The Falling Machine (24 page)

She frowned and walked toward them, although the intensity of the heat and smoke made her skin prickle as if it were covered with a horde of tiny insects.

“Didn't you hear me, Sarah? The Automaton's gone mad!”

“Are you still drunk, or have you finally gone totally round the bend? That's the biggest load of nonsense I've heard come out of your mouth in the ten years I've known you.”

“Twelve years,” Nathaniel replied, correcting her.

Sarah stepped in between the man and the machine, her feet disappearing into a growing mud puddle. She could feel the ice-cold water seeping in through the leather of her boots. “Now both of you, it's time to put a stop to this nonsense.”

Nathaniel lowered his arms an inch and then shuffled a few steps sideways, clearly looking to find a line of sight to his opponent that didn't have a girl standing in the middle of it. “Sarah, this isn't a good time for another one of your hysterical tirades.” He pointed to the side of the nearby willow tree. “Look what he's done to Mr. Hughes.”

Sarah turned to see what Nathaniel was pointing at and let out an embarrassing shriek. Somehow she had missed it before, but William Hughes, wearing nothing more than a body stocking, was trussed up to a padded metal pole sticking straight up out of the ground. Blood stained the canvas sling holding his legs, and the whole contraption had been thrust into the earth deeply enough to allow it to stand upright next to the tree trunk. He was completely limp, his eyes closed, either unconscious or dead.

“Tom,” she said sharply, “what is going on here?”

“I was attempting to bring…Mr. Hughes to safety when…Mr. Winthorp appeared in his…costume and told me to put him down. I tried to do so in a way that would not cause him to freeze to death before we had finished our…confrontation.”

“Af-af-af,” Nathaniel spluttered. “After you almost killed me in the Aereodrome!”

“Mr.Winthorp attempted to attack me using the very same…pneumatic weapon that is now attached to my arm, and managed to knock himself…unconscious in the process.”

“He's lying to you, Sarah. Tom killed the Sleuth.” He lifted up his gauntlets and aimed them back at the Automaton.

Sarah needed a moment to fully understand the words that had just been said to her. “Wickham is dead?” she said in a tone so calm it almost surprised her.

Tom gave her a quick mechanical nod. “I found his body in the…parlor when I returned to the…mansion this morning. I was attempting to examine his…corpse for clues when…Mr. Winthorp found me.”

Despite all her attempts to avoid the clichés that came along with being the weaker sex, the sheer volume and impact of the information that had just been given to her, along with the growing heat of the fire, made her feel as if she was going to swoon. And truth be told, the thought of falling into the icy waters of the puddle seemed like it would come as a relief. Instead she summoned her Stanton wherewithal and mopped her brow with the sleeve of her overcoat.

“Are you all right, Sarah?” Nathaniel said with alarm. “I need you to move out of the way so I can take care of this menace to humanity.”

Wickham was dead? How could that even be possible? She had seen the old man hale and hearty just a few hours before.

Sarah took a breath to rally herself and grimaced as the smoke bit into her lungs. Perhaps she would have been better off taking the Frenchman's advice and waiting for the fire brigade in the street. But there was no time for that now. “Clearly you've both had a traumatic—”

Nathaniel rose up into the air in front of her, the turbines on his back spitting out a plume of white steam as he rose toward the sky. He let out an almost-comical yelp as the improperly tightened harness dragged him up by his arms and crotch.

With Sarah no longer in his way he aimed both hands out in front of him and activated the turbines on his wrists. Streams of compressed air and steam shot out toward the empty space where Tom had been a moment before. The focused pulse of pressure smashed through the fire-weakened walls of the house so perfectly it left two holes behind.

Nathaniel, unable to exert any genuine control over his new suit, found himself at the merciless hands of the immutable laws of physics. He was flung backward, trying to regain control before he crashed into the ground.

There was a sucking sound as the fire inhaled the fresh air through the new holes. And from somewhere inside the mansion there was a heavy vibration, followed a moment later by a dull thump.

The nearby wall and window disintegrated completely as a fireball ripped through them and enveloped Tom and Sarah. She shrieked as it hit her. From somewhere far way she heard Nathaniel scream out her name.

For a moment Sarah was weightless, then she plunged into darkness. Time and all feeling seemed to slip away into a comforting feeling of floating, as if she had simply been cast out of the world—free of all feeling, lost in a moment of pure nothingness. Everything in her world was now cool, quiet, and peaceful, like a tranquil cave.

Sarah's moment of calm lasted until she tried to take a breath. The dirty water that entered into her lungs threw her out of her reverie and into a reality defined by darkness and terror.

Her hands were icy cold, trapped in a thick ooze. And as she tried to find some kind of purchase to escape from the darkness, her lungs attempted to expel the water, each shuddering convulsion only managing to drag in another drowning breath.

When she finally managed to rise upward, and air flooded back into her, she coughed violently—water expelling itself from her lungs in a series of rasping barks. Her vision was blurry, and she couldn't make out anything but a vague sea of brown and green.

After a few seconds the world began to come back to her, and her first realization was that she was down on all fours, hands sunk deep into the freezing mud. There was also a new sensation: a tingling down her entire left side, as if she had been simultaneously smacked and pulled by hundreds of hands.

As her vision cleared in her right eye, she could see the remains of her winter hat. It slowly disappeared underneath the muddy water in front of her, far too singed and misshapen to ever be fashionable again.

A bony hand grabbed her shoulders and tugged her upward. Sarah turned to look up at Tom, and she realized that she couldn't make out the words he was saying. Something about a fire…

Then the Automaton grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up as if she were nothing more than a child's toy doll. She felt her left boot slide away from her foot as she was pulled out of the mud.

Tom took her and ran away from the house, but she could still feel the heat on her neck and back as a long tongue of fire licked out toward them.

A few yards away Nathaniel sat up. He had landed on his back, and the suit had been badly dented by the impact of what had clearly been a very ungraceful landing.

Tom set her down on a snowy patch of grass, and Sarah coughed again. She encouraged it this time, hoping to clear out the remaining dregs of mud in her lungs. Her throat felt constricted and raw.

The tingling along her left side was now being replaced by genuine pain, with a fresh new area of rawness that seemed mostly centered around her left eye, and a reminder that her hip had only just begun to heal. As she reached up to touch her face Tom's left arm stopped hers. “No…Miss Stanton. You have some…glass in your…face. Let me help.”

The fingers of Tom's left hand reached up and delicately plucked at something just above her sight.

“I…I can't see out of my left eye, Tom.”

“There is no obvious damage to your eyes, but there is a great deal of…blood. I should get you to a…hospital as quickly as possible.”

From the street beyond came the distant sound of clanging bells. The fire brigade was finally on the way, although it was clearly coming too late to save any significant portion of the Darby mansion. The flames burned even more voraciously after the explosion and were clearly blazing through Darby's collection of rare books. She found it hard to care, although she was sure the world would one day miss the secrets hidden in that house. “I'll be fine, but you need to go.”

An angry voice came from up above them. “Get off of her, you monster.”

Sarah looked up and saw Nathaniel through her unblurred right eye. Even to her he didn't seem very much of a threat.

“Don't be—” Her response came out as nothing more than a croak. She swallowed and tried again. “Don't be an idiot, Nathaniel. Tom just saved my life.”

“He's tricked you, Sarah. He's been fooling all of us for a very long time, but he won't fool
me
anymore.”

From her position on the ground it almost appeared as if there was a jet of steam shooting from Nathaniel's head. His rush to get into this new costume had clearly been one of a string of bad ideas. The body stocking was bunched up underneath the straps of the main harness, and a long shock of his hair was dangling down from underneath the helmet. The turbines that had been attached to the wing along the back were either broken off or hanging loosely at odd angles. He looked simultaneously ridiculous and pathetic, and she couldn't help but laugh at him. “You're right. I'm a fool, Nathaniel. But it isn't because I believed Tom. It was for thinking that you would actually be able to grow up.”

Nathaniel twitched as if he'd been physically struck. “Sarah, you're still in shock.” He held out his hand, as if to comfort her.

“For the longest time I couldn't understand why you act the way you do. Every time someone says something you don't want to be true you tell them that they're sadly mistaken. But I'm not. The world isn't always black and white, Nathaniel.” She could feel blood trickling down into her collar. “And there are more flavors to people than just good and evil.” At that moment she realized she must have looked something like a harpy from hell, but she wasn't going to be afraid to use it to her advantage. “You're not a Paragon. Not really. You're just a little boy playing dress-up, thinking you can make the world be the way you want it to be by acting like the pathetic old men you've watched play at being heroes for your entire life.”

“Please Sarah, I…” He stopped and took a step back, holding up his one working gauntlet. “You need to step away from Tom now.”

“No, Nathaniel, I don't. I'm not going to do what you say. I trust Tom, and I don't trust you.” Sarah turned around and faced the Automaton. “Take me to the hospital, Tom.” The bells of the fire carts were getting closer.

“Yes…Miss Stanton.” She felt herself being lifted up. Tom's metal arms were still warm from the fire.

Nathaniel still stood ready to fire, but the look on his face made it plain that he was clearly at a loss for what to do next. “Don't do this, Sarah. You'll regret it.”

She smiled at him, then winced from the pain in her face. Whatever it was that had kept that pain from overwhelming her was starting to fade. “Somehow you've managed to let Darby and Wickham die, burn down this house, and almost kill me, Mr. Hughes, and yourself in the process. I can't imagine what you'd do to the poor woman foolish enough to love you.”

She pointed toward the wall. “Let's go, Tom.”

I
t took Tom a dozen strides to reach the high stone wall that surrounded the house. Moving at speed, he launched himself into the air, reaching the ramparts of the stone fence in a single bound, stepping onto the top of it as if he were walking up a flight of stairs.

Outside the park the streets weren't busy, but a number of residents had come out of their houses to watch as one of the last grand mansions in the neighborhood burned to the ground.

The onlookers reacted with shock when Tom and Sarah appeared, smashing onto the sidewalk. “It's the Automaton!” one man yelled out, and the rest cheered. The people of New York still remembered Tom as a hero.

Sarah had expected to feel a shuddering jolt as she landed, but somehow Tom absorbed most of the shock. As he began to run down the street the buildings turned to a blur even in her good eye. Sarah felt as if she were floating down the street. If not for the growing awareness that she was wet, cold, and blind in one eye, it would have seemed like a magical ride. Then she felt an unpleasant shock of realization. “Stop!”

Tom tried to respond, but his feet struck a patch of ice and started to skid. They spun around, careening across the road, until Tom slammed up against a brick wall. “Miss…Stanton. What's the matter? Are you hurt?”

She looked up at his metal face. “You're taking me to the Hall of Paragons?”

“You said you needed…medical help. That is the closest place to receive it.”

She shook her head violently. “No! They confined you to the house. If you go there now, looking like this…They won't let you leave, and after Nathaniel tells his version of the story they'll destroy you.”

His face turned toward hers. She had never seen him wearing his “human” eyes before. The effect of it was far more unsettling than she could imagine. There was something about them being not-quite human that made them even more monstrous than his artfully painted features ever had been. “You're hurt. Getting you some…help is my first priority.”

“But not at the cost of your life, Tom.”

“Then where should I take you?”

She pointed southward. “Our family doctor. He has his office on Thirty-fifth and Seventh.”

“That is quite a bit…farther away.”

“I won't have you disassembled on my account. Nothing is worth that. Anyway, I don't think I'm hurt that badly.” The actual sensations of pain seemed to be growing more intense, and appearing in more places. “Some scratches, mostly. I'm guessing that Nathaniel's pride was wounded more than I was.” But her sight was starting to return in the left eye. Perhaps it had been more shock than anything else. She just hoped that the frost creeping up her dress didn't mean her exposed foot would be frostbitten before they arrived.

They had only been standing still for half a minute, but already a small crowd of onlookers had begun to form down the block. “All right…Miss Stanton. I will take you to your…doctor.” He began to move again.

“And then what?”

Tom's shoes, or what was left of them, made a loud rhythmic slapping as they pounded against the sidewalk. “I'm not sure I understand your question.”

“After you've delivered me to safety, what will you do?”

“I have retrieved…Mr. Wickham's notebook from his corpse. He had made some…inquiries in his attempt to discover which member of the Paragons it is that has turned traitor. I shall endeavor to continue that investigation.”

“To what end?”

“The Sleuth sent me out last night to investigate a…warehouse where he believed I would find evidence of the…conspiracy. I was attacked, but I also discovered evidence that someone has stolen…Sir Dennis's inventions for their own ends.

“And that was where you were when…”

“…Mr. Wickham was killed,” Tom replied.

“But you can take the other Paragons to the warehouse!”

“Unfortunately it was completely destroyed.”

Sarah frowned. “Why is it that the Paragons seem unable to enter a building without demolishing it?”

“I could not…answer that question.”

Sarah barked out a laugh. “Nor should you! But if that's the case, then who is the traitor?”

“I still cannot be certain.”

“I'm not trying to play twenty questions with you, Tom. Who do you
think
it is?”

There was a long pause before his reply. “I don't think it is wise for you to become any more…involved in this…affair than you already are…Miss Stanton.

“As you said earlier, the fact that…Nathaniel will report this…encounter between us will already make things far too dangerous for you once the traitor…realizes he has been found out.”

“Don't patronize me, Tom. Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean that I'm unable to think.”

“Of course not…Miss Stanton. I have no bias toward your gender. But I am no longer in a position to…protect you.”

“Protect me? From whom?”

“The…Paragons, or anyone else who would wish you harm.”

“My father is the
leader
of the Paragons!”

“As was…Sir Dennis.”

She gripped his arm more tightly. “Do you think he could be next?”

“No. At least there is no…reason to believe so as of yet.”

She relaxed slightly, although she was unsure whether she could believe him. “That's some good news, at least.”

Tom came to a sudden halt. He spun around sharply, then quickly traversed a small set of stairs. “We are here…Miss Stanton.”

“Perhaps it's time you started calling me by my first name.”

“If you wish…Sarah.” Tom lowered her gently to the ground. Even after the journey through the winter wind, the bricks were shockingly cold against the exposed skin of her foot.

“I do.” She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a hug. His slightly inhuman shape made it awkward, but she held him close against her for a moment, feeling the thousands of vibrations as the machinery inside of him churned. Sarah wondered for a moment if this was how Tom sensed the world, feeling the movements of everything around him. “Thank you, Tom. I know things have been hard recently, but I've grown rather fond of you over the last few years.”

“I appreciate your trust in me…Sarah.” He put his left arm around her gently and squeezed back. Sarah was surprised. She hadn't expected it. “I will do everything in my power to…prove that your faith in me is not misplaced.”

“Pish. You have nothing to prove to me, Tom. Or to anyone.” The cold was starting to get to her now. She could feel the shivers rising up, sapping what remained of her strength. Another minute and she'd collapse to the ground.

“The others may not be able to see it, Tom, but you're more like Darby than any of them care to admit.”

He let go of her and took her hand. “I found our time together…pleasurable.”

“Don't give up hope,” she said quietly. “We'll find a way to save you.”

“I am afraid that after today there are not many…outcomes in which I will continue to exist for long.”

Sarah let go of his hand and pointed a finger at him. “Don't say that!” She was surprised to feel tears welling up in her eyes.

“But if I am destroyed, I will endeavor to leave whatever…information I gather where you can find it.”

“I thought you said I shouldn't get involved.”

“When I am…gone you will be the only one who still knows that the…Paragons are compromised. Your honesty and…forthrightness will be needed.” He pulled the pneumatic gun free from his iron arm and held it out to her. A length of tubing trailed after it back into his arm. “You may need this.”

Sarah waved it away. “A gun? I can't—”

Tom moved it closer to her. “It is an air-powered weapon. It was created by…Sir Dennis for…Nathaniel.”

She took it and cradled it between her hands. “It won't kill?”

“It does not have to. Now please hold the base of the…weapon toward me.”

Sarah did so, and Tom twisted something into it with his left hand. The tubing dangled free and then retracted into his arm.

“It uses fortified steam. I have modified it so that it is weaker and safer than it once was, but still powerful enough to protect you.” Reaching under his chest plate he pulled out a small metal sphere. “You will need to find your own supply of…fortified steam once you have used this.” It had a brass nozzle with a grooved fitting along the top of it. He snapped it into place along the bottom of the weapon. With the brass ball underneath the barrel, the weapon had a gangly, otherworldly appearance. “But it will shoot at least…ten times before then.” He flipped it over before placing the weapon back into her hand, grip first. Then he reached out and rapped on the door behind her.

Sarah lifted up her bustle and shoved the gun in between the hoops. When she dropped it back into place the weapon was invisible. Sarah was pleased to discover that the garment was good for something. “I want one more thing from you, Tom.”

“What is it…Sarah?”

She stood up on her tiptoes and then reached her hand up behind his neck. Their faces moved closer together.

Sarah grabbed the Sleuth's mask and began to tug it up and over his head. “This.”

He realized what she wanted and used his hand to untie the cord. Once that was done it came away easily. “I think…Mr. Wickham would be happy to know you have it.”

The sound of someone clambering down the stairs could be heard from inside the house. “But you should be…careful. Sir…Dennis said that when a man puts on a mask he discovers his greatest…confidence and his darkest desire at the same moment.”

She looked up at him and smiled, her hand tightly clutching her prize. “It's lucky for me that I'm not a man, then.”

“Stay safe…Sarah Stanton.”

“You too, Tom.” She gave him a kiss on the side of his face. It was cold against her lips.

Tom turned and moved down the stairs. “Good-bye.”

Sarah watched him as he began to run down the street. It was a loping, almost animal movement, like a rabbit or a deer. The mechanical man turned a corner and vanished into the streets of Manhattan just as the door behind her opened.

She turned to see the doctor's assistant looking down at her with shock and horror. “What in the name of heaven has happened to you?”

Seeing herself in the woman's terrified eyes she realized just how frightful she must look. “I've been in a fight, I'm afraid.” Then her legs gave out, and Sarah heard the woman scream out her name as she collapsed to the ground, the world turning mercifully black.