We walked quickly through the halls, passing only a few other members of the Brotherhood, most of them in nightclothes or just starting their shifts in the mechanics’ bay. No one paid us the slightest bit of attention; we were two faceless girls meekly going on our way.
The library wasn’t locked, although a sign on the door noted that it was closed and would reopen at eight a.m.
We slipped in and Casey stopped me inside the main doors, pointing back through the stacks. The library was massive, shelves curving far over our heads, bolted to the ceiling and the floor, and reading tables every few feet. With the lights off, the library was eerie, shelves crouched like lines of sentinels waiting for the signal to come to life and march forward.
We crept through the stacks, toward a flare of light near the back wall. Every footstep seemed magnified, every breath Casey and I took echoingly loud. But the two guards watching the small iron cage didn’t seem to notice, and I breathed a little easier—that is to say, I breathed.
The two men in white sat on hard metal stools on either side of the cage. One leafed through a magazine and the other dozed, his head tilted back.
Casey looked at me and I examined our options. The men had weapons—short truncheons on their belts— and there could have been more hidden.
She nodded, knotting her hands into tight, knobby fists. I sucked in a breath. I was shaking. Once I took this step, there was no turning back.
Still, I didn’t hesitate before I called up my Weird and burst the bulb of the aether lamp on the wall next to the guards. A bit of smoke curled, and the scent of burnt paper permeated the air.
I didn’t have any more time to worry. The guards were up, shouting, stumbling into one another, and I saw the flash of Casey’s metal hair decorations as she flew past me and laid the first guard out with a right cross. She fell on the man, kicking him and hitting him, letting out small huffs of rage.
I grabbed my guard by the front of his tunic and used the one fighting move every girl knows: I drove my knee hard into the spot between his legs. The guard buckled and fell, and I hit him once more in the temple to make sure he was out.
Casey was still punching her guard, atop him, her face gleaming with sweat. “Casey!” I hissed, horrified. These men had done nothing to us—they were just obstacles. “Casey,
She blinked at me, as if she’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah. Sorry,” she said.
I helped her up, watching her wipe blood off her knuckles onto the tail of her shirt. “What happened?” I said softly. The pain on her face echoed in me. “Not just now. I mean, why did you do that?”
She shook her head, not looking at me. I brought a portable aether lamp from one of the tables and turned it on low so I could look into her eyes. Casey remained sullen. “It’s not easy being an orphan the Brotherhood plucks off the street,” she finally said with a sigh. “Any more than it is being a ward that the Lovecraft Proctors get their hands on.”
She didn’t meet my eyes, and I didn’t push the issue. I knew the rage that could boil up when you least expected it. I knew it all too well. “Let’s take a look at these locks,” I suggested.
Casey looked crestfallen. “Mr. Crosley has the only copy of the keys. There’s no way I’m getting my hands on them.”
At least here, I was in my element. I could do something about Casey’s misery. “Good thing I don’t need his keys, then, eh?” I said, placing my hands on the door to the cage. Casey was right—the locks were strong, complicated, not the sort of kid stuff I could break open easily with my Weird.
But it could be done. Was going to be done. I laid my forehead against the iron. I didn’t have much time, and the pressure didn’t help my concentration, but I let the locks speak to me, let my Weird speak to them, allow the meshing of two machines, one ethereal and one iron, to occur.
After a moment, the locks popped open, and Casey gave a small squeak. “I’ll never get used to that,” she explained when I gave her a questioning look. “Closest thing to magic I’ll ever see.”
I thought of my father trying to teach me control back on the beach and felt a small pang. I did want to see him again, to give us a chance to spend more than a few days together, to really be father and daughter.
But for the sake of everything else, I shoved the tightness in my chest aside and pointed into the cage. “I probably shouldn’t spend too much time enclosed in all that iron,” I told Casey. “Can you get the Tesla stuff and bring it out here?”
“Sure can,” she said, seeming relieved to have a task. I looked back at the guards, wondering how we were going to explain them. While Casey collected diaries, blueprints, journals and bound papers, I rooted through the librarian’s desk until I unearthed a flat bottle of whiskey.
Perfect. I upended it over the unconscious guards’ clothes, then left the bottle lying near the outstretched hand of the one Casey had beaten up. Not that whiskey would explain the bruises, but it would at least cast doubt on the story that two grown men had been beaten by two teenage girls—if they admitted such a thing at all.
When Casey had finished stacking a table high with archived documents, I took a seat before them, pulling the aether lamp close while she kept a lookout. I figured I had a few hours at most—the Brotherhood never truly slept, and sooner or later somebody would notice that I wasn’t in my room, nor was Casey in hers. I had to be fast, to focus, even though my mind was still spinning from Tremaine’s visit and felt like it might never stop.
His plans weren’t anything special to look at—his handwriting was precise, his drawings meticulous, but they didn’t glow or catch fire beneath my fingers, as would seem to fit such a portentous occasion. And there were lots of plans and diaries—hundreds at least. Tesla was prolific, and I’d heard that, unlike his competitor Edison, he recorded most ideas, even the wholly impractical ones. “This is going to take forever,” I muttered. Casey shrugged.
“The ones Mr. Crosley thinks are particularly special are bound up in that big blue book,” she said, shoving toward me a ledger that was almost too large for me to turn the pages of. It was full of blueprints, most of them for terrestrial inventions that I’d seen back in Lovecraft—the prototype steam jitney engine, a Tesla coil, an aether feeder that became the system everyone in the world whose home was piped with the stuff was familiar with.
I set the book aside. Crosley’s ego display didn’t interest me. I tried a few of Tesla’s personal journals, and then started looking through loose plans, some folded and faded so that the machines were almost unrecognizable. But the clock wasn’t among them. There were no notes to even indicate Tesla had entertained the idea of such a machine.
I had a terrible sensation in my stomach that I might have gone about this all wrong, but I persisted. The nightmare clock had to be here. For so many reasons.
Casey looked back at me, chewing on her lip. “I can hear people moving around out there. We should probably get going soon.”
“If we do get caught,” I said, opening another bound volume, the paper so decayed the corners turned to dust in my hands, “blame me. Crosley needs me—I’ll be punished less.”
Casey gave me a tentative smile. “Thanks. But I don’t want you punished either.”
I shrugged. “I’m not scared of Harold Crosley. You helped me, now I’ll help you. That’s how it works.”
Casey lowered her eyes. “Maybe in your world. I’m not used to it.”
“What do you …,” I started, but was distracted by the spidery handwriting at the top of the last blueprint in the bound journal.
I felt my mouth drop open in surprise, and I flipped the book around so Casey could see. “There’s a Gate? Here?”
Casey nodded, looking as if she’d done something wrong. “But it never worked right. Mr. Crosley won’t let anyone use it—there’ve been folks who’ve lost limbs and horrible stories about people who got shot out into the vacuum of space and whatnot.” She chewed her lip. “Said it was just a prototype Tesla fiddled with. He locked that whole wing. Nobody goes there.”
I heard Octavia’s whisper.
