The eyes were a tiny flourish, a vibrato on the high note. They were a perfectly rolled r. They made the tiny machine more than the sum of its parts. They made it look alive as she connected the copper to the battery, as the tiny pin legs moved one after the other. Alive, rather than simply logic. Just cause and effect. Nell looked down at the bobbly little battery with legs, a mess with no casing or style. She could see how every part of him worked—how every part of it worked. It.
There was no magic here. Eyes didn’t make it any more than coils and wire and hinge and metal. Scrap. Practice. The exercise of the steel sprite wasn’t enough for Nell anymore. She wanted more than button eyes. She knew that before the Turn machines could think. That. That was what she wanted.
The sprite skittered clumsily across her desk. A whispered word for a thinking machine was computer. The word sent thrills down Nell’s spine. Forbidden, clever metal things.
Computers had brought about the end of the world. Black Water City was so grateful to have survived—even if it was still sick and wheezing—that the very mention of computers was blasphemy. They were brought to life by reams of numbers that conjured thought, and impulse, and memory out of nothing. Whole tomes of language in numbers and oblique symbols that, when lined up just right, could bring consciousness to steel. She longed for access to it, for how huge it could be.
Nell didn’t think there was any reason to be afraid of numbers and letters. She’d been raised with a wrench in her hand; there wasn’t a thing made of steel that could spook her. She spent her every waking hour listening to the ticking of a machine that kept her alive. She was sure that the rest of the folk in Black Water City were afraid only because they didn’t ask questions, because they believed what they were told. If all you’d ever heard about the history of your world was horror stories about gleaming boxes full of bad knowledge, of course you’d be afraid.
Nell knew better than this. Her father had told her that the metal boxes full of magic had been fine. It was people, frightened, angry people, that had brought the world down. Was it just the boxes, she often wondered, that they were so afraid of? How easy it is to stuff myth and horror into a box. Haunted slices of clever steel, something with hard lines, something cold.
Surely, if there was a way to make a computer look like something people trusted, there’d be a chance for a world full of clever machines again. Friendly-looking computers, full of knowledge, full of answers. Nell sighed. “Think of all we could know.”
Her wish fell dead in the air, onto the desk. She watched her tiny motion machine dance across the surface and tapped her fingernails against the wood, matching the rhythm it walked in. It was almost endearing, its little eyes blankly staring out. She turned it around, and it walked back toward her, a kind of sweetness to its almost dance.
She imagined it blinking up at her, moving of free will rather than rote.
“Hello,” she whispered. It tippled along, silent. Nell wanted so much more, but all she had was this desk, these batteries. The analogue. The not enough.
She sighed, caught the sprite as it attempted to potter away toward a nest of springs. She disengaged the battery, and all movement dropped out of the little creature. A quiet, tiny friend, but not enough.
Kodak nipped at her ankles, not willing to be ignored much longer, then hopped into her lap. This was the specific kind of needy he always became at this time of night. The hunt, then dinner.
“A’right, a’right,” Nell conceded, placing the tiny exercise on a shelf above her tools where a space was open, ready, among a menagerie of twenty, thirty steel sprites just like him. None worthy of presentation, none a big deal. Essentially the shelf was full of toys. Nell sighed, looking up at them, knowing they were a waste of battery energy, knowing that her new little pal wasn’t what Nan had intended Nell to use her gift for. She tucked Kodak under her arm, grabbed her satchel, and walked across her room, away from her cove, to the great bay window. The sprites were trinkets, just enough to satisfy the parts of her that wanted to bring things to life; what Nell needed was something much bigger. Black Water City needed something much bigger, too.
She swung the window wide and stepped out into the fresh night.
CHAPTER 4
Nell sat on the hot red tiles of the roof, looking out over the parklands and the city. Kodak was curled up at her feet. Out beyond the glistening green of the forest the city cracked open with light against the darkened sky, a pomegranate with a split gut, all jewels. When the city had been rebuilt, dedicating electricity rations to illuminating the streets had been the local council’s absolute imperative. Memories of the atrocities had hung around dark corners, and the light kept the deep swaths of national depression at bay. On the roof, Nell kept a little oil lamp by her side (no sense in wasting a battery) so she wouldn’t lose footing, and the glow was a cradle against the blackness of the forest at night.
In the distance stood the tall white monument, Kathleen ni Houlihan. Or Kath, Kate, Katie. Stone and majesty, six hundred and some feet tall. Nell’s mother, Cora, had designed her body on paper at the very same desk Nell drew at. Cora had pulled her construction out of her imagination. For her whole life, Nell had been watching her mother’s contribution rise over the cityscape from this quiet spot on her roof. Day after day Kate grew, and now all that was missing was the right side of her face, a forearm and hand. She was posed gracefully, reaching one hand back out to the ocean and one arm toward the center of the city, stopping, incomplete, at the elbow. Nell usually came out to say good-night to her. They’d been made by the same woman after all.
Nell’s stomach tightened at the sight of her mother’s contribution. There really was only a few months left for her own. Her grandmother’s list scrolled behind her eyes. Make something. Marry someone. Leave. Shame them all by going to the stoneyard. Of the four, only one was something she wanted to reach out and touch, and that was the making. But what? Something worthy and important and powerful. Something that mattered to her as well as to the city.
Nell was a good mimic, had a good eye for structure. She drew excellent plans for all sorts of little civilian machines: cameras, typewriters, useful recreational objects that unfortunately existed already and were in no need of augmentation. Why build something new if one from before the Turn could be salvaged?
“We’re trying to move forward,” her father would insist. “Keep that in mind. You should be contributing something that brings us forward.”
Nell wasn’t sure it was possible to go forward if they didn’t look back to before the Turn. Their island was still disconnected from the rest of the world.
The people of the city lived in a strange, dusty cornucopia. There were so few of them left in a place built for millions that they all had more or less what they needed. Except Nell. She couldn’t fish a worthy idea out of the water at the end of the Livia.
Every time Nell mentioned this looming problem to her father, he told her she was “frustrating but capable,” that he was sure she would think of something and then occupied himself elsewhere.
It was as if the topic of her future were a mild potential inconvenience, preferably one to be avoided, as opposed to a massive shift in Nell’s entire life trajectory.
If she chose the monument, Nell would be gone on early or late shift work, laying stones from one end of the day to another. Her only friend would probably be too embarrassed by her to keep her company, and even if she weren’t, their lives would look so different. Their worlds, unmoored, would drift. Ruby was already untethering herself anyway, shamelessly unpicking the knots of their friendship to loose herself upon the world, and there was absolutely nothing Nell could do about it. Nobody ever made Ruby do anything she didn’t want to.
Ruby would become a tailor or a weaver or whatever she wanted. She could start her own business or marry into a partnership or take ability tests to start life in the Pasture if she wanted; she was whole but for her eye. Ruby stood in a bright atrium with open doors on all sides. R
uby was going to be just fine.
If Nell walked through the door that led to the monument, maybe she would find new friends—once she got over the massive, excruciating shame of falling so far short of the Crane family brilliance. Maybe she could just curl up and disappear. That sounded appealing.
If Nell moved to the Pasture, maybe she could convince the people there that she was an oracle, just like Nan. Give prayer sermons and blessings. Put bird bones and sage in little jars, and call them spells. Be the only augmented living thing for three hundred miles. Get stared at by the healed; get treated like a piece of machinery. Crack up completely. Delightful.
Option three: Oliver Kelly.
Nope.
Nell sighed deeply, opened her satchel, and began to unpack her spoils from the shore. She laid them out in the lamplight. The thick spool of stiff copper wire. Two large, unbroken lightbulbs. Nell considered taking them apart. Their filaments could be salvaged; she could perhaps cut them open very gently, maybe turn them into terrariums for the kitchen. A handful of sea glass that Ruby didn’t want. The headset of an analogue telephone, easily from well before the Turn. It would have been the best find of the day if it hadn’t been for the hand.
Nell examined it carefully, curious. It was nothing more than a stray piece of a mannequin. But she admired it. Such a strange piece of the old world. A boy’s hand.
Any time Nell thought about boys, or girls for that matter, she immediately sabotaged her fantasy self out of any romance. No beautiful strangers waited in the lamplight to whisk her away from her life, and if there were, Nell was certain that she’d viciously alienate them in less than five minutes flat. If it wasn’t her dour expression or the scar that ran from her chin to her gut, then the ticking would send them running. There’s not much thrill in kissing a grandfather clock in a girl’s dress. Nobody wants to dance with a time bomb.
It all came so naturally to Ruby. Ruby was funny and pretty and didn’t tick. She always had a boyfriend—she ate up the thirsty-eyed boys and spit them out, bored as soon as they had made themselves comfortable. She picked her teeth with their bones and cackled scandal to Nell, who usually loved the thrill of Ruby’s tales. Or she had when she believed that she’d grow into something like Ruby’s charm or come across someone who could see past the height of her family’s name, her ticking. Now Nell’s hope was dimming, and Ruby’s ease seemed so unfair. Plus Ruby had ideas. She was always creating beautiful things.
Nell turned the hand over again and again.
What use was a hand with no boy to go with it? Nell could have launched it off the roof that very moment, sent it plummeting down into the garden to smash or rot or otherwise disappear. She looked to stone Kate on the horizon, mocked throwing it right at her head.
“You can have it,” she said to the one-handed stone woman on the skyline, her voice catching with the bitterness. “You need it more than I do.”
In the distance, the torchlights of the night watch folk danced around the woman’s skirts, her waist, her neck. They were fireflies, phosphorescent and magic instead of labored and repetitive. It looked so much better from far away, Nell thought. She might be a firefly someday soon, a glowing speck waltzing around the still, hard body of the closest thing Black Water City had to a god. The god people like her grandmother prayed to in the Pasture was too busy with green fields to throw its eyes on the metal and concrete of the Pale. Kate would do. Nell held the hand up to the statue’s unfinished arm, the perspective difference between her and the great statue making it almost match. Almost.
“You’re not finished yet, are you?” Nell whispered. “It’s okay. Neither am I.”
Someday soon it would take twenty or thirty people and miles of thick cable rope and sweat and aching muscles to bring the forearm up from the city floor to its position at the end of Kate’s elbow. Every day sculptors sat around an enormous hand, chipping away at the stone, detailing her fingers, her palm. Do women of stone get life lines? Love lines? Do their knuckles have marks? Do their fingernails have cuticles? Calluses? Did the sculptors just slapdash the work to make the hand look moderately human, or did they write her life there?
As she mulled over her future with a pick and hammer, with rope-burned hands and shadows under her eyes from the night watch, she began to unspool the wire she’d salvaged. It was sharp, and if she wasn’t careful, she would tear her fingertips; but Nell knew how to deal with metal. She loved the smell of it, how it changed against heat. She coiled the wire around the wrist of the useless hand a few times and then extended the spiral slowly around the air, a scaffolding for an invisible arm, a hard copper spiderweb. She reached where the elbow would have been and stopped. She pulled her pliers out of the front pouch of her satchel (with her big magnifying glass and spare leather gloves and knife and the panic whistle Ruby made her keep on her at all times) and nipped the wire free from the rest of the spool. What remained was a wire frame gauntlet, an empty arm for the mannequin hand.
“This will have to do for now,” she whispered, holding it up. Kate’s face was still missing, but her body was now more or less complete in Nell’s gaze. Awkward, partially metal, but complete.
Motes of dust were illuminated by Nell’s lantern, and against the dark they seemed like tiny live sprites swirling around the inventor’s daughter. She held the copper skeleton arm alongside her own and locked her fingers with the hard, unmoving mannequin hand. She had never held a boy’s hand before.
In the dim light his body, from elbow to shoulder to other shoulder, bloomed before her. His throat, his chest, his stomach and hips and legs. His skin, the rise and fall of breath.
Her mother gave this city a six-hundred-foot woman of stone. Her mother drew the inside and outside of her onto paper and stood in front of the council and told them that building a stone body would remind them of their humanity, after everything.
What could be more human than building something new, more human than making life? An idea lit Nell up then, sparkling like the torches along Kate’s stony skirts.
If it was possible to build parts of a person, it was possible to build a whole one. Of course it was. If people were afraid of coded magic in steel boxes, she’d take the magic out of the steel boxes and put it in a brand-new body. Not a stone giant. One just her size. A whole person. Hang limbs on a spine and find a way to give him a brain, a heart—a soul. Could you make a soul out of spare and found parts? Why not?
“Sorry, Kate,” Nell whispered, gripping the hand. “I think I’ll be needing this after all.”
CHAPTER 5
It always happens like this.
You are seven years old. You have a pain in your chest. Or something like it. At least, a murmur of pain, a suggestion. You are coming to, just waking up. You are lying down and looking up, and there is light blinding you; there is something over your mouth. You are having difficulty breathing.
A gray mechanical hand descends on you, and you begin to panic; but it releases you from the mask, and you can breathe easier. You are sure for a moment that your father is standing above you: his blurry silhouette, his tall presence. He casts a warm shadow. There is a noise you can’t quite make out, but it is new and constant. Then he is gone.
You try to lean forward, to sit up and reach for him, but you are so heavy. You say something that should be his name, but your tongue is deadened and useless. You pull your new, shocking weight against gravity, and after an eternity, you sit up, and the new sound suddenly makes sense: a clock. A tense, even punctuation. The volume of it ascends like a sick panic, like something terrible.
“Da?” You try to say it again; but nothing comes, and you climb down off the bed—no, the bench—the operating table. Wires lead from your wrists like the strings on a marionette, but you cannot see where the wires go; you are connected to something you cannot see.
You stumble to your feet. You want to walk, you want to run; but fat wires are holding you, and the ticking is deafening. A roulette wheel, a machine gun.
Your bottom lip becomes heavy; your mouth weighs a ton. It splits open, your chin and throat part, your sternum and chest, your gut, and there are birds coming from you, small steel birds flying from the cavity of you. Their song is a ticking and mechanical symphony, ugly and loud. The birds are the last thing; they are always the last thing, gray and red and everywhere, singing a terrible countdown. Tick, tick, tick.
When you wake in the sharp of morning, whole and grown, the wires are gone. The dark is gone, your room is quiet and safe, but the ticking is still there. It is always there. The ticking is always there.
CHAPTER 6
Nell brushed her teeth at the small sink in the poky water closet off her bedroom. When the dream came and the ticking in her chest got so loud it woke her and left her shaking, she knew how to handle it. She couldn’t just lie among her blankets and pillows and dwell on it; she had to get up and be a live, mobile person. Her father was rattling around the house somewhere. Kodak must have been down there with him because he was nowhere in sight. She rinsed her mouth and washed her face and pinned away her mad spirals of curls.
She dressed herself from the tall wardrobe in the corner, in front of a gilded mirror. It had been her mother’s; aside from underthings and shoes, everything Nell wore had once belonged to her mother. Cora Crane had always dressed remarkably well, even in her daughter’s hazy memories of her. It was one of the few trappings of her Pastoral upbringing that she held about her in her city life: good fabric, everything made just her size.
Nell wanted to carry that same grace, the same silhouette. She was tall and spindly where Cora had been short and soft, but things somehow still managed to fit, just about.
Spare and Found Parts Page 3
