This Monstrous Thing(9)

Father snapped his pocket watch shut and glared at me over the top of his spectacles. “You’re late, Alasdair.”

Oliver had worn me out, and I was in no mood to joust with my father, so I sank into my place at the table without a word. Mum had put out embroidered napkins, and a bouquet of snowdrop flowers was nestled in a teacup between the candlesticks.

For a long moment, none of us said anything. Mum stared down at her empty plate, Father glared at the goose, and I looked between them, wondering which of us would speak first.

It was Father who finally raised his glass. I thought he would make a speech, because he was always one for lectures, but he simply said, “Happy birthday, Oliver.” His features sat in their practiced scowl, but I saw the tremor in his jaw as he finished, “You are missed.”

Mum nodded, her thumb pressed against her lips.

Father looked over at me, and I dropped my eyes to my own glass. “Would you like to say something about your brother, Alasdair?” he asked. “Something you remember.”

There were so many things I remembered about Oliver, but the harder I tried to cling to them the faster they seemed to slip away. The images of our vagabond youth—children of the Shadow Boys, back when we were knotted so tight together—had been washed away by my latest memories of him in Chateau de Sang, raging and snarling and tearing apart the furniture. The fight in him that I had once admired had been transformed from glowing and bright into something you could fall and cut yourself on, and that was what was left of him—a man I didn’t know who wore his ill-fitting skin and spoke in his voice. My brother, obliterated by himself.

All at once I felt like crying, and I stared hard at my fingers around my glass to stop my eyes from burning. The scars on my hand from the loose gears and wires on resurrection night flickered from red to white. The flesh memories of the nights I had killed my brother, and brought him back to life.

“To Oliver,” I said, and I drained my glass in one swallow.




Morand came by the shop the next afternoon to collect his arm.

He was a short, stocky fellow about my father’s age with a head of thick graying hair that he wore long and loose. We saw him twice a year, consistent as clockwork, when he left his boardinghouse in Ornex for Geneva to pick up false identification papers for the clockwork men and women he harbored. The forgeries left mechanical parts unlisted, which made it easier to get a job and travel.

Morand liked a good catch-up when he came, so it was usually Father who did the installation, but today he let me take Morand back into the workshop on my own. I thought that meant he was beginning to let out my lead, until he murmured, “We’ll see about your half-inch stock” as I passed him behind the counter.

Inside the workshop, I did a quick lap around to light the lamps. Morand shifted my breakfast dishes off the chair and settled down, already rolling up his sleeve over the tarnished socket fused to his elbow.

“So how’s Geneva treating the Finches?” he asked as I tugged my magnifying goggles over my eyes and hefted the clockwork arm up from the workbench.

“Good. Fine.” I fit the arm into the socket, twisting until the bolts lined up, then started to tighten them. The gears settled with a soft groan.

Morand laughed. “I forgot, you aren’t the chatty one, are you? Your brother used to—” He stopped and looked down at the floor.

I kept my eyes on my work. “You can talk about him. I don’t mind.”

He grunted, then rolled back his shoulder as I finished with the bolts. “He was always one for a good conversation, Oliver Finch. You look just like him, you know.”

I mustered a smile and reached behind me for the pulse gloves. As I moved, the lamplight caught a bronze badge in the shape of a cog pinned to the lapel of Morand’s coat, same as the old man on the omnibus had been wearing the day before.

Morand caught me staring at it and grinned. “Are you admiring my Frankenstein badge?”

I nearly dropped the gloves. “What did you call it?” I asked, though I’d heard him clearly. I could see the word spelled out in gold leaf on the spine of the book Mary had sent.

“Frankenstein badge. Haven’t you heard that? It’s what my boarders coming out of Geneva call them. All the clockworks here have to wear them now.”

“I know,” I said quickly. “I just hadn’t heard them called that before.”

“Have you read it—Frankenstein?” he asked as I strapped on the pulse gloves and started to get a charge building between them. “Nobody knows who wrote it, not even the newspapers. I heard it’s about Geisler, though. Your family doesn’t speak to him anymore, do you?”

“No.” The electric current gathering between my hands snapped like an affirmation. “Why would someone write a book about Geisler? He’s still a wanted man in most places.”

Morand shrugged. “It might not be about him, but it’s a definitely about a Shadow Boy. I don’t know, I haven’t read it, I just hear about it from my boarders. Something about clockwork men and whether or not we’re actually human. And then there’s a doctor in it who makes a mechanical monster from a corpse and it turns on him.”

“Hell’s teeth.”

“Sounds like Geisler’s work, doesn’t it? It’s set here in Geneva as well. I sort of expected the whole city to be in an uproar over it. It’s quieter than I expected.”