Steelhands - Jaida Jones [30]
Then again, there was a lot we hadn’t known about one another. With so many things the others hadn’t ever learned about me, I supposed it would have been foolish indeed to assume I’d learned everything about them.
But all that was conjecture. Time to focus instead on the business at hand—literally the business at hands.
Before me was a far smaller task than marching through the city until I came to the Rue. It was almost so mundane as to be entirely insignificant, though it troubled me more than I was willing to admit to anyone but myself—and even then sometimes I had difficulty with it. I’d somewhat lost track of the days because of my current routine of lively debates with the representatives from Arlemagne; but one that was marked upon my calendar, in no uncertain terms, was my monthly checkup and overhaul. I could have called it my day for polishing if I’d had anyone to joke with about it. Nonetheless, if I wished to have hands that didn’t work in the slightest as opposed to making do with what I had now in order to keep up the pretense of being somehow more normal, by all means, I could avoid the appointment.
But I would not—especially because I feared the retribution from the magician in charge of my prosthetics.
Magicians—at least the ones I’d met—seemed to enjoy being rude almost more than the airmen had, though a magician’s rudeness was more about being sly and less about dangling you by the ankles out a window.
Admittedly, my hands were a less startling sight than they’d been to me in the beginning, but there were still nights when I woke from dreams of flesh and bone only to wonder with a violent start what beastly metal nightmares had attached themselves to my wrists. There were those who might have found them beautiful—I had no doubts about this, since they represented a rather pleasing triumph of machinery and craftsmanship—but to their owner, they only signified a replacement that fell considerably short of the original.
Also, painfully enough, they reminded me of Anastasia. They were even made of the same metal.
My fingers were silver in color, though the rest was not, since I supposed all the tarnishing would have made that impractical. When I’d asked, I’d been told that the materials were closer to steel—something my body was less likely to reject—and sensibly sturdy as well. They wouldn’t rust, so long as I made sure to dry them carefully should they ever get wet, and they shone brightly in the light—alien and eerily beautiful—even if I felt no particular affection for them one way or another. The palms of both hands were smooth and cold to the touch, as well as the fingertips, and there were even little grooves where each piece fit together that a fortune-teller might still read my fate by.
It was the backs of my hands—the part I was supposed to know better than anything else, or so the saying went—that everyone seemed to find the most interesting. There was no steel plate to be found there, but a series of minute, interlocking gears and pulleys that turned as I moved and made the softest of clicking sounds whenever I did something as simple as drumming my fingers against the table. Somewhere inside that, past what looked like the workings of the most intricate clock I’d ever seen, there was a vial of concentrated magic that was worth more than my weight in gold. Worth more than my statue’s weight in gold, in fact. And I hadn’t the faintest idea how it worked.
It was the same way Anastasia had worked, after all, and I hadn’t needed to understand what was inside her in order to know how well she flew.
I’d had to commission gloves of a sturdier fabric once it became apparent that the gears were going to tear right through all my best pairs, and it simply wouldn’t be possible to go without. The diplomats from Arlemagne would stare, not to mention everyone else, and I would be worn down from answering the same questions day in and day out. My hands looked strange; I would be the first to admit it.