The dragons were not the end of us. Or so we made ourselves believe.
It was possible to think this way, a year ago, because back then, the Metropolitan Fire Department was still extinguishing the vast majority of fires. Our fire department had forever been a point of pride. Long before the dragons came, we named our firemen “Empire’s Bravest” and sacrificed a building to them each year, immolating it for their practice. We erected a temple in their honor, a Fire Museum, with daytime tours to indoctrinate schoolchildren and midnight sex galas to benefit elite philanthropic institutions. We bestowed crests and medals upon our firemen. We held them in genuine esteem.
Unlike the city’s police force, the Metropolitan Fire Department was holy, incorruptible. A fire offers no bribes. No force is excessive in putting it down. So we believed at the time. When the dragons came, it was only natural that we would turn to the fire department and say, “Tell us what you need and we will give it. Take our water. Take our taxes. Take our sons.” We did not want to believe they would take too much, that they would risk more than they saved. We told ourselves that conscripting youths into the fire department was worth the risk, that we were investing in the city’s future. But our nightmares told a different story. In these, we saw a figure, gas-masked like a fireman, tapping at our window, though we lived on the fourteenth floor. We saw him beckoning to us from the other side of the mirror.
Nightmares spread in a city like ours.
Then, six months ago, the Metropolitan Fire Department disbanded after a series of mutinies. Blood was shed. When the fires began to rage unchecked, many reconsidered the decision to linger in this place. Over the years, we had seen many waves of evacuation, but for those of us inextricably bound to the city, this was the worst. The hot-meat carts rolled away. The last of the fluorescent lights flickered off in the conference rooms. The buses, stolen by their drivers, rumbled over the bridges, never to return.
Other places beckoned: Upstate, the Sprawl, the Inhospitable West, even the East, all beset by their own calamities and pollutants, but nothing on the order of this. Some of us idly browsed faraway rental listings, halfheartedly filled out work visa applications, but we knew we didn’t intend to go anywhere, despite having lost our jobs, our property values, our illusion of safety, all of our excuses to stay. All excuses except the true one: we do not know how to live anywhere else.
Perhaps we do not know how to live at all.
* * *
Even in the best of times, a city does not love you back. We citydwellers are a strange breed, lodging in cramped rooms, filling our lungs with smog. Our buildings block the sun; our lights weaken the night. Humans make a city, but a city makes humans tolerate the intolerable. We have always known this in our minds. Now we know it in our broken hearts. Empire Island will kill us in the end. But what would it mean to leave?
We used to believe that the city made nobodies into somebodies. Staying here was an expression of fierce individuality—that stubbornness, that drive to carve out a name and own it. Yet one cannot own a city. It is a system we plug into…a system that we are. As that system fails, we fail too, by degrees. Abandoning it would mean abandoning ourselves.
So instead, we stay. We wait for buses that never come. We walk the streets at night, but we are never alone. The dragons fly above, unleashed.
8
THE WAY OUT
Sharkey is carving his name into a scrawny kid’s back. Three swillers hold the fucker down, wham his head into the table when he thrashes. Sharkey’s parlor is no place for heroics—more prayers. The walls are a mottled pattern of bullet holes and cursory attempts at spackling them. Rumor has it the carpet, an intricate pattern of brown and darkish red, used to be just brown.
Sharkey’s hand is steady, his eye typesetter-keen, even as each blocked letter oozes itself bloodily illegible.
“I’ll sans-serif this, seeing it’s a first offense.” He strips off his white undershirt to pat the trademark dry, admires his handiwork. The w in Eisenhower is a bit aslant, but he doesn’t pay that any mind. In his old age, he’s learning to ease up on the details. “Kid, you look so pretty, I should hang you up outside. A sorta shingle for the business. Swillers, what do ya say?”
The swillers eagerly hoist the kid back to his feet, make as though to drag him to the egress.
“Mr. S! Swear to shit”—the kid’s Mohawk is limp with sweat, his green plastic shutter shades cracked in three places—“next raid we go on, you’ll get pick of the litter and then some!”
“Isn’t gonna be a next raid unless I get whole haul. No fucking joke.”
The kid squirms. The swillers hold him so his heelies barely skim the floor. “Whole haul! Swear to shit!”
“Pocket so much as a watch fob and I’ll be making diamonds from your cremains,” Sharkey snaps. The swillers let loose the kid and he’s out of the parlor, through the shop, and down the steps outside faster than his blood drops can hit the floor. The welcome bell on the shop door jingles as it slams.
Sometimes Sharkey thinks he should start going along on the raids himself again. Keep an eye on things. But he’s management now. The legwork is beneath him.
Sharkey started working out an atlas of the tunnels more than twenty years back. Now he has the city’s underground drawn down to the manholes, with a key marking what’s been plugged up and what’s yet to be busted through. He calls it his masterpiece. No one’s seen the thing entire, not that they could understand it if they did. The knowledge is his alone. The city has not one but two abandoned subway systems, the Black Line and the Blue, intertwined: city planners didn’t dig deep enough the first time, so whole lines had to be filled with limestone and dirt, hasty graves to prop up skyscrapers. But parts of the original are still there, ghost tracks beneath the streets, with cumulous black scorches on the bricks from where red-bellied locomotives used to blow off steam.
Sharkey knows what’s fastest for crosstown transit and where the last trains are stalled, blocking up the tracks. He can recognize the platforms by their tile. Deeper down, he knows the routes of the sewer gondoliers, those taxis of the damned—their going rates and medallion numbers, how much you have to tip. (It ain’t a bad way to transport product you don’t want scorched, though he’s lost his patience for the smell.) Beyond all that, he possesses a knowledge so eldritch, it wasn’t common even in the city’s youth.
He knows what you have to do to drive.
His book is leather-bound, stuffed with maps and legends, cross sections and blueprints, more a landscape sketchbook from the pit than a travel guide for the uninitiated. The Way Out reads the title page. By Me.
What’s more, Sharkey knows how to storm just about anyplace worth the time: security systems, panic rooms, bank vault–thick locks just add style to an operation, far as he’s concerned. He knows how long it takes to drill up through a concrete basement floor, which name-brand families go hands up at a HowScoot backfiring, and which ones itch to play home-invasion avenger in the name of self-defense.
He knows too that things have changed, these last six months. Money’s leaving the city, in the form of the moneyed; nobody’s stopping the fires. It used to be you could find a penthouse, a brownstone, within blocks of the Outer Walls—you’d rob it and three weeks later you’d rob it again. Now it’s looking like another Siege of Wonland will be in order before too long, not from ambition but from necessity. What happens when there’s nowhere left to raid? Sharkey doesn’t know. But if lean times are coming, he’s stocking up.
Sharkey gives the orders and sends his raiders on their merry way. In return, he gets “pick of the litter”: his choice of the schwag, and an option to buy the rest at a discount. Unless of course the raiders hold out on him. Then he can take whatever he wants, merchandise or a life—he went easy on the kid today. It’s all in the contracts he drew up years ago, when he went through his law books phase. He has the raiders sign them still. Even if their X’s hardly constitute a sig.
Whole haul: Sharke
y’s got big plans for this next job. Bigger than anybody’s tried in a while. He’ll send these raiders all the way to the top this time. They can’t say no; they owe him. And if they don’t make it back alive, he’ll just chalk it up to experience.
You never know what’s possible unless you reach for the Heights.
Sharkey takes his place back at the head of the table. Duluth, his most trusted swiller, a twentysomething old-timer built like a fridge, tosses him a fresh undershirt. Sharkey puts it on.
“Next order of business,” he says. The swillers hustle to their seats.
Sharkey doesn’t like having regular employees. He prefers contracting out jobs, like he does with the raids. Employees get to know their boss’s habits, things he’d rather keep quiet: how much currency is in the safe, when he’s got a broken finger or a flat limo tire. That sometimes he keeps the gator in his own bathtub, nights. Not secrets exactly, but knowledge about Sharkey that, if compiled, could create some sort of picture more nuanced than any he’d care to portray. He knows the power of good PR, both for instilling terror and its kissing cousin, reverence. To some of the natives, Sharkey, the oldest man in Torchtown, is half-sacred, half sci-fi: a suspected time traveler, thrown up from a past splendiferous beyond imagining, whose unhindered passage through their era back to his own guarantees the present existence of the world. Natives can believe whatever they want about him as long as they go by faith alone. Which is to say he don’t like snoops.
The swillers he hires are the bare minimum, the skeleton crew he needs to keep operations up and running. Right now, it’s just these three. Officially, Sharkey’s never had to retire one of his own men, and he tries to keep it that way. Unofficially, Sharkey’s sent a few of them out on errands over the years—to buy a jar of hooch at a saucemart, say—that’ve ended with a different kind of firing. “Accidents happen,” is what Sharkey always makes a point of supposing, and his employees never contradict him. The next day’s always like Sunday school around the backroom table.
“Lemme see.” Sharkey flips open his account ledger. “Keelhaul, you got tributes from the Dolls?”
Keelhaul, his newest recruit, a kid with waist-long dreads and second-degree scars on his forearms, forks over a jingle bag. It’s full enough, but Sharkey puts on his pince-nez and counts it right then anyhow: currency, some bangles, two artificial fingernails. He wonders, not for the first time, if Keelhaul’s been skimming, then tables the worry for now. He’ll know for sure sooner or later, probably sooner. Sometimes a swiller’s sly enough to avoid being obvious, for a while, till he gets greedy. Happens every time.
“Bronco, you take care of that thing?” Sharkey asks the bucktoothed hothead sitting farthest from him down the table. Bronco flips shut his gravity knife in mute assent.
“Duluth, what about the Mudpuppies? They pay up?”
Duluth shrugs, a gesture that doesn’t signify much: he’s all shoulders and no neck anyway. “Said they’d have it tomorrow.”
“You squeeze them?”
“Said tomorrow, Shark.”
Sharkey sets down his pince-nez, and Duluth picks at a scabby face tattoo, like making himself bleed might preempt any inklings Sharkey has in that direction.
“You think they didn’t have it?”
“They said that.”
“You think they hadn’t sold the chaw? You think to ask for it back?”
“Next time I’ll squeeze them.”
“Smart kid.”
He ain’t, though, and Sharkey knows it. Duluth may be as reliable as an Outer Wall, but like Keelhaul and Bronco, in fact, like every swiller Sharkey’s ever had, he’s turned out disappointingly dumb. It’s enough to make Sharkey saw a man’s legs off at the knees, if only that would do some good. It isn’t so much that the swillers are slow, though they can be that too—Sharkey’s got some pet theories about the neighborhood gene pool. But it’s their flatfooted incuriosity that makes him mad.
At twelve, Sharkey was apprentice to Jawbone Park, a mean old inmate who’d been sentenced to Torchtown for manslaughter, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and siccing dogs on a police horse, and who’d most recently set about making a name for himself in the growth field of home-cooked psychotropics. Jawbone had spent some years previous working his way through the grislier parts of a prison library, and young Sharkey made it his habit to linger in the evenings, scrubbing molasses and sometimes gore off the floorboards while Jawbone, deep in his evening chew, pontificated on all things applicable, historically, from the final fate of the dinosaurs to lantern-kicking cow-arsonists and where their fires spread.
More important, Jawbone taught Sharkey about the chaw business: how to keep an inventory, how to balance the books, the difference between profits gross and net, and when to bother playing fair. Sharkey’s amassed a shelf full of books on management and free-market econ since then, as well as some useful true-crime titles. But most of what he relies on still comes from those early days with Jawbone. He’s always expected that sooner or later one of his own swillers would take a similar interest, but so far, no dice. They’re too dumb, or too scared, or maybe they figure life’s too short. When he tries to explain anything more complicated than a thumbscrew, they squirm like they need to piss and he’s running water by their ears. It wouldn’t matter much, except Sharkey’s getting old. He needs somebody he can trust, somebody he can talk to, somebody to take the shop over when he’s gone. Somebody who doesn’t need him to explain every little thing.
The window’s propped open behind the blinds. From somewhere outside, Sharkey hears a fire start. The whoosh of wings, and then the crackle, like wind with dead leaves in it. Probably a block away. That rubble lot with all the tents in it. Yeah. Sharkey looks at his swillers. He can tell they can’t hear it yet. No one can: it’s coming from the future. Ten minutes from now, max. Some days he’d keep the meeting running straight through, watch the worry flicker across their faces while they tried to ID the screamers. But today he’s not in the mood. He wants them out of here. He cracks his knuckles, running his thumbs over the letters inked into his skin there—FUCK FIRE—and shuts the ledger.
“All right,” he says. “It’s break time. Scram.”
9
BEGONIAS
MEMO
TO: Duncan H. Ripple V
FROM: D. Humphrey Ripple IV
CC: Osmond Strangeboyle Ripple, Katya Ripple
SUBJECT: Re: Troubling Developments
As per our conversation yesterday, I am attaching herewith my Guidelines for Legally Tenable Courtship Practices. These guidelines were drawn from formal written agreements with the Dahlberg household and from informal discussions with those family members copied in here; they have been annotated to address the specific challenges of your current entanglement. Please note that these points are nonnegotiable under the terms of your marriage contract, and that noncompliance may result not only in the termination of that agreement but also in disinheritance, familial estrangement, and repossession of assets from this estate as well. Study this document in full before engaging in any form of communication whatsoever, with your Intended or any other parties not CC’d.
Guidelines for Legally Tenable Courtship Practices:
I. Appearance and manner. The Bride-to-Be (hereafter “B2B”) is entitled to a clean, wholesome physical appearance and manner in her Affianced Male (hereafter “AM”), including but not limited to: coordinated business-casual attire; clean-shaven face or evenly trimmed facial hair; pleasant-smelling skin; proper use of grammar; warm yet respectful use of endearment terms, such as “dear,” “beloved,” “pet,” and “my lark” (a longer list of suggestions available upon request). Use of profanity or terms deemed derogatory to women (such as slang idioms referring to prostitution), especially when describing one’s relationship to a Wild Teenaged/Twentyish Female (hereafter “WTF”), is absolutely impermissible.
II. Disclosure of sexual health concerns. The B2B is entitled to an AM with no known sexual he
alth concerns or risk factors, including a history of unprotected sexual intercourse, unprotected fellatio, unprotected cunnilingus, unprotected mutual masturbation, and unprotected anal penetration. I am going to assume there were condoms on that island, Duncan.
III. Disclosure of financial concerns. Fortunately a non-issue. Refer B2B to me or any of our accountants with questions.
IV. Premarital conference. The B2B is entitled to at least one private premarital conference with her AM; acceptable activities include lively discussion, the viewing of educational Toob specials, a garden stroll in the greenhouse, or the consumption of a meal. At no time should a WTF be present during the course of these conferences, nor should a WTF be the subject of the aforementioned “lively discussion.”
Duncan, these Courtship Practices should be fairly self-explanatory; as I recall, we went over them in depth six months ago when you originally signed your contracts. But if you have any questions whatsoever, please contact me immediately.
I will remind you that, upon your graduation last year from the Chokely Bradford Underschool with the lowest scores in that institution’s history, you chose to engage a partner to share your fiscal and other responsibilities rather than re-taking the economics courses that would enable you to enter the Chokely Bradford Overschool Finance Program and shoulder the burden alone. The Dahlberg family has long had an illustrious reputation for their canny judgments in business and their role in philanthropic circles, and as you’ll recall, Penelope “Pippi” Dahlberg and I were once professional colleagues. The Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg is, to all appearances, a highly intelligent, circumspect, and resourceful young woman, one I would be proud to have as a daughter-in-law or, indeed, as an only child. Your alliance with her will prove invaluable for the success of this family in the years to come. I strongly advise you to keep that in mind.
The Sky Is Yours Page 9