The Brass Giant

by Brooke Johnson

  Petra said nothing, weighing the events of the night in her mind. One truth spoke louder than the rest, pulsing through her with every beat of her heart: this was where she belonged—­here, in the University. She knew it to the very core of her being. It was the only place in the world she truly felt at home, among all the brass and electric light, the smell of grease and gasoline, the sounds of whirring gears and spinning belts and rocking levers singing the song of every engineer that had come before.

  This was her future, her legacy.

  All she had to do was prove herself.

  “You offered me time to reconsider,” she said, her eyes on the distant moon. Her heartbeat quickened. “Well, I’ve made my decision.” She inhaled a deep breath, her skin prickling with goose bumps as her hands trembled in her lap. “I’ll do it.”

  “You will?” Emmerich stared at her, lips parted. “I thought—­”

  “I can have a preliminary design for the new power system finished for you within a week, if that is acceptable.”

  His face brightened and he smiled crookedly. “You’ll help me?”

  She couldn’t help but smile in return. “I said I would, didn’t I?”

  Chapter 4

  THE BELL OVER the front door of the pawnshop tinkled, and a customer came in, carrying what looked like a busted mantel clock. He shuffled across the store and placed the clock on the counter.

  “What happened here?” asked Mr. Stricket.

  “Missus knocked it down cleaning. Can you fix it?”

  Mr. Stricket flipped the magnifying glass over his spectacles and lifted his screwdriver pouch from his breast pocket. “Petra, my dear, could you come here for a moment?” He carefully removed the movement—­the hefty block of metal that housed all the gears, pinions, and springs—­and handed it to her. “Take a look and see what needs replacing.”

  Petra took the instrument into the workroom and dismantled the main components, assessing the damage. The air brake had come loose, and the pawl that held the mainspring tight had snapped cleanly in two. Otherwise, the clock was relatively fine. She fit everything back together, tightening the brake and replacing the pawl with a spare one, before returning the piece back to the front counter.

  “It should be working now,” she said, handing the movement back to Mr. Stricket. “None of the gears were bent, nor the pinions that I could tell. I went ahead and reconnected the air brake and replaced the main pawl. I didn’t check the mainspring, but the barrel looks undamaged, so other than expected wear, the clock should be in working order.”

  “Let’s have a look, then, shall we?” Mr. Stricket retrieved a handful of winding keys from the top drawer of his desk, picking though each one before finally settling on a tarnished silver key with a half-­circle insert. He fit the key to the movement and wound the mainspring; it began ticking immediately. “Well, there you are,” he said to the customer with a smile. “Fully repaired.”

  “How much?”

  Mr. Stricket punched a few numbers through the calculating machine. “For the cost of the parts, evaluation, and repair . . .” The machine printed a stub of sums. “That’ll be six shillings.”

  The man fished the money out of his pocket and handed it over, taking the mantel clock into his arms. “Thanks, Mr. Stricket.”

  “Any time.”

  Once the customer had gone, Mr. Stricket grabbed a stack of letters sitting at the edge of the counter and thumbed through the envelopes. “I have to run to the post to mail off these parts orders. Think you can handle the shop for half an hour?”

  “Of course,” said Petra.

  After he left the pawnshop, Petra returned to her tiny work space in the storage room. She removed a document box from the shelf next to the door and retrieved her automaton designs. Sitting on the floor, she propped herself against the wall and examined her schematics. She had drawn little in the last three days, only a rough sketch of the automaton’s central mechanism and an outline of the arm cam.

  When Emmerich had recruited her, she imagined she would have no problem crafting the perfect automaton, one that would impress him—­and the Guild. But now, instead, she stared at half-­imagined designs, wondering where to begin. She knew what parts the ticker required, what functions it needed to be able to perform, and the basic layout, yet, every time she sat down to work, she blanked. And she couldn’t afford to delay much longer. Emmerich was expecting the designs by the end of the week.

  Petra stared down at the collection of pages again and shuffled the arm cam and central mechanism to the back of the stack. Deciding to start from the bottom up, she drew the pencil across the paper, sketching the legs. In order to keep the leg mechanisms contained within the plating, the tension cables she planned to use would need to be fixed to guides along the frame, but then there was the matter of maintaining constant tension.

  She tapped the edge of her pencil against the pad of paper. Weights would be useless if the automaton was in any position other than upright. They could employ pistonlike sliders within the thigh cavity—­the motion would sufficiently drive the cables—­but once the legs were bent, the cables would leave too much slack. A complex pulley system attached to the slider might hold the tension, but the power needed to move the sliders quickly and maintain tension would take a lot of energy, and a complex guidance system. The loss of power between the mainspring, gear trains, cam, and sliders needed to be as minimal as possible. And she had to make sure the sliders could withstand the pressure of all four cam patterns, keeping in mind that the cable tension would need to undergo constant adjustment as the machine switched between each specific action, and—­

  Petra dropped the pages into her lap. To build everything properly, the automaton would have to be at least six feet tall and half as broad, if not larger—­which would, of course, require even more power. The barrel for each mainspring would need to be the size of a small cask to run the contraption. She had never worked on anything larger than a grandfather clock, and nothing nearly as complicated. If she and Emmerich managed it, what a beauty it would be! A ticker that complex and powerful would revolutionize engineering. ­People from all over the world would come to see it, to learn how it worked.

  The doorbell clanged again, and Petra jumped, the automaton design falling from her lap and skittering across the floor.

  “Just a moment!”

  She gathered the automaton designs and shoved them back into the document box, haphazardly setting it on a stool before dashing out of the storage room. A man stood in the center of the shop.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Stricket’s gone out,” she said, smoothing her skirts. “But you’re welcome to wait until he gets back. He shouldn’t be long.”

  The man moved silently to the back of the shop and fixed Petra with a curious stare. “I’m looking for someone to fix me watch,” he said, laying a pocket watch on the counter. “Think you can look it over?” He propped his elbow up and leaned in, the reek of mothballs on his worn jacket and a noticeable shadow of stubble on his chin.

  A bit unnerved by the way the customer seemed to be studying her, Petra picked up the watch and turned it over in her hand. It was an old watch. The silver plating was tarnished, and the metal beneath had already begun to rust. She wound the winding stem but nothing happened. The hands stood still. “When was the last time the watch was brought in for maintenance?”

  “Don’t know. Can you fix it?”

  “Mr. Stricket can have a look at it when he returns. I’m sure he’ll be back shortly.”

  “How long you been working for this Stricket fellow?” the man asked, leaning against the counter. “Know much about clocks, do you?”

  Petra narrowed her eyes. “I suppose . . .” she said slowly.

  The back door to the alley opened and shut with a bang, and before Petra could blink, the man grabbed the watch, crossed the shop, and stepped through the front doo
r without so much as a sound.

  “Odd.” She shook her head and turned toward the storage room, running squarely into Tolly’s chest.

  “What’s odd?” he asked, holding her steady.

  “Hello, Tolly.” Why he always used the back entrance, she never understood. She quickly brushed him away. “Weird customer is all.”

  “Oh yeah? Where’s Mr. Stricket?”

  “At the post.”

  He hopped onto the counter and patted the spot beside him. “Then take a break. You’ve been slaving away all day.”

  Petra glanced at the box sitting precariously atop the stool in the storage room. She couldn’t afford not to work on the automaton designs. “That’s all right,” she said. “I have some things I need to do, so—­”

  “I haven’t seen much of you in the last few days.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve been busy.”

  “With what? What’s so important that you can’t spare a bit of time for me?”

  Petra scowled at him. He would only laugh at her if she told him about the automaton designs—­not that she could. “It’s nothing that would interest you.”

  “Well it isn’t going to keep you busy on Saturday, is it?”

  That was her next meeting with Emmerich. “Yes, as a matter of fact. It will.”

  “All day?”

  “Well, no, but—­”

  “Excellent.” He reached into his coat pocket. “I wanted to give you this a few days ago, but you were being a bit snappish, so I decided to wait.” He withdrew a folded handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “Open it up.”

  Frowning at Tolly, Petra carefully unfolded the cloth. Two small spools of silk ribbon sat in the handkerchief, one a pearlescent white and the other a dark rich blue.

  “I thought they might look nice when you braid your hair,” he said.

  “They’re lovely, Tolly.”

  “You can wear them Saturday, to the theater,” he said grinning.

  “The theater?”

  “A libretto opens this weekend in the second quadrant, at that fancy French place you’re always on about, the mechanical one. I thought you might like to go, you know—­the two of us.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well?”

  She couldn’t miss her meeting with Emmerich, but she couldn’t tell Tolly what she was up to either. “What time?”

  “Three o’clock, according to the tickets I already bought.”

  Petra frowned. He was trying to bully her into going, just like he always did when he wanted something. But a three o’clock showing left no time in the evening to work on the automaton design with Emmerich. “I can’t.”

  “Oh come on, Pet. It’ll be fun.”

  “I said I can’t, Tolly. I’m sorry.”

  His smile vanished. “Can’t—­or won’t?”

  She sighed. “It’s not like that.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed—­you’ve been avoiding me. You haven’t played cards with us in months. Every time I ask you to go somewhere, you decline, and when I try to talk to you, you ignore me or tell me to bugger off.”

  “I told you,” she said, “I’ve been busy.”

  “With what?”

  She bit her lip.

  “It’s something to do with that stupid University, isn’t it?” His eyes burned with anger. “Ever since you got it in your head to attend that infernal school, you’ve changed. You’re different now.”

  “When have I ever wanted anything else?”

  “It was just a dream, Petra—­a stupid childhood fantasy. You know you can never be an engineer for the Guild. Why do you keep trying?”

  “Because someday I’ll design tickers that will change the world. You’ll see.”

  “Do you honestly believe that? Listen to yourself,” he scoffed. “It’s time you understand something about the world: no man wants to marry a woman with grease under her nails—­or bed her, for that matter. Women are good for two things only, and messing about with machines isn’t one of them. The sooner you figure that out, the better off you’ll be.” He wheeled around and stormed through the storage room, knocking Petra’s automaton designs down from the stool. As the papers scattered across the floor, he paused and nudged one aside with his foot, tilting his head to examine the mechanical sketches. He snatched up the leg design and glanced back at her. “You’re not a little girl anymore, Pet,” he said, ripping the paper into fourths. “It’s time you grew up and accepted your place in this world—­starting now.” He thrust the scraps toward her, and they fluttered to the floor.

  Petra’s heart burned in her chest, her hands clenched tightly at her sides. The rush of blood in her ears drowned all sound as her eyes darted across the room, looking for the nearest thing to throw. Nothing was heavy or large enough. Tolly grabbed the door handle, and her shoulders tensed, every muscle in her body bristling. She felt the weight of her pocket watch hanging from her belt, and without thinking, she detached it from its chain and hurled it at Tolly’s head.

  The door slammed behind him, and her pocket watch shattered against it.

  MR. STRICKET FOUND Petra slumped against the back door, the pieces of her broken pocket watch clutched in her trembling hands. He knelt in front of her, his feeble fingers delicately brushing the matted hair from her eyes. “Petra, whatever is the matter?”

  She looked up, still seething over her argument with Tolly. In the calmest tone she could manage, she told Mr. Stricket she was fine, but anger rattled her voice. She squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a deep breath, but when she exhaled, she felt no better. Tolly was still an intolerable ass.

  “What’s this here?” asked Mr. Stricket, prying Petra’s fingers away from the pocket watch.

  Petra couldn’t muster the words to respond.

  Mr. Stricket took the broken watch into his spindly hands. “Let’s see what the damage is.” He carried the pieces into the back room and spread them out on the worktable. After a few minutes he called for Petra.

  She climbed to her feet and entered the workroom, thankful for something to take her mind off Tolly.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, gesturing to the broken watch.

  She shrugged. “I’ve always had it.” The watch had been on her person when Matron Wade took her in all those years ago, along with a screwdriver and a half-­eaten slice of crumb cake, the legacy of whatever life she’d left behind.

  “The craftsmanship is the most artistic, complex clockwork engineering I have seen in all my years,” Mr. Stricket said. “Whoever made this watch was a master clockwork engineer. The gear makeup is phenomenal, and two mainsprings . . . I’d have never thought of it.”

  Petra blinked. “Two mainsprings?”

  Mr. Stricket drew her in. “See here, the double barrel? One mainspring drives the gears, but it also winds the second mainspring as it uncoils, diverting a small amount of power to a secondary system, all without jeopardizing the integrity of the timepiece. Once the first mainspring has expended its energy, the gears shift, using the second mainspring to power the watch, in the meantime tightening the first mainspring again.”

  “Powering the watch in tandem,” she said, pulling up a chair.

  “Yes! Now, there is a bit of energy loss between the two mainsprings over time, which is expected, but the carrier of the watch only has to tighten the primary mainspring with the winding stem, no more complicated than your standard single-­mainspring watch.”

  Two mainsprings. When the idea first came to her, Petra had thought it would revolutionize ticker engineering, but someone had already thought of it—­and had gone so far as to build a functional model. All this time, she had been carrying it around in her pocket. The possibilities of such a system . . . If her pocket watch could run off two mainsprings, that meant the technology worked. It wasn’t just possible,
wasn’t just a theory. It actually worked. She could design the automaton to use a similar design.

  “Mr. Stricket, would you mind if I spent the rest of the afternoon putting it back together?”

  “Not at all,” he said, patting her arm. “Take all the time you need.”

  Mr. Stricket left her at the worktable, and she examined the broken watch. The glass covering the clock face had cracked into three pieces, and the minute hand had come loose, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. She cringed at the thought of the damage inside, and her anger at Tolly quickly turned into bitterness and self-­loathing. She should not have thrown her watch, no matter how angry she had been. It was stupid and rash, and she hated Tolly all the more for being such an insufferable prat.

  She rubbed her forehead and glanced at the back casing of the watch, sitting beside the rest of the scattered pieces. The cursive inscription glared back at her, caught in the overhead light. She pulled the gilt disk closer and read the engraving: for Petra, my love.

  An ache filled her chest and her eyes burned. It had been so long since she last opened the case, the questions buried within the watch still unanswered. Who wrote the inscription? Where were they now? She was no closer to finding out than when she first opened the watch and found the inscription all those years ago. She recalled Vice-­Chancellor Lyndon’s face when he had looked at the watch, and she wondered if maybe he knew.

  With a heavy sigh, she set the pieces down on the table and leaned back in the chair. Whoever gave her the watch was long gone. They had abandoned her, and she had since tried not to care about whatever—­or whoever—­she left behind the day Matron found her. The past didn’t matter; it couldn’t change the future or affect the present. Only she could do that—­here, and now. Whatever she earned in life, it would be hers and hers alone. She didn’t need to rely on things like parents or a home or money. She’d build her own future.

  Petra fetched her automaton designs from the storage room floor, and as she picked up the torn leg schematics, anger swelled again within her chest. The pages trembled in her hands. Tolly truly believed she could never be an engineer. He didn’t believe in her. No one did.