Shadow of the War Machine (The Secret Order) (33 page)

I took a step closer to her, and she shifted her weight back.

She raised her head. “Judge me if you like.” She lifted a revolver. “It won’t save you.”

She aimed for my heart.

At that moment the trunk of the elephant came crashing down only inches from Boucher. The gun went off, and the ball pinged against the metal trunk. Boucher leapt back in shock, directly into the path of the death ray.

She screamed as her dress caught fire, the flames licking up her body. She tried to stumble out of the circle of death, but the elephant trunk had trapped her.

I fell backward against the rail, curling against it as if it could protect me from the death all around me. The metal grew warm as I wrapped my head in my arms in spite of the pain in my wrist.

Balling up on instinct, I pressed harder into the security of the metal behind me. Closing my eyes tight, I tried to block out the sound of her wail. And at every moment I anticipated an attack, but I was frozen in horror, too terrified to move.

The silence that followed was worse than the screams as the air filled with the most awful-smelling smoke, tinged with the scent of burned hair and flesh.

When I opened my eyes, all that remained of Boucher
was a charred skeleton with a necklace hanging on the grisly neck bones. In the center of the black stone, Haddock’s mark glowed fiery red.

I let out a gasp, then huffed through my nose and clenched my teeth tight. I cradled my wounded wrist as I stumbled toward the controls and released the valves to the boiler. Steam rushed out of the dying juggernaut, and at last the lingering glow of the death ray faded, leaving smoke and ash rising from the top of the terrible machine.

It’s over.

Whatever fear and desperation had kept me alive through the battle, it had suddenly abandoned me, leaving me weak and shaking, my entire body racked with pain.

I cradled my injured wrist to my chest, wrapping up the chain in my other hand.

Feeling lost, I looked around. From behind the rail I only had a clear view of the pillars throughout the chamber and the smoky ceiling. With the smoke and flickering fires, I felt as if I had entered a cathedral of hell.

I didn’t know what had happened to Will. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. David, Oliver, Peter . . . Michael.

I let out another heavy breath and felt the stinging in my nose.

“Meg?” Papa crawled over the debris of the ruined elephant and the smashed blades of the juggernaut. “Meg, my darling girl.”

Blood streamed down the side of his head from a nasty cut on his bare scalp. He limped as he approached, but then he wrapped me in the strongest embrace I had ever felt.

I felt the shaking in his chest, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The tears began to flow. I let his arms surround me. He kissed the top of my head the way he had when I was a small child. “You did it. You saved us.”

Holding my emotions back was too difficult to bear. I was exhausted, injured, and still terrified. But now I had him again. I felt as if I had stepped into the warmth of home after a long and cold winter alone and in the dark. He was here with me. I had someone to share in my triumphs and to comfort my sorrows. I had a family again. “I love you, Papa.”

“I love you, too.” He stroked my hair, and for a moment I felt safe and whole again.

But I couldn’t savor the victory. I struggled to my feet. “We have to help the others.” My stomach still ached with worry for Will. I had to find him.

“Will?” I called as I descended the rungs on the outside of the juggernaut. I couldn’t grip or hold anything with my
hand, so I tucked it close to my chest and climbed down as best I could one-handed. “Will? Where are you?”

I jumped down from the wreck and took in the carnage as I stepped around pieces of metal and broken Amusements. As I ran around the back of the machine near where I’d felt him drop, I noticed a boot lying, motionless, beneath the wheel.

“
WILL
!”
I RAN TO HIM,
the whole while praying a thousand times in a matter of seconds that the Lord had spared him. At least he was here. My uncle was the one who had caught on fire. It was little comfort as I reached him.

Blood poured over his face from a gash on his cheek, and he lay without moving.

I stopped breathing and brought my hand to my face. The tears fell of their own accord, stinging against my burned skin. “Will?” It came out as a plea.

He didn’t move.

I heard footsteps behind me. “Please,” I begged. “Don’t be gone.”

Stepping forward, I knelt at his side. I reached out to brush his hair away from his softly closed eyes.

“Please don’t leave me,” I whispered.

I laid my head on his chest, because I could do nothing else. I desperately wished I could hear the beat of his heart, but I couldn’t hear anything past the rushing in my ears. Holding his body to mine, I cried against him. What would I do if his arms never surrounded me again? It would be my fault. I’d drawn him into this. He’d done it for me.

“I love you,” I whispered. And I did, truly. I had only once ever felt a pain as great as this, on the night my parents had died.

I felt a soft touch at the back of my head. Pulling myself up, I looked hopefully at Will’s face.

His eyes blinked open.

“That’s good.” He coughed. “Because I wouldn’t do this for just anyone. I love you, too.”

My tears fell freely as I gathered his hand and pressed it to my face. I trembled with overwhelming emotion—love, grief, elation, and shock. “We did it, Will. We did it.”

“I knew we would.” He grinned, like the first warm light of sun after a dark winter.

I smiled back and sighed. “Then you are more clever than I.”

“Was that ever in doubt?” He shifted, pulling himself up so he could sit. His motion tugged on the chain at my wrist, and I cried out.

“You’re hurt.” His entire tone changed as he lifted my wounded wrist.

Papa crouched next to me and helped him up. “Can you move, son?”

“I think my leg is broken.” Will used his hands to support his knee, and grimaced. Then he wrapped an arm around his waist. “And a rib as well.”

Papa glanced up. “That was quite a fall.”

Will gazed at me, and I had no doubt of the depth of his love, but there was something else too. “I would have died if you hadn’t thrown the chain. I was able to swing free of the vents before I fell.”

Another moment, and he would have fallen into the fire. The fraction of time between life and death had been so slim. If I had tried to stop Boucher instead of reaching for him, he would have died.

Papa got to his feet and wandered off, searching for material for a splint. I stayed at Will’s side.

He touched my wrist, and I flinched. “You injured it when I fell, didn’t you?”

“Don’t. If a broken wrist means you’re alive, I’ll gladly break my other one.” I leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss. He reached up and caught the back of my head. I didn’t resist as he pulled me back to him. His lips teased mine, lingering playfully as if all the pain racking both of us didn’t matter in the face of that simple pleasure. I succumbed to it, and the kiss turned passionate. I could no longer tell what was him and what was me. It didn’t matter. A million feelings and sensations flowed through me, and for a moment it felt as if I had died, only a little.

He broke the kiss reluctantly, keeping our faces close.

I allowed the warmth of his touch to comfort me even as I felt my exhaustion and pain in every bone in my body. Will brushed a bit of hair from my forehead. “The shadow is gone.”

I kissed him again before weaving my fingers with his. “I thought when Boucher took us from Paris, I’d never see you again. How did you know they had taken me to London?”

Will smiled sheepishly. “I figured that if Haddock’s daughter needed you to unlock the machine, she’d have to take you to it. The most likely place for it to be was England, not France. So Gustave and I came here to search the archives to see where the machine might have been hidden. We were
still looking when a girl came in claiming that you and your grandfather were here and alive. We gathered as many people as would come.”

Will was always resourceful, and I’d never take it for granted. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for not giving up on me.”

“Never.” He leaned forward to kiss me again, but Papa had returned.

Papa cleared his throat. “I found some bars we can use as a splint, and I retrieved the key for the manacle.” He took my wrist gingerly and unlocked the shackle.

I tucked my wrist against my stomach, then got to my feet as Papa knelt next to Will and placed the rods next to his leg. Will shrugged off his shirt and ripped strips of cloth.

I felt suddenly warm as I looked at him half-undressed. “I’ll go see to the others.” I could feel the heat stealing into my cheeks as I turned away. Papa and Will were safe, but there were so many more friends I cared about.

I swallowed a lump in my throat as I climbed out from behind the juggernaut.

War had been incomprehensible to me—the wanton destruction, the death—until that very moment.

What had once been glorious machines born of the creative
intellect of the finest minds in the world lay crumpled and broken in heaps around the cavernous chamber. Glorious beasts and magical creatures had become nothing more than dented and twisted plates covering broken gear trains and shattered axles.

Tendrils of smoke rose to join the clouds of steam swirling on the ceiling. It made the chamber smell like ash and death.

Men crawled like ants over the rubble. The whole of the Order, the Foundry, and the Guild streamed in through the archway that led to the tunnel.

I couldn’t swallow. My throat felt tight, and tears gathered in my eyes. My gaze swept over the scene. Groups of men were dragging the injured out of the rubble.

My head felt in a fog as everything that had happened washed back through me. My heart raced, and I felt a stabbing pain behind my eyes when I looked up at the fallen elephant lying on its side. The twisted and broken blades of the juggernaut had sliced through its armor and cut through to the gears.

My mind flashed back to the cannon fire blasting into the heart of the bear Michael had commandeered.

Holding my wrist to my ribs, I ran around the elephant
and circled the juggernaut, searching for Michael, Samuel, and David.

A million flashes of memory came rushing back, small moments that had meant the world to me. Michael had always looked so awkward with his long limbs and toothy smile, but he didn’t have a cruel bone in his body. We so often teased one another that he truly felt like a brother to me.

Poor Samuel. He had borne the resentment of his father his entire life, and while he may have reflected that resentment onto the world, David counted him as a loyal friend, and David wouldn’t have held such an opinion lightly.

David.

A part of me was sorry I didn’t love him the way he wished I would. If he were gone, I would feel the guilt of it for all time. I cared for him. I wanted all the best things for him. I wished I could be as close to him as I felt to his sister, Lucinda, and hold him as a brother of the heart.

I found the wrecked bear first and saw a shock of ginger hair as three of my instructors lifted a limp body out of the machine. My heart turned to a ball of thick lead, dropping heavily through my body as I struggled forward over debris and shattered bricks and mortar. His arms and legs were twisted, hanging lifelessly, like a lamb that had succumbed to the slaughter.

Dear Lord, no. “Michael?” I came up next to my instructors. They laid him down on the hard stone floor. I reached up and brushed his hair from his cold forehead. His once laughing eyes stared lifelessly at me. “Oh, Michael.”

Tears slipped over my cheeks. I gently closed his eyes and continued to stroke his hair. He had given me a world of playful grief, followed by laughter. He’d never been malicious in nature. He’d never been that sort. He’d been good.

My tear fell upon his cold cheek and slid over his pale skin. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Michael?” a man’s voice shouted in panic. “Michael, lad?”

I backed away as Michael’s father ran up with a howl that echoed through the stillness of the chamber. “Sweet Mary, tell me it’s not so,” he choked as he gathered his son in his arms and cradled him against his heart. Michael’s father fell forward in sobs over his son.

As I let the tears fall, I heard another voice behind me. A cluster of men had gathered to my right.

David, please no.

I ran and pushed through the crowd. David was kneeling over Samuel. The dark-haired boy’s lower body was crushed beneath the wreckage. “Damn it, Sam. Keep breathing. Don’t you dare fail me.”

A trail of blood came from Samuel’s lip as he lay on the ground. “I can’t feel my legs,” he whispered.

David let out a strangled noise as he stood and attempted to lift the wreckage off his friend. I came up beside him and pushed my shoulder into it, but I couldn’t grip anything with my injured wrist.

Josephine appeared and took my place. I dropped to Samuel’s side. A trio of Guildsmen helped them lift the rubble.

“Don’t worry, Sam. Things are going to be fine,” I assured. He gave me a hopeless laugh.

“You look terrible,” he whispered. “Really, you should do something with yourself.”

I let out a disbelieving cough. “It’s been a difficult day.”

David and Josephine lifted the last piece of wreckage, and Samuel grasped my injured hand, squeezing it tight. I wanted to cry out in pain but didn’t. His face was contorted with pain, and in that moment it was one thing we could share.

I glanced down at his crushed legs, and gasped. He would never walk again, if he could keep his legs at all. Oh, God.

David took my place. “Don’t worry. We’re going to get you well.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Samuel said. He didn’t bother trying to lift his head.

“Not so bad,” David lied. “You’ll be walking again soon. I promise.”

Josephine appeared with one of the fuel carts and two of the Guildsmen. “We have to find a surgeon, and quickly.” They loaded Samuel onto the cart. He screamed in pain, and I felt it like a shot to my heart. I staggered to my feet and watched as they pushed Sam away.