Valeria Read online

  “Do you work for a delivery service? Is that why I’ve been seeing more airfoils in the last three years?” she asked, nibbling at a fresh salad.

  Mache picked at the food, still queasy from his conk on the head. “Yes. Once the airfoil was made available to the general market at an affordable price, express delivery exploded. We can cut the time seventy-five percent, and because we don’t use more fuel than it takes to keep our dirigibles up, it’s not prohibitively expensive.”

  “How delightful,” she chirruped. “Though I wish you’d been able to keep your aircraft in the room. I would have loved to see the differences between my first generation and yours. I wonder how they got the price down?”

  “What’s yours made of?” Mache asked, tilting his head. Higher quality airfoils were made with higher quality metals.

  “Paper covered in a compound glass derivative,” she said. “I think they call it fiber glass on the ground.”

  Mache started. “Fiberglass? Wow. Mine was aluminum.”

  She laughed. “That would explain the price difference, wouldn’t it?” She hummed. “They probably have less sophisticated controls. I admit I don’t even know how to fly mine.”

  “You what?” Mache was caught off guard. “I mean, what if the dirigible went down? Don’t you go down to get food, see your family?”

  Valeria shrugged, her voice light and sweet as ever. “This is my home,” she said, “and it has been for fifteen years. I only go down when an executive wants to talk to me and can’t come up here. Elthgo sends food up once a month and I don’t have family.”

  “Oh.” Mache wondered how he was supposed to feel about that. The way she said it sounded as if she wasn’t sorry about the lack, a state he shared. But if he were wrong, there was no doubt she would get very testy. There was a long moment of silence. Feeling rather lame, Mache offered, “I don’t either.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t bother me.” Valeria sat up, holding out her hands, hair shifting in her haste to speak. “No, not at all. They sold me into slavery for some food before Elthgo recognized my talent and bought my contract.”

  Mache blinked. “You’re a slave?” he asked.

  “Do I look like a slave?” she countered.

  Mache looked around. The dining area was sumptuous, the dinner fresh and tasty even if he was still having trouble eating it, and she was well kept. Still, it bothered him, a single person stuck in a dirigible drifting above the land. “When was the last time you went down?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

  She seemed content with this and tapped her chin. “Oh, two years ago I guess.”

  “What do you do?” Mache asked, fighting the urge to drop his jaw. He couldn’t imagine being stuck in one place like that.

  Valeria giggled. “I’m an inventor, silly,” she said. “I invent.”

  “But, people? Don’t you get lonely?”

  She shrugged. “Not really.” she said. “Crowds make me nervous, people are dangerous.”

  “Yeah, but–” Mache cut himself off, shaking his head. He stabbed a carrot, put it in his mouth and chewed, forcing himself to calm down. Valeria was putting up with him and he was the guest. It wasn’t his place to question her lifestyle. Once he swallowed, he asked, “What do you invent?”

  Valeria’s good eye lit up as she sat up straighter. “Many things, but I like to focus on limbs and body parts. My hand is my own invention!”

  “Yeah, you mentioned,” he murmured, glancing at her strangely long fingers. “What happened to your real hand?”

  “It was crushed by a gear setting in the factory when I was eight,” she said, and waved. “It was terrible, but my fault.”

  “…crushed?” he asked faintly, eyes wide. What planet did this woman live on? Why was an eight-year-old working with gears in a factory and why was she okay with this? Had he passed through dimensions when he hit the glass? Perhaps he was hallucinating.

  “Sure. I was setting a gear in place for a dirigible engine and when it slipped in place my hand got caught in one of the wells.”

  “You were eight,” he protested. “What were you doing setting a gear?”

  Valeria grinned. “I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. It was my invention.”

  “You were eight,” he said again, wondering if she’d ever get it.

  “Yes. And the Elthgo Dirigible Power Fifth Generation was mine.” She glowed with pride.

  Mache coughed. “The fifth generation came out almost thirty years ago,” he said. “I wasn’t even born yet.”

  “I was eight.”

  “You’re thirty-eight?”

  “And a half.”

  Mache stared. He coughed. “You don’t look a day over twenty.”

  “It’s the replacements.” Valeria said, tapping her hands and the eye patch. She beamed. “I haven’t been able to prove it yet. I think my method of attaching spare limbs increases life span slightly. It reduces the amount of energy the body spends on repair and upkeep.”

  Mache stared again. He was tempted to rise, thank Valeria for dinner and leave post haste. Clearly his first impression had been correct. He was in an alternate universe or some sort of fold in space-time. Outside factories churned smoke, the streets bustled with women who complained that their corsets were too tight and men who complained the same. And yet here he was in this dirigible with a madwoman talking about extended life and how she’d crushed her hand in an inventing accident when she was eight.

  “And your eye?” he asked.

  “My best invention,” she said. “Actually, I only perfected it last year, with a few spare crystals the CEO brought up for me.”

  “Invention?” he asked, trying to decide how an eye patch was a new invention.

  “Oh, that,” she said, and reached up, burying slim fingers in her golden locks and made a few motions until the leather patch fell away. Mache gasped. Nestled in her eye socket was a sphere of silver with a gilded lip that matched her hair. A startling golden light filled what was clearly an empty space. “It’s a variable magnification lens,” she said, and started to outline how the model came to be, the expensive materials Mache had never heard of, and how she’d come to make it. Mache only heard one thing.

  “You plucked out your own eye?”

  Valeria was brought up short. “Yes.”

  He reached up, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Your own blooming eye,” he murmured. “What the hell for?”

  She hummed. “I wanted to see better when I was working with small parts.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t design a properly functioning lid, though. Without the fluid of a natural eye it was difficult to mold something properly, but I might figure it out with a few more years.”

  He put the fork down, more queasy than ever. “Well…” he said, meaning to get up and leave.

  Valeria stood, interjecting. “You can see my workshop,” she said. “And then we’ll look over the plane and you can tell me more about yours, maybe even teach me.”

  “Teach?” Mache asked. “You want me to teach you to fly?”

  “Of course I do,” she said, beaming. “Like you say, what if the ship went through a catastrophic failure that I couldn’t fix or something happened in the ship and I needed to get down quickly? I should learn and since you’re here, I won’t have to bother the CEO.”

  He supposed he could understand. And it wasn’t like laying low for a few days wouldn’t do him some good. The shipment wasn’t too important but he wasn’t sure if it was insured. If it wasn’t the customer was likely to be cross. If it was, the customer would be fine. The boss, however, would be more than a little testy. Besides, figuring out Valeria was becoming a more and more difficult task by the minute. “All right. Invention show for flying lessons. I can deal with that.”

  * * * *

  She showed him things he had never imagined and kept him up late that night. Mache couldn’t manage a complaint, too in awe of the spread of her talent. Mobile arms, steam-p
owered hammers, drills, and saws that could cycle their water rather than allowing it to escape, creating near infinite energy. He discovered to his amazement that she had decorated the dirigible herself; the chandeliers he had admired upon arriving were her handiwork. Her labs were a riot of function and art.

  It occurred to him that if he was caught aboard with Valeria, he would surely die. And why not? His airfoil was in tiny pieces on the ground and his boss would probably assume he’d gotten caught in a tree somewhere and sliced to ribbons. Valeria never mentioned the danger, though. He wasn’t sure if she didn’t know, didn’t care, or wasn’t talking about it.

  He could understand why Elthgo would kill him, though. Valeria was a treasure.

  “How much of your body is natural?” He asked in wonder as she showed him the dexterity of her hands.

  She tapped her chin. “The only parts that aren’t natural are my hands and my eye,” she said. “I’d say, oh, ninety-five percent according to volume, a bit more by weight. Both parts are metal alloys, you see. Very dense.”

  “Sure.” Mache yawned. It was probably three in the morning but he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed. “What’s it like, working for Elthgo?” he asked. “Rumor says it sucks.”

  “Sucks?” she asked, frowning. “That means bad?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking to the side. “Sorry for the crass language,” he mumbled.

  She beamed. “Oh, it’s okay. It’s nice working for Elthgo! I get to invent whatever I want most times, and the CEO comes up to see my things every few months.”

  “The CEO? You know them?” Mache’s eyebrows rose a few notches. No one even knew if the CEO of Elthgo was a man or a woman.

  Valeria nodded. “She’s so nice. She always tells me what I’ve done well, and sometimes she gives me these marvelous ideas. She even gave me the idea for the eye when I complained I couldn’t see delicately enough.”

  Mache felt his veins chill. “Sounds great,” he said, unable to get the part about plucking out her own eye out of his mind. He shivered. “So most stuff coming out of Elthgo is your invention?”

  “I doubt it,” Valeria said, waving. “I have very high-quality materials. I’m mostly a special requests person. If someone important needs something like a leg or an arm, they come to me. It’s my specialty.”

  “And that’s why the ship is so pretty,” he said, looking around the lab. It was full without being cluttered and most everything was clearly in its own special place.

  “Most of it.” She giggled. “People never come in here or my room. You’re the first in something like ten years!”

  Mache blinked. First, huh? He smirked. “Honored.”

  She stood, stretching her long hands up to the ceiling, tilting her head back and humming with a small grin. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Having someone to talk to, I mean. I didn’t miss it, but it is nice.”

  He was struck by the lines of her body still laced tightly in her bustier, stretched within arm’s reach, shirt pressed tight against her skin as she pulled one arm back, and then the other. Mache forgot to speak for a moment. “Er,” he said, floundering until her words caught up to him. “Sure. I mean, no problem.”

  “And tomorrow is flying lessons,” she said with a smile. “I’m going to bed early.”

  “Early?” he asked.

  “I don’t need much sleep. I never have. I lay down and I think and I think and I think and it doesn’t seem to matter when I go to bed.”

  “Right,” he said, and rose. “What time would you like to wake?”

  “Whenever the sun wakes you will be fine. I’ll make breakfast.” She bounced with excitement.

  Mache gulped and rose. “All right,” he said, a little too quickly. He hoped her innocence would hold out long enough for him to exit. Thirty-eight and bouncing around like a fifteen-year-old just wasn’t fair. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Valeria probably bid him good night, but he wasn’t positive, breathing a sigh of relief as he got back to his rooms.

  * * * *

  Morning came early for Valeria. Thus, morning came early for him too.

  “Mache?” There was a gentle touch on his bare shoulder. A cool, soft something slid over his skin. The smell of fresh grass and warm metal. What a peculiar combination. Still, whatever it was, it was disturbing the best night of sleep on the softest of mattresses. He batted the touch away.

  “You should get up. Breakfast is ready.”

  His head pounded in protest of the late night and early morning so soon after being knocked around. He groaned as the hand drew a cool line across his shoulders. “…Nuh-uh.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Okay. If that’s the way you want it.” The hand withdrew. He pressed his face into the pillow. For a breath, he fancied himself asleep again. There was a cheerful, bubbly giggle. It was Valeria doing something that she found funny and he would probably find completely mortifying. “Wake up time!”

  He had time to open his eyes half way before a tumble of leather, cotton, blond hair and ninety-five-percent flesh according to volume fell onto his midriff. Her hands ripped away the covers and, unperturbed by the fact that he’d divested himself of his shirt before sleeping, poked, prodded and tickled his chest.

  His first response was a grunt at the sudden weight on his stomach. He winced at the rush of blood to the head. It began to pound again. Finally, there was the alternate cold and warmth of her hands as she chanted, “Time to get up, time to get up.”

  “I’m up, I’m up,” he cried, batting at her hands. He managed to grab the warm one but couldn’t quite bring himself to touch the one of metal. It stilled as he grabbed the natural one. Trying to hide a grimace at the thought of the millipede hand in his, Mache left it laying in the center of his chest. He eyed her. Valeria sat on his stomach, already dressed in flying gear–the same bustier, now with a leather jacket, a flying cap over her hair and a single goggle pulled up over her cap. The eye-patch was different, he noticed, with the emblem of Elthgo stamped in the middle.

  For some reason the stamp chilled him, and he focused on her good eye. “Do you wake up everyone this way?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” she said. “A friend did it all the time in the factory. I haven’t gotten to do it since I came here.”

  “And where is that friend now?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “You can do it to him.”

  Valeria’s face fell. “There was a big explosion fifteen years ago. He died in that.”

  Mache felt terrible. Women always managed to do that to him. Nibbling on his lip, he tried to think of something to cheer her. “You’ve only got one airfoil, right?” he asked.

  As expected she perked up, or she hadn’t been too sad in the first place. Mache supposed the incident was fifteen years passed. She pulled her hair in a tail from where it spilled in beautiful waves out of her flying cap and let it go again. “Yes. That’s okay, right?”

  “Most airfoils are made with room for two,” Mache replied, trying to find his shirt. “Should be fine.”

  “Is my hair okay?” She asked. “If it’s out of the cap?”

  He blinked. Then he chuckled. “It might be difficult to brush out afterward, but it should be fine.”

  “What do the lady pilots do?” she asked, eyes wide in curiosity. “The ones with long hair?”

  Mache frowned, trying to figure out if he knew any lady pilots. There were a handful of airship captains he’d heard of. Mistress Henley was the most famous of them, from America, but he didn’t even know what she looked like. “I guess they tuck it under their cap.” he said, shrugging. “Don’t really know.”

  Pulling on his gear, Mache tried to keep up with Valeria’s next conversation, mind twisting around air speed velocities, gliding power, head winds, and trade winds. Even with his fairly good education on flying, he gave up after a minute and focused on getting everything ready. Hopefully he wouldn’t pass out or anything due to his conc
ussion.

  He waited for her to take a breath. “Okay, ready. Let’s go to the hanger and we’ll start there.”

  “Wonderful! We can get breakfast there too.”

  Mache blinked. “We can?”

  She took his hand and dragged him out. Not in the habit of arguing with beautiful women, Mache followed. He saw a fair amount of the airship the night before, but in the morning light it was even more dazzling. The curtains were free of dust, the chandeliers glittered in the morning light, a hundred details he hadn’t seen before making themselves known, like the wire wrapping on the glass drops to keep them in place and the way many of the structures of the chandeliers were actually delicate gears wrapped in gold plating. It was more than valuable metal, though–it was art, and Mache found himself admiring it without any thought to the gold, only the golden haired beauty that made it.

  Valeria threw open the doors, doing a turn as Mache looked around. “This was the main control room. We altered it to be the hanger when we bought it. It keeps people confused if they don’t know where to land.”

  “Or, you know, has them crashing through your ballroom,” Mache retorted.

  She giggled. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I replaced most of the window last night, I’ll do the rest today.”

  “Where’d you get the material?” he asked, frowning.

  “There’s a lot of silicon in the lab, and you crashed inward. I picked up the pieces, ground them, and melted it back to the correct shape,” she said, and knelt at a plot of lettuce growing near the window, pulling up a few leaves.

  Mache looked around again. The materials up here were worth hundreds of thousands of marks. It unsettled him. Materials so valuable on the ground were hers at the drop of a hat. He frowned and shook himself. No skin off his nose. “Does the lettuce grow well up here?”

  “Year-round too,” she said, pulling up a head, breaking off a piece and standing. She pressed it to his lips with her natural hand, smiling. “Here.”

  He took a cautious bite. “It’s good,” he said. “We ate some yesterday, right?”