Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

Sofiya touched his shoulder. He looked into her calm blue eyes, and then something pricked his arm. She pulled away a long glass syringe. The pain receded a little, and then Thad’s world went dark.

* * *

Thad pushed through thickets and dark fog. Voices muttered and groaned like hidden ghosts. His limbs felt heavy, and he struggled to move. His hand hurt. No, it was his wrist. A woman was talking to him, and he fought toward the sound of her voice. At last he managed to pull his eyes open. The fog receded a little, though his vision was still blurry.

“Can you hear me, Thad?” Sofiya’s accented English carried her worry. “Can you speak?”

Thad tried, but his tongue felt weighed down with wood chips and stone. He managed to croak, “Thirsty.”

A cup came to his lips, and he drank cold water. The simple act helped wake him up more and he became aware that he was lying on a pile of quilts atop one of the fold-down shelves in his wagon. Sofiya was sitting next to him. The spiders and speaker box were gone.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Heavy.” His lips were a little numb. “What-?”

“Try to stay still,” she said. “The opiates should wear off soon, but you will feel their effects for a while.”

“Where’s Griffin?”

“He has left. Some men with horses unhooked his boxcars from the train and hauled them away. Do not worry about him right now.”

Another thought came to him, and this one carried a stab of fear with it. “What about Nikolai?”

“He’s with the Tortellis. He’s perfectly fine, though he worries about you. Dante watches him.”

His mind was still blurry. “I can’t-what happened to-?” And then it all came rushing back. The crackle of the pistol going off and the horrible pain. He started to lift his left arm, but Sofiya gently pressed it back down to the bed.

“I do not know that you are ready for this,” she said. “Perhaps you should wait.”

Dread drove more of the dizziness away. “Wait for what? I…lost my hand, didn’t I?”

“You took the shot Mr. Griffin intended for me,” Sofiya said softly. “And you saved my sister. Thank you, Thad.”

“You only destroyed that spider because I missed it,” he said. “That punishment was meant for me.”

“I am still grateful.”

“Let me see,” Thad said. “I want to see.”

Sofiya nodded and released his arm. Thad raised it. The sensations were strange. It hurt, but not as badly as it seemed it should. He could also still feel his hand in a strange way. He had read of people who had lost limbs being able to feel them. Was it a mangled mess? Or had Sofiya cut it off at the wrist? And how had she done it? Why did she have a syringe and opiates with her? The ache grew more intense when he moved, though there was no trace of the horrible burning he had felt before. He would have to learn how to get along with only one hand. The implications were too powerful for him to think about. He brought his wrist into view.

He had expected to see a bandage, but metal gleamed at the end of his wrist instead. Thad stared at his new brass hand. The fingers were thin and showed spinning gears at the joints. The hand itself was blocky and sinewy at the same time. Parts of it were covered with brass skin, but most of it revealed the machinery beneath. The hand had been created from one of Mr. Griffin’s spiders.

“I am sorry for the inelegance,” Sofiya said. “I had to work quickly, with the materials I had at hand. So to speak.”

Thad turned it back and forth in the light of the lamp that hung from the ceiling. A thick ring of scab and shiny scar tissue encircled his wrist just below the metal. He couldn’t quite take it in. He tried to move. The fingers twitched, spread themselves open, made a fist. The sensation was more than strange. It was like wearing a thick glove that made his hand a little numb and unresponsive, but still his. Then shock overcame him. His skin went cold and he wanted to fling the hand away, but it was attached. His gorge rose and acid burned at the back of his throat. Fortunately, Sofiya had anticipated this and was ready with a basin. When the nauseating spasms ended, she gave him a handkerchief and the cup of water. Automatically he tried to take the latter with his new left hand. The metal fingers clenched around the pottery and shattered it, sending water everywhere.

“Sorry,” he muttered, blotting ineffectively at the mess with the handkerchief. He was suddenly embarrassed at being in a sickbed in front of Sofiya, especially with her playing nurse. At least he was still wearing his clothes.

“It is understandable.” She produced a tea towel to help clean up. “It will take time for you to learn its use.”

“I can’t seem to-” He stiffened. “You. I didn’t understand before. You forged this hand. Not Griffin.”

“Yes.”

“You amputated my original hand and attached this one.”

“Yes.”

“You’re-”

“A clockworker. Yes.”

The signs rushed at Thad like boulders down a mountainside. The agility she had displayed on the train. Her remark about clockworkers not being evil. Her occasionally erratic behavior. Her affinity for Nikolai. The horse and the pistol. He had assumed Kalvis had come from Mr. Griffin, though she had never actually said so, and she had simply lied about buying the gun. His stomach roiled again and he swallowed hard to keep it under control.

“You’re fil-”

She held up a hand. “That will keep.”

“You’re as bad as Griffin.” He thrust out his own hand, the brass one. “You did this to me in order to-”

“I saved your life because you destroyed your hand for me. Is this something a lunatic would do?”

He closed his eyes. The world rocked around him, pushing and pulling at him and trying to tip him over while he slid a sword into his throat. He felt for his blades, but they were gone. She had taken them.

“How is it possible?” he said. “You don’t present like a clockworker.”

“It is early for me still.” She rested in her chin in her hand. Her fleshy, human hand. “I know what you have been through, Thad. I understand it from the inside. But you cut the world in half with your swords and your knives, and you believe everything must fall on one side or the other.”

“Clockworkers are monsters.”

“A clockworker saved you,” she said. “An automaton saved you. What does it take for you to see us as something other than evil?”

Thad didn’t answer for a long moment. Then he said, “We haven’t heard the end of Griffin, have we?”

“I doubt it very much. He still needs us for something. Like he needed Havoc’s machine.” She wound a strand of golden hair around her finger. “I was the baby of the family, you know. I had four elder brothers and two elder sisters. My mother was a dairy worker outside of this very city. She knew to make cheese that melted in the mouth. My father, he was often away. There was no work in my village, so he often went to Saint Petersburg. Many men do this, and leave their families unprotected. And still there was little-my family were serfs and most of what we earned went to the landowner in taxes and fees. Ivan and Mikhail, two of my brothers, were conscripted into the army when they were thirteen and fourteen.” Her face grew sad. “I still have not heard what happened to them. They are probably dead, fighting Turks in a foreign war, but no one thinks to write home about the death of a serf.”

Thad lay without moving. Each word was a tiny nail that pinned him to the bed.

“There was no money, ever. My mother, she later found work in the landowner’s kitchen as a cook, and then things became a little better. Cooks, of course, can sneak extra food away, and they also have a reputation for being willing to trade their bodies for little gifts from other men.”