Mission: Nutcracker

Chapter 20

20

Terminus, 23 December 1871

Devon checked the ballroom one last time before the servants allowed the guests to enter. He didn’t think there was anything amiss, but he didn’t want to take any chances that the scene from the Tinkerer’s Ball would repeat itself. Never mind that as of yet, no one had heard anything from the missing people, and now they had a complete list. Most of the names were of the tinkerers from the guild’s roster, a few servants, and a fair number of wives and daughters. Devon couldn’t figure out why they’d all been taken, and it definitely bewildered him that no one had asked for ransom. Certainly there were families willing to pay. He would even chip in for some of them.

The search of the Lillet household hadn’t turned up anything, not even an aetherized nutcracker doll. What had the purpose of it been? And how did the aether connect to Fiona’s strange dreams? Davidson’s team hadn’t been able to extrapolate anything beyond some potential emotional manipulation. He would have liked to think the doll was behind the fact that Fiona couldn’t talk to him, but in truth, he had to admit that problem had preceded the appearance of the nutcrackers, both non-automaton and miniature.

“Is everything set?” Devon asked Henry Davidson, who looked dapper in his tuxedo. His cravat had been starched very white, and he pulled on his gloves. Beads of sweat on his upper lip matched those on Devon’s. Devon had ordered for the fireplaces to be lit that morning to dispel the chill, and then the day had turned surprisingly warm. He’d forgotten how strange the Southern US weather was since he’d lived for a decade in France. But he couldn’t have them douse the fireplaces now or everyone would leave smelling of smoke, so he instructed the servants to not add any wood to them.

“Yes, Patrick has been around the room with the aetherometer, and he hasn’t found any evidence of devices, diabolical or otherwise. Edward did the same earlier, so it’s been checked over twice.”

Devon nodded. He of course had worked with Patrick O’Connell the day before, and he’d been thrilled to meet the infamous Professor Bailey, the genius who had stabilized aether and had led the way to using it in more ways than anyone had dreamed. Devon hoped that perhaps he’d figure out how to use it for energy, specifically on trains, while staying under Devon’s roof, but no luck yet. Everyone had been too taken with the kidnappings.

The guests began to arrive. Of course there were plenty of mamas with their debutantes. Devon smiled at each of them, allowed his lips to hover over the young ladies’ gloves, and searched their faces for…what? Some spark of intelligence, perhaps? He hoped they were simply nervous, and that’s why they only smiled shyly or tittered in the manner only American girls giggled when he made some jest or even complimented them.

Fiona and her mother arrived in blue gowns that were very similar in cut, but Fiona’s of a lighter shade. They both wore feathers in their hair, as did many of the other young ladies. Where had they gotten the money to be so stylish? Or had dressing his daughter for her debut driven Bryan Telfair to ruin?

Devon’s uncharitable thoughts made him recognize that he tried to justify his behavior from earlier that week. He acknowledged now that he should have given Fiona some warning, but Henry had wanted to surprise her so she couldn’t hide anything of her father’s. Not that there had been much to find.

Devon greeted both Telfairs, and Margie gave him a bright smile that recalled what she must have looked like on the stage.

“Thank you for inviting us,” she said. “I hope all is well with your investigation.”

“I’m pleased that you’re here.” He ignored that Mrs. Telfair squeezed her daughter’s hand at his words. “And yes, it proceeds, although nothing conclusive yet.”

Mrs. Telfair sniffed. “Well, I’m sure you’ll progress quickly now that you’ve rescued my house from that dreadful doll.”

Devon tried not to laugh, and he didn’t dare meet Fiona’s gaze for a moment. But when he finally did, he only saw coldness, not the answering wit he’d hoped for. As he searched her face for some sign of familiarity or humor, he saw the shadows under her eyes, and alarm jolted through him. Was she unwell? He bowed over her hand, which she took back as quickly as was polite.

“I’ve a terrible headache,” Fiona murmured to her mother as they walked away, her words carrying to Devon. He almost started after them, but a soft touch on his sleeve brought his attention to Therese, who stood there with Lucy and Posey Lillet and their mother. If Fiona had looked unamused, this trio appeared downright angry, but Devon was as polite to them as he could be. He deferred to Therese to welcome them and take them to the punch table.

As soon as all the guests had arrived—surprisingly on time for Terminus—Devon grabbed a glass of punch and gave the signal to the maestro to stop the orchestra from playing after the next song. He checked for his men—Davidson and his team and the extra security detail he’d hired—all stationed around the room, guessing that if something were to happen, it would be when everyone’s attention was diverted, in this case, by him. But he needed to say something to his guests.

The music stopped, and Devon walked up to the stage. He looked around for Fiona and her mother and thought he saw her mother’s bright blue feather poking up from the crowd, but hers was nowhere to be seen. He hoped she’d found somewhere to rest and vowed to make time to check on her. Even if they could no longer be friends, he at least wanted to make sure of her welfare.

Devon mounted the dais, putting thoughts of Fiona and her mother to the back of his mind. This was the first time he was going to address the creme de la creme of Terminus society, the ones he needed to make a good impression on to cement his legacy...and prove he wasn’t a coward. He looked over the assembled, the shrewd mothers and the hopeful daughters and the confident fathers, each sure his daughter would win this lottery on the marriage mart. He took a deep breath and focused on his intended legacy—progress through unity.

He started his speech with the words he had prepared, and he was just about to get to the pitch for his legacy when a shriek nearly made him drop the papers he held. The feathers he’d identified as Margie Telfair’s swayed once, twice, and then toppled into the crowd. The ladies around her cried out, and Chadwick Radcliffe rushed through the sea of satin and silk to her side.

He shouldn’t have lit the damn fireplaces that morning. Devon walked over to where the woman lay in a faint and looked around for Fiona.

“Where’s her daughter?”

Claire McPhee, who had just put something in her reticule, shrugged. “I’m sure she’s around somewhere. But you need to get this woman to a cooler place.”

Devon helped Radcliffe, Davidson, and violinist Johann Bledsoe move Margie Telfair into the green guest bedroom in the southern wing.

Fiona barely took note of the ballroom as she passed through it. She murmured a question to a maid, who led her to the ladies’ retiring room. Even this early, it was busy with debutantes fixing hems, tucking feathers into hair, and otherwise undoing the small damages that their travel to the Meriweather mansion had caused. None of them took note of Fiona, instead briefly meeting her eyes, then flicking their gazes away to show she was of no consequence.

And indeed, she wasn’t. Her family had no money or clout from before the war. They belonged to the merchant class, which, to the high society, was just a step up from paid servants, and those barely a skip up from slaves.

Fiona found a spot at a mirror and sank on to the cushioned chair in front of it. She didn’t pretend to apply powder to her face or fix her hair. Her headache pounded like a tiny hammer and anvil behind her right eye, and her shoulders twitched from the tension. She shouldn’t have come. She knew this, just as she knew that Devon was no longer worthy of her attention, but her mother had been adamant. She looked at the girls who surrounded her, and snippets of their conversations floated through the air.

“Looking plump since her family’s farm started producing again.”

“With those teeth? She couldn’t snare a horse’s interest.”

“Too mousy to be of any notice.”

That last one made Fiona look around for its source before she realized none of them could be talking about her. Or perhaps they were. One of the girls flounced over, her silver dance card case winking in the light. Fiona stifled a sigh.

Of all the luck, Meribelle Blair had found her.

“What are you doing here, Mouse?” she asked. A sneer ruined her features, which would have been pretty if not for her haughty expression. “I didn’t realize the Meriweathers knew such common people.”

“I had an invite the same as you, Meribelle,” Fiona sighed. “But don’t worry, I’m not after Devon.”

“I wasn’t worried, Mouse. You’re no competition for the rest of us. Why would he even look at you with your red hair? Why, it practically screams washerwoman. Irish peasant, even.”

Fiona shrugged. She knew from experience that to continue to argue with Meribelle would only prolong the encounter. But then she remembered facing down the non-automaton and how she thought she’d killed him. Meribelle had no weapons besides her tongue, and in a flash, Fiona recognized that Meribelle did what the automatons had done and what her father, Jim Blair, had tried to do—intimidated to imitate power. And to this point, she’d capitulated.

The pounding behind her right eye spread to nausea in her stomach, but she stood. “Well, if there’s one thing an Irish peasant isn’t afraid of, it’s taking down a nobleman by any means necessary. Have you ever killed a man, Meribelle?”

Meribelle’s face flashed white, and Fiona knew her father had told her of his suspicions about Fiona.

“I haven’t needed to,” Meribelle said, but her words lacked her previous swagger.

“Then you don’t know about the feeling of complete triumph over someone who was threatening you.” Fiona wanted to stop herself from digging herself any deeper, but she couldn’t help it. “You don’t know what it’s like to have true power over someone. Not the feigned influence you so desperately put forth. Oh, I’m sorry. Are the words I’m using too big for you?”

Now Meribelle’s face flushed red. “Not at all. I’m not the peasant rat.”

“Still, let me spell it out for you. Leave me alone. I know you’re faking more than just your swagger.” Fiona allowed her gaze to drop to Meribelle’s decolletage, which she knew for a fact the girl stuffed. She could recognize structural adjustments in women’s clothing.

Meribelle crossed her arms, and Fiona knew she’d won, Pyrrhic though her victory may have been. She guessed some nasty rumor about her would be flying around the ball by the end of the evening, and she would be powerless to defend herself.

She left the retiring room with her head held high, but rather than return to the ballroom with its smells of sweat and food and the pulsing of the music, she turned left and found the library. The barest wisp of a melody caught her attention. It sounded like the one she’d improvised on the violin that afternoon, the one that spoke of longing for a past that hadn’t been what she’d thought.

A book with a red leather cover caught her eye. She walked over to it and picked it up. Aetherics and the Music of the Spheres shone in golden letters embossed upon the cover.

It seemed somewhat artsy for a scientific book, but not enough to dissuade her from investigating. Indeed, she couldn’t resist the urge to pick it up and run her fingers over the indentations of the letters.

“Did you find something you like?”

The words almost made Fiona drop the book, and she wheeled around to see Devon standing in the door. No, not Devon, Pierce. Now that she’d spent so much time in Devon’s company, she could tell the two of them apart. Another thought hit her—had the teasing she’d endured from Devon in their earlier acquaintance come from his cousin? Indeed, his next words confirmed her suspicions.

“No good comes to a bookworm,” he said. “At least you’ve found something worthy of reading, not that fictional fluff you were so interested in last summer.”

“My reading preferences are not your affair,” she said as coolly as possible. “In fact, I don’t care whether you approve or not.”

He approached her, and while she held the book in front of her like a shield, she refused to back down. His left arm swung naturally in spite of the sling that held it, but he held something behind him. As he got closer, a tingling buzz filled the air and surrounded her.

“But I bet you care if Devon does,” he said. “Too bad he’ll never know.”

Fiona’s eyes widened, recalling the mysterious woman’s shooting one of the automaton men in the left shoulder. “You were at Tinkerer Hall on Friday,” she said. “You chased us and then you got shot.”

“Very good, little mouse.” He smiled, but without warmth. In fact, he examined Fiona with the eyes of an inventor looking at an object he’d created. Or considered destroying for a fundamental flaw in its design.

Now she did back up, but she didn’t have far to go. When her back bumped the bookshelf, he brought out what he’d been holding—a nutcracker doll. But this one was bigger, its eyes brighter.

“Do you know what happens to human flesh when it’s exposed to a certain frequency of aether?” he asked and turned the knob on the doll’s back. “Especially for hours on end?”

Fiona, her throat too full of panic to answer, shook her head. Her skin felt loose, then tight, then loose again as though it considered sloughing off her, leaving her a creature of naked muscle and bone.

“Well, interesting things happen. Time and space can bend. Laws of conservation of matter suspend, or seem to, as your extra matter is released into the aether. And young women turn into mice.”

He gave the knob a final twist and held the doll to Fiona’s face. The air around her shimmered and glowed, and she couldn’t move. She tried to shut her eyes, but the afterimage of the doll’s glowing eyes seared into her brain, and she couldn’t escape. Her dress became looser and her corset expanded. She tried to cover herself, but she changed too fast, shrinking into the dress itself, which sank to the floor with a satin poof! Gray fur covered her like a cloak, and she pulled it around her until it became part of her. It allowed her to dart through the walls and tunnels of fabric, always seeking a darker spot, a tighter, safer place to hide, especially once the ceiling started to collapse in bursts, then let up, then punch down again.

The part of Fiona’s brain that retained its human faculties realized with a jolt of terror that Pierce was trying to catch her. Or kill her. Either way, she didn’t want him to succeed.

Curses rained about her like the grabs through the fabric.

“Damnation, she’s fast…”

She recognized she would be better off letting instinct take over, so she did so, allowing her little feet to carry her in a zigzag pattern and urging them to stick to places where the fabric made tunnels, and so she would be less visible going through it. Finally she found the spot where her dress ran out, but bookshelf met floor. She didn’t know if she would be a copper-colored mouse because of her fur, so she paused to look back at Pierce. He had picked up her dress and shook it, so she moved as quickly and quietly as she could away from him.

The smells of the ballroom drew her, and although she didn’t want to go, she couldn’t help herself. She had to find her mother, after all. What if something happened to her because she’d been in the house with the doll, too?

Vinni paused on the flimsy catwalk and held up a hand. Cat stopped just in time to not run into her. Vinni could feel Cat at her back, her solid mass both comforting and smothering.

Vinni pushed aside the thoughts. Now that they were on their mission, emotions had no place in her field of awareness. What she needed to focus on was the thick darkness below. Her eyesight had adjusted, and she had excellent night vision, so why couldn’t she see what was thirty feet under her? Rafters and other walkways hung around her, but the floor of the warehouse remained shrouded in gloom.

Or was it the absence of light?

“Aether shadow,” Cat breathed into her ear, and Vinni nodded. If someone isolated aether and stabilized it long enough, in certain forms it would pull the light from around it and concentrate it, leaving a thick shadow, like a little cloud. But who would be working with enough aether to produce what looked like black smoke?

Yes, they’d found their target. Now they only needed to discover the identity and aim of the aether manipulator.

The catwalk shifted, and the metal ground against stone. Both she and Cat stilled, each of them barely breathing. Vinni looked around for the source of the noise, which had echoed in the cavernous space to the point of obscuring its origin. After what felt like forever, but which only amounted to ten counted breaths, Vinni stepped forward. The catwalk, obviously designed for just one person, slid down a couple of inches. Vinni and Cat both dropped to their knees so they could hold on to something in the absence of a hand rail.

“Go back,” Vinni mouthed. She didn’t say Cat was the heavier of the two of them, almost six feet of solid muscle. Cat nodded and retreated until she reached the platform they’d embarked from to get a better look at the warehouse’s contents. She backed into the shadows, the only indication she was there the barest glimmer of light reflected in her eyes. Vinni crept forward.

“What are you doing?” The words hissed through the air, imperceptible to anyone who didn’t know her and Cat’s secret language of breath. Vinni motioned with her hand for Cat to hush. She’d spotted a ladder that would hopefully allow her to climb below the shadow line and peek at what was beneath.

But as she inched forward, the metal bridge dropped another few inches. She looked ahead rather than down, and now that she had reached the midpoint, saw that the bolts had been loosened where the catwalk was supposed to be secured to the wall beside another platform.

No, there were no bolts, and the metal had scratched marks into the concrete of the surface to which it was supposedly attached.

Vinni dug in with her fingers, ignoring the sharp pain, as the brackets continued to slide down the wall with a screech, the metal groaning. While she couldn’t claim a lithe debutante figure, Vinni certainly didn’t have the sort of bulk to warrant the catwalk’s failure, which meant one thing.

She and Cat had walked into a trap. Well, climbed from an alley on to the roof and then into a window of a trap, but still. They were in trouble.

There was no time to turn around, so she pushed herself to her feet and ran as fast as she could, making a leap when she thought she could reach the ladder. The force of her jump made the catwalk finally fail completely, and it crashed to the ground, hitting other objects with a variety of noises that would have delighted her had she not been counting on stealth. She didn’t have time to enjoy the jolly smashes. Rather, she reached full-length and got one hand on the ladder. She slammed into it with the weight of her body and hooked an arm over another rung, wrapping her legs around it as well.

The noises from the crash subsided after one more tinkle of something glass, and Vinni hung there, waiting to catch her breath and for her heart to stop pounding in her ears. She guessed some of her fingers had been cut, judging from the wet slickness between her right hand and the rung she clung to, but she kept herself from noticing more. She looked over her shoulder and caught Cat’s wide-eyed look. Her partner, too shocked to utter anything, made a hand signal—what now?

Vinni shrugged. She had to figure out what direction to take—up, where there was hopefully another way to get to their ropes and therefore their escape, or down, where danger lay.

Or would this be her chance to get away from the neo-Pythagoreans?

Her mind was made up by the crack-whoosh of a door opening below. Of course they wouldn’t be lucky enough for the falling catwalk to go unnoticed. At least the aether shadow kept anyone from seeing her. Even without it, she’d be near invisible in her brick-colored jacket, pantaloons, mask, and now-shredded gloves, all designed to camouflage her in dark surroundings made from Terminus’s favorite building material.

Up it was, then. She stifled a grunt as her muscles protested moving after having hung so tightly. A glance over her shoulder and down made her climb faster, albeit still silently. Now a glow suffused the edges of the room, pairs of orange splotches at what would be man-height that shone through the aether fog, which—oh, cripes!—was dissipating. The edges of the fallen catwalk came into view, and Vinni’s right hand met air—the end of the ladder. She jerked her attention away from what was below and hoisted herself on to the platform, barely stopping to catch her breath before crouching and trying the knob of the door in the wall.

Unlocked! But if this was a trap, not just another one of several old warehouses, whose owners never bothered to keep in good repair, how smart was it to keep going? Should she find another way across?

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and concentrated. The cult had trained her in her one gods-given special ability, but she hated to use it. She’d seen the price extracted by the gods on others who didn’t use their gifts wisely—Uncle Dross, for example, who had descended into madness and drink. But this was a case of survival.

Forgive me, she thought and stilled her mind, calling forth a vision of a light shining through a gray cloud, like on a rainy day just before the sun breaks through. If it had a feeling, the ability came from the base of her skull, which tightened, inside and outside. The outline of a dark hand appeared in the middle of the cloud and clenched into a fist.

Vinni leaped back as the door was flung open. If she’d been standing where she’d been a moment before, it would’ve sent her flying off the platform. As it was, she grabbed the person who, not expecting the door to meet no resistance, stumbled out and over the edge of the platform. He clung to the doorknob, his feet in their shiny boots dangling in midair. His black eyes met Vinni’s, and she tried not to smile back. No, he grimaced under his white beard.

Automaton!

She pulled a large knife from her boot and brought it down on the creature’s wrist. The blade severed the cables and passed through the joint. The automaton’s eyes glowed orange, and it swung its other arm around to catch her, but its fist met air as it tumbled to the room below.

Vinni hadn’t let go of the vision, and now the hand beckoned her forward. She maneuvered around the door and entered a room that looked like an office. She couldn’t resist one last look at the floor below. A man’s voice floated up to her.

“Good, you got them. Oh, oh no. You lost your hand, you silly creature. No, that’s damage from a blade.” Then a piercing whistle. “Guards! There’s an intruder in the building.”