Angel of Brass (11 page)

“The shamblers?”

“It must have been.” Jin shrugged. “But I
don’t really understand why. The shamblers are horrifying, but they
wouldn’t make terribly good soldiers. They move and follow orders,
but it’s all the controllers. Their brains aren’t active anymore—we
had one without a head, and it just kept stumbling around with the
rest.”

Molly shuddered at the picture his words
conjured up. Jin’s arms tightened around her. “Forgive me,” he
said. “It’s strange, the things that you can get used to. After a
while, it all just starts to seem normal. I can’t imagine how this
must sound to you.”

“No need to apologize,” she said, wondering
what else Jin had seen that could possibly make headless, walking
corpses seem comparatively normal. “So if they weren’t meant to be
soldiers, what did Malachi do with the shamblers he had?”

“Not much, really. They were more of an
experiment. A toy.” Jin let out a gusty sigh. “He’d do all kinds of
mad things, just to see if he could. They’re probably how he got
involved in the plot, though—the resurrectionist had delivered some
of the bodies, knew what Malachi could do, and thought he would be
useful.”

“Yes.” Molly shifted slightly, trying to find
a more comfortable position. “It would be nice if we knew who the
other man was. Are you sure you didn’t recognize him?”

“It’s not as if the doctor got that many
visitors,” Jin said dryly. “People tend to steer clear of insane
recluses who have ways of making trespassers and traveling salesmen
disappear. I’d remember if I’d seen him before.”

“Ah.”

He turned his head, listening, his body
tensing slightly, then relaxing again. “Do you think it’s safe to
go down?” she asked.

“Probably. But I’d rather wait until closer
to dawn, if you don’t mind. I’m sure they’ll recall the shamblers
by then, to keep them from being seen. Not much of a secret
conspiracy if people spot dead bodies wandering around the
neighborhood, after all.”

“That makes sense.”

“Why don’t you try to sleep?” he asked. “I’ll
stay awake. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

A bit to her own shock, Molly found herself
suppressing a yawn. Now that the immediate danger had passed, her
muscles felt as though they’d been replaced by lead, and exhaustion
tugged on her eyelids. “All right,” she murmured, and shifted a
little to get in a more comfortable position. Despite the
situation, there was something wonderful about having his arms
around her as she drifted off. His heat soaked through her clothes,
and the feel of his lean body warmed her in a second, even more
pleasant, fashion.

I wish...

No, don’t. Don’t wish. Just enjoy it while
you can.

Nuzzling sleepily into his shoulder, she slid
away into dreams.

Chapter 8

Jin waited until the sun peeked over the
horizon to wake Molly. She’d slid down in her sleep, until she lay
across his lap, her head pillowed on his thigh. He never would have
imagined that having someone drool on his pants would be adorable,
and yet somehow it was.

He didn’t want this to end, didn’t want her
to wake and move away from him. She felt soft and warm, and he
ached for her with a fierceness that shook him to his core. Shortly
before dawn, she whimpered in her sleep, so he allowed himself to
stroke her hair and whisper that everything was all right, that she
was safe. She had quieted then, her breath evening back out into
untroubled sleep. Somehow, it had felt desperately important that
he was able to do this small thing for her.

So he let her rest, until he could no longer
ignore the sounds of the waking city. “Molly?” he said softly,
shaking her shoulder. “Time to get up.”

She blinked sleepily up at him, seeming
confused for a moment. Then her eyes cleared, and she sat up,
absently fishing a watch from the pocket in her quilted vest. “Ugh.
I feel as though someone beat me with sticks. Saints, my legs
hurt.”

Missing her warmth already, he passed her
coat back to her, and watched as she pulled it on. “Moving will
help,” he said.

She winced as she shifted her weight and
stretched her legs in front of her. “Or kill me. At least I’ll be
out of my misery. I can’t believe that I just slept on a roof.”

Jin suppressed a sigh. Miserable as it had
been for her, for him it had possibly been one of the best moments
in his life.
How pathetic is that?

“I’m sorry—you didn’t sleep at all, and here
I am complaining,” Molly said, perhaps catching some shift of his
expression. “Let’s get moving, so we can find you a bed as soon as
possible.”

He climbed down carefully, acutely conscious
of her body clinging to his back. When they reached the ground, she
went to uncover the controller he’d hidden in the trash. It was
covered with muck; Molly wiped it off with a handkerchief that she
then abandoned as ruined.

As the sun came up, the city began to wake
around them. Presumably the shamblers had been recalled before
running into anyone else on the streets, given that the paperboys
weren’t shouting out headlines about the dead walking the earth.
The smell of baking bread filled the air, and a steam car rattled
past, belching smoke. A pair of youths, one dressed mostly in
yellow, the other in green, traded insults on a corner. Jin caught
a flash of knives, which disappeared when a mechapede rippled down
the street. The boys themselves melted away almost as quickly,
their territorial dispute temporarily put aside.

“Goggleboys,” Molly said, with a dismissive
shake of her head.

There was a telpherage platform not far away;
despite the relative expense, Molly declared that she wasn’t
walking anywhere. The tramway car was filled with workers making
their way across the city, none of whom spared a glance for a
dirty, tired boy and an equally-dirty gear girl.

As the car lifted into the air on its wires,
Jin worked his way to the window and stared out, watching the
ground recede. The sight made him ache for his rig, almost as
fiercely as he had ached for Molly.

It’s gone, probably forever, unless we can
rescue it along with Del
. Maybe, if Malachi was arrested and
taken away, the authorities would let Del and him keep their
rigs.

Molly joined him at the window. “These things
always make me a little queasy,” she said, peering out. “There was
an accident a few years ago. The wires hadn’t been properly
maintained, and a car fell. I know it doesn’t happen often, but I
still can’t help but be nervous.”

“Understandable,” he said. “So where are we
going next?”

“As much as I’d love a long, hot bath and a
change of clothes, I think we should take the controller to the
institute,” she replied. “I want Liam to take a look at it.”

“Will he be there? I thought there weren’t
any classes today.”

“There aren’t, but I know Liam. As excited as
he was about the notes you gave him, he’s probably only left the
lab to eat, sleep, and visit his boyfriends.”

Jin shook his head, bemused. “You two
certainly are single-minded.”

“Hmph,” Molly said, hugging the controller to
her chest. “I don’t know what you mean.”

They rode the telpherage all the way to
Brasstown, then bought crêpes from a cart for breakfast. The
streets were quiet and the grounds of the institute nearly
deserted.

As Molly had predicted, Liam was in the lab.
They found him stretched out on his bench, dozing, an arm flung
across his eyes. When Molly put the controller on the table with a
loud clunk, he started wildly, almost falling onto the floor.

“Saints, Molly, you scared me half to death,”
he said. The spikes of his hair had been flattened in the back, and
he absently tugged on them. “What time is it?”

“Eight. And I’ve been up for almost two hours
already, so I don’t want to hear any complaints from you.”

He rubbed his eyes, took a second look at
Molly, then at Jin, his expression deepening into a frown. “You two
look like a boiler explosion.”

“Thanks. I can see why your charm has won you
so many friends.”

He waved a dismissive hand at her. “You know
that isn’t what I meant. I take it you had an interesting
night?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Molly
launched into their tale, Jin supplementing her account where
necessary. When they were done, Liam stared at the controller with
a mixed expression of curiosity and revulsion.

“So. These shamblers are corpses, which are
somehow made to move and respond to commands by this thing.”

Jin nodded. “That’s right.”

Liam’s gaze shifted to Jin, and his eyes
narrowed. “And what about you? Do you follow orders, too?”

It hit him like a blow to the chest.
He
knows. The notebook gave away more than I realized
.

Molly frowned in confusion, glancing back and
forth between the two boys. “What are you talking about?”

Liam ignored her. “What
are
you?” he
asked Jin bluntly. “It seems to me that Molly’s putting her life on
the line. I think she has a right to know what she’s risking it
for.”

“Liam!” Molly snapped, harshly enough to get
his attention. “Have you lost your mind? What are you talking
about?”

Liam took out the notebook, opened it to a
marked page, and pushed it across to Molly. “Look at this.”

No
. But there was nothing Jin could do
to stop what was to come.

Jin didn’t need to take a closer look to know
what Molly saw. A single sketch spread across both pages, showing a
male body—his body—in outline. It was all lovingly shaded and
rendered in beautiful detail. His artificial legs and forearms were
represented of course...but that wasn’t all. There were the hollow
metal bones and fine-tuned joints, all stronger and lighter than
anything human. Sockets ran along either side of his spine, wired
into his nervous system. The lungs within the cage of metal ribs
connected to air sacks, cutting weight and allowing for more
efficient extraction of oxygen. And in the center, perhaps most
damning of all, was a mechanical heart.

“This is you,” Liam said to Jin. “Isn’t
it?”

There was no point in denying it. “Yes,” he
whispered.

He couldn’t just stand there. Couldn’t bear
Molly’s horror, when she realized what she’d allowed to comfort her
last night. Wrapping his arms around himself, he walked quickly to
the door, ignoring the sound of Molly calling after him.

The morning was still bitterly cold, but he
welcomed the clean sting of the air in his lungs. The fact that
cold didn’t bother him was just one more reminder that he was a
monster.

“Jin!”

Startled, he turned, and saw Molly hastening
down the steps, the chains on her coat jingling loudly in the clear
air. “Jin, talk to me,” she said as she caught up with him. “Tell
me what’s wrong.”

He looked away from her, picking up the pace
in the hopes of leaving her behind. “You know what’s wrong. Your
friend Liam certainly understood quickly enough.”

“Liam’s an idiot,” she said, scowling.
“Considering that he poked around in your foot once already, I
don’t see where he gets to act surprised. It isn’t as though we
didn’t already know Malachi had replaced parts of you.”

“He’s surprised because I lied,” Jin said.
Saints, couldn’t she see it? Was it part of his penance for wanting
her, to have to speak the damning words out loud? “I pretended to
be a real person!”

She blinked, taken aback. “You are a real
person.”

“I’m not!” He closed his eyes, hating
Malachi. Hating himself. “Molly...I told you that Del and I were
adopted. But that was a lie. Malachi cobbled us together in his
lab. He built himself a pair of young monsters, and then raised us
as if we were human children, tinkering the whole time.
‘Perfecting’ his work, he would say.”

“Jin—”

“I’m a monster, Molly,” he said, cutting
ruthlessly across her words.
The faster this is over with, the
better
. “I’m not human. I’ve never been human. I’m a thing, a
creation, no different than the shamblers or the smiling men.”

“That’s not true!” She grabbed him roughly by
the upper arm, jerking him around to face her.
“Listen
to me
for five seconds, curse you! If there’s a monster here, it’s
Malachi, not you.”

“I’m not real!”

“If you were nothing more than an uncaring
machine, you would have left me for the shamblers last night and
saved yourself. You didn’t.” She shifted both hands to his
shoulders, gazing earnestly up at him. “You saved my life.”

Hardly daring to believe that he was hearing
her correctly, he said, “It’s my fault that your life was in danger
in the first place.”

A smile softened her face. “That bothers you,
doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does.”

“See?” she laid one palm on his chest, over
his heart. “You’re not like the shamblers or the smiling men. Or
Malachi. It doesn’t matter if your heart is flesh and blood, or
gold and titanium. It doesn’t matter if you were born the
conventional way, or constructed by a brilliant madman. You’re
still a good person. Trust me on this.”

No answer seemed adequate. “Th-thank you,” he
managed at last.

She smiled and stepped away, linking her hand
gently with his. “I’m just telling you the truth, Jin, that’s all.
Now, let’s get in out of the cold. You can take a nap on the couch
in the lobby, and I’ll have a little talk with Liam.”

“You don’t have to,” he said, letting her
draw him after her up the steps.

“Yes, I do,” she said firmly. “I’m not going
to have my friends arguing, especially if it’s because one of them
is being an idiot. All right?”

“All right.”

He sat down on the couch once they were
inside, watching her stride to the lift. When she was gone, he laid
back and stared at the ceiling.