Chapter Three
“THERE IS NO TRUE RIGHT AND WRONG ON TRINITY. THERE IS ONLY PAPER AND POWER, AND THOSE WHO WIELD IT WRITE YOUR MORALITY.”
—EXCERPT FROM TRACTS FROM A REBEL PREACHER
I jerk away from the body so fast that my heels catch against another corpse and I fall backward, landing hard on my ass in a pool of quickly congealing gore.
Panic scrambles up my throat, my breath coming fast, and I have to curl in on myself and force it to slow down.
Not the cold, steel-skinned Butcher anymore; back to being Val.
And Val needs to get their head on straight and figure out what the fuck just happened.
Breathe. Just breathe.
Getting back to my feet, I go to each of the bodies and fumble to take off their masks, my gloves sticky with blood, and try to decipher the scattered pieces on this metaphorical board.
The shorter figure in red turns out to be Quick-Shot Jim, Kilpatrick’s right-hand man.
Then there’s the preacher and the other one in white, who also looks to be a preacher or maybe an apprentice.
Judging by the shape and model of their gold pulse pistols, the two in black are wardens of some kind or other.
And the three in green? No clue. But they’re dressed so richly that my best guess is that they’re barons.
I lean against the cargo hold ladder, staring around the room without seeing it.
I’ve heard rumors about shadow sessions where the power players of a city meet up in secret to make deals to keep everything running on their terms. The fact that someone like Kilpatrick is in this shoddy airship with preachers and wardens and barons certainly fits the bill.
But obviously, if that’s the case, Kilpatrick wasn’t the one who hired the Butcher for this job. So then who did? Who contacted Dani with a fake story and the cash to buy my services?
My eyes drift back over to Bloody Bill, staring, dead-eyed, up at the ceiling.
He looks so much smaller right now. Diminished. He was always a big guy, broad-shouldered, built like someone who was both accustomed to the finer things in life and also had never forgotten how to make people bleed to get those things.
In a lot of ways, Bloody Bill Kilpatrick made the Butcher.
My first job was for him, and he is—was—the Butcher’s highest-paying, most regular client. Which makes sense. Only the head of a group like the Gold Town Gang would have a consistent need for a killer.
Kilpatrick had been the boss of the Gold Town Gang since well before I was born, coming to power in the middle of the 2089 Riots, when naphtha and water had been even scarcer than usual and boroughs had exploded into fires and protests.
Kilpatrick had taken advantage of the chaos, bargaining and provoking and killing and threatening until, when the flames finally died, he was the ruling crime lord of Covenant.
But now … Now he’s just blood on my blades. Like so many others. And the organization he’d built by the crush of his own knuckles is suddenly leaderless.
Not your problem.
Right now, the only thing I need to focus on is extricating myself from this mess as quickly and as smoothly as possible and getting back home to my sisters.
I wipe my blades clean on the preacher’s robe—it’s not like he can really object anymore—and phase back up into the galley.
Immediately, I head for the steerage deck and look for the signal flag controls.
Every ship is supposed to have them, a series of switches that let you raise flags of different colors and patterns along the top and bottom hulls to communicate with other skyliner vessels.
Dani is likely still in the area, within eyesight of the airship in case I need help.
I’ve never needed it before, but this would be the quickest and easiest way to get her attention.
But there are no signal flag controls on this airship.
I look everywhere, I even sweep the vessel’s layout with my goggles, but there’s no sign that signal flags had ever been built into the structure of this thing.
I bow forward, gripping the handle of the ship’s wheel, measuring my breaths slowly in and out.
I need to make a plan, but plans aren’t really my thing.
They’re Dani’s thing. They’re my sister Halle’s thing.
I usually just take the first path of least resistance that I can find and slice my way through.
Just get out of there, ghoulie. I can practically hear Dani’s voice in my head, and even the idea of it calms me. Cover your ass and get out of there.
This airship—and all the bodies on it—needs to disappear.
It’s a pretty unsophisticated vessel, but from the looks of it, you can set a fixed heading and that’s all I really need.
I set the ship’s wheel into place, pointing the nose of it up toward the bottom of the homestead island floating over us.
I move around the deck, opening every hatch and turning off every safety valve I can find, until the naphtha engines start to screech and smoke.
And then I’m gone, phasing through the walls and out of the ship, down to the streets and buildings below.
Above the city of Covenant, the airship slams into the smooth metal underbelly of the homestead and explodes in a burst of orange and blue against the fading sky.