Ticker

by Lisa Mantchev

  “You really think so? You think them fools to be wary of a man who kidnapped people and experimented on them?” The muscles in my chest tightened like strings on a violin. I’d seen the pictures in the papers, faces that would haunt me for a lifetime. “The last girl, Nic . . . the last victim was only ten years old. What excuse could he give for that?”

  “He did it for you, Penny.” Nic kept his voice calm, but an echo of Warwick’s mad passion bled through. “All he ever wanted to do was help you. He told me he just needs the original diagrams and a bit of time to finish your new Ticker.”

  Despite sitting so close to the fire, I felt the cold creeping up my legs and arms. A spreading frost reached for my clockwork heart with icy fingers. “Did you know any of this was going to happen? The jailbreak? The kidnapping?”

  “No!” Nic’s jaw clenched. “He never said a word to me, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. Or sorry he escaped.”

  “Nic, people died in that explosion!”

  Now his hands were balled up into fists. “You died in my arms!”

  “This morning was just a fainting spell!”

  “You know damn well that’s not what I meant!”

  Yes, I knew what he meant. The memory of that particular day was stitched into the scars on my chest, relived with each faint ticktock inside me. We’d been picnicking at Sebastian’s country estate. Carteblanche rested its elbows on thousands of acres of rolling lawns, ancient oak trees, and streams. The house itself was the epitome of a country manor: vaguely drafty, enormous, echoing. Thick plaster coated the walls, and the gauze hangings obscured wooden shutters. Nic and I spent a considerable number of our leisure and holiday hours there, perhaps because adult supervision was such a rarity.

  On that day, though, my parents had accompanied us. It had been a scant month since Dimitria had died, and we were all clad in a cloud of mourning black. The shadows under Mama’s eyes were the purple-blue of a bruise, and her reddened nose suggested nights of weeping. Papa wore the bleary look of an owl coaxed into the daylight, blinking in surprise at the glowing orb of the sun hanging in a brilliant blue sky. I half expected him to hoot and hurry back to the car; instead he retreated into a bottle of Gentian Amaros.

  Warwick had been persuaded to come along with us. He looked ragged about the edges, unkempt and uncared for, as if he’d been sleeping in his suit because it was the last thing Dimitria had touched. Perhaps it was, but I was too afraid to ask. Afraid that if I offered him any words, any comfort, the dam I’d used to shore up my own tears would break.

  Hoping to escape the others and my own feelings of guilt, I had gone out into the fields with Sebastian, Violet, and Nic. After reveling in a few moments of freedom and the sun’s warmth on my upturned face, I consulted my pocket copy of Felix Bertram’s Field Guide to Lepidoptera Mechanika, Second Edition. At the ready was a new net of my own devising, one capable of stunning a captured Butterfly with a small electrical discharge.

  “The elusive Brimstone shall be mine, by any means fair or foul,” I called to the others, though I would have traded a hundred of the rare and coveted Gonepteryx rhamni—nay, my whole collection of Butterflies—just to have my older sister back.

  “I don’t think you ought to be chasing about after mechanical insects,” Mama said, fretting when we returned to the blankets, nets empty, for glasses of lemonade and sandwiches.

  Over the previous four weeks, her manner of parenting had shifted from devoted to smothering. When she wasn’t reading tarot cards or dragging me to a séance, she monitored my pulse, my color, every breath drawn, and every mouthful eaten. Nothing was ever good enough to set her mind at ease; her fears were like the lions prowling behind the bars at the Square Park Zoo. She even went so far as to withdraw me from school and had forbidden me from riding cycles and horses both.

  Mama’s forehead puckered like the row of pinch pleats in her bustle skirt. “Isn’t her color a bit high, Emery?”

  Papa was already snoring, having consumed his bottle, so it was Nic who answered.

  “She was walking in the sun for an hour, Mama. Note the freckles on her nose, a sure sign of good health.” With the eye she couldn’t see, my twin winked at me before clapping Warwick on the shoulder. “How much longer are you going to fiddle with that thing?”

  Startled, the surgeon peered up from the clockwork innards of the original Ticker prototype. “It’s almost done. Not as refined as I would like, though, and the pumping mechanism sticks every so often. The next one will be more sophisticated. Then . . .”

  He paused, inevitably thinking of the surgery I’d need to keep me alive.

  I didn’t want to reflect on it any more than he did. “I’m going for another walk. Would anyone else care to join me?”

  Ever willing to play the knight in shining armor to a needful lord or lady, Sebastian volunteered. “I have a new project in development I’d like you to take a look at.”

  Before Mama could protest, I had found my feet. With Violet and Nic trailing behind, Sebastian led us to the Carteblanche stables. Inside, the scents of warm metal, saddle soap, and hay tickled my nostrils. Mellow sunshine slanted in through the chinks in the wooden slats and bounced off the gleaming surfaces of a prototype ThoroughBred. Seventeen hands of slender, copper-plated equine rose above us. Its forelock, withers, and hooves already showed signs of blue-green oxidation, but the patina only added to her charm.

  “I give you Her Royal Highness, the Princess Andromeda!” Sebastian said with a grand flourish.

  “Better to have named her Bucket of Bolts and a Prayer,” Nic said, “because that’s what you’ll need for her to complete one jump, much less an entire course.”

  “Never mind him,” I said to the metallic mount, reaching for a bridle and reins. “You’re gorgeous.”

  “She’s hot-blooded,” Sebastian said with barely suppressed pride. “I modeled her after the Bhaskarian racers.”

  The winding key had stuck at first, but he forced it around. Andromeda’s shuttered eyes slid open, the amber fire in their depths growing brighter as her inner gears picked up speed. Whiiiiir-clang! Whiiiiir-clang! She lifted one dainty foot, then the other, following him out of the barn.

  Nic’s professional curiosity soon got the better of him. “I suppose the jumps knock her balance wheels loose?”

  “The mechanics spend more time realigning her innards than they do riding her,” Sebastian admitted with a laugh.

  I had no idea what came over me in that moment. Perhaps it was the desire to call my fate my own. The need to take control of my life. Or it could have been the thought of Dimitria dropping dead without warning and the knowledge that the very same thing could happen to me at any time.

  “There’s no better diagnostic than putting her through her paces,” I announced, abruptly grasping Andromeda’s reins.

  “By all the Cogs of the Carillon,” Nic said the moment he regained his wits and his tongue, “you’re going to kill yourself! And then Mama is going to kill me!”

  Though I’d always cherished my twin’s good opinion of me, I was beyond tired of being bossed about. “You can weep for me when I’m gone and not a moment sooner!”

  The words cut deep; I saw it on Nic’s face.

  Conscience already pricking me, I gathered my skirts in my fist. “Give me a hand, Sebastian.”

  He looked from his pristine gray gloves to my muddied boots, then, with a long-suffering sigh, helped me to clamber up. “The things I endure for you, my dear Penelope.”

  “Your devotion is noted along with your sacrifice.” I stroked Andromeda’s glowing copper coat. Then, squeezing with my knees and holding on for dear life, I shouted, “Tally-ho!”

  She had leapt forward, racing down the road. My perch was precarious, but the pace was exhilarating. I lost my hat, shedding hairpins until my curls tangled over my shoulders in wild streamers. It might have been a few weeks since I last rode, but I hadn’t forgotten the way of it. The mechanical steed was a bit tricky
to master, with an occasionally hitching gait that necessitated adjustments of balance and posture.

  Determined to take at least one jump, I had aimed her for a low stone wall. Behind me, I heard a faint cry from Nic.

  “Penny, take care!”

  “I’m trying, but there’s only so much care I can manage right now!” I braced myself for the jump.

  It had felt like we were airborne forever. The forest blurred into shifting draperies of moss-green velvet. The sun crystallized like a drop of honey on a plate of robin’s-egg blue. Then we landed, and several things happened simultaneously:

  I held my breath.

  Andromeda’s innards made a terrible noise.

  My heart seized up.

  With a gasp and a cry, I had let go of the reins and clutched at my chest. My nails scrabbled ineffectually against the black mourning dress, but even if I’d been able to tear the cloth aside, there was nothing I could do to turn back the tide of pain. The world cartwheeled around me as I slid off Andromeda and landed in the mud. Unable to breathe, unable to think, I stared up at the sky as it darkened to midnight taffeta shot through with brilliant silver shooting stars.

  Death wears a ball gown.

  Nic had reached me first. He scooped me up and carried me back to the house at a flat run, calling for help, for our parents, and, in between gasps, he begged me not to die. My head bounced off his chest with every hasty step, but I hadn’t the breath to protest. It hurt. It hurt, but I clung to the pain with tenacious fingers, welcoming it. As long as I could feel anything at all, I was still alive.

  But not for long, I feared.

  I heard Violet sobbing, my mother screaming my name, Warwick’s shout of “Get her into the house!”

  Then we had entered the kitchen; all cold white tile and shining metal surfaces, it served as an excellent stand-in for a hospital. Nic set me down on the table near the fire, and Warwick turned up his sleeves.

  “Compress her chest with your hands,” he ordered my brother. “Keep her blood moving.”

  Someone must have fetched his medicine bag from the car. The next thing I knew, gentle hands clamped a cotton rag reeking of ether over my nose and mouth. I tried to pull it away as everything began to fade. Nic leaned over me, and his hazel eyes looked into mine.

  That was the moment he broke; I saw it happen as clearly as if he’d cracked in half.

  After that, there was nothing. Nothing until I woke with a bit of clockwork machinery lodged in my chest. A piece of technology I was never meant to test. Ticktock was the reminder it gave me with every passing second.

  Looking at my brother now, I knew I wasn’t the only one with scars. After a year of shadowboxing, it seemed only willpower and the quiet determination to keep me alive kept him going.

  “Every time you die, it breaks something inside me.” Nic let out a harsh breath. “What if I can’t get your Ticker restarted the next time your balance wheels go off-kilter?”

  “Cygna was only a day old when she passed. Dimitria made it to eighteen.” I drew my knees up, wrapping my arms about them and resting my chin atop. “The Farthing women tend to leave the party without notice.”

  “Don’t say that.” He swallowed so hard that I could see the knot in his throat bob down and up again. “You can’t leave me here by myself. The only Farthing boy. The only one without a death sentence hanging over my heart. Mama and Papa already look through me, trying to see where you are, what you’re doing, how you’re faring. If you die, they’ll never see me properly again.”

  I would have argued, but I felt much the same after Dimitria died, like I was the ghost haunting the house. “I won’t go quietly, Nic. To my last breath, I’ll be kicking and screaming and fighting to take another.”

  “With Warwick’s help, you wouldn’t have to,” he said softly.

  “He took our parents, Nic. How can you trust him?”

  “I . . . I guess I can sympathize. Always trying to do the right thing, even when loved ones fight you every step of the way.” Reaching past me, he snagged my messenger bag. A quick rummage produced Papa’s watch. “Mind if I hold onto this for a bit?”

  I leaned against his shoulder. “A sundial isn’t going to be of much use by firelight.”

  “True.” Nic snapped it open and lifted the metal dial into place. “But maybe it will keep me from wandering too far afield in my dreams.” Pressing the briefest of kisses to my forehead, he made his way to one of the unoccupied beds and climbed in.

  I also retired, though I didn’t think I’d sleep at all. Staring at the top bunk, I listened to the soft, even breathing of the others. The fire was mere embers by the time I relaxed enough to drift off. Swirling in my head like fog off the River Aire, the events of the day largely featured the honorable Marcus Kingsley and the expression on his face when he’d placed the iron bracelets on my wrists. Recalling him there, on bended knee and looking up at me so earnestly, did very odd things to my Ticker.

  I rolled over and put the pillow atop my head.

  “Penny?” A gentle hand on my shoulder roused me.

  “I can fetch a bucket of water,” said someone decidedly masculine.

  My brain skipped about, leaping to the realization that Sebastian and Violet stood over me, that I wasn’t in my own four-poster bed, that this wasn’t Glasshouse at all, and that my hair must look a fright.

  Being a layabout isn’t one of my countless faults, and I can go from asleep to awake faster than Sebastian’s Combustible can charge down a thoroughfare. “What time is it?”

  “Rise-and-shine time.” Violet was already dressed in a gown of navy silk twill, expensive for all its lack of frills and fussing. It was strange to see her so somberly dressed, but she’d made it her own with an acid-green sash and a matching ribbon tied about her head.

  I squinted at the clock on the mantelpiece. “Did I miss breakfast?”

  “Perhaps that’s where he went,” Sebastian said, turning to stir up the fire in the hearth. He wore a suit that was not his. Though it lacked the impeccable tailoring that was his calling card, he looked affably rakish, as usual.

  “Where who went?” I stretched to remove the kinks from my spine.

  “Nic was gone by the time we woke up,” he clarified.

  Violet sniffed to indicate that my brother’s whereabouts were of no interest to her. I, however, sat up and cracked my head on the wooden slats of the bunk above.

  “He’s not here?”

  “I checked the lavatories already,” Sebastian said, clearly puzzled by my reaction. “But not the dining hall.”

  An uncomfortable tingling took up residence in my spine and tickled at the back of my brain, like I needed to sneeze but couldn’t quite manage it.

  Damn it, Nic, I was worried enough about Mama and Papa. Now I have to worry about you as well?

  I could easily imagine his retort of “Turnabout is fair play.”

  Hastening from the bed, I ran my fingers through the snarled mess that was my hair and cast about for something to wear. “Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

  “You still have circles under your eyes from yesterday, and we thought you could use an extra hour.” Violet had approximately four hundred and seventy-three frowns in her repertoire, which ranged from “The Biscuits Went Flat” to “You’re Being Dreadfully Annoying.” Just now, still peeved with my brother, she wore “Don’t You Use That Tone of Voice on Me.”

  “There’s an hour, and then there’s an hour,” was my response as I twitched aside the collar of my nightdress. Inserting the key into the Ticker’s faceplate, I turned it for the first of a hundred clicks with a wince; the touch of the cold metal was like splashing ice water over my face. “I assume there’s a dress for me?”

  “There is.” When I was done with the winding, Violet handed me a skirt and bodice of bottle green, then flapped her hands at Sebastian. “Turn your back, please.”

  “And here I thought I would be allowed to witness that mystery of mysteries, a lady’s to
ilette,” he said as he obliged.

  She slapped his shoulder anyway. “Don’t be pert.”

  Fingers flying, I dressed in record time. Dreadnaught would have marveled at the sight of it. “Despite his other shortcomings, Marcus Kingsley has decent taste in clothing.”

  “Impressive how he got your measurements so close to perfect,” Sebastian said, peeking over his shoulder with a wicked grin.

  Violet forced me to sit long enough for her to plait my hair and coil it at the nape of my neck. “We’ll probably have to take one of those SkyDarts back to the city,” she said, her words muffled by a mouthful of pins. “No need to look a right mess when we arrive.”

  “Breakfast first.” Sebastian checked his pocket watch as he led the way to the door. “I warn you, I’ll start nibbling the draperies if I have to wait much longer.”

  The commissary was a shifting sea of gray wool, so Nic would be easy to pick out. Indeed, the dresses Violet and I wore, plain as they were in contrast to our usual attire, drew a bit of attention. In his midnight black three-piece suit, Sebastian enjoyed himself thoroughly, strolling like a gentleman taking the air, greeting every enlisted man and woman, officer and private alike, with his dimples on full display.

  “Stop that,” Violet hissed at him as she slid into a chair. “You’re making an utter ass of yourself.”

  “I can’t seem to help myself,” Sebastian said without taking his eyes off the group sitting adjacent us. “Life is short, so I’m going to have dessert whenever possible.”

  The morning papers were stacked on the sturdy oak tables. Although filled with coverage of the courthouse blast, they contained precious little information beyond the ugliest of details: “The damage to the structure is worse than originally reported.” “Twenty-seven people were rushed to Currey Hospital.” “Eleven Dead!”

  More people had died as a result of their injuries, then. I glanced over the worst of the headlines, my stomach sinking further with each typeset word. By the time I finished, I had no appetite, though I had to eat or suffer the consequences later. The military’s idea of a simple repast meant that the rolls were plain instead of braided and the butter wasn’t carved into rosettes. Brawn and galantines quivered alongside fish kedgeree and crinkled strips of bacon. Homely stewed prunes occupied the space next to a platter of fresh apricots and strawberries. I studiously avoided the foods that wobbled, making my way through a plate of bread and fruit.