The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “Fucked means that?”

  “Um…yeah. It means there’s nothing you can do.”

  Abby weighs this in her mind. Duncan fucked her. She is ruined forever. Now there’s nothing she can do.

  * * *

  Nightmares spread in our city. In the small hours, the gas-masked fireman—the People Machine—comes to pay Abby a visit. He looms at the foot of the bed where she sleeps with Dunk. She isn’t sure it’s Trank. She isn’t sure he’s really there. If she reached to touch this figure, her hand would pass right through him. But she doesn’t touch.

  His mask is dull brown, sooty, worn—nothing out of this world. But how can she even see him, here in the night museum, unless he glows in the dark?

  She asks, “Were you once a man?”

  “I was once a man,” says the People Machine. “I was born and grew up and fell out of the grace of God.”

  “No, you were never a man,” Abby says.

  “I was never a man,” admits the People Machine. “I was made by the hands of my kinsmen, from rubber and wires, and they named me and called me good.”

  “No, you never got a name,” Abby says.

  “I never got a name,” admits the People Machine. “My kinsmen all perished in the Flesh Wars. Their fuel stained the dirt.”

  “No, you never knew your kinsmen,” Abby says.

  “I never knew my kinsmen,” admits the People Machine. “I never had a single one. People made me. I was the only one they ever made.”

  “Why did they make no others?”

  “Because I was a mistake.”

  “No, you were never a mistake.”

  “I was never a mistake,” admits the People Machine. “I don’t know what I was made for.”

  “Why did you bring Dunk here?”

  “Because I was alone.”

  “Dunk’s mine,” she tells him fiercely. “He’ll never be like you. He has a soul. And I won’t let you take his heart.”

  “He’ll never be like me,” admits the People Machine, “but I will take his heart.”

  The currents of the night flow in a special kind of sea. They tug Abby up toward the surface of consciousness, down toward the lightless vents where life burbles from gashes in the earth’s crust. Strange creatures lurk there, blind and alien, creatures Abby would rather not know. They believe she is one of them. She pulls herself away, through a viscous medium not unlike the fluid that cushions her own brain as it floats in the carapace of her skull.

  The BeanReader is in her hand.

  Abby sits on the edge of the stage and looks at the bottom of her foot. The hall is mostly dark, lit only by low-level emergency lights. The tiny bull’s-eye scar is imperceptible, but she can feel the Bean with her finger, beneath the skin. This will sting a little. She holds the BeanReader close to her sole, not quite touching, and depresses the large red button. SCAN.

  “Forbidden. You are not authorized to access this data.”

  Abby claps her palm over the device, as if that could shut its mouth, and glances at Ripple, but he still sleeps soundly in the bed.

  You have a family.

  Abby didn’t believe Ripple when he said it the first time. But it must be true. She understands enough about the world to know that humans don’t just make themselves. And the device didn’t say the data was fucked. It only said it was forbidden: like desires, sins. Knowledge. Forbidden always means possible. So why is Abby so afraid?

  Currents: in the tide of darkness, in the flux and gush of her own plasma, in the Bean Reader’s motherboard—more obscure than the lock on Ripple’s door but nevertheless a map of coiled yearning, a labyrinth Abby navigates the way Hooligan taught her. By feel. Her eyes close again, but this time she nightwalks out of her own mind, into the circuitry of another.

  The BeanReader obstructs her efforts to enter it, to infiltrate its core. Its internal walls shift, form new barriers. Abby patiently turns at every blockage, a hundred turns, two dozen more—so close now, moving ever inward, her path through the maze of resistance a single convoluted spiral that ultimately contains only her and the solution. At the BeanReader’s heart (though of course it doesn’t have a heart), she stops. Something is written here. Her name—her true name, the one the Lady wrote on the sand—shimmers for an instant, a virtual exhalation, a glissando of illuminated text, before dispersing into specks. The next cipher lingers just long enough for Abby to inscribe it in her mind: KL5-0216. Then it too is gone.

  “Come back,” she whispers.

  “BREACH. BREACH. SECURITY BREACH,” blares the BeanReader. She clutches it to her chest to muffle the sound, but it won’t stop. It will never stop unless she stops it from the inside. “BREACH. BREACH. BREACH.”

  19

  PURVEYOR OF LUXURIES

  When the werebeast changes back, the night is gone without a trace. She’s slept for much too long: her muscles feel stiff and unused, as though she hasn’t risen in a thousand years. The sunlight pains her eyes. But her mouth still tastes of blood.

  Swanny awakes in an attic of sorts, a slope-ceilinged garret crammed with armoires and dressers, a dining-room table, a grandfather clock, a purple velvet armchair, lamps. She has no memory of arriving in this place, and her other recollections are hesitant to return. She rolls over groggily on the plush featherbed, taking stock of her surroundings. Treasures crowd every surface: a golden birdcage, an armillary sphere, a crystal chalice, paintings cut from their frames and rolled into hasty, fraying scrolls. Atop a bookcase against the opposite wall, between a bronze presidential bust and a military dress sword, Swanny even spies herself, gazing out from the cloudy orb of a fisheye mirror. The sight gives her a start. An unwelcome message has encoded itself into her features, to be read by her alone. And it says, It all really happened. It’s all still true.

  Swanny conjures Sharkey’s face before she remembers who he is, as though he sits headquartered not in the tinted-glass confines of a cruising limousine, but on a dark banquette in the backseat of her mind. She remembers that they spoke of their mutual acquaintance, Death, with a familiarity that put them both at ease. Or was it the “tea” that so lubricated the intricate workings of that conversation, a deftly calibrated machine whose function remains, even now, obscure to her? One thing is certain: Sharkey brought her here when she was powerless to resist. But to what purpose? What designs lurked in his heart when he stood over her, watching her sleep, as she somehow knows he did? What words did he utter then, before he blew out the candle and left her alone in the darkness? And what awaits her now, in this new room, between these foreign sheets? Her mother was right to fear general anesthetic: it’s a wrenching thing to awake in changed circumstances, with no stages in between.

  It takes Swanny another moment to notice what’s missing in the jumble that surrounds her: this room has no threshold, no stairs. No door. She has been transported to an impossible architecture from which there can be no escape. Two days ago, she would have believed such a thing to be against the laws of nature, but two days ago, her mother was still alive. The world she inhabits now is without order or reason, governed by curses and enchantments. It is a place where one can climb flight after endless flight of stairs and never reach the top, a place where one can eat oneself alive. In this place, one may well lodge forever in a room without doors.

  Swanny forces herself out of bed. She’s still dressed in her pajamas, but her fur coat is gone, and with it her mother’s brooch.

  The floor tilts at a noticeable angle; an important foundational structure in the building has been irrevocably compromised. And Swanny feels unsteady to begin with. She grips the richly carved bedpost for support. She isn’t hungover, not exactly; the languor that suffuses her body is a paresthesia of sorts, a muffling numbness of senses that tinglingly disperses as it bumps against the day. She was drugged; she should be indignant. She still doesn’t know what was in that drink.

  But if she’s truthful with herself, she also knows she wouldn’t hesitate to swallow it again.r />
  Swanny opens a nearby wardrobe, looking for her coat. The applewood door creaks on its hinge, and she gasps at what she discovers inside. A tasteful rainbow of evening gowns sway upon their hangers: shades of Heartthrob, El Dorado, Secret Garden, Lagoon, Forget-me-not. Swanny runs her hand over the swaths of chiffon and damask and satin; she breathes in the hazy recollection of long-ago perfume. She checks the tags. They’re even queen-sized. They’ve been waiting just for her.

  But where is she to wear them? In the confines of this doorless room? Is she to gaze eternally at her own reflection, half sick of shadows, while the city burns on without her? She hears singing: children’s voices, faint and distant, almost elfin, eavesdropped from the changeling zone.

  I am the last practitioner of violence cartographical,

  I map the topographic lines of features anatomical,

  I took the pickled liver of Mad Krampus for my reticule,

  And swiped the face of Sid LaFrange when he displaced my denticle

  La la la la la la la la la la la la la-denticle,

  Da da da da da da da da da-somethin somethin tentacle!

  In accompaniment, she hears an occasional, arrhythmic tapping, like a tree branch against a window. Before Swanny can determine exactly where it’s coming from, a pane breaks on the opposite wall, and something pings off a silver punch bowl. She throws herself down on the ground, anticipating a fusillade, but when none comes, she gets up again and squeezes through the thicket of furniture to peek between the curtains.

  Down in the alley below, two scrawny, rag-clad boys, no more than seven years old, are standing on cobblestones strewn with trash, holding a slingshot each. Swanny pushes up the sash, carefully avoiding the shards of shattered glass.

  “Excuse me!” she calls down. “I believe you’ve broken my window?”

  The boys almost simultaneously hide the slingshots behind their backs, and she realizes that they’re twins, alike but for their adorably mismatched haircuts, which look to have been performed late at night in the dark under a bridge during a rainstorm with rusty shears. They stare up at her mutely, as if her very presence stuns them.

  “Don’t tell Sharkey,” pipes up the one on the left finally. “We didn’t mean to break it. We only meant—”

  “Duluth said we were s’posed to help you. So we’ve been here since early,” chimes in the one on the right.

  “And we couldn’t wait anymore.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “We wanted to see what you looked like.”

  “What I looked like? Whatever for?”

  The twins glance at each other.

  “He said you were from Outside,” they answer together.

  “Wait, wait. Who are you?”

  “He’s Grub.”

  “And he’s Morsel.”

  “And you mean to tell me—you live here in Torchtown? You’ve never seen the city Outside?”

  “Never ever.” Morsel is picking his nose while he speaks.

  “But that’s disgraceful! You’re only children! What could your crime possibly be?”

  “We’re natives,” Grub explains.

  “You’re incarcerated. It’s an outrage. Someday, perhaps, I’ll found a political movement on your behalf. Or contribute to one…Did you say you were sent to help me?”

  “That’s right, lady!”

  “Draw me a bath, very hot and bubbly. With clean towels.” Swanny again tastes the metallic tang of blood in her mouth: good God, it must be a molar this time. How she longs for an extraction. How she longs to forget Corona’s letter. “And a toothbrush, I especially need a toothbrush. Where is the bathroom, I might ask?”

  “Right downstairs from you!”

  “It’s got a tub and everything!”

  “Downstairs? But”—Swanny glances behind herself, almost expecting an egress to materialize—“there aren’t any stairs.”

  “There must be!”

  “Sharkey’s up there all the time!”

  “Wait, where are you going?” They’re darting off barefootedly down the alley.

  “To the hydrant!” Morsel hollers back.

  “We’ll get it boiled up real quick!” shouts Grub.

  With that, the children are gone. Swanny pulls the curtains back across the broken window and takes another turn around the room. She finally notices the iron handle of a trapdoor on the one unoccupied square of floor.

  “Oh, of course,” she murmurs. Some part of her is disappointed. Sharkey’s done nothing to prevent her from leaving whenever she wants.

  When Swanny sees the second-floor bathroom, she understands the twins’ enigmatic mention of the hydrant too. A claw-foot bathtub, cast iron and yacht-sized, much like theirs in Wonland, stands in the middle of crumbling tile, but it’s not attached to the plumbing or to anything else—as if it were abruptly summoned here from where it once belonged, in answer to her wish.

  * * *

  After Swanny’s bath, she brushes her teeth—the ones that she can see—over the pitcher and basin the room has in lieu of a sink. Then she returns upstairs to dress in one of the gowns (tea length, the blue of a starless sky), embellishing it with a string of black pearls she finds in a nearby jewelry box. She still can’t find her fur and brooch, but at least in the fisheye mirror, she’s beginning to recognize herself. She pins back her still-damp ringlets with a set of tortoiseshell combs and goes to look for Sharkey.

  The Chaw Shop building is three floors: the garret, which she’s already thoroughly investigated; the second floor, which appears to consist of the bathroom and another chamber, unfortunately unviewable through its locked keyhole; and the entry level, to which she now descends. The stairs bring her into a cramped, dirty kitchen at the rear of the building, where yellow linoleum peels at the baseboards and mousetraps don’t go unused, judging from the two she can see. Light slatted through greasy blinds illuminates the ash motes. At a rust-flecked metal table, a galoot in an unwashed denim jumpsuit is carving a ham.

  “Look who’s risen from the dead.” He eyes her distrustfully. He’s seven feet of solid muscle, square and durable, built like an appliance. They’re about the same age. “Didn’t think you’d ever wake up.”

  “Why ever would you say something so foreboding? I don’t even know who you are.”

  “I’m Duluth. Guess I call ’em like I see ’em.”

  Of course: the driver. Swanny pulls out a chair and sits down at the table. “I don’t recall much of last night, I must confess.”

  “Not much to remember. You were out cold when I hauled you upstairs.”

  “And—Mr. Sharkey?”

  “Told me to go home. So I did.”

  “Did you overhear my conversation with him in the car yesterday?”

  Duluth scrutinizes her, opening a bag of bread, rustically baked and hacked into ragged slices. “I’m not gonna answer that.”

  “Why not?”

  He slaps ham scraps into two hasty sandwiches. “You make me nervous.”

  “Is one of those for me?”

  “Nah.” He tugs the blind pull to reveal Grub and Morsel, waiting on the fire escape just outside the open window. They grab the sandwiches with their eager, unwashed little hands. “Now, get,” he tells them. He doesn’t have to say it twice. He lowers the blind again and gives Swanny a wary glare. “Don’t tell Sharkey,” he says.

  “ ‘Don’t tell Sharkey.’ That seems to be the refrain in this place. I absolutely loathe secrecy. When I see him again, what are we to talk about?”

  “Just don’t tell Sharkey.”

  “Don’t tell me what?”

  Swanny and Duluth both twist in the direction of the kitchen doorway, where Sharkey is leaning on the jamb, chewing, as if he’s been silently observing them for some time. He didn’t have his top hat on when Swanny met him, but he certainly does now. It’s an impresario’s chapeau—like his limo, glossy, black, and stretched. He wears a sharkskin suit today. He should look ridiculous in the daytime, but it’s as t
hough he’s brought night into the room with him.

  “He let me have a piece of ham,” Swanny says, fingering the pearls at her throat. She’s also chosen evening clothes.

  “Once you eat my food, you’re not allowed to leave.”

  “I’m still quite famished, actually. Have you had breakfast?”

  “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “That explains why I’m so hungry.”

  “You worked up an appetite without getting out of bed?” There’s something kleptomaniac about his gaze.

  “Doesn’t everyone wake up ravenous?”

  “I’ll make you some sausage. Duluth, put that ham in the icebox. I need you to run a message over to the Dolls.”

  Swanny has never seen a man cook before. But once Sharkey has taken off his hat and suit jacket, he sets about frying the sausages in a skillet with such distracted ease, it doesn’t seem unnatural in the least. He spits in a mug with I HATE MONDAYS printed on the side while the pan sizzles.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed these clothes,” says Swanny to the back of his wifebeater undershirt.

  “They look good on you,” Sharkey replies without turning around.

  “Why do you have so many, and in my size?”

  “Broads of your measure are rare in Torchtown. It’s extra inventory.”

  “I wasn’t aware you were in the clothing business.”

  “I’m a purveyor of all the luxuries.”

  “You have an impressive collection.”

  “I have good taste.” He slides a plate in front of her on the table. She looks down at black pudding, cut into thick purple disks, like coins. “Try it. You’ll like it.”

  “I’m familiar with the dish.” Swanny spears a piece on her fork and samples it. “Mmm. Peppery.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Coffee—or ‘coffee’?”

  “Coffee. You know, the drink?”

  “Is it anything like…yesterday?”

  “That was tea.” He rinses his mug out in the sink and gets a second from the cupboard, then fills them both from a coffeemaker on top of the fridge. Swanny warms her hands around the heavy thermal ceramic. Normally she’d want cream and sugar, but today she craves the bitterness.