I watch silently as he turns back and stumbles toward his sleeping hides, stopping when he notices Elena. He squats next to her and whispers something. I continue dragging myself forward. My dirt-stained cuirass crunches over stalks of grass as I pull myself over the periphery of the camp. But the rider is not listening for danger. He is pushing Elena silently onto her back, a forearm pressed to her neck. Untying her ankles, he roughly spreads her legs.
The man is grinning, teeth glinting red in the dawn.
I pick up a helmet as I pass the man’s sleeping mat. One urgent, broken lurch at a time, sliding through wet grass, I plant the metal bowl of it into the dirt and drag myself forward. The armored hat is made of steel, fur-lined and peaked in the middle.
“What?” the bandit exclaims, recoiling onto his knees as he finds nothing beneath her cloak but the cold anatomy of clockwork. “What—what are you?”
At the last moment, he turns, his dark curly hair rusty in the morning light—eyes widening at the sight of my ruin, cheeks twitching in fright. I am rearing back on the remains of my left elbow, helmet lifted high in my good hand. The man is choking on a shout as I bring the helmet down.
The metal bowl glances over the bridge of his nose. His jaw snaps shut and he starts to fall, fear and blood mingling on his face. Elena kicks with both legs, sending the rider flailing onto his back with a grunt, the air knocked from his lungs.
I bring the helmet down again.
This time it lands with a wet crunch in the middle of the rider’s face. Again. A half dozen more times until I feel the skull crack and the grass is littered with teeth and blood and saliva.
I hear a gurgling scream from across the camp and see Elena is on her feet. Acting on an assassin’s instinct, she has freed her hands, tugged her stilettos free from the fallen rider’s pack, and pierced the hearts of his companions. In moments, there are no men living.
The smoldering fire now warms only metal, wood, and leather.
“Oh, Peter,” says Elena. “Oh my poor Peter.”
Elena’s arms encircle my head, cradling my remains on her lap. With her other hand she is patting my body, feeling for the extent of the damage. Faintly, I hear the trickle of blood flowing into the grass and the whinny of a nervous horse.
“You are very damaged,” Elena says, her voice hollow.
“As long as my anima is intact,” I respond, “my vessel can be repaired.”
“The empress will hunt us.”
“She will,” I say to Elena, my eternal sister. “But we will survive. We will run forever and ever. Remember, little one, no matter her power, the empress is only a mortal human being. You and I are something more.”
I let my eyes settle on the curve of her porcelain cheek, a bright arc in the dawn. Elena was once a mindless doll and I a lifeless husk. But now…she and I are more than things.
“We are avtomat,” I say.
15
OREGON, PRESENT
“Please,” says the tall man, sitting hunched in the middle of the road. His legs are laid out before him, one of them twisted at a terrible angle, the heel of his hand pressed hard against his face, desperately holding a knife wound closed.
“I promise I will not harm you,” he says.
“Yeah?” I ask, leveling the shotgun on him. “That’s good to know. Stay there. The police will be here any second.”
With shaking fingers, I pop the remaining couple of shells off the ammunition loop one by one and shove them into the gun with my thumb.
Click.
“But they will not,” says the man. He leans over, his face in shadow, and puts both hands on his damaged knee.
“Our friend here is jamming radio signals. If police were coming, they would have arrived already. We have minutes before he is operational. You do not have enough ammunition, and I am too damaged to protect you.”
Click.
I pause and glance over at the man with silver hair. If it’s a man. Part of his face is peeled off, a chunk of his hair lying on glittering pavement, quivering in the wind and still attached to a piece of his scalp. His fingers are clawing the ground blindly, body shaking and writhing.
He looks like roadkill to me.
“What is that thing?” I ask.
“He is called Talus,” he says, struggling to bend his leg straight. “He is…avtomat.”
I blink, remembering.
“Avtomat? The Old Believer’s doll wrote that.”
“You activated the girl of Saint Petersburg?”
I shrug at him, holding the loaded shotgun across my chest.
“Few humans know that word,” he says, finally wrenching his broken leg into a straight line. “The avtomat guard the secret of their existence. Always, and to the death.”
I notice no blood is coursing from the open wound on his face.
“So you’re saying…” I begin to ask.
I stop. It’s crazy. It can’t be true.
“You’re saying that guy is a machine,” I say, voice flat.
Looking over at the struggling body, I pull the shotgun tighter across my chest. Then I shudder. The roadkill is looking right back at me, eye wide open. His blue skull drags against the pavement, one of his arms flopping. He’s making a grunting sound, trying to get up.
“Others are coming,” says the tall man, hand still pressed to his face. “We must flee.”
“Okay,” I say, backing away. “Okay, this is fucked.”
“Talus will kill you for the relic,” says the tall man, holding up his car keys to me on outstretched fingers. “I can help you. Take my car keys.”
I walk closer to him, wary. Reach out and snatch the keys away.
“Why? Why are you helping me?”
“The avtomat are at war. They do not understand how to…recharge their batteries. His master,” he says, nodding at the fallen man, “is collecting every artifact, studying them—even simple automatons, like the girl of Saint Petersburg.”
“You mean my research?”
“The Kunlun Foundation is avtomat. They use your expertise to find lost automatons, then send agents to the artifacts before you arrive. They are desperate to understand how the avtomat work, to restore their own power.”
Wolves.
I clench my jaw, feeling a pinch of anger. It makes sudden sense. The wolves were always one step ahead. They always knew my next destination, and so they showed up ahead of me and took what they wanted.
“You’ve been spying on them?” I ask. “Spying on me—”
The tall man looks at the flailing corpse that is now grinding across the pavement. He gestures at his black car as a far-off buzzing sound rises.
“No more time.”
With a painful-looking lurch, he pushes himself off the pavement. Clenching one hand against his side and the other to his face, he drags his hurt leg behind him, putting only light pressure on it, limping toward the passenger door of the muscle car.
I nose the shotgun up, covering him. He shrugs at me, not stopping.
“If we stay here, we will die,” he says.
Beyond the next turn in the road, I see motorcycle headlights cutting through rows of pine trees. The silver-haired thing has dragged itself onto its knees. Head cocked, it’s staring at my chest, a sheen of skull gleaming under torn skin. Reaching up, I feel the dark crescent of the relic hanging outside my shirt.
Clutching the shotgun, I walk to the driver’s side of the muscle car and unlock the door. I can’t believe I’m considering getting inside.
I call to the tall man over the black hood of the car.