This Monstrous Thing

by Mackenzi Lee

  She glared up at me. “Who says I want to stop this?”

  “Do you understand what you’re doing?” I cried, loud enough that Ottinger shushed me from the doorway. I slid to my knees so I was right beside her and dropped my voice. “This won’t change a bleeding thing. You’ve proved them all right! All those people who think that metal parts make you violent and cruel and less than human—you’ve gone and shown them that’s exactly what you are. You could have demanded anything and you called for someone’s death. What’s killing Mary going to change?”

  “We don’t have to change anything,” she hissed back. “What could we have asked for—equality? Tolerance? Those aren’t things you can claim to want with a tower full of explosives at your back. They would have made promises until they were hoarse and then shot us all the moment we put our hands up.”

  “So you’d have Mary shot instead?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted her dead,” she replied, and suddenly she looked angry.

  I was angry too; angry that here was someone else I thought I knew and now she had thrown her true self into sharp relief. Perhaps I didn’t really know anyone. Perhaps everyone was just a fiction inside my head. “But the exploding clock tower—you’re all right with those causalities?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Then why are you here?” I demanded. “What is it you want?”

  “I don’t want to live this way anymore!” She dropped her head backward against the shelf, and a nutcracker fell to the ground with a soft clatter. “It’s just unfair,” she said, and when she took a breath, I heard her lungs pop. “All of it.”

  I slid down from my knees so I was sitting cross-legged in front of her. “Why’d you take Oliver to the rebels?”

  “He wanted to go. And I was looking for something to fight for. I’ve been a prisoner for so long, fighting for freedom seemed rather appealing.” She kicked the nutcracker at her feet and it splintered as it bounced across the floor. “Oliver’s not going to walk away.”

  “Just let me talk to him.”

  “I can’t promise they’ll let you through. They might . . .” She trailed off, but I filled in the silence.

  “I’m dead either way,” I said.

  “Well then,” she said, and she sounded herself again, “might as well go down fighting.” She climbed to her feet, reached out a hand, and pulled me up beside her. Our eyes met, and she smirked at me, that stupid twist of a smile, and the knot in my chest loosened just a smidge.

  Ottinger, Clémence, and I slipped out of the market stall and took shelter near the banks of the Rhone beneath an abandoned carriage. Clémence said we could access the tower by the river path, but there were policemen blocking the stairs we needed to get there. We were arguing softly over the best way to pass them when they abandoned their post and started to jog to the other side of the square. I followed their progress, and through the spokes of the wheel I could make out some sort of commotion across the way. A pair of police wagons had just arrived, and a large group of officers were clustered around them. I spotted Jiroux near the center, the red feather on his cornered hat standing out like a splash of blood. He was shouting orders and gesturing at his men, overseeing a fresh batch of policemen filing out of the wagons.

  Then the light from the industrial torches hit their skeletons and I realized they weren’t policemen—they were Clock Breakers.

  “He’s sending in Geisler’s automatons,” I hissed at Clémence.

  “It’ll be a massacre. There’s no chance Oliver will listen to peace once he sees them.”

  “Then we need to stall them.”

  “I can do that,” Ottinger said from my other side.

  I twisted around to face him. “Are you sure?”

  “I can try, if you tell me how.”

  “Here.” Clémence dug in the pockets of her coat, elbowing me in the process, and pulled out a pair of pulse gloves. “You have to rub them together to get a charge,” she explained as she handed them to Ottinger. “Then just grab onto one of the automatons anywhere and they’ll disable it. Better if you can use both hands; they take a good shock to shut down. And if one of your fellow policemen tries to stop you, just grab him too. Pulse gloves can knock a grown man out cold if they’re fully charged.”

  Ottinger took the gloves from her and fastened the leather straps around his wrists. “They’ll spot me fast with these. I can buy you some time, but not a lot.”

  “Some is better than none,” Clémence replied.

  “Are you sure you can do it?” I asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure you want to do it?” I corrected.

  He raised his face to mine, elbows splayed to keep his balance. “I didn’t tell you this, Mr. Finch, but my sister’s clockwork. She was born with a bad leg, and your father gave her a new one a few years ago and kept our secret. So I’ve got a stake in this too.” He looked past me to Clémence. “I thought you should know, not everyone’s against you.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He gave an awkward salute, careful not to touch his skin with the plates, then rolled out from under the carriage and took off at a run toward the automatons.

  “Let’s go,” Clémence hissed, I followed her as we crawled back toward the riverbank.

  The stairway that led to the waterfront path was submerged halfway up, but there was no chain here like when we left Geneva. Instead we had to walk along the top of the retaining wall, bricks slippery with moss and water. My boots were so wide that only half my foot fit.

  Ahead of me, Clémence skirted as gracefully as an acrobat, though I thought I saw her waver a few times. I gritted my teeth, struggling to keep my balance, but the arm I needed most was useless in its sling. After nearly falling twice, I decided there were worse things than torn stitches, and ripped the sling off and tossed it into the river. I stretched my shoulder cautiously. The sutures pulled, but they held. I placed both hands against the damp wall and began walking again, steadier than before.

  One of the clock tower struts moored on the riverbank was hollow, with a ladder running up the inside. Clémence went up first and I followed, close enough that I had to keep ducking to avoid getting kicked in the head. Water dripped down the metal walls, and the whole thing shook as the cogs churned above us. My shoulder was starting to burn, but I kept going, pulling myself up hand over hand through the damp darkness until a small circle of metallic light blinked into view above us. I pressed down the pain by focusing on that spot and counted the rungs as it got larger and larger, and then suddenly Clémence had her hand around my elbow and was hoisting me out.

  We were on a narrow metal walkway that stretched like a bridge across the clock tower from end to end, nothing below it but a long fall broken by support beams and struts. Level with the bridge but a good six feet away were the glockenspiel chimes and the horizontal wheel where Oliver had stood when he called his army into the square. Clockwork figures as tall as I was were lined up and frozen along its edge. Above us, the clock face was obscured by grinding cogs, the underbelly of the giant timepiece now running in reverse. Sparks jumped between the teeth as the wheels turned, and the air was metallic and charged like the prelude to a lightning strike. I remembered this from the night Oliver died, and the resurrection. My stomach twisted sharply.

  I pulled myself to my feet with the help of the iron railing that ran along both sides of the walkway. Beside us, a weight dropped from between the cogs, a beam of white electricity skittering up its chain. The whole tower was charged.

  “Do you know where Oliver is?” I called to Clémence over the chatter of the cogs. She nodded and started across the bridge, but stopped suddenly.

  Three people were coming toward us, two men and a woman, all with guns. “Le Brey!” the man in the lead shouted at Clémence. He had long, scraggly hair and a bad limp from clockwork in his left knee. The woman’s mechanical arm was in poor repair. It ended in a hook rather than an actual hand, but she kept it on the t
rigger of her gun, and I was certain it could have fired just as well. I didn’t see any clockwork on the second man, but I knew it must be there, out of sight.

  “Where’s Oliver, Raif?” Clémence called across the bridge.

  “You said you’d bring back Mary Shelley or you wouldn’t come back at all.” Raif took a step toward Clémence. She put a hand on either side of the railing. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Oliver’s brother,” she replied.

  Raif let out a crackling laugh. “The brother who sold him out to the police?”

  “I didn’t!” I shouted, but I wasn’t sure he heard me.

  Clémence raised her chin as Raif took another step forward, pistol still pointed at her. “Out of the way, Le Brey.”

  She didn’t move. “Alasdair’s one of the Shadow Boys. He’s on our side.”

  “Then why wasn’t he here fighting with us?” Raif demanded.

  “He’s here now,” she said. “Let him see his brother.”

  “Who’s there?” someone called from behind Raif and his companions, and they all turned. I had to lean around Clémence to match sight to the voice I recognized.

  Oliver. It was hard to see him properly in the darkness as he dropped from a ladder onto the end of the bridge and straightened. All three of his men stepped back, a sort of fearful reverence in their posture toward him. “Le Brey brought your brother,” the woman said.

  “Did she?” Oliver came forward slowly. I could feel his footsteps ripple across the bridge and resonate up through the soles of my feet. “Where’s Mary Shelley?” he called to us.

  “She’s gone,” I said before Clémence could speak. “You can’t have her, Oliver.”

  The shadows of the cogs fell on his face, turning him in and out of darkness as they spun. He looked smoldering, a lit fuse burning into a bomb. “Then we haven’t got long left.”

  “You don’t have to do this!” I called. I tried to get past Clémence but she kept her arms in place and I was worried that if I shoved past her, one of us would fall. “Mary isn’t your martyr, and she isn’t your enemy. She didn’t sell you out.”

  “Mary took my life and used it against me. Now her life belongs to me.”

  “That’s not how—”

  “This is retribution!” he shouted over me. “For Mary Shelley, and Frankenstein, and for every wrong done to every clockwork man in Geneva.”

  “This isn’t retribution, Oliver, this is suicide!” I cried. I saw Raif’s pistol rise, but I pressed on, unafraid. I was startled by how unafraid I was. “You’re throwing away your life, and the lives of all these people who worship you. The only message you’ll send Geneva is that clockwork men are monsters!”

  “Can I shoot him?” Raif asked Oliver, finger flexing on the trigger.

  “That’s all they’ll remember you for,” I said. “You’re proving them right.”

  Oliver’s metal fist tightened on the rail, and he turned his face away from me. For a moment, the shadows from the gears matched the pulse of the ones beneath his skin. “If they want monsters, we shall be their monsters.”

  Clémence’s shoulders shrank, and I sidestepped her so that Oliver and I were face to face, so close our shadows were the same. “You are not a monster,” I said, as quietly as I could and still be heard.

  I could see him clearly now, even in the dim light—the stitches across his forehead, gears pushing back against his skin, body that didn’t fit right—but more than that, I was seeing him. Really seeing him, clearer than I had since the resurrection, and I knew him. It was Oliver, my brother, the brother I’d grown up with, who’d stolen strawberries for me, and given me his coat when I was cold. Who couldn’t sing in tune and who spoke Dutch with Scottish vowels and wrote poetry in charcoal on the school walls and taught me how to skip stones and cuss and survive. Who he had been, and who he still was, the dark-haired boy with the wild heart who just felt everything so deeply.

  “You are not a monster,” I said again, and this time, I meant it.

  “I am a monster!” He shouted it, as loud as I had been soft. “I was murdered by a madman and resurrected by his devil work. I was damned to be inhuman from the moment I was reborn.”

  “Geisler didn’t kill you,” I said. My hands were shaking, but my voice stayed steady. I knew what I was about to do, and I didn’t flinch from it.

  “He pushed me off the clock tower,” Oliver replied through clenched teeth. “You can say it for the rest of your life, Alasdair, but I will never believe it was an accident.”

  “It was an accident,” I said, “but it wasn’t Geisler who killed you.”

  Oliver looked up, as though he finally heard me. “You told me—”

  “I know what I told you,” I said. “I lied. I’ve been lying to you since I brought you back.” I felt lightheaded, dizzy with what I was about to say, and I had to plant my hands on either side of the railing to steady myself. My shoulder was burning. “Oliver, Geisler didn’t kill you. He wasn’t even there; he was halfway across the city trying to get out. I convinced you to take me to his laboratory. We came here because I wanted his journals. Oliver,” I said, and my heartbeat shook, “I killed you.”

  He took a step back, like I’d thumped him in the face. I had never known him to retreat from anything, and I had never known him to look at me the way he did now. He stared at me, like he’d never seen me before, and perhaps he never had until that moment.

  It might have been all wrong to tell him then. I thought of Mary in Château de Sang, blurting at exactly the wrong moment that she had written Frankenstein; of sitting by Lake Geneva with her and kissing her at exactly the wrong moment; of Oliver in the clock tower the night we’d found Geisler’s journals, shouting at me that I was mad and wicked at exactly the wrong moment. Perhaps we all said the right things at the wrong time; perhaps we couldn’t help it. Perhaps words became too heavy to haul, and the moment we let them loose was always the wrong one, but they needed to be free. And I had carried this like a lead weight around my neck for years, feeling it get heavier and heavier every time I saw him, and suddenly I had dropped it down into the chasm of the clock tower. No matter what happened next, no matter if the timing was all wrong, no matter if everything was wrong, Oliver knew, and that was right.

  I don’t know what I expected him to do. It wouldn’t have seemed strange for him to pick me up and hurl me over the side of the bridge right then.

  I didn’t expect him to run, but he spun on his heel and bolted back the way he’d come, up the ladder and out of sight. I started to chase after him, but I felt Raif’s pistol in my belly. The barrel shuddered as the bullet clicked into its chamber.

  I didn’t move, didn’t back away or try to fight him. It seemed sort of fitting if he killed me after that confession. A life for a life.

  But then, from behind me, Clémence shrieked, “Look out!”

  A shadow moved over Raif’s shoulder, then something smashed into the side of his head. Blood slapped me across the face as Raif pitched sideways over the bridge and fell, his body striking the beams below with a hollow clang.

  Clock Breakers were swarming onto the bridge, each stiff-legged step rattling its length. I stumbled backward as the lead Clock Breaker took a swipe at me and tripped over Clémence. She seized me by the collar before I fell and dragged me after her, back toward the ladder we’d come from. Two of the Clock Breakers had made quick work of the others who’d been with Raif. One had ripped the woman’s clockwork arm out with such force that her shoulder had come out of its socket and was spraying blood as she screamed. The second man was on the ground, twitching with a Clock Breaker’s foot on his throat. And there were more, coming now from both ends of the bridge and trapping us in the center.

  “Do you have pulse gloves?” I shouted to Clémence.

  “Ottinger’s got my only pair,” she replied. “Anyways, I don’t think they’d be enough.” Between us, her hand snatched at mine, and I clung to it. I could feel her heartbeat galloping i
n her wrist.

  “Do we surrender?” I asked her, though I wasn’t sure the Clock Breakers knew the meaning of the word.

  “Not yet,” she replied.

  There was a groan above us and we both looked up. The balance wheel was shifting, teeth slipping another step on the track as its airbreaks began to spin. The clock was striking the quarter hour, I realized, and a moment later the gong boomed in confirmation, the noise so low and loud that I felt it shudder straight through me. A weight began to drop from between the gears, and I wasn’t sure if it would hit us or just miss. Perhaps that would be a better way to go than being left to the mercy of the Clock Breakers.

  Suddenly Clémence grabbed me by the shoulders. “Jump over to the glockenspiel platform.”

  I looked over at the wheel and all the empty space between it and the bridge. “I won’t make it.”

  “Don’t think about it, just jump.”

  Before I knew what I was doing, she shoved me toward the rail and I hoisted myself onto it. The weight was dropping toward us and a Clock Breaker was near enough that I felt the skeletal tips of its fingers against my neck as Clémence yelled, “Jump!” And I jumped.

  I landed half on the platform, my stomach and the bottom of my rib cage smashing into the edge and knocking all the wind out of me. My fingers found a hold in the track the figures ran on, and I managed to heave myself up and roll onto my side, trying to get out of the way for Clémence to follow, but she didn’t.

  She was balanced on the rail, her knees bent to spring, but when she jumped, she jumped straight upward toward the dropping weight and caught it, arms wrapped around it like an embrace. The momentum of her body carried it sideways so that instead of passing by the bridge, it crashed directly into it. Metal slammed against metal and the electric current rushing through the entire clock tower funneled through the weight and into the bridge like a magnified shock from a set of pulse gloves.

  The flash was so bright and strong I threw my hands up over my face. All the Clock Breakers were flung backward as the electric pulse hit them—some off the bridge, some down the ladder, some just blasted off their feet and crumpled like broken toys, their circuits overwhelmed by the current.