Cold.
It was cold when Clara awoke, the kind of cold so extreme that it took her a moment to feel it.
She blinked into the dull whiteness around her three times. Then the cold came at her, sharp-toothed, raising the hairs on her body.
I have to get warm, she thought automatically.
She tried to speak the words several times, but her throat caught them in spasms of shock. Finally her voice began working: “Cold.”
Rolling onto her side, she cried out in pain, for every bone felt jarred loose. Her skull throbbed; her teeth ached. How far had she fallen?
Where was she?
She rubbed her arms to warm them, and failed. She realized that she lay in snow, or perhaps frost. Frozen bracken, mud, twigs.
She tried to ask for help. But who would answer her?
Then she felt the wind. Malevolent, cunning, it slipped up her tattered skirts and sliced into her skin. Her eyes squeezed shut, ice hammering her body, and she felt herself begin to shake violently. Even her thoughts seemed to shiver.
Perhaps it was the shivering itself that nudged her eyelids open one last time. Or perhaps it was the distant sense that she was actually not alone. Whatever it was, Clara opened her eyes, and saw him:
The man with metal patchwork across his body, wearing Godfather’s greatcoat. Crawling toward her now. Reaching for her.
What was his name?
Nicholas.
Clara mouthed the word and stared at his outstretched hand, gnarled with metal and blue with frost. She blinked; the ice on her eyelids cracked into paper-thin flakes and fell away.
She remembered now. She had grabbed on to that hand moments before and had jumped out a window.
Godfather had been lying to her. Godfather was the reason her mother was dead.
A man had stolen her father away, and Felicity was at home, alone.
No, not alone—with Patricia Plum and Dr. Victor.
As these facts settled within Clara, fear shocked her awake. She surged upright, ignoring the pain of her wounds as she clawed at the frozen ground for leverage. Her eyes had lost some of their heaviness; she saw snow, vast stretches of snow, and a murky sky dim with dawn. She assumed it was dawn, anyway, and wondered how long they had been unconscious after their fall.
“Father,” she croaked. Nothing but white wilderness surrounded her. “Father!”
“Take my hand,” Nicholas shouted, beaten halfway to the ground by the wind. His lips were white, splintering into brittle triangles of skin.
“Where is he?” She grabbed his arm, shaking him. “He’s supposed to be here! Where did they take him?”
“I don’t know—”
“You told me to jump through that Door, and now we’re here.” Clara was frantic. The cold was making her teeth chatter; the pain in her head stabbed her behind the eyes. “Tell me where he is!”
Nicholas held her still. “I said I don’t know, but I do know this—we’ll die if we don’t get out of this cold soon. We need to find shelter. Take my hand.”
When Clara reluctantly agreed, he pulled her closer and pressed his cheek to hers.
“I promise you, Clara,” he said, and even this close Clara could barely hear him over the howling wind, “we will find him. But we’re no good to him dead.”
She nodded, put her arm around him, and let him do the same to her. They rose to their feet with great effort. Huddled close like some two-headed monster, they stumbled forward, their free hands up to shield their eyes. Lightning flashes, high above the snowy gusts and colored a strange, sickly green, illuminated their path. They walked for an interminable amount of time, stumbling through knee-high snowdrifts, futilely searching through the storm for a haven. They could have been walking in circles, and as the cold settled in even more deeply, numbing Clara with the temptation of sleep, she felt torn between tears and laughter. Dying in a blizzard, she supposed, was better than dying at the hands of Dr. Victor. She clung ferociously to such hysterical thoughts; they kept her feet moving.
A dark shape emerged, surfacing from frothy white depths like one of the sea serpents from Godfather’s stories. Nicholas was pointing; he was gasping at her ear. It was shelter.
They stumbled inside after struggling to wedge open the door. It occurred to Clara that the place might already be occupied. It also occurred to her that she did not care. There had never been such a beautiful sight as this rickety shack and its floor of hard black dirt. Nicholas groped for the door, and pulled it shut behind them. They fumbled through the shack’s contents, seeing by touch rather than by sight as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Stacks of strange equipment lined the walls. There was a desk, a chair, an empty cup, but no signs of life.
Falling to her hands and knees, Clara coughed violently in the sudden stillness, as though her body had grown accustomed to the storm and could not function outside of it. Nicholas staggered down beside her. She turned, shaking, to see him heaving at her side. Even through her hazy vision she could see the angry colors on his face and chest—patches of yellows, reds, tinges of blues, the black metal. The storm had burned him—and her as well, she noticed, glancing down at her reddened arms.
“My skin . . . ,” she murmured.
For a long moment Nicholas simply lay there with his eyes closed, recovering. Then he said quietly, “We should take off our clothes.”
She wanted to be horrified but was incapable of it, not with her limbs half-frozen.
“Why?” she said, watching him fumble with the sleeves of his coat, the buckle of his trousers, and the sword at his waist. At the last moment she remembered to look away. As if she hadn’t seen him completely naked not an hour ago. As if nakedness mattered in such appalling cold.
“It’s easier to stay warm skin to skin.”
“How do you know that?”
Through the ice on his lashes, teeth chattering, he winked. “Everybody knows that, Clara.”
Unsure how to respond, she kept silent. He knelt beside her, a mosaic of metal clamps and pale, wiry limbs, and started undoing the laces at her back.
She stiffened at the touch of his fingers; it was intimate, terribly so. “Let me do it,” she said, trying to push him away, but she was fading, and so was he.
Nicholas released her at once; his voice was gentle, or maybe simply exhausted. “It’ll be faster with two of us.”
A pause, and Clara acquiesced, though her body was rigid with the urge to hide, to run from the sensation of this man unveiling her, piece by piece. She remembered at the last moment to hide the dagger that had been strapped to her thigh, before Nicholas could notice it, and she slipped it into one of her boots. The less he knew about her weapons, the better. She might have jumped out a window with him, but he was still a stranger, even if his face did look like the statue’s had, even if his hands were soft upon her as he settled on the floor and drew her close.
At first all was awkward silence. Clara still wore her chemise, but it did little to dull the sensation of Nicholas’s palms against her back. Dimly she registered her breasts pressing into his chest, his thigh draped over hers. The metal plates along his spine creaked when he shifted his weight.
“Do you know where we are?” she whispered at last, into his neck.
He was quiet for a moment. “I’m not certain,” he said, sounding frustrated. “Perhaps when the storm clears up . . .”
Clara burrowed into him, trying not to think of her father, lost somewhere in the cold with his abductor, nor of Felicity, being tucked back into bed by Dr. Victor at the mansion, or of Godfather, wherever he was. Had he tried to follow them? Was he here, somewhere out in the snow?
Did she care?
She closed her eyes, trying not to think of them, and trying not to think of herself in an embrace with this man, barer than she liked to be even when alone. She reached desperately for the forced calm that had seen her through the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“We can’t sleep for long,” she said. “I don’t have much time to get him home.”
Nicholas’s lips were cold at her ear. “We’ll wait for the storm to pass. No longer.”
Clara would have to be satisfied with that. She listened for his heartbeat—faint but steady against her cheek—and wondered if it had beat these long years, encased in metal in Godfather’s shop, or if it had been frozen along with his body. Restless, exhausted, fear hard in her chest, she felt the heavy blackness of sleep approach, and let it take her.