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J. Scott Savage
“Starts with a bang… an ingenious steampunk world… Tenton will be a firm friend to any readers who long to use their talents to make their world better.”-Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“With fascinating and relatable characters, amazing mysteries, and incredible amounts of conflict, Fires of Invention is well-written and chock full of action. Kids are going to go crazy for this book!”-Peggy Eddleman, best-selling author of Sky Jumpers series
“Fires of Invention is an amazing adventure that will grab hold of you and never let go. With each surprising turn, the story builds a powerful story of courage, adventure, and friendship.”-Jennifer A. Nielsen, New York Times best-selling author
Trenton Colman is a creative thirteen-year-old boy with a knack for all things mechanical. But his talents are viewed with suspicion in Cove, a steam-powered city built inside a mountain. In Cove, creativity is a crime and “invention” is a curse word.Kallista Babbage is a repair technician and daughter of the notorious Leo Babbage, whose father died in an explosion—an event the leaders of Cove point to as an example of the danger of creativity.Working together, Trenton and Kallista learn that Leo Babbage was developing a secret project before he perished. Following clues he left behind, they begin to assemble a strange machine that is unlikely anything they’ve ever seen before. They soon discover that what they are building may threaten every truth their city is founded on—and quite possibly their very lives.
Excerpt:
By the time Kallista unfolded the paper, the document was nearly three feet wide and four feet tall. It looked like a schematic for some kind of machine.
“Was is it?” Trenton asked. “Did you discover you father really was building a giant . . .”
The words died in his mouth as he leaned closer to the light and saw what was on the paper. It was a set of plans all right. It was what her father had been working on. What they had been putting together.
It was a machine. But not only a machine. It was a weapon. But not only a weapon. It was . . . Well, he didn’t know exactly what it was. If the plans had been drawn up by anyone other than Leo Babbage, Trenton would have considered them a joke. But if there was one thing he had learned about Kallista’s father, it was that the man did not appear to possess a very refined sense of humor.
The plans were no joke. They were real. But why he would have drawn them up and what he expected his daughter to do with them was beyond understanding.
Because the plans on the page-shown in surprisingly great detail-were for building a creature that looked like it had come directly from the pages of one of the storybooks in Leo Babbage’s workshop. Trenton studied the powerful clawed legs, broad wings, and sharp toothed mouth. “What is it?” he whispered.
Kallista held the plans up before her, eyes filled with wonder. “It’s a dragon.”
