Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories by Kelly Link Read Free Book Online Page B

ourselves, might could move around in time like prayer beads on a string. Inside the Enigma were the Temporal Displacement Dial. I'd scooted its splintery hands 'round and 'round, taken it apart, put it back together twelve ways from Sunday. Didn't come to much. This time, I got to looking at the tiny whirling eye that joined them hands at the center. I cain't rightly say what gear it were that clicked in my head and told me I should take a thin, pulsing strand of blue nettle and settle it into that center, but that's what I done. Then I pushed that second hand faster and faster 'round that dial. With my hand tingling like a siddle-bug bite, I aimed the Enigma at myself. I felt a jolt, and then I were standing still in the shop listening to Josephine ringing the dinner bell. I knowed that couldn't be right—it were only two o'clock in the afternoon, and dinner weren't till six most days. Long shadows crept over the shop floor. Six-o'clock shadows. I'd lost four whole hours. Had I slept? I knowed I hadn't—not standing up with my boots on, anyways. A tingle twisted through my insides till I felt as alive as a blue nettle. I'd done it.
    I'd unlocked time.
     
    That night, Colleen brought out a bottle of whiskey and poured us each a tall glass. "There's a train coming soon. The four-ten through the Kelly Pass. It's the best one yet. I've seen the passenger list. It is impressive. You can be sure there'll be pearls big as fists. And rubies and diamonds, too."
    Josephine let out a holler, but Amanda scowled.
    "Gettin' tired of gems," she said, reaching for the bottle. "Nowhere to wear 'em. No where to trade 'em in much anymore."
    Colleen shrugged. "There'll be gold dust on this one."
    I couldn't hold it back no more. "Maybe we're goin' about this the wrong way. Maybe we should be looking at the Enigma App . . . Appar . . . the watch as our best haul," I said. I weren't used to whiskey. It made my thoughts spin. "You ever think of using it on something other than a train?"
    Amanda spat out a stream of tobacco. It stained the hay the color of a fevered man on his deathbed. "Like what?"
    "Say, for going forward in time to see what you'll be eatin' next week. Or maybe for going back. Maybe to a day you'd want to do over."
    "Ain't nothing I'd want to go back to," Josephine said.
    "What about all them tomorrows?"
    "I'll likely be dead. Or fat," Amanda said, and laughed. "Either way, I don't want to know."
    The girls commenced to teasing Amanda 'bout her future as a fat farmer's wife. Maybe it were the whiskey, but I couldn't let it alone. "What I'm sayin' is that we might could use the Enigma to travel through time and see if there's anything out there besides this miserable rock—maybe even to unlock bigger secrets. Ain't that a durn sight better than a pearl?" I slammed my tankard down on the table, and the girls got right quiet then. I hadn't never been much of a talker, much less a yeller.
    Colleen played with the poker chips. They made a plinkety-plink sound. In the dim light, she looked less like an outlaw, more like a schoolgirl. Sometimes I forgot she weren't but seventeen. "Go on, Addie."
    "I done it," I said, breathing heavy. "Time travel. With the Engima. I figured it."
    I had their attention then. I told 'em about my experiments, how I'd jumped ahead hours just that afternoon. "It's just a start," I cautioned. "I ain't perfected nothing yet."
    Fadwa licked her fingers. "I don't understand. Why do we want this?"
    "Don't you see? We wouldn't need to rob trains then. We could go anywhere we wanted," Colleen said. "Perhaps there's something better ahead, something we can have without cheating."
    Colleen and me locked eyes, and I saw something in her face that put me in mind ofJohn Barks. Hope. She put the chips back on the table. "I'm in for the ride, Watchmaker. Do the Glory Girls proud."
    "Yes'm," I said, swallowing hard.
    "In the meantime, we'd better get ready for the four-ten."
     
    The next morning, Fadwa and me saddled