Arachnodactyl

by Danny Knestaut

  Ikey propped himself on an elbow and looked up at Wendy. “When’s Cross getting back?”

  Wendy barked a short laugh. “He ain’t coming back. Not today. And if you don’t bugger this turbine up too bad, we can get out of here early, too.”

  Getting away from Wendy as soon as possible sounded delightful. Ikey nodded.

  Wendy sat cross-legged on the floor. “Do you know the first thing about electricity?”

  Ikey looked away. “Not really.”

  Wendy barked again and slapped his knee. “You daft moron. I heard you were supposed to be some kind of mechanical genius, but you ain’t done a thing but shovel coal and build bunks since you got here. Why all of a sudden does Cross want you to learn how to build up a turbine and fit these tanks? What’s the point of you again?”

  Ikey ground his teeth. He peered into the guts of the turbine a few seconds, then looked back at Wendy. “Admiral Daughton told me to. He told me to learn the ship’s systems inside and out. I’m supposed to replace someone.”

  A flicker passed over Wendy’s face before he buried it in a scowl. “Rubbish. There ain’t no one to replace but me and Cross. The rest of the crew consists of carpenters and laborers, and none of them need to know how any of this works.”

  Before giving up a smile, Ikey settled back onto the floor and turned his attention to the innards of the turbine.

  “Who?” Wendy asked.

  “Who what?” Ikey asked. He undid the final bolt, set it aside, and slid the stator out of its housing.

  “Who are you supposed to replace? A moron like you can’t possibly know half of what Cross knows. It’s his ship. His design. And you don’t even know what the hell electricity is, let alone how to turn it into hydrogen. You can’t replace us. Either of us. So why are you even pretending?”

  Ikey sat up, lifted the stator into his lap, and examined it to figure out how to break it down further. “I don’t know.” He looked Wendy in the eye. “I fixed the arm of Admiral Daughton’s coachman. He told me I could either come here and work on this ship or get shipped off to the war. Here I am.”

  Wendy scoffed. “Bollocks. You’re here to scare me, right? A little fire under the burner? Fine. You can tell Admiral Daughton that we’re working as hard as we can. We know what the hell we’re doing, and if he thinks he can find someone who can replace us, then he’s welcome to try. I’ll show you half of what I know about this ship, and it will leave your head spinning. You can go back and tell Admiral Daughton that there is no replacing me. Ready?”

  Ikey shook his head. “I’m not spying for Admiral Daughton. I’m only doing what he said.”

  “Right. And I’m as smart as you are pretty, am I?”

  A response escaped Ikey. He returned his attention to the stator.

  “No matter,” Wendy said. “Try all you want. You’ll never be able to hold a candle to me. Let’s get started.”

  Wendy plucked a spanner from his waistcoat and settled down beside Ikey. Before long, he had the stator out of his turbine, and he showed Ikey how to break them down and strip the copper wire off. They replaced the magnets on the shaft with larger ones that Wendy claimed had been treated to increase their power. They rewound the copper wiring around the stator, adding more in what Wendy said should take advantage of the increased magnetism in the shaft. As they reassembled the turbines, Wendy showed him how the steam from the boiler turned the rotor, and the rotating magnet inside created an electric current in the windings. Copper wires then shunted the current to the electrolysis converters where it passed through a concentrated brine solution to produce oxygen, hydrogen, and lye. One coil and tube collected oxygen and fed it to the boiler to burn the coal hotter. The other coil and tube fed hydrogen to the cells above.

  Wendy made constant jibes and acted as if he was explaining the process to a five-year-old. Ikey said nothing, but asked no questions either. He nodded and followed along with Wendy’s explanation of electric current and magnetic fields. It was all new stuff to him, and amazing as well. On one hand, the ship’s design was so minimalist that it couldn’t possibly have originated from the same person who had made the enigmatic and intricate music boxes. On the other hand, Cross himself had said they tried to scrap every excess pound from the ship. The situation called for minimalism.

  “So we’re stuck in this vicious circle,” Wendy said as he showed Ikey how to top off one of the tanks with the brine solution. “To generate the lift we need, we have to enlarge the envelope and the alum structure. We’d also have to add more hydrolysis converters. To power those, we need another turbine. To power that, we need a larger boiler, more water, more coal. All of which adds weight that negates the added lift from a couple more cells. So you see, we have to figure out how to maximize what we got here. We have to make this more efficient. Produce more hydrogen with what we’ve already got aboard. Understand?”

  Ikey nodded.

  “Sure? You don’t need me to explain it again?”

  Ikey shook his head. He rubbed the tips of his index fingers and thumbs together as he pictured the ship’s systems. Again, the brilliance of it staggered him. Piping the oxygen back to the boiler to increase the heat was ingenious. More heat meant more power with less coal—less weight. Filling the envelope with cells introduced redundancy. If one or two failed, the ship would not crash to earth like a stricken bird. Ikey had never dreamt of stuff like this. He thought in terms of mechanics, of moving parts and jobs to be done and actions to be taken. Cross appeared to think in terms of force. Heat vs. pressure. Pressure vs. friction. Friction vs. electric current. Electric current vs. resistance. As Rose had introduced Ikey to a new way of seeing, Cross’s inventions introduced Ikey to a new way of thinking.

  His growing admiration for Cross pissed him the hell off. The man was a bitter cur. Mean and sour. And absolutely brilliant.

  The flutter of Ikey’s fingers grew in agitation as he thought through the steps taken in his attempt to disassembled a music box. If he considered it in terms of forces, instead of mechanics, might the answer leap out at him?

  “Are you sure you don’t need me to walk you through it again?” Wendy asked.

  “No,” Ikey said. “I’ve got it.”

  After Wendy fitted the lid on the last tank, he dusted his palms together. “That ought to do it. I think we’re done here for tonight.” An ugly smile creased his lips. “Now you can go tell Admiral Daughton why we haven’t gotten this working yet.”

  Ikey looked down at the tank. The surface of the brine solution trembled with the residue of Wendy’s efforts.

  “Go ahead and leave,” Wendy said. “I’ll find Sharp wherever he’s napping and tell him what Cross said.”

  Ikey turned away, stopped, and then looked back at Wendy. “Thanks.”

  Wendy stared into the mess of iron rails and glass tanks and spiraling wires and hoses and shook his head. “Don’t mention it. You hate to have to get within a few yards of him, that’s for sure, but it does make Sharp easy to find.”

  “I mean,” Ikey waved a hand at the rack, “thanks for showing me all this.”

  Wendy looked at Ikey. His eyes ranged over him as if searching for clues of sincerity, then settled back on Ikey’s face. “You’re staying with Cross, aren’t you?”

  Ikey nodded.

  “You met his wife?”

  Ikey’s jaw tightened. He nodded.

  “What’s she like?”

  Ikey shrugged. “She’s nice.”

  Wendy stepped closer and lowered his face a bit. “I heard she’s a witch.”

  Ikey straightened his back. “She’s not a witch. She’s not.”

  Wendy smirked. “Yeah, then what’s under that veil?” He waved a hand over his own face. “What’s she hiding?”

  Ikey looked away, to the array of tools festooning Wendy’s waistcoat. He wanted to pull a pick from its loop and drive it into Wendy.

  “She’s blind,” Ikey said. “That’s all.”

  “Blind. Yeah, but then
why hide her face? Does she not have any eyes? She got these empty, dry sockets—”

  “Knock it off,” Ikey said.

  Wendy smirked again. “You seen what’s under the veil?”

  Ikey glared. “It’s none of my business.”

  “It might be. I heard she lost her face in a spell gone bad. And Cross made a deal with her. She gets this ship flying, then Cross gives her his face.”

  Ikey’s hands balled up into fists. “That’s stupid,” Ikey said.

  Wendy shook his head. “I don’t know. This ship has been nothing but cursed since its inception.” Wendy shifted his weight and folded his arms over his chest. “Maybe you’re next? Maybe she’ll take your face… Nah. No one’s that desperate.”

  “Stop,” Ikey said.

  Wendy’s face widened in surprise. “Oh! You’re not scared, are you?” He clapped his hands to his cheeks in mock terror. “The witch of Whitby is after you, is she?”

  Heat rushed to Ikey’s face and radiated from his cheeks. A distant ringing echoed through his head.

  Wendy’s hands slid from his cheeks and fell to his side. He regarded Ikey a moment, then threw his head back in a laugh.

  Ikey brought his fists up to his belly.

  When his laugh subsided, Wendy glanced down at Ikey’s fists. The tone of his laugh changed the tiniest bit. The tempo lengthened. The tone dropped. The laugh came out forced, and then Wendy was saying something else about Rose, but the words fell away and rang hollow.

  Ikey’s dad used to do that to Uncle Michael before he broke his hip. He baited Uncle Michael with insults and jibes to goad him into throwing the first punch.

  Wendy was setting him up.

  Ikey walked away and slammed the engine room door behind him.

  “Hey!” Wendy yelled after him. “I wasn’t done talking to you!”

  Ikey barreled up the steps, across the deck, and almost tumbled down the ladder.

  “Get your ass back here!” Wendy yelled as he lunged up onto the deck.

  Ikey kept going.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The front door was locked.

  Ikey let go of the doorknob and craned his head back to take in the front of Cross’s house. Its pale stucco front and dark windows stared over his head, out to the river that scrubbed the bottom of the town. He raised a fist to knock, but it hovered before the door. Amid the paint, the outline of a knocker stood visible. Several small holes in the wood showed where it once hung some time ago.

  Ikey glanced down, as if the knocker might be before the doorway, laying on its side, waiting to be replaced.

  Nothing sat there, of course.

  He lowered his fist and peered at the dark curtains pressed against the dirty, dust-crusted glass.

  If he knocked, would she answer? At times, Rose indeed felt like an apparition. She was barely seen or heard. She moved in a ghostly fashion and her features did appear distorted. Those hands. The long limbs. The veil. And he had never seen her leave the house. Always she stood among shadows, as if trapped inside.

  Ikey rubbed the tips of his fingers over his thumb. Ridiculous. He ought to go inside and flat-out ask Rose about her nature. Sit down and have the discussion and be done with it. With the subject broached, he might discover a way to suggest that she aid him in the construction of others of her kind. The answer was that simple.

  Ikey regarded the door.

  Would she answer?

  A nattily dressed couple strolled past. The woman held her chin aloft and found something fascinating to look at while she studied the other side of the street. She clutched the elbow of a man like an ornament dangling from his arm. The man stared at Ikey in a stern manner while gripping a fine, silver-tipped stick in the right hand.

  Ikey slunk down the street and around to the alley behind the row of houses. There, he located the back of Cross’s house and tried the gate. Locked, of course.

  After looking both ways, Ikey took a running jump at the wall. His hands clutched the top of edge. A toe found purchase. He pulled himself up. On top of the wall, he saw a woman in the window of one of the neighboring houses. Her gray, frizzy hair sat like a lump of lint on top of her head. She scowled through a wrinkled face and raised a finger to scold Ikey, but he slipped down and landed in the narrow alley between the workshop and the garden wall.

  As he approached the house, he glanced over his shoulder into the workshop’s windows. The table and shelves inside sat in shadows. The room stood empty. Ikey continued on the path to the backdoor. He grabbed the knob and gave it a twist.

  Locked as well.

  Ikey stepped back, planted his hands on his hips, and stared up at the back of the house. This was ridiculous now, sneaking around like a common burglar. He stepped up to the door, and before he could give it another thought, rapped on the wood.

  And waited.

  Ikey sighed and stepped back. He looked up at the back of the house again, even though the last thing he’d see would be a light burning or a drape stirring and offering evidence of someone at home.

  He stepped up to the door and knocked again, his knuckles ringing the wood in sharp, forceful blows. The door shuddered with his efforts.

  Nothing.

  Ikey ran a hand through his hair. He turned around and planted his hands on his hips. In Cross’s workshop he would find everything needed to pick the lock.

  The door creaked open.

  Ikey turned back around and found Cross’s face peering from the dark.

  “Why didn’t you knock?” Cross asked.

  Ikey glanced away and back. “I just did. Twice.”

  Cross rolled his eyes. “On the front door. Like a civil person.”

  Ikey shrugged.

  “Wait, the back gate is locked, ain’t it?” Cross asked.

  Ikey looked down, ready to nod, then stopped himself. He straightened his back. “It is.”

  Cross squinted. “So how did you… Oh, bugger it. Get in here and clean up. Dinner is about served.”

  Cross withdrew into the house. Ikey stepped into the scullery, washed up, and then joined Cross at the table with his lantern.

  “You and Wendy get everything taken care of?” Cross asked as he leaned forward onto his elbows.

  “We did,” Ikey said.

  “Good. And he taught you how to strip one of them turbines, replace the innards, and put it back together?”

  “He did.”

  Cross rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “Good. Then tomorrow we’ll fire the thing up and see if we can at least get her to stand on her toes.”

  The stairs cracked. Ikey stared at the top of the stairwell until Rose reached the dining room. She looked the same as always, but Ikey had expected her to look different. Or to treat him different. Or to… he knew not what. But instead of acknowledging him at all, she placed a small plate of sliced bread and a dish of butter on the sideboard, then returned to the kitchen.

  Unlike the previous two nights, dinner passed in a manner close to pleasant. Cross sat deep in thought and stared at the table. Instead of speaking around a mouthful of food, he took absent bites and chewed in a slow and deliberate manner.

  Rose ate considerably less and sat in silence as well. The silence gnawed at Ikey. An urge pushed at him to lean towards her and whisper, ask if she was all right. If everything was all right. Was it acceptable, what happened the night before? As the dinner stretched on, Ikey’s skin crawled and crept around him. He picked at his food as well and wished Cross would grow tired of the lack of drink on the table and finally leave Ikey and Rose alone to speak in private.

  Finally, Cross placed his fork on the table and nudged his plate back a knuckle’s width. He looked at Ikey. “You done?”

  Ikey swallowed a bite of fish. “I guess so.”

  “Good. Let’s get out to the workshop. We have a lot of work tonight.”

  The bottom fell out of his stomach.

  Cross stood and hitched his belt.

  “Hasn’t he had a hard enoug
h day?” Rose asked as she stood and picked up her plate.

  “What? And I haven’t?” Cross asked.

  “You can decide when you’ve had enough. Ikey can’t very well tell you no, can he?”

  Cross waved a dismissive hand at her while he looked at Ikey. “Now tell me true; you want to go out and work in the workshop, or do you want to stay in here and knit in the dark, or whatever the hell it is she does when I’m not around?”

  Rose clucked her tongue as she picked up plates and utensils from the sideboard. “No, it’s not like I’m keeping your house clean or anything.”

  “Are you?” Cross asked, his eyebrows arched in mock surprise. “It’s not like I could tell with all the light in here. How can you even tell?”

  “Because my feet don’t stick to the floor anymore, and this house no longer smells like a meat locker gone sour.” With that, Rose whisked into the scullery. A clatter of plates and a jangle of utensils followed.

  Cross shook his head. He planted his palms on the table and leaned over until his face hovered in front of Ikey’s. “Get married the first moment you can, Ikey. There’s nothing like marriage to keep a man focused on what’s important. Let’s get out of her way and on to our work.”

  Out in the workshop, Cross lit another lantern and set it in the middle of the table. The next order of business was to grab the bottle from the junk heap. As Cross poured himself a cup, Ikey strained to see a sign that Cross had found the remains of the music box. It appeared he hadn’t.

  “Want any?” Cross tilted the bottle to Ikey.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Probably for the best,” Cross said, then tilted the cup back.

  Ikey looked to the shelf where the arm sat. After studying Cross’s other creations, he wished to hold it and examine it again. What more might he glean from the arm this time around?

  Cross thunked the cup onto the table top.

  Ikey started.

  “All right,” Cross said. “Tonight’s order of business. We—you and I—are going to build a brand new engine for the Kittiwake. From scratch. Forget everything Wendy showed you, everything he told you. Forget it all.” Cross wiped his palm across the air before him. “Clean slate. Now. Here’s the problem—”