Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (68 page)

“So
you
stashed it in that bar?” I then asked. “
You’re
Foxley?”

Foxley. I
should’ve known.

“Of course,” Kitt
replied. “I was reading it there. Some royal soldiers came in, I panicked, and
asked the barman to hold the papers under the first false name I could invent.
That’s how I traced you down to the windmill, you know. Came back for the
diary, bartender said a tall man with a spoon in his hat asked for it, and a
patron said she saw you wander off with a grimacing, hotheaded Magnate.”

“Gren.”

“I figured.
Witness said it didn’t seem like you were being taken in custody, and Gren’s
the only hothead I’ve seen you continually endure. How you ever knew I had
hidden those papers there, I can’t imagine.”

“Long story.”

“I’ll bet. Anyhow,
after that, it was only a matter of figuring out where you were staying. And
the night that the Motorists showed up and grabbed you, I followed them.”

“And you took the
key.”

“Right.”

“And the toy.”

“What?”

“The bubblemaker.
You took that too.”

“Oh, is
that
what
that was? Yeah, I heard you screaming to Gren on the mill sails about how it
contained the Doll’s pieces. I figured I’d return those lost parts to her.”

“It was supposed
to be a gift.”

“Oh. Well, she got
it.”

I took the whole
story in and squeezed my eyes. Life was so much simpler when it was boring.

When I opened my
lids, my focus fell on a large pile of scrap beyond where we stood. The tip of
something familiar was poking up behind.

“You’ve got the
Priest’s shuttle back there,” I said, “don’t you?”

He nodded. I began
walking toward the mound, brushing Kitt out of the path with my shoulder.

“What’re you
doing?” he asked.

“I’m taking it,” I
responded.

“Really? Great! We
can get on the move then!”

“No, Kitt,” I
clarified. “I’m
taking
it.”

“What?”

“I’m going after
her by myself.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You want to stop
me?” I said, turning back. “Then run that knife through me.”

“I will if I have
to.”

“No, you won’t.”

Kitt clutched his
fist and furrowed his brows. They slid angrily down beneath his cap and
goggles.

“You need me,” he
said at last. “There’s no way you know how to pilot that thing.”

“I’ll figure it
out,” I said, resuming my walk.

Kitt jogged after
me.

“Oh, will you?” he
called out. “You may get it into the air if you’re lucky, but I’m betting you
won’t keep it there very long. You want to risk crashing to your death? Huh? Do
you hear me, Pocket?”

“You’re not
coming,” I said, “and that’s final.”

“So you’re just
going to leave me here?!? Stranded?!?”

“Yep,” I said,
reaching the shuttle. “Let’s see how you like it.”

“No!” Kitt
demanded, putting a little fire in his voice. It surprised me, and I slowly
looked him over.

“No?” I asked,
challenging him.

“That’s right!” he
responded. “I don’t give a damn about what you say or how you feel about it,
you’re not keeping me off of that machine!”

Without a word I
brought out the pistol, and even in the shadows I could see the color drain out
of Kitt’s eyes. He hadn’t expected that.

“Pocket,” Kitt
whispered, “where did you get—“

“You aren’t
coming,” I said, my fingers pieces of stone around the gun.

“I…don’t
believe…you would—“

“Believe it.”

He shook his head
in sad disbelief. “Do you even know how to use that?”

I steadied my aim.
“I’ll figure it out.”

Kitt dropped his
tool, raised his arms, and knelt down in surrender.

“You’ll regret
this,” he said.

“I know.” Keeping
my gun hand trained on him, I began feeling around the shuttle for the
entrance.”

“Pocket…”

“What?” I spat.

“Driver enters
through the roof, remember?”

“Oh. Right, sure.”
I clawed my way to the top of the machine and began opening the hatch.

“Guess this is
goodbye, huh?” Kitt glumly said as I climbed down into the front compartment of
the shuttle.

“Guess it is,” I
muttered, peering over the foreign-looking controls.

“They’re going to
kill her, you know.”

I sprung my head
back up out of the open hatch. Kitt was still in his surrender pose.

“What was that?” I
demanded.

“If they get to
her first, they’ll kill her.”

“
Who
will?”

“All the King’s
horses and all the King’s men,” Kitt said. “Who do you
think?
”

“But I thought—“

“Orders to
capture? To disassemble? Yeah, those orders changed. Like you said, I was
stupid to think any more of those who are at the heart of this. They want her
destroyed.
”

“Are you sure? By
‘destroyed,’ are you sure you don’t mean dissected, explored, broken apart,
maybe kept in storage?”

“Destroyed. ‘Scrap
completely,’ was language I heard used. ‘Break down, crush, dispose. Burn the
synthetics—”

“Her hair and
skin.”

“—gut out the
framework—”

“Break her bones.”

“—salvage whatever
screws and bolts might be deemed useful, and mark the rest as debris.’ That’s
the official plan of action. ‘Scrap all except the desired piece.’”

“Piece?” I asked.
“Just one part?”

“That’s all they
want.”

I rested my weight
on the round, metal lip of the open hatchway.

“You want proof?”
Kitt said, reaching into his jacket. “Because I’ve got it.”

He brought out a
neatly folded document and read it aloud to me. He recited every word, every
official, emotionless piece of authorized language that insisted upon, in
absolutely no uncertain terms, the termination of the Watchmaker’s Doll.

“Just a piece,” I
said, utterly stupefied. “One piece, out of an entire, speaking, thinking,
living clockwork girl. That’s all she’s worth to them.”

“Yeah,” Kitt
nodded. “Isn’t that disgusting?”

“The Motorists,” I
remembered. “They said something to me in that windmill, something about
wanting what was inside of her. I can’t imagine what she possibly has, but—”

“But you don’t
want to wait for her insides to get pulled out to learn, right?”

I shook my head
solemnly.

“Yeah,” Kitt said.
“Me neither.”

I told myself that
the time for conversation was over, that all I needed to do was to drop myself
back down into the machine and get as far away from Kitt Sunner as possible.
But I hesitated, and the fox knew it.

“I gave this to
Dolly,” Kitt said, waving the paper at me. “I hated to tell her what those
people are planning to do to her, but she had to know.”

“How’d she take
it?”

 “She didn’t
really say anything. It was like she…I don’t know…”

“Already knew?” I
guessed.

“Yeah. And that
was that. Last night, as I fell asleep in the shuttle, the Doll was sitting up
in the back, looking at stars through the window, I think. When I got up this
morning, all that was left was this paper. But she had added to it.”

“What?”

Kitt approached
the shuttle and held the document up to me. Across the bottom, handwritten in
the girl’s familiar, curvy letters, were the following statements:

I’M GOING HOME TO FATHER.

IF YOU TRY TO FOLLOW ME, I WILL GO TO THE POLICE.

GOODBYE FOREVER.

I groaned at my
own shadow as the poison in my throat dropped back into the pit of my stomach.
I wanted so desperately to chew through my tongue, if only to prevent my next
words from being spoken.

“Get in,” I said
to Kitt.

We were soon back
in that black-blue wash, another trip through the sky, another tour across
Purgatory.

It was a quiet
Purgatory for awhile, as I kept my voice spitefully muted. I had relinquished
the controls and the driver’s compartment to Kitt and allowed him to join me on
the search, but that didn’t mean all had been forgiven. I just sat fuming, my
eyes glaring precise, little holes through the tinted pane of glass that
separated the two compartments, but my demeanor did nothing to prevent Kitt
from pushing dialogue at me. The pistol was still fused to my hand, and I
impatiently tapped the barrel of it against my knee.

“That’s a quick
way to get your leg blown through,” Kitt said without looking.

“Just keep
flying,” I said to his rigid back.

He did. Silently.

For awhile,
anyway.

“So where’s your
bottle of—“

“Gone.”

“Oh. That must’ve
been hard to—“

“Kitt!”

“Sorry.”

And again, peace.

For awhile,
anyway.

“I have to say,”
Kitt spoke as he slid and tilted us around the stars, “I’m surprised Gren let
you take off without him so easily. That must’ve been a tough argument.”

“I didn’t tell
him,” I replied.

Kitt chuckled.
“That so? Well, less yelling, I guess. So where’d you tell him you were
heading?”

I said nothing.

Kitt’s voice got
soft. “You didn’t just leave him there, did you?”

I exhaled. “Yeah,”
I bluntly stated. “Guess I’ve been around you for too long.”

“Mind if I ask
why?”

“Why I left him?
It’s like you said. If he had any suspicion of what I was about to do, he
would’ve insisted on coming, and I don’t want him a part of this any longer.
It’s dangerous, and he’s got…responsibilities worth living for.”

“Oh, you mean his
daughter? The little girl?”

I sat up straight
and peered at the back of Kitt’s head. “How did you—”

“I’ve done a lot
of research since we’ve last talked. And not just on the Doll.”

Research, he
called it. Eavesdropping and spying seemed more appropriate.

“A lot of research
on a lot of things,” he continued. “I was worried that Gren or Eddie might have
been named as accomplices after, you know, they defended us in broad daylight
in front of a city block of witnesses. So I sniffed around for whatever
information there was on them. Did you know Gren paid off a man to fake that
headline about his death?”

“You should check
your sources better, Kitt. That headline was written as a payoff
to
Gren.
A man owned him money.”

“No, he didn’t,”
Kitt argued. “I met the man. He thought I was the police trying to incriminate
him until I offered to buy him a beer. Of course, then I had to pick a few
pockets at the bar to get—”

“And you’re sure
of this? I mean, that it was Gren who had paid?”

“Yeah. I saw the
money. Pretty nice stack of bills. Why?”

I dropped my head
back and felt it land on the soft green fuzz of the billiard’s table I had lay
upon at that damned investors’ ball.

“Gren’s in a hard
way with money,” Quill had said to me there.

“Well, he just got
a hold of some,” I had ignorantly retorted. “You’d think he’d be in slightly
higher spirits.”

“It’s like this,
Pocket,” Hack-Jack had told me. “Sometimes some people have more than just
their own problems to tend to.”

I had allowed Gren
to leave with me from the
Lucidia.

I had allowed him
to convince me that charging the Magnates was a good idea.

I failed to
retrieve him when he got left behind, and he had given a good amount of his
heist money to fake a death.

And the rest went
to a week of food in hiding.

I hadn’t stopped
Gren from getting involved.

I hadn’t prevented
him from giving away what was meant for his child.

And I believed him
when he lied about it.

“Sometimes some
people have more than just their own problems to tend to,” Jack had said.
I had been feeling so sorry for myself since I climbed down from that windmill,
so pathetically robbed of what I felt that I needed. The last week in the
parlor, I’d been feeling like a wounded fly wrapped in the sticky binds of a
spider’s web. Sure, I was aware that everyone who had extended a hand to me in
this struggle was stuck in the web with me, but I was too blind to see that
whenever I tugged and pulled to free myself of the webbing, I was slowly
pulling those around me even deeper.

“Pocket?” Kitt
said. “Hello? You awake?”

“Unfortunately.”

We continued on as
Kitt explained more of what he had uncovered, little pieces and whispers about
the King and his Magnates, the Motorists and their occupied powder mill, and so
forth. He also recounted his mad chase after Dolly on the day he had awoken
her.

“Of course, I
followed after her into the trees,” Kitt explained, “but I lost her trail much
more quickly than expected. You’d think an experienced street thief could track
down a crying, flailing, young woman in pigtails with a little more ease.”

“Nothing involving
women is ever easy, Kitt.”

“So I spent
hours
in the woods until I had basically completed a big circle. I eventually had
to use this shuttle to find her, and even from the skies, it wasn’t easy. Trees
hide a lot, you see. But at long last, I discovered her curled up on a rock in
a clearing. She was upset, but I didn’t think she’d try running off again. She
had plenty of opportunities on the days I went off to rummage for food and
supplies in the city.”

“How
did
you manage to get into the city proper? I nearly got shot dead trying to elude
the guards and barricades!”

Kitt spoke to me
like I was a slow-witted child. “I had a flying machine, Pocket.”

“So did I,” I
stated, recalling the smoldering wreck of the
Prospero.
“Sort of.”

“Mmm,” Kitt said,
tossing my excuse aside in one rather condescending sound. “Well, maybe you
aren’t that skilled at inconspicuous flying. You have to be discreet.”