by Tom Miller
MARCH–APRIL 1918
The Wayne County Coroner’s Office declared Lucretia Cadwallader’s cause of death to be “accidental self-inflicted spontaneous human combustion.” This only further inflamed suspicions that Cadwallader had been the victim of a Trencher assassination and intensified the First Disturbance.
Victoria Ferris-Smythe, Empirical Philosophy: An American History, 1938
I STUMBLED INTO THE common room and Unger handed me a copy of the Sunday Globe.
A picture of Dar and me anchored the front page: Dar was wearing her borrowed helmet and firefighter’s coat, which was unbuttoned to reveal her dress and pearls. We were both smudged with soot. She was clutching my arm with one hand and pointing toward the building with the other. Her face was intense and concerned, focused on whatever technicality we’d been discussing. I had my suit jacket slung over one shoulder and was laughing.
HERO OF HELLESPONT SAVES TRENCHERS: CASTLE CLUB BURNS; 24 DEAD, the headline ran.
I read a bit from the article:
Hardin fearlessly employed the same philosophical techniques she used during her famous action in the Dardanelles. After transporting firefighters to the sixth floor, she searched room to room alongside them, rolling back the smoke with her bare hands. Seven Trenchers were rescued from the labyrinthine halls, many of them overcome by the heat.
Twenty-three men on the lower floors perished. Mrs. Katie O’Sullivan, the fire department’s smokecarver, was also killed while fighting the blaze.
Radcliffe freshman Robert Weekes assisted by retrieving noted orator and four-time Trencher Party presidential candidate Maxwell Gannet, who had become trapped on the roof.
“Isn’t it terrific?” said Unger. He’d bought fifteen copies.
I suspected Danielle might feel otherwise. I took one of Unger’s newspapers and went to visit her. She met me at the door of her apartment, wrapped in her housecoat. She wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
She ducked her shoulders and took a step away from me. Her eyes were full.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
She handed me a copy of the Boston Informer, which had put out a special edition. They’d taken their usual editorial perspective.
RENEGADE PHILOSOPHERS MURDER 23.
And below it: EXCLUSIVE TO THE INFORMER: A STATEMENT BY MAXWELL GANNET.
Gannet had produced three rambling pages of madness and hellfire, but his final paragraph was coherent enough:
Robbed of control over my own body and pitched from the roof—I would have sooner died than allow that charlatan Weekes to defile me. If I’d woken an hour earlier, I would have gone over and shot the lot of them dead. So bravo, ladies and gentleman. I wish you all the joy of your murderous arson and hope that I will have the opportunity to repay you for depriving so many of my brethren of their lives.
“My God,” I whispered.
“You should have left him there,” Dar said. “Why didn’t you leave him?”
“They’ll arrest Gannet for saying that.”
“No they won’t. He stopped just short of making an actionable threat. But his followers know exactly what he wants them to do.”
I sank down in a chair. “They can’t go out and murder a couple of young, good-looking people who so recently saved their lives. It would damage the Trencher movement. That’s not how you win followers.”
“Gannet doesn’t care about the movement,” said Dar. “He thinks God put him on Earth to kill sigilrists.”
She folded the paper and set it on a stack of others—New York Times, Detroit Defender, Chicago Tribune—all of them with the same picture of the two of us.
“I feel sick,” Dar said. “I want to go home. A couple of reporters from the Globe came by at four in the morning to ask for my reaction. I told them to go to hell.”
“Well, there you go,” I said. “Go to the Globe and give them an exclusive right back. Tell them what you think of an organization that threatens a twenty-two-year-old girl.”
Dar scowled. “I’m done with all that, with my words being twisted. Go down there yourself and do it. You’d be good at it.”
“Maybe I will.”
• • •
I went instead to the shooting range in the basement of the Gray Box with Mother’s revolver. Every time another question bubbled up, I reloaded and popped off another four rounds at a paper target. Should I have left Gannet to burn? Should I have killed him myself? Were his acolytes plotting against Dar? Against me?
I’d been at it a good while when one of Belle Addams’s men sidled up at the next spot over. He was the same one who’d spoken with me at the freshman social.
“Good morning, Mr. Weekes,” he said, raising two fingers to his brow.
“Howdy,” I said. I decocked my revolver. “You’ve come to ‘prepare’ me off to Ms. Addams’s office?”
He waved, as if we had all the time in the world. “Many different sorts of preparedness, you know. I see you’re quite well prepared with a pistol.”
I smiled wanly. “It’s about the smallest gun in the world.”
“A Westmarch Armory four-shot revolver in .22 Short, double action,” the man supplied. “They only made a hundred of them, but it’s quite an admirable weapon—terrifically accurate for its size. I’ve always wanted to try one.”
“Would you care to trade?” I asked him.
He unholstered a large semiautomatic and we switched weapons. The heavy recoil of the big gun felt immensely good to me.
“Now, that’s the right-looking piece for a man,” I said as I handed it back to him.
“I disagree,” he replied. “Yours is more easily concealable. One could hardly blame a young gentleman for carrying it when he went out of the house.”
My blood ran cold. “Is that a suggestion?”
“No—merely an observation that ours is a time that rewards preparation.”
“Is there something I should be looking out for? Somebody?”
The man smoothed his hands over his vest. “It’s my job to look, Mr. Weekes. It’s yours to stay out of trouble.”
• • •
And indeed, there was plenty of trouble.
Recriminations flew back and forth among the Trenchers over how the Castle Club had been infiltrated—perhaps the Hand of the Righteous had allied itself with a sigilrist in order to remove the older Trencher leadership. No, it was the Trenchers from Texas and California settling an old grudge against their Eastern counterparts. No, Gannet himself had sabotaged the meeting—see how easily he’d escaped!
But the feuding Trencher groups all agreed that they had to strike back against every philosophical target they could find. Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma were plunged into fresh rounds of murder and kidnapping; houses and effigies were set alight from Seattle to Miami.
The Jayhawks and Gray Hats retaliated in kind. A smokecarver in Kansas City swathed a Trencher meetinghouse in a cloud of vaporized kerosene, drew an ignite sigil, and ran for her life—thirty-eight souls incinerated on the spot. In Davenport, a group of young men had assembled at another meetinghouse for weapons instruction from more senior Trenchers, only to have the building transported—with them still in it—into the middle of the Mississippi River. The building sank, drowning nine boys, the youngest of whom was twelve.
That begat a retired Corps general disemboweled and hanged on her front porch, which caused a general strike of the cargo hoverers in New Orleans, which inspired someone to fire on them with a Lewis gun. And a thousand other incidents besides.
Dar gave one interview after another, pleading for an end to the violence. Despite her good intentions, both sides turned on her. The Trencher Times accused her of conspiring to commit murder—her protest must have provided the cover for the smokecarvers to smuggle their incendiaries into the Castle Club. Meanwhile, the Defender called her a turncoat for rescuing the enemy.
One of Belle Addams’s men was with Dar whenever she
went out. The hate mail and death threats from the public came in by the bagful.
They trickled in for me, too. By the tenth one, Addams decided I would have an escort as well.
“Until the worst of this quiets down,” she pronounced during a private meeting a few days later.
“Lord,” I muttered. “I wish . . .”
“No, you don’t,” Addams said. “You don’t shoot a man in a hospital bed. You don’t put a bomb in an ambulance. And you don’t bonekill a man you’ve gone to save. I fought in a war where there were no rules and we still abided by those. You did the right thing.”
“I wish anybody else agreed,” I said.
“You’re R&E through and through, Mr. Weekes,” she said. “So, you put your head down. Train as hard as you can. Let me handle the Trenchers. I’ve been on Max Gannet’s little lists for the last fourteen months. I’ll get you through it.”
Trying to spot the guards became a game for me. The man in the raincoat, smoking on the corner, perhaps, or the gentleman in the argyle vest walking the Pomeranian, or the lad on the bicycle with two wicker baskets. Or, more likely, one of them and one I couldn’t see.
I could only hope the Trenchers weren’t as good at hiding in plain sight.
• • •
I tried to forget the Trenchers by sinking even more time into my preparations for the Cup. My conditioning flights stretched from four hours to six as March turned into April and the weather improved. I did a hundred flare and settles a day, left-handed passes, wind sprints on the ground in full harness with sixty pounds of sandbags strapped to my back. I eked out another two miles an hour here, one mile an hour there.
I put my energy into practicing for the Contingency Exam, too, which was only days away. I spent dozens of hours on arcane sigils that I would never use again after the test: simultaneous semaphore glyphs, sigils to change red to green, the left-breaking Habbie (which seemed to have no use at all outside of cheating at billiards). Yet no matter how much I practiced, little worries about the exam nagged. What if it’s the one time in forty that I can’t get my ignite glyph to work? The one time in two thousand that my message doesn’t take? Or if I forget the sigil for manual reduplication altogether?
All the other freshman scholarship cases went around in similar blurs of anxiety—fail the exam and you had to pay back your scholarship. The single serene, unworried exception was Unger. Never a word of complaint or unease, just a little cross-eyed from all his hours of practice. For his area of specialty, he’d chosen philosophical chemistry, a subject on which he could have conducted a yearlong seminar. But that didn’t matter if he failed the basic sigilry half of the test.
We did a mock exam in Essentials II, which I passed easily. I was paired with Mayweather, who blithely failed his dissipate sigil and was charmingly flummoxed by the koru for walnut trees. Mostly, he wanted to rehash the finer points of the Castle Club fire and its aftermath.
“You’re holding up, I hope?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I told Addams don’t send any of the hate mail to me unless it’s a threat against my mother or something creative. Nothing so far.”
“The Trenchers aren’t literary types, are they?” And then, lowering his voice, “But tell me—how’s Danielle? How is she really?”
“Aw, she’s fine!” I said. The Globe had run an article that morning speculating that Dar was having a nervous breakdown. “It’s just another smear.”
“You know she did have a bit of, well, an episode at the end of her junior year.”
“Yeah, she cussed out her French professor and walked out of the final exam to join the Corps. I know all about that.”
Mayweather nodded. “She never told you the whole story, then. That was the morning that German undersea boat torpedoed the troop transport carrying two hundred newly minted corpswomen off the coast of Spain. Exploded and burned, lost with all hands.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
“Eleven of the women were Cliffes. All the girls here were in hysterics, but Danielle was inconsolable. She walked out of that exam and spent two days in her room, crying, refusing to move. The good Reverend Hardin had to carry her out of the building.”
“Don’t go spreading—”
“Jake had the room right down the hall. She was the one who messaged Danielle’s father. I don’t know why Jake’s never told you.”
Presumably because Dar might never forgive her.
“So be careful with her,” Mayweather said. “And, goodness, if anything ever happened to you—one shudders to imagine.”
• • •
On the day of the Contingency Exam, the federal examiners took over the fourth sub-basement of the Gray Box. We stood quietly in the hallways waiting to be called into one room or another so we could perform each of the basic sigils being tested.
I passed all of them without incident. Later, my hover specialty test went so well that my examiner simply shouted “Pass” halfway through and waved me down to the ground. I considered lodging a complaint—she hadn’t seen a counterclockwise turn or a landing—but they had a long line of people to get through.
At the exam’s conclusion, I received a strip of paper on which I was to write my preferences for positions.
I ran my finger down the list: 306: Hoverer, cargo (dock flying, logistics, freight, postal); 307: Hoverer, field (county philosopher, search and rescue, emergency stasis team); 308: Hoverer, passenger and courier (long-distance, short-distance).
For a moment I considered doing something stupid. Surely someone needed a rough and tumble sort of philosopher out in the field—useful employment, necessary work, some adventure that even the men headed off to war would respect. Something more than being a lapdog to a future politician.
I damned myself for even thinking it. Be wise, be kind, do the obvious thing. And be a little careful.
I wrote: 308 (Durstman and Associates).
• • •
I returned home to find Unger at the table in the common room, sitting with a bowl of ink and a stack of fresh white paper, just as he had for months. Manual reduplication—because it required the least philosophical energy of any sigil.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Unger said at last. “That something would be different. That I’d been using fake powder all this time, but they’d have the real stuff. You know how they kept telling us to forget what we’d done in the first room when we went into the second, not to be too excited or to let disappointment throw us off? I did that. It only began to sink in when I finished. Not that it’s really sunk in, even now.”
“How was the chemistry?” I asked.
He gave a heartless laugh. “Perfect score, only one of the day. They told everyone else pass or fail, but they told me the number, too.”
“The Contingency Board won’t give you a waiver and let you do lab work? Or theoretical research?”
He shook his head. “Practical sigilry only.”
“If you need a loan—” I suggested.
“It’s not the money,” said Unger. “My parents won’t be happy, but we’ll scrape tuition together. No, it’s the playacting that hurts. Me, you, everyone pretending I had a chance.”
“Let me take you out for a drink,” I suggested.
“I’m already going. With Mayweather and a few of the other hopeless cases.”
Mayweather had passed three sigils, failed four, and then flunked the message specialty test. He, at least, had his commission to fall back on. Unger would have to take his chances with the draft.
30
APRIL–MAY 1918
The lever, the wheel, the inclined plane: break down any complex mechanism into its component parts and you’ll find the same simple machines. Why not in sigilry as well? One part of the glyph to initiate, one for power, one to control the extent of its effect. Separate them out and you could modify sigils at will.
K. F. Unger, “The Use of Laplace and Fourier Transforms in Analysi
s of Trestor Wave Patterns,” Distinguished Lecturer Series in Theoretical Empirical Philosophy, Maria Trestor College, 1936
WITH SIX WEEKS LEFT before the Cup, the late-model regulators from Denver Custom Instruments arrived. Suddenly, the entire aerodrome was interested in training.
Essie made 400 miles an hour on her first flight with her new reg. Jake, Francine, and Tillie all easily hit 425. And my fancy five hundred dollar piece of clockwork bought me an extra—three miles an hour. I couldn’t break 250.
“Again!” Brock said. “Do it again.”
I ran our one-mile course, over and over, but I failed to improve: 249.
No advantage as I pushed harder on my conditioning flights, no faster even as I dropped another few pounds, no edge when we increased the corn dust ratio in my powder.
Five weeks left until the Cup, then four.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Brock said. “You’ve got to be losing energy somewhere, but I can’t see it. You have no slippage. Your streamlining’s fine. You have no fade or leap, so you’re drawing often enough.”
“Bad reg?” suggested Gertrude. “Not running rich enough?”
I traded regulators with Astrid, but nothing changed. We tried one hundred percent corn for my powder, but other than hitting me harder on my launch, it did nothing for my top speed.
“What am I missing?” Brock asked.
“He’s peaked,” Gertrude answered. “That’s the only explanation, even if we don’t want to admit it. But it’s a hell of a victory! A year ago if you’d told me I could fly a man at two hundred and fifty, I would have called you insane.”
“I’d hoped for a little more,” Brock said. “At two hundred seventy-five you might have beaten the girls from Trestor. It’s going to be an ugly loss. Do you mind, Robert? I could put you in the endurance flight, instead. We have a—how to put it?”
“We’re employing novel means to win,” Gertrude said. “It’ll be a hoot. They’ll be talking about it for years. The medals are pretty.”
“Would I have any shot at a Corps invitation?” I asked.
Gertrude shook her head. “Not for the endurance flight, no.”
“Then the long course,” I said. “And if some theorist from Trestor kicks my ass by four minutes, I can’t say you didn’t warn me.”