This Monstrous Thing(42)

I set the bolt in place and twisted it with the spanner, still holding her rib cage where it should be. “You’re going to be all right,” I told her as I worked. She didn’t say anything, but I felt her heartbeat slow. It was strange, the way I could feel it echoing through her chest, so close I might as well have been holding her heart in my hand. When I worked on Oliver, it was always gears ticking, but Clémence was real and alive, flesh on top of metal.

When I finished, she took several deep breaths, each steaming white against the cold air. I watched the bellows flex, returning more to their original shape with every inhalation.

“Better?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice still feathery but stronger. She shut the panel across her chest, then climbed to her feet with a hiss of pain. I looked away as she retrieved her coat from the floor and wrapped it around herself, pulling it tight at the waist. For a moment, it seemed like she was going to walk out without saying anything else and we’d be left with each other’s secrets, but then, with one hand still pressed to her rib cage, she sank down again, and I slid from the balls of my feet so we were sitting side by side, with our backs against the wall.

Neither of us said anything for a while. We didn’t look at each other either, just stared forward into the darkness. Then Clémence asked, “Would you like to go first?”

“First at what?”

“Asking questions. I suspect you’re a bit slower to trust that I am, so I’m hoping that if I tell my story you’ll be more inclined to tell me yours.”

“All right, uh . . . ,” I fumbled, mostly because I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start, but Clémence interpreted my silence otherwise. She tipped her chin to her chest and smiled sadly.

“Am I that repulsive?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Not that at all. I think you’re . . . remarkable.”

She looked up, and her hair caught a button on her shoulder so that it fell into a swinging arc beneath her chin. “You don’t have to—”

“I mean it.” I said. “How did it happen?”

She took a deep breath, and I heard the bellows inside her inflate with a crackle. Now that I knew it was there, I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t heard it before.

“I was born in Paris, you know that,” she said. “My family survived the Revolution by making bombs for the Jacobins, and when everything settled down, my father turned that enterprise into a business manufacturing mining explosives, and he made a lot of money doing it. It was a good life, I suppose, if you enjoy uncomfortable shoes and boring conversation.” She pushed the strand of hair behind her ear. “The spring I turned fourteen, I went to Geneva to see a friend. Against my parents’ wishes. Not that it matters. While I was there, I was in a carriage accident, and one side of my body was crushed. I was treated by Dr. Geisler, and he saw me as a chance to test an experiment he had been perfecting in his mind for years. Internal repairs, I suppose you could say.”

“I’m familiar with it.”

“He saved my life, but when I returned to Paris and told my parents, they threw me out.”

“God’s wounds. You’d think they’d be pleased you weren’t dead.”

“To them, I was. Being mechanical is as good as dead, and I’m worse because I can’t survive without clockwork in me. I’ve never met anyone else like that.”

I thought of Oliver but didn’t say anything.

“So I was a girl alone in Paris with no home or family and no money when I got word that Geisler was looking for me. He wanted payment for his services, and I had nothing. I could have taken debtors’ prison, but that seemed like throwing away my second chance at life. So Geisler agreed to let me work for him and pay off my debt that way.”

“How long are you contracted with him?”

“Fifteen years.”

“So you’re not his assistant?”

She gave a brittle laugh. “No, nothing like that. I don’t know anything about mechanics, or medicine. I’m just paying off what I owe. Geisler doesn’t like me and he doesn’t particularly want me here, but I’m obligated to stay silent about the things he’d rather most people didn’t know about his research. Which is a good quality in a worker, I suppose.”

“So why did you tell me you were his assistant?”

“I don’t know.” She pursed her lips in what might have started as a smile but ended up looking like pain. “Because it’s a kinder word than slave.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my elbows on them. The cold was staring to come back now that I wasn’t working, and I shivered. “What sorts of things do you work on with Geisler?”

“You mean do I work downstairs?” She rapped the floorboards with her knuckles. “No point in pretending it isn’t there.”

I could still smell it, sharp and foul in the back of my throat, and I resisted the urge to spit. “What’s he trying to do?”

“You saw it. And if you were in Geneva two years ago, you know. He wants to bring back the dead.”

I had guessed. But I needed to hear her say it.

“He’s been obsessed with it for a while,” she continued. “It sort of dropped off after we first left Geneva, and I thought he’d given it up. But since Frankenstein came out, he’s been back at it, more manic than ever. I don’t understand what he’s so upset over. He’s acting like that book’s an instruction manual for resurrection, but it’s just a stupid made-up story.”