Moving quickly, a dirty-faced bandit dismounts and loots the corpses of his two fallen comrades. Cursing, he tugs at the bloodstained saddle trapped under the disemboweled horse. He slips in the mud and falls, staining his outer jacket.
“Leave it,” orders the leader. His eyes are dark and scared over a thick brown mustache. His breath is visible in the moist air.
With a last wary look in my direction, the three surviving riders lead their dead comrade’s horse away and gallop for the horizon. I wait until the vibrations in the dirt fade before I so much as blink. Wait until the sight of them has receded into tiny blurred specks before I dare to stir.
Now I am alone in the grass with silent corpses. The sun has finished easing itself over the flat horizon. The great blue-gray orb of the moon has appeared, jovial, its faint light sending my jagged shadow reaching out across the grass. In the sudden chill of night, I can feel I am badly broken. Alone, I am beyond repair.
But Elena may still be alive. I must protect her. I promised.
I take a handful of grass with my thumb and two remaining fingers. With a violent yank, I drag myself an arm’s length forward. Part of my hip and my right leg stay in the grass behind me. My left leg is still attached but mostly useless. I pull again with my one good arm, leaving a slug’s trail of broken machinery glinting darkly under moonlight.
But the grass is plentiful and my grip strong.
Stars fade into view through evaporating purple skies as I leave the wreck of my body behind, one arm’s length at a time. Night engulfs the vast undulating plains. And hidden here among the blades of grass, I am reduced to a crooked head and part of a torso, cloaked in black wool and broken armor, relentlessly slithering forward. Without pause or thought, I pull myself toward Elena, my sister—through the muddy footsteps of three riders who know nothing of the horror they’ve left for dead.
13
OREGON, PRESENT
The two strange men are facing off in the middle of the empty two-lane highway, jackets glistening under a light coating of rain.
“Leave her to me,” is what the tall one said.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
The violence of the last hour has passed through me like a shock wave. Blinking away the flashes of brutality, I force myself to think only of survival.
I crawl to my feet and head toward the hulk of the police cruiser. It rests half off the road, cockeyed on blown tires, the driver’s-side door hanging open. Inside, I can see the silhouette of a shotgun, standing at attention on a vertical mount. The radio must be broken, sputtering to itself in tones of gray fuzz.
My side is aching. Elbows skinned, my hair is streaked with blood and tears. My cell phone is still in the hotel room, but a stolen police car will be attracting attention. And when the police arrive this time, it won’t be an ambush. All I need to do is wait—to stay alive long enough for the cavalry to show up.
The two men ignore me as I hobble away, both of them strafed in the glaring headlights of the muscle car. They are speaking to each other over the hiss of wind through trees, though I can barely make sense of their words.
“Old friend,” says the silver-haired man, “the Worm Mother will be pleased to hear of your survival. Wrong decisions can be made right.”
“We have bigger concerns,” says the tall one. “The clockwork is slowing. Too many have died. We need this woman—”
“She is short-lived. By first axiom, her life is forfeit to forbidden knowledge.”
“Your secrets mean nothing if you have passed from this world.”
The two stare at each other for a long, tense moment.
“Then you will join the rest,” says the silver-haired man, quietly. He advances, hands at his sides like a gunslinger. He takes a swing and the tall man dodges, boots scraping wet pavement. “You will become food for the strong.”
Reaching the cruiser, I rest my palms on the warm hood.
Down the road, the two men lock arms and smash into each other with complicated-looking punches and blocks. They move like shadows, silent, unnaturally fast. Their fighting happens in vicious bursts of movement, and I hear only the dull smack when a punch connects.
Groaning, I lean into the demolished police car and take the keys from the ignition. In the glow of weak headlights, I fumble through keys until I find one that fits the gun mount. Unlocking it, I wrench the weapon out.
The combat shotgun is surprisingly light. The textured grip feels like pebbles under my palms. My dad taught me to shoot when I was young, but the gun I learned on was smooth wood, a hunting weapon. This shotgun is already loaded, bristling with a few extra red shells on a plastic bandolier mounted to the stock.
Emerging from the cruiser, I see the men circling each other.
“I never understood her fascination with you,” says the silver-haired man. He is holding an ornate, curved dagger like he knows how to use it. In a detached way, I recognize the antique as an Ottoman hancer blade, its horn handle decorated in silver.
“I was always the better choice,” he adds.
The tall one has his fists up. He pivots on his back foot, head sliding back and forth, rotating his body warily to face the smaller man.
I level the shotgun at my hip and wait.
The silver-haired man lunges with the knife and the tall one bats his wrist away, grabbing at the man with his other hand. But the lunge was a feint. Turning his back on his adversary, the smaller man flicks his knife straight up over his shoulder.
The blade slices open the big man’s face from chin to forehead.
Falling to a knee, he presses his palm flat against the wound. The man doesn’t yell in pain or even blink—just turns to watch me as I take a step closer. In torn motorcycle armor, the silver-haired man stands over his opponent, knife out.
“She dies now,” he says, gesturing at me with the blade.
I shoulder the shotgun, squinting down the sight.
“No she doesn’t,” I say, pulling the trigger.
The shotgun roars and kicks against my shoulder, launching a cloud of buckshot. The metal pellets spread out and rip into both men. Shreds of leather and fabric spray into the air like feathers from a burst pillow. The knife bounces away as both men are turned around by the impact. The larger one takes the opportunity to stand. The silver-haired one shields his face and glares at me over his elbow.
He seems annoyed.
Pulling the trigger again, I advance. Buckshot dances off the pavement and both men dive away, still fighting each other, ignoring me and the hail of lead pellets ripping through the air.
Hardly seeing beyond the exploding muzzle in front of me, I keep pulling the trigger until the gun clicks. My shoulder throbbing, I blink into the dazzling headlights, in disbelief that the two figures are still grappling. As my eyes adjust, I begin to back away, my fingers wrapped tightly around the empty shotgun.
Something is wrong, really wrong.
In the sudden quiet, the tall one catches the other by his silver hair and yanks.
Part of the man’s scalp peels away, sickeningly easy, taking his forehead and upper cheek with it. I can’t comprehend the sight. Beneath the skin, I see a skull shape made of translucent blue plastic. When he blinks, only the remaining eyelid closes. The other eye is wide and round and staring without the skin of an eyelid around it.
I drop the shotgun clattering to the pavement.
Blood pounds in my temples at the horrific sight. Putting a hand over my mouth, I take panicked breaths. My nostrils are filled with the nauseating smell of gunpowder and sweat and burned rubber.
In a blur, the silver-haired man launches himself at the larger man. Swinging his fists like cinder blocks, he buries staccato punches into the other man’s torso. I can feel the concussion of each strike from where I stand. Grabbing the larger man by the shoulders, the silver-haired man draws back for a kick and lands a boot heel on his kneecap.
The leg bends backward, cracking loudly, and the tall man collapses.
<
br /> Now I’m scrambling to pick up the shotgun again, watching the silver-haired man as he turns to me. He’s picked up his dagger from the road. Seeing the panic on my face, he grins, then reaches up and slowly peels the rest of the flap of skin away from his skull, leaving half a face.
Holding the strip of skin and hair in one gloved hand, he drops it to the road.
“Not one human in a billion has seen what you’ve just seen,” he says, a lidless eye trained on me as I stand up with the shotgun in my numb hands. I stumble backward, feet dragging on asphalt, still trying to comprehend.
It’s not a man, some part of me is thinking. Not a man at all.
The mannequin-thing keeps smiling with half a mouth, takes another step. Half silhouetted in the headlights, he draws his arm back to throw the knife.
“Not that it matters,” he adds.
Then he stops in place, body rigid. His exposed skull flashes an electric blue and he coughs once, loudly. Falling stiffly to his knees, fingers twisting, he pitches forward onto his face. He lies in the road, shivering, eye rolling in its socket. I think he is trying to crawl, shaking arms pulling in tight against his chest.
Behind him, the tall man sits on the pavement, broken leg splayed out. He’s got a stun gun in one hand, the other pressed flat against the wound to his face. Breathing shallow, he locks eyes on me and drops the gun. He puts up his free hand, palm out in surrender.
“June,” he says. “Please. I am not here to harm you.”
“Then what do you want?” I call, aiming the empty shotgun at him.
“I am at your mercy,” he says. “I am here to plead for your help.”
14
GREAT EUROPEAN PLAINS, 1725
Grip a handful of grass. Pull. Release. Reach again.
The gods who haunt the hidden angles of the constellations offer their assurance to me through clear patches of sky above. The bright eye of Mars watches as I am soaked in dew and rain, and smiles to see the blood washing out of my cloak. Part of my face is caught on a serpentine root, the leather of my cheek torn, leaving an obscene hole.
And so it continues.
Under the gaze of a starry night, my body, made lighter by loss, squirms its way over waves of grass. The great smiling moon is fading on a pink horizon when I finally see the silhouettes of four horses tied to a scrubby tree.
The bandits are sleeping. My Elena is a dark pile of robes next to a smoldering campfire. Her hands and feet are tied. I slide closer through dirt, my one good arm out, head cocked to the side and eyes open wide to the predawn light. My broken torso drags entrails of metal, leather, and wax.
A shape stirs. I pause, arm outstretched.
Someone tosses a reindeer hide to the side. A bandit stands, head turning warily, still clumsy with sleep. The man steps closer to where I am hidden in the grass, my body sprawling and deformed. He stops, tugs at his trousers, and sprays an arc of steaming piss into the dewy grass.
I watch silently as he turns back and stumbles toward his sleeping hides, stopping when he notices Elena. He squats next to her and whispers something. I continue dragging myself forward. My dirt-stained cuirass crunches over stalks of grass as I pull myself over the periphery of the camp. But the rider is not listening for danger. He is pushing Elena silently onto her back, a forearm pressed to her neck. Untying her ankles, he roughly spreads her legs.
The man is grinning, teeth glinting red in the dawn.
I pick up a helmet as I pass the man’s sleeping mat. One urgent, broken lurch at a time, sliding through wet grass, I plant the metal bowl of it into the dirt and drag myself forward. The armored hat is made of steel, fur-lined and peaked in the middle.
“What?” the bandit exclaims, recoiling onto his knees as he finds nothing beneath her cloak but the cold anatomy of clockwork. “What—what are you?”
At the last moment, he turns, his dark curly hair rusty in the morning light—eyes widening at the sight of my ruin, cheeks twitching in fright. I am rearing back on the remains of my left elbow, helmet lifted high in my good hand. The man is choking on a shout as I bring the helmet down.
The metal bowl glances over the bridge of his nose. His jaw snaps shut and he starts to fall, fear and blood mingling on his face. Elena kicks with both legs, sending the rider flailing onto his back with a grunt, the air knocked from his lungs.
I bring the helmet down again.
This time it lands with a wet crunch in the middle of the rider’s face. Again. A half dozen more times until I feel the skull crack and the grass is littered with teeth and blood and saliva.
I hear a gurgling scream from across the camp and see Elena is on her feet. Acting on an assassin’s instinct, she has freed her hands, tugged her stilettos free from the fallen rider’s pack, and pierced the hearts of his companions. In moments, there are no men living.
The smoldering fire now warms only metal, wood, and leather.
“Oh, Peter,” says Elena. “Oh my poor Peter.”
Elena’s arms encircle my head, cradling my remains on her lap. With her other hand she is patting my body, feeling for the extent of the damage. Faintly, I hear the trickle of blood flowing into the grass and the whinny of a nervous horse.
“You are very damaged,” Elena says, her voice hollow.
“As long as my anima is intact,” I respond, “my vessel can be repaired.”
“The empress will hunt us.”
“She will,” I say to Elena, my eternal sister. “But we will survive. We will run forever and ever. Remember, little one, no matter her power, the empress is only a mortal human being. You and I are something more.”
I let my eyes settle on the curve of her porcelain cheek, a bright arc in the dawn. Elena was once a mindless doll and I a lifeless husk. But now…she and I are more than things.
“We are avtomat,” I say.
15
OREGON, PRESENT
“Please,” says the tall man, sitting hunched in the middle of the road. His legs are laid out before him, one of them twisted at a terrible angle, the heel of his hand pressed hard against his face, desperately holding a knife wound closed.
“I promise I will not harm you,” he says.
“Yeah?” I ask, leveling the shotgun on him. “That’s good to know. Stay there. The police will be here any second.”
With shaking fingers, I pop the remaining couple of shells off the ammunition loop one by one and shove them into the gun with my thumb.
Click.
“But they will not,” says the man. He leans over, his face in shadow, and puts both hands on his damaged knee.
“Our friend here is jamming radio signals. If police were coming, they would have arrived already. We have minutes before he is operational. You do not have enough ammunition, and I am too damaged to protect you.”
Click.
I pause and glance over at the man with silver hair. If it’s a man. Part of his face is peeled off, a chunk of his hair lying on glittering pavement, quivering in the wind and still attached to a piece of his scalp. His fingers are clawing the ground blindly, body shaking and writhing.
He looks like roadkill to me.
“What is that thing?” I ask.
“He is called Talus,” he says, struggling to bend his leg straight. “He is…avtomat.”
I blink, remembering.
“Avtomat? The Old Believer’s doll wrote that.”
“You activated the girl of Saint Petersburg?”
I shrug at him, holding the loaded shotgun across my chest.
“Few humans know that word,” he says, finally wrenching his broken leg into a straight line. “The avtomat guard the secret of their existence. Always, and to the death.”
I notice no blood is coursing from the open wound on his face.
“So you’re saying…” I begin to ask.
I stop. It’s crazy. It can’t be true.
“You’re saying that guy is a machine,” I say, voice flat.
Looking over at the struggl
ing body, I pull the shotgun tighter across my chest. Then I shudder. The roadkill is looking right back at me, eye wide open. His blue skull drags against the pavement, one of his arms flopping. He’s making a grunting sound, trying to get up.
“Others are coming,” says the tall man, hand still pressed to his face. “We must flee.”
“Okay,” I say, backing away. “Okay, this is fucked.”
“Talus will kill you for the relic,” says the tall man, holding up his car keys to me on outstretched fingers. “I can help you. Take my car keys.”
I walk closer to him, wary. Reach out and snatch the keys away.
“Why? Why are you helping me?”
“The avtomat are at war. They do not understand how to…recharge their batteries. His master,” he says, nodding at the fallen man, “is collecting every artifact, studying them—even simple automatons, like the girl of Saint Petersburg.”
“You mean my research?”
“The Kunlun Foundation is avtomat. They use your expertise to find lost automatons, then send agents to the artifacts before you arrive. They are desperate to understand how the avtomat work, to restore their own power.”
Wolves.
I clench my jaw, feeling a pinch of anger. It makes sudden sense. The wolves were always one step ahead. They always knew my next destination, and so they showed up ahead of me and took what they wanted.
“You’ve been spying on them?” I ask. “Spying on me—”
The tall man looks at the flailing corpse that is now grinding across the pavement. He gestures at his black car as a far-off buzzing sound rises.
“No more time.”
With a painful-looking lurch, he pushes himself off the pavement. Clenching one hand against his side and the other to his face, he drags his hurt leg behind him, putting only light pressure on it, limping toward the passenger door of the muscle car.
I nose the shotgun up, covering him. He shrugs at me, not stopping.
“If we stay here, we will die,” he says.
Beyond the next turn in the road, I see motorcycle headlights cutting through rows of pine trees. The silver-haired thing has dragged itself onto its knees. Head cocked, it’s staring at my chest, a sheen of skull gleaming under torn skin. Reaching up, I feel the dark crescent of the relic hanging outside my shirt.