Gearteeth (#1 in the Trilogy) Preview

Chapter 1

"It is as ambrosia; the taste of man's flesh be like nothing you can imagine; but you'll know it for truth soon enough. Judge me now, but yea, your own judgment cometh this moon," I read.

I flipped the dog-eared paperback's cover over: Street and Smith, c. 1890, New York.

"Poor bastards," I sighed. "Twenty years gone . . . did you end up in the bellies of the werewolves when the world went to hell, or wearing the fur yourselves?"

I glanced up from the battered book; the moon sat full and gloating in the afternoon sky. A sudden updraft threatened to send me tumbling from my perch, causing me to shut the old dime-store novel tight before its pages were torn away. My legs, honed by years of clambering all over the Heaven's Grace while she thundered through the air, locked down hard and clutched the collection vane as the errant wind buffeted me. The extra weight from my metal-lined work clothes helped to keep me steady on the swaying column. Closing my eyes, I reached out with senses sharpened by years of working the storms, feeling for any hint that the curse of clear skies would be broken soon, any tickle of humidity on my skin or face. But the wind was dry, harsh, and unaccountably hot for April. The hundreds of vanes and lightning rods jutting up from roofs across the city were like the skeletal, cobweb-strewn branches of a dying forest begging for the rains to come and give them life once more.

As the parched wind died down, I heard my name called out. "Eli! What are you doing up there?"

I craned my neck and looked back over my shoulder. Twenty feet below, Henry, the other brakeman that shared my berth on the Heaven's Grace, inched his way up the back of the towering vane's main column toward me. I'd been so intent on reading about the beasts that I hadn't heard him climbing up. Whereas I'd barely even bothered to secure myself when I ascended, Henry was using every nook and cranny that he could to anchor his tether. Despite the fact that our jobs called for us to cling to the side of a steel behemoth barreling through the air a mile up, my friend had an incredible fear of heights.

"Oh, just enjoying the sunlight and a good book."

Truthfully, up here was also a good place to die if you weren't careful. Although there were belaying loops spaced along the length of the three hundred-foot shaft, it wasn't exactly sane to climb the huge vanes. We were actually safer working on the windswept sides of our Thunder Train, what with her complicated safety system of cables and pulleys.

On the moisture vanes, you had to free climb between the various anchoring points. The flimsy, almost invisible sails of leaching silk stretched between the crossbeams would never save a man falling through them; it'd be like trying to catch a horse with a spider's web. Not that the vanes themselves were much better. While the steel shafts of the city's air wells were fairly thick, they were hollow to allow the condensed water to flow down into the reservoir within Wardenclyffe. Each footstep set the vanes to wavering, and it was a deadly game just predicting when the wind would pick up and add to the fun.

"I wouldn't use that one," I said as Henry's foot fumbled for a rust-covered protrusion.

Wardenclyffe was the first of the salvation cities, designed and built by Tesla before he went missing during the Blood Panic. The fifteen years since it had lifted off the ground hadn't been kind to it. Rust had an unholy love for the city's superstructure, spreading faster than fire through dry grass and outpacing the constant efforts to repair the damage. It was a wonder the old girl was still aloft at all. None of the cities had been meant to stay up this long, but that didn't matter much to the residents when allowing it to crash meant more than just bracing for impact. The same critters that had sent us high-tailing it for the clouds still stalked the Earth below, and none of us were too anxious to meet them nose to muzzle.