The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  Nixon eyed Osebo warily. “Good for her. But you’re not getting anywhere near my tenders, faggot, so fuck off back to whatever Congo you crawled out of.” He paused, reconsidering his options. “We’ve got unboys aplenty for you to diddle back at the Minorarium if you’re into sicko shit.” Osebo was right, Nixon had learned a few lessons. Such as when to prioritize profit over machismo. “If you’re dead set on pederasty, I can make the connections. Won’t cost you more than a few dirties. . . .”

  “I am uninterested in intimacy with anyone but my wife.” He smiled where Nixon could not see. So preoccupied, so young.

  “Sure, sure,” Nixon jawed, comfortable now that he was talking shop. “They all say that.”

  Osebo stopped at a wooden gate across from a sleepy café. A few old men were playing dominoes at a table, but besides them and the grapevines growing over the fence posts on both sides of the lane, he and Nixon were alone. The alley looked quaint—were they in the Lindenstrasse again, or was this somewhere else? Not the Guiselaine. Purseyet was too rundown. Amelia Heights? Caparisonside?

  Osebo pointed to the morning sky. The suns had reached halfway to their aphelion, moving as one. A concomitant binary day, then. Should be cloudless blue as long as it lasted, which Osebo judged would be at least until eve ning. The little intersection of magic and physics that Osebo called the Skylit Fall would be stable till then. A piece of folded space tucked between plots of lilies and lettuce, it might be an accident of spaciotemporal mechanics or the remnant of some long- gone display of the excesses of metaphysical engineering, like the ruins of a desert boulevard lined with overflowing fountains. He knew all of the ways to return to the cottage he shared with his wife in the Anvitine Run, but this was his favorite— and he thought this the best way to impress upon Nixon that he need not abandon every thread of childhood in the name of self- preservation. The unboy’s cynicism was not so far gone that it couldn’t be teased into something wry but hale.

  Osebo rebuked himself—here he was, taking time out of the end of everything to teach one reborn cretin the value of wonder. It was all her fault. How she’d tamed him!

  “Would you like to see something impossible, Nixon? Harmless, I assure you, but impossible nonetheless?”

  “It’s sweet of you to care, big man, but I’ve survived enough ‘impossible’ to last me a hundred lives, thanks.”

  Osebo cocked his head. “Not like this, I think. Not in your few lives. A simple thing, but it brings me the kind of joy I associate with the very young.”

  “I told you: young I ain’t. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but life isn’t exactly what it was.”

  “By my standards, you’re young.” Osebo flashed Nixon a grin. This one would not fall into the trap of so many of his ilk—he’d already relinquished the memory of the power and privilege he’d once enjoyed. Despite his rancor, Nixon had acknowledged the truth: that the past was the past, no matter how desperately one clung to it. The past, thought Osebo in Nixon’s own idiom—to practice mortal- scale empathy—was spent rocket fuel. You could no more reclaim it than you could recapture the jettisoned first stage of an orbital launch missile. Nixon may still be spitting fire, but he’d moved on to other strata. He would not go the way of his bimillennial peer, Thea Philopater.

  Nixon looked up at the dark- skinned hunter. “Who the hell are you, pal?”

  “Do you remember the woman who paid you yesterday, if that is not too broad a description?”

  “The doll with the box of money?” Nixon cawed. “How could I forget! Red hair, wearing next to nothing, legs like cream cheese and toes worth nibbling all day long? Yeah, I got her all right.”

  Osebo blinked. “I am her husband.”

  Nixon hadn’t the good sense to be abashed. He whistled. “Lucky bastard.”

  Osebo nodded. “Yes. But you should call me Osebo instead; ‘lucky bastard’ might not impress my wife.”

  “Osebo, then.” Nixon stuck out his ten-year-old hand. Osebo shook it with all the seriousness the little man required, and Nixon nodded in approval. “It’s good to meet a family man. ’Pologize for the misunderstanding. You never quite get used to being young again, do you?”

  “I don’t think one gets used to being anything other than what one was when one began,” Osebo said with a sideways smile. It was the closest one of the First People could come to answering “yes” to the question.

  “Sure, whatever. Show me.” Nixon shrugged.

  The gate swung open with a creak and Osebo ushered Nixon into a little courtyard—the kind of hidden shaft of green that lived behind every apartment building in every world across the cosmoses—a secret emerald gem where mothers grew irises they’d taken from their grandmothers’ flowerbeds back in the old country, the suburbs, the childhood garden. Electric lights shaped like jalapeño peppers or stars, flotsam furniture, a zinc bucket for cigarette butts. You could change bodies, you could live on a floating continent fueled by birdsong or coast between stars on some industry’s freighter, but wherever you found cities, you found these interstitial cloisters, growing windowsill tomatoes and sheltering garden parties. People rarely evinced dissimilarities in their means of finding comfort, an observation that brought a smile to Osebo’s face, remembering his recent adventure in a barrel of beer.

  Nixon strolled through and looked back at Osebo with a skeptical face.

  “Great. Tomatoes and Christmas lights. Thanks a ton, pal.”

  Had he been human, Osebo might have rolled his eyes.

  “Turn around, Nixon.”

  The sky was blue and untroubled, and Nixon quietly appreciated the simple sight of blue sky through green leaves as he looked up and turned around. The buildings on each side framed the bricked patio of the courtyard, except for the far side. Strangely, there were no buildings there, just blue sky. Odd, thought Nixon, I didn’t think you could find an unobstructed view of the horizon anywhere nearby—

  Oh.

  The sky continued down past where the city blocks—let alone the nonexis tent horizon—ought to have been. Instead he peered over a ribbon of sky that stretched as far below him as it did above, as if they stood on the precipice of a city in the sky.

  “Sky.” He mouthed the word.

  “Earth.” Osebo smiled. “I like this game.”

  “Huh,” grunted Nixon. “Ain’t that a thing. Where’d the ground go?”

  Osebo shrugged. “The ground was never here to begin with. Just a slice of sky. There’s no reason why, not that I’m aware of, and no purposed served—just a bit of the heavens, sandwiched between city blocks and embraced by these apartment buildings.”

  Nixon leaned out over the edge just a little bit, then snapped back from the ledge. The sky went down all the way, as blue as blue could be. “Huh,” he grunted again, by way of appreciation. “Can’t buy that kind of view, can you?”

  “Not with money.”

  He looked up at Osebo with a flash of something that might have been filial- adjacent. “Kind of like forever decided to give us a little peck on the cheek, isn’t it?”

  Osebo patted Nixon on the back. “I’m happy you appreciate the view.”

  Nixon shrugged off the hand. “I appreciate cash and hot meat. But this isn’t half bad. Although,” he mused, one foot in paranoia again, “it’d also be the perfect place to diddle some brat. I’m keeping my eye on you. We need to find you a shirt, pal.”

  Osebo might have laughed if the boy’s mistrust hadn’t been so deeply pathological. Instead he folded his hands and nodded. “Do whatever makes you feel safe, Nixon.”

  “Yeah.” Nixon nodded, chewing his lip. “Yeah . . . That doesn’t always work out so good.”

  They chuckled together. “That’s a lesson a lot of men spend many lives failing to learn.”

  Nixon shrugged. “Yeah, well, walk a mile, right?”

  The sky looked less blue than it had a few moments ago, and Osebo reconsidered his forecast. “Nixon, what would you say to a bite of breakfast?”


  The promise of food evaporated the remains of the unboy’s skepticism.

  “I’d say ‘yes!’ ”

  Osebo turned to the wall and put his palm flat against the bricks while he pinched one of the beads around his neck with his other hand. He twitched a mental muscle in a part of himself that no mortal could understand or possess. The air became brittle, then viscous like honey, and the Skylit Fall vanished. The troubling sky vanished. Lilies and lettuces, vanished. As vertigo overtook him, Nixon smelled bacon frying and eggs on the skillet. The expression on his face as he disappeared from the City Unspoken was a hungry smile.

  The Undertow maintained near-constant contact with one another, although he didn’t know if that was how they lived or simply protocol for a raiding party. He could hear their shorthand chirrups flitting across the rooftops, a birdsong patois of real-time intelligence—blocked thoroughfares, broken roofs, which ways were safe and which were not.

  Cooper could hear fear, but the Death Boys and Charnel Girls whooping as they raced each other across the rooftops of the City Unspoken felt little to none, so his access was self-limited. Maybe they owed that carefree attitude to the triumph of a successful mission; maybe it ran deeper than that, maybe their lich-lord masters had cauterized their ability to feel fear. Maybe they drank it like blood.

  He could see Marvin’s face reacting to unheard information, making subtle course corrections as they sped toward the looming towers, top floors burning bright and near enough now to compete with the deranging suns. But he picked up nothing from Marvin or the others—not even brainstem moments of widened eyes and increased heartbeats as a volley of dark-clad youths pushed off a taller building; an instant of panic as a gutter- slick rope slipped through outstretched hands. Their eyes widened and their heartbeats surely quickened, but he could hear nothing.

  Cooper followed Marvin’s effortless landing, touching pavement and ducking immediately into a roll that dispersed their momentum—Cooper realized these acrobatics were not his own, but an extension of the groupcompetence the Undertow seemed to possess. He also knew he should be concerned, that there was something or somethings he was forgetting to worry about, but each time his mind grasped for thoughts about Sesstri, Asher, or his own increasingly dire predicament, Marvin would squeeze his hand or press his body close, and Cooper knew only lust and an insatiable hunger for adventure, for freedom.

  One of the huge chains that embroidered the city emerged from the pavement at an angle, and Marvin ran up it like a ramp. Cooper slipped on the corroded metal and stumbled, grabbing Marvin’s hand for support. His outstretched hand reminded Cooper of Nixon and his surly assistance, and for a moment he wondered what happened to the cantankerous urchin, or if he’d ever scored a shirt that fit him.

  “This is dangerous,” Cooper said numbly as Marvin lifted him to his feet. What did he mean, dangerous—did he mean the skylarking? Being with Marvin, heading to whatever fate awaited him? Or did he mean the whole city? The words had come out before Cooper could process them—so much of himself was muted now, still tingling with the hallucinatory aftereffects of the queen of the Nile and the adrenaline of running with the Undertow.

  Marvin scoffed. “We live above, with the real danger.” He hummed, pointing a finger to the sky. Cooper followed, and saw torchlight flickering at the topmost flights of the ruined skyscrapers. Dark clouds circled perpetually overhead, the contrails of the lich-lords and their court in the sky. There, like snow above tree line, the Death Boys and Charnel Girls sang to their lich-lovers, the ice- skinned masters Cooper half-dreaded, half-hungered to see. Everything here worships death, Cooper thought as he leapt from the chain to another rooftop, Marvin’s hand in his, and death comes in more colors than you could ever imagine. The alley beneath them looked like a brown-gray line.

  Cooper! The woman’s voice had stopped crying, and started screaming his name. She was terrified, and she was alone, and she was up there. Every time he heard her voice it was like all the bells in the city ringing at once inside his skull, and between her call and the pull of lust toward Marvin, Cooper did not know who—or what—was responsible for his decisions.

  “We live above,” Marvin repeated. “So we can catch their tails and fly.” Catch whose tails? Cooper thought. He knew that the Undertow served some kind of undead masters, but little more. He shivered, but followed. As they neared the towers, Cooper saw the buildings more clearly and noted that they shared the same apocalyptic diversity as the rest of the city: Here was a skyscraper that could have been ripped from Times Square, all mirrored glass and right angles, its lower reaches barnacled with darkened signs that might have once enjoyed electricity. There, a spire like a narwhal’s tooth-horn, spiral bone rising straight but perforated like a flute at its upper levels, where the wind played a lonely tune. Some were built of stone bricks and some seemingly hewn in one piece from a mountainside, some of clear or colored crystal, another that resembled a thick stem, with door- sized stoma pulsing above bristling fronds. There seemed to be no pattern to which spires remained whole and which blazed but were not consumed by fire. He saw black shapes skittering across even the burning towers—he could add fire to the list of things that the Undertow did not fear.

  Cooooperrrr!

  “Who built these towers?” he asked Marvin, not really expecting a response, but needing to drown out the voice.

  “We don’t know. They aren’t as old as the Dome or even the Apostery, but they were here long before we were. Hestor, our leader, says that they were stolen from their worlds by a tyrant who wanted a forest of towers. Dorian says that’s bunk, but nobody believes Dorian.”

  Cooper agreed with the latter assessment, although he didn’t say so— one felt the presence of age here in a way that made Rome look like Levittown. The idea that this city might once have been different was carved into his mind like a rune, and Cooper pictured the beauty that must once have reigned, and the intervening eons scribbled over that first landscape in a palimpsest of ruin: a primeval jungle; a city of light built by cousins to gods; a forest of towers; a hermetic Dome and a poisonous sky. Was everything a perversion of something greater, older? Was nothing hallowed? Not here, not anymore. Nothing could be held sacred in the City Unspoken but Death and freedom, if any difference existed between the two.

  Marvin climbed a wall and stood atop it in triumph, smiling down at Cooper, who lifted his arms.

  “Help me up.”

  “Help yourself, Cooper.” Others streamed past them, swinging and jumping onto the exposed I-beams of the skeletal tower that rose before them, a skinless monolith. He caught some faces staring down at him as they flashed overhead, hair streaking behind them, brilliant smiles exposing lips marked with the serpent and coin tattoo. A Charnel Girl with plaited white-blond hair sailed past and landed in a crouch next to Marvin atop the wall.

  “Tasty.” She leered down at Cooper before Marvin spun in place, knocking her backward over the wall with a brutal swipe of his forearm.

  “And mine,” he agreed to the place where she’d been standing. “Now follow, Cooper!”

  His cock and his conscience drove him on, toward the burning towers, toward the woman whose fear begged him to save her. Cooper only hoped he wasn’t dooming himself in the process.

  Sesstri kept quiet as she attempted to restore some semblance of habitability to her blown-out living room. Glass scattered and blood smeared everywhere painted her house in shades of destruction, but Sesstri only paid half a mind to the disorder. Her decision to go tromping off to Bonseki-sai hadn’t been a decision at all—but rather a summons. She scolded herself for answering that summons as she threw her weight behind her overturned sofa and, grunting, righted it.

  Infuriating. The woman was millions, billions of years old, and yet she couldn’t hold a simple conversation. When Alouette had first found Sesstri, when the redhead brought her to this house and gave her shelter, Sesstri had thought her a benevolent loon, perhaps indicative of the addlepated citiz
enry of the City Unspoken—which, after all, did love its madmen. Now, she realized the convolution of manipulation, otherness, and fragmentation that characterized Chesmarul’s manifestation in “human context.” A ridiculous term, but seemingly apt. As Alouette, Chesmarul was at once both a superior being and an inferior one. Working as both a physically embodied being and a world-spanning supermind, Chesmarul partnered with herself to cajole Sesstri into place, monitor the collapse of City Unspoken and the breakdown of True Death, summon Cooper for unconvincing reasons, hire Nixon, and bind them all together to endure who-knows-what-else. What a partnership—what an infuriation.

  Chesmarul’s manifestation seemed like a personal attack against Sesstri. There was nothing human about Chesmarul, nothing to which Sesstri could relate by anything so naïvely simple as an extrapolation of scale. Despite what she said, the red ribbon was nothing like a woman.

  Were all the First People so unreachable to mortals? The question seemed trivial, but it writhed in Sesstri’s gut like a worm in hot ashes. She massaged the divot between her furrowed brows and missed the simple days when all she’d needed to worry about was a filicidal father and a world that wouldn’t let anything with a clitoris read books.

  Sesstri picked up cushions and tested them for intactness, returned them to the sofa, and tried to address the broken windows. “Fucking knife tears in my curtains.” She pulled together the remnants of her window treatment. “At least they’re from my knives. Idiots.”

  The City Unspoken sheltered many beings that others called “gods”; the people of this city were atheist to their bones, which made it a wonderful hidey-hole for all manner of First People who could live here relatively unmolested, without attracting worship or excessive regard. The citizens of the City Unspoken treated every being the same: as chattel, corpse, or customer. The bells tolled for everyone, and only coin counted.

  They tolled now, pealing through the shattered windows with the breeze. Soothing and maddening her. Sesstri hoped Cooper was safe, wherever he’d been taken. But she knew who to blame now, besides herself, which was something.