Angel of Brass (16 page)

“Molly,” she said in surprise. “Come in, come
in. How are you doing?”

Molly followed her into a narrow hallway. In
one corner, a god with a dozen arms presided over a small offering
bowl, which contained a spray of holly. A door to the left opened
onto a small sitting room, which was crammed with half-finished
projects: disassembled clocks, part of a coffee engine, the guts of
a wireless, and a dozen other machines that Molly couldn’t
immediately identify.

The only piece of furniture not piled with
gears and pistons was an armchair, arranged so that its back was to
the window. Master Singh slumped in the chair, dressed in a shabby
undershirt and trousers, as if putting on anything more would have
taken too much effort. His mustache drooped sadly, and his eyes
looked hollow as he contemplated nothingness.

Molly approached the chair hesitantly.
“Master Singh? I came to see how you’re doing.”

His dark eyes finally shifted to her, but no
spark enlivened their listlessness. “It’s gone,” he said. “All
gone.”

“That’s almost all he says,” Varuni told
Molly from the doorway.

Master Singh glanced at his wife briefly,
then back to Molly. “You understand, don’t you? All my work is
gone. My inventions. My whole life, ever since I set foot in Eroe,
spent working hard, and what is left to show for it? Ash. Nothing
but ash.”

A part of Molly wanted to point out that if
Singh had actually completed any of his mad schemes, he might
actually have something more to show for his life. Now didn’t seem
the time for quite that much honesty, however, so she only said,
“You can start over, Master Singh. Build a new shop. And you still
have these,” she added, indicating the tangle of gears and wire
around them.

He gestured dismissively at them. “These?
Bah. They are nothing. Small things. Not like what I had in the
shop. No, it’s gone. All gone.”

“Er, yes,” Molly said, feeling horribly
uncomfortable. What did one say when confronted with such
relentless despair? “Well, I hope you feel better soon, Master
Singh. I’ll just let myself out.”

The air outside felt freer than it had before
entering the oppressive house. “How’s he doing?” Jin asked,
detaching himself from the street lamp he’d been leaning
against.

Given how guilty Jin felt already, Molly
wasn’t sure that there would be anything gained from the truth.
“Oh, about as well as can be expected,” she said vaguely. “Shall we
go visit Liam, then?”

Jin gave her a faintly suspicious look, but
nodded when she only returned a bland expression. Glad to be going,
she turned her back on the ruin her employer had become and walked
away.

* * *

Shortly before the week was out, Molly and
Jin sat at Liam’s lab table after hours. Molly was trying to make
sense of the parts of the controller that she didn’t yet
understand, while Jin handed her tools. When the door opened
unexpectedly, Molly was shocked to find Liam himself standing
there, a wan grin on his face. There were new lines of pain around
his mouth and eyes, and his right arm was in a sling, but otherwise
he looked remarkably well.

“Liam!” she exclaimed, jumping up and running
around the side of the table. “You’re out of the hospital!”

“The doctors released me this afternoon,” he
said, careful to keep his right arm well out of the way as he
hugged her with the left. “I thought I’d come by and see how things
were going.”

Jin rose to his feet. “I should leave.”

“No. At least, not until you hear me
out.”

Jin watched him warily. “All right.”

“I wanted to apologize for the things I said
to you before,” Liam said. “I called you a machine, and treated you
like a monster. But...I’ve seen real monsters now. You aren’t
one.”

Jin’s eyes widened in surprise. “I...oh.
Thank you.”

“I owe you my life, for dragging me out of
that alley. You’re a good person, Jin Malachi, and I’m sorry I
didn’t see that right away.”

“Apology accepted,” Jin said with a tentative
smile. “Here, let me clear the bench off so you can sit down.”

Once they were all settled, Molly said, “How
are you doing, Liam?”

“Not as well as I’d like,” Liam admitted,
slumping onto the bench. “The monorail ride nearly did me in. The
doctors gave me laudanum, but it makes me stupid, so I’m trying not
to take any if I can avoid it.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Yeah.” Liam gave her a brave smile, but she
could see the tightness around his eyes. “And let me say right now
that learning how to get dressed with only one hand is a lot harder
than it sounds.”

“You should go home, take your laudanum, and
get some rest,” Molly said severely. “What were you thinking,
coming to the lab?”

“Because this is important.” Liam nodded in
the direction of the controller, his earrings sparking in the last
light coming through the high windows. “Molly, you said that you
saw dozens of shamblers in that refrigerated room. What do you bet
they aren’t the only ones in the city? And Jin, you heard the
resurrectionist and Reynard discussing them as if they were
soldiers of some sort. If Reynard really is planning to unleash an
army of shamblers, finding a way—any way—to stop them should be our
first priority.” He glanced down at his wounded arm, then away
again. “Even if that means we have to make sacrifices.”

Molly found herself looking at her friend as
if she’d never seen him before. His face was drawn and his color
poor. Given everything he’d been through in the last few days, he
had every right to leave Chartown and not look back—or at least go
home and stay in bed until it was all over. Instead, his green eyes
were tired but determined, and the spark of curiosity still burned
in their depths when he looked at the controller.

“That’s really brave of you,” she said
quietly. “All right. You’re the expert here. Come tell me what to
do.”

Liam did so, and they spent the next several
hours enmeshed in the guts of the machine. It was long after
midnight, when Liam said, “You know, I think that might do it.”

Molly ran her eyes over the scribbled
calculations that covered the slate board on one wall. “I think you
might be right. We’ll just have to build the device and test
it.”

Jin had fallen asleep in a chair; now, he
opened his eyes and looked at them blearily. “You figured something
out?”

“We think so.” Molly absently tapped the
stick of chalk she held against her lower lip, only realizing that
she was doing it when she tasted the bitter dust. “The controller
has two critical systems. One involves the way in which it hooks
into the corpse’s spine. The fresher the body, the better, I’m
guessing, because it uses the body’s own nervous system to move it
about. Simple and elegant.”

“That part is similar to your, uh,
attachments,” Liam said, giving Jin a chagrined look. “You’re more
sophisticated, but essentially an organic nervous system has been
incorporated into the machine.”

“The other critical system,” Molly went on,
“is the one that receives commands from outside. The controller
isn’t smart; or rather, it’s just smart enough to make a shambler
walk in the right direction and kill anyone it stumbles over. Or
anyone who stumbles over it, in the case of the guard I ran across
at the resurrectionists’ house. Someone has to tell it where to go,
or to not go. From what we can tell, the commands are being sent
via aetherwave. Most likely a short-distance transmitter, or else
you’d need an antenna, and that would probably be a little too
obvious.”

Jin nodded. “I understand. So, are you going
to try to jam the signals they receive, so that they don’t know
what to do?”

“In part, yes. Part of the problem is that we
don’t know what the shamblers will do without guidance. Stop? Fall
down? Keeping killing indiscriminately? So the other part of our
device will interrupt the electrical signals between nerves and
machine.”

“Oh, hell,” Liam said suddenly, his eyes
going wide. “Jin needs to be out of the building when we construct
and test this thing.
Far
out of the building.”

Molly swore, unable to believe that she
hadn’t seen it before. “Saints, we must be tired.”

Jin looked from one to the other. “It will
stop my heart, won’t it?” he guessed.

Liam nodded grimly. “Yes. I don’t know what
sort of auto-restart mechanisms you might have in there, but that
won’t matter if you’re exposed long enough for the organic parts of
your body to fail.”

“Damn it!” Molly chewed on her lower lip and
scowled at the equations. “This is too dangerous. We’ll have to
just settle for jamming the incoming signal.”

“No.” Jin rose to his feet and gestured to
the chalkboard. “This is our best chance.”

“This could kill you!”

“So could a death ray,” he pointed out. “Or a
fall, or a bullet, or a thousand other things. I’ll simply have to
be careful around this, the way I would any of those other dangers.
Just let me know ahead of time before you fire it up, will
you?”

“But—”

“Just work hard to get it finished. Now,
let’s get Liam home before he collapses altogether.”

“Thanks,” Liam said. He looked utterly
wretched, and Molly’s heart twisted. “If you don’t mind,
accompanying me, I’ll take a dose of the laudanum now.”

They escorted Liam back to his flat, which
wasn’t too far from Molly’s boarding house. When they arrived,
Molly paused on the doorstep, looking worriedly at her friend. “Are
you going to be all right alone?”

He shrugged, then gasped in pain. “I’ll have
to,” he managed to say.

Jin ran a hand back through his hair and
feathers. “I can stay and help, if there’s a spot on your floor
where I can sleep.”

Liam gave him a weak smile. “A spot on the
couch, even. I’d appreciate your help.”

“No problem, then,” Jin said. “I’ll be right
in.”

Liam nodded and went inside. “Thank you for
doing that,” Molly said, once he was gone.

“It’s the least I can do, seeing as it’s
partially my fault he was injured.” Jin held up one of his gloved
hands, as if inspecting it, then slowly tightened it into a fist.
“I hope someone can find a way to make...this...into something that
will help him.”

“Considering that no other prosthetic will
let him manipulate tools as well as he needs to, so do I,” Molly
agreed. “Hopefully, we can get the biology department involved and
figure out how to duplicate Dr. Malachi’s work.”

“Yes.” Jin let his hand drop to his side. “It
was interesting watching the two of you work together today. You’re
very...well-matched.”

“We’ve been friends for a couple of years
now.” Molly said. “True, we’ve never tried to do anything like this
before, but it seems to be working out. Maybe when this is over, we
can work on some slightly less life-and-death projects
together.”

Jin turned back to the door. “Yes,” he said,
his voice bleak. “When this is over.”

Before she could ask what he meant, the door
shut between them.

Chapter 12

“I don’t think I can make it to dinner with
you and Mother tonight,” Molly said, as soon as Winifred opened the
carriage door.

After her last class, Molly had made her way
to Brasstown, having arranged to meet Winifred at the dressmaker’s
shop. When she arrived, the coach with its clockwork horse had
already been waiting patiently out front.

Winifred gave Molly a knowing smile. “Going
to the festival in Chartown, are you? I told Mother you likely
would.”

“Er, yes.” When Winifred’s smile didn’t
waver, Molly gave in. “What festival would that be, again? It seems
to have slipped my mind.”

Winifred shook her head bemusedly as she
preceded Molly to the shop door. A cage of clockwork birds hung
outside, their voices sweetly greeting potential customers. “Prince
Five Jaguar arrived yesterday by royal dirigible. Tonight, there is
to be a public celebration—he’s going to attend some sort of
ceremony at the Sun Temple in Chartown. There will be a big parade
welcoming him. I’m surprised you didn’t realize.”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

“Ah, yes. How
is
Jin?”

Molly gave her sister a sharp look, trying to
decide what exactly she meant by the question. When Winifred
maintained a blandly innocent expression, Molly said, “Fine. He’s
helping Liam Two-Gears, now that Liam’s out of the hospital.”

“He might like to see the festival as well,
you know. Being Xatlian.”

“We don’t know that Jin’s, uh, organic parts
are
Xatlian,” Molly pointed out as she followed Winifred
through the door. “As Liam is constantly reminding me, not everyone
on the other side of the ocean is from Xatli, or even a citizen of
the Empire. But even if some part of Jin is Xatlian, he’s lived his
entire life in Eroe, and was raised by an Eroevian.”

“Then he’ll enjoy the spectacle of it, just
as you will.”

By that time, the dressmaker and her
attendants had reached them. There were polite greetings, effusive
exchanges of praise, and the serving of tea. Molly waited while
Winifred had her fitting, and made the appropriate noises when
Winifred came out from behind the screens to show off her dress. It
was beautiful, a thing of pale colors and lace that turned Winifred
into something ethereal. Of course, her older sister would look
stunning in nothing but a potato sack with holes cut in it for arms
and head, Molly thought grumpily.

When it was her turn, she stripped down to
her under things and climbed onto the low stool. “You won’t be
wearing those spectacles, of course,” the dressmaker said.

Molly glowered. “I will most certainly be
wearing them. At least, if the other dancers don’t want me knocking
them over.”

The dressmaker tutted quietly under her
breath, but let the subject drop. No doubt she, like most, believed
that learning to make her way through a crowded room when she was
blind as a bat was an essential skill for any lady of class. Molly
recalled her mother’s long-ago advice, to let her escort guide her
at all times, rather than venture forth herself when she couldn’t
see anything.