A better person, Jane was sure, would have been able to restrain herself, to spare the time to soothe an old friend into death before returning to her own affairs. But try though she might she could not. Feeling awful, she asked, "Where's Peter?"
Ragwort chuckled. It sounded like sheet metal tearing. "Last I saw him, the boy was headed upslope." He called after her, "Give him a kiss for me, girlie. He's earned it."
* * *
Peter had hanged himself.
His slim body hung from a low branch of an elm tree near the top of the slope. It was hard to see at first, but as she climbed the hillside the ground, trees, and sky resolved themselves into three separate shades of gray, with Peter's corpse suspended at their center. A faint breeze moved it ever so slightly—any less and the motion would be undetectable. His feet were a slowly turning compass, quartering out the night.
Jane stayed midway up the slope through the darkest part of the night, unwilling to leave and unable to bear coming any closer. Caught between conflicting urges, she could give in to neither and in the end she simply didn't move.
Around midnight the moon rose and shortly thereafter there was a slight stirring at the center of Peter's forehead. Slowly, a slim black crack appeared and widened there. His face broke open like brittle paper.
Something dark crawled from the crack. It spread damp wings, pulsed, and then flew away. More dark specks emerged from Peter's skull, one and then three and five at a time, pausing briefly and then taking wing. A thin stream formed, thickened, moved away.
It was a swarm of hornets.
"Come." A small hand—a child's hand—took hers and led her away.
* * *
She was far down the road before she thought to look to her side and see who was leading her. Then, when she did, what she saw was so unexpected she found it hard to credit her own numbed senses.
It was the shadow-boy.
Too much had happened; she could not respond. They walked, saying nothing. Miles passed. At the schoolyard the shadow-boy released her and said, "I came to say good-bye." He smiled sadly. "I can't help you any more. They've given up on finding you and the child catcher has been recalled. I'll be going back to the factory now."
"The factory," Jane said. It was hard to think of the factory. She tried to come up with something appropriate to say. "How is everybody doing there?"
"Everything is the same there. Nothing ever changes." The shadow-boy's voice was wistful. "It can't." He shifted and was gone.
"Wait!" Jane cried. "It was… you in the shadows all this time?"
From behind her, the shadow-boy said, "The child catcher brought me to help find you. Like a bloodhound, you know." She whirled and caught a fraction of his shy smile. "He has less control over me than he thought. I wasn't able to do much. But I gave you what protection I could. On Midsummer's Day, the bonfire? It was me who fetched your teacher when you were attacked. Things like that."
"You did that? Why would you go to all that trouble for me?"
"I'm your friend." A gentle, papery touch of his hand. "Friends help friends."
She turned to return his touch with a hug but there was nothing there. The sense of phantom presence that had haunted her all these past months was gone. Slowly, wearily, Jane headed back up to the landfill.
* * *
The dragon was gone.
Unbelieving, Jane wandered across the space where he had been. The low moon provided just enough light to show that there was nothing there but churned-up earth.
The meryons were gone as well, their buildings light-less and abandoned. Jane stumbled across their perimeters and was not challenged. A Quonset hut crumpled underfoot and she was not attacked. She came upon a neat pile of blankets and clothing, rolled-up posters, schoolbooks, brushes and combs, the total accumulation of wealth she had managed to amass since fleeing the factory. She screamed.
"My stuff! You just left all my stuff out in the open!"
Not caring what happened, she called on Melanchthon with all her will, howling his true name across the landfill and shouting out the catalog codes she had memorized so long ago for anyone to hear.
A voice answered from within the ground.
Go away. You are no longer needed.
His voice was more powerful than it had ever been before. It made her skull vibrate and rattled her teeth. "We cut a deal," she reminded him. "You're supposed to protect me."
And who broke the compact first? Eh, little virgin?
His scorn scorched her face and left small blisters on her nose and cheeks. She cried out in pain. But she could no longer control herself. "You bastard! You planned all this, you arranged all this, it's all your doing, I know it! I'm going to rip your wiring out—I'll take you apart with my bare hands!"
A pipe thrust out of the soil, right at her feet, and ratcheted upward, skewing crazily into the sky. Jane danced back from it. To her side, a steel tower erupted from the ground, rocketing toward the moon, shedding dirt. "Stop!" Jane shouted. But metal structures were sprouting everywhere about her, in sheets and chrome walls, slamming and clashing against one another, blocking the horizon and hiding the stars and clouds. An iron bulwark curved overhead, clanging into a slotted wall, and then all motion stopped.
Jane was enclosed in a city of steel, with no windows or doors.
"Where am I?" she cried in horror.
"Location is an illusion." The voice came from a corridor to her side. She spun about and saw a warrior approaching, elf-handsome in camouflage fatigues, a pistol within a buckled holster at his belt. "That is one of the first things that Melanchthon taught us." The warrior's mouth moved, but nothing else. His eyes were beads of jet. It might as well have been a mask talking.
"You know his name," Jane said flatly.
"A dragon is not like most creatures. Knowing his true name gives you no power over him unless you also stand at his controls."
It was true. Jane knew it was true by how bitter it tasted. "Who are you?" she asked.
"We are your replacements."
She looked more closely at him. She knew now that they were meeting not on a physical level but in some virtual dream-space of Melanchthon's devising. She studied the simplified planes of the warrior's face, his flat, emotionless expression. Her apprehension of scale did a sudden flip-flop, and she realized that rather than standing within a roofed passageway in an enormous city, she had been reduced in stature and set down among the pistons and workings of the dragon's interior. "You're a meryon."
"Yes. We are. Melanchthon still needs work, and with your virginity you have lost your neutrality of power. Your hands are no longer pH-neutral. His circuitry would burn at your touch. You could not so much as open an access hatch without disturbing the balance of charges within. We, however, reproduce asexually. We have dismantled our industries and moved them within the dragon's thorax, so that we might devote ourselves to his repair and maintenance." He gestured down one long corridor where minuscule service lights gleamed on surfaces of copper, steel, molybdenum. Tiny figures moved purposefully in the distance. "See what work we have done already."
"What do you get out of this arrangement?"
"Shelter," said the meryon. "And enough wheat to see us through the winter."
"You wouldn't need his shelter or his wheat if he hadn't arranged it. He's messed with your culture, tricked you into not growing enough food to feed yourselves, and made you dependent on coal and conquest for survival, when he knew all along that it would lead you to the brink of starvation."
"The strong abuse the weak," said the meryon. "Why should this bother anybody? It's a system."
Jane saw it then. No longer needing her help, Melanchthon had led and manipulated her into losing her virginity. That done, their compact was broken, and he was thus freed from the necessity even of going back on his word. "I could still fight him, you know." She felt weary and useless. "Right here, right now. I know his wiring inside out—I could do him serious damage."
"Yes
, but could you win?"
They both knew the answer to that.
The metal walls dissolved, and with them the meryon as well. The smell of the landfill filled Jane's nostrils again, and she was standing beside the pile of her clothes. She squatted to scoop up an armful of the best. She was so tired. There had to be someplace she could find shelter.
Jane slept that night in a wooden crate at the edge of the landfill. In the morning she crawled outside, sore and aching. She stood and looked around.
Above the trees, to the west, faerie towers melted into a gray sky. The skyscrapers had merged together into a single silhouetted wall. A magickal smog hung over the City. It looked sick with possibility.
— 12 —
SIRIN'S EXPERIMENTS ALWAYS WORKED.
That's what bugged Jane. They could construct identical assemblages of retorts and glass tubing, heat them with Bunsen burners feeding off the same petcock, flames tuned to the same height and color, measure out portions of sal ammoniac and exsanguinated toad's liver from the same carboys, their weights identical to the gram, and come morning Sirin's alembic would contain an azure essential oil with a spirit of light dancing in its depths and Jane's would be black with carbonized gunk. She had to pay for any glassware rendered unreusable, so there would follow a good fifteen minutes' sincere and futile brushwork at the sink before the thing would finally and mercifully burst in her hands. It seemed her fingers were always stained and bandaged, where Sirin's were long and slim and white as milk.
It wasn't fair.
Frustrated, she stepped out of the Alk-200 lab and let the thronging students sweep her away. The hall echoed with the clicking of hooves and heels. Everyone was in hurry, walking rapidly, turning suddenly to step into a classroom, appearing abruptly from side corridors no wider than a doorway. They seemed to be constantly popping in and out of existence. Jane's half of the traffic suddenly poured down a wide marble staircase, and she was carried along with them. Three floors she descended, and made it to the dissecting theater just as the bell rang.
Monkey was in a benevolent mood and had saved her a seat by the railing. Jane nodded thanks as Monkey lifted her stack of books away. Comparative and Speculative Anatomy was one of Jane's favorite classes. She looked forward to next semester, when she'd get to do some dissecting herself.
"Are we still on the centaur?" she whispered.
"No, I think he finally rotted." Monkey giggled, slipped a foot out of its shoe, and tugged at one of her own braids. "By the look of the control, I'd guess we're finally going to get to see something cute cut up."
"About time."
In the narrow horseshoe balcony, students were settling themselves in, a bright ripple of beaks and bat-wings, horns, jackal's-heads, bandannas, and horsehair plumes. Below, the control stood by the linen-covered dissecting table. He was a well-made young fey in an olive dressing gown provided by the Department. He had sleek black hair and a scornful eye—he was scanning the audience dispassionately—and when his gaze met Jane's she shivered involuntarily, as if somebody had touched ice to the nape of her neck.
The Chirurgeon strode into the amphitheater. With a muffled clatter everyone rose. Solemn and imposing in black, she brooded over the corpse, hands folded, like a priestess at the altar. When the class had reseated themselves, she nodded to either side. A teaching assistant whipped the linen cover away. The control put the gown aside and stood naked beside the dissecting table.
Monkey's eyes narrowed. She wrote a large "7" on the top of her yellow tablet. A nixie to her other side reached over to scrawl "6.5 at most!" beneath the 7 and underlined the most! three times.
Monkey dipped her head to stifle her laughter.
"—the incidence and frequency of the minor organs," the Chirurgeon was saying, "the gallbladder, suprarenal glands and kidneys in particular." She gestured down at the corpse, a gray twin of the young fey beside her. "The abdominal cavity has already been partially opened by a transverse and a lower vertical incision. Now I shall continue the operation by making a second vertical incision and opening the peritoneal cavity."
Hands the color of bone china floated delicately down to make the first cut. They flicked an invisible bit of tissue onto the floor as an offering to the Goddess.
An elbow dug into Jane's ribs. Glancing to the side, she saw that Monkey had filled her tablet page with a careful rendering of the control's genitalia. Jane scowled and shook her head.
This was serious, damn it.
* * *
By the end of class Jane's hand was cramped and aching from taking notes, and Monkey's drawing was surrounded by a woven wreath of lesser penises in varying states of erection. The Chirurgeon laid down her scalpel and with the slightest hint of a bow removed herself from the amphitheater. The air brightened. The students began to stand, chatter, gather up their books. The control put on his gown. "Oh, hey," Jane said. "Are you done with my Shearer's?"
"The dissection manual?" Monkey asked airily. "I ate it."
"You what?"
"I ate it. Why else would I want it? I was hungry and I ate it."
"But I need it for class."
"Then you shouldn't have given it to me." Monkey's beady eyes glittered strangely, maliciously, in her round face. "Really, Jane, you can be so dim at times." With a sudden standing backflip she disappeared through the doorway.
Jane's hands clenched. But really it was no more than she had learned to expect. Roommates were forever eating your books, having anxiety attacks, adopting rats and carnivorous slimes which they then expected you to feed, getting drunk and throwing up on your best dress, moving into the closet and refusing to come out for months on end, threatening suicide the night before Finals, leaving piles of rotting leaves in the middle of the floor, entertaining boyfriends in your bed because it was made and theirs not, evolving into large bloodsucking insects. Monkey was actually good of her kind.
Well, she could always pick up a new manual.
She took an express elevator eight floors up to the University bookstore. Over the past year Jane had come to know the layout well, the nature and locations of its antitheft systems and the identity of the part-time plainclothes dick. Security was tight up front by the cash registers. But there was an emergency exit at the back of the store, hidden from the cameras by the overstocked back shelves. Opening it would automatically trip an alarm, but that shouldn't be too big a problem.
Jane gathered up a new Shearer's and traced an indirect path toward the exit. Luckily, she'd had the foresight to case the back halls recently and break the lock on a nearby stairwell door. She was pretty sure she could be down a flight before the detective reached the door, and around a corner by the time he got to the stairs. There was an element of risk, but it was a method she'd never used and was eager to try out.
She took a deep breath and put a hand on the push bar.
A sudden sense of dark unease swept through her, a heavy wash of gravitas that unsettled her stomach and left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Iron talons seized her shoulder. "Miss Alderberry."
It was Doctor Nemesis.
"Ma'am!" Stricken, she looked up into her adviser's face. The doctor's eyeglasses rode low on her beak, two luminous disks under a painfully weak pair of watery pink eyes. The effect was like being stared at by two separate creatures, one of which you pitied and the other feared.
"I have been going over your laboratory reports, Miss Alderberry." Dr. Nemesis put an arm through hers, and walked her toward the front. "They are, if I may confide in you, disappointing, most disappointing in a student of your potential."
"I've been having trouble with the sophic—"
"Exactly so." They strolled out the front entrance. Distractedly, Jane realized that, cloaked within the magnetic field of Dr. Nemesis's dignity, she had effortlessly bypassed security. What would have taken calculation, daring, and risk on her part, her adviser had accomplished without even noticing.
She walked Jane to a faculty elevator and
unlocked the controls. It was snug as a nut within, walnut panels polished to a glassy smoothness. The doors closed noiselessly. Silently, they ascended. Jane could dimly see her own reflection in the wood with her adviser looming beside her like a storm cloud.
"You must surely realize why I am concerned for you."
"Well…" Jane didn't really, but that double glare bored into her, waiting for an intelligent response. "I'm here on a merit scholarship, so I suppose—"
"No!" Dr. Nemesis stamped her foot impatiently. As if in response the elevator door slid open. She steered Jane outside. They were on an office level now. The walls were decorated with large unframed oils of umbrellas and sides of beef. The runners on the hall floors smelled new. "I am not talking about mere money, but about your very survival! This is a Teind year, surely you must know that." Jane nodded, meaning no. "The department heads are even now assembling the list of those ten percent of the students who are… expendable. Your name, Miss Alderberry, is going to be on that list unless you straighten up and fly right." She glared at her: weakly, sternly.
"There's something I'm missing," Jane said rapidly. "It must surely be something elementary, something basic. If I could only understand it, if only I could see what it was, I'm certain I could keep up."
"I feel it may help, Miss Alderberry, were I to admit to you that at one time I was myself but an indifferent researcher. Oh, yes. Even I." Dr. Nemesis smiled vainly. "Lazy, unorganized, insolent—all the virtues a teaching assistant can have, I lacked."
"I was wondering could it maybe be the pontic water—"
"What set me straight was one particular incident. My adviser, none other than the wizard Bongay himself mind you, had obtained grant money from the Horned Man Foundation to create a divinatory engine in the form of a brazen head. This was, you will understand, very early in the history of cybernetics. It was all done with vacuum tubes then."
"It couldn't be my technique. I was ever so careful."
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