Elias Thorne's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The glowing forest thinned, and Elias stopped. Ahead stood a workshop built into the hollow base of a colossal tree. Brass pipes climbed its trunk and breathed thin curls of steam into the dusk. Amber windows glowed between ridges of bark. Broad walkways ringed the base, cluttered with strange machines whose purposes Elias could not begin to guess. Deeper among the trees, distant lights flickered. Not scattered fires. Windows. Lamps. Streets, perhaps. A settlement. Elias breathed out slowly. Until that moment, some stubborn part of him had still entertained the possibility that Nyra was alone. He looked up at his towering blue-skinned guide and pointed toward the workshop. “This is yours?” Nyra said nothing. She only pointed toward the door. They climbed a broad ramp to the entrance. Elias had to hurry to keep pace with her longer strides. At the top, Nyra pressed one long finger against a brass plate set into the bark. Something clicked deep within the tree. Gears turned. Bolts withdrew. The round door swung inward. Warmth spilled out, followed by amber light and the smells of oil, hot metal, cut wood, and something faintly sweet that Elias could not identify. He stepped through and, for several seconds, forgot to be afraid. The workshop held more wonders than he could count. Tools hung from hooks in neat rows, though many were twice the size of anything he would have used in London. Glass vessels glowed softly on shelves. Coils of metallic wire hung beside leather belts and polished brass fittings. Half-built engines crowded heavy worktables. Some resembled pumps or turbines. Others appeared to have no Earthly equivalent at all. Elias wanted desperately to touch everything. Instead, he reached into his coat and drew out one of his watches. Three still ticked on this world. He wanted to know why. More immediately, he wanted Nyra to understand that he was not merely some helpless little creature she had found beside a wreck. Across the room, Nyra had moved to a workbench. She removed the small brass device she had carried through the forest and placed it carefully on the table. Elias recognized it. The recorder. Nyra adjusted several tiny dials. A glass tube within the device began to glow. Then Elias heard his own voice. Fragments of it. Distorted. Slowed. Reassembled. “Machine.” A pause. “London.” Another pause. “Elias Thorne.” He stared. The device clicked softly. Then, in a strange mechanical approximation of English, it said: “Speech pattern… sufficient.” Elias took one step closer. “It learned.” Nyra watched him. “You made it learn my tongue.” The machine clicked again, as though uncertain whether the sentence required a response. Elias laughed once in disbelief. Here was something no lecture hall in London had ever prepared him for: a mind born beneath another sky, using a machine to bridge the gulf between them. He placed his ticking watch on the workbench. “Then let me show you mine.” Nyra leaned closer. Elias opened the watch case and began naming what lay inside. “Spring.” The recorder hummed. “Gear.” Another hum. “Balance wheel.” Nyra’s amber eyes moved quickly between the watch and Elias’s face. She pointed to one component. Elias named it. She repeated the word into the machine. The translator returned something in her language, smooth and musical but completely unintelligible to him. For the first time since arriving on Orinth, Elias smiled. Then he began describing the chronomachine. The smile vanished from Nyra’s face. Elias pulled the pencil from his coat and found an empty stretch of cuff. He sketched the broad circle of the portal frame, the coils arranged around it, the central housing, the rotating rings. “This carried me here.” Nyra stared at the drawing. Her glowing facial markings brightened. Then dimmed. She stepped backward. The dry amusement Elias had begun to recognize in her expression disappeared entirely. Nyra took the recorder in both hands and spoke into it. The machine hesitated. “That…” A click. “Old.” Another pause. “Forbidden.” Elias looked from the translator to her. “Forbidden by whom?” The machine struggled with the question, repeating one word in Nyra’s language before falling silent. Nyra did not answer. Instead she crossed to one of the curved windows and looked toward the distant settlement lights. Her long fingers curled against the frame. When she turned back, she spoke quickly into the recorder. “You here…” The device clicked. “Danger.” Nyra said something else. “To you.” Another phrase. “To me.” Elias stared at her. He had finally reached shelter, only to discover that shelter was not safety. His arrival was something Nyra intended to conceal. And the machine he needed in order to return home was connected somehow to knowledge that Orinth had buried—or tried to. Elias closed his watch. The proof he had dreamed of bringing back to London suddenly had teeth. “Then we hide it,” he said. “Until we understand what I’ve done.” The translator struggled through his sentence. Nyra watched him for a long moment. Then her amber eyes shifted toward the settlement beyond the trees. She did not nod. But she did not disagree.