Engines of the Broken World (21 page)

“He’s lying to hurt you, Merce,” Gospel said.

“I know it.”

“Rebekkah killed your mama,” the devil said. “That’s the truth.”

I shook my head. “No, she didn’t.”

“Who the Hell cares? You got a chance to make God pay for what He’s done. Driving your mama mad, killing your papa, leaving you two all alone: if God’s so strong, so mighty, and so loving, couldn’t He have stopped it? Couldn’t He have helped you? But no, all you got was that useless little Minister.”

“We can’t … we’re not
supposed
to understand God’s will,” I said.

“That’s just another way for Him to avoid the blame, isn’t it? I mean, Hell, the guys I killed didn’t understand why I did it. Don’t mean I had a good reason. Least not as the way they would see it, right?”

I didn’t know what to say. There was badness and wickedness in the world, yes, and God let it happen, yes. But I just had to trust that there was a plan, even if I couldn’t guess at what it was. Even if maybe it was a bad plan. “I trust God.”

“That’s helped you a whole lot, hasn’t it, girl? Better to trust Him once you’ve got some leverage. Once the Minister’s in your hands and you can make Him sweat.”

“Why would we help you with that?” Gospel asked.

“’Cause it feels good to get back at someone. Didn’t it feel great to bash my head off? Didn’t it feel great to shoot the other bitch?”

It hadn’t, of course. It had felt terrible. Oh, there was a moment, a tiny, tiny moment, when I had been kind of excited and happy just to do something, to save Gospel and defend myself, but I hated what I had to do to make that happen.

“You don’t understand them at all,” the Minister’s calm voice said from the darkness of the sitting room. I wanted to look for it but didn’t dare tear my eyes from the Widow. “This world isn’t like yours. They’re gentle, even Gospel, who’s halfway to the Devil.”

“I ain’t gentle,” Gospel said, but he didn’t put anything into saying it.

“Children, come away from him.”

I stepped out of the bedroom right away, but Gospel stood there a moment longer. I could see from the doorway his hand tight on the knife, his fingers flexing in the gloves, like he wanted to do something but didn’t dare, or like he was trying to make up his mind. But he only backed slowly to the door, shutting it behind him and coming out into the sitting room to stand beside me.

“You’ll be back,” we heard, muffled and terrible, the man’s voice from the Widow’s dead mouth. “I’ll be waiting.”

“You give me that gun, Merce. If you ain’t gonna shoot at a moment like that, I’ll just hold on to it, okay?”

“I can shoot when it’s needful.”

“Well if that weren’t a needful moment, then do you think there’s really going to be another?”

I thought for a minute and then realized he might be right, and handed him the pistol. He put it back inside his coat.

The Minister was waiting on the loom, bright black eyes shining in the light of a lamp that rested on the floor beside it. I wondered how it got the light there, with its tiny squirrel paws, but maybe the Minister wasn’t holding to one shape very much anymore. Rules were changing, they all said: why not for the made things too?

“He’s right about one thing, children. There isn’t much time left. I’m sorry for that, at least. I would have liked to see you grow up.”

And maybe that was the saddest thing I’d heard yet. The little machine sitting on the loom, and the faint hint of ache in its voice as it mourned for us who weren’t even dead yet. I wished to God that we didn’t have to die, but I didn’t guess He would listen on that particular request.

“What’s really happening, Minister? You got to tell us,” Gospel said.

“And can we believe anything you say anymore?” I asked.

“I have only been untruthful when it was necessary, and I won’t lie to you now.” If the Minister could’ve sighed, it would’ve, I could tell. But that wasn’t something it was made to do, so instead it just dipped its head, rubbing its small paws together. “I will tell you what you need to know. There’s no time left anyway, and you should make your choices in knowledge, not ignorance.”

“Choices?”

“Hush, Merciful,” Gospel said, and the Minister started to speak.

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

“
It began with the Last War. Such terrors. The slaughter of innocents, and no mercy or pity. God grew angry with man, as He had before. We pleaded for kindness this time, though. We remember the Flood—it was awful. We begged for Him to be gentle and He did as we asked, my brothers and sisters and I. Gentle He was, yes, and kind. But now … it’s hard to bear, this kindness. Hard to think that everything will soon be nothing.”

“Wait just a second, Minister. You spoke to God? Directly?” Gospel said.

“I am His Minister here. Of course I have spoken to Him.”

“But you’re a made thing, not a … I don’t know, an angel.”

The little nose twitched. “We
were
made, but not here. Long ago, and in a place that you can’t understand, God made us. Machines, made things, devices: you had so many names for us when we first came to you.”

“I thought all the machines went away after the Last War,” I said.

“We were not machines, Merciful. We were the Ministers. You mistook us, as mortals will.”

Gospel drew a breath for another question, but I shoved my elbow into his ribs and he shut up. We didn’t have the time for his foolishness. Or for mine, if I were honest.

“When God grew angry,” the Minister continued, “we asked for mercy, and He in His wisdom granted it. A slow ending, a winding down, and He would start again. There would be less freedom this time, and fewer opportunities to make bad choices, to choose evil. Even in the ending of days, in the twilight of the world, God knew that people would need guidance away from evil, or else the world might end on its own, outside of His plan. That’s what free will allows, you understand—it means that God’s plan isn’t ever final. You, fragile wonderful creatures that you are, can disturb it and rattle it like the windows in this house.” They were rattling hard, for the wind was fierce and carried so much snow that they looked white.

“So we were sent, one and all, and I was the first, to this very place, where I saw Esmeralda Cally as a girl, freshly married when I arrived. And years later, both of you would be born. And a hundred, a thousand, a million other Ministers went out into the world, under various names and seemings. And every one with a power about them, to calm people and shape people with words, so that you all became better and better. Even you, Gospel, who imagine you are so very wicked.

“Years passed, and the world changed. There were bad times and bad things, but the people were good.” It paused, paused and looked at us for a long while with tiny eyes that seemed happy and sad all at once. “Then the winding down began as we had known it would, whether we made you better or not. Only, if we did it right, all the flocks we had tended would go to Heaven, and if we didn’t … well, not a one of us liked to think about that, I’ll tell you. But for the most part this world died without sin and went to God. The people found their way to Heaven.”

“You made us good so we could die?” I asked, with a catch in my throat.

“Everyone dies, Merciful. Every single person who’s ever lived was meant to die one day. The best we could hope for, the best
you
could hope for, was Heaven afterward, and the eternal bliss of the presence of God. That’s what we tried to give to you, one and all. I think we Ministers did well enough.”

I hadn’t spent much time thinking about Heaven, truth be told. It had always seemed a long way away, and not much of a patch on Earth. Angels and harps and clouds were one thing, but a life was another, with a man and little ones, a house and a garden plot. That was something I wanted, not Heaven. “Why didn’t you just make us better and let us be, then? Let us die naturally in our own time?”

“The world was being wound down, Merciful. This
is
your time. We saved what we could, all that was really valuable. Your souls.”

“God damn it, why didn’t you save
us
? Why didn’t you save Mama or Miz Cally or any of them?” Gospel was real angry, and his hands kept making fists.

“I did save both of them. I brought them to their reward.”

“But they died!” I shouted. “They got killed, the both of them, and you didn’t do a thing!”

“And I regret the manner of it, Merciful,” the Minister said. “I am alone, and my power is almost all tied up in finishing off the world. I could not make an easy end for them. And I cannot for you, either.”

“Then what blasted use are you?” Gospel asked, and I felt like saying just about the same thing. What use was a Minister who couldn’t protect us, like they said they always would? Who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, guide us? Why did it even exist?

And then I knew what we had to do, Gospel and I. He was still ranting on while the sad, dark eyes of the Minister looked at us with something like pity, but I put my hand on Gospel’s arm and he got quiet.

“We got to go talk to Auntie,” I said.

“What for? She’s full of lies like the other one.”

“But she knows how to stop this.”

“She doesn’t,” the Minister said, but I could tell that it was scared, terrible scared, when it said that.

“Maybe she don’t. But we’ll go and listen to her anyway. You just told us there ain’t much you can do, so what use are you to us? Maybe she’s got something instead. I’m sure as heck not ready to die just yet.”

The Minister’s tale was terrible, but was it worse than the thing in the Widow? Not a bit. Worse than Auntie? I didn’t know yet.

“Stay here with me, children, and wait. I can make you comfortable. Make you ready for His embrace.”

“Wait?” Gospel said, spitting out the word. “Wait for the end of everything, for the damned fog to come chew us up like it did Jenny Gone? Hell, no. We’ll take our chances. We’ll make our own choices.” I took up the lantern that was sitting near the little made thing, and we started out of the room.

“Be careful of those choices, children. The world’s ending is no more set in stone than anything else. It can be worse than this. Much worse.” The Minister’s warning words followed us out of the room, as I could tell its eyes did, but I made myself not look back. You should never look back. It’ll only break your heart.

T
WENTY
-F
OUR

The kitchen still had the touch of warmth what the Minister had left in it, and the fire still burned brightly, but I didn’t feel any better for being there. Spatters of blood on the floor, white gunk from where Auntie had got shot, the smell of the gun in the air—I didn’t want to be there longer than I needed. But at the same time, I wasn’t any too eager to go into the cellar and wouldn’t be going at all but for Gospel leading the way. I didn’t expect the thing down there to be too happy with me, and I expected it would still be pretty perilous to talk with.

Gospel took a deep breath and stopped in the kitchen, in the middle of all the wreck and ruination. “Merciful. I got to tell you something. Something hard.”

“Is it about Papa?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. And it ain’t a nice story. It’s a sad story.”

I bit at my lips a second and then let out my breath in a whoosh. “I reckon I should hear it all the same, shouldn’t I?”

“You were just a little girl,” he said. “It was a bit before you turned six. You remember? I was playing with you, with those little wooden men I used to have. We were in the bedroom, and you’d made a fort out of the pillows, and my men were attacking yours.”

It came back to me clear as day. Gospel wasn’t quite nine, and we were still, as best we could be, friends. Even if we argued about our little games. And then … I shut my eyes as Gospel kept talking.

“Such a crack. You looked over at me, and I thought maybe you were going to cry. I knew what it was, but I didn’t tell you.”

“It was the gun. A gunshot.”

“You didn’t know that, Merce. Not yet. We told you later, but you didn’t know it then. I grabbed you down off the bed, and you started to cry because I’d wrecked the game. You still had one of the wooden men in your hand, and you held it real tight to your chest. I pushed you under the bed.”

And that I remembered: under the bed, with the dust and an old sock and a folded-up blanket and a pair of shoes that didn’t fit anyone quite right, too big for me and too little for Gospel. It was hot and close under there. Outside it was late summer, with the bees buzzing around, and the honeysuckle smell filled the air, but under the bed it was just stuffy.

I could remember that I had lain there and watched Gospel flipping down the blankets, and then I was alone, almost in the dark, and then I started to cry. Quiet, gulping sobs, but nobody came: not Mama or Papa, and not Gospel, who’d left me there.

And then something pushed up under the blanket and came and sat down next to me. In the light when it came in, I could see it was a cat: plump and gray and with yellow eyes that shone under the bed.

“Don’t be afraid, Merciful,” the Minister had said to me.

“I’m scared, Minister,” I said, and reached out and drew it in to me. It was soft and didn’t resist, which as a bigger girl I realized had been strange. But all this memory was something I hadn’t thought much about: that terrible day when Papa died, so maybe even then I knew it was peculiar to touch the made thing.

And then the little cat, because that’s what it looked like just then, said something I’d completely forgotten. “Do you know what helps sometimes when you’re afraid?”

“No, Minister.”

“Praying. Will you pray with me, Merciful? Just say what I say. ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven,’” its soft voice said, and I recited the Lord’s Prayer right along with it.

I don’t know how long we lay in the dark that day, me and the Minister. Not all the memory came back to me. But we were there enough time that I felt a little better, I knew that much.

“The Minister came and prayed with me,” I told Gospel, there in the broken-down kitchen six years later.