Excerpt: The Iron Tongue of Midnight

Death was his trade, it seemed. Only mere hours ago (although now, in this endless moment, it seemed to have been over a lifetime), he had been dealing in such sinister goods, waging a battle in skies far from this haven of a mooring, against foes with whom he had no quarrel save that his Empire told him to go, and as a good little captain of good little clockwork soldiers, he went. They had been ultimately victorious, he was told by the Empire, even though he could have been fooled by the sheer number of his good little clockwork soldiers (who were really not clockwork at all, who were instead flesh and blood and crux, the blood) who had fallen down around him. Yes, Death was everywhere he looked outside, but while he remained here in this port, in this little pinprick of light in a world otherwise so very dark, he could lose himself in this wonderland of sweat and sex and living.
He spotted her from across the room, a flash of remembrance when all he wanted to do was forget. Her face was as vacantly blissful as he knew his own must be, so full of Friday were they both, but even as he stared straight at her, all he could see was the quiet, resigned despair and barely-contained rage he'd witnessed in her expression when she had boarded his airship to sign the paperwork officially recording her surrender of the A.S. Amazon only earlier that day. She was quite beautiful, he could see now that she had laid down the vestments of command, the uniform of battle and blood, and he found himself drawn toward her by a force stronger than drugs or duty or the Empire itself. His eyes raked up and down her form, only minimally concealed by a short, sheer shift already sticking to her in a manner that left him spellbound. It was wrong to approach her, he knew, wrong on so many levels to move ever closer to a woman grieving lost battles and lost shipmates, losses that were all his fault, but he could not keep himself from pushing through the crowd of revelers to reach her. Not even her clear recognition flashing across her face could make him do more than pause briefly before continuing his journey.
He never broke eye contact with her once it was forged, not until he fought past the last of the people in his way and stood directly before her. Neither moved or spoke at first, a still island in the rollicking sea of bodies around them. Their eyes each spoke of pain, of regret, of loss, and of the all-powerful need to feel something other than all of that. To see those eyes of mourning, so like his own, in a place so full of life and light as this, made him want to weep with joy and weep with sadness, to overflow with the rush of feeling in and around him. He could do none of those things, so he did the next thing that made sense: he threw their bodies into delicious contact, and brought his lips crashing down onto hers.