This Monstrous Thing(41)

The glass lighting tube stopped at a spot on the wall where the darkness seemed somehow deeper. I took a few steps toward it before I realized it was a barred cell like a prison. Inside were two naked bodies, one lying facedown, the other on its side with its back to me. I reached through the bars with my spanner, hooked it around an arm, and tugged. Instead of the body rolling over like I had expected, the torso crumbled away from the legs and fell onto its back. The entire front of the chest was missing, rib cage nothing but bloody splintered stumps and the inside stripped clean. The corpse was empty.

I stumbled backward, tripped over myself, and sat down hard on the dirt floor. The thought of what might have occupied the floor before me sent me scrambling back to my feet so fast I knocked over my burner and snuffed it. I had to swallow hard several times to keep myself from being sick. I had seen bodies before, seen them gutted and stripped and reconstructed, seen metal fused with muscle and bone, even done it myself, but there was something about this, the brutality and obsession of it, that made me light-headed.

I needed to be out of here. There was no chance I’d forget what I’d seen, but I didn’t have to stare at it any longer. I groped along the wall for the knob that had ignited the glass tube and turned it the opposite direction. Like the Carcel burner, the flame sank and died with a chatter of gears, leaving me in total darkness. I stumbled forward until my shin smacked against the bottom rung of the ladder and I started to clamber up, one hand groping above for the trapdoor. My fingers brushed cold gears, and I started clawing at them, feeling for the lever and the mechanism that would get them moving again and set me free.

Then, above me, the workshop door opened.

I froze, listening hard. Footsteps crossed the floor, passed above me, and stopped, followed by a soft flump like the sound of a heavy cloth hitting the ground.

I eased myself down onto the top rung, trying to determine who was walking above me and what chance I would stand if I made a run for it. I would risk the automatons—I was certain I could outrun them back to the house. But if it wasn’t an automaton, it would be Geisler, and I couldn’t let him catch me sneaking out of his underground laboratory.

A loud, hollow thunk on the other side of the floorboards made me jump. Something heavy had been dropped. Slow footsteps followed and the distinct buzz of machinery. It had to be one of the automatons. If I snuck out the trapdoor and hit the floor running, I could make it out.

I gave a hard tug on the cogs beside me, then yanked my hand out of the way as they started to turn, lever churning like a piston. A sliver of pale darkness began to expand above me as the trapdoor opened. I waited, my body a loaded spring, until the gap was finally wide enough, then I hoisted myself up into the workshop and ran. As I reached the door, I tossed a quick glance over my shoulder to where I was certain the automaton was waiting.

But it wasn’t an automaton. It was Clémence.




Clémence was crumpled on the floor beside the empty fireplace, bare arms wrapped around herself, but I could see she was naked from the waist up. Her skin looked bone-white against the darkness. On the floor next to her, her coat and blouse lay in a heap, the large spanner from the workbench beside them.

I stopped short, one hand on the door. Clémence looked up at the same time, and for a moment we just gaped at each other. I had to focus on keeping my eyes on her face instead of letting them wander down—even with her arms crossed over her chest, her bare shoulders were enough to make the air around me feel hotter.

“Clémence,” I said, her name the only word that shoved itself through my surprise.

She didn’t say anything, and I realized each of her deep breaths shuddered and cracked like a static pulse.

It seemed an idiotic question, but I asked anyway. “Are you all right?” Her hair swung over her shoulder as she shook her head. I took a step forward. “Can I help?”

She nodded and I went the rest of the way across the room and knelt beside her. When she spoke, her voice sounded like ripping paper. “Can you fix me?”

“Can I . . . what?”

Then she moved her arms, and I saw what she meant.

The skin across her chest wasn’t skin at all, but a hard steel panel that swung open like a door, and inside she was mechanical. Her rib cage on one side was gone, replaced by steel rods and a small cluster of churning gears connected to oiled paper bellows that jerked up and down as she gasped for air.

Mechanical, like Oliver.

She took another drowning breath and I realized one of her steel ribs had come undone and was sloping inward at an odd angle so that it pressed on the bellows and kept it from inflating properly. By some miracle, it hadn’t punctured her skin or the oiled paper.

“I can fix it,” I said. “A bolt’s come loose, that’s all.”

She flapped her hand toward the spanner she had discarded on the floor. “Wrong size,” I said, pulling the smaller one out from my braces. “I’ve got the right one here. Sorry.”

“So this is . . . all your fault,” she murmured.

“Did you actually try to fix it with that massive thing?” I nudged the large spanner with my foot.

Clémence laughed weakly. “Made it worse.”

“Yes,” I said. “Stop talking for a minute.”

It was hard to see in the dim light, and I wished fervently for the magnifying goggles that were probably in pieces back in my father’s ransacked shop. I reached down with one hand to the steel plate beneath the bellows where the bolt had fallen, then nudged the loose rib back into place with the other. Clémence gasped like she was surfacing from water.