Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Draven
The Aerie
Restricted Levels
Worthless machine.
Draven was tempted to toss the thing from the Aerie’s highest tower, but even as broken as it was, it could still be used for parts. Sadly, that could be said for many things in the fortress. Once it was a marvel of cutting-edge technology, then a relic of a more advanced age, and now it was a trash heap. A very well-fortified trash heap.
Repairing and patching equipment took most of his time. Lemoine and Stringer were more than capable of handling the day-to-day operation of the Aerie, but this? Who else could he trust? Someone with barely two decades of life and who regarded the aging technology as something akin to magic? No. There was no one else alive who knew how the machines were meant to operate. Even though he was never an engineer, he did have years of experience.
Centuries, even.
In the days following the incident in the library, Charlotte had been wary in his presence. He sympathized. It could not have been pleasant to have been reminded that his fangs were for more than show. The way she had pleaded for mercy, like she expected him to flay the guard alive, troubled him. He had wanted to frighten the guard, to press upon her the importance of her task. He had meant every word when he said no one was more important than Charlotte. He needed someone he could trust to stay with Charlotte during the day while he dealt with what could not be delegated. Not that he trusted the fresh-faced guard, but she was eager to earn her place and unlikely to deviate from orders a second time.
Electronic innards spread across the workbench, roughly grouped into two piles. On the left, what could be salvaged. To the right, scrap. The pump worked reasonably well, so it went to the left. With a new power supply, it’d function. The filter was a poor substitute for activated charcoal, but it accomplished its task. It could be reused. Some circuits were free of obvious damage and wear, but the majority went to the scrap heap.
Draven stretched, rolling his neck to work out a knot. A leaking battery did this. He had inspected the unit not long ago and failed to detect any corrosion. It seemed like only a matter of weeks but might have been as long as a year ago. Maintenance logs would have the answer, but he didn’t care that much. What did it matter? He was the only one who performed the inspections, and he simply did not have time to see to them all. Maintenance lapsed. Batteries leaked. A broken machine was always a priority, and as soon as he cobbled one together, another one broke.
Somedays the Aerie felt like a chain, holding him frozen on this mountain. Escape seemed impossible. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a chance to do his work. His real work, not the endless mending. To add to the frustration, he’d rather spend the time with Charlotte.
That thought surprised him. Much about Charlotte surprised him. Her determination. Her intellect. The way she melted with pleasure when he praised her.
She was unexpected. He hadn’t expected to enjoy her questions. They ranged from fact gathering about the colonial ships, about the tech, historical events, his condition, and his personal history. Draven sidestepped the questions that were too personal. While he entertained her questions, he wasn’t interested in revisiting his past. When he contracted his condition, so much about himself changed. Not only his physiology, though that was the most dramatic, but also his temperament. His wants and ambitions. Before, he had been a man with a curious mind. Charlotte’s curiosity was one of the things that drew him to her. Other than his willingness to explore the intellectual frontier, he had been frightfully bland in every other aspect of his colonial life.
How the masses would be disappointed to learn the bloodthirsty vampire had started as a meek and mild scientist.
Draven mentally shook himself before melancholy settled on him. It didn’t matter how he started. He changed. He left that name—that life—behind.
Charlotte’s questions kept picking at the past, bit by bit. She was determined to uncover him and occasionally he wanted to be uncovered. How would she react if he recited the terrible deeds he had done? If he recited the names of those he wronged? The lives he ended? A better man would be able to recount all their names. He was not that man, and the list was too extensive.
No. It was better to keep his past hidden. Some things were better left buried. Considering his misdeeds—how generous, when others would call those misdeeds crimes against humanity —perhaps his affliction hadn’t changed him so dramatically. The darkness had always been there. The vampirism just gave him an excuse to indulge in his destructive tendencies.
He needed to shut down Charlotte’s questions. If he forbade them, she’d only persist. They hadn’t known each other long but he recognized the stubborn streak in her. She wouldn’t relent. She’d keep picking away with indirect questions, talking around the prohibited topics, until he slipped and revealed a previously hidden piece of himself.
Previous companions had been easy to control with trinkets and luxuries. He knew that would not work with Charlotte. What did he have that she wanted that he could limit? His library? Possibly, but he enjoyed watching her read by the fire too much to take that away. Draven found that he was a selfish creature, inclined to indulge his cravings. Could he limit access to himself? His blackened, shriveled heart ached at the thought. That was the last thing he wanted.
He required a distraction, something more interesting and shinier than his two centuries of experience. Sadly, his imagination failed.
Draven leaned against the workbench and contemplated his most recent problem: the ruined cryo unit. It had functioned for two hundred and eleven years since landing and another eighty-eight years of space flight. Two hundred and ninety-nine years. No one could claim that it was shoddy craftsmanship. Naturally occurring mineral deposits in the mountain shielded the delicate circuits from the energy surges that fried so many other electronics. That shielding was why the mountain had been selected for the lab. The military base was mere decoration, hiding the last remaining pieces of functional technology. Emphasis on last.
What the Nexus energy surges failed to damage, time accomplished. Material degraded. Corroded. Leaked .
Fucking battery. The last battery.
Draven crossed the room and stood before the cryo unit. If he didn’t know better, he’d suspect it to have broken on purpose.
On his wedding night. The timing couldn’t have been more auspicious. Minimal guards on duty meant that alarms would go unheeded, no one would have noticed the unit’s countdown to opening, and no one had been there when the prisoner woke.
Currently, the cryo unit’s inhabitant was sedated and chained in a cell on a lower level. It wasn’t a good solution. A terrible solution, actually. He needed either to fix the cryo unit—impossible—or figure out what to do with the prisoner.
Draven placed a hand on the cryo unit and slumped forward until his forehead rested on a control panel. Lettering had long since worn away, but he knew the layout by heart. He entered the code in his sleep, on the rare occasions he slept. The body of the unit was constructed of tempered, high-endurance glass. Once the glass panels had been transparent, allowing technicians to observe the sleeping occupants. Time discolored the glass to a grungy, foggy gray.
“Useless thing,” he said, smacking the control panel with the palm of his hand. The tactile feel of the panel gave way, but nothing responded. Nothing would without power. Perhaps if he strung together enough photovoltaic panels and wired it directly into the—
No. The solar panels were fairly low-tech and less prone to malfunction but he lacked the ability to make more. He already scavenged the abandoned levels of the Aerie for solar panels. Every single one was already in use.
Ancient humans had batteries. Copper rods and…He struggled to remember. Iron? Tin? He couldn’t imagine that copper and iron would produce enough of a chemical reaction to generate much of a charge, but it was a starting point.
This is what he had come to? Rooting about in his collection of broken toys, hoping to repair them with bits of copper and iron? Useless garbage, the lot of it.
Furious with himself and the situation, he kicked the cryo unit. The panel rattled, barely attached. It clattered to the floor, revealing the battery compartment. Discolored blue and gray crystallized acid covered one end of the battery. He ripped the battery from the unit, wires dangling and scattering the crystals. He turned it over in his hands, closely inspecting the end of the block coated in crystals.
Crystals that were clustered around a puncture. The perfectly round puncture.
Rage overtook him. Someone did this. Someone sabotaged his work. Worse, realization dawned that Charlotte’s wormwood poisoning had been a distraction while someone punched holes in the last functioning battery.
He threw the damaged battery across the room. It slammed into a shelving unit, knocking over a glass jar. The jar landed on its side and slowly rolled to the edge of the shelf. Draven clenched his hand, wanting to catch the jar but he was too far away. He watched as the jar plummeted to the floor.
The sound of shattering glass filled the lab.
The last bit of his control broke. He grabbed a metal baton—every workstation was equipped with batons because the prisoner was not always compliant—and slammed the baton into the cryo unit. The brittle plastic of the control panel cracked. Tempered glass panels groaned under the assault. Fine cracks splintered across the surface with a creak and a pop. Typical. The material was engineered to withstand unimaginable force and dramatic temperature fluctuations, but time—just time—caused it to fail.
Enraged, he hit the weakened point again. And again. All he had were broken pieces and worn parts. No matter how many times he cobbled the pieces together, he could never succeed. Time always won.
The baton vibrated in Draven’s hands, and he pummeled the cryo unit. The tempered glass cracked. A network of spider web-like fractures spread across the surface. Soon the entire front of the unit was cracked glass.
He turned his wrath to the nearest workbench, swinging the baton along the surface and knocking everything to the ground. Glass shattered. Paper drifted in the air. The stench of chemicals offended his nose, but he did not care. He barely breathed. His respiration rates were so low that he could breathe in a toxic cloud without concern. He swept the workbench clear of the cryo unit’s salvaged parts. What did he need them for? He’d never get it working again. Not that it mattered, not with someone actively destroying his equipment.
Stringer watched him from the door, arms crossed over his chest. “Feel better?”
Draven’s chest heaved. He dropped the baton. Metal rang out against the concrete floor. “I do.”
“Dare I even ask?”
He smoothed back his hair, retying his hair in a queue. “Better not. Are you here for a reason or to silently judge me?”
“The duty roster needs your approval.” Stringer held out a clipboard.
Draven waved it away. “I need a list of everyone who accessed this level the night of the wedding,” Draven said.
Stringer frowned. “There was a skeleton shift. I can find out who was on duty.”
“Everyone. Not just the guards. I want the names of everyone, from the guards down to the person who scrubs the floors. Do it.” Draven paused, waiting for the man to comply. “Now.”
The man scurried away.
Draven surveyed the wrecked lab. He could placate himself with the knowledge that he had another. He had plenty of space. Even had enough pieces of broken equipment that he could have a tantrum daily and it wouldn’t make a difference. He needed to deal with the prisoner. Containing it in a cryo unit had worked far longer than it had any right to. Sedating the prisoner was temporary. He needed to address the prisoner’s underlying issues and stop wasting his time with broken tech. And, of course, he still had Charlotte to manage.
On his way out, he spotted an answer to at least one of his problems. Despite being surrounded by garbage, perhaps there was some magic left in the Aerie after all.
Charlotte
The Aerie
Charlotte’s Bedroom
In the days and weeks following, they fell into a comfortable pattern. Orianne escorted Charlotte to and from the library and other locations as needed, but the library was all she required. The guard resisted Charlotte’s efforts to befriend her. Draven’s lecture about duty had left a lasting impression; Orianne was now all business.
Evenings were spent with Draven. Often they met in the library, sometimes in the dining room or her rooms, and once in his sitting room. She had yet to see his bedroom. Charlotte got the impression that he did not require much sleep and seldom used the bedroom at the top of his tower.
She pushed away any speculation that he held himself back. When he was with her, she only ever had the impression that he was with her completely in that moment. Did she know every detail of his long life? No. She’d be foolish to expect that when they had only known each other for what, considering that long life of his, must seem like a blink of an eye. He spent his nights in her company and had not vanished for days on end. Charlotte was untroubled.
They worked their way down her list of questions. For every item crossed off, Charlotte replaced it with a new one. He skipped a fair few questions. That was fine. She had other ways to get answers. She spent her days in the library researching the very same questions Draven declined to answer. That wasn’t snooping. She was a historian. It was research.
Perhaps she was a little troubled, but she told herself that everyone had secrets. He had lived lifetimes. Her handful of years, nearly thirty, paled in comparison. Of course he had secrets. She had secrets. Draven likely had forgotten more secrets than the Founding scandal sheets could even hope to publish. It was natural that she should feel some distance between them.
It was just one room, and she had the key to unlock the door in her pocket. If she really wanted to see what was so special about the room, she could take a look for herself. Any time. Any day. She chose not to because she understood privacy and boundaries, and, most importantly, she was not a snoop.
To demonstrate how much she was not a snoop, she never once tried to pry open the locked drawers of Draven’s desk in the library with an envelope opener, even though the lock appeared insubstantial, and she felt fairly certain she could force it open. Not that she’d ever entertained such ideas. She was a gentleman’s daughter and a scholar.
Besides, Charlotte felt confident that Orianne would snitch on her in a heartbeat.
Around the time the sunlight dimmed, and she needed to light the lanterns in the library, she received a note that Draven would meet her in her rooms that evening. She closed the book she had been reading and packed her notes into her satchel, ready to return to her rooms with enough time to scrub the ink from her fingers and tidy up her appearance.
Orianne entered the room first, and Charlotte followed close behind. They found the room in near darkness. The fire had gone out, and a lone lantern cast a pale light. The air was wrong. Too still. Too cold. Light from the corridor spilled in, but it could not banish the deep shadows.
The guard held up a hand, silently asking Charlotte to remain quiet.
A pricking of awareness that they were not alone came over her. Something was here. Something dangerous.
A figure stirred in the dark.
Instinct, that animal part of her mind that acted before reason could have its say, made her gasp and throw her satchel across the room at the intruder.
Draven caught the bag. Notebooks and quills tumbled to the floor. “Calm yourself.”
Charlotte pressed a hand to her chest. “What are you doing lurking about in the dark like…like—”
“Like a vampire?”
“Like an intruder,” she finished, although yes. Exactly like a vampire.
“My apologies,” he said.
Orianne stood to attention. “Lord Draven.”
“That is all,” he said, dismissing Orianne.
The chair creaked as he rose. A moment later, there was the scent of a match and candle lighting. The candlelight cast half his features in warm light. “I thought I would share a relic with you.”
“In the dark?”
“Yes, sweetness. Come here. Mind the coffee table.”
“This would be easier if the fire were lit,” she said, carefully making her way across the darkened room.
“Unfortunately, the projector works best in the dark.”
“Oh, the way you tease me, Lord Draven,” she said playfully. Her shins bumped into the table, but she otherwise made it safely across the room. A warm blanket settled over her shoulders.
“Sit,” he ordered, guiding her to the settee.
He extinguished the candle and the lantern dimmed. There was a click, followed by an odd electrical hum, and a light spilled from a small canister on a table. Ghostly figures hovered over a golden disc. The figures were frozen, and the colors washed out.
“What is this?” Charlotte asked. She stretched out her hand, her fingers passing through the figure without resistance. The image wavered. “Is that a halo?”
“Holo,” Draven said. He stood beside her, hands folded neatly behind his back in his relaxed posture. “The projector crystal has degraded. The images are meant to be vivid.”
“This is amazing.” She swept her hand through the figure again. It wavered, like disturbed water, but she felt nothing, not even heat from the lamp. “I’ve read about them. I never thought I’d see a working model.”
“They are meant to be immersive with sound and light,” he said, sitting down next to her and stretching his arm across the back of the settee. “Now sit back and watch.”
She perched on the edge of her seat, utterly mesmerized when the figures moved. The canister emitted distorted sounds, at first music and then voices. Charlotte had to focus on the words as it felt like she was eavesdropping on two people having a conversation at the end of a long corridor. The speech cadence was off. Old-fashioned. “What is this?”
“This is footage of the day we arrived on Nexus.”
“Landing Day?”
“Arrival protocol number three. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. There’s the captain.”
A tall woman with long dark hair threaded with silver—but that could be the projector—stood in the center of the crowd. Heads were bowed over handheld equipment. Some officers looked around warily, hands on their blasters.
Charlotte’s fingers itched to touch the image of Captain Beckford. She commanded attention without so much as saying a word. With a flick of her wrist, two officers followed her to the edge of a river. Charlotte recognized the scene and the faces. Illustrations were in every history book, after all. Captain Beckford and the crew’s first steps on Nexus were at the site that would eventually become Founding. The man with the shaved bald head could only be August Reeve, the cartographer. The woman with the long braid and glasses was her namesake, Charlotte Stoker, the ship’s navigator and founder of the university.
“This is remarkable,” she said. “How was it captured?”
“Recorded,” he corrected. “This footage was taken by a drone. That’s a small flying machine. We used drones to scout out the area and create maps.”
“I thought the planet was scanned before the ship landed?”
“It was. Those scans told us about landmass, water, and resources, and gave us the best location to land, but missed the finer details and fauna did not register at all.” He paused. “No one else has seen this since it was recorded. We only have this because of a last-minute notion for posterity.”
“Your idea?” She leaned back and shifted to face him.
He shook his head. “My brother’s, actually.”
He had a brother. That was new information.
“Is he there?” She pointed to the silvery figures. She had so many questions.
“No.”
“How is this possible? I thought all the electronics malfunctioned.”
“During a Nexus event, yes. The mineral deposits in the mountain act as a shield.”
“Winter solstice is approaching. Are we shielded here? Do we risk damaging the projector?” As much as she had explored the Aerie, she had no idea how far into the mountain her rooms were.
“This room is adequate.”
“Is that the colony ship? I thought it would be larger.” The ship was boxy and gray, all color washed out. The familiar three-star emblem decorated the side.
“Part of the ship. That’s a shuttle. It functions as a carriage, transporting small groups. The ship was still in orbit,” he explained.
“I guess that’s a silly question.”
“The only silly question is the one you don’t ask.”
The recording’s perspective shifted, pulling back from the people to sweep over the landscape. Except for the river, the terrain was unrecognizable from the present day. This was untamed with open meadows and tall grasses.
“It looks so wild,” she said.
He placed a hand on her back, rubbing it in a circle. “Sweetness, watch the recording. It’s not very long. You can ask your questions later.”
She leaned against him, sharing the blanket. The holographic images were fascinating, but she kept replaying the words no one else . He had this wonder, a literal treasure from another world, and shared it with her. Only her.
Glancing up, she caught him watching her. She smiled. His expression was as neutral as always, but his arm tightened around her, pulling her closer. Satisfaction settled over her, warming her as efficiently as the blanket.