The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (39 page)

The old woman is sniffling
again—doesn’t she ever stop?—and her nose is all red. “I thought he would save
me from this,” the old woman moans. “From the memories. I thought he would save
me.”

I stroke her hair, and remember
the lipstick, and the cafe, and Jakie’s kind eyes. “I know,” I tell her. “I
know. But we will have to do it ourselves.”

She nods, and wipes her eyes.
“You are right,” she says. “Of course. It’s all up to us.”

My uncle has stepped forward,
and one of the clean German soldiers, an officer I think, takes a gun from his
pocket and points it at him just like the gangsters in the American movies. I
know I should run back, but I won’t leave my uncle. “You fucking Jew,” the
officer says, calm as if he were just saying hello, “You fucking rich Jew, you
think you own the world?”

My uncle pushes me away. “Back
to the house,” he says, his teeth clenched, every word distinct. “Now! Do you
hear?”

The soldiers are scaring me, so
I look at the two women. They are crying about something, but then they hold
their arms out to me. “Come, sweetheart,” says the old lady. “It’s a beautiful
morning. Forget the handsome American soldier. He will not save you. Come to
us—come and show us your lovely new dress.”

I walk toward them, passing in
front of my uncle. There is a loud sharp sound from far away, and it all stops.

Clockwork, Patchwork and
Ravens

Peter M. Ball

Jackson said
she’d been hanging with the Corvidae before he found her, that she was one of
those girls that bounced between gangers named Jackdaw6 or Raven8. They’d
pumped her full of genemorphs laced with avian DNA, hoping she’d be lucky and
avoid the bad reaction. It had already affected her teeth, turning the molars
into rotting shards. Her lips were growing hard, thickening into dark
cartilage, and I could see the shadow of her organs beneath the bleached skin
stretched across her ribcage. Jackson said he found her wandering in the alley
behind the crow boy’s nest, trying to staunch the fluid seeping from her
fresh-plucked eye-socket. He brought her home, patched her up, and turned her
over to me for safe-keeping while he went downstairs to work. I stood over her
and watched her, letting the hours tick by, and eventually I kissed her.

My kiss didn’t
wake her, though she stirred a little at my touch. Downside is not a place
where fairytales happen, and no-one would mistake me for a handsome prince. It
was a clumsy kiss, as you’d expect, but a kiss. A kiss!

When she did
not wake I stood, resuming my vigil. I could feel myself blushing, my right
cheek warm. I turned my other cheek toward her, hiding behind the copper mask.

Even now,
looking back, I’m still not sure why I did it. It’s not as if she was a pretty
thing, with her bruises and her missing eye, but there was still some remnant
of beauty beneath the blue stitches of Jackson’s repair. She was a creature of
the Downside streets, all feral promise and rough allure. I didn’t love her—that
would be unseemly for a half-man like me—but I envied her, desperately, for the
blue stitching that held her together and the heart that still beat in her
chest. I wished, for just a moment, that Jackson had done the same for me. I
could feel the steady flick of that pulse when our lips touched. It was alive;
faint, but eager to exist. My own heart ticked on, steady and regular, the soft
tick-tock marking a regular beat as it pulped blood through those veins I still
possessed.

Jackson wanted to be a hero, I
knew that without asking. When I was little, just after he took me in, Jackson
used to tell me stories about heroes, about knights and princes and ducks that
turned into swans. I would listen to his stories, curled up in bed, crying as
the pain of a new graft wracked my chest and shoulder. I had to ignore the
sound of the gangs and the crowds that filled the Downside streets, the
occasional brawl or gunshot cutting through the din. Jackson would fill my head
with heroes, with worlds where heroes still existed. I never believed in his
stories, but I always believed in Jackson. It was easier, cleaner, but it was
just as dangerous in the end.

The girl slept for three days,
sedated and monitored. I spent my nights watching her fight against the
painkillers, twisting against the thin sheets in Jackson’s cot. I was afraid to
move, afraid the grinding cogs in my arms would disturb her bad dreams. I
dreamt of kissing her again, dreamt of her waking up and looking on my copper
mask and grafted limbs without the inevitable shudder. It was not to be. She
woke in the dim light of the third morning, jettisoned from her nightmares with
a gurgling scream. She cast about the room with her good eye, looking for
something familiar, but all she got was me, and the mangled nubbin of flesh
that had been her tongue started making strangled sounds that could have been
words. I knelt beside her, putting my good hand on hers, making sure there was
contact between her flesh and mine.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re safe
here.”

She struggled and I held her
down, the steady tick-tock of my heart frightening her more than the cold grip
of my hand. She had a coppery, nervous scent and I saw blood stains on her
bandages. Her good eye
stared at my face as
I leaned in to check the stitches. She waited, tre
mbling and sluggish,
still woozy from the barbiturates. I pulled back and limped away. She was
scared of me, so scared her fear emerged through the painkiller haze, and I
couldn’t calm her down.

“You’ve pulled your stitches,”
I told her. I couldn’t make my voice sound soothing, no matter how hard I
tried. “You’re bleeding. Wait here, I’ll go get Jackson.” And I ran, fleeing
the bedroom, as she let loose an angry gurgle that should have been a scream.

There was comfort in the
clutter of Jackson’s workshop downstairs; the overburdened workbenches piled
high with bits of clockwork and old tech and equipment we scavenged from the
burnt-out hospital on the river. I followed the sound of Jackson’s snoring
through the cramped maze of junk and spare parts, found him in the overstuffed
chair he left by the boiler, soaking up warmth as he slept. He looked old, even
for Jackson, the wrinkled features like the grooves of a thumbprint, the wisps
of hair hanging limp around his face. I leant over and shook him, letting the
metal fingers close over his shoulder. “Jackson,” I said. “Jackson, the girl’s
awake.”

He slept, stubbornly, until I
placed a cold right hand against his bare forehead. Jackson had built me that
arm from scratch, and the one I’d worn before it, and the one before that. Its
touch woke him faster than any jostling or loud noise ever could. “Randal?” he
said, blinking. His eyes were never good, especially in the dark. I lifted the
notebook off his lap and helped him to his feet, setting his journal on a
nearby bench while he straightened himself up.

“It’s morning, Jackson,” I told
him. The left side of my mouth twisted into a wry smile. “She’s awake and she’s
pulled some stitches. I think I might have frightened her.”

“She’ll calm down,” he said.
“And pulling the stitches won’t harm her anymore than she’s been harmed.”
Jackson rubbed his eyes with one hand and smiled his forlorn smile. “How is
she?”

“Struggling to speak.” I
clenched my fist, metal straining against metal. “They took her tongue,
Jackson. The crow boys, they cut it right out.” It was a mistake to mention the
tongue. Jackson nodded, eyes growing distant, and I knew that I’d lost him,
that his mind had the association it needed to turn toward to his beloved work.
Jackson picked up his notebook, finger tracing the anatomical sketches and
blueprints. He was making plans, figuring out a way to replace what was lost. I
touched his arm again.

“We should run,” I said. “We
can. She’s awake now. We should run before they come for her.”

Jackson looked up and shook his
head. “It would kill her,” he said. “To move her now, so soon, so soon
after...” He shook his head again and sighed. “We need a week. Maybe two.
Enough time for her to heal. Then we can leave. Then we can run.” His eyes
dropped to the notebook as he said it, the blue-and-black plans and the
detailed annotations. There was a thump upstairs as she fell out of bed. A loud
moan of pain filtering down through the floorboards. I thought of the mangled
face, the blue stitching and the scars. Beaten by the Corvidae, Jackson had
said. We both knew what would happen when they realised the girl had lived.

“They’ll find us before then,”
I told him.

“I know.” My heart beat,
tick-tock, tick-tock, as I watched Jackson blink back tears. His face set,
trying to hold back a shiver of fear. The Corvidae were bad news; both of us
knew that. He put his hand on my shoulder, fingers wrapping across the scars.
“But I’m going to take care of her,” Jackson said. “She didn’t deserve this,
Randal.”

No-one ever does. Jackson
didn’t look at me, just tore a page from his notebook and held it out. It was a
list of parts, carefully annotated, written in Jackson’s sloppy script. I ran
down the list, noting the unfamiliar names. They were small parts, tiny.
Expensive, too, with our finances.

“I’ll take care of her
stitches,” Jackson said, limping toward the stairs. “It will be okay, Randal.
We’ll get away before you know it.”

I double-checked the locks as I
left, nervous about leaving him alone. Most of the time, shopping for Jackson
takes effort rather than money. This time he was working small, and that meant
parts with names I didn’t recognise. Technology; state of the art; the kind
with names that read like a secret code. Finding those parts meant someone with
black-market contacts. It meant shopping fast and getting off the streets
before someone noticed what I was doing. It meant Jackie Pelican.

I went down to the river and
found him sitting near the harbour tunnel, hawking cheap tech to Cityside
tourists heading home after a day in their favourite kink-house. There was an
art to the way Jackie worked, pretending to thumb a ride and then hustling the
drivers with cheap promises and stolen tech the moment the car stopped. Pelican
always said that anyone stupid enough to stop for a Downsider wearing six
jackets as he thumbed a ride was going to be an easy mark for his patter, and
it turned out he was right more often than not.

He was cutting a deal when I
found him, a lump of layered coats and furs pushing data-chips through the
window of a Cityside Lexus. I hung back, out of sight. The Pelican didn’t need
me interrupting his business, and I knew better than to get in his way. It took
him five, maybe six minutes to close the deal. Money changed hands and the
Lexus sped off, threading into the tunnel that linked the Downside grime with
the towers and gleaming lights of the city. The Pelican stood by the side of
the road, shuffling through his bills, then nodded and slipped the cash into the
pockets of his second jacket. I lumbered across the concrete, coming up behind
him. Pelican heard me coming, recognised the tick and the steady thump of my
limp. “Randal,” he said, making a wide turn, his small face beaming among the
layered jacket collars. I clapped Pelican on the shoulder and the gears in my
arm groaned. He feigned a shudder at the noise. “Clockwork was a bad fad,
Randy. When are you going to let me fix you up with something a little less
retro?”

“I don’t have money for your
upgrades, Pelican. You know that.”

“You could work it off,
Randal,” Pelican said. “You’re a good kid, talented, and you’re wasted in
Jackson’s workshop. I’m sure I could find a job for you.”

“I like the workshop,” I said.
“It’s homey.”

Pelican rolled his eyes and laughed,
the thick layers of coats wobbling, his throat swelling up as his humour boomed
out. “Fine,” he said. “If you can’t be lured away from the aging reprobate, why
don’t you tell me what the Pelican can do for you? I assume Jackson’s sent you
on another shopping trip?”

I held out the list and pointed
at the items I needed, letting the Pelican study them through the cracked lens
of his glasses. He puffed his cheeks out as his read, fleshy jowls ballooning
as he chewed on the air. “That’s a strange list, Randal. What’s Jackson up to?”

“I don’t know, but if I had to
guess...”

“Yeah?”

I shook my head and shrugged.
“If I had to guess, I’d say he’s building someone a tongue.”

The Pelican’s eyes went narrow
and his teeth clicked together. He breathed in, hissing. “A tongue for whom?”

He was standing straight now,
drawing up to his full height, bulging jowls starting to quiver. I stumbled
backwards, putting weight on the bad leg. Jackie didn’t move to help me, he
just settled back into the seat he kept near his hitching spot. “I don’t know,”
I said. “Some girl he found.”

The Pelican whistled through
his yellowing teeth. “Jackson and his strays,” he said. “Fuck.” He closed his
eyes and quivered. I knelt down next to him, waited for him to explain,
watching the watery eyes that refused to meet mine. I put the clockwork arm on
his shoulder, let him feel its weight.

“What do you know, Jackie
Pelican?”

The Pelican let out a soft
snort, glancing to either side. “Nothing, kid,” he said. “I know nothing. Just
be careful, okay?”