The Eterna Solution

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  Marlowe smiled. When she smiled it was alternately endearing and terrifying, as there was something nearly ancient about the expression. Marlowe was too human, too much of one all at once. She was overwhelming.

  “Is that what this is about?” Clara asked softly. “Companionship?”

  “Ah, no,” Marlowe said definitively. “I could never take you away from your most important time line. You began to understand, by wielding localized magic, and deploying a soul compass, the lines along which life runs.”

  “Ley lines are the … latitude and longitude of magic?” Rose asked, grasping for purchase on the topic.

  Marlowe grimaced at the word “magic.” “Do you have to call it that?”

  “Life-force, energy lines so powerful they are nearly supernatural,” Clara offered.

  “Yes. Can you feel those lines?” Marlowe asked.

  Clara thought a moment. “No.”

  Marlowe leaned in. “Try.”

  “How? What do I look for?”

  Marlowe clucked her tongue. “You’re clairvoyant, you don’t look. Not in the normal way.”

  Clara reflexively thought to ask what sense she should sharpen but remained silent when she knew the answer would be her sixth; the maddening sixth, knowing without being able to prove how in common terms. But if there was one thing the Eterna Commission had demanded of her, it was that she stop second-guessing that knowledge and begin treating it with proud certainty.

  There was a long pause. All Clara could hear was the water, see was the endless horizon, smell and taste was a salt wind, and feel was that moist wind on flushed cheeks and the sensation of a speeding vessel beneath her steady feet that had no trouble with the pitch and yaw of the boat.

  As for her sixth sense, Clara wasn’t sure what indicators to consider. She could feel Elizabeth staring at her, through her, perhaps seeing more of her than even she could. It was terribly disconcerting, everything about the visitor always was; she made no sense to any of her senses, especially not her sixth.

  Very often her sixth sense was a hybrid of other senses, a slight tweak to her hearing or a flicker to her vision.

  The visitor suddenly smacked her in the abdomen. Clara yelped. Had she been wearing her corset, it would have been like hitting a cage, considering the steel bones; instead, with her being in only soft layers and with her body being on high alert, it had a higher impact.

  “Your gut will tell you where the lines are,” Marlowe stated. “Don’t think, just feel the flow of energy and tell me which direction it is from where you stand right now.”

  Clara stared at this unprecedented, unpredictable woman and then faced the prow. The hairs on her head rose a bit and there was a visceral stirring sensation within her. She felt her left hand lifting, pointing forward as they headed west, every movement coming from that visceral place. Her body flooded with a warm, luminous power. She smiled, unable to help herself. She could, in fact, feel this line.

  There was an audible component, too. Something soft lifted from this peaceful thrall, a thrumming, vibrant hum that was not the steam engines, not the water, a faint violin string in vibrato across the waves.

  “That’s the ley line,” Marlowe murmured, pleased. “Toward where you’re pointing, ahead, behind, we’re nearly on top of it in this sea-lane. But the direction you turned? That thing that made you perk your ears up port side and come out here to see what was wrong? The rest is—”

  “The transatlantic cable ringing with a sour note, comparatively,” Clara finished.

  “Dissonance. Yes.” The visitor sighed. “The cable was put in unfortunately close to our line. Doubt the planners had any sense of it, but who can blame their instinct? Something drew them, literally along this line. Humans gravitate to these old lines constantly, but sometimes I feel like what happens upon them are at cross-purposes.”

  Evelyn, Miss Knight, and Rose had all been listening at a polite few paces off, but Evelyn took a step forward, Marlowe’s nearest rival in terms of sheer force of presence.

  “The force of the world doesn’t like to run on man-made wires, but goodness if mankind doesn’t like to run along the force of the world,” Evelyn offered.

  “If that’s not the truth, I don’t know what is,” Marlowe murmured, and looked up at the stars. If Clara wasn’t mistaken, the one toward which the visitor stared winked out. At this, the strange woman frowned, as if personally wounded. She turned fierce eyes upon Clara.

  “So. Remember this lesson, Templeton. Never forget it. These lines are life or death. For you, and for me.…”

  It was Miss Knight’s turn to step forward, her long crimson robes billowing dramatically in a gust of wind. “Do you know, then, what will happen next?”

  “No, not exactly,” Marlowe replied. “Beyond the fact that the amassed, negative energies are a distinct threat no matter where they appear. I mean, I could try to see your future if I concentrated very hard, but there are too many variables to say for certainty and my consciousness can only focus in on you for so long before I become a danger.”

  “Are you, then,” Clara asked, “in more places than one?”

  At this, Marlowe smiled. “Aren’t you?”

  Clara thought of her lives, lives she could see at any point if she concentrated hard enough, lives that each chewed upon an important crux. She had a sense that the lines were her crux, the one that this life hinged upon. There was a truth to the visitor’s idea of a broader consciousness. At that moment came a gust of wind so strong and sudden that Clara had to close her eyes against the salt spray. When she opened them again, the visitor was gone.

  While she’d been focused on Marlowe, Rose had gone to their cabin to retrieve the doctor’s bag filled with protective Wards and was now returning to her.

  At Rose’s side walked Senator Bishop, an additional bundle of Wards in his hands. He was tall, striking, and distinguished, dressed in a black satin robe; his silver hair positively glowing in the moonlight, giving his face a preternatural halo.

  The moment he caught sight of Clara, his eyes sought out hers and spoke volumes of his care. She moved to meet him nearer the door he’d come through; the magnetism that had grown between them was dizzying, and she put her hand on the rail.

  “Warding the ship,” he stated with a smile. “Leave it to a group of brilliant women to be working through the night for the benefit of all.”

  He turned to nod out at the water and the still-floating shadows. “They woke me, too, a thrumming racket in my ears and a dread press on my heart. I have to imagine anyone with even rudimentary sensitivities either won’t be able to sleep or will have a miserable set of nightmares to show for it,” he said grimly.

  He shook off the pall and turned to Clara, beaming. “What may I do to help, my dear? I am ever at your service.”

  His deference and respect, his radiant smile, as if her rising to leadership was the source of his greatest pride, moved and inspired her. Her fingers ached to touch him but she had to recall herself to the moment and task at hand.

  “Thank you, Rupert,” she murmured. She turned to the rest of her company and spoke with calm authority. “We should Ward each flank of the ship, and at different levels, but in inconspicuous places. It will be done quickly if we divide up the vials.”

  “All the more quickly for extra hands,” came another voice, from the deck door directly behind them.

  Harold Spire, the leader of London’s Omega department—“a policeman turned circus manager,” as he termed himself bitterly—strode toward their number, dressed in shirtsleeves that accented broad shoulders and an open waistcoat that mirrored the company’s haphazard dress, his brown hair mussed.

  The default scowl of the dour man was affixed until he saw Rose step out from behind Clara and his expression softened.

  “Have you worked around us Sensitives long enough that the presence of the paranormal affects you as it does us? Drawing you to the front lines?” Clara asked with a hopeful smile.

 
“No, that honor goes to Lord Denbury,” Spire replied with a sigh. “Poor boy had one bloody hell of a nightmare, woke moaning about his mother, his razed home, the demons.… He wasn’t quite to a screaming fit but I heard enough on the other side of the cabin wall. Lord Black thankfully was able to quiet him, he’s like a mother hen, that one.”

  “Cluck, cluck,” Black said with a small laugh, his turn to speak from the doorway, his own box of Wards in hand. “He’ll be all right. He just needs time to heal, grieve, and to frankly be away from all this. Warding will help, I’m sure.”

  An immaculate, handsome, fashionable man who usually dressed in light colors, patterns and pastels, a stark contrast to the darker and bolder shades of most of the rest of the teams, Lord Black was currently arrayed in an emerald silk smoking jacket with a loose cream ascot, looking far more put together than the rest of them.

  Wards were distributed among the group.

  “We’ll affix them inconspicuously how?” Spire asked. Rose lifted up a small box of twine, cloth, and scissors. “Miss Everhart again wins the day with usefulness,” he stated. She beamed, and Clara could feel the little ripple of light and warmth that resulted. Energies and moods were atmospheric conditions, and despite Spire’s thick clouds of skepticism, his deepening bond with his second-in-command made for clearer skies.

  The small glass tubes were mostly filled with London’s protective recipe, and a precious few still held New York’s ingredients; Clara hoped they would work here, in the middle of the ocean, for both shores.

  Without a word between them, Miss Knight and Evelyn began lashing Wards to various out-of-the-way places along the prow. Lord Black, Rose, and Spire went further aft and port.

  Clara instinctively went starboard, toward the ley-line side, and Bishop followed. They were silent, knowing that prayerful contemplation was the best way to attend to their work and to charge the Wards with their own personal fire. She felt the Wards vibrate in her hand as if invigorated as she neared the ship’s rail.

  Once she’d tucked two of the glass tubes into a notch in the wood, striking a match to light their contents, satisfied by the ethereal light that burned in the glass, she reached out to feel the ley line again. It was like it was singing within her.

  As she felt it, she turned to the port side. In the distance, one of the wavering, inky human forms hovering above the transatlantic cable faded into the bluer night sky. Clara smiled. Magnifying the lines within her, an amplifying resonance, there was an effect. The full line of shadows was gone, and she heaved a sigh of relief.

  The rest of the team had vanished, leaving her alone with the senator in what likely was a message of encouragement. No one could doubt what an indomitable partnership Clara and he had become. “Do you believe in ley lines?” Clara asked finally.

  “Yes. I could feel what you did. You seemed to be tapping directly into them, a refreshing jolt all around you.”

  “Better than a cup of coffee,” Clara chuckled before she looked out again at where the inky silhouettes had floated. “We have to fight to keep the ley lines clean, wherever they run, and try to keep industrial lines clear. Wards can cleanse any ley lines that industry sullies and they can in turn bolster the Wards. A symbiotic protection.”

  Bishop placed his hand on her shoulder. “So we shall. Fight the deadly shadows with the potency of our life. I’m so proud of you and your widening power.”

  “Thank you for being so very good to me,” she said, turning to him, intuiting that his touch invited closer contact.

  “You have kept me good all my life,” he said earnestly, keeping the hand on her shoulder but sliding his other around her waist, as if he were about to dance with her.

  “My powers of mesmerism could have taken me down a very dark path,” he continued. “The ‘two walks’ as Evelyn always called them. Life and death, war and peace, illumination or obscurity, generosity or greed. Because of you, the great responsibility that was providing for inimitable you, there was no choice but to walk the upright walk. Being good to you has always meant what is good for me.”

  “And … now?” she asked, tilting her head to him. Just what kind of power could she wield indeed? His fingertips inched down her back and further around her side, beginning to envelop her in a covetous embrace.

  “I want to be very good to you indeed,” he murmured.

  She let herself fall against him with a soft sigh as his arms fully enclosed her, having longed for a kiss since the last night at Lord Black’s estate. There, something definitively changed between them; an agreement that she would carefully open herself to feelings buried deep in her heart. In that compression it had become far more precious, a diamond waiting to be mined.

  A laugh sounded around the side of one of the great steam stacks. At the sound, Bishop turned his face, taking a step back and letting his arms fall away, breaking what had been the promise of a kiss, ever the gentleman of public propriety, offering Clara an apologetic look.

  She turned to the noise to see Louis’s twin, Andre Dupris, and Eterna’s best spy, Ephigenia Bixby, deeply engrossed in conversation, dressed as though they’d not yet gone to sleep, Andre in the navy evening suit coat he’d worn to dinner and Effie in a white linen dress with ribbon trim, her tight brown spiral curls tucked up under a felt and feather hat.

  The two had partnered together in England, sliding between classes and cultures, saving as many lives of the struggling as they could, striving to keep them from the Master’s Society’s vile clutches. The moment they made out the figures at the side of the ship as their compatriots, Effie gasped.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, looking from Bishop to Clara, “I hope we didn’t … interrupt anything.”

  “Indeed,” Andre intoned with a slight, knowing smile that made Clara blush.

  “Ever since the nights trying to convince the dockworkers not to work for Apex, trying to warn as many of London’s underclass of the dangers as possible, we’ve not been able to keep regular hours and find ourselves pacing the night,” Effie confessed.

  “I was awoken by the sense of Summoned forces and we’ve just been Warding the ship,” Clara offered.

  “Ah!” Andre exclaimed. “I’m no Sensitive but I was there when those shadows snuffed out Eterna’s researchers and not a day goes by that I don’t yearn for the Summoned to be banished from the face of the earth forever. I’m sure they’re the reasons I couldn’t sleep tonight.”

  “But perhaps we should all try again,” Bishop declared. “I think our Warding has made the night sing more sweetly.” He bowed his head. “Until morning, friends, for soon we are home,” he said, and walked off with a lingering look at Clara before disappearing beyond the door to the cabin halls.

  “Good night,” Clara said, casting one more glance over her shoulder at the water before striding ahead to the deck door, hoping to catch Bishop in the hall beyond. But he was gone, down to his room, and she didn’t dare pursue him there. Not yet.

  Lying in her bunk, Clara drifted to sleep with an unresolved question on her mind, wondering if her new skills of ley-line sensitivity would increase the likelihood of epileptic attacks. If fully attuned to the great dynamos of the earth’s life force, would she be paralyzed in the face of danger? With every gift there came physical consequences, and she prayed she wouldn’t suffer unduly in the process.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Lady Tantagenet, lounging in her boudoir, reached out her hands, raising them in the moonlight like large, climbing spiders over her head.

  She stretched to feel the ebb and flow of her magic along all the lines she had begun to co-opt: rail, telegraph, and electrical. She liked to think the pulse of energy whispered her name, Celeste, with every chug of a steam engine and every whir of a dynamo turbine.

  It was time for maintenance and renewal of the leeching boxes. Her stations on both sides of the Atlantic, pulling on Master’s Society channels cut deep between the two countries, had lost their potency. Commissioni
ng renewals would be tomorrow’s task.

  Tonight, however, her whirring thoughts turned to consider what had brought her here, closer and closer to her ultimate goal of transcending her limited flesh.

  The day she had first arrived in Manhattan, the train ride was as smooth as she hoped it would be, which gave her the assurance she needed: that the tokens she’d been laying anytime their train stopped were having an immediate, amplifying effect.

  The arsenic-laced tea and alcohol she’d fed to her ailing, dazed husband, a boring man whose title she’d needed to further her aims, helped keep the ride enjoyable, and she was blessedly able to focus on nothing but how her latest ventures had changed the breadth and scope of her gifts.

  She felt younger, more energized, and moved with far more ease. O, how this petty age worshipped youth and beauty. People bent to her will like willow branches, responded to her with eager haste, as if the requests she had made were ordered by royalty. She could sway the world, mesmerize it, and finally be at peace within it.…

  Nothing is worth doing if it can’t be felt, she maintained, and remembered opening herself to the train as if she were inviting in a lover. The hum, the vibration, the turning wheels chugging from one industrial station to another, speeding and screeching, sooty and steamy, a shrieking metal monster across the vast tracts of wilderness. She felt it all.

  Like many other burgeoning empires before it, the United States was founded on slaughter and blindness. On genocide and slavery. On fear, feast, and famine. Arrogant and often without principle, it was perfectly suited to her purpose. The country had belonged to the shadows since its beginnings in seizure and violence.

  Celeste was much like the society of her birth. A usurper. Soon she would collect her due, the country seeing her as one of its very own. Grateful to men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, who sought to monopolize certain industries, she considered consolidation far easier to leech onto and undermine than individual businesses. It was easy to hide within conglomerates.

  She’d dipped her toes into an assortment of the various blood pools of Chicago industry, the slaughterhouses beautiful visions of hell on earth, but when she began worming her way into the railroad industry, she knew it was her best fit. As New York was the hub and the heart of the rails, relocation was inevitable. The rails and the electrical grids would best fulfill her widening needs.