7. Corset

Bones gave no answer, aside from flickering color-changes in his eyebeams. Remora hadn’t really expected one, although she supposed even the lack of a refusal was a good sign.

Carefully, Remora plucked the tiny purple crystal from its setting in the locket, heart beating faster. Such a fragile thing, to hold so many of her hopes for the future. She bit her lip.

Please, let this work.

Alchemy was the difference between pure engineering and cogsmithing. The Thumper was just a dumb device until she added the source and the focus. She unscrewed the vial from the Thumper’s underbelly, checking its contents carefully. The sun shone through the red liquid, sparking odd highlights from the fragment of starshard already in the phial.

“Is that blood?” asked Bones.

She nodded. “Mine, actually.” Every cogwork apparatus needed a liquid to bind its pieces. Saltwater and pure water were the most common liquids, but those wouldn’t do for this purpose. She was seeking something far more specific, and for that, she needed to considerably narrow the scope.

This was another reason she hadn’t wanted Serena or Montgomery here. Bones simply looked uncomfortable, but either of the other two cogsmithers would have been aghast at her use of blood for the source’s suspension liquid. Additionally, they might have wondered why she thought human blood would assist in her goal—and she most certainly did not want to explain that her blood wasn’t precisely human.

Remora knew she was right in using her blood, though. Cogsmithing was one of the few things she was actually good at, and this felt right to her. It wasn’t as if there was an established formula for the Thumper that she could follow. She had to trust her instincts, and her instincts said that she could choose no better suspension for this source.

She took a deep breath and dropped the purple crystal into the vial. Exhaling, she watched the shard sink slowly through the blood until it fell to the bottom, nudging against the starshard fragment already inside.

“Are you sure about this?” Bones asked.

“Yes. And no.” Remora screwed the vial back into the Thumper’s belly, giving it a final pat before she straightened and gave Bones a smile. “This is the fun part.”

Bones looked less than convinced. She turned away from him to hide the nervous biting of her lip.

Please, please let this work.

She flicked aside the safety catch from the Thumper’s activator, thumb hovering over the wide red button for a fraction of an instant before she pressed it.

The Thumper hummed and the ground beneath her feet vibrated. Pebbles kicked up and skittered down the side of the hill. The Thumper’s head lifted and began to spin in a counterclockwise circle. The humming deepened and she felt her chest tighten.

A soft click announced the Thumper’s eye clicking on. A beam of violet light shot into the distance, striking a cloud to the southwest. The cloud swirled and vanished.

It’s working! It’s working!

Remora couldn’t breathe for the excitement. From the moment she had acquired the purple crystal, she had done nothing except plan for this day.

The Thumper’s head continued to rotate. Twice more the purple beam was released. Once to the west. Again, almost due north. When it faced her, the eye flickered to life. The light caught her in the ribs and drew its way across her waist, the smell of burning cloth reaching her nose an instant too late.

Too much. The power was too much! She lunged forward to turn off the Thumper, the beam traveling up between her breasts to trace a jagged and uneven line across her shoulder before she managed to push the button.

She fell backward as the humming stopped, vision spinning. She could smell burnt flesh now, along with the cloth.

Her last thought before passing out was that she had to come up with some way to make sure Hank never found out about this. She’d never live it down.

 

Remora woke with the sun in her eyes and a breeze tickling her cheek.

Something was wrong.

Her hands clutched at the blanket thrown over her and she sat up, gasping in pain as her shoulder protested.

She glanced down. That was no blanket. That was a jacket. Bones’s trench coat.

Her breath rattled through her chest, full and unencumbered.

Her eyes widened. One hand dropped below the trench coat and traced her ribcage.

Her corset was gone.

Alarm froze her heart and for a moment her vision spun dizzily. Her corset. She had to find her corset, before someone saw her.

“Remora, be calm. You are safe here. I had to remove your corset to survey the damage.” Bones. That was Bones’s voice. The panic clutching at her throat barely dimmed. It was impossible that he would have missed them, that he might not have seen.

Remora froze and stared at Bones, feeling very much a mouse facing a housecat.

For the first time since she had known him, his ticker body was completely bare before her, thin metallic rods bound together in a parody of the human form. Solid bars mimicked a ribcage to protect his cogsmithing source.

Normally, she would have been fascinated. Normally, she would have asked to look closer, asked him a thousand questions. Right now, her body trembled with the need to run.

He must have noticed the panic in her face. “You are safe,” he repeated.

One of his hands lifted, fingers curled around something. Dozens of tiny gears in his joints spun as he extended his arm toward her. She leaned away, shaking her head, as if she could deny the thing he held in his hand.

The fingers unfurled, revealing her worst fear.

A feather.

The wind tugged at the treacherous thing, but Bones snatched it back before it could fly away. The vane of the feather caught the light, shimmering red against maroon. The soft fluff of after-feather at the base of the shaft was a dull black.

“You know,” she said, her voice hollow.

He nodded.

She pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her forehead into her thighs, not caring that her burned shoulder screamed in pain at the motion. She pressed her closed eyelids against the smooth fabric of his coat until she no longer felt the need to cry.

Freed from their normal prison beneath the constricting boning of her corset, a tiny pair of cherub wings, no longer than her arm, lifted and arched over her back.

She didn’t have to look back to know what Bones saw. One wing was completely black. The other was only half black, the sooty base of the wing giving way to sleek red and black feathers like the one that Bones held in his hand.

It was over. The moment anyone found out about this, she was ruined. Magnus Price did not have wings. Nor did her mother. Remora hadn’t even needed to do much research into genetics to learn what that meant. Her mother was unquestionably her mother, which meant that Magnus Price was not her father. Therefore, the final heir to the Price fortune not truly a Price.

She would be ruined. Cast out and penniless, a bastard half-breed child.

If only that were the worst of it.

Moments passed in silence, a slight breeze tickling her wings. Sensitive after so many years of being tightly bound beneath her corset, her wings twitched involuntarily at each tiny wind eddy.

Bones said nothing.

She lifted her head. Bones wasn’t even looking at her. Instead, he inspected the feather in his hand, staring at it intently.

“I’m a half-breed Seraph bastard,” she said. A knot in her chest tightened. She’d never actually said the words out loud before. The wind ripped them from her lips and danced away with them before she could call them back.

“This feather,” he said quietly, “was not from today. I found it in the Westmouth prison cell.” His eyebeams shifted from the feather to her face. He showed no sign of judgment or derision. He was just . . . Bones.

The tightness in her chest loosened slightly. She swallowed past it.

She felt bold, reckless. Bones already knew her secret. The thought that anyone knew, she could say these words to anyone at all, made her throw caution to the wind. “Every Seraph half-breed in recorded history has died suddenly on their twentieth birthday, assuming they did not die before that.” She said. Another thing she’d never said out loud.

“You . . . you are going to die?” asked Bones, eyes flashing a vivid yellow. She’d startled him.

“My birthday is in seven months,” she said. She took a deep breath, her fists knotting in the fabric of his trench coat. “I am going to die in seven months.”

(There was no poll at the end of this installment)