This Monstrous Thing(12)

But any of that—even moving twelve miles up the road to France—was hopeless so long as Oliver was locked up in the foothills. There’d be nowhere to hide him in a town as small as Ornex, and there was no chance of letting him out on his own. The rest of my life seemed firmly shackled to Geneva and my resurrected brother, too wild and rough for the world.

With the strict regulations on clockwork men and the Shadow Boys who made them, Geneva had always felt like a prison, even before Oliver kept me here. Geisler had encouraged my father to claim home in places where clockworks most needed allies—there was always more work for us there. We’d skipped from Edinburgh to Bergen when I was a child, then to Bruges, Utrecht, and Amsterdam in such quick procession that they started to blend together. All the timbered houses and canals, and the running and the fear and the never having enough to eat. It was hard to separate them anymore—everything was just seasons and years and the ages Oliver and I had been when we’d arrived and fled.

But it was always Oliver and me, together, everywhere we went. I did remember that.

I had better memories of Paris, where Father had started pressing Oliver harder and harder to start studying mechanics, and Oliver had pushed back with just as much strength. He horrified our parents by falling in with a group of boxers and coming home past dawn with his knuckles bleeding. Started smoking like a chimney. Never once showed up to the job Father had gotten him fixing clocks.

Then he’d taken up with a dancer and told her about our work. She’d threatened to turn us in to the police unless we paid her off. Father had been ready to throttle Oliver, but our only choices seemed to be complying and hoping she died soon of consumption, or fleeing. At the same time, Geisler had been commissioned to do repairs on Geneva’s new clock tower and he suggested we join him. He’d had his eye on Oliver for years, and when he offered an apprenticeship, Father had snatched it up in yet another hopeless attempt to mold Oliver into the Shadow Boy and older son that he so badly wanted.

And so we had left Paris for Geneva, and spent an uneventful year with Oliver and Father on the cusp of murdering each other, Oliver moaning to me about working with Geisler, and me pretending I wasn’t sick with envy over it.

Then Geisler had been arrested, and Mary Godwin had arrived, and Oliver had died, and a piece of me had died with him, and unlike Oliver, it never came back.

The bell above the shop door jingled and Father entered. I slid off the counter, because he hated it when I sat up there—mostly, I knew, because Oliver used to. With his arms crossed, he gave the packing I had done a critical inspection. “Don’t stack them too deep or the paint will chip,” he said. Then he slid his spectacles down onto his nose and took his place on the other side of the counter, and I stood across from him, crammed in a shop, in a city, in a life that was far too small.




Father was up earlier than usual the next morning, mucking about in the kitchen and clattering the teakettle to rouse me. I’d been awake for a while but I stayed curled on my pallet with my head all the way under my quilt, delaying actually getting up as long as possible. Sunlight was worming its way through the stitching, but when I pressed my hand against the bare floorboards the cold snapped at me, and I retreated. Too cold to be anywhere but under blankets, and I was about to spend all day standing outside.

By the time I dressed and dragged myself into the kitchen, the tea was lukewarm, but Father was putting his coat on and I knew I didn’t have time to heat it. I choked down a cup as Mum, still in her dressing gown, watched from the table, with her hands wrapped around a mug. “Will you come down to the market?” I asked her as I laced my boots.

She shook her head. “It’s always so crowded the first day. Next week, maybe.” She smiled at me as she took a sip of tea. “Take a walk around for me and see if you can find the best-priced marzipan.”

“There won’t be any walking around, we’ll be working,” Father snapped from the doorway. He flipped his pocket watch open and frowned. “You’ve made us late, Alasdair.”

I swooped in to kiss Mum on the cheek.

“Stay warm,” she said.

“Not likely,” I replied, and followed Father out of the flat.

We retrieved the crates from the shop and started up the road toward the Christmas market. With sunrise still blooming along the rooftops, Vieille Ville was closed and quiet, but as we approached Place de l’Horloge, the city began to wake around us. Clockwork carriages chugged past, expelling clouds of steam that sparkled in the sunlight, and merchants unlocking their doors shouted to each other across the walks. Some of the shops already had their Christmas decorations up, evergreen branches and strung cranberries draped between the icicles clinging to the window boxes. Bakeries were advertising Yule log cakes, and the metal mannequins in the dressmaker’s window were wearing exaggerated hats studded with mistletoe and candles. The air smelled like pine and steam.

Place de l’Horloge had been lined with market stalls built to look like miniature chalets, each with a dusting of snow on its beams, and holly garlands threaded the walkways between them. There were already vendors setting up shop, laying out everything from meats and cheeses to fine glasswork to children’s puzzles and marionettes. A giant mechanical Christmas pyramide had been erected near the center, the tiered wooden platforms lined with clockwork Nativity figures that rotated slowly. It was as tall as the buildings lining the square, but it looked small in the shadow of the clock tower. The whole market looked smaller beneath it—all the Christmas nonsense was usually held in Place de la Fusterie, nearer to the lakeshore and the financial district, but it had been moved this year in honor of the renovated tower and the clock scheduled to strike on Christmas Eve.