Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century 5)

Either way, Maria had a gun. Hainey said she should shoot for the head.

And she had a mask. She pulled it out of her pocket and drew it over her face, exactly the way Hainey had showed her, making sure it fit without any gaps or leaks. “When it hurts to breathe, you know it’s on right,” he’d assured her. He should know. He’d worn them in Seattle.

The air she drew through the filters tasted like mildew and charcoal, but that was better than sulfur and blood.

She glanced out the window one last time. The image of Katharine Haymes wavered and wobbled as if it were surrounded by rainbows—distorted by the window itself. Ah, so that’s what the note had meant. The glass didn’t just protect observers, it detected the gas as well. The whole thing must be polarized, which must’ve cost a fortune.

But Katharine Haymes had a fortune.

Maria seized the research files and stashed them in her bag. She readied her gun, tested the mask one last time … and opened the control room door.

Twenty-four

December 1880

“‘It did not happen immediately, but it happened quickly in the wake of Katharine Haymes’s death: Word was out. Word went even farther the next morning, when all of us—Abraham, Gideon, Nelson, and myself—exhausted to the bone yet thrilled to be alive, scattered to the four winds. We took the news wherever we went, threw it as far as our aim could reach.

“In the ensuing weeks, we found others reaching out from across the Mason-Dixon—reaching across a barrier that had once seemed insurmountable. The diminutive Confederate officer Sally Louisa Tompkins regained her standing and her credibility by force of will, and her voice amplified our message. Maria Boyd’s voice did likewise, for although she belongs to neither North nor South, she speaks to both with equal authority. So, too, Gideon Bardsley, no longer a slave but a citizen, both of Alabama and the District. Outcast and hero, the inventor and scientist who created the machine that might save us all with its warnings. ’”

Julia shook her head. “Dearest, no one talks like that. Least of all you. ”

“No, but people write like this. This is the language that ‘keeps’ the best. ”

“I wish you wouldn’t bother. Sounds a bit forced to me, if you don’t mind me saying so. ”

“I don’t mind,” he said, not taking his eyes off the papers he’d so meticulously written out by hand. They’d taken five months to compose, and they went off to the printer tomorrow. This was his last chance to read it before he committed indefinitely to the saga. “But if I wrote it as it happened, with all the swearing and sweating, no one would want to read it. ”

“Oh, but you’re wrong about that,” his wife murmured with a sly smile. She lounged in an overstuffed chair beside a cooling fire. “If anything, I think the readership might blossom. ”

“No one wants to read about men being bored on trains, or swearing every day when the post comes. ”

“Or threatening to punch telegraph operators. ”

“That only happened the once. You may rest assured, I’ve left that part out. ”

She grinned, and she was beautiful. “More’s the pity. Honestly, I can’t believe you’ve written so much so quickly. Anyway, go on. ”

“‘Those who had been silenced were heard, and although forces conspired to silence them once more, the truth grew larger than the lies—large enough to rise above them, and stand its ground. The undead leprosy was a threat to all. It cared nothing for the color of a man’s uniform, or the state of his purse. It disregarded politics, age, and virtue. It came for all alike.

“It came for us. ’”

“Oh, very dramatic, dear. ”

“But it has come for us, hasn’t it? You’ve seen the measures we’ve taken—the measures we’ve been forced to take. ” He meant the quarantined quarters. He meant the pits dug at the far side of town, and filled with the remnants of the writhing corpses, killed again and burned, then buried.

“The war is over, and that’s cause for celebration, isn’t it? We’re living at the beginning of a brave new age—a new era of cooperation against a common foe. But here you go, writing your memoirs like you’re already living the epilogue. ”

“It is an epilogue of a sort,” he said defensively. “The end of the conflict—the reunification of the United States of America. ”

“The ink on the treaty is scarcely dry, and here you go spilling more of it. You’ve earned some time to rest, and I wish you’d take it. ”

He shook his head and bit his tongue, not saying aloud what he suspected at the bottom of his heart: He did not have as much time as she thought. Something was wrong; he felt it when he swallowed, when he woke in the night after nightmares of hands clenched around his throat. He sensed it in the weight he’d lost, and in the weakness he felt upon standing.

Julia would’ve called it old age, but it was something else, something he’d shared with no one but the physician Nelson Wellers—who now visited him weekly, for a chat and some brandy. And for an examination, after Julia went to bed.

Wellers saw it, too, and had offered prescriptions and suggestions, but not much in the way of diagnosis or hope.

Perhaps months, perhaps years. Perhaps it was nothing at all, for in some respects the human body was as foreign a frontier as the moon, or the bottom of the ocean. But in truth, Grant did not expect to find medical treatment. He only wished to tell someone in confidence that he knew he was dying, and to have that secret kept so long as it needed keeping.