“I didn’t expect to see you here. Normally this part is Brian’s job,” Amelia said.
Calvin breathed in the soft vanilla scent that seemed to float off of Amelia’s skin. Brian could dump his chores on Calvin anytime if it worked out this way.
“How’ve you been?” she asked, moving over to the scale and picking up the ledger where he’d left off. They easily fell into a working rhythm, as if they’d done this many times before.
“Busy,” Calvin said, waving a hand at the food. “As you can see.”
“This is a good haul. Could use some more meat, but that’s easy to come by,” she said. “I just had to clean out the inside of the shark mimic. Dirty job, that.”
“Your dad won’t let you study with the cadets, but he’ll let you clean the mimics?” Calvin asked.
“He thinks it will keep me out of trouble.” Amelia grinned and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “He doesn’t know, but I have taken the shark out a couple of times. Just up and down the river.”
“You can drive that thing?”
“Yes. It’s so great! You’re going to love piloting one. Oh, here.” She handed him a canvas sack of apples. His hand brushed hers as he took it, and his ears burned. He wondered if this was how it went when a girl fancied you, or if she was just being friendly. He told himself not to overthink it—there were already enough ways to get in trouble with the McCrackens.
“Thanks,” he said, putting the sack on the fruit shelf.
“So Brian has you doing his chores, huh? He must be afraid of you,” Amelia said.
“Whoa, what?” Calvin halted and almost dropped a can.
“He’s done this once or twice before—if there’s a recruit he doesn’t like, he’ll put them on remedial duties for a day or two, just to slow them down. Makes them look worse on paper so they get grunt work assignments when it comes time to go into the field,” Amelia said.
“That prat! Wait, so that means I’m good at all this?”
Amelia shrugged. “So far, yeah. But you guys haven’t even started the good stuff. Next week, if you keep the schedule, you’ll start mimic simulations.”
“If I keep the schedule,” Calvin muttered, stocking another can.
She lowered her voice. “Don’t be in such a rush to hit the field. I’ve seen thousands of recruits graduate from training, but it’s always the same people in charge who pass back through.”
“You don’t think they all die out there, do you?” Calvin asked.
“Well, no. I mean sure, some do, but mostly I meant . . .” She looked down and bit her lip. Was he imagining the flush of red in her cheeks? “You’re not in a rush to run off and get killed, are you Calvin?”
“Definitely not. I am here to run off and . . .” he thought about saying do some killing but he didn’t want to think of the mage again. “And fight for something worthwhile.”
Amelia stopped writing in the ledger and rested her hands on the counter. “Why do you feel that way, Calvin?”
He pursed his lips as he recalled the tea merchant in Boston, telling Amelia a brief version of the story. “Before my dad could take me away from there, I asked a man in the crowd what was going on. I wondered why the captain had thrown away his own goods. The man, the bystander, looked at me like I’d asked him why the sun comes up every morning. I’ll always remember what he said.
“‘Them tea-makers are standing up for what’s theirs, kid. Better to go broke for freedom than to smile with someone’s boot on your neck.’”
“Wow,” Amelia said, listening with great interest. “Is that why you joined up, Calvin? To go broke in the fight?”
“I came here because John Penn’s crew snuck into my house and gave me a really lopsided choice,” Calvin admitted.
“That’s how you got here. But that’s not why you’re here,” Amelia said.
Calvin thought it over. “I guess to be honest I don’t know why I’m here. Not just yet. But, well . . .” he felt his face flush again as he met her eyes with his. “I found a reason to enjoy it, for what that’s worth.”
There was a long silence between them. Amelia’s cheeks really did go red and she looked away. “I know what you mean.”
The pantry door swung open with a hard crack. Both of them jumped a mile as Commodore McCracken pushed his way inside, carrying two cured legs of pork. He almost dropped them both when he saw Calvin and Amelia in the enclosed space.
“Amelia! Why aren’t you at the docks?” he snapped. Calvin didn’t like how she flinched at her father’s voice.
“I just, I was . . . Calvin, he . . . Brian made him come in here and he didn’t know. . .”
“You were supposed to clean the shark mimic!” McCracken said.
“I did! It’s already clean.”
“Then clean something else. Go on, get!”
As Amelia scuttled out of the pantry, McCracken set his fiery gaze on Calvin. Calvin rooted himself to the spot, trying to convey some measure of courage, though his insides churned with uncertainty.
“And you,” the old man seethed. “Stay away from my daughter, or you walk home. This is your only warning. Are we clear?”
“Crystal,” Calvin said, fighting a tremble in his hands.
“Get out on the range. Now.”
~
CHAPTER 6
Commodore McCracken changed Amelia’s routine, and Calvin didn’t see her for the rest of that week or the start of the next one. That wasn’t to say that she was out of his head, though. He thought of her whenever his mind didn’t need to be on the training at hand.
The days at Mount Vernon stretched on and on, melting into one continual push of brutal training that was occasionally interrupted by sleep. Brian and Peter kept running the recruits ragged, and a few of them reached their breaking point at the end of the first week. Calvin and the others woke up in time to beat the water buckets, and a quick headcount revealed that fewer than twenty recruits remained.
“Where do they go?” asked Stitch.
“They walk home,” Edsel said.
“They say that, but that’s not what they mean,” Rusty said.
“That’s what Pete told me.” Edsel shrugged.
“Peter told you, but not us?” Cohen wondered aloud as he brushed chunks of mud out of his thick, sandy hair.
Edsel shrugged again. “Sure. I mean, we talk.”
Calvin said nothing. Resentment welled up inside him—he was really starting to dislike Edsel, who had no shortage of talents. Whatever the McCracken brothers scribbled on their papers each day, the good of it was on Edsel’s sheets. The way Calvin saw it, the rankings were only half about one’s skills, and the other half was how well the trainers liked you personally. Calvin really wanted to beat Edsel, and he’d never do it by winning over the McCracken brothers. He’d have to do it with sheer grit, then.
While Calvin doubted he’d ever be as good at swimming as Edsel, he had risen to the top of the class in rifle shooting, he’d improved with the handguns to where he was just behind Edsel, and his agility among the rampaging swine was the talk of the dormitory. Word of this must have gotten back to the McCracken brothers—that, or Brian had gotten an earful from his father over allowing Calvin to be alone with Amelia—because they really stepped up their focus on Calvin.
“Another two hundred yards,” Brian would say, once Calvin reached the end of the mile swim. “I saw you floating with the current back there.”
Like hell you did, Calvin thought. But he choked back the words and swam the two hundred yards. He carried extra logs, lugged extra machinery, and ran extra miles every time they cracked the whip. Brian breathed down his neck the whole way, just waiting for Calvin to break. Fueled by pure spite, Calvin met each challenge. He wouldn’t let this chump do him in.
He’d be lying to himself if he said part of his fuel wasn’t Amelia. He sensed her eyes on him from time to time, watching from a mansion window, and whenever he thought of her, he pushed just a little harder.
*
Aside from physical conditioning, new opportunities arose for Calvin to prove his worth; after ten days at Mount Vernon, the McCracken brothers added classroom sessions to the recruits’ schedules. Each cadet was issued a quill, ink bottle, and sheets of paper to take notes and study in the evenings. Stitch couldn’t read or write, so he teamed up with Rusty, but Calvin helped him too. His mother had taught him to read at a young age, a skill which he hadn’t always appreciated. Now it was another round in the cylinder.
Special instructors came in from other technomancer camps up and down the continent, teaching the recruits about various scientific disciplines that would give them an advantage over the mages. The first teacher was a bespectacled balding man named Bartholomew Rockefeller who specialized in chemistry. Calvin took notes about “accelerants” like gun powder, nitro glycerin, trinitrotoluene, and petroleum derivatives.
Once they got into petroleum, they learned about a wide load of uses for the bubbling black stuff, like how it was refined into different liquids for varied purposes. Rockefeller wanted the recruits to be able to identify the potent products based on smell and color alone. Before long most of the recruits had red eyes, runny noses, and ripping headaches from the fumes, and had to spend the rest of the session outside in the open air.
While going over his notes, Calvin reflected on how the mages used petroleum products to amplify the effects of some magical potions, while the technomancers used them to fuel and lubricate the engines on their mimics. The substance would be precious to both sides, if they went into a state of all-out war.
“Did you take good notes on the ‘terramancy equations’ he talked about?” Rusty asked, holding up her sheet of neatly-written notes. Calvin frowned.
“Terra-what?”
Rusty read from her paper. “He said the mages and mancers can use ‘equations’ with their magic to expand their senses. Terramancy helps them know where things are on the ground even if they can’t see them. There’s a way to counteract it, I think.”
Calvin blushed a little. “I didn’t catch that. I was trying to write down everything he said about petroleum.”
“I bet you could counteract terramancy if you shoot the mage,” Stitch said, shrugging his shoulders.
Rusty arched her eyebrows, then nodded and conceded the point. She and Calvin wrote that down.
*
The day after Rockefeller’s class, they heard from a botanist named Shantewa Goodall. Ms. Goodall had them copy passages from her manuscript, Herbs, Poxes & You, and taught them how to identify useful foliage by the shapes of the leaves—some for medicines, others for poisons. The most common medicinal plant turned out to be tobacco, which went into poultices for disinfecting open wounds or healing bruises. Calvin had seen Brian use wads of the stuff on some of the cattle they kept on the grounds.
Miss Goodall also gave them a complicated recipe for a tincture called “crimbrose,” an intense botanical cure-all which could counteract the effects of malpox. Calvin had heard of the disease before, by symptom rather than by name. It had spread through areas of Baltimore a few years back, killing hundreds. Miss Goodall told them that it still flared up in different places, and that if any of them showed symptoms of malpox, they were to immediately enter quarantine and begin a regiment of crimbrose infusions.
“Technomancers travel all across the continent. If you’re contagious, you will only worsen the spread of this sickness,” she explained.
That night Calvin asked Stitch if he knew what the word “quarantine” meant.
“Rusty said it’s complete isolation. Kind of like being in the brig,” Stitch said.
“Yeah, remember the brig, Calvin?” Edsel asked as he walked by, tailed by Lyla. She snickered at the jab. Calvin glared at him.
“I do, Edsel. They threw me down there for being too quick in the pigpen,” he shot back. The look on Edsel’s face confirmed a silent suspicion: it bugged him that Calvin was ahead of him in certain things.
Edsel just snorted and walked off with Lyla.
“I’m starting to not like him,” Stitch said in a low voice. “Kind of a show-off.”
“Don’t worry about him,” said Calvin, who worried about beating Edsel more than any of the other young recruits. “We were talking about isolation?
Stitch nodded. “Right. Quarantine. If you catch malpox, you might not get assigned to field duty, and that means no mimics.”
“So what you’re saying is, crimbrose is a good potion to know,” Calvin said.
“Not a potion,” Stitch warned, lowering his voice. “A concoction. Or an infusion. We don’t make potions, man. That’s for the Brits.”
“Good point.” Calvin filed the knowledge away and went to sleep.
*
After Miss Goodall’s lecture, he expected a third day of lectures. Instead, the McCracken brothers took the cadets into the stables, where a large tarp covered something vaguely horse-shaped. Peter grabbed a handful of the cloth and yanked it aside to reveal a mechanical . . . object. Calvin frowned as he tried to figure it out; maybe it had been a wolf at one point, but it lacked a lot of the armor panels that he’d seen on pictures of other, more complete mimics.
“This is an outdated model,” Peter said. “The engineers tried making warg-mimics a few generations ago, but the walkers aren’t as effective as the flying machines, so they phased them out. We use this one for practice. Your instructor today is a master mechanic named Horace Whitney. Give him your full attention.”
Calvin took an instant liking to Horace, a rotund man with a wide mustache and perpetually grease-stained hands. He wore a full-body suit made of dark blue canvas, presumably to keep the rest of his body from getting dirty while he worked on the mimics, but it smelled of grime and oil, even in the stables. Horace didn’t bother introducing himself further, or even going so far as to ask the recruits their names. He jumped right into his lecture and got to know the recruits along the way.
“These mimics are how we get monsters on our side. The mages can control biology, so we match them or beat them with technology.” Horace slapped the dilapidated saddle on the back of the warg. “Engines, gear sets, transmissions, generators, pistons,
actuators—all of these words are important mimic parts, and you should learn the basics before trying to operate one.”
The basics turned out to be rather extensive. Calvin was grouped with Stitch and Lyla, using tools like wrenches, screwdrivers, sockets, and other strangely named things to remove
various parts and change out the damaged bits. Edsel’s team focused on the gears and differential in the warg’s hindquarters, and a silent race began between the two teams to see who could do it better.
Calvin’s team got the engine back together first. While Edsel’s team tried to put the gears in place, Calvin studied the ignition mechanism on the warg’s control panel; it was a narrow slot filled with tiny pieces of metal that Horace called “tumblers,” which fell into the different ridges of a key. Each mimic had a unique key, so that it couldn’t be stolen or operated without the rider’s permission. The whole concept fascinated Calvin, and he fiddled with it for half an hour.
The hands-on experience with the warg mimic helped them to prepare for classroom instruction on the larger mimics that the technomancers currently used in the field. Horace’s lecture was short, as he was more inclined to practical instruction, and he soon bade farewell to the recruits, wishing them luck in their work. When the series of lectures ended, the McCracken brothers unveiled the greatest thing Calvin had ever seen in his life. They called it a “flight simulator.” Having just come off a lecture about moving parts, his eyes naturally picked it apart to see what it did.
The McCrackens had retrofitted one whole room with a wide array of implements to reproduce different conditions of a mimic flight. One wall was covered with a taut white sheet, and the wall opposite featured a control booth with a “projector” inside. There was a pressurized chemical tank capped by hoses that
snaked around the room, generating fake fog or smoke at the push of a button. Giant fans could create artificial wind, and a network of copper pipes rained down water from overhead.
All of this equipment surrounded a mimic sawhorse in the middle of the room, one without wings or an engine. All it had was a saddle and some handlebars with the standard controls of a dragonling mimic. It sat atop a thick spring that was bolted to the floor, and strong rubber cords pulled on it from four directions. Commodore McCracken himself sat up in the control booth and loaded a reel into the projector to show them how it worked. The recruits watched in intense silence as Peter manned the simulator controls and Brian mounted the sawhorse.
The room came alive. Images played on the screen wall, showing a mix of forest and sky racing past. Calvin blinked several times before he realized that this image must have been captured from a flying mimic at some previous time, then transmitted to the projector by whatever science the McCrackens used to make moving pictures. As the moving image veered left and down, Peter tugged on the controls that yanked the sawhorse to the left. Brian leaned into the turn, manipulating the handlebars as if he were atop a real mimic. Above the projector screen, a green lamp lit up.
“That means his response was correct,” Peter explained.
Calvin looked up as the Commodore pulled some levers in the booth. Fog began to pour into the room. Rainwater followed, spraying down on Brian, who pulled himself tighter against the sawhorse. Peter worked the rubber cords hard, simulating very rough flying conditions. Whatever Brian did on the sawhorse, it set off a red light above the projection screen, followed by a blaring alarm. The sawhorse bucked violently and Brian was thrown onto a padded mat down below.
“And you can guess what that means,” Peter said.
Calvin positively itched inside and out to get on that sawhorse. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Edsel wringing his fingers and shifting from foot to foot. Jealousy bubbled inside him, and Calvin recommitted to beating Edsel. There was no way that anything Edsel had done in his life prior to being recruited would give him an edge on the flight simulator.
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