The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  What would this series be called? Late Capitalism’s Royalty: Enlistment Edition? Or something new—City Savior? Fear Fighter? Whoa That Pro Is Brave?

  Only the promise of dinner brought Ripple mostly back to tonight’s reality: turns out dousing a fire and walking half the length of the city works up a major appetite. Trank called in the order, which was delivered in less than thirty minutes by a disaffected youth in a Nomex bomber jacket and a trucker hat labeled BRICK OVEN.

  “No charge,” the delivery guy said at the door, refusing Ripple’s currency. “Leather Lungs and me, we have a deal. He doesn’t conscript me, he gets free pizza for life.” Then he was back on his HowScoot, gone into the night.

  Now Ripple, Trank, and Abby are down in the Fire Museum cafeteria. Behind sneeze screens, furniture-sized stainless-steel appliances stand cold and unused. Trash cans shaped like fire hydrants stand in the room’s corners. The floor is concrete. The only light comes from flat fluorescent boxes, suspended on chains from the ceiling. They’re chowing down on a pie loaded up with all possible toppings just the way Ripple likes it: pepperoni and crab, pickles and marshmallows. Gutbuster.

  “Of course there are still pizzas. People still live here, a few, and I know in my heart the rest will return. A city like this one doesn’t just fade away, not on my watch. We’re fighting a battle for the soul of the place.” Trank eats his piece crust-first, jaw clenching and unclenching in a way that seems both mechanical and pained. “Pizzas or no, I’m here for the duration.”

  “Right.” The movie left Ripple pumped, stoked for his new boss and job, but now that they’ve shunned its epic slow-mo dreamscapes for this harsher light, his sense of unease toward Trank is returning. He looks over at Abby, who’s warily poking the Gutbuster with a fork the same way he once saw her prod a dead jellyfish on the beach. “You OK, fem?”

  “It tastes funny.”

  “Try to eat a little, OK? You need to keep your strength up.”

  Grudgingly, she lifts a dripping slice; an anchovy slip-slides to the plate. “I have a family, Dunk. You said. When are we going to find them?”

  “She got kidnapped or abandoned or something when she was just little,” Ripple explains to Trank. “But she’s chipped so, you know. Breeding.”

  Ripple and Trank look over simultaneously. Somehow Abby’s already managed to get tomato paste in her hair and is in the process of slurping it out.

  “We have a BeanReader upstairs,” Trank reports. “In an exhibit case, in the Hall of Ultimate Sacrifice. Battle scarred, but it still works—IDed a lot of remains, back in the day. If her folks are still in the city, you can drop her off at home and get right back to your training. No place for a woman on a fire squad anyway. Save that for weekends.”

  Ripple doesn’t want his clam-ramming privileges revoked Monday through Friday, but the thought of off-loading Abby to somebody else’s part-time care is a surprising relief. Ever since they left the trash, she’s been so needy. “Hear that, Abby? He’s going to help you.”

  “I don’t like the metal man,” she repeats to herself, wiping grease from her mouth with her sleeve.

  Trank takes another bite, but he’s struggling to chew; it’s like the food is gumming up his mouth somehow. He sets his paper plate aside, and, mouth a little ajar, takes out a packet of cotton swabs and an ashtray from a cargo pocket of his turnout pants. “Do you mind?” he asks them.

  Ripple shrugs. Abby freezes.

  Trank reaches behind his head with two hands. Ripple hears snaps popping free, and Trank’s face—his rubber skin—his second mask—crumples as he peels it off.

  Beneath, his face is an elaborate construction of titanium implants and hydraulic tubes, which hiss and whirr as his expression reconfigures itself. The rods in his forehead click together when he furrows his brow.

  “Even after all the time I’ve had to heal,” he says ruefully.

  He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. The flesh below the titanium implants is red and swollen in places, oozy in others. Trank’s sweat and sebum collect in the ridges of the screws. His salty tears calcify on the zoom lenses of his glass eyes. Mucus clots on his steely nose wedge. He loosens a pin on one side of his jaw and pulls an errant clump of mozzarella free from the hinge.

  “Wow. You’re like…” Ripple searches for the word, but the visual sectors of his brain are overwhelming the verbal: this is the grossest thing he’s ever seen. “Like…”

  “People Machine,” Abby whispers.

  “A cyborg.” Trank’s face is so gross, it’s actually kind of awesome. A spectacle, that’s what Ripple’s videographers would say. What kind of pro can take that kind of damage and then go back out there again, to dominate another day? “How did it happen?”

  Trank takes a cotton swab from the box, looks at it, and sighs. He slides it under his metallic replacement cheekbone and roots around pensively. The cotton swab emerges, unimaginably changed, glistening with orange-yellow discharge. He deposits it in the ashtray and takes up another. As he tells his tale, Trank uses the entire box of cotton swabs to clean the machinery of his face.

  The Fire Chief’s Firsthand Account of Bravery Under Fire

  “The long and short of it is: I should have been wearing the gas mask. It was my fault and I take full responsibility. I’d fail as an example to you if I didn’t own up to that right off the bat. The no-good mutineers who left me to die under a pile of smoldering wreckage, they’re not to blame. There’s an expression: in the end, a man’s left with the face he deserves. This face is mine, because I was a goddamn fool, and anyone who follows me should learn from my mistake.

  “Always keep your Tarnhelm on.

  “Six months ago, when the Gemini Building burned—the east tower—I was there with the first dispatch to the scene. I always took pride in leading the charge into danger. Men want to follow a leader, not a hologram of some idiot flailing around in a motion-capture suit across town. But twenty-five, thirty stories up, the laddermen behind me were moving slow. A bunch of rank, cowardly bastards. Every one among them had been caught participating in demonstrations. This was their punishment. We called it the probation squad. Usually I could motivate even the worst of the lily-livered pantywaists, rouse them to their civic duty, but on that day they wouldn’t fall in line. So I turned back, and I pulled up my gas mask to yell down the stairs.

  “And that’s when I did it. I looked up. Unthinkable. Chief of the whole goddamn operation, decades of experience under my belt, and I made a rookie mistake. Just as the ceiling caved in, I looked up. The slicker did its job. Gloves too. But the mask—the mask didn’t have a chance.

  “Made matters worse that I lay there for two days while the mutineers ran roughshod all over the city. Metropolitan Police Department was overfaced. You can’t shoot deserters when it’s all of them. Not enough bullets in the world. But that didn’t stop the MPD from trying, God bless ’em. It was forty-eight hours later, when city gov officially lifted conscription, that they finally found time to send a couple of patrolmen to sift through the wreckage for my corpse.

  “Lo and behold, I was still kicking—what was left of me. Cheekbones shattered. Nose smashed flat. Jaw fractured in nine places. Nine. And you know how it smells when your skin cooks to a crisp? Delicious. Just like bacon. A goddamn cannibal’s delicacy. I didn’t even know how bad I looked. My eyes were fried. Hardboiled eggs. That’s why they hooked them up to these falsies. Don’t flinch, I can tap on my eyeball all I want. ’Bout as sensitive as a camera lens. Ha! Miracle of science.

  “I begged to die, I’ll admit it. I’d lost my men, my face, my name. My place in the world. My faith in heroism for its own sake. I’d fought the fires for more than forty years, and I’d lost. But the chief of police is a friend of mine, and he wasn’t ready to let me shrug off this mortal coil just yet. He kept the news out of the papers that I was alive, in case someone might see fit to assassinate me in my weakened state, and sent me to recover at the same burn ward where they sent
the governor’s son a few years back.

  “The air hurt; when they changed the bandages it was like they were peeling off my skin. And the surgeries were brutal. When you feel bolt join bone, you have to believe it happened for a reason. For me, that reason was gone. All the painkillers in the world can’t defend you against the darkness inside your own mind. But lying in that bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, something happened—a revelation, I’d say, if I were a man of faith. Only it didn’t come from a higher power. It came from me. I figured it out: why my life’s work mattered, why it was still too soon to give up the fight. I suppose you could call it a vision.

  “You see, I saw the future.

  “I saw throngs in the streets, lights in the windows, money in the shops, the way it used to be when I was just a boy. I saw Empire Island restored to her former glory. And what’s more, I saw how it would happen—how, and when, and why. I went over and over it until all my doubts were gone, so when I finally rose from that bed, I rose with one purpose only: to take damn fine care of my city until her day comes again.”

  The ashtray is full of used cotton swabs, unctuous now with scabby goo. Trank pops off his chin plate, indented slightly for the cleft, and peers discontentedly at the gunk inside. He takes his time wiping it out with a handkerchief.

  “Prosthetics,” he grumbles. “More of an art than a science, if you ask me.”

  But Ripple’s mind is working overtime. A sky full of HowFlys—streets full of life? It’s as crazy as anything from Abby’s weird religion, and yet Paxton Trank isn’t a feral teenage hermit-girl; he’s a legit authority figure, a seasoned dadster who’s seen some shit. He doesn’t sound crazy. He sounds determined…like he has a plan.

  “I don’t get it. In the dream, did you slay the dragons?”

  “Slay the dragons? Hell no, son. The dragons will be our salvation in the end.”

  “How?”

  “Because in my vision, the dragons did what they should have been doing all along.” Trank’s hydraulics shimmy inscrutably. He lowers his voice. “They protected this place. They belonged to the city.”

  “Uh, you think the dragons are going to stop torching us?”

  “I know it.”

  “Riiiight.”

  “I’ve already told too much.” Trank finishes polishing his chin, snaps it back on. “Believe what you want. But I intend to save my city from the ash bin of history. Someday soon, you’ll be able to say you played a part in that.”

  Ripple nods slowly. Even if this old pro’s lost it, he made a name for himself once. Maybe Trank knows more than he’s saying; maybe he’s just an optimist. But everybody’s got to believe in something.

  “I want to be the greatest fireman in the world,” says Ripple. “Do you think you can make that happen for me?”

  “Not until I keel over dead.” Trank chuckles, lifting his rubberized epidermis from the table. It hangs from his hand like a tattered flag. “But you’ve got spirit. You’ll go far.”

  Neither Trank nor Ripple has paid attention to Abby in quite a while. They haven’t noticed her quivering lips, her rigid, seized-up posture, or the fact that she’s barely blinked for the last five minutes. So when she abruptly rises, knocking her chair to the ground behind her and, with a single shakily extended finger, at long last points to Trank and lets loose a full-throated scream, they are too surprised to react before her eyes roll back in her head and she faints in a pile on the floor.

  * * *

  A ceiling of electric white. The People Machines have caught Abby. They have beamed her up into their Contraption and will never bring her home. She lies strapped to a padded table as they stand over her, faces in shadow. One of them holds a device. “This will sting a little,” he says, touching it to the bottom of her foot.

  “Abby, chillax, it’s me. Hold still for a second. Abby, seriously, this is what you wanted.”

  Abby’s eyes go in and out of focus: Dunk, People Machine, Dunk, People Machine. Dunk. The device in Dunk’s hand beeps, says, “Forbidden. You are not authorized to access this data.”

  “Yo, Trank, it didn’t work this time either.”

  “Must be corrupted. That scanner’s government issue—bypasses all security measures.”

  “This sucks so much. I’m done, Abby, you can sit up now.”

  Abby does. She’s in a bed shaped like a HowDouse, on a raised platform in a strange little room with only three walls—the fourth is missing—and an untrue window with a painted scene of the star-strewn sky past its glass. A bright light shines down on her, a circle of radiance as blinding as the sun when she looks directly up. It reminds her of the Contraption’s searchlight, how it sought and held her in its glare.

  “Where are we?” she asks, shielding her eyes.

  “This is the Hall of Prevention and Safety,” says Trank. “They used to put on plays here, for the kids. Stop Drop and Roll, Fire in the Night. A grown man dressed as a Dalmatian. Never one for theater, myself.” He has on his false face now, but Abby’s seen his real one. She knows what he’s really made of. And she knows better than to ask for Dunk’s help this time.

  “Dear God,” she prays. “Make it die.”

  The two men exchange glances.

  “Amen,” Abby adds, just in case that’s the part that counts. She isn’t surprised when nothing happens. She’s gotten used to her prayers not coming true.

  “So we checked your Bean,” Ripple tells her. He’s still holding the BeanReader, a clunky plastic scanner gun with a big red button and a readout screen. It looks like a weapon to Abby. “Did you, like, step on a magnet sometime? Because nothing came up.”

  “It didn’t say my name?”

  “It didn’t say anything.”

  “Maybe it’s scared.”

  Ripple exchanges another glance with Trank, who snorts.

  “Female intuition,” Trank says. “No reasoning with that.”

  “I know what you are,” Abby tells Trank. How could he think that skin would fool her? It’s even on a little crooked. At the corner of his left eye, she can see a sliver of titanium glinting. “I know where you come from.”

  Trank’s eyes train on her. His lenses whiz into focus. He has her in his sights. “And where’s that, missy?”

  “When a skin-and-bone woman gives in to her lust for a machine, the Devil lets form a terrible thing.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave my mother out of this.” Maybe those are the words he says. Abby hears his machine parts hum, Let my secrets be.

  But Ripple doesn’t hear that at all. “Not cool, Abby, not cool!”

  Tears fill her eyes. No one will listen to her. No one ever does. She tries again anyway: “Can’t you see, Dunk? He’s a People Machine. I’m sure this time. He’s going to empty you out, replace you piece by piece!”

  Ripple turns away toward Trank. “Don’t take it too personally, pro. I think she has brain damage. It’s not just her parents—she doesn’t even know her name. I found her out on Hoover Island. The garbage dump.”

  Trank’s jaw parts grind out a smile. “Sounds like you saved her.”

  “Huh.” Ripple nods. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

  “Hero-in-training already. I’ll let the two of you get some shut-eye.”

  Abby feels sick. Everything in this place is wrong, even Dunk’s story. Doesn’t he remember? She saved him.

  After that, Trank switches off the spotlight and leaves them in the dark museum hall, onstage without an audience. Ripple reaches for her halfheartedly, but when she doesn’t respond, he rolls over with an exhausted groan, his back a wall between her and his dreams.

  Abby tries to sleep. But she cannot. The day has been long and puzzling, a story without an end. Thoughts of all she’s seen—the stump-footed pigeon, the library, the fire, the museum’s objects so silent and still, her own face glinting back at her, reflected in the eyeholes of that mask—churn in her until she can no longer stand it. She leans over and pukes over the side of the bed. Pin
eapple, jalapenos, butterscotch, mozzarella cheese…

  “What the snuff, Abby! I could’ve shown you where the bathroom was!”

  Abby, emptied now, stares in disbelief at the hot mess coagulating on the floor. The colors have mixed into a single nuclear orange, radiating in the darkness. “I could taste it.”

  “Taste what?”

  “The chemicals!”

  “Wench, everything’s made of chemicals. You and me, we’re made of chemicals.”

  “No!” Abby is hysterically emphatic: “God made me! I want to go back to God!”

  “Umm…”

  But Abby is through trying to explain. Ripple tries to hold her still as she squalls herself into forgetfulness, a tide of salty tears erasing every footprint from the shore. She thinks of the Island before he arrived, how strong she was amid the birds and the fish and the rats, the last human in the world.

  “I wish you had never come,” she weeps. “I wish I’d dreamed of you forever.”

  “Look, if anybody should be mad, it’s me,” Ripple hisses. “We’re out here, totally on our own. This fireman gig could be a good thing for me. And you’re obsessed with fucking it up. Paxton Trank was an elective official, OK? His mother did not bang a robot!”

  “I’ve forgotten how to survive alone.”

  “Then chill the fuck out, because I cannot handle your psychodrama right now.”

  “I saw what he wants you to do. On the big screen. He wants you to go into the fires. He wants you to die.”

  “I’m not going to die.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “You’re supposed to believe in me.”

  “I don’t want you to die.” She presses her ear against his chest, lets her breathing match his. She listens to his heartbeat, like she did that first day. All animals have hearts. After a long time, he starts to stroke her back. “Dunk. You said we would find my name.”

  “Yeah, but we tried reading your Bean, Abby. The data’s corrupted.”

  “Corrupted?”

  “You know. Ruined forever. Fucked.”