Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

Focus.

A slim girl—a girl with strong arms and no chest to speak of—might lift herself out of the carriage onto the roof, if she had a screwdriver to open the filter on one of the ventilation hatches. So long as the train was not going through any tunnels and so long as it was travelling relatively slowly, she might then make her way along the roof to the engine, and slip back in via the roof maintenance hatch, then rejoin the train proper in Abel Jasmine’s study via the connecting door.

The bell rings. Time to go.

“Just got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right?” Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely’s that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught. People just insert whatever they think you must be doing, and—having lied to themselves on your behalf—are disinclined to check up on you. She turns.

Clarissa Foxglove bends down, quite unselfconsciously, to pick up a spool of copper wire. Edie Banister, caught in amber, slides past her gingerly, trying extremely hard not to feel the rasp of cotton on cotton or the contours of Clarissa’s buttocks against her hips. Edie hears a faint, earthy chuckle, or it might be a pleased yelp, and shakes her head to clear it.

Really need to corner her later and discuss this. It’s very distracting. The whole thing needs discussion. Resolution. Needs to be laid out. We should bare our thoughts.

Um. Mm-hm. Upon a soft cushion…

Fortunately, Clarissa Foxglove’s backside is now twenty foot away and the door to the companionway and the hatch is ahead of her. The other girls are heading in the opposite direction.

That’s good, Edie tells herself sternly. That is not a pity. It is the whole point of the plan. I do not want to be wedged in here with Clarissa Foxglove.

God, I want to be wedged in here with Clarissa Foxglove .

But not now.

She levers open the hatch, and air roars in. Her ears pop. The rest of the train won’t notice, though, because Edie has already closed the hermetically sealed doors between carriages.

This stretch of the line—which she has selected carefully—is somewhere in Cambridgeshire. There are no hills to pass through, and the winding track restrains the speed of the train somewhat. It’s a gloomy, desolate stretch of fenland, though, with very little topographically between it and Siberia except shivering reindeer and mournful bears—so it’s bitterly cold. Well, nothing for it. She had considered wearing two sets of underclothes for today’s shift, but that would have made her sweat more, and thus increased the chill. She thought about concealing at least a jumper here, but reasoned that it would be discovered. The distance is comparatively short. She will be cold, yes. She will not be frozen.

She grasps the sides of the hatchway and lifts herself up.

Edie’s first impression is of having accidentally coincided with a bucket of cold water hurled upward from the carriage in front. The air is a liquid, clinging and chilly, filled with moisture. It takes away her sense of smell, flattens her skin against her bones. She nearly lets go and falls back into the train.

No.

She heaves again, and flies up into the airstream, catches the breeze, and blows over backwards, rolling towards the edge of the train. She flails, and catches the hatch cover, then draws herself to a crouch. Her hand is cut across the fingers, not deeply, but jaggedly. She’s covered in soot. And the alarming numbness in her fingers tells her that she has underestimated the chill.

She moves into the wind. Bloody-minded, much? Yes , she replies to herself. Yes, I am.

Half a minute later, she is standing on the next carriage, bare feet padding on the slick surface, toes gripping rivets and bolt-heads, hands reaching for ladder rails and corners, ventilation chimneys and antennae. Twenty seconds more, the next, and then the engine is in sight, long, sinister, strange, and dark. And what the bloody hell is that huge black thing blotting out the sky? Edie drops flat, and a scourging devil’s hand slams over her head, spiny fingers and thorns, then another and another, one catching her back and scratching, tearing at her.

Ow, ow, ow. And blast, I like this chemise. Buggery bugger. A chunk of her hair is gone, too, pulled out in a handful, but she has at least identified the enemy: a copse, hawthorn and oak, gnarled branches clasping.

And now she can’t undo the hatch. Her fingers are too cold, and she has no lever. She left the screwdriver she used to open the one in the companionway behind. Careless.

So. The way back is painful, the way forward, hard. Choose.

Edie’s fingers clamp around the handle, and she heaves. Slowly, stiffly, it comes up. Mercifully this one has no filter, just a shutter which lifts up, so… and then it gives way entirely and almost throws her on her back again.

She lets herself down into the shadows. The chamber is lit in red, covered in lights and buttons: the generator room, turning steam power into electricity for the code machines. She touches nothing, sees herself reflected in the door panel and almost screams: red light behind her, hair mussed up and flyaway, blood on her face and eyes like holes in a mask. She looks like her own ghost, if ghosts can be mussed.

Out through the door, ten steps to the back of Abel Jasmine’s office. Is there an alarm? Edie doesn’t know. Certainly, there is one on the other door. But did he consider the possibility of infiltration from this end? Perhaps not. How would they get here? Parachute onto a moving train? Drop from a bridge, perhaps—but to do so without being seen and awaited? Academic, anyway—she’s come this far. She checks it once with her eyes and—thinking of the Keeper—with her fingertips, too. No wires. No bulges. No secret switches. Surely there should be something?

She wonders whether there’s just a bomb on the other side, then reasons that Abel Jasmine or the Keeper or someone must come through here all the time to check on the generator, and it is therefore unlikely to explode without warning. And then, too, that would run counter to her perceptions about the strategic construction of the train: everything runs to preserve this room, not destroy it… though no doubt there is a mechanism for that, in extremis …

Enough. She opens the door.

Nothing happens. No klaxons, no furious shouts. So. She gropes along the wall, finds the desk, switches on the lamp.

“You owe me five shillings, Abel,” Amanda Baines says cheerfully. “She made it all the way.”

They are sitting in the shadows on a leather couch, Abel Jasmine in his dressing gown, and Amanda Baines with a jaunty sailor’s outfit complete with captain’s hat. It is not the kind of outfit you would go to sea in. It brings new meaning to the description “saucy tar.”

“Bloody hell, girl,” Amanda Baines says, “we need to get you cleaned up.”

“Good work, all the same, Miss Banister,” Mr. Jasmine says. “Very good, indeed.” He smiles.

“I’m not in trouble?” Edie asks.

“Oh, God, yes, of the most frightful kind. But no, you are not being disciplined. You are being promoted and transferred. You may shortly regard that as very big trouble indeed. But you passed what you may wish to think of as an informal test. You formulated a plan, acquired information, timetabled the whole thing, and refused to be distracted by… shall we say, physical blandishments?”

Edie blushes from the roots downwards.

“So now, my dear, you are moving up in the world. However, that’s tomorrow. Today, we need to get that cut seen to and—good Lord, whatever happened to your hair?”

“A tree,” says a husky voice from the doorway. “The Bracknell Woods.” And there is Clarissa Foxglove, in her dressing gown. “I waited until they were gone,” she tells Edie, “and the Ely bridge nearly took my head off altogether.”