Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (7 page)

Fadwa were waiting impatiently when I come down to the hitching post after my conference with the chief.

"Where were you?" Fadwa asked.

I rubbed at the back of my neck. I wanted to cry, but it wouldn't help none. If I were a better girl, I'd've told her to run and taken my chances with the law. But I couldn't stop thinking about the Engima. I was so close. I couldn't just walk away.

"Just some old business I had to take care of," I said, and helped her load up the horses.

That night, I drank more whiskey than I should have. I would've drowned my sorrows in the Poppy, but I knew that were no good. The Glory Girls was in good spirits. Tomorrow they'd take on the 4:10 in the Kelly Pass. They made their plans then, where they'd hide out, what kind of train the 4:10 was and where it were best to board — all of it being transmitted right back to the Pinkertons. A cold trickle worked its way through my insides. It were like I looked up to find the moons and stars gone to flat pictures painted on muslin.

"You all right, Addie-loo?" Josephine squinted at me like she weren't sure if she should make me a poultice for fever.

"Yes'm. Tired," I lied.

Colleen clapped a hand on my back. "You just have the Enigma ready to greet the 4:10 tomorrow, and I'll show you a haul, Addie, that will make you forget all your troubles."

They toasted me then, but the whiskey tasted sour and my head was hurting.

When everybody else was sleeping, I took myself for a walk up into the mountains. I looked down on the revival tents, at the shadowy mystery snaking through the basin, where folks left their sins and come up with a vision. John Barks told me it were choice, but I weren't so sure.

The day they baptized John Barks were terrible hot. The sky come up a gloomy orange and stayed that way. We'd gathered at the river with the young penitents. John Barks had been scrubbed pink. His black hair shone.

"I'll take you to wife, Addie Jones. Just you see," he whispered, and went to stand with the others.

My gut hurt. I wanted to tell him not to do it, to pack up his kit and run away with me on the next airship. We could see for ourselves if there were anything 'sides rocks spinning out in that vast midnight. But I wanted him to prove me wrong, too. I needed to be sure. So I watched as the aldermen dressed him in the white robes, and Mrs. Jackson balmed up his eyes, and Reverend Jackson slipped the Poppy under his tongue. When his body went limp, the women commenced to hymn singing, and the menfolk lowered John Barks's body into the Pitch. The dark river come over him like a living thing, devouring legs, arms, chest. Finally, his face were under and I counted the seconds: One. Two. Three. Ten. Eleven. Twenty.

A hand broke the surface, followed by John Barks's tar-stained face. He gagged and gasped, fighting the Poppy in his blood. He wouldn't lie still. It were like he'd been caught in one of them ecstasies you read about in the One Bible, where saints and chosen shepherds saw things beyond dust and weak moons and miners' toothless grins. He cried, "Oh, Holy! There are stars newborn and great ships with searching sails set against pink-painted ribbons of eternal clouds — oh Holy! Oh Lamb! — the electric blood of the most heavenly body, oh sweet warm breath—kiss of a girl you love! What more? What more?"

The aldermen looked to Reverend Jackson for what to do. Sometimes people got too scared and had to come up from the Pitch before their time. But nobody had ever done like John Barks. And I could see in the Reverend's face that he were frightened, like there weren't no commandment to explain this.

"Reverend?" an alderman named Wills whispered.

"The sin fights him!" Reverend Jackson shouted. "He must be held still to accept the One God's vision. Let us come to his aid!"

The women lifted their arms in fervent hymn singing, and the Reverend Jackson spoke in tongues I didn't know. I kept listening to John Barks calling out wonders, like a madman on the mountain. The men took hold of his arms and legs and held him under, waiting for him to still, to accept the darkness and the One God's grace that allows us to see what comes next. But John Barks fought with everything he had in him. I screamed out that they was a-killin' him, and Mam told me to hush-a-bye and turned my face to her breast. The song rose louder, and it were a terrible song. And when John Barks finally went quiet, it were for good. He drowned in that river, his lungs full of Pitch and his vision stilled on his tongue.

The authorities come and pronounced it an accident. They took cider from the church ladies while John Barks's body lay on the scrubby bank under a sheet, the dried Pitch on his long arms gone to peeling gray scales. "The One God moves in His own way," Reverend Jackson said, but his hands shook. The aldermen dug a grave right there in the basin and buried John Barks without so much as a wooden stake to mark it. They said later he were too old for obedience. That were the problem. Or he might've gotten too much Poppy and seen the glory of the One God too soon, before he'd made his confession. A few folks believed he were chosen to receive a vision and die for all our sins, and we should honor John Barks on the feasting day. Still others whispered that his sin must've been too great for the One God to forgive or that he weren't willing to give up his sin, and I thought about our kiss under the blue nettle tree, what we done there with the lightning pulsing around us. I wondered if I hadn't damned John Barks with that kiss, sure as if I'd poured the Pitch into his mouth myself. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, and that not knowing haunts me still.

The first streaks of graying orange come up in the sky when I walked down from the mountains and wrote my last note to the chief. Then I set about my work. The lamp burned through the night, and by the time the two moons was as pale as a skein of ash against the hot orange glow of the day, I'd done what I aimed to do. The Enigma Apparatus was ready.

"It's time, Addie," Colleen said.

The 4:10 puffed right into line. I pressed the button on the side of the clock face, bracing myself for the recoil as the train ground to a stop, floating in a blue light cloud. Amanda let out a loud whoop. "Let's go, Glory Girls! Time's a-wastin'."

They patted my back as they went, told me I done good. I grabbed Colleen's arm.

"Addie!" she said, trying to shake me loose. "I've got to go!"

I wanted to tell her everything, but then the chief would hear and swoop in too fast. "Mayhap there's something better up ahead, in the tomorrows," I said. "Strap yourself in good."

She gave me a strange look. "You're an odd one, Addie Jones."

And then they was across the light bridge and on the train. It took a few seconds longer than I figured for them to realize there weren't nobody on the 4:10, just a bunch of sawdust dummies. Weren't no treasures, neither. No comforts to keep in a pocket or a drawer. The Pinkertons had seen to that after I'd let the chief know the plan. Even from where I was, I could see their confusion. The sound of hoof-beats told me the agents was near. They were just coming over the ridge in a cloud of dust. Colleen saw it, too. The leader of the Glory Girls looked at me through one of the train's windows. In the blue light, her face had a strange, haunting beauty to it. She'd cottoned to what'd happened and who'd done it. And I think she knew her time had run out. She nodded at me to do it. I clicked the tiny switch that bled blue nettle into the whirling eye at the center of the Temporal Displacement Dial. With my index finger, I pushed that second hand 'round and 'round, the devil racing you through the woods and gaining fast. Colleen Feeney was yelling something at the others and they strapped themselves in. The cloud over the 4:10 sparked with angry light. I can't say what the Glory Girls felt then—wonder? Amazement? Fear? I just know they never stopped looking at me. Not once. And I wondered if it would be the last time I'd see 'em or if I'd ever make it to where they was going. The cloud crackled again, and the train car disappeared in a shower of light that brought a mess of rain over the basin. The recoil on the Enigma were like a punch then. Knocked me clean out.

Chief Coolidge weren't none too happy with me when I come to. He paced the floor while I sat in the one uncomfortable chair in his office. He'd had me sit there special. "We were supposed to catch them alive, have a trial, Miss Jones! That is the way of law!"

"Something must've went wrong with that contraption, Chief. Time's a tricky proposition."

He scowled and I tried real hard not to twitch. "Yes. Well. At least we were able to salvage what was left of the Enigma Apparatus. With effort, we'll get it running again."

"That's real good news, sir."

"I would be happy to know that you were working on the Enigma project, Miss Jones. Are you quite certain you won't stay with the Agency?"

I shook my head. "My time's up, sir."

"I might be able to recognize you as a deputy agent. It isn't full, you understand, but it is something."

"I 'preciate that, sir. I do."

He saw I weren't budging. "What will you do, then?"

"Well. 'Spect I'll travel some. See what's out there."

The chief sighed, and I noticed his mustache had more gray in it these days. "Addie, do you really expect me to believe that you had nothing to do with what happened to those girls?"

I looked him right in the eyes. I'd learned to do that. "You can believe what you want, Chief."

Chief Coolidge's gaze turned hard. "It's a free world, eh?"

"You can even believe that if you like."

When they'd lowered me down, them years ago, I'd done as my mam told me. I lay real still, even though I wanted to scream out, to beg them to pull me up even if I still had all my sin attached. It were as terrifying as the grave under the river. But I were a good girl, a true Believer, and so I made my full confession in my mind, and I waited — waited for the One God to show me a small glimpse of my future.

It started as the tiniest ticking sound. It grew louder and louder, till I thought I might go mad. But that weren't as bad as what followed. My vision come up over me in a wave, and I felt the weight of it all around me.

Darkness. That were all I saw. Just a vast nothing forever and ever.

There were hands pulling me up then, singing, "Hallelujah!" and pointing to the shape of my sins in the Pitch. But I knew better. I knew they'd never left me.

I slipped into John Barks's duster and headed out into the dry, red morning. On my wrist, the Enigma Apparatus shone. The Pinkertons was fellas. They'd never thought to question a lady's jewelry. I'd given Chief Coolidge a bucket full of bolts what might make a nice hat rack, but nothing that would bend time to his will.

The storekeepers swept their front walks in hopes of a day's good business. The johns stumbled out of the Red Cat ahead of the town's judging eyes. The seeding ships was out, piercing the clouds. Farther on, the Believers packed up their tents. They was done with visions and covenants for another year.

I reached into my pocket, letting my fingers rest for a just a second on that Poppy brick before finding the coin in the corner. Forward or back, forward or back. John Barks told me once I had a choice, and I guess it come down to heads or tails.

I flicked the coin with my thumb and watched it spiral into the sudden rain.

Monty Goldfarb walked into Saint Agatha's like he owned the place, a superior look on the half of his face that was still intact, a spring in his step despite his steel left leg. And it wasn't long before he
did
own the place, had taken it over by simple murder and cunning artifice. It wasn't long before he was my best friend and my master, too, and the master of all Saint Agatha's, and didn't he preside over a
golden
era in the history of that miserable place?

I've lived at Saint Agatha's for six years, since I was eleven years old, when a reciprocating gear in the Muddy York Hall of Computing took off my right arm at the elbow. My da had sent me off to Muddy York when Ma died of the consumption. He'd sold me into service of the Computers and I'd thrived in the big city, hadn't cried, not even once, not even when Master Saunders beat me for playing kick the can with the other boys when I was meant to be polishing the brass. I didn't cry when I lost my arm, nor when the barber-surgeon clamped me off and burned my stump with his medicinal tar.

I've seen every kind of boy and girl come to Saint Aggie's — swaggering, scared, tough, meek. The burned ones are often the hardest to read, inscrutable beneath their scars. Old Grinder don't care, though, not one bit. Angry or scared, burned and hobbling, or swaggering and full of beans, the first thing he does when new meat turns up on his doorstep is tenderize it a little. That means a good long session with the belt—and Grinder doesn't care where the strap lands, whole skin or fresh scars, it's all the same to him — and then a night or two down the hole, where there's no light and no warmth and nothing for company except for the big hairy Muddy York rats who'll come and nibble at whatever's left of you, if you manage to fall asleep. It's the blood, see, it draws them out.