Loose culottes, small boots. A blouse with short sleeves and a high collar. A long scarf wound around her neck. Another wound around her hair, to keep it out of her face. Earth tones, all, today. Deep blues and greens and browns and burgundies. If Nell stood out in the thicket at the right time of evening, she’d be invisible. She leaned in close to the mirror and dabbed tincture on her lips, and they bloomed red. The ticking slowly hushed to its usual thrum as she completed her morning routine, her self-assembly, with focused deliberation. It was barely audible by the time she was ready to leave her room and go downstairs.
The hand sat, untouched, on the pillow where she had left it. She stared at it for a moment, considering whether or not she should bring it down for breakfast, rest it next to her mug full of tea and saucer heaped with toast, but decided against it. If her father saw it, she’d have to tell him where it came from, and he wouldn’t be impressed. She’d keep it to herself, the warm egg of something terrific. No use in his tapping on it until it cracked. It would hatch when it was ready.
She pottered out of her room and down the steep wooden stairs. The Cranes didn’t have a lounge or living room downstairs: just Julian’s laboratory and the cavernous kitchen. The house was more or less a two-up two-down, but bigger, and it had become crooked with expansion. The laboratory’s door was permanently closed. The kitchen, however, was the most welcoming room Nell had ever known.
It was a hearth and a belly and a hub, a powerful room, all terra-cotta flooring and strong, exposed beams. Drifting spider plants hung in old glass jars from the rafters. Lanky shelves, most neatly packed with books upon books, stood around the walls, but occasional cubbies would be precariously stacked with crockery and pans. The kitchen could have just as easily served as a library in its own right. It basically served as everything else: from principal location of many a town meeting to Nell’s childhood playroom, her classroom.
The kitchen table was a huge, stately-looking slab. It had borne witness to so much change. The elbows of giants had rested on it, world-changing plans had bounced back and forth over it, and it had seen more than its fair share of spilled food, water, and wine. The cooker was a gnarled wrought-iron thing, black and imposing. It was scarred from half a century of heavy use. A kettle, bronzed and ornate, stood on a scorching red hob and sang the beginning of a boiling song. Julian stood with his back to his daughter, plucking a pair of mugs out of the cupboard, one in his human arm, one in his augmented arm. He looked tired but not irritated. Nell took this as a blessing.
“Tea?” he asked brightly.
“Yes!” Nell replied. “Have you eaten?”
“No, but there’s just enough of that loaf left to sort us both out for the morning. And there’s fresh jam. The eggs went off overnight.”
Quietly they prepared breakfast, sweet and simple, the same thing they ate almost every morning, depending what had been gifted to them that week. So many of the great tradesmen of the city were indebted to Julian for the limbs he had built them that they were kept in fresh bread, sweet jams, cured meat. Nell’s days were regularly punctuated by taking calls from the townsfolk bearing tokens. Part of her apprenticeship seemingly was to act as receptionist to the Marvelous Dr. Crane. It was exhausting: all that smiling and thanking people and taking note of who dropped off what and who paid their debts in tokens and who paid theirs in produce.
Julian was often too wrapped up to take them himself. Or at least he said he was busy. “Ordinary” craftsfolk profoundly annoyed him, and the misanthropic apple didn’t really fall far from the antisocial tree; Nell wasn’t in the least bit keen on the hostessing bit either. The townspeople often looked her over and asked prying questions about her forthcoming contribution. She played secretive to them usually, as though her great idea wasn’t ready to be spoken aloud yet. Her ticking would rise, but she’d grit her teeth, gracious through the panic. Who knew if they ever believed her, but she did what she could, smiling and thanking them for coming all the way out to the parklands, for considering her family in their weekly dues. She’d shut the door softly after visitors, then lean against it, eyes closed, inhaling and exhaling her ticking back to normal.
The Cranes sat at the table with steaming mugs of tea, small bags of dried dark leaves at the bottom, bitter hot cups, and thick slabs of soda bread toast slathered in sweet, fresh nectarine jam. They ate quietly and thoughtfully in the morning warmth.
Their family resemblance rang true, except that Julian was pale and Nell was not. They had the same bags under their eyes, the same heavy lids. He was tall and thin and had a long, sad face, which in public was usually animated with an earnest charm that passed for authentic, that kept people rapt. This was why he could only ever be social in small doses. It exhausted him to be well liked. Nell saw it, and heard the flatness behind his jovial tone.
“Your hair needs a cut, Da.”
“Do you think Ruby’d give it a go over for me this afternoon? Tomorrow?” Julian ruffled it with his hand, and it stuck out at all angles.
Nell nodded. “I’ll ask her. You look ridiculous.”
Julian feigned a grateful bow over his tea, with a flourish of his augmented hand.
Aside from the hair situation, he looked very formal today. He wore a neatly fitting linen shirt, a highly respectable tie, and black suit pants with shiny black shoes. He wasn’t working in the lab; he was heading out to the city to fit people with new limbs. He made every single one from scratch, then brought them down to the city twice a week to affix them to new owners at the Medical Center.
His arm was the miracle about him. It was the first of its kind, a fully responsive and intuitive biorobotic limb. It was a tasteful matte gray steel, not painted to match his skin or a gaudy plastic, as many of the more popular models were. It was modest and silent. The formula for his structures was impervious to epidemic traces or aftershocks: it was safe, healing technology.
Nell was never sure whether or not she hated it. When she looked too closely at it, it shone with everything she hadn’t been able to achieve. The best contribution their infant city had ever seen. The healer of the nation.
Julian had been looked upon as a boy genius, a maverick: solely responsible for revolutionizing how the survivors of the epidemic lived. He’d been born without his left arm. The legend went that he built model after model until he eventually developed the design that behaved perfectly naturally. He’d started with wood, then advanced to steel, then broken the steel down, and made it cleverer, completely kinetic. Somewhere between wire and steel and organic materials, some perfect formula. His wife’s family, the Starlings, hovered above, possibly pulling delicate strings in his favor; what he presented was dangerously close to pre-Turn technology, the kind that their land was still paying for. But it was deemed necessary, and he received an exception from the council. Kinetic augmented limbs were declared nondisruptive.
Nell had just been born when he presented the first model, and Cora still alive. They were young, bright parents on the cusp of a healing world.
Now it was just Julian and Nell. He was still a hero of the city, and she—well, they all were waiting for her. She couldn’t drop by the beauty shop for a replacement kohl pencil without Delia and Janey, the highly painted ladies with soft voices and impossibly colored hair, cooing, “Girl, you got anything exciting in the works?”
Ruby was usually Nell’s shield in these circumstances. She’d laugh it off and say something like “Ladies! Would you put a cake on the table before it was iced?” or “There’s no point in asking her. Every time she tries to explain it to me, I’ve not a clue what she’s talking about!” But lately even Ruby had stopped trying.
“Having dinner with Daniel and the mayor tonight,” Julian said, holding a slice of bread near his mouth. “You going to the Bayou?”
Of course he knew about the party tonight. Nobody Julian’s age would be caught dead at the Bayou, but tonight’s party was out of the ordinary; murmurings must have eked out to the circles of trade
smen and masters alike.
“Yes. Ruby says it’s important.”
“Daniel was telling me. She’s not wrong. You can’t be going and hanging around there twice every week without showing up and raising a glass to the twins. They pulled that place out of nowhere, you know. It was an incredible contribution to the city, given their start in the world.”
Nell raised the deep mug to her mouth and closed her eyes. Contribution. The Fox twins did deserve a celebration, and yes, the Bayou was important to a lot of people; but she hated it. Noise and clutter, all the bodies and smoke. Ruby always spent the first fifteen minutes with her, a pained look on her face, then excused herself to dance with somebody and was gone. Nell would spend the rest of the night perched at the bar, people-watching, warding off nosy acquaintances. Twice a week, every week. She’d stay until Ruby forgot she was there, and then she’d ghost out without any good-byes. Lately she’d had to stay for less and less time; last week it had only been an hour.
“You should try to enjoy yourself, occasionally, Nell. It’s starting to show in your face. You’ll never get anything done if you worry all the time; you’ll run down your engine from the stress. Wouldn’t want that, would you? Besides, how do you expect to create anything if you can’t enjoy anything? You’re no use to anyone if you’re cracking yourself up.” Julian finished his tea and the last chunk of sweet, crumbly bread, then wiped his hands, the flesh of the left and augmented steel of the right passing each other without a second of delay or interference, without a telltale creak or hum. It used to hum loudly; this silence was fresh.
Why couldn’t he have made the machine in her chest quiet, instead of so imposing and loud. He probably could now, Nell supposed, with the advances he’d made in his designs, but the idea of ever going under a knife again made her sick to her stomach. She put down her tea. Even the quiet wouldn’t be worth it.
“I’ll swing home in the afternoon to see if you and Ruby are about to sort out this mop”—he ran a hand through his hair again—“and tonight I’m hoping to be back in the house early. I’ve some new work to go over with Daniel, so don’t be surprised if the house is quiet when you get in; we’ll be in the lab. Ruby can stay over if she doesn’t want to sleep in the cottage on her own.”
Her father gathered himself, collecting his dark leather doctor’s bag and his bicycle helmet from the rack on the wall by the door to the back garden. He left his plate and mug on the table.
“You look like someone died, Nell.” Julian ruffled her hair a little too hard, dislodging her headscarf. “Oh, and this is for you. See if you can get it to light up, will you? I haven’t had a minute to look at it, and I thought it’d make an interesting project. Might spark something, you know? You’re running out of time.”
He opened his bag and pulled out an almost flat silver box, around the size of his palm. Nell took it from him. One side of it was black glass; the other, silver. On one of the thin edges there were two small holes. Nell hadn’t a clue what it was.
“Somebody gave it to me on the quiet down at the clinic, thought I’d be interested in it. From the look of it, it’s a music box. Digital. Absolutely pre-epidemic, pre-Turn. Contraband of the highest order. Run a few volts through it real gently. See what happens.”
“But—” Nell began, wanting to know exactly how she would just “run a few volts” through this tiny box without setting it on fire, but he was out of the kitchen and down the hall. The front door opened and closed with a click. She sighed deeply and placed the little box on the table next to her unfinished breakfast.
She plucked the teabag out of Julian’s abandoned mug and placed it in her own, the water still hot, pulling more deep, bitter flavor from the damp leaves in the used paper pouch. She sat there awhile, still and quiet. Kodak crept into the kitchen and hopped up into her lap. Nell fed him morsels of the soda bread until it was all gone, then rinsed the mugs and saucers.
She left them to dry and wandered back upstairs to her bedroom, almost forgetting to take the silver “music box” or whatever it was that Julian had left her. She’d pull it apart all right, but she was doubtful that anything on her work desk would be compatible with technology as sophisticated as this. She could stick some eye buttons onto it maybe. Maybe a battery pack and tiny motorized legs. With three batteries she could build a propeller and make it fly, but Nell doubted that she could make it sing.
She wasn’t even sure that she liked music that much. The loud clutter of noise and old torch songs the band at the Bayou played made her whole face hurt. Why would she want to take it all back home with her? Why would she want to listen to music from a different time? Surely it was all going to be a mess that she didn’t understand.
Nell tossed the box onto her bed and grabbed the hand from her pillow. She sat at her desk and set the hand in front of her. Kodak nestled around her ankles.
She looked at the hand and lifted her pencil to the enormous thin sheet of paper spread out on her workspace and began very slowly to draw. When she was done outlining the angle of each finger, the silent intonation of its gesture, she moved up to a wrist, a forearm, an elbow; before she fully realized it, she had almost turned it into a whole person.
A kind person. A person who spoke softly and made her laugh and liked her just the way she was, who didn’t ask her questions she couldn’t answer.
Hours melted away as she drew, and the cogs in her head turned and the cogs in her heart turned. This person on the butcher paper developed into a boy with a soft face, and he sprawled out, limb to limb. He took up nearly all of her desk. The ticking in her chest was almost inaudible, a soft, steady peace.
She glanced up at the clock on her wall, and the clock in her chest shot straight up in volume. It was almost four. She’d spent the whole day drawing. She’d done nothing, and Ruby would be there soon. If only the peace that came from putting pencil to paper were enough for the rest of the world. For Nan.
Nell begrudgingly stood up to get changed. She looked down at her desk, the new landscape of an imaginary boy with a tender face and no spare parts. As a last detail she drew the line, the line that separated the hand from the body. There. Perfect.
CHAPTER 7
“It’ll bring out the flecks of gold in your iris,” Ruby said to Nell.
She held Nell’s face with one hand and, with the other, very carefully painted a slick of toxic bright purple eyeliner onto the lid of her left eye, biting her tongue in concentration. The two girls sat cross-legged on the kitchen table, facing each other. A small mountain of black hair sat at the base of a tall broom in the corner. Ruby had given Julian a quick once-over with her miracle scissors and had transformed him from Mad Scientist back into a clean-cut Marvelous Doctor. The speed and understanding she had for shape and something more elusive than that—style—were utterly beyond Nell. Julian had remarked that Ruby’s taste should be her contribution, and Ruby wholeheartedly agreed.
“I’d paint this town all over, Dr. Crane,” she’d said, perfecting the hairline at the back of his neck, blade dangerously close to skin. “You just give me time.”
Nell was always a great appreciator of Ruby’s gift, but at present, with a long, thin brush flying this way and that around her eye sockets, she wished she could appreciate it with a little more distance.
Ruby added a flourish here and there, then paused to admire her work. “There. Perfect.”
“Mhm,” managed Nell, in something resembling agreement. Her eyes were brown; she was fairly sure there wasn’t any gold in there, but she wasn’t going to argue with a girl holding a paintbrush at extremely close proximity to her eyeball. Ruby’s forehead was wrinkled in concentration. She’d been twenty minutes doing Nell’s makeup because “You can’t go out with those big messy black eyes on you; you look like you haven’t slept in ten years. Just for once step into the night; don’t be hiding.”
Ruby smelled like oranges. Her face was flawless; her eyepatch for tonight, a muted black velvet. Her other eye was surrounde
d by a cloud of gold powder, and her lashes extended long and doll-like. She’d painted up her clusters of freckles to accent them: they popped. Her mouth pouted in focus, a pink that was gold when the light caught it.
Ruby perceived beauty in almost everything and with a few subtle but confident touches could turn anything around. Even Nell. Ruby painted Nell’s face regularly; neither could irritate the other when they were quiet like this. Nell tried to enjoy this closeness, to push down the dread of spending the evening in the Bayou.
When Ruby was done, she beamed with pride and said, “There we go. Human after all,” and Nell stuck out her tongue. Ruby flashed her a mirror. Nell’s reflection looked, unsurprisingly, just like Nell, only Nell with big violet halos around her eyes and some dotted freckles to match Ruby’s. The dark moons usually under her eyes were invisible. Her mouth was glossed subtly. Fine, Nell thought. That’s fine.
“It’s wonderful,” she said, mustering enough enthusiasm so Ruby believed her.
As the girls gathered their things to leave, Ruby bopped about in excitement. Nell should have found it contagious, but she couldn’t feel a thing other than the heavy sludge of dread. She scooped Kodak up in her arms as they walked out the front door and down the porch steps to their bikes. Ruby gave her a disapproving look, an I-cannot-believe-you’re-bringing-an-animal-to-the-bar look but managed to not chide her. Not this early in the night.
Past Ruby’s home, a cozy bungalow with a thatched roof, the district was barren of buildings or life. That was why the twins had chosen the guts of the parkland for their speakeasy, though most young patrons’ routes barely touched the long and winding journey Ruby and Nell cycled to get there.
The Phoenix Parklands held acres and acres of wet, overgrown greenery. These swamps had thickened and the ferns grown tall when the temperatures rose during the Turn. Once Black Water City and the country surrounding it had been cold and rainy, but now it was a hot, dense place. It was said that the same sickness that had poisoned the inhabitants had bled out into the atmosphere. This year the hot season had lasted too long; the air around them needed to break. It ached with humidity. The time was coming. The girls’ ride through the parklands was tense in the hot, new dark of evening.
Spare and Found Parts Page 4
