Corsets & Clockwork

by Trish Telep

  I gaped. So, what Athena had said was true. I crept down onto the floor, every muscle shaking so hard I wondered how I could stay standing. Anger, bitterness, and grief chased one another in a vicious circle through my chest.

  "Not without this," Athena said. She raised the Heart in her hands then so the Emperor could see it, and it burst into eerie flame.

  "No," the emperor said. His voice had an edge keen as my pike. "Foolish girl, to think you can handle such power."

  He moved toward her. A dagger coalesced in the shadows of his hand.

  I scarcely dared breathe and certainly didn't think as I crept up behind him. Athena, wise witch, gave no sign that she knew I was there. I prayed the Emperor couldn't hear my thoughts as she could.

  I dug the tip of my pike into his lower back. He wore no armor, no protection whatsoever. I could slice him in half as easily as look at him. "How do you dare, Sire," I said, "to threaten the one who might save us all? Or shall I call you Butcher Vaunt instead?"

  He stiffened.

  "Drop your weapon," I ordered.

  He laughed. He half-turned to look at me. "You shall regret this deeply one day, Corporal," he spat. And then, he disappeared in a thread of stinking smoke.

  I cursed. "Hurry," I said to Athena. "I'm quite certain he'll be back."

  Athena set the Heart down, and her hands roamed over the wires and tubes snaking in and out of the Manticore. She looked over her shoulder at me as I came nearer.

  "Help me," she hissed.

  She started unhooking and pulling things, but the Manticore cried out in pain. I reached for Athena's hands. Her fingers were cold and shaking.

  You cannot release me, the Manticore said. I shall die for certain.

  "Why?" Athena whispered. She had always seemed so much older than her years, so sure of herself, but now she was little more than a child. I longed to comfort her, but there was no soothing away this hurt.

  My heart is gone, the Manticore said. This machine keeps me alive.

  It was then that the tears came. Athena's shoulders shook with them and she kneaded her fingers through the Manticore's belly fur, for all the world like a nursing kitten, save for her howling grief. I took her in my arms without a word, and she folded herself there against my heart.

  Children, the Manticore sighed at last. You should go while you still can. He will return. I am content with my fate.

  At that, Athena turned from my arms, wiping her face with the edge of her robe. "I'm not," she said. "I'm not letting him win. All those afternoons ... all you taught me ... I proposed this to save you, not torment you!"

  She heard my unspoken question, for she looked at me and said, "I used to sneak out of the Tower and ride to the Forest to meet her. She taught me everything I know about magic, about how what I'd been brought up to believe wasn't true. She taught me so much. I can't just leave her to die."

  "Forgive me," I said to them both, "but you may have to. Your father will return soon. Do you have magic enough to fend off his entire guard?" I glanced down at the Heart, glowing softly where she had placed it on the floor.

  "Of course I don't," Athena said. "But there must be some way to undo this ..." She paced up and down, glancing occasionally at the devilish machine. I tried to listen beyond the sounds of her pacing and the Manticore's labored breathing. Was that the turn of a key in a door? A shift in the movement of an everlantern?

  I was about to urge her again to hurry when she stopped. She stood so still for a moment that I wondered if the Emperor had secreted a Basilisk in the chamber. Athena was like stone.

  Then she grinned.

  "What?" I said.

  She had knelt down to touch the Heart of All Matter.

  "What will you do with it?" I asked, though I was fairly certain I already knew.

  "Put down that pike and help," she said.

  I set my pike carefully on the stone floor, and put my hands on the Heart, alongside hers, to lift it up. It had grown strangely heavy, and seemed to grow heavier the closer we got to the Manticore. The rhythm of its pulsing grew faster, like a heart waking into action after a long sleep.

  Child, the Manticore said to Athena. You mustn't. Your father ...

  "We both know my father will use this for evil someday," Athena said. "I'd rather he didn't have the chance. I'd rather you were able to live free."

  But it isn't mine to possess ...

  The Manticore's protests were subsumed in a field of glittering light as together we placed the Heart in the beast's chest. A flash and a low concussion knocked us back from the table.

  When I could see again, the Manticore stood, her spiked tail twitching. With one swipe of her red paw, she sent the Emperor's horrid machine flying across the room. The Heart in her chest clicked and purred as it knitted itself between muscle and bone.

  Then the great beast's eyes met mine.

  Come here, child, the Manticore said.

  The inexorable pull of her voice sent shivers across my scalp.

  I went.

  Kneel.

  She loomed above me. The great, smiling mouth with its triple row of teeth was just above my head. I wondered for a moment if she would take me as her first free meal, and she must have heard that thought, for she laughed, a sound like deep silver bells ringing.

  I am going to give you something, she said.

  She bent her head and breathed on me.

  Remember, she said.

  The curtain over my mind shredded. It was as though someone pulled a shroud from over me, and I could at last breathe in the light. I remembered who I had been in the Forest. I remembered that I ran away to become a guard because I was ashamed. I remembered that I was a wolf.

  "I am ..." I couldn't quite form the words. The idea was so strange, so forbidden, that I hardly understood how to comprehend it, except that I knew in every bone and muscle of my body that it was true.

  One of the Were, yes, the Manticore said. Welcome, little brother.

  Then it was my turn to weep. For the pack I'd lost. For the wolf-brethren I'd forgotten. For all I'd never known.

  "If you're done blubbering," Athena said, "I could use some help. This door is heavy!"

  I gathered my pike up and turned to see her pulling frantically at the door to the chamber.

  "Figured it out finally?" she asked, as I approached. She was in complete control again; the vulnerable child I'd held in my arms had vanished.

  "You knew?" I asked. "You knew and you didn't tell me?"

  She looked at me sidelong. "Would you have believed me? I hardly think one should tell one he's a werewolf on first meeting, do you?"

  I couldn't help but laugh. "No. I suppose not."

  I rested my pike against the wall as we scraped the great iron door open together. There was no one on the other side, but somehow I knew the Emperor would return. Every moment wasted was a moment we might lose for ever.

  "Now let's get her out," Athena said.

  I had no idea how we would sneak a Manticore out of the Tower and down through the City in the middle of the night with the entire Imperial Guard after us.

  Use all your senses, the Manticore encouraged.

  I hated the thought that we might have saved her life only to botch her escape.

  * * *

  I stood in the doorway and sensed with all of my being. It had been a long time since I'd done anything like that. I was amazed that I still knew how. Worms and other insects crept through the foundation of the Tower all around us. Guards murmured in a distant dicing game. I smelled mold, stone, the remnants of torture. And then a thread of river air, a ribbon of freedom twining underneath all the rest.

  "This way," I said, nodding toward the ground-level door.

  Athena stopped me. "I doubt I can hide all of us with magic. But we may be able to hide in plain sight."

  "How so?"

  "We'll just pretend that we're transferring her somewhere else. I'll be the handler and you be the guard. Hopefully, we'll get out before
my father returns."

  The Manticore nodded her approval. Athena slipped a length of silver chain over her neck, murmuring an apology.

  I watched as Athena magically altered her dressing gown into a hooded robe that hid her face and most of her body. I shifted my pike into position, glad of its familiar weight in my hands.

  Together the three of us entered the corridor. I prayed to every saint I could think of that the Emperor had not yet put the entire dungeon on alert. I also hoped that no one would look too closely at my house uniform.

  As it happened, there was no one on our corridor. We wended our way past prisons packed with hopeless victims, past torture rooms that my rediscovered senses told me I didn't want to explore. We came at last out into a great hall of sorts, a cavernous room hollowed from the living rock. There were cages there, mostly empty, but the Manticore paced past them sadly nonetheless.

  This place should not be, she said. Great harm will come of it.

  "We must get you out of here," I said. I didn't want to think about anything beyond seeing the Manticore to freedom.

  We were nearly under the eave of the cavern wall and into a corridor that would lead us to the river when the word I'd dreaded came.

  "Halt!"

  A regiment of dungeon guards hurried across the shadowed floor, their pikes gleaming as they came.

  I could think of nothing else to do. The guards were obviously already aware of the devastation in the Emperor's laboratory.

  "Run!" I shouted.

  Athena and the Manticore bolted past me, the silver chains slipping from the monster's body, while I took up rear guard. I had no idea how long I could hold the soldiers while the Princess and the beast worked at the door that would give us our freedom.

  And then I felt him. The Emperor. And with him was a power so terrible I nearly dropped the pike I held. But then I gripped it tighter. If my death could delay him long enough for Athena and the Manticore to get free, then so be it.

  The soldiers fell back as the Emperor approached. On his hand, the nulling gauntlet that his Huntsman had worn in the Forest gleamed darkly.

  "I told you that you would regret your insolence, Corporal," he said.

  "I regret nothing," I said through gritted teeth. "Except that I ever bent the knee to you."

  "Is that so?" he asked.

  He stepped forward, and I nearly swooned under the influence of his fell magic.

  "Then, you shall die at my feet," he said. His smile was sharp as a knife.

  I lifted my pike. He shattered it with a word.

  My regulation dagger was in my boot. I waited until he came closer. One step. Another.

  Then I heard the sound I longed for--the door behind me scraping open.

  The light of the full moon poured in, turning the Emperor and his guard to skeletal shadows.

  "Garrett!" Athena screamed. "Come, now!"

  I half turned. The river gleamed under the moon; its voice was deep and loud and I understood every word of its song.

  And in that moment, as the cold light touched my face, I was no longer human but wolf. The Manticore roared behind me. Several spikes from her tail felled guards in the mouth of the tunnel, and several lodged in the left side of the Emperor's body--his face, his shoulder, his knee. He fell, bellowing in agony, curses leaking from his paralyzed lips.

  I leaped to Athena and crouched before her. "Climb up," I said, my voice rough as the stone on which I stood. She climbed onto my back, digging her small hands in my ruff.

  "Go!" Athena cried, as the guard advanced. "Go!"

  I went. And the sound of my claws on stone was music. And the feel of her body against mine was delight. And the moon was nearly as bright as the Heart that burned in the Manticore's chest.

  I followed the Manticore into the river, the Emperor's man no longer.

  Chickie Hill's Badass Ride

  BY DIA REEVES

  THE MORE SUE Jean Mahoney listened to her boyfriend wax poetic about his newly remodeled 1958 Ford Thunderbird--his glasspack muffler and his whitewalls and his fancy-schmancy Motorola radio--the more she wanted to hop into the driver's seat and run him over.

  She'd rushed here to the garage where he worked, upset about her parents and needing someone to listen to her, but Chickie only had eyes for his T-bird. Eyes and hands. The flash of heat that ignited Sue Jean's blood as she watched him stroke his gorgeous white and candy-apple red car felt weirdly like jealousy.

  Chickie had popped the hood to show Sue Jean his rebuilt engine. "The steam doesn't power the car," he said as she scowled at the pistoning brass cylinders and glass tubes white with vapor. "That's just for effect. Look." He reached through the car's window and fiddled with something, and Sue Jean leaped backward as steam chuffed from the grille.

  "See that?" he exclaimed. "When I'm racing her, I want it to look like she zoomed straight outta hell, like she's breathing fire and brimstone. Plus I put in a bunch of other dragster-worthy modifications." He herded Sue Jean into the passenger's side and pointed to the center console, which contained numerous antique brass knobs and dials that, like the fantastical steam engine, seemed out of place in his modern, newly remodeled masterpiece. "There's the usual stuff," he said. "Like, you turn that knob to raise and lower the windows, and that knob turns on the air conditioning. But! When you turn that knob, flames shoot out of the--"

  "Chickie Hill, if I hear one more word about this silly automobile, I will have no choice but to set it on fire." Sue Jean punched the center console and was about to punch it again when Chickie grabbed her fist.

  "Careful! You almost hit the compass. It's very delicate. Very ... special."

  "You're special," said Sue Jean, and meant it. Chickie had qualities no one else had, certainly no one else in his family, who in the past had done their best to downplay his exploits. Like the time a five-year-old Chickie "fixed" the TV and made it impossible to watch American stations--only European ones. Or when, at seven, he fashioned robot legs for his pet frog, Mr. Hoppers, who leaped into the air in 1952 and nine years later still hadn't landed.

  But the day Chickie built a time machine in his closet, the day he had gone to lunch a ten-year-old and to dinner the same day as a twelve-year-old, his parents decided to stop ignoring his abilities. They put him to work in the garage hoping to keep him too busy to get into any more trouble.

  "The most special boy I know," Sue Jean repeated, "but you're so shallow. Why are you more concerned about this car than about social injustice?" She pushed out of the T-bird, but didn't feel any less oppressed outside. Their town of Portero, Texas, was heavily forested, and the trees loomed over them at all times, hemming them in like prison bars.

  Chickie said, "Was that today? That thing?"

  "The freedom ride!" How could he call the most exciting trip ever a "thing"? People from all over, Sue Jean's parents included, were caravanning to Washington, D.C., and from there, riding buses into the Deep South to protest against segregation. The most exciting trip ever, and yet everyone was slouching along the busy street totally unconcerned that history was about to be made.

  "My folks just left," said Sue Jean, ignoring Chickie's wince when she slumped against his precious car, as if she were the one wearing greasy coveralls. "I tried to talk them into taking me, but they didn't think it was 'an appropriate venue for a girl my age.' They're so ... parental. I have just as much of a right to protest as some old fogey."

  "It's 1961 not 1861," Chickie said. "I don't need anybody to fight for my rights."

  "So you like having to sit in the colored section and being told where you can and can't go?" When Chickie rolled his eyes and walked into the garage, Sue Jean followed him, willing to sacrifice her pristine saddle shoes to the grimy floor in order to make him care. "You know what we should do? Organize a sit-in! Just like those kids up in Greensboro and Nashville."

  "We don't have a Woolworth's in Portero."

  "There's Ducane's Department Store; we can start there. We can do so much
!"

  "Or ..." Chickie peered around the garage to make sure they were alone before pulling her into his arms, "since your folks are out of town, we can go back to your place and neck all night long."

  Sue Jean pushed him away. "Shallow!"

  "What? I'm just being realistic. You know how tricky it is upsetting the natural order? Let's just keep everything nice and simple and go make out."

  "The natural order? What's natural about being treated like second-class citizens?"

  Chickie waved away Sue Jean's ire. "I don't mean segregation in particular. I mean any situation, in general, where you upset the status quo can have unintended consequences. Like the French. They were inspired by the success of the American Revolution to revolt against their aristocracy, right? So thousands upon thousands of people got beheaded, governments rose and fell, and families were destroyed or displaced all because a handful of cheapskate American bastards didn't want to pay their taxes. What people do, even little things, can have huge bloody consequences. But what you wanna do ain't little. You wanna change the world."

  "For the better," said Sue Jean defensively. Just when she thought Chickie couldn't be more frivolous, he turned into a college professor.

  Chickie laughed. "The world according to Sue Jean Mahoney: a bunch of uptight missionaries doing good deeds. Uptight missionaries with long silky legs." He lifted her circle skirt up to her thighs and got a playful smack in the face for his efforts.

  "Get outta there." Sue Jean straightened her skirt as he reached across the workbench against the wall and switched on the oily Zenith transistor radio. When he heard the song "Mannish Boy," he cranked the volume. It was definitely Chickie's theme song; he could be so adult about certain things (he had stolen an extra two years from the universe, after all) but a five-year-old about everything else.

  "You just don't understand, Chickie. I don't want to wait around and do nothing. I don't want to hope things get better. I want to know."