The Best of Penny Dread Tales

Smashwords Edition – 2014

WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-254-7

Copyright © 2014 WordFire Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by Kathryn S. Renta

Art Director Kevin J. Anderson

Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

Published by
WordFire Press, an imprint of
WordFire, Inc.
PO Box 1840
Monument, CO 80132

***

Introduction

The
Penny Dread Tales
series can be traced back to a single conversation at MileHiCon in Denver in 2010. I’d just set my feet upon the path of becoming an author and was looking for writing gigs. The de facto leader of the local steampunk community was promoting both AnomalyCon (Colorado’s primary steampunk convention) and her Internet radio show
RadioSteam
. We talked, and as a result of that conversation, she let me write what turned into two episodes for the show.

My interest in the burgeoning steampunk sub-genre was born. I’d grown up loving steampunk, even before the term “steampunk” had been coined. The old
Wild Wild West
TV show as well as works by Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells were all things I could claim as writing influences. But this was something new. Steampunk as it is today put a lot of interesting new twists into 19
^th
century sci-fi, modernizing it into a palatable form of both aesthetic and social commentary that encourages all manner of cross-over.

That’s probably what intrigued me most. I love cross-genre fiction. It’s like they say, “There is nothing new under the sun.” However, crossing sci-fi, paranormal, horror, mystery, western, historical, and everything else with the steampunk aesthetic is commonplace today. For a writer, I consider it to be fertile ground.

Add to that my desire to have another book on my table at conventions, and producing a steampunk anthology seemed like a logical course of action. I think
Six-Guns Straight from Hell,
published by David B. Riley in 2010, contributed to my decision as well. It’s a mashup of paranormal and horror stories set in the Old West. I figured that if weird westerns could make up viable anthologies, then there was no reason steampunk couldn’t. I sent out calls for submission, went through a surprisingly large number of stories, and was able to compile the first
Penny Dread Tales
, which was released at the first AnomalyCon in 2011. I must admit, I had no idea I would end up producing a second volume, let alone a fourth, but when I saw the interest, there was only one thing to do.

I really had no idea what I was doing, but as a result, a new
PDT
volume has hit the table (and the Internet) each year, with more and more people asking about the next edition. The books have garnered increasing interest over the past four years, so when Kevin J. Anderson asked me about letting WordFire do one of them, I was ecstatic. It was validation. I’ve been bumbling along in this writing career of mine for five years now, and to have someone like Kevin take notice was worth its weight in gold. During our initial conversation, I suggested a
Best Of
collection to him, which is what you’re reading now.

The
PDT
series has been, and I hope will continue to be, a labor of love. It has also been one of the best learning experiences I’ve had since I set out to become a writer.
PDT
has allowed me to meet some amazing new people and extend my “writer’s tribe” literally across the globe. It’s been a most amazing experience.

I wanted to take an opportunity to thank each and every writer and artist who ever had enough faith in
Penny Dread Tales
to work with me. Not all of them made the
Penny Dread Tales
volumes, and only a short list made the
Best Of
collection, but every one enhanced my understanding and appreciation of what steampunk is and can be. I also wanted to thank Laura Givens for the first
PDT
cover, Nathan Lee for what was the original second cover, and Kathryn S. Renta for the new look of the
PDT
series as well as the covers for volumes III and IV. Finally, I can’t thank Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta at WordFire Press enough for helping make the Penny Dread dream (among others) come true.

I am supremely grateful and monumentally humbled by what
Penny Dread Tales
has become. I owe everyone who has ever been involved a debt of thanks I can only repay by continuing to do what I do. I’ll try not to falter along the way.

— Quincy J. Allen

***

Iron Angel

Cayleigh Hickey

Deryn

I love dreaming that I can fly … until I wake up tangled in the sheets on my bed in the room that has been my home for the past sixteen years of my miserable, wingless life. Every inch of these walls makes me want to scream, so perfectly I’ve memorized them. The sprawling, luxurious bed my father built when I was six, with its dark, sweet-smelling wood and its gauzy white canopy; I want to tear it all to shreds and demolish the room that has been my prison.

The only small comfort I can find in glancing around it is in Corbin’s drawings. They’re everywhere, pinned to the walls, stacked on my nightstand, dangling from the ceiling. Pictures of me, of him, of the townspeople, of the forest that lies just outside my balcony but is as untouchable as the sky the rest of my race soars through on beautiful, glossy wings I’ll never have. The pictures depress me sometimes, but they’re nearly all I have, so I hold them close.

I’ve got Corbin’s pictures … and Corbin. They’re the only things that will ever put a smile on my pale, elfin face.

After waking, I lie in bed for long, tense minutes until I absolutely can’t stand it anymore—until I know the sanity of walking will outweigh the agony of it. It takes a full quarter-hour for me to drag myself up and hobble, step by excruciating step, over to the balcony adjoining my room where I collapse against the rail, taking all the weight I can off my fragile legs. Even this, the most freedom I can have, drives an awful reminder deep into my heart. My balcony is the only one of hundreds that has or needs a railing, for a painfully obvious reason.

If anyone besides me were to fall, they’d have five hundred feet to spread their wings and fly to safety. I don’t imagine flapping my arms all over Hell would offer much lift, and a soft landing it wouldn’t be. My legs would shatter, even if my spine or skull didn’t. Hell, my legs would crumble if I fell the ten feet to my living room. By design, my people are born with weak legs. We aren’t supposed to need them much, after all—we’re supposed to be able to fly. There’s a few keywords there—
supposed to be.

I’m an anomaly: twisted and malformed. I came into this world without wings and with nothing to compensate for the loss of them. I was sick—still am. My bones are even frailer than most—they’re like glass. I can’t walk faster than a crawl and could never run any more than I could fly. There’s no going anywhere, no doing anything. My dad put together a ladder leading to the lower floor of my house, but only on a good day can I manage that, and I have very few of those.

I peer through the sturdy, utilitarian rail at the beautifully vast world sprawled out before me and contemplate screaming. It’s positively gorgeous, all of it, and I can reach none of it: the trees that soar as high as my sister can, with their lovely, gnarled trunks a mile thick; the houses that wrap around them like chains, strung with moss and flowers that ooze colors so vibrant they hurt my eyes; the leafy canopy hanging overhead, fluttering in a breeze I can’t feel this far down, offering tantalizing glimpses of clear blue sky, bits like broken eggshells. I can see a few of my people dancing with the clouds, their outstretched wings just as stunning as the torturous vista engulfing me.

Screaming seems all the more tempting.

“Deryn?” It’s my mother calling, and I’m tempted not to answer. She’ll find me within moments; I can’t exactly hide anywhere. But I call back anyway, because I know how much she frets over me. She’s convinced that I’m going to tumble right off of the balcony, even though the railing could halt a charging bull, and I’m not
that
clumsy. Weak, maybe, but plenty coordinated enough to keep my feet on the ground, exactly where I wish they weren’t.

“I’m out here!”

She flutters through my room to where I sit, her feet barely grazing the ground I suffered over. My mother is ridiculously lovely: all long, lanky limbs and shiny red curls that I might’ve been envious of if I hadn’t already been so distorted. As it is, my plain, dark hair is the least of my discontents.

“Good morning, sweetie,” she says, leaning down to give me the lightest of hugs, afraid I’ll break in her arms. I know she’s being careful not to let her wings brush my skin, and part of me is grateful while the rest roils with irritation. They’re huge and dark brown, with just the faintest dusting of white peeking out from underneath. They’re elegantly beautiful, and they could’ve been mine. My sister got them. I got nothing.

“Morning, mom,” I mumble back, making it more one word than two. I pull my arms back and tuck them tightly over my chest, crumpling bits of my silky white nightgown between my fingers.

“Do you want anything to eat?” she asks, crouching beside me so that that the tips of her pinions brush the wooden floor. “There’s some stew leftover from last night, or I can make you something else …”

She lets her voice trail off to leave the statement as a question. I answer with a gentle shake of my head and a noncommittal sound that could be taken a dozen different ways. My mother frowns, distraught by my sullenness. “Alright then …” she struggles upright with a groan, her legs despising her for making them bear so much weight. She presses a feathery kiss to the top of my head. “Let me know if you need anything. Is Corbin coming by at all?”

I sigh, wishing she hadn’t asked but knowing all along that she would. It wasn’t like the answer wasn’t the same everyday lately. “I don’t know,” I enunciate, trying to bang the idea into her head. “He might.
I don’t know
.”

My mom walks away and leaves it there, and for that, at least, I’m thankful. A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have minded her asking—a few weeks ago my answer would’ve been an undoubted, unshakable
yes.
It used to be that everyday Corbin would fall to my balcony with a huge, manic grin, a folder of sketches under one arm and a breakfast for two hanging from the other. I’d clamber out of bed to meet him. If it was a bad day, he’d come to me, and we’d sit in my room for hours eating and talking and laughing as he told me about the world, drawing pictures in the air with his fingers and on paper with the pencil that was forever perched behind his ear.

But now … there are days when he doesn’t show at all, and when he does, it’s never for more than an hour. There’s something different now in the way he carries himself, some sort of apprehension. Either he or I have built a wall between us, and I can’t, for the life of me, tell how thick it is … or if I can bring it crashing down if I just try hard enough.

Forty-five minutes I wait for him there, my legs dangling off into space through the gaps in the railing, my chin pillowed on my forearms, my eyes scanning the skies for any glimpse of his dark wings and hair. When my limbs start to fall asleep, I admit defeat and haul myself back inside, gritting my teeth through it all.

Corbin

Sarika is just about the craziest, most eccentric woman on or off the face of the planet, but she’s the best bet if you’re trying to hunt down something city-side. And my tall order of metal plating, pipes, motors and a dozen other gizmos is definitely up her alley.

She has everything you could ask for buried in the massive cave of wonders she calls home. She goes into the city, her wings glamoured from human sight, and trades with the best inventors she can find. She gives them magic secrets in returns for what they make from them.

There are people who hate her, who think she’s meddling in the timeline of humanity, giving them things that are too advanced for them to handle. But everything she has works, and that’s all I care about.

“What is it you’re looking for this time?” she asks as she sifts through a heap of screws and bolts, tucking some away into the pockets of her apron and binning others. She’s wearing men’s trousers and a shirt that hang like a pillowcase over her bony frame, her white wings peeping from frayed holes. There’s a pair of thick goggles perched atop her head, cushioned by her graying blond hair.

“I need another motor,” I explain, casting my eyes around the shop. There’s metal and glass everywhere, from twisted hunks of iron to delicate aluminum framework to decorative designs in silver and gold. “Lighter than the one you gave me last time.”

Sarika bites her lower lip, centering the glasses that are eternally slipping down her nose. “Hmm, I’m nearly positive that was the lightest I have,” she says, her brows knitting together with thought. “I’ll look though. Maybe there’s something hiding from me.”

Clattering like a metal man, Sarika wades down the aisle, stepping carefully over fallen bits of shrapnel and weaving her arms through contraptions hanging from the ceiling, raw ideas made into wood and iron flesh: a long, thin tube with narrowed ends and flat, featherless wings poking from either side; a wire box with four wheels running along on air. These are things Sarika will show to the humans, things they will build long before they would’ve thought of them themselves.

Sarika is a million miles ahead of me, clanging through her workshop, and I have to scramble to catch up with her. She stops in front of a series of shelves, and I’m moving so carelessly that only a frantic pin-wheeling of arms keeps me from running right into her.

The shelves she’s contemplating are packed full of gadgets and hardware of all shapes and sizes, twisted and smooth, fragile and sturdy. I can’t count them all, but she runs her eyes over them with the air of someone glancing over a collection of books they know by heart. It sounds like she’s murmuring something under her breath, but I can’t make out anything concrete.

She lets out a triumphant breath, and her nimble fingers dart forward, digging out something about the size of a baby’s head and about as lumpy. She dumps it into my open hands, and I weigh it tentatively, not daring to get my hopes up until my mind has fully registered the feather-lightness … and then those hopes soar right off.

***

When I alight on our front step, the first thing I hear after the rush of flying fades is someone arguing, her words pointed and tipped with venom. Fluttering inside with the bag of parts dangling from my shoulder I find my brother Bran in the middle of the living room. He’s tall and intimidating, even slouching as he is, cowering in the face of a pint-sized, whip-thin fireball that looks like she could as much do damage to him as a fly could to a buffalo. Her twiggy arms cut through the air like knives, illustrating some grand point that apparently my brother can’t get through his head.

“Well where the hell is he?” she rants, cutting off with disturbing suddenness as the creaking of the shutting door interrupts. Whirling on the tips of her toes, her skirts fanning out about her knees and her wild, crimson hair flaring around her pale, freckled face, she glares at me angrily. “
There
you are.”

It’s Arlette, Deryn’s older, tinier, scarier sister. The woman that would hardly come up to my shoulder is overflowing with bloodlust, all of it directed straight at me. I don’t dare say anything, knowing that she’ll take the reins without any prodding.

“Where the hell have you been disappearing to for the last three weeks?” she shrieks, hands flying instantly to her diminutive hips. Folded at her back, the dark brown feathers of her wings are ruffling with anger. Only when she’s this furious can you see any familial resemblance between her and Deryn. They have the same frown, the same quirk of wrinkling their noses and drawing their eyebrows together.

“What do you mean?” I ask, figuring that feigning ignorance is the best plan of action here … acting like I have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the elephant in the room she’s referring to.

“You know exactly what I mean,” she says, shooting me full of glares. “You’ve hardly been to see Deryn in nearly a month. She’s going to go mad soon if she doesn’t have anyone to talk to!”

Now I know
exactly
what she’s talking about, and I know that I would never consider abandoning Deryn to her miserable fate, but I can’t figure any other way to get Arlette out of my hair. I’ll have to feign cruelty, callousness, all the things I never, ever show.

I don’t dare tell her the truth without knowing how she’ll react. There’s every possibility she’ll stop me now, that she’ll dash Deryn’s last hope without a second thought. If she doesn’t trust me enough, all she’ll see is her sister in danger, and she won’t stand for that. So I cross my arms and try on the most withering look I can manage. “I’m not her keeper,” I say, trying to channel some of Arlette’s irritation into my voice. She’s got plenty to spare. “It’s not my job to check in on her twenty-four-seven.”

This stops her short. I don’t know what she was expecting me to say, but it definitely wasn’t that. “I …” There’s a long pause during which her mouth closes and opens again, gaping like a dying fish. “Well then,” she finishes with a huff, tugging at her skirt with fingers made clumsy by shock. I think she might be trying to smooth out some wrinkles, but if she is, it’s a lost cause—she’s just making them worse.

Hiking her chin, she glances over her shoulder at Bran who’s staring like the idiot he is. She tosses him a terse nod before blazing past me towards the door. I doubt her bony shoulder clipping my upper arm as she passes is any sort of accident.

Arlette pauses at the threshold without looking back, fingering the doorframe. “I always thought you were a better boy than that. I guess I was wrong.” Then she’s gone, and Bran collapses onto the old couch, his long spider legs dangling over the end.

There’s a strange look on his face, caught in a fight between anxiety and pain. “Thanks for not telling her,” I mumble, knowing that he must’ve borne the brunt of Arlette’s anger before I came and knowing exactly how hard that must’ve been for him. After all, he’s been head over heels in love with her since he was a gangly twelve-year-old that hadn’t yet grown into his height.

“No problem, Corbin,” he breathes, running a big hand over his face, pushing back the long, messy fringe that just loves
to fall in his eyes. He sends me a tired grin, and for someone like Bran who hands out his smiles like war rations, that means something. “I’m not
that
much of a sellout. Did you get the last part you needed?”