“I wanna see your teeth first.”
“Why? Don’t you trust me?”
“I wanna take another look.”
Swanny perches beside him on the edge of the seat. Gingerly, with one finger, she pulls the corner of her lip back. “Satisfied?”
“Open your mouth.”
She does, and Sharkey cups her chin in his hand, swivels her head slightly from side to side.
“That’s what I thought,” he says. “There are too many. When were you gonna tell me why?”
Swanny turns away, aghast. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. You’ve got that teeth disease. That mutation. From seepage in the Wonland wells.”
“How did you find out?”
“I’ve been doing some reading up on the subject. How come you didn’t tell me? I thought we were friends.”
“Because it’s fatal.”
“Not always.”
“Really?”
“Sometimes something else kills you first. That’s what I read.”
“How long do people live?”
“All kinds of time.”
Swanny thinks of his premonitions. He knows where the fires will be. He knew how to find her, among the endless vacant corridors of the abandoned city: I had a dream I was gonna meet somebody like you today. He saved her life, just down the street. Surely, he’s privy to some classified knowledge. When she asks her next question, it’s in a tone of utmost urgency. “How long will I live, Howie?”
He doesn’t hesitate: “Years.”
Falling into his arms is like succumbing to the aching pull of sleep, a sweet ocean of welcoming dark that rises up to meet her. His mouth is on her mouth, his tongue is in her throat, but there’s no need to breathe, no need to resurface; she is an animal made to dwell in the crashing of this tide. It’s only when he begins to slide his hand up between her thighs that with some difficulty, she partially extricates herself.
“I am married, you know,” she says. One of her suede pumps has fallen to the floor.
“You don’t seem to miss him much,” Sharkey observes, relocating his hand to her knee. She’s still sitting on his lap.
“How could you know what lurks in a woman’s heart?”
“I’ve got some idea.” Sharkey daubs at her smudged lips with his thumb; she can almost taste the spice of his skin. “Don’t pretend. It ain’t convincing.”
“I just need some time, Howie. Time to heal.” She reflects on the luxury of the phrase. You’ll have time, isn’t that what her mother said? At last she’s able to believe it. What a relief from the pressure that’s been upon her these last weeks—what a release. “He mistreated me terribly, you know.”
“Yeah.” Sharkey smirks. “He threw you to the wolves.”
“At any rate,” Swanny says, smoothing her mussed hair, “shall we get down to business?”
“What? You mean the guns?”
They disentangle, and Sharkey scales a stepladder in the bedroom closet. He returns with a large cardboard box. “Remember, it’s another two weeks before you get your ammo, though.”
Swanny rolls her eyes; it’s absurd he’s being such a stickler after everything else that’s passed between them. She sets the cardboard box on the cushion next to her and unseals the flaps.
“I don’t know how I’m ever going to choose one,” she warns him, “I’m an utter naïf about these things.”
Inside, the muzzles and triggers are crammed together. A pirate’s blunderbuss. A vaquero’s six-shooter. A dueling flintlock, inlaid with curlicues of gold. A tommy gun. Swanny lays them out on the rug one by one. Museum pieces, all. An antique gun collection. Deep inside her something twists: the knowledge that comes before knowledge. The feeling she had as a child, looking into that rabbit’s fanged insides.
“I could teach you,” Sharkey is saying. “Pop some bottles in the alley. Pop some rats.”
But Swanny isn’t listening to him. She’s looking at the double-action semiautomatic that she’s holding. As nonchalantly as she’s able, she turns it over in her trembling hand. The monogram is right where she remembers, emblazoned on the grip.
PFD.
Penelope Frederica Dahlberg.
Pretty Fucking Dead.
* * *
That night, Swanny and Sharkey supper together, as usual, in the parlor, at the long conference table where he has his meetings. Tonight’s meal is veal kidneys, sourced—Swanny guesses now—from some distant, plundered charcuterie or violated Frigidaire before finding its way to an ice-packed Styrofoam cooler in Sharkey’s larder. Dining on the organs feels a bit like chewing a loved one’s viscera, though Swanny forces herself to eat as much as she can. She mustn’t arouse his suspicion. She must keep up her strength.
“I finished that book,” says Sharkey.
“Which one?” Swanny asks. She’s never noticed before how many dents and spackled patches mar this room’s paint job. What kinds of interactions perforated these walls?
“That one you kept going on about. Canfield Manor.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Funny thing is, when it started off I thought it was gonna be a romance. But it’s actually more like a horror story.”
“How so?”
“After they kill Bertrand in the war, Etta’s a young widow. She’s desperate. And the colonel’s conveniently there. He’s been there this whole time. He even says something like, ‘I was waiting.’ ‘I was waiting.’ Kind of a funny thing to say to a woman whose husband just got rubbed out. It got me wondering if maybe he had something to do with it.”
“With what?” Swanny traces her finger along a crimson groove in the table. The surface of the wood is rough and scarred, its finish hacked away in spots. They’re sitting at an enormous cutting board.
“With what happened to Bertrand. Officers weren’t usually down on the battlefield, were they? Unless somebody put them there.”
“That’s an interesting analysis, Howie.”
“And the end, with their wedding night, Etta and the colonel, there’s no talking, no nothing. Just, ‘She surrendered herself to him utterly.’ Kind of a funny turn of phrase. ‘Surrendered.’ Kind of violent.” He scrapes a gold toothpick between his teeth. “I dunno, just my two cents.” He glances at her cup. “You’re not drinking your tea.”
“I may go out later.” She feels as though she might cry. “My investigation…”
Sharkey spits. “Suit yourself.”
23
SOURCE UNKNOWN
Abby walks through the Fire Museum alone in the middle of the day, barefoot, in Ripple’s old sweatshirt, still. It’s gone unwashed so long it no longer smells of anyone but her.
Here in the Fire Museum, everything is trapped, pinned and posed, displayed in locked showcases or behind velvet ropes. Nothing lives or dies or changes. The only place that Abby likes is the Hall of Natural Disasters. She pretends the dioramas are landscapes she could step into without any effort at all. She doesn’t understand why droughts and forest fires are natural if dragons aren’t…but in this space her mind calms.
She likes the volcano diorama best. It shows an island like her Island, not like Empire Island. There are no cities. There are no ruins. The only sign of man is a single straw hut, its stilts perched on the slope. A place apart. But this place is even more beautiful than her Island: the shore is made of glass ground so fine she imagines it would be soft beneath her feet. The water is the color of antifreeze. Red pigeons and blue vultures circle through the pink painted clouds. Paths twist amid green shadows, and strange creatures with dog hands and old men’s faces clamber up the plants.
In the center of it all is the volcano, bursting into the sky. Fire from below. Abby imagines Dunk saving her from it. She imagines clinging to him, her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, as he runs through the green leaves down toward the beach. In real life, she can run faster than he can, so in her imagination, she’s wounded in some small way, sliced
by debris like he was when she found him floating in the bay. She wouldn’t mind him endangering himself if he did it for her; that’s the only reason she can accept. After all, she would die for him.
The fire-from-below is beautiful, not like the fires she knows. It showers through the sky like rain and pours down the sides of the volcano in rivers. What if Dunk couldn’t run fast enough? What if that flowing mass of orange gold overtook them, and they fell into it? The fire-from-below would be hot and sweet and sticky—it would coat their bodies and pull them inside. Rather than burning, it would melt her and Dunk completely, and then they would become part of it, feeling everything it touched, feeling every part of each other, their love a single substance reaching from the island’s edge to the lip of the volcano and down its throat into the ground. When they cooled, they would be the island, and someday new feet would walk upon them, and new flowers would bloom upon them, until there were no feet and no flowers and no ocean lapping at their shore, and even then, they would be together, a single mass, until they wore away to dust.
She is living in the wrong disaster.
Abby is so lost in her daydream, it takes her a long time to notice that something is different about the volcano diorama today. She gazes into it more carefully. The miniature HowDouse, lofted by wires up at the very top of the exhibit, swings slightly left and right. It is off balance.
It has a passenger.
A rat with eyes like blood drops.
But the white rat isn’t only there, in the diorama, behind the glass.
Abby has a passenger too.
It is very odd to feel an intruder creeping through your mind, sniffing and nibbling at what he finds there. Abby’s brain is a maze, and the rat sneaks through it, nimbly and with a strong sense of direction. He noses through the fantasy she just had, digs around in her memories of breakfast, then scampers toward her dreams from last night. Before he can snoop through those, Abby tries to shift the parameters, to corner him, but he’s too deft to trap. As the floor of her mind tilts beneath him and her perception shines a beam to catch him, he wriggles his way into a gap in her awareness too small for her consciousness to fit into. She senses him in there, slinking along on the undersides of her ideas and feelings, whiskering his way through the dark of her.
Is this what it’s like to be decrypted? She feels something like sympathy for the BeanReader she infiltrated.
—Who are you, and what are you doing in my head?!
The rat stops dead, a small weight detectable in his sudden stillness. He thinks she still might not notice him. He thinks it’s impossible that she’s onto him already.
—Get out!
It feels like sneezing, like coughing out a throat-lodged fish bone, like vomiting up that pizza the first night here in the Fire Museum. Abby’s body has powers she knows nothing about, and one of these is the power to expel. The rat’s psychic avatar flies from her mind and back into his own verminal skull with such force that he falls from the miniature HowDouse onto the volcano, where he rolls down the slope in an avalanche of foam-flake-and-wire trees.
—ABORT MISSION. EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ENACTED.
The rat skitters across the plastic ocean and squeezes into a little hole in the diorama’s far corner.
“Hey! Hey, stop!”
Abby can no longer see the rat, but she hears him behind the wall: scrabble scrabble, scrabble scrabble. She chases the sound, past the other disasters and out into the corridor that connects the halls. The rat runs out of the baseboard and hightails it down the tiles.
—Come back here!
The rat glances over his shoulder at this telepathic exhortation, but he patters on, down the corridor, down the grand stairs into the lobby, past the bronze fireman and the ticket booths, toward the basement cafeteria. Abby loses sight of him down amid the tables and chairs.
—Come back…!
But he’s gone; it’s like he was never there. He’s gone.
Years of solving her own problems on the Island should have prepared Abby for a setback like this; it’s been a long time since she wept in pure frustration. But that’s what she does today. She wanders into the cafeteria’s kitchen and sits down on the floor with her back against the refrigerator, her knees pulled up to her chest. The box of ice and wires thrums electric against her back. There was a time when she would have recoiled from the sensation, but right now, it’s the only warmth she knows. What is she becoming? She’s mad at the rat for entering her mind without permission. She has never been the subject of such an intrusion before. But she’s even madder at herself for letting him escape before she found out how he was able to do that. He holds some key to her that she didn’t know existed. He knows something. About her.
And for the first time in her life, it isn’t some unknown Other that she longs for most. It isn’t even Dunk. It’s knowledge of her own true self.
Snap!
—gnaw off, leave on. 50% pro-con ratio. CANNOT COMPUTE. gnaw off, leave on. gnaw off, leave on. gnaw off, leave on. SYSTEM FAILURE. RESTART. gnaw off, leave on. 50% pro-con ratio…
It’s coming from behind the stove. Abby climbs onto the counter and peers down into the gap between the back of the oven and the wall. At the bottom is the white rat. His tail is stuck in a mousetrap. He stares up at her, red eyes blinking.
—There you are.
When the rat replies, he sounds less robotic. Squeakier.
—you will eat me.
—No. I never eat magic animals. Wait here.
Abby slides back down to the floor and pads over to the utility closet. When she returns, she’s holding a length of twine. She dangles it over the back of the oven.
—Grab on to the knot I tied. Use your front paws.
The rat tentatively takes hold, and she reels him up onto the countertop. It reminds her of catching fish, although sometimes she used to catch trash rats too. She pries up the snapped-down hammer of the mousetrap and the lab rat yanks his tail free. There’s a bloody indentation in the snaky pink flesh, but he doesn’t seem to have broken any bones.
—thank you, goodbye.
Abby grabs him around the middle before he can escape. His little legs paddle uselessly in midair.
—ABORT. ABORT.
—Where did you come from? What are you doing here? Why were you inside my head?
The rat twists around, trying to nip her fingers, but she doesn’t loosen her grip.
—Don’t bother peeing on me either. I won’t let go.
—ACCESS DENIED. FORBIDDEN. FORBIDDEN.
Forbidden. Just like the data in her Bean.
—Who are you?
—LOG IN TO CONTINUE.
Abby opens a cabinet with her free hand. Pots and pans clatter until she finds the colander Trank uses to make pasta.
—you will eat me!
Abby tosses the rat on the counter and slams the colander upside-down over him, containing him in an aluminum prison dome. She weighs down the top of it with an industrial-sized can of peas.
—ERROR. cookware detected.
—Calm down! I just want you to answer my questions.
The rat hesitates.
—state source designation.
—I’m Abby. I’m a human.
—but you speak lab rat.
—This is the language of all magic creatures.
—INCORRECT. this is our proprietary code.
—“Our”? Who’s “our”?
—…the colony.
—So there are more of you? More lab rats?
—also some controls.
—Where is your colony? Did the others send you here? Were you looking for me?
—FORBIDDEN. FORBIDDEN. ACCESS DENIED.
—Can you at least tell me who you are?
The rat calculates the question’s permissibility before answering.
—i am GEN 103 ID: 4923801—TYPE SCAVENGER. my role is information retrieval.
—Why were you retrieving it from me?
—FORBIDDEN.
—You can’t try to steal my thoughts and not even tell me why!
—INCORRECT. i am FORBIDDEN to disclose data to unknown sources, especially human sources, when data could compromise the colony’s security or mission. even the threat of termination cannot override this directive.
—You’ll die before you tell me?
—CORRECT.
—Why?
—85 GENS ago, humans destroyed our colony. 73% of our kind were stomped underfoot. also some controls. we do not disclose data to unknown human sources.
Abby frowns.
—I don’t want to hurt you or your colony. I just want to know what you were looking for. Why you were looking in me.
—state the purpose of your query.
—I don’t know who I am. Or where I came from.
The rat pauses for a long moment, computing.
—GEN 103 is the first generation in 85 GENS to return to the colony’s original location. we too seek to reconstruct a timeline of our history and origins.
—What does that have to do with me?
—UNDETERMINED. maybe nothing.
Abby musters up her determination. She’ll come back and find Dunk later. She has to do this, even if she has to do it alone.
—Take me to your colony. Right now.
—FORBIDDEN.
This is getting her nowhere. Abby feels drained. She never had lunch today. She ignores the rat as she gets a jar of peanut butter out of one of the cupboards and starts eating it with her fingers. Back on her Island, a jar like this would have been a real find, a treat that she saved for the coldest time of winter when ice floes dotted the waves and the fish could not be lured. Today she can barely taste it. It’s no longer enough just to sustain herself, to cling to life and scrape the surface of the world. She wants to belong.
—ID: /?/ - TYPE ABBY?
—I’m not going to let you out, Scavenger.
—i propose a mutually acceptable solution.
—What?
—communication with known sources does not compromise the colony’s security and mission. you will become a known source. then i will bring you to the colony for a reciprocal information exchange.
The Sky Is Yours Page 31