Steven Harper - The Doomsday Vault

“Oh.” The compliment brought a warm feeling to Gavin’s chest, and he flashed Alice a smile. “Thanks.”

Alice seemed embarrassed, and she quickly turned to examine a pile of machinery. “That’s an unusual arrangement for a violin case, I have to say,” she said. “Don’t most players carry theirs by the handle?”

“Not on an airship,” he said. “You want both hands free.”

“You mentioned a ship,” Alice said. “I assumed you were a sailor. But you’re an airman.”

“Was,” he said. “Flying is the most wonderful profession in the whole damned world, pardon my language. You glide above the clouds and everything is fresh and fine and pure. You can see the whole world, and music carries a hundred miles.”

“How did you come to London, then?”

He told her while they poked through the wreckage of the laboratory, though he deliberately left out the part about Madoc Blue and his harsh hands. Blue still nipped and tore at Gavin’s clothes at night, and behind Blue stood the first mate with his heavy whip, and Gavin often woke up soaked in terror sweat. Even talking around it made his heart jerk. It was difficult enough to tell Alice about the deaths of Tom and Captain Naismith and the loss of the Juniper. As he spoke, his hand began to ache, and he realized his fist was clenched around the nightingale in his pocket, though the longer he spoke, the more he began to relax. It felt strangely good to tell someone else about it.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Ennock,” she said when he finished. “Perhaps when we’re done here, we can find a way to get you back to Boston.”

Hope touched Gavin. After the pirates and clerk at Boston Shipping and Mail and the kidnappers, the idea that someone was willing to help him brought an unexpected lump to his throat.

Click meowed and batted at a pile of metal in a side niche. It was the shell of another automaton, painted black and white, as if it were wearing a butler’s coat. Two light-bulbs formed eyes, and a metal grate gave it a sort of mouth on an otherwise blank brass face. On a table beside it lay a jumble of parts-gears, pistons, wheels, and other bits Gavin didn’t understand. Click meowed again.

Alice came over to investigate. “What is it?”

The cat swiped at the automaton with metal claws.

“What’s that on its side?” Gavin said. “Looks like writing.”

They both leaned in. Inscribed on the torso in graceful script were the words Love, Aunt Edwina. Alice went pale.

“What is it?” Gavin asked, afraid she was going to faint.

“She wrote that on every one of the automatons she sent me. And look-there’s a diagram on the inside of his front panel.”

“What do we do?”

“Aunt Edwina meant me to find him. She assumed that her attackers wouldn’t notice him or wouldn’t know how he goes together. Clearly Aunt Edwina wanted me to assemble him so he could tell me more.”

“This is the same woman,” Gavin reminded her, “who imprisoned me in a tower and set deadly traps.”

“Yes,” Alice said. She picked up a wrench from a scattering of tools on the floor. “And I’m assuming she had reasons for all of that. The traps, for example, may have been set to keep out whoever destroyed this place.”

“They didn’t work.”

“Not everything goes as planned, Mr. Ennock. Hand me that spanner, would you?”

He did. “Let’s work out what happened so far, then. First, your aunt comes down with the clockwork plague, but instead of dying, she becomes a clockworker.”

“And she lives as a clockworker longer than any clockworker I’ve ever heard of.” Alice examined a gear, discarded it, picked up another.

“She vanishes-or seems to,” Gavin went on. “Which triggers a provision in her will that leaves you her estate. Does that make you a wealthy woman?”

“No.” Alice opened the back of the automaton’s head and peered inside. “The memory wheels seem to be intact. That’s helpful. The house isn’t inhabitable, as you can see, and it will take months, perhaps years, to sell the land. And since I’m not technically nobility yet, I will have to pay exorbitant taxes on the sale. Now that I think about it, I may have to pay taxes on it now.”

“You’re not technically nobility? What does that mean?”

“My father is a baron, but I won’t be a baroness until I inherit his title. And before you interrupt with the question you Americans always seem to ask, Mr. Ennock, there are no men in my family to inherit the title. In such a case, the daughter inherits. But until that happens, I’m not nobility, and I must pay taxes.”

Gavin stared. Alice was the daughter of a baron? “Incredible,” he whispered.

“What all of this means,” Alice continued, “is that I may have to pay an enormous inheritance tax on this estate, and Aunt Edwina’s solicitor was extremely lax in failing to mention it.”

“Uh, sorry I brought it up,” Gavin said, still impressed. “Anyway, your aunt disappears, leaving you an estate full of traps. Which brings us to the first question-why would she leave you a house that tried to kill you?”

“I said before that I don’t think she was trying to kill me,” Alice said. “I think she was trying to keep someone else out. It worked, but only for a while-someone got down here. The traps didn’t keep me out, either, but they weren’t intended to. Aunt Edwina knew I would outsmart them.”

“She must have a lot of confidence in you,” Gavin said.

“Presumably.”

“In the meantime, she also had me kidnapped and put in that tower. Why?”

Alice unwound a coil of copper wire and snipped off a length. “I think she wanted me to let you out so you could help defeat the traps and help me take the house. It’s certainly what happened.”

“But why ?”

“That I don’t know. Clockworkers do go mad. Now, where did I put that piston lubricant?”

Gavin watched her work, her movements confident and quick. She looked a little older than he was-somewhere in her early twenties-and he wanted to ask her exact age, but that would have been really rude, and he didn’t want to offend her. Hell, more than anything he wanted to impress her, but what would impress this woman?

“Uh… Miss Michaels?”

Alice had stuck her head into the automaton’s chest cavity. She withdrew and blinked at him. A bit of grease smudged her cheek. “Yes?”

“Er…” His entire face felt hot, and he realized he was blushing. Cursing himself for an idiot, he plunged ahead anyway. “Would you like some music while you work?”

She blinked at him again, and he looked away, scuffing the stone floor with one foot. What kind of fool would-

“I would love some music, Mr. Ennock. Do you know any Mozart? I find his music focuses my mind on mathematics.”

“Uh.. ”

“Something from The Marriage of Figaro, perhaps.” She hummed a few bars of a familiar tune.

“Oh, yeah-I know those songs. I didn’t know Mozart was the composer.” He set bow to strings and played. Despite the pain in his fingers, every note came out sweet and quick, like flavored ice on a summer day. Maybe it was the time he had spent in the tower with nothing to do but practice, but his playing seemed to have improved lately. He didn’t think he could have played that hellish song the automatons had laid out before he’d been captured.

Alice went back to work, and she seemed to be going even more quickly now. Gavin slipped from one song to the next, always keeping with Mozart, the famous clockworker composer, while Click watched. Their work melded, music and science melting together with every twist of Alice’s wrenches and every slide of Gavin’s bow. In what felt like very little time, Alice was tightening a final bolt on the automaton’s chest plate. She straightened, and Gavin heard her back pop even over “Open Your Eyes.” He stopped playing.