The Lazarus Engine – Chapter 6
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
The darkness lasted only a moment.
Thorne struck a match. The flame caught the edge of a fallen curtain, then a candelabra, then the oil in a brass lamp. Light returned to the library in flickering waves.
Lady Isolde Vane was still in her chair. The engine in her lap had stopped ticking. Her hands were folded over it, calm as a prayer.
“Charlotte is in the basement,” she said again. “She has been there for ten years.”
Gray moved to the window. The fire hadn’t gone out—it had been extinguished, as if someone had blown on it from across the room. “How did you put out the flames?”
“I didn’t. Charlotte did. She can do things now. Things her father only dreamed of.” Isolde looked at Thorne. “You knew Victor. You knew his genius. But Charlotte surpassed him before she was fifteen. And in ten years of solitude, she has become something else entirely.”
“A killer,” Gray said.
“A perfectionist. She doesn’t kill for pleasure. She kills to test her engines. Each victim brings her closer to her goal.”
“Which is?”
Isolde stood up. The engine fell from her lap and shattered on the floor. Inside it, instead of gears, there was a human tooth.
“To bring back her father,” she said. “To wind the engine that will restart Victor March’s heart. And then—to wind it again. And again. To make him immortal.”
Thorne stared at the tooth. “Whose is that?”
“Yours, Dr. Thorne. Charlotte took it from your old rooms at the hospital. She has been collecting pieces of everyone who wronged her father. A tooth from you. A lock of hair from Dr. Hale. A pocket watch from Sir Humphrey Wells. When she has enough, she will build the final engine. The one that doesn’t just restart a heart—it rewinds time.”
Gray’s face was pale. “That’s impossible.”
“So was the locked carriage. So was the ticking engine. So was the resurrection of a dead man’s eyes.” Isolde walked to the door. “Follow me. It’s time you met her.”
The basement of Vane Manor was not a cellar. It was a cathedral.
Thorne and Gray descended a spiral staircase into a vast underground chamber lit by gas lamps and electrical arc lights. The walls were lined with workbenches covered in tools, blueprints, and half-finished engines. In the center of the room, a massive brass device hung from the ceiling like a pendulum—but this pendulum had arms, legs, and a hollow chest.
“A body,” Gray whispered.
“A shell,” Isolde corrected. “For Victor’s soul. When Charlotte is ready, she will place his preserved heart inside that chest, wind the engine, and speak the words her father wrote in his final journal.”
“And the words?”
Isolde pointed to a blackboard covered in equations. At the bottom, written in chalk: “Let the dead praise the Lord. Let the clock wind itself. Let the second breath begin.”
Thorne stepped closer to the brass shell. The chest cavity was empty, but the interior was lined with tiny gears—each one identical to the engines found in the victims.
“She’s been practicing,” he said. “Each victim taught her something. How to stop a heart. How to restart it. How to make the engine tick without fuel.”
“Now she’s ready for the final test,” Isolde said. “She needs a living heart to power the resurrection. A heart that has already been stopped and restarted. A heart like yours, Dr. Thorne.”
Gray’s hand went to her truncheon. “We’re leaving. Now.”
A voice echoed from the shadows.
“No. You’re not.”
Charlotte March stepped into the light.
She was twenty-five years old, but she looked older. Her hair was gray. Her skin was pale. Her eyes were the color of tarnished brass. She wore a blacksmith’s apron over a simple dress, and her hands were covered in oil and tiny scars.
“Dr. Thorne,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“You killed Sir Humphrey Wells. Dr. Hale. The others.”
“I perfected them. They died so that my father could live.” She smiled—a thin, joyless expression. “You understand, don’t you? You killed a man to learn the secrets of death. I’m killing men to learn the secrets of life. We’re the same.”
Thorne shook his head. “No. I stopped my experiment. I let the man die. You’re winding the engine tighter and tighter, refusing to let go.”
Charlotte’s smile faltered. “Then you’re weak.”
“Then I’m human.”
The brass engine in the center of the room began to tick. Faster. Louder.
Charlotte raised her hand. In her palm, a small brass gear spun.
“Your heart, Dr. Thorne. Or I stop your constable’s.”
Gray lunged forward.
The room exploded in light.