ENEMIES IN THE ROSES

Vieve was waiting for Sophronia behind the Nib and Crinkle as arranged. She smelled as though she had managed to persuade the proprietor to serve her a pint—and then gone swimming in it.

“Really, Vieve, ale?”

“It’s the kind of thing a boy would do. I spilled most of it intentionally, caused a fuss, and got myself booted out. Now if Bunson’s discovers I’m out, they have a story about where I’ve been.”

“All that for little old me?”

Vieve winked at her. “Never say I don’t care, green eyes.”

Sophronia laughed. Clearly Vieve was also working on how to flirt like a boy. Following in the footsteps of Pistons, was she? “Vieve, you’re turning into a rake.”

“Do you really think so? Topping.”

Bumbersnoot chose that moment to shoot a bit of smoke out his ears, flapping the leather in greeting. He didn’t like being ignored. Sophronia had him flung over her neck and one arm for transport. He was still wearing the frilly lace reticule disguise they’d devised for the ball.

Vieve’s attention was diverted. “There you are, my beautiful boy.”

Much as she adored Bumbersnoot, Sophronia would never describe him as beautiful. Vieve, however, possessed an indescribable love for technology. She saw Bumbersnoot not for his dented and rusty carapace, his patchwork metal bits, or his mismatched leather ear flaps, but for the work of mechanical genius beneath all that. Inside, Bumbersnoot had a high-grade aether-tapping miniature boiler and a steam-processing mechanism so sophisticated the rest of Europe still hadn’t discovered the technology. Vieve loved him for the cranks and valves that made him move with realistic smoothness and for the cyclical protocols and punch commands that told him how and where to go. She appreciated the two ways he could swallow—into storage or into his boiler. Vieve saw Bumbersnoot for what he really was—a technological masterpiece. She’d had the care of him ever since he came into Sophronia’s possession. While they both knew mechanimals were a Picklemen product, Bumbersnoot had never yet led them astray.

Vieve set the mechanimal reverently on the ground and popped him open to check his internal workings.

Sophronia let her tinker in silence. They were secluded near the pub behind some large rosebushes. A good spot, for it afforded them a decent view of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s, anchored outside of town. The massive dirigible bobbed quietly. It was low to the ground, fortunately for Sophronia. She’d be able to get back on board using the sooties’ rope ladder.

“Everything looks in order.” Vieve drew Sophronia’s attention back to Bumbersnoot. “What was it you wanted adjusted?”

Sophronia tossed Vieve a small object. It was a faceted crystal valve, almost like cut glass with metal components embedded within. It was awfully familiar looking to those who knew the style.

Vieve knew it. “One of the newest crystalline valve frequensors. Where’d you get it?”

“You heard about my train misappropriation last winter?”

“I heard you eliminated a shipload of these pretties. Terrible waste.”

“Let’s say one of them came into my possession. Only, this one is special.”

“How so?”

“It’s the one the vampires were using to track the Picklemen. Bumbersnoot and Dimity smuggled it out.”

“You think it’s somehow tracing the other valves?”

“The vampires would have triggered this valve to react to the activation of the new ones. Could you hook this into Bumbersnoot? I know he’s only a mechanimal, so he wouldn’t be able to react exactly as ordered to whatever new protocol the Picklemen transmit. But if we could get him to do that steam whistle alarm he makes in times of crisis?”

Vieve followed her reasoning. “You want him to be the canary in the coal mine? Alert you when the Picklemen make their move?”

“I do.”

Vieve grinned. “Brilliant idea. It’s large for such a little beastie. I’ll have to install it in his storage compartment. You’ll lose half that capacity. Hooking it in so it activates his alarm, when I’m not sure…” She rubbed the side of her nose in thought, smearing it with grease. “Plus, not knowing precisely what the Picklemen intend the valve to trigger…” Vieve had a habit of leaving her sentences unfinished in times of contemplation. “Well, it’s a unique idea, I’ll give you that much.”

She looked intrigued enough to take on the assignment. That was the thing with Vieve, she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t think it a challenge. Sophronia had once asked her to construct a bladed fan. Vieve had scoffed at the very idea. “It’s already been done. Why would I bother?”

But this, this was something new and subversive.

“It’s going to take time. I’ll need to keep him with me.” Vieve stood, decided.

“Of course. How long do you need?”

Vieve frowned. “A week. Will that work?”

“Perfect timing if you can make it. The school should be back at Swiffle for the holiday break. Meet you here the night we come in? Midnight? You’ll have to keep an eye to the moor, for the airship.”

“I always do. If I don’t make the deadline, I’ll send him to the sooties while the school is in port. They’ll pass him along to you after Christmas.”

Sophronia nodded. “You aren’t going home?”

“Can’t go to my aunt, since she stays on board with Professor Braithwope, and I’ve no other family. Honestly, I like having Bunson’s to myself. No one tries to stop me using the expensive equipment. I may visit the sooties if I have time.”

“They send their regards, by the way.”

Vieve smiled wistfully. “Of course they do.” Her small face fell, dimples vanishing. “I miss Soap.”

Sophronia could feel her own face shuttering closed. “Me, too.” She quickly changed the subject. “Anything else you neglected to tell me about the Picklemen?”

Vieve considered the question, pocketing the valve and slinging Bumbersnoot over her shoulder by his reticule strap. “Four of them. Lower down the ranks—I’d suspect merely Spicers. Younger. Saw them leaving Bunson’s, on foot, just before I did.”

Sophronia frowned. “What did they want?”

“That’s your business to find out, no? I’d best get back.”

“Thank you, Vieve.”

Vieve gave her a mocking little bow. “Pleasure is all mine, as always.”

Sophronia watched her friend stride confidently back toward Bunson’s. Then she left the seclusion of the rosebushes to shadow the goat path, rather than walk down the middle of it. Too visible from the air. As a result, she almost ran into Monique, who was standing in the dark under a holly tree, binoculars to her eyes, watching the front half of the school.

Sophronia froze, terrified that she would step on some loud twig and give herself away. She’d been intent on not being seen. She should also have been thinking about not being heard.

If Monique had heard her, she gave no sign.

Sophronia crouched down slowly, shifting so she was on the other side of the tree. She watched, trying to determine what the blonde was staring at. Sophronia never went anywhere without the standard Geraldine’s armament: sewing scissors, handkerchief, perfume, lemon, hair ribbon, and red lace doily. She also carried her own special items: hurlie, obstructor, fake mustache, tea sachet, and chatelaine, from which hung her carnet de bal, a Depraved Lens of Crispy Magnification, and a velvet pouch containing a small pork pie. Unfortunately, this vast collection did not include binoculars. She pulled up her lens. It was better for examining details and setting things on fire, but could be peered through over distances if one had no other option.

Something was going on at the pilot’s bubble.

Sophronia squinted, wishing the moon were fuller and the mists not quite so low. Shadows, three of them, climbed toward the base of the scaffolding that held the bubble up and away from the front decks of the dirigible. Shadows wearing top hats.

Picklemen were breaking into her school! They were scaling the outside by stages, using grappling hooks not unlike Sophronia’s hurlie. They were positioned in such a way as to be entirely out of view from the teachers’ balconies. What in all aether do they want with the pilot’s bubble? Sophronia was one of the few students who’d been inside it. It was a mess of gears, coils, valves, and cables. It contained nothing particularly worth stealing. Certainly not for the Picklemen, who were generally wealthy in all that mattered: property, technology, and consequence.

Why take such a risk? Mademoiselle Geraldine’s was the nest of the enemy. It was one of the few institutions that not only knew all about the Picklemen’s secret society but opposed them, and had the spy network to do so properly. Yet this was obviously a well-planned penetration. They would have had to see schematics of the airship to know that an approach from down low and in small numbers was most likely to succeed. Sophronia could not help but admire the operation.

“No proximity alarm?” Monique muttered to herself.

Sophronia was wondering the same thing. The pilot’s bubble had extra protections. How had the Picklemen disabled the school’s soldier mechanicals? Did they have an obstructor? They made mechanicals. She wouldn’t put it past them to have the means to turn them off. She wouldn’t put it past Vieve to have sold the technology to the highest bidder, either. They must be doing something, for the school remained slumbering and silent.

Then Sophronia remembered—the alarms around the bubble had been disabled. Something to do with Professor Braithwope continually setting them off. He’d had a fascination with walking the top stabilizer beam out to the bubble—or dancing along it—ever since his fall and tether snap. It was one of his more consistent symptoms of separation insanity.

Nothing for it, thought Sophronia. I must get on board and set off the alarms myself. And quickly, before they steal whatever it is they’re after.

She broke cover and sprinted toward the ship.

Monique gasped. “What?” But whatever Monique’s orders, they didn’t include stopping Sophronia.

The Pickleman guard, on the other hand, was a different story.

Stupid, Sophronia. Vieve had said four Picklemen. Only three were climbing.

He stepped into the path, facing her, pistol drawn and very deadly.

Sophronia froze. After what had happened to Soap and Felix, she was not particularly fond of guns. She thought them quite vulgar. However, she would wager this man didn’t want to fire, as that would awaken the school.

Impasse.

“Running around the moors alone at night, little girl? That’s not safe at all. That’s how little girls get hurt.” He wiggled his heavy gun around almost casually, although keeping it pointed at her.

Sophronia was not impressed by threats. “What are you after?”

“Currently? Stupid little girls.” He moved closer.

Sophronia almost wanted him to get within striking distance. Except there was the gun to consider.

A shot fired. Loud in the silence of the late night, but it wasn’t from him. Instead, the man looked startled and dropped his gun to clutch at his side with both hands. His legs buckled and he fell to his knees.

“Stupid little boys should learn to use guns and not wave them around.” Monique walked past Sophronia to the man. She held her own small pistol steady. She put one pretty little kid boot on the man’s chest and shoved him to lie back, coming to stand over him, pistol pointed at his head. She didn’t even look at Sophronia.

Sophronia added, “And that stupid little girls travel in pairs.” Then she sprinted past, heading for the ship. Things were changing there. The climbing Picklemen, instead of coming to their friend’s rescue, were moving much faster and more frantically. A few lights were on in the front module of the ship, the red-tassel section, the area forbidden to students. That shot had woken teachers.

The hatch to the boiler room was open. A few dirty-faced imps, also known as ship’s sooties, were dropping a rope ladder and gesturing at Sophronia to hurry.

She was up it in a trice.

“Miss, are you hurt?” A thin young man spoke first, offering her a hand through the hatch. Sophronia took it. No cause to be rude or churlish. She’d learned to value sooties to an extent entirely at odds with her upbringing and her training.

“Not me, Handle. But we’ve got another problem. Infiltration.”

“I didn’t hear no alarm.”

“Exactly! What’s the nearest well-patrolled hallway?”

Handle, so called for the size of his ears as well as the usefulness of his actions, knew better than to ask questions of Sophronia when gunshots had been fired. He’d inherited her from his predecessor, Soap. And while not as proactively accommodating to her needs, he appreciated a system of barter that served them both admirably. Sophronia brought the sooties tea cakes as often as possible, and the sooties honored her odd hours and odder requests—when they were a low risk to themselves.

Handle had been selected as their new leader by the sooties’ cat, Smokey Bones, rather than by any democratic process. Smokey Bones liked Handle best, after Soap. So when Soap left, Handle was in charge. Simple as that.

He led Sophronia over to a door she’d never noticed before at the back end of the boiler room. Since engineering was vast, this shouldn’t be a surprise, but Sophronia had thought she knew all the airship’s secrets by now. The door was so small she had to crawl through it.

She emerged into the hallway that ran through the sooties’ sleeping quarters and from there into the kitchen and serving rooms. These last were littered with tracks designed to carry and power the many household mechanicals that ran the day-to-day lives of the students and teachers. Even late at night, with most of the steam turned down, some were around tending to laundry and the morning meal. Sophronia hadn’t frequented this area before, as she spent most of her time trying to avoid the most trundled hallways.

Where normally Sophronia would have whipped out her obstructor and stilled any clangermaid she encountered, this time she allowed herself to be noticed.

The maid took only a few seconds to realize it was an intruder. It was an odd-looking creature, as mechanicals went—faceless, with its head gears exposed, yet it wore a pinafore protecting the front portion of its conical carapace, as though an actual human maid. This particular clangermaid carried a basket full of dirty linens.

Upon sensing Sophronia, it paused and let out a whistle of inquiry. When Sophronia did not respond, it whistled again, imperiously. Then the whistle turned into a very loud shriek, like that of a teakettle. Soon this was picked up by other mechanicals nearby and then throughout the ship. Those that had been shut down whirred to life, screaming as if awoken from some nightmare of coal shortages.

Regulations required that all the students stay wherever they were when an alarm sounded. This meant the students were trapped in their quarters while the teachers hopefully investigated and found the infiltrating Picklemen.

With most of the mechanicals zipping to defend as protection protocols dictated, the maid who’d found Sophronia approached, menacing. Mechanicals were supposed to keep an intruder trapped, if possible.

Now Sophronia brought out her obstructor. She blasted the clangermaid into silent stillness—the alarm still sounded by dozens of others—and slipped past. She dashed through the kitchen, blasting those who seemed inclined to stop her and avoiding those who had other protocols in place. Afraid that if she ran into a teacher, she would be stopped, Sophronia took to the exterior of the dirigible. It was a less direct route, but it would be faster than having to explain herself.

Sophronia shot her hurlie and swung from one balcony to the next, moving at a dangerous pace. If it hadn’t been so low to the ground, even she wouldn’t have risked it. The hurlie was relatively new, with fancy modifications from Vieve—smaller and stealthier, faster to emit, and with an added winch to pull taut as needed. Excellent changes, all. Should be, as Vieve had made the design alterations based on Sophronia’s experience. There was also a marked dexterity to the fancy India rubber soles of Sophronia’s special walking boots that only a certain cobbler on Bond Street could attest to. Add to these tools the fact that Sophronia boasted muscles on her arms that no young lady ought to have, and the airship didn’t stand a chance at containing her. She increased her speed through the red-tassel section, aware that inside, the shadows rushing through the hallways were those of teachers awake and hunting.

Sophronia made it to the very front of the dirigible, hung on a protrusion, and tilted her head way back. There it was, above her—the pilot’s bubble. Sort of like a crow’s nest, only enclosed, it looked like two large bathtubs, one overturned on top of the other. It was held, suspended above and in front of the prow, by a set of struts and one long beam from the forward squeak deck.

The three Picklemen were better equipped than she, for they had managed to climb up the scaffolding and were now crawling over the outside of the bubble. One of them appeared to be already inside. The ship’s pilot was a mechanical comprised of a jumble of gears, levers, chains, and valves, many of which were probably valuable. Her only guess was that the Picklemen needed something for which they didn’t hold the patent. Some nefarious part of their scheme to take over England.

There was nothing she could do to stop the invaders. She’d once been stuck inside the pilot’s bubble precisely because of its precarious position jutting out on spindly supports into nothingness.

Where are the teachers? Distracted by something? Did the Picklemen plan for that, too?

The smallest of the three emerged, and they all began to climb down. Sophronia couldn’t see if the man’s satchel was bulging in any recognizable manner. She scuttled out of view, hiding behind a balcony support beam.

She peeked around in time to watch them rappel off the bubble, dropping rapidly, like spiders extending threads. She’d never done anything like this before, but someone had to do something. Not sure of her timing, she hooked her hurlie over a sturdy rail and with a deep breath kicked out off the side and swung out on an interception trajectory.

She was a little off. She didn’t exactly knock into the littlest Pickleman. But she did knock off his hat, which tumbled sadly to the moor below. In their desperate grapple, she also managed to rip the satchel off his back, before swinging back toward the ship. It was all done in a weird silence, because even startled by a flying female, the three men did not yell, intent on getting away as quickly and quietly as possible. They landed on the ground below, unsnapped themselves from their ropes, and took off at breakneck speed down the goat path.

Sophronia was left, dangling, clutching a sack. At which moment, Lady Linette, Professor Lefoux, and Sister Mattie finally emerged onto the front squeak deck. Lady Linette stuck her head over the edge.

“Sophronia Temminnick? Is that you? I might have known. Get up here this minute, young lady.”

Sophronia sighed. “It may take me more than a minute, Lady Linette.”

Sophronia tried to explain what had happened, but they focused on the fact that she had been caught. They thought she was concocting a wild story to explain triggering the alarm. They refused to believe there had been an attack. “We have people in place to warn us of such things,” dismissed Professor Lefoux. They thought she’d been off at Bunson’s trysting with a boy! That was the downside of training intelligencers—it was impossible to tell when they were fibbing.

Of course Sophronia couldn’t defend herself with, “I’ve been climbing around for years without triggering your infernal alarm!” That would only incriminate her further, and they’d likely confiscate her obstructor and her hurlie.

She showed them the satchel she’d managed to grab off the Pickleman.

Empty.

“How do we know it isn’t yours, young lady?” asked Professor Lefoux.

“But it’s so ugly!” objected Sophronia.

“Exactly, to throw us off.”

“This is ridiculous. Would one of you at least check the pilot’s bubble? See if anything is amiss.”

Lady Linette was firm. “We have wasted enough time on your shenanigans this evening, young lady. To bed with all of us. Tomorrow we will come up with a suitable punishment.”

Sophronia turned to a more sympathetic ear. “Sister Mattie?”

The friendliest of her teachers shook her head. “A ladybug cannot change her spots.”

Lady Linette sighed heavily. “Tomorrow night I’ll have Professor Braithwope run over and—”

“Professor Braithwope! What good could he possibly do?” Sophronia was so frustrated that she interrupted.

Lady Linette was equally frustrated. “That is enough, young lady. To your chambers this instant, and if I see you outside of proper hours or classrooms at all in the next week, you risk being sent down permanently! Am I understood?”

“Yes, Lady Linette,” said Sophronia.