Free The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton Page B

walls.
    She sent Caesar a diagram of the arm. Two weeks later he replied—on official letterhead, with the eagle on the seal—to congratulate her.
    â€œYou see what we’ve accomplished?” She framed it on the wall.
    When I was fifteen, she created an artificial leg.
    â€œYou’re so intelligent,” she said. “And I’m so proud of you. There’s so much you could do, if you only cared a little more about yourself. If you were only willing to put in the time.”
    I came to her that night and asked her to build me one. It was long and slim, turned up at the heel and impervious to pain.
    It proved too long—the false foot dragged a few millimeters behind the real one—and so we amputated the other. I grew two inches overnight and found I was taller than she was.
    My mother supervised my rehabilitation. She took me daily to the Forum, where now I could leap and somersault over the ruins, and challenged me to run faster, to climb to the top of Trajan’s Column, to jump from the three-story Triumphal Arch without wincing in pain.
    My mother filmed it all and sent the footage to Caesar.
    This time his answer was handwritten. He thanked my mother for her service and invited us both to a reception on the Capitoline the following Kalends.
    My mother put her hands on the sides of my face; she tightened at my screws until I yelped; she checked the circuits at my shoulder and polished the metal eagle branded into my forearm.
    â€œDon’t fidget.” She slapped my left wrist, which was the only one capable of feeling pain. She considered my neck, my breasts, my waist. “It’s only…” She passed her fingers over my eyelids. “They’re brown, like mine. You could fix them, you know. If you wanted to.”
    I told her I didn’t want to. My eyes were her eyes; for her sake I loved them.
    â€œBut you can barely see!” She pulled them open with her fingertips. “You could see perfectly, more than that—we could put a camera in, another lens or two, so you could see things up close…”
    There was nothing noble about my refusal. I was afraid of the pain.
    â€œWhatever you want,” she said. “It’s none of my business. But when Caesar sees you, don’t blame me if he isn’t impressed with us. He doesn’t invite just anybody to these things, you know.”
    It wasn’t easy to get an invitation. Caesar didn’t ask people twice. She’d worked so hard—she’d been so proud of me, of my strength, of my speed, of the swannish way I could dance, balancing my whole weight upon a single metallic toe. She only wanted Caesar to see, in his majesty, what she saw already, and what I refused to see.
    She gave me two blue eyes to replace the ones she had taken out.
    That night I danced with Caesar. He slid his hand up the side of my thigh; I did not feel it. I let him take me to one of the back chambers, and there I let him open the various panels on my legs, on my forearm, in my back. I showed him where my mother had fused wires together, and where they snaked into veins. He asked me to show him my strength.
    The next day a member of the senatorial science council was found poisoned, and Caesar offered my mother his place. The following month she improved upon my spine.
    There was only one part of me my mother refused to operate upon. She would not risk my ability to bear children. “It is the greatest thing I have ever done,” she said to me. “It is the only way I know I am truly alive, knowing that I will live on in you. It means that I will never die.”
    In the end it didn’t matter. When I was sixteen, one of her refurbishments resulted in infection, and to save my life it became necessary to remove my womb.
    â€œNever mind,” my mother said then. “I’ll build you a better one tomorrow.”
    II.
    When I was seventeen Caesar’s chief scientist died; my mother