Chapter Sixteen

“Only three more streets,” Ginny muttered to herself as the tram rumbled slowly to a halt, belching steam. Then she could get off and walk the rest of the way to the house on Linwood. It felt like a long ride home from her meeting at Phil Ballister’s office, where she’d gone to request he draw up plans to dissolve her interests and ownership in the surviving Landry’s Ladies. To free them all.

She hated the tram, which lurched and swayed, threatening to make her lose the contents of her stomach. To Ginny it seemed to epitomize the things to which she objected about life in the city—dirt, noise, and overcrowding by rank humanity.

Well, humanity and steam units. A number of the latter rode along with Ginny and the human passengers, most looking like they were out on errands for their owners. One stood in the aisle next to Ginny, who shared her bench seat with a large woman holding a sleeping baby.

It would have been faster had she taken a steamcab home. But she detested those even more than the trams. Darting everywhere far too quickly, cutting off pedestrians and other vehicles, she considered them a menace.

She should have hired a horse-drawn cab but hadn’t seen one, and the tram had stopped right there outside Ballister’s office.

Her thoughts broke off as the tram, still stopped at the corner, suddenly rocked violently. Several people in the car exclaimed, and the baby next to Ginny woke up.

“What was that?” Ginny asked the woman.

“I don’t know. The—”

The car rocked a second time, far more aggressively. The steam unit next to Ginny, a large silver model, swayed and banged into her seat. Someone screamed, and the baby in the woman’s arms began to wail.

A man near the front of the car got to his feet and pushed up toward the driver. “What’s happening, driver?” he asked. “The tram should have left the stop by now.”

Before the driver could reply, people all around Ginny began to exclaim, “Look, look! Oh, my God, look!”

She leaned across the large woman and peered out the window. Now, at late afternoon, the descending sun glinted off something silver. Here, there…there again…all around the tram car.

She felt a bump, hard, on the outside of the car, and it swayed again, mightily.

“They’re trying to push us over! They’re going to kill us all!”

Ginny leaned into her neighbor’s lap and pressed her face to the window. She saw steam units, a veritable chain of them, each one beside another, shoulder to shoulder, surrounding the tram. She stared into the molded silver face of the one right outside her window. It had its arms extended, braced against the tram, its very expressionlessness terrifying.

She heard the tram driver exclaim. Seated about halfway down the aisle, she couldn’t see him very well, but he sounded alarmed, and fear gripped her throat. If the steam units pushed the tram over, people—and an awful lot of metal—would go flying. With the big steam unit beside her, she could be mangled or crushed.

She glanced at it as the tram rocked again. The steamie steadied itself, using the bar that ran up from the floor beside her seat, and gave no outward sign of alarm.

The tram shuddered, and the floor beneath Ginny’s feet began to rise. The car seemed to teeter on the far wheels before crashing back down onto the street with a force that rattled her teeth.

The passengers screamed. Ginny’s neighbor cried, “Oh, my baby!”

“Cuddle him against you like this.” Ginny wrapped her arms around the woman, holding the wailing infant close.

The tram tipped the other way, and everything inside shifted. Ginny’s neighbor was thrown against the window with Ginny on top of her. The large steam unit, perhaps pressed by others, came pushing in. She was going to die, crushed here, no breath in her lungs.

That thought exploded into her mind before the left-side wheels crashed back down into contact with the street. A terrible roaring filled her ears; it took her a moment to realize it came from outside. The attackers pounded on the skin of the tram and cried out in dozens of mechanical voices.

The woman seated just ahead of Ginny began weeping hysterically. The tram rocked again.

This time she felt cool metal fingers catch and steady her even as her neighboring unit pressed against her.

“I beg your pardon,” it clicked in a deep voice.

“Can you make them stop?”

The tram crashed back down, and she heard a dual whoosh as the mechanical doors opened. Her heart leaped into her throat.

The silver units would come in. They would…

She had only a poor view of what happened next. A glint of silver—arms?—and the driver was hauled from his seat, down the steps, and out the door.

Everyone screamed.

The baby next to Ginny wailed at deafening volume. Its mother had turned milk white. “We’re all going to die.”

Were they? Damn it all. She hadn’t even slept with Brendan Fagan.

As if her thoughts had conjured him, she saw a flash of blue outside her window. Not him—it couldn’t be him—but the police had arrived. In fact, it appeared a full-fledged riot had erupted in the street outside.

What if Ginny’s neighboring unit, as well as the others onboard, decided to join in? What if every steam unit in the city did? The human population would not stand a chance.

Yet her metal neighbor continued to steady her gently as the tram rocked once more, less violently this time.

“They’re moving. They’re moving away,” the baby’s mother gasped.

“Thank God.”

It took a good ten minutes for the police to clear the units away from the tram. All that time—which seemed much longer—the interior of the car continued to heat up. The woman in front of Ginny had stopped weeping and slumped forward. Ginny wondered if she had fainted.

Eventually a police officer appeared at the rear door, which still stood open, and shouted, “I’d like everyone to exit. In an orderly fashion, please.”

“Is it safe?” a man boomed. “Are those vicious mechanicals gone?”

Vicious mechanicals? Ginny wondered what her silver guardian thought of that. Did it think? She had no time to decide; a stampede began.

Everyone wanted off the tram at once. They exited both fore and aft—or attempted to. The aisles, already full of standing passengers, mostly steamies—immediately clogged, and the screaming resumed.

“Off! I want off,” Ginny’s neighbor wept, tears running down her face.

“I can’t move,” Ginny told her.

The steam unit beside them turned its head. For an instant the molded metal depressions that served as its eyes met Ginny’s gaze. It stiffened its back and held off the pressing crowd.

“Go,” it told them.

She squeezed past, so close she felt the heat from its boiler, knowing it could kill her if it chose. Instead it helped, waiting till her seatmate also pushed past to move. She led the woman with the baby the few short steps to the rear door and down into the street.

The scene outside did not look much better than that inside the car. People milled everywhere, passengers and onlookers alike. Here and there a silver steam unit had been pushed over. Water ran from them like blood. Police made a strong presence. Ginny stumbled away, her arm around her neighbor.

“All right? Is the baby all right?”

“I don’t know. I think so. He’s still hollering.”

So he was. “Do you need help getting home?”

“No—it’s just up there—my mother’s house. I was on my way… Oh, I’ve never been so scared.”

Neither had Ginny. Her heart still pounded, and her legs threatened to give way beneath her.

She looked around, trying to spot the steam unit that had maintained its station beside her. She wanted to thank it but couldn’t catch a glimpse of it anywhere.

When she turned back, the woman with the baby had gone, swallowed up by the crowd as if she’d never existed.

Ginny stumbled back from the thick of the crowd and up a walkway, where she sank onto the stoop of a stranger’s home. She put her head in her hands.

That was no better, for now she could hear everything. A stream of competing conversations, the shouts of the police, and a persistent pounding. No, that was inside her head.

“Miss? Are you injured?”

She looked up into the face of a police officer—not Brendan Fagan. What were the odds he’d find her here? Suddenly she wanted him to, so much it frightened her.

She wanted him.

“Miss, do you need an ambulance? They’re on the way.”

“No. No, I’m…all right.”

“Will you give a statement? You were on the tram?”

“Yes. I didn’t see much.”

“Name?”

“Virginia Landry.”

Did he do a double take? Hard to tell. He scribbled in his notebook rapidly.

“I was on my way home. The tram had stopped at the corner. It—it just started rocking. They came from nowhere…”

“Yes, miss. Give me your address. Someone may want to speak with you later.”

She rattled it off. “Officer, there was a steam unit on the tram—it protected us, me and my seatmate, who had a little baby. They’re not all bad.”

She thought of her steamies back home, earnest and concerned for her comfort.

The officer’s expression did not change. “You sure you’re not hurt? Do you require assistance getting home?”

“No, I…just need a minute.”

He went away. Ginny lowered her face back into her hands, wishing the rest of the world would follow him.