Deep night, now. Above is the veiled moon, sleeping stars.
The machinist moves through the forest without light. Where an ordinary man might stumble over roots and cut himself against jutting branches, Karl Heisenberg strides deftly through knotted woods, crushes bracken and burrs beneath his heavy-soled boots. He pauses every so often to roll off new columns of cigar ash against tree bark, to study the crooked paths between trees. He is used to operating in the darkness, even with the smoked wire-rimmed lenses he wears even at nighttime.
He had been a small child when he scavenged his spectacles from the remains of a soldier that had long expired on the fields behind his dead father's factory. When he pressed them desperately against his aching, sun-scorched eyes, so mutated from countless experiments, he could finally see. A boy with a hundred monsters inside him, for whom the sky growing dark was an infinite relief.
Without his glasses, Heisenberg's naked glare will otherwise absorb all the blinding luster of the world. Even a moonless night will have burning shreds of brightness that he will find. The amber glow of a kerosene lamp in the distance, a scatter of starlight on leaves. The eye of a woman in a ruined Orthodox Church. Her skin's soft shine and the silver dagger of her glance. He had recognized the fierce, lambent expression on her face, had heard it in her demands of her lover before he had approached them, had seen that searing look in his reflection—the look of a trapped, angry animal.
He ought to have carried her off then from that damned road; might have done her some good—his first act as a liberator, perhaps.
No. Not yet. Heisenberg's first act as liberator is—has always been—to free himself. He will never forget that, this yearning that galvanizes the body. He crushes the Romeo y Julieta against the sleeve of his coat, feels the heat burning through the fabric. Hungry for erstwhile notes of cedar and leather, he inhales the bitter tar smell and immediately regrets it; a waste of a good cigar.
Heisenberg tosses its smoldering remnants to the undergrowth, briefly wonders if the embers will start a forest fire. That's an idea, he thinks. Burn the whole fucking place to the ground.
—
Heisenberg skirts the northern perimeter of the village, passing beneath the ramparts and towers of Castle Dimitrescu. He is moving towards the grove of bone trees in the Forbidden Woods, where, many hours before, a woman with one eye had helped bury a dead mother. When he emerges into the copse of silver firs, there are two figures already waiting for him, their silhouettes haloed by lamplight.
The more human of the two approaches Heisenberg, his movements brisk, urgent. Victor Florescu, wrapped in a dark coat, thrusts out a wooden shovel that Heisenberg does not take.
"I don't dig, old man. Haven't done that in a while, and I'm not about to start now."
"Old man yourself. Do not forget you are older than I am."
Where Karl Heisenberg is immortal, Victor Florescu is ephemeral. A decade separates these two men, both with graying hair. Years of work and sleeplessness have pulled at the latter's skin, scrawled wrinkles across his face. Heisenberg, who appears as though he is still in his early fifties, does not carry such marks. How much older might he look now if he were fully human?
Victor punches the shovel into the earth so that it stands between them.
"We all have to dig. Quickly. Uriaș has been doubling the number of sentinels on patrol ever since his brother disappeared." There is no edge to Victor's voice, only the brute force of fact. He turns and lifts his shovel and begins to dig at the base of a sapling. "He's rightly guessed that whoever or whatever has taken Beniamin must have been something large or numerous. Mother Miranda should consider easing her use of Lycans; otherwise, the night will be overrun with sentries."
"Let them come," Heisenberg growls to the night as though daring the approach of footsteps. He tugs the shovel free and sights a patch of newly disturbed soil. "I'll finish them off. That way, we'll get a pile of corpses for the taking. None of this damned digging."
Victor pauses in his exertions.
"I've no time for killing tonight, old friend. I have a daughter to return to."
"Ah yes. Odette." Heisenberg forces the blade of the shovel into the thick loam with a new grin and lifts the dirt away. "If she had any sense, she'd be staying put at home, waiting for you."
In all their decades of knowing each other, this is the first time that Heisenberg has uttered the name of Victor's daughter. He can feel the doctor's scrutinizing stare upon him. Alert, alarmed. Go ahead, old man—look all you want. He cannot see through the skull, cannot see the pale figure in the moonlight who lingers within it still, the pleasured tilt of her head, her heaving body in the dark.
"She has plenty of sense," Victor finally says. "Unlike certain company at present."
"If you say so. Soldat Null! Get your moldy ass over here and start digging."
The second silhouette, which had remained silent and still since Heisenberg's arrival, grinds into life at its master's command, its left leg moving forward slowly. Then its right. The noise of rusting gears and wet flesh pours into Victor's ears as the jagged, misshapen form stalks past him, lifting a drill where a left arm had once been. And then there is the stench. Decades of tending to rotting flesh-wounds and amputating putrefying limbs could not prepare the doctor for the rank miasma that now stains the air. Sizzling meat, the edges of human skin frying against the reactor that lay in a cavity that once held a living heart. Half-man, half-machine, Soldat Null is amongst the first of Karl Heisenberg's Promethean horrors. It will not be the last.
"Over here by me. There's a fresh corpse in this one. I can smell it."
The creature, who once been the woodcutter Adam Athanasiu, groans and stumbles before the desecrated grave. As it thrusts its drill into the ground, Heisenberg leans against the shovel and observes his creation with narrowed eyes.
In life, Adam Athanasiu had been a trembling, little man with an uneven walk and a twisted spine. In death, his body has become a grotesque, mechanical wonder: all muscle, tendon, and ligaments powered by the glowing reactor in the chest; the twisted back steadied by the band of iron running up the spine. The once-separated head sutured to the neck and engulfed by a cranial cybernetic mask amplifying sight and hearing. But Heisenberg had determined, long ago, that this prototype was riddled with imperfections—too slow, too stubborn, too eager to communicate its fear or dissatisfaction with orders it had been given. These were Soldat Null's primary defects: unpredictable flare-ups of will, sudden seizures of moral conscience, flaws which Heisenberg had studied and eliminated in subsequent models with diligent efficiency.
The drill's roar rattles the air, loud enough that Victor thinks that even his daughter, asleep in her bed in their home, might be able to hear it. Abandoning his grave, he rushes to Soldat Null's side and grips at its forearm to halt the excavation.
"Adam," he hisses between clenched teeth. "Stop, or all the sentinels will hear and come for us."
At this, the creature halts its drill, the whirling blades spitting out the last of dirt. It pulls back, nodding its head once, remembering that a long time ago, in another life, sentinels had captured him and chained him to a granite plinth to die.
Meanwhile, Heisenberg widens the cavity that Soldat Null has made, chuckling when he finds and lifts the head, then the shoulders from the grave, the body still rosy with embalming fluid.
"This one's new. Female."
With a gloved hand, he prises an eyelid apart, examines the pupils. He hums out a consideration. "Mint condition, which makes it worth salvaging. And besides, I've been thinking of giving Dimitrescu's moroaică a run for their money."
"No, Karl. Not that one."
"Didn't ask for your opinion."
But Victor is already pulling the body away from Heisenberg's grip and closing the eye. "Not this one," he insists more fiercely, returning Maria Lupu to the folds of the earth, between the twisting roots that mark her grave. "My daughter embalmed her. This is my daughter's work. She braids the hair of those she looks after, you see."
"And the men," Heisenberg snaps. "She braids their hair too?"
"We're not taking this one," is the obstinate reply. Victor is shoving soil back upon the body with bare hands. "Look, there's another corpse I've dug up over there. Not as fresh, but it'll do."
Snarling, Heisenberg leans back on his haunches, pinches his nose. Damned, old man antics. The doctor had become more intransigent as of late, more challenging to heel. Here he is now, consumed by foolish, doddering sentiment, losing his usefulness by the year: a father obsessed with his daughter's protection and preservation. Twenty-seven years' worth of alliances and agreements, they can all go to hell.
Heisenberg grabs Victor by the collar, nearly lifts him off his feet. Soldat Null grunts in alarm somewhere behind them, only for its master to raise a finger, freeze all its metal joints into place so that the creature cannot advance any further.
"It would seem," Heisenberg says softly. "That you forget who's in charge here, old man. I'll take whatever I want, especially if I can use it against that bitch Miranda."
It had only been a matter of time before the machinist would have turned on him. An infected dog betraying its human companion. But Victor Florescu knows how to deal with rabid animals; he extracts a battered, leather-bound notebook from his coat.
"And you forget that I have this, old friend."
He holds the notebook up to the level of Heisenberg's spectacles.
"Go near that body, and I'll rip this book into a thousand pieces. I'll burn everything I've written in it. Yes, everything you need to win against her."
The two men stare each other down, each one on either side of a great ocean. They have never been friends in the truest sense of the word; one of them is too dangerous, the other too secretive. The foundation of their alliance is the mutual hatred of the woman who holds all pasts, presents, and futures in her ageless hands. Victor needs the machinist's army to free himself from Mother Miranda's grasp. Heisenberg needs the doctor's secrets to destroy her.
"Well played, Florescu." Sneering, Heisenberg loosens his grip on the doctor and releases the soldat from stasis. The notebook returns to its sheath beneath Victor's coat. Once again, there is a truce between them, albeit one more volatile than what they had shared before. "Now, show me what you've got."
They move to Victor's plot to exhume the body of a young farmhand who had died three weeks prior from sepsis. As they hoist the decaying body from its final resting place and load it onto an iron wagon, the doctor transforms into the chronicler and embarks, at length, upon the history of grave robbing. The soldat listens to the raiding of Egyptian pyramids; the plundering of mausoleums belonging to Chinese emperors; the so-called "liberation" of Aztec artifacts from forgotten tombs, which looters sold on the black market to the anonymous elite.
The soldat tilts its head to the side, digesting the sordid stories. In 18th-century London, we would've been called resurrectionists, Victor says as he wraps a sheet over the body and secures it in place. At the time, cadavers required for medical study were in short supply, a scarcity caused by, of all things, new laws and changing legislations. Although the practice had become illegal (citizens already saw it as morally-reprehensible), physicians employed resurrectionists to dig up the newly dead, all for the sake of furthering anatomical knowledge.
"Without the resurrectionists of old, we wouldn't have known as much about the human body as we do today." Victor pats the soldat's shoulder blade, smiling tiredly. "Wouldn't have known how to put you back together."
Soldat Null huffs and lowers its head to look at its hand. Heisenberg picks up the twin kerosene lamp and extinguishes their flames, casting the trees into a preternatural gloom.
"Storytime is over."
—
A swift point of light amongst the bone trees. It is not theirs. The sound of a stranger's blundering footfalls, wartime boots crisp against fallen leaves. The sentinel that steps into the circle of silver firs is not Stelian Uriaș, though it would be easy for you or me to mistake him to be the same man. All sentinels wear the uniforms that once belonged to cavalry soldiers from the Second World War. Gray drab with high collars, with matching caps to match.
This one is Petre Borcea, a red-haired man who will not live out the night.
He was patrolling the main road that runs through the Forbidden Woods when he heard the drilling, and—because Petre Borcea is dutiful, brave, and stupid—he had immediately gone to investigate the source of the noise. His approach was loud, indiscreet, his revolver at the ready and the lantern high over his head, marking him out as a target.
What he had expected to find between the bone trees and among the dead, we will never know, but it certainly wasn't the village doctor and Lord Heisenberg himself.
At first, Petre Borcea is too stunned to speak. This moment is the first time in his short life that he has seen one of the great lords, who have always been more myth to him than living beings. Lord Heisenberg's presence in this place must mean that Petre has entered a sacred site forbidden to the uninitiated. Shaking, he lowers himself to his knees, sets his revolver and lamp before him, and, in practiced supplication, clasps his hands in prayer.
"Lord Heisenberg." His voice is an earthquake. "I humbly beg you to forgive my trespassing. If I had only known…."
The rest of his lament is drowned out by the lord's cruel laugh. Heisenberg turns to Dr. Florescu, whose expression of pale shock and horror mirrors Petre's own.
"See how easy it is? When you let them, they'll come like lambs to the slaughter. Soldat Null!"
He barks out a command in German.
Petre Borcea does not see his executioner approach, an infernal amalgamation of man and machine. Does not see the whirring drill blades, though he hears their deafening roar, the last sound of his life. Does not see that drill draw back, though he can feel the wind shudder behind him.
But Victor sees it all, sees Soldat Null, that rotting reaper of death and collector of bodies, the slack grimace it wears. He watches the drill drive through skin, muscle, and spine, tear into the lattice of ribs, churn into the beating heart. He sees the young man screaming, the rupturing of his viscera, his impulsive, desperate attempt to grab at the whirling blades, only for his palms to tear into shreds. And then, the dying of engines, the sopping noise of iron separating from flesh as Soldat Null pulls the drill out of the ruined body, which sinks to the ground in a bloody heap.
Later in his factory, Heisenberg will fill the torso cavity with a reactor containing a parasite. He will reinforce the spine with iron, graft a drill to the left arm, give his creation a new name.
—
The doctor drifts through the aftermath, kneels beside the corpse. With both thumbs, he closes the sentinel's eyes.
"You didn't need to do this, Karl."
But the machinist is already lighting a new cigar.
"I warned you, Victor. I will take whatever I want."
—
At sunrise, after he has finished his patrol on the eastern perimeter, Stelian Uriaș keeps the promise he has made Odette. Mind cobwebbed with exhaustion and dreaming of coffee, he steps through the Forbidden Woods, following the path that a now-dead sentinel had taken the previous night. In short order, he arrives at the bone trees where resurrectionists have left traces of their violations.
He sees first the sentinel's cap, dark with dried blood; the skeleton of a kerosene lantern, its glass smashed in, the flame long-dead. Twin imprints of wagon wheels upon the grass like scars. Scattered bootprints. Freshly turned earth; two disturbed graves.
One of them is empty, a gaping wound at the roots of silver fir—nothing left of its occupant, not even bones. Maria Lupu's grave, on the other hand, seems to Stelian as though it had been dug up, then filled back in moments later after a brief argument or a scuffle, the corpse left to its own devices. Stelian runs his fingers through the black, crumbling soil, seeking some clue, some intimation of the graverobber's identity.
His thumb finds something smooth and solid. He unearths the silver ring, lets it settle in the palm of his hand. There is a date imprinted upon the inside band.
13-05-1972
Somewhere in the archive of Stelian's childhood, there is a memory from the Thirteenth of May, 1978. He had been six years old then, and already he was studying his father closely, mimicking his posture, his leonine pride. That morning, he had watched Constantin shuffle from the bedroom to the doorstep of their house, his shoulders hunched, his face as dark as a brewing storm on the horizon. Stelian had followed him out, a little soldier at the heels of his captain.
"Father?"
Constantin raised his stare to the village rooftops, the path of his eyes traveling beyond them to some unknown destination or dream.
"It is the Thirteenth of May."
"Is it a good day, father?"
Constantin had shaken his head, his mane of bright hair shifting in the breeze.
"It is the day I lost who would have been your mother. The day Elisabeta married the doctor."
Twenty-four years later, on the second of October, Stelian Uriaș curls his fist around the wedding ring and closes his eyes in despair.
—
Dr. Victor Florescu is a good man, the villagers invariably say. Since the sixties, he has been our doctor when Mother Miranda had called him back from medical university in Cluj. He could have stayed away, took up a prestigious residency at one of the great hospitals of the nation, thought only of himself. Instead, he answered the Black God's call and returned to the isolated village in the mountains that bore and raised him.
Mother Miranda had gifted him the wartime clinic upon his homecoming, appointed him as the healer of all ailments, the surgeon of all ills. Those he could not save, he spirited off to care of the great mother herself, sometimes to one of the houses of the Four Lords. None ever returned.
Thus, the elders posit that if Mother Miranda is the Black God's High Priestess, then Victor Florescu is His living saint. A saint who does not seem to sleep. One can expect him to be already awake at the early hours of the morning for coffee he brews in the Turkish style and drinks while reviewing medical reports. Sometimes, his daughter will help him, having memorized his patients' names, the current status of their symptoms, and their body's armament of allergies. Odette is his meticulous archivist, recording vital statistics and dosing schedules and filing them in the endless columns of cabinets behind his desk.
At eight, he opens his doors to a rotating roster of nurses he had tutored in previous years out of necessity. Since his return from Cluj, Mother Miranda had closed the borders of their village to a troubled nation poisoned by Nicolae Ceauşescu's Communist regime and, later, his questionable presidency. Victor Florescu thus became the only citizen who was formally educated outside of the village. Sometimes, Luiza Cozma comes in; on other days, it is Roxana Ioviță or her sister, Tereza. Odette keeps their names, too, their particular skills, and, yes, even their favorite dishes, which she will prepare for them if she knows they have had a busy day.
The daughter, too. They say the daughter is a good woman.
The doctor attends a procession of patient interviews until mid-afternoon. He makes prognoses and administers prescriptions. For those with immediate complaints or life-threatening disorders, Victor will send them two rooms down to the care of the presiding nurse of the day. When it is time for him to do surgery, he appoints Luiza to the doctor's office.
The workday is always long, altering depending on the season, the weather, the patients that arrive at his door. In the wintertime, there is a cavalcade of runny noses, lung infections. Allergies in the springtime and sunstroke in the summer. Harvest-related injuries in autumn, scythe wounds. When he has five minutes to spare for dreaming, Victor closes his eyes and fantasizes of long hospital corridors, endless clean, white rooms, a legion of medical practitioners. He remembers his university days in Cluj, the long evenings of study, the weekend sunsets strolling the perimeter of Gheorgheni Lake with a girl, drinking from sweating bottles of palinka in Iulius Park with friends. And all around him, music, color, life.
—
He stays awake most nights, waiting until all the village is asleep and the moon has climbed high into the sky. Victor moves past his daughter's bedroom on bare feet, careful not to wake her. He leaves the clinic quietly, evades the sentinel patrols. Traverses the walkways that cross the village, the ceremony circle, and beyond to the smoking factory that lies at the far edge of his little world.
It is at Heisenberg's factory, deep in the Tartarean heat, where he assists the machinist in his infernal work. In previous years, he had regulated the vitals of the living dead, conducted strategic amputations and the grafting of mechanical parts to corpses. These days, however, Heisenberg orchestrates the violent fusion of men and machine, having observed, adopted, and improved upon the doctor's techniques.
When he is no longer needed in the operating theater, Victor presides over his laboratory. This room had once been a secondary utility plant, back in the years of wars when the factory had produced small-arm cartridges and utility rounds. It is here where he grows miniature versions of his dead wife's roses in rows of boxes under heat lamps, mixes batches of inoculations that he will later prescribe to his daughter, once every two weeks. With careful penmanship, he records in his leather-bound notebook the date and components of each set and their effects, adverse or otherwise.
He leaves the factory at three in the morning, quickly and without announcement. All his body's atoms yearning to return home.
—
The doctor wakes to the flutter of laughter from the kitchen. It is a strange, alien sound to him; he who had spent the few hours between periods of waking tossing fitfully in his bed. He gathers himself up, struggles to the sink, and splashes his face with water. He scours his hands fastidiously with soap until there is no more blood or dirt left.
As he dresses, Victor pauses by last night's coat, which he had flung over the back of a chair. There is a moment of consideration, after which he extracts the leather-bound notebook from the inside pocket. Only then he leaves the room.
He descends the twenty-two steps that bring him to the kitchen's archway. He sees Odette and Elena Lupu sitting at the wooden table, an impressive spread of country bread, fruit, and crumbling cheese between them. They are laughing over the lines of milk above their lips because it reminds them of fuzzy old grandfathers. They haven't noticed the doctor yet, the aging man who is watching them, recalling an old conversation he had once had with his wife—something about one day giving Odette a little brother or sister.
Molto allégro. He can almost feel Elisabeta in this kitchen now, drifting in lightly en pointe, her long black hair worn loose down her back, and all the dust in the air following her. She is twirling with the infant Odette in her arms. Their daughter's first pirouette. She will be a dancer one day, the ghost of Elisabeta Florescu says, pressing an invisible kiss to Odette's temple.
"Good morning Dr. Florescu."
Elena Lupu is on her feet and curtsying before him shyly. She is holding a familiar straw bear in her arms. Laughing again, Odette kneels by her, wipes away the milk mustache from the little girl's lips with a towel.
"Off you go now," she says, ruffling the girl's hair. Beaming, Elena skips past them and into the sunlight.
Odette wipes her own mustache with the back of her hand, which she then rubs against the front of her trousers. Victor frowns at his daughter's brusque display of poor hygiene.
"She came early this morning, looking for someone to talk to," Odette explains. She rises to collect the emptied plates and cutlery, brushes crumbs of bread and cheese off the table and into her hand. "We talked about our mothers. I gave her my old bear—remember him, the one mama stitched together? We made breakfast. Elena talks like there's no tomorrow. She's grieving, of course, but some people grieve differently. I remember I refused to talk to anyone at all when mama died…."
Victor seats himself at the table as though he is a drowning man tied to a sinking anchor. He worries the leather notebook in his hands. Casting a sidelong glance at him, Odette continues to speak as she scrubs at the plates beneath a thin waterfall.
"When you hadn't woken up yet, I started to worry. I called Tereza to cover for you today, and she obliged. She's in your office now with Iulian, who has a large bruise on his temple. An apple from a tree, I think. I promised her double the shift's pay and the next round of eggs from the coop. I hope you don't mind, papa."
No, Victor doesn't mind. He is far away, in a grove of silver trees, in the company of the dead.
—
"You have to tell me what's wrong."
Odette has pulled a chair up to him, her voice changing timbre. Gone is the lilt from her laughter, the brightness in her eye. All that is left is her hollowed-out sharpness. Her face is tired, pale, as though she, too, had stayed up late into the night, haunted by unfathomable dreams.
"Are you happy here?"
A strange question; her father has never asked one like it. "In this house? Of course, I am happy." Odette reaches out to brush a lock of hair from Victor's forehead.
"In this village? Truly happy?"
"I never said I wasn't."
"So you want to marry the chieftain's son, commit the rest of your life to this."
This: the small, square world outside the kitchen window. Its wooden houses, its muddy streets, the ancient forest pressing in. And, all around this little universe, the ghosts of the dead. His daughter pulls back, a crease forming between her brows. Victor can see her jaw muscles stiffening, lips flattening, all of her face turning into stone.
"Of course I do. I wouldn't have said yes if I didn't."
"Do not waste your time lying to me, Odette. You mouth your prayers at church to fool your betters, but I know you don't speak a single word. People only pray to deities that don't exist; they stop praying when they see gods walking amongst them and see that they are only made of flesh and blood."
He grips his daughter's hand. Tightly, that Odette can see her father's knuckles whitening. He studies the walls of her face, the ramparts she has built, the evasive movement of her eye.
Heisenberg had spoken her name mere hours before.
Victor Florescu is not a telepath, but he is a father who can extrapolate from the scraps of words and gestures the thousands of dangers that might fall upon his only child.
"You saw him last night."
He does not mean You saw Stelian last night. Odette closes her eye, swallowing down the memory of cedar and leather, of Heisenberg moving to the sound of her voice, of rough lips taking in all the smoke and air around him and, yes, even her very breath. The magnet of his body, warm and electrifying, moving past her and into another world entirely. Dark and unmapped.
"I allowed him to see me."
Victor does not pursue the implication of her words. He frees his daughter's hand, watches her fingertips curl, and dig into her palms.
"So, he has seen you. That is something I cannot change."
His voice is weary, heavy with the weight of centuries. These days, he has taken to asking himself each morning: will this be the day I will die? His whole head has turned white; his bones now ache at the turn of the seasons. Victor Florescu does not know if he will last out the day or if there will be, for him, a new tomorrow.
"What I can do is to tell you not to trust him. What I can do is to give you the truth. I believe you are ready."
With one hand, he unfurls Odette's palms, turns them to face the ceiling. With the other, he presses the notebook into them.
"That book contains everything you need to know."
He watches his daughter run her palm over the battered cover and all its marks and scars.
Why this? "Why now?"
"Because something has changed since last night. Before you commit your life, your soul to this place, you must know the truth behind this village, behind the Black God, Mother Miranda, and all the lords we must pay fealty to, or else we die or disappear, or we lose the ones we love. My wife. Your mother.
"The truth about your left eye, Odette. Yes! I have written it there in that book, which you must now keep close to you. Do not trust it to anyone else. Not Stelian. Not Heisenberg. Not Mother Miranda. It contains the recipe for the immunization I give you every two weeks. A serum that you must learn to make and administer to yourself, if and when I die or disappear. Remember, you have lost your mother. You could lose your father too."
"Papa—"
He grabs her shoulders, nearly shaking her, wanting to shake her awake, make her see sense. "This is important! Look. Listen. Remember."
Odette rifles through the pages of her father's notebook. There are lines upon lines of neat handwriting, the occasional diagram of a rose, the anatomy of a human part taken out of context. She frowns, lifts the book to the stream of light coming in from the window, turns it this way and that. Even with this method, the text remains inscrutable, obdurate.
"I can't read this. What language is this?"
Victor releases a wild laugh, startling the birds in the trees outside. He is wearing the face of a man who has stumbled across the remnants of a forgotten civilization—the face of a scientist playing at god, watching a mechanized corpse electrify into life.
"Most of it is written in a simple transposition cipher—one of the most basic forms of cryptography. If you have enough time, you might be able to solve it by brute force. However, the chances are that you won't have much time, just as I won't have much time left in this world. So there is a faster way to solve it."
Bewildered, Odette closes the book.
"How?"
She has neither the time nor the skill of cryptography. Has her father forgotten? Her father is speaking in riddles. Her father must be ill. He has not been sleeping well, has never slept well. Two meager hours a night, every night, for as long as she can remember. Lack of sleep over twenty-seven years would turn any human being mad. She takes his left hand between hers, finds that it is shaking even though it is warm in the kitchen and not yet winter.
"You must find and use the key, Odette. And the key lies with your mother."
Victor is wild-eyed, breathing quickly, heavily. Odette places her father's hands to her lips, hushing into them as though she were hushing a fitful baby. His fingers are fragile in her grip, the whorls at his knuckles forming labyrinths of wrinkles, all at once new and familiar. But something is different about her father's hands. Something is missing.
"Your wedding ring, papa. It's gone."
Victor snatches his hand away from hers as though they are burning. "It cannot be." I keep it with me always, this key to my heart, my entire existence.
"If I have lost it, then it must mean I am doomed."
There is a knock at the door. A pause. A heartbeat. And then, another.
—
The sentinels force the door open, flooding in. A torrent of faceless men in gray soldier's uniforms spreading through every corner of the Florescu home like a virus, wrenching cabinet doors off their hinges, pulling apart drawers, sweeping their arms across the clutter of surfaces, ripping pages out of books. They drag Tereza and her patient out of the clinic, shove them into the muddied road. They enter the embalming room, taking even the waiting dead lying in their horizontal freezers. These bodies will be evidence, they tell Odette as they draw the thawing corpses out into the sun.
Flanking the sentinels is Chief Uriaș, a lion with a rifle aimed at Odette and her father. He orders them to move into the center of the room, hands up. Victor obeys, silent as stone, as though accepting the doom that has befallen them. When his daughter gnashes her teeth, demanding answers, Uriaș grips her jaw, pulls her close, inhales the scent of roses in her hair.
"All the grave robbing and corpse looting that has happened in all the years since your birth. All of that has been the work of your father. Victor Florescu, that wicked thief of bodies. And we have caught him at last."
"The evidence," Odette snarls, twisting herself away. "Show me your evidence."
"Ah yes, my evidence. The most important thing. I must thank my son for finding this. He does not patrol the Forbidden Woods, but something, some god-given instinct must have compelled him to travel to the bone trees. He found this on Maria Lupu's grave."
With fierce relish, Uriaș pulls from his pocket the evidence and brandishes it before her. It is a small thing, silver and stained with soil—her father's wedding with its damning imprint.
The Thirteenth of May, 1972.