Tin Swift(98)

Cedar lifted his head. There was a scent on the wind, a song he could feel in his bones.

Wil snarled.

The Strange. He narrowed his eyes and searched the ship’s portholes. Steely-faced men stood there, rifles, shotguns, and flamethrowers at the ready.

Theobald pressed his spectacles closer to his face, glanced at the same portholes Cedar was looking at, and swore. “I think we’ll need more than guns for this fight.”

The men staring out of the ship were not human. Well, not all of them.

They were strangeworked.

Just like the things that had nearly killed Mae, Wil, and little Elbert back in Hallelujah. Just like Mr. Shunt.

“Why do you say that, Theobald?” Captain Hink asked.

Cedar’s heart thumped against his ribs. “Those aren’t men.”

“What?” Hink asked. “Of course they’re men. I know his crew.”

“They aren’t men,” Cedar continued as Theobald got busy unpacking things from his carpetbag and handing them to Miss Dupuis and Miss Wright. “They stink of the Strange.”

Hink took a moment to give Cedar a long look. Then, “Strange. All right. So they’re not men. Haven’t met a thing that breathes that can’t be unlunged. Take the ship first. Fans, and rudder, don’t aim for the envelope. Unless we have fire, a few rounds of bullets won’t take her down. And if we ground this beast, be ready to aim for the head of anything that crawls out of her belly.

“We clear on that?” he asked.

“Yes, Captain,” Miss Dupuis said, latching a contraption of brass and tubes and gauges that fit over her shotgun, like a second weapon.

“Aye, sir,” Theobald said, adjusting his goggles and shrugging a belt of bullets over his shoulder, that fed into the chamber of the blunderbuss in his hand.

“Aye,” Miss Wright said, winding a coil of wires up her left arm and sliding her gun into a fanned-out device of brass and copper that looked like a dinner plate–sized shield with tubes and wires rolling around it.

“Mr. Hunt?” Captain Hink asked. “Are you in agreement?”

The beast pushed against Cedar’s bones. It wasn’t the full moon—wasn’t even close. The new moon should be tonight, complete blackness in the sky. But he couldn’t think. Couldn’t just think as a man ought to. The hunger, the need, the scent of the Strange drew a hard, killing thirst up through him.

His grip on logic, on the thoughts of a man, was slipping.

The beast thrilled and tore at his mind. Taking. Ruling.

Kill, it whispered. Destroy.

Cedar strained to push that desire away. His sanity was sliding with each breath.

He growled, and pulled his goggles into place, his crystal-sighted Walker heavy in his palm, and the need to spill blood and tear bones from flesh rolling through him in a hot wave.

“You have me,” Cedar rasped, answering Hink, answering the beast within him. And promising the ship full of strangeworked men, coming down hard over the landing pad now, doors open, guns rattling through the air, that he would be their end.

Distantly, Cedar was aware of the captain and the others firing at the ship.

He didn’t care about the ship. Didn’t care about the bullets spraying through the air. Didn’t care about the cannons locked and loaded, fuses lit.

He ran. To the ship, to the strangeworked crew, Wil beside him, ahead of him.

All the world seemed to slow to a dream landscape. He could sense the heartbeats of the strangeworked men in the ship. He could hear their sour song, hungry to devour this world, tainted with the nightmare singsong stitched together by Mr. Shunt’s thread.

The song, the beat of hearts, the blood he could almost taste in the back of his throat were so clear, they made Captain Hink’s yell, the gunfire behind him, the gunfire ahead of him seem like the softest hush of wind through leaves.

Cedar’s world was filled with the scent of the Strange. All his reason for breathing was their death.

He was running, close enough now so he could see their faces clearly, the flat hatred twisting features into snarls of malevolence. The ship wasn’t near enough the ground, still, three of the strangeworked men jumped from it.

Their legs should have shattered. But they landed cat-light, and were running, guns firing, straight at him, each with a flamethrower at the ready on his back.

Cedar didn’t pause. Ax in one hand, gun in the other, he shot the first Strange in the head, then pivoted and hacked the second man through the neck.

They both fell.

And they both stood up again. But not for long. Wil was on them, tearing out throats, breaking necks.

Cedar laughed. He licked the blood off his lips, shifted his grip on the slick ax handle, and lifted his gun. He took aim again and fired.