She was, after all, an engineer.
Because it was Priya, strapped into the modified Singer sewing machine she’d turned into a suit of armor, which I’d worn just earlier that same winter to rescue a cat and to fight with some Russians.
She finally squeezed the chassis through the gap where the door had been, without collapsing the doorway any further. I expected the borglum to fly at her while she was vulnerable, or at least to leg it. The electric torch had gone out when I dove for the floor, and I shook it good to get it to come back on, following Mrs. Horner’s excellent example. The beam steadied after a second, and when I turned it back toward where the borglum had been he was still there. Still leaning on his pickaxe. Head cocked the other way now, as if he was considering what sort of thing Priya in her machine might be, and what to do about her.
I got my legs untangled from my petticoats, more or less, and pushed myself up onto one knee. The work lights on the Singer hissed and crackled into life, too dazzling for me to look at Priya directly. I’m not sure if the hard electric arcs hurt the knocker, startled him, or if he just decided he might as well be elsewhere on account of some giant metal monster crashing his pickaxe party, but he lifted up his pick and slammed it on the floor by his feet, and before you could say “Jack Robinson” he’d vanished through the fresh new hole, falling out of sight with the flinders of the boards.
A hollow sound of knocking echoed up through the hole where he had been, but I didn’t get close to it in time to see anything down there in the beam of the rekindled torch except for dust and blackness.
The hole seemed to go down a long way and I didn’t feel like looking at it. I glanced down at my hands and then away again; I’d skinned up my knuckles pretty good and the sight of blood has never set easy with me, even when there’s an arc light making it look more black than red due to glare. I still couldn’t look at Priya because of that same glare, so I shut my eyes and shaded them and said, “I missed you.”
I would have hurled myself at her, but I would have just been hugging the machine.
She snorted. The Singer hissed steam as she shifted her weight. “This don’t mean I’m not still mad. It just means I’m not planning to let nobody else have the killing of you.”
She sounded angry, too, not teasing. I figured I didn’t want to fight with her in front of the Arcades, or Mrs. Horner, who was gathering around us on all sides. So I said, “How did you know where I was?”
She held up a little device I recognized. It was a locator we’d used to keep track of our friend Miss Francina this one time when she was infiltrating an enemy stronghold.
“I slipped the bug into the lining of your reticule,” Priya said. “Just in case you got into trouble without me again.”
I started to say something snitty, and then shut my mouth. Considering she had just come to the rescue, I guessed I didn’t have too much to snit about. I thought about asking how she’d known to come back, but it wasn’t like you wouldn’t be able to see the whole Riverside shaking and shuddering and falling over itself from just about anywhere downtown, never mind up in the hills overlooking the city where our little ranch was. I could hear her breathing heavily, winded, so she’d obviously run the whole way back. In the Singer, that was fast enough.
I stepped to the side so I could open my eyes and look at her. She was kind enough not to turn the lights to follow me, which was good; I was starting to feel like I was in for an interrogation.
She’d grown tall enough that the Singer fit her better than it did me, now, and I felt a little spike of jealousy. Which was stupid, and I knew it as soon as I felt it, and felt even more ashamed over it when Priya said, “We’ve got to get you out of here.”
Mrs. Horner shook more plaster dust out of her widow’s weeds, then undid what little good the work had done by wiping her hands down the front and sticking the right one out to Priya like they was both white men. “You must be Miss Memery’s friend,” she said. “She mentioned you were an engineer while she was telling me about you. Your work?” A nod to the Singer. “Very fine.”
The littler Arcade was giving the Singer the once-over, too, and whatever jealousy I’d been feeling wound up puffed over with pride. My girl’s work was good enough to draw praise and attention from these other lady engineers, and that made me gloating happy.
I introduced them all, right quick and not at all formally, and Miss Francina would have been that put out with my performance. I could hear her tutting in my mind.
Priya sort of bowed to Mrs. Horner, as best she could inside the Singer, and said formally, “I am sorry to have missed your performance.”
Mrs. Horner twinkled at her like a much younger woman. “Tonight’s performance has been postponed due to shenanigans,” she said. “I feel confident that the opera house will permit me to do a makeup tomorrow, rather than having to refund all those tickets. Your Miss Memery has a backstage pass to share with you and I expect to see you both there on the morrow.
“Now. Shall we shake the dust from our shoes, my ladies?”
But something about just leaving was bothering me, and as they turned toward the busted-down door I asked, “What about the Riverside? We can’t just leave this borglum running around loose in here.”
“Karen.” Priya sighed. She didn’t ask me what a borglum was, which was typical. She’d look it up or figure it out herself from context, and only if she couldn’t would she ask me to explain. “You can’t solve everybody’s problem every time. They can hire somebody to trap it or something, I’m sure. If they even decide to rebuild.”
I felt even sadder thinking about that. Rapid wouldn’t be Rapid without the Rain City Riverside. And what about Alexandre and the others, and their jobs?
And what about the poor borglum?
I was starting to have a theory about that little Knocker, you see.
“I think the borglum needs help,” I said.
“The borglum tried to kill us,” Hypatia said.
“He tried to keep us from leaving,” Mrs. Horner corrected. “He had the opportunity to do more. But he didn’t. Kidnapping’s a heinous act, but it isn’t murder.”
Hilaria looked at me. “You talked to him,” she said, more curious than suspicious. “How did you know to talk to him?”
“Well,” I said. “He was real careful not to drop those chandeliers on any people, wasn’t he? He could have killed us, or a lot of those people in the lobby. I think he was probably in Old Boston’s steamer trunk, the one that was smashed up, and he’d kidnapped the borglum from Alaska and brought it back. I don’t know how he escaped, or why he decided to kill him and everybody else, and blind the piano player, and why he didn’t decide to kill us or Alexandre or any of the guests, though.”
“Well,” Priya said, “none of us did anything to deserve being killed over. Maybe that original crew did.” She fixed Hypatia with a stare. “Unless you two have even more secrets.”
Hilaria looked at me. “I thought you said you could square things with her.”
“What?” Priya rounded on me, forgetting for a second that she was in the Singer and turning so fast she overbalanced herself and had to take a quick step to keep from tumbling into and probably through the wall.
“Let’s fight later,” I suggested, with a glance at the audience.
She glared at me but simmered down. Or maybe I should say seethed more quietly.
I said, “It was Priya and my table he decided to flip. So I wondered if he was, you know. Trying to get our attention.”
Priya was still huffing through her nose like she wanted to paw and stamp and she bit off her words, but her voice was pretty level when she said, “Why our table?”
Hypatia said, “Because we’re women?”
Priya didn’t say anything else, but she was listening so hard her harness creaked.
“Women in a mine is supposed to be unlucky, because the borglums don’t like ’em. Don’t like us.” I shrugged. “Course, it’s men that say that, and t
hey say all kinds of things that mostly serve to keep women out of jobs. We’re supposed to be unlucky on ships, too, come to think of it.”
“You and I were unlucky for Captain Nemo,” Priya pointed out, from amid the rattle and hiss of the sewing machine.
“That weren’t nobody’s fault but his own.” Our eyes caught on each other’s in the splash light from the electric torch, and a bubble of hope pressed my heart up, which was the first time in hours it had felt like it wasn’t somewhere down in my bowels.
“Maybe he likes fellow tricksters,” Mrs. Horner said. For a moment, I thought she was talking about our old friend Captain Nemo, but then I realized she probably meant the borglum. I guess if he weren’t immediately trying to kill us I was more distracted with Priya than with mine critters.
“You think the Misses Arcade banging and levitating is what caught his ear?”
“It seems to be how he communicates,” she said. “It’s possible he thought they were trying to talk to him.”
“If this . . . Old Boston . . . stole that little man away from his home and his people, I don’t blame him for striking out.” Priya spoke with the no-nonsense authority and certainty of her moral rectitude of any three-year-old. I imagined she felt the knocker’s theorized exile real personal-like. “We should go after him, and offer to help him get back home. Or wherever he wants to go.”
“You want us to jump down his bottomless hole?” Hypatia asked, horrified.
“There are more traditional means to achieve access to a cellar,” Mrs. Horner said. “We can meet him halfway.”
* * *
The Arcade girls didn’t like it one bit. I thought for a minute that they was going to head out that shattered stage door and leave us to clean up the mess. But they exchanged one of them glances, and Hypatia nodded and Hilaria rolled her eyes and sighed, and apparently it was settled.
Priya for her part gave me two rolled eyes and a sigh also, but I knew what hers meant. It was, “Here you go charging off to poke your nose into something that isn’t any of your business because you caught a whiff of injustice, and I’m not going to let you get killed on your own.”
Which was fair. Or maybe she was serious about reserving my murder for her own private property, but that was fair, too, when it came down to it.
* * *
The hilarity of the next few minutes was compounded by the fact that nary a one of us knowed how to get down to the cellars, though we guessed there must be a stair near the kitchens. And of course, there was no guarantee all the cellars connected to one another, and of further course, we was about as far from the kitchens as it was possible to be and still be in Rapid City. So we decided to work our way across the ground floor toward the dining room looking for stairs, which was logical, but complicated by the state of disrepair of the hotel. At least with the Singer and its work lights there I could save the batteries in Mrs. Horner’s electric torch, and once I gave it back I had my hands free.
The hotel ground floor was mostly solid enough not to crack and fall apart under the Singer, but we had to be cautious on that front because of the damage, too. And we was worrited about the Singer running out of diesel, so we was trying to move fast. So it weren’t quite a fuzzle, but things was a bit tense, even as the circumstances warranted them.
We was picking our way down a hall full of unsettled plaster dust, glancing over our shoulders every time the building readjusted itself—which it did, being in a bad way structurally speaking. Priya kept the Singer close enough to the side wall to scrape the wallpaper off in long curls, and I kept my eye on Priya like a cat with only one kitten. Her back was so far up that the furious came off her in waves, like heat from an overstoked Franklin stove—but the Singer was running at a nice low purr that told me she’d throttled it way back and vented pressure. And I was keeping as close as I could.
Priya might be mad as hell at me, and I might be mad as hell at her—but I was that tore between being terrified that she was here in danger and so glad I could cry that she hadn’t left me here alone that it would have taken a blindfold and three big men to get me to let her out of my sight for an instant.
Hypatia and Mrs. Horner was third and fourth, and Hilaria was bringing up the rear, when Hypatia said softly, and without theatrics this time, “I sense a presence.”
Mrs. Horner might have been deaf as a post, for all the reaction that got out of her.
“Someone is here. Someone who cares deeply about our safety.”
“Next she’ll make a rope turn into a cobra,” Priya said under her breath, and it was Hypatia’s turn to act stone-deaf, or maybe she really was only able to hear the voices from inside her head.
“About your safety, Mrs. Horner. I can feel him. He’s right here beside me, over my shoulder. He has guidance to offer, if you will but accept it. He’s thinking of a word.”
“Better women than you have tried to work that password out of me,” Mrs. Horner said.
Hypatia turned. She seemed to come out of her trance, and snapped with real fire, “I don’t need you to give me any password.”
“Ah. So you admit you were looking for me when you came here.” The widow shook her head and sighed. “I told Mr. Horner it was going to be like this, but would he listen? And of course, I was curious, too. But still, dealing with all the mountebanks who’ve wanted to collect that reward has been more trouble than knowing for certain was worth.”
She looked sad as she said it, as if knowing for certain—whatever it was she knew now—had proved a disappointment. That sorrow didn’t stop her from brandishing a finger at the girls, however. “You’re smart young ladies with pretty fine accomplishments, judging by the sewing and the science that’s gone into your outfits, and the sleight of hand I’ve seen you do. You could do a lot more with your lives than bilking little old ladies and breaking our hearts.”
Her heart didn’t sound broken. She started walking again, and she said, “If I were you ladies, I would find me a plausible young man with good hands and a convincing moustache, and I would set him up with a bag of tricks and go on the road as honest showmen.”
“And be dependent on a man?” Hilaria laughed. “Not hardly!”
“Make the man dependent on you,” Mrs. Horner answered. “I agree, if you could perform on your own, that would be better. But people won’t show up to see a woman magician. No matter how good she is, they’ll always claim they’ve seen better, and if she’s the best there ever was, they’ll claim she’s the only one there’s ever been and nearly as good as a man. It ain’t fair, but it’s how the world is set up, and if we ladies want to get by in it long enough to change it, we’ll do what we got to do.”
“You sound like a suffragist.”
The widow shrugged lightly, as if there weren’t nothing remarkable about that.
Hypatia let the silence stretch a little before she said, “The theatrics aren’t real, Mrs. Horner. But the power is. The theatrics are just what it takes to get people to accept the truth of what the spirits say to me.”
“And it’s a better living than trying to make it as a female magician,” Priya put in. I was surprised; I’d thought all her concentration was going to not falling through the floor.
“You got to perform to make your way in the world,” I said. “Even a wife performs. She just does it day in and day out, because men have their expectations.”
All four of the other women surprised me by agreeing. I wouldn’t have thought we five could agree on the color of the sky, or whether eggs and ham biscuits was a forthright breakfast.
“Things don’t always come through from the other side clearly,” Hypatia said. “The channels are obscure. But—‘Mechania,’ Mrs. Horner. That’s the word he wants you to hear.”
Five more steps crunched on debris. “He used to call me that,” Mrs. Horner agreed. “But you know that already.”
Hypatia and Hilaria waited expectantly.
Mrs. Horner stepped a little faster. “Girls, I lived with Mr. Ho
rner for forty-five years. We traveled out of the same steamer trunks. I built his tricks, and he performed mine. When I got too old to be his lovely assistant, I ran things from backstage, as Miss Arcade here has reason to know. I’ve kept his confidences for a lifetime and he kept mine. A pet name won’t do it.”
“That’s as may be, but you didn’t know Cager like I did.” Hypatia said it silkily, with a smirk that was meant to imply something. “If he were going to come back to anyone, you know it would be me.”
Mrs. Horner stared at her for a long, long minute. All our forward progress halted, and I wondered for a moment if she was going to slap Hypatia, or maybe just knock her skull in with a chair leg or a fireplace poker. Hypatia might have figured she’d overplayed her hand, too. She shrank back against her sister, and jumped off her little boot heels when Mrs. Horner finally broke the silence by throwing her head back and laughing like a drain.
It was long and harsh, and when it ended the widow wiped her eyes and shook her head. “It’s a nice try, since the ghost-talking angle isn’t working out for you. But even if I thought for a second that was true, honey, let me tell you something you might appreciate in twenty years. That’s the sort of thing you young girls tell yourselves when you don’t yet know any better than to believe the things a man whispers in bed—or when he’s trying to get you there.
“Sweetheart, when you’re my age, you’d realize knowing somebody is not just listening to what they say. And it’s not just holding their head when they’re sick or even just sick drunk. It’s not just waiting up nights for them to come home or keeping the hearth warm when they’re off on the road, either. That’s romantic nonsense one level down.
“Loving somebody for real, a real marriage—it’s looking at what they do, not just what they say. It’s living with what they do, because what they do changes your life, too, and it’s understanding why they broke your heart—or maybe even realizing that you’ll never understand why, because it don’t make no sense, it’s just something that happened—and it’s deciding to love them anyway, because someday you’re going to break their heart, too, and you might not even understand why you did it, and all you’ll be able to do is ask for forgiveness. That’s what a marriage is. Really knowing somebody, beyond the romantic nonsense and a pretty profile and a sharp wit. Knowing them beyond what they can do for you, or how they make you feel special or pretty or flattered or smart. Knowing them, and loving them anyway, the same way you got to know and love yourself—not in spite of all the bits that aren’t perfect and need forgiving, but in inclusion of them.”
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