The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (40 page)

He smiled at me, cheeks rosy,
and named me a price. I paid it and collected the parts, lugged them home,
worrying.

Jackson had the girl awake by
the time I made it back, the steady patter of his speech broken by the stilted
syllables of a synthesizer linked to a touch pad. I listened to the dead, cold
voice as it answered questions, carrying on her half of the conversation. It
was raspy, empty. There were better programs available, but Jackson preferred
the retro feel of passive inflections and static. I put the supplies down on
the nearest workbench and locked the door, double checking all three deadbolts
before stepping back. The alleyway outside was empty, dark even during the day,
but talking to Pelican had left me feeling anxious and worried about what was
coming. I’d stumbled down three or four different alleyways on my way home,
backtracking and cutting through side-streets. I wondered how long it would be
before I was actually being followed; sooner or later the news that the girl
had survived would filter its way to the Corvidae and they’d come looking for
her. I contemplated pulling a workbench in front of the door, damn the mess
that moving one would make.

“Randal?” Jackson’s voice
floated down the stairwell. “Randal, is that you?” There was fear in his voice,
but he disguised it well.

“It’s me.” I limped to the
stairwell and waved.

“Randal,” Jackson said, “Come
up and meet our guest.” I shook my head and Jackson frowned at me, his thick
eyebrows drawing together. I pointed to the lopsided mask, the arm that had
frightened her earlier, and Jackson snorted

“Randal,” he said, and I
lowered my head. I started climbing up the stairs, my right foot thumping on
the wood. Jackson smiled and took my arm as I reached the top, leading me into
the room. The girl was still limp, still caught in the numb painkiller haze,
she shuddered when she saw my face. Jackson led me over and sat on the corner
of the cot. “This is Randal,” he said, keeping his voice calm and low. “You’d
call him my assistant, I guess. He took care of you during the evenings.”

“Hi,” I said. I gave her a
lopsided grin. “You look like you’re healing well.”

She was pale now, paler than
when I’d left the workshop, and there were bloodstains on her bandages. Jackson
had been drugging her, prepping her for more surgery, re-working the lines of
blue stitches that held her battered body together. There were sutures on her
cheeks that hadn’t been there when I left. The girl scratched her hand across
the touchpad, letting the computer beside the cot translate the movements into
speech.
Thank. You. Randal. My. Name. Is. Rose
.

There was something lucid
beneath the drug haze, something aware of where she’d found herself. She
studied my face with her good eye, following the lines of steel and scarred
skin, suddenly focused on what those scars could mean. “It’s an old job,” I
said. “And I’m too cantankerous a patient for Jackson to replace things or make
them pretty. Don’t worry; he’ll make sure you’re still beautiful when he’s
done.”

She smiled at me then, a
terrible expression on her broken face, and winced as the smile tugged at the
sutures. Jackson slipped a hypodermic into her neck, easing opiates into her
bloodstream. I stepped back, giving him room, watching as she went under.

“Sleep now, Miss Rose,” Jackson
said. “We’ll have you up and talking soon.” She shook her head, fingers
fumbling for the pad, but the drugs hit and she faded. Her hand went limp
again.

Jackson stood up and ran his
fingers through the pale wisps of his hair, looking pensive as she studied the
ruin of her face. “She isn’t going to be pretty, Randal. You shouldn’t have
lied to her.”

I turned around and walked
toward the stairs.

“She’ll be pretty enough,” I
said. “You’ll rebuild her and she’ll be pretty enough.”

We both knew he planned to
install the tongue before we ran away.

We argued after that, Jackson
and I. Argued about running, about rescuing the girl, about trying to install a
new tongue while we both knew the Corvidae were coming to find us. Jackson won,
as always; he’s a smart man, and he has arguments aplenty when he needs them.

“We shall stay,” he said. “Who
would find us, if they looked for her? Who would even consider looking for a
girl in a place like this?”

“Pelican knows,” I told him.
“He knew the moment I asked for the parts. He
knows
, Jackson, and
they’ll know to ask him. They’re looking, Jackson. They’re going to come.”

Jackson shook his head, his
eyes sad. “We are safe enough, Randall. She’ll heal before they find us, and
there is always the tunnel if she does not. Pelican knows many things, but he
does not know about that.” He settled down behind his workbench, sitting in the
battered hardwood chair with its back stiff and straight like a throne.
Jackson, king of clockwork, master of the world he surveyed. I didn’t share his
faith in the tunnel. We could get out if we used it, yes, but we still had to
run. And the tunnel has been here longer than I have, longer than Jackson and
his towering piles of junk. He always told me it was a service entrance, built
in the days when the workshop was home to grander creations than ours. It
wasn’t a secret then, and it was barely a secret now.

That night I took a lantern and
walked down the dark length of the tunnel. We had used it as a graveyard, a
crypt for the gutted husks of grandfather clocks we’d salvaged for parts. The
slow tick-tock of my heart echoed against the stones, mocking the dead
clock-faces.

“Safe enough,” I told myself,
and the words echoed off the walls. It took hours to clear a path, to make sure
the tunnel was ready if we needed it. I checked the locks and the keys at the
far end, just to be sure. I ambled down the narrow corridor. It would be a
short sprint, if running was needed, but I’m not built for speed and Jackson
was old. My faith in his plan waned as I contemplated the possibilities.

They found us the day after
Jackson installed Rose’s new tongue.

Jackson and Rose were asleep
when it happened. He, lost in a quiet slump beside the cot, she, twisting and
turning through another night of medicated slumber. I stood by the doorway, my
heart a metronome beat beneath the steady rhythm of Jackson’s snoring, and I
heard the muffled thump in the workshop downstairs. I thought it might have
been an invention, or a pile of Jackson’s parts collapsing in the night. Such
things weren’t unheard of in a workshop such as ours. It wasn’t until the
second thump, and then the third, that I realized what it was: someone kicking,
hammering, trying to batter down our door. I heard the wood give way, the locks
bending inwards, the soft crunch of someone walking across the workshop floor.

We had an intruder, and that
wasn’t a pleasant thought.

I heard the glass face of
Jackson’s second-favourite clock shattering beneath a heavy fist, and I allowed
myself a few seconds to consider the merits of cowardice. It was tempting; I am
ill-equipped for stealth, what with my steel-shod limp and the endless
tick-tock tick-tock eliminating the possibility of approaching unannounced.
Investigation meant a confrontation, facing the intruder down, and I was coward
enough that the thought gave me pause.

I picked up Jackson’s poker, a
cast-iron antique he’d acquired at an auction. I’d scoffed at him when he
bought it, claiming it was useless, but it felt comforting to have a weapon in
hand. The poker felt solid, weighted for a quick swing should I need to
bludgeon a potential thief, and I held it before me as I limped down the stairs
and switched on the workshop lights.

There was a Corvidae in the
workshop, languid and ready for my approach. He was an angry snarl of a boy,
just like the rest of them, black-feather hair, fingers like raptor talons,
eyes as smooth and dark as marbles. He stank of carrion, thick and overripe. I
raised the poker, holding it like a sword, ready to cave in the boy’s skull
with its iron head. The Corvidae sneered. “Ya bully dreaming, Tick-Tock.
Me-and-I pluck your vitreous; squish-squish, sweet’n’juicy, yum-yum-ha.” He
cawed then, cackling. He had a crow’s laugh, a harsh croak. “Where da patch?”

I charged him, swinging the
poker, a futile gesture fuelled by anger and fear. He moved fast, a dash of
shadow against the sulphurous yellow light. It didn’t take long, no more than
three ticks of my heart, and it was over. I saw him move, felt the poker rip
free of my hand, then he crashed backwards with his hollow weight bearing me to
the floor. I looked up into a wicked grin, grubby talons hovering over my eyes.

“Where da patch?” he croaked.
He kept his voice low, all secret whispers. I shook my head. “Gone,” I said.
“Jackson’s gone. He isn’t here.”

His talons wove an eager
pattern in the air as a narrow, black tongue licked pointed Corvidae teeth.
“Where da girl den, Tick-Tock? You hide our pretty-pretty, our little
birdy-bird? We want her back, Tick-Tock. Gotta finish what we started.”

“She’s not hiding.” My
treacherous voice quavered, just a little, giving away my fear. “She’s not
here, she ran away.”

The Corvidae gave me a
harlequin’s smile, leaning forwards to run his long tongue across the tender
flesh of my good eye. “Tell da patch I came, Tick-Tock. Tell him Rook3 wants
‘is dolly back, no matter what.” And I nodded, stiff-necked, my eye following
the pointed claw dancing a hair’s breadth from my pupil. Rook3 laughed, drunk
on my fear. He floated to his feet in a flurry of limbs, dancing and spinning
his way to the gaping maw of our broken doorway. “Me-and-I be seeing you,
Tick-Tock,” he said, and then he was gone, nothing more than a caw of laughter
on the wind.

I lay on the floor for a long time.

Jackson had shown me his
blueprints for my arm and chest, the detailed plans and notes he’d compiled
explaining how and why they work. I know that there are three-hundred and
fifty-seven cogs and gears in my arm alone. I lay on the ground and listened to
my heart, the steady tick-tock that never felt the surge of adrenaline, never
sped up when danger loomed. When I flexed my fingers, pondering their movement,
I knew that another hundred and twenty cogs came to life. I tried to console
myself with this knowledge, telling myself that clocks are works of precision
and delicacy, that they do not lend themselves to strength, or violence.

It didn’t help.

Jackson unlocked the bedroom
door; his feet padded down the stairs. My good arm trembled. Jackson stood next
to me, staring at the broken door. “They came,” he said.

“Just one.” I stood up, busying
myself clearing a bench, moving the junk onto the surrounding piles. When I was
done I tipped it on its side, pushing it against the doorframe to replace the
door. I leant my weight against it, holding it secure. “He’s fast and he’s
angry. I’m sure he’ll collect the rest of them.”

Jackson clucked his tongue and
forced me to sit, fussing with my arm. He checked mechanisms and servos,
double-checking to be sure. He always worried when I fell, always wanted to
make sure that I hadn’t damaged the intricate parts of his creation. “They want
her back, Jackson,” I told him. “They want us to hand her over, or they’ll kill
us both. Kill us and eat our eyes.”

Jackson bowed his head and kept
his attention on the arm. His face pinched, locked into a frown of
concentration. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll keep her safe, somehow.”

“We need to run. Tonight.”

Jackson shook his head, closed
the casing on my arm. “If they found us, it’s too late. They’re expecting us to
run and she still needs rest, another day or two at least. We need to stay,
keep them out somehow. Give her time to heal, then use the tunnel to sneak
away.”

I looked at the upright bench,
thinner and weaker than our stout wooden door. “How?”

“Somehow,” Jackson said. He
rapped my arm with a sharp knuckle, the soft echo filling the room. “We haven’t
got a choice here, Randal. We must do the best we can.”

I went back to Pelican the next
morning. I bought the best security system our money could afford. “Lethal or
non-lethal,” Pelican asked me.

“Whichever you’ve got,” I told
him. “As long as I can walk away with it today and have it installed by
nightfall.” He gave me a queer look and a price, and I gave him the money. It
took the better part of a day to get the workshop straightened out and the new
locks installed, repairing the door and barricading the windows with steel bars
and old workbenches I bolted into place. I spent the afternoon installing
Pelican’s toys: taser banks and motion detectors; thick Kevlar sheets that sat
over the doorjamb, securing it against gunfire and battering shoulders; voltage
packs that would pass a charge through anything metal that was tampered with on
the exterior of the workshop, leaving a claw blackened and the man behind it
stunned. Jackson was upstairs while I toiled below; he checked his work on
Rose’s prosthetic tongue.

I finished the security job
after sunset, just in time for the first Corvidae’s croaky laughter to echo at
the end of our alleyway. Jackson came down as I was making dinner, flinching at
the distant laughter outside. “Done,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. His
blue, worn overalls stained with patches of rust. “She can talk.”