Power Under Pressure (The Society of Steam)

by Andrew P. Mayer

  For an instant Nathaniel felt tempted to finish the job, and burn the Children to death. He held up his arms, fully intending to do the deed, and was only stopped by a sudden memory of the fate of his parents. “I’m no villain,” he told himself, lowering his arms. “Not like him.”

  But not completely unlike the Crucible either, he realized. More irony to be heaped onto what seemed to be an ever-growing pile. As he walked through the doorway, another group of Children ran toward him. He raised his temperature and watched the men peel away as the light flared out of him.

  “Where is Eschaton?” he yelled after them as he strode down the long granite corridor. Since no one was willing to answer him, Nathaniel moved toward the conference room. He found himself eager to confront the gray giant again. This time, free from the interference of Anubis, perhaps he could finish the job.

  The plan had been for him to engage with Eschaton (or at least to threaten to), creating a distraction while Sarah snuck quietly through the building, rescuing Tom and Viola. Grüsser would use his knowledge of the secrets of the Hall to create further distractions.

  The moment he saw Sarah standing in the corridor, Nathaniel saw just how badly that plan had failed. He had arrived just in the nick of time—she was facing off against the Bomb Lance and a number of Blades. The damned Irishman had his barb leveled at the girl’s chest.

  “Dammit lass,” the Bomb Lance said, “how is it that I can never be rid of you?” In the confined space of the hallway there was little chance that he could miss.

  Nathaniel rushed forward as fast as he could, praying that he could tackle the villain from behind before Sarah was hurt. He had felt the sharp end of the Irishman’s barbs more than once, and he was determined that she would never suffer the way he did.

  “This will be the last time,” Sarah said. For an instant Nathaniel was pleased with his transparent form for providing him with the stealth to sneak up on the Irishman before any of the Children could stop him.

  What he had failed to account for was the fact that Sarah, seeing only the danger, and not her transparent rescuer, would pull the trigger on her weapon, sending a blast of wind rushing down the corridor in his direction.

  The Bomb Lance fired in response to Sarah’s attack, but even the slim harpoon couldn’t avoid being swept up in the vortex her gun created. It engulfed Murphy and Jack first, spinning the two villains up into the air.

  Nathaniel’s brain told him to stop, but he couldn’t react quickly enough. Then the wind swept him up as well, dashing his body up against the ceiling, then back down onto the ground.

  The electric lights on the walls had mostly gone dark, the fragile bulbs smashed in the wind. Nathaniel could sympathize, his own body feeling shattered.

  “Where are ya, ya damn harpy?” Clearly the Bomb Lance had managed to rally himself more quickly than the other Children. Nathaniel couldn’t see him in the dim light, but the Irishman was yelling loudly. “I’ll pierce you like a pincushion!”

  “I have a gun as well, sir,” Sarah replied. Nathaniel cringed, finding her too easily in the gloom. He wanted to shout out to her, but the painfully familiar hiss of the Bomb Lance’s gun meant that the Irishman had seen her as well. Nathaniel swallowed hard as he waited to hear her cry out, fatally pierced by the man’s barb.

  Despite her bravado, determination, and family heritage, Sarah had never been trained for combat. In the end, the difference between life and death was a matter of knowing when to avoid your instincts. After all, it was never the thing you noticed that became the end of you.

  Nathaniel lit up his arm, filling the hallway with a dazzling brilliance that would hopefully be blinding. Staring through his own phosphorous light, he looked around and saw nothing. Neither the Bomb Lance nor Sarah. Instead, there were only the open doors that led into the meeting room—the place where he had seen Alexander Stanton die; the room he and Anubis had escaped only a few days before.

  Nathaniel hesitated just for an instant. He heard Sarah shouting out his name from down the bend in the corridor.

  He followed her call, stopping short when he reached the turn. The lights were still working in this section and he had Sarah’s back this time, but she was in no less danger now, and this time there was far less that he could do.

  She and the Bomb Lance were now aiming their weapons directly at one another, which was an improvement. But sitting a few yards behind him, slumped in his wheelchair, was Doc Dynamite, a revolver in his hand and an unlit stick of dynamite on his chest, waiting to be ignited and flung in their direction.

  “Let her go!” Nathaniel yelled at the Irishman.

  “I’m not holding her, ya daft boy,” the Irishman yelled back.

  Nathaniel frowned. He knew their plan was doomed to failure, he just hadn’t expected it to fall apart quite so quickly.

  He took a step forward, and then jerked back from the crack of a bullet against his shoulder. “That’s far enough,” the Texan said, waving his still-smoking gun.

  If the Texan was so confident with his aim, why hadn’t he just shot Sarah and been done with it? Nathaniel took another step.

  The second bullet struck him directly in the head, but the force of the blow simply knocked him backwards instead of shattering his mind as it had previously. He could feel the silver liquid protecting him, as if there was a second living creature inside him, learning and responding to what was going on around him. “If you harm a hair on her head. . .”

  “You shouldn’t be so worried about her,” the Irishman said. “You’re one of the Children now. It’s time for you to admit it.”

  “I’m still a Paragon.” He said it proudly and took another step forward.

  “Stop, Nathaniel,” Sarah said. He almost cringed when he realized that she had actually turned to look at him. If they had wanted her dead, she would have been dead. Perhaps Eschaton still needed something from her?

  “You’ll be the last one,” the Texan said.

  “You think we won’t kill her if we have to?” The Bomb Lance asked, waving his barb around. “I almost had ya twice, girlie, it’ll be a pleasure to finally finish ya off.” But he hadn’t shot her yet.

  “It’s me,” Nathaniel muttered to himself. The only thing holding them back from killing Sarah was him. He was something more than human now, and they were smart enough to realize that if they killed Sarah he’d cook them both.

  “I’ve had enough of this standoff,” Doc Dynamite said. Despite the broken state of his body, the villain’s arm windmilled around with a practiced ease that was almost terrifyingly calm. As the arm came up, something flared in the man’s hand. The man had struck a parlor match against the wooden edge of the chair.

  The tiny flame had barely ignited before it was pressed against the fuse of the explosive that lay against the Doctor’s chest.

  Even though he had watched the entire event, it still took Nathaniel a moment to comprehend what he had just seen. By that time, the Texan’s arm was swinging toward him, the fuse sparkling as it burned.

  Nathaniel would have sworn that the lit stick had already been sailing toward him before Grüsser grabbed the Texan’s arm, but he caught the Doctor just before he could throw.

  The fat German stood directly behind Doc Dynamite, and his sudden interruption of the swing had jolted the stick out of the Doctor’s hand. It landed on the blanket across his lap.

  “Run, Sarah!” Nathaniel said loudly, and she turned toward him. He considered running as well, but he had a far better chance of surviving then Sarah did, and if she reached him, he could shield her with his body.

  He stared into Grüsser’s eyes. He had never liked the Prussian much, and he had never understood why they had let him become a part of the team. He had turned traitor to Eschaton to literally save his own neck.

  But in that instant, Nathaniel was proud of the man, and he was sure that the other Paragons would have been as well.

  No matter what he had thought of him in the past, he had proved him
self now.

  “Thank you!” he began to say, but Sarah had already reached him. He grabbed her as she ran by, shielding her from the explosion, and then a second unexpected pulse of powerful heat that came as all the sticks hidden in the Texan’s duster ignited simultaneously.

  The heat was intense, but didn’t burn him. He could feel his flesh almost drinking the energy in, somehow absorbing the fire, and hopefully protecting Sarah from being scorched. There was nothing to be done about the force of the explosion, however, and he and Sarah were tossed helplessly down the corridor. Somewhere along the way, Sarah was torn away from him and thrown into the darkness.

  As the roaring died down, Nathaniel once again found himself in the dark. Standing up, he ignited his hand, but the smoke and dust from the explosion still swirled around him. As he moved, the world was brown, with some of the particles bursting into tiny flares as they came into contact with his hand.

  He looked around, waving his arm back and forth until he found Sarah. She was utterly unconscious, and Nathaniel hoisted her onto his shoulder with surprising ease. He seemed to be continuing to evolve in ways that would confound Charles Darwin. Perhaps he would write the old man and tell him about what had happened to him, if he survived.

  Marching back down the hallway toward the exit, he found his way through one of the side corridors and then into what appeared to be an accounting office. The rows and rows of pigeon holes in the walls had once been neatly stacked with papers—all the day-to-day affairs of the Society of Paragons, when it had been more than just a cover for the activities of Eschaton and his villains.

  Now it was a ransacked mess, the papers scattered and strewn across the floor by the same barbarians who were supposedly going to remake humanity and restart the future. Nathaniel supposed that men who were expecting the end of the universe had little time for planning out their finances.

  The lights reacted to the door closing, giving out a pop and a hiss. They flickered into brilliance as Nathaniel eased Sarah down and sat in the chair next to her.

  These lights were unlike any he’d ever seen before. Recessed into the ceiling, they were long tubes that flickered to life with a strange hum. Instead of the warm yellow glow he had come to expect, they gave off a disconcerting cool blue light. Nathaniel imagined they must have been one of Darby’s side projects. The old man had always claimed that Edison’s bulbs were a failure by their very nature, and that there were far better ways to create illumination then by simply burning things, no matter how long they lasted. “Nature abhors a vacuum, but loves a noble gas!”

  “How are you doing, Sarah?” He still hated how different his voice sounded, but no one else seemed to notice.

  “You saved me, somehow . . . from the fire.”

  Nathaniel nodded. “Not sure if I could do it again if you asked me, though.”

  She sighed. “But, Grüsser is gone . . .”

  “Yes,” he replied grimly.

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “All the Paragons are gone now.”

  “What about Tom?” she asked.

  “Whether he’s man or machine, he’s no more the same Automaton you once knew than I’m still the Turbine.” He looked at Sarah in the blue light, trying to determine if she was more hurt than she was letting on. She had been scorched and knocked about in the explosion, and her hat was gone, but beyond a few bumps and bruises, it seemed she had sustained no real damage.

  “But we got the cowboy as well,” she said.

  He decided to let her change the subject. “That’s one for our side.”

  Sarah nodded. “But what about the Bomb Lance?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “How could God protect him after all the terrible things he’s done?” She stared directly at him, but from a quick glance down at his hands and legs it was clear that this light rendered him even more translucent than normal.

  “Your father told me that you need to have your enemy’s head on a pike before you can stop looking over your shoulder.”

  “That does sound like my father,” she said with a small smile.

  Nathaniel put his hand on her shoulder. “I miss him. He was a great man.”

  She shook her head slightly. “I’d like to think that he understood. But what he did after Darby died . . .”

  “And it didn’t make any difference. Look at you! I think he would have been proud of Columbia.”

  Sarah looked up at him and smiled. He couldn’t remember having ever seen her give him that look since they were children. “Thank you, Nathaniel.” Even in the blue light, it looked like sunshine. “You know, I think that despite what it did to your complexion, your transformation has made you a better man.”

  Nathaniel felt a fleeting instant of anger before another part of him realized that she might have been right. “I’m not sure Eschaton would be happy to hear that.”

  He randomly grabbed one of the papers from the floor. It concerned Darby’s death, and the date at the top read January 11th, 1880. Only six months, but it had been a different world then.

  “We still need to find Tom.” Sarah began tying a handkerchief around her head, and pulling it back so that her hair would remain out of her eyes. Nathaniel was always stunned by the ability that women had to take the most casual actions and accomplish them in a way that made them heartrendingly beautiful. “Tom?” she asked again. “We need to go find him.”

  “Emilio may be down there already,” Nathaniel replied. “Under the building.”

  “What?” Sarah asked.

  “He’ll be all right, I think. He just dug down too far.” It seemed that nothing he was saying was actually helping the situation. “I told him to dig down to the basement.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “What if Eschaton’s down there?”

  “What if he’s up here?” Nathaniel felt a touch of his old anger rising up. “We’re trapped in a building full of enemies, all of whom are looking to kill us, or worse. What do we do next?”

  Sarah rubbed her hand over the kerchief that covered her hair. “We show them just how powerful you are,” she said.

  Nathaniel frowned. He didn’t like their odds. It had been a fool’s errand to begin with, but they’d lost the minimal element of surprise, along with the only other member of their party who had any genuine fighting skills. “We need to leave, Sarah.”

  “Without Emilio? Are we going to abandon him?” Her smile was gone, replaced by anger. “Do you want him to end up like you?” she said, her voice rising to a shout.

  Nathaniel felt stung. “A better man?” It had sounded clever in his head, but the words sounded petty, even to him.

  He let the fire trail up his arm, and touched his hand to the floor. The papers ignited to his touch, curling up as they burned. “Let’s go.”

  He opened the door, revealing a figure dressed mostly in black except for a white hood and skirt. A mask over his face gave him the faintest resemblance to a bird.

  “I found you,” the voice rumbled.

  Chapter 24: Sibling Rivalry

  CHAPTER 24

  SIBLING RIVALRY

  Viola wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting in darkness, and to be honest, she didn’t care. At first the drugs that the old Frenchman had given her had done their work, but as the opium had worn off the burning sensation had grown more and more powerful until it had become overwhelming and all-consuming. Strapped to the table, unable to move, she had found herself praying for unconsciousness or death to release her from her suffering.

  Neither had come, and eventually that scorching pain had become her entire existence. What made it worse was the occasional cool breeze that seemed to sweep across her, providing a tiny moment of relief before another terrible wave of burning agony.

  In those occasional moments of thought that came between the suffering, she wondered if she was already dead, and had entered into the eternal torment of hell that her mother promised would be the eventual fate of all wild and uncontrolla
ble girls such as herself.

  But a part of her doubted she had left the mortal world behind. No version of hell Viola had ever heard of came with a rattling fan and a rhythmic hissing. She knew that somewhere nearby the Automaton’s heart was beating and guiding her transformation. It was the fortified steam that came directly from Tom’s heart that was washing over her.

  Somewhere above her a hatch opened, and light flooded into the room. The fan rattled as it slowed, and then began spinning in the opposite direction, pushing fresh air in. Unlike the burning of the smoke, this felt like a thousand needles piercing her skin.

  She began to cough, pushing the remaining gas from her lungs. Suddenly desperate to escape, she tried to sit up, only to find herself jerking against her restraints. “Let me out!” she shouted. “Somebody help me!”

  She was glad when she heard a muffled, unintelligible voice, followed by the squeal of rubber and metal as the door was thrown open. “Viola? Sei tu?”

  For a moment she couldn’t believe the words she was hearing. It simply seemed too impossible that he might be here. “Emilio?” she asked. The word was slurred slightly, but she was unable to tell if it was the lingering effects of the smoke, or the fact that her face was still covered by a mask. “Get me out of this,” she yelled at him in Italian.

  “Viola! You’re okay!” He ran toward her, hands fumbling against the straps and opening the buckles.

  “Brother, how can you be here?”

  “Sarah brought me,” he said as he finally released one of the restraints. “We came to rescue you.”