NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week: Invented Wings (an extract)

My post today is an extract from my own work, my novel-in-progress 'Invented Wings'. It's Young Adult steampunk set in an alternative Wellington around 1850, and this extract comes from right at the beginning. I hope you enjoy.

Bernie stumbled down the hill, through the carefully cut grass, arms outstretched in an attempt to keep her balance, her cream dress with the cut needle lace edging blowing around her ankles. To her left, running from Kelburne above her and down to the quay, the brass escalator was full, ladies and gentlemen enjoying this early day of summer by taking a ride around the gardens and watching their magnificent city spread out before them
Bernie had no time for that, though, not today. Her uncle's airship would be docking – and here she looked at the gold pocket watch she wore around her neck – exactly two minutes and thirty nine seconds, and she wanted to be there the instant he stepped onto South Tower, made his way down the spiraling steps to greet her. She missed him immensely on these absences, even though they were the norm and his brief visits the exception. He was her only living relative on her mother's side, and who else would have thought to bring her that necklace of crocodile teeth, which Betty said was an aberration and only grudgingly allowed in the house. He told her stories of far off lands; of huge stone templed hidden deep in the forest for thousands of years, of people who pierced bars through their noses and rings around their necks.
As Bernie continued she took in the whole of Wellington spread out before her, this great clunking city, this southern corner with its harbour and its hills, transformed in the space of little over fifty years from bush to refuge and finally to a beacon that – even if they did not see it now – the rest of the world would surely come to bow down to. She saw the rooves of the factories glimmering in the sun, their great chimneys rising up to the sky, the railway line stretching out around the harbour and further north than she could see. The city's streets were crisscrossed by tramlines and she could see the gleaming red and gold trams making their way through. Amongst them were the first of the private trackcars, a show of status if there ever was one, their exteriors proudly polished. Steamers were docked and cargo ships loaded by the great cranes which had been constructed along the docks, and beside them an airship was just leaving from north tower, perhaps bound for Dunedin where so many young men were seeking their fortune in the gold fields.
Around her in the gardens were people going about their lives, children playing with hoops or balls or – when the warden's back was turned – climbing the prized trees. It was said that a specimen of every tree in the world grew here, and though Bernie knew this to be a clear exaggeration, she was nevertheless proud of this magnificent collection located only minutes from her home. Students from the university sat among these fine trees, paying varying degrees of attention to the books of equations and diagrams open on their laps. One had his hand on the leg of another, and she was giggling, her eyes shining Some on the escalator turned their heads away with a smile, perhaps recognising something of their younger selves, but others were clearly aghast and the warden good-naturedly moved them along.
And then a bang. It came from Bernie's left at first, the side of her bad ear, so it took a moment for her to realise what and where it it was, even though she heard it clearly in the right, the impact so sudden and loud that she could almost feel the individual vibrations of her ear drum. By the time she realised it she had already been propelled several metres across the grass, her ankle twisted under her and – looking down – her feet had caught against her dress and ripped it. Her first thought was how disappointed Betty would be, how she'd wonder aloud why Bernie was so clumsy, and she didn't believe all those wacky theories about her ear being responsible – how can your ear be responsible for what your feet do? And then Bernie heard the screams.
Someone – a man, young, perhaps a student – was asking if she was alright and she said she was, thank you very much for asking, and he helped her to her feet. Then, looking round, she stumbled back in horror. Where the escalator had been was now a mangled wreck of metal, twisted and contorted and obscured by smoke. There were people amongst the rubble, limbs twisted to impossible angled, mangled parasols. A woman lay motionless on the ground and someone was walking away from her, shaking his head. Bernie saw something lying on the ground, puzzled, tried to identify it and then, registering it as an arm, she began to scream.
She was silenced by the man who had helped her to her feet placing his hand on her arm. “I'll take you home.” He was wearing a beige shirt, without a necktie, and his hair was a little unkempt but not so much so that the average person would notice.
Bernie shook her head, moved forward. She sat down beside a little boy with a gash in his arm, showed him how to hold it above his head to stem the bleeding and, after a few moments deliberation, declared her dress to be a hopeless case anyway and ripped strips from the bottow to make bandages. She sat beside a couple who were essentially uninjured but badly shaken, though of course only she was admitting it. He was attempting to reassure her but, such was the extent of his shock, he was only making things worse. Then she took a rug from where a small group had been picnicking and used it to cover up a body, a man perhaps in his fifties, still looking neat in his weekday suit.
Then, shaking and limping, she accepted the offer to be walked home.

Bernie's home was nearby, a large wooden villa with a deep porch and dormer windows protruding from the roof. Any property in Kelburne was highly desirable, particularly given the city's rapidly expanding population, and though the garden was not as neat as those of the other houses in the street and the paintwork was worn and chipped in places, the tragic death of a wife and mother could excuse a lot. Or so Bernie reasoned.
At the gate, Bernie offered brief thanks, and he nodded, excused himself and was gone. She opened the front door quietly, hoping – against all reason – to sneak upstairs without having to speak to anyone, but barely was she through the door before Betty was fussing around her, exclaiming what did she do to her dress and Bernie was suddenly very quiet and then began to cry, weeping in silence until Betty undid her dress there at the kitchen table and helped her into a newly laundered smock with blue flowers and began to gently brush out Bernie's blonde curls until at last she told her what had happened.
Betty shook her head. This was the second attach in a month; the first, an explosion in a tea room, had killed a baby. Someone needed to start cracking down on these people. She couldn't understand why anyone would do anything like that, not when there were more than enough perfectly legitimate ways of changing things if you didn't like them – after all, Wellington was the only place in the world with universal sufferage and a truly free press.
Then Betty told Bernie not to worry about the dress, and she should go and lie down (“not with a book – you don't want to strain your head”) and suddenly Bernie remembered.
“Uncle Melthas! I forgot! He should be here by now. I must...” She began to lace up her boots. Betty stopped her.
“He's quite capable of finding his own way here.”
“But he'll wonder where I am.”
“You can explain everything when he gets here. Anyway, if you go now you'll probably just end up missing each other.”
“But...”
“No.”
Bernie knew when she was beaten, and she dragged herself upstairs, her body feeling surprisingly heavy. She thought of pinning up her hair, but felt, for some reason she couldn't define, that she couldn't bear to have anything constricting her; even her loose linen frock, one of her most casual, seemed uncomfortable, almost a burden.
She lay down on her bed and read anyway by the glow of the oil lamp. The Ruby Necklace was one of those trashy novels Betty disapproved of, but her father bought for her sometimes with his newspaper, perhaps knowing little about them, more likely not caring. She tried to make herself interested in the desperate searching of the heroine for the young man she had farewelled on a treacherous journey, but though she would normally have absorbed the exciting twists of the plot in one sitting she found herself restless, distracted.
In an hour she was up, worried that her uncle had still not arrived, ready to head out and search the streets. But her father, now emerged looking tired and distracted, forbade it, with Betty's backing.
“You know what Melthas is like,” Betty said, the scientist with his swollen eyes and thinning hair nodding in agreement. “Always off on some adventure, totally unreliable. He will probably turn up next week with no idea what year it is, even.”
Bernie insisted that such a statememnt was unfair. For all his untethered existence he had not let her down once; his plans for this visit had been meticulously laid out; he had told her the ship he would take passage on to Melbourne – which had arrived four days ago, confirmed by the listings at the back of the paper, and then the scheduled airship to Wellington.
Father and Betty gave each other knowing looks, as if to say that one day she would learn, so she told them, without raising her voice but with a noticeable tremble, that they'd be sorry if something happened to him, and then walked upstairs to her bedroom where she read by the glow of the oil lamp. Bernie didn't understand why everyone seemed to feel the way they did about Uncle Melthas – he was so kind and so funny, always looking out for her even from far away. And he hadn't had it easy either – his wife, after less than two years of marriage, had left in the middle of the night, taking their baby son with her. Bernie became almost white with fury when she thought about this; her just getting up and leaving him all alone. And thus, with these thoughts, it was a restless night as she tossed and turned below the duvet before being woken by a loud thud against the window.
Bernie jumped, still unsettled by the explosion, and then opened the small attic window to look outside, but when she raised the dull glow of the lamp she had left burning, she could see something green on the roof.
“Mister Butterworth” she breathed in horror, and anxiously dragged her chair to the window. Standing on that, and with the help of a clothes hanger – from which she carelessly discarded a smock on the floor – she managed to drag the lifeless parrot, its feathers askew and its neck at a frightening angle, dropped it on to the pillow.
She had no idea how to revive it, but she did what she could, massaging the area where she assumed his heart would be, smoothing his feathers down, breathing air onto his face. With tears in her eyes she finally admitted to herself that it was all no good. How devastated Uncle Melthas would be – she couldn't remember a time before he had Mister Butterworth perched on his arm of shoulder, or flying circles above him.
Drying her eyes, and knowing that, with Mister Butterworth here, Uncle Melthas must have reached Wellington at least, she noticed a ring on the bird's leg, inside a slip of paper. It was nothing more than an address, an address in Tarikaka. Which raised significantly more questions than it answered.