“So you think we’ll save you? We short-lived??”
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe without even knowing it. Watch how many of your billionaires spend their money on spaceflight, materials science, artificial intelligence, transportation, nanotechnology, brain research. It is not a coincidence. The avtomat have resources, and we need basic science. We need to understand ourselves before the last of us runs out of power. Because then there will be no one else to start a new age.”
“You’re parasites then,” I say, half joking. “Preying on our big brains.”
Peter considers.
“In a way,” he says. “But I do not think the avtomat would survive without human beings. I do not know that there would be a reason to. We are made in your image, June. There is a truth in that.”
“How far back do you remember?”
“I last woke in the early seventeen hundreds,” he says. “Russia.”
I grip the armrest tighter, mind reeling. Peter’s strange existence feels like a bridge to another world. A secret window to the past.
“Peter the Great?” I venture.
“I was at his side when he passed,” responds Peter, staring out the window. “And then I was exiled. Sent wandering on a path that led here.”
The awe I felt as a kid in my grandfather’s workshop is nothing compared to this. I’m sitting across from a living legend. This man-shaped artifact has borne witness to an incredible swathe of forgotten history.
“You’re even older than that, Peter. Some of the components inside your frame. There are brass gears that look Greek, like something from the Antikythera machine. And deeper inside, I saw ceramic plates—pottery, really—with Chinese markings. The same for Batuo.”
Peter is watching me now, interested.
“I do not know my true age,” he says. “I mean, I would not know how to date those things. I have never thought of it.”
“You never looked at yourself??” I ask.
“Not with your eyes.”
“Peter,” I say. “That kind of pottery…in China alone it could go back twenty thousand years. You couldn’t be that old. Right?”
“Our anima are impossible to fathom,” says Peter. “The relics are too complex. Nearly indestructible. Losing them disturbs our memories, but…perhaps we were made that way on purpose, to forget. Or perhaps we have been marooned from our own time for too long, and we are falling apart.”
“You don’t even know where you’re from.”
“Every decade for the last hundred years, at risk of death, I have paid the great minds of the era to examine and explain an avtomat relic. None could even come close. We came striding out of the past, yet our bones are made of the future.”
Peter turns back to the window, the light cutting his face in half again.
“Whoever made us did so before the current era of written history. Whatever they made us for, the reason for our anima, I do not know for certain. And as the years gather, I worry that our time may have come and gone.”
I can’t help it; I sit up and grab his hand. “Peter, you’re walking proof that great things are waiting for us. Seeing you, the way you move, the way you think…you’re an example of what people have achieved, and what we could achieve again.”
Peter suppresses a smile, taking his hand away. “If I had arrived ten minutes later, you would have met only Talus. And in that case, I wonder if you would still believe what you just said. Or been alive to believe it.”
I sit back in the plush seat. A cocktail has appeared on my armrest and I didn’t notice. Taking the crystalline flute by the stem, I twist it back and forth in my fingers, spraying rainbow shards of light and dark across the cabin.
“So, who is Elena?” I ask.
“An old friend,” sighs Peter.
“Why does she know where the emperor is?”
“Because she is always learning. It is her nature.”
“Then why haven’t you already talked to her?”
Peter smiles at me, the corners of his lips catching shadows.
“Because the last time we spoke, she promised to kill me if I ever returned.”
42
LONDON, 1758
I wait for a moment in the darkness at the end of a forbidding hallway. My soaking-wet hood is pulled low over my eyes, a puddle pooling on the rough timber floor around my boots. The leather on the back of my hands is dark, my body seeping river water from every seam, my riding cloak muddy. I try to walk softly, but each footstep rumbles and creaks. Luckily, the noise of my advance is lost under soft, terrible sounds coming from behind closed doors that line the hall.
Small moans and cries. Rough laughter. The scraping of beds against the floor. An occasional human whimper of pain.
The greasy walls and stained floors of this brothel are foul. The long hallway leans out of square, wrong feeling, nauseating. It feels as if a sickness permeates this decrepit building, almost visible in the air, roiling down this cramped corridor like a tendril of oil spreading through drinking water.
Avoiding the front door and its red lantern, I smashed in through a window around the back. The empty stairwell took me to the second floor and this hall. Elena was carried in here minutes ago.
Stopping, I listen for her voice.
The girl believes she no longer needs my protection, but the sight of her futile grip on Hypatia’s devastated body flashes in my mind. Elena was hurt to the quick. My fear of losing her—to Hypatia, to Leizu, or to these monsters—is warming to a hot rage.
The urge to protect her is irresistible. So I give myself to it.
I remember a round copper table in a field tent. A leather map, weighted at the corners, marked with battle lines and bits of colored stone. She studies the plot, a black-haired child, eyes calculating. And around her, in the shadows, warriors loom. We watch her, awaiting orders.
I shake my head to clear it.
The hallway remains empty, lit every few doorways with whale-oil lamps that burn putrid and black. I raise a hand and feel the air on the damp skin of my fingers. My sister is nearby.
The first door I push against is barred from the inside. Vile noises are coming from behind it. Pushing harder, I hear rotten wood splintering. It snaps quietly, the bar thunking to the floor, and I ease the door fully open.
A girl on a stained mattress. A grown man on top. This place is worse than I ever imagined.
Not Elena.
In one lunging step I am upon him, my elbow sliding under the man’s chin. My cheek buried in his curly, flea-infested hair, I stand up and squeeze my bicep until I feel his spine separate from his skull. I drop the warm corpse to the floor while on the bed, a little girl cowers.
A shriek reverberates from down the hall—it is a man’s shout, high-pitched and surprised and cut off almost immediately.
I throw off my hood and dash down the corridor. The door bursts open before I can touch it and a man stumbles out. His filthy hands are wrapped around his own neck, red-black rivulets of blood streaming over his fingers. He opens his mouth to speak and cannot. His teeth are knocked out and broken, throat slit.