Spare and Found Parts E-Book

Sarah Maria Griffin

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 415

Beschreibung

We are all more than the sum of our parts... Fans of Louise O'Neill and V.E. Schwab will delight in Sarah Maria Griffin's stunning science-fiction story of creation in the wake of destruction.Nell Crane has never held a boy's hand.In a city devastated by an epidemic, where survivors are all missing parts—an arm, a leg, an eye—Nell has always been an outsider. Her father is the famed scientist who created the biomechanical limbs that everyone now uses. But she's the only one with her machinery on the inside: her heart. Since the childhood operation, she has ticked. Like a clock, like a bomb. And as her community rebuilds, everyone is expected to contribute to the society's good . . . but how can Nell live up to her father's revolutionary ideas when she has none of her own?Then she finds a lost mannequin's hand while salvaging on the beach, and inspiration strikes. Can Nell build her own companion in a world that fears advanced technology? The deeper she sinks into this plan, the more she learns about her city—and her father, who is hiding secret experiments of his own.Sarah Maria Griffin's haunting literary debut will entrance fans of Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking series, Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker, and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PROLOGUE

ASSEMBLY

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

ALIVE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN

TITANBOOKS

Spare and Found Parts

Print edition ISBN: 9781785657054

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785657061

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: February 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

© 2016, 2018 by Sarah Maria Griffin. All rights reserved.

Permission to reprint excerpt from “Sharp Things” granted by the author.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

TO KATIE

I recognize, I must tell you, the ways

I have taken after my mother,

the ways I know I have become her,

my head tilted towards the clouds,

hips raw like the aftermath of falling into a rose bush.

FROM “SHARP THINGS,” BY NIC ALEA

PROLOGUE

When you grow up, you’ll never be sure if this happened or not. Never sure if it was just something your grief stitched together from the parts of her you remember and the questions still in your throat. Your doubt comes up against the image of her, flickering behind your eyelids.

This is the last time you see her.

You’ve managed to steal up into her room, though you know it’s bold to go up there, though you know she needs to be resting. You haven’t been near her in so long. You’ll rest with her, you think, climbing up into her bed and across soft cotton plains. She laughs, deep, when she sees you, leans over. “Come here to me, come here to me!”

She is beautiful.

She holds her hand up in front of your face, inches from your nose. At her fingertips, there are lights. Blinking green sparks, pinprick. She brings her touch to your face, cradles your cheek and your jaw. You feel small, hard lumps beneath the surface of her touch. Her skin, once warm, is now ash. There is green at the edge of your vision. Green like a frog. Green like leaves. Green like nature but unnatural, artificial instead. You have never seen these before.

There are gaps where the teeth at the edges of her smile should be. Her eyes are still soft, if far away. A green pinprick flickers above the arch of her left eyebrow. Her hair is wrapped in a scarf, escaped black tendrils here and there.

Her lips are chapped. Your cheeks are wet with tears; she thumbs them away. “Don’t cry for me, Penelope,” she sings, rhythmic, lullaby. “Don’t cry for me.”

A strange light sits in the center of her chest: a bigger one, round as a penny. It sits like a jewel amid chalky scar tissue. It doesn’t flicker, but rather flashes, framed by the softness of her nightshirt. Her veins are risen and pattern her skin, tiny black rivers.

“There’s nothing to be sad about. I am so happy.” She’s whispering, she’s laughing. “I wish you could hear the things I hear. I have spoken to electric gods. You will, too; I know it.” Her finger is hard on your jaw now; it starts to hurt. “You’ll find a way. You’re cut of my cloth, girl.”

Her voice is thick. You climb over the duvet landscape to her lap, and she cradles you. You put your ear to her chest, looking for warmth, listening for a heartbeat. There is none. A hiss comes from under her skin, a static thrum. She smells like burning, like copper.

“Can you hear the machines, Nell?” she whispers to you. “Can you hear what I hear? They tell me you’ll do great things. They tell me that I am dying but that my questions live on in you.”

“Who are they?” you ask.

“They have voices like falling stars,” she says, her hand on her chest.

“Who are they?” you ask again.

Your mother holds her hand above your face, sparks in her fingerprints, filaments alive. “The questions. You’ve started already.”

A door swings open. You are lifted away.

They argue, your da and your ma.

“Don’t be talking to her when you’re like this; you’ll poison her worse than she already is,” he says, and she swears at him.

“She’s more like me than you; she has my eyes.”

And you’re out into the hallway, down the stairs in his arms, floods of tears, green still at the corner of your vision. Green like the parklands, green like poison. Like electricity.

Green like Go.

There are three rules:

1. The sick in the Pale, the healed in the Pasture.

2. Contribute, at all cost.

3. All code is blasphemy.

CHAPTER 1

Just under the surface of the waves where the ocean met the land, a hand without a body reached out for someone to grab it. The hand was wrapped in plastic, so time and water hadn’t eaten it, and its fingers, unmoving, were poised and ready to be held. Nell Crane picked it up out of the foam. She placed it quietly into her satchel.

Right where the black river split into the big wild blue, Nell and Ruby Underwood were collecting bits of treasure from the foam. They were farther out than they were supposed to be, out on the city’s jagged edge, the pair of them charged with rebellion. Besides, this was where all the best stuff washed up. Right before the hungry sea gobbled the old pieces of the city into oblivion, the estuary caught them and spread them all out on the beach. Treasure among the pebbles.

Nell wouldn’t take her boots off and stood at the kissing lip of the water, keenly eyeing the drift. A lightbulb, a coil of wire: she snatched them and tucked them away. Only useful things. Maybe they’d be the very things that would spark off a great idea—she needed one, and fast. Summer would be over soon. Days like today were a distraction from the forms Nell had not yet filled out, the letters she hadn’t answered, the end of apprenticeship project she had not yet begun. Here by the waterside she could forget, at least for a little while.

Her small pet stoat, Kodak, was far more courageous, leaping about in the foam. Ruby, however, bravest of them all, was in up to her knees, a net in her left hand, a long stick with a pincer at the end in her right, and a basket thrown over her shoulder. She was a round, bright pinwheel in the water, and Nell was drawn out like her long shadow on the land.

The shoreline was pocked with dilapidated signage roaring impotent scarlet warnings like TURN BACK NOW or NO ENTRY. The girls ignored them. Quarantine was over; there hadn’t been an aftershock in years. The two of them had been touched by the epidemic in different ways, both their families scarred by the toxic electromagnetic pulses of the Turn, but these times were for healing. This water was theirs.

The fat old sun wouldn’t lower into the horizon for another hour or so, and the heat of the day was beginning to weigh heavy. The salty air helped, alluded to a breeze, but it was still so hot. The sky had been a too blue blankness for months now, so quiet that it had long since become suspicious. Sweat beaded down Nell’s forehead and nose, gathering at the tip of her chin, where a chalky ashen scar began.

Despite the heat, she was covered almost head to toe in linen and cotton. Her hair was a black crow’s nest, impossibly thick and just about persuaded into a bundle, speared with a thick graphite pencil. She’d deal with the sweat; it was the price she paid for invisibility. She’d never shown anyone the whole scar, the path of it down the center of her body. Her chest cavity at least ticked only faintly this afternoon, a soft metronome against the laughter of the waves. She would have traded the scar and the ticking for a mechanical arm, or leg, in a heartbeat—or whatever the machine did, close enough to a heartbeat that her body believed it was real.

It was commonplace to sport an arm, a leg, a set of ears, two fingers, or even the bottom half of a jaw crafted from exquisite, intuitive prosthetic. Absent limbs were part of the price the people of Black Water City paid for surviving the cruel touch of the epidemic. Nell, however, was the only person with all her metal inside. She was the only person who ticked.

Ruby surveyed the murky water. She dug up hunks of sea glass and other shining scraps, sometimes whole objects that had been fed to the Livia River by accident, or perhaps sacrifice, during the Turn. With salty fingers, she adjusted the patch that sat comfortably over her right eye socket. Ruby staunchly refused prosthetic or augmentation, wasn’t keen on the machines; she always said, “What’s good for the rest of you is good for the rest of you.” Thick eyelashes framed her left eye, so dark brown that it was almost black. Today she had painted all around it in gold and jade powders a proclamation: “You’d better look right at me. I survived!”

Ruby looked up. Kodak had gone and got himself into a spot of bother. The stoat floundered barely a foot offshore; something had caught his tiny leg. He barked softly, fighting it but losing. She stomped toward him and pried his leg free as he squirmed.

“Ah, would you look!” she exclaimed, tossing the offending object to Nell. “That’s for you!”

The tall girl shrieked and clumsily batted away the slimy, cold web of seaweed. Ruby cackled, and Nell thought for a moment about rushing in and splashing her as watery revenge but looked down at her boots: not going in there proper, not today. The beach was good for combing, but farther in, you never knew what you could find or what could find you.

Not that they’d ever come across anything made of flesh and bone, but the abandoned pieces of people’s lives were sad and terrible enough: drowned blank books, washed of ink, useless pieces of unconscious technology, scraps of the old world swallowed up while the town was burning.

Behind the girls and the beach and the dunes lay ghostly industrial estates, tall and gray, with scorched black windows like rows of blank eyes. Beyond and to the west, past the factories, stood a stone monument—a woman, towering more than a mile high over the rest of Black Water City. Beyond the devastated capital, western still, sat the Phoenix Parklands, where Nell’s and Ruby’s homes lay. It was a long ride back, and the girls’ bikes waited for them in the pebbles, like spindly steel horses.

“All right! I’m done!” announced Ruby, storming back to shore. “I won’t be able to carry all this if I keep at it!” She staggered a little under the weight of her basket as she strode from the water. “Ugh.” The seaweed was oily on the soles of her bare feet.

Nell was glad she’d kept her boots on. As they walked up the stony shore, Ruby said, “Well, give us a look at what you found.”

“Just scraps. And this.” Nell took the hand she’d picked from the drift. Kodak flounced out of the water and ran in circles on the beach, shaking himself off with the disgruntled gait of a wet cat and the enthusiasm of a puppy. They planted themselves on the stones by the bikes for a moment. Ruby was panting a little, and her basket landed on the beach with a thud. It was almost completely full of smooth glass shards but for the occasional iceberg of bright plastic breaking the little sea of green.

Nell peeled the briny plastic wrap from the hand, cellophane strips placed there in some attempt at preserving it. The plastic was old but held strong. She unwound it like bandages and revealed the too pink painted skin. The hand was posed as though it were holding something invisible, painted crudely but with the intent of looking marginally lifelike—pinker nails, clumsily engraved knuckles. It stopped just below the wrist, with a screw protruding from a flat base. It was weirdly big, an ungraceful thing. Nell turned it over and over in her own hands, fascinated.

“What do you think, Ruby?” asked Nell, locking her fingers with it, her own hand small against it.

“Well, it’s useless to me,” answered her friend, absentmindedly combing through her basket of treasure. “If it were a bit more elegant, I’d use it for displaying rings, but it’s too masculine for what I’m working on right now.”

Nell hadn’t thought about giving it boyness or girlness, but now it certainly seemed boyish. A boy’s hand.

“Huh, I suppose so,” she mumbled.

“Look, you can keep him. Show him off down the Bayou; take him home to meet your father. Then all your problems will be over!” jibed Ruby, planting an elbow into Nell’s ribs.

“Piss off.” Nell elbowed her right back.

“Get him involved in the family business. Break Oliver Kelly’s heart once and for all.”

Oliver Kelly. Trust Ruby to conjure him to their quiet afternoon—in revenge, she placed the long, strange fingers of the hand on Ruby’s face. She shrieked, and Nell cackled. Ruby had meant it, though, had thrown Oliver Kelly’s name like the seaweed, slimy and cold, unpleasant.

“Can we go home?” asked Nell, retreating and discreetly placing the hand back into her satchel. She eyed the tide, a little greedier now, eating further into the land.

Ruby rolled her eyes. “So early.”

“I know, I just . . . Da worries.”

“It’s what, five o’clock? It won’t get proper dark until ten. Your da needs to calm down.”

“I know,” Nell repeated, her voice sinking quietly in her throat. Her ticking escalated ever so slightly; she could just about hear it.

Ruby groaned and stood. “Fine, fine. Let’s go.”

They affixed their belongings to their bikes and took off in silent flight down the beach and out onto the deserted roads. They didn’t say much as they shot along, their empty shadowbox city offering a meager welcome.

The population sign at the leaning harp of Godot Bridge boomed: Welcome to Black Water City, We’re Well Again! Population 10,076. It had been 74 that morning, and the paint was still wet. The number hadn’t taken a significant dive downward in quite some time. It flickered week to week—three up here, three down there—marking the revolving door on the city. Nell took small reassurance from it; chances were that the babies had arrived safely, maybe had even been born without missing any parts. Or maybe it would be just a missing finger or toe or a cavity somewhere innocuous—lower back was common and easily repaired. They’d be due a good life in the Pasture; a whole body could be a ticket out of the Pale. The number would waver but would never plunge deep again.

Every time the number on the sign rose, though, their city gained strength. Glasses would be raised in the three taverns; the bands would play later. For all the gray and gloom, the people who remained in the city were happy and eager and strong. Their world was small, but they were content to try to make it bigger, one brick at a time.

By the looks of it, the construction workers were being let out an hour early, too. The girls found themselves cycling amid the daily exodus from the site of the giant woman.

Strong, stony-eyed folk, decked out in flannel and denim, hard hats under their arms, marked out with neon vests and heavy boots, strode toward the city in clusters. The women wore their hair in efficient braids; the men were largely bearded. They’d a style of their own, a culture developing all along the skirts and curves of the monument. Their kinetic limbs were bigger and gaudier than the rest of the civilians—part statement, part function. Their smart biorobotic arms and legs needed to support more movement, lift heavier things.

Altogether around a thousand people worked on the statue and would work on the next when this one was finally done. Some were older than Ruby’s and Nell’s fathers, some were just about their age, a couple here and there were younger. They were a vast collective, a village almost, working together to erect the closest thing their island had to a beacon. These folks had hope. Some sang their way home, others chatted. The news of the two births had spread.

The giant woman was Nell’s titanic sister; her plans had been Nell’s mother’s contribution to Black Water City. Like any sister, Nell wasn’t sure if she loved her or hated her and was almost certain she’d never live up to her. Best to admire her from a safe distance. The scale of her importance was staggering when she got too close. Nell’s achievements—or striking lack thereof—were shameful in the shadow of what her parents had made.

Each lamppost they passed had the same stack of flyers hung on a shiny nail, declaring, “Dr. Julian Crane’s Marvelous Augmentations—Present This Flyer and Construction Collective Membership Card for a Free Strength Upgrade!” Nell’s father’s sharp cheekbones and glinting eyes and round spectacles peered out from the ink. A genius, folks would say, but so reclusive. Such a shame what happened to Cora Starling-Crane! He must still be heartbroken. She was so young, they’d say. It was her death that drove him to be so passionate about his work; it was he, you know, who brought the first prosthetic to life! The augmentation! A miracle! And he was only twenty-onewhen he came up with it! Unheard of, that level of prodigy. And his tiny daughter! Well—

Somebody called out, “Look, it’s Nell Crane! Heard you’ll be joining us soon!” A ricochet reply: “Nah, she’s going out to live with the preachers in the fields, aren’t you, Nellie?” Other workers hooted and cheered, but Nell kept her head down, her skin crawling. Under no circumstances would she be joining them or going out to live in the Pasture. Ruby didn’t say anything.

The pair coasted up the boardwalk alongside the Livia River, past the hodgepodge markets of downtown. The city was a labyrinth of burned-out houses littered with small pockets of community. It had taken almost a hundred years for this quiet to fall, for the fires to stop. It had once been so vibrant, so full of technology and ideas. Too much technology, some thought. Too many ideas.

That bright city was a thing of the past. Strictly rationed electricity dimmed the glow of the place to embers. They’d scorched it out, renamed it, started from nothing. But it was a peaceful ash heap at least. The blue turning violet of the sky was scored with black wires that had once carried power and information; now they simply hung there, making the sky a harsh dead grid above them, thin square shadows on the paths.

Nell and Ruby raced up the quays of the murky river and swung north for the Phoenix Parklands, where their fathers’ houses were. The hungry, pulsing trees and tall ferns filled the air with their dense aroma as the girls passed through the ancient iron gates and made their way up the winding road home. The parklands was almost a village scattered throughout a huge forest, pocked with old family houses, just outside the city. It had made a good retreat when the Turn had become violent: a dense, leafy stronghold, bubbling with swamps.

The Cranes and Underwoods were the only families in this neck of the woods. The farther Ruby and Nell rode, the more the greenery gnawed at the path until they turned sharply into the glades cradling their homes. When they pulled up at the messy garden that marked the Crane house, they stopped together.

“Still coming to the Bayou tomorrow, aren’t you?” Ruby asked, challenging Nell to say no.

“Yes, I suppose.”

Ruby made a theatrical, exaggerated noise. “Suppose! Try and muster up a little excitement for once, would you?”

Nell forced a smile that was all gritted teeth. “Yes. Yes, I’m coming.”

“The party’s going to be wonderful. Wear something nice like; don’t make a show of me all decked out for a funeral. I’ll come for you at half six.” Ruby clumsily shifted her bicycle back toward the path. “Stick that awful hand in a pot of boiling water before putting it on any of your shelves, too. Never know, it might start creeping around when you’re not looking.”

Ruby stuck out her tongue and cycled away toward her house, just on the other side of a fat, twisted thicket of briars. Nell watched Ruby disappear, then led her bike to the house.

The Crane house stood with a shabby kind of magnificence on four thick pillars, twenty-odd feet from the ground. The wooden paneling on the walls was stained and dark; the windows were long and covered by blinds. If a wrong kind of magic touched it, it could walk away on its own, a clumsy creature of a house. It loomed. It was home.

It had started life as an elegant holiday home for the Starling family, visited rarely, planted deliberately in the last green lands of Black Water City. When Nell’s willful mother decided she wanted to get out of the Pasture and live in the Pale, her parents reluctantly gave her the keys. As time peeled away that history, the house had taken Nell’s father’s name instead.

Nell checked the postbox. There a crisp, slim letter and a carefully wrapped brown package sat neatly together, addressed to Miss Penelope Starling-Crane. She sighed. Definitely from Nan.

She kicked out the stand and left her bike in its place under the stairway to the porch. Kodak scampered up her arm and onto her shoulder as she took her satchel and trudged up the stairs, her head a thousand miles away.

Through the front door, down the hall, and up another rickety stairway she went, creaking a symphony, up to the crooked landing, to her bedroom.

Nell’s room was uncommonly large, with high ceilings and a bay window looking out over the tangled mess that their back garden had become. Just beyond a ridge of full, low-dipping willows, lay a small lake. In the dark, it reflected the night sky so clearly that sometimes it looked as if the whole world ended at the bottom of the garden. The Pasture could begin here really—Nell was sure of it—but healed folk had marked a twenty-mile stretch of land outside the city as sick, too. That whole barren territory was marked as the Pale. The Pasture spanned the rest of the island, ruined and quiet but for the port town to the west. During the island’s quarantine a partition that stood to this day had been built around it. Nell hadn’t any desire to leave but knew that out there in the western reaches of the Pasture was the Library Complex, towers full of paper from before the Turn, the printed Internet, being alphabetized, sorted, stored—away from civilian eyes.

Nell had asked Nan in her childhood if she could go to visit the Library buildings, but Nan had just laughed. “You’ve enough paper here to be contending with, girl, rather than need to see what’s out there.”

Nell did occupy herself with an awful lot of paper. The walls of her sanctuary were covered in drawings and diagrams, proof of Nell’s studies; detailed pencil-drawn charts of leaves, a dead mouse, how the kettle boils. Her father had been a distant mentor through her apprenticeship, but she worked hard, if alone.

She drew reams and reams and reams of things on long sheets of butcher paper: thin detailed lines, light gray shading, to scale and then bigger and bigger. Massive spiders stood watch with unmoving eyes from their homes on her papers. A single great rose almost burst into a flood of gray petals above her bed. By her wardrobe were a cluster of self-portraits and a constellation of drawings of her mother, facial comparison studies. They had the same full mouth, the same brown skin, the same nest of thick, untamable hair.

Nell dropped her satchel and sat down by the window at her drawing table to read the letter. It was heavy in her hands. She’d been expecting it. She hadn’t replied to the last one or the one before. This table was the quietest space in the whole room: a barren expanse but for a fat stack of similar envelopes in the corner, weighted down by a spare wrench. It was a stark plain in contrast with the mad cavern of her work desk, a quiet place to think. Nell ran her finger along the gum of the envelope and tore it open.

Penelope, dear.

Where has the time gone? Summer again already—the days are so long, a grand stretch in the evening. I’m sure you’re as surprised as I am that contribution season is almost upon us. For so many families in the city this must be such an exciting time, the next generation of apprentices ready to contribute to the healing. Out here in the Pasture everyone is positively humming with curiosity about what the contributions will be. There is stone fruit on every altar, and my rituals have mostly taken place outdoors.

I would love to be as excited as my neighbors, but sadly I have a great deal of trepidation about your seeming unwillingness—or inability—to provide any progress reports on your project to either the Youth Council or to me.

This is not easy, but I must be stern in the face of your recent silence. I’m unsure what kind of point you’re trying to make. Is this a silent rebellion, or pure laziness, or a cry for help? I certainly hope it’s not a deliberate attempt to cause Julian Crane—or me—any anxiety. If you believe there to be some charm or honor in working the stone woman site, then you are sorely mistaken.

You are from the line that drew the stone woman. Our Cora was a pioneer. She found a way to employ hundreds of people, to give them hope. You’ll bring nothing but shame on us. My own mother and father didn’t strive as hard as they did to remain whole and healthy just so the last in the Starling line could throw it all in. Cora had a rebellious streak, but she worked hard. You are simply not doing enough, Penelope.

I’ve outlined below the only options I see fit for you from here on in.

1. Produce a contribution of excellent standard by the Youth Council’s appointed date.

2. Quickly, and without notable fuss, begin a courtship with an appropriate partner whose contribution aligns with your skillset. If you do pursue this avenue, alert me immediately so I can schedule a visit at the soonest possible juncture in order to approve your selection.

3. Pack up your belongings and relocate to my estate on the Pasture. I can formally employ you as my personal assistant, and you will remain preserved from stonework.

4. Continue to squander your time. In this case, I am unsure if Julian will permit your residence at the parkland house, and I will be ceasing any contact and withdrawing my support. You will not work on the stone site with my blessing.

I will write each choice on a nectarine and place them on the windowsill until the season changes. I hope the fourth rots last, child. This letter has taken me all day to write. I have been reading it aloud to myself over and over. These things need to be said before it is too late. I hope you will make the right decision. Cora would have wanted more for you than the scaffolding and the stoneyard. You could have a very good life out here in the Pasture if you wanted.

Write me soon. My love and blessings are with you.

Nan

CHAPTER 2

The first thing is you are ten years old.

Your last summer in the Pasture is rose and tender until it is sour and wrong.

Your grandmother isn’t much taller than you, all long linen jackets in coral and powder blue, all floral skirts. She smells like dry lavender, like aloe vera and safety. She wears rough crystals on her neck, on her fingers. She asks you questions and hangs your drawings around the mirror in her dressing chamber. You love her, and you love the halls of her country home, the high ceilings and the tall, airy corridors, the shiny marble floors, the lush carpets. There’s nowhere in Black Water City like the Starling manor. Starling, like the iridescent black birds with bright white tips on the feathers on their breasts, like comets falling on an oily night sky. Starling like your mother.

You wish your chest would sound like a falling star. Instead, tick, tick, tick, all along the hallways. It bounces back at you from the shining surfaces. It echoes as if there were more of you. But there aren’t more of you. Just one. Nan doesn’t care.

You sit on the floor at her feet in the conservatory. All the world is green just past the glass walls, and the sky is spotless blue. Nothing is gray. This is the uncity. Nan is in the grand wicker chair, Kodak resting on the arm beside her. She braids your hair, the masses of it, with dexterity. Your ticking reverberates louder against the glass, and you are trying to ignore it, trying not to let it change the fabric of this quiet afternoon world. Nan doesn’t mention it (Nan never mentions it), and you are thankful to her for this. You are thankful for her pearly painted nails on your scalp, knowing and gentle. She hums a sweetness, and it gets behind your eyes and you feel better. You can barely hear yourself when you focus on her voice.

You aren’t sure if you believe in magic, but you understand why people say she is an oracle. You understand why they gather in the garden after dark and listen to her prayers. You understand why people come to her with lost objects, broken hearts. Her hands are in your hair, and you are not a clockwork girl; you’re her grandchild, protected. The Pasture is endless, and the city is nowhere in sight. You are warm in this prism. You could stay. You think about asking her if she’d let you. She might.

You are without lessons for the season, without Oliver Kelly on weekends and your father’s watchful eye, his rules. You are without constant instruction or the fumes from the laboratory, the relentless stench of scorched metal. These things all fade into the concrete city beyond the horizon line of the Pasture.

You wish you could show Ruby these rolling fields, this clear sky. Even still, you are happy. A quiet, ordinary feeling. Nan doesn’t say anything, you don’t say anything, and the pair of you are linked in the afternoon hush.

Two of her maids bustle in just then, wheeling a gilded tea service. Healed, the pair of them, or just about; you can’t spot any augmentations. The elder of the pair, Lynn, who’s worked in the Starling house as long as you remember, begins to unload dainty porcelain towers of iced cakes, pink and white and mint. She transfers them to a glass table, low enough that neither you nor Nan has to bend out of your way to eat.

The other girl you’ve never seen before. She’s a teenager, hair cropped close to a pixie face. You don’t get too much of a look at her before she exclaims, “Oh!” and drops a teacup. It smashes empty on the tiles. Her eyes are ice blue; you notice then—only because they’re all over you. Tick, tick, tick. They’re up and down the length of your scar, her pupils pinpoint, her mouth sour, open.

She pales a little, bubbles, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” blushing and stammering. She’s still staring, your neck, your chest, a moment, two, then blusters away, leaving the air thick and awful. It is too bright in here. Your skin is too tight. Lynn quickly picks up the pieces of the cup and, producing another, seamlessly pours tea and places two cups at the bottom of the cake tree. But all you can see is the new girl’s horror, her shaking hands.

“I am so, so sorry about this, Mrs. Starling,” Lynn trills. “I warned Annie about Miss Nell, but she just wasn’t prepared. I’ll ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Nan does not say a word, but her hands are motionless on your head. Lynn leaves the cornucopia of tiny cakes and proud-bellied teapot on the table, curtsies, and wheels the service away.

Tickticktick.

You are old enough now that when adults talk as though you were not there, you are not oblivious. Instead, you are furious, and the sound your body makes is the music of that fury. Nan’s hands take up braiding again, and steam rises from the teacups. Perhaps you would like, after all, to go back to the city. You are not like the people in the city, but you are more like them than like the folk here. City people never look scared of you.

“Not to worry. We’ll get you some nice, colorful scarves,” coos Nan, and you say, “Thank you,” but you mean, “Why didn’t you say anything?” and you mean, “Are you scared of me, too?”

You don’t see the younger maid again, but her eyes are on you always. Her mouth, disgusted. You don’t go to the Pasture the following summer. You miss it, the green world, until you don’t. Until the gray world is a comfort.

You don’t stop missing Nan, though. She sends scarves in brown paper packages, and you wear them around your throat, disguise your scar with softness, with cotton. They come every week. She stops asking you to visit. Eventually she starts telling you what to do.

CHAPTER 3

Far outside the boundaries of Black Water City, a silent, guarded line lay between the Pale and the Pasture. The world changed there. The sick were raised and grew and contributed in the Pale; the healed lived and farmed and prayed in the tall grasslands of the Pasture. Nell cast a look over her shoulder at her tousled bed and thought for a moment about the fresh, expensive white sheets she’d sleep in at Nan’s, about the quality of the light out there.

Until now Nan’s weekly letters had been concerned, full of questions, but never formal. Never angry. Or cold. Nell traced her fingers over Nan’s writing, something worse than guilt catching in her throat. She folded the paper over and placed it back into its envelope, then shuffled it anonymously into the bundle of correspondence. Her wrench, a sometime paperweight, sat in its place.

The package the letter had arrived with was wrapped with such precision that Nell took it apart with reverence, so as not to spoil the embossed paper patterned with tiny birds in flight. It contained a scarf, a wisteria print flecked with tiny sequins, newly woven, not salvaged. A scarf for going out. A fancy scarf, one for the mood lighting at the Bayou. A pretty disguise. Nell pulled it out to wrap around her shoulders, and something fell out of its shimmering folds: four batteries, shrink wrapped. A small square of paper flittered to the ground. Nell scooped it up. Nan again: “Make good use of these.”

A smile woke up in Nell. All right, Nan, she thought. I will.

She unpeeled the film and examined the batteries: wouldn’t be much use for a big project, but for a small exercise, perfect.

Nell’s work desk, oak and sturdy and far older than she was, was nestled in an alcove in the corner of her room, just a little away from her drawing table. It was part immaculate order and part utter chaos and looked as if it had bloomed out of the wall: a natural junkyard, just her size. There were jars full of tiny gears, clusters of springs, careful assortments of screws, collections of tape, coils of wires organized by size on the pegboard on the wall, their metal glinting in the lamplight. There was just enough room for Nell to spread her elbows, a whole inventory of pieces and parts barely even an arm’s length away. She knew the geography of this clockwork cove better than any place.

A tiny blowtorch was coupled neatly with an alarmingly toothy set of pliers, overseen by a grand family of hammers displayed on the headboard, all the way from the daintiest of cross-peen pins to a grand, fat joiner’s mallet. Nell had never actually used that one; she didn’t really deal in large constructions, but it was handy to have it there nonetheless. Hinges of gold and silver and stainless steel and some polluted with rust lay about the place like loose butterflies in a lush metal garden. This was Nell’s playground, and her Nan, her furious Nan, had gifted her some new batteries to toy with.

Two sets of goggles hung like neighbors: one for general protection (Nell had torched her eyebrows off on more than one occasion) and the other equipped with adjustable lenses, allowing her to look more closely at smaller parts and mechanisms without having to use one hand for a magnifying glass. Though lupes and spyglasses were helpful, too; a bouquet of varying lenses stood in a vase in the corner.

Nell’s gloves (latex, cotton, leather, steel tipped at the fingers) and welding masks all were hung in clusters, where she could change them in a moment as her projects dictated. Her lamp dangled from a thick red cord from the ceiling, a pool of yellow enveloping her workshop.

Two pins, two wee ball bearings. Nell used tweezers to make sure they didn’t up and roll away into the crevice between the desk and the wall (it ate more good parts than she could spare). One fresh battery. Some springs, a couple of cogs, three inches of wire. Two buttons painted to look like eyes. Twenty-five minutes of Nell’s fingers pulling sense from the scrap, her whole mind empty but for the rising satisfaction of a tiny creature coming together at her hands. It was only a creature because of the eyes. Otherwise it was just a practical exercise in assembly and kinetic movement. She was running scales on the piano here, conjugating satisfying reams of verbs.

The eyes were a tiny flourish, a vibrato on the high note. They were a perfectly rolled r. They made the tiny machine more than the sum of its parts. They made it look alive as she connected the copper to the battery, as the tiny pin legs moved one after the other. Alive, rather than simply logic. Just cause and effect. Nell looked down at the bobbly little battery with legs, a mess with no casing or style. She could see how every part of him worked—how every part of it worked. It.

There was no magic here. Eyes didn’t make it any more than coils and wire and hinge and metal. Scrap. Practice. The exercise of the steel sprite wasn’t enough for Nell anymore. She wanted more than button eyes. She knew that before the Turn machines could think. That. That was what she wanted.

The sprite skittered clumsily across her desk. A whispered word for a thinking machine was computer. The word sent thrills down Nell’s spine. Forbidden, clever metal things.

Computers had brought about the end of the world. Black Water City was so grateful to have survived—even if it was still sick and wheezing—that the very mention of computers was blasphemy. They were brought to life by reams of numbers that conjured thought, and impulse, and memory out of nothing. Whole tomes of language in numbers and oblique symbols that, when lined up just right, could bring consciousness to steel. She longed for access to it, for how huge it could be.

Nell didn’t think there was any reason to be afraid of numbers and letters. She’d been raised with a wrench in her hand; there wasn’t a thing made of steel that could spook her. She spent her every waking hour listening to the ticking of a machine that kept her alive. She was sure that the rest of the folk in Black Water City were afraid only because they didn’t ask questions, because they believed what they were told. If all you’d ever heard about the history of your world was horror stories about gleaming boxes full of bad knowledge, of course you’d be afraid.

Nell knew better than this. Her father had told her that the metal boxes full of magic had been fine. It was people, frightened, angry people, that had brought the world down. Was it just the boxes, she often wondered, that they were so afraid of? How easy it is to stuff myth and horror into a box. Haunted slices of clever steel, something with hard lines, something cold.

Surely, if there was a way to make a computer look like something people trusted, there’d be a chance for a world full of clever machines again. Friendly-looking computers, full of knowledge, full of answers. Nell sighed. “Think of all we could know.”

Her wish fell dead in the air, onto the desk. She watched her tiny motion machine dance across the surface and tapped her fingernails against the wood, matching the rhythm it walked in. It was almost endearing, its little eyes blankly staring out. She turned it around, and it walked back toward her, a kind of sweetness to its almost dance.

She imagined it blinking up at her, moving of free will rather than rote.

“Hello,” she whispered. It tippled along, silent. Nell wanted so much more, but all she had was this desk, these batteries. The analogue. The not enough.

She sighed, caught the sprite as it attempted to potter away toward a nest of springs. She disengaged the battery, and all movement dropped out of the little creature. A quiet, tiny friend, but not enough.

Kodak nipped at her ankles, not willing to be ignored much longer, then hopped into her lap. This was the specific kind of needy he always became at this time of night. The hunt, then dinner.

“A’right, a’right,” Nell conceded, placing the tiny exercise on a shelf above her tools where a space was open, ready, among a menagerie of twenty, thirty steel sprites just like him. None worthy of presentation, none a big deal. Essentially the shelf was full of toys. Nell sighed, looking up at them, knowing they were a waste of battery energy, knowing that her new little pal wasn’t what Nan had intended Nell to use her gift for. She tucked Kodak under her arm, grabbed her satchel, and walked across her room, away from her cove, to the great bay window. The sprites were trinkets, just enough to satisfy the parts of her that wanted to bring things to life; what Nell needed was something much bigger. Black Water City needed something much bigger, too.

She swung the window wide and stepped out into the fresh night.

CHAPTER 4

Nell sat on the hot red tiles of the roof, looking out over the parklands and the city. Kodak was curled up at her feet. Out beyond the glistening green of the forest the city cracked open with light against the darkened sky, a pomegranate with a split gut, all jewels. When the city had been rebuilt, dedicating electricity rations to illuminating the streets had been the local council’s absolute imperative. Memories of the atrocities had hung around dark corners, and the light kept the deep swaths of national depression at bay. On the roof, Nell kept a little oil lamp by her side (no sense in wasting a battery) so she wouldn’t lose footing, and the glow was a cradle against the blackness of the forest at night.

In the distance stood the tall white monument, Kathleen ni Houlihan. Or Kath, Kate, Katie. Stone and majesty, six hundred and some feet tall. Nell’s mother, Cora, had designed her body on paper at the very same desk Nell drew at. Cora had pulled her construction out of her imagination. For her whole life, Nell had been watching her mother’s contribution rise over the cityscape from this quiet spot on her roof. Day after day Kate grew, and now all that was missing was the right side of her face, a forearm and hand. She was posed gracefully, reaching one hand back out to the ocean and one arm toward the center of the city, stopping, incomplete, at the elbow. Nell usually came out to say good-night to her. They’d been made by the same woman after all.

Nell’s stomach tightened at the sight of her mother’s contribution. There really was only a few months left for her own. Her grandmother’s list scrolled behind her eyes. Make something. Marry someone. Leave. Shame them all by going to the stoneyard. Of the four, only one was something she wanted to reach out and touch, and that was the making. But what? Something worthy and important and powerful. Something that mattered to her as well as to the city.

Nell was a good mimic, had a good eye for structure. She drew excellent plans for all sorts of little civilian machines: cameras, typewriters, useful recreational objects that unfortunately existed already and were in no need of augmentation. Why build something new if one from before the Turn could be salvaged?

“We’re trying to move forward,” her father would insist. “Keep that in mind. You should be contributing something that brings us forward.”

Nell wasn’t sure it was possible to go forward if they didn’t look back to before the Turn. Their island was still disconnected from the rest of the world.

The people of the city lived in a strange, dusty cornucopia. There were so few of them left in a place built for millions that they all had more or less what they needed. Except Nell. She couldn’t fish a worthy idea out of the water at the end of the Livia.

Every time Nell mentioned this looming problem to her father, he told her she was “frustrating but capable,” that he was sure she would think of something and then occupied himself elsewhere.

It was as if the topic of her future were a mild potential inconvenience, preferably one to be avoided, as opposed to a massive shift in Nell’s entire life trajectory.

If she chose the monument, Nell would be gone on early or late shift work, laying stones from one end of the day to another. Her only friend would probably be too embarrassed by her to keep her company, and even if she weren’t, their lives would look so different. Their worlds, unmoored, would drift. Ruby was already untethering herself anyway, shamelessly unpicking the knots of their friendship to loose herself upon the world, and there was absolutely nothing Nell could do about it. Nobody ever made Ruby do anything she didn’t want to.

Ruby would become a tailor or a weaver or whatever she wanted. She could start her own business or marry into a partnership or take ability tests to start life in the Pasture if she wanted; she was whole but for her eye. Ruby stood in a bright atrium with open doors on all sides. Ruby was going to be just fine.

If Nell walked through the door that led to the monument, maybe she would find new friends—once she got over the massive, excruciating shame of falling so far short of the Crane family brilliance. Maybe she could just curl up and disappear. That sounded appealing.