And they were both, in at least some small way, his. And he was ready to try and offer a spot of kindness himself.
Philadelphia
Marion tried to sleep that night in the park but his dreams were as dark as the farthest corner of the sky. When dawn finally came he rose from where he’d hidden by the public hedge-maze and staggered onto the main thoroughfare. He touched things at random as he stumbled back down the Hill to the Below. No longer did he worry who saw or who screamed. No longer did he bother with anonymity or soft action. These were the people who destroyed all he ever loved. These were the people who built on the backs of his kind and ruined anyone who loved the Witches. The Witches who provided stability for their country—their government’s country.
“An election year,” the boy had said.
Marion grinned and reached out for a window box hanging in front of a cheese shop’s painted window. He trailed his fingers along a single fringed dianthus petal and watched the frost spread out like tiny snowflakes flattened flush to the flower. Wrapping round its stem, cold consumed its leaves. The frost scrambled the short distance to the next plant in the box, leaving a glittering path of destruction that wiped the entire window box of life in under a minute—all while Marion stood silent and watched his talent seek and destroy.
He would bring them all down, he promised himself, make them all suffer the unseasonable cold that was ever in his heart. He began his journey down to the Below once more, his eyes on a certain bridge and the warm glow of firelight peeking out from beneath it already. The sun was still low in the sky when he began to formulate his plan. Destiny had saved him five years ago and Made him who he was for this purpose. And if he was to get his revenge in a proper way, he had best research and prepare.
Bringing down the Maker would require planning and transportation.
But if revenge was a dish best eaten cold he was surely the best man to enjoy both its taste and temperature.
Holgate
“Today we will try something new,” the Maker told Jordan.
Her stomach flopped like a fish caught in the net of her gut. Silently she assumed her spot by the board, offering her manacled wrists to be bound for the day’s new torture.
“No, no,” he corrected. “Today we will have a spot of kindness. And a spot of tea.” He smiled and opened the door to the laboratory. In walked Meggie, carrying a tray with a teapot and cups and saucers balanced on its surface.
“Sit, please,” Bran requested, motioning for Jordan to perch on a chair.
It was then, as she sipped tea with her torturer, that Jordan realized he was quite insane. It was also then that she wondered if perhaps she would not soon follow in the same manner.
Following the new treatment he asked her if there was anything he might do to make her feel more comfortable. He made it clear he would not remove her from the Tanks, but was there anything else she might appreciate? Her eyes fell on the tea set and narrowed. “A daily cup of tea in my Tank.”
His eyes crinkled at their edges and he nodded. “That I can most certainly provide.”
And for the next several days, he was good to his word, hoping that kindness might make magick blossom when nothing else would. For those days tea became the shared ritual of Jordan and her cell mates—a spot of sanity amid the pain and darkness. And on those days, unbeknownst to Jordan, the Maker was a kind, gentle, and happy man.
One day Jordan would take a sip and pass the cup and saucer through the hole between her cell and Caleb’s, the next she took a sip and passed it the other direction to Kate.
But the happiness was short-lived. Jordan still summoned no storms and, having proof that she could, the Maker had to presume she was refusing or required a different method to trigger her skills. So the torture resumed, but the tea kept coming.
It was on one such a day after Jordan had returned from her time on the Eastern Tower’s top, her hand aching all over again from the Maker’s attentions, that the trio first argued over who received the precious liquid.
Jordan passed the cup through the hole in the wall, her shaking hand making the cup clatter against the saucer. “Apologies,” she whispered, tea spilling onto her fingers.
“Stop,” Caleb insisted. “You need it more than I…”
“No,” Jordan said.
But the cup and saucer paused and Caleb scooted it back so it rested just in the shared shadow of the wall.
“I will leave it there,” Jordan challenged. “You should drink it—enjoy it so it does not go to waste.”
There was a groan from the wall’s other side. “It is on your side of the wall.”
“It is not,” Jordan protested.
“Indeed it is.”
“Not.”
“You are the most difficult neighbor I have yet had,” Caleb muttered. With a grinding and chattering noise the cup and accompanying saucer walked closer to her in the grip of her mysterious neighbor’s hand.
It was the most Jordan had ever glimpsed of Caleb and just one look made her stomach do flips. The hand was as dirty as hers—that was far from surprising, but the marks that crisscrossed the back of Caleb’s hand were a system of cross-hatched scars, white and rising from the skin’s already pale surface and a testament to Caleb’s continued courage.
He said he wouldn’t give in to the Maker and he hadn’t, though it had cost him.
Before Caleb could withdraw his hand, Jordan knocked the cup awkwardly aside to grasp his fingers.
For a moment they were still and silent that way, tea leaking from the overturned cup, Jordan’s hand clenching the fingers of the boy next door.
“Please don’t,” he whispered, his voice rasping to finally break the shared silence. “You’re wasting good tea.”
But she wrapped her fingers more tightly around his. “How did you come to be here?”
“Although I do not mind your questions normally…” He shifted in the straw on the hole’s other side. “You must not ask me that.”
His fingers twitched against her palm.
“You must let me go,” he said.
“Not yet.” She twisted closer, trying to get her face close enough that she could see his face.
But the darkness between them was too deep.
“I don’t wish to let go just yet.”
“We never do.” He groaned. “Who are you really holding on to, Jordan? It can’t be me … You barely know me…”
She sighed.
“Who was he?”
She released him then, pulling away to tuck her knees up and wrap her arms around them. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Liar. You’re holding on to someone. In your heart. I know it.”
“How would you know?”
“Because we do that—hold on. It’s what keeps us going. It’s all that keeps us going.”
She heard him move in the straw again and she imagined him mirroring her position just a wall away. “Is that what keeps us going?”
“Well, it certainly isn’t the love of one’s family … not for me.” Silence soaked up the moments like a sponge falling into water for the first time. He reached through the gap in the wall again, this time even farther into the grim space of her cell. His fingers fidgeted, wanting hers, and she could not help but take them again.
“Who keeps you going?” she asked into the dark.
“Thomas.”
She nearly pulled back in surprise at him naming another man. But his delivery of the name, so soft and sweet and … loving, made her brow furrow, and not thinking of her own imperfections or the wrinkles she’d surely earn, she squeezed his fingers tight, whispering, “Tell me all about him.”
And they rested that way in the dirt and the straw, neither of them worrying over filth or social convention, holding hands and remembering a brighter, better time when love was fresh and new and within reach. It was remembering those things that next spurred Jordan to action. Caleb was right, she was holding on to someone and realized then in her Tank
how lost she felt without him.
En Route to Holgate
Rowen was lost and he’d been lost for days. How was it that a man of his education and breeding could be so utterly turned around in a forest? He sat with a huff at the base of a tree and ran his hands across his face, scratching at the stubble growing there. He growled out his despair. He no longer had clean clothing, a ramrod for his pistol, or his horse, and, to make things worse, he was growing whiskers to rival his grandfather’s. Soon he’d have a full beard and mustache and children would flock to him and call him Father Christmas …
How did people stay reasonably clean shaven before barbers and razors and straps? Did they use other knives? He looked at his sword. He’d cut his head clean off if he tried to shave with it. The natives. What did they use? Flint? He glared at his pistol and its firing mechanism. No flint to be had as they’d made the fashionable switch to percussion caps not long ago. They fired better most times, but one could hardly get a good shave from a percussion cap.
Flint was merely a piece of rock that could be sharpened. Surely he could find that. Even if he couldn’t find the horses. Or Holgate. Or Jordan.
His stomach rumbled. Well, no one would mistake him for Father Christmas, as lean as he was becoming. He threw a rock he’d managed to sit on and cursed at the thought it might have been flint. And no one would ever mistake him for being jolly.
Damn it all! His best friend was dead, his steed was missing along with most of his remaining possessions, he hadn’t had a meal of substance since Frederick’s house, and he was absolutely certain he had sat beneath this same exact tree raging about his failures before!
By the time he reached Holgate Jordan would already be gone. If he ever reached Holgate. His chance at a happily ever after was slim at best and his chance of being a hero? Worse.
He dragged himself back up to his feet and held onto the tree. He had to take desperate measures. He had to find Ransom. Or Silver. Or both.
And he might just have to do the thing he’d never dreamed of doing—ask for directions.
Damn it all!
Holgate
There was something about a child and spreading kindness that did not sit well with Bran and his title of Maker, so he summoned Councilman Stevenson to his laboratory to conclude business. “I have not the stomach for this job anymore,” Bran admitted, his gaze traveling over the Councilman’s head to rest on the sightless skull in its makeshift place of honor—the skull belonging to the child who reminded him so much of the little girl who now frequently shadowed his steps. The same little girl that looked up at him with worshipful eyes and suggested he try patience above pain.
“And precisely what do you mean by that?”
“I mean…” Bran looked down, his brow pinching together over the narrow bridge of his nose. “I cannot be your Maker any longer.”
The Councilman hopped back, shaking his head in surprise. “You cannot…?” Again he shook his head. “I fail to see how you have come to believe that you have a choice in such matters.”
“Of course I have a choice. I have a family now. I must make this choice for their good as much as my own. Perhaps more for theirs than mine.”
“A family?” the Councilman chortled, holding his stomach with one hand. “You have a bastard daughter by a whore and a maid warming your bed until you tighten your purse strings or she finds someone more interesting.” He shook his head, still laughing. “A family?”
Bran crossed his arms over his chest and spread his feet in a broader stance. “I will Make no more Conductors.”
“Then who do you think will? Who will provide our most valuable energy resource except you? Who will power our lights and our carriages and our airships?”
“There is talk of a better power source: steam,” Bran suggested.
The Councilman’s head snaked forward. “Steam?”
“Yes. Steam.”
Lord Stevenson raked a hand through his thinning hair. “Do you have any idea of how a change to steam—only a possibility of power, truly—would change our entire society? Can you fathom what such a thing might mean?”
“It might mean that Councilman Braga was right. It might mean revolution,” Bran said matter-of-factly.
Stevenson snorted. “My God.” He turned his back to Bran, smacked his palms onto the countertop, and lowered his head, rolling it back and forth on his thin neck. “And you would do this because you no longer have the stomach for your family’s line of work?”
“And because of my family,” Bran said, grating the word out from between his teeth.
Stevenson raised his head and a chill raced over Bran’s arms when he realized what the Councilman’s gaze had come to rest on.
Sybil’s fragile skull.
Stevenson’s tone of voice changed, frustration falling away and, although Bran could not see his expression, he was certain he now spoke through a smile. “For the sake of your family,” Stevenson said, “I would continue being the Maker, if I were you. Such a dramatic upheaval as you suggest can be especially hard … on a child.”
“Are you threatening me?” Bran asked, his voice thin, eyes dangerous.
Stevenson turned to face him. “Threatening? Why, no. I am merely suggesting—strongly—as I did to Councilman Braga before his untimely disappearance that you reconsider what might happen if things around here changed too much. Perhaps with a good night’s sleep and a bottle of bitters you might find you still have the stomach for this work after all.”
* * *
Jordan folded the paper star and tucked it back up her sleeve not far from where Rowen’s heart was pinned, and, standing, waited by her Tank’s door. The watchman shuffled by on his rounds, pausing at her door. There was a clatter as he adjusted the things on the tray. “I have no care to know what it is you do to have curried the Maker’s favor enough to give you a proper tea, but I sure as Hell wish you’d give it a rest.” He fumbled with the keys and she envisioned him balancing the tray, teapot, and teacup between his hip and the door like any good servant would when struggling so.
With a grunt he opened the door and Jordan took the tray from him with one hand and a gracious nod while slipping the folded star into the void the door’s handle needed to connect with in order to give a proper lock.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, jostling the tray so that tea spilled and soaked the watchman as he struggled to catch pot, cup, and saucer all at once. “How horribly clumsy of me … so very sorry…”
He righted the tray and its contents and scrambled back from the door cursing. The door slammed shut and Jordan heard him storm away.
“Take your chance now,” Caleb urged. “While he’s gone. Take your chance!”
“I’ll bring you with me,” she said, slipping out her door to stand outside his.
“No. There’s no time for such foolishness. Grab his cloak and throw it over your chain to make it look like you’re carrying something. But go,” he urged. “This is your chance. Run with it!”
Exasperated, she did as he ordered, promising, “I’ll come back for you!”
The door at the end of the hall closed behind her and she never heard him say, “No, you won’t.”
She pounded her way down the stairs and burst out the bottom door and onto the main square of Holgate before the watchmen spotted her and neatly brought her down.
“I promised I would come back for you,” she announced to Caleb, moping as the watchman threw her back into her Tank and slammed the door, this time making sure the lock held.
“Although I find your willingness to keep your word awe-inspiring, I did not quite imagine it happening like this,” Caleb admitted.
They said nothing else to each other then because after such a defeat there was truly nothing to say.
It was not long before the Maker summoned her.
“You realize what this means?” Bran asked.
Jordan looked away, unwilling to answer.
“I cannot trust you. Now I must chain you to you
r Tank’s floor. I wanted so badly to avoid this,” he said, spitting the words out. “I wanted so badly to avoid all of this,” he said, the words somehow about far more than chaining Jordan and distrusting her.
“How do I explain to Meggie what I must now do to you?”
“Meggie?” It was the first time he’d dropped his guard enough to name his daughter. “Tell her the truth,” she suggested, raising her chin as he strapped her to the boards. “Tell her that you are a cruel man who has nothing but dark designs.” She screwed her face up, eyes squeezed tight, and braced herself for his inevitable retaliation.
Finally she opened her eyes and relaxed her jaw.
He stood a few feet away. Silent. His eyes seemed fixed on the floor as if he’d suddenly discovered some great secret about its construction. No hand was raised against her, no tool was poised to bite into her flesh. “I wish things were different,” he muttered.
“You are certainly not alone in that wish,” she scoffed.
He puffed out a deep breath and stepped forward to check that she was cinched tight. “But we are both the products of our environment and our parentage—whatever yours might be,” he added. “And so we must do some unpleasant things from time to time to get by. Sometimes we have no choice.”
Then he did a new variation of her treatment. Still she remained Grounded and unMade. When the Wardens finally came to take her away, she was crying.
Bran stumbled to a bucket in the laboratory’s corner and, crouching before it, watched everything he’d eaten earlier in the day rush back out the same way it had been put in.
* * *
Jordan was an aching lump in her Tank. Today the sunlight was not enough to lighten her mood and being surrounded by the same grim walls was far from inspirational. Her right hand flopped out, limp, on her lap, wrapped in a hasty bandage that had soaked through with a stinking salve. “To heal the burn,” the Maker had promised.
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