by Giselle Ava
“He’s probably dead,” I say after I finish nodding.
“He’s the smartest man in London, maybe in the world.”
“When it comes to machines, maybe,” is what I say.
“Not just machines.” Her blue eye twinkles like sunlight when it reflects off the ocean. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the ocean. Or anything beautiful, really.
“Why did you take me in here?” I ask.
Cecelia shrugs. She looks my age but she might be older or she might be younger—it’s difficult to tell. I have realised that not many people look like she does so it’s hard to tell. With her face this close to mine and with how the lamp casts yellow light across her, I have noticed slight dimples in her cheeks which deepen when she softly smiles.
This is what she says to me: “That’s my thing.”
What the hell does that mean, I don’t say.
I drink the rest of my tea while staring at her, and then hand her the cup as I stand. Pain receptors go ouch and my left knee makes a creaking sound that knees shouldn’t make. My hand goes to the spot on my abdomen where the bullet went in. She’s strapped me up, though my grey shirt is still heavy with blood and fingernail-bits of copper.
Standing on top of the television set is a black and white photograph of two people who look like they’re in love. I determine that the girl is Cecelia Craxton and the man is her secret lover. I also see London as it was before this all happened: bright, happy, peaceful. And then the photograph goes black under the shadow of a mechanical giant.
The only thing I know about love is that it hurts.
Do you remember her? says the whine. It returns with such bite I slap the back of my head as though it had been clipped by a mosquito.
Oh sod off, I say to the whine.
I don’t remember her. She’s distant.
I turn back to Cecelia Craxton, who has taken a step out of the shadows and stands now underneath a lamp hanging from the ceiling fan. White ash sprinkles through her hair like grated cheese on pasta. I realise I am very hungry. I am Human. When you don’t eat because you’re busy tearing down the regime of Charles Fortescue, you begin to starve. I wonder, for a moment, how long it’s been since my last meal and I conclude: a long time.
“How long have I been down here?”
“Two days,” Cecelia says.
I take in that information like you take in a cold shower in winter. If Frederick was captured, he’s dead. If the borders are open, and he wasn’t captured, he’s fled. It’s enough time for Fortescue’s mob to have established patrols around the city. I can imagine Fortescue Plaza, where Charles hides in his glass tower, is locked down completely. They know who they’ve killed and they know who’s still missing, and they know that I’m not accounted for.
A man who’s missing his left arm.
A mechanical, the whine says into both ears at once.
What do I do now? How do I know I can trust Cecelia?
If just one person recognises you, that’s the end of little Arthur.
No, I had nothing to do with this happening. Charles Fortescue in his glass house owes me no favour for destroying the revolution. But, and I admit this with pain, the annoying whine may be starting to speak some sense. I do need to be careful.
You’re still a mechanical, says the whine.
And I look a god-awful mess at the moment.
I suppose you could go back to the Gresham Club anyway.
I’m starting to think that’s my only option.
Of course, they probably all know what you did.
“Son of a bitch!”
I turn my head abashedly to see Cecelia Craxton staring at me with a look of bewilderment. I offer a smile, not that smiling is very easy when your jaw has been imploded.
What the hell is happening to me?
What happened to the revolution?
Why isn’t Charles Fortescue dead?
“Are you okay?” Cecelia says.
My response is instant: “Hm.”
All of a sudden she’s standing by my side and her hand is on my shoulder. I raise my only hand to my face and notice my fingers are trembling.
“It’s dangerous for you,” she tells me.
I’m staring at her and I’m wondering if she knows who I am. I’m wondering if she knows what I did, that I’m the one who destroyed Mildred Piper’s revolution. Why is my hand shaking so much? I look to the empty space behind Cecelia’s golden hair and watch ash float from the ceiling, from the fires we started throughout London. The city is burning.
My immediate next thought is I have to find Frederick Hardy.
“I need a coat and a hat,” is what I say to her.
The concern does not leave her face as she crosses the room and tears a coat from a briefcase, throwing it into my hand. I take it from her and relax it about myself. The coat has a number of silver pins on it, things that are unrecognisable and meaningless to me. I then pluck a black top hat from a mannequin and slap it firmly down on my head.
“People are being executed in the streets,” Cecelia says.
My hand finds the door and pushes it open.
Cecelia Craxton lives in a hovel underneath a dress store at an intersection. In the intersection is nothing of note besides a water fountain and a park bench beside it, covered in ash. There are more buildings and more people but nobody who looks like a threat. Despite this, I pull down the brim of my top hat, shading my face. I’m not taking chances.
When I look up, the red sun is gone but the haze remains. Street lamps illuminate the city of London. Street lamps and the black glow from lingering fires and the white motes of ash, twinkling effervescently as though a million tiny stars are falling.
I haven’t heard London be this silent in a long time.
“Take this,” Cecelia says.
I turn around and see her standing there before me, a full head shorter. Her hair stirs softly in the warm breeze. Her arm is outstretched and a small white ticket flaps between her fingertips. There’s black text printed on this ticket. She doesn’t look up to meet my eyes. I spot her foot tapping against the gravel. The ticket bends and contorts.
My fingers clasp the ticket and slide it from her hand.
“You can leave London,” she says.
Wouldn’t you look at that, says the whine.
Cecelia turns and retreats back inside her hovel under the dress store. I stare at the door as it swings shut, ash trickling from the hinge. The ticket is cold between my fingertips. I pull it to my eyes and read what it says. Train. Tonight. It’s going somewhere that is not London and that’s all that matters. I could escape this. Nobody will ever know.
No. They’ll know.
I slide the ticket into my pants pocket and ensure the bandages are properly fastened around my face. They did this to themselves. They forced us to become their weapons, to fight a war that we had no part in, and then they turned us into rusted antiques.
If you knew what we could do...
Arthur, you’re confusing them. Leaving out the most important piece of information. Why did they make you their weapons? Why have you become metal encased in human skin?
They would hate us.
And you’re afraid of that?
I bite my tongue. I don’t have to talk to that thing—whatever that thing is, wherever it came from. Ignore what it says. That annoying whine knows nothing about me.
I need to find Frederick Hardy.
The Gresham Club
The war was never this bad. The air is so thick you can barely breathe. The stillness, this is familiar, but it’s worse because it means we failed. Occasionally, you hear a scream split through the silent streets, and you know it could be you or someone you know.
I climb the stone steps to the front door of the Gresham Club and open it. There’s more of a crowd than usual. Footfalls rap against the wooden floorboards, which creak and groan. Beer is poured into a glass and then dirty fingers embrace it. The man drinks while staring at me.
I let the door fall shut and then make sure it grabs the latch.
The Gresham Club is warm lighting and red timber walls. It’s men at tables drinking beer and playing cards. It’s a piano in the corner and a skinny man playing jazz. It’s a fella with a cigar watching the man play piano, and slowly tapping his foot to the beat.
That man with the beer knows what I did. He’s watching me as I step into the club and briefly make eye-contact with the barkeep, a short black man with big eyes and an apron. He darts his big eyes back down to the counter and pretends to be cleaning.
Frederick Hardy isn’t here.
He’ll be upstairs.
I lower my eyes and cross to the staircase leading to the second floor. The steps complain underneath my weight. A large black dog lies on the landing at the top, to the side of the door. It looks at me without moving any part of its body, making a resigned whine.
My hand emerges from the end of my coat and takes the fingerprinted door handle, twisting it. I step forward into the second club room and immediately hesitate. The room is half the size of the one below, but doorways lead to other areas. There are no windows, just wooden walls adorned with trophies, medallions and various other memorabilia. The light bulbs flicker on and off but there’s always at least two of them on at the same time. Drinks sit on wooden tables and a radio is broadcasting straight from Fortescue Plaza.
The door closes with a clap but nobody looks.
Something’s going on.
“You left them there to die!” says a man in a brown coat. There are four guys standing. There are others around the room, playing cards, drinking, ignoring the commotion.
“We all had to make sacrifices,” Frederick Hardy responds as he steps away from the big man and meets my eye across the room. Frederick Hardy is in one piece but there’s a sparkle of sweat all across his forehead. His caramel skin is unbroken, but metal isn’t the only way to know that somebody’s a mechanical. You can tell when you look into their eyes. You see the same thing in all of them. Despair. Hopelessness. Fear.
We don’t belong in London anymore. At some point, we tricked ourselves into believing that we still did, and then they used us in their war and you know the rest.
“They weren’t pawns in a game of chess!” the loud man bellows. One of the other guys in the group flinches and retreats back to his table, leaving three of them.
Frederick wheels on the man and stiffens his back. Frederick is a tall man a few years my senior, his hair cut short and square, no beard, not even a moustache. He rarely smiles. He rarely makes any expression these days. We knew each other before the war, before we were made of metal. I catch myself. I’ve gone too far back in time.
Tell them, Arthur—
Focus on Frederick.
“I had no choice,” Frederick says.
“We always have a choice,” the man says.
“Then I chose to gamble.”
“You have their blood on your hands.”
“If you would like to retrieve their bodies, I promise you, they’ll still be there. Rotting. Gathering rust. What would you have liked me to do?”
The man grunts and shakes his head, walking away. His shoulder brushes me as he reaches the door, throwing it open and storming out. Frederick watches him until he is gone, and then his eyes land on me. The corner of his lip twitches. His fingers tremble. The others barely look into each other’s eyes. One man keeps muttering to himself, words so slurred they’re impossible to understand. Another man is habitually scratching his scalp, his hair all mismatched and frayed. Another just keeps drinking.
This is what they’ve done to us.
Frederick leads me to a table and sits down behind a half-finished meal of chicken parmigiana. I sit down opposite him. I look at the meal and my stomach gurgles. Frederick slides it across the table to me, a silver fork sticking out of the chicken like a scarecrow. He nods to it and refills our glasses from the beer pitcher.
“Arthur, your face is smashed,” Frederick notes.
I take the fork and tear apart the chicken. Red sauce oozes over the cheese, from the chicken to the mashed potato on the side of the plate. I hurl it into my mouth and bite down. It’s very cold, but suddenly everything seems a little bit better.
Frederick continues to watch me. “You okay?”
It’s difficult to swallow but I manage. “Hm,” I respond.
The room on the second floor of the Gresham Club has gone quiet except for the radio chatter and the guy who’s muttering. Glasses thump the tables softly. Knives and forks scrape against porcelain plates. There’s a man sitting a few tables across from me and Frederick, and he’s watching the door. It’s not the only exit. The Gresham Club has a fire escape in that other room there. As I gaze in that direction, one of the men playing cards takes a swig of beer and his opponent takes a drag of his cigarette, filling the room with smoke.
“Do you envision getting your arm reattached?” Frederick asks.
I shrug with my good shoulder. “It wasn’t my arm anyway.”
My arm was blown off in the war. Us mechanicals, we use metal to keep ourselves together, because our human parts started malfunctioning when they made us fight in their war. We became walking antiques not by choice but out of necessity. That arm was never mine. I was gifted it because, as I said, my human one was blown off by a bomb.
I learned how to live with one arm long before I got that fake one. I like only having one arm. It makes you one arm lighter. One less arm to get in the way. And, besides, you only need one arm to fire a gun. Hell, you only need a finger to pull a trigger.
“Where’s George?” I ask Frederick as I take a mouthful of chicken. Sauce trickles down my lip and I trade my fork for a napkin, cleaning myself up.
Frederick looks askance. I follow his eyes to the other side of the room, a spot unadorned by any meaningful decorations, just a fireplace that hasn’t caught aflame since the last winter. “George!” he yells. The wood in the fireplace stirs and suddenly a diaphanous man emerges. Somebody swears and a glass of beer knocks to the floorboards. This vaguely-blue apparition flies onto his feet and settles into the form of George.
“That’s Dead George now,” says Frederick.
“Christ,” I say, throwing back my seat and standing up. The man now known as Dead George brushes himself off and approaches me with his hands on his hips. He’s still wearing his revolution coat and a healthy combover, his pants tight and concerning. He smiles to reveal alarmingly-white teeth. Every part of him is transparent, like fog in a dark forest.
“No need to get up!” Dead George proclaims.
I continue to watch Dead George prance through the room as I take my seat and stick the fork back into the chicken. The ghost produces no shadow. His footsteps are silent, but the groaning floorboards betray any notion of stealth. He begins to sit, and as he does this, a chair flies out from a nearby table and catches him cleanly.
Dead George draws a satisfied breath.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Dead George says to me as he leans forward across the table. His hands fly about majestically. George is half-Italian and that’s what they do in Italy. “You’re thinking how on Earth is this dashing gentleman still alive—”
“Dashing?” I query.
“After all,” Dead George continues, “he was poisoned, shot in the stomach, twice!”—he taps his abdomen twice, slap-slap—“and then left for dead on the side of the road. The poor fella beside me was shot in the face. Now, if you ask me, I’m grateful they left me in the state I’m now in. I could’ve been mutilated, had my gorgeous features malformed! But alas, no. So though I am a ghost, my dear friend, the women thus far have not complained.”
I look from Dead George to Frederick, who drinks.
“Oh dear,” Dead George says. “Look at your face.”
“You couldn’t stay dead, could you,” I say.
“You should try it, honestly.” He grimaces as he reaches out to touch my face. His fingers against my ja
w feel like somebody grazing me with ice and I recoil. “You wouldn’t look so goddamn terrifying, I can tell you that for sure.”
My fork lifts a piece of chicken to my lips. “At least I can enjoy a meal once in a while,” is what I say, biting down on the chicken and idly rearranging the contents of my plate. I met George two years ago, after the war; there’d been an incident at the factory he was working in and he was deemed not fit to work there anymore. We played cards here every Tuesday night. Most other nights, we went down to the harbour and kept the ledgers up-to-date for a couple dollars per hour. I hated that job. I briefly recall the last time all three of us were seated around a table together and a sharp pain sparks in the back of my head.
Be careful, Arthur.
“So what now?” I say.
Frederick is watching me like he knows something.
“There’s a mole in the police ranks,” Frederick says, finishing his beer and sliding the glass across the table. “His name is Sniper. We believe him to be dead but he did leave us with the name of a secret project involving death camps in the heart of the city. Not only that, they’ll be rounding up all people of our kind, even when they’re young.”
People like you, says the whine.
“Shit,” I say.
“The project is being led by a man called Bernard Craxton. We believe, if we can capture this man, we may be able to bargain with the regime.”
Craxton. I know that name. I remember meeting Cecelia Craxton in the hovel underneath the dress shop. I feel the ticket she gave me, and I wonder if she knew about the secret project, or if she gave me that ticket so I’d leave the project alone.
I say nothing.
Frederick continues. “It’s no longer a reasonable option to act as a group. We need to keep our numbers scattered so it’s more difficult for them to wipe us all out. As long as there’s one of us remaining, the Piper Revolution prevails.”
“You sure it’s not a trap?” I say.
Frederick’s jaw tightens. “It could be.” He reaches underneath the table and withdraws a pistol, thumping it down on the tabletop, sliding it to my plate of parmigiana. “We don’t have the luxury of getting to choose our targets.”