by Mike Allen
* * *
Of course, Joe squeals in the morning.
Six gets hauled into Father’s office after breakfast with last year’s blackberry jam still on his mouth. “What’re you telling your brother?” Father says, back to his desk and leaning heavy in his big black leather-backed chair. There are papers scattered on his desk, Market language that Six can’t yet read. Interrupting Father’s work used to be worth a spanking too, when more of the brothers and sisters were young. Father is a busy man. Except when it comes to Joe.
“Nothin’,” Six mutters, knowing there’s no good answer to give.
Father clucks his tongue, and Six bounces back and forth from foot to foot, rearing, raring to go. The air in Father’s office smells dry and sweet like paper. All the other air in the clan building smells like dirt and green.
“Saturday’s child has far to go,” Six’s father sighs under his fat moustache, and Six hates him. Father is the agribaron of the whole central district. Everyone in central knows him; he has three whole cars on the Moving Market staffed by Six and Joe’s big sisters, and on Sunday market the papermen and water-sellers and the three rich owners of Hydro tip their hats at his clan through the windows.
Six isn’t allowed to work the Market cars. Six makes trouble. The last time, he threw fresh tomatoes at the tailor’s little boy, and Mama went white with rage and sentenced him to garden work until he knew the value of good food.
So now Six works in the gardens, underfoot between his big sister Lucinda and stupid little Joe, who’s small enough and spoiled to only do half-chores in the kitchen and be a pain in the ass the rest of the day. All the Higgins children know their sums and their letters, but Joe’s gonna go to the alchemists when he’s ten. Seventh son of a seventh son’s strong magic by them, so he doesn’t do full-chores and hasn’t learned the garden. There’s no use in it if you’re going away.
Six weeds tomato beds all afternoon in whispery silent disgrace, stared at crinkle-eyed by sisters and brothers and their wives, but he doesn’t throw them at no one. He goes up to the tall pasture, spread over the soaring rooftop, and feeds the ducks that lay in the pond that used to be a tiled swimming pool. And Joe follows him everywhere, kicking and pinching and chattering so loud the mama ducks flutter their wings and stick their necks out in case Joe’s starting something with their brats.
Sunshine comes through the windows around the pond, through the thick glass door that goes out to the pasture and the wall that keeps the goats and sheep from the thirty-floor drop below. Six goes to the rail and looks down, way down: the cracked pavement streets and rubbled-out buildings stretch all the way to the lakeshore, empty of people, of ships. He turns around, fingers tight on the rail, tries to glance casual over the backs of the Uncles’ prize flock of sheep.
Joe watches him. He don’t even flinch.
It’s halfway down to dinnertime before Six finally loses Joe, trailing him into the kitchens Mama keeps on floor twenty-six and making a run for it when Joe’s eyes stray to the fat raisin cake for dessert time. He runs pounding down the stairs down to floor number six, still uncleared, full of pigeon shit where the screen doors came open once upon a time.
When Father and his brothers claimed the clan building for their own they started cleaning from the top: the work hasn’t gone down past nine these days, not with all hands busy with the milking and shearing and growing and weeding and tending to the biggest clan farm in all of central district—and with the cousins clearing their own buildings, taking up their trades and moving out. The twenty-second floor was once Uncle Elmer’s yarnshop. The twenty-first, Uncle Ignatz’s dairy. The nineteenth was Uncle Eddie’s garden, but Uncle Eddie grew devil’s weed and the rest of them kicked him out.
Uncle Eddie was a sixth son. He smoked little brown cigarettes that smelled like cinnamon toast and talked with his hands open like he was bringing fire into the universe. Six was too young to remember much more when they threw out Uncle Eddie and burned his crop on the wasteheap, but Mama called Uncle Eddie a bad seed. Bad seeds don’t grow when you put them in the dirt, but Six doesn’t know why that meant burning. Bad seeds don’t hurt anyone else.
They cleaned out Uncle Eddie’s garden when they booted him out, but Six snagged a lamp and hid it real good from Father. Over the years he’s got himself a bunch of Uncle Elmer’s spare string, old herb stakes, cracked pots, odds and ends and unwanted things too busted to recycle. It all gets smuggled down to the sixth floor, through the peeling walls and dust-stink carpets, where Six has set up his workshop.
The workshop’s behind a broken-locked door, or never locked by whoever lived there once when the world fell one night between evening and dawn. Six cleared it all by himself, broken machines and moldering paper snuck out to the waste on odd, switched-up days. The water’s dirty here, but the water runs. It keeps Six’s little garden.
Six plants the flawed seeds. He plants the bad seeds, the ones that don’t grow when you lay ’em down, or grow crooked, or bear limp and yearning fruit. He sneaks down and waters them every other day, shoos flies away from the opening leaves and nibbles the produce at night when the whole clan’s down asleep.
“I’ll take care of you,” he tells the bum seeds. They make spindly, delicate, blight-prone plants. Half of them die before they can strengthen out. Six has to tie them to popsicle sticks with Uncle Elmer’s old grey string, and they lean like addled sheep against the snap-end, dirty wood.
Six don’t think they’re beautiful. He knows the difference between strong and busted, good and no-good.
He and his plants, they stick together. They’re bad news.
* * *
The alchemists run their long black train only at full midnight. Market girls tell stories about it, rushing through the platforms like a ghost of what the city used to be, rustling the flyers and wrappers and dust into a hiss against black book-magic.
People talk ’bout the alchemists only in whispers. They bring the good weather. They bring the out-of-district news and keep books, mounds of books written in faded-out scripts that no one can read since the world fell two generations past. Nobody ever sees their faces, knows their names.
They give out magic, and they take sons.
They take sons to their Destinies.
* * *
Father throws a feast for Joe’s tenth birthday. He gets paper from the papermen and the sisters take a whole day off to pen the invitations, and come the afternoon of Joe’s nativity the whole clan gathers in, cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers, and holds a festival day in the downstairs meeting-hall.
Six helps set the buffet table. The sisters and brothers’-wives boss him around, dump basket or plate in his arms to ferry one to the other, every single one of them sharp-voiced and mad. None of the brothers’-wives ruffle his hair today. Everyone’s edgy. Everyone’s bad.
The clan puts on its best Sunday clothes and Father holds up his glass, handed down from before the world fell and full of out-district oaked white wine.
“To our son,” Father says, and the whole clan roars.
To our son!
Six slides out of his chair between the stamping and cheering and weeping. He boots it around the cousins and the table with the soup tureen down the rattletrap metal-gray stairs to the sixth floor.
His workshop’s quiet. Six floors above, he can’t hear the cheering and congratulations and condolences, the aunts touching shoulders and saying how brave one is to give up a loved little brother for the good of the district, the world. “They didn’t have a party for you,” Six tells the empty air, the bent-stemmed plants and his green and growing bastard-born potatoes.
The absence of Uncle Eddie says no, they did not.
The air ducts whisper and clank, and go silent.
Someone’s watching.
Six feels the gaze like spider legs on his neck, somewhere behind him where he can’t see, in the dark. But there’s no one on the balcony, no one in the closets, no one in the bedroom of the
billet he’s made his own. He peeks careful careful out the never-locked broken-locked door, but nobody’s picking their way through the sixth floor, through the piles of debris that only little kids can get around.
“Uncle Eddie?” Six whispers, skin prickling, belly aching, but there ain’t nobody there but the ghosts.
* * *
He hides from the dead men. From the dead Uncles haunting through the uncleared halls and the live ones drinking up Father’s wine and laughing up their sleeves at his first, his one misfortune, this demand of a seventh son by the alchemists in their black train. He hides upstairs in the clan quarters, in the billet he’ll share for one more night with goddamn Joe the special kid, Joe who’ll be gone from the sheep-fold and the dirt.
When the party breaks up goddamn special blond-curls smartmouth Joe comes up full of sweet cream and holiday raisin cake. Six stares up at him with his empty mad eyes.
“I’ll jump,” Six whispers, holding his pillow against the length of his body. His tummy feels hot and terrible, like the fall of the whole big world. “I’ll die, and they won’t want you anymore, and they’ll send you back tomorrow night and that’ll show you.”
“So do it, ” Joe screams clean as torchlight, and leaps.
Joe punches like a girl. Six’s never been punched by a girl, but Joe sure’s hell don’t punch like a boy, and half the hits don’t even hurt. Six just holds him off, catching his fists with his own hands or the soft bits along his belly, until Joe lands him one right in the nose and the night goes bright with sparkles.
“Goddamn!” Six roars and throws Joe off him, throws him clear across the mattress and into the wad of baby blanket that he sleeps with every night. He rears back to go after him, to beat the sense right good into his special stupid skull, and his breath comes hot and bitter, liquidy. Wrong.
Six wipes his nose. There’s blood stinking up his mouth and something else: hot and wet and bitter.
It’s crying. Not his. The baby’s crying.
Six feels the red from his face to his elbows, hot right down to his toes. “Hey,” he says, then softer: “Hey. Cut it out.” But Joe doesn’t cut it out, he just hugs himself down in his padded corner and cries without making one sound, cries like the sisters getting ready to throw another nephew, in the worst part where Six gets sent out for water so he can’t hear them stop pushing and make a sound that’s all the lost hope in the world.
Six scrubs at the blood on his right hand with the sheet and it don’t come off.
He goes running down the hall for Mama.
There’s fighting behind the door where Mama and Father make their billet. They always fight in low polite voices, more polite than anyone ever speaks in the clan farm where usually it’s yelling across whole rooms and floors. Six presses his ear to the old brass mailslot in the brown wood door, heart running up against the inside of his chest like it might run right out. Please be done with it, he thinks, the first time he’s thought please to his parents since Joe got himself a key at seven years old. Maybe when they’re done with it he can knock, pretend he don’t know nothing about it. Get one of them to make that soundless crying stop.
But “They never come back,” Mama’s saying, far and near and far and near. Six pushes up the mailslot, slow and careful hands, and she’s rocking on the long black couch that Father bought her for a bearing-gift after she had Marabel. Her Sunday dress is all wrinkled. Her face is puffed-up crying.
“They’ll raise him up right,” Father rumbles. He’s standing behind her, both hands on her shoulders, resting heavier than they should to hold her back straight. “There’s good education there. Book-smarts. He’ll learn things to help us all build back up.”
“How d’you know that’s what they do?” Mama asks, her voice going high and thin as the fingers she’s got clenched in her lap. “Maybe they kill them. Maybe they use them. Nobody comes back. ”
The blood smears down Six’s lip and drips onto his chin. He has never heard his Mama scared, not in his life.
“Talk sense,” says Father, the agribaron of the central district. The most respected man from the north stations to the lakeside where the sugar factory churns. “They’re learned. And they’re the only men in this district or the next who seem to care about—about why, about more than eating and shitting and dying.”
“Nobody comes back,” Mama repeats, and shakes off Father’s hands, paces back and forth across their soft-carpeted floor. “I’ve tried to let the boy have fun. I’ve tried to make his life here good—”
“It’s done.”
“He’s only a baby—”
“Martha—”
“I wish you’d never let them in,” Mama says, and slaps Father’s face so hard the silence echoes for a three-count after. And soft, polite and very very soft: “I wish I’d not given you enough children that you can spend them so very cheap.”
Father doesn’t move. He stands still as a pigeon scarecrow, hands straight at his sides and not one single feeling on his face.
Six backs up. He shuffles back on the carpet, eyes big as the bright blue sky.
The mailslot clangs, and the silence spreads out like a strapping.
Six runs.
He scrambles up and runs hard down the hallway, back to the billet and inside and locks the door fast behind him. “Pretend you’re sleeping,” he pants to Joe, and Joe, red-faced and still dripping baby snot, doesn’t say one word against him.
They lie together silent, eyes pressed shut and gulping down their breathing for five minutes, ten, until there’s no steps down the hallway and there isn’t gonna be. Six sits up, lets himself cough. He’s tacky with sweat.
“Is it safe?” Joe asks, curled up in the blankets, one eye open as if the other can keep the nightmares out.
“Yeah,” Six whispers, pats his little fist. Taking care of the baby. “C’mon. I’ll show you a special thing.”
The sixth floor is scary at night. Lucinda’s new beau hasn’t drawn down the power to the uncleared floors, and the emergency lights are long burned out, dead as dead for twenty-five years.
Six’s workshop runs on filched batteries, a beat-up old charger he hides under the laundry pile in their billet on the twentieth floor. He hits one of the old slap-lights and it clicks into glowing, casts shadows across the dusty floor. There’s no feeling like ghosts. Joe holds his hand tight, and it keeps the ghosts away.
“You got a garden,” he says, just as breathless in wonder as he was in fear, and Six feels something he hasn’t in a long time, not since Father let them all know about Joe and his destiny. He feels things going right.
“Yeah. It’s a secret,” he says, and brushes a curled-up leaf with his free right hand.
“What’d you make?” Joe whispers, hugging himself in outlines, in the dark.
“Mint plant,” Six says, and his head comes up a little, his eyes go bright with pride. “Strawberries. The little potatoes Mama didn’t want last year. Spinach.”
“The old seeds.”
“I saved them.”
Six and Joe sit on Six’s old emergency blanket and share out the crop on a beat-up kitchen plate. Their fingers poke each other on the way to strawberries and light-washed spinach. It washes the taste of blood away.
“Thanks,” Joe says sleepy when the harvest’s all done. “S’good.”
Joe’s not a little kid anymore. He’s not half as light as a chicken or a goat. But Six carries him up fourteen floors of stairway to their billet, mouth smeared with strawberries, fast asleep.
* * *
The alchemists’ train is the black train that comes down the tracks come midnight. Six has never seen it up close: by midnight every good kid and even the bad ones have locked the doors of their billets and are fast asleep, full knowing they’ve got a six a.m. wakeup.
The turnstile men don’t guard the station gates when the alchemists’ train comes in. They unlatch the metal bars that’re for strollers and wheelchairs and market-buggies, and everyone walks f
ree to the platform, free out again until the sunlight spills sickly down the stairs and announces it Market time.
The boy who comes through the gate, hooded, face covered ’gainst public eyes is too big for a ten-year-old if you look hard, or look twice. His arms are too thick, his legs too thin and gangling.
He doesn’t say goodbye to his father, who stands at the stairway under his best Sunday hat, mouth a tight line under his bushy moustache.
But midnight’s so that nobody notices: the too-long cloak, the shaky step. The blond-haired brother smuggled down early evening to a broken-backed sixth floor garden, holding himself in outlines, in the dark, with the taste of secret strawberries on his tongue. Midnight’s the alchemists’ hour, and in their hands things go strange.
The wind rises from the tunnel, from the dark. The train comes in.
The midnight train is dark as stars. The midnight train’s painted up with planets, each car banded with the swoop of a heavenly body ringed or striped or pitted. It moves like a snake along the tracks every child in central’s seen so many times on Market days, cheering as the rumble gets loud and the Moving Market comes in.
The doors all open. Nobody cheers the midnight train.
At the staircase, somebody sobs.
The boy in the black rough cloak looks into the dark of the lead car. There’s no lights at midnight on the platform, in the train. He steps from dark to darker; he steps inside.
“Greetings,” say the alchemists, and their voices are sharp like devil weed, bad seed, breaking the rules. The alchemists in their black train, learned men, terror-men, are hard to see for a boy who grew up billeting in a place where it’s never full dark. They’re flashes of patched knees and sunless skin. They’re eyes that reflect metal and never close.
The train doors shut behind him with a hiss of dead men watching. The sobbing’s sliced clean from his ears with metal and rubber seal, and then the only sound’s one he hasn’t heard since he was littler: the train, whish-whisper, the moving of wheels on track.