Of Silk and Steam
Page 75

“Oh, but—”
“Now,” he told the pouting girl at his back.
“Excellent prosthesis,” Mina murmured as the girl snatched up her shirt and stalked past, steel gleaming at her hip.
The second girl—Clara, she thought—stalked across the floorboards, draping a shirt over her shoulders without buttoning it. Her voluptuous curves taunted in the gaslight and even Mina arched a brow as she stopped in front of Leo, trailing her fingers over his shoulder.
“How ’bout you? Want to play with me?” There was no sign of a mechanical body part, which she’d have to have to live in the enclaves.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Leo replied, his gaze meeting Mina’s with a challenge. “I’ve got everything I want right in front of me.”
Mina felt heat rising in her cheeks.
A cynical snort came from behind. Kincaid had laced himself into his leather trousers, thank goodness, and was eyeing Leo with considerable mistrust. “Who’s the leech?”
“A friend of mine,” she replied.
That made his eyes narrow. “Out,” Kincaid commanded Clara, circling Leo as if he were some muscled gladiator in the Pits in the East End, where men wagered on blood and death.
She didn’t have time for this—and she also wasn’t entirely certain how Kincaid would react. The mech was a dangerous man, used to ruling his enclaves with an iron fist—literally. She’d seen him kill men for the smallest of infractions, and he despised blue bloods.
“Leo Barrons,” Leo said, holding out his hand.
Kincaid gripped it, squeezing hard. Mina took a step forward but Leo’s swift glance spoke volumes and she froze. Muscle strained in his forearm as Kincaid tightened his iron grip with a nasty grin, and it was a surprise to see that Leo was taller than the burly mech.
“Got a good grip on you.” Kincaid laughed. “Come on, why don’t you show me how good?”
A mocking arch of the brow. “I don’t need to. I already know my cock’s bigger than yours.”
That startled a laugh out of Kincaid, and Mina watched with bated breath as he released Leo’s hand and stepped back with narrowed eyes. “Barrons, eh? You’re the one with the price on your head.”
“Don’t go getting any ideas. In short order, nobody’s going to have any coin to pay that reward.”
Kincaid scratched his jaw. Almost as if someone blew out the flame on a match, his entire demeanor changed, leaving her wondering just what kind of man Kincaid truly was. “We’re not ready,” he said bluntly. “The Echelon’s been squeezing our resources, pushin’ our quotas. Haven’t had a bloody chance to sneak in any work on the Cyclops.” All business.
“We’ll take what you have,” she replied.
“And ruin the bloody lot?” A scowl darkened his brow and he took a step toward her.
Leo somehow just happened to be standing in the way, looking down at the shorter man as he picked a fanciful clockwork paperweight off his desk and rolled it over the back of his deft fingers. Nothing in his expression changed but Mina had that breathless feeling that they were walking the edge of a knife again and that he was daring Kincaid to push him.
“You’re not the only pocket of revolutionists producing the Cyclops,” she admitted. “There are four hidden foundries in the city. This is merely the largest.”
That made Kincaid’s eyes narrow.
“Men can’t speak of what they don’t know,” she reminded him.
“They’re all risin’ up?”
“As many of them as we can outfit with the Cyclops.” All of the humanists she could summon, anyway. The message she’d sent to Sir Gideon Scott would hopefully have found him by now.
Their job wasn’t to wait. Sir Gideon could rouse the humanists in their network and fit out the Cyclops in the other sectors. She needed this sector, however, to crush Morioch’s forces and spare the rookery.
A devilish gleam burned in those blue eyes. “We’re taking the Tower?”
“A slight detour first, then, yes, the Tower.”
Kincaid snatched up a metal brace from the desk, drawing it over his head and fixing the leather straps in place to support his iron arm. He hooked a pair of small chains onto the steel hydraulics in his forearm. “Been waitin’ on this moment for a long time, lass. My steel wants to taste blood. Blue blood.” A pair of thin blades shot out through his steel knuckles.
“Just remember—some of the blue bloods are on our side,” she warned. “If we do this, you follow my command.”
There was a momentary pause. Then Kincaid graced her with a dangerous smile. “Of course. Wouldn’t dream otherwise.”
* * *
“Bloody hell.”
Leo rapped a knuckle against one of the steel breastplates on the first Cyclops. They gleamed in the darkness as Kincaid lifted his phosphorescent smuggler’s lantern, dozens of them…no, hundreds…stretching into the cavernous warehouse buried deep beneath the enclaves. All of them faceless, with thin, glass eye slits at the throat through which a man inside could peer as he operated the massive device. They stood a good three feet taller than the largest spitfire, wielding enormous flame-throwing cannons fitted to their arms.
“It reminds me of an old tale I once read about rumors of a hidden, long-lost army in the Orient,” Leo murmured.
Mina came into view, her hand sliding over the elbow joint of the Cyclops in front of him. “You’ve read Sir Nicodemus Banks’s Travels to the Orient?”
Few blue bloods gave a damn about their origins. Banks had written of his journeys through such foreign lands, including rumors of the Emperors of the White Court hunting for word of the craving virus when the whispers first came to their attention and then deliberately infecting themselves with it to become gods to their people.
“Curiosity is my greatest affliction,” he admitted wryly. “I like to know how things work. Why they work. Where they come from.”
The human classes in France had dealt with their blue-blood aristocracy during the Revolution, and the Spaniards had used the Inquisition with theirs. Leo paused for a moment, wondering if he was on the brink of the downfall of the remaining blue bloods in London. Change, he told himself, is the way of the future.
Perhaps England could forge a new way forward, involving mechs, humans, and blue bloods, the way the other countries hadn’t.