Ikey shivered, then turned his attention back to the end of the hall where the watchman barked several orders. A moment later, he hurried back down the aisle, casting glances over his shoulder. Behind him, the two mechanical asses carried a man between them. The man screamed as they trundled past. In the lantern light, dark, glistening droplets fell from the man and hit the floor and did their best to look like pools of liquid night.
Ikey laid back on the bunk.
Excited talking rippled up and down the aisle. Ikey fished his blindfold out of the waistband of his knickers and tied it around his head.
Philip turned away from the sight as the watchman and the two asses left the hall. Philip’s breath rolled against Ikey’s side like hot oil. A moment later, after a shout from the remaining watchman that all go back to sleep, the lantern light faded away.
“I’m scared that I’m going to die, and I don’t know how,” Philip said. “My mom died at home. And she laid in bed and moaned and moaned like all the breath in her was to be expelled before she passed, like she was a bellows that had to be emptied. And I sent my brothers and sisters out because I didn’t want them to see her suffer so. It was just me that sat beside her and held her hand. And every time she moaned, she’d squeeze my hand and it was like that, like I thought if I could keep her from squeezing, then she wouldn’t lose her life so fast. And so I told her—I leaned forward and I whispered into her ear and the heat baked off her and she smelled so awful and sour like something gone to rot in the sun and she looked it, too. All small and shriveled. I said, Mom, don’t squeeze. Don’t. You’re pushing the life right out of you.
“And she—her eyes were all over, like she was looking for something. Frantic for it. But as soon as I spoke, her eyes stilled and she stared straight up. Straight up, I tell you. And she stared so intently that I looked up, too. Bent my neck back and stared at the ceiling but there was nothing there except for the shadows of smoke off the lantern. And I began to wonder—No. I was scared. I was afraid that God was there. In that room. And He was staring down at Mom and me and He was… Like He couldn’t decide whether or not she was worth saving. Why would He let her suffer so if He knew she was worth saving? And so I pleaded with Mom to stop squeezing my hand. To lie still. To not breathe so hard and stop burning up and I was there stupid and daft and blubbering all over her like a boy in kneepants instead of saying a single damned proper prayer over her body. And then that was it. She died. She—One last rattling breath like something came loose in her and she was gone and I was alone and I turned to the ceiling and I said some…”
Philip shuddered.
Ikey turned on his side and put his flesh arm over Philip and pulled him close. Philip shuddered again, balled the blanket up, and buried his face into it. He heaved a sob into it, and Ikey tightened his grip before the boy was shaken loose from the world. He held the boy until the sobs subsided and the boy’s breathing settled into a steady, deep rhythm.
Ikey lay in bed, wide awake, sore and aching, his left side hurting where the iron of his arm dug into his rib cage. But he stayed still, motionless. The slightest movement might give away the furious pace at which his mind raced, dreaming up ways to escape Marlhewn.
Cross could take care of himself. And he had said before that Ikey shouldn’t have saved him from the burning deck of the Kittiwake. Cross might have been sent to the Continent, or escaped, or maybe he had been killed in the attack. Regardless, Ikey would have to get Philip out of Marlhewn. David, too. And Gavril. Everyone he could.
He’d let others know what went on here, and he’d bring back help for Cross.
Chapter Twelve
The watchman rang his handbell. Ikey sat up and tore the blindfold from his face. Along the aisle, a trail of dark spots marked the passage of the injured man last night.
He looked at Philip, who slid off the bunk.
Ikey dropped to the floor himself as David and Gavril climbed out of bed.
“How’d you sleep last night?” David asked.
“What happened?” Ikey asked.
David pushed his leg into his trousers, then shrugged. “Hard to say. Though I’m sure we’ll hear about it over the course of the day. Probably someone trying to fix his augment, or his situation.”
“His situation?”
David drew a finger across his throat.
Ikey pulled his uniform from the basket.
At breakfast, as they queued for their bowls, a man cut into the line behind Ikey. “I hear you fix things,” he said.
Ikey looked behind himself. “What do you want?”
“I heard you fixed your mate’s thumb. I want my leg fixed as well,” the man whispered over Ikey’s shoulder. “It ain’t right. Something jabs me fierce when I walk. Feels like something’s going to poke out my bloody side if I step down hard. If you can fix it, I’ll make it worth your while.”
Ikey turned around. The man behind him looked away. He had a large, thin nose. He looked back, then shifted his eyes down. “Well, what do you want in exchange?”
Ikey leaned in. “A way out.”
The man stared out across the benches filling up with inmates. He chuckled. “You think I’d be bloody-well standing here, asking for your help, if I had such a thing?”
Heat flushed over Ikey’s face. There had to be a way. The music boxes Cross designed flitted to mind. They were astoundingly ornate, put together in complex, intricate ways that Ikey couldn’t exactly wrap his mind around, but they were still assembled. There was always a way. This man would be charged with finding it, if he wanted Ikey’s help.
As he opened his mouth to tell the man he would stand firm on his demand, David grasped Ikey’s shoulder and leaned into the conversation. “Pardon me, gentlemen, but I couldn’t help but overhear you. If I may be so bold, I’d like to suggest something.”
The man arched an eyebrow at David.
“Ikey here will fix your leg if you can come up with a dram of consumption tonic.”
Ikey shot a furrowed glance at David.
The man sneered. “And where the bloody hell would you like me to get that? Maybe down at the dispencery?”
“Talk to Rolfe,” David said.
Ikey started to object. David hushed him.
“Rolfe?” the man balked. “I tell him I have consumption, he’s as likely to send me off to the chopper for a set of copper lungs as give me a drop of medicine.”
“Then I hope your leg doesn’t bother you too much today, I do,” David said before turning back to the queue.
The man arched his eyebrow again. He shifted his weight. A glimmer of pain traipsed over his face. He looked away again, out toward the crowd. The wedge of his nose hid most of his expression.
Ikey cleared his throat. “I need tools. Find me some tools, and I’ll take a look at your leg.”
“I’d rather you fixed it as opposed to look at it.”
“Then find me some tools.”
“Such as?”
“Whatever you can find.”
The man nodded. “You’ll see that I will.”
He limped off down the line, heading back to where he came from.
As Ikey turned around, David asked him what he wanted tools for.
“I can’t fix things without them.”
A wry grin spread over David’s face. “What do you plan on fixing?”
“Whatever needs fixing. Can they do copper lungs?”
David shook his head. “It’s an expression. A joke. I think. I don’t know. You look around this hall of horrors and I wouldn’t doubt it a moment to hear that someone did indeed have copper lungs.”
Ikey leaned in close to David. “What about Gavril?” he whispered.
“What about him?”
“Copper lungs?”
David lifted his hands and held them before him. He wiggled the fingers. They clacked and clicked and the bits of tin smeared the gaslight across his fingertips. “You never know what you miss until it's gone, right?” David asked his finge
rs. “I can’t tell you what I wouldn’t give to be able to touch something, you know? Proper. My fingers on something and letting me know what is there. But…” David leaned closer to Ikey. “I look down at these hands, and they’re these monster’s hands, you know? These horrible, ugly, metallic beasties. And they’re absolutely dead. Lifeless. Nothing to them.”
The hands clenched into a pair of fists as David watched. He shook his head. “I knew how awful it was to lose the one hand, and I can’t tell you how much I kick myself for not being more careful with the other. Now that it’s gone, it’s like I’m in a cage. This little cage that fits right around me and weighs but nothing, you know? It’s still iron. And everything around me, everything I try to touch, it’s only iron bars.”
David’s eyelids drifted down. His jaw clenched. Ikey wanted to see David’s fists tremble, to quake in the space between the two men, but his fists remained still, solid, lifeless as promised.
Gavril started to cough behind David.
The fists dropped to David’s sides as his eyes flew open. He leaned in closer and whispered, “And that’s why I’d rather see him in his grave, than see him step off the porter’s wagon.”
David turned around and placed an iron hand on Gavril’s shoulder as the man hacked into his fist.
Ikey gazed out over the tables filling with men feeding what few bits of humanity they still clung to.
The coughing grew in intensity, shook with a ragged sound, then subsided before turning into the wet hacking, retching sounds that preceded the bloody globs of mucous.
Ikey closed his eye. The world drew into sharper focus.
He raised his face to the ceiling, away from everyone. A sparrow perched on one of the rafters. Its little brown and gray head flicked in small, quick degrees as it surveyed the room.
Would Gavril have visited David in the infirmary? Would he have shown up as David lay in bed, his arm throbbing where the hand used to be? And would Gavril lay a hand upon David’s shin and let him know that he wasn’t so far away? That he could still be touched. That he was worthy of that touch. He was worth the effort.
Ikey swallowed hard. Clicks peppered the air. He looked down to see his own mechanical hand drawn into a fist. Ikey laid his good hand across his mechanical arm. It was cold to the touch. Hard.
He looked back to the rafters. The sparrow was gone.
Ikey turned forward as the queue finally approached the window. David whispered something into Gavril’s ear. Gavril turned his head to the side and nodded. A slight smile curled the corner of his lips.
It didn’t matter to David whether or not Gavril would visit him. David’s devotion to Gavril was its own reward. It kept him going. It got him off the bunk. It kept him from being carted out of the hall in the night in a fireman’s carry, blood dripping from whatever hole he had torn in himself. It kept him whole.
Ikey looked past Gavril. Philip stood before him and took the bowl of gruel handed to him. He didn’t stare at it like the others, those who saw it as a slight wedge against their ceaseless hunger. Philip’s blank stare, the slight wrinkle of his nose, said he saw it as insult. Further evidence of how hopeless things were.
After breakfast, they were once again led in procession across the factory and put to work at the same machines they had tended the previous day. As they fell into their rhythms, Ikey surveyed the room with renewed scrutiny. The stairway that ascended to the catwalk was guarded by two automatons. The doors to the sewing room floor were unguarded as boys pushed in empty carts and took out filled carts. Escape seemed unlikely through the sewing room.
As they leaned down together to sweep the tray, Ikey asked David about potential escape routes.
“Move!” David yelled.
Ikey looked into the machine as the tray rose up. His hand was still sweeping out leather pieces. He jerked back. The machine crunched down, missing his pinky finger by less than an inch.
“Pay attention,” David spat as the tray fell away from the leather and blades. “You can’t afford another trip to the chopper.”
Ikey nodded. His insides quivered. He glanced at the tin-plated finger tips and the iron rods that made up his hand and arm. It was unfeeling metal, but the thought of it being crushed inside the machine turned his stomach as much as the thought of his flesh and blood being mangled in the machine’s jaw.
Ikey leaned forward to sweep out the pieces. “We need to escape.”
“You know a hanging awaits you for even suggesting that, right?”
“I’d rather die a quick death at the end of a short rope than die piece by piece in this hole.”
David sighed. The press clanged. The two men reached into its jaw again.
“Then what?” David asked. “What would you do? Where would you go? You’d be a wanted man.”
“I’d go find help. I’d find my friend.”
“Your friend might end up here yet. If his injuries were worse than yours, he might take an extra few days at recuperation.”
Ikey glanced back at Philip. His fingers, dusted black from the leather, shuffled through the pieces gathered in his arm. He stepped up to the cart and sorted the pieces into the appropriate bins, his eyes blank and unseeing.
“He won’t last long in here,” Ikey said. “I’ve got to get him out. You should come, too.”
David snorted. “And what would I do outside of here? I got nowhere else to go. They catch me with stolen augments, then that’s the end of me.”
“You’ll come to an end in here as well.”
David glanced back at Gavril.
Ikey cleared his throat. “We can take Gavril with us. Get him some help. Before he gets augmented as well.”
David leaned into the tray with Ikey and shook his head. “I can’t. If anything happened to him, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”
“He’s not augmented. Why’s he here?”
“Russian. He escaped a Romanian invasion with his grandfather after they lost the rest of his family. They stowed away on a ship returning to Kerryford. His grandfather died of consumption on the voyage. Gavril stepped off the boat with nothing in his pocket but two words of English. It wasn’t long before he got picked up for vagrancy. They couldn’t send him to the front lines, so they stuck him in here.”
Ikey’s eyes sought out the Russian man. He leaned against the cart for a few seconds as he caught his breath.
“He’s not any better off in here,” Ikey said. “We find my friend, I can get us out of here. We can go up to Whitby. Things aren’t like this up there.”
David scoffed. “Whitby? And what? Get some holiday air? A bit of sun and sea?”
“It’s not like this up there,” Ikey repeated as he shook his head. “You’d be safe.”
“In the Whitby workhouse?”
“I’m telling you, it’s not like this up there. The workhouses ask you to break stone or pick oakum or something like that. You aren’t a prisoner. You can leave when you want. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll find you some work.”
David laughed and swept the leather off the tray with more gusto than usual. The pieces curled and swirled out into the air before raining down at Philip’s feet.
“Work? What would I do with these?” He held his hands up before himself as the tray clanged shut.
“I’ll hire you.”
“For what?”
“My assistant.”
The tray opened and David leaned in. He shook his head, then glanced over at Ikey. “As I seem to recall, you’re in a workhouse as well. I don’t think you’re in a position to be hiring.”
“I fix things,” Ikey said. “Like your hand. I can make money fixing things as soon as I get out of here. But if you don’t want to work for me—“
“Hey!” The Alligator bellowed.
Ikey and David swept out the tray and stood up in time to see The Alligator lumbering down the row of machines. One hand rested on the handle of his mace. The other hand pointed a finger at a young man who stood at the cart
at the next machine over. His head was hung. Beads of sweat shone off his pale cheeks and dripped from the tip of his nose. His hands rested on the edge of the cart, and he appeared to want nothing more in the world than to lean his weight against it, ask it to take some of his load, but the casters would not consider it. He remained upright, however, with one leg as still and solid as mechanism while the other leg trembled, the knee quaking.
“Get back to work! Now!” The Alligator bellowed.
“Do as he says,” David said to Ikey, then swept the tray before them, clearing more than his half.
Ikey turned and swept the rest of the tray clean, then glanced over his shoulder as he pulled his mechanical arm free.
“I said to get back to work!” The Alligator yelled at the young man who remained at the cart, head bowed. But now his elbows trembled.
Ikey stood upright.
“You’ll only make it worse,” David said. He gripped Ikey’s sleeve.
As The Alligator’s steady stride ate up the distance between them, he pulled the wooden handle from his belt and flicked his arm out. The brass-studded block swung away from him and barely missed an older man who shuffled back to the machine. The Alligator swung the mace over his head. The block whipped through the air. The fact that Ikey couldn’t hear the whoosh of it parting the air for the clamor of the machines made it worse, made it a phantom. At least when his dad had taken the switch to him, he heard every lash, every hum of the branch as it lilted through the air and came crashing down. It gave him a chance to steel himself.
But the young man didn’t appear to know. Ikey yanked his sleeve out of David’s grip and stepped away from the machine.
“Ikey!” David called out in a rasp, what passed as a whisper in the cacophony of the room.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ikey caught sight of Gavril approaching from the cart. He pointed at the machine behind Ikey. His face was stone, solid, a wall approaching. Ikey turned toward Gavril to prepare for however the man would try and stop him.
Tin Fingers: Book 2 in the Arachnodactyl Series Page 14
