A rainbow reflected off the shape of a wing. It was a fairy.
All the pieces fell into place. The light, the dark. The prisms.
The garden. The secrets. The warnings. The rainbows. Fairies
loved green and growing things. They loved colors and light.
They had souls that shone like beacons. This fairy had no
business being anywhere near Shadow Street, but for better or
worse she had come, and met her end here.
This wasn’t just any wraith. This was his mother.
And, just like that, Sun once again had something to live for.
New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess,
a fairy godmother, and a geek. She's known for screwing up the
alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into
mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales. Alethea is the
co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunter Companion , and
penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. Her short fiction,
essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and
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magazines. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner
winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and
Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome . Her YA fairy tale novel,
Enchanted , won the Gelett Burgess Children's Book Award in
2012, was nominated for the Audie Award in 2013, and was
selected for World Book Night in 2014. Both Enchanted and its
sequel, Hero , were nominated for the Andre Norton Award. Tales
of Arilland, a short story collection set in the same fairy tale world, won a second Gelett Burgess Award in 2015. Born in
Burlington, Vermont, Alethea currently lives and writes on the
Space Coast of Florida. She makes the best baklava you've ever
tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie.You can find
Princess Alethea online at: www.aletheakontis.com .
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At St. Agatha’s Home for the Rehabilitation of Crippled
Children, residents find themselves serving their own Fagin right
out of Dickens’ Oliver , a tough taskmaster they call Old Grinder.
But instead of hoping for his eighteenth birthday and escape, a
boy named Sian looks for a way out—maybe even one that can
improve life for them all, in Cory Doctorow’s inspiring
steampunk tale …
C L O C K W O R K F A G I N
By Cory Doctorow
Monty Goldfarb walked into St Agatha’s like he owned the
place, a superior look on the half of his face that was still intact,
a spring in his step despite his steel left leg. And it wasn’t long
before he did own the place, taken it over by simple murder and
cunning artifice. It wasn’t long before he was my best friend and
my master, too, and the master of all St Agatha’s, and didn’t he
preside over a golden era in the history of that miserable place?
I’ve lived in St Agatha’s for six years, since I was 11 years
old, when a reciprocating gear in the Muddy York Hall of
Computing took off my right arm at the elbow. My Da had sent
me off to Muddy York when Ma died of the consumption. He’d
sold me into service of the Computers and I’d thrived in the big
city, hadn’t cried, not even once, not even when Master Saunders
beat me for playing kick-the-can with the other boys when I was
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meant to be polishing the brass. I didn’t cry when I lost my arm,
nor when the barber-surgeon clamped me off and burned my
stump with his medicinal tar.
I’ve seen every kind of boy and girl come to St Aggie’s—
swaggering, scared, tough, meek. The burned ones are often the
hardest to read, inscrutable beneath their scars. Old Grinder don’t
care, though, not one bit. Angry or scared, burned and hobbling
or swaggering and full of beans, the first thing he does when new
meat turns up on his doorstep is tenderize it a little. That means
a good long session with the belt—and Grinder doesn’t care
where the strap lands, whole skin or fresh scars, it’s all the same
to him—and then a night or two down the hole, where there’s no
light and no warmth and nothing for company except for the big
hairy Muddy York rats who’ll come and nibble at whatever’s left
of you if you manage to fall asleep. It’s the blood, see, it draws
them out.
So there we all was, that first night when Monty Goldfarb
turned up, dropped off by a pair of sour-faced Sisters in white
capes who turned their noses up at the smell of the horse-
droppings as they stepped out of their coal-fired banger and
handed Monty over to Grinder, who smiled and dry-washed his
hairy hands and promised, “Oh, aye, sisters, I shall look after this
poor crippled birdie like he was my own get. We’ll be great
friends, won’t we, Monty?” Monty actually laughed when
Grinder said that, like he’d already winkled it out.
As soon as the boiler on the sisters’ car had its head of steam
up and they were clanking away, Grinder took Monty inside,
leading him past the parlour where we all sat, quiet as mice,
eyeless or armless, shy a leg or half a face, or even a scalp (as
was little Gertie Shine-Pate, whose hair got caught in the mighty
rollers of one of the pressing engines down at the logic mill in
Cabbagetown).
He gave us a jaunty wave as Grinder led him away, and I’m
ashamed to say that none of us had the stuff to wave back at him,
or even to shout a warning. Grinder had done his work on us, too
true, and turned us from kids into cowards.
Presently, we heard the whistle and slap of the strap, but
instead of screams of agony, we heard howls of defiance, and
yes, even laughter!
“Is that the best you have, you greasy old sack of suet? Put
some arm into it!”
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And then: “Oh, dearie me, you must be tiring of your work.
See how the sweat runs down your face, how your tongue doth
protrude from your stinking gob. Oh please, dear master, tell me
your pathetic old ticker isn’t about to pack it in, I don’t know
what I’d do if you dropped dead here on the floor before me!”
And then: “Your chest heaves like a bellows. Is this what
passes for a beating round here? Oh, when I get the strap, old
man, I will show you how we beat a man in Montreal, you may
count on it my sweet.”
The way he carried on, you’d think he was enjoying the
beating, and I had a picture of him leaping to and fro, avoiding
the strap with the curious, skipping jump of a one-legged boy,
but when Grinder led him past the parlour again, he looked half
dead. The good side of his face was a pulpy mess, and his one
eye was near swollen shut, and he walked with even more of a
limp than he’d had coming in. But he grinned at us again, and
spat a tooth on the threadbare rug that we were made to sweep
three times a day, a tooth that left a trail of blood behind it on the
spl
intery floor.
We heard the thud as Monty was tossed down onto the hole’s
dirt floor, and then the labored breathing as Grinder locked him
in, and then the singing, loud and distinct, from under the
floorboards: “Come gather ye good children, good news to you
I’ll tell, ‘bout how the Grinder bastard will roast and rot in Hell—
” There was more, apparently improvised (later, I’d hear Monty
improvise many and many a song, using some hymn or popular
song for a tune beneath his bawdy and obscene lyrics), and we
all strove to keep the smiles from our face as Grinder stamped
back into his rooms, shooting us dagger-looks as he passed by
the open door.
And that was the day that Monty came to St Agatha’s Home
for the Rehabilitation of Crippled Children.
*
I remember my first night in the hole, a time that seemed to
stretch into infinity, a darkness so deep I thought that perhaps I’d
gone blind. And most of all, I remember the sound of the cellar
door loosening, the bar being shifted, the ancient hinges
squeaking, the blinding light stabbing into me from above, and
the silhouette of old Grinder, holding out one of his hairy, long-
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fingered hands for me to catch hold of, like an angel come to
rescue me from the pits of Hades. Grinder pulled me out of the
hole like a man pulling up a carrot, with a gesture practiced on
many other children over the years, and I near wept from
gratitude. I’d soiled my trousers, and I couldn’t hardly see, nor
speak from my dry throat, and every sound and sight was
magnified a thousandfold and I put my face in his great coat,
there in the horrible smell of the man and the muscle beneath like
a side of beef, and I cried like he was my old Mam come to get
me out of a fever-bed.
I remember this, and I ain’t proud of it, and I never spoke of
it to any of the other St Aggie’s children, nor did they speak of it
to me. I was broken then, and I was old Grinder’s boy, and when
he turned me out later that day with a begging bowl, sent me
down to the distillery and off to the ports to approach the navvies
and the lobsterbacks for a ha’penny or a groat or a tuppence, I
went out like a grateful doggie, and never once thought of putting
any of Grinder’s money by in a secret place for my own
spending.
Of course, over time I did get less doggy and more wolf about
the Grinder, dreamt of tearing out his throat with my teeth, and
Grinder always seemed to know when the doggy was going,
because bung, you’d be back in the hole before you had a chance
to chance old Grinder. A day or two downstairs would bring the
doggie back out, especially if Grinder tenderized you some with
his strap before he heaved you down the stairs. I’d seen big boys
and rough girls come to St Aggie’s, hard as boots, and come out
of Grinder’s hole so good doggy that they practically licked his
boots for him. Grinder understood children, I give you that. Give
us a mean, hard father of a man, a man who doles out punishment
and protection like old Jehovah from the Sisters’ hymnals, and
we line up to take his orders.
But Grinder didn’t understand Monty Goldfarb.
I’d just come down to lay the long tables for breakfast—it
was my turn that day—when I heard Grinder shoot the lock to
his door and then the sound of his callouses rasping on the
polished brass knob. As his door swung open, I heard the music-
box playing its tune, Grinder’s favorite, a Scottish hymn that the
music box sung in Gaelic, its weird horsegut voice-box making
the auld words even weirder, like the eldritch crooning of some
crone in a street-play.
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Grinder’s heavy tramp receded down the hall, to the cellar
door. The doors creaked open and I felt a shiver down in my
stomach and down below that, in my stones, as I remembered my
times in the pit. There was the thunder of his heavy boots on the
steps, then his cruel laughter as he beheld Monty.
“Oh, my darling, is this how they take their punishment in
Montreal? ‘Tis no wonder the Frenchies lost their wars to the
Upper Canadians, with such weak little mice as you to fight for
them.”
They came back up the stairs: Grinder’s jaunty tromp,
Monty’s dragging, beaten limp. Down the hall they came, and I
heard poor Monty reaching out to steady himself, brushing the
framed drawings of Grinder’s horrible ancestors as he went, and
I flinched with each squeak of a picture knocked askew, for
disturbing Grinder’s forebears was a beating offence at St
Aggie’s. But Grinder must have been feeling charitable, for he
did not pause to whip beaten Monty that morning.
And so they came into the dining hall, and I did not raise my
head, but beheld them from the corners of my eyes, taking cutlery
from the basket hung over the hook at my right elbow and laying
it down neat and precise on the splintery tables.
Each table had three hard loaves on it, charity bread donated
from Muddy York’s bakeries to us poor crippled kiddees, day-
old and more than a day-old, and tough as stone. Before each loaf
was a knife as long as a man’s forearm, sharp as a butcher’s, and
the head child at each table was responsible for slicing the bread
using that knife each day (children who were shy an arm or two
were exempted from this duty, for which I was thankful, since
those children were always accused of favoring some child with
a thicker slice, and fights were common).
Monty was leaning heavily on Grinder, his head down and
his steps like those of an old, old man, first a click of his steel
foot, then a dragging from his remaining leg. But as they passed
the head of the furthest table, Monty sprang from Grinder’s side,
took up the knife, and with a sure, steady hand—a movement so
spry I knew he’d been shamming from the moment Grinder
opened up the cellar door—he plunged the knife into Grinder’s
barrel-chest, just over his heart, and shoved it home, giving it a
hard twist.
He stepped back to consider his handiwork. Grinder was
standing perfectly still, his face pale beneath his whiskers, and
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his mouth was working, and I could almost hear the words he
was trying to get out, words I’d heard so many times before: Oh,
my lovely, you are a naughty one, but Grinder will beat the devil
out of you, purify you with rod and fire, have no fear—
But no sound escaped Grinder’s furious lips. Monty put his
hands on his hips and watched him with the critical eye of a
bricklayer or a machinist surveying his work. Then, calmly, he
put his good right hand on Grinder’s chest, just to one side of the
knife handle. He said, “Oh, no, Mr Grindersworth, th
is is how
we take our punishment in Montreal.” Then he gave the smallest
of pushes and Grinder went over like a chimney that’s been hit
by a wrecking ball.
He turned then, and regarded me full on, the good side of his
face alive with mischief, the mess on the other side a wreck of
burned skin. He winked his good eye at me and said, “Now, he
was a proper pile of filth and muck, wasn’t he? World’s a better
place now, I daresay.” He wiped his hand on his filthy trousers—
grimed with the brown dirt of the cellar—and held it out to me.
“Montague Goldfarb, machinist’s boy and prentice artificer, late
of old Montreal. Montreal Monty, if you please,” he said.
I tried to say something—anything—and realized that I’d
bitten the inside of my cheek so hard I could taste the blood. I
was so dicombobulated that I held out my abbreviated right arm
to him, hook and cutlery basket and all, something I hadn’t done
since I’d first lost the limb. Truth told, I was a little tender and
shy about my mutilation, and didn’t like to think about it, and I
especially couldn’t bear to see whole people shying back from
me as though I were some kind of monster. But Monty just
reached out, calm as you like, and took my hook with his cunning
fingers—fingers so long they seemed to have an extra joint—and
shook my hook as though it were a whole hand.
“Sorry, mate, I didn’t catch your name.”
I tried to speak again, and this time I found my voice. “Sian
O’Leary,” I said. “Antrim Town, then Hamilton, and then here.”
I wondered what else to say. “Third-grade Computerman’s boy,
once upon a time.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” he said. “Skilled tradesmen’s helpers are
what we want around here. You know the lads and lasses round
here, Sian, are there more like you? Children who can make
things, should they be called upon?”
I nodded. It was queer to be holding this calm conversation
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over the cooling body of Grinder, who now smelt of the ordure
his slack bowels had loosed into his fine trousers. But it was also
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