He really is handsome, now that he’s been put back together.
“I’ve got to get one of these,” I say.
“It is easier if you founded a bank,” he responds. “Preferably, at least two hundred years ago.”
With a half smile, I watch a terrain of fluffy clouds roll past below. My entire body is aching, but after a meal and a shower and some aspirin and coffee…I’m feeling almost like a human being again.
“So you’re what, a secret billionaire?” I ask.
Peter shrugs.
“What do you spend it on?”
“Mostly research and development. New technology. Some transportation when necessary,” he says, gesturing to the cabin.
I wince and shake my head.
“Only progress matters,” he adds.
“You’re trying to understand your own anima,” I say. “To find a way to replenish your energy?”
He nods.
It’s fascinating to me that these creature comforts are wasted on Peter. All the money in the world doesn’t matter to him—not in the way it might to a person. Our civilization has nothing he considers worth buying. Not yet, anyway.
Peter is waiting for humankind to catch up, and has been for centuries.
“Still seems like a waste.” I sigh, rubbing my toes in the carpet.
“Not a waste. Without technological progress, the avtomat will certainly die. We are survivors of a cataclysm that has passed out of all memory. And we cannot afford another fall of civilization—our power will not last until humankind rises again.”
“So you think we’ll save you? We short-lived ?”
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe without even knowing it. Watch how many of your billionaires spend their money on spaceflight, materials science, artificial intelligence, transportation, nanotechnology, brain research. It is not a coincidence. The avtomat have resources, and we need basic science. We need to understand ourselves before the last of us runs out of power. Because then there will be no one else to start a new age.”
“You’re parasites then,” I say, half joking. “Preying on our big brains.”
Peter considers.
“In a way,” he says. “But I do not think the avtomat would survive without human beings. I do not know that there would be a reason to. We are made in your image, June. There is a truth in that.”
“How far back do you remember?”
“I last woke in the early seventeen hundreds,” he says. “Russia.”
I grip the armrest tighter, mind reeling. Peter’s strange existence feels like a bridge to another world. A secret window to the past.
“Peter the Great?” I venture.
“I was at his side when he passed,” responds Peter, staring out the window. “And then I was exiled. Sent wandering on a path that led here.”
The awe I felt as a kid in my grandfather’s workshop is nothing compared to this. I’m sitting across from a living legend. This man-shaped artifact has borne witness to an incredible swathe of forgotten history.
“You’re even older than that, Peter. Some of the components inside your frame. There are brass gears that look Greek, like something from the Antikythera machine. And deeper inside, I saw ceramic plates—pottery, really—with Chinese markings. The same for Batuo.”
Peter is watching me now, interested.
“I do not know my true age,” he says. “I mean, I would not know how to date those things. I have never thought of it.”
“You never looked at yourself ?” I ask.
“Not with your eyes.”
“Peter,” I say. “That kind of pottery…in China alone it could go back twenty thousand years. You couldn’t be that old. Right?”
“Our anima are impossible to fathom,” says Peter. “The relics are too complex. Nearly indestructible. Losing them disturbs our memories, but…perhaps we were made that way on purpose, to forget. Or perhaps we have been marooned from our own time for too long, and we are falling apart.”
“You don’t even know where you’re from.”
“Every decade for the last hundred years, at risk of death, I have paid the great minds of the era to examine and explain an avtomat relic. None could even come close. We came striding out of the past, yet our bones are made of the future.”
Peter turns back to the window, the light cutting his face in half again.
“Whoever made us did so before the current era of written history. Whatever they made us for, the reason for our anima, I do not know for certain. And as the years gather, I worry that our time may have come and gone.”
I can’t help it; I sit up and grab his hand. “Peter, you’re walking proof that great things are waiting for us. Seeing you, the way you move, the way you think…you’re an example of what people have achieved, and what we could achieve again.”
Peter suppresses a smile, taking his hand away. “If I had arrived ten minutes later, you would have met only Talus. And in that case, I wonder if you would still believe what you just said. Or been alive to believe it.”
I sit back in the plush seat. A cocktail has appeared on my armrest and I didn’t notice. Taking the crystalline flute by the stem, I twist it back and forth in my fingers, spraying rainbow shards of light and dark across the cabin.
“So, who is Elena?” I ask.
“An old friend,” sighs Peter.
“Why does she know where the emperor is?”
“Because she is always learning. It is her nature.”
“Then why haven’t you already talked to her?”
Peter smiles at me, the corners of his lips catching shadows.
“Because the last time we spoke, she promised to kill me if I ever returned.”
42
LONDON, 1758
I wait for a moment in the darkness at the end of a forbidding hallway. My soaking-wet hood is pulled low over my eyes, a puddle pooling on the rough timber floor around my boots. The leather on the back of my hands is dark, my body seeping river water from every seam, my riding cloak muddy. I try to walk softly, but each footstep rumbles and creaks. Luckily, the noise of my advance is lost under soft, terrible sounds coming from behind closed doors that line the hall.
Small moans and cries. Rough laughter. The scraping of beds against the floor. An occasional human whimper of pain.
The greasy walls and stained floors of this brothel are foul. The long hallway leans out of square, wrong feeling, nauseating. It feels as if a sickness permeates this decrepit building, almost visible in the air, roiling down this cramped corridor like a tendril of oil spreading through drinking water.
Avoiding the front door and its red lantern, I smashed in through a window around the back. The empty stairwell took me to the second floor and this hall. Elena was carried in here minutes ago.
Stopping, I listen for her voice.
The girl believes she no longer needs my protection, but the sight of her futile grip on Hypatia’s devastated body flashes in my mind. Elena was hurt to the quick. My fear of losing her—to Hypatia, to Leizu, or to these monsters—is warming to a hot rage.
The urge to protect her is irresistible. So I give myself to it.
I remember a round copper table in a field tent. A leather map, weighted at the corners, marked with battle lines and bits of colored stone. She studies the plot, a black-haired child, eyes calculating. And around her, in the shadows, warriors loom. We watch her, awaiting orders.
I shake my head to clear it.
The hallway remains empty, lit every few doorways with whale-oil lamps that burn putrid and black. I raise a hand and feel the air on the damp skin of my fingers. My sister is nearby.
The first door I push against is barred from the inside. Vile noises are coming from behind it. Pushing harder, I hear rotten wood splintering. It snaps quietly, the bar thunking to the floor, and I ease the door fully open.
A girl on a stained mattress. A grown man on top. This place is worse than I ever imagined.
Not Elena.
> In one lunging step I am upon him, my elbow sliding under the man’s chin. My cheek buried in his curly, flea-infested hair, I stand up and squeeze my bicep until I feel his spine separate from his skull. I drop the warm corpse to the floor while on the bed, a little girl cowers.
A shriek reverberates from down the hall—it is a man’s shout, high-pitched and surprised and cut off almost immediately.
I throw off my hood and dash down the corridor. The door bursts open before I can touch it and a man stumbles out. His filthy hands are wrapped around his own neck, red-black rivulets of blood streaming over his fingers. He opens his mouth to speak and cannot. His teeth are knocked out and broken, throat slit.
I know the small fists that did this.
Up and down the corridor, doors are slamming open. Drunk faces, twisted, confused, and angry. Hair mussed, sweat rolling from soiled creases in their faces, a few half-dressed men are pulling up their trousers, stumbling, craning their necks.
On his knees, the bleeding man tugs at my cloak, tries to mouth the word help.
I push him roughly against the wall and he falls, sliding with his back pressed against the timber. His blood is pooling like spilled ink.
“Oy,” calls a man. “What’s happened to him?”
“Ate a blade,” I say, shrugging.
I casually step over the body and into the narrow room, closing and barring the door behind me.
“I knew you’d come,” says a small voice.
Elena stands on the straw mattress of a sagging bed. Her cloak is wet and singed black, her wig hanging crooked. She is clearly not a human being. Her leather face is washed clean of pigment, dark as alligator skin. Through a tear in her shoulder I can see mechanisms—brass struts and silver-coiled tendons.
Boots shuffle outside the door, concerned voices muffled.
“Everyone stay in your rooms,” shouts a rough voice.
Slam. The door vibrates against my back as someone shoves against it.
“Hey! Come on out,” calls an unconvincing voice.
Slam.
The door rocks on its hinges.
“Elena, there are too many. Cover yourself. We will run.”
“No,” she says, defiant. “We’re not running. Not again.”
Slam.
The girl is taking too long.
“Trust me,” I say, leaning over, intending to swoop her up and carry her out. My arms close on air and I stumble. The hard pressure of a stiletto presses against my throat.
“No,” she says. “You will trust me. I have thought of a use for this place—a way that I can blend in…forever.”
Slam. The wooden door is splintering.
Brushing past me, Elena puts a palm flat on the door. Her lips move as she counts. She is timing the hits.
Slam.
Three, two, one…
Elena yanks the door open and a man plows into the room, off balance. In one quick movement she sticks the stiletto in and out of his lower spine. The momentum of his body dissipates in a heap over the ragged bed. What’s happened registers on the face of the dead fellow’s friend and he lets out a surprised yelp.
“They’re robbing him!” he shouts, pointing. “He’s been stabbed!”
The hallway is a crowd of jostling elbows and fists. I put a hand on Elena’s shoulder and she shrugs it off, stepping right out the open door and into the hallway, her eyes aimed at the floor, standing hunch shouldered, surrounded by cretins.
A dozen grimy faces stare down at Elena in foul-smelling lamplight. Wide eyes and sweat-stained armpits. Grubby hands clutching improvised weapons snatched off floors. A few, the ones in charge of maintaining order, are even wearing light armor.
“Put down those blades, little girl,” says one.
Elena slowly straightens, raising her horrific face to them, a stiletto in each hand. The men collectively take a step back. Someone whimpers.
“By the devil.”
“Her skin ain’t right,” says another.
Demon come the whispers. Witch.
“Let’s begin,” Elena says, and she darts between a pair of legs. The men fall upon her, shouting, swinging weapons and fists.
I draw my khanjali—a simple blade about the length of my forearm. Pushing into the hallway, I plunge my blade into the nearest heart. With my other hand, I lift a man by his throat and pin him against the wall, listening to his glottal struggling. A dagger slips into my side over the hip and something heavy glances off the side of my head and I choose not to react.
Someone shrieks.
Jackknifing my arm, I ignore the injuries and slice into the crowd of perspiring meat that is compressed into the corridor. The neck in my hand snaps. Already, the whoremongers are trying to escape, screaming, squealing like slaughtered pigs, turning and slipping on their own blood, holding their guts in with dirty fingers.
A small black demon flits between them like a lethal toy.
We advance down the hall, following the survivors toward the main stairs. Around us, vermin-infested corners are strewn with broken-necked, mutilated corpses. Elena is dashing ahead, crawling around and between the legs of panicked men toward the end of the hallway. There, she slams shut the door at the top of the stairs, trapping the last few men between us. Ignoring pleas for mercy, Elena and I meet in a grisly dance.
Behind us, a few brave girls are emerging from their rooms. One of them quietly and efficiently slits the throats of fallen men with a scavenged knife. Crouched on scabbed knees, she works emotionlessly, moving from one to the next.
In seconds, the men are dispatched, sprawled grotesquely up and down the hall, collapsed on one another in heaps.
It is done.
Meanwhile, the hallway is filling with girls and young women. Dirty faces and torn gowns. They watch us with cautious glances. The only way out of this hall of horrors is past one of us.
Elena presses an ear against the closed door. After a moment, she yanks it open and the madam of the brothel stumbles out, falling to her knees, breasts spilling from her elaborate corset. She wears stockings, her knees instantly stained red as she crawls over glistening carnage. At the sight of it, her eyes fly open, jaw working soundlessly until she begins to keen.
“Please!” she shouts. “Please!”
Elena puts a hand firmly on the madam’s shoulder and the woman stops shouting, swallowing sobs instead. My sister watches the woman with a blank face, inhuman, skin stained with crimson drops of blood under a wig of disheveled black hair. She is emotionless as she turns to face the hallway.
Women and girls of the brothel stand and crouch, shivering, looking upon Elena’s uncanny countenance with faces frozen in fear or fascination. The madam cowers, locks of her hair spiraling away in corkscrews, hands wavering over her face.
Elena motions to the stairwell door, letting it creak slowly open. When she speaks, I hear her jaw clicking with each word.
“If you are a grown woman, leave,” she says.
Knees dipping, a rush of women grab clothes and personal effects, tiptoeing over the carnage in a controlled scramble to escape, pushing cautiously past Elena and thumping down the stairwell.
Now a hallway full of girls remain, trembling, eyes wide.
“The rest of you go back to your rooms,” Elena says, in a low voice. “This is no longer a brothel. School begins tomorrow.”
43
LONDON, PRESENT
“Just pretend you are my wife,” says Peter, one arm wrapped around the small of my back. “Follow my lead.”
“Won’t they judge me for being American?” I ask.
“Not if you are as rich as the documents I sent indicate.”
I stiffen for an instant and then allow him to usher me forward. Aside from being a fighter, Peter must also be an incredible actor. It’s the only way he could have managed to blend in with human beings for this long.
I smooth my dress for the hundredth time, the weight of a pearl bracelet tugging at my wrist. Batuo’s tool roll is stu
ffed into a sparkling clutch purse, tucked under my sweating armpit.
Peter and I have just had the most efficient shopping spree imaginable.
A limousine driver, unseen behind a tinted divider window, picked us up at a private airport and drove us straight into London. The car took an unmarked road leading directly beneath Harrods department store. Through a plain door in a blank concrete wall, we entered a wonderland of smiling salespeople.
After five minutes, I realized we were the only customers.
Careening between departments, it finally began to sink in that a race of automatons has been living alongside us for centuries—all the while creating a new, unimaginable level of wealth. With a quick phone call, Peter requested the luxurious department store be emptied just so we could shop in total privacy.
How utterly sickening. And what guilty fun.
I began to understand why the store had complied when Peter led us to the jewelry boutique. Inside, he began picking out pieces with disinterested efficiency. Necklace, earrings, rings—a blur of attendants in orbit around us, bearing velvet cushions loaded with fat, glittering gems embedded in precious metals. Each new piece reminded me of an exotic, dead insect displayed on a pushpin.
Meanwhile, Peter seemed to be speaking in code with the attendants.
“Kashmir?” he asked, peering down at a teardrop sapphire. The attendant nodded and Peter motioned for them to wrap it up.
“These have been in style since Shakespeare was playing the Globe,” Peter said, examining a gem-encrusted brooch in the shape of a curved feather.
He meant it literally.
After forty-five minutes, Peter and I were in new clothes, our hair hastily styled and both of us languishing under a cloud of perfume. An ungodly amount of money had changed hands and my collarbones were chafing under a diamond necklace that came with its own name and a handwritten list of previous owners.
The jewelry is pretty, but it gives me satisfaction to think that the most valuable piece is still Huangdi’s relic—hidden in the clutch purse, pinned tight under my arm.