The Flux Engine Read Online Free Page B

and vest with gleaming silver buttons topped off with a bowler hat. A pair of spectacles hung on a tiny chain from his topmost buttonhole and he raised them to his brown eyes as he caught sight of Robi. He looked her up and down for a moment and his thin, shrewd face split into a delighted grin.
    “Well, well,” he said in an amused voice. “What have we here?”

Chapter 3
    The Enforcer
    John wasn’t conscious of being dead. But then, he wasn’t conscious of being alive either. In fact he felt nothing at all as his mind seemed to drift in a great black emptiness. Absently he wondered if he would be called up to the Builder’s workshop or condemned to the Forge of Souls.
    Fire erupted in his throat, tracing a line of fire down to his gut and choking him as it went. With a horrible tearing sound filling his ears, John’s mind was wrenched back to consciousness. Searing liquid filled his mouth and burned his tongue. Gagging and spluttering, he swallowed hard, forcing the molten stuff into his stomach. Catching the feel of air again, his lungs surged, gulping in. As his rib cage expanded, it tore at the bullet wound, sending daggers of pain deep into his chest.
    As he cried out in mortal agony, the rim of a glass bottle was forced between his teeth and more of the torturous liquid streamed into his mouth. John choked and swallowed, trying to turn his head away, but something had him in a vise-like hold. He couldn’t see and the sound of his own pulse was like thunder drumming in his ears. He wasn’t sure if his eyes weren’t working or if they were simply closed, but either way his vision remained dark. As another gout of burning liquid gushed past his lips and down his throat, John heard a voice, coming to him as if from a great distance.
    “Drink it all, boy,” it said, drifting into his awareness. “It’ll keep you alive.”
    He felt the liquid run down his throat again, but this time it seemed to bring emptiness with it. Everywhere it touched, from his mouth to his stomach, seemed to disappear from his mind. The numbness flowed outward from his gut, erasing his chest and the fiery, burning wound, his torso, and finally his arms and legs.
    John’s mind drifted, freed from the link to his tortured and dying body. He could hear things, voices and strange sounds. At first, they were distant, incoherent sounds, like the buzzing bees in a hive, but gradually they resolved themselves into strings of syllables that demanded John’s attention.
    “ … Did the right thing,” a man’s voice said in a twangy, territorial accent. “Get him into the chamber.”
    There was a sound of water and a splash.
    “Is he going to survive?” a second voice said. John recognized it from before, when he’d been forced to drink the horrible liquid.
    “Not if you don’t get out of the way,” the first voice said. “Hit him with this and then shut the lid.”
    Before John could wonder who was speaking or what they meant, something cold formed where his gut used to be. He could feel it moving, twisting and flowing, as if seeking a way out. The pressure built until finally, the liquid in his gut ignited, bursting into a raging inferno. Waves of heat expanded outward like an explosion, bringing back the sense of his stomach, his organs, bones, and skin—and burning as it went. His eyes snapped open at last and his whole body went rigid. Every muscle in his arms and legs locked into place, quivered like over-taut piano wires.
    Floating above him in the fog of his newly restored vision, was a small window in a wall of brass that hung just over his body. It looked uncomfortably to John the way he imagined the inside of a coffin lid would look. The only difference was the window that now framed an unfamiliar face. It was haggard and rough, with an immense, salt-and-pepper mustache and two ice-blue eyes that regarded him through the glass.
    “Hold on now,” the accented voice said from somewhere beyond the window. “It gets a bit