Excerpt: Paper Lily

"Oh, enough of the clothes talk," Red whined. "Show us this gadget of yours."

A slow, mischievous grin crept across Ofeibea's face as she laid the small round object, just slightly larger than a pocket watch, in the palm of her hand. At once, the quiet whirring set up inside the mechanism. "This gadget, you mean?" she asked coyly.

They all leaned far in and stared. "Sweet green, that's gorgeous," Jimmy breathed.

"But what is it?" Jesse asked, a bit more skeptically.

"It is a thermal-powered clockwork calculator," she said proudly.

"How on Earth does it work?" This question, she noted with great amusement, came from Mr. Murphy.

"Well, it's a bit tricky," she admitted.

Tallulah laughed. "As the best tinkerer's devices are."

"The heat from one's hands warms up the gears and stores energy. The gears inside start turning – here." She carefully pried off the cover and exposed the works inside. Everyone leaned even closer to watch the tiny brass, glass, and wooden cogs begin to turn. "Now I simply push the numbers and operands required for my calculation – I'll say two plus one, to keep things simple for us." She pressed down on the "2" key, the plus sign, and the "1" key. A frenzy of whirring kicked up inside as the calculator performed the operation. "Now we watch here, where the clock face would be." A small brass arm raised up and slid into position where, if the cover were still attached, a small opening like the sun and moon dial on a clock had been left. Attached to the end of the arm was a small wooden cube emblazoned "3."

"That's brilliant!" Jumper declared.

"Honestly, it's not," Ofeibea said, returning the cover to the calculator and the calculator to its pocket. She had learned from painful experience not to leave her gadgets lying about within reach of curious fingers, no matter how much tinkering knowledge of their own they claimed to have – or even actually had. "It's a clever piece of work, I will grant. But it is embarrassingly slow – you saw how hard it had to think to come up with 'one plus two' – and it simply cannot perform any operation more complicated than whole-number division; if there's so much as the idea of a remainder, you might as well forget it, and fractions and percentages might as well be moon-men, for all I could get it to understand them."

"Still," Tallulah said, seeming deep in thought (Ofeibea realized that Tallulah did this with great frequency, as though her mind was simultaneously engaged in the conversation she was having with you and the possible future implications and applications of everything you were telling her. She rather reminded Ofeibea of her colleagues who had formerly been in the military, and she wondered if Tallulah was counted in that category, as well), "it is a very nice piece you've created. You did create that one, didn't you? Not just a modification?"

"More of a kit, you might say. My father – the skies alone know where he put his hand to them – had in his possession a copy of a design created by a German fellow called Wilhelm Schickard, all the way back in the 1600s. And he thought – that's my father, of course, not Schickard – that a clockwork calculator was as indispensible a possession to a proper young lady as a clutch or a reticule. He cleared off a few feet of space at a table in his workshop, sat my sister and me down at it, and rolled the plans and a bag of parts out in front of us. My sister was out of the room and up the street to write imaginary love letters to famous actors the instant Father's back was turned, but I stayed at it."

"A plan from the 1600s called for a thermal activation mechanism?" Jesse asked.

"Oh, no!" Ofeibea laughed. "That was my modification. The design called for all manner of additional gears and cogs and springs and winding pins. But I realized that I could reduce the number of parts by at least ten percent if I took all of that rot out and substituted a thermocouple, which of course Father had in breathtaking abundance all over the house."

Tallulah nodded. "That is impressive, Miss Worrow," she said. "To show that level of innovation and adaptability in a technical endeavor at the age of – how old were you?"

Ofeibea counted back, trying to place the calculator's origins based on who Daphne had been friends with and what Father had been working on, bent over those dusty, cluttered tables. "Twelve, I think."

Tallulah choked on a bite of spaghetti. "You've had that since you were twelve?"

"Why not? It still works so well – I've replaced the thermocouple twice, but as long as it can still add one plus two—"

"But, I mean – that is to say—" Tallulah sputtered, "you've managed to keep it in tact and running for – I'm sorry, I know it doesn't quite do to guess a lady's age, but I assume you've had that for over a decade."

Ofeibea smiled a tight-lipped, toothless smile. "I have, at that. And you're right – it doesn't do." She folded her napkin and slipped it primly beneath the edge of her plate. "The key, of course, was to make the outer casing as sturdy as possible. I may have lost a bit of efficiency and ecology through the heaviness of my materials, but I think that's been more than counterbalanced by the fact that I've been using the thing all these years and never had to replace it. Longevity counts for something, does it not?"

"Oh, of course, of course!" Tallulah said enthusiastically. "Miss Worrow, I hope you would not consider it impudent of me to ask if you'd ever given any thought to joining one of the Reliance settlements."

Fire flashed in Ofeibea's brain, but she forced it down. The persona she was trying to present to Tallulah and her crew would not be someone who would consider the activities of the Reliance communities to be criminal or in any way untoward. She would delight in them, maybe even embrace them. The outrage she was feeling now, no matter how justified it was, would be entirely out of place here. She smiled shyly and dropped her eyes to her plate. "Oh, Miss Berry," she said, "you're having me on."