Cathedral of Bones

by A. J. Steiger

  “Your head, obviously. Your left arm. Part of your lower body, though I couldn’t salvage the legs. Your heart is now artificial, as are most of your other organs, though you still have a rudimentary digestive tract, so you should be able to eat . . . though you don’t actually need to. Overall, I would say around seventy percent of your body is now mechanical.”

  Seventy, he thought, dazed. Well over the limit set by the Foundation. He was more golem than human.

  His father continued: “I installed a device inside your new heart, similar to the one that powers my spiders, which constantly draws in meta. You’ll never have to worry about running out of fuel, so to speak. Your mechanical organs should last at least as long as the organic ones . . . probably longer. Though there’s no precedent for this, it’s conceivable that, with proper maintenance and occasional repair work, you could live up to two hundred and fifty years.” A pause. “Although, of course, your existence is no longer strictly legal.”

  So, he was in the same boat as Alice.

  Yet now, he felt only a quiet gratitude for the cool softness of the pillow against his cheek, the blue of the sky outside his window, the distant sound of waves. I’m alive. The rest could wait.

  He sat up and carefully touched his left leg, now smooth, rigid, and cool. There was still sensation. Muted, strange, like something felt through a layer of cotton, but there.

  “I gave up my soul to save her,” he said quietly. “At least, I think I did. But . . . I still feel like the same person. How can that be?”

  Dr. Hawking shrugged. “I have always considered the soul a rather overrated concept. The brain is far more useful.”

  Simon touched his chest. A vague memory stirred—a sensation of drifting apart, dissolving. Azathoth had ripped out the linchpin holding his mind together. Simon had felt himself unraveling, becoming nothing. And then . . . warmth. A soft, welcoming glow, like a lighthouse guiding him back home.

  Alice. Alice had done that. She had saved him—somehow.

  Was it love? Was that what had allowed him to stare into the darkness and return with his soul intact? His father would probably scoff at such a sentimental notion. But Simon could think of no other explanation. Maybe, sometimes, the answer really was that simple.

  “You said you remembered a bit,” Dr. Hawking said softly. “What was it like? When you used your power.”

  A shudder gripped Simon. He had become something more than human . . . but something much, much less, too. In that brief span of time, he’d been a consciousness too vast and all-encompassing to care about the destruction he was causing, because—at the time—it had seemed so meaningless, like stepping on an anthill. Now he felt sick. His mind flinched away from the memory. “I killed people,” he said.

  And Neeta . . . had he killed her, too? He couldn’t even remember. His heart ticked faster.

  His father gripped his hand firmly. “Simon.”

  He blinked a few times, snapping back to the present. His father released his hand. “You were not yourself,” Father said. “You bear no responsibility.”

  He’d said the same thing about Olivia’s death. Simon knew it wasn’t that simple. But panicking and falling apart wouldn’t help anything, either. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, hiding in darkness, then opened them again. “How many dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Whatever happened, he decided, he would face the future when it came. He had spent most of his life being afraid; it was simply too tiring. It was all he could do, right now, just to lie in bed, feeling the strange lightness of his new body. “I don’t feel cold,” he murmured. “But I don’t feel warm, either.” He turned his head toward his father. “I saw my mother, you know. And Olivia.”

  His shoulders stiffened, but he said nothing.

  “Did you know? About them?”

  Dr. Hawking looked away. “I won’t ask your forgiveness.”

  Simon said nothing.

  “Your mother and I . . . when we first met, we told each other that we would never have children. Because we were both the same sort of people. I never believed myself capable of being a decent father. In that, it seems, I was right. But still, when she announced she was pregnant with twins, I . . . I thought maybe I could try.” He lowered his head. “I made so many mistakes. And now you will live the rest of your life as an Abomination, because I was too cowardly to let you go. We are the same, your mother and I.”

  “Thank you,” Simon whispered. “For saving me.”

  A subtle tension eased out of Dr. Hawking’s shoulders. He nodded and blinked his eyes dry. “I’ll, uh. I’ll let Alice know you’re awake.”

  It was the first time, in Simon’s memory, that his father had called her by name. “Where is she? I’ll go to her.”

  A pause. “Are you sure? Can you stand?”

  Simon sat up and pushed aside the covers, looking at himself for the first time. He was wearing loose drawstring pants, but everything from the waist up was bare.

  As a child, he’d had a toy, a small metal man that could be bent and posed; his new body resembled, more than anything, a life-sized version of that toy. The skin was slightly reddened where it joined with the metal plates. It itched, but there was no pain. In the center of his chest was a convex glass circle that glowed with soft golden light. It pulsed like a heartbeat.

  Simon swung his legs over the edge of the bed and straightened slowly. His new limbs wobbled, but held. Standing felt different—a strange balancing act. But he would get used to it, he supposed. “Where is Alice?”

  Dr. Hawking turned. “Follow me.”

  Simon took one small, careful step, then another. His bare feet clicked against the stone floor as they walked down the hallway, toward Olivia’s old room. “For a full day, she refused to leave your side,” Dr. Hawking remarked. “I ordered her to get some sleep, and she agreed, on the condition that I wake her when you regained consciousness.” He knocked on the door. “Alice? He’s up.”

  There was a brief pause . . . then the door sprang open. Alice stood there, dark bags under her reddened eyes. At the sight of Simon, they widened.

  He gave her a tiny smile and interlaced his hands behind his back, feeling suddenly shy. “Er . . . how are y—”

  She flung her arms around him and buried her face in the crook between his neck and shoulder. “Don’t ever scare me like that again,” she said, voice trembling.

  He stiffened in surprise . . . then hugged her back, tightly.

  Dr. Hawking retreated, giving them privacy.

  Alice clung to him for another few minutes, then pulled back, wiped her eyes with the back of one hand, and looked him up and down. She tugged him into the room by his arm, and they sat side by side on the edge of the bed. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not really.” He absently touched the luminous circle in the center of his chest. “I know it looks strange, though.”

  “Strange?” She laughed, a choked sound. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”

  He looked into her violet eyes. “I suppose we have even more in common, now.”

  She smiled, a tiny, complicated smile—wry and bittersweet and knowing. “I suppose we do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A powdery blanket of snow lay over Eidendel. The shops were decked with holly boughs and red bows.

  “I still think this is a bad idea,” Alice muttered. She hung back in an alley, swallowed up by her cloak. A scarf covered her nose and mouth, leaving only her eyes visible.

  “I’ve been working on my illusion-crafting over the past month,” Simon said. “It’s just a few small tweaks, but still, no one should recognize our faces.”

  “Even so . . .”

  “You can’t stay cooped up in Blackthorn all the time,” Simon told her. “You said just the other day you were feeling claustrophobic, that you were going to explode if you didn’t get outside. Well, here we are.” He stretched out a hand to her. “We won’t stay out long, I promise. I just want to show
you the Gaokerena tree in the Gregor Temple. They always decorate it for Solstice. It’s probably the most beautiful thing in the city right now.”

  She hesitated . . . then stretched out an arm and placed her hand in his. He led her out into the street, and they resumed walking. No one spared them a glance.

  Still, Simon kept his guard up. Despite what he’d said, he knew this was risky. They were Abominations, trespassers in the world of normal people. And everyone in Eidendel was still talking about what had happened several months ago—the hole in the sky, the bizarre phenomenon that had destroyed Grunewick. The island was far enough from the shore that no one in the city had been harmed—though a handful had gone temporarily mad during the incident, raving and screaming. There’d been headlines and endless articles speculating about the incident, but experts had no answers. The Eidendel Underground was the only paper to run an accurate story—AZATHOTH APPEARS IN SKY, DESTROYS SECRET GOVERNMENT LABORATORY!—though of course no respectable person believed it.

  People were confused and on guard. If Simon were wiser, perhaps, he would lie low. Or leave the city entirely.

  Still, hiding away in darkness and shadows didn’t feel right, and fleeing seemed even worse. For better or worse, Eidendel was his home, and he was tired of hiding. What was the point of being alive if you weren’t going to live?

  He and Alice made their way down the street, past the warm, golden, glowing squares of shop windows. The snow covered everything, muffling their footsteps. The world felt soft and silent, wreathed in white.

  Simon glimpsed a face in the crowd, and his artificial heart lurched. Neeta.

  She wore an eyepatch and walked with a limp; she looked as though she’d aged ten years in the span of a few months. But it was unmistakably her.

  He stood frozen, gripping Alice’s hand tightly. His gaze briefly met Neeta’s, but he saw no recognition there.

  He kept walking, head down, gripping Alice’s hand tightly. They turned a corner, and he glanced over his shoulder. No sign of her. He exhaled.

  She’s alive. The revelation filled him with a quiet gratitude, mingled with unease. If Neeta had survived, it meant there was still someone who knew what had really happened to Grunewick. But she probably believed that Simon was dead. As long as she thought that, he was safe. Hopefully.

  “I guess the illusion spell is working,” Alice whispered.

  “I suppose so.” Maintaining it was exhausting. Their actual faces hadn’t been altered, so appearing as someone else meant constantly projecting the illusion into the minds of everyone around him, and with a crowd this size, that was a daunting task. But Simon found that, with his new body, he was able to channel larger amounts of meta than ever before.

  He hadn’t used Chaos-energy since his transformation. He hoped he would never need to again. He still felt it, like a shadow lurking in the corner of his mind—a dark potential. But now that he understood what it was, he could control it, keep it locked away.

  They reached the Gregor Temple, and the tree within. Strings of softly twinkling golden meta-lights, replenished daily by the Animists who tended the Temple, encircled the Gaokerena’s trunk and festooned its branches, along with an assortment of silver bows and golden bells. Its leaves had fallen; without the decorations the tree would have appeared gray, skeletal, and faintly foreboding. But now it glowed with warmth and cheer.

  Simon’s breath plumed in the air as he gazed up at the tree. “My family and I used to come here when I was small, every Solstice. My father was never much interested in tradition, but Olivia always bullied him into coming with us. And even if he never said so, I think he was glad she did.” A faint smile touched his lips.

  He realized Alice hadn’t spoken for a while and glanced over at her. She was staring at the tree with an unreadable expression.

  His mind flashed to the Gaokerena in the mountains, the broken fragments of shell.

  Then she reached out and took his gloved hand in hers. “You’re right,” she said. “This was worth the trip.”

  They stood, holding hands, as the snow fell softly through the open ceiling.

  Simon shivered a little. “It’s cold,” he murmured.

  “Can you still feel the cold?”

  “I can, sort of. It’s just . . . different.”

  She placed a hand on his arm and squeezed. “Can you feel this?”

  A flush rose into his cheeks. “Yes.” He could feel her gaze on him, and he wondered what she was thinking. He placed a hand against the meta-core in his chest—the glowing circle, hidden by layers of clothing.

  “Simon?”

  He swallowed, his hand trembling a little. “I still think about it sometimes. That moment when I let the power consume me. What I saw, what I felt . . .” His eyes drifted out of focus. “It felt awful. But at the same time, it was incredible. And . . . I feel like I still haven’t come back entirely. Like maybe I never will. I’m not sure I know who I am anymore, or what I am.”

  “You’re Simon,” she said. “You’re my friend. And more. That’s all that matters.”

  He looked into her eyes. She smiled and squeezed his hand.

  He’d never felt more human than he did in that moment.

  Epilogue

  Night.

  A faint creak broke the silence. Simon stirred in bed, rubbing at his eyes. His door was open an inch.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  He slid his feet into a pair of slippers and padded across the room, through the door. The hallway was quiet and dark. Moonlight slanted in through a nearby open window—had it been open earlier?—and lay in a silvery bar across the floor.

  A slender form stepped out of the shadows, into the moonlight.

  The sight of her hit him like a splash of ice water. For a long moment, they faced each other in silence. “Olivia?”

  He hadn’t seen her, or his mother, since his visit to Veera’s castle in the Eldritch Realm. He hadn’t thought Olivia would want to see him.

  “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

  She pulled a blade from a sheath at her hip and held it out to him: the Dagger of Yig. “Mother found it in the rubble. We thought you might want it back.”

  “Is she . . .”

  “She’s fine. She came to check on you a while ago, after Father saved you . . . though you were still unconscious. She believes you’re angry at her.”

  “I’m not. Please tell her that.”

  Olivia nodded.

  He took the dagger, feeling its weight and warmth in his palm. “Thank you.”

  She pulled a lock of hair behind one delicate, fin-shaped ear. Her dark, inscrutable eyes glinted in the pale moonlight. “You did something extraordinary, you know.”

  He hesitated. “The Queen . . . is she really dead?”

  Olivia gave him a mildly reproachful look. “It will take her a hundred years or more to knit her body back together. To her, that’s only the blink of an eye. But for us, well . . . it will give us time to figure something out. Mother is already working on it.”

  “Neeta, my teacher . . . she said there were other, worse things out there. Things that might attack humanity once the Queen was gone.”

  Olivia gave a small shrug. “To trade a known horror for the unknown is always a risk.”

  He asked the question that had been hovering in the back of his mind ever since his reawakening: “Do you think I did the right thing?”

  “We can never know what’s right, in the moment we make a choice,” she replied. “Only later, when we know the results, can we figure right and wrong.” For a moment, she seemed inscrutably old and somehow very young at the same time. And he wondered, again, why she was so different from the Olivia he remembered—and so different from Alice. Cold, where Alice was warm. Withdrawn, where Alice was outspoken.

  It was as though Olivia had never fully come back. As though she had been ready to move on, and so only pieces of her returned.

  “We never really had a
chance to talk,” she said.

  “I didn’t realize you wanted to.”

  She averted her eyes. “Mother still thinks I’m her,” she said. “The old Olivia, I mean. Sometimes . . . when she looks at me, I feel like she’s looking at someone else. I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint her.”

  “No matter who you are, you’re still her daughter. I know it’s confusing. Sometimes I don’t really know who I am to my father, either—or who he is to me. Maybe I’ll always be figuring it out. But that’s what it is to be human.”

  “Human.” She shook her head, as though the words were a bitter joke.

  “A person, I mean.” He rubbed his thumb idly over the carved hilt of the dagger. “Listen. I don’t want you to feel like you have to fill the old Olivia’s shoes. Just be who you are.”

  Her lips curved—the faintest ghost of a smile, tiny and sad and mysterious. “You seem like a kind person. She was lucky to have you for a brother.”

  A dull ache filled his chest, and for a few seconds, tears prickled in his sinuses. Then the urge to cry retreated. “Give Mother my love.”

  She nodded. “Goodbye, Simon. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

  Then she crawled out the window, lizard-like, and was gone.

  Simon gazed out at the slowly brightening sky, the gray-green ocean. Waves crashed and surged against the shore in an ancient heartbeat.

  Things would never return to the way they’d been. For the first time, though, that acknowledgment didn’t feel like the end of the world. There was a path forward. It was crooked, and he couldn’t see where it led—there were too many twists and turns, too many questions—but he would find out, one step at a time.

  Simon Frost laid a hand against the icy windowpane and stared at his own reflection in the glass. His eyes were bright green—brighter, it seemed, than they had ever been. But he felt no fear, only a strange awakeness, as though he’d shaken off the last, clinging cobwebs of an old dream. As though both the world and Simon himself had been remade on some deep and invisible level, and every particle of existence had shifted ever so slightly to make room. For what, he couldn’t say.