The trees in the backyard had multiplied and grown over the years and a willow nearly hid the door to the workshop. His mother’s portrait in her gold frame admonished him from across the room as he stood on the threshold.
He was a fool. Most of his father’s lenses were stored inside this one lab. He’d been too busy, too focused on his inventions to follow his father’s last request. He opened the chest and gazed down at them all. Malcontent would never agree to bring them. And he’d destroy everything in his wake. Kent let the lid fall closed again.
He gathered supplies quickly. Malcontent’s guards stayed so close that whenever he moved he bumped into one of them. One held a bag for him to drop supplies into. The other had a gun. Malcontent divided his own attention between Kent and April. As she moved gracefully through the room, touching his things, Kent wondered what she was thinking.
Finally, he picked up a pair of spectacles from one of the tables. The guard held out the bag of supplies, but Kent ignored him, placing the glasses atop his head. At least he’d have one extra pair.
“There are other things here that might be useful,” he said to Malcontent.
“To you,” the Reverend said softly, ushering them out. “I doubt that they would be useful to me. If you can make a bomb for me, you can certainly make one to fight me. But if you can’t see to do it . . . well, then I don’t have to kill you.”
Malcontent nodded to the guard. Kent didn’t watch. April was biting her lip. He smelled the smoke, but didn’t want to see his father’s work and sacrifice burning, so he walked without looking back.
In an underground room—not the one where they’d been imprisoned, but a different room with a table and a window that had been boarded over—Kent toiled over his fake bomb, barely sleeping. Often Malcontent stood over him. The man knew more about explosives than Kent would have liked, always asking questions, always suspicious.
April was gone. He didn’t ask where they’d put her. Thinking about it distracted him.
Finally, days later, Kent sat, crouched over a last bit of wiring. Someone entered the room, but he didn’t look up.
“This is lovely,” the Reverend said, examining the ticking contraption that Kent had put together. Kent tried to read his expression, but at that moment the glow of the lantern caught the edge of the lens of his glasses and blinded him. Did Malcontent really believe this would explode? Kent pulled his goggles over his head, tucking them carefully into his pocket and replacing them with the metal wire spectacles he’d taken before Malcontent burned his father’s laboratory.
“If you are finished.” The madman gestured toward the doorway. A guard ushered Kent back to the room where he’d first been imprisoned. April was sitting on the couch.
“What happened to your grand escape plan?” he said.
“Apparently Elliott has gone to Prospero’s palace looking for me. Father keeps taunting me with it. Why make the effort when there’s nothing to escape to? And while you’ve been tinkering, I’ve been busy spying.”
Kent felt chilled. He hadn’t exactly been counting on Elliott to come rescue him, but he’d hoped that someone would come for April.
“He has men, dozens, and he’s moving them into the city using the tunnels,” she whispered. “This is important. We have to tell Elliott, though if Uncle has him . . . ” She looked more despondent than he’d ever seen her. But then she shook herself. “Malcontent goes out at night, and takes most of the men with him. I’ve been such an easy prisoner, they won’t expect trouble. We leave tonight.”
Kent nodded and then collapsed, exhausted, against the wall.
April woke him some hours later.
“Are you ready?”
He followed her, still groggy. “Father always looks to the left when he approaches the corridor. Something there makes him uneasy. We should go in that direction.”
The guard outside their door was half asleep, and didn’t expect to be attacked. Kent hit him twice. He wasn’t a fighter but he’d studied human anatomy enough to know where to hit a man to do the most damage. He dragged the guard across the room and closed the manacle around his wrist.
“Nicely done,” April commented. He felt himself flushing.
Once in the corridor he was lost, but April led him without hesitation to a set of steps, to street level. They had to hide from one of Malcontent’s patrols, squatting behind some refuse bins, but finally, as the sun rose, they were on the sidewalk, headed to the upper city.
Once they’d crossed the river they stopped in front of a ruined cathedral.
“I’m sorry they burned your laboratory,” April said.
Kent felt a twinge at the loss of his mother’s portrait and all those precious lenses. But he was here, alive, walking beside this clever, fearless girl who had rescued him from Malcontent’s lair.
The rising sun illuminated the ruin before them, the blackened stone stark against the sky.
“What a waste,” April said softly. “It was so beautiful once.”
“I don’t think I see beauty like other people,” Kent admitted.
The look she shot him was oddly vulnerable. He wanted to explain that he thought she was wonderful, but not because of her golden hair, not because of the sparkly eye makeup. He wondered if she would believe him. If she would care.
“I have to go to my mother,” she said. “Elliott has apartments in both the university and the Debauchery Club. I don’t know where he’ll be . . . or if he’ll return. But Mother will be afraid.” They walked toward the Akkadian Towers.
“He’ll return,” Kent said with more certainty than he felt. He’d been to Prospero’s castle once, after all. “We’ll both tell him everything we’ve learned. The device I built won’t explode, but he’ll still want to be careful.”
She grabbed his arm. “I’ll tell him everything I heard,” she said. “But I’ve changed my mind about Malcontent. I don’t want to watch Elliott eviscerate him. I want to keep Elliott away from him.”
“Once Elliott knows—”
“Exactly. He can’t know. Not yet. I don’t know why our father hates him so, but he wants to kill Elliott. I can’t lose him, Kent.”
April’s eyes were wide, and uncharacteristically unguarded. “I’ll tell him everything but Malcontent’s identity then.” He wondered, as he said it, if he was making a mistake.
“I’ll see you again,” she said. It wasn’t a question. And then she was gone, through a side door, into the tower.
Kent went back to the basement lab that Elliott had procured. He was close to recreating the design of the protective masks. And after days of making a bomb for Malcontent—even a fake one—he needed to do something to help others.
He’d been working without much rest when Elliott arrived, panicked, with the scientist’s daughter. They’d escaped from Prospero, but the girl had been poisoned.
Kent worked frantically, trying to calm Elliott at the same time. He was painfully aware of his lack of sleep. That his brain was fuzzy. But he did it. At last, the girl’s fever broke and her breathing eased.
“Thank you,” Elliott said, grasping Kent’s hand. “We need her if we’re going to succeed in his venture.” And then he handed over the exact plans for the masks, with all the blanks Kent had been trying to fill already filled in for him. The girl had stolen them from her father.
“Wait. Prospero’s no longer our biggest concern.”
He told Elliott of Malcontent’s plan to target the steamship, but that he, Kent, had built a fake bomb. Elliott took it in, growing more rigid with every passing minute. Finally he nodded, scooped Dr. Worth’s daughter up, and swept from the room. Not until he was gone did Kent realize he hadn’t mentioned April. Elliott was going back to the tower; he’d find her, and Kent’s part in her story would be over.
But once again, Kent was wrong.
Two days later one of Elliott’s men came with a message. Kent read it carefully. The plans were a variation of what he’d discussed with Elliott multiple times.
The launch would go as planned that night. Their own rebel soldiers would be posted, just in case. Elliott would play his part, leaving on the steamship, and Kent would follow on the airship and pick him up, returning to the city to start the revolution. But now April was going on the ship with Elliott. Kent told himself that they knew all the risks. They knew Malcontent was targeting the launch and they’d be vigilant.
He closed up the mask workshop for now and walked across town to the Morgue, where he’d wait until it was time for his move. The Morgue was already full of people looking for oblivion. He ignored them and locked himself in the spare room he’d rented. For a full half-hour he sat on the floor looking at all of his drawings. The flying machines that he’d imagined since he was a boy. And then he went to the roof. The balloon that marked the Debauchery District was his. Though it’d been manufactured before the plague, he’d modified it, and used it to make calculations needed for his greatest flying device, his steam-powered airship.
As Kent moved away from the edge, Will materialized, the way he sometimes did. He was too graceful for his own good.
“Araby is going on the ship with Prospero’s nephew,” he told Kent. Will’s voice, when he said her name, sounded desperate and sad and thrilled, all at the same time. Kent understood how his friend felt. And yet, Elliott had been frantic when she’d been poisoned. This was not going to go smoothly. He’d never seen Elliott show such emotion, and Will . . . he never asked for much, never wanted anything for himself. He deserved to fall in love with a girl whose heart wasn’t divided.
“I want to take her up in the balloon,” Will continued. “She has to see that there are good things here . . . before it’s too late.”
Kent agreed, reluctantly, to keep watch while they went up and then to pull it back down. Will disappeared down the stairs, off to fetch the scientist’s daughter.
When he returned, pulling Araby along with him, his cheeks were flushed, and Kent suspected he’d had a drink or two along the way. And the girl . . . Kent didn’t know what to think. He watched Will help her into the basket, let the balloon ascend. Her father was his hero. But the glittering eye makeup that she wore made him think only of shimmering blonde hair and an evil laugh.
It had been obvious when April had stopped in front of him in the game room of the Debauchery Club that she knew the effect she had on boys. He just hadn’t expected to succumb.
The wind whipped around him, and he steadied the balloon. When he looked up Will was kissing Araby as if the world would end if they stopped. He looked away and checked his watch. Two more minutes and he had to start bringing them down or Araby wouldn’t make the boat.
He was turning the crank to lower the balloon when the fireworks began. An impressive display.
“Seems the celebration is starting early,” Kent said as the basket of the balloon bumped the roof. “His Majesty must have discovered that some religious zealots were planning to ruin his party.”