Real Girls Don't Rust

by Jennifer Carson

  * * *

  He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found:

  yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.

  —Job 20:8

  Dr. Job’s lifelight will be removed. The Dysart Official charged and convicted him of all the recent killings. Papa goes to the Ending ceremony. I can’t bring myself to face it. Instead, I go up to my room and draw the curtains as the sun sets on yet another day. I lift the strap of the eyepiece and remove it from around my head. I toss it down and assure myself I’m doing the right thing. As soon as I can, I’ll have the implanted sphere surgically removed. What I have failed to see for so long is that vision is something I already have; it is more than sight. It is my ideals, my sense of justice. It is my desire for equality and change, and it was already with me as a child when I accompanied my mother to the rally. It is something I still have now, even after witnessing the desire for power turn deadly, and experiencing a hateful mistrust that came so close to taking my friend.

  I rub the tender skin under the eyepiece and wait for a tear that will never fall. But I won’t wait forever, because all over Dysart City the golems and The Ω are waiting for someone with a voice to stand up and ask a question. To make a noise. And I am ready.

  Together, Stacey and I will finish what my mother began.

  The Henning Flyer

  Kristin Lanett

  A fine layer of coal dust covered her face. The wind swirled the heat from the firebox around her, making it difficult to breathe even with the handkerchief tied around her mouth. Muscles screamed in defiance as she shoveled the last of the coal into the monster’s burning maw.

  “Ellie! Get down here!” a gruff voice barked at her, but the bite was carried away on the wind.

  “Not now, Heatherton! I’ve almost,” she hit the throttle, “got it.” The engine belched, rumbled, and coughed out a small cloud of steam.

  “Looks like the old girl may have finally given up the ghost.” Gus Heatherton let out a hearty laugh and shook his head. “Storm is on the horizon. We need to take cover; could see some twisters out of it.”

  Ellie pulled up her goggles, revealing bright green eyes ringed in black. “All this you can tell from clouds that have to be at least a hundred miles away?” Smiling, she jumped down from the cab of the locomotive, her cotton work shirt and canvas trousers blackened with coal dust and wet with her sweat. Her grandfather’s railroader watch hung at her side, bouncing against her thigh as a constant reminder. Her blonde hair fell in two braids, one over each shoulder.

  She pulled the handkerchief down and breathed deep. The wind carried the pungent tang of sage, and she smelled hints of the spring wildflowers and prairie grasses starting to bloom. Out here, there were no acrid odors of people, horses, and industry heaped together as there were in the city.

  “Been out here all my life, Ellie. It’s not the clouds telling me, it’s my sniffer.” He tapped his nose and winked. Laying his hand against the matte-black train engine, he shook his head. “Sorry to see it looks like you’re still struggling to get this old girl running. Your grandpa felt he was this close.” He held his thumb and index finger a mere half-inch apart.

  Gus mentioning her grandpa caused Ellie’s heart to squeeze in her chest for just a moment. Making his dream a reality was why she’d packed up what little she had left in Chicago and come here, to the great plains of North Dakota. Well, that and the fact that her home had been burned to the ground. Still, she was the only one left who had a chance to make something of what he’d started.

  She decided to ignore Gus’s statement. “I don’t get it; it should be firing up. I rebuilt the regulator to Grandpa’s specifications.” She adjusted the black railroader’s hat that sat a bit lopsided on her head. Dust kicked up behind her boots. The hard ground could use some rain, she thought. “I guess we best get back to the house if what you say about the storm is right.” She lifted the watch, flipped it open, and gazed at its face, snapping it shut quickly. “Besides, it’s near quitting time.”

  Though her parents had moved her and her brother, Otto, to Chicago about the time Ellie had started to speak and he grunt, they had allowed her to visit her grandparents each summer until she was thirteen. Ellie had stuck to her grandpa’s side, watching and helping as he’d tinker with his creations in the evenings after his long days on the railroad. It was from him that her love of working with her hands and creating something from nothing was born. He was a man full of kindness and patience, and he had pushed Ellie to believe in herself and not give up easily, even when setbacks threatened to waylay her. The visits stopped, though, the year she turned thirteen; she was forced to find work to help her father after her mother had succumbed to consumption. It seemed nothing was quite the same after that.

  The mammoth, gleaming locomotive would be one of the fastest on the rails. Ellie’s grandfather had worked on it bit by bit over the years. He had decided it would bring those from the large cities back east to the Wild West, where they would watch the sun rise over the Rocky Mountains and see the wildlife from a custom flying machine that would detach from a specially-made flat car. Ellie vowed that not only would it cater to those with the ability to rent the airships, but that the standard passenger cars would allow those who were just arriving in America to be brought to the West to begin their lives anew at an affordable rate. She would give Mr. Pullman a run for his money; all passengers would travel in a style unheard of until now.

  Gus patted her shoulder. “If anyone can figure this out, you can, Ellie. However…”

  Ellie stopped and turned toward him. “‘However?’ However what, Heatherton? ‘However, if you don’t fix it and get it to Chicago, don’t worry, Ellie; you are, after all, just a girl.’ Is that about right?” She rested one hand on her hip, close to the Lefaucheux twenty-shot pistol nearly hidden by her large cotton shirt. The French pistol was modified, of course, to make it a more accurate shot.

  “Whoa, Ellie, take it easy. That was nowhere near what I was going to say. You are definitely Henning’s granddaughter—quick to anger and passionate as hell.”

  Ellie slowly smiled and dropped her hand from her hip. “Sorry, Gus. Too many years living in the city being asked why I wouldn’t just wear a corset and find a nice young man to settle down with.” Her voice was nasal and high, imitating the older women who constantly nagged at her.

  “Well, they have no idea what they’re saying. Besides, corsets really have no place out here.”

  Ellie laughed. “Yes, and they pinch something fierce.”

  They laughed and headed toward the two-room building that had been her grandfather’s home and workshop. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

  Back at home Gus settled into the scarred, overstuffed leather chair, lighting his double-bowled briarwood pipe. “Ahh, nothing like a good smoke after a long day in the field.”

  The soft vanilla tobacco fragrance almost had Ellie believing she’d turn and see her grandpa. Ellie nodded and smiled. “Or a day on the rails?”

  “Aye.” Gus was a foreman, promoted last year under Grandpa Henning. It was nothing but bad luck and a huge loss that Henning had passed from what the local doctor thought was a heart attack.

  Gas lamps threw their soft yellow light over the small interior of the workroom. Light reflected off the metal parts on the worktable and the gold-lettered spines of the books above her, Grandfather Henning’s life-long collection. Notes and drawings in his handwriting were pinned to the wood beams around the bookshelf and above the worktable.

  Ellie went about shuffling the parts that lay scattered, searching for the notes she had on the steam locomotive’s reworked engine. Rain started to fall, accompanied by two cracks of thunder and the flash of lightning, and Ellie wondered if perhaps Gus was right and a big storm was on the way. The weather was different on the plains than between the tall cramped buildings of the city.

  Gus pointed with his pipe down at Zedock, Ellie’s mechanical bulldog. “Perhaps you could tur
n the old boy on?”

  “Of course. It’s just not quite the same with him sitting there like a well-behaved statue.” Opening a side panel, Ellie wound the small creation to life. She’d brought Zedock from Chicago. It was one of her first creations that had turned out even better than she could have hoped. He may have been made of metal and tin with an old bedspring for a tail, but he was bulldog reinvented, all angles and some rough edges. Even better, he required no food and only occasionally expelled a nut or bolt.

  As she finished winding, Zedock’s joints popped and the wide metal mouth opened in a yawn as he came awake, the light glinting off his sharp teeth. Ellie had needed a protector in the city; for this reason, she’d given Zedock razor-sharp canines and fast, albeit tiny, moving legs. It seemed he was smiling now, though, as Gus scratched him behind the ears, treating him as if he were a flesh and blood dog.

  “The answer has to be here, Gus. It must be and I’m just missing it. If the regulator is not the problem, what is?” Ellie’s eyes scanned the books, diagrams, and notes scratched on bits of torn paper. “Perhaps I ought to stick with simpler things and give all this up. Settle down and take up knitting.” She slid down to the floor, her back against the potbellied stove that kept her warm in winter. She rolled a spring back and forth absentmindedly between her thumb and forefinger. “Gus, do you think I’m crazy? For coming here and thinking I can finish The Flyer?”

  “I often think about what your grandfather did when he would come up against an obstacle. He used to always get real quiet, look everything over, not mention it for a few days, and then come out of his workshop like Moses comin’ down from the mountain.” Gus smiled, enjoying a private memory, and Ellie felt a jealous pang.

  “I can’t seem to get past this problem with the steam…it’s like I’m missing a piece that Grandpa didn’t account for. The steam should be able to push the engine to nearly 100 miles per hour. If I’m going to get this to the Exposition I’ve got to have a breakthrough. And right now, I’m not so sure that’s going to happen.”

  A black and white photo that Ellie had found in the box delivered to her in Chicago was now framed and hanging on the wall; it was one of her grandfather with his rail crew. On the back, Henning had scrawled a note to her, almost as if he knew his time were nearly up and he needed Ellie to know how much she’d meant to him. Ellie stared at the photo now, shaking her head and worrying she was about to let him down.

  Gus exhaled a mouthful of smoke, which swirled and hovered in the air, given an ethereal glow by the gas lamps. “Ellie, there was something that I thought strange about a year and a half ago. I had just started up on the line working for Henning.”

  A tinny growl came from deep inside Zedock. From without, Ellie could hear the puttering of what only could be a motorcar. A motorcar? Here? The thunder and wind nearly masked it, and though she hadn’t heard it since the city, she knew her ears did not deceive.

  “Zedock, you always did have keen ears.” Standing and moving swiftly, Ellie grabbed the handles of a periscope that hung over the end of her work table and twisted. Grandpa Henning had been keenly aware that an inventor of his caliber on the open plain would be inviting trouble from those who might see fit to take what wasn’t theirs. He’d rigged the periscope so that it would not be seen from without, but he could still see around the property a full 360 degrees. This was in addition to the metal panels that were hung and fixed to each of the four windows and front and back doors. He had vowed no sneak thief would take him by surprise. Unfortunately, Ellie knew they hadn’t slid the panel on the front door back into place when they’d returned from the work yard.

  Outside, she spotted the one person she never thought she’d ever see again—Silas Skink. What was he doing here? How had he known she’d come here? Her mouth hung open slightly as she watched him step out of the motorcar and adjust himself from a long ride. There wasn’t the slightest flicker of recognition from the intruder that he knew he was being watched. He placed a black satchel next to him on the ground.

  Gray hair peeked out above his ears under his high black derby hat. A wool frock coat hung to his knees. It was as if he thought he needed city class out on the plains, when function, Ellie knew, always came before form out here. A glint of metal shone from beneath the hem of his pant leg; his right leg was mechanical. Ellie had seen it before, as he’d run down that black, moonless alley in Chicago. The flames had nearly concealed him, but as she’d run toward her workshop, the metal leg reflected the flames back at her. Since then, it had haunted her dreams.

  “Give it up, girl! Only room for one of us to be great ‘round here!” Silas’s voice faded into the night as she grabbed a water pail that always sat at the ready, flinging it on the flames.

  Her life’s work was going up as smoke into the night sky. Everything she’d been working on for the past five years. The project that had been nearing completion, hoping to show at the World’s Fair in one year’s time, sat smoldering and melting. Not only that, she thought, but what would Mr. and Mrs. Martinbok say? They’d taken a chance on her. They’d let a single young woman move into their ground floor apartment and turn the back room into a workshop. Of course, she’d fixed anything that had gears, cogs, or ran on steam free of charge for them and the other tenants. But that would hardly matter now, with people screaming and running out to the street, and their homes going up in smoke. She grabbed the only things that really mattered—a small box of mementos and Zedock the mechanical bulldog. Of course, that cursed night she’d not wound Zedock. He had sat stone silent as Silas Skink skulked around her workshop and torched their home. Oh, how she rued that day.

  Over the sounds of falling timbers and small explosions, the fire alarm box had been activated; soon one of the neighborhood’s fire engines would arrive, along with questions. Ellie backed away across the street, shielding her eyes from the heat and light with one arm and cradling Zedock under the other. Angry voices surrounded her, but she couldn’t focus. Instead, she sank to the ground and buried her face in her knees. Mr. Clarence from the apartment above hers spit daggers as he ran toward her. “Aye girl, what have ye done? I knew you weren’t nothin’ but trouble from the day you moved in!”

  After that, the Martinboks asked her to leave, and no one in the area would rent to the young girl who spent too much time in a workshop and not enough time being a proper young woman and settling down to marriage. What was she going to do now? The Columbian Exposition was a year away. For two years, she’d spent time on the weekends walking down to 56th Street and the lakefront to the construction area, watching as the land was sculpted before her eyes. Ellie felt it in her bones that she would be a part of the World’s Fair. She would find a place in the machinery building alongside her brightest male counterparts. Hopefully she would become an apprentice to one of them. After the fire, however, it seemed like someone else’s life she’d been dreaming about.

  Therefore, it seemed almost serendipitous when a package arrived on the day Ellie was picking through the ashes to see if there was anything she could salvage.

  “Ellie Cole?”

  Ellie ignored the man’s voice behind her; she continued bending and picking through the black tangled mess.

  “’Scuse me, miss, but I’ve got a package for a Miss Ellie Cole. Might you know if she survived this atrocity?”

  Ellie turned and eyed the postman, leery about who could be sending her a parcel and what could be contained within it. “That would be me.”

  “Mighty sorry to see the predicament you’re in, miss. However, I’ll still need ya to sign for the package.”

  “You’re too kind, really.” She picked her way carefully through the detritus and reached for the brown-wrapped box. After signing her name, the courier was gone as fast as he’d appeared. From that moment on, her fate had taken a turn.

  The package had been sent by Gus, telling Ellie of her grandfather’s passing. He told Ellie of her grandfather’s last wish, that she be given the plans to the Henn
ing Flyer. Inside was a torn, faded photograph of her grandfather in front of the most beautiful steam locomotives Ellie had ever seen, matte black with modifications only Grandpa Henning could have made.

  So it was that Ellie had found herself in the diminutive outpost of a town called Tappenton, North Dakota, for eight months now, working on what was left of her grandfather’s legacy. Ellie knew she was the best suited to complete his dream and showcase it at the World’s Fair back in Chicago. This would be an illustrious offering; other inventors would finally take her seriously once they saw what she’d been able to accomplish.

  As Gus watched through the scope, Ellie took a moment to walk to the door that led out of the back of the workshop. Zedock was in tow, grumbling as he shuffled along. Cracking the door and sliding the heavy metal panel to the side, she saw that the winds had picked up and the dirt was swirling, rain just starting to fall. The sky was looking menacing and she feared they might yet see a tornado. As she went to slide the panel back, lightning lit up the sky and thunder cracked overhead. It was then she saw the shadowy, quick movements around the locomotive.

  “Gus, we’ve got company!” Ellie said as she slid the door shut and turned. She ran to a wood cabinet that stood inconspicuously in the corner, threw open the door, and grabbed the refitted Winchester. She shoved it at Gus. “Here, take some of these as well.” She put a few baseball-sized glass globes into a black bag. They were Ellie’s own creation—flash globes. “I’ll keep my visitor out front distracted while you get rid of his buddies,” Ellie said. “I can’t have anything happen to that locomotive.”

  Gus nodded and slipped silently out into the worsening storm, rifle at the ready and the bag of flash globes over his shoulder.