Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

Thad stared at her. “Your mother let men-”

“Yes, of course.” Sofiya straightened her cloak. “I know that farther west, people find this shocking, but in Russia, it is quite normal. The husbands of the women all know it happens but act as if they know nothing. It became better at home because Mama could sell the things men gave her. And we could eat twice a day.”

“It’s prostitution,” Thad said. He couldn’t help it.

“It is the world,” Sofiya said. “It moves the way it moves, not as you think it should. When a woman’s husband is away and she has a baby which cannot be his, she will take it to the forest or a lake and-”

“I don’t want to hear,” Thad interrupted. “No more.”

“The man who kills the victims of the clockwork plague balks at the death of a baby who would grow up as hated and unwanted as a clockworker,” she said. “How strange.”

“Clockworkers aren’t victims,” Thad said. “David was a victim.”

“Both cannot be victims?” Sofiya gestured at his hand. “You should exercise that. The more you use it, the easier it will become to control it.”

Thad thought of refusing, then set that aside as unrealistic and childish. He flexed the hand and tried working the fingers one by one. It still felt numb. A clockworker had forced him to shoot his own hand off. He felt violated and angry and sick, and he wanted to hit something or yell or scream. Instead he made himself wiggle fingers.

“My mother’s deed mattered little in the end,” Sofiya continued. “Papa came home last winter festival. He’d been gone for seven months, and I was so happy to see him. He was tall and strong and he had a big brown beard that made him very proud. He brought me chocolate drops from the city, and a little toy dog made of painted clay. Grigori and Nikolai, my other brothers, came from their homes to visit.”

“Nikolai?”

“I gave that name after my brother, yes,” Sofiya said. “We ate together and it was a fine night. But the next day Papa was coughing. When fever came, we knew what it was. By then it was too late.”

“I’m sorry,” Thad said automatically. The thumb was especially hard to use. He folded it in and out, in and out.

“Papa died first.” Sofiya’s voice was matter-of-fact now. “Then Mama and Nikolai. Grigori lost his mind and stumbled away. You call it a zombie. I call it my older brother, the one who used to climb trees to pick apples for me and who could whistle so like a bird, he could fool them into thinking he was one of them. I found out later someone shot him. My sister Olenka…” She trailed off.

The pain Thad had seen in her before was back, though Sofiya was working to cover it.

“Your sister what?” he asked.

“She became very ill,” Sofiya said quickly, “but she recovered. I recovered from the illness, too, but I…I was different. I have seen things no one should have seen, and now I see things no one else can see.” She paused. “I went into a fugue and built a sledge that could drive itself across the snow. It took me to Saint Petersburg. But Russia is not kind to clockworkers, you know.”

“My mother was from Minsk.”

“She was?” Sofiya raised her eyebrows. “Then the way Russian serfs behave should not be a surprise to you.”

“My mother never talked about her life in Minsk,” Thad replied shortly. “Ever.”

“Perhaps this is why. Perhaps she joined the circus to get away from a landowner who-”

“We were talking about clockworkers,” Thad interjected. He ticked off points. “England fears clockworkers. China reveres them. And Russia? Russia loathes them.” He belatedly realized he was using his brass hand and stared at it for moment.

“True. But all three places use their-our-inventions quite happily. I knew in Saint Petersburg I would have to hide. It would not be safe if anyone knew what I had become. And then Mr. Griffin found me. I don’t know how. But he promised he could help my sister. And he has, after a fashion. Olenka has everything she needs now, and does not break her back in the field-or in a rich man’s bed.”

“But Griffin exacts a price.”

“Everything has a price.” She tapped his hand, and her fingernail clicked against the brass.

“You are early in the process,” Thad said. “You haven’t gone insane. That’s how you hid your…status from me and why you can still work with other people without being cruel or wicked.”

“I imagine so.”

A little heat came to his voice. “Doesn’t it bother you to know that you’ll go mad and die in less than three years? Don’t you want to find a cure?”

“A cure?” Her laugh was like ice. “This is the most fun I have had in my entire life, Thaddeus Sharpe. Ideas slice through my mind like silver knives, and they carve secrets out of the darkness. I am very much looking forward to seeing what happens next. And then, when I finally go mad, I will forget everything-the plague, my family, and every scrap of pain. I can hardly wait.”

Thad swallowed. He had never thought that someone with the plague would want anything but a cure. A number of uncomfortable new truths were forcing themselves on him today. Thad flexed his new hand again and changed the subject. “You made this out of one of Griffin’s spiders, didn’t you?”

“I did. I am very proud.”

“Can he still…use it?”

“I very much doubt it.”

“He orders me to destroy your-my-hand over one of his blasted spiders, and then he just gives you a spider to replace it?”

“He didn’t give. I took.” Sofiya closed her eyes. “The destruction of your hand sent me into a fugue. Your hand became a…project, and only my death could have stopped me from taking one of Mr. Griffin’s spiders. Mr. Griffin knew that, so he allowed it. He doesn’t wish me to die, you see. Not yet. I also think the entire affair amuses him.”

“Amuses him?”

“It put me further into his debt. And now a clockworker who uses spiders for hands has a man in his employ who has a spider for a hand. Mr. Griffin still has that spider as a hand, you see, even though you hate clockworkers. I think he couldn’t resist the irony.”

Jaw tight, Thad pushed aside the bedclothes and swung his legs around. The last of the opiate fog had faded from his system and he was feeling normal now. Except for the hand. He looked at Sofiya.

“You told me all that about yourself in order to change my mind about clockworkers,” he said. “So I would see a person, with history and life instead of a monster.”

“Of course. Was I successful?”

He exhaled slowly, as if sending clouds of thought to Mount Olympus. “I think,” he replied slowly, forming the words as the ideas came to him, “that I am willing to work with you as long as we have a common enemy in Mr. Griffin.”

“Good. And as someone who continues to work with you, I have one favor to ask.”

“And that would be?”

She towed him toward the door. “It will be easier to talk about it after the cannon goes off.”

* * *

The machine crouched in the darkness, listening to the signal, and learning. It learned words like tunnel and darkness and metal and gears and memory and thought and knowledge and master. The knowledge came slowly, over a period of days, another new word that was part of the word time. Other spiders, ones similar but inferior to itself, brought the machine metals of many different kinds. The machine touched the metals, tasting them with its feet. It liked them, became excited by them for reasons it could not name.

It learned the world build.