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Bran nodded mutely, helplessly. Brunty waved his device in the frosted air.
“It’s a Voltaic Pyle! I stole it from Mr. Volta’s laboratory in Switzerland. Just swiped it—right out of your world and into mine. I think he called it a battery when I broke his fingers getting it free. Very stubborn, your Swiss. That’s what your wooden friends are so cross about. Not supposed to go hopping the fence into Breathertown. But why not, I say? You can trip on your own faces and get up in Glass Town. Why shouldn’t I see Switzerland?”
Branwell blinked. He shrugged uncertainly. “What’s a bat-tree?” he asked.
“It’s what’ll make Glass Town and Gondal equal at last, that’s what it is!” the Magazine Man snapped. He seemed very put out that Branwell had not gasped or shown other signs of awe. “It gives me power.”
Suddenly, the capital O’s of Brunty’s eyes looked terribly young and afraid.
“I . . . I actually don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next,” Brunty whispered. “If it all goes pear-shaped, tell my sisters I tried—”
But Branwell never heard what the poor man wanted his sisters to know. Brunty the Inking Liar, Brunty the Godforsaken Gondalier, Can’t-Take-Him-Anywhere Brunty, Brunty the Spying Sack of Slime, Brunty the Miserable Fat Folio, went rigid as a streetlamp. His arms shot straight up to the cloudy sky. His jaw hung slack. Inside his mouth, his wood-pulp teeth began to glow green and smoke.
“Make ready!” cried Captain Bravey.
His raggedy regiment thumped their oaken chests in the jumbled joy and terror and regret and blind red rapture all soldiers feel in the moment before the fight begins. Whatever happened next, they would have a new story to tell round the hearth of Bravey’s Inn. Some of them would, anyhow.
“Fire!” roared the Captain, and they did, but so did Brunty.
The volley of loyal Glass Town musket balls banged across the frosted meadow in an arc so perfect military historians would have fallen to their knees in awe. Anne moaned and began to stir against her knotty yew tree. She only just managed to convince her eyes to open as the bullets began to unfurl into the stout Brown Besses they’d seen in Port Ruby, with their brown aprons and brown rolling pins and their stout brown hearts. Anne’s vision blurred and wriggled and through a groggy silver film of pain she saw the musket girls explode in gouts of ultramarine flame. She tried to scream for them, but nothing came out. Her head lolled round, trying to find someone she knew in the smoke.
Brunty was gone. Or, at least, he wasn’t Brunty anymore. The thick, soapy green acid of his machine foamed out of his mouth. It rimmed the scrolls of his perfectly arranged hair. It seeped through the joints of his elbows and knees. It overflowed the capital O’s of his eyes like moss climbing out of two broken windows. The blue lightning no longer snapped or spit or crackled. It exploded from the tips of his fingers and boomed out of the middle of his chest and even dribbled horribly out of his nostrils. Wherever the lightning hit a musket ball, it detonated, and the half-uncurled little warrior inside vanished into half a thimble full of ash. The headlines on Brunty’s waistcoat shivered. They broke open into new print: HEAR YE HEAR YE, READ ALL ABOUT IT! THE TRIUMPH OF BRUNTY’S AMAZING BATTERY! VICTORY ASSURED! V-GT DAY HAS COME AT LAST! The lightning kept coming and coming, firing at crazy angles, seeming to suck more strength from the heavy clouds above. Bravey’s men scattered and took cover behind stumps, woodpiles, inside the thick wooden door of the pub. Someone inside began passing buckets of water out down the line, to put out the flames before they could creep toward the inn with its thatched and naked roof and its rooms full of wooden men.
The Captain did not flinch. He just shouted:
“Form ranks, lads, form ranks! Prime and load! He’s just one man! Not even a man, he’s just Brunty! Naughty. Little. Pupper!”
The air smelled of old coins and ozone and lamp oil and a house still burning to the ground. Anne tried to stand, but she was so dizzy. The tree felt real and true against her back. Everything in front of her felt mad and gruesome and wrong and she wanted it to turn right back around and go back where it came from.
Brunty began to laugh. Then, his laughter boiled into a scream. A howl, really. And once he started, he couldn’t stop. Green smoke hissed up from his body. Burning holes opened up in the text that covered his clothes and his face and his hair and his hands, the text that was Brunty. The block-print headlines on his waistcoat sizzled together into a wet black mass of nothing. Acid ate up whole chapters of him as Bran and Anne watched, wanting it to stop, wanting to be free of him, wanting no one else to get hurt. Under all that great pile of wanting they could not twitch the smallest muscle. The Magazine Man groaned and screeched and wept. And slowly, slowly, while his fingers flung lightning at the world, he dr
agged his hand toward the latch on the side of his scroll-knob belly. The hand did not want to obey. It wanted to keep living the life electric. Brunty the Godforsaken Gondalier lifted his eyes to Anne. Green foam poured like moldy tears out of the once-elegant printed O’s of his eyes.
“Please,” he rasped through dissolving teeth. “I can’t turn it off. I don’t know how. It hurts. Wasn’t supposed to hurt.”
Anne found her feet. Her head throbbed and her spine ached, but she stood up all the same. She stood and looked at the sorry man writhing in pain and reaching out to her for help, reaching out for Anne, who could not even bear for one solitary field mouse to go hungry in the garden if she could help it. She stood, and watched him burn, and did nothing.
“Poor bugger,” Anne said, and the smile on her face was cold and cruel.
Branwell took a step away from his sister. She was only eight years old. She wasn’t supposed to know how to be cold yet. Had they taught her that, the three of them? He remembered suddenly a night years ago, when Anne had been so small and so quiet. It had been deep night, and the fire burned in the parlor, and they had still been six, then. Maria and Elizabeth had been tatting lace by candlelight. Papa had asked Anne what she wanted most in all the world. Just a silly thing papas ask sometimes. But Anne had looked at him with huge, serious, willful eyes and said: age and experience. What kind of girl said that, and not: I’d very much like a pony, thank you. It had made him shudder then and it made him shudder now. And in that eerie winter light all shadowed with acid flames, Anne looked quite, quite grown.
Branwell ran. He ran up the hill, toward Bravey’s Inn, away from that old, knowing look on his little sister’s face, away from the book burning to death on the grass. He felt as though his heart were crying and his eyes were beating. He snatched one of the fire-buckets from a retired corporal’s hands and dashed back down the hill, trying not to slosh all the water out as his legs thumped against the half-frozen ground. Finally, Bran stopped, his breath hitching with sobs and hiccups and misery and the brightness of battle.
“Everyone mucks up sometimes!” he screamed at Brunty. The Magazine Man looked at him like Branwell had just turned into a camel. A sputtering bolt of sickly flame shot past Bran’s head, missing him by the space of a fly’s wing. Branwell scowled. Well, of course it made no sense now, but it had seemed just the perfect thing to say ten minutes ago, when the Gondalier had looked so beaten. Branwell sighed and dumped out the bucket of water onto Brunty’s smoking, boiling chest. The beastly ultramarine light went out of Brunty and he crumpled to the ground, his burnt fingers still working, grasping, twitching.
“If you’d have stopped hollering so loud, I might have gotten a word before now,” Branwell complained.
Anne’s heart sank down into the icy pit of her stomach as a horrible cry bashed through the woods behind her. The spine that had hardened into diamond in her went wobbly as water. The cold, cruel expression vanished from her dear face. Anne knew that cry. She’d made it herself enough times when they were playing soldiers and Bran killed Captain Bravey again and forced Anne to act out a noble death for him and give him a state funeral in the butter dish. She turned and bolted up the hill.
Branwell was already running at a dead sprint across the hoarfrost to the fallen warrior in the grass.
Please don’t let it be Bravey, he thought, and Anne did, too. Please don’t let it be Bravey. Let it be someone we don’t know, someone we never named and slept with and made to march across the parlor in formation.
But it was. It was Bravey. Half his body was charred black where the last fork of Brunty’s unnatural lightning had struck him. Bran had not thought a wooden eye would look any different dead than alive, but Captain Bravey’s did. They had been such a nice walnut-wood color before. Now they were white as birch-bark. Anne flung herself onto Bravey’s scorched, stiff chest. Branwell let her. She was a girl, after all, and girls could fling themselves and cry and that. Sometimes he envied them, but not often. He wiped dried blood off his upper lip. The danger past, Bravey’s loyal men crowded round. They took off their caps and held them to their hearts. One old Quartermaster, with splendid muttonchops carved into his rowan-wood face and a long bandolier full of vials and capsules and cartridges round his barrel-chest, began to weep golden sap onto the Captain’s gentle forehead.
“Stop it!” snapped Anne.
Branwell recoiled. His lips curled up into a snarl as he got ready to scold her stupid for being so callous in the face of tragedy. What was wrong with her?
