The Guild Conspiracy by Brooke Johnson Read Free Book Online

swiveling control cabin, and a towering machine with jointed legs. There were too many possibilities, so many different ways she could build this war machine, and so many reasons she shouldn’t.
    She chewed on her lip. Rupert was bound to show up soon, and she’d have to put her war machine schematics away so that they could work on the mech. Part of her welcomed the distraction, but she also knew that if she didn’t finish the concept for the war machine in time for her proposal next week, she wouldn’t have the privilege of distractions.
    Julian would see to that.
    Focusing on the task at hand, she turned to the bipedal design again, trying to wrap her head around the idea of manual interior controls, but the thought of what such a machine could do in the hands of a soldier made her stomach churn. And the idea of a soldier inside such a devastating machine—­a machine of her own making—­made the war suddenly more personal, more real.
    She didn’t want to send men to war in her machines. Yet here she was, and for what? Because she feared for her own life? For her freedom?
    Was she really willing to put the lives of others before her own?
    Was she really that much of a coward?
    The belts in the dumbwaiter chute whirred to life and the platform rattled up into the darkness of the shaft. Resolved to finish the design concept later, Petra gathered her schematics and shoved the files into her bag. She needed to distract herself with something else for a while. The dumbwaiter descended a few moments later, clattering loudly down the tracks.
    Rupert appeared at the bottom, stepping down from the platform into her office, a bag over his shoulder. “Brought my design sketches,” he said, pulling a stack of drafting pages out of his bag—­the original designs for the mech. He laid the pages on the desk. “I wasn’t very meticulous with the measurements, but this is the basic layout.”
    â€œThis will do fine,” she said, sifting through the draft notes, the pencil marks thick and smudged. “I just needed to see how you put it together so I would know what adjustments to make as we made repairs.”
    â€œDo you know what you’re going to build yet?”
    â€œVaguely,” she said, pushing the war machine to the back of her mind as she glanced over the rough sketches of the mech’s central power mechanism. “I took a general inventory of the parts last night, and I think I can salvage most of what’s already there, though we’ll need to take it apart and remove what’s no longer usable.”
    Half the mech was a total ruin—­plating, gears, and part of the frame melted and warped—­but the rest seemed to be in working order, as best she could tell without firing up the engine.
    The worst damage was to the right arm, the frame destroyed beyond recognition.
    According to the schematics, Rupert had fitted the arm with a hidden blade, but the gear mechanism used to protract the knife was flawed—­the gears would never rotate properly, not with the joint movement of the elbow.
    â€œRupert . . . these notes don’t make sense. How did you make this work?”
    He came to stand over her shoulder. “I didn’t,” he said, seeing what she meant. “I told you Darrow used his blowlamp to melt the transmission? Well, he never would have had the chance had I been able to activate the punch-­blade. But it locked up midfight, and Darrow found his opening.” He frowned at the schematics. “I’m not sure what I did wrong.”
    â€œIt’s the gear makeup,” she explained. “The angle of the arm joint interferes with the rotation at this linkage here, and this one, knocking these two gears out of alignment. See?” She pointed to the fault. “Maybe if the arm were locked straight, it might have worked, but not with all of these rotational variables involved.” She