Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

“I want to come!” Nikolai protested.

“Bless my soul,” Dante said.

“No arguing.” Thad jammed on his hat and stuffed the map into his long leather coat. It felt good to be suiting up again, taking control of his life again. “I can’t afford to keep track of you. If you run into trouble, go see Mama Berloni or the Tortellis.”

“Am I forbidden from attending?” Sofiya asked archly.

Thad held out his arm for Dante. “Do as you like. We have to hurry.”

Riding Kalvis would draw too much attention, so they left the wagon and crossed the Field of Mars to the line of carriages for hire that always waited in front of the barrack, all of the drivers in their big coats and hats and beards. Thad, remembering what Sofiya had said last time, spotted the same driver who had taken them to the market by checking for the way he combed his beard.

“Vanka!” Thad called, and every driver started shouting at them.

“No, no, no!” yelled “their” Vanka. “I have driven them before, and they love my fine cab. Of course they will ride with me. For a much higher price because of all the mud from last time.”

“We paid for you to clean your cab,” Sofiya countered. “We will pay you-”

“No.” Thad flipped the surprised Vanka a pair of coins. “Another time I will play the game, Vanka. Today, we are in a great hurry. I will give you two more of those if you get us to this address within twenty minutes, and I promise to tell everyone that you argued all day about it.”

Nineteen terrifying minutes later, they pulled up at the address. Thad shakily paid Vanka the promised money, which also paid him to wait for them. They were standing in front of a nondescript building of stone, three stories tall, with nothing to indicate what was inside. Other similar buildings flanked it. A set of railroad tracks ran behind them. The street here was paved, and they were some distance from the river. There was little traffic of any kind, and no automatons.

“Doom,” said Dante. “Help!”

“Quiet, birdbrain,” Thad ordered. He trotted down the alley beside the building, searching the cobblestones until he found an actual grating over a hole, the first such thing he had seen since coming to Saint Petersburg. It wasn’t even fastened down. He flipped it aside with his brass hand and knelt for a better look.

“Are we going in?” Sofiya asked at his elbow.

“Griffin will have laid traps, if he’s down there,” he said. “Unless it’s a gingerbread house, and what are the odds of having two of those in a row?”

“Gingerbread house?”

“A technical term.” He tied a silk rope to Dante’s leg and lowered him upside down into the hole. Dante suffered this treatment without comment.

“What are you doing?” Sofiya asked.

“Look,” Thad said. “We won’t get very far with me explaining everything I do. If you want to come, you have to do what I say, without question.”

“Ha!” she snorted.

“Truth, Sofiya.” Thad continued lowering Dante. “I’m not saying it as a joke or to force you to obey just because you’re a woman. If I say something like jump or run or close your eyes, and you pause to ask questions, you could die. We both could.”

“Hm. Agreed, then.”

The rope went slack in Thad’s hand. He pulled Dante back up. His brass hand seemed to be working perfectly now, with no delay, though he couldn’t feel anything in it except vibrations or changes in temperature. He barely heard the little zing the gears made when they moved anymore. So much had been happening, he’d barely had time to think about his hand, and it had seemed to have wormed its way into his everyday life, becoming a normal part of it, without Thad’s much noticing.

Dante emerged from the hole, dangling upside down from the rope. “Traps?” Thad asked.

The parrot whistled. “Bless my soul.”

“Let’s go.” Thad started climbing down a series of rungs bolted to the side of the tunnel, with the parrot on his shoulder.

“How do you know there are no traps?” Sofiya asked.

“If Dante had seen any, he would have said something that started with the letter D. Or he would have set the traps off.”

“Doom,” Dante said sadly. “Death, despair.”

Thad reached the bottom and found himself in a long, low tunnel that smelled rotten and rank. He was something of a sewer connoisseur, and this one was poorly built-bad bricks, cracking mortar, uneven flooring. Within a decade, it would collapse and probably bring down the buildings above it. Would the tsar care if he knew? The man was such a mix. He seemed to love his children, but he didn’t care about other people’s children. He spent money freely, which helped many businesses, but he collected taxes heavily, which hurt them just as badly. He wanted to free the serfs, but only out of economic necessity, not out of compassion for their lot.

Thad shook his head. This wasn’t the time for such musings. He lit a candle and gave it to Dante to hold while Sofiya clambered down, mindful of her skirts.

“Which way?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Thad admitted. “This is the hard part, really. We could search for days without finding any-”

“Spider,” Sofiya said, pointing.

Thad’s knife leaped into his hand, and this time it connected. The spider, which was clinging to the wall about ten feet away, stiffened and dropped to the mucky floor with the blade sticking out of its back. It was the size of a small house cat. Sofiya ran over to pick it up.

“Poor thing,” she crooned.

“Is it dead?” Thad asked, pleased that it had worked this time.

“A strange question from someone who doesn’t see Nikolai as alive. You have tools, do you not? Bring them here with the light.”

Thad obeyed and watched while Sofiya prized the spider open with his little screwdriver. “What are you up to?”

She handed him his knife back with a wide smile that carried a hint of chill and held the spider close to the light. “I am making a few changes. Your knife pierced the back, but only knocked its memory wheels askew. Give me a moment.”

Her quick fingers worked at the spider’s insides. She muttered to herself. Thad tensed, wondering if she would go into a full-blown fugue. But in a few moments, she shut the spider’s perforated access door and pressed a switch. It twitched and came to life in her hands.

“Pretty lady,” Dante muttered around the candle he held in his beak.

The knife leaped back into Thad’s hand. “What did you just do?”

“She obeys me now.” Sofiya put the spider on her shoulder. It bobbed up and down with little squeaking noises. “You have your pet, and I have mine. I believe I will name her Avtomashtika.”

“Little automatic?” Thad translated. “You have to be joking. It should be something smashing like Mechanica or Arachne .”

“Avtomashtika,” Sofiya repeated.

“Everyone’s going to call her Maddie,” Thad said. “Or at least, I will.”

“Maddie the spider? What kind of name is that?”

“Better than Avtomashtika. ” He took his tools back and put them away. “I’m actually glad it showed up.”

“She,” Sofiya said airily. “If Nikolai can be a he, Maddie can be a she.”

“That makes as much sense as anything in my life does.” Thad sighed. “At any rate, I’m glad for it-”

“Her.”

“-because it means we’re on the right track. Come on.”

They moved slowly down the tunnel, ducking their heads to avoid hitting the low ceiling. Thad kept a sharp eye out for trip wires, suspiciously clean sections of flooring, areas of wall that looked too new-or too old. Once, he found a guillotine-like device cleverly designed to drop from the ceiling. Another time, he stopped Sofiya from touching a trigger connected to a series of gas jets that would have ignited a ball of flame designed to incinerate them both. She examined the latter with interest, but Thad pulled her along. He felt in his element now, in control, the hunter going after unsuspecting prey. His senses felt heightened, and he was aware of everything around him-the rustle of Sofiya’s skirts, the grinding creak of Dante’s gears, the heat from the candle near his head, the drip of water from the stones, the dampness in the air. Every step brought him closer to Griffin, closer to finding the truth.