“Do you kill people?”
Also too often. “Yes.”
“Then you’re a Captain Cutthroat,” she said, turning to crouch beside the influence machine. “Come and spin this.”
His instincts bristled at the command. He squashed his first response before it left his mouth. His ankle was too stiff to crouch easily, but he sank slowly to his heels while Ivy attached two clamps to the long trailing wires coming off her arm. She fixed the connecting clamps to the nodes of the influence machine, then pointed to the handle that spun the disks, generating the static charge.
“Spin it fast.”
Somewhat bemused, he began. The wheel clicked, the metal plates attached to the glass disks rotating past the discharge brushes and collection combs. Ivy tapped the fingers of her left and right hands together, as if testing.
“Faster,” she said.
The clicking became a whir. After a moment, her fingertips seemed to stick before she pulled them apart. She flattened the hand of her copper-encircled arm against the front of the tank. The metal kraken inside suddenly tilted and skidded across the bottom. It smacked into the thick glass opposite her palm.
“By da Vinci’s blessed pen!” Eben couldn’t contain his astonishment. His hand faltered on the handle.
“Don’t stop spinning.” Slowly, she began to slide her hand up the side of the tank. The kraken followed, as if glued to her palm. “If the current fails, she’ll drop straight to the bottom again.”
And she’d just made her arm into the most powerful magnet he’d ever seen, Eben realized. When the kraken was almost to the top, she reached over the glass with her opposite hand and plucked the machine out of the water. Eben stopped spinning and reached for the clamps.
She pulled away. “Mind the wire—it’s blazing hot. Take this instead.”
The wriggling kraken landed in his palm. He looked for the stop mechanism and didn’t see one.
“How is this powered?”
Ivy began unwrapping the copper wire. “Electrostatic machines. When I have the mechanical flesh, it needs electrical input—but for now they’re to power the propulsion pumps.” When he looked at her blankly, she said, “The squid moves by squirting out water.”
“Like puncturing an airship’s balloon pushes it the opposite direction?”
“Much like.” Her lips twisted. “It won’t work when the squid is metal. It’s too heavy.”
“Kraken are armored.”
“They have an armored shell. They aren’t metal all the way through.”
“Find a way to make it work, Ivy.”
Temper reddened her cheeks, but if she snapped at him, Eben didn’t hear a word she said. He’d found the hatch that opened the kraken’s body, and was staring inside at three tiny automatons, each nothing more than a couple of gears and metal pegs made to resemble legs. They pedaled influence machines, the whir audible.
Jesus Christ. Everyone who came out of the Blacksmith’s guild was skilled, but the short time she’d worked on this suggested a talent beyond anything he’d seen. Each arm and tentacle meticulously crafted, she’d created a near perfect, watertight submersible. Even something nonfunctional like this would fetch a hefty price in London or the New World, where automatons and clockworks were all the rage. Within a month or two, she could have been living like a queen anywhere she chose to go—yet she’d been creating egg-crackers and singing birds for a town that couldn’t afford them.
The night she’d fled London, Eben had visited the Blacksmith, who’d said she’d already paid for her arms. Knowing how much Barker still owed for his leg, Eben hadn’t understood how it was possible; looking at the automatons now, he suddenly did. The work she’d done for the Blacksmith must have brought him a fortune.
Yet she only had one damn coin. “What the hell were you doing in Fool’s Cove?”
“Hiding from you.”
His gaze snapped up, but she’d turned toward her worktable. His heart beat sickeningly for a few long seconds.
“And Netta’s husband was killed when a steamcoach boiler exploded in Port Fallow. Netta and I pooled our resources, and we made it as far as Fool’s Cove.” She tossed the coil of wire onto a hook. “What did you come here for, Captain Machen. A progress report?”
For you. Like a lovesick fool. And now he found the flimsiest excuse to stay a little longer.
“No,” he said gruffly. “My Achilles tube.”
She hesitated for an instant, and he realized she hadn’t forgotten, as he’d assumed. She’d delayed it, hoping to use it later—perhaps after her coins were gone.
Then he’d be damned if he left without her repairing it. She had one denier left. Tonight would be the last she kept him from touching her.
After a long second, she nodded and took the kraken from him, gesturing to his foot. “Remove your boot, then.”
He did, without glancing down at the prosthetic. Though steel, the skeletal leg appeared thin and weak. He hated looking at it.
Ivy crouched behind him. “Brace your weight on your left leg. You’ll lose your balance when I take this out,” she said, and he heard her fingers loosening a bolt. “How did this happen?”
“Shark.”
She gave a snort of disbelief. “What did you do—go swimming with one?”
“Yes.”
She yanked out the pneumatic, wrenching his leg backward. Struggling to keep upright, he braced his hand on the worktable.
Cheeks flushed, she stood in front of him, the cylinder pointed at his face. “You’re not that foolish. And I hope you don’t think I’m foolish enough to believe that.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think that. But it’s the truth.”
She stared at him, as if waiting for him to explain, and finally turned away. He watched her rigid shoulders as she worked over the cylinder. A moment later, she was crouching next to him again, screwing the pneumatic back into place. Eben retrieved his boot, hauled it on. When he turned back to her, she was standing with her jaw set and her hand out.
“I’m not a member of your crew, Captain. And every man from this ship who has come to me for repairs has walked away without paying. No more.”
The men Yasmeen had sent to Fool’s Cove with their damned embellished stories. “Ivy, if I’d have known where you were, I’d have come to you myself.”
Her lashes flickered, but other than that, she didn’t move. Just held out her hand, waiting.
He wouldn’t pay her in coin. Not when she’d use it to keep him away. But he only had one other thing that she’d want. Reluctantly, he dipped his fingers into his watch pocket and withdrew the bent iron disk he’d carried with him for two years. He placed it in her palm.
Her lips parted as she stared down at the ruined flange that had once been her elbow. A bullet had smashed into the center, filling in the hole and protruding like a mushroom cap through the other side.
“I was wearing it on a cord around my neck. The bullet still knocked me overboard.” He tapped his hand against the side of his leg. “That’s when the shark took it.”
Her fingers closed over the iron piece. Her shining gaze lifted to his. “Thank you.”
For the explanation or for returning the flange, he wasn’t sure. He only knew that if he stayed any longer, nothing would stop him from kissing her. He left—and was amidships before he realized his right foot was moving as smoothly as his left, and he hadn’t thought to thank her in return.
Ivy didn’t know how long she sat holding the flange, staring at the plans on her worktable. Her mind was filled with stories: of a ruthless pirate who attacked passenger ships and made slaves of the crew . . . of a ship’s surgeon hung over the side of a boat.
He’d asked her not to speak of that, and she’d assumed he wanted to hide the madness of defying his captain—perhaps to keep his crew from doing the same. But how could that be? Everyone knew that part. Now she wondered if he didn’t want them to know he’d done it trying to save members of the crew, because that would make him seem soft.