Spare and Found Parts Read Online Free Page A

again, but her eyes are on you always. Her mouth, disgusted. You don’t go to the Pasture the following summer. You miss it, the green world, until you don’t. Until the gray world is a comfort.
    You don’t stop missing Nan, though. She sends scarves in brown paper packages, and you wear them around your throat, disguise your scar with softness, with cotton. They come every week. She stops asking you to visit. Eventually she starts telling you what to do.

CHAPTER 3
    F ar outside the boundaries of Black Water City, a silent, guarded line lay between the Pale and the Pasture. The world changed there. The sick were raised and grew and contributed in the Pale; the healed lived and farmed and prayed in the tall grasslands of the Pasture. Nell cast a look over her shoulder at her tousled bed and thought for a moment about the fresh, expensive white sheets she’d sleep in at Nan’s, about the quality of the light out there.
    Until now Nan’s weekly letters had been concerned, full of questions, but never formal. Never angry. Or cold. Nell traced her fingers over Nan’s writing, something worse than guilt catching in her throat. She folded the paper over and placed it back into its envelope, then shuffled it anonymously into the bundle of correspondence. Her wrench, a sometime paperweight, sat in its place.
    The package the letter had arrived with was wrapped with such precision that Nell took it apart with reverence, so as not to spoil the embossed paper patterned with tiny birds in flight. It contained a scarf, a wisteria print flecked with tiny sequins, newly woven, not salvaged. A scarf for going out. A fancy scarf, one for the mood lighting at the Bayou. A pretty disguise. Nell pulled it out to wrap around her shoulders, and something fell out of its shimmering folds: four batteries, shrink wrapped. A small square of paper flittered to the ground. Nell scooped it up. Nan again: “Make good use of these.”
    A smile woke up in Nell. All right, Nan, she thought. I will.
    She unpeeled the film and examined the batteries: wouldn’t be much use for a big project, but for a small exercise, perfect.
    Nell’s work desk, oak and sturdy and far older than she was, was nestled in an alcove in the corner of her room, just a little away from her drawing table. It was part immaculate order and part utter chaos and looked as if it had bloomed out of the wall: a natural junkyard, just her size. There were jars full of tiny gears, clusters of springs, careful assortments of screws, collections of tape, coils of wires organized by size on the pegboard on the wall, their metal glinting in the lamplight. There was just enough room for Nell to spread herelbows, a whole inventory of pieces and parts barely even an arm’s length away. She knew the geography of this clockwork cove better than any place.
    A tiny blowtorch was coupled neatly with an alarmingly toothy set of pliers, overseen by a grand family of hammers displayed on the headboard, all the way from the daintiest of cross-peen pins to a grand, fat joiner’s mallet. Nell had never actually used that one; she didn’t really deal in large constructions, but it was handy to have it there nonetheless. Hinges of gold and silver and stainless steel and some polluted with rust lay about the place like loose butterflies in a lush metal garden. This was Nell’s playground, and her Nan, her furious Nan, had gifted her some new batteries to toy with.
    Two sets of goggles hung like neighbors: one for general protection (Nell had torched her eyebrows off on more than one occasion) and the other equipped with adjustable lenses, allowing her to look more closely at smaller parts and mechanisms without having to use one hand for a magnifying glass. Though lupes and spyglasses were helpful, too; a bouquet of varying lenses stood in a vase in the corner.
    Nell’s gloves (latex, cotton, leather, steel tipped at the fingers) and welding masks all