A Circus of Brass and Bone Read online

  “Once we arrive in Boston, we can telegraph the investors. They will know what we ought to do,” Lacey said. It was almost a prayer.

  ~ * ~

  The Mountains of East Tennessee

  It began with an imperfection in a handblown glass tube. The join of the stopcock made the small air bubble nigh-invisible. The new assistant assigned to maintain the lab didn’t notice a thing. Likely, he was regretting having agreed to take a position in the remote mountains of East Tennessee. The town nearby wasn’t what anyone would call lively. Most of the young girls had moved to the cities for paying jobs in factories. The ones who remained weren’t the brightest or the most beautiful, and they all had relatives with shotguns.

  The imperfection hardly mattered, but it had gone unnoticed for a month, allowing the slow leak of fire aether to form an invisible bubble that floated and danced in the assistant’s wake, now behind him, now ahead.

  The assistant opened the exterior door to the aether enrichment chamber, and then hesitated. Beyond the interior door, the enriched aether was stored. He could not resist the urge to peek.

  And even that would not have caused serious harm, except to any potential progeny of the assistant, if he had not squinted at the interior, decided it needed a closer look, and struck a match to light his lamp—too close to the invisible bubble of fire aether.

  ~ * ~

  Nearby

  Mina trudged home. It was the last year her parents could afford to send her to school. She planned to treasure every bit of it, even the long walk back. At the Culhane farm, she stopped to pet the farm cats that lingered near the fence.

  After one last scratch behind the ears of a raggedy tom, she straightened and looked up—as the sky exploded in spreading whiteness. Mina clapped her hands over her eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Then sound like a thunderclap picked her up and threw her off the path to tumble down the mountain. She came to rest in a trickle of water in a shallow gorge. Blackness took her. She never felt the rocks bouncing down the scree and striking her body.

  ~ * ~

  40 Miles West of Topeka, Kansas

  Gerhardt Yoder straightened from cutting hay and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. Only a few more hours to sundown, and then he could enjoy a beer cooled in the spring. He looked across his field with pride. He and his sons had worked hard: his cattle would not go hungry this winter. Life in the new country was good.

  Light flashed in the East, bright as if another sun was rising. He squinted and shielded his eyes with his hand. The brilliant whiteness rolled closer. He couldn’t bear to look at it directly for more than a few seconds. When his sons were small, he’d bought a circle of smoked glass from a peddler so that the family could watch the eclipse. He wished for it now.

  Closer.

  It moved faster than any cloud. The storm grew at an uneven rate, suddenly expanding forward or to one side as if it had hit a pocket of accelerant. Streaks of lightning crossed the sky, and where they led, the brilliant whiteness followed.

  Gerhardt sensed that the others had stopped working as well, but he didn’t scold them. In snatched glances before his eyes burned and watered, he saw tornado funnels of whiteness reaching down. In the distance, smoke.

  “Fire!” he shouted. “I think the Johansen farm. Come! We hitch the horses and go. Wilhelm, get shovels. Johan, axes.”

  “Wait!” Johan said, pointing. “There are more!”

  Other columns of smoke rose where the twisters touched down. The leading edge of the white storm approached Gerhardt’s farm. Even the crickets in the field grew silent. A sizzle and snap made the hairs on Gerhardt’s arms stand on end. When he looked up, lightning arched across the sky over his field like a cathedral dome. A vortex of fire reached down.

  “Run!” Gerhardt shouted.

  Mercifully, the intense heat from the fire killed him before he realized that he did not die alone.

  ~ * ~

  Denver, Colorado

  Mrs. Du Voix (Marcella Simmons, according to her identification papers) surveyed her “guests” with lidded eyes. Half her gift was timing. Three women and one man sat around the table. They held hands to form a circle, their eyes closed, their expressions anticipatory. Almost ready, Mrs. Du Voix thought. The drapes shrouding the windows provided the perfect atmosphere—though more light seeped through than she expected.

  She made a mental note to order heavier drapes from the seamstress, though she kept her outer expression tranquil. “Oh, Sister Lucia Magdalene,” she intoned, “come to me. Aid us to communicate with our dearly departed. Share with us the wisdom of those beyond the veil!”

  Really, the light was too bright.

  “I feel Sister Lucia entering me!” she cried. The hands holding hers jerked satisfactorily in surprise. This would be a good session, she thought—and then she did feel something.

  Her eyes sprang open. Brilliant light streamed through the heavy drapes. Her back arched. Her mouth gasped in a paroxysm of pain. She felt her bones expand, radiance pouring out of them and into her flesh at an unbearable rate.

  Around her, her clients thrashed, caught in spasms of their own.

  “Have mercy!” she croaked, fearing that a powerful spirit had taken offense at her deceptions. She hoped it would release her.

  Instead, she felt her heart rate accelerate like a runaway horse. Blood vessels burst beneath her skin. Trails of blood oozed from her nose, mouth, ears, and eyes. And then the almost-famous spiritualist Mrs. Du Voix achieved her final, permanent communion with the departed.

  ~ * ~

  On the Outskirts of Augusta, Georgia

  The sun beat down on Jacob’s neck as he bent and heaved a massive boulder out of the ground. Sweat beaded on his dark skin and trickled across the brass and leather aether harness he wore. He hated the thing with all his heart. After the war, when he got his freedom, he’d sworn he’d never put it on again.

  The night his master said he had to work for another year, he and his wife—and the two of their children who hadn’t been sold away yet—bundled up what little they had and stole away in the night. They hid in the woods until they stumbled across a group of freed slaves building their own town.

  In Freeville, they scratched a living out of soil so poor that no whites contested them for it. They built themselves a one-room house, ate what they could grow and raise and trade for, and dressed in cast-offs, but they had very little money. When they could, they went to Augusta to buy or barter for necessities.

  Life got harder when Augusta passed Black Codes. Only the ex-slaves with work papers from a white master were allowed in town. Jacob still wouldn’t put the aether harness back on.

  It wasn’t worth it, he argued to the other free blacks who thought it was the only way. The harness stole the aether from their bones to provide extra vitality to their muscles—at the cost of years of their life, and weakness in their old age. And the harness could control them. They might as well be slaves again!

  But when Jacob and his wife’s new baby was born, it was weak and fitful and in need of proper doctoring, doctoring that cost money.

  Jacob carried the boulder over to the cart, tumbled it in, and walked, at his own pace, to the next large rock. The overseer gave him a dirty look but made no threat. Jacob smiled to himself. At least that had changed.

  The overseer’s expression grew confused, then fearful. Jacob looked over his shoulder. A vast white cloud expanded toward them from three sides, glittering like mica in the sunlight.

  “Boss, what—” he began. He stopped. The overseer was plainly as pig-ignorant as he.

  When had an overseer provided help anyway? Jacob touched his charm bag, squared his shoulders, and prepared to take it, whatever “it” might be.

  The sky went white. His aether harness tightened around his chest as if it were a living thing. Jacob felt a tug on his bones that he recognized as the harness spindling bone aether out to power his muscles. He gasped and tensed. The power flo
oded his body. Then the flow reversed. Energy poured into him, until his whole body vibrated with it. He threw back his head and howled. The cascade of energy didn’t stop. The harness tried to store all that power—and failed. It funneled the excess into his flesh. His muscles all convulsed simultaneously. Pain radiated through him where the overload fired his muscles so strongly that they tore away from bone and ligament. His face locked into a rictus, his eyes wide and staring at the sky. He fell to the ground. Shuddering gasps and groans provided the accompaniment to his pain. Some of them came from his throat, and some, not.

  Thrashing like a fish drowning in air, he flopped onto his side. The overseer had crumpled to the ground, dead or unconscious. Convulsions like Jacob’s wracked one of the other harnessed freedmen. The second had died in his traces, withered down to half his size in only a few minutes. If Jacob had had control over his muscles, he would have flinched. Instead, he writhed on the ground and prayed for the pain to end.

  ~ * ~

  William McCormack

  Boston, Massachusetts

  William McCormack’s legs ached and his feet throbbed. He’d walked all day looking for a place that might hire him. His father had died in the last sickness that spread through the slums, but William wasn’t big enough to take his place canal-building. When he’d tried to get a job as a newspaper hawker, the other boys chased him away with cries of, “Stinking Paddy!”

  Across the street, he saw a sign in the window of a butcher shop saying “Help Wanted.” He trotted over, lured by the scent of sausages on the breeze. If he worked there, maybe the butcher would let him take scraps home sometimes. He was at the door, hand raised to knock, when he saw the smaller sign in the window: “No Irishmen or Dogs Allowed.”

  Shoulders slumped, he plodded away, his dreams of sausages evaporating.

  His mam’s shift in the crystal workshop at Peacock Chandeliers ended soon. The supervisor, Mr. Roger, wasn’t a bad man. He’d let William sit at the edge of the shop floor and wait for his mam, so long as William kept quiet and didn’t get in the way. Mr. Roger kept candy in his pocket, and he gave a piece to each child worker at the end of their shift. Sometimes William would get a wrapped molasses taffy or a piece of horehound candy at shift change, too.

  The waiting list for jobs in the crystal workshop grew longer each time a new shipful of immigrants docked. Conditions were much better than at some of the other factories. Twenty minutes for lunch, a row of thick glass blocks near the ceiling letting in plenty of light, a fan to keep the heat bearable. Mr. Roger wasn’t the kind to take personal liberties with the workers, either.

  William slipped inside the noisy factory and found his way to the crystal workshop. His mam glanced across at him and smiled, but her fingers never stopped flying as she fished a crystal prism from the basket on her table, hooked it onto a short chain, and draped the chain over a hook on the slow-moving conveyor that snaked its way past the work tables. At the end of the conveyor, children plucked the hanging prisms and attached them to loops on child-high chandelier skeletons. They spun the chandeliers this way and that, to make sure no crystals were missing—and perhaps to send rainbows cavorting across the workshop.

  Mr. Roger looked down from his glass-windowed office up above the shop floor, where he could watch all that went on. Though he didn’t come out and chase William away, he didn’t smile either. No candy today, William thought. That was okay. All he really wanted was to rest.

  William sat near the door, his back to the wall. He drew up his knees, pillowed his head on his arms, and closed his eyes.

  He woke slowly from a dream in which person after person turned him down for a job as his face grew hotter and hotter. Awake, the heat was real enough. White light blazed through the glass blocks above, illuminating the factory floor with unbearable clarity and bleaching the crystal-cast rainbows to invisibility.

  White-hot brightness flashed like lightning inside his eyes, blotting out everything else. Pain swept through him with prickling heat. He fell to the ground, screaming. Around him, he heard other people crying out and sharp cracking sounds that he couldn’t identify. Something sharp cut his cheek. He struggled against the pain and pushed himself up to his knees. A bang! rattled the workshop and hurled him to the ground.

  The horrible, painful brightness faded, leaving blindness in its wake. William pushed himself up to hands and knees. He swayed. Standing seemed impossible. If he had to crawl, he would.

  His vision seeped back, though he stared at the world through a heavy veil. Everything was black and shades of gray. Slowly, he understood what he looked at. A hole gaped where a wall had stood. Rubble was strewn across the workshop. The workers lay like tantrum-tossed dolls. Only a handful struggled to push themselves up.

  Across the room, the heavy worktable his mother sat behind had crashed to the side. He couldn’t see her. Glimmering crystal shards were strewn across the floor, their beauty promising only pain. He crawled toward his mother’s table, picking his way around the fallen, careful where he placed his hands and knees. He tried not to look at the dead workers, but he could not keep himself from studying their faces. Blood ran from their eyes, their nose, their ears, but he stared at each one until he knew: not his mam.

  Halfway there, he saw her. She huddled in a crumpled heap under the heavy weight of the worktable. He pushed himself to his feet to run to her, but on the first step, his muscles gave way. He fell and hit the ground with bruising force.

  He crawled faster, no longer choosing his way but simply plowing through. The crystal shards cut into his palms and his knees. It hurt, but the anticipatory, waiting-to-unfold pain in his heart overwhelmed it.

  “Mam!” he said, when he reached her. “Mam, it’s William! Mam, look at me!” He cradled her head with bloody hands.

  When she opened her eyes to look at him and managed a faint smile, he knew everything could still be all right. “Hello—.” A frown crossed her face. “Can’t—breathe.” She gasped for air. “Too—heavy.”

  William pushed against the worktable, but he couldn’t budge it.

  He crawled to the doorway of the factory and pulled himself up to stand. Bodies sprawled in the street, but nobody moved.

  “Hello, can somebody help?” he called. “Please, my mother is trapped! Please help! Is anybody there?”

  He held his breath, but all he heard were the soft whimpers and moans coming from the factory behind him.

  ~ * ~

  Meanwhile, the igniting aetheric wave swept past Boston and over the Atlantic Ocean, where a steamship called Aether’s Bounty traveled unknowingly into it.

  Chapter 2

  ~* * *~

  The Great Boston Pyre, Part I

  The first wave of death rolled across America. The chain reaction of supercharged air and fire aether agitated any other aether it passed close to. Steam power stopped working when the containment chambers blew out. Factories exploded. Munitions depots with the new fire aether tanks were wiped from the face of the earth, along with any nearby buildings. All the lights went out. Water ceased to flow from spigots, or in some cases, erupted out with force enough to demolish anything in its path. Such commotion and turmoil! I wish I could have seen it.

  Bone aether did not remain unaffected. Whether vital force was thrust into bone, or drawn out from it, pity the mortal flesh caught between. Death was not stingy with her favors.

  Seawater absorbed the roil of aether, weakening it and slowing its spread. Those bathing at the seaside were unaffected, though their holidays turned grim when they saw the devastation that awaited them on shore. America’s neighbors across the sea survived the first wave better.

  Except England and France. They both had their own secret aether enrichment projects. When the wave of charged aether—reduced in strength, but still much more powerful than in its natural state—activated the enriched aether, the chain reaction regained its original vigor.

  Death poured out.

  Countries without enrichment proje
cts were less affected. Perhaps only two out of every five people died in the first wave, compared to the four in five who died in North America.

  The circus survived because we were surrounded by salt water. We got off practically scot-free, although our aetheric devices were affected. The steam engine that powered the ship surged, rocketing us forward through the waves. The engineers talked knowledgeably about “natural aether fluctuations” in an attempt to hide their bafflement. The Indian elephant of bone and brass acted odd afterward, as if the vast wave of aetheric power had reminded it of being a living creature. We kept it, for it was a lovely showpiece. But we began to treat it cautiously, as if it truly were a vast creature of uncertain temperament. I say we, though I didn’t interact with it until much later. At this time, I was still silenced and smothered in layers of cloth, my arm bound to my side.

  ~ * ~

  Jonathan Matzke, the Man So Thin He Wears a Wedding Ring As a Belt!

  On the Ship, Aether’s Bounty, the Atlantic Ocean.

  The skeleton man hungered.

  Breakfast seemed so long ago, though he’d gobbled biscuits and tea until his stomach hurt. His precious stash of tasties was buried in his wagon for their grand entrance into Boston, along with everything else he had to his name. He had so little—he thought self-pityingly—that his kit was packed and loaded while others still dallied in their quarters, packing away the wondrous sprawl of their belongings. And so Jonathan Matzke, The Man So Thin He Wears a Wedding Ring as a Belt!, went without. His stomach clenched tight in rebellion.

  Though the hardtack and cheese and dried apples he’d packed didn’t appeal to him, anyway. Jonathan ravened, but not for that. For something else. He didn’t know what yet.

  He’d know it when he saw it, by the salivating of his mouth. Maybe one of the others might have something that would fill the aching pit in his stomach. Maybe they’d give him some if he asked nicely. Or—in the upset of packing, they wouldn’t notice or care if a little bit here or there went missing. Mice. Ships always had mice.