The Falling Machine (11 page)

Clamping a hand down on his cap and scrunching up his face as far as it would go, he leaned into the cold wind and began to follow him. “Is it far?”

“Not far, no. But nothing is very far away in this city, I think.”

“Just honesty and truth,” Tim grumbled.

The big man laughed in response. “I look for that only in what's in front of me, or in my Bible.”

Except for the occasional dilapidated old building, the neighborhood was mostly made up of featureless brick and cast-iron fronts. High windows were open in vain hope that the only thing that would enter them was sunlight and fresh air.

Reaching the end of the block, the round man turned a sharp corner and entered into the shadows of an alley. Tim turned and followed him into the darkness. After a few steps the breeze disappeared, the roar of the wind replaced by an echoing howl that rang through the cold blue gloom that filled the alleyway.

“Is this a shortcut?”

“Oh no. This is the
way.
”

At first it seemed like it must be a short path, but instead of finding its way out to another street the alley twisted and turned between tall buildings on either side. The red-bearded man dragged his hand along the wall and muttered to himself with each bend, clearly attempting to keep track of which way they were going, but after the six or seventh bend it would have been almost impossible for any man to remember the path they had taken.

The German laughed. “I wish you luck, Mr. Hogan. It took me many months to remember the path.”

“I'll take that as a challenge.”

They walked a few yards down a straight lane before taking a sharp right that took them out of the maze and put them at the entrance to a small courtyard formed from the windowless backsides of the buildings that surrounded it. Any windows that looked into the space had been papered over, and the loading docks had long ago been bricked up.

A trio of poorly constructed shacks leaned up against the walls. They were pieced together from mismatched scraps of wood and bricks, with each of them sporting a windowpane with impressively unbroken glass. Smoke rose up from their tin chimneys, floating toward the sky in dark columns until it reached the rooftops and was torn apart by the wind.

In front of them sat three men all dressed in tweed coats and silk ties. They were clearly part of a gang of sorts, and the leader was a tall figure in a top hat. His jacket reached down past his knees and was a finely tailored piece of clothing, free of the patches the rest of them wore. It had been cut to be worn long and tight, and it made him appear like a bent reed about to snap.

The leader leaned against a barrel, his long legs stretching out in front of him. In his hand he held an apple that he was peeling with a shiny pocketknife. He threw a chunk of rind into the cheerfully burning brazier in front of him, and it hissed as it landed in the flames.

He let out a quick whistle, and two more men came out from the shacks, one of them still young enough to be considered a boy.

“You've been asking a lot of questions about the Brotherhood,” said the man on the barrel.

Tim stopped short, letting his escort waddle his way to the rest of the group. Brandon slid into the group as smoothly as a tool being put back into its case—although he clearly was designed for a different use than the others.

“Aye, and no one seemed ta know a damn thing.”

“Not many people do. They're not supposed to.” His voice was dramatic, with his long “O”s revealing the broken remains of an English accent.

“But I'm bettin’ ya know
all
about them,” Tim replied.

The tall man dragged his feet along the ground and then rose up from the barrel like a spider. Even without his top hat and boots he would have stood well over six feet tall, but taken altogether he was closer to seven. “I know that you've been asking about things you shouldn't even know exist. That makes it my job to find out how much you do know, and how you come to know it.” It took a moment for the others to realize that they were expected to stand up behind their leader and act threatening.

“So, what's your name, old man?”

The fat German took a step forward and broke in breathlessly. “His name is Tim Ho—” His words were cut off by the wet smack of a half-peeled apple as it exploded in his face. Brandon's look of surprise was punctuated by a trickle of blood that rolled out from his nose.

“I didn't ask you, you fat idiot,” the leader sighed.

The German wiped his face, taking a moment to stare at the crimson streak on his hand before replying. “Very sorry.”

“Don't apologize! I should say thanks to you for managing to bring him back here without getting lost, or alerting the police.”

Brandon pulled out a handkerchief so gray and tattered it was impossible to tell where the stains ended and the clean parts began. He pressed it up against his nose. “You're welcome, sir.”

“I'm not a sir.”

“Sorry, Jack.”

The red-whiskered man raised up his cane. “My name is Tim Hogan, if ya still care ta know.” With his left hand he reached down through a hole on the inside of his coat and slipped his hand, unseen, into his vest pocket, using his fingertips to grasp one of the glass spheres. “I figured that the Children of Eschaton was just a
name
, but I guess the ‘children’ part was right.”

Jack turned in his direction and smiled. “Clever, Mr. Hogan.” He took a single step toward him, but with his long legs it moved him a great deal closer. “But then, you would have to be, in order to uncover the name of a secret organization that only recruits members from men
it
chooses to invite.” He began unbuttoning his black coat, flicking the buttons open one at a time with a snap of his fingers. The cloth draped heavily as it peeled apart, pulled downward by a row of small but nasty looking steel knives that had been sewn into the jacket lining on either side.

“I'm not that smart,” Tim continued. “I simply heard two men talking about yer crew. It sounded interestin', so I thought I'd go ahead and ask around.”

“Unlikely story.” Ignoring the blades he had just revealed, Jack reached into the outside pocket and pulled out the knife he had been using to peel the apple. With a smooth snap of his wrist, he flicked it open.

“You say that, but now that I've met a few of yer men, I'm thinkin’ they're not the sharpest tools in the box.”

Jack chuckled. “Are you listening, boys? This man says he doesn't think you're very bright.”

Somewhere under his walrus mustache Brandon smiled. “I may not be smart, but I am useful, aren't I, Jack?”

“You are indeed.” The tall man smiled back as he spoke to Brandon. His grin managed to be warm and predatory at the same time. “You should know, Mr. Hogan, that Mr. Kurtz here is a medical marvel. He is not only twice as strong as he is stupid, but he was born entirely without a conscience. There is no act on God's green earth too despicable or debased for him to carry out if I order him to do it. If you want kittens drowned, of any size or species, then Brandon Kurtz is the man to do the job. It makes him tremendously useful for extracting information or inflicting punishment.”

The German nodded and stammered, “Th-thanks, Jack.”

Jack patted the German on the shoulder. “Now, hopefully Tim, you'll give me the answers I'm looking for, so I won't find it necessary to unleash him on you.”

Tim put his cane on the ground and swayed forward slightly. “You know my name, and I already met Mr. Kurtz, back at the bar. But we still haven't been formally introduced.”

Jack snapped shut the knife in his hand and opened his arms wide, letting the polished blades that lined his jacket glitter in the murky light. “The boys around here call me Jack Knife.”

“Then I guess I'm pleased ta meet ya, Jack.” Shoving his cane up under his left arm, Tim took a step forward, his hand outstretched. The other men immediately jumped up, thrusting their hands into their pockets.

“That's all right, boys. He's just an old man. He isn't going to do any harm.” But instead of returning the gesture, he flicked the knife in his hand open again. “Now that you've found us, Mr. Hogan, what would you like to know? Ask me anything you like, anything at all.”

“I heard you boys are working on a job. Something big.”

“And you think you can help?”

“I may be old, but my hands are still good. There's not a safe built that I can't open up.”

“A cracksman? Well that would be most useful to us, except for one small problem.”

“And what would that be?” He let one of the balls drop down his pant leg. It rolled softly off his shoe and dropped to the pavement.

Jack lifted up his knife. “Your beard, it's peeling off. And honestly, that's the sort of thing can make you doubt a man's veracity.”

Tim's hand reached up toward his face, stopping a foot away from his cheek. He looked into Jack's eyes, but they were giving nothing away.

“Now then, boys,” Jack said, his grin widening. “What you see here is what the educated folks call a ‘conundrum.’” He flipped his knife up in the air and caught it without a thought. “Because Mr. Hogan here is either sure that his beard is real, and stopped because the very idea of it peeling off his face is utterly ridiculous, or he is wearing a false beard, and he's afraid if it isn't peeling off he'll give the game away for sure if he checks it. Either way, we know something he doesn't.”

Brandon opened his mouth to speak, and Jack jabbed his elbow into his chest. The German gasped as he doubled over, sputtering. “So don't give away the game, Brandon. I'd be very angry if you ruined my fun.”

The red-whiskered man stood frozen and then slowly lowered his arm. “It's as real as the hair on your head.”

“Unless, of course, it
is
peeling, in which case I
know
you're a liar.”

“And why would I be wearing a pair of false whiskers?” He lifted his cane a few inches off the ground.

“I can think of a few, actually, but how about we try this one on for size?” Jack's smile grew. “Because you're actually Peter Wickham, the Sleuth, and you've come to try to find out who it was that killed Dennis Darby.”

“Damn,” he said in a most perfect and proper English accent, and smashed the tip of the cane down onto the glass sphere at his feet. It exploded violently, ripping the cane out of his hand and sending up a cloud of white smoke that enveloped him completely.

Wickham used the momentum of the explosion to throw himself backward, hoping the commotion and confusion could allow him to appear to vanish. It would have been no small feat to pull off the trick successfully at the best of times, and Jack was clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Two small steel blades ripped through the cloud. The first passed through empty air, traveling through the space that had been occupied by Wickham's head only a moment before.

The second blade struck directly into his chest.

“Damn and damn,” he repeated as he fell.

A
s a young girl Sarah had enjoyed sneaking around inside the Stanton mansion, imagining herself fighting bad people in faraway places. Grown-ups would not only play the role of whatever imaginary evil it was that she had dreamed up, but they were, more often than not, genuine foes of grand adventures and interesting secrets. And now, years later, she was fully grown, and still skulking around the halls of her house, hoping to avoid any other adults.

At least the servants were far less capable than Mr. Wickham. Yesterday, when one of the maids had caught Sarah riffling through the papers in the basement, it had been easy to convince the woman that Sarah was simply looking for something of her mother's, and the maid had let her be.

The only one of the house staff that she was genuinely afraid of was O'Rourke. The gray-haired butler had informed her father of every infraction she committed in the house, no matter how small, and he had done it for longer than she could remember. Any new bits of strange behavior by “the young miss” were simply fresh suspicion to be added to the mountain.

Not that his opinion actually mattered much. She had been given the free run of most of the mansion after her mother died, although there were still two places where her presence might arouse more than just a few casual questions. The first was the library, simply because it was somewhere that women weren't ever invited or welcomed.

She had been caught in there once, years ago, after having spent a most enjoyable hour unrolling the cigars in her father's humidor one after another in a naïve attempt to discover what it was at the center of the strange brown cylinders that made them able to produce so much smoke.

But eleven years later she wouldn't be able to get away with simply claiming ignorance and shedding a few tears, although she was sure that she could come up with
some
suitably convincing story that would keep the help from telling her father.

The other room was another matter entirely. The prohibition against being in her father's office was absolute, and had been enforced with the promise of a spanking (or worse) from the time Sarah had been old enough to know what the term “off-limits” truly meant. Not that it had been enough to keep her out the last time….

And yet here she was, inside her father's inner sanctum, searching for clues that she hoped would help her to uncover something in her father's notes that might reveal who the thief actually was.

So far she had found nothing of interest beyond a few stacks of papers and certificates. From what she could tell, they seemed primarily to concern her father's business dealings and other investments. They were, she had to admit, neither interesting nor revealing of anything beyond the fact that Alexander Stanton, a man who found satisfaction charging into battle against monstrous villains with guns blazing, seemed to harbor an equal passion for the most minute and boring details of the business world.

She was sure that had he been given access to the same information, the Sleuth would already have discovered some curious notation, an out-of-place decimal point, or some other detail that would have allowed him to construct a conspiracy of people, places, and things that would have led to a clear answer as to who the thief must be.

But even if Sarah wasn't a master detective, that didn't mean she was completely unable to understand the numbers in front of her. Under the tutelage of Sir Dennis she had already learned far more about mathematics than was considered proper for a lady. And Sarah had shown more of a natural flair for numbers and mathematics than Nathaniel ever would. Even so, there was a difference between being able to understand the figures, and recognizing that the spreadsheet in front of her actually pointed to something nefarious. “If,” she said out loud, to remind herself, “there actually is anything there to be found at all.”

She began to organize the papers she had looked through back into a tidy stack. She had to admit to herself that she wasn't the Sleuth, and never would be. If there
was
something to find, then it would need to reveal itself to her in a far more obvious way.

When she had decided to raid her father's office, Sarah had made a promise to herself that she would only search what was open and available. But the thrill of being in here, of being surrounded by the forbidden, made her want to uncover more. “And who knows when I'll get another chance, or manage to find the courage to take it?”

She rattled the desk drawers again, just to see, but they remained locked.

Trying to decide what to do next, her eyes wandered to the safe standing on the sidewall by the window. It was an impressive-looking black box, with the requisite brass locks and hinges, and a large dial that sat in the claw of an eagle painted across the front of it—wings spread menacingly.

The safe was obviously the place where big secrets should be kept. But the few times she had been invited into the office, her father had left it open. It usually contained an impressive amount of money and stock certificates, but neither of those were valuable information.

What Sarah was looking to uncover were deep, dark secrets—the kind that would be kept in deep, dark places—and she had a very good idea where those would be hidden. It was somewhere she had been before.

When the Industrialist had first appeared to the world, wearing his smoking hat and holding an automated pistol in his hand, no one had known who the man behind the mask really was. The enigmatic “Capitalist of action” quickly became the talk of the town, with artist's renderings of him appearing on the front pages of all the newspapers, along with a torrent of fanciful novels that had imagined all sorts of lurid origins and ridiculous secret identities.

But despite all the attention, for the first few years of his career the flamboyant hero managed to maintain his anonymity. Politicians, newsmen, and other villains had all been unable to uncover who the man behind the mask really was. And it probably would have remained that way, if not for a curious nine-year-old girl stumbling onto her father's secret and revealing it to the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was a sequence of events that had begun with Sarah sneaking into the same room she was in now. They had ended, three years later, with the Industrialist, revealing his identity to the world, hoping to save the life of his wife and child from the dastardly villain who had kidnapped them. Only Sarah had escaped with her life.

As she pulled her thoughts back to the present, Sarah caught herself looking up from the desk and letting her gaze rest on the gas lamp coming out of the wall behind her. That was the exact spot where the trouble had begun, and looking at it now it was a wonder that such a little girl had ever managed to reach it at all, let alone manipulate it in exactly the proper way to cause the wall to open up.

She walked over to it and dragged her fingertips across the long brass tube. It was the first time she had touched it in eleven years, and it felt smooth and cool to the touch. She had often wondered if her father had modified the mechanism since she had opened it. He had had Darby help him remodel his sanctum a few years ago, and he certainly could have created something far more—

The familiar click surprised her. She had pushed it in without even thinking about it, or at least without thinking about thinking about it. She caught her distorted image in the clear blown glass of the lamp and saw that there was a trace of a knowing smile on her lips.

It dawned on Sarah that secretly this had been her plan all along. Her promise to herself that she would avoid coming back to the scene of the crime after all these years was a lie, and the curious nine-year-old girl who still lived inside of her was thrilled.

The adult, however, was not so sure, and she hesitated for just a moment before twisting the lamp to the side—but only for a moment.

There was a heavy “thunk” as the chained weight behind the wall was released, and the panel behind the desk started to rise. It was still exactly the same. Her father was nothing if not a traditionalist.

As she watched the oaken wall behind the desk disappear into the ceiling she realized that one thing
had
changed: there was a large portrait of Alexander Stanton dressed as the Industrialist hung on the wall that was rising up, and there was no place for it to go.

Sarah dove for the picture, tripping over her heels as she went. She bumped into the rising wall, managing to find just enough purchase to push her hands upward and slip the picture off its hook before the panel passed the point of no return.

Freed from its stable hook, the large portrait wobbled in her hands and then began to topple over. She managed to make a desperate twist to the right, driving her corset into her ribs. The top edge of the gold rococo frame banged into the track where the wall had lifted away, and stopped.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she slid the picture to the ground. She looked up and realized that there was a spring-loaded flap in the ceiling perfectly sized to let the painting slip through.

“Damn,” she said. So far her attempts at being a master detective revealed that Sarah was far better at being clumsy and desperate than she was at being clever. She wondered if the Sleuth's true special powers were simply that he had the patience to consider all the possibilities
before
he acted.

Her mother, she was sure, would have reminded her that lack of attention was a weakness of her gender.

But Darby had never had any patience for those kinds of excuses. When he had first created the Turbine costume for Nathaniel, she had asked the old man why he couldn't make her into a Paragon as well. “My mother said it's because I'm a girl.”

The scientist had laughed at that. “My dear child, it isn't your gender that makes you a hero,” he had told her. “And it isn't a costume either. Any fool with a gun can already perform acts beyond those of an ordinary man. It's having the strength of will needed to overcome your own
inabilities
that makes you special.” But in the end it had still been Nathaniel whom he had chosen to give the ability to fly.

Sarah stared into the open closet in front of her. The secret room had changed very little in the years since she had first peeked inside. Laid out on a large central table were multiple sets of the Industrialist's red-and-blue leather costume, each with its own version of the ridiculous steam-spewing hat that her father seemed convinced was the
pièce de résistance
of the entire suit.

A frame in back held up his shield along with the mechanical bandolier that allowed her father to feed a seemingly endless stream of bullets to his guns. Bolted to the back of it was the small metal bottle that acted as a reservoir for the fortified steam that propelled them with such terrifying power.

It was all far more advanced than it had been when she had first discovered her father's secret. Before Darby had gotten his hands on it, the weapon had simply been a mechanical device created by one of Alexander Stanton's brilliant young engineers using a series of clockworks and springs, along with a crude gunpowder mechanism. According to her father it had been bulky but effective, although it often froze at inopportune moments, a weakness that was almost fatal when it ignited during a battle with Dr. Phlogiston.

After that he had worked with Sir Dennis to reengineer the suit completely, and anyone familiar with the old man's style could see the inventor's handiwork in every element of the device. It was compact, streamlined, efficient, and beautiful in a way that revealed a true artistic skill.

Looking at it now, it felt as if a part of Dennis Darby were here in the room with her. She felt a pang of loss in the pit of her stomach stronger than anything she had felt since the funeral.

The other, less conspicuous element that had been “updated” since she had first stumbled onto the costume was that the waistline of the suit was larger than it had been a decade ago. Aging was something that her father had great difficulty accepting, although she had often assured him that he was still very fit for a man of his years.

Maybe next time he complained about getting older she could just tell him what Darby had told her. “You must remember, Father,” she would say to him, “it is a person's ability to overcome their
inabilities
that makes them special.”

She smiled at the thought of what his reaction might be to
that
, although the image was soured by the fact that his response would be something both withering and sarcastic.

She thought she could hear his stern tones now: “She must be in this house
somewhere.
I want you to find her and bring her down to my office right away.”

Sarah gasped. The words, along with some very determined footsteps, were more than just in her imagination—they were echoing from the hallway outside of the door! And although the size of the house made it easy enough to hear conversation coming from almost any of the main halls, the fact that the words were so clear meant that it would only be a matter of seconds before Alexander Stanton burst into his office and discovered his fully grown daughter reenacting the exact event that had stolen away his secret identity and almost killed his family.