This Monstrous Thing(78)

“What happened then?” Oliver asked softly.

“You grabbed the journals,” I said, “and you started ripping pages out, so I jumped on you. Right on your arm. I think I must have snapped your wrist. You let go of them, anyhow. And you were in pain and off balance for just a second. And I didn’t even think. I don’t remember deciding what I was going to do, I just did it.”

“You pushed me off the tower.”

“I pushed you into the clock face, and the glass cracked. And then it broke.” I looked up at him. “And then you fell.”

Fell from the same spot where he sat now, staring at me with his face blank. The clearest I’d ever seen it.

The strength went out of me then, like all my gears had run down, and I sank to my knees in front of Oliver so that our eyes were level. I waited for him to strike me or kill me or do whatever it was he was about to do to me now that he knew the truth.

But all he said was, “I’m so tired, Ally.”

I swallowed. “Me too.”

“And I’m scared.” He pressed his mechanical hand to his forehead, leaving an imprint of the bars and cogs like a new set of scars when he moved it away. “I can’t remember the last time I was this afraid.”

“I didn’t think you were ever afraid,” I said with a weak smile.

“I think I was afraid when I fell. And when I woke again. When I was a boy, I remember reading books and thinking the monsters weren’t afraid, but they are. They’re more frightened than anyone.” He glanced up at me. “You’re bleeding.”

I looked down. My front was speckled with Raif’s blood, but a thicker crimson stain was spreading into my shirt. The wound in my shoulder had opened back up and I hadn’t had time to feel the pain. “I’m all right.”

“Did I do that?”

“I think I deserved it.”

“You didn’t,” he said. “You don’t. No one deserves anything I’ve set on them.” He closed his eyes, his jaw tightening like a fist. “You should have told me how I died.”

“I know,” I said. “But I thought you already hated me for bringing you back and keeping you locked up. You’d have hated me more if you knew what I’d done.”

“I don’t hate you.”

I held those words tight for a moment, pressed them deep and hard inside me until they left an imprint there, a brand to carry and run my fingers over when I didn’t believe it. “Do you think it would have changed anything?” I asked. “If I’d told you the truth from the start?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Probably not. I still would have been a monster.”

“We’re all monsters,” I said. “We’re all careless and cruel in the end.”

“I don’t want to be.”

“Then don’t do this. You can still surrender.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, and it came out in the middle of a sob. “If I walk away, they’ll put me in prison and do experiments on me until they finally shut me down. Maybe it would be better if I just . . .” His voice hitched, and he ducked his head. “If I asked you . . . would you just end me now?”

My heart splintered. “Oliver . . .”

“You killed me once, so just do it again,” he said, and it sounded almost like he laughed. “Ally, please. Just shut me down. You can do it quicker and kinder than they would, I know you can.”

For a long, tight moment, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. There hadn’t been a day since I’d brought Oliver back that I hadn’t wanted to be rid of him, and now here he was, asking to leave me. But instead of feeling relieved or free or any of that, I was hurtled back to the night I had stuck gears and cogs into his skeleton. I hadn’t done it to be clever, or right, or to see if I could—I wasn’t Geisler, and I wasn’t Victor Frankenstein. It was because a piece of me had gone into the coffin with Oliver, and there were bits of him I’d carried too, like shrapnel in my skin, and I couldn’t bury that. Not then. Not now. We were locked so tightly together, he and I. It would always be us—dead or alive or alive again—knit like gears so that neither could turn without moving the other as well.

“I don’t think you want to die,” I said. “I think you want to live. Just not like this.”

He took a deep breath. I heard it crackle through his paper lungs.

I kept going. “It’s only you they want—the rest of your men can walk away if they’re quick and clever about it. If you dismantle the explosives, I think I can get you out of here.” The platform shifted underneath us as the hand of the clock moved another minute. My heart jumped. “You can start a new life, somewhere no one knows about Frankenstein.”

“I’ll never be free of that.”

“I can call off Mary. Get her to undo some of the damage. She’ll help, she owes us that much. And then . . . then you can go somewhere. Somewhere things are different.”

“Don’t you have to come along and make sure I stay out of trouble?”

“I think . . .” I faltered. I’d spent so long feeling certain my future was a prisoner of Oliver that I’d never realized he was chained just as tightly to me. “I think you need to be free of me. You need to be on your own. Make your own life.”