I believe I understand why.
Under the fairy glow of the city’s skyline, we have found only chaos. In Peter’s empire, Elena and I lived in opulence, the events of each day lined up like a neat row of fence posts. Ensconced in the royal keep, we were protected from harm—given purchase to explore books and tutors and trainers. I would prefer even the half-built bog of Saint Petersburg to this great bleeding wound of a city.
“We cannot stay here,” says Elena, retreating from the stairs into our room. “We need to find others like us, the message writers.”
Following her inside, I keep my back to the window and empty the coin purse I took from the thief into my palm. His stinking body still lies on the stairs below, face twisted in disbelief at his final sight. I am careful to keep the coins from clinking together as I count them—these walls are thin and the people here are poor and desperate, willing to risk everything for nothing.
“You know that is too dangerous,” I say, lighting our only lamp. “Besides, what would you have me do? We have no means. No way to disguise ourselves among the humans.”
Elena stands at the window, taps a finger against her chin, thinking.
“We need finances,” she says. “You’ll have to earn them, as nobody will pay attention to a child. But we’ve got advantages. You are strong, intimidating…nearly impervious to harm, and you’re a fighter.”
“I cannot show my face,” I say, turning to her and removing the ornate mask that covers my eyes and cheeks. The patched leather skin of my face looks strange from a distance, menacing in the feeble flame of a whale-oil lamp, and in broad daylight I would horrify anyone directing half a glance in my direction. “And I will not break pravda.”
“Simple constraints,” she says, thinking. “For now, you must continue to use the mask and speak little. The job I shall find for you will not require daylight…and it will be honorable enough.”
Elena sets to strategizing, and, before dawn, my new career has begun.
The job of debt collector is available to anyone brave or foolish enough to take it. Myriad private banks have sprung up, their notice boards sprouting sheaves of debtor warrants like leaves. Debtor’s prisons are eager to pay for the men and women who have failed in their financial obligations—criminals running from justice, in their view. And so I set my will to the hunt. After scanning the notice boards, I find my eyes can pick out faces in the crowds and my ears ring to the names I have read, spoken in the chatter of the street.
Over the months, I become a regular attendee of the public hangings or pillories. Finding my place the night before, I wait behind hidden windows and watch, never sparing a glance for whatever doomed soul stands on the gallows. Instead, my gaze devours the roaring mass of the audience, the faces of my prey blinking into notice one by one, their features twisted into rage or amusement or curiosity at the suffering of the person gone swinging.
Debtors soon learn to fear the man in the bronze mask—the dark one who comes at night for those who owe, never speaking, with a grip like stone. Because I do not prey on the poor debtors of my neighborhood—only the wealthy from other quarters—my name is often celebrated in the Lanes. And though I overhear many toasts made to me, none are made in my presence. The sweep of my cloak and sheen of my mask inspire only silence and dread.
Declining social invitations is not an issue.
Elena, for her part, spends the early years as a doll, locked away at home where she can draw no attention. Business is good, and I am well suited for it. Soon, I rent the flat next door to use as a holding room for my prisoners. My wealthiest debtors gladly pay any fee I ask to be held outside true debtors’ prison—wisely avoiding exposure to degraded conditions that more often than not lead to disease and death.
And all this while, Elena is trapped with few books and no outside company. She takes to pacing the perimeter of our room like a caged animal, moving day and night with steady tapping footsteps that send shivers of guilt racing through me. Withdrawn and sullen, she speaks less and less, sometimes sitting for hours without moving.
For my part, I find that each guilty person whom I collect and punish according to the law of this new land only satisfies some small, fleeting aspect of pravda. All around me, I witness injustices great and small. But without orders from my tsar I have no direction, reduced to running collection routes and neglecting my true purpose.
My Word becomes a gnawing hunger inside me.
I return one morning to find Elena standing by our drafty window. Her fractured face is lit in the harsh dawn glare, streaked with hard rays of sunlight filtered through coal smoke and river miasma. She holds an ornate hand mirror, looking at her reflection, idly tracing fingers across the curve of her sculpted lips.
“I need to go outside,” she says. “I need to see.”
“But your face—” I say. Interrupting me, she points out the window to a factory along the river. A tannery.
“It is time to fix that,” she says. “For both of us.”
Elena has chosen an artist after months spent researching and corresponding with dozens of leatherworkers. He is a young man, handsome and talented—a doll maker in his spare time. Feigning the role of a plague survivor, I approach him from behind my mask and offer him a vague job. He is wary, but from my reputation, he knows I can pay. And his fear recedes when I place a sizable banknote in his soot-stained hand.
The next day, armed with a sheath of supple calfskin and a satchel of tools, the leatherworker enters our flat. He swallows, standing rigid and ready to flee as he gazes upon Elena’s doll-like body. Dressed in her finest gown, the little girl lies perfectly still on a bed of straw in a small square of light from the only window.
In a hushed voice, my crooked features hidden behind the bronze mask, I spin the tale Elena has given me.
I describe my beloved daughter, my only reason for living—lost to the Black Death that scarred my own face. Hoarse with grief, I speak of a beautiful doll, an eternal reminder of the angelic child who I’ll never see again. She is my last link to a world that has taken everything from me. And feigning the heartbreak of a father, I finally beg the leatherworker to practice his craft—to give this doll the face of a living girl.
It is a strange request, but tragedy and its warped aftereffects are common here. The leatherworker hesitates, then drops to his knees beside the small, limp form of the girl and begins to efficiently unpack his satchel. The first time he lifts her, he does so roughly, and I put fingers on his shoulder like the pinch of an iron gate.
“Gently,” I tell him. She is precious to me.
After that, the leatherworker touches Elena’s face as if she were a real little girl.
His fingers are nimble and confident as he pries the porcelain mask away from her head. Nostalgia floods my heart as I see her beautiful face discarded on the floor. The innocence of her simple facade will be lost, her beautiful clean doll’s features transformed into something so much more complex. I wonder, as I often do lately, if I am going to lose her.
My darling Elena, to her credit, does not so much as tremble, completing the illusion of a doll under the man’s needle and thread. At the sight of her clockwork, the leatherworker turns to me.
“Sir,” he says, “this doll of yours is ingeniously constructed. She’s a treasure, fit for showing in the finest wonder room. Have you considered…”
Seeing my masked face, the sentence evaporates on his lips.
“Apologies, sir,” he says.
He sets Elena on a wooden chair, her liquid eyes staring vacantly across the room from within a skinless face. I cannot bear to look, and I go on long walks or simply wait outside on the stairs, hearing the click of needle and thimble.
Working from a small bust of Aphrodite and a collection of hand-drawn sketches, he crafts the best face he can. Losing himself in a place of focus, the leatherworker falls into a reverie, hands flying, unaware of me or of anything besides the little girl who is coming to life beneath his hands. Th
e thin leather, dyed and dusted with powder, becomes a simulacrum of the pure unblemished skin of youth, bright red lips and wide eyes taking form under his expert hand.
The young man works for days, from morning until late in the night. Stopping only to take meals and short naps, he continues under the meager radiance of candles as the sunlight fades. Finally, near morning, the sound of working stops and does not resume. Rising from the stairs, I steel myself and enter our room.
I find the leatherworker standing with his back to me. Holding a brush, he has just finished applying a final layer of pigment. His shoulders are rising and falling as he takes manic breaths, staring at the girl in the chair. Hearing my creaking footsteps, he turns to me with shining eyes.
Over his shoulder, I see Elena has become a real girl, with a real face.
“My god,” he breathes, “she’s…alive.”
Quickly, I clamp a hand over his bicep and guide him to the doorway. I press a bulging wallet of coins into his palm and thank him brusquely. Confused and overcompensated, he mouths his thanks and stumbles out into the dark hallway.
I close the door firmly behind him and lock it.
Under the familiar flicker of candlelight, I meet my sister for the second time.
“Darling,” I say, kneeling before her chair. “He’s gone.”
Elena slowly blinks. This time, I do not hear the click of a doll’s eyes.
Now, I see the contours of Elena’s true face. From the sculpture of Aphrodite and her own drawings, she has chosen the woman she wanted to become. And now that she has, I realize this was always who she was.
“Peter,” she says, smiling, her red-tinged cheeks bright beneath sparkling eyes. She slides off the chair on slippered feet and pushes down the ruffles of her dress. Standing face-to-face with me, her familiar black curls now frame the beguiling face of a young lady.
Reaching out, Elena takes my broken face in her hands.
“Let me fix yours now,” she says. “London awaits us.”
21
SEATTLE, PRESENT
Knifing through the heart of Seattle, Peter leans behind the wheel and drives with his thumbs, barely moving. A flap of skin from his damaged face has peeled away from the golden skeleton beneath. Struggling, he reaches up and tries to push his wound closed.
“We need to fix your face,” I say, crinkling my nose.
“Not now,” he says.
“You look like Frankenstein’s monster. Somebody is going to notice and call the cops. Or the morgue.”
“No,” Peter replies. “The sooner we arrive the less chance our enemies will have—”
“Look,” I say, interrupting him. “I can stitch you up. It will take five minutes and then we can go meet your friend. But if somebody in Seattle sees fucking metal under your face, then we’re going to end up on the news.”
Peter regards me silently for a long second. From his expression, I guess he must not get interrupted very often. Or at all.
“Trust me,” I say quietly.
Something in his expression twinges, some obscure emotion rippling across his face. With one hand, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small leather satchel. He tosses it on my lap.
“Are you familiar?” he asks.
I nod, the satchel looks strangely similar to my own tool roll.
“Very well,” he responds.
Soon after we pass the tower, Peter pulls off the highway and drives through the industrial area along Lake Union until he sees an empty lot. It’s weedy and abandoned, leading to a warren of buildings heaped onto a long jetty reaching into the lake. Beyond a chain-link fence, the rusty hulls of dry-docked freighters loom over gritty concrete. Loose gravel grinds and pops under our tires as the loud, gasoline-smelling car rumbles to a stop.
Nobody is around this early in the morning.
“This will work,” I say, cracking open the groaning door.
I toss the satchel on the warm hood of the car. Unfolding it, I see an array of fine clockmaker’s tools. Some of the pieces date back hundreds of years, forged in bronze and shaped by hand. Other tools I don’t recognize, modern creations wrought in sterile titanium. Picks and microscopes and narrow drills crowd the loops of the satchel.
“Wow,” I say, pulling out a scalpel.
“Are you able to do this?” Peter asks, climbing out of the door without putting weight on his shattered knee. He cradles one arm to his chest in a way that worries me. “I can do it myself if necessary.”
“I’m fine,” I say, running my fingers over the other tools. “Most of my projects are a lot further gone than you.”
“Good. No sterilization. Simply do the repair.”
As Peter leans himself against the side of the car, I slide out a forceps and use it to pluck a curved needle from the satchel. There is a coil of silken thread, gummy, coated with a substance similar to the skin on Peter’s face. With well-practiced motions, I thread the needle.
“So let’s say your friend fixes your leg, then what?”
“We use the relic,” Peter says, patiently holding his face closed. “With it, we can stop the fighting—”
A shudder runs through his chest and Peter puts a hand over his heart until it passes. Ignoring my confused expression, he hoists himself onto the hood. Sitting, he drops his elbows onto his thighs and leans forward, putting his mangled face within my reach.
“How?” I ask.
“One thing at a time,” he says to the empty lot.
Up high, the wind blows through pine trees, sending shadows dancing over gravel. The engine still ticks over quietly, heat radiating from the muscle car. Seabirds call to each other on the lake.
I hold up the forceps, needle glinting. Watching me carefully, Peter takes his hand away from his cheek. The wound falls open, but his gold-flecked brown eyes stay trained on me as I press my fingers to his face.
At my touch, he blinks hard. I pull back a little.
“You okay?”
“It has been a long time since…someone repaired me in this way.”
I watch his face but it’s gone to stone again. I wonder to myself exactly what he means by a “long time.”
“And never a human being,” he adds.
“I’ll go slow,” I say.
Pressing the wound closed, I make a series of neat dives and swoops through his tough skin. As the thread pinches the laceration back together, his stubborn jawline returns. The skin feels completely natural against my fingers, warm, with the faintest sandpaper scratch of stubble.
I can’t help it; I pinch a curl of his unruly chestnut hair between my thumb and forefinger. The strands are smooth and natural. His skin is supple and soft, freckled and tanned a light brown. I don’t know the technology for this.
“How do you have skin?” I ask. “I mean, where did it come from? It isn’t…”
“It is synthetic,” he says, holding his head still for me.
“I didn’t know they could make it that real,” I say.
“They can’t,” he says. “But we can.”
I pause.
“If the avtomat wish to survive among humans, we cannot exist,” he says. “We have been crafting better materials over the centuries, using them to blend in with your kind. My birth face was lambskin pulled tight over sculpted metal. Tougher leather covered my palms and fingertips, so I could hold weapons without losing grip.”
Now he looks at both his hands.
“My maker spent a long while determining the perfect balance. Too rough and the ax handle slips. Too soft and the skin tears on a strong blow.”
I nod, remembering something similar from my studies. “Vaucanson built a flute player in the seventeen hundreds,” I say. “The machine had lungs and an esophagus and mouth, tongue, teeth. It played the way a person plays, by blowing into the instrument. But for months he couldn’t get the machine to play as well as a human. Then he finally realized: she needed lips. Vaucanson used leather.”
Peter turns his gaze back u
p to me, considering.
“Perhaps my existence is not as surprising to you as it would be to others.”
I pull the needle through.
Peter’s cheek pulls back into the faintest smile, and the wound in his cheek dimples only the slightest bit. The seam where his face was sliced open is disappearing. Whatever the thread is made of is combining with the skin around it, healing.
“You’ve been hiding in plain sight for centuries?” I muse, leaning in to finish the last stitch in a final swoop. Peter doesn’t seem to notice.
“Over history, some avtomat have been discovered. It is inevitable,” he says. “If the captured one is not burned for a witch, then the others make sure he disappears completely. Written accounts, photographs, people—we always clean up our messes. The dozens of us who are left have become old and solitary. Some are ancient. But we are all trained to protect the secret of our existence from humanity…It is a matter of life and death.”
My face inches from his, I watch as the last stitches on his wound close.
“That’s really reassuring, Peter,” I say, leaning back. “How is your friend going to like seeing me?”
As he moves his jaw, testing the repair, I’m reminded of how well his face is put together. Strong jawline and thick eyebrows. A stubborn streak in his chin, but faint laugh lines radiating over his cheeks. His eyes are especially well done, wet and large, brown with bands of yellow expanding out like sunbursts.
“This is the end. I have no choice, neither does my friend, and neither do you.”
Sliding off the hood of the car, Peter cranes his neck. Looking past me, his eyes open wide.
“We are not alone,” he says.
I spin around, needle and thread still in my fingers. All I see is the empty lot. Besides the wind and the distant roar of traffic on the highway, I don’t hear anything. A flock of birds sits on a telephone wire, watching us.
“What are you talking about?” I ask Peter.
“The birds,” he says.