Dead Boys

by Gabriel Squailia

  The seer turned away; she didn’t want to see.

  All hundred and one of his killers were singing.

  His blood was bright on their faces.

  They were singing the song he’d taught them. Tra-la! Tra-lay!

  But he wasn’t singing along, not any more. He wasn’t alive any more, either—couldn’t be, with so much of him spread around the room. He was shouting, though, trying to drown them out, saying anything that came to mind: multiplication tables, names of relatives, nursery rhymes. But the crowd turned the words back on him, mocking him, shouting him down, and pretty soon he’d switched to a language like nothing she’d ever heard, and his crazy talk kept going on until there was nothing left but his head.

  No one would touch it. No one but Clarissa, who pulled it out of its puddle and set it on the empty bar.

  The baby thumped, slower now.

  “You knew all along,” she whispered to her belly. “Knew what he was. How’d you know that, baby? You can’t even see.”

  “There’s an idea,” said her boss from over her shoulder. He pointed at the head. “A crystal ball. One that talks.” He slammed a drink down in front of her. “I think it’s time we put your natural talent for bullshit to use. Apparently a hustle as simple as the Dead City Welcome is beyond your capabilities, but this is something you might just have a knack for.”

  She stared at him, then down at the murdered boy’s head. It was still yammering on, its eyes landing on the ceiling, the walls, anything but a human face.

  “You want me to—”

  “Put a cloth on a table. Put the head on the cloth. Put your hands on the head. And pretend that only the head can see the future, and that only you can understand the head. We’ll make a fortune. Fifty-fifty.”

  It worked. Better than her boss had ever imagined it would. His cut made him rich, but it wasn’t long before she’d bought out her debt, then filled up an account of her own. Inevitably, the two of them had a falling-out, but by then she had enough to buy her own bar.

  She didn’t know much about running an establishment, but she learned. Learned how to brew swill, how to bully runners, how to squeeze every last year of credit out of a drunkard’s account. Nor was that the extent of her education.

  Slowly, one guess at a time, she learned to comprehend her baby’s kicks and thumps. Discovered that the child had an honest-to-God talent for clairvoyance, one that kept the months flowing into her account. But along with it came a passion for justice that Clarissa was wholly unprepared to handle, and a temper to match.

  For it was obvious that the baby was furious, tired of having played the silent partner, of taking part in unsavory business, of swindling good folks along with the bad. She’d learned how disappointed the child could be in her, in what she’d said, in what she’d done, in what she was doing still. Learned that the baby blamed her for making it complicit in any number of nasty endeavors.

  Most of all what had happened to that boy.

  The severed head learned, too.

  Learned to quiet down. To disappear into his dreams.

  She envied him that, though it cost her a fortune. What filled her felt like it would never empty, and when Clarissa closed her eyes she had visions of the child disowning its own mother, a passenger fleeing a sinking ship.

  It happened suddenly: she knew she couldn’t stand another minute underground, drowning in shame, so she picked Barnabas out of the crowd and handed him the keys to the bar. Then Clarissa turned her back on the Crowded Car and stumbled away, lacking the strength to take one last look at the boy’s head, let alone apologize. She’d climbed up Southheap and set up shop as far from the Tunnels as she could get, but regret followed like a beaten dog on a long chain, just far enough away that she could forget it was there sometimes, only to hear it scratching for food again.

  She’d give anything to be quit of it, or so she told herself.

  The child told her a finger was as good a start as any.

  Six Seekers held the skull of the seventh high.

  The company interlaced their skeletal arms, lifting Etienne into the shifting sands, feeding him memories of their own.

  Etienne turned from his howling, only for a moment.

  In that moment he saw Jacob laughing so hard he snorted, his head against another boy’s chest.

  He saw Siham dancing, the bangles on her wrists chiming in time with music that poured from speakers as tall as trees.

  He saw Shailesh climbing a branch and peering at a nest full of baby birds.

  He saw Remington jumping naked into a creek.

  He saw Adam and Eve sitting side-by-side, pointing through an airplane window.

  He saw himself, in his chair with his Book.

  A moment was enough. He spoke his greeting through the storm.

  “That was—heavy,” he said.

  “A weight you’ve carried long enough,” said Jacob. “Let the dust bear it now.”

  Lowering Etienne’s skull, he followed the others through the storm. There was no need to form a chain and hold on; by now, they were attuned to the glimpses of life and death that rose and rebounded from one another’s bones. The visions began to fade as they left the rock buried behind them, trekking toward the blurry boundary of the storm. From blindness, they passed into static, and from static into the dim, dawning light that shone between the grains.

  Jacob stared down at his fleshless feet, watching sand and dust shift between metatarsals. He held up the hand that wasn’t holding Etienne and willed his dust to gather between the bones. While he’d centered on his marrow, he’d felt the motes being scraped from his skeleton by the storm, and kept as many as he could clinging to the bone. Now here they were, forming a tiny trickle of dust, allowing him to dangle one distal phalange an inch from its neighbor.

  He still had much to learn, he thought, returning the digit to its proper place and wiggling his fingers before his eyes.

  Through their white bars, he was the first to spot the Plainsmen.

  Five warriors trod the sands, pitching rocks at the sandstorm.

  “Look,” Jacob said, startled by the sound of his voice. The storm was but a whisper now. “Are they lost, do you think?”

  “They’re coming from the direction of White City,” said Siham.

  By then, the Plainsmen had seen them. With a unified hoot of excitement, they staggered ahead, brandishing clubs and swords.

  Even that far-off threat sent a rush through Jacob’s frame. Before he’d decided to react, he was tearing ahead, his talon-like feet pitching sand in the air behind him. The company fell in, their bodies blurring as they skidded in a ring around the warriors.

  “All right!” rasped a Plainswoman in a leather girdle. “A little practice before we get down to business.”

  Jacob saw the axe beginning its swing and leapt deftly aside. As the axe-wielder sank his blade in the sands, Jacob struck and was surprised to see his opponent launched into the air by the touch of his hand.

  “What business?” said Remington, sidestepping another slow blow. “Are you trying to get back to the scrimmage?”

  From the ground, the axe-wielder shook his head. “Ain’t no scrimmage to speak of,” he gurgled. “Whole thing’s cleared out, from Rim to Rim.” Laboriously, he righted himself, then trotted toward his axe, seemingly oblivious to Jacob’s strength and speed.

  “Now our little squadron will be the first to return,” said the Plainswoman, jabbing her sword in the general direction of Adam’s ribs. “All we have to do is fight each other until three of our four are fallen, and the remaining fighter will, by definition, be—”

  “The Last Man Standing!” they all roared at once, hollering and whooping as they made ineffectual passes at the ring of Seekers.

  “Let us leave these simpletons and discuss,” said Shailesh, drawing the company away. The Plainsmen were happy enough to stagger on, clashing their weapons together as they went. “Something has happened in the Plains,” he said. “Something
momentous and unexpected.”

  “And those four weren’t at all afraid of us,” said Siham. “Isn’t that weird? Don’t the Plainsmen think we’re all witchy?”

  Jacob, peering toward the distant walls of White City, had an awful premonition. “Remington,” he murmured, “can you see through the crow’s eyes from this distance?”

  “Hm? Oh, sure. There he is, flying above the walls.” Remington spread out his bony arms and started running in circles, crying, “Whee!”

  “Focus, Remy,” said Jacob. “What can you see down below?”

  “Oh, that. Everybody looks like little ants! The Seekers are the white ants, and the other guys—wow, there’s a lot of them. They’re kind of everywhere.” Remington dropped his arms and looked up at the company. “I think the city’s under siege.”

  “Scaffolds,” said Jacob, pointing. “The walls of the city aren’t white any more. They’re covered with scaffolds.”

  It was a great while before anyone spoke, and it hardly mattered who it was.

  “How long were we gone?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Mask of the Magnate

  The crow fluttered to a landing on the corner of an open-roofed laboratory in the midst of occupied White City. The chamber’s walls had been half-heartedly defaced by its occupants, ten of whom lounged about trying to summon the civic pride to do more damage as the other two theatrically decried their situation.

  “It’s dehumanizing, that’s what it is!” cried Elspeth, pacing before a large plastic barrel, waving the blunt-tipped sword she’d been issued by the Magnate’s bean-counters.

  “O fickle-fettled Fortuna! We’re nought but dehumans to thee,” said Oxnard, pounding his fist against the barrel’s lid, causing the river-water within to slop over one side.

  “They made it sound so glamorous, with their tales of ransacking and kidnapping. And did you hear how we were to bring low the beast?”

  The ten other warriors added their grumbles to the performance, urging Elspeth on.

  “And what did that amount to? Spectating at a safe distance while all ten metal-men cut the Last Man Standing into hanks and hunks, shrugging off its blows as if they tickled their chrome-plated skulls. Well, the Magnate told us one thing truly: we’re stronger now that we’ve joined his army, ain’t we? So long as we stand behind the ten of them, we are!”

  “A plagueful of poxen on the Manganate!”

  “They said they’d make me an officer, didn’t they, Ox? But none of us, not even myself, is anything more than a metal-man’s lackey. What maneuver has any Plainsman performed here but for leaping into the raining blows of some jumped-up pile of bones? We’re agents of distraction, all in the name of giving one of them gilded lilies an opening. And now, as if our lackeyism weren’t crystal-clear, we’ve been blessed with a new assignment: guarding a blooming bucket while the metal-men bash Boners through eternity!”

  “Teckmology hath dunked us to the depths of woe,” moaned Oxnard, thumping the barrel’s lid again and paying no mind when it thumped back.

  “And why were the metal-men chosen? Were they the best among us, Ox?”

  “Elspeth, sir, they wasn’t!”

  “Nay, Ox! They were merely—the least.”

  The Plainsmen, having warmed to the topic, were excited enough to resume hacking at the walls.

  “’Twas cheaper to weld blades and hammers to broken men than to plate a warrior entire, so those that fell beneath our swords in the scrimmage were made into our generals. They’re the ones were hacked apart, yet we’re their spectators now!”

  “Indignable it are!” said Oxnard. “We art the lowliest of lowlies now: lowlier than face-lacking debtors; lowlier than hacked-up metal-men; and fathom-depths of lowliness lowlier than them Boners, who art speedier and strengthier than I know not what! All them what’s greater than we art lesser in form: yet do you think, sir, that if we wert whittled down to bonishness ourselves we’d rocket through the ranks? Nay, we wouldst not even then!”

  Elspeth dropped her sword on the floor. “Oxnard, that’s it!” she cried. “You great, moronic genius, you!”

  “Eureka!” cried Oxnard, dropping his sword in agreement. “But, sir, what have I geniused?”

  Elspeth pulled her armor loose and peeled off the grimy garments beneath, revealing a body more husk than flesh. “Those Boners are quicker than our metal-men, aren’t they, Ox?”

  “By a muchness, sir,” said Oxnard.

  The warriors around them stared in confusion as Elspeth gripped the dehydrated remnant of her calf and tore it from the bone. “Their movements are so rapid that they’re all but invisible to the naked eye, aren’t they? Fast enough to fake, Ox. Fast enough to fake.”

  She’d stripped her lower half down to bone caked with ages-old grime but was having trouble reaching the rest. “Help me whittle, lummox!”

  Oxnard, too confused to protest, began yanking off his commander’s flesh by the fistful, and hiccuped in delight when it was done. “Why, Elspeth, sir, you’re rebirthed! My own noble commandress, the first Plainsman to abstain the mightiful strength of the Boners.” He thudded to his knees, stricken by a sudden fear of her tiny frame, which in its filth could pass for that of an elder Seeker. “But be thou merciful, sir. Chop me not with thy dust-beams, nay, not even for demonstrational purposes!”

  “Oh, stop your mewling, Oxnard, I don’t have any damn dust-beams. However!” Elspeth whirled about, imitating the martial style of the Seekers, and brought her open palm to a halt at Oxnard’s sternum.

  “Thou really dothn’t have dust-beams, sir. I felt that not whatever.”

  “No,” said Elspeth slowly, “but when I make such a gesture at you, you’ll fly backward as if it were the mightiest blow that ever a Boner landed. Thus, when they see me tossing the dozen of you about like grotty little rag dolls, they’ll think I’m one of them, and I’ll stroll into their impenetrable Plaza forthwith!”

  The sense of this plan impressed the Plainsmen, who, in a roaring rush, abandoned their post to practice in the open. The crow fluttered down to peck at the lid of the barrel, broadcasting nothing to Remington now but an empty room.

  “I guess that’s it,” said Remington, running through the desert in the midst of the company, pitching sand behind his skeletal feet. “There’s nothing in the lab now but that barrel of water, but I swear, guys, something inside it thumped! Maybe it’s an ultimate weapon. It could be a super-warrior built from pieces of the Last Man Standing!”

  “Or a platinum-plated vulture,” said Jacob, “with lasers for eyes.”

  “Ooh, what if it is?”

  “It could be anything or nothing at all. But with the city taken over, we haven’t the time—”

  “Remington’s right,” said Etienne. “If the Magnate thought it was worth protecting, it’s worth investigating.”

  “We’ll go there first,” said Siham, “with Remy’s crow as our lookout.”

  “What a terrible scene!” cried Shailesh as they spied Sandy Gate. “And what a shame that we’ve missed so much of the struggle!”

  “This can’t all really be about a handful of pocket watches, can it?” wondered Siham.

  The crow swooped over White City’s reconfigured streets, sweeping over bands of vandals, shipments of munitions, and the chaos at the city’s center before zeroing in on a maze of empty streets. The company, who’d followed Remington’s wordless signals and the crow’s overhead surveillance from the unguarded Sandy Gate, dashed through abandoned rooms and disused hallways until the sudden appearance of a group of debtors forced them into the marble room, no larger than a closet, where Siham had perfected her Ten Arrows technique.

  As they crammed themselves inside, their ribs becoming fundamentally entangled, Jacob whispered, “Does fighting our way through appeal to anyone else?”

  “The Magnate’s forces outnumber us a thousand to one,” said Siham. “How would we dig ourselves out?”

  “Cutting them into manageable
pieces has always worked for us,” said Etienne.

  “Impossible!” said Shailesh. “Every Seeker has taken a vow not to divide that which died whole.”

  “At the cost of your body?” said Jacob. “At the cost of your city?”

  “At the cost of the underworld itself!” said Shailesh. “We are not gods, to decide which men may walk and which must sit on the shelves like weights for paper!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Shailesh,” said Siham. “Doing nothing means letting White City fall. Doing nothing is doing something.”

  Shailesh sighed. “You are no longer my student, Siham. But I would still ask you to respect that these debates have occupied the Meeting for centuries.”

  “So has the question of how to keep the minutes. Look, Shailesh, it’s not complicated. The rule against dividing corpses is all about potential. Anybody could end up being a fool, or a sage, or a hero, or a villain, so long as she’s around long enough. And Seekers are all about giving people the chance to make good. Right?”

  Shailesh ceded the point. “Just as the Plains warriors joined the Poet, then turned to peace, so may any man transform in the fullness of time.”

  “Then it follows that we have a duty to protect our own first, before our enemies. Your own city, your own people, your own self—those are the things you have control over. Those are the things you actually have a shot at changing for the better.”

  “So we should cut our way through these weaklings to preserve ourselves?” said Shailesh. “But they are harmless! They lack the means to damage us!”

  “Just because they haven’t yet doesn’t mean they never will,” said Siham. “If they’ve gone from zero to metal-men in the time it took us to scour, how much further will they go if we just stand around and parry their blows for another five years?”

  “Aha!” said Shailesh. “So, because they have the potential to destroy us, we should destroy their potential to do it. I see your logic and vehemently dispute it!”

  “Hasn’t scouring taught you anything? We don’t destroy or create—we transform. All we do is change. But Etienne is no less himself because he’s lost his body. And Althea and Hamish would never have founded the art of bone-fighting—the art you’ve dedicated your afterlife to studying!—if they hadn’t been hacked to pieces.”