Shadow of the War Machine (The Secret Order) by Kristin Bailey Page A

Beautiful and delicate with dark eyes and hair, the deceased baroness floated through the fog. Her translucent hands caressed her swollen belly. She must have been only days from delivering her child.
    I watched her, mute and transfixed, as she continuedtoward me with a soft and welcoming smile on her full lips. Except for the lack of color in her face, she seemed so real, I expected her to step around me as a normal person would. Instead Rathford’s wife continued forward. I took a step back and gasped as the woman made of nothing but smoke and light walked right through me.
    I bent over, holding my arms over my middle just to feel I was real. Then I spun quickly, not wanting to miss a single moment of what transpired.
    “If I didn’t come down here, I would never see you at all,” she said. Like Rathford, her voice sounded distant, as if she were speaking from within a glass bottle. “Do you finally have it working?” She kissed Rathford’s cheek. He stood and embraced her for a long time.
    “This is so strange,” Peter commented, stepping closer to the couple as the machine behind us shifted the lenses and made a whirring noise. He waved his hand in front of Rathford’s face. The smoke curled in the breeze, making the image waver like a reflection in a pond. “It’s as if they are alive, but not.”
    “I’ve seen some of the old plans for moving-picture machines, but this is beyond words,” Will said even as my eyes began to water. The smoke stung them, or perhaps it was the lingering effects of the bright light.
    Rathford leaned back, his gaze taking in his wife’s translucent face. The wisps of smoke curled away from her, and her body faded for a moment. The lights flickered, and yet Rathford noticed none of it. “My love, you shouldn’t have come down those stairs at all. Are you still feeling faint?” Rathford laid a reverent hand against his wife’s belly.
    “I’m fine. Whatever came over me passed yesterday. Does your invention function as you had hoped?” She turned and looked up at the machine. “Can it really capture a moment in time?”
    “We shall see. I’m testing it now.” Rathford placed his hands on his wife’s delicate shoulders and gazed up at his creation. I knew the look I saw in his eyes. I knew the hope and the feeling of fullness in his heart that I could so plainly see on his face. It was part of the power of invention, the intoxicating allure of creation. Rathford had been a brilliant man, but the dark temptation of that talent had corrupted him.
    “I cannot wait to see what you have done.” She turned to face him. “I am so proud of you.”
    He kissed her hand. “Go upstairs and have your tea. Promise me if you feel weak or faint at all, you will go straight to bed.”
    “Straight to bed, I promise.”
    The lights flickered and died, and the ghosts faded into the curling smoke. I felt a heaviness deep in my chest. Rathford had been obsessed with the moment of his wife’s death. She had fallen down the stairs after she had spilled her tea in the sitting room. Dear Lord, we had just witnessed their final moment together.
    “Well,” Peter interjected with an overly cheery voice. “That wasn’t disturbing at all, what?”
    Will shuddered next to me even as I tried to shake off my lingering horror. That was when it dawned on me. “The other crystal tubes over there on the table, they must be for the machine.” Will and Peter met me at the table. We inspected each of the large murky crystals. They were shaped a bit like hexagonal prisms. I held one up to the light shining through the crack in the panel door. Within the crystal were thousands of tiny images, miniature shadows trapped in the glass.
    For the life of me, I could not figure how Rathford had printed them within the clear confines of the prism. As I turned the crystal between my fingers, the tiny images shifted like the falling pieces within a kaleidoscope. I turned the prism in the light, and my fingertip