I completely zoned out while writing this, which is exciting – it means I’m getting very absorbed in my writing. I’ve finally began to develop the motif I’ve wanted to since the beginning, and it doesn’t look like the story is going to move out of talos anytime soon. We’ll see how things go, but for now just keep reading if you’re enjoying the story! :D

In addition, I’ve been reading The Time Machine by HG Wells since a few days ago, and am over half finished with it, and I mut say I’m really in love with the steampunk atmosphere right now. I don’t want it to go away! But I’ve got big plans for Ames, so you’ll just have to keep reading and see what she turns out to be. By the way, if you haven’t noticed, most major characters that stick around get their names from early 20th century and late 19th century inventors and engineers. Yeah, there was a guy named Wheat. Go figure!

Word Count: 36,753

“What?”

“I- I’ve never seen anything like that before. We’ve got to get the hell out of here. That’s not normal, I’ve, I’ve…” Wheat picked himself up and ran outside of the shrubbery into plain view, avoiding the window and treading lightly on his feet to minimize noise and suspicion, and almost instantly Graham followed. Neither had thought to remain in the bushes until the guard left, for they were sure that if the guard had technology that could forcibly float an unconscious man and his two children in the air, then the guard also had technology that could find them hiding behind a shrubbery. “Graham,” he said panting for breath, “is there anything like that technology where you come from?”

“It looked like a Taser,” Graham said, equally out of breath from running so fast, and both continue to run for several minutes without saying another word, until the house and the knight were entirely out of view. They stopped just in front the entrance to the train station, gasping for air and hiding against the wall that bordered the Orange District. Against the wall was a giant clock that Graham noticed closely resembled the clock printed on his money, but he didn’t dare take out a bill to check. “Listen, let’s get back to the house I’ll tell you about it there.”

Having caught their breath and escaped the knight, Graham turned around and took a last look at the large clock, about three quarters as tall and a human being. Its designer had split it into three concentric sections; each section bulged out of the larger disk, forming ripples where hundreds of backlit slits rested. Slits were cut at the height of each ripple, and although only one slit was lit and a time and the light appeared to revolve around and around the chains of slits, Graham could not make sense of the clock. But he was sure that it was a clock, and was also sure that because it was a clock, there was a way to tell time with it. In a way, each measurement of time, if measurements of time the slits were, were barricaded from one another by the ripples upon which they rested, signifying that barriers exist even for the most uncontrollable of all things, time itself. At the very top of the clock, if a clock it was, was the gigantic grasshopper, just as it has appeared on the gold passes, only now it moved in rhythm with the bottom pendulum. It was meticulously painted and its movements carefully calibrated so that it appeared to walk along the disk-like mechanism that rotated about the vertical axis of the clock. In essence, the grasshopper looked to be driving the clock, a living entity in and of itself enslaved to time, forced to power time for as long as the clock would tell it. Time was as much a slave to the ripples constricting it as the grasshopper was to time.

But there was no time for idle chatter on this with Wheat, for both men knew that they had to scale the elevator shaft and leave the Yellow District, just in case the knight had seen them. There was nothing that could be done for the man and his children, especially while the knight possessed that strange technology. Wheat reached into his pocket on the way up the elevator, which was driven by the same clockwork robot Graham had seen in all the other elevators – but for some reason this clockwork robot bothered him more than the one he’d seen arriving in the Yellow District. It was clearly a slightly different model, more closely resembling the one he’s seen entering the Green District earlier in the day, and that invoked the memories of the missing elevator boy. Graham moved himself to the far corner of the lift and asked, “How are we supposed to get back to the Green District if you can only possess a single type of district pass a time?”

“Well, people have relatives all over the city, you know. You can request temporary passes, and so through the grapevine the Railroad has acquired a whole mess of them, to any district except the Orange District of course. I was actually about to take two of them out. Don’t lose it before the train comes, because you’ll need it to get on. You won’t need anything to get off, though, and they rarely monitor to see if you return. To them, the poor are scum – but the rich are more so. That’s why it’s easy to find someone in the Yellow District under assault; wealthy men and women are the easiest of all to scare. All you have to do is threaten their fortune and they behave like whimpering kittens. It’s embarrassing, really.”

Wheat handed Graham a green pass with black and blue bordering, signifying that the pass was one-way. There was no name written on the pass; it looked like it could be given to just about anyone. Graham wondered what the point was, whose decision it was to allow free travel between districts in this manner – for all one had to do was acquire enough districts and whole legions of people could travel anywhere they wanted. Which is what the Underground Railroad had done. How much of the city was under control of the Railroad, and how much was under control of the knights?

“I know what you are thinking, but that’s not how it works,” Wheat said as a soft chime rang, signifying their arrival at the upper level of the station. “We are limited to one per person per year. So you will not be going anywhere anytime soon – not unless you want to be arrested like that man back there. And after witnessing his brutal arrest, I wouldn’t risk it. Whatever they have under their belts now is by and large the most terrifying thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

They arrived back at the house just after midnight; Ames was furious that Graham had not kept his promise that he would be there for the move but once the two men explained their prolonged absence she calmed down.

“But there’s one more part of the story,” Wheat said, “that I haven’t told you. Better sit down for this one.”

Everyone but Graham took a seat wherever they could and listened attentively to Wheat. “The knight we saw tonight was crimson, a low-level enforcer who should have only had arresting and beating privileges. When I saw the knight attack the wealthy man, I witnessed him finish the job with a foreign tool. It was a small device that he removed easily from his pocket, and from it a beam of startling blue light appeared and encircled the poor man. I have never seen any technology like this in my life, and if every knight, even crimson knights, are carrying these tools, our lives just became ten thousand times more difficult.”

Everyone was in shock, but ultimately confused – nobody understood how a beam of light could trap a man. Graham spoke up, “I’ve never seen anything like it, either, but where I’m from, from Earth, there’s a piece of electrical equipment called a Taser that systematically delivers a pulsed electrical shock to the victim through two electrodes wired to the device.”

Everyone stared at him, clueless. They were utterly lost, and Graham realized his error – pulsed electrical shock? They may not even have known what electricity was, or if they did, they would not know how to use it to power a device. Revising his statements to be clearer, Graham said, “You’re all familiar with static shock, right? When you shuffle your feet on a carpet, and whenever you touch something metal – I suppose that would practically anything in Lanford City – you get an electric shock.”

The group nodded, all but Ames, who felt Graham was treating her like an unintelligible nitwit. She had understood his first description easily.

“Imagine,” Graham continued, “applying ten thousand times the amount of that one electric shock to the tip of a pin, and then firing two of these pins at a human being. The human being becomes incapacitated, temporarily paralyzed, leaving the attacker – or defender, if the person is defending themselves from an attacker with the device – immobile while they make their move, be it to successfully demolish a man’s head, or run away from someone looking to demolish your head.

“But, don’t get me wrong. That’s not what Joseph and I saw tonight. It’s just the closest thing that comes to mind. In fact, it’s probably not even close, because Tasers don’t let out flashes of light – in fact, they’re pretty lightless.”

“Well then, don’t waste our time with your silly tangents. If you know you’re not right, don’t speak. We clearly don’t have time,” Ames said. “Speaking of which, are you coming with me tonight or not? I’m leaving in ten minutes, so pack your things.”

“I have no things. But are you sure we won’t get caught by the knights?”

“We’re fine, I’ve got plenty of midnight passes, and new housing information; everything is ready so that we can get the hell out of here.”

“And what about everyone else?”

“Listen, James, we’re a station – that means people don’t stay here. The only people that stay here for long are Joseph and Amelia, and they monitor the station at all times to make sure it’s safe from the knights and the local government. We’re moving to a new station, Station F, which is currently empty and needs occupants to keep it inside the Railroad. If it stays empty any longer, someone will discover it and report empty housing, and it’ll be either snatched up by someone useless to us or destroyed to make room for some other structure.”

“Alright, I’ll go, if it will help me find what I need to return home.”

“If you can’t find it, you can build it.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Isn’t everything?” she said, and picked up a large knapsack, full of supplies, food, and personal items, that was nearly bursting at the seams, then moved toward the front door.

“Ames,” Wheat said, “if you need us, please broadgraph us. I won’t lose you like the last people we sent away – you broadgraph us as soon as you’re there, make sure that you find a hookup.”

“Of course, Joseph. You worry too much.”

“If I don’t worry, people die.”

“Not me.”

“You’re not invincible – nobody is. You were not here, but the rest of us had to face that truth. That we all thought we were invincible to too long, and then when one of us was gone, we knew we had to treat lighter. And now, now that we know the knights have new, foreign technology, you want to be risky? Don’t be a fool; the Railroad needs everyone to stay alive.”

Ames shrugged and stepped closer to the door, then asked for Graham to come with here. Graham said goodbye to everyone, especially to Wheat who had opened his eyes to the truth of Lanford City – and the world of Talos – and said that he would contact them by some means as soon as he arrived in his new home. He made sure he had his midnight passes, one from Marcus and one from Wheat, securely in his pocket before leaving, and once he had done so it was off into the night he went.

“So, where is this new house?”

“It’s a long walk.” She stopped. “It’s cold. There’s a coat in the backpack, you should get it.”

Graham noticed that it was suddenly cold. It hadn’t been cold before, not during the day – he’d never realized when the transition happened. In fact, he was quite sure nobody had. So why did he suddenly feel so cold as soon as Ames mentioned it?

He eagerly took the jacket from the knapsack. When he had finished putting it on, he looked up to see Jessica Ames staring down at him. Behind Ames was something Graham was most curious about – another copy of the same clock on the wall bounding the Yellow District, the same size and shape as the one on the wall bounding the Orange District. “While we walk, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, as long as you trust my answers.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not a moron, you know. The rest of the people at Station A might be clueless, but I know just as much as you. I know about real technology, in this world, and not fictional electricity-spouting nonsense. If you’re going to brag about technology from your world, at least do it right.” She smiled, signifying that she meant no real harm to Graham. “I can see bullshit. Keep that in mind.”

“Of course,” Graham said, pausing for a moment before adding, “But it wasn’t bullshit.” To this, Ames said nothing. “Now, I want to ask about that weird gold disk, over there – is that a clock? I’ve seen several of them, and they’re on the money here, too.”

“That old thing? That’s a corpus clock. Expensive piles of junk, to me.”

“They look fascinating.”

“People used to love them, but then they were everywhere – they’ve become ubiquitous enough to have lost their charm, though not all of them are as decorative as the brass clocks on the walls, and almost none of them have Lamp Spheres inside to backlight those slits. To tell time with it, you first look at the center ring of slits – there are twelve of them, one for each hour, arranged like a normal analog clock. Then the minutes are the ring of slits around that, on the second ripple, and there are sixty total slits that circle around for an entire hour. The last ring of slits, the largest one, contains one hundred slits. You can see that the light spins around this circle fastest of all – once every second, in fact – so each slit is one hundredth of a second.”

Graham curiosity was far from satiated, but he could see Ames was bored with the clock – as though it were possible to be bored with time itself, and for the rest of the walk they barely spoke, their split engineering backgrounds clashing with their personalities. It was clear that Ames was either very afraid of Graham for his distant heritage, or very jealous of the man for his experience with more advanced technologies – either way, he couldn’t foresee working with her to be a pleasure.

As they continued walking, and up until the point where they reached the house, Graham saw tiny pipes, small enough to be capillaries in the human vein system, laid across the district barrier walls. He traced these pipes with his eye, not knowing where they led to or where they came from. Eventually they all dipped into the ground, and not all at once but at random intervals, like strange pipe ivy growing slowly, engulfing the wall.

This new house looked rather the same on the outside, but was entirely different from within. Before entering Ames pinned some forms to the front door with a powerful magnet, then opened the door. There were no keys – every door in Lanford remained unlocked, giving the knights easy access to any potential enemy of the government. According to the forms on Graham’s new front door, though, neither he nor Ames was an enemy of the government, and thus neither could foresee a knight entering, but they both wouldn’t have put it past the knights to do such a thing.

The entire first floor of the building was a well-kept laboratory made of brass and steel like the outside. The floor, too, was steel with a strange coating, and every corner of every lab table was beveled with a sheet of highly polished brass. There was no equipment, only the lab tables. The basement was a kitchen, and bedrooms were on the second floor. All the supplies the two had were in the knapsack, and all the money they needed, Ames had been told, was in Graham’s pockets.

Ames began unpacking the knapsack, and took out several different types of pipe, an unused Light Sphere, a machine resembling a telegraph with a steam port on one end like the Light Sphere, and food that would last the two a few days at most, which she stored in an refrigerator-like apparatus in the kitchen that used steam technology to cool food as if by magic. So this is what she meant by her knowing more than me, Graham thought.

After the two were situated, Ames took the telegraph-like machine and propped it onto one of the lab tables, then with spare pipe connected it to one of two open steam ports, whereby she twisted a number into a rotating dial and began tapping with short bursts of energy.

“What are you doing?” Graham asked, confounded.

“Don’t interrupt me, I need to concentrate when I’m broadgraphing.” She was contacting Wheat and company – with every press of the finger a short burst of air pressure flowed through the pipe. The broadgraph machine on Wheat’s end detected these short pulses in air pressure and interpreted them as letters, like Morse code, though it was clearly not Morse code or Graham would have instantly recognized it. The difference between this machine and a telegraph machine was the ability to dynamically select who the message was sent to, akin to a telephone, as well as the machine’s unique ability to print the incoming messages onto a piece of paper with a very compact automated typewriter.

It looks just like Curie’s, Graham said silently. He saw words appear on the paper just as he had seen them appear on Curie’s typewriter that fateful night when he’d been pulled into Talos, a method and rhythm of typing that so eerily resembled the way in which words on Curie’s typewriter appeared that he rubbed his eyes to make sure his sight did not deceive him, and rubbed his ears to make sure that the rhythm he detected was indeed the rhythm from that night. He looked at the messages coming in on the broadgraph machine’s page, and after staring a minute in complete disbelief, he picked up his feet as fast as he could and sprinted awkwardly out of the room.