Of Shadows and Obsession (4 page)

Chapter Four

I MISS THE FIREWORKS.

By the time I come back to myself, it is nearly morning, and the blood has dried, and all that is left is to wash up and clean up.

And breathe.

It is harder than it has been in a long, long time.

Part of me wants to remain on the floor and simply let myself die. I could do it. No one would find me if I didn’t want them to, not even Guiren. I could end this now. I could surrender. Maybe it should have happened a long time ago. Maybe I was never meant to live in the first place. I should have died on the killing floor.

I should be dead. Really, truly dead.

But . . . what would have happened to Wen last night if I was? The thought is whispered into my ear like it comes from somewhere else, someone else. One way or another, that man would have killed Guiren’s precious treasure-box girl. If I hadn’t stopped him, right now Wen would be living the last few terror-filled days of her life.

It is enough to get me to my feet. It is enough to move my hands and inflate my lungs and blot out the memory of those faces, staring at me. Temporarily, at least.

Bit by bit, I start to clean up. I set two sweeper spiders going and they take care of the mess on the floor. While they scuttle back and forth, I read the prayers I collected the night before to get my mind back on my usual tasks. Minny from the cafeteria has written a wish, asking that the Ghost grant her a healthy birth for her child. I can’t do that. But Minny is kind and a hard worker, and I want her to have something. So I will grant the wish of her supervisor, Lin, who is asking that the seal on the freezer door work properly so the meat stops thawing out. If Lin has her wish, perhaps she will be in a generous mood and go easy on Minny in these last weeks of her pregnancy. That is something I can do.

Gathering my tools keeps my eye away from the shards of mirror glass piling up in the corner. I do not want to see my face, not right now. It hasn’t bothered me for a few years. I’m so used to looking at it that it almost seems normal until I am near people who have two eyes and two hands and faces that are symmetrical, with smooth flesh wrapped over smooth muscle wrapped over smooth bone.

I’m used to watching them now from a safe distance, as if I really were a floating spirit, invisible and untouchable. I like to see what goes on, what makes these people move and keeps them still, what makes them angry and what captures their hearts. I have been content to observe for so long now that it seemed like enough. It wasn’t until last night with Wen that I realized how much more I want.

Maybe it was her dress. The way she looked like an open treasure box. I read a few more wishes and try to convince myself it was because she was clothed like a princess. I have always enjoyed fairy tales, and she looked like she had stepped straight out of one. And I was enchanted.

I close my eyes and bow my head. I am smarter than that. She is not a princess, and I am no bandit, especially not one stupid enough to give up his freedom in exchange for something as fleeting as a kiss. I need to put her out of my mind. The screams of the girl in the lavender dress echo inside of me, reminding me why.

Last night is stamped on me, and I will never forget again.

I am meant for the night and the shadows.

But I am also a legend. I am more than broken bones and missing pieces.

I have to believe that, or there is no reason to keep breathing.

I pick up a piece of steel from my scrap pile, a thin triangular sheet. I hold it over the left side of my face and stare at my reflection in the largest piece of mirror glass that remains. Looking back at me is a boy, and his skin is clear and perfect, and his eye is dark, and his mouth and nose are fine and strong. His hair is thick, his jaw is angular, his brow is smooth. If this was all they saw, there would be no screams. There would be no need to look away. If this was all there was, I could have been the boy who silly Vie wanted to dance with.

Even better, I could have been the boy who offered Wen his hand and walked with her in the parade.

That will never be all people see, though.

There are always two sides, and what is on the left will taint what they see on the right. Not that I’m going to let anyone see me. So really, what is on the left taints what
I
see on the right. But I can control that.

Maybe the difference between whole monster and half monster is bigger than I thought.

So I get to work. I nestle myself within the plans on my paper, and I take my measurements, and I make sure they are precise. With my shined and oiled metal fingers, my personal machine, I draw my model, and then I create it, inch by inch, shaping and molding and hammering and heating. Until it is a perfect metal skin.

When I am finally finished, I slip the mask over the half monster and tie it into place. I look in the mirror again. This is better. This is the new Bo. Someone worthy of fear and admiration, who no one would think to pity, because he is flawless. Seeing this version of me helps me breathe.

I am beautiful, like one of the glorious machines in Gochan Two.

I am efficient and merciless. I can do great things.

I am not a fool. Not anymore.

I am the Ghost, and that is more than enough.

READ ON FOR A LOOK AT THE NEXT NOVEL ABOUT BO AND WEN:

Of Dreams and Rust

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.

“This scar looks a little better. Faded,” I say as I sink to my knees beside him.

“I don’t care what it looks like. I only care whether my leg is functional.”

If that were truly the case, I don’t think he would be trembling, but I don’t call attention to it. I am careful with him. I always have been. Not because I am afraid he will lash out; he has never hurt me, and I think he would die from the pain of it if he did. No, I am more concerned with hurting him. If I cajole, if I hold back, if I craft my words just so, it makes it easier for Bo to stay with me, to stay himself. “Of course. I only meant that it looked stronger.”

He laughs, just a hiss of breath from his nose. “I see right through you.”

I pour a bit of rose hip oil into my palm and rub my hands together. “How so?”

“Do you really think I am so naive, Wen? You don’t have to always say what I want to hear.”

“I know.”

He turns his head and looks at me. “Do you?” His human hand reaches across his body and touches mine. “How can I be your friend if you are always protecting me?”

I let him take my hand. I let him stroke my fingers. It feels both comforting and dangerous. “You always protect me. Why can’t I do the same?”

His grip tightens. “Because it’s not the same. I would protect you from anything that threatened you. Any man, any creature, any machine. And you, you protect me from . . . you, I suppose.” He lets me go and then clenches his fist so hard his knuckles go pale. His metal fingers click, startling me. “It’s the last thing I want to be protected from.”

“That’s not fair.” I lay my warm palms on his bare thigh, over the thick, ropy scar. Bo’s chest stills and his eyes close. “You know me better than anyone does.”

He shakes his head. “Only the parts you allow me to see.”

I press down a swell of frustration and begin to massage his leg, long downward strokes toward his knee and then upward to midthigh, as my father taught me. It will keep the muscles supple, the blood flowing, the skin from growing taut and angry. I am gentle at first, cautious. I watch my hands moving over his skin. I’ve memorized every flaw. It makes the perfect parts that much more exquisite, but as soon as that thought surfaces, I try to drown it. It would be utterly scandalous for me to be alone with a man, touching him like this with no one to supervise, but my father trusts us both. Bo is a patient right now, nothing more.

It is impossible to think of him as nothing more. But so is thinking of him any other way.

I remind myself to be like my father, to think like my father, and my movements harden. My hands become instruments, my thoughts technical . . . but with shamefully ragged edges. Bo clutches at his blanket with both hands. His face glitters with pinpoint beads of sweat. I’m hurting him, but Father said it would hurt if I did it right. What he didn’t say: how my stomach would knot, how my eyes would burn, how my precision would be worn away by the desire to smooth back Bo’s damp hair and kiss his forehead.

“You could take off your mask,” I tell him after a few minutes. It must be uncomfortable when he sweats like this.

“No,” he says in a choked voice. “I don’t want to.”

“I see only the parts you allow me to see,” I say, a warped echo, an accusation that I for once do not hold back.

“How can you possibly think it’s the same?” he whispers. “You hide beauty from me. The only thing I hide from you is ugliness.” A tear suddenly slips free from the corner of his tightly closed eye, and he swipes it away as his face twists with anger and humiliation. I bow my head because my own tears are about to betray me as well.

Bo sits up abruptly. “I’ve had enough.”

He says it so sharply that I freeze. For a moment there is only silence and stillness, but then he tips my chin up with his callused fingertips. I wonder if my eyes are red like his, if his chest is as tight as mine. His mouth opens, but his words are locked inside him. We stare at each other. I don’t understand why this happens, why we make each other fall apart, why it can’t be simple and easy. But as I look into Bo’s face, half handsome and half monster, the space between us fills with all the things we do not say. The things we’ll probably never say.

His hand falls away from me, landing in his lap like a dead weight. “I’ll be out in a moment.” His voice is rough, uneven.

I move quickly, eager to give him the privacy he needs so badly right now. While he gets dressed, I set a bun on a plate for him and start a pot of water heating on a small burner he keeps on his worktable. Once the coil flares red hot, I fill a large teapot with tea leaves and set out the strainer. “Someone saw you two nights ago,” I say, longing to steer our conversation toward calmer waters, to occupy Bo’s mind with the now, the real, the things he can control.