Karen Memory

Chapter Twenty-four

We didn’t have no trouble beating the submersible back to Rapid — turns out there’s some advantages to airships — and I’d like to say it was a pleasant flight, but in all honesty I don’t remember a damned thing about it. Priya and me lay down on the couch for just a minute, watching the gray outside the window all featureless as fog. Which I guess it was, after a fashion. Or rather, fog is clouds.

And the next thing I knew, Merry was crouched down beside me and Priya, shaking us both awake. It was still daylight and the windows was still gray, but there was some texture to it now. As I watched — as we dropped lower, I guessed — the gray broke into streamers and billows across the top of the window, and then we was low enough to see the dirty cotton-wool texture of the cloud bellies up close. I wanted to reach out and touch ’em. They looked solid as ice, but I knew if I put a hand out it’d be just mist and cold between my fingers.

“We’re landing,” Merry said, somewhat unnecessarily, and left us with a pot of coffee while we rubbed our eyes and sorted ourselves. There was clothing laid out, all of it for a man twice my size, but beggars can’t be choosers and there was a hank of cord to use for belts. I tied on a pair of Captain Colony’s trousers over my wind- and rope-shredded bloomers and felt much better, all in all.

I’d fallen asleep with the Marshal’s silver dollar in the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Priya’s. It was turning into a kind of talisman for me, and I tucked it back into my bindings — but not before sneaking it a little kiss. Priya saw, I noticed when I turned around, and I felt a little apprehension knot in my breast, but she just winked and smiled and went back to struggling a comb through her hair.

We had time. When I looked out the window now, I saw Rapid all spread out below us — ragged buildings and people small as ants — and so I led her to the window so we could both watch while I combed her hair. I braided it good and tight — a French braid — and then she did mine in a five-strand weave that used up most of the length and got it right up out of my way. Comfortable — and pretty, too.

By then the Marshal was awake, and Merry came back with sandwiches and cookies. The cookies and the bread was stale; the meat was potted; there weren’t no green but pickles. I ate it like I’d never seen food before.

Amazing what sleep and food will do for you. By the time the little cigar and matchboxes below turned into proper houses and shops and men was running out on to the airfield to lash Captain Colony’s airship down, I felt almost human again.

“You think Bantle’s back here already?” Priya asked me.

I bit my lip. “Probably came back with Scarlet. I think we might have seen him, if he was on that Octopus.”

* * *

We hired a wagon to bring us back to the mayor’s house — Priya and me might have been able to walk it, but it wouldn’t have been pretty — and it turned out to be a good thing, too. Because when we got up there, we could tell right away that something was wrong. There was constables going in and out of the front door, which was standing open, and neighbors finding any sort of excuse at all to be out in the street twisting one another’s ears off with gossip. Marshal Reeves touched the teamster on the shoulder, showed him his badge, and asked him to keep driving. The teamster shook the reins over his mules and didn’t speak a word.

Men are polite when you slip them a whole silver dollar for a twenty-cent job.

We kept rolling past, and I was proud of myself for managing not to scream when a man and a woman walked up beside the cart as if it was something they did every day and swung up beside us. A second later, and I was glad I hadn’t disgraced myself, because it was Crispin and Miss Francina. Miss Francina was in the plainest dress I’ve ever seen her in, and Crispin was dressed like a laborer in flannel and a canvas coat. They settled in, and the cart kept rolling.“We hoped you’d come back,” Crispin said before I could ask. “Things is bad, Miss Karen.”

I looked at Miss Francina. She nodded, mouth and eyes tight under her bonnet. “Madame’s in jail,” she said. “The mayor too. Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel.”

“Who puts the mayor in jail?!” I asked.

I knew, though. Even before Crispin turned his head and spat. “Peter Bantle.”

“He’s declared martial law,” Miss Francina said. “He’s declared himself mayor.”

“We broke his machine!” I felt betrayed by the whole damn universe. People were supposed to come back to our side when Bantle wasn’t running their thoughts for ’em no more.

“I think he paid off the constables,” Miss Francina said.

“Shit,” I answered. “All that time we spent under one or another of those ungrateful bastards. You’d think it’d count for something.”

She laughed — the sweet, girlish giggle that took ten years off her. “How do you think I got away?”

“The others?” I asked. Merry Lee and Priya were tucked back under the canvas cover, but I could see them leaning forward out of the corner of my eye, straining after every word.

“Beatrice, Effie, and Pollywog are all safe,” Miss Francina said. “We’ve been taking it in turns to watch for you.”

“Where are they?”

“We’ve been staying — well, the Professor knew somebody. He said I was hiding from a mean drunken husband.” She held up her ring finger. A tiny diamond glittered there. “Crispin’s my groom, and Effie and Pollywog are my daughters. We told the Professor’s friend I had another daughter, too, and I was trying to get her away from my husband.”

“What about Bea?”

“Well, that’s my little girl,” Crispin drawled affectedly. “She’s a right fine lady’s maid and don’t you forget it!”

Gravel gritted under the cart wheels. His face fell. “I don’t know how long we can stay there. And I don’t know where Tomoatooah got off to, begging your pardon, Marshal.”

“He got away?” Reeves’ shoulders maybe eased a little under his salt-stained black canvas coat.

“Yessir.”

“Then I ain’t worried about him.”

I was worried, though. “What about Signor?”

“Bea ain’t let him out of her sight.” Crispin nodded, satisfied. “But”—his face creased with worry again as he glanced over his shoulder—“I don’t know what we’re going to say about Priya, if we bring her back.”

“Priya can stay with me,” Merry said.

Marshal Reeves gave the teamster another dollar.

Miss Francina picked at the fingertip of one of her gloves. “We need to start thinking about how to get out of the city. And how we’re getting Madame out of jail.”

“We thought of making for Vancouver,” Crispin said. “We could bail her, but I don’t know if Madame would agree to jump bail.”

“She won’t,” I said.

Miss Francinca nodded, of course. “Madame never ran from anything this side of a Kodiak bear.”

It was the right thing to say. I remembered that damned barn cat and what I’d decided on the Octopus. And I remembered that if we ran there wasn’t nobody to stop Bantle and Standish and Nemo from doing whatever the hell they liked.

And I remembered that the man paying off the teamster was a duly sworn and appointed lawman of the United States and Territories and that he hadn’t revoked his deputizing of me yet. Which made me a duly appointed lawwoman, of sorts.

“The jail they got ’em in. It’s the one in Chinatown?”

“Bantle’s turf,” Crispin said. “Of course.”

“Not just his turf,” replied Merry Lee.

“Ain’t none of us gonna run,” I said. “We’re gonna fight.”

* * *

The thing that stumped me most was what we were going to do to get the sewing machine back. But once Priya and Merry Lee and the Marshal and me explained the complex of problems to the others — this was after we paid off that teamster and left him behind, not anywhere close to anything that might be construed as a destination, and Merry Lee led us through byways to a room in Chinatown where she said nobody on earth was likely to bother us — everybody was agreed that we had to bring the fight to Bantle. And not just to bust Madame out of jail.

“How long do you think it’ll take this submersible to reach us?” Miss Francina asked.

Marshal Reeves huffed through his mustache. “That’d be a question for Captain Colony, I’m afraid. I ain’t no expert on steamship velocities, underwater or otherwise.”

“Is the ship like to be a real problem?” I asked. “I mean, I figure they got the cholera on board, probably in drums of water, right? But all we gotta do is stop those from being shipped to Anchorage.”

“What if they decide to release it here after all?” Crispin asked. “They could just dump it in a cistern down by the docks. Or at one of the cribhouses. Hell, Bantle’s cribhouse. The sailors would cart the infection off to Anchorage inside their intestines, if what you say about them having some kind of … dormant and hibernating … variety is true.”

I bit my lip. They could. And would. And no one the wiser until people started dying in droves.

Priya said, “If their plan needed Bantle to be mayor, then it wasn’t ready to spring yet anyway. We might have rushed them by crashing their party.”

“There’s too much we ain’t privy to,” said Marshal Reeves. He hunkered down under his hat, elbows on knees. In his black duster, he could have passed for a raven skinchanged into a man and none too happy about it. “But that’s the way of it. So we work from what we do know.”

In the pregnant silence that followed, the careful tap on the door of the room that no one was supposed to be tapping on sounded like shotgun blasts. I jumped so high I near came down next to my pants.

The Marshal flicked his duster back from his pistols, but Merry laid a gentling hand on his elbow and he settled some. “If it were the constables,” she said, “they would just have kicked in the door. Besides, I know that knock.”

She was right, it turned out. Because when she unbarred the door and opened it, beyond was Aashini and Tomoatooah. They sidled in, and Merry barred the door once more.

It was getting damned close in that windowless closet, and we had long since run out of places to sit. But after Priya and Aashini had finished hugging each other until I thought their ribs would crack, it transpired that the newcomers had brought a passel of steamed Chinese buns — chicken and vegetables — and a salty sharp sauce to slather on ’em. And they’d brought news, too, though that waited a minute.

I never did find out how Merry got word to Aashini where we were. But I hadn’t understood a single word she said to her countrymen on the way in, neither, so that ain’t too much of a mystery.

We settled again — cheek by jowl, at this point, and wishing for a breeze — and had recommenced arguing about whether to take on Peter Bantle direct like, and how to get our hands on Standish when he was somewhere under the Sound with the Russian Nemo, and whether we should just go bust Madame out of jail with dynamite five minutes ago.

That was when Tomoatooah started telling us about what he’d seen in the last day or so, which he’d spent spying on Bantle. Namely, that as of an hour previous when he’d tracked down Aashini at Merry’s other safe house, he’d just come from Bantle’s temporary lodging, where he was receiving visitors. To wit, Horaz Standish and an older white man, well dressed, answering the description of the Russian Nemo. They must have rushed right there as soon as the Octopus made it into the harbor — and it had to have made better time than Captain Colony thought possible, too.

Tomoatooah’d been with Aashini when the runner had come from Merry Lee informing her of our whereabouts. They had sensibly decided that the best plan was for us to regroup and share information.

A useful fellow, that Tomoatooah. He was only saved from perfection by the fact that he told us these details through a mouthful of half-chewed vegetable bun.

“Where’s the sewing machine?” I asked. “The Singer. The one I used in the fire.”

“Still at the mayor’s house, as far as I know,” said Miss Francina.

Crispin said, “You aren’t plotting what I think you’re plotting, young lady.”

I pasted my most innocent expression on. “If Nemo’s here, his submersible must be in the harbor, right? Ready to pick him up? I can think of one way to end the threat of it sinking ships for good and all. And put paid to any chance of a cholera epidemic, also.”

He spent a long time looking at me, and I spent just as long looking back.

“Besides,” I said. “I bet after all Miss Lizzie’s done to hot-rod it, that Singer can bust down a jailhouse wall pretty well. Don’t you?”

Crispin frowned and stared harder. I smiled more. The standoff only ended because Miss Francina put her chicken bun down on her knee, sighed, and said, “You know if we don’t help her, she’s just going to try to do it by herself.”

Butter wouldn’t have melted in my smile, I swear.

* * *

So it was Marshal Reeves who tore strips of black fabric into masks, which we snipped eyeholes in with Miss Francina’s nail scissors — of course she had them in her reticule. We all tied them over our faces until we looked like a pack of cartoon banditos, and by then it was dark enough that we slunk out into the night. We split up, because that always works out so well for the heroes in the dime novels. Most of our party stayed in Chinatown but took off over the roofs under Merry’s guidance toward the building down by the waterfront where Bantle processed his new-imported indenturees. Apparently, he was staying there until he got his parlor fixed.

My heart bled, I tell you.

Aashini had stayed behind, though Priya had had to twist her arm something awful to make it happen. She had a letter written out by Miss Francina and addressed to Mr. Orange Jacobs, who had been the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Washington until 1875 and who was now the Territory’s Delegate to the Congress of the United States, even if he couldn’t vote there. In this letter was explained everything we’d learned about what Bantle and Nemo and Standish were up to.

So even if we all died, somebody would find out the truth and maybe be able to do something about it.

Merry Lee would have been the member of our company most specialized for second-story work, but as she was occupied, me and the Comache made do. He collected Adobe and Scout from the livery where they was stabled, and we made our way up the hill at a good trot. Not fast enough to draw attention but not slow, either.

The masks stayed inside our collars for now, tucked down like range bandannas.

We left the mares a street away, tied to a hitching rail, and crept around the back of the mayor’s house. Tomoatooah lifted me through the window on the back porch roof while the constables milled about more or less uselessly below, and it was Tomoatooah and me who creeped down the servants’ stair by stepping only on the edges of the risers, where the boards wouldn’t creak. Most of the activity around the place seemed to have halted with suppertime. Though there was guards at each of the doors, the constant in-and-out had stopped and we moved through the shadows of the stairwell unobserved.

I knowed the Singer was in one of the rooms at the back of the house, and it was easy enough to figure out which one because the doorway smelled like rancid smoke. I made a face, but Tomoatooah was right at my shoulder, and we’d been through too much together for me to let him down. Besides, I’d be letting the whole city — the whole nation, and President Hayes to boot! — down if I didn’t go through with it.

Tomoatooah patted me on the shoulder, and I pretended not to notice that his hand was still trembling some from the shock he’d taken. I hoped it would heal up, given time.

The door was already cracked. And the mayor’s staff did a good job keeping the hinges oiled. We eased it open and greased inside.

The room loomed with shadows. There was some light from the outside — up here on the hill, they had gas lamps along the streets and some of the houses had electric arcs to illuminate their patios. One across the wide back lawn actually had a garden party going on — in the middle of winter, no less, with tall perforated stoves for heaters, and those lights glaring off everything. At least it was a clearer night than the day had been. And I reckon it gave those rich folk the chance to show off their furs.

I hoped they all caught pneumonia.

And there, hulking in the center of the room, was Madame’s battered sewing machine.

Maybe it was the darkness, but the armature looked better than I had anticipated by a considerable.

The straps were hanging loose and the hasps were open, like they hadn’t moved a thing since they pried me out of it. It still smelled like a fire in a cathouse, too. But I stepped inside and with Tomoatooah’s help got it strapped on tight — and actually fitted properly this time. We’d decided we would fire up the steam engine first, and then once it came up to pressure we’d crank up the diesel, what with the diesel being louder.

Of course, that’s when we discovered that the reservoirs was dry. Fortunately, there was a kerosene stove in that same room and a pump handle in the kitchen just one hall over. We filled the thing up with kero and water and we primed it and lit it. And then settled in to try to wait real quiet while the water began to heat.

The good news was it didn’t make much noise while it was just coming up to a boil, and to pressure. Tomoatooah took advantage of the twenty minutes or so while I was trapped inside the thing in a rising state of anxiety to sit down in the corner with his rifle across his knees, fold his arms over the rifle, and take a nap. I just tried to stand still and concentrate on my breathing.

Finally the pressure gauge edged up into the green. I turned the valve, and the hiss of released steam and the thump of pistons wakened Tomoatooah. Shaky or not, he was on his feet in an instant.

A good thing, too, because that noise had carried far enough to alert the constables. Their boots was thudding down the hallway toward us while he turned the crank to spark the diesel engine. Their voices echoed through the empty house. We wouldn’t make it to either door without stomping over the lot of ’em.

Just as well that had never been our intention.

I took three running steps toward the full-length windows and crashed through a pair of them, then out onto the porch. Boards splintered under the weight of the armature, so I kept moving, running, bursting through the rail. Tomoatooah was hot on my heels, and we thudded across the frozen ground toward the nearest hedge and a line of safe deep shadows before the first bullets started to cut the air.

Either a sergeant arrived or a cooler head prevailed, because there were only a few gunshots before the constables seemed to realize they were shooting toward a garden party full of rich folk and quit. First time the bourgeoisie ever did much for me.

By then Tomoatooah and me was among the trees, and by the time the constables actually got themselves organized to chase us I was flat out running and he was back up on Scout, leading Adobe — and we was long, long gone.

* * *

We expected a pursuit. But it didn’t materialize immediately, and then we took to side alleys and thought maybe we’d eluded ’em for a bit. Not for long, though, because it turns out sprinting through the streets of Rapid in a sewing machine with one busted, stiff, grinding knee joint and a Red Indian for an outrider does draw something of a crowd. Fortunately, we was moving so fast that we stayed ahead of the interest, and inside of twenty minutes we had made it back to Chinatown.

Just in time to catch up to the gun battle outside the jailhouse. And — not too much later — for the gun battle to catch up to us.

I don’t know whether one of our folk started proceedings prematurely or if Bantle and Standish and their boys looked out the window at the wrong minute and caught the Marshal and Crispin and Miss Francina and Merry and Priya slipping up on them. There wasn’t exactly time to get a straight story out of anybody.

Tomoatooah and me came running up — well, he came running; I came thudding — and we heard the sound of gunfire from three blocks off, just where the plain brick facades started to give way to ornate wrought iron painted in brilliant reds and blues and greens and oranges, marking the boundary of Chinatown. We slowed down, then, under the big banner with the bright gold characters I’d have to ask Priya to read to me, someday.

If we both happened to live through this.

People was sheltering in doorways, huddled behind the corners of buildings, and scrunched down at the bottoms of the walkway wells. Trying to stay out of the line of fire. I could just make out the gray-painted clapboard of the jailhouse up ahead and the bright licks of muzzle flash from inside it.

I figured the odds were good that they hadn’t seen us yet through the dark, and in the noise of that firefight they sure hadn’t heard us. It looked like at least some of our friends had taken shelter in a side street opposite, and I couldn’t tell if they were returning fire. Or even who was over there: from this side, all we could tell was where the people inside the jailhouse were concentrating their fire.

Tomoatooah reined Scout back, which seemed like a good idea to me. I wouldn’t ride down a street toward shooters inside a building if I had any choice at all, either. He sidestepped her into Passage Street, Adobe following, and I went with ’em. We stopped by the side door of a block of apartments, with five or six trash bins lined up beside it. The horses, I will say, was damned calm about that hissing contraption I was piloting, too. They seemed more nervous about the drop down to sidewalk level.

I looked down at my arms, shielded under the steel plates at the front, and sighed. This one was going to be up to me.

I was grateful for all the time Miss Lizzie had put into tinkering with the thing, also. If I made it off this waterfront alive, I was going to pay for an inventor’s license and set her up in business as a Mad Scientist.

But right now, Priya and close to half of everybody else I had ever cared about was down there somewhere being shot at, and unless I was much mistaken, it was my plan to bust out Madame that had gotten them into that position. I looked at Tomoatooah. He scowled back and unlimbered his Colt.

I said, “At least the constables ain’t gotten here yet.”

“I’ll go around back,” he offered. He hooked a thumb over that black rag mask and pulled it up to cover his eyes. When it was settled to his liking, he unhooked Adobe’s reins from his saddle biscuit and dropped them on the curb. The horse snorted and dropped her head, like she didn’t think much of this turn of events but was willing to play along.

“Well, I guess that makes me the distraction,” I said, and picked up a metal trash bin lid in each one of the Singer’s dented hands.

* * *

It would have been nice if I could have used those sunken sidewalks to stay out of the line of fire, but there was one more drawback of them not connecting to one another underneath the roads. As it was, well, the darkness was my best advantage, and I was going to use it. And going to use every other thing I had at my disposal to get the attention of the defenders inside the jailhouse away from my friends.

Surely they couldn’t be pinned down. If nothing else, that side street that was drawing all the fire opened out on the waterfront at the back.

Would have been nice to have had a firearm, anyhow.

“So much for a nice quiet jailbreak,” I muttered. Hefting my bin lids, I pumped up the pressure in the Singer again, and started to run.

For the first time since I can’t remember when, luck was with me. At least for the next thirty seconds or so, as I bolted the length of that street in the dark, inside the shuddering armature of that sewing machine.

I blessed Lizzie and Priya every step of the way. These things ain’t built for running — or climbing walls, or punching out of burning houses, for that matter — but their tinkering had turned it into the next best thing to a one-woman ironclad. The gyroscopes meant all I had to do was keep the feet rising and falling, which given the dark and the uncertain footing was a blessing and a half. And in that dark, I was three-fifths of the way down the block to the Chinatown jail before anybody inside it realized where that clanking and thudding was coming from and that they should be concerned about it. Bullets commenced to rattle and spark off the stones around me, and one or two ricocheted off my galvanized trash bin lids.

I thumped past the side street where the shooters inside the jailhouse had been aiming before I arrived, and though I didn’t turn my head to try and peer through the dark at who was there, I heard Priya’s voice raised in a wild shout as I cantered past. Sparks snapped from under my feet, and some of ’em was from bullets and some was from the grippers on the Singer’s treads. That sticky knee still grated with every step, but I pushed it through the motion and it got easier. Whatever was bent in there must be wearing off or grinding loose. I heard somebody running behind me, and more gunfire back there, and the barrage from the jail let up. A few shots still whizzed past me, but they was unaimed, and from the flash it looked like somebody was just firing out the window corner and hoping to get lucky.

A bullet spanged off the cage beside my face and something hot shocked my cheek and ear. I thought it was just sparks, and between the crop weal and the burns from the glove I couldn’t care much more than that if it were a bullet crease. A big gun spoke to my left, and the flash at the window corner stopped. I looked over to see the Marshal running, his Winchester at his shoulder. He’d shot right through the clapboard siding and got his man.

The wall of the Chinatown jail loomed up like a clapboard cliff. And to nobody’s surprise more than mine, I jumped across the sidewalk trench like it wasn’t even there and busted right through the jailhouse siding in a blizzard of spruce-scented splinters.

Contracted out to the lowest bidder, I bet.

I fell three feet on the other side, because the floor was lower than the road. The Singer caught and balanced me, though the joists creaked and bowed under the impact. I realized I’d lost the garbage lids somewhere. For a moment, I thought I’d be plunging through to the ground floor, but despite protest the planks held. There was a dead Russian — all right, fair enough, I assumed he was a Russian — slumped in the corner beside the window, the walls around him streaked and daubed in red. Looking at that almost gave me a second view of my chicken buns, but I kept my head together and the Singer kept me on my feet.

The cells were probably on the ground floor, I reckoned. What would be the belowground floor now.

I was pounding down the stairs, rounding the first landing before I realized that I should have picked up the dead man’s gun. The banister tore off in the Singer’s gripper, but the gyros saved me, and it was too late to turn back now.

* * *

There was gunshots at the next landing. I just kept running, remembering something some war-veteran john had told me about crossing battlefields, and how it was better to be the first man running through a gap than the second. Move fast, and keep on moving.

I missed my garbage can lids then, but I plunged down the stairs with my arms raised in front of my face. I didn’t hear or feel anything ricochet off the Singer, and — even better — I didn’t feel anything slam into my flesh.

My foot went through a riser on the next flight. My left hand plunged into the plaster wall as I unbalanced, and it was sheerest luck that behind splintered lath and wads of horsehair, I found a stud. It cracked as the Singer’s gripper closed on it, but it didn’t shatter, and it gave me the leverage I needed to yank myself free. Then I rounded the final landing and knocked the door at the bottom right out of its hinges. It flew across the room and clanged into the bars of a cell, then tipped and fell to the floor with a crash.

For a moment, I stood panting, my ears full of the hiss of steam and the roar of the diesel engine, and had a look around the room. Madame stood inside the cell, back straight and shoulders back. No mere oaken door bouncing off the bars a foot from her face was going to draw a flinch from Madame Damnable.

Mayor Stone had flinched back onto the bench behind her. I didn’t spare him much of a look, however, because what drew my attention was the sound of a shotgun being racked.

I looked toward it and found myself face — to-face with Bruce Scarlet, or whatever his real name was. The Russian engineer stood two steps in front of Horaz Standish, alongside the left side of that cell where the constable’s desk was, and they both of ’em was heeled and standing over a pair of overturned chairs like they’d been taking their ease down here while the firefight raged out front.

They had me dead to rights.

It’s one thing to run through a storm of bullets in the dark or when you’re passing across a narrow passage and you know the bad guy’s ain’t got much time to aim. It’s another to charge right at two men with a bead on you already, one with a ten-gauge street sweeper and one with a Winchester cocked and aimed at your eye.

Slowly, with a creak of stressed metal and a shower of plaster dust, I raised the Singer’s scratched and dented arms.

The roar of a long arm beside and behind me near to deafened me, and I flinched from it so hard that if it weren’t for the Singer’s gyroscopes I would have pitched right over and sprawled. As it was, I staggered and twisted and danced drunkenly halfway across the room.

Buckshot pattered off the Singer’s frame and something smacked into my hip and thigh. Madame hollered a curse that was probably exceptional even by her standards, if I could have made it out — but it ended with, “Horaz Standish, you obtuse son of a syphilitic bitch.”

I also thought I heard Horaz yelp, but my ears was ringing so I couldn’t be sure.

When I managed to drag myself upright, the first thing I saw was Bruce Scarlet in a puddle of sticky, stinking red, the top of his head clean gone.

Reader, this time I didn’t manage to keep those chicken buns from revisiting daylight. When I straightened up inside the Singer — and discovered I couldn’t wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve because of the mica visor and the armature — it was to see Marshal Reeves grinning at me from behind his black strip of mask as he twisted Standish’s arms behind his back and locked the shackles on. Horaz had a good big welt on his temple, and I noticed one of Madame’s hard-heeled borrowed purple velvet boots lying against the wall.

Merry Lee came out of the busted stairwell door behind me, crouched down by what was left of Scarlet, and pulled a ring of keys off his belt. She didn’t seem troubled by the mess. When she straightened up, I saw she was wearing a black strip across her eyes and the bridge of her nose, too, with a range hat pulled low to shade her features. If she’d had a bandanna tugged up to cover her face, she would have looked like a cow-boy kitted for a range war.

“Where’s Priya?” I asked.

“Covering the exit,” she answered.

Keys jingling, spattering drops of red (I looked at the wall), she jogged to the cell and fiddled with the locks until she opened it. Madame came out, hopping on her good foot and supported by Mayor Stone. At least he made a halfway decent walking cane.

Marshal Reeves strong-armed Standish toward the cell while Merry stood ready with the keys. That seemed like a fine idea to me, but I admit I was wondering where Peter Bantle and Captain Nemo was. I still made a point of looking Horaz in the face when they walked him past. “I hear hanging don’t hurt so much as flogging to death,” I told him when he curled his lip in a sneer. “It’s humane, like.”

He spat at the Singer’s feet. He missed.

“Careful,” I told Marshal Reeves. “He keeps a riding crop in his boot.”

Reeves flourished it in his free hand. I hadn’t even seen him relieve Standish of it, but I guess a U.S. Marshal gets pretty sharp at patting suspects down.

That door clanking shut was a very fine sound.

“Karen,” Merry Lee said when she’d turned the lock and checked the door, “I saw Bantle running on down toward the waterfront when I came in. He was too far away to me to catch him, but—”

She waved at the Singer. But you could.

The gesture drew Marshal Reeves’ attention, and I caught the flash of whites as his eyes widened behind the mask. His duster flared as he turned toward me.

But it was Madame who put her hand on the Singer’s elbow and said, “Karen, you’re bleeding.”

I looked down, spotted the blood soaking through the cloth at my hip, and quickly looked away again. The good news was I had no lunch left to lose. “He just winged me,” I said. “Don’t hurt yet.”

It would, I knew. But for now, I wasn’t lying; the crop cut across my cheek hurt more, and my lungs was on fire. This was going to be pneumonia before too much longer and no mistake.

But that was a problem for if I lived through today. And right now, I was going to go get Peter goddamned Bantle if it was the last goddamned thing I did.

* * *

I busted three more stairs on my way back up again and jumped back to the road through the hole I’d left coming in. The Singer was making some horrible grinding noises through that damaged knee and around the hip joint, but it still moved and balanced. My jump back across the sidewalk gap left me dizzy with pain from the impact on the other side, though. Especially where it jarred my hip, and sent a fresh slick of wet heat down my thigh.

I turned in the road. I didn’t see Priya or Tomoatooah, Miss Francina or Crispin anywhere. But I could see the waterfront from here, only a block downhill, and that was the direction Merry Lee had said Bantle had run.

I set off in pursuit.

Every step jarred my hip, and the hydraulics along that leg shrieked and smoked. I screamed through gritted teeth with every one of those first eight or ten strides as the armature dragged on my creased hip. Then my body seemed to resign itself to the abuse, and it started to hurt less. I picked up speed, running hard.

The sky, I realized a little dizzily, was turning gray. When I broke out onto Front Street I could see up and down the waterfront quite a ways in the gloaming, and out along the docks that floated in the quiet waters of the harbor.

And there was Peter Bantle — looking away from me, standing alongside a warehouse just this side of Commerce Pier, with Captain Nemo facing him — about two hundred yards away. Bantle waved his arms, and even over the clanking and growling of the Singer I heard his raised voice, if not his words.

Nemo wore a plain black suit rather than his uniform, but even at this distance I recognized him by that trim silver beard. He had a revolver in one hand, though that hand was down by his side, and I realized that again I’d forgotten to pick up a weapon. I was just an all-around terrible failure as a commando, and that was that.

“I found them!” I yelled, hoping somebody who liked me was close enough to hear. Then I lurched toward them at the Singer’s increasingly unsteady run.

It weren’t quiet.

Bantle paused in the middle of one of his better arm waves and turned toward me. “You son of a bitch!” he yelled — at Nemo, I guessed, rather than at me. “If you’d just agreed to take me with you we would have been gone by now!”

Bantle turned back toward me, pushing his coat back — to get at a revolver, I was guessing. I was gritting my teeth for another hail of bullets, too—

Then Nemo shot Peter Bantle in the back.

I almost tripped over the Singer’s feet.

Bantle went down on his knees like he was falling through molasses. Nemo didn’t seem concerned; he dropped the hot gun in his pocket, which didn’t seem like the best idea, and turned his attention to a little black box that appeared in his other hand.

Bantle finished toppling forward. He ended up on his face, and his hat couldn’t cover the stain spreading out underneath his head. I didn’t gag this time; maybe I was already as sick of gore as it was possible for me to get.

Nemo thumbed a toggle switch on his box, like a little silver chessman, and a red light started blinking. I recognized the kissing cousin of the little box that has been supposed to let us know that Miss Francina needed a rescue when she was sneaking into Bantle’s crib. The difference being, apparently this one was functional.

I had a real bad feeling I knew what happened next.

The dock beside me exploded into splinters as the Octopus lurched up through it, all its mechanical arms uncoiling explosively. I staggered sideways, but the Singer caught me. I most certainly did not scream. And even if I had, no one would have been able to hear me over the Pandemonium of shrieking metal and shattering wood. Writhing metal tentacles whipped overhead with a whistling screech, splinters scattering from their barbs, rattling off the metal cage that protected me. One whistled out toward Nemo—

He stood calmly, watching it come. I didn’t think it would hurt him, somehow. This was his escape. Then he could just come back later when the heat had died down, or head up to Seattle or down to San Francisco, and work his evil plan over from scratch again.

And there was nothing I could do about it. Where on earth had I ever gotten the idea that the Singer would be any use against something like this?

A racing blur of black and white peeled from behind the warehouse, trailing the hollow cannonade of unshod hooves. I had a confused glimpse of Tomoatooah leaning low over Scout’s neck, her streaked mane whipping back as she ran. I froze in terror as a barbed tentacle whipped down. Scout dodged to avoid it, back feet where her front feet had been, and the road shifted under my feet with the force of the blow.

Then Tomoatooah had Nemo by the collar and was dragging him beside Scout. They charged toward me and suddenly those tentacles was writhing helplessly on all sides, slapping, trying to startle and herd the horse. One slammed down right before her, denting itself and shattering stone. Scout jumped it like she was born to steeplechase and pelted toward me, stretching out to a hard straight run.

Tomoatooah had somehow dragged Nemo up over his saddle. He stretched out toward me, something in his hand. I reached toward him. He hurtled past, Scout so close her lather splattered the mica visor. I looked down.

Three sticks of dynamite wrapped with tape, burning an inch of fuse, hissed in the Singer’s claw.

“Holy Christ!” I shouted, and the Octopus wrapped a tentacle around my armature and whipped me into the air.

I slung hard against the straps, one direction and the other, and felt the thing’s battered hip joint give — and then my hip wrench, too, torn or separated as the weight of the Singer’s leg fell just on me. I think the force might have torn my leg off if the Octopus’ tentacle hadn’t been wrapped all around me, holding me together.

The barbs scratched and bruised, and there was a sharp pop as the thing squeezed — but the Singer’s armature held. For now.

I screamed now, all right. And somehow, maybe just because the gripper locked until you intentionally released it, I held on to that dynamite. If nothing else, I figured, maybe if I was still holding on to it when it went off it might blow this thing’s tentacles back down its throat. I wouldn’t even have to be alive.

Which was just as well. I didn’t relish getting blown up none.

The Octopus was thrashing around, still, splintering ships and dock, but it didn’t seem able to drag itself out of the water. Maybe it was hoping if it broke enough things Tomoatooah would bring its master back.

I was just about to settle in for a nice refreshing faint, the world getting black and thick around the edges, when the Octopus whipped me around one more time and I caught sight of that big, snapping metal beak that the arms usually folded up to cover. And Reader, I had one of my very occasional good ideas.

I unlocked the Singer’s gripper and cocked my arm back, bided my time until I was dangling near the maw and there was only a whisper of slow match left, and hurled that dynamite inside.

I made it, too. And either I timed that fuse right or the chomping beak itself detonated the dynamite.

A shudder ran through the thing, and a cloud of black smoke billowed from the beak. The Octopus started to slide backward, still thrashing — that hadn’t been enough to torpedo it entirely, then. The arms were folding up tight again, closing over the beak. But not sealing as tight as before! The whole front of the submersible was twisted slightly askew, so it couldn’t close itself up into a smooth, almost-seamless cone.

I wished them luck limping back to Russia like that, the sons of bastards. And I wondered for a moment why it was that I wasn’t hearing the tremendous rasping and grating of metal, before I realized I wasn’t hearing much of anything at all.

Then I was falling through the air, shaken loose from the barbed arm, and the ground came up and struck me — and the Singer — a prodigious blow.

* * *

I woke to find Priya kneeling beside me, reaching through the cage to touch my cheek and press my face. I squinted; her lips were moving. I couldn’t hear what she said over the flat, painful ringing in my ears. But once she saw my eyes open, she smiled a dazzling smile.

Carefully, steadily, she unlocked the Singer’s retaining bars and unbuckled the harness.

She caught me when I rolled out, too. Then she kissed me on the cheek like she didn’t mind the blood on my face or the vomit in my hair. I couldn’t stand; my hip hurt that much. But I was happy just to lay in her lap and let her stroke my hair.

After a bit, I decided I was probably even going to live, though I might regret it for a while.

Priya squeezed my hand until my eyes opened again. From watching her lips, I figured out what she said: “I need to confess something.”

I looked at her, so serious, and a chill settled into my chest. It was going to be bad news, whatever it was. Nobody ever got told nothing good lying in the middle of the smoking ruins of a city dock.

Then she said, “I read your journal.”

My hearing was coming back, but I must have heard that wrong. “You — wait, what?”

“Please don’t be angry,” she said. “I just … I missed you, and I couldn’t find you, and I was scared. And once I started, Karen, I couldn’t stop. You tell stories better than any of the ones we read in the library.” She looked at me so earnestly I almost melted.

I opened my mouth. I closed it again.

She said, “What if we got Captain Colony to bring your manuscript back to Chicago? Or even New York? You know he said he knows writers. Maybe one of them would write a letter of introduction to a publisher.…”

She trailed off, looking at my face.

“That’s not what you want.”

“It is what I want,” I said.

I struggled to get up, and after a minute she gave up fighting with me about it. Over her shoulder, I saw Crispin and Francina jogging toward us, the Marshal and Merry behind them. Tomoatooah was back there on Scout, and there was a bundle in a black coat over his saddle still.

I said, “But I thought … you’d want to go home.” Back to India.

She stared at me like I was stupid, and then she smiled. “Aashini is going home,” she answered, while she helped me sit. I leaned on her hard. “We’ll get the money somehow. I want to stay with you. And I thought a book would help pay for your stable, and maybe I could keep fixing things. We can make something work.”

The lightning of my heart hurt more than the buckshot in my wrenched hip. And the pain was a hell of a lot more welcome, too.

I dug in my shirt, inside the wrap binding up my bosom, until I found a warm disc of metal. It slipped, wet with sweat, but I dug it out and folded it in my fist. The fist was sticky with dried blood. I was a goddamn mess.

“I want you to have this,” I said. “Marshal Reeves gave it to me. It’s been … lucky.”

She held out her hand hesitantly, curious, and I laid the Marshal’s dollar in it.

She slid her thumb across and frowned. Then smiled. “She looks like you,” she said, and grinned at me with all the morning sunlight caught in her bottomless eyes.