Of Metal and Wishes

  Bo’s hand slips into mine, and he’s shaking a little. He tugs me farther into the room, where I see a carved wooden chair and the most amazing bed I’ve ever beheld, the headboard intricately fashioned in a spiderweb of metal, the mattress fat and soft looking, and the whole thing is enclosed in gauzy silken fabric.

  I look back at him, confused, my heart thrumming against my ribs. “Is this your bedroom?”

  He smiles. “No, Wen. It’s yours.”

  I FEEL LIKE I’VE SWALLOWED a metal spider. The outside of me is still, quiet, smooth. The inside of me is being shredded. Because I see the smile on his face, how happy he is, how proud of himself, and I know he’s serious. He expects me to stay here with him. He’s been planning it. He’s prepared this place for me.

  I put my hand on my stomach because that metal spider is going to eat right through me and let my screams come pouring out. “I can’t stay here, Bo.”

  He tilts his head to the side. “You have to. You can’t go back up there.”

  “I need to.”

  He shakes his head. “Then Mugo would just . . . no, I’m sorry. I won’t allow that.” He sees the tears in my eyes and reaches out to touch my face. I force myself not to flinch, because I know that would upset him. “Are you worried about Guiren? Because he can come visit you!”

  He says it like he’s offering me a special gift.

  “No, that’s not enough,” I whisper. The metal walls are creeping closer, I swear, they are caving in on me. “I belong up there.”

  He takes my hand and drags me past other metal chambers, to the one at the very front, nearest the steps. He pulls me into the room, which is wide and bright and . . . appears to be the place where every single pipe in the entire Gochan One factory complex leads. There are hundreds of them descending from the ceiling and along the walls, and they converge along the back of the space, ending in open spouts, all lined up, hundreds of hungry, gaping little mouths.

  Bo points at them. “You can see most of the factory from here. What are you missing so much? What do you want to see so badly?”

  It’s not what. It’s who. But I won’t say his name out loud. I’m not certain how I know this. Maybe it’s instinct, like how a mouse knows to freeze when it senses a predator approaching.

  I do not want Bo to know how much Melik means to me.

  He yanks me forward, his metal arm swinging up to tap one of the pipes. “Mugo’s office? Look! Will you miss this so very much?”

  I put my eye to the opening of the pipe and gasp. It’s all right there, slightly distorted, but there. Mugo’s office. Or what’s left of it. My view must be from the vent high above my desk. Shattered glass glitters on every surface. My typewriter lies in pieces on the floor, next to my overturned desk chair. Mugo’s balding head glides directly under my vantage point, and I jerk back.

  Bo pulls me over to another pipe. “What about this one? The cafeteria? Are your friends in there? The one who lifted your skirt? The one who called you stupid?” Bo’s voice is growing sharper, like a blade on a whetting stone.

  I peer into the mouth of the pipe and can barely make sense of what I see. The tables do not hold full plates of food. They hold bodies. Bleeding. Burned. Writhing, flailing, crying. My father is scampering up and down these rows, tending to the wounded.

  The men who are suffering because Bo couldn’t stand to watch Mugo touch me. Saliva fills my mouth; I am going to be sick. I stumble back, sucking deep breaths of the dank air, thinking of bells and citron and crab apples and embroidered roses and anything, anything but this. Bo appears shocked at my reaction and peers into the pipe himself.

  “Oh,” he says. “I guess the clinic is pretty small. Guiren was smart to tend to them there.”

  I stare at him as he makes his cold assessment. He seems completely disconnected from the fact that he did this. He hurt these men. I swallow the spit that has gathered in my mouth. I shake off the cold, ghostly hand gripping my throat.

  “Show me something else,” I say, because I want to know what’s going on up there. I want to know whether Melik got out. I didn’t see him among the wounded, but what if he isn’t wounded? What if he’s dead? No. He was behind me. Right behind me.

  “Here’s the area outside the cafeteria,” Bo says, bending over to look into another pipe. He frowns and curses under his breath.

  “What is it?”

  “I was hoping they’d assume you were dead.”

  My heart beats double time. “Someone’s looking for me.”

  “Yes. I think so. They have no idea what they’re about to step into.”

  I rush over. “Can I look? Please?” He moves over and I peek in. I had no idea I could feel both elated and terrified at the same time, but here it is. Melik, uninjured except for the blood smeared at his left temple, is standing with a group of Noor and a few older Itanyai workers at the edge of the open area outside the cafeteria. He’s right by the turn to the administrative hallway, and as he talks to all of them, he’s pointing down the hall to the area where I stumbled out of Mugo’s office. There is fire in his eyes as he argues with Hazzi about something. He gestures across to the dark hallway where I first chased Bo, and several Noor head for it as Hazzi calls after them. As he does, Melik and a few others disappear down the administrative hallway.

  It could be nothing. It’s impossible to tell what they’re actually doing. But when I turn around and look at Bo’s face, it’s like his inhuman, machine half has taken over, like it’s driven its screws and cogs and springs straight into his brain. The warmth of the past hour is absent from his expression, and now there’s only ice. “He’s looking for you,” he says quietly. “The red one. The Noor.”

  My hands fist in my skirts.

  Bo’s metal fingers close over one of the pipes. “He must have seen me grab you.” He laughs, this jittery giggle that freezes my insides. “This is about to get messy.”

  The Noor haven’t heard the stories—or maybe Hazzi tried to tell them and they didn’t listen or believe. They don’t know what awaits them if they journey below the factory.

  “Bo, you have to let me go. Now. Please.” The metal spider has eaten all the way through me now, and my panic is unfurling, red and raw.

  I dart for the door, but he blocks it with his body and looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Because of them? They’ve been cruel to you, Wen! They’re about to get what they deserve, if you ask me.”

  He seems genuinely baffled, but that’s because he’s seen only the bad parts. He hasn’t seen the Noor the way I have. So I tell him, all about how I cared for them, how they cared for one another, how they shamed me with their decency and their dignity. I am very careful not to mention Melik specifically.

  Bo shakes his head, unconvinced, casual, like dozens of men are not about to die at his hands. I thought he knew so much about me, but now I see he knows nothing at all, if he thinks I’ll be able to live with this. I glare at Bo, and now mine are the dead black eyes. My expression is metal. Impenetrable. Cold.

  “If you keep me here against my will, you are just like Mugo.”

  His mouth drops open. “What? I am nothing like Mugo! I’m protecting you from him!”

  “Mugo wants to control me. He wants to own me. He doesn’t care what I want, only what he wants. And that is what you’re doing right now.” My voice is steady. I do not look away from his face.

  “You’re wrong.” His voice is not so steady. He will not meet my gaze.

  “Bo,” I say, moving toward him. “You can do amazing things. You have saved me more than once. But if you keep me here, you’ve rescued me from one cage only to imprison me in another.”

  He slumps, like my words weigh a thousand pounds. “But . . . I thought you’d want to stay with me.” He blinks quickly. “I thought you might . . .” A tear slides from his walnut brown, human eye, and I am once again reminded how alo
ne he has been, how much he must crave warmth and the touch of another person.

  I want to say I’m sorry. I really don’t want to hurt him. But I mean every word I’ve just said. “Let me go, and I’ll come back and visit you. We need to go now, though, so the men looking for me don’t die before they find me.”

  “They’re not important,” he says in a raspy voice.

  “They’re trying to do exactly what you were doing, Bo—they’re trying to save me. If you care about me, you should honor that, not punish it.”

  “But—”

  I stamp my foot. “If a single one of them dies,” I say, my voice echoing off metal walls, “I will never forgive myself. Or you. Did my father tell you how stubborn I am?”

  Finally he looks me in the eye, like he’s trying to understand, like I am a problem to solve. “You’ll come to see me again if I let you go now?”

  “Only if you protect the men who are looking for me.”

  Bo searches my expression for a few long moments, but then he lunges for the pipe and looks in again. “They’re already headed for the stairs.” He grabs my hand in his metal one, grinding the stalks of my finger bones together in his punishing grip. I don’t cry out, because I’m too filled with relief and fear to complain. I follow him out of the room and up the stone stairs, hoping we’re not too late.

  As the door at the top of the stairs slides open, Bo turns to me. “Follow me exactly. Step only where I step, and do everything I say.” His expression is tight with worry. “We’re going to follow the route to the cafeteria.”

  Melik was in the other group, the one headed toward the administrative hallway.

  When Bo sees the look on my face, he grimaces. “If the red Noor saw you disappear, he’ll be looking where it happened, right by Jipu’s office. But it will take them much longer to find their way below because that entrance is hidden.”

  Satisfied that Melik might not find his way to danger before I reach the factory floor, I move to follow Bo, and he frowns. I wonder if it’s because my selfish thoughts of Melik are written all over my face. For a second I’m scared Bo will change his mind, but he simply reminds me again to match his steps and strides forward. It’s a determined, intricate dance through the metal hallway, and then a race along the long, narrow corridor, past a few rat carcasses and piles of bloody metal shavings, over trip wires, inching around odd protrusions in the wall that will trigger Bo-only-knows-what kind of terrors. He is muttering to himself about circuits and kill switches.

  We don’t go down the hallway where the enormous, sharp-legged spider waits to fall upon the first poor soul who breaks the wire beneath its web. Instead we take a series of turns and go up a flight of stairs. Bo makes me skip every third one. The light is so dim, only the glow of the scant yellow emergency lanterns, but I see those spiders everywhere I look. The dull black glint of an eye, or the faint silver gleam of a leg, or the smooth, bulbous swell of a belly. Between coils of pipes, nested in snarls of wires, peeking from holes in the cinder block, crouching in the air vents. I could be wrong. It could be my imagination. But the way Bo is weaving through this maze beneath the factory, I think it’s real, and I begin to suspect he’s as scared of them as I am, which is the most frightening thought of all.

  “I can hear them, up ahead,” he finally says. I hear nothing, but he knows the gurgles and whispers of this factory much better than I do. “If they go much farther, I won’t be able to save them.”

  It might be because I’m picturing Melik snapping a trip wire, the spiders descending on his shoulders and crawling up his legs, doing damage I’d never be able to repair. It might be because Bo is remembering my promise to visit him only if he protects the search party. He lets go of my hand and begins to run, and I forget to match his steps. I’m not sure exactly what my mistake is. Maybe my foot lands on the wrong spot. Maybe I don’t hold my skirts high enough. Maybe I brush the wrong place on the wall with my elbows.

  But when I hear the whirring of tiny gears and the click of metal feet, I know I’ve awakened the spiders.

  The first one, the size of a fat spring melon, pops out from under a pipe running along the wall. It lands on the cement floor in front of me, its dead black eyes fixed on my skirts. “Bo?” I call, just a squeak of terror.

  He whirls around. “Back up, back up, back up,” he chants, running toward me. “Now!”

  I leap back as another spider drops from the ceiling and lands right where I was standing. I press myself against the wall to get away from it, but my skirts brush its face, and that is all it needs to know it has found its prey.

  With an echoing click, it leaps onto my skirt, sinking its fangs into the layers of wool and lace over my knees. My scream unfolds in that narrow corridor, tearing at the silence. I shake my skirts, desperately trying to jar the thing loose, but its sharp legs are buried in the folds of my dress, and it is slashing its way through, crawling up to my waist.

  Bo charges up the corridor and kicks the spring-melon spider to the side. It crashes into the wall and bounces off, its fangs rising and falling like a butcher’s cleaver. It scrabbles around in a circle because several of its legs are hanging limp from its body. It still seems dangerous, but Bo ignores it because his eyes are on the spider on my dress. “Don’t move,” he barks.

  There’s so much noise here. High-pitched gasps; heavy, dizzying thuds; roaring and ringing in my ears. The sounds of my body fighting death. But something else, too. Someone is calling my name. I don’t recognize the voice, but I’m sure I hear it, distant and faint.

  Bo’s expression is grim as he buries his machine hand in my skirts and wrenches the squirming metal creature away from me. Parts of my dress are hanging from its fangs. “I’m sorry,” Bo whispers.

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s not talking to me.

  He holds the thing with his gleaming metal fingers. The spider has no chance—its legs and fangs meet nothing but open air as it tries to do what Bo made it to do. With sorrow in his eyes, Bo reaches with his flesh-and-bone fingers, pressing a spot on the spider’s back. The spider stops moving for a split second and then begins to vibrate like the machines on the factory floor. At first I think it’s purring, and I can’t understand why Bo looks so stricken.

  Then the spider just . . . disintegrates.

  I watch the glittering cloud of metal shavings fall to the floor, and it’s like an icy finger stroking along my spine. This is Bo’s calling card. Spread along the floors of the factory. In little piles along the walls of my home—next to my sleeping pallet. In Mugo’s office after his shelves collapsed. And on the killing floor, falling from the hook system right after Melik unjammed it. The metal shavings aren’t coming from Gochan Two, blown through our vents from their factory. They’re coming from right here in Gochan One. They’re what’s left after a spider has done its job and run its course.

  Bo hits the kill switch on the other spider before it finds its way to my skirts. He has a hard time, because even though it is broken, this one is bigger and seems more determined to rip us apart. It is nothing when caught in the grip of Bo’s mechanical arm, though. It reminds me of the machinery of Gochan Two, the machines that make the machines. That’s what Bo is, and this is how he controls his vicious creations.

  He looks down at his fingers, shimmering with delicate metal scales, all that’s left of this creature he built with his own hands. “I had to have a way to prevent them from being detected,” he says. “They fall apart on their own once they complete their job. The switch just makes it happen immediately.”

  “You tried to kill Melik.” My voice is as cold as the rest of me.

  His metal fingers click together as his flesh hand brushes the remains of the spider away. “He hurt you. He insulted you. I could see the pain on your face.”

  I stare at him. “Is that why?”

  He turns his machine side toward me. “He doesn’t de
serve you. He can’t have you.” He says it petulantly, like I’m a toy he doesn’t want to share.

  I keep my words level and calm. “Promise me you won’t hurt him again. If you care for me, you have to promise.”

  He wipes something from his human cheek. A shaving of metal, maybe, or possibly a tear. Whatever it is, he won’t let me see. “I promise I will not hurt him. You promise you will come to see me again.”

  He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it. “I waited so long,” he says. “And then I ruined it, didn’t I?”

  I squeeze his fingers. “Help me now, all right? Help me now.”

  He nods. “Will you come? Will you promise?”

  Some of the tension leaks from me. “I promise.”

  He raises his head and looks down the hall that will take us to the stairs, to the factory floor, to my life, to—

  A piercing cry of terror echoing down the corridor.

  BO CLUTCHES MY HAND and we race forward together. I am so desperate to reach the person whose cries go on and on that Bo has to push me behind him to keep me from blundering ahead. He leaps over a trip wire and lifts me over as well, and then we’re around a corner where the power’s been cut and the darkness is thick around us. I glance over at Bo to see that his black eye is glowing now, a light in the darkness. His steps are sure as he charges toward the struggling mound halfway down the corridor. It’s a man. He’s on the floor up ahead, all in a heap.

  From a few hallways away several others call this man’s name, Ugur or something like that, and their desperation matches his. He calls back to them, speaking Noor in short, panicked bursts.