She needed another option, and the idea came to her all at once.

She hurried across town to Perdition. It was that strange hour between day and night, the sky streaked red with the last vestiges of sunlight. The street was beginning to buzz with pleasure-seekers, and the air was redolent with opium. The Eden was still closed, but other establishments had flung their doors open to the night, music and laughter filling the streets.

She turned down the alley, hoping to find Zeke’s barn doors open and him on his crate, but they were closed tight, and no light shone from inside. She knocked, but no one answered. She tried the door, and, to her surprise, it pushed open.

“Zeke?” she called into the dark.

He wasn’t there, but she couldn’t wait.

There, in the center of the room, was the mountain trike he had displayed so proudly. She remembered the drawer where he’d kept the key and retrieved it.

“Zeke?” she called one last time, words of excuse ready on her tongue should he catch her stealing his most prized possession. But there was only silence.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, hoping perhaps the echo of her regret would linger and soften his anger upon his return, and then she ceased regretting, telling herself this was for Mariel and therefore justified.

She used the key to crank the engine until it hummed, the divinity glowing bright inside, and then steered the thing out of the barn, all the while expecting Zeke to return and catch her red-handed. But he did not, and she was away and down the alley within moments. She stuck to the back ways until she was clear of town so as not to draw too much attention, but people were becoming more accustomed to divinity engines every day. It was only a matter of time before they would be commonplace in Goetia.

The climb was more gradual than she had expected, and she made good time in Zeke’s machine. The road was clear, no sign of the donkey-hauled wagons that carried miners from the camp to the mine entrance. It was between shifts, not quite quitting time for the day shift or first bell for the late shift, so she had the road to herself. The trike proved easy to maneuver as it curved around the contours of the mountain, until finally she reached the mine complex.

Tabor’s mine was a combination of tall pitched-roof wooden buildings constructed across the valley. The mine entrance itself was somewhere inside it all, a hole and a tunnel that led into the belly of the mountain where Abaddon’s body rotted into treasure and birthed man’s next great age.