Ticker (2 page)

I didn’t dare put my hands on the glass because Violet abhorred fingerprints. Instead, I lolled upon my elbows and mustered a half-smile. “Do you need a step stool?”

“Certainly not.” She finally grasped the burnished wood handle and pulled it down. Unseen gears locked tooth-to-tooth, and hidden wheels whirled and spun until, with a hiss of steam and a trumpeted fanfare, a door opened in the wall. A SugarWerks Signature Ribbon-Striped Carry-Away Box slid down the gleaming gravity-roller conveyor belt and came to rest in front of us. Developed by Violet’s father, Gustaf, to prevent small children from spoiling their suppers, the SugarWerks Carry-Away Boxes could be set to open at a given hour, unless the contents included ice custard, in which case they should be opened immediately. Violet looped a strap around the box and buckled it down tight. “You need to get moving.”

“I also need to keep up my blood sugar.” Though I didn’t say so, needing to eat every few hours was no chore, not with my appetite and love of all things sweet. I tapped a gloved fingertip against one of the bell domes. “You wouldn’t send me off with a box of sticky buns and an empty stomach, would you? My mechanisms are winding down.”

“If you ate all of them in one go, you’d have dyspepsia.” Reaching into her pocket, Violet pulled out a SugarWerks token and handed it to me. “Pick your pleasure and take your choice.”

I flipped the token over my knuckles; as heavy as a real piece of money, it was good for use only in the Automatic Dessert Dispenser. My parents helped develop the vending machine for the Nesselrodes, and it remained the only one of its kind in the Industrian Empire. At any hour of the day, one could insert a token, open a door, and get a hot cherry turnover with the perfect scoop of frozen ice custard on top.

Mmm. Ice custard.

Pity I needed to pick something I could eat with one hand! Sending one last lingering, loving look at the cream puffs, I inserted my token, tugged at the knob, and withdrew an oft-picked favorite.

“The Figure Eight again?” Violet pulled out a piece of blue-and-white striped paper and set it on the counter.

“Don’t squeeze it in the middle,” I warned, passing her my selection. “I don’t want the chocolate filling to mix with the raspberry jam.”

“Take these and leave before I toss you outside without so much as a day-old pastry for your troubles!” After handing over the paper-wrapped treat and the Carry-Away Box, Violet used the considerable ruffles on her apron to shoo me out the front door.

Grinning at her over my shoulder, I affixed the Carry-Away Box to the platform behind the Vitesse’s slick wooden seat. Then, unable to resist a second longer, I took an enormous bite of the Figure Eight. An incoming message from Nic startled me, and I nearly choked on chocolate filling.

WE ARE GOING TO BE LATE - STOP - WHERE THE COGS ARE YOU - QUERY MARK

A short time ago, he would have been full of teases and dares, offering to race me across town, betting a month’s worth of
shoeblacking or a box of chocolate bars. With a sigh, I transferred my snack to my left hand so I could tap out a response with my right.

WILL BE THERE IN THREE MINUTES OR LESS - STOP - KEEP YOUR HAIR ON - STOP

Firing up the engine, I pulled down my goggles and kicked the Vitesse into gear. Reentering traffic, I almost ran over an elderly gentleman who perambulated somewhat haphazardly on one leg of flesh and the other a brass prosthesis that must have been made at our factory.

“Attention, please, you demitasse of feminine frippery!” he barked. “This isn’t the Eight Bells Steeplechase!”

“A thousand pardons!” I returned, struggling to rein in my mechanical steed.

I made quick work of the Figure Eight as I drove, but the streets clogged up as I approached the traffic circle known as the Heart of the Star. The roundabout connected the eight Etoile Roads, which radiated outward like the spokes on the Vitesse, and it was more congested than I’d ever before seen it.

“Take care there, sir!” I slapped my hand against the side of a cart before it could run me up a curb; negotiating the hub wasn’t for the weak of knees or the faint of heart! “Ahoy, Freddy!”

Frederick Carmichael wore the charcoal uniform and namesake iron bracelets that marked his employment in the Ferrum Viriae. The largest and longest standing of Industria’s privatized militaries recently won the coveted contracts for Police, Fire, and Emergency Rescue Squadrons. Frederick was the soldier who’d aided me after my last accident. That particular occurrence left me with a twisted ankle, an official citation, and an off-the-record,
blistering lecture about yielding to larger vehicles. Never let it be said that the Ferrum Viriae are not thorough.

Frederick bestowed one of his infrequent smiles upon me along with a white-gloved wave to proceed with caution. “You promised you’d slow down!” The silver glint of his whistle flashed as he lifted it to his mouth.

“Progress waits for no woman!” was my retort.

“All the same,” he said, jerking his chin at the sidewalk behind me. “Mind the crowd.”

Looking about, I finally realized the cause for the congestion: a sizable assembly of protestors. The Edoceon Movement sprang up almost immediately after my surgery, protesting the “unnatural” idea of Augmentation. Very few paid them any attention until formal accusations were brought against Calvin Warwick, but since the start of the trial, their numbers had quadrupled. The newspapers printed their well-researched and scathing letters to the editor with alarming regularity.

Today, the jostling figures held signs that read “Instruct, Inform, Apprise,” “Man Before Machine,” and “You Cannot Augment the Human Soul!” Restless, they shifted against the rough wooden barricades set in place to keep them off the road. They might have remained corralled, if they hadn’t seen me. Pity that I’m not the sort of girl who fades into the wallpaper.

“The Farthing girl! She’s over there!”

Heads pivoted in my direction. Then it was as though someone had uncorked a bottle of effervescent hatred and directed the resulting spray at me.

“That’s her!”

“The first abomination!”

“Freak!”

“How do you sleep at night?”

The verbal abuse they hurled had less effect on me than the actual bottle someone threw. Glass shattered under the front wheel of the Vitesse, forcing me to swerve. Perhaps in response to all the excitement, my Ticker paused in its good work. My head began to spin, carousel dizzy. I couldn’t focus my eyes. Everything slowed down, like I’d abruptly driven through sticky toffee pudding.

“Miss Farthing?” I heard Frederick Carmichael call out behind me, followed by a more frantic, “Penny!”

But I had no words with which to answer him, and everything seemed to happen at once: the crowd broke through the barricade, stampeding toward me with murder in their eyes; Frederick dove into the melee, whistle blaring; I fell off the Vitesse and landed with a thump on the cobblestones.

“I’ve called for backup,” Frederick shouted as though from the end of a tunnel. “Arrests are going to be made if you don’t remain peaceable!”

Despite my vision going fuzzy about the edges, I could see the demonstrators hesitate, weighing the cost of righteous anger against spending a night or two in prison. Taking their signs and their barely disguised hatred, they retreated to the curb.

“Laugh up your sleeve at us all you like, Miss Farthing,” a narrow woman snarled in passing. “Your precious Warwick is going to hang. The tables are about to be turned.”

Frederick shooed her away as he knelt next to me. “By all the Bells, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I lied the moment I could speak. Flashes of gold light swam around me when I tried to sit up. A full minute passed before I could manage, “But this is really becoming a habit, you scraping me off the road.”

“Shall I message for your brother? Or perhaps the hospital?”

I let him set me on my feet, and the satisfying swish of silken skirts around my ankles soothed me in a way that words never could. Secure in the knowledge of six flounces and velvet ribbon trim, I let go of his gloved hand. “It was just a little dizzy spell. I have them all the time.”

With a frown, Frederick righted the Vitesse. “At least let me summon you a hansom cab.”

“I’ll be fine,” I insisted to him and the world, except I wasn’t at all certain either was listening. Clambering aboard the cycle, I struggled to look poised and confident.

“If you won’t be convinced otherwise . . .” He reluctantly cleared me a space in the road.

I roared past him and down the street. He yelled a final remonstration, but the wind and the engine conspired against him.

“I’ll be fine,” I repeated, this time trying to convince myself. The morning seemed devoid of color now, and even the prospect of sticky buns had lost its sweet appeal. There was no doubt in my mind that Warwick would be found guilty. If he went to jail, the entire country would breathe a sigh of relief; if he hanged, I’d carry that guilt with me for the rest of my days. Somewhere deep inside him still dwelled the caring surgeon and gentle man I’d known, but the blood of more than twenty people stained his hands, people he’d kidnapped off the streets of Bazalgate and experimented upon, testing different clockwork ventriculators . . .

All to save me.

Just ahead, the wrought iron gates of the Gears & Rivets Factory stood open, with half a dozen delivery wagons queued up to enter the courtyard. One of the streetcars paused just before me and disgorged a dozen workers, each wearing our distinctive emerald-and-black uniform. Beyond them, the smokestacks emitted lazy plumes now that the boilers were stoked for the morning.
Gaslight shone out of a single window. Ambrose Farnsworth, the supervisor, must already be noting the day’s goals in his ledger with a series of numbers and hieroglyphs worthy of an Aígyptian burial chamber.

The Gears & Rivets Factory was a family enterprise. Mama and Papa were both mechanical engineers. Nic had a talent for small machinery, so he headed Research and Development. That left the bookkeeping to me. Since my operation a year ago, we’d shifted all the machinery over to produce the tiny fittings, gears, mainsprings, and brass plates our Augmentation team needed to build prosthetics and implants. We skated on thin financial ice because of public disapproval, more so now than ever with the trial coming to its messy and sensational climax, but we were steadfast in our resolve that the technology could be used for the good of all. Development also proceeded slowly because none of the surgeons in our employ had Warwick’s spark of genius.

Perhaps that’s a good thing
.

Interrupting my train of thought, the RiPA fired off yet another message from my twin.

THREE MINUTES HAVE PASSED - STOP - ONE MINUTE MORE AND I AM GOING TO CATCH THE STREETCAR - STOP

I didn’t bother to answer. If he exited the building, I could head him off.

Or run him over.

I could well imagine the lecture he was composing. Nic would be furious when I told him about the protestors. And there was still the verdict on Warwick’s trial yet to be announced.

This day will surely get worse before it gets better
—

In the second between one tick of my Ticker and the next, the front wall of the factory exploded outward. Brick and glass and bits of iron flew through the air and rained down on the courtyard. The shock wave threw me from the Vitesse, and I hit the cobblestones with a bone-jarring thud. Once the enormous and terrible noise of the blast passed and the ringing in my ears faded a little, I could make out the screams from the workers fleeing the building. Everything was chaos. Madness.

And Nic was waiting for me in his office.

TWO

In Which a Stream of Trouble Flows into a River of Mayhem

Scrambling to my feet, I ran for the door. Ambrose Farnsworth intercepted me as he stumbled out of the building.

“Miss Farthing!” he said between coughs, eyes streaming.

“Is Nic still inside?”

The supervisor shook his head and coughed before answering, “I’ve messaged for the Emergency Rescue Squadrons. I think the factory floor might be on fire.”

“Is my brother still inside?!”

Farnsworth sagged under the weight of my question. “Yes.” When I moved to pass him, he tried to hold me back. “You can’t go in. There might be structural damage!”

I shook him off as though he were no more than one of my mechanical Butterflies and ran into the factory. Smoke filled the hall. Dust billowed out every broken window. Coughing, I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and held it over my nose.

Two bodies lay prone in the rubble. I scrambled over, uncertain if I felt relief or despair when I saw that neither one was my brother. Floor supervisors, both limp and pale, but each had a strong pulse and neither appeared to be bleeding. Just beyond them, the door to Nic’s office dangled from one hinge, its glass scattered across the floor. I kicked the remaining wood until it gave way, then peered inside. Everything familiar was obliterated, but the room appeared otherwise empty.

Ambrose must have been mistaken. Nic couldn’t have been inside when the blast happened.