The Transference Engine by Julia Verne St. John

the table, making little grasping movements. He had yet to learn all the fine nuances of becoming an adept pickpocket. Others of my tribe of urchins did it better when I asked them to steal letters and notes. Another reason to keep him close and let him be tamed.
    I slapped my hand flat atop the coins. “Sweeping is only worth a penny. Serving, brewing, baking, and keeping the library require better manners, cleaner hands, and an education. Therefore, those tasks are worth more.”
    â€œOh.” His mouth made a near perfect O and he retreated toward the kitchen. I hoped I’d given him something to think about.
    I opened the front door and welcomed the rest of my customers, wishing Drew were here to discuss Inspector Witherspoon’s ideas.
    Lacking Drew, I had access to someone else with knowledge of machines that performed near impossible tasks.
    â€œMickey, I need you to take a note to Lovelace House! After you’ve scrubbed your hands and face.”

    â€œWhat do you think of this, Elise?” Lady Ada asked the moment my foot crossed the threshold of her workroom. She didn’t bother looking up from a mass of gears and gyroscopes. She’d appropriated the big family parlor adjacent to the servant stair on the first floor above ground. Normally this room would make an admirable morning room, with good light from the east and south.
    I watched as she pressed a spring and a thin metal sheet slid down over an opening and then slid back up into place. Upon more careful examination, I determined there were two such openings in the area that approximated the head of her machine.
    â€œAre you trying to make the automaton blink?” I shuffled my feet so that I could see the length of the machine well enough to know what most of the parts represented, without coming close enough to actually touch, or be touched, by the artificial person. I had read too much, seen too much, to ever be truly comfortable around these machines.
    When my lady was but a tiny babe, her father, the infamous Lord Byron and his physician Dr. Polidari, had invented a machine to transfer a man’s soul from a damaged but living body into an undamaged but dead body. He was still out there waiting for . . . the perfect body, mechanical or real, to accept his soul, personality, and poetic genius, as well as his perfidy.
    Tapping his daughter’s mathematical genius to accomplish his nefarious schemes had always been a worrisome probability. Possessing her body while she still lived, so that he could share her genius bothered me more. He’d tried that once and failed. Would he try again next time she fell ill and vulnerable?
    â€œOh, come closer, Elise. It won’t hurt you. It doesn’t have its thinking cards installed,” Ada said, dismissing my misgivings. “I’ve been studying Henri Maillardet’s theories of automation for his puppets—parlor tricks and games only; he never went beyond to something useful. Still, his work is amazing and set me to thinking what else I can do with his methods.”
    â€œMight it be taught to harm?” I asked, still not coming closer.
    A mischievous smile creased her too thin face. I hadn’t seen much of that smile of late. She touched another spring, and a skeletal arm made of metal and leather, gears and hinges, jerked outward, fingers grasping toward me.
    â€œEeeek!” I jumped back, hand to chest, trying to still my heart that suddenly beat so hard and fast I thought it might burst through my ribs.
    â€œYou!” Ada laughed, long and loud, the delightful sound rippling up from her toes and making her eyes dance with mirth. “You are so funny.”
    â€œEnough of your pranks, my lady,” I admonished, returning to my governess voice and tone.
    â€œWhy is 25.807 banned from usage?” she asked, her face a mask of false innocence.
    â€œI don’t know. Why?” I knew better, truly I did. But how can one