This Monstrous Thing(75)
I pulled myself to my feet with the help of the iron railing that ran along both sides of the walkway. Beside us, a weight dropped from between the cogs, a beam of white electricity skittering up its chain. The whole tower was charged.
“Do you know where Oliver is?” I called to Clémence over the chatter of the cogs. She nodded and started across the bridge, but stopped suddenly.
Three people were coming toward us, two men and a woman, all with guns. “Le Brey!” the man in the lead shouted at Clémence. He had long, scraggly hair and a bad limp from clockwork in his left knee. The woman’s mechanical arm was in poor repair. It ended in a hook rather than an actual hand, but she kept it on the trigger of her gun, and I was certain it could have fired just as well. I didn’t see any clockwork on the second man, but I knew it must be there, out of sight.
“Where’s Oliver, Raif?” Clémence called across the bridge.
“You said you’d bring back Mary Shelley or you wouldn’t come back at all.” Raif took a step toward Clémence. She put a hand on either side of the railing. “Who’s this?”
“This is Oliver’s brother,” she replied.
Raif let out a crackling laugh. “The brother who sold him out to the police?”
“I didn’t!” I shouted, but I wasn’t sure he heard me.
Clémence raised her chin as Raif took another step forward, pistol still pointed at her. “Out of the way, Le Brey.”
She didn’t move. “Alasdair’s one of the Shadow Boys. He’s on our side.”
“Then why wasn’t he here fighting with us?” Raif demanded.
“He’s here now,” she said. “Let him see his brother.”
“Who’s there?” someone called from behind Raif and his companions, and they all turned. I had to lean around Clémence to match sight to the voice I recognized.
Oliver. It was hard to see him properly in the darkness as he dropped from a ladder onto the end of the bridge and straightened. All three of his men stepped back, a sort of fearful reverence in their posture toward him. “Le Brey brought your brother,” the woman said.
“Did she?” Oliver came forward slowly. I could feel his footsteps ripple across the bridge and resonate up through the soles of my feet. “Where’s Mary Shelley?” he called to us.
“She’s gone,” I said before Clémence could speak. “You can’t have her, Oliver.”
The shadows of the cogs fell on his face, turning him in and out of darkness as they spun. He looked smoldering, a lit fuse burning into a bomb. “Then we haven’t got long left.”
“You don’t have to do this!” I called. I tried to get past Clémence but she kept her arms in place and I was worried that if I shoved past her, one of us would fall. “Mary isn’t your martyr, and she isn’t your enemy. She didn’t sell you out.”
“Mary took my life and used it against me. Now her life belongs to me.”
“That’s not how—”
“This is retribution!” he shouted over me. “For Mary Shelley, and Frankenstein, and for every wrong done to every clockwork man in Geneva.”
“This isn’t retribution, Oliver, this is suicide!” I cried. I saw Raif’s pistol rise, but I pressed on, unafraid. I was startled by how unafraid I was. “You’re throwing away your life, and the lives of all these people who worship you. The only message you’ll send Geneva is that clockwork men are monsters!”
“Can I shoot him?” Raif asked Oliver, finger flexing on the trigger.
“That’s all they’ll remember you for,” I said. “You’re proving them right.”
Oliver’s metal fist tightened on the rail, and he turned his face away from me. For a moment, the shadows from the gears matched the pulse of the ones beneath his skin. “If they want monsters, we shall be their monsters.”
Clémence’s shoulders shrank, and I sidestepped her so that Oliver and I were face to face, so close our shadows were the same. “You are not a monster,” I said, as quietly as I could and still be heard.
I could see him clearly now, even in the dim light—the stitches across his forehead, gears pushing back against his skin, body that didn’t fit right—but more than that, I was seeing him. Really seeing him, clearer than I had since the resurrection, and I knew him. It was Oliver, my brother, the brother I’d grown up with, who’d stolen strawberries for me, and given me his coat when I was cold. Who couldn’t sing in tune and who spoke Dutch with Scottish vowels and wrote poetry in charcoal on the school walls and taught me how to skip stones and cuss and survive. Who he had been, and who he still was, the dark-haired boy with the wild heart who just felt everything so deeply.
“You are not a monster,” I said again, and this time, I meant it.
“I am a monster!” He shouted it, as loud as I had been soft. “I was murdered by a madman and resurrected by his devil work. I was damned to be inhuman from the moment I was reborn.”
“Geisler didn’t kill you,” I said. My hands were shaking, but my voice stayed steady. I knew what I was about to do, and I didn’t flinch from it.
“He pushed me off the clock tower,” Oliver replied through clenched teeth. “You can say it for the rest of your life, Alasdair, but I will never believe it was an accident.”