Liberty (Flash Gold, #5) Read Online Free Page B

dusk fell, darkening the streets, Kali leaned
against the wall of a bank half a block from Mountie Headquarters
and considered the airship floating above the building. To say it
was unexpected was an understatement. Seeing it filled her with a
mixture of longing and frustration. Longing because her dream of
flying her own airship was further away than ever, and frustration
because…
Tarnation
, how was she supposed to break Cedar
out of jail when what was probably some kind of law enforcement
aircraft hovered right over the headquarters building?
    In the dark, she couldn’t
see the name on the side of the ship, but she couldn’t imagine that
a pirate craft would have anchored so brazenly close to the
Mounties. The hull was painted a dark blue, and big artillery guns
were visible at different points. Lanterns burned on the deck, and
a man carrying a rifle and wearing a blue uniform jacket and a blue
hat with a pointy spike on top came into view.
    “Definitely not pirates,”
Kali muttered.
    Having never traveled
outside of the Yukon, she had no idea what the military uniforms of
the world looked like, but she guessed those were U.S. soldiers.
Though she hoped they were here for something unrelated to Cedar,
she feared that another Pinkerton detective had been sent to
retrieve him, this time with backup. And Cedar would be easy to
retrieve from a jail cell.
    She thumped her fist
against her thigh and growled in frustration. A man walking down
the boardwalk with a hired girl on his arm gave her a curious
look.
    Kali nodded at them, then
started walking in the opposite direction. It wouldn’t be good to
have passersby remember that she had been lurking about, studying
the Mounties’ building. The streets were still busy, people flush
with gold ambling into hotels, bit houses, and dancing halls.
    While Kali walked, she
mulled over how to get Cedar out. She had nothing but the tools on
her person. Even if she could cut a hole in the wall with them, it
would take a lot of time. Under normal circumstances, she might
have found that time in the middle of the night if the town lay
quiet, but the area around the building was well-lit, even the
muddy alley out back, and the soldiers on that airship might remain
on patrol around the clock. What if Cedar had already been taken up
there, and the soldiers planned to leave in the morning?
    She fished into her
pocket, wrapping her hand around the now cooled lump of flash gold.
It might be used to power a tool, if she could find a place to work
and some scrap parts so she could make such a tool. Her heart grew
heavy at the idea of using the last piece of the energy source that
she had, but she couldn’t imagine freeing Cedar without some extra
help. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had an airship she needed to
save the substance to power anymore.
    Kali turned down the
street that led to the boarding house on the outskirts of town
where Cedar had a room. Where he’d
had
a room. If word had
gotten out that he had been arrested, the mistress who ran the
place might have already sold his goods and given the room to
someone else. Kali hoped that hadn’t happened and that she could
retrieve his belongings while she considered how to distract those
soldiers. Unfortunately, everything that came to mind involved
destroying things—publicly, loudly, and perhaps with flames. Cedar
hadn’t wanted her to become a criminal to help him, but did she
have any other choice? If only her completed airship was anchored
outside of town, the envelope full of gas, the craft ready to take
off. Without it, the best scenario she could envision was being on
the run with Cedar, fleeing into the Canadian wilderness with
winter on the way.
    “One problem at a time,”
she murmured, slipping through the back door of the boarding
house.
    The owner or one of her
helpers would be up front, and Kali wanted to avoid being seen.
Even though she had been here numerous times, she did not want to
explain if the lady asked