Human for a Day (9781101552391) (2 page)

Jax wiggled his fingers.
Is it as bad as they say
?
The stench?

“It smells like a herd of elephants drowned in an open sewer,” said Willem.

That doesn't sound so bad. You squishy humans. So delicate.
Jax signed this along with a trill of gearing from deep in his torso: the Clakker equivalent of a chuckle, though most took it for a growl.

“They drowned a month ago,” said Willem. “And they're getting ripe.”

In the centuries since Jax's primary mainspring had been wound and sealed into his torso, only Willem had ever taken the time to know him. Only Willem recognized that being mute didn't make Jax a halfwit. Willem alone had ever wondered about the thoughts imprisoned within the brass jail of Jax's skull, and only he had seen fit to set them free with sign language. Willem was his only friend and the best human he had ever known.

Soon Jax would have a Key and a voice. His chromium-plated exoskeleton would undergo the alchemical transformation that would render it soft flesh. He'd be able to hug Willem, and thank him, without cutting or crushing him. His love would not be deadly.

The wind sculpted snowdrifts of confetti against an empty grandstand. The Mayors of New Amsterdam had been in attendance when the queen presented the lord governor with his medal, his title, and, most extravagant of all, the tulips. He'd gained her favor by pushing the French back across the border, and lavish were her rewards. But now the celebration was over and the sterile glow of electric street lights bleached color from the rainbow-hued streamers. Wind-strewn crepe flittered through the legs of the motionless clockwork servitors lining the approach to the
Huygens
. The rest of the queen's guard had accompanied her to the ball at the governor's palace.

The buzz of saws and the percussion of hammers echoed across the harbor. Carpenters were already hard at work dismantling the stands. Wood was in rare supply these days.

The wind died. The queen's standard fell limp against the flagpole. But Willem kept the handkerchief pressed to his nose. Jax pretended not to hear him blowing his nose; politely turned a blind eye to the way he dabbed at his eyes. He felt the same way, but envied Willem his tears. Jax couldn't cry. That was the province of humans.

But that didn't mean he couldn't worry. Willem would pay dearly if his role in Jax's escape were uncovered.

Willem gave his nose a final blow, tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket. A rueful smile touched the corners of his eyes. “Miss my chance to see you finally free? Don't be silly. But now that I'm here, I find I'll miss being a sailor.”

Jax shook his head. A passerby at that moment might have thought a steam engine had slipped its bearings.
You should stay
, he signed.
Let me go alone
. A Dutch naval officer caught sneaking into French Quebec is likely to be shot on sight. Worse, it could reignite the war.

Willem said, “Let's make an effort not to get caught, then.” This time the smile missed his eyes. Instead it speared Jax in the hollow where a human's heart would have been. It hurt worse than a grain of sand pinched in the coils of a mainspring, or a cracked tooth on a cog.

“Are you ready?”

Jax nodded.

“Very well, then.” Willem stood straighter and looked Jax in the eyes. The regal bearing couldn't completely erase the wetness in his eyes. The tears, Jax knew, signified both joy and sorrow. He'd observed humans for a long time before he understood this.

“Jackivantus, heed my words, for as a human being I claim my right to lay this geas upon you: I demand that you forsake your duties aboard the Christiaan Huygens. I demand that you venture into New Amsterdam with the sole and unwavering purpose of seeking freedom in Quebec. I demand you seek the maker of counterfeit Keys, who is said to live above a machinist's shop on Vermeers Street, and that you make every effort to do so, including doing violence to those of your own kind if such is necessary. And I demand that you take every precaution to avoid receiving any further geas that would supersede this compulsion.” The seriousness around his thin lips gave way to the smirk. “And, as your friend, I demand that you let me help you.”

Willem meant well. He didn't know how much the compulsion hurt. No human did.

The words were a lightning bolt to the helpless dry tinder of Jax's soul; an unstoppable brush fire that would burn him to ash, over and over, until he satisfied the geas. He could not but obey. He had no Key. No free will.

Willem's bootsteps evoked a quiet rattle from the gangplank. Jax crouched beside the taffrail, his knees hinging backwards in the manner some found grotesque. They ratcheted closed with the tick-tick-tick of an outsized pocket watch. He rocked onto his toes, pressing his ankle joints tighter against the springs of his haunches. Willem set foot on the pier. He ignored the guards and went straight to the carpenters, clever and bold and oh-so-handsome in his lieutenant's grays. Only a man with nothing to hide would be so brazen.

Jax's anxiety grew with every pulse of hydraulic fluid into the pistons that drove his legs. He quivered like an overheated boiler. The compulsion had stiffened the springs in his legs, made them stronger, almost too strong to withstand. Light glinted between Willem's fingers when he pulled the silvered flask from his pocket. The carpenters gathered around: the price of good liquor had increased a hundredfold during their adulthoods.

Jax waited until after Willem had taken his own sip and passed the flask around. And when the lieutenant had captured their attention, he jumped.

A quiet puff belied the explosive release of potential energy that launched him from the deck. He arced over the pier, over the Clakkers tirelessly protecting the
Huygens
from French perfidy, over the flagpoles and the queen's standard. Jax soared beyond the ring of electric lights toward the shipping offices and warehouses. The carpenters might have seen a glint of light streaking across the sky and thought it a shooting star.

On the way down, Jax unfolded his arms to their fullest extent. As the shadows of the wharf enveloped him, he tightened the springs in his arms and torso.

Like a steel javelin, Jax's outstretched body speared a warehouse roof. His arms buckled to their fullest compression with a spine-rattling clank. The impact pulverized roofing tiles. The handstand persisted for a fraction of a second, and then he somersaulted through the air, flipping along the roofline like a Chinese acrobat. Each landing absorbed more energy and slowed him further.

Until he crashed through a skylight. Jax flailed at nothing on the way down and came to rest atop a flattened pile of wooden crates. His landing launched billowing clouds of dust and debris through dark aisles.

He stood. Glass tinkled and wood creaked. Nails jutted from the demolished crates, scritching across his armatures. Something soft and round bounced away when he brushed himself off. Jax stepped out of the wreckage and crushed another soft something underfoot.

A tulip bulb.

The queen's gift, he realized. He untangled himself from a length of tangerine bunting.

Electric arc lights flared to blinding life. A shout echoed through the warehouse. It was followed by the rumble of a loading-dock door and the unmistakable clatter of brass on concrete as a squad of the queen's guards poured inside.

The tulip shipment was the most valuable thing to enter the harbor in a very long time. A king's ransom, or a city's, or an entire winter without hunger for those desperate and bold enough to risk tulip soup. Of course it was guarded. Metal troopers, machines like Jax, weren't the worst problem. The real danger was their human commander, once he realized a rogue Clakker was loose in the warehouse.

Willem's compulsion rose within Jax: a searing ember that couldn't be extinguished, hot enough to consume him if he resisted.

Jax shredded the bunting and then shoved the rags into the holes in his skull with enough force to bend the rims of his ears. No matter. They could always be hammered back into shape. But now he couldn't hear an order to desist.

Nor could he hear the guards. But he'd served in more than one army in the centuries before he was sold to the navy, and knew the tactics of the human minds who commanded the clockworks. They sought human offenders: impoverished thieves weak from hunger, or French saboteurs.

Jax leapt upon one of the iron pillars spread throughout the cavernous warehouse. Stiffened fingers and toes punched rivet-sized holes through the beam as he scrambled into the shadows above the lights. A rain of iron doughnut holes pattered upon the concrete slab, oddly silent to Jax's close-packed ears. A waxy half moon shone through the empty skylight frame.

Bullets ricocheted through the iron scrollwork of the ceiling beams. They struck sparks that flickered in the darkness like fireflies in high summer.

Jax swung himself up through the broken window and back to the roof. One round creased his foot and another dented the plating where the small of a human's back would have been. He sprinted to the edge of the roof and flung himself over the alley to an adjacent warehouse. He crossed the gap between buildings folded into a sphere, while the queen's guards on the streets below mustered into squads with clockwork precision.

He rolled to his feet, sprinted to the edge, and repeated the process. He couldn't stop to watch the search. Even now, the Clakkers from the warehouse would be climbing after him. Any delay threatened failure to comply with the geas Willem had laid upon him, and that was impossible for a Clakker without a Key.

Jax crossed one rooftop, and another, always following the tug of the compass rose in his chest. According to the map he'd studied with Willem, Vermeers Street was a narrow slash northwest of the city center.

The pounding of his heavy feet dislodged a roofing tile. It cracked free, bounced along the eaves, and tumbled three stories to shatter on the street like a flowerpot. It drew his hunters as sharks to blood, warlords to weakness. He bounded over the next alley faster than the humans could bring their weapons to bear, but not faster than the Clakkers could respond. Three more bullets pinged from Jax's balled-up body.

The mechanical men carried rifles, which they wielded and aimed far better than any mortal could achieve. Their human controllers carried tar guns and sand sprayers.

Any Clakker found in possession of a counterfeit Key—any slave with the gall to pick the lock on its own soul—was subject to summary execution in the dreaded forges of The Hague. So said the Highest Law since the time of Huygens, when his publication of the Horologium Oscillatorium begat three centuries of Dutch ascendancy. Even the British, with their insistence that Huygens had stolen the alchemical researches of an obscure natural philosopher named Newton, had fallen silent when elite legions of clockwork fusiliers marched through Westminster. Only the French had stood firm in their enlightenment: first Paris, then Montreal had been the seat of a government that espoused the ideal of universal human rights for mechanical men; a dangerous and irresponsible policy to the Dutch point of view. And thus the holy crusade.

The compulsion flared anew, like a white-hot fishhook snagged in Jax's mind. He stumbled. He would fail Willem and violate the geas if he led his pursuers to the machinist. He turned west, and made a show of it.

It brought him closer to the guards from the warehouse. They brought their clockwork perfection, and their rifles, to bear on the bunting wrapped about Jax's ears. He ducked, spun, and flipped over another alley. Their shots drew more sparks where they dimpled his body, flares of pain that lit the night like flashes from a semaphore lamp. One round snapped his head back; another shattered the crystal in his left eye socket. The world went flat.

Jax kicked up a tile. He hefted it while he ran, got a sense of its weight and aerodynamic properties, while turning to again cross over the human pursuers. The loss of binocular vision made it difficult to aim. And the geas raged like a conflagration against the hard boundaries of the mechano-alchemy that had imbued Jax with life. No Clakker could harm a human being unless specifically bidden to do so with elaborate bindings and special geas; a simple compulsion like Willem's could never overcome that.

He could, however, knock the tar gun from unsuspecting fingers and use it against his pursuers. Jax let the tile fly and dove into the alley.

 

Several hours later, when he finally limped to Vermeers Street alone and unpursued, his chassis had more dimples than a golf ball. His knees groaned with metal fatigue. The piston rods in his right arm were warped and immobile. Sand scoured his cervical bearings when he turned his head. Smears of tar covered his face and dripped from his ears.

It hurt to move. But not moving, ignoring the geas, hurt more.

He knocked at the machinist's. The door opened almost at once. Willem gasped. Jax couldn't hear what he said. The AWOL lieutenant pulled him inside.

They stood in the shadows of presses and lathes, saws and drills and welding equipment. Their feet kicked up eddies of sawdust. A mundane and law-abiding workplace : not a pentangle or pendulum to be found; no sign of grimoires or gears. Clockmaking, and the associated arcane arts, were the sole province of the queen's forges.

The man who emerged from the shadows had the large callused hands of any laborer, but the peculiar haunted eyes of one whose study of alchemy hadn't deadened his conscience. He appraised Jax with a long look, and betrayed no reaction when doing it. The machinist snapped at Willem. The lieutenant looked abashed.

The machinist retrieved a metal can from a cabinet. Jax saw it was turpentine. It didn't take long with the two men working together—one on the left ear and one on the right—before Jax could hear again.