The Flux Engine Read online

  A lead weight dropped into Robi’s gut.

  Damn him.

  “You can’t leave me here,” she hissed.

  “I’ve got the keys,” he said, jingling them suggestively. “I can walk out of here right now and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  “I can yell.”

  He shook his head.

  “Nice try,” he said. “The others must have gone out. No one came when this one got shocked.”

  Damn, damn, damn.

  “You won’t last an hour out there,” she said. “They’ll find you and bring you right back here.”

  “That’s why I need you,” John said. “You need me to get out of your cell, and I need you to help me pick up the trail of the tattooed woman. Is it a deal?”

  Robi sighed. This was not going the way she’d anticipated. All she had to do was get out and help John get on a train for somewhere else and then everybody would be fine. Now crystal boy wanted to muck up a perfectly good plan with his personal revenge.

  Still, what choice did she have?

  “Fine,” she said. “I know a few people and we can ask around. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone who remembers a woman with a tattoo on half her face.”

  “Swear,” he said.

  Unbidden, the old man’s words came rushing to her lips. “You don’t know me, so I’m going to let that one go. When I give my word, it’s my bond, my honor. If anyone breaks this deal, it will be you.”

  John seemed to think about this for a moment, then he nodded, turning off the flux valve in the shocker box. A few minutes later, Robi stood outside the Scrapstalker cell, retrieving her dropped lock pick.

  “What now?” John asked, eyeing the solid door leading to the front office.

  Robi closed the door of the Scrapstalker cell and re-locked the door. “Reactivate the shocker box.”

  “Why?” John asked.

  “It’s something my dad taught me,” she said. “No one wonders how you got out of an unlocked cell. But if they find you gone and the door locked, it keeps them guessing. People literally thought my dad could walk through walls.”

  John considered that for a moment, then shrugged and turned the rubber valve to re-activate the shocker box.

  Without waiting for the cell to charge again, Robi tied the deputy’s keys back on his belt, then led the way to the cell block door. Her steps were light and noiseless. John, however, sounded like an army of steam chickens on parade.

  “Step where I step,” she said.

  “I am.”

  At least the sheriff and his men seemed to be out on other business.

  As Robi reached the door, she dropped onto her belly, and peered beneath the door. The outer office was empty.

  “Where is everyone?” John asked.

  Robi shrugged as she picked open the lock on the cell block door.

  “Out on patrol,” she said. “Who cares? We’re free.”

  She eased the door open and John followed her out into the empty front room. A shadow moved across the wall as someone walked by outside and John held his breath until they were out of sight.

  “Relax,” Robi said, locking the cell block door behind him.

  “How do we get out?” John said, his voice cracking. “The only door leads right out into the street.”

  Robi rolled her eyes. It was good to feel like she was in charge again. She took John’s face in her hands and looked him right in the eye.

  “Nobody out there knows we’ve escaped, John,” she said. “Once we walk out that door, we’re just two people going about their business among thousands. If we look like we belong, no one will notice us, and, more importantly, no one will remember us.”

  “I’m wearing a shirt that’s too big for me and you don’t have any shoes,” John pointed out. She shrugged.

  “They’re still stuck to Pemberton’s rug. Don’t worry, you’d be surprised how nobody actually notices your feet.”

  She moved silently to the door and looked out. It was about mid-day and dozens of people of all descriptions were hurrying about their business.

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to John. “Just follow my lead and everything will be fine. Just breathe deep, take my arm, and we’ll walk out nice and easy.”

  John nodded, but his skin had gone pasty. He took a deep breath and seemed to calm down a bit. He took Robi’s arm and escorted her through the door. She sensed him start to panic as he realized he didn’t know which way to turn. Robi tugged his arm to the left and he turned, following her lead. Walking steadily, they moved away from the jail, turning at the nearest cross street.

  John’s arm trembled under her fingers. He was shaking. She remembered the feeling, the first time she’d hid in a bush while armed men searched for her mere feet away. She’d been sure there was a glowstone placard over her head proclaiming her hiding place.

  “Calm down,” she said in her most soothing voice.

  John took a deep breath and his arm stopped shaking.

  “Where are we going?” he asked after a moment.

  “Wardrobe.”

  “What?” John asked. Robi sighed.

  “You really have led a sheltered life, haven’t you? Wardrobe is a theater term, it’s where the costumes are stored.”

  John shot her a confused look but didn’t question her further. Robi felt a little twinge of guilt for lording her skill over him, but then he had blackmailed her into helping him. She deserved a little payback.

  After a few minutes, Robi led them away from the saloons and shops that occupied the center of Sprocketville. Gradually the streets became narrower and dirtier. They passed dozens of people going about their business. Each time John’s arm tensed up, but she just led him on as if nothing was wrong. A team of laborers from the pipeworks was repairing a steam line outside a smithy and the air was heavy with mist that swirled into little eddies as they passed.

  Eventually, Robi turned along an unpaved alley that separated a line of ramshackle row houses from warehouse lane on the edge of town. Between the alley and the backs of the houses were small yards, no more than fifteen foot square. Like the dirty, unrepaired houses, the yards were magnets for clutter, broken things, and trash. A few appeared in good repair, as if their owners actually cared, but most were overgrown and shoddy.

  Perfect.

  The great thing about overgrown frontier towns like Sprocketville was that with this many people all crammed in together, someone was always doing laundry. A gray towel hung from a wash line strung between one of the houses and a makeshift pole made out of a copper pipe. As they passed Robi reached out casually and pulled it from the line.

  “Here,” she said, passing it to John and pointing to a foul looking water pump beside the rear entrance of a warehouse. “Wash your face and try to do something with your hair.”

  As John moved to obey, Robi continued casually walking up the street, appraising the various laundry for size as she went. She slipped a drab gray dress off one line as she passed and quickly slipped it over her head, covering her tan shirt and pants. To this, she added a worn-out blue corset, tying it loosely in the back, just enough to make the dress more form-fitting. She still didn’t have any shoes, but the dress was long enough to hide her bare feet.

  Satisfied with her attire, she snatched a few more things for John and turned back the way she’d come. She found John naked to the waist and dripping in front of the public pump. The water smelled of sulfur but John had dutifully used it to slick back his unruly hair.

  “Much better,” Robi said.

  He looked up at her, water still dripping from his hair, and just stared.

  “I’m glad you like it,” she said, turning so he could see her stolen clothes. “Lace me in a bit tighter.”

  John pulled the laces of the corset tighter and tied them off.

  “Here,” she said, pressing the bundle of clothes she had stolen for him into his hands. “Put these on.”

  John slipped into the shirt, bu
ttoning it quickly, then looked around as he undid his belt. Robi turned her back, willing her cheeks not to blush. A few minutes later he stepped out in front of her. The clothes were meager enough, a threadbare green shirt and brown waistcoat that almost matched the pants. In more civilized clothes he might even be handsome.

  “You’ll do,” she said. “Now come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shopping,” Robi said with a grin.

  “We’re wanted by the law and don’t have any money.”

  Robi sighed. John wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes by himself.

  “Silly boy,” she said, patting him on the face as if he were a child. “That’s the first thing on my list.”

  A shadow of irritation crossed his face but he didn’t respond.

  Money would be easy enough to come by. Wallets could be lifted and needed items pilfered. Still, it wouldn’t be enough to get rid of John. If she was going to make good on her promise to help him find the tattooed woman, she was going to need more.

  “How do we find the woman who shot me?”

  One problem at a time, the old man whispered in her head.

  Robi fixed John with her eyes and smiled, an expression her father had drummed into her to soften up males. Based on John’s soft-brained expression, it worked.

  “I thought we might have better luck finding her if we showed her picture around.”

  John’s expression soured.

  “I don’t have a picture of her,” he said. “I never met her before.”

  “I know someone who can help with that,” Robi said, hoping she could fulfill on that promise. “But there is something very important we have to do first.”

  “What?”

  “Eat,” she said. “The last decent meal I had was Thursday.”

  Chapter 7

  The Tintype

  John sat at a small, dingy table in a small, dingy restaurant that catered to the laborers of warehouse row. Across from him, Robi sat, busily finishing off her second plate of some grayish stew that bore no discernible resemblance to actual food. The windows of the restaurant were old, warped, and coated with a pervasive layer of grime that rendered the outside world in a gray and brown haze. To take his mind off what Robi was eating, John scrubbed a small patch of the window clean with his sleeve so he could watch the tradesmen and teamsters in the street outside. A row of steam wagons sat in front of a granary across the street. Each of the boxy, six-wheeled contraptions had smoke seeping from its stack as it sat idling.

  A steam chicken lurched up the street, its cargo platform loaded with boxes and parcels wrapped in brown paper. Another, smaller one chugged by in the opposite direction, towing a trailer piled high with bricks.

  John had always been fascinated by those mini-walkers. They came in all sizes but were built around the same basic design, two legs with a cargo platform on top. To get the balance right, the knees of the legs had to face backwards. This allowed the walker to run at surprising speeds and gave birth to its unfortunate nickname, The Steam Chicken.

  He’d spent hours watching the men who delivered food to the orphan asylum come and go in their cargo walker. One time, when Doctor Shultz sent him to deliver harmony crystals to a farmer in Maple Dell, he’d actually ridden in the overland coach, a steam chicken that could carry a dozen people and stood twenty feet high. The trip had been hot and dusty with the walker lurching every step of the way, but it had felt like a grand adventure.

  John smiled at the memory.

  Sprocketville was big for a frontier town with a constant flow of goods and people moving through her, making their way between the Colonial Alliance and the western territories. In the early days of westward expansion, most goods and raw materials were transported in walkers, multi-legged steam platforms, more commonly known as Tarantulas. The problem with big walkers, of course, was speed—they tended to be slow. Nowadays most things went by train or airship.

  John’s reverie was interrupted as Robi’s spoon clattered into her empty bowl and she pushed it away.

  “Oh, I needed that.” She burped and then sat back, rubbing her stomach.

  John wondered where the petite girl had put two full plates of stew, but decided that asking might not be the smartest choice. Robi pulled two bits from the purse she had bought off a street peddler and laid it on the table.

  “There’s still a little money left,” she said, peering inside. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?”

  He shook his head. Between breaking out of jail, stealing clothes, and watching Robi lift a wallet off a portly businessman, John’s stomach was tied up in nervous knots. He was certain that any minute now they would be recognized, and Sheriff Batts would close in with his deputies in tow. Every time the door opened, his heart jumped into his throat. At this point he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to eat again. Robi shrugged and rose.

  “Let’s go, then.” She didn’t look around or check outside. She just rose, walked to the door, and left with John hurrying after her.

  “Aren’t you worried someone will see us?” John hissed, hurrying to catch up.

  “Only if you keep walking like you’re trying to hide at the same time,” she said. “Straighten up and give me your arm.”

  John did as he was told and Robi took his arm, walking leisurely, as if she had no particular place to go.

  “That’s better,” she said under her breath. “Remember, people only notice things that are out of place. A pair of young lovers in working-class clothes won’t even raise an eyebrow in this part of town.”

  “L-lovers?” he stuttered, suddenly flushing.

  “Easy, John,” Robi said. She patted his arm with her callused hand. “We’re trying to paint a picture in the minds of people who see us.”

  John smiled and nodded as they passed a man and woman in coveralls that marked them as mechanics.

  “Why do we want to be seen at all?”

  “We can’t avoid being seen,” Robi said, pretending to admire something in the grimy window of a pawn shop. “But when the sheriff or that enforcer of yours ask these people what they saw, they won’t remember seeing two escaped prisoners, just regular people.”

  John wasn’t sure that would work, but his head was beginning to hurt from trying to follow Robi’s explanations so he let it drop.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “I’m taking you to see Fixer,” she said, walking on.

  “Who?”

  “He’s one of my dad’s old pals. I sell him things whenever I’m in town.”

  She had finally said something John understood. You couldn’t just steal things and then sell them to a regular merchant who might summon the sheriff on you. A thief needed someone he could trust.

  “He’s your fence.”

  “Fixer’s more than just a fence,” Robi said. “He’s the biggest scrounge west of the blight. He’s also a whiz at building things. Give him a set of blueprints for anything and he’ll build it out of scraps, spit, and bailing wire. He’s got a shop full of strange equipment.”

  “Such as?”

  “The kinds of things that regular people aren’t supposed to have.” Robi grinned and led him onward.

  O O O

  Fixer’s place was a dirty, one-story building of adobe brick squatting among a row of dirty shops. The roof was set on at a funny angle, as if parts of it had been built at different times by different people, making the building look as if it were leaning to one side. Some of the brown clay shingles ran straight and true, while others meandered like a drunkard on a Saturday night. The windows were cracked and dirty, framed by sturdy-looking, unpainted shutters. The front door stood ajar, and a faded yellow sign hung over it that read, Ironmongery.

  John escorted Robi across the wide street, between a row of steam carts and up to the dirty shop. A puff of cool air washed over him as he entered and he could hear the noise of a large fan spinning from somewhere in back. Boxes and bags of all descriptions were pil
ed in every available space, spilling cogs and wheels and unidentifiable bits of metal onto the floor. Machine parts, crystals, and gears littered a dozen sturdy workbenches along one wall. Everything from rusted scrap to exquisitely decorated boxes could be found among the chaos.

  In the middle of this unmoving avalanche of junk sat a portly man in a pinstriped white shirt and black waistcoat. A thick shock of red hair stuck out from under a shabby gray newsboy cap and spilled down his face into mutton-chop sideburns. A brass plate covered the left side of his face from the nose to the ear and John could see the rivets where it had been attached to his skull. A brass tube emerged from the metallic skin and ended in a lens of convex glass set into the center of the plate. John had seen prosthetic replacements before, but wondered where the master of junk would come up with the money for a new eye. As they moved in from the doorway, the glass of the mechanical eye turned toward them, catching the light from the open door.

  The image of him, sitting behind his low counter, surrounded by his wares, gave John the impression of an enormous red spider waiting patiently for its next prey to come along.

  “I can’t buy these,” the man was saying to a scrawny woman holding an open box. “There’s no way to tell what they’re for or if they’re any good.” He held up a crystal and adjusted his prosthetic eye to focus more tightly on it.

  “What if I sort them out?” the woman pleaded. “There’s got to be something in here that’s worth money.”

  “Fine,” he said, dropping the crystal back in the box and waving her away. “Just do it over there. I’ve got business to conduct.”

  “Hello, Fixer,” Robi said.

  The fat man fumbled to readjust the focus of his eye, then his face split into a wide grin.

  “Robi, darling,” he said in a thick Britannic accent. “I heard you’d been pinched.”

  “You know jail doesn’t agree with me.”

  As Robi and Fixer continued to greet each other, John’s attention wandered to the woman in the corner. She sat, squatting over her box, systematically taking out crystals and striking them with a chunk of steel and then pressing them against a crystal tester. The tester was supposed to register a good crystal with a green light, but it appeared to be broken. Each time she did it, the crystals rang out like bells. Most of the tones were sour and off key, the result of poorly grown or cracked crystals. Every once in a while there was a pure tone, but mostly they set John’s teeth on edge.