Mina’s throat tightened and she had to force out the question: “Are you saying that I’m just like—”
“Oh no, no,” Gregory said, frowning at her like she had said something completely ridiculous. “You are alive, Mina, and you will grow and live and die the same as any living being; it’s only your heart that’s artificial. I commanded your new heart to keep you alive, but because I created it without my blood, it is still, in essence, glass, so it lacks some of the nuances of a real heart—like a heartbeat. It was the best I could do.”
She tried to think back to a time when her heart might have lurched or pounded or fluttered—anything to announce its presence—but there was only ever silence. She thought again of that mouse dissolving into sand. “I don’t—I don’t believe you.”
“Do you need more proof? I was hoping you would. Turn around.”
She knew. She knew as she turned to the table at the end of the room what he wanted her to see. She knew what that withered, rotten piece of meat inside the jar was, and she fought the urge to retch.
“That’s your heart, Mina,” Gregory said from right behind her. “Aren’t you grateful that rotting thing isn’t a part of you anymore? Don’t you think you owe me, after all?”
3
MINA
Mina stared at the heart—her heart—and tried not to scream. “Why couldn’t you save my mother, if you could save me?” she asked her father. She might still trap him in a lie, if she kept calm.
Gregory’s voice grew harsh. “Your mother was never ill. She was horrified when she learned what I had done to save your life. The idea of it was repulsive to her. She’d been unhappy for a long time, but only after I replaced your heart did she choose to do something about it. She wanted to punish me for what I’d done—and to punish you for what you had become.” He roughly turned Mina by the shoulders so that she was facing him. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Mina? Your mother … your mother killed herself.”
“You’re lying,” Mina said at once. “She died because she was ill. Hana told me.”
“Because that’s what I told Hana to tell you.” The words sounded bitter on his tongue. “Your mother chose death over me, over you, because she was weak. She could endure me, but when she sensed an emptiness in her child, it was too much for her to bear. Your heart was shaped to survive, not to love, and your mother was selfish: she was incapable of loving someone who could never love her back.”
“I—I can love,” Mina said. She tried to think of a way to prove him wrong, to fight back. But she didn’t love her father, and even if she pretended she did, he would never believe it.
Hana? Hana was familiar, but there had never been much affection between them. What did love feel like? How would she know if she’d ever felt it before? I loved my mother, she wanted to say, but then Hana’s accusation came back to her: It’s as if you don’t care about her at all. Mina had denied it, but now she wasn’t sure. She loved the memory of her mother, the idea of having a mother, but the woman herself was a mystery to her, as was everything that had happened to her before her father gave her a glass heart. She always wondered why she had such trouble remembering her early childhood, but now she understood: her old life had ended the day her heart stopped, and a new one had begun.
She felt so drained, suddenly, so empty. For the first time, she noticed the silence in her body, the absence of that steady beating in her chest. You don’t care for anything but yourself. She couldn’t even remember if she had ever shed a single tear.
Gregory came to stand in front of her, blocking her view of the heart in the jar. His face was drawn and solemn. “There’s no point fighting me on this, Mina. I understand how you function better than you do. You can rage and hate and despair and hope as well as anyone else, but love is something more complicated. Love requires a real heart, which you do not have, and so you cannot love, and you will never be loved, except”—he came closer to her and brushed his knuckles against her cheek—“you have beauty, and beauty is more powerful than love. People can’t help themselves: they crave beauty. They will overlook anything, even a glass heart, for it. If they love you for anything, it will be for your beauty. But there’s nothing for either of us here. Come to court with me, and you’ll be the most beautiful lady there, the most envied, the most desired.”
He stopped to see if his words were having any effect on her, but Mina’s face was as still as her heart.
“Well? Do you agree? Will you be ready to leave for Whitespring by tomorrow?”
He reached his hand out for her in a gesture of reconciliation, and though she hated herself for it, Mina put her hand in his.
What else did she have?
*
Mina laid her mother’s mirror down on the grass by the stream. She had meant to put it back, but the thought of going into her mother’s room now was too painful. She was sorry to leave behind her favorite places—the hidden stream where it was always cool, the giant oak tree that she had once tried (and failed) to climb as a child, the ruins of the old church with the caved-in roof. They were all solitary places, of course—none of the villagers would miss her or her father when they were gone.
She remembered the first time she had been brave enough to approach a group of children playing by the stream, dangling their feet in the water. She had been only seven or eight, and her loneliness had finally overcome her timidity. Mina had already begun to notice the way parents would pull their children closer to them whenever Hana took her into the market, but she had never understood why. For all she knew, it was because of Hana, not because of her.
But she had been alone the time she tried to join the children at the stream, and so when half of them had jumped up from the water and run away, and the other half had sneered and called her and her father cruel names, Mina finally understood: They hate me.
She had decided at that moment that she hated them, too.
But today there was no one at the stream, so Mina was free to sit on its banks and say a final good-bye. She refused to hate this place just because of one bad memory on its banks. There was too much to appreciate here—the drops of sunlight falling in between the leaves overhead, the sound of the water rushing past, the scent of the grass. Mina even loved the large chunks of stone that littered the stream, remnants of a bridge that had collapsed years ago. She had come here to cheer herself up, but everywhere she looked, she found something else she was leaving behind.
Her reflection looked up at her from the mirror, and even that offered her little comfort anymore. From seeing the portrait of Dorothea that hung in her room, Mina knew they bore a fairly strong resemblance. Her life she owed to her father, but her beauty she owed to her mother.
No, I owe you nothing. You left me with him.