Spare and Found Parts (11 page)

N
ell stepped out of the shower, and the water she left behind her was gray. Her arms had been smudged with ink from writing and drafting. It had been like this every evening for the last few days, just Nell and her ink and her paper. She'd managed to push Ruby from her thoughts for now, but cabin fever was starting to flush at her collar.

The tiny bathroom was full of steam. Dripping, refreshed, she skipped lightly from bathmat to tile to the wooden floor of her room. She combed out her hair. The stoat snoozed.

It was late. Very late. But she wasn't due to meet Oliver until almost sunrise, and she couldn't sleep with the budding excitement. Instead, she stayed up tinkering with the silver box her father had given her. In the cove of her desk, she tried to take it apart with a
tiny screwdriver to absolutely no success; the device was welded shut around a tiny seam. Nell considered an appropriately angled little crowbar. She wanted to open the box, but she didn't want to break it.

“What do you look like on the inside?” Nell whispered to it, tapping her nail on its glass surface. “What do you know?”

There were two sockets. One was a tiny slot that she didn't recognize; one was likely an audiovisual jack. She considered applying a wire set and battery to the mystery socket, but that could burn it out. Nell tapped her fingers against the desktop and clicked her tongue. In all she'd learned about machines and clockwork and anatomy and prosthetics and organically responsive robotics and synthetic responsive fibers and motion and kinetic electricity, she hadn't a blind clue how to work a computer. A silent little mystery box.

She
was
relieved she didn't have to build all of her creation's limbs from scratch, though. That would take forever and be extremely difficult to hide from her father, given how much of his help she'd need.

If Nell could convince Oliver to help her out with some of his salvaged Crane brand limbs from the Gonne Hospital, much of the complex, intricate kinetic technology would already be in place. She'd just have to get each limb to recognize the other and provide a central
command chamber and a good strong battery—a brain and a heart—to set it all into motion. A clever computer. Run a few volts through it. That was all. Right? Right. One nearly impossible thing at a time.

The clock on the wall beat a slow nighttime pulse, and Nell put herself together. She looked long and hard in the mirror, tracing her fingertips down her scar. She so often tried to ignore it in its entirety, bundling it away, not thinking about it. What would the first person to see all of it, from below her navel to her lip, think? The first person to lay his head on her chest and hear the cogs, their strange grind. What if it was Oliver after all? What if it was someone made of more metal than even she was?

The clock dragged heavy hands as she paced, its ticking sometimes in sync with hers, sometimes not; she put things on and then took them off, put other things on, until it was time for her to go. She roused Kodak, and he made an almost human noise of complaint.

The house was pitch-black, not yet lit by the dewy spectrum of dawn. Her father was a quiet sleeper, but Nell wasn't even sure he was home. He often spent nights late out in a tavern in the city with Daniel or over at the Underwood place, though things were different since their argument. She passed the great door to his laboratory, and there it was, that crack of light
that said he was still working. She touched the door as she walked past, a graze, a good-night, a wish me luck. Maybe he'd be really proud of her.

Or furious.

Either way it didn't bear thinking of; she wasn't telling him. She slid out the door, and it clicked shut. The sky outside was just cusping light, but there was no real color in the world yet. She placed the stoat in the basket of her bike, kicked the stand from under the wheel, hopped on, and cycled away into the parklands.

It was different going alone, the fevered race through the lush, swampy woods. Nell strained her eyes for detail all around her. It wasn't as if Ruby could have defended them, even if she had been there. Being by herself made no difference.

Nell quickly passed the Underwood house and workshop, all the lights out. It wasn't quite as ramshackle as her place, kept better, painted white, with plants deliberately organized around it, flowering and ornate, as opposed to chewing the structure to pieces with leathery vines and thick leaves. All the lights were off as Nell whizzed past, the family still sleeping. She got a sad pang in her stomach. She hadn't reached out to Ruby since their argument. Had she been sleeping? Had she been worrying? The house disappeared, but thoughts of Ruby lingered as she traveled into the
dark. Nell shook them off, trying to stay alert against the wilderness.

She raced through the tangled knots of wood, barely able to catch her breath, fevered half from anticipation and half from fear. As she spotted the lights of the Bayou in the distance and the trees thinned out, she cycled so fast that the muscles in her legs felt like fire. She passed revelers laughing and singing on their way home, couples kissing in the shelter of the trees, and ignored the scatter of “Oh, hello, Nell!” and “Is that Nell Crane?”

She leaped off her bike almost before the wheels stopped turning and locked the chain seamlessly. She held her head up as she walked straight up to the closed door of the Bayou, which read
NOPE
instead of its usual
OPEN
.

She rapped confidently on the door.

Nobody answered.

Undeterred, she knocked again, louder this time.

Still nothing.

Her patience gave in, and she twisted the handle. It was unlocked, so she let herself in. Nell strode past the small table where Janey, the bouncer, usually sat and down the narrow corridor toward the ballroom.

Empty, it lacked its hodgepodge splendor. The band had been cleared away; a closed upright piano was all
that remained of it. It seemed grimmer, sadder, a harder reflection of their lives, all floorboards and hanging dust and ragged bunting and the stench of tobacco and pipe smoke.

Alone at the bar, Oliver sat hunched into a glass, scribbling in a ledger. Antoinette pottered about, tidying and singing to herself, melody carrying long and rich over the room.

“Barfly,” said Nell, in a voice she barely recognized, strong and sharp.

“Hermit,” mumbled Oliver. Wait,
slurred
Oliver. Nell did a quick scan of him as he turned to her, his hair unruly and his clothes a little disheveled. He was drunk.

“Oliver.” She couldn't mask her shock. “Are—are—you—”

“It's four o'clock in the morning, Nell. Of
course
I'm a bit—” He cut her off. “Mercy, you really do live under a rock. You, you're . . . surprised.
Surprise!
” He laughed, and Nell, for a moment, felt very naive and very small.

“I just expected you to be in business form, considering you called me here to—” She halted suddenly, flicking her eyes to Antoinette, who caught her discomfort and laughed.

“Oh, petal, I don't care what he's dealing you. There's not a person who comes in and out of here that
doesn't get something supplied by Mr. Kelly. Your old man's waiting list is far too long for some of us.”

“Yes, yes,” Oliver said lazily. “Yes. We're still on. I did some asking around, checked if you were all right to be shown—to be brought to where they keep them.”

“Keep them? The”—Nell, reverent, dropped her voice—“computers?”

“I owe some people some major favors, but I've got it sorted.”

“Fine. When?”

When had she started trusting Oliver's word or become willing to follow him?

“In, around—now actually. Now,” he said, draining his glass and straightening himself.

Antoinette flipped Oliver's notebook closed, and he batted her away. “You want out of here pretty sharp if you want to get down to New Smithfield Square before the world wakes up,” she said.

Nell was aghast. “You told her?”

The barmaid laughed, and it was sparkling and sharp. “C'mon now, Crane, I know everybody's business in this town. Funny thing is you think yours is the most important!”

“It's important to me.” Nell leaned over the bar. “And I'm not
every
body.” She wasn't sure if she was flirting or challenging Anto to a fight. It felt like both.

“Girls, girls, girls.” Oliver waved his arms in an attempt at diffusing the tension, but Antoinette slammed her fist down on the bar fiercely.

“Don't you go calling me a girl, Oliver Kelly!”

“Right. Ladies,” Oliver offered. “There's no point arguing. Anto, Nell's got her reasons for being out of the loop. We're working on it.
Aren't we
?” He gave her a loaded stare, a for-the-sake-of-peace-please-just-play-nice kind of stare.

Nell inhaled deeply and steadied her temper. “Yes. Working on it.”

“Now, we can stand here and argue about who knows more secrets or we can leave and actually get some work done. Which do you prefer?”

“I can stand here and listen to Miss Penelope lose her temper all morning, Oliver.” Antoinette leaned across the bar, and cooed, “You really hate people as much as they say you do, don't you?”

“Anto, stop.” Oliver was almost pleading with her now, and Nell bristled. She definitely, definitely wanted to fight her.

“If someone doesn't tease her once in a while, she'll never come down from her tower, will she?”

“Leave it. Are you coming, Nell?” Oliver swayed a little. Nell took his arm, staring Antoinette in the eye.

“Yes, I'm ready to leave now.”

“See you tomorrow, Oliver. Take care of yourself, Crane, and lighten up a little, would you?” Antoinette waved them out, blowing kisses, singing, “Good-bye, good luck, so long, farewell, I'm glad to see the back of you.”

When they hit the outdoors, the finger-painted neon pink of dawn was just beginning to rise. Oliver made movement toward his bicycle.

“You're not cycling. You're a mess. I'm not picking bits of you up off the ground if you fall,” Nell said sternly.

“Well, we're hardly walking, are we?” said Oliver, gesturing dramatically.

“No. Look, I'll give you a crossbar.”

“A what?”

“A crossbar. Sit on the crossbar of my bike, and I'll steer.”

“God almighty, Nell.”

“Don't bring him into it. It's that or nothing, and I'm not waiting another day to see what you're talking about.”

Nell was coming down off the crest of her gusto, deflated in the end by Antoinette's sneer. She wanted to go, get a computer, and go home to continue her plans. She wished she had slept. People were so completely exhausting. Oliver especially.

But he gave in. “Fine. Let's do it.”

What followed was a terribly awkward scene in which Oliver was far too close to Nell for comfort. She propped up her bicycle, and he, after several failed attempts, sat astride the handlebars. He always smelled so strong. Now, like moonshine and that poxy cologne: heady, overbearing. Nell did not disguise how unimpressed she was. She wrinkled her nose and squinted at him, his face too close to hers. Kodak capered over him and into the basket, shielding his eyes, maybe against the now surreal pink light of day or maybe against the scene of sheer calamity he was watching. Too many limbs, too little bicycle.

Eventually, after some staggering, some swearing—“Well, that was colorful, Nell!”; some “Look, just get off, and we'll try from a different angle”; some “
Get
your hands
off
my waist!”—the pair took off, back into the forest. Fortunately, Oliver's bony frame was more an awkwardness than an imposition, and Nell managed to pick up speed after all. Oliver clung to the handlebars, the breeze almost cool, sweeping his hair back, finding all this very romantic.

They took a different route through the park this time, away from Nell's house. Up past the ruins of the police headquarters, and out onto the roads with the little redbrick houses still boarded up, still streaked
with ash, some still marked with large telltale red stripes on their doors: “This house is sick”; “And this one”; “And this one.”

Nobody lived up here anymore. Some horses and deer occasionally would dash about: great mountainous beasts, ghosts of a time long gone. Bad things had happened here; the place had been crushed, and still nobody was ready to remove that cast and see if the bones were fixed. Nell never left the park this way to go to the city. It was too close to the wastelands at the edges of the Pale for her liking. Too close to the wreckage not to make her skin crawl.

Her legs were on fire by the time they got to the slight hill of Stonybatter and coasted down between the hollowed-out houses, the charred smell of fire still in the air against Oliver's perfume.

“Which way do I go?” Nell asked.

“Down to the Old Smithfield Square.”

Nell turned left and wound down a skinny cobbled road, then hit the abomination that had once been a bright, vast market square. There were craters like this all over the island, a handful pocking Black Water City. The electromagnetic pulse that had triggered the Turn had pulled airplanes from the sky, a violent metal rain then hammering the land. It looked as though a terrible god had punched the earth, the crater a shallow,
ugly mess; huge tall streetlamps, once majestic, were buckled down, some leaning, some twisted, some drooping in sorrow.

Nell kept the bicycle close to the old warehouses and kept her eyes straight ahead.

“Stop in just a moment, here by these steps,” Oliver guided her.

Nell braked, and the jolt uprooted Oliver from the handlebars. Thankfully he didn't hurt himself, just staggered off. Nell didn't laugh aloud but wanted to. She preferred him like this, all his sharp edges ragged.

She locked up her bike and took the stoat around her shoulders. Oliver walked unsteadily across the small cracked plaza toward a building set deep off the square.