This Monstrous Thing (3 page)

A group got on at the clock tower station, and I had to slide into the corner to make room. I nearly dropped
Frankenstein
in the shuffle, and as the pages fanned, a thin envelope slid from between them. I snatched it from the air before it fell.

There was my name again on the front in Mary’s looped handwriting. I stared at it for a long moment as the omnibus jerked forward, and I tried not to let all that stupid hope inside me fill in what it might say. As angry as I was at her after the way we had ended, it thrilled me to think that maybe, at long last, she wanted to make things right
between us. All she needed was to say the word, and I would have been hers in an instant.

I started to break the seal, but then a harsh voice from down the car growled, “Get up, you piece of machinery.”

I froze. A police officer was standing a few feet down the car, navy greatcoat sweeping all the way to the floor like a shroud, and I’d been so busy mooning like an idiot over Mary’s letter I hadn’t noticed him get on. I knew him at once—Inspector Jiroux, head of Geneva’s police force—by the heavy gold cross he kept on a chain through the buttonhole of his waistcoat. It flashed as he crossed his arms, glaring down at an old man with a shock of white hair and a brass button in the shape of a cog pinned to his coat collar. I shoved Mary’s letter back between the pages of
Frankenstein
and started to shoulder my way to the door, my heart stuttering.

Jiroux kicked the old man’s leg. There was a low metallic clang. “Get up,” he said again. “Don’t you see all these whole human men standing up around you?” He turned suddenly and pointed his baton at me. The old man and I both flinched. “Give this young man your seat.”

“It’s all right,” I mumbled, eyes on my boots.

“No it isn’t,” Jiroux said. “It’s not all right for men like you to be second to mechanicals like him.”

“He’s fine, really,” I said.

“He’s not fine, he’s a machine.” Jiroux seized the knee of the old man’s trousers and tugged it up, revealing the metal skeleton and mess of gears sinking into scar tissue beneath. “Not even a man anymore,” Jiroux said, and nudged the bars with the toe of his boot. They clattered softly.

The old man’s shoulders slumped. “Please, I can’t stand well. I lost it in the war.”

“And so you chose to spit in the face of God by letting a man make you mechanical?”

“It is not disrespect for God, sir—” the old man began, but Jiroux interrupted him, voice carrying through the cab like a priest from the pulpit.

“The form of man, as designed by God’s hand, is perfect. If God had wanted men made from metal, we would have been born as such. With the decision to install a mechanical piece, you have made yourself an offense against Him and His divine creation, and you forfeit the God-given rights of a human man.” He seized the old man by the collar and dragged him out of his seat. “Sit down,” he barked at me. I didn’t move. Everyone in the car was watching us. “Sit,” Jiroux said again as the omnibus began to slow.

“I’m getting off,” I said.

Jiroux glared at me, then shoved the old man, who tripped, barely stopping his fall on the edge of a woman’s seat.
She jerked away from him like he had a catching disease. The doors to the omnibus flew open, and I stumbled down the stairs and out onto the pavement. It was two stops earlier than I’d meant to get off, but it still took the whole walk to the city’s edge to convince my heart to slow again.

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed had left people across Europe with missing and damaged limbs and, in turn, more people than ever wanting clockwork parts to replace the ones they’d lost. Lots of the political expatriates from France had come down to Switzerland, and Geneva had become a haven for them, a city that boasted neutrality and sanctuary for war refugees. The veterans were a new set of clients for our shop, though we still saw the sorts of injuries we’d treated before we came to Geneva: limbs ripped up and ruined by factory work, arthritic joints, and club feet to be replaced with moving metal pieces, twisted spines swapped out with metal vertebrae. We’d grafted a set of steam-powered pistons to the hips of a man paralyzed from the waist down so he could walk again.

My father liked to say that prejudice didn’t have to make sense, but I’d still never worked out how anyone could think what we did was wicked. People like Jiroux thought that as soon as metal was fused to bone and muscle it took something fundamental and human away, and that men and women with mechanical parts were machines,
somehow less than the rest of us.

The clockwork men either lived broken, or hated. It was a shitty choice.

T
hrough the checkpoint and beyond the city walls, the foothills stretched like open palms raised toward the sinking sun. I left the road and started upward along the vineyard roads that turned into narrow mountain paths, mud sucking at my boots as I climbed. Around me, the cliffs were silent, their stillness broken only by the somber wailing of the winter wind through the pines and the far-off industrial hum of the city, growing fainter with every step.

At the top of the final ridge, I stopped to catch my breath and look out. Far below, the surface of the iced lake sparkled like diamonds, with the villas of the magistrates and merchants that rimmed it peering out between the evergreens. On its banks, Geneva was outlined black against the sunset—turreted roofs and spires divided of Vieille Ville divided from the factory by the Rhone, with the clock tower standing in solitary silhouette above it all.

I counted backward from a hundred as I stared out at the view; then I turned. Across the craggy hilltop, a small dark-stone castle was perched, a feather of white smoke rising from one of its chimneys. Château de Sang, skeletal and dark, like a hole cut in the winter sky.

The cold was starting to get under my coat, but I didn’t move. Part of me wanted to stand there and let the time
run down until I had to return home. The gut-twisting mix of dread and necessity was rising like bile inside me, and I knew I couldn’t swallow it. I’d just have to let it burn in my stomach until I could leave, but even then it never faded entirely.

I took a deep breath, braced myself, and started down the slope toward the gates.

I let myself into the castle through a service entrance in the back, the only way in that wasn’t boarded. I had picked the lock the city installed and replaced it with my own that locked from both the inside and outside when it was closed, same as the one in our shop. I stuck a rock into the frame to keep the door propped.

Inside, everything was smoky with shadows. Dust motes wafted across the thin bars of sunlight that filtered through the high windows, all boarded up, and cobwebs decorated the walls like spun tapestries. The air was thick with the smell of age and mold, underscored by the sharp sulfur of the gunpowder and explosives the city kept stored in the cellars.

I took the familiar path across the kitchen, making only a quick stop to check that the pantry was stocked, then climbed a long set of winding stairs, listening hard to the silence and trying to decide where he would be. When I reached the upstairs hall, I spotted the amber glow of firelight at the end and followed it.

The room looked like a heavy windstorm had swept
through just before I arrived. Crumpled papers were scattered across the floor, and pens stuck out of the wall like darts in a pub board. A goose-down pillow I had stolen from my parents had been left lying in the center of the room, feathers blooming from a rip down its middle and carried by the wind slithering down the chimney. Plates festering with dried food were stacked in random spots, and most of the furniture left by the castle’s previous owners, already spindly with age, was battered and abused. It looked like the remnants of a battlefield, somewhere looted and then left behind.

And in the center of it all, like a king on his throne, was Oliver.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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B
efore his resurrection, Oliver had been a good-looking lad, the sort girls would stare at as he walked by on the street. He was trim and athletic, not skinny like me, and he had a swagger that I was beginning to doubt I would ever grow into. He hadn’t lost the swagger in his second life, but it was different now, less confident and more menacing.

We shared most physical features—dark, curly hair and dark eyes, most notably—but we didn’t look alike anymore, not the way we once had. Oliver’s resurrection had added nearly a foot to his height, and now he was made mostly of sharp lines and strange angles. Clothes didn’t fit him properly, and he wore a loose-fitting linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, braces hanging down to
his knees and trousers sagging in odd places. His dark hair had grown back as thick as before, but the strips of it atop his scars never would, leaving him with a bald stretches amid the curls.

The resurrection had robbed him too of the bone structure that had given him sharp cheekbones and a square jaw before. Now one eyelid sagged, and the skin of his face, like the rest of his body, was rippled and perpetually bruised from the machinery that pressed against it from inside.

Two years later and it was still hard not to look away from him. I forced myself to meet his gaze and hold it steady as I stood in the doorway. When he didn’t say anything, I dropped my bag on the floor beside the chaise and said, “Sorry I haven’t been by.” My chest was already feeling tight, and it was hard to get words out without sounding winded.

Oliver watched me from his perch atop the writing desk as I peeled off my coat and scarf, an unlit pipe jammed between his teeth. Smoking was hazardous now that his lungs were made of waxed paper and leather, but he still liked gnawing on his pipe as if it were lit. They were strange and unpredictable, the things like smoking that had carried over from before.

I kicked a balled-up bit of paper out from under the chaise. “What happened here?”

“I’m bored,” he replied, sliding down off the desk so that
he was straddling the chair. His mechanical joints creaked when he moved. I had replaced one of his arms entirely with a clockwork one, and both knees as well, since that was easier than letting the bones grow back wrong.

“So clean this place up, that’ll keep you busy for a while. I mended your shirt,” I added as I pulled it out of my bag and threw it to him. He caught it with his mechanical hand. “Anything else you need?”

“Tobacco.”

“No.” I pushed a ragged copy of
Paradise Lost
to the other end of the chaise and sank down onto the cushion. “Why’d you shred all the paper I brought?”

“Because writing’s dull. Everything’s dull. I’m so bored.” Oliver tossed the shirt on top of the feather pillow. There was a metallic whine, shrill as a teakettle, and he winced.

I sat up. “Is it giving you problems?”

“Not the arm,” he said, and rapped his knuckles against his chest. It rang hollowly.

“I brought my tools.”

“I’m all right.”

“Don’t be daft, let me look.” I pulled my work gloves out of my bag as Oliver raised the flame of the lamp balanced on the writing desk and pulled his shirt off over his head. The skin under it was so puckered and punctured that it hardly looked like skin at all. You could still see the stitches, the bolts, the blue patches where
the needles had gone in. There were places in his side that bulged and rippled as the gears ticked beneath. My fingers stumbled as I wedged them under the seam in his chest and opened it.

Inside, Oliver was pure machine, all gears and pins like an engine. In a way that’s all it was, an engine doing everything that his irreparably broken body no longer could. His rib cage on one side was gone, replaced by steel rods and a cluster of churning gears connected by leather tubes to a set of bellows that opened and closed with each breath. Where his heart should have been was a knot of cogs around the mainspring, pushing against each other as they ticked like a clock rather than beat like a heart.

The trouble was easy to spot. One of the bolts had come loose so that a gear was grinding against the oscillating weight as it turned. I tugged my magnifying goggles up from around my neck and fished in my bag for my needle-nose pliers.

“Can I ask you about something? It’s been bothering me that I can’t remember.” Oliver held up his flesh-and-blood hand for me to see. A thin white scar ran across the knuckles. “What’s this from? It’s older than the others.”

“Boxing, I think.” I gripped the gear with my pliers and jammed it back into place. Oliver sucked in a sharp breath. “Sorry, should have warned you that might hurt.”

He shrugged like it didn’t matter, but his voice was
tighter when he spoke again. “It doesn’t look like a boxing scar. I thought I must have put my hand through a window or something.”

“No, you told me someone threw a bottle in the ring and you sliced up your hand.”

“Did I win the match?”

“God, Oliver, does it matter? You hurt yourself doing stupid things so many times. They all start to blur together.”

“Were you there? Did you ever box?”

I slid the pliers from under the weight and swapped them for a spanner that fit around a loose bolt. “No, boxing is too wild for me.”

“Wish I could box now.”

I tightened the bolt harder than I needed to, and Oliver yelped. “And then as soon as you took your shirt off in the ring, they’d see you’re mostly metal and haul you away.”

“God’s wounds, Ally, it was a joke.” He flexed his hand, watching the scar move with his skin. “It’s strange, you know. Having scars and not knowing where they came from.”

“Well, any others you can’t remember?” I asked.

“All of them.” He ran his fingertips along a seam in his skull. “I don’t remember getting any of them.”

I scrubbed at an oily spot on my spanner and said nothing.

Most of Oliver’s memory had come back to him, slowly and with coaxing on my part. He’d returned to the world
blank, but things like speech and reading and motor skills had come back quickly. The memories had been harder. I tried to supply him with what I could, but I had a sense that instead of genuinely remembering things, he mostly just took my word for what I said had happened. Sometimes he’d surprise me with a memory I hadn’t fed him, though what came back was unpredictable—he remembered specific fights with Father but not a thing about Mum, the color of the walls in our shop in Paris though he had lost Bergen entirely, that he hated Geisler though I had to remind him why. It scared me a bit, the things he found without my help. Mostly because there was still a chance the truth of the night he died might return without warning, and it wouldn’t line up with the story I’d given him.

I snapped the band of my goggles to keep them from sliding down my nose. “Well, lucky you’ve got me and I remember everything. Take a breath.” Oliver obeyed, and I pressed two gloved fingers against the gear to test the placement. “That’ll work for now. One of the bolts is stripped, so it won’t stay in place for long. I’ll bring a new one next time I come.”

“And what am I meant to do until then?”

“You can hold on to my pliers in case you need to tighten it.” I fished around in my bag until I found them, then tossed them on the desk. They skidded to the edge with a clatter. “They’re not really meant for bolts, but Father will miss a spanner. How’s everything else running?”

“My arm feels stiff.”

“Probably needs to be cleaned. I haven’t got oil today, but I can give it a pulse. It might help.” Oliver made a face, and I almost made a smart remark about how he should be used to the pain by now, but changed my mind at the last second. I retrieved the pulse gloves from my bag and swapped them out for the leatherwork ones. Oliver slumped in the chair as I rubbed my hands together, both of us watching the pale energy gather between the plates. “Sorry, they take so bleeding long to get a charge going.”

“Tell Father you need new ones.”

“They’re hard to get now. Every tool the Shadow Boys use is monitored dead close. Shopkeepers have to do an inventory for the police of who buys them. Some places you need a permit.”

“Geneva’s getting smarter.”

I separated my palms with a grunt. A flicker of white-blue light ran along the plates. “Brace yourself.”

I pressed the gloves to the conducting plates on clockwork shoulder. There was a faint flash as the metal connected, then Oliver’s whole body jerked as the shock went through it. The gears in his arm sped up as the energy coiled through the mainspring, running faster than before. He bent his elbow a few times, and nodded. “Better.”

“Next time give me some warning before it needs oiling.”

Oliver swatted that away, then stood up and rotated his mechanical arm in its socket. “You think you’ll stay in Geneva?” he asked.

“Father seems keen on it. You don’t remember Morand, do you?” He shook his head. “He runs a boardinghouse just over the border in France for clockworks who need a place to stay. He keeps trying to get us to come work for him there, but Father isn’t interested. I think he and Mum are getting tired of moving around so much. I just wish they’d gotten tired somewhere friendlier.”

“No, I mean you. Will
you
stay?” He scooped up a handful of paper scraps and tossed them into the fire. “Weren’t you meant to apply to university this year?”

“I was.”

“So what happened?”

I stripped off the pulse gloves and dropped them back into my bag. Just thinking about university sent a heavy pang through me, like a taut wire plucked inside my chest. I’d planned on it for so long—going to university in Ingolstadt to study mechanics with Geisler, the way Oliver was going to before he died. Wanting it still stung deep, and it was worse with Oliver on the other end of the question. “I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t fancy it. Father needs me. Money.” I shrugged. “Why does it matter?”

He picked up a fire poker from beside the grate and jabbed the flames. “I just thought if you went to uni, maybe I could go somewhere too.”

“Go where?”

“Somewhere not here. Away . . . and not with you.” I didn’t mean to, but I laughed. Oliver scowled, and I shut my mouth quick. “What’s funny?”

“I couldn’t leave you alone.”

His scowl went deeper, and for a strange moment, I saw a shadow of Father in his face. “I could look after myself.”

“Like hell you could. Oliver, all I’ve ever done our whole lives is look out for you when you did daft things. Even when we were lads. Who took the fall for stealing sweets so you wouldn’t get thrown out of school? Who bailed you out of jail twice so Father wouldn’t find out? Who fixed all those clocks so you wouldn’t lose that shop job in Paris?”

“And don’t forget, I’d be dead without you,” he added, his voice suddenly closer to a snarl.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Please, Oliver, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“You’re not going to uni because of me. You didn’t even apply because of me. Going to university used to be all you talked about, I remember
that.
I’m not an idiot, Ally.”

A flare went off inside my chest, and I stood up so hard my chair wobbled. “Sod it, fine. You’re right, is
that what you want to hear? I didn’t apply to Ingolstadt because I have to stay here and take care of you.”

I didn’t realize what I’d said for a moment. Then Oliver repeated, “Ingolstadt?” And my heart sank. “You want to go to university in Ingolstadt?”

“Oliver—”

“Because Geisler’s on faculty there.”

I could feel his anger—that feral creature that had barely been controlled in his first life and now raged untamed in his second—rear its ugly head. I took a step toward him, one hand rising between us. “I didn’t mean—”

He flung the fire poker, and it skittered across the floor. A few pieces of glowing charcoal separated from the tip and sparked against the stone. “Here I was touched by your sacrifice, and come to find out you’re still obsessed with Ingolstadt and studying with the man who killed me.”

A cold stone dropped in the pit of my stomach, but I kept my face blank.

When I had told Oliver the story of his own death, Dr. Geisler being responsible for it had seemed the best lie there was, and the easiest. It was the same story I’d told my parents, and the police, and Mary, and everyone since—there had been an accident in the clock tower while Geisler was escaping the city. It wasn’t intentional, but it was Geisler who’d pushed Oliver, and he’d fallen through the clock face and onto the riverbank. It was too late to retreat from it now. I’d told Oliver the story too many times,
burned it into him myself in an attempt to ward off the truth. But I wished desperately that I could go back and make up something else. Police, maybe, or too much wine, or loose floorboards. Something that wouldn’t stand so firmly in the way of the things I wanted.

“It was an accident,” I said. “I told you that.”

“But I still ended up dead. Geisler’s the reason I’m a monster!”

“You’re not a monster,” I said, though my voice rang hollow with the frequent reprise. If you say anything enough, even the truth, it starts to sound like a lie, and I wasn’t certain what the truth was where Oliver was concerned.