Of Metal and Wishes

by Sarah Fine

The air around me is gradually becoming clearer, cooler, and I can breathe, though my lungs burn with every breath. High above me I hear the faintest thread of sound, sirens from the town, from the local fire regiment. Is the factory on fire?

  “Just a small one,” says the person carrying me, and I snap to like I’ve been poked with a cattle prod when I recognize his voice.

  “Bo!” I gasp.

  “I’ve decided to grant your wish.” He clutches me tight, and it hurts. Like I’m caught in one of the brutal metal spinners. I cry out.

  “Sorry,” he mutters, and loosens his grip slightly. He carries me through the darkness, past stone walls and black moss, past hanging lanterns and smooth metal panels. He never hesitates, never wavers. He knows where all the traps are.

  And as he walks through a patch of lantern light, I turn my head and see his face for the first time.

  HALF OF BO’S FACE is normal—handsome, even—with a straight nose and a generous mouth, a walnut brown eye and long eyelashes, a bold brow and thick black hair. The other half of his head and face is covered with molded metal. A gleaming steel mask. And the eye of the mask is black and dead, like the eyes of all of Bo’s metal creations.

  He allows me to stare as he walks along, down the stone steps and into his home, past the metal figures of Jipu and Mugo and Jima and my father. Something catches my eye in the corner. There’s a new statue standing near the wall, next to one of the ancient, hulking machines. I would have noticed him if he’d been here the first time I visited. He’s tall, with broad shoulders, and he doesn’t look like the rest of them. Instead of grayish steel, his hair is fashioned from copper, and it shines brightly under the lantern light.

  It’s a dead-eyed metal version of Melik, and for some reason, knowing Bo has noticed him makes my heart clutch with dread.

  Bo carries me into one of the rooms he’s built and sets me on a chair. He takes a few steps back, giving me a view of all of him. The creaking and clanking, the shape of him . . . it makes sense now.

  One of his arms is made of metal. It is a mechanical wonder, gears and cogs and springs, long, nimble fingers that move like they’re connected to his brain. The metal arm is slightly longer and thicker than his other arm. It is held to his body with straps around his neck and chest. The arm glints dully in the dim yellow lantern light. The shoulder is rounded, shaped like the muscles of a human arm and roped with veins, but the true workings are pure machine. It is beautiful but also frightening.

  He’s looking at me like he’s thinking the same thing. He seems scared yet hopeful. Like he might run, but he’s not sure in which direction.

  “What happened?” I ask him, regretting the catch in my voice.

  His expression changes, his mouth becoming a flat, grim line. “I created a distraction. Things had gone far enough.”

  “You were watching.”

  “I couldn’t let him. I tried to stay out of it. I thought maybe he would see the shelves as a bad omen, a warning. But his lust controls him, and I couldn’t . . .” His metal fingers click together.

  “What did you do?”

  He looks down at his mechanical hand. “I blew up the boiler on the west side of the killing floor, the one closest to the administrative offices.”

  He says it so matter-of-factly, like this is just one of his daily tasks. Like he can do this type of thing anytime he wants to. My stomach twists. It was almost noon. There were still workers on the floor. “Were people hurt?”

  He shrugs. “It had to be done. Mugo . . . he is not a good man. He was going to hurt you.” He winces. “I saw what he did to Jima.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  He frowns. “I installed the explosives and rigged the shelf just before she was fired.”

  Poor Jima. Her prayer was answered too late. And, like mine, in a terrible, violent way.

  I stare at Bo. I know I should thank him, but all I can picture are young men, strong one moment, broken and burned and ruined the next. And Melik—what happened to him? Was he hurt? I think back, trying to remember. He was up and moving after the explosion. I felt the sure grip of his hands on my waist, shoving me to safety. Surely he got out?

  “They’ll need help up there,” I say. “My father is only one man.”

  Bo shakes his head. “You said you wanted to meet me, and now you’re meeting me. That’s what you wanted.” His dead black eye stares at me heartlessly, but his warm brown eye is full of questions and hurt. His tone reminds me of a child’s, so focused on what it wants, unaware of anything else. But he is not a child.

  I take a breath, grimacing at the tightness in my chest. “Yes. I wanted to see you. I’m just worried about what’s happening.”

  “Do you worry about yourself?” His voice is hard. “I brought you down here to keep you safe.” Both of his hands, the flesh and the metal, become fists.

  “Thank you,” I say quietly.

  It seems to be what he needs, because he relaxes a bit. “You’re welcome.”

  I look around me, finally taking in my surroundings. We’re in a room with corrugated metal walls, arching over us in crazy angles and zigzagging bits, creating tiny nooks in which he has stashed offering upon offering, stacks of paper and ink sticks, a pile of candles, a tangled nest of braided thread bracelets, a row of carved wooden animals, a few bolts of fine fabric. In one nook several prayers are laid out, and I wonder if these are the ones Bo is considering granting. A bright lamp is suspended over a large work table along one side of the room. Scattered over the table are wires, cogs, screws, and nuts . . . and the round, smooth body of a large spider with three spindly legs attached to its sides.

  I get up and walk over to it, a bit unsteady on my feet. “You make the spiders.”

  “Yes.” He glances over at me shyly as he joins me at the table. He seems so nervous. But as if they have ideas of their own, his hands are already on the spider. Metal and flesh work together in a kind of automatic dance, a twist of the wrist, a flare of the fingers. It is clear he has done this thousands of times, so often that he doesn’t need to think about it. His human and machine hands flip shut the panel on the spider’s back, then use a small drill to attach a few more legs to its body. As they do, Bo’s expression relaxes a bit, and I . . . understand. This is how I feel when I am suturing or scrubbing. Deep in purposeful work, safe from everything else, from selfish thoughts and worries and hopes.

  I find myself drifting closer to him as I watch the elegant movements of his hands, the deft way in which he transforms a piece of steel into a creature that can do terrible, amazing things. Bo’s tension has drained from him as he tinkers, and it is clear how soothing this is for him. This is the place he finds himself. Minute by minute, wire by wire, he has created himself a world.

  My gaze travels over the table, the tools, the circuitry, things for which I don’t have the proper names, but that seem to belong in the future, not here and now. “You built everything here, didn’t you?”

  Bo raises his head and looks around. “It was a bare stone chamber as big as the killing floor when Guiren first brought me down here. He gave me a pallet and a small stove. A lantern. A chair. Some books.” He chuckles. “It wasn’t enough for me.”

  “Where do you get all of this metal?”

  He throws his shoulders back and smiles. “Come see.” He releases the spider and holds out his hand, the one made of flesh, and I take it. He leads me out of the chamber, into the high-ceilinged factory room, where we walk along a metal path. My wool shoes make hardly any noise, but Bo’s hard soles clack and echo. He keeps me on the right side of him, the human side. From this angle he could be any boy leading a girl for a walk down a garden path. We stroll past statues of Minny and Hazzi and Onya, past Ebian and a few others I recognize, and past many I do not.

  As we reach the center of the massive floor, I hear it, the whir of tiny gears and the c
licking of metal on metal, of sharp, stabbing spider feet. I whirl around, already lifting my skirts above my ankles.

  Bo laughs. “What are you doing?”

  “The spiders,” I say in a choked voice. It is one thing to see one lying half assembled on the table. It is entirely another to hear the sound of its movements, to know it is creeping toward me.

  “It won’t hurt you. Look.” He points to a small opening at the base of a squat metal hive built into one of the central columns. From it marches a metal spider the size of a star fruit, but instead of fangs it has a . . . a . . .

  “Is that a bristle brush?”

  He gazes fondly at the vicious-looking arachnid. “My personal cleaning service. These are not for security.”

  I eye it as it walks in a steady rhythm, sliding its brush along the floor in a straight line, then turns and treads a parallel path back to its hive. And now that I know it won’t be jumping on my skirt, my fear subsides and I am fascinated. “How does it work?” Surely it can’t have a steam engine inside it—it’s almost silent. All I hear is clicking.

  “Do you know how a watch works?”

  “Sort of. I know my father has to wind his every day or it stops.”

  Bo stands up straighter. “My spiders, most of them, at least, don’t have to be wound. All they need is vibrations. Movement. There’s a small weight inside of them, and as they move and shift, it pulls the mainspring tight, so they’re always ready.”

  The spider is still pacing, up and down, up and down, until it’s cleaned a large rectangular panel. It’s created a tiny pile of debris right in front of its little burrow, and finally, it pushes it in and disappears into its hole. “But . . . these spiders move like they’re alive. It looks like magic.”

  “You are full of compliments,” he says, and his face is practically glowing. “They aren’t alive, not really.” He releases my hand and strides toward another column, beside which stands a metal woman. I think it’s one of the cafeteria workers on the day shift, but I’m not completely sure. She has a squarish face and a cleft in her chin, which Bo has rendered in careful detail. He opens a panel in her stomach. “Look in there.”

  Right where her guts would be, there is a rolled sheet of the thinnest metal, delicate as paper. It’s speckled with tiny holes.

  “Do you know how a player piano works?” Bo asks. “The holes are punched just so, and when it’s powered up, it makes the keys move down in a specific sequence?”

  I don’t really understand, but I nod vaguely.

  There’s more clicking by my ankles and I flinch away, but Bo leans down and scoops an orange-size spider up, turning it on its back. Its spindly legs keep moving, stabbing at the air. Set into its body, the part that hangs lowest, is a circular panel that looks like a turntable, with a set of wheels in its center. Bo angles the tip of his metal pointer finger down and taps the spider’s abdomen, right between the two wheels. A flap pops open, revealing a punched roll similar to the one in the metal woman’s belly. It is whirring along, moving like the cylinder in a music box. Bo closes the hatch and sets the spider on the ground, where it marches away, off to do whatever it was made to do.

  “They move in sequences I’ve set. If they bump into something, like a wall, they reset using the wheels in their bellies and head off in another direction. The security spiders, they’re a bit different. If they run into something—”

  “They bite it,” I say in a small, shaky voice, thinking of the disemboweled rat in the corridor. This is why, despite all its other problems, Gochan One has not had much of an issue with rats in recent years. The Ghost has made sure of it.

  He grins. “They are marvelous, aren’t they?”

  They are. Marvelous and terrifying. “I’ve seen something like them. In the newspapers. The off-road war machines . . .”

  Bo nods and points up ahead, at a metal sliding door. “That’s where I got the idea.” He leads me to the door and hits a rusty button. There is a familiar noise, a high-pitched keening, and I realize this is what I’ve been hearing from the vents. It’s not a person or a spirit or the factory crying itself to sleep.

  It’s an elevator.

  The door slides open, and I peer inside. It’s a heavy metal cage. It must have been a freight elevator when the factory was new, years ago when it was used for who knows what, before it became a slaughterhouse. “This is the only one that works,” Bo says. “It’s the only one I allow to work.”

  He ushers me aboard, holding my hand tightly enough that I think he’s afraid I might run, which is exactly what I want to do. My breath is rasping in my throat like a saw on a tree branch. The gates crash shut and the cage comes to life, shaking beneath my feet, all around me, and I am going to be buried, crushed, eaten by this metal monster. I can’t help it; I tuck myself into Bo’s side and throw my arms around his waist, burying my face in the warmth of his shirt, keeping myself as far from the carnivorous, hard steel and rust bars as I possibly can.

  After a moment of hesitation Bo wraps his human arm around me and whispers, “I will never allow you to be hurt. You’re safe.”

  I don’t feel safe. I feel like I will be gobbled down at any moment. I’m already in this thing’s mouth and it will chomp me to bits. We’re zooming up, and I feel dizzy. Bo holds me steady, and I can tell by the solid beat of his heart that he’s not nervous at all. He is the master of this beast, and it does what he wants it to do.

  We jerk to a stop, and I cannot look at him as I let go of his waist. Bo slides the creaking cage doors open on daylight. We must be near the roof of the factory, because there’s less cinder block and more glass. Most of it is shattered, and I step carefully around the shards because the larger ones could cut right through my cloth soles. There is a sudden burst of life in front of us, feathers and flapping and the bitter-damp smell of bird droppings.

  “They nest up here,” Bo says. “Even in the winter it’s quite warm because the furnace stack is nearby.”

  “We’re that close to the rear of the factory?”

  He points through the filmy, cracked glass. “That’s the stacks.” He points just to the left of that. “And that’s the roof of Gochan Two.”

  I peer at the hulking shadows in front of us. The enormous warehouses that make up the Gochan Two complex are much closer to Gochan One than I thought; I’ve never seen them from this angle. But right here, at the rear of the factory, they are close enough to leap from roof to roof. Or to build a bridge and stroll across. And that’s exactly what someone, I assume Bo, has done.

  “I get the metal from here,” he explains, leading me along the short, wide catwalk. I make the mistake of looking down and my stomach clenches. We are at least four stories off the ground.

  “No one sees you walking back and forth?”

  Bo scoffs. “Who would see? There aren’t any windows in these buildings. And Gochan Two falls silent at night.”

  Already the noise of Gochan Two is deafening, and we are still on the outside of it. Bo leads me to an improvised hatch cut through the metal roof, and then I hear nothing but crashing. Like a war is going on in our war machine factory. We’re in some kind of crawl space, and I cover my ears and squat low, overwhelmed as the noise takes over. Bo touches my shoulder and tugs me over to another door, which leads to a room more insulated from the piercing sounds of metal on metal. Lit from windows cut in the roof, the floor of this chamber is strewn with the same kind of metal debris that lines the hallways and corridors of Gochan One. In the corner is a low table, and spread across it is a sheet of paper, curled at the corners, covered in diagrams and numbers. I point to it. “Is that yours?”

  He nods. “I work in here sometimes. From this room I can go anywhere in the factory. I’ve been doing it for years. It’s so quiet at night. Peaceful. I learned most of what I know from the manuals the engineers keep in their offices.” He gives me a bashful smile. “I like t
o think I’ve improved upon their designs.”

  I wander over to an opening that’s been carved into the floor and covered with a pane of glass. I gasp—we are high above the factory floor of Gochan Two, looking down from the roof, hidden by crisscrossing beams that keep this massive structure from falling in on itself. What I see beneath me is blinding and brutal. I have to squint as the swinging arms of the assembly machines and massive presses catch the glaring overhead lights. Gray-shirted workers look so tiny and vulnerable amidst all this steel and iron and copper, piecing together the heavy steam engines of the war machines, crafting their enormous metal legs and cannons and whatever else helps them kill those who stand against our government. I wince as I think of Sinan playing in the scars these things have left on the land.

  When I look up at Bo’s half-human, half-machine face, I see that he is entranced. This is his kingdom. This is the size of his world, and it is infinite and sorrowfully tiny at the same time. He pulls his eyes away from the controlled chaos below to gaze at my face.

  “You’re here,” he says quietly, like he doesn’t believe it.

  I look into his walnut brown eye, the human one, the one that is full of emotions I can’t possibly understand. I feel so silly, pitying myself for being alone. People will look for me if I disappear. People are probably looking for me now. But Bo . . . no one is looking for him. He is long dead and buried, and the only time people think of him is when they want a favor from the Ghost. They don’t wonder if he’s lonely, but I know he is.

  “I’m here,” I agree. I’m not sure what I can offer him or what he wants from me, and I hope this moment is enough.

  He smiles, but its sweetness is tainted by his cruel, black, glaring eye. “You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

  My father will be happy to see me, so relieved. I can only imagine what he’s going through right now. And Melik—I need to know he’s all right. But when we get to the fortresslike lair, Bo doesn’t guide me to the set of stone steps that leads upward to my life. He takes me to one of the metal chambers he’s built at the edge of the old factory floor. Warm light glows from this room, and inside is a table set with cutlery, plates of plum cakes and candied dates, and a bottle of fruit wine that must have been an offering from Jipu or Mugo, because the stuff is so expensive that no one else can afford it.