Free The Brass Giant by Brooke Johnson Page B

as her eyes darted across the room, looking for the nearest thing to throw. Nothing was heavy or large enough. Tolly grabbed the door handle, and her shoulders tensed, every muscle in her body bristling. She felt the weight of her pocket watch hanging from her belt, and without thinking, she detached it from its chain and hurled it at Tolly’s head.
    The door slammed behind him, and her pocket watch shattered against it.
    M R. S TRICKET FOUND Petra slumped against the back door, the pieces of her broken pocket watch clutched in her trembling hands. He knelt in front of her, his feeble fingers delicately brushing the matted hair from her eyes. “Petra, whatever is the matter?”
    She looked up, still seething over her argument with Tolly. In the calmest tone she could manage, she told Mr. Stricket she was fine, but anger rattled her voice. She squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a deep breath, but when she exhaled, she felt no better. Tolly was still an intolerable ass.
    â€œWhat’s this here?” asked Mr. Stricket, prying Petra’s fingers away from the pocket watch.
    Petra couldn’t muster the words to respond.
    Mr. Stricket took the broken watch into his spindly hands. “Let’s see what the damage is.” He carried the pieces into the back room and spread them out on the worktable. After a few minutes he called for Petra.
    She climbed to her feet and entered the workroom, thankful for something to take her mind off Tolly.
    â€œWhere did you get this?” he asked, gesturing to the broken watch.
    She shrugged. “I’ve always had it.” The watch had been on her person when Matron Wade took her in all those years ago, along with a screwdriver and a half-­eaten slice of crumb cake, the legacy of whatever life she’d left behind.
    â€œThe craftsmanship is the most artistic, complex clockwork engineering I have seen in all my years,” Mr. Stricket said. “Whoever made this watch was a master clockwork engineer. The gear makeup is phenomenal, and two mainsprings . . . I’d have never thought of it.”
    Petra blinked. “ Two mainsprings?”
    Mr. Stricket drew her in. “See here, the double barrel? One mainspring drives the gears, but it also winds the second mainspring as it uncoils, diverting a small amount of power to a secondary system, all without jeopardizing the integrity of the timepiece. Once the first mainspring has expended its energy, the gears shift, using the second mainspring to power the watch, in the meantime tightening the first mainspring again.”
    â€œPowering the watch in tandem,” she said, pulling up a chair.
    â€œYes! Now, there is a bit of energy loss between the two mainsprings over time, which is expected, but the carrier of the watch only has to tighten the primary mainspring with the winding stem, no more complicated than your standard single-­mainspring watch.”
    Two mainsprings. When the idea first came to her, Petra had thought it would revolutionize ticker engineering, but someone had already thought of it—­ and had gone so far as to build a functional model. All this time, she had been carrying it around in her pocket. The possibilities of such a system . . . If her pocket watch could run off two mainsprings, that meant the technology worked. It wasn’t just possible, wasn’t just a theory. It actually worked . She could design the automaton to use a similar design.
    â€œMr. Stricket, would you mind if I spent the rest of the afternoon putting it back together?”
    â€œNot at all,” he said, patting her arm. “Take all the time you need.”
    Mr. Stricket left her at the worktable, and she examined the broken watch. The glass covering the clock face had cracked into three pieces, and the minute hand had come loose, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. She cringed at the thought of the damage inside, and her anger at Tolly quickly turned into