Curio (30 page)

They slipped through the entry only to meet another wall of junk. Paths led away from where they stood. Grey tossed Blaise a glance. “Right or left?”

He raised an eyebrow, his dark eyes tossing the question back to her. After a moment of deliberation, she took the trail on the left.

Blaise deferred to her when they reached the next corner and the next and the next. Deeper and deeper they walked into the labyrinth of building materials, cast-off furniture, and mechanical parts.

Blaise snagged her coat and directed her attention to the base of one pile. When she gave him a puzzled look he bent and lifted a coarse cloth off a stack of paintings. The first painting depicted flowers, the second an empty urn, but the third had a cluster of grapes, a loaf of bread, and a goblet. Blaise grabbed all three, sharing the food with her.

“How did you find out about the paintings?”

He swallowed and handed her the rest of the bread. “I nearly starved before I saw a porcie child playing with a painting on his family's wall. He'd reach up and scratch the canvas. His fingers came away with tufts of grass.”

“How?”

He frowned and leaned against a carriage missing its wheels. “This prison supports life. I believe it was designed to keep me alive.” He looked up at the pillars surrounding them. “The rest . . . sometimes I think the rest was an accident.”

Grey set the grapes and bread on an overturned pot and moved closer.

“Who sent you here, Blaise?”

“The Chemists.” He stared at one of the stacks, the frozen mask back on his face. “And your father.”

“But why would my father banish you here? He's a good man. He was.” Grey's voice broke.

“I don't know.” He took a deep breath, as if drawing in strength. “My father and I returned to Mercury to find everything changed. In the years we'd been away, the Chemists had grown stronger. They had created warriors of their own, men seething with green power. We sought out Olan Havardsson, the man who'd given my father the wellspring water and the power to fight for his people. Olan explained that the water he'd brought from the Old Country was running out, and the party of Defenders sent to fetch more had vanished. The Chemists were no longer content with Olan's offering or with the Defender justice system. Their blood greed grew like gold fever, and they had begun to mine from weaker veins.”

Blaise swallowed and took a moment before he went on. “The Defenders were on the verge of a treaty, offering their own blood to satisfy the Chemists' requirements in exchange for protection of those bound to the potion and an end to further blood experimentation. My father's loyalty lay with his people, so Olan urged us to return to the Jicarilla lands. We were preparing to leave when they came, Adante and his guard. They hurled their bottled blood magic through our windows and smoke filled the cabin.” He pressed a hand to the center of his chest, his face a grimace of remembered pain. “We were forced outside. I saw Steinar then, standing in the trees. My father and I fought, but against the new potion-breathers, even mighty Chief Tazo could not stand.
They dragged him away and bound and blindfolded me. Adante and Steinar, men I'd known since boyhood, took me to a place that reeked of blood and potion. They removed my blindfold a moment before cutting my hand. I remember a glass case, my blood dripping into the lock and somehow pulling me inside. Then I was here.”

“But Father would never help—” She couldn't finish the sentence. Because he had. Pieces of Blaise's broken story dashed through her mind, shredding everything she'd thought she knew. No, there had to be more to it.

Blaise stalked away toward the next bend and she followed. “I heard my grandfather talking about the treaty between Chemists and Defenders. He said he wouldn't risk breaking it. Lives depended on it.”

He whirled on her, his duster whipping in a circle around his legs. “Life is always the price. I would've paid it. Instead I'm here, suspended in time with a collection of lunatic toys. We should've fought the Chemists rather than making deals, believing they would temper their obsession.”

“And if you'd lost?”

With lids lowered, he blew out a defeated breath. “A generation. Saint Gerodi have mercy.” Brown eyes opened to meet hers. “Yes, an entire generation would've died without Defender blood to sustain them, but with them the potion dependence would've ended. Yet those lives were a price we could not pay. Rather surrender every drop of our own blood.” He moved as if to cup her cheek. “Well, almost every drop.”

He dropped his hand, turned, and strode deeper into the shadows of the stacks, shoulders slumped under a weight just beginning to press on Grey. Defenders were not the monsters of the Council textbooks, nor were they subjugated whipping boys. Their existence, their function in the society
she knew, was a thing of terrible beauty. The mark on Grey's belly whispered a call that traveled through her blood and took root in her heart. She hurried after the warrior with the copper-threaded hair.

They walked in silence until a rhythmic squeak carried from somewhere ahead. After a few more turns, they emerged onto a wider path.

A strange shape approached from the other end of the road. As they got closer, Grey made out a rough wheelbarrow-like contraption piled with wares. At first she thought the porcie behind the cart was sitting, but when Blaise stopped to sift through the merchandise, Grey saw that the man was missing both legs below the knees. He sat in a wheeled chair attached to the wagon and propelled both by cranking levers at his sides.

The peddler looked at her, confusion in his gem eyes. Brown cracks mapped his face, shifting when he opened his mouth to speak. Blaise forestalled the porcie's questions with one of his own. “Would the lady fancy a new hat?” He held up a wide-brimmed black hat with a gray ribbon trimming the rounded top and a plume of silky material jutting up like spray from a fountain.

It wasn't red. It wasn't Beauty's Best. And Grey loved it. She grinned and nodded her approval.

“How much?” he asked the peddler.

“Five pieces or whatever you've got to trade.”

Blaise pulled a handful of coins out of a pocket in his duster and dropped them in the porcie's gloved palm. The merchant thanked him and rolled off, leaving squeaks in his wake.

Blaise drew near to position the hat on Grey's head. The scents of sawdust and machine oil carried off him, wrapping
Grey in a sweet-smelling haze. She leaned in and admired the line of his strong jaw as he concentrated, tilting the hat brim this way and that.

The pull between them surged. She twisted her fingers together to keep from reaching out to him. It was either close the gap or distract herself. “What happened to him?”

“Some sort of accident.” Blaise stepped back and studied her.

“Like a flood?”

Dark eyes held hers and a deliberate tone marked his words. “Or a carriage crash or a fall.”

“Why isn't he like your friend?”

“When I found Callis, he was missing half his body. His jitter pump system was broken, and there was no way he'd ever reanimate without help. I experimented until I brought him back.” He moved on down the aisle between the debris, tossing another comment over his shoulder. “But most porcies would rather stay cold than look like Callis.”

How ridiculous. Grey sighed and followed Blaise's towering figure. A handful of twists and turns brought them to a street bustling with dilapidated tocks and porcies. A little girl with a cracked face and tangled hair tugged on Blaise's coat.

“Buy some cinderite?”

He squatted down. “Let's see what you have.”

With one arm she held a small bucket full of black pellets up for his inspection. She concealed her other hand in the folds of her dirty skirt.

“I'll take the lot,” Blaise said. He dug for more coins in his pocket.

The little girl set the bucket down and held out her left hand for the money. When a coin slid off the pile she snatched for it, revealing a right hand missing most of the fingers.

At least five more children stopped them, selling cinderite, sludge-like water, and various gears, clothing, and parts. Blaise sent them all off with piles of coins.

A boy in a miner's cap darted behind a stack when he saw Grey watching him. Jeweled green eyes in a cracked face peeped around the heap at her. “Why are there so many children here?”

Blaise turned away from the market stall of a tock who had black corrosion covering every visible limb. “No one ages here. The children are wild and reckless. If they're lucky, a porcie couple will keep them, take care of them, try to prevent them from breaking. But most of them end up here after one too many accidents.”

“Why do their parents—”

“Keepers.”

“Why do their keepers not, er, keep them?”

Blaise lowered his voice, his gaze moving about the widened portion of the maze that passed for a village. “The porcies believe the Designer made them to be beautiful. If you're not beautiful, you run the risk of angering the Designer. He might de-animate you permanently. So the ugly ones hide away here.”

A porcie woman in a padded dress tottered by, patting herself as if checking for missing pieces. She flinched and stepped around a jagged stack of machine parts.

Grey's throat tightened. “And it just gets worse down here, doesn't it? They're all so damaged.”

“It doesn't have to be this way.” Blaise tugged her arm, and they walked on. “I can fix them. They can learn how to fix themselves. They'd live and function. But it wouldn't be beautiful, at least not according to their standards.”

“But Callis is
much
better off than these people.” Grey turned to watch the shuffling figure of the porcie woman.

“And Callis isn't afraid. Not of the Designer. Not of breaking. And that absence of fear has made him something of a visionary.” He gave a low chuckle.

“Is Callis part of the Valor Society?”

Blaise plunged his hands into his pockets and shifted to smile at her. “You've heard the talk, then?”

“You and Callis are behind it?”

“Actually, no. We didn't start the movement.” Blaise surveyed the long corridor before them, but his face bore the stamp of faraway thought. “Somewhere in Curio, there's another porcie or tock who's lost everything and no longer fears breaking a few rules.”

Grey stopped walking and closed her eyes, but the image of Whit's striped back remained clear as the night she'd knelt by his bed. She looked up to find Blaise studying her and thrust her chin in a defiant angle. “Better to live without fear than follow rules that will bring you down anyway.”

A smile hitched his full mouth. “Look who's talking revolution now.”

“That's why you brought me here.” Grey motioned to the jungle of junk. Shadows stretched from the stacks towering over their heads, swallowing paths and dousing the place in hopelessness.

Blaise stepped closer. “Tell me what you're feeling now.”

Her Defender mark leapt into a warm dance at his nearness. “Um . . .”

He jerked his head in the direction of the little community they'd passed through. “What did seeing them do to you?”

She dropped her gaze to the top button of his vest. Beneath it smooth, caramel-colored skin outlined the planes and dips of muscle. The brim of her hat blocked his handsome face, but his presence stirred her concentration. “It
made me angry, and it made me want to help.” A surge of strength pulsed from just behind her mark, and her eyes found his again.

He offered a slow smile. “There's the Defender I thought I'd find in here. It's in your blood, Grey. In our blood.”

A strange power rushed between them. In her mind they were flying again, the wind buffeting their bodies together. She opened her mouth to speak, but Blaise let out a soft, frustrated groan. The pull of the mark won out. Space melted between them, and his arms wrapped around her. When her hat got in his way, he yanked it off, holding it against her back as he crushed her closer.

His lips touched hers and moved away, grazing her jawline as if asking permission to explore further. A little moan, just an exhalation of breath, escaped Grey's open mouth. Blaise responded with a kiss too hungry to be gentle. Fierce need ignited deep in her belly and spread outward. She threaded her fingers through the locks at his neck and pulled his head down to hers. The fine wire woven through his hair bit into her hands, but her fingers burrowed deeper as electricity pulsed at her navel. He slid a hand beneath her coat to the hem of her shirt and skimmed her waistline, his thumb brushing the Defender imprint on her skin. Grey gasped against Blaise's lips. He broke the kiss and backed away, questions and apologies widening his eyes.

With no words to give him, she dropped her gaze and traced the indentations on her palms.

“We have to find our way out,” Blaise said after a moment. “Not that wandering around with you the whole night isn't appealing, but there are plans to discuss at Gagnon's.”

Grey nodded, though she ached to be back in his arms. If his mark burned the way hers did, how could he ignore the connection? She curled her hands into fists. When he
stepped close again she almost lifted her mouth to him, but he settled the hat back onto her head, tucking strands of hair away from her face as he did.

“Beauty's Best,” he whispered and caught her hand. He seared her palm with his lips then laced his fingers between hers.

They moved through the spreading shadows toward the next bend in the labyrinth.