Heart of Steel Read Free Page B

doors and shuttered windows, hoping that whatever business Yasmeen had wouldn’t involve them.
    They were in luck. Today, Yasmeen only sought one woman: Zenobia Fox, author of several popular stories that Yasmeen had read to pieces, and sister to a charming antiquities salvager whose adventures Zenobia based her stories on . . . a man whom Yasmeen had recently killed.
    Yasmeen had also killed their father and taken over his airship, renaming her Lady Corsair . That had happened some time ago, however, and no one would consider Emmerich Gunther-Baptiste charming , including his daughter. Yasmeen had seen Zenobia Fox once before, though the girl had been called Geraldine Gunther-Baptiste then. As one of the mercenary crew aboard Gunther-Baptiste’s skyrunner, Yasmeen had watched an awkward girl with mousy-brown braids wave farewell to her father from the docks. Zenobia had been standing next to her pale and worn-looking mother.
    Neither she nor her mother had appeared sorry to see him go.
    Would Zenobia be sorry that her brother was dead? Yasmeen didn’t know, but it promised to be an entertaining encounter. She hadn’t looked forward to meeting someone this much since Archimedes Fox had first boarded Lady Corsair —and before she’d learned that he was really Wolfram Gunther-Baptiste. Hopefully, her acquaintance with his sister wouldn’t end the same way.
    A familiar grunt came from Yasmeen’s left. Lady Corsair ’s quartermaster stood at the port rail, consulting a hand-drawn map before casting a derisive look over the town.
    Yasmeen tucked her scarf beneath her chin so the heavy wool wouldn’t muffle her voice. “Is there a problem, Monsieur Rousseau?”
    Rousseau pushed his striped scarf away from his mouth, exposing a short black beard. With gloved hands, he gestured to the rows of houses, each one identical to the next in all but color. “Only that they are exactly the same, Captain. But it is not a problem. It is simply an irritant.”
    Yasmeen nodded. She didn’t doubt Rousseau could find the house. Though hopeless with a sword or gun, her quartermaster could interpret the most rudimentary of maps as if they’d been drawn by skilled cartographers. That ability, combined with his expressive grunts and eyebrows that could wordlessly discipline or praise the aviators—and a booming voice for when nothing but words would do—made him the most valuable member of Yasmeen’s crew. A significant number of jobs that Yasmeen took in Europe required Lady Corsair to navigate through half-remembered terrain and landmarks. Historical maps of the continent were easy to come by, but matching their details to the overgrown ruins that existed now demanded another skill entirely—that of reading the story of the Horde’s centuries-long occupation.
    Though not ruins, Fladstrand’s identical rows of houses told another tale, one that Yasmeen had seen repeated along the Scandinavian coastlines.
    In one of her adventures, Zenobia Fox had written that the worth of any society could be judged by measuring the length of time it took for dissenters to go from the street to the noose. Zenobia might have based that statement on the history of her adopted Danish home; a few centuries ago, that time hadn’t been long at all. Soon after the Horde’s war machines had broken through the Hapsburg Wall, they’d deliberately created a zombie infection that had outpaced their armies, and the steady trickle of refugees from eastern Europe had opened into a flood. Those who had the means bought passage aboard a ship to the New World, but those without money or connections migrated north, pushing farther and farther up the Jutland Peninsula until they crowded the northern tip. Some fled across the sea to Norway and Sweden, while others bargained for passage to the Danish islands. Those refugees who were left built rows of shacks, and waited for the Horde and the