Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,75

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Nothing. She looked at the gravity plates, and saw the device was now melted and smeared, like Clef’s manipulations had burned the thing out.

“How did you do that?” demanded Gregor again. For once, the captain looked genuinely shaken.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know?”

“No!” she shouted. “No, no! I don’t even know if I did do that!”

She sat there in the fairway, bewildered and exhausted. Gregor watched her, wary.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said wearily. “There could be more of them. Last time they called in a whole damn army! There could b—”

She stopped talking as a black, unmarked carriage rattled into the fairway.

“Shit,” she sighed.

Gregor scrambled through the mud, grabbed his espringal, and pointed it at the carriage—but then he lowered it, surprised.

The carriage pulled up in front of them. A young, rather pretty girl wearing gold-and-yellow robes peered out of the cockpit window. “Get in, Captain,” she said. “Now.” She looked at Sancia. “You too.”

“Miss Berenice?” said the captain, astonished.

“Now means now,” she said.

The captain hobbled around and started climbing in on the other side of the cockpit. “I’m not going to have to make you get in this thing, am I?” he asked Sancia.

Sancia briefly calculated the risks. She had absolutely no idea who in the hell this girl was. But with the captain’s bond still on her ankle, Clef suddenly dead and silent, and the whole of the Commons suddenly deeply unsafe for her, she had few choices.

She climbed in the back, and the carriage took off toward the Dandolo Chartered campo.

13

Sancia sat huddled in the passenger seat, gripping her wrist where she’d hidden Clef. She stayed quiet. Her skull was pounding terribly, and she had no idea what in hell was going on. For all she knew this girl was the queen of Tevanne, and could have her head lopped off with but a word.

She tugged at the bond on her ankle. It held fast, of course. She’d considered using Clef to undo it during the fight—but that would have tipped off the captain to the fact that she possessed something that could break scrived locks, so she’d refrained. She bitterly regretted the choice now.

Gregor sat in the cockpit with the girl, wrapping up his injured arm. He peered up at the rooftops outside. “You saw them?” he asked. “The flying men?”

“I saw them,” said the girl. Her voice was oddly calm.

“They have spies everywhere,” he said. “Eyes everywhere.” Then he sat up. “Did…Did you check this carriage? They put this thing on mine, this scrived button so they could follow me! You should pull over, now, and we should—”

“That won’t be necessary, Captain,” she said.

“I am deadly serious, Miss Berenice!” said Gregor. “We should pull over now and look over every inch of this carriage!”

“That is not necessary, Captain,” she said again. “Please calm down.”

Gregor slowly turned to look at her. “Why?”

She said nothing.

“How…How did you happen upon us, anyway?” he asked, suspicious.

Silence.

“They weren’t the ones who put that button on my carriage at all, were they?” he asked. “It was you. You put it there.”

She glanced at him as she piloted the carriage through the Dandolo southern gates. “Yes,” she said reluctantly.

“Orso sent you to follow me,” he said. “As I went to catch the thief.”

The girl took a long breath in, and let it out. “It has been,” she said with a touch of fatigue, “a very eventful evening.”

Sancia listened closely. She still didn’t understand what the hell they were talking about, but now it seemed to involve her. That was bad.

She considered her options. she said. But Clef was silent. If he was awake, she could pop the bond off her ankle and jump out of the carriage the first chance she got. She supposed she could dart Dandolo, or both of them, and steal the key to the bond. But she’d been in an out-of-control carriage once tonight, and had no desire to repeat the experience. And either way, both options left her abandoned on the Dandolo campo—and without Clef, her life there wasn’t worth a copper duvot.

So she stayed put, and waited. An opportunity would present itself eventually. Provided they all stayed alive.

“So it was Orso’s box,” he said, triumphant. “Wasn’t it? I was right! He had you ship it into my waterfront, under your name, didn’t he? And he…” He stopped. “Wait. So if you put the scrived button on my carriage instead of our attackers…how did our