Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,88

Avellish style—which is to say strung from copper rods by flax strands bookended with wooden slats. Dozens of scrolls hang from just one strand, looking like a string of butterfly cocoons swaying gently in an airless breeze.

And then there are the things that don’t even look like books—rotating copper orbs with specifically patterned indents, crosscuts of gelatin the size of walls with ink spirals of all colors frozen within them. What I presume to be polymaths in silver robes gather around these contraptions, peering into them and turning them with handles this way and that, as if…reading them? But that’s not possible—those things don’t even look like language. Language is with ink and words. Stranger still, no matter how high the bookshelves extend up, no matter the daunting distance the scrolls hang from, there are no ladders. But that—that doesn’t make any sense.

Malachite echoes my sentiments.

“How do they get up to those books when they need ’em?” He glowers. The line of silver robes accompanying us start to peel off in all directions, some toward the books, others to shadowed nooks.

“We approach the machines,” the woman says suddenly. “Walk with care.”

We feel them before we see them. The rumbling of the black stone floor is gentle at first, and then crescendos to a quaking, undeniable presence. Something is coming—something reminiscent of a valkerax with the way every gargantuan step shudders the bone. But it’s the sharp, acrid smell that makes me cover my nose, that makes Malachite hiss a soft swear under his breath.

“White mercury,” Lucien murmurs beside me.

“Highly refined,” Fione corrects him, but her next words are cut off as the source of the heavy steps rounds the corner. Slowly, a brass giant comes into view, shaped like a human and yet impossibly heavier, bulkier. Its face is smooth of all features, save for a small slot on the bottom where a mouth would be. The sheer clumsy bulkiness of it seems out of place among so much careful order and arrangement. With every movement of its pendulous arms and creaking knees, curls of white mercury steam exhale from its joints, spiraling up into the archive air.

“Don’t stare.” Mal elbows me.

“And how do you propose that?” I breathe. “When it’s a man made entirely of metal?”

“Is there a man inside?” The beneather squints.

“Obviously not,” Lucien says.

“It’s moving on its own.” Fione’s determined facade slips for a moment, her marvel sparking her eyes with pale blue fire. “Incredible! It’s…automating!”

“We call them self-motivators.” The woman looks over her shoulder at us. “Though I suppose it’s been agreed to call them ‘matronics’ in the common vernacular.”

“Automatic motion, fueled by highly refined white mercury.” Fione leans in to look at the woman. “What type do you use? Qessen-red? Or perhaps starscreed? Is starscreed even strong enough to power something like this? What method of expulsion do you use to generate the energy?”

“Such questions are not of the sort you have traded information for,” the woman insists. “We move on.”

The gleam in Fione’s eyes doesn’t fade, her face riveted to the heavy steps of the matronic. It moves like a person, its gait wide with metallic hip flexors, but I’m more than a little put off by the fact it’s moving without seeing—no eyes on its face or anywhere else I can see. I can’t tell which sense it’s using to navigate, if any sense at all. A senseless creature made of metal, moving simply because it’s been made to. I can’t help but feel kinship with it.

“They aren’t…alive, right?” I ask the woman.

“They do not possess sentience,” she affirms, turning a corner and leaving the matronic behind even as all of us are surreptitiously glancing back at it. “Manmade sentience has only ever been accomplished by the Wave.”

“Then why do they not like being looked at?” Lucien asks. “Surely things without sentience cannot have preferences.”

“Does a bird not have a preference for gentle wind and sunny days?” the woman asks. “We have created life in the matronics, and so they prefer it a certain way.”

Malachite and I share a thoroughly worried look. Fione, meanwhile, appears lost in her imagination, thrilled at the polymathematics of it all, and Lucien looks likewise intrigued. But the beneather and I know better—if the Black Archives are making these matronics, then that means they’re the only ones who know how to control them. It’s worrisome. What are they making them for? I doubt they’ll ever tell us that. I glance back now and then, and it appears the