The Lazarus Engine – Chapter 19
The Choice
The clock ticked overhead. Eleven fifty-four.
Thorne stood frozen, the useless decoy still in his hand. Charlotte watched him with her father’s calm eyes, the mechanical hand raised, its brass fingers glinting in the gaslight.
“You can’t stop time, Dr. Thorne,” she said. “You can only choose how to spend it.”
Thorne looked at Gray. She was crouched behind a stack of gears, her truncheon forgotten, her eyes fixed on the mechanical hand. She had seen something. A flaw.
He needed to buy her time.
“Charlotte,” he said, taking a step forward. “Tell me about your mother.”
Charlotte’s smile flickered. “My mother died when I was born. I never knew her.”
“Then you know what it’s like to lose someone before you could love them. Your father raised you alone. Taught you everything. And then he died. Left you alone.”
“He didn’t leave. He was taken.” Charlotte’s voice hardened. “By the Order. By their failed experiments. By their arrogance.”
“And now you’re continuing those experiments. Doing exactly what they did.”
“I’m perfecting them. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” Thorne took another step. “Your father built the first engine to bring back his sister. He failed. He spent the rest of his life trying to fix his failure. And now you’re doing the same. Chasing a ghost.”
Charlotte’s hand trembled. The brass fingers clicked.
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand grief. I understand loss. I stopped a dead man’s heart twice. I know what it is to hold life in your hands and watch it slip away.” Thorne stopped a few feet from her. “But I also know that death is not an enemy. It’s a part of life. And the more you fight it, the more it fights back.”
The clock struck eleven fifty-five.
Charlotte looked at her father’s body. The heart in the glass chamber was beating stronger now. Faster.
“I don’t care,” she whispered. “I want him back.”
Gray moved.
She lunged from behind the gears, not at Charlotte, but at the mechanical hand. She grabbed it by the wrist—the one place where the brass plates didn’t quite meet.
Charlotte screamed. The hand’s fingers spasmed, opening and closing wildly. Gray held on, pressing her thumb into the gap between the plates.
“The wiring!” she shouted. “It’s exposed!”
Thorne dropped the decoy and ran to the brass table. He grabbed the mechanical hand’s forearm and twisted. The plates groaned. A spark leaped from the wrist.
Charlotte tried to pull away, but Gray’s grip was iron. Together, Thorne and Gray wrenched the hand from Charlotte’s arm.
It clattered to the floor, its fingers still twitching.
Charlotte stumbled back, cradling her real hand—red, bruised, but whole.
“You broke it,” she said, staring at the twitching brass fingers.
“We stopped it,” Thorne said. “Now stop the engine.”
Charlotte looked at the clock. Eleven fifty-seven.
“No.”
She ran to the massive engine and placed both hands on its main gear. The gear began to turn faster. The heartbeat grew louder.
“She’s accelerating the winding!” Gray shouted.
Thorne grabbed the regulator—the real one? He didn’t know. He pulled out Pound’s counter-measure instead, the small brass disc.
“Charlotte! Last chance!”
She ignored him.
Thorne pressed the counter-measure against the engine’s main housing.
The engine stuttered. The heartbeat skipped.
Charlotte screamed.
The clock struck eleven fifty-eight.