Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (3 page)

When Rose returns from the walk, she finds Ellen in her room, sitting on her bed. Cordelia is on the windowsill, singing a tuneless little song. When Rose comes in, dragging an empty trunk from the attic, Ellen scrambles to sit on it, kicking her little heels against the sides. "You can't go away and leave us," she says as Rose determinedly pushes her aside and begins to pile in her clothes.

"Yes, I can," says Rose.

"No one will take care of us," says Cordelia desolately from the windowsill.

"Father will come back and take care of you."

"He isn't ever coming back," says Ellen. "He went away and died in the war, and now you're going away, too." She can't cry — she was never designed for it—but her voice sounds like weeping.

Rose snaps the trunk shut with a final sound. "Leave me alone," she says, "or I'll turn you both off. Forever."

They are silent after that.

Rose dresses with care, in one of her mother's old gowns. Lace drips from the cuffs and the hem. She goes down into the cellar and finds the last of the preserved peaches and a single bottle of wine. There is dried meat as well, and some flour and old bread. There is no use in saving these things anymore, now that she is going, so she fries vegetables from the garden with the dried meat and puts them out on the table with the fine china, the wine, and the preserves.

Jonah laughs when he comes downstairs and sees what she's done. "Well, you did the best you could," he says. "It reminds me of midnight feasts I used to have with my sisters, when we would raid the pantry at night."

Rose smiles back at him, but she is aware of the eyes watching from the shadows—small shapes that dart and flicker when she looks at them. Cordelia and Ellen. She mentally damns them both to the pit of hell and goes back to smiling at Jonah. He is all pleasantry, filling her wineglass, and then his own, and proposing a toast to their winning the war. Rose has forgotten what the war is about or who they are fighting, but she drinks the wine nonetheless: it tastes dark and bitter, like cellar dust, but she pretends to like it. She drains her glass and he fills it again, with another toast: this one, he says, is for women like her; the war would be won already if all damsels were as valiant as she. Rose discovers that even though the wine tastes bad, it fills her with a pleasant glow when she drinks it.

On the third round of toasting, with the bottle nearly empty, he stands up. "And last," he says, "a toast to some fortunate future day when, perhaps, once this war is over, we might see each other again."

Rose freezes, the glass halfway to her lips. "What did you say?"

He repeats the toast. His eyes are bright, his cheeks flushed. He looks like a recruitment poster for airship pilots:
Seeking young men, hardy, handy, and brave...

"But I thought I was coming with you to the Capital," she says. "I thought you were going to bring me with you."

He looks startled. "But, Rose, the way back to the Capital is through enemy territory. It's much too dangerous —"

"You can't leave me here," she says.

"No, of course not. I had planned to alert the authorities when I returned, and they would send someone for you. I'm not callous, Rose. I understand what you did for me, but it's too dangerous —"

"Nothing is too dangerous if we're together," says Rose. She thinks she may have heard someone say this in a novel once.

"That's not true at all." Jonah seems agitated by her refusal to understand. "It will be much easier for me to maneuver without worrying about you, Rose. And you aren't trained for anything like this. It just isn't possible."

"I thought you loved me," says Rose. "I thought we were going to the Capital so we could get married."

There's a horrified silence. Then Jonah stammers out, "But, Rose, I'm already engaged. My fiancee, her name is Lily — I can show you a chromolithograph —" His hand strays to his throat, where a locket hangs on a chain. But Rose has no interest in this girl, this fiancee with a flower name like her own. She stumbles to her feet and away from him, even as he moves toward her. "I think of you as if you were my own little sister, Rose —"

She runs past him, runs up the stairs and into her father's study, slamming the door behind her. She can hear him calling out for her, but after a while, he stops calling, and there is silence. The sun has begun to set outside, and the room is filled with reddish light. She slips to the floor, her head in her hands, and begins to weep. Sobs rack her body. She is aware of the touch of hands on her hair and someone stroking her back. Ellen and Cordelia surround her, petting her as if she were a crying child. She sobs for hours, but they don't tire; it is Rose, finally, who wearies first. Her tears slow and stop, and she stares at the wall, vacantly, gazing into nothingness.

"He was supposed to fall in love with me," she says aloud. "I must have done something wrong."

"Everyone makes mistakes," says Ellen.

"It's all for the best," says Cordelia.

"I never liked him, anyway," says Ellen.

"If only I could do it again," Rose says. "I'd be different this time. More charming. I'd make him fall in love with me and forget everything else."

"It doesn't matter," says Cordelia.

Dawn is lightening the room. Rose gets to her feet and goes over to her father's desk. She rummages through the drawers until she finds what she is looking for, then returns to the window. Looking down, from here, she can see the front door, the garden, the meadow, and the forest in the distance.

The dolls clamor around her legs like children, but she ignores them. She waits. She has nothing but time. The sun is high in the sky when the front door opens and Jonah steps out. He is wearing his uniform, patched at the shoulder where she cut it away from him. He is carrying nothing in his hands, taking nothing from her house as he goes. Nothing but her heart, she thinks. He sets off down the path that leads from the front door toward the meadow and to the wider road beyond.

He stops once, a few steps from the house, and looks back and up, squinting into the sun. He raises his hand in a halfhearted wave, but Rose does not respond. This Jonah, this version of him, no longer matters. It doesn't matter where he thinks he's going. It doesn't matter that he doesn't love her. She is going to change all that.

He drops his hand and turns away, and Rose looks down at the time device. She spins the dial back. One day. Two days. Three. She hears Cordelia call out to her, but she snaps the device shut, and the doll's voice is lost in the whirlwind that picks her up and spins her round and carries her backward through time. In moments, it is over, and she is breathless, sitting once again on the windowsill. The dolls are gone, the time device no longer in her hands.

She anxiously looks out the window. Has she guessed the time right? Did she miscalculate? But no — her heart leaps up with happiness as she sees the man staggering out of the forest and dropping to his knees in the meadow. Leaving a trail of blood behind him, he begins the long and painful crawl toward her garden, where she will find him again.

I were riding with the Glory Girls, and we had an appointment with the 4:10 coming through the Kelly Pass. I fiddled with the Enigma Apparatus on my wrist, watching the seconds tick off. When the 4:10 was in sight, I'd take aim, and a cloud of blue light would come down over that iron horse. The serum would do its work, slowing time and the passengers to stillness inside the train. Then the Glory Girls'd walk across a bridge of light, climb aboard, and take whatever they wanted, same as they'd done to all them other trains — a dozen easy in the past six months.

In the distance, the white peaks of the revival tents dotted the basin like ladies' handkerchiefs hanging on the washing line. It were spring, and the Believers had come to baptize their young in the Pitch River. Way down below us, the miners were about their business; I could feel them vibrations passing from my boots up through my back teeth like the gentle rocking of a cradle. The air a-swirled with a gritty dust you could taste on the back of your tongue always.

"Almost time," Colleen said, and the red of the sky played against her hair till it look like a patch of crimson floss catching fire in an evening dust storm.

Fadwa readied her pistols. Josephine drummed her fingers on the rock. Amanda, cool as usual, offered me a pinch of chaw, which I declined.

"I sure hope you fixed that contraption for good, Watchmaker," she said.

"Yes'm," I answered, and didn't say no more.

My eyes were trained on them black wisps of steam peeking up over the hills. The 4:10, right on schedule. We hunkered down behind the rocks and waited.

How I ended up riding with the Glory Girls, the most notorious gang of all-girl outlaws, is a story on its own, I reckon. It's on account of my being with the Agency—that's the Pinkerton Detectives, Pinkertons for short. That's a story, too, but I cain't tell the one without the other, so you'll just have to pardon me for going on a bit at first. Truth is, I never set out to do neither. My life had been planned from the time I were a little one, sitting at my mam's skirts. Back then, I knew my place, and there were a real order to it all — the chores, the catechism, the spring revivals. Days, I spent milking and sewing, reading the One Bible. Evenings, we evangelized at the miners' camp, warning them about the End Times, asking if they'd join us in finding the passage to the Promised Land. Sunday mornings were spent in a high-collared dress, listening to the Right Reverend Jackson's fiery sermons.

Sunday afternoons, as an act of charity, I helped Master Crawford, the watchmaker, now that his sight had gone and faded to a thin pinpoint of light. That were my favorite time. I loved the beauty of all them parts working perfectly together, a little world that could be put to rights with the click of gears, like time itself answered to your fingers.

"There is a beauty to the way things work. Remove one part, add another, you've changed the mechanism as surely as the One God rewrites the structure of a finch over generations," Master Crawford'd told me as I helped him put the tools to the tiny parts. By the time I left the township, I knowed just about all there was to know in regards to clockworks and the like. Before what happened to John Barks, my life were as ordered as them watches. But I ain't ready to talk about John Barks yet, and anyway, you want to know how I come to be with the Pinkertons.

It were after Mam had died and Pap were lost to the Poppy that I left New Canaan and come to Speculation to seek my fortune. Weren't more'n a day into town when a pickpocket relieved me of my meager coins and left me in a quandary of a serious nature, that quandary bein' how to survive. There weren't no work for a girl like me — the mines couldn't even hire the men lining up outside the overseer's office. About the only place that would take me was the Red Cat brothel, and I hoped it wouldn't come to that. So, with my guts roiling, I stole a beedleworm dumpling off a Chinaman's cart—none too well, I might add — and found myself warming a cell beside a boy-whore whose bail were paid by a senator's aide. I knew nobody'd be coming for me, and I was right scared they'd be sending me back to the township. I just couldn't tolerate that.

Took me seven seconds to pick the lock and another forty-four to take the gate mechanism down to its bones. Couldn't do nothing about the whap to the back of my head, courtesy of the guard. Next thing I knew, I had an audience with Pinkerton chief Dexter Coolidge.

"What's your name? Lie to me and I'll have you in a sweatbox before sundown."

"Adelaide Jones, sir."

"Where are you from, Miss Jones?"

"New Canaan Township, sir."

Chief Coolidge frowned. "A Believer?"

"Was," I said.

Chief Coolidge lit a cigar and took a few puffs. "I guess you've already had your dip in the Pitch."

"Yessir. When I were thirteen."

"And you've received your vision?"

"Yessir."

"And did you see yourself here in manacles before me, Miss Jones?" He joked from behind a haze of spicy smoke.

I didn't answer that. Most people didn't understand the Believers. We kept to ourselves. My folks come to this planet as pilgrims before I were even born. It was here, the Right Reverend Jackson told us, where the One God set this whole traveling snake-oil wagon show in motion. The Garden of Eden were hidden in the mountains, the Scriptures said. If people lived right lives, followed the Ways of the One Bible, that Eden would be revealed to us when the End Times came, and those Believers would be led right into the Promised Land, while the Non-Believers would perish in an everlasting nothing. As a girl, I learnt the Ways and the Stations and all the things a goodly young woman should know, like how to make oat-blossom bread and spin thread from sweet clover. I learnt about the importance of baptism in the Pitch River, when all your sins would be removed and the One God would reveal his truth to you in a vision. But we never shared our visions with others. That were forbidden.

Chief Coolidge's sigh brought me back to my present predicament. "I must say, I've never understood why anyone would submit to such barbaric practices," he said, and it weren't snooty so much as it were curious.