16. Burn.

Whether she'd followed the kid intentionally I couldn't tell, but as I wound my way through the workbenches and assembly lines, I saw it to be the case….Fink's boy exited the same way she was fleeing. She wasn't throwing tears at me this time and I caught her just before the doors.

"Oh, my God...what've I done!?" She wailed as I yanked her to me.

"What you had to do. Look, I know how this feels." After a moment, she pressed herself into my chest, sobbing disconsolately.

Eventually she looked up, eyes imploring somehow that I absolve her. "I...I guess it runs in the family."

"No." I wiped her tears away. "It doesn't. You're nothing like your father." I heard a door slam...glanced back over my shoulder. "But that kid is going to make everything we've done for naught if he gets himself killed. We have to catch him before Daisy's folks do."

I kicked the double doors to our right inward, her in one hand and my repeater in the other. Above them the sign read, "Entering Fink-Lutece Liftworks," the 'Lutece' in the sign scratched out. "You know what this place is?" She shook her head and I realized I'd get little of value from her. Passages veered off to the left and right, but I kept hearing noise ahead and carried on. The next pair of doors opened to five hundred feet of nightmare.

Below the blue Atlantic tossed and turned, whitecaps marching north to south. Amid a swath of clouds off to the right I could see Emporia's smoldering skyline. Across its gulf another building hung, reached by an iron truss-work bridge suspending runs of cable.

The Liftworks.

Though surrounded by a cylinder of glass, the bridge gave us pause. My eyes fixated through its grated metal walk to the distant toss below. Ahead I heard a noise...looked up to see the boy running. Releasing her to grasp the handrail, I headed out. "Come on. If a damned ten-year-old can do it, so can we." She simply stood there, petrified. "Elizabeth! We have to move!" She startled and took a first step, then another. Soon we were making progress. As we made our way forward, I could feel the catwalk swaying…hear the wind blowing and buffeting. Alongside the Liftworks' wharves two smaller airships were moored, and I could see people in civilian dress piling onboard. "There." I said, gesturing their way with the gun. "That's our way out of here." I felt my feet leaden, our steps as if under some great weight. Neither of us had fully recovered from the terror of the Monument.

After what seemed like an eternity we reached the other side, passing with relief through the Liftworks gates into 'solid' ground. Beyond the gates a sign read "Authorized Personnel Only." Inside lay a deserted factory floor, not unlike what we'd seen in the Fink Factory.

"Fink!?" I shouted, weapon at the ready.

Silently Elizabeth stepped forward, reaching up to touch the half assembled gunmetal of a foot long cylinder where it lay upon a bench. "What...what is this?" She whispered, puzzlement lifting the devastation that had lingered upon her face.

I sidestepped to a conveyor belt, sweeping the floor with my sights. With my barrel I rolled one of the tubes silver length...looked at its empty window. It was the same I'd seen at the core of the Star of the Atlantic. "I think it's a lift cell."

"A…Lutece cell?" She took it in hand. "It doesn't feel very light."

"I guess they ain't fully cooked." Hearing a slam of door, I hastened my pace down the belt, coming to a wall and doorway to the right of the line. Here the cells had gained parts and a crystal peep hole, the metal assembly around it open to reveal a pair of aligned magnets. Blue eyes stared up at me from beneath a stand of machinery.

"Hey." I lowered my repeater's barrel.

"Please don't shoot me, Mister." The kid said, eyes glistening below the brim of newsy. Had my attention not been drawn to the belt by Elizabeth, I'd have missed him.

"We ain't about to shoot you. Come here."

"You...shot those other men."

"They deserved it."

With a reproachful glance Elizabeth imposed herself, kneeling until her eyes were level with the boy's. "Mr. DeWitt didn't want to, but they were going to hurt him like they did your father. Like they did your mother. I'm...sorry that happened. Please, we want to help you."

"Is my father dead?"

"Yes, he is." She said, a silent tear trailing down her cheek. "A...a lot of people are." She held her bloodied arms out to him. As the boy began to sob, she hugged him in, a baleful moan escaping her lips as much for herself as the boy.

I looked about warily. "We have to go."

"I don't know the way!" Elizabeth wailed.

"These cells get packed and shipped somewhere. Our destination's got to be at the end of the line."

#

"Look, I'm, uh, sorry about your mother." I managed as we walked along. With his hand in Elizabeth's the boy only looked at me, content to draw himself closer to her at my remark. It didn't matter...the woman was dead and nothing I'd say would change that. I wasn't about to say I was sorry in the least about his father's fate. The son of a bitch had deserved everything he got and more. As we moved forward, I found the next hatch closed and struggled to undo its latch, finally turning its lever with a grunt. About its sides, placards warned, "Danger, X Rays!"

"Elizabeth, you said you'd read about Physics and such. What's an 'X-Ray'?" I entered the chamber, finding the line devoid of people and dark but lined with machinery. Although it was inactive, a few lights had been left on.

"Rontgen radiation. Dis...discovered a few years after the Lutece particle...1895, I think. It's a kind of light." She said absently.

I glanced to her, worried, before prodding the equipment with the barrel of my repeater. "Light, eh? What good are they and why would they have a bunch of red danger signs here about them?"

The question gave Elizabeth pause, and pulled her again from her distress. "You can use them to see through things. I read that they thought them harmless at first, but with exposure people got badly burned and disfigured. Some people even died."

"Died?" I said as I looked at a burnt spot on the assembly belt. On a track between two pincers a lift module was centered, window open. Above it hung an upside-down steel mushroom, bracketed by two smaller balls on electrodes.

"What's your name?" Elizabeth said, kneeling to look the boy in the eye. I could still hear the catch in her throat.

"Freddy." He answered, voice small.

"Freddy, will you stay with us? We're going to get you to your family." When he didn't respond Elizabeth took his hand and rose.

"This looks like the place they make lift cells." I said, absorbing the equipment and layout. "It looks a lot like the gear they were using on you in the tower."

I heard her sigh. Composing herself, she looked about and took an abandoned manual in blood-stained hand. She seemed to read silently the pages before moving toward more interesting fare. 'The so-called quantum Lutece Particle is in actuality a special case of the more generalized Lutece field, a time symmetric application whereupon the locus is anchored at the following spatio-temporal coordinates in Heliocentric reckoning, with a Poynting vector normal and inward to the planar interface.'

"In English?"

With trembling, blood-blackened fingernail she traced below the numbers that followed. "These are...spherical coordinates centered on the Sun." She turned weary and perplexed eyes toward mine. "Very long and precise terms...the two angles zero and the radius just under a half million miles. I think they must set the machine with them." The page was stamped top and bottom bright red, 'SECRET - EYES ONLY.' "And I think this Poynting vector...it's normally the cross product of the Electric Field rotated into the Magnetic and establishes a directional flux density...I think they're talking about a tear."

"Then these Lutece particles...they're just small tears? And all Lift cells are set with these coordinates?" I asked, not understanding half of what she'd said.

"It seems so...every one of them. But tears...they open to different times and spaces and worlds. What could they be anchored to?"

"I don't know. The lift cells I saw on the Star of the Atlantic only had a spark in them, but it was bright as hell…near impossible to look at. Couldn't you, uh, open it to these coordinates yourself?"

She frowned. "No. That's not the way I do it. I have to...have to see what I'm looking for, to imagine. That's why I draw and paint...if I get it right, it makes it easier."

"Like wish fulfillment." Carefully I sheared the page from the book. Elizabeth seemed appalled. "Might come in handy later." Folding it into the pocket of my vest, I looked back to the kid. "Who is your family, Freddy? Any Aunts or Uncles?"

Amid a wet sniffle the boy spoke. "Uncle Albert and Aunt Lucy."

"Where do they live?" I asked, worried now about the noise I heard echoing in the distance.

"Emporia, Sir." For the son of a tyrant, he seemed unusually well mannered.

"Emporia, eh?"

A crashing now came from behind us, not from the entrance we'd come by but another more distant. I heard men working their way through the assembly lines. "Fan out! The little bastard's gotta be here somewhere!" Pushing with the back of my hand Elizabeth and the boy aside, I leapt upon the next door, a door whose lever would not budge.

"Is it locked?!" Elizabeth whispered. I shrugged. Down she went to her knees, working at it from the rubber floor. After a word I didn't quite recognize there was a flash. The door came open. Several tables lay parallel to one another in the next room, along which tracks branched from the finishing cell we'd just left. Beside one a dead man lay on the plank, throat sliced. The boy jumped and Elizabeth recoiled, knocking a welding tank and torch to the floor.

"D'you hear somethin'?" I heard, the voice of another man. "Over there in the lift cell cages!"

We crouched through the tables, stepping about the dead fellow's body with as much stomach as we could muster. Judging by the dried blood, it had been many hours since he'd met his demise. Slipping through the exit doors, we came onto a loading dock. Several box cars hung about the artificial cavern below, several more suspended upon the idle freight skyrail at the space's center. Down a long passage I could see the brilliance of cloud and daylight, a vista that looked like the one Elizabeth had conjured in the elevator, only farther away. Despite the distant daylight it was dark here, illuminated only by a handful of caged light bulbs.

As Elizabeth and Freddy staggered to a halt behind me, I heard a door open to my left. Silhouetted by the spot of daylight were a contingent of ill-tempered Vox. "You!" One shouted, hefting a shotgun and tire iron. The others bore rifles, rifles they'd trained upon us.

I realized Elizabeth was afraid because that damnable glimmering in the air appeared before us, the one balloons and sailors had frequented and almost put me to an end. "Stop it!" I said as the six approached, not to them but her.

"They're going to kill us!" She said hysterically, and by their eyes I knew she was right.

"Give us 'em an we let you go." A lean brown man said, a worker type in blue coveralls and white shirt. The weapon he carried was a Winchester '73...old school but it could still pack a wallop.

"Desert." I said. "The damned Sahara at noon! Open a tear!"

"I can't do that!"

"Bullshit, Elizabeth! Think of a goddamned burning desert or we're gonna die!"

As the white guy who'd first spoken came into view with gun aimed at my head, I dropped and rolled for a stack of crates. Their guns followed but before they could open fire the air crackled and exploded beside me. In the shade of the loading dock the brilliance of the sun burst forth and to a man their shots went astray. From behind the crates, I raked the lot, shooting out knees, thighs, chests and heads in bloody spray as my weapon tracked sideways. Then, it clicked empty.

"Booker, catch!" Turning past the side of the ring that blazed like an arc light, I saw Elizabeth heave the Broadsider my way. A Broadsider I'd clearly left behind with dead Fitzroy. As I plucked it from the air two Vox were still alive and moving. As one took aim and caught up his hand against the brilliance, I put a bullet in his chest and another into his neck for good measure. The last came running, barrel forward, firing blindly. I shot him in the head and he dropped to his knees. His eyes rolled up to look at the hole between them as red poured out. He spilled forward onto the concrete. In a dash I grabbed his repeater and dropped to scavenge ammo. Two of the rifles had .303 but only ten rounds. The boy was cowering upon the ramp.

I heard a pop and darkness enveloped the space, my eyes only slowly adjusting. As I fumbled for rounds in the dim light, the handful I'd gathered tumbled, bouncing…rolling willy-nilly amid the sprawl of bodies. Suddenly Elizabeth was at my side, holding my hand, whispering into my ear. "It's all right, Mr. DeWitt. You got them. Here." She knelt and handed me a magazine.

"What's this?" I looked at the object until I realized it was ammunition. "Where the hell..."

She put her caked hand upon my cheek with a gallows smile, and I could feel her quaking. "Apparently…apparently they just leave them laying round in the Sahara."

#

The prospect of how she'd come by the Broadsider, let alone the magazines now and before set my distracted me as we set out again. Why the Vox had surprised me, so I didn't know. In the distance clouds could be seen, resolving amid the blazing rectangle of light at the tunnel's end. It wasn't the blinding sun of Elizabeth's Sahara, but it was bright enough to hurt the eyes. I found myself squinting. Down the center of the thirty-foot-wide corridor the skyrails hung near the ceiling. I remembered my ride to Monument Island on the rails and shuddered.

"Emporia, eh?" I asked the boy as I held my hand against the bright. "Is there an easy way to get there?"

"No, Sir." He answered with sullen voice and fearful eyes. "It's Market Street where my...Uncle and Aunt live, and my school."

My memories turned back to my Grandfather, and how I'd come to live with him. Family was important. "We'll get you there, son. Back to them, that is."

Arms about herself, Elizabeth's attention turned from the boy to me. "I didn't gather you the charitable sort, Mr. DeWitt."

"I'm not." I answered, feeling the heft of my weapon laden with her destructive fruit. "But I know what it's like to be abandoned. I won't abandon him to the Vox...and I won't abandon you."

"No. You wouldn't, would you?" Though still a mess, her tears had dried. When not speaking to me or the boy I'd found her lost in catatonia. What she'd done would never be far from her mind now. Nor mine. "Do we even have a plan? To get him back there?"

I glanced to the boy holding her sleeve, glazed eyes vacant upon the rolling clouds ahead. "Maybe we get to the airships and find someone to take him off our hands. The last thing we need to do is to go crashing about in the heart of Founder territory with Fink's kid in tow. You could fix all of this by just doing that thing you do...opening a...a tear."

"I can't. I told you that I cannot just do that."

"You just did it back there."

"I'd seen pictures of deserts. Paris when I had something to visualize it with...but to other parts of Columbia I've never seen? Even just outside the door of my old home? It's like a morass. Nothing is clear. Everything is uncertain. I can't see Emporia any better than you can!" Her eyes cast up to my hand, then, shaking, to hers. "I so want to, but I promise you, I can't. Not here in Columbia. Something is...I can feel something doesn't let me see here, not well and not far. It's like..."

"Like in the tower?" I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. She nodded and I noticed Freddy attached to her leg. "What about other places?"

"Sometimes."

"You know, if Daisy's people...whatever they've devolved into now, if any of them capture the boy, they'll kill him...and us too." Thinking about what she'd said...what she'd done, I couldn't help but ask. "If you can see...like your father, you have the gift. Prophecy."

There was no chuckle this time. Blood had a way of drowning one's sense of humor. "I wouldn't call it that...it's so...Biblical. I can just...see...other places sometimes. For the longest time I simply thought it was my imagination playing tricks on me. Then I started to realize there was more to it than that."

"Apparently your father thinks it's pretty 'Biblical.' He's grooming you to take his stead."

"I've read the good book, Mr. DeWitt..." She said, looking at me almost hopelessly. "Particularly the New Testament, despite my tutors' refusal to provide me an unadulterated copy. I can assure you that from my observation, very little I've seen here in Columbia is 'Biblical'."

"I'd have never noticed. Frankly, it surprises me that dear old Dad doesn't have you brainwashed like the rest of these morons."

"It wasn't like his people didn't try, but..." She sighed. "I've always been a curious sort and, well...I have ways of getting what I want."

I found myself wondering if she were simply talking or issuing a threat. "And what did Elizabeth find out from her foray into religion?"

"That my father's 'scriptures' are forged. They hold none the Lord's most important truths...those of his sacrifice for us...the equality of people in his eyes. I will never follow in his footsteps."

I'd never been much on religion. I wasn't about to start. "Anything else?" I added snidely.

"That there is a God, Mr. DeWitt." She looked at me intently before her eyes fell to the boy's hand within hers. She continued with the barest whisper closed her eyes. A tear leapt out. "And he'll...he'll hold us accountable for…what we've done."

I wiped the streak from her cheek. "Elizabeth, we had no choice. You had no choice. It was her…or him."

"Didn't we?" She winced and hugged Freddy to her. He now was crying too.

She was new to the world, and I could forgive her for being naïve and fearful. Me however...I'd been around enough to know there was no such higher power, or at least none who cared about innocents. Still, she was observant...for such a religious people I'd seen precious few Bibles about, particularly when everyone down below had been slinging them at me since Wounded Knee. Spying people in silhouette against the railing outside the tunnel, I held my hand up, motioning my charges back into the shadows.

A broad crowd had assembled along the skyside frontage, a sea of hats and coats and dresses all trying desperately to flee the hell Finkton had become. Beyond them an airship was approaching.

"Stand back, stand back!" A uniformed man cried, black brimmed wheel cap and silver badge upon it marking him as a figure of authority. "The next ship is here!" About him others had gathered, men and women, well dressed though haggard. "Mr. Fink assures you that all employees will be evacuated for the duration of the emergency. Please have your identification ready prior to boarding."

"But what if the Vox and Bolsheviks overrun your perimeter?" One man said unnerved.

Unconsciously the gentleman in the hat palmed the handgun at his side. "The Vox and their allies might control the upper tiers of the plant, but they seem content to leave us alone here on the wharves. I guess they want us to leave. We've put several boats across to Emporia and we see no reason this shall be the last. Please maintain your places in line."

Slipping from the shadows, our trio entered the ragged crowd toward its rear, blending in with the well-to-do and fearful. The walkway continued down the sky front, twenty feet wide from the footers of the Finkton embankment to the railings, that concrete balustrade the only thing keeping the press of the mob from falling oblivion. The Constable's eyes were elsewhere than us, and I detected as much worry on his part as the man he'd shut down...he seemed to be scanning the approaches for the likes of whom we'd killed.

"Comstock's men are in few number here. The fight must not be going in their favor if they're evacuating from their bread and butter, but then again, with Fitzroy gone..." For a moment Elizabeth seemed like she'd come unglued and I strangled the thought. "The Vox haven't been as restless. It seems like a standoff."

"You need to remove your belongings, or we cannot evacuate any more people! The ship is full!" I heard a mate say from onboard the boat's crowded outer deck. Above him the ship's colorful three-hundred-foot-long fabric popped and snapped in the wind. "You're going to have to remove some of your luggage if we're going to fit more people on deck!"

Holding the boy's hand ever more tightly, Elizabeth recovered and pointed toward gunships exchanging rocket fire over Emporia's distant skyline. "Do…do you think we'll be able to make it?"

"I don't know. But if we can just get to Emporia before Comstock and the Vox blow it to hell, we might have a chance." Weapon at my side, I pointed with hand toward Downtown, which from our vantage point bore an uncanny resemblance to New York's Wall Street as viewed from Governor's Island. "From Downtown we'd have to make the Aerodrome, but, like I said before…I have some acquaintances there who just might be able to help."