Breath of Earth Read online

  Mussel Rock was south. This was the attack.

  The flickering light in the corridor exploded, the sound muffled by the terrible roar, as if a geomantic Hidden One had reared up to devour the city itself. The throaty rumble of the earth didn’t stop.

  Ingrid pressed her forehead to the bars. Through the haze of energy sickness, she concentrated on a roughly welded seam of her iron handcuffs. The link exploded. The recoil knocked her back, but just in time she managed to grip the bars again, her hands spaced out. Her toes clung to a narrow crossbar.

  Keenly aware of the heat of her breath, she focused on the scarf in her mouth. The fabric weakened beneath her exhalation, and when her tongue jabbed forward, the scarf shredded and fell away. She gasped in relief despite the rawness of her lips.

  The roar continued, punctuated by nearby avalanches of bricks, cascades of breaking glass, and screams. So many screams.

  If Ingrid could stay here, on the second floor, she might survive. She’d be ill, but she could manage.

  Dust sifted from the ceiling. A magnificent crack resounded through her ears and reverberated through her body. In the darkness, it was nigh impossible to see, but she felt the floor give. It groaned like an arthritic old man standing upright. The bars in her grip leaned forward.

  “Oh God,” she whispered. The roar swallowed her blasphemy.

  The whole building folded inward. With a mighty snap, the iron bars ripped from the floor in a long untidy row. A ceiling tile crashed down, followed by another. Dust thickened the air, and then she fell. She released her grip on the bars and let the heavier weight drop away as she drew on the terrible heat that roiled in her chest.

  A protective bubble snapped into existence. Even filtered, the roar continued to reverberate through the shell, far worse than the auxiliary explosion. This was deeper, more prolonged. Blackness and dust squelched light from the world.

  The bubble smashed into solidness, throwing her forward. She grunted as her hands caught most of the blow. A great weight pressed down on the back of the bubble. Her awareness of the debris felt different from the auxiliary blast. It took her a half second to realize why: she absorbed the energy-laden reverberations through shattered bricks and wood.

  She fell forward again into nothing, that new source of energy cut off. A splash of water embraced the bubble and she rocked backward, momentarily floating.

  Water? The ground might be liquefied, but how could it be that she was in actual water? She was nowhere near the bay. Bubbles streamed past. She shoved herself to stand upright. Her bubble rocked and rested. Water sloshed at chest level. Heat surged through her feet as she took in more energy. Ingrid screamed and caught herself against the pseudo glass before she could topple to her knees. Frothy water churned against her protective shell.

  Thin illumination filtered from above. Something massive and dark blotted most of her view, but honest-to-God morning sunlight shone from on high. This was the basement Ambassador Blum had mentioned. The quake had burst the water main.

  Ingrid quivered as her heart threatened to gallop from her breast. Nausea bubbled in her stomach. The quake wasn’t stopping. She had to break contact with the ground. Cy wasn’t here to help, nor would selkies come to her aid. She had to get out on her own.

  Cy—she had pushed him away with her power before. Maybe she could push the floor away, too.

  Ingrid breathed in. All she tasted, smelled, touched was heat. She angled her head to stare downward, and she shoved herself away.

  With a brilliant gunfire-loud crack, the bubble soared. Light blinded her, a cloudy sky tilting into view. While she was airborne, the flow of power was squelched again, but she had already taken in so much. So very, very much. The bubble faded. The harshness of smoke and dust smacked her senses, and then she pounded into the ground shoulder first. She screamed. Within the haze of fever, the sound felt disconnected and foreign. Her body landed splayed on ground, still coursing with power. She convulsed.

  “Get up! Move!” Mr. Sakaguchi yelled in her ear. “If you stay still in a massive earthquake, you’ll die. You have to get off the ground.”

  “You’re hurt!” snapped Mama. “You’ll provoke another earthquake, perpetuate the cycle! Move!”

  “Ingrid! Get up!” yelled Cy. “Come on!”

  She lifted her head. Wind buffeted hair from her face and lapped coldness against her skin. She shivered, violently. She couldn’t see. Her vision was blackness with white spots, but her ears recognized the low rumble of an airship engine.

  “Vent it, Ingrid!” Cy yelled again.

  Vent it. Get off the ground. Find metal, a tree, something.

  She couldn’t feel anything through her hands and feet. She flung out her right hand, blindly, and shoved out power.

  The white specks faded from her vision. All she knew was the roar in her ears—the roar from above, the roar from below. It shook through her the way a terrier shakes a rat.

  I’m dying.

  Pressure seized her. The waves of power stopped, but stored energy still buzzed throughout her body.

  “Ingrid!” Cy shouted into her ear. “I have you. You have to get some of the power out. There are people who need help. They’re trapped in a building. I’m going to place your hand on something for you to push away. Do you understand?”

  She tried to nod, but she wasn’t sure if she had a head anymore, or a hand, or anything besides awful blackness and heat like hellfire.

  But she felt the pressure of his broad hands around her wrist. She knew his touch. She trusted him. People needed help. She had to help.

  “Now,” he said.

  Ingrid shoved power away. This time, she felt it go. The world lightened. The roar stopped, and there were other sounds. Not the common morning sounds of the city either. Screams. Thudding bricks. Sobs. The keen of a horse.

  “Can you get out now?” Cy’s voice was directed away from her. “There! Get out to the street, away from the building.”

  “Cy?” She could barely hear herself. Her throat felt raw and tight, as if squeezed between meaty fists.

  “Ingrid. Thank God. You’re burning up. Here. There’s a car in the street. Push it away. Vent more.”

  She did. Blurry shapes took form, but they weren’t buildings. The edges were too sharp, too strange. Acrid smoke stung her nostrils. A horse screamed again. A single gunshot rang out.

  “Dios. Dios. El niño!” A woman half sobbed, half screeched.

  “My husband, my husband, I can see his hand, I can—”

  “God Almighty,” Cy whispered.

  “Buried?” Ingrid whispered. “I can help. Push.”

  “No. No. You can’t help anyone in that building. Here. Is anyone alive in there?”

  “Hai!” The man’s voice was faint. “Under here. We’re pinned.”

  This time, she felt the rough divots in a brick beneath her palm. She pushed it away with such intensity a hot wind sprung from her hand. There was an immediate rumble from above.

  “Damn it!” Cy jumped backward, and she bounced in his arms.

  “What? Did I—”

  “No, no, it’s not your fault, there was no other way to get him out. Christ!”

  A wave of dust burned her eyes. She sneezed as his feet pounded backward. The movement speared agony through her shoulder. She screamed against his shirt.

  “Ingrid?”

  She pulled back and opened her eyes. A fog of brown and gray filled the air, but she could see Cy. A pair of thick aviator goggles covered his glasses. Her shoulder pulsed in pain, but it was an almost welcome sensation. She could feel something beyond the heat that relentlessly paced her body like a caged wyvern.

  “I’m better,” she whispered, then coughed. “The man . . . ?”

  “Sir?” Cy called loudly as he walked forward. “Can you hear me?”

  Ingrid clutched at Cy’s lapel. Her handcuffs’ chains dangled against his chest. He wore a tweed jacket powdered with gray. She could hear his rapid breaths, feel the
racing thrum of his heart, but from the wreckage, nothing.

  Islands of bricks and mortar rested in a sheen of blue. The miasma, turbulent as the ocean, lapped against the wreckage. Tall, elegant buildings had been rendered into architectural skeletons against a smoky sky. She could see flames only a block away. Their stench tainted the wind.

  Figures staggered down the street. Men, naked but for blood and filth. Women and children in shredded nightgowns, a mother’s hair up in a bonnet of rollers.

  “It happened. It really happened.” Ingrid had known it was real, had experienced the chaos for several minutes already, but seeing it—that was different. “The fires. The quake shattered the water lines, the fire department—”

  “I know. We have to get out of here. What’s left is a tinderbox.” Cy cradled her closer in his arms and headed down the street. Part of her was indignant at being carried, but this was no time for pride.

  Besides, the fog of power was so thick she wouldn’t have been quite sure where to step with so much debris about. The last thing she needed was to hurt herself again while in direct contact with the ground.

  That blue layer roiled in and out of a jagged crack that split the road. The miasma prevented her from seeing inside, but she had a terrible sense that it was deep. Where the fissure crossed beneath the cable car tracks, the metal rods curved through the air like a dead snake gone stiff in the sun.

  “I thought I heard an airship,” she said.

  Cy coughed as they walked through a foul billow of smoke. “You did. The Bug. Our grand rescue attempt. Fenris got me low enough to jump out. We saw you fly out of the building. It was beautiful. And awful.” His voice lowered to a whisper.

  “You jumped out of an airship? Onto pavement?”

  “What was I going to do, look for a mattress to land on? I had to. You were—you were dying. I’ve seen death. I know it. Grabbing hold of you felt like gripping a live coal with both arms. I don’t know how you’re still alive.”

  The Ambassador’s Reiki. It used living animals. That’s probably all that prevented her brain from boiling in her skull. “How long did the earthquake last? It felt like forever.”

  “A minute, I think, but it looked like forever. God as my witness, I never want to see anything like that again.”

  She shivered as heat lapped her skin again. His body created a gap between her and the earth, but he was still organic, and still conducted power.

  “Cy, off the ground! Now!”

  He didn’t hesitate. In two mighty bounds he made it to the bumper of an autocar and from there onto a hood already peppered with broken bricks. The earth shuddered, followed by another roar. Ingrid slid down to stand. Her rubbery legs wobbled and she almost fell, but Cy grabbed hold of her.

  His head jerked up. “Ingrid!”

  From instinct, she formed the bubble around them, venting power even as more heat trickled in through her feet. She looked up as the full brick facade of a building smashed into them. Tons of material bounced and cascaded off the barrier. The dust didn’t reach them, trapped inside as they were, but a cloud of brown blocked out the world. Cy pressed her head to his chest. His heart drummed a chaotic, fearful beat, even as he felt so strong and stalwart against her.

  “Why won’t this end?” she whispered.

  “It’s not . . . not because the earth feels your pain, is it?”

  “I was hurt last night, but no, I can say this wasn’t my fault. Thank God.”

  “You were hurt?” Rage rumbled in his words. The cloud around them began to dissipate.

  “It wasn’t the soldiers. They . . . It was an Ambassador. Ambassador Blum. She knew about Papa, she knew what they had done to him. She . . . she stabbed me to see what would happen.”

  “God Almighty.” His breath drew in with a hiss. “Ambassador Blum. I’d call her a bitch, but that’d offend many fine dogs.”

  “You know her?”

  “Know her? Yes, I know her.” The bitterness in his tone surprised her. It didn’t sound like Cy at all. “Blum oversaw the building of my prototype Durendal most every day for months. She omitted the minor fact that she was an Ambassador, though, among other things.”

  “But the signet ring—”

  “She always wore gloves, like some proper lady.” His grip around Ingrid tightened, as did the hard line of his mouth. “Ambassador Blum. I wonder if she’s incapable of lies. She’ll tell you everything, yet nothing all at once. Most dangerous person I’ve ever known.”

  The dust settled enough that they could see again. Ingrid let the bubble collapse and immediately began to cough. Agony seared through her shoulder. Cy held her upright. She cringed into him, dreading another earthquake in response to her pain. She felt the slightest burble, but the solid metal of the car did its job.

  The autocar had become an island in a sea of bricks set within a greater ocean of deep blue fog, like gradients of color around a Caribbean atoll. The building beside them was exposed at the front like a little girl’s dollhouse. There was a parlor, and an office with fine cherrywood furniture, and a bathroom where black water spurted from a shower head. A bed looked perfectly made but for a single ceiling beam dropped into the middle. A pale arm draped outside of the sheets.

  “Ingrid, look at me. Not the building.” Cy’s broad hands cupped both sides of her face and angled her head to look at him. Dust painted his cheeks in blotchy brown. His voice sounded softer again. “Where did Blum stab you?”

  She blinked as she struggled to remember what they had been talking about. “My leg. She used dark Reiki right after so it didn’t hurt for long. It’s even helping my shoulder now.”

  “We’ve got to get to the docks to meet Fenris.”

  “He can’t fly through here again? There’s no rope ladder?”

  Cy gave her a look as he scooped her up in his arms. “Miss Ingrid, that works dandy in books, but in reality, if you have a loose rope dangling beneath anything smaller than a Tiamat class, it’ll get sucked up into a turbine and could very well cause an engine fire. That’s why mooring is tricky business.”

  “Oh.” Bricks slid and crumbled underfoot as he hopped to the street. It unnerved her that she couldn’t see his feet through the cloud. Heat still fizzled through her, as present as the miasma. The bubble had helped, but it only offset so much damage.

  “Thuggees are behind the attack. I overheard their plot last night as I left Quist’s. The attack was set for dawn at Mussel Rock. Maybe they’re still there.”

  Would San Francisco ever rise from this? Tears and filth burned her eyes. The city looked like a newsreel from Peking or Calcutta or Manila, the aftermath of hellfire and prolonged warfare. This was war. That was the attackers’ intent. Why? Why strike here, not at a British holding?

  Smoke lashed her face. People hobbled past, crying, muttering, some absolutely still. An older woman limped past in a long calico nightie, chin uplifted and a small straw hat on her head. In her hand she held a cage containing cooing lovebirds.

  “How are they doing this? Do they . . . do they have your father?”

  What a terrible thought. “Sutcliff and Blum both said Papa was dead. Killed in China. This . . . maybe there are others like me, like Papa. I don’t know. But the man who did this killed everyone else in the auxiliary so the attack could proceed without interference.”

  “We’ll find him. We’ll interfere. But foremost, let’s get to the airship and far away from Blum.”

  Ingrid could see the spire of the Port Authority still upright straight down Market Street. The shredded skyline revealed mooring towers and gasbags that should have been hidden behind skyscrapers.

  “Look,” she said, bobbing her head instead of pointing. Far down the pier, two Portermans were ablaze. Flames clawed the sky as the airships danced and quickly sagged, hydrogen depleted.

  “The whole port may go up. If Fenris can’t moor here, we’ll have to catch a boat and get to Oakland.” He put more hustle into his step, though he already breathed heavi
ly from exertion.

  Up ahead, a man sobbed and cried out as he dug through bricks. Ingrid squeezed Cy’s arm. “We can work that way, but I’m still holding too much power. My fever must be around a hundred and two.”

  “Ingrid.” He said her name in a way that warned her a lecture was coming. “You may not be able to do much. Your power’s strong, but it’s a bludgeon. These buildings—it’ll take time and care to get people out, and God help us all, but they don’t have time and neither do we.”

  A full five-story building was alight. One side of the structure had caved in. It slouched against its neighbor like they were sailors leaving a Barbary Coast saloon. Dark windows lit up with flashes of red. People stood in the street and dumbly stared.

  A loud bell dinged behind them. Cy turned. A fire wagon made to turn and confronted debris. Swerving away with the bell still ringing, the wagon rumbled down a side street, taking with it a load of half-dressed helmeted men.

  Tears coursed Ingrid’s cheeks. Even if the firemen made it down the block to that particular building, there wouldn’t be any water. The mains had likely snapped beneath all of downtown.

  Blood-streaked women stumbled past. In the road, a milk wagon sat unblemished, its wooden sides ornate with swirls of color. On the far side, a dead horse slumped in the shafts. Bricks almost completely buried it from head to yoke. Tufts of mane emerged through dust like grass in a sand dune. The horse’s haunches were still propped up as if it knelt to drink from the shifting blue fog.

  “You got a light?” a man asked. He stood outside a wrecked building as if he waited at a cable car stop. A gigantic suit jacket draped over his bare torso and red flannel pants. An unlit cigarette waited between his lips.

  “Don’t light anything,” snapped Cy. “The gas lines have been ruptured. The slightest spark will start more fires.”

  “Damn.” The man lifted a hand to his cigarette. The large sleeve slid back to reveal half of his fingers in a mass of mangled, flattened flesh. Spears of bone pierced through the tips. His hand trembled violently and lowered again. “Can’t think why, but I can’t work my lighter.”