Of Dreams and Rust

For Cathryn and Shizhou

Chapter

IN THE LAST year I have come to understand the traitorous nature of skin. We cannot live without this barrier between our beating hearts and the outside world, yet it is the most fragile of things, as well as the most deceptive. My own, despite its golden undertones, cannot keep me warm. The memory of Melik's, the ruddy tan of earth under sun, leaves me aching in darkness. My father's, thin and buckling under the weight of his years and all the things he's lost, hides his silent strength.

And Bo's, so broken and torn, is woven from sheer betrayal. Stretched over his bones like the work of a clumsy tailor, carelessly patched, heedlessly sewn. I have come to know it almost as well as I do my own, and I hate it for its failure, for the painful story it tells. I hate it because, despite its weakness, it is somehow powerful enough to keep him from the world.

“Stop,” he snaps, wrenching his forearm from my grasp. “You're making it worse.”

I quickly rub my fingertips together, the rose hip oil slick between them. “It will keep the scar from growing stiff.” I gentle my tone. “I'm sorry if I was pressing too hard.”

Bo's machine hand, a work of mad, relentless genius, covers the scar on his arm, shielding it from me. His human skin is the same color as mine, but his machine parts glint silver beneath the lantern dangling from the rough rock ceiling of this chamber. Despite the fact that I have seen him without his mask, Bo always wears it when I visit. I am reflected in his half-metal face, my cheekbones and chin sharp, my forehead wide and distorted, my eyes dark. They, at least, tell the truth. The weariness and sorrow within them is as deep as the canyon that leads through the Western Hills.

Bo tilts his head. “You were far away just now. Again.”

I lower my gaze to my fingers. I hurt him when I am not with him, but I seem to hurt him almost as much by being here, and I can't figure out how to change that. “Shall I continue?”

Bo blinks his brown eye. His ebony hair hangs over his forehead, part steel, part flesh, yet all smooth. “I'm sure Guiren will be missing you. It is almost time for the clinic to open.”

“And I am sure you have many plans for today, all of which involve the use of this arm and these fingers, as well as both legs.” I glance over at his long work table, strewn with metal body parts, a bicep here, a pectoral there, circuits for blood vessels, gears and springs and bearings waiting for Bo to give them purpose, to bring them to life. Usually I love hearing about his creations and inventions. When he talks about a new idea, his whole face lights up. Sometimes I come down here just to watch him work, a few hours on a quiet afternoon spent staring at his hands moving in concert while his face cradles the tiniest of contented smiles. I have even made peace with his metal spiders, for the most part. However, when Bo began designing himself a complete steel shell, when he started to fashion a machine arm to fit over his human one, and then a set of legs, I began to realize he was the creation this time.

Now the sight of them chills me to the bone.

“I have a few minutes before I must go,” I say to him. “Let's make the most of it.”

“All right.” He sags a bit in his chair, its legs squeaking against the patterned metal panel that covers the floor. His machine arm arcs with precise grace to hang at his side. Sometimes it seems to move on its own, walking his skeletal fingers through a dance set to electrical pulses, transmitted by wires and circuits that wind like veins within the contours of his steel muscles. My own fingertips move hesitantly over the scar on his arm, the healed wound inflicted by his own fearsome spider creations as he rescued me and Melik from a mob—a trap that Bo himself had set for the rust-haired Noor boy who had claimed my heart. Bo's own heart would not allow him to see it through, though, and he paid for that mercy with blood. Four seasons have passed, but Bo's flesh has an unfailing, unforgiving memory.

“Any interestingly gory cases yesterday?” he asks as casually as he might inquire about the weather.

I smirk. “I am probably the only girl in the country who does not find that to be a repulsive and offensive question.”

“You're the only girl in the country I talk to, so I guess I'm lucky.” With his playful smile, he lifts some of the weight off my shoulders. It is magnetic, drawing the corners of my mouth up to match.

“Dr. Yixa is still put off by my eagerness to suture his patients' wounds. He makes the funniest faces whenever he witnesses me washing blood from my hands.” I imitate it, lowering my eyebrows and grimacing, and Bo laughs. “But at this point he knows my stitches are neater and straighter than his own.”

“Then I give him credit for being observant.”

I wonder if Bo realizes how his simple faith in me melts away some of my own doubts.

“He should be grateful,” Bo continues. “Gochan One was dangerous, but Gochan Two is as heartlessly deadly as the war machines it creates. He needed the help.”

“Father and I were fortunate he did.” After the destruction of Gochan One, Father and I thought we might have to leave in search of work, but Dr. Yixa, the chief physician and surgeon for the neighboring factory, discovered us caring for victims of the catastrophe, and he offered my father a position. My father refused to accept unless I could come along as his assistant.

“I was fortunate he did, too,” Bo murmurs. “I thought I'd never see either of you again, and then Guiren found me.”

I think of the little steel-and-wire girl that I keep tucked under my pillow, her hair short like mine was right after a spider sliced off my braid with its fangs, her body enfolded within the arms of a faceless, unknowable boy. Given how injured Bo was at the time, it must have hurt him to create her, to sneak her into the pocket of my dress. “You had sent me a message.” He was giving me the chance to return to him—or to stay away. “I was happy that it helped us find you.”

Bo's smile has not faded. “Not as happy as I was.”

I'm not so sure about that. This morning, like every morning now, I woke to the light of the stars and moon winking dimly through my tiny window and the faint sound of my father's snoring coming from the next room. I pulled on my work dress and crept down the darkened stairways of Gochan Two, a sprawling beast that sleeps until the sun rises over the high factory fence. I slipped around the few traps, knowing well where they are and what they hold in store for trespassers.

Within the old mining tunnels and caves beneath this weapons factory, Bo is once again building himself a world.

Unlike his skin, his mind never fails him.

I followed his instructions, long since memorized, to find the hidden door that marks the entrance to his kingdom, merely the bones of what he plans to build someday. He escaped through these tunnels when he brought the Gochan One slaughterhouse down, burying a hundred men in a tomb of metal and brick and burned meat. And though he was wounded, he immediately began to weave his steel web around him. My father and I helped. Bo is ours, and we could not let him go. And now I look forward to every morning, because in this hour I am more myself than I can be for the rest of the day. Bo knows my secrets, and whether he likes them or not, he seems to forgive me for having them. Knowing he looks forward to our time as well makes me determined to carve it into my day, no matter how early I must rise. It is an unspoken promise. It binds us to each other, out of mutual need.

And yet, lately, I feel like I am losing him, circuit by circuit.

Bo flinches again as my thumb follows the path of his jagged scar. “Must you always press right where it hurts the most? I don't see how it helps.”

“Father says that if we do this every day, you'll be able to retain the mobility in your arm.” I duck my head to make sure he is looking at me. “He also said that if you wear those mechanical frames around your arm and legs for too long, if you let them do the work of your body for you, you will lose strength in these muscles.” I skim my palm over his forearm, a silent apology, but draw back quickly when he shivers.

Bo presses his lips together as he glares at his imperfect flesh. “Sometimes I wish I were made entirely of steel and wire,” he says. “I often wish that, in fact.”

“I don't.” I continue to massage the rose hip oil into his arm, over the puckered, mottled pink and white of his scar and the light brown of his unmarked skin. “I like you this way.”

He sighs. “When you are here, I like myself this way too,” he says quietly. He draws himself up, setting his jaw. “But you are not here most of the time. Including when you are sitting right in front of me.”

The silence between us is alive with wishes, his and mine. We want pieces of each other that we will never have. Bo wishes I would stop missing Melik—and I wish Bo wanted to be human. If one of us could move, I believe the other could as well, but because neither of us can move, our hearts are frozen in place. And yet we give each other what we can.

“I am here now,” I say. “And we have time to work on your leg—if you're willing? You said it was bothering you.”

He frowns. “Give me a minute.” His cheeks have darkened.

I fidget with my oil and cloth as he disappears behind a partition. His arm hums and fabric whispers as he pulls off his pants. We are about to do a delicate dance, one that sways between clinical and intimate. I never know, from moment to moment, if I want it or if I want to pull away, and I think Bo feels the same.

“I'm ready,” he mumbles.

I rise from my chair and move around the partition, my skirt swishing around my ankles. Bo lies on his sleep pallet, his blanket pulled over his hips and his right leg. His left, the one savaged by a metal spider a year ago, is bare and goose-bumped. Bo's face is turned to the wall. He never looks at me when I do this.