Due to a few requests by people in the original thread, I'm starting a new thread for Steam.
It's the thread you're in right now.
Neat huh?
Steam is an erotic steampunk adventure full of magic, intrigue, sword fights, trains and sex.
Expect updates monthly (quicker if I get a bunch of support).
This story is going to be very long! And complicated!
Check it out below.
Also, check out my already finished story, Pressia, at the link below.
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=2131
Prologue and Chapter One
Spoiler (click to show/hide):
Steam
axmanjack
Prologue | The Lady Turandot
Sylvia dug her feet into the sand, trying to push herself up far enough under the burning sheet of metal that she wouldn’t be seen. The air was on fire. The sky was scorched, soot-black and snowing bits of gray ash that collected here and there in powdery drifts. Her broken right arm still clutched the grip of a ruined revolver, but she couldn’t force her hand to open. The arm was numb. Her mouth tasted like blood.
Amid the screams and wrenching crackle of metal burning for miles down the track behind her, Sylvia could hear the footsteps of searchers outside of her hidey-hole. She held her breath and counted the seconds. Foreign voices, male. The screech of something dying. Ice cold mountain wind howling through the shattered remnants of railcar. A pair of booted feet moved into view.
Her terrified mind drank in every detail, stretched every rotten second into an hour. The boots were made of thick, brown leather, well-worn and streaked black and grey from the accumulating ash. Woven cotton thongs interlaced up their fronts, crisscrossing at hard angles up through iron eyelets polished silver from constant friction. Riveted steel plates hung like dragon scales on spats above the boots, and, beneath them, heavy, red uniform pants. The owner of the boots turned his feet to face her.
The world seemed so quiet. She could feel the sting of every cold, raspy breath, could hear it vibrating through her chest. Her numb, broken arm began to shake, rattling the bent barrel of the revolver against the ground. Sylvia grabbed her wrist with her good hand and pulled hard. Pins and needles became daggers and spears in the bad arm, razor blades against her frail nerves that made her mind sway. Another rasping breath. Another. Another. The boots don’t move.
Sylvia blinks back tears of helpless frustration. Just do it you bastard, God damn you, just do it. Her nose was running, but she didn’t notice. How was it so quiet? A gloved hand, tooled to match the boots, reached down and wrapped its fingers around the edge of the bit of metal shielding. Sylvia’s body tensed. Her mind went black. The hand pulled her shelter up and away from her. She screamed and tried to swing the revolver around to bear, but her dumb arm ignored the command.
One of the boots flew forward in an arc, connecting with her jaw and sending her sprawling. She came to with it pressing down hard on her bad arm, and watched as the gloved hand pried the gun from her fingers and tossed it aside. Somebody grabbed her by the back of her neck, his grip nearly encircling her throat, and she was pulled to her feet. A single, gruff command and a sharp jab to her lower back.
“Walk.”
Sylvia nodded and complied. Her eyes wandered. Red-cloaked figures moved like phantoms through the white, steaming mists of the smoldering wreckage. They picked through the ruins, noiselessly going about their work as the night winds and the wounded survivors screamed around them. The railcar had derailed in the saddle between two mountains, and now lay bundled up and twisted over itself like a section of discarded intestine. Her captor moved her past a stack of bodies, all in white uniforms. The Imperium escort detail that had been sent along with the railcar.
Sylvia’s escort led her to the end of a line of other prisoners, some too wounded even to kneel, and forced her down beside them. She looked down the row, catching the frightened eyes of a few people she knew. Some of them cried, and others just stared out into the wreckage, waiting for what they knew was coming.
“No… please, no,” begged some pitiful voice from the other side of the line. Sylvia looked down to see Berthold, the assistant quartermaster, being drug away. “No, no!” She felt the entire line flinch when the gunshot rang out, quieting Berthold. A woman in the line began to cry.
A rough hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to her feet, and Sylvia found herself muttering the same, pitiful pleas. God she wanted to die with some dignity, but her legs gave out beneath her and she was dragged the rest of the way by her scalp and dropped before another pair of boots. She sobbed, curling around her wounded arm and not bothering to wipe the mess of tears, snot and soot from her face. The hand in her hair forced her to face forward.
“Hello,” the man before her said in Caanish, the language of the mid-westerners. He was a large, grey-haired man, with a dour, bored expression and the weatherworn face of a lifelong outdoorsman. His gaze was unavoidable, and she couldn’t break eye contact with him. “Do you speak a real language?” Sylvia hesitated, confused, and he waved a hand at the man holding her hair. He began dragging her away when she found her voice.
“Yes,” she said, her words cracking on the ice in her throat. “Yes!” She screamed the second time, and the grey-haired man held up a halting hand.
“I am Colonel Foucault, commander of first mountaineers, third regiment. Who are you?” With a nod of his head the hand in her hair released her, letting her fall on her butt. She had to swallow a few times before continuing.
“Sy-Sylvia Messerschmitt, sir, I—“ Sylvia swallowed again. Her left leg shook so bad it made her rock back and forth. “I am… I am the… Steam Trainer, a Steam Trainer, for the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union. I’m… a civilian sir, please, I don’t want to die.”
“Nobody wants to die, Sylvia Messerschmitt of the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union,” Foucault said. He gestured to the soldier behind her and, with a complicated series of hand gestures. Tears streamed down her face as the soldiers began systematically executing the prisoners. “Thank your God that you are useful to me. You will see the sun rise today.” Sylvia sucked breath into her lungs, forcing herself to breathe through the tears.
“Thank you,” she said. A stream of blood began moving down the hill, cutting a path through the ash. Its tributaries grew with every gunshot, thickening the stream into a river that plunged, hot and steaming, ever westward. The soldier helped Sylvia to her feet, a bit more easily this time. “Thank you.”
Chapter One | Sunrise
Pram tangled her fingers up in the thick locks of Bennett’s hair and pulled his face into her neck. He moved with little resistance to her collarbone, running his tongue over it and up the side of her neck, biting down just as he pushed inside her. She gasped, pulled his head back and kissed him hard on the mouth. For a brief moment, their breathing fell into sync with the rhythmic pumps of his hips between her legs. He braced himself against the headboard with one hand and pushed her back down against the bed with the other.
The rough callouses on his palms scratched at the smooth, brown skin of her shoulder. Bennett’s hands were indelicate, strong and she relished him for his coarseness. She released her grip on his hair and lay back, letting his rough palm move down over her throat, and then down further to cup her breast. She bit her lip. He picked up speed. Sweat beaded up on both their faces despite the cool air blowing in from the tower window.
Pram could see the first traces of sunlight leaking over the eastern hills. It poured into the room in beams through the fluttering blue of the silk curtains. It highlighted the harsh, angular lines of Bennett’s face, glimmered in the sweat on his skin as it ran down across his chest, and cast shadows between the taught, flexing muscles of his abdomen. His eyes were a darker shade of blue than the curtains. His hair was a lighter shade of black than the fading night outside. Pram found him incredibly dull, but he was a great way to waste a morning.
Her body shivered, approaching climax, and her legs flexed involuntarily against his sides. He moved his hands to grip behind her knees and pushed down hard, moving her feet past her head. The suddenness of the motion hurt and she gasped.
“Are you OK?” He asked, slowing down.
“Don’t stop,” she responded, covering his hands with hers and pulling back further. He obliged, wrapping his hands behind her back and around her shoulders and picking up the momentum. The surge took her breath away. She bit down on his shoulder, but he kept pace. His skin tasted like sweat and leather and sex and she couldn’t get enough and then she came, her nails digging hard into the skin of her legs. Warm, buttery ecstasy flooded her mind, turned every nerve into a hot pinprick of light. For a moment, nothing mattered. Nothing at all.
“Did you?” Bennett asked, slowing up a bit.
“Yeah,” Pram replied softly. She traced the contours of his chest muscles with a fingernail, and then pulled his lips to hers. They kissed, lips barely brushing. Teeth bit down gently, tugging. The flick of one tongue against another. His stubble on her cheek. Her nails on his back. The weight of his body, his hands tracing the curves of her skin.
“Where should I…” he asked without finishing the sentence.
“On me,” she said lazily, “not in me.” He kissed her again, pulled out, and stood on his knees. She looked up at him, all taut muscles glistening in the rising sunlight, and rubbed his flanks with a contented calf muscle. He stroked himself with a single hand, his eyes clenched shut until he came onto her stomach. He wiped the hot little droplets off of her with a towel before they had a chance to cool, and then flopped down onto the sheets beside her.
He smiled playfully, rubbing her side with his hand pushing his hand beneath her head. They kissed. A steam whistle howled to life in the crisp morning air outside. Pram turned away from Bennett and picked her father’s black wristwatch from the bedside table.
“That was the seven o’clock to Morrissey,” she said aloud, feeling the clockwork inside the watch turning over itself in her hand. “I’ve got to be at the platform in an hour.” She groaned and let Bennett cradle her head on his shoulder. She draped an arm over him and kissed his chest, hating the sun rising in the window.
“Me too,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “Somebody changed the manifest yesterday afternoon and we’ve got to recheck the back 80 cars before departure.”
“Sounds terrible,” she said, sitting up and fumbling around the dark side of the bed for a shirt.
“Yeah,” he said, sitting up beside her. “But at least I don’t have to get set on fire for my job.” She chuckled, he had a point. Bennett summoned a hobo’s flame in his right hand, filling the dark side of the room with ugly white light. Pram squinted at it, and then found her oversized, button-up pajama shirt beside Bennett’s ugly, orange and blue striped boxer shorts. She stood and pulled the shirt on over her head.
“I wish I could do that,” she said, pointing at the hobo’s flame. “It’s so convenient.” Bennett laughed and dispelled it, picking up his boxers in the process.
“Yeah, and I wish I was I larger conduit, so I could a real job instead of being a maintenance monkey for fancy Steam Trainers like you,” he said, grinning and leaning in for a kiss. She leaned away, smiling.
“Put some pants on,” she said, “I need a shower and you’ve got to go.” Bennett pulled on his boxers and they kissed again. “I’ll see you later, OK?”
“Yeah,” he said, and then he was gone.
Pram showered and got dressed, strapping her father’s watch to her wrist as she moved to the window looking out over the town. The Bailey Hub was slow to rise in the morning, and she could only see the shadowy outlines of a few morning commuters shuffling back and forth to whatever drudgery the day was going to bring. She had only been here a few times before the war began, and even after the Imperium built up the Hub to handle supply missions, the townsfolk had changed very little.
Conflicts in the west were nothing new to Bailey, it had been a frontier town for hundreds of years now, captured and repatriated a hundred times before the Imperium had existed. The same tired-faced Plebes would be still be wandering across those cracked grey pavers a thousand years from now, listlessly working themselves to death in pointless ignominy. Another steam whistle pealed out its cry into the morning air, the seven-thirty to Dulles Dane Mills. Time to go.
Pram locked the door to the tower apartment behind her and turned the key in at the desk downstairs. The clerk, entirely too cheery for the early hour, smiled and had her sign out on the register.
“Thank you for staying with us ma’am,” said the clerk. Pram wondered to herself if the girl couldn’t blink, or just chose not to.
“Yeah, thanks,” replied Pram, pulling her wallet out of her side bag and sliding a twenty across the desk. “Hey, could you have somebody run my bags over to platform 2B? Just have them drop them at the Compton E&L head office and give them my name. Pram Beazley, it’s on all the bags too.” The clerk nodded.
“Of course, ma’am,” she said, “and thank you again for staying with Bailey Castle Tower Suites.” Pram halfheartedly returned her smile and left through the refurbished castle’s massive, studded-oak doors. The streets were still relatively quiet outside, and a cold mist hung low over the cobbled stone streets, still wet from the last night’s rain.
The air was chilly, and it had the sort of mid-fall coldness to it that sank into the skin slowly until it got to the bone. Her uniform, a set of heavy canvas shorts and a vest over a skintight, black thermal suit that covered all but her hands and neck, provided little heat, but it was a short few blocks to the platform. Her heavy soled boots clacked loudly against the ground as she walked, and the echoing taps of her footfalls were the only noticeable sound on the quiet streets.
The few trees lining the side of the main boulevard that led to the platform had begun shedding their fall regalia, leaving whole swaths of the ground covered in formless red and gold mosaics. The wet leaves would occasionally stick to the sides of her feet every few steps, only to fall off moments later. It made her think of her train, up ahead, and the steady ticking of her father’s watch.
The sound of the station grew steadily louder as she approached, a tumultuous roar of voices, clattering cars and the constant rushing bustle of foot traffic up and down the platform. The press of bodies inside the station kept it warm, despite its lack of a dedicated heating system, and Pram took a moment to stretch and shake off the cold. Her tryst with Bennett had left her sore, in a good way, though it did make stretching her legs somewhat addictive. She got warm thinking of him, despite herself.
Pram rolled her eyes at her own schoolgirl foolishness and moved through the throng of bodies toward the Compton E&L field office at platform B2. Most of the people here were military, she noticed, wishing she were taller to better see where she was going. The rest were an assorted hodgepodge of traders, regular passengers and employees of the three rail companies that were currently operating out of the Bailey Hub. Something made her shiver.
A pair of black eyes caught hers through the crowd, locked on them. The glimpse only lasted a moment. Thick, unruly black hair, a shock-white face and the sharp features of a bird or a snake. She froze, unease seeping into her stomach like oil from a broken feed line. Her hair stood on end. Then, it was over, shaken off like the odd case of déjà vu. Despite the warmth of the station, Pram found herself rubbing her arms the rest of the way to the office.
Nash leaned against one of the platform’s support columns and yawned, popped his neck, and absent-mindedly thumbed through the free train schedule he had taken from a rack of pamphlets by the customs window. “Ride! With The Pride of The Imperium,” said blocky typeface over the family of four smiling in front of some huge commuter engine. He could make out the outline of the White Fingers looming in the distance behind the train, and the tip of Mount Granger partially blocking out the sun behind them. The Fingers are called the Granger Pass on this side of the continent, he reminded himself, flipping over the pamphlet.
The information held little use for Nash. He had spent the last few days holed up in a dingy little apartment on the south side of Bailey, memorizing every facet of the job. Less than a week to become a perfunctory expert on Compton E&L, the rail system and every crewmate and passenger. A tall order, but the money was worth it. Now that everything was in place, all he had to do was spot his mark. By far, the most boring portion of the job. He kept himself busy watching people shuffling through the station.
Hundreds of people stood in lines to get tickets, milled about the shops or rested on the golden framework of the benches that dotted each platform in uniform rows. A family of colonists, looking on the run from the troubles out west, huddled in a grey pile of moldering travel coats. Two young children rested their heads on the father’s lap. The man gazed off into the middle distance, his face covered in stubble and pulled low and slack from worry. The lot of them were fair-haired and light-eyed, likely Gunnervand immigrants. A grey-haired woman, possibly the mother, gently shook the father on the shoulder and motioned toward the platform. The peel of a whistle shrieked over the noise of the crowd, preceding the rumble of a train pulling into the station from the yard.
“Those western dogs are too ferocious for civilized interaction,” said a woman behind Nash. “I’ve heard they refused any possibilities of a peaceful resolution to this conflict.” Nash turned his back to the pillar and watched the conversation from the corner of his eye. Two plump ladies, covered from head-to-toe in the intricately woven silk fashionable in the eastern coastal cities, tittered back and forth to each other about politics behind gloved hands.
“Well I’ve heard that that’s all just Senate politics,” said the scarlet-haired second woman. Nash spotted a stain on her otherwise immaculate lace overcoat, a spot of red wine that stood out brilliantly against the garish white. It was a perfectly round dot, the size of an eyeball, just above the knee. Neither of the two noticed. “My husband says the Senate is trying to whip the plebes up into a frenzy, get them ready for an invasion of the west.” The other woman scoffed into the back of her hand. She caught Nash’s eye as she did so.
He winked at her, cracking half a smile and doffing the slender brim of his hat at her. She blushed, turned away and pulled at her friend’s wrist. They walked a few paces away, turned back to catch a glimpse of Nash, and then quickly rushed off down the platform, giggling like idiots. He ran a hand down his unfamiliar face, marveling at the power of stolen beauty as a wry smile curled his lips. The voice of the station manager came over the intercom system, instructing all passengers boarding the eight o’clock to Cullville. The masses obeyed, moving around Nash like water past a rock.
The crowd shrunk surged and receded as the arriving passengers pushed past their replacements. This shipment had brought with it a load of soldiers wearing the white uniforms of the Imperium. Troops heading for the front line. Most of them would probably end up on the same train he was getting on, which was a shame for them. They looked young.
Nash spotted his mark standing in line at a concession booth, barely visible behind a street conjurer performing simplistic spells for a group of children. He stood stock still, the shear thrill of accomplishment freezing him in place. His mind raced through possibilities, weighing the few available options against likelihoods of success. The best option was to wait. His eyes drank up every detail of the man he was about to kill.
The man was tall, just shy of two meters, with honey-blonde hair and blue eyes. His skin had the deep, golden-brown tan of an outdoorsman, and it was stretched taut over his muscular frame. The man moved away from the concession stand, dropping the cap of a drink bottle into the performer’s upturned cap. The performer didn’t notice the deceit, and formed a laughing face out of wavering light to thank him. Nash’s fingers twitched in anticipation.
His mark was an incredible specimen, pushing his lumbering frame through the crowd toward the train yard behind the station. The man had an arrogant sort of strut, his weight moving indelicately across the ground in long strides. There was little refinement to his motion, thought Nash, and he probably had little, if any, combat training. The approach would be speed, silence and opportunity. A harsh, shuddering breath was all Nash could muster as the man passed within a meter of him, completely unaware. When he was roughly thirty meters away, Nash began to follow.
He tipped down the brim of the hat over his eyes, just enough to not be spotted by the man should he turn around. The mark left a large wake in the crowd that Nash avoided. His appearance would immediately cause suspicion if he was seen too closely.
The crowd thinned as he stalked his quarry through the station. It made him easier to spot, but made his prey easier to follow. The far end of the station ended in a series of offices, storage hangars and the miles of tracks used to organize the routes of the incoming and outbound trains. His target stepped through a doorway into the back areas, and, after a moment, Nash followed him through.
The rear passages reeked of oil and overheated steel, and were much quieter than the conversation-filled din of the platform. The mission files had said the security would be lax, aside from active magic detection on the platform and in the train yard. He wasn’t disappointed. The few staff in the long, door-filled hallway bustled past, unconcerned, and there were no dedicated security guards.
The target stopped at an office door midway down the line, knocking twice and heading inside. Clocking in for work at Compton E&L, thought Nash. He took a seat on a bench in front of an unmarked supply office. The door to the office in front of him had been left open. A pretty young secretary sat at the desk inside the door, plucking away lazily at the keys of a typewriter. She looked up and caught his eye, and he smiled and winked. She blushed and went back to work, typing perhaps a bit quicker. Magic, he marveled.
A door closed down the hall and Nash saw the target coming towards him out of the corner of his eye. He feigned sleep, stretching out a bit on the bench, and the man passed him again, oblivious. The man walked past a few more doors, and then took a right through a set of double doors that led out to the yard. Nash followed at a brisk pace, only stopping when he heard the man’s voice in conversation with some unseen woman on the far side of the door. He promised to come see her when the train stopped for the night, breaking the promise even as he made it. They said goodbye to each other, fondly.
Nash heard the woman walking toward the door, her footsteps a great deal quieter than his target’s, and he swept the door open with a great flourish. He doffed his hat and bowed deeply, holding the door open for her with an embarrassingly loud “Madame.” His face was too low for her to see, and his very presence was awkward enough that she made a fast exit from the situation with little more than a mumbled thanks. When the heavy brown leather of her boots was out of sight, he continued the chase.
The train yard was a massive, interconnected jumble of glinting steel tracks winding their way over the gravel-covered ground toward the station. Rumbling engines and the clash of connecting train cars drowned out every other sound but the occasional squeal of wheels braking on the line. Nash quickly discarded the tall hat, jacket, and gloves of his disguise and rolled up his sleeves to his elbow. Being dressed as a dandy wouldn’t do him any good out here. He scanned the area for his mark and saw the man just as he turned the corner around the closest line of cars.
Nash looked around for any other personnel in the yard that were close enough to spot him, noting that the closest workers were about fifty meters away and busy at work. He hopped between the connectors of the closest line of trains, peeked up and down the line, and moved into the next alley. The mark was nowhere in sight.
He cursed to himself and jumped onto the next set of connectors. He peeked around the corner and spotted a group of mechanics sitting along the doorframe of an empty boxcar. He popped back around the side of the car before they noticed him, and ran a few cars up the track before jumping over the connectors into their alley. The mark wasn’t with them, and they weren’t with Compton E&L.
“Hey!” Nash called, getting their attention. They stopped talking and looked over at him, trying to squint through the sunlight rising over the glass roof of the platform behind him.
“Yeah?”
“You know where Compton E&L’s quartermaster is? I’ve got 30,000 liters of milk that needs to get loaded into an ice car before it spoils.”
“Uh, no,” one of the workers replied, shielding his eyes with his hand. “You try the office? You’re really not allowed to be out here.”
“Yeah I tried the office,” Nash said, “but I couldn’t find the guy and if I don’t get this stuff off the truck in the next hour I’m up shit creek without a paddle.” They talked among themselves for a second.
“The only Compton train that’s loading up is on line 5, headed for platform 2B,” the worker said. “Go three more lines down and you’ll see it.” The man pointed north and Nash waved and thanked him, running off between the cars. He jumped two more sets of couplings in rapid succession before spotting his mark, walking the line with a clipboard and inspecting the rails and couplings. His back was to Nash, and only twenty or so meters away. Too far for gravel below foot and the long, unbroken corridors of visible area between the lines.
Nash ducked back between the cars to think of the best approach when the cars began moving beneath him, pulling further into the yard and moving him closer to his target. It would be too easy to spot him standing on the couplings from the right angle. He thought for a second and then dropped down onto the track, letting the cars move over him. There was nearly a meter of space between the trestles and the suspension of the train, leaving Nash with plenty of space. He watched the suspension until he saw something that wasn’t moving or sharp looking and grabbed onto it, pulling himself up off the track.
The car moved him slowly down the line until he let go five cars past his target. He rolled out from beneath the train and kept rolling until he made it to the other side of the Compton train. He scanned up and down the line, saw no one, and sprinted up the side of the cars, looking below each car to keep tabs on his target’s legs. Nash climbed to the top of the target’s car, staying low to the roof to avoid being spotted by the control tower at the far edge of the yard. He crawled on all fours, his arms out to the side and bent at ninety-degree angles like an alligator’s, moving slowly. Slowly. Slowly.
Nash peaked over the edge and saw his mark by the side of the train. He watched the man’s every move, unblinking, as he moved his body into position to strike. His mouth watered. He could feel heat building up at the back of his neck. He could see bits of cracked graphite flaking away from the point of the man’s pencil as he checked a box on the form. The car on the line next to them screeched to a halt. He dropped.
Nash hit the man from above. He wrapped his arm around the man’s neck on the descent and used the man’s upper body as a pivot point, choking off a surprised yelp. Nash rotated to land on his feet and used the momentum of the fall to roll backward just as he finished curling his arms around the man’s neck. He wrapped his legs around the man’s waist and arched his back as hard as possible. Nash savored the few ecstatic moments of struggle. There was a snap. The man’s body went limp.
Nash fell back on the gravel, breathing heavily. He checked up and down the line for workers and found none, pushing the mark’s body off of himself and standing. The man’s radiant blue eyes had gone glassy. Nash slapped the man’s face and double-checked his pulse to make sure the job was done. It was.
He stripped down and replaced his clothes with the man’s brown mechanic uniform. It was a perfect fit, along with the man’s boots and cap. He pulled a gold key out of the man’s pocket and unlocked the nearest boxcar, sliding the heavy wooden door open. He dragged the body to the door and managed to get it inside after some considerable effort, throwing his old clothes on top of it and securing the door. He checked the number of the car against the ledger on the clipboard and saw that its contents were listed as a series of X’s. Nash chuckled, nobody was going to find that body until he was long gone.
“Hey!” Called voice from behind him. Nash turned and smiled, recognizing the train’s quartermaster from the mission file.
“What’s up Kittredge?” Nash asked.
“Oh,” Kittredge said, recognizing him. The glamour had held up perfectly. “Hey Bennett, what’re you doing back here?”
“Just some last minute checks on the coupling mechanisms,” he said, holding up the clipboard. Kittredge nodded.
“Why are you sweating?” He asked. Nash laughed and rubbed the back of his head.
“I had a few too many drinks last night,” he replied. “Hangover sweats, you know how it is.” To his relief, Kittredge laughed.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Well make sure you’ve wrapped up soon, our schedule’s been moved up an hour. We’re getting crew briefings in ten, so be at the office by then.”
“Will do,” Nash said, feigning looking around at his surroundings. “Actually, I’m pretty much done here. I’ll just head back with you.”
“Uh, ok,” said Kittredge, pausing for a second. “Wait a second, have you seen a guy asking about a milk shipment? That’s the reason I came out here in the first place.”
“Uh,” Nash began, scratching his head, “yeah, I saw that guy a couple minutes ago. I’m pretty sure he had the wrong information, like he was a day ahead or something. He seemed pretty pissed, stormed off back toward the offices.” He shrugged. Kittredge rolled his eyes.
“Whatever, let’s get going then.” They headed back down the line and took a right toward the offices. The glamour Nash had been fitted with before leaving had held. Bennett Carlisle’s life was now his, and Bennett himself was dead and out of the way. He looked down the train yard, to where the lines fell off into infinity, past the horizon and into the west. Bennett Carlisle was dead, he thought. One down, three more to go.
Nash sighed to himself. Life was just great sometimes.
“Have a seat Beazley,” said Perry Cartwright, the Bella Faccia’s conductor, as Pram stepped into his temporary office in the bureaucratic hall of the station. She shut the gold inlaid door perhaps a bit too hard behind her, and the smoked glass window rattled in its filigreed frame. She jumped a bit. “You OK Beazley?” She smiled and nodded at him, then sat, running a hand through her hair.
“It’s been a weird morning, sir,” she responded, resting her calf on her knee and leaning back against the seat’s uncomfortable leather padding. Field offices always had the worst furniture. Cartwright’s desk was a sad, thin thing made of pressed metal and covered in a fluttering layer of paper. A wooden fan circled lethargically overhead, pulled along by clockwork wheels and taut leather thongs. Pram could hear an out of time tick in its flywheel, probably a broken bearing.
“Understood,” said Cartwright, fumbling through a pile of heavy paper envelopes to his left and freeing one from near the top of the off-kilter stack. He peered at the label through the gold-rimmed spectacles hanging near the edge of his nose.
“Here,” he said, tossing the envelope across the desk. “Your copy of the file for our next route. Maps, duty list, pay, and whatever else.” She gave the packet a cursory thumbing through. Pram hadn’t actually read over a briefing in nearly half a decade. No point in starting now. She set the envelope down beside the chair and turned her attention back to Cartwright. He was wiggling the fat tuft of hair beneath his nose, which meant bad news.
“Beazley,” he started.
“Sir?”
He exhaled a rattling breath that made his moustache wiggle.
“There is an… opportunity that I’m under obligation to inform you of,” he said, leaning back in the office chair with a creak. He folded his hands over his belly. “The Lady Turandot derailed last night in the Granger Pass, and the Croesus office specifically has asked us to run a route up there, pick up whatever’s left, and then drop off what she was supposed to be carrying at the Imperium fort west of the pass.”
“That’s a military operation, sir,” Pram said.
“And, as such, your compensation will increase alongside the risk.”
“Is that why the Turandot was derailed sir?”
“No way of knowing until we get there,” he said, scratching at his stomach. He leaned forward and pulled a plain steel canteen out of the right side desk drawer. The canteen was a relic from his days fighting for the Imperium, and he still only kept water in it. Pram could feel her father’s watch ticking against the back of her wrist. What a weird morning. “Of course, that’s what I wanted to speak to you about.”
“Sir?”
“Your contract is up come arrival in Coalton, and you’ll be able to sign on with another engine or head back home.” He put the canteen back in the drawer and pulled out another, smaller envelope of the same color as the briefing packet. He dropped it on the desk as well. She looked at him, slightly confused, and then opened the packet to find a small fortune in promissory notes. “You stay aboard after Coalton and that’s yours, plus another sum of the same amount when we get back.”
“Sir, that’s more than anybody on the line gets paid.”
“Not my call Beazley,” he responded, pointing a single, heavy finger at the envelope. “That bribe there came directly from the Croesus office with your name printed on the side. Not that I don’t value your services, but that’s more than I’m worth.”
“Did they say why?”
“There are Imperium interests tied up in this route,” he said, shrugging. “You’re the only person going west of the hub that has a gauge level high enough to run the engine uphill for an extended period of time.”
“Huh, lucky me,” she said, pushing the envelope back across the desk to Cartwright. Now that she had noticed the offbeat tick in the ceiling fan, it had started driving her nuts. She fought the urge to rub the inside of her ear with her pinky finger.
“Not going to take it, then?” Cartwright asked, raising one of his bushy, white eyebrows.
“Going to think about it, sir,” she said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been home,” she rubbed an unconscious finger beneath the watchband, “and the western rails rarely forgive greedy decision making.” He nodded sagely.
“’No long arms on the western lines,’ I think the saying goes?” He asked.
“Something like that sir,” she replied, picking the briefing packet up from beside her chair. He nodded and picked up the packet of money, slapping it a few times atop the desk before returning it to the drawer it had come from.
“Well,” he said, standing with an outstretched hand. “Thanks for your time, Beazley, and get word to me about your decision before Coalton if you can.” She took his hand and shook it. Three gruff pumps. His hands were surprisingly soft for how big he was.
“Will do sir,” she said, turning and leaving.
Pram took better care to close the door on the way out. She walked down the hallway toward the train yard access doors, scanning the blank backside of the packet as though it had some answers to her questions. Western rail jobs, colony rail jobs especially, were very dangerous. The frontier was little more than desperate settlers, bandits and wastelands. Nobody came of age in the Imperium without hearing stories of cannibal tribes, cloistered sorcerers and the nightmare creatures that slunk through the stinking marshes of the Verdant Wastes. She shivered.
“Hey, Pram!” Called a voice from down the hall. She looked up to see Kittredge’s beaming face below a quickly waving hand. She chuckled and returned the greeting, trying not to blush when she caught Bennett grinning at her from behind him. She bit the inside of her lip and tried to smile at the same time. The face she ended up making made Kittredge raise confused eyebrow. She coughed to cover up her embarrassment. What a shitty morning.
“Hey Kittredge,” she said, turning curtly to Bennett. “And, hello, Mr., um, Carlisle.” They locked eyes and her heartbeat soared. His gaze was colder somehow, more confident. Was it because of this morning? He didn’t even blink.
“Hello Pram.”
“Oh,” said Kittredge, taken somewhat aback by the informality. Technically speaking, Pram was Bennett’s superior, though such formalities were rarely observed by the rail workers. Kittredge smiled like a man caught between two large dogs and a locked door. He hated confrontations he wasn’t a part of.
“We, uh,” Pram started. Her face was on fire. She hoped her dark skin and the poor lighting in the hallway were enough to hide the blush.
“Had drinks together last night,” Bennett said, not breaking his gaze. She couldn’t look away if she tried. Some electric thing ran its cool fingers along the edges of her scalp. Pram could almost feel his fingers on her neck, squeezing. She swallowed. “I went out with some buddies of mine and we ran into her and a few of her friends. You got home safely, right?”
“Yeah… just fine,” she said, silently thanking him for the out. Something felt off. Pram’s mind wandered to thin-faced specters floating over the platform, and then her brain took over and forced her mouth to smile. “I had a great time.”
“Oh, nice,” said Kittredge, willfully oblivious to whatever had just been exchanged. Pram wasn’t sure herself. Kittredge turned to Pram. “I didn’t know you had any friends.” Pram narrowed her eyes incredulously.
“Hey!” She said, punching him softly in the shoulder. He laughed and pretended to curl up for protection. “What gives you that idea?”
“Your sunny disposition,” he replied, still chuckling. He stopped abruptly, checking his watch and making a distressed face. “Oh dear, it seems were coming up a bit late.”
“For?”
“Crew meeting and final preparations. Apparently,” he said, “there’s going to be some big hullabaloo with this job and we’ve all got to be briefed as a group before send off. All of us, that is, except our illustrious Steam Train, Madame Pram Beazley.” Kittredge doffed his cap with a flourish and she laughed.
“You’re a complete ass, Mr. Pascal,” she said, returning the gesture with an awkward curtsey.
“Yes, well,” he shrugged, “a complete ass needs all of its pieces, and I’m afraid some of mine may be chewed off if the honorable Mr. Cartwright doesn’t see me in the next five minutes. I’ll be seeing you.” He flicked the brim of his cap and began to walk off down the hall.
“Maybe,” Bennett added as he followed, winking at Pram as he walked off down the hall. Her eyes followed them, him specifically, until they both disappeared around a far corner. Bennett had told Kittredge something funny and they both exchanged a loud laugh that echoed off the powder blue paint of the hallway. She hoped, like an idiot she told herself, that he hadn’t just made a joke about her. He was such a weird guy, she thought, but all guys were weird when you got to know them.
Pram caught her reflection in the glass of one of the office door windows. She had only a vague idea of what constituted pretty, but she thought she was pretty cute for her mid-20’s. Soft brown skin, her mother’s emerald green eyes, hell, she was a fucking catch if anybody asked. She pursed her lips defiantly in her makeshift mirror and nodded, throwing herself a thumbs-up as she did so.
“Girl, you are fucking awesome,” she said to herself, turning on her heel and walking down the hall.
It was a strange, strange morning, she thought as she walked out onto the gravel of the yard. She let the feel of the lines around her wash away her worries. All magic users had affinity fields, and this was hers. Heat, clockwork and forged metals, the smell of oil and hot iron, all of these things revitalized her. They made her feel at home even when she was so very far away. Standing on a single line, she could feel all of the interconnected miles of the railway, stretching out across the continent, like a single, massive collection of nerves.
She tried to push the mornings distractions out of her mind as made her way to the Bella, her little girl, sitting fat and happy on her own little platform away from the indignant hustle and bustle of the commuters. She tried not to be bothered by that weird face on the platform. She made herself ignore Bennett’s strange, aggressive behavior and that parting wink. She forced herself not to fix, in her mind, Cartwright’s misquote of the old rail runner’s proverb.
Long arms on the Western rails end at the wrist.
Pram rubbed the spot below the band of her father’s watch and tried not to think about how weird the morning had been.
Steam
axmanjack
Prologue | The Lady Turandot
Sylvia dug her feet into the sand, trying to push herself up far enough under the burning sheet of metal that she wouldn’t be seen. The air was on fire. The sky was scorched, soot-black and snowing bits of gray ash that collected here and there in powdery drifts. Her broken right arm still clutched the grip of a ruined revolver, but she couldn’t force her hand to open. The arm was numb. Her mouth tasted like blood.
Amid the screams and wrenching crackle of metal burning for miles down the track behind her, Sylvia could hear the footsteps of searchers outside of her hidey-hole. She held her breath and counted the seconds. Foreign voices, male. The screech of something dying. Ice cold mountain wind howling through the shattered remnants of railcar. A pair of booted feet moved into view.
Her terrified mind drank in every detail, stretched every rotten second into an hour. The boots were made of thick, brown leather, well-worn and streaked black and grey from the accumulating ash. Woven cotton thongs interlaced up their fronts, crisscrossing at hard angles up through iron eyelets polished silver from constant friction. Riveted steel plates hung like dragon scales on spats above the boots, and, beneath them, heavy, red uniform pants. The owner of the boots turned his feet to face her.
The world seemed so quiet. She could feel the sting of every cold, raspy breath, could hear it vibrating through her chest. Her numb, broken arm began to shake, rattling the bent barrel of the revolver against the ground. Sylvia grabbed her wrist with her good hand and pulled hard. Pins and needles became daggers and spears in the bad arm, razor blades against her frail nerves that made her mind sway. Another rasping breath. Another. Another. The boots don’t move.
Sylvia blinks back tears of helpless frustration. Just do it you bastard, God damn you, just do it. Her nose was running, but she didn’t notice. How was it so quiet? A gloved hand, tooled to match the boots, reached down and wrapped its fingers around the edge of the bit of metal shielding. Sylvia’s body tensed. Her mind went black. The hand pulled her shelter up and away from her. She screamed and tried to swing the revolver around to bear, but her dumb arm ignored the command.
One of the boots flew forward in an arc, connecting with her jaw and sending her sprawling. She came to with it pressing down hard on her bad arm, and watched as the gloved hand pried the gun from her fingers and tossed it aside. Somebody grabbed her by the back of her neck, his grip nearly encircling her throat, and she was pulled to her feet. A single, gruff command and a sharp jab to her lower back.
“Walk.”
Sylvia nodded and complied. Her eyes wandered. Red-cloaked figures moved like phantoms through the white, steaming mists of the smoldering wreckage. They picked through the ruins, noiselessly going about their work as the night winds and the wounded survivors screamed around them. The railcar had derailed in the saddle between two mountains, and now lay bundled up and twisted over itself like a section of discarded intestine. Her captor moved her past a stack of bodies, all in white uniforms. The Imperium escort detail that had been sent along with the railcar.
Sylvia’s escort led her to the end of a line of other prisoners, some too wounded even to kneel, and forced her down beside them. She looked down the row, catching the frightened eyes of a few people she knew. Some of them cried, and others just stared out into the wreckage, waiting for what they knew was coming.
“No… please, no,” begged some pitiful voice from the other side of the line. Sylvia looked down to see Berthold, the assistant quartermaster, being drug away. “No, no!” She felt the entire line flinch when the gunshot rang out, quieting Berthold. A woman in the line began to cry.
A rough hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to her feet, and Sylvia found herself muttering the same, pitiful pleas. God she wanted to die with some dignity, but her legs gave out beneath her and she was dragged the rest of the way by her scalp and dropped before another pair of boots. She sobbed, curling around her wounded arm and not bothering to wipe the mess of tears, snot and soot from her face. The hand in her hair forced her to face forward.
“Hello,” the man before her said in Caanish, the language of the mid-westerners. He was a large, grey-haired man, with a dour, bored expression and the weatherworn face of a lifelong outdoorsman. His gaze was unavoidable, and she couldn’t break eye contact with him. “Do you speak a real language?” Sylvia hesitated, confused, and he waved a hand at the man holding her hair. He began dragging her away when she found her voice.
“Yes,” she said, her words cracking on the ice in her throat. “Yes!” She screamed the second time, and the grey-haired man held up a halting hand.
“I am Colonel Foucault, commander of first mountaineers, third regiment. Who are you?” With a nod of his head the hand in her hair released her, letting her fall on her butt. She had to swallow a few times before continuing.
“Sy-Sylvia Messerschmitt, sir, I—“ Sylvia swallowed again. Her left leg shook so bad it made her rock back and forth. “I am… I am the… Steam Trainer, a Steam Trainer, for the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union. I’m… a civilian sir, please, I don’t want to die.”
“Nobody wants to die, Sylvia Messerschmitt of the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union,” Foucault said. He gestured to the soldier behind her and, with a complicated series of hand gestures. Tears streamed down her face as the soldiers began systematically executing the prisoners. “Thank your God that you are useful to me. You will see the sun rise today.” Sylvia sucked breath into her lungs, forcing herself to breathe through the tears.
“Thank you,” she said. A stream of blood began moving down the hill, cutting a path through the ash. Its tributaries grew with every gunshot, thickening the stream into a river that plunged, hot and steaming, ever westward. The soldier helped Sylvia to her feet, a bit more easily this time. “Thank you.”
Chapter One | Sunrise
Pram tangled her fingers up in the thick locks of Bennett’s hair and pulled his face into her neck. He moved with little resistance to her collarbone, running his tongue over it and up the side of her neck, biting down just as he pushed inside her. She gasped, pulled his head back and kissed him hard on the mouth. For a brief moment, their breathing fell into sync with the rhythmic pumps of his hips between her legs. He braced himself against the headboard with one hand and pushed her back down against the bed with the other.
The rough callouses on his palms scratched at the smooth, brown skin of her shoulder. Bennett’s hands were indelicate, strong and she relished him for his coarseness. She released her grip on his hair and lay back, letting his rough palm move down over her throat, and then down further to cup her breast. She bit her lip. He picked up speed. Sweat beaded up on both their faces despite the cool air blowing in from the tower window.
Pram could see the first traces of sunlight leaking over the eastern hills. It poured into the room in beams through the fluttering blue of the silk curtains. It highlighted the harsh, angular lines of Bennett’s face, glimmered in the sweat on his skin as it ran down across his chest, and cast shadows between the taught, flexing muscles of his abdomen. His eyes were a darker shade of blue than the curtains. His hair was a lighter shade of black than the fading night outside. Pram found him incredibly dull, but he was a great way to waste a morning.
Her body shivered, approaching climax, and her legs flexed involuntarily against his sides. He moved his hands to grip behind her knees and pushed down hard, moving her feet past her head. The suddenness of the motion hurt and she gasped.
“Are you OK?” He asked, slowing down.
“Don’t stop,” she responded, covering his hands with hers and pulling back further. He obliged, wrapping his hands behind her back and around her shoulders and picking up the momentum. The surge took her breath away. She bit down on his shoulder, but he kept pace. His skin tasted like sweat and leather and sex and she couldn’t get enough and then she came, her nails digging hard into the skin of her legs. Warm, buttery ecstasy flooded her mind, turned every nerve into a hot pinprick of light. For a moment, nothing mattered. Nothing at all.
“Did you?” Bennett asked, slowing up a bit.
“Yeah,” Pram replied softly. She traced the contours of his chest muscles with a fingernail, and then pulled his lips to hers. They kissed, lips barely brushing. Teeth bit down gently, tugging. The flick of one tongue against another. His stubble on her cheek. Her nails on his back. The weight of his body, his hands tracing the curves of her skin.
“Where should I…” he asked without finishing the sentence.
“On me,” she said lazily, “not in me.” He kissed her again, pulled out, and stood on his knees. She looked up at him, all taut muscles glistening in the rising sunlight, and rubbed his flanks with a contented calf muscle. He stroked himself with a single hand, his eyes clenched shut until he came onto her stomach. He wiped the hot little droplets off of her with a towel before they had a chance to cool, and then flopped down onto the sheets beside her.
He smiled playfully, rubbing her side with his hand pushing his hand beneath her head. They kissed. A steam whistle howled to life in the crisp morning air outside. Pram turned away from Bennett and picked her father’s black wristwatch from the bedside table.
“That was the seven o’clock to Morrissey,” she said aloud, feeling the clockwork inside the watch turning over itself in her hand. “I’ve got to be at the platform in an hour.” She groaned and let Bennett cradle her head on his shoulder. She draped an arm over him and kissed his chest, hating the sun rising in the window.
“Me too,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “Somebody changed the manifest yesterday afternoon and we’ve got to recheck the back 80 cars before departure.”
“Sounds terrible,” she said, sitting up and fumbling around the dark side of the bed for a shirt.
“Yeah,” he said, sitting up beside her. “But at least I don’t have to get set on fire for my job.” She chuckled, he had a point. Bennett summoned a hobo’s flame in his right hand, filling the dark side of the room with ugly white light. Pram squinted at it, and then found her oversized, button-up pajama shirt beside Bennett’s ugly, orange and blue striped boxer shorts. She stood and pulled the shirt on over her head.
“I wish I could do that,” she said, pointing at the hobo’s flame. “It’s so convenient.” Bennett laughed and dispelled it, picking up his boxers in the process.
“Yeah, and I wish I was I larger conduit, so I could a real job instead of being a maintenance monkey for fancy Steam Trainers like you,” he said, grinning and leaning in for a kiss. She leaned away, smiling.
“Put some pants on,” she said, “I need a shower and you’ve got to go.” Bennett pulled on his boxers and they kissed again. “I’ll see you later, OK?”
“Yeah,” he said, and then he was gone.
Pram showered and got dressed, strapping her father’s watch to her wrist as she moved to the window looking out over the town. The Bailey Hub was slow to rise in the morning, and she could only see the shadowy outlines of a few morning commuters shuffling back and forth to whatever drudgery the day was going to bring. She had only been here a few times before the war began, and even after the Imperium built up the Hub to handle supply missions, the townsfolk had changed very little.
Conflicts in the west were nothing new to Bailey, it had been a frontier town for hundreds of years now, captured and repatriated a hundred times before the Imperium had existed. The same tired-faced Plebes would be still be wandering across those cracked grey pavers a thousand years from now, listlessly working themselves to death in pointless ignominy. Another steam whistle pealed out its cry into the morning air, the seven-thirty to Dulles Dane Mills. Time to go.
Pram locked the door to the tower apartment behind her and turned the key in at the desk downstairs. The clerk, entirely too cheery for the early hour, smiled and had her sign out on the register.
“Thank you for staying with us ma’am,” said the clerk. Pram wondered to herself if the girl couldn’t blink, or just chose not to.
“Yeah, thanks,” replied Pram, pulling her wallet out of her side bag and sliding a twenty across the desk. “Hey, could you have somebody run my bags over to platform 2B? Just have them drop them at the Compton E&L head office and give them my name. Pram Beazley, it’s on all the bags too.” The clerk nodded.
“Of course, ma’am,” she said, “and thank you again for staying with Bailey Castle Tower Suites.” Pram halfheartedly returned her smile and left through the refurbished castle’s massive, studded-oak doors. The streets were still relatively quiet outside, and a cold mist hung low over the cobbled stone streets, still wet from the last night’s rain.
The air was chilly, and it had the sort of mid-fall coldness to it that sank into the skin slowly until it got to the bone. Her uniform, a set of heavy canvas shorts and a vest over a skintight, black thermal suit that covered all but her hands and neck, provided little heat, but it was a short few blocks to the platform. Her heavy soled boots clacked loudly against the ground as she walked, and the echoing taps of her footfalls were the only noticeable sound on the quiet streets.
The few trees lining the side of the main boulevard that led to the platform had begun shedding their fall regalia, leaving whole swaths of the ground covered in formless red and gold mosaics. The wet leaves would occasionally stick to the sides of her feet every few steps, only to fall off moments later. It made her think of her train, up ahead, and the steady ticking of her father’s watch.
The sound of the station grew steadily louder as she approached, a tumultuous roar of voices, clattering cars and the constant rushing bustle of foot traffic up and down the platform. The press of bodies inside the station kept it warm, despite its lack of a dedicated heating system, and Pram took a moment to stretch and shake off the cold. Her tryst with Bennett had left her sore, in a good way, though it did make stretching her legs somewhat addictive. She got warm thinking of him, despite herself.
Pram rolled her eyes at her own schoolgirl foolishness and moved through the throng of bodies toward the Compton E&L field office at platform B2. Most of the people here were military, she noticed, wishing she were taller to better see where she was going. The rest were an assorted hodgepodge of traders, regular passengers and employees of the three rail companies that were currently operating out of the Bailey Hub. Something made her shiver.
A pair of black eyes caught hers through the crowd, locked on them. The glimpse only lasted a moment. Thick, unruly black hair, a shock-white face and the sharp features of a bird or a snake. She froze, unease seeping into her stomach like oil from a broken feed line. Her hair stood on end. Then, it was over, shaken off like the odd case of déjà vu. Despite the warmth of the station, Pram found herself rubbing her arms the rest of the way to the office.
Nash leaned against one of the platform’s support columns and yawned, popped his neck, and absent-mindedly thumbed through the free train schedule he had taken from a rack of pamphlets by the customs window. “Ride! With The Pride of The Imperium,” said blocky typeface over the family of four smiling in front of some huge commuter engine. He could make out the outline of the White Fingers looming in the distance behind the train, and the tip of Mount Granger partially blocking out the sun behind them. The Fingers are called the Granger Pass on this side of the continent, he reminded himself, flipping over the pamphlet.
The information held little use for Nash. He had spent the last few days holed up in a dingy little apartment on the south side of Bailey, memorizing every facet of the job. Less than a week to become a perfunctory expert on Compton E&L, the rail system and every crewmate and passenger. A tall order, but the money was worth it. Now that everything was in place, all he had to do was spot his mark. By far, the most boring portion of the job. He kept himself busy watching people shuffling through the station.
Hundreds of people stood in lines to get tickets, milled about the shops or rested on the golden framework of the benches that dotted each platform in uniform rows. A family of colonists, looking on the run from the troubles out west, huddled in a grey pile of moldering travel coats. Two young children rested their heads on the father’s lap. The man gazed off into the middle distance, his face covered in stubble and pulled low and slack from worry. The lot of them were fair-haired and light-eyed, likely Gunnervand immigrants. A grey-haired woman, possibly the mother, gently shook the father on the shoulder and motioned toward the platform. The peel of a whistle shrieked over the noise of the crowd, preceding the rumble of a train pulling into the station from the yard.
“Those western dogs are too ferocious for civilized interaction,” said a woman behind Nash. “I’ve heard they refused any possibilities of a peaceful resolution to this conflict.” Nash turned his back to the pillar and watched the conversation from the corner of his eye. Two plump ladies, covered from head-to-toe in the intricately woven silk fashionable in the eastern coastal cities, tittered back and forth to each other about politics behind gloved hands.
“Well I’ve heard that that’s all just Senate politics,” said the scarlet-haired second woman. Nash spotted a stain on her otherwise immaculate lace overcoat, a spot of red wine that stood out brilliantly against the garish white. It was a perfectly round dot, the size of an eyeball, just above the knee. Neither of the two noticed. “My husband says the Senate is trying to whip the plebes up into a frenzy, get them ready for an invasion of the west.” The other woman scoffed into the back of her hand. She caught Nash’s eye as she did so.
He winked at her, cracking half a smile and doffing the slender brim of his hat at her. She blushed, turned away and pulled at her friend’s wrist. They walked a few paces away, turned back to catch a glimpse of Nash, and then quickly rushed off down the platform, giggling like idiots. He ran a hand down his unfamiliar face, marveling at the power of stolen beauty as a wry smile curled his lips. The voice of the station manager came over the intercom system, instructing all passengers boarding the eight o’clock to Cullville. The masses obeyed, moving around Nash like water past a rock.
The crowd shrunk surged and receded as the arriving passengers pushed past their replacements. This shipment had brought with it a load of soldiers wearing the white uniforms of the Imperium. Troops heading for the front line. Most of them would probably end up on the same train he was getting on, which was a shame for them. They looked young.
Nash spotted his mark standing in line at a concession booth, barely visible behind a street conjurer performing simplistic spells for a group of children. He stood stock still, the shear thrill of accomplishment freezing him in place. His mind raced through possibilities, weighing the few available options against likelihoods of success. The best option was to wait. His eyes drank up every detail of the man he was about to kill.
The man was tall, just shy of two meters, with honey-blonde hair and blue eyes. His skin had the deep, golden-brown tan of an outdoorsman, and it was stretched taut over his muscular frame. The man moved away from the concession stand, dropping the cap of a drink bottle into the performer’s upturned cap. The performer didn’t notice the deceit, and formed a laughing face out of wavering light to thank him. Nash’s fingers twitched in anticipation.
His mark was an incredible specimen, pushing his lumbering frame through the crowd toward the train yard behind the station. The man had an arrogant sort of strut, his weight moving indelicately across the ground in long strides. There was little refinement to his motion, thought Nash, and he probably had little, if any, combat training. The approach would be speed, silence and opportunity. A harsh, shuddering breath was all Nash could muster as the man passed within a meter of him, completely unaware. When he was roughly thirty meters away, Nash began to follow.
He tipped down the brim of the hat over his eyes, just enough to not be spotted by the man should he turn around. The mark left a large wake in the crowd that Nash avoided. His appearance would immediately cause suspicion if he was seen too closely.
The crowd thinned as he stalked his quarry through the station. It made him easier to spot, but made his prey easier to follow. The far end of the station ended in a series of offices, storage hangars and the miles of tracks used to organize the routes of the incoming and outbound trains. His target stepped through a doorway into the back areas, and, after a moment, Nash followed him through.
The rear passages reeked of oil and overheated steel, and were much quieter than the conversation-filled din of the platform. The mission files had said the security would be lax, aside from active magic detection on the platform and in the train yard. He wasn’t disappointed. The few staff in the long, door-filled hallway bustled past, unconcerned, and there were no dedicated security guards.
The target stopped at an office door midway down the line, knocking twice and heading inside. Clocking in for work at Compton E&L, thought Nash. He took a seat on a bench in front of an unmarked supply office. The door to the office in front of him had been left open. A pretty young secretary sat at the desk inside the door, plucking away lazily at the keys of a typewriter. She looked up and caught his eye, and he smiled and winked. She blushed and went back to work, typing perhaps a bit quicker. Magic, he marveled.
A door closed down the hall and Nash saw the target coming towards him out of the corner of his eye. He feigned sleep, stretching out a bit on the bench, and the man passed him again, oblivious. The man walked past a few more doors, and then took a right through a set of double doors that led out to the yard. Nash followed at a brisk pace, only stopping when he heard the man’s voice in conversation with some unseen woman on the far side of the door. He promised to come see her when the train stopped for the night, breaking the promise even as he made it. They said goodbye to each other, fondly.
Nash heard the woman walking toward the door, her footsteps a great deal quieter than his target’s, and he swept the door open with a great flourish. He doffed his hat and bowed deeply, holding the door open for her with an embarrassingly loud “Madame.” His face was too low for her to see, and his very presence was awkward enough that she made a fast exit from the situation with little more than a mumbled thanks. When the heavy brown leather of her boots was out of sight, he continued the chase.
The train yard was a massive, interconnected jumble of glinting steel tracks winding their way over the gravel-covered ground toward the station. Rumbling engines and the clash of connecting train cars drowned out every other sound but the occasional squeal of wheels braking on the line. Nash quickly discarded the tall hat, jacket, and gloves of his disguise and rolled up his sleeves to his elbow. Being dressed as a dandy wouldn’t do him any good out here. He scanned the area for his mark and saw the man just as he turned the corner around the closest line of cars.
Nash looked around for any other personnel in the yard that were close enough to spot him, noting that the closest workers were about fifty meters away and busy at work. He hopped between the connectors of the closest line of trains, peeked up and down the line, and moved into the next alley. The mark was nowhere in sight.
He cursed to himself and jumped onto the next set of connectors. He peeked around the corner and spotted a group of mechanics sitting along the doorframe of an empty boxcar. He popped back around the side of the car before they noticed him, and ran a few cars up the track before jumping over the connectors into their alley. The mark wasn’t with them, and they weren’t with Compton E&L.
“Hey!” Nash called, getting their attention. They stopped talking and looked over at him, trying to squint through the sunlight rising over the glass roof of the platform behind him.
“Yeah?”
“You know where Compton E&L’s quartermaster is? I’ve got 30,000 liters of milk that needs to get loaded into an ice car before it spoils.”
“Uh, no,” one of the workers replied, shielding his eyes with his hand. “You try the office? You’re really not allowed to be out here.”
“Yeah I tried the office,” Nash said, “but I couldn’t find the guy and if I don’t get this stuff off the truck in the next hour I’m up shit creek without a paddle.” They talked among themselves for a second.
“The only Compton train that’s loading up is on line 5, headed for platform 2B,” the worker said. “Go three more lines down and you’ll see it.” The man pointed north and Nash waved and thanked him, running off between the cars. He jumped two more sets of couplings in rapid succession before spotting his mark, walking the line with a clipboard and inspecting the rails and couplings. His back was to Nash, and only twenty or so meters away. Too far for gravel below foot and the long, unbroken corridors of visible area between the lines.
Nash ducked back between the cars to think of the best approach when the cars began moving beneath him, pulling further into the yard and moving him closer to his target. It would be too easy to spot him standing on the couplings from the right angle. He thought for a second and then dropped down onto the track, letting the cars move over him. There was nearly a meter of space between the trestles and the suspension of the train, leaving Nash with plenty of space. He watched the suspension until he saw something that wasn’t moving or sharp looking and grabbed onto it, pulling himself up off the track.
The car moved him slowly down the line until he let go five cars past his target. He rolled out from beneath the train and kept rolling until he made it to the other side of the Compton train. He scanned up and down the line, saw no one, and sprinted up the side of the cars, looking below each car to keep tabs on his target’s legs. Nash climbed to the top of the target’s car, staying low to the roof to avoid being spotted by the control tower at the far edge of the yard. He crawled on all fours, his arms out to the side and bent at ninety-degree angles like an alligator’s, moving slowly. Slowly. Slowly.
Nash peaked over the edge and saw his mark by the side of the train. He watched the man’s every move, unblinking, as he moved his body into position to strike. His mouth watered. He could feel heat building up at the back of his neck. He could see bits of cracked graphite flaking away from the point of the man’s pencil as he checked a box on the form. The car on the line next to them screeched to a halt. He dropped.
Nash hit the man from above. He wrapped his arm around the man’s neck on the descent and used the man’s upper body as a pivot point, choking off a surprised yelp. Nash rotated to land on his feet and used the momentum of the fall to roll backward just as he finished curling his arms around the man’s neck. He wrapped his legs around the man’s waist and arched his back as hard as possible. Nash savored the few ecstatic moments of struggle. There was a snap. The man’s body went limp.
Nash fell back on the gravel, breathing heavily. He checked up and down the line for workers and found none, pushing the mark’s body off of himself and standing. The man’s radiant blue eyes had gone glassy. Nash slapped the man’s face and double-checked his pulse to make sure the job was done. It was.
He stripped down and replaced his clothes with the man’s brown mechanic uniform. It was a perfect fit, along with the man’s boots and cap. He pulled a gold key out of the man’s pocket and unlocked the nearest boxcar, sliding the heavy wooden door open. He dragged the body to the door and managed to get it inside after some considerable effort, throwing his old clothes on top of it and securing the door. He checked the number of the car against the ledger on the clipboard and saw that its contents were listed as a series of X’s. Nash chuckled, nobody was going to find that body until he was long gone.
“Hey!” Called voice from behind him. Nash turned and smiled, recognizing the train’s quartermaster from the mission file.
“What’s up Kittredge?” Nash asked.
“Oh,” Kittredge said, recognizing him. The glamour had held up perfectly. “Hey Bennett, what’re you doing back here?”
“Just some last minute checks on the coupling mechanisms,” he said, holding up the clipboard. Kittredge nodded.
“Why are you sweating?” He asked. Nash laughed and rubbed the back of his head.
“I had a few too many drinks last night,” he replied. “Hangover sweats, you know how it is.” To his relief, Kittredge laughed.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Well make sure you’ve wrapped up soon, our schedule’s been moved up an hour. We’re getting crew briefings in ten, so be at the office by then.”
“Will do,” Nash said, feigning looking around at his surroundings. “Actually, I’m pretty much done here. I’ll just head back with you.”
“Uh, ok,” said Kittredge, pausing for a second. “Wait a second, have you seen a guy asking about a milk shipment? That’s the reason I came out here in the first place.”
“Uh,” Nash began, scratching his head, “yeah, I saw that guy a couple minutes ago. I’m pretty sure he had the wrong information, like he was a day ahead or something. He seemed pretty pissed, stormed off back toward the offices.” He shrugged. Kittredge rolled his eyes.
“Whatever, let’s get going then.” They headed back down the line and took a right toward the offices. The glamour Nash had been fitted with before leaving had held. Bennett Carlisle’s life was now his, and Bennett himself was dead and out of the way. He looked down the train yard, to where the lines fell off into infinity, past the horizon and into the west. Bennett Carlisle was dead, he thought. One down, three more to go.
Nash sighed to himself. Life was just great sometimes.
“Have a seat Beazley,” said Perry Cartwright, the Bella Faccia’s conductor, as Pram stepped into his temporary office in the bureaucratic hall of the station. She shut the gold inlaid door perhaps a bit too hard behind her, and the smoked glass window rattled in its filigreed frame. She jumped a bit. “You OK Beazley?” She smiled and nodded at him, then sat, running a hand through her hair.
“It’s been a weird morning, sir,” she responded, resting her calf on her knee and leaning back against the seat’s uncomfortable leather padding. Field offices always had the worst furniture. Cartwright’s desk was a sad, thin thing made of pressed metal and covered in a fluttering layer of paper. A wooden fan circled lethargically overhead, pulled along by clockwork wheels and taut leather thongs. Pram could hear an out of time tick in its flywheel, probably a broken bearing.
“Understood,” said Cartwright, fumbling through a pile of heavy paper envelopes to his left and freeing one from near the top of the off-kilter stack. He peered at the label through the gold-rimmed spectacles hanging near the edge of his nose.
“Here,” he said, tossing the envelope across the desk. “Your copy of the file for our next route. Maps, duty list, pay, and whatever else.” She gave the packet a cursory thumbing through. Pram hadn’t actually read over a briefing in nearly half a decade. No point in starting now. She set the envelope down beside the chair and turned her attention back to Cartwright. He was wiggling the fat tuft of hair beneath his nose, which meant bad news.
“Beazley,” he started.
“Sir?”
He exhaled a rattling breath that made his moustache wiggle.
“There is an… opportunity that I’m under obligation to inform you of,” he said, leaning back in the office chair with a creak. He folded his hands over his belly. “The Lady Turandot derailed last night in the Granger Pass, and the Croesus office specifically has asked us to run a route up there, pick up whatever’s left, and then drop off what she was supposed to be carrying at the Imperium fort west of the pass.”
“That’s a military operation, sir,” Pram said.
“And, as such, your compensation will increase alongside the risk.”
“Is that why the Turandot was derailed sir?”
“No way of knowing until we get there,” he said, scratching at his stomach. He leaned forward and pulled a plain steel canteen out of the right side desk drawer. The canteen was a relic from his days fighting for the Imperium, and he still only kept water in it. Pram could feel her father’s watch ticking against the back of her wrist. What a weird morning. “Of course, that’s what I wanted to speak to you about.”
“Sir?”
“Your contract is up come arrival in Coalton, and you’ll be able to sign on with another engine or head back home.” He put the canteen back in the drawer and pulled out another, smaller envelope of the same color as the briefing packet. He dropped it on the desk as well. She looked at him, slightly confused, and then opened the packet to find a small fortune in promissory notes. “You stay aboard after Coalton and that’s yours, plus another sum of the same amount when we get back.”
“Sir, that’s more than anybody on the line gets paid.”
“Not my call Beazley,” he responded, pointing a single, heavy finger at the envelope. “That bribe there came directly from the Croesus office with your name printed on the side. Not that I don’t value your services, but that’s more than I’m worth.”
“Did they say why?”
“There are Imperium interests tied up in this route,” he said, shrugging. “You’re the only person going west of the hub that has a gauge level high enough to run the engine uphill for an extended period of time.”
“Huh, lucky me,” she said, pushing the envelope back across the desk to Cartwright. Now that she had noticed the offbeat tick in the ceiling fan, it had started driving her nuts. She fought the urge to rub the inside of her ear with her pinky finger.
“Not going to take it, then?” Cartwright asked, raising one of his bushy, white eyebrows.
“Going to think about it, sir,” she said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been home,” she rubbed an unconscious finger beneath the watchband, “and the western rails rarely forgive greedy decision making.” He nodded sagely.
“’No long arms on the western lines,’ I think the saying goes?” He asked.
“Something like that sir,” she replied, picking the briefing packet up from beside her chair. He nodded and picked up the packet of money, slapping it a few times atop the desk before returning it to the drawer it had come from.
“Well,” he said, standing with an outstretched hand. “Thanks for your time, Beazley, and get word to me about your decision before Coalton if you can.” She took his hand and shook it. Three gruff pumps. His hands were surprisingly soft for how big he was.
“Will do sir,” she said, turning and leaving.
Pram took better care to close the door on the way out. She walked down the hallway toward the train yard access doors, scanning the blank backside of the packet as though it had some answers to her questions. Western rail jobs, colony rail jobs especially, were very dangerous. The frontier was little more than desperate settlers, bandits and wastelands. Nobody came of age in the Imperium without hearing stories of cannibal tribes, cloistered sorcerers and the nightmare creatures that slunk through the stinking marshes of the Verdant Wastes. She shivered.
“Hey, Pram!” Called a voice from down the hall. She looked up to see Kittredge’s beaming face below a quickly waving hand. She chuckled and returned the greeting, trying not to blush when she caught Bennett grinning at her from behind him. She bit the inside of her lip and tried to smile at the same time. The face she ended up making made Kittredge raise confused eyebrow. She coughed to cover up her embarrassment. What a shitty morning.
“Hey Kittredge,” she said, turning curtly to Bennett. “And, hello, Mr., um, Carlisle.” They locked eyes and her heartbeat soared. His gaze was colder somehow, more confident. Was it because of this morning? He didn’t even blink.
“Hello Pram.”
“Oh,” said Kittredge, taken somewhat aback by the informality. Technically speaking, Pram was Bennett’s superior, though such formalities were rarely observed by the rail workers. Kittredge smiled like a man caught between two large dogs and a locked door. He hated confrontations he wasn’t a part of.
“We, uh,” Pram started. Her face was on fire. She hoped her dark skin and the poor lighting in the hallway were enough to hide the blush.
“Had drinks together last night,” Bennett said, not breaking his gaze. She couldn’t look away if she tried. Some electric thing ran its cool fingers along the edges of her scalp. Pram could almost feel his fingers on her neck, squeezing. She swallowed. “I went out with some buddies of mine and we ran into her and a few of her friends. You got home safely, right?”
“Yeah… just fine,” she said, silently thanking him for the out. Something felt off. Pram’s mind wandered to thin-faced specters floating over the platform, and then her brain took over and forced her mouth to smile. “I had a great time.”
“Oh, nice,” said Kittredge, willfully oblivious to whatever had just been exchanged. Pram wasn’t sure herself. Kittredge turned to Pram. “I didn’t know you had any friends.” Pram narrowed her eyes incredulously.
“Hey!” She said, punching him softly in the shoulder. He laughed and pretended to curl up for protection. “What gives you that idea?”
“Your sunny disposition,” he replied, still chuckling. He stopped abruptly, checking his watch and making a distressed face. “Oh dear, it seems were coming up a bit late.”
“For?”
“Crew meeting and final preparations. Apparently,” he said, “there’s going to be some big hullabaloo with this job and we’ve all got to be briefed as a group before send off. All of us, that is, except our illustrious Steam Train, Madame Pram Beazley.” Kittredge doffed his cap with a flourish and she laughed.
“You’re a complete ass, Mr. Pascal,” she said, returning the gesture with an awkward curtsey.
“Yes, well,” he shrugged, “a complete ass needs all of its pieces, and I’m afraid some of mine may be chewed off if the honorable Mr. Cartwright doesn’t see me in the next five minutes. I’ll be seeing you.” He flicked the brim of his cap and began to walk off down the hall.
“Maybe,” Bennett added as he followed, winking at Pram as he walked off down the hall. Her eyes followed them, him specifically, until they both disappeared around a far corner. Bennett had told Kittredge something funny and they both exchanged a loud laugh that echoed off the powder blue paint of the hallway. She hoped, like an idiot she told herself, that he hadn’t just made a joke about her. He was such a weird guy, she thought, but all guys were weird when you got to know them.
Pram caught her reflection in the glass of one of the office door windows. She had only a vague idea of what constituted pretty, but she thought she was pretty cute for her mid-20’s. Soft brown skin, her mother’s emerald green eyes, hell, she was a fucking catch if anybody asked. She pursed her lips defiantly in her makeshift mirror and nodded, throwing herself a thumbs-up as she did so.
“Girl, you are fucking awesome,” she said to herself, turning on her heel and walking down the hall.
It was a strange, strange morning, she thought as she walked out onto the gravel of the yard. She let the feel of the lines around her wash away her worries. All magic users had affinity fields, and this was hers. Heat, clockwork and forged metals, the smell of oil and hot iron, all of these things revitalized her. They made her feel at home even when she was so very far away. Standing on a single line, she could feel all of the interconnected miles of the railway, stretching out across the continent, like a single, massive collection of nerves.
She tried to push the mornings distractions out of her mind as made her way to the Bella, her little girl, sitting fat and happy on her own little platform away from the indignant hustle and bustle of the commuters. She tried not to be bothered by that weird face on the platform. She made herself ignore Bennett’s strange, aggressive behavior and that parting wink. She forced herself not to fix, in her mind, Cartwright’s misquote of the old rail runner’s proverb.
Long arms on the Western rails end at the wrist.
Pram rubbed the spot below the band of her father’s watch and tried not to think about how weird the morning had been.
