“Very sensible of you,” Henry said, rising and reaching into his pocket. “Allow me to contact my colleagues.” He went into the corner the rebels had just vacated and spoke briefly into something that looked like a small pocket mirror. He came back to us, putting the object in his pocket as he walked. “They should be here soon, but in the meantime, I can help you get started. The hard part will be getting everything out of this part of town.”

Alec grinned. “Actually, that will be the easy part. Where we’ll need your help is getting out of the city.”

We trooped down to the basement and into a corridor I’d never seen. It smelled familiar, though, and I suspected I knew where Alec was leading us. We came out into the underground railway station. “This leads uptown, past where you live,” Alec told Henry. “We use it to transport machines within the city.”

Henry gazed wide-eyed around the chamber and at the machine powering the railway. “Remarkable!” he said with a huge grin. “So we’ll merely need to load the machines onto your railway to get them out of the immediate reach of the soldiers.”

“That won’t be easy,” Colin said. “The dynamo is heavy, and it isn’t on wheels.”

“That’s where I come in,” Henry said cheerfully.

His friends had arrived by the time we made it back to the theater’s basement, where the machines had been hidden during the diversionary theatrical production. The dynamo had already been disconnected, and the group of magisters soon had it floating into the rail station, where it landed light as a feather on a flatbed car behind the pilot car. Once it was loaded, the car shot down the tunnel.

The Mechanics pushed the smaller steam engine into the cavern, with much effort, but the magisters stepped in and had it gliding along under its own power. After that demonstration, the Mechanics’ resistance to magister help faded. Getting Bessie onto a flatbed car took a combined effort from magisters and Mechanics. While the magisters and Mechanics worked with the heavy machinery, Lizzie and I went around the theater, gathering all evidence of the Mechanics’ presence there. It had mostly been cleared out for the performance, but in the balcony, basement, and dressing rooms we found some banners, maps, and machine diagrams that we added to the loads heading up the tunnel.

We worked in uncomfortable silence for a while before Lizzie finally said, “I know you’re angry at us. Maybe we should have just honestly recruited you instead of staging all those little dramas for you, but you must admit that you were alarmed to learn we were Mechanics. Why should we have thought that you’d be open to joining us?”