Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (22 page)

On the other side of a doorway, Mother and Father were there. Drinking tea, perhaps, or sat down to dinner.

Weeping, again, at the loss of their son. Jack did not like to hope for this, and yet . . .

“Oy!”

Jack spun, nearly slipped on the ice. A big, burly man stood ten feet away, pale gray as everything around them but for mean slashes of pink high on pockmarked cheeks. “H-hello,” he said.

“Nothing ’ere for stealing,” said the man.

Jack shook his head. “No, no sir, I was only—” But the man wouldn’t believe him if Jack explained, and so he closed his mouth.

The man took a step toward him. “You look mightily familiar, boy. Have I seen you snooping around before?”
He pursed his lips and snapped his fingers. “Yeah, I’ve seen you. All up on your airship with the Lady. Right pleased, the missus was, that the Lady finally had ’erself a son, even without a husband about the place. Best not to talk about that, eh?” The man laughed. The sound was as sticky as the dirty snow.

“I’m not . . . not him,” Jack said fiercely. It wasn’t quite an untruth. The boy who’d lived at the palace felt like an old Jack, a different Jack, as a snake that sheds its skin. A brief, sparkling time during which it had been far too easy to forget things he ought’ve remembered.

He looked at the factory wall again.

“Hmph. You might be right. I’m sure that one had both his hands. Shame. Would’ve been a story to tell. Off with you, then, if you’re not royalty I should invite to tea.” The man sauntered off, hobnailed boots crunching.

“I’m coming back, Mother,” Jack whispered to the wall. “I’m sorry.”

•  •  •

When Jack arrived back at Harleye Street, laden with a pie, the doctor wasn’t alone. Xeno had arrived, and the air was thick with a fug of expectation. If Jack hadn’t known better, he would have said Beth was sleeping, in the way she slept, but something about the skin was too dull, flat. Crude lines of red stitches seamed her limbs not
covered by her dress and slashed across her forehead.

He put the pie down none too gently. “She won’t always look like that, will she?”

Xeno winked. The crack in the glass made it extremely disconcerting. “Watch.”

Together, the doctor and Xeno hoisted Beth to sitting, bending her legs to hang from the edge of the table.

“Allow me,” Xeno said as Dr. Snailwater reached for her key, but the doctor shook his head. Slowly, he wound her up, each turn loud in the room, over the machines and the hammering of Jack’s heart.

At the final click, Beth’s eyes opened. Jack moved closer, drawn in by their odd blankness. She looked from one to the next with no sign of recognition. His stomach sank. Dr. Snailwater was right; she wouldn’t be the same.

“The bottle,” said the doctor, prizing open her mouth with a gentle thumb on her chin. Xeno reached over with a long arm. Inside the glass, the soul pulsed vibrant blue as his hand wrapped around the neck. “Drink up, Beth. There’s a good girl.”

Obediently, she drank, the mist sucked from the bottle in great gulps.

Jack stepped closer still, disbelieving. The stitches faded, then disappeared completely, healed from within. Her skin began to brighten, her eyes to spark with life. She
drank the very last drop and pushed the bottle away.

“A healthy soul, a healthy body,” whispered Xeno to Jack. “One cures the other.”

Jack only half listened, far too fascinated all over again by Beth.

“Hello,” she said dully. The hairs at Jack’s neck tingled. It
sounded
like Beth, but
not
like her, too. She’d always been so cheerful before. “Who are all of you?”

The doctor turned away; Jack thought he saw tears. Xeno put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “The soul has to heal her insides, too. Give it time, Mephisto. Give it time.”

•  •  •

Time, however, was not a friendly thing for a while. Two days and nights passed. Dr. Snailwater wandered the house, muttering to himself that he’d known it would happen. That he never should have listened, or been persuaded to reassemble her.

He barely spoke to Jack, or to Xeno. The second time Beth’s key wound down, he forbade anyone to wind it up again. She remembered none of them, and had scarce said a word after those first few.

“What do we do?” Jack asked Xeno, who did not answer straightaway. Instead, his glass eyes swiveled around the workshop, not looking at anything in particular. Upstairs, Beth, who wasn’t really Beth, sat unseeing in
her chair. The doctor had shut himself away in his rooms.

“We wait,” said Xeno after a while. “I’ve seen this before, once or twice.”

“Why does it happen?”

“The brain and the soul must work together,” Xeno answered. “Beth’s brain is all the same parts as before, but the soul is new. Just like your hand, you know, but a bit the other way around. The essence and the solid, one is near useless without the other. You saw her skin—the soul will heal her, remind her brain of who she is, but she was badly broken. That won’t always fix in an eyeblink.”

Footsteps thudded on the stairs. Jack and Xeno both looked toward them, watching Dr. Snailwater descend with Beth in his arms, a determined look on his face.

“Enough of this nonsense,” said the doctor angrily. “I won’t have her taking up space.” He set Beth, still as marble, sitting on the edge of a table. “There’s good parts in here. I can use them for something else. Perfect measurements. Xeno, get ready to take the soul, if you want it. Worthless thing, if you ask me.”

“Mephisto—”

“No!” Jack shouted, running to stand beside Beth. “You can’t just take her apart again. You
can’t.
”

Dr. Snailwater glared at him. “I think you’ll find I can do exactly that, lad. And you, you’ve been nothing
but trouble since you got here. Throwing everything into chaos, running away, coming back like ye never left, getting Beth all smashed up. Off with you, if you don’t want to see it.”

“She was my first friend here,” Jack whispered. “I’m sorry, for all of it. I want to go home. Please don’t break her again. Don’t kill her.”

“Mephisto,” Xeno began once more. “Over here.” He dragged the doctor to the far corner of the workshop; Jack heard them arguing in whispers.

Neither one was looking at him. Perhaps if her eyes were open, if she was moving, the doctor wouldn’t be able to do it. Slowly, so as not to attract attention, Jack began to turn Beth’s key. When it stopped, her eyelids fluttered and clicked.

“Hello, Jack! You’re back! And still ugly, but not so pink! And you have a new hand! Gosh, I feel just like myself again,” she said, spying Xeno and the doctor, “and everyone’s here. Are we having a party?”

It took some time for a relieved Dr. Snailwater to explain that there had been an . . . accident, but he and Xeno and Jack had put her back together. Beth’s head tilted, the way it always had when she was thinking, carefully, of the kind thing to do. “Thank you,” she said finally, as the doctor dabbed at his eyes with a rag.

“You’re most welcome, dear.”

There
was
a festive atmosphere to the place, through supper and tea after, with a fresh bottle of brandy for Xeno and Dr. Snailwater. Beth released the dragon from its cage and it flew lazily around the ceiling, frightening the passengers on the miniature train.

They were something of a family, Jack thought, Beth and the doctor and Xeno, bound together by strangeness thick as any blood. He was very lucky to have found them; where he would be now if he hadn’t . . . Jack squirmed to think of it.

But blood mattered too. And perhaps no family was perfect. His was in London, waiting for him to come home. A secret excitement bubbled in Jack at all the things he could tell his father about metals and steam and clockwork. Foster & Sons had been a grand company for many years, and with what Jack had learned in the Empire, he could make it greater still.

If he could only get back.

Xeno took his leave, having to get over the great, frozen Thames to his bed, and soon after, the doctor retired for the night, whistling as he went. Beth, who had been wound much later in the day than usual, sat in her armchair, a book in her lap and her eyes on Jack.

“I was awake, you know,” she said. “When they
came for me. I only pretended I wasn’t.”

Jack thought he might lose his supper. “Did it hurt?”

“No. It was a bit like flying must be, and after that I don’t remember anything. Lorcan was in an odd room, filled with odd things. I think he must have been doing magic. The bad sort.”

“
He
is horrible,” Jack said, sitting on his blankets. And it all came spilling out, the reason for the hangings, and Lorcan, and yes, even the voice he’d heard in his head. The thought he’d been trying to capture for days came close and ran away again, giggling like a faery. He told Beth of his time with the Lady, the cakes and hide-and-seek, steering the airships over the island. Of Christmas Day, the egg in the box, waking in his bed to find his hand was gone. Of the Lady’s anger and wanting to go home.

Finally, he told her of Xeno’s story, the Gearwing, though this turned out to be quite unnecessary, as she’d heard it before.

“I think it must be real, don’t you?” she asked.

“I think,” said Jack, sleep beginning to tickle at him, “that it is easy to believe in anything here.” His eyes closed, the pillow musty under his head. He could picture it, clear as he’d seen in the crystal ball. Big, nearly, as a dragon, flame-colored, fierce. Swooping, swooping . . .

He did not dream, so he didn’t know what woke him
late into the night. Beth, possibly, but no. The book rested open, unseen, on her lap, her key wound fully down. For a time he lay there, comforted by darkness, but it would be light again soon. Another day during which he was in the Empire, cold and clogged with soot. Days would add up to months, years, and he might die here, veins choked with black, none of his family any the wiser about what had become of him.

He couldn’t bear it. A deep, terrible sadness washed over him. This place was full of clockwork, ticking away, but not a single one could rewind the time to a few minutes before twelve on a drizzly day spent shopping with Mrs. Pond. He doubted there were any men in the whole Empire cleverer than the doctor and Xeno, and their only answer was a story. True or not, it didn’t matter.

Suddenly very much awake, Jack straightened, sat up. He was Jack Foster, which meant very little here but quite a lot in London. Lords and ladies came to supper in his fine house; he would run Foster & Sons one day. This mad, strange, fantastic place would not trap him.

Pushing himself up, Jack looked across the room. It was an unusually clear night, and a rare strip of moonlight shone through the window, turning the crystal ball to a tiny, glowing moon itself. Jack rose from his blankets
and crossed the room, past Beth, perfectly motionless. His metal fingertips clinked against the glass as he lifted it to his eyes, right in the path of the moonbeam. “Show me,” he whispered, entirely unsure what he hoped to see. Within, the mist swirled slightly.

All was quiet and still. Even the dust was resting, coddled in nooks and crannies. Over and over he commanded the crystal ball, but stubbornly, it showed him nothing.

Jack closed his eyes. Music began to play, far beyond Harleye Street.

He opened them again. It wasn’t music, but the beginning of the chimes to mark the hour. Not just any hour, but midnight.

Precisely at midnight, when magic is strongest,
Lorcan had said in the carriage.
Watch the clock.
The clock above where the magical doorway had been.

The ball fell from his hands and to the floor with such a thump he was lucky it didn’t truly break this time. It rolled beneath an armchair, all but forgotten as Jack ran from the parlor to wake the doctor.

“Dr. Snailwater, please, wake up.” Jack grasped his shoulder and shook him, far too excited to think of how rude he was, standing in the doctor’s bedchamber at a silly hour. “Please.”

The doctor snuffled and blinked, his nightcap askew on his fluffy hair.

“It’s real,” Jack said urgently as the doctor sat up.

“Hmph?”

“The Gearwing. It
is
real, and I know where it’s hidden.”

F
OR THE SECOND TIME, JACK
left Dr. Snailwater’s in the darkness, but now he was not alone. Beth, freshly wound by Jack’s shaking fingers, followed with the doctor, keeping up as best they could as Jack ran through the snow. He did not stop to watch the faeries in the lamplight, or to answer the questions that rang out behind him.

They would see. It all made so much more sense if he showed them. An imp had been summoned, bribed with oil to dash all the way to the East End on nimble feet. The night lay overhead, a shroud of cold. Jack looked up, a handful of bright points in the sky visible through a thin layer of the clouds that gave the Empire its name.

“Madness,” muttered Dr. Snailwater. Jack ignored him, for it wasn’t madness. Soon they would understand.

He could smell the river, brackish and ice and starlight, none of the stink of summer. The thing was close; he could feel it. This must be how Lorcan felt. Fear sliced through Jack; Lorcan might be close, too.