Ticker (31 page)

All of us crammed into Marcus’s motorcar for the ride to Currey Hospital. Papa was in surgery by the time we arrived, and Mama paced the hallway.

“I want to stay,” Marcus said, watching her wear a groove into the floor. “But seeing as half my forces are under the influence of the Spiders and there are infested Carry-Away Boxes scattered about the city . . .”

“Go,” I said, only half meaning it. “Take Sebastian with you.”

“I suppose I have to leave you at the mercy of the doctors. Or perhaps I got that backward.” One last squeeze and he tucked a finger under my chin. “Permission to call this evening?”

“Don’t you need to submit your requests in triplicate?” It wasn’t flirting. Not after everything we’d been through.

For an answer, Marcus lifted my bare hand to his mouth and kissed it thrice. “Will that do?”

“Quite,” I said, slapping at him. “Now go, before my face bursts into actual flames.”

After Marcus departed, Violet sat with my mother while Nic and I were hustled into an examination room. The Augmentation specialists took pages of notes, focusing primarily on my new clockwork ventriculator and my brother’s ocular corrections. No doubt a study would be published in the medical journals just as soon as ink could hit paper. We were admonished to get plenty of rest and food, and then excused. Before I rejoined the others, I donned the dress Mama had ordered from a nearby shop. Grateful for my good health and that of my loved ones, I didn’t offer a single complaint that it was the most trying shade of amaranth pink imaginable.

Nic was just outside the examination room when I exited, and we regarded each other with eyes that were no longer twinned mirrors. The memory of his fist connecting with my face and the accusations he’d made in the alley still burned, but I tamped down that fire.

“
Tempus est clavis
,” I whispered, reaching out a hand.

Time will heal all wounds, outside as well as in.

The moment I touched his arm, Nic relaxed his shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

“Impossibly energized.” I paused to consider the matter further. “And starving. I don’t know when I last ate. You?”

“Fit as the proverbial fiddle. We really should speak with Marcus about an Augmentation contract. If a soldier can come out of battle feeling this way, he’d be nearly unstoppable.”

“Warwick promised him something similar,” I said without thinking.

Nic looked down at me. “It sounds as though there’s more to that story.”

“I’ll explain later.” I gazed up at him, uncertain what else to say. “I didn’t want to venture anything in front of the doctors, but we could remove the upgrades . . . all except the ones in your eyes, I think. You could be as you were before.”

“I don’t think any of us are going to be as we were before.” Nic took my hand in his newly Augmented one, metal fingers sliding alongside mine, the whir of gears and balance wheels like a pulse, new yet familiar. “Don’t fret. I’ll get used to them in time.”

“They’re a forever sort of souvenir.” I thought about the machine beating away in my chest, of Warwick, of the look upon his face when he whispered Dimitria’s name one last time. “And how long will it be before we sleep without nightmares and walk down the street without looking over our shoulders?”

“Or see a Spider without jumping out of our skins?” Nic reached up to rub a finger about his ear.

“That’s not funny,” Violet said, joining us with Mama just behind her. “Your next project is to redesign the Carry-Away Boxes. Otherwise, I won’t be able to load them with cake without wondering first if they’re full of mind-controlling arachnids.”

“Done.” He drew her into his arms. “But I won’t be able to manage it on an empty stomach. Will anyone join me for a meal?”

“Your father ought to be out of surgery soon,” Mama said. “They removed the bullet, and thankfully it missed everything vital. I’ll stay here to wait for him to wake up. He’ll be as cranky as anything.”

“I’ll wait with Mama,” I said. “Bring me something from the canteen?”

“A piece of pie?” Violet asked as Nic led her toward the stairs.

“An entire pie,” I said, sitting down alongside Mama. “And a bucket of tea with a dozen lumps of sugar.”

My mother permitted herself a small laugh as she noted, “I’ll help you drink it. It’s been too long since I had a proper cup.”

We’d both been through such a lot, and yet there was one more thing to tell her. “I owe you an apology, Mama.”

“Whatever for, dear heart?” She wrapped an arm about me, her rose water perfume instantly transporting me back to the dining room, into the company of my elder sister, listening to the cradle rock in the corner.

I should have believed my mother. She knew it was possible all along.

“I thought you were crazy, consulting all those psychics and mediums, trying to reach Dimitria and Cygna.” I nestled against her. “Why didn’t you tell me about the Grand Design?”

“I signed papers. Gave Mister Kingsley my word. And I didn’t like to say anything before it was working properly. False hope, and all that.”

“But it
does
work.” I explained about reanimating Lucy Reilly’s corpse, about my own near-death moment spent in the in-between place that resembled our dining room.

“You saw her, then,” Mama said. “You spoke with Dimitria?”

“Yes. She looked just as she did . . . on her birthday.” I couldn’t bring myself to word it any other way.

“And Cygna?”

“I didn’t see her. Just the cradle rocking.”

“I wish I could have been there with you.” Mama’s eyes filled with tears, but she hugged me hard.

“We’ll try again,” I surprised myself by saying. “I’ll go with you to see Philomena.”

“I’d like that,” my mother said. “Very much.”

My RiPA delivered a message from Marcus.

HALF THE AFFLICTED SOLDIERS HAVE GONE ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE - STOP - BRACELETS DEACTIVATED - STOP - WARWICK PROGRAMMING PROVING DIFFICULT TO DECODE - STOP

More news followed, none of it particularly good. The soldiers who’d recovered from the Spider removal—Frederick Carmichael among them—were still in the process of tracking down the Carry-Away Boxes and neutralizing the remaining threat. The broadsheets had picked up the story, and bulletins had been issued to every RiPA and PaperTape machine in the city, warning Bazalgate’s citizens to be wary of unexpected gifts of cake.

“The Legatus will see things set to rights, never fear,” Mama said when the stream of messages ceased, her mouth quirking a bit. “He’s a very remarkable young man.”

I didn’t ask what she meant by such a leading comment because a doctor interrupted us.

“Mister Farthing is out of surgery and recovering nicely. If one of you would like to go in, that ought to be fine.”

Mama and I exchanged a look, and I gave her a little push. “Go. We’ll meet you back at Glasshouse.”

But I wasn’t going to head straight home. Life ought to be celebrated at every possible opportunity, and we had a lot of catching up to do.

After sending Nic ahead to prepare Dreadnaught, Violet and I made our way to Perpetua Marketplace. We had the meat dishes, vegetables, creams, and ices sent back to Glasshouse, but I carried
the turtle myself.

It was an accident; I’d never intended on buying such a thing and had even less intention of eating it, but with the costermonger and the Meridian fishmonger extolling the virtues of their wares in each of my ears, I’d somehow come away from the transaction with several lobsters for pastry vol-au-vents, twenty pounds of fresh peas, sparrow-grass and cowcumbers, and one largish and very much alive Bhaskarian turtle.

“Every bit of it can be used,” the fishmonger had said as he took my money and ignored my protests. “Boil the belly, roast the back meat, and put the innards in a
beyootiful
soup. Tell your cook that the shell can be used as a tureen!”

He had wrapped the poor creature in damp burlap and handed it over as Violet snickered into her gloved hands. The turtle’s significant weight left no doubt in my mind that it would indeed serve eight to ten, as the fishmonger repeatedly assured me.

“But—”

He’d already turned to help another customer. “Of course the oysters are fresh, sir! I am appalled you would even ask such a thing!”

Ducking the spray as he enthusiastically shucked shellfish, we hastened to exit the marketplace.

“All we wanted was a bit of light supper,” I muttered as we wended our way through the stalls. “Dreadnaught is going to have a fit when she sees this.”

“The creature is the very opposite of ‘light’ dining,” Violet said, helping me carry it.

There was a trick to heaving the turtle into a hansom cab, another to convince the driver that it wouldn’t eat the upholstery. Once we were on our way, I poured my remaining coins into my
lap, looking from the copper pence to the impulsively purchased chelonian.

“Who would have thought you could cost so much?”

The creature’s head emerged from its shell, and it regarded me with something akin to reproach.

“I would have helped pay for it!” Violet informed me.

“You did enough, what with the marzipan and the cream and the pineapples. Whatever possessed you to buy such ugly things?”

“Wait until you taste what I bake with them—almond soufflés and pineapple tartlets.” Violet clapped her hands together. “And you’re one to speak about buying ugly ingredients.”

When the turtle snapped at our toes, we squeaked and pulled up our skirts.

“I don’t much care for the idea of eating something whose face I’ve seen, I can tell you that much,” I said as we pulled up at Glasshouse. The turtle turned its head and nibbled at its burlap wrappings. “You certainly are a useless and nonsensical thing. I’ll call you Brimborion.” I leapt over him and out the door in one mighty bound. “Help me bring him around to the kitchen garden, Violet, and mind your fingers.”

The second we exited the carriage, the press descended. Violet and I retreated to the sanctity of the kitchen, where Nic and Dreadnaught met us.

“They won’t leave us in peace until they get their story,” I said, suddenly weary down to my toes. “Take Violet into the back parlor and show the reporters in.”

Nic donned a new pair of smoked-glass spectacles to hide his eyes before Dreadnaught permitted the representatives from the
Bazalgate Pictorial: An Illustrated Weekly, The Gazette,
and
The Evening Express
access to the front parlor. She did not offer
them tea or refreshments, not that they cared. They stampeded in, shouting questions.

“Our readers want to hear about your encounter with Calvin Warwick! What happened?”

“Is it true he proposed to you, Miss Farthing?”

“That he threatened to blow up the entire city?”

“What about the Spiders?”

There was the brilliant light of a camera flash, and I flinched at the
whoosh!
of burning potassium permanganate and aluminum. “It all happened terribly fast. The Ferrum Viriae arrived and bundled us away.”

The reporters weren’t satisfied with such a bland answer and pressed closer, pencils poised above their notebooks, RiPAs at the ready.

“What about the doctor?”

“Is he in custody?”

I didn’t want to say as much, but Marcus had dealt with Warwick himself. Under the influence of the golden Spiders, he’d been docile, silent. Guilty, doubly so, and destined for the gallows, he’d been escorted back to Gannet Penitentiary.

But will the surgeons be able to remove the Spiders? Or will Warwick be trapped within his own mind as well as the prison?

Those were thoughts for another day, and nothing I was going to share with the newspapers. “I think we’ve answered enough questions for now.”

The most insistent of the reporters wagged his pencil under my nose. “What do you have to say about the city of Bazalgate lauding you and your friends as heroes?”

“No comment,” I said firmly.

“But surely you have an opinion!”

“There are no heroes in a situation like this,” Nic said. “There are only the dead and the survivors.”

Closing my eyes, I wished all these horrible people would go away and leave us alone. Like a genie granting my request, Dreadnaught appeared in the doorway. “You have other callers, Miss Farthing.”

The reporters paled when Marcus and Sebastian entered the parlor. Both of them had found clean clothes in the interim, but it was Marcus’s demeanor as much as his uniform that brought everyone to attention.

“Am I interrupting something?” the Legatus calmly inquired.

Our unwelcome guests bowed their heads and filed past him with much stumbling over furniture and hastily packed photography equipment.

“A most welcome interruption.” I rose from the chaise but made no move toward them.

Sebastian took the first step. “I need to apologize for my behavior and make amends. Instead of flowers or chocolates, I’ve rung my barristers. The factory and courthouse will be rebuilt, and a hundred thousand aureii will go into a trust, to be divided between the families of the victims. My insurance doesn’t cover acts of terrorism and valiant stupidity, so this will be coming out of my own pocket.”