“I don’t think they can see it,” Elena whispers.
The eye’s gaze seems to cut through the growing fog, radiating and growing in my vision until it is all I can see. With an effort, I turn my face away from it. The reddish haze casts a bloody tint over Elena’s cloak.
I scoop her up in my arms and hold her to me.
“It’s a sign, isn’t it?” she asks. “I have seen that symbol in Favorini’s books. It is an old language.”
“It glows with the fires of hell,” I mutter, turning.
“But someone put it there. A message.”
I clutch her tighter and begin to walk away, pushing through the tide of people walking up the hill in the middle of the road.
“Don’t you understand, Peter?” Elena asks, lips brushing my ear. When I don’t respond, she pulls back from me, her arms still tight around my shoulders. Beneath her cloak, the delicate whalebone spokes of her ribs prod my forearms. Her face is bright, lips parted in awe as she breathes the words: “We are not alone here.”
19
OREGON, PRESENT
I’m watching the stripes on the highway disappear under the headlights of our rumbling car, still holding my aching ribs, drifting in and out of sleep. The clockwork man is driving now with the patience of a machine, hardly moving, keeping his eyes on the blurred road as we speed north along the coast.
My grandfather called this thing—this impossible man—an angel.
Head leaning against the window, tires thrumming beneath me, my mind wanders into the past—to the last day I went to Sunday school. I was maybe ten or twelve, and it was a bright morning. Nearly Christmas, the church hallways smelled like sugar cookies, with walls covered in construction paper cutouts of Jesus and nubby Christmas trees and smiling angels with downcast eyes.
It was the angels that were bothering me.
I was a long-legged girl with scabby knees, and I remember sitting cross-legged on the thin carpet of the Sunday school room and hesitantly raising my hand. The sweet old lady with the cranberry-dyed perm was delighted to tell us all about how angels lived in heaven, doing errands for the Almighty.
But that wasn’t what I wanted to know. And so my damp palm crept back up.
I remember the teacher’s face tightening as I began to sketch out my ideas of how flight dynamics might work for a human-size creature with wings.
Hollow bones and increased muscle mass, you could take that for granted.
But how much would an angel have to eat, to power a body capable of launching itself into the sky? Would they really be able to walk, weighted down by those beautiful, draped gossamer wings? What material could halos be made of??
The other kids rolled their eyes, annoyed by the breathless questions and childish theories. But in that moment I was more fascinated with the church than I ever had been. I felt as if I were on the verge of understanding something magical. With the faith of a child, I was eager to learn more about these amazing creatures.
Mouth pinched, the Sunday school teacher waved at me to stop talking. Folding her Bible on her lap, she told me my answer.
Because the Bible says so, June.
Because. It never satisfied me. But how much easier would my life be if “because” were enough?
My grandfather used to say the world is full of hidden truths, if only you open your eyes and look. New frontiers are waiting to be explored, no matter what the schoolteachers say or how many books have been written. Maps are just a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe.
But I don’t know if I’m strong enough for this truth.
I lean against the car window, thinking and pretending to be asleep and watching Peter’s face as he drives. He looks like a man, but I’ll bet the ridges on the backs of his hands are made of cables, not tendons. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m looking around a hidden corner right now, studying the flight mechanics of an angel.
No living person could have built Peter. Studying his lacerated face like an anatomical cross section, I’m surprised to see his cheekbone has tiny beaten brass rivets and a stripe of what looks like hardened wood—materials leaden with the weight of centuries. The layers of his flesh are newer, plastics and synthetic fibers and the ripple of muscle-like polymer actuators. The craftsmanship seems both old and new, all at once, and yet all of it is way beyond the ken of modern man.
Feeling the trace of bruises over my rib cage, the flashes of violence I saw at the motel replay in my mind like a movie. Drifting off, my eyes start to close. But a sudden nausea rises in my throat as I recall the sight of the motorcycle hopping the curb. I should have yelled, should have somehow warned Oleg and that poor policeman. I’m tensing my body to shout when my eyes fly open to see Peter watching me.
“The sun is coming up,” Peter says. “We will enter the avtomat domain soon. If we are allowed inside, stay close to me. Do not speak.”
I open my eyes and blink away the cobwebs of half sleep. Sitting up, I stretch my arms and wince at the pain lancing across my body. Through the shuddering car vents, I can smell the ocean on crisp morning air.
“Where is it, exactly?” I ask, swallowing a yawn.
Beyond a haze of bug corpses on the passenger window, I can see the blush of dawn on the horizon. The early morning traffic on the highway has grown thicker as we’ve speared north into Seattle. Ahead of us, the sleeping gray city is engulfed in morning fog, the distant buildings curled against the slate waters of Elliot Bay.
“Where else does a king live?” asks Peter, lifting a finger from the steering wheel to point downtown. A single skyscraper rises from the bed of mist like a slender black sword. It is prehistorically big, its skin gemmed with moisture, the top of it wreathed in low-hanging clouds.
“But in a castle?”
20
LONDON, 1726
Elena and I find our first home in a grim place near the river, simply called the Lanes—a room on a street so narrow that only a stripe of gray sky is visible walking down it. Not that we can look up, as the residents routinely toss their feces and garbage to the reeking, stained cobblestones below.
The city of London spans five miles, with half a million or so people living here, and more accumulating daily, the new faces absorbed almost imperceptibly into the city itself. The fringes are a no-man’s-land of wind-strewn trash, half-abandoned shanties, brick ovens, heaps of cinders, and men trading sick animals. This periphery is like the flank of a diseased horse, welted and knotted with parasites.