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The king’s agent suddenly knew exactly who, where, and when he was.
The wrong Burton.
In the wrong place.
On the wrong day.
Another repeat performance. Why?
Babbage ran his finger around the side of the Nimtz generator. The disk crackled and threw out a fountain of sparks. The old man recoiled with a cry of alarm.
Burton reached to either side, took Swinburne and Spencer by their arms, and started to pull them away from the bench.
Babbage stepped backward. “I hadn’t anticipated—”
A bubble formed around the helmet, suit and boots. With a thunderous bang, it popped, and the time suit, most of the workbench, and a large chunk of Isambard Kingdom Brunel vanished. The engineer slumped and became motionless.
Spencer cried out, “Blimey! Where’s it gone?”
“No! No! No!” Babbage wailed. “This is a disaster! We can’t have lost it! It’s impossible!” He stamped his feet and clapped his hands to his face. “How? How?”
Burton closed his eyes and massaged the sides of his head. “I’ve had enough of mysteries, and the light in this place always gives me a headache. I’m leaving.”
Swinburne and Spencer joined him. They walked back across the workshop and out through its doors. Snow was falling from a pitch-black sky. It was white. The courtyard, swathed in it, glared brilliantly under the spotlights.
The men left the power station and approached the armadillidium. Burton ordered, “Open.” It unrolled its considerable bulk. He climbed aboard, and his companions followed him up.
“The chaps are waiting for us at the Hog in the Pound,” Swinburne said. “Let’s see what plan Trounce and Slaughter have come up with. A means to rescue Miss Mayson from Gladstone’s lustful groping, I hope.”
Taking hold of the reins, Burton guided the woodlouse back through the gardens and out onto Nine Elms Lane.
He looked down at his hands. The scar on the left was no longer there. Brightness swept in from the corners of his eyes. He saw his fingers curled around the reins of his armadillidium; around the reins of a clockwork horse; around the handlebars of a velocipede.
In an instant, the snow stopped falling and it was daylight.
He lost control of his vehicle, hit the back of a hansom cab, careened into the kerb, and crashed to the ground. The pe
He lay sprawled on the ground.
The cab driver yelled, “You blithering idiot!” but didn’t stop his vehicle.
A raggedly dressed match seller—a woman who lacked teeth but possessed an overabundance of facial hair—shuffled over and squinted down at the king’s agent. “Is ye hurt, ducky?”
For a moment, he couldn’t reply, then he managed to croak, “No. I’m all right.”
“You look all battered. Better get yerself up off the pavemint afore the snow soaks into ’em smart togs o’ yourn. Stain ’em scarlit, so it will. Would ye like t’ buy a box o’ lucifers?”
Burton pushed himself up. He thanked the woman for her concern and exchanged a few coins for a matchbook.
After dragging his broken velocipede out of the road, picking up his hat, and brushing himself down, he stood for a minute, utterly perplexed. He touched his head and found that his hair was short. There were scars on his scalp, a painful lump at the back of his skull, and a scabby cut on his chin. His left elbow hurt. In fact, all of him hurt.
Gradually, it dawned on him that he was on Cheyne Walk. He could see Battersea Power Station on the other side of the river. Fumbling for his chronometer, he flipped its lid. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.
Of what day?
He retrieved a cheroot from his pocket and smoked it while watching a creaking and clanking litter crab lumber past. The humped contraption was dragging itself along, its eight thick mechanical legs thumping against the impacted pink slush that covered the road, the twenty-four thin arms on its belly snatching this way and that, digging rubbish out of the mushy layer and throwing it through the machine’s maw into the furnace.
Burton’s hands were shaking.
He scraped at the ground with his heel and revealed a layer of bright red beneath. It appeared oddly fibrous, and he vaguely registered that the seeds had extended long hair-like roots.
Home?
The carriages and wagons that passed him were drawn either by real horses or by their steam-powered equivalents—small wheel-mounted engines that somewhat resembled the famous Stephenson’s Rocket. People crowded the thoroughfare just as they always did, a mélange of the well-to-do and poverty-stricken, of the ma
A rotorchair chopped through the leaden sky. A hawker sang, “Hot chestnuts, hot chestnuts, pe
The final vestigial glow of Saltzma
He looked back the way he’d come. The distant, blackened and ragged stump of Parliament’s clock tower was visible over the rooftops.
All was as it should be, but he could sense on the inside of his legs, just above the knees, where the woodlouse’s saddle had pressed against his legs, and when he closed his eyes he could hear the resentful tones of the mechanical horse.
Those experiences had been real.
He finished his cigar, flicked it away, and wheeled his clanking pe
“What ho! What ho! What ho!” the poet shrilled. “Fancy finding you on my doorstep. I thought you’d be out for the count. Did you come to talk me into taking an afternoon tipple? I mustn’t. I mustn’t. Oh all right. Consider me persuaded. Have you slept? I say! Look at the state of your boneshaker. Surely you didn’t ride it in this weather?”
“The crankshaft broke,” Burton replied, “and, in truth, Algy, I have no notion of how or why I ended up here.”
“Are you one over the eight already? Drinking to ease the pain, I suppose, though your wounds appear somewhat less gruesome by the light of day. Not your face. Just your wounds.”
“I haven’t touched a drop, but a drink sounds like a very good idea.” Burton tested his left elbow, bending it cautiously. It hurt, but not as much as he expected. “Sister Raghavendra applied her miraculous salves?”
Swinburne looked surprised. “She was stitching and smearing for some considerable time. Have you forgotten?”
“After a fashion. Let’s cross to Battersea. I’d like to take a look at the station. I’ll explain on the way.”
“We were there just yesterday. Explain what?”
“Yesterday? Is it Thursday?”
“The sixteenth, of course. Did that knock to your head scramble your wits?”
“A very good question.”
Burton searched his memories and found them to be a confusing tangle, some fading quickly, while others suddenly emerged like the sun breaking through clouds. Experiences overlaid one another in palimpsestic contradictions.
He’d been at Battersea Power Station, where Raghavendra had treated his wounds. The recollection was clear. He could see her bending over him, her long black hair hanging down, her skin dark, and her eyes big, brown and beautiful.
“The ointment smells rather bad,” she’d said, “but it will accelerate the healing provided you can avoid being hit again, which, knowing you, is very doubtful. I’m tempted to thump you myself.”
As vivid as that scene was in his mind’s eye, he knew that at exactly the moment it occurred he was also riding a clockwork horse from Buckingham Palace to the headquarters of the Department of Guided Science. Similarly, he’d watched Charles Babbage’s experiment go awry at nine o’clock last night while he was, at the same time, sitting at his desk this morning writing up a report of Spring Heeled Jack’s attack. He’d snatched three hours of sleep at exactly the moment he’d witnessed Babbage’s actions repeated.