I didn’t answer, my uncle’s voice mixing with the humming in my head and the blood pumping in my ears. I shook my head again at the movement of Lane’s eyes, wondering if he could somehow tell Joseph not to shoot.
“I’m going to give her everything. And what can you give her?”
The gray gaze bore back into Ben. “Nothing much.”
“That’s right. I am going to give her everything that you can’t, and she will take it. … Stay where you are!”
Lane had taken two quick steps forward, risking Robert’s shaking hand. Robert had followed and Ben stepped back, while, unnoticed, Henri moved closer to Robert. It was like watching a mad dance, a dance that had nearly gotten Lane shot. But it had taken me out of what I guessed must be Joseph’s line of fire. I slid back, again aligning myself with Robert and the entrance. If Joseph’s shot hit the guncotton, we were all going to die, perhaps along with the people in the streets above us. I saw Lane’s gaze take in my movement, then lift to the barrels behind me.
“Not to touch, not to touch …” said Uncle Tully.
“If he moves again, shoot him!” Ben said. “Do you understand me? And make him be quiet!”
This last order had been to me. My uncle worked frantically, paying no mind to any of us, deep in his own world. I wiped the blood from my mouth and, keeping my eyes on the scene in front of me, curled the fingers of my other hand around a small wrench. It would not hurt anyone, not much, but it might cause a distraction if needed. Ben was straightening his jacket, adjusting the cloth around his neck to its position before the scuffle.
“I don’t know exactly what either of you think you are going to accomplish down here, Mr. Moreau. You’re not getting them out. In fact, I think it rather likely that Miss Tulman will not go. She might ask you to stay, though. You’ll have to decide what to do with Marchand. Wait and see if she …”
Lane moved forward, two quick, long steps that again had Robert following and me gasping in terror. But Robert did not shoot; I could see the fear all over his face. Who he should have been fearing was Henri. Henri had again moved closer, deliberately staying silent, still out of reach, but now with something gleaming held just below his right shirtsleeve. Lane was going to have to risk that move again to get Robert out of line with the barrels of guncotton.
“… not to touch, not to touch, not to …”
“What I expect to accomplish,” Lane said, deadly calm, “is making certain that bloody machine and nothing like it ever sees the light of day …”
“Not to touch, not to touch …”
“… and to leave this place with all of them. The question is whether you wish to be alive or not when I do it.”
Ben grinned, stretching the arms of his well-cut suit, looking heavenward in mock exasperation. “You realize I’m about to have you shot, don’t you?” I glanced at the gun shaking in Robert’s hand. “You know that I will be the one walking out of here with Mr. Tully and his niece? And that she is going to come willingly?” I gripped the wrench in my hand. “Because she knows I can give her what I promised.”
“You can give her nothing that’s good enough,” Lane said, his voice very low.
“Not good enough? Not good enough!” he yelled. “That, coming from you, to a Bonaparte? You are nothing! What can you do that I cannot? Name one thing I cannot give!”
“Not to touch, not to touch, not to …”
The gray eyes were all for Ben now, and they were stone. Lane put his hands in his pockets. I think he’d forgotten everything else, including the gun pointed at his head. “Give her Davy back,” he said. “And Mr. Babcock.”
“And John George,” I whispered.
“Not to touch, not to touch …”
“Give her back the last eighteen months. Can you do that?”
“Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …”
“Shut him up!” Ben screamed.
“Give Mr. Tully back his old workshop, and all the things he made there. Give me back the Lower Village.”
It was as if the world had again narrowed, making it impossible to look away. Lane was furious, and there was something mesmerizing in the evenness of his rage.
“It is you who are nothing,” he said. “You were always trying to make it not so, even when we were children. Only it still was.”
“Stop it,” Ben said.
“Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …”
“Everything you’ve tried to accomplish, every foul thing you ever did, all to fawn over a man who will not even give you his name, and instead of more, you were less.”
“Shut him up!”
“And you are still less.”
“Not to touch, not to …”
“So I ask you, when we leave here, do you wish to be alive, or not?”
“Stop it! And shut him … What is he doing?”
I broke from my trance and looked properly at my uncle. And suddenly I knew exactly what he was doing. The crate beside him, full of his things from the attic workshop, the wires running down to the glass jars in the crate, the hum that was not really in my head. And Uncle Tully, repeating and repeating his odd phrase at the parts that had taken shape on the table beside the fish, the blue-white spark reaching up and between two spindles. And then I saw Ben’s body tilting forward, straining to see over my uncle’s creation, the blue, empty eyes wide as he spotted the strange flame; and I saw Lane’s brows coming down, his hand coming up, and the wires now connected to the fish’s metal frame. I watched Lane’s arm stretch, and Ben leaning, both Ben’s hands coming down toward the fish.
“Stop!” I screamed. And Lane did.
There was a blinding flash and Ben’s body convulsed, crackling, eyes unblinking, staring straight at my uncle as he shook, stuck to the fish as if to a magnet. Smoke went up, a corona of purple fire and light blazing from his hands. A part of me realized that there was screaming, that it was coming from my mouth, and that the word I was screaming was “No!” Robert had dropped the gun and was reaching for Ben, to wrench him away from the fish and, as soon as he touched Ben’s body, he was thrown violently, almost supernaturally across the room, hitting the metal press before he fell to the floor. Ben dropped as Robert did and the crackling stopped, leaving only the smaller hum of the blue flame between the spindles.
Uncle Tully let go of his little switch, and the electricity was gone. “Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …” he chanted.
I sat down hard on a crate, learning the smell of burnt flesh. I saw Henri’s bloody face staring downward, horror-struck, the same expression on Joseph’s as he rose up from behind a workbench near the door. His pistol was still cocked.
“Stay where you are, Katharine,” Lane said, but there was no need. I could see Ben’s dead body from underneath the table. His hands were charred, blackened stumps.
As soon as Lane had picked the lock on Uncle Tully’s shackle, we led my uncle out and a little way down the passage, distracting him from the sound of the hammers inside the cavern, where Joseph and Henri were destroying Ben Aldridge’s fish. It was uncertain whether Robert had died from the electricity or from the blow of the metal press, but either way, my uncle had examined the two bodies curiously and carefully. It was seeing a machine taken apart that we were not sure he could stomach.
We set him in a chair from the workshop and he folded his hands in his lap. “I am ready to go now,” he said. “And I wish to go to the old place, not the new one.” He was supremely confident. I was amazed, stunned, and also horrified, unable to feel anything properly. “This place was not right, was it, little niece?”