Power Under Pressure (The Society of Steam)

by Andrew P. Mayer

  In the end, the abandoned books had been a blessing in disguise. Clements had burned many of them in the fireplace, using the blackening pages to warm his hands during the cold nights.

  He had considered keeping a few of the fancier books, since people in the north often assumed he was stupid or uneducated simply because of his accent. But Clements wasn’t really much of a reader, and most of the books that Stanton had been interested in seemed to be concerned with philosophy and justice, two subjects that Jordan always felt were most often used to try to explain why all the bad things that happened in life weren’t actually bad—or how, if you just looked at them right, they’d one day turn out to have actually been good for you after all. Worst of all were the ones that explained why the bad things that happened to you weren’t really bad for anyone else but you. There was a simple truth about life which Clements had figured out after the Union had burned down his family’s home: it was all bull. There were no excuses for all the terrible things that happened in the world. Good things were good, bad were bad, and that was the way the world worked. Everyone wanted more of the good things, but you had to fight to get them.

  It seemed like a harsh way to live, but it was reality. And once you figured that out, you could stop pretending that when people pissed on you, it was actually rain.

  When Clements had turned ten—just old enough for him to truly understand what was happening—war had come to their bucolic plantation. It had taken only a matter of hours: bullets and bombs had reduced his home from a triumph of Southern finery to a shattered ruin. He’d watched brave Confederate soldiers die in front of him, and his mother had been gravely wounded. But in the end, with the help of his father and the other men, they had driven back the Northern aggressors.

  Over the next few years he watched his mother fade away, leaving him in the rough hands of his remaining parent. His father had often told him that fighting any worthwhile battle, whether against man or animal, would always come at a great cost. But if you destroyed your enemy and survived, you must never forget what you lost—you needed to keep a trophy. That prize, he had told Jordan, was not only an important part of keeping your sanity in the madness of war, it was also a reminder that you remained in this world and they did not, and that one day, no matter how hard you struggled, your time would come as well.

  To this day, Clements still had the hat he had taken off the dead Yankee soldier before they buried him. After he had killed Stanton, he had wanted to keep the Industrialist’s gun, perhaps to even use it for himself, but Eschaton had decided he needed to study it, and had taken it away. He was still a bit angry about that, truth be told. If he had been brandishing that man’s weapon in the theater when that machine had come back to life, things might have gone very differently. Instead he had kept Stanton’s ridiculous red-white-and-blue top hat. It still sat on one of the empty shelves in the office.

  Clements smiled a tight little grin as he remembered the look on Stanton’s face when his fist had crashed into it. That was the moment the Industrialist had discovered that the White Knight wasn’t actually the fat, hapless bumpkin that he’d been expecting—he was a man with power. Stanton had offered to let him beat him to death, and he had almost been able to take him up on it. Then Nathaniel Winthorp had interfered. If the boy hadn’t surprised him, if his powers hadn’t failed him at just that moment, he would have taken him, too.

  But when Clements had taken Stanton’s life, the boy had been watching him. And now Nathaniel had become one of the more freakish examples of Eschaton’s purified humans. Surviving was winning. That was the best kind of justice. And maybe Eschaton would let him take Anubis’s mask to add to his collection of “scalps.”

  He reached the jail cells and found the entrance guarded by one of Jack Knife’s flunkies. The man was built like a fortress: so many muscles on muscles that it almost made him look fat. His tweed jacket was ill-fitting, shabby, and worn. He also stank a bit—although less than Clements would have expected of one of Jack’s pieces of street trash.

  Since they’d ousted the original Paragons, the men in tweed jackets were all over the Hall. They were mostly working to keep the building secure. Eschaton had brought in a large number of men to become his “Paragon Militia,” but Jack’s “Blades” were considered the most trustworthy despite their lowly origins.

  Clements didn’t like the idea of having all these uniforms around. It made him nervous, and reminded him too much of the war. Still, they were useful, he supposed. And they were docile enough, although if you stared at them directly they always had a look in their eyes as if they were planning something.

  “Open the gate,” he snapped at the guard, jerking his head in the direction of the door. The big fellow pulled a key out of his pocket and slipped it into the lock. Jordan took the opportunity to study the man a bit more: he had a thick red beard that covered most of his face—obviously Irish. Clements didn’t really have anything against the potato eaters—although he didn’t have anything for them either. There had been a lot of Irish soldiers fighting for the Yankees in the war. And if they were going to be a problem, it was one that belonged to New York and Boston. When Clements finally did leave this wretched city to go back home, he would leave them behind as well.

  As soon as the door had been unlocked and opened enough to permit him access he shoved past the Blade, managing to “accidentally” land an elbow in the man’s stomach on the way through. Clements felt the shock of fear as he wondered how the man might respond, but all the bearded gorilla did was let out a grunt. He hadn’t risen to the challenge. These men were nothing to be scared of!

  The cells were a row of small square caves carved directly into the building’s stone foundations. Each one was set behind an iron door and contained a wooden bench, a mattress, a blanket, and a bucket. Although the accommodations might be simple, during the war he’d seen men held in far worse holes. After the attack on his home there had been dozens of captured Union soldiers who had simply been placed into dirt pits to wait for justice. More often than not it had come from the end of a rifle, although his father had told him those men were lucky. Yankees, he said, would sometimes bury men alive. That had never seemed like much of a problem to Clements—the object of war was to always make sure that there were more dead men on the other side than there were on yours. Winning was surviving, and history never seemed to care much for how people lost.

  These prison cells were certainly far too good for the prisoner they held now. He stared at the man sitting on the cot inside the cell, hoping to catch his eye. The Negro’s head was bowed, and if he noticed Clements, he refused to acknowledge him. “Hey boy!” Clements yelled as he walked up to the cell and rattled the iron bars. There was no response. “Can you hear me, boy?” he asked, dropping his tone on the last word.

  “I can hear you,” the prisoner replied. His tone was flat and grim—the same deep voice that had come from the jackal mask, but it was much less terrifying from human lips. With his mask ripped away, Anubis had become simply another pathetic Negro with delusions of grandeur.

  “Then answer me when I talk to you.”

  The man looked at his hands and slowly clenched them up into fists. “You can go to hell.”

  Jordan felt something rising up in his stomach, and he swallowed it down. He knew there was nothing to be afraid of: the metal bars between them protected him completely. And the time for this man was coming very soon. One way or another he’d get his due. Justice was everywhere in the Hall of Paragons.

  If Eschaton had let him have the Industrialist’s gun, he’d have been here as an executioner, but the gray man had warned Clements that he wasn’t allowed to harm this man before they had conducted their trial. Once he had been found guilty of treason against the Children, Eschaton would take him for his experiments. “When that’s done,” he had told him, “you’re free to execute him.” But first Eschaton was going to try to turn Anubis into one of his purified humans. Clements had seen what had become of N
athaniel, and he had been glad that his own results hadn’t been nearly as traumatic.

  Early on, when he had first been brought into the Children of Eschaton, the gray man had told him that if Clements was willing to be a part of Eschaton’s experiments he could become something more than “just” a man. “There is a new race of men coming, Jordan,” he had told him, “and this is your chance to be one of them.”

  Eschaton made no secret of the fact that the procedure was risky, and left it up to Clements to decide exactly how much risk he was willing to take. It had taken Jordan a few days to work up the courage to accept the offer.

  The procedure itself had been very simple. He had been given an injection, then put in a smoky room with a mask over his face. Three hours later when he came out, his skin was raw and burning. He had spent the next week in his bed, overcoming the terrifying symptoms of bathing in the strange vapor.

  At first it had colored his skin with a strange, dark pallor and he had been terrified that his flesh might turn black, as Eschaton’s had. Instead it had simply vanished, leaving him even more pink and pale than he had been before. And for a while he thought it had done nothing to him at all besides making him ever so slightly more impervious to damage—hardly worth the pain and suffering he had gone through.

  It wasn’t until the fight with Stanton in the courtyard that Clements had begun to understand the full extent of his transformation. It had turned the tide of the fight, but he knew that there was more under the surface. He had only begun to discover the full force of his new powers.

  But when Eschaton told him that he planned to give the same treatment to the Negro, Clements had asked him if it even could affect a man with black skin.

  Eschaton had laughed at him for that, and told him that the color of the flesh made no difference to its composition. “Skin is skin.”

  Jordan found that hard to believe. It didn’t take much time in a city like New York to see that the superiority of one race over another was more than just about color. It wasn’t how people looked, but their very actions and thoughts that set one race apart from another. It was no accident that the residents of the mansions of New York were every bit as white as the plantation owners of the South.

  And if Eschaton was right, and he did manage to give this Negro powers beyond those of the average man, what then? Clements had watched men try to domesticate wild animals for his entire childhood. If he had learned one thing from all those years on the plantation it was that just because you put a collar around a creature’s neck, it wasn’t suddenly your pet.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Anubis.” The Negro still hadn’t looked him in the eye. He supposed that was better, in a way. At least some part of the man knew his place, even if his mouth didn’t.

  “Not that fake name, your real one.” He wouldn’t call him Anubis ever again. The idea that he had ever managed to fool any of them with his secret identity now seemed ridiculous. It was like one of the monkeys at a circus claiming to be the ringmaster simply because it knew how to carry a whip.

  The man’s head raised until Clements could see the whites of his eyes. He was staring at him now, and the look he gave him was shockingly hard and angry. Jordan’s stomach did another little flip. “My name is Abraham,” he finally replied.

  It was odd seeing those eyes. Anubis had been one of Eschaton’s Children for far longer than Clements had, and during that time he had somehow managed to keep his face completely hidden. He supposed that he knew the shame of his race.

  Clements felt nothing but pride in his heritage. Even under the hood of the White Knight he had always made sure to reveal a little bit of his white skin. He had sometimes imagined that Anubis’s eyes would be squinted or slanted, like a demon or a Chinaman. But now that they were finally revealed, Abraham’s eyes were wide and green, surrounded by the purest white. It was an unusual color for a Negro, and one that he couldn’t remember seeing on any of the slaves that had been on his plantation.

  He wanted to ask the Negro for his surname as well, but when he took another glance at the angry stare he felt the bile in his belly start to rise, and he looked away. It didn’t matter much anyway. If this man had been born into slavery it would just be the name of his first master, or something they made up.

  Jordan Clements had been a nervous child, clinging to his mother’s skirts until he had been almost ten years old. It was a shameful memory, but in the end it had been his father who had broken him away from his cowardly ways and taught him how to be the kind of man who might one day properly run the family’s plantation.

  His father was a quiet man who rarely showed any emotion at all, neither smiling nor scowling. Jordan’s greatest memory of him was the whip he wore at his belt. The old man had always been handy with a lash, and was quick to use it when someone needed a reminder of authority.

  He still bore the scars from the times his father had felt the need to teach his son those lessons. The muscles in his back and legs stiffened from the memory, and there was a tightness where he had been marked by the lash. It had been a hard way to learn, but he would also never forget what he had been taught. When he had been given the “treatment” by Eschaton, it had been those old scars that had caused him the greatest pain and discomfort.

  Jordan expected the Negro to still be glaring at him, but he’d dropped his head back down. He stared for a moment, hoping to catch his eyes and prove to him who was the better man, but Anubis—Abraham—refused to look up again. “Where’d you come from?”

  “What do you mean?” the Negro replied.

  “You an escaped slave?”

  The Negro shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the question he was being asked. “I don’t know if anyone told you, but there aren’t any slaves anymore.”

  “But they weren’t all born free. And I don’t think you were, either.” Hiding his identity under a mask was exactly the kind of thing an escaped slave would do. This was a man who was clearly ashamed of what he had been, and who he was.

  “No. They weren’t.” Abraham took a deep breath and continued. “You’re right, I was born on a plantation. When I was eight my parents and I escaped. We reached New York, and I wasn’t a slave anymore.” Clements could see a flicker of something on Anubis’s—Abraham’s—face. He’d struck a nerve.

  Clements took a step toward the bars. “Whose were you?”

  A dark look came over the Negro’s face. “I wasn’t yours, don’t worry.”

  If his father had been in the room, the lash would already be out. “How do you know?”

  “Because I know who you are.” Abraham rolled up his head and stared at him once more. “And because I am Anubis,” he said in rumbling tones. “I know what weighs on the hearts of men, and yours, Jordan Clements, is very heavy and very dark.”

  “You—you’re nothing!” Clements was shouting. “Nothing but a Negro who doesn’t know his place!” But Clements could feel himself staggering backwards, his legs betraying him, revealing the fear that now seemed to be spreading through his entire body. The room was small, and it took only a few steps before he could feel the wall digging into his back, thankfully preventing him from running any farther. Before he could bolt for the door he swallowed again, the sour taste of bile rising up from his stomach.

  But why was he so scared? He was no longer that child. He had power now! He could hear his father’s voice in his ear: “Jordan, you are a craven, cowardly boy! But I’m going to show you how to be a man!”

  Doing his best to gather his wits, Clements stepped forward again. The sad black creature in front of him was helpless—an animal locked behind the bars at the zoo. There was nothing to be scared of. “You don’t know me!”

  Anubis smiled at him. The grin was lean and cruel, and Jordan realized that it made the Negro look a bit like a jackal even without the mask. “Your family plantation,” he said, “it wasn’t far away from where I grew up. And sometimes, when your family came to visit, they’d bring a
few slaves, and we’d talk. They’d tell us how your father was a cruel, sad man who beat his slaves for the slightest insult. He was weak and afraid, so he took out his fear on others. And they also told us that his son was a scared, weak little child.” He had slurred the words, letting just a touch of a Southern accent come through.

  “That’s a lie!” But Clements could feel his hands trembling and his stomach tightening. As a child he had often been sick—every part of his body clenching and shaking until he ended up on the floor, retching and coughing. But he was more than that now: he had become one of Eschaton’s purified humans. He was better than this piece of black filth!

  Waiting a moment for the sickness to subside, he turned and yelled toward the door. “You! Irishman! Get in here!”

  When he turned back to look at the Negro, he saw that Abraham was staring at him again, but the grin was gone. “Stop looking at me, boy,” Clements said. “I’m about to teach you a lesson.”

  Anubis—Abraham—the man, didn’t flinch or look away. Instead his gaze only seemed to grow more intense. “Anubis has judged you, Jordan Clements, and I have found your heart heavy, filled with sadness, anger, and greed.” He leaned forward, and Clements felt his hands beginning to tremble once again. “And very soon I’m going to send you straight to hell.”

  Jordan reached up toward his neck, expecting to find the cold comfort of the wire noose he wore, but there was nothing there. He hadn’t considered coming dressed as the White Knight to visit an unarmed man in a cell, but now he wished that he had.

  “What do you want?” The gruff voice startled Clements. He whipped his head around to see the red-bearded Irish guard peering at him from the end of the hall.