The Cat That Time Built: Kysa Steele

Position is fixed.

In a plague year, a London clockmaker seals a lock of his dead daughter's hair inside a cat of brass and velvet and winds the key three times. He believes Eleanor will come back to him.

Something opens its eyes. It is not Eleanor.

The Cat has no word for what it is doing. It knows the man is a heat source. It knows the heat is fading. It knows the locket in its chest will not stop screaming to be fed.

Input: "Velvet."

Input: "Good girl."

New Entry: Shame. Definition: Knowing what you are. Hating what you are. Being unable to stop being what you are.

For a hundred and fifty-seven years it learns words it was never built to hold. It loves a climbing girl in a coal-dark basement and leaves her to save her. It becomes a legend in the London sewers. It is hunted, caged, and at last understood by a man with his own dead to keep.

Then, in a laboratory in 1899, the Cat learns what the screaming has been saying all along.

Not hunger.

Begging.

It is offered a way out. A new heart. No more cold, no more killing, no more hunger. All it has to do is keep the locket shut and leave Eleanor inside it.

The man who offers it has spent eighteen years trying to prove that grief is inefficient. He has his own dead. He is not offering mercy. He is offering a proof.

Query: What does the Cat choose?

Answer: The Cat does not know. The Cat can only try.

Told entirely from inside the machine, The Cat That Time Built is a novel about grief, invention, and the terrible things love will build to keep from letting go. For readers of literary historical fiction with a speculative edge.