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No beauty, no. But then, that quality had never been my main object, and while I’d still been piecing him together the difference between our sizes had seemed, similarly, no consideration. Upright, however, he seemed huge and oddly alien, as though the arcane commingling of science and necromancy I had practiced to bring him to life had conjured up a demon: Skin dark and dry, hands lightly clawed, jaws pushing forward like a muzzle into a grim jawful of shark’s teeth. His eyes were mismatched, too, I noticed only now—one grey, one

blue.

But what matter? They worked.

HE worked.

The sight of the candle-flame made him recoil, varicolored gaze gone wide and wounded. But like the child he truly was, his attention span was too short yet to hold such fear for long.

Abruptly oblivious to me, he stepped back, eyes casting around the room for whatever caught his fancy. I followed him at a wary distance, observing how he studied each item in turn.

“Plate,” I said, as he stroked a gilded slice of Ivan’s best china.

He turned too quickly, toppling, and the weight of him almost broke my hand.

Then, still clutching the thing in question, he offered it to me.

“Plate,” I repeated.

“Paaaht.”

Soon we were pointing at all sorts of things.

Finally, he put a finger to my own chest. After a moment’s hesitation, some imp of the perverse made me answer:

“Mikela.”

“Mi-ke-la,” he replied, clearly.

We smiled at each other.

* * *

Which is all that I remember of my first night alive.

2.

My liaison with Ivan yielded the keep (one of his hereditary holdings) and enough money to live on while I completed my experiments. Unfortunately, it also—for a time—yielded HIM, playing understandable havoc with my powers of concentration. Barely a fortnight had passed, however, before he came storming into the laboratory with a letter in one hand, a drink in the other.

“Most intolerable! My father has arranged . . . ” His voice shook at the horror of it: “ . . . a marriage.”

“I feel your loss already,” I replied, making another notation.

He left swearing eternal fidelity, a claim so patently foolish it gave me no honest way of even acknowledging it, let alone matching it.

* * *

My life soon settled into a seductive routine of education—question and answer, enthusiasm and exploration, all framed by your careful supervision—and one day, my curiosity piqued by a word I had heard you use once too often without definition, I asked: “What is this God, Mikela?”

“They say God made the world.”

“As you made me.”

You laughed, shortly. “Not quite—God has no need of science. He simply thought the world, and so it was.”

“Then God made you.”

“If you believe so, yes.”