Ticker (6 page)

Opening Papa’s copy, I saw it was inscribed with an ink scrawl.

Perhaps this will help broker an understanding between us.

Though it was unsigned, I knew who’d sent it.

I set the pamphlet aside to wrestle with the desk’s other hidden compartments and decorative panels. Within minutes, I’d amassed a collection of letters, all of them from Warwick. The earliest one dated back to the week after Dimitria’s death.

Dear Sir:

It is my sincere hope that together we can avert further tragedy.

That one contained a rough pencil sketch in the margin: an early diagram of my Ticker. The newer missives, written on the thin, cheap paper provided by Gannet Penitentiary, were decorated with angry ink blots where Warwick pressed his pen too long or too hard upon the page.

You are not the only one to doubt me, but you are the only one whom I called “friend.”

The final note I discovered had my name upon it. “This one is for me.”

“Do you want me to read it for you?” Nic asked.

I shook my head. The broken wax seal on the back indicated my father had opened it already.

Dear Penny:

You are too young to understand yet, but it is my sincerest wish that someday soon we will speak and I will be able to explain everything to you. At the heart of the matter, I am both guilty and innocent. And I would do it all over again to save you. It is what your sister wanted.

“Lies. Dimitria never would have wanted him to kill in my name.” With a shudder, I shoved all the notes into a pile and pushed away from the desk. “What we need isn’t here. We have to get to the Bibliothèca.”

“Whatever for?” Violet asked, forehead scrunched up.

“Papa kept copies of important information on Eidolachometer punch cards,” I explained. “We need to retrieve them from our vault before the thieves realize that’s an option.”

Unable to stop himself, Nic raised a protest. “Downtown is going to be utter chaos. Everyone is waiting for the verdict. There are Edoceon everywhere. Never mind that you shouldn’t go running about after what happened in the hall.”

“I can, and I shall.” I started to stand and felt the floor tilt under my feet. “But a few more minutes to gather my thoughts and another piece of cake wouldn’t come amiss.”

Violet laughed and handed me the last slice as Sebastian whistled, long and low.

“Little did I know when I woke up this morning that I would be knee-deep in Gordian knots by the lunch hour,” he said with a sardonic glance at my brother.

“Enjoy the ride,” Nic muttered. “If I know Penny, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in trouble by teatime.”

FOUR

In Which Silence Is More Than Golden

It was a ridiculous thing to have to stop and consider my clothes. Ripped in countless places and dotted with Nic’s blood, my sadly maligned morning suit was now as inappropriate for a rescue excursion as Violet’s SugarWerks uniform. I hurried as fast as I dared up the stairs, with everyone following close behind. The terrible knowledge that Mama and Papa were in certain peril pursued us to the third floor.

“I think my aubergine dress will fit you,” I said to Violet, “if you can avoid tripping over the skirts.”

“I’ll loop them up about my neck if I have to,” she promised as we reached my bedroom.

None of us commented on the door just down the hallway that was shrouded in mourning gloom. To my knowledge, no one in the family save Mama had entered Dimitria’s room in the year since she’d died. There were times in the quiet, dark hours when I thought I could sense my sister moving across the floor with her
careful footsteps, winding up the Cylindrella machine and playing her favorite recordings.

Try as I might to keep the door closed on the memories, they crept toward me with strains of remembered music. Though Dimitria played no instrument herself, she was always humming something under her breath, half the time not even realizing she did so. She also loved gardens and studied floriography.

“There’s a hidden meaning in every flower, Penny,” she’d told me once, touching her fingertips to a newly arrived bouquet of tulips. “The pink ones are for caring, and yellow is for good cheer.”

“And the red?” I’d asked. Missives had been arriving with alarming regularity: messages via the Calliope, paper-wrapped parcels in the mail. Gifts, I had realized with a start, from my sister’s as-yet-unnamed boyfriend. “Red flowers are for love, aren’t they?”

Her answer had been a blush that put the tulips to shame, but any hope that her romance would bloom died with her, and along with it the hope that any Farthing girl could survive the condition that plagued us. She’d been the healthiest of us, while I’d been the invalid, and Cygna given no chance at all by fate. Warwick checked my older sister every month but only caught a vague, irregular heartbeat on occasion—certainly nothing that indicated her time left upon this earth should have been measured in minutes rather than years.

Sebastian nudged me out of the past with a gentle elbow as he headed into my brother’s room. “Tend to your ablutions, Miss Farthing. You strongly resemble a chimney sweep.”

Turning back to my own door, I lined up the letters for my password on a rotating copper permutation lock.

M-E-T-A-L-M-A-R-K

It was the common name for the
Voltinia dramba
Butterfly and the newest addition to my collection. Letters properly aligned, I pulled the activation lever. Gears behind wood and plaster whirred and clanked, then granted us permission to enter.

I stepped into the room, turning up the lamps and taking a mental inventory of the contents, starting with the chocolate-brown velvet eiderdown and the Bhaskarian rug in shades of coffee and cream. A warm glow danced over walls that shimmered with the movement of dozens of mechanical Butterflies. I’d dusted their shadow boxes that very morning, all the better to see the diamanté stickpins that held each specimen against black velvet. The constant tick-tick-tick of infinitesimal inner workings caused their wings to flutter up and down, and I automatically sought out my favorites: the Silver-studded Blue (
Plebeius argus
) winking next to the Geranium Bronze (
Cacyreus marshalli
).

Heeding Sebastian’s suggestion, I also checked the nearest mirror. The morning had certainly taken its toll. There was dirt and worse on my face. Escaping its pins, my hair straggled over my shoulders in unruly copper curls. Wide hazel eyes stared back at me.

“Ever-changing Twindicators,” Dimitria had teased, because the color of our eyes shifted from brown to amber to green depending on the light, the fabrics Nic and I wore, and whatever mood we might be in.

Knowing the wash water would take time to heat, I turned the spigot over the corner basin to “Scalding.” The radiator hissed and clanked in protest, so I gave its cast-iron ribs a swift kick with my boot.

“I know just how you feel,” Violet said, but I didn’t know if she was speaking to me or the radiator.

“You go first,” I told her when the copper water pipes rattled against the wall behind me, “while the towels are still relatively clean.”

She obliged, stripping down to her underthings. I detached the RiPA from my garter, but hesitated to set it down on the desk, which was in its perpetual state of chaos. At the moment, the shiny innards of a pocket watch littered the scarred surface of the wood, and teetering towers of account ledgers sat under the magnificent stained-glass window known as the “Papilionoidea.”

The RiPA in my hand began to clack and clatter. The message was from Ambrose Farnsworth.

BACK INSIDE THE FACTORY - STOP - DAMAGE LESS THAN ORIGINALLY ESTIMATED - STOP - SOME STOCK AS YET UNACCOUNTED FOR - STOP

Pursing my lips, I tapped out a response.

DESTROYED IN THE EXPLOSION - QUERY MARK

His answer was as troubling as it was puzzling.

CRATES EARMARKED FOR CURREY HOSPITAL ARE MISSING - STOP - DID YOU AUTHORIZE REMOVAL - QUERY MARK

I hadn’t, but at this point in time, a few missing packing cases were the least of our worries.

I DID NOT - STOP - CHECK TO SEE IF THEY WERE PICKED UP IN THE COMMOTION - STOP

A soft knock at the door signaled Dreadnaught’s arrival with more clean linen. “Can I assist with your toilettes, ladies?”

“I’m all right.” I pulled off my shirtwaist and considered the damage. Before the chatelaine took up residency at Glasshouse, the majority of my wardrobe had been cobbled together with pins, liquid adhesive, and rivets purloined from the factory. Though I couldn’t sew a tidy buttonhole to save my life, I was a crack hand at mending tears and holes. “I’ll just get my stapler and fix this.”

“You will
not
,” Dreadnaught said. Only two degrees removed from a garment district stitch-counter, she was beyond horrified by the very suggestion. “Surely you have something more suitable.”

I unfastened the hooks on my skirt and stepped out of my bustle without tripping and killing myself. Only that morning, I’d read that one in ten young ladies become entrapped in the wire cages. The claim was made by the founder of the Center for Fashionable Reform, but I didn’t feel compelled to desert my own “dress-enhancing death trap” until official documentation linked it to fatality or dismemberment. “Define ‘suitable.’ ”

“There’s only one outfit fit to be seen right now.” Dreadnaught crossed to the wardrobe and extracted a walking dress of dove foulard. I raised an eyebrow at the elaborately draped overskirt, the rosettes, and the broad box pleats of navy silk. From Kashenkerry’s Atelier (Fine Garments & Ready To Wear) and a gift from my Grandmother Pendleton, it had hung in the wardrobe for a month like the shy miss at a cotillion. “Scrub everything from the waist up or you’ll leave smudge marks,” the chatelaine added.

Under her keen-eyed supervision, I washed the grit and grime of the factory explosion from my arms and face, scrubbing at my skin with a washcloth until I was the color of a boiled Meridian lobster. Aided by the chatelaine, both Violet and I were dressed, coiffed, and sensibly accessorized in due time.

Just not hastily enough for my taste. With every passing moment, my anxiety about my parents grew. It was one thing to watch them retreat into their own worlds after the deaths of my sisters and quite another to think that I might never see them again. “Everything that’s happened has been my fault, Vi.”

“Piffle,” she retorted, adjusting her borrowed skirts. “It’s not your fault you were born with a heart defect, or that your parents care enough for you to move the stars to see you healed and well.”

“Maybe. But it’s my fault they are goodness-knows-where. That Warwick tried to develop a better Ticker.”

That he went mad and killed people in the attempt.

I wouldn’t think about that just now. Defiant in the face of my fears, I marched from the room and made my way downstairs via a slide down the banister. Difficult to do when wearing a bustle skirt.

Difficult, but not impossible.

“Never mind waiting for your Ticker to give out, Penny. You’re going to break your neck,” Violet said for the second time that morning, following me down the more customary way. The ends of her ribbons flapped to match the cadence of her feet on the stairs. With lace mitts covering her tattoos and her gearring removed, she looked every inch the demure lass, save for her amethyst hair and her great stompy boots peeping out from under my skirts.

While we waited for Nic and Sebastian to finish refreshing their linen, I ducked briefly into the study to close the wall safe and retrieve my father’s watch. Violet passed the time striding up and down the hall. After a particularly loud about-face, she caught sight of the chatelaine and tilted her head to one side.

“Perhaps you ought to come with us, Miss Dreadnaught. You shouldn’t remain here alone. What if the thieves come back?”

“They wouldn’t catch me unaware,” was the chatelaine’s grim response. “I shall stay here to protect the house from further attack. There’s also a great deal of work to be done.”

“If I didn’t know better,” I said, closing the study door behind me and reaching for my bag, “I’d think you’re almost looking forward to a cleanup of this magnitude.”

“It will be quite satisfying to set everything to rights,” she admitted, seeing us to the door.

Just outside, a messenger boy stood on the stoop, one finger outstretched toward the doorbell. He had a pack slung over his shoulder and a winning, gap-toothed smile at the ready.

“Delivery for Miss Farthing,” he said with a tip of his cap.

Dreadnaught traded a handful of coppers for the letter, then passed it to me. The card stock was produced locally by the Featherweight Mill, watermarked with the Ferrum Viriae’s crest, and needlessly expensive, but then Marcus probably scribbled his grocery list on fine linen when it suited him.

“A bit soon for a summons from the good Mister Kingsley, isn’t it?” I murmured, not bothering with a letter opener.

But the paper within didn’t remind me of the stern Legatus. It reeked of sandalwood, and for an instant, I was transported to a silken tent on a Bhaskarian desert. I unfolded it with a frown and squinted at the spider-thin handwriting.