Of Dreams and Rust - Sarah Fine Page 0,1

about the weather.

I smirk. “I am probably the only girl in the country who does not find that to be a repulsive and offensive question.”

“You’re the only girl in the country I talk to, so I guess I’m lucky.” With his playful smile, he lifts some of the weight off my shoulders. It is magnetic, drawing the corners of my mouth up to match.

“Dr. Yixa is still put off by my eagerness to suture his patients’ wounds. He makes the funniest faces whenever he witnesses me washing blood from my hands.” I imitate it, lowering my eyebrows and grimacing, and Bo laughs. “But at this point he knows my stitches are neater and straighter than his own.”

“Then I give him credit for being observant.”

I wonder if Bo realizes how his simple faith in me melts away some of my own doubts.

“He should be grateful,” Bo continues. “Gochan One was dangerous, but Gochan Two is as heartlessly deadly as the war machines it creates. He needed the help.”

“Father and I were fortunate he did.” After the destruction of Gochan One, Father and I thought we might have to leave in search of work, but Dr. Yixa, the chief physician and surgeon for the neighboring factory, discovered us caring for victims of the catastrophe, and he offered my father a position. My father refused to accept unless I could come along as his assistant.

“I was fortunate he did, too,” Bo murmurs. “I thought I’d never see either of you again, and then Guiren found me.”

I think of the little steel-and-wire girl that I keep tucked under my pillow, her hair short like mine was right after a spider sliced off my braid with its fangs, her body enfolded within the arms of a faceless, unknowable boy. Given how injured Bo was at the time, it must have hurt him to create her, to sneak her into the pocket of my dress. “You had sent me a message.” He was giving me the chance to return to him—or to stay away. “I was happy that it helped us find you.”

Bo’s smile has not faded. “Not as happy as I was.”

I’m not so sure about that. This morning, like every morning now, I woke to the light of the stars and moon winking dimly through my tiny window and the faint sound of my father’s snoring coming from the next room. I pulled on my work dress and crept down the darkened stairways of Gochan Two, a sprawling beast that sleeps until the sun rises over the high factory fence. I slipped around the few traps, knowing well where they are and what they hold in store for trespassers.

Within the old mining tunnels and caves beneath this weapons factory, Bo is once again building himself a world.

Unlike his skin, his mind never fails him.

I followed his instructions, long since memorized, to find the hidden door that marks the entrance to his kingdom, merely the bones of what he plans to build someday. He escaped through these tunnels when he brought the Gochan One slaughterhouse down, burying a hundred men in a tomb of metal and brick and burned meat. And though he was wounded, he immediately began to weave his steel web around him. My father and I helped. Bo is ours, and we could not let him go. And now I look forward to every morning, because in this hour I am more myself than I can be for the rest of the day. Bo knows my secrets, and whether he likes them or not, he seems to forgive me for having them. Knowing he looks forward to our time as well makes me determined to carve it into my day, no matter how early I must rise. It is an unspoken promise. It binds us to each other, out of mutual need.

And yet, lately, I feel like I am losing him, circuit by circuit.

Bo flinches again as my thumb follows the path of his jagged scar. “Must you always press right where it hurts the most? I don’t see how it helps.”

“Father says that if we do this every day, you’ll be able to retain the mobility in your arm.” I duck my head to make sure he is looking at me. “He also said that if you wear those mechanical frames around your arm and legs for too long, if you let them do the work of your body for you, you will lose strength in these muscles.” I skim my