This Monstrous Thing(59)

He’d never struck me before. Not since we were children and didn’t know better.

Mary shrieked. I braced myself as Oliver came at me again, but he reared back suddenly with a yelp of pain. Clémence had grabbed his mechanical arm at the socket and twisted. He thrashed, and his elbow knocked into her chin and sent her stumbling backward. A trickle of blood ran from her lip, but she swiped it away and turned to face him, her knees bent like she was ready for a fight.

Oliver rounded on her now and began to advance. I tried to stand, but my vision dipped again and I sat down hard instead. “So who are you, exactly?” he asked with another step toward Clémence. She didn’t back away. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”

“I’m someone like you,” she replied.

Oliver gave a short caw of laughter. “No one in this whole world is like me.”

“I am.” Clémence seized his metal arm around the wrist and slammed it against her own chest. There was a hollow clang of metal on metal.

Oliver started, and looked up from his clenched fist to her face. “Bleeding hell.”

With one hand still around Oliver’s wrist, Clémence tugged down the neckline of her dress and showed off the gleaming metal panel beneath. “You are not alone in this world,” she said softly.

For a moment, Oliver looked like he might kiss her. I’d never realized just how lonely he was until I saw that rush in his face, cheeks all at once bright with a color they had missed for years. “So you’re not his sweetheart,” he said. “You’re his experiment.”

“I’m not Alasdair’s,” Clémence replied. “I don’t belong to anyone.”

“But someone made you.”

“Geisler,” she said. “He’s the one you should be fighting, not Alasdair.”

“My dear brother,” Oliver said, and he choked on the words, “has turned against me.”

I finally managed to pull myself back onto my feet. “I haven’t, Oliver, I swear.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He didn’t write it,” Clémence said.

“How do you know?” He was shouting again, and his voice screeched against the high ceiling and bounced back. “If it wasn’t Alasdair, then tell me who it was!”

“It was me,” Mary said.

Oliver froze, gaping at her with his misshapen mouth half open. I froze too, every hope that we would all walk away from here in one piece shattering inside me. It was in my defense, I knew, but there couldn’t have been a worse moment for her to say it out loud. She’d taken what little control I had left over Oliver and set it on fire.

Mary seemed to take the silence as a cue to say more, for she started speaking, fast and reckless. “After I left Geneva, I wrote it all down, everything I could remember about the resurrection, and I showed it to my husband.”

Just shut up, I pleaded with her silently. Shut up, shut up!

But she kept going. “I wasn’t going to do anything with it, but then—” Her voice hitched. “Oliver, I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

Oliver didn’t say anything for a moment. He stood still, firelight glinting off his mechanical pieces, and I swore I could see through his skin to his metal skeleton, bars and rods that joined like tributaries of a river to form the twisted shape of him.

“You sold us out,” Oliver said, his voice so low I had to strain to hear it over the snapping fire.

“I’m sorry,” Mary whispered. Her hands were clasped before her like she was praying. “Please, I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t think—”

Her words fell into a shriek as Oliver lunged toward her, as fast as before, but this time I was expecting it. I sprang forward and grabbed him around the shoulders, trying to hold him back, but he wrenched me straight off my feet.

But my added weight was enough to slow him down, and he halted, too far from Mary to strike her. Then he twisted sharply, and I was thrown to the ground. My elbow hit the stone with a sharp blossom of pain. Clémence was coming forward now—I could see her from the corner of my eye, but she didn’t seem to want to stop Oliver. She hovered, reaching out to no one in particular.

Oliver seized Mary by the shoulders, pressed her against the wall, and pinned her there with his mechanical arm. He was shouting at her, words lost in volume and ferocity, and she was crying, tears streaming down her cheeks. Oliver raised his fist, and the firelight caught a flash of something in his hand. As his arm came crashing toward Mary, I flung myself to my feet and leapt between them so that his fist landed on my shoulder instead of hers.

I didn’t realize he had stabbed me until blood started to pool along my collarbone. We both watched as the dark stain began to stretch its fingers across my shirt. Then Oliver looked up and I thought I caught a glimpse of panic or remorse, a smidge of someone that I hadn’t seen since before he died. He looked, for a moment, almost human.

It may have been longer than that, but the pain set in then, sharp and sudden, and I swooned. Mary caught me before my head cracked against the floor, and we sank to the ground together. All the sound in the room seemed to funnel and close, flushing me into silence with a weight like a collapsing tunnel. I looked up at Mary. Her lips were moving, and I realized she was saying my name. “Alasdair!” She had one hand cupped at the back of my neck. “Alasdair, stay here with me!”