Lizzie peered at the squirming amphibian, which was nearly eight inches long and as thick as a man’s wrist.
“Hold it right there.”
Lizzie put her hand on the salamander’s slick skin as Will and Byram drew closer. In one quick motion, Makepiece brought a scalpel down on the creature’s thick tail, severing it. Will gave a strangled scream and stumbled back as the salamander’s tail snapped back and forth a few times.
“Now, now, nothing to worry about.” Makepiece held the salamander’s tail as it continued to writhe. “The tail is a decoy... In the wild, it would snap off in a predator’s jaws, giving Sally here a chance to get away.”
“So she’s going to be all right, Professor Makepiece?” Lizzie was trying to keep the poor creature from escaping without hurting it as it attempted to scrabble out of her grasp. Her heart was still pounding in her chest, but unlike Will, she knew she had to appear unaffected by Makepiece’s actions. Anything less, and they would probably kick her out of school.
“Oh, yes, she’s as right as rain. As a matter of fact,” Makepiece went on, “Sally here will regrow this appendage in a matter of days.”
“Will she really?” Byram limped forward, looking at the tail. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Oh, yes,” said Makepiece, returning the salamander to its cage. “And what’s even more remarkable, she can regrow a severed limb. Some of her relatives can even regrow hearts and spinal cords.”
“Incredible,” said Byram, for once without a trace of irony in his voice. “And so you are looking to understand why these creatures are capable of these feats while we are not?”
“But we are capable,” said Makepiece, his dark eyes glittering with excitement. “Up until the age of eleven, a child can regrow the tip of his finger, if the cut is clean enough. And the liver is capable of regeneration, as well.” There was a plaintive meow, and Makepiece bent down to pet a small black cat that was winding in and out of his trouser legs. “The question is, why do we lose this ability? Why can’t we regenerate lost limbs...weak lungs...the nerves of the spinal cord?” Makepiece picked up the cat, which began to purr. “I believe the answer lies in the electromagnetic charge of the affected area.”
“That sounds like my father’s research,” said Lizzie.
“Your father was working on the electromagnetic field generated by the living body. I am speaking of the vital spark of animal electricity that circulates within the body.”
“Wait...you knew my father?”
“Knew him? Why, we worked together, my dear. And we were friends.”
“You were?”
“Yes, he and I were both intrigued by the possibility of using electricity to stimulate cell regrowth, but then we had a bit of a falling-out. I’m afraid your father became concerned about the ethical considerations of reanimating corpses. He seemed to feel we should establish the legal status of Bio-Mechanicals before proceeding with the experiments.”
“He never spoke of it to me,” said Lizzie, biting her lip. Perhaps her father would not have approved of her coming to Ingold.
“Well, to be honest, I think we both mellowed a bit, as one does with age. Always meant to write your father about my more recent experiments...ah, but I suppose pride kept me from making the first move.” The cat jumped down from his arms, and Makepiece sighed. “That’s the thing about getting older. You think you have all the time in the world, and then one day you look up and you don’t have any more time at all.”
Byram caught Lizzie’s eye and made a hurrying along motion.
“Professor Makepiece,” she said, and then was distracted by the cat, which had jumped up on a high shelf, peered down into an open vat and started lapping up the glowing green liquid inside. She gave a little squeak of distress. “Sir, your cat...”
Will, looking pale, scooped the cat into his arms. “What is that? Will it hurt her?”
“Of course not.” Makepiece picked up a small vial and dipped it into the vat. “This,” he said proudly, “is ichor. Ichor and electricity—the two keys to reanimating the dead,” said Makepiece, putting the vial down and scowling at it as if it had personally disappointed him. “The problem is, the ichor degrades, and then the whole creatures just starts to break down, and you can keep injecting more ichor and giving more shocks, but it doesn’t really help. If we could trick the body into regenerating its cells...” Makepiece touched the gold locket inside his waistcoat pocket as if it were a talisman. He did not finish his sentence.
“Begging your pardon, Professor, but isn’t it a bit of a stretch from salamanders to humans?” Will stroked the cat’s head as he looked at the blackboard, where someone had drawn up a blueprint for a mechanical arm that looked both beautiful and terrifying. “After all, we’re a lot more complicated than lizards.”
“Amphibians, my boy. And when you break it down into a mathematical equation, the underlying principle remains the same.”
“If you say so, sir. But it strikes me that the essential spark of self is the soul, not the brain.”
“I didn’t know you believed in that kind of religious claptrap,” Byram said with a laugh.
“Don’t you believe in souls, Byram?” Lizzie wasn’t sure that she did, either, but she’d never heard anyone say so openly before.
“I believe that if there were such a thing as a soul, a scientist would have found some proof of it by now. What I’m interested in is what you said about limb regeneration.” He took a step closer to Makepiece, too absorbed to disguise his limp. “Have you attempted this on a human subject yet?”
Just as Makepiece was about to reply, Will made a choking noise. Lizzie turned to see that he was staring down at the cat in his arms with something like horror in his eyes. “The cat. I was rubbing her behind her ears and...are those electrodes coming out of her neck?”
“Yes,” said Makepiece, with obvious pride. “I discovered Aldini after she was run over by a carriage. Quite a lot of damage, but as you can see, she’s doing just fine now. You might say she’s on her tenth life.”
“So she’s a Bio-Mechanical cat?” Will dropped her onto the floor, where she promptly sat, licked her paw and commenced cleaning her face.
“I will never understand the antipathy some people have toward felines.” Makepiece scooped up Aldini. “Come on, girl, let’s get you some dinner.”
“Lizzie,” Will whispered, once Makepiece was out of earshot. “I hate to interrupt, but it is getting late. We should get back to the main building before study hall is over.”
“But I haven’t had a chance to show Professor Makepiece the magnetometer!”
Byram sighed. “Show it to him when he gets back, then, but hurry.”
She unwrapped the broken pieces and laid them on a table just as Makepiece reappeared from the back room, chewing on what appeared to be a piece of stale bread. “My condolences on your father’s passing, by the way. Meant to write you, but it slipped my mind. Very sad thing, but of course, he would insist on still seeing sick patients.” Pausing at the magnetometer, he stroked his beard. “What’s this?”
“It’s my father’s etheric magnetometer. I can fix it, but I just need some glass tubes, some wire and a hollow rubber tube.”
“Your father’s invention, you say? Interesting. I’ve never known him to work on such a small scale.”
Lizzie swallowed, wondering if he had guessed that it was she who had invented it. “He thought that the small size would make it easier to transport.”
“Did he now? How practical.” Makepiece looked at her. “Always thought your father could have used a few more pragmatic considerations in his work. Never did seem to consider how things would work in the real world.”
Lizzie, who had thought the same thing, felt it would be disloyal to agree. “I don’t suppose you’d consider letting me attempt a repair here?”
Makep
iece picked up a broken tube, examining it. “Go right ahead. I have all the materials you require.”
Lizzie let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Oh, thank you, sir! I’ve been quite anxious. I think Professor Moulsdale’s already considering my expulsion.”
Makepiece raised his eyebrows. “My dear girl, don’t worry about Moulsdale. I’ve already taken care of him and Grimbald.”
“You have?”
“Oh, yes, Grimbald’s a simple sort of man—he just didn’t want to admit a female to the school. Moulsdale’s the one for whispers and plots, always thinking everyone else is as devious as he is. He was concerned that you might share your father’s position on granting Bio-Mechanicals legal status and work behind the scenes to undermine us. But I swayed them. You are my student, you see.” He beamed at her.
Well, she thought, that certainly explained why Moulsdale tried to set her up to fail on her first day. “But...I thought we aren’t assigned schools until second year—”
“I let the paper pushers worry about those details,” Makepiece interrupted. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re part of the engineering school. Assuming you want to be?”
“Yes, absolutely! Thank you!”
In the distance, a bell began to toll.
“That’s it, we’re cooked,” Will said.
“Nonsense,” said Byram. “We’re all right if we make it back before last bell.” He moved toward the door. “Coming, Lizzie?”
She looked from Makepiece to her friends, torn.
“Go on with you, then,” said Makepiece, sensing her distress. “Come back here tomorrow right after breakfast and we’ll see what needs doing to your magnetometer.”
“We have rounds after breakfast,” Lizzie explained.
“Then come after that. Come whenever you like. I’m here all day. Bring me a roll, if you think of it. And perhaps a bit of cheese.”
In the last moment before she followed Byram and Will out the door, Lizzie looked over her shoulder. Makepiece seemed to have forgotten all about his visitors. He had taken out the gold locket and was looking at the pictures again. In the vat beside him, there was a ripple of bubbles in the green liquid around the arm.
“Come on, Lizzie, we have to hurry!”
“Wait,” she said, but Will was already tugging at her elbow, pulling her away, and she couldn’t say for certain whether she had really seen the fingers of the dismembered hand wriggling like the severed salamander tail.
9
Sometimes he thought he was back in prison. Or perhaps in the workhouse, which was worse. Whatever this place was, at least he wasn’t breaking stones here. In his more lucid moments, he thought he must be in hospital. Until, one day, a doctor brought him out of his bedchamber and into a larger, windowless room set with wooden school desks on one side, and rowing machines, stationary bicycles and free weights on the other. The room was oppressively hot, and the floor was warm underneath his bare feet, which meant there was probably a furnace below. The dry heat brought out the distinctive smell of chalk on a slate blackboard, undercut with the stale odor of masculine sweat and wood varnish. Someone had hung a single amateurish landscape painting of a ruined castle on one wall, in a rather futile attempt to make the room seem less like a dungeon.
“Look,” said a skinny young doctor with heavy-lidded eyes and an air of profound ennui. “Do this.” He lifted one of the smaller barbells in two hands and heaved it up to his chest. “I don’t even know why I bother,” the young man muttered to himself as he handed over the weight with a grunt. “Not one of you has the mental acuity of a walnut, and yet day after day I have to repeat the same...huh.” His mouth dropped open as he watched Victor carefully set the twenty-pound barbell back in its slot in the rack along the wall. The young doctor’s expression remained comically surprised as Victor selected a forty-pound weight and executed a set of ten bicep curls.
After that, Victor was brought there each morning for a regimen of daily physical exercises.
The physical training came easily to him. Within a week, he was shimmying up the rope to the ceiling while the doctor timing him smiled and shook his head in disbelief. None of the other patients could even manage to get halfway up the rope. The other patients were all big, hulking brutes with scarred faces, and their mouths hung open as they pedaled laboriously on the stationary bikes, their feet tangling in the pedals, or sat awkwardly on the rowing machines, unable to coordinate their arms and legs. As his strength continued to return, he began doing chin-ups and running up and down the stairs that led down to the furnace. He felt infinitely superior to his inept, dead-eyed companions, but it occasionally occurred to him that he might just be the star pupil at a lunatic asylum. Not much to boast about there.
Yet he did feel pride when the men in the white coats moved him over to the side of the room set up as a classroom and gave him a series of wood puzzles to assemble. He fit together the shapes so rapidly that a new white coat was brought in to observe. This one was older, a gaunt man with a long white beard and fierce eyebrows. After this man left, the children’s puzzles were replaced by more challenging games. Right now, he was working on a set of interlocking metal rings, which he was clearly expected to disentangle. Piece of cake, he thought as he manipulated the rings so that he could slide them free of each other. Just like jimmying a lock. He looked up at the doctor who was timing him with his pocket watch. Was the sawbones impressed? He ought to be. Victor had challenged himself by mainly using his left hand to work the puzzle.
His left hand. Victor stared down at the brass gauntlet that began just above the elbow and, fused with screws at the ulna and radius, terminated in a fingerless metal glove that ended just above the proximal interphalangeal joints. He tried to flex his fingers. They did not respond.
Why had he received a Bio-Mechanical graft? What had happened to his own arm? Those memories of prison...he had never been to prison. Perhaps he was thinking of some serialized story he had read in the paper? Victor looked over at the doctor and remembered that it was Henry, his old friend. He tried to speak his name, but the garbled sound that came out sounded like the bellow of a wounded beast.
Henry wheeled around, his eyes round behind his spectacles, and clutched his right arm to his chest. His hand was in a cast.
I did that, Victor thought. With my bad hand.
“I said do it now,” Henry was shouting at an orderly, and Victor felt something sharp jab him in the arm. “He needs to be recalibrated,” Henry said. “Take him up to the Galvanic Reanimator.”
Victor felt a chill of fear—he felt that he had seen bodies galvanized, but he could not seem to remember how or when—and then, abruptly, he felt nothing at all.
* * *
For a long time after that, Victor had only scattered moments of awareness. Waking up in the dark. An orderly helping him to a chamber pot, as though he were an invalid. Someone spooning gruel into his mouth. Sometimes he was shuffling in a long line of men. Sometimes he was running. It was difficult to tell what was a dream and what was not. He knew, though, that Henry dropped by from time to time, inspecting Victor from a safe distance, his hand still in a cast.
One night, after the orderly had nearly choked Victor by spooning down the gruel faster than Victor could swallow it, he dreamed that Henry arrived without a cast and sat on the edge of Victor’s bed as though they were still roommates.
“Funny old world,” he said, offering Victor a glass of Madeira. “Who would’ve guessed you would want to be a surgeon? One step above a butcher, really.”
“Just what my father believes,” said Victor, taking the glass. “But it’s not just the surgery. I like working with the engineering department. I like tinkering with things.”
“Well, here’s to tinkering,” said Henry, clinking his wine glass to Victor’s. They drank in companionable silence, and then Henry raised the bottle again. ?
??Top you up?”
Victor shook his head. “We’d best get to bed now, or we’ll never get to the lecture on time tomorrow.”
“Killjoy.” Henry went over to his own bed. There was a rustle of sheets, the sound of shoes dropping to the floor, and then a massive belch.
“Scalawag.”
“Puritan.”
“I’m turning out the light, Henry.” He turned the knob on the lamp, casting the room into darkness.
“Henry?”
Victor listened for the sound of his friend’s familiar snoring, but he was alone.
Sometimes his dreams felt more real than his waking life.
* * *
At some point, Victor became aware that he was being drugged. At least, that was Victor’s working hypothesis, but he needed to test it. It could be sheer exhaustion that was keeping his thoughts vague and muddled. Now that they were allowing him out for training, Victor realized how weak he had become, and the thin workhouse gruel they served him for breakfast, lunch and dinner left him perpetually light-headed from hunger, and ravenous.
On the other hand, thought Victor, perhaps it was simply malnutrition that was robbing him of his ability to concentrate. In the past, he had never been terribly fussed about what food he put in his mouth, but now he found himself fantasizing about favorite meals: rare roast beef garlanded by crispy potatoes with gooseberry preserve, and a bit of bread to soak up the drippings, a rasher of bacon, a shepherd’s pie, even a slice of sharp cheese and a sour pickle.
Despite the narrow cot, too short for his six-foot-three frame, he fell straight to sleep each night as though plummeting down a dark well.
One night, trying to fight unconsciousness, Victor remembered that there was a children’s book that began with a girl falling down a well or a hole of some sort. It had been an odd and charming book, with talking rabbits and mad tea parties. He had read it to Will on his last night in the nursery, right before he’d been sent away to school. How Will had carried on the next day, wailing that he would never hear the end of the story now.