Of Shadows and Obsession (3 page)

Or maybe that’s all me.

Because as I watch Vie fuss over a blood stain on Wen’s sleeve, as I see Wen brush it off with no distress, I can’t take my eye off Guiren’s daughter. She is so like him. She doesn’t shrink away from torn flesh or dirt. She doesn’t hesitate to spend her money to ease the suffering of someone else. She doesn’t look away and pretend she doesn’t
see
.

All of me is coiled tight, and my eye is burning, but not from the smoke. This girl, this treasure-box, jewel-bright girl, I need to know her. I have to. That bandit, the foolish one who exchanged his freedom for a kiss . . . understanding of his plight hits me with the force of a war machine, right in the chest. Guiren’s words about how the wily bandit wanted something more elusive and precious than a string of gems—that makes perfect sense. Now I want it too.

“Ai!” yelps the vendor woman. My head snaps to the side, and I see her staring down at my left hand with an expression of absolute horror. Probably because my fingers are clutching the edge of her cast-iron griddle and tendrils of smoke are twisting up from my burning glove. I yank my hand away and pat the smoldering material against my pants as the woman stares at me, probably wondering why I’m not screaming.

“My apologies,” I mutter, sinking back into the crowd. Wen is wandering away again, surrounded by revelers, and I have to see what she does next. The last four years of solitude are crushing me in their fist, grinding me up. I thought it was what I wanted, I thought I was perfectly happy by myself, and now . . . now I can’t stand the thought of another minute in my own head.

I want to be in hers.

A few blocks away, the giant dragon rises above the square, its wide mouth opening and closing as its catlike eyes glare into the night, daring any malevolent creature to challenge it. The massive head rises and falls on its pole, controlled from the ground by pedals and pulleys. That is where the parade will start, where the strong men and acrobats and dancing girls and trained panthers will head the procession. The temple guardians will bring up the rear, and the incense-waving citizens will march between, driving away the evil spirits from the north. Very soon it will begin, and Vie is already handing Wen a stick of incense and chattering at her about getting a good place in the procession.

I think I’ll join the procession too. I accept a stick of incense from a temple guardian, pull my hood a little lower, and drift with the slow-moving crowd.

A man presses in close to my left shoulder, grabbing incense from the stooped, elderly guardian and shoving forward until he is ahead of me and right behind Wen. I flinch away automatically, my metal fingers clicking within the charred fabric of the glove, chiming alarms going off in my head. Not because he is rude or because I am not used to being touched, though both are true. No, I have just seen his eyes, glittering beneath the hood of his cloak. Only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. Unlike everyone else, this man is not looking at the dragon’s head or the acrobats. He is not trying to get a good spot in the procession. He wants something else entirely.

I can tell. I do enough watching to know.

I push my way past a couple on my left, apologizing as they yip in surprise when my metal shoulder and arm bump against them. I’m not sorry, though, because now I’m behind Wen too, and next to the hooded man.

The one who is just as focused on her as I am.

Chapter Three

THE MUSIC BEGINS, A RATTLE-RING RIBBON
of sound that spirals up and wraps around the people in the square, making them dance and wave their not-yet-lit incense sticks. Wen edges her way to the fringes of the crowd as we reach the plaza where the revelers are assembling. She tucks a stray tendril of hair behind her ear and looks around, maybe searching for her mother and Guiren. I duck behind a firecracker vendor to stay concealed while I get a better view of Wen and Vie. Because now I’m not watching only them—I’m looking for the man who was following them.

Except . . . he’s disappeared.

The minstrels play a lively song, and the crowd clears a space for several couples to dance. Vie takes a few steps toward a group of boys leaning against the wall of the public bathhouse, perhaps hoping one of them will ask her to dance. Guiren was so right; she
is
a silly creature. I return my attention to Wen . . . who is not where she was a second ago.

My heart lurches into my throat. I’m so stupid. I didn’t watch when I should have, and now she’s gone—

No, there she is. Half a block away.

And she’s talking to the cloaked man with dark, glittering eyes, the one who was following her. His hood is thrown back now, revealing a lined face and big ears that poke out from beneath his scraggly black hair. He’s got a bandage around his thigh and he gestures at it while he speaks. I lay a coin on the firecracker vendor’s cart and take what I need. I creep closer, weaving in and out and around people clutching incense sticks and huddling near the basin fires that circle the square.

I do not take my eye off the man, and he does not take his eyes off Wen.

The inside of my brain is full of calculations. Distance. Force. Angle. Velocity. I peel off my glove and shove it into my pocket.

Wen is asking him questions now. Maybe she’s wondering if she should offer to help him or if she should take him to her father for care. Whatever it is, the big-eared man is taking advantage of her kindness. He is using her compassion against her, and it makes my fist clench. I slip my hand beneath my cloak and increase the tension in the gears until my metal fingers snap together with merciless precision. I wonder if Wen has noticed that the “blood” that stains the man’s bandage is red pepper sauce he stole from the café I just passed. The outline of the bottle is in his pocket, the smell is in the air, but would Wen even suspect? My guess is she wouldn’t. She does not see what’s hidden in the heart of this man. She’s thirteen and she only wants to help him.

Well, I’m seventeen. And I have my own kind of help in mind.

I’m only a few feet away when my hand shoots out and lights the wick of the smoke bomb in the flames of the basin fire. Purple smoke hisses from it as I toss it between Wen and the man. She steps back, coughing and waving her arms, and so do the few people closest to her and the man.

That’s all I need. My metal arm wraps around the man’s chest, and I yank him backward off the bench and into an alley before he realizes what’s happening. A few people yell, but the purple smoke is thick and cloying. And distracting. And concealing. He lets out a cry, and I clamp my hand over his mouth as I drag him into the narrow lane, then down another and another, deep into the maze. When we are completely hidden from the square, when the sounds of the crowd are only a whisper, I pull him through a rotten wooden gate into a tiny yard behind a restaurant, filled with bins of decaying vegetables. The stench is enough to make me gag but not enough to make me let him go. I throw the man to the ground and drop my knees to his chest. My metal fingers close around his throat.

“Tell me,” I say very quietly, so he has to stop whimpering and listen closely, “what were you going to do with her? Don’t lie.”

The whites of his eyes are stark and bright beneath the light in this refuse yard. He starts to claim his innocence, but I have no patience for this kind of game, and I loosen my grip only when his face turns red as a cherry and his fingers scrabble at my sleeve, sliding off my mechanical arm.

“I’ll tell you,” he rasps, so I sit back a little. “Such a girl, she would fetch a fine ransom.”

“A ransom.”

“Yes. You only have to look at her to see that she is from one of the upper-class families, maybe the daughter of one of the bosses! In the Ring without a chaperone! It is a brilliant opportunity. Think of what they would pay to have her back. I . . . I wasn’t going to hurt her.”

I take the time to let out a long, slow breath. “No? And when she screams as you drag her away? When she cries for help? You will have to be very crafty if you intend not to hurt her, for she has the look of a girl who will fight.”

The man looks up at me, trying to read my expression, but my hood is low and he can’t see my face. “Y-yes. Very crafty.”

“How much do you think her family would pay?”

“Ah . . . seven hundred, maybe? Eight?”

“Ha! So little?”

The man frowns. “Why, would you like a cut? If you help me, I-I’ll give you half!” My fingers tighten over his throat. “Sixty percent!” he yelps.

My fingers loosen. “You’d offer me this to help you take her?”

“Of course. I know a place we could keep her until they pay up.”

“You know it would be hard to return her to her family without being caught by the authorities.”

His eyes are glittering again, with eagerness instead of fear. “Ah, but that is part of my plan! We don’t have to give her back to her family at all. Once we have the ransom, we could take her as far as Kanong and—”

But that is the last thing he says, the last thing he will ever say. My fingers constrict around his neck, and they are like the machines of Gochan Two, uncaring and cold. They simply need to make a fist, and this man’s throat happens to be in their way. That won’t stop them, though. It couldn’t. He is only flesh and muscle and veins and bone, and that is nothing to steel and gears, nothing at all. He lets out a high-pitched squeak, and then a funny whistling sound, and then his eyes speak for him, so wide, but no more eagerness, only horror.

I watch every moment, and I see when the horror goes too, fading into nothing.

He is not the first man I’ve destroyed.

He is the first one I’ve destroyed with my own hands, though. And it feels . . .
fine
.

I lift my clenched mechanical fist and release the tension at the elbow. What’s left of the man slides from my steel palm and iron fingers, landing with wet squelching sounds next to one of his big ears. I wipe my hand on his cloak. I am done here.

I stand up. Music drifts through the alley along with the roar of the crowd. The parade is starting. I pull my cloak around me and jog toward the light, away from the vegetable stench that will soon conceal another, darker smell, one that whispers of terrible violent death. When I reach the sidewalk, I glance down to make sure I am not a mess, but with my cloak to conceal what lies beneath, I should be fine until I can return to the factory and rinse the blood away.

The parade is already snaking its way around the square. I squint though the lingering smoke and the glare of torches, trying to spot the treasure-box girl, needing to see that she is well and safe. Sure enough, she’s there, next to her silly friend, waving her incense stick and looking as happy as everyone else. I have never seen anything so blinding in its perfection. I have never wanted anything as much as I want to know this girl. She would understand me, I think. She would not look away. She would see me for what I can do and who I am. Maybe she would touch me like she touched that little boy, so gently, with that soft look in her eye. Just the thought of it is enough to set my feet in motion. Would it be improper to introduce myself as a friend of her father’s? Should I wait and ask Guiren first?

I jerk to the side as my hood snags on a hanging meat skewer and is torn away from my face. I reach to tug it up, but before my fingers find the fabric, the scream comes, a stab of sound that wheels me around. The vendor’s mouth is gaping, and the small crowd around the smoking grill is staring, wide-eyed.

At my face.

The scream goes on and on. It is coming from a teenage girl in a lavender dress, who has her black hair in a bun high on her head. Her hands cover her mouth, but the shrieks penetrate her fingers and knife right through me. Her expression . . . in her eyes I see what I am.

I rip my hood loose, sending the skewer and several others clattering to the ground around me, nearly overturning the vendor’s flimsy cart. The crowd stumbles back, gasping at the ruin of my face, the ugliness, the blindness, the broken-empty-boney-destroyed half of me. Everywhere I turn, the wide eyes are around me. I can’t escape from those stares, that disgust, that pity, that terror. Those screams. I would do anything to stop those screams. My fingers click together, signaling my panic, my jangling nerves firing like cannons. The faces become a blur as my eye burns with tears.

I shove my way through the crowd and run. Pelting through the streets like a hunted man, like a deer stalked by panthers. Anyone in my way ends up on the ground. I sprint for the darkness, for my sanctuary, for any place that is away from eyes eyes eyes. By the time I dive through the hole in the Gochan Two fence, tears are streaming down my face and I claw them away, hating every breath that comes from my throat and every thought that spins within my skull. I run for the stairs, all the way up, across the catwalk, and into my elevator. I don’t slow down until I am in my basement.

My home.

My world.

I don’t know why I ever thought it was too small. Suddenly, it seems too big. I tear off my cloak and toss it onto the rack, then turn the lantern up to illuminate my work space. I need my refuge, the paper, the compass, the angles and planes and calculations and—

My own reflection stares up at me from the dozens of mirrors on the desk. Dozens of broken, hideous Bo faces: one dark eye, one empty socket; half skull, half scar, half monster.

And the difference between half monster and whole monster is
nothing
.

The agonized sound that comes from my throat echoes through the whole basement and still is too quiet to drown out the screeching in my head. The girl, the one in the lavender dress, has transformed, and with every shriek, she looks more like Wen, with her amber dress and shining hair and wide eyes now full of loathing and terror. I sweep the mirrors off the desk and they shatter against the floor and the walls, and then there are hundreds of monsters staring up at me from every possible place, the floor, the desk, the folds of the cloak. I fall to my knees and scream, squeezing my eye shut while I lash out, desperate to make the monster go away. I scream until I spit blood onto the floor, until my metal hand has pounded a deep dent into the steel wall panel, until my flesh is torn and shards of mirror have sliced my fingers to ribbons.

I scream until I can’t. And then I stop.

I lie in the blood and the sorrow, the pathetic leftovers of the night I decided my world could be as big as I wanted it to be. The night I actually tricked myself into believing I could talk to a girl, and that she might not look away.

I was right when I thought I might be more than the Ghost. I was so right.

I am a fool.