Burning Up

view. Now that the lamp lit the cabin, his reflection appeared in the glass, instead. He stood at the bureau with his back to the windows, filling the washbowl with water. She glanced away when he removed his jacket, but looked again when she heard his shirt come off.
    She’d spent years training at the Blacksmith’s smithy, learning to build machines that ranged from tiny clockworks to enormous steam-powered locomotives. But before the Blacksmith had let her touch a single prosthetic, she’d had to study anatomy. For two years, she’d watched people wearing tight clothes and loose, observed the nude models brought in by the Blacksmith—and during quiet sessions at night, opening the drowned corpses brought in by the body collectors along the Thames—until she understood how every muscle, tendon, and joint within a human body affected balance and movement.
    With sharply delineated muscle that moved smoothly beneath his tanned skin, Mad Machen had a form well worth studying.
    Stripped down to his breeches, he washed his face, then wetted a cloth and wiped down the back of his neck, his chest, his underarms. He glanced around once, as if checking to see that she still faced the window. After a brief hesitation, he moved to a bootjack. Bracing his foot, he pulled off his left boot—but when his right came off, she turned in the armchair for a better look, frowning.
    His breeches extended to midcalf, so she couldn’t see his knee, but the mechanical leg looked to be a standard skeletal prosthetic, made of nickel-plated steel with basic movement at the joints . . . and a badly configured ankle.
    “You have a load-bearing pneumatic where your Achilles tube should be.” She stood and crossed the room. Crouching next to him, she fingered the wide cylinder above his heel. “Look at this. Shoddy work—”
    She paused suddenly, looked up; he was staring down at her, his expression unreadable. “It’s not by your ship’s blacksmith, is it?”
    “No.”
    His gruff response released the tension that had sprung through her. In London, there could be no excuse for work like this, but on a ship, there could be any number of reasons—a lack of equipment being the most likely. She didn’t want to endanger a blacksmith’s position over circumstances he couldn’t avoid.
    “Alright. Look here. Your Achilles tube is for balance and stability—it doesn’t handle much weight, but prevents your foot apparatus from flopping around like a fish. But this . . .” She tapped her finger against the cylinder, shaking her head. “It’s harder to compress, which limits the range of motion. You probably don’t take note of it except for on an incline or stairs, or when you want to walk quickly—but then it’s stiff. Yes?”
    “Yes.”
    His voice had deepened, but Ivy didn’t glance up to gauge his expression. She lifted the leg of his breeches and examined the knee. Rudimentary, but fine. Her fingers itched to build a more advanced joint, but fixing what he had would have to serve.
    “If you show me to your smithy, I’ll adjust the cylinder’s valve so that it compresses under minimal weight. It won’t be perfect, but you’ll have a smoother stride until the pneumatic can be replaced.”
    “Not tonight.”
    Ivy closed her eyes as his answer sank through her. Pushing to her feet, she walked back to the window.
    He might have sighed, but she wasn’t certain. The creaking of the ship and the clank of his foot as he moved toward her covered the sound. He stopped by the table and glanced down at her plates. She’d eaten from all of them but one.
    His brows lifted. “You don’t like lemon tarts?”
    She didn’t know; she hadn’t tried one. “Duckie said the sugar came from the Antilles.”
    Two hundred years before, the Horde had used cheap imported sugars and teas to infect almost everyone in Britain with their nanoagents. Ivy didn’t know anyone raised under Horde rule who sweetened their food with anything but honey.
    Sitting back against the table, he paused with his hand over the tart. “May I?”
    “Yes,” she said, grateful that unlike some descendents of the merchants and aristocrats who’d fled when the Horde had advanced across Europe—and who still considered themselves Englishmen, though they’d never stepped foot on British soil until after the Iron Duke blew up the Horde’s tower—Mad Machen didn’t try to convince her that she had nothing to fear from sugar imported from the New World.
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