The Brass Giant (6 page)

She turned around. “How?” she demanded. “If the Guild doesn't approve—­”

“The Guild doesn't have to know.”

Petra frowned. “What do you mean?”

“It's . . . complicated. Look, I know you have no reason to trust me on this, but—­”

“Then
give
me a reason to trust you.” She stared into his copper-­brown eyes, and for the first time since she had met him, Emmerich Goss faltered. The intensity of his eyes waned in that moment—­a flicker of sadness and defeat. “If you want my help,” she continued more gently, “be honest with me. You owe me that much.”

Emmerich ran his fingers through his hair then leaned against his desk, crossing his arms. “The truth . . .” He released a heavy sigh. “Very well. You want to know why I asked for your help? I'll tell you, but what I say cannot leave this room, understand?”

Petra nodded slowly.

“The automaton project is highly confidential, the modified design known only to a select number of engineers within the Guild, myself included, and even I do not know the full extent of what the Guild plans to do with the finished machine. We all have our part to play. Mine is to design the control system and the basic design, power system included. If any one of us was found or captured and interrogated by the Guild's competitors, we would be unable to deliver the full spectrum of its new design. The council swore us to secrecy on the knowledge we possess of the automaton.” He shifted uncomfortably. “If the Guild came to know I acquired outside help, I would be marked . . .” He took a deep breath. “I would be marked for treason against the Guild, perhaps even the city itself.”

Petra blinked. Treason? The automaton project could not be so important, and if it was, Emmerich had no business dragging her into it. She frowned. “If the automaton is confidential, why were you strutting down Medlock with it?”

“Everyone knew of the automaton prototype. It was my thesis project for the University. I wasn't a Guild engineer then, only a student. I never even intended to use it to apply to the Guild, but then my father pressured me into presenting it, and here we are.”

“But why ask
me
to help? Why not ask someone in the Guild, or another student?”

He placed his hands on her shoulders. “I want
your
help.”

Petra shrugged him away.

“Please,” said Emmerich. “At least consider. I know you already said that you would do it, that you would help, but in light of this, I will not hold you to that. I was not truthful with you, and that isn't fair. You didn't ask to be dragged into this.”

She regarded him carefully, his eyes shining with sincerity. She could see that he was telling her the truth, but if they must work in secret, that meant her hopes of becoming a Guild engineer were next to impossible, buried beneath an oath of secrecy and the risk of being accused of treason. She chewed on her lip, torn between accepting the proposal despite the risks or walking away from her one opportunity to work for the Guild. “If I did still agree, you wouldn't be able to acknowledge my involvement on the automaton, would you? My name won't be on the designs or the final presentation.”

“No,” he said hoarsely. “I'm sorry, but I cannot—­not officially.”

“Officially,” she repeated. Petra scoffed and shook her head. At this rate she would never join the Guild, never become a proper engineer.

She should have expected as much.

Pulling her pocket watch from her skirt pocket, she checked the time—­nearly ten o'clock. “It's getting late,” she said, not sure why it mattered. No one was expecting her home tonight. “I should go.”

“Wait.” Emmerich stepped forward. “I want to show you something . . .” He trailed off with a frown, his eyes focused intently on her face—­there was guilt there, she saw, and something else. He cleared his throat. “ . . . before you leave.”

They climbed the stairs to the main floor and entered the lobby, the dark night casting a shadow beyond the front entrance. Emmerich led her to the lift and gestured for her to step inside.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He smiled warmly. “You'll see.”

She entered the lift and turned in a circle as she examined all the exposed gears and belts, pulleys, linkages, and electric wires, forgetting her disappointment, forgetting her worries and her doubts. Emmerich followed her in, the curved glass door of the lift closing behind him.

Buttons decorated a freestanding podium at the back of the lift, each one seeming to correspond with a floor in the east tower. There was a large lever on one side of the podium; Emmerich produced a key and slid it into a locking mechanism on the other side. Petra heard a distinct click within, and then, above the lift chamber, the drive motor whirred. Emmerich pressed a button labeled with an ornate
O
at the top right of the panel and pulled a knob at the bottom. The gearbox within the drive motor shifted, and a white bulb above the podium ignited.

“Ready?” He placed both hands on the large lever.

Petra nodded, and he put all of his weight into pulling the lever back. The whirring of the drive motor slowed for a moment, and with a loud click, the driveshaft locked. She held her breath. The spring-­loaded lever snapped back to its original position, and the lift slowly rose above the lobby floor.

Petra's heartbeat quickened, the steady hum of machinery whirring beneath her feet, vibrating through her bones. She could not help but smile, the gears spinning in perfect, deliberate harmony—­a sound fashioned by the hands of a skilled engineer.
This
was why she wanted to be a part of the Guild, why she tried so hard to prove herself; she wanted to build things that
sang
, machines so expertly designed that they never faltered, so innovative that she changed the very motions of the world.

She wanted to build the future.

The last chink of light from the lobby disappeared, and the gearbox above their heads shifted again, spinning into a violent whir.

“You might want to hold on.”

Petra grabbed the lift railing and Emmerich followed suit.

The lift shot upward.

Her weight sank to the floor, gravity welling at her ankles as the lift rocketed past floor after floor, ascending at a speed she could never have imagined. Before she could stop herself, she was laughing. Emmerich smiled at her, his copper eyes flickering in the fleeting light of each floor they passed.

As she grew accustomed to the strange gravity of the lift, she carefully edged toward him, and the rocking floor threw her into the railing.

“This is fantastic!” she yelled.

He smiled down at her. “Hold on.” His voice was nearly lost in the racket of the rattling lift.

Petra gripped the railing again. She didn't hear the gearbox shift—­the sudden change to a slower speed caught her by surprise. Her momentum carried her upward a few inches, and for a brief moment she felt completely weightless. She eased back to the floor as the lift clattered up more slowly.

Emmerich stepped away from the rail and pressed the knob back into the panel, and a moment later, pale moonlight flooded the lift. A series of clicks and gear stalls brought them to a halt, and when he retrieved his key from the podium, the curved glass door swiveled open. Then he led Petra into the empty observatory.

“You can see the entire city from here,” he said, guiding her to the edge of the deck.

From the observatory, the city was a collection of pipes, steam, and smoke. She could see the port outside the city walls, ships drifting silently in the harbor, and the vast, dark ocean spreading outward from the island. If it were day, she knew she might have seen the coast of southern Wales just miles away. Instead, the night plunged everything in darkness, save the gas lamps flickering along the streets below.

Emmerich seated himself on a stool attached to one of the enormous observatory telescopes. “Take a look at this,” he said, aiming the instrument up toward the sickle-­shaped moon.

As Petra neared the telescope, he withdrew from the eyepiece and stepped down to help her onto the stool. His firm grip held her steady as she climbed the narrow footholds, letting go the moment she settled into the chair. The small of her back tingled from the absence of his warm hand, but she kept a straight face, dismissing the familiar touch as nothing more than concern for her safety, to keep her from tripping over her skirts and slipping from the pedestal. She cleared her throat and leaned forward to peer through the scope, pressing her eye into the eyepiece.

The moon filled her sight, a brilliant, white crescent suspended in the sky. She gasped, able to see distinct shapes on its silvery surface, cosmic pockmarks—­the gentle curves of the larger craters, the fierce starbursts of tiny asteroidal impacts—­visible even in the darkness of the shadowed side of the moon. “It's beautiful,” she whispered.

“Isn't it?”

She abandoned the telescope and eyed the tiny moon high above, seeming as far out of reach as her dream of ever becoming a Guild engineer. She released her breath with a heavy sigh.

“Is something wrong?” asked Emmerich.

“All I ever wanted was to be a part of the Guild, to be an engineer the world remembered.” She stared out the curved glass of the observatory, the whole of the city laid out below her. “And then you came along. You offered me everything—­and yet I feel I'd be a fool to accept.”

Emmerich maintained the silence for a moment, both of them caught in the stillness of the night. Finally, he spoke. “I meant what I said. If you no longer wish to help me, I understand. It wasn't fair of me to promise you things that I could not give, and I am sorry for that.”

Petra said nothing, weighing the events of the night in her mind. One truth spoke louder than the rest, pulsing through her with every beat of her heart:
this
was where she belonged—­here, in the University. She knew it to the very core of her being. It was the only place in the world she truly felt at home, among all the brass and electric light, the smell of grease and gasoline, the sounds of whirring gears and spinning belts and rocking levers singing the song of every engineer that had come before.

This was her future, her legacy.

All she had to do was prove herself.

“You offered me time to reconsider,” she said, her eyes on the distant moon. Her heartbeat quickened. “Well, I've made my decision.” She inhaled a deep breath, her skin prickling with goose bumps as her hands trembled in her lap. “I'll do it.”

“You will?” Emmerich stared at her, lips parted. “I thought—­”

“I can have a preliminary design for the new power system finished for you within a week, if that is acceptable.”

His face brightened and he smiled crookedly. “You'll help me?”

She couldn't help but smile in return. “I said I would, didn't I?”

 

Chapter 4

T
HE BELL OVER
the front door of the pawnshop tinkled, and a customer came in, carrying what looked like a busted mantel clock. He shuffled across the store and placed the clock on the counter.

“What happened here?” asked Mr. Stricket.

“Missus knocked it down cleaning. Can you fix it?”

Mr. Stricket flipped the magnifying glass over his spectacles and lifted his screwdriver pouch from his breast pocket. “Petra, my dear, could you come here for a moment?” He carefully removed the movement—­the hefty block of metal that housed all the gears, pinions, and springs—­and handed it to her. “Take a look and see what needs replacing.”

Petra took the instrument into the workroom and dismantled the main components, assessing the damage. The air brake had come loose, and the pawl that held the mainspring tight had snapped cleanly in two. Otherwise, the clock was relatively fine. She fit everything back together, tightening the brake and replacing the pawl with a spare one, before returning the piece back to the front counter.

“It should be working now,” she said, handing the movement back to Mr. Stricket. “None of the gears were bent, nor the pinions that I could tell. I went ahead and reconnected the air brake and replaced the main pawl. I didn't check the mainspring, but the barrel looks undamaged, so other than expected wear, the clock should be in working order.”

“Let's have a look, then, shall we?” Mr. Stricket retrieved a handful of winding keys from the top drawer of his desk, picking though each one before finally settling on a tarnished silver key with a half-­circle insert. He fit the key to the movement and wound the mainspring; it began ticking immediately. “Well, there you are,” he said to the customer with a smile. “Fully repaired.”

“How much?”

Mr. Stricket punched a few numbers through the calculating machine. “For the cost of the parts, evaluation, and repair . . .” The machine printed a stub of sums. “That'll be six shillings.”

The man fished the money out of his pocket and handed it over, taking the mantel clock into his arms. “Thanks, Mr. Stricket.”

“Any time.”

Once the customer had gone, Mr. Stricket grabbed a stack of letters sitting at the edge of the counter and thumbed through the envelopes. “I have to run to the post to mail off these parts orders. Think you can handle the shop for half an hour?”

“Of course,” said Petra.

After he left the pawnshop, Petra returned to her tiny work space in the storage room. She removed a document box from the shelf next to the door and retrieved her automaton designs. Sitting on the floor, she propped herself against the wall and examined her schematics. She had drawn little in the last three days, only a rough sketch of the automaton's central mechanism and an outline of the arm cam.

When Emmerich had recruited her, she imagined she would have no problem crafting the perfect automaton, one that would impress him—­and the Guild. But now, instead, she stared at half-­imagined designs, wondering where to begin. She knew what parts the ticker required, what functions it needed to be able to perform, and the basic layout, yet, every time she sat down to work, she blanked. And she couldn't afford to delay much longer. Emmerich was expecting the designs by the end of the week.

Petra stared down at the collection of pages again and shuffled the arm cam and central mechanism to the back of the stack. Deciding to start from the bottom up, she drew the pencil across the paper, sketching the legs. In order to keep the leg mechanisms contained within the plating, the tension cables she planned to use would need to be fixed to guides along the frame, but then there was the matter of maintaining constant tension.

She tapped the edge of her pencil against the pad of paper. Weights would be useless if the automaton was in any position other than upright. They could employ pistonlike sliders within the thigh cavity—­the motion would sufficiently drive the cables—­but once the legs were bent, the cables would leave too much slack. A complex pulley system attached to the slider might hold the tension, but the power needed to move the sliders quickly
and
maintain tension would take a lot of energy, and a complex guidance system. The loss of power between the mainspring, gear trains, cam, and sliders needed to be as minimal as possible.
And
she had to make sure the sliders could withstand the pressure of all four cam patterns, keeping in mind that the cable tension would need to undergo constant adjustment as the machine switched between each specific action, and—­

Petra dropped the pages into her lap. To build everything properly, the automaton would have to be at least six feet tall and half as broad, if not larger—­which would, of course, require even more power. The barrel for each mainspring would need to be the size of a small cask to run the contraption. She had never worked on anything larger than a grandfather clock, and nothing nearly as complicated. If she and Emmerich managed it, what a beauty it would be! A ticker that complex and powerful would revolutionize engineering. ­People from all over the world would come to see it, to learn how it worked.

The doorbell clanged again, and Petra jumped, the automaton design falling from her lap and skittering across the floor.

“Just a moment!”

She gathered the automaton designs and shoved them back into the document box, haphazardly setting it on a stool before dashing out of the storage room. A man stood in the center of the shop.

“I'm afraid Mr. Stricket's gone out,” she said, smoothing her skirts. “But you're welcome to wait until he gets back. He shouldn't be long.”

The man moved silently to the back of the shop and fixed Petra with a curious stare. “I'm looking for someone to fix me watch,” he said, laying a pocket watch on the counter. “Think you can look it over?” He propped his elbow up and leaned in, the reek of mothballs on his worn jacket and a noticeable shadow of stubble on his chin.

A bit unnerved by the way the customer seemed to be studying her, Petra picked up the watch and turned it over in her hand. It was an old watch. The silver plating was tarnished, and the metal beneath had already begun to rust. She wound the winding stem but nothing happened. The hands stood still. “When was the last time the watch was brought in for maintenance?”

“Don't know. Can you fix it?”

“Mr. Stricket can have a look at it when he returns. I'm sure he'll be back shortly.”

“How long you been working for this Stricket fellow?” the man asked, leaning against the counter. “Know much about clocks, do you?”

Petra narrowed her eyes. “I suppose . . .” she said slowly.

The back door to the alley opened and shut with a bang, and before Petra could blink, the man grabbed the watch, crossed the shop, and stepped through the front door without so much as a sound.

“Odd.” She shook her head and turned toward the storage room, running squarely into Tolly's chest.

“What's odd?” he asked, holding her steady.

“Hello, Tolly.” Why he always used the back entrance, she never understood. She quickly brushed him away. “Weird customer is all.”

“Oh yeah? Where's Mr. Stricket?”

“At the post.”

He hopped onto the counter and patted the spot beside him. “Then take a break. You've been slaving away all day.”

Petra glanced at the box sitting precariously atop the stool in the storage room. She couldn't afford not to work on the automaton designs. “That's all right,” she said. “I have some things I need to do, so—­”

“I haven't seen much of you in the last few days.”

She shrugged. “I've been busy.”

“With what? What's so important that you can't spare a bit of time for me?”

Petra scowled at him. He would only laugh at her if she told him about the automaton designs—­not that she could. “It's nothing that would interest
you
.”

“Well it isn't going to keep you busy on Saturday, is it?”

That was her next meeting with Emmerich. “Yes, as a matter of fact. It will.”

“All day?”

“Well, no, but—­”

“Excellent.” He reached into his coat pocket. “I wanted to give you this a few days ago, but you were being a bit snappish, so I decided to wait.” He withdrew a folded handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “Open it up.”

Frowning at Tolly, Petra carefully unfolded the cloth. Two small spools of silk ribbon sat in the handkerchief, one a pearlescent white and the other a dark rich blue.

“I thought they might look nice when you braid your hair,” he said.

“They're lovely, Tolly.”

“You can wear them Saturday, to the theater,” he said grinning.

“The theater?”

“A libretto opens this weekend in the second quadrant, at that fancy French place you're always on about, the mechanical one. I thought you might like to go, you know—­the two of us.”

“Oh.”

“Well?”

She couldn't miss her meeting with Emmerich, but she couldn't tell Tolly what she was up to either. “What time?”

“Three o'clock, according to the tickets I already bought.”

Petra frowned. He was trying to bully her into going, just like he always did when he wanted something. But a three o'clock showing left no time in the evening to work on the automaton design with Emmerich. “I can't.”

“Oh come on, Pet. It'll be fun.”

“I said I can't, Tolly. I'm sorry.”

His smile vanished. “Can't—­or won't?”

She sighed. “It's not like that.”

“Don't think I haven't noticed—­you've been avoiding me. You haven't played cards with us in months. Every time I ask you to go somewhere, you decline, and when I try to talk to you, you ignore me or tell me to bugger off.”

“I told you,” she said, “I've been busy.”

“With
what
?”

She bit her lip.

“It's something to do with that stupid University, isn't it?” His eyes burned with anger. “Ever since you got it in your head to attend that infernal school, you've changed. You're different now.”

“When have I ever wanted anything else?”

“It was just a dream, Petra—­a stupid childhood fantasy. You know you can never be an engineer for the Guild. Why do you keep trying?”

“Because someday I'll design tickers that will change the world. You'll see.”

“Do you honestly believe that? Listen to yourself,” he scoffed. “It's time you understand something about the world: no man wants to marry a woman with grease under her nails—­or bed her, for that matter. Women are good for two things only, and messing about with machines isn't one of them. The sooner you figure that out, the better off you'll be.” He wheeled around and stormed through the storage room, knocking Petra's automaton designs down from the stool. As the papers scattered across the floor, he paused and nudged one aside with his foot, tilting his head to examine the mechanical sketches. He snatched up the leg design and glanced back at her. “You're not a little girl anymore, Pet,” he said, ripping the paper into fourths. “It's time you grew up and accepted your place in this world—­starting now.” He thrust the scraps toward her, and they fluttered to the floor.

Petra's heart burned in her chest, her hands clenched tightly at her sides. The rush of blood in her ears drowned all sound as her eyes darted across the room, looking for the nearest thing to throw. Nothing was heavy or large enough. Tolly grabbed the door handle, and her shoulders tensed, every muscle in her body bristling. She felt the weight of her pocket watch hanging from her belt, and without thinking, she detached it from its chain and hurled it at Tolly's head.

The door slammed behind him, and her pocket watch shattered against it.

M
R.
S
TRICKET
FOUND
Petra slumped against the back door, the pieces of her broken pocket watch clutched in her trembling hands. He knelt in front of her, his feeble fingers delicately brushing the matted hair from her eyes. “Petra, whatever is the matter?”

She looked up, still seething over her argument with Tolly. In the calmest tone she could manage, she told Mr. Stricket she was fine, but anger rattled her voice. She squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a deep breath, but when she exhaled, she felt no better. Tolly was still an intolerable ass.

“What's this here?” asked Mr. Stricket, prying Petra's fingers away from the pocket watch.

Petra couldn't muster the words to respond.

Mr. Stricket took the broken watch into his spindly hands. “Let's see what the damage is.” He carried the pieces into the back room and spread them out on the worktable. After a few minutes he called for Petra.

She climbed to her feet and entered the workroom, thankful for something to take her mind off Tolly.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, gesturing to the broken watch.

She shrugged. “I've always had it.” The watch had been on her person when Matron Wade took her in all those years ago, along with a screwdriver and a half-­eaten slice of crumb cake, the legacy of whatever life she'd left behind.

“The craftsmanship is the most artistic, complex clockwork engineering I have seen in all my years,” Mr. Stricket said. “Whoever made this watch was a master clockwork engineer. The gear makeup is phenomenal, and two mainsprings . . . I'd have never thought of it.”

Petra blinked. “
Two
mainsprings?”

Mr. Stricket drew her in. “See here, the double barrel? One mainspring drives the gears, but it also winds the second mainspring as it uncoils, diverting a small amount of power to a secondary system, all without jeopardizing the integrity of the timepiece. Once the first mainspring has expended its energy, the gears shift, using the second mainspring to power the watch, in the meantime tightening the first mainspring again.”