Closing up the house had been an easy affair: all it required was some sheets over the furniture in the rooms that would be closed until their return, the donation of the majority of the perishable goods to the temple, where they could be distributed among the deserving poor, and the transfer of the projects Michael had been working on for Hellstromme to other labs, where they could be brought to beneficial fruition.
From the beginning of the process to its conclusion, the whole thing had taken less than three days. It seemed like such a small amount of time, when stacked against the enormity of what was to come next. It should have been impossible.
Helen had long since learned that nothing was impossible when Dr. Murphy willed that it be so. He was no god or monster—only a man—but he was possessed of an iron will and an unshakable belief in his own infallibility. Helen thought, sometimes, that a man convinced that he was doing the right thing might be more dangerous than a monster, which was, after all, only convinced that it should fill its belly and continue on its terrible way. Monsters acted because of the way they were made. Men acted because of the way they chose to be.
Choice was almost always more terrifying than the alternative.
The carriage he had commissioned for the journey sat on the road outside of the house, gleaming with steel plates and polished wood. It was a battleship of a conveyance, capable of standing up to all but the most violent of assaults. A vent at the rear was open to allow a thin, constant trickle of steam to escape. The internal mechanisms were working, then; there was a chance that Annabelle would survive the journey. Only that: a chance. Which meant there was a chance she wouldn’t.
“I wish you would let me go with you, sir,” said Helen. “With the complications of the road, it’s possible that Annabelle will require more care than you will be in a position to provide.”
“Are you saying that I can’t take care of my own child?” Dr. Murphy’s question was mild, but not so mild that she couldn’t hear the threat lurking beneath it, like a great worm lurking beneath seemingly calm desert sands. She was walking farther into dangerous territory with every word she spoke.
Still, she pressed on. For Annabelle’s sake. “No, sir, only that—”
“Because my wife has been able to care for Adeline without me. Without any of the luxuries that Annabelle has been afforded by our life here in the Holy City. She has raised our little girl like a dog in the street, barefoot and profane and surrounded by men who are not of her flesh, not of her blood, not of her faith. Would you really claim that Grace, of all people, is better suited to parenthood than I, who has reordered the world for the sake of my daughter?”
Yes, whispered the traitorous voice of Helen’s doubts, deep in the back of her mind, where even Dr. Murphy could not hear or shame her for it.
“No, sir,” she said. “You have been the best of fathers, and I am sure you will only continue to grow in your wisdom and experience. I look forward to your returning with Adeline, who has been too long gone and deserves to know her father.”
“She will be treated like the princess that she is,” said Dr. Murphy stiffly.
“But the road is hard, sir, even for the best of fathers—even for the best of warriors, with nothing but themselves to worry about. I am merely concerned that you might come to harm when you allow your natural concern for Annabelle to distract you from the business of fighting the filthy heathens between you and your goal.”
Dr. Murphy’s face softened, enough so that Helen thought, for a moment, that he might be listening to reason. He was a brilliant man. Surely he could understand the sense in what she was saying.
“Dear, sweet Helen,” he said. “Truly, you are an honor to your father and to your family. I could not take you into the world outside Deseret. Someone as fine and good and unsullied as yourself would never survive there. Annabelle possesses all those qualities, but Annabelle has no choice. If she is to survive, she needs her sister. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Helen whispered.
“Go home to your family. Your wages will continue until I return. If, when I come home, you find that you do not wish to return to my service, we will discuss the matter of your replacement.”
“I would never want to leave your service, sir.”
“Come now, Helen. You are a young woman in the prime of your life. One day a clever young man will steal you away from me, and I’ll be glad to let you go, for what better duty can a woman have than motherhood?” He reached out and touched the top of her head paternally. Helen managed, somehow, not to flinch away. “You have been an excellent helpmeet. I will see you soon.”
“Yes, sir,” whispered Helen, and ducked her head, so that she wouldn’t need to watch him walk away.
As for Dr. Murphy, once he had turned and started for the waiting carriage, he did not look back, not once; did not even feel the urge. Yes, the house he left behind was his home, and the people who stood watching him go were his servants. He felt toward them a casual possessiveness, as he might feel for any of his replaceable tools. Break a hammer, purchase a new one. Fire—or accidentally incapacitate—a servant, hire another. There were always bodies, eager and willing to work in the house of a great man, prepared to risk their own health and safety for the sake of their families. The poor had so many mouths to feed.
(That he classed even those who would have seemed unfathomably wealthy by the standards of Junkyard as “the poor” was perhaps more telling than he intended it to be. In the world of Dr. Michael Murphy, people were either useful, useless, or dangerous. There were few gradations within those categories. The world was either for him, against him, or there to be exploited.)
Three large men stood beside the carriage, waiting for him. Dr. Murphy nodded to each of them in turn as he continued onward toward the front, where a woman in brown leather sat, her feet propped against the running board, the reins held loosely in her hands. A wide-brimmed hat blocked her face from the sun, less out of vanity than practicality. If she couldn’t see where she was going, she couldn’t shoot, or keep the wagon on the narrow path to their goal.
“Laura,” he said stiffly. It was odd, addressing a woman who only technically worked for him without honorific or civility. But it was her preference, and he was not going to go against it: not as long as he needed something from her. “The house is closed. The servants have been sent home. Dr. Hellstromme knows that we’re to depart today.”
“That’s all true,” said the woman he called Laura, still lounging with her back against the carriage, shoulders slightly bowed, like she hadn’t a care in the world. “Trouble is, he hasn’t given me the go yet, and I’m his dogsbody, not yours. Until he drops the hammer, this is where I sit, and since I’m your driver, this is where you sit. Get comfortable, doctor-man.”
“Time is of the essence.”
“You’re not wrong. You’re not right, either.” Laura sat up, stretching languidly, allowing the reins to drop from her hand. The motion exposed the supple length of her body, forcing Dr. Murphy to turn away, feeling his cheeks flare red. His wife might be a harlot and a Jezebel, running away from her duties, stealing from her husband, but she was still his wife. As long as she lived, he was a married man, and looking at another woman—even a stained unbeliever like this Laura—was a sin.
“Explain,” he said, voice tight.
“The rattlers are at their most active this time of day. We drive this pretty little rig of yours out there right now, I’d lay even odds that we’re devoured before we have time to engage the steam engines—and the house always wins that sort of a gamble, Murphy. The house always wins. Wait an hour, let the sun drop a bit, deploy the decoys, and hit the road. We can be out of their range before they realize there was something tasty on that wagon.” Laura smiled at the back of his head. “I’ve made this run before. You haven’t. You may be a genius, but part of genius is admitting it when you’re not the smartest man in the room.”
“We don’t have much time. If the passages into Oregon close for the winter before we can get there, we’ll never catch them.” Annabelle wouldn’t survive another winter separated from her sister. She wasn’t strong enough. All his efforts, all his treatments, and still she wasn’t strong enough. She needed Adeline if she were going to survive.
It was infuriating, how rarely people wanted to listen to him. How often they questioned him, acting as if their own small experiences could make them his equals. Sometimes he wanted to show them just how much damage he could do when he took his own reins off and allowed the monster of his mind to roam free.
But no. Hellstromme would not approve, and this woman, this, this impertinent girl, belonged to him.
“An hour, you say,” he said tightly.
“No more, no less,” said Laura. “Get comfortable. Tell your daughter about what she’s going to see. She seems like a nice girl.”
“You will not go near my daughter.” There was sudden venom in his voice. “You will not touch her; you will not talk to her. You should not have done so in the first place.”
“I spoke to her on Hellstromme’s orders.”
The statement was surprising enough that Dr. Murphy turned back to her, eyes wide. She was leaning forward, elbows resting on her knees, looking at him like he was some sort of insect, barely worth her notice.
“He told me to see the girl, to judge for myself whether she could even survive this little adventure. He’s very interested in what becomes of her, you know.”
“H-he is my mentor and my supervisor,” said Dr. Murphy. “He has always been kind to my family.”
“He wants to know if you can put something broken back together and make it work,” said Laura. “He wants to know if you can fix her. Frankly, I don’t know why he cares so much, and I don’t want to know. It’s a waste of his time. He could be doing great things, and instead, he’s wasting his attention on you. Your work has never been more than passable. You say you’re a genius, but you come up with machines any fool could have assembled. You’re a blight on the face of Deseret—and that’s funny, when you consider what the rest of the world thinks of us. You stink of ghost rock and despair. So yeah, when your master told me to look at your daughter, I did it. I would have slit her throat if he’d told me to.”
“You dare—”
“I do! I do dare. I’m here to babysit you and make sure you don’t stray beyond the terms of your release. Hellstromme is happy to help you with your researches, but that doesn’t make him a fool, and better men than you have snuck out of Deseret under the cover of going to look at something interesting somewhere else. Bringing your daughter along just makes you more of a chancy proposition.” Laura’s smile was slow and languid as the sun peeking through the smog, and just as laced with novel, impossible poisons. She was a rattlesnake in a woman’s shape, and every move she made only drew the comparison deeper. “She’s a pretty thing. Can you imagine how many hearts she’d break if she could go more than a few feet from her bed? There are fathers in the Holy City who’d kill to be in your shoes.”
Before he could speak Laura was gone, sliding off the baseboard and vanishing behind the wagon. Dr. Murphy barely had time to register her absence before fingers were threaded through his hair, yanking his head ever so slightly back to make it easier for her to lay the edge of her knife across his throat.
“I dare,” she said sweetly. “I do not work for you. I am in Hellstromme’s employ, even as you are, and while my science may be a little less clinical than your own, never question that I am a scientist in my own right. I work in blood and bullets and bodies on the floor, and I am at the top of my profession. Do you understand me?”
“Hellstromme will have your hands when I tell him that you put them on me.”
“Hellstromme may have your tongue when I tell him that you forced me to do it.” Laura withdrew her knife before shoving him forward, hard enough that he had to put out his hands in order to keep from smacking his forehead against the wagon.
Dr. Murphy turned, fury and embarrassment burning in his veins, cheeks flaring red with the realization that his men—his men, who were meant to follow his orders without question, to see him as a cruel and absolute commander—had seen his mistreatment at the hands of this slip of a girl. That she was a gunslinger in the direct service of his own master mattered little. It was her place to yield to him, to be subservient to him, and her refusal was a slight in the eyes of God.
She was gone.
He stared for a moment, disbelieving, before he turned and looked back to the wagon. She was seated once more on the boards, the reins back in her hand, looking for all the world like she had never moved in the first place.
“We move in an hour, boss,” said Laura easily. “Go see your girl.”
Dr. Michael Murphy was a proud man. Some would call him a cruel man. But he had never been a foolish man, nor courted fights he knew he couldn’t win. Cheeks still burning from the humiliation of it all, he turned and walked down the length of the wagon to the door.
It was locked. It was always to be locked while they were on the road. He slid the ring from his index finger and pressed it to the keyhole, twisting it sharply to the right. With a click, the lock released, and the door came open under his hand. He stepped up and inside, pulling the door closed behind himself.
The other two wagons that would travel with them were ordinary things: dark, cramped, packed with supplies and weapons to get them to Oregon. The drive would not be long, not when it was to be bolstered by steam across the flat plains and driven by skilled wagoners through the hills and delicate terrain. Most of those between them and their goal would know better than to interfere with a wagon train that traveled under Hellstromme’s banner. There was robbery as a way of life and then there was robbery as a means of suicide. This wagon, though …
The inside was white. As white as Annabelle’s room, so white that every speck of dust and smudge from the road would show up in stark relief against her gauzy draperies. Dr. Murphy had pledged to clean them himself, showing himself as the humble, devoted father he was. Hellstromme would like that. The great doctor appreciated it when his men were properly devoted to their families, and it wasn’t as if Helen could have traveled with them; she was unmarried, unbonded to his household in any way beyond employment, and it would have been the very height of impropriety to drag her outside of Deseret.
(The fact that she had offered was inconsequential. Women rarely knew what was best for them. They needed to be coddled, cared for, and confined, kept from breaking themselves against the harsh realities of the world. Helen thought she wanted to travel with him, to care for Annabelle and prove that she deserved her place in his household. She was wrong. It was a sign of what a good man he was, how gloriously pious, that he would not allow his own desire for the small human comforts to override the need to keep her safe.)
The seats inside the carriage had been removed to make room for Annabelle’s bed and the great machines that made up the headboard. They seemed starker here than they had in her room, where he had been able to spend years carefully concealing them behind layers of polished walnut and gauzy linen. They labored, silver sides heaving, as they performed the difficult, essential task of keeping her alive.
Annabelle’s eyes were closed. He leaned forward, putting his hand over her own small, cold one.
“Wake up, my pet,” he said, voice low and gentle. “Your father would look upon you.”
Annabelle opened her eyes. She did not sit up, or even try to; she simply let her head lean forward a bit, lashes fluttering against the pale curve of her cheek. She was so beautiful. She was so perfect. She should have been the crown jewel of Deseret—and would be, of that much he was certain. As soon as he had healed her, undoing the damage dealt by her careless beast of a mother, she would be the finest star in Deseret’s crown, and Dr. Hellstromme would see what a good and faithful servant he was, how well he had labored for the goodness and glory of their home.
“Papa?” Her voice was thin as a whisper.
Dr. Murphy made a silent note to adjust the pressure in her breathing tubes. She should have sounded hale, healthy even, regardless of whether she had the strength to put any force into her words. Appearances were as important as realities. When they caught up with Grace, he needed her to see what a good father he had been to the child she’d left behind.
He needed that to be the last thing she saw, before he closed her lying eyes forever.
“I’m right here, pet,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
Annabelle’s pretty face drew into a distinctly unpretty pout. The expression cut deep furrows into the skin to either side of her mouth, making her look like an old woman trapped inside a child’s body.
“I want my room,” she said. “I want my bed, and my room, and my window. I want Helen. Those men, they touched me. They put their hands on me, and they touched me. Like they were allowed! They shouldn’t even have been looking at me, and they touched me.” Offense dripped from her words like honey, thick and clinging and viscous.
There had been times—shameful times, for which he had prayed to be forgiven—when Michael had questioned Annabelle’s parentage. She looked so little like him, or like his Grace, and Grace had been unfaithful in mind and spirit both. Who was to say that she hadn’t been unfaithful in body as well? But then came moments like this one, when he looked into his daughter’s face and knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that she was his. There was no one else in this world who could have made her. Not even Dr. Hellstromme had the skill.
“I’m sorry, poppet, but they touched you on my order, and they’re not to be punished for what they’ve done,” he said. “You had to be moved from your bedroom to here. I lowered the oxygen in your room to make it easier for you to sleep. Did you sleep?”
“It was like a dream,” she admitted. “I thought I was asleep until I woke up and I was here, and I knew that it had all been true. I don’t want to be here, Papa. I want to be in my room. Please, can’t I be in my room, Papa? I won’t even yell when they touch me again, I’ll be so good, I’ll be like a stone.” She looked at him hopefully.
He had asked her to be like a stone before, when he needed to operate on her, or when he needed to refill the reservoirs of ghost rock that powered her cold and clockwork heart. She could maintain her poise through agonies that would have broken a lesser child. Truly, one day, she would be the finest flower in Deseret. All he had to do was fix her.
“No, my dearest,” he said. “You must remain here. We’re going on a trip.”
“A trip?” She frowned again, more delicately this time, so that she still looked like a little girl. “But where would we go? We never go on trips.”
“We do today.” He leaned forward, smoothing her blankets with the tips of his fingers. “You’ll have this whole wagon to yourself, and you have a driver—a real driver—from Dr. Hellstromme himself. Her name is Laura, and she’s one of the best drivers in all of Deseret.”
“I met her. She seems nice. Are there horses?”
“Yes, on your wagon. We want to avoid using the steam engine if at all possible. It might not get along with your machines. If we have to use it, Laura will tell you first, and she’ll ask you to hold your breath, just in case.”
“Can I see the horses?” persisted Annabelle.
Surprised, Dr. Murphy smiled. Sometimes it was easy to forget that she was just a little girl. “I’ll see about bringing them by your window when we break for the night. You’re going to see things you’ve never seen before, my pet. You’re such a lucky little girl.”
Annabelle nodded solemnly. She had been told her entire life that she was lucky: that other little girls had things infinitely worse than she did. She had never questioned the people who told her that. They knew more little girls than she did. Surely, they must be correct.
“Where are we going, Papa?”
This was the difficult part. This was the part where everything could come to pieces. It would be possible to make the journey while keeping Annabelle sedated, but it would be difficult, and more, it would require them to travel more slowly, as someone would need to monitor her at all times.
“A man came to see me last week, pet,” he said. “He told me that he had found your mother.”
Annabelle’s eyes widened.
“She is in a far-off territory called ‘Oregon,’ but we know how to get there. We are clever. We have maps. If we go now, before she has time to move on again, we can find her. We can bring her home.”
“Is my sister with her?”
Dr. Murphy nodded. “Yes.”
“But…” Annabelle frowned. “There aren’t any quiet, clean rooms in places like that. Only in Deseret. Where does she keep Pearl?”
“Outside. With the beasts.”
Annabelle’s face turned cold, the emotion draining out of it one drop at a time, until she was a statue, pale as marble, cold as summer ice.
“She shouldn’t be outside when I’m not,” said Annabelle. “It’s not fair.”
“I know. That’s why we’re going to get her. We’re going to bring her home.”
“Good.” Annabelle leaned back in her pillows, the machines around her huffing and wheezing. “I need a friend who can’t leave me.”
“And you shall have it,” Dr. Murphy said, and kissed his daughter’s hand.