Spare and Found Parts (16 page)

N
ell burst from the door out of the hospital, and the daylight hit her like a bright wave. She gasped in the day, drank in the freshness of it, her eyes dark planets. Certainly it was a thick, heavy day with a blanket of dusty clouds, but it was day. It was not the hospital, sick and ashen. She felt as though she had been in there for years, had become older with the sheer bleak of the place, though maybe the drugs hadn't quite worn off yet.

Her arm twinged. She couldn't look down at it. She only needed the painkiller to last until she got home. Just a little longer.

She was halfway back onto the broad central street at the base of the Needle when she realized she'd left her mother's gloves in Oliver's workshop. Too late now. Too late. No point holding on to them anyway,
the soft shadow of protection left by her mother. It was her own hands that had done this.

Some people were on the street, going to their jobs. The few straggling plaid and neon construction folk didn't even look at her, their eyes as gray as the ceiling of foreboding humidity and smog above them. They did not see the filthy teenager with a camping bag strapped to her back, dressed in the tight black uniform of a thief, red bandage on her arm, pupils the size of dinner plates. They were busy.

She tried to dash, but her legs felt like they were made of different material from the rest of her. They trembled as she went. So she walked, wobbly but with strong, urgent purpose. She held herself as though she had done nothing wrong, as though she had committed no strange or terrible act and was not about to commit another. Certainly not. That new smile poked the corners of her tired mouth. Something was alight in her veins, and her mind was both miles above her body and in it, feeling every part of it, this exhilarating day, these wounds and this weight and this victory.

The weight of the bag was staggering. Her father's kinetic limbs were designed to match and balance the weight of their humans. Legs, Nell thought. She wanted to say it aloud, to stop the gray man who was walking toward her and tell him, “Oh, oh, just you
wait, just you wait to see what I make.” She wanted to scream up to Kate's stone blindness, “You'll never have me now, never, never, never!”

The smile itched to grow across her face; she thought for a moment about kissing Oliver. Well, about whatever that almost kind of kiss was. Kissing was probably great when the other person didn't feel guilty about it. She decided then that she would never again kiss a person who didn't want to be kissed.

Her bicycle was there, chained to a lamppost. Bicycle, road, park, home, rest; then build. The words propelled her on.

“Nell!”

Ruby called her name, and the entire world slowed to a blur. Nell wasn't sure where the voice was coming from; but then Ruby's hand was on Nell's shoulder, and she almost screamed.

“Oh, oh, Ruby, hello.” It came out of this new mouth of hers, a control she wasn't sure she had voluntarily mustered.

Ruby's face was a closed gate. Her anger was quivering on her lips; her brow, a furrow of
I know what you have done
. She was dressed in soft, slate clothing. So unlike her usual multitude of patterns. Her dense mane of curls was smothered under a woolen hat. She was trying to be invisible.

This was the last day that Ruby would wear her eyepatch.

“How are you?” Nell asked.

Impotent and stupid question. When they were children, Nell had painted flowers onto Ruby's patch with a tiny brush and paints, green and white and red acrylics. It was a garden; it was a canvas; it was her chosen badge of honor. It was as much Ruby as the rest of her. Now the patch was being left behind for a new part. Today was important. All these things blurred together and Nell couldn't connect them with the part of her brain that knew how to speak.

Ruby growled, heavy, furious: “What have you done?”

Nell couldn't say a thing. She couldn't say she was sorry; she couldn't say good luck. Couldn't tell Ruby she loved her.

“I saw you leave the hospital.” Ruby examined Nell's face for a moment and was aghast. “Your eyes. What did you take? Did Oliver give you something? What did you
do
?”

Ruby's voice was rising in volume and if she drew attention to them, everything would fall apart. Nell couldn't become visible, not for what she had just done, not for what she was about to do.

Nell wanted to say how excited she was for Ruby. Instead, she said, “The key to the wardrobe is on the
workbench. He's not hurt. Tell him I'm sorry. I left the door at the side unlocked.”

Two girls stood facing each other on Old Talbot Street under the long, fat shadow of the Needle, under the blindness of Kate, and something happened that had been aching to happen for months and months and months. A single heavy, cool drop of rain landed on Nell's cheek. Another landed on Ruby's nose.

The sky had begun to crack. The filth and density of summer had shattered. Ruby stared up into the changing air as the water drizzled down, its freshness on her face.

Nell began to walk away, goose pimples rising on her skin as the air changed. Ruby was saying something, but she wasn't listening. Bicycle, road, park, home, rest. Her smile opened up again as the rain grew steady and the ground changed color, filled in by new wetness. The soft gray of concrete turned a charcoal black and shone.

By the time she started to cycle away, Ruby had gone. The pain in her arm had become quietly present, its shocking red voice echoing through the corridors of her body, pushing the volume of her ticking right up, and up again. She was less stoned now, and the task of getting to her house felt monumental as she pedaled faster, her satchel impossibly heavy. The spokes of her
bike wheels and the ticking of her chest beat a speeding rhythm together. She would carry this weight if it took her all day to reach her door.

At least she had the rain. She focused on her skin, her face, and the fresh gorgeousness of this change. It felt like love. It carried her home. It did not stop. It kept getting heavier.

L
ater, still jittering from adrenaline, Nell set about stealing the ladder from its precarious lean at the back of the Crane house. She didn't expect to be noticed.

The rain was a fresh, calming drone on a light wind. It had escalated, but Nell could feel that it was still only blossoming; the fat, violent bloom of this storm had not truly shown itself, its terrifying petals not yet open. Droplets misted Nell's face and caught on her eyelashes. She loved it but didn't have time to relish the pleasure of the change.

Instead, she turned fat old screws to release the ladder's tension and then, with a whoosh, let it slip down to half its original size. As steel slid into the steel, she jolted. What would it feel like if she got her finger stuck in there? It would get sliced right off. Her ticking rose a little at the suggestion.

Such a dangerous thing, the folding of a ladder. And so awkward to carry. Should she build a person out of such an awkward thing? What if he inherited that clumsiness, that inclination toward accident, that potential for unintended violence? Well, it was too late now. A ladder was the best thing she had to make a scaffold: great-quality metal, and lots of it. She was almost back to the door when she heard a yell above the symphony of new wet weather.

“Nell! What are you doing? I need to get back down!”

Her father, soaked, stood precariously on the slope of the roof.

“What are you doing up there?” she shouted to him, both astounded and extremely concerned, quickly inventing plausible excuses for why she was taking the ladder indoors. She unfolded it and extended it slowly up toward him. The roof tiles shone with rain and her stomach clenched at the sight of Julian climbing down so quickly, so confidently, no fear of the wet ground betraying him. He moved like a cat with too long limbs, though the steel on the ladder was slick.

After Julian had jumped down the last few steps and landed on the thick grass with a squelch, he looked at his daughter quizzically. “Should I even ask?”

Nell took a leap of faith. “No. Best that you don't. Why were you on the roof?”

“Lightning rod.”

Nell wasn't in the least bit surprised. There was always something. A lightning rod. She shook her head a little, hid a smile.

“Going to try to get our generator up and running with no support from the land lines. Will you put it back when you're done?” He took off his glasses and began to wipe them on his jacket.

“There might not be a lot of it left when I'm done. I didn't know we had a lightning rod.”

“We didn't an hour ago. We do now. Will you get me a new ladder to replace it?”

“Yes.”

“Grand so.”

And that was all that was said about the ladder.

Julian didn't even notice the kettle was missing.

Nell sat down to her blueprints once more, her new bounty in mind, pushing threads of guilt about what might be happening back at Oliver's armory out of her mind. She wasn't proud of how she behaved, but here before her lay the most beautiful distraction. The body on the page splayed out like a star, arms and legs outstretched, the head making a fifth point
on a pentagram. Could she summon him from here? Pull his form out of the blank netherworld of paper. A witch summoning a demon from the mouth of an aligning world. There was no time now to be fretting over Oliver Kelly and Ruby Underwood when she had all this to play with.

She knew his lines so well and completely, but they could no longer be just wish or folly; now they were plan and instruction. Numbers began to come in useful little equations: blooming like tiny accidental gardens.

The rain rattled an invisible percussion. It sounded like life.

A list of names was scrawled along the margins, then scribbled out. How can you name someone you've never met?

She'd drawn his face a hundred times. The kettle wouldn't look like him, but in her head she knew his true face. She'd drawn him smiling and crying and with his tongue sticking out, but then she realized he probably wouldn't have a tongue. Oh. She looked at the stolen kettle. Now wasn't the time for daydreaming. Now was the time for composition.

She'd considered skin for him, had just the dress to cut it from. It was cream coffee warmth and strong old silk. Her mother had worn it only once. Nell was
certain she would never have the big day to wear it herself. She would cut off the lace and keep it in a box. She would light a candle and place it on top and burn it until it was gone, and she would say she was sorry. But not yet.

The largest plans hung up in the window frame, so the light of the day made the paper almost glow and the lines were a dark map against it. Nell stood below her work and used it as a projection to lay his parts out; it was the constellation by which she charted her course. It was almost to scale.

The stoat was locked outside Nell's room. Kodak got too curious, nudging bolts and screws with his little black nose, chewing wires. At first he scratched at the door, but then he was quiet. Nell pictured him curled up, waiting for her to come for him.

Spines are strange things, strong delicate blocks of bone sewn together with impossibly sensitive little threads of nerve and muscle. They had to be able to move and curl and bend but also keep a person standing—a complicated string of pearls.

Shoulders don't need to be broad. Her creation's shoulders definitely didn't. Nell wasn't designing it—sorry, him—for work. That's what broad shoulders were normally for, weren't they? Carrying heavy things. Building things. Being strong. Nell wasn't
sure if he would need to be very strong, though for a moment she closed her eyes and pictured him carrying her on his shoulders.

She had never sat on anybody's shoulders, not that she could remember. But she reinforced the steel of them, added an inch on each side, imagining herself picking nectarines from high branches of trees in the forest and eating them, the sweet juice running from her mouth to her chin. Her creation would marvel at its fresh gold, its life.

She made a lot of mistakes. She burned through gloves, two pairs, with the welding iron. (Julian didn't notice that was missing either.) Her head ached from the fumes.

When the body itself was finally a clumsy rib cage, a set of hips and shoulders, and a spine, it made an ugly noise as it moved. But still, it moved. It looked like a useless musical instrument or a broken chair. It was utterly inhuman. Still when Nell blurred her eyes, she could see him emerging from the skeleton of it; she could see him sitting up on her work desk and smiling.

The kettle didn't make for the best face. Transferring her imagined creation onto it hadn't been entirely successful, and carving around it was difficult and frustrating. It ended up looking like a kettle with two holes and a nose-ish mound. The hinge she had fashioned for
the jaw wasn't—it just wasn't right, but it would have to do for now. She affixed a fulcrum tightly to the top of the spine, a hollow cavern, a twisted unhandsome piece of soldered steel. Maybe later she'd make him a mask. She'd get him standing first, make him beautiful after. Beauty wasn't important; what was important was that he was alive.

The wires from the Lighthouse were a bundle in her hands, and she separated them delicately, then patiently threaded them onto the form. The clumsy, mismatched plugs hung from each shoulder, each hip, and one inside the kettle skull.

Left leg. The shell was matte black cast iron. The knee and ankle were seamless; the foot was sturdy. Must have cost whoever it belonged to a solid fortune.

Right leg. Exposed wiring on the knee, an older model. She soldered a crescent moon of steel (once from a stockpot, long cut to pieces) onto a set of hinges and arranged something of a knee for him. She hoped it didn't give him a limp. The rest of the leg was great: strong ankle movement, good intuitive foot. Same length as the left. Nell, even in her high, had measured them in the hospital.

Arms were a matching pair. Their shell was robin's-egg blue and made of tin—mid-era. This had been the height of style maybe five years ago. When people took
to augmented limbs, they all wanted theirs to be the most up-to-date, the most flashy, the most pretty, the most beautifully designed. This was a quiet culture of wealth and class as well as one of survival.

Nell understood the folks who painted their arms and legs. It marked celebration, growth. She remembered thinking how it would be nice if her scar could look more deliberate. Artistic, even, instead of whatever it was. Not quite horrible. Sort of sad.

As time passed, the colorful, bejeweled biomechanics trend moved further toward the limbs looking like armor, like new strength. Nell understood that, too. Her creation would look like all the eras of her father's inventions pieced together, a history book.

The hands had joints and palms. They flexed and moved. Nell took one in hers and interlocked their fingers. It wasn't quite the same as the hand from the shore. It wasn't Oliver's hand or Rua's from the dark of the Lighthouse. She frowned and retrieved the hand from the shore from her work desk. It was around the same size as the prosthetic.

Nell knew that she had only one try to convert the hand from the sea into something that moved; there couldn't be any mistakes. But it wasn't worth building him without this hand. It was still reaching out to her, after all this.

It took her longer than the rest of the assembly combined to deconstruct the hand, drill out hollows in each finger while leaving enough structural integrity to keep its form familiar. Threading wires through, gently soldering tiny hinges, transferring the technology and sockets from the stolen hand into the hand gifted to her by the sea: all this had her trembling with anticipation. It came together at her will, and a cocktail of delight and pride swelled inside her. She would hold this hand. She would be held by this hand.

When it was done, she brought it over to where the rest of her creation lay ready to be strung together. The once ladder was the core of the thing, and all the rest of the pieces lay about it, ready to be connected. Each limb connected to a socket: shoulder, shoulder, hip, hip. Everything fit, sort of. After a moment or two it looked like a person, technically. Personish. Boyish.

She placed the delicate glass eyes into the kettle head and with tiny tweezers connected this wire to that wire—and almost crushed one of the lenses with the force of her eager fingertip. Tiny cameras sat inside their orbs, or something like cameras. Eye technology, now that was something utterly unreal. The eyes would light up and glow, she hoped. They'd respond to a central computer. They'd see her. They'd like her.

He'd like her.

The tiny computer was the most important thing. She affixed the wires that fit. Red wires, blue wires. She made a little cradle inside the kettle head so it wouldn't rattle around. A music box for a brain, Nell thought. Maybe he would sing. Just run a few volts through him.

Nell wrapped long strips of taupe silk around the parts of the creation that still looked like a ladder, still looked like hinges and wires. Still looked machine. The strong silk of her mother's dress looked more like bandages wound around sharp angles than skin around flesh, but it would have to do for now.

When he was finally assembled, when the clock on the wall had smeared the time of night into mystery. Nell stood and admired him. The room smelled like hot steel. She half shut her eyes. Yes, it was a him for sure. In the blur between her eyelashes and reality, she imagined him rising, light pouring from his eyes, his kettle face suddenly warm, suddenly more human, suddenly boyish.

His mismatched glass eyes and their minuscule delicate cameras stared up at the ceiling above them both. He was so thin. A wire frame. Nell placed her hands on her hips; they would be alike. Two spindly, terrible monsters. Quite a pair.

Now, she thought, what next? She had to charge
him, somehow. She scanned the room: The little socket there wouldn't be enough; she'd have to find a way to—

The first strike of lightning hit the bottom of their garden with a crack and a flash. Strange, dazzling joy roared through Nell as the window flashed again.

There it was. The lightning rod above her ate it all up, all that power. After all this just the spark she needed.

She couldn't wait to meet him.