by Martin Kee
An idea forming in his mind, Scribble lifted the pencil and began a series of small images on the notepad, a story in pictures, separated by frames. It began with Skyla arriving in Lassimir. The girl walked through the streets of markets and pawnshops, spending that strange coin. Skyla felt heat rising in her face as the story unfolded.
Scribble sat on a rooftop watching her leave, a drawing at his lap. Beside him on the rooftop were pages after pages with her image on them. The sketch-Scribble turned his head as two tattered legs appeared behind him. Skyla knew immediately who it was, that boy Mackerel, the boy with the knife who had tried to kill her. Mack snatched the pages away from Sketch-Scribble, looking through them. Mack pointed at the page and at Skyla.
He placed the notepad down in front of her and crossed his arms. So there.
“You were a lot smaller then,” she said. “I’m guessing he was pretty persuasive.”
Yes.
“He threatened you, too,” she said. That prickly feeling came over him as she stared through him. “He made you steal for him, made you tempt visitors with your drawings, use it as a way to beg, to get their guard down so he and his boys could mug them. I wasn’t the first one, after all.”
He paused, then nodded, wondering how she was seeing all this.
“Did he die in the raid?”
Scribble nodded slowly and Skyla seemed as though she was about to say something else, but then didn’t.
“A lot of people died that day,” she said. “You were lucky to get away.”
He picked up the paper and drew…
The new story showed sketch-Scribble drawing on an old sheet of paper—his picture inside a picture. Around him the other boys groaned and cursed. Mackerel—Scribble’s gang leader in Lassimir—held a bloody nose. They joked about what they would do to the girl when they finally caught her. None of them even saw the massive airship rising into the sky along the horizon.
The explosion threw them all to the ground and when Scribble looked up, Mackerel had a bayonet through his chest. The boys ran, Scribble separated from the group. He found them later, Gripper, a hole the size of a fist in his stomach; Pickle with half his head missing. The horrors continued until Scribble made it to the forest line.
“They killed them all,” Skyla said, watching the familiar scene unfold. “All but you.”
The pen moved and a new image emerged, one of a giant man carrying him on his shoulders. When he looked up at her, she was fixated on the image, her features softening somewhat now.
“He said he’d meet me,” she said, her fingers going to a chain around her neck. She pulled it up, fishing a large ring from inside her shirt. “I was going to give this back to him.”
She placed it back into the collar of her shirt, letting it fall deep against her heart.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
Scribble held his breath, nodded.
“Do you believe in heaven?” she asked him.
He gave a slow shrug.
“Well, some people believe in something like that, but only because they choose to. Others have a harder time doing it. It’s where we all go. All of us. But it means different things to different people. It’s the reason people believe what they do. It’s because they’re scared of dying.”
She looked back at the picture of Marley. “I know this because I can see it, Scribble. I see it in bits and pieces. I see this all the time, everywhere I go. I know it like you know air or water or the ground, and yet I still feel like crying when I know someone who has died. It’s still sad.”
With a dirty finger, she reached out and traced the image of Marley, then looked up at Scribble. Even through the lenses he could see she wasn’t lying.
“I saw Gripper.”
Scribble felt his breath catch.
“I saw him and knew he was dead. I saw the wound in his belly and we even talked. He was looking for you. He cared about you a lot.”
She pushed the notebook back to him. “So you are in another gang…”
He nodded.
“Yeah… people go in circles. My mother said that we are all pinwheels, that we always end up repeating the same mistakes until something big enough knocks us off the cycle to move in another direction. Sometimes it takes something really big.”
Scribble shrugged and looked past her at the globe in the background with its swirling light. But it was fading to dusk soon. He could tell by the way the Bowl glowed a murky blue. There was silence between them, broken only by the occasional drip of leaking water.
“So you’re probably wanting to get out of here,” she said.
He nodded.
“And why should I trust you?” she asked. He felt another jab of fear at the question.
“I mean it,” she continued. “What’s to say I help you out and there isn’t another gang of boys waiting to attack me or cut me or rape me?”
It was true. She had no reason to trust him. After a long moment, he put the pencil on the page and drew the only two words he knew. The letters were strange and ornate, hardly letters at all.
PLEASE HELP
Skyla stared at the words, then back at him. “Please help? Are those the only two words you know?”
He nodded. He had never heard anyone read them aloud before.
“Well,” she said, “of all the words to know, I suppose those are the most useful. You don’t know any others?”
He shook his head and Skyla stood.
“I’ll lead you out best I can,” she said. “But at the first sign that we’re being followed, I’ll ditch you. You have no idea how fast I can leave this place if I want to.”
Scribble nodded eagerly. He pointed again at the words.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I’ll help. But don’t think this means I trust you.” She placed her hands on her hips and turned in a slow circle. “But if I do help you, it might not be pleasant for either of us. I hope you are okay with that.”
Scribble hefted his bag and followed her. He didn’t mind at all.
Chapter 26
Rhinewall
SO THE CROW Girl was real, actually real, a real person, as in not-a-ghost. Scribble had a hard time wrapping his mind around it. It made his heart flutter a little knowing that she was there, walking beside him now. A part of him wanted to reach out, touch her sleeve, anything to verify somehow that she was not some vision in the death throes of asphyxiation.
They reached a pair of ornate wooden doors and Skyla paused. The door was whitewashed like the rest of the complex. Nail holes marked the ghost of a name, unreadable to him:
RHIA
The Crow Girl turned to him. “Wait here.”
But Scribble shook his head adamantly, his eyes glancing at the haunted corners of the hallway. Even though nothing could live here, something was watching him, something without real eyes. He gave her a pleading glance.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Just shine this torch into the shadows if you think you see anything… which you won’t.” She gave him a reassuring smile, but Scribble didn’t feel reassured at all. He held the brass cylinder in his shaking hand as she entered the door and vanished.
Further now from the sound of water, Scribble could hear only his breathing, only the beating of his pulse in his ears. Things appeared to move in the corner of his eye and he spun, shining the torch at blank walls and puddles of sludge.
And then he thought he heard talking. The Crow Girl was talking to someone. Who else could possibly be down here?
“No,” she said.
He pressed his ear against the door.
“You can’t get her now,” she muttered. “Not here anyway.”
More silence, then the sound of wind.
“Was it always this hard for you?” she said into silence. There was no answer, only a pause.
“Well that’s because you’re dead. It’s always easier for you.”
A pause, water dripping. The sound of leaking pipes.
“It’s even more complicat
ed now… A boy I knew… From Lassimir… He’s okay, I think—I hope.”
Drip, drip, drip. A tile fell in the hallways and shattered somewhere. Scribble jumped but kept listening. He held the torch out, shining it like a ward at the shadows.
“No I forgot about the drop. I’ll have to take him through… No. No, I know what I’m doing. I don’t care if you think it’s a bad idea. He’ll die either way.”
Scribble felt his skin slick over with sweat. Who was she talking to?
“We’ll have to find out... Father Thomas came out okay.”
Another pause, and this time when she spoke, the Crow Girl’s voice was quavering, rising towards hysteria as she spoke. “What do you mean he didn’t? …In what way is he like my mother? …Where is he now? What? …Why didn’t you say something?” A long, uncomfortable silence fell over the room, punctuated only by the soft sounds of sobbing. “But he seemed fine!” Sniffling. “Okay. Okay, I’ll see him. But first I… I have to do this. It’s the only way to save him.”
Footsteps grew louder and Scribble jumped back just as the door swung open. The cone of light from his torch showed a grizzly scene. A woman lay decaying on a bed, the surrounding mattress yellowed and blackened with age and rot.
The Crow Girl looked at him, then at the bed. “She was a friend, but now she’s dead,” she said in a flat voice.
From her pocket, the girl took out a match, lit it, and tossed it onto the bed where it ignited. She closed the door and walked past him. “Let’s go. Ceremony is for the living, not the dead.”
They walked in silence for a long time as Scribble’s mind filled with questions. This girl he had drawn ever day of his life seemed different now, older, jaded. And she wore those goggles constantly. He wondered if she even had eyes underneath them at all, then laughed silently to himself for even thinking such a thing.
“Up here and to the left,” she said, pointing to a darkened section of hallways that he needed a torch to see. “I am trying to get us as close to the drop as possible before I take you through. It will be a short trip and hopefully a painless one.”
There were no signs, no arrows, no markings of any kind. The hallway was a twisted maze of carbon marked tile, but the Crow Girl navigated it like it was a second home.
“I like your drawings,” she said, not looking at him.
He blushed in the darkness.
“Sucks what they did to your hand. Why don’t you just leave if they are all so awful?”
The conversation felt to Scribble as if she was somehow reading his life from a play, watching his past like some casual audience member. Each time she glanced at him, past him, she seemed to gain more answers.
He drew a finger across his throat, slitting it in effigy.
She nodded. “Yeah, they can be rough. I hear the girl gangs aren’t much better.”
They reached an open area, so deep the torchlight fell away into a void. The floor here had caved in, leaving a pile of girders, beams, glass, and concrete. Poison gas poured from broken pipes wide enough for him to crawl through. Up above, the barely visible twisted metal of a catwalk taunted them from an impossible height.
“It’s forty feet or so above us,” she said, looking at him. He realized then that she hadn’t said much because she was concerned. She knew they were coming to this. “We have no rope. And the only exits left are the one you came in through and that one up there.” She pointed up, as if it weren’t obvious enough.
He listened to all this as his heart raced faster and faster in his chest. How would they get up? Was she simply saying goodbye and planning to abandon him? He wouldn’t blame her after all that had happened between them. A hot lump filled his throat as he thought about how foolish he had been to think they could start over, put everything in Lassimir behind them.
“But I know another way,” she said, her expression hidden by the mask. “I’ve only done it twice before with someone, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to do it again.”
Scribble waited, watching her for the answer to this riddle. She had a rope hidden somewhere, or a folding ladder. Cautious hope rose in his chest as she stepped towards him, placed her arms around his waist, and jumped…
He sat in a boat… was being held in a boat.
Gentle waves lapped at the sides of the vessel as it rocked along the Lassimir River. Giants sat all around him, pressing against each other as they floated silently on the water. He tried to move, but found his arms and legs stuck, bound in cloth… swaddling cloth. He was an infant.
“Those are the towers,” said the woman holding him.
“Shut up, woman!” the man in the front hissed. “You know they can hear us.”
“But we are growing closer,” she said, her voice insistent but softer.
“I know very damn well we are growing closer to the damn towers,” he said.
“She’s right,” said a man from beside him. “We should signal them.”
“Who has the code?’ said a woman to his right.
Scribble tried to see her, but he was tightly bound, his mother holding him so close she practically smothered him. The smell of brine and dead fish filled his nostrils and it made him scared. He tried to struggle, but he couldn’t move his arms.
“Quiet, my Timothy,” she soothed. It helped a little, but couldn’t completely dismiss the panic and confusion rising in his stomach.
“Boyd has the code,” said a man from the front. “Get the semaphore.”
Another man hefted a large lantern from a trunk below deck, forced to push past bodies to reach it and Scribble realized that the boat was not just crowded, heavily overburdened. Bodies shifted as the man mounted the lantern onto the edge of the boat. Water lapped over the side and seeped into his clothes, cold and smelling of dead fish. He uttered a cry.
“Shhhh!” said his mother. “Don’t speak. It will be all right.”
But the danger continued to press in from all sides, a smothering blindness that draped all his senses in a black fog. He saw what was happening, even as an infant. He knew the code wouldn’t work. He had seen them argue over it in Arist. They didn’t know what the code was. “We’ll just have to wing it,” one man had said.
The boat rocked again and more ice water soaked into his clothes. For an infant he had learned to speak surprisingly early. He knew a few words and he spoke them now.
“Mommy. Cold.”
“Shut that little brat up!” Boyd hissed from the front, a huge man, terrified.
“He’s scared,” Scribble’s mother said. “He doesn’t understand.”
“He’ll get us killed!” hissed the man. He turned to the other man and said, “Try to ask for help. P L E A S E H E L P. Try that in the code we have. See if it works.”
The tower extended from the water like a skeleton finger on the horizon, its outline a spiky array of cannons and ballistae. It waited silently for them, watched them. Extended outlines along its flank began to shift, rotating to face them.
“Do it,” whispered Boyd. “Do it!”
Scribble could no longer contain his fear. “SCARED!” he screamed.
The boat went silent as three-dozen people all held their breath, not as they had before—the surprise at an infant who could speak so well. This was breathing held out of fear, or resignation, or simple sadness. Eyes bore into him as his mother’s tears fell to his swaddling clothes. They were warm, and for the first time this journey, Scribble smiled at her.
The world erupted in flame. Splintered wood tore at his clothes, his mother’s arms still holding him. But there was no mother, only light and pain and blood. Then water.
He was sinking into the cold depths, sinking among the fish. But he rose. Air filled his lungs and he cried, screaming into the night as pieces of boat and bodies drifted and bobbed around him. In the distance, a boy swam out to him, a boy named Mackerel.
And they were standing, alone in the silence and dark. The Crow Girl stood before him, her mask removed, a sad smile on her mouth as she held h
im up by his shoulders.
“We’re through,” she said, a hopeful look on her face. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, still getting used to legs that now seemed too long and too grown up. The world was no longer wet but dry, and the air was now moist with fog and dispersed street lamps. They were in the graveyard, above the drop. They were free.
Tearing the helmet from his head, Scribble smiled at her, wanting to thank her. But when he went to speak, the words seemed to jam into his throat, clogging there, making him choke. All he could do was inhale the briny fog and cool air.
“It’s okay,” she said, a look of pride on her face. “You did really well. Certainly better than the last one I took through. I’m surprised that he didn’t come looking for us, to be honest.”
She laughed a little as Scribble continued to stare around at his new surroundings. How had she done this? Had he been unconscious?
A shadow moved through the fog behind the Crow Girl and his smile faded.
“You know,” she said. “I get it now. I think I really do…”
He wanted to warn her of Emil, wanted to scream “LOOK OUT!” but all he could do is cough. The words seemed to pile higher and higher in his throat until they threatened to choke him to death.
“I’ll tell you,” she said as Emil emerged from the fog behind her. “You’re all right, Scribble.”
A large board rose up behind her, paused, and then crashed down onto her head. The Crow Girl slumped to the floor as Emil stood over her. He look up at Scribble and met the horror there with a crooked grin.
“Looks like you brought us more than we even hoped for, Chimp.”
Chapter 27
In-Between
EMANUEL PERLANDINE WATCHED the boy tug on his collar with slow fascination, watched it all through the gray-green glass wall. Guards burst through the doors, (Amanda screeching from behind them like the idiot she was) and dragged Tom out of the room by the wrists. It was all incredibly strange, the feeling of observing this from afar, through aquarium glass.