XVIII #2
I hastily plugged the bottle again and waved a hand to dissipate the magic vapors.
“Aether,” I said, my voice low. “Higgins probably took a case at a time from the line, mixed the aether into the syrup himself, then brought it to Grace Gallery to sell under the table.” I put the bottle back and shut the drawer.
“No indication the front deliveries from Pinkerton’s ever came through here. ”
Gunner shook his head. “I suspect those all went to the warehouse on Hester. Never smart to keep all of your eggs in one basket.” He returned to the door and stared out across the work floor. “There’s another room on the opposite end.”
We stood in the threshold and listened to the building settle, but beyond the natural sounds of weight-bearing pillars sighing and the wind kicking up outside, we were alone.
So where was Bligh? Gunner strode across the work floor, sure steps leading the way around supply and tool chests and work benches, until we reached a room that I suspected mirrored Higgins’s office, although this door was firmly closed.
As Gunner touched the knob, I wasn’t certain which sensation hit me first in that singular second: the nightcrawler magic from the dead and dying mechanical men, squirming under my skin, its intention and origins completely and wholly foreign to me, or one picked up by my physical senses—a stench .
One I knew well. One I had never been able to forget.
Gunner shifted his weight and looked at me. He smelled it too.
I cast a ball of lightning in my hand and gave him an affirmative nod.
So he cocked his Waterbury, and the manufactured aether activated as Gunner opened the door.
The stink of death and decay was immediate.
Gunner brought his forearm up to his nose as he took a step inside the room, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t follow, couldn’t be his backup.
The putrid smell of rotting flesh and bone dropped me into the immediate chaos of a field hospital.
Men were crying and screaming and vomiting and dying.
Doctors used primitive surgical tools on soldiers, hacked off body parts, and nurses discarded the remains into piles stacked as tall as me.
Muskets cracked the air, cannon fire shook the ground.
A uniformed officer dragged me from the tent and onto the battlefield.
I had only wanted to wash my hands. They were caked in dirt and filth and someone else’s blood and… I had only wanted to wash them.
“Gillian?”
I startled as if my soul had just reentered the body.
The electricity I’d been holding snapped and crackled and melted to the floor like water, leaving behind clean hands.
Manicured hands. Palms scarred, knuckles large from all of the breaks, and the left index had healed crooked. These were… my hands— adult hands.
I wasn’t that boy anymore. I couldn’t be him anymore. He was suffocating me.
I looked up at Gunner, who was scrutinizing my every shallow breath. “I can’t go inside,” I whispered.
He simply nodded, came out, forcing me to step back, and shut the door behind himself. “You don’t need to.”
I was still holding my hands in front of myself, palms up. “What—what was in there? Tell me.”
Gunner appeared to be considering his words—weighing the intensity of his description for what I had already pieced together. “The Hester Street warehouse was where Tick Tock was amassing his stockpile of weapons and ammunition.”
I nodded.
“But I believe the location where that Sawbones character was building Tick Tock an army of mechanical men was… here.” Gunner reached out and gently enclosed my hand with his own. “It appears he hightailed it—very recently. He’s left behind considerable evidence.”
“Evidence as to who Sawbones is?” I asked.
“If that clue is here, I believe it would require a much more in-depth survey of the room to find.”
“Tuffey was right—he’s playing God. We can’t have Sawbones running free.” I touched my neck for the PDD that wasn’t there. “Oh… I threw my device at a wall.”
Gunner moved his hand to my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s finish investigating—”
On the opposite end of the factory came a colossal crash and smash , and we both turned toward the damage as tremors pulsated through the building’s frame.
An immense ball of fire was already hurtling toward us, consuming my field of vision entirely.
I raised an arm to shield us, but my reaction was too sluggish after the resurfacing of those godawful memories, and I was thrown backward into the wall by the manufactured magic.
I broke through the plaster and tumbled to a stop somewhere within Sawbones’s workroom.
I sat up as another blow shook the floor and Gunner began firing.
My sleeves were on fire, and I hastily yanked the winter coat free and tossed it aside.
My eyes followed the flames, like a moth, and in the glow, I could make out the fetid discarded body parts.
Hands and arms and legs and whole torsos, further surrounded by elemental replacements made of brass and silver and iron.
A makeshift surgical table, like what the soldiers had been placed on in the open-air tent, was situated in the middle of the room.
And as I stumbled to my feet, my legs all but entirely numb at this point, I could see the table coated in fresh blood, in cogs, in screws, in pressure tubes.
The shelves on the walls were cluttered with bottles, vats, and vials—no doubt a plethora of chemicals somehow useful to Sawbones’s butchery.
I tripped over myself in my haste to climb through the hole in the wall, stumbled through the debris, and was immediately sick.
I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and looked up in time to see Gunner run for the cover of a storage cabinet to my right.
I jerked my head to the left as the floor shook again and I all but forgot the carnage I’d just scrambled out of.
Because lumbering across the factory was a mechanical creature that not even Mary Shelley could have envisioned while writing Frankenstein .
He reached at least ten feet, roving forward on heavy iron wheels, not unlike those of Ferguson’s locomotive, instead of legs.
Before him was a Gatling gun and scope, the barrels still smoking from the previous round of magic, and the gun’s levers were operated with terrifying mechanical claws in place of hands, the steam hissing around joints, like it’d been a hasty build and some of the cogs were loose.
The monster had a tank of a chest, made from melded elements.
Iron and platinum, perhaps, which gave Gunner’s Waterbury more of an advantage without any silver incorporated into the build, but his pistol alone wasn’t going to save our hides.
This atrocity had been built with me in mind, utilizing the least conductive natural elements with also the highest melting point for operating that bastardized fire magic.
The creature had a steam headlamp bolted into its chest, and when it twisted its upper body toward me, I had to raise a hand to shield my eyes.
Its iron helmet let out a hiss as fasteners were released and the top flipped back like an accordion—revealing Henry Bligh.
His golden hair was in complete disarray, the tip of his nose still blackened from our scuffle earlier in the day, one eye was milky, like an advanced cataract, the other replaced with the face of a pocket watch, and his once-unblemished skin was red and blotchy.
“Bligh. What in God’s name have you done to yourself?”
“If it isn’t the Bureau’s favorite street rat, Gillian Hamilton,” Bligh answered, and his voice had gotten deeper, rougher, with almost a metallic tinge to it. “You look surprised to see me, Hamilton.”
A sudden sweat had broken out across my chest and underarms as I wrangled with the reality that the body parts strewn about the room behind me, the ones I’d fallen into, touched , could very well have been Bligh’s.
“Sawbones just got better and better with every build, didn’t he? Between the incorporation of a noble element, my manufactured fire, and his quintessence magic, I am perfect .” Bligh raised a clawed hand, and it rotated in a spectacular three hundred and sixty degrees.
The foreign magic squirming down my spine had a name— quintessence .
“Bligh,” I tried again, speaking even as my voice shook. “He’s turned you into a monster .”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Hamilton. Sawbones has turned me into divinity. I am indestructible.”
“But your fiancée—”
“Emma Olin is New Money trash. I’m not interested in carrying that albatross around my neck.”
“Your family—” But I was cut short when Bligh laughed and fired the Gatling gun at the ceiling and fire began to rain from overhead. I raised my arm and moved it in an arc, a tidal wave crashing into the fire, putting it out, and then the magic water dissipated in smoky, glittering tendrils.
“My father has been withholding a portion of my inheritance,” Bligh replied, a smug expression on his disturbed face, “until I was promoted at the Bureau. But so long as you—Moore’s golden goose—stood in the way of all the career-making cases, I’d be arresting steam-pilfering scum in the Five Points until I died of old age. ”
Every incident, every clue, every moment began coming into perfect alignment, like the tumblers of a skeleton key locking in place.
I took a step back as Bligh rolled forward on those two massive wheels, the floorboards groaning under the weight.
“Did you orchestrate the invention of fire bullets just to one-up me?”