hostage, that they were one flesh. And only if she could break the bond with the stone…” He cut off abruptly and gave her a sly smile. “This all sounds like nonsense to you, doesn’t it?”
“No,” Mattie said. “Not at all. It makes perfect sense.”
“This is why I became a mechanic,” Sebastian said, and stopped smiling. “The alchemists… you just babble nonsense and pretend that it means something.”
“It does,” Mattie said. “How did they let you into the Lyceum? You… you’re not like them.”
“My mother pulled some favors,” he answered, frowning. When he got angry, he seemed to get bigger, and the stool under him looked ready to give up and crumble, abandoning its duty. “But of course, once they let me in, they watched me like a thief in a jewelry store. I could do no right. No matter what I proposed, they refused it, and then acted like one of them came up with that idea. And it’s just relentless.” He slapped his knee. “Every day, every day!” His impassioned speech brought color to his cheeks, and despite her preoccupation, Mattie noticed how attractive he looked.
“You are very beautiful,” she said.
He looked at her—she couldn’t quite comprehend his expression, but it reminded her of the time she first asked Loharri for her key. “Not an hour ago, I almost hit you,” he said, quietly and slowly. “If it hadn’t been for the gargoyles, I would’ve killed you; you’d be just a pile of springs and gears. Why do you talk like that?”
Mattie realized that she had said something wrong. “You didn’t kill me, though,” she said. “You’re not my enemy.”
He shook his head. “How did you come to be an alchemist, anyway? And how come the gargoyles chose you?”
“That’s what I wanted to be,” Mattie said. “You became a mechanic because you were raised by an alchemist; I became an alchemist because a mechanic made me.”
He smiled at that, showing small, uneven teeth. “Fair enough. What about the gargoyles? They seem protective of you.”
Mattie nodded. “Yes. But I don’t know why they chose me after your mother. Because we are both women? Because we are resented for what we are?”
“You got that right,” he muttered. “She told me that the alchemists were better with the foreigners than the mechanics, but not by much. They just take the trouble to hide it a little.”
“That’s something, isn’t it? I feel grateful to even be emancipated, let alone accepted into the society.”
Sebastian studied her for a while, as if considering how she fit into his view of the world. “Emancipated, eh? And how did you manage that?”
“I just asked my master to be an alchemist,” she said. “As I got better, he decided that making me clean his house was a waste, and he made me new hands and built another automaton for housework.”
“It must be nice to have someone do for you the work you loathe,” he said. There was a hint of disapproval in his voice.
“It was a mindless automaton,” Mattie said. “Whatever the case may be, when I asked to be emancipated, my master agreed and signed the papers. I only see him when I want to.”
“Congratulations,” Sebastian said. “Who is your master?”
“Loharri,” she said. “Do you know him?”
“A little,” Sebastian said. “He’s not quite as awful as the rest of them.”
“He can be pretty awful,” Mattie said. “He was the one who told me that you were exiled… but he didn’t tell me why, and neither did you.”
Sebastian laughed. “I only just met you,” he said. “Suffice it to say, I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Mattie did not think it sufficed at all, but just nodded her agreement. “Why are you still in the city then?”
He stood. “I still have business here,” he said. “Do me a favor, don’t tell anyone you saw me.”
Mattie shook her head. “I won’t. Before you go, promise you’ll tell me if you remember anything else about the gargoyles and your mother’s work.”
“Will do.” He stepped to the door but paused on the threshold. “Come and think of it, I remember something else. The gargoyles have no souls.”
“Everyone knows that,” Mattie said, disappointed.
“That’s what she said,” Sebastian answered with a careless shrug of his large shoulders, and left. His heavy footsteps rattled down the stairs.
Mattie started on her daily work, potions and salves the apothecary downstairs bought from her as often as she offered them, her movements smooth and habitual, honed by long repetitious hours in the same cramped space. A small window over the workbench offered a small but welcome glimpse of the early morning sky, pinking around the edges, the clouds gilded by the still-invisible sun. Mattie worried if Sebastian would make his way to the temple undetected and scolded herself—of course he would; he survived here just fine, without her knowing or worrying about him.
There was a cadence to the movements of her hands, a rhythm to the small shuffling steps she took as she moved back and forth along the bench, mixing herbs and powders, cutting the sheep’s eyes open and squeezing the clouded jelly smelling of mutton into the bowl. Mattie tasted the air—still good, but she would need to stop by the butcher’s soon. She let her thoughts drift, and they tumbled in her head lazily, in beat with the whirring of her insides. Memories wafted in and out of her mind, and she watched them like a detached observer.
When she was first made, she did not feel pain. She fell and broke her face, and Loharri made sure that she knew hurt. “It’s for your own protection,” he said. “Pain is good—it warns you that you are about to hurt yourself.”
A week later, she passed out on the floor. He took out her key and wound her, and she flinched away. Then, he made her feel pleasure. Being wound had been the only pleasure she knew.
Until now, she thought, until she became an alchemist. Her hands flew, and her mind drifted, and her heart beat in a steady happy rhythm.
Mattie left the house and headed down the street toward the river; she meant to go to the butcher’s eventually, but for now she decided to take a walk along the embankment, away from the paper factory toward the western district, where the trees smelled sweet and cast cool shadows, where large, soft leaves absorbed the noise of the traffic.
She walked through the shaded alleys, enjoying the peace and the silence that did not belong to her. She stared at the whitewashed fronts of the houses, at the groomed trees in front of them. That was the only thing she missed about living with Loharri—the quiet and self-satisfied demeanor of this neighborhood. She felt exiled for no reason.
As she entered the streets that led to the market, the noise grew—there was a clip-clopping of oxen hooves, scraping of lizard claws, soft hissing of the buggies, and a clang of metal from some indeterminate source.
“Out of the way!” She heard a voice from behind, and bolted to the curb. She turned, to see a mechanized contraption she hadn’t seen before—it belched fire and twin streams of steam as it crawled down the street. The contraption had several pairs of stubby piston legs that gripped the cobbles of the street; its jointed back bearing several chairs (empty for now) moved in a sinusoid curve as the thing slithered down the street. A lone mechanic presided over the front end of the contraption; he sat on a small shelf jutting out of the monster’s flat metal face, and moved two long jointed levers.
“What is it?” Mattie shouted over the roar and hiss of the mechanical beast as it passed her.
“It’s a caterpillar,” the mechanic shouted back. “It can carry ten people at once.”
“What if they are going to different places?” Mattie asked.
The mechanic did not grace her with an answer—the mechanics often ignored stupid questions, especially if they came from automatons and easterners—and steered the metal caterpillar down the street. Mattie had a feeling that soon enough more of them would crawl through the narrow streets, displacing pedestrians and buggies and spooking the lizards.
She realized that her feet, of their own volition, were taking her to Loharri’s house. It was only natural, she supposed—she passed this market so many times, up the slight incline of the ancient hill eroded almost to nothing, to the white house almost hidden by overgrown rose bushes. Loharri paid little mind to the plants now that Mattie, who had planted them, wasn’t there to take care of the succulent green growth that seemed to become more audacious with every passing year. Ten years since she first planted the roses, and now they were taking over,
