Elena drops her teacup rattling onto the saucer.
“I am quite capable of protecting myself, Brother,” she says.
I push back from the table.
“We are exposed,” I say. “Our lives are at risk. We could have hidden here together safely—”
“And yet you saw fit to leave,” says Hypatia, swirling her tea. “These dalliances across India, the battles and the plunder and the glory of the king. Perhaps you thought it would…satisfy. But none of it means anything.”
Hypatia leans across the table, hands on either side of the hidden object resting between us. “It does not satisfy because those aren’t our wars. Our wars are fought far more viciously, for far longer, and in the shadows.”
“Open it,” says Elena. “Please, Peter.”
I stare at the shrouded outline of the thing for a long moment, feeling its draw. Then I lean over, take hold of the corners of the handkerchief, and pull them taut. The fabric lifts away in a golden square. On the table, I see a crescent ridge of metal.
The anima of a fallen avtomat.
“This is your fight, Peter,” says Elena. “Your purpose.”
I can almost remember this artifact. Something is so familiar about it. I gently scoop the relic up and feel its warmth in my hands. My eyes close and—
Elena is screaming over a chaos of yellow water and frothing mist. A waterfall is roaring—not a dragon after all. Her face pressed against my chest. The shadow of an arrow passes by my face. Please, please she is going to die. I am going to lose her—
“Peter? Peter?” says Elena, her hand on my shoulder. I blink, back in the parlor. Dropping the anima to the table, I wipe my hands on my chest. A sick fear crawls through my belly, nauseous remorse for a sin I cannot place.
“Who is it?” I ask, my eyes averted from the anima, voice barely audible.
Elena shares another look with Hypatia. She speaks, voice low and intense: “This is the anima of Huangdi, made by the progenitor race, Cosmic Ruler and founder of the first dynasty of China. Legends say the Yellow Emperor looked upon what he had made and decided the world was not ready for our kind. He chose to hibernate for a thousand years. But his consort, Leizu, mother of silkworms…betrayed him. As Huangdi lay down to sleep, she plucked his anima from his breast.”
“How did you find it?”
A tight smile appears on Hypatia’s face and she shares a look with Elena. “As I said, your sister and I make a good team. But that is a story for another time,” she says.
“Why bring it to me?”
“On that long-ago day, a loyal general stood and fought Leizu—seized the soul of his master and fled. Though his path was lost to the ages, agents of the tsardom found the body of this champion buried in a muddy riverbank.”
Elena puts a hand over mine, closing my fingers over the artifact.
“Favorini said our vessels were found in the East. He said he put us back together. But he never mentioned that we carried a third anima—the soul of a mighty ruler, missing its vessel.”
Elena holds my hands in hers now, the artifact a warm ember between us.
“Five thousand years, Peter,” she says. “The dawn of civilization. It has been five millennia since you fought the Worm Mother and saved your master’s soul.
“And now it is yours to save again.”
37
SEATTLE, PRESENT
In the fairy tale, the prince kisses the sleeping beauty on her rosy lips and she wakes up, eyelashes fluttering. Standing in the mangled wreckage of this cathedral, on a lake of cool marble hidden deep underground, I feel like this could be a fairy tale world. Peter, with his dimpled chin and closed eyes, could be a prince asleep under an evil curse.
I’d kiss him, maybe, but I’ve got my hands buried wrist deep in his chest.
Click.
Both relics finally slide together against the stone disk. My fingertips tickle long enough for me to think Oh shi—
With a concussive thump, the relics lock together and a column of white light strobes from Peter’s chest. The surge throws me back, the outline of my forearm leaving an imprint on my vision. Blinking, rubbing my eyes, I see Peter’s eyelids fly open, his mouth twisting into a surprised grimace. He screams in agony, back arching and chest convulsing.
This is not like a fairy tale.
“Peter, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
I snatch a leather strap from the tool roll and use both hands to push it into Peter’s mouth. His teeth clench on the strap, eyes rolling left to right, squinted against the blue-white electrical light pouring from his open chest. I take his right hand in both of mine, wincing at his grip and the numbing tickle of electricity, and pull it close to my chest, leaning to him.
“It’s a power transfer,” I say. “You’ll be okay.”
I hope I sound confident. Squeezing my eyes shut, I hope he understands.
Still holding his hand, I crouch and lean against the table. Through my closed eyelids, the strobes of light pulse quicker and quicker, and a whining sound grows to an earsplitting crescendo. My whole body buzzes with electricity, and Peter’s moans are lost under the scream of hidden machinery.
Then, finally, the storm passes.
The unnatural glare fades and we are left again under the warm flicker of hundreds of candles and the shadows of the whirring drones that tend them. A thin haze of smoke lingers above us. The seams of Peter’s face glow a dark silver, but his eyes are open and alert.
“Peter?” I ask. “Are you okay?”
Straining to sit up, Peter reaches into his own chest and pulls out Batuo’s relic with a shaking hand. The stone bi disk is still attached to it. Looking at it in wonder, a slow realization creeps over his face. Turning to me, I can see that he knows.
“Batuo,” he asks, voice flat.
I shake my head sadly, glimpsing the dull glow of Peter’s relic inside his exposed chest. The symbol imprinted on Peter’s anima looks like a flat column, a plinth used to support larger structures. Noticing my gaze, Peter quickly closes the spherical cage around his anima. The carbon fiber ribs of his chest lace themselves shut and with a swipe of his finger, he draws a line from his navel to his collarbone—the skin over his muscular chest connecting like a zipper.
Now Peter looks like a bare-chested man, his body still quivering with occasional electrical spasms. He swings his legs over the table, looking around for the first time. At his feet, he spots Batuo.
“How did you know?” he asks. “To commit the transfer?”
“I didn’t. It was an emergency—an accident,” I say, packing up Batuo’s leather tool roll. I take the monk’s relic and the bi disk and place them both inside. I roll the fabric up and tuck it into the waistband of my jeans, in the small of my back.
“No, not an accident,” says Peter with a grim smile. “I chose well, after all.”
My cheeks turn hot and I look away.
“How did it happen?” Peter asks, spotting the portly man, splayed out in a mess of robes, arms and legs mismatched, his skinless chest open to reveal an empty cradle where his relic was housed. Batuo’s face is still, eyes closed and peaceful.
“That,” I say, nodding across the room.
The wreck of Talus lies in a heap of disembodied limbs, faceless, teeth snarling at nothing, fingers curled in agony, a spear shaft jutting from his chest.
“Oh, no,” Peter murmurs.
At the sight of Talus, a sadness settles into his broad shoulders, his lips set in a small hurt grimace. Slipping off the table, Peter walks over, stepping around the smears of quicksilver and broken limbs.
He kneels beside the wretched body.
Reverent, Peter pushes Talus over onto his back. He sighs at the insults to the destroyed face. Hidden by the curve of his back, I see Peter’s hands move busily over the fallen man’s chest. In quick economical movements, Peter is retrieving a relic.
Stepping closer, I stoop to pick up a slice of metal. It’s the death mask—a curve of hardened
liquid that covered Talus’s face, jagged along the edges where he sawed it away from his own skull. The features on the mask are calm, a beatific expression locked forever in contours of silver-colored metal.
Standing at Peter’s shoulder, I hand him the mask. Peter places it over the body’s ruined face, returning the corpse to some semblance of peace.
Peter holds up the relic that belonged to Talus, considering it. On its face is a fading symbol, I realize—a plinth. It is the same squat column that I saw on Peter’s relic. The two avtomat somehow have the same inscription—the same Word.
Talus was a monster, a murderer without remorse.
“What does that symbol mean?” I ask, my voice hollow.
Peter ignores my question, pocketing the relic. Leaning over, he scoops Talus up in both arms. Holding the limp body like a sleeping child, he lumbers toward the shadowed wall of crypts.
“Peter, I know his symbol is the same as yours,” I say.
The man pauses a few yards away, shoulders massive and sloped. He doesn’t turn to face me, just clings sadly to the body in his arms.
“We have the same symbol, but different masters,” he says.
“Tell me the truth,” I insist. “Why do you have the same Word as that monster?”
Peter’s voice is hoarse, drenched in sadness.
“Because he was my little brother.”
38
LONDON, 1758
Five thousand years. The black, broken stretch of lost memory reels on for longer than I ever imagined. My mind fails to contain it, balking and returning always to the girl.
Hypatia sits beside Elena, watching me carefully across a skyline of teacups and saucers and a teapot and a small clay dragon kept for good luck. The anima rests on the table between us like a poisonous spider. I don’t dare to touch the half-moon of metal again. My mind is buzzing from the thoughts it gave me before—a vision of death and loss.
This artifact has reappeared from a forgotten life, and it threatens to pull me away from the only life I know. Away from my sister. When I learned she was in danger, my priorities snapped into focus—Elena is all I have ever truly cared about. The undertow from this shard of evil metal cannot break that focus.
“What is the first thing?” Favorini asked in the candlelight.
When I answered him, translating a deep, nameless hunger into a Russian word: pravda—it was her face I watched across the room, her porcelain cheek writhing with candle flame. She is my lone beacon in a great darkness.
“Huangdi was betrayed to his death, his anima lost for ages,” says Hypatia. “Now he has been reunited with you, his sworn protector. We must act quickly. Leizu is close behind and her spies are legion. She very likely knows her enemy has surfaced, and she will destroy his relic to prevent his reincarnation.”
“We can’t stay,” says Elena. “We will leave together—”
“Flee? To where?” I ask.
“To the New World,” says Hypatia. “The colonies are suitably wild to provide a safe haven for the three of us, though it will not be easy to evade the Worm Mother.”
Now I understand. Elena has procured this artifact as a peace offering. Her relentless logic has found a way to bring me along. Too loyal to abandon me, she scoured the ends of the earth to find a trinket that could satisfy my Word.
This is how I lose her, I can’t help thinking. This is how she leaves me.
“Don’t you think Leizu’s agents will be watching the docks?” I ask.
“A risk we shall have to take,” responds Hypatia.
Mustering all my willpower, I force myself to wrap the anima back in its silk handkerchief. In an avalanche of teacups, I push the bundle back to Hypatia. I press my palms flat against the wooden table to stop them shaking.
“Get out,” I say quietly.
“Excuse me?” Hypatia asks. “I cannot believe you would shirk—”
“Get out,” I say louder, standing and jarring the table. The teacups roll and shiver together, sloshing tea across the linen. The fire gutters and jumps at the shift of air in the closed room.
“I do not know this Huangdi,” I say. “I do not remember him. I did not choose to protect him. I will have nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, Peter,” Elena mutters in anguish. She slips away from the table and runs from the room.
Hypatia is standing now, backpedaling, the bundle clasped tightly in her hands.
“During her research, Elena found that the Word on your master’s anima is divine light,” she says. “Meaning that our enemy carries the darkness of hell,” she continues, speaking urgently. “They were in balance—a Oneness—but Leizu shattered that. Now she suffers a broken Word, unsatisfied, and she seeks a great champion to oppose her. That’s you, Peter.”
My hands curl back into fists. Elena’s sharp clicking footsteps are fading into the abandoned, leaf-strewn hallways of the mansion. Hypatia tucks the anima under her elbow and puts her hands out to me, pleading.
“Pyotr. You are the first protector, since time beyond reckoning. Huangdi is your master.”
“Not anymore,” I say. “I lost my sister once, long ago in another life. Never again.”
“Leizu will come here,” says Hypatia. “She is drawn to you, Peter. Whether you take this anima or not, she will never stop hunting—”
Her eyes drop to where my fingers have closed over the hilt of my saber. I draw the weapon an inch out of its sheath. The blade gleams, a warm silver in the glow of candles and sunset through thick drapes.
Hypatia nods, a small salute.
“Then I shall take my leave,” she says, turning her back to me. “But know that you speak for yourself. You have no right to choose for others. Regardless of what you believe your purpose to be, or whom you think you serve.”
I follow the woman, stalking after her through the hallways and out into the darkening courtyard, stopping only at the gape-mouthed front door. I watch her figure retreat, gray riding jacket disappearing into evening mist at the periphery of the estate.
Hypatia never looks back.
The vast acres around our abandoned mansion are empty of people but full of beasts and insects. A last lick of weak sunlight wavers across the mossy water of our neglected fountain. I sit down on the front steps, knees rising to meet my elbows.
Alone, I listen to the geese honking as they fly over. Hear the animals in the encroaching woods as they chitter and bark at one another. The sun is extinguishing itself through clawed branches. The last of the evening light splinters through a latticework of limbs and the world fades to a dull gray.
Hours pass before I feel a small palm pressing on my shoulder. I put my hand over her cold fingers.
“I love you, Elena,” I say. “I will protect you.”
She says nothing.
“I told you it was too dangerous,” I say, and her hand leaves its perch. My shoulder feels empty.
She sits beside me on the steps and says nothing.
The silence between us lasts a long time and it terrifies me.
Side by side, we watch as the courtyard fills with mist creeping in from the forest. The abandoned crates lining the driveway tilt crazily in the gloom, like broken tombstones. Cloaked in freezing vapor, the long hours of the night march by us in a reverie. An infinity of stars have opened their cold eyes to us by the time she speaks.
“Peter?” Elena asks. “If you could let go of your Word, would you?”
I consider the question.
“There is truth in it…” I trail off. “I would not.”
“But the world isn’t so simple as you pretend. You have made yourself a slave to others. And the worst part…you’re a willing slave.”
“Are you not a slave to logicka?” I ask, turning to her. “Are you not dancing through this world like a clockwork ballerina?”
Elena blinks, seeming to see me for the first time. She leans against me, but I feel a black gulf expanding between us. Abruptly, she reaches her arms around my shoulders i
n an urgent hug.
Surprised by how grateful I am, I pull the girl onto my lap, sighing as her small arms tighten around my neck in the old familiar way. She is calm now, here in the empty night. Her perfume and the quiet flutter of her gear work are my sanctuary. I could almost pretend the old Elena is back, and we are playing at being vampir in the frozen streets of Moscow.
“You are right, Peter. We are avtomat,” she murmurs into my neck. “We live and die by clockwork. Like the stars on their tracks, we must yield to nature. We must make hard decisions and live by them.”
She pulls back and her face is a pale mask in the night.
“Do you know what logicka dictates?” she asks. “For decades, it has pushed me, whispered to me, willed me to do one thing.”
“What is that, my dear?”
Elena hugs me again, fiercely, her forehead pressed like a knuckle into my chest. When she speaks, her words are needles that shiver into my heart.
“To leave you behind, Peter. Forever.”
39
SEATTLE, PRESENT
Batuo’s laboratory seems sad and quiet without the jovial little man. Gruesome remnants of the fight are spread over the marble floor: broken limbs, pieces of the destroyed nurse robot, and ragged smears of liquefied metal.
Thankfully, the bodies of Batuo and Talus are gone. Peter carried them to the mausoleum wall, sliding open the rectangular crypts and laying them inside. Dozens of other avtomat must occupy the rest of the slots in that marble facade. All of them are sleeping, waiting for a new dawn.
Sitting on Batuo’s broad desk, I am considering my own relic, dangling it from the necklace chain and letting my eyes skim over its symbol—a teardrop with a circle trapped inside. Across the room, Peter methodically rifles through drawers, pawing through shelves and running his fingers over carved wood panels.
“You said you served a different master than your brother. Who?”
“An avtomat called Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor.”
“Where is he?”
“You wear his relic around your neck.”
And yet without his true body, this relic is just an oddly heavy necklace.