by C. S. Poe
“Gillian?”
I startled as if my soul had just reentered the body. The electricity I’d been holding snapped and crackled and melted to the floor like water, leaving behind clean hands. Manicured hands. Palms scarred, knuckles large from all of the breaks, and the left index had healed crooked. These were… my hands—adult hands.
I wasn’t that boy anymore. I couldn’t be him anymore. He was suffocating me.
I looked up at Gunner, who was scrutinizing my every shallow breath. “I can’t go inside,” I whispered.
He simply nodded, came out, forcing me to step back, and shut the door behind himself. “You don’t need to.”
I was still holding my hands in front of myself, palms up. “What—what was in there? Tell me.”
Gunner appeared to be considering his words—weighing the intensity of his description for what I had already pieced together. “The Hester Street warehouse was where Tick Tock was amassing his stockpile of weapons and ammunition.”
I nodded.
“But I believe the location where that Sawbones character was building Tick Tock an army of mechanical men was… here.” Gunner reached out and gently enclosed my hand with his own. “It appears he hightailed it—very recently. He’s left behind considerable evidence.”
“Evidence as to who Sawbones is?” I asked.
“If that clue is here, I believe it would require a much more in-depth survey of the room to find.”
“Tuffey was right—he’s playing God. We can’t have Sawbones running free.” I touched my neck for the PDD that wasn’t there. “Oh… I threw my device at a wall.”
Gunner moved his hand to my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s finish investigating—”
On the opposite end of the factory came a colossal crash and smash, and we both turned toward the damage as tremors pulsated through the building’s frame. An immense ball of fire was already hurtling toward us, consuming my field of vision entirely. I raised an arm to shield us, but my reaction was too sluggish after the resurfacing of those godawful memories, and I was thrown backward into the wall by the manufactured magic. I broke through the plaster and tumbled to a stop somewhere within Sawbones’s workroom.
I sat up as another blow shook the floor and Gunner began firing. My sleeves were on fire, and I hastily yanked the winter coat free and tossed it aside. My eyes followed the flames, like a moth, and in the glow, I could make out the fetid discarded body parts. Hands and arms and legs and whole torsos, further surrounded by elemental replacements made of brass and silver and iron. A makeshift surgical table, like what the soldiers had been placed on in the open-air tent, was situated in the middle of the room. And as I stumbled to my feet, my legs all but entirely numb at this point, I could see the table coated in fresh blood, in cogs, in screws, in pressure tubes. The shelves on the walls were cluttered with bottles, vats, and vials—no doubt a plethora of chemicals somehow useful to Sawbones’s butchery.
I tripped over myself in my haste to climb through the hole in the wall, stumbled through the debris, and was immediately sick. I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and looked up in time to see Gunner run for the cover of a storage cabinet to my right. I jerked my head to the left as the floor shook again and I all but forgot the carnage I’d just scrambled out of.
Because lumbering across the factory was a mechanical creature that not even Mary Shelley could have envisioned while writing Frankenstein. He reached at least ten feet, roving forward on heavy iron wheels, not unlike those of Ferguson’s locomotive, instead of legs. Before him was a Gatling gun and scope, the barrels still smoking from the previous round of magic, and the gun’s levers were operated with terrifying mechanical claws in place of hands, the steam hissing around joints, like it’d been a hasty build and some of the cogs were loose. The monster had a tank of a chest, made from melded elements. Iron and platinum, perhaps, which gave Gunner’s Waterbury more of an advantage without any silver incorporated into the build, but his pistol alone wasn’t going to save our hides. This atrocity had been built with me in mind, utilizing the least conductive natural elements with also the highest melting point for operating that bastardized fire magic.
The creature had a steam headlamp bolted into its chest, and when it twisted its upper body toward me, I had to raise a hand to shield my eyes. Its iron helmet let out a hiss as fasteners were released and the top flipped back like an accordion—revealing Henry Bligh. His golden hair was in complete disarray, the tip of his nose still blackened from our scuffle earlier in the day, one eye was milky, like an advanced cataract, the other replaced with the face of a pocket watch, and his once-unblemished skin was red and blotchy.
“Bligh. What in God’s name have you done to yourself?”
“If it isn’t the Bureau’s favorite street rat, Gillian Hamilton,” Bligh answered, and his voice had gotten deeper, rougher, with almost a metallic tinge to it. “You look surprised to see me, Hamilton.”
A sudden sweat had broken out across my chest and underarms as I wrangled with the reality that the body parts strewn about the room behind me, the ones I’d fallen into, touched, could very well have been Bligh’s.
“Sawbones just got better and better with every build, didn’t he? Between the incorporation of a noble element, my manufactured fire, and his quintessence magic, I am perfect.” Bligh raised a clawed hand, and it rotated in a spectacular three hundred and sixty degrees.
The foreign magic squirming down my spine had a name—quintessence.
“Bligh,” I tried again, speaking even as my voice shook. “He’s turned you into a monster.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Hamilton. Sawbones has turned me into divinity. I am indestructible.”
“But your fiancée—”
“Emma Olin is New Money trash. I’m not interested in carrying that albatross around my neck.”
“Your family—” But I was cut short when Bligh laughed and fired the Gatling gun at the ceiling and fire began to rain from overhead. I raised my arm and moved it in an arc, a tidal wave crashing into the fire, putting it out, and then the magic water dissipated in smoky, glittering tendrils.
“My father has been withholding a portion of my inheritance,” Bligh replied, a smug expression on his disturbed face, “until I was promoted at the Bureau. But so long as you—Moore’s golden goose—stood in the way of all the career-making cases, I’d be arresting steam-pilfering scum in the Five Points until I died of old age.”
Every incident, every clue, every moment began coming into perfect alignment, like the tumblers of a skeleton key locking in place. I took a step back as Bligh rolled forward on those two massive wheels, the floorboards groaning under the weight. “Did you orchestrate the invention of fire bullets just to one-up me?”
Bligh rolled forward again, but this time I stubbornly held my ground. He stopped several feet short, and with a ticktock, ticktock, leaned his upper body closer to me. “Did you know that the mother black lace-weaver spider allows her offspring to consume her alive? That was the idea behind Tick Tock—use a new and mysterious gangster as a way for the Whyos to turn on Driscoll. Allow them to destroy their own gang from the inside out.”
“But then you met Weaver?” I countered.
The minute hand of Bligh’s clock eye began spinning counter clockwise. “I’ll admit this, Hamilton, once you sink those grubby little fingers into something, you’re hard-pressed to let go. I didn’t meet him. I had the idea to hire an architect and caster team—to tinker with magic bullets as a backup plan to taking Driscoll down. Even if it didn’t work, presenting Moore with the evidence of the bullets, something him and every director across the country are terrified of, would mean something for my career.”
“But then Milo Ferguson got his hands on some of the prototypes.”
That minute hand began spinning faster. “Yes,” Bligh ground out. “But even with you involved, let’s just say investing in this technology at the jumping-off point would be more lucrative th
an what my family has amassed in three generations. Partnering with Sawbones is how I closed the gap between plausibility and reality.”
“Moore knows,” I said, my fists clenched so tightly that it felt as if my knuckles would burst from the skin. “He knows everything. The warehouse on Hester, the shipments from California, that you assisted Gatling Man in Fishback’s murder and staged the scene to make it look like a break-in. What about the one you sent to my home? You planned that too, didn’t you? That’s why you were so surprised to see me last night. You were celebrating because you thought I was dead.”
Bligh’s upper lip peeled away from his teeth in a vicious snarl, and that hideous, milky-white eye rolled briefly to the right as my storm outside caused a window to shatter. “Good luck proving any of it without his testimony.” Bligh started to right his posture—ticktock, tick—
“Moore’s alive. I saw to that.”
“Liar.”
Another window broke and the wind howled. I said, “Sometimes the biggest dangers present themselves in the smallest packages.”
Bligh was taken aback, whether about Moore or from my unparalleled skills on display, I couldn’t say, but that brief hesitation was all Gunner needed to open fire from where he’d been taking cover. An aether round hit Bligh directly in the clock eye. Springs and gizmos went flying, and Bligh reared back with a roar. His helmet came down over his head, steam hissed as the locks set in place, he maneuvered backward on the wheels, then those clawed hands grabbed the Gatling gun levers. Bligh opened fire, cylinder spinning and barrels pumping out fire spells one after another, after another. Bullets pinged, punctured, ricocheted, and set fire across the entire factory as Bligh followed Gunner across its expanse, only to lose him as my outlaw vanished into Higgins’s office.
“Who’s your criminal friend, Hamilton?” Bligh questioned. He hammered the doorframe with more bullets, setting the room ablaze.
It took an incredible amount of concentration on my part to push aside the itching sensation of too much manufactured magic in the air just to cast a spell of my own. I shot a hand up, wind screamed through the broken windows, spiraled upward, and tore a portion of the roof off the factory. The rain that had begun assailing the city, glowing a wild blue, rich with energy from the magic atmosphere, came down in torrents inside. I stood before Bligh, one hand pointed toward the office, directing sheets of rain to extinguish the fire, the other moving the water in a circular motion around myself that kept me from being incinerated by Bligh’s relentless assault.
He was still cranking the lever when the Gatling gun stopped spitting bullets. Bligh’s muffled voice from within his helmet swore, and one clawed hand tore an ammunition pack from his bulky iron-and-platinum right arm. Maintaining the wind and rain, something I could have done under any other circumstance with ease, was taking a much more conscious commitment, as every time I grabbed for more raw energy, I had to push through that newly created barrier—a thick, gooey sort of refuse the illegal spells left in the aftermath. It almost felt as if the festering wound in the magical current got torn open a bit more with every bullet shot, and this waste was the atmosphere bleeding a slow death. If what Bligh created, a potentially successful underground business of manufactured magic, wasn’t immediately stopped, this barrier was bound to get stronger. It’d make casting a challenge, not only for me, but for the weakest or newest members of the magic community. There was no way to say what damage this could do to our bodies in the long run, let alone the planet, but I knew—even without the facts, without the data—it would be devastating.
“If you’d done one iota of work in the last three years, Bligh, you’d recognize a face from our rogues’ gallery.”
Bligh’s helmet rose as he looked up from trying to fit the new ammunition cartridge into the Gatling gun. “What?”
Gunner strode from the office just then, flanked by heat and smoke, his face dirty with soot. He raised the Waterbury and said, “You can call me Gunner the Deadly.” Then Gunner shot out Bligh’s headlight, settling what remained of the factory into darkness, as all of the emergency bulbs had already been destroyed by Bligh’s bullets and my magic.
Bligh’s torso rocked backward from the hit and the wheels of his roving contraption shifted rather ominously.
“A bit of light, if you will, Hamilton,” Gunner called.
I snapped my fingers and lightning cracked and splintered across the sky overhead.
By the sudden illumination, Gunner took aim a second time and fired. I thought he’d wildly missed his target when the three aether bullets ricocheted off Bligh’s left arm, but then I realized that Gunner had knocked free another cartridge of ammunition and was now running to collect it. I raised my hands, palms out, and the downpour of rain ceased. It held suspended around us, glowing like a billion fireflies on the first summer night. Gunner turned, Waterbury holstered and a massive metal cartridge that housed the rounds for the Gatling gun in both hands.
“Get down!” I shouted.
Gunner must have had a flashback to Shallow Grave, because he didn’t question me. Instead, he dropped the ammunition, threw himself to the floor, and covered his head.
I pulled my hands back and the rain mimicked the motion. Each water droplet elongated until it resembled a needle several inches in length, completely surrounding Bligh from every angle. Bligh, in return, struggled harder to get the new ammunition set into the cylinder, no easy task with metal claws for fingers, and opened fire on me just as I directed the water magic to go on the offense. I reached further into the surrounding atmosphere, the viscous waste now past my wrist, my forearm, until I was elbows-deep, tearing energy to fuel my spell as the rain assaulted Bligh. Every fire bullet eradicated by my magic sent an aftershock through my body, and if I’d not been encased in flesh, surely my skeleton would have been shaken apart. The rain drilled into Bligh’s armor, but even with a spell the elemental opposite of fire, the combination of platinum and this unknown quintessence magic kept me from landing any lethal hits.
“Take cover,” I called to Gunner before I released the spell and ran back to Sawbones’s workroom. I froze in the doorway as the rotten stink assaulted my senses again, but I managed to take a breath without the immediate need to vomit and plunged deeper into the dark, enclosed space. I tripped over a severed arm and stepped in something that squished—skinned flesh at best and some sort of innards at worst.
Snap.
Snap.
Snap.
I was choking on bile by the time I reached the far wall slovenly arranged with all of the mysterious bottled liquids. I cast a small ball of lightning, the electricity bouncing in my hand as I read the scrawled labels. The problem being presented to me was that my water magic couldn’t easily eradicate the manufactured fire because Sawbones had reinforced Bligh with goddamn platinum. Platinum didn’t easily melt like brass, nor did it hold a current the way silver did. And his armor was so thick that even Gunner’s aether bullets were having little effect. Before my own magic would be superior in a one-on-one match, I’d have to reduce the effectiveness of Bligh’s platinum armor.
Sawbones had clearly kept chemicals on-hand in order to bend and ply his body parts to suit the weapons being shipped in from California. Which made sense, considering each mechanical soldier would be custom, from the one who fell off my balcony, to McCarthy, to Bligh himself. And that meant Sawbones had to have had a solvent to use on platinum. I was thinking of the story Higgins told me before his untimely death—of the poison woman and her Aqua Tofana—when I saw it in the back, its label curled and discolored:
Aqua Regia.
It’d been a while since I’d studied my Latin declensions, but regia was from the associative term domus regia. A home or dwelling; pertaining to a king.
Royal water.
Noble element.
I grabbed the bottle, the orange solution sloshing as I raced back to the factory floor in time to see Gunner run and dive between the wheels of Bligh’s apparatus, causin
g Bligh to almost fire the Gatling gun on himself.
“Come out from under there,” Bligh bellowed, rolling back and then forward, trying to catch Gunner without cover so he could shoot several rounds directly into the top of his head.
“Bligh!” I shouted, raising the bottle up and over my head.
He swiveled in my direction. His claws cocked the levers of the Gatling gun. Then he fired.
I smashed the bottle of Aqua Regia on the floorboards, and before it could seep into the wood, I forced the liquid to merge with the storm—used every ounce of raw energy I could pull from the tangles of magic around us—and by sheer brute force, intertwined the Aqua Regia into my water spell so the corrosive elements rained down atop Bligh and his suit of platinum armor. My hands glowed a cobalt blue. The violence kept deep inside me was awake, roaring like a lion, hurling itself against my ribcage to be let free. I had so much magic within me that excess light was streaming from my fingertips, rolling down the sides of my face and neck like sweat.
I was incandescent.
Bligh was screaming as the rain ate through his armor. Pockmarks in the metal began to show, and vapors wafted upward as the Aqua Regia came into contact with platinum, the achievement further fueled by my merciless magic. His fantastical roving vehicle began to crack along its axis, and Gunner, still underneath and shielded from the chemicals mixed into my rain, quickly shot a succession of aether rounds into the floorboards. One of the wheels fell into the caved-in floor, keeping Bligh stuck and at an angle so the mechanics didn’t smash Gunner. Bligh’s clawed hands let go of the Gatling gun levers and fought to remove his helmet in a sort of blind panic. But then an ominous snap rang out and the armor, bolted onto the wheels and gun about the waist, fell apart and Bligh crashed backward.
I waved one hand and the rain ceased. I watched a moment as Bligh, his armor crumbling with every move, dragged his legless, massive girth along the floor. He reached a broken claw upward for his gun, and Gunner took several steps back while pointing his Waterbury at Bligh. I snapped my fingers and a glittering sphere of water formed before me, growing bigger and bigger, silent as it twisted and turned on itself. Then I shot my hand forward, and the blast hit Bligh so hard, he went flying across the factory, slammed into the front door we’d entered, and dropped into a heap of mechanical garbage.
