It begins in the bullet shop. One step at a time.
The bullet shop used to be the Parcel Pickup for the block; the wall behind the counter is a grid of locked letterboxes, each cubby hidden behind a numbered brass door. Ting, ting, ting! Next to the cash register, the slugmonger sits at his anvil, reshaping a bullet with a tiny hammer. In an open toolbox beside him are a series of surgical implements—a speculum, a pair of pliers, needles and thread—that appear designed to remove shrapnel from wounds as painfully and unhygienically as possible.
“Show me where it hurts,” he says amiably, not bothering to remove the loupe from his screwed-up eye. Ting, ting!
“I’m buying, not selling,” Swanny says, breathless. She takes her mother’s sidearm out of her pocketbook and hands it to him. “Do you have any ammunition that would fit one of these?”
The slugmonger jumps down from his forging stool with unaccustomed eagerness: it’s been a while since he’s had a shopper. He’s Swanny’s age, a runt with all hope for growth behind him—why are all the storekeepers so very short? He wears a dickey in place of a shirt and fingerless leather evening gloves, presumably to protect his arms from powder burns.
“Double-action, semiautomatic, top of the line, vintage 301999 AF! Haven’t seen one of these in years. Where’d you get it?” he asks, dropping the magazine into his palm with an eager click.
“It was my mother’s.”
The slugmonger sifts through a ring of keys slowly, thoughtfully—too slowly, too thoughtfully—before finally opening one metallic square in the grid. Number 66.
“I’ve only got two,” he says, loading the gun. He casually levels the weapon at her, looking down the sights. “What’s it worth to you?”
Swanny realizes too late she’s put herself at a lethal disadvantage. She’s armed a stranger with her one necessary possession. “Mr. Sharkey’s good for it.”
The loupe magnifies his scrutiny. “Does he know you’re here?”
“Of course.” Swanny prays it isn’t true; she snuck out while Sharkey was in a meeting with his swillers, the backroom door shut and locked to her. But she can imagine him getting a whiff of her disobedience, following her scent through the criminal maze of lanes and back paths she took to find her way here. How strong are his powers of presentiment? She doesn’t know. She can imagine him finding her anywhere. “We have no secrets from each other. I’m sure you take my meaning.”
Annoyed, the slugmonger hands over the pistol; he’s not a gambling man. “I’ll bill his account.”
“Have a splendid day.”
Back out on the street, in air now tinged with smoke from the next block’s dragonfire, Swanny hurries home with her purchase, glancing around furtively.
When will all of this end?
* * *
“What are you doing there?”
Swanny directs this question to Grub and Morsel, who crouch under the Chaw Shop register, huddled together like stowaways. She clunks her purse, locked and loaded, onto the counter above their heads.
“We came to see you, Your Bareness,” one of them finally says. “But then we heard footsteps and got scared it was Sharkey.”
“Well, you should be scared, very scared indeed. Kindlings aren’t allowed in here, especially not behind the counter.”
“But we was playing Chaw Shop,” pipes up the other.
Swanny finds herself wondering how they’ve survived as long as they have, in this evolutionary killing field of mercurial tempers. “Out you go,” she says, shooing them brusquely. But before they can scrabble out from below, the bells jangle again, and it is Sharkey this time.
Swanny slept in—or rather, tossed and turned sleepless—till past breakfast; it’s the first time all day she’s seen him. His body is an accusation to her, tall-hatted and intact in his finest sharkskin. His smirking lips, his hot cloven hands, send signals to all her guiltiest pleasure centers.
“Hello there,” he says, as if it isn’t her personal responsibility to send him to hell. He glances around. “Who’re you talking to?”
“No one. Myself.” Swanny sashays around the counter to divert him from the twins. “And it’s all your fault, Howie. I’ve been bored to distraction, waiting here for you.”
“Since when? I made coffee, you never came down.” Sharkey reaches for her, curving his hand around her waist; Swanny stiffens. “What’s the matter, your husband ain’t watching.”
“I just have the most awful—toothache.” It’s true: a new molar asserts itself in the back of her upper jaw, in defiance of his prophecy.
Sharkey touches her swollen cheek. “Maybe you need some ice.”
“I’m sure it’ll pass.”
“C’mon, I’ll make something soft for lunch. You want soup?”
She moves as if to follow him, then stalls. “Just let me get my purse.”
“What for? You planning to leave me a tip?”
Swanny thinks of the boys beneath the counter; she didn’t plan on witnesses. But the moment is perfect. Almost effortlessly, she reaches inside the handbag, grasps her mother’s gun, and draws it out, a graceful assassin. But though she has a perfect shot, Sharkey’s back is turned, headed toward the kitchen, and she can’t bring herself to cap him unawares.
“Here’s a message from Pippi Dahlberg,” Swanny says, just as she practiced in her attic bedroom last night. To her relief, he turns. “Eat shit and die.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that her aim would be so poor. The slug barely grazes his shoulder as he lunges, spring-loaded, in her direction, already fully adapted to the sudden change in circumstances. She tries to fire the weapon again, but before she can, he twists it out of her fingers and hurls it across the room. Then he punches her in the stomach. The event strikes Swanny as astonishing, impossible, even as she doubles over—it quite literally takes her breath away. Before she can recover, Sharkey punches her in the face. Her body is full of the most dreadful surprises: she never knew she had so many capillaries before they burst. She recoils, staggering back, and Sharkey knocks her to the floor. She’s so much larger than him, but she isn’t stronger.
“Please,” Swanny whimpers.
“Please? You’re asking me please?”
Sharkey kicks her in the ribs, then grabs her by the shoulders and slams her head into the unyielding floorboards. Above her, the electrolier makes dazzling revolutions in triplicate. Sharkey unholsters his own gun, and she falls down that barrel, that tunnel, that portal, that well, into the negative space.
“Can’t you see, I had to try,” she weeps. “I had to. I owed her that much, at least.”
Sharkey fires.
And fires.
And fires a third time for good measure.
Gunpowder sizzles against Swanny’s cheek and hair. Her brain throbs. She opens her eyes. Sharkey is still standing over her. She turns her head. Right beside her, a cluster of bullet holes bore through the floor. She can see the basement from here.
Sharkey puts his gun back in its holster. His face is tight with malice, but there’s something else in his expression too, something all-too-familiar but so very out of place that it takes her a moment to recognize it: he’s disappointed in her.
“Go to your room,” he says.
* * *
Grub and Morsel like to play pretend. They don’t even have to talk to do it. They just look at each other, and they’re two baby rats in a rat nest. They’re two chicks inside an egg. They’re two dragons in the sky, flying around like gloop, gloop, gloop, we’re gonna breathe some fire. They aren’t even in Torchtown anymore, and they sure aren’t in the Chaw Shop, under the counter, listening to Sharkey’s feet creak on the floorboards as he paces back and forth.
“I knew it,” he fumes. “I knew it. Fuckin mess. She’s done.”
Duluth tells Grub and Morsel fables at bedtime, about monsters under the dead and woofs at the door. The moral of every story is: run away. Or, if you can’t run away, hide and keep your mouth shut. They don’t ne
ed to make a peep to play pretend. They look at each other with big eyes and know.
On the other side of the counter, Sharkey’s footsteps slow down. Stop, even.
“…the fuck was she talking to?” he mutters.
Grub and Morsel can hold their breath for almost a minute, each; they’ve practiced. They’re going to break the record this time.
* * *
Sharkey’s probably the only man in Torchtown with a regular habit of lighting fires. He doesn’t use the fireplace in his den too much, but on a night like tonight, staring into the crackling flames helps him think. Something nice about a fire in a hearth. It’s like a tiger in a cage. It makes Sharkey feel powerful to know that he can starve it if he wants. Or just as easily let it loose.
He’s drinking hooch tonight. It’s a hooch-drunk kind of night. Sharkey drank hooch the night that Jawbone died, so much hooch he passed out. By then, Sharkey’d already killed the guys that done it, so there wasn’t much else left to do. Now, he spits his chaw into the jelly jar and mixes it with his finger, slouched against the sofa cushions. He’s lucky to be alive, but he doesn’t feel lucky. He doesn’t even feel alive.
He should’ve killed her when he had the chance. When he still had his rage. He’ll never bring himself to do it now.
He knew it before they met: she’s going to kill him. And he’s going to let her.
The knock at the door is no surprise. He’s been expecting it for a while. It’s why he left the lock unbolted.
“It’s open.”
Swanny’s got a black eye, and a cut on her cheek, from his pinky ring, probably. It hurts his knuckles to look at it: he sure left his signature on her face. She’s in her nighty, some kind of lace-and-satin devising, nothing like the kid pajamas she had on when he found her. She looks all grown up.
“It feels like home,” she says, timid in the doorway, of the hearth.
“Yeah, it’s cozy.”
“No—I mean, like my home. In Wonland County. Mother always enjoyed a fire on cool nights. Sometimes our housekeeper would roast a rabbit on a spit, which Mother said was barbaric. But there we were, out in the boonies—who would ever know?”
“Your ma’s famous around here. You know that? She killed some friends of mine back during the Siege. Took out almost a whole raiding party. Single-handed. The last guy lost half his leg to her land mines, pogoed out to warn the rest of us at camp. Nothing to do but let him die in the woods. Ten years after, people were still telling stories about her to scare the kindlings. Old Mom with a machine gun; now, that’ll give ya nightmares. Pippi Dahlberg.” He toasts her, sips again from his jar. “You know she spiked a man’s head on her fence.”
“I believe I was in utero at the time.”
“You’re younger than I thought.”
“I suppose we still don’t know each other very well.”
The fire hisses. It’s eating itself alive. Sharkey’ll have to decide whether or not to feed it pretty soon.
“Sit down.”
Swanny obediently pads across the room and alights on the sofa. She warms her hands, peering into the fireplace.
“Good lord, you’re burning books in there.”
“Yeah. I weed out the doubles. And the dictionaries—how many dictionaries does a guy need?”
“I suppose, only a handful.”
“One for formal, one for slang,” he instructs her. “Anything else is a waste of space. You cold?”
“The garret was a bit drafty.”
“Get under the blanket.”
Swanny tucks herself under a corner of the afghan and looks at him diffidently. He takes his time drinking. He lets her stew.
“You made me real mad,” he eventually says. “I never got that mad at somebody and didn’t kill ’em before.”
“Is that a compliment or a threat?” Swanny tries to say it lightly, but her voice quavers.
“I’m trying to say I don’t have much practice apologizing.”
Swanny hesitates, then cautiously, gingerly, rests her head on Sharkey’s shoulder. He strokes her hair. He can feel her trembling.
“I’ll never beat you again,” he tells her. “That was a one-time thing.”
“But Howie?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you still going to kill me?”
“That depends. Are you planning to behave yourself?”
“Yes.”
“No more revenge?”
“No more revenge.”
“All right, then.” Sharkey throws another book on the fire. “Truce.”
They lounge together, achy and damaged. Exhaustion is the dullest drug of all, but it trumps the others—erodes away the contours of even the sharpest highs and lows. Sharkey watches the flames like he did when he was just a kindling, looking for figures in the combustion, guardian emissaries dispatched from the Kingdom of Burn, where everybody winds up in the end. Swanny relaxes into him, and he lets her.
“May I sleep here tonight? Only sleep,” she murmurs, like someone already in a dream.
“What for?”
“I’m frightened.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
“You will?”
“I’ll take care of everything.”
26
DRAGON PRINCE
Paxton Trank never had a son, and he doesn’t have one now. When he watches Ripple pushing the hot-dog cart through Longacre Circle—past the shuttered wax museum, the gutted strip clubs, the hologram house, past surface street vehicles, abandoned forever at the curb—through that vast carnival of neon signs and billboards all gone dark—it isn’t a father’s pride he feels. He’s wondering instead if today’s strategy was the right one, if the time was really ripe to reveal his plan. Ripple reacted the way he hoped at first, but since the park he’s grown strange and distant, as sullen as a mutineer. Trank doesn’t care for the attitude. Still, he bites his tongue.
Much as Trank would like to deny it, he needs Duncan Ripple, or someone like him, someone young and charismatic, someone who can talk to cameras and the public both, someone with that spark that makes a fellow suitable to public life. Trank used to have that spark, but now it’s gone, snuffed out with some part of his soul, under that pile of smoldering rubble in the east Gemini tower. Trank doesn’t miss it. The same piece of him kept him tethered to his men, who betrayed him—to city gov, who limited his powers and deserted his cause and left him to die in his hour of direst need. Trank no longer cares what anyone thinks of him. But when he tames the dragons, he’ll still need to coax people back to Empire Island: investors, renters, tourists. No one will come to a kingdom ruled by a bitter, disfigured has-been. If he’s to govern, his administration will need a spokesman. His city will need a face.
They return to the Fire Museum, and Ripple disappears to shower. Trank removes his Tarnhelm and sits down on a bench in the lobby near the bronze fireman. He takes out his singed and tattered logbook. The answer is in here, he knows—it has to be. He turns the pages, unfolding grids where he’s mapped the shapes of fires. Zigzags and parabolas reshape themselves into N’s and W’s, U’s and C’s. It was in front of Trank’s eyes the whole time, and yet Ripple saw it at a glance. But what does it mean?
Trank has the data. He’s close to the dragons’ secret, to claiming their power, which after all these years of toil in their shadows should at long last be rightfully his. And yet something still eludes him.
“It’s not in Torchtown,” the herpetologist told him that night in the burn ward, his voice a dying croak, a lone assertion in the darkness of Trank’s mind—both of them blind and eyeless, heads bundled in strips of gauze. “It’s not in the Lipgloss Building. We’ve checked the obvious places. The first thing I learned about dragons is that they speak to us in riddles.”
No matter. Trank won’t give up. Flight is not an option, and neither is defeat. The command console won’t heal his face, but it is the only thing that can heal the city, that will justify his life, and for that
reason he believes finding it is inevitable.
It’s then that he senses he’s not alone. “Come out from where you’re hiding,” he advises the lobby. His words echo.
Ripple’s girl slinks out from behind the bronze fireman, stroking that vermin pet of hers. Tonight she’s dressed in a Dalmatian costume from the Fire Museum gift shop, a hooded set of footie pajamas, speckled black on white. It’s a mercy that she changed out of that sweatshirt, which reeked like a barnyard, but it’s almost as unsettling to see her dressed like an animal as stinking like one. She’s a pitiful little thing, Trank’s always thought so, weak like a woman but with none of the feminine graces, and feebleminded to boot. Trank likes a woman who can hold her own but who knows her place. This one does neither.
“I know what you’re planning,” she says now. He knows she has no idea. Yet she seems so certain. The certainty of instinct, ignorance. Female intuition. “It won’t work. He came out of a Toob before. He won’t become your machine.”
Dinnertime. Trank orders a pizza (plain cheese tonight—he’s not about to reward the boy with Gutbuster, and Trank’s stomach can’t handle it again besides). Ripple comes to the cafeteria, but he’s just as silent and hostile as before, if not more so. He rips a slice out of the pie and takes an angry chomp.
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