ARIANNA
Arianna nearly lost her breath pulling the glider upright. She landed it on a platform, albeit roughly, rather than going for the hangar on the edge of Garre. She was in and out so often by glider these days, it had become her own personal landing pad.
“After you.”
Xavier, the Master Rivet who’d returned home with her, descended with wonder in his eyes. Arianna couldn’t imagine what the homecoming was like for him.
“I never expected to see it again.”
“I believe it.” Arianna stepped heavily off the glider. Feeding on Dragon hearts was a way to sustain, but not thrive. She needed some time before she went up to Nova again.
There was a click inside the tower her platform was attached to and the entire structure groaned to life. Xavier held his hands out, working to balance himself, unaccustomed to the mechanics of the guild hall. Arianna could hear the grinding of massive gears as an entire segment of the tower turned, connecting with another platform that had been on the opposite side.
Waiting there was a familiar, weathered face.
“I’m beginning to think you have a death wish.” It wasn’t much of a greeting from the Vicar Rivet. Willard walked over, stopping when his eyes settled on Xavier.
“I brought a master home, liberated from our enemies,” Arianna explained. Xavier was overcome with emotion and, given the glistening in his eyes, it would be some time until he could form cohesive sentences.
“I thought you were acquiring more flowers.” Willard gave her a long, hard stare.
“Oh, I got those.” Arianna patted the satchel at her side. “I just made a detour, working off some intel that Rok had built their own refineries and workshops.”
“What? How did you find this out?”
“Our Dragon friends.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. Cvareh had mentioned the refinery project when he had shown her Xin’s own structure. But what prompted her to actually investigate was when the Dragon Queen had asked Adam for two more ledgers from Holx, thinking the demand would be passed on to Louie. Arianna recognized the target ingredients as refinery resources.
“Dragon friends?” Xavier was brought back to life with the mention of Dragons. “It’s true? Xin?”
“It is.” Willard ushered the master toward him. “Come, come, we’ll get you inside. I’ll summon the Vicar Alchemist to look at you both.”
“I’m fine, Willard.” Arianna stretched. She knew the cure for her ailments—a good night’s rest, rarer than gold now on Loom. “I’m going to head toward the workshops.”
“The Vicar Alchemist is here?” Xavier asked, ignoring her. Arianna was hardly offended; she wanted to be forgotten by people as quickly as she appeared before them.
Willard gave Arianna a nod before ushering Xavier away.
“We’ve come to attend you, oh queen!” Helen burst through a door opposite the one Willard had just departed through. She gave a bow with a mocking flourish.
Arianna was weeks away from trying to fight the foolishness of her unwanted Raven chicks. Instead, she shrugged out of her coat. “Will, follow Willard and tell him that I still need to speak with him when he’s done with Xavier.” Arianna threw the garment at Helen. “And you, fix my sleeve.”
“I am not a tailor!” Helen fumed to the point of nearly stomping her foot like the child she was.
“And I am not a babysitter. You want to remain in my good graces?”
Helen stormed off without another word, thanks to a look of encouragement from Will, who followed close behind. Arianna headed in the opposite direction.
The manufacturing line might be where the boxes were made, but the workshops were where they transformed into functioning Philosopher’s Boxes that were then passed along to what had become the Alchemists’ wing of the guild hall. They were implanted in Chimera, and after that . . . it was up to the Revolvers for training.
“I’d like to see everyone’s progress,” Arianna announced the moment she entered the room and set down the tubes of flowers in their storage spot. She was too tired for pleasantries, and focused on the task at hand. It was a mixed bag of successes that launched her into a familiar lecture. “ . . . Extracting the properties of the flowers comes more from magic than mechanics. You need to heat the gold using magic, and then pull the magic that lives in the flower into it while it’s near-molten.
“Try again.” Arianna stood over one particularly focused journeyman and, at the risk of breaking his concentration, said, “Exactly like that . . .You know the magic is transferring properly because the gold will actually begin to cool again. It’s very similar to tempering with blood.”
“Oh.” One journeyman said. “But we’re not mixing the molten gold with blood here.”
“No, just the magics are mixing,” Arianna reiterated. “It’s not identical to tempering with blood—fundamentally similar, but not the same.”
A woman gave a grunt of frustration, hanging her head over like a wilted flower petal. Arianna didn’t even need to touch the box in her hands to know that it wasn’t tempered properly. She struggled with all her might to stifle a sigh and failed. She was too tired these days to expend much energy on patience.
“Put any boxes you think are successful on the table here.” Vicar Willard’s voice cut through the room, saving Arianna from herself. “The rest, bring back into the finishing room to be recalibrated so we may try again tomorrow.”
Arianna gave the man a severe look, but managed to hold her tongue until they were alone—somehow. “There won’t be a tomorrow if they don’t get better at this.”
“Exactly, so why stress them further and lessen our chances?”
She ground her knuckles into the table next to her.
“You don’t really take after Oliver, after all.”
“Excuse me?” Arianna arched her eyebrows.
“Well, given how you were at first with the initiates, with Florence, I thought perhaps we had a new great teacher among us.”
Florence. She knew the woman had departed for Ter.3.2, where they had begun manufacturing the new weapons.
“I just play favorites with the competent. In that way, I’m exactly like Oliver.” Arianna shrugged, leaning against the table, completely unashamed of the fact. Willard chuckled at the idea but didn’t contest it. “How’s our master?”
“With Vicar Ethel, then I think some much-needed rest.” Arianna let her silence be her agreement. She could not imagine what the man was going through, having spent his life on Nova until now. Willard returned his attention to the boxes. “Will you be able to do any today?”
Arianna glanced over at the boxes that lined the table. She’d already counted how many they had started with and knew how many more were in the other room waiting to be salvaged. Even more still waited at the end of the line on the factory floor beyond that.
“Ten, maybe fifteen . . .”
“Stick with ten,” Willard cautioned. “You have been expending a lot of magic these days with your jaunts up to Nova.”
“I’m not a child, old man. I don’t need you cautioning me.”
“I think you do.” Willard stood his ground and Arianna didn’t argue the point further. The last thing she wanted was him bringing up the last time she’d pushed herself too hard, and he’d found her completely passed out the next morning on the floor of the workshop. It was an embarrassment he’d spared her publicly, but Arianna was now tempted to tell all of Loom herself so the man couldn’t hang it over her head. “We don’t have that many flowers, in any case. We’re somewhat limited until more Perfect Chimera can confidently fly gliders. We should preserve them for more practice.”
“How are things with the Revolvers going?” There was only a small pack of them now, training what few Perfect Chimera had been made. But they were all hoping for more to come, since Loom had moved away from the Underground.
“Progressing. I will ask you to measure the progress of the first class. You know better than any what they need to stand ag
ainst Dragons.”
Arianna folded her arms over her chest. “Speaking of fighting Dragons . . . The refineries on Nova, while utterly pointless as refineries—”
“No resources?”
“No resources.” Arianna affirmed. She found it amusing how any Fenthri instantly knew about the issue with refineries on Nova, but none of the Dragons seemed to have figured it out, or heeded the warnings. “In any case, they are making weapons there.”
“Dragons armed with weapons. That is not ideal.”
“No,” she agreed. “But they’re rudimentary, and the Dragons don’t understand how to use them. We’ll still overpower them with Florence’s gun and with the Perfect Chimera.”
“Oddly optimistic for you,” he observed.
Arianna shrugged. “What other choice do I have?”
“A hard spot we’ve put you in, indeed.”
“I don’t mind the fighting.”
“I didn’t just mean the fighting.” She stared at the old man, waiting for him to clarify. “You’ve spent your life in secrecy, Arianna. You’ve worked in the shadows, functioned mostly alone. Now, so much rests on your shoulders. Too much.”
“I’m fine.” Arianna herself didn’t know if it was a lie. “As I said before, what other choice do I have? I won’t abandon Loom.”
“That’s good to hear.”
Arianna searched the vicar’s face. Her eyes narrowed. “Did you suspect I would?”
“You were forced into the limelight. Your hand is forced to action. And you were forced to do what no inventor should—share your schematics.”
“Sharing them was my choice.” The four words were so familiar that Arianna almost believed them.
Willard spared her his protest. “Loom appreciates your loyalty. I, and every Chimera, appreciate you sharing the whole technology of the boxes, unaltered.”
That was when she understood him. Arianna couldn’t stop a snarl. “I may be a Wraith, but I would not harm my own people.”
“You never wanted to share the boxes, and the idea of widespread Perfect Chimera was something you resisted. Forgive me for asking Arianna, but is there anything I should know about them?”
“They are as true as the one in me.” Arianna scowled at the man.
“Very well.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“It doesn’t matter if I do or do not. You have or haven’t tampered with them. You will or won’t. But this wave has crested, Arianna. There is no turning back progress now.” He paused, and Arianna had nothing to fill the silence with. “Don’t exhaust yourself. We need you alive.” With that, the old man departed.
“No turning back progress,” she repeated, staring at the boxes that lined the table. Was it really progress? Or was her creation the thing that would drive Loom to its demise?
COLETTA
Along the narrow, depressingly unadorned passage away from her Gray Room was another receiving area—a collection of holding cells, really—where incoming Fen would be tested on their worth. Rok only had room and resources to support a select few of the wretched creatures, so the pack needed to be thinned. This area had been re-purposed as an observation room for the two women who currently occupied the space.
Topann lay on the table in the center of the room, a book Coletta had granted her open flat. The woman cupped her chin with her palm, lazily flipping the pages as her foot, with a mind of its own, rocked a chair slightly behind her back and forth. Where she was the picture of serenity and patience, the other beast in the room was not.
Fae crouched before the barred door to one of the cells that lined the perimeter and grinned at the cowering Alchemist inside. With one claw, she scratched away at the lock. A deep groove had already formed underneath the harrowing sound of her claw.
At Coletta and Yveun’s arrival, the two women were on their feet with varying speeds and levels of decorum. Topann stood straight, head bowed, hands folded demurely before her. Fae leaned heavily against the door of the cell, causing a faint clanking sound as the hinges strained under her bulk. Her purple eyes drifted lustily over to Yveun, the foreplay between them beginning with a mere look.
“How many organs do you each have?” Coletta asked.
“All of them,” Topann answered dutifully. “Save for lungs.”
“What she said.” Fae gave a mocking imitation of Coletta’s flower.
“The sickness, the magic rejection . . . You worked through it?” Yveun walked straight for Fae. “I want to see.”
“I’ll let you see inside me, if it pleases the Dono.” Fae made a show of leaning forward to whisper in his ear, but it was really entirely for the titillation of the man before her. Coletta, in turn, gave an approving look to Fae. She needed the woman to smooth over her mate’s rough edges at the impending news.
“How did you do it?” Yveun couldn’t seem to decide on which head he wanted to let govern his actions, and his body pivoted between her and Fae. Coletta knew his curiosity was great indeed if it pulled him away from the purring sex goddess before him.
“At first, we used like-organs.” Coletta motioned to Topann. “A symbol of Rok’s strength certainly required the best organs and nothing less. So I scoured the underbelly of Lysip, and then topside when that did not work.”
“But you said none of them took,” Yveun recalled.
“Indeed. Fae was the key.” Having a recklessly accepting test subject had more than proved Fae’s worth to Coletta. “She experienced no problem accepting Rok organs, even those from below.”
“A particular Dragon, then?” Yveun theorized.
“I thought the same, but Topann still rejected them, even ones regrown from the same stock.”
“You said you now have all of them but the rarest?” Yveun looked to her flower. “What did it take?”
Topann looked uncomfortable now. She folded and unfolded her hands firmly, working up her resolve. Coletta spared her flower the difficulty. The agony was needless.
“It took no half measures.”
“What does that mean?” The slight edge to Yveun’s voice from earlier was returning.
“Well, Fae as a Tam could accept Rok organs without rejection. I assume Xin can accept Tam organs . . .” Coletta wanted to see if he could put it together on his own. She had every faith her mate could, but hate blinded him too much. Prejudice was the true antithesis to progress. “Xin organs. A Perfect Rok Dragon requires Xin organs.”
There was a long silence.
Then, an explosion.
“What?” Yveun turned his head to the Alchemist in the cage. Coletta knew he hadn’t realized at the time that she was locking him in there for his protection. A kindness truly befitting a great ruler like herself. “Explain this, Fen.”
“I-I can’t!” He scooted away from the opening of his prison. Coletta could almost smell the sour aroma of fear oozing from his pores. “She’s right, but I don’t know why, it just is.”
“Explain!”
Coletta let the exchange drag on a moment. It was good for the Fen to see Yveun in a fearsome role, to reinforce the image of their great and terrible ruler.
“I don’t know. I’m not a proper Alchemist. I never received—”
“Do you want to give me excuses?” Yveun’s voice dropped, low and deadly, as his hand gripped the lock. Coletta wondered if he could rip it off. She almost wanted to let the situation escalate long enough to see him try.
“Magic rots Fenthri. We know Fenthri bodies aren’t made for it, so it rots us out . . . It doesn’t matter where the organs come from, it’s a property of magic.” The man swallowed hard a few times. “Perhaps there are different types of magic in different Dragons, in the different houses? There’s no way we could’ve known because it’s all magic for a Fenthri—it causes the same issue no matter who it’s from, or what type . . . But perhaps it explains why some can have three organs before falling, and some only two. Perhaps different houses have different potencies, or certain organs are noncompatible in
a single body . . . ” The man trailed off into his own thoughts.
Yveun turned to Coletta. When his world was at its bleakest, its most unstable, he turned to her. It was their balance, their equal parts. “What does this mean?”
“It means that nothing has changed,” she said easily. “We hunted Xin before, purely for their deaths. Now, we will hunt them for their organs.”
Yveun was quiet a moment, but only just. With a half-snarl, half-roar, he buried his fist into the nearby wall, splintering and cracking the wood. “No, we will not.”
“No half measures.” Coletta shouldn’t have to remind him of their house’s motto, of how his failure to embrace it had only led, time and again, to their failure.
“This is not a half measure, this is a matter of our pride! We shall not lower ourselves to Xin for strength.” Yveun swung his head toward Topann. For a brief moment, Coletta could feel him considering saying something, but he abandoned the notion, storming out of the room. Even when he was pushed past his limit, he knew better than to disturb her precious flowers.
“Fae.” Coletta was unfettered. “Please go see to the Dono.”
“With pleasure.” The woman practically moaned the last word in her carnal excitement.
“Then you will head down to Loom.” They didn’t have time for dalliances and her mate needed to learn how to be placated without a toy to keep him occupied. If Coletta could teach him that one skill, how much easier would her life be?
“Yes, I remember the deal, what you gave me all this power for. Kill the girl, nab more gold.”
“And another, after Florence.”
Fae tilted her head as a display of her attention.
“Arianna, Queen of Wraiths.”
“Yveun will be pleased.” Fae bared her teeth. Clearly the name was already one Yveun had uttered, no doubt time and again.
“Good. Now go.” She waited until Fae was gone and they were alone. Well, excluding the Fen. “And you—” she turned to Topann “—you will help me in acquiring Xin organs.”