Reciprocity Read online

  “Nah, don’t worry. If they’re not smart enough to avoid hitting you, then they deserve whatever you do to them,” Kasper said, his voice thick as taffy. Then he laughed. “Besides, it’s not like I’m letting them off the leash with your wonder weapon.”

  “So the rumors are true—you used the damned thing,” Josef replied with a voice that frosted the windows. “Henriette, you failed to mention that.”

  “It was amazing!” Henriette squealed. “I swear, it was like the gods’ own typewriter was chattering away in Kasper’s hands, and those cow-eyed fools fell like bowling pins.”

  “It was loud as the dickens, but you weren’t scared at all, were you, pet?” Kasper slurred. I heard him turn in his seat. “That’s one hell of a machine, Joe. I like it. I want more of them.”

  “That wasn’t the agreement,” the man named Joe said. “You shouldn’t have used it. This changes things.”

  “Damn right it does, so let’s talk. We have an opportunity for a closer partnership, you know?” A shifting of cloth on cloth, like two bodies cuddling closer together. “Could be lucrative for both Lange and Cantabile.”

  A flat slap of palms on a table, and a scraping of chair legs.

  “Perhaps I should be speaking to your father,” Josef said through clenched teeth.

  Kasper thumped a half-full bottle on the tabletop. “You can talk to me.”

  It got quiet—the full-to-bursting kind of quiet where one man put his hands under the table for a gun, and everyone else knew he had it. After a year or two, Henriette broke the spell with a tinkling, merry laugh. “Now, now, boys. Josef, come on. Old Hendrik’s not going to be in charge forever, and Kas is next in line. But let’s talk about that later. This booth suddenly isn’t so private.”

  I straightened, sweat prickling on the small of my back. I squared my shoulders and stood where I could see all three of them and they could see me. Josef’s face was a construction of cruel planes and angles, and his jaw could cut glass. His blue-black hair was slicked back and cut precisely; it was impossible to imagine it messed up. Sure, he was pretty—pretty like a snake. Henriette was a little closer to my taste, but not by much—a softer, rounder face framed by a riot of blonde ringlets. Her eyes were like his, though: narrow, black as tar, and full of meanness. She was nice enough to look at—until you got to those eyes. The idea of taking her to bed gave me the cold sweats.

  Lucky for me, she was on Kasper’s arm, not mine. The pudgy man’s olive face was flushed red, and his eyes weren’t tracking on me too good. He leaned back in his chair, his belly straining at his vest. “Well, there she is,” he said a little too loudly. “You took your time.”

  I cast my eyes down, as much to show respect as to not have to look at those sweating cheeks of his. “There was some trouble. Rademakers tailed me. Had to lose them.”

  “Who?” he demanded.

  “Tommy Sforza and some other guys.”

  Kasper waved a dismissive hand. “Just a kid.”

  “You say so, meneer. But you know who his sister is.” Kasper would know about Vedette, about how Tommy would want to do something big to make a name for himself, or to impress her. “And they were all wearing black bands on their arms.”

  Henriette laid a hand on Kasper’s forearm. “Black bands?”

  “It’s a sign of mourning,” he replied, squinting at me like he didn’t get the joke.

  I decided to help him out. “It’s like they knew that some of their own got bumped last night.”

  Kasper shrugged and poured himself another glass. “Streets are a dangerous place.”

  “That’s so. But they were following me the minute I left the warehouse. Could be they were hanging around, watching the place, but didn’t want to take on a bunch of us. Little Tommy meant business, too. Pulled a gun on me in broad daylight, with coppers coming from all sides.”

  He peered at me. “So what happened?”

  “I sorted him out and am-scrayed.” I’d have given a lot to light up just then. Phantom hands raised an imaginary cigarette to my mouth a half dozen times. “Cops have him now, I’m sure.”

  “He bought his way out by now, or Vedette did.”

  I shrugged. I could have told him that it wasn’t likely, since trade regulators probably had their hands on Tommy. I could have told him that Tommy was also missing a hand for his trouble. But both of those things would have raised more questions than I really wanted to answer, so I kept mum.

  “So I guess you were successful in getting my message to Lewis, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek before speaking. “Yes, meneer. Just a little delayed, is all.”

  “And so? What’d the little runt say?”

  Kasper wasn’t being very clever by making me spill my guts in front of Josef. I had my suspicions, and if I was even close to right, Josef would know exactly what Kasper was planning. He wouldn’t like that, sure as taxes.

  I let my eyes slide over to Henriette and her riot of soft curls before I answered. Did she know what Kasper was cooking up? Would she like it, or would she side with her brother?

  “He had a problem with your schematics and wanted see you tonight at the club. He also said he would need additional resources to perform the work, including any prototypes you might have.” Nearly every word of that was a lie, but saying the whole truth was like shoving my hand into a meat grinder while blindfolded. Maybe someone had their hand on the crank, and maybe they didn’t, but it paid to be safe.

  Kasper looked at me through slitted, suddenly sober eyes and nodded. “Yeah, okay. Now get out of here. You’re breathing my air.”

  “Meneer,” I said, and straightened to leave.

  A light, quick hand rapped on the heavy screen. “Meneer Lange, sorry we’re la— Oh. Hey, Kaeri. You in on the special raid, too?”

  I turned to face Milan, standing just inside the booth with Sleepy Jeanne. Bart loomed behind them, dull as a slab of granite. “Nope. Just leaving.”

  “Then leave,” snarled Kasper. “And Milan, you could learn to shut your mouth. Get in here—I got a job for you three.”

  * * *

  After popping up to my room to change into something less ridiculous, I made a date with myself at the hotel bar. I took a cigarette out of its case, examined it closely, and then put it back. The bartender Eduardo gave me a gin with soda and the afternoon newspaper. I spent a while staring at the front page, but none of the words made it past my eyelashes.

  I told myself I wouldn’t get too worked up about what Kasper did next. It was bound to be something dangerously stupid, and I just had to duck at the right time. I told myself I wouldn’t fret over whatever special job he had for Milan and company, or if Josef was in on it, too. Kasper didn’t want me along for a reason, and maybe it’d save me from catching a bullet. I told myself I didn’t care what Maria said to Felix. It wasn’t my business if she spilled everything to the law and opened a bottle of trouble for her family.

  But the Cantabile sibling act had been hanging around Kasper for a while, and trade regulator trouble was bound to spill over into Lange turf. If that happened, Wolfgang and Felix would come knocking again, wanting me to snitch for them. And maybe they wouldn’t be so nice this time. I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what to do about that.

  But no, I wasn’t going to worry about any of that. Not at all. I ordered a second gin, hold the soda.

  My eyes scanned the headlines, and it was the usual sensational stuff: foul murder in the Cove overnight, several tourists robbed at knifepoint at the Grannis Isle amusement park, an opinion piece moaning about the general depravity of society and the ascendance of drug abuse. That last one was mildly interesting, if a little overblown and breathless. The author decried the insidious blue dust robbing a generation of its intellect and usefulness and other such things.

  Aker was nasty stuff, and I wouldn’t touch it for anything, but some folks seemed to like it. It had all the smooth mellow of laudanum, but at
half the price. On top of all that, it made people forget they were hungry. It also left you a blind, emaciated idiot, huddled with other hopheads in graveyard alleys and church doorways. The cops had been at their wits’ end trying to figure out the source—was it shipped in from somewhere, or was it manufactured in town? What was it made of? How, and who was doing it? Lange had a few cops on the take, and they all reported the same: nobody knew, and everybody wanted to.

  The papers took to calling aker addicts “barnacles” or “limpets,” and no wonder; they clung to the side of buildings and were generally a nuisance. They couldn’t work, and they didn’t contribute anything to the Great Economy. I imagined that if enough gathered in one place, they could pull a building down as surely as real limpets could hole a ship and sink it.

  You picked your poison, and then you lived with it, or you didn’t. I smirked at the glass of gin and tossed it down to join its neighbor.

  I sighed and turned the page over, scarcely reading the business news. I thought about settling in for the rest of the bottle, but one brief item caught my eye.

  PUBLIC NOTICE

  by order of the Leemte Port Authority

  Warehouse Two, Fusili Wharf, Cove Quarter will be CLOSED for unscheduled maintenance. All goods stored therein will be held in trust by the LPA for a brief time. Apologies, etc. Inquiries may be directed to the LPA Branch Office on Costanza Wharf, Cove Quarter.

  I frowned and wondered why that was significant. While I was doing that, a man sat down on the stool next to mine and ordered a tall beer and a ham sandwich.

  “Kaeri,” the man said, low and gruff. “Why the long face?”

  “Ludo,” I replied, not bothering to fight the smile. I liked the old man, and I didn’t mind how he looked out for me. He, in turn, didn’t mind when I called him by his given name. In private moments like this, anyway. “I was trying a gin lunch, but it doesn’t agree with me.”

  “Can’t imagine why. What’s bothering you?”

  “That business at the warehouse from this morning. It made the afternoon paper.” I gave him the paper, and he scanned it. “Sort of, anyway.”

  “Ah, yep. The guys did a pretty good job getting rid of the bodies and cleaning the blood, but you can’t do anything about a couple dozen bullet holes in the wall.” He folded the paper neatly and set it on the bar. “We had to start a smallish sort of fire.”

  “A fire.”

  “A smallish fire. We put it out. Couldn’t have the whole place go up, or the port authority cops would have called in the trade regulators and arson guys. An army of insurance adjusters and gods know who else would have showed up. They would have uncovered something, fire or not, so we made sure none of the property being stored there got damaged.” Ludo took a pull off his beer and raised an eyebrow at me. “I don’t think you need to worry about it too much.”

  “I’m not worried about arson cops or insurance.” I turned away from the bar and looked out into the lobby. A few of the guys were hanging around, smoking cigarettes and generally being useless. A quiet afternoon.

  “Yeah?” he said, staring into his glass and rolling it between two huge hands. “What are you worried about?”

  I thought that one over as I picked a cigarette out of my case, a black lacquered number with an ivory-inlaid heron, piercing her own breast with her beak. Donatella gave it to me when I turned twenty. She said it was a filthy habit, but if I was going to have a filthy habit, I should have it in style. I hadn’t smoked since that day fourteen months ago, when Donatella’s stroke took her down. I put the cigarette back.

  There might be one right way to answer Ludo’s question, and a thousand wrong ways. Ludo was Hendrik’s raadsman, and loyal to him alone. Maybe not the same way he was loyal to Donatella, but Ludo knew his business. He was the Boss’s own right hand, and that hand turned into a fist when something threatened the family. Would Ludo see Kasper’s half-baked plan to get more of these carbines as a threat? Would Hendrik?

  If I spilled what I knew, and Ludo decided I was on the level, he’d probably flatten Kasper. Kasper would come out of that breathing, but only because he was the Boss’s son; he’d come for my throat after that. If I spilled and Ludo didn’t believe me, the Boss would think I was out to undermine Kasper’s budding authority. Then I’d be sporting a brand-new pair of concrete shoes at the bottom of the bay, feeding the sharks in a most personal way. Sometimes it didn’t matter if you were right or wrong—you were just screwed, whichever way you opened your mouth.

  “It’s okay if you want to be a little cagey, kiddo,” he said. “A girl’s gotta have her secrets, I guess. You know you can tell me anything you want. You meant a lot to Donatella, so I’m gonna look out for you.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I’m not sure you do. Look, I get what you’re afraid of.” An invisible hand grabbed my throat when he said that, but I didn’t say anything. “Hendrik, he may not like you much now, but he’ll come around. He listens to me. You’re a valuable asset to this family. When the time comes and Kasper’s in charge, he’s gonna need someone like you, the same way Hendrik needs me.”

  A second invisible hand ripped the bottom out of my stomach, and I thought I might black out. “Ludo, that really isn’t funny.”

  Ludo laughed and wrapped one massive arm around my shoulder. “You’re going to be just fine, you know that? You’re just like I was back in the old days, though of course I was much better looking than you. You always look out for what’s best for the family, even if everyone don’t appreciate it.”

  “De familie volhardt.” The family perseveres.

  “Damn right, kiddo.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at Ludo’s nice words, and I didn’t even mind him manhandling me like I was a kid. But the goodwill soured in my stomach like a glass of bad milk when I saw Josef making his way through the lobby, aviator goggles around his neck, flying gloves clutched in one fist. Maybe if the Cantabiles had never shown up, I could have let myself be convinced to stand as raadsman for Kasper. Maybe he would have grown up a little, gotten a little less psychotic, and turned into a decent Lange Boss. Maybe I could have learned to grow a thicker skin and made some peace with cleaning up his messes for the rest of my life. But none of that was going to happen, not with the Cantabiles around. Kasper was too wrapped up in Henriette, Hendrik was too interested in merging Lange with a noble family, and the gods only knew what Josef was up to.

  Ludo’s hand left my shoulder, and he chuckled. “I know that look.”

  “Look?” I asked. I watched Josef scowl at some poor affiliat who got in his way. She blanched and opened the inner door for him.

  “That look that says you got a bone to gnaw on, and nothing else is gonna make you happy.” He jerked his chin at the door. “Dunno what you got on your mind, but watch your ass.”

  “I always do,” I replied, and followed Josef out.

  Chapter 7

  I shouldered past the affiliat at the door and hustled to the curb to hail a cab. Josef was already gone, the distillate fumes of his ornithopter’s engine sharp in my nose. I looked toward the fading whir of the engine and caught sight of his rear Vrijdag sphere and rudder wing disappearing between two rooftops.

  “Drive,” I said as I got into the passenger side of the taxi.

  “Where to, sister?”

  The childlike voice pulled my attention from the sky. A ladoni driver sat on an apple crate, and he’d strapped short stilts his shoes to let him reach the pedals. He raised his eyebrows at me, waiting.

  “This is a bad joke,” I said.

  “No disrespect or nothing, mevrouw, but if you don’t like a shortling driver, another cab will be along soon.” He smiled nice enough at me, but I caught his meaning just fine. Ladoni almost never called themselves shortlings, since it was a pretty rotten thing to call someone. They only did it if they expected the human they were talking to wasn’t too friendly to ladoni.

  I shook my head. “No, you’ll do. But step on i
t.”

  “No particular place to go?”

  “Take this first left. I’ll tell you more when I see something I like.”

  He shrugged and pulled his heap into traffic. “It’s your money, lady.”

  I fished a ten-spot from my jacket pocket and held it between two fingers. “It’s yours if you give it some gas.”

  His eyebrows climbed in appreciation and acquainted the pedal with the floorboards. I grunted and hauled myself out of the seat, planted my ass in the window, and leaned out. The window casing dug into my flesh and I had to clamp a hand to my head to keep my hat on.

  “Lady, get back in here,” the driver yelled at me. “You’ll get your head took off.”

  “Just drive,” I called. I watched the skies and listened hard for Josef’s ornithopter.

  Every kind of airship that wasn’t a simple hot-air balloon or an aerostat flew thanks to lymanium—everything from Josef’s slick little ornithopter to Maria’s favorite Comptroller-class frigate. Most folks called the stuff spraystone, on account of it came from the Spray, that ring of rocks and ice that went around the equator of the planet. Sometimes enough iron and lead and rock glommed on to a chunk of lymanium that it came plummeting out of the sky. If the lymanium came loose during the fall or after it crashed, it’d go shooting off back into the Spray, and never mind silly little things like gravity. If the lymanium stayed stuck in the meteor or got buried under enough dirt, it’d stay in the ground. Some spraystone deposits had been in the ground for longer than anyone had been alive.

  Lymanium was damned hard to get and keep. A strong man might be able to hold on to a pea-sized lump of cut spraystone without getting carried off into the sky, but I didn’t think anyone would try it. The only things that kept a chunk of spraystone from rocketing into orbit were tons of stone and dirt, a respectably heavy piece of lead, or carefully calibrated magnets inside a hollow wooden ball, like the kind you found in a Vrijdag sphere. Put it in anything else—an ingot of steel or a wad of marshmallow—and the spraystone would carry it right into space.