“But that hardly applies to me. You saw it yourself. I work in the shop.”
“All right.” Duluth keeps his tone to a mutter. “Sharkey knows where the fires will be. Before they happen. That’s how come he’s lived so long. Sometimes he’s just normal violent, when he’s got cause. Like for killing offenses. But when he just don’t like a guy, a swiller or somebody, Sharkey sends him into a fire. Damns him, is what people say. Because even if you miss the first one, he’ll make sure another one gets you later.”
“Do you mean to tell me that Sharkey actually causes fires? He’s an arsonist?”
“Nah, nothing like that. These are drake fires I’m talking about.”
“Then what does Sharkey have to do with it?”
Duluth hesitates. “He…knows how to use them.”
“So his knowledge frightens you?”
“Not just me. Everybody.”
Swanny runs her finger around the rim of her glass. “Does he have any friends? Any peers?”
“Mr. Sharkey don’t socialize much.”
“How terrifically lonely he must be.” She downs the last of her drink and reaches for the bottle. After pouring herself another shot, she offers it to Duluth, but he holds up a hand in refusal.
“Never touch the stuff.”
When Duluth drops Swanny off back at the Chaw Shop, she finds the front door unlocked and a note stuck up on the wall inside with a pushpin:
I got tired and went to bed. There’s a plate for you in the fridge. Be in the shop tomorrow & early. ES
It’s typewritten, like the contract and the labels. Sharkey must be concealing truly atrocious handwriting.
After a cold repast of antipasto—ham, cheese, smoked chicken, and yes, a few delectable olives (though no martini)—Swanny retires to the attic. Once in her pajamas, though, the day’s events continue to churn through her mind. She searches the room until she finds the one thing that can give her relief: a writing set, unused and intact, still in its marbled gift box, with a daybook, dip pen, and sealed bottle of ink, along with sheets of stationery and a calendar for the year 302001 AF. She needs to set her thoughts in order.
Dear Diary,
In the past it has been my habit to introduce myself when beginning a new journal, to state my name and rank and the most notable of my recent accomplishments. But this evening, I am at a loss for such formalities. Am I a Dahlberg or a Ripple, or even still a baroness? What do such appellations even mean in a wonderland such as this? Will I find comfort and happiness here for a time? Or will I perish—falling prey to the brutality I witnessed in the streets tonight, undistinguished and unloved, or burning away to nothing, mere fuel for the flames? I am afraid I cannot bear to set about answering these few simple questions. And there are many others that I dare not even contemplate, questions that, like my wretched affliction, gnaw me from within.
Instead, I will enumerate my goals, for though they are also many and daunting, they give me cause to soldier on.
Before the month is out, I will:
1. Locate Mother’s murderers.
2. Torture them at some length for information, until I can rest certain knowing no co-conspirators remain.
3. Kill them in a manner commensurate with how they dispatched Mother (so preferably by shooting them in the face).
4. Have their bodies disposed of discreetly and hygienically (perhaps I shall ask Mr. Scharkee for his advice w/r/t this).
5.
Swanny’s pen, which has been scratching across the paper rapidly, abruptly pauses, and her finger slides in her mouth, unbidden, to prod her newest tooth. What comes after that? She hasn’t yet thought so far in advance—though of course it may take more time to proceed through steps 1–4 than she’s permitting herself to believe—more time, indeed, than she even has.
She dips the pen in the inkwell and continues:
5. Duncan Ripple? Punish him? Win him back?
But she hates the appearance of those question marks, so girlish and juvenile, each the shape of half a broken heart. To think of him, when so much else is at stake—well. She dips the pen again and scribbles out the words.
20
A CALLING
The next evening, after his first day fighting fires with Trank, Ripple is back, showered, and studying in the Hall of Ultimate Sacrifice, sitting on one of the grief benches across from the Wall of Remembrance. This is the wall where the names of the fallen firemen from the first twelve years of the dragon attacks shimmer on engraved brass plaques. Years thirteen and fourteen are rendered in initials only; below those, there’s one more that reads, simply, ETC.
Ripple is flipping through a heavily illustrated primer—over his shoulder, Abby sees cautionary images of wildly spurting hoses, disobedient Dalmatians, dangerously positioned ladders, all circled and crossed out—and writing answers in the blanks. “Wench. Stop playing with my hair.”
But Abby loves the way his hair feels against her fingers: wet and soft with conditioner, slick as the breast feathers of a vulture. She reluctantly withdraws her hand.
“I need to concentrate,” Ripple continues. “I’ve got to finish this homework.”
“What’s homework?” He isn’t home. Neither is she. But Ripple sighs heavily, as if he can’t believe she doesn’t know.
“I have to do these stupid worksheets if I want the Special Officer certification, OK?”
“Why do you have to do them if they’re stupid?”
“It’s required by the Metropolitan Police Department.”
“They require you to be stupid?”
“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t do anything.”
“Yes, I do.”
He scrubs at the page with his eraser. “No you don’t.”
“I do.”
“Uh, no.”
“Last night I got the BeanReader to tell me my name.”
“What?” He stops erasing, his puzzled expression reflected in the golden wall of inscriptions. She has his attention now. For a second at least.
“Last night I…”
“I heard you, I just—we already tried it. It didn’t work.”
“I made it work.”
“How?”
“I listened to it. I snuck inside.”
“OK, I get it. You’re making this up to distract me.”
“No, I’m not!”
“So what’s your name, then?”
“The same one I’ve always had.”
“Abracadabra?”
“That’s not my real name.”
“I seriously do not have time for this.”
She takes the pencil out of his hand, writes the cipher in the margin of the page. The characters are large and shaky, but she makes sure he can read them. KL5-0216. “What’s that?” she asks.
“What’s it supposed to be?”
“Dunno. The BeanReader said it.”
“Nice try, but it’s not long enough to be a PRL.”
“Pearl?”
“Personal Record Locator. Those are eight digits. This is, uhh…seven.” He squints. “Where’d you get it? Seriously?”
“I told you.”
“The BeanReader.”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I broke it.”
“You broke Trank’s BeanReader?! He’s going to fucking kill you, Abby!”
She frowns, touches the letters and numbers she just wrote. A faint metallic shimmer transfers to her fingertip. “He’s going to kill you first.”
But if Trank notices the broken BeanReader, he doesn’t say anything. Downstairs in the Fire Museum cafeteria, he orders pizza for them again. Abby sees him do it this time. Another machine lives on the wall down here, its workings concealed in an exoskeleton of black plastic. Trank twists its faceplate first one way and then the other. He speaks the names of dinner into a smaller device that hangs from the host machine by a rubbery umbilicus.
“What’s he doing?” Abby whispers.
Ripple slurps from a can of Carbon8. “Old-school dialer. I guess that’s how they reached people back in loser times.”
“So they come when he calls them?”
“They better. In thirty minutes or less.”
“Why don’t you call your family?”
“Because I don’t want to talk to them right now. I told you, I’m not going back home until I make a name for myself.” He contemplates the phone, then shakes his head definitively. “Besides, the number’s, like, privatized. Normally I just poke their picture.”
Two days later, in the morning when Trank and Ripple are out fighting fires, Abby stands at the dialer, holding its receiver in her hand. Thirty minutes or less. It doesn’t seem like enough time to prepare herself. You have a family. She thinks of Dunk’s family, his father’s strange nests of artificial hair, his uncle’s belches and wheels. She thinks of Katya, so kind and yet so sad. The Ripples. A family. A tribe. Strange that Abby lost hers and never longed for them, never missed them the way she missed the Lady, never dreamed of them the way she dreamed of Dunk. Maybe they have forgotten her too. Maybe they abandoned her, cast her away. It would explain why she wound up in the trash.
Each hole in the dialer’s faceplate displays several letters and numbers. Abby places her finger in the K and cranks it around. Within the machine, she feels the activating shift: the gears stirring, sparking. Waking up. L…5…0…2…
When the faceplate spins back into place the final time, Abby presses the receiver to her ear, as she saw Trank do. Somewhere deep inside, it trills, a foreign sound to Abby but one that suggests all she needs to know, which is: wait. Wait. Soon.
“Hello?” she says when the trilling stops. “Hello?”
The quality of the silence inside the receiver has changed. Before, it was mute in the way of things inanimate, dumb as a box of rocks, like the Lady used to say. The new silence is complicated by omission, a quiet full of background noise. A hush of things unsaid.
“Hello?” she repeats. “This is Abby. At least—I call myself that now. Maybe you called me something else?”
She hears something, a faint…squeaking? But no words come in reply.
“I don’t know who I am,” she confesses. “I don’t know who I’m calling.”
The squeaking intensifies, but Abby can’t make out a syllable she recognizes. Is the machine itself talking to her? Or is there truly someone on the other end?
“The Lady used to warn me about false mothers,” she says. “The People Machines pretend to be mothers sometimes, so you love them and trust them. Inside, they’re just puppets for science. You can always tell a false mother when you twist her neck. Their heads go all the way around. Are you my mother? Are you going to come and find me?”
A fainter squeak, and then nothing but that other thing: the presence of someone or something at the other end of the line. That sense of a connection.
“I’m at the Fire Museum,” Abby blurts. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. I don’t know where I belong.”
Abby can’t tell time, but hours after her call is ended, she knows that Dunk was wrong. Thirty minutes or less. Answers won’t come to her so quickly. Maybe it’s her own fault. She doesn’t even know which questions to ask.
21
UNTORCHABLE
What does it mean, to have a brother? To be a brother? To lose a brother? Osmond looks at Humphrey’s corpse, stained with blue poison foam around the mouth, the skin lifeless and stiffening by the second, every inch of it fast becoming false and unvital as the toupee that, even now, clings to its forsaken perch. Humphrey’s velour pajamas are his costume for the afterlife. But Osmond still has time to change.
The panic room hardly accommodates a full turn of Osmond’s wheelchair when uninhabited; it’s nearly impossible to negotiate with both these bodies in the way. But he manages to back himself into the far corner to reach the emergency wet bar. He cracks open a cask-aged limited-release bottle of hundred-proof Moondrool and pours a hefty draught into his pint glass. The time for beer is done.
When, at age fifteen, Osmond was a contestant on CHALLENGER, his brother, not yet graduated from underschool, was the only person in the world to advise him against probable besplatterment.
“There’s no use in killing yourself,” Humphrey told Osmond. “It’s wasteful. Sure, you’re a weirdo and a mama’s boy, you’re out of shape, you’ve got a fungus growing on your neck—that cream isn’t working, by the way, I wish you’d see my dermatologist—but all of those problems can be easily corrected with diet and behavior. And even if you don’t want to make an effort to improve your situation, think about how rich we are. You can approximate happiness through purchasing power. Women are all basically prostitutes anyway.”
“Money is no reason to live,” Osmond grumbled, in his dressing gown (the hour was late), pacing. Using his legs for the last time, actually, come to think of it. His toes nestled in fur-lined slippers, every one soaking in sensation, in animate life. “Pleasure is meaningless in absence of principle. To have something to live for is to have something to die for, mon frère—and I die to mark man’s name upon the reign of the dragons. Even if I only eviscerate one of those bristleworm pterosaurs, posterity will be sure to cast my likeness in bronze.”
“Not to belabor the point, but that’s fucking retarded,” said Humphrey in his most grating debate-team voice. “For one thing…”
Osmond plugged up his ears: “Fa-la-la-la-la, I can’t hear you!”
But Humphrey didn’t budge. He stayed with Osmond till the small hours, trying to talk him out of it. The next morning, of course, when the camera crew returned, Osmond went up in the fateful HowTank anyway. He ignored his brother’s advice and attempted suicide—he would have said “bravery” at the time, but the difference is semantic. Now Humphrey’s done the same. But like everything else in life, he succeeded where Osmond failed.
And Katya too. In her negligee, she looks like the star of a pornographic snuff film. Bride of the Necrophiliac. The ultimate trophy to Humphrey’s acquisitive machismo—the very sort of prostitute he’d so prophetically described in his sales pitch for survival, though he uttered those words over a decade in advance of her birth. She lived the life of a consumer product, a fully functional machine, with features to be road tested on command: toning an ab, birthing a child, performing a strip show for her own birthday party. She even had an off switch.
Osmond gazes into those glassy blue eyes, now fixed and dilated. Is he looking into the perfect sky of her irises, or into a contact lens? Was she even a natural blonde? Katya existed as a sort of human pet, engineered like an apehound for the connoisseur buyer. She repulsed Osmond in life, but in death, she touches him. The single-mindedness that her last act implies! The clarity of thought! If action is character, she loved Humphrey more than Osmond did—loved selflessly, against her own best interest. What must that have felt like? All of Osmond’s feelings are nonsense and confusion. Bound unambiguously to nothing, his logic is free verse.
“I’m having one of my attacks,” he tells the panic room, trying to focus on his surroundings. The space is no bigger than a butler pantry—they never thought they’d have to use it—and no servants were invited to join them here in the holy of holies. That now strikes Osmond as a crucial omission. No family and no help. The world is a desolate place indeed. He presses the Call button on the console.
“Room service? Housekeeping? Poison control?” But it’s too late for all that. The house is an unmanned vessel on a sea of fire. Osmond turns his gaze to the monitors, to watch the engulfing tide of flames.
Except the tide is going out. The torchies didn’t go about their arson properly, Osmond starts to see that now. They didn’t account for the stubborn retardant—fucking retarded—in the paints and carpets. They’d allowed gasoline to puddle on the floor and burn itself out. They didn’t bother to disable the sprinkler system, and when it kicks on late, a belated
baptism, it washes out what’s left of their crude approximation of hell. The fire sputters out without ever reaching the second floor.
“Never invest emotionally,” Humphrey told Osmond long ago, when they were only children. Humphrey had just returned from an afternoon’s excursion with their father to one of the city’s exchanges, and Osmond was jealous and annoyed, building castles with his blocks. “Never dump shares in a panic. The market is volatile, but we don’t have to be. Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine it’s all happening to somebody else.”
Humphrey has died over a level of property damage he could have paid for out of pocket. And Osmond, who’s never affected calm or detachment for any reason, who in infancy made a habit of knocking down even his most elaborate block structures in a rage, sees no reason to stand—or more accurately, sit still—for it any longer. He punches in the code, unseals the panic-room door, and rolls into the hall.
Osmond has never before been alone in the home he’s occupied since birth. Emptied of waitstaff—chambermaids, footmen, sommelier—the mansion feels not just abandoned but meaningless, a body without a soul. His wheels glide over carpets, rumble across a wood floor, round the corner toward the elevator that mutely offers passage to realms below: Going down? We believe that we love the places where we live, but this is only an illusion. It is never a place we long for, but a time.
The best accelerants aren’t splashed on the floor. They’re released miasmic into the air; Osmond has read enough on the subject to know that much. It isn’t the first time he’s considered cranking up the gas and punching holes in the copper pipes that line the house’s walls, a delicate plumbery of toxin. It is, however, the first time he’s acted on the impulse. The dullness of the premeditative grunt work almost numbs him into boredom: he proceeds first to the boiler room, then to the utility closets one by one, twisting gears and blunting hacksaws until every room is filled with the whistling promise of oblivion. Humphrey believed the mansion would incinerate them all. For once, Osmond will prove his brother right. He lights candelabras and votives, every one a fuse. And then he waits.
The Sky Is Yours Page 28