The Girl with the Iron Touch

“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.”

“Poor thing. I wonder if she’s being looked after.”

It took a moment longer than it should have for her to figure out what Emily was talking about. “The automaton?”

“Aye.”

“It’s a machine, Em. I’m fairly certain it can look after itself.” Not to mention it could break both the arms of a full-grown man without trying very hard.

“It’s not just a machine.” Emily looked outraged that Finley would even think such a thing. “If it was indeed covered in bits of flesh, then it has been exposed to organites. Either she’s badly injured and decomposing, or her skin is not yet fully formed. Regardless, she most certainly cannot look after herself.”

“You think she’s like the Victoria automaton?” The thought of that awful thing put a bad taste in her mouth. It had looked so much like the queen that she’d spent several days thinking someone was going to arrest her for ripping its head off. The thing had been so humanlike that destroying it felt like murder.

“We both know what the beasties are capable of doing. They helped repair Sam’s heart, treated injuries. They’re the reason we’re…evolved. I have no doubt that she’s very much like the mechanical majesty. By the time the organite process is completed, I reckon she’ll be a living, breathing girl with a gregorite skeleton and a great capacity for learning. I’ve no idea what someone might want with her. There are so many possibilities.”

“I wouldn’t recommend thinking on it too hard,” Finley suggested with a grimace. “I’ve heard stories about what some men like to do to automatons. Some women, too.”

Emily held up a hand. In the dark her shirt was so very bright it made her look a little tanned, though she often burned more than anything else. “I don’t want to know, thank you very much.”

Finley cast a sideways glance in her direction, her expression dubious. “Whenever anyone says that it’s because they already know or have a fairly good idea.”

“I know lots of things, but that doesn’t change the matter of me not wanting to speak of them. I’m not the fragile little doll everyone seems to think I am.”

She snorted. “Nothing fragile about you, you mad Irish harpy.” Finley waited until she had gotten a smile in return before pressing on. Now was as good a time as any…. “Em, did somebody hurt you?”

Emily came to an abrupt stop. Her eyes were wide, but her jaw was firm, as though something inside her was trying to force its way out and she was determined to control it. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said finally. When her expression went completely blank—even her eyes—Finley knew she’d struck a nerve, knew she was right. She wished she wasn’t.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I don’t want to pry, but if you do…I’d like to listen.” She began walking again to let her friend know she wasn’t going to pressure her.

“How did you know?” Emily asked a few moments later when the silence between them had stretched on.

Finley shrugged. Good Lord, where was the bloody exit? “For a while I’ve suspected something had happened.” Suspected and wished her friend would share with her, so she could share, as well. Lord Felix hadn’t been the first bloke to try to force himself on her, but he’d been the most frightening, and not just because he would have hurt her badly, but because of how badly she had wanted to hurt him for trying it.

“I should have known you’d figure it out. Of course you would.”

Was that a compliment or a judgment? Maybe neither. No one who had ever been hurt in such a manner would treat someone else’s experience as a positive thing, and they certainly wouldn’t cast blame.

“Do you want to talk about it?” This was what girls who were friends did, right? Talked about things that had happened to them, traded secrets. Emily was only the second friend she’d had since her twelfth birthday, and the first one had been her employer so it didn’t really count. She had no idea how to handle this sort of situation.

Only she knew that she would like five minutes alone with whoever had hurt Em. Five minutes and a cricket bat.