Godspeed (22 page)

“THIS gives me every right!” I cried. “This monstrosity, wired and bolted to my chest. This unholy clockwork noose that cannot be removed, except at peril of my very existence. This hellish invention that keeps me prisoner of the darkness, unable to ever live again in the light of the sun without fear of every breath being my last!” I narrowed my eyes as I stared deeply into his and recognized now the familiar curves of the dead woman's face in his own fine features. “The same wires that violate my chest bore into the chest of this woman, as she lies asleep in death before us. Or is she only in suspension, waiting for the time to come when he can resurrect her?”

Schuyler released me.

“She is dead,” he whispered, tears filling his eyes now as he stumbled backward, up against the coffin. “My sister is…” His hands elevated to his face, and he wept, dropping to his knees. “My sister is dead, and he refuses to believe that—” He stopped, unable to speak any more.

I found myself staring once again at the wires that were just barely visible beneath the dead woman's long, silken curls. My own hand rose and my fingertips brushed against the wires protruding from my chest.

I slowly lowered myself to the floor and, despite my fear, gathered Schuyler into my arms.

He had shown me kindness once, when no one else in the world would even have noticed that I was alive. I would not disregard his suffering now, regardless how I personally felt about his concealing the truth from me. Those were matters to be dealt with later, and truthfully, with another person — a man whom I knew would never agree willingly to discuss them with me at all.

He sobbed on my shoulder; for how long, I could not have said. When his breathing finally slowed, and my own heart seemed to resume its singular, artificially regulated cadence, I pulled back from him and began to press him for the answers I longed for.

“Tell me the truth.” I lifted his face until he was forced to look at me, and I marveled that though he was as many years older than me as Quinn, he looked in this moment like a lost little boy.

“How much truth are you truly prepared for, and what right do you have to demand anything from me when you still won't even tell me your name?” Schuyler shook his head. “You won't even tell him your name, the man that you so dearly love.”

I drew back even further. He could not have injured me more if he had reached out and struck me.

“The man I love?” Now was the time for truth in whole, I decided. And that would include, it seemed, calling Schuyler's own feelings for Quinn precisely what I was certain they were. “What of you, Schuyler? Tell me, how difficult has it been, all these years, to watch the man you love so well grieve for the touch of your dead sister?”

He looked for an instant as though he really did wish to strike me, but I knew he was much too kind and far too wounded.

He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, his forehead dropping down to hide his face from my unwavering glare.

“Is it so obvious?”

“Not to anyone but someone who knows what it means to love him, too.” I felt I owed him at least this much. If I was going to cut him so by revealing that I was fully aware of his feelings for Quinn, it felt only right in this moment that I should openly confess my own.

“That is some small comfort.” His voice was muffled, but the emotions in it were still undeniably clear. “You see, when you've loved someone as long as I have loved Quinn, sometimes you begin to doubt your ability to conceal it, even though you know that you must, even if it takes years from your life.” He finally tilted his face back up toward mine. His expression was changed, his eyes were emptier than I had ever seen them before. “Even if it takes your life.”

“That night, when you argued,” I whispered. “When you said ‘this time’ you were speaking of the fact that he had attempted to interfere with the workings of a human heart before.”

“He tried so hard to save her.” Schuyler said, tears filling and falling from his eyes again. “He would have taken the heart from his own chest and put it into hers, if he could have, in order to stop her from dying.”

“What happened?”

“What happened?” He quietly echoed the question. “Two deceptively simple words, comprising a question so complicated it is nearly impossible to answer.” Schuyler wiped furiously at his cheek with the back of his fist. “My sister grew ill, from fever, just as you. She suffered fainting spells. She would stop breathing, and turn blue.” The memory hurt him, and I felt guilty in that moment for forcing him to relive it. Still, I had to know the origins of the machinery that was keeping me alive, if I was ever going to understand the workings of the mind that invented it.

“He was only an apprentice surgeon then, working with some of the greatest experts in the field that Fairever has ever known. He was privileged. He was trusted. He was considered to be the future of medicine.”

“He abused that trust,” I concluded, without further prompting.

Schuyler nodded. “He was willing to sacrifice anything to save her, including his own future. And he did.” He sighed, running his hands back through his hair. “He used his access to equipment and laboratories to test his theories, and to construct an artificial means to stimulate the heart back into a steadier rhythm. Only he couldn't maintain it, and there were times when the heart would race out of control. He was doing alternately as much damage as he was good, and my sister was…” He lowered his eyes, pain coursing through him. “Suffering.”

I did not doubt it, for I lived with pain that I was sure must be similar to that which she had endured. “She was dying.”

“She did die, several times, if you define death as the absence of breathing and heartbeat. Each time, Quinn revived her. Until.”

“Until?”

“The external shocks became too much for her body, and he revealed to me that he had conceived of an idea for a small, powerful device that could continually regulate the heart with lesser charges. The problem was keeping the energy source to run it consistent, and strong enough. He drove himself to sheer madness attempting to figure it out before her time ran out.” He rose on shaking knees and lurched forward, touching the glass with the back of extended fingers as if imagining caressing his sister's soft, fair skin. “He was too late. By the time he figured out that the necessary power source had been there all along, as clear as the sky above his head, she was already gone.”

“The power of the sun,” I whispered. Truly, Quinn Godspeed was a genius, evidence of that was clear in the fact that I now rose to my feet again as well, alive and fully aware of the implications of his work.

“He was absolutely furious with himself for not figuring it out sooner. He laments to me, to this day, the fact that it was only because the Sun was shining so brightly the day that we were meant to bury her that he realized what he had been missing.”

He shook his head, and he looked up at me again. “Something in Quinn shattered that day, and even as the truth of his work came to light and he lost his license to practice medicine, nothing mattered to him but continuing to design, to understand, and to refine this work.

“He was cast out of society, and we were forced, in the end, to allow the rumors to flourish that he had ended his own life. Death by hanging, consumed with grief over the death of his beloved, Orchid.”

“But if he was supposed to be dead—”

“It was easy enough to fabricate a brother, a non-existent twin that would take Quinn's place. Returned home from a stint overseas trying to make his way as an inventor. An eccentric, a man not to be trusted but feared.”

I tried to reconcile this story with the life he seemed to live here, with laboratory and access to the components that were required to do the kind of work that he did… the work he'd done on Jib and Penn and the others…

“Ah, I know what you are thinking now.” Schuyler turned away from his sister's body and stared at a small table nearby. Slowly he moved toward it, picked up a framed drawing and held it up on display. “I promised her that I would do all I could to protect him. That I would help him. I think…” His eyes focused on the floor, and he started to shake. “I believe she knew what she was asking of me, and still, she asked it anyway. And I loved…” He stopped.

“You loved him too much to walk away.”

Once again, tears trailed down his face. “I still love him too much to ever walk away.”

I understood more than I wanted to admit, or believe.

“Do you think,” he asked me slowly, trembling from head to toe now with fear of what I might say in reply, “that he knows?”

“No,” I answered with certainty. “He doesn't know, or at least, he doesn't understand, any more than—” I stopped.

“Any more than he understands that
you
love him.”

I was now the one wiping tears away from my face.

Schuyler set the frame back down upon the table and moved once more toward his sister's coffin. “He said that goddesses do not sleep beneath blankets of earth,” he whispered. “He said that until he could send her to rest amidst the stars of heaven where she belonged, she would slumber here, safe in his keeping. Though I believe…” His voice dwindled down to nothing, but I was not having it.

“You believe what, Schuyler?”

“I believe that he still holds out the slightest of hopes that somehow, he will be able instead one day to wake her.”

I took her in again. She was a true beauty, classically elegant in ways that made me feel like I was suffocating, trapped within the body that contained me.

“What was she like?”

“My sister…” Schuyler looked at her again, this time his face taking on an innocence that surely accompanied many boyhood memories. “Orchid was the embodiment of laughter. Of music and light. To know her truly was to love her. She did have a darker streak to her nature, however. She was…” He looked almost ashamed now. “She was not above playing a man's heart for sport when it suited her.”

My cheeks took on color, burning with anger. Here, I loved Quinn as I did and his heart was always out of my reach. To think that anyone could intentionally inflict pain upon him was unimaginable, and truly unbearable to me. “Quinn's heart?”

Schuyler's head moved up and down in one definitive nod, and the look in his eyes now told me that it pained him as well to see someone he loved so dearly so mistreated. “She did not love him.”

“But the ring…?” I was unable to stop myself asking the question, even though I did not finish it.

“A posthumous gift.” He shivered, and began to wring his hands in that way he did when he was nearing the end of his ability to cope. “A small triumph, to picture her spirit bound to his, somehow, by the ring that he'd intended to give her that Christmas in front of my entire family and with my father's blessing.” He shook his head. “Whether or not it was her intention or desire, Orchid
would
have married him.

“Now here she lies in silent testament. A statue of dark award in honor of his dearest failure.” He looked up at me again at last. “You know Quinn. His mind is of an entirely logical, rational bent. He hates little more than to suffer reminders of his failures.” He sighed, glancing affectionately toward Quinn's desk. “They overshadow his successes, no matter how great they are or many they number.”

“Do I know Quinn?” I whispered, my hand rising to the device he'd tethered to me and clutching it within my palm. For a moment I was tempted to rip it out, just tear it from my body and let myself become another reminder to him. Even if I became one that he hated, at least I would stay in his memory.

“There is much you do not know about your beloved Doctor Godspeed,” Schuyler sneered at me, and I tried to steady my voice before speaking again. He was unnerving me, and I could not allow it if I had any chance of getting the information I still required.

He was right, there was much I wanted —
needed
to know about Godspeed, but there was no way I believed that I could ever get the answers from the man himself.

“I am not lacking in the ability to hear or understand, sir. Please, enlighten me as to what it is about him that could so change the way I see him.”

“You don't know him well enough to say you truly love him,” Schuyler declared. “If there is one thing you must understand about Quinn, young woman, it is that he is, in many ways, his own evil twin and always has been. There has been a shadow side to Quinn since boyhood that he can never escape to completely stand in the light. His is a soul divided by halves, and not neatly down the middle as by tailor's shears. The edges are exposed, ragged, and as sharp as broken mirror.”

He dropped his head into his hands again, but this time it was no dramatic gesture; it was a sign of true and penetrating grief. “You have seen how he goes days sometimes without sleep. He would do the same for food and drink, were I not there to look after him. Quinn functions highly within the confines of his genius, but he cannot survive alone outside its stained glass walls.”

I nearly laughed. “You think that he could not survive in the world without you?”

“Tell me that you don't have fantasies, child, of saving him from that deep melancholy you think you alone can see.”

I said nothing. To deny that I wanted to save him from his pain would be a falsehood I could never carry off with any degree of belief from my audience.

“I have been saving him every day for years. He was different once, more the Quinn I remember. Before…” His voice withered as his hand heavily gestured toward Orchid's coffin. “Before this.”

“And since?”

“Since he has splintered. Fragmented into remains of himself, no more alive than she is. It was supposed to be fiction that Quinn died after Orchid did. But the truth is, for all practical purposes, Quinn Godspeed
did
die that day, and was replaced by the man you now see.”

“A good man. A caring, brilliant man.”

“Do not let those beautiful blue eyes of his fool you into thinking that his is not the most dysfunctional heart of all,” Schuyler warned, shifting as if beneath the weight of a heavy, unseen burden. “Or can you tell me that you have never seen a look on his face or heard a tone in his voice that could not quickly cut you to the bone?”