by Steven Bohls
This isn’t right. None of it is.
“What do you mean you asked me to bring it?” Jed said.
His grandfather lifted his eyebrows. “What?”
“The lemon. You said you asked me to bring one.”
“I’ll explain everything in time. Enjoy your doughnut.”
Jed set the doughnut onto the counter and backed away. His throat felt hot and shaking.
“You knew everything! The lemon…the doughnuts! How did you know?” His voice roared through the room.
His grandfather patted the air. “Calm down. You’re safe. Nobody’s trying to hurt you.”
“Safe?” How could I have been so stupid? “Shay. Where is Shay?”
“With your friend. Don’t you remember?”
And then he did remember. He remembered how she’d slumped. How she’d stared at the deck, hands clasped in front of her as if shielding herself from the man with the music box.
“You hurt her,” Jed said. “She told me. You beat her with a pipe!”
“That’s absurd. Why would I do that?”
The dread. Their fallen twisted bodies.
“Don’t lie to me. I know you hurt her!”
“Listen to me. Shay’s memory, it’s broken. She doesn’t remember things clearly.”
“Maybe that’s what happens when you hit people with pipes!”
His grandfather’s jaw tightened. “This was supposed to be a wonderful moment. A beautiful moment.” He mumbled as if speaking to the floor. “Now it’s ruined.” He slapped the wire rack of doughnuts. They flopped through the air and splattered over the glossy hardwood. “Ruined.”
Jed backed toward the kitchen door.
His grandfather raised his hand. “Stop. Please.”
“I’m going to find my friends.”
“I’ve had them taken elsewhere. They’re being cared for, I promise.”
“Promise? You promised to tell me what’s going on!”
“It’s not that simple. But you’re home. We have plenty of time to talk.”
“Home? This isn’t my home! I don’t even know you!”
“I’m your grandfather.”
No. Whatever this is, it’s not my grandfather.
“Where are my parents? What have you done with them?”
“Your parents? Why would I have any idea where they are?”
“You took them. I know you did! Tell me where they are!”
As Jed’s words echoed in the room, the man’s eyes changed. Gone was the doughy pout. Gone was the misty compassion, the gentle smile, the lemon poppy-seed pretense. Poison trickled into the narrowed slits.
“Take them? I didn’t take anyone!” Spittle dribbled onto his chin, but he didn’t wipe it away. “I don’t take people and lock them away in some prison like those maggots did to you! Your—what did you call them?—parents didn’t have the spine to kill you like they planned! No. Instead they took you! Take, take, take!” He shook his head and clutched his face with both hands. “Even after you were gone, I could still hear you—feel you. But they took you so far…until all I could hear were whispers.”
Jed backed against the kitchen door and grabbed the knob.
The man waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t bother. It’s locked. You were never going to leave this room.” He sighed and sank into a chair.
Jed tested the handle. It didn’t move.
“Who are you?”
The man rubbed his eyes. “Your grandfather, and your father, and your mother all in one. I’m more of a grandfather to you than this meat sack ever was.” He pinched a wad of flesh on his arm and curled a lip in disgust.
The motions reminded Jed of when Kizer had done the same to him. “You’re the dread king,” Jed said. “You’re not my grandfather at all, are you?”
“This meat sack”—he pointed at his face—“deserved what he got! Taking you away from me! Letting maggots raise you in a tunnel! Yes…it was a blue car seat. They snatched you away from me. Sneaky maggots. Those things you call parents wanted to kill you. They snuck onto my boat to murder you. Spineless fools couldn’t do it. So they took you instead. What kind of people steal a baby? One as precious as you?”
“Shut up!” Jed yelled. “Just shut up! Where is my grandfather?”
Poison surged in the man’s eyes. “This face is not your grandfather! I am your grandfather! Not this filthy”—his fingers clutched the flesh around his forearm—“sack of”—he pulled the patch of skin and it tore away—“meat !”
Underneath the skin, hundreds of golden gears spun and whirred. The gold glinted as if the metal parts themselves had been painted in sunshine.
He stepped toward Jed.
“Get away from me, you freak!” Jed yelled.
“Freak?” A wicked grin danced on the monster’s lips.
The yellow metal in his arm looked like pure gold. Every gear was as small as one from a…
Jed glanced at his own arm.
As one from a wristwatch.
The creature took another step.
“I said get away from me!”
“You should find a place to lie down. It will be taking effect any moment now.”
“What will be tak—” And then he felt it. A tickling sensation in his brain. The slow loris flashed in his mind. The poison…the blurry sensation…the fading consciousness. “You drugged me.” His foot pressed into one of the doughnuts, and icing smeared along wood planks. “You—”
Jed fell to the floor.
“Jed…” The dread king’s voice rang like tuning forks in Jed’s ears. “Wake up.”
Jed opened his eyes. He tried to move, but his hands and feet were strapped to a metal table.
“I was starting to worry. You’ve been out for nearly a day. I’m afraid I overdosed the doughnuts a bit. But it’s over now. You’re here. You’re safe.”
The room swirled into focus. The white walls looked like a hospital.
Jed tugged against his restraints. “Let me go!”
“Soon. We need to talk.”
“What have you done with my grandfather, you lying scrap of gutter clunk!”
The man ground his teeth together. “He’s not your grandfather. And I do have a name. It’s Lyle. Not Gutter Clunk.”
“What did you do with him?”
Lyle raised his arm. Underneath the torn patch of skin, golden machinery flashed in the light. “I’m wearing him. This is all that’s left.”
“You—you killed him!”
Lyle rolled his eyes. “Oh, stop that nonsense. Stop acting like you’re going to throw up. You can’t. Not even if you want to.”
“You killed him.”
“Hush. None of that matters. You’d been gone so long, I was afraid you’d forgotten everything.” Lyle scratched his forehead. “I suppose you have forgotten everything.” He touched Jed’s arm. “Listen to me. The people who claim to be your parents are not your parents. They are weak little bugs that wither and die with a little sip of oil. Pathetic! Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic!” Lyle shouted. His hands shook. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “But not you. You’re pure. Crisp. Engineered for greatness.”
“Engineered?”
“Of course.” He gripped the table with both hands and stared into Jed’s eyes. “You. You are the final gilded relic. The greatest of all the gilded relics.”
The words hung in the air.
Relic?
What was he talking about?
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not lying to you. You know it’s true.”
“That’s a bunch of scrap,” Jed said. “You’ll have to try something better than that. It’s not even a good lie. Pick something I might actually believe.”
“You’re right. It’s preposterous. Tell me, have you ever broken a bone? Have you ever been sick? Chicken pox? Tonsillitis? No?” He leaned even closer. “What about the common cold?”
Jed saw himself floating through the air, hitting the tugboat deck, sliding fast. So fa
st. Head slamming into something dense. A crack. His neck broken. His body paralyzed. And then he was leaping from the tugboat deck. Forty, maybe fifty feet onto a tattered mattress not much thicker than his hand. The impact should have shattered his body.
The malaria-infested jungles of Africa.
Drinking river water in China. Everyone got sick that day. Everyone but me.
“It’s okay, Jed,” Lyle said. “You’re home. Everything will be okay.”
“This isn’t my home!”
“No.” Lyle shook his head. “I hardly recognize it either. Oh, how it’s changed. But we’ll fix it. We’ll fix everything. Rebuild until it becomes what it once was!”
“I have a home,” Jed said. “You’re a liar!”
Jed focused on the image of his parents. The first time they made a pineapple upside-down cake together. His father started a flour fight, and they threw handfuls of it back and forth until they all looked like ghosts. He even remembered the way the cake tasted when it came out of the oven. They ate on the kitchen floor, surrounded by the flour, which covered the kitchen like a winter snowfall.
“No. I’m not what you say.”
“It’s okay. You’ll come around. 99R15!” Lyle called. “Where is the other patient?”
Metal footsteps limped outside the room, and a gurney rolled through the doors. The dread was unusually tall and had only one eye. It stared at Jed—its head turning from Lyle to Jed, Jed to Lyle.
“What are you staring at? Go clean the deck or something.” Lyle shoved the dread from the room. He wheeled the gurney beside Jed.
Shay.
“Shay!” Jed said. “Shay, are you all right?”
Her eyes darted in a dozen different directions, and she pulled against the restraints.
“She’s fine,” Lyle said.
“What are you going to do to her?”
“Relax. I’m going to fix her.”
“I don’t want you to fix me!” Shay yelled.
“Yes, you do. You just don’t know it yet.”
“Leave her alone!” Jed yelled.
“She needs a bit of oil is all.” He took a silver can from a cupboard.
“What are you doing?” Jed said. “Don’t touch her!”
Lyle opened the can. “Bottoms up.”
Shay’s lip quivered. “Jed, help!”
Jed jerked against his restraints. “Don’t touch her! Get your hands off of her!”
Lyle pried open her mouth and stuffed a tennis ball between her teeth. Shay began to cry.
“Stop it!” Jed tried hopelessly to yank an arm free. “Leave her alone!”
Lyle tipped the can, and a thick stream of oil poured onto the tennis ball and leaked between the edges of her lips. She choked and coughed, but he continued to pour.
Tears squeezed from Jed’s eyes. “Stop it! You’re killing her!”
Lyle rolled his eyes. “I’m doing nothing of the sort. Settle down.”
Jed kicked and strained, but the straps held him in place.
When Lyle had emptied the last of the can, he wiped its rim with his finger and licked off the oil. He pulled the tennis ball from Shay’s mouth and dropped it into the can. “See?” he said. “Not so bad, was it?”
Shay’s lips and cheeks were black with oil. She sniffled, and her whole body rattled with fear.
Lyle dabbed her face with a white rag.
“Shay? Shay? Say something.”
“I’m…I’m okay.”
“What did you give her?”
Lyle held the can to Jed’s nose. “I already told you.”
Jed sniffed the scent of oil.
“But—”
“She’s a gilded relic too. The first. My first. My sweet daughter who sometimes can’t remember who she is. How special she is.” He stroked her face and combed his fingers through her hair.
“Shay? Is that true?”
Her eyes flicked back and forth. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” she repeated. She looked as if she was about to start crying again.
“I was younger at the time,” Lyle said, still stroking her hair. “Less capable. Far less practiced. I blame myself for your shortcomings,” he whispered to her. “For the fragility of your memory…the instability of your mind. But we all have our purpose, and she’s always fulfilled hers so wonderfully.”
Jed met his eyes. “Her purpose?”
Lyle nodded. “She’s had many purposes over the years. But most recently, it was to find you. And bring you to me.”
“Me? Why me?”
Lyle stood up straighter. “You are my greatest creation. The gilded relic of gilded relics. You and I are destined to be together. To purge the junkyard. To build a new world. A golden world. A gilded world. This is your purpose.”
Shay’s eyes tightened, and a tear slipped free, dropping onto the pillow under her head.
“But she didn’t bring me here,” Jed said.
“Oh, but she did. Each captain of a dread vessel has a beacon. Some people say it looks a bit like…a spyglass.”
Jed opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out. He pictured the red, pulsing lens. Pulsing…pulsing. Every day before breakfast.
“Stuck on that stack, it couldn’t activate the beacon. But Shay could. And she did. Every morning. And then you’d shut it right back off.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t do any of that!” Shay said, tears streaming down her face.
“I know, sweetheart, you won’t remember. I took those awful memories away.”
She sobbed as he stroked her hair.
“You’re lying!” Jed yelled.
“No. I’m not a liar. We share that quality of integrity, you and me.”
“Prove it!”
Lyle pulled a box from his pocket. Inside were tiny circles of glass. He pinched one. “Hold still,” he said, even though Jed was strapped tightly to the bed. He pried open Jed’s eyelids and slid a lens over each eye.
Jed’s vision changed. It was as if he were looking through someone else’s eyes.
Shay’s eyes.
Scene after scene flashed in brief fragments, like spliced excerpts of corrupted memories.
Shay talking to herself…
Arguing with herself…
Telling herself Jed was a “good mouse” and not a “Lyle mouse” at all…
Standing by the smokestack…
Activating the spyglass…
Finding it deactivated…
Reactivating it…
Again and again…
Waiting for the dread to arrive…
Watching Jed get wrapped in a sack…
Sitting by his bound body on the dreadnought…
Watching him use the can slicer to escape…
Leading him through the dreadnought…
Sneaking away to meet with Spyglass as the others rescued Captain Bog…
Telling Spyglass and his dread to obey whoever held the fire extinguisher…
Volunteering to join Jed in storming the Galleon…
Seeing the approval in Lyle’s eyes…
The images disappeared as soon as Lyle removed the lens.
“Don’t be upset with her,” Lyle said. “She genuinely doesn’t remember.” His voice was soft and sympathetic. “I keep the hard memories—the ones that hurt her—right here.” He opened the box and slid the lens back in its slot. “We all have a purpose. You. Me. Shay. It’s who we are. Like Shay, you’ll come to learn this.”
“You’re insane if you think I’m going to help you do anything,” Jed said. He wanted to sound strong, but his voice quivered.
“That won’t be your choice to make.”
“Do whatever you want to me. I won’t do what you say. You’re a liar. You’re lying about everything!”
“Perhaps. Then again, perhaps you only need a little convincing.”
He grabbed his shatterbox, aimed it at Jed’s chest, and pulled the trigger.
A white blast slammed into Jed’s chest with
a crushing force. He couldn’t breathe.
“This is for the best,” Lyle said. “It’s the only way you’ll understand. And you must understand.”
The shot blasted a wide hole in his clothes. As the smoke cleared, bits of metal glittered underneath. Instead of broken bone and torn muscle, there were gears and coils—as golden as the sun.
Captain Bog’s voice rang in his ears. Looks like we got ourselves a little golden boy. Eh, Ki?
Jed’s heart thumped. He could feel the blood beat under his skin. Dizziness swirled in his stomach. “No, I feel. I can feel.”
“Of course you can feel,” Lyle said. “You feel deeper than any of those meat sacks could ever hope to.”
“I—have a heart.”
“A wonderful, golden heart. Stronger than every bit of iron or copper this world has ever unearthed.”
“I’m—I’m bleeding.”
Lyle swiped a finger in the red liquid and rubbed it against his thumb. “Oil.”
“No.” Jed shook his head. “This isn’t possible. What have you done to me?”
“You have a destiny, my boy. And it’s all in here.” Lyle pressed his palm against the golden machinery in Jed’s chest. Lyle whipped a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed a patch of oil until the gold underneath shone.
“Here.” He tapped the center of Jed’s chest. “This will fix you—fix everything.”
Lyle’s finger traced a small shape. A keyhole.
“What—what is that for?”
“It unlocks your potential. Unlocks everything you are capable of. There’s so much more inside of you than you could ever imagine. Potential like the world has never seen.” He scrunched his lips together. “Each gem of possibility, each bottled talent, each treasure box of power, comes with a key. A key to control the dread, as Shay does. A key to make you strong. A key to make you clever. Even a key to make you fly.”
He reached into his coat and removed a ring of keys. He flicked through them, one at a time.
“So many keys. All for you.” He dropped the ring to the floor. “But none of them matter. Because the maggots who stole you from me stole the only key of significance. The only key I care about. A key I can’t reforge. I don’t suppose you’ve seen such a key?”
