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“Careful,” said Nate. “You don’t want to break it.”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t feel weak,” he said. “Just stiff. Ahhh!” He grinned. “Got it loose.”

Roger twisted his hand and the lock turned.

A series of clanks came from inside the walls. They banged out one after another. It was the sound of chains and giant clocks grinding to life.

A second noise, a shrill sound, started up behind the long wooden planks. All around the apartment, they trembled in time with the sounds. A deep rattle echoed out, and Nate realized all the sounds had become much clearer.

“Fuck!” shouted Roger.

Clive lunged at the ladder as all the walls in the room became hazy. The boards puffed out years of dust along their entire lengths. The tremble became a blur. A beat later Nate realized why Roger had shouted.

The planks turned like a monstrous set of vertical blinds. The ladder shifted with them and almost toppled before Clive leaped onto the bottom rung to balance it. Nate and Tim dove in to help. Roger slid down, almost fell on top of Clive, and a loud crack echoed in the room. The rotating boards forced the loft away from the walls. The side of the wooden steps splintered as the outer edge of the platform refused to budge.

The ladder fell against the kitchen counter and crashed to the floor.

The planks kicked up more dust as they swung open to reveal the dark space inside the walls. Sounds echoed out and shook the glass in the windows. The boards pointed straight out from the wall and slid back into narrow slots.

The noises stopped. There was a beat of silence.

“You okay?” Nate asked Roger. His eyes stared past the man to the new walls.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. He stared over his own shoulder. “That big wet spot’s just a drink I spilled in my lap.”

Tim chuckled and batted his hand at the air.

Debbie coughed out some dust. “Oh my God.”

The walls behind the planks were brass and wood. In places they were steel. A faint hum drifted from them, felt on the air more than heard. In a few spots there were tall cylinders. Veek pointed at the wall by the apartment door. It held racks and racks of horizontal glass tubes, each one strung with a series of glowing wires. A second row was visible behind the framework holding them. “Are those fuses,” Veek asked, “or vacuum tubes?”

“Christ,” said Tim. “It’s all World War One high tech.”

“Forget World War One,” murmured Clive. He and Debbie clenched their shaking hands together. “It’s all steampunk.”

What had been the space between the kitchen and the loft was now a large panel of switches and pushbuttons, levers and knobs. They were grouped in rows and in small rectangles. A handful of large gauges clustered above the controls, like six brass portholes.

“What the fuck is all this?” murmured Roger.

Nate glanced at Tim. “You were right,” he said. “You don’t control a building. You control a machine.”

Veek walked up to the control panel and shook her head. “I think I can say a Victorian super-computer was one of the last things I expected to find in this place.”

Clive and Debbie looked at the wall of fuses. Half of it was hidden by their loft. He reached out to touch one of the glass tubes and she jerked his hand back. She glanced back at the others. “Do you think it all still works?”

There was a crackle of energy from one of the tubes. Debbie stepped back as it flared a brilliant orange and then faded. Tim leaned past them and peered at it.

“Power surge,” he announced. “Almost blew the fuse, but not quite.”

“So it’s a fuse?” asked Roger.

Tim shrugged. “Maybe. Just a figure of speech, I guess.”

Clive inspected the edge of one of the boards. An inch of it still stuck out between the banks of glass tubes. He pinched it between his fingers and slid his hand down its length. “They’re covered with rubber inside,” he said. “Electrical insulation. It probably soundproofed the apartment a bit, too.”

“So this is what all the power’s for,” said Nate. “Whatever the hell this is.”

“It’s a
Koturovic
,” said Veek.

“Sorry?”

She pointed next to the kitchen counter. There was a brass plaque on a dusty wooden panel. The word was engraved across the plaque in tall letters. “
Koturovic
,” she repeated.

“What the hell’s a co-turravitch?” said Roger.

“Is it the machine,” asked Tim, “or the creator?”

“Or someone they dedicated it to?” said Clive. “Maybe someone who died while they were building it. It could be a memorial.”

Debbie’s face lit up. “K is one of the letters on the cornerstone, isn’t it?”

Veek gave a half shrug. “It is, but it’s a middle initial. Kinda weird to just use your middle name on a plaque.”

“Koturovic’s a surname,” said Tim. “A patronymic. Not a middle name.”

“Know what?” said Roger. He was standing by the gauges and switches. “These controls are all fucked up.”

Nate looked up from the plaque. “What makes you say that?”

“Everything’s at zero.”

“So?”

He gestured at the wall of tubes. “Power’s on right? Things are glowing, tubes are sparking, all that?”

“Flux capacitor is fluxing,” nodded Clive.

“Should be reading something, then, right?”

“Maybe zero is what you’re reading,” said Nate.

Roger shook his head. “If zero’s normal what do the needles do when the power shuts off?”

“Maybe the power isn’t really on,” said Debbie. “Maybe this is all...I don’t know, in sleep mode or something.” She gestured at the kitchen counter. Behind it was an array of brass cylinders like a pipe organ. “You can have power running to the microwave even when it’s not doing anything.”

Roger shook his head again. “It’s old and it’s busted.”

Tim walked over and peered at the brass-ringed dials. “Zero’s in the middle,” he said, “not at the end.”

“So?”

“So it means the needles can go either way,” said Tim. “They’re not at an extreme, they’re at a midpoint.” He tapped one of the dials. “These tell you if it’s in balance.”

“If what’s in balance?” asked Nate.

“Beats the shit outta me,” said Roger.

“Question,” said Veek. “Do you think this is all one thing, one machine, or is this a bunch of stuff that’s just all controlled here?”

“Kinda the same thing, isn’t it?” asked Clive.

Nate shook his head. “You can have a universal remote that controls a bunch of stuff.”

“Right,” said Clive, “but it’s a bunch of stuff that’s all part of the same system.”

Nate got close to the wall of tubes. He could feel Debbie’s hand hovering near his arm, ready to pull him back if something happened. There was another rack of glass fuses—if they
were
fuses—past the first one. Behind those he could see more wires and cables and something like a tire wrapped in copper wire. He stepped back and looked over at the panel of switches and buttons. It looked like the controls for a Victorian jumbo jet.

“So a hundred and twenty years ago,” he said, “someone built a big machine in the middle of Los Angeles and disguised it as a building. Why?”

“Not even in the middle,” said Veek. “There’s a great map on the Library of Congress website from 1909. A hundred years ago this wasn’t even the suburbs. Hollywood was still a big field. Heck, the official roads ended over at Temple Street.”

Nate looked at the banks of machinery and instruments. “So they built it far away from everything,” he said. “On the far coast of the country, on the outskirts of a city that was only a few thousand people. They probably never dreamed it would get this big, that Kavach would end up dead in the middle of everything.”

Something clicked. It echoed through the apartment. Roger’s hand hovered by the controls.

They all closed in on him. “What’d you do?” said Nate.

“Flipped a switch,” he said. “Don’t worry, bro, I’ve got my hand over it.”

“You idiot,” snapped Veek. “We don’t know what this thing does.”

“Only way to find out is to do something,” said Roger. He nodded at the six large dials. “Check it out.”

The first dial hadn’t budged, but the needle on the second one had shifted over by four thin lines. The next needle was still moving, creeping across the round face. Two of the bottom ones hadn’t moved. The needle on the last dial had tilted in the opposite direction.

“You’re right,” Roger said to Tim. “Some kinda load-balance or something for the power lines.”

“Still stupid,” said Veek. “That could’ve been the self-destruct switch or something.”

“Naaah,” said Clive. “Self-destruct’s always a big red button.”

Roger and Debbie chuckled. The corners of Veek’s mouth twitched. “Still think it was a stupid move,” she said.

A big truck drove by on the street outside. It blended with the hum of the machine. The low rumble made the floor tremble.

Roger studied the dials. “Can’t figure out what they’re measuring, though.”

“I thought you didn’t know power stuff,” said Nate.

“Don’t, but I know the basics.”

“None of us know this, though,” said Tim. “We don’t know what this thing does, or how much one switch affects it doing its...whatever it does.”

A cloud crossed the sun and the windows grew dim. Nate glanced up at the sky. As his eyes moved he saw Debbie looking at the chandelier. Veek and Tim looked back and forth at the corners of the room.

The rumble of the truck was still going. It got louder. It swung the chandelier. It shook the floor. The loft was quivering on its legs.

“Quake!” Clive called out. “Get out from under the chandelier.”

Debbie dashed to her husband. Tim took a few long strides and pressed himself against the door. Roger and Veek, California veterans, stood their ground and waited to see how bad it got.

Nate’s gaze came down from the sky—a sky burned into his mind—and looked at the building next door. He could see it through the trembling panes of glass. While he watched a little girl walked by a window. She held a bright blue plastic cup at chin height with both hands.

“Roger,” he said, “flip the switch back.”

“What?”

Nate pointed at the panel. Roger’s hand had drifted away from the switch but was still close enough to be sure which one he’d flipped. “Put it back.”

The dishes in the sink began to clatter. The vase of flowers on the table toppled and water splashed to the floor.

“It’s a fucking earthquake, bro.”

“It’s not an earthquake,” shouted Nate over the rumble, “it’s
the building
! Put the switch back!”

Roger’s finger stretched out, settled against a tiny lever, and flexed. The switch snapped down. A small spark flashed around the rim of its base and vanished.

Two of the needles leaped to zero. The last one, the slow one, paused for a moment and then reversed its swing. It inched its way back up to its start position.

The rumble faded. The clouds cleared away outside and the sun beamed through the window. A few seconds later, the only sign of the disturbance was the creak from the swaying chandelier. Then it stopped and there was silence.

“Holy shit,” muttered Tim.

Nate looked out the window again, up at the sky. The rest of them exchanged glances and took tentative steps. “Everyone okay?” asked Veek.

“Think I wet my pants for real this time,” said Roger.

“You’re not alone,” murmured Debbie.

Veek punched Roger in the arm. “You are a fucking idiot, you know that?”

“Hey,” he snapped, “how was I supposed to know it was a fucking earthquake machine? You think somebody’d label the switches for something like that.”

“It wasn’t an earthquake,” said Nate. He was still staring out the window.

“How can you be so sure?” asked Tim.

Nate turned from the window. He looked up above the control panel. A square of polished wood, a foot on each side, still remained there. Clive’s Allen wrench jutted out from the center of it. The silver steel looked out of place against all the wood and brass. “Can you reach that?” he asked Roger.

Roger glanced at the ladder, still stretched out on the floor by the kitchen. “Think so,” he said. “Might be a little tricky, but I think I can use the A-frame now that I know where the keyhole is.”

“Do it,” said Nate. “Get these walls closed up.”

“Hey,” said Veek. “Hang on. What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” echoed Nate. “Did you miss that? This thing...this
place
is
dangerous
. We shouldn’t be fucking around with it.” He jabbed a finger at the Allen wrenches. “Close it and forget it.”

“How are we supposed to forget about it?” said Debbie. “We live here. It’s all around us.”

“Well, you have to,” said Nate, “because we can’t mess around with this thing anymore.” He looked at their faces, took in a breath to say something else, and shook his head. He walked past Tim, yanked the door open, and headed down the hall toward the stairwell.