“Herself, I guess,” Susan told her. “Seems like she’s alone a lot.”
They kept a little distance from her after that, as Susan silently reviewed all the stories she knew about lunatic kidnappers, mad ax murderers, and phantoms who hid in opera houses or the woods. None of them had been Liyla’s age. At least there was that.
Ahead, Liyla began singing a marching song, using one hairy fist to punctuate the beats:
“Gem of the ea-east, home of the pure,
Our great Domai-ain, it will endure.
The past is dea-ed, see future’s rise,
In progress clai-aim the victor’s prize.
O Ganbiha-ar, where darkness reigned,
All hail the Genius and his Domain.”
A squirrel scuttled across a flat patch of weeds and disappeared under a mound of vines that had overtaken some low bushes. Insects chirped beneath the undergrowth, sounding like they were shaking a can of dry beans.
Even Max and Nell had drawn back once Liyla began to sing. They motioned to the others to hurry up, and Susan jogged toward them.
“Well, she’s cracked,” Max told them. “It’s confirmed.”
“Thank you, Doctor Obvious,” Susan said. “Can you try to keep your voice down at least?”
Nell waved a hand. “She’s singing too loud to hear. Don’t worry.”
A few paces up the nonexistent path, Liyla launched into another verse:
“Scour the ci-ty and clear the farms.
The pure will con-quer with force of arms.
O Ganbiha-ar, your day is here.
The change is go-ing, never fear.”
Max shook his head. “What a creepy song! She gets weirder by the second.”
Kate wiped a sweaty hand across her forehead. “What’s wrong with her face?” she asked.
She was flushed, and Susan could see how tired she and Jean were. She hoped they were near the city; the little girls needed to rest. The forest steamed around them, the air so heavy she could feel the weight of it on her skin.
“She’s a mutant,” Max said. “That’s my theory.”
Jean scratched at a mosquito bite on her arm, and Susan watched her dig her nail into it, trying to get the itching to stop.
“A mutant?” she asked.
“Something got changed around in her genes. Make sure you don’t stare at her. It’s not nice.”
Jean gave her arm one final, vigorous scratch and looked up at him.
“I wasn’t staring. She was.”
“Yeah, well, either way. She’s crazy. Just wanted to warn you.”
Kate looked dismayed.
“So how come we’re following her?”
Good question, Susan thought. But she said, “Well, even crazy people can know where the city is, can’t they?”
“I guess.”
“So we’ll get there, and find a phone, and call home. That’s the plan, okay?”
“Okay,” Kate said.
“And in the meanwhile, try to be nice to her. Think what it would be to have a face like that. You wouldn’t like it, would you?”
Kate shook her head vehemently and Jean sighed. “No.”
“Right. Neither would I. So just keep that in mind.”
Susan would have liked that to be the last word, but of course it wasn’t.
“Is she crazy enough to have made up a whole geography of crazy? You know, a city no one’s ever heard of, and songs?” Nell asked. “That’s a lot of crazy for one person.”
Max sighed. “It’s called a delusion,” he told Nell. “They can be very elaborate.”
The forest was leveling out now, and a faint footpath appeared among the weeds. Susan thought that a good sign. Civilization, she told herself. Roads, telephones, and air-conditioning. She was looking forward to it.
Jean had been pondering Max’s explanation. “Delusion,” she said. “So she’s singing it right now?”
Max nodded. “Exactly.”
Ahead, the singing stopped. “Hey! Plums!” Liyla called back. “Hurry now — we’re almost there!”
They hurried. A few minutes later, the trees thinned, and the children emerged into view of what Liyla proudly announced was the city, the Domain of the Genius, marvelous capital of all Ganbihar, greatest city on the face of Loam. Max opened his mouth to say something, then promptly shut it.
“Interesting delusion,” Nell whispered beside Susan. “Who’s having it — us or her?”
And Susan thought: Criminations.
The greatest city in the world was made of sticks and mud. The greatest city in Ganbihar, actually, Susan reminded herself, or maybe Loam, whatever that was. Five minutes ago, she’d been telling herself Liyla had just made that up. But the city was real enough, or at least the collection of dirty, badly made houses on the edge of it was. They’d come out of the woods into a weedy field, where the forest path gradually widened into a road. The houses here were less lined up than thrown down, as if some giant child had tossed his toys in a fit. They sat at all angles, squatting in bald yards, their brown walls sweating in the humid afternoon. Some seemed to sag in the heat, straw roofs dipping toward mucky patches that had dried to dust where the sun hit them. Goats tugged at the weeds here and there, and a couple of mean-looking cats fought in the shade of a parched tree, but Susan couldn’t see a single person.
“Laundry day,” Liyla said, in answer to her unspoken question. “They’re all down by the smoke blowers. But that’s the better for us, isn’t it?”
Susan didn’t see why it would be, until they came to a forlorn market square, several blocks in. Flat stones marked it off, and dusty stalls sat around it. All but one was empty.
Liyla jogged over to that booth, and reluctantly, the children followed.
The fruit seller sat hunched between two piles of browning apples, snoring with gusto.
“Hey, Pull!” Liyla yelled. “Got wares for you!” She slapped a hand against the side of the stall. An apple rolled off and broke softly in the dirt. The man lifted his head blearily.
Susan stopped. She heard Max draw a sharp breath, and Nell nearly tripped.
The man had the same ferocious features as Liyla.
“I thought you said she was different,” Jean whispered to Max.
“I thought she was,” he said.
The words waxed and filed became suddenly clear as Susan stared at the man. His face had the look of a skinned knee. All but his eyebrows seemed to have been ripped out by the roots, and as he yawned mightily, she could see that his long teeth had been blunted at the ends, filed artificially flat, like his nails.
He caught sight of the children and stood up so fast his head hit the dirty canopy and his chair hit the ground.
“What’s this?” he asked. “Is it rally day, then?”
Liyla waved the kids closer. “Every day will be soon,” she said. “Found these out in the wilds, and they stick this way.”
The man came out from behind his stall to look at them. Despite the sharp lines of his face, the rest of him was all soft dough. The tattered woolen undershirt he wore was patterned with what looked like fruit stains. They definitely were, Susan decided as he closed in on them. The man smelled of sweat and the sick-sweet perfume of rotten apples. Beneath the unraveling hem of his shirt, one strip of stomach peeked out, a hairy belt.
“Workshops,” he said. He reached for Max’s face, but Max ducked out of the way.
“Oh, let him touch,” Liyla said. “So he knows it’s real.”
Reluctantly, Max let the man reach for him. Susan shuddered in sympathy as the merchant ran a blunted finger down the side of her brother’s face.
“By all that’s new,” he said. “He’s done it, hasn’t he?”
Liyla puffed up like a rooster.
“Yes, he has. And I’m the one found them, aren’t I? Next you’ll see me standing beside the Genius on rally day.”
The fruit seller looked at her swiftly and frowned.
“You watch that, girl. C
lever enough to find me plums doesn’t make you clever enough to keep out of the workshops yourself.”
Liyla deflated slightly. “I’m an only,” she said. “You know it.”
He shook his head, and a few drops of sweat went flying. “That’s a bed tale of your mama’s,” he said, tugging his shirt down over his stomach. “And you’d be wise not to trust it with your skin, not now you’ve got wares like these.”
Liyla only tossed her head, but the word wares made Susan go cold. She looked at Max, who seemed to be having trouble recovering from the sight of the fruit seller. He kept rubbing his face and blinking his eyes, as if he were testing his eyesight. But Nell had heard the word.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
One of the browning apples might have spoken, given the way the man jumped at the sound of her voice. He shot Liyla a look, but she only shrugged.
“Nothing,” he said after taking a minute to collect himself. “Only wondering how you got lost, is all. And who might be looking for you.”
Susan found herself liking this conversation less and less. She scuffed her shoe against the dusty ground, scattering some hay that had been pressed into the dirt. “We need to get in touch with our parents,” she said firmly. “Could you tell us how to do that?”
Even on the man’s malformed face, she knew a look of profound pity when she saw one. He shook his head.
“Such a pretty thing,” he said. “It’s a shame. I don’t like to think the stories are true, but it seems they are.”
“What stories? What are you talking about?” she asked him.
He ignored her. From his back pocket he pulled a stained handkerchief, spread it over his hand as if he were going to do a magic trick, then used it to wipe his face from forehead to chin. He repeated the procedure on his neck. When he was finished, he stuffed the sodden cloth back into his pants and looked over at Liyla. “Listen, lamb,” he said. “I like you, you know it, so take my advice. Get these to your mama fast as you can, and by the side streets. Red cloaks are busy with the crowds today, so you’ll have a little space from them. Just don’t go through the main market like you do. You’ll do well to hear me.”
The girl bit her lip but nodded. “Thought of that myself, anyway,” she said. “Just came here to get my due.”
Pull smiled at her. “Of course you did.”
He reached behind the stall and brought out a deep wicker hamper with a hinged top. It smelled strongly of mold, and Susan wrinkled her nose as Liyla poured out half the bright plums. They thudded dully to the bottom.
The man inspected the fruit and then, with a certain amount of huffing effort, extracted a leather pouch from the belt he wore, half hidden by the great ledge of his stomach. It took him a moment, searching, to find it. From its smooth mouth he produced what looked like two small iron rings and several coins that might have been brass. Liyla squinted at them.
“You shorting me? It’s supposed to be a full ven I get!”
The man shrugged. “Had to pay extra to keep the reds out of this space today, and me to get an early slot for the wash. We split that, don’t we?”
The girl frowned but scooped the coins from the counter, pulled a pouch from her dress pocket, and put them inside.
“Seems to me I ought not to split it when I do all the climbing and scrounging,” she grumbled, dropping the pouch back into her pocket.
The man only shrugged. “There are plenty who’d pay me to know where you get fruits without being dunned by the Purity, wouldn’t they? I think fair’s fair, isn’t it?”
A look of mild alarm crossed the girl’s face, and she hitched up one shoulder. “I guess so,” she said. “Fair’s fair.” She seemed to think of something then, and looked swiftly at the children.
“But this lot, this isn’t something you heard about, right?”
He folded his arms and shook his head. “Oh, no, Liyla. Like I said, I like you, and there’s no sense in me getting mixed up in all that. You see what your mama says, why don’t you? That’ll be her think, not mine. I’m just a fruit seller, and happy to stay that way.”
She gave him a curt nod. “Right. Good, then. We’ll take the side streets. Thanks.”
She led them from the square, and Susan looked back to see the man watching them as they went. He didn’t stop looking until they’d turned the corner.
A line of mournful rectangle-faced houses with close-set window eyes and awful complexions of peeling paint sat on this side of the square. Porches hung off the front of them, drooling trash into the street.
The roads were paved here, but whoever did it might as well have left the dirt. So many of the flat stones were broken or missing that the children had to hop over the gaps as they walked.
Occasionally, what ought to have been a block of houses turned out to be only the remains of them, a clearing full of splintered wood, iron tubs, wagons missing wheels, and dented worktables.
Almost no one was outside, but once or twice they spotted someone sitting on a porch, and to Susan’s dismay, these people looked no different from Liyla and the fruit seller.
“Getting crowded,” the girl grumbled after a man fiddling with a broken wheelbarrow stood up to get a second look at them. “Keep your heads down.”
She led them into the back alleys after that. If anything, it was worse there. Every few steps they’d pass through a pocket of rancid humid air. Susan gagged.
“Outhouses,” Max said, pointing to the wooden huts behind the houses. “They must not have indoor plumbing!”
The marvelous city kept getting less marvelous, Susan thought bitterly.
“What happened to the people here?” she asked Max. “They can’t all be mutants, can they?”
He shrugged. “Shouldn’t be possible, I don’t think.” He looked over quickly at Jean and lowered his voice. “But if this isn’t a dream, then something happened. It would be nice to know what.”
Nice wouldn’t have been Susan’s choice of words. As they moved along, the houses grew slightly bigger, and some were made of brick, but they were still pocked and soot stained. The smell of burning drifted over from several blocks ahead. She squinted between the houses and caught sight of what looked like smoke.
“Something’s on fire,” she said.
Liyla barely turned her head.
“It’s wash day — I told you,” she said. “The machines are out. That’s where everyone’s gathered.”
They could hear activity in the distance, the occasional shout or bark of a dog. They had come from the back alleys into the street again, and here the road was wider. A series of empty sheds, gray collections of boards with doors hanging half off hinges, peppered the side of the road. Susan thought they probably held more garbage, but when she peeked inside one, she discovered it was full of huddled shapes. The air in the shed was worse than the outhouses. For a second she thought this must be where people dumped the waste out, along with old clothes and the rest of what they didn’t need. Then something moved.
She jumped. The shapes were men and women.
The others had seen it, too. As Liyla marched on ahead, the children stood staring into the shadowy space. An emaciated woman lay on her back, arms flung over her head. A man with a patchy beard coughed and snorted, curled into a ball nearby. Three, four, five people lay there, limp on the hard ground. Susan peered in and saw more mounds in the corners. How many were in there?
“I don’t think they’re conscious,” Max said. “But they’re definitely breathing.”
Something moved again in the shadows, and a child crawled over the pile and out into the light. He might have been Nell’s age, by the size of him. Like Liyla’s, his nose sloped out low in his face, and his cheeks were wide and dusted with a film of hair. But he was dirty, so filthy, that his hair, slicked back from his forehead, looked streaked with gray. And despite the unnatural width of his face, his cheeks sank inward; his eyes sat in hollow sockets. He gawked at them.
“You rea
l?” he asked in a surprisingly clear voice.
Susan nodded.
He accepted that without comment.
After a second he said, “Got any food?”
She reached inside a pocket and handed him a peach.
“Here.”
Liyla came jogging back to them.
“What are you stopping for? Shoo, you!” she said to the boy. He retreated into the shed.
“Hey!” Max said. “Don’t be like that!”
Nell looked stricken. “He wasn’t doing anything.”
Inside the shed, the boy dug among the unconscious figures until he retrieved a ragged sack. He untied it, dropped the peach inside, then buried it behind a woman’s head. He glanced back at them warily.
“Sleeper’s boy,” Liyla spat, watching him.
The children stared at her.
“Sleeper? You mean those people in there?” Jean asked. Inside the shed, one of the women groaned and turned. The boy laid a hand on her arm and bent to whisper something in her ear. He kept his eyes on Liyla, though.
She curled her lip at him. “I’d hardly call them people,” Liyla said. “They’re useless, all of them. Leeching change-bringers, that’s what they are. It’s against the law to feed them.”
The boy receded farther into the shed.
“Against the law?” Susan echoed. “How can it be?”
“I said they’re useless, didn’t I?” Liyla stuck her tongue out and licked her lips, then flashed her teeth again, as if the thought of people sleeping touched some nerve in her.
The boy watched them from the shadows. With Liyla’s mention of the law, he had gotten halfway up again, unburied his sack, and clutched it in one fist. He looked ready to run.
“Change-bringers?” Max said. “What’s that?”
Liyla waved toward her own face distractedly. “Change-bringers! They’re the reason you had to go to the workshops to begin with, or don’t you remember that? Seems like if there’s one thing the lot of you would keep in mind, it’d be what you’re here for. How do you expect those faces to stay if you feed the useless?”
She leaned in toward the boy, grimacing at the stench of the shed. “Or maybe you’d like to give yourself over, huh? Look what the workshops did for these discards. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
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