SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“I don’t believe in that sort of exchange, Miss Rose. It’s not a fair trade, money for emotions, or in this case, the lack thereof. All people have emotions, even if they try their hardest to contain them, and I’m not keen on having to consider a second sentient being under this roof.” She brought her glass up, as if proposing a toast. “I’m a princess in a tower, Miss, prepared to deal with no emotions but my own.”

And yet, Rosie’s assistant had caught plenty of words on the street about her nighttime visitors.

“I have stated my wishes, Miss, and I know you are the person to accomplish them. Your fame precedes you, as they say. Your skills…. The dolls you’ve made for the children of the rich and powerful. Dolls that move in the night. Dolls that crawl and walk and brawl…. Dolls that think, even?”

Rosie would rather not speak of the dolls. She’d kept the pieces of her first, built by Varadys before she’d met him, stacked inside a safe in a corner of the shop, and Theo’s horrified eyes had been enough to prove that he, too, could hear the rattling.

“What kind of…look are you interested in?”

“Something that looks, and acts, real will suffice. Gender or appearance details are irrelevant.”

“And…anatomical details?”

The lady gave her a sly smile over the rim of her glass.

“Do you think I need a sexual aid, Miss?”

She didn’t reply. She’d realized, early in life, that there was no point trying to understand people’s inner desires from the curl of their pulse, or the whiteness of the teeth they bared in a casual smile.

The order was simple, then. A companion piece. A robot. A mechanical person that wouldn’t stand out in a decayed palace where the ink was gold and the letters smelled of roses.

She sat at the drawing board the following afternoon, behind the counter of the shop she owned, even though she’d never bothered to remove the name of her mentor from the sign. Varadys Automata, that was what it said, and she was just Miss V, to most people. Petite, head a mess of golden thread, hands elegant but calloused—like a thief’s. Monsieur Varadys had been dead for five years, and she kept his ashes in a metal urn, sculpted to the approximate shape of his skull while he’d been alive to approve it. She’d placed him above the fireplace, as a reminder— you might be alone now, Rosie, but I’ve left you big shoes to fill.

In her drawing pad, lines at the end of her pencil took the shape of what she assumed must be a good-looking person. She started with the hardest option, a boy’s face. Boys were difficult. She could lay out the whole span of the universe, examine it with a loupe of the highest quality, and return without finding more than one to her liking. She’d loved a boy, once. To think of it, herself a precocious eight-year old, and he a dreamer selling himself for wings. Ten more years, and she would have built him a pair, sturdy enough to escape. His features found their way into the blank paper and she didn’t fight them. Dark skin, wavy hair, blue-green eyes. He wore an eyepatch, and his body was covered in scars.

At noon, the door struck the chime hanging from above, and Theo walked in with winter on his back. Elegant glasses and a penchant for cravats that went a little too tight around his throat—she’d never asked, he’d never told—she supposed he was good-looking too, if only a little less authentic, if only a little more conscious of his own appeal. Theo was her second assistant in five years, since she’d taken over the shop. The first one had been a girl, but Rosie had found herself falling for her pronounced Cupid’s bow and the way her fingers moved when she adjusted the legs of the tin dolls on the shelves. There was something about femininity that drew her in. Something about the way some women sprayed their perfumes and applied their powders, wrapping themselves in protective layers of scent and color, refusing the crude touch of the same air that enveloped common mortals. The women in her childhood had been that way too—tall and proud, self-assured, knuckles white over the reins that drew people, and only the right people into their lives, puppets on a string, choreographed to perfection by the hands that had once rocked her to sleep.

“Myers paid ahead, two dolls to be delivered next month at the townhouse…” Theo flipped through his notes as he delved further into the shop, reaching ahead of his own steps to open the hidden counter door, the final boundary that protected the half of the shop where she didn’t have to worry about presenting herself, too, as a doll ready to be sold. “…got a couple more orders, but nothing you’ll have to attend to in person.” He closed his notebook with a blunt sweep of his right hand, and removed his glasses to let them hang by a gold chain at his neck. “But now you must tell me. The lady. What did she want?”

She recounted the small meeting, and he nodded along, attentive, drinking her every word, peeking over her shoulder to analyze her half-conscious sketch with a slight frown. He recognized the subject, of course. Max, with his eye patch and his scars. As a rule, Rosie didn’t keep secrets.

“What are you thinking, then? We can’t build a robot that looks like a human. There’s no way we can recreate the skin, the texture…”

“Yes, that’s why we won’t.” She pushed her boot against the desk and slid backwards on the wheeled chair, stopping by the fireplace across the room. Theo sidestepped to abandon the collision course, but there was a smile on his face and she understood she had to do everything in her power to keep him by her side. He’d play along, no matter what it was. He was curious and driven and excitable. And young. “We’ll use human parts. Real human parts. I want the best, so make sure you find someone worthy.”

Theo’s eyes were half-amused, half-cautious slits.

“Someone…dead, of course?”

“Freshly so, if possible.” She stood to her full—but tiny—height and made her way to the stairs, hoping that sleep would prove beneficial to her creativity. “It won’t be of any use if it starts decomposing, so see if you can find someone whom…whom will tell you about incoming dead.”

“Will do. May I ask, though…?”

She’d just touched the first step with her heel, but still she turned.

“…why are you going to such trouble for a powdered princess in a decayed mansion? Is the pay…that good?”

“The pay is okay. That’s not the point.”

“Then…?”

“The point…” She abandoned the stairs to rejoin Theo by the fireplace. “…is that I didn’t train here to make toys. I’ve told you this. That wasn’t the reason my family chose to burden a reclusive old man with my education. I know I can give life to anything I choose, and I have chosen to start now. The stakes are high, I’ve got the conditions gathered. I can’t fail. If Varadys could bring life to my childhood dolls, I can do the same. And…”

She stopped herself short, keeping the rest of the justification to herself. She’d seen the woman, spoken to her, and if there was one thing consistent about halls of mirrors, was that one always struggled to find their way out. Not because of the mirrors, or the doors, or the confusing layout camouflaged behind the reflective walls, in that particular case. No. But because every mirror reflected the same thing, and that thing was a velvet armchair where a woman sat. She was young, dark, and the fire brought out the determination in her eyes, a soft gray lined with precise needles of black kohl. And like so many women before her, women for whom Rosie had carved check marks on her bedposts, she had a pronounced Cupid’s bow, and her fingers moved in the most alluring of ways every time she seized her glass and took a careful sip.