Spare and Found Parts (4 page)

N
ell sat on the hot red tiles of the roof, looking out over the parklands and the city. Kodak was curled up at her feet. Out beyond the glistening green of the forest the city cracked open with light against the darkened sky, a pomegranate with a split gut, all jewels. When the city had been rebuilt, dedicating electricity rations to illuminating the streets had been the local council's absolute imperative. Memories of the atrocities had hung around dark corners, and the light kept the deep swaths of national depression at bay. On the roof, Nell kept a little oil lamp by her side (no sense in wasting a battery) so she wouldn't lose footing, and the glow was a cradle against the blackness of the forest at night.

In the distance stood the tall white monument, Kathleen ni Houlihan. Or Kath, Kate, Katie. Stone and
majesty, six hundred and some feet tall. Nell's mother, Cora, had designed her body on paper at the very same desk Nell drew at. Cora had pulled her construction out of her imagination. For her whole life, Nell had been watching her mother's contribution rise over the cityscape from this quiet spot on her roof. Day after day Kate grew, and now all that was missing was the right side of her face, a forearm and hand. She was posed gracefully, reaching one hand back out to the ocean and one arm toward the center of the city, stopping, incomplete, at the elbow. Nell usually came out to say good-night to her. They'd been made by the same woman after all.

Nell's stomach tightened at the sight of her mother's contribution. There really was only a few months left for her own. Her grandmother's list scrolled behind her eyes. Make something. Marry someone. Leave. Shame them all by going to the stoneyard. Of the four, only one was something she wanted to reach out and touch, and that was the making. But
what
? Something worthy and important and powerful. Something that mattered to her as well as to the city.

Nell was a good mimic, had a good eye for structure. She drew excellent plans for all sorts of little civilian machines: cameras, typewriters, useful recreational objects that unfortunately existed already and were in
no need of augmentation. Why build something new if one from before the Turn could be salvaged?

“We're trying to
move forward
,” her father would insist. “Keep that in mind. You should be contributing something that brings us forward.”

Nell wasn't sure it was possible to go forward if they didn't look back to before the Turn. Their island was still disconnected from the rest of the world.

The people of the city lived in a strange, dusty cornucopia. There were so few of them left in a place built for millions that they all had more or less what they needed. Except Nell. She couldn't fish a worthy idea out of the water at the end of the Livia.

Every time Nell mentioned this looming problem to her father, he told her she was “frustrating but capable,” that he was
sure
she would think of something and then occupied himself elsewhere.

It was as if the topic of her future were a mild potential inconvenience, preferably one to be avoided, as opposed to a massive shift in Nell's entire life trajectory.

If she chose the monument, Nell would be gone on early or late shift work, laying stones from one end of the day to another. Her only friend would probably be too embarrassed by her to keep her company, and even if she weren't, their lives would look so different. Their worlds, unmoored, would drift. Ruby was already
untethering herself anyway, shamelessly unpicking the knots of their friendship to loose herself upon the world, and there was absolutely nothing Nell could do about it. Nobody ever made Ruby do anything she didn't want to.

Ruby would become a tailor or a weaver or whatever she wanted. She could start her own business or marry into a partnership or take ability tests to start life in the Pasture if she wanted; she was whole but for her eye. Ruby stood in a bright atrium with open doors on all sides. Ruby was going to be just fine.

If Nell walked through the door that led to the monument, maybe she would find new friends—once she got over the massive, excruciating shame of falling so far short of the Crane family brilliance. Maybe she could just curl up and disappear. That sounded appealing.

If Nell moved to the Pasture, maybe she could convince the people there that she was an oracle, just like Nan. Give prayer sermons and blessings. Put bird bones and sage in little jars, and call them spells. Be the only augmented living thing for three hundred miles. Get stared at by the healed; get treated like a piece of machinery. Crack up completely. Delightful.

Option three: Oliver Kelly.

Nope.

Nell sighed deeply, opened her satchel, and began to unpack her spoils from the shore. She laid them out in the lamplight. The thick spool of stiff copper wire. Two large, unbroken lightbulbs. Nell considered taking them apart. Their filaments could be salvaged; she could perhaps cut them open very gently, maybe turn them into terrariums for the kitchen. A handful of sea glass that Ruby didn't want. The headset of an analogue telephone, easily from well before the Turn. It would have been the best find of the day if it hadn't been for the hand.

Nell examined it carefully, curious. It was nothing more than a stray piece of a mannequin. But she admired it. Such a strange piece of the old world. A boy's hand.

Any time Nell thought about boys, or girls for that matter, she immediately sabotaged her fantasy self out of any romance. No beautiful strangers waited in the lamplight to whisk her away from her life, and if there were, Nell was certain that she'd viciously alienate them in less than five minutes flat. If it wasn't her dour expression or the scar that ran from her chin to her gut, then the ticking would send them running. There's not much thrill in kissing a grandfather clock in a girl's dress. Nobody wants to dance with a time bomb.

It all came so naturally to Ruby. Ruby was funny and pretty and didn't tick. She always had a boyfriend—she ate up the thirsty-eyed boys and spit them out, bored as soon as they had made themselves comfortable. She picked her teeth with their bones and cackled scandal to Nell, who usually loved the thrill of Ruby's tales. Or she had when she believed that she'd grow into something like Ruby's charm or come across someone who could see past the height of her family's name, her ticking. Now Nell's hope was dimming, and Ruby's ease seemed so unfair. Plus Ruby had ideas. She was always creating beautiful things.

Nell turned the hand over again and again.

What use was a hand with no boy to go with it? Nell could have launched it off the roof that very moment, sent it plummeting down into the garden to smash or rot or otherwise disappear. She looked to stone Kate on the horizon, mocked throwing it right at her head.

“You can have it,” she said to the one-handed stone woman on the skyline, her voice catching with the bitterness. “You need it more than I do.”

In the distance, the torchlights of the night watch folk danced around the woman's skirts, her waist, her neck. They were fireflies, phosphorescent and magic instead of labored and repetitive. It looked so much better from far away, Nell thought. She might be a firefly
someday soon, a glowing speck waltzing around the still, hard body of the closest thing Black Water City had to a god. The god people like her grandmother prayed to in the Pasture was too busy with green fields to throw its eyes on the metal and concrete of the Pale. Kate would do. Nell held the hand up to the statue's unfinished arm, the perspective difference between her and the great statue making it almost match. Almost.

“You're not finished yet, are you?” Nell whispered. “It's okay. Neither am I.”

Someday soon it would take twenty or thirty people and miles of thick cable rope and sweat and aching muscles to bring the forearm up from the city floor to its position at the end of Kate's elbow. Every day sculptors sat around an enormous hand, chipping away at the stone, detailing her fingers, her palm. Do women of stone get life lines? Love lines? Do their knuckles have marks? Do their fingernails have cuticles? Calluses? Did the sculptors just slapdash the work to make the hand look moderately human, or did they write her life there?

As she mulled over her future with a pick and hammer, with rope-burned hands and shadows under her eyes from the night watch, she began to unspool the wire she'd salvaged. It was sharp, and if she wasn't careful, she would tear her fingertips; but Nell knew
how to deal with metal. She loved the smell of it, how it changed against heat. She coiled the wire around the wrist of the useless hand a few times and then extended the spiral slowly around the air, a scaffolding for an invisible arm, a hard copper spiderweb. She reached where the elbow would have been and stopped. She pulled her pliers out of the front pouch of her satchel (with her big magnifying glass and spare leather gloves and knife and the panic whistle Ruby made her keep on her at all times) and nipped the wire free from the rest of the spool. What remained was a wire frame gauntlet, an empty arm for the mannequin hand.

“This will have to do for now,” she whispered, holding it up. Kate's face was still missing, but her body was now more or less complete in Nell's gaze. Awkward, partially metal, but complete.

Motes of dust were illuminated by Nell's lantern, and against the dark they seemed like tiny live sprites swirling around the inventor's daughter. She held the copper skeleton arm alongside her own and locked her fingers with the hard, unmoving mannequin hand. She had never held a boy's hand before.

In the dim light his body, from elbow to shoulder to other shoulder, bloomed before her. His throat, his chest, his stomach and hips and legs. His skin, the rise and fall of breath.

Her mother gave this city a six-hundred-foot woman of stone. Her mother drew the inside and outside of her onto paper and stood in front of the council and told them that building a stone body would remind them of their humanity, after everything.

What could be more human than building something new, more human than making life? An idea lit Nell up then, sparkling like the torches along Kate's stony skirts.

If it was possible to build parts of a person, it was possible to build a whole one. Of course it was. If people were afraid of coded magic in steel boxes, she'd take the magic out of the steel boxes and put it in a brand-new body. Not a stone giant. One just her size. A whole person. Hang limbs on a spine and find a way to give him a brain, a heart—a soul. Could you make a soul out of spare and found parts? Why not?

“Sorry, Kate,” Nell whispered, gripping the hand. “I think I'll be needing this after all.”

I
t always happens like this.

You are seven years old. You have a pain in your chest. Or something like it. At least, a murmur of pain, a suggestion. You are coming to, just waking up. You are lying down and looking up, and there is light blinding you; there is something over your mouth. You are having difficulty breathing.

A gray mechanical hand descends on you, and you begin to panic; but it releases you from the mask, and you can breathe easier. You are sure for a moment that your father is standing above you: his blurry silhouette, his tall presence. He casts a warm shadow. There is a noise you can't quite make out, but it is new and constant. Then he is gone.

You try to lean forward, to sit up and reach for him, but you are so heavy. You say something that should
be his name, but your tongue is deadened and useless. You pull your new, shocking weight against gravity, and after an eternity, you sit up, and the new sound suddenly makes sense: a clock. A tense, even punctuation. The volume of it ascends like a sick panic, like something terrible.

“Da?” You try to say it again; but nothing comes, and you climb down off the bed—no, the bench—the operating table. Wires lead from your wrists like the strings on a marionette, but you cannot see where the wires go; you are connected to something you cannot see.

You stumble to your feet. You want to walk, you want to run; but fat wires are holding you, and the ticking is deafening. A roulette wheel, a machine gun.

Your bottom lip becomes heavy; your mouth weighs a ton. It splits open, your chin and throat part, your sternum and chest, your gut, and there are birds coming from you, small steel birds flying from the cavity of you. Their song is a ticking and mechanical symphony, ugly and loud. The birds are the last thing; they are always the last thing, gray and red and everywhere, singing a terrible countdown.
Tick, tick, tick.

When you wake in the sharp of morning, whole and grown, the wires are gone. The dark is gone, your room is quiet and safe, but the ticking is still there. It is always there. The ticking is always there.

N
ell brushed her teeth at the small sink in the poky water closet off her bedroom. When the dream came and the ticking in her chest got so loud it woke her and left her shaking, she knew how to handle it. She couldn't just lie among her blankets and pillows and dwell on it; she had to get up and be a live, mobile person. Her father was rattling around the house somewhere. Kodak must have been down there with him because he was nowhere in sight. She rinsed her mouth and washed her face and pinned away her mad spirals of curls.

She dressed herself from the tall wardrobe in the corner, in front of a gilded mirror. It had been her mother's; aside from underthings and shoes, everything Nell wore had once belonged to her mother. Cora Crane had always dressed remarkably well, even
in her daughter's hazy memories of her. It was one of the few trappings of her Pastoral upbringing that she held about her in her city life: good fabric, everything made just her size.

Nell wanted to carry that same grace, the same silhouette. She was tall and spindly where Cora had been short and soft, but things somehow still managed to fit, just about.

Loose culottes, small boots. A blouse with short sleeves and a high collar. A long scarf wound around her neck. Another wound around her hair, to keep it out of her face. Earth tones, all, today. Deep blues and greens and browns and burgundies. If Nell stood out in the thicket at the right time of evening, she'd be invisible. She leaned in close to the mirror and dabbed tincture on her lips, and they bloomed red. The ticking slowly hushed to its usual thrum as she completed her morning routine, her self-assembly, with focused deliberation. It was barely audible by the time she was ready to leave her room and go downstairs.

The hand sat, untouched, on the pillow where she had left it. She stared at it for a moment, considering whether or not she should bring it down for breakfast, rest it next to her mug full of tea and saucer heaped with toast, but decided against it. If her father saw it, she'd have to tell him where it came from, and he wouldn't
be impressed. She'd keep it to herself, the warm egg of something terrific. No use in his tapping on it until it cracked. It would hatch when it was ready.

She pottered out of her room and down the steep wooden stairs. The Cranes didn't have a lounge or living room downstairs: just Julian's laboratory and the cavernous kitchen. The house was more or less a two-up two-down, but bigger, and it had become crooked with expansion. The laboratory's door was permanently closed. The kitchen, however, was the most welcoming room Nell had ever known.

It was a hearth and a belly and a hub, a powerful room, all terra-cotta flooring and strong, exposed beams. Drifting spider plants hung in old glass jars from the rafters. Lanky shelves, most neatly packed with books upon books, stood around the walls, but occasional cubbies would be precariously stacked with crockery and pans. The kitchen could have just as easily served as a library in its own right. It basically served as everything else: from principal location of many a town meeting to Nell's childhood playroom, her classroom.

The kitchen table was a huge, stately-looking slab. It had borne witness to so much change. The elbows of giants had rested on it, world-changing plans had bounced back and forth over it, and it had seen more than its fair share of spilled food, water, and wine. The
cooker was a gnarled wrought-iron thing, black and imposing. It was scarred from half a century of heavy use. A kettle, bronzed and ornate, stood on a scorching red hob and sang the beginning of a boiling song. Julian stood with his back to his daughter, plucking a pair of mugs out of the cupboard, one in his human arm, one in his augmented arm. He looked tired but not irritated. Nell took this as a blessing.

“Tea?” he asked brightly.

“Yes!” Nell replied. “Have you eaten?”

“No, but there's just enough of that loaf left to sort us both out for the morning. And there's fresh jam. The eggs went off overnight.”

Quietly they prepared breakfast, sweet and simple, the same thing they ate almost every morning, depending what had been gifted to them that week. So many of the great tradesmen of the city were indebted to Julian for the limbs he had built them that they were kept in fresh bread, sweet jams, cured meat. Nell's days were regularly punctuated by taking calls from the townsfolk bearing tokens. Part of her apprenticeship seemingly was to act as receptionist to the Marvelous Dr. Crane. It was exhausting: all that smiling and thanking people and taking note of who dropped off what and who paid their debts in tokens and who paid theirs in produce.

Julian was often too wrapped up to take them himself. Or at least he said he was busy. “Ordinary” craftsfolk profoundly annoyed him, and the misanthropic apple didn't really fall far from the antisocial tree; Nell wasn't in the least bit keen on the hostessing bit either. The townspeople often looked her over and asked prying questions about her forthcoming contribution. She played secretive to them usually, as though her great idea wasn't ready to be spoken aloud yet. Her ticking would rise, but she'd grit her teeth, gracious through the panic. Who knew if they ever believed her, but she did what she could, smiling and thanking them for coming all the way out to the parklands, for considering her family in their weekly dues. She'd shut the door softly after visitors, then lean against it, eyes closed, inhaling and exhaling her ticking back to normal.

The Cranes sat at the table with steaming mugs of tea, small bags of dried dark leaves at the bottom, bitter hot cups, and thick slabs of soda bread toast slathered in sweet, fresh nectarine jam. They ate quietly and thoughtfully in the morning warmth.

Their family resemblance rang true, except that Julian was pale and Nell was not. They had the same bags under their eyes, the same heavy lids. He was tall and thin and had a long, sad face, which in public was usually animated with an earnest charm that passed
for authentic, that kept people rapt. This was why he could only ever be social in small doses. It exhausted him to be well liked. Nell saw it, and heard the flatness behind his jovial tone.

“Your hair needs a cut, Da.”

“Do you think Ruby'd give it a go over for me this afternoon? Tomorrow?” Julian ruffled it with his hand, and it stuck out at all angles.

Nell nodded. “I'll ask her. You look ridiculous.”

Julian feigned a grateful bow over his tea, with a flourish of his augmented hand.

Aside from the hair situation, he looked very formal today. He wore a neatly fitting linen shirt, a highly respectable tie, and black suit pants with shiny black shoes. He wasn't working in the lab; he was heading out to the city to fit people with new limbs. He made every single one from scratch, then brought them down to the city twice a week to affix them to new owners at the Medical Center.

His arm was the miracle about him. It was the first of its kind, a fully responsive and intuitive biorobotic limb. It was a tasteful matte gray steel, not painted to match his skin or a gaudy plastic, as many of the more popular models were. It was modest and silent. The formula for his structures was impervious to epidemic traces or aftershocks: it was safe, healing technology.

Nell was never sure whether or not she hated it. When she looked too closely at it, it shone with everything she hadn't been able to achieve. The best contribution their infant city had ever seen. The healer of the nation.

Julian had been looked upon as a boy genius, a maverick: solely responsible for revolutionizing how the survivors of the epidemic lived. He'd been born without his left arm. The legend went that he built model after model until he eventually developed the design that behaved perfectly naturally. He'd started with wood, then advanced to steel, then broken the steel down, and made it cleverer, completely kinetic. Somewhere between wire and steel and organic materials, some perfect formula. His wife's family, the Starlings, hovered above, possibly pulling delicate strings in his favor; what he presented was dangerously close to pre-Turn technology, the kind that their land was still paying for. But it was deemed necessary, and he received an exception from the council. Kinetic augmented limbs were declared nondisruptive.

Nell had just been born when he presented the first model, and Cora still alive. They were young, bright parents on the cusp of a healing world.

Now it was just Julian and Nell. He was still a hero of the city, and she—well, they all were waiting for
her. She couldn't drop by the beauty shop for a replacement kohl pencil without Delia and Janey, the highly painted ladies with soft voices and impossibly colored hair, cooing, “Girl, you got anything exciting in the works?”

Ruby was usually Nell's shield in these circumstances. She'd laugh it off and say something like “Ladies! Would you put a cake on the table before it was iced?” or “There's no point in asking her. Every time she tries to explain it to me, I've not a clue what she's talking about!” But lately even Ruby had stopped trying.

“Having dinner with Daniel and the mayor tonight,” Julian said, holding a slice of bread near his mouth. “You going to the Bayou?”

Of course he knew about the party tonight. Nobody Julian's age would be caught dead at the Bayou, but tonight's party was out of the ordinary; murmurings must have eked out to the circles of tradesmen and masters alike.

“Yes. Ruby says it's important.”

“Daniel was telling me. She's not wrong. You can't be going and hanging around there twice every week without showing up and raising a glass to the twins. They pulled that place out of nowhere, you know. It was an incredible contribution to the city, given their start in the world.”

Nell raised the deep mug to her mouth and closed her eyes. Contribution. The Fox twins
did
deserve a celebration, and yes, the Bayou was important to a lot of people; but she hated it. Noise and clutter, all the bodies and smoke. Ruby always spent the first fifteen minutes with her, a pained look on her face, then excused herself to dance with somebody and was gone. Nell would spend the rest of the night perched at the bar, people-watching, warding off nosy acquaintances. Twice a week, every week. She'd stay until Ruby forgot she was there, and then she'd ghost out without any good-byes. Lately she'd had to stay for less and less time; last week it had only been an hour.

“You should try to enjoy yourself, occasionally, Nell. It's starting to show in your face. You'll never get anything done if you worry all the time; you'll run down your engine from the stress. Wouldn't want that, would you? Besides, how do you expect to create anything if you can't enjoy anything? You're no use to anyone if you're cracking yourself up.” Julian finished his tea and the last chunk of sweet, crumbly bread, then wiped his hands, the flesh of the left and augmented steel of the right passing each other without a second of delay or interference, without a telltale creak or hum. It used to hum loudly; this silence was fresh.

Why couldn't he have made the machine in her chest quiet, instead of so imposing and loud. He probably could now, Nell supposed, with the advances he'd made in his designs, but the idea of ever going under a knife again made her sick to her stomach. She put down her tea. Even the quiet wouldn't be worth it.

“I'll swing home in the afternoon to see if you and Ruby are about to sort out this mop”—he ran a hand through his hair again—“and tonight I'm hoping to be back in the house early. I've some new work to go over with Daniel, so don't be surprised if the house is quiet when you get in; we'll be in the lab. Ruby can stay over if she doesn't want to sleep in the cottage on her own.”

Her father gathered himself, collecting his dark leather doctor's bag and his bicycle helmet from the rack on the wall by the door to the back garden. He left his plate and mug on the table.

“You look like someone died, Nell.” Julian ruffled her hair a little too hard, dislodging her headscarf. “Oh, and this is for you. See if you can get it to light up, will you? I haven't had a minute to look at it, and I thought it'd make an interesting project. Might spark something, you know? You're running out of time.”

He opened his bag and pulled out an almost flat silver box, around the size of his palm. Nell took it from him. One side of it was black glass; the other, silver.
On one of the thin edges there were two small holes. Nell hadn't a clue what it was.

“Somebody gave it to me on the quiet down at the clinic, thought I'd be interested in it. From the look of it, it's a music box. Digital. Absolutely pre-epidemic, pre-Turn. Contraband of the highest order. Run a few volts through it real gently. See what happens.”

“But—” Nell began, wanting to know exactly
how
she would just “run a few volts” through this tiny box without setting it on fire, but he was out of the kitchen and down the hall. The front door opened and closed with a click. She sighed deeply and placed the little box on the table next to her unfinished breakfast.

She plucked the teabag out of Julian's abandoned mug and placed it in her own, the water still hot, pulling more deep, bitter flavor from the damp leaves in the used paper pouch. She sat there awhile, still and quiet. Kodak crept into the kitchen and hopped up into her lap. Nell fed him morsels of the soda bread until it was all gone, then rinsed the mugs and saucers.

She left them to dry and wandered back upstairs to her bedroom, almost forgetting to take the silver “music box” or whatever it was that Julian had left her. She'd pull it apart all right, but she was doubtful that anything on her work desk would be compatible with technology as sophisticated as this. She could stick
some eye buttons onto it maybe. Maybe a battery pack and tiny motorized legs. With three batteries she could build a propeller and make it fly, but Nell doubted that she could make it sing.

She wasn't even sure that she liked music that much. The loud clutter of noise and old torch songs the band at the Bayou played made her whole face hurt. Why would she want to take it all back home with her? Why would she want to listen to music from a different time? Surely it was all going to be a mess that she didn't understand.