Demon in the Machine

by Lise MacTague

  Still, there was nothing with Thomas Holcroft’s name on it. It was unlikely the owner of the company would work in a room with rank and file clerks, but surely there had to be some sign of him. Isabella shuffled through more papers, trying to find a memo or other communication from him, but to no avail. He had to have an office here somewhere.

  Isabella slipped out the door and froze. A long row of windows there looked out onto the manufacturing area. The windows were almost as grimy as those outside had been to her relief. Between that and the light being reflected back from inside the factory, it was unlikely anyone out there would see her skulking through the offices. She would have to be quick about it. Her presence would be exceedingly difficult to explain if anyone found her, and escape from here would be tricky.

  She had a job to do and Briar was waiting for her. Disappointing her wasn’t an option, so Isabella opened the door to the next office and stepped inside.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The driver’s seat of the earl’s new carriage was comfortable enough, but Briar had wrapped a blanket around her legs to ward off the damp spring air as she waited. While the seat was comfortable, the horseless itself was not. Of course it had been the only one available in the carriage house when she’d arrived home. The skin on her back crawled, and she kept looking behind her though she knew no one was watching. If nothing else, she was unlikely to fall asleep while waiting for Isabella. There was no sign of her, so she must still be in the Mirabilia factory. The thought produced a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold and damp evening. How would Briar know if something had happened?

  It had taken her well over an hour to flag down a cab, then return with a borrowed horseless carriage. Fortunately, she’d convinced Johnson to show her the rudiments of piloting one of the carriages a few years ago. She’d rushed back as quickly as possible. For all her exhortations on the ride home, the cabbie had taken his time. She’d made up for that on her way back, to the tune of shouted curses and shaken fists as she blew by the few slow-moving, mostly traditional carriages that were out at this time of night. It seemed her haste had been wasted.

  Her mind drifted back to the poor man who was likely still trussed up in the room Isabella had rented for them. They’d left the door to the room ajar, and sooner or later someone would wonder about that and discover him. If he was lucky, the imp would have gotten bored and left him. They weren’t known for their attention to detail nor their attention spans. With some effort, she put him from her mind.

  Briar rubbed her hands together. Gloved though they were, they still ached slightly from the cold. Blowing on them did nothing through the thin leather, but tucking them under her thighs helped immensely. She looked up, trying to will Isabella into appearing, but the line of rooftops above her stayed disappointingly empty.

  * * *

  The side of the building was rough stone, for which Isabella was eternally grateful. It made climbing up the side so much easier. She walked up, aided by the winch and line at her belt. After checking the gauge on the tank of her jumping rig, she had decided not to use any more of it. She had barely more than half a tank left. If she used too much more, she wouldn’t have enough left for her getaway across the rooftops.

  So far, the only sign of life in the building had been the hive of activity on the factory floor. She’d long since allowed the din of their work to recede from her ears; now it was simply more background noise.

  As she climbed, it occurred to her to wonder what the large building to her left was. The building housing the chassis factory with all of its noise was on the other side of the wall she was on. She was doing her best to ascend to the small windows high up, almost to the roof. But there was another building, still large enough at half the size of the one she ascended. It was silent, however, and without the lights that streamed out of the chassis factory.

  As she got closer to the roof, Isabella took note of the covered walkway connecting the two buildings. Unless she missed her guess, it went from the rooms that were her target to the mysterious second building. Maybe it was a storage area of some sort and the carriages she’d seen in the courtyard had been the overflow.

  The row of windows that were her destination were right above her. Isabella reached out and tugged experimentally at the edge of one. To her relief, it swung out easily. She slithered over the windowsill and down to the floor. It absorbed her weight without even a thump. When Isabella looked down, she saw why. The room’s floor was covered in plush rugs.

  She leaned back out the window and retrieved her harpoon, reloading it into the pistol before returning it to the holster in the back of her waistband. She turned and surveyed the room. It was so different from the offices on the floor that she wondered if she’d somehow ended up in someone’s house. Beside the carpets that littered the floor, heavy drapery lined the walls. The room was large and ran the width of the factory. Unlike the main offices, it hadn’t been walled off into different rooms, though someone had gone to the trouble to place screens at different points to create partitions.

  This was obviously the office area. A heavy desk with lushly appointed furnishings took up much of the space. The leather chair looked as expensive as it looked comfortable. To the right of the desk was something Isabella recognized. She had one in what had been her dressing room. A drafting table and tall stool sat angled away from the windows, positioned to get the perfect amount of natural light during the day. It was where Isabella would have put it, taking advantage of the window’s northern exposure. This was more like it!

  The drawers on the desk weren’t even locked, and, as she had expected, their contents were disappointing. The documents she found were copies of many of the reports she’d already seen down in the main office area. A few of them had notes scrawled in the margins. The handwriting was strong and slashed with messy vigor across the whiteness of the page.

  The drafting table held a few half-finished diagrams. Some of the writing glowed green. Isabella closed one eye and the glowing runes disappeared; the new lens from LaFarge was working as advertised. The drawings were a cross between regular schematics and demoniac inscriptions. She carefully folded up two sheets and crammed them into one of her pouches. They would give Isabella as much insight as the grimoire should give Briar.

  There was still no sign of the grimoire Briar was convinced would be here. What if Holcroft took it him to wherever he lives? The thought stopped Isabella cold. It had been hard enough to find the factory; finding his home would be even more difficult. With that in mind, Isabella kept her eye out for anything with an address on it. All she could do was search this place as thoroughly as possible. If there was no grimoire, she and Briar would figure out where else it might be. A few more pieces of paper went into other pockets, but Isabella did her best to leave the desk and table as undisturbed as possible. There was no point in advertising that she’d been in there.

  Behind the first screens, the furniture had been arranged into a small sitting area, with a long table taking up much of the space in front of one wall. There was nothing of interest on the table. A large chair dominated one end, while a handful of mismatched, uncomfortable-looking chairs ringed around the far end. There were no chairs at all in the intervening space.

  Someone has delusions of grandeur. This close to the drapery-swathed walls, Isabella could make out the faint sounds of machinery. She realized that almost none of the manufacturing noises penetrated into this room. The hangings and rugs muffled the noise, but they shouldn’t have been able to reduce it so completely. She twitched a drape to one side and blinked at the sudden brightness as the light from the factory floor intruded into the dark space. The cacophony outside exploded in there along with the light. Isabella let the curtain fall, and both cut off again. She peered at the curtain, then noticed a faint green line along the drape’s bottom. It met up with a similar line on the curtains to either side. Isabella turned in place. As much as she could see of the drapes around her, each one had that green lin
e. She was in the middle of a circle the size of the room. Her skin prickled at the realization.

  Keep moving, silly girl. There was little else of interest here. The chairs at the other side of the partitioned area were arranged as if in front of a fire, though no fireplace existed. A large crystal ashtray sat on a small table next to one of the chairs. A half-smoked cigar accompanied several cigar butts, but there was nothing else to betray that anyone had been there recently.

  Another set of screens obscured the next area, as did a set of hangings that ran all the way up to the ceiling. Isabella was thankful for the goggle lenses that allowed her to see in the dark. This far from the windows, there was nothing to introduce light in that area. As she slid between the curtains at the gap between screens, Isabella remembered that the drapes around the main room hadn’t allowed even the slightest hint of light from the work area to intrude. The small amount of light that had come in had been through the windows where she’d entered.

  The little room beyond was dark, to her relief. If she’d thought the other areas had been lushly appointed, it was only because she hadn’t been in here yet. A large daybed dominated the room. Unlike the heavy velvet drapes around the rooms, the four posts of the bed were shrouded in silk. Satin sheets clothed the bed and were in such a rumple that the bed’s purpose was immediately clear. This was not a bed meant for sleeping. The same green line traced the circumference of this room as well. Isabella would have wagered that someone standing three feet away on the other side of the partition would have heard nothing, not even if an orgy was taking place in here.

  A table next to the bed held implements Isabella couldn’t name. Her mind shied away from considering their uses. There was little chance the grimoire would be secreted somewhere in here, but she rifled through the few pieces of furniture, giving the bed a wide berth the entire time. At least here she didn’t have to worry about being neat. Everything was in such disarray that it was unlikely anybody would realize someone else had been there.

  She found nothing. No grimoire, no drawings, no memos, only disturbing implements and an overwhelming sense of disgust. She was going to have to return to Briar with empty hands and nothing to show for the night’s work. Briar would not be amused at all.

  Unless… The walkway to the next building, the entrance to that was up here somewhere. But where? Though it was a reach to think it might lead to anything more than a storage area, she refused to admit defeat until she’d examined everything she could.

  Isabella grasped the nearest curtain and pulled it back, revealing a brick wall. She worked her way around the room and finally found a door hidden right next to the bed. The handle turned easily under her hand. She pushed it open and ventured hesitantly into the darkened hall behind it. A low drone grew louder as she made her way to the door at the other end of the hall. Strange symbols and drawings lined the walls and floor. When she tried to look at them directly, they seemed to shift, giving her a sensation in the pit of her stomach like she was falling. She focused instead on the door opposite her, the door that it was taking too long to reach. The walkway hadn’t seemed nearly this long from the outside.

  By the time she reached the far end, Isabella was drenched in sweat. Her chest heaved as though she had completed a particularly grueling training session. The handle beneath her gloved hands felt slick and it resisted her grip. Finally, she took it in both hands and wrenched it open.

  The door opened into Hell. The droning noise washed over her and green fire spread across half her vision. Isabella braced herself with both hands on the doorframe, trying to wrap her mind around what she saw. It seemed that green flames licked every surface of the huge room beyond. She blinked once, twice before realizing there were gaps in the flames.

  Words written in inhuman characters lined every surface, their shape similar to those she’d seen LaFarge employ so many times. Dark shapes moved between her and the flaming letters, silhouettes of things that couldn’t be. Above it all, a series of stacked tubes hummed and popped, dominating the back wall. They glowed from within, radiating that same sickly flickering green that filled the room.

  This wasn’t Hell, she decided, though it was certainly populated by its denizens. All of her wildest imaginings over what this building held could never have prepared her for the reality. In an eerie mirror image of the chassis factory floor, groups of beings surrounded featureless metal cylinders on the floor. The low drone that took the place of the banging and sounds of machinery turned out to be chanting voices overlapping into a disharmonious whole that made Isabella want to clap her hands over her ears.

  Against her screaming instincts, she inched forward from her vantage point, a platform overlooking the demon-factory below her, to get a better look. She cast disbelieving eyes to one side and followed the line of a walkway around the wall and down to the factory floor. The metal railing beneath her fingers was cold. She clutched at it, trying to anchor herself. The heavy railing dwarfed the thin bars of metal holding it up. Someone had welded a lectern to the rail, she saw. A huge book sat on the lectern, chains crisscrossing it and holding down pages of curling vellum.

  That’s it! Isabella approached the book. The chains were a complication, but not a major one. She had her own answer to those. From a pocket high up on her arm, she pulled a metal-sheathed glass vial. She never carried more than one of these. Crushing it in a fall would put her in a world of hurt; the concentrated acid within ate through clothing and skin in seconds. Metal took longer. She upended the vial on a length of chain where it wrapped around the lectern’s base.

  Something flitted through the air between Isabella and the shining tower. At first she thought perhaps it was only a series of flickers from the unstable energy it housed, but it was too regular. There were no catwalks high up here, perhaps because whoever supervised these workers could fly. They crisscrossed back and forth, at least one flying close enough that Isabella should have been able to make out its features. All she saw was a silhouette against the green flames that still dazzled her. Whatever it was, the shadow had bat-like wings and horns. Was that a tail?

  Isabella bent forward to check on the progress of the acid. She squinted and discovered that the link was no longer whole. With one eye on the flying creatures, she carefully unwrapped the grimoire. As soon as the chains were gone from the pages, they started slowly flipping back and forth as if an invisible hand perused the book.

  Enough is enough. It’s time to get out of here. Despite the brave words, Isabella had to force trembling hands out toward the malevolent book. It took both hands to wrestle shut the cover.

  The sound of a gong rang out and the platform burst forth into brilliant light around her feet. The droning stopped and the fluttering figures froze in midair, then turned toward her. This was not good. Her worst nightmares should have taken notes. Isabella had an instant to realize she would be reliving this moment for years to come. If she survived it.

  Fear lent her strength and speed. She snatched up the grimoire and turned to flee through the door. It took seconds to cross the walkway this time, and she burst out into the strangely silent rooms overseeing the chassis factory.

  How far behind me are they? She couldn’t stop to check. As she darted through the too-quiet rooms, Isabella struggled to wrestle the grimoire into a large satchel at her hip. Now she understood why Briar had insisted she bring such a large bag. She had to stop in front of the window that had been her entry point to get it settled.

  The curtains to the far room parted and dread flooded her; a torrent of every fear she’d ever felt rooted her to the spot. Shadows poured into the room, boiling over each other as they came ever nearer. Isabella glanced up as shadows scudded across the ceiling, accompanied by scratching and screeching. Puffs of masonry rained down as furrows appeared in the plaster.

  She needed to find Briar. Isabella threw herself out the window, shaking the throttle wands down into her hands as she fell. They landed in her hands with satisfying thumps. These she co
uld be certain of.

  You’d better be waiting, Briar, she thought.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Freefall had never felt so good. Anything that got her away from those shadows was a boon, even plummeting toward the ground. Isabella engaged the jump pack and careened toward the highest roof at the top of the factory. Her trajectory was off and she stuck out an elbow and thrust hard to the right. At the top of the arc, she glanced down at the window she’d just jumped out of.

  It seethed with shadowy figures. They vomited forth in a never-ending stream. Some fell away toward the ground, others spread out on the wall like a churning ink blot, still others separated from the mass and hovered. One shadowy face looked up at her. All Isabella could see were green eyes, no other facial features, but they locked on her. Almost as one, the larger shadow shifted, moving toward her.

  She hit the roof in an ungainly heap, shaken by what was after her. Getting her feet under her took much too long. Her break across the roof was unsteady and halting. The harder Isabella pushed herself, the slower she seemed to go, though her heart hammered in her ears like a piston. Finally, she was up to speed, the far edge of the factory roof approaching quickly.

  Don’t look back, she screamed inside her head. Don’t you look back, for god’s sake. She looked back. They were on her tail, some scampering with ease over the roof, the rest flying in a diabolical cloud of swirling shapes and chartreuse fire, all heading straight in her direction.

  Isabella’s toe dragged on something and she tipped forward, pulled by the weight of her gear and her momentum. She windmilled her arms and pulled up. If she went down, they would be on her and she was deathly certain she would never stand up again.

  A thunderous susurrus of flapping wings filled the air around her. How many of them are there? A few stumbling steps forward was all she needed to get back up to speed. She would have to time the jump perfectly. If she took off too early, she’d likely be short of the rooftops across the way. If she was too late, there would be less surface area to thrust against, and she’d be even shorter.