This Monstrous Thing (21 page)

I started forward cautiously, good arm extended so I wouldn’t smash into anything. Rust and metal shavings crunched under my feet. My heart was slamming like a piston, and I kept waiting for someone to grab me. If they were kind, they’d cut my throat right there and spare me from having to sort out the wretched mess I’d gotten myself into.

But there was no one. The factory seemed well and truly deserted. I walked the floor end to end and found not a soul, nor any hint of a revolution being built there. No rebels. No clockwork men. No Oliver.

Then, just as I was about to give up, I found a gated set of spiral stairs that led underground. At their base, a pale light flickered. I hopped the gate and jogged down, a bit unsteady without a hand to put on the rail.

The stairs opened onto a storeroom a quarter the size of the floor above. The air was different here, sulfurous and chalky instead of metallic. In the center of the room was a Carcel burner with a glass shade—not a fine piece, but too delicate for a factory—and the flame cast a sheen of pale light across the low ceilings and the cracked stone floor. Beside the burner were a few loose sheets of paper, and when I picked one up, I realized it was a leaflet, same as the one Mirette had given Clémence and me. The paper was brushed black with something that looked like soot but felt coarse when I scrubbed at it. It was on the ground too, I realized, a light dust like something had spilled. I held my fingers above the burner shade and rubbed them together. A bit of the powder wafted down into the lamp, and the flame sparked with a loud pop. I jumped back, realizing what it was. Gunpowder.

I dropped the leaflet and crouched down in the center of the underground room, trying to figure out what I was meant to do with this empty room and a few leaflets laced with gunpowder, but the only thing I could think about was Oliver with his wild heart and now with devoted revolutionaries at his command, ready to let himself and his men loose on Geneva. I looked down again at the leaflet, black powder gathering in its creases—
FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER LIVES!

There was a soft patter from behind me like scuttling
footsteps on the stone. I looked up just as a brass gear the size of my fist was lobbed out of the darkness and clattered to the ground at my feet. “Hello?” I called.

Silence. Then a small voice replied, “I know you, Shadow Boy.”

And from the corner came Mirette, black hair striped amber in the lamplight and another gear in her hand.

I kicked the one on the ground. “Did you throw that at me?”

“I meant it to hit you.”

“Bleeding awful aim.”

“It’s heavy.” A pause as she took a step closer to me, head cocked so her tangled hair raked over her shoulders. “Were you crying?”

“No.”

“I didn’t know boys cried.”

“I wasn’t . . .” And then I stopped, because the light from the burner had sliced across her face and I realized
she
had tears on her cheeks. “What’s wrong with you?”

“They told me to stay hidden down here, but I wanted to help. Then I heard someone upstairs and I thought it was the police come for me.” She dragged her hand across her cheeks and gave a throaty sniff, then added, “You were wrong, you know.”

“What was I wrong about?”

“The resurrected man.” She pointed at the drawing on
one of the leaflets. “He’s not just in the book. He’s real. I saw him with my own eyes.”

I sat up. “So he was here?”

“He came to lead us. I told you he would.”

“Where have they gone?” I asked. “Where’s he taken them?”

Mirette sucked her bottom lip. “I’m not supposed to say.”

“It’s important, Mirette, please.” She turned away from me, her face out of the lantern light. I crawled forward so I was right beside her, and I nudged the burner into the space between us. “How’s your foot?” I asked.

“I can still move my toes,” she replied, then thrust out her foot to demonstrate for me. She’d wrapped it in rags so that the socket fused into her skin was covered. “And I’m going to nick some shoes soon as I can. You fixed it good.”

“I wish I could do better.” I picked up one of the leaflets and held it between us. “The resurrected man,” I said, “he’s my brother. I’m trying to find him. Please, Mirette, will you help me?”

Mirette pressed her metal foot hard into the floor, leaving a clear print in the black dust. Then she said, “First we went to the castle.”

“The castle?”

“Up in the foothills. They let me come along to carry the lantern.”

“All right, then what?”

“Then they brought the crates back here.”

“They brought what?”

“Crates. All the crates. That was yesterday.”

“What did the crates . . . ?” And then I realized. Oliver was running around with Clémence, the daughter of a bomb maker, and they had gone back to Château de Sang for the gunpowder packed in the basement and left a trail of it here between the stones. “Mirette, where’ve they gone?”

“The tower. The clock strikes again tonight.”

I could have hugged her for that, but I was worried she’d whip another gear at me if I tried, and I was a much easier target with just a few feet between us. “You have to promise me you’ll stay here tonight. Don’t go anywhere near the clock tower.”

“But I want to help.”

“You can’t help. You need to stay here.”

“Are you going?” she asked. I hesitated, which answered the question, and she grabbed my coat sleeve. “Take me too!”

“No, it’s dangerous.”

“But
you’re
going. That’s not fair.”

“Mirette, if you follow me, I’ll tell the resurrected man that it was you who blabbed about where he and his men had gone and you’ll be in trouble.”

Her fist twisted on my coat sleeve, so tight the material tugged at my skin. “No, please don’t!”

“Then promise me you’ll stay here and stay hidden.”

Her mouth puckered into a scowl. “Fine. I’ll stay here.”

“Good. And for God’s sake, put the light out before you blow yourself up.”

Mirette twisted the knob on the side of the burner and the flame died into nothing. She was gone before I could stand—I heard her footsteps fade into the darkness—and I went in the opposite direction, fumbling my way back to the bottom of the stairs, the powdered remnants of my brother’s bombs crunching under my feet.

I
left the Cogworks and sprinted through the north quarter until I came to the river and crossed back into the financial district. Every inch of me was buzzing. I knew should have gone to the police first, but there wasn’t time. All I could think about was Oliver and his army somewhere in the crowd in the clock tower square, waiting to make their move, and Mary there too, waiting for me, not knowing that something was about to happen.

The noise from the square reached me from streets away, the sound of the market and so much happy chatter and the voices raised in carols. When I turned the corner into the square, I found Place de l’Horloge packed. The Christmas market stalls were walled in by people shopping and eating and staking out their spots to watch the clock strike for the first time in years. The frosty air was spiced with wassail and sweet smoke from the braziers. I
shoved my way through the crowd toward the base of the clock tower, hoping that by some miracle I’d smash into someone I recognized—Ottinger or Oliver or Mary, especially, so I could drag her away from here.

I searched the sea of upturned faces pinched red by the cold, and across the square I spotted Clémence.

She was standing in the middle of everything, looking straight ahead instead of up at the clock like everyone else. Perhaps she sensed my gaze, for she turned her head and I caught a glimpse of the left side of her face, where the bruise from the automaton’s fist was blushing violet. I thought for a moment she was looking right at me; then I realized her attention was on someone else across the crowd. She tapped two fingers to her lips like a greeting or a signal and started to move. I changed course and followed her.

Clémence was smaller than I was and she moved easily through all the people. I kept getting whacked by elbows and shopping bag and scarves as they were whipped over their owners’ shoulders. I stopped apologizing after stepping on a man’s foot, nearly cost me the sight of her.

She broke from the rows of market stalls and trotted around the side of the clock tower, away from the crowd. I followed, but when I rounded the corner, she was gone, as suddenly as if she’d vanished into thin air. It was only me standing at the edge of the river, trying to work out where she went.

Then, from high above me, there was a flash like a sudden sunbeam, accompanied by a coarse grinding sound. A cheer went up from the square, and I looked up. Someone inside the clock had given it a pulse, and I could hear the gears starting to churn, weights sinking and rising on heavy chains as the chimes began to sing. I heard it all, and I felt it inside of me, like my own heart syncing to the clockwork.

Then a murmur ran through the crowd, cheers turning into a collective gasp. Something was wrong.

I jogged back to the edge of the market and looked up at the clock face. The minute hand, poised to strike when the clock was started, had moved one step backward instead.

Then the doors to the glockenspiel under the face opened, and the platform began to roll out. The clockwork figures that were meant to be there had gone, and in their place was a single crouching form. I knew him before he stood, but stand he did. Stood and looked out across the city like a grotesque gargoyle from a cathedral buttress.

It was Oliver.

He was wearing nothing but trousers, and it seemed a miracle that his metal joints hadn’t frozen at that height in this cold. He raised his chin as the wind teased his dark hair, the light from the clock face shafting through it like veins of gold in obsidian. He had his shoulders thrust back, his twisted clockwork body on display.

For a moment, the crowd didn’t seem to realize that the strange brass form gleaming above them was not a clockwork figure from the glockenspiel but a living man made of stitches and metal. Then people began pointing and shouting. Someone screamed, high and shrill.

“Geneva!” Oliver cried, his voice carrying over the wind and the river and the crowd. “You have tried to silence us, but we cannot be silenced.”

A man in front of me bolted, knocking into my shoulder as he ran. My stitches flared. “What’s going on?” a woman nearby whimpered.

“Your monsters are unleashed,” Oliver cried, raising his arms before him as though in presentation. “And they come for the men who beat them and broke them.”

He looked down, and the crowd followed his gaze to the archways at the base of the clock tower. Shadows were breaking from the darkness, joining the cobblestone square and taking the shape of people. Clockwork people, I realized, with their mechanical limbs on display. Men and women with brass legs and iron fists and silver shoulders and kneecaps, trousers and skirts and coat sleeves rolled up so their limbs could be seen. They walked toward the crowd, with Oliver shouting above them, reciting:

“Thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; my agony was still superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever.”

Frankenstein
,
I realized. He was quoting
Frankenstein
in the cawing oratory voice he used to adopt when he and Mary read Milton aloud on the shores of Lake Geneva, and birds scattered from the grass before him.

Now it was the crowd scattering before him as his army advanced. A woman stepped backward on top of me and I almost lost my footing. Someone shoved me from behind. People were starting to run.

The first explosion went off then. Somewhere in the back of the crowd there was a bang and a flash, and the screams multiplied. One of the market stalls had caught fire, sending a tongue of flame blazing into the air. Then there was a second bang from close behind me, and a gust of hot, sulfurous air hit me so hard I stumbled.

And then everyone was running and coughing and shouting. It was hard to make out anything amid the noise, though I swore I could still hear Oliver reciting
Frankenstein
, like a scripture, at the top of his voice. The clockworks were shoving back at the crowd, pikes and hammers and fists ready for a fight.

Though the haze, I could see blue-uniformed police officers streaming into the crowd. They had their rifles raised and were making for the tower, but the ring of clockworks held them off. Shots were fired. More people screamed. I saw a splash of blood in the river— washed away so fast it was like blinking away sunspots.

My eyes were burning from the smoke and it was
hard to keep them open. Ahead of me, amber flames were clawing at the air, jumping from one stall to the next along the garlands. I staggered forward and tripped over something. A body was sprawled at my feet, and blood was trickling into the cracks between the cobblestones. I stopped dead for a moment, too shocked to move, but I knew I didn’t have time to waste being afraid. Mary was somewhere in the crush. My brother was swearing vengeance against her book in her own words,
and I had to find her.

“Mary!” I called, not certain if anyone but myself could hear. I started to shove my way back, against the crowd and toward the clock tower base. It was a fight to not get sucked under and stepped on. The crowd was funneling toward the mouths of the streets and across the bridge, which was jammed up too tight for anyone to move.

“Mary!” I shouted again, so loud I felt something tear in my throat.
“MARY!”

And, miraculously, I heard someone shout back, “Alasdair!” I turned. Mary was struggling toward me, scarf pulled up over her nose and tears streaming down her cheeks. She reached out. I snatched at her hand, just the tips of our fingers brushing, but the second time, I caught her and pulled her against me. Our arms tangled, and I held as tight as I could to her as we started fighting our way out.

We were shoved sideways, away from the square and
toward the clock tower. A line of policemen had formed a perimeter around one of the arches at the base; they stood shoulder to shoulder with their rifles trained forward, but they weren’t firing.