The Flux Engine (27 page)

John closed his eyes, trying to focus on the one sound and shut all others out. Before the Paragon Elixir, he could have done it easily, but now it just hovered there on the edge of his senses, teasing him like a child holding a bone just out of a dog’s reach. He abandoned his attempt and swept the structure with his eyes. Crystals whirled and moved so fast they seemed little more than blurs. A few, mounted on the larger rings or gears, moved slow enough to get a good look at, but none of them were his.

He closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose in frustration. When he opened his eyes he just stared. If he wanted to find his mother’s crystal, he was going to have to figure out a way to shut down the machine. If he did that, he wouldn’t have long to find it before the great airship fell out of the sky. Maybe a minute.

The steam engine and the transmission that connected to the Flux Engine were armored, their sensitive parts covered to prevent tampering. Worse, the steam engine’s controls required special tools to operate, tools John was sure were locked in an ironbound strongbox clamped to the engine’s side. The box had a series of concentric rings embedded in the front, and each movable ring had numbers etched on it. To open the box he would need the code, a code that Bertram undoubtedly knew but was in no condition to supply. If Robi were here, she’d have it open in seconds, bus she was still conspicuously absent.

John looked back at the whirling array of crystals and spared a moment to worry about Robi.

Then he saw it.

Burning with a bright red light, it sat at the very center of a halo of sparkling crystals, a north star in a galaxy of swirling lights.

It was in the exact center of the moving arms and whirling gigs and churning gears. If John reached in anywhere near it, he’d lose a finger at best, his arm at worst.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a cold, familiar voice broke upon him.

He whirled, hand dropping to his pistol.

A woman stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her hip cocked, enhancing the lines of her lithe form. Chestnut hair spilled down over shoulders and framed a lean, angular face. The face was beautiful, but the smile was turned up, giving it a look of cruelty and her hand, like John’s, rested on her pistol.

“Hello, Sira,” John said, then he jerked his pistol free of the holster and fired.

Chapter 29

Full Circle

John’s first shot tore into the door jamb above and to the left of where Sira’s head had been. She seemed to move almost before the shot hit, darting to the side and jerking her own gun free of its holster. Her movements were graceful and fluid with that unnatural swiftness Derek Morgan had exhibited when he fought Wild Bill in the ruins of Fixer’s shop. She returned fire and John heard the bullet buzz like an angry bee as it passed his head so close the shock wave burned his ear.

His brain screamed at him to get moving and John dodged right, away from the Flux Engine. He didn’t think Sira would risk hitting it, but he didn’t want to take chances. With his luck, she’d put a bullet right through his mother’s crystal and kill them all.

Firing on the run, John ducked behind a row of storage shelves loaded down with spare parts and crystals. His shots missed the fast-moving Sira.

But she wasn’t moving as fast as before.

A tray of crystals exploded as Sira’s bullet tore through it, showering him with glittering shards.

Sira darted from behind one of the Flux Engine’s structural supports and dove behind a coal bin. John unloaded his gun at her but didn’t get close. Sira fired back but he saw her aiming and took shelter again, ejecting the spent cartridges from his pistol.

She was definitely moving slower, or rather he was moving faster.

“Hooray for Paragon Elixir,” he muttered, scrambling to reload.

John jammed the cartridges into his gun and spun the cylinder back into place. He came up from cover, ready to fire, but Sira had not been idle. As soon as he moved, she fired, the bullet tearing through a jar of powdered flash crystal. It burst out of the broken jar in a shower of burning particles.

John yelped as flaming embers hit his face and neck. He dropped to the ground, swatting at his neck, and rolling to prevent his clothes from catching fire. He lost his grip on his pistol and it spun away, clattering across the deck. Forcing his watering eyes open, he scooped up the weapon as the sound of running feet reached his ears.

Thumbing the hammer back, John jumped out from behind the shelves, bringing his pistol to bear.

Sira was there, right in front of him as he emerged. His finger tightened on the trigger but she reached out and smashed his hand. His pistol went spinning away and she raised her own weapon.

Two could play at that game.

John brought his left hand down hard on Sira’s wrist. She didn’t lose the weapon, but it went down and away before she could shoot him in the chest again. Instead, the bullet tore through the meaty part of his thigh. Pain lanced through him and suddenly his leg wouldn’t support him. He fell with a cry, slamming his back into the shelves and sliding down to the floor.

He expected to get a bullet through the head before the stars swimming in his vision cleared, but when he could finally see again, Sira simply stood over him, smiling.

“I thought I killed you already,” she said, her gun pointing at his chest. Her finger ran around the trigger guard of her pistol, caressing it, as if drawing out the suspense gave her pleasure.

“Takes more than that to kill me,” John said, trying to keep his voice from cracking.

Sira’s face split into a wide grin and she jammed the toe of her boot into his injured leg.

The pain went from a throbbing ache to a raging inferno and he screamed. After what seemed like an eternity, the pressure eased and John clamped his teeth shut, cutting his scream into a more manly growl of pain.

Sira’s smile turned into a pout.

“Wow, you really are tough,” she said, her voice low and sultry and dripping with sarcasm.

John gasped in pain but the red haze that had gathered around his vision when Sira stepped on him cleared. Sira moved away, slipping her gun into its holster. She stepped back and brought her heel down hard on John’s lost pistol. There was a ringing crack as the firing crystal broke, rendering the weapon useless.

“Did you really think you could beat me?” she said, the heels of her boots thumping on the deck as she came toward him in a slow, steady walk that accented the femininity of her hips. “Did you think you could stop the force of a thousand years of prophecy?”

John shook his head to clear it. He’d hit it pretty hard on the shelf when he went down and he reached up to feel the lump on the back of his head. As he did so, his hand brushed the metal haft of a tool protruding from the shelf. Sira had some need to explain her actions to him. He decided to keep her going.

“What are you talking about, lady?” he said, covertly wrapping his hand around the thick shaft of metal. “What prophecy?”

“This land was stolen from my people by the Lantians,” she said. “They drove us from our—”

John didn’t wait for her to finish. Whatever her reasons for wanting to destroy Castle Rock, a city full of people, they weren’t good enough. Moving with the speed of a striking snake, John whipped his arm forward, sending a short length of metal rod spinning right at Sira’s face.

Even caught by surprise, she was fast. She hurled herself to the side, bringing her arm up to ward off the blow. The rod missed her head, but struck her arm solidly, hard enough that John heard the bone crack.

Sira screamed, not so much with pain as with fury. She reached for her gun with her wounded arm and gasped in pain, her face turning white.

Cradling her wounded arm, she reached down with her left hand and drew a slender, wavy-bladed knife from her boot. John hauled on the shelf, trying to pull himself up despite his wounded leg. He barely managed it before Sira rushed him, slashing out with the knife. Taking a staggering step to the side, John threw himself toward a workbench. The knife bit into his bicep, tracing a line of burning pain across it as he managed to avoid most of the strike.

“You’ve grown since last we met,” Sira said as John rolled over the top of the desk.

The knife slashed out again, hitting him another glancing blow across the shoulder, and he could feel blood soaking through his shirt … She slashed across the desk again, forcing John to lean back to avoid the knife. It thunked down into the top of the workbench, sinking in over an inch.

“Not bad,” she said, wrenching the knife free with an almost casual twist of her arm.

He had to end this quickly and decisively or next time she would be jerking her knife out of his corpse.

Sira’s hips suddenly shifted, gathering her strength for another explosive burst of movement. John saw it coming. He flung himself across the workbench again, rolling to the far side on his back as Sira dashed around it. Her knife flashed out again and he felt, rather than saw, it slice through the air just above his head.

This time when John came down on his good leg, he kept his momentum going, lurching to the heavy iron shelves. With a cry of triumph, Sira vaulted the workbench and closed with him, raising her blade to deliver a fatal strike. Seizing a glass bottle of crystal salt, John whipped it directly at her. The pipe he’d thrown earlier had caught Sira by surprise, but she was a trained warrior, not the kind to be taken by the same trick twice. Her blade altered trajectory and smashed the missile out of the air before it could reach her.

Or at least it would have, if the jar hadn’t been made of glass.

The jar of salt exploded when the knife hit it, sending a gout of white crystals flooding into Sira’s face. She shrieked as salt burned her eyes and blocked her vision. John didn’t waste the moment; he stepped forward on his good leg and, bringing all the power of his upper body to bear, punched Sira square in the face.

The punch sent Sira reeling back into the workbench.

And it hurt like crazy.

Still, John laughed as he shook his smarting hand.

Screaming obscenities and spitting blood from a busted lip, Sira came up swinging. Blind and furious, she lashed out, swinging her knife in dangerous, glittering arcs. John scrambled away as fast as he could on his wounded leg but it wasn’t fast enough. Alerted to his presence by the sound, Sira turned and threw her knife. It sailed through the intervening space, cartwheeling end over end, and hit John in the back like a hammer. He heard something crack and the force of the blow made him stumble. He and the knife clattered to the floor.

He’d been lucky. Sira’s knife had hit him with the pommel instead of the blade.

Without waiting for the deranged woman to throw something else at him, John tried to push himself back to his feet. Pain lanced through his back where the knife had hit him and he gasped.

“You,” Sira growled, blinking the last of the salt from her eyes. “I will make you suffer for that. You will beg me to die before I let you.”

John moved his hands in another attempt to rise and his fingers brushed against something hard and metal.

His gun.

Grasping it by the grip, he rolled over, grabbing a workbench and pulling himself to a standing position. The pain was almost overwhelming. Sira reached for her own gun but winced when she tried again to pull it with her broken arm. Cursing, she reached across her body with her left hand, grasping for the weapon.

“Don’t,” John said, bracing himself against the table and raising his gun.

Sira’s snarl of anger melted into a mocking smile of derision.

“Your crystal’s broken, little boy,” she said, her hand wrapping around the hilt of her pistol. “That might as well be an empty gun.”

He moved his finger to the fractured firing crystal. As he touched it, the full crystal sense finally burst into his consciousness, filling him with a wild, burning joy as its sound broke over him like a wave. He could feel the impeller crystal vibrating faintly, responding to the touch of his finger. With a minimal effort of concentration he could feel the pathways in the crystal structure, dry river beds just waiting to channel energy from the flux in the cartridge.

Sira began to pull her gun free of its holster.

John felt the fractures where the crystal had cracked when Sira stomped on it. Beneath his touch he pushed the channels, moving some to link up with others and forcing some back together. He held the gun out, sighting in on a spot between her breasts.

The gun cleared the edge of the holster and Sira’s face split into a hungry, wolfish grin.

The moment froze.

John could see the face of the pirate, begging for his life before being swept off his airboat by a shattergun blast. He saw Professor Solomon, standing over him, an easy target.
You’ve seen the consequences of hesitation,
Hickok’s voice whispered in his mind.
Next time you might have a different reaction.

Sira’s gun came up slowly, as if John’s mind were racing ahead of time itself. He made his decision. Willing vital energy from his own body down his arm and through his hand, he poured it into the impeller. The dry river beds suddenly flooded with energy and he pulled the trigger.

He didn’t hear the shot but neither, it seemed, did Sira. One moment her face was alight with triumph, the next her gun tumbled from her hand and a look of profound shock spread over her face.

She watched the gun fall as if surprised that she could have dropped so important a thing. A moment later she looked down at the rapidly spreading red stain on the front of her white shirt and collapsed.

Chapter 30

The Bloodsand Stone

Robi scrambled along the narrow confines of the pipeway. Steam pipes burned her arms and legs but she pushed the pain from her mind. She had to find John, to warn him that Morgan was coming. To tell him about Wild Bill.

The flux pipe turned downward, through the floor, and she could see the top of an enormous tank below. This had to be the crystal room, where the mysterious Flux Engine would reside. Before she could move into the vertical shaft, however, voices drifted up to her.

She heard a woman’s voice, cold and mocking and John telling her not to do something. There was a pleading note in his voice and a second later a shot rang out.

Her bowels turned to ice water that began crawling up her spine.

“John!” she cried, lunging into the downward shaft head-first. She opened her legs, pressing her boots against the sides of the shaft to slow her descent until she reached the bottom. Dropping free, she landed on the flux tank and rolled into a crouch, whipping her arm forward to propel a two-shot derringer into her hand.

The tank was wide and flat, obscuring much of the room below, but she could hear someone stagger, knocking something metal to the floor with a crash, and then fall. She used the noise to scramble to the edge of the flux tank and peer over.

John stood there on the floor below, his feet spread apart and his shoulders fixed as he slowly lowered his pistol. On the floor in front of him, her lifeless eyes staring up at Robi, lay Sira, shirt stained with bright blood. Her hands still clutched toward the grip of a fallen pistol that was of no use to her now.

Robi’s eyes traveled up from the dead woman to John. His face bore a look of grim determination tempered with sadness. John was becoming more like Wild Bill Hickok with each passing day.

Was that a good thing?

John’s shoulders suddenly jerked and his arm jumped up, raising his pistol to point at Robi. He couldn’t have heard her over the noise of the room, but his pistol tracked her just the same. There was a moment of recognition and he shook his head, lowering the weapon.

“Thank the Builder,” he said, a wide smile breaking out on his face. He took a step and staggered. Robi could see the dark blood staining the leg of his pants.

The flux tank was suspended over the engine itself, the whole thing supported by curved steel girders, like an enormous ribcage. Robi leapt to one of the metal ribs, gripping its bottom lip with her hands and sliding down until her feet hit the floor. When she turned, John was there and without a conscious thought, she embraced him.

“Are you all right?” she asked, pushing him back and examining his leg. He gasped as she prodded the wound and rocked onto his good leg.

“It’s not bleeding too bad,” he said through clenched teeth.

“It’s bleeding enough,” she said. “We need to pack it and keep pressure on it.”

“How do you know that?” he asked as she helped him up on one of the workbenches.

“You think my father never got hurt on a job?” she asked. “He taught me more about emergency doctoring than you’ll ever know.”

With that, she tore strips of cloth out of the lining of John’s discarded boiler suit and packed the wound. Fortunately it looked like the bullet went straight through without hitting the bone or anything vital. While she worked, she told him about Hickok and Morgan.

“Damn it,” John swore, grunting in pain as she tied a long strip tightly around his leg to keep pressure on the wound.

“Did you get your crystal?” she asked as he slid off the workbench and took a tentative step, grunting in pain.

“No,” he said, limping over to the Crystal Engine. It reminded Robi of the two-story-high chandelier in the Palmer House in Chicago.

“My crystal is there,” he said, pointing at a spot in the very center of the mass of whirling gears and spinning crystals.

Robi squinted her eyes and stared. There did seem to be a single, scarlet crystal resting atop an unmoving pedestal right in the middle. She whistled.

“Can you stop the machine?”

John shook his head.

“What about smashing the crystals we can reach?”

“That won’t get my crystal out,” he said. “And if I were designing this thing, the vital crystals would be inside where they couldn’t be smashed. Most likely all we’d be doing is giving Morgan time to find us.”

Robi chewed her lip. They didn’t have much time. As soon as Morgan got Hickok to the brig, he’d be coming back for them. He probably thought Sira was already here, so maybe that would slow him down.

That’s wishful thinking
, the old man said in her head.
Get the job done or give it up and get out before you’re caught.

“Can you shoot it?”

“I can barely see it in there,” John said. “It looks like there are a couple of places where a person could stand or crouch inside the machine, but I don’t know how I’d get in.”

“My dad could have done it,” Robi said, the old man’s words still ringing in her head. “He once stole a gold statue a businessman hid inside a hog butchering machine.”

“Did that happen a lot?”

“You’d be surprised,” Robi said. “Inside constantly moving machinery is a very good place to hide things you want to keep safe.”

John looked at her like he’d been slapped. Then he laughed.

“We need the world’s greatest thief,” he said, as if Robi hadn’t just said that.

“He’s dead.”

John shook his head.

“But you’re not,” he said. “His knowledge isn’t gone. He taught you, Robi. Everything he was lives on in you.”

She looked at the flux engine with its whirling gears and cogs and spinning crystals so sharp they might as well be razor blades, and shook her head.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “I can’t do this. It would take a master, someone with years of experience to—”

John put a finger over her lips and she stopped.

“I’ve seen you,” he said. “You’ve got gear for every possible situation and … and rules for picking targets and getting out. You can open locks faster than people who have the key. You’ve been doing this for years.”

He took his finger away and looked her in the eyes.

“If we don’t get that crystal out of there and shut this thing down, thousands of people at Castle Rock are going to die. This isn’t about getting my crystal back anymore. We have to stop it from being used to kill.”

“But I—” she began, but his look silenced her.

“Your father’s been dead for years. It’s time you took your rightful place, Robirah,” he said, shocking her that he remembered her real name. “It’s time for a new World’s Greatest Thief. It’s time for the Cat to prowl again.”

An electric thrill ran up her body and she shivered.

It’s time, daughter.

John was right. She could do this. It would be dangerous and difficult, but she could do it.

“All right,” Robi said, her voice firm and confident. “Robi Laryn. World’s Greatest Thief.”

John smiled and nodded.

She turned to the flux engine. It was overwhelming. Cogs and gears whirled around carrying crystals into and through the device. Pistons moved, wheels turned, and escapements clicked back and forth.

It’s too complex.

No. It’s just a machine, it moves in regular patterns. Study it, find your way in, find your way out.

She took a cleansing breath. “World’s Greatest Thief,” she whispered, then focused on the flux engine.

As she watched, the patterns began to resolve themselves. There were five holes in the pattern big enough to fit her. Three were constant openings where she could stop and take her bearings, but the other two, the ones closest to the crystal, opened and closed at regular intervals.

She began to count in her head. The old man had made her do it with a metronome until she could keep a steady beat without speeding up or slowing down.

One. Two. Three. Step over the crossbar, duck under the whirligig. Four, five, six, roll to the safe space, pull in your knee before the cog arm comes back.

She went on like that, planning out each move and setting it to the time of her inner metronome. In, get the crystal, then back out again.

John took in a breath to say something but she held up a finger to silence him. Twice more she went over her plan in her head, leaving nothing to chance, ensuring each move was well memorized. The old man had made her learn how to see and remember quickly and she’d learned the lessons well.

“All right,” she said at last. “I’m going in. How long will the engine continue to work after I get the crystal out?”

“A few minutes at least.”

That might be enough to get Hickok out of the brig and escape.

She turned to look at John. He leaned against a workbench, quietly regarding her with his serious eyes, a look that was roguish and handsome with a twinge of boyish charm.

Focus.

Robi turned away and faced the whirling engine that could cut her fragile body to ribbons as easily as she could swat a fly. She set the mental metronome counting and when the moment came, she moved.

On her second step one of the crystal rigs got too close. There was a tug at her arm and a flash of pain, but she couldn’t stop. Stopping meant death; life existed only in movement and the count.

When she reached the first safe zone she checked her arm. A long, shallow, razor-like gash ran from her shoulder to mid-bicep. It was bleeding more than she liked, but there was no room to do anything about it. Around her the flux engine clacked and whirled, stirring up the air and blowing a stray lock of hair that had escaped her ponytail into her face.

“Robi Laryn,” she reminded herself. “World’s Greatest Thief.”

From here she had two more safe zones, but they only lasted a few moments each. Once she moved, she would have to stay moving, no matter what, or the flux engine would crush her.

“I hope this isn’t the last mistake I’ll ever make,” she said to no one in particular, then she took a breath, waited for the right count, and ran.

Reaching the second safe zone meant crawling under a flat, round gear with crystals mounted on it, then pushing up onto one leg and one arm so she could slide over a reticulating piston. Finally she darted between two revolving wheels and stopped to catch her breath.

Safe zone three was the hardest and stayed open less than half a minute. She’d have just that long to free John’s crystal and start back before it closed. Running her hand along the inside of her left arm, she felt the small crowbar secured there by an elastic band. It was all she had time for as the safe zone began to collapse.

Waiting until the last possible second, she threw herself forward, under a spinning gear that cut the air above her like a scythe. Scrambling with her feet, she pushed herself forward along the ground, jerking her leg out of the way just as a piston arm passed down through a slot in the floor. She rolled and turned, dodging death at every move until at last she knelt in the safe spot before the pedestal.

With only seconds to work, she extracted the crowbar and used it to bend the metal clamp that held the crystal in place. With the clamp gone, it slipped out easily and she pressed it into her pocket. As she touched it, it felt warm and seemed to pulse as if it had a heartbeat of its own.

No wonder John thinks this thing is linked to his mother.

“Robi Laryn,” she said, stuffing the crystal into her pocket. “World’s Greatest Thief.”

Belatedly, she noticed that the beating of the crystal’s pulses was exactly in rhythm with her mental count, but there was no time to ponder that; her safe space was collapsing. She had to move. The timing made returning to the second safe zone impossible, but she’d seen that when she made her plan. Without hesitation, she turned and rolled away, keeping her arms and legs in a tight ball. When she bumped into one of the support beams, she uncoiled and stood, jumping over a sweeping shaft carrying a lattice of crystals on its end.

Something was wrong.

She should have been able to hop up onto a large rotating gear and ride its half circle to the far side, but there was a metal housing covering it on this side. Worse, it angled down from the support beam, giving her nothing to grab onto.

Terror threatened to reach up and throttle her. She should have walked around the flux engine to double-check her route. Robi forced herself to stay calm. Any loss of time here would be fatal.

She looked overhead and spotted a piston moving a snowflake pattern of crystals back and forth. There was no time. A whirligig of crystals was coming at her midsection like a buzz saw.

Robi jumped, catching the piston as it retracted. Her grip slipped and the crystals on the end drove backward, plunging into her forearm. She screamed and let go, hoping she’d made it to the far side of the big gear. The knob end of a drive joint hit her hard in the shoulder as she landed, and she stumbled forward, barely stopping herself in time to avoid something that could only be described as a churning crystal maw.

Her arm was numb and bleeding and it hurt to flex her fingers; worse, somewhere in the pain and confusion, she’d lost the count.

Looking up, she realized she was close to one of the permanent safe zones. Something whipped by her face so close that the rogue lock of hair went spinning away, severed cleanly from her head by the razor edge of a crystal.

If she stayed, she was dead, so she gathered herself and scrambled forward, meeting each obstacle she encountered in real time until she crouched, gasping and bleeding from a dozen small wounds, in the safe zone. Her body began to tremble violently as she realized what she’d just done, and how close she’d come to an agonizing, messy death.

Robi stuck a finger from her good hand into her mouth and bit down hard.

Stay focused!

There’d be time to fall apart later.

“Robi Laryn,” she gasped, forcing her body to stop trembling. “World’s Greatest Thief.”

She turned and watched the machinery that still stood between her and the exit. It took a minute or two, but she found the count again. Mustering her inner calm, she moved out with a steady grace that made the rest look easy.