Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Lady of the House of Mirrors

Originally published by Lethe Press

The order was simple, and it arrived written in golden ink over pale pink, thick paper with a vague scent of roses. Rosie smiled at the coincidence, that a local legend should use perfume that referenced her own name in a professional card, but roses were common—unlike the job she was being commissioned for, she thought.

She folded the note into a small square, perfect to fit in her breast pocket, and slid into the shoulder strap of her tool bag. Slumped over a work table, Theo, her copper-headed assistant, sanded the last imperfections out of a piece of clay where he, too, had seen a doll head. He could watch the shop for a couple of hours, but as a reminder, she still gave him a soft pat on the shoulder before crossing the threshold of their discreet and picturesque door—Varadys Automata, Dolls For Dreamers—and stepping into a winter so harsh it’d taken her twelve years to get used to. Her eyes took a second to adjust to the silvery winter air, but a cab trip later, she was back inside—though the colors no longer matched the earth tones of doll parts, and instead the powdered shades of make-up and expensive perfume.

“Miss V, I presume?”

The voice belonged to a butler, an old man with dark, delicate hands that reached out to take her coat. She shed it without a second thought, and followed the man’s crooked back through halls of mirrors into a large, flaky ballroom. The blinds were only partially pulled, letting in blades of late afternoon light, and the fireplace was lit on the furthest corner of the room. On either side, an armchair, and on one of them, a delicate hand on an armrest.

The woman looked towards the door and her hair unraveled from behind her ear.

“You can leave, Carter. Thank you.” The hand curled into a wave. “Come closer, Miss. Please don’t be shy.”

Rosie had never been shy. Not as a child, even less as an adult. Strangers posed no threat when you’d grown up surrounded by the crème de la crème of the underground. She walked up to the fireplace, crude work boots echoing against the floorboards until she stepped on the carpet. The woman was young, and the fire brought out the determination in her dark complexion and soft gray eyes, lined with precise needles of black kohl. Her face was made-up, an invention, a mask of power that didn’t slip even when she had to look up from her disadvantageous sitting position, and meet Rosie’s stare. She controlled the room with an aura so strong it made Rosie’s heart wither and wilt.

“Please sit. We have a lot to discuss.”

Her only choice was the second armchair, and so she sat with eyes fixed on the fire ahead. If she moved she would surely pop a shirt button, or worse, disturb the languor that furnished the room. Words flew in the streets, and if one walked with ears perked high enough, they’d be able to catch them—the lady of the house of mirrors, was how they called her current customer. A poor thing, delicate and faint, a butterfly in her cocoon, with skin so sensitive to the sun that mere exposure would make her pass out, or inflame her skin until the tender, bulbous tumors rendered her unrecognizable, or dead, even—depending on whose words one took for granted on the matter.

“May I offer you a drink, Miss…?” Her voice was low, in that way of people who were sure even their whispers rose to the skies. “…excuse me, is it Varadys? Like the old man?”

“No, ma’am, I…” Rosie’s voice, though, was low in that way of people whose lips often failed to communicate the words so carefully aligned in their minds. “…I have taken up his business, but we are not related. You may call me Rose. And thank you for the offer, but I’d rather not…drink.” She didn’t add that while she wasn’t against voluntary intoxication, she didn’t trust anyone enough to let them fill her glass.

“Very well.” She took a careful sip from whatever glittering liquid filled the glass by her side, and reset it on the circle of condensation it had left on the surface of the table. Her nails, dark red, were filed to elegant points. “Miss Rose, then. May I ask why you’ve taken up his business if you are not related? You’re not from here, clearly.” She held out her fingers, gesturing towards Rosie’s self-conscious head.”

“I moved here when I was young. My family knew Mr. Varadys, and when the time came for them to take on a complicated job opportunity, they left me here to hone my…” She struggled to find a good way to word it, a small lie with which she could speak the truth. “…craft skills.”

The lady let out a small smile, as if the revelation pleased her.

“We have both been left aside by our families, then.”

“There were attempts to recover me afterwards, but by then I’d convinced myself I belonged here.” Here, where the underground has taken over the surface and no one seems to notice.

The lady held her chin on her dainty fingers and murderous nails, welltended lips pursing in thought.

“Wise decision. I wouldn’t have met you otherwise.”

That small line delivered the final blow, and Rosie found herself growing uncomfortable.

“If I may be bold, ma’am…why have you called me here?”

“Your old employer was the best in the business, and you take after him. The truth is, Miss, I need something done.” Silence dragged on, while the lady appeared to rethink her words. “Someone, in fact. I want a companion piece, a machine that acts and looks human in every way…to keep me company, you understand, since nobody else seems up to the task.”

She didn’t doubt it. What she doubted, though, was her own ability to build such a thing. She knew herself incapable—even if there was little she had to consider on a rational level, no matter the assignment. Most mechanisms simply made themselves known to her, and in a trance, she built them to the image seared into her brain. Injecting life, a ghost into the machine wasn’t hard—it was life force, and like everything else in a world of labeled packages and weighted parcels, it could be harnessed and collected, distilled from blood and sweat, cooked from skin cells and forgotten hairs. There was method to what others saw only as madness—but she had no interest in showing it to them.

The lady had kept on talking. Rosie hadn’t noticed.

“…and I would want it to be polite and courteous, and to obey my every whim.”

“Why don’t you just hire someone?” It was an uncomfortable question, but Rosie had grown to accept that people would sell just about anything: their time, the skin off their backs, the arch of their spines when pleasure hit.

“I don’t believe in that sort of exchange, Miss Rose. It’s not a fair trade, money for emotions, or in this case, the lack thereof. All people have emotions, even if they try their hardest to contain them, and I’m not keen on having to consider a second sentient being under this roof.” She brought her glass up, as if proposing a toast. “I’m a princess in a tower, Miss, prepared to deal with no emotions but my own.”

And yet, Rosie’s assistant had caught plenty of words on the street about her nighttime visitors.

“I have stated my wishes, Miss, and I know you are the person to accomplish them. Your fame precedes you, as they say. Your skills…. The dolls you’ve made for the children of the rich and powerful. Dolls that move in the night. Dolls that crawl and walk and brawl…. Dolls that think, even?”

Rosie would rather not speak of the dolls. She’d kept the pieces of her first, built by Varadys before she’d met him, stacked inside a safe in a corner of the shop, and Theo’s horrified eyes had been enough to prove that he, too, could hear the rattling.

“What kind of…look are you interested in?”

“Something that looks, and acts, real will suffice. Gender or appearance details are irrelevant.”

“And…anatomical details?”

The lady gave her a sly smile over the rim of her glass.

“Do you think I need a sexual aid, Miss?”

She didn’t reply. She’d realized, early in life, that there was no point trying to understand people’s inner desires from the curl of their pulse, or the whiteness of the teeth they bared in a casual smile.

The order was simple, then. A companion piece. A robot. A mechanical person that wouldn’t stand out in a decayed palace where the ink was gold and the letters smelled of roses.

She sat at the drawing board the following afternoon, behind the counter of the shop she owned, even though she’d never bothered to remove the name of her mentor from the sign. Varadys Automata, that was what it said, and she was just Miss V, to most people. Petite, head a mess of golden thread, hands elegant but calloused—like a thief’s. Monsieur Varadys had been dead for five years, and she kept his ashes in a metal urn, sculpted to the approximate shape of his skull while he’d been alive to approve it. She’d placed him above the fireplace, as a reminder—you might be alone now, Rosie, but I’ve left you big shoes to fill.

In her drawing pad, lines at the end of her pencil took the shape of what she assumed must be a good-looking person. She started with the hardest option, a boy’s face. Boys were difficult. She could lay out the whole span of the universe, examine it with a loupe of the highest quality, and return without finding more than one to her liking. She’d loved a boy, once. To think of it, herself a precocious eight-year old, and he a dreamer selling himself for wings. Ten more years, and she would have built him a pair, sturdy enough to escape. His features found their way into the blank paper and she didn’t fight them. Dark skin, wavy hair, blue-green eyes. He wore an eyepatch, and his body was covered in scars.

At noon, the door struck the chime hanging from above, and Theo walked in with winter on his back. Elegant glasses and a penchant for cravats that went a little too tight around his throat—she’d never asked, he’d never told—she supposed he was good-looking too, if only a little less authentic, if only a little more conscious of his own appeal. Theo was her second assistant in five years, since she’d taken over the shop. The first one had been a girl, but Rosie had found herself falling for her pronounced Cupid’s bow and the way her fingers moved when she adjusted the legs of the tin dolls on the shelves. There was something about femininity that drew her in. Something about the way some women sprayed their perfumes and applied their powders, wrapping themselves in protective layers of scent and color, refusing the crude touch of the same air that enveloped common mortals. The women in her childhood had been that way too—tall and proud, self-assured, knuckles white over the reins that drew people, and only the right people into their lives, puppets on a string, choreographed to perfection by the hands that had once rocked her to sleep.

“Myers paid ahead, two dolls to be delivered next month at the townhouse…” Theo flipped through his notes as he delved further into the shop, reaching ahead of his own steps to open the hidden counter door, the final boundary that protected the half of the shop where she didn’t have to worry about presenting herself, too, as a doll ready to be sold. “…got a couple more orders, but nothing you’ll have to attend to in person.” He closed his notebook with a blunt sweep of his right hand, and removed his glasses to let them hang by a gold chain at his neck. “But now you must tell me. The lady. What did she want?”

She recounted the small meeting, and he nodded along, attentive, drinking her every word, peeking over her shoulder to analyze her half-conscious sketch with a slight frown. He recognized the subject, of course. Max, with his eye patch and his scars. As a rule, Rosie didn’t keep secrets.

“What are you thinking, then? We can’t build a robot that looks like a human. There’s no way we can recreate the skin, the texture…”

“Yes, that’s why we won’t.” She pushed her boot against the desk and slid backwards on the wheeled chair, stopping by the fireplace across the room. Theo sidestepped to abandon the collision course, but there was a smile on his face and she understood she had to do everything in her power to keep him by her side. He’d play along, no matter what it was. He was curious and driven and excitable. And young. “We’ll use human parts. Real human parts. I want the best, so make sure you find someone worthy.”

Theo’s eyes were half-amused, half-cautious slits.

“Someone…dead, of course?”

“Freshly so, if possible.” She stood to her full—but tiny—height and made her way to the stairs, hoping that sleep would prove beneficial to her creativity. “It won’t be of any use if it starts decomposing, so see if you can find someone whom…whom will tell you about incoming dead.”

“Will do. May I ask, though…?”

She’d just touched the first step with her heel, but still she turned.

“…why are you going to such trouble for a powdered princess in a decayed mansion? Is the pay…that good?”

“The pay is okay. That’s not the point.”

“Then…?”

“The point…” She abandoned the stairs to rejoin Theo by the fireplace. “…is that I didn’t train here to make toys. I’ve told you this. That wasn’t the reason my family chose to burden a reclusive old man with my education. I know I can give life to anything I choose, and I have chosen to start now. The stakes are high, I’ve got the conditions gathered. I can’t fail. If Varadys could bring life to my childhood dolls, I can do the same. And…”

She stopped herself short, keeping the rest of the justification to herself. She’d seen the woman, spoken to her, and if there was one thing consistent about halls of mirrors, was that one always struggled to find their way out. Not because of the mirrors, or the doors, or the confusing layout camouflaged behind the reflective walls, in that particular case. No. But because every mirror reflected the same thing, and that thing was a velvet armchair where a woman sat. She was young, dark, and the fire brought out the determination in her eyes, a soft gray lined with precise needles of black kohl. And like so many women before her, women for whom Rosie had carved check marks on her bedposts, she had a pronounced Cupid’s bow, and her fingers moved in the most alluring of ways every time she seized her glass and took a careful sip.

It didn’t take Theo long to figure out what they’d have to do. The redhead was resourceful, and when he didn’t spend the day with her, fixing dolls for little girls, sewing tiny dresses, accessorizing his right eye with intricate loupes, or fixing the casual curl of the fringe that fell over his eyes, he was outside, collecting intelligence, making sure Rosie got the latest news without ever having to walk out the door. They were both outlanders, after all, neither born nor raised in the city that had seen them grow into their clumsy young versions of adulthood.

That evening, he arrived with a triumphant note, and the smile on his face echoed the one that took her own lips by assault.

“Did you get it?”

“I got it.” He was feeling brave, the kind of bravery sold in pill boxes and syringes, and it showed in the way he sat on the counter and spun to plant his feet on the other side—her side—of the barricade. “A friend of mine, Aiden. He’s apprenticed to an embalmer across town. They get called to fix the…well, the ugliest bodies every once in a while, in the red light district, but—”

“We don’t want an ugly body, Th—”

“No, Rosie, I know we don’t.” His voice was flat, stern, but he held out his hands as if to apologize for it—scared that she could find him, perhaps, pretty enough to turn into a machine if all else failed. The idea, albeit attractive in theory, didn’t receive any gold stars from the pragmatic side of her mind. Rosie hadn’t forgotten. Rosie remembered the trees scratching the windows of her childhood home and the murderous look in her aunt’s eyes when she came home from a particularly taxing day, the scars she left on her slave’s body afterwards. She remembered his face, as well, Max’s face, enough to know it looked nothing like Theo’s, enough to wonder if the magic had held through the years. Maybe he’d found someone to restore his missing eye. “All I’m saying is…there’s a body in a morgue by the river. It’s a boy, and he matches your original idea. Black hair, light eyes. He might be a little too light-skinned, but…it’s an experiment, right?”

His eyes looked hopeful, though unsure. Rosie raised an eyebrow, one decorated with three tiny silver rings. “What do you mean, an experiment?”

“You won’t…sell him to her, right? Not the first? Not the prototype?”

Rosie lay back in her seat, ran a hand through her hair, found her fingers caught in the knots. It was a good question. What if it worked? What if it didn’t? What if he glitched? What if the body wasn’t even usable to being with?

No use in wondering. “Come along, we have work to do.”

Across town, the young man Rosie assumed must be Aiden awaited them by the morgue. He looked perfectly nondescript, and his left sleeve ended in a knot below the elbow, nothing but frigid air where his forearm used to be. Rosie made a note to fix it for him, as soon as she could. He led them into the deserted morgue, their figures casting shadows upon, first, the waiting room, then the embalming tables, and finally, the wall of numbered drawers.

“He’s over there. Bottom row, second door.”

Theo swallowed shaky words, and gestured for Rosie to step forward. He hadn’t grown in the midst of madness the way she had—he wasn’t used to the bodies and the blood and the guts. She approached the set of metallic doors with respect, even though she knew what lay on the other side had to be seen as nothing but feedstock.

The body slid out with a swift pull, feet first. He was barefoot, his feet clad in black stockings that ended beneath loose shorts that ended at his knees. He wore a corset, a bottle green corset that pulled in his waist—not enough to deform him, not enough to catapult him into the realm of the uncanny. His skin was pale, nearly white in the thin light, and his eyes were glazed over—hard to tell whether they were hazel or gray. Dark brown hair, growing long around his chin, an easy fix. But the inside of the drawer reeked of alcohol, and that, she didn’t find quite so auspicious.

“Cause of death?”

Aiden, standing by the door, hand draped over the door handle as if body snatching was something he did every day, gave her a shrug.

“Not sure. Some are saying overdose. As I suppose you can imagine, he hasn’t been autopsied yet.”

Was that passive-aggressiveness in his tone? Condescension? Rosie decided she would fix his forearm for him, sure, but she’d charge him twice as she would anybody else.

“Drugs, then?”

“I suppose.”

That wouldn’t do. What if something didn’t work? What if he’d been damaged beyond repair, beyond the point where she’d still be able to fix him with money and machines?

“Theo, help me prepare him.” He walked forward with a large bag clutched between jeweled knuckles, and together, they eased the body into its new cocoon. Halfway through, she decided to remove the corset. It left boning marks criss-crossed over his own exposed bones, and she wasn’t sure they’d go away.

It was so late it was turning early, and Rosie couldn’t help but stare at the body on the table in the back room, a little workshop where she used to sit on a toolarge armchair and watch Varadys work on his most ambitious projects. The walls had been covered in brass legs and brass heads ever since she remembered, but nothing else had stood the test of time—she was alone then, braving new territory, and taking a risk with parts of a different kind. On the first day, Rosie wasn’t sure she could do it. On the second day, she was sure she couldn’t do it, when the smell set in and her fingers froze inches from the boy’s body, curling into hesitant claws, retreating to rest idly by her side. The experiment rotted in the back of the workshop, and she didn’t try to make it work.

Two days later, morning found her huddled in a corner, wrapped in a tattered blanket. The safe rattled, the doll wanted out. On the table, the boy had turned purple where gravity had pooled blood beneath his skin. She sat as he lay, and in their own ways, both drifted closer to their own demises, carrying marks of their individual prisons—his a physical set of metal bones, hers a mental picture of a short but eventful life—into the unknown.

If results tended to show themselves to her, they were not doing it this time. Oh no. Her mind was empty but for the icy paralysis that came with fear, and terror, and the stench of the corpse on her work table. Theo was gone. She’d asked him to lay off work for a few days, and when solitude became too much, she asked Aiden to recover the body. She didn’t say a word beyond the ones she’d written on her calling card, sent clutched in the right hand of a dead-eyed child, as her left held a brand new doll. Varadys Automata, Dolls For Dreamers, the sign over the door said—and sometimes, Rosie still tried to live up to it.

The body left, the smell lingered. And then the note arrived, written in golden ink over pale pink, thick paper with a vague scent of roses.

There’s one more thing, Miss. I want it to speak. But more than that, I want it able to converse. Call back when possible. With love, G.

She tore the note and let the pieces fall around her feet on the floor boards. A figure of despair, she found herself looking up at the walls of the brass reliquary that was her workshop. The lady didn’t know what she wanted, but Rosie did—and it was no longer a robot. It was a slave.

No one knew slaves quite like Max. Maximillian, once. Dark skin, wavy hair, bluegreen eyes, an eyepatch, and a body covered in scars, all worn like uncomfortable clothes around one of the highest penthouses in the city—one with rooftop access, and thus an escape route into the skies he had always called home.

On the ground floor, a doorwoman stopped her with an authoritative hand, asked for her name, noted her address. She took them all with her into a small room where Rosie wasn’t allowed, a room from which she came back with a snarl.

“Please take the elevator. He’ll be expecting you.”

It could have been true, but the person on the other side of the ascending gilded cage was not the one she had been expecting. The defining characteristics had remained unchanged, but the eyepatch was gone, replaced by a discreet glass eye—he was already half doll, then, even without her intervention—and the scars on the back of his fidgeting hands had healed to barely noticeable silver lines. Hard to tell whether he was happy to see her.

“Are you alone?” It was the first thing she asked, and the one that cracked his face into the smile she had always associated with his character.

“Such a predatory question for a guest to ask, Rose.” He stepped forward and unlocked the cage, but didn’t open the door. “May I ask…why the sudden visit?”

Half of her wanted to sit, relax, act friendly for old times’ sake. The other half wanted to leave as soon as possible, abandon the uptown world of polished hardwood penthouses and return to the moldy riverside, where the dust was toxic but the people were kind.

“I need your help.”

“Well, obviously.”

When had the women in her family ever remembered him with no strings attached, no favors asked? Rosie wondered, as she followed his defeated shoulders into the living room. By the large windows, he invited her to take the sofa, but chose to stay on his feet himself—she understood he needed the advantage, and gave it away, sinking into the pillows, expecting the silence to break on its own. Finally, he indicated the city.

“So how’s business on the ground?”

“Haven’t you been down?”

A headshake, a smile. “Not once this year, no. It’s too much for me—the people, the noises. I’d rather stay above ground…and get somebody else to do the shopping.”

Did he need a companion piece, too? The smell of the dead body caught up to her, and his creature comforts didn’t seem quite so interesting in comparison.

“Listen, Max…have you heard of the house of mirrors?”

“Can’t say I have.” He seemed honest, if uninterested—she’d prepared herself to see him shiver, as if he too had been one of the lady’s nocturnal visitors, as if he too had already fulfilled companion duties a robot would never be able to live up to.

“There’s a lady who lives there, and she never goes outside. She has hired me to create her…a doll. A companion piece. Life-sized, able to speak, to move, to do everything a human does, except…not human.”

Max was listening. The one eye he retained any control over was curious. His knuckles were white from gripping his sleeves at his elbows.

“I came to you in case you had any ideas.”

“I don’t know anything about dolls.” But she knew he knew where she was going, and he was bracing himself for it.

“No, but you know about machines. And you know about…”

He nodded. “You can say it.”

“…submitting. Listen, I-I can’t program a thing to speak if she wants it able to hold a conversation. I can’t make a machine do the things she wants. It’s just not possible. But I told her I would, and if I don’t, she…she’s going to flay me, I just know it.”

Max gave her nothing more than a shrug.

“Then find her someone. A slave, a submissive. With time, we could train someone.” He sat on the coffee table in front of her, elbows on his knees, a little too close, and she was again young, fascinated by this creature who would have once braved an army to keep her out of harm’s way. “Do we have time?”

“It doesn’t matter, it’s just a thought. I’m not…I’m not really going to do it.” Or was she? “What if they change their mind, what if they leave? She doesn’t want a person acting like a robot, she wants a robot acting like a person, and it’s not the sam—”

“No, it’s not, but can she tell the difference?” And his smile was different, and his face was different, and he wasn’t the most beautiful boy in the world anymore—she wouldn’t have handed him to a customer if he had been the last human standing.

“I didn’t know you were this…cunning, Max.” And when he averted his eyes, she struck again. “Spending too much time working with my family, I see.”

He gave her what seemed to be an eye roll, hard to identify by his half paralyzed orbs and his sudden, rushed movement, up and away from the sofa.

“Don’t flatter your kin. If you want help, that’s my proposal.” By the window, he calmed down again, still as a statue, as his right hand moved into the void to explain his point. “She’s not going to know if you train someone and pay them well. There are hundreds of people out there who would love to get out of the streets, and into a house with a proper roof. Besides, if she treats them well…it’s not that bad of a deal.”

She wondered if, apart from everything else, the parts she couldn’t see under his clothes, the rest she already knew about…Max had also sold his soul.

“People will do the darkest things for safety. But I don’t expect you to understand.” He ran a caring hand through her hair as he walked by the sofa, and disappeared up the stairs.

His words lingered in the back of her mind, but she pushed them aside every so often. She requested a second body from Aiden, and that time she wasn’t picky. Anything would do, and what came was a middle-aged woman, her hair a dyed shade of bright red. Anything would do, she kept telling herself, head lolling forward on the hinge of her shoulders, finding no solace even when she took the time to drag herself into the corner couch where childhood had brought her such sweet dreams.

“Have you been sleeping?” It was Theo, concerned, voice mixed with the jingle of the front door keys hanging from his fingers. Was it past closing time already?

She shook her head, closing her eyes in silent surrender. No, she hadn’t been sleeping, not at all. She felt herself being consumed by ideas, eaten inside out. That time, she opened the body. She wore gloves, and into a bag that Theo held open in his own bare hands—he could be fearless, when her motivation overflowed into him—she transferred every organ in the chest cavity. Next was the blood. She’d seen them do it in funeral homes, a pump replacing blood with embalming fluid, something to keep the tissues looking at least vaguely human while the insides became something else. It was late, but not enough to be early that time. Theo threw a blanket over her shoulders, and together, they stood and watched.

“You know, I…this isn’t how I imagined my first contact with the workforce.” He added air quotes around the final word, surely a remnant from times spent with a nouveau riche family for whom work was such a shameful word it should never be uttered on its own.

She pulled the blanket tighter around her neck and smiled against the warm wool. It was strange to think she was the same age as Theo, curious to think that they had so much more in common than she and Max ever would—and yet, she thought of him as a pupil, the next in line for the little Varadys shop. Dolls for dreamers. Did he have what it took? Did the science of doll-making, life-making, did the god complex particles run in his blood, the way they did in hers?

“Have you thought that maybe you could…take over in a few years?”

“Oh, no…” He looked displaced, all of a sudden. “…no way, I…I’m not like you. I can’t do…the things you can. You look at a problem and your mind solves it before you do, but that’s not me. I can’t do that.”

She looked at the body on the table, the blood replaced by the fluid, the skin looking waxen under the oppressive light bulbs. There was no moonlight, and the workshop was a silent crypt—she’d never seen herself so close to her demise.

“I’m not sure I can solve this problem, either.”

He smiled, sympathetic, before lacing an arm around her shoulders and squeezing lightly. “I have faith in you.”

He brought tea and biscuits. She upgraded the look of the Creation itself from flesh-colored to gold and bronze. She replaced organs with clock parts and muscles with elaborate systems of levers and pulleys and pistons. She was close.

A second note arrived.

I hope this delay doesn’t mean you have stepped down from the assignment, Miss V. May I remind you, you shook my hand, we’re bound now. If not by law, then by honor. With love, G.

But there was no honor among thieves, and Rosie let out a bone-chilling scream when the second body, too, started to rot.

She returned to the house of mirrors after the third body, after the stench in the workshop became so intense she had started to work with a mask. Theo himself had moved works in progress to his own house—business wasn’t so bad it could justify selling miasmatical baby dolls. No need to pass on the honors of an unfortunate childhood at the hands of a Varadys masterpiece.

Rosie said the words over tea with the lady, staring at impeccable nails tapping the arm of the powder blue armchair. The room reeked of rotten roses, or perhaps just roses in general, and she was the one bringing in the rot. “I can’t give you everything you want in one companion. It’s impossible. I can’t do it.”

The lady didn’t answer with anger, instead putting on a polite mask of curiosity, her face inquisitive in the way small wrinkles formed around her eyes.

“Then who can? If not you, then who?”

“I need a lot of time, and effort…”

“And I can pay you for both.”

“Yes, ma’am, I understand, but…”

“What seems to be the problem?” The lady set down her glass, sitting up straight, adjusting a curl of her hair behind her pierced ear. “Miss, why do I have a feeling you’re failing on purpose? Avoiding my notes, refusing to give me any feedback on the assignment I ordered…this isn’t a game to me. You may be as fickle as a child, and very well, for you are still one, but I am not. If you don’t want my business, just say so, and I’ll send my assistant to search for it elsewhere.”

Rosie didn’t acknowledge the frustration building up, but when her fingers clenched too tight around the teacup she’d been handed just minutes before, suddenly too warm, too slippery, too uncomfortable, she broke.

“Then search for it elsewhere!” She threw the teacup at the wall, where it broke and scattered, staining the wallpaper, transforming the floorboards into a porcelain minefield. The lady’s hand rose to clutch her pearls, as if comfort lived in the texture of the string of masterpieces around her neck, the result of a hundred underwater jobs well done, never disturbed by the sensory overload of death, the entrails in trash bags discarded by the entrance, the dismayed looks on the faces of innocent young assistants. Her breakdown seemed out of place in the shadowy room, and she cradled her head in her hands, pressing fingers against the cane of her nose to keep from crying. “Forgive me. Forgive me, ma’am, I don’t know what got to me.”

“I will ask you again, Miss…” The lady touched Rosie’s bare wrist, then her fingers, until she had them trapped in her own. She pulled them out, as if relaxing the claws of some murderous animal, and carefully placed her own cup between them. Rosie let herself be maneuvered, herself a doll, but not much of a companion. “…what seems to be the problem? I don’t know about machines, or whatever else your work consists of. But I know about fear, and frustration, and if what you need is help coping, I might be able to offer it.”

“The only thing you can offer me is your understanding. What you’ve asked of me…it’s not possible.”

“I thought you made dolls for dreamers. I thought you could make anything work.”

“I’ve started to doubt that myself.”

“What is it that you don’t want to achieve, Miss? Fame? Fortune? Is my generosity not enough for you? Or do you pity me, like everybody else?”

“It’s nothing of the sort, ma’am, nothing. It’s just I haven’t found the solution to this particular problem yet, and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t do it until inspiration…until the solution comes to me.”

The lady bent forward, setting her sharp chin on the back of her folded hand.

“Is that the way you work? You sit and wait for inspiration to strike you? For the solutions to come to you? Doesn’t seem too productive to me, Miss. What if inspiration doesn’t feel like coming?”

“Then I disappoint my customer, ma’am.”

The lady laughed, looking away, sitting back in the chair, disturbing the blanket over her legs as she crossed them underneath the fabric. “And that shouldn’t ever be an option, should it? Lest disappointment be something they can’t handle.”

She dared look up at the woman, but her skin was perfect and powdered and her hair fell in ideal curls over her shoulder, and her earrings were long cascades of jewels that mingled between them, and she was so alluring that she couldn’t bear the thought of having disappointed her.

“If I may ask…why haven’t you considered escaping?”

The lady blinked, closed her eyes for a moment as the corner of her lips rose, cat-like, in a satisfied smile.

“Do you think me stupid, Miss?”

“No. No, not…not at all.”

“Nothing you can possibly say to me about my own life or condition will make more sense to me than what I can already say to myself. You don’t know me. I didn’t invite you here to give me life-changing advice.”

She stood. “You are correct. I will return to work.”

The lady let her walk away, a few tentative steps, before putting out her cigarette on the marble surface of the side table. She rose, and Rosie had never seen her stand—if not exactly tall, she looked ominous, wrapped in a dark shawl with only her claws for front clasps.

“Will you?”

“Yes. Yes, I will. I will try the best I can.”

The woman inched closer, running thin fingers through Rosie’s blonde locks. “And answer my notes this time, will you? I’m very interested in knowing how you work. Since I can’t…go out to see it myself.” She closed the distance between them, and Rosie felt herself freeze, until the lady planted a soft kiss on her jawline—then she melted. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to invite you to come work here until you’re done.”

It was a threat disguised with a kiss, and Rosie caught it somewhere in the air between the skin her lips had touched, and the fingers she brought up to trap their fading presence.

The solution came to her a few days later, after two hours of sleep and a cup of despicable tea, as she leaned on Theo’s silk-covered shoulder and coached him into painting a doll’s eye just right. She didn’t let him know, but she counted every minute, every second until he boxed the doll and announced he was leaving for its delivery. Like a dutiful wife standing guard by the window, following her undutiful husband’s footsteps until the nearest corner obscured him from view, she waited. And then, she flipped the sign. Dolls for dreamers, absolutely, but not always, not then.

She planned carefully, drew letters and diagrams, collected all the materials and contacts she would need to make it work. From the cash register, a heavy stash of bank notes. From behind the counter, her tool bag. She walked out a little after sunset, turned right in the direction of the shady inns and alleys where drug dealers and similar night crawlers made their living, and didn’t come back.

The doll was delivered by Rosie’s own hands—with the assistance of Theo’s and Aiden’s—to the infamous house of mirrors a few days later, two weeks, in an elaborate box remade from a white coffin. It was life-sized, as expected, as ordered, and wrapped in white tissue paper, thin as the wings of a cabbage butterfly.

It was brighter than usual inside the living room, and the lady awaited her small entourage standing by the nearly opaque white curtains, wrapped in a floral shawl. She looked over at the box, but didn’t let her face fall into any show of emotion.

“Do you bring me a dead man, Miss?”

Rosie felt like laughing, but Theo caught her eye—and he didn’t seem at all amused.

“I will explain everything once my helpers leave, ma’am.”

Helpers. The word seemed to linger over Theo’s shoulders, dripping like acid rain from his wavy hair. “Fine.” He gave the lady a small bow, she nodded in his direction, and then he was gone, with only Aiden and a slight suggestion of anger on his trail.

They were alone. Just the two of them, women from different walks of life, two different types of criminal. The mastermind and the wrecking ball. The wizard—perhaps the witch?—and the dragon. The lady walked forward, and Rosie half expected to hear killer heels on the floor boards, but no—she was barefoot, and her toenails were painted the same bloody shade as her finger nails.

“Shall we unwrap it, then?”

“Of course.” First the locks on the side of the coffin, then the layers and layers of tissue paper. It wasn’t a boy, that time, but a girl. A girl with long black hair that fell straight around her shoulders, small breasts and protruding hipbones. She—it, perhaps—came clothed in a two piece black suit, the jacket long and the neckline deep, deep enough to reveal the Y-shaped, hand-stitched incision that marred her chest. Rosie was willing to admit defeat for how much she looked like Max, if only in the proud features—but when she sat up, after a little coaxing from Rosie’s part, she even seemed to move like him. Cautious, but full of unused potential. Built for carnage, first, and for love, later. Rosie helped her up and out of the box, careful not to strain muscles cold from lying in a tight space for too long. Her eyes were empty—they couldn’t be emptier if Rosie had pulled them out of their sockets and replaced them with glass spheres.

“Does it have a name, Miss V?”

“I haven’t named her, ma’am. I was expecting you would want to do it yourself.”

The lady stepped closer, blew into the doll’s eye. She blinked.

“Should it do that?”

Rosie had kept her fingers crossed. Hoped the lady wouldn’t ask questions she could not answer, because the answers had come while she’d been too artificially dazed, somewhere between Theo’s and Max’s apartments, to remember to take notes.

“She…. I mean, it…. Forgive me, ma’am…” She wasn’t yet good at extracting the humanity from the parts, from the skin and bone and skull and lips of the human who stood just inches from her, a face and body framed in black, tarnished only by a Y-shaped scar over the chest. “The shell is very much human. If you touch h- it, you will realize the skin feels warm, like a human’s would. The shell is human, and it works like a human’s, which means there will be some needs you will need to attend to. Think of it as recharging your companion—perpetual motion is still very much beyond my skill set.”

“How does this creature you offer me differ from a human, then?”

Rosie reached out, and touched the doll. Touched her, not it, running a finger upwards over the stitches. “It’s different here.” She let the finger rest on the doll’s forehead. “And here. The shell is human. The rest is as empty as it looks. And it’s yours to change, and create, and improve as you see fit. I’m sure it will suit your needs. Any changes you feel like making, on the outside or the inside, I will be more than happy to take care of.”

“Anything else I should know?”

No. No, most definitely not.

There was, after all, method to what others saw only as Rosie’s madness—but she had no interest in showing it to them.

The stitches came out ten days later. The doll served tea. Her name was Gemma, and she moved with the trained delicacy of a creature conscious of eyes lingering over her figure every second of the day, and probably the night.

You lied. -G

The note was simple, and it arrived four days later written in golden ink over pale pink, thick paper with a vague scent of roses. It deviated from every other note simply in the fact that it reached the shop tied to a box, a white box with gold locks filled with white tissue paper, thin as the wings of a cabbage butterfly. Inside, a kitchen knife, tainted red, and a bundle of paper stained just as dark.

She unwrapped it, and found someone’s heart in her hands.