Engines of the Broken World Read Free Page A

honest. It doesn’t manage to blink, or make anything like living responses, most of the time. Made things never could, my mama used to say, but I didn’t ever know quite what she had meant. “The snow will only get deeper, Merciful, and the task only harder.”
    “Do you know how long it’s going to snow?”
    “A day, and a day, and more than a day more,” the silly thing said, which was Ministerspeak for a long time. But the Minister did have a touch for the weather, and knew it well enough: better than me for sure, and better than Gospel, who thought he was clever (and probably was clever enough, truth be told). So if it said it would snow for a long time, I figured that it was right, and I thought of the body in the kitchen and that maybe we should do something after all. Something, but I didn’t know what. I really didn’t think we could bury it, just the two of us, a not-quite-man and a girl half-grown, in the snow in the dark.
    “Can we wait till morning?” I asked. Of course I didn’t want to wait. It was wrong not to bury her, and anyway, it gave me the shivers just thinking about there being a dead body about the place, even if it was Mama. “Probably there won’t be too much snow under the Big Tree, and we can bury her there.”
    “Leave her that birthed you to sit and harden till dawn? Ungrateful child, crueler than poison.”
    And I felt guilty, yes I did. But there really wasn’t anything at all I could do on my own, and I knew Gospel wouldn’t stir from his bed for anything less than a bear or a catamount or something worse, so it had to be the morning, if I could even convince him then. Morning or not at all, and I couldn’t think of that because, after all, it was Mama lying there, with her toe sticking out of a hole in her left sock and her long painted fingernails crossed on her chest and her face under our best tea towel.
    The Minister waited a silent moment until I turned away from its yellow gaze. I used to be a good girl and do exactly what it said and what it told me, and it liked me better then, I gathered. But since Mama got so sick and I had to be in charge more often than not, I started to feel like it was just bothering me. Only I hated how its eyes staring out at me still could make me feel guilty. More than that, I desperately wished to have someone to tell me what to do—even a preachy little cat what I’d been growing more used to ignoring with every passing year—but it wasn’t as easy as all that anymore. The Minister stood up and stretched, for a moment almost what it seemed, and paced purposefully past the chairs and into the darkness of the kitchen. I couldn’t hear it, so quiet was its tread, or see it in the dim and flickery light of the lamp, so I just waited with Gospel’s pants in my chilled fingers and a needle thrust into the arm of the chair and a spool of Mama’s perfect thread on the table beside me, along with a teacup filled with melting snow that Gospel had fetched me when I was working.
    It came back and settled down again. “She’s growing hard and almost as cold as outside, Merciful. And tomorrow she’ll be harder yet, and a load to maneuver. But if it can’t be helped, it can’t be helped, and dawn is better than dusk, tomorrow better than never.” That last was another Minister phrase, one that didn’t get much use, but I knew it still. The Minister hopped up to Papa’s old chair and breathed two long breaths onto my teacup, and the snow melted and grew to steaming just a little. I drank it down and said thank you kindly both because it was the polite thing for me to do and because I really was grateful to get a little warm into me. The Minister didn’t do things like that often.
    “You should sleep now, Merciful,” the little thing said, and went back over to the kitchen doorway, where it settled down facing into the dark room. Its gray tail swept back and forth, almost like that of a normal cat. I finished the hot water and set down