Fires of Invention Read online

  Mysteries of Cove, Book 1

  Fires of Invention

  J. Scott Savage

  © 2015 J. Scott Savage.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  Warriors

  Words and Music by Alexander Grant, Daniel Reynolds, Daniel Sermon, Benjamin McKee, Daniel Platzman and Joshua Mosser

  Copyright (c) 2014 SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC., ALEXANDER GRANT, IMAGINE DRAGONS PUBLISHING, SONGS FOR KIDINAKORNER and JOSHUA MOSSER

  All Rights for ALEXANDER GRANT Controlled and Administered by SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC.

  All Rights for IMAGINE DRAGONS PUBLISHING and SONGS FOR KIDINAKORNER Controlled and Administered by SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC.

  All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

  Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  © 2015 J. Scott Savage

  Illustrations of dragons and City of Cove by Brandon Dorman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at [email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  Visit us at ShadowMountain.com

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Savage, J. Scott (Jeffrey Scott), 1963– author.

  Fires of invention / J. Scott Savage.

  pages cm. — (Mysteries of Cove ; book 1)

  Summary: Even though technology and inventions have been outlawed in the mountain city of Cove, in order to save the city Trenton and Kallista must follow a set of mysterious blueprints to build a creature to protect them from the dragons outside their door.

  ISBN 978-1-62972-092-0 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  [1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Robots—Fiction. 3. Technology—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series: Savage, J. Scott (Jeffrey Scott), 1963–. Mysteries of Cove ; bk. 1.

  PZ7.S25897Fi 2015

  [Fic]—dc232015010149

  Printed in the United States of America

  Edwards Brothers Malloy, Ann Arbor, MI

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Bill Sheehy,

  the high school English teacher who

  sparked the creativity inside me.

  And to LuAnn Staheli,

  who encouraged thousands to

  love reading and writing.

  And to all the other teachers

  sparking creativity throughout the world.

  In youth you’d lay

  Awake at night and scheme

  Of all the things that you would change

  But it was just a dream

  The time will come

  When you’ll have to rise

  Above the best and prove yourself

  Your spirit never dies!

  —Imagine Dragons, “Warriors”

  The City of Cove

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  This was going to be the best thing Trenton had ever built—assuming he could finish assembling it without getting crushed. The “getting crushed” part was a real possibility. Every sixty seconds exactly, the horizontally spinning gear he clung to carried him beneath a cast-iron beam that would smash his head if he didn’t press himself flat against the spinning surface. If the impact didn’t kill him, the twenty-five-foot fall to the ground would.

  Gripping his wrench in his right hand and clinging to the gear with his left, he counted silently. At fifty-seven, he tightened the bolt with one last twist.

  Fifty-eight . . . He pulled the wrench free of the bolt.

  Fifty-nine . . . He looked up to see the beam coming toward him.

  And . . . sixty. He pressed his cheek against the grease-coated metal and passed so closely under the beam that he felt it brush his curly brown hair.

  As soon as he was clear of the beam, he popped up and double-checked each bolt. A rumble came from the small metal building nearby—the power-conversion machinery turning the gear. The wind blowing against his face carried the scent of oil, metal, and burning coal—a smell he could never get enough of.

  “Trenton,” one of the kids below yelled up at him. “If you get killed, can I have your tool set?”

  “What would you want with my tools?” Trenton shouted back. “As clumsy as you are, you’d end up cutting off one of your fingers and getting blood all over my kit.”

  General laughter sounded from below, and Trenton grinned. With the bolts checked, he swung through one of the holes in the giant gear and wrapped his legs around the second of two chains hanging below it.

  “You look like a monkey,” a redheaded girl called.

  Although none of the kids had actually seen a real monkey, they’d read about them in their history of Earth class that year. Swinging from the chain, Trenton hooted and pantomimed eating a banana. The girl laughed, and he felt a pleasant heat rush to his face. Simoni was the main reason he’d gone to all this trouble.

  Two weeks before, he’d overheard her telling a friend that there was nothing fun to do. The idea of using the huge gear attached to the conversion station to power his ride had popped into his head as if it was meant to be. Since then, he’d scavenged spare parts and sketched out the plans for what he hoped would show Simoni that he was more than someone who happened to be good at fixing bicycles and greasing playground equipment and roller-skate bearings. He shimmied up the chain to where he’d rigged a complicated series of pulleys, cables, and a metal lever that engaged the contraption.

  Holding a screwdriver between his teeth, he hooked a spring to one end of the lever. He took the screwdriver from his mouth and used it as a pry bar to stretch the spring until his arm began to shake. Then he looped the spring around a metal hoop that had once been part of a water pump, and the whole thing snapped into place.

  “Look,” said a voice that was all too familiar—Angus. “The grease monkey made a toy so he won’t have to play in the coal pits anymore.”

  Trenton hadn’t invited him to the lot outside the power-conversion station, but the boy with the perfect hair and big biceps followed Simoni everywhere like a puppy. Making coal jokes was one of Angus’s favorite taunts, partly because Trenton’s last name was Coleman, and partly because Trenton’s father worked in the mines.

  Trenton tied a rope around the end of the lever, yanked it tight, and slid down to a leather seat hanging between the two chains. From there it was a drop of only six or seven feet to the ground. Still, he had to make th
e jump carefully because the seat spun at the same rate as the gear it was connected to.

  He hit the ground, rolled on one shoulder, and leaped to his feet. He might not have been as big or as strong as most of the other boys his age, but he was nimble. Folding his arms across his chest, he looked up at his finished work with pride. With one chain attached to the inside of the gear and the other to the outside, the seat swung gracefully overhead, powered by the rumbling equipment of the station. The rope hung in easy reach, trailing around and around like the tail of a circling beast.

  “What’s it supposed to be?” asked a second grader who’d tagged along with his older brother.

  Trenton, who was about to graduate from eighth grade and start vocational training, patted the kid on the head. “I’m glad you asked.”

  He yanked on the rope as the swing passed by, and the pulley on the outside moved toward the center—the two chains drawing together until the seat was only a couple of feet above the ground. “This is going to be the most fun any kid has ever had.” He looked at the redheaded girl out of the corner of his eye. “I call it the Simoni Swing.”

  “You named it after me?” Simoni asked, watching wide-eyed as the swing circled around and around.

  This was exactly how Trenton had planned it—except for the part about Angus being there. He held out a hand. “Do you want to be the first to try it?”

  She looked up at the pulleys and springs. “Is it safe?”

  “Safer than riding the trolley to City Center.” Trenton had done the calculations over and over, making sure everything would work perfectly. Of course, it might have been better to try the swing for the first time with no one around. But he’d been too excited to show off his work for that.

  “You’re not really going to get on that invention, are you?” Angus asked Simoni.

  Trenton couldn’t believe what he heard. He spun around to face the bigger boy. “What did you call my swing?”

  “Exactly what it is.” Angus sneered. “An invention. And you’re an . . . an inventor.”

  Several of the smaller children gasped at the curse word, and part of the group moved away, as if even standing close might associate them with something which could land them in serious trouble.

  Trenton balled his fists. “Take it back, or I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Angus stepped forward and stared down at Trenton. “You going to hit me? You want to be guilty of violence and inventing, all in one day?”

  Forcing his hands to unclench, Trenton gripped his tool belt. Violence of any kind was nearly as big a crime as creating anything new, but he couldn’t stand there and let someone call him something so dirty—so humiliating.

  Simoni stepped between them. “It’s not an in—” She licked her pink lips as though saying the word would dirty them. “A you-know-what, is it? Because I don’t want anything to do with something like that. Or anyone who would make one.”

  Trenton felt his face go red again, this time in a bad way. His great plan of impressing Simoni was quickly falling apart. He had to pull things together before people got the wrong idea.

  He looked around the group. “How many of you have been to the playground by the air-circulation pumps?”

  Everyone except Angus raised their hands.

  The central exhaust pipe, which sucked used air out of the enclosed city and pulled filtered air in, ran up the center of each level. No one was allowed near it because the suction was strong enough to knock you off your feet. Each section of the city also had its own park and smaller circulation pumps to move the air around.

  All of the kids used to go to that playground after school until they got too old for it. Everyone except Angus. His dad was the marshal, the chancellor’s head of security, which gave him access to the executive playground used only by family members of city employees.

  “Right,” Trenton said, ignoring Angus’s snub. “And how many of you have been on the swings?” Of course, the same kids raised their hands.

  Simoni pointed to the gear. “But those swings aren’t hooked up to, you know . . .”

  “Which makes this an invention,” Angus said. “When my dad hears about it, he’ll put you into retraining.”

  Trenton swallowed. He didn’t know exactly what retraining was, except that it involved both physical and mental punishment. He’d seen a few people come back from it, and they all looked like they’d been through a war.

  This was part of the reason he hadn’t wanted Angus around. Technically, the swing could be viewed as building something not on Cove’s list of approved devices—inventing—but only if you looked at it the wrong way.

  He pointed to the swing. “Swings are already on the approved list. They’ve been around since long before we were born.” The kids nodded. He pointed to the spinning gear. “The power station equipment is the same thing they’ve used since level two was dug out of the mountain.”

  Angus opened his mouth, but Trenton hurried on before he could be interrupted. “All I did was take one approved device and hook it to another approved device using approved screws, bolts, springs, and levers. There is absolutely nothing new here. Which means this is not an invention. If anyone is an inventor here, it’s Angus, for inventing stories.”

  It was a good thing his mother wasn’t there. She’d stick soap in his mouth for an hour for using that kind of language.

  Simoni looked from Trenton to Angus and then at the swing. What she said next would determine whether Trenton would be taken in for retraining. Angus would never tell his father about something Simoni approved.

  But if she decided Trenton’s swing was something new . . .

  She took the end of Trenton’s shirt and wiped grease from his face. “I don’t think it’s an . . . invention.” Trenton released a pent-up breath. “But maybe you should try it first. To make sure it’s safe.”

  Trenton jumped into action. “Absolutely. I’ll show you. It’s so safe a baby could use it.” He grinned over his shoulder at Angus, who scowled. “Which makes it perfect for you.”

  He slid the wrench back into his belt and trotted to the circling swing. Because the chains currently hung near the inside of the gear, they weren’t moving very fast. The next time the seat came around, he stepped in front of it and sat down.

  A girl shrugged. “Not very exciting.”

  “Not yet.” Trenton said, circling around. “But watch this.” He grabbed the rope hanging above his head. “Everybody stand back.”

  Once the rest of the kids were clear of the radius of the gear, he pulled the rope, unlocking the spring. Attached to the pulleys, the chains and seat began to slide outward. The closer to the edge it moved, the faster the swing went. By the time he reached the outside of the gear, the chains were nearly horizontal. High over his friend’s heads, Trenton flew so fast that the force pushed him down into the seat.

  He grasped the chains with both hands, amazed at how well his swing worked. From this height, he could see a trolley chugging along its metal tracks with little puffs of steam coming from its polished smokestack. Near the city offices, the clock struck four, and the mechanical figures of a baker, a miner, a teacher, and—Trenton’s favorite—a mechanic, emerged from a set of brass doors set into the clock face. If he craned his neck, he could just make out the apartment building where he lived. His hair blew back from his forehead, and he grinned down at the faces staring up at him as he circled high above them.

  “Look at him go!” one kid shouted.

  “I want a turn,” another one yelled.

  Simoni waved at Trenton, her eyes alight. “It’s wonderful.”

  Trenton waved back. Things were working out better than his wildest expectations. Everyone pushed forward excitedly. Even annoying Angus stared up, eyes wide.

  “My turn, my turn!” all the kids shouted.

  “Stay back,” Trenton yelled as he passed over them. “You don’t want to get hit.”

  “Can I try it next?” Simoni called, shaking back her lo
ng red hair. Trenton could imagine it streaming out behind her on his swing.

  “Simoni gets the first ride,” he called. If Angus told his father now, every kid in the school would hate him. He pulled the rope again, and the springs began winding up.

  He was halfway back to the inside of the gear when a loud clang sounded from inside the power station. Then a crunch. The gear slowed, and the kids moved away—delight turning to fear.

  As the swing slowed to a stop, warning bells clanged throughout the city. What had he done? The swing couldn’t have caused this, could it?