yellow lifted his hands, stepped back. His face was flushed red to the ears. “I didn’t mean nothing.”
It was almost as if Emily could feel the mood in the car shift. The men who wore charms stood up a little straighter. They looked firmer, more resolute, and certainly happier. Stanton had defended them and made the man in purple and yellow seem a blowhard and bumbler. But the dissection had been unsettling to watch.
“Did you have to be so harsh?” she said under her breath.
“Uneducated idiots like that can wreak havoc with a credomancer’s power unless they’re brought up good and short.” He sniffed distastefully. “Scientists.”
At that moment, the conductor came into the car.
“Well, gents, they say it’s a gusher,” he announced, with a rueful glance at his watch. “They’ve sent Aberrancy hunters down the tracks to deal with the mess, but it could be hours before they let us pass.”
“A gusher!” the words passed excitedly between the men in the car. Even the fellow in the purple and yellow waistcoat seemed awed by the announcement, but Emily had no idea what it meant.
“Let’s have a look!” someone suggested.
“The train’s not going anywhere!” came an answering voice. “I want to see the Aberrancy hunters at work!”
The young men were the first off, obviously glad for the opportunity to stretch their legs. They whooped their way toward the front of the train. Older men followed; even the man in purple and yellow went to have a look. Soon, the only ones left in the car were Emily, Stanton, and two elderly men whose faces were set in expressions that indicated they were far too old for such nonsense.
“A gusher?” Emily said to Stanton.
He looked at her tiredly, his eyes red rimmed.
“Must we? I have a headache.”
“Fine.” Emily threw up a hand. “I’ll go alone. You stay here.”
Stanton ground out his cigar.
“Oh, certainly not,” he sighed. “Sit comfortably when I could be doing something dangerous instead? Perish the thought.”
The scene of the commotion was about a mile up from where the train had stopped. Compared to the endless emptiness surrounding them, the group that had collected around the “gusher” seemed small and inconsequential. But as they drew closer, Emily saw that it was quite a large and active gathering.
And as they got closer still, she saw that the scene was actually one of barely controlled chaos. The crowd from the train was watching a crew of a dozen workers who milled about a dark, steaming mass. The workers wore globe-shaped helmets of silver, their features hidden behind green smoked-glass faceplates. Indeed, the workers did not display a single inch of skin; they were dressed in heavy suits of stiff material that glittered as they moved, as if their clothes were embroidered with diamonds.
“Are those the Aberrancy hunters?” Emily asked through a hand covering her mouth and nose; the smell was foul, like rotten eggs and decaying meat. “What’s that they’re wearing?”
“They’re wearing protective suits of spun glass and silver,” Stanton said. “Black Exunge will wick through most organic materials.”
Emily and Stanton pressed through the crowd. On every side Emily heard the whispered word “gusher” again.
“What’s a ‘gusher’?” Emily asked.
“Sometimes large pockets of Exunge will collect under the ground, building pressure. Gushers are rare, and good thing, too, for their occurrence is nothing short of a natural disaster.” Stanton looked up over the top of the crowd. “This isn’t a gusher, though. If it was, they wouldn’t be letting people push in so close to watch. Probably just a little upwell causing annoyances.”
They finally came to a place where they could see the Aberrancy hunters at work. The men were using coal-oil flamethrowers to scorch the earth around a trickling black pool.
“They have to completely sterilize the area around the source of the flow,” Stanton explained. “Notice that they’re keeping the flames well away from the Exunge itself. It’s indecently flammable, a property which can be either extremely dangerous or extremely useful.”
As if to illustrate Stanton’s somewhat oblique statement, a grasshopper leaping away from the heat of the flamethrower landed directly on the tarry mass. The insect began to grow at a frightful rate, expanding like a bubble in a pan of hot molasses. There were screams from the crowd; everyone pulled back in preparation for panicked flight. But the Abberancy hunters responded with practiced efficiency. One who’d been standing off to the side jumped directly into the path of the swelling Aberrancy, flapping a bright red handkerchief. The action drew the creature’s