orange fish—some solid, some patterned—played in the emerald green tangles of the lake grass, their quick shadows streaking across the white, sandy bottom.
Mattie had been here only once before, and she looked for Iolanda’s house. She did not know how she would recognize it, only that she would—every house here was elaborate, and Mattie thought she would spot Iolanda’s taste with ease.
She spent a long time wandering between the houses, studying the ornate ironwork on the gates, looking for any sign of Iolanda’s presence. Most of the residences stood empty since their inhabitants had left the city, but a few harbored signs of life—soft music and laughter wafted through the air, along with a light clinking of dishes and glasses. But the gates were locked, and no matter how hard she looked, she saw no sign of Iolanda.
She was ready to give up, and turned back, now lost in the maze of the wide, quiet streets. She felt even more alien in this eerie, luxurious place, and she hurried along, suddenly afraid. And then she saw people in the streets.
They did not belong here either. Dressed in cheap, rough clothes covered with coal dust, their faces gaunt and peppered with coal particles absorbed into their skin so that no soap could get them out. They moved in a silent, tight formation, their eyes unnaturally light in their darkened faces. Several of them carried torches, and they cast a troubled orange light over the trees and the streets.
Mattie got out of the way, flattening against an iron fence. The bars felt reassuring against the metal of her back as she watched the silent and somber procession pass by. The tide of miners did not stem—they filled the street, and Mattie tasted coal and hot metal in the air.
There were others too—not as stained as the rest, but just as gaunt and silent. For a moment, Mattie thought that these people were ghosts vomited up by the Soul-Smoker and given flesh through some perversion of nature, through the foul magic of smoke and clanging metal that filled the city, rendering flesh more and more obsolete each day, and this unwanted flesh now walked the streets, lost.
At first, they didn’t even look at Mattie, intent and determined. But as more and more men walked by, she noticed that a few glanced in her direction; when the end of the column was moving past her, they stared.
“Hey,” one of them called, breaking the silence. “Shouldn’t we do something about the clunker here?”
She was too scared to take offense as several men left their place in the column, creating a little eddy of people, and walked up to her.
“I’ve done nothing to you,” Mattie said.
“It talks,” one of them said, perplexed. “When did you learn to talk?”
“I always could,” Mattie said. “I’m not like the other machines. I’m emancipated.”
The man studied her, his narrow face unshaven and impenetrable. “We heard about the intelligent machine,” he said, finally.
“The one who tells the government what to do with us,” one of his fellows added. “Is it you? Is it you who took away our land and stuffed us into mines?”
“Their kind took our fields, too,” another one said.
Mattie shook her head and folded her hands. “No,” she said. “It’s not me, I swear. I’m just an alchemist, I make ointments. You want the Calculator by the Grackle Pond.”
“We’ll get to it in due time,” the first man said. “Now the question is, what to do with you?”
Mattie sensed restrained violence in the tense set of his shoulders, in the subtle tightening of his fists, knobby and disproportionately large on his thin forearms.
A shout from somewhere at the head of the procession tore at the silence, and there was a sound of smashed glass and whooping. More shouting, more noises, and a thin wisp of dirty smoke curled into the sky like a curlicue. Mattie’s interlocutors were compelled to look away, stretching their necks to see better.
Mattie bolted. The man closest to her gave a surprised gasp as she pushed him away, and reflexively his fist caught her on the cheek; she felt cracks opening in her face, blooming into stars, but already she ran, the wind hissing in the fissures of her porcelain mask.
The crowd had grown sparser and she had no trouble weaving her way between them. She was faster than any of them, and they seemed too preoccupied to pay her much mind. Her feet pounded the pavement, but instead of resonating loudly like before,