Dust City

by Robert Paul Weston

  Inside, it’s cool and surprisingly wet. The air is calm, the clouds acting as a blanket against the wind. Suddenly, the serenity of the place is shattered by a scream.

  “Fiona?!” I search the clouds above me, but all I can see is a dim white mass. I pull myself up as fast as I can. I’m frantic. I’m climbing recklessly.

  Then, fluttering into view is what appears to be a slip of paper. It curls and tumbles down and all I have to do is reach out and . . . catch it. It’s blue.

  Steadying myself against the stalk, I flip it open with one paw. There’s a smattering of words written on the page in a childish hand:

  DER SIS,

  THANK YOO FOR TECHING ME REEDING.

  I LUV YOO,

  ROY

  It’s the letter Roy didn’t want anyone to see. He just wanted to thank his sister for teaching him to read. He was trying to better himself.

  “Fiona?” I call up to her again. No answer, so I keep climbing.

  The underside of Eden emerges lazily from the fog. It fills the sky, gray and craggy and silent. The stalk begins to tilt, leaning backward slightly to rise over the clifflike lip of Eden’s edge. Then it twists again, until it’s horizontal, broad and firm enough to walk on.

  “What took you so long?” There she is, sitting cross-legged with her face in her hands.

  “You okay?”

  “I lost something,” she says. “On the way up.”

  “Could this be it?” I take out the note.

  She stares at it, dumbfounded. “You caught it?” She throws her arms around me like she did before, and I’m rewarded with another kiss. Then our faces slide forward, and we cradle our heads on each other’s shoulders. “Thank you so much,” she says. We sit there like that a while, the exhaustion of the climb setting in. We’re simply too tired to move.

  “I was there,” I tell her, pointing to the note, “when Gunther took it away from him.”

  She nods, beaming at the slip of blue paper. “It’s the first thing he’s ever written to me. Prob’ly the first thing he’s ever written in his whole life.”

  I take a breath. “I need to tell you something. It’s about what happened to Roy.”

  “I think I already know.”

  “You do?”

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out,” she says. “Roy told me he was planning to audition for Skinner. So when you told me you got the job, I put two and two together. If you won the race, you must have been at least partly responsible.”

  My tail dips as low as it ever has. “Maybe more than just partly.”

  “I know they dose you up beforehand. It wasn’t the real you.” She almost laughs. “Anyone can see that.”

  “I hope so, but that’s not how they explained it. They said it would bring out our true selves.”

  She shakes her head. “It was bad dust, that’s all. They can design it that way. Which is why we’re gonna find the fairies. Right now. And we’re gonna bring back the good stuff.”

  Down below us, there’s the glow of lamplight. It’s rising up like steam. “We should keep going,” I say. “We need to find a place that’s close enough to the ground to jump off—and quick, too. Before it’s too late.”

  Fiona lets go of my face. “Um, what’s that supposed to mean?”

  As if in answer to her question, the stalk begins to tremble.

  “Hurry,” I tell her. “It’s starting!”

  “What is starting?”

  “It’s how Jack covers his tracks. This whole thing is gonna disappear!”

  But Fiona isn’t moving. She crosses her arms and pastes a stubborn expression on her face. “You do realize that’s Eden down there, right?”

  “Where else did you think we were?”

  “If this thing we’re sitting on disappears, how’re we supposed to get back? You have more of those beans, right?” The trunk sways beneath us. There’s a crackling sound like a newly set fire. The spongy green we’re sitting on is turning brown and brittle.

  “I thought if I used the whole bag it’d last long enough for us to get back!”

  “The whole bag? You mean you don’t have any more?”

  “You were there when Jack gave them to me! All he told me was—” But I can’t finish. The trunk’s melting all around us. It swings over the fancy lampposts, over an empty street, over the Eden treetops.

  “Hang on!”

  We both try, but the swaying is too violent. We pitch sideways with enough force to throw us over the side of the stalk. We’re left hanging from the thickest vines, and there aren’t many of them left. Everything is fading in our grip. Huge leaves—red, orange, brown—wrinkle and curl and break away, fluttering to the earth like a thousand Octobers.

  Then it’s our turn.

  The final vines wither away and we tumble down. Instinct pitches us forward to all fours, cushioning the fall. We land on grass, close-cropped and irrigated so thoroughly it’s springy as a mattress. We’re in some sort of park, more clear and quiet and beautiful than any I’ve ever seen. We’re safe.

  One flame-red leaf, big as a newspaper, snows down from above. It shatters at my feet with a hushed magic, moldering to nothing before my eyes.

  “Idiot!”

  Fiona punches me again—same arm, same place. She turns in an aimless circle, her arms at first spread wide and then collapsing angrily at her sides. “This is just great! What’re we supposed to do now? We’re stuck!”

  We are stuck. We’re stranded a mile up in the air in the one place the city’s animalia are never allowed to be. We’re in Eden.

  37

  CREEPING DISEASE

  A CAR, A BIG ONE—AN ENORMOUS ONE—THUNDERS DOWN AN ADJACENT street. The headlights strobe through the trees, blinding us both. It’s a giant’s car, overwhelmingly huge and rumbling as loud as a thunderstorm. We duck behind a dense row of hedges to let it pass (not that whoever’s driving would notice us).

  When the air’s silent again, Fiona stands up. She lets out a low whistle. “Look at this place. It’s gorgeous!”

  I have to admit, Eden has an austere beauty, with its pillowy earth and finely cropped grass, its ornate lampposts and coiffed greenery, its polished benches with silver fittings. Rising above it all are the tapered cones of fairy palaces, places we’ve been told all our lives are devoid of fairies, places I’ve wanted to see ever since I was a cub.

  “No wonder the Edenites keep all this to themselves,” says Fiona. “It’s beautiful.”

  Breathtaking. Majestic. Eerily perfect. It’s all of these things, but there’s something missing. It’s as if you have to hold your hand out in front of your face to make certain it’s got three dimensions, that it’s not just a painted backdrop. Then, when your senses tell you it’s really there, you can’t help feeling like you’re standing in the midst of a full-scale model railway set, everything cast from plastic and pressboard.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t smell right. It smells like—actually, it doesn’t smell at all.”

  Fiona laughs. “That’s because it’s clean. It’s not that Eden doesn’t smell, it’s that the City stinks.”

  I take Fiona’s paw and lead her past perfect trees, tiered fountains, huge firebrick urns that erupt with blossoms.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  I point to the highest spire of all, dead in the center of Eden. We both know it from the Nimbus TV commercials. It’s the hub around which the whole corporation spins. And we know the story that goes with it, too. Once upon a time, it belonged to the fairy queen, the first of her species. They said she could still communicate with moths and butterflies. But now it’s the epicenter of Nimbus Labs.

  We stick to the trees and shadows along the edges of the street, but everywhere is deserted. There’s none of the bustle you find in the rest of the City. The only sound is the cool buzz of electricity. It comes from the lampposts, each hung with a squidlike chandelier, the tentacles tipped with bluish bulbs.

  The homes aren�
�t homes at all. They’re castles and palaces. Everywhere you look, you see spires and ravelins, steeples and domes, all of them rising high above the trees that seclude them from the street. It’s lonely to think there’re folks buried deep inside all that stone and glass.

  Soon, we’re nearing the center. We turn a corner onto a street that looks like all the rest—rows of palaces, well removed from the sidewalk and buried in blue shadow. But then I notice a difference. They’re all connected. And there’s a raised concrete monorail running between all the buildings. A signpost reads: Nimbus Thaumaturgical ~ Better Living Through Enchantment. It’s topped with the familiar halo.

  Farther along the street we see it’s more than just a monorail that links these buildings. The palaces are ancient, but they’re connected by a thoroughly modern network of pipes, towers, platforms, exhaust vents, storage tanks—all of them glistening under the moonlight. High-voltage wires sag from everything. It’s as if the laboratory modifications are a creeping disease, a gleaming virus spreading from the foundation upward.

  Fiona shakes her head. “Look at it all. They’re ruining this place.”

  “We have to find a way in,” I whisper.

  All around the compound, there’s a tall fence, crowned with loops of razor wire. If worse comes to worst, we could scale it, but not without leaving a good few snags of ourselves behind. There ought to be another way.

  “We’ll keep following the fences,” I say. “Maybe we can find a lock you can pick.”

  We stay behind a hem of bushes and keep going, circling the palace-cum-laboratory. Eventually our search pays off. We find a door in the fence fastened with a huge padlock. It’s massive.

  “You think you can beat that one?” I ask Fiona.

  She sucks in a breath. “Might be beyond my capabilities.”

  “See if you can—” I stop. I grab hold of her shoulder and pull her back to the bushes.

  Someone is coming.

  Fiona pricks up her ears. She hears it, too. Muffled footsteps through a door. The jingle of keys. We watch through the bushes and through the fence as a man comes out from an unmarked door in the building. He’s dressed in a set of gray coveralls and he’s stumbling badly, zigzagging toward the fence. He falls onto the links, grabbing hold to steady himself.

  “He’s drunk,” Fiona whispers.

  With one hand, the man is covering his face, wearing his palm like an eye-patch. He struggles to open the lock and then comes through, heading straight for us.

  Fiona flinches beside me. I’m about to leap out, when the man stops and turns and plops down on the grass, right in front of us. He’s muttering to himself. “No way, no way, this cannot be happening . . .”

  Fiona stares at me. I put a finger to my lips and point in the opposite direction. Maybe we can sneak off. Gingerly, we raise ourselves to all fours and tiptoe away.

  “Who’s there?” The man leaps to his feet, shining a flashlight into the bushes. All the while, he keeps one side of his face covered with his hand.

  “Who—” The man peers into the bushes. “You better come out now.” He takes a step closer. “You’re—” He stops. “A wolf! There’s a w—”

  I lunge out of the bushes, bowl him over, and pin him to the grass. I clamp his mouth shut and he’s too shocked to put up a fight. Besides, he seems more worried about covering his face. His one hand is still glued there, cupping his eye.

  I bare my teeth. “You’re not going to scream, okay?”

  He nods. There’s a blue badge pinned to his coveralls. It says: Richard Froschler, Shipping and Receiving.

  Fiona comes out of the bushes, crouching behind me. “We’re not going to hurt you, understand?”

  He nods again, so I take my paw from his mouth.

  He gapes at me, wide-eyed. “And I thought I had it bad.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Finally, he takes his hand away from his face. It’s his eye. It’s huge—the massive, glossy, bulging eye of a frog. It’s popping grotesquely out of its socket, rimmed with lumpy green skin. “See?” he says. “I’m changing back.”

  “Huh?”

  He sighs heavily. “They never tell you about the fine print, do they? Sure, it sounds good at the time. Get the girl, fall in love, and we’ll make you a hominid. You can live up in Eden, get seats at the theater, get into the country clubs. ‘Sounds great,’ you tell them. Damn fairies! So you say, ‘Sure, wave your wand, sprinkle your dust, do what you gotta do.’ But what they neglect to mention, is what happens when things go south. When you fall out of love, I mean. Suddenly, they up and disappear, and by the time you figure out you’re screwed, there’s nobody around to fix it.” He lolls his head back and forth. “But what am I telling you for? Obviously, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Looks like the magic ran out for you and your lady friend a looooong time ago.”

  Fiona’s first to figure out what he means. “Sorry to burst your bubble,” she says, standing over the pair of us, “but Henry and I have never masqueraded as hominids. It’s not like we’ve lost our sheep’s clothing. We’re just wolves, plain and simple. We’re looking for something.”

  The man blinks at us, with one normal eyelid and one huge, translucent mess. “Wolves! There are wolves in—”

  I slap his mouth shut again. “Okay, already. We established that.” I lean in close. “Now, listen—Richard. Judging by that eye of yours, do you really think it’s a good idea to start drawing attention to yourself?”

  He stares for a moment, thinking. He shakes his head. So I do him a favor and let him speak.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Force of habit. They sort of train us up here to cry wolf. But you certainly have a point there. Can’t have anyone finding me looking like this. Right now, all I wanna do is to bail on this whole crazy place.” He sighs, gazing wistfully into the sky. “I thought it’d work out, y’know? Thought I’d be able to fake it, even after things went sour for Lily and me—that’s my wife, by the way. Ex-wife. Obviously, it did not work out.” He points to his amphibious eye. “It’s getting worse now, too—and fast. Believe it or not, I didn’t look like this when I started my shift. All I had was this little green patch on my temple. But the divorce was finalized today, so I think that’s why. Figure I’ve got another twelve hours, maybe a day, before I’m back to my old hippity-hoppity self.” He squirms to look back at the Nimbus buildings. “Sure as hell can’t be up here when that happens.” He looks back at Fiona and me. “Just like you shouldn’t be here, either.”

  “Sorry,” I tell him, “but we came here for a reason.”

  “Better be a damn good one.”

  “It is,” says Fiona.

  “Wonderful. Congratulations. And now that we’ve settled that, would you mind letting me up? I’m gonna have to get past security going down the Empyrean, and the sooner I do, the better.”

  I give him another glance at my teeth. “You’re not going to tell anyone about us, right?”

  “I promise,” he says. “Look at me. Who am I gonna tell?”

  “Okay.” I help Richard to his feet and take special care to brush him off, picking crumbs of grass and dirt off the back of his coveralls. “There you go,” I tell him. I give him a friendly slap on his back. “Get going, and good luck.”

  He looks at me oddly for a moment, like he’s astonished I didn’t chew his face off. “Thanks,” he says. “Uh, you too.” Then he scampers off down the street.

  Fiona watches him. “You sure it’s wise to just let him go?” she asks. “You seemed awfully nice cleaning him up like that. Maybe sometimes you’re a little too nice to folks.”

  “Or not.” And I show her what I mean, holding up the ring of keys I picked from Richard’s pocket. “A little trick I learned from Jack.”

  38

  LEFTOVER MIRACLES

  INSIDE THE GROUNDS, WE’RE SUCKED INTO A SWAMP OF LABORATORY works. We head toward the center, toward the largest, most forbidding tower of them all. The nearer we get
, the denser the shafts and wires become. Around the base, you can’t even see the walls of the palace.

  We jam the stolen keys into door after door until we find one that works. It’s a service entrance, leading to a corridor with walls of painted breeze blocks and a ceiling lined with pipes. There are noises down the corridor—whirs of machinery and clanks of metal. We follow them. It brings us to the entrance to a warehouse full of enormous shipping containers. Keeping to the shadows outside the entranceway, we watch.

  There are several workers in uniforms like the one the frog-eyed man was wearing. Two of them control a pair of cranes, lifting the containers from here to there. Parked in the corner are several trucks—just like the one that killed my mother. The cranes swing the containers from the trucks and into an enormous freight elevator. When the elevator’s loaded, the doors shut and the containers (unaccompanied by any of the workers) get spirited away to some other part of the compound.

  I cock my head in the direction of the elevator. “Bet that goes somewhere important,” I whisper.

  “Yeah,” says Fiona, “but where?”

  “One way to find out.”

  Slipping to all fours, I lead Fiona from container to container until we’re beside the elevator doors. When the crane swings past we lope in its shadow—and right inside. The floor of the elevator is oddly soft and rubbery. We’re squeezed into the rear when the doors shut, casting us into pitch darkness.

  Fiona moves close to me. “You think this is a good idea?”

  “It’s the only one I’ve got.”

  I take Fiona’s paw in mine and for a moment, nothing happens. Then the elevator buzzes and clicks and starts moving upward. Distant winches and cables strain to lift us, creaking with the weight. At last, we stop, only the doors don’t open.

  Fiona’s grip tightens. “Now what?”

  I prick up my ears, hoping I’ll hear something. But I don’t. This may’ve been a mistake. We might be trapped. Who knows if—

  There’s the crackle of electricity behind us. The elevator wall we’re leaning against slides away, taking us by surprise. There’s another set of doors on the opposite side of the freight car; and as if that weren’t enough to throw us off balance, the floor starts moving. I realize that’s why the floor was rubbery. It’s all automated, a huge conveyor belt.