Ticker (13 page)

Nic squinted at me. “One of Industria’s founding scientists Malachi Baynard?”

“No, random passerby Malachi Baynard. Yes, dummy, him.”

“He was the one obsessed with the occult. He thought that life and death were merely multiple planes of the same existence.” A suspicious note crept into Nic’s voice. “Why?”

That left me to explain about Mama’s work with Marcus and the Grand Design. By the end of it, Nic had taken off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief at least twice.

“Malachi was brilliant but had enough near-death engineering experiences to turn every hair on his head white,” he said. “He was actually pronounced dead twice and resuscitated. He designed and built that machine to try to communicate with the Great Beyond.”

“A place he actually thought he’d been,” I said. “What did he say it was like? Stars and comets and fluffy white clouds?”

“That was the really odd part,” Nic admitted. “All he wrote about it in a journal entry was that it was like ‘going home.’ ” When I opened my mouth to ask another question, he shook his hand at me. “Seriously, Penny, that’s all I remember.”

“Allow me to change the subject then.” I jerked my thumb at the bunk where Violet was a lump under the coverlet. “Don’t you think you should apologize?”

Nic flushed up to the tips of his ears, pulled away from me, and sent a furtive glance in Violet’s direction. “It takes two to argue,” he said, “and I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of that particular book.”

I thought about all the times this past year that he’d spoken his mind or expressed his concern for me. Now was the time to return the favor. “You can’t try to control the people you care about, not even to keep them safe. You’ll only push her away.”

“Like I’ve pushed you.” Worry filled his eyes, and the barely healed scratches on his face looked somehow worse by firelight: darker, deeper, with the promise of blood and bone beneath them. “How are you feeling?”

I left the toast upon my fork to scorch as I contemplated the pattern on the rug, pretending to find it very interesting. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

“Don’t play that game with me, Penny,” he cautioned. “Your Ticker stopped today and you nearly died.
Again.
”

“I’m still here,” I said, trying to reassure both of us. “Still breathing. That’s enough for now, isn’t it?”

“It’s not, no.” Though his voice was low, urgency roughened up the words. “You know what needs to be done, don’t you?”

Pulling the charred bit of bread off the fork, I flung it to the flames and reached for another slice. “I won’t lie abed like some invalid.”

“That’s what our parents would have you do,” Nic said with impatience. “You need to see Warwick.”

The very idea was preposterous. “The man is a criminal. A murderer.”

My twin bent closer in his eagerness to explain. “He’s also the only one who can save you. Papa and I have worked with the surgeons since his arrest, trying to perfect the new implant, but they’re no match for him. And he wants to help.”

“How could you possibly know that?” The words came very slowly, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

The silence spun out between us like cooked sugar from Violet’s fairy-floss machine and then broke. “Because he told me when I went to see him.”

“By all the Bells, Nic, have you lost your mind?” I abandoned the toast completely, dropping the fork on the hearth. Disturbed by the clatter, Violet and Sebastian shifted and resettled, so I lowered my voice. “You went to the prison? When?”

“Months ago.” It seemed Nic didn’t have a look to spare for me now, and perhaps that was just as well. “That weekend you thought I went with Sebastian to Carteblanche.”

“Mama and Papa—”

“Didn’t know. Not until afterward.” My brother scowled with the memory of it. “In this matter, our parents are acting the fools.”

“You really think so? You think them fools to be wary of a man who kidnapped people and experimented on them?” The muscles in my chest tightened like strings on a violin. I’d seen the pictures in the papers, faces that would haunt me for a lifetime. “The last girl, Nic . . . the last victim was only ten years old. What excuse could he give for that?”

“He did it for you, Penny.” Nic kept his voice calm, but an echo of Warwick’s mad passion bled through. “All he ever wanted to do was help you. He told me he just needs the original diagrams and a bit of time to finish your new Ticker.”

Despite sitting so close to the fire, I felt the cold creeping up my legs and arms. A spreading frost reached for my clockwork
heart with icy fingers. “Did you know any of this was going to happen? The jailbreak? The kidnapping?”

“No!” Nic’s jaw clenched. “He never said a word to me, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. Or sorry he escaped.”

“Nic, people
died
in that explosion!”

Now his hands were balled up into fists. “You died in my arms!”

“This morning was just a fainting spell!”

“You know damn well that’s not what I meant!”

Yes, I knew what he meant. The memory of that particular day was stitched into the scars on my chest, relived with each faint ticktock inside me. We’d been picnicking at Sebastian’s country estate. Carteblanche rested its elbows on thousands of acres of rolling lawns, ancient oak trees, and streams. The house itself was the epitome of a country manor: vaguely drafty, enormous, echoing. Thick plaster coated the walls, and the gauze hangings obscured wooden shutters. Nic and I spent a considerable number of our leisure and holiday hours there, perhaps because adult supervision was such a rarity.

On that day, though, my parents had accompanied us. It had been a scant month since Dimitria had died, and we were all clad in a cloud of mourning black. The shadows under Mama’s eyes were the purple-blue of a bruise, and her reddened nose suggested nights of weeping. Papa wore the bleary look of an owl coaxed into the daylight, blinking in surprise at the glowing orb of the sun hanging in a brilliant blue sky. I half expected him to hoot and hurry back to the car; instead he retreated into a bottle of Gentian Amaros.

Warwick had been persuaded to come along with us. He looked ragged about the edges, unkempt and uncared for, as if he’d been sleeping in his suit because it was the last thing Dimitria had touched. Perhaps it was, but I was too afraid to ask. Afraid that if I
offered him any words, any comfort, the dam I’d used to shore up my own tears would break.

Hoping to escape the others and my own feelings of guilt, I had gone out into the fields with Sebastian, Violet, and Nic. After reveling in a few moments of freedom and the sun’s warmth on my upturned face, I consulted my pocket copy of
Felix Bertram’s Field Guide to Lepidoptera Mechanika, Second Edition
. At the ready was a new net of my own devising, one capable of stunning a captured Butterfly with a small electrical discharge.

“The elusive Brimstone shall be mine, by any means fair or foul,” I called to the others, though I would have traded a hundred of the rare and coveted
Gonepteryx rhamni
—nay, my whole collection of Butterflies—just to have my older sister back.

“I don’t think you ought to be chasing about after mechanical insects,” Mama said, fretting when we returned to the blankets, nets empty, for glasses of lemonade and sandwiches.

Over the previous four weeks, her manner of parenting had shifted from devoted to smothering. When she wasn’t reading tarot cards or dragging me to a séance, she monitored my pulse, my color, every breath drawn, and every mouthful eaten. Nothing was ever good enough to set her mind at ease; her fears were like the lions prowling behind the bars at the Square Park Zoo. She even went so far as to withdraw me from school and had forbidden me from riding cycles and horses both.

Mama’s forehead puckered like the row of pinch pleats in her bustle skirt. “Isn’t her color a bit high, Emery?”

Papa was already snoring, having consumed his bottle, so it was Nic who answered.

“She was walking in the sun for an hour, Mama. Note the freckles on her nose, a sure sign of good health.” With the eye she couldn’t see, my twin winked at me before clapping Warwick on
the shoulder. “How much longer are you going to fiddle with that thing?”

Startled, the surgeon peered up from the clockwork innards of the original Ticker prototype. “It’s almost done. Not as refined as I would like, though, and the pumping mechanism sticks every so often. The next one will be more sophisticated. Then . . .”

He paused, inevitably thinking of the surgery I’d need to keep me alive.

I didn’t want to reflect on it any more than he did. “I’m going for another walk. Would anyone else care to join me?”

Ever willing to play the knight in shining armor to a needful lord or lady, Sebastian volunteered. “I have a new project in development I’d like you to take a look at.”

Before Mama could protest, I had found my feet. With Violet and Nic trailing behind, Sebastian led us to the Carteblanche stables. Inside, the scents of warm metal, saddle soap, and hay tickled my nostrils. Mellow sunshine slanted in through the chinks in the wooden slats and bounced off the gleaming surfaces of a prototype ThoroughBred. Seventeen hands of slender, copper-plated equine rose above us. Its forelock, withers, and hooves already showed signs of blue-green oxidation, but the patina only added to her charm.

“I give you Her Royal Highness, the Princess Andromeda!” Sebastian said with a grand flourish.

“Better to have named her Bucket of Bolts and a Prayer,” Nic said, “because that’s what you’ll need for her to complete one jump, much less an entire course.”

“Never mind him,” I said to the metallic mount, reaching for a bridle and reins. “You’re gorgeous.”

“She’s hot-blooded,” Sebastian said with barely suppressed pride. “I modeled her after the Bhaskarian racers.”

The winding key had stuck at first, but he forced it around. Andromeda’s shuttered eyes slid open, the amber fire in their depths growing brighter as her inner gears picked up speed.
Whiiiiir-clang! Whiiiiir-clang!
She lifted one dainty foot, then the other, following him out of the barn.

Nic’s professional curiosity soon got the better of him. “I suppose the jumps knock her balance wheels loose?”

“The mechanics spend more time realigning her innards than they do riding her,” Sebastian admitted with a laugh.

I had no idea what came over me in that moment. Perhaps it was the desire to call my fate my own. The need to take control of my life. Or it could have been the thought of Dimitria dropping dead without warning and the knowledge that the very same thing could happen to me at any time.

“There’s no better diagnostic than putting her through her paces,” I announced, abruptly grasping Andromeda’s reins.

“By all the Cogs of the Carillon,” Nic said the moment he regained his wits and his tongue, “you’re going to kill yourself! And then Mama is going to kill
me
!”

Though I’d always cherished my twin’s good opinion of me, I was beyond tired of being bossed about. “You can weep for me when I’m gone and not a moment sooner!”

The words cut deep; I saw it on Nic’s face.

Conscience already pricking me, I gathered my skirts in my fist. “Give me a hand, Sebastian.”

He looked from his pristine gray gloves to my muddied boots, then, with a long-suffering sigh, helped me to clamber up. “The things I endure for you, my dear Penelope.”

“Your devotion is noted along with your sacrifice.” I stroked Andromeda’s glowing copper coat. Then, squeezing with my knees and holding on for dear life, I shouted, “Tally-ho!”

She had leapt forward, racing down the road. My perch was precarious, but the pace was exhilarating. I lost my hat, shedding hairpins until my curls tangled over my shoulders in wild streamers. It might have been a few weeks since I last rode, but I hadn’t forgotten the way of it. The mechanical steed was a bit tricky to master, with an occasionally hitching gait that necessitated adjustments of balance and posture.

Determined to take at least one jump, I had aimed her for a low stone wall. Behind me, I heard a faint cry from Nic.

“Penny, take care!”

“I’m trying, but there’s only so much care I can manage right now!” I braced myself for the jump.

It had felt like we were airborne forever. The forest blurred into shifting draperies of moss-green velvet. The sun crystallized like a drop of honey on a plate of robin’s-egg blue. Then we landed, and several things happened simultaneously:

I held my breath.

Andromeda’s innards made a terrible noise.

My heart seized up.

With a gasp and a cry, I had let go of the reins and clutched at my chest. My nails scrabbled ineffectually against the black mourning dress, but even if I’d been able to tear the cloth aside, there was nothing I could do to turn back the tide of pain. The world cartwheeled around me as I slid off Andromeda and landed in the mud. Unable to breathe, unable to think, I stared up at the sky as it darkened to midnight taffeta shot through with brilliant silver shooting stars.

Death wears a ball gown
.

Nic had reached me first. He scooped me up and carried me back to the house at a flat run, calling for help, for our parents, and, in between gasps, he begged me not to die. My head bounced off
his chest with every hasty step, but I hadn’t the breath to protest. It hurt. It hurt, but I clung to the pain with tenacious fingers, welcoming it. As long as I could feel anything at all, I was still alive.

But not for long, I feared.

I heard Violet sobbing, my mother screaming my name, Warwick’s shout of “Get her into the house!”

Then we had entered the kitchen; all cold white tile and shining metal surfaces, it served as an excellent stand-in for a hospital. Nic set me down on the table near the fire, and Warwick turned up his sleeves.

“Compress her chest with your hands,” he ordered my brother. “Keep her blood moving.”

Someone must have fetched his medicine bag from the car. The next thing I knew, gentle hands clamped a cotton rag reeking of ether over my nose and mouth. I tried to pull it away as everything began to fade. Nic leaned over me, and his hazel eyes looked into mine.