“Look at me.”
Mary White looked and was amazed and could not tear her gaze away from the sight of him, could not stop the dry catch of breath in her throat as her scream died there before it could reach her tongue.
Along the shore, the wind swirled sand into small hills and broke them down again, carrying the grains on. The sideshow workers packed up their cards and dice. A dog barked and was rewarded with hot-dog scraps. The bearded lady sighed at her window; her lover was late. The globe of the world spun and wobbled, set in motion by some invisible finger. A thin cloak of gray clouds passed in the night sky; the moon ducked behind them and hid its face for grief.
SERGEANT LEONARD
Jericho pulled himself to a sitting position and hissed with pain. He was sore and his shirt was off. The faded scar, which snaked down the front of his broad chest, was now partially hidden by a layer of soft down. There was a new wound—a stitched hole above his left pectoral muscle—and Jericho remembered being surrounded in the woods, remembered the gun going off and the impact. He pieced together what must have happened and realized with growing horror that Evie must know everything now. But there she was on the other bed, asleep in her clothes, her shoes still on. She’d stayed with him, he realized. She’d found out and chosen to stay.
Jericho lay back down on his side, watching her breathe just an arm’s length from him. She was not beautiful while she slept; her mouth hung open and she snored very lightly, and this, despite everything that had happened, made him smile. Dreaming, she stirred and stretched, and he looked away. The first glimmerings of dawn showed through the window. The tiny tin clock on the bedside table read ten minutes past five. Evie’s eyes fluttered open, and Jericho quickly pulled the sheet up to cover his scars.
“Jericho?” Evie asked, her voice still sleep-caked.
“What happened, Evie?”
“You were shot. Unc and I got you back here,” she said carefully. “Jericho, what’s in those blue vials?”
“How many did it take?”
“Three.”
“Did I… did I hurt you or Will?”
“No,” she lied. “Jericho, please.”
“You won’t understand,” he said softly.
“Please stop telling me that.”
“You won’t.”
“I won’t unless you tell me.”
“The infantile paralysis. There was no miracle. It burned through me just like it did my sister. It shut down my legs, then my arms, and finally my lungs. They put me in the metal coffin and told me I’d be in it for the rest of my life. Trapped. I’d never breathe on my own. Never walk or ride a horse again. Never touch anyone.” His gaze flicked over the curve of Evie’s body. “Never do a thing but stare up at that ceiling till I died. After the war, there were soldiers coming back with their arms and legs missing. Men blown apart. They had a secret innovation they were trying—the Daedalus program—to help the soldiers coming back.”
“What sort of innovation?”
Jericho took a deep breath. “A merging of man and machine. A human-automaton hybrid,” Jericho said. “They would replace what had been damaged beyond repair in the war or by disease with steel and wires and cogs. We would be the perfect miracle of the industrial age. The robotnik. You’re staring.”
Evie quickly looked away. “I… I’m sorry. It’s so fantastic. I just don’t understand….” She looked at him again. “Please.”
“We were the test subjects,” Jericho continued. “They wouldn’t tell us anything except that the machinery would replace our defective parts and, over time, fuse with our very human systems. This was achieved by a new miracle serum—the vials of blue liquid—and vitamin tonic. It was supposed to keep the balance between our two selves. We would change mankind, they promised.”
“That’s astonishing. But why hasn’t it been in the papers? Why isn’t this the biggest story since Moses brought down the Ten Commandments?”
“Because it didn’t work,” Jericho said bitterly.
“But… I don’t understand.”
“I told you there were others.” With one finger, Jericho rolled a spent ampoule in his palm. “Their bodies rejected the formula, or the machinery, or both. It might be a few days or a few weeks, but then they’d turn feverish as the infection burned through their ravaged bodies, proving just how human they were after all. But the ones who died were lucky.”
“Lucky?” Evie said, incredulous.
Jericho’s expression darkened. “Some went mad. They’d see things that weren’t there, talk to nothing at all. They’d rage with prophecies. Or they’d go wild until the orderlies would have to come with the restraints, and even then it took an awful lot of men to hold them down. The doctors doped them while they tried to figure out what to do. I watched them shrink back into themselves. Husks sent off to asylums to die.”
Jericho placed the ampoule on the bedside table. The glass still had a blue cast to it. “There was this soldier in the bed beside mine. Sergeant Barry Leonard, from Topeka. I remember he told me that if I wanted to know what Topeka looked like, I should just imagine hell with a dry-goods store. And the dry-goods store didn’t have anything you wanted, anyway. He was a pretty funny fellow.”
Jericho grinned at some private memory, then went serious again.