by Mackenzi Lee
I unlocked the workshop door and peered around the frame to be certain I was alone before I went in. The room was as bare and chilly as before. I retrieved the Carcel burner from the workbench and fished a match from the box, but my hands were so shaky from the cold it was tricky to strike. When it finally caught, I tipped it against the burner wick, not realizing how close to my fingers it had burned until it singed me.
“Dammit.” I dropped the match onto the floor and stuck my smarting finger in my mouth. The wick’s flame wavered but stood tall as I replaced the shade one-handed and moved it to get a better look at the tools. There weren’t as many out as there had been before; they’d all vanished except for two clunky spanners with bright rust creeping across their edges. I did a quick lap of the room, opening drawers and searching for more, but everything except the broken clocks had been cleared out.
I cursed under my breath, then retrieved one of the clocks and moved it to the table nearer the window, into the moonlight. I didn’t have tools, but, at the risk of pinched fingers, I could still mess about. I pulled back the chair and sat down.
Next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back on the floor. I blinked, shaking stars from my eyes, and realized the chair had tipped backward when I sat and sent me flying. I pulled myself up and examined the chair, which was now sprawled on the ground beside me. It only had three legs; the fourth, which was still sticking straight up from the floor, wasn’t a leg at all. It was a lever.
I crawled forward for a better look. There was a thin seam between the base of the lever and the floorboards, but when I pressed my eye to the gap, it was too dark to see what was below. I ran my knuckles along the wooden floor and rapped hard. The sound that returned was hollow. There was some empty space underneath the floor, tucked away and hidden.
I didn’t stop to think what I was doing. I just I seized the lever and pulled.
Immediately the floor beneath me began to tremble, accompanied by the low rasp of gears interlocking. Then a trapdoor began to sink into the floor, leaving a half-meter square of pure darkness beneath the worktable. The pale beam of my burner illuminated a set of rungs, but I couldn’t see a thing beyond the pale splash of lamplight. Not how far it went, or what waited at the end.
I backed away from the trapdoor, my eyes still on it like something was about to leap out at me, then retrieved the smaller of the two spanners from where it lay on the workbench and tucked it into my braces. I didn’t know what was beneath the floorboards, but my mind kept drifting to the automatons, and I felt a spanner might be a better weapon against them than anything else. I wished I’d brought the pulse gloves, but they were still stashed up in my bedroom.
I returned to the trapdoor and peered down again. The light from the burner seemed somehow fainter, though that may have been just a trick of my waning courage. Before I lost my nerve, I picked up the burner and placed my foot gingerly a few rungs down, easing myself into the hole. My head was beneath the floorboards when I heard a creaking above me. The gears were lurching forward again, the trapdoor moving back into place. For a moment, everything inside me screamed to scrambled back out to safety, but I banished that swell of panic with the knowledge that the gears were on my side, under the floor, and I could get them moving again if I needed to. I wouldn’t be trapped.
It was a short descent, probably half as long as the stairs in Geisler’s house, but the smell assaulted me immediately. It was rotten and metallic, heavy with dead flesh—I knew it from our workshop back in Geneva, but this was sharper. Fresher. I edged down, letting my feet explore the darkness for a moment before they found the next rung.
I finally reached a dirt floor, and straightened. My head brushed a beam. I held up my burner, trying to see what lay ahead, but its light barely stretched beyond the base of the ladder. Not far enough to see the room or its contents properly.
“Hello?” I called. My voice echoed faintly, but there was no reply, just the steady slither of water running down the walls.
I reached out behind me until I found damp stone and walked along it until my fingers knocked into what felt like a cold, smooth tube. I raised my lamp. A transparent half cylinder of glass about the width of my fist protruded from the wall with what looked like a thick candlewick inside of it. The tube ran parallel with the floor just below my eye level and disappeared ahead of me into the darkness.
I set my lamp on the ground and fished for the matches in my pocket. I lit one and held it experimentally against the end of the wick. It caught just like a candle and smoldered, still too faint to see into the room. But its light illuminated a knob, at one end of the tube, that connected to a rusted pipe just above it. I twisted it. There was a click like gears, followed by a slow drip, then suddenly, with a whoosh, the flame began to spread along the wick, stretching the perimeter of the room and bathing it all in a bloody light.
The room was clearly Geisler’s laboratory, but it wasn’t the workshop full of cogs and gears I had expected. This was less a workshop and more a morgue, or a scene from some medieval dungeon. There were human limbs—fresh human limbs, I realized with a jolt—wilting on a gouged, bloody bench. Some were split down the middle, with gears spilling out between the seams as though they had been stuffed in rather than lined up to actually operate. Unmistakably human organs were stacked in pickling jars on a shelf above them, floating in a frothy yellow liquid, and skin was stretched and pinned against one wall like tanning leather. In the center was a heavy metal table, blood and rust on its bolts glinting the same flaky orange.
The glass lighting tube stopped at a spot on the wall where the darkness seemed somehow deeper. I took a few steps toward it before I realized it was a barred cell like a prison. Inside were two naked bodies, one lying facedown, the other on its side with its back to me. I reached through the bars with my spanner, hooked it around an arm, and tugged. Instead of the body rolling over like I had expected, the torso crumbled away from the legs and fell onto its back. The entire front of the chest was missing, rib cage nothing but bloody splintered stumps and the inside stripped clean. The corpse was empty.
I stumbled backward, tripped over myself, and sat down hard on the dirt floor. The thought of what might have occupied the floor before me sent me scrambling back to my feet so fast I knocked over my burner and snuffed it. I had to swallow hard several times to keep myself from being sick. I had seen bodies before, seen them gutted and stripped and reconstructed, seen metal fused with muscle and bone, even done it myself, but there was something about this, the brutality and obsession of it, that made me light-headed.
I needed to be out of here. There was no chance I’d forget what I’d seen, but I didn’t have to stare at it any longer. I groped along the wall for the knob that had ignited the glass tube and turned it the opposite direction. Like the Carcel burner, the flame sank and died with a chatter of gears, leaving me in total darkness. I stumbled forward until my shin smacked against the bottom rung of the ladder and I started to clamber up, one hand groping above for the trapdoor. My fingers brushed cold gears, and I started clawing at them, feeling for the lever and the mechanism that would get them moving again and set me free.
Then, above me, the workshop door opened.
I froze, listening hard. Footsteps crossed the floor, passed above me, and stopped, followed by a soft flump like the sound of a heavy cloth hitting the ground.
I eased myself down onto the top rung, trying to determine who was walking above me and what chance I would stand if I made a run for it. I would risk the automatons—I was certain I could outrun them back to the house. But if it wasn’t an automaton, it would be Geisler, and I couldn’t let him catch me sneaking out of his underground laboratory.
A loud, hollow thunk on the other side of the floorboards made me jump. Something heavy had been dropped. Slow footsteps followed and the distinct buzz of machinery. It had to be one of the automatons. If I snuck out the trapdoor and hit the floor running, I could make it out.
I gave a hard t
ug on the cogs beside me, then yanked my hand out of the way as they started to turn, lever churning like a piston. A sliver of pale darkness began to expand above me as the trapdoor opened. I waited, my body a loaded spring, until the gap was finally wide enough, then I hoisted myself up into the workshop and ran. As I reached the door, I tossed a quick glance over my shoulder to where I was certain the automaton was waiting.
But it wasn’t an automaton. It was Clémence.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Clémence was crumpled on the floor beside the empty fireplace, bare arms wrapped around herself, but I could see she was naked from the waist up. Her skin looked bone-white against the darkness. On the floor next to her, her coat and blouse lay in a heap, the large spanner from the workbench beside them.
I stopped short, one hand on the door. Clémence looked up at the same time, and for a moment we just gaped at each other. I had to focus on keeping my eyes on her face instead of letting them wander down—even with her arms crossed over her chest, her bare shoulders were enough to make the air around me feel hotter.
“Clémence,” I said, her name the only word that shoved itself through my surprise.
She didn’t say anything, and I realized each of her deep breaths shuddered and cracked like a static pulse.
It seemed an idiotic question, but I asked anyway. “Are you all right?” Her hair swung over her shoulder as she shook her head. I took a step forward. “Can I help?”
She nodded and I went the rest of the way across the room and knelt beside her. When she spoke, her voice sounded like ripping paper. “Can you fix me?”
“Can I . . . what?”
Then she moved her arms, and I saw what she meant.
The skin across her chest wasn’t skin at all, but a hard steel panel that swung open like a door, and inside she was mechanical. Her rib cage on one side was gone, replaced by steel rods and a small cluster of churning gears connected to oiled paper bellows that jerked up and down as she gasped for air.
Mechanical, like Oliver.
She took another drowning breath and I realized one of her steel ribs had come undone and was sloping inward at an odd angle so that it pressed on the bellows and kept it from inflating properly. By some miracle, it hadn’t punctured her skin or the oiled paper.
“I can fix it,” I said. “A bolt’s come loose, that’s all.”
She flapped her hand toward the spanner she had discarded on the floor. “Wrong size,” I said, pulling the smaller one out from my braces. “I’ve got the right one here. Sorry.”
“So this is . . . all your fault,” she murmured.
“Did you actually try to fix it with that massive thing?” I nudged the large spanner with my foot.
Clémence laughed weakly. “Made it worse.”
“Yes,” I said. “Stop talking for a minute.”
It was hard to see in the dim light, and I wished fervently for the magnifying goggles that were probably in pieces back in my father’s ransacked shop. I reached down with one hand to the steel plate beneath the bellows where the bolt had fallen, then nudged the loose rib back into place with the other. Clémence gasped like she was surfacing from water.
I set the bolt in place and twisted it with the spanner, still holding her rib cage where it should be. “You’re going to be all right,” I told her as I worked. She didn’t say anything, but I felt her heartbeat slow. It was strange, the way I could feel it echoing through her chest, so close I might as well have been holding her heart in my hand. When I worked on Oliver, it was always gears ticking, but Clémence was real and alive, flesh on top of metal.
When I finished, she took several deep breaths, each steaming white against the cold air. I watched the bellows flex, returning more to their original shape with every inhalation.
“Better?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice still feathery but stronger. She shut the panel across her chest, then climbed to her feet with a hiss of pain. I looked away as she retrieved her coat from the floor and wrapped it around herself, pulling it tight at the waist. For a moment, it seemed like she was going to walk out without saying anything else and we’d be left with each other’s secrets, but then, with one hand still pressed to her rib cage, she sank down again, and I slid from the balls of my feet so we were sitting side by side, with our backs against the wall.
Neither of us said anything for a while. We didn’t look at each other either, just stared forward into the darkness. Then Clémence asked, “Would you like to go first?”
“First at what?”
“Asking questions. I suspect you’re a bit slower to trust that I am, so I’m hoping that if I tell my story you’ll be more inclined to tell me yours.”
“All right, uh . . . ,” I fumbled, mostly because I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start, but Clémence interpreted my silence otherwise. She tipped her chin to her chest and smiled sadly.
“Am I that repulsive?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Not that at all. I think you’re . . . remarkable.”
She looked up, and her hair caught a button on her shoulder so that it fell into a swinging arc beneath her chin. “You don’t have to—”
“I mean it.” I said. “How did it happen?”
She took a deep breath, and I heard the bellows inside her inflate with a crackle. Now that I knew it was there, I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t heard it before.
“I was born in Paris, you know that,” she said. “My family survived the Revolution by making bombs for the Jacobins, and when everything settled down, my father turned that enterprise into a business manufacturing mining explosives, and he made a lot of money doing it. It was a good life, I suppose, if you enjoy uncomfortable shoes and boring conversation.” She pushed the strand of hair behind her ear. “The spring I turned fourteen, I went to Geneva to see a friend. Against my parents’ wishes. Not that it matters. While I was there, I was in a carriage accident, and one side of my body was crushed. I was treated by Dr. Geisler, and he saw me as a chance to test an experiment he had been perfecting in his mind for years. Internal repairs, I suppose you could say.”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“He saved my life, but when I returned to Paris and told my parents, they threw me out.”
“God’s wounds. You’d think they’d be pleased you weren’t dead.”
“To them, I was. Being mechanical is as good as dead, and I’m worse because I can’t survive without clockwork in me. I’ve never met anyone else like that.”
I thought of Oliver but didn’t say anything.
“So I was a girl alone in Paris with no home or family and no money when I got word that Geisler was looking for me. He wanted payment for his services, and I had nothing. I could have taken debtors’ prison, but that seemed like throwing away my second chance at life. So Geisler agreed to let me work for him and pay off my debt that way.”
“How long are you contracted with him?”
“Fifteen years.”
“So you’re not his assistant?”
She gave a brittle laugh. “No, nothing like that. I don’t know anything about mechanics, or medicine. I’m just paying off what I owe. Geisler doesn’t like me and he doesn’t particularly want me here, but I’m obligated to stay silent about the things he’d rather most people didn’t know about his research. Which is a good quality in a worker, I suppose.”
“So why did you tell me you were his assistant?”
“I don’t know.” She pursed her lips in what might have started as a smile but ended up looking like pain. “Because it’s a kinder word than slave.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my elbows on them. The cold was staring to come back now that I wasn’t working, and I shivered. “What sorts of things do you work on with Geisler?”
“You mean do I work downstairs?” She rapp
ed the floorboards with her knuckles. “No point in pretending it isn’t there.”
I could still smell it, sharp and foul in the back of my throat, and I resisted the urge to spit. “What’s he trying to do?”
“You saw it. And if you were in Geneva two years ago, you know. He wants to bring back the dead.”
I had guessed. But I needed to hear her say it.
“He’s been obsessed with it for a while,” she continued. “It sort of dropped off after we first left Geneva, and I thought he’d given it up. But since Frankenstein came out, he’s been back at it, more manic than ever. I don’t understand what he’s so upset over. He’s acting like that book’s an instruction manual for resurrection, but it’s just a stupid made-up story.”
“You came from Geneva with Geisler?” I asked, and she nodded. “So you were with him when he fled.”
“No, after he was arrested I hid out in Ornex for a while. We met up there after his escape and came straight here.”
“Oh.” The knot that had been forming in my chest loosened. She hadn’t been with Geisler the night he left the city, so she couldn’t refute my story about Oliver’s death. I was still safe.
She arched an eyebrow. “Why?”
“My brother died that night,” I said. “That’s all.”
“How did he die? You never told me.”
“You don’t want to hear that story.”
“I do. If you’ll tell it.”
I looked down at my boots. It occurred to me suddenly that I could tell her the truth. For the first time, I could tell someone the real story of how Oliver had died. Clémence hardly knew me, and I hardly knew her. We’d probably part for good in a few days, and whatever she thought of me was of little consequence. I had gotten so rehearsed in my lie that I’d forgotten telling the truth was even an option.
“Geisler hid with our family for two nights after he escaped from prison,” I began, not quite sure which version was about to come out of my mouth—they both started the same. “The police were looking for him, and security around the borders was tight, so he thought it would be safer to lie low in Geneva before he made a run for it. The night he left, Oliver and I went with him. We were meant to be some sort of cover, and to be certain he made it safely to the river.”