The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  Now, in the Ripple mansion, Pippi cuts through the so-called hidden passage, really just a utility closet off the hall that opens up to the kitchen on the other side. Diodes and fuse boxes, wires and pipes, the house’s veins and bones and nerve endings: she’d wanted to gut the house in Wonland, but they hadn’t been able to afford it, and a good thing too. She can’t believe how much they sank into that manor, which now stands ownerless and hollow and uncontested, the great fortress of a battle long past. At least she packed the cow-shaped cowhide rug. A room can always use a little zip, a little something to say, “I’m here.”

  Pippi kicks open the door to the kitchen and enters the room handgun first. But she’s alone. There’s no sound but the metallic, faintly poisonous plink of a leaky faucet into the stainless-steel sink. Pippi flips on the lights, which buzz and fizzle themselves awake as she stealths across the tile. She swings open the door to the walk-in icebox; the light inside is already on. A mostly empty carton of butter macaroon frozen custard lies on the floor beside a bottle of caramel topping and a tipped-over jar sticky with red juice. Pippi picks it up and checks the label. Just as she suspected: maraschino.

  Pippi is familiar with her daughter’s unconventional feeding habits, particularly the one Swanny blithely refers to as “Second Dinner” in the pages of what she’s had the insolence to title her Secret Diary. Swanny eats emotionally, which is to say when she’s angry. It used to be a vice of Pippi’s too, though she had the good sense not to keep it down, and in time, learned to restrict her bingeing to liquids. But there’s something about Swanny’s overconsumption that Pippi almost admires. It’s as though her child believes she can devour the world and still have leftovers for later.

  Pippi throws open the servants’ door to the dining room and stops dead. The drop fixtures twinkle above the long table, the Edison bulbs red-gold as dying embers, and a large bowl of ice-cream sundae sits meltingly abandoned on the table. But Pippi sees only the form of the shirtless Mohawked intruder, removing a commemorative platinum plaque from one of the walls with a rusty screwdriver.

  “Freeze,” says Pippi, and he does, on his tiptoes, not even making a grab for the trigger of the chain saw strapped to his chest. The raiders never were this soft, this green. “Drop your weapon.”

  He unbuckles the power tool’s holster and lowers it to the ground. It gives her enough time to see the scars on his back, half-healed: a name, first and last, carved deep into the skin. Of course. He’s just a calling card for someone else. Then he turns around to face her, his arms raised.

  “Is that all you’ve got?” she asks.

  “Swear to shit,” he replies. He’s actually trembling.

  “No pistol? No ammunition?”

  “No, no, swear to shit.”

  “Then I’d like for us to work together. You can start by answering a question for me: where are your friends?”

  “The study…there’s…a safe, with currency…and…”

  Pippi shoots him in the face. The bullet slams downward through the bridge of his nose, out the back of his head, and into the sequoia floorboard with the satisfying thunk of an ax into kindling. He crumples. Pippi kneels down and looks under the table. Swanny’s eyes shine in the darkness. One fist still clutches a sticky spoon. How many times has Pippi found her daughter just like this, beneath the table on the ballroom floor, with her miniature tea set, her china dolls and taxidermied rabbits?

  “Stop crying,” Pippi says.

  “I’m not.”

  “Good, because there’s no reason to. Get up. We’re going to the panic room.”

  “Is it…safe?”

  “Of course not. But right now your only protection is a tablecloth. Consider it an improvement.”

  Swanny crawls out, unsteadily rising to her feet. In the last year, she’s grown an inch taller than Pippi, a fact Pippi refuses to acknowledge, much less accept. But with the chinchilla coat on over those homely unisex pajamas, her daughter looks much like she did as a toddler, clad at Chet’s insistence in frumpy “play clothes” to make swan wings in the snow. It’s always struck Pippi as ungrateful that Swanny refuses to recollect her father, though perhaps it can’t be helped. Even the sharpest mind doesn’t retain much from before the age of three, and it isn’t as though Pippi refreshes Swanny’s memory by talking about him.

  “Follow me,” Pippi tells Swanny, and they sneak back through the kitchen, back up the servant stairs. The panic room is in the penthouse, in the interest of an airlift rescue.

  “What if they’ve already sealed themselves in?” Swanny whispers when they reach the landing between the fourth and fifth floors.

  The thought occurred to Pippi, but she had the tact not to mention it. She continues to ascend. “They can punch in the exit code, of course.”

  “But will they do that? For us? If it means exposing themselves to risk?”

  “They’re legally obligated. There’s an escape accommodations clause in the contract, I made certain of that.”

  “Legally—but—”

  “But nothing. How would it look if we were gored three feet from safety? Besides, with all the vetting you got, they’d be hard- pressed to find an adequate replacement.” They reach the fifth-floor landing and round the corner. “Humphrey Ripple didn’t get where he is today discarding sound investments.”

  “It’s not Humphrey I’m worried about. Duncan…doesn’t love me.”

  “Love takes time.” Pippi swiftly preempts the protest she knows is rising in Swanny’s throat: “And you’ll have time.”

  The first bullet clips Pippi in the right shoulder. Her immediate reaction is not pain, not even surprise, but a rage so searing it’s as though the pellet has released a corrosive vitriol from the torn flesh of her upper arm. The perp is wielding a pirate’s blunderbuss, and as he hastens to reload the muzzle with another vintage shot, she pops him in the neck—she was trying for the eye socket, but the pain in her deltoid has thrown off her aim. At least she hits a major artery; this is no time for perfectionism. It’s then that she hears an unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat, a sound like the furious subtractions of an infernal adding machine: a tommy gun. She yanks Swanny out of the way just in time, hurling her halfway back down the fifth flight of stairs.

  The study. Of course. Humphrey keeps the house well stocked.

  The safe full of currency. The safe full of death.

  “They’ve got into Humphrey’s antique gun collection!” she hisses at Swanny, crouching low against the banister, angling her next shot up through the negative space at the center of the stairwell’s helix. But she can hardly see her assailant from this angle: it’s like aiming from the bottom of a well.

  “What shall we do?”

  Pippi fires seventeen times. The machine gunner stays just out of range. She curses and reaches into her pocket to reload, but she pulls out a handful of diamonds instead.

  “Mother?”

  “What are you doing, just standing there?” Pippi tosses a bauble to Swanny, then crams the rest of the jewelry back into her pocket. “Take that and go.”

  “But Mother, you’re bleeding.”

  “And you’re distracting me.” Pippi slams another full magazine into the handle. “Go back to the kitchen. There’s a passage out under the floorboards of the wine cellar. I’ll join you there shortly.”

  Swanny hesitates for another second.

  “Don’t dawdle. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Hurry.”

  Swanny turns and begins rushing down the stairs.

  “Hold on to the rail!” Pippi calls after her daughter, because she’s always been a clumsy girl, a disaster at dance, such poor posture, always dropping things, tripping over her own two feet, when they named her Swan they named her all wrong, because there’s not a graceful thing about her, the child is, to put it frankly, a weight, a terrible heaviness on Pippi’s heart, because Pippi cannot bear to see her fall, she simply cannot bear it, in certain cases the laws of gravity simply should not apply.
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br />   But Swanny doesn’t fall. She pounds down the stairs, two at a time, around and around the helix, her chinchilla coat flying out behind, the first athletic feat of her life, while up above the gunfire makes a symphony of percussion. Swanny’s nearly to the first floor when she hears her mother scream. And then she sees Pippi, plummeting through the center of the staircase, that column of nothingness around which the whole thing revolves, and crashing to the concrete floor. And even though Pippi is dissolving into a pool of herself, a red so dark and lustrous and conclusive that Swanny’s old decorator kit would name it Rapture, Swanny cannot stop to stare, she’s through the door and back out into the house’s lobby, because she’s reached the ground floor, there’s no farther down to go.

  * * *

  Beneath our city lies another city, carved into the earth, a city of hollowness, a city of emptiness, a city of negative space. Its skyline will never be revealed, not until that time in the future when our society’s final resting place is excavated and disturbed by a more advanced species. But until that day, we can only know our shadow city piece by piece, by the frail beam of a flashlight, by the touch of a hand outstretched in darkness. Long ago, parts of our underground were illuminated day and night—train platforms and exit signs, emergency stairs. Since then, all the electricity has escaped, seeping out the ends of frayed wires or bolting free from fuse boxes in dazzling sudden starbursts. Though this is the one realm unthreatened by the dragons, we have allowed it to decay like everything else we bury.

  Once, the Black Line ran through these tunnels. But subterranean public transportation ceased decades ago, the first of the city’s systems to fail and still, blood in the veins of a corpse. Now the Chute has become the lair of Torchtown escapees, conscription dodgers, and others who don’t wish to be found. In that final category, one must include teenage runaways, even if, with their clumsy footfalls and their worried talk and their mutant dog straining at his leash, they make their presence in this place an open secret.

  “I probably would’ve just gotten in the way,” Ripple is saying. “Don’t stick your hands in where they don’t belong, that’s what I learned in Power Tools class. Unless you’re suicidal, and fuck that. There’s a reason CHALLENGER got canceled; nobody likes to see a pro like Osmond stuck in a chair forever.”

  Abby has been ignoring Ripple’s guilty monologue up till now, but this, of all things, finally captures her attention. “I thought the wheels were part of him.”

  “Osmond? No way. The chair moves all on its own, it’s high tech.”

  “It’s alive?”

  “It’s like—motorized.”

  “OK.” Abby bends to pick up a candy wrapper from the gunky trench between two ties. He doesn’t get why this is so hard for her to understand.

  “It moves, but there’s an engine in there. Not a heart. Not a soul.”

  “It’s evil?”

  “No, it’s just…” Ripple jolts. “Did you hear that?”

  The three of them stop walking. Hooligan cups a hand around one floppy ear.

  “It sounded like footsteps,” whispers Ripple. “Like someone’s following us.”

  “The bad ones? From the house?”

  “I don’t think so.” Ripple swings the beam of his electric torch in an uneven circle, shedding light on iron columns, rat nests, a crumpled tarp. “Nobody’s here.” His words, echoing against the cement, don’t sound reassuring.

  “I’m scared,” announces Abby. Hooligan whines in agreement. “There’s no sky.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “God can’t see me.”

  “If he’s God, can’t he just look in through the ceiling?”

  Abby tilts her head. “How?”

  “I dunno, holy magic?”

  “You’re silly.” Abby wraps her arms around his neck and presses her lips to his. The sensation is an island of comfort in the river of darkness, a place just big enough for the two of them. It’s funny how many worries go away when your mouth can’t form words. “Mmm. I don’t need God. Now I have you.”

  Then they hear the voice, low and disembodied, a few yards away: “Freeze.”

  Ripple leaps a foot in the air, swipes at the darkness with his flashlight beam. “Who’s there?”

  “Don’t you recognize my voice, Duncan? Am I really so changed?”

  Ripple feels something run over his foot—maybe a mouse?—and a shiver goes up his spine.

  “Swanny,” he says, “what happened to you?”

  There’s nothing obvious, not on the surface. She’s wearing that fluffy gray coat again over her pajamas, and her hair is frizzy and snarled, but she didn’t look way better right after they consummated. What’s different now is her face. Maybe she had a device installed behind her eyes that gives her terrible powers in place of a mortal soul. Her skin is so pale, she looks like a hologram floating in the beam of illumination.

  “Give me half of everything you’ve got,” she says. He notices that one hand is concealed in the pocket of her coat, thrust forward in a gesture it takes him a second to recognize: it’s supposed to be point-blank concealment, a mugger’s heads-up.

  “Sorry, we’re still married. I’m keeping my stuff.”

  “When it comes to ink on paper, it’s either there or it’s not.” Swanny seems to have acquired a tremor, or, more accurately in her case, a jiggle—every thirty seconds, a major seismic event happens that she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Right.” He wonders if she really has a gun. That could be bad. “Well, I bet everybody back at the house is worried about you, so…”

  “Everybody?”

  “Sure, your mom…”

  “Mother is dead.”

  “Whoa, what?” He reflexively touches his cheek, which still stings from Pippi’s blow, then plays innocent. “How did she die?”

  “How do you think?”

  “How’m I supposed to know, she was super old.”

  “You were a teen pregnancy, you ugly hulking scoundrel!” Swanny’s face scrunches disturbingly. Then her eyes go wide, like she’s watching an instant replay only she can see. “They shot her. Those fucking torchies—shot her down.”

  “They had guns?”

  “They had your father’s guns. How nice that he keeps the house well stocked.”

  “Oh shit. Oh shit.” But Ripple isn’t thinking of his mother-in-law now. “What about my parents? Osmond? Are they OK?”

  “I don’t know, Duncan, they didn’t check in with us before fleeing to the panic room.” Her voice drips with bitter sarcasm. “I suppose cowardice runs in the family.”

  “Uh—” Ripple would throw down a comeback, but all of a sudden Swanny is looking less pallid and more…greenish. “Hey, are you OK? Maybe you should sit down.”

  “I don’t need to ‘sit down,’ I simply need to, to, to…” As if checking an invisible timepiece, Swanny raises her wrist to her eyes, then faints.

  Ripple’s mind whirs. Pippi Dahlberg? Shot? What exactly is he supposed to think about that? If Pippi is dead, that must mean that his own father allowed it to happen—that it happened on his watch.

  The panic room, Ripple reminds himself. They’re in the panic room. That’s what Swanny said, and he has no reason to disbelieve her.

  “She wouldn’t want us to move her, right?” Ripple asks, shining light on the prone body sprawled across the subway tracks. Hooligan whines in assent, but for once Abby ignores the dog. She goes to her fallen rival and unbuttons the chinchilla coat and the first few buttons of the PJ top, then blows cool air down the ravine of Swanny’s cleavage. Abby’s got a knack for waking people up. Swanny heaves and flops over, washed ashore.

  “Unhand me!” It sounds like something Osmond would say, but now Swanny’s voice is a little girl’s. She sits up. “Unhand me this instant.”

  “Too warm for coats.”

  “Don’t touch me. I don’t know where you’ve been.”

  Abby keeps stroking Swanny’s furry sleev
e anyway, gazing at her intently, mirroring her posture. “I remember when the Lady died.”

  “She wasn’t a lady, she was a CEO,” snaps Swanny.

  “No—my Lady. She brought me to the Island in a big green tub. When she died, she left me there.”

  Ripple holds the girls in his spotlight. It’s so weird to see them having a conversation, one that’s not about him.

  “I think she means the fem who raised her,” he offers. “Some weird aunt, or a kidnapper, maybe, I haven’t figured it out.”

  “The Lady gave me my name. She taught me about the People Machines. She taught me how to fish. I licked her bones for luck. Sometimes I still hear her voice. She tried to keep me safe. Your lady did too, didn’t she?”

  Abby’s fingers continue to furrow through the chinchilla. There’s something hypnotic in the motion, a lullaby of touch.

  “I suppose,” Swanny finally replies, “she wanted me to learn to fend for myself.”

  Abby nods. “The Lady threw me in the river to learn swimming.”

  “Mother gave me pop quizzes.”

  “The Lady burned out my fleas. I used to yell.”

  “Mother had me fitted with an IUD when I was fifteen. The blood was something apocalyptic, but she called it a sound investment. Ha. A lot of good it does me now.” Swanny winces at the memory. “State-of-the-art too. She spared no expense. Some only last a decade or so, but mine is made from the copper they use in coins. Indestructible. They call it the Moneyclip. An evocative name, don’t you think?”

  Ripple has no idea what she’s talking about, and he doubts Abby does either. “Look, I don’t think we should stay down here.”