Breath of Earth Read online

  Miss Rossi burst out laughing. “Men! Think they know so much.”

  Mr. Thornton glared at Miss Rossi and then back at Ingrid. “Why destroy the city? Miss Carmichael, have you seen what the Unified Pacific has really done to China? No, of course not. Newspapers and theater reels don’t show reality—it’s all waving flags and parades here. China is destroyed. Leveled. Ashes and debris for mile upon mile. Farmland is little better, with rivers dammed or contaminated, fields left to desiccation or rot. Britannia will do the same to India, and who will stop them? The Americans? No. Factories in Atlanta are churning out Durendals and dirigibles and painting Union Jacks on them now. Because if the Brits are fighting in India, they won’t be fighting the Unified Pacific, and there’s money to be made. Brilliant, eh?” Mr. Thornton’s lips curled back in a snarl. “My beautiful India. They’d make it a wasteland.”

  “But why attack San Francisco?” Tears stung her eyes.

  “By necessity. This was our first strike, our test. The auxiliary . . . that had to be done first. The wardens would have lessened the impact too much.” His expression softened. Sweat made his skin shine as the blue energy thickened over him. “I hated having the others killed, Miss Carmichael. They were my friends, my colleagues. I knew Mr. Calhoun from the time we were boys.”

  “Yet you killed him first,” Ingrid said with a nod. “Arsenic.”

  “Yes. I had to.” Mr. Thornton stared at her, blinking, as though stunned to realize that she had added two plus two. “I thought his experience in India would bind him to our cause. He didn’t agree.”

  “Enough of this!” snarled the bodyguard. He aimed his gun at Ingrid.

  A gun fired from just behind her. Blood gushed from the bodyguard’s shoulder. Almost simultaneously, he lifted up ten feet in the air, then twenty feet, and hovered there for the space of a breath. Cy’s gun certainly didn’t cause that.

  In a blur, the man slammed into the ground—not dropped, but flung. His body sloshed at the force of the impact, bloody pulp wrapped in tweed. Miss Rossi screamed, high and shrill. Mr. Thornton, awash in spatter, fell backward.

  Papa smiled at Ingrid. It was the guileless smile of a child expecting approval. Ingrid’s stomach roiled. The cattle earlier had been bad enough. But that was—had been—a man.

  Cy stepped alongside her. The earth quivered. “Ingrid, we—”

  “Get away from her.” Papa flicked a hand. Cy jerked away and landed in the bushes with a terrible crackle.

  “Cy!” Ingrid yelled, then whirled to face Papa. “Don’t hurt him! He’s on our side.”

  “You can’t trust anyone. You’re just a little girl. He’ll hurt you. They all hurt you.” He glanced down at himself. “These people don’t even know how to properly torture. The Unified Pacific—now, those people know their jobs. When they used me in China, I didn’t even have bruises. Certainly not this mess.”

  Papa waved a hand toward Miss Rossi. She screeched and spun in midair, striking the ground with an audible crack of breaking bones. She moaned and lay still. Ingrid looked to where Cy had landed. She couldn’t see or hear him, and if she approached him, Papa might attack again. Her heart galloped. Heat siphoned through her skin. She wavered on her feet.

  “Lucas Thornton.” Papa stood over the fallen man. “You always were a pompous bastard.”

  “How can you pull in such power while in so much pain?” Mr. Thornton squealed out the words. “Anyone else would be comatose or dead.”

  “Oh, Lucas. I’m worse than a cat.”

  Papa glowed with an intensity that made Ingrid’s eyes ache. He opened a hand, fingers splayed like spider legs, and he drew power up in tendrils of blue. He wove the strands, like a Reiki doctor at work, though now she could see the very ki of the earth. At his feet, Mr. Thornton curled up, his hands tucked against his body.

  Ingrid had thought she could confront Mr. Thornton. She thought she could kill him. She looked at the mush of bone and flesh, and back to Mr. Thornton.

  “Papa, no!” she said. “We need to know what he has planned, what they’re going to do with the kermanite. He needs to be alive. The government—we can hand him over.” She thought of the worst possible fate. “Give him to Ambassador Blum. She can make him talk.”

  “Ambassador Blum!” Papa snarled the name. “What do you know about that thing?”

  That distraction was all Mr. Thornton needed. He lashed upward. The knife caught Papa in the thigh. Arterial blood gushed out in vivid red. Papa crumpled over Mr. Thornton, the two men in a blue knot splashed in blood. With a sharp pop and a gurgle, Mr. Thornton’s head flung back, far too flexible for a human being.

  Blue dissipated from his body, as if the energy escaped along with Mr. Thornton’s soul.

  Simultaneously, the earth groaned and shuddered. Ingrid stumbled to her knees. A terrible roar filled the air along with a choking wave of dust. Trees snapped. Ingrid, doubled over, coughed and tried to breathe as a tidal wave of power swept over her. For about a half second, it felt good—deliriously, exquisitely good—and then the heat came, and the scorching fever. She didn’t realize she lay facedown on the ground until she tasted grass on her tongue.

  Something else roared, and it wasn’t the earth.

  Ingrid barely managed to raise her head. Through the brown-and-blue cloud rose an elongated shape the size of an autocar. Dust faded to show the ripple of brown scales, the pattern mottled along the spine, and black eyes the size of dinner plates. She felt its gaze on her. With a loud, air-shuddering hiss, the other head emerged. It was darker than its mate. The mouth parted and a tongue as long as Ingrid’s body slithered out to taste the air.

  She had no fondness for snakes, but this being was beautiful. Elegant. She could see why Hidden Ones had once been revered as gods. This felt like a god, with so much power, power that would kill her in steadily accelerating degrees.

  “Ingrid.” Cy’s voice was close to her ear, his hand on her shoulder. “Use your power to throw me over the chasm so I can get the airship.”

  “What?” Her consciousness wavered.

  “Throw me over the gap! Hurry!”

  Airship. Escape. Survive. Yes.

  Cy stood back. She forced herself up onto her knees. As she had seen Papa do, she drew up strands of blue and grabbed hold of Cy as with a fist. Feathery tendrils, like cirrus clouds, gripped him from shoulder to knee and hoisted him up. Unlike Papa, she didn’t fling him. Power swirled through her like a whirlpool; there was no way she could vent it as it flowed in. Cy was ten feet away, suspended in the air, but she could feel his entire body as if it fit in the hand, like a porcelain doll. His rapid heartbeat quivered beneath a mighty thumb. It would be so easy to squeeze.

  The fact that she even thought such a thing frightened her. What was this power doing to her? She didn’t want to be like Papa. She couldn’t be like him. She refused.

  Cy’s gaze on her conveyed absolute trust. Even his posture conveyed trust. He was scared, yes; he’d be stupid to feel otherwise. Taking a steadying breath, Ingrid lifted him high over the pit and the sinuous snake heads, and to the far side. The snakes showed no interest in him at all. Another quake jolted through her with a slice of power. She gasped. Cy fell. Blackness swarmed her vision, the fever searing her brain.

  “No,” she whispered. Don’t let Cy be hurt. Don’t let him be dead.

  The snake heads roiled, hissing like vents of steam. She couldn’t see them anymore, but she knew their movements, just as she sensed waves eddying around her ankles as if she stood on the beach with her eyes shut. A few minutes more and she’d drown. If she truly shared in Papa’s resilience against death, the past day must have exhausted all nine lives.

  But Cy might be alive. He might get to the airship, get them out of there. She couldn’t give up.

  “Papa, I . . .” She knew he could hear her, but what could she say? That she missed him? She hadn’t; she had Mr. Sakaguchi, her ojisan. But she did wish she had known him, if for no other reason than so she could
understand herself, and this power.

  “I’ve been thinking these past few minutes, Ingrid, about the best thing to do. You should kill yourself.” Papa sounded so matter-of-fact. His voice echoed like a rattled, broken thing. “Your whole life will be spent running from them, or being tortured to the brink of death, again and again. They’ll kill ten people through Reiki to revive you. If you jump into the crevasse, you’ll die, and it will be fast.”

  She knew the shock waves as he stood, tottering like a tree in a tornado. She couldn’t see with her eyes, but through the thick magic, she sensed him as if he stood inches away. Blood boiled down his thigh. The sheer heat of him was like a furnace. Frothy red bubbles popped and sizzled as they struck the ground.

  “I can still hear them scream at night, the people in Peking. When I sleep. When they let me sleep. I hear the walls crashing down. I hear them dying.” Papa sighed. “Nobuo Sakaguchi never wrote the truth about you, what you really were. Only that you looked like me. That you were bright.

  “If I’d known, I would have come back to California. I would have smothered you in your sleep, back when you were small, innocent. You’re too old to be innocent now. You’re damned, same as me. The old stories always say gods and goddesses are so powerful. My mother always whispered of the old glory, how it used to be, but the truth is, Christianity is the closest to getting it right. When you’re like us, every day is a Garden of Gethsemane. We can plead to God, to people, for mercy, but in the end we’re still nailed to the cross.”

  Ripples of power slapped Ingrid as he walked forward.

  “I don’t want to die. I want to live,” she yelled.

  “Do we ever get what we want? Really?” He sounded so fatherly.

  “That doesn’t mean we stop trying. There has to be hope.”

  “Ah, Ingrid. You’ve been around Nobuo too long.”

  Tears stung her eyes at the thought of Mr. Sakaguchi. She ached for his reassuring presence. She pictured his smile of delight at the sight of the Hidden One. The twin heads wouldn’t merely appeal to his academic side—no, he would love them the way a little boy loves his first puppy.

  Through the cloud of magic, she sensed as the two massive maws opened wide. The snakes’ forked tongues prodded the thick air. Liquid dripped from a fang as long as her arm. But for some reason, she wasn’t frightened—not of them, in any case. Ingrid smiled at the snakes in Mr. Sakaguchi’s stead, focusing on them as if she could transfer the impression of their might to him through sheer willpower.

  The heads shifted. She jolted at the intensity of their four eyes. She couldn’t truly see them, but she felt their focus like the heaviness of metal pipes. They stared at her, through her, as if they read her thoughts.

  That was an idea.

  Hello? she thought at them.

  Words didn’t pop into her mind, but images. Impressions: hot rock. sunny day. skin warmed. Happy thoughts, the things that would delight a snake. Happiness directed at her, because she had somehow initiated contact. Their joy mirrored hers at the thought of Mr. Sakaguchi—of that special bond with someone.

  How long had it been since they had spoken with anyone? She pictured the sun and moon, of trees in all seasons.

  In reply, intrusive images pressed on her consciousness. Cold earth, warmed; slickness of rain on skin, and sounds—voices, in a foreign tongue. Natives, unseen, their drums and rollicking rhythms shuddering through the earth to caress the growing Hidden One in its burrow of the San Andreas fault.

  She thought at them again, this time picturing Cy. Maybe, with their keen awareness, the snakes could tell her if he was okay. She imagined his kiss, his smile, the way he carried her through the heat and pain. The feel of gratitude and security in the face of agony.

  At that, the snakes flinched. The heat against her flared: pain. Yes. They knew pain. They knew it, because Papa knew it.

  Through them, she comprehended that Papa was dying.

  As hot as the air was, his arms and legs were cooling, drained of blood. Papa’s brain still boiled with power, even as his life force faded. His thready pulse was a baby’s breath against hurricane winds. His spirit was far stronger than his frail, abused body. Mr. Thornton’s knife had struck true. Whatever Papa’s powers were, they didn’t include self-healing. Nor could he communicate with the snakes.

  Ingrid knew this by their delight in her presence, even through their empathetic pain with Papa. She didn’t detect any malice. They simply were, in Zen simplicity.

  She had called to the selkies, too, projected her prayer into the depths of the ocean. She could communicate with fantastics. A week ago, that knowledge would have caused her to erupt in delighted giggles and dance about the house. Now the thought of yet another mystery made her weary.

  Papa stepped forward. Ripples brushed her skin.

  “The killing will continue, Ingrid, despite your fancies. If that old fox Blum knows about you, if anyone knows about you, you’ll never have peace. You’ll kill and kill. Japanese, Thuggees, Americans. Who holds us doesn’t really matter. The result is the same.”

  Sudden pressure clenched her neck. A final wheeze escaped her throat.

  “The world isn’t meant for gods like us anymore. Our power doesn’t let us rule. It makes us slaves.”

  Adrenaline flooded through her veins. She grabbed at her neck, her fingers flailing at air. She drew on her own heat to push him away as she had before, but he blocked her throat from within. Her lungs seared in desperation.

  The snake heads recoiled at her pain. Their distress penetrated her fading awareness.

  A strange sense of sadness broke into her mind, with images:

  animal attack. eggs breaking. nest mates dying. stop?

  Ingrid replied, picturing Papa. Picturing him as the raccoon attacking the egg.

  Silent and sinuous, the snake heads reached out of the fissure. Blood pounded in her ears, but she still heard a slight squawk, a juicy crunch.

  The pressure on her released. Ingrid fell over, gasping. The heat around her whirled and flowed and withdrew, like water sucked into a drain. Papa’s pain no longer provoked the snakes.

  She didn’t have the strength to raise her head, but she didn’t need to see with her eyes.

  The Hidden One was gone. Retreated into the deep recesses of the earth.

  Papa was gone.

  She was too weary for grief, if any existed at all. Something roared overhead and strangely cool air caressed her feverish skin, but the world was still too hot, and she was so very tired.

  CHAPTER 23

  Ice pressed against her palms. It burned through her, stark against the heat that sweltered in her veins. Ingrid gasped. She heard herself as if she echoed down a long tunnel, distant and tinny.

  “Relax, Ingrid. I have you.”

  She knew the strength of those hands on her, the fingers large and long enough to encircle her wrists. Cold pressed against her palms again. She tried to orient herself. She faced down. Something dripped from her head and trickled down her nose. Everything was hot. She opened her lips. Liquid dribbled inside. Water, flavored by iron. She might have spit it out, but her parched tongue craved any moisture at all, and spitting took energy she didn’t have.

  Funny, really. So much energy inside, yet she couldn’t muster the strength to spit.

  Heat trickled down her hands. Ingrid cranked her eyelids open.

  She stared into a chunk of kermanite. Not horse-sized, but like a bowling ball, big enough to power a Behemoth-class vessel. Her body curled around it as if to protect the stone. Cy’s hand was inches from her face, holding her fingers secure on the surface. Smokiness whirled inside the clarity of the crystal; half full, perhaps. She could likely fill it.

  “Cy?” Ingrid’s voice creaked.

  “Thank the Almighty. I have water here. Let me lift your head.”

  She was limp as overcooked udon in his hands. He draped her back onto his lap. Her head lolled to one side. Sleek silver and copper arched overhead—the
spines and ridges of a dirigible cabin, one she had never seen before. An engine rumbled, louder than Fenris’s ship. Cy cupped her jaw and tilted her head back enough for her to take a sip of water, then more.

  “Need to stop meeting like this,” she slurred. “You have to keep . . . carrying me around. Taking care of me like a baby.”

  “A baby who can make men fly and shatter buildings with the touch of a hand.”

  “Does only . . . so much if I’m too pathetic to even walk on my own.”

  “I should make a sling for you, like mothers use. Might be relaxing in the long run, like a portable hammock.”

  She tried to laugh and it came out as a small cough. He helped her take another drink. “Where are we?”

  “Hovering over Olema Valley. I was afraid to land until you vented power. I almost sang the full ‘Hallelujah’ chorus when I saw they had a stockpile of empty kermanite on board.”

  The auxiliary’s stolen kermanite. Everything flooded back to her. Blum. The horrible earthquake. The Hidden One. Papa.

  “The Hidden One, it . . . ate him,” she whispered as she crouched over the kermanite again. Heat poured out of her.

  “I didn’t see it happen. From here in the cabin, though, I heard you and your father talking.” He paused. His thumb idly stroked the back of her knuckles. It felt so good she wanted to lean into him, like a cat. “I saw an opera performed years ago, Mount Sinai. They had the voice of God boom from a megaphone offstage. That’s what the two of you sounded like. Voices of God.”

  Papa and his talk of gods and goddesses. Ingrid shivered. Mama hadn’t raised her to be a churchgoer, but Ingrid still knew blasphemy, and she didn’t like to be deified that way. It felt topsy-turvy and wrong.

  “When I was little, I always wondered what Papa was like,” she whispered. “I rather imagined he was like Mr. Sakaguchi, only he looked like me. Silly, I know.”

  “You filled in the blanks, Ingrid.”