Which, in a way, is what Jack had been.
“The cornea is an extremely thin membrane,” said Victor. “We’re talking about just a few cells.”
“But they’re important cells,” said Lizzie. “And the phrenological mesmerator is meant to increase the connections between the brain’s two hemispheres. What if it’s doing something else? What if it is forging a connection between Aggie and Dodger?”
Aggie swallowed. “Wait, what did you say?”
Lizzie looked confused for a moment. “Um, I wondered if it was forming a connection between you and Dodger.”
Aggie stared at Lizzie, stunned into silence.
“You know,” Lizzie prompted. “Dodger, your corneal donor.”
“I know that,” Aggie said. “But how do you know that?”
Lizzie looked at Victor, who held out his hands and shrugged. “Because,” Lizzie said, “he’s the recipient of the Bio-Mechanical eyes.”
Present tense. Lizzie was talking about him in the present tense. Aggie felt a moment of elation so pure she could have gotten drunk on it. “Are you telling me—he’s alive? Dodger’s alive?”
Lizzie nodded, as if this were common knowledge.
“Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”
Lizzie’s shoulders stiffened. “I had no idea you knew him. How do you know him, Aggie?”
She felt as though she were melting in the airless room. “He helped me find my way through the East End the night Jenny was injured. He’s a friend.” She hesitated. “He was also with me the night I lost my sight.”
“Why haven’t you told me this before?” Lizzie looked stung, as though Aggie was the one in the wrong here. “I thought we were friends.”
“It’s not as though you’ve been telling me what’s going on with you, either,” said Aggie. “Why didn’t you mention that Dodger was your patient?”
“Because we are friends,” said Lizzie. “You were so upset about not being allowed to go back to your nursing studies, and I didn’t want to rub it in about all my new, exciting projects.”
Dodger was Lizzie’s project. For a moment, this made no sense, and then it seemed so obvious that Aggie was astonished she hadn’t made the connection before. “So Dodger is a full-on Bio-Mechanical now?” With a rush of relief, Aggie imagined him restored, like Victor, to the person he had been before. Then she remembered—Victor was the only Bio-Mechanical who could remember his former life. The rest of them were empty-eyed, shambling husks. “What is he like? Can he remember anything? Can he speak?”
Lizzie’s smile was a complicated thing. “Your friend is rather remarkable. He’s the project that Victor and I have been working on to show the kaiser. The Dreadnaught.”
Aggie let out a shaky breath she had not realized she was holding. She wanted to run away to a dark room to sort through the tangle of her emotions.
“You can’t tell anyone,” said Victor. “The whole project is supposed to be top secret. But considering everything, perhaps we should—” He broke off at the sound of a knock on the door. “Bloody hell, is it five already?”
Still reeling from the news Dodger was alive—reanimated—Aggie didn’t understand why Victor was rushing to get to the door as it opened. “Listen,” he said, “something’s come up. We’re not going to have a session today.”
It was too late. Dodger was already standing on the threshold of the room, instantly recognizable but subtly altered. His lean frame was perhaps a bit more athletic than before, and instead of a top hat and swallowtail coat, he was wearing a flat-brimmed cap and roughspun tunic. But then he raised his gaze to hers, revealing the biggest change—his new, strange, glass-and-metal eyes. As his eyes locked with hers, they brightened, gleaming with the luminescent green of ichor. “You’re the girl from my dreams,” he said, and then listed abruptly to one side.
* * *
Still dazed, Dodger stared up at the redhead from his dreams. For some reason, her eyes were concealed behind small dark glasses. “Is it really you?” He felt as though he couldn’t draw enough air into his lungs. The air in the windowless room felt thick with unseen currents and unanswered questions. “Take off your specs so I can see you.”
She hesitated a moment and then removed them, revealing her familiar, lovely face—and the fact that it had changed.
“Your eyes. They’re not green.”
“It’s the eye drops,” she said, replacing the glasses. They were seated on the floor, he realized, and his head was in her lap.
“No.” Dodger struggled upright, but his eyes had begun a frantic oscillation, making him sink back down again. “You were blind,” he said. “I remember now. That witch of a nurse said they was going to give you my eyes.”
The redhead frowned. Aggie. Her name was Aggie. “They gave me your corneas.”
“You stole my eyes and turned me into a monster.” The words came out more bewildered than angry. He tried to focus on her face, but his head was pounding, and his whirling eyes locked onto a hideous furred beast with two large, beady black eyes and four smaller ones.
Spider.
Aggie’s cool hand touched the side of his face, and his eyes refocused, reducing the magnification so now he could see the small wolf spider was crawling up the wall. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t plan for any of this.”
“Maybe I deserved it.” He sat up, cradling his aching head in his hands. “I was a thief, wasn’t I?”
“Maybe we’ve been straining his brain with the phrenologic mesmerator,” said Victor.
“No, the treatments are working.” Lizzie’s shadow fell over him. “Are you remembering something?”
What did he remember?
He remembered this: the sense of being outside the rules that fenced regular folks in and kept them docile. The reckless joy of moving through a crowd, sizing up the gulls and the saps and moving in on them. The sense of moving fast and nimble while everyone around him trudged like cart horses toward the glue factory.
Perhaps this was fate’s way of serving him his comeuppance. For every purse and pocket watch and stickpin he had snatched, there had been a divine reckoning of debts accrued and accounts payable.
Then he recalled something else. A richly appointed office. A letter from the kaiser. A hard-faced woman, her fierce cold hands, the heavy scent of chloroform.
He laughed at the absurdity of it, even though laughing made his head hurt again. He had gotten caught up in someone else’s con. He wasn’t even the mark. He was a passerby who got knocked over by mistake and wound up being run over by a trolley.
Aggie’s hand touched his shoulder. “I know this must be upsetting to you. If it’s any consolation, it’s upsetting to me, too.”
“You’ll get over it, I expect.” He waited for the room to stop spinning.
“I would have come to see you if I’d known you were here. I thought you were dead and buried.” Her voice was gentle, tinged with sadness and regret. She had mourned him, he realized.
Dodger got to his feet, then reached down to help Aggie stand. “You picked the wrong hospital for that.”
She smiled at him, but with the dark spectacles covering her eyes, he couldn’t tell if she thought he was being funny or frivolous or bitter. Christ, he barely knew himself. “So you don’t hate me?” she asked.
“I don’t hate you,” he assured her. He stood next to Aggie, and for a moment it seemed that he had awoken from a terrible dream and that everything was back to how it had always been. Then he became aware that Lizzie and Victor were arguing.
“...for the same reason we didn’t bring the Mesmerator into the lab,” Lizzie was saying. “I want some time to understand our results before Moulsdale tries to weaponize it.”
“Fair enough,” said Victor grudgingly. “But let’s start on the lowest setting.”
“Midrange is perfectl
y safe.” Lizzie was already unpacking the two copper-paddled wheels from their box and setting them up on the rosewood desk. “Dodger’s been using the highest setting for weeks.”
“And has the headaches to prove it,” added Dodger.
Lizzie waved this away. “A small price for your memories, wouldn’t you say? Aggie, come sit over here.”
Aggie held up her hands, as if trying to calm a runaway horse. “Mind telling me what you’re going to do to me before you attempt to electrocute me?”
Lizzie stepped around Aggie’s hands and clamped an electrical lead onto her right ear. “We know you’ve both already experienced some sort of unusual feedback from each other’s eyes. We’re just going to see if we can evoke the response at will.”
Aggie touched the small metal clamp on her ear. “Will it hurt?”
Lizzie attached the other lead to the electrode on the side of Dodger’s neck. “Not at all.”
Aggie looked at Dodger for confirmation. “What do you say?”
“I say no more mucking about with my brain.” He removed the clamp from his electrode and pushed it back into Lizzie’s hands. “You want my help? I need a stake.”
“Are you angling for funds?” Victor chuckled appreciatively. “I guess I can manage a couple of shillings.” He rummaged in his waistcoat pocket, then paused, looking at Dodger intently. “In case you have any ideas about running away, I should inform you that without weekly infusions of ichor, your new life is going to be even shorter than your old one.”
“Nevertheless, I’ll take the infusion of silver,” said Dodger, holding out his hand. In his head, he filed away the additional information. In order to escape, he would need to find a supply of ichor.
“After.” Lizzie reattached the clamp, and Dodger found himself seated face-to-face with Aggie.
“Aggie? You’ll have to take off the spectacles,” said Lizzie.
Aggie hesitated, and Dodger gently put his hand out. “May I?”
She nodded, and he pulled off her dark lenses. This close, he could see the swirl of dark brown and green in her irises, where before there had been only green. He became aware of a tone in his left ear, and then the room tilted and the angle of his vision shifted. With a wave of disorientation, he realized he was looking at a lean, sharp-featured boy with bright, uncanny eyes. There were faint markings visible around the iris, like the lines etched to indicate minutes and hours on a clock face.
Himself. He was looking at himself, from Aggie’s eyes.
Oh, Lord. He grabbed for Aggie’s hand, and for a moment, he felt a current between them, of attraction, perhaps—or something deeper, stronger and more insidious. Aggie pulled away as though she had been stung.
“That’s enough of that,” said Aggie, drawing the device from her ear.
Lizzie disconnected Dodger, as well. “What happened? Can you describe it?”
Aggie had restored her dark spectacles and with them, some of her composure. “It felt like I was looking out of Dodger’s eyes.”
Dodger scratched his head. “This is completely barmy.”
Victor jotted down a note in a folder marked Dreadnaught Protocol. “Did you experience anything, Dodger?”
“Yeah.” His smile felt lopsided. “What she said. Felt like I was looking out of Aggie’s eyes.”
Even through the opaque lenses, he could feel her alarm. That’s right, he thought. It goes both ways.
“This is astonishing,” said Victor. “Think of the implications for sharing information over long distances. This might be the most valuable discovery since electricity!”
“No,” said Aggie, in a tight, clipped voice. “We’re not telling anyone about this.”
“But Aggie,” said Victor, looking almost comically distressed. “This is an important scientific discovery.”
“No, Victor.” She was hugging herself, absently rubbing one arm with the opposite hand. “This is my life.” She looked down at her hands. “You don’t understand what it’s like to be poor and female. I chose to become a nurse because I wanted to make my own way in the world. If Moulsdale knows that I have some freakish link to Dodger, I’ll become little more than a servant—or a slave.”
“But Aggie,” Victor said, “how can we ignore something so spectacularly important?”
“We’re not going to ignore it,” said Lizzie. “We can study it privately. But we’re not going to rat out my best friend to Moulsdale and ruin her life.”
24
In the final days leading up to the kaiser’s visit, Dodger was kept busy. Exhausted from the previous day’s brain-tuning sessions and Grimbald’s training exercises, he was shaken awake by Wiggins after what felt like two hours’ rest. “Time to do a bit of work,” said Wiggins.
“Thought I was supposed to be in top shape for the kaiser,” said Dodger, feeling as though he might keel over.
Wiggins was unmoved. “A little light cleaning shouldn’t tire you out.”
Now, standing in front of the hospital, Dodger pretended to scrub the dirt off the building’s facade while expending as little effort as possible. Gazing at the crowd of East Enders waiting for the gates to be opened, he discovered he could read someone’s newspaper, even though the fine print was over fifty feet away.
Today’s edition of the London Daily News boasted a ten-year-old photograph of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm under a cumbersome headline:
Her Majesty to Visit the Royal Victoria Hospital and School of Bio-Mechanical Medicine and Science this Monday! A marvel of Bio-Mechanical engineering to be revealed!
Reports of the hospital’s increasingly severe financial straits were dismissed by Ambrose Moulsdale, the school’s head of medicine and Her Majesty’s most trusted personal physician.
“It is entirely untrue that the hospital’s financial well-being depends on the success of this visit,” stated Moulsdale.
Dodger was reading about the queen’s remarkable hardiness when a sudden gust of wind blew the paper out of the man’s fingers and up into the freshly budded branches of a plane tree.
The newspaper’s owner, who had an abscess on his cheek, was vocal about his displeasure. Even though Dodger couldn’t hear the man, he could read his lips. Bollocks, he said to his companion, a young woman with a violet in her black hat and a bandage on her left hand. Gossip told a darker tale about the queen. Some said the elderly monarch had to be restrained so she didn’t wander about on her own at night. She had been overheard by at least one patient uttering peculiar statements about cabbages and cabals.
This, the aggrieved man said, was what came from clinging to the waxwork facade of monarchy at the dawn of the twentieth century. He was about to share his opinion with the man on his left when something caught his eye. Cor, blimey, he said, pointing behind the gate.
Corpse walkers, said the other man, giving a little shiver of distaste as he observed the other Bio-Mechanicals moving like drunks, with awkward, fixed determination.
“Aren’t they meant to be dangerous weapons?” asked a woman with bright red cheeks. “These lot don’t look fit enough to fight off a hausfrau.”
“Looks can be deceivin’,” said the costermonger.
It’s people who are dangerous, thought Dodger as two guards moved to open the front gates. The likes of us are just rabbits for poaching. He thought of Aggie, staring back at him with his eyes. That was one expensive kiss they had shared. It had cost him his freedom. Aggie’s throwaway comment still rang in his ears: If Moulsdale knows that I have some freakish link to Dodger, I’ll become little more than a servant—or a slave.
Not that he wanted Aggie’s life to be ruined, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone that his life was apparently as disposable as a leaky chamber pot. He felt a right mark, remembering Victor’s high-flown talk about serving the Crown. What it all boiled down to was this—folks were betting on him to
win a contest as though he were a dog or a horse. If he failed to perform as desired, he expected his fate would be the same as a dog who loses a fight or a racehorse who doesn’t place—the knacker’s yard.
That’s what falling for a girl did to a bloke. Aggie wasn’t even that pretty, he told himself, feeling sour. She would probably lose her looks by the time she was thirty. Or sooner. By the time she was twenty-five. She had probably already peaked, looks-wise. All downhill from age seventeen.
Not that he would live to see her prettiness fade if they decided to experiment on him some more—or if they shipped him off to some German battlefield. Besides, none of it mattered. She could be fifty and he would probably still be daft over her.
“Oi! Stop draggin’ your feet and go pump some water!”
Dodger doffed his cap, acknowledging the porter’s reprimand. Then he picked up an empty bucket and carried it over to the water pump. When the bucket was almost full, he wrapped a bit of rag around his hand so the handle wouldn’t open his blistered palms and hefted it over to the others.
He passed a small boy who kept darting back and forth between the crowd and the Bio-Mechanicals, getting closer and closer, until his mother yelled, “Villn zi tzu esen eir?” Dodger translated the Yiddish in his head: Do you want them to eat you? The woman grabbed her son’s ear and wrenched it to drive her argument home. Sobbing, the boy clung to her skirts.
A girl who had come to the hospital to check on her father’s surgery squinted at the Bio-Mechanicals from a safe distance. “What’re they up to anyway?”
“Nothing kosher,” said the mother of the crying boy. She pointed up at the second story, where a pair of workmen on tall ladders were arguing about the proper way to hang a banner leftover from the queen’s Diamond Jubilee, held five years previously. “What’s that say?”
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