Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

Two spiders were just finishing off the hinges on the door to Thad’s wagon when they arrived. The door fell off, and a swarm of spiders poured in through the opening. Rage poured over Thad, and he actually pulled ahead of Sofiya. Beside the wagon, Kalvis was bucking and stomping. Havoc spiders were trying to crawl up his legs, and he was shaking them off to trample them. A little boy’s scream came from inside the wagon, and Thad’s heart stopped.

“I have Niko,” he shouted. “Get the horse!” And he dove into the wagon without waiting for a reply.

Inside, Nikolai was backed up against the wardrobe. Spiders covered his face and body. Thad bellowed something inarticulate and bolted for him. He tore a havoc spider off with each hand and flung them away, then grabbed two more and two more. Nikolai continued to scream and the sound put Thad right back in Power’s laboratory, and this time, this time, no one was going to die because he hadn’t arrived in time. But every time he pulled a spider off, another one crawled up to take its place. Nikolai screamed and screamed. Thad ripped spiders off with his hands, crushed them with his feet, and still they came. He grabbed the water pitcher and dowsed the spiders with it. The ones on Nikolai’s body made spitting noises and dropped motionless to the floor, but others leaped to take their places and now the pitcher was empty. Still Nikolai screamed. Dante leaped onto Nikolai’s shoulder and flung spiders away with his powerful beak. Thad didn’t know what to do except keep pulling.

“I’ve got you, Niko!” he said. “I won’t let them-”

And then the spiders fled. As one, they ran down Nikolai’s body, out the door, and away. Nikolai stopped screaming. He stood there, dripping wet, his mechanical face and too-human eyes staring up at Thad in disbelief for a long moment.

Dante jumped to his perch. “Bless my soul.”

Thad grabbed Nikolai by both shoulders, and a small, stupid part of him noticed that Nikolai was indeed taller. “Are you all right?”

He looked at Thad for another moment, then slowly nodded. “They didn’t hurt me. They just crawled on me. What were they?”

“They didn’t hurt you at all?” Weak with relief and unwilling to examine that relief too closely, Thad checked over Nikolai, but found nothing wrong-no tears or gouges out of him, nothing missing. No problems at all.

Dante coughed up a spider leg. It clattered to the floor. “Death!” he said with satisfaction. “Doom!”

“I was so scared,” Nikolai said. “I thought they were going to kill me.”

“They didn’t,” Thad said. “And…and you can’t really die anyway, so…” Why was he saying this?

“You’re supposed to embrace me,” Nikolai said.

“Am I?” Thad said.

“That’s what-”

“A papa does, yes.” Thad sighed. The worst of the tension had lifted and things were returning to…well, he couldn’t call it normal. Usual, perhaps.

“So, then?” Nikolai held up his arms.

Thad suddenly didn’t know how to respond. He felt uncomfortable again, and caught between Nikolai the machine and Nikolai the little boy. His brass hand felt heavy. And then something else struck him. What had happened to Sofiya and Kalvis?

“Wait here!” he said to Nikolai, and dashed to the door to look outside.

Sofiya and Kalvis were gone.

Sofiya Ivanova Ekk saw the spiders abruptly rush away. A few remaining ones, injured by Kalvis’s hooves, tried to flee as well, but only managed a slow drag. Inside the wagon, Nikolai’s screams ended. Sofiya, her dress torn and her feet sore, gave Kalvis a split-second check to see if he were all right-he had a few nicks and scratches, but otherwise seemed fine-before running to the wagon. Inside, Thad was kneeling in front of little Nikolai to examine him.

“They didn’t hurt me,” Nikolai was saying. “They just crawled on me. What were they?”

The little one was safe. Kalvis was safe. Sofiya wanted to collapse with relief, but she didn’t dare, not yet. The spiders were getting away, and she couldn’t let this chance pass by. Thad could stay with Nikolai.

With Maddie still clinging to her shoulder, Sofiya leaped onto Kalvis’s saddle broad back and he bolted forward, following the trail of mechanical spiders. The brass horse leaped over tent ropes and wagon tongues and once even a person. Sofiya followed his movements with ease. It was both frightening and exhilarating, having these strange abilities. It was as if someone had handed her the rule book for the universe. Every object around her was reduced to its component mathematics at a glance-weight, volume, inertia, trajectory. She could calculate with a razor’s precision where to throw, how high to jump, when to shove. Her own body had become a series of levers and wedges. The new strength was nearly more than she could contain.

But contain it she did. The world was also full of enticements: elements to combine into new configurations; little parts to build into large engines; small ideas to expand into enormous ideas. She didn’t dare explore them. This new precision of body and intellect also etched into her mind the memory of looking down at the mangled body of her dear sister, the awful look of pain as Olenka awoke, the terrible feeling of fear and betrayal in her sibling’s eyes. Sofiya remembered every bit of black, crushing guilt, and she swore that she would fight the clockworker fugues from then on. She wasn’t always successful. Kalvis. The energy pistol. Thad’s hand. Nikolai’s head. She remembered very little of the building fugues, and Thad swore she hadn’t hurt him during the latest one, but she spied the bruises, and she noted him limping when he thought she couldn’t see, and the thought that she could have done worse made her shake inside.

Thad had saved her more than once, and even though she had similarly saved him, she felt guilty for bringing him into Mr. Griffin’s web in the first place. Thad was a fine man, very handsome with his dark hair and whipcord build, and the clockwork part of her mind had taken a thrill out of putting her hands on him during the operation, feeling how his muscles and bones went together. She had initially gotten a perverse pleasure in teasing him, tricking what she had taken to be a foolish, cruel man who hunted clockworkers into working with one. For one. But the more time she had spent with him and the more she had learned about him, the more she understood him, saw that his misery was similar to her own. It was painful to watch the way he tried to keep a wall between himself and Nikolai.

Nikolai. He had also started as a way to annoy Thad. At first she had found amusing the little automaton’s insistence that they were a family, and she had gone out of her way to push him and Thad together, force the man who killed clockworkers to confront a clockwork invention. How she had laughed over that! As a clockworker herself, she would have no trouble remaining aloof, seeing Nikolai as nothing but a machine. How foolish. But at least she had come to accept the way she now saw Nikolai. Thad was another matter.

When Sofiya was not much older than Nikolai looked, she had found a thin, starving tabby cat lost in a wheat field and brought it home. Papa had refused to let it in the house and told Sofiya to drown it in the river. But Sofiya took the cat to the barn, and when Papa saw her catch and kill a rat, he grudgingly allowed her to stay-as long as she continued to catch and kill rodents. Never, however, was anyone allowed to feed her or waste time playing with her. Some months later, Sofiya caught Papa rubbing the cat’s ears and slipping her some scraps from the slop bucket. Papa huffed away to finish feeding the pigs when he noticed Sofiya watching him, and neither of them mentioned the incident. But two years later, when a horse accidentally kicked the cat and killed her, Papa hid in the barn and wouldn’t come out for more than an hour. Thad reminded Sofiya of Papa.