Kady Cross - The Girl with the Iron Touch

The spot where she stood was home to a powerful magnet, one that froze the metal inside her to the spot. This was why the others felt they could leave her, leave the other slumbering machines—because there was little chance of escape.

And if there was little chance of escape, logic insisted that she was to be kept there regardless of her own thoughts on the matter.

She stared at the girls on the grainy surface of the glass, and then through a small slit in the door. There were two of them—one tall with light hair streaked with dark and another shorter one with hair that looked like ropes.

Part of her reacted to the sight of them. It was her heart again, kicking up a fuss in her chest cavity. She knew them. She didn’t know how, but she had seen them before. The little one especially.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement and jerked her head around. For a moment she was terrified of the strange girl staring at her from just a few feet away. The girl had curly red hair, honey-colored eyes and pale skin. She was tall and slender and dressed in ill-fitting clothes.

The girl was her. It was nothing but her own reflection staring back at her from the scuffed surface of a long, framed mirror. She reached up—it took real effort to lift her arm under the magnet’s pull—and touched her hair, then looked back at the girls outside. They walked past the door to where she was as though they didn’t even see it.

But she saw them. Or rather, she saw her; the red-haired girl. Her mother.

Somehow, in what was left of her logic engine memory capacitors, she recognized a physical connection between herself and that tiny girl. She recognized another connection with the taller girl, as well, but not as strong. She reached forward, but the two couldn’t see her. She opened her jaw to cry out, but only a low keening noise filled the room. The fleshy thing in her mouth still didn’t work properly.

To her left yet another door opened. The old woman stood there, and she did not look amused. Her disapproval was made disconcerting given the odd angle of her head. She looked like a corpse that had been reanimated after its neck was broken, though how she knew that was an apt description was a mystery.

“What are you doing?” the woman demanded. The hitch in her voice box sounded worse. “Were you trying to leave?”

“I heard voices,” she confessed, pointing at the glass, but her gaze was pulled past the old woman, into the room behind her. It was a sterile place, filled with soft lights and scads of machinery.

The badly repaired automaton pulled a switch on the wall, and the magnetic force abruptly disappeared. Meanwhile, her companion skittered toward the door, blocking her view of the catacombs. It didn’t matter—the girls had passed by and were almost out of sight.

What interested her now was inside that forgotten room. She walked toward it and peeked over the threshold. Tubes and wires ran from a framework of machinery bolted onto the ceiling to a long metal containment tube with a thick glass cover. Inside the tank she could see the form of a man suspended in a green, viscous fluid. A mask covered his nose and mouth, and a hose ran from the mask to the inner wall. A bellows outside the tank rose and fell in a steady rhythm that matched the rise and fall of the man’s chest.

Apparatuses hummed and buzzed, clicked and chirped. Bladders filled with liquids hung from hooks, their tubes attached to one larger hub on the outside of the tank. One thicker tube ran inside and was embedded in the man’s forearm. Were they giving him medicine? Sustenance? Poison?

No, they weren’t trying to kill him. They were trying to save him. As soon as she realized it, she knew who he was.

“Get away from there!” the old woman snapped, shoving her out of the room. Her voice hummed with an odd metallic echo. She smelled bad, and her gown gaped where it was missing a button, showing a stained chemise beneath the dirty silk. She shut the door.

“You’ve no business in there. None whatsoever. You were made for one purpose, to learn and understand. To be the perfect vessel. You should be content with that. It is a great honor that awaits you, little one. If you fail, you will doom us all. You will doom him. Now, back to your room. There are books there for you to read.”

Reading. That was the deciphering of words upon a page so that they told a story. Yes, it was one of her favorite pastimes, though she was certain she’d never done it before. In fact, she knew she hadn’t done it before, because she had no idea how to figure out what the letters meant when they were bunched together.

As she glanced over her shoulder at the door of the man’s room, she was also certain of something else: if the red-haired girl was her mother, then the man being kept alive in the glass-and-metal tube was her master.

“Well, this was a rather dismal waste of time,” Finley commented as she and Emily worked their way through the dank darkness of the catacombs toward an exit. While their excursion had yielded a Roman coin, a few skeletons and a host of belligerent rats, it had not produced any information to support Jack’s story.

She hadn’t even found anything to hit. Kicking rubbish and old bottles didn’t afford the same satisfaction.

“Do you think Dandy lied to us?” Emily asked.

Finley shook her head and wrinkled her nose as a whiff of something that smelled suspiciously like sewer assaulted her. “Jack manipulates with charm and power. He doesn’t lie so much as wrap the truth in temptation.”

“You’ve given it considerable thought, haven’t you?”

Despite Emily’s teasing tone, Finley stiffened and made a point of shining the small but powerful lamp Emily had given her on the catacomb wall. “He’s my friend.”

“Oh, now don’t go getting all bent out of shape. I’m just teasing, lass.”

“I’m sorry, Em. I reckon I’m more thinly skinned than I thought.”

“No need to apologize. I ought to have known better than to poke you when Griffin’s being such a dunderhead.”

“Dunderhead,” Finley scoffed, unable to keep from smiling. “I can think of a few stronger names to call him.”

“No doubt they’d be more succinct.” Her friend grinned but quickly turned serious once more as she shone the beam of her light around them. “Other than some tracks in the dirt I haven’t seen anything out of sorts. You?”

Finley shook her head. “If the automaton is down here they’ve done a bang-up job of hiding it, and any tracks it might have made.”

Emily glanced over her shoulder. “I feel like someone is watching us. Did you hear that?”

“It sounded like a moan.” Finley aimed her light in the direction of the sound. “I don’t see anything.”

“It could have come from anywhere. This place is bad for echoes.”

“And plenty of things that could have made such a sound.”

“Don’t remind me. I’ve heard that there are people who live down here, and strange creatures unlike anything you’d see street-side.”

Finley scratched her back. “Now you’ve got me thinking we’re being watched, too.” She’d rather take on a stronger opponent she could see than tangle with a weak one she couldn’t.

“Paranoia’s contagious. I don’t see a ruddy thing and I’m hungry. Let’s go back to the house. I think I have spiders in my hair.”

Just the thought made Finley shudder. Blood didn’t bother her, nor did violence, but the thought of something crawling on her…well, that was enough to make a girl scream and run about like an idiot. There was just something sinister about something with so many legs, especially if they possessed wings. It wasn’t natural.

“Might as well,” she agreed. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”