by Steve Berman
The salamander in my left hand exploded. The worst pain I’ve ever known washed through me and took my hand away in a burst of blood and bone. I screamed.
The other six-gun barely held. The wash of flame from above subsided, and in my remaining hand, the salamander glowed as if born from Bright Hell’s forge. The scale-folk screeched and roared, cheering on their Momma who’d come to protect them. In the sky, she wheeled, circled back to me, to the sunblooders behind me.
At my feet, Ko and Felbrem were dead and smoking.
I stood, letting my stump of a hand drip blood onto the scorched and glassy swamp. Raising the salamander, so hot I could smell my hand roasting, I leveled it at the great Momma from another world, whose jaws snapped the air, screaming for her fallen babies.
I was ready to die, I suppose.
I mean, the Mayor was dead. Ko and Felbrem were dead. The rest of the sunblooders huddled around me, bloody and scorched and beaten. I wanted to die because it honestly seemed the easiest thing to do.
But if you didn’t protect your family with all you had, what were you?
Momma Scales fell like a comet from Dark Heaven. Her jaws opened and I saw behind her teeth a great, bubbling heat. Her and I, our hands were on the triggers.
She approached.
The universe yelled, “Draw!”
We fired.
I was faster.
The bullet ascended like a star from Bright Hell, cutting through the flames of her jaw, and out the back of her mighty skull.
She didn’t scream as she fell, but her babies did. They cried and wept as she landed into the swamp behind us, dead as dead as dead.
Last thing I remembered was dropping the six-gun to the water, sizzling, and staring at my lost hand, the bloody stump, and smiling like a fool before I fell with her.
What happened to the scale-folk after their Momma died? Well, I imagine they did what we all have to do: they learned to live on without her.
There’ve been raids every so often, but they’re few. Without her, they’re lost, as lost as the sunblooders without the Mayor. But we all learn to make do with loss; life is just learning how to lose things with grace.
Would the Mayor have been proud of us, to see us fight back so? Did he even care for us? Or was he just a broken body searching for a ghost, before he could let himself die?
He may have been poisoned, and he may have been foolish, but he was right about one thing: The world is larger than the Stand, and to sit still in a world going down in flames without trying to help douse the inferno is just as bad as being the one to start the fire.
So I’m headed out. I’ve got a horse. I’ve got his last six-gun, battered and busted as it is. Even got his silver chain around my neck; maybe his ghost can help keep my feet on this earth. Momma Scales is dead by my horrific, scarred hand, and if I can do that to one, I can teach others how to do it to the remaining lizard lords that still dot the coast, biding their time until they bring their war back through the skies. I’ll see if we can’t drive those bastards back to their world without taking ours with them.
One of these days, I’ll die. I’ll be dragged under or poisoned or turned to their family. But not before teaching every person I meet that the world can only survive if you help it to, and fear is just a rope holding you back.
I don’t know if it’s what he would’ve wanted, but hope is all I’ve got left to give.
I gave it up, once upon a time and a hand ago. I don’t intend to again.
CRACKS
XEN
1
Asad Gregory Johnson counted the beat of his heart in the closing of doors.
That was how he knew it was time to wake: when throughout Boston, one door after another after another slammed shut. Windows closed without so much as a single crack. Blinds shuttered with one last nervous glance. Runners pushed up against the bases of door frames, stopping the gaps beneath. Vents snapped air-tight. Each day the sound swelled like rain, fleeing in advance of sunset in a wave across the city.
Asad sat up in bed, leaned against the headboard, and watched the sun sink across the horizon, a bloody egg yolk punctured and melting across the sky. He reminded himself, as he did each day, that he was one of a small few allowed to see this. One of the few who could look at the sunset with his window unshaded and his eyes wide open, and that should be privilege enough.
It wasn’t.
The other bed in the room was empty, the sheets carelessly smoothed. A battered, scarred Sox jacket was draped over the pillow, clean clothes and underwear laid out across the duvet. His brother was up already, but not gone yet. The patter-splat of the shower mixed with the hiss of a sizzling skillet, the smell of frying ham.
“Saad?” Gam called. Her voice creaked querulous as his mattress springs as he rolled over and buried his face in his threadbare pillow with a groan. “Ain’t no dawdlin’, boy. You know night comes on faster after equinox. I done taught you not to waste the dark.”
Asad said nothing.
But he wondered, as he had with many sunsets and many moonrises, what it would be like to lock himself away with the coming of the dark, and sleep through the night without a care in the world.
He let himself roll until he hit the edge of the bed, then fell and caught himself on his legs at the last second. As Asad’s feet hit the floor, Tarif knocked the bedroom door open and strutted in with a towel around his waist, his skin steaming dark as volcanic stone and the tight, close-cropped curls of his hair beaded with water droplets like dew on cobwebs. “Shower’s yours, baby bro,” he announced, decisive as calling a ringside hit; that was how Tarif did everything, in grand proclamations. Half the damn time he sounded like a club promoter in a Steve Harvey suit.
“Didn’t even use all the hot water this time.”
“You in some kinda hurry?”
Tarif grinned and thumped his broad barrel chest, then the smaller, rounder cask of his belly. “Just get moving. Haul your Black ass or I won’t leave you any breakfast, squeak.”
“Sure.” Asad pulled the closet open and dragged a clean t-shirt and jeans off their hangers—but stopped when Tarif curled a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey. You okay?”
Asad stilled, looking down. The denim draped over his arm was ratty and torn, the knees of even his newest jeans blown out, the seams down the sides worn down to stripes of fibrous thread threatening to rip at the slightest pull. He plucked at one loose scrap, then lifted his head and turned a smile over his shoulder. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“You look tired.”
“I am.”
Tarif watched him with a knit to his brows, a furrow to his lips making the dip between his broad, smooth nose and upper lip sink into a little almond-shaped canyon. “It gets better, Saad. It really does.”
Asad laughed briefly. “Do it?”
“You ain’t old enough yet. When you finish school—”
“I’ll still be kept in the dark.” He turned to face his brother. “Not enough of us, Rifi. You know they’ll never let me go dayside. And even if they would, Gam would be ashamed of me.”
“Gam’s her own person. She gotta let you be your own person, too.”
“Can she, though?” Asad bit off. And when Tarif reached for him again, Asad knocked his brother’s hand away and backed up until the closet doorknob hit the small of his back. “No point in trying to have a life when that life could get swallowed up.”
Tarif stared at him, his eyes wide and liquid and strange. Asad stared back, and wondered for the millionth time if Tarif had chosen this—the darkness, the weight of it all—or if he’d been given no choice but to come back.
When all you knew was the dark, sometimes the light burned too much to stand.
Tarif looked away first. Looked away, and pulled his towel off to scrub his hair dry as he walked stark-ass naked across the room. He picked up his boxers from his bed.
“Happened again last night,” drifted over his shoulder, a subdued murmur. “Loui
sville.”
Asad sucked in a gasp. It lodged in his throat like swallowed gum. Last he’d heard, Louisville still had well over two hundred thousand people within the city limits. People who walked the day, and people who kept the night away; people like him, who stopped the dark from splitting open into cracks and canyons that could swallow the world up and seal it off without so much as a burp.
“Nobody talking about it,” Tarif continued. “Not on the news, anyway. Total blackout, like the whole place never existed. Only a few people got out—the dark ones—but no one knows what happened to them since then. If they’re being blamed.”
Asad’s heart thumped violently. He stared at his brother. “Where you hear that, if nobody talking?”
“…somewhere. Don’t you worry none for it.”
“Where’s somewhere? Rifi, what you been doing?”
“It’s just a thing.” Tarif hunched his shoulders and stepped into his boxers, then swiped his phone off the dresser and thumbed the screen. “Links you up to other people like us. Anonymous. Deletes the messages five minutes after. Ain’t nothing but underground chatter, but the news telling us less and less.”
“You can’t be fucking serious.”
Tarif hissed under his breath, glaring, clutching his phone harder. “We dying, Saad. I can fucking bet you. It’s not just the cracks. If a place goes dark, we go dark with it, even the survivors. People who don’t get out fast enough, run somewhere else, get snatched up and don’t nobody ever hear from them again. If them dayside folk won’t tell the truth, we gotta find other ways to say it.”
Asad leaned over and stole a glimpse at the screen, before Tarif jerked it away. What he’d seen didn’t tell him much: a simple black screen with rapid-scrolling letters, timestamps, strings of numbers instead of user names.
It told him enough.
It told him this was trouble.
“You don’t know who’s really on the other end,” he said. “What if the wrong people watching?”
“They can’t do nothing,” Tarif retorted sullenly. “We don’t give out locations or meet up. No identifying info. Nobody dime out nobody.”
“Except IP addresses, cellphone triangulation…”
“All that shit’s encrypted.”
“Okay. Sure. Who told you that? Santa Claus?” Asad dumped his clothing on his bed and pushed past his brother to the door. “I’m gonna shower. Delete it.”
“You don’t tell me what to do, baby brother,” Tarif snarled after him.
“You want Gam to kill us both?” Asad paused in the doorway, glancing back. “Delete it.”
“We ain’t doing nothing wrong.” Tarif turned his face away, glaring at the window, his mouth twisted up into a knot. “They need us. They don’t get to control us.”
“Yeah?” Asad laughed bitterly. “But they do.”
2
Breakfast was quiet, but then breakfast was always quiet. Felt like church sometimes, and maybe Asad was only imagining an old memory of bursting white flowers and ladies in hats like great netted boat sails and matching jackets and skirts, everybody in pale Easter colors that made their dark, dark skin only shine that much more. Maybe he’d seen it on TV, the choir clapping and the reverend up there swaying back and forth with his glasses gleaming and his thick bristly mustache and his purple sash draped over his black satiny robe, because Gam had never taken them to daytime church. Not that he could remember.
Daytime church was for praying. Nighttime folk was for fixing things, ’cause Gam always said weren’t no room for praying when there was time to do.
Still, when Tarif and Asad finished eating—still not looking at each other, still not speaking to each other—and pulled on their jackets, Asad in his threadbare Fresh Waffles hoodie, Gam stopped them at the door. She barely came up to his ribs; she used to fill up the world, but he’d hit a growth spurt a few years ago, and Tarif had always been big. She was a tiny thing between them; tiny, but not small. Gam could never be small, for all the wrinkles and the thinness of the bones poking through her wrists. All that power in her had compressed, over the years. Concentrated. And concentrated things just meant it took a lot less to knock you on your ass, one hundred eighty-proof liquid fire and not a bit watered down.
That power brimmed in Gam’s hands, as she laid them atop Tarif and Asad’s heads. Her palms were dry and neither warm nor cold, as though they weren’t flesh at all but paper written with the secrets carried between them. They whispered, a crawling sensation against the skin of his brow, and his own palms tingled in echo.
“Come home,” Gam said, as she always did—Gam’s prayer, more powerful than begging and pleading and wailing to the sky could ever be, more powerful than Sunday church hats and clapping hands and gospel hymns. This was their church: her hand on their heads, her voice both whisper and resonant command. “You boys stay together, and you come home to me.”
“We will, Gam,” Asad promised, knowing damned well they might not come home at all.
Pointedly not looking at each other, tension bristling between them, Asad and Tarif clattered down the concrete steps of their narrow brick apartment building, feet scuffing over the faded remnants of children’s chalk drawings. Little things—yellow chalk suns with radiating spears of light, pale blue crescent moons, stick figures of mommy and daddy and the dog and cat and little girls’ and boys’ friends and enemies and make-believe stories. But Asad stopped on the bottom step, and studied a sigil chalked on the corner in white: an eye with a slit pupil and long cats-eye lashes, enclosed in a dashed circle. The dashes weren’t right, should be runework, but nobody knew the runes but him and people like him, the after-dark people. Daytime people didn’t have the eyes, but they understood.
And some little boy or girl in this building understood enough to ask Asad to watch over them tonight. A little boy or girl who had nightmares, maybe—bad dreams ’bout falling through the cracks, slipping away from all the people in those stick-figure pictures, the little pink chalk version of themselves washed out with the rain and never drawn back in.
Asad closed his eyes. His breaths had thorns, and he didn’t like it. This was why he’d never go dayside, even if he had the choice.
Even if he missed the sun on his face, baking into his flesh, searing and shining on black skin that had been made to drink the light into its glow.
Tarif touched his shoulder, his arm, a silent gesture that said, I know.
I know.
And just like that they weren’t fighting anymore. They drifted close to each other with their hands in their jacket pockets against the early evening chill, elbows bumping together as they stepped out into the night.
The street lights were out again, except one flickering at the end of the block where Floyd turned onto Callender Street. Turned all of Mattapan into shades of blue and gray with little touches of gold where the light seeped between buildings from Stratton across the way. Made the shadows thicker, alive, heavy enough that if Asad looked at them long enough they took on weight and started to crawl, oozing along the spidery chasms in jagged sidewalk that hadn’t been repaired since the last big split. He’d always thought people who fell through the cracks looked like that. They stopped being human, and turned into awful carbon-paper tatters. Even if he knew better; Gam had told him what happened, how bad it was. Like crossing the event horizon of a black hole, she’d said.
And people who fell through the cracks got torn to pieces, shredded by the gravitational forces holding two worlds both together and apart. Anything that came back out weren’t nothing he wanted to meet. Besides—things that came through? Nobody knew what they looked like.
Because they swallowed everything up, and didn’t leave a single eye left to see.
He tilted his head back, and looked up at the sky. His school books said in places where the city lights had gone, people could see the stars as more than one or two pinpricks here and there. His school books said, too, before the first big split there used to be cars in the st
reets with their tail lights red and glaring, and airplanes and helicopters up there with their running lights blinking, their engines roaring, instead of this dead, empty silence and starless wrongness lit only by a pallid infected mood, seeping its clear pale juices onto the edges of the clouds ringing its light.
“Think they’ll ever fix the street lights?” he asked.
“Nah. Keeping us in the dark means they don’t have to look at us.”
“Do they hate us that much?”
“Ain’t us they hate. It’s that we can walk where they can’t.” Tarif ginned and spread his arms. “Nothing like this. This quiet night, when the whole world’s made out of silver and blue velvet. They can’t never see this. They come out here, they die. But us?” He turned with his arms still flung out wide, spinning a slow full circle. “We own this. It don’t own us.”
Asad glanced around—at the broken heaps of concrete apartment tenements with their hollow eyes, so run-down it was hard to tell which were occupied and which were condemned. At the scrub pushing up through the sidewalks. At the barren desolation of a neighborhood with the abandoned look of a place no one wanted to live, even when they had no choice.
One block over, the brownstones started. Tall and sleek and gentrified, restored and polished and rented out at three times their original value. But right here, right now, on Floyd Street, wasn’t a single damned thing anyone wanted to own.
Just what they settled with.
“What the hell do we own?” he asked, and Tarif snorted.
“Nuh-uh. I’m not letting your fucking tired soggy ass bring me down tonight.” He elbowed Asad. “Let’s split up.”
Asad stopped, knees locking, and stared at his brother. “Gam said—”
“You’re seventeen. Don’t be a baby.”
The words came out in a sneer, but Tarif’s cheeks burned red, dark and deep, and he hunched his shoulders and kicked at the sidewalk, looking past Asad but never quite making eye contact. Asad sighed.
“You meeting that girl, huh. The one from down south.”