Fiddlehead

“So this is your plan? Bring me back to Washington to see my sentence carried out?”

“That’s someone’s plan. Maybe when I left the District that was my plan, but it’s not anymore. If you ride with pirates, you get ideas.”

“Ideas?” Haymes asked, raising an eyebrow as if she sensed an opportunity.

She sensed wrong.

“You see, over the last few weeks I feel like I’ve really … gotten to know you. Uncomfortably well, if you want the truth. And if I take you back to face justice, you’ll only writhe loose, or buy your way free of it.”

“You have great faith in me.”

“Faith? Of a sort. I have faith in your bank accounts and your wiles. I have faith that you will absolutely do the most awful things necessary to have your way. I don’t know how you became such a monster, and to be frank, I do not care.” Maria’s hand settled on a checklist beside a lever.

“Then why are we still talking? You’re awfully chatty for someone who doesn’t want information or conversation.”

“Oh, you know. Just killing time while I figure out this … system.”

The checklist read:

• Activate overhead light source.

• Close control room communication vents.

• Seal observation door.

• Close emergency doors.

• Pull to release gas.

A second checklist beside it read:

• Before exiting, close off gas.

• Turn on fans.

• Wait for window to clear.

Maria didn’t know what it meant about the window clearing, but she understood everything else well enough to proceed.

“What are you doing?” Haymes asked, as Maria closed the communication portal, cutting off the last word. She said something else, but Maria didn’t hear it.

“They’d hang you,” she muttered, staring down at the controls and making sure she knew what came next. “Or shoot you. Either way, it’s better than you deserve. This is more fitting, I think.” She looked over at the door and saw that yes, it was sealed. She couldn’t close the emergency doors from within the control room, but she had a feeling it wouldn’t matter.

Katharine Haymes dropped the bag and ran to the window, hitting it with her fists. She shouted, but Maria couldn’t hear her; the glass was uncommonly thick. She wondered if even a bullet would break it. It was almost like the windscreens of a big airship, and maybe that’s what it was. Something very similar, at least.

Haymes had thought of almost everything.

Maria pulled the lever. She pulled hard, and it drew down slowly. She did not hear the hiss of gas spilling through the tubes and out of the tanks, but she could see it: a yellow jet of air, puffing, curling, and falling to the floor like syrup.

Katharine Haymes stopped pounding on the glass. She took a step back away from it, collecting her composure as the room began to fill. Stoically she stood as the gas pooled at her feet, hiding her boots and the hem of her skirt. She remained there without budging as it crawled up her thighs, and covered her to her waist, then her breasts. Her breathing faltered, but she stayed strong, holding back the coughing fit that her body begged for until the last moments, when the poisonous air flowed down her throat.

Maria could still see her through the murky air, a shadow of a well-dressed woman, standing stock-still save for clenching and unclenching her fists, until she fell to her knees, then to her hands and knees.

Then to the floor, where she writhed and twisted.

And then stopped moving altogether.

When Maria had asked the Fiddlehead how many people would die from the gas, and how many would turn into shambling fiends, the machine told her that 70 percent would die but keep walking. Maybe Haymes was in that fortunate 30 percent who’d stop for good. Maybe she’d poke her head up again momentarily, as the noxious fumes tugged at her nervous system and puppeted her into ca

Either way, Maria had a gun. Hainey said she should shoot for the head.

And she had a mask. She pulled it out of her pocket and drew it over her face, exactly the way Hainey had showed her, making sure it fit without any gaps or leaks. “When it hurts to breathe, you know it’s on right,” he’d assured her. He should know. He’d worn them in Seattle.

The air she drew through the filters tasted like mildew and charcoal, but that was better than sulfur and blood.

She glanced out the window one last time. The image of Katharine Haymes wavered and wobbled as if it were surrounded by rainbows—distorted by the window itself. Ah, so that’s what the note had meant. The glass didn’t just protect observers, it detected the gas as well. The whole thing must be polarized, which must’ve cost a fortune.

But Katharine Haymes had a fortune.

Maria seized the research files and stashed them in her bag. She readied her gun, tested the mask one last time … and opened the control room door.

Twenty-four

December 1880

“‘It did not happen immediately, but it happened quickly in the wake of Katharine Haymes’s death: Word was out. Word went even farther the next morning, when all of us—Abraham, Gideon, Nelson, and myself—exhausted to the bone yet thrilled to be alive, scattered to the four winds. We took the news wherever we went, threw it as far as our aim could reach.

“In the ensuing weeks, we found others reaching out from across the Mason-Dixon—reaching across a barrier that had once seemed insurmountable. The diminutive Confederate officer Sally Louisa Tompkins regained her standing and her credibility by force of will, and her voice amplified our message. Maria Boyd’s voice did likewise, for although she belongs to neither North nor South, she speaks to both with equal authority. So, too, Gideon Bardsley, no longer a slave but a citizen, both of Alabama and the District. Outcast and hero, the inventor and scientist who created the machine that might save us all with its warnings.’”

Julia shook her head. “Dearest, no one talks like that. Least of all you.”

“No, but people write like this. This is the language that ‘keeps’ the best.”

“I wish you wouldn’t bother. Sounds a bit forced to me, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, not taking his eyes off the papers he’d so meticulously written out by hand. They’d taken five months to compose, and they went off to the printer tomorrow. This was his last chance to read it before he committed indefinitely to the saga. “But if I wrote it as it happened, with all the swearing and sweating, no one would want to read it.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong about that,” his wife murmured with a sly smile. She lounged in an overstuffed chair beside a cooling fire. “If anything, I think the readership might blossom.”

“No one wants to read about men being bored on trains, or swearing every day when the post comes.”

“Or threatening to punch telegraph operators.”

“That only happened the once. You may rest assured, I’ve left that part out.”

She gri

“‘Those who had been silenced were heard, and although forces conspired to silence them once more, the truth grew larger than the lies—large enough to rise above them, and stand its ground. The undead leprosy was a threat to all. It cared nothing for the color of a man’s uniform, or the state of his purse. It disregarded politics, age, and virtue. It came for all alike.

“It came for us.’”

“Oh, very dramatic, dear.”

“But it has come for us, hasn’t it? You’ve seen the measures we’ve taken—the measures we’ve been forced to take.” He meant the quarantined quarters. He meant the pits dug at the far side of town, and filled with the remnants of the writhing corpses, killed again and burned, then buried.