This Monstrous Thing
Mackenzi Lee
My brother’s heart was heavy in my hands.
The screws along the soldered edges flashed as the candlelight flickered, and I checked one last time to be certain the mainspring was fastened tight. It was smaller than I had imagined a heart would be, all those cogs locked together into a knot barely the size of my fist, but when I laid it in its place between the exposed gears in Oliver’s open chest, it fit precisely, the final piece of the puzzle of teeth and bolts I had been laboring over all night.
He wasn’t broken anymore. But he was still dead.
I slid forward onto my knees and let go a breath so deep it made my lungs ache. Below me, the inner workings of the clock tower hung still and silent. The gears had been unmoving for years, though tonight the pendulums swayed in the wind funneling from the jagged hole in the clock face. When I looked through it, I could follow the path the Rhone River cut across Geneva, past the city walls, and all the way to the lake, where the starlight was fading into milky dawn along the horizon.
When we dug up Oliver’s body, it had seemed fitting to bring him here, Dr. Geisler’s secret workshop in the clock tower where the resurrection work had begun, but now the whole thing felt stupid. And dangerous. I kept waiting for the police to swarm in—they’d kept a close watch on this place since Geisler’s arrest—or for someone to discover us, to walk in and spoil it all. I kept waiting for Oliver to sit up and open his eyes like nothing had happened. As though by simply being in this place I could reach out and pull his soul back from where it had landed when he’d crashed through the clock face and plunged.
“Alasdair.”
I looked up. Mary was kneeling on the other side of Oliver’s body, her face still spattered with cemetery dirt. We were a sight, the pair of us, Mary with her muddy dress and wild hair, me with the knees torn out of my trousers, braces unfastened, and my shirt smeared with blood. We looked mad, Mary and I, exactly the sort of people who would be digging up corpses and resurrecting them in a clock tower. I felt a bit mad in that moment.
Mary held out the pulse gloves and I took them, our fingers brushing for a heartbeat. She already had the plates charged, and when I pulled the laces tight around my wrists, I could feel their current thrumming inside me, soft and static like a second heartbeat that started in my hands.
“Alasdair.” She said my name again, so softly it sounded like a prayer. “Are you going to do it?”
I took a breath and closed my eyes.
When I remembered my brother, it would always be with his face bright and his gaze sharp. I would remember the days of being wild-haired boys together, of running in his shadow, of the hundred different ways he’d taught me to be brave and loyal and kind. Of falling asleep on his shoulder, and holding on to his sleeve in every strange new city. Of hunting with him in Lapland, skating the canals together in Amsterdam, watching him sneak away to visit the forbidden corners of Paris, and the nights he let me come along.
It would not be watching him take his last breath two nights before, already more corpse than man as he lay collapsed and bleeding in the velvet darkness on the banks of the Rhone.
I wouldn’t remember the night my brother died.
Instead, I would remember tonight, and what was about to happen, the moment hurtling toward me like a runaway carriage, when Oliver would open his eyes and look up at me. Alive, alive, alive again.
I knelt beside him and pressed my palms to either side of his shaved head, my fingers running along the track of stitches there. The metal plates beneath his skin were cold and tight. I closed my eyes as the shock of electricity leapt from my gloves, let it sing backward into my hands and all the way through me, and forward into Oliver, into his clockwork heart and his clockwork lungs and every piece of the clockwork that would bring him back.
There was a pulse, a flash, and the gears began to turn.
TWO YEARS LATER
The clockwork arm jumped on the workbench as the pulse from my gloves hit it.
I stepped backward to Father’s side, both of us watching the gears ease to life and intertwine. The ball joint in the wrist twitched, and Father’s eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. His fingers tapped out a quick rhythm on the top of the workbench that set my teeth on edge.
Finally, eyes still on the arm, he said, “You used the half-inch stock for the center wheel.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.
“I told you to use the quarter.”
I thought about showing him the four quarter-inch gears I’d snapped the teeth off of trying to follow his directions before I had gone with my gut and used the half-inch, but instead I simply said, “It didn’t work.”
“Half-inch is too wide. If it slides off the track—”
“It won’t.”
“If it slides off the track—” he repeated, louder this time, but I interrupted again.
“The ratio wheel’s running fine on half. The problem is that the ratchet’s catching on the—”
“If you don’t do the work the way I ask, Alasdair, you can stand out front and mind the counter instead.”
I shut my mouth and started putting my spanners back in their sling.
Father crossed his arms and glared at me over the workbench. He was tall and thin, with a boy’s frame that he’d passed on to me. I kept hoping I’d bulk up a bit, grow lean and toned like Oliver had been, but so far I was just skinny. Father looked dead harmless, with his tiny spectacles and receding hairline. Not the sort of man you’d expect to be illegally forging clockwork pieces to human flesh in the back of his toy shop. Some of the other Shadow Boys we’d met looked the part, with scars and tattoos and that sort of shady, underground air about them, but not Father. He looked, more than anything, like a toy maker. “Morand’s coming for this tomorrow before he leaves Geneva,” he said, tapping one finger against the clockwork arm. The pulse had been so small that the gears were already starting to slow. “There isn’t time for trouble with it.”