The Dragons of Nova (Loom Saga #2)(9)

Just beyond the edge of the traps’ territory was where she’d made her range—a decent winding walk from the guild hall. Florence didn’t presume her activities had gone unnoticed. Her detonations weren’t exactly subtle. But she hadn’t expected to find a trike waiting for her.

A man lay out in the seat of the vehicle, his knees draped over the handlebars. His hands were folded behind his head, their obsidian skin nearly blending in with the iron of his hair in the dim light. He wore a loose shirt, barely decent enough to be counted as a dressing for bed, and loose pants that were nearly the same shade of brown as the bronze of his vehicle.

Florence was accustomed now to Derek venturing about in such a lax state of undress, but it had been the cause for much surprise the first early morning they’d worked together.

“I was wondering when you’d show.” He beat her to the first word.

“I might have never. I don’t come out here every morning.” Florence continued onward, narrowing the distance between her and the trike positioned right at the start of her makeshift shooting range.

“You come out here every morning you get up early to finish a canister.” He peered at her with one golden eye. It was a dark color, nearly smoldering red. Against the dark ash of his skin, it looked like an ember that remained in wait for the chance to spark fire again.

“I didn’t know you paid that much attention to my work.” Florence rounded the large tires of the vehicle. On the other side was a long stretch of bare forest. Holes of upturned earth marked the spaces that Florence had used as testing grounds for bombs. A tree wider than four of her rested perpendicular to her line of sight. Countless pockmarks pitted its surface from rounds long past. Whole chunks had been reduced to sawdust along the stretch of trunk. Today, if Florence’s round worked as she hoped, there would be another gaping maw in its bark.

“I’ve paid attention to your work from the first time I saw it.”

That wasn’t untrue. Derek had always heeded Florence’s input. But only when it came to the things that were important to him. She’d been all too eager to help the rebellion however she could, and with her connections in Ter.4’s Underground through Will and Helen, and ties in Mercury Town, that meant assisting with getting the Alchemists the necessary supplies the Dragon King had been trying to throttle.

To date, Florence had only very minor successes on that front, and she could tell that it was beginning to grate on the nerves of the powers in the Alchemists’ Guild. Florence opened the hinge on her revolver in frustration. No matter how much she explained otherwise, they saw the tattoo on her cheek—the outline of a raven—before listening to her about where her skills lay. She knew nothing about how long it would take to get supplies across the world. She didn’t understand the nuances of seafaring. And train schedules made her eyes blur over. The Alchemists needed a true Raven to accomplish what they wanted; Florence could make the right introductions, but she was useless beyond that.

“You’re going to break the gun if you keep loading rounds like that.” Derek drew in his feet, sitting upward in the seat of the trike.

“Actually, this is an alpha model. The hinges are more durable than the beta versions, cast in high heat steel.” Florence held up the gun, inspecting it in the light. “I’ve also reinforced the locking mechanism and tightened the springs. It’s meant to hold up under the strain of active combat, so it can take a bit of abuse from canister loading.”

Derek was silent, but she could feel his eyes on her back. There was a certain type of power that came from knowing she had done something to earn stiff-lipped respect. Eventually, she might even get through to him and the rest of them that her value extended far beyond the marking on her cheek.

Let him watch, Florence thought as she pushed small piles of dirt on either side of her feet to assume a wide firing stance. She wanted him to see the fruits of her labor. To respect her ingenuity like she had respected Ari’s for years.

Power surged though her arms. It was leeched from her blood like sweat from pores on a hot day. It oozed through her hands and flowed in a perfect channel to the runes along the barrel. It wrapped around the canister like a constricting serpent.

Her finger curled around the trigger. That was always her favorite moment: the half second when her skin first came in contact with the trigger of a gun. It was a surge of power. Judgment encased in metal, welded together with the ability to change the world with the merest twitch of muscle. In that breath, everything else faded away, and Florence felt like the universe hung on her will.

The last rune along the barrel lit up. The charge was too slow, but she could work on that later. Florence took her aim and pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded in her hand with a rain of shrapnel. She tumbled backward, half in surprise and half from force. A clumsy beam of energy shot forward, radiating outward and carving a ditch into the earth underneath the line of its shot.

She hit the ground ungracefully, bringing a hand up to her stinging face. Bits of metal were lodged into her cheek. The pain was ringing in her ears and the exhaustion from her magic working overtime set in, forming bruises along her legs as it tried to heal the cuts on her face.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” Derek muttered.

Florence hadn’t heard him move, but he was now squatted before her. One hand curled around the more intact side of her face. She blinked away the haze as his other hand began to pick out the bits of metal. Even when he wasn’t trying to be graceful, his movements held a surgical precision. Her eyes settled on the tattoo on his cheek: two solid black triangles, one pointing up, the other down, connected by a line.