Chapter 12
Chapter 12
I don’t return to the tower, nor to Heartwood’s garden. I will, but I need time to think.
Because I know who did it.
I mull over this for the thousandth time as I sit, butt right on the dirt, in the corner of the forge, working on the rover as Arthen melts and shapes my latest scraps. He saves small, excess fragments and covertly sets them aside, and I know he’s readying some for a new set of darts, but most are being diverted for my pet project. If we can get this rover working, it will help the farmers, which will help all of us.
The rover is a machine I understand. One that doesn’t drill into my head and give me flashes of something other. In my hands are pure truth: tools, grit, sweat, metal. I made the ceramic pieces myself. They’ll wear, but they’re supposed to. Something I learned from the tower. A lot of what I’m doing I learned from the tower. I based the motor on a simplified version of the turbine system in Machine One.
I hate these pestering thoughts. They nag and bite like fire ants, and no matter how many times I sweep them away, they return, in numbers, relentless. The earth murmurs beneath me as another gentle quake rolls by, as if to agree with the sentiment.
Hands. I can’t remember enough detail about the hands in that ... vision. But the imprint in the strut is no flight of fancy. Moseus and Heartwood are similar in appearance, yes. But Moseus has a more slender build, more elegant. If that didn’t exonerate him, his utter control of his emotions would.
Heartwood left that mark in the strut. His hands are the right size. The mathematician in me says I should measure to be sure, but I know. I know.
But I don’t understand why. Which is one of the reasons I haven’t returned to the tower. But that’s fine. Emgarden needs me, too. I have other things to do besides tinkering around with millennia-old apparatus until the mist.
“Here.” Arthen hands me the last piece I commissioned. The one I made him redo twice, because it didn’t fit in the rover. It’s cool and still damp from the quenching bucket as I accept it without looking up. I’m grateful. He knows I’m grateful. I’m just focused.
I remember the cycle when Moseus first came to my door, knocking at the height of the mist. Remember the stir of his cool breath as he leaned close to me in the dark of his room. How insistent he was that I help him. How important it was. The tower was the only means he had for getting past the amaranthine wall. For reuniting with his people.
And Heartwood had single-handedly destroyed it.
Had he done more? I dwell on the very first unwanted image the machines pressed into my thoughts: Machine One, in far more pieces than it had been when I first saw it. Was that something to come? Something from another lifetime? I hate trying to sort this out. I’d truly rather throw my head into the wall until my skull cracked.
“When was the last time you slept?” Arthen asks.
I merely hum in response, tightening the nut on the new piece. It’s not until then that I realize the rover is, more or less, finished. I want a shell on it, to protect the mechanics from the elements and provide hooks for more pails, but ... this is it. Just needs wheels.
I sit with the creation, numb, for a long moment.
“Pell?” Arthen prods me with the toe of his boot.
Coming to myself, I shove him away. “I just need wheels.”
He helps me turn the thing over—it’s heavier than it looks—and brings the wheels over, screwing in the one at the front while I do the two in the back. Then, with the tip of a nail, I carve my mark—a rhombus with three lines—on the underside of the frame.
With a grunt, we right it. I grab a banged-up kettle and pour water into the intake at the back. Wind the machine at the bottom, pull a cord to spark the simple engine. The rover shudders, barks, and rolls forward.
“Serpent bite me.” Arthen puts his hands on his hips.
I cry. Almost. Moisture fills my eyes, my throat thickens, my head hurts. But no tears fall. Instead, as the rover picks up speed and exits the forge, I laugh. It hurts to laugh. Chasing after the thing, I stop it before it hits the shop across the road.
We did it. We built it. We made this.
I can do this.
“What in Ruin’s hell is that?” Maglon’s voice rings down the street. He steps out from the alehouse, wiping his hands on a towel. “Is that the ... the thing?”
“The thing,” I manage, clearing my throat and steadying myself. “This is the thing.”
Arthen shows Maglon how to work it while I run to Salki’s house. Casnia is sleeping. She hasn’t left Salki’s side since we brought her back home. She’s not all there, but she’s not irrational. Her disappearance was an emotional outburst that she didn’t understand. Still, Salki moves quickly as I take her to the rover, not wanting to be away long.
Arthen has straightened out the machine and started it up again, so it heads straight down the road. It’s as high as my hip and about a meter wide. Will measure wider, once I complete the shell.
“Wow.” Salki gapes. Reaches out to touch it as it passes by, only to whip her hand away like it will sting her. “It’s really ... moving on its own?” She bends down, trying to see under the carriage.
“With some water and wires.” I beam. I’m tired. Suddenly so very tired, but pride fills my chest, ballooning me up on heavy legs.
More people come out to see it, curious, unconvinced. In a show of bravery, Amlynn sits on the edge of the rover, then shrieks when it carries her off. I built it to hold a lot of weight. It can’t move as fast as a man running, for now, but it can outlast one. Future adjustments and iterations will improve the design.
Mist settles in as we put the rover away, ready for its maiden voyage come first sun.
I accept praise and congratulations humbly, if only because I’m tired, and wend my way home, seeing Salki to hers first. I barely remember to lock the door before I drop on my bed and pass out like I’ve just dug a grave. Which is why, two hours later, I’m reluctant to peel my eyes open when someone knocks on my door.
I know it’s Moseus. How I know, I’m not sure. I haven’t memorized his knock, and he hates leaving the tower. Yet when I open the door, I’m unsurprised. Merely wave him inside.
“I was coming back next mist.” I stifle a yawn with the back of my hand.
“I was concerned.” Moseus looks me over. For injury, maybe. He looks hale, like the first mist we met. He stands straighter. His eyes are brighter, less sunken.
“I still have work here,” I press. “I can’t be at your every beck and call.”
He lifts a fine white eyebrow. “I don’t recall becking, nor calling.”
I smirk, but the half-formed smile swiftly fades. Hugging myself, I peer out the window into the high mist, which obscures nearly everything. “I ... do need to talk to you. Better here than there.”
Moseus folds his arms, his hands disappearing into his black robe. “What is it?”
I gesture to a chair, my eyes straying to the hidden floor panel, then away. “Care to sit?”
“I don’t mean to be away long. You understand.”
Stepping away from door and window, I decide on straightforwardness as the best method. I don’t want to hurt Moseus, but I value truth over his relationship with Heartwood, and I get the sense that he does, too. Still, to be sure, I extend my hand. “May I?”
Confusion limns his brow, but after a moment, he understands and reaches a hand toward mine. His remarkably pale skin contrasts starkly with mine; his walk in the mist has made his touch cold. I expected soft skin and a frail touch, but there’s strength in these fingers, more than meets the eye. Still, I take measure of his knuckles, and I know I’m right.
Releasing his hand, I explain, “I thought Machine Three was forgotten by the Ancients, but it wasn’t. It was broken. I’ve found damage.” The literal imprint of a fist, and what kind of a creature can cave steel with his knuckles? Squaring my shoulders, I add, “Heartwood broke it.”
I expect tension in his smooth features, a widening of the eyes, a step back at the news. But Moseus exudes only calmness. “I know.”
Okay, I’ll react that way, then. Louder than I intend, I counter, “What do you mean, you know?”
“I need you to fix it, Pell.” He leans forward, determined, unruffled. “I will handle Heartwood.”
I gape. “You knew he destroyed the machine you need to reunite with your people, and you didn’t think it necessary to tell me?” Heat flares in my belly and licks out toward my limbs.
“Can you fix it?”
Grabbing a fistful of hair, I walk away from him. Release it and pace back. “I think? There is physical damage in the struts, and who knows where else. There’s a lot to sift through!” One breath, two, three. “Why? Why would he do such a thing?”
A soft frown pulls at Moseus’s lips. “Heartwood can be ... volatile.”
Volatile, great. I love the idea of working in a tower with a man who can just casually snap my femur if I look at him wrong. “He’s dangerous?”
“I will worry about Heartwood,” he reiterates. “He will not harm you.”
Won’t he?I almost say. I might have protested further, if I hadn’t followed Heartwood into his garden. If he hadn’t, oddly enough, welcomed my presence there.
Do not tell Moseus,he’d said. But why?
“Though, it may be in your best interest to give him a wide berth,” Moseus adds.
I take a moment to settle myself. Wide berth. Why didn’t I get this warning sooner? When I first came to the tower, for instance. Shouldn’t one of the rules have been, Stay away from that guy. He’s volatile? And yet Heartwood seemed anything but dangerous in the garden. He hadn’t even left a bruise on my arm when he fished me out of that spring.
I work my jaw, my fingers. Ignore a headache blooming between my eyes. “Is there anything else I need to know?”
“Does knowing the reason for the machine’s dilapidation alter the means you must take to repair it?”
I stew at that question and grind out, “Not particularly.”
“I will handle Heartwood. I need you to fix the machines.”
My neck a rusted joint, I nod, and Moseus sees himself to the door. “Next mist,” he says, and vanishes into the fog.
As promised, I return to the tower during the next mist. I’m glad to have had a cycle to tamp down my anger, but it simmers around my bones, all the hotter when I get up to the third floor and pick up that bent strut. Moseus will have to concede and let me take it to Arthen, unless I can get the machine working without it. I don’t know if Arthen will notice the imprint of a fist. I don’t know if he’ll have questions.
Always more questions, but never enough answers.
In a bout of fury, I chuck the thing across the room, the metal clamoring loudly against the stone floor. Guess Heartwood isn’t the only volatile one in this tower. Repair, repair, repair, but my limitations continuously grow. My victory with the water rover feels paltry in comparison to the dismantled beast before me. How am I supposed to fix what I don’t understand?
“If you want to start talking to me again and give me a hint, now’s the time to do it,” I mutter to the machine. I scoot piles of parts closer to its base, trying to map out their relationships. I’m thinking too far ahead. I know I am. I need to stay in the present. One little step at a time. But I’m overwhelmed. I’m looking at all of this, and I’m drowning in it.
Volatile. Strong enough to bend steel. Fantastic.
I work better when I’m angry. Faster. But I can’t utilize that fuel because I’m lost, which only frustrates me more. I’m not gentle with the pieces, but they can handle it. The Ancients built these things strong. Just not strong enough for the people trapped on the other side of the wall.
Maybe they’re supposed to stay over there.
I’m grumbling to myself as I shift the entry angle for a spindle feed, wondering if this hunk of machinery is supposed to run off of dreams and emilies, when I hear footsteps on the ladder. I push my socket wrench too hard and it snaps a screw, causing my hand to slam into a plate, and I curse loudly.
“Pell.”
Heartwood’s voice. Oh, buddy, you do not want to talk to me right now. Guess Moseus’s suggestion to keep a wide berth wasn’t shared with the other keeper.
Ignoring him, I shake out my hand, adjust the damn entry angle, and step back, grabbing a coil despite having no idea where it goes.
He pauses near the center of the room, halfway between the ladder and the machine. “You should not be gone so long without word,” he says.
My blood boils hotter. “I’m not your slave,” I bite back, setting the coil aside and grabbing a pile of gears. Maybe if I can fit these together on the floor, I’ll figure out how they fit in the machine.
“I never said as much. I—we—were merely concerned.”
“Concerned?”I drop a gear and stand up, glowering. “You’re concerned for me?” So many venomous words rise in my throat, I almost choke on them. Forcing my attention back to the gears, I say, “Go away, Heartwood. I don’t want you anywhere near me or this machine.”
He doesn’t retreat. “I don’t understand.”
Now I chuck one of the gears at the wall, feeling a little satisfaction when he starts. “Let me spell it out for you. I have to fix this garbage because you broke it. I know you did. I don’t know what the hell you are, but I know.”
His eyes widen, but he schools his features decently well, minus the eyes and the clenching of his jaw.
I try to turn back to my work, but I can’t. Red curls around my vision like mist. Wielding an accusatory wrench, I advance on him. He starts heading back toward the ladder.
“Coward,” I spit.
He flinches.
“I don’t understand.” I march toward him. “If you’re so desperate to get these machines working again, why would you do something like this? What’s your aim?”
His shoulders tense. He doesn’t turn toward me. In the back of my mind, I know I’m walking a thin line, but my fury needs an outlet, and I want answers.
“Is this some kind of sick ploy against Moseus? He’s trying so hard, Heartwood. He came and collected me himself. And he knows you’re the reason the tower doesn’t function. Even before I told him, he knew. I don’t know how he has the patience and forgiving nature to keep you around, but I sure wouldn’t.”
I’m a pace away from him now. As usual, Heartwood remains silent, and the silence makes me rage. How dare he ignore me.
“Don’t you care?” The thread of emotion leaking into my voice surprises me, and I grow louder to compensate for it. “If I miraculously find some way to put this back together, does it even mean anything, or will you just tear it apart again—”
I don’t see it coming.
Heartwood lunges, a blur of white and brown. His hand grabs the front of my shirt and yanks me to the side, pressing me against the nearest wall and pinning me with inhuman strength. One fist against my collar, his opposite arm barring both of mine, one long leg pinning my thighs. I am helpless, and with his ghostly features looming over me, I realize how small I am, how stupid. Fear seizes my heart in cold, clamped fingers. Words die in my mouth.
“I broke it,” he hisses, “because it took you away from me.”
He releases me all at once, and I gasp in air like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
Heartwood’s sharp eyes peel away from me, and he vanishes down the hole in the floor, never once touching the ladder.