Steampunk! Part 2

"That so?" Chief Coolidge had said the less you spoke, the better off you were. I didn't talk much anyway, so that suited me just fine.

"I've got something needs fixing."

I jerked my head at the box of parts on my desk. "Everybody's got something needs fixing."

"Well, this is something special. And I'll pay."

"If it's beedleworm dumplings and good-luck charms, I ain't interested."

She grinned and it made her face a different face altogether, like somebody who knew what it was to be happy once. "I got real money. And earbobs with emeralds the size of your fist. Or maybe you'd like some Poppy?"

"What'm I gonna do with emerald earbobs on this dirt clod?"

"Wear 'em to the next hanging," she said, and then I were the one grinning.

I packed up my kit, such as it were, and Colleen stopped to pick up some sugar and chewing tobacco at Grant's Dry Goods. She bought a bag of licorice whips and give one to all the kids in the store. On the way out, we had to pa.s.s through the revival tents. It were the one time I got a might nervous, because Becky Threadkill took sight of me. Becky and I done all our catechisms together, and she were always the one to tell if somebody stopped paying attention or didn't finish making their absolutions. I figured her to call me out, and she didn't disappoint.

"Adelaide Jones."

"Becky Threadkill."

"It's Mrs. Dungill now. I married Abraham Dungill." She puffed herself up like we oughta be laying at her feet. I had half a mind to tell her that Sarah Simpson had been his first choice and everybody knowed it. "Over to the township, they say you got yourself in some trouble." Her smile were smug.

"That so?"

"'Tis. Heard it told you stole two bottles of whiskey from Mr. Blankenship's establishment, and you was in jail three long months for it."

I hung my head and shuffled my boots in the dirt, but mostly, I were trying to hide the smile bubbling up. Chief Coolidge done a good job getting the word out that I were a thief.

Becky Threadkill took my head hanging as confirmation of my sins. "I knowed you'd come to no good, Addie Jones. One day, you'll be pitched into the everlasting nothing."

"Well, it's good I had so much practice here first, then," I said. "You have a good day now, Mrs. Dungill."

Once we were clear, I stopped Colleen. "You heard what she said. If'n you want to find yourself another watchmaker, I'll understand."

Colleen give me an easy smile. "I think we found ourselves the right girl." She put the handkerchief over my mouth, and the ether done its work.

I woke up in an old wooden house, surrounded by four close faces.

"We're real sorry about the ether, miss. But you can't be too careful in our line of work." I recognized the speaker as Josephine Folkes. She were taller than the others and wore her hair all braided this way and that. The brand from her slave days were still on her forearm.

"Wh-what work is that?" I forced myself up on my elbows. My mouth were dry as a drought month.

Fadwa Shadid stepped out of the shadows and put her pistol to my temple. My stomach got as tight as a churchgoing woman's bootlaces then. "Not yet. First, we must determine if you are who you claim to be. We have no secrets between us," she said. Her voice made words sound like fancy writing on a lady's stationery. She wore a scarf that covered her head, and her eyes was big and ginger-cake brown.

"I'm from New Canaan. Used to be a Believer. But my mam died of the fever and my pap were out of his mind on Poppy. There weren't nothing for me there 'cept a life of looking after brats and spinning oat-blossom bread. I weren't cut out for too much woman's work," I said, and my words sounded fast to my ears. "That's all I got to say on it. So if'n you're of a mind to shoot me, I reckon you should just do it now."

Master Crawford had told me once that time weren't fixed but relative. Right then, I cottoned to what he meant, because those seconds watching Colleen Feeney's face and wondering if she'd give Fadwa the order to shoot me felt like hours. Finally, Colleen waved Fadwa back, and the cold metal left my skin.

"I like you, Addie Jones." Colleen said, grinning.

"I'm a might relieved to hear that," I said, letting out all my air.

She offered me some water. "I'm going to show you what we brought you here to fix. You can still say no. Understand, now, if you say yes, you'll be one of us. There's no going back."

"Like I said, got nothin' much to go back to, ma'am."

They led me to a barn with a small desk and a banker's lamp. Colleen pulled open a drawer and took out a velvet box. Inside were the most unusual timepiece I ever seen. The clockface were twice the size of a regular one. It were set into a silver bracelet shaped a might like a spider. Colleen showed me how it clamped on her arm. I could see a little hinge on the side of the clockface, so I knowed it opened up like a locket.

"This is the Enigma Temporal Suspension Apparatus," Colleen told me.

"What's it do?"

"What it did was suspend time. You aim the Enigma Apparatus at something, say, a train," she said, allowing a smirk. "And an energy field envelops the entire thing, slowing down time inside to a crawl. It doesn't last long, seven minutes at the outside. But it's enough for us to climb aboard and be about our business."

"What business is that?" I asked, my eyes still on the Enigma.

"Robbing trains and airships," Amanda Harper said, and spat out a plug of tobacco. She were short, with wheat-colored hair that hung straight to her middle back.

"We're reminders that people shouldn't feel too smug. That what you think you own, you don't. That life can change just like that." Fadwa snapped her fingers.

Colleen opened up the watch face. There were gears upon gears, the most intricate I ever seen, more like metal lacework than parts. They'd been pretty burned and bent up. Tiny flares of light tried to catch but died before they could spark. Right in the center were a teardrop-shaped gla.s.s vial. A blue serum dripped inside.

"Pretty, isn't she?" Colleen purred.

"How do you know it's a she?" I said, echoing Agent Meeks.

"Oh, it's a she, all right. Under all those shiny parts is a heart of caged tears."

"We didn't make this world, Addie. It don't play fair. But that don't mean we have to lie down," Josephine said.

Colleen put the Enigma Apparatus in my hands, and a rush of excitement come over me when I felt all that cold metal. "Can you fix her?" she asked.

I clicked a small piece into place. Something shifted inside me. "Ma'am, I'm sure gonna try."

Colleen clapped a hand on my shoulder - they all did - and it might as well have been a brand. I'd just become one of the Glory Girls. When night come, I rolled up a tiny note, tucked it into the beak of a mechanical pigeon, and sent it back to the chief to let him know I were in.

Master Crawford taught me about getting inside the clockworks, that you have to shut out the distractions till it's just you and the gears and you can hear the smooth click and tick, like a baby's first breath. You can give lovers their moonrises off the Argonaut Peninsula or the wonder of a seeding ship with its silos pumping steam into the clouds, bringing on rain. To me, ain't nothing more beautiful than the order of parts. It's a world you can make run right.

"There's some speculators what say time is as much an illusion as the Promised Land," Master Crawford told me once, when we was working, "and that if you want to find G.o.d, you must master time. Manipulate it. Get rid of the days and minutes, the measurements of our eventual end."

I didn't quite cotton to what Master Crawford were saying. But that weren't unusual. "Well, sir, I wouldn't let the Right Reverend Jackson hear you talk like that."

"The Right Reverend Jackson don't listen to me, so I reckon I'm safe." He winked, and in the magnifying gla.s.s, his eye was huge. "I saw it in a vision when they dipped me into the Pitch. I hadn't even whiskers and already I knew time was but another frontier to conquer. There'll come a messenger to deliver us, to impress upon us that our minds are the machines we must dismantle and rebuild in order to grasp the infinite."

"If'n you say so, sir. But I don't see what that has to do with Widow Jenkins's cuckoo clock."

He patted my shoulder like a grandpappy might. "Quite right, Miss Addie. Quite right. Now. See if you can find an instrument with the slanted tip. . . ."

We got to working again, but Master Crawford's words had set my mind a-whirring with strange new thoughts. What if there were a way to best time, to crawl inside the ticks and tocks of it and press against it with both hands, stretching out the measures? Could you slide backward and forward, undo a day that had already been, or see what was comin' around the blind curve of the future? What if there weren't nothing ahead, nothing but a darkness as thick and forever seeming as your time under the Pitch? What if there weren't no One G.o.d at all and a body were only owing to herself, and none of it - the catechisms, the baptisms, the rules to keep you safe - none of it meant a dadburned thing? That set me a-shiver, and I made myself say my prayers of confession and absolution silently, to remind myself that there were a One G.o.d with a plan for me and the infinite, a One G.o.d who held time in His hands, and it weren't for the likes of me to know. I prayed myself into a kind of believing again and promised myself I wouldn't think more on such thoughts. Instead, I concentrated on the fit of gears. The bird pushed through the doors of the Widow Jenkins's clock and give us a cuckoo.

Master Crawford beamed. "You're a right good watchmaker, Miss Addie. Better than I were at your age. The pupil will best the master soon enough, I reckon," he said, and I felt a sense of pride, though I knew that were a sin.

The night Mam took sick, Master Crawford let me harness up his horse to ride for the doctor. Our two moons shone as bright as a bridegroom's pearled b.u.t.tons. The wind come up cold, slapping my cheeks to chapped red squares by the time I reached the miners' camp. Outside the bunkhouses, the guards sat on empty ale barrels, playing cards and rolling dice. There were a doc in the camp, and I went to him, begged on my knees. I told him how we'd buried Baby Alice the week before, and now here was our mam, our rock and our refuge, burning up with the fever, her fingers already slate tipped with bad blood, and wouldn't he please, please come back with me?

He didn't even put down his whiskey. "Nothing you can do 'cept stay out of its way, young lady."

"But it's my mam!" I cried.

"I'm sorry," the doc said, and offered me a drink. In the camp, there were shouting. Somebody'd come up snake eyes.

It were Master Crawford give me the Poppy for Mam. "I was saving this for the End Times, like the Right Reverend Jackson said. But I'm an old man, and your mother needs it a sight more than I do."

I stared at the red-and-black cube in my palm. I had half a mind to swallow it down myself, live out the rest of my days on some colony in my mind. But then I were scared I'd be trapped in a forever night of nothingness, and me the only livin' thing.

I fed Mam a little to ease her pa.s.sage and put the rest in my pocket. Then I lit the kerosene lamp and kept watch through the night. She never said nothing, but curled in on herself till she lay whorled against the bed linens like a fossil in the rock. I heard Master Crawford died during the winter. Died in his sleep in the pale workroom, under a blanket of down. 'Tweren't the fever or his heart or his veins tightening up.

It were just that his time had run out.

Over the next few weeks, I learnt a lot about the Glory Girls. Josephine and her sister Bernadette had run away from the working fields. The overseer's bullet found Bernadette 'fore they even reached the mountains, but Josephine got away, and now she wore a thread from her sister's dress woven into her coa.r.s.e braids as a reminder. She could set a broken bone as easily as she cooked a pan of corn bread, said it were about the same difference to her.

When Amanda's uncle got too friendly in the night, she found refuge doing hard labor in the shipyards. She'd spent long hours there and knew how to find the vulnerable spot in all that steel, the place where the Enigma could take hold and do its work. She were able to find timetables, too, so the girls would know which trains to hit and when.

Fadwa were a crack shot who'd honed her skills picking off the scorpions that roamed the cracked dirt outside the tents where she lived with her family in the refugee camps. The authorities took her pap to who knows where. Dysentery took the rest of her family.

That left Colleen. She'd been a debutante with fancy ball gowns, a governess, and a private coach. Her daddy were a speculator what had invented the Enigma Apparatus. He were also an anarchist, and when he tried to blow up the Parliament, that were the end of the gowns and the governess. They arrested her daddy for treason. 'Fore they could collect Colleen, she took the Enigma and fled on the next airship.

I felt a might sorry for all of them when I heard their tales. It were an awful feeling to have n.o.body. We had that in common, and I had a mind to come clean, tell them who I were and stop lying. But I had a job to do. At first, I done like Chief Coolidge told me, stalling on the repairs while trying to sniff out details from the Glory Girls and their next robbery. But they wasn't trusting me with that yet, and I figured it couldn't hurt to know more about the Enigma Apparatus. Besides, my pride were on the line, and I figured I'd better make good on my reputation as a girl what could fix things. Soon I were hunched over that device, from rooster crow till long after the moons scarred the skin of the sky. I'd figured out most of the gears, but them sputters of light around the serum vial vexed me.

"Simple windup won't do. Near as I can tell, she needs a jolt to get her going," I said after I'd been at her for a good three weeks with not much to show for it.

Amanda looked up from the barrel where she was washing Fadwa's long black hair. "Mercy, where would we find us somethin' like 'at?"

I thought for a bit, rubbing my thumb over the old Poppy square in my pocket. "I think a blue nettle might could do it."

"What's that?" asked Josephine.

"It's a kind of flower with a little bit of lightning inside. They grow in a orchard back to New Canaan."

"But that's on Believer land."

"Believers is all at the river for baptism time," I said. "Besides, I know where to go."

"Guess we best go picking, then." Amanda said. Giggling, she poured a bucket of cold water all over Fadwa, who pulled her gun so fast I thought I saw sparks.

John Barks's family hadn't been Believers. His mam and pap died in an airship fight off the western coast when he were fourteen. The Right Reverend Jackson and his wife took John in and started teaching him the Ways of the One Bible. You'd think that an orphan left to fend for himself on a planet where even the dust tries to choke you might have a score to settle with the One G.o.d. But not John Barks. Where most of us believed 'cause we were told to or afraid not to or just out of habit, he believed with his entire self.

"I'm a free man," he'd say. "And I'll believe what I want."

I couldn't rightly argue with that.

For two years, I'd watched John Barks grow from a sapling of a boy to a fine young man with muscles that strained the seams of the prayer shirts Mrs. Jackson sewed for him. He had a head of black hair what could rival a gentleman's boots for shine. Becky Threadkill swore he'd take her to wife, said she'd seen it in her vision under the Pitch. Half a dozen other girls swore the same till the Right Reverend were forced to spend the next Sunday cautioning against the sin of sharing your visions.

But it were me John Barks said "Mornin'" to when I went to fetch water, and me he asked to tutor him in the Scriptures. It were me he asked to tell him about being baptized in the Holy Pitch when he turned sixteen.

Every spring, the Believers of the End of Days walked the five miles to the River Pitch and set down their tents to await the baptism day. Most of us got dipped when we reached thirteen and done all our catechisms. They dressed you in the robes and slipped the tiniest petal tip of Poppy under your tongue to quiet your fear, slow your breathing, and keep you still. It stole into your bloodstream and weighted your bones like stones sewn into the lining of your skin. I remember Mam telling me not to be scared, that it were just like getting in a thick bath.

"Just lay real still, Addie-loo," she cooed, stroking the eucalyptus balm over my eyes to keep the Pitch blindness out. "When you're calm, the One G.o.d'll show you a vision, your purpose in this life."

"Yes'm."

"But first you have to face the darkness. There'll come a time when you want to fight it, but don't. Just let it cover you. It'll be over before you know it. Promise me you won't fight."

"Promise."

"That's my good girl."

The catechisms said that once you lay in the Pitch and come up again, you came up newborn, your sin purged and left behind you in the thick black tar, like an impression in the mud. That's what they said, anyway. But you never knew what would come bubbling up inside you while you was under. You had to last a full minute with the oily darkness moving over you like a coffin lid, closing out the world. Even a world as d.a.m.ned as this one is better than the weight of nothingness the Pitch smothers you in. All sense of time and place is lost in that river. The Believers say it give you a taste of what could become of your immortal soul if you don't turn to the One G.o.d and prepare for the End Times. When you come up outta that river, your d.a.m.nation sliding down your body like a syrupy shed skin, you fall on your knees and say thanks to your Maker for that breath of hot, dusty air. It makes Believers, the Right Reverend Jackson says. No one wants to spend eternity in such a place as that.

Once you was done, the priests gave you your first real taste of Poppy to seal your covenant with the One G.o.d. Miracles and wonders played across your eyes then, reminders of His mercy and goodness. Master Crawford muttered that it weren't proof of nothing 'cept folks' willingness to be hornswaggled. But n.o.body paid him any mind.

I told John Barks all of this the week before his baptism while we were walking in the orchard.

"They say that when you take your first taste of Poppy, your legs go all p.r.i.c.kle bones and your tongue numbs like a snowcake feast and stars explode behind your eyes, making new flowers against the closed dark-velvet stage curtains of your retina, letting you know the One G.o.d's show's about to get under way," John said, bustin' with excitement.

"Well, the Poppy is right strong," I said.

"And did you feel the One G.o.d sure and true then, Addie?"

"I reckon."

We'd stopped under a blue nettle tree in full bloom, the gla.s.slike, bell-shaped blossoms pulsing with small bursts of lightning. The air was sharp. Overhead, the seeding ships pierced the dark-red cloud blanket, trying to bring on rain. John Barks's arm brushed mine and I colored. We were s'posed to keep a respectful distance, as if the One G.o.d's mam walked between us.

"What did the One G.o.d reveal to you down under the river, Adelaide Jones?" His hand had moved to my cheek. "Did you see us here by the tree?"

We weren't s'posed to tell our visions. They were for us alone. But I wanted to tell John Barks what I'd witnessed, see what he'd make of it, see if he could ease my mind some. So right there with the new light buzzing all around us, I told him what I seen under the river. When I were done, John Barks kissed me soft and sweet on the forehead.

"I don't believe that," he said. "Not for one second."

"But I seen it!"

"I think the One G.o.d leaves some things up to us to decide. He shows us a vision, and it's your choice what to do with it." He smiled. "I can tell you what I hope to see next week."

"What?" I said, trying hard not to cry.

"This," he whispered.

It started to rain. John Barks put his coat over us and kissed me on the mouth this time, and oh, not even clockworks could match up to the feeling of that kiss. It made me believe what John Barks said, that we might could change our fates, and I forgot to be afraid.