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

It didn’t take Theo long to figure out what they’d have to do. The redhead was resourceful, and when he didn’t spend the day with her, fixing dolls for little girls, sewing tiny dresses, accessorizing his right eye with intricate loupes, or fixing the casual curl of the fringe that fell over his eyes, he was outside, collecting intelligence, making sure Rosie got the latest news without ever having to walk out the door. They were both outlanders, after all, neither born nor raised in the city that had seen them grow into their clumsy young versions of adulthood.

That evening, he arrived with a triumphant note, and the smile on his face echoed the one that took her own lips by assault.

“Did you get it?”

“I got it.” He was feeling brave, the kind of bravery sold in pill boxes and syringes, and it showed in the way he sat on the counter and spun to plant his feet on the other side—her side—of the barricade. “A friend of mine, Aiden. He’s apprenticed to an embalmer across town. They get called to fix the…well, the ugliest bodies every once in a while, in the red light district, but—”

“We don’t want an ugly body, Th—”

“No, Rosie, I know we don’t.” His voice was flat, stern, but he held out his hands as if to apologize for it—scared that she could find him, perhaps, pretty enough to turn into a machine if all else failed. The idea, albeit attractive in theory, didn’t receive any gold stars from the pragmatic side of her mind. Rosie hadn’t forgotten. Rosie remembered the trees scratching the windows of her childhood home and the murderous look in her aunt’s eyes when she came home from a particularly taxing day, the scars she left on her slave’s body afterwards. She remembered his face, as well, Max’s face, enough to know it looked nothing like Theo’s, enough to wonder if the magic had held through the years. Maybe he’d found someone to restore his missing eye. “All I’m saying is…there’s a body in a morgue by the river. It’s a boy, and he matches your original idea. Black hair, light eyes. He might be a little too light-skinned, but…it’s an experiment, right?”

His eyes looked hopeful, though unsure. Rosie raised an eyebrow, one decorated with three tiny silver rings. “What do you mean, an experiment?”

“You won’t…sell him to her, right? Not the first? Not the prototype?”

Rosie lay back in her seat, ran a hand through her hair, found her fingers caught in the knots. It was a good question. What if it worked? What if it didn’t? What if he glitched? What if the body wasn’t even usable to being with?

No use in wondering. “Come along, we have work to do.”

Across town, the young man Rosie assumed must be Aiden awaited them by the morgue. He looked perfectly nondescript, and his left sleeve ended in a knot below the elbow, nothing but frigid air where his forearm used to be. Rosie made a note to fix it for him, as soon as she could. He led them into the deserted morgue, their figures casting shadows upon, first, the waiting room, then the embalming tables, and finally, the wall of numbered drawers.

“He’s over there. Bottom row, second door.”

Theo swallowed shaky words, and gestured for Rosie to step forward. He hadn’t grown in the midst of madness the way she had—he wasn’t used to the bodies and the blood and the guts. She approached the set of metallic doors with respect, even though she knew what lay on the other side had to be seen as nothing but feedstock.

The body slid out with a swift pull, feet first. He was barefoot, his feet clad in black stockings that ended beneath loose shorts that ended at his knees. He wore a corset, a bottle green corset that pulled in his waist—not enough to deform him, not enough to catapult him into the realm of the uncanny. His skin was pale, nearly white in the thin light, and his eyes were glazed over—hard to tell whether they were hazel or gray. Dark brown hair, growing long around his chin, an easy fix. But the inside of the drawer reeked of alcohol, and that, she didn’t find quite so auspicious.

“Cause of death?”

Aiden, standing by the door, hand draped over the door handle as if body snatching was something he did every day, gave her a shrug.

“Not sure. Some are saying overdose. As I suppose you can imagine, he hasn’t been autopsied yet.”

Was that passive-aggressiveness in his tone? Condescension? Rosie decided she would fix his forearm for him, sure, but she’d charge him twice as she would anybody else.

“Drugs, then?”

“I suppose.”

That wouldn’t do. What if something didn’t work? What if he’d been damaged beyond repair, beyond the point where she’d still be able to fix him with money and machines?

“Theo, help me prepare him.” He walked forward with a large bag clutched between jeweled knuckles, and together, they eased the body into its new cocoon. Halfway through, she decided to remove the corset. It left boning marks criss-crossed over his own exposed bones, and she wasn’t sure they’d go away.

It was so late it was turning early, and Rosie couldn’t help but stare at the body on the table in the back room, a little workshop where she used to sit on a toolarge armchair and watch Varadys work on his most ambitious projects. The walls had been covered in brass legs and brass heads ever since she remembered, but nothing else had stood the test of time—she was alone then, braving new territory, and taking a risk with parts of a different kind. On the first day, Rosie wasn’t sure she could do it. On the second day, she was sure she couldn’t do it, when the smell set in and her fingers froze inches from the boy’s body, curling into hesitant claws, retreating to rest idly by her side. The experiment rotted in the back of the workshop, and she didn’t try to make it work.

Two days later, morning found her huddled in a corner, wrapped in a tattered blanket. The safe rattled, the doll wanted out. On the table, the boy had turned purple where gravity had pooled blood beneath his skin. She sat as he lay, and in their own ways, both drifted closer to their own demises, carrying marks of their individual prisons—his a physical set of metal bones, hers a mental picture of a short but eventful life—into the unknown.

If results tended to show themselves to her, they were not doing it this time. Oh no. Her mind was empty but for the icy paralysis that came with fear, and terror, and the stench of the corpse on her work table. Theo was gone. She’d asked him to lay off work for a few days, and when solitude became too much, she asked Aiden to recover the body. She didn’t say a word beyond the ones she’d written on her calling card, sent clutched in the right hand of a dead-eyed child, as her left held a brand new doll. Varadys Automata, Dolls For Dreamers , the sign over the door said—and sometimes, Rosie still tried to live up to it.

The body left, the smell lingered. And then the note arrived, written in golden ink over pale pink, thick paper with a vague scent of roses.

There’s one more thing, Miss. I want it to speak. But more than that, I want it able to converse. Call back when possible. With love, G.

She tore the note and let the pieces fall around her feet on the floor boards. A figure of despair, she found herself looking up at the walls of the brass reliquary that was her workshop. The lady didn’t know what she wanted, but Rosie did—and it was no longer a robot. It was a slave.

No one knew slaves quite like Max. Maximillian, once. Dark skin, wavy hair, bluegreen eyes, an eyepatch, and a body covered in scars, all worn like uncomfortable clothes around one of the highest penthouses in the city—one with rooftop access, and thus an escape route into the skies he had always called home.