The Flux Engine Read Free

possible. Handlers didn’t control Tommys directly, like he had in his vision, they only gave them commands. On top of that, the handler box only had a range of about a hundred yards. The mine was at least a mile out of town.
    Somehow his mother’s crystal had boosted the signal from the handler box, amplified it by a factor of ten—or more.
    It simply wasn’t possible. As he looked out over the smoke-filled skies of Sprocketville, however, he couldn’t deny what he saw. He reached out to the doorframe for support as his limbs began to tremble. The damage must be extensive; when everyone found out what he had done—he’d go to jail. What if someone died? He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but would a jury believe that? If they didn’t he’d be hung as a murderer.
    Run.
    Get out now. Run and don’t look back.
    He took an involuntary step but a moment later he calmed down enough to think. If the handler box was fixed and working properly when Doctor Shultz got back from Ironton, no one would ever know what he had done. Taking a deep breath to keep himself calm, John turned and went back into the lab, barring the door behind him.
    No one could be allowed to find out what really happened, and, with a few hours work, no one ever would.
    John entered the lab, passing the workbenches full of grow trays where new crystals were forming in various tanks of chemical solutions. He stopped in front of the locked cabinet that contained the finished crystals. Doctor Shultz always kept it locked, but John had seen him hide his spare key. Next to the crystal cabinet stood a heavy shelf filled with dozens of containers of salt, the primary ingredient in crystal growing. Each heavy glass jar held a different grade of salt, from sources all over the world. Most of them were colored to better identify them, making the shelf an entire spectrum of hues. He surveyed them briefly until he found one labeled Antarctic Sea Salt .
    Plunging his hand in, John reached around until his fingers grasped a hard metal object. What he came up with was a long steel key with teeth cut along its top and bottom edge and a third edge protruding from the middle. Without replacing the jar, he turned back to the cabinet and unlocked it. Inside were row upon row of drawers, each meticulously labeled with a small paper card.
    John didn’t have to search for the crystals he needed; he’d memorized the position of every crystal in the cabinet. He’d even grown some of them himself. Moving quickly, he gathered the four crystals he’d need to replace the damaged ones in the handler box, then turned.
    He almost dropped the crystals onto the stone floor. Standing not ten feet away, watching him with an amused smile, was a woman. Woman might be too generous a term, for she was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, only a few years older than John himself. She wore a loose-fitting shirt with a tight corset over it that accentuated her curves perfectly and ended at the top of a knee-length skirt. She had a top hat of brown silk with a pair of aviator’s goggles strapped around it and a peacock feather sticking up from the band. Her hair was brown and her skin tan and she had a dark tattoo covering the left side of her face. A thick leather belt was bound around her waist that reached down to a heavy holster on her right hip. John could see the wooden handle of a flux pistol protruding from the holster where her hand rested easily upon it.
    “Well, hi there,” she said, her face breaking into a dazzling smile. She wasn’t just pretty, she was beautiful, with a sharp, angular jawline, prominent cheekbones, and dark eyes. Her nose was perhaps a bit overlarge, but in the exotic beauty of her face it was more of an accent than a detraction. John suddenly had trouble making his mouth work.
    “Who—,” he began, but she cut him off.
    “I was hoping you’d lead me to the crystal, but I see you’re busy,” her dark eyes bored into him with an intensity that defied the