by C. S. Poe
Gunner had pulled the edge of his black bandana up to his mouth as the sand went every which way, only lowering it once I’d safely settled on the ground beside him. “Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
Gunner seemed like he had something else on his mind, even appeared to consider speaking the thought aloud, but he let that mask of impassiveness fall over his features again, checked his pocket watch, then led the way deeper into the canyon.
The trek wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined—the passages at times so narrow we had to squeeze through sideways, or climb over boulders that had fallen into place when the earth had first split in two. But it was beautiful. The canyon was a burned-orange sandstone, a lovely contrast to the bright blue sky overhead. The lofty walls were smoothed and warped into fantastic shapes from Mother Nature’s persnickety artistic vision finally coming to fruition after countless years of trial and error.
A fresh sweat had been worked up by the time Gunner came to an abrupt stop in a passage that had been slowly widening for the last several paces. He got down on one knee and retrieved something from the sand.
“What’ve you got?” I asked.
Gunner slowly rose, turned, and dumped a handful of loose cogs into my palm. I did not acknowledge the brush of his fingers against my own. He had done it purposefully. And while I did enjoy his attention very much, Gunner’s subtle and authentic approach more impactful than anything I could have paid for at the Bowery, he had made the reality of his life perfectly clear—I would only be another passing ship in the night.
I could have kicked myself then, because I had just, for however brief a moment, considered sleeping with Gunner the Deadly. And I had the audacity to be upset because we’d be nothing more than two strangers tossing each other off. The dry desert air must not have been good for my sensibilities.
“Hamilton?”
I took a breath and made a show of weighing the cogs in my hand. “There’s a presence of aether in these. Very slight, but this material has been in close contact with aether ammunition for some time, I suspect.” I tossed the cogs to the ground again and wiped my hands.
Gunner unholstered his Waterbury and cocked the pistol. He moved forward with slow, cautious steps, mindful of how footfalls echoed off the rock cliffs. He led us deeper into the canyon, and as we came around a bend, the passage suddenly opened into what I could only imagine was the Atrium.
There wasn’t even a spare moment to take in our surroundings before the atmosphere crackled with living, produced magic. Aether ammunition. But not from Gunner’s weapon. It came from farther inside the Atrium, and the magnitude was a dozen times more powerful than the Waterbury. I shouted Gunner’s name in warning at the same instance as he turned and shoved me, and the two of us went sprawling to the ground. The aether explosion missed its intended targets and cracked the sandstone walls above us. Chunks of rock tore free and poured down like a fiery avalanche.
Gunner’s long form tensed. Firm muscles and the hard angles of a male body pressed down on me, taking the beating from the falling debris. I knocked his hat off, wrapped my arms around his head, and forced Gunner’s face into the crook of my neck and shoulder to protect what I could of him in return. Neither of us moved until the slip, slide, and rumble of sandstone subsided and a fine orange cloud of dust lingered in the air.
Gunner pulled back, breath sweet and warm against my face. He shifted enough to draw a hand up and wipe my cheek. “Are you okay?”
Was I? The well-being of my body was secondary to the very real and novel reality of having a man lying on top of me. I could smell Gunner’s sweat and soap, and he too wore Crown perfume—its name momentarily lost to me. Top note of citrus, base note of a spicy, woodsy—Sandringham. That was it. And my God, even my most private, vivid daydreams did not compare to what it actually felt like to be touched this way.
My skin prickled and snapped and my muscles damn near convulsed. The sensations were quite similar to what happened when two casters touched each other. But there was no magic between me and Gunner, just flesh and bone and blood and heat and my heart breaking because the taste of human touch was confirmation that I wouldn’t survive much longer in my self-induced isolation. I was wasting away inside, and Gunner was an antidote.
“Gillian?”
I startled at the sound of my first name on his lips, husky and a little raw. I returned my gaze to Gunner’s but fell short of managing any response to his inquiry. His eyes were wild. His hand moved from my cheek to grasp my chin.
Gunner was going to kiss me.
And I’d allow it.
I’d allow this infuriating, complicated, law-breaking bastard, with a smile that made my knees buckle, kiss me—touch me—do whatever he wished with me. I’d welcome it. Revel in it.
Because for once.
Just once.
I wanted to be happy.
A maniacal laugh erupted from the Atrium, followed by the hiss and roar of a steam engine coming to life.
Gunner blinked, that light in his eyes—that hunger—gone. He swore under his breath, grabbed his hat, and stood. I scrambled to my feet, looked at Gunner as he put his Stetson on, and followed his line of sight. There, in the open space of the canyon, was a magnificent armored locomotive. It was wider than the trains that ran on New York City’s elevated platforms. Bulkier. Steam poured from a vent in the back, and the ground under our feet rumbled. A long cylindrical tube stuck out from the face of the mechanical beast. I wasn’t certain what it was used for, but I didn’t like the look of it one bit.
Standing in front of the locomotive was a giant who could have shamed participants in a strong man competition. He had a bowler on and sported a fantastic curled mustache. He wore outrageous pinstripe trousers and only a buttoned waistcoat over his chest, laying bare his muscular and tattooed arms for the world to see.
Milo Ferguson.
He smiled a violent sort of smile and said, in an animated voice akin to a circus ringleader, “Howdy, Gunner. You’re right on time.”
Gunner started to raise his Waterbury.
“Ah, ah, ah.” Ferguson tsked while wagging a finger. He raised his other hand, outfitted in a mechanical fighting glove. It was similar to what street gangsters wore back home—cogs spinning and steam spitting as he flexed the jointed fingers. He pointed at me with the glove, and the cylindrical pipe on the locomotive mirrored the motion.
Manufactured aether kicked up and sent an uncomfortable static through the air.
Gunner hesitated.
“Remote-controlled aether ammunition,” I murmured. I shot a glance over my shoulder and studied the severe damage the first shot did to the canyon wall. “A lot of it.”
Ferguson tilted his head. He wore an almost comical, mad-as-a-hatter expression on his face. “Who’re you?”
“Special Agent Gillian Hamilton with the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam.” I pulled back the lapel of my coat to show my badge.
Ferguson rolled his head and bared his teeth at Gunner in another one of those bizarre smiles. He laughed and said, “Buggering a copper now?”
I bristled and called loudly, “By the authority vested in me by the President of the United States, I’m here to place you under arrest—”
Ferguson spoke over me like I was nobody. “You do love taking risks, don’t you, Gunner? That’s right. You always did. The more danger a prick presents, the more you want to fuck it. The more you want to taste it. Choke on it.”
Gunner raised the Waterbury the rest of the way. “Stop.” That was it. That was all he said. One word. No tone, no inflection, but the world might as well have ceased spinning at the command, if only for a moment.
Ferguson looked nonplussed. Then he grinned like a man possessed.
I cannot control time—scholars of the magic community do fear that such a spell might be possible with the correct caster and architect duo—but I did have the capability to take a mental step back. I was able to pick the moment apart, ga
uge the dangers, assess all possible outcomes, then act accordingly. It was, in a sense, like time slowed.
Gunner’s finger was on the trigger of his pistol.
Ferguson’s gloved hand released puffs of steam.
Gunner would shoot, of this I had no doubt.
But I instinctively knew Ferguson would first.
I held both hands palm down and then heaved upward, tapping into my magical connection with hard rock and dirt and earth to tear sandstone from the ground to use as a column of protection. Simultaneously Ferguson made a fist with his glove and the cylinder of the locomotive opened fire. Manufactured aether slammed into the rock, and it exploded in a shower of splinters.
Gunner moved seamlessly with how the seconds played out—his reflexes reinforcing why he’d “never been shot, never been caught.” He stooped behind the sandstone, dropped to one knee at the release of aether, and turned his head away at the impact. Fluid and graceful, like a cat landing on their feet. He raised the Waterbury again and shot through the cloud of settling dust. His bullets hit the side of the locomotive, and I felt my magic reverberate through iron and… silver.
Ferguson’s insane laughter echoed across the Atrium, followed by the slam of a metal door and locking mechanisms snapping into place. The locomotive lurched forward on heavily reinforced wheels, not unlike those of touring automobiles in design, and made directly for the towering cliffs. The top of the behemoth swiveled, and the cylinder fired another round of illegal magic.
Gunner took off in pursuit, leaving me to cover him. I raised one hand, palm upturned, then brought it down in a rush. A billion volts of electricity tore down from the sky and followed my motion, promptly colliding with the aether in an explosion of white and yellow light and a roar powerful enough to leave a ringing in my ears. The lightning bolt crushed the aether, followed the current to its source, and slammed into the locomotive. The machine staggered but kept rolling toward the sandstone walls and away from Gunner, who was giving chase. With a sudden screech of metal, four grappling arms—two on either side—unfolded from the locomotive, and the articulating claws buried themselves into the rock. And like some terrible mechanical monster, it began to scale the cliffs of the slot canyon.
The cylinder fired again, and again I let loose a storm of electricity. My magic was enough to overpower Ferguson’s aether ammunition, but only just so. He wasn’t shooting bullets like Gunner had in his Waterbury—the madman was shooting projectiles as big as shells used in field warfare. And with no inherent weakness in aether, the constant discharge from the locomotive was enough to keep me occupied while Ferguson successfully escaped.
The last shot from the cylinder was particularly volatile and ended up crushing my lightning spell. The charge snapped like a rubber band and engulfed my hands in sparks of wild energy interwoven with aether remnants. I swore loudly and shook my hands, the electricity dissipating as it fell to the ground. A few arcs bounced between my fingers, and the mixed-in aether drew beads of blood to the surface of my skin. I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth.
“Hamilton!” Gunner shouted, boots pounding the ground as he returned.
Hamilton. Not Gillian.
He skidded to a stop, holstering his weapon. “Are you okay?”
Blood seeped between my fingers and dripped down my knuckles. My hands shook a little as I relaxed them. “It’s nothing. That last one got past me, is all.”
Gunner didn’t speak. But it was no matter. I felt I was beginning to understand those tells he had—the depth of his emotional state from the slight narrowing of his eyes, the words he chose not to voice that still managed to fill his silence.
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “Let’s go. We can’t let him get away.”
Quickly getting out of the canyon was a whole other matter. We didn’t have engineering means, and I feared utilizing the elements would overtax me before we had a chance to take Ferguson down. So we ran. Back through the mile of twists and turns and tight crevasses before reaching the boxer teeth, climbing the precarious juts of rock, and safely returning to the surface.
The afternoon sun beat down overhead. My back and shoulders felt like I’d slept too close to an open flame, and I’d worked up a hell of a sweat that was overpowering the Fougère perfume. The horses whinnied and tossed their heads at our approach. It took a moment to calm them enough that we were able to climb onto the saddles, and after breaking into a gallop, I could see what had been the cause of their nervous state—the locomotive had come dangerously close and left tracks gouged in the baked earth.
“We have to get Ferguson out of the locomotive,” Gunner called over the rush of wind and hooves. “Otherwise I’ll spend all my ammo trying to put a dent in it.”
“Keep those aether canisters off me and it won’t be a problem,” I answered loudly.
“That iron is too thick for lightning or aether magic to penetrate.”
“It’s the silver,” I corrected.
“What?”
“Ferguson has already incorporated silver into his engineering,” I called back. “It makes sense—the properties hold up well against aether.” I looked at Gunner briefly. “Against you.”
“But?”
I gripped the reins hard in one fist, raised my other, and cast a fire spell that danced in the palm of my hand. “He should be afraid of me.”
VI
October 11, 1881
Ferguson had made it back to Shallow Grave. He’d driven that steam-powered monstrosity right into town and now stood beside an open hatch on its left side in the middle of Boot Spur Street. In a booming voice, he demanded that the silver ore—packed and waiting for the lone evening airship that stopped in Benson to unload cargo due for the smelter before traveling to Tucson—be brought to him at once.
Before he did something… regrettable.
I pulled the horse’s reins hard and swung down from the mare just as a clerk stepped out of an office with an overhead sign reading: Dexter Mining Co. “No,” I said, so authoritatively that the poor man startled and spun toward me. “Give him nothing,” I ordered, pointing at Ferguson a few storefronts away.
“But he’ll kill—”
Gunner got down from his stallion, tugged his bandana from his nose and mouth, and handed the horse’s reins to the clerk. “Get these animals to the corral. And stay inside.”
The clerk, visibly brightening at the sight of Gunner, nodded obediently. He took the reins of my horse as well, and with a cluck of his tongue, quickly led them away from the scene.
Gunner unholstered his Waterbury and cocked the pistol. “Work your clever tricks, Hamilton.” He looked down, winked again, then took off in an all-out run, barreling toward Ferguson as fast as his long legs could take him.
Ferguson turned at the pounding of boots, ducked behind the open door of the locomotive, and easily missed eating three bullets. He laughed like a man truly unhinged, climbed back into his machine, and locked the door behind him. One of the mechanical arms untucked from the side and lunged at Gunner, its iron claws snapping like the beak of a bird of prey. Gunner shot again, this time blowing the claws to pieces, cogs and screws spewing in an arc across the afternoon sky. He dodged an attempt by the apparatus to simply bludgeon him with the smoking stump and then ran down a side street, vanishing from my line of sight.
Gunner missed on purpose.
The thought—a sudden realization buzzing around in my head like a gnat—had not spawned from nothing. Gunner the Deadly was a wanted man. He was a deadeye marksman. He told me only the night before that he was in Shallow Grave with the sole intention of killing Milo Ferguson. So why, when his opportunity had been clean, had Gunner not pulled the trigger until Ferguson ducked for cover?
Choke on it.
Then it was like the gnat had been snatched out of the air and squashed between two fingers. The buzzing stopped.
Gunner has a history with Ferguson.
I had no tangible proof. No written accounts of such intimacies
. Nothing conclusive I could point at and say, Ah-ha! It was only—Gunner had hesitated. More than once. Before meeting the man, I had thought that Gunner’s skewed morality was based on the here and now, action and reaction, black and white. But if that were the case, Gunner would have fired true.
His past dogged him.
His past altered his expected response to a situation he had actively sought out.
His past grayed his thinking. Exposed Gunner to the vulnerabilities of man.
The curtain. A funeral pall. The Conqueror Worm.
The locomotive’s axle spun hard, kicking up dirt as it turned to follow Gunner.
I shot after it, losing my bowler as I ran down the street and came up behind the locomotive. However it was that Ferguson viewed his surroundings from the inside, he apparently couldn’t see behind, which was well and fine with me. I jumped onto one of the still-tucked-in mechanical arms, hoisted myself onto the fender over a massive wheel, and climbed across the locomotive until I was directly behind the top portion of machinery with the swiveling cylinder.
I pressed both palms firmly against the iron housing, closed my eyes, and sought out the silver I’d felt before that had been fused into the engineering. My hands turned red with the heat of a fire spell being activated.
The locals had said Ferguson feared no man but Gunner, and so he’d prepared his steam marvels accordingly—orange—to withstand the blasts of a Waterbury with illegal ammunition. Aether had no magical weakness—yellow—but certain natural elements could take the brunt of its power longer than others. And while agents at the Bureau were not typically on loan to locations outside of their assignment—white—there was a reason I was.
My spell found the silver, and it immediately began melting, leaving pockmarks in the structure. The mechanics glowed hot and bright, steam wafted, and sweat trickled down the sides of my face. I heard a muffled yelp from inside the locomotive, and then the cylinder fired an aether canister in the direction of Gunner. The kickback of the blast threw me right off the side of the locomotive. I hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs, leaving me coughing and gasping as the side hatch opened and Ferguson scampered out of the smelter I’d created.
