The Girl With the Iron Touch by Kady Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

photographic camera had to be positioned somewhere near the ceiling out in the catacombs, not far from the door. Harnessed Aetheric energy fed the images seen through the lens of the camera to the receiver in the box with the glass front.
    The visitors appeared on the glass. She grinned and hurried toward the door. Halfway there, she came to an abrupt and unanticipated stop.
    Scowling, she looked down at the limbs that refused to move. She pulled and strained but to no avail. She could not move. It was then that she became aware of a humming noise and realized that she was more prisoner than guest herself.
    The spot where she stood was home to a powerful magnet, one that froze the metal inside her to the spot. This was why the others felt they could leave her, leave the other slumbering machines—because there was little chance of escape.
    And if there was little chance of escape, logic insisted that she was to be kept there regardless of her own thoughts on the matter.
    She stared at the girls on the grainy surface of the glass, and then through a small slit in the door. There were two of them—one tall with light hair streaked with dark and another shorter one with hair that looked like ropes.
    Part of her reacted to the sight of them. It was her heart again, kicking up a fuss in her chest cavity. She knew them. She didn’t know how, but she had seen them before. The little one especially.
    Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement and jerked her head around. For a moment she was terrified of the strange girl staring at her from just a few feet away. The girl had curly red hair, honey-colored eyes and pale skin. She was tall and slender and dressed in ill-fitting clothes.
    The girl was her. It was nothing but her own reflection staring back at her from the scuffed surface of a long, framed mirror. She reached up—it took real effort to lift her arm under the magnet’s pull—and touched her hair, then looked back at the girls outside. They walked past the door to where she was as though they didn’t even see it.
    But she saw them. Or rather, she saw her; the redhaired girl. Her mother.
    Somehow, in what was left of her logic engine memory capacitors, she recognized a physical connection between herself and that tiny girl. She recognized another connection with the taller girl, as well, but not as strong. She reached forward, but the two couldn’t see her. She opened her jaw to cry out, but only a low keening noise filled the room. The fleshy thing in her mouth still didn’t work properly.
    To her left yet another door opened. The old woman stood there, and she did not look amused. Her disapproval was made disconcerting given the odd angle of her head. She looked like a corpse that had been reanimated after its neck was broken, though how she knew that was an apt description was a mystery.
    “What are you doing?” the woman demanded. The hitch in her voice box sounded worse. “Were you trying to leave?”
    “I heard voices,” she confessed, pointing at the glass, but her gaze was pulled past the old woman, into the room behind her. It was a sterile place, filled with soft lights and scads of machinery.
    The badly repaired automaton pulled a switch on the wall, and the magnetic force abruptly disappeared. Meanwhile, her companion skittered toward the door, blocking her view of the catacombs. It didn’t matter— the girls had passed by and were almost out of sight.
    What interested her now was inside that forgotten room. She walked toward it and peeked over the threshold. Tubes and wires ran from a framework of machinery bolted onto the ceiling to a long metal containment tube with a thick glass cover. Inside the tank she could see the form of a man suspended in a green, viscous fluid. A mask covered his nose and mouth, and a hose ran from the mask to the inner wall. A bellows outside the tank rose and fell in a steady rhythm that matched the rise and fall of the man’s chest.
    Apparatuses hummed and buzzed,