As I’m pulled away, I glimpse the automaton’s face again under the lamplight, her eyes pointed mindlessly at the ceiling. A patient survivor of the ages, she has finished sharing her message. But I know there are others like her. Other messages are waiting to be found—other doorways to the past.
The Old Believer slides between me and the automaton, ushering me out of the room. Oleg’s firm hand settles around my shoulder. The priest continues to urge us hoarsely to get out of the church and I shuffle along without complaining. Only as I’m leaving does it strike me—the old man doesn’t sound angry.
He sounds afraid.
4
MOSCOW, 1710
The doll is bright, pretty, and hard.
I have grown used to watching her where she sits at a writing table in Favorini’s workshop. Her face is a pale oval, lips pursed, expression lost in the folds of her lace gown and strands of black hair. She is a thing, like me, and I am reassured by the clockwork cadence of her movement.
In the weeks after I come into being, Favorini keeps me confined to his dim laboratory in what he tells me are the depths of the tsar’s palace in the city of Moscow. At night, as the old man works, I lie silently on the table where I was constructed from mysterious parts. I close my eyes, feeling the hard slab of wood on my back, lingering in the warm air as incantations roll off Favo’s lips.
This world is sometimes overwhelming, but I am patient.
Each morning, Favo sends me to stand beside the doorway. I listen as a tutor drags a stool to the other side of the closed door. I can hear his knee joints popping and I surmise he is a very old man. Favorini must have chosen him because he is hard of hearing and his sight dim. The hidden teacher recites my lessons like a confession and then leaves as soon as he can.
A man who has lived such a long time must have learned not to ask questions.
“Never reveal your nature to a human being,” says Favorini. “You are not of our time. People cannot understand your existence.”
So I stand and I listen to my lessons. I speak only to answer questions, and then I do so quickly and with my ringing voice muffled by the door.
“We will make you better,” Favo says, patting my brass-plated chest. “We can replace some of your parts. You will come to look more like us. Sound more like us. But it will take time. Perhaps centuries.”
Centuries.
“Be patient,” he says, not realizing I have the patience of a mountain. Or perhaps, when Favo says this, he is speaking to himself. “None live who remember the art of creation. Your body I found and was able to restore, but the anima inside you was stamped with the Word long ago. It is what binds you to serve the tsar, and allows you to think, perceive, and feel.”
One morning I return from my lessons to find the doll is missing from her perch at the small writing table. A few stray pieces of her body, inside and out, are scattered grotesquely over the wooden table. It causes me…distress.
The doll is my touchstone. Her presence softens the boundaries of my solitude. My first sight and the most reassuring, she is the closest thing I have ever known to myself.
And in the darkness, I hear a whisper.
“What is the first thing?” asks Favorini. “What is your Word?”
It is a question I have heard before…but this time he is not asking me. This time the question goes out into the flickering gloom, to walls lashed by candlelight. I hear no response, not yet.
Approaching silently, I see the doll sitting on the velvet cushion of a high-backed wooden chair. Her back is straight, knees lost in the frills of her dress, tiny shoes dangling over the floor between chair legs carved into griffin talons.
On his knees, Favorini seems almost to be praying to her.
I am about to retreat back into the darkness…until I notice a fluttering at the throat of her dress—the golden pulse of moving clockwork. A gear in her neck clicks audibly and I pause, watching.
Neck creaking, the doll turns her head to face Favo. Her porcelain eyelids click shut and open again to reveal black eyes. When she speaks, her voice is high-pitched, lilting, like the tinkle of harpsichord keys.
Somehow, it is the voice of a child.
“The Word?” she asks, and within her voice I hear the half-remembered chiming of silver bells and the singing of birds and the burbling of clear streams.
Click. Her eyes blink again.
“Logicka,” she says. “I am the purity of reason.”
Favorini chuckles, delighted.
“Yes, yes!” he says, clapping his hands together.
“The mind,” says Favorini. “Evidence, inference, and cold truth. These are the principles you are devoted to. You seek order in the chaos—”
A board squeaks under my weight. Hands still clasped together, Favorini cranes his neck to peer up at me. I step forward, a hulking shadow emerging into feeble light. Fear skates over the old man’s face.
“The doll who writes?” I ask, and my voice is the crash of waves on rock. Both faces before me are ashen, one of ceramic and the other flesh. “Is this…her?”
“Y-yes and no,” says Favorini. “I have taken her apart and put her back together again. She is something different now. Someone different.”
My porcelain doll—my touchstone—is gone. Unbidden, my fingers fall together into fists. I do not understand how I know what I know, or why I feel what I feel. But the doll is precious to me, and I will not see her harmed.
“Who gave you the right to take her…parts?”
Favorini stands, hunched, his long hands flapping at me like bird wings. “Do not be alarmed, my friend. All is well. Some of her parts were used to create a simple writing doll. A gift for the pope from the tsar. But your porcelain girl, she is still here, with us. Look!”
I look at the childlike machine, recognize the curve of her cheek. She seems larger away from the desk, perhaps the size of a twelve-year-old human girl.
“This is a very special day,” says Favo, his beard twitching with a smile. “I have worked long and hard for this day.”
The doll-girl sits on her velvet cushion, not moving, blank face turned to the darkness. Her voice could almost have been an echo of a dream—a phantom chorus conjured in the unknown workings of my mind. Still and silent, she rests like a toy left abandoned on the chair by a capricious child.
“I meant no harm,” I grumble to both of them.
I take a heavy step back.
And the doll moves. Her arms lift and pat down the ruffles of her dress. She cranes her neck to take in my full height. Her wig of false hair shivers over a porcelain mask. But behind her carved face I can sense thoughts, dropping into neat slots in her mind as her gaze lingers on the rough leather of my cheek. Though her eyes are two black nothings, I feel an understanding in them. An appreciation.
This girl knows what is beneath my skin—what we hold in common.
“Who are you?” I ask.
Favorini responds for her.