Ahh, and now it gets interesting in the “paradise” city of Lanford. It’s all rising action from here! Though there’s a nice local climax in today’s writing.

Word Count: 40,044

Ames found him in the kitchen later pouring himself a cup of tea with hot water from a kettle he had heated up on a steam-heated stove; every nerve in his arm activated causing it to shake violently. The hot water missed the cup; in one instance Graham even burned himself and let out a violent shriek that sounded, at best, inhuman. Ames stared at him, then moved gracefully towards his shaking body, reaching out her hands to clasp his arms and hold them still. She gently guided his right hand, which was holding the kettle of hot water, to the cast iron cup, making sure no water escaped onto the countertop – or onto either of their hands. After Graham had taken a few sips of tea, his nerves calmed and he was able to explain himself to Ames. He told her about the night he’d been pulled into Talos, about the typewriter – and what he now felt had caused the typewriter to act up.

“Impossible,” she said after both had escaped the kitchen and traveled back into the laboratory. “Broadgraph connections don’t travel between worlds. And your friend’s typewriter is not a broadgraph receiver.” Her gentle stance from before hardened into stone, little by little, with each word she spoke.

“It’s not impossible. That I’m here is proof that it’s not impossible. If we denied everything and surrendered to the notion that our knowledge now is definite, then we can never advance technologically! I’ve seen countless inventions previously deemed impossible. Light in a jar was impossible. But you have that,” Graham said, pointing to the Lamp Sphere on the lab table.

Then Graham shuffled aside and picked up the Lamp Sphere, noting that it was the first time he’d found one unplugged from its port. Not he could see its inside, and examine the makeup of the steam port, which consisted of four different-sized and length pipes made specifically to fit into a base with four slightly wider pipes that would cover the pipes on the Lamp Sphere’s steam port, delivering a safe connection of steam to the device through the pipes. From there, the steam entered into the large glass sphere, where the four pipes converged to a single point that forced the combined heat of the steam from each pipe onto a crisscross of filaments. The filaments became white-hot and gave off light, just as light bulbs did on Earth, only Graham was confused as to what became of the steam.

Then her noticed that the thin wall of glass he’d thought protected the Lamp Sphere’s supposedly matte-surface was really thick, glossy, heavy glass. That meant the soft glow came from within – and then he knew that the steam did go somewhere; it remained inside the lamp, floating around and shielding innocent victims’ eyes from the blinding light of the raw, hot filaments. But there was still one curiosity that baffled Graham…
Luckily, Ames could read his mind. “The fourth pipe on the port doesn’t deliver steam, it receives it. To avoid an excess pressure difference, excess steam is recycled through the fourth pipe, and sent back to the power plant at the center of Lanford in the White District, which powers the entire city. Along the way it cools into water, so they have to reheat it into steam. Most every apparatus using those ports has recycling functionality built-in nowadays, which has made power cheaper to produce for everyone.”

“You really know everything about this place, don’t you?”

“Hey, I live here, you know?” She was right; she did. Graham couldn’t argue that fact, and so he didn’t ask any more questions. He merely thanked her for letting him know what he’d wanted to know.
His curiosity satiated, he put the bulb down gently so as not to break it. Immediately after both residents decided it was time they slept at last. Both made their way up the stairs until reaching the bedroom, of which there was only one – they slept together, for the moment very far apart, but in their slumber did not hesitate to shrink the distance between their bodies.

It was late morning before Ames awoke, and this was quite a while before Graham. Ames immediately began plugging in the Lamp Sphere, which was an arduous task taking quite a bit of effort, so that she could work late that night. A thick switch on the base of the Lamp Sphere activated the flow of steam; she forced it to the “on” position with great strength, for the pressure of the flowing steam was great enough to make the task of merely turning on the bulb difficult, and this was why so many Lanfordians chose to keep their Light Spheres activated always. From this moment on, Ames never turned the Lamp Sphere off. It lit the room excessively, but excess was better to her than no light at all in the late hours of the night.

Hours later, at around noon, Graham woke to find Ames hard at work assembling some strange technology in the laboratory. He asked what she was working on.

“Hopefully, something that can rival what the knights have cooked up. Our guns probably won’t be powerful enough anymore. Since I can’t make any of your otherworldly devices, I’m just making a more powerful steam gun. Our original steam guns are tiny and weak, but can fire multiple projectiles at once out of a trumpet-like barrel. This new one should be at least slightly more powerful.”

“That’s not going to do anything against what I saw. What I saw would stop a bullet dead in its tracks. Don’t build a gun. In fact, don’t build anything – I doubt there’s anything you can do against their new toy.”

“That’s quite a change of heart from someone who only yesterday said that we should never neglect the impossible.”

“Oh, I’m not saying that – but if we can find the technology, or build the technology, to take me back to Earth, then I will have access to parts and manufactured devices that may rival the knights’. You’re never going to be able to develop such an advanced technology on your own, especially when it requires an entirely different architecture than what you’ve got in front of you. I don’t know where they got it, but I’m sure it’s related to my presence in Talos.”

Ames nodded, realizing the futility of her morning efforts. At the same time, both recognized the challenge presented to them in building a device that would pull Graham back into Earth as it had originally done on that fateful night several days ago. Strangely, Graham was beginning to have second thoughts about going back, unsure whether or not he wanted to experience the feeling of traveling between worlds again – it was a feeling of emptiness, the feeling that one was falling off of a cliff with no end of the drop in sight. The speed increases without bound, for there is no air to withhold the faller’s velocity, until at last consciousness is lost and the fallen awakens, unsure whether or not he has died or is in dream.

Graham still hadn’t but aside the possibility that the entire world of Talos could be a dream. But he didn’t want to accept that theory and undermine all the work he and Ames were about to begin; so say that none of it existed openly and with confidence would dampen all their spirits, not to mention spark heated rebellion in the already hot-tempered Ames.

Hours passed with no productivity, for neither party could figure out how to accomplish creating an otherworldly portal. Eventually, they lost hope – Graham had not been the one to build it back on Earth, and he certainly was not going to be the one to build it on Talos. He was assured that nobody within his easy reach had access to the type of technology required to build such a device. As the hours passed by, he watched the pendulum of the small corpus clock on the wall of the laboratory swing back and forth. The grasshopper, a miniature version of the grasshopper he’d seen coming to the house, walked indefinitely along the surface of the clock, its mouse opening and closing in rhythm with time. It appeared to consume time, and in his mind Graham named it the Chronophage, an evil beast who consumed seconds and minutes and hours to the dismay of all humans that sought to gain those very things.

It was while watching the Chronophage in motion that he determined that if he could not build an world-linking device on his own, or even with Ames’s help, then he would have to steal from the only people whom he knew had technology advanced enough to derive a crude machine from: The knights.

Jumping up from his lab seat at this realization, he quickly notified Ames, who told him without hesitation that he was a mad fool and that she would never agree to steal from the knights, especially from one carrying a strange device she had yet to witness even once. And yet, secretly the thought of obtaining such a device intrigued her. Her soft golden eyes filled with an engineer’s passion; she wanted to take hold of the knights’ weaponry and dissect it for her own purposes, even if she would never admit this to Graham.

In the end, she still refused to go with Graham that night to assault a knight and obtain the strange taser-like device. Graham, upset and incredibly nervous, left at approximately eight at night – or so said the corpus clock – armed with one of Ames’s steam guns and his identification information.

It was not difficult for him to find a knight, but he didn’t want to assault one nearby, and he wanted to ensure that whomever he assaulted had the technology he was looking for. By now, though he did not know this, most every knight was equipped with the taser-like devices, and in fact they had circulated to even lesser peacekeepers such as the train conductors for the purposes of ensuring that the locomotive systems remained secure and under control.

They were given permission by the Lanford government to strike down any man or woman causing trouble on the trains. Murder was not out of the question – and, had Graham paid closer attention to the news, he would have heard about two supposed murders that had taken place on the very same locomotive he rode with Wheat, though not on the same day, at the hands of the conductors gone mad with power.

Graham spoke to himself, “There’s no way I’m getting out of this alive, but by God if I do… I hope it gets me home.”

Far away from the laboratory, he found a knight wandering with a strange blue-glowing device strapped to his waist. There’s one of them, he said to himself, and approached the knight.

“Sir, could you help me? I’m quite lost,” he said, hoping to appeal to the same kind of sympathy the first knight he had met in Lanford showed him. “This is only my second day here, and I know it’s late, but if you could help me find the theater I’d greatly appreciate it. I have no map and I know no one.” He attempted to mimic the native Lanford accent, but got the impression that his impression failed miserably. He’d never been an actor, in any case.

He looked the knight straight in the eye, and it was clear to him that no longer were these the friendly knights he’d seen on his first few days in Talos – this one in particular looked more malevolent; he covered his mouth with part of his armor and refused to look directly at Graham.

“Lost, are you?” the knight said. “Well, let me see some identification.”

Graham, pleased that the knight might actually take time to rummage through his identification information, began rummaging through his pockets to get the papers – but as he was doing so, the knight, whose armor was a deep navy blue color so that he blended in with the nighttime air, brought his fist down upon Graham’s head with striking force. Graham fell face-first onto the road upon which the two men stood.

“Scum, you are not allowed to be out at night. Tonight’s curfew was more than a whole hour ago, and I know you people are not without some brains.” The knight moved closer to Graham, who was grasping his head in utter pain as it bled onto the street. “Tell me,” the knight said, bending over and smiling behind his metal mask, “what inferior shits like you are doing out disobeying our President’s orders?”

Relieving his arms from his head, Graham attempted to grasp the gun on his waist. As soon as he did so, the knight grabbed him by the hair and hoisted him up. Graham screamed in pain, but the knight covered his mouse with a cupped hand. The metal around the knight’s hand felt cool, but still warmer than the freezing outside air.

“Had a bad day, huh?” Graham said slowly through a weak, coarse voice, chuckling.

“Only as bad as you’re about to have,” the knight threatened in retaliation.

But graham had a hold of his gun at last. Without wasting a moment he used all his strength to lift it directly up to the knight’s face, and fired in between the man’s eyes. The shot made a loud cracking noise that echoed throughout the sound chamber of the Green District, clearly alerting other knights that something was going on, while the defeated knight fell over dead. “I don’t think so,” Graham said once he was sure that the knight was dead, and reached over to take the glowing blue device on the knight’s waist. He remembered hearing once from Wheat that the navy knights were the lowest order – clearly this one had no idea of the technology at his disposal.

Though he mentioned the President; someone was distributing this technology. Looking at it for more than a moment, it looked far more advanced than anything he’d seen in Lanford thus far, but he wouldn’t have put it beyond someone on Talos to invent a device like this, given that they had been able to make robots powered by mere steam.

He took his spoils quickly back to the lab, running as fast as his feeble engineer’s legs would carry him, praying that he would avoid capture by some other knight. He was weakened considerably by the single blow he’d already received, and wasn’t sure if he could stand to take another and live to tell about it. Luckily, he managed to slip back into the lab undetected. Bloody, very bloody, but undetected.

Ames immediately heard his entrance and ran down to greet him, not startled that he was gravely injured. By this time, Graham felt considerably woozy and asked if he could sit down while Ames began treating his wounds. “Lock the doors,” he said to Ames.

“There are no locks,” she said. “The government forbids them.”

“Goddamnit,” he said. “Ouch, not so rough. This is my skull we’re dealing with here.” He kept his hands down at his sides while Ames soaked up the blood with a cloth. Once it was clean, she washed herself. She was about to apply a bandage to Graham’s head when the broadgraph machine began rapidly typing out messages. Ames ran over, ignoring Graham to take a look. Graham also turned his head, not without considerable pain, and watched the messages flow out of the broadgraph machine.

Hello,
SOS!!!
James and Jessica, Station A infiltrated! DO NOT GO TO STATION A UNDER ANY CI

Immediately Ames picked up the broadgraph machine, ripped I from its steam port, and threw it against the wall. Its wooden frame cracked open revealing its pipe and gear work inside, which too shattered apart after hitting the ground. Graham understood what had happened, and was speechless. But then it flashed through his mind a conversation he’d had with the first knight he’d met in Lanford:

“The elevator boy on the elevator back at the train station just freaked me out a bit. He was a little to cheerful for my tastes.”

“Mr. Graham, there is no elevator boy operating that elevator. All of our elevators are operated by robots.”

Scared half to death, his face went pale. Had he caused this by insinuating that he’d seen something the knights had not wanted him to see? What if there had truly been an elevator boy there one minute, but not the next? The knights would want to conceal it. Naturally, Graham would have told anybody currently living in that household about what he’d seen, and if the knights were as intelligent as they gave themselves credit for, they would know that some homes were stations of the Underground Railroad, and…

Graham stood up; blood trickled down his skull, but not in excess enough to make him fall back down. Ames was crying nearby the broken broadgraph machine. “Ames,” graham said, “I’m going to Station A. Stay here.” Ames looked at him through desperate eyes and continued sobbing.

“Why would you go there? They’re probably dead by now! This must be my fault – our fault – for leaving them last night. They were on to us the entire time, how could we not see it? Idiots! That’s what we are! Imbeciles!” She hit her fist against her hand.

“If they’re not dead, there’s still time to save them, and if they’re arrested, then—”

“Then what? Once you’re jailed in the Black District, you don’t get out. Ever, James. Your first felony is prison for life, without trial or exception – not even for knights.” The Black District was Lanford City’s first and only prison; nobody knew where it was or if it even existed, but it was certain that nobody had ever returned from the Black District. If Wheat, Lavan, Judson, Lambert, or any of the others were still alive, Ames knew that was where they would be – but not even the most rebellious in Lanford City were foolhardy enough to find and infiltrate the Black District.

Graham slipped on heavier clothes and picked up a second gun. “Fine, then. You stay here, but I’m going to go check out the scene. If they’re dead, they’re dead,” he said, choking on those words and pausing for a moment. “But I have a feeling they’re not. Call it a hunch, or whatever you like – I know they’re not dead.”

“How?” she asked, hoping to find flaw in Graham’s mental state due to his injuries.

“That knight had this with him.” He pulled out the taser-like device he’d stolen from the knight. It still glowed blue, which Graham took to mean it was active and working. With great care, he walked over and handed the device to Ames for safekeeping. “He could have used it to hill me, or at least detain me, at any time during our short fight. Either he was too stupid to use it, or deliberately chose not to so that he could eventually arrest me.”

Ames was silent.

“If you have nothing else to say,” Graham continued, “I’m going.”

“Be careful,” she said. “If there are still knights lurking around, and I know that there will, you’ll be an easy target. Take a second gun; I’ll wait here until tomorrow morning. If I don’t hear from you—”

Graham cut her off. “Let’s not think about that, okay?” Ames nodded, still sobbing from the sudden news, while Graham put the second gun into one of his deep coat pockets and slipped out the front door.