The Shadow Constant

by AJ Scudiere

  “Evan, are you okay? You’re acting weird.”

  He gave a quarter laugh, “Kay, you may not perpetuate the myth of the weak woman—for which I am eternally grateful—but I grew up in a culture that tells me I’m the man and I need to protect my womens.”

  “We aren’t your harem, Ev. We’re good. And all carrying guns now.” She smiled, knowing the gun had her walking taller, more forcefully, even though she knew it to be a false confidence. “I get to tell them what I did.”

  “All right.” He plucked at the front of his T-shirt trying to dispel the heat or sweat he’d built up there. “I get to take a shower.”

  “Well, if you aren’t going to be there, then I’ll tell you now. I solved the first shadow constant, so tomorrow, I’m going to see if I can power one of the buildings.”

  “Holy shit, Kay. Do you think it will?”

  “I have no idea if it’s going to work or die or blow a fuse. So I’m thinking one of the smaller buildings.”

  “You could try the kitchen. Reenie was cleaning in there the other day. It got wired at some time.”

  Kayla laughed. It would be good. “Yeah. That’s a smart bet. I’m guessing it got wired around the time of Jesus, so if I burn anything up, I won’t feel bad.” She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets. It was warmer out here, hiking across the grass. Evan paced her on her straight route. She hadn’t yet worn a path across the field and through the trees, but she’d cleared a little, just by going through every day.

  Evan pointed as they approached the back of the Overseer’s House, “Do you think the generator’s big enough to power that? It’s a small one. Not intended for the kind of power a place like this draws.”

  “Nah, I don’t. I don’t think it’s the machine but the generator that will be the failing point if we go for a big building first. But if round one works, I want to upgrade and try it.”

  Evan nodded and went inside, sending her up to the attic where she found Ivy and Reenie with notebooks, hangers and boxes. They didn’t notice her and she watched silently for a few minutes. The two women worked in a fluid tandem, skirting around each other in the small space, reading each other clearly.

  It took Kayla a few minutes to recognize the tightness in her chest as jealousy. Ivy and Reenie fit together well. And Reenie had Evan, but Kayla wanted to have that with someone—that counterweight, that other half that she read about and sometimes saw on TV. On shows, she’d always written it off as choreography and practice. Her parents had never had it; they had been very verbal people, always working things out by talking and writing down lists and rules. Evan and Reenie were somewhere in the middle, but not like this. Not like a dance that was clearly improvised but no less graceful for it.

  Reenie asked Ivy several times, “Do you know what that’s worth?” and each time Ivy had responded in the negative until the last.

  “Holy shit. I think that’s a sugar chest.”

  Reenie stilled, her hands on her hips, “And that’s a ‘holy shit’ because?’

  “There aren’t many of them left. Most were destroyed during the Civil War. I hear they’re worth tens of thousands a lot of the time. But I’m not positive that’s one.” She didn’t touch it, didn’t pick it up from where Reenie had placed it in the middle of their findings.

  Kayla stayed silent and out of the way, but as she moved her hand to the doorframe she saw the black smears of used motor oil everywhere. They ran across the back of her hand and up her arm; she likely had them on her face, too. And, since she wasn’t sure she liked what she was seeing, she turned away to go get a shower without ever having been seen.

  Ten minutes later, she was clean and sitting in the kitchen at the Overseer’s House when Evan came in. He too had wet hair plastered to his head, but his eyes were quick and they darted only once to the sandwich and chips she’d made herself before he quickly set to making an identical set for himself. He knew exactly what was in the sandwich. Though Kayla would eat many different dishes, when left to her own devices she made one kind of sandwich, the same way every time, same chips, same drink. She also had one soup, served with Cheezits. One dish—chicken pasta with pesto, cheese, and sundried tomatoes—and her repertoire was done.

  Three minutes later, he sat himself across from her at the small table with an identical meal in front of him. Evan frowned. “What’s wrong? You made light. Like God.”

  She laughed but didn’t want to say she’d felt odd and out of place watching Reenie and Ivy sort through the attic. That once in a while she saw people interacting with each other without any words or instructions and she got jealous. They read a language she didn’t understand and had no hope of learning. It was akin to being deaf: she was never going to hear it. But she shook off her self-pity and smiled at Evan. “I did make light. And I took a shower, so I smell better. I’ll probably need to go into town later tomorrow for that bigger generator.”

  “Why would you need a bigger generator?” Reenie stuck her head through the doorway, clearly having just caught the last part. “Are you planning on knocking the power out or something?”

  “Almost.” Kayla laughed, then frowned again. “Where’s Ivy?”

  Reenie gestured to her dust-covered self. She didn’t seem to know that she had a wisp of spiderweb clinging to her hair, and Kayla wasn’t going to tell her. “Ivy looks as bad as me, if not worse. She’s showering in the big house.”

  Evan pointed at Kayla. “Tell her what you did.”

  Kayla finished her bite and smiled. “I made light.”

  “Like God?”

  Inside something clicked. She wasn’t sure when or how it happened. But—while she knew that she and Reenie were going to bump heads again, that it was inevitable—she knew now that Reenie sometimes got her. Not always. But enough. “Yeah, like God. I hooked the machine to the small generator and powered the light with it for a while.”

  “Wow.” Reenie’s eyes and mouth opened and she appeared genuinely amazed.

  Kayla held her hand up, though. “That’s a really small power draw. It’s not as impressive as it may sound. I need to power something bigger. I was thinking the old kitchen is about right.” At that point she consciously shut herself up. She’d passed her three sentence limit, and while she was ready to launch into a full explanation of why it was the right building to test on, she knew Reenie only gave a crap that Kayla didn’t blow the power. Instead, she switched tacks. “If it passes all the tests, you get to do the big one, Reenie.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the biggest power draw here. You use your hairdryer and curling iron, you do all the cooking, you turn on all the lights wherever you go.”

  “What?” It had clearly been taken as an insult and Kayla had to pull back a bit.

  “What did I miss?” Ivy slid beside Reenie in the doorway. She took care not to brush her clean and still-damp self against Reenie’s still-dirty one.

  Reenie gaped at her. “You’re already done?”

  “I’m fast.” Ivy smiled and seated herself next to Kayla, stealing a chip and taking a drink from her glass. “What did I miss?”

  A wry smile and a shrug passed through Reenie’s body. “Apparently, I’m the biggest power suck in the household.” Then she shook her head and started to turn away. “I’m going to go practice for your big test, Kayla. Don’t anyone bother me. I’m seeing how much power I can draw at one time.”

  “Thank you!” Kayla hollered as Reenie headed down the hall. But she couldn’t see Reenie’s face and had no way of knowing if Reenie understood that it had been kind of snarky. But she turned back to Ivy. “I made light.”

      

  Kayla picked a bolt from the lot in Ivy’s palm. How she stayed clean and pristine remained a mystery. Ivy handed parts, wiped down messes and buried oil drips so no one kneeled into them by accident.

  “There.” Kayla stood back, her set up identical to yesterday’s. She’d only managed to get in one trial before Evan showed up the n
ight before. But an early night led to an early morning, and when Kayla rolled out of bed with the sunrise she’d woken Ivy. But her roommate hadn’t minded; in fact she’d seemed as excited as Kayla to trek down here and reset everything.

  Kayla started to grab the wheel and bar but then had another thought. “You do it.” It was scientific to have Ivy start it, she’d decided. “And I can talk you through. Someone besides me needs to start it.”

  “Why?”

  “What if I’m magic?” Kayla shrugged. It didn’t make any sense, but she felt she had to test it. “If it’s as good as we think it is, if it really works, then anyone can start it.”

  Ivy laughed at that. “You might just be magic, Kay. But tell me what to do . . .”

  Kayla talked her through several frustrating attempts to get the wheel and the bar headed in just the right directions and at just the right speed. On the fourth try, Ivy managed to get it to catch. “Ha ha!” She jumped up and down and clapped like a schoolgirl—a schoolgirl in tight jeans and dark eyeliner—and smiled at her accomplishment.

  Kayla nodded. “Excellent. Now we have proved that it isn’t magic. Plug in the light.”

  Just as she suspected, with her new, altered constants, the machine smoothly and quickly picked up speed from the pace it had assumed when Ivy started it. Kayla noticed that yesterday, too. It ran one speed on its own, but the light seemed to draw on it.

  Ivy’s voice cut through her thoughts. “Is it going to break? Did I do it wrong?”

  “No.” Kayla didn’t look at her. The higher tone indicated Ivy was nervous. “The light is drawing power; the machine is speeding up to produce it.”

  “I thought power was a constant.”

  From the reaction on Ivy’s face, Kayla had made a “what-the-hell-are-you-thinking” face. “No. Every time you plug something in you draw more power through the system. It’s why they come read your meter every month, to see how much you drew. That’s why you can blow a fuse. It’s not a constant at all.”

  “Oh.” At least she didn’t seem insulted, because Kayla was realizing—after the fact, of course—that she could have come across as though she thought Ivy was stupid. She didn’t know how to say she thought nothing of the sort.

  “So, if I unplug the light, the machine will slow down?”

  “It should. Try it.” Yeah, Ivy was nowhere near stupid.

  They plugged in the light and unplugged it several times and had Kayla wishing for a good hairdryer. Those things sucked power like nobody’s business. At one point she’d calculated the number of years of ozone life span that could be added to the earth if everyone quit using their hairdryers.

  “Kayla.” The harsh whisper was accompanied by Ivy’s hand on her arm, and Kayla went suddenly still.

  Ivy silently turned off the light, then put her finger to her lips. Breathing softly but heavily, she turned to the doorway and peeked outside, only to snap her head back in. “Shit.” She mouthed it, but Kayla understood just the same.

  With wide eyes and a panicked expression, she mouthed, “Stop it!” The finger pointing at the machine made it all clear. Quietly and efficiently, she began unplugging and dismantling peripherals. She made panicked movements, changes in decisions as she tried to place things far apart, like they did each time they dismantled.

  Kayla knew from Ivy’s face that there wasn’t time to do it right. She could fix it later. So she reached out and grabbed the bar.

  She was smart enough to choose a grip that went with the rotation of the magnetized bar rather than against it, but there was no choice that kept it from burning through her skin as she brought it to a rapid halt with no towel for protection or stepwise reduction in speed. Her palm screamed in pain as she yanked the bar from its spot even as it made its last rotation.

  Even as she wrapped the still-hot bar into the hem of her shirt, she looked for something else to take. The big wheel was too time consuming to take out, but she managed to yank a cog and pull a support from under it. Ivy kicked dirt at the overturned apparatus and grabbed the biggest and heaviest piece from Kayla. Then she pointed at the window.

  Too quickly to pay attention to technique, the two of them pushed through the opening, stopping for one moment to plaster themselves to the side of the building. Then Ivy turned to her, chest still heaving and pointed around to the other side of the building. She mouthed the words, “They’re over there.”

  And Kayla had one thought, they?

  13

  The Icehouse

  “They?” Kayla mouthed the word to Ivy only to be answered by a very worried nod.

  They stood, clasping their gears and cogs, Kayla ignoring the rough burn on her palm, their backs pressed against the hard casing of the blacksmith’s building. They were coming.

  Ivy pointed in one direction. They were coming from the woods, from the edge of the property. No one up to any good came from the edge of the property by Kayla’s reasoning.

  Ivy clutched her gear closer and pointed toward the old icehouse. Kayla understood. Ducking low and running, she tried to keep the blacksmith’s between her and ‘them,’ tried to stay low, disappear into the tall grass. She wasn’t stealthy, and she feared she’d give them away.

  Tucking in right behind Ivy, she tracked her friend’s graceful lead until they came up against the doors to the icehouse. With her free hand shaking and nearly thwarting her, Ivy pushed the latch out of the way and ducked sideways through the door. Kayla followed quickly as behind her she heard voices.

  The voices came from back at the blacksmith’s, carrying around the side of the old building and across the tops of the grass between them, so she couldn’t distinguish the words from this distance. Hardly able to hear over the harsh chop of her own breath, Kayla stepped to the side and reached out to pull the door shut, and found she couldn’t latch it.

  Plastered once again to a building, she and Ivy stood for just one moment, backs against the wall—this time inside the icehouse, inside the darkness they’d created by closing the door behind them. The thin sliver of light disappeared into the gaping space in front of them.

  Kayla turned her face to the side and whispered, “I can’t latch it. We have to go down.”

  Ivy blinked, and tipped her head down to look into the sharp and sudden drop-off. “No.”

  “Yes.” If they didn’t go down and they opened the door, Kayla and Ivy could step back and fall.

  They were standing on the stone rim that hovered near the door. The icehouse appeared squat from the outside, as it was mostly cut into the ground rather than built above it. Thick rocks lined the walls over a story’s depth into the earth and the cool air inside—air that had maintained ice from the frozen winter pond through the summer months in the old days—wafted up to them, chilling Kayla to the bone. Or maybe that was just the fear.

  “Down.” She said again. Into the dark, toward a bottom that was simply a pool of shadow and cold.

  But the steep staircase descending the side went down three steps and disappeared into a pile of the rocks it was built from, long ago having succumbed to the pressures of earth on the walls. The icehouse had lasted over a hundred years but not a hundred and fifty. The well was no longer round, the twenty-foot diameter no longer consistent.

  When they first arrived at the plantation, Kayla and Evan climbed down here and shored up the bulging walls with a few well placed beams per Reenie’s directions. It had been the first piece of reconstruction on the farm. Evan planned to take out most of the north wall and replace it with Plexiglas so that visitors could look down in and see what it had once been. It would likely never be safe for tours or even use. The pond no longer froze six- to ten-foot-thick sheets of ice to cut and store here; global warming was a fact, but one Kayla couldn’t feel now as she stood on the ledge and motioned Ivy to go down.

  Ivy shook her head, forcing Kayla to lead the way.

  One of the thick beams that braced the walls came to rest about a foot below where they stood. Kayla tested
it warily, putting weight on it with one foot, before turning and carefully backing down. The sharp, near forty-five degree angle required that one hand grip the wood and the other wrap around her middle, trapping the gears she carried. If they clunked to the hay-covered floor, the noise would carry. Maybe a clink off each other, maybe just a dull thud, but they’d draw attention she and Ivy couldn’t afford.

  Facing the wall, Kayla saw Ivy shake her head and pull out the gun from the back of her jeans.

  This time it was Kayla who made as fierce a “no” gesture as she could with all her limbs preoccupied with not falling the remaining twenty feet to the hard ground herself. Never be the first to pull a gun. It made people nervous.

  “Did you see a gun on them?” She hissed.

  Ivy shook her head no.

  “Then put it away and climb down!” It didn’t matter that her friend was scared. She was scared, too. But they had to get away. They had to stay out of sight and keep the machine out of the wrong hands. Until they could put it in everyone’s hands—until they knew if they even should—Kayla would fight to keep her secrets close.

  Ivy turned reluctantly to the wall and stepped down onto the beam, her foot searching around in open space until finally landing on solid wood. At the wall, her pressure was well placed, but as she slowly scooted further down, the beam started to shift, bowing just a little under their combined weights.

  About seven feet above the ground, Kayla tilted precariously and almost fell. Though it didn’t sound like much, it was a huge drop she wasn’t ready to take. Looking up, she saw Ivy clinging to the four inches of wood like a frightened monkey. There was nothing she could do except whisper, “Come on. You can make it. We have to be fast.”