Steampunk World

Hatavat Chalom Lillian Cohen-Moore

It is as always, the same.

The gates of the city rang beneath the siege forces, summoning sonorous booms that rivaled any thunder to be found in nature. Bombards and culverins filled the sky with sparks and smoke. Their wheels turned beneath them, large and unforgiving. The condottieri on the battle field followed the shouted orders of their Capitans, bound not by loyalty to the city state, but to the pay to come. The gendarmes were deep within the fighting; cutting men from their horses with bewildering speed, taking men from the battle as if they were of one mind, a many-headed malakh ha-mavet, the Angel of Death come to the battlefield of mortal men. For every gendarme taken from his horse, another took his place. The ground was carpeted in bodies, man and horse alike.

A once smoke-stained blue sky above them soon grew darker still. As if an eclipse was forming in the heavens above them, darkness began to fall over the battle. A single swath of long black shadow, married to a rumbling that shook the ground, a sound threatening to eclipse the clash of armies. It was not painted in the livery of a city-state, or that of a foreign King. It rose up from among them, its body metal, dark, the great grinding of wheels and gears serving as its own cracking vertebrae and clicking teeth. It steamed and moved, its gait steady. Its first step drew no great notice, but the second shook the ground.

It was a beast. A monster of gargantuan proportions, taller than a ballista, a mockery of the men around it, be they French or Italian. For it was not a man, but a wide expanse of metal unlike any they had ever seen. Its encroaching wheels came down upon a few unlucky fighters, and if they screamed louder than those dying around them, there was no way of sorting the sounds of their ignominious death from the slaughter at hand. It stopped moving, as mercenaries and loyal armies looked upon its visage, its black and copper body. For a breath, the world pulled upon itself, unsure of the thing that had entered it. The fighting slowed, ceasing in its shadow. And as the trembling fighters began to move away, its chest opened, a black void from which hellish smoke billowed, and from within it came a great wailing sound. Twin vibrations shook along the air, fire and forge laboring together.

The dream was always the same, the too-sharp smell of battle and fear, the intake of breath as they gazed upon the dark hole and the depths within it. From inside it came the flash of muzzles, and unholy sound of dozens of culverins, firing as one from inside its dark form. It was still the last thing she saw before her eyes opened to see the ceiling above her bed.

As she had for many mornings, Margarita Contanto woke screaming, the sound being torn from her body one of mindless, primal fear. Her Aunt Caterina was the one person in their home brave enough to try comforting her, to hold the thrashing younger woman firmly in her arms, ignoring the smears of tears soaking into the front of her dress, or the screams that caused her ears to ring.

Caterina would rise before the sun to take on matters of the household, but it was Margarita who would wake as the sunrise crept over the ghetto for the past month, waking the household along with her through the sound of her tortured screams.

Margarita joined her Aunt in her morning labors after she prepared herself to greet the day, returning the books hidden in her bedside to her absent Uncle’s study. Math and science were for the hours no one was awake. Her morning would be one of labor with her family. Margarita’s cousins, Lorenza and Fiora, were part of the complicated morning dance of cooking, sewing and correspondence. When Margarita reached for another piece of mending, her hand closed around an envelope instead. Startled, she raised her head to see her aunt.

“You have done more than enough work for the morning.” Caterina reached out to touch her on the cheek, a gesture that summoned vague recollections of her own mother. “You must take this message into Ghetto Vecchio. There is a household there that awaits it.” Caterina curved her fingers, pulling a few of Margarita’s unruly curls behind one of the young woman’s ear. “You will bear the letter for me, to Isaac de Fonseca’s household. Give the letter to his sister, Veronica. Tell her your Uncle will come to them in a few weeks, when both he and Isaac have each returned from their journeys.” Caterina waited for her niece’s hand to withdraw the letter from the basket, and press it gently against her chest.

“I shall go now?”

Caterina went to reach her hand out again to touch her niece, but instead let it fall, her expression inscrutable. “Yes. Go now. I will see you when you have returned.”

Margarita dwelled on the conversation as she went to prepare herself to leave for the Ghetto Vecchio, full of Levantine Jews from the Ottoman Empire. She repeated the directions back to Caterina three times before her Aunt would let her step out the door. Carrying the message against herself, arms folded over her chest, she made haste to cross the island of the Ghetto Nuovo. Between the two ghettos was a simple bridge over a canal, and it was that slender ribbon of connection she would use to cross into the other ghetto. The rain falling on the stones beneath her feet was not yet a downpour, content to fall upon her as a mist, with few droplets rising back up from the ground, inundating her with the smell of moist cloth and stone. For a moment, the earthen smell of wet stone tugged at her memory, the smell of the battered city walls beneath the siege engines. Had it been raining in her nightmare?

She shook her head as she went over the bridge, quickening her pace. It was a dream. A strange, frightening dream, and one day it would go away and she would be as she was before it came—without a single recollection of a dream. Her passage into the Vecchio streets was unremarkable. The smells of bread, pastry, wet stones and hot air were the same in either ghetto, though the scent of metal was still curiously stronger off the island and on the streets of Ghetto Vecchio. Even with the rain, the sunshine still struggled through the clouds above her. It would be hours till sunset, and she would surely return to Ghetto Nuovo by then, ready to be locked inside with the rest of her people, as she had every night for as long as she had lived. Only from dawn to dusk were they even remotely free.

Distressed by the dark turn of her own thoughts, she raised her head, eyes and nose drinking in the Vecchio streets. At least confined to the ghettos from dusk to dawn, locked in by the government, they were safer from those who hated the Jews of Venice. Margarita shook her head, as if to force the thoughts away, focusing on her task. Across the streets, away from the canals, the scents of unfamiliar spices would weave across the air, scents that grew stronger, even in the slowly worsening rainfall, when she approached the home of the trader Isaac de Fonseca.

Their front door was a blue unlike any she had seen, and the house of de Fonseca was considerably larger than the Cantanto residence. She sat with no little apprehension in the reception room after a servant abandoned her, in order to fetch Veronica. Margarita blew gently on the envelope as she waited, as if her breath would somehow cure the dampness of the paper. The reception room was both familiar and jarring, filled with Italian furniture of an older style, and art that rang as clearly foreign. Perhaps art from the Empire? She mused on the origins of what she saw around her, uncertain about something as normal as décor, and attempted to estimate the mathematical measurement of the room and furniture to pass the time.

Veronica de Fonseca did not enter the reception room, she graced it. Her hair was thick and dark, strands of white darting in and out without pattern or reason. The rings she wore on her hands were different from the jewelry Margarita had seen worn by women in Venice. Margarita had no chance to introduce herself; no sooner had she risen to her feet, Veronica seized her hands, envelope pressed awkwardly inside their clasping hands.

“Caterina always promised she would send you to me someday!” She took in Margarita’s befuddled expression, transferring the envelope to one of her own hands as she continued to clasp one of the younger woman’s hands, pulling her down with her to sit upon the couch. “I am a friend of your Aunt and Uncle’s. I have not been here in many years, but Caterina had sworn she would let me see you.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth, smiling. “You were such a beautiful little girl, now a lovely young woman.” Veronica took back her hand, prying the envelope open with ease. “You must stay for lunch.”

Margarita watched Veronica reading; saw the brief flicker of concern on her face. “I should be going. My Aunt will worry if I’m gone too long.” Unspoken, the knowledge of the curfew hung between them. Veronica raised her head, smiling again, the crow’s feet around her eyes forming a nest of marks around her crinkling eyes. “We will get you home in time. But I insist you stay for lunch, and tell me all about what Caterina has been up to. I only just returned to Venice, and she has not found time to come to me!”

Veronica folded the letter in half, and moved it back into the safety of its envelope. Margarita, stunned at the notice and attention of someone outside her family, managed to murmur what she assumed was agreement. Veronica again smiled, leading her by the hand from the reception room. Lunch was indoors, bemoaned by her hostess as they listened to the ever-strengthening rain slapping against the outside world with ferocious speed. The wind was just as fierce, and Margarita felt her heart sink when one of the de Fonseca servants entered the dining room. The maid’s expression of concern raised an equal measure of uncertainty in Veronica’s face. “What is it? Is Isaac—“

The maid shook her head. “No, Signora. It is the storm. We fear flooding, and must tell you not to go forth till the storm passes.” Veronica looked at Margarita, noting her expression of alarm.

“You may stay here tonight, Margarita, if the storm has not passed in time to get you home. Your family has always been welcome in our home, and that has not changed.” Veronica’s grave expression lightened. “Now, you said you help Caterina with the art of the needle, and I am sure I can find you something in the house to pass your time.”

The younger woman nodded numbly, returning to the meal as Veronica did, after dismissing the maid. Her appetite diminished, she spent her attention on answering Veronica’s questions about her own household skills, troubled by her sudden stranded status in the Ghetto Vecchio.

Fears of flooding rose as fast as the tide did. The storm steadily worsened as the day progressed, and Margarita bent her head over foreign fabric and thread, assisting Veronica in the assembly of garments for a Torah. Each tiny stitch took her further outside of herself and her concerns. When Veronica informed her she would have to stay the night, she barely acknowledged the distressing news, her senses anchored in her fingertips, and each small stitch. Her Uncle had once told her that her father had been the same, writing in his books without any hearing of the world outside his pen and paper. When Veronica spoke of dinner, she shook her head.

“I feel quite poorly, Signora. I am so sorry.”

Veronica leaned from her seat, and placed a hand against the young woman’s cheek. “You are cold. Would you like to go to bed for a time, and see if your appetite returns?”

Margarita nodded, swallowing as a wave of nausea passed through her stomach. Veronica placed her in a room near the top of the house, alike in placement, but not quality, of her room at her aunt’s house. At home, she slept in a small room away from everyone; a blessing to the house in recent weeks, for the distance muffled her screams.

Here, the chamber was equipped with a bed that all but swallowed her, that smelled of unfamiliar spices that offered a strange comfort. She was asleep within a few, deep breaths, moments after she had lain down. Once again, Margarita was watching the great, monstrous metal device advancing on the gendarmes and the mercenaries, smelling the blood already bathing the battlefield. She saw the copper and iron of the machine, even as she stood in the tip of its shadow beneath the smoke-streaked sky.

She knew this thing. Not how or why, but she did know its sounds and sighs, and once again a porthole opened, and the cacophony of culverins began, explosive force that would come for her and rip her ap—

Veronica was there at the bedside, gathering Margarita up in her arms as the younger woman choked, fighting for air under the weight of her own dread. She rocked her, murmuring against her ear, snatches of almost-familiar lullabies drawing her back into the waking world, heart slowing its painful pounding inside her chest. Margarita withdrew from her embrace, wiping tears from her eyes. “I apologize for the noise.” She sounded breathy, shaken, even to her own ears.

The older woman shook her head. “Screams from a bad dream are preferable to screams over an intruder.” Veronica patted Margarita’s hand.

“It must be quite fearsome, to cause such a strong girl to scream. Would you like to speak of it?”

Margarita raised her head, eyes widening. “I…” she licked her lips, aware of the dryness of her lips and mouth, throat tender from screaming. “I’ve never spoken to anyone about it.” Veronica curled her hand around Margarita’s, squeezing it.

“You can cure the dream.” Veronica was silent for a moment. “I’m sure your aunt would have taught you. Hatavat chalom. Tell me. Tell others. Let us tell you of the good in it, so it will not haunt you or come to pass as truth.”

With great hesitation, Margarita began to speak. “It starts with a blue sky, full of smoke, and the sounds of a great battle…”

Margarita left the de Fonseca home, under-slept but heart lightened. The lightness sank as she took in the sight of the flooding that came in the night. Though the high waters had receded, damage and watermarks remained. She had been told once of a flood from when she was a child, too young to remember. She listened to people as she walked back, from the streets of Ghetto Vecchio to her own Ghetto Nuovo. The flooding, and the storm, had stopped just short of dawn.

She bore a basket of pastries from Veronica for the Contanto residence, and told the story of her overnight stay in the de Fonseca home in distracted bursts. Her cousins wanted to know about Veronica’s dress, her manners, and the inside of her house. It took Caterina reprimanding them to let her attend to her sewing in peace, turning Veronica’s words over and over again in her mind.

It is about the will of the Lord, Margarita. You do not see the victors or the cause of the battle because only the Eternal King can determine our fates.

If she wished to complete the ritual to make her dream better, she would have to tell it two more times. She pricked her finger as her hands stumbled, struck with fear at the thought. Not even Caterina had asked about the nightmare’s content. If she could not tell her aunt, who else could she tell? It was another three nights before the answer came to her, in the smiling face of her newly returned uncle. She would tell Abram Contanto, and trust that he would have the wisdom to give her proper counsel.

Perhaps counsel strong enough to end the dream. Margarita waited through the affectionate greetings of her cousins and aunt for Abram, and the hours of stories, two meals, and the return of her cousins to their beds before she would brave his study to talk to him. Margarita knocked softly on his study door, entering only after her bid her to do so.

He removed his glasses, restoring the ordinary appearance of his eyes, as he leaned back in his chair. “How is my little Rita?”

She dragged one of the small stools in the room to sit beside him at his desk, taking a deep breath. “I…I have been having a bad dream, since you left.”

Abram raised his eyebrows. “A? Only one dream?”

“Every night, Uncle. And it repeats. It is always the same.” He watched her unhappy visage, nodding in silent encouragement. “I dream of a battle. There are mercenaries, and foreign armies. They lay siege against a city, and everywhere trembles under the weight of the siege engines and the fighting. The air is full of smoke. The sky is blue.”

“Have you been reading histories while I have been gone?” At her expression of surprise, he chuckled. “I know you come to the study sometimes when I am not here, to read. It is not love stories, so I let it be.”

She shook her head. “No, Uncle. Not histories or love stories. There is…” she raised her hands, trying to summon the machine of her nightmares. “…a machine. A terrible machine, like none I have seen. With walls of copper and iron, and it moves on many wheels and hums with fire and gears.”

Abram’s expression grew somber. He placed a hand on her own. “And this machine?”

“It rolls over the men on the battlefield. It is tall, and casts a long shadow. It’s…the face of it opens, and many culverins fire from within it. And I wake screaming. Convinced I am in front of it, and about to die.”

They sat in silence as Abram withdrew his hand, thinking. After a time, he nodded to himself. “Perhaps it is about the power of a people. A community.” He kept his gaze locked on her face, looking into her eyes. “One people, united, can do great and fearsome things, Rita. They can protect things others would steal from them.” Abram gently placed his hand upon her shoulder. “Is that all you wished to speak of?”

After a moment, she exhaled, looking down into her lap. “I know it. I do not know how, but I know the machine.”

“You believe you have seen it before?”

Margarita struggled to breath, to think, forcing herself to lift her head. “Uncle, I think I may have made it. But I know not how such a thing could be.”

“You have studied the books of science and mathematics in my study, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You ask me about the wonders I have seen in the world, and the news of new science?”

“Yes, Uncle, but what does th—“

Abram held up a finger. “Rita. You have not had the same life your father had, you have not been an artist distracted by science before. But you have his talent for drawing, for thinking. For wanting to know. Tomorrow, I will send a servant to fetch you art supplies. You will draw this machine. Perhaps that will cure your dream, and convince your soul that it is but a fancy, not a thing to be achieved in form.”

Abram was good to his word. Their servant came and went before the Sabbath, and the package sat in her room under the miniscule excuse for a desk beneath her small window. There was plenty of moonlight, and the house was asleep. She knew that even though they did not cleave to things as strongly as others might, that to take ink to paper on the Sabbath would cause even Caterina to frown.

This is why she was as quiet as she could when she opened the package. She weighed a long piece of vellum down, and began to draw. Not the battle or the bloodshed. But the machine. Abram had not misspoken; she did know mathematics and science, far more than many women did. But she could not make sense of how such a machine could work. Yet still, she drew. It was massive, long, a fearsome expanse of metal. Details came to her that she had never fully recalled after the nightmare and those too she rendered on paper.

She had little knowledge of metalwork, and only slightly more about the use of gears, and soon Margarita’s head swam with questions, questions she committed to another piece of paper. She crawled into bed hours after the house had fallen asleep, and by morning she clawed her way out of her bed linens, gasping, sweat soaked, and thankful to be alive. She had dreamt of the culverins again, somehow visible when they had not been before.

To draw it was not the cure.

Abram had begun taking time every night to grill her about the device, and her slowly changing nightmare. Each night she would pray, before lying down in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. No more did she feel an unequal opponent to the nightmare. It still scared her, terrified her deeply, but with Abram’s support she went to bed each night to fight with it. Jacob had survived wrestling an Angel. She could survive battle with a brutal dream, challenge it to give her details. But two weeks after his return, a gilt-touched envelope arrived from the de Fonseca house. Isaac was home, and Veronica wished to invite them to dine at their home in honor of her brother’s safe return. Abram only laughed when Margarita muttered a complaint, head bent over a book they had begun to study, on the construction of ancient siege engines.

“Why do you not wish to go, Rita?”

She sighed forcefully, before gesturing to the book. “This is important. Why is dinner with the de Fonseca’s more important than this?”

“Because they are our people, and we must celebrate our survival whenever and wherever we can.” He squeezed her shoulder, and shook his head as she went to question him. “No, Rita. We shall end early tonight. Go rest, for tomorrow is a different kind of labor.”

The dinner included not only the de Fonseca siblings, Margarita and her aunt and uncle, but a few men she did not know as well. She and Caterina were introduced to Justefino Rosso and Mordechai Bellini. Margarita spoke little over the dinner, concentrating on the strange currents in the air around them. Caterina knew neither man, but the blithe way her aunt spoke to them was an illusion, a distraction to keep them from noticing her shaking hands and the tight set of her shoulders, something Margarita expected no one outside their household to know. Abram kept looking at Isaac de Fonseca as if he could speak to the man only with his eyes, which held something close to anger or contempt. Veronica plied her wits against both her aunt and Justefino, and as the dinner dragged on, Margarita was increasingly certain he was not Venetian—perhaps not even Italian.

Despite her discomfort in sensing she was missing something, she did her best to speak when spoken to, and say little else. When they each came to say goodnight to the de Fonsecas, Isaac looked as if he wanted to say something, but held it back. He gave Margarita a brief smile instead.

“Thank you, for the company you gave my sister while I was absent. It means much to me, that she finds friends in Venice.” Margarita’s brow furrowed, she summoned a sincere, but bewildered thank you of her own, claimed within moments by her aunt and uncle for the return home. The shadows were not yet long, but they made haste regardless. The smallest glance back over her shoulder revealed the figure of Veronica at one of the front windows, but soon both house and womanly shadow were concealed by the turn of the street. She tried to put the strange evening out of her mind, but Abram sending her to bed once they returned home, and the odd dinner, preyed upon her mind.

She paced her small room for some time after dressing for bed, trying to discern the meaning of the many things left unsaid at the dinner, and the few that had been given voice. Her nightmare was splintered and disorganized, without insight and left only with a ringing in her ears. She went straight to her needlework after dressing for the day, shrugging off Caterina’s concerns with a shake of her head.

“Work will clear my head, Aunt. Please let me work.”

She bent her head back down before Caterina could protest, listening with only half her attention to the household rising from its nightly rest. Mouthing the words with her head bowed over her sewing, she thanked the Eternal King for returning the souls of their household to them, and for allowing them to rise refreshed to greet another day. She prayed infrequently, following Caterina’s example in that regard, but the dream was still not cured, and perhaps prayer would help where other things had failed.

With that thought, she paid no more heed to her surroundings, jarred from her productive haze by the sound of distant shouting. Her cousins were themselves loudly talking with their mother, and the vibration of the nearby argument was a brief tremor in the air between their breaths. She left her needle gently hooked on her project, and excused herself with little ceremony. Her shoes were soft on the floor, following the few simple turns and stairs toward the now considerably quieter study of her Uncle. She hesitated at the door, straining her ears to listen, unsure of the words, only Abram’s tone—both angry and pleading.

Margarita raised her hand, knocking twice about the door with her knuckles. Instead of sending her away, her Uncle opened the door, yanking her in and shutting it behind her. Across her Uncle’s desk sat Isaac de Fonseca. He looked under-slept, skin swept with ashen pallor beneath his dark color. He looked upon her like he had never seen her before, as if she were not an orphan ward, but something strange and unknowable.

Margarita drew her shoulders in, unconscious of her need to become smaller. “Uncle?”

Abram pointed at Isaac, the gesture accusatory, his tone a venomous hiss. “He does not understand my concerns about the country, Rita. Tell him. Tell him of the dream.”

She pressed a hand against her middle, opening her mouth to plead, but Abram’s look in her direction stopped her. Whatever was going on, his anger, rare to appear, would not vanish unless quenched. Unless she yet again repeated her dream. Margarita leaned against the door, forcing herself not to sag inward. She focused her eyes not on the fury of her Uncle’s form, but on Isaac’s face. His eyes were also full of anger, but concern came with it.

Concern for her?

“I have a dream. I…it has come for weeks. Every night. Even in your home, when I was unable to leave the night of the flood.” Her breaths felt uneven beneath her clothes, as if her hammering heart would tear forth from her chest and stain corset and chemise alike beneath her burgundy gown.

“There is a battle. Pitched and brutal, Italians against French.” She felt her eyes water with unshed tears, unsure of why it felt so difficult this time, the third time, in the telling. “There is a machine. It casts a shadow upon the battle. And it grinds, with wheels and gears. It is a towering thing of copper and iron, and I know not how it is propelled. But it moves forward, and crushes men beneath it.” Isaac rose from his chair at her words, his look to Abram both betrayal and confusion.

“It does not stop. It keeps on going forward, and a—a hole opens up in its front. Inside there is steam, and warmth, and culverins. Perhaps a dozen. Firing as one.”

Silence. Her heart felt as if it would stop, before Isaac finally spoke. “Perhaps it was a dream of conquest over a great challenge.” He looked at her, as if desperate for this interpretation to be agreed upon, and save them both from further words. Abram’s tone was harsh in answer.

“You know what she dreams of, yet you still insist on looking away.” Margarita looked between both men, light headed from speaking, the unceasing pounding in her chest.

“Abram—“

Her Uncle seized Isaac by his shoulders. “If she is taken from here, she can complete it. If she can complete it, we can be saved.”

“Uncle—“

“Abram—“

Abram looked at them both, his expression somber, hollow. “I know you are confused, Rita. And I wish I could explain this to its fullest extent, but you must be sent away from the ghetto. For your safety. For all of our safety. And if Isaac can take you to the Empire, you may solve the riddle of your great machine. And it is safer there, far safer, than life here. Life under the Muslims is far more tolerable, and questions will not be asked there as they were here. But Isaac must be the one to take you.”

Margarita wasn’t sure if the sound that came from her lips was laughter or tears. “I must make the machine? Why? And why Isaac? Shall he disguise me like Sarah was, and he shall tell the Sultan I am his sister?”

“He shall say you are his wife.” Abram spoke the words in low, even tones. “And you shall be married to him before you leave Italy. He shall take his bride to the Empire to see his homeland, and enjoy a land unlike her native Venice. There, you will build the machine, or Venice shall fall beneath the French, and only the Eternal King knows if the Jews shall survive. Isaac is to take you because he is not a foreigner there; despite the faith we all share in this room.”

Isaac reached for her hand, but let his drop when she shrank away, eyes filled with tears. “And if I refuse?”

Abram shrugged. “Then I will try and reason with you.”

“And if I continue to refuse?”

“Then you will stay. And when the French come to Venice, the children of Israel will die in the streets. As we often do, when invaders come to a place that houses us with disdain and hate.”

Margarita could feel her composure failing, the tremble through her lips and chin warning of tears to come. She slipped out the door before they could speak to her again, running for the front door and then out it, barely pausing to seize her cloak. She kept her head bowed as she ran for the bridge between the ghettos, Old and New, one hand pressed against her mouth to muffle her weeping. She felt hot and cold, lightheaded and unable to think. Fear and betrayal and anger lashed around inside her, angry snakes that choked and bit within. She cried on the bridge, cried till her face was swollen and she felt as if she would vomit into the canal water. She gripped the bridge, waiting for reprisal, for Abram to drag her back. To force her into a plan she barely understood.

Isaac was the one to come for her, not with anger but sympathy, and a scrap of cloth that she ran across her face, drying the ends of tear tracks. Her voice was hoarse and miserable. “So I am to be your wife, and go forth to a strange land? To build something I don’t understand for a war that isn’t even here yet?”

She looked up at him, both of them pressed against the railing of the bridge. Isaac was older than her, surely in his thirties. Wouldn’t Abram listen to him? All he had to do was say he couldn’t take her, couldn’t marry her. He didn’t touch her, but he stood closely, body radiating warmth.

“Perhaps the dream is about a triumph of yours, Margarita. Of winning against impossible odds.”

“Winning a war for Venice?” She laughed, the sound cold and broken.

“Winning a war for yourself. I…I am no prophet. And I think you know that both my household and your own, we know things few do, or would expect us to.” He placed his hand on the railing, close to hers, yet still not touching. “What he is asking, we must both agree to do. I will not touch you, put a hand upon you, or force you to do anything as my wife. I will not let him make you do this, if you do not wish to. If you doubt his intentions, his methods, I will continue in my life as you do in yours. But if you believe the counsel of your Uncle, that this is a task only you can accomplish, there are many engineers in the Empire. Forges and foundries would not be hard to find. And there is a man, in another part of the Empire, who seeks to build an engine to drive machines—one made of steam.”

Steam and smoke. Her gasp was slight, but her thoughts were already tumbling. Depending on the placement and size, perhaps a dual—

Perhaps it could be done. And if it could be done, if it was even possible, perhaps this would cure her dream.

Margarita shook her head, glancing down at their hands. “You will help protect me?”

“With all I have to offer to that service.” Isaac was serious, sincere, and did not smile when she looked back up. Their hands stayed as they were, next to each other.

If it was possible that she could do what had been asked of her, children like Lorenza and Fiora might not have to die.

“When could we leave?”