The Girl With the Iron Touch by Kady Cross Page A

word to Sam and the others.
    Sam. They hadn’t gotten to finish their conversation.
    That was what really pissed her off, to borrow a phrase from Finley. She should be back at King House listening to Sam tell her he loved her, too. At least, that was what she expected he might say—if he even realized that he loved her. And he had to love her, because seeing his face every day was what made her get out of bed some mornings, especially after a night of bad dreams.
    Regardless of whether or not he was aware of his feelings, she knew that Sam would come for her. And she knew that Finley would be with him, and so would Griffin even though he was sick. And Jasper, despite his own problems, would come as well, because that’s what friends did for one another. Her friends would soon be looking for her—if they weren’t already.
    She just had to stay alive long enough to be saved or save herself.
    As the automaton led her away from her room, down a hall to another, larger space, Emily realized where she was. Underground, the catacombs. She knew because she could smell the hot grease from the trains on the steam-dampened air, and there was a bit of a Roman wall sticking up from the dirt floor. This might have been a street or an alley several centuries earlier.
    Now it was home to a motley bunch that dropped her jaw as soon as she saw them.
    Automatons. At least a dozen of them in various shapes and sizes and made from different materials. Some looked new, others ancient, and some had been patched together with scrap like old soldiers mended as best they could be on the field of battle and then sent home.
    “How did you all come to be here?” she asked as, one by one, the machines stopped what they were doing and turned to her. Some were big and faceless things— nothing humanoid about them at all. Others were small and looked like dustbins or toys. A few were quite human, indeed.
    There was another girl there. A pretty girl who looked vaguely familiar to her. Had they met before? Emily opened her mouth to say something, anything to get the girl’s attention, and then quickly snapped it shut as the girl turned her head.
    This was not a girl—not a human one at any rate. Not yet. She was lovely with hair much similar in color to Emily’s own, but she was taller with more curves. Bits of her metal skeleton were still visible, though just barely through the pale flesh that covered her. She was being taken over by organic material, becoming a living thing.
    And when she was done no one would know she wasn’t human. This was the “package” Jack Dandy had been asked to deliver, she was sure of it. She was more organic now than when Jack had opened the crate, but it was her.
    It wasn’t coincidence that the machines had come for her, Emily realized, the notion taking hold with an icy certainty in the pit of her stomach. They had seen her with Finley earlier. Those feelings of having been watched were justified and not just paranoia. And certainly not rats. They had tracked her and brought her here, but why? Why her and not Finley?
    The automaton led her into yet another room. A few of the others followed. She could hear them chattering behind her—some in English, some in machine-speak. She understood some of it, but with all of them talking at once she could only pick out a few words like mother, savior and master. None of those were particularly comforting.
    “This is why you are here,” the metal told her, pointing one tarnished, arachnid-like limb at what appeared to be a large incubator. Emily turned her attention toward the glass tube setting in an iron base, tubes and wires running into and around it. A bellows kept the rhythm of relaxed human breathing.
    When she saw what was in the tub she gasped. Horror grabbed her by the throat and squeezed hard.
    “You will fix him, mother,” the spider told her. “Fix our Master so that he may lead us.”
    Like hell she would. Fear bled away to rage. And hate.
    It was