“I always worried about her,” Emilio replied. “But I’ve also learned that it doesn’t mean you’re ever going to make a difference in what she chooses.”
“Perhaps,” Nathaniel said, patting the Italian on the back, “that’s why she ended up with you instead of me.”
“That’s one of the reasons.” The sound of Sarah’s voice was slightly muffled by the mask, but he could hear the mix of exasperation and just a touch of anger. It was a tone she reserved for giving someone just one more chance before she unleashed her full fury.
Nathaniel held up his hands. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”
Sarah laughed. “An apology from Nathaniel Winthorp? We haven’t even begun to fight and today is already a miraculous day.”
Emilio felt himself wanting to come to the boy’s defense, but even if Nathaniel was only her step-brother, he knew enough about brothers and sisters to stay out of their way. He decided it might serve them better to entirely change the direction of the conversation instead. “Perhaps we could see your costume, Sarah?”
So far he had only seen the long coat she had been wearing to cover what the women of Stanton house had put together for her. He knew that it was loosely based on her father’s costume, and had, in fact, been constructed from pieces of his original outfit, but he couldn’t begin to imagine what it might be.
“Don’t be so eager, Emilio.” But even hidden away under her coat, the costume seemed to be having an effect on her. She stood tall and proud, her hair once again returned to its proper blonde color, although it seemed to have been impossible to effectively clear away all the red; and a tinge of copper still danced in it. “Before we get started, do we all know our part in the plan?”
Nathaniel nodded. “Just don’t get too confident, Sarah. Eschaton is a clever, dangerous man.”
Sarah raised her eyebrows. “Last time we met I knocked him on his behind, and this time I have a better gun.”
“He isn’t that man anymore.” Nathaniel held up his transparent arm. “He may have begun to unravel the secrets of the universe, but I’m inclined to believe that his mind is going with it.”
Emilio didn’t like the sound of that. It was one thing to face an evil genius, and quite another to be confronting a madman. “We need to find my sister.”
Sarah nodded. “I haven’t forgotten about Viola. If she’s in there, we’ll find her, but first we need to get inside.”
He nodded in agreement, but he had little doubt that Viola had ended up inside these walls. There were few places she would have gone without telling him, and unlike Sarah and the more genteel women that she was accustomed to, Viola was capable of heading out into the city without getting lost or hurt. “All right, Sarah, but we save her, no matter what.”
What he hadn’t said out loud was that the more he thought about it, the more he realized that his sister joining Eschaton was inevitable. Although he had wanted to believe she was a hero in her heart, he also knew that the villain’s plan to destroy the world made his goals the same as hers.
Sarah didn’t move, or even blink—or at least not so far as he could see through the helmet he wore. If he’d had more time he would have removed the glass eye covers entirely. Perhaps that’s why Vincent had taken out the second layer of glass by the time he had put the costume on in the theater. With the old showman dead and buried, it was far too late to find out. “First we find Tom. Once we have him back, we’ll be able to fight more effectively.”
“If he’s still alive,” Nathaniel added.
“That’s quite an enlightened attitude, Nathaniel,” Sarah said with a smile. “I thought you believed a machine couldn’t be a living thing.”
“I haven’t changed my mind on that account,” he told her, “but I can tell the difference between a broken steam engine and a working one, and we need him.”
Sarah stared at Nathaniel quietly for a moment. “Hopefully Tom will be able to convince you. Now wait a few minutes, and then you can begin.”
“Where am I supposed to start?” Emilio asked. It was one thing to have an ambitious plan, and quite another to put it into action.
“Right there,” Sarah said, pointing at a large white crack in the marble. It had clearly been patched multiple times with concrete, and it looked as if it would soon need it again. “That is where the original Steamhammer tried to bring down the Hall of Paragons before my father stopped him. But this time,” she said, whipping open her coat and pulling out her gun, “you’ll have the power of the Industrialist on your side.”
“Are you taking your father’s name, Sarah?” Nathaniel asked with an incredulous look on his face.
“Hardly.” She finished undoing the thick black buttons on her overcoat, a gesture that Emilio hoped Nathaniel wasn’t finding as alluring as he was. She pulled off her hood and dropped the coat to the ground in a single grand gesture.
“You can call me Columbia now.” Sarah took a quick turn, showing off the entire outfit. Emilio gasped in spite of himself. The new costume did indeed incorporate the patriotic theme from her father’s original Industrialist costume, but now it had been taken to an almost absurd extreme.
The leather jacket was still mostly the same, but underneath it was a billowing dress of taffeta that had been designed to suggest the form of the United States flag in full wave.
And wrapped around her head was a red and white striped headband that might have been pulled completely from her father’s original top hat. But most shocking of all were the two guns holstered on her waist: one was the pneumatic weapon that Tom had given to her. The other was her father’s weapon, the bullet feed that powered it leading up to the canister of fortified steam on her back.
“Well, gentlemen,” she said as she finished her twirl, “What do you think?”
“It’s good . . .” Emilio said, finding himself at even more of a loss for words than usual.
“It is good,” Nathaniel confirmed, and then let slip a small chuckle.
Emilio was shocked to find that he had let out a small laugh, as well—one that he hoped would be concealed by the suit. But it seemed that was not to be, and the transparent man responded to his slight laugh by letting out a larger guffaw.
Somehow that sound made Emilio laugh even harder, and it took only a few moments before the two men found themselves gasping and leaning against each other as the laughter rolled out of them.
Emilio tried desperately to control it, but the dagger-filled look that he was being given by Sarah only confirmed his fears that she was taking this entirely the wrong way. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” he managed to choke out between fits of laughter.
“Fine, then,” she said. “You two children can have your laugh at my expense, but this is deadly serious business. If nothing else, I was hoping you could at least support me.”
Nathaniel was the first to calm down, and he spoke as Emilio pulled off his helmet to get a breath of air. “I’m not mocking you, Sarah, truly I’m not.”
She squinted, eyeing him with a sincere lack of trust that made Emilio glad that he wasn’t the one who had spoken up first. “Then what is it that you’ve found so amusing?”
Emilio broke in. “It’s a very,” he choked down a chortle, “very strange world that we’ve found ourselves in, I think.”
Nathaniel nodded in response, clearly less in control of his laughter than Emilio was. “After all this,” he choked out. “To see you in that.”
Sarah frowned. The explanation clearly wasn’t making her feel any better. “All right, you two can make your excuses later. For now, I need you to get to work.”
Emilio nodded and stepped forward. Sarah almost turned away, but for whatever reason she hesitated, and he took the moment to plant a kiss directly on her lips. “I love you, Sarah Stanton,” he said in a half whisper. “Whatever happens, be safe. I want you to come back to me.”
He stared directly into her eyes. His declaration of emotion seemed to give her a bit more confidence. “I love you too, Emil
io.” She leaned forward and he gave her another kiss—one far more passionate. He closed his eyes, and was glad that he couldn’t see Nathaniel’s face.
As she pulled away Sarah smiled at him for a moment, then let the emotion pass. She pulled a wire-wrapped key out of her pocket and walked halfway down the alley, toward a metal door with a hole in the center of it.
As she approached the entrance, she pulled the gun out of its holster with her right hand.
Emilio had made some changes to the weapon, but like everything Darby had created, the work in the gun’s design spoke to a level of insight and skill that seemed beyond reason. It would have been one thing to simply read about such marvels. There was not an inventor in the world who didn’t live in awe of the machines that Dennis Darby had created. But Emilio hadn’t just touched the master’s work—he’d talked to it.
Emilio watched intently as Sarah slipped the key into the door and held it there. There was a loud “thunk” and the door consumed it. A few seconds later, the door popped open. “No turning back,” Sarah said, pulling the pneumatic gun out of its holster, and slipping into the blackness.
Emilio was thunderstruck. “She is amazing.”
“She is, at that. You’re a lucky man.”
Emilio laughed and held up the metal arms. “Luck will be us staying alive.”
“True enough,” Nathaniel said. “Now how do we start up this ridiculous contraption you’re wearing?”
“The switches that are down there,” he said, nodding at the device at his back. “Turn them all on.”
Nathaniel did as he was told, and Emilio could feel the device coming to life as the water inside it began to swirl. He had only begun his modifications on it when the attack on the junkyard had come, and although he had finished his work in the workshop at the Stanton mansion there had been no time (or way) for him to test the device before putting it on.
It was certainly nowhere near as complex—or as full of mystery—as Darby’s devices seemed to be, but even so there was a chance that the changes he had made could cause the chisels he was wearing to malfunction with catastrophic consequences.
Most troubling was a specific bit of strange machinery that Emilio didn’t fully understand. He referred to it as “The Harmonic Neutrality,” and it was, as far as he could tell, the part of the device that allowed it to send tremendous shockwaves outward without tearing apart the person inside. If he had damaged it—or thrown it off-balance—the suit’s tremendous energy would be thrown back at him.
“So, where do we begin?” Nathaniel said, smacking his glassy palms together. “It’s time we showed the Children some manners.”
Emilio smiled. Whenever he had read about the exploits of the Paragons, they had always been peppered with tremendous amounts of pithy bon mots directed at their enemies. Up until now he had always assumed that these were literary embellishments designed for the readers, but it seemed this was really how a gentlemen adventurer spoke. Hearing it with his own ears gave him a thrill and filled him with pride. “Let’s make them shake with fear!”
“That’s the spirit!” Nathaniel said. “We’ll make a hero of you yet!”
Emilio took a few steps toward the corner of the building and pressed the chisels against the cracks. “This is for you, Vincent,” he shouted, and then depressed the switches at his fingertips.
The eye-covers snapped shut, and an instant later the shaking began. The effect was immediate and devastating. The concrete turned to powder almost instantly, sending out a blinding rush of dust, and Emilio was finally glad for the extra layer of protection the suit had placed over his eyes.
Unable to see or hear, he had only his sense of touch to guide him as he drove his arms deeper and deeper into the marble. Feeling the earth parting at his touch gave him a sense of something that went beyond simple pride. It was a moment of almost God-like power. He had become a mythic being—a character out of legend! Emilio Armando would be the man who brought down the Hall of Paragons!
He pressed down with his thumb, injecting a small puff of fortified smoke into the water tank on his back. The machine reacted as though it were an angry mule, bucking and jerking. For a moment he was convinced that he had misjudged his modifications, and the suit might tear him apart, but before he decided to pull his fingers off the triggers it settled into its next level of power. The vibrating seemed to calm down again, and he could feel the ground giving way even faster than before.
Driving the chisels downward, Emilio dug deeper into the foundations of the building. He could feel the ground sinking away underneath him. It was as if the earth beneath his feet had suddenly transformed into a gas, and he was sinking into the very bowels of the planet.
Even surrounded by the dust he could see that the sunlight was disappearing. Before he fell completely into darkness, Emilio lifted his fingers from the activators and the chisels slowed down. The eye guards snapped back, and he looked out to survey his handiwork.
Sarah’s plan had been for him to simply crack a hole into the side of the Hall. It would announce the arrival of the Society of Steam, giving him and Nathaniel the unenviable task of dealing with the first wave of defenders while Sarah snuck in. But as the dust cleared, it was obvious that the Steamhammer had gone a great deal farther than that.
Emilio found himself at the bottom of a pit ten feet deep. The corner of the Hall above him was gone entirely, and what remained of the building was not only shattered and cracked, but a large chunk of the granite floor hung precipitously over him, held up by nothing more than wishful thinking and some very good engineering on the part of the building’s designers.
He heard Nathaniel’s voice calling down from above. “Well done, sir! No one can question your enthusiasm.”
“I don’t think I can get out!” Emilio said, waving his chisels above his head.
“At this point your best bet may be to just keep drilling straight through to China!” It was followed by a large guffaw. The sound seemed entirely incongruous with its transparent source, although he was happy that the Mercurial Man was still in good spirits.
“What should we do?”
“I can get into the building now. I think I should go and help Sarah.”
Emilio realized that in his power-mad foolishness he had not only become trapped, but had also rendered himself unfit to provide aid to the woman he loved. Up above, he saw Nathaniel leap across the hole he had made, landing inside the building. The transparent man looked back down at him, the sun shining through his skin. “Will you be okay?”
“I figure it out.” A spray of dust rained down on him from above. “Go help her!”
Nathaniel nodded, then disappeared. Emilio wondered if he had done the right thing.
Looking around, he saw that the foundations of the building were fully exposed now. The wall in front of him was patched and broken. Vincent had told him that the original Steamhammer had managed to break into Darby’s lab. This must have been where . . .
“Naturalmente!” If Vincent had used the suit to enter the building after he had been buried there, he could do the same thing.
After waiting a moment to make sure that Nathaniel had gotten completely clear, he pressed the chisels up against the side of the building, and pressed down on the activators once again.
The eye covers dropped into place, and the rumbling started up again. He pressed harder into it, until suddenly there was no pressure at all. He managed to avoid tumbling into the abyss he had just opened by only a hair’s breadth, but the ground under his feet betrayed him anyway, his legs sliding out from under him as the loose earth drained away, dragging him into the darkness that he had opened under the foundation of the building.
As he fell, Emilio was struck with an almost-amusing thought: he had, like any human who dreamed themselves to have the power of a god, simply opened a path to the underworld.
Chapter 22: A Confrontation of Opposites
CHAPTER 22
A CONFRONTATION OF OPPOSITES
/>
As Anubis crashed through the church window he had no idea what to expect on the other side. After his recent luck, he fully expected to be taking the same drop on this side of the window that he had just avoided on the other.
At least his body wouldn’t be subject to the same indignities inside a church that it would be on a New York City street.
But his fall was mercifully short, and he travelled only a yard or so through the air before landing hard on the top of an oak desk. The impact knocked the breath out of him and pens, papers, and a bottle of ink all went flying in different directions as his momentum slid him across the surface and onto the ground.
The air had been knocked out of him, and Anubis lay there for a moment, catching his breath, stunned by both his fall and the fact that he had managed to simultaneously reach the ground and stay alive. He felt pain shooting down his leg from knee to ankle from kicking in the window. He flexed his toes to make sure that they still worked, and then slowly dragged himself upright.
As high up as he was, he could still hear the shouting from the street below. “Where are you, Negro?” He’d heard those voices before, back when he was a boy, and they were never good news. “You might as well come out. We’ll go easier on you!”
This particular accent was not only familiar; it sent a shock of fear dancing up Anubis’s spine. The White Knight had left him badly beaten after their last encounter, but it had only been his flesh that had betrayed him in the fight. The fear he felt from the sound of Clements’s voice was the kind that clung to a man’s soul. “C’mon, Anubis. You know we won’t kill you. I saw you fall off of the quicksilver man, and I need to bring you back to Lord Eschaton.”
Perhaps, if he just lay low, they’d go away. “Knight! Over here!” shouted one of the other men. If they had stumbled onto some of the debris from his crash it was only a matter of time . . .
Pulling himself up to his feet, Anubis stumbled toward the entrance. There had to be more than one way out. Maybe he could slip free before they found him.
Power Under Pressure (The Society of Steam) Page 32