The Girl With the Iron Touch by Kady Cross

Author:Kady Cross
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Steampunk, Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy & Magic, General, Fantasy, Historical
ISBN: 9780373210855
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Leonardo Garibaldi was fragile, vulnerable. He was no threat to her safety whatsoever, and would be incredibly easy to kill if Emily could just get close enough to do it without a bloody piece of metal watching her.

She hadn’t lost her nerve, nor did she think she would be able to do the deed without it changing her forever. Anyone who could kill and not feel the gravity of it was probably not right in the head. It was why opposite sides in a war were made to think of each other as enemies that would kill them if they didn’t shoot first. They were taught to think of each other as evil, because no sane man or woman could walk up to another and put a bullet in their belly without the justification of doing it to protect themselves, their loved ones, their country, or their cause.

Emily looked at it as preventing someone truly evil from walking the earth, but more importantly, she would do it to protect her friends. She would do it for Sam, and she would gladly bear the weight of her actions. She would bear it without regret, and that was as disturbing as it was comforting.

She didn’t court death, nor was she happy about having to take a life, but it was Garibaldi, and if ever there was a man who needed killing, it was him. She could accept the responsibility that came with it, she could almost convince herself that it was something she would happily die to accomplish. That was a lie, of course. She didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to die without seeing Sam one last time.

But, this was the man responsible for the machine that killed Sam. If she got the chance, she would make certain Garibaldi never hurt anyone again.

She stood in front of the tank, staring at the Machinist’s broken body as it floated in the viscous fluid. The wounds and bones had healed, but the machines that put him in this…soup didn’t have much more than a working knowledge of the human form and how it reacted to organite. She supposed that the automatons believed putting him in the tank would be enough to heal him, but they hadn’t set his bones or assessed internal damage.

He would make a fortune for a freak show were he to be exhibited. Perhaps one would purchase his corpse once his brain was removed from it.

“Victoria” checked the oxygenation levels of the fluid and the input/output stations. The machines “fed” their master through a tube that traveled from a cask of mush into the tank, into his mouth and down into his stomach. Waste material was collected by other tubes and disposed of in a small cauldron with a sealed lid to prevent stink. Sometimes she curled her nose at the smell when new waste flushed through the tubes, but for the most part it was easy to ignore, having grown up with an outdoor privy.

“I’ve been reading the material you gave me,” she told it.

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