She’d kept the teeth; she’d kept each of the items the Verdant Empress had asked her to retrieve. She’d rescued them from the floor of the ruined house after the spirit had been awakened, and she’d carried them with her when she sprinted for the safety of the boy’s mausoleum, the only place she knew would be spared the ravages of the ivy. The items were there in her pocket, in the pocket of her gray robe, and she held them out to show everyone gathered in the ivy-strewn meadow. An eagle feather, a white pebble, and yes: a full set of teeth. As Zita told the story, they all listened slack-jawed. Seamus, having recovered from his earlier fright, briefly raged at the girl for what she’d done, showering her with recriminations as if she was a misbehaving schoolchild, which she was, to a certain degree. As for Carol and Esben, they remained strangely silent during the retelling, understanding that Zita’s actions were just one part of an intricate web that was being woven before them. The girl wept a little in the telling and Martha gravitated to her side, resting a consoling hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” said Martha. “What’s done is done.”
“I just . . . ,” simpered Zita. “I just wanted to make things right. For someone.” She looked through her tear-blurred eyes at each of the individuals in the meadow: the old blind man, the bear, the bandit, and the little girl with the goggles. “It’s like, so much had gone wrong, you know? I mean, with me. It’s like—can’t I just fix things for someone, anyway? Like, relieve someone’s pain. That’s all I wanted to do, I swear.”
When she was done, the crowd remained in silence. Finally, Carol motioned to Martha, who walked to his side. Setting his hand on the back of the girl’s neck, he walked forward to Zita and said, “I understand your pain, child. We all have experienced loss. All of us. You’ve done what you could. And now, you truly do have an opportunity to set things to rights.” He held out his knobby, weathered hand, its palm open. “Let’s have those teeth, then.”
She set them, the boy’s teeth, in his hand, and the old man closed his fingers around them. He then had Martha walk him back to the fire, where he reached into a small groove in a rock and produced something shiny and spinning. He turned to Martha and smiled.
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
She did as he instructed, and the old man set the completed Möbius Cog in her palm.
It was a beautiful thing; all shining brass, its three concentric rings, wrapped one into the other, spun fluidly around a kind of glowing core. How two beings had managed to construct such an incredible thing was well beyond Martha’s ken, but she knew it was a thing of beauty.
“It’s . . . ,” she managed. “It’s wonderful.”
“Ain’t it?”
Esben appeared in their huddle around the cog, and he smiled at his creation. “An improvement over the first, I’d say,” he put in. “We made some extra embellishments.”
“And now, the final test,” said Carol.
The boy’s chassis, all shining brass and metal, lay naked by the fire, stripped of its regal uniform. They’d built an operating table for him, made of the salvaged boards from the collapsed hut at the edge of the meadow, and this was where he was laid, like a statue on top of an ornamental sarcophagus. Martha guided Carol to the boy’s side; Esben stood opposite him. Seamus and Zita stood quietly at the boy’s feet, watching the transpiring surgery in a hushed trance.
“Screwdriver,” said Carol.
Esben, with a little difficulty, pinched the handle of a small flathead screwdriver between his hooks and handed it across the table. He then guided the blind man’s hands to the first of the four screws that were set in the corners of a shiny, square plate in the automaton’s chest. Each one came out fluidly, and Martha caught them in her hands as they rolled out of their holes.
“Oil,” said Carol. Martha, holding a small oiling can, dutifully applied a few drops of the stuff to the two hinges that sat inlaid by the machine’s rib cage.
The plate was folded open. Inside, the boy’s innards could be seen by everyone present: a landscape of myriad cogs and sprockets, the workings of the most complex grandfather clock ever imagined.
In the center of the boy’s chest, amid the stationary workings, was a small, round, and very empty cavity, the size of a tennis ball.
“Cog,” said Carol. Martha handed the Möbius Cog to Carol. The thing glowed and whirred in his hand. With a little guidance from Esben, he found the empty spot in the boy’s chest and gently set the cog in place.
It slipped into the opening with a snug click, and the glow began to expand. It cast a warm illumination onto the cold metal of the surrounding gears. The miraculous orb’s three rings started spinning faster and the purring whir grew louder and soon the mechanics of the boy’s chest began to slowly shift into movement.
“Close it up!” instructed Carol, having heard the sound of the boy’s gears working, and the door in his chest was closed and its screws replaced. The whir of the cog became muffled behind the metal plate, but still discernible. Both Carol and Esben stood back, waiting.
Nothing was happening.
And then: The boy’s eyes fluttered open.
The crowd surrounding the table gave an audible gasp to see the machine come to life. The little blue irises in the boy’s opaline eyes flickered side to side, taking in this new onslaught of vision. His mouth rasped open; the hinges moaned.
“More oil!” Carol cried. “He’s trying to speak!”
Martha flew to the machine’s head and daubed grease on its mouth hinges. The eyes watched Martha carefully as she did this. A moment passed before the boy tried the mechanics of his mouth again; he clacked his jaws together a few times before issuing the first word of his newly remade life.
“Why?” he asked.
It was an odd picture, to be sure: the massive wall of ivy growing up on the edge of the Impassable Wilderness, seemingly contained by some invisible force field, but most Portlanders didn’t think much of it. They’d become so accustomed to ignoring this strange and inhospitable stretch of land on the border of their city that this phenomenon mostly went unnoted. The ivy had sprung up early that morning, growing larger and larger as it lapped against this transparent wall, but nothing much else had happened, so it was assumed to be relatively benign. In fact, by the following afternoon, it had been all but forgotten, and most Portlanders went about their day as they normally would.
“What’s that, Daddy?” asked one particularly precocious toddler, sitting in the back of her parents’ station wagon on the way home from day care. They were driving along the Willamette Bluffs and were afforded a good view of this forbidden no-man’s-land and its bizarre transformation.
“What, honey?”
The child was pointing to the squirming, wiggling ivy wall, just on the other side of the river, which by now had completely curtained off the typical view of the I.W.’s many tall and imposing trees. “All that plant,” managed the toddler, with what few words she had to describe a three-hundred-foot-tall screen of positively menacing-looking ivy vines.
The child’s father, who’s name was Foom (for reasons too strange and complicated to unpack here), simply said, “Oh, that’s nothing.”
“Is it mad?” pressed the child.
The girl’s father laughed. “You say the funniest things sometimes. I’ll have to remember to put that up on SocialFace later.”
“Will it get us?”
“Comedy gold,” was all her father said, and that was that. By the time the Periphery Bind, the magic ribbon that, for millennia untold, had kept the Outside safe from the impositions of the Impassable Wilderness (and vice versa, depending on your perspective), dissipated with its quick snap, the child in question was sitting on the floor of her room and removing the head from her Intrepid Tina doll while her father was in the living room, merrily broadcasting his daughter’s childish bon mot for the world to mindlessly skim. The ivy had built up so much force, pressing against the barrier, that when it was unleashed it was like some pent-up Mesozoic lake that had, after centuries, been finally made free to swamp the world in a flood that would transform the immediate landscape for centuries more to come.
The citizens of the Outside did not know what hit them. Literally.
When the Bind broke and the wall of ivy exploded forward, the first to be consumed was the Industrial Wastes. The milling horde of stevedores, carefully picking through the debris of the collapsed Titan Tower, were caught unawares; they’d just unearthed the toupee of their beloved leader, Brad Wigman, and were preparing to sanctify it as a relic for a religion of their own future devising, when the tide of ivy crashed through the gravel roads and alleyways of the Wastes like muddy water through a sluice box and poured over them with the force of a tsunami. They were, each of them, frozen in place as the magic coursing through the ivy pitched them into a deep, untroubled sleep. Soon, the chemical silos and web of piping of this forbidden land was covered as if with a furry green tea cozy and the ivy moved on, splashing into the water of the Willamette River.
The rampaging plant bridged the water handily, rumbling into the current, and soon made landfall on the far side. It captured trucks that were idling by the wharves and fishermen as they quietly bobbed their lures from old wooden docks. It gave shape to the Ghost Bridge, that mighty structure that spanned the banks of the Willamette only when its bell was rung; the ivy, being shot through with enchantment, was unaffected by the bridge’s nonexistence, and so those Outsiders who happened to be gazing out at the river in that particular direction for a moment saw the vision of a gorgeous suspension bridge being seemingly knitted out of thin air by vines of ivy—that is, before they succumbed to the wave of the plant too, and then all memory of the vision was erased in their dreamy slumber.
And then it moved on; it went farther afield. It swept along the placid avenues of the neighborhoods that bordered the Impassable Wilderness, up in the hills, and it poured over the cars navigating the looping streets, freezing the traffic in its widespread green cocoon. The power of the Verdant Empress and her thrall over the ivy was such now that those who were unlucky enough to be swallowed were instantaneously slept; reactions were limited to the following fleeting thought, which, oddly enough, was entertained by nearly every Portlander just moments before the wave of ivy overtook them: “What should I have for dinner? That’s strange; it looks like some big green carpet is just about to . . .”
Gaining steam as it covered more territory, the ivy fell in torrents on the downtown, climbing the tallest buildings and filling the lowest basements. Unsuspecting citizens, perched over their coffees, had scarce opportunity to dash off a witty riposte about the coming vegetal deluge on their phones when they were consumed and frozen in stasis, tossed haphazardly into some strange dream. Cats and dogs, swallowed. Bicyclists, swept up. Laundromats, fire stations: blanketed. Parks and schools, civic administrative buildings and carefully restored Craftsman houses in the gridded streets of the East Side—nothing was spared.
The flood covered everything; everything was placed in a fathoms-deep sleep.
Prue looked out on the devastation from the back of an airborne heron and wept.
“Well, that’s a difficult question,” said Esben, in reply to the first query to come from the mechanical boy’s reborn consciousness. “Like, in what sense?”
The boy, Alexei, the mechanical boy prince, the heir apparent to the Pittock Mansion, pushed himself up on his elbows as each joint whined noisily from years of disuse; Martha kindly doused each complaining hinge with the oil can as he shifted. He swiveled his head on his neck, a telescoping metal conduit, and surveyed his new surroundings. He looked at the bear, the boy’s face still betraying no sign of understanding or emotion. “Why did you do this?”
“Do what?” asked the bear.
His eyes, while still being the cold eyes of a machine, caught the bear’s gaze and fixed him with a look of intense betrayal. “Why did you do this to me?”
The bear, clearly out of his depth, stepped back from the table, abashed. Carol moved forward. “We’re your makers, Alexei,” he said. “We made you.” He motioned to Esben, though he’d only managed to indicate the air beside the bear, who helpfully stepped sideways so as to meet the old man’s gesture.
“You did this?” asked the boy. His voice was calm and soft; the slightest tinge of an echo was the only thing to suggest that the sound had originated from a metal container. Otherwise, it sounded like a boy’s voice.
Esben nodded.
“Then you can unmake me,” said Alexei.
“But . . . ,” stammered Esben, surprised. “We went through a lot of trouble. And not just us, but . . . a lot of people.”
“No one asked me,” said the boy matter-of-factly.
“Well, no. But—” said Esben, but Carol interrupted.
“You’re alive, Alexei! Again! Smell the air. Feel the ground beneath you,” said the old man, the emotion rising in his voice. He stamped his feet a few times against the soft turf of the ivy bed, as if to illustrate.
The boy marked the change that had overtaken the landscape. “What’s happened?”
“Your mother,” replied Esben. “She’s, well, she’s gone a little crazy.”
“My mother?” Alexei processed the word slowly, as if having to reconstruct the reality he’d previously lived piece by piece. “My mother.”
“She’s become a part of the ivy. It’s a little messy,” said Carol.
“But not only that—there was a kind of prophecy involved. You were meant to come back and, well, set things to rights.” Saying this, Esben made quick, uncertain eye contact with Seamus and Martha. He was clearly winging it; none of them had foreseen the mechanical boy taking his revival so poorly. “I think I’m getting that all right. You’d have to talk to Prue to get all the details.”
The boy on the table only looked blankly at the individuals surrounding him; they all squirmed a little in his gaze.
“Thing is,” put in Seamus, affecting a quiet and polite tack, “we kind of have to get a move on if we want to stop her. She’s already pretty far gone. And we’re supposed to meet up with the rest of the gang in North Wood. So we should probably . . .” Here he made a kind of sweeping motion with his hands toward the northern edge of the meadow.
A silence settled over the gathering. Finally, Alexei said, “Can I have a moment?”
“Oh sure, sure,” replied Esben.
“Just not, you know, too long,” put in Seamus. Everyone’s glare at the bandit seemed to out-wither one another’s. Martha inked the automaton’s knee and ankle joints with oil, and he threw his legs over the side of the table and, pushing away from his seat, took his first tentative steps. He looked down at his metallic body, all rivets and plating, and said:
“Could I get some clothes in the meantime?”
They all rushed to retrieve his regal uniform, which Martha had folded neatly and laid in a pile at the base of the table. It resembled a strange coronation, this dressing of the Governor-Regent apparent, but soon he was back in his princely costume. He gave a curt nod to his dressers before walking some yards off to an ivy-covered rock, and there he sat, his chin in his hands.
He sat there for a long time.
The rest of the group remained at a polite distance, over by the dimming fire, while the ivy churned around them. They didn’t speak much to one another; occasionally, one of them would glance in the direction of the pensive prince, who, for the most part, remained completely still, staring out at the empty meadow and the far line of ivy-smothered trees. Now a vine of ivy made an attempt for his knee; now he wiped it back with a flick of his mechanical fingers.
Time passed; the sun continued its downward migration. Still, the mechanical boy sat in his place on the rock, his chin resting on his hands.
“You’d think,” said Seamus, the first one to speak for a time, “that after all that time being, you know, dead, he’d be a little happier.”
“I imagine it’s complicated,” said Esben.
The bandit looked up in the sky, at the lowering angle of the sun, and said, “I expect we’ll be needed soon.”
“What’s he supposed to do, anyway?” asked Martha.
“Search me,” said the bandit. “Something Prue concocted.”
“It was decreed by the Council Tree,” said Esben. “That the true heir be reconstructed.” He looked at Carol and frowned. “We did that much, despite the odds. Don’t know what else we should do.”
“Let me go talk to him,” said Seamus. “I’ve had some experience cooling the heels of some of the younger bandits when they get in a state. I’ll slap some sense into him and we can be on our way.”
The bandit began to stand up, despite the unanimous calls for him to not do this, when Zita, who’d been silent up to now, spoke. “I’ll talk to him.”
“You?” said Seamus. “Not likely. This is all very simple. I’ll just—”
“Seamus, sit down,” said Carol firmly. The bandit eyed the blind man for a few moments before doing as he’d been directed. “Let the girl go.”
Zita flattened the front of her white dress—she’d long ago ditched her father’s Synodal gray robe—and stood. Taking a deep breath, she walked over to where the mechanical boy sat. She paused briefly by his side before sitting down on the ground beside his rock perch.
“Hi,” she said.
The boy didn’t respond.
“I’m Zita. I live near here.” She waved a hand, meaning to point out the direction of her neighborhood, but quickly realized that the landscape had been so transformed as to make it impossible to know which way her house was. “Or somewhere.”
Still no response; the boy’s eyes were fixed on the distant trees.
“I was the May Queen,” said Zita, at a loss for how to proceed. “That was pretty cool. I wore my crown today.” She pulled the thing from her head and studied it. “Seen better days, I guess.”
The boy glanced at the garland in her lap; it was the first sign of his attentiveness, and she tried to capitalize on it. “So, this is all kind of my fault. Bringing your mother back and all. I didn’t know that this other stuff was happening, all this stuff about rebuilding the cog and reviving you. I haven’t even met the girl who was making it all happen. Her name’s Prue. Sounds like a nice girl. She’s from the Outside.” She paused then, trying to find her way forward.
“I guess I’m saying that I can’t really know how you feel, but I know you’re upset. I mean, they said you removed the cog yourself, the first time. I can’t imagine, really, what you’re going through. And I think it sort of sucks that you were brought back to life the first time and you didn’t want it. But you have to understand where she was coming from. Your mother, I mean. She lost you. That’s so huge. And she had a chance to bring you back. What person wouldn’t do that? What person who loved another person so much wouldn’t do that?”
She found she was beginning to cry as she spoke. She fought back the tears, saying, “My mom died. Kind of out of nowhere. She was, like, there one day and gone the next. And I would’ve given anything to have her back. Anything. And when I met this spirit, your mother, and she was so desperate, you know? And it was like she’d experienced the same sort of loss as I had. We were kindred. I had to do what I did. In a weird way, I was bringing back my mom.”
The tears were flowing now. “I get the feeling she’s not back ’cause she wants to be. Like you. I think she’s angry, like you. And I might be going out on a limb here saying this, but I think she might be angry at herself. For doing what she did. And all she wants is to be forgiven. And you need to be that person to forgive her.”
“Why?” asked Alexei, an echo of his first declaration.
“Because she was freaked out. And she lost you. And she’s human.” She paused, then, before saying, “Or she was.”
The mechanical boy prince processed all this for several silent minutes. Zita was about to stand and walk away, her mission failed, when he spoke again. “If I do this, if I go to her, will you send me back?”
“What, like, take the cog out again?”
“Yes. Take it out. Destroy it. Unmake me.”
“If that’s what you want,” said Zita, though she knew she was out of her depth here. It just felt like the right response.
The boy heaved a long, rattling sigh and stared back out at the strange new world he found himself living in.