Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (4 page)

"It's a free world," I said.

"Mmmm." Chief Coolidge squinched together them blue eyes and rubbed a thumb against his fat mustache while he sized me up — the moleskin pants tucked into the workman's boots, the denim shirt and the duster what used to belong to John Barks. My brown hair were plaited into long braids gone half unraveled now. There were dirt caked on my face till you couldn't hardly tell I had freckles across my nose and cheeks. Chief Coolidge shook his head, and I figured I were done for, but then he went and turned a crank on the wall and spoke into a long, fluted tube. "Mrs. Beasley. Please bring up some of that superior pheasant, roasted potatoes, and a portion of orange-blossom cake, I should think, thank you."

When the fancy silver tray come, and the heavenly Mrs. Beasley put it down beside me, I dug in without even saying grace or washing the dirt from under my fingernails.

"Miss Jones, your facility with the mechanical is quite impressive. Can you put things together as well as you take them apart?"

I told him about Master Crawford and the watches, and he give me a choice: go back to jail or come work for the Pinkertons. I told him that didn't seem like much of a choice to me, just two different kinds of servitude. Chief Coolidge give me his first real smile. "As you said, Miss Jones: it's a free world."

The next morning, Chief Coolidge set me up in the laboratory. Every manner of device and contraption you could imagine were there. Rifles that fired pulses of light. Clockwork horses that could ride for a hundred miles full out and not get tuckered. Armored vests what would stop a bullet like it weren't no more'n a fly. Master Crawford's little watch shop paled in comparison. I'd be lying if I said the sight of all them metal parts didn't make my heartbeat flutter some.

"Gentlemen, may I introduce Miss Adelaide Jones, late of New Canaan Township? She is apprenticed to our agency in the Apparatus Division. Please see to it that she receives your utmost courtesy."

Chief Coolidge put me at a long bench piled thick with gears, rivets, tubes, and filaments. A long, fat rifle of some sort with a mess of metal innards laid out for me.

"This, Miss Jones, is Captain Smythfield's Miasmic Decider. The weapon was confiscated from a Russian agent at considerable trouble. A schematic has been provided, courtesy of our engineering department. As of yet, we've not gotten it to fire. Perhaps you will prove useful in that capacity. I'll leave you to it."

The fellas didn't take too kindly to me being there. Mam would've said I should let them win, that a woman shining her light too bright was unnatural in the eyes of the One God. Mam always kept a soft voice and her eyes downcast. Folks said she were the very picture of a Believer woman. It didn't save her from the fever none. So I kept my eyes downcast, trained right on the gun in front of me.

One of the agents, fella named Meeks, stood over me while I tried to figure out the puzzle of it. "He's testing you. That gizmo's not Russian; it's Australian. From the war. Their particle know-how is second to none. Put a piece wrong and you'll burn a man's head off or turn him to vapor. H'ain't been able to crack this one yet."

He put his hand on my shoulder. "If'n you like, I can keep you comp'ny, show you what to do." That hand gave my shoulder a too-friendly squeeze.

"If it's all the same to you, sir, I'd like to have a look at her on my own."

"Her, eh? How'd you know it's a she?"

"Just do," I said, and removed his hand. He skulked off, grumbling about what the world were coming to when the Pinkertons let a girl do a man's job. I ignored him and stared at the schematic, but I could tell it were wrong, so I put it aside. Once I sat down to a contraption, it were like I could feel them gears inside me, and I could tell which pieces didn't belong. By the end of the day, I had Captain Smythfield's Miasmic Decider ready to fire. Chief Coolidge fixed his brass goggles over his eyes and took 'er out to the firing range. She vaporized the target and blew a hole clean through the wall behind. Chief Coolidge stared at the Decider, then at me.

"Made a few changes to her, sir," I said.

"So I see, Miss Jones."

"Hope that were all right."

"Indeed it is. Gentlemen, whatever needs fixing, please deliver it to Miss Jones tomorrow morning."

I give Mr. Meeks a right nice curtsy on the way out.

For six months, I worked at that gear-strewn table. The fellas and I came to a peaceable understanding, 'cept for Mr. Meeks, who took to wearing his goggles all the time so's he didn't have to look me in the eye none. I got to know the other divisions. Most agents was field types who made sure the mines were lawful and that the miners didn't rough up the Chinamen or get too drunk and cause a ruckus. They left the brothels alone for the most part, under the idea that the whores weren't hurtin' folks none and ever'body needed a little company from time to time—usually the agents themselves. They kept a close eye on the saloons and boardinghouses, where some enterprising folks had taken to peddling the new machine-pressed Poppy, with names like Dr. Festus's All-Seeing Eye, Tincture of Light-Smoke, Mistress Violet's Glimpse into the Immortal Chasm, and Lady Laudanum's Sweet Sister. Plenty of people left the Church still searching for that first taste of eternity they got in the Pitch, and they'd chase it in the petal, even if it came out of a secret mill that might also be pressing mine dust or crimson floss. I'd had Poppy exactly twice — during my baptism and just after. I weren't eager to try it again.

Mostly, I kept myself to myself and worked hard to understand the way a Turkish Oscillating Orphanage Builder were different from an Armenian Widow Maker, though near as I could tell, they both went about the same business. In my resting hours, I worked on watches, finding comfort in the way they tidied up the world and kept it moving forward with a steady tick. I even fixed the chief's old pocket watch, which had been running three minutes slow for a year. I joked with him that he'd probably lost about four months of his life and he should put in to the Office of Restitution for it. Chief Coolidge scowled and handed me the plans for a new code breaker. He weren't big on jokes.

Then one hot summer day, the Glory Girls rode in like the Four Horsemen, robbing trains and airships. No one knew where they'd come from or how they done what they did. The witnesses couldn't remember nothing, 'cept for seeing a blue light before they'd wake some time later to find their jewels and lockboxes gone and the Glory Girls' calling card left on a table all polite and proper. Wanted posters hung on every post-office wall, till folks knowed the girls' names like the saints: Colleen Feeney. Josephine Folkes. Fadwa Shadid. Amanda Harper. There'd always been a troublesome balance between law and lawlessness, and the Glory Girls done tipped the scales into a pretty mess.

At a town meeting, Chief Coolidge assured everybody that the Pinkertons would put things to rights. "We are the Pinkertons, and we always catch our man."

"But Not Our Girl" was the headline of the next day's
Gazette.
The chief were in a mood then. "Without law and order, there is chaos," he bellowed to us, reminding me a portion of Reverend Jackson. He thundered that he didn't care if the miners killed one another and the Poppy turned half the planet into blithering idiots; the Pinkertons was now in the Glory Girl business. Capturing them become our sole purpose.

Chief Coolidge asked me to follow him. In the corner of a paneled library were a beautiful Victrola with a crank on the side. The chief give it a few turns, and presently, a wispy shaft of light appeared with ghostly moving pictures inside it. The chief called it a Holographic Remembrance. The pictures showed riders running alongside a great black train. I couldn't make out the riders' faces none 'cause they wore kerchiefs 'cross their mouths and goggles over their eyes, but I knew it were the Glory Girls. Oh, they were a sight to behold, with their hair flying out free and the dust rising up into a cloud, like the mist of a primeval forest. One of the girls raised her arm, and I couldn't see what happened real well, but a blue light bubble come over the train and it stopped dead on the tracks. Then the picture crackled up like old Christmas paper, and there weren't no more. Chief Coolidge turned up the gas lamps again.

"What do you make of that, Miss Jones?"

"Well, sir, I don't rightly know."

"Nor do we. No one in the divisions has seen anything like it. However, we've heard that someone who may have been Colleen Feeney was seen near the mines, inquiring after a watchmaker." He leaned both fists on his desk. "I need a woman on the inside. You could gain their trust. Alert us to their plans. It would be a chance to prove yourself, Miss Jones. But of course, it's your choice."

Your choice. It were what John Barks said to me once.

Chief Coolidge set me up in a rooming house near the mines just outside Speculation. We'd heard tell that the Glory Girls come through there every now and then for supplies. It were let known that I could be handy; I fixed the furnace at the brothel and got the clock in the town square working again after a Pinkerton done a bit of helpful sabotage on it. I went about my business, and one afternoon, there were a knock at my door and then I were looking into the sly green eyes of a girl not much older'n me from the looks of it. Her curly red hair were tied back at her neck, and she walked like a gunslinger, wary and ready. Miss Colleen Feeney had arrived.

"I hear that you're handy with watches and gears," she said, picking up my magnifying glass and giving it a look-through.

"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 pass 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 second 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 clock face 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 clock face, so I knowed it opened up like a locket.