by Aria Noble
It was that, probably more than anything, that left her wondering. She’d been mucking around in the first doll’s head, beneath a layer of hair and manufactured skin and a thin metal panel that popped open beneath her fingertips, for at least an hour, and mostly she’d been able to keep her fingers from shaking, her thoughts from wandering.
But now…
She hadn’t meant to drop the doll to the floor. She didn’t know what she was doing with all the blinking bits of electrics inside the doll’s head — gears and belts and joints, she understood, but not electrics. Not lights and programming.
But Vallenovich would hear none of her attempts to explain that to him. Apparently, the queen had told him that Ember was the girl who would be fixing their dolls, and nothing Ember herself said would deter him.
So Ember fiddled away with the inside of the doll’s blinking head, and now he — it — was lying at her feet, as blank and unresponsive as a dead body.
Vallenovich looked over the doll again, a small frown on his pressed-thin lips. He crouched for a moment to be nearer to eye-level with the unresponsive body, stared at it, considered before standing back up and turning his attention to Ember again. “Well. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but perhaps it’ll do for now.”
Ember’s stomach flopped again. Her saliva turned sour and warm, and she swallowed, hard and fast, until the queasiness eased.
Vallenovich nodded toward the female doll. “Go on, then.”
Ember glanced at the doll; it looked back at her, not smiling, and the loss of that single doll-like expression turned her face so utterly human that this time bile actually rose into Ember’s mouth.
She clamped her teeth together, jammed her hand against her mouth, and swallowed down the sensation, nearly gagging at the taste as the vomit nearly touched her tongue.
Slowly, slowly, the trembling in her limbs quieted, and the nausea passed again. Ember lowered her hand — the other one was fisted hard around the pliers — and took a step toward the doll.
It didn’t move, barely reacted at all, only stared at her until it couldn’t keep her in its sights without turning. Ember nudged aside its hair, opened the panel of skin and metal at the back of its head, and stared down into another head of blinking lights and tiny wires.
I’m sorry, she thought, though she didn’t dare open her mouth to say it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…
She touched the pliers to the place in the doll’s head that had dropped the first one, and the female doll slumped like the dead over its chair.
* * *
The queen was waiting in the big room when the redheaded man took Ember back to it after finishing with the dolls.
He startled and then bowed low to her. “Your Highness,” he gasped at the deepest part of his bow. “To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”
The queen made a funny sort of waving gesture at him, a clear dismissal. “Never mind the formalities, Vallenovich — I only wanted to see how our new mechanic did on her first assignment.”
The queen looked from the red-haired man — Vallenovich — to Ember, one eyebrow raised. If she had hair there like a normal person, Ember imagined it would be arched, as dramatic as the rest of her face. “Turned them off?”
“I wasn’t sure what else to do.” Ember didn’t mean for her voice to come out sounding so uncertain, but the twisting anxiety of the day hadn’t yet left her stomach. The blank, staring eyes of the dolls would surely haunt her dreams tonight.
Vallenovich hadn’t raised himself from his bow. His voice was muffled by the way it was directed at the floor. “She says there’s nothing wrong with them.”
“There isn’t,” Ember cut in.
The queen turned all her attention onto Ember then. Ember fought against the urge to flinch under her gaze. “Nothing wrong?”
“Not anything obvious, anyway. Nothing I could find.”
The queen just stared, that same hairless eyebrow raised in continued question.
Ember changed the subject, hoping that she could maybe get an answer from the queen. After all, if the queen didn’t know what the dolls might mean, who would? “They’re saying the wall is cracking.”
The queen went very still at the words. She hadn’t moved much before, of course, but there was a different kind of stillness to her now. She was suddenly a statue made of rock and ice, those strange dark eyes boring into Ember like she wanted to tap directly into her very thoughts.
Ember forced herself to meet the queen’s gaze. She hadn’t done anything wrong, so there was no reason to hide from her.
“Say that again,” the queen said slowly, each word coming like it was being punched from her throat.
“The dolls. They’re saying the wall is cracking.”
The queen pushed suddenly past Vallenovich, who was at last coming out of his bow at Ember’s words, darting forward and snatching Ember’s arm in a grip that hurt. “Is that what’s happening? All my dolls that have been malfunctioning? They’re telling people that the wall is cracking?”
“I…” Ember’s voice caught and shredded against the lump rising in her throat. She swallowed hard and forced her words to stay level. “I don’t know. It’s what the dolls I saw today were saying.”
And the ones she’d seen out on the streets, the ones that had been taken away by people in white suits and shiny black shoes like Vallenovich’s, but she didn’t add that part.
“They can’t be doing that. Do you understand me?” The queen’s fingers shook, and her grip was so tight Ember could already feel the bruises beginning to form beneath their pressure. “Under no circumstances can the dolls be saying such things. Do you understand?”
“I … no, not really. Why’s the wall cracking?”
The queen brought her face very close to Ember’s, and the sudden closeness stopped the question dead on Ember’s tongue. No warmth leaked off her skin — even her breath smelled like ice. Just another thing about her to confuse and frighten Ember. Even the dolls emitted heat, radiating it off their skin surfaces like a normal person. She met Ember’s eyes with a ferocity of someone trying to communicate much more with their expression than what they were saying with their words, but what she was trying to say, Ember didn’t understand.
“Listen to me, Ember Mikailanova. Listen to me very closely. The wall is not cracking. The dolls are speaking lies.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ember had never been more grateful to leave a place as she was to get out of the palace that day, but she couldn’t stop staring at Maudie as the other woman — the doll — took her back to her room. There was a strange new tension in her escort’s expression, though perhaps that was only Ember projecting anxiety onto a mechanical being that couldn’t actually feel anything at all.
Eli was sitting on the couch when she came into the room, but he got right to his feet when Ember came in as if able to sense her distress.
He’d always been good at that.
He took Ember’s hand, gently, and tugged her, just as gently, over to the couch. Sat and urged her to do the same. “Tell me.”
Maudie was gone. Ember and Eli were alone.
Maybe she ought to tell him. Maybe it would help.
Maudie. The trolley drivers. So many of the people they’d passed on the streets. Even the woman who’d sold them the tickets to the moving picture.
Dolls. All of them. Smiling too wide and performing duties that must not be of much interest to the people of Frost.
How many of them were dolls? How many people did Frost actually have?
Did the actual people, the flesh-and-blood ones, know? Did they even care?
Ember had always felt watched in Frost — even if that feeling was based more on how she thought she ought to feel rather than what was actually happening around her — and now she knew why.
Because half, or maybe more, of the people she met were mechanical people, programmed with those unnerving smiles, tasked with doing who-knew-what in the city.
Were there dolls nearby? How good was their hearing? Could she whisper quiet enough to not be overheard? Would it even matter?
“Ember.” Eli squeezed the hand he still held, pulling her attention back to him. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Ember answered automatically, then paused to reconsider the truth of that statement. “It’s … maybe nothing.”
“You don’t think it’s nothing. Just tell me.”
“The people here. The smiling ones like Maudie. They’re not people.”
This was definitely not what Eli had expected her to say — both his eyebrows went all the way up at the words. “Not people?” he repeated slowly, turning the words over in his mouth as if he didn’t know what they meant.
“I mean, maybe they are people, I don’t know. What makes a person a person?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“The one I’ve been thinking about all day.”
Eli snorted. “Since when have you been philosophical?”
“Since I turned off two maybe-people today.”
“Ember. You’re not making sense.”
“The people, or … or not-people. They call them dolls. They’re mechanical, and some of them are saying things.”
“Mechanical people?” Again, he repeated the words like he didn’t understand them. Like the very words themselves didn’t make any sense.
Which was fair, Ember thought. She’d struggled to understand them herself all day, and so far, she wasn’t sure she’d gotten any closer to it than she was the first time they tangled in her head.
“Dolls. The smiling ones. Maudie, the trolley driver, almost half of the people riding inside of them. All of them — they’re mechanical. I think it’s like half the population of Frost, from what I’ve seen on the streets.”
Eli frowned, but he wasn’t really listening to her. “That’s not possible.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so, either, but then I saw them. The insides of them. It’s all circuitry. You can turn them off if you touch the right part in the back of their heads. I did it. Twice. And I think the queen will be having me do it again and again, because the dolls — they’re saying things.”
“Wait. No. Stop it.” Eli’s attention snapped back to her all at once, and the sudden force of it stilled Ember’s tongue. “I know where you’re going with this, and I’m not interested.”
“I’m not ‘going’ anywhere.”
“Yes, you are. You wanna drag me into some kind of conspiracy theory of yours, and I’m not going there.”
“That’s not—”
“Don’t. We both know I’m right. I’m. Not. Interested.” He turned each of the last words into their own sentence.
Ember hadn’t flinched under the queen’s gaze. She hadn’t even when the queen dug her fingers into her arm tight enough to bruise. She’d looked straight at the queen’s unnerving dark eyes and waited for her to say what she needed to say, recognizing by the force of it that she was lying, to herself or to Ember, or maybe to both, but lying just the same.
Ember flinched now.
Eli softened a little at that, one hand shifting toward her as if to reach for her hand or arm. He hesitated before actually completing the gesture and let his arm fall awkwardly against his leg instead. “Not everything is a mystery you need to solve. Some things are none of your business, and you shouldn’t go poking your nose into things that aren’t.”
“This isn’t one of those things.”
“Are you sure? Really, truly certain? Because you know that once you start, you’ll never stop.”
“Eli—”
“Ember,” he echoed back in the same half-frustrated tone. “Stay out of it. Not everything is a mystery you have to solve.”
Chapter Fifteen
Eli’s words echoed in her head as she went to bed, tried to sleep, as she eventually gave up and made her way back out of the room, through the electrically lit streets and to the palace square.
She found herself drawn to the Atalanta statue, which glimmered in the electric lights of the night. She sat cross-legged in front of it and stared up at the statue’s face, triumphant over the dead beast at her feet.
None of her business, indeed. The queen had seemed quite pleased to make it her business — it was her, after all, who assigned her to the dolls and then reacted so strongly to the words they repeated.
Eli was wrong. There was something strange going on in Frost, something that the queen was determined to hide, and she was putting Ember smack in the middle of it whether she intended to or not.
The people — the dolls — knew her name. Her patronymic. They knew her, and they kept trying to tell her that the wall was cracking, whatever that was supposed to mean. That made it her business. Her mystery to solve.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d prayed. Frankly, prayer was an activity she mostly left to Eli and his mother — she knew they prayed over her enough that she shouldn’t need to say anything on her own behalf.
But, today, she found herself praying. For the strength to carry on, for something to finally make some kind of sense she could follow. For the discernment to tell the difference between truth and lies.
Because she was beginning to suspect that a lot of what she was being told were indeed lies. And a lot of those lies seemed to be centered on the queen herself.
Ember might’ve dozed out there in front of the Atalanta statue. The next thing she really knew about her surroundings was a warm hand suddenly touching her shoulder.
She leapt to her feet, knocking off the hand, and spun to face the person, but relaxed when she recognized him. “Felix.” His name punched out of her like a sigh.
Felix smiled that cheerful grin of his, but he shifted his weight from foot to foot as if uncomfortable, and he kept his voice down like he didn’t want to disturb anyone else. “Godden, Ember.”
“Is it morning already?” she mumbled, mostly to herself.
He grinned again, but his ears were tinging pink. The color clashed with his hair so badly it was almost adorable. “It’ll do that. Time, I mean. Moves on.”
He wasn’t here to tell her about how time worked. Ember smiled acknowledgment and waited.
“Are you hungry? Have you had breakfast?”
Ah, there it was. He wanted to offer her breakfast. What was it about this Frost boy and feeding her?
Not that she was complaining. Breakfast with Felix sounded like fun.
In Dusk, for a man to offer a woman food was a statement. Maybe not of official intentions, exactly, but of the fact that those intentions were crossing the man’s mind.
Those apples during their first conversation couldn’t have been that; that time, he was just being nice. Sharing the bounty that Frost apparently had.
This time, though, it felt like a statement. One that Ember found herself wanting to return.
And — the thought jumped suddenly into her mind — perhaps he would be someone who could tell her about the wall, and what it meant that it was cracking.
“I haven’t had breakfast,” she answered. Then, because she wondered what it would feel like, what sort of reaction it would provoke, she let a little cheek slip into her smile. Just a touch, she hoped, not too much to make it obvious. “Do you wanna take me?”
The pink in his ears spilled onto his cheeks. The dusting of freckles over the bridge of his nose stood out like stars in the darkened sky. “I … yeah. If you want.”
“I do want. Very much.”
A fresh grin, lodged halfway between pleased and relieved, spread across his face. “Have you been to the Queen’s Cross Café yet?”
Ember shook her head.
“Well, let’s go.”
The Queen’s Cross Café was a few blocks beyond the square, marked by a wooden sign over the door. Felix opened the door and held it open for her. Warmth like the heat from a roaring fire poured out through the door; it carried with it some of the unfamiliar food scents Ember had occas
ionally caught on the edges of the Frost breeze.
She stepped through the door, and Felix followed her, letting the door shut on its own behind him. The room was large and square, lit with several electric bulbs hanging in glass domes from the ceiling. A dozen or more square wooden tables were scattered neatly about the room; a couple of people sat around one of the tables, sipping from large porcelain teacups.
A woman wearing a dark apron over her white Frost dress came out through a doorway to the right, perhaps alerted by the little bell that tinkled over the door when Felix let it close. “Godden,” she said with an unnaturally wide smile.
A doll. Ember smiled and forced it to hold a little brightness. The doll didn’t seem to notice her especially, its mechanical eyes skipping over to Felix as if familiar or comfortable with him. “Table for two?”
“Yes, please,” Felix answered.
The doll grabbed a couple of papers from the small stack on the nearby table and gestured for them to follow. It led them to one of the tables away from the other occupied one, close to the glass walls that covered half the room.
Felix sat, then grinned when Ember hesitated. She lifted her chin just a little in an effort to prove that she wasn’t confused or intimidated, and sat, too. The doll handed each of them a sheet of paper, which Ember saw was printed with several food and beverage options, then smiled and said it’d give them a minute to look over the menu.
“Order whatever you want,” Felix said. “This is my treat.”
Ember watched the doll walk away, its hips swinging beneath its Frost-woman clothing as if it was feeling saucy and wanted people in the cafe to notice it. Such a small thing, a little human affectation, and it made Ember’s stomach twist.
“Ember?” Felix frowned at her, concerned. “You okay?”
“Oh. Yeah, sorry.” Her words tumbled past her lips like lies, so she smiled briefly at him and turned her attention back to the menu to prove she was fine.
Almost nothing on the paper sounded even a little bit familiar. Rice and cafei, she knew, but she’d never heard of eggs, sausage, or muffins, hot chocolate or au laits.
