The captain mopped the back of his neck with the tail of his scarf. “Ladies and gentleman, may I introduce you to your three new crew members. Johann Berger, whom I’ve flown with before, his friend the master tinker, whose name I don’t know, and their awkward French friend who will be of no use whatsoever.”
Conny did his best to look grand and imposing. “My name is Cornelius. And my friend is Valentin.”
“Capital.” The captain pointed to himself, then the others. “I am Captain Crawley, and you may call me Captain, or Sir, or Your Worship. This is Heng, your quartermaster. You will call him Sir.” He gestured to the short-haired woman. “Beside him is Olivia, our sailing master, and beside her is Molly, The Brass Farthing’s engineer.” Crawley put his hands on his hips. “The three of you aren’t simply getting a ride out of town. You’ll be working every minute you’re on this ship. Johann, you’ll be a mate, same as you were before.” He gestured to Cornelius. “You’re obviously the tinker-surgeon.” Crawley grinned nastily at Valentin. “You, sweet fop, will be our new jape.”
Val, barely holding himself together, glanced at Conny and spoke in a tremulous voice in French. “What is he saying? Why is he looking at me like that?”
Heng shut his eyes and shook his head. He murmured something in Chinese, which made the rest of the pirates laugh.
Crawley switched to French as he addressed Val. “You’re the jape, Frenchie. You’re our odd-jobs man. You do the work no one else wants to do. You answer to everyone else. If someone has something they need doing, you do the job. You don’t argue, you don’t complain. You say yes, sir and yes, ma’am and work like a dog. If you last long enough for us to take on more crew, you’ll be promoted to mate and someone else will be the jape.”
For a tense moment, Conny feared Val would argue, but he only gave a surly nod and wrapped his arms around his belly.
Cornelius made a small bow. “How do you do. We’re happy to be aboard.”
Olivia raised her eyebrows. Molly snorted.
Heng looked dubious. “Master tinker? What’s one of those doing on this piece of junk?”
“Getting his neck saved. And signing a contract.” Crawley rubbed his hands together before gesturing to the officer’s quarters. “If you’d be so kind as to follow me, gentlemen?”
The captain’s office wasn’t any nicer than the rest of the ship, though as he inspected things closer, Cornelius could tell it had once been quite grand. What he’d taken for tarnish on the rails was clearly places where filigree and ornament had been stripped away, likely to be sold. Many dark spots on the walls told stories of art and decoration that had hung long enough to withstand the stain of sun, but were absent now. The table serving as a desk was not grand, and the two chairs seated at it were wobbly and mismatched.
Crawley spread three scrolls across the table and laid out a broken fountain pen. He picked it up, initialed in a few places and wrote in wages. “I’m only giving you double, love.”
Cornelius took the contract from his hands, and after a few lines of reading, he confiscated the pen as well. On his contract and the others’, he crossed out several lines, added a few phrases of his own and adjusted everyone’s percentages. He doubled once more the number Crawley had written for the post of tinker, signed at the bottom and handed it back. When Crawley started to sputter in rage, Cornelius interrupted him.
“Bring me the most complicated, necessary items you have in need of fixing.”
While Crawley stood deciding if he would obey or not, Cornelius stumbled to Valentin, reclaimed his satchel and set it on the table. As he laid out tools he’d need to fix the chairs and the table, he couldn’t stop himself from indexing the countless bits of equipment he’d had to leave behind, many which would be ever so helpful in this moment. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he steadied his hands as best he could and got to work.
He glanced up at Val, who appeared well beyond terrified. Perhaps giving him a task could help calm them both. “Un café, Val?”
“I can show him the coffee,” Heng said, and caught Valentin by the elbow. “Venez, Frenchie.”
Shortly after they left, Cornelius got the legs off the chair, and Crawley left too. Olivia and Molly stood off to the side, arms folded, but Johann crouched awkwardly on his mechanical legs. “May I help?”
Cornelius shook his head, more to clear it than anything else. “I need coffee.” He bit his lip and added, “And a quarter wrench.”
Johann became his assistant, passing him tools and parts, listening patiently when Cornelius had to explain what they looked like. Several times he had to reroute his plan because he was missing a part or a tool, but by the time Crawley returned with a ratty basket full of things sticking out of the sides, Conny had repaired the table and one of the chairs.
Crawley set the basket down. “I’m not giving you the shirt off my back because you fixed a table.”
“I fixed the table and the chair so I had an adequate place to work.” He plucked a broken spyglass from the basket. “I will require a room of at least this size and this level of brightness as my workshop. This space would be adequate, but I will need a great deal more shelving.”
“I don’t know who you are, lad, but—” He stopped as he watched Conny crack the spyglass open, pull out the lenses and spread them across a handkerchief.
When the coffee appeared beside Conny, he noted it absently, taking a few fortifying sips before diving back into his work. The spyglass was quite boring and not very good, so he improved it. When he finished, he handed it to Crawley without meeting his gaze. “Go and try it on the stars.”
“It doesn’t go that far—”
“Go, Captain.” Conny pulled out an electric toaster and huffed. “Appliances?” He tossed it on the table and glared at Heng. “Bring me your compass.”
“It isn’t broken,” Heng said.
“It isn’t any good, either, is it?” Conny unscrewed the toaster with pursed lips. “Toasters. I could rebuild your engine in an hour, make your ship fly three times as fast in a long evening, if I had the right tools. Bring me something that matters.”
They did. They brought him the compass—out of balance, wobbling, which he repaired and improved, adding an aether-detecting sensor. They brought him a broken windlass, a grapnel, a lutchet and a steel length of martingale. Everything dull and unimpressive.
“Bring me something more.”
“That’s all we have,” they confessed.
With a Gallic sigh, Conny pulled open his satchel, grabbed a handful of parts and began to build.
He wasn’t sure what it was meant to be at first, but when his weary, sodden mind seized on the animal he’d once seen in a traveling show, he couldn’t help himself. He smiled as the monkey appeared out of the bits of wire and brass, and he gave it a golden set of gears for eyes. When it was finished, he wound it up and fitted an aether battery to its back, then sat back and watched it dance across the table.
The crew stared at him, open-mouthed.
“You are worth more for one day,” Crawley croaked at last, “than the value of my entire ship.”
Cornelius finished off the last of his coffee. “And yet I am grateful for your help. Twenty percent of the profits, plus eight for each of my companions, is all that I ask. At the end of the year, we can see if you still wish to retain me, at which point I might ask for a higher percentage again. As per the terms of the revised contracts.”
He passed them over to Crawley, who fell over himself to sign.
* * * * *
As Johann led the others to the crew’s quarters, his mind finally had quiet enough to panic.
The Brass Farthing had two sleeping chambers, one on the upper deck for the captain and quartermaster, and the smaller, darker one on the gun deck for the lesser officers’ mates. Johann led Cornelius and Valentin down the narrow, open-slat stairs, past the a
ether cannons to the rack of bunks near the stern. At full capacity the ship had four officers and six mates, but even with the addition of the three of them they were at best a skeleton crew. Johann and his companions took up the center row of bunks with plenty of room on either side.
He could tell Cornelius wanted to talk to him, but Johann couldn’t bear to. It had been one thing while they were convincing Crawley to let them stay aboard, but now that he had time to think about what had happened, there was too much to process. Being on the Farthing again. The soldiers pretending to be Austrian. The threat to Cornelius. Being with Cornelius as a lover. Running away with Cornelius—and Valentin.
Having a clockwork heart sewed into his chest, a heart the whole world wanted to use as a weapon.
It was too much. He couldn’t speak of anything out loud. Not now. So when Cornelius put a hand on his arm and said his name with that sweet, worried voice, Johann didn’t let himself give in to the urge to sink into his tinker’s arms. “It’s been a big day. We should sleep.”
“We should talk. You seem upset.”
Johann was upset. Which was why he didn’t want to talk. “Tomorrow,” he said to Cornelius, though he doubted morning would bring a different frame of mind.
He thought he’d lie awake, plagued by his thoughts, but the next thing he knew Heng was shouting down the hatch for them to wake. Johann rose with the rest of the crew, but Cornelius moaned in complaint and Valentin simply pulled his covers over his head. Johann felt a bit guilty not staying to help them out, but he knew Heng would make it worse for them if he did, so he simply went to mess with the others. He choked down gruel and coffee only slightly better than the army’s, and rose to report to Olivia on the open deck as a bleary Cornelius and complaining Valentin stumbled to the table.
“You’re leaving?” Cornelius frowned at Johann. “But I wanted to speak with you.”
“I need to work.” He tried to go, but Conny stepped into his way.
“I understand you’re upset with me, but there are a few things we need to go over regardless.”
Johann was trying to form a lie about how he wasn’t upset with Conny when Olivia stepped between them, arms folded over her chest and a sneer of disdain on her face. “You can have your lover’s quarrel later. Right now I need a mate on deck.”
She grabbed Johann’s left arm and tugged hard—and Johann doubled over as he cried out in pain, clutching the stub of his arm as Olivia stared in horror at the clockwork appendage in her hand.
Cornelius sprang to life, swearing in French as he reclaimed the clockwork and helped Johann to the floor. “Breathe, darling. You’re not actually injured, but your nerve endings don’t know that. Your brain is aware your arm was ripped off, but it can’t understand that’s simply a matter of circuitry, not blood and gore. It will throb until I can get you some aether, but once I reset the circuit it will all be well.” After a kiss on Johann’s forehead, Conny spoke harshly to Olivia. “As I was trying to explain, I hadn’t engineered Johann’s clockwork for hard labor or casual abuse. Normal people don’t have their shoulders ripped out of their socket when going about their day, you see.”
“I hardly tugged—”
“I’m a tinker-surgeon. I can calculate the amount of pressure my clockwork can take to the thousandth fraction of a newton. I can measure the strength of your grip after shaking your hand. You tugged his arm hard enough to punish him. Were his arm merely flesh and bone, your unannounced yank would have strained the ligaments of his shoulder a considerable amount. But since he is clockwork, you stressed a contact point of flesh and metal, and by design, the metal gave. Which means whatever else anyone had planned for either of us today, now I must spend hours repairing damage in addition to reinforcing his appendages.” His lips brushed Johann’s skin again. “Come, darling. Let’s get you upstairs to my workshop so we can put you back together.”
What Cornelius referred to as his workshop was actually the captain’s drawing room, but everyone was so stupefied by the sight of Johann’s plight, no one bothered to point out the mistake. Cornelius helped Johann up the stairs and onto the table. After demanding a vial of aether, he uncapped it, wafted it briefly beneath Johann’s nose, and Johann floated away on a pretty pink cloud for several hours. When he drifted back to the Farthing, Cornelius was bent over his left side, squinting through half-moon glasses as he soldered fine wires on the clockwork arm.
He favored Johann with a flash of a smile before returning to his work. “Welcome back. I’m nearly finished with your upgrades.” He wiped sweat away from his brow with a rueful smile. “Well, your arm’s upgrades. Your legs in general aren’t tugged about, and in any event I didn’t bring enough copper wire to apply the change everywhere.”
Johann blinked away bleariness enough to focus on Cornelius’s work. “What have you done?”
He hadn’t meant the question to be an accusation, but it hung in the air as one anyway. Cornelius’s cheerful expression faded toward grim weariness. “The technical explanation of what I’ve done would require a few hours and some detailed drawings—which I’m happy to provide, if you wish. The short version is that I’ve altered the joint where your arm’s flesh and metal meet.”
The joint in question was completely exposed, the metal casing removed to allow Johann a disturbing view of his metal conductors. His flesh stub ached a bit, which made sense as tiny metal circles had been grafted to his skin.
Cornelius pressed the soldering iron to a wire, and a gentle shower of sparks rose as he spoke. “I dislike the army’s clockwork joints, as they’re known to cause aches and sometimes shooting pains if the soldier survives longer than ten years past the assignment of mechanical parts. But the advantage to their method is a tighter, more sure fit. It took me the better part of the morning, but I’ve worked out a kind of compromise, allowing preservation of your nerve endings but also locking the joint more tightly. As insurance, though, I’m going to add a leather sling to your wardrobe. It will allow your mechanical arm to be anchored to your shoulders, meaning if you receive a tug like that, your shoulders will pitch forward instead of your clockwork giving way. This is more how a flesh arm behaves, though you’ll now have the advantage of being less likely to dislocate your shoulder because of the brace.” He smiled again, but this time the gesture seemed quite forced. “Olivia is a fine leather craftswoman as it turns out. She’s volunteered to produce my design as an apology for ripping off your arm.”
Conny seemed to run out of conversation after that, and Johann watched him work in silence. The aether clung to him like cotton, softening the edges of the world. While he knew he was still upset with Cornelius, it didn’t seem to matter at the moment. In fact, the more he watched Cornelius’s deft fingers move across his arm, the more he observed Conny’s habit of biting his lip while he focused, the more Johann thought about how good it had felt when they’d kissed and fondled one another at the café.
Then he caught Cornelius’s glance at his naked chest, at the scars over the places where Johann’s flesh organs had been replaced with ones of metal, and he remembered it all.
“Why did you make me a weapon?”
He winced as the question made Cornelius’s hand tremble, the soldering iron slipping to send a message of heat along wiring attached to his nerves. Cornelius set the implement aside and folded his hands into his lap. “I didn’t turn you into a weapon. I gave you a piece of machinery that saved your life. A pump allowing blood to circulate through your body.”
“But you said this machine is what both armies want. That they will make it a weapon.” He remembered the fear he’d felt when he’d first woken in Cornelius’s chamber, that he’d been turned into an automaton. How easily and foolishly he’d let the pretty man convince him otherwise.
Cornelius caught the clockwork hand in his own, curling his fingers around the metal digits as he stared earnestly into Johann’s face. “No one knows y
ou have this heart but you and me. Félix believes it’s been stolen. Whoever broke into the shop thinks someone else got to it first. There’s no reason for anyone to suspect you carry the heart. No reason whatsoever.”
Johann touched the scar with his right hand. “It glows red when I run. Through a leather waistcoat.”
“If I add a shielding panel to your clothing, the problem is solved.”
It annoyed Johann for Cornelius to be nonchalant over something so serious. He glowered and forced them back to the blunt truth of the matter. “Why did you give this to me? Why did you save me and give me this horrible thing? If it’s this valuable, they won’t stop looking for it. They’ll find it. They’ll find me. They’ll make me their automaton. Which never would have happened if you’d left me to die as you should have.”
Cornelius rose, hugging his arms tight over the midsection of his leather apron. He went to the large wall of windows, looking out over the clouds for several moments before speaking in a quiet, defeated tone. “I didn’t know the heart was anything but a forgotten piece of machinery when I gave it to you. I only knew how angry I was with my father, my country. There was no reason to believe anyone would notice its absence.”
“But now they have. Now I am what they seek.”
“No.” Cornelius turned to face Johann with fire in his gaze. “They’re looking for a heart. They aren’t giving you so much as a moment’s consideration. Only a handful of people are aware I gave you any clockwork, and as far as they know, it’s only limbs.” He lifted his chin. “Frankly, they’d never believe I knew how to do such a complicated surgery. Everyone thinks I’m just a gentleman’s bastard mucking about, that simply working with Félix couldn’t make me as good as I am.”
Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 Page 10