Spare and Found Parts (23 page)

T
hat evening Io led Nell down to the kitchen for a change of scenery. She sat at the table, drinking hot chicken stock from a mug, while Io fussed around, preparing a proper meal. Nell's appetite had been voracious lately; everything she ate was fuel toward her body's taking new steps and healing itself. The hunger was at least partially artificial from the Medi-Patch, but as the heady and dense rosemary and echo of white wine (and a suggestion of mushroom and . . . was that bay leaf?) in the stock hit her tongue, she was glad of it.

Io played some music for her (soft, guitars, a man's voice this time) and sliced bright vegetables into even disks. He placed them one by one into a simmering dark sauce on the hob in the fat cast-iron pan and then set about cobbling together a cake. Watching him brought
Nell a very quiet peace; this soft domesticity was a relief from Oliver's confession scene earlier in the day. She watched Io's hands, confident and uncanny. They still unsettled her but in a way that pulled her in now, rather than drove her away. She wasn't afraid of him.

“I promise I know how to cook, too,” Nell said, over the lip of her mug. “Do you ever get hungry?”

“No.” Io seamlessly cracked one egg into a bowl, then another. “But I appreciate the composition of food. I am feeling this more acutely the more I practice the recipes in my applications. The instructions are effectively equations and the cake”—he gestured to his mixing bowl—“will be the correct result. How satisfying.”

Nell chuckled. “Yes. I agree. Cake is a fine answer to any equation. It is a shame you can't taste it, though.”

Io shrugged. “There were taste extensions and applications for my model, but at present the hardware needed to build me a fully functioning palate would be extremely complex and would require some hypersensitive fibers that I am unsure are still in existence.”

“Maybe when I'm better, I can get working on that for you. I'm sure Da knows a thing or two about that. Who knows what materials he's got stashed back there.?”

Nell said this lightly but caught herself. The things
her father kept in the laboratory weren't for playful suggestion. She sipped her broth again, warmed by it.

Io cradled the mixing bowl and stirred rhythmically, quiet for a moment. He was deliberating.

“Nell, I would like to tell you something.”

Not this again. Nell wasn't sure she could handle anything else today after Oliver, but she said, “Oh, what is it?” instead of “I am very delicate right now. Can we please go back to talking about desserts?”

“In Dr. Crane's laboratory I saw that he was making drawings for”—Io hesitated and looked into the mixing bowl—“for something like me.”

The chiming began to escalate in her for the first time in days. Something like him? An android? A robot? A person? Io didn't look up, his arm still churning the batter in the heavy enamel bowl.

“Excuse me?”

“He is planning to build something like me, Nell. Only not like me. I think he intends it to be a woman.”

The sound of the wooden spoon in the mix was a dull beat in circles, and the spiral of it was something awful. Nell blinked.

“Do you think Dr. Crane is making a friend for me?” Io asked then, earnest, turning toward the cake tin on the counter, expertly lined with brown greaseproof
paper. He carefully poured the pale batter down into it, a neat transfer.

“I don't know. Maybe?”

Nell did know. She saw her mother's body under the sheet again, a flash of it, a flash of what the landscape of her father's mind looked like. If he couldn't have Cora's body, would he build something like it? Of course he would. The laboratory was a cave of transfiguration, a mechanical womb for him to try and try again to claw Cora back from the dead. So he could prove to himself—or even prove to her—that he could. That he was capable of anything, regardless of death.

Nell looked at Io. She couldn't tell him all this when it was barely clear to her. What good would it do to pour all this into Io's hands? What could he do with it?

“Do you . . . want a friend?”

Io opened the oven, and a deep breath of heat rolled into the room. He placed the cake pan inside and closed the hatch behind it. “I don't know. I like you. But you aren't like me. So”—Io stalled—“maybe I could find a song for this?”

Nell shook her head. “Don't.”

She hadn't built him to watch him interact with things like him; he wasn't another exercise or a steel sprite to add to her little collection. She'd built him for herself, for her world, but she had never considered for
a moment that maybe he would prefer the company of someone more like him.

Maybe humans weren't all that interesting after all; maybe their world, full of things he couldn't experience, tastes he couldn't taste, was dull to him. Maybe he needed someone to talk in code with, to learn about the human world alongside, a cipher to piece this place together with. Maybe he didn't want a programmer or a maker condescending to him. The maybes grew taller and taller in Nell until her chime sang, “Maybe I am wrong; maybe this is all wrong.”

Io saw her panic and came to her across the kitchen tiles, placed his hand on her shoulder. Nell swallowed hard on all the ugly questions and asked, “Would you like a friend who's just like you? Because if you would, maybe I can make you one.”

Her creation turned his bronze face to her. “If you want to build me a friend, I will have a friend. If Dr. Crane has a friend for me and you find this the correct way to continue, I will have a friend. But I am happy to be your friend, just yours, if that is what you wish.”

How did reams of numbers flash light into this? Nell wondered, looking up at him. How did algorithm become emotion? The recipe of him just worked that way, she supposed. If Io believed himself to be happy, he was happy. Faith and programming might be the
same thing. Maybe this was how he understood cake.

Nell said, “Lean down.”

The robot did, and she placed her lips very softly on the architecture of his cheek. It was metal and hard, but this time it was warm.

“Thank you,” Io said.

When the cake was done, 24.4 minutes later, the kitchen air was charged with sugar and that special alchemy that baking brings to a space. The dessert cooled on a rack, and Io and Nell sat at the table, playing Snap.

Nell's reflexes were a good match for Io's image processing speed. A two of diamonds, an eight of spades, a jack of spades, a jack of—
snap
! Io gathered the stack, and they started again. A queen of clubs, a three of hearts, Cora's body pulled into focus in Nell's mind. Who would be on that empty table next? Was there something already there? Were parts being gathered or forged anew? Nell ran her fingers over her Medi-Patch, tempted to tear it off, to face down the dread in her belly and be her whole self again.

The front door of the house opened, then closed.

Io peered over his cards and didn't draw another, but before he could ask Nell what she was thinking, Julian blustered in, the smell of fresh rain and earth rolling off him, his glasses fogging up. He wasn't wearing a
raincoat, just his worn tweed jacket, his tie too tight.

“Nell, what did you say to Oliver Kelly?” he demanded.

His tone was urgent, furious, and marbled with terror. He pushed his glasses up into his tangle of hair, his brow beaded with sweat.

“Did you see him? Is he all right?” Nell asked, knowing full well that these were the wrong questions. Io held his cards still and didn't make a sound.

“Nell. What did you say . . . to . . . him?”

Nell fanned her cards out and looked into the black and red and white of them, instead of over at her father's intensity. Best to keep it frank.

“I told him that I am not and never will be in love with him. I'm cutting him loose; it's not fair on him anymore, Da. He'll recover.”

Julian stood very still for a moment. He shot a dark look at Io, then at Nell, then at Io again, speechless.

Nell steeled herself and looked casually over her shoulder at him, keeping her fan of cards high. “Why? Is he all right?”

“Oh, he's going to be all right,” replied Julian, walking out of the kitchen. His voice carried through the doorway. “Us, though, we're not.”

His laboratory door creaked, then slammed, a tremor running sick through the whole house.

A roar came up through Nell before the mugs on the shelf were finished rattling. “What is that supposed to even
mean
?” Julian dipped in and out of Nell's orbit, a strange and troublesome comet. He'd land with real destruction someday. That day was soon, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Nell threw her cards on the floor, a scatter of black and white and red. She stormed, as best she could against the stiffness of her legs, to the door of his laboratory and hammered with her fist. “You can't just keep hiding in there!” she shouted into the dark wood. “You're going to have to talk to me someday!”

The reply was simply the click of a lock, the heavy slide of a bolt, the sound of her father's footsteps walking back into his own wretched world.

Nell placed her head against the door for a moment and ran her fingernails slowly down its surface, the scratch against the varnish a last whisper of her fury. She made her way down the corridor back to the kitchen and breathed her chiming back to normal volume. She sat down at the table again with a heave.

She held her face with her hands and measured her breath against the quiet, against the response she'd never get from Julian. Something was wrong, and he'd
make sure she'd never see it coming. Around her, Io picked up the cards, one by one.

Nell eventually pulled her face from the dark of her palms. “Do you think the cake has cooled?”

The knife slid down the belly of the cake easily. It was delicious.

I
n the morning, after an empty sleep, Nell pulled back the covers and ran her hands over her legs. She silently asked her muscles to be strong. Her fingernails were ragged. She'd get Julian to come out and talk to her today one way or another.

Rays of early light stretched over her room from the windows. Cabin fever was edging at her. She'd ask Io to help her out to the garden today if the sun stayed out and the rain kept away. Maybe she'd go talk to her mother, pick some wildflowers and leave them at the side of the lake.

Nell pushed the deadening patch with her fingers, hoping for a moment or two of peace, missing the thin curtain between her anxious brain and the real world, the veil of chemical calm. She was adjusted now. There was no more relief in the high. There was no more relief at all.

“Oliver was going to be fine,” her father had said. “Us, though. We're not
.
” He'd locked his door in the face of her rage. He'd stepped away from handing her any sort of truth. Nell was confused, but more than this. There was something terribly wrong in this house. Were they in danger?

She huddled among her pillows, and Kodak squirreled his way up the covers and nuzzled into her neck.

“What do you know then?” she whispered to him. “What do you know?” She rubbed his head, his silky coat. The clock on the wall read an inch or so past nine, and she listened closely to the house for movement.

Muffled laughter drifted up from directly below her. Something was happening in the kitchen. But who was there? What kind of laughter was it? Good spirited, cruel? It set her teeth on edge.

Then a shriek of joy reverberated up the stairs: Ruby, that was Ruby's voice. Right, at least that meant there wasn't immediate trouble. It felt dissonant to Nell, a stark contrast with the mood of the Crane house.

A barrel of footsteps up the stairs. Three clear knocks on the door, deliberate and formal.

“Ruby, what, what?”

Ruby laughed gaily and hushed her. “Shh! You'll see! C'mon!”

More than a little awkwardly (and far more stiffly and painfully than she let on) Nell got herself to the doorframe: then Ruby placed an arm around her waist and helped her through the door and onto the landing. It was an awkward waltz, but the first steps of the day would be the stiffest. Nell was steadier than she'd been the day before. She was almost fine, but if she fell now, she'd take both of them tumbling down at once. The top of the stairway was a precarious ledge.

“Why don't you sit here? It'll give you a great view!”

Nell held the banister and slowly sat down where the landing met the top stair. “A view?”

“You'll see!”

Ruby skipped down the stairs with an ease that Nell utterly envied. She rubbed her knees, thought: Soon, soon. Ruby called over her shoulder, “Don't run away on me!” as if Nell had any choice at all in the matter.

“Sure,” she replied, still steadying her breathing. “Sounds grand.” Running. That was a long, inconvenient way off yet. Her sarcasm disappeared into the empty hallway.

Ruby appeared again at the bottom of the stairs and cleared her throat theatrically. “Miss Crane, in lieu of your oncoming wardrobe, it is my pleasure to present to you this fine, drizzly morning, the Premier Underwood Android Collection for Autumn and Winter.”

The kitchen door swung open with a flourish. Nell gasped.

Io emerged, but hardly as Nell knew him. Ruby had made him clothes.

His shirt was informal, a heather gray linen with tiny bronze buttons tailored to his form. Ruby had rolled up one of his sleeves. His trousers were charcoal, cut just above his ankles, as was the style in the city that year. A red woolen scarf was slung about his neck cavalier, and as he paraded the hallway, he flung a length of it over his shoulder, delighted with himself. Ruby applauded his performance, and Nell was breathless with laughter. She clapped wildly as he pivoted, and Ruby fussed around him.

Io still looked like six and a half feet of metal. He was still mismatched and clunky, still almost faceless. But Ruby's wrapping him in good tailored fabric brought him just a little closer to being human, at least from where Nell sat. She put her hand to her chest as her creation danced about with her best friend. A wave of pride, and relief, rolled through her. Life could look like this. The sound of laughter in the halls of the Crane house didn't have to be so scarce, didn't have to feel like a threat. She looked at the still closed door to her father's lab. She hoped he could hear them. She hoped he was curious.

“Well?” Ruby demanded, teasing. “On a scale of, let me see, one to Ruby, you are a genius, where have I landed?”

Io began to ascend the staircase toward her. “Do you like it, Nell?”

Nell nodded, grinning, and he sat down beside her on the stairs. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, holding her delight. The fabric of Io's new clothes smelled fresh and clean.

“I like it, too,” Io said to her quietly. “Very much.”

Ruby stood at the bottom of the stairs, hands on her hips, very pleased with herself.

“Next, I'll be setting you up with a jacket. I have
just
the tweed in mind. Maybe a hat with a dashing brim for the winter? You'll be the talk of the whole city. Forget your body; everyone'll be asking who composed that dapper ensemble!” Ruby whirled toward the front door in a pantomime of her future success, thanking invisible fans for their esteem and compliments. “Why, yes! I do sew everything myself!” and “No, no, these hands aren't augmented!”

She blew kisses and leaned against the hall door. “Nellie, I hate to tell you, but I get the feeling my star is going to rise even higher than yours! The Marvelous Miraculous Ruby Underwood!”

And then, as if the universe had got wind that they
were having just a little too much fun, an unusual sound came from out beyond the front garden.

A purr of engine, the riff of a vehicle pulling in, pulling back, parking. A car. Outside. Ruby's and Nell's eyes connected. No one in the Pale had a car.

“Open the door,” said Nell, the chime suddenly ricocheting through her body, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end.

Ruby wrapped her hand around the knob and pulled. The day opened up before them. Nell couldn't see what Ruby could at the bottom of the garden, so she stood up and took some creaky steps down the flight of stairs.

A white albatross of a car. A woman removing a case from the boot. Dread rose over Nell, the heap of unanswered letters in her mind's eye.

Nan was here. Her recent silence had been a summoning.

“Close the door!” Nell called out, and Ruby slammed it shut.

“Io, go to my room!”

Io looked down to Nell, and Nell looked up to Io. He registered her urgency and rose quickly to disappear across the landing into Nell's room.

Five rhythmic and stern raps at the door. Rat-tat-a-tat-tat.

“Nell, it's your
grandmother
!” whispered Ruby, clasping her hands over her mouth as though the word were a curse, or a spell gone wrong, as if she'd conjured her up herself.

“Let her in,” Nell said. “Let her in.”