This Monstrous Thing Read Online Free

pipe jammed between his teeth. Smoking was hazardous now that his lungs were made of waxed paper and leather, but he still liked gnawing on his pipe as if it were lit. They were strange and unpredictable, the things like smoking that had carried over from before.
    I kicked a balled-up bit of paper out from under the chaise. “What happened here?”
    “I’m bored,” he replied, sliding down off the desk so thathe was straddling the chair. His mechanical joints creaked when he moved. I had replaced one of his arms entirely with a clockwork one, and both knees as well, since that was easier than letting the bones grow back wrong.
    “So clean this place up, that’ll keep you busy for a while. I mended your shirt,” I added as I pulled it out of my bag and threw it to him. He caught it with his mechanical hand. “Anything else you need?”
    “Tobacco.”
    “No.” I pushed a ragged copy of Paradise Lost to the other end of the chaise and sank down onto the cushion. “Why’d you shred all the paper I brought?”
    “Because writing’s dull. Everything’s dull. I’m so bored.” Oliver tossed the shirt on top of the feather pillow. There was a metallic whine, shrill as a teakettle, and he winced.
    I sat up. “Is it giving you problems?”
    “Not the arm,” he said, and rapped his knuckles against his chest. It rang hollowly.
    “I brought my tools.”
    “I’m all right.”
    “Don’t be daft, let me look.” I pulled my work gloves out of my bag as Oliver raised the flame of the lamp balanced on the writing desk and pulled his shirt off over his head. The skin under it was so puckered and punctured that it hardly looked like skin at all. You could still see the stitches, the bolts, the blue patches wherethe needles had gone in. There were places in his side that bulged and rippled as the gears ticked beneath. My fingers stumbled as I wedged them under the seam in his chest and opened it.
    Inside, Oliver was pure machine, all gears and pins like an engine. In a way that’s all it was, an engine doing everything that his irreparably broken body no longer could. His rib cage on one side was gone, replaced by steel rods and a cluster of churning gears connected by leather tubes to a set of bellows that opened and closed with each breath. Where his heart should have been was a knot of cogs around the mainspring, pushing against each other as they ticked like a clock rather than beat like a heart.
    The trouble was easy to spot. One of the bolts had come loose so that a gear was grinding against the oscillating weight as it turned. I tugged my magnifying goggles up from around my neck and fished in my bag for my needle-nose pliers.
    “Can I ask you about something? It’s been bothering me that I can’t remember.” Oliver held up his flesh-and-blood hand for me to see. A thin white scar ran across the knuckles. “What’s this from? It’s older than the others.”
    “Boxing, I think.” I gripped the gear with my pliers and jammed it back into place. Oliver sucked in a sharp breath. “Sorry, should have warned you that might hurt.”
    He shrugged like it didn’t matter, but his voice wastighter when he spoke again. “It doesn’t look like a boxing scar. I thought I must have put my hand through a window or something.”
    “No, you told me someone threw a bottle in the ring and you sliced up your hand.”
    “Did I win the match?”
    “God, Oliver, does it matter? You hurt yourself doing stupid things so many times. They all start to blur together.”
    “Were you there? Did you ever box?”
    I slid the pliers from under the weight and swapped them for a spanner that fit around a loose bolt. “No, boxing is too wild for me.”
    “Wish I could box now.”
    I tightened the bolt harder than I needed to, and Oliver yelped. “And then as soon as you took your shirt off in the ring, they’d see you’re mostly metal and haul you away.”
    “God’s wounds, Ally, it was a joke.” He flexed his hand, watching