The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine

by Jason Sizemore

  “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?”

  He smiled at me, cheeks rosy, and named me a price. I paid it and collected the parts, lugged them home, worrying.

  Jackson had the girl awake by the time I made it back, the steady patter of his speech broken by the stilted syllables of a synthesizer linked to a touch pad. I listened to the dead, cold voice as it answered questions, carrying on her half of the conversation. It was raspy, empty. There were better programs available, but Jackson preferred the retro feel of passive inflections and static. I put the supplies down on the nearest workbench and locked the door, double checking all three deadbolts before stepping back. The alleyway outside was empty, dark even during the day, but talking to Pelican had left me feeling anxious and worried about what was coming. I’d stumbled down three or four different alleyways on my way home, backtracking and cutting through side-streets. I wondered how long it would be before I was actually being followed; sooner or later the news that the girl had survived would filter its way to the Corvidae and they’d come looking for her. I contemplated pulling a workbench in front of the door, damn the mess that moving one would make.

  “Randal?” Jackson’s voice floated down the stairwell. “Randal, is that you?” There was fear in his voice, but he disguised it well.

  “It’s me.” I limped to the stairwell and waved.

  “Randal,” Jackson said, “Come up and meet our guest.” I shook my head and Jackson frowned at me, his thick eyebrows drawing together. I pointed to the lopsided mask, the arm that had frightened her earlier, and Jackson snorted

  “Randal,” he said, and I lowered my head. I started climbing up the stairs, my right foot thumping on the wood. Jackson smiled and took my arm as I reached the top, leading me into the room. The girl was still limp, still caught in the numb painkiller haze, she shuddered when she saw my face. Jackson led me over and sat on the corner of the cot. “This is Randal,” he said, keeping his voice calm and low. “You’d call him my assistant, I guess. He took care of you during the evenings.”

  “Hi,” I said. I gave her a lopsided grin. “You look like you’re healing well.”

  She was pale now, paler than when I’d left the workshop, and there were bloodstains on her bandages. Jackson had been drugging her, prepping her for more surgery, re-working the lines of blue stitches that held her battered body together. There were sutures on her cheeks that hadn’t been there when I left. The girl scratched her hand across the touchpad, letting the computer beside the cot translate the movements into speech. Thank. You. Randal. My. Name. Is. Rose.

  There was something lucid beneath the drug haze, something aware of where she’d found herself. She studied my face with her good eye, following the lines of steel and scarred skin, suddenly focused on what those scars could mean. “It’s an old job,” I said. “And I’m too cantankerous a patient for Jackson to replace things or make them pretty. Don’t worry; he’ll make sure you’re still beautiful when he’s done.”

  She smiled at me then, a terrible expression on her broken face, and winced as the smile tugged at the sutures. Jackson slipped a hypodermic into her neck, easing opiates into her bloodstream. I stepped back, giving him room, watching as she went under.

  “Sleep now, Miss Rose,” Jackson said. “We’ll have you up and talking soon.” She shook her head, fingers fumbling for the pad, but the drugs hit and she faded. Her hand went limp again.

  Jackson stood up and ran his fingers through the pale wisps of his hair, looking pensive as she studied the ruin of her face. “She isn’t going to be pretty, Randal. You shouldn’t have lied to her.”

  I turned around and walked toward the stairs.

  “She’ll be pretty enough,” I said. “You’ll rebuild her and she’ll be pretty enough.”

  We both knew he planned to install the tongue before we ran away.

  We argued after that, Jackson and I. Argued about running, about rescuing the girl, about trying to install a new tongue while we both knew the Corvidae were coming to find us. Jackson won, as always; he’s a smart man, and he has arguments aplenty when he needs them.

  “We shall stay,” he said. “Who would find us, if they looked for her? Who would even consider looking for a girl in a place like this?”

  “Pelican knows,” I told him. “He knew the moment I asked for the parts. He knows, Jackson, and they’ll know to ask him. They’re looking, Jackson. They’re going to come.”

  Jackson shook his head, his eyes sad. “We are safe enough, Randall. She’ll heal before they find us, and there is always the tunnel if she does not. Pelican knows many things, but he does not know about that.” He settled down behind his workbench, sitting in the battered hardwood chair with its back stiff and straight like a throne. Jackson, king of clockwork, master of the world he surveyed. I didn’t share his faith in the tunnel. We could get out if we used it, yes, but we still had to run. And the tunnel has been here longer than I have, longer than Jackson and his towering piles of junk. He always told me it was a service entrance, built in the days when the workshop was home to grander creations than ours. It wasn’t a secret then, and it was barely a secret now.

  That night I took a lantern and walked down the dark length of the tunnel. We had used it as a graveyard, a crypt for the gutted husks of grandfather clocks we’d salvaged for parts. The slow tick-tock of my heart echoed against the stones, mocking the dead clock-faces.

  “Safe enough,” I told myself, and the words echoed off the walls. It took hours to clear a path, to make sure the tunnel was ready if we needed it. I checked the locks and the keys at the far end, just to be sure. I ambled down the narrow corridor. It would be a short sprint, if running was needed, but I’m not built for speed and Jackson was old. My faith in his plan waned as I contemplated the possibilities.

  They found us the day after Jackson installed Rose’s new tongue.

  Jackson and Rose were asleep when it happened. He, lost in a quiet slump beside the cot, she, twisting and turning through another night of medicated slumber. I stood by the doorway, my heart a metronome beat beneath the steady rhythm of Jackson’s snoring, and I heard the muffled thump in the workshop downstairs. I thought it might have been an invention, or a pile of Jackson’s parts collapsing in the night. Such things weren’t unheard of in a workshop such as ours. It wasn’t until the second thump, and then the third, that I realized what it was: someone kicking, hammering, trying to batter down our door. I heard the wood give way, the locks bending inwards, the soft crunch of someone walking across the workshop floor.

  We had an intruder, and that wasn’t a pleasant thought.

  I heard the glass face of Jackson’s second-favourite clock shattering beneath a heavy fist, and I allowed myself a few seconds to consider the merits of cowardice. It was tempting; I am ill-equipped for stealth, what with my steel-shod limp and the endless tick-tock tick-tock eliminating the possibility of approaching unannounced. Investigation meant a confrontation, facing the intrude
r down, and I was coward enough that the thought gave me pause.

  I picked up Jackson’s poker, a cast-iron antique he’d acquired at an auction. I’d scoffed at him when he bought it, claiming it was useless, but it felt comforting to have a weapon in hand. The poker felt solid, weighted for a quick swing should I need to bludgeon a potential thief, and I held it before me as I limped down the stairs and switched on the workshop lights.

  There was a Corvidae in the workshop, languid and ready for my approach. He was an angry snarl of a boy, just like the rest of them, black-feather hair, fingers like raptor talons, eyes as smooth and dark as marbles. He stank of carrion, thick and overripe. I raised the poker, holding it like a sword, ready to cave in the boy’s skull with its iron head. The Corvidae sneered. “Ya bully dreaming, Tick-Tock. Me-and-I pluck your vitreous; squish-squish, sweet’n’juicy, yum-yum-ha.” He cawed then, cackling. He had a crow’s laugh, a harsh croak. “Where da patch?”

  I charged him, swinging the poker, a futile gesture fuelled by anger and fear. He moved fast, a dash of shadow against the sulphurous yellow light. It didn’t take long, no more than three ticks of my heart, and it was over. I saw him move, felt the poker rip free of my hand, then he crashed backwards with his hollow weight bearing me to the floor. I looked up into a wicked grin, grubby talons hovering over my eyes.

  “Where da patch?” he croaked. He kept his voice low, all secret whispers. I shook my head. “Gone,” I said. “Jackson’s gone. He isn’t here.”

  His talons wove an eager pattern in the air as a narrow, black tongue licked pointed Corvidae teeth. “Where da girl den, Tick-Tock? You hide our pretty-pretty, our little birdy-bird? We want her back, Tick-Tock. Gotta finish what we started.”

  “She’s not hiding.” My treacherous voice quavered, just a little, giving away my fear. “She’s not here, she ran away.”

  The Corvidae gave me a harlequin’s smile, leaning forwards to run his long tongue across the tender flesh of my good eye. “Tell da patch I came, Tick-Tock. Tell him Rook3 wants ‘is dolly back, no matter what.” And I nodded, stiff-necked, my eye following the pointed claw dancing a hair’s breadth from my pupil. Rook3 laughed, drunk on my fear. He floated to his feet in a flurry of limbs, dancing and spinning his way to the gaping maw of our broken doorway. “Me-and-I be seeing you, Tick-Tock,” he said, and then he was gone, nothing more than a caw of laughter on the wind.

  I lay on the floor for a long time.

  Jackson had shown me his blueprints for my arm and chest, the detailed plans and notes he’d compiled explaining how and why they work. I know that there are three-hundred and fifty-seven cogs and gears in my arm alone. I lay on the ground and listened to my heart, the steady tick-tock that never felt the surge of adrenaline, never sped up when danger loomed. When I flexed my fingers, pondering their movement, I knew that another hundred and twenty cogs came to life. I tried to console myself with this knowledge, telling myself that clocks are works of precision and delicacy, that they do not lend themselves to strength, or violence.

  It didn’t help.

  Jackson unlocked the bedroom door; his feet padded down the stairs. My good arm trembled. Jackson stood next to me, staring at the broken door. “They came,” he said.

  “Just one.” I stood up, busying myself clearing a bench, moving the junk onto the surrounding piles. When I was done I tipped it on its side, pushing it against the doorframe to replace the door. I leant my weight against it, holding it secure. “He’s fast and he’s angry. I’m sure he’ll collect the rest of them.”

  Jackson clucked his tongue and forced me to sit, fussing with my arm. He checked mechanisms and servos, double-checking to be sure. He always worried when I fell, always wanted to make sure that I hadn’t damaged the intricate parts of his creation. “They want her back, Jackson,” I told him. “They want us to hand her over, or they’ll kill us both. Kill us and eat our eyes.”

  Jackson bowed his head and kept his attention on the arm. His face pinched, locked into a frown of concentration. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll keep her safe, somehow.”

  “We need to run. Tonight.”

  Jackson shook his head, closed the casing on my arm. “If they found us, it’s too late. They’re expecting us to run and she still needs rest, another day or two at least. We need to stay, keep them out somehow. Give her time to heal, then use the tunnel to sneak away.”

  I looked at the upright bench, thinner and weaker than our stout wooden door. “How?”

  “Somehow,” Jackson said. He rapped my arm with a sharp knuckle, the soft echo filling the room. “We haven’t got a choice here, Randal. We must do the best we can.”

  I went back to Pelican the next morning. I bought the best security system our money could afford. “Lethal or non-lethal,” Pelican asked me.

  “Whichever you’ve got,” I told him. “As long as I can walk away with it today and have it installed by nightfall.” He gave me a queer look and a price, and I gave him the money. It took the better part of a day to get the workshop straightened out and the new locks installed, repairing the door and barricading the windows with steel bars and old workbenches I bolted into place. I spent the afternoon installing Pelican’s toys: taser banks and motion detectors; thick Kevlar sheets that sat over the doorjamb, securing it against gunfire and battering shoulders; voltage packs that would pass a charge through anything metal that was tampered with on the exterior of the workshop, leaving a claw blackened and the man behind it stunned. Jackson was upstairs while I toiled below; he checked his work on Rose’s prosthetic tongue.

  I finished the security job after sunset, just in time for the first Corvidae’s croaky laughter to echo at the end of our alleyway. Jackson came down as I was making dinner, flinching at the distant laughter outside. “Done,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. His blue, worn overalls stained with patches of rust. “She can talk.”

  “Can she eat?” I ladled soup into a bowl and pushed it toward him, then filled a second when Jackson nodded. I started limping toward the stairs, bowl on a plastic tray.

  “She’s probably sleeping,” Jackson said. “And she’ll be groggy, even if she’s not. Make sure she doesn’t choke, Randal—she’ll need some practice before she’s used to swallowing with the prosthetic.”

  The whole gang arrived while I was climbing the stairs, loud caws and laughter shrill in the alleyway. I ignored them and kept climbing, opened the door to Rose’s room. She wasn’t sleeping, but her eyes were glassy from Jackson’s painkillers. She was insulated by the drugs, able to look into my face without flinching. She seemed numb to the point where even the noise outside was absent. I sat down next to her and she smiled at me, wincing. “Randal,” she said. Her new tongue stumbled around the name, blunting the n, but I could recognise the word through the awkwardness. “Your name is Randal.”

  “I brought you food,” I said. “Something soft. Soup. Jackson wants you to practice swallowing.”

  “I can hear birds,” she said. Her face turned toward the window, toward the aftermath of sunset lingering behind the skyline. The song of the Corvidae filled the air.

  “Nothing to worry about.” I tried to look her in the eye. “You should eat.”

  I held a spoon before her face, the soup steaming and thick. I watched the patchwork plastic and Kevlar move when she opened her mouth, the faint flicker at the base of her throat as Jackson’s prosthetic worked with the torn scraps of her real tongue. Jackson was right—it was ugly work, but Rose remained beautiful. I fed her a spoon at a time, using my good hand to guide the spoon. The crow calls grew louder, cutting through the groggy haze. She stopped eating and turned to the window, shuddering.

  “It’s them.” She said. “They...hated me. They told me to leave. Why are they here?”

  “No one likes to lose,” I said.

  She blinked back tears, remembering. “Why am I here? Why aren’t I dead?”

  I thought of Jackson, sitting downstairs, working his way through
a bowl of soup. “Jackson likes old stories,” I told her, and she frowned. “Fairytales and stuff. You needed help and he helped you.” I clenched my fist, listening to the gears creak. “He does that, sometimes.”

  The painkillers kicked in, responding to her stress. She drifted off, unable to fight Jackson’s drugs, and I went downstairs to listen to the bird calls. Jackson was by the stove again, hidden in the corner of the workshop. He cradled a half-full bowl of soup in his lap. The Corvidae were right outside now. I turned the lights off, one by one, relying on the shadows to give us some cover.

  “She’s scared,” I said, settling into the stool next to him.

  “She’s a smart girl,” Jackson answered. He lowered his head and stared into the murkiness of the soup, wispy hair falling in front of his face. Something thumped hard against the front door and the charge went off, filling the air with ozone. We listened to something young and birdlike squeal in pain, then the sound of a limping body retreating into the distance. “We should have closed-circuit,” Jackson said. “I don’t like hearing them without seeing what they’re up to.” The second thump was more solid, prepared for the shock that followed. The sound echoed across the workshop as the taser’s hiss cut through the darkness.

  “Pelican didn’t have any cameras,” I said. “It’d take at least a week to get some in.”

  Jackson slept in his chair, fitful, flinching with every measured assault against our doorway. I stayed awake, keeping vigil, the poker gripped in the clockwork hand. My slow hand, the hated hand, but it was strong enough to shatter bone if I could land a solid blow. Jackson used to tell me stories about a broken boy who was put back together by kindly elves with a talent for magic and clockwork. He would tell me the boy’s arm was magical, that his heart was a wonder in a world where hearts rarely beat, where all too often hearts were lost for no reason. Love was a powerful thing in Jackson’s stories. It could conquer armies and rewrite time. It could make the broken whole again.