“Good. No sterilization. Simply do the repair.”
As Peter leans himself against the side of the car, I slide out a forceps and use it to pluck a curved needle from the satchel. There is a coil of silken thread, gummy, coated with a substance similar to the skin on Peter’s face. With well-practiced motions, I thread the needle.
“So let’s say your friend fixes your leg, then what?”
“We use the relic,” Peter says, patiently holding his face closed. “With it, we can stop the fighting—”
A shudder runs through his chest and Peter puts a hand over his heart until it passes. Ignoring my confused expression, he hoists himself onto the hood. Sitting, he drops his elbows onto his thighs and leans forward, putting his mangled face within my reach.
“How?” I ask.
“One thing at a time,” he says to the empty lot.
Up high, the wind blows through pine trees, sending shadows dancing over gravel. The engine still ticks over quietly, heat radiating from the muscle car. Seabirds call to each other on the lake.
I hold up the forceps, needle glinting. Watching me carefully, Peter takes his hand away from his cheek. The wound falls open, but his gold-flecked brown eyes stay trained on me as I press my fingers to his face.
At my touch, he blinks hard. I pull back a little.
“You okay?”
“It has been a long time since…someone repaired me in this way.”
I watch his face but it’s gone to stone again. I wonder to myself exactly what he means by a “long time.”
“And never a human being,” he adds.
“I’ll go slow,” I say.
Pressing the wound closed, I make a series of neat dives and swoops through his tough skin. As the thread pinches the laceration back together, his stubborn jawline returns. The skin feels completely natural against my fingers, warm, with the faintest sandpaper scratch of stubble.
I can’t help it; I pinch a curl of his unruly chestnut hair between my thumb and forefinger. The strands are smooth and natural. His skin is supple and soft, freckled and tanned a light brown. I don’t know the technology for this.
“How do you have skin?” I ask. “I mean, where did it come from? It isn’t…”
“It is synthetic,” he says, holding his head still for me.
“I didn’t know they could make it that real,” I say.
“They can’t,” he says. “But we can.”
I pause.
“If the avtomat wish to survive among humans, we cannot exist,” he says. “We have been crafting better materials over the centuries, using them to blend in with your kind. My birth face was lambskin pulled tight over sculpted metal. Tougher leather covered my palms and fingertips, so I could hold weapons without losing grip.”
Now he looks at both his hands.
“My maker spent a long while determining the perfect balance. Too rough and the ax handle slips. Too soft and the skin tears on a strong blow.”
I nod, remembering something similar from my studies. “Vaucanson built a flute player in the seventeen hundreds,” I say. “The machine had lungs and an esophagus and mouth, tongue, teeth. It played the way a person plays, by blowing into the instrument. But for months he couldn’t get the machine to play as well as a human. Then he finally realized: she needed lips. Vaucanson used leather.”
Peter turns his gaze back up to me, considering.
“Perhaps my existence is not as surprising to you as it would be to others.”
I pull the needle through.
Peter’s cheek pulls back into the faintest smile, and the wound in his cheek dimples only the slightest bit. The seam where his face was sliced open is disappearing. Whatever the thread is made of is combining with the skin around it, healing.
“You’ve been hiding in plain sight for centuries?” I muse, leaning in to finish the last stitch in a final swoop. Peter doesn’t seem to notice.
“Over history, some avtomat have been discovered. It is inevitable,” he says. “If the captured one is not burned for a witch, then the others make sure he disappears completely. Written accounts, photographs, people—we always clean up our messes. The dozens of us who are left have become old and solitary. Some are ancient. But we are all trained to protect the secret of our existence from humanity…It is a matter of life and death.”
My face inches from his, I watch as the last stitches on his wound close.
“That’s really reassuring, Peter,” I say, leaning back. “How is your friend going to like seeing me?”
As he moves his jaw, testing the repair, I’m reminded of how well his face is put together. Strong jawline and thick eyebrows. A stubborn streak in his chin, but faint laugh lines radiating over his cheeks. His eyes are especially well done, wet and large, brown with bands of yellow expanding out like sunbursts.
“This is the end. I have no choice, neither does my friend, and neither do you.”
Sliding off the hood of the car, Peter cranes his neck. Looking past me, his eyes open wide.
“We are not alone,” he says.
I spin around, needle and thread still in my fingers. All I see is the empty lot. Besides the wind and the distant roar of traffic on the highway, I don’t hear anything. A flock of birds sits on a telephone wire, watching us.
“What are you talking about?” I ask Peter.
“The birds,” he says.
A few crows sit on an old telephone wire that sags across the weedy lot. Nothing out of the ordinary. Peter registers my annoyed look as I pack the tools back into his roll.
“The grouping,” he says quietly. “One bird, then three, one, three. Thirteen. This is a sign.”
“Okay,” I say with a frown, glancing at the birds. They seem perfectly normal, sitting clustered into little groups. I count them, double-checking Peter’s math. “Fine. But how is that a code? What’s it supposed to mean?”
“This is the domain of an old avtomat called Batuo.”
“Your friend, right?” I ask.
I trail off as a fat black crow flaps its wings, lobbing itself toward us. It lands on the roof of the car in a flurry of feathers and scrabbling talons. In jerky movements, the yellow-eyed bird cocks its head at me.
Peter regards the bird seriously for a long moment. Finally, he speaks to it.
“Batuo,” he says.
The bird hops closer, to within a foot of where Peter leans against the warm hood of the car. Peering up at him with bright eyes, it goes still. Now that it isn’t moving, I notice a metallic gleam to its feathers. Its black legs and beak look like rugged plastic. The glow of its yellow eyes take on the sheen of an LED.
“No way,” I murmur. And yet I have read accounts of the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum building a wooden dove capable of flight around 350 BC. A lot of progress could have been made in two thousand years.
Peter speaks to the bird, using oddly stilted language. “I ask peaceful entry into your domain. You know my Word and my nature. I will do you no harm. My companion is under my aegis. Grant us entry, Batuo. Together, we can fulfill my first quest, and the last.”
After another pause, the bird seems to reanimate. It hops backward, head cocked again. Then it caws loudly and bobs its head at Peter.