Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

This time the bear responded. “It doesn’t need sparkling. It doesn’t need dressing up. It’s a cog.”

“Doesn’t look like one,” the bandit grumbled.

“No, it doesn’t, does it?” said the bear, his hackles rising. He reached down and picked the thing up from the anvil, looping the point of his hook through its cavity, and held it out for the bandit to see. “It looks like a . . . I don’t know . . . squashed metal insect.”

And indeed, it did. The bandit by the bear’s side could only nod at Esben’s uncanny observation. However, their goal hadn’t been to construct a squashed metal insect. It had been to create, with what tools and materials they could scavenge from a rapidly decomposing world, one of the most incredible and improbable machinations ever devised by man—or bear, for that matter: the Möbius Cog, a tri-sprocket oscillating monogear and the central component needed for a certain mechanical boy prince’s life-giving functions. Had the cog’s two inventors not been blinded and de-handed, respectively, they’d have been, without a doubt, on the short list for the South Wood Mechanical Fabrication Society’s Gear of the Year.

(What the bear and the bandit couldn’t know, however, was that the thing they’d created—this squashed insect—did have a purpose, albeit fairly arcane: When installed correctly, it turned the average household clothes dryer into a time machine that, when “wrinkle guard” was engaged, actually sent one’s socks ten minutes into the future.)

“Start again,” said the bear, and he threw the brass jumble into the dirt by the fire.

Seamus groaned and trudged back out into the surrounding forest in search of more fuel; Esben set the crucible back into the flames and began sorting through the drawerful of jewelry that had been salvaged from South Wood’s collapsing houses and buildings. It was a sad lot: wedding rings, necklace chains, heart pendants. The trinkets’ owners either volunteered the stuff, happy to be of service to such a grand gambit, or were sleeping beneath a mound of ivy and weren’t necessarily available to not give consent. A few tearfully parted with the items, a nearby loved one consoling them as they gave away the locket their grandmother wore, the brass badge their father carried as a constable. And so it was with a heavy heart that Esben sacrificed these keepsakes to the smelter, all the while knowing that his reconstructing the Möbius Cog on his own was as likely as his building a living butterfly from some pipe cleaners and a ball of wax.

He selected another item: a circular pendant on a chain. Someone’s name had been lovingly inscribed on the shiny brass. With a deep sigh, the bear dangled the chain from his hook and dropped it into the dimpled gray crucible.

He was so engrossed in his despair that he did not hear the approaching bird as it circled a few times above the pyre and landed some twenty feet off from where he was standing. He did not hear its two riders dismount and approach him, one helping the other walk across the difficult, viny terrain.

“Hello there, old friend,” came a voice. It was a voice the bear recognized.

He turned and saw Carol Grod, his old partner and fellow machinist, standing in the midst of the wriggling ivy vines, holding the hand of a young black-haired girl. The bear sputtered a few times. He found he could barely speak. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground.

“What’s he doing?” asked the old man, suddenly confused that his greeting had been given no response.

“He’s kneeling on the ground and his mouth is moving, but he’s not really saying anything,” said the girl.

“But he’s a bear, with hooks for hands?” asked Carol.

“Definitely,” confirmed the girl.

Carol spoke to the air. “Esben, if it’s really you and not some other bear with his paws removed, why don’t you say somethin?”

The dam broke and Esben let loose a torrent of words: “Carol! Carol Grod! You’re okay! You’re safe!” He leapt up from his knees and threw his arms around the old man’s neck.

“Hey there,” said Carol. “Easy. I’m an old human, you remember. Made of more fragile stuff than you.” The two then parted and Carol reached down for the bear’s hands. Finding the metallic prosthetics, he said, “Oh, what she’s done.”

“I know, Carol, I know,” said the bear. “And you—your eyes.”

“These wooden ones suit me just fine these days.” As if to show off the things, he raised his eyebrows and the wooden, painted orbs danced in their sockets.

And so the two friends stood, marveling at their sudden and unexpected reunion. They spoke over each other, trying to ferret out where the other had been all this time, wondering at what sweet horror the Mansion had visited upon them in their exile. They expressed sorrow and pity for each other’s particular predicament, while insisting that their own had not been that bad; they’d managed as well as could be expected. In the end, though, they were each in agreement about the considerable serendipities at play that had brought them back together and the apparent gravity of their new task.

The bear was glowing. “You couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment.” He looked down at Martha and said, “And who are you?”

“Martha Song,” replied the girl, not a little daunted to be speaking to a talking bear. “Mr. Bear, sir.”

“You’ve got some goggles there,” said Esben, pointing at the plastic pair perched on her forehead.

“Don’t go anywhere without ’em,” replied Martha.

“And today, they’ll come in very handy,” said the bear as he waved Carol and Martha to the roaring fire. “We’ve got some work to do.”

“Where are you at with it?” asked Carol as Martha carefully navigated him through the ivy toward the fire pit. They’d constructed a kind of open kiln of salvaged bricks from the many dilapidated buildings of South Wood, each being slowly dismantled by the scourge of the ivy vines. An iron dowel held the crucible in place in the center of the pit’s glowing coals.

“We’ve had two stabs at it so far,” explained the bear. “Took a bit for me to remember exactly how it went—going totally off of memory here. I have no idea where the schematics ended up.”

Carol tapped his forehead. “Got ’em right here. Ever since she took my eyes from me, those things’ve been burned in my brain. Spend days just sittin, lookin over those plans, seein ways to improve ’em. In my mind. A way to pass time, anyway.”

“Well, that’s good news, for once. And how are those fingers holding up?” asked the bear.