Spare and Found Parts

by Sarah Maria Griffin

  Nell took Ruby’s hand and squeezed it to release some of her frustration. “I just can’t believe them,” she whispered bitterly.

  “You look like you’re about to scream,” Ruby said, and Nell clenched her teeth.

  “There’s time for screaming plenty later.”

  “Nell, Julian still has all your papers; you should go get them while you still can.” Ruby pointed to the lab door, still open. Perfect.

  Nell nodded. “I’m going in there, and I’m not coming out until I have something to fight him with.”

  “Are you sure you want me to leave?” Ruby asked quietly then. “Are you sure you’ll be safe?”

  Safe. Maybe Nell had never been safe in the Crane house.

  “I don’t feel right leaving you. Can I come? Even just as an outside eye to make sure nothing . . . bad happens?”

  If there was one thing the Cranes and Starlings valued, it was saving face. It was kept secrets. Asking Ruby to stay was not weakness; it was defiance.

  “Yes. Stay,” Nell said softly. Ruby lifted Nell’s hand and kissed her palm.

  She led Ruby and Io down the hallway. Adrenaline coursed through her; she almost shook with it. Her plan crackled together: Get into the lab; lock the door; find her blueprints for Io. Find a way to reason with both her father and Nan.

  The rain-flecked air breathed through the doorframe, and the laboratory door responded like a valve squeaking on its old hinges, swinging back and forth.

  The three heaped into the lab, and Nell slid home the locks, sealing the world behind them very softly, so the bolts didn’t make a sound. A fastened door bought her all the time she needed.

  She’d destroy all her plans if she had to, rinse out the ink, tear apart the paper of them. She’d write them anew and make sure he never got his hands on them. To think, he’d given her all her education. Even the thinking core of Io had been a gift from him. Nell’s stomach twisted at the thought. She could never have done this without him. To make Io, she’d stolen, taken her father’s work, taken advantage of Oliver. Did that make her as bad as her father? A specter of doubt touched her: Was anything she had truly her own?

  But Nell had turned Io from arms and legs and a ladder and a kettle into this, into a friend. Nell had discovered that he could wake up and read computers from the past, discovered that he was a key. Nell had been brave enough. That belonged to her. It had to.

  “Ruby, will you keep an ear out at the door, please? Warn me if you hear them coming?”

  Ruby gave her a salute and posted herself by the door, her ear pressed to the crack between worlds. “I can’t hear anything; they must be still arguing in the kitchen.”

  “Good, good.” Nell sat down at her father’s desk, placed herself at the helm of his empire of blueprints, some stolen, some his own. The desk was a mess.

  “Nell, what is happening? What are we going to do?” Io sounded almost fearful, and it just about broke Nell’s heart. None of this was his fault, but he stood at the center of it still.

  “I don’t know,” Nell replied, steeling herself. “All I can do is make sure he doesn’t take you.”

  “But . . . your grandmother wants to take you,” Io replied, his voice glitching ever so slightly.

  Nell took a deep breath. “Even if she does, we’ll find a way to keep you safe. But know I don’t plan on going anywhere.”

  She riffled through the papers on Julian’s desk, keenly looking out for any mark of her own pen. Nothing looked right: all reams of equation, all reams of numbers and symbols. Walls of her father’s even, tiny print. Then the anomaly she was looking for: in the disarray of loose-leaf, a notebook, wide open. Scattered over the blossom of pages was what looked like her own writing, her tall consonants and loops.

  She fished it out of the mess puzzled. It was an unwieldy thing, a thick leather binder, a cover marred with old stickers. Nell had never seen it before. Why would Julian take the trouble to put her notes in here? She looked closer; her chiming sang higher from the shock of the certainty that came over her as she read. The voice that echoed out from the pages was the soft tones of a paper ghost.

  Cora just wouldn’t leave this house. Here she was, in Nell’s arms again.

  CHAPTER 17

  Ruby posted at the door and Io standing over her, Nell disappeared out of the room, out of her rage. She ran her fingertips over each page’s smoothness, the indentation of her mother’s pen barely traceable. This paper was so precious that she worried that if she pushed down too hard, the words would shatter like glass ornaments under her touch. The ink would smudge, or the page would somehow tear, and her mother’s secrets would be corrupted or lost forever.

  There were sketches of her mother’s body drawn out again and again: obsessive self-portraiture, drawing herself into existence.

  On one page, Cora had outlined her own pregnant body as a diagram: the swelling crescent of her belly, her heavy breasts, her arms outstretched—like a woman, but also like an eagle or maybe an angel. Thin lines matched her left breast to more equations in the margins. The nest where Nell had grown was etched with blue grids.

  It felt hugely private, a violation even to be thumbing through the secret ruminations of her mother, but Nell could not pull her eyes away. Pregnancy, invention, illness. She had held Cora’s remains in her arms, but she had never been closer to her than in this moment.

  Nell’s chime began to rise, a small symphony to accompany her reading. Nell held the notebook up close to her face and let her eyes follow every curve of her mother’s lettering.

  One page simply read, “onwards & upwards,” and the ampersand was perfect, a simple knot. A private mantra. Below it: “Done with the stone, on to the steel!”

  Kate. Her mother’s great contribution to Black Water City, but Nell didn’t see anything else about the stone woman here. None of this was architecture; none of this was design. It was all formulas, all something else, all what Cora had really been working on.

  Many pages had letters squeezed tightly and neatly together between lines; others were more spread out, white space littered with numbers and equations and measurements. The diagrams were drawn with less flourish: concise, clear illustrations of where veins would become pulsing, kinetic tubing, or exactly how wires would weave over bones and become tightly braided scaffolding in their own right. Symbols Nell had never seen before splayed out in equations to equal huge words like MOVEMENT and ENERGY and HEART.

  In the margins Cora had doodled. Sometimes just CS JC; sometimes her maiden name, then her married name, Starling-Crane, Starling-Crane.

  Beside the date, one day, in tiny letters: “I hope the bump is a girl!” Other days; “Sick again.” Sometimes “Sick again, chest.” Sometimes “Sick again, baby!”

  Nell turned a page and entered a city of lists, pages and pages of orderly lined and notated salvaged goods and their precise locations. Boots from the old Arnott’s Car Park, found inside a burned-out Ford Fiesta. Eight boxes of eyeglasses in perfect condition, found behind a shutter near the Trinity ruins. Box of chips—chips?

  Sometimes Cora’s handwriting looped and dived excitedly, other times it was precise and neat, but it was always her, no matter the mood. Here Cora sprang to life in elongated stalks and the occasional hurried misspelling, in scribbles and stains where the nib of the pen split under her excitement. Nell wanted to take out each page, fold it up one by one into tiny squares, and place it in her mouth. She wanted to eat these pieces of her mother.

  She hated that Julian had ever had these things, that his awful name was scribbled in her margins, “Jules, Jules,” and sometimes “JEWELS.” She was barely older than Nell herself. A teenager in love.

  “FOUND A STOAT TODAY, AND I AM KEEPING IT WHETHER JULES LIKES IT OR NOT! A BABY STOAT IS CALLED A KIT, MAY CALL THE BABY KIT”

  This was Cora’s diary, her workbook, all knitted into one cover. Her whole world was in here, from the mundane notes of her day-to-day—“Clarissa Underwood is pregnant! Race you to
labor! Poor girl is still throwing up every morning, hate that!”—to page after page of intricate maps of a prosthetic left arm. Julian’s left arm.

  Under the final perfected image in the series, Cora had written: “Happy Birthday, you son of a bitch.” Nell inhaled sharply, the shock of the insult before her. Cora’s letters were hard, dug deep in the paper with anger. Nell’s stomach lurched at the dried teardrops that had muddled the ink into tiny stained pools. Those tears were older than she was. Her eyes, in that moment, were molded to the page as if all of her mother’s anger had reached out of the liquid ink to touch her, a channel of fury through time.

  The next page was more shocking still than her mother’s venomous note to her father; it was a contract, stapled in, with just one signature at the end. Julian’s. Where Cora’s name should have been, just a blank space.

  Nell scanned it quickly, her fingers shaking. It would have given all the rights of her intellectual creations to her husband, Julian Crane, from the date of signature and thereafter. But Cora hadn’t signed. She’d built his arm on to his body, and he’d presented the idea as his own. Marvelous Doctor: marvelous liar.

  Nell flipped the next page. More drawings and symbols and equations, but no notes in the margins. They were less coded and more deliberately instructional, but Cora’s voice was still there: “the incision should begin in the center manubrium and continue down my sternum but finish before my navel. Don’t start any higher, there’s no point, the scarring will just be ugly. This way it’ll be easier to hide.” Nell placed her fingertips at the beginning of her scar, just beneath her bottom lip. Ugly—wait—my sternum? Cora’s sternum? Nell scoured forward. This couldn’t be.

  Her stomach churned. The beginnings of a guide to the removal and replacement of a chest cavity. Removal and replacement of a heart. Cora’s heart. Piece by piece. She was designing this for herself and instructing Julian on how to perform the surgery.

  Nell blinked. Cora had designed the very engine that kept Nell alive, the very engine that made him marvelous in the eyes of Black Water City, the very structure that he would exploit again.

  He must never have had a chance to operate on her. Had it gone too late? Had Julian made a mistake? Had he not been able to learn fast enough?

  Nell closed the book for a moment to steady herself. She flipped to the back to see if Cora had gotten all the way to the end.

  A grid of tiny calendars ate up page after page after page. Every day marked with a simple tick. Two or three with an X. Pages of calendar, tiny and neat. Eventually, the Xs outweighed the ticks; the last X was just eight days before she died.

  Nearer the middle there were more diagrams, illustrations, and a tiny piece of gray metal. It was smaller than a fingernail, taped in place. A tiny computer. Cora had drawn arrows from it leading to more equations, more numbers. Nell had no idea what they meant. Small paragraphs of text were among the symbols; one was connected to the chip with an arrow:

  “This is one of the functioning sentience chips. If I can implant it, I can communicate with it. If I can communicate with it, think of what I can learn. Think of what I can ask it. Think of what I can know. There is infinite knowledge to be had. I want to know everything. This is how I will do it. I will ask the computers what they know.”

  Nell understood her mother in this moment. Nell wanted to ask what the computers knew, but she wanted to share it, to scream it from rooftops, use it to unlock the whole world. Cora’s whole world was here between the pages; her whole world was a secret.

  On the next page, a stream of appendages and dates:

  Finger—didn’t feel it. Took it out after 24 hours.

  Forearm—didn’t feel it. Took it out after 24 hours.

  Sternum—definite change. Left it in! Let’s wait and see.

  Pregnant! Will continue—shouldn’t interfere.

  Calf—nothing. Left it in.

  Thigh—nothing. Left it in.

  Sternum Update: Has a green light! Something is happening!

  Nell blinked.

  Green, round as a penny. Green like poison.

  She’d been putting metal inside herself. Cora had been operating on herself. Before she was pregnant with Nell, after she was pregnant, conducting experiments on herself. Nell clutched her chest, anger flickering within.

  Nell’s thick red scar, the ticking of her body: all from her mother’s recklessness and greed for an electric god. Her whole life Nell had believed her mother to have been stricken by some bolt-from-the-blue toxic aftershock of the epidemic, some cruel twist of fate, and her own illness to have just been collateral. Nell’s poisoned body was not an accident; it was a direct consequence of her mother’s pursuit of some sacred knowledge.

  There was no sanctuary in Cora’s memory; there was no safety in her father’s arms. Nell was trembling, white-hot with rage. With this book in her lap, Nell was so close to Cora, but pulling farther and farther away. She would make sure nobody ever fell poisoned from her work, from her discoveries. Just because her mother had been so mercenary didn’t mean she had to be.

  A note was nestled between the following pages, loose. Nell plucked it and thumbed it open.

  Jules,

  The Pasture has been a wonderful break. Nell just loves the gardens; today we counted bugs for hours! I have not told my mother about the implant. I do not think I will. She senses that I am sick and distracted, but I am brushing her off. My teeth are loose, and if they start to fall out, there’ll be no hiding it.

  I want you to know that though I am ill, I feel incredible. No matter what comes of these experiments, I am glad I performed them. I can hear the quiet voices of the sentient chips, and they are telling me things about this world; they are telling me secrets. I write this now because I am getting weaker and soon may not be able to write at all.

  I know you are angry, and afraid, but perhaps someday you will understand. I am not afraid. No matter what happens, I have heard electric voices, I have heard my footsteps counted, been warned of oncoming rain. I know something greater than my mother’s spells.

  When Nell sleeps, I listen to it count her breaths. I listen to it tell me when dawn is coming. It tells me I am poisoned. Please prepare my laboratory when I come home. We’ll find a way to leave it in and settle the fluttering in my heartbeat. I trust your clever hands—sure, didn’t I make one of them myself?

  Yours, always,

  C. C.

  Nell closed the book for a moment to come up for air. She trembled under the weight of this silent conversation with Cora, under the fresh, terrible knowledge of it. She chimed and she seared with fury. How could they both have been such wretched disasters? Their violent, unchecked ambition appalled Nell. How could they both have been so greedy? Knowledge and glory regardless of the price: How they both deserved each other, Cora and Julian Crane.

  Nell was angry, but within that fire she felt something new. She would be better than both of them; she would be the best parts of them; she would not be a reflection of their secrecy and their recklessness. She looked up at Io and thought how astonished her mother would be, how proud perhaps that her child had roused a digital titan from his slumber. How could one human ever expect to keep something so huge for herself? How could her mother have hoped to contain power like this in her own body? Nell would not keep his voice for herself; she would play it for all of Black Water City to hear. She would broadcast it.

  Suddenly Ruby called to her, breaking her time travel. “They’re coming!”

  There were voices outside the door. Time had run out.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Open the door, Ruby. Nan has to see; she has to see all of this.”

  All of it, yes, but most important, Nan had to see the empty space below Cora’s typeset name at the end of the contract; this would be enough to unwrench her father’s hands from their grip around Nell’s future. That would be the first thing. She’d show her the rest later.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” Ruby asked her, and Io
followed with a chorus: “Don’t you need more time?”

  Nell shook her head. “I can’t wait any longer. I’m finished.”

  Io nodded. “You are very brave. I am glad to be yours.”

  A great wave came over Nell as she looked at her companions. Maybe Io wouldn’t feel that way if he knew everything about this mess; the logic in him surely couldn’t rationalize any sense out of staying in the company of someone like her. A disaster like Julian, a furious rebel like Cora: Nell was a cocktail of them both. The chaos of them lived on in her. Io was bound to realize that he was a product of that selfishness; that very same impulse to uncover secrets, to pick apart locks, to charge into places not meant for her was the same as the impulse that had led her mother to poison herself to death with old toxic metals. And Ruby—Would Ruby stick by her?

  It was suspiciously quiet then, for a heartbeat too long; the voices at the door stopped calling Nell’s name.

  A terrible roar shattered the strange quiet. “Where is she?”

  Oliver Kelly’s ragged, wild voice.

  Ruby turned to Nell, her hand on the doorknob. “Should I open it?”

  Nell nodded. “No more closed doors, Ruby. No more.”

  Now wasn’t the time to hide away, no matter what Oliver brought in with the storm. Ruby took a deep breath and unslid the locks.

  It was barely open a blink before Oliver blazed into the lab, shoving Ruby out of the way. “She must be in here, she must be!” He was a savage demon, wearing the body of the boy they knew.

  Nell was not afraid of him. She saw beyond the unhinged rage, dug her fingernails into the pages of her mother’s history, and drew quiet power from them. She stood up. “Here I am, Oliver.”

  “Not you, Nell!” he bellowed, his voice cracking, sweeping his arm across a worktable full of test tubes and Bunsen flasks; a shower of broken glass crackled ugly to the floor. “Where is Cora Crane? Where is Cora Crane?” he called, stomping down to the end of the laboratory, kicking over a chair, approaching the operating tables, the stacks of clean linen folded neatly on their surface. Ruby flashed Nell a frozen look, her back against the wall. Nell shook her head and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”