Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  “You don’t know what he did on the day he passed?” Scoth asked as she laid out the spoons and took a chair.

  “I got up and he was gone with his bicycle like regular. Went about my day, visited with the ladies, did the shopping, and I came back in the afternoon to make dinner. He came home and was acting queer.”

  “Can you tell me more about that?”

  “He took his satchel up to his room rather than putting it on his hook by the door, and I had to call three times before he came down for dinner. He gobbled up his food and went back upstairs.” She had not been interested then in what was bothering her son, and it didn’t appear that she was interested now. Sipping her soup, she said, “I did the dishes and took to the parlor to do some mending and listen to music. He came downstairs and left without a goodbye, fit to be tied about something.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw his face. Mad or upset about something as he went by. He had his satchel on again, his work clothes still, and I heard him get on his bicycle. Then he rode off and never came back. Exactly like Dochi, just left and didn’t return. Is there something wrong with your soup?”

  “A querulous stomach,” Jesco lied. Because some people still found a demonic cause to his power, Scoth had introduced him as a police consultant until they had a better guess of the woman’s most likely reaction to the truth.

  The soup before Jesco was of uncertain color, scent, and description, its surface pimpled by mysterious chunks of meat or vegetable underneath. He had not brought his own utensils from the asylum and could not risk the spoon touching his lips or tongue. Nor could he wipe off with a napkin.

  Displeased with him, the woman turned to Scoth. He ate a spoonful to placate her and said, “Thank you. This is good.” There was something quite subtle in his eyes that made Jesco think it was not good.

  “I like to see a man with a healthy appetite,” she said to Scoth. “I could put a whole roast chicken in front of Dochi and come back ten minutes later to a heap of bones and him in the cupboard looking for something else to eat. Never picky.”

  After taking a second and third sip of the soup, Scoth brought out a photograph of the timepiece. “Mrs. Jibb, this was found near your son. Did it belong to him?”

  She looked at the photograph and shook her head. “He didn’t own a timepiece, that one or any other.”

  Scoth put it away. “Was he ever in trouble?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Trouble with women or men, trouble with opium, trouble of any kind. Did he run with friends who had some trouble?”

  “That boy never ran with anyone. I told my sons from the time they were small: you don’t have anything to do with these common folk. You’ve got the blood of lords and ladies in your veins! All of this is beneath you. So you talk proper and use your manners, act like lords until the world gives you your due. Lord Calvert saw the grandness in Dochi. He didn’t scuffle about on break with the grooms in the stables but read a proper book in the corner, said please and thank you to the maid who brought him food and drink, always rushed to get the door for the lord’s wife and to wish her a fine day. He made sure his clothes were spit-spot and a cut above anything you’d find in any closet on this block. He could mingle with the rich at that show and not stand out with nasty street dialect or behavior.”

  Jesco could only feel sorry for Hasten Jibb, who was neither the favorite son while he lived, nor very much mourned in his death. His mother could only keep bringing the conversation back around to her beloved Dochi. She cast Jesco another peeved look for not touching the soup and turned her full attention to Scoth. But then she grew peeved with him as well, because he was just as stubbornly bringing the conversation back around to Hasten. “Is it possible that Hasten stole this piece?” he asked.

  “Stole?” she exclaimed in outrage. “Hasten was not a thief! I taught my boys to be respectable.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out how this arrived at the crime scene.”

  “It came some other way than in Hasten’s pocket! I didn’t raise a criminal in this home!”

  “He doesn’t mean to offend,” Jesco said as the old woman swelled up. She looked like she wanted to yank the bowl of soup away from Scoth. “We only want a clear picture of your son to help with finding the person who deprived you of him. Hasten sounds like he was an honest fellow.”

  “Yes, he was! Honest!” Mrs. Jibb cried. “He wasn’t half the man that Dochi was, but he was honest. If he had ever found a wallet in the street, he would have returned it with every cent intact. I’ve got money squirreled away and he knew where, and never did a dollar of it go missing even when he was so keen to buy that big, stupid blue bicycle.” Now she preferred Jesco and turned in her chair to face him. Given a scornful shoulder, Scoth had another sip of his soup and winced.

  “Was he interested in anyone?” Jesco asked. He had accompanied detectives on enough investigations to know what the most common questions were. “Did he ever mention a person special to him?”

  “He didn’t have those interests.” She nodded fiercely when Jesco’s brow furrowed at the thought of a man in his twenties having no interest in romance and sex. “It’s true! Because of the illness he had, the Gelerm fever. He was in the hospital to have his tonsils out and somehow contracted it in his recovery. He was eight then, and it neutered him in head and body. A boy forever, unable to father a child, unable to even know what it was to desire a woman. So no, there was no one special. The doctors said that he would look like a regular man when he grew up, but he wouldn’t ever understand what the fuss was all about. Then he did grow up and they were right. He looked every bit a man, but he wasn’t. The prettiest woman in all of Ainscote could stroll past him and he wouldn’t notice. I asked the doctors all those years ago: what good is a son like that? Generations raise generations, but all that work and I’ll just be raising a dead end. That’s what the fever left him, a dead end. The doctors pointed out that some of the greatest inventors and healers and poets were people without children, but Hasten wasn’t going to be the greatest of anything, so what was the use of him?”

  “I’ve never heard of the Gelerm fever,” Jesco said, pitying Hasten all the more.

  “It’s rare as hen’s teeth, more rare than that, and nobody could establish precisely how he got it. Someone had to have gone through the hospital in the early stages of infection, perhaps a visitor, left the germs around and a doctor or nurse transferred them to Hasten. It almost killed him and Dochi was just distraught to see his baby brother in isolation.”

  Before she could get started on Dochi, Jesco asked, “How did he get the job at the courier company?”

  “I wanted him to go into dogs, pick up the torch, if you will, but he didn’t like them much. He didn’t follow up on Dochi’s connections and I told him that he was being a fool to let those slip through his fingers. But he wanted to do it his own way. A lot of the boys and girls around here do a stint as a courier. He was bound and determined to work Golden Circle and make his own connections. But what are those? Here’s your package; thank you, here’s a dollar. Being a dog trainer gets you right into someone’s home. A courier only ever sees the front doorstep.”

  From what the supervisor had said, Hasten saw a lot more than the front doorstep with Lord Ennings, but Guiline Jibb had not been a confidante of her son’s. Since he had not done things her way, she could only disparage him. Quietly, Jesco said, “Do you have any idea, any idea at all, who would want to hurt your son?” He hoped that Scoth was going to step in soon, but the detective appeared content to let Jesco ask.

  The woman stared down to her soup and trailed her spoon through the surface. Her clashing and clattering and excitement had passed. Now her shoulders slumped and she looked old and drawn. “No. He kept himself to himself and had ever since he was a small boy. He got up early, worked hard, and slept the night away. He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t a thief. He wasn’t a fighter. He was missing a little . . .” she paused to tap o
n her forehead, “upstairs since the fever. Just a smidgen, not so much he stood out. A bit of him was still a boy in that man’s body. He didn’t stir up trouble; he didn’t want any part in trouble. He just wanted to ride his bicycle all around and read those penny tales about pirates and battles in the high seas, save up for nice clothes. That’s all I can say about Hasten.”

  With the same quiet, Scoth said, “Does your family know anyone in the Wattling area?”

  Her pepper rose once more. “Wattling? That cesspool? We’re descended from lords, Detective, not risen from rabble. We don’t have any people in Wattling.”

  “Can you think of any reason he would have been there? Or in the surrounding communities?”

  “No! We don’t know anyone who lives over in that area. It had to be a courier job that took him there.”

  They already knew that it wasn’t. “Would it be all right if we took a look at his room?” Scoth asked.

  She escorted them upstairs and left them to it. Great clashes and clangs and whistles rang out from the kitchen below as they looked around a very small bedroom. The bed was made, and Scoth opened the closet door to a neat rack of clothes. Drawing his finger down the sleeve of a shirt, he said, “Hasten had good taste.”

  There were stacks of penny tales upon the table under the window, each one weighed down with a decorative rock. Jesco wanted to touch something that Hasten Jibb had used on the day of his death, but he had left with his bicycle and satchel, and dressed in the same clothes that he had worked in all day. What had he done for the short time he was in here? He had not rested upon his bed, unless his mother made it up. It didn’t seem likely that Mrs. Jibb would remember which plates and utensils he used in his last dinner either. Jesco could always try the knob to the front door, but the problem with that was he would not only get a flood of memories from Hasten, but also his mother and brother and everyone who had ever lived within this house or even just visited it. Another problem was that one only touched a doorknob for a second or two at a time. All of the memories within doorknobs were fragments.

  Scoth went through the closet, looked under the bed, and examined the table. “He lived lightly upon this world.”

  “He might have sat in that chair,” Jesco said.

  “And he might not have, and if he did, he was wearing his trousers. That’s an old chair. You’ll be flooded.” Turning around in place, Scoth skimmed the sparse features of the room. “Something to upset him happened in the afternoon. He came back from the job with the lord and the bank just fine, or Wassel would have mentioned it. Jibb was happy enough to spot the Silver job, ride that package over and maybe collect a personal for his trouble. But then he came home in distress. What happened between Melekei and here?”

  Deciding that there was nothing clearly related to the case for Jesco to touch, they said their goodbyes to Mrs. Jibb and returned to the carriage. The wind had picked up speed but still the carriage didn’t rock as all the others did on the drive to the asylum. Scoth took notes of what they had learned from Hasten’s mother and rubbed his face tiredly. “Guess I brought you out for nothing.”

  His tone was gruff and unpleasant. Jesco gave him the benefit of the doubt and said, “It was better for me to come and have there be nothing to touch than the other way around.”

  “Still, just a waste of a day for you.”

  Curious at what the detective was truly getting at, Jesco said, “I take pleasure in my work, and I do not consider it a waste just because we did not learn as much as we had hoped.”

  It was quiet within the carriage, and all that could be heard outside of it was the roar of the wind. Jesco looked out the window as the detective dozed in his seat. He kept forcing himself back to wakefulness and losing the battle, and his spurts of sleep were restless. But he had denied himself too long the rest that he needed, and it persisted in overcoming him again and again.

  By the time the autohorse turned down the flowered lane of the asylum, the wind was approaching violence. They were winds from the Shorgum Sea, and they were the advance guard of a storm. Branches scraped all along the sides of the carriage on the way to the building, and Scoth woke just as the autohorse stopped. He looked even more tired for his rest than he had without it.

  An attendant came out at once to help with the chair, the wind even shaking the thin fabric of his disposable gloves as he changed his grip on the bars to bring it down to the ground. He rolled it inside fast, the wind pushing at him with such ferocity that both he and the chair went off course and nearly hit the wall.

  All that was left of Jesco’s lunch was one apple and the hunk of cheese, which he offered to Scoth. Scoth shook his head and Jesco gleaned that it was not personal but automatic. He placed them next to Scoth and went to the door of the carriage.

  “I’ll try not to call on you unless I have something firmer on this case,” Scoth said uncomfortably.

  Jesco wondered what he would see if he touched a belonging of the detective’s. “It’s not only those on the police force who care what has happened to the victims. The seer does, too. I walk with them. I walk with them as they were when living. I know them as I know myself, and I want to bring them justice just as much as you do. If not more, because for a short time, I am them.”

  The detective looked at him with an inscrutable expression, almost as if he were trying to see Hasten Jibb within Jesco. “They walk with me,” Scoth said in a whisper.

  “Be kinder to yourself, Laeric,” Jesco said, and got out of the carriage. Scoth called to the autohorse and closed the door. The carriage went around the drive. Just before it turned onto the lane, Jesco caught a glimpse of the detective through the window. He had the cheese at his lips.

  Chapter Five

  “I see ’um,” the boy said, his eyes fixed to some far-off point. He was the new one, and he was in thrall beside Jesco’s private table in the dining hall. The nurses and attendants were busy and had not noticed. Jesco was eating quickly, having received a message that he was going to be picked up for further investigative work on the Jibb case. The message had also told him to have a bag packed for several days.

  Nine-year-old Sfinx had rather the opposite problem of Jesco’s. His thralls concerned the future, he had no way to guide them, and there was no way at all to protect him from it. Luckily for the boy, the thralls were random occurrences that came upon him once or twice a week. He remained marginally aware of his true surroundings while in thrall, and when Jesco did not reply, Sfinx repeated, “I see ’um, sir.”

  “What do you see?” Jesco asked.

  “What’s here and what’s not. The asylum, see, it’s not here. It’s gone. Ripped down and carted away. You’re dead. I’m dead. Everyone here is dead. There’s a house here now, with a great big picture box on the wall. The pictures are moving. They’re telling a story about a dragon. A man and woman are sitting on the couch, and they’re wearing funny blue trousers. I see ’um. The house rattles a little ’cause the flying tube full of people is passing over.” His look became more distant still. “The house is gone. They’re dead. Their children are dead, and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. Now this is a street. It’s full of shelled carriages that move on their own, no horses or autohorses, and there are dozens of people going into shops for the holidays. I see ’um. Shops on the first floor, apartments on the second floor, little colored lights strung everywhere in the trees and everybody is talking and laughing. But then it’s quiet. Real quiet. You never seen anything so quiet, sir, so quiet when it shouldn’t be quiet at all. The buildings are crumbling. Curtains hang out the broken windows. Some places are just heaps of rock, and the street is cratered. Nothing grows. Nothing moves but shadows and it’s always dark.” The boy’s head turned so that he could see something, and he said fearfully, “No. Something is moving out there.”

  He fell silent to stare at it. Jesco motioned to an attendant, who set down a tray and came over. The woman put her hands on the boy’s shoulders and said kindly, “A
ll right then, love, leave Mr. Currane to finish his meal.”

  “And then it’s green,” Sfinx said as he was steered away. “Green grass and blue sky and white clouds, and little yellow flowers growing in bunches. Everywhere you look, it’s beautiful. A woman with dark skin and a red gown appears from a shaft of light like an angel. She’s walking through the grass and picks a flower, and then she laughs to the heavens.”

  It was odd to listen to someone foretell what would happen in this very place hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of years in the future. Jesco thought about it over the last of his eggs, profoundly relieved to have his own problem and not the boy’s. It was likely just as odd for people to listen to Jesco tell them of the past. He had witnessed ancient times through artifacts, touched inadvertently or with reason.

  “Ach then, you’re a precious thing, aren’t you!” He looked up to Tamora Squince, who was scooping up Nelle into her arms. The girl crowed as the junior sketch artist spotted Jesco and came to his table. He set down his fork and pushed back his chair. In good cheer, she said, “Sorry to interrupt your meal, Jesco, it’s just that you and Scoth are dropping me off at the train station to catch a ride to Hooler.”

  “Not a problem,” Jesco said, picking up his suitcase.

  A nurse came to take Nelle. Brushing back her hair, which was loose today and hanging almost to her elbows, Tammie smiled at a table full of patients. They looked away from her stonily. “Who put sand in their drawers?” she asked as the two of them walked out of the dining hall. “It isn’t because I’m wearing trousers, is it? It’s not such a rare thing to see a woman in trousers anymore.”