Queen of Frost by Aria Noble

Author:Aria Noble [Noble, Aria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Ember had never considered what made a person. That was the sort of question that wouldn’t have made sense to her before — if it looked and walked and talked like a person, then it was one, wasn’t it?

She was wondering now.

She stared down at the doll, crumpled gracelessly at her feet, its eyes staring as open and vacant as a corpse, and she had to swallow hard against the bile rising in her throat.

The red-haired man had finally elected to take the chair the doll had vacated and have a seat a few paces away from where Ember worked. He got up again as the doll fell, expression alarmed. “What did you—”

“I don’t know,” Ember interrupted. Cold sweat beaded at her hairline, and her stomach flopped over. “I just…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. What was the end of it?

Killed someone?

The other doll, the female-looking one, turned to Ember, and for the first time, her smile faltered.

It was that, probably more than anything, that left her wondering. She’d been mucking around in the first doll’s head, beneath a layer of hair and manufactured skin and a thin metal panel that popped open beneath her fingertips, for at least an hour, and mostly she’d been able to keep her fingers from shaking, her thoughts from wandering.

But now…

She hadn’t meant to drop the doll to the floor. She didn’t know what she was doing with all the blinking bits of electrics inside the doll’s head — gears and belts and joints, she understood, but not electrics. Not lights and programming.

But Vallenovich would hear none of her attempts to explain that to him. Apparently, the queen had told him that Ember was the girl who would be fixing their dolls, and nothing Ember herself said would deter him.

So Ember fiddled away with the inside of the doll’s blinking head, and now he — it — was lying at her feet, as blank and unresponsive as a dead body.

Vallenovich looked over the doll again, a small frown on his pressed-thin lips. He crouched for a moment to be nearer to eye-level with the unresponsive body, stared at it, considered before standing back up and turning his attention to Ember again. “Well. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but perhaps it’ll do for now.”

Ember’s stomach flopped again. Her saliva turned sour and warm, and she swallowed, hard and fast, until the queasiness eased.

Vallenovich nodded toward the female doll. “Go on, then.”

Ember glanced at the doll; it looked back at her, not smiling, and the loss of that single doll-like expression turned her face so utterly human that this time bile actually rose into Ember’s mouth.

She clamped her teeth together, jammed her hand against her mouth, and swallowed down the sensation, nearly gagging at the taste as the vomit nearly touched her tongue.

Slowly, slowly, the trembling in her limbs quieted, and the nausea passed again. Ember lowered her hand — the other one was fisted hard around the pliers — and took a step toward the doll.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.