Clockwork Pandora (Heart of Bronze Book 2) Read online

  Maggie jostled her tresses in the direction of the old barn. “Not much of a barn, either.” She held up the bottle. “’bout a couple doozen o’ deez stashed in a carner under some hay.”

  Kevin winced and blinked at the old barn. “No tools or anything?”

  Maggie stood, shook her head and moved to join her husband. She smirked, causing the cat-whisker tattoo on her cheek to twitch. “Not a drot, and the days’ll be coolin’ us right quick, so thar’s no time for you to be tinkin’ ‘bout tinkerin’, Kevin Tarnish.”

  “I’m not,” he protested, then looked skyward, toward what was now a faint smudge of gray in the sky. “We’re losing our trail, darling. Must keep moving.”

  Maggie nodded and offered the whiskey bottle of water to Kevin. He took it, gave it a tentative swig, then made a face and shrugged. “Can’t get that clean enough, but whatever alcohol’s left in the lining will stave off sickness and another damp night.”

  “Too bad none are full,” Maggie smiled, taking the bottle back and tipping the end up like some bar frequenting floozy. Kevin laughed and started out toward the gravel road that wound toward the smoke and parallel to the trail of creek they’d been following since their parachutes dropped them here. Maggie squinted up at the bright blue sky before falling into step next to him. “What do we do, Kev’n? I mean… What do we do after we get to ‘er and…” Maggie trailed off. She was thinking of the likelihood they would find their traveling companion dead in the wreckage of the Mystic Lady rather than perched politely on a stump impatiently waiting for them.

  “Well… If she’s there, we give her a decent Trinity burial. If she’s not, we’ll know for a fact that she’s been spirited up.”

  “So, then we won’t find ‘er.”

  Kevin smiled down at his wife, who kept her pace slow in time to his limp.

  Three days ago the Dr. Tarnish Traveling Road Show was well fed, had everything they needed in their covered sky wagon, and even felt the grace of an angel in the guise of a beaten woman who blessed Maggie’s empty womb with her touch. Then, they were picked up by sky pirates, lost their wagon with all their food and property, and left the fire haired angel to her doom as Imperial planes shot down the airship they managed to relieve from the pirates. Kevin shook his head, smoothed back his hair once more, and carefully slowed his step even more.

  He didn’t want to find the Mystic Lady again, not really. While there was hope they’d find some of their property on the trail to that column of smoke, it was more likely—in his mind—that they’d come across the crumpled corpse of “Alice the Angel.” Kevin Tarnish believed in angels, but he didn’t believe Alice was among their choir. She was a gifted Samaritan was all, but no creature of God would stand by and even allow bloodthirsty pirates to die. And though she touched Maggie with a smile and apparent blessing, he was sure she only did that for one reason; so that he and Maggie could take the only two parachutes out of the smoldering hell of their sinking airship.

  “Hungry, love?” Maggie asked as she dipped a hand into the bag they scrounged on the evening of their first day.

  “Nah. I’ll last a bit.”

  She pulled out an apple and bit into it. She chewed, swallowed, then beamed. “I’m eatin’ for two now, ya know.”

  It was three plodding steps later that Kevin finally nodded and muttered, “You are.”

  ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

  There was no crack of thunder, no flash of mystical light, when the witch appeared on Kevin and Maggie’s trail. There was only a slight breeze, a fluttering of leaves, and she appeared.

  Dorothea Rink, Pandora by her witch name, completed her transport spell somewhere outside of Lexington, Kentucky, far away from the battle in which she found herself so deeply embroiled. It was dark when she left. Now the sun was bright and mocked her from high in the sky. She popped in about a foot off the ground, stumbled forward out of the air, and rolled down a grassy hill, leaving a damp wake of salty sea air around her. Her jacket, boots and trousers were damp with seawater, her long dark braid was gnarled and soaked, and the rips and tears weren’t limited only to her clothes.

  She pressed a hand to her forehead, brought it back to see blood from the gash there, then passed out from exhaustion.

  Pandora dreamed of the battle, her glass sword singing through the air, colliding with the glass cane-spear of the demonic Teivel Hearse, high over the North Atlantic. Biplanes, Kites and dirigibles swooped the dark skies, spitting fire in the Civil War that waged over the mysterious find miles below the ocean’s surface. In her dream, she found her eyes locked on Hearse’s, his malevolent red inhuman eyes in that cruel ashen face. His silk and velvet suits couldn’t hide what he was. He was a ghoul. An abomination.

  Like her.

  In the dream, Hearse’s eyes became pleading, almost sad. She saw in him a reflection of her own youth, of being snatched up by the Empire of The North, of being subjected to torturous experiments. Hearse too had been an innocent child at some point, kidnapped and plugged into their hissing, clanking machines. Though he had been much older than she, Pandora’s dream made them the same age. And though boys were treated separate from her, she saw them together, strapped to large wooden chairs.

  The freezing metal rods that drilled into their skulls found the place where fantasy and reality are divided, the place where deja vu is understood, where intuition and the unknown flourish as tangible, untapped reality.

  The Imperial scientists were creating a witch of fantasy-bending urchins kidnapped from their homes were brainwashed and twisted into weapons.

  They did not foresee the inherent differences between the boy and girl subjects. The girls achieved their expectations. They became skilled wielders of magics and unseen forces.

  The boys, however, mutated only physically at first. Their skin died over their living muscle and sinew. Their eyes became weak in the daylight but powerful in the dark. They grew physically stronger and mentally quick, but they also devolved into cannibalistic creatures who broke from their cages and consumed the lab animals as well as the scientists who studied them. Too much to handle, the boys were caged and moved to secret locations, internment camps that served as holding pens until they could be put down.

  But the boys couldn’t be put down.

  Shooting, gassing, impaling… even the guillotine—which left abominable, and physically terrifying, headless monsters groping for their former keepers—weren’t enough to undo what had been done.

  So they were used as weapons anyway.

  Airships carrying carts hovered on the outskirts of northern cities controlled by the Confederates. The carts were dropped, opened, and teams of wild, slavering beasts tore through the streets and train stations, ripping people to shreds, mindlessly devouring every living thing before them.

  The ghouls fled the day into the lower levels of the cities, into the subways, steam tunnels, and underground garages and walkways. Surface-level travel was limited after dusk, then banned all together. Basements were sealed. Missing persons reports were closed and forgotten because everyone knew the ghouls of the undercities were to blame.

  There were vast numbers of ghouls in the undercities. It seemed their numbers never diminished, even when deprived of food and proper shelter. Of course no one checked the whithering rat populations in the undercity either.

  The girls, however, were viable tools for the Empire. They used magic to uncover Confederate strongholds, start fires, confuse the enemy, even kill. But they too possessed a flaw: free will.

  Despite the brainwashing, torture and training, many were able to crack their conditioning and use magic to break their bonds and escape. None of them knew where they came from, nearly all of them forgetting their parents and homes, and so they took to the safe upper streets and hid in plain sight as urchins, beggars, and roustabouts.

  Some, like Pandora, used their wiles to gain favor, find homes, even get jobs. Fewer still, like Pandora, were able to break the lowest levels of conditioning and find their
ways back home. She hid her true nature with the help of her father and some friends in the Confederate military, and she felt like she had the world at her fingertips, in full control; and then Pandora’s Box opened when an intelligent ghoul took her prisoner, tried to use her in his vile machinations, tortured, and raped her.

  She was free of him now. Mostly. Bound to him by their coupling, his every move was known to her. It was how she was able to track him to the airship where they dueled over the North Atlantic. Then she felt him far below. Then she felt nothing at all. Teivel Hearse was dead.

  But that didn’t mean he didn’t haunt her subconscious, the seed of his memory now physically growing within her.

  Then minutes, maybe hours after she had fallen to earth, her eyes fluttered open and she sat up.

  She blinked as her head swiveled around to get her bearings. She rolled to a crouch, then stood up and brushed off her jacket and trousers.

  Down the hill, along a dirt path that rimmed a wood, she saw a man and woman shuffling along tiredly. She drew a breath, then headed down the hill at an angle to cut them off.

  ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

  Maggie glanced around them, squinting into the woods to their right, then up the hill to their left. “Kevin, love, I dun tink we’re gonna find another orchard any time soon.”

  “Still hungry?” her husband asked as he winced. His eyes remained fixed ahead, now focusing on the woman walking toward them aways up the path.

  “Well…No, but we’ve got only the one apple left, an’ I dun know how much—” Maggie stopped herself and glanced up at Kevin as he stopped walking. She followed his gaze to the dark woman coming their way. She raised her hand in what she hoped was a friendly enough greeting to locals. “Who’s da?”

  “I don’t know, my dear, but let me make the introductions, hm?”

  Maggie nodded. They held their ground as the woman approached. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, a bit haggard, showing signs of cuts and scrapes here and there. The long black braid of her hair was loose and tangled, and her large almond eyes regarded them warily even though she approached with a smile. Maggie noted the uniform jacket she wore and muttered, “Confed poilot.”

  “I see that,” Kevin murmured in return, then smiled as brightly as he could muster after swiping a hand through his hair in lieu of tipping a hat. “How do, miss? I’m Dr. Kevin Tarnish of the Tarnish Traveling Road Show, and this is my lovely bride, Magdelene.”

  The woman stopped in front of them, her eyes rolling over their clothes and rough appearance. “Y’all ain’t much of a road show,” she smirked.

  “We met with some troub—” Maggie started.

  Kevin put a hand on her arm. He nodded the direction they were heading. “Did you happen to see the wreckage, miss? The downed airship?”

  The woman’s eyes seemed to glaze momentarily, but then re-focused on the couple. “No.” She pointed up the hill. “I came from yonder.”

  “Mm.” Kevin said, “We were survivors of a disaster, young lady, and—”

  “Pandora.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Pandora. My name.”

  “First or last?” Maggie chimed in, flashing the briefest of scowls.

  Kevin quickly resumed. “We were hoping to find—”

  “The angel who saved—”

  “Our luggage.” Kevin shot his wife a pointed look. The cheek with the whisker tattoo twitched and she looked down to the scrounging sack in her hands. Kevin smiled at Pandora. “We’re hoping to salvage our luggage from the wreck.”

  “An angel saved your luggage,” Pandora smirked through the half-question.

  Kevin and Maggie looked at each other as Pandora’s eyes dropped to the sack in Maggie’s hands. She said, “Mind if I have one of your apples? I’m starvin’ for some reason.”

  Maggie glanced to Pandora, then looked down. “We only have—”

  Kevin turned to his wife, his eyes widening before slowly swinging back to the strange woman on the path. Maggie lifted the bag, which was now full and heavy in her hand. She opened it and peered inside, reached in and pulled out a perfectly ripe orange.

  “I said apple, but that’ll do,” Pandora grinned and grabbed the fruit from the small woman’s hand. Maggie reached back in and withdrew a small cheese wheel wrapped in cloth.

  “Kevin, there’s—”

  “I know,” he said flatly, eyeing Pandora. “We didn’t have—”

  “Your arm and leg are better too,” Pandora said as she pressed a thumbnail into the skin of the orange and began peeling.

  Kevin flexed his wounded arm, bent his elbow, turned his wrist and twiddled his fingers. The only tear or gash was in his clothing. The skin underneath was unmarred beneath the hasty bandages.

  Maggie took a step back, her eyes locked on Pandora as the woman pulled a wedge from the orange and stared back.

  Kevin said, “You’re a—”

  “Witch,” Maggie finished.

  Pandora chewed a wedge of orange and said, “Boo.”

  Chapter 3, The King of New Cali

  The tricks to scavenging the ruins of the California coast are in keeping the same routes every time and branching off from them in short forays. It’s too easy to get lost, especially in the big cities, where new hills, cliffs and valleys were made out of crumpled buildings of stone and iron. Street names are pointless, even if I knew something about California. But, as long as I kept the floating city in sight as I worked the shore, I knew I could always find my way home.

  My home is a city called New Cali, and it hovers a hundred feet above the ocean like an enormous airship made of brick and tarnished bronze. I imagine it’s a grand sight, seeing something like that against the blue sky, casting a titanic shadow over the coast, but it’s really not what you might imagine.

  A large part of New Cali was built from the island that formed out of Old San Francisco, miraculously saved from the shock waves when the big quake leveled the entire state. Imperial industrialists took to building on the island, filling it with the essentials of a comfortable lifestyle. Unfortunately, New Cali was made with more industry and the profit margins of businesses in mind than a place to live.

  Then the island decided to climb toward the heavens.

  It was gradual at first. More cracks formed in the streets and around the periphery of some of the structures. A backlash quake shook the land around the island that left the island itself unscathed, except that it seemed to have risen four to five feet in a day. The next day it was ten, the next week it was twenty. A river flowing “in” from the ocean ringed the city before soaking under it and lifting it. The city rose like a water spider rising to its legs on a calm pool.

  Those with the most coin invested in the “The Progress of New Cali”—as the iron welcoming arch reads that spans the main avenue into the city—were reluctant to leave her. They created lies, spun tales about a man-made steam-powered gargantuan engine that lifted the city to the safety of the sky.

  But soon they too panicked and fled, abandoning the gilded halls and richly appointed apartments and businesses still sweet with the smell of fresh paint and polished cherry wood and brass.

  New Cali is a ghost town, a monument to avarice and man’s thought that he could stand on the wreckage of God’s wrath and shake his fist at the sky. The city was constructed as a salute to the glory of everything California once was, filled with art museums, moving picture houses, parks, even rolling hills and rocky cliff sides that overlook the majesty of the Pacific Ocean, and it all died in a fortnight.

  The few that remained soon found the solitude of the floating city too much. Some took their lives, others perished when they wandered too close to the edge, cabin fever took even more. Some took the separation of the land to heart and coupled it with a separation from God or Law and became thieves, rapists and murderers as the once sufficient security force dwindled to nothing. That didn’t last long. They eventually killed each other out and left only one single soul.

&nbs
p; Me.

  I did my share of exploring, sure. I was a scholar, after all, and curious about the machinations (or miracle) of New Cali. I found nothing to explain it, so I stopped questioning. I was content to live out my days in peace, my senses turned to the splendor of the view, and the stark white stone beauty of what Man left behind.

  The dark gray airship arrived barely a year ago, the crew whooping and hollering over their theft of something nobody else wanted. I suppose it wasn’t really a theft, and the taking of New Cali by Captain Scorpion was nothing more than a squat. Like a wandering gypsy who finally decided to stop, the Scorpion moved in to the abandoned metropolis and sat there.

  They found me soon after while moving from building to building. The Scorpion stayed the hand of the henchman who was to be my executioner and smiled at me. Maybe I reminded him of his grandfather or something, I couldn’t say. All I know is that I was the last to remain in a city that was more than big enough for one pirate crew and an old man, so they let me be.

  I’d like to add, “and let live,” but that wasn’t the case.

  I soon became The Scorpion’s link to the mainland; his one-man raiding party of the coastal cities. While his airship remained moored and unused, I was sent scrambling down chains and rope ladders to one of the access skiffs below, small boats I could take to shore and back. Meanwhile, The Scorpion set his crew to locking up any food or wealth they might have uncovered in New Cali. He declared himself the ruler of the dead city and sat like a miser on his piles of gold no one else knew existed.

  I saw boredom in his crew, and I became the target of their restlessness. Allowed to live by proclamation of their master, it didn’t mean they couldn’t humiliate or beat me at any turn. Just looking at them would earn me a bruise or a black eye. The Scorpion wouldn’t let them break my bones for sport, because that would prevent me from crawling down the spider’s web to scavenge for him. There were times I would have welcomed a splintered limb. Last Christmas they dressed me in nothing but a floppy jester’s hat and made me sing and dance at knife point, sneering and laughing at my nakedness. Fortunately, their revelry didn’t last long. I think it depressed them more than anything and they let me go after throwing yellow paint on me.