Chains of Silver: a YA Theater Steampunk Novel (Alchemy Empire Book 1)

by Meredith Rose

  He looked horrified. “What did you do?”

  “I dumped a bucket of paint over her head and went to tell Master Fenrey.”

  He laughed. “Good for you. So she was sacked?”

  “Yes. Other theaters put up with that kind of thing, but not Fenrey.”

  “I’m glad to know that.” Then he frowned. “So how does Miss Birdwell fit into this?”

  “She was a favorite. I don’t know what she did to get there, and I don’t want to know, but when our director was sacked, Miss Birdwell was furious. That woman was her idol, and I think she hates you simply because you took her place.”

  He let out a low whistle. “And she hates you because you were the one that went to Master Fenrey.”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  He lifted an eyebrow at that, but I didn’t want to tell him anything else.

  He hoisted himself to sit on the stage. “Do you think your former director is still making demands on her?”

  “I doubt it. I heard she took a directorship in Sardinia. And Master Fenrey wants to keep Miss Birdwell here after her apprenticeship, so I can’t think of any hold Director Hyll would still have over her.”

  He was quiet for a moment. Then, “I’m not like that, you know.”

  “I know.” I swallowed, and clasped my hands tightly together in front of me. I stared out across the empty house of the practice theater.

  Another pause. “But you still don’t trust me.”

  My breath hitched. How had I let this get personal again? “I don’t trust hardly anyone, Presul Wolff.”

  “I see.” He sounded regretful. “I’m concerned about Miss Birdwell.”

  My head jerked toward him. “Why?”

  “She’s exhausted and worried sick about something.”

  “But she hates you! She’s trying to ruin your career.”

  “She’s hurting.”

  I snorted. “You sound like Nadine.”

  “Dame Fairchild?”

  I nodded. “She’s always telling me, ‘Have more compassion for that poor girl, my dear.’” My lips curled in a scowl.

  “I take it you don’t agree?”

  Dark images flashed through my mind, to the haunting melody of a calliope organ. I shuddered and forced the memories away. “Lots of us are hurting, sir. But we’re not treating everyone else like dirt because of it. She still has a choice in how she acts, and I don’t think her nastiness should be excused just because her life is tough.”

  He studied me, his lips pressing into a respectful line. “Well put, Miss Mellor.”

  I smiled tightly. “You’re not going to let her push you out, are you?”

  “Do you think she can?”

  I gave a speculative little hum, like I was weighing the question. “The seventh-years have the odds at three to one in your favor.”

  He chuckled. “Seriously? That’s flattering. The staff is only giving me a fifty-fifty chance.”

  I giggled, and brought my hand to my mouth to stifle it. “So who do you think is right?”

  His eyes took on an intensity that had my heart thudding again. “Anyone who bets against me is a cog-brained idiot.”

  My breath caught. “I believe you,” I murmured.

  The door at the back of the house opened.

  “Minx?” My best friend and roommate, Thea Wright, stood in the doorway.

  I glanced at Presul Wolff. He nodded and waved his hand toward the door.

  “Thanks for the discussion, Miss Mellor.”

  “Thanks for not being mad about the sketch, Presul Wolff.”

  I tossed one of my signature flirty grins over my shoulder at him. He smiled in return, but I could still feel the weight of his thoughtful gaze on me as I grabbed my bag and hurried up the aisle to where Thea waited for me.

  When we were in the hall outside the theater, she grabbed my arm and leaned close.

  “I have the most fascinating news,” she told me. “About Delphine.”

  Chapter Three

  “So what happened in rehearsal? People in the hall were saying you showed off your dragonfly bot and then got scolded by Presul Wolff.” Thea linked her arm through mine. We sauntered down the hall, weaving through the other apprentices heading toward a few precious minutes of free time.

  I shrugged. “That’s about it. What did you hear about Delphine?”

  “First, tell me why he scolded you.”

  “I want to know about Delphine!”

  Several apprentices glanced curiously at us.

  “Shh, not here, cog-head,” she whispered, giggling. “Tell me about rehearsal.”

  I huffed. “It was so stupid.” I told her about Delphine’s diva fit and showed her the Hellphine sketch.

  She grabbed it and let out a high-pitched squeal. “You. Are. Brilliant.” She took another look at the sketch, and broke into snickers. “You sketch, you design fantastic gadgets, and you’re too clever by half. If I didn’t love you so much, I’d really have to hate you.” She held up the sketch, waving it at passing apprentices. “Minx is bloody brilliant!”

  I shrieked and grabbed for the sketch. Not an easy task since she was about six inches taller than me. “Stop it!” I wrestled it from her, laughing. “I don’t want to give Delphine even more reason to despise me.”

  “Hellphine, you mean.” She let go of the sketch.

  I slid it back into my sketch pad, shaking my head. “Yes, her, too.”

  “And you don’t want Dietrich Wolff to disapprove of you.” Thea eyed me with that look that told me she was using her psychic magic a little bit. She was too polite to read my actual thoughts without my permission, but it didn’t stop her from reading everything else about me.

  It struck me that her way of reading me felt ever so much different than when the director looked at me. She could tell exactly how I felt or what I thought at any given moment, but Dietrich Wolff seemed to know who I was at my core. I shivered—from fear or fascination, I couldn’t say.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  I quickly shifted my thoughts to something I knew would provoke a reaction from her. “You tell me.”

  It was a game we often played. She gazed at me, eyes half-closed. I felt a sort of tingle, like tiny crackles of static electricity, skitter through my head and down my spine. After half a moment, her eyes snapped wide open and she gasped. “He didn’t!”

  “Oh yes, my dear Miss Wright, he did.”

  She pursed her mouth. “Exactly how did he say it?”

  I did my best impersonation of Newton Figg, a fellow eighth-year tech apprentice. “I prefer my women,” I intoned with the swagger Newt often used, “to be a goodly handful.” I deepened my voice, imitating his attempts to sound seductive. “Take Miss Wright, for example. I’d love to ride her hot air balloons, if you know what I mean.” I smoothed my hands over my breasts, wiggling my eyebrows.

  Thea nearly collapsed from laughing. “You’re terrible!”

  I smirked. “I am only the messenger here.”

  “Oh my god. His women?” She shook her head. “The empress will fall in love with the King of Maya and have a dozen little Mayan-Mercian babies before I would ever be Newton Figg’s ‘woman.’ Ride my hot air balloons? Ew!”

  “That was the definite low point of the conversation.”

  “No kidding. Arrogant, self-absorbed chav is what he is.”

  “You mean, you don’t find him steamy?”

  “Like a fresh pile of horse poo on the street, maybe.”

  This is why I loved Thea. “All I’m saying is that he likes your, uh, balloons.”

  “He can like them all he wants, but he’s not riding them. I could never be interested in someone like him.”

  “I’m sure he’s not the only one who thinks you’re steamy—in the non-horse-poo kind of way.”

  She lifted one shoulder, looking suddenly defeated. “One can always hope.”

  I didn’t have psychic magic, but I wasn’t totally unobserva
nt. Thea didn’t want Newt—not that I blamed her. But unless I had suddenly grown cogs for brains, there was someone she did want. She just wasn’t telling me who.

  Before I could pursue the topic, she laughed again, high spirits restored. “I know—we’ll let Delphine have him. They’d make a perfect couple.”

  “Her balloons are probably too small—he’d never get up—”

  She clapped her hand over my mouth, tittering. “Hush.” She pointed to one of the professional actors walking down the hall toward us.

  I stood tall and swallowed my amusement. Glancing up at Thea, I saw her blue eyes sparking with naughty humor and her shimmering gold curls trembling from barely-restrained laughter. As soon as the actor passed us, we both burst into more giggles, and she tugged me into an empty vocal practice room.

  She fumbled for the brass turnkey on the wall sconce and gave it a twist. There was the soft hiss of illuminating gas being released through gleaming tubes, and then a series of short clicks from the electric ignition system. With a sharp puff, flame lit the lamp, brightening the room. Thea closed the door.

  “About Delphine…” she said.

  “Finally.”

  Even though we were alone in the room, she bent down until her head nearly touched mine. “She’s been sneaking out at night. Alone. Past curfew.”

  My brows lifted, and I let out a small whistle. That would be a difficult stunt to pull off. In order to leave the theater, seventh and eighth year apprentices had to go in groups of at least two, and we had to use the bio-monitor I had invented a few months ago. It kept the entrance locked until we slid our finger into the sensor for the machine to identify us. If we weren’t a Guild member or a seventh or eighth year apprentice, the door stayed locked. It was no good trying to sneak a younger apprentice out in the middle of a crowd of us either because the system counted bodies, and if everyone wasn’t scanned, it set off an alarm. The process was the same to get back in. I had designed it to keep a record of who came in and out and at what times.

  Our curfew was midnight, and the doors were locked at precisely 12:01 in the morning. Apprentices who were late ended up with punishments like scrubbing the miles and miles of marble corridors or cleaning the grease out of the pulleys of the fly system above the stage. If you were late more than once, you weren’t allowed to leave the theater at all for six months unless you were with a Theatrical Guild member.

  “How is she getting around the bio monitors? And sneaking back in?”

  “Through a ventilation grate in the storage vaults below the theater. It’s open under there, like a cavern. And it connects to what looks like a utility or drainage tunnel.”

  I slumped against the wall of the practice room. “Blimey. Now I hate her even more.”

  “I know—it’s awful, right?” Thea scowled.

  “No. Well, yes. But no, I hate her for coming up with such a brilliant way to sneak out. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

  “You’re terrible. You designed the bio-monitor.”

  “Only because Master Fenrey asked me to.” I grinned. “So where does she go?”

  Thea shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is that she leaves about 8:00 in the evening and doesn’t return until about 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning.”

  “So strange.” Then I shoved away from the wall. “Wait a minute—how do you know all this?”

  A satisfied smirk twisted her lips. “I’ve been keeping her under surveillance for the last two months. I got up one night to use the lavatory, and I saw her go into her room. It looked as if she’d been out. The next day, when Fenrey went to pull the lists from the bio monitor, I just peeked into his mind and read the lists. She wasn’t on any of them. After that, I decided to investigate on my own.”

  “All this time, and you never told me!” I shook her arm gently.

  She patted my hand. “I did it for you, sweet. You’ve been working so hard to finish all your projects. And you still have nightmares and trouble sleeping. You needed your rest. So I thought I would do the boring investigative work, and then bring you in when it was time for some fun. Now we can follow her, find out what she’s up to, and bring it to the attention of the proper authorities.”

  I chuckled. “That’s…so kind of you.”

  She patted her upswept hair. “No, it’s not. It’s rule-breaking with malicious intent.”

  I put my arm around her waist and squeezed. “Yes, but it was for me. That makes it kind.”

  She hugged me back. “What she did to you last year was unforgivable. Just because you told on Director Hyll doesn’t give her the right to sabotage your work.”

  Shortly after Director Hyll had been sacked, I had to turn in my final project for seventh year. I’d designed and built an entire miniature set for a play. It was only about the size of a puppet stage, but for weeks, I’d put my heart and soul into making it perfect—complete with tiny gadgets and special mechanical effects. The morning before our technical director was to evaluate it, I found it outside in the courtyard, soaked from rain. Ruined. Our technical director almost didn’t give me a chance to redo it. I couldn’t tell him that my friend Raymond had said he’d seen Delphine carting something out to the courtyard late the night before. We had no proof.

  “She can hate me all she wants, but I don’t like how she’s trying to get rid of Presul Wolff. And I despise how she bullies people like Walter. She needs to be stopped.” I pulled back from Thea and extended my hand. “Miss Wright, I say it’s time to find out what a certain diva-bitch is up to.”

  Her lips curved in a slow smile. She clasped my hand. “Miss Mellor, I am all agreement.”

  Chapter Four

  After supper, Thea and I hurried back to our small room high up under the eaves of the theater. We were lucky enough to have a room with a sloped dormer and a window. It looked out over the jagged, sooty skyline of Aldwych, the capitol city of the Mercian Empire. We had placed a trunk under the window, and in my quieter moments, I loved to sit there and watch pigeons strut across the carved stone ledge outside. Sometimes, Thea or I pocketed a bun from supper and cracked open the window to toss crumbs at the birds. There was something mysterious and soothing about the smoke curling from hundreds of chimneys, and at sunset, the brick buildings glowed red and orange. One by one, the windows across the city lit up with the cheery halo of gas lamps. It was in the evenings that Aldwych was at its best and most magical.

  And most dangerous.

  We helped each other out of our apprentice uniforms—the fitted white blouses and long skirts pinstriped with purple and red on a tan background. I slid off my petticoats and boots. Thea untied my corset for me, and I sprawled on my narrow iron-framed bed in my drawers and chemise, enjoying the luxury of slouching.

  “What should we wear?” Thea flung open our very simple, very small oak wardrobe to study its contents.

  “I’m not sure. We don’t even know where we’re going.”

  None of the apprentices had a lot of extra clothing, aside from our uniforms. Many of us were orphans, and those who did have families were usually quite poor. The apprentice program supplied us with basic necessities: two sets of uniforms, underclothing, personal care items, bedding, as well as a small monthly allowance—thanks to some wealthy donors. Wealthy patrons also donated unwanted or worn clothing. The costume department put apprentices to work remaking and repairing these items as part of their training, and then the new outfits were sold very cheaply in a special shop just for apprentices. Most of us became quite creative in coming up with new ways to use the outdated and made-over clothing. We could never hope to keep up with upper class fashion, but I thought our style was every bit as charming and much more original.

  Thea had more money than most of us. Her parents both worked in a theater in the empire province of Gaul. They were so busy, they tended to forget they had a daughter in the capitol city. But on occasion, they would remember, feel guilty, and send money. She always shared with me when that happened, so
we had built up a surprisingly good wardrobe despite being lowly apprentices.

  “What does Delphine usually wear when she goes out?” I said at last.

  “Oh. Good thought.” Thea flipped through the bustled skirts and gowns on wire hangers. “She never wears anything fancy. Usually, it’s dark, simple. Sturdy boots.” She grabbed a few items as she spoke, and draped them on her bed. “Boring, sorry to say.”

  “Maybe so, but probably sensible if she’s walking far, especially through the tunnels.”

  “Did you just call her sensible?”

  “Momentary coggle-brain—I’m better now.” I picked up a black poplin skirt that I had made over to have five drawstrings running the length of the skirt. Each could be left flat to wear the skirt long or cinched up so it could be worn as a bustle over another skirt. If I cinched it up to the top of my boots, it would be easier to walk in, and I was already wearing black stockings. I paired it with a close-fitted black and white striped blouse, and my favorite black leather underbust harness.

  Thea chose all brown: flounced skirt, leather overbust corset, and a smart little jacket. Both her corset and my harness had compartments added to hold a few of my special gadgets—a luminescent compass, a pepper-spray gun, and a tiny electric torch. The torch was bronze and shaped in the form of the goddess Diana. She held a white globe over her head that contained the light bulb, and it could be switched to full power or to a pale glow like moonlight. I loved it because it was both functional and beautiful.

  As we helped each other dress, I felt her eyeing me, as she so often did. Eyeing and comparing, and being critical of herself. I wished she wouldn’t. We were nearly opposites in looks—I was short and petite, she was tall and curvy. I had midnight hair, hers was like sunlight. Our two points of similarity were the dimples in our cheeks and our blue eyes. I looked small and impish, like a mischievous fairy. I was fine with that most of the time. But Thea was truly beautiful. Unfortunately, all she seemed to notice was that she didn’t look like me. As if that were even important.