The smile evaporated as he thought of holding a knitting needle in his left hand. His right hand joined his left and grasped an imaginary knitting needle.
He closed his right eye. The left one stared up at his hands, poised on the cusp of conducting some mysterious spell.
Ikey dropped his right hand down beside himself on the bunk. The left one remained in the air. He took a deep breath and worked through the series of motions needed to return it to the wooden bunk.
A whistle shook the room. A few minutes later, men filed in. They walked up to bunks and stripped out of uniforms stained with dark smudges and spots of sweat. Waves of aromas floated past full of sweat and unwashed bodies, but threaded through them were the scents of coal smoke and leather and an acrid odor Ikey couldn’t name.
The men who piled into the room were haggard. Most of them stood with a stoop, their shoulders rolled forward. Their faces were joyless beneath streaks and smudges of grime. Picking Cross’s height out would have been easy, had he been among them.
Instead, Ikey recognized David as the man stepped up to the bunk.
“Nice haircut. Enjoy your first day?” he asked with a half-grin.
Ikey shook his head.
“They put you in the kitchen?”
Ikey nodded.
“Filch any food?”
Ikey shook his head again.
David shook his own head as he watched his iron fingers fiddle with the buttons of his shirt. “You should have. Could have got yourself something nice. Maybe even fatten yourself up a bit.”
“Next time,” Ikey said.
“Won’t be a next time. They’ll figure someone has already approached you about stealing food. You can’t be trusted, you know.”
David peeled his shirt away. His face crumpled into a grimace as he arched his back and slid the sleeves down his arms. The man’s chest was hairless and pale, his ribs pushing at his skin over his concave belly.
Ikey glanced around and saw more of the same.
“They don’t feed you in here?”
“They don’t feed us in here.”
Ikey looked around again in disbelief.
A man pulled his leg behind him in a limp as he approached the bunk. He reached up and started to fiddle with the top button of his shirt.
David turned and faced the man, shook his head, and pointed down the row.
The man stopped. His chest heaved a couple times in exhaustion. When David didn’t flinch or move, the man’s chin sank. He moved on.
“What was that about?” Ikey asked.
“He wanted the bunk,” David said as he watched the man go.
“He can have mine.”
“He won’t climb up. And he won’t bunk with me.” David sat down on the bottom bunk, then yanked at the boots on his feet.
“You,” David said with a nod to Philip, who watched from the next bunk over. “This is your first day here, too, right?”
Philip nodded.
“Then you must be acquainted with Ikey already. You best get over here and bunk with Ikey before someone else decides he wants your bunk.”
Philip remained still.
David shook his head. “Suit yourself.”
As Ikey continued to watch for Cross, he noticed that most of the bunks were full, yet men continued to stream into the room. They were starting to pair up, two men apiece in a single bunk. Ikey glanced at Philip, who was watching the same. He then lowered himself to the floor, stepped around David, and then climbed up to the second berth with Ikey.
Ikey hung his head over the edge of the bunk. “Is this normal? Men doubling up?”
“For summer,” David said. “Things tend to get crowded in the winter.”
David dropped his uniform into a basket as another man approached. He regarded Ikey and Philip through deep-set eyes until David introduced them.
“This is my friend Gavril,” David said and clapped the man on the shoulder. “He’s a good man to have in your corner, so don’t piss him off. And whatever you do, don’t make fun of his accent. Gavril, meet Marlhewn’s newest, Ikey and Philip.”
Gavril nodded, but said nothing as he undid the buttons of his shirt. Underneath, resting against the flat of his breastbone, a crucifix hung from a length of twine around his neck. The crucifix was fashioned from a length of copper wire, twisted and doubled back on itself several times.
Ikey looked from Gavril to David and back. “Have either of you seen a really tall man who is new here? Blond hair. He wears his shirt sleeves rolled, and he has a tattoo of tentacles wrapped around an anchor on his forearm.”
Gavril arched an eyebrow at David.
“Well?” David asked. “You were here, were you not?”
Gavril shook his head.
“You heard it from his own mouth, gentlemen,” David said.
“I’m looking for such a man,” Ikey said. “His name is Cross. He’s my friend. Please let me know if you see him.”
“Someone matching that description will come through here sooner or later,” David said as he lay down and scooted to the edge of the bunk, shaking the structure as he did so.
“His name is Cross,” Ikey repeated. “Please.”
Gavril nodded, then sat on the edge of the bed. As he began to yank at his boots, a rumbling began in his chest that grew in pitches and waves until the man shook several times. Finally, he let loose with a cough. He shoved his fist up to his open mouth. He coughed and hacked and wheezed. As Ikey peered over the edge of the bunk, David slid a hand out from behind his head and reached out to touch Gavril on the back, to lay the tips of his fingers across the hills of Gavril’s ribs and the knobs of his spine. His eyes flicked from the back of Gavril’s head to the tips of his tin-plated fingers, identical to Ikey’s own hand. David’s jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. A flush of color passed over his face like a shadow before his eyes jumped to Ikey, who stared down from the edge of the bunk with the glass eye he could not close.
David replaced his hand beneath his head as he returned Ikey’s stare. His face smoothed into an expressionless mask as Gavril kept hacking until he spat a bloody wad of something onto the floor.
While still wearing his trousers, Gavril took a few deep, ragged breaths, and fell sideways onto the bunk, his eyes closed, chest rattling. A wheezing sound purred from his lips.
David continued to stare. His mask hardened into a challenge.
Ikey rolled over and lay down beside Philip, who trembled next to him, his chest hitching and hiccuping with his efforts not to cry.
A man in a proper shirt and waistcoat entered the room. He rang the hand bell he carried. The man at the desk extinguished his lantern and darkness fell upon the bunk hall.
Muffled sounds of sobbing emerged from the dark, one by one like stars. Ikey stared at the rafters above him, lit by what scraps of light squeezed through the windows. His inability to spot Cross in the crowd pressed a deep sigh from him. His right arm throbbed. His hand ached. His knuckles burned. Soreness nestled into the left side of his chest.
He’d have to stay at Marlhewn a bit longer. He’d find a way out before Cross showed up. But what if Cross never showed up? What if Cross had been sent off to the Continent? Or had been killed? Or escaped? Ikey shook his head. He hadn’t escaped. He wouldn’t have run away and left Ikey behind. He wouldn’t have.
Ikey rolled onto his side. A week. He’d give Cross at least a week. Then he’d escape, slip away and find out what happened to his friend.
Ikey sighed again and waited for sleep. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of something flitting through the rafters. Ikey turned his head, but saw only shadows. He gritted his teeth. He lifted his mechanical arm. The clicking and grinding of it sounded enormous as he positioned his tin-plated hand over his glass eye to block out the sight of the ceiling above. He sighed again and closed his right eye.
But he was still staring at his hand in the dark.
The irony sat hot and sour in his mouth. A week ago, he would
have given anything to see again. Now, he wanted to be able to shut his eyes, to black out the world, to slip into darkness and dream and leave the shell of his body behind. His stupid eye anchored him to this wretched world.
Ikey’s breath hitched, and he blew it away, past pursed lips. He sat up and lowered his mechanical arm. All around, shadows of bunks marched off into the dark. A few men sat up as well, gray light trickling over their pale chests. A couple wafts of song passed Ikey’s ears.
He looked down at his arm, the mechanical one. He glanced over to the door. He grabbed the thin, wool blanket that he and Philip shared. Without difficulty, he tore a strip from it. The ripping fibers echoed through the room. Someone answered by making farting sounds with a cupped hand and his armpit.
With a good bit of difficulty, Ikey tied the strip of fabric around his head to serve as a blindfold. When he lay back down, Philip turned over in the bunk. His breath washed over Ikey’s bare shoulder. Ikey thought of Ellie, his sister, and how as young children, when the fights between his parents grew loud enough to wake them from slumber, Ellie had curled up next to him. The other boys were not willing to tolerate her fear and closeness. So Ellie’s breath washed against him and smelled sweet in the way that good things made the world worth suffering.
Philip’s breath, however, smelled vaguely metallic, like blood. Sour.
“Do you have a dad?” Philip whispered so quietly, that for a moment, Ikey wasn’t sure if he had heard the question, or simply thought it.
Ikey took a deep breath. “Why do you ask?”
“My dad used to tuck me in every night. Even when I got too old, he’d still come into our room and tuck in my brothers and sisters, and he’d pause at the foot of my bed. I could see he wanted to tuck me in, too. But he didn’t. And I didn’t want to seem like a babe, so I played like I didn’t want him to tuck me in, but it was enough to know that he wanted to, and that he was there to do it. I miss that. I miss that more than I thought I could miss anything.”
Ikey rubbed the palm of his hand against the edge of the bed. “Why are you telling me?”
No answer came. As Ikey began to suspect that Philip had drifted off to sleep, the boy whispered, “Because I fear that I won’t be here long. And it feels like I should say so now. Because if I don’t, I’ll never have the chance again.”
“You’ll be fine,” Ikey said. “Six months.”
“I’ve heard stories,” Philip said. “Terrible stories. The things they do to you here.”
“They’re just stories.”
Philip shifted forward. The tip of his nose hovered close to Ikey’s ear.
“Look at these men. The stories are true. They’re real.”
“Go to sleep.”
After a moment more, Philip asked, “Does it hurt? The arm?”
“Go to sleep,” Ikey repeated.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.” Then as he realized that it hurt less than the phantom pains, Ikey said so.
“How did you lose your arm? Which machine?”
“I lost it in a fire.”
“Oh. The scars, then.”
“Yes. Same fire.”
“How did you do it?”
Ikey rolled over, his back to Philip. He felt stupid, however, and rolled back over. “How did I do what?”
“I’m scared to death of losing something. My hand. My arm. A leg. How do you do it? I mean, if I even think…” Philip curled up tighter.
“You don’t think. It just happens. And you… I don’t remember. I don’t remember it. I woke up in the hospital without an arm, and my head wrapped in bandages so I couldn’t see.”
As the words left Ikey’s lips and dribbled into the pool of space between the two, Ikey thought of Admiral Daughton dancing, his arms flailing, the flames writhing. Boom.
“That makes it worse,” Philip said. “If I could know for sure that when the moment came, I could look down at my bloody stump and say to myself, Oh, so this is the moment. And now I’ve lost my hand. And there’s the blood and the bone that I always imagined I’d see. And here is the pain. And here are the people running over to help me. And I’m going to lie down now and they are going to cart me off to The Old Chopper where he will give me a new hand and everything will be right as rain. If I knew it could be like that, that I knew what to expect, it would be bearable. But you don’t know how much worse you make it when you say you don’t know how it is. That you don’t remember. I swear you’re lying to me. Are you lying to me?”
“I’m not lying to you,” Ikey said.
“How could you not remember that?”
“Go to sleep.”
“How can I sleep?”
“Close your eyes.”
“I see the worst things when my eyes are closed,” Philip said.
“Think of something else.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. What did your mum look like?”
A coughing fit roared to life several bunks down, then subsided into the embers of soft groans and pants before fading away.
“I don’t want to be like you,” Philip said. “I shouldn’t be that way, but I am. And that’s what scares me. I can’t put it right with words, you know. I mean, the way you and the others act. I see you flexing that arm, making fists. And it is the look you get on your face when you do it. You look like… I don’t know. But it’s scary to behold. You want to hurt someone, don’t you? You want to drive that fist through a person’s face to see it split like a rotten apple, don’t you?”
“No,” Ikey said.
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
Philip turned away and pulled the blanket after him. Ikey gave it a yank. Philip turned onto his back. “So what is that look?”
“I was brought here against my will. I was kidnapped, given this arm and this eye without permission, and sent here to work it off. I shouldn’t be here.”
Philip stared at Ikey in the dark. His breath pooled between them like the deep, still part of a creek. “I don’t understand.”
Ikey explained how he became entangled with The Old Chopper.
Philip nodded. “I’ve heard of that. I was told to watch out for that. They need so much help to keep the factories going with so many of the men off on the Continent.”
“They have no right to do this to me and my friend.”
Philip turned his face back to the ceiling. “It seems that they do.”
“How did you end up here?” Ikey asked.
“My dad died. He was a clerk. Got run down in the street by a steam carriage. Then my mom died a few months later.” After a few seconds, he added, “There wasn’t any money left after we buried my dad. And none of my kin would pay for Mom’s burial. They said they couldn’t afford it. So I… The undertaker told me I could work off the expense, you know. And I told him I would. I had to bury my mom.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I think I’d rather have gone off to the Continent. I think I’d rather be shot and gassed than lose an arm to the machines.”
Ikey told him of Smith and the arm he lost on Talana Hill.
Philip rubbed his nose. “My dad said that man is too wicked to keep going on in God’s image. And that’s what’s happening with augmentations. Man is falling farther and farther from God and grace. Adam was made of earth. Underneath the earth is the realm of stone and iron. We’re falling from grace.”
After a few seconds, Ikey stated that grace didn’t help him button his trousers after a piss.
“Whose fault was it that you lost your arm?”
“Mine,” Ikey said.
Philip turned over and said no more.
Chapter Ten
A clanging bell woke Ikey.
He sat up and tore the blindfold from his face. A man paraded down the aisle. He wagged a bell with such vigor that it appeared as if the bell handle were painfully stuck, and he was attempting to shake his hand free.
Inmates poured out onto the floor and yank
ed baskets from beneath their bunks. Ikey lowered himself to the floor and pulled his own basket out.
As David pulled his trousers up and cinched the belt at his waist, he warned Philip and Ikey to stick close to him and Gavril. They wouldn’t allow uprights to work two days in a row in the kitchen. They’d be spending the day on the floor with them.
“Doing what?” Ikey asked.
“Surviving,” David said, then turned away to pick up his shirt.
Once dressed, Ikey and Philip followed David and Gavril and the other inmates to the galley. They queued and David warned them in a whisper that talking wasn’t permitted in the galley. After they each collected a bowl of thin gruel, they took their breakfasts to long tables with benches on one side so that everyone stared at the backs of the heads of the men at the next table.
After they sat, David leaned over and warned Ikey and Philip to pick out the black bits and not eat them.
When Ikey whispered back and asked what they were, David bowed his head over his bowl and stirred the thin liquid. What appeared to be mice droppings surfaced. He then used his spoon to scoop them up. He wiped them off with his fingers, then wiped his fingers on the leg of his trousers.
Beyond David, Gavril fished the crucifix out from under his shirt and held it clutched in his hand as he bowed his head over his bowl. Up and down the length of the table, half of the inmates did as David did. The other half ate quickly and quietly, inclined over the bowls as they spooned the watery gruel into their mouths and swallowed.
Ikey swirled his spoon through his bowl, then put the spoon aside. He pushed his bowl over to David.
David arched his eyebrows. “Don’t be daft, man. You’ll soon regret it.”
“Not hungry,” Ikey said.
“Suit yourself,” David said with a shrug. “Thanks.”
David picked up Ikey’s bowl. He poured some of the contents into his own, then handed the rest to Gavril. The quiet man took the bowl in both hands, leaned forward, gave a half bow at the neck to Ikey, then poured its contents into his own bowl.
Ikey surveyed those in the room. Almost everyone sported an augmentation. One man, at the table behind him, spooned up his gruel and tipped it back over the lip of a brass jaw. He then tilted his head up to the ceiling until his Adam’s apple bobbed. As he looked back down, his eyes caught on Ikey’s. He glared a second, then turned his attention back to the gruel and shook his head.
Tin Fingers: Book 2 in the Arachnodactyl Series Page 11