by AJ Scudiere
Reenie’s target looked the same. But the cluster of holes was smaller. Her accuracy was better. And she had fewer misses. She had a hole where an arm would be. One in the lower torso—a gut shot. But mostly, Reenie had nailed the kill.
Kayla looked over at Reenie’s target as she was pulling it down. “You did better than me.”
It was just a statement. Reenie shrugged, but Kayla smiled. “This means, when the shit goes down, I’m getting behind you.”
At Reenie’s laugh, Evan felt some of the tension in his shoulders seep out and disperse with the sound. At least the peace between them appeared to hold, even as it went to hell everywhere else.
The three of them decided to call it a day, and Evan stayed behind to dismantle the hay-bale stack into something that looked more like it belonged on a plantation. The last thing he wanted to do was advertise that they were improving their gun skills. Or that they had caught on that they needed to improve them. He completed the sweaty work and contemplated his own paranoia while he was at it.
When he made it back up to the buildings, he was in need of a shower he wouldn’t yet take.
He found Kayla out in the sun behind the old kitchen, hooking up the generator and the machine. She’d rescued the gears from the bottom of the icehouse and used a wheelbarrow to cart the whole machine up the hill herself. She’d done it in pieces into the evening the night before, commenting on the old wheel barrow and how it was a quality tool and had lasted well over a hundred years. But then again, there was something to be said for rubber wheels and ball bearings. Things that could be had cheap in today’s market.
He wanted to stop and help, but Reenie was peeking around the back corner; a rumbling somewhere in the distance signaled that their shipment of wood had arrived.
The rumbling of what had to be the delivery truck came closer and he could almost hear the ruts in the drive. He looked at Reenie and knew she had her twenty-two tucked on her person, somewhere. Just the thought scared the crap out of him. But he nodded as though it were perfectly normal to be getting a delivery of wood while everyone was armed and strange people had been sneaking onto the property.
He directed the truck, then was invited to climb into the cab to share the bumpy ride down to the barn where he’d set up his shop. What Evan actually shared were faked smiles and a cover of friendliness while all along he assessed the driver, wondered what he was up to, if the man was really just delivering wood.
For a moment, he imagined the truck as a Trojan horse, considering the possibility that there were armed soldiers in the back who would burst forth and pour across his land as soon as the truck was deep enough onto the property. They would take the machine.
And in that moment, Evan decided they could have it. It wasn’t worth being a farmer with a gun and a set of suspicious people hanging around. If his hand was forced, Evan knew he’d hand the damn machine over before he put his family in trouble, before he had Kayla shimmying down support beams into dark, cold wells again, and with a burned hand.
Besides, Kayla could just build another one.
And right at that moment, he realized that he would have to defend that machine to the death.
Because if anyone figured out that she could just build another one, then Kayla would become expendable too.
His thoughts were interrupted by the truck jerking to a halt. While Evan had been woolgathering, the driver had expertly turned the small rig around and backed up toward the barn door. And that, Evan realized, was dangerous. He couldn’t afford to drop his guard anymore. Not for a moment.
The driver climbed down and with a few short sentences established where Evan wanted the wood. With motions as efficient as his words, he unloaded it down a short ramp. Luckily, the only thing stashed in the back was the order itself and a super-dolly that made Evan’s presence nearly useless. There were no soldiers waiting with Kevlar vests and spare ammo.
Evan watched carefully as the truck drove off and set to arranging the wood. He had enough now for the backs and casings of many of the display pieces Reenie had designed. With an architect’s eye, she had created boxes for each purpose, something unique to house each item on display. Had Evan not loved her and had he not also loved a challenge, he would have pitched her complicated designs back at her and demanded they buy prefab cases. Instead, he would use found and re-claimed wood from the plantation as designed. People would be able to touch part of the history. He would take out the steps on the back porch of the Overseer’s—one of these days—and use some of that as well.
The boxes would suffer wear from the oils on the hands of people who would come to see the place. Reenie understood that. She also knew the plantation itself would wear with use, but she found that much preferable to being torn down, unused or unloved. She’d played here as a child and remembered her childish appreciation for the bridge, the chipped paint in some of the rooms. Only as an adult viewing it in disrepair, seeing it as a designer, did she develop an understanding of the dip worn into the bridge from untold numbers of feet, the smooth patina in the center of the steps, the chair rail, dented and nicked by chairs over more than a century. Better used than neglected, she said. So Evan would build her display cases.
He was halfway through the first construction when Kayla came by.
Looking up at her, her image slightly distorted through his goggles, he immediately pulled his earplugs and asked, “Have you eaten yet today?”
She tilted her head and gave him a sour look. She probably didn’t appreciate his immediately directing the conversation to her care. “No, I was coming down to see if you wanted to join me for lunch? I’m headed up now.”
He looked around at his work. Checked his watch. Then nodded.
Kayla just stood there, a blank expression on her face as he unplugged the table saw and hung his goggles on a pull switch, stacking his gloves on top. He ran his fingers through his hair, shaking out the sawdust that had surely gathered. He was rewarded by a pale tan cloud that sank through the air to blend into the barn floor in front of him.
But Evan waited. He couldn’t tell if Kayla was angry or just off in Neverland. When they were about fifteen feet away from the barn, she looked back over her shoulder, then told him.
“I came down to see if you wanted lunch, but I wanted to look around, too.” She sighed. “I didn’t do it last night, I didn’t want to look like I was looking, you know?”
He nodded, not sure that he did know, but having a bad feeling that he just might.
“There’s now a bug inside the blacksmith’s shop and one just outside your barn door, over on the right, toward the stables. When I came in to get you, I’m pretty sure I saw one inside, too.”
“Shit.” He sighed it out. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“That’s pretty much my thought, too.” I called Ivy on her cell and told her and Reenie to sweep the inside of the big house, just in case. We can help when we get there. They are going to act like they are checking each room for something checklisty, in case someone is listening in.”
Evan sighed again. “If they’ve got devices inside the houses, I think we’ll need to remove them. I don’t see how we can go on playing like we don’t know. It’s one thing when they’re outside, but . . .”
He didn’t finish and he didn’t need to. Kayla understood him. Nearly thirty years of shared history meant they could probably have a whole conversation in front of a listening device and no one would be any the wiser. Where other people would do that with facial expressions and nuance, he and Kayla would be strictly in code.
She led him back through the tree line, places they didn’t feel a bug would be likely and they came up behind the old kitchen building. Evan looked up. Built of brick and painted white, it had the old kitchen downstairs, with storage and a full root cellar the likes of which he’d never seen before in the crawl space underneath. But at one point, the building had been wired for electricity and the second floor converted to an apartment. As old as it was, it wasn’t real
ly useful as living space. It had an old wood stove in the corner for heat and cooking. The windows were double hung and leaky as hell. But now the building itself looked loved.
Every light in the place was on. Nothing flickered. And, as they approached Evan heard the sound of the generator overlaid with the slight hum of Kayla’s machine.
He stopped cold. “How long has it been running?”
She checked her watch. “An hour and seventeen minutes. And not a flicker yet, not that I’ve seen.” She smiled.
“Holy crap, Kay.” He watched in awe. “How much of it is the machine and how much is the power line?”
“It’s all machine. And it hasn’t hurt the wires inside at all.”
He wanted to ask, And you know this how? But he didn’t. The question wasn’t had she tested it, but what with. It turned out he didn’t even have to ask.
“I got out my voltmeter and checked it with the power line still intact. Read the meter, cranked the numbers. Then I completely disconnected the power here—” She pointed up where the wire attached at the roofline and ran down through a protected shell on the outside of the building, right up to the power box. It was obviously an add-on. Nothing on this plantation had been built with electricity in mind, anyone’s mind.
He interrupted. “Isn’t that a big deal, and dangerous?”
“Nah. It’s an old building. Wiring was additional. And compared to today’s systems, it’s poor quality without any safety backups. It was basically plugged in at the breaker box.” She shrugged as though altering the power source to a building was normal. Then again, she was a mechanical engineer. He didn’t know all the details of all the jobs she’d held. Only that she’d done a stellar job on each until she’d perfected something they hadn’t wanted perfected or refused to cut corners that the owner had insisted be cut. “Then I hooked the machine to the generator and hooked the whole thing to the building. So far, so good. I rechecked all the numbers before I came to get you, and I’ll check all the outlets again after we eat.”
He looked up. “All of them?”
“Evan, it’s old! It was wired back when there were only about five different things that could even use electricity.” She laughed. “It doesn’t even have an electric source for the oven or heat. So there are about six outlets in the whole building—which was apparently very forward thinking at the time.”
Evan nodded and they headed inside the Overseer’s for lunch, and for the more somber tasks of telling Reenie and Ivy about the new bugs.
Kayla had slept fitfully.
It had been hard to fall asleep and harder to stay asleep. Her dreams had been plagued by men chasing her and Ivy into the icehouse. In her dreams the two of them fell and didn’t hit bottom. They were shot at, yelled at. Sometimes, the machine was destroyed, stolen or modified to become a nuclear weapon. Even asleep Kayla hadn’t grasped how they had done that. Even in her dreams she clung tight to the laws of physics.
She’d woken Ivy twice with her jerks and yelps as she yanked herself from nightmares. She’d eventually given up and rolled out of bed quietly, thinking she might as well start the day early as fall back into another nightmare. She kept the gun on the counter in the bathroom while she showered. It was always kept closer now, since the icehouse incident. Since there were more bugs. There was no longer talk of not needing it somewhere like the bathroom. There were no longer heavy sighs or arguments of overkill.
In the predawn she’d scanned the area and had gone out to check on the machine. She’d wanted to purchase a larger generator last evening, but Evan had argued her down and eventually she’d given in and given him her specs and watched him leave to buy her toy.
While he was gone, she dismantled the machine, storing parts in separate places. Most were in the carriage house, but several were now in her backpack, having been tucked there last evening and spent the night under her bed. At least she would have known had someone come for them.
Now as the sun rose, Kayla worked behind the big house, reassembling pieces of the machine. With no functioning kitchen and only she and Ivy giving the main building other than occasional use, she reasoned that it was the best test for the big generator. Not only was it the next level up in power, but they could test its capacity easily just by turning lights off and on. And if the whole thing went to hell, then she and Ivy could move into her old room at the Overseer’s or over the kitchen. Testing the big house would be much easier than explaining to Evan and Reenie that she’d blown their power and they would have to get their house rewired.
After this, it would be time to start on a second machine. So she’d call Charles and get him the specs for the whole thing. Since he’d already machined three critical parts, she wouldn’t have to send those, a fact that soothed her worry about where her information was getting tapped that she didn’t know about.
A rumble came from the distance, a deep hum that got slowly louder. The sound concerned Kayla until she realized it came from a combination of airplane and paranoia. The Savannah International Airport was closer to here than it was to Savannah, even though planes rarely came over the Ebenezer area. But the paranoia gave her a thought, and thirty minutes later she was working in the shade of the tarp lean-to she had rigged. It was nice that it kept the sun off of her skin, but more important, it would keep planes and helicopters and satellites from seeing what she’d built and where it was.
Ivy came out then, wearing cut-off jeans in homage to the heat. Her legs were about a mile long, ending in work boots that had only been laced halfway. It shouldn’t have looked good, but it did. Today’s bra was bright pink under a skintight white tee. “What can I do to help?” She stretched and yawned, making Kayla yawn, too.
“Bring coffee?” She hadn’t wanted it until she saw that Ivy was in need, but suddenly she craved it, and knew she wouldn’t last long without.
She’d changed out here under the Georgia sun. She’d become more daring, less in need of her routine. She still had it, but it had changed, too. She now lived with options. Everyone on the plantation had been generous, allowing her to build the machine rather than helping Evan with the construction of the display cases or painting edges as Reenie had hoped she would—Kayla’s were machine precise. Reenie had opted to let Kayla continue her work and suffer through with only Reenie and Ivy’s own “human” painting skills.
But Kayla was going to pay them back with this machine. After the past few days she was convinced that they could operate completely off the grid. She could save them the entire power bill for the plantation . . . and that was a big bill. They just needed several of these little babies, and she would have contributed her part. She wasn’t sure what she’d do when Hazelton House opened its doors for business. The construction and wiring part of the job would be completed. And while she could easily see Reenie and Ivy dressed in period pieces and giving tours, she couldn’t see herself doing the same.
Pushing that thought out of the way to be dealt with later, she reached up to take the coffee Ivy held out as she ducked under the edge of the tarp. With a deep inhale, Kayla went through her coffee ritual. Breathe in, blow on it, repeat. Sip. “Mmmmm.”
“I know. Reenie’s been getting into some local stuff at the grocer’s. It’s really good.” Ivy picked up a metal piece and fitted it into place in the machine before setting down her mug and reaching for a bolt.
More and more, Kayla was becoming convinced that the machine was important. She’d have to fight for it. Have to prove what it could do. But Ivy was on her side. She smiled at her roommate and sipped her coffee while she watched as Ivy handed her the next several pieces.
Over the next hour they worked mostly in silence. When Reenie checked in later, they said they were great, that things were going well. Kayla told her the new coffee was wonderful.
When Evan came by, they gave him a projected hookup time. In another hour and a half they expected to have checked the power in the big house, unhooked the existing l
ine, and hooked up the machine and generator in its place. In ninety minutes they expected to be running on Whitney power. Free power.
Evan wanted to be there when the switch was flipped. Ivy promised to call, then Evan went down to the barn to check out the bugs, look for any new tracks, and maybe even build something so they could open the museum on time. And Ivy handed her the next gear.
Heavy and laden with deep cogs, it was tipped just so. Ivy angled the piece into Kayla’s hands ready to slide into its spot. The cogs fitted neatly against their counterparts on the smaller wheel, and Ivy handed over a bolt and nut to hold it into place. Before she’d tightened the nut, Ivy had oiled the spot, just enough to make the gear run smoothly.
Kayla looked up then, and as Ivy smiled, Kayla realized she’d found her dance.
Improv and necessity blended together with a friend. She smiled back.
Before she had paid much attention, they were finished. The sun was at an angle, peeking in under the wide seam of the tarp, sneaking up on her feet, and pushing her to be ready to test what she had built. Ivy was on the phone with Evan so Kayla decided to hop into the Overseer’s.
“You’re ready?” Reenie was holding up a dress that was about a foot shorter than anything she could have worn. Without any qualms, she set the dress aside and carefully closed the book she’d been making notes in, then followed Kayla outside nearly as excited as Kayla was herself.
Evan appeared over the hillside as Kayla gathered the two cords in her hands. Anxious to plug them together, she gestured to him to hurry. Though he was clearly tired, he did, and as he approached Kayla pushed her two pieces together and nearly squealed with glee when the lights on the second floor came on.
