The Flux Engine (7 page)

Satisfied with her attire, she snatched a few more things for John and turned back the way she’d come. She found John naked to the waist and dripping in front of the public pump. The water smelled of sulfur but John had dutifully used it to slick back his unruly hair.

“Much better,” Robi said.

He looked up at her, water still dripping from his hair, and just stared.

“I’m glad you like it,” she said, turning so he could see her stolen clothes. “Lace me in a bit tighter.”

John pulled the laces of the corset tighter and tied them off.

“Here,” she said, pressing the bundle of clothes she had stolen for him into his hands. “Put these on.”

John slipped into the shirt, buttoning it quickly, then looked around as he undid his belt. Robi turned her back, willing her cheeks not to blush. A few minutes later he stepped out in front of her. The clothes were meager enough, a threadbare green shirt and brown waistcoat that almost matched the pants. In more civilized clothes he might even be handsome.

“You’ll do,” she said. “Now come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“Shopping,” Robi said with a grin.

“We’re wanted by the law and don’t have any money.”

Robi sighed. John wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes by himself.

“Silly boy,” she said, patting him on the face as if he were a child. “That’s the first thing on my list.”

A shadow of irritation crossed his face but he didn’t respond.

Money would be easy enough to come by. Wallets could be lifted and needed items pilfered. Still, it wouldn’t be enough to get rid of John. If she was going to make good on her promise to help him find the tattooed woman, she was going to need more.

“How do we find the woman who shot me?”

One problem at a time
, the old man whispered in her head.

Robi fixed John with her eyes and smiled, an expression her father had drummed into her to soften up males. Based on John’s soft-brained expression, it worked.

“I thought we might have better luck finding her if we showed her picture around.”

John’s expression soured.

“I don’t have a picture of her,” he said. “I never met her before.”

“I know someone who can help with that,” Robi said, hoping she could fulfill on that promise. “But there is something very important we have to do first.”

“What?”

“Eat,” she said. “The last decent meal I had was Thursday.”

Chapter 7

The Tintype

John sat at a small, dingy table in a small, dingy restaurant that catered to the laborers of warehouse row. Across from him, Robi sat, busily finishing off her second plate of some grayish stew that bore no discernible resemblance to actual food. The windows of the restaurant were old, warped, and coated with a pervasive layer of grime that rendered the outside world in a gray and brown haze. To take his mind off what Robi was eating, John scrubbed a small patch of the window clean with his sleeve so he could watch the tradesmen and teamsters in the street outside. A row of steam wagons sat in front of a granary across the street. Each of the boxy, six-wheeled contraptions had smoke seeping from its stack as it sat idling.

A steam chicken lurched up the street, its cargo platform loaded with boxes and parcels wrapped in brown paper. Another, smaller one chugged by in the opposite direction, towing a trailer piled high with bricks.

John had always been fascinated by those mini-walkers. They came in all sizes but were built around the same basic design, two legs with a cargo platform on top. To get the balance right, the knees of the legs had to face backwards. This allowed the walker to run at surprising speeds and gave birth to its unfortunate nickname,
The Steam Chicken
.

He’d spent hours watching the men who delivered food to the orphan asylum come and go in their cargo walker. One time, when Doctor Shultz sent him to deliver harmony crystals to a farmer in Maple Dell, he’d actually ridden in the overland coach, a steam chicken that could carry a dozen people and stood twenty feet high. The trip had been hot and dusty with the walker lurching every step of the way, but it had felt like a grand adventure.

John smiled at the memory.

Sprocketville was big for a frontier town with a constant flow of goods and people moving through her, making their way between the Colonial Alliance and the western territories. In the early days of westward expansion, most goods and raw materials were transported in walkers, multi-legged steam platforms, more commonly known as Tarantulas. The problem with big walkers, of course, was speed—they tended to be slow. Nowadays most things went by train or airship.

John’s reverie was interrupted as Robi’s spoon clattered into her empty bowl and she pushed it away.

“Oh, I needed that.” She burped and then sat back, rubbing her stomach.

John wondered where the petite girl had put two full plates of stew, but decided that asking might not be the smartest choice. Robi pulled two bits from the purse she had bought off a street peddler and laid it on the table.

“There’s still a little money left,” she said, peering inside. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?”

He shook his head. Between breaking out of jail, stealing clothes, and watching Robi lift a wallet off a portly businessman, John’s stomach was tied up in nervous knots. He was certain that any minute now they would be recognized, and Sheriff Batts would close in with his deputies in tow. Every time the door opened, his heart jumped into his throat. At this point he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to eat again. Robi shrugged and rose.

“Let’s go, then.” She didn’t look around or check outside. She just rose, walked to the door, and left with John hurrying after her.

“Aren’t you worried someone will see us?” John hissed, hurrying to catch up.

“Only if you keep walking like you’re trying to hide at the same time,” she said. “Straighten up and give me your arm.”

John did as he was told and Robi took his arm, walking leisurely, as if she had no particular place to go.

“That’s better,” she said under her breath. “Remember, people only notice things that are out of place. A pair of young lovers in working-class clothes won’t even raise an eyebrow in this part of town.”

“L-lovers?” he stuttered, suddenly flushing.

“Easy, John,” Robi said. She patted his arm with her callused hand. “We’re trying to paint a picture in the minds of people who see us.”

John smiled and nodded as they passed a man and woman in coveralls that marked them as mechanics.

“Why do we want to be seen at all?”

“We can’t avoid being seen,” Robi said, pretending to admire something in the grimy window of a pawn shop. “But when the sheriff or that enforcer of yours ask these people what they saw, they won’t remember seeing two escaped prisoners, just regular people.”

John wasn’t sure that would work, but his head was beginning to hurt from trying to follow Robi’s explanations so he let it drop.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“I’m taking you to see Fixer,” she said, walking on.

“Who?”

“He’s one of my dad’s old pals. I sell him things whenever I’m in town.”

She had finally said something John understood. You couldn’t just steal things and then sell them to a regular merchant who might summon the sheriff on you. A thief needed someone he could trust.

“He’s your fence.”

“Fixer’s more than just a fence,” Robi said. “He’s the biggest scrounge west of the blight. He’s also a whiz at building things. Give him a set of blueprints for anything and he’ll build it out of scraps, spit, and bailing wire. He’s got a shop full of strange equipment.”

“Such as?”

“The kinds of things that regular people aren’t supposed to have.” Robi grinned and led him onward.

O O O

Fixer’s place was a dirty, one-story building of adobe brick squatting among a row of dirty shops. The roof was set on at a funny angle, as if parts of it had been built at different times by different people, making the building look as if it were leaning to one side. Some of the brown clay shingles ran straight and true, while others meandered like a drunkard on a Saturday night. The windows were cracked and dirty, framed by sturdy-looking, unpainted shutters. The front door stood ajar, and a faded yellow sign hung over it that read,
Ironmongery
.

John escorted Robi across the wide street, between a row of steam carts and up to the dirty shop. A puff of cool air washed over him as he entered and he could hear the noise of a large fan spinning from somewhere in back. Boxes and bags of all descriptions were piled in every available space, spilling cogs and wheels and unidentifiable bits of metal onto the floor. Machine parts, crystals, and gears littered a dozen sturdy workbenches along one wall. Everything from rusted scrap to exquisitely decorated boxes could be found among the chaos.

In the middle of this unmoving avalanche of junk sat a portly man in a pinstriped white shirt and black waistcoat. A thick shock of red hair stuck out from under a shabby gray newsboy cap and spilled down his face into mutton-chop sideburns. A brass plate covered the left side of his face from the nose to the ear and John could see the rivets where it had been attached to his skull. A brass tube emerged from the metallic skin and ended in a lens of convex glass set into the center of the plate. John had seen prosthetic replacements before, but wondered where the master of junk would come up with the money for a new eye. As they moved in from the doorway, the glass of the mechanical eye turned toward them, catching the light from the open door.

The image of him, sitting behind his low counter, surrounded by his wares, gave John the impression of an enormous red spider waiting patiently for its next prey to come along.

“I can’t buy these,” the man was saying to a scrawny woman holding an open box. “There’s no way to tell what they’re for or if they’re any good.” He held up a crystal and adjusted his prosthetic eye to focus more tightly on it.

“What if I sort them out?” the woman pleaded. “There’s got to be something in here that’s worth money.”

“Fine,” he said, dropping the crystal back in the box and waving her away. “Just do it over there. I’ve got business to conduct.”

“Hello, Fixer,” Robi said.

The fat man fumbled to readjust the focus of his eye, then his face split into a wide grin.

“Robi, darling,” he said in a thick Britannic accent. “I heard you’d been pinched.”

“You know jail doesn’t agree with me.”

As Robi and Fixer continued to greet each other, John’s attention wandered to the woman in the corner. She sat, squatting over her box, systematically taking out crystals and striking them with a chunk of steel and then pressing them against a crystal tester. The tester was supposed to register a good crystal with a green light, but it appeared to be broken. Each time she did it, the crystals rang out like bells. Most of the tones were sour and off key, the result of poorly grown or cracked crystals. Every once in a while there was a pure tone, but mostly they set John’s teeth on edge.

“Oh, come on, Fixer,” Robi’s wheedling voice cut back into John’s consciousness. “Do it for me.”

Twang
. A broken crystal rang out.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Fixer said, sounding genuinely regretful. “I just can’t. Do you have any idea how expensive the Neuro-Chromatigraph is to operate? It eats three resonance crystals each time I use it. And then there’s the chemicals, Green Vitriol, Alkalized Nitre, and Black Flux. That stuff’s not cheap.”

Ting
. Another good crystal.

“Well, maybe we can work it out in trade,” Robi said.

Twang
.

“Maybe there’s something you’d like me to—acquire—for you?” she asked.

Fixer thought for a minute, scratching absently at his side burns. Somehow his mechanical eye managed to look shifty. Finally he shook his head.

T-ting!
This time the sound resounded through the room. It was so loud it began to give John a headache. He could never understand why most people couldn’t hear the racket crystals made, especially the rare and valuable ones.

“Excuse us for a second,” John said, putting his hand on Robi’s shoulder and pulling her aside. “How much money do you have left?” he whispered.

“About forty bucks,” Robi said.

“Give me twenty.”

“What for?”

“Trust me,” John said.

Robi looked as if she wanted to argue, but thought better of it with Fixer looking on. She extracted a ten-dollar bill and two fives from her purse and pressed it into John’s hand.

“Now, where were we?” she asked, turning back to the ironmongery’s portly proprietor.

John picked his way through the debris-strewn floor until he’d reached the woman with the box full of crystals.

“What are you doing?” he asked as she continued to strike each crystal.

“Leave me alone,” she said, not bothering to look up.

“I really like crystals,” John said, slowing his speech so as not to sound overly bright. “Are any of those for sale?”

The woman’s hand froze over the box, then she looked up at him. She wasn’t as old as she looked. Clearly she’d lived hard.

“I’ll sell you the whole damn box for the right price,” she said. John held out the twenty dollars and the woman’s eyes grew wide.

“Will this be enough?”

The woman snatched the bills and pushed the box into John’s hands. Without a word of thanks, she hustled out of the little shop, leaving John standing alone. He realized that it had suddenly gone very quiet. When he turned around, he found Robi and Fixer watching him, the latter with a look of amusement on his face.

“Boy, that’s got to be the daftest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I was only going to offer her a tenner for that box—and that was being generous.” He turned back to Robi. “Where did you pick up this nutter?” he asked.

“How much does it cost to run the Neuro-Chromatigraph?” John said before Robi could speak.

Fixer regarded him for a moment, focusing his prosthetic eye as John picked his way back to the counter.

“About two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said.

John sorted through the box until he found the crystal that had made the ringing tone.

“And what would you pay for a working fertility crystal?”

Fixer’s eye got wide as John removed the crystal from the box and set it on the counter.

“I bet there’s a rancher around here who would pay good money to get his hands on that before breeding season.” John reached back into the box and brought out two more. “What about a medium lifter crystal, or a minor resonator?” John added them to the pile. “Here’s a cracked energy crystal,” John said, holding up a purple stone with a burn mark running around its middle. “Any Thurger worth his salt can repair it for a small fee.”

“How are you doing that?” Fixer asked, suspicion on his face.

“I was trained as a Thurger,” John said. “I can recognize most crystals by sight.” It was a lie, but he doubted Fixer would believe he could pick them out by their sound.

“All right,” Fixer said after a long moment. “You trade me the good crystals out of that box, and maybe identify a couple more I got laying around, and I’ll let you use the Neuro-Chromatigraph.”

They shook on it and John quickly separated the useful and reparable crystals from the junk in the box. He noticed with a pang of guilt that there were at least two hundred dollars worth in the pile, yet he had paid the woman only twenty. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but he hated the thought that he’d abused the woman’s trust. Just because he was surrounded by thieves didn’t mean he had to become one of them. There probably wasn’t any way to find the woman and make amends, but John resolved not to take advantage of someone like that again.

The decision made him feel better.

Once John finished with Fixer’s crystals, the portly man levered himself out of his chair and led them through his maze of junk to an enormous fan mounted in the back wall. He touched the end of a bolt sticking out from the fan’s housing and the whole thing slid to the side. The room beyond the hidden door was almost as large as the shop out front but with none of the clutter. The skeletal frameworks of machines stood at regular intervals along the walls like clockwork sentinels. Most of them were in various stages of construction, missing crystals or gears or levers, but some were whole, silently waiting for Fixer to need them. Thick rubber hoses connected the working devices to a steam line that ran along the wall about waist high. None of the valves were open and the machines were all still and silent.