The next day, June woke to an empty house. She headed out to find Silas and heard banging over by the collapsed silo. Wandering over, she found Silas wrenching on part of the collapsed metal side of the silo. She looked beyond the mess he was working on and saw some kind of vehicle.

“It’s my old bike.” He explained, “I thought it got crushed when the silo fell, but it looks intact.”

“What do you need a bike for?”

“How else am I going to get into the city?”

He had a point. She could fly the Skiffer; Ned and Vernon were already there; but Silas had no way to get there on his own.

So she pitched in. The bike was in a shed, which had collapsed on it under the weight of the silo. The framing had crushed in just such a way that the bike was on its side and looked mostly intact.

Twenty minutes later they had the debris cleared from around it. Silas attached a rope and they struggled to drag it out from under the collapsed structures.

It was dirty, scratched, and a little dinged, but looked fine otherwise. It was a Swiftcycle, a much older style that made June think it must be antique. It had brass plates where she was used to seeing steel.

They stood it up, and Silas started going over it, while June went to make them both coffee.

A few minutes later the ground shook, and for a second, she thought Silas had blown himself up.

She hurried out behind the silo to find Silas staring at the thumping Swiftcycle with a look approaching a grin. It was probably the happiest she’d seen him.

He looked at her with the almost-grin on his tired face.

“She lives!” He proclaimed.

They enjoyed their cups of coffee as the bike’s complicated hydrogen engine warmed to temperature.

Silas hunted down an old pair of goggles in the silo, and collected all the plans and paperwork he needed.

They went over the documents and double-checked to make sure they had documented every aspect of the Skiffer.

June signed an affidavit naming Silas her agent to file the patent for her.

Finally, they were ready.

They stood in the yard, Silas holding the documents and June with her hands in her jacket pockets.

“Be careful out there.” Silas said, aware how many times he said the same thing, “We will be taking the advantage from the Parsons and they won’t be happy about it. They may do something drastic to prevent it. To you or to Vernon.

“Keep a sharp eye out and don’t do anything too risky. Fly around in the center of the spaces between buildings. Let yourself be seen. If you can manage it, let yourself be photographed.”

She nodded. Most of that would be fairly easy. Holding still long enough to be photographed, certainly. Even her own plan, the one she didn’t tell Silas about, wouldn’t be too difficult. Everything that came after...

She pushed that aside. She’d worry about all that once she was in the middle of it.

“Be careful, June.”

“I will. This plan is going to work, don’t worry.”

“You’ve built an amazing machine.”

“We did that.”

They stood there, too many things to say; everything held equal meaning and the bottleneck meant nothing came out.

“I’ll see you on the other side,” Silas said finally.

June stepped forward and gave the old man a hug. It was sudden and unexpected and he hesitated a second before returning the gesture.

June stepped back, gave Silas a nod, then turned and headed toward the Skiffer.

Silas slid his goggles down and used his cane for balance to help lift his bad leg over the Swiftcycle saddle.

He heard the Skiffer start up and looked over his shoulder to see it lift effortlessly into the air. June made a single loop of the yard, gave him a wave, and shot off toward the city, her hair streaming behind her.

Silas smiled at the sight. He had a hard time reconciling the June of today with the headstrong, impatient version who had first come to the Tinkery.

With a head shake that spoke to the mystery of time and its power to change people, he lowered his goggles, kicked the bike on, and roared off in the same direction as June and her amazing flying machine.

~*~

Vernon’s heart pounded as he looked out at the gathering crowd. It had taken him until late in the night and a good deal of this morning to pull every string he could find and call in every favor he had.

Now, finally, fifty reporters and a curious crowd gathered to hear what he was going to say. He looked back at Ned, who gave a nod of encouragement. Taking a deep breath, he stepped out. For a second nothing happened. Then a flash bulb popped. Then two, then twenty.

He knew his face would have been shocking on a train wreck victim. The bruises had darkened since he’d first received them at the end of a fist. The cuts were clear in their ferocity and number. It was quite shocking to anyone not prepared to see it, and he had not prepared anyone.

One reporter, an old chum from school, spoke up first, “Vernon? What the blazes happened to you?”

Vernon smiled carefully, trying to not split his lip again and spoke into the microphone that had been set up on the steps of Inspiration Station. “Well, Carl, that’s what I called you all here to talk about. It’s a rather pathetic story, so I beg your indulgence. It started when I made a deal with the devils.”

~*~

June’s heart pounded, and for the first time in days, it wasn’t pounding from fear.

The Skiffer moved as swiftly and agilely as any bird, dodging between buildings, zipping over narrow streets, and soaring without hesitation.

At one point she climbed straight up until the entire city spread out below her like a map. She cut power to the rotors and the cyclorotor blades gave her perfect control as she plunged straight down. She engaged the motors again with a hundred feet to spare, and she could honestly say she had never felt more alive.

She kept this up for half an hour before she could see the change in the crowds as she flew over. Heads looked up and fingers pointed. As she flew past a clock tower, she checked the time. Vernon should be in full swing by now.

Time for the unplanned part of the plan.

~*~

“… I can tell you I did not wake up thinking I would spend a part of the day plummeting to my death, let me assure you. But given their actions up to that point, I should not have been surprised. Philip Parsons has never had the greatest self-control. Of the two brothers, he is most certainly the smaller man, and it was with great glee, I am sure, that he shoved me off the edge and watched me fall.

“The details beyond this point are now a blur in my memory, but I know that as I fell to my death, an angel with no cause to do so, flew down, caught me and saved my life. That angel, ladies and gentlemen, is the inventor and pilot of the flying craft so many witnessed the evening before last.”

He had them on the edge of their seats. He could see it. They wanted to know the rest.

All except for the man with a neat mustache at the rear. His collar was up and his hat brim lowered. but Vernon just knew this man was an agent of the brothers. It was time to make June, Silas, and himself untouchable.

“Her name is Juniper Hughes, and, with an inventor named Silas Ames of the Tinkery, she has built the most amazing craft since…”

He trailed off as a familiar object rounded a distant building and headed straight for him. The hum of the motors and whir of the rotors and Vernon’s gaze all served to direct the crowd’s attention toward the Skiffer as it barreled down on them.

What is she doing? Vernon thought. June better slow down quickly, or she’s going to crash.

Instead, June pulled a quick, sideways flip, her hair streaming in the wind and the brass goggles glinting in the light as she and her machine rolled like a wheel.

A flash bulb popped, capturing the moment June and the Skiffer together danced gracefully into history.

Then the second was over, and the Skiffer was upright again – facing backward as she vectored the thrust to slow her momentum and come to an almost perfect stop above and slightly behind Vernon. A second later, the Skiffer landed. June jumped out as the rotors slowed and yanked the goggles off. She stepped beside Vernon and spoke into the microphone.

“I am June. I have run and hidden long enough.

“To the scum that call themselves Parsons, I have a message for you.

“You have no idea what you stole; no idea how to fly it. You are lowly thieves. You do not have the intelligence to fly what you have, and I’m going to prove it to you. Meet me tomorrow at Grisham Central Park. The first to circumnavigate the park while not exceeding twenty feet wins the rights to the Skiffer.

“I challenge you both. If you are too yellow to show up, then this city will not let you forget it.

“But I doubt you’ll show. You’ve got neither the wit nor the spine. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. The city will witness your response.”

With that, she donned the goggles and climbed back in the Skiffer. The rotors hadn’t even come up to speed before the crowd let out a cheer that followed her as she and the Skiffer leapt into the sky and zipped around a corner.

Vernon shot a glance at the mustached man who was hurrying away.

His mouth was dry as he whispered, “What have you done?”

The trio headed out into the night air and found the street in a less busy state than Baxter, not counting the memories he didn’t form, had ever seen it.

How does one start a hunt of this kind? Baxter wondered.

Vesta chuckled: You could ask. I find it’s a great method to learn things.

Baxter, more or less agreeing entirely, and having no cohesive objection, moved forward with the suggestion.

“Marshal, how does one start a hunt of this variety?”

“Not fast enough for you, Baxter?”

Arguably, walking along the boardwalk was the least rapid form of hunting Baxter was aware of, as most hunts involved at least a little chasing, and pursuit by its very nature, tended to imply speed.

“I would have thought hunting would have involved more hunting.” Baxter replied, his insides filling with Vesta’s chortling.

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“Hold on just one minute.

“Let me get this straight. You want me to go out there. In public. To mouth off to THE GUYS WHO THREW ME FROM AN AIRSHIP? I get I haven’t exactly been a bosom buddy of yours, June, but that’s suicide.”

Vernon looked at June and Silas, fear written all over his face.

Silas lifted a calming hand. “It’s not like that. We…”

June cut him off, “They won’t know about you until you start speaking, because the whole city will be looking at me flying the Skiffer around.”

Vernon’s brow scrunched up. “Why would you be doing that?”

“Because,” Silas said, “Our plan has three parts designed to make us very hard for them to kill.”

Vernon nodded, still not convinced. “So, I’m talking to reporters, telling them my story; June’s flying around as bait; and what are you doing?”

Silas smiled, “I got the least exciting job. I’ll be filing in-depth patent paperwork on the Skiffer. Between you and June, they’ll miss the moment that makes it illegal to steal the design. Well, more illegal a…

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The jail at ten in the evening had shrunk to the size of its lamplight.

Thompson had built the fire up in the little stove and then found he had nowhere to put himself, so he stood beside it with his hands behind his back, for all the world like a man at the funeral of somebody he had never liked.

The doctor sat at the desk with his transcript squared and a fresh page under his hand, acting as scribe once again.

Baxter stood in the middle of the floor trying not to be a part of the proceedings.

Brinson also stood, in the second cell, behind the bars, with the stillness of a thing that had made its peace with waiting long before any of this began.

The marshal had been at him for forty minutes, to little, or rather, little measurable effect.

He is not going to get it, Vesta said.

No, I don’t think he will.

He is asking beautifully, though. He has a way with these sorts of things.

Her tone was light, almost cheery.

He is asking beautifully at a door that has been cleverly bolted, Baxter responde…

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For a second, nobody moved. And then, because he was above all else a polite man, Ned climbed out and headed around the front to greet June.

This action dislodged whatever morose block had seized up Silas’ internal workings, and he too climbed down from the cab.

He walked stiffly toward the pair and was vaguely aware that greetings had been exchanged followed by Ned asking about the rescue in the paper. This piqued Silas’ interest, and he listened in as he came up beside them.

“I don’t know what the papers said, but it came down to Vernon was falling and I had to catch him.”

Ned nodded and filled in a gap she hadn’t been willing to fill herself out loud. “But you couldn’t go back to the hospital? Because of those men?”

She nodded, then looked up at the big man, “I wonder, Ned, if I could have some time with Silas? The man I caught is in the house, on the right. Would you mind going in there and staying with him while Silas and I talk?”

Ned sensed what was carefully not said and tipped his …

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The reply took four seconds to assemble, which was the longest sentence she had yet spent.

L. O. O. K. A. T. T. H. E. M. A. R. K. S. N. O. T. T. H. E. C. O. U. N. T.

“Beg pardon?”

Blur. Then, deliberately, spaced: four marks in a row.

Baxter replayed the last two seconds and brought the four of them up at magnification, which he had not previously bothered to do on the grounds that a defect was a defect and one blur was very much like another.

One blur, as it happened, was not very much like another at all.

The first mark ran one way across the ribbon and was brief. The second ran the same way and was held nearly three times as long. The third reversed direction entirely, a flux laid against the grain, unmistakable once he was looking for it. The fourth reversed and held.

He examined them for a second and a half, which was, for Baxter, a considerable stare. Four loci of data; a not insubstantial data density.

Then he went back and pulled the very first instance of the defect, from Wednesday …

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The paper cost him two cents and told him almost nothing.

He read it under the electric lamp outside the newsstand, holding it at a distance to allow his eyes to focus. The story ran to eleven paragraphs and contradicted itself in at least four of them. A patient had been taken from a ward aboard the Lewis Hospital Airship. At least two men had done the taking. Staff had been injured, one seriously, though the paper could not agree with itself on how many or how badly.

Then, a man had gone off the receiving platform’s edge. A flying machine had come off the platform after him and had caught him in the air, or had caught him near the ground, or had struck him and carried him that way, depending on which of the paper’s witnesses one preferred. The machine had then flown west and had not returned.

No name for the patient. No name for the machine. No name for whoever had been flying it.

He read it a second time, more slowly, looking for the things a newspaper puts in without meaning to.

‘A you…

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Evening came to Martinsville the way it apparently came every day, whether or not anyone in town had been not-murdered or had spent the afternoon transcribing such a mostly non-existent murder.

Baxter stood at the window of the doctor’s front room, in the gap between the curtain and the frame, where he could watch the street. Down at the corner, warm light showed in the depot office where the marshal was bending a telegraph clerk’s whole evening to his purposes, and the marshal’s silhouette crossed the window there at intervals, and each time it did, it paused, facing up the street, checking.

Above him, floorboards creaked as the doctor changed into clothes suitable for drinking with a freight hauler. In the back room, the blankets had come down off the ruined window, now that the sun was no longer present to be blocked from entering, and the ordinary night air of Ohio moved through the house.

It was, Baxter realized, the first time he had been alone since the field.

He stood with the da…

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The front door was unlocked, which surprised June, but she was grateful that she wouldn’t have to leave Vernon on the porch as she broke in. Inside was a set of stairs to the left, a doorway to what was probably the dining room, and a kind of sitting room to the right. The dimming light let her see a sofa, and she helped a groaning and limping Vernon to it.

The air inside possessed a stillness of a house that has been closed a long time. Not stale exactly. Cool and dry and undisturbed, carrying the smell of old wood, varnish, and dust and something faintly floral.

She eased him down onto the couch and helped him recline in a comfortable position. Even though they moved slowly to minimize his pain, fine dust still left the cushions and filmed the room.

It hung in the low light coming through the two windows on the west side, turning the light into visible shafts that lay across the floorboards at a steep evening angle.

The sofa was shorter than Vernon was long, and the hard armrest made it…

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The marshal stood at the blanketed window gazing through as if it wasn’t there.

“We need to take stock of the man we’re dealing with,” he said. “He came three hundred and twenty-five miles to get that tool, and didn’t get it. He arranged a murder, and by now the whole county knows the corpse jumped through a window at noon.

His machine that stayed behind is in the jail, and his machine that ran is behind two wool blankets with a federal marshal. Every single thing he came for has gone wrong, and there is exactly one door out of all of it for him.” He turned from the window. “And the door is you, Baxter. He cannot leave this town. Not without the property in your chest, and not, if he knows his trade half as well as I think he does, while your spools are still wound. You bear too much evidence.”

“He knows what I carry in more senses than one,” Baxter agreed. “A mechanician would understand, the moment he realized that this body never came back last night, that the whole of his Wednesday …

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Silas felt the safety of the noon crowds as he walked down the Tinkery’s street. The local commerce and industrial concerns shared a common lunch hour and the foot traffic moving as a mass gave him perfect cover as he limped along, his cane tapping out an even, if not quick, rhythm.

Clement Street at noon on a weekday was a river of people. The printing concern on the north side of the block emptied its afternoon shift out onto the pavement in their ink-stained aprons. The bootmakers two doors down, the tin shop at the corner, the accounting house in the brick building across from the Tinkery all released their people into the same hour, and the pavements on both sides of the street filled with men and women moving toward the food vendors at the Clement and Ninth.

The air smelled of frying onions and coffee. A tram passed, its bell competing with the general noise, and nobody looked up at it.

Nobody looked at Silas either, which was rather the point.

He decided that instead of walking rig…

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Nothing indicated that I would ever be a writer. I had quite a few of the building blocks, but no inclination. In fact, when my brother began writing, my first instinct was to say, "Yeah, there's no way I could do that."

So I went to vocational school, collected a few degrees, a few more certifications, and aced speech class. Then came a whirlwind of jobs, pursuits, and experiments. I discovered I liked knowing how things ticked, how to make things tick, and how to make them tick better.

Fast forward about eleven years. Suddenly, my godson was turning 13. I thought a good coming of age book or something exciting like the Hardy Boys or Jules Verne would be great for a newly minted teen.

Turns out, there was nothing like that for him. All the new stuff was drenched in gloom, and saturated with a sense of can't do.

The good gu…

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Chapter Eleven: A Message in a Bolton Part 3

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The record becomes a river of moonlit ground, tall grass parting and gone, the horizon jolting, and beneath the images the telemetry stripe lights up like a switchboard. Drive pressure to its stops. Governors overridden. Stride length beyond rated maximum and lengthening. Bolton is spending himself at a rate the maker never sanctioned, and the margin of the tape is one long ribbon of alarms.

Baxter paused there, because the alarms were the point.

Behind the running comes the sound of pursuit.

It is footfalls, but the arithmetic of them is wrong in two directions at once. Too heavy for a man, each strike a flat, dense report like a dropped beam, and too far apart, the rhythm of something whose stride eats ten feet at its leisure. And laid under the rhythm, a mechanical note, a hiss-and-knock in the left leg’s cycle, the sound of a machine that has been damaged and yet continued, driven on by purpose.

Bolton does not look back. The stride-song gr…

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It turned out the Lark ambulance airship was slower than the Skiffer.

June discovered this within thirty seconds of leaving the Lewis’s receiving platform, when she pulled alongside the ascending Lark and found herself reducing throttle to avoid overrunning it. The Lark’s bladeless engine system -- a turbine design that moved air through smooth-walled channels with no rotating external components, the exhaust directed through vectoring nozzles for thrust and attitude control -- was quiet and reliable. It rose at a steady, measured rate toward the Lewis, rotating as it climbed so that by the time it reached the receiving platform its rear hatch was already oriented toward the platform’s edge.

She held the Skiffer in a wide orbit around the ascending Lark, watching it dock, and then climbed past it and came in over the Lewis’s receiving platform from above.

The platform was larger than the hospital’s rooftop pad -- a full working surface with marked landing areas, ground crew stations, equ…

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The sound the man makes is not a word. It is the sound a chair makes when it is shoved back hard across parquet, and under it, tangled with it, a human voice with no language in it at all, only pressure. Inarticulate, just sound.

Bolton turns. The gaze comes around low and careful, and it finds the desk with the chair skidded away from it, papers sliding from the blotter, and two hands, above the desk, crushing a slip of paper into a fist. The paper carries a printed header. The gaze does not rise past the second button of the waistcoat, but the hands it watches are shaking.

“The header,” the marshal said. “Can you read it?”

Baxter froze the frame and drew the fist closer, resolving the crumpled paper by degrees. “Western Union. The rest is folded into the hand.”

“A wire has a sender,” the marshal said, in the ledger voice. “And a sending office, and the office keeps a flimsy. Somebody put words on that paper, and somewhere there’s a copy of them with a name attached.” He nodded thoughtfu…

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“For what?” June asked. She kept her voice low.

Vernon drew a breath and the breath cost him something. She could see it in the tightening around his eye, the slight compression of his lips as the cracked ribs on his left side registered the expansion of his chest.

He let the breath out carefully, in a controlled exhalation that minimized the movement.

“The Parsons,” he said. “I told the Parsons everything.”

June looked at him. “Preachers did this to you?”

Something moved across his face that was not quite a smile. “Parsons. A family. From Boston.” He paused for the next breath, managing it. “Old money. Very old.”

She had heard the name, she thought, in a roundabout indirect way in newspaper society pages and financial columns or something equally peripheral. She was not certain she had heard it in any specific context.

“Tell me what happened,” she said. “From the beginning.”

He looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then he looked at her.

“I sell information,” he said. Each sentence came out sep…

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“It is, in fact, Thursday. “ the marshal said.

Baxter stood very still among the wreckage of the operating theatre, the scattered instruments, the shattered window frame through which a dead man had recently departed at considerable speed, and allowed the words to arrive in full.

It was Thursday.

He had known it. He had known it since the field, since the dew and the cows and the observation of the particular quality of the morning light. Not known it in the rigorous sense, admittedly, but in the as-rigorous-sense-as-possible he had known almost nothing, a condition the day had been at some pains to demonstrate to him repeatedly and from several angles. But the hunch had held. Through the fence and the jail and the accusation of murder and the resurrection of his own alleged victim, through every ungreased hour of it, the hunch had sat quietly in his processors with real meat on its bones, waiting with the patience of a vulture.

Thursday.

Somewhere in his internal architecture, a modest ce…

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The city at night from one hundred feet up was a different city than the one June knew from the street.

She knew Grisham from pavement level, from the perspective of someone who had walked its neighborhoods and ridden its trams and looked up at its buildings. From one hundred feet, the buildings were still tall but their tops were close, and the streets between them were channels of lamplight with dark moving shapes in them, and the elevated maglev line was no longer above her but approximately level, the cars on it passing with the resonant hum of their drive coils at a distance she could have thrown a stone to cover.

She held the Skiffer at that height and pushed west, keeping her airspeed low enough that the wind in her face was manageable without goggles in the dark. The goggles would have helped but she needed her full unfiltered field of view to navigate, and the April night air at low speed was cold but not punishing.

The instrument panel was invisible. She had not installed lamp …

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