Chapter Text
Van finds Wealwell perched atop one of the scrap-heaps surrounding the crew’s current hideout. He’s looking out over the rust-colored sky, but it’s clear he’s not really seeing anything. His eyes are red and raw from crying. And he’s slouching.
“Here,” she says, handing him a cup of black bean soup. “With love from Bert.” She’s a ship’s bosun without a ship right now. All she can do is bully her crewmates into eating— they need all the strength they can get. It’s a miracle Bert managed to jury-rig one of the many gizmos and gears on that monstrous mech into some sort of hot plate.
Wealwell stares into the soup as if he wants to sink into it. “You should give this to someone who can keep it down,” he says, voice hoarse and cracking at the edges, thin paint flaking away from the polished gentleman who left Gath a week or so ago.
“Drink up,” Van says, pushing a little more sternness into her voice. “You need the calories.” She’s trying not to think about what happens when Bert’s supply and ingenuity run out, and they’re left stranded in a world of mechanisms and machines but nothing organic.
Van sinks to a seat on some of the rusted metal detritus and pats the spot next to her for Wealwell to sit down. He does after a moment, joining her, the soup cup clutched in both his hands. “I was supposed to look out for him,” Wealwell says finally, staring out at the Zernian sky. “That’s the whole reason I came along, you know? I said all that stuff about Goldbeard’s gold, but I… I just wanted to look out for him. I felt sure he was going to do something foolish and get himself killed.” He pulls the cup of soup toward him and forces back a swallow. “And I was right.”
Van winds one tentacle around his shoulders— gently, not touching his bare skin. Everyone’s got different comfort levels when it comes to her new appendages, she’s well aware. Wealwell leans back into the touch a little, though, so maybe she’s doing an inch of good. Maybe.
As an only child, she’s not fully able to grasp the same grief Wealwell is grappling with. But she loved Maxwell, too. It’s the same loss that’s tearing holes in both of them. She opens her mouth and shuts it a couple of times before stammering out, “I never had any children.”
Wealwell looks at her. “No?”
“No, never,” she says, feeling her resolve cracking, snapped riggings on a ship. If she actually says it, if she names it, she won’t be able to stay afloat. That’ll be it.
She’s silent for long enough that Wealwell prods, “And?”
“And nothing,” she says, grabbing the soup cup from his hands. “I dunno. That’s the end of the sentence.” She takes a swig of soup and passes it back to him.
Wealwell sips and wraps an arm around his knees. “I tried to fall on my katanas,” he admits. “Daisuke stopped me.”
“Fucking good,” Van says. “I’m not about to lose two Gotches.”
It was a mishap. It was mayhem. They were surrounded on all sides by naughtomata, hulking and chittering beasts of iron and steel and copper. Torse was fighting at Van’s side, freshly reanimated and shredding through metal with his blades. One of the assailants went right for his heart, and Van had swung to block it with a tentacle. She managed to stop the naughtomaton from puncturing Torse’s chestplate, but he still took a heavy blow and stumbled back, letting out a crunch-buzz of shock as he did.
It was that noise that made Maxwell turn from his opponent, that noise that made him whip around during combat to check on Torse, his mouth forming the metal man’s name. He was still looking back when the wickedly sharp claw jutted through him from behind, speared his heart and shoved it out through the front of his chest.
(Van can still see it now when she shuts her eyes— that moment, that millisecond, where Maxwell glanced down at his own heart in front of him. He looked so surprised.)
When the naughtomata began to haul Maxwell’s body away, Torse had taken off like a madman, cutting through clockwork soldiers with a single-minded fury. He tore after the body, so much like Maxwell’s own mad dash to recover Torse’s unconscious form when they first arrived in Zern. It was poetic, in a way.
Or it might have been, if he had managed it.
There were too many enemies. Torse was already badly damaged. Van had screamed at him to fall back, but Torse refused, cutting through more and more naughtomata in a futile attempt to reach Gotch’s corpse, taking hit after hit as he barreled relentlessly forward. It was finally Olethra in the MechLeod that got him to stop, physically grabbing him and pulling him back from the horde, hollering at him that they were outnumbered, that it was no use.
Torse’s helm had been smeared with oil when he turned around, distraught tears shining in the sickly orange light. “We cannot let them take Maxwell,” he’d shouted. Begged. Van didn’t have to see his iron heart to know the rage and pain pulsing through it.
“Get back in the bloody mech,” Van had ordered. Torse writhed in Olethra’s mech’s hold, but he couldn’t escape.
The Wind Riders retreated, alive to fight another day.
Alive to mourn Maxwell Gotch.
Bert’s arms are tucked around her waist and Van tips her head down to bury her face in his hair, someplace safe and quiet where she can hide. Hide from the image of Gotch’s flesh heart in the steel grip of the naughtomaton. Hide from the faces around her— Olethra pale and sniffling, Marya with her face buried in her hands, tucked up into Monty’s side. Comfrey’s mouth is pressed into a thin line and her eyes keep darting around— problem-solving eyes. Trying to crack a code that has no answer.
Torse has made himself very small in one corner of the cockpit and refused all of Marya’s and Sandy’s attempts to fix him up.
“We can head true Vim from here,” Comfrey says finally. “Find our way back to Zood. With our defense capabilities restored, we—”
“No.”
It’s Olethra who speaks out, Olethra who challenges her grandmother. Van pulls her husband close and looks over his head at the Kid— bedraggled, beaten, bright-eyed. She and Gotch came into this without the experience. Without the trauma.
Well, now she’s got it.
“No,” Olethra goes on, “because we’re not done here, right? We have to… we have to stop Ludmila, or save her, or… Torse, this is your home. If we can fix it… I mean, that’s what Max would have wanted. Right?”
Torse’s visor glints dully, fixed on nothing in particular. “You are all going to die,” he says flatly. “And I will be the last of my tribe once again.”
“Olethra is right,” Freyja says, arms crossed where she leans against the wall. “We must fight.”
Pappy wraps his arms around Olethra and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “I’m with the Kid,” he says finally, meeting Comfrey’s gaze as if he’s daring her to disagree.
“This is my fault,” the Professor says.
Van squeezes Bert’s hand, taking her strength there. “We don’t have time for any of that,” she tells Comfrey. “Fault, blame… Just, we’re here now. And the only way out is through.”
Torse looks around the cockpit, and Van knows that he’s seeing the same thing Marya must be seeing— all of them dead and gone, with one sole survivor left to carry the weight of the grief. It isn’t fair. None of it is bloody fair.
But Marya meets Van’s gaze and agrees to fight.
Torse is the last of their party to concede. But he does ask, voicebox rumbling, if he could have his heart removed until such time as they need him to fight.
It’s Wealwell who pulls the last of the Aganti Zernai to his feet, looking fiercely up at him. “Stand up,” he says. “I have never known my little brother to make friends easily, but you seemed to come easily to him. I don’t know why. I was sort of paying attention to other stuff. Nevertheless.” He pulls out an embroidered handkerchief and starts to clean some of the soot off Torse’s pauldrons. “You shouldn’t be alone, or made hollow. I don’t think Maxwell would have wanted that. Also, I have been forbidden from killing myself in despair and it would be kind of not fair if you got to do it temporarily.”
Torse looks absolutely haunted. Looks defeated.
But he lets Wealwell keep polishing him up with the handkerchief. And he doesn’t say anything else about being disanimated.
It’s days later, just outside the Queen’s throne room, that Van Chapman finally realizes just how bad bad can get. They are battling through swarms of naughtomata, wrestling their way through Ludmila’s forces. Marya and Dawderdale are piloting the mech, taking shots from up above. Torse has torn off into the fray, slashing through the empty shells of mechanical men with Freyja kicking and punching combatants in his wake.
Olethra has the MechLeod in combat mode and she’s locked in, dropping enemies left and right. Van is trying not to think about the mech’s kill switch, and how likely it is that the Queen somehow has it in her possession. She lashes out with her tentacles and takes a hold of one of the nearby robots long enough for Monty to shoot it from his vantage point on Courtney’s back.
Slowly but surely, they clear a path toward the door Ludmila lies beyond.
Van is battered, Freyja is bloodied. Pappy pops up with blood gushing down the side of his face from a head wound, but he keeps marching forward. Determination burns through Van like hot soup, like spicy aioli. She already let Gotch die. She won’t let him die for nothing. They press onward, onward, until finally she finds herself side-by-side with Torse and Freyja at the entryway to Ludmila’s base.
The gilded door opens and a figure emerges.
It is not the Queen of Zern.
It’s Maxwell Gotch.
Van’s father used to tell her ghost stories, stories about sailors who fell overboard and showed up on the deck of their ships days later, appearing out of the fog with blue lips and water gushing from every orifice. He spoke of crewmen seeing their dead mothers and wives appear out of the mist, enticing the living to join them in the fathoms below. Fish stories. Tales of death and undeath.
The thing that shambles out of Ludmila’s fortress both is and isn’t Maxwell.
It is his bare chest, pale and bloodless, with the symbol of naught carved over the hole where his heart used to be. It is his eyes, but empty, with some kind of metallic muzzle welded over the lower half of his face. It is his hair, still fixed in that perfect middle part. Various iron and copper pieces have been hooked up to him, almost as if the Queen were just throwing scrap at him to see what would stick.
It’s the prosthesis Van used to wear taken to its furthest extreme— function without form, technological enhancement and advancement without any thought to comfort or compassion. While her arm was a useful tool, Maxwell’s whole body has been turned into a tool. A weapon in the Queen’s arsenal.
The same hands that created the Straka have molded Gotch into something the Queen can use. Smog puffs out of the mouthpiece of his faceplate. “What business do you have with the Queen of Industrious Progress?”
At her side, Torse chokes out, “Maxwell…”
Gotch’s lifeless eyes fix on his friend. “Aganti Zernai,” he identifies. “Property of the Queen.” He looks at Van, gears in his neck clicking in contentment. “Thank you for returning this malfunctioning unit to its proper place.”
It hurts.
This is natural for the body. Natural to hurt both intransitively and transitively— to be in pain, or to be causing pain. This is what the body was made for.
It hurts. It was meant to.
It is very good at hurting.
The Queen tells it to hurt interlopers and threats to her sovereignty. It follows orders well. It hurts well. Gears grind within it, meeting resistance in flesh and sinew, tendons tugging like elastic belts, blood and oil mixing and congealing within veins and tubes. It is less than human, more than machine. It is useful.
It has collected the Aganti Zernai from the Queen’s front step, missing machine parts thoughtfully hand-delivered by Comfrey MacLeod’s associates. The bosun and the former House of Fehujar banker are in tow as well. They may prove useful to the Queen. The clockwork construct makes strange, broken noises as it follows behind the Queen’s new factory foreman.
“Maxwell,” it says. “My friend. I am so sorry.”
“This unit will be disassembled and inspected carefully to diagnose and eliminate the mistake in its programming,” the foreman says to the bosun. Speaking at the construct would be nonsensical. Like asking a gun why it has backfired.
Van, Torse and Freyja follow Maxwell Gotch’s reanimated body into Ludmila’s lair. Monty and Pappy would know to regroup and reassess, Van’s sure of this. She’s hoping Monty at least got a look at the Maxwell thing, that he has some kind of a read on the situation, and how well and truly fucked they all are. He and Marya and Comfrey can put their heads together and find a way forward. They have to.
She walks in step with Torse, listening to him clench his fists so tightly that the metal scrapes against itself.
“You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” Van whispers, looking at the back of Gotch’s head, at the unnatural lope of his now partially clockwork form. “That’s why you fought so hard to get to his body.”
Despair weighs Torse down, as though he’s made from lead rather than iron. “Spare parts for the Queen of Ruin,” he says. “She is, as ever, uniquely resourceful.” Something inside of him whines and whirrs, like a gear spinning out of place, failing to catch on the teeth of another.
“Master Gotch,” Freyja tries, scurrying out from behind Torse’s huge frame to call after the Queen’s newest pawn. “Maxwell.” He ignores her, plodding forward.
This enrages the girl.
“So that’s it? You roll over and submit to the Queen of Zern?” Freyja demands, agitation in every step she takes. “Hey, I’m talking to you, Mr. Big Britches!”
Gotch finally wheels around and lifts the young banker up in the air before shoving her hard against the wall, her feet dangling uselessly above the floor. Mismatched claw arms have been added to Maxwell, like a twisted parody of the attachments the crew added to their mech. A literal vice-like grip catches on Freyja’s arm and squeezes, tightening and tightening until the girl can no longer hold back a whimper of pain. All the while Gotch studies her impassively.
“This is too small and too weak,” he finally determines. “Not of use to the Queen.” He drops her and keeps walking.
Van hurries to Freyja’s side and helps her up, dusts her off. She’s reminded, with a lurch in her stomach, of the way you’re meant to react when a toddler falls over— don't react. Don’t cry or shout. Act like it’s no big deal. Brush ’em off. “You’re alright, easy there, you’re alright,” she mutters, straightening Freyja’s bowler hat with one tentacle.
Van pretends the girl’s lower lip isn’t trembling. She’s fine. “What happened to him?” Freyja says.
“Something that has never been done to an organic being before,” Torse says.
Van frowns. “You don’t think this is what happened to Ludmila?”
“That she was corrupted, corroded, is true,” Torse says. “But I do not believe that she was naughtomatized.”
The three of them keep walking. It’s clear Gotch has no intent to slow down.
Van watches Torse’s face. He isn’t crying, but besides that she really can’t get a read on his blank helm. She can't tell if he’s trying like hell not to cry. “We’ll figure this out,” she murmurs, not quite sure what she even means. They’ll kill this thing using Maxwell Gotch’s body? They’ll survive? Is there even anything left of Gotch?
Torse shakes his head. “I’ve lost brothers in this way before, but never a friend,” Torse says. “Never anybody who made me feel…” He trails off.
Van does not ask whether that was the end of the sentence.