He smiled. “Oh, Mattie. I don’t have anything new for you, but maybe one of the prototypes will work for now.”
“Prototypes?”
“You don’t think I’d settle for a design without trying others, do you? Come on, I’ll show you.”
“Eat,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Afraid of being home all by yourself?”
“No.” Afraid of being home with someone else, she thought, but never said it out loud. “Eat your sandwich.”
He obeyed, still smiling. “You don’t hate me as much as you make out, do you, Mattie?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she said. “And I never said I hated you.”
“You make a fairly good impression. No words needed, dear girl, and you know full well that I’m not entirely dim. Surely, you expected me to pick up on some of your mannerisms.”
“I just don’t want you touching me,” she said. “And I want my key.”
“I left it to you in my will,” he said. “You won’t kill me though, will you?”
“I’ll consider it,” she said.
He didn’t think her dangerous—if he did, he wouldn’t joke about it and pretend that her anger was indeed a concern to him. He occasionally enjoyed making a show out of capitulating to her, but only because they both knew he held more power. Not any more, Mattie thought. I hope that Iolanda is all right. She didn’t mind feeling selfish just this once—of course, her concern for Iolanda was more about Iolanda and Niobe than it was about the blood homunculus; but she couldn’t deny that the small bubbling creature figured in her thoughts prominently.
“This is nice,” he said. He finished his meal and sat back in his chair, stretching his long legs with a drawn- out sigh. “Just like the old times.”
Mattie inclined her head. “There was something you wanted to show me?”
He led her to his workshop, which seemed to grow more cluttered by the day. Under the piles of scrap metal and gear trains, racks and pinions, he found a large crate, uncharacteristically well-kept and neatly covered with straw. In it, there were several faces, and Mattie was surprised to discover that they were all different from the one she had worn until then. There were faces with thin noses and upturned noses, plump and narrow lips, high and low foreheads, and a wide variety of cheekbones. “This one sort of looks like you,” Loharri said and picked up a mask that indeed bore some resemblance to the face Mattie had grown accustomed to and recognized as her own—a face with rounded childish cheeks and wide eyes, with a small mouth smiling at some untold secret.
“I like this one better.” The face Mattie picked was unpainted and plain, with features that suggested neither youth nor wisdom of experience. It was a very average face, and Mattie suspected that Loharri considered it a failure and only kept it because he could rarely bear to throw anything away, on the off chance that he might decide that he needed it after all.
Loharri grimaced. “I’m usually not the man to criticize my own work, but I regret to say that you lack artistic taste, Mattie.”
“Can I have it?”
He shrugged. “Why not? It’s only temporary.” He helped her to put it on, and gave her a long appraising look. “Not terrible. But tell me something, my sweet machine, tell me—last time I visited, your face was already off. How’d you managed that?”
“I don’t remember,” Mattie lied. “I don’t remember much of that day—only that Niobe was there to help me.”
“And she’s not a mechanic.”
“Not that I know of,” Mattie answered cautiously. “Does one need to be a mechanic to take my face off?”
“It certainly helps.” Loharri watched her still, with a calm curiosity in his eyes that Mattie found unsettling. “If there was a mechanic who had stopped by, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course.” She made her voice as steady as she could manage. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“This is exactly what I’m trying to figure out,” Loharri said, smiling.
We feel a strange sense of kinship to the people who are burning the city down—not to their actions, but they have come from the stone, like us—the ground opened and disgorged them, a whole throng, torches and gaunt faces, as if they were born from the rock and appeared on the surface by magic, already sullen and dissatisfied with the world as it was.
And then we see the deformed spiderlike men crawling out, their long weak arms grabbing onto the rocks as they struggle to exit narrow passages where diamonds and emeralds and rubies hide, where only small bodies and long fingers can reach; they haul themselves out, with little help from their deformed spindly legs, weak from constant crouching. Their red-rimmed eyes blink even though the sun is setting and the shadows are long and velvet-soft. We wonder if these children of stone are to succeed us and if they are the reason for our decline, if the stone has planned it like this, all these centuries ago—that we are to return where we came from and others would come in our stead.
But they look weak, and we know that they have been shaped by human hands—the hands that stuffed them into cages where their bodies could not grow; we know that they find it difficult to breathe and can easily suffocate in their sleep—every night is a gamble for them. Like it is for us, we suppose.
We follow them as they crawl, and more emerge from the earth, so pale, so blind, so helpless on the surface. They come in the wake of the first riots, and they watch the orange light tinting the horizon, streaked with black smoke. It’s not like they remember it from last night, but last night was different, too—they did not enter the city but instead crawled to their hovels outside the city wall, to sleep and dream of death. Tonight, they pass through the gates, and we follow them, curious now.
They notice us—we do not know how, but they do, and their red eyes linger as we cling to the city wall, to the buildings.
“Don’t be afraid,” they croak and coo and call us in strangled voices. In their hands they have gems—blue and green and red, the stone that gave birth to them still clinging to their rough uneven edges. They offer the gemstones to us, and we cannot resist—we have been hungry for so long. We descend to the ground, to their level, and we eat the stones out of their hands. Their slender fingers touch our faces in wonder and apprehension, they slide off the abrupt precipices of our cheekbones and noses. The stones taste of cool subterranean depths, and we suddenly miss home.
“Come with us,” they call and coo. “Come with us, help us like you haven’t helped us before.”
“But what can we do?” we say, the shards of emeralds and rubies grating on our worn teeth. “We can only watch.”
“Come with us,” they say and beckon. “There’s stone down in these tunnels, and great twisting passages; there are crystals growing from the low roofs, and there’s fluorescent moss covering the walls.”
“We can’t,” we say, and we move away, the crumbs of gemstones dropping from our lips.
We climb the walls again, and we follow them around the city on their slow, exploratory crawl. They pay us no attention, pretending that they have forgotten about us. But we know better. They are afraid of us, afraid that we will protect our city, and they want to lure us to the tunnels, where we will be out of the way, in the soft cradling embrace of our home. But we cannot go. The city is our responsibility—even though we can only watch.
They crawl toward the fires, drawn to them like all creatures living in the dark. There are men with torches everywhere, and they are not burning but fleeing now—we hear the distant clanging of the buggies and the shouts of their passengers, and musket shots ringing through the streets.
The windows are shuttered, and even the shopkeepers do not leave the safety when they hear the sounds of broken glass. The smells of smoke and jasmine make the air sing, make the darkness so much deeper, so much bluer. The buildings to our east are hidden by the darkness, but the ones to our west are outlined in black against the orange sky which grows brighter, then dims, pulsing, like a living heart.
