He almost doesn’t hear the knock, but Hooligan, ears swiveling, jumps up, pads to the door, and stands at it, eagerly wagging. Ripple retrieves a pair of boxers from the bed boat’s stern and pulls them on.
“Open it, boy.”
Hooligan’s prehensile fingers grasp the knob and twist. Ripple claps on the lights.
“Hi, Mom,” he says. He isn’t surprised to see her, somehow, even though it’s the small hours of the morning after his wedding night, even though he can’t remember the last time she came into his room. It’s like he’s been expecting her.
“Where is your wife?” she asks. Not pointedly; his mother has a way of making any question, any statement, sound bland and neutral. Maybe because the words aren’t really hers? She’s almost never spoken her native tongue to him; his dad thought it would “contaminate his language development.” So when he was born, he and his mom learned English together. Sometimes, when she lets her guard down, he can still hear something singsong, babyish in her inflection. If she has an accent, she picked it up from him.
“Yeah, that didn’t work out. Don’t tell me she went crying to Dad again.”
“I’m not here because of her.” Katya bends down to pick up his crumpled tuxedo jacket from where he tossed it on the floor. She shakes out the wrinkles. She barely shows her age —she’s still the youngest mom of all his friends’—but for just a second, Ripple sees how much she’s changed over the years. She was practically a kid when she had him, a few months younger than he is now. But she knew just what to do. It wasn’t the kind of thing you learned from a book. Based on the family Holosnaps, she breast-fed him a lot the first year, or at least that was when Osmond felt inclined to whip out the camera. Ripple remembers her getting down on the ground to play with him—none of the other adults ever would. They had one game where she curled up into a shy hedgehog whenever he tackled her. They understood each other, before language, without either of them knowing the first thing about how to live in his father’s world, how to be Ripples. What happened? When did they lose each other?
Who’s going to take care of him now?
Katya looks at him. Her face is as neutral as her spoken words—maybe it isn’t really hers either. Maybe that’s the cost of being so beautiful: your face no longer belongs to you. Kind of creepy to think of his mom like that, but there it is. She got where she is on looks alone. And maybe when that counts for so much, all the time, you learn to hide beneath what people see. Still, he reads her anyway, much easier than text on a page.
“You want me to save Abby.” He wonders if there’s still an umbilical cord to his brain.
“You have to do what you think is right.”
“I can’t believe you’re actually encouraging me to run away. Isn’t that the opposite of your job?”
“Maybe my job is done. Maybe you’re all grown up.”
“Uh, sorry, no.”
“Dunky…”
He flops on the bed, hugs a pillow to his face. Muffled: “Dad is going to kill us.”
“I’ll pack your bag, leave it outside your door. I wish I had time to make you some sandwiches…”
“Don’t forget my lucky socks.”
* * *
Ripple goes up to Abby’s room with no plan, no idea where they’re going to go or what they’re going to do there. This whole thing is way off script. He reaches Abby’s door and punches in the code—R-I-P-L—and lets himself in without knocking. He’s almost surprised to see her in the flesh, zipped into his old hoodie, watching Toob. Smaller than he remembered, dimmer somehow, like the lightning bugs he once caught on the fifth-floor terrace and left in a glass canister overnight. She’s petting Hooligan, which is weird too, how did he get in here? She stares at Ripple for a good thirty seconds, as if she’s not quite sure he’s really there.
“Nice to see you too,” says Ripple, who was expecting more of a hero’s welcome.
“Dunk? Are you real? Are you free?” She glances at the Toob. “How did you get out of it?”
“I’m not divorced or anything. But I’m as free as I’m going to be for a while.”
“What about the girl from Hollow Gram? Is she back out in the world too?”
Thinking about Swanny annoys him. She has nothing to do with this, with anything; he wants her edited out of the final cut of his life. “I’m here, that’s what matters. I’m going to take you anywhere you want to go.”
“OK.”
But now Ripple is peeved: “I don’t think you appreciate what’s happening. It’s my wedding night, and I’m running away with you. We’re going to live on the streets and fight hobos for food scraps, probably. I’m giving up my name and my house and my Slay Bed, and I’m doing it all for you.”
“I don’t want to live on a street.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Uh-huh.”
This should be interesting. “Uh-huh…?”
“Go back to my ‘previous owners.’ Find out where I belong.”
“What are you talking about?”
Instead of answering, she holds out her foot. “Feel.”
Ripple, feeling pretty silly, palpates the callused skin. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he finds it anyway. There’s a bump just under her arch, a little pellet the size of a BB, with a trademark bull’s-eye injection scar just beneath. He rolls his finger against it. No way. “Fem, are you serious? You’re ’chipped?”
The BlackBean is the ultimate subcutaneous status symbol. He’s been hearing the jingles since he was a kid (“For when you’re burned beyond re-re-recognition!”), noting the locations of his classmates’ injection scars—the newer models usually go in the biceps, but bottom of the foot is a classic placement. Maybe an old-money thing? Anyway, what makes the BlackBean so special in the crowded market of ID chips is its indestructibility. It can withstand searing heat, crushing blows, the digestive juices of every land predator known to man. Ripple always enjoyed the commercials, but he wouldn’t want to be one of those alpha testers.
“Hooli found it. He says it’ll tell me where I was bred, who owned me first. He says, maybe they have a big yard.”
Ripple glances at his dog, who wriggles onto his back for a belly rub. Maybe Abby would’ve fit in at the Quiet Place better than he wants to admit. “Hooli told you?”
“Was it a secret?”
All those years of isolation must have messed with her head—she and that vulture were always supposedly having conversations. It’s probably a survival skill she learned, to keep her from going even crazier. Obviously she was normal once. Somebody’s sweet little girl, back earlier than she can remember.
Nobody bothers tagging a mental defecto.
“Do you get what this means?” Ripple continues, gentler. “You have a family. Parents, maybe siblings too. I bet they’re a higher peerage than the Dahlbergs. And they’re going to be so glad I brought you back.”
The more he thinks about this, the better it bodes. Where would a damsel like Abby be from, anyway? A penthouse in the Fraud District? Maybe her dad worked for Laidly Bros., or one of the other finance firms that still kept a satellite office in the city. No, better: maybe her dad owned one of the firms. The scene plays out in high definition in Ripple’s mind. It’s sixteen years ago. Abby’s parents bring her to the city on a business trip, stay in one of the last big hotels, bellhops tap-dancing and all that shit, when boom, the place goes up in flames. The parents escape, but they’re sooty and beat up—in a tuxedo and an evening gown, for maximum effect—and Abby’s mom is all crying, “My baaaaby, my baaaaby!” sifting through the ashes with her opera gloves. So they go home to wherever they’re from—their own island, but instead of a garbage dump it’s a tropical paradise, with coral reefs and waterslides and definitely a volcano—and they grieve. But they still have a hot tub full of Abby’s sisters to take care of (older, younger, a whole sorority of sun-kissed fun-seekers), so life goes on. Until one day, they get a text from Ripple saying, “Hey, I don’t
know if you still want your lost daughter back…?” and they lose their minds. Ripple and Abby fly out via private HowJet and boom, they’re walking down a white-sand beach hand in hand, and Abby’s hot sisters are streaming out en masse, bouncing bikini’d down the dunes to hug them…it’s been so long since she’s seen these fems, they’re practically strangers…
“This will rule.” He leans in to kiss her, but Abby pulls away, scrunching her brow.
“How will we find them?”
“First, we’ve got to find a BeanReader. They usually have them at orphanariums and morgues.” He snaps his fingers. “They’ll scan this bad boy and it’ll spit out your name, your personal-record locator, everything.”
“My name?”
“Sure, why not?”
Abby twists a strand of hair around one finger. She doesn’t meet his eyes. As if she’s attempting to remember something important—or attempting to forget.
“I love you,” she says instead.
“Uh…” Ripple didn’t plan on this contingency. I do. Love. The second big commitment in an overcommitted day. Is this what he wants? He looks at Abby, her pixie-ish face, gentle yet feral, the wild blond hair, her ears sticking out through the strands. A girl like Mom? A poochi-poo? He can never know for sure unless he takes the plunge. “…I love you too?”
* * *
In the bag his mother packed: all the currency he has, cargo shorts, his Shredder multitool, a six-pack of Voltage, six bags of BacoCrisps, a pair of flip-flops, his sleeping bag, a deck of Skin Pic playing cards, a flashlight, the old stuffed mastodon from his bed, crayons, his LookyGlass, a solar-powered camping toothbrush, T-shirts, underpants, his inhaler, a lighter shaped like a headless woman’s torso where the fire comes out of her neck stump. Lucky socks. He hoists the duffel onto his shoulders, snaps Hooligan’s leash onto his collar, and glances around his bedroom one last time.
“Anything else you want? Dad’ll probably toss the rest of it once he finds out I quit the family.”
Abby considers the toys, electronics, controllers strewn around the room. She gets up and goes over to the ball pit, squats down at the edge, and carefully selects one yellow sphere.
“OK!” she says.
Ripple takes Abby’s hand and the two of them walk down the hall with the dog, where the elevator is still waiting. They step into that jewel box of a container, reflected in the gilt-edged mirrors behind. Abby inhales sharply. Then the door slides shut.
“You OK?” he asks. She squeezes his hand and smiles.
Just then, he hears a high-pitched siren sounding in the distant regions of the house. The elevator shudders to a halt. “Fuck! My dad must be onto us!”
“What?”
“Total butt nugget set off the security alarm!” Ripple fumbles through his pockets, pulls out a set of keys. He opens a locked panel under the buttons on the elevator, exposing a numerical pad and a recog screen. “Like I don’t know how to manual override? Guess again, pro.” The doors open, exposing a gap of a couple feet between the elevator floor and the lobby floor below. “OK, that’s the best I can do. Follow me.”
Ripple and Abby jump down into the hallway. “We better hurry,” he says, already breathless. “The whole place is in lockdown, c’mon.”
They’re on the first floor, near the greenhouse. Ripple takes off at a jog, counting on Abby to follow close behind, but a dozen paces later, he stops dead in his tracks, staring up at the convex security mirror positioned up near the ceiling just before the right-angle bend in the hall.
Torchies. One is shirtless with a Mohawk. One has a bad burn across half his face, as red and veiny as a monster mask. One wears a morningstar-spiked scrum cap and a kutte vest, bare arms bearing sleeves of slice-’n’-smudge tattoos. And the last one is a child, or very nearly: he’s small and fierce and disorientingly hairless, with his hair and eyebrows singed away. Dressed all in black. Like the others, he’s holding a chain saw.
Four torchies, inside Ripple’s house.
Time stops. It’s at this moment, for the first time, that Ripple truly realizes the nature of the story that he’s in. Up until this moment, he believed himself to be the hero, if not in terms of actual bravery, at least in terms of situational positioning. The story was about him, always. Now, though, Ripple realizes what an illusion all that was, a function of clever editing in service of mindless entertainment. He grabs Abby by the forearm, hard, silences her with a look.
The torchies disappear down the hall in the opposite direction.
“OK,” he whispers—and the choice is so weak, it doesn’t feel like he’s even making one, though later he’ll go over it again and again, trying to replay his logic step by step, to understand how he could do what he did when his mother, father, uncle, were still alive and vulnerable in the far reaches of the house. How he could have felt, even, relief, at that pivotal moment, when he cast away his birthright and gave up any hope of a truly happy ending: “Let’s get out of here.”
14
NEGATIVE SPACE
Shortly before they moved to the boonies of Wonland County, Pippi took a Vigilance course at the nearly defunct Seventy-First Street End Rape Alliance down the block from their townhouse. In a half-empty indoor shooting range, she and six other women took orders from an enraged, grandmotherly instructor in a fuchsia track suit, on the Seven Deadly Signs of Home Invasion (number five: broken glass), the best time of year to plant land mines (summer) and where (below the first-floor windows but not too close to the foundation of the house), as well as the care and use of their sidearms. Underemployed for the first time in four decades—though she was still consulting!—Pippi threw herself into the classes with a gusto that Instructor Joan, an armchair psychologist, appreciatively dubbed “aggressive-aggressive.” Little did either of them know this was just the beginning of an education that would continue far from that boot camp for city-fleeing retirees, into Pippi’s own perilous manor home, during the days of the Siege.
But tonight, it’s that first Vigilance class that springs to Pippi’s mind the instant she hears the fateful chirp of the Ripples’ tastefully unobtrusive security system. She knows in an instant, faster than reflex, that it’s not a false alarm—the surveillance AI is a slumbering mental giant, easy to waken but hard to spook. This is real, and Pippi’s mind flashes instantly to Instructor Joan’s Rule for the Road: “Get the children out alive. Believe me, there’s no point if you don’t.”
Never mind that Pippi is still twitching with rage at Swan Lenore—literally, actually twitching, she can feel the muscle squirming unattractively under the taut skin near her right eye like a trapped leech. But she’s learned enough in the last nineteen years to understand Joan’s message now. When you’re an Old Mom, you go to war for the child you have, not the child you wish you had.
Pippi loads her sidearm, and as she slams the magazine into the handle, something inside her also snaps into place. Her senses quicken. It’s just like riding a bicycle: it comes back. She drops extra rounds into one pocket of her robe, a fistful of jewelry into the other. Oh, she’s ready.
What is it like to walk through a mansion, prepared to shoot on sight? Life takes on the saturated hue of a game it is possible to win or lose. And Pippi loves to win.
She doesn’t take the elevator, that gift-wrapped box for ambushers. She takes instead the servant stairwell, a dull, square-edged helical corkscrew of concrete, windowless but for a filthy skylight at the top, through which one can see as much bird excrement as stars. You can tell a lot about a home by the condition of its staff quarters. Pippi approves of Humphrey’s frugality to a point, but you don’t want to cut corners, not with a property like this. Pippi’s Bone-Soother slippers make no sound on the steps as she briskly and without incident descends.
When she exits onto the first floor, she nearly collides with Duncan Ripple, who screams girlishly until she grudgingly withdraws the gun barrel from his temple.
“Mama Law,” he gasps, either mispronouncing Mom-in-
Law or deeply confused about the role of the preposition in speech.
“Where is my daughter?”
“I dunno, I thought she was with you. Look, we’ve gotta go. Torchies all over the place. With chain saws.”
It’s then that Pippi notices the Girl, hiding behind him almost successfully, clutching the leash of that awful dog. Pippi hadn’t bothered forming a mental image of someone so insignificant, but the Girl confirms all her worst suspicions. A pinkie finger of a person. And she is a Girl, not a Woman, despite the estrogen-ripeness that softens her boyish frame: Swanny was never so young. Strong men take pride in their lovers; weak men prefer to pity them. As the Girl’s little hand snakes uncertainly toward Duncan’s, Pippi strikes him across the face with her sidearm. It surprises her not at all that he hits the floor so easily.
“Hey!” he howls, rubbing his cheek. “You’re not my mom!”
“Shut up. How many are there?”
“I dunno, like, four? Five? Maybe more. They were breaking into the security booth—I guess they wanted maps of the house?”
Pippi steps over him and continues on her mission.
She knows better than to walk the Hall of Ancestors; there’s no cover in a corridor, and she’s not about to retreat if they have projectile-firing weapons in addition to the chain saws. It’s unlikely, of course. Bullets are so rare in Torchtown, the criminals have been known to pry them out of their wounds to resell for a profit. Yet another reason Pippi aims to kill.
Pippi remembers the first day of the Siege. She’d been up all night, listening to radio reports of the invasions. The power was out. The county had shut down the grid to discourage the raiders, who needed to recharge the batteries of their saws and the engines of their Road Daggers upon occasion as they plundered and pillaged from house to house. Pippi hadn’t bothered turning on the generator. She didn’t need an electric stove or a refrigerator for what she was doing. She didn’t even need lights. She sat in the dark with a machine gun in her lap, wearing the most invulnerable pantsuit that would fit over her six-months-pregnant belly—along with most of her diamonds. A box of grenades sat beside her on the couch cushion. Chet was in an induced coma in the bedroom upstairs. Shortly after dawn broke, she saw the first scouts from the raiding party making their way up the drive.
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