Liberty

  There wasn’t any time to hesitate. Kali leaped from her perch.

  The spider fired, bullets cutting through the branches where she had been. She didn’t quite make it to the construct with her leap, landing in front of it, but she sprang forward before the gun barrels could fire again. She scrambled onto the creature’s back, hooking one boot around the vent. It would be too hot to grab onto—she could feel the heat radiating through the carapace—and she balanced precariously.

  That didn’t keep her from locking her wrench around the first bolt she spotted. As she started unscrewing it, the spider dropped down from the log. First, it spun its body, firing as it went. Kali hoped Cedar was staying back, but she couldn’t take the time to look at him. As it was, the spinning made her stomach want to heave its contents.

  The first bolt came loose, and she let it fall to the ground as she attacked a second one, trying to open up one of the panels so she might gain access. Abruptly, the construct sank to the ground, its legs bending to their maximum. Before she could guess at its new strategy, it leaped into the air. Her boot slipped from around the vent pipe, and she was almost thrown off like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. She tried to straddle the creature, ignoring the heat burning through her trousers, and gripping it with her knees. But it was only her grip on the wrench, and its grip on a bolt, that kept her from flying off.

  As the creature leaped around the log like a drunken rabbit, she moved onto a third bolt. She almost had it off when the right-side legs went down as the left-side legs thrust upward. In a feat she wouldn’t have guessed possible, the spider rolled.

  Kali squawked with surprise and leaped away, just avoiding being crushed. Hope sparked momentarily as she imagined the spider getting stuck on its back, but it completed its roll by springing up onto its legs again. The gun barrels rotated toward Kali. Like a tenacious dog in a pit fight, she leaped atop it again before those weapons could target her. Once more, she attacked the third bolt.

  The construct’s guns fired, and she glimpsed Cedar ducking behind a tree. Somewhere, he had found an axe. That might do more damage to the spider than the bullets—if she could get this panel open. Kali pried at the edge as she worked on the fourth bolt.

  With a great squealing of metal, the panel came free. Kali flung it away, peering inside and trying to identify something critical. Before she formulated a plan of attack, Cedar sprinted over, the axe raised overhead. Even though she trusted his aim, it was an alarming sight, and she lurched backward, falling off the carapace.

  Cedar slammed the axe into the creature’s innards. Bolts, springs, and bits of metal and wire flew like shrapnel released from one of her smoke nuts.

  Kali jumped to her feet, expecting the spider to spin toward him—or her—and continue firing. But Cedar was relentless, bashing the heavy blade into its workings. The construct clanked and jittered, trying to walk and spitting black smoke into his face, but under the assault, it eventually stopped moving. The legs shuddered, then bent, and the spider collapsed.

  Cedar slammed the axe down several more times before stopping. He took a few deep breaths as he leaned the tool on the log, then proceeded to lean on it himself for support.

  “What you lack in finesse, you make up for in vigor,” Kali informed him.

  “My vigor is legendary. Are you all right?”

  “I think so.” Kali plucked her wrench out of the grass, where it lay among dozens, if not hundreds of pieces that had flown out of the machine. “Are you?” She looked toward the leg he had seemed to be favoring before.

  “Mostly.” Cedar rolled up his trouser leg to reveal an ugly cut that wrapped around his calf and shin. “While I was patting myself on the back for avoiding one trap, I stepped into another. Want some advice? Don’t walk close to the trees next to the cabin, and definitely don’t walk under any nets.”

  “I didn’t do any of those things, and I still got attacked by a giant spider.” Kali eyed the broken construct, wondering why it had so determinedly come after her, even after Cedar had started shooting at it. Was it possible that Amelia had left explicit instructions that Kali was to be kept away? If so, how could that be done? Even though Kali found mundane engineering more interesting, she wished she understood more about magic, its limitations specifically.

  “Maybe it woke up when I triggered the first trap back there.” Cedar waved toward the woods behind the cabin.

  “So I have you to blame for being shot at?”

  “I told you I’m just a tracker. It might not be too late to go back for the nose-whistling criminal.”

  “Ha ha.” Kali took a deep breath. “Can you find me a safe way into that cabin, Tracker Cedar?”

  “I can find you a way in. Unfortunately, safety isn’t anything I can promise you anymore.” He cast a wistful gaze toward the sky, and Kali knew he was thinking of more than booby traps.

  • • • • •

  The inside of the cabin was not what Cedar expected. After seeing that mechanical spider stomp out, he had figured a whole laboratory would wait inside, complete with the latest gadgets and creations from the twisted mind of that Amelia woman. Instead, the dim interior matched the exterior, with dead leaves littering the worn plank flooring and mildew fuzzing a back wall. A breeze gusted through the two glassless windows, tugging at tattered curtains that dangled from rusty rods. Ants wandered across the floor, and some small animal skittered about in the dust under a broken bed frame, the mattress long gone. A dresser without drawers lay on its side next to a table resting near a hearth, the aged bricks blackened by soot. Several logs were stacked in a wood box beside to the fireplace, and they were as covered with dust as everything else in the cabin.

  “This is making my cave workshop look palatial in comparison,” Kali muttered, standing in the doorway.

  Cedar stood only a couple of inches behind her, his revolver in one hand and the axe in the other. He did not see anything that he was tempted to use either on, but he could tell from the disturbed dust on the floor and a few crushed leaves in the center of the cabin that someone wearing shoes had been inside recently. The big spider had lacked footwear.

  “Maybe she destroyed your workshop out of jealousy,” he said.

  “There must be something in here.” Kali eased inside, watching her step intently. “Otherwise, why would she have bothered setting traps? And building a giant spider to guard the place?”

  “Impending insanity?”

  Kali shook her head and stepped carefully toward the table. Cedar used the haft of the axe to thump at the knotty planks underfoot. Many cabins simply had earthen floors. The fact that this one didn’t made him wonder if there might be a root cellar. Amelia could have hidden much in such a place. He pushed aside a moth-eaten bearskin rug with the head still attached, thinking a trapdoor might lie underneath, but all he found was a section of the floor less dusty than the rest.

  Kali swept her hand across the table, knocking off a few small springs and screws. She ticked her fingernail against a lantern perched on the corner. “This doesn’t look as old as the rest of the cabin.”

  “Her work area, I presume. That table looks sturdy enough that she could have assembled a giant spider on it.”

  “Perhaps other things as well.” Kali rapped her knuckles on the table. “I wonder if she needed to create a detonator in order to blow up the flash gold. I’ve found it to be full of easily accessible energy, and it never proved as volatile as dynamite when I worked with it. I experimented on it after my father first passed away. I applied heat and flame, and the small pieces never blew up.” She sighed. “It was a fine energy source. Maybe the most superior source in the world. I wish my father had left the schematics. Or recipe. Whatever alchemists use.”

  Cedar wasn’t sure whether the world was ready for flash gold—he’d understood Amelia’s fears when she had stated them, that such a powerful energy source could be used for evil—though he had never minded it being in Kali’s hands. He hoped she found the other half befo
re Amelia did.

  “No desks or cupboards that she could have stored anything in.” Kali looked under the bed frame. “Mouse droppings all over under there.”

  “Probably not the ideal storage environment.” Cedar thumped around more with the axe handle.

  Kali noticed his thumping and grabbed a fireplace poker to do the same thing. She tapped the bricks of the hearth. Minutes passed with nothing but their asynchronous beat filling the space.

  Now and then, Cedar looked out the windows, but particularly the one facing the pond. Those new airships might be keeping the soldiers distracted, but he couldn’t assume that the search for them had been halted. Even if the airship had been diverted, the Mounties could continue their search on foot, and they had some decent trackers among their ranks.

  “The spider must have been guarding something.” Kali lowered her poker with a clank, then dropped to her knees in front of the firebox.

  Cedar walked over and thumped on the floorboards beside the hearth. He had almost given up on finding anything down there, but the axe thudded hollowly. He tapped the planks a few feet away. A solid sound. He returned to the floor by the hearth. Definitely a hollow sound.

  “Kali? I might have found something.” He tapped around more, trying to identify the size of the hollow spot. It extended across several floorboards, so it was definitely larger than a niche for hiding valuables. Maybe he’d found a staircase to a root cellar that had been dug off to the side of the cabin?

  Kali had her head inside the chimney, her body twisted so she could look up, and she did not seem to have heard him. “Ah, what’s this?”

  “More mouse droppings?” Cedar dropped to his knees and slid his hands along the dusty floorboards, looking for a crack or a hidden lever.

  “No…”

  “Mildew? Mold?”

  Kali crawled further into the hearth, her shoulders disappearing up into the chimney.

  “Soot?” Cedar abandoned his search for a trapdoor for the moment and crouched beside her in case she needed help. Who knew if the crazy inventor woman might have booby-trapped the chimney?

  A soft clank came from inside. Kali grunted, then wriggled back out, her face and hair coated with soot.

  “I see my guess was accurate,” Cedar said, brushing the fine black powder from her braid.

  “What?” Kali barely seemed aware of him. She had pulled something down from the chimney and stared down at it.

  A book? A journal?

  She opened it with sooty fingers, revealing a page mixed with drawings and small cursive writing.

  “Are these her notes?” Kali asked, wonder in her voice. “There’s a date on this page. August 17, 1867. This predates me. My existence, I mean.”

  “Are you sure it belonged to her and isn’t the diary of some mad trapper who was pining away for a woman during some long winter nights?” Cedar would have believed that the cabin had been abandoned for more than twenty years.

  “Would a mad trapper have gotten poetic about Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism?” Kali asked, pointing to a page.

  “Depends on how mad he was.”

  Kali snorted. “This is amazing. Why would she have left her notes here?”

  “Maybe she thought she’d get caught blowing up the mountainside and didn’t want to risk the Mounties getting ahold of a book filled with such scintillating topics.”

  Kali flipped through the pages, then froze about a quarter of the way into the journal. Long seconds passed as she stared down at scribbles and equations. They made no sense to Cedar, but the lump sketched in the margin looked vaguely like a lump of ore.

  “Is that—” he started.

  “Flash gold,” Kali breathed.

  “It’s not the recipe, is it?”

  “I… I’m not sure. I need to go through this carefully. When we met her, she said she’d worked with my father, right? Been his partner on the project? At least early on.”

  “I’m not sure met is quite the word for the encounter we had with her.” Cedar rubbed his backside, remembering those tiny bullets biting into it.

  “What if she has all the same notes that he had?” Kali whispered. “What if the secret is right here within these pages?”

  “Why would someone who wanted to destroy the flash gold—and make sure nobody else ever made any—keep instructions on how to create it?”

  “I’d never throw out my notes, especially if I discovered something important.” A wistful expression crossed Kali’s face. “Not that I’ve ever done anything important. Making gadgets to ride around on isn’t exactly groundbreaking.”

  “Kali. First off, your gadgets are important, and they’re damned clever too. They’re much more useful than anything some stuffy scientist in a stuffy laboratory would come up with. Second, you’re eighteen. Nobody expects a scientist to be groundbreaking until she’s at least twenty-five.”

  She snorted. “I’ll never be a scientist. Not with my lack of education.” She turned the page, her gaze never leaving the journal as she spoke to him.

  “It’s not like you can’t get some formal schooling once you get out of here.” Cedar had not had much formal schooling himself, so he couldn’t speak of how useful it might be, but she was smart enough that she might enjoy it.

  Kali shook her head and flipped another page.

  He almost opened his mouth to try again, to assert that she had plenty of time to make a difference in the world, if that was what she wanted, but his lips faltered, and the words died on his tongue. How was she going to enroll in school somewhere if she was a known criminal? How would she publish papers, if her name and face were on post office walls? He rubbed his face, holding back a groan. Had he ruined her life by letting her rescue him? It wasn’t as if he could have stopped her from within that jail cell, but if she’d never met him, she never would have been tempted to turn criminal.

  With a lump of regret thickening in his throat, he started toward the front window, intending to look out again to make sure they didn’t have any company. On the way, he accidentally kicked the corner of the box of firewood.

  A click sounded behind him, followed by a ker-thunk as a trapdoor fell open on the other side of the fireplace. The spot where he had detected the hollow.

  Kali lowered the journal and dropped to her knees to peer into the darkness. “There are stairs here going down to a room. I’m going to take a look.”

  “It’s darker than midnight down there. Might want the lantern.”

  Cedar walked toward the table to fetch it, but remembered that he had wanted to check outside and swung over to the window on the way. He thought it would be a cursory glance, but he cursed when he spotted movement out near the pond. Someone was pushing through the reeds near the dock, someone wearing the red uniform jacket of a Mountie.

  “Kali, it’s time to go,” Cedar whispered.

  She had disappeared down the stairs and did not hear his whisper. Instead, she called back, “Cedar, come look. Someone did some mining down here, and she’s using the hollow for a workshop. This is where all of her goodies are. I think that’s a table for alchemy—there’re all manner of potions on it. Are you bringing the lantern?”

  Cedar ducked below the window, so he wouldn’t be visible if the Mountie looked toward the cabin, and crouched by the trapdoor.

  “Kali, we’ve got company coming, and the guard spider isn’t likely to stop it.”

  “Now? I want to look around.”

  “It’s a Mountie, and there’s probably more than one.” He was probably one of the trackers Cedar had been thinking of earlier, leading a party of men.

  Kali poked her soot-covered face out of the hidden nook. “What if you shut the door and join me, and we hide down here until they give up searching for us?”

  “You want to trap us in the lair of a mad witch?” Cedar frowned at the dusty floor of the cabin. The tracker might be able to pick out his large footprints among the smaller ones that Kali and Amelia had left.

/>   “There are tools down here, Cedar. Tools I could borrow to make some Mountie-distracting gizmos.”

  Though he hated the idea of letting himself be trapped, he could hear the plea in her voice and suspected she might not listen to reason and leave with him even if he said it was too dangerous to stay. He took a step onto the stairs but halted when the baying of a hound drifted through the door.

  He backed up. “Sorry, Kali. They’ve got dogs on our trail. They’ll find us, even through a hidden trapdoor.”

  She cursed lengthily, but walked up the stairs as she did so.

  “At least you’ve got the journal, right?”

  That earned him a long sigh, followed by an unintelligible grumble.

  Cedar waved for her to duck low as they crossed to the doorway. He trusted the shadows inside the cabin would make it difficult for the Mountie to see them through the window, but they didn’t need to take risks. The door wasn’t visible from the pond, so he led the way out, then headed toward the trees out back, keeping the cabin between them and the Mountie, and keeping his eyes open as well. The tracker might be in the lead, but the team could have split up, too, and there could be more men searching behind the cabin.

  Shouts sounded from the direction of the pond, and the hound bayed again, enthusiasm for its job coming through in its sonorous voice. It was definitely on their trail, and it was excited about that.

  Cedar and Kali jogged a half mile through the trees in silence. As he turned into a stream, hoping the water would confuse the dog for a while, he couldn’t help but think again about how Kali was only in this predicament because he had talked her into helping him with his bounty hunting the winter before.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” he apologized as the icy water flowed around their ankles.

  To his surprise, she smiled at him. She couldn’t be happy about leaving that workshop unexplored, so that must mean...