I brought it to the office and switched on my lamp. The shell was grooved silver. Two of the six legs had snapped off from the cold. One of the wings beneath had burned away, leaving little more than a stub. I fetched a Q-tip from the bathroom and tried to clean the soot from the other, but I succeeded only in snapping it. Under the light, the broken wing looked like a tissue-thin strip of nacre peeled from the inside of an oyster shell.
Beneath the shell were gears that would have made a Swiss watchmaker weep with envy. The eyes were like droplets of red wine. Garnets, maybe?
“What is it?” Lena asked.
“Not a clue.” Disproportionately large copper mandibles clicked at my fingers. “What steampunk adventure did you sneak out of? Cherie Priest? Girl Genius? You’re gorgeous, whatever you are.”
“And in the meantime, its friends are drilling deeper into Lena’s oak,” Nidhi said tightly.
I winced. “Sorry. I got—”
“It’s all right,” said Lena. “We’re used to you. ‘Look at the shiny magic thing trying to kill us, isn’t it awesome?’ I’ll be happy to admire them with you as soon as we get them out of my tree.”
I held the tip of a wooden pencil in front of the ladybug’s head. It snapped cleanly through both wood and graphite. “I see several types of metal in there. Copper and silver. Possibly steel.”
“Were they created with libriomancy?” Nidhi asked.
“Most likely.” Only a few people could manipulate raw magic. Far more could use books to help them shape that power. “I’ll check the Porter catalog when I’m done here to see if I can figure out what book they might have come from.”
I looked around the office. I didn’t know where my magnifying glass had gone, but I spotted something else that should work. Holding the pliers tight, I squeezed past Lena to the 10” telescope tucked into the corner. A built-in rack on the side of the scope held a set of eyepieces. I grabbed one from the middle and returned to the desk.
Holding the two-inch-long metal-and-plastic tube to my right eye, I peered at the insect. I had to look through the wrong end of the eyepiece to bring things into proper focus, but it worked well enough.
“There are no welds. The shell looks like it’s riveted to the body.” The rivets appeared to be copper, but they were impossibly tiny, as were the hinges and joints below.
The ladybug snapped at me, the mandibles clicking audibly. The sight of those magnified, serrated pincers reaching for my eye made me jerk back so hard I almost dropped the pliers.
I tested a magnet next, but it had no effect. Whatever metals this was made of, they weren’t ferrous. “I need a better way to hold this thing while I study it.” Superglue on the joints should effectively paralyze it, though that might obscure the finer details.
Before I could go digging for the glue, Lena reached past me and stabbed a toothpick through the center of the ladybug’s body. She gave the toothpick a vicious twist, eased the pliers from my hand, and set them aside. She raised the still-squirming thing into the air. “Hold it by this end.”
I swallowed and took the toothpick. With the eyepiece lens, I could see the tiny white threads growing from the toothpick through the interior workings, like parasites devouring the bug from within. I would have felt bad for it, had its cousins not been doing the same thing to Lena.
A coiled spring down the center of the back appeared to provide movement, but I saw no place for a key, no way of winding that spring once it died. I might be able to wind it with a pair of jewelry pliers, but more likely I’d just break something else. I set down the eyepiece and used a straightened paper clip to fold one of the legs back. A gear the size of a snowflake popped out of place as a result of my clumsy efforts.
I pulled the lamp closer. Mechanically, this made no sense at all. Tiny pistons and gears manipulated the legs, but I saw no way to coordinate or control their movement. “Let’s see if you have some sort of brain in there.”
I grabbed the pliers, tightened them carefully around the insect’s head, and twisted it free of the body.
The ladybug went dead. The spring jumped free, followed by a sprinkling of gears and rods. No way was this Humpty Dumpty getting put back together again. I set the body on the desk and studied the head through the eyepiece. Inside, tiny silver prongs held an oily sphere in place, like a jewelry setting designed for the world’s smallest engagement ring.
I used the paper clip to pop the sphere free. It landed on the desk without bouncing or rolling, despite being perfectly round. I touched it with my finger, and it stuck to my skin, allowing me to study it under the lens. I placed the tip of the paper clip to the sphere, and it clicked onto the metal like a magnet. When I tugged it free and set it on a piece of paper, it clung there just as easily.
“What is it?” Normally I would have enjoyed the way Lena’s body pressed against mine as she peered over my shoulder, but now I barely noticed.
“It’s called a boson chip.” From what I remembered, it would stick to just about anything through a kind of subatomic static charge. I felt a sense of magical pressure, like a balloon inflated to the bursting point. “Harvested from the brain of a fictional silicon-based hive mind. This little thing could store every book in the Copper River Library, and it would still have space for Nicola Pallas’ music collection.”
“You’ve seen them before?” asked Nidhi.
“I’m the one who pulled them out of a bad space opera.” I stared at the chip. “Victor Harrison had requisitioned a batch for one of his pet projects.”
Victor was a legend among the Porters. He had the amazing ability to make magic and technology play nicely together, and had built everything from a telepathic coffee maker to a database server that transformed would-be hackers into various reptiles. He had also jinxed my telescope so that every time I looked at Mars, Marvin the Martian popped up and threatened to destroy the Earth with an explosive space-modulator. Victor was more than capable of putting together a set of pseudoliving metal insects.
Rather, he would have been capable of doing so, if not for the fact that Victor Harrison had been murdered earlier this year.
5
For as long as Frank and I were together, I never questioned my actions. I never asked why Marion Dearing wept when she thought nobody could hear. I gave her husband happiness. How could she object to that if she truly loved him?
I saw nothing wrong in fanning the embers of Frank’s lust. He wanted to be seduced, pushed over the edge until nothing existed but desire and satisfaction.
For myself, I knew only joy. I lived for those moments when my body entwined with his, the urgent grunts of his exertions blending with my quiet moans, but there were other pleasures as well. The burn of my muscles when I was out working the farm. Devouring the meals Marion prepared for us.
In the beginning, the other farmhands tried to flirt with me. I tolerated their overly familiar comments and “accidental” touches. Frank wanted others to appreciate what he had, but he was unwilling to share. So when one man tried to take things further, I broke his arm in two places.
I knew I was stronger than the others, but that was the first time I had used my strength against another person. Through that confrontation, I discovered that violence could be just another source of pleasure.
Only years later, long after I had buried Frank in the dirt, did I begin to recognize what I had done. What I had become.