The Boneshaker (3 page)

"I think I need a day away from gears, Nattie. Besides," he said with a smile, "don't you have something to show off to Miranda and the rest of your gang?"

He looked so proud.

"Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot." She dropped her chin back onto her fist and drew circles in the maple syrup on her plate with her fork.

While Natalie fidgeted at her kitchen table and Doc Fitzwater made his steady, chugging way out of town, another crowd in another dusty village watched a little caravan prepare for a different departure.

At the reins of the wagon in front, a tall man in blue-lensed spectacles stood and waved, smiling a showman's smile that did not reach his eyes. The hands that held the reins wore expensive leather gloves in a pearly pale ivory shade. A silk top hat sat on the seat beside him, and his mane of red hair shot through with gray shone in the sun. It waved about a touch more than it seemed it ought to in the soft breeze.

He sat with a whirl of dark cloak and flicked his wrists. The wagon lurched into motion, the first in a train of more old and peeling wagons drawn by mottled mules. The procession left a rattle of glass and the faint carnival smell of fresh hay, frying grease, and spun candy in its wake.

The caravan turned westward, toward Arcane.

N
ATALIE'S LIFE
was a mess of gears and yarns. If you looked closely, however (the way she loved to look at a mechanical device or a story), the tangle resolved itself into a perfectly crafted mechanism. All the parts were made to work together. In the same way that Natalie could tell when she was looking at a well-built machine, she knew her life was pretty good. Everything just fit.

Arcane, however, was different. The more complex a machine got and the more parts it contained, the more places there were where gears could fail to mesh. A town was like that. Sometimes it just didn't seem to work quite as smoothly as it did at other times, especially when the oil that eased the cogs' meshing ran out.

Like now, for instance. It was barely past suppertime; Doc hadn't even been gone a whole day, and already the town's cogs were starting to stick. It was in the air—something strange and hard to pin down. Natalie paused outside Lester Finch's pharmacy. Inside, despite the late hour, Mr. Finch still had customers lined up at the counter. She leaned her bright red enameled bicycle against her side and considered the shopfront.

"Don't you think there's got to be something odd going on out there in Pinnacle if Doc has to go and clean house for them?" Natalie wondered. "What's the matter with their doctor?"

"I don't know." Miranda Porter twisted a finger disinterestedly in one blond curl and half-shrugged. Then she put her hands on her hips and gave Natalie a critical look. "You're wearing that silly thing
again?
"

Natalie frowned and made an effort not to feel for the tiny brass sprocket she wore like a charm on a string around her neck. Just because Miranda couldn't think of anything better to talk about than necklaces didn't mean Natalie was going to sink to that level.

"Pay attention." Natalie jerked her head toward the pharmacy. "It's probably some awful kind of deadly sickness, like the Black Plague."

Anybody else would've picked up the cue, hissed in horror, and joined the game with another ghastly suggestion as to what was going on in the next town over, as gruesome and vile as possible. It would've made Natalie feel better, for sure—just a little bit of normal behavior, for goodness' sake; was that too much to ask? Miranda had been really good at those kinds of games once, but lately she seemed to find them beneath her. Natalie had given up trying to figure it out.

Now, predictably, Miranda just shrugged again. "Who cares? Pinnacle's practically in another state."

Hopeless
and
lacking factual information: an unforgivable combination. "It isn't. It's a hundred and ten miles," Natalie snapped.

"Who
cares?
" Miranda folded her arms bossily over her chest. Her eyes flicked around—looking to see if anybody was watching, probably. "When are you going to let me ride your bicycle?"

Natalie stopped dead in her tracks, strange ailments forgotten. "Why would you want to ride my bicycle?" she demanded. "Who are you trying to impress?"

Miranda's mouth squeezed itself into a tight little line. "Nobody."

"I bet it's Alfred Tate." Amazing. Miranda turned the same pink as her dress.

"
Shut your—
"

"Thought so." Natalie laughed. "Miranda, you can't ride it. You'll get your dress caught in the springs."

Miranda plunked her hands on her hips. "I will not."

Natalie propped the item in question carefully against a hitching post and regarded Miranda's pink calico dress so skeptically that her friend looked down to see if she had put on something absurd like an old-fashioned hoop skirt without noticing it. "I'm looking out for you, Miranda, that's all. Don't want Alfred Tate to see your dress tear straight off 'cause it's caught up, do you?"

Miranda glanced around before she could help herself. "
He's not here!
"

"So it's okay for everybody else to see your bloomers?"

"All right, then,
you
ride it."

Natalie's heart sank.

"If it's really the fastest bicycle in the world, show me." Pink hands on her pink hips, pink face draining to an angry white, Miranda tapped her foot, raising little puffs of dry dirt around her ankles.

Natalie decided to tough it out. "No."

"Because it probably isn't, and you don't want anyone to find out."

"Because it's late. Because you're pestering me, and I don't feel like it."
Anything
to stop this conversation ... Natalie grabbed the bicycle's handlebars and stalked away. Miranda got the point—for once—and didn't try to keep up.

"How do you
know
it's the fastest bicycle in the world? You don't know that."

"I helped my dad build it! I know what it's made of!"

"Yeah," Miranda yelled after her, "it's made of bicycle parts, like any other bicycle! That's all!"

Natalie stopped again and whirled on Miranda. "Like any other...?" People were so stupid. You only had to
look
at the bicycle to see that it was special. The frame alone was a work of art, and the rest of it was made of parts from the best bicycles there were, each piece picked out specially by her father to build Natalie the fastest, most perfect, most beautiful bicycle in all of Missouri, if not the entire world. It was unquestionably one of a kind.

It was just Natalie's size, and the whole frame, enameled in her favorite shade of red, was etched with a pattern of whorls and curlicues. It had a varnished wicker basket attached to the back (instead of the front, where it might've slowed the bicycle down), and the basket had a leather strap with a new brass buckle so that no matter how fast she rode and no matter how bumpy the street, Natalie's belongings would stay safely inside. Best of all, her father had sent away to Dayton, Ohio, for an actual Wright Cycle Company nameplate from back when the Wright brothers were still building bicycles, a little oval badge with a pointy top and bottom that now gleamed at the front of the handlebar stem.

If Miranda Porter in her
ignorance
couldn't see that it was the best bicycle in the country, well then, after thirteen years of life she at least ought to understand it was better than anything she, Miranda, had ever seen. Or probably ever would.

As for fast ... Natalie had asked her father for the fastest bicycle he could build, and he had built her this one. Nobody, but
nobody,
was better at bicycles than Ted Minks, so the fastest bicycle from Natalie's father clearly had to be the fastest there was.

In the world. Ever. It was just good logic.

Maybe Miranda was just that big an idiot, and she simply tried harder to hide it when the boys were around. You couldn't talk to an idiot about all the extra springs in the frame that would let Natalie fly over rough roads, the beveled gears or the very special tires that wouldn't skid, the motorcycle pedals or the chrome-plated electric light between the handlebars that had been ordered from Chicago. It would be like trying to explain the Winton motorcar to George Sills.

"It's
old
," Miranda protested. "How could anything so old be fast? That just doesn't make any
sense.
"

Natalie glared. "If you're talking about the frame, Miranda, it's not old."

"Well, antique, I guess I should've said, but that just means old, Natalie," Miranda said with a meanly sympathetic smile. "Why couldn't your dad find you something newer? I mean, if he was going to build you a bicycle in the first place?"

This was hopeless—an absolutely hopeless endeavor. Natalie settled for yelling, "You don't know anything!" and breaking into a run alongside the bicycle.

"You can't prove it!" Miranda's voice dripped victory. Natalie's face burned. "I bet it's
slo-ow,
" Miranda bawled, "the slowest, oldest, most rickety thing there is! You won't ride it because then everyone would see and
know!
"

The world took on the same red as the bicycle, and the guilt that had been eating away at Natalie's stomach since breakfast started to boil. Tears hit her cheeks and dripped down into the dust under the tires. She kept running until she could turn a corner and get off Bard Street. When she was safely out of sight, she propped the bicycle carefully, lovingly against a wall. Then she sat hard, dropped her head onto her knees, and sobbed.

"I'm sorry, Dad," she said into her tear-wet overalls. She couldn't prove Miranda wrong, not even to defend her father, the most brilliant mechanic in Arcane (and Missouri, and America, and the world). If she had been able to hop on and pedal with every ounce of energy she had, Miranda would have had to take back all those awful things she'd just said. But that was impossible.

Natalie Minks, the girl with the world's fastest bicycle, couldn't ride it.

After a few minutes, she wiped her face dry on her shirt and got up. If Miranda saw this display, she'd think she was right.

Parallel to Bard Street, between the livery stable where Doc had kept his motorcar for years and the smithy behind it where Mr. Swifte, the blacksmith, lived and worked, a little alley called Smith Lane stretched, just wide enough for three people to walk side by side. Now Natalie walked the bicycle with as much poise as she could muster around the livery stable to the alley, swung her leg over the crossbar, and put a foot on one pedal.

The particularly marvelous thing about a bicycle (or an automaton, or a Winton motorcar, or any mechanical thing at all, really), was the way that it was made up of lots of pieces doing specific jobs. The insides of Natalie's flyer, for instance, were a beautiful puzzle, a jumble of parts. Once she put the puzzle together, those parts would work together at last and the flyer would do what she had built it to do.

Once you could see how all the pieces fit together and understand what their special jobs were, you could understand the machine. For Natalie, that was enough to make mechanical things beautiful, especially in the moment when suddenly, after staring at a puzzle of cams and cogs and wheels, it all came together and made sense.

Except for this exceedingly simple machine in her hands.

"Just like riding any other bicycle," she said softly, and kicked off.

One foot off the ground, and then the other ... but the bicycle was already tilting ... She flung her body the other way—too hard!—and put out her hand to keep from falling into the stable wall. Her palm whacked the rough boards and slid down along with the rest of her as the wheels shot out sideways.

She bit down to keep from crying out as her leg twisted painfully under the frame. Her palm burned; there would be splinters to soak out later. She shook her hand a few times and hopped to her feet, then got back on the bicycle. This time she kicked off too hard, so the pedals spun and she couldn't get her feet on them. After a minute she lost her balance and fell again.

The third time, she glanced down to put her feet squarely on the spinning pedals, leaned too far to the right, and steered straight into the stable wall. Unbelievable. The thing had a mind of its own.

The problem, of course, was that riding the red bicycle wasn't like riding any other bicycle. Not by a long shot.

Mr. Minks had bought it in Kansas City the year before from a shop that was going out of business, along with a whole tangle of frames and tires and pedals and gears. The second Natalie saw it, she had begged him to fix it up for her. Even filthy from sitting for decades in someone's shop, its heavy old metal wheels rusting and bent out of true and all its crimson enamel and etchings coated in grime, it was beautiful. And different.

It had a down-turned set of handlebars with rosewood grips. Its wheels were bigger than Natalie was used to, and they were less than six inches apart, which was a lot closer together than was normal on newer cycles. The one in the front was bigger by a little bit than the one in the back, too. Instead of a seat on a vertical saddle post, this bicycle's seat was positioned on a nearly horizontal bar that sloped from the steering column to a spring over the rear tire (just one of a collection of springs supporting it in various odd places). It had a longer front fender than any other bicycle she'd seen, and the fender had two little hooks on either side of it that were meant to hold the rider's feet when he or she wanted to coast without pedaling. That should've been the big tip-off that this was going to be a difficult bicycle, but even that wasn't its weirdest (and most interesting) feature.

Below the triangle that held the seat and connected the steering column to the fork of the rear wheel, another set of tubes completed the frame: a diamond cut in half by a vertical piece that formed a hinge between the front part and the back. The red enameled frame was built so that it could actually
pivot
at the middle.

"I don't know, Nattie," her father had said, looking critically at it. "I don't think this is the best choice for you. I have a feeling whatever I do to it, any bicycle built on this frame is going to ride like a boneshaker."