This Monstrous Thing(73)

“Why the hell not?”

“Because that’s my brother!” I cried, louder than I meant to. Ottinger glanced down the street; then his grip loosened. I slid free and faced him head-on in the pale beam of his lantern. “I have to get into the clock tower. I can talk to Oliver.”

He shook his head. “No one can get through. Jiroux had his men shoot three of the clockwork sentries and then try to force their way in, but they were massacred. We have a girl from the clockworks who says they’ll let her pass, but she won’t go without Mary Shelley. That’s our only way.”

“Mary’s gone,” I said, and the realization caved inside me all over again.

“Jiroux’s been operating under that assumption. It doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t have turned her over. He won’t do anything that might be interpreted as compliance.”

I closed my eyes, trying to put together some sort of plan, but my brain was a mess of stuck cogs, rusted and wound down and refusing to turn fast enough.

Then I realized what he had said.

“The police have a girl from the clockworks?” I asked, and he nodded. “The blond one? Clémence?”

“I think so. They’re holding her in the square.”

“Can you take me to her? She can get me through to see Oliver.”

“She said she won’t go without Mary.”

“She’ll take me, I know she will.” I saw the hesitation in his eyes and before he had a chance to say no, I pressed on. “I know you aren’t as thoughtless as them. If I can talk to Oliver, I can help.”

“You truly think you can call him off?”

I wasn’t anywhere close to certain, but doubt wouldn’t do me any favors, so I nodded.

Ottinger held my gaze for a long moment, and then he nodded slowly. “All right, I’ll take you. Come on, stay close.”

As we crossed back into the street, a low clang echoed from the square, loud as a cannon blast. We both jumped and then turned in its direction. The clock was striking the half hour.

Half our time was gone.


The police had created a spotty perimeter around the square, using the abandoned market stalls for cover. The whole force seemed to be crouched behind the barricades with their rifles trained on the clock tower base, waiting for whatever would happen next.

Ottinger gave me his cap. It was hardly a disguise, but it kept my face in shadow. “Walk like you know where you’re going,” he told me. “And let me talk if we’re questioned.” But no one stopped us as we skirted the square. Hardly anyone even looked our way. They were too busy watching the clock tower.

The police had thrown Clémence in one of the stalls at the edge of the market, near the river. Ottinger unlocked the door, and as he pushed it open, I heard her say, “And here I thought you were going to let us blow a crater in your city.” I stepped past Ottinger and went inside. She was sitting on the floor with her back against a shelf of broken nutcrackers; she was smirking until she saw me, and then her face straightened. “Alasdair.”

“Mary’s gone,” I told her. “She left the city. She’s not going to give herself up.”

She blinked, and just for a second, a sliver of surprise blazed through her well-worn veil of defiance. Then she swiped her hair out of her eyes and said very calmly, “So we’re all dead.”

“Not if you let me talk to Oliver. You’re the only one his men will let through, and if I’m with you, they’ll let me through too.”

“They said it could only be Mary.”

“Well then, we’re going to have to figure something else out, but I need you. You are the only way we can stop this.”

She glared up at me. “Who says I want to stop this?”

“Do you understand what you’re doing?” I cried, loud enough that Ottinger shushed me from the doorway. I slid to my knees so I was right beside her and dropped my voice. “This won’t change a bleeding thing. You’ve proved them all right! All those people who think that metal parts make you violent and cruel and less than human—you’ve gone and shown them that’s exactly what you are. You could have demanded anything and you called for someone’s death. What’s killing Mary going to change?”

“We don’t have to change anything,” she hissed back. “What could we have asked for—equality? Tolerance? Those aren’t things you can claim to want with a tower full of explosives at your back. They would have made promises until they were hoarse and then shot us all the moment we put our hands up.”

“So you’d have Mary shot instead?”

“I didn’t say I wanted her dead,” she replied, and suddenly she looked angry.

I was angry too; angry that here was someone else I thought I knew and now she had thrown her true self into sharp relief. Perhaps I didn’t really know anyone. Perhaps everyone was just a fiction inside my head. “But the exploding clock tower—you’re all right with those causalities?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Then why are you here?” I demanded. “What is it you want?”

“I don’t want to live this way anymore!” She dropped her head backward against the shelf, and a nutcracker fell to the ground with a soft clatter. “It’s just unfair,” she said, and when she took a breath, I heard her lungs pop. “All of it.”