Page 90 of The Teras Trials

“There are far better ways to feel good,” Leo murmurs.

And I can’t believe he’s flirting with me when I look like this, when I’m naked, hunched over, missing an arm, scratched to hell and bruised, so I laugh. I sit there and laugh and then I push myself back to lie on the bed stretched out. I look up at the ceiling, white with floral cornices, and my heart settles enough that for the first time in days I can really breathe.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s all okay. Maybe it will be fine. Because he makes me laugh, and I can envision it: years studying together, years learning, making love, graduating.

Leo lies down with me, not looking my way, just staring up at the ceiling. And in that pocket of a moment and a dream for a future, I think I could be happy. Long enough to forget what I had to do to get there.

He reaches out for my right hand. I take it.

“Will you light a cigarette for me?” I ask. I haven’t had one in days. “I’ve been too afraid to try and light it. I think that would break me, you know? Seeing how impossible it is to light a cigarette.”

Leo says nothing. But he gets up and lights me a cigarette.

* * *

The arm is beautiful.

The Artificer returns alone the following morning. He is already in my room when I wake, unboxing the thing as if it’s perfectly acceptable to be agitating in the corner of a wounded man’s space.

“Right,” he says, when he catches my eye. Abraham. “Are you ready?”

The Artificer kneels before this long, tan-leather box with two golden clasps. He snaps them open and the lid pops up, shielding my view. But when he raises it high, and I see it for the first time, my heart nearly stops.

It doesn’t look like mine. And I don’t mean this literally. I’m not stupid. I knew it wasn’t going to look like flesh.

But it is beautiful, inherently. The craftsmanship, the material, the blue shot through the porcelain like veins, the way the fingers droop—how can this belong to Cassius Jones? I’m a rat. I have lived in hovels and a tiny apartment my whole life. Even when I’ve spent years safe behind London’s wards, there is a stark difference between myself and people who grew up here. Between safety and luxury. And I know it is solipsistic self-absorption to think there is inherent dirt in my flesh, but I can’t help but shiver at the thought of having such a beautiful item classed as mine.

I have the thought that I don’t deserve this. At once, I think I mean losing my arm and gaining this one.

Abraham comes close with it. As he walks, the morning sun catches the metal interspersed between the arms joints. It’s a white porcelain, alabaster. Gold connects every articulated joint, and likely runs below the porcelain plates that have been placed on top. And the porcelain is painted in the way fine china is; blue floral decadence, vines my new veins.

Abraham kneels before me and holds the arm high, like a knight offering his sword to a king, which ultimately feels so silly I can’t do anything except nod. Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, thank you, please attach it. Abraham’s face lights up with my approval. I can’t imagine anyone denying this.

Attachment, as it turns out, is not a simple process. The prosthetics I saw outside London were crude but did their jobs, and the wearer was able to slip them on and off with ease. But permanent attachment inside London is possible. Only I never had much cause to ask until now.

“I’m sure it is upsetting,” Abraham says far too cheerfully. He puts the prosthetic on the bed beside me and uses both hands to raise my severed forearm for inspection, “but really, having some bone exposed like this is the best for us Artificers. Makes long-term attachment that much easier.”

I don’t reply, but he doesn’t need me to. Without the dean’s presence, Abraham is untethered, in a sweet way: the joy for his work is palpable, and he talks endlessly about the process of creation. I learn the arm is the work of four Artificers, and hidden from the eye, their signatures are etched somewhere in the metal or porcelain. I learn Meléti’s ichor is the lifeblood of it; and that the automaton generates ichor like blood. He drags the bedside table forward and puts the edge of my arm on it. The prosthetic is laid against it, ready for the joining. I rummage in the sheets for a cigarette and raise it, asking Abraham to light it for me. He has matches in his pockets for the joining, and I intend to take advantage.

“Ichor is an interesting thing,” Abraham tells me. He wanders back over by the leather box, dropping to his knees to rummage for something. “We can coat exposed bone with it, and it will harden to something like metal. All this without restricting the bone. It can still absorb nutrients, expel waste. It won’t die, is what I mean. But it allows us to solder the prosthetic.”

The ichor in question is bottled up and looks like liquid gold. When it’s unstoppered, Abraham tilts it. Gravity should take over. It should pour from the bottle all over me. But Abraham has to coax it out.

“θ?ω,” he whispers. I run. I fly. And the ichor uncurls from its corner of the bottle and gently flows out onto my bones, the ulnar and radius. I feel nothing as it lands, but I watch it once again defy gravity. It acts as if my bone and it are lost friends; the ichor curls around the bone and stops at the puckered flesh. “πα?ω.” I stop. I cease. Slowly it hardens. My bone glimmers golden. I am compelled to stare at it; a teras’ blood is a part of me.

Abraham turns to the prosthetic next and does something to pull it apart. The forearm splits open, still fully joined from wrist downward. Abraham slips it over my bone.

“Wait there,” Abraham says, like I’ll run out the window. He returns to his gear and stands tall again with something he informs me is a soldering lamp. It’s brass and looks very much like an oil lamp with an extended snout. Abraham lights it, then blows additional air through a blowpipe to increase the temperature. The flame flickers at the end of the snout and when the flame turns blue, Abraham informs me it’s hot enough to solder.

He brings the burning snout to the join between the arm and the bone and solders it together. There is more at play here, some Artificer magic I can’t see happening, but can feel, because when I next look there is no join whatsoever, no noticeable seam. The arm seems to have fused directly to the remaining flesh. I can’t peer at the bone beneath. Nor can I pry it off.

This unnatural arm is mine in truth. It is a part of my body. It might as well be flesh.

I don’t know how it works, but it feels like magic; a thrumming that connects what my brain wants to do to the prosthetic itself. It moves in a way that feels supernatural, real but hauntingly so. I tell my fingers to move and they’re already halfway through curling. I go to flex the muscles in my forearm, and feel the stretch of them. Somehow I feel the psychosomatic pull to the flesh and bone in the Nemean Lion’s stomach ebb away. So quickly my body accepts that this is the arm it was missing, even when I turn it over and stare at the clockwork whirring happening in the palm, beneath the porcelain plates.

“There you are, Mr Jones, good as new.”

I glance up at him. I can think of a few choice things to say to that, because there are too many versions of myself in my head, and I think no kindlier for this one—but I let them all fester internally instead. I give Abraham a smile and he accepts it graciously with a little bow.

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