Spare and Found Parts (25 page)

R
uby posted at the door and Io standing over her, Nell disappeared out of the room, out of her rage. She ran her fingertips over each page's smoothness, the indentation of her mother's pen barely traceable. This paper was so precious that she worried that if she pushed down too hard, the words would shatter like glass ornaments under her touch. The ink would smudge, or the page would somehow tear, and her mother's secrets would be corrupted or lost forever.

There were sketches of her mother's body drawn out again and again: obsessive self-portraiture, drawing herself into existence.

On one page, Cora had outlined her own pregnant body as a diagram: the swelling crescent of her belly, her heavy breasts, her arms outstretched—like a woman, but also like an eagle or maybe an angel. Thin
lines matched her left breast to more equations in the margins. The nest where Nell had grown was etched with blue grids.

It felt hugely private, a violation even to be thumbing through the secret ruminations of her mother, but Nell could not pull her eyes away. Pregnancy, invention, illness. She had held Cora's remains in her arms, but she had never been closer to her than in this moment.

Nell's chime began to rise, a small symphony to accompany her reading. Nell held the notebook up close to her face and let her eyes follow every curve of her mother's lettering.

One page simply read, “onwards & upwards,” and the ampersand was perfect, a simple knot. A private mantra. Below it: “Done with the stone, on to the steel!”

Kate. Her mother's great contribution to Black Water City, but Nell didn't see anything else about the stone woman here. None of this was architecture; none of this was design. It was all formulas, all something else, all what Cora had really been working on.

Many pages had letters squeezed tightly and neatly together between lines; others were more spread out, white space littered with numbers and equations and measurements. The diagrams were drawn with less flourish: concise, clear illustrations of where veins
would become pulsing, kinetic tubing, or exactly how wires would weave over bones and become tightly braided scaffolding in their own right. Symbols Nell had never seen before splayed out in equations to equal huge words like MOVEMENT and ENERGY and HEART.

In the margins Cora had doodled. Sometimes just
CS JC
; sometimes her maiden name, then her married name, Starling-Crane, Starling-Crane.

Beside the date, one day, in tiny letters: “I hope the bump is a girl!” Other days; “Sick again.” Sometimes “Sick again, chest.” Sometimes “Sick again, baby!”

Nell turned a page and entered a city of lists, pages and pages of orderly lined and notated salvaged goods and their precise locations. Boots from the old Arnott's Car Park, found inside a burned-out Ford Fiesta. Eight boxes of eyeglasses in perfect condition, found behind a shutter near the Trinity ruins. Box of chips—chips?

Sometimes Cora's handwriting looped and dived excitedly, other times it was precise and neat, but it was always her, no matter the mood. Here Cora sprang to life in elongated stalks and the occasional hurried misspelling, in scribbles and stains where the nib of the pen split under her excitement. Nell wanted to take out each page, fold it up one by one into tiny squares,
and place it in her mouth. She wanted to eat these pieces of her mother.

She hated that Julian had ever had these things, that his awful name was scribbled in her margins, “Jules, Jules,” and sometimes “JEWELS.” She was barely older than Nell herself. A teenager in love.

“FOUND A STOAT TODAY, AND I AM KEEPING IT WHETHER JULES LIKES IT OR NOT! A BABY STOAT IS CALLED A KIT, MAY CALL THE BABY KIT”

This was Cora's diary, her workbook, all knitted into one cover. Her whole world was in here, from the mundane notes of her day-to-day—“Clarissa Underwood is pregnant! Race you to labor! Poor girl is still throwing up every morning, hate that!”—to page after page of intricate maps of a prosthetic left arm. Julian's left arm.

Under the final perfected image in the series, Cora had written: “Happy Birthday, you son of a bitch.” Nell inhaled sharply, the shock of the insult before her. Cora's letters were hard, dug deep in the paper with anger. Nell's stomach lurched at the dried teardrops that had muddled the ink into tiny stained pools. Those tears were older than she was. Her eyes, in that moment, were molded to the page as if all of her mother's anger had reached out of the liquid ink to touch her, a channel of fury through time.

The next page was more shocking still than her mother's venomous note to her father; it was a contract, stapled in, with just one signature at the end. Julian's. Where Cora's name should have been, just a blank space.

Nell scanned it quickly, her fingers shaking. It would have given all the rights of her intellectual creations to her husband, Julian Crane, from the date of signature and thereafter. But Cora hadn't signed. She'd built his arm on to his body, and he'd presented the idea as his own. Marvelous Doctor: marvelous liar.

Nell flipped the next page. More drawings and symbols and equations, but no notes in the margins. They were less coded and more deliberately instructional, but Cora's voice was still there: “the incision should begin in the center manubrium and continue down my sternum but finish before my navel. Don't start any higher, there's no point, the scarring will just be ugly. This way it'll be easier to hide.” Nell placed her fingertips at the beginning of her scar, just beneath her bottom lip.
Ugly—wait—my sternum? Cora's sternum?
Nell scoured forward. This couldn't be.

Her stomach churned. The beginnings of a guide to the removal and replacement of a chest cavity. Removal and replacement of a heart. Cora's heart. Piece by piece. She was designing this for herself and
instructing Julian on how to perform the surgery.

Nell blinked. Cora had designed the very engine that kept Nell alive, the very engine that made him marvelous in the eyes of Black Water City, the very structure that he would exploit again.

He must never have had a chance to operate on her. Had it gone too late? Had Julian made a mistake? Had he not been able to learn fast enough?

Nell closed the book for a moment to steady herself. She flipped to the back to see if Cora had gotten all the way to the end.

A grid of tiny calendars ate up page after page after page. Every day marked with a simple tick. Two or three with an
X
. Pages of calendar, tiny and neat. Eventually, the
X
s outweighed the ticks; the last
X
was just eight days before she died.

Nearer the middle there were more diagrams, illustrations, and a tiny piece of gray metal. It was smaller than a fingernail, taped in place. A tiny computer. Cora had drawn arrows from it leading to more equations, more numbers. Nell had no idea what they meant. Small paragraphs of text were among the symbols; one was connected to the chip with an arrow:

“This is one of the functioning sentience chips. If I can implant it, I can communicate with it. If I can communicate with it, think of what I can learn. Think
of what I can ask it. Think of what I can know. There is infinite knowledge to be had. I want to know everything. This is how I will do it. I will ask the computers what they know.”

Nell understood her mother in this moment. Nell wanted to ask what the computers knew, but she wanted to share it, to scream it from rooftops, use it to unlock the whole world. Cora's whole world was here between the pages; her whole world was a secret.

On the next page, a stream of appendages and dates:

Finger—didn't feel it. Took it out after 24 hours.

Forearm
—
didn't feel it. Took it out after 24 hours
.

Sternum—definite change. Left it in! Let's wait and see.

Pregnant! Will continue—shouldn't interfere.

Calf—nothing. Left it in.

Thigh—nothing. Left it in.

Sternum Update: Has a green light! Something is happening!

Nell blinked.

Green, round as a penny. Green like poison.

She'd been putting metal inside herself. Cora had been operating on herself. Before she was pregnant with Nell, after she was pregnant, conducting experiments on herself. Nell clutched her chest, anger flickering within.

Nell's thick red scar, the ticking of her body: all from her mother's recklessness and greed for an electric god. Her whole life Nell had believed her mother to have been stricken by some bolt-from-the-blue toxic aftershock of the epidemic, some cruel twist of fate, and her own illness to have just been collateral. Nell's poisoned body was not an accident; it was a direct consequence of her mother's pursuit of some sacred knowledge.

There was no sanctuary in Cora's memory; there was no safety in her father's arms. Nell was trembling, white-hot with rage. With this book in her lap, Nell was so close to Cora, but pulling farther and farther away. She would make sure nobody ever fell poisoned from her work, from her discoveries. Just because her mother had been so mercenary didn't mean she had to be.

A note was nestled between the following pages, loose. Nell plucked it and thumbed it open.

Jules,

The Pasture has been a wonderful break. Nell just loves the gardens; today we counted bugs for hours! I have not told my mother about the implant. I do not think I will. She senses that I am sick and distracted, but I am brushing her off. My teeth are loose, and if they start to fall out, there'll be no hiding it.

I want you to know that though I am ill, I feel incredible. No matter what comes of these experiments, I am glad I performed them. I can hear the quiet voices of the sentient chips, and they are telling me things about this world; they are telling me secrets. I write this now because I am getting weaker and soon may not be able to write at all.

I know you are angry, and afraid, but perhaps someday you will understand. I am not afraid. No matter what happens, I have heard electric voices, I have heard my footsteps counted, been warned of oncoming rain. I know something greater than my mother's spells.

When Nell sleeps, I listen to it count her breaths. I listen to it tell me when dawn is coming. It tells me I am poisoned. Please prepare my laboratory when I come home. We'll find a way to leave it in and settle the fluttering in my heartbeat. I trust your clever hands—sure, didn't I make one of them myself?

Yours, always,

C. C.

Nell closed the book for a moment to come up for air. She trembled under the weight of this silent conversation with Cora, under the fresh, terrible knowledge of it. She chimed and she seared with fury. How
could they both have been such wretched disasters? Their violent, unchecked ambition appalled Nell. How could they both have been so greedy? Knowledge and glory regardless of the price: How they both deserved each other, Cora and Julian Crane.

Nell was angry, but within that fire she felt something new. She would be better than both of them; she would be the best parts of them; she would not be a reflection of their secrecy and their recklessness. She looked up at Io and thought how astonished her mother would be, how proud perhaps that her child had roused a digital titan from his slumber. How could one human ever expect to keep something so huge for herself? How could her mother have hoped to contain power like this in her own body? Nell would not keep his voice for herself; she would play it for all of Black Water City to hear. She would broadcast it.

Suddenly Ruby called to her, breaking her time travel. “They're coming!”

There were voices outside the door. Time had run out.

“O
pen the door, Ruby. Nan has to see; she has to see all of this.”

All of it, yes, but most important, Nan had to see the empty space below Cora's typeset name at the end of the contract; this would be enough to unwrench her father's hands from their grip around Nell's future. That would be the first thing. She'd show her the rest later.

“Are you sure you're ready?” Ruby asked her, and Io followed with a chorus: “Don't you need more time?”

Nell shook her head. “I can't wait any longer. I'm finished.”

Io nodded. “You are very brave. I am glad to be yours.”

A great wave came over Nell as she looked at her companions. Maybe Io wouldn't feel that way if he knew everything about this mess; the logic in him
surely couldn't rationalize any sense out of staying in the company of someone like her. A disaster like Julian, a furious rebel like Cora: Nell was a cocktail of them both. The chaos of them lived on in her. Io was bound to realize that he was a product of that selfishness; that very same impulse to uncover secrets, to pick apart locks, to charge into places not meant for her was the same as the impulse that had led her mother to poison herself to death with old toxic metals. And Ruby—Would Ruby stick by her?

It was suspiciously quiet then, for a heartbeat too long; the voices at the door stopped calling Nell's name.

A terrible roar shattered the strange quiet. “Where is she?”

Oliver Kelly's ragged, wild voice.

Ruby turned to Nell, her hand on the doorknob. “Should I open it?”

Nell nodded. “No more closed doors, Ruby. No more.”

Now wasn't the time to hide away, no matter what Oliver brought in with the storm. Ruby took a deep breath and unslid the locks.

It was barely open a blink before Oliver blazed into the lab, shoving Ruby out of the way. “She must be in here, she must be!” He was a savage demon, wearing the body of the boy they knew.

Nell was not afraid of him. She saw beyond the unhinged rage, dug her fingernails into the pages of her mother's history, and drew quiet power from them. She stood up. “Here I am, Oliver.”

“Not
you,
Nell!” he bellowed, his voice cracking, sweeping his arm across a worktable full of test tubes and Bunsen flasks; a shower of broken glass crackled ugly to the floor. “Where is Cora Crane? Where is Cora Crane?” he called, stomping down to the end of the laboratory, kicking over a chair, approaching the operating tables, the stacks of clean linen folded neatly on their surface. Ruby flashed Nell a frozen look, her back against the wall. Nell shook her head and mouthed, “I'm sorry.”

“Your mother, your mother—Crane has her body here; he has her!”

Nell summoned stillness against his madness, her truth against his terror. “She was here. I found her. I took her to the lake. She's gone now.”

“What?” he exclaimed. “She's gone?”

“Yes. She's gone.”

Nan and Julian were in the doorway then, Nan's face drained of color and Julian a scarlet flash, clenching and unclenching his fists, silent and fuming.

“Do you know how he got her here, Nell?” Oliver was almost laughing, manic. “He bought her body
from my mother. My mother recorded Cora as cremated. And do you know—do you know what he bought her silence with?”

Nell didn't. What was the cost of that kind of silence? What was the cost of a body delivered? How could Julian pay for something so huge? What currency was enough for this?

“What?” she asked, her chiming ascending to a ringing, impossible pitch.

“With you.
You
. He promised my mother that I could
have you
when we were old enough.”

Tears of fury and shame overcame the boy then, Oliver Kelly, the barfly, Nell's counterpoint, now half mad with shock, in a terrible frenzy.

Ruby's hand clasped her mouth as she stood against the wall. Nell heard her gasp.

And Nell just stood there, a terrible vignette scrolling behind her eyes: her father shaking hands with the undertaker, her mother's body delivered like meat, her own body for trade. Like an object, a machine. A contribution.

“My mother told me. She's been trying to tell me for years.” Oliver swung around to face Julian, and the tension around them shifted up a notch, electric, dangerous. Sensing it somehow, Io moved closer to his maker, putting his hand on her shoulder. Nell squeezed it for a
moment, then lifted it and moved out from behind the desk. This was not about Oliver and her father.

Nan was still in the doorframe, one foot in the hall, her lips moving in silent prayer, and Nell loved her just then, blessing this awful room, blessing everything she feared.

“How could—” Oliver began to ask the question that had been festering away inside Nell herself, but she cut him off.

“How
could
you do this?” she shouted. How could you keep my mother's body in here, how could you steal my plans, how could you promise me to somebody, how could you use me that way, how could you, how could you?

The reply came with Julian's sneer. “Cora was a genius, and she'd have loved it; she'd have done anything to live forever. She was reckless, but think of what she would have
known
if it hadn't all been ruined.” He turned his piercing gaze to Nell for a moment, then back to Oliver. “Kelly, you haven't a blind clue what you're talking about. You'd do the very same if you could.”

Nell was shaking with rage. “No, he wouldn't.”

Oliver looked at her, astonished.

Julian actually laughed. “Please. He's been ignoring your refusals for years, Nell. He'd have broken you
down eventually. He doesn't care what you want.”

“I do care!” Oliver insisted, but Julian waved him off cruelly.

“Ha! You'd keep her if you could. I know you, Oliver Kelly. You've been looking at me like a god your whole life; you'd kill to be just like me, to do what I do.”

Something blinding and fast and dreadful happened inside Nell as Oliver shot toward Julian and the dull clumsy thudding of blunt punches filled the room—the snorting and breathlessness of two men fighting. There was maybe four, maybe six long seconds. Nell wouldn't watch it any longer: Oliver stumbling, the dark clatter of her father's mechanical hand against the back of his head, Ruby's shocked scream puncturing the air—“No, no. Please stop!”—through her hands. Oliver was about to keel as Julian swung back, preparing for a strike that would knock him out.

Nell threw herself between them, her hand shot up to meet Julian's in the middle of his strike. Her fingers clasped around his arm, and all of her might was there.

There was cracking and graceless wrenching and a wail.

“My arm! You stupid girl, my arm—”

The arm was separate from her father, clenching and sparking in her fist, from the elbow down. She dropped it, and metal clattered against the tiles. She
gasped and stepped away from it. It writhed for a second or two as if it were still possessed, like a snake. Then it was still. Just a broken thing.

“That arm was never yours, Da.” Nell was trembling, her hand bloody, her legs weak.

Julian dropped to his knees, gasping, swearing, and Oliver kicked the arm away across the floor. Io moved toward Nell, arms raised for an embrace, but she stepped away from him. “No, no.”

She didn't want to be comforted. Adrenaline still seared through her; she was vibrating with it, her chest sore and her hands aching, her fingertips burst, a nail loose. Her ears rang. She couldn't look at Julian, crumpled, heaving. A hot streak of guilt rose though her for her violence, but it felt like a purge, like an exorcism.

“I am not yours either,” she said. He didn't say anything at all.

Nan touched her shoulder then, and the room stilled.

“I want you gone, Da,” Nell said, her grandmother by her side. “You take the business, Oliver. You take on Da's work. There's no way he'll be permitted to carry on anyway, not after his confession.”

Julian's head snapped up, a lens of his glasses smashed, her face and red hands reflected back at her in them.

“It's all in here, Da,” Nell said, her voice almost cracking. “Ma's notes, all of them. She designed your arm. She designed what's inside of me. And you, you took and took and then tried to wake her up to take
more
. You will—you will write a confession. You'll tell the council and the city what you've done. You'll resign. You'll leave.”

Nell stood taller, her hands bloody, her chiming symphonic. She retrieved her mother's book, watched the blood from her hands seep onto the cover, red around the lip of the pages.

“Do you really think that Kelly can take on my work? Do you—”

“He's welcome to if Nell wishes.” Nan cut him off sharply, her voice sheer voltage, her power undeniable, her fists full of crystals.

Nell looked to Oliver, his eyes watery, his skin blanched, and said, “Do better with it than he did.”

“Nell, are you sure?” Ruby gasped, her face soaked with tears.

Nell nodded. “Ruby, he cares about this work far more than I do. I have something bigger to build.”

Oliver accepted, his hands clasped in gratitude, mute.

“You are not welcome on any Starling land, Julian; this is not your house any longer.” Nan continued,
matter-of-factly. “There will be work for you out in the Libraries. You'll be allowed your dignity, as long as you stay away.”

Io stood away from this, blinking silently through it. Kodak had scampered in, and the android had taken him in his arms, as though for comfort. Nell looked over at them for a moment, the notebook heavy and precious in her grip. “I am sorry you have had to see this, Io. We are going to be better than this.”

Io didn't say anything at all.

“Penelope, you will come stay in the Pasture until your father has packed his things and left. I want you away from all this awfulness—” Nan started, but Nell shook her head.

“No. This is my home. I'll be staying here, with Io. You are welcome to join us, but my work isn't over. I have—I have a contribution to make.”

“There are ways around that, Nell, after all this.” Nan studied her, then Io: “I don't think the city is ready for something like that.”

“You're not ready for something like
him
,
Nan. That doesn't go for everyone else. There are people who are ready, and those who aren't, I'll—I'll show them why they should try. There's so much about our nation that we could learn from sleeping computers, Nan; there's so much knowledge, so much music, so much about
the whole world. Io can conduct that information. He can pass it out to us. I'll be responsible with it,” Nell pleaded. “You can stay here with me. I want you to see. To hear the music. I want you to look at this book with me. Will you?”

Her grandmother looked out over the laboratory, her eyes far away. She cast her crystals into the air, and they froze there for a second, turned to prisms, then disappeared. Ruby gasped.

“I will stay until these halls are clean of what has happened here—for you, child. I won't leave you alone with either of these creatures.” She cast a glance to Julian, then Io. Nell put her arms around her grandmother and held her. She smelled like heady incense and clean sage, the fabric of her so soft. Nell leaned into her and was lost for a moment in her safety, until Ruby broke the moment.

“Oliver, I think we should leave.”

The boy gathered himself for a second. “Of course. I'll—I'll inform my mothers of this update then. If they ask who's responsible for the state of me, I'll make sure to let them know it wasn't you. There—there weren't any blowtorches within reach this time.”

Nell turned to him, his cheek cut, a bruise blooming on his forehead. “Thanks, Oliver.”

“If you need anything, please don't hesitate . . .”
He walked backward toward the door, unable to look away.

Nell nodded. “If I ever need anything from you, I'll take it.”

Oliver smiled wryly. “Of course you will.”

Ruby threw herself at Nell then, a roaring thunder of a hug, her cheeks soaked. “Nellie, I'm only five minutes up the road always.”

Nell muffled a thanks, a sorry-for-everything into Ruby's shoulder.

“Don't you be saying sorry. Don't you
ever
say sorry to me,” Ruby said to her, pulling herself away. She turned to Oliver. “Come on, you. Can't send you home to your mothers like that.”

Then the pair were gone out of the lab, leaving Io and Nan and Nell and Julian in a strange silence. Nell took once last look over the bad white room and turned away. As she left, she heard her father softly call, “Nell,” but she couldn't even turn to him.

“If you want to talk to me,” she said, “you can write me a letter. Maybe I'll read it. I'll reply when I am ready.”

Io placed a strong hand on her shoulder. Nell was grateful for its weight. She closed the laboratory door behind them. The house felt different to her, as though relief had started to wash through the halls, something
like release. She was glad of Nan's stern presence, even if the old woman wouldn't look at Io. Even if she asked for him to be sent upstairs. Nell agreed, and Io and the stoat alighted to her room.

In the kitchen Nan had Nell run her hands under cold water until the blood ran clear, and at the kitchen table she powdered them with something strange, something that stung; Nell didn't ask what it was. Just there in the quiet Nan blessed her hands, their fresh wounds.

On the table sat Cora's journal. After a time Nan asked Nell could they go through it together. Nell took the book in her lap, opened it to the first page, and began to read.