Chas stirred, shook his head.
"Fuck," he said to himself, testing his jaw with his good hand. "Feels like I've been hit with a fucking steel bar."
He looked around the bare white room. He was lying on a thin slab of white foam which lay on a shelf of concrete sticking out of the wall, at about the same height as the top bunk of a standard sized bunk bed. A fluorescent light shone behind a thick pane of glass in the ceiling, and one wall was entirely glass.
He stared groggily at the glass wall for a moment, then remembered. "Nics!" He sat bolt upright, nearly bashing his head on the ceiling, then reached up with his right hand to touch it.
The flash of white plaster on his arm reminded him of something else. In a panic he checked first his cast, then his breast pocket. The oval of mother-of-pearl was still there, but the mouse was gone.
Moving slowly, because his head felt like there were several large somethings with hammers in it, he swung both legs over the edge of the bed and jumped down.
Underneath his bunk was another, lower shelf. Nics lay on it, her face as white as the walls.
Forgetting his own pain completely, Chas knelt beside her, frantically feeling in her throat for a pulse. There wasn't one. But yet, where he expected a bright red stain of blood on her blouse, there was nothing.
He pulled her blouse open, scanning for the bullet wound. Her chest was one massive bruise, but instead of a bloody and gaping hole, there was the silver and mother-of-pearl pendant that the silversmith Sven had given her. The mother-of-pearl was cracked, and the silver badly bent out of true, but lodged firmly in the centre of the pendant was a hard, flat shape. The bullet.
Carefully, he gathered her up into his arms, calling her name.
"Nics, babes, can you hear me? Wake up, tell me you're alright! Nics... babes... please?"
Suddenly her eyes snapped open, like a doll's, and she sat bolt upright, her head just missing the bottom of the bunk above. With a very blank expression she coughed once.
And a mother-of-pearl disk fell out of her mouth and landed with a soft thud on her lap.
Chas recoiled like he'd been bitten. "Holy shit! Nics!!"
But she just sat there, eyes staring.
"Nics, babes," he said, looking into her eyes. "Talk to me!"
He grabbed her shoulders and tried to shake her, but she was as rigid as a plank of wood.
"That's not going to do any good, dear boy," said a voice from outside the cell.
Chas spun around to see Mr Cuckoo, Jeremy Grandfather and the Agency woman, Barbra Allen watching him.
It was Mr Cuckoo who had spoken. He had shed his disguise of an old and feeble man completely now, to reveal himself in his true clockwork glory. Arms, legs and body were all gleaming steel and brass, with gears and belts and cogs all whirring away endlessly. He stood a good seven feet tall, balancing effortlessly on legs that looked strong enough to support a bridge. His face was still the same, the skin wrinkled and pale, but his eyes had been replaced by a chilling pair of metallic orbs that gleamed gold in the light.
Barbra Allen looked exactly as she had the last time Chas had seen her. But this time her golden lion broach sat like a cat upon her right shoulder, and a life-size golden tarantula sat on her left. All three stood with perfect and absolute stillness.
Jeremy looked very nervous, shifting from foot to foot, and winding his long fingers into each other.
"In case you didn't realise," Mr Cuckoo continued, "she's a fake. A phoney, a simulacrum of a real person. My partner and I created her, a long time ago. She and her brother were our finest pieces. We were ready to release them to the world, and make an absolute fortune.
"But Jeremiah - he couldn't stop tinkering with her. There was always something more that he wanted to get her to do. We had her perfect, she looked and moved like a real person. She could even talk like a real person. But Jeremiah wanted to make her feel like a real person."
The last sentence was injected with so much venom the Chas shivered, despite the heat in the cell.
"So Jeremiah went off for a while, and came back with these two bits of oyster shell, these two disks of mother-of-pearl. I was against it from the start, but he was right, it did make her perfect! So perfect a fake that no one could tell the difference. And one totally loyal to us. A perfect spy. A perfect assassin. A perfect slave."
Flecks of foam appeared at the corners of his mouth.
"I was all ready to install the second disk in her brother, when she went missing. I knew it had to be Jeremiah, he was the only one who could have changed her personality, removed the limitations I had set.
"He denied it completely, but I knew the truth. So I took the boy's body and hid it from him.
"It was a good thing I did, as it was mere hours later that that bloody Agency woman, April Upton-Baxter broke in. She stole the disk and killed Jeremiah. She shot me too, and left me for dead, but I was harder to kill than old Jeremiah."
Jeremy looked at the floor, and then up at Chas again. There was malevolence there, and a never-forgotten old pain.
"She died soon after that. But I never got the disk back. So I never could achieve the perfection of what we had done in our early work. I came close, mind you."
He waved one hand at Barbra.
"Very close. There are a lot of my clockwork people around. One even got elected president. But your average person knows in their gut that there's something wrong with them. So they're not trusted."
He took a step closer to the glass.
"But now, now she's come back to me, and, even better, comes bringing the second disk! The locket is worthless, a trinket. It's the disk I want. And you, my dear boy, are going to give it to me."
Chas shook his head, mutely, no.
"Oh, you will," said Mr Cuckoo, smiling evilly. "If you don't, you'll never get your girlfriend back. I'll take great pleasure in making sure that you never ever see her again as anything other than the clockwork toy you see sitting next to you."
"Tell me how to bring her back," said Chas in a low steady voice. "Tell me," he said, bringing out the disk from inside his cast and placing it on the concrete floor, "or I swear, I'll smash this disk to dust."
Mr Cuckoo licked his lips at the sight of the second disk.
"Very well," he said, face impassive. "Place it in her mouth and close her mouth again."
Chas did so, though it took a bit of effort to get Nics’ mouth open. As soon as her mouth was shut, she made a swallowing motion, and her body lost its unnatural stiffness. Her eyes filled with tears, and she clung to Chas, sobbing.
He held her tight with his bad arm, all the while watching Mr Cuckoo. With his good hand, he reached out and picked up the other disk, slipping it back into his cast.
Mr Cuckoo made a humming sound of satisfaction, while Jeremy watched with curiosity. Barbra was as still and blank as a puppet.
Mr Cuckoo watched as Nics pull herself together and turned to face him, tear streaks down her cheeks. Then, mumbling something in a tone of voice that might have been "such wonderful work" he spun abruptly on one heel and walked off.
"Bring them to the laboratory," he ordered Barbra and Jeremy.
"Sam betrayed us," whispered Chas to Nics.
"I know," she whispered back. "Oh Chas, it was terrible, I remember exactly what happened. While - while I was out of my body."
She stuttered to a stop, because Barbra and Jeremy had stepped into the room.
Jeremy held a gun in unsteady hands, pointed at Chas. A nod from Barbra sent the clockwork spider scurrying along the floor, to run up Chas' leg and perch on his shoulder, fangs next to his neck.
"I wouldn't advise trying anything stupid," she said in a monotone. "The spider has a very nasty bite."
"An-an-and you," stuttered Jeremy to Nics. "If you love him, you won't try anything either. You may have survived a shot at point blank range to the chest, but I'm pretty sure he won't."
"Oh, what I'd give for a banana now, babes," whispered Chas to Nics as they were shoved and prodded out of the cell.
"I can't see how it'd help," she whispered back.
"You'd be surprised," he said, grinning evilly.
Nics blinked as a thought struck her hard.
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