Ghost Town

She was gathering up her grease-stained doughnut bag, and stopped to stare at him. “What for?”

“For making me think of that,” he said softly. “I do miss her. I really do.” He seemed a little surprised about it, then shook out of it with visible effort. “Enough. Let me show you what I’ve accomplished while you were out getting yourself in so much trouble.”

“I didn’t—”

“Claire.” He gave her a long, reproachful look, and put his finger to his lips. “Silence while I am speaking. We don’t have time for you to quibble.”

He did have a point, sort of. She nodded, and he led her over to the nearest lab table, which held undefined lumps of things under a gray canvas. Myrnin whipped the canvas off like a magician unveiling a trick, complete with, “Ta-da!”

It looked worse than it had when she’d last been here. It looked like a completely insane, random collection of parts, cobbled together without any sense of reason. Wires went everywhere, looping into snarls, and he’d used so many colors of wire that the whole thing had a strange rainbow look to it that made even less sense.

There really wasn’t much to say, except, “What is it?”

“Oh, Claire, it’s my latest attempt to bring up the barriers around the town; what do you think it is? Look, I added vacuum pumps here, and here, and a new gear assembly, and—”

“Myrnin, stop. Just . . . stop.” She closed her eyes for a second, thinking, I’m going to die, and finally forced herself to look at him again. “Let’s start from the beginning. Where’s the input?”

“You mean the point at which energy enters the system?”

“Yes.”

“Here.” He touched something in the middle of the device, which made even less sense. It looked like a funnel made of bright, shiny brass. In fact, it looked almost like a horn.

“And then where does the . . . ah, energy go?”

“Isn’t it obvious? No? I weep for the state of public schools.” He traced two wires, one that split off into a tangle of tubes, and one that went into what looked like a clock, only there were no numbers on the dial. “It draws power during the daytime hours, but it’s at its most powerful at night, under the influence of the moon, which is why I’ve made certain parts of it from elements that resonate with the lunar cycle. I tried to balance the effects of the different elements, day and night, to achieve a perfect oscillation. It’s obvious.”

If you were insane.

Claire sighed. “We need to start over,” she said. “Just start from scratch and build it again. One thing at a time, and you explain to me what it does, okay?”

“There’s no need to start over. I’ve been perfectly—”

“Myrnin,” Claire interrupted. “No time to quibble, remember? It’s going to take all day to tear this thing apart, but I need to understand what you’re doing. Really.”

He considered it, looking at her for the longest time, and then grudgingly nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s begin.”

Autopsying Myrnin’s mad-scientist machine was weirder than anything Claire had ever done in Morganville, and that was definitely a new record. Some of the parts were slippery, and felt almost . . . alive. Some were ice-cold. Some were hot—so hot she burned her fingers on them. Asking why didn’t seem to do any good; Myrnin didn’t have explanations that she could follow, since they drifted out of science and off into alchemy. But she methodically broke down the machine, labeled each part with a number, and made a diagram as she did of where each thing fit.

For a device that was supposed to establish a kind of detection field around the town limits, and then a second stage that would physically disable vehicles that weren’t already cleared for exit, and then a third stage that selectively wiped memories, it was . . .

Incomprehensible, really. She could see pieces of what Myrnin was doing; the detection-field part was simple enough. She could even follow the purely mechanical part of how the machine broadcast a shutoff of a vehicle’s electrical system—which led into the more complicated problem of how to rewire people’s brains. But it was all just so . . . weird.

It took hours, but all of a sudden as she was drawing the plug-in for a vacuum pump that felt as if it was radiating cold, although she didn’t know how, Claire saw . . . something. It was like a flash of intuition, one of those moments that came to her sometimes when she thought about higher-order physics problems. Not calculation, exactly, not logic. Instinct.

She saw what he was doing, and for that one second, it was beautiful.

Crazy, but in a beautiful kind of way. Like everything Myrnin did, it twisted the basic rules of physics, bent them and reshaped them until they became . . . something else. He’s a genius, she thought. She’d always known that, but this . . . this was something else. Something beyond all his usual tinkering and weirdness.

“It’s going to work,” she said. Her voice sounded odd. She carefully set the vacuum pump in its place on the meticulously labeled canvas sheet.

Myrnin, who was sitting in his armchair with his feet comfortably on a hassock, looked up. He was reading a book through tiny little square spectacles that might have once belonged to Benjamin Franklin. “Well, of course it’s going to work,” he said. “What did you expect? I do know what I’m doing.”

This from a man wearing clothing from the OMG No store, and his battered vampire-bunny slippers. He’d crossed his feet at the ankles on top of a footstool, and both the bunnies’ red mouths were flapping open to reveal their sharp, pointy teeth.

Claire grinned, suddenly full of enthusiasm for what she was doing. “I didn’t expect anything else,” she said. “When’s lunch?”

“You humans, always eating. I’ll make you soup. You can eat it while you keep working.” Myrnin set aside his book and walked into the back of the lab.

“Don’t use the same beaker you used for poisons!” Claire yelled after him. He waved a pale hand. “I mean it! ”

She looked back down at the machine. The flash of intuition was gone, but the excitement remained, and she started in on the screws holding the next part.

She was exhausted, and she had no idea what time it was. Time didn’t exist in Myrnin’s lab; the lamps were always burning. There were no windows, no clocks, no sense of how long she’d been standing here over this table, tinkering. Days, it felt like. The only time she’d been able to sit down was when she had to go to the bathroom; even Myrnin admitted he didn’t think Amelie had meant for her to be denied restroom privileges.

He kept bringing her cups of things. Soup, when she was hungry. Coffee. Sodas. Once, memorably, a glass of orange juice that tasted like sunshine—at least, as far as she was able to remember sunshine.

She was so tired. She could hardly hold on to her tools anymore, and her hands were clumsy and aching. Her back was on fire. Her legs trembled with the effort to stay standing. She couldn’t work sitting down, as high as the table was, and when she tried to stop and sit for a moment, Myrnin was always there.

This time, as she inched toward the stool, he suddenly made a furious sound and knocked it away, and halfway across the lab, where it hit and rolled with a shocking clatter. “No!” he barked. “Stay awake. Do you think I like this?”

“I can’t do it!” she cried, and felt tears stinging her eyes. “Myrnin, I’m so tired! I need to sit down; please let me sit down! Amelie won’t know!”

“She will,” came a voice from the shadows, by one of the storage room doors. Claire blinked and focused, and there was Oliver, leaning against the wall. “You will always have observers, Claire. You chose this punishment, and now you have to survive it. Personally, I think that’s unlikely; I believe you’ll collapse long before you finish the work, and we both know that Amelie can’t afford to be seen as merciful to you. If you fail, all the better. I never agreed with this compassion nonsense.” He sounded dismissive, and still angry that she wasn’t in a cage in the middle of Founder’s Square, waiting for a bonfire. She felt a surge of hate so hot it shocked her. If she’d had a stake, she’d have used it on him, and never mind the consequences.

She went back to work. She didn’t know how, but she did, focusing so fiercely that every part was etched in her mind, every gleaming metal surface.