The Boneshaker (29 page)

"The oath,
Alpheus,
" Dr. Limberleg snapped. "I said, because of the oath: 'First, do no harm.'"

Behind Nervine, Vorticelt broke into terrible laughter. "Did he just quote the Hippocratic oath at you, Alpheus?"

"Why yes, my dear Paracelsus, I believe he did."

"I don't like your tone," Limberleg said through clenched teeth.

Vorticelt stopped laughing and stepped past Nervine to face Dr. Limberleg, whipping off his mercury-colored
spectacles to bring the full weight of his dreadful, black-eyed glare to bear on the other man. Limberleg flinched.

"Don't you? All right, then. We'll have our wheel by midnight, the grateful mechanic says. What next,
master?
What orders from the doctor, whose will we are bound to ... at least as long as he lives? Something's strange in this town. What's your plan,
Doctor?
"

Limberleg held the Paragon of Magnetism's awful stare for a long, long minute. Behind Vorticelt the others moved restlessly, like prowling animals.

"We have some hours left before the gingerfoot begins to surface," Limberleg said, eyes flicking from one restive Paragon to the next.

In the corner, the One-Man Band stirred, sending up a nerve-racking rustle of noise with every twitch.

"And your instructions?" Vorticelt demanded. The others leaned inward like housecats toward a cornered creature.

Jake Limberleg drew himself up to his full six-and-a-half feet of height and eyed the Paragons, one by one. One by one, they stopped prowling and came to stand before him.

"My
instructions,
" Limberleg said at last, "are these: we have some hours left. We have many, many people left to treat." The four Paragons exchanged a series of impossible-to-read glances. Limberleg nodded, as if he had heard an unspoken question. "Sell it all. We'll have our wheel." He smiled grimly. "Burn the lot."

An air of cruel satisfaction settled over the Paragons. It was an old hucksters' phrase, one Limberleg had never spoken before. It was an order to take the town for
everything it had. It meant,
Don't concern yourselves with what they think of us afterward.
It meant they could never pass through this place again.

It also meant there would probably be nothing remaining of Arcane when they left.

B
Y THE TIME NATALIE RECOVERED
and felt well enough to tell Miranda what she'd seen, the crickets were out, along with the earliest stars ... and Natalie was pretty sure bruises were already coming up where she had fallen against the back wall of Ogle's Stable.

"But how do you know all that?" Miranda insisted.

"Keep your voice down," Natalie mumbled. Nobody could sneak up on them in Smith Lane without their knowing it, and Miranda really wasn't talking all that loudly, but Natalie had no answer for the very good question her friend had just asked and needed to buy some time.

"The things we found," she said, finally. It was a lame answer even to her ears. "They obviously didn't belong. That's all it was."

"Okaaay," Miranda said, her voice trailing off in that way that instantly tells you someone doesn't mean what
she's saying at
all.
"Natalie, you told me way too many details to get from just that stuff."

No denying that. Natalie sighed. "I don't know." Dully, because Miranda was going to rip her apart for saying it, she admitted, "It just came to me. I saw it. I've seen other things, too." Let Miranda laugh, if she thought having all that stuff flood your brain was funny. After passing out at least three times in less than an hour, remembering almost nothing of their flight from the fair ... heck, just after what she'd
seen,
Natalie thought she could be forgiven for not having a perfect explanation for it all.

But there was no doubt or scorn on Miranda's face. She was watching Natalie with something closer to curiosity. Fearful curiosity, perhaps, but curiosity nonetheless. "I don't understand," she said quietly, but it was different from any other time Natalie had heard her say those words. Usually, Natalie knew she really meant,
Shut up.
or
Knock it off.
But this time she seemed to mean,
Go on.
Impossibly, Miranda believed her.

"Do you think you were reading his mind?"

What a horrible thought. The awful image of Limberleg reaching into his patients' minds without their knowing it was still so fresh—had she done the same thing? Sneaked into someone's memories without his permission? Been inside a damned man's head, unwelcome and unable to get out?

"I don't think so. Because..." Because it was a horrible possibility, but that wasn't enough. Natalie thought hard. "...because there were things missing—things I
couldn't figure out or I couldn't see. But he would have known them. Limberleg, I mean. If I was reading his mind, wouldn't I see everything?"

Miranda nodded as if that made perfect sense and put her chin on her knees. "That must've been really weird."

What was really weird was Miranda Porter, who made a hobby of acting as if she thought Natalie didn't know what she was talking about, accepting at face value all the absurd statements Natalie had just made. There had to be a catch.

"It
was,
really ... I couldn't..." Natalie's eyes began to prickle. Why? Why tears, on top of it all? She swiped a fist across her eyes and tried to hold her voice steady. "I couldn't make it stop." Natalie leaned her head back against the wall, looking straight up and willing her eyes not to overflow.

"I'm sorry," Miranda said simply.

"Thanks."

Miranda smoothed her dress over her knees. "Just keep your weird mind-reading thing out of my head, is all," she said primly.

Natalie snorted out a laugh so unexpected she almost choked on it.

"I mean it," Miranda retorted.

They sat in silence for a while. "Miranda," Natalie said at last. "That drifter, Jack—I feel like I know him from someplace."

"Well, I don't see how you could," Miranda said. "Other than seeing him around town, I mean. But Dr. Limberleg knew who he was, didn't he? The drifter said so."

Natalie nodded but didn't say anything. There was something, something she ought to remember; she was certain of it. Something that had jarred her memory when the drifter had talked about finding just the right place. Something, too, when he'd said what he did about defection. To
defect
was to change sides in a battle, and the drifter had claimed that there used to be two options and now there were three.
That coal says I'm a force of my own,
he'd said. Why did that seem so significant?

After a moment, Miranda got to her feet. "Let's go get a soda. Then I have to go check on my mother, okay?"

Natalie groaned inwardly, realizing she would have to go back to the fair for the Chesterlane before she went home herself. She'd been in such a state when Miranda had dragged her out that neither of them had remembered the red bicycle tucked under the hawthorn. "I'm okay. You should go home."

"Well, I will, but I want a soda first, if that's okay with you," Miranda said in the snotty tone Natalie was used to hearing. It was strangely comforting.

They trooped back out to Bard Street and up the stairs of the general store. It was late, but the lights were on and the front door was still open, so the girls trooped inside to find Mr. Tilden and Mr. Finch standing at the back of the store near the Central Exchange. They turned to look at Natalie so sharply that she stopped in her tracks. A thin sheet of paper shook in the grocer's hand.

"Hey, did my dad get the telegraph working?" Natalie asked.

Neither of the two men answered. Instead, Mrs. Tilden, whom Natalie hadn't even noticed, rose from the desk where she ran Central. She came forward and put her hands on Natalie's shoulders. When she spoke, her voice was soft, serious, terrifying.

"Natalie, is it true what Mr. Finch says? That this Limberleg fellow ... treated your mother?"

Like a punch to the stomach, Simon Coffrett's words came back to her:
I expected more of him ... yourfather ...

"Is it true?" Mrs. Tilden asked again.

Natalie felt sick. She wanted to lie. She wanted it so badly she actually tried. She looked Mrs. Tilden in the face, tried to look truthful and confident. "No."

It didn't work. "Oh, Natalie," Mrs. Tilden said, her face falling into something worse than sadness. "Oh, Natalie."

That was it, absolutely the last straw. Natalie pulled out of Mrs. Tilden's hands and stamped her foot in a fury, making the old floorboards shake. Behind the counter along the left-hand wall, the patent medicine sign fell and shattered.

"What is it?" Natalie tried to keep her voice even, but every bit of her was trembling. "Someone has to tell me.
Someone has to tell me what's going on!
" Her voice rose into something unnatural, not quite a scream. "I know it's bad that—that they—and I tried to figure it out on my own—we went back there—we looked—we found things—something happened to me!"

Now she was crying freely. Miranda came to put an arm over Natalie's shoulder, and Mrs. Tilden silently bent
to put her arms around her, too. The grocer and the pharmacist looked each other, then at Natalie, both of them stunned and uncomfortable. "If you don't tell me what's happening to me ... and to my mother, I'll ... I'll..." But there was nothing she could really do, so Natalie just stood red-faced and stiff in Mrs. Tilden's arms and waited for the sobs to subside.

"I'll check on Annie," the grocer's wife said after a moment. She gave Natalie a last squeeze and swept out the door.

"I wish I could explain everything," Mr. Tilden said after a moment. "I really do."

Natalie nodded, gulping air. "But you can't. I know." She looked at the glass shards from the smashed sign on the floor and sighed. "I'll get that, I guess."

As she started picking up the glass behind the counter, the grocer and the pharmacist turned to speak with each other in quiet voices. "We've got to tell everyone," Mr. Finch said.

"Mr. Tilden?" Miranda said.

"The fair's closed," Mr. Tilden muttered. "The damage is done. How are we going to get them to believe a word we say?"

"Mr. Tilden!" This time Miranda's voice had an unmistakable edge of panic to it. Behind the counter, the sign's broken frame in her hands, Natalie stiffened.

"It doesn't matter. People have bottles of that stuff in their homes now. We have to move fast," Mr. Finch snapped.

"
Mr. Tilden!
"

The bell over the door jingled. Mr. Tilden inhaled sharply and stepped around the counter fast. He shoved Natalie roughly underneath it and dropped the paper he'd been holding in her lap.

"Yes, sir, can I help you?"

"One of my colleagues is expecting a wire." The voice was Alpheus Nervine's.

"No wires, sir, just as I told you," Mr. Tilden said. "Still broken. Nothing yesterday, nothing today." He nudged Natalie with his foot once, then again.

"That's odd. I thought for sure you gents would have it up and running by now."

"Nope." This time Mr. Tilden nudged her hard. She tucked the paper in her mouth and began crawling beneath the counter toward the back of the store. What was going on?

"You're positive? It's a very important wire. Would've been from ... what's that town just down the road?
Pinnacle.
Maybe you mistook our wire for someone else's. Let me have a look at your book."

Natalie scooted along the length of the counter to the far end near the Central Exchange and ducked around back into the aisle just as Nervine stepped behind the counter to examine Mr. Tilden's ledger. Farther down the aisle, near the soda fountain, Mr. Finch put a hand behind his back and beckoned.

Natalie pressed up against the counter and crawled on all fours toward Mr. Finch and the petrified Miranda. If
Nervine came back around, he would spot her, if not trip over her. If anyone came up the porch stairs to the front door, they'd see her plain as day, crawling down the center aisle like an idiot, and probably loudly inquire as to why.

And, incidentally, she thought wildly as she listened to Nervine flipping pages in the ledger, why
was
she crawling down the center aisle of the general store with what seemed to be a secret message of some sort in her mouth? For sure she didn't want to see Nervine ever again, but surely she didn't have to hide from him here in the general store.

"Well," announced Mr. Finch, "guess I'll be going. Come by the pharmacy later for coffee, Ed." Nervine, bent over the ledger, ignored him. The pharmacist strolled down the aisle until he caught up with Natalie. "Miss Porter, let's go have a look at that splinter now." He shoved open the door for Natalie and Miranda to duck outside.

"Tear that wire up," he whispered. "Don't let any of them see it. I'm going to make sure Mr. Tilden's all right."

Natalie shoved the paper into her pocket and dashed down the stairs with Miranda at her heels. By unspoken agreement they sprinted until they reached Miranda's house on Sanctuary Street. Natalie dropped onto the bottom step, head in her hands.

Minutes passed. Too exhausted to cry anymore, unable to think, she stared miserably at the patch of dirt between her shoes. Miranda stood silently at her side. Then another pair of shoes stepped into view, toe-to-toe with her own.

Old Tom Guyot looked down at her. "Natalie? Y'all right, darlin'?"

She handed over the crumpled telegram. "I think Mr. Tilden is in trouble. Mr. Finch said to tear this up before anyone saw it."

Tom scowled as he read. "It's from Doc Fitzwater.
Pinnacle flu ended but citizens demonstrating new symptoms, beginning with inability to walk. Symptoms may be connected to merchandise sold by itinerants; do not make purchases from itinerant salesman until samples are tested. Doc.
"

"Itinerants?"

"Traveling folk. Limberleg and his lot, no doubt. Looks to me like a lot of folks are in trouble, Natalie," Tom said. "Maybe everyone who took that tonic of theirs."

Miranda sprinted wordlessly up the stairs and through the front door. Inside Natalie could hear faint voices—Miranda pleading, trying to convince her mother to stop scrubbing her hands.