Claire turned—to leave the stage, to run—but a member of her military escort stopped her with a hand.

  “The ceremony isn’t over,” he said, and as if on cue, a battery of trumpets blew their fanfare. The boy choir, pinching and prodding one another, fell into line. When they opened their mouths, their faces rearranged themselves into solemnity.

  My country, ’tis of thee,

  God’s chosen monarchy,

  Of thee I sing—

  All Claire could see was the surprisingly rumpled back of Governor Duchamp’s head as he walked to the podium. The crowd, so calm while the mayor had been speaking, kicked up into a flurry of whispers. The General had been right: the people were uneasy about Duchamp’s leadership.

  As Claire watched from behind the curtain, the General, from his seat, held up a lazy hand to the audience. Even the foreigners among them quieted.

  As though Monticello needed any more of a reminder of who its real leader was.

  “Ladies,” Governor Duchamp said. “Ah. Gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice was soft, his intonation foreign. The sound didn’t carry. Claire strained to hear him from the back of the stage. “I welcome you to the Fair.” One of his hands stole up to adjust his collar, smooth the back of his dark hair. “I welcome you to Monticello. I welcome you to St. Cloud. I welcome you to the Great American Kingdom.” There was grandeur in the writing of the speech, but not in its delivery. Remy Duchamp spoke as though each word out of his mouth surprised him just a little. “Welcome,” he said again, clutching his cue cards in his left hand. Their gold edges caught the light, trembled.

  The crowd tittered at the Governor. Claire felt a faint, surprising flush of pity.

  St. Cloud is doomed.

  “I am—” He tried for a smile. “I am to tell you that this Fair will showcase our greatest technological achievements since the steam engine. Which, as you know, was invented in the late eighteenth century. Though some argue that with the invention of the pumping engine, we had its precursor in 1698. . . .” He cleared his throat. “I digress.”

  “Get to the point!” someone called. Though the front rows were filled with St. Cloud’s soldiers, Claire was troubled to see so many red-clad Livmonian soldiers elbowing one another in the crowd. The shout, she was sure, had come from one of them.

  This time, the General didn’t lift his hand. He let Duchamp bathe in the disapproval.

  “As you know, we have worked . . . we have worked very hard on bringing you this Fair to showcase American genius. Our great Nikola Tesla, the inventor, will be conducting electricity before . . . before your very eyes. You saw just a little of that now. The great wheel you see above you will turn to show you the wonders of the city. Our city. That is, it will turn as you ride it. And you will see . . . other things. Cows. Cuisine. Some dancing. And for now, we will fire the very large gun you see behind me.”

  He took a step back, hesitated. Looked at his seat. It was clear that he knew he must remain standing before this crowd, and that he would rather do anything but.

  Into the confused silence, the great gun began to turn. Jeremiah Emerson’s men were sweating under the sun as they pulled its turret about with their ropes, heaving with the sound. It made a sound like a great sigh, like it knew the promise of its purpose was about to be kept.

  Emerson’s eyes seized on his daughter, and Claire shrank back into the shadowy wings. All bravery gone.

  If he would just stop looking at her in such desperation.

  “On your signal,” Emerson called to the Governor.

  Duchamp looked faintly ill. He nodded. For the first time since he’d taken the stage, the crowd began to cheer.

  Emerson stepped up behind his gun and laid his hands on it, expectantly. It had already been loaded with a one-ton shell; the shell would fire out above the crowd and fall into the great lake, where it would explode. Emerson turned his sweat-glossed face to the crowd, and for a brief moment, in that heavy, expectant silence, he beamed like a man who had been touched by his God’s own hands.

  The silence continued. Continued. Continued on.

  Jeremiah Emerson aimed the gun far above the heads of the crowd, and fired.

  Nothing happened.

  Remy Duchamp glanced at the cards in his hand, as though the moment of this failure had been written into the agenda.

  “And now,” Emerson said, “the Barrage!” There was a desperate showman’s turn to his voice. Behind him, the General was standing with a look like lightning.

  The gun did not fire.

  The men did not move.

  “My daughter!” he cried out, and it carried to the farthest reaches of the audience. “Bring me my daughter! She is the one responsible for this failure!”

  This is what she would remember, in the years that followed. The sun on her shoulders, the slim line of sweat down her back. The soldiers’ rough hands bearing her forward. The General, fingers twitching in the pile of his fur-trimmed cape, his face written over with grimmest pleasure. For he had been right in his warnings. Emerson the madman? Emerson had failed. And his willful daughter would be now made to pay in the most public way possible, as daughters were made to pay for the crimes of their fathers.

  Remy Duchamp set his jaw and said nothing.

  Claire was pushed from one man’s hands to another, shoved roughly up the steps to the gun, and though she struggled to pull herself away (though where would she go? How could she escape the entire city?), her father caught a fistful of her crepe de chine dress and drew her close. The crowd howled like hungry dogs. They had come here for spectacle.

  This was spectacle.

  “Bless me,” her father said, and in his desperate grip, Beatrix’s lovely dress wrinkled and stained. “Bless me, you devil.”

  She was at the top of the known world, here, higher than any point than the great untiring wheel, and the smallest part of her wondered what the swell of faces before her thought. Who here would imagine that the girl in the white dress had built this great machine? Easier, somehow, to imagine that it was her failure, without it ever having been her triumph.

  What else could she say? “I bless this man,” she whispered.

  “I bless this weapon.”

  Claire wrapped her arms around herself. “I bless this weapon.”

  “Take it in your hands, child,” her father said, and when Claire didn’t immediately take up the gunner’s position, he took one of her wrists in each of his hands and held them up for display, as though for one brief, awful moment she were offering surrender. Then he pushed them down.

  The gun didn’t hesitate. It knew her touch, or it knew her father’s, or perhaps (as Beatrix would say, always searching for the logic), Claire with her sudden weight had dislodged some heat-swollen gear and sent the thing running along as it should. Did it matter what the cause when it discharged with a great bellowing sound, firing out just above the crowd’s heads?

  The shell exploded in the lake beyond, kicking up a mighty wave.

  There was screaming. Shoving. There was wonder in the voices, fear, the collective wail of boys taking refuge in their mothers’ arms. Despite their Governor’s warning, no one had expected the gun to fire. For the Barrage to prove something about St. Cloud’s might. That it was uncontrolled, erratic. Nothing you could count on.

  That it came at the hands of a girl.

  Even now, Claire could see the pair of Livingston-Monroe men breaking away to pelt toward the Fair’s entrance, so they could report to their masters what they had seen.

  Below the blue, white, and red bunting that snapped in the wind, the General gazed up at her, a smile playing at his lips, plans in his eyes. Though that should have been enough to terrify her, it wasn’t what set her heart to pounding. What was it that the General had said? Duchamp couldn’t care less for Jeremiah Emerson’s Barrage. The Governor wanted his Fair to be a show of marvels, of ingenuity. Electricity and great pleasure. Wheels and some dancing. Was that why Duchamp was looking at Claire with haunted, furious eyes?

  “Come down from there,” Duchamp ordered.

  Her father released her wrists. He’d still been holding them as though she were a marionette. “You’ve brought shame on our house, girl,” he said, sorrowing.

  She could hear it, then, the sound of her escape plan collapsing.

  There was nowhere else to go. Claire drew her chin up high and descended the steps from the platform, the slight wind teasing the skirt at her ankles. A faraway part of her noticed that her hands were altogether soot to the wrists, her nails caked under with her father’s powder. The hint of a flame would set her blazing like a Catherine wheel.

  “Come,” Duchamp said again, as she paused at the bottom of the platform, and when she didn’t move, he took two steps forward and seized her by the arm, fingers closing over the bruises the General had left, and she hissed.

  Duchamp paid no notice. With an authority he hadn’t yet shown, he hauled her to the podium. Another man handling her as though she was his property.

  Perhaps she was.

  “What you have seen,” Duchamp said, “what you have all seen now, is a miracle.” His voice carried easily this time—and was it her imagination, or had his accent vanished? His vowels were open like doors to the prairie. “And did I not promise miracles? Did I not promise feats beyond your most distant dreams? You came from Nuevo México, from Alta California; you came from beyond the Atlantic Ocean; you came by railroad and by horse, you came on your own ambitious feet. You came to see what St. Cloud has accomplished. What America can do. This is but—a rehearsal for what is to come! We will fire again at the Fair’s closing!

  “For now, tell me—do you see this young girl? Look at her in her white dress, as though she stepped off a marble pedestal from our great Hall of Wonders.” His words belied his ferocious grip on her arm. “Let her be the conduit for our men’s imagination! Let her usher in our era of change! Let us open our great Fair!”

  His people, the people of the Great American Kingdom, roared.

  In this moment, they loved him.

  How to square this man with the uncertain boy who had promised cows, and cuisine, and dancing? Who are you? Who did you just become? Claire stood, shuddering, stripped bare by the crowd’s eyes, and when she tipped up her head to look at Duchamp, she saw his eyes were fixed on her with wonder.

  “I will take her to my mansion,” he said, wrenching his head back to the crowd. “She will sit in St. Cloud’s great room as our angel. She will remain there until the last fairgoer leaves this place, filled with our spirit of ingenuity, off to go into the world, changed! Now go—go and find your own delights!”

  Duchamp sliced his free arm through the air, and a brass band stumbled out from the wings. Under the roar of the music, the crowd began to dissipate.

  Claire shook herself free from Duchamp’s grip, but he reached for her again. “Let me go,” she said, sidestepping, as he passed a hand over his face and said roughly, “God, who are you?”

  “I am not your captive,” she said. “I’m not your spirit, nor your angel.”

  Tomorrow, she thought. I was supposed to leave tomorrow.

  “You?” His eyes were as cold as water. “You are someone who knows something I do not.”

  In her fury, she stumbled through her words. “You’ve laid claim on me like—like I was a cow! Like I was a thing.”

  “I didn’t plan to do it,” he said quietly, “until I spoke the words. And still it doesn’t matter what you think, does it?”

  Her father. The General. Remy Duchamp. “I will not go,” she said, and already she was planning it—she and Beatrix would ransack her workshop, they would take up their bindles and ride the railroad all the way to West Florida and disembark down into the swamplands, they would build a little wooden house in the wilderness and bolt the door. No one would ever see them again.

  “You will,” Duchamp said.

  If it wouldn’t have ended in her death, she would have hit him full in the face. “I won’t be your ornament.”

  “All you are is responsible,” he said, his hand against the bare skin of her arm. “For the Emerson gun! Or was it mere luck that it fired, and in the way it did? Tell me, truly—was it your doing?”

  “It was not.”

  “It was her doing,” her father rumbled from behind her. Claire stiffened. “All I have laid claim to. It is her doing! And she is my child, and you will not have her.”

  “Oh,” the General said, joining them. “I rather think he will. Wouldn’t it be fascinating, boy, to learn what Mr. Emerson has been keeping from us all this time?” He raised his hand again, crooked his fingers. A pair of soldiers surged past him and seized her father by the shoulders.

  “You cannot do this!” he yelled. “You cannot take me from my girl! Claire! Claire! My girl! I am coming for you!”

  Claire flinched, but she did not turn to look. The General canted his head as he watched his men pull Emerson away. And Remy Duchamp, slim shouldered, straight-backed, every inch now the prince he hadn’t been before, paid them no attention. He studied Claire’s face as though she were his muse.

  Ambrose, she thought, mourning. Orleans. An escape—

  Today, of all days, she had forgotten her gloves. Why had she forgotten her gloves?

  “Claire, is it?” the Governor asked, in a voice like silk. “I have so very many questions for you.”

  Seven

  It wasn’t until the next morning that Claire fully understood the complexities of her situation.

  The process of transporting her to the Governor’s Mansion had been achingly slow, as Duchamp and the General had duties to attend at the Fair for the rest of the day. And yet the General, in particular, didn’t want to let Claire out of his sight. With a nervous sergeant in tow, he’d marched her to a pavilion at the far side of the Fair, an icebox of a building devoted to St. Cloud’s dairy industry. Past the display of mechanical churns, past the electric lights beaming down on the show Holsteins tended by pink-cheeked, picture-perfect farmhands, past the clusters of tourists sipping new cream from glass pitchers. Up a side set of stairs into a little office. The General gestured brusquely for Claire to sit at the desk, and he and the guard stepped outside onto the platform overlooking the pavilion.

  “There’s nothing uncanny about that girl,” she heard the General mutter, “but her father’s gone and lost his mind, and he’d stop at nothing to get her back.”

  “Pardon my asking, but why do you bother with Jeremiah Emerson, sir?”

  Claire leaned forward to peer through the cracked door. The General was adjusting his cape, thinking. “Fanatics work long hours for little pay, and this one is smarter than most,” he said, finally. “The trick is in knowing when to cut ’em loose, son.”

  “But won’t taking his daughter just enrage him?”

  The General sighed. “Tell that to the Infant. Duchamp’s grown himself a set of iron balls overnight.” With that, he shut the door, and Claire watched, horrified, as the lock turned behind him.

  She spent a good eight hours in that little room, cooling her heels, covering her mouth when the rich, round smell of the buttercream below was too much to bear on an empty stomach. No one had thought to feed her, but that seemed to be the smallest of her problems. She had gone without food before.

  Instead she thought over the morning again, and again—had there been a time she could have resisted? Run? Her brother would be waiting for her at the station tomorrow. Waiting with flowers in his arms, a key for her room in his pocket. A chance to choose her future—and even if, somehow, both of her brother’s friends were cruel tyrants, at least she could have had a say in her new captor.

  It wasn’t safety, but by God, it was closer to safety than where she was now.

  They came for her at dusk. The Fair had been trimmed with streetlights, and they glimmered against the darkening sky as the soldiers put her into a carriage and set her off to the mansion.

  Claire knew where the Governor’s Mansion was. Everyone did. A few years before Claire had been born, the city of Monticello-by-the-Lake had been decimated by a fire. Three square miles of the city had been taken, including the old residence, home to Remy Duchamp’s father, that had overlooked the great sparkling lake that the city’s name had laid claim to. The Duchamps had taken the fire as an opportunity to move their home inward to a more defensible position, and now the mansion sprawled down Prairie Street.

  Tonight their carriage passed the smaller homes of the mayor and the General (three-storied and turreted, still too much house for anyone) that clung sycophantically to the end of Prairie until they could see the mansion rising in the distance. It looked like a castle. Not just in style, but in how it had clearly been built to be defensible—small windows, small doors, great swaths of undecorated stone. No wood, not even in its shutters. The fire had taught them that. The mansion went on for what should have been blocks, its walls swelled out to the edges of the sidewalk, and in the gathering dark Claire felt a prickle of fear begin behind her eyes.

  “I don’t have any of my things,” she whispered as the carriage pulled up out front. It was an idiotic thing to say, but maybe, just maybe, they would let her go home first, and as she packed her bag, someone would turn their head for a moment and she could change her ticket, take a train to Orleans tonight—

  The soldier snorted as he hopped out the door. “You won’t need your things,” he said, and hauled her down to the ground.

  Soldiers everywhere: soldiers opening the mansion’s doors, soldiers milling about in the hall inside. She only had a brief, confused impression of the mansion’s foyer—polished pale marble floors, a white-armed statue of Hera, all the ceilings inlaid with a mosaic tile that gleamed like blackfish below the water—before she was ushered upstairs and into a room at the end of a long hall of doors.

  “I don’t have any of my things,” she said again, as the soldier produced a set of keys and fumbled with the lock.

  The lock. They could lock her in there.

  At that, he looked her full in the face. Dark eyes, dark hair, a generous mouth that right now was turned down at its edges. His skin was brown from the sun.