The Tremblers

by Raquel Byrnes

  “Ashton would have died,” I rasped.

  “You are right, but isn’t it his choice for what and whom he risks his life?”

  “I did what I thought was right at the time.” I stared at my glove. I’d lost the other one in the museum. “I refuse to regret it.”

  “Yes, he said you would.” My gaze snapped to hers.

  The strange expression on her face caught me off guard. “He also said it gave him an idea, your little sleight-of-hand.”

  “You gave me a pain killer?” I didn’t understand. The dose I gave Ashton put him out almost immediately.

  “Yes, but it also serves another purpose according to my scientist. The elixir I gave you is also a muscle spasm relaxer,” Lizzie corrected. “It helps for a while.”

  “For a while,” I repeated. “So Ashton knew?”

  “He said he noticed the symptoms, but couldn’t be sure until he saw the first of the blue at your temple.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s probably fighting to get back out here,” Lizzie quipped. “It was all we could do to wrestle him into receiving care in the first place. He wanted to come after you at once.”

  I nodded. That sounded like him. “You’ve seen others? Tremblers, I mean.”

  “Not as many as Ashton recounted,” Lizzie’s voice was edged with anger. “We had no idea there were so many already infected and at such a late stage of the blight. They’ve been hiding the truth for far longer than anyone realized.”

  “But you’ve encountered this. You know what happens. How fast—”

  “Charlie,” She held my shoulders. “We’ve been able to slow it down and control the damage to bones, but so far everyone...” She met my gaze with sorrow. “So far we’ve lost everyone, eventually.”

  “How…?” I bit my lip, sighing deeply to breathe through the ache in my throat. “How did this happen? How is it I am stricken and those around me are spared? He is spared, right Lizzie?”

  “Yes. Ashton shows no signs.” She shrugged, her face a mask of confusion. “That’s what we’re here to find out,” she intoned, walking off.

  “Lizzie,” I took the journal from beneath my bodice, pulled it from the pouch, and held it out to her.

  “I won’t have it. Not now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You made it, Charlie.”

  “What?” I followed her to the warehouses. We stole from shadow to shadow, our gum boots silent on the street. Unlit filament lamps stood like dark watchers over us.

  She stopped short at the edge of the road.

  I regarded her, perplexed. “What are you doing?”

  Lizzie looked down at her feet and bounced a few times atop a metal lattice set over the storm overflow drain in the road. She bent down, pulled something wedged between the metal grids, and held it up. It was bright blue with an etched letter ‘T’.

  “Tommy found them.”

  “Found what?” I asked as she dropped the rock. It clattered off the sides of the shaft as it plummeted, disappearing into darkness.

  “The grates.”

  “The grates…” My father’s mandate echoed in my head. I can hold them off. Get to the grates. I gasped, my heart ramming in my chest. “Collodin! You found Collodin!”

  “Yes,” Lizzie answered, pulling the grate aside with a metallic scrape. “We found your elusive inventor.”

  33

  We descended the rusty ladder, pulling the grate back into place over our heads. Once down below the street, I let the utter darkness settle over me. Disorienting and cloying, I reached out, feeling for the walls with my gloved hand.

  “How did you find him?”

  “I asked the network and Tommy came to me. He said one of the children who dwells down here heard the name before. It was easy after that.”

  “He said children?” I asked, my voice echoing in the vast corridor. Splashing at my feet and a faint squeak pulled a frown from me. Of all the things I survived thus far, I did not believe I could weather rats.

  “Orphans of The Great Calamity,” Lizzie answered. A single flame flared bright in the inky black as she set the gas lamp ablaze. Adjusting the light, she closed the glass covering the lantern and held it aloft, peering down the brick-lined walls of the storm drain tunnel.

  “They live down here?” Every manner of litter crowded the ground. Newspapers stained with fish oil, tattered clothing, but my heart ached at the sight of what they used as toys. Small boats fashioned from pieces of trash, a doll made of rags with a painted piece of wood for a face, a pile of rocks in the shape of a corral with stick horses. All of it pricked my heart.

  “Runaways from the work houses and other government programs, I’m told.”

  “How do they survive down here?” Something ran over my foot, and I flinched. “Where are they now?”

  “They are pick-pockets and beggars,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “They move throughout the city via these passages. Tommy said no one lives here anymore since the grid started to leak vapor.”

  “Tommy knows them?”

  “He said Moira lived down here for a time when their parents passed and they were separated.”

  “I didn’t know.” I thought of her bravery at the museum. “Are you sure they are safe?”

  “Yes. Moira is amazingly adept at survival, Charlie.” Lizzie turned, smiling over her shoulder. “As are you, it seems, debutante.”

  But I wasn’t anymore, was I? Not a daughter or a niece. I was not a society lady, not a prospective bride, not even a form of leverage anymore. I was nothing to anyone. My father had died long before I saw him last. The monster I killed barely even looked like him in the end. So much pain, but it did not fill me with sorrow or even fear. It was like when I was young and the doctor removed the bandages covering my burns. He did not do it slowly or even particularly gently…but mercifully fast.

  And so much, so quickly, overwhelmed me to the point of shocked numbness. The pain came eventually, as it always must, but not before I was ready. Not until I could fully grieve. Until then, I followed Lizzie into the shadows and hoped to emerge in one piece. “How much farther?” The cold and dank crowded out the light of the lantern and I thought living here would be nightmarish at best. Dripping from an overhead pipe splashed cold on my forehead, and I jumped.

  “The instructions were one hundred yards,” Lizzie consulted her compass. “Then a turn at the cave-in.”

  “Cave-in?” I rasped. Originally used by the city as combined sewer systems, the network of shafts crisscrossed beneath the whole of New York. Abandoned as a viable system after the quakes collapsed many of them, the idea that an intelligent tinkerer lived down here seemed unlikely. “Are you certain Collodin dwells here?”

  “In the sewer system, no, I suppose not,” Lizzie said. “But this is where he agreed to meet you.”

  I stopped mid-stride. “You spoke with him? How so quickly? Berkley only just asked for help when we sent you a missive from his ship.”

  “That is not entirely true. After your first night on the Stygian, I have to admit I listened at the door to your conversation with Ash.”

  “When I told him about the journal and Collodin.” My hand went to the pocket watch still dangling from my neck.

  “Yes,” Lizzie shrugged. She slipped a folded piece of parchment from her pouch and handed it to me.

  Unfurling it, I examined it underneath the lantern light, unable to conceal the shock. “This is from the journal!”

  “Well, the end, really,” Lizzie said. “I nicked a page when Ashton wasn’t looking. I wanted to get my scientist to figure out what it was.”

  “And did you get any answers?”

  “No. Not entirely. She had ideas, unfortunately one page was not enough.” Lizzie turned, continuing down the hall without even an apology. “So I had to make sure Berkley got me the whole thing, but…”

  “So his assertion that you only helped to get your hands on the journal was not wrong.” I kn
ew I should not feel duped or even affronted, but I did. Was no one kind without ulterior motive?

  “Charlie, you can be kind for both reasons. Mutual benefit does not disqualify a favor.”

  I sniffed, unable to argue. I had not thought of it that way and was not sure if she was right.

  “Berkley was giving it to The Order,” I muttered. She glanced over, nodding.

  “That was always a suspicion, but he was the closest to you and Ash at Port Rodale.”

  “But if you knew—”

  The clanging buzz of gear works echoed from further down the corridor, silencing both of us. Lizzie handed me the lantern, drawing her weapon.

  A steady thump, whir, thump, whir sounded in the darkness, and then a figure emerged. A man’s silhouette slid across the bricks. A small light jiggled as it moved.

  “Collodin?” Lizzie called out, kneeling on one leg as she leveled her gun. “Is that you?”

  “It is,” a voice called back. The strange mechanical stomping started once more.

  “Show yourself.” Lizzie motioned for me to step behind her.

  “Yes, yes, that is what I am trying to do,” Collodin said.

  I stood stock still, my hands balled as I took in the bizarre figure emerging into our lantern light. A man, his legs encased in a brace of metal rods, gears, and wires, walked toward us with great difficulty. The outlandish device encircled his waist and rose up to his chest via leather straps at his shoulders like overalls. A filament light was strapped to his pith helmet and it nearly blinded me. Nevertheless, when he neared I recognized him at once. Not as the man who fixed my father’s leg, but as the man who stared out from photographs all over the Peaceful Union. He did not hold plans to steam works in his hands nor did he stare down poisonous vapors through a glass facemask, but it was him. I knew it to my bones.

  Nikola Tesla, frail and broken, looked at me over spectacles and smiled.

  “I heard you’ve been looking for me, Blackburn’s Daughter.”

  34

  I stared with disbelief, unable to take in what I was seeing as I stood at the threshold of Tesla’s workshop. He strode ahead of me on his mechanical legs, slipping off his pith helmet and placing it carefully on a hat stand by the entrance. His dark hair, split down the middle, was perfectly combed and a carefully groomed mustache bristled underneath his aquiline nose. One of the legs froze, the gear works grinding, and he prodded it with a screwdriver before moving on.

  We were in the drainage network in a hub of some sort and yet the workshop before me, with its cobbled-together doors and furniture made of crate parts, kept some semblance of propriety almost out of the sheer will of the designer.

  The arched bricks formed a doorway to what I guessed had been a storage area for supplies during construction. Pipes ran the length of the room along the walls and ceilings, levers and valves stuck out at intervals along the ground.

  I wandered just inside, taking in the glass bell jars with arcing energy, whirling motors of driving machines I could not fathom the use of, and more tools than I had ever seen in my life, all hung neatly on nails along a mounted board. A table and hammock took up a corner of the workshop. Over the table, a small shelf held dishes, a kettle, and some jars of spices.

  He did live here. A humble home in the bowels of a broken land.

  Passing a hay-filled shipping crate, I picked up an incandescent bulb and gasped when the filament glowed to life in my hand.

  “That was quite popular at parties before the quakes,” Tesla said in his thick accent. It made me flash on a moment long ago in my father’s study. I remembered now, how I’d watched with fascination as a young, dark-haired man gestured excitedly to my father about something, and I realized it had been Tesla. So young, only four or five, I had not made the connection between the man who built my father’s leg, and the man the adults praised after the quakes.

  He stopped next to a large chair near a counter, turned slowly until his back was to the counter, and unbuckled the straps at his shoulders. He sighed heavily, unclasping the bindings at his chest, and opening up the harness like a coat.

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  “Wireless transmission of power coursing through the air. The human body is an especially efficient conduit.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off of him as I set the bulb down.

  “I thought you were dead,” Lizzie pushed past me, finding a chair in the corner, and slumping down into it. “We all did.”

  “Lizzie!” I said, shocked. “You mustn’t be so rude.”

  “Well, we did,” She continued. “Because you disappeared without word after everything that happened. How could you do that?”

  “Mr. Tesla…” I steadied myself against the wall. Words eluded me. Here stood the man who embodied all the anger and loss of my childhood whose unparalleled mind conjured the destruction of our world. And yet I was so incredibly relieved to see him.

  “She is correct.” Easing one leg out of the framework, he leaned on the table as he worked the other from the casing. Sliding a cane from the counter, he used it to hobble sideways to the chair. “When the soldiers chased me off the roof, I believe that it was their aim to be rid of me. I simply let them believe that to be true.”

  “Chased you?” I gasped. “What happened?”

  “What always happens when a pet becomes tiresome?” He cut across my words. “Look at what we have become. I could not keep my tongue and I nearly paid the ultimate price for it.”

  “After all you have done for the Peaceful Union?” I croaked. “But you saved the city-states.”

  “They turned on you.” Lizzie gave him knowing look. “Imagine my surprise.”

  Known as a proud man, an audacious showman, his personality filled the room during his exhibitions. I remember my father took me to a demonstration and he seemed so much bigger, so much larger than life. He would not hesitate to voice his opinions and anger over the use of his machine and the results.

  “But the photographs, the stories of your leadership in crisis…” I muttered.

  “What you don’t see in those portraits are the Union Security Soldiers holding their weapons on me as I directed the construction.” Tesla slapped the armrest of the wooden chair. “Lies, all of it, lies by the Governors to quell the fear and deflect blame. Take to the sea, I told them. This, the domes cannot last, but they did not want to hear it. They preferred to glue back their world the best they could.” He took a metal box from under the counter and slid it across the brick floor to me. “You should address that wound.”

  I looked down surprised, having forgotten the slash save for the dull ache. Reaching for the medical kit, I pushed at the still bleeding cut. “Oh…”

  “Bells on fire, Charlie,” Lizzie yelped and hurried over. She ripped my stocking, then washed and bound the wound.

  I sat, dumbfounded that the numbness so permeated me that I would have gone on bleeding without the slightest notice.

  Tesla watched us with wary eyes.

  After all that happened, I didn’t quite know how be angry at him anymore.

  “The cavitation engine,” I asked finally. “Did you know its capability?”

  “Of course!” He snapped, his ill temper furrowing the skin above his brows. “I predicted the eruption of the Sleeping Giant in the Dakotas.”

  “Then why make the schematics?” I shook my head, voice breaking.

  “Not just schematics,” Tesla corrected. “A prototype.”

  “What?” I backed up out of fear I might strike him out of anger. “You made one?”

  “And why not?” He snapped. “I find it strange that the others…the alternating current, the wireless incandescents, rotating magnetic fields, all of it I dreamt and put onto paper and yet they are forgotten. Those works ultimately saved our hides.” He motioned around his workshop. “But some only remember the desolation of one invention.”

  “Because it is the one that broke our world!”

  “Easy, Char
lie.” Lizzie gave me a look.

  But I continued. “It shattered our nation and allowed for greedy men to parse it amongst themselves.”

  “If you thought men didn’t do that before, then you are mistaken, Blackburn. Of that, I am sure.” Tesla favored me with a withering look. “Or are you as naïve as the masses?”

  “But you built it.” All the time my Aunt Sadie defended him as a victim of thievery and he had fashioned the instrument of our destruction with his own hands. My chest tightened and I pushed down the anger burning my gut. “Why would you do that?”

  “It was theirs to begin with,” he said, sniffing with affront and brushing at imaginary dust on his slacks. “A government patent to ensure coal, gold, and silver came out of the ground faster for some prospecting establishments than others.”

  “Money,” Lizzie said, shaking her head.

  “Power,” I corrected. “To control the markets and monopolize trade. Leverage over foreign policy and land grants.”

  “Yes.” Tesla said. “They did not parcel out the country after the quakes. They simply reorganized what they already owned.”

  “You could have destroyed it, the machine. You could have stopped them before all of this. You had access. You knew their intentions.”

  “It was not one machine, Blackburn. It was dozens, all working day and night deep within the ground. I warned them about the resonance.” He shook his head. “I told them there was a frequency they must not achieve, a consolidation of waves that might set off the fissures in the earth, but it was all conjecture to them and they worked even faster. They made even more cavitation engines. I protested, threatened to alert the public, and was jailed to assure my silence.”

  “They put them too close and too deep,” I finished, realizing. “They didn’t listen to you.”

  “And the harmonics nearly ripped us to the core.” He regarded me with those dark and piercing eyes I’d stared at in photos. “And now a new threat hangs over us and I intend to make them listen this time.”

  “The Tremblers?”

  “I believe, as your father did, that they are linked to the mines, somehow.”