Tin Fingers: Book 2 in the Arachnodactyl Series Page 7

  “I am a veteran of the Boer War.”

  Ikey picked up his glass. “You fought the Boers? Did you fight on Talana Hill?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Percy said. “It was a long time ago, and I have a new battle to fight.”

  “And that is?” Cross asked.

  Percy leaned forward. His voice hovered above a whisper. “The people of Kerryford are my kith and kin. I was born and raised here. In these streets. I came back from the war and watched as this area turned from a peaceful village to towering factories. These factories swallow up our people. They eat fingers. Hands. Whole legs and arms. Entire bodies. More than once I’ve had to help scrape away and untangle the remains of a young person who stood too close to a belted flywheel. And for our efforts, for every finger, hand, or arm we lose, we are sent off to the choppers for augmentations, to have our injuries replaced with mechanism so that we might be sent straight back to the factory floor.”

  Cross’s chair creaked as he sat back. “Why, that doesn’t sound half bad. If Ikey here had lost his arm—”

  “You had a choice, though, didn’t you, Ikey?” Percy asked. “You heard about Kerryford. About the choppers. You chose to come down here and seek out someone who could replace your arm. Am I right?”

  Ikey nodded. He took a sip of his drink.

  “No one gets such a choice here. You get an augmentation whether you want one or not.”

  “Bah! Who doesn’t bloody well want one?” Cross asked.

  “It’s a steep price. The augmentations are expensive. Prohibitively so. The only way one can afford them is to have them financed by an employer. If you agree to augmentation, you also agree to work indentured to the factory until the balance of the augmentation is paid off.”

  Ikey sipped at his drink. He could work hard. He could pay off an augmentation or two, especially if one of the choppers gave him back his eyesight.

  “That sounds nothing but fair,” Cross said. “I don’t see what the problem is. Of course the employer should get his money back.”

  “It’s not fair. There is nothing fair to it,” Percy continued. “The employers forgo even the most basic safety measures, and they do so because they wish neither to pay for a safe working environment, nor see their employees leave. Once a person falls prey to augmentation, his life is over. The most basic augmentation costs a small fortune. While working off the balance of one, the laborer invariably falls prey to a second or third crippling accident, taking on more augmentations and going deeper into debt. It is slavery. Foul slavery.”

  Ikey rubbed at his chin. “How expensive are the augmentations? Say, an arm? And maybe an eye?”

  “More than you can afford.”

  “How do you know what we can afford?” Cross asked.

  “I know what you cannot afford,” Percy said. “And you cannot afford to dally with a chopper in Kerryford. If you had money enough to avoid this trap, you would not be here. You would be paying for a chopper to visit you.”

  Ikey placed his drink on the table. “I have to have an arm. Or at least the hooks, the set-up. I can build my own arm. Or we can. Cross and me. We’re right smart with mechanics.”

  Laughter erupted across the bar. Feet shuffled, then chairs and a table scooted across the floor. A glass shattered with unnerving clarity. More laughter erupted and the chairs on either side of Ikey squeaked as his companions turned to watch the commotion.

  “I implore you,” Percy said as he turned back to Ikey. “Reconsider what you truly value. There is dignity in being human. A dignity to being a creature of flesh, a man made in God’s own image. Augmentation is… It’s something that I’ve seen erode the souls of many men and women. Once you have that mechanical arm or leg, and you see the raw power of it, the strength and stamina, the rest of your body appears inferior. It seems weak. And I’ve seen people fall into the trap where the flesh body becomes something to shed. They take liberties with their remaining limbs, willing to have them smashed or torn from their body so they can be replaced with something that never grows weary, never aches or blisters or pulses with pain. Such people erode away to mechanism over time, becoming less and less human until somewhere along the way, they lose whatever spark it was that made them a person. They become machines. Automatons. It is a slippery slope, and I caution you to be wary of its pull. I ask you to stand up for the dignity of humanity and be yourself. Reject augmentation.”

  Cross snickered. “Says the man wearing a mask.”

  Ikey straightened his back. Percy’s words sat around him like strange animals, creatures that he didn’t know the nature or inclination of.

  “My beliefs and my willingness to stick with them make me an unpopular man with the parish,” Percy said. “I find it to my advantage to keep a low profile. Men wearing masks aren’t uncommon in Kerryford.”

  “Your slur, though,” Ikey said. “Your face is damaged.”

  “Yes. A long time ago. Another fight on another continent. And I’ve chosen to live with these wounds and these scars because men need to be reminded of the cost of war. And that is why I ask you to bear the burden of your disability proudly and openly. We need to be reminded of the cost of industry as much as war.”

  Fingers drummed across the table. “Another round?” Cross asked.

  Ikey held up an open palm. “I’ll pass.”

  “Suit yourself.” His chair scooted back and Cross’s familiar, long stride stilted across the floor.

  “How did you lose your arm and your eyes?” Percy asked.

  Ikey snorted. “Call it an industrial accident. I was working on a ship and got caught in a fire.”

  “Whose fault was it?”

  “Mine.”

  A finger tapped the edge of a glass. The ring of it suggested that it was still half full. Ikey took a drink of his own.

  “I admire your honesty,” Percy said. “I don’t see much of that anymore.”

  “I don’t see much of anything.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I can’t live like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Could you?” Ikey asked.

  “I could.”

  “You say that now because you can see.”

  “I say that now because it is the truth. I know beyond all doubt that if I succumb to augmentation, I am weakening the stand I take against the oligarchy that runs this kingdom. I am standing up for the dignity, the safety, and the security of my fellow countrymen. I will defend that to my dying breath, and so I can say with absolute certainty that I would not take an augmentation no matter my loss.”

  “Bully for you,” Ikey said and chased his statement with a swallow of scotch. Heat flushed across his arm and his legs. One of the few nice things about blindness was not having to avoid Percy’s gaze. Still, Ikey found himself staring down at the dark space where the table sat.

  If anything, Percy’s words filled Ikey with hope. Work in Kerryford would be plentiful. He could do more than tend some loom or feed a boiler. Put to work fixing the machines of industry, or even building the prosthetics used by the workers, he could make a pretty penny and make it quickly. With what he had learned from Cross, he could make prosthetics unlike any seen in Kerryford. Prosthetics that would be coveted. Ikey pictured elegant arms that resembled the one discovered in Cross’s workshop. He imagined presenting the arm to someone like himself, how the person’s face would light up with joy and appreciation for having part of his pride restored.

  Percy, on the other hand, was asking Ikey to remain a beggar, a pauper living off the guilt or whatever it was that spurred Cross and Rose to keep him around. This was unacceptable. He would not cower in a dark house the rest of his life. Whatever it took, whatever the cost, he had to get back what he lost.

  “I thank you for your advice,” Ikey said. “I appreciate it.”

  Percy took a drink and replaced his glass before him. “I renege on what I said earlier about your honesty.”

  “That’s your right. Your
business.”

  “And your business is your own, of course. I only request that you ask yourself what makes you so special that the same rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to you.”

  Cross stepped up to the table. “I think I’m in love.”

  When no one asked him to elaborate, Cross spoke of the barmaid’s sharp wit, the glint in her eye when she invited him to go bugger himself.

  “Jessamine is known far and wide,” Percy said.

  “I think our business is finished here,” Ikey said. He tilted back his glass and swallowed the rest of the scotch. It tore the breath from his chest and whipped it about like shaking dust from a rug.

  “I just got settled in,” Cross said.

  “I believe he was talking to me,” Percy said. His chair scooted back from the table. “I will take my leave of you, gentlemen. But if this man is your friend, you will keep him out of the choppers’ shops. If they unsheath their scalpels against him, you will have lost him forever.”

  “I’m his friend all right,” Cross said, “but not his bloody nanny. He can do as he pleases.”

  Ikey smiled at Cross’s response.

  “I see.” Percy pushed his chair back to the table. “Then I bid you both a fair evening, and I will caution you with one last thing. Don’t dally in Kerryford. Many of the people in this city have become resentful of those who are whole-bodied or without augments. You can expect to find that a certain attitude will follow you around until you leave.”

  “Bah,” Cross said. “They just haven’t gotten to know me yet. I’m really quite loveable, I am.”

  A few seconds passed before Percy walked away and the form of him faded into the blurry stew of images and shapes that shifted and eddied across the mud of Ikey’s vision.

  “What a happy bloke, that one,” Cross said as he leaned over the table. “What do you suppose he was after?”

  Ikey shrugged. “I don’t know. A nutter, I guess.”

  “Need another?”

  Ikey shook his head. The fumes from the scotch clouded his head. Though it eased the pain in his shoulder, it also made thinking difficult. Furthermore, it clouded his senses, jumbled together the sounds and smells and the few sights he made out. The world pressed around him like a thick paste, like he walked around shrouded forever in curtains of muslin. If he had his eyesight, he wouldn’t have gotten lost. He would have never met Percy and be treated to his crackpot lunacy. Hell, if he’d had his eyes and his arm, he wouldn’t be here at all. He’d be…

  He knew he should be back at the farm, looking after his uncle, but he pictured himself perched on a stool, elbow planted on the stained and scarred surface of Cross’s workbench, the broken music boxes silently regarding them as they constructed some miraculous machine.

  With Uncle Michael, Ikey only repaired things. Cross created things.

  Ikey lowered his head. Heat flushed into his face. “I’d like to get going.”

  “You in a hurry?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  After Cross got directions, they set out for a chopper’s shop. As they navigated the streets, Cross kept a hand on Ikey’s shoulder and guided him along. A coughing jag spread a deep heat across Ikey’s cheeks, and he was glad for it, grateful the flushing and coughing covered the embarrassment of being steered through the streets like a mule.

  As they walked, the unique soundscape of Kerryford accompanied them, wrapped them in its cloak of percussion as the city crawled over itself with mechanism.

  “It’s the damnedest thing,” Cross said.

  “What’s that?” Ikey asked.

  “Not a bloody beggar to be seen.”

  Ikey closed his eye and listened. Now that Cross had mentioned it, he hadn’t heard a single person ask for change or food. He hadn’t heard the jingle of change in a cup.

  “Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Their vagrancy laws must be enforced stiffly down here. That’s all there is to it. They can’t possibly be without paupers here.”

  The sounds of the street were different, as if Cross had pulled aside a curtain and revealed another street behind it. The sounds were harder. Sharper. Alien and strange.

  After a few more blocks, Cross announced they were there, and steered Ikey to his right.

  “Up a flight of stairs,” Cross said.

  Ikey reached into the dark and felt along the wall until his hand lighted upon a stair rail. He pulled himself up. The toe of his boot tested each step before he counted it off. His eye drifted closed, and for a moment, he pretended he was back at Cross’s house, pulling himself up the stairwell to the top floor, to the hallway that ran the length of the house and took him to his bedroom where Rose used to visit him.

  A hiss of steam and a holler, a whoop jolted Ikey from his reverie.

  “What the bloody hell?” Cross asked from behind.

  Ikey paused on the stairs.

  “Well, move along,” Cross called.

  Ikey continued up. After the 14th step, his toe thumped against and rattled a door. He found the doorknob. As he twisted, he expected to find it locked, but the latch slid back with a click. He pushed. The hinges creaked and the scent of oil and rot oozed past him.

  “Bloody Nora,” Cross whispered.

  Ikey opened his eye. Vague shapes stood out of the shadows. A blurry ball of light appeared at the back of a shallow room. One of the shapes shifted and moved. It grew larger as the floorboards creaked under a shuffling stride.

  “Can we help us, gentlemen--nnnn…” a voice asked. An odd voice, fake and inhuman. Not exactly like a voice on a phonograph, but artificial, with a steady rhythm to it.

  “Move,” Cross hissed and gave a slight shove to Ikey’s shoulder with his knuckles.

  Ikey stumbled forward a step.

  “We’re looking for The Old Chopper,” Cross said.

  “We are The Old Chopper,” the voice said. “Are we here for augmentation-nnnnn...” the voice asked, its inflection rising up at the end of its question, building in pitch until it ended in a click.

  Cross nudged Ikey.

  “Yes,” Ikey said. “I’d like augmentation. I want a new arm. And an eye. And I want the arm with the hooks embedded in the chest so that I can control a mechanical arm. I want that.”

  “One moment,” the voice said. It shuffled back to the end of the room. A match hissed. A new, fuzzy orb of light appeared. It floated toward Ikey and halted before him. The heat of it washed over his face. A cold, metallic vice gripped his chin and lifted until his back was straight, and his heels ached not to pitch him up on his toes.

  “That face,” the voice said in a measured, slow tone. “Looks like a serious burn. Old, too. Why didn’t our employers send you to us-ssss…” Click.

  “None of your business,” Cross said. “Can you help him or not?”

  “We can help you, of course,” the voice said. “But without financial assistance from our employer, I doubt we will be able to afford treatment.”

  “I have means,” Cross said.

  “I’m willing to work,” Ikey mumbled. He pulled himself backwards until he slipped out of the thing’s grip and stumbled back into the pole of Cross.

  “I’m sure we are,” the voice said. “We all are.”

  “He don’t need to work,” Cross said.

  “Tell me how much you’ll charge. For everything.”

  The voice rocked with a rhythmic racket that sounded like an engine chugging under labor. It died off slowly as Ikey realized it was intended as laughter.

  “Oh, dear boy,” The Old Chopper said, “if we think we can waltz in here and try to buy our services, then we have neither the sense nor the money to receive augmentations. We’re afraid contracted labor is the only way to get what we want.”

  “What contract?” Ikey asked.

  Cross placed a hand on Ikey’s shoulder. “Never mind. There are other choppers in Kerryford.”

  “Simple contract,” the voice said. “A company pays for augmentation
s, then we work until the balance is paid.”

  The grip tightened on Ikey’s shoulder. “Come on. He’s not the only bugger in town.”

  “How long? What does it take to pay off the balance?” Ikey asked. Pressure built up in his stomach. Augmentation seemed so possible. He rubbed the tips of his fingers against the leg of his trousers and felt the press of his touch against his thigh. The ghost of his left arm cried out and throbbed and itched and squirmed with the prickling of thousands of needles and the part of his brain responsible for touch and sensation felt like a slipped gear as it wondered why it registered nothing from the left thigh as well.

  To be rid of that. Made whole. And to see again. To not have to be led around like an animal. To stand up for himself, see clearly and wield a fist of iron and not have to rely on Cross or Percy or anyone else to come to his rescue. And to work for it himself, without the charity of Cross. Oh, it couldn’t be soon enough!

  “Depends on the augmentation,” the voice said. “A new arm and eye would require… say two years.”

  “Two years?” Ikey asked. His eyebrow lifted at the prospect. Two years as a common laborer could be reduced to months if he put his mechanical skills to work.

  “Let’s go,” Cross said.

  “I’d like to think it over,” Ikey said.

  A high-pitched moan pulsed through the wall behind the voice. The moan stopped in a clatter. A muffled giggle seeped through the wall like brackish water.

  “Take our time,” the voice said. “When we’re ready, we’ll be here.”

  “Come on, you blasted tosser,” Cross said with a tug on Ikey’s shoulder.

  Ikey turned around, then glanced over his shoulder and tried for one last, good glimpse of The Old Chopper, but he saw only the blur of light that may have been a face. But in that room, nothing seemed what it ought to be.

  Ikey reached out and found the doorway. He guided his foot onto the first step. Cross hurried him, shoving against his shoulder. His balance lurched. Ikey stamped down on the next step and slapped his palm flat against the wall to stop himself from tumbling down the flight of stairs.

  “Watch it,” Ikey spat.

  “Yeah yeah. Sorry, Sally, but let’s get moving, got it?” Cross coughed.