“Alice, will you marry me?” he blurted out.
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Will you marry me?” Words poured out of him. “I started to ask you back in Kiev, but we got interrupted, and what with one thing and another, I never got the chance to ask again, and now there’s a small chance I’ll be dead, or at least seriously wounded, in the next ten minutes, so I want to know: Will you marry me?”
“Oh, good Lord,” Phipps muttered from the helm.
“I… I… Oh, Gavin, this isn’t the time,” Alice stammered.
He took both her hands in his. Adrenaline thrummed his nerves like cello strings. Alice’s left hand was covered by an iron spider that wrapped around her forearm, hand, and fingers to create a strange metal gauntlet, and the spider’s eyes glowed red at his touch. Gavin had his own machinery to contend with—the pair of metal wings harnessed to his back. They flared again when he shifted his weight.
“The universe will never give us the right time.” Gavin’s voice was low and light. “We have to make our own.”
“Dr. Clef tried to make time,” Alice said, “and look where it got him.”
“He wanted to keep it for himself.” Gavin looked into Alice’s eyes. They were brown as good, clean earth, and just as deep. “We’ll share it with the world. I can’t offer you more than the open sky and every tune my fiddle will play, but will you marry me?”
“There’s no minister. Not even a priest!”
“So you’re saying you don’t want to.”
She flushed. “Oh, Gavin. I do, yes, I do. But—”
“No!” He held up a hand. “No yes, but. Just yes. And only if you mean it.”
“Ah. Very well.” Alice, Lady Michaels, took a deep breath. Her dress, a piece of sky pinned by the breeze, swirled about her. “Yes, Gavin. I will marry you.”
With a shout of glee, Gavin leaped over the edge.
Air tore past his ears and his stomach dropped. The Lady’s hull blurred past him, and perhaps two dozen yards below, the calm Caspian Sea shimmered hard and sharp and a little angry. Gavin spread his arms, moved his shoulders, and the wires attached to his body harness drew on tiny pulleys. The wings snapped open. The battery pack between his shoulder blades pulsed power, and blue light coruscated across the wings with a soft chime like that of a wet finger sliding over a crystal goblet. A matching blue light current glowed through a lacy endoskeleton underneath the Lady’s envelope above, giving her a delicate, elegant air. The endoskeleton and the wings were fashioned from the same alloy, though the wings consisted of tiny interwoven links of metal, much like chain mail. And when electricity pulsed through the alloy—
Gavin dove toward the water a moment longer, until the glow and the chime reached the very tips of his wings. In that moment, the alloy pushed against gravity itself, and abruptly he was swooping back up, up, and up; by God, he was rising, climbing, ascending, flying and the wind pushed him higher with an invisible hand and the deck with Alice and Phipps upon it flashed by so fast, Gavin barely had time to register their surprised expressions and then the Lady’s curli-blue envelope plunged toward him like a whale falling onto a minnow and the wind tore his surprised yell away as a sacrifice, giving him just enough time to twist his body and turn the unfamiliar flapping wings—God, yes, they were wings—so that he skimmed up the side of the envelope so close his belly brushed the cloth and with dizzying speed he was above the ship, looking down at her sleek envelope and her little rudder at the back and the fine net of ropes that cradled the ship like soft fingers and his body stretched in all directions with nothing below or above him. Every bit of his spirit rushed with exhilaration, flooded with absolute freedom. His legs in white leather and his feet in white boots hung beneath him, deliciously useless. His muscles moved, and the wings, made of azure light, flapped in response, lifting him into the cool, damp air, with bright Brother Sun calling to him, lifting body and soul. A rainbow of power gushed through him, and he was part of the heavens themselves, a whole note streaking through infinity, cleansed by wind and mist and shedding worries like grace notes. Gavin yelled and whooped, and his voice thundered across distant clouds as if it might split them in two. This was what he’d been born for. This was home.
He hung in the blue nothing for a tiny moment. His wings glowed and sang softly behind him. The clouds spread a cottony pasture far away, and he could almost—almost—see gods and angels striding across them. A calm stole over him. It didn’t matter how many trillions of particles held him aloft or how gravity failed to function. It didn’t matter that a disease was coursing through his body and killing him bit by bit. There was blessed nothing. His mind slowed and joined the stillness. The wind sighed and Gavin hummed a soft note in response as the breeze curled about his white-clad body. Harmony. Peace. How perfect it was there.
A shadow below caught his eye. The Lady was still hovering just above the surface of the calm Caspian Sea. This was at Phipps’s insistence—if Gavin’s wings had failed, he wouldn’t have fallen far, and the ocean would have provided a more pleasant landing than hard ground. Perhaps five miles ahead of the ship lay a sliver of an island, and just beyond that, a rocky coast. The shadow was moving beneath the water, growing larger and larger beneath the Lady as whatever cast it moved up from the bottom of the sea. The thing was nothing natural. Unease bloomed quickly into concern and fear. Gavin tucked and dove, his wings pulled in tightly. He didn’t dare dive too quickly—he didn’t know how much the harness could take, even though his mind was automatically calculating foot pounds and stress levels. He shouted a warning to Alice and Phipps and felt the vibration of his vocal cords, sensed the compression of air, knew the sound would scatter helplessly long before it reached Alice’s eardrums, and still he shouted.
Half a mile below him, a pair of enormous black tentacles rose up from the shadow and broke the surface of the water. At seven or eight feet thick, they easily looped themselves up and around the Lady with incredible speed, even though she was the size of a decent cottage. Fear chased Gavin’s heart out of his rib cage as he dove closer. He could hear Alice shrieking and Phipps yelling in thin, tinny voices that were ballooning into full volume. Air burned his cheeks as he dove past the envelope, now wrapped in suckered black flesh, and he caught the rank smell of ocean depths and old fish.
Instinct rushed him ahead. He had to reach Alice. No other thought but to reach her, to get her to safety. Even the Lady’s distress didn’t matter.
Below and just behind the ship, a black island rose from the waves. Eight other tentacles trailed in oily shadows beneath the ship, and a wicked horned beak large enough to crack an oak tree snapped open and shut. A single eye the size of a stagecoach stared up at Gavin, and he caught his own reflection in the dark iris. Inside Gavin a monster equal to the one below roared its anger. For a mad moment, he wondered if he could dive into the eye, punch both fists straight through cornea into vitreous goo and force the creature away. Grimly, he ended that line of thought, as it was foolish. Instead he made himself fling his wings open and end the dive with a sharp jerk that sent a red web of pain down his back and into his groin, where the flight harness was strapped to his lower body. He skimmed through a gap in the tentacles and the rope web that supported the Lady’s hull, twisting his body in ways that were already becoming reflexive, until he could drop to the deck. His wings folded back into a metallic cloak that dragged at his back and shoulders once the blue glow faded and the chime stopped.