The Tremblers

by Raquel Byrnes

  “You spoke with him?” My heart raced as I finally understood. “He sent you the missive that last night, right before they took him.”

  “He said his daughter was coming to me with information of the utmost importance.”

  That moment in my father’s study seemed like a lifetime ago. I stood at the counter next to Tesla, taking in the thin, pale skin of his hands. A tattered copy of a book sat splayed open next to a cup of tea. It was Faust.

  “I—I have the journal,” I whispered, handing it to him and barely believing I’d made it.

  Tesla held the book in one frail palm and let it fall open to the first page. He ran the pads of his fingers over the raised design and a faint smile pulled at his lips as he murmured.

  Lizzie rose, her face tense.

  “Do you know what it is?” she asked.

  “One moment.” Tesla reached for a pair of spectacles in a basket on the counter. He donned them, articulating the three-layered lenses over the right eye, and flipped through the pages, his fingers shaking. “I did not think it possible.”

  “What?” I touched the edges of the pages, my stomach fluttering with anticipation. “What is it?”

  “These patterns here, they are impregnated with a chemical or several, if I am correct. It is an electrochemical cascade,” Tesla said, lifting the journal to his nose and sniffing it.

  I shot a curious look to Lizzie who wrung her hands.

  “This was pure theory when I discussed it with your father years ago. Conjecture at best. I came to him for advice on the reagents. He must have hand made this parchment.”

  “Can you help us?” I asked, barely able to draw breath. “Can you help us reveal its secrets?”

  “Possibly,” Tesla said. “Where is the catalyst?”

  “What do you mean?” Lizzie stepped forward. “Catalyst?”

  “Yes, a compound to react with the charge.” He turned to me. “Did he give you anything else?”

  “Only a pocket watch.” I tugged the chain at my neck, revealing the broken timepiece.

  “Let me see.”

  I pulled it over my head, placing it in his hand. He inspected it, held it up to the light and then reached for a pair of pliers.

  “What are you doing?” I tried to stop him. “That is all I have left of him.”

  “Observe,” Tesla said in his presentation voice and clamped the pliers around the second knob at the top of the watch. He gave it a half twist and a small click sounded before he lifted it off the timepiece. A hidden flask rose up with the knob. Flat and hollow, it couldn’t hold more than a few milliliters of liquid. He held it out to me.

  I grasped it between my thumb and forefinger and could feel the swish of something inside. “I had it with me this whole time.” I stared at the small container, mortified that I’d considered trading the pocket watch instead of my opera glasses up in Outer City. What would have happened then?

  “You there,” Tesla motioned for Lizzie. “Get me that vial.”

  “That’s the catalyst?” Lizzie handed him the glass tube and we watched as he poured the blue liquid. It glowed faintly, pulsing as he swirled it.

  “Great Scott!” He handed it to me, shuffling with his cane around the counter and rooting around in a bin.

  “What is it?” I asked, mesmerized by its iridescence.

  “It is Coruscatem.” Tesla explained. He pulled a dusty notebook from a pile in the corner. “Your father discovered the compound, but instability was a problem.”

  “Instability?” Lizzie took a step back.

  “I’ve never heard of this. He never spoke of it at all.”

  Tesla handed me a weathered notebook, the scrawled title made me smile; Blackburn Collaborations.

  “It did not do what he intended,” Tesla said, pursing his lips as he pulled a heavy flat machine and some wires from another bin. “I mean to say, he hoped to use it for something and struggled.”

  “Do what he intended?” I helped him hoist the components to the countertop.

  Tesla murmured, unrolled a pouch of small tools, and poked at the works. I assisted when I could, gently tapping the solution in the tube as he toiled. It would flare bright for a moment, and then settle back down to the soft glow. It reminded me of the lightning bugs that used to swarm over the marsh grasses at night when I was a young child. Mother would give me a jar to catch them, but I never could.

  Tesla pulled the gear works of the contraption apart and zapped at them with a current wand, splicing the wires together.

  Lizzie snored softly from the corner chair, her hair flapping in the constant stream of air that flowed from the underground network of tunnels.

  He labored for hours, his limbs steady as he built the components into a strange device.

  I found myself amazed at the stamina of the frail man. He didn’t speak once, merely grunting and pointing at tools or swishing me out of the way with a wave of his hand. Before long, the contrivance took form. Tesla attached a small winding lever and with a satisfied sigh, locked gazes with me. “We are ready.”

  I tossed a rag at Lizzie and she stirred, rubbing her eyes, as she yawned. She walked up to the counter, raised her brow at the device and looked from me to Tesla.

  I slid the journal across the surface to him with bated breath.

  Silently he took the book, gently turning it in his hands, before placing it on the flat bed of the mechanism. He used a clip to hold the first pages flat.

  He snaked wires from the winding lever box to the device, and from it, to the pages of the book.

  I understood at once.

  Ashton had mentioned the pages were woven with metal threads. He’d noticed it that first night on the Stygian.

  “Blackburn,” Tesla said nodding to the power box lever. “A charge, if you would.”

  I grasped the handle, winding it. A low hum sounded from the device, the innards vibrating as I cranked up my efforts. Electricity crackled from the contact points on the book, traveling down the conducting filaments embedded in the pages.

  Tesla’s hand shot out, his fingers shaking. He twisted the dial on the device and the thrum vibrated over all of us. A force erupted over the entire counter top, pulsating the air around us and enclosing us in a bubble of undulating energy.

  The compound, quickly!” he shouted, and pointed to his eyes. “And goggles, both of you!”

  Lizzie slid a pair across the counter toward me.

  I donned them, careful to hand the chemical to him without spilling.

  He held the vial over the book, locked my gaze with a fevered look, and let a drop fall to the page.

  35

  The catalyst spread out, a pool of glimmering liquid that sparked at the edges until it touched a raised part of the pattern. The moment the compound reached the embedded chemical, a mist twisted out from the paper, suspended in the magnetic field humming over us. The vapor hovered just over the journal, rippling with more colors than I imagined possible.

  My throat ached. Poetry of the universe, Papa.

  Tesla added more, accelerating the reaction and the colors settled onto the pages as one cloudy spray.

  I frowned, not understanding until the chemical degraded, filling in the shape with shadows and dark spaces. Hand to my mouth, I was speechless as a scene of what looked like gray and brown water colors burned onto the pages as the magnetized filaments in the paper reacted with the catalyst.

  Equations appeared, racing toward a solution in my father’s script. Images drew themselves, erupting onto the pages in the way he’d illustrated them. Anatomical sketches scratched themselves across the pages; dissected and splayed bodies, mangled mouths, and black unseeing eyes turned my stomach.

  Tremblers.

  My father’s notes rose up from the depths of the paper, explaining, asking questions, the comments of a man struggling with growing horror.

  Their skin is cold to the touch. Signs of frozen tissue underneath the microscope from the eyes to the organs. The body, des
perate to maintain heat, tries to generate it with trembling as if the subjects were freezing to death. Only to have the very attempt at salvation rip them bone by bone to pieces. There are so many. So many more than I first believed. Hundreds. Where are they coming from? What is this pestilence?

  Darkening, the sketch burned a permanent image into the journal.

  Tesla moved, disengaging the wires, turning the page, reconnecting, and dropping more catalyst.

  The chemical in the raised dots swirled into a landscape that drifted down to the page.

  I leaned in, squinting at the sign, Rothfair Power and Works, hung over a sprawling building. Schematics of the building flared up, and my father’s notes spoke of the atrocities he’d found as a depiction fluttered, staining the pages with the terrors encountered within the warren of the coal conversion factory.

  A moat of bodies encircled the steam works of the plant as if attracted by heat. Sizzling across the burning filaments, the catalyst showed in flip-book animation, how the Tremblers threw themselves against burning pipes, their mouths agape in silent screams.

  I gripped the edges of the counter, fighting off the panic as I realized that was my eventual fate. Mindless need and self-destruction. I blinked back tears.

  Lizzie put her hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently.

  Another page and Tesla adjusted his goggles, his expression perplexed as the outline of a strange machine drifted up with a hiss from the paper.

  “Do you recognize this, Blackburn?” He looked at me and then Lizzie. “Mrs. Frances?”

  “I don’t but…” I squinted, wiping the goggles. “The components. I’ve seen them before.” I pointed to a section near the pump. “This is a type of injection infuser.” I thought back, fighting through the fog in my mind to before all of this. “When my father was packing. That night they took him, he had in his hand something like this.” I shook my head frustrated. “There was also a meter.”

  “For what?” Tesla asked.

  “I am not sure…” The equations in my father’s study flashed to me. “Calibration constants.”

  “To measure what?” Tesla reached out and gripped my forearm. “Volts, flow, do you remember?”

  My head pounded, a piercing pain behind my right eye as I struggled to remember. My father’s figure moving near his desk, the soldiers pounding on the study door, the tracer in my hands, it all came back and I panted, trying to focus. The notations on a fallen paper at my side came to mind and I jerked, surprised.

  “Temperature!” So thankful I’d paid attention to the science lessons with my father, I grabbed a pen from the basket on the counter and scribbled the equations as I remembered them onto the surface. “It…they were for error of indication, I think.”

  Tesla added more catalyst and the vapors sprayed even higher, whirling over the journal before getting caught in the magnetic force they drifted down, splaying a scene across the pages. Metal and pipe works snaked across the paper connecting to a tumbler.

  “That’s an internal combustion engine,” Lizzie said. “I’ve seen this in documents stolen from the Ignition Laboratory.”

  Tesla and I both looked over at her.

  She shrugged.

  The images continued to form. A piece of the machinery looked familiar. Like a giant raindrop with a bent tail, the vessel was not glass as in my father’s lab, but I recognized it nonetheless.

  “That is a retort,” I said, my voice cracking with excitement. The colors deepened and the heated vapor within the sketch of the retort turned a dark blue. “He’s using it to distill something or add gas to something.”

  “He’s thermo-splicing,” Tesla said, pounding the counter with this fist. “This is not possible.”

  “What?” Lizzie said. “I don’t understand.”

  “It is possible, look.” I motioned to the journal. The equations changed as the last of the catalyst reacted with the pages. “The temperature values are descending.”

  “I meant that it is not possible to do this without consequences,” Tesla said, his face a mask of anger. “Why did they not take to the sea?”

  “Tell me what is going on or I will attack someone,” Lizzie demanded.

  “I have heard of a man working on this, but then the quakes…” Tesla shook his head. “He died. I did not know another had built on this research. It is a way to use coal to make electricity. It is called gasification.”

  “Rothfair is developing something to rival steam power?” Lizzie shook her head. “Why?”

  “He said I had the destruction and salvation of our people in my hands.” I remembered the worry and desperation in Rothfair’s face. “What had he meant by that…salvation?”

  Tesla pointed to the journal sketches. “Gasification is what powered the gas lamps on the streets before the quakes and the subsequent sinkholes and constantly burning vapors made it far too dangerous. Rothfair seems to be using the gasification process again, to turn coal into gas for use as energy, but he’s added a step I do not recognize.”

  “He’s infusing the vapor made during the gasification process with something.” My gaze went to the blue of my fingers.

  “But what is he infusing the vapor with and why?” Lizzie asked.

  “We shall see.” Carefully dripping a few drops onto the page, Tesla adjusted the dial on the device, thrumming the electromagnetic force higher. The catalyst sped along the raised pattern, spraying up and churning like a thundercloud over the journal. Misting the embedded filaments, the hiss of the reaction seemed louder this time. Settling onto the page, the scene swept swiftly across, painting an anatomical image of a man’s face, the tissues of the nose and mouth allowing gas to enter.

  The poison flooded the heart, racing to the brain in the sketch, rendering the chemicals within the mind chaotic. My father’s notes indicated particles much smaller than conventional contaminants in the factories or out in the wasteland. Sketches of choking figures, men grabbing at their throats as they fell, formed in the corner of the page.

  “They breathed it in,” I whispered. “It is not a pestilence, not a plague, but an accident of engineering? This was man-made?”

  “I have seen it spread from person to person though. How is this possible?” Tesla turned the page, he frowned. “There is a page missing.”

  “The one I took, Charlie,” Lizzie said, her face flushing underneath her goggles.

  Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the page she had stolen and handed it to him. He held the ripped edge in front of his face, murmuring.

  “I do not know if this will work,” he said finally, firing an angry look at her. “The filaments are dislodged. Half of them are still attached to the spine of the journal.”

  “Please try,” I begged.

  He flipped to the last page and positioned the torn one to the right of it trying to align the hair-thin wires before taking a breath. Twisting the dial to the highest reading, the field around us pulsed, filling the air with an electrified hum. Our hair lifted on end, standing straight up as the charge within the bubble intensified. Tesla held up the vial, a miniscule amount remained.

  I held my breath, caught his gaze, and nodded.

  He let the final vestige of my father’s catalyst fall.

  More equations skittered across the top of the pages, a few of the numbers did not form right as they crawled over the page that had been ripped.

  I squinted, trying to understand the calculations and notes.

  The infusion designed to make the vapor combust at a lower temperature and lower the amount of coal needed to run the prototype machinery outgassed in a terribly unpredictable way. Burning through the containment hoses, miniscule particles flooded the factory. Symptoms began within two days, progressing rapidly by order of proximity to initial contamination.

  Drawings of hands, their fingertips turning blue and eyes, the irises ringing in black before becoming completely dark formed underneath the formulas. Arrows pointing outward surrounded a figure of a man labeled
patient zero. They led to more figures and then to more, spanning the page onto the second. A list of days and numbers scrolled down from the top of the page. The amounts were staggering.

  “The salvation and destruction of our people,” I repeated Rothfair’s words. The sickening realization hitting me. He wanted to slow the burn, to make the fuel last as long as possible. That he was willing to sacrifice lives and hide the effects of his additive meant one thing. “We’re running out of coal.”

  “And he searched for a way to extend the supplies we have, but this number cannot be correct,” Tesla said. “There are not so many people working in the factories, no?”

  Secondary infection began four months after the first victim. I suspect the concentration in the host may…

  The filaments shorted out, sparks firing along the edge of the torn paper setting the entire page aflame. I jumped back, slapping at the journal.

  Tesla struggled with the dials of the device, flicking the switch and collapsing the field around us.

  “That is why he was blowing up his factories,” Lizzie said, her face a mask of incredulity. “He was hiding evidence of this. Protecting himself and the Governors from the wrath of the people if this became public.”

  “Our domes, the railways, the solariums and orchard greenhouses,” I croaked, the icy tendrils of fear encircling my heart. “It all runs on electricity gained by steam…by coal.”

  “Rothfair intended to stop the collapse of the Peaceful Union,” Tesla said. “An inevitable ruin when our supplies dwindle.”

  “How is it spreading?” Lizzie asked. “Rothfair—”

  “The lungs,” My voice broke as the reason for my death hit me. My father, screaming with pain from the lash of a tracer weapon, had delivered the killing dose. His breath, sickly sweet and teeming with poison, sentenced me to his fate. “It’s in their screams.”

  36

  He killed me. My father killed me. Throat aching, I struggled to draw breath. Hand to my chest I tried to quell the pain seizing me. Papa…

  Striving to save us, he’d unintentionally doomed his only child. The abject irony hit me in the stomach. I had wondered how, with all of our encounters, I managed to contract the sickness and not Ashton.