Page 49 of The Toymaker's Son

This couldn’t be my fate. What a stupid way to die, wandering lost in the woods, probably a mile from civilization—if Minerva could be called that.

A collection of boulders at the side of the road caught my eye. The wind buffeted me and threw flakes in my eyes. I tucked myself between the large rocks and shivered in their refuge.

Alone, teeth chattering, I had no choice but to wait out the night with my thoughts. Perhaps Devere would return; he already filled my head. Devere would know what to say. He’d snarl first, then tell me the voices in my head were magic, not science. Magic was the unknown. I heard voices. I talked to them, talked to Hush, because she’d been the only one who would listen. She’d been there, in the cold and the dark, when I’d had nothing and nobody else.

Until Devere.

I’d wanted him to like me, to think me a normal boy, to think mefixed, like my father had said I could be. So I’d doubled down on being like the rest of the boys in my class. When I’d kissed him, I’d been afraid of being different again, of going back beneath the stairs.

But before that, when I’d tucked a flower in Devere’s hair, when I’d told him he was pretty once and he’d asked,“Prettylike a girl?”seeming most perturbed, I’d told him boys could be pretty too, told him we could be anything we wanted to be.

I’d been better with him. Been myself. Until I’d ruined it all.

I pulled my knees to my chest. The wind howled, and the snow spiraled and drifted in waves. If I listened hard, would I hear the voices again? Sometimes they’d sung lullabies. Other times they’d talked among themselves.

Hush, Valentine. It will all be over soon.

What if they were real?

Devere had told me to stop searching for reasonable answers. If I took all reason and logic out of the equation, I was left with magic. Then what? If the voices were real, and Hush was real, and there was nothing at all wrong with me, then what was I seeing? Who was I talking with, and where did they come from?

What if I wasn’t broken and never had been?

“H-Hush?” I whispered, feeling like a fool. I hadn’t talked to her since I was a boy, because talking to imaginary friends wasn’t something grown men did. At least not the ones who wanted to stay on the outside of mental asylums.

The wind picked up again and howled its fury.

No answer came.

What had I been expecting, really? For her to appear? She’d only ever been a voice—

The beetle scurried out from under my shirt cuff, ran over the back of my hand, and hopped onto my knee, just a few inches from my face.

“H-hello,” I said, stuttering from the cold.

Her sheer wings buzzed, and within her metal body, her clock workings ticked in rhythm, like a heartbeat all their own.

Magic was science we did not yet understand. What if she was magic?

“Wait, are you…” No, it was absurd. More absurd than the rest of it. “You can’t be her. Are you?”

Her little antennae rippled.

“Hush?”

She spun in a circle on my knee.

“No?”

She stopped.

“Really?”

She spun.

The voice I’d heard all those years ago, the voice that had kept me company in the dark, belonged to a clockwork beetle?

“How—never mind, you clearly can’t talk anymore, or you would.”

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