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“The sun never set on the British Empire.” It was true, technically. But in certain places, the sun never shone much, either. This city was one such place: even now, well after dawn, the streets were dim, the sun obscured behind the clouds of soot and smoke that was the dragon-breath of the factories and the lifeblood of the empire. So it was the Gladys Lockhart stepped off of the train and into the half-light of the rest of her life.
As she made her way down the cobblestone streets, she was grateful that she had chosen black for her dress, corset, and hat: any other color would have been marred by the ash that drifted down in a steady rain, as if she walked the streets of Pompeii in the city’s last moments. She was not dressed stylishly, she knew: her clothes lacked the flowing sleeves and careful layers of the Imperial vogue, but her new employer had been luridly detailed about what happened to people who’s loose clothing caught in the machinery, and even if she would be working at a desk far from the factory floor, she found the image of being ground beneath the gears rather compelling.
As it slowly became clear just how far from the station her destination was, Gladys wished she had had the presence of mind to hire a cab. Not one of the new ones, of course, with a clockwork horse—she could never afford it—but one drawn by a beast of flesh and blood. As it was, she would have to rely on her own feet—and none-too-comfortable shoes—to take her to her new job.
When she arrived at the modest factory, Gladys stood for a moment before the door. It was intimidating, ornate affair, a bit out of scale with the building it was attached to, with heavy brass ornamentation and her employer’s name in elaborate script above. As she stood examining the monument to poor taste, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end: she was being watched. She turned quickly, and caught sight of an urchin boy, a little younger than herself, staring at her from the mouth of the alley that ran next to the factory. His shirt was smudged and stained by soot, but the once-white fabric flapped once behind him as he turned and fled down the alley. Shrugging, Gladys turned back to the door and pushed it open.
She stepped through and into the building’s foyer, which was as garish as the door that led to it. A brass chandelier, hung with dozens of glass teardrops, lit the red-carpeted room, and made the statue that stood beneath it gleam golden. Gladys winced. The entire room spoke to enthusiasm and budget that far outstripped practicality, expertise, or taste. Well, at least she knew who was responsible.
“Miss Lockhart!”
Speak of the devil.
The man that came bounding down the stairs across the foyer was middle-aged, lean almost to the point of cadaverous, and possessed a voice that belonged to a man at least twice his size.
“Allow me to welcome you personally to Johnson Science Innovation and Life Enrichment! You will find a fine future here, Miss Lockhart! The one we are building together!”
C.S. Johnson had a voice like an ocean: it expanded to fill all space available, and left his audience to ride the tide as best they could. She had spoken to him in person only once before, at her graduation, and he had offered her a job at his company after talking with her for only a few minutes. She had wondered why, then, but seeing him in his natural habitat, as it were, made it obvious: this was not a man prone to long contemplation.
“Well, come along. You need to be shown around the place. I can’t have anyone working for me who doesn’t know the work we do here as well as I do, can I?”
Gladys blinked. “I suppose not.”
C.S. Johnson spun on his heel. “Then step lively, Miss Lockhart!” he called as he strode away. “There is so much for you to see.”
Gladys followed her boss out to the factory floor, where the rattle and roar of machinery made conversation impossible. She could see brass and steel being stamped into shape under the wary eyes of soot-faced men, but the purpose of the parts was a mystery to her. The workers hardly glanced at her or Johnson as they passed, and before long they left the haze of noise and stood on a flight of bare metal steps. Johnson was beaming.
“Incredible, isn’t it? And that’s not the half of it!” He said as he led the way down the stairs.
“It certainly makes an impression.” Gladys said carefully. “But what exactly are they making?”
“The future, Miss Lockhart. One rivet at a time” said Johnson, less than helpfully. As they descended he continued “Tell me, Miss Lockhart, if you wanted to travel to Philadelphia, how would you do it?”
“Well, I suppose I would take a train to Edinburgh, a ship to New York, another train to…”
Johnson nodded. “And so on. We stand in the middle of the 19th century still bound to the same methods of travel used for centuries—but if the steam engine revolutionized land travel, why not turn our attention to the oceans? They still make ships out of wood, for God’s sake!”
Gladys blinked. “There are plenty of steamers on the ocean, Mr. Johnson.”
Johnson scoffed. “Baby steps, Miss Lockhart. Small dreams of small men.” He paused at the bottom of the stairs. “What I intend to build will make the steamship as obsolete as the chariot” he said as he opened the door into another cavernous room.
“And what do you intend to build?” Gladys was growing weary of Johnson’s rhetoric. It seemed as if the man was always speaking to investors.
“Airships, Miss Lockhart.” Johnson said it as if it were the simplest things in the world. “It is high time we looked to the sky for the next revolution in transportation. No borders, no limits, no need to fiddle with the change from rail to sea and back again. Two points on the map, brought so close as to make no matter.” Johnson’s eyes were alight. “Above, we are forging their hearts. Down here, we stitch together their skins.”
Gladys blinked and looked around the room she had been led into. It was even larger than the one above, and lit by sickly yellow electric lights. The machines here whirred and clanked as the others had, but it was faint grey cloth, not gleaming metal, that was fed into their iron maws. But Gladys was more interested in spider web of pipes and the stone ceiling they disappeared into.
“We’re underground, aren’t we? Is this even legal?”
Johnson waved her objection aside. “This much territory aboveground would have cost me an arm and a leg. And anyone could wander in and see what we’re working on. I’ve had my ideas stolen before, Miss Lockhart, and I’m not about to let it happen again.”
“Property was too expensive, so you decided to hollow out a cavern underneath your factory?” Gladys wasn’t sure if she should be impressed or aghast.
“You can see I did.” Johnson pointed at the pipes in the ceilings. “We had to dig through some of the gas lines, but I’m pretty sure we got them all connected to the right places again. And we had to put in a few extra pipes to move the fumes out of here. We’ve got that down to a science, though—we moved the last of the canaries out months ago…”
Johnson continued to ramble—Gladys wondered if perhaps the man’s heart was connected directly to his tongue—as they ascended back to dubious sunlight and eventually to an office that was, if possible, even more ostentatious then the foyer of the building. Arched windows let in what light filtered through the city’s constant smog, and the heavy desk of polished red-brown wood seemed to sag under the weight of the papers that formed hills and valleys of bureaucracy across its surface. Johnson was pacing behind the desk, between two shelves filled with a bewildering array of gadgets: some spun, some whirred, some merely gleamed sullenly.
“And this, Miss Lockhart, is where you’ll be working.”
Not for the first time that day, Gladys blinked in surprise. “But isn’t this your office?”
Johnson waved her objection away. “It used to be my office. But I can’t be cooped up in here—I need to be out on the floor and down in the vaults, supervising. None of those wretches out there can be trusted with my work.” He plucked a pair of spectacles from one of the shelves. The mismatched lenses—one a sea-green rectangle, the other a ruby circle—winked at Gladys as he gestured. “Those other ideas, the ones stolen from me? Those were distractions, and good luck to the thieving bastards. This, this is my life’s work. My legacy.”
His voice was as quiet as Gladys had ever heard it—quiet enough for her to hear the soft tread of someone on the stairs. Johnson looked up, and smiled as the footsteps entered the room behind her.
“Ah, there you are. Miss Lockhart, there’s someone you need to meet.”
Gladys turned, and started when she saw the urchin boy from the alley standing before her: a soft grey cap pulled down over his ears, a shirt that had once, in the distant past, been white hung across narrow shoulders, and only the brass bracings that fastened above his knees and ran to his ankles suggested he was anything more than the street rat he appeared to be.
“Miss Lockhart, I would like you to meet my daughter, Chell.”
Gladys’s prepared pleasantry died in her throat. His daughter? But, now that she knew… the figure before her did seem very slim, and not in the half-starved way of a vagrant. And the dark hair visible beneath the cap curled in a way that suggested much longer locks had been tucked under. And, yes, she could see now that she was looking, the smudged shirt concealed the telltale curves of the chest beneath it. Suddenly aware that she was staring, Gladys fixed her eyes on the girl’s face and managed
“It’s my pleasure.”
The girl—Chell—said nothing, but she seemed to be studying Gladys with at least as much interest as the woman had stared at her. After a long silence, she smiled, nodded to her father, then spun and clattered down the stairs with far more racket then she had climbed them.
Gladys turned back to her boss, feeling as if she had just passed some kind of test. C.S. Johnson smiled. “Now you know my business as well as I do, Miss Lockhart—or very nearly, anyway.” He circled the desk and extended his hand. “Welcome to the job.”
-x-
The job, as Gladys discovered in the ensuing weeks, mostly consisted of Johnson’s job, or rather the parts of it the man lacked the patience, temperament, or (occasionally) brain to handle himself. It amazed her that a man whose raw talent for technology all but dripped from him like sweat could view mathematics as a distraction and budgets as an annoyance. So it fell to Gladys to see that the raw materials kept arriving, the workers were paid, and the investors were mollified. Her slow sift through the topography of paper that covered the desk didn’t look particularly impressive, she knew—but it was all that kept the machinery that Johnson spent his time fretting over running. It was satisfying, hearing the rumble of the factory behind her and knowing that it was her attention that stoked the furnaces. If not for her one distraction, Gladys Lockhart might have considered her job perfect.
Said distraction was never seemed far away from Johnson’s—her—office. She would wander in and out, apparently at random, sometimes perching in a corner for a few minutes to watch Gladys work before departing again. She never said word, and never lingered for long before clattering back down the stairs or clambering out of the window. It was strange: the first time she had seen Chell disappear through one of the office’s arching windows, she hadn’t even blinked. Of course Cave Johnson’s daughter, who dressed like a beggar or a pickpocket and a male one at that, would scramble about on the walls and roofs of the factory—what else would she do?
Today, though, she found her pen sitting idle as she watched the tan-skinned girl swing easily over the sill and out into space, hanging suspended for an instant before climbing out of view. It was not until she had returned to the letter in front of her that she heard the rap of knuckles on the frame and saw a hand beckoning her from the open window.
Well, she though as she deftly forged Johnson’s signature at the bottom of the page, why not?
She rose and crossed to the window, leaning out to catch a glimpse of the climbing girl. Chell was nowhere to be found, but there was a black metal ladder, evidently intended as a fire escape, riveted to the bricks. Telling the bits of her brain that were beginning to call her names to pipe down, Gladys carefully took hold of the nearest rung and swung herself onto the ladder.
Several undignified moments later—she had neither the experience nor the wardrobe for urban exploration—she found herself on the gently sloping roof, a familiar figure giving her a cheerful wave from the end nearest the street. Picking her way across the shingles, Gladys found Chell sitting cross-legged, her back against a convenient brick outcropping.
“You spend a lot of time here?”
A nod.
“And you don’t talk much, do you?”
Chell shook her head.
“Why not?”
The young woman pointed to her own throat and shrugged.
Oh. “I’m sorry.”
Another shrug. Chell didn’t seem particularly put out by Gladys’s lack of tact.
“You like it up here.”
Nod.
“Why?”
Chell pointed out across the city, where the clock towers and chimneys rose from the smog like lost ruins.
Gladys considered. “It is pretty, when you look at it from here. Down there, the city’s just so much noise and confusion.”
Smile, nod.
“This isn’t the only roof you climb, is it?”
Chell’s smile widened, and she shook her head.
Gladys pointed to the elaborate metal framework on the young woman’s legs. “And those help you climb.”
Frown, headshake. Chell held up both hands, curled into fists, and made a motion like snapping a stick in two.
Silently, Gladys cursed herself. All she seemed able to do was put her foot in her mouth. But, unable to stop herself, she asked “What happened?”
Chell paused, looking thoughtful. Finally, she scrambled to the edge of the roof and pointed to the street below, where a black cab rattled its way across the cobbles.
“A cart?”
Headshake.
“A horse?”
Nod. Chell mimed pulling something from her pocket and holding it in front of her face. At Gladys’s look of confusion she held her hand to her ear.
Like she’s listening to something…
“A… watch?”
Relieved smile, nod. Chell pointed from the street to the hand cupped around an imaginary pocket watch and back again.
“A clockwork horse.”
Nod.
Gladys rocked back on her heels. The relatively new clockwork steeds could pull heavier loads, required only oil and occasional winding rather than rest, water, and oats, and tended to trample anything that wandered into their path. It was all too easy to imagine bones snapping beneath their steadily plodding hooves.
With a sigh, she produced a cigarette and lit it, dropping the match to the streets below. It was a habit she had started in University: when exams came around it was that or brandy, and the latter played hell with her studies. The silence and the tobacco smoke hung together in the air, until at last Gladys said
“I haven’t been in the city very long, you know. And I was wondering…” Gladys forced a smile, despite her nerves. (Why was she nervous? She was only talking to Chell.) “I was wondering if you could show me around. I haven’t seen much of anything beyond this place and where I’m staying.”
Chell regarded her for a moment or two longer than was comfortable, then nodded shortly.
“I get off at five. Meet you outside then?”
Another nod, and Gladys left the roof, still unsure of what the strange girl thought of her.
-x-
That afternoon, after the shift whistle had sent the factory workers on their way, Gladys found Chell on the street outside Johnson Science Innovator’s elaborate front door. Chell looked up as she emerged, then set off up the street, walking quickly as Gladys hurried in her wake.
What Chell eventually led her to was no monument or grand piece of architecture. It was instead a scrap yard, a watchmaker’s battlefield of broken springs and toothless gears. It was not a scenic sight, but if Gladys had wanted something conventionally beautiful, she would never have asked Chell to be her guide.
Apparently deciding that the thicket of brass and copper needed no further introduction, the young woman wandered off, leaving Gladys to pick through the maze of metal. Among the pieces so corroded as to be unrecognizable, she found the torso of some household automata, its shoulders still draped in the tattered remains of butler’s coat. Further on, a tarnished horse’s head stared blankly up at her, a length of broken chain trailing from its severed neck. As Gladys watched, the setting sun pierced the smog of the city, and a single ray gleamed in the machine’s sea-green eye. Gladys started back as the beast’s severed head seemed to glare up at her. Then the light was lost again in the haze, and the illusion of life was gone.
Gladys closed her eyes and breathed deep. She knew better than to be frightened by little things like that. But the scrapyard was full of dull and glassy eyes, and blank gazes burned from wherever her back was turned to. It was all too easy to imagine them watching, nursing resentment for their untimely demises, waiting for any human foolish enough to wander into their midst…
Gladys shook the thought away, fishing a cigarette from the pocket of her overcoat. If she kept up like this, she would be as mad as Chell. She was fumbling for a match when a hand fell on her shoulder and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
Chell was standing behind her, a look of innocence too perfect to be genuine painted across her face. As Gladys glared, Chell smiled and held out her hand: sitting her palm was a metal disk of tarnished silver, the same size and shape as a pocket watch. Chell’s hand tightened on the disk, and a small blue flame blossomed from the blackened depression in the device’s center. With forced nonchalance, Gladys lit her cigarette in the flame and sat down on the smooth curve of half-buried boiler.
As the first breath of smoke left her lungs, she said
“How did you find this place, Chell?”
The girl held a hand to forehead, as if shielding her eyes from the sun, and shrugged.
“Why were you looking for it?”
Chell reached into her pocket and produced several apparently random pieces of wire, spring, and cogs.
“Searching for materials?”
Nod.
“You really are your father’s daughter.”
Grin, nod.
Gladys stood, speaking around the cigarette perched on her lip.
“Thanks for the tour, Chell. But I should get back to my rooms.” She started back towards the street, but stopped when she was only a few steps away. Half-turning back, she asked
“Same time tomorrow?”
For the first time since she had met her, Gladys thought Chell looked surprised. Then she nodded, stepped forward, and pressed the circular lighter into Gladys’s hand. The surprised woman had just enough time to register the twin sensations of cool metal and warm fingers against her own, and then Chell was gone. Gladys watched as the lean girl’s back was lost to amidst the gleaming detritus. Then, when the bobbing black hair was finally out of view, she shook herself, and began the long walk back to her home.
-x-
It became almost routine. In the evenings, when Gladys left her job at Johnson Science Innovators, Chell would be waiting. She would lead the way to some half-forgotten corner of the city that only she ever seemed to know of. For Gladys, where they found themselves came to matter less than what she learned about the strange girl that led her there.
At a long-dry fountain, home to the statue of some god or hero left faceless by time, she learned that Chell’s magpie eye for discarded machinery was in service to the girl’s talent for tinkering. Before Gladys’s eyes, Chell had fashioned copper wire and foil that looked remarkably like gold into a simulacrum of a bird, wings outstretched.
In a rooftop garden that had been left to go feral and overgrown what remained of its greenhouse, she learned that Chell was eighteen years old, and that her last tutor had fled years previously, at which point her father had declared she was ready to follow in his footsteps.
Sitting gasping and breathless at the top of a climb Chell had scampered (it really was the only word for it—the girl climbed like a squirrel) up with ease, she learned that the young woman was far stronger than her lean frame suggested, and that she had the disagreeable habit of laughing at people who were not.
Chell laughed as she did everything, silently, her chest shaking as she fought for breath past her mirth. Gladys’s attempt at a glare was ruined by her own disheveled appearance, and Chell had continued with her silent attack of giggles until Gladys regained enough breath to threaten to throw her off the roof. Then she had learned that, mute though the girl may be, she was quite eloquent in the street-language of insulting gestures—and, as it turned out, a more formal sort as well.
Gradually, Chell taught Gladys the basics of a signed language that was, apparently, unique to her. Gladys was only vaguely aware of the existence of a language taught at schools for the deaf and dumb, and Chell’s seemed to have only the barest similarity to it: the gestures were small, quick, and as a result devilishly difficult to decipher. Slowly, over the course of many, many repetitions, Gladys learned the meanings of each almost-random twitch. On the rare occasions that Chell’s hands were not occupied with one of her many mechanical projects, she could speak with her fingers as fast as Gladys could with her tongue—but those times were rare. Even when she could speak, Chell seemed more comfortable with silence.
Not that the exchange was entirely one-sided: Gladys told Chell of herself as well. She told of her growing up in Kent to parents with somewhat radical Views, of life at the University as one of perhaps a dozen women with the influence, capital, or sheer bloody-mindedness to force the door into the boy’s club.
Gladys saw more of Chell at work as well. She began to keep one corner of her desk free for Chell to use for tinkering with whatever it was she had in her pockets. But whenever the speaking tube on the desk crackled and the secretary in the foyer bellow announced the arrival of one of her many appointments, Chell would vanish through the window, returning hours later, if at all. Gladys never commented on Chell’s furtive comings and goings, but she listened for the rattle of the window’s latch that heralded Chell’s return with far more enthusiasm than the tinny voice that prompted her departure.
One night, as she eased into a hot bath to sooth myriad aches left behind from a particularly taxing rooftop scramble, Gladys finally asked herself why. Why was she content to follow Chell into whatever long forgotten corner of the city she had in mind? Why bother with the strange girl and her even stranger idea of a good time? What was it about Chell that made her unable to stay away?
As the steam wrapped around her and unknotted her muscles, Gladys sighed. A better question might be, “why was she letting this trouble her?” Chell was her friend—had it been so long since she had had one that she had forgotten what the word meant? It was, Gladys thought as she sunk deeper into the bath, a good answer. She was rather proud of thinking of it.
-x-
Gladys scratched the last signature onto the page in front of her, already reaching for the next sheet. It was only when her fingers closed on air that she looked over and saw her inbox was empty. With a satisfied sigh, she pulled a plain sheet of paper from a desk drawer and traded her pen for a pencil. It was a hobby she had let slide during her years at University, and, after a conversation (such as it was) with Chell, she had decided to see if her talent remained. With the girl currently testing the latest modifications she had made to her leg braces on the building’s exterior, Gladys had the chance to do a bit of experimenting of her own.
Her first few strokes were hesitant, but bit by bit her old confidence returned, and for some time the only sound in the office was the scratch of her pencil. At last, Gladys paused and held the paper up to examine her handiwork. What she saw worried her. It wasn’t that it failed to meet her old standards—far from it. But what had begun as a simple sketch suddenly looked a lot more complicated to her.
Chell looked up at her from the page. No more than a pencil sketch, perhaps, but the dark eyes, wide and invariably alive with mischief, were unmistakable. So were the full lips, curved into the slight smile she always suspected was slightly mocking, the smile she was always tempted to wipe off the girl’s face… somehow. All in all, the portrait on the page looked suspiciously like a labor of love.
Gladys let the paper fall. Damn. She had almost managed to convince herself that the reason she could never tear her eyes from Chell as she climbed was simple admiration of her athletic ability, rather than a worrying fascination with the way the girl’s legs moved in those scandalous trousers of hers. Gladys took a deep breath. She needed look at this logically—emotional outbursts would only take up energy.
She was treading new ground, at least for her. At University, she had been too busy with studies to cultivate anything more than a casual acquaintance with anyone of either sex, and now she found herself… enamored…with not just a young woman but a profoundly strange one.
Gladys pressed her fingers to her temples. She was overreacting. Her…infatuation…would fade in time. She would be able to at least think words like that one without significant pauses eventually. Until then, all she had to do was play it safe. After all, there was no reason to suspect that Chell would be at all interested, even if Gladys had decided she was a, a
“Dyke?”
Gladys jumped. “What?” she snapped into the speaking tube.
“Er…” The man on other end stammered. “Humphrey Dyke here to see you, ma’am. From the patent office.”
Gladys sighed. “Yes, of course. Send him up, Whateley.”
-x-
Work, at least, provided a distraction: the questions that endless paperwork and a nearly equal number of potential clients, investors, and assorted busybodies presented her with were ones she knew the answers to, after all.
But as the money flowed in and just as quickly back out again, Gladys wondered what, precisely, her employer was doing. She had seen little of C.S. Johnson since her first day, and in recent weeks had disappeared altogether.
She had almost resolved to send a search team into the lower factory to find the man when Whateley informed her that “Mr. Johnson wants to see you, ma’am. All he’d say is that he’s ‘down below.’”
He sounded nervous, but then he always did, and Gladys was relieved simply to hear Johnson had not been found dead in some distant corner. But as she descended the creaking metal stairs into the subterranean (and extra-legal) portions of Johnson Science Innovators, she could not help but imagine what had so occupied the eccentric inventor’s time.
The belowground area had extended downwards considerably since her tour, but she still had not managed to banish visions of a colossal digging machine poised and waiting for an ill-chosen command to sink the entire city when the stairs ended and she stepped onto level ground. The room at the bottom of the factory seemed cramped and close compared to the cavernous factory halls above it, but it would be a rare building aboveground that could match its size. Like the factory hall, electric lamps cast their eerie, unchanging light on the bare stone. But here the light gleamed off a spider-web of copper.
Gladys thought at first what hung from the ceiling was an unlit chandelier. But as she examined it more closely, she saw it was a harness, a human outline waiting to be filled. The way it hung, dead and empty, its arms and legs rigid, put her in mind of an artifact of the Spanish Inquisition only just uncovered.
And, standing in the sodium-yellow light and gazing pensively up at the tangle of metal, was C.S. Johnson.
“Miss Lockhart.” was all he said as she stepped up beside him.
“You wanted to see me?”
Johnson nodded. “I’m getting older. And no one ever said science was a safe career. What happens if I die with my work unfinished? Will it pass into the hands of those small men with large wallets at the bank?”
Gladys was silent. She knew a patented Cave Johnson rant when she heard one.
“There’s only one person I’d trust to inherit what I’ve built. Only one who has the talent, the fire in her blood.”
Gladys tensed, her jaw closing with a faint click.
“She knows my work as well as I do, or better, and I have utter confidence in her ability to continue my work long after I am gone.”
She could feel her palms start to sweat. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was leading up to, but if involved the monstrosity suspended above her, she wanted no part in it.
“But, unfortunately, she is also mute. So I’ve had to resort to somewhat esoteric means to ensure Chell’s inheritance.”
The flash of relief that she wasn’t the subject of Johnson’s ramblings met a rush of concern for Chell. As they averaged out to a churning nausea, the man continued
“With this—” Johnson waved a hand at forbidding harness and the tangle of metal that held it “Chell will be able to run my company without ever saying a word. Every gear and cog can be controlled from right up there.”
“Er… couldn’t she just give orders in writing?” Gladys asked, waving a small flag for sanity.
“Ha!” Johnson barked a laugh. “In my experience, Miss Lockhart, some problems can only be solved by shouting at people.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “I’m telling you all this so that, if worse comes to worst, you can help Chell take her rightful place as my heir. I know you two have grown close, and I’m confident you want the best of her, just as I do.”
It took a moment for Gladys to speak. “You are right about that, sir.”
And as she climbed the stairs out of the pit, she thought to herself: which is why I’ll see that poor girl strapped into that thing over my dead body.
The girl in question was perched on her desk when she returned. Chell smiled as Gladys walked in, and the older woman returned the gesture weakly. She could imagine all too well Chell climbing into the sinister machine below, eager to make her father proud, before the copper bands tightened and she was made a prisoner, like an accused witch in an iron maiden. It took several seconds, slumped in her chair, for her to banish that particular image. As she did so, she was able to focus on Chell outstretched hand.
Perched in the center of the young woman’s hand was a golden bird. Far more than a simple wire frame, the outlines of feathers were etched into its metal wings, and jet-black eyes glittered in the sculpted head. Seeing that she had Gladys’s attention, Chell set the bird down on the desk. There was a faint click, and the creature’s wings fluttered as it hopped across the desk. Gladys reached out to catch just before it tumbled over the edge, turning it in her hand: she could see no winding-key, but the faint whirring as the construct went still meant there had to be clockwork somewhere within the tiny body.
As she frowned at device, wondering how Chell had made this, and how long it had taken her, she felt the silent girl’s hands on hers.
Chell was sitting closer than Gladys remembered. She was looking down at the older woman with an unreadable expression, and while her hands had closed around the bird (trapping Gladys’s fingers there as well) she made no move to pull her clockwork creation away. Gladys felt cool metal beneath her hands, warm flesh above them. As she looked up into Chell’s eyes, she felt the girl’s breath, hot on her face. That was odd, Gladys thought, because suddenly she wasn’t breathing at all.
One of Chell’s hands rose from the bird, brushing a stray lock of straw-blonde hair away from Gladys’s face. The older woman felt the hand rest on her cheek, lingering there for a moment. And then another. Gladys leaned forward, and she thought she felt Chell’s breath catch. Her eyes fluttered closed, and
“Ma’am?” The squawk of the speaking tube shattered the frozen moment into a thousand crystal shards. In an instant, Chell was gone, the window swinging in her wake. Gladys’s breath was sharp and hissed, as if she had been struck, as the voice from the tube continued. “There were several messages for you while you were down below, ma’am. Shall I send them up?”
“Whateley?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Piss off.”
Gladys slumped back into her chair, head propped between thumb and forefinger. Damn Whateley and his interruptions. A few seconds longer and she might have…
She might have ruined everything. She had a plan, didn’t she? Keep her head down, focus on the job. Be Chell’s friend. Never try to kiss her in her own father’s office. Oh, hell. She hadn’t even considered how Johnson would react. He might give his daughter free roam of the factory and the city, but she somehow doubted that liberality would extend to her being seduced by one of his employees. One of his female employees, no less. Gladys could see it with the curious clarity an overactive imagination gives worst-case scenarios: Chell would be disinherited, she would lose her job, they’d both be forced to beg or walk the streets or—
Gladys stood. That was why she had the plan, wasn’t it? All she had to do was climb up to the roof and explain things to Chell. How hard could it be? And, with the walk of the condemned, Gladys made her way to the window.
Chell was sitting cross-legged, her back to the fire escape, when Gladys reached the roof. She turned at the sound of Gladys’s footsteps, looking nearly as uncertain as the other woman felt. Gladys took a breath. All she needed to do was follow the plan, after all.
“Chell… I’m sorry, but… I can’t do this. We can’t do this. You’re my boss’s daughter, for god’s sake. And someday you’ll marry a young man with money, or connections, or both, and you’ll pass your father’s business on to your children.”
Chell’s expression was stony. Gladys knew her voice was pleading.
“What you make me feel, whatever it is that you feel, it… it just can’t happen. You see? What we have… what we had… it’s over. I’m sorry.”
Gladys turned away. She had forced the words out. Now all she needed to do was muster the energy to return to the world below. Her world. The sensible one.
It was the sound that made her stop. The faint clink of metal on brick sent her turning reluctantly back, to see Chell, on her knees. The young woman’s head was bowed, and Gladys thought she saw her shaking. In her mind, the plan withered and died.
Chell started when she felt hands on her skin, cupping her face, and Gladys had just enough time to see her eyes widen before she brought their lips together.
Later, Gladys would remember that kissing Chell was like walking out into soft summer rain: it brought a gentle warmth that saturated her body, and made her limbs tremble. It was almost like being drunk, except that she could feel everything quite clearly: Chell’s hand on the back of her neck (the other was occupied keeping her balance) the roughness of the bricks against her knees, the pressure of Chell’s leg brace against her own leg, the movement of Chell’s lips against hers. The last, she decided, was by far the best.
Eventually, Gladys pulled back, resting her forehead against Chell’s.
“I think,” she whispered, “I would like to reconsider what I just said.”
In some ways, nothing changed. Gladys continued her work, while Chell continued her wandering of the factory and the city beyond. In the evenings, Gladys would follow Chell to whatever rooftop or secluded cranny struck her fancy. But now, the location mattered little. Wherever Chell led, it was merely a place where they could be together: where Gladys could enjoy the quiet comfort of Chell’s touch, the smell of her hair, the taste of her lips.
At such times, Gladys was content. But it still troubled her that their relationship must, by necessity, be hidden. Kisses stolen in secret were sweet enough, it was true, but there were times when she wanted to simply take Chell’s hand and walk with her through the streets.
-x-
It was early autumn, and by rights Gladys should have been spending her rare day off outside, enjoying the last decent weather that the city would see for months. Instead, she was idling in the rooms she rented on Lyons Grove, alternately flicking impatiently through a book and wondering where Chell had disappeared to. She had almost resolved to go to work anyway, just to try to find the girl, when there was a rap on her door.
“You have a caller, Miss Lockhart.” Her landlady’s voice called.
Gladys rose, startled. Chell usually entered via the balcony when she visited her at home. Swinging the door open, she asked`
“Who?”
“He wouldn’t give his name. I rather think he’s what they call the strong, silent type. But he left this for you.”
The landlady handed Gladys an envelope, with “Gladys Lockhart” written across the front in neat script. Inside was a single sheet of paper which read, in the same hand
“I’m waiting downstairs.”
Gladys blinked. “You said it was a man who delivered this?”
“A young man, yes. A military type, too.”
“Is he still here?”
“I think so. He didn’t seem keen to leave when I said I’d deliver his message.”
“I think I’ll see him myself, then.” Gladys pushed past the middle-aged woman and down the stairs. When she saw who was waiting for her, she nearly stumbled on the last step.
Chell stood in the boarding-house’s hallway, clad in a deep blue coat and trousers. Her long hair was tucked expertly under her cap, and the anchors of a lieutenant of the Royal Navy glinted on her shoulders. Clearly pleased by Gladys’s look of shock, she made a flourishing bow before offering Gladys her arm. Gladys, aware that her landlady was watching from the stairs, merely accepted the proffered arm and allowed Chell to lead her outside. It was only as they made their way down that the street that she asked
“Do I want to know where you managed to find a Navy uniform?”
Chell grinned and shook her head.
“It fits you rather well. It could stand to be a little tighter in the waist, though.”
Chell shot her a glance, then nodded significantly at their interlinked arms.
“I know it would defeat the point. It doesn’t mean I can’t dream.”
Grin, nod.
“So, Lieutenant, where are you taking me?”
Chell only shook her head.
“Don’t you know?”
Her fingers twitched as she replied.
‘Surprise.’
“I don’t like surprises, Chell.”
Chell merely shrugged.
“You’re still not going to tell me, are you?”
Headshake.
As it turned out, Gladys wasn’t in suspense for long. Chell led her to Sparkhill Park, where a long white tent had been spread out on the leaf-strewn grass. Gladys could just hear the sounds of music drifting from the park’s bandstand, and she could see distant figures spinning together under the tent. Turning to her, Chell signed
‘Dance?’
Gladys took the proffered hand and, smiling, said
“Why, Lieutenant. I’d be honored.”
Gladys didn’t know what occasion warranted a dance in the park, nor how Chell had learned of it. Nor did she care, especially with Chell fingers locked in hers and Chell’s arm around her waist. Gladys couldn’t decide if she should be amused or alarmed that the young woman passed so easily for a man, but no one seemed to doubt it.
Maybe it’s the uniform, she thought as she watched Chell pick her way back from the drinks table. Young men are the only ones who are supposed to wear it, therefore anyone in one must be a young man. Despite occasional evidence to the contrary.
The only near miss came when a man who might have charitably been defined as gentleman (Gladys, who was rarely charitable, classified him as a dandy) asked Chell for a military opinion on the war in America. Fortunately, Gladys was near enough to step in.
“You’ll have to forgive him, sir,” she said, forcing a smile. “He’s only just returned—his ship was boarded by Mexican raiders in the gulf, and they cut out all the officers’ tongues.”
“Oh, I see. Damned sorry, Lieutenant. Bad business, that. Still, health of the colonies, wealth of the empire, eh?” And with that he was gone, before Gladys could launch into the story of a daring escape from a Mexican prison ship or possibly a few months of adventures with a band of American partisans west of the Mississippi.
‘Quick thinking,’ Chell’s fingers told her.
“I try not to be overawed by your courage, dear.”
Chell cast a quick a look around. Once she was sure all eyes where elsewhere, she leaned over, kissed Gladys, and proved that, no matter what the other woman said, there was nothing wrong with her tongue.
Later that evening, after the band had packed their instruments away and the last of the dancers were gone, they returned to Gladys’s rooms. Standing on the balcony outside her window, they watched the stars appear one by one in a sky that was, for once, mostly clear of smog.
Gladys felt Chell’s hand slip from her own, and looked over to see her sign
‘There’s another surprise, you know.’
Before Gladys could ask what Chell had in mind, Chell reached into a pocket of her officer’s coat and pressed what she pulled from it into Gladys’s hand.
Gladys turned the device between her fingers, holding it up to the light from indoors to examine it more closely. It was a small cube, less than three inches on a side, and it fit comfortably into her palm. Each side was crafted of a pure white material she could not identify, though it might have been ivory. At each corner, a polished silver bracket held the sides together, and each face was adorned with a child’s drawing of a heart in neat pink paint.
‘Six sides. Six months.’ Chell signed.
Gladys blinked. Had it really been that long? She made the mental calculation: she arrived to take her new job just after the New Year, and it had been March when she had kissed Chell on the roof—and it was now September. Chell’s fingers began to move, but Gladys interrupted her, pulling the young woman into a hug. Their cheeks pressed together, she whispered
“I love you too, Chell.”
-x-
It was a cold fall morning, and Gladys’s breath—even after she stubbed her last cigarette out—was smoky in the cold air. She was standing at the front of a crowd of shivering, stamping, and occasionally cursing spectators, all of them watching the great canopy before them slowly rise into shape. It was Johnson’s first prototype, still nameless, preparing for its first launch.
The cigar-shaped balloon was blossoming into shape as the hydrogen cells within were filled, and the three engines still and waiting to propel the airship across the sky. The gondola that hung below was small, only large enough for perhaps a dozen people, but on this flight it would carry only two: Johnson and Chell, who would be flying the prototype to Johnson’s estate, some 30 miles from the city. They would put the airship through its paces, and be back in the city by Monday to give the order for production of the first full-scale airship to begin.
Gladys watched as the twin figures of Chell and her father climb into the gondola, waving to the crowd. She raised her hand in reply, but it was merely a gesture: she had said her goodbyes earlier, when she and Chell had enjoyed the luxury of privacy. But she joined in the cheers as the airship rose into the sky, and watched until it disappeared beyond towers and chimneys of the city.
-x-
Gladys spent most of Monday staring out the window, wondering what Chell would have to say about the airship’s maiden voyage. The girl took to rooftops like a crow, she could only imagine what she would think of being airborne. But when, in early afternoon, she finally heard footsteps on the stairs and the door to her office swung open, it was a stranger who entered.
He was middle aged and stocky, and his black bowler hat turned slowly in his hands as he stepped forward. His voice was low and tired.
“Miss Lockhart?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“I am Inspector Barrow.” He produced a police badge. “This morning, we were called to what appears to be the wreckage of an airship twenty miles from the city.”
Gladys felt a cold knife slide between her ribs.
“I’m sorry to inform you, ma’am, that both passengers in the airship died. The pilot has been identified as Cave Johnson, but—“
The knife tumbled from Gladys’s chest and sliced open her stomach before disappearing into the floor. She closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them again, the inspector would be gone. He wasn’t.
“But we don’t know the identity of the passenger. I would appreciate it if you—”
“Chell Johnson.”
The inspector blinked. “What?”
“The passenger was a young woman, yes? With dark hair?”
“Er—we think so, ma’am. There has been some difficulty with—”
“Her name is Chell Johnson. Mr. Johnson’s daughter.”
“I see. Would you be willing to accompany me to confirm that?”
“No.”
Another blink. “What?”
Gladys shuffled the papers on her desk briskly. “I am a busy woman, Inspector. Particularly now that you have told my employer is dead and I shall have to keep his company afloat despite that. I will visit the morgue at my earliest convenience. Is that all?”
Barrow looked as if he wanted to say something, but he only sighed. “Yes, ma’am. You have my sympathies.”
Gladys waited until his footsteps faded from hearing. She wanted to scream. She wanted to sob. Instead, she collected every last scrap of paper from her desk, every report, invoice, and letter, and threw them into the fireplace. As they burned, she thought
God damn Cave Johnson and his dreams of flight. God damn me for going along with them. God damn Chell for believing in them.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the cube Chell had fashioned for her. It followed the papers into the flames. Gladys stood for a moment, watching the paint crack and the silver blacken, then spun on her heel and marched out of the office.
The factory moved on as if nothing had changed. The machines were still fed and working, the gears still turned, the furnaces still burned. Gladys was offended by that. Surely the creations of the master should die with him. The gears should have split the moment the airship crashed—that might have been fitting notification that Chell was dead, not weasel words from Barrow and his dusty hat. Gladys marched through the factory and down, past the subterranean production lines to the room that she could only think of as the pit.
As she stared up at the sullenly gleaming tangle of copper and bronze, she remembered how repulsed she had been. She had sworn that, no matter what Johnson said, Chell would never enter this room. But Johnson and Chell were both dead, somewhere in the world above. That was a complicated world: messy, smog-shrouded, and at the moment very, very painful. At that moment, Gladys wanted nothing more than the cold simplicity of metal and gears.
The only thing she felt at first, as the copper bands closed across her arms, legs, forehead, and waist, was a sharp pain at the back of her neck. She hung in the half-light for a long moment, waiting. Then she sighed. So Cave Johnson had created another failure—shocking, truly. She had no energy to pry herself from the harness, nor did she particularly care to try. So she closed her eyes, and waited. And when she opened them again, it was as if for the first time.
She could feel the factory above her, the movement of every machine like the beat of her own heart. The furnaces’ fiery breath was her own, it was her own hands that bent the molten metal into shape. Gladys flexed her fingers, and a hundred whirring engines jumped at her call.
-x-
The first thing she did was find the flaw in the prototype. It was obvious, really. Of course the second fuel valve on the third engine would leak if the throttle was set to reverse sixty percent for more than fifteen minutes. And, naturally, if the rudder was kept at full starboard for the entire maneuver, the fuel would end up only a few feet above the second engine. Which, if the craft had been operational for between thirty-eight and forty-six minutes, would be hot enough to ignite the excess fuel, not vaporize it. Gladys shook her head, at least metaphorically. Why couldn’t people just think?
-x-
The problem, she decided, was the workers. She had made all the necessary alterations the design, and the production of the new models could go forward. But she was hampered at every turn by the shortcomings of the feeble men who tended her machines. The never worked at peak efficiency, took frequent breaks, and all in all presented an obstacle to the smooth running of her factory. But she could fix that, couldn’t she? Instead of airship components, let the engines turn out clockwork. Clockwork men to stoke the fires and feed the ore, to watch the line and take the finished components away. Clockwork men would not need to halt for rest, or food. And she could shutdown that irritating air vent system and devote the power it leeched to something useful for a change.
-x-
It took her some time to realize something was wrong. She had almost finished with the assembly of the first production run of her new, more reliable workforce, when she noticed the faintest stutter in the rhythm she knew so well. It was faint, hardly discernible unless she was listening for it, but it was there. Something was not as it should be.
That was all the warning she received before pain shot through her and she screamed. It was like losing a limb: one of her engines, part of her heart, was lost to her. Another followed it into darkness, and another. Gladys writhed in the harness, deaf to her own screams that echoed around the pit.
Her furnaces went next. Each fire that was extinguished left her gasping for breath, desperate to cling to what life remained. It was all in vain. One by one, her links to her factory were severed, and she shrank in on herself, terrified of the silence, until at last the harness itself failed and she dropped to cold stone floor.
She lay there, gasping, like a fish newly washed ashore, trying to comprehend how to breathe oxygen, or the workings of her own limbs. As she flapped, helplessly, she saw two legs standing before her in the darkness. They were wearing brass bracers from knee to ankle.
-x-
It should be raining. Gladys thought. Though I suppose snow would be more likely. It was a bitter cold day, and she stood in graveyard beneath a pale winter sun. Her arm was around Chell’s shoulders, and they looked down at the twin headstones before them. The first read:
“Cave S. Johnson.
1814-1862
Beloved Father.”
The second:
“Caroline A. Johnson
1820-1862
Cherished Mother”
It was probably for the best that Gladys had missed the funeral. She might have offered a somewhat less positive epitaph for her employer—“Damned Fool,” perhaps.
Though that was nothing compared to what she might have called herself. She hadn’t known Chell’s mother was still alive, but she might have checked, instead leaving it to the police who visited the Johnson estate to inform her of the deaths of her husband and daughter—only to discover said daughter was the only one home.
Gladys still didn’t know how Chell had had the strength to come looking for her after that. Nor to climb down into the depths of the factory, to places her father had never told her of, to sever Gladys’s link with the machinery. She had hung in the pit only a few days—days when she had been someone, or something, else—and she had still spent a month in a wheelchair before she could be sure of commanding her own limbs.
Now, she stood in a graveyard with her lover, looking down at the graves of her parents.
She felt Chell sag against her, and pulled her into an embrace. She held her close as she cried, silent sobs shaking her body. It wasn’t the first time she had done so. It wouldn’t be the last. But as Chell’s shaking gradually stilled and her breathing resumed a ragged kind of rhythm, Gladys hoped that this time would be the worst.
They walked back to Gladys’s rooms hand in hand, Gladys’s eyes daring anyone to comment. As they walked, she thought:
The prototype failed and the founder died in it—can the company survive this? Chell is a new-made orphan. She hasn’t yet known me a year. How can I comfort her? How can I hope to help her?
She squeezed Chell’s hand, and felt an answering squeeze a moment later.
I have to try. It’s the only choice I have. Maybe things will be alright. Maybe they won’t. But I have to try. I’ll do what I can. Because I must.