The Broken Isles

SEVENTEEN

Jeza decided it was time to return to the location where the Mourning Wasp had been discovered. Though she had taken small samples to assess its potential, she alone could not have conducted the complex experiments to take it back to the factory.

She brought Coren and Diggsy with her this time, and they helped her with their sophisticated equipment. The boys cursed the rain that lashed against their faces on the journey there, and cursed the ascent on their skittish horses. But, eventually, in the sanctuary of the cave, they saw what Jeza had found and were astounded — as she had been herself.

As she stared at the remnants of the original Mourning Wasp once again she realized that the find managed to fulfil that need in her life, the thirst for knowledge.

It seemed to fill the void of answers in her own existence.

Like some of the others at the factory, Jeza had grown up without knowing her parents. She told herself she didn’t care about this. She had been lucky, though, and had somehow managed to scrape a decent existence alongside cultists, who had taught her to read, had instilled in her a sense of curiosity.

Jeza felt a strange kinship with these forgotten creatures of the past; and she was determined not to be forgotten. So she wanted to make her mark.

And she would do that through palaeomancy.

Coren laughed a little, pushed a few strands of black hair from his eyes. He walked around, folding his arms around his stocky midriff. ‘I’ll give you this. It’s the best find you’ve made.’

She examined his comments for any traces of sarcasm and then beamed with pride and said, ‘Thanks!’

They unpacked their relics and set to work. They built a frame over the pit using small silver rods, so that after an hour it seemed as if a metallic spider had been at work on some alarmingly brutal web. Once this was in place, she began to attach the necessary wires to a thaumaturge unit, which in reality was no more than a two-feet-square box, but she struggled to lift its weight on her own. Finally, she attached a large glass vial to collect what she liked to tell others was the distilled essence of Time. What was collected was essential to the re-creation phase back in the factory.

They switched on the equipment. Light shot along the wires and the silver metal mesh began to glow purple, illuminating their faces. They stared down on the work in progress. The exoskeleton on the Mourning Wasp began to stutter in and out of existence, then, soon after that, so did the skull.

After the better part of an hour, what remained was a translucent set of remains. This was the bit where she felt guilty, that these beautiful almost-fossilized remains would never be the same again. In the right light, it would seem as if a ghost lay there on the floor. She checked the vial and it had indeed filled up with a murky-looking fluid. She unscrewed it carefully, sealed it, and placed it in a bag — for the next few hours, it wouldn’t leave her side.

After the operation the three of them crouched down by the side of the Mourning Wasp. It now lay there both in and out of existence, half of it removed, half of it to remain there indefinitely.

‘We’re done,’ Diggsy sighed, placing his arm casually around Jeza’s waist.

‘Finally,’ Coren muttered, ‘we can head back to civilization.’

‘I like it out here,’ Jeza replied. ‘It gives you space to think.’

‘Think about what? There’s nothing to think about out here. There’s nothing but rain and rocks. No wonder this poor thing decided to end its days. If it lived in the city, at least there’d be something to think about.’

‘Well, there’s not a huge amount left in Villiren these days either.’

‘True, I’ll give you that,’ Coren said.

‘Anyway, let’s head home,’ Jeza said, ‘I want to get started on bringing him back.’ She gestured to the inconsistent form of the Mourning Wasp.

Later that night, back at Factory 54, phase two began. With the rest of the young group gathered around excitedly, Jeza and Diggsy reconstructed the metallic web around their large marble workbench, while Coren complained that his legs ached and sat glumly in the kitchen area watching them. Still, she liked that it was her and Diggsy doing this; it was something else for them to bond over, something else to share.

For the better part of an hour they arranged the rods and this time she had to make sure that they were all tilted according to the correct angles. More than once she had to consult her books, because she was always forgetting an equation here and there.

Pilli had lit a few coloured lanterns nearby, lighting the room with a warm glow. Jeza could smell food being cooked as she walked around making minute adjustments. There were sudden shouts and weapons clashing outside and for a moment they thought the war had restarted, though Gorri ran back in saying it was just a few of the gangs engaged in a turf fight.

‘Great,’ Jeza muttered. ‘I guess soon even we’ll have to start paying protection money.’

‘Nah,’ Diggsy replied. ‘I’ve heard they’re too busy trying to build up numbers from the war. It’ll be a while yet.’

She turned back to her work, inserted the vial containing the essence of the Mourning Wasp and watched it drain into the rods. Then, she stood back as they began to glow.

Slowly but surely, as she expected, a form started to materialize before them on the workbench. It stuttered into existence, and then became cohesive.

Once the rods were removed, everyone in the group — even Coren, whose legs were mysteriously no longer aching — shuffled across to see the results.

It was the Mourning Wasp, and it maintained the same slightly curled pose that it had in the cave.

‘It’s strange,’ Jeza said. ‘The skull seems to have arrived complete, yet the rest of the body is still translucent.’

‘Your bit of kit always worked better on bone. It was designed by cultists interested in the necromancy of humans and rumels, don’t forget.’

‘Yeah, I guess so. Dammit, this is going to mean another failure.’

‘Don’t be so harsh on yourself,’ Diggsy said. His startling eyes disarmed her anger. ‘It’s too early yet. Besides, we could think of something.’

‘How? We need a complete body — a full exoskeleton — if we’re to do anything with this.’

Little Gorri pushed in to get a closer look. The kid needed to visit the barber, since his red hair almost covered his eyes. ‘I know I spend most of my time with designs and stuff, but you could always use the Okun parts, eh?’

Jeza looked at Diggsy, and then at Coren, who made a face that said it was worth a go.

Jeza puzzled over the theory for a day or two. She lay on her bed, surrounded by fossils perched haphazardly upon shelves, which she’d hoarded in her childhood. She held one in her hands, a small spiralled shell now blended with rock, mystified as to its purpose in life. She examined her notebooks on shared characteristics of fauna, to see if there were any patterns that might be of use. She looked at massive charts, complex family trees spread about on vellum across the walls, which only she could really fathom — though much of that was down to her dire handwriting. She had spent much of her life wondering where certain creatures came from, but the Mourning Wasp was all the more difficult to assess given the fact that cultists had a penchant for tinkering with the fabric of life.

Diggsy entered the room only at night, and the two of them lay alongside each other in a passionless state. She still churned through speculative theories in her mind, all the time wondering what might happen.

If she could somehow ensure the Mourning Wasp’s form was stable, by using something from the Okun material — and even its biological matter — then the creature would surely be able to survive. Then they could easily reproduce it.

When she was certain Diggsy was asleep, she leaned over to retrieve the small box containing Lim’s notebooks. For a long time she was scared of opening them, scared of what she might feel, but as soon as she looked across his theories and formulae she put aside whatever emotions she had felt — still felt — for him and got lost in the magic of his silence.