Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

nanoagents to help her along as they did him. It was no surprise she’d dropped off so easily inside the whale, then again the previous night. “And what is your mother like?”
    A laugh rolled through her, and she dropped her head back into her arms with a groan. David resumed rubbing the tense muscles along her spine. He didn’t know which pleased him more: that she welcomed his touch, or her blissful sigh as she did.
    “Stubborn,” she said. “The only argument I ever won was when I told her I was leaving to look for Källa. She eventually agreed that I had to, or I’d never be able to hold my head up at home—and the guilt would crush me. How could I be happy like that? I would be as miserable as she was.” Her lips pursed, her expression pensive. “I think she might be happy now.”
    David frowned. “Because you’re gone?”
    “Oh, no. I think she’s much like your aunt—often sad. There are pieces of her life that gave her joy, however, and I am one of those.” Annika bit her lip. “That’s probably why I liked Lucia so well.”
    Who’d begun a friendship under a false pretense. “She’s sorry.”
    “I know. I knew it then. But I needed to be angry first.” Annika looked up at him. David wanted to turn his face, present his good side. He didn’t. “I’ll miss you so much. I wish we had more time. There are so many things I want to know about you.”
    There were many other things he wanted to know, too. He suspected that a lifetime wouldn’t be long enough.
    At this moment, he wanted to know her taste. He wanted to feel her wet and trembling beneath his mouth, to give her even a fraction of the pleasure she’d offered him.
    Not yet. Not until these knots beneath his fingers had loosened.
    He bent, kissed her nape. “I’ll be improper later.”

    David never got the chance. The distant thrum of an airship engine alerted him after noon. It flew south of them—heading west. Returning to the rail camp, and hopefully abandoning the search.
    He looked for the airship again as the sun set. The sky was clear. Annika stoked the furnace, and soon the troll’s nose steamed, the engines huffed. He watched her ease into the driver’s seat, still stiff. God, David hated that he couldn’t help her.
    She must have caught his look. “It’s not far,” she reassured him. “Only an hour and a half.”
    He nodded, took his place on the ladder behind the head to serve as her eyes—though she wouldn’t need him as much tonight. Few clouds scudded across the sky. The moon shone bright over the snow, illuminating a clear path along the river.
    David remained on the ladder, anyway, watching over her shoulder. She started off at an easy pace. Only an hour and a half. There was too much to ask, too much that he wanted to know. She must have thought so, too. Every breath not spent driving the troll was answering his questions or asking her own.
    The low plains rolled out ahead. Too soon, they reached the shoreline again, the black sand strewn with rounded stones. They spoke less now as Annika had to navigate around basalt flows, to head away from the beach and behind high cliffs, waves crashing at their base. The dogs were everywhere. Not the same ones as at the waterfall, trotting alongside for a while before slinking off into the dark.
    “It used to be hares.” Without a break in the rhythm of her pumping feet and pulling arms, Annika wiped the sweat from her face. “A hundred years ago, when Hanna and the Englishwomen first came, they couldn’t keep a garden because the hares would eatthe greens as soon as they shot up out of the ground. It hardly mattered, though; the women got fat on rabbit.”
    A hundred years ago. “After the fissure eruptions?”
    “Not long after.”
    A grimace of dismay suddenly pulled her lips tight. She’d realized what she was revealing, he thought.
    “I still don’t know where it is,” he reminded her. “Everything else hardly matters.”
    She nodded. “About two generations ago, they started speaking of the dogs, instead—how many there were.”
    A few dogs left by the early settlers, and a bounty of hares. It was no surprise that their population had exploded, but that couldn’t last forever. “They’ll likely die off, too, after they eat all of the hares.”
    “They already have. That’s why the dogs have been so bad, we think—why they began attacking us and the flocks eight or nine years ago. They never used to be such a problem.”
    “So the