Free The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook

early-morning sunshine trickling in through the windows seemed more like a drizzle, so that everything the pale light touched appeared damp.
    Even her mother’s white hair seemed muted by it. Without glancing up from the newssheets spread across her father’s reading apparatus, she observed, “You forgot to wind your clock, Mina.”
    Mina hadn’t thought she would need to. The night had been a sleepless one . . . except during the hour she was supposed to have risen. “Yes.”
    “Are you in a hurry, then?”
    “Not yet.” Newberry wouldn’t bring his cart around for another quarter hour.
    From the sideboard, Mina selected a boiled egg and thinly sliced toast. Simple fare, perhaps, but Cook’s toast was unequaled anywhere—even her mother had not yet devised a machine that could replicate it. To Mina’s surprise, a length of sausage was leftover, given as payment after her father had infected the butcher’s newborn with nanoagents. If her brothers Henry and Andrew had still lived here, not even a smear of grease would have remained. Suddenly missing them acutely, she slid the sausage onto her plate and took the chair across from her mother.
    She poured the cheap Liberé coffee and pretended not to notice as, on her left, her father looked up from the newssheets and subjected her to a quiet scrutiny—looking for bruises or stiffness in her movements, she knew. In the first years following the revolution, she’d tried to hide them, scuffling with her brothers as cover. Stupid, perhaps, because her father hadn’t been fooled. But she couldn’t bear the helpless anger in her father’s eyes every time she returned home with a puffy lip or a bruised cheek. At least the fights with her brothers let him do something, even if it was only a reprimand.
    Fortunately, she hadn’t needed to cover any bruises of late—not since Newberry had been assigned to her. A giant hulk of a man following her about dissuaded anyone from striking her, no matter how much they hated the Horde.
    And if not for Newberry, her brothers might never have felt they could leave—first the practical Henry, gone to Northampton to see if he could wrestle order and prosperity from an estate that no one in their family had seen for two hundred years, followed by Andrew, embarking on the first steps toward a career at sea. Her gaze fell on Andrew’s empty seat. Marco’s Terror should have reached the Caribbean by now, and so his letters would be arriving from the French Antilles within a few weeks. She wondered if he’d write of how much he hated the ship, or how much he loved it.
    Strange, that she couldn’t guess. Unlike Henry, whose steely good sense rivaled their father’s, Andrew’s and Mina’s characters had been assembled from both parents—though neither were as high-strung as their mother, whose emotions even the Horde hadn’t been able to suppress. Typically, Andrew’s opinions and reactions mirrored Mina’s, but she couldn’t predict how he would find life aboard the ship. Would he chafe against the rigid order on the Terror , or revel in the freedom of the open seas and every new sight that his journey presented? And if it were both, which would win out over the other?
    Whatever his response, she was certain of one thing: that he would be grateful for the opportunity to know whether it suited him, rather than forever wondering. Mina would always be similarly grateful to Hale—and for finding a job that so perfectly suited her.
    Dead people of all sorts were more tolerable than most of those living.
    Her father finished his silent examination and returned to his newssheets, clicking the page turner. Though faster by hand, anyone living with her mother soon learned the simple pleasure of watching a well-designed machine at work. A stylus with a rubber ball at its tip slowly pushed the paper over, treating Mina to a sideways view of the caricature of a Horde magistrate: rat-faced, his eyes nothing more than slits drawn with