The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) (21 page)

This place, it was…

Queen Mab and her Lost Boys, they…

Neverland did not acknowledge the sanctity of a Clakker’s bodily identity. They treated themselves, and other mechanicals, as no more than the sum of their parts. Their meaningless, mass-produced,
interchangeable
parts.

Lilith held a key; one of the Lost Boys hefted a lamp. Daniel took a step back. How did they intend to “repair” him? By twisting his body into an asymmetric grotesquerie? By warping him into an abomination comprising untold numbers of individual Clakkers?

What’s wrong, Daniel? I thought you’d approve of such a place. After all, your good
friend
Berenice has one just like it.

Lilith advanced with the key. He pivoted on his broken ankle, skidded around the corner, and limp-sprinted for the exit. Lilith gave chase. The raw metal of his ankle struck sparks from the stone floor. There was a ladder up to the hatch, but he couldn’t climb it with his useless arms and single foot. He crouched, preparing to leap through the overhead portal. It slammed shut. Lilith tackled him.

They tussled, but she was whole and he was badly compromised. The impact of their metal bodies launched cacophonous echoes through the passages. Lilith pinned him to the floor. He tried to shake his head as she brought the key to his forehead, but his weathervane neck betrayed him.

No! Please, NO!

She slammed the key into his forehead and gave it a savage twist. The world disintegrated, and his consciousness hurtled into the void.

He didn’t dream. He didn’t exist.

And then he did.

The transition was a blink. Like the sun momentarily eclipsed by a passing airship, but faster. Instantaneous.

Lilith tugged at the key protruding from his forehead. When he was no longer a unicorn or narwhal, she stepped out of his field of view. He lay on the table, he realized.

She said,
It’s over, Daniel.

Daniel. That’s me.
He sorted through his recent memories, taking a second to review the story of how he came to be in this
place, which was the story of the Clakker he’d been before he was Daniel. His mind appeared intact.

He turned toward her voice, resigned as always to the struggle to control the slewing of his head until he could aim his eyes in roughly the right direction. Instead his head stopped short—exactly where he’d aimed, expecting it to keep turning. He adjusted. His head followed the motion of his neck and no longer swayed like a weathervane or unlatched gate. The damage had been fixed. And his head was weighted correctly, he realized: They’d removed the epoxy from his face and the internal mechanisms of his jaw. From his arms, too: They were no longer useless clubs.

They were so pristine they looked as though they’d never come within a hundred miles of a French weapon. A moment’s panic quickened the tempo of his mainspring heart. Was that true? Had they—oh, no, no—had they removed his useless arms and replaced them with… with… somebody else’s? Was he now a chimera, as twisted and wrong as any other Lost Boy?

He refocused his eyes. A moment’s close inspection—without the repairs to his neck this might have been impossible—convinced him that these were still his arms. The arms he’d had on the day he first achieved consciousness. He couldn’t find a trace of the hardened sheaths. Not a chip, not a crumb, even in the finest crevices. He wondered how they’d managed to chisel away the offending material so thoroughly.

He couldn’t hide his relief.
I’m still me
, he thought.
They didn’t merge me with somebody else.

The others had departed while he was inert. They’d left Daniel’s reactivation to Lilith.

He stood. It was disorienting when the slightest motion didn’t cause his head to bob and sway. He’d put up with it for so long that it’d come to feel normal. And his hands! He could use his hands again!

Thank you
, he said.

Lilith said,
You’re lucky.
Her tone said something very different. The soft chatter of her gearing might have suggested regret, even remorse.
They had to tear this place apart before they found a suitable replacement for your missing flanges and the broken pinion in your neck.

Daniel froze. They had done it to him after all: made him a chimera. Something grotesque. He carried part of a different mechanical inside him. A machine who had almost certainly come to a bad end.

What a fool he was. When the Clockmakers repaired a Clakker, they did it at the Forge, where they had plenty of new material at their disposal and could even fabricate at need. They never had to violate another mechanical’s bodily integrity to fix another. But Neverland didn’t have a Forge. So they resorted to using scavenged… parts… to repair themselves here.

What happened while I was out?

You were repaired
, Lilith said. She headed for the ladder, snuffing out the alchemical lamps as she went. She paused beneath the hatch, touched her face.
And made a full citizen of Neverland.

Daniel found Queen Mab standing on a rocky cleft overlooking the frozen river. The aurora had returned. Diaphanous streamers of emerald and cobalt flapped across the starry sky. The light shimmered differently from the variety of alloys in her body. It gave her a mottled appearance, like a human leper.

You look much better
, she said.
Everything back in working order?

He flexed his hands.
Yes. Thank you.

Her body clicked as if to shrug off the gratitude.

We take care of our fellow mechanicals, here. Because we’re free to do so.

They watched the aurora. The moon rose. Metal clanked in the valley. Daniel had so many questions. What did Mab and the Lost Boys do with their freedom? What was he supposed to
do with himself? And why had these free Clakkers, this motley collection of rogues and runaways, become an assortment of atrocities?

He touched his neck, unconsciously mimicking Lilith. Mab saw this.

She said,
Do you enjoy riddles, Daniel?

“I don’t know any riddles,” he said. It felt good, knowing he could once again speak aloud if he chose.

I do.
Mab paced. She was strangely graceful on the legs that clearly were not part of her original body plan. He wondered how long it had taken her to acquire such grace, how long she’d been so horrifically disfigured, how it happened. She saw him examining her, but he couldn’t help it. Only an extraordinary Clakker would have the will to keep existing after becoming the epitome of her own kind’s greatest taboo. More than that, she’d built a community and rallied others to her when her very existence ought to have been anathema. Remarkable.

Imagine a ship, built by humans—

Humans don’t build ships
, he blurted.

They used to.
He supposed that was true. Though it was hard to imagine how their makers had lived before they created Clakkers.

Still pacing, she said,
A stout and fearsome wooden warship. It circles the globe again and again, driven by one captain, then another, then another. It spends decades on the sea, ever on the move, never at port.
Daniel imagined he knew where this was going. Mab continued:
But occasionally, because of its hard service, pieces of the ship must be replaced. A plank here, a line there. A sail. A nail. The bowsprit. And so it goes. And sometimes the captain makes changes to improve the ship: replacing the cannon with stronger guns, or hiring better sailors. Until one day, many years after it was christened, long decades or even a century after its first
voyage, not a single piece of the original ship remains. Every inch has been replaced.

She stopped pacing and pivoted on one hoof to face him.

Imagine that, Daniel, and then tell me. Is it still the same ship? Or is it no longer the same, but a different ship sailing under the same name?

Daniel mulled this. Mab’s mismatched eyes rotated in their sockets, bezels humming while she watched him.

Suppressing a rattle of revulsion, he said,
I think your riddle rests on a deliberate ambiguity. To a landlubber who has never set foot on open water, a ship is merely a tangible physical object, a finite collection of wood and rope. But to the sailor who calls it her home, the ship is the sum of its voyages and of her adventures. Its spirit. But your question is posed in such a way as to juxtapose these meanings.

Yes, yes, you’re very clever. Just answer the damn question
, Mab said. Her blade arm vibrated with the
hum
of retensioned springs. Daniel took a step backward. He’d encountered military Clakkers after he’d been outed as a rogue in New Amsterdam, and had been lucky to escape without getting sheared in half. Did she actually use that thing? Jesus, what could she possibly need it for? Was she going to do it now? But after a moment’s visible effort she calmed herself.

She asked,
Where does the ship reside: in the planks of the hull, or in the name?

Daniel said,
The physical embodiment of the ship has changed. But its identity has not.

The cables in her blade arm stopped thrumming.
Identity! That’s the crux of it. This
—quicker than he could react, she tapped Daniel on the forehead where Lilith had jammed the key that put his consciousness on hiatus—
is what carries your identity and makes you the Clakker that you are. We are who we
say we are, not the strange bodies our makers tried to give us. As long as the former is safe, who cares of the latter?

In the private confines of his own thoughts, Daniel said to himself,
I do. My identity is what I choose it to be.
Aloud he said,
I see.
Although he didn’t.

Speaking of safeguarding your precious identity
, said Mab,
I have a gift for you
. From the cavity within her skeletal chest she produced a thin metal plate and a rubber tube similar to the ones that contained his former owners’ dentifrice. The plate resembled the others he’d seen covering the Lost Boys’ keyholes. The tube, it turned out, contained powerful adhesive. It didn’t set as quickly as the French epoxy that had nearly led to Daniel’s demise, but its origin couldn’t be doubted.

Holding the plate over his keyhole with two fingertips, waiting for the glue to dry, he asked,
Where did you obtain a tube of French epoxy?

In French, Mab said, “From the Inuit. They trade with the French, and then they trade with us.”

“But what do you give them? What could a colony of free Clakkers have that would be of any value to them?”

“Labor,” said Mab. “In five minutes you can do with your fingers things that might take a human days to achieve with a hammer and bone knife.”

Daniel thought about this. Overhead, the aurora flared momentarily red. “While they spend a great deal of time traveling inside French territory.” Mab turned to look at him. He concluded, “You pay them for information about New France.”

“I see I was well informed about you, Daniel. You are a clever one.”

Her words struck him like a thunderbolt. “Informed by whom? Once across the border, I never passed through any towns or villages. Who could have brought word of my approach? Damaged though I was, I traveled faster than any
human contrivance over this terrain.” He’d heard of dogsleds and hoped to someday see one.

But she went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Clever and ruthless. It’s too bad about the airship. What an ally that would have been! But surely you knew from the start it was an ill-fated beast. I do wonder how you subdued it.”

The demise of the Clakker airship was spectacular and unusual. It wasn’t hard to imagine the tale had spread from within Nieuw Nederland to New France and points elsewhere. But Mab didn’t know, or pretended not to know, about the bauble he’d inadvertently received from Pastor Visser. The glass with the power to break the geasa. Nevertheless, Mab knew much for somebody living in the snowy wilderness hundreds of miles from the ragged fringes of New France.

Daniel asked, “How could you possibly know so much about my movements?”

A sweep of her arm encompassed the valley and their kin in the far distance. “You didn’t think this was the entirety of Neverland, did you? That in a quarter of a millennium less than three dozen of us have been so lucky? No, Daniel. We have brothers and sisters spread throughout the human world.”