Levi, Mary, Four, and I gathered in the kitchen. An ashtray between us on the table. We all smoked.
“When are we getting out of here?” Four asked.
“The Lull’s no good anymore,” Levi said. “Penelope watched a cluster of backpacked undergrads heading down Broadway, toward Thirty-five.”
“What does that mean?” Mary asked. We could hear Penelope speaking softly in the other room. I could hear her humming.
Levi looked at Mary. “First of all, what you all did was right.”
He had no idea, not yet.
I looked down at the table, but that was a mistake, too. I looked back up, to take a drag of that awful cigarette. Four was staring at me, her expression soft as she read the lines of my face.
“But to answer your question, it was an exodus. Dorm kids, I’d guess. They didn’t make it far, open like that during the Lull.”
“How far?” Mary asked.
“The cemetery.”
“So we’ll wait out the second wave,” I said. “We’ve got a lot more firepower than we’d planned on.”
“We could use it now. To get out,” Mary said.
“Yes,” Four said.
“Waste of ammunition,” I said. “The trucks would take unnecessary damage. The Jacks’ chemicals could make a fifty-foot crater in all directions if they took fire.”
“What about Circe?” Mary asked. “The Book doesn’t have any Narrative for her. For this.”
“I know,” I said.
I looked at them. At Mary, their White Mary who could lay her hands on anything. Make anything make sense. And Four, with those serpents, with her darkness, the small voice in the bookstore office, who had calmed Circe, when she had been only Morgan, waiting for her boyfriend while the Guard shelled the living fuck out of the bookstore and the Auditorium Building. Who had calmed her again, arms around Circe’s shoulders, by yanking her out of the high school hallway. Who had been there with hands after Luke had gone. Becoming Carson again, in those last important moments.
If we weren’t careful, “Circe” might not take. If one went, they all might, here in the House of Cards. She needed to be shown what was right.
I needed the Jacks. We needed them. I had to think about Amaranth. About what we’d need if we had to Forage the nearby farms. If we needed to destroy access roads and overpasses. I didn’t know how to cook anything, and neither did Levi.
I scooted out of my chair and ducked into my bedroom. Fluff and Edmund were on the bed, staring with big eyes. Watching things in the darkness that we couldn’t even see. I had an old cigar box on my desk, filled with vials of essential oils. It was from my time as a shaman. I’d sketched an eagle’s head onto the box’s surface with a black marker.
I stepped back into the kitchen and slid the box onto the table. “You’re going to clean her up.”
Levi stared at the box. “Right. The tub—you two and Penelope. Bathe her. Or something.”
“A baptism,” Mary said.
Four rubbed her head. “We can’t let her go, even if she wants to.”
“There isn’t anywhere to go,” Levi said. “Amaranth is all Places now.”
Mary lifted the lid on the box. “And these?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Rub her down with them, or something. It’ll look like you know what you’re doing.”
“Maintain the illusion of control.”
They looked at me then.
From up on the roof, I could see most things. The Jacks were inside, having something to eat, while Mary and Four and Penelope worked on Circe. There were still a few beers in the fridge, so Levi parceled them out. He got them started sharing toasts and telling stories. About the school, about themselves, while I kept watch with the binocs. They poured some on the floor, a little bit, every time they toasted.
The pitch of the roof was steep, and I didn’t trust the masonry on the old fireplace, so I kept myself in place by holding on to the PVC bathroom vent. One of the women, Four maybe, was singing, down there, below, in the waters. Like something from some Old Country. A rusalka, maybe. A tune for the divining pond that could get you underground, where all magic occurred.
I was glad the gas line was still working, because otherwise it would have been a damn cold bath without the water heater.
I could see charred rooflines downtown. The courthouse itself looked like it had been firebombed—the dome at its top, at least. If there was still a Group there, they were staying put. I guessed they went underground, into the service tunnels and storm drains. Salvage had maps for those, which were easy to get. Levi and I had even had a look around ourselves. Before. Dozens of taggers had marked those tunnels. Staking claim. Bullshit like that.
In the other direction, over the backyard, across the bam-booed Humvee and the tarped trucks—beyond the apartment building on the other side of the sycamore trees at the edge of the property line, behind Mary’s building—I could see a few dormer windows in the mansions along Greek Row. Where the frats were. They were idiots for burning lights upstairs like that, but those buildings were almost impenetrable. And they had more Members than we did. There were more of them who needed to find their way through the darkness and all of the smoke. More worming their ways through the holes in the earth, so maybe it made sense. To beckon.
I could see a bit of the Dallas glow. Not the buildings or the fires themselves—the roof wasn’t high enough for that. Elsewhere, in Slade, the Salvage Clearing burned. Clusters of houses and strip malls and unfinished developments were going up as planned. Flushing Outsiders from one place to another—eventually, to be shooed out of Slade altogether. The fires made pillars of smoke that I could only see as black-on-black distortion. Darkness inside against darkness out. But the fires, themselves, like glowing flowers in the darkness—things that couldn’t die—those came from the underworld. Amaranths, all of them, as they shone behind tree lines.
Levi made his way up to me. Circe was finally crying down the pipe. I assumed. I could hear something electric buzzing.
“What the hell is that noise?” I asked.
“Tattoo gun. Penelope had it—one of those rigs made from ballpoint pens and a tape deck motor. I think it uses a compass for a needle. You know, like, from geometry classes.”
“How the hell is she powering it?”
“Car battery.”
“Jesus. What are they tattooing?”
He shrugged. “I need to Hear what happened.”
Yeah.
A review. Just in case. Party Leadership wasn’t a permanent assignment, and it needed to be reviewed, for future consideration.
But I could only footnote it for him, because minute-by-minute, the more I thought about the operation, the more sense it was making, the more right it was becoming.
“Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Procedure I.,” “The First Phase,” Paragraph 1, Item iii.
“And at which point did you lose control?” he asked.
“Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Procedure I.,” “The First Phase,” Paragraph 4, Item ii.
“How did the other Jacks take it?”
“Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Procedure I.,” “The Second Phase,” Paragraph 9.
“What about Mary and Four?”
“Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Event Exit Strategy,” Paragraph 7, Item viii.
He looked at me then, because we were supposed to always look. “And what about you?”
“Well—” “Two,” Section “I,” Subsection “c,” “Event Exit Strategy,” Paragraph 7, Item iii.
“Good, then,” he said.
He watched the flowers with me for a time, an arm around my shoulder to steady himself.
“I’ve seen the Jacks’ inventory,” he said. “The gains outweigh the losses. The operation was a success.”
Some blocks away, people were throwing cocktails at one another. It was beautiful. When car tires screeched, at this distance, it sound
ed like the hoot of the train that moved through town, late at night, just beyond the city limits. It was a sound I liked.
There was still plenty of gunfire coming from campus, but I hadn’t seen evidence of any more Guard. I didn’t think there were any more left to come.
“Do I need to explain it again?” he asked.
“No.” It hadn’t been necessary when I told him I was going west. It hadn’t been necessary when we ceased to be a family. It hadn’t been necessary when I told my mom and sisters what to do, when this happened, because I wouldn’t be coming for them.
I was going to start over.
He gave me a cigarette. We heard something down the pipe.
“To be a fly on the wall in that bathroom right now,” he said, staring away.
I laughed. I wondered which of them I would look at most. Which I wanted to look at most.
“At least we found some women,” I said. “It was going to be a hell of a sausage fest. Before.”
“Well”—he turned and batted his eyes at me—“I guess we would have gone sailor. Taking turns wearing the dress and all that.”
I could hear the Jacks, barely, laughing around the table. I guessed they found more beer. Which was all right. We weren’t leaving tonight.
We were quiet, while we smoked. It tasted terrible, and it made my head swim.
“Do you remember Charice?” he asked.
“Who?”
“That girl from my biology lab. Went bowling with her.”
“Right. What about her?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just asking.”
When they brought her out, Circe smelled like sandalwood and amber. She was wearing a white sundress, and they had shorn her hair. I wondered, then, if we should change her name. Bathsheba, perhaps. After all, that name would be in the eye of the beholder—she couldn’t take it for herself. Someone had to see her, to lust after her, before she could become such. Someone like Luke had done, who could help her bear great children. She had already proven her affinity for explosives. Maybe she had a Solomon in the works, only instead of designing great temples it would blow them apart.
We were looking at her. I even called Matthew and Mark from their post on the porch, keeping watch. Four had come and told me they were bringing her out. It was most important that Matthew and Mark see her. That they saw what Luke no longer could. It had cleared things up for King David, after all—seeing Bathsheba. Mary was holding her hand, standing behind her.
I stood up. “Your sacrifice is ours, Circe.”
She looked at me, and smiled. “We will remember him with our first Monument,” she said.
I embraced her. Stepped aside so everyone else could. They each laid a hand on her, in turn.
Which him did she mean?
And then she lifted her dress and showed us the tattoo—slick with oil, to keep it from scabbing, its india-ink ridges puckered and red over that womb-space between her navel and the low waistband of her underwear. There, the tattoo would expand, become something more, if she ever became pregnant.
… should carry some mark …
The Jacks stared. She stood there, the hem of her dress in one fist, Mary’s hand in the other. She stared back.
I looked at the tattoo, at the wildstyle A, with one down-pointed chevron beneath it. Now, when she made grenades, when one of these other boys brought half of the necessary genes and gave her something to carry, she would birth them for us. For Amaranth.
“Hiram,” Mark said.
I didn’t look away from Circe because, really, I didn’t want to.
“We have something for you to read.”
I looked then. “What is it?”
He handed me a sheet of paper. “This has to come next. There has to be more.”
It was more about the Last Man. They’d written it, I guessed, when I was on the roof with Levi.
Circe lowered her dress.
“We think this is a good time,” Mark said. “With Circe’s bath and all.”
Wearing his goggles, Last discovered fire. He decided to call fire “Prometheus,” and he gave it to everyone else.
Prometheus lit the way underground, where Last spent three days measuring the dead. When he returned, with salt and ether, he used glass-water and blood to grow the first woman. We shall name her Last.
Last used ink to spell her name. Everyone else read the letters in the sand.
“Is it good?”
“It’s good.”
“Can we tag the street with it? For everyone else?”
Merlin had a bottle of vodka among his cook’s gear. With permission, he went and got it. Mary took them all, especially Circe, into the living room. Circe followed Mary’s examples, mannerisms. She touched the Jacks lightly. She knew what Amaranth could cost, and they needed to know what that felt like, especially at the fingertips of someone beautiful.
Penelope retrieved her tattoo gun, her battery, and the ink … They should carry some mark…., and she would give it to them. She would write their names in the sand.
I wasn’t going to be on watch rotation, so I went to my room. To sleep. Four came with me. She was exhausted, and she didn’t have a post in the rotation tonight, either.
We lay in the darkness, listening to the occasional sound of a sentry’s footsteps crunching on the gravel drive, outside my window. The cats organized themselves between us.
“How is Circe?” I asked.
“She’s fine. For now. She’ll be fucked up when she has the chance to. After.”
She laughed. “Mary really enjoyed bathing her.”
I hadn’t thought about that.
“Circe’s got this … thing,” Four said. “I don’t know. Those boyfriends of hers, they’re … symptomatic.”
I realized, now, that Four had reserved some of the oils for herself. I could smell cedar and vanilla. And body odor. From both of us.
“It’s the attention,” she said.
I was sure that made some kind of sense.
“By the way, she doesn’t want to wear red paint anymore. Is that allowed?”
We didn’t actually have rules about paint. About creating oneself in one’s own image, with the right color scheme. “Yeah, I guess. What does she want to wear instead?”
“White.”
“I see. What about you?”
“I still like black.”
I thought for a moment.
Me, too.
“Where did she get that dress?” I asked.
There was a pause. “Christ, Hiram. Don’t you think we might pack something other than commando knives and survival blankets? What the hell is the point, otherwise?”
I turned on my side, upsetting Edmund, and offered her a dark smile.
“Did you? Pack something?”
I wondered. Four wore dark shirts, and heavy eyeliner, and jeans with holes and safety pins in them. What would she pack?
What would I?
She wasn’t going to answer. I didn’t realize until later, trying to fall asleep, how much better than an answer it was. How much better than hearing she had a thong bunched up in her duffel. Or a soft blouse, or dress that would admit sunlight at just the right angle.
“Are you—”
She interrupted me. “What were you going to do before?”
“What?”
“Before. Like, what’s your major?”
I thought that it should have been a funny question, but I wasn’t laughing. “Interdisciplinary studies.”
“Levi, too?”
“Yeah, both of us.”
“So what were you going to do?”
“You mean for a job?”
“Or whatever.”
I stared at her arm, with its serpents coiling, where I could see her bra strap slipping, in the wan light from the window.
“I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know.”
“I was going to own my own studio,” she said.
“There are acetylene torches and tanks and stuff at Ama
ranth.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“They’re just … there.”
She was quiet for a while, content to smell like vanilla and cedar.
“Can I ask you about your name?”
“Maybe.”
“Why ‘Hiram’?”
Sitting atop Four’s abdomen, Fluff purred. I reached out and stroked her head.
“He was a Phoenician king.”
“And that’s why?”
“No.”
“Then …?”
“When I was a kid, my dad and I built a remote-control robot. It was the first time I’d ever soldered metal before. The first time I’d followed blueprints. I loved it.”
Four watched me.
“We named it ‘Hiram’ because I’d just learned about the king, in Sunday school.
“My dad called me ‘Hiram’ sometimes—because I spent every waking minute with that thing.”
Four smiled. “Do you still have it?”
“No.”
THE BOOK:
“THREE”
SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “B” (“MONUMENT”)
[1] (i) You should raise your first Monument on “Arrival Day”—under the circumstances, this work does not violate the terms of rest, and you may requisition Members with necessary skills to this end. (ii) Your Monument may take any of a number of forms: an edifice of new beginning, a cenotaph, an expression of the Place itself, etc. (iii) Avoid the use of religious Monuments, for later Additions may not share this faith, which can create division, unrest, and Failure. Religion should, under all circumstances, be a personal event, as should be the maintenance of its paraphernalia. (iv) Do not attach the Place itself to a religion. Doing so invites later fanaticism, which is almost certain to Fail your Place. (v) Do not enforce specific codes of morality. (vi) Do not practice racism, sexism, or other forms of prejudice. Doing so limits the development of prosperity and opportunity without question. (vii) Do not tolerate intolerance.
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