“Another…one of you?”
“Avtomat, yes,” he says. “These days, most of us operate alone or in small groups. But some have acquired domains. His is one of the last.”
“And this person is your friend?”
“He was, once. Now, I do not know,” says Peter. “The rules are splintering. Few of us are left, and the last of the avtomat are hunting one another—cannibalizing one another to extend their own life spans. The artifact you hold is key to stopping this slaughter. I hope my friend will see that.”
“So, what? You’re planning to just take the relic from me and go?”
“No, the relic is yours. I have no desire to possess it again. We will go together, and you will remain under my protection.”
“Your protection?” I ask, voice wavering with disbelief.
“I will allow no harm to come to you.”
“Oh, kind of like a hostage? Nice.”
As he winds the watch, Peter’s fingers begin to shake. The lump of metal slithers out of his hands and thumps to the floorboard. From his slow, deliberate movements I can tell he is hurt much worse than he let on.
“What makes you think I need you to protect me?” I ask. “I could dump you right now and go.”
Head lolling on his neck, Peter faces me.
“And die. You have become visible to the avtomat. They will hunt you for the relic and for what you know about them. These creatures have survived for centuries. They are desperate. Too many have already reached the end of their power reservoirs and expired. They will kill you for the slightest hope of prolonging their own survival.”
“And you’re different?” I ask, leaning across the seat. Reaching down, I scoop the watch off the floorboard.
“Each of us serves his own…purpose,” he says. “Mine does not include killing the innocent. I believe you can help us, June.”
The pocket watch feels dense and warm in my hand. It seems to be vibrating, a buzz that travels up my arm and grows louder in my ears. The complex pattern of humming and clicking swells, somehow drowning out the road noise.
Blinking hard, I toss the watch onto Peter’s lap.
“What—what is that thing?” I ask.
“Avtomat technology,” he says, lifting the device. “It can determine the distance and direction to others. Sometimes.”
“Why does it look like a pocket watch?”
Peter shrugs. “A disguise, for the period in which it was built.”
“It’s a hundred-year-old pocket watch…” I say, trailing off.
Peter turns to me with the watch in his hand, the angles of his injured face smoldering in the dashboard lights. Under his mustache, I see a dimple forming in his cheek as he half smiles.
“So, June,” Peter says. “Now you begin to understand.”
18
LONDON, 1725
In the depths of the ship’s hold, Elena and I hear the cacophony of the harbor well before we see it. We hear the restless shuffle of the passengers above, the calls of the sailors as we come to port, and the bells of other ships. An anxious energy propels the unseen travelers and mariners to disembark—after all, the vessel we inhabit is cursed.
The crew found the steward’s body days ago, their hushed, concerned voices echoing throughout the cargo hold. A torch shone in every corner and suspicious eyes were cast at our crates. But the captain’s men ultimately dragged the strangled corpse away, shut the door to the cargo hold, and did not return.
“Elena,” I call in the dark.
“It’s time,” she responds, her melodic voice full of anticipation. The lock to her trunk is already broken, and I hear the lid creak open.
Bracing my elbows against the back wall of my trunk, I push. The metal hinges groan, iron bands buckling. Weakened by my earlier efforts, the lid bulges and finally bursts open in a spray of splinters. I kick through the remaining wood and step onto the swaying deck on wobbling, poorly repaired legs.
The rocking of the ship seems to amplify and I pitch forward.
But Elena is waiting, her bright and broken face smiling up at me with permanently pursed lips. Lost among the towering walls of crates and trunks, she firmly presses small hands against my torso, pushing, keeping me from falling.
I put a palm against a nearby crate and steady myself.
“I am sorry,” I say. “I did not realize…my legs…”
“It’s all right, Peter. Like everything on God’s earth, we are falling apart.”
She turns so I can better see the fractures that zigzag across her cheek.
Flexing my fists and stamping my feet, I regain my balance. In the dim light of the hold, I can see the skin of my hands is still torn and the clockwork of my joints only hastily repaired. Something clicks inside my torso as I take a few experimental steps. The plains riders left me with grievous injuries. After the cramped voyage, Elena’s repairs are barely holding my body together.
I kneel and trace a finger over the jagged cracks fanning over her face. The girl is right. We are all falling apart. Even the most beautiful of us.
“Unlike everything else living on God’s earth, we can be restored,” I say.
“Cloaks,” she says. “We must disguise ourselves. There’s not much time.”
Luckily, we have come to port near dusk. Above us, the seamen are shouting to other ships, negotiating to take on a pilot who can guide us to the wharves. Maneuvering through traffic has them distracted for now. But porters will be coming down to offload the cargo soon.
Elena and I empty our trunks of the few valuables we have left, disguising ourselves once again beneath riding cloaks stained with mud and grass and other, darker substances. Soon, we are both buried under layers of clothing, our faces turned to shadow under peaked hoods.
“Ready?” I ask Elena, my arm against the door.
She puts a hand on my arm, looks up into my eyes. The shuffle of footsteps is loud above us. Rough thumping, shouts and laughter, sinister harbingers of a world we’ve never seen.
“Does it matter?” she asks.
We emerge from belowdecks together—a father and daughter, arm in arm. Pushing out onto the deck, we mix in among the crowd of off-smelling human passengers as they gather their luggage and prepare to make landfall. A few hundred yards away, the wooden dock is crowded with porters and workers, all shouting and shoving.
Our ship nestles roughly against the rotten wood beams of the dock, creaking and grinding on a bed of waves that smells like a sewer. And now I can see London, rising behind the wharves, a multitude of silhouetted buildings, spewing streams of lamp and chimney smoke, her damp streets swallowed in a foggy dusk.
“Landfall,” shouts a porter, ringing a bell from his elbow. “This way to disembark.”
One hand on Elena’s shoulder, I usher her through the throng to the front. We shove past the bewildered porter and rattle down the gangplank before anyone can stop us. The surprised murmurs at the sight of us quickly fade as my boot heels hit the wooden pier and Elena and I trot away into the crowd. Unburdened by luggage, we are free to abandon the filth-caked shoreline of the river.
“Quickly now,” I say to Elena.
“Yes, Father,” she responds, sarcastic, yet with a smile in her voice.
In moments, we are lost among people.
Night is falling and the evening lanterns are burning in London. After the long darkness of the voyage, the humming excitement and sheer stimulus of the great city dazzles—lights and sounds and stupendous hordes of people. There are more human beings here than I have ever seen at once, or even seriously considered might be alive. Saint Petersburg was home to tens of thousands, but this place…this accumulation of humanity is on another scale, perhaps the hundreds of thousands—or more.
Along the uneven cobblestoned streets near the docks, a parade of human beings passes by—walking, running, sometimes dancing—so similar in their form and yet drastically different in the contrasts of speech, demeanor, and dress.
The streets
are clumped with hay and mud and horse droppings. Laborers and maids and urchins move by, many already dosed with gin, legs wobbling. Wealthy men in powdered wigs pass, ensconced in ornate carriages pulled by snorting horses.
Looking to the sky, I see that this hoard of human animals, wretched and noble, have thrown up such a confusion of noise and light and language that it has pushed away the sight of the stars. The occupants of London are living under a dome of their own humanity—immune to the howl of the wolf or the bite of the cold in a way I have never seen men do. Without fear of God or nature, these souls are choosing between good and evil in a kind of muddy Eden of their own making, safe within their own sturdy walls.
This is the strange state of man which they call civilization. And perhaps most strange, I think, is that by all accounts it is the natural state of humanity.
Elena looks up at me, lamplight glinting from her porcelain face, eyes shining.
“Peter,” she says. “It’s wonderful.”
With the stench of the Thames at our backs, we walk beyond the docks, making our way through groups of sailors and lurking pickpockets, past the nefarious gambling houses and brothels that ring the wharves, waiting to catch sailors like the fishnets they use out on the blue wastes.
As the drunken shouting and the calls of whores fade into the distance, Elena and I shuffle down a side lane, trying to move with confidence as we search for lodging. The meandering road is humped in the middle, a central gutter trickling with black waste. It is too narrow and steep for carts or horses here, so we are briefly safe from the flashing wheels and cudgels of the carriage drivers.
I feel a tug on my cloak. Elena has stopped walking. Her pale face is tilted back, eyes wide. I pivot on my heel to see what she sees.
We have emerged from a warren of filthy streets to the flank of a magnificent church, wrought in unblemished brown stone. Its towers are under construction, surrounded by scaffolding and raw building materials. And among the leaded windows and carved ridges are grand lines of script, scrawled fifty feet high upon its walls, glowing and writhing like flame.
“What is it?” asks Elena, awe in her voice.
On the cathedral’s flank, the drawing of a huge red eye glares at us without seeing. The evil light flutters, beating itself against wet stone. People straggle past us along the wall, directly below the symbol, oblivious to the pulsing waves of illumination.
“I don’t think they can see it,” Elena whispers.
The eye’s gaze seems to cut through the growing fog, radiating and growing in my vision until it is all I can see. With an effort, I turn my face away from it. The reddish haze casts a bloody tint over Elena’s cloak.
I scoop her up in my arms and hold her to me.
“It’s a sign, isn’t it?” she asks. “I have seen that symbol in Favorini’s books. It is an old language.”
“It glows with the fires of hell,” I mutter, turning.
“But someone put it there. A message.”
I clutch her tighter and begin to walk away, pushing through the tide of people walking up the hill in the middle of the road.
“Don’t you understand, Peter?” Elena asks, lips brushing my ear. When I don’t respond, she pulls back from me, her arms still tight around my shoulders. Beneath her cloak, the delicate whalebone spokes of her ribs prod my forearms. Her face is bright, lips parted in awe as she breathes the words: “We are not alone here.”
19
OREGON, PRESENT
I’m watching the stripes on the highway disappear under the headlights of our rumbling car, still holding my aching ribs, drifting in and out of sleep. The clockwork man is driving now with the patience of a machine, hardly moving, keeping his eyes on the blurred road as we speed north along the coast.
My grandfather called this thing—this impossible man—an angel.
Head leaning against the window, tires thrumming beneath me, my mind wanders into the past—to the last day I went to Sunday school. I was maybe ten or twelve, and it was a bright morning. Nearly Christmas, the church hallways smelled like sugar cookies, with walls covered in construction paper cutouts of Jesus and nubby Christmas trees and smiling angels with downcast eyes.
It was the angels that were bothering me.
I was a long-legged girl with scabby knees, and I remember sitting cross-legged on the thin carpet of the Sunday school room and hesitantly raising my hand. The sweet old lady with the cranberry-dyed perm was delighted to tell us all about how angels lived in heaven, doing errands for the Almighty.
But that wasn’t what I wanted to know. And so my damp palm crept back up.
I remember the teacher’s face tightening as I began to sketch out my ideas of how flight dynamics might work for a human-size creature with wings.
Hollow bones and increased muscle mass, you could take that for granted.
But how much would an angel have to eat, to power a body capable of launching itself into the sky? Would they really be able to walk, weighted down by those beautiful, draped gossamer wings? What material could halos be made of ?
The other kids rolled their eyes, annoyed by the breathless questions and childish theories. But in that moment I was more fascinated with the church than I ever had been. I felt as if I were on the verge of understanding something magical. With the faith of a child, I was eager to learn more about these amazing creatures.
Mouth pinched, the Sunday school teacher waved at me to stop talking. Folding her Bible on her lap, she told me my answer.
Because the Bible says so, June.
Because. It never satisfied me. But how much easier would my life be if “because” were enough?
My grandfather used to say the world is full of hidden truths, if only you open your eyes and look. New frontiers are waiting to be explored, no matter what the schoolteachers say or how many books have been written. Maps are just a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe.
But I don’t know if I’m strong enough for this truth.
I lean against the car window, thinking and pretending to be asleep and watching Peter’s face as he drives. He looks like a man, but I’ll bet the ridges on the backs of his hands are made of cables, not tendons. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m looking around a hidden corner right now, studying the flight mechanics of an angel.
No living person could have built Peter. Studying his lacerated face like an anatomical cross section, I’m surprised to see his cheekbone has tiny beaten brass rivets and a stripe of what looks like hardened wood—materials leaden with the weight of centuries. The layers of his flesh are newer, plastics and synthetic fibers and the ripple of muscle-like polymer actuators. The craftsmanship seems both old and new, all at once, and yet all of it is way beyond the ken of modern man.
Feeling the trace of bruises over my rib cage, the flashes of violence I saw at the motel replay in my mind like a movie. Drifting off, my eyes start to close. But a sudden nausea rises in my throat as I recall the sight of the motorcycle hopping the curb. I should have yelled, should have somehow warned Oleg and that poor policeman. I’m tensing my body to shout when my eyes fly open to see Peter watching me.
“The sun is coming up,” Peter says. “We will enter the avtomat domain soon. If we are allowed inside, stay close to me. Do not speak.”
I open my eyes and blink away the cobwebs of half sleep. Sitting up, I stretch my arms and wince at the pain lancing across my body. Through the shuddering car vents, I can smell the ocean on crisp morning air.
“Where is it, exactly?” I ask, swallowing a yawn.
Beyond a haze of bug corpses on the passenger window, I can see the blush of dawn on the horizon. The early morning traffic on the highway has grown thicker as we’ve speared north into Seattle. Ahead of us, the sleeping gray city is engulfed in morning fog, the distant buildings curled against the slate waters of Elliot Bay.
“Where else does a king live?” asks Peter, lifting a finger from the steering wheel to point downtown. A single skyscraper rises from the
bed of mist like a slender black sword. It is prehistorically big, its skin gemmed with moisture, the top of it wreathed in low-hanging clouds.
“But in a castle?”
20
LONDON, 1726
Elena and I find our first home in a grim place near the river, simply called the Lanes—a room on a street so narrow that only a stripe of gray sky is visible walking down it. Not that we can look up, as the residents routinely toss their feces and garbage to the reeking, stained cobblestones below.
The city of London spans five miles, with half a million or so people living here, and more accumulating daily, the new faces absorbed almost imperceptibly into the city itself. The fringes are a no-man’s-land of wind-strewn trash, half-abandoned shanties, brick ovens, heaps of cinders, and men trading sick animals. This periphery is like the flank of a diseased horse, welted and knotted with parasites.
Perpetually in shade, our flat is a single bare room embedded in a long wooden building, poorly constructed, creaking like the hold of the ship we just left and continually rocked by the arguments, shouting matches, drunken laughter, and screaming children of the gin-soaked wretches who eke out their short lives here.
Elena and I secure rent on our leftover coin, and count ourselves lucky our health is not affected by the skin-numbing cold of the fog or the pinch of hunger that daily afflicts these people. Fleas and parasites swarm over our bodies and eventually leap away, still searching for food. On the first night, I listen as a drunken man is robbed, then loudly and slowly beaten to death in the lane below us.
Without the mandate of my first sovereign, and hunted by his successor, a troubling question is growing in my heart—how shall I serve my Word? An aching pain is seeping into my bones. Abandoned to the world of men, how am I meant to make justice from injustice? Am I beholden to the king of this new land?
I quietly slip outside into the lane. Later, I return, my khanjali wet with blood.
Elena greets me at the top of the narrow stairs. She stands in the doorway to our dark, bare room, thin arms crossed over her chest. The weight of despair rests heavy in the curve of her shoulders.