SIREN BENEATH THE WAVES
* * *
If you forget my name, you will go astray.
—björk
28
MAGIC
This is a story of inheritance—of what parents leave to their children, the curses and the gifts. Of how our families call us home, even when return would mean forsaking everything we have.
* * *
Abby is talking to the city.
When the fire chief zapped her, Abby felt nothing. All sensation left her mortal form, and for a moment, she wondered if this was what happened to Dunk on his wedding day, when he went into the Toob, became of it. Had the invisible bolts translated her from flesh and blood and bone and hair into a creature of pure idea, a pixelated essence immune to touch? She experienced neither pain nor pleasure as she watched her wilted husk flop over Trank’s shoulder, journey lifeless in his arms to the truck-bed mattress, submit limply to the ropes he wrapped around her and knotted at her wrists and ankles. It was only after he shrouded her with the blanket, committing her to darkness, that she returned to her body. There she became aware of the strange new power coursing through her veins.
She is the city at night. The lights flicker on one by one.
The electricity activates each cell, illuminates it. The switches flip in a cascade of awareness, an awakening like none she’s ever known. Abby lies still, but not paralyzed; she wants to receive what is happening to her without feint or deflection. And when the whole of her lifts toward the sky in frozen fireworks, a grand imaginary architecture asserting itself, when she glows and hums, no longer human, it is then that she hears Empire Island speak.
The city’s voice is not like Dunk’s or the Lady’s, made of sounds in the air, or like Hooligan’s or Scavenger’s, made of transmissions to her mind. The city speaks wordlessly, in vibrations she feels all throughout her body. She is tied to it with a million quivering strings. And those strings are electricity: the city’s grid, mapped onto the very core of her. Abby feels the voices of all the machines plugged in. The fridges, bovine and complacent; the Toob screens, raving and hallucinating; the electric blankets and power strips and shameless, dazzling lamps. These machines are not individuals, in the same way as human beings or magic animals; they are a hive, a colony, many making one. And for that reason, even stronger than the voices, Abby feels the city’s wounds. The disconnections. She feels each exploded fuse, as raw and pained as a severed nerve ending. And she knows, beyond a doubt, that the dragons know the hurt they are inflicting on this living thing, broken, beaten, cowering beneath their wings.
But why, why?
The dragons are torturing the city for information.
But why, why?
What does the city know that they don’t?
Abby is at the cusp of that knowledge. Then the lights begin to dim. The electricity pours out the tips of her fingers and toes. For an instant, she is a starburst and then it’s gone. Blackout.
She lies under the blanket, motionless except for muscles twitching again from the ebbing voltage. The mattress is unnaturally soft beneath her. Everything is unnatural.
“The machines are alive, just like you and me,” she whispers, aloud, in the voice she uses for communicating with humans. She’s speaking a foreign language. All her life she has feared the People Machines, feared electricity above all other forces. But electricity is not a tool for evil. It’s not a tool at all. It’s nothing made by man. It’s energy, the soul juice of matter. It’s life itself.
—ID: /?/ - TYPE ABBY?
—Scavenger! I thought you ran away!
—protocol requires observing all violent interactions at a safe, concealed distance.
—You couldn’t have fought him off anyway. Here, nibble at my ropes.
When Ripple pulls the blanket off an hour later, the rat is still nibbling.
“Thank fuck you’re OK.” He fumbles with her bonds, flopping her back and forth as he yanks at them. His red long johns are splattered almost purple in places, chunky-sauced, the fabric starting to stiffen. He smells like salt and fear and rusty iron. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Dunk?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you all bloody?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He frees her wrists. She rubs them, sitting up, as he tackles the ropes around her legs and ankles.
“Is he dead?”
“Wench, what did I just say?”
She picks a glob of brain off of his chest—over his heart—and inspects it. “Dunk?”
“What?”
“Are you really going to kill the dragons next?”
He turns away, tugging at the knots around her ankles. “I have to do something.”
“But do you have to do that?”
Ripple doesn’t answer, doesn’t seem to have heard. She reaches for the top of his head, to trace furrows in his tousled hair, the way that once soothed Hooligan, but he jerks away as if she’s shocked him.
Her longing to connect is sharper than a pain. The lost voltage has left behind an empty space in every cell. The second he gets her loose, Abby scrambles down off the mattress. She makes for the nearest electrical outlet and jabs at it with her fingernails.
“Fem, stop it!” Ripple pulls her away. “Why are you trying to kill yourself?”
“I want to talk to the city!”
Ripple sinks to the floor, buries his face in his hands. “You’re—so—weird!”
She regards him, gore-beslimed and curled in a fetal position at her feet like something born too soon. The first time she saw him, he was damaged too, his arm slashed and dripping, his parachute tangled around him. But he seemed so perfect then, a gift from the universe to her. She lay beside him for hours, staring into his face—ostensibly to make sure he kept breathing and protect herself in case he woke up, but really because the pleasure flowed into her ceaseless and intense as she memorized him, every freckle and clogged pore, every flake of dandruff and rivulet of drool, every eyelash a wish come true. She would never be alone again, now that he had come. And for a while she wasn’t. But in the days and weeks that have passed since she followed him home to the mansion, she has felt more alien than she ever did when she believed herself to be the last of her kind.
The last of her kind. Maybe she really is. Maybe she doesn’t belong in Dunk’s world after all.
—i have not yet made my final determination. but your willingness to place another’s safety above your own supports my hypothesis that you pose no threat.
Scavenger is perched on the edge of the mattress, picking rope fibers out from between his tiny teeth. Abby steps around Ripple and scoops up the rodent.
—Thanks, Scavenger. You’re sweet.
—i am perceptive.
“I guess I should take a shower,” Ripple utters from the floor. He heaves himself up to his feet and looks at her. “I wish I understood you, you know? I wish I knew what you’re thinking.”
“I wish that too,” says Abby, half to him, half to the rat in her hand. But as Ripple makes his way to the bathroom, it’s Scavenger who answers her:
—he never will. he is a control.
* * *
Ripple has never figured out why the Fire Museum contains a baroquely decorated bathhouse, or why there’s an additional admission turnstile outside of it, saying 18 & UP, ONLY next to a solid-gold men’s room sign, upon which the masculine silhouette wears a tiny fireman helmet of rubies. The entrance is right there on the first floor, just past the coat check: they must have steered the kids away from it on his class trip. Was it open the same hours as the rest of the museum, or did they reserve it for galas? And…was it some kind of sex club? It’s a labyrinth of gleaming tile, with pirate-ship wheels for knobs to the various faucets, including a bunch of hydrotherapy massage and other hose extensions. Neatly stacked white towels wait in baskets everywhere. Ripple’s been showering here for a month and a half, and he still hasn’t run out.
He stands
under the pulsating showerhead—the water pressure is amazing—and tries to feel every drop of Trank’s blood, down to the molecular level, powerwash off his skin. It didn’t really happen, he tells himself. Nobody filmed it.
But try telling that to the Metropolitan Police Department. They graded his worksheets; they issued him his Junior Special Officer badge. Although he hasn’t met any of them in person, he’s going to be their number-one suspect, when and if they dispatch somebody over to the museum to check on their independent extinguishment contractor.
As bad as he feels right now, Ripple has never understood the villains in movies who feel compelled to confess. He’s never gotten the point. “Pro,” he’s wanted to say when various content purveyors have presented him with this scenario, “your pregnant wife is already dead. You know that, you hid the sledgehammer yourself. No amount of time you spend eating baloney bones in jail is going to bring her back.” Wanting to be punished only makes sense to Ripple in relation to the “Dungeon Master” folder in his porno collection. And that goes double now that he’s in this situation himself. More than anything else that’s happened in his adventures, the idea that he killed somebody—self-defense, self-defense, but the word is still “kill”—and might be brought to account for it makes him want to go running home to Mommy.
Except, his parents are dead.
Ripple tries to masturbate, since that usually makes him feel better, but um. Not the right moment apparently. So he gives in to the other vice he learned to indulge under the fluid- and sound-masking deluge of his private shower back at underschool. He lets himself cry. It’s such a relief, he wonders why he doesn’t do it all the time. I’ll cry forever, he promises himself, I never have to stop, and when it occurs to him how depressing that thought is, it just makes him cry even harder.
Trank: an exploded blender of meaty pulp. Multiple puddles, at least one with a finger floating in it. Ripple can’t bury the body. It’s everywhere. It’s all over him.
Ripple stands under the water for a long time, letting the steam rise, letting his fingerprints prune and his ears slosh. He stays there until he feels human again. He’s almost ready to turn off the spray when Abby enters to join him.
“You’re totally naked,” Ripple observes.
Abby turns around under the water till her hair hangs in wet strings over her eyes. “I’m naked for you,” she says.
This is new. Abby doesn’t usually initiate sex, not so directly, unless you count climbing on top of him, which is pretty much her go-to move in nonsexual situations too. Ripple touches her boob experimentally. He isn’t exactly in the mood, but it’s definitely better than stroking off. At least according to his cock.
“All right,” he says.
Fucking in the shower is a logistical nightmare. Every surface involved is slick and slippery, the tile as unforgiving as ice. Ripple presses Abby against the wall, barely inside her, trying to lift her up, to get a foothold, to keep his face out of the shower’s spray.
“Is this OK?”
“Uh-huh!” She’s smiling at him, kind of intensely—like there’s something she knows that he doesn’t, something right behind him, just over his shoulder. He resists the urge to turn around, instead nuzzles his face into her neck, shuts his eyes. I’m inside her, he reminds himself, yet the thought—once so potent he forbid himself to think it till he was about to come anyway—doesn’t send him rocketing toward climax. Instead, he sees the inside of the Witch Church again, not on fire but this time alive, the hammer-beam trusses replaced with rib bones, the walls pink, yielding flesh, breathing in and out…a chest cavity so big he could make a whole life inside it without ever attracting the creature’s notice or attention…except he has, it knows he’s here, and what’s worse, it wants him to stay….
You are not the one.
Ripple opens his eyes again, sees the comforting spiral of Abby’s ear, illuminated brilliantly under the ceiling of electric white.
“It’s you,” he reassures himself, “it’s just you, you’re Abby, you’re my girl.”
“Listen,” Abby says, and the lights of the bathhouse gleam still brighter, until all at once they burst and the entire space plunges into darkness.
“What the snuff?!”
“Oops,” says Abby. “I’m sorry!”
“Why are you sorry?” Ripple is no longer inside of anything. He cranks off the shower, feels around for his towel. Thankfully he’s wearing flip-flops. The sole of one crunches on some lightbulb glass. “We must have blown a fuse.” Unless Kelvin’s prediction is finally coming true. Water and power are probably next.
“No, it was me.”
“What?”
“I told you. The electricity woke me up. I can talk to the city. I was trying to send you a message, but only the lightbulbs heard.”
“I know you got tased, but it’s not demonic possession, OK? You can’t explode lightbulbs with your mind.”
“It wasn’t my mind. It was my heart. I wanted you to know you’re in my heart.”
Is insanity sexually transmitted? Ripple can’t continue this conversation. He gropes his way through the dark showers, toward the room with sinks, where the lights are still intact.
“Dunk? Dunk, where are you going?” Abby follows behind him, deft and unhesitating: what, does she have night vision now?
“Fem, I’m in a bad place. I need you to stop making things up.”
“But I’m not.” She looks at his electric razor, plugged into the wall below the mirrors. It buzzes to life. “See?”
No way. No way. No. Ripple grabs the razor, yanks it out of the wall, hurls it to the tile floor. Its plastic carapace cracks, but it doesn’t turn off. It still buzzes, vibrating and shimmying, blades oscillating. “Turn it off. Turn it off!” Ripple yells. “Make it die!”
She looks very sad. The razor stills.
“I love you,” she says.
* * *
The first time Abby visited the Ripple mansion, she flew. Returning by land, she feels the gravity with every step she takes. She never knew her own slight body could weigh so heavy on her. She wishes she could leave it behind somewhere, to “wander lonely as a cloud,” like somebody on the Toob said during a feminine hygiene advertisement. On the Island, she spent whole days scrabbling over the dunes. But she always lay down in the shade of a tire tower, or curled into a cradling nest of junked upholstery foam, before exhaustion truly claimed her. On this march, though, they take no breaks. Her feet, as callused as they are, chafe on the endless asphalt. Her knees quake in the shadows of the dragons who pass overhead from time to time, the size of bad weather, blocking out the warmthless sun. Ripple doesn’t pause. Abby knows that if she stopped, he wouldn’t stop with her. He’d sling her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, or worse, leave her behind.
“It doesn’t matter that you killed him,” she tells Dunk, whose hand feels dead and untender in hers. The sky is fluorescent white and sunless. Soot and garbage swirl in the howling wind, in the canyon formed by skyscrapers. The chill bites at their skin. “He would have died anyway. Everything dies. The Lady used to say that the People Machines want to be the only people on the face of this Earth. But they just want to survive. Everything wants to survive, but nothing does. It’s sad but it’s OK. As long as something survives, it’s OK.”
“Uh, yeah.” Ripple points to the next intersection. Her words don’t seem to comfort him at all. “Time for us to hang a right.”
Ripple uses a tourist map from the old admissions counter to guide them. He wears his ladderman’s uniform. His civilian garb was ruined forever in that first fire. This is all he has now. Abby wears her Dalmatian suit from the gift shop. She remembers swimming naked in Nereid Bay, which she knew then only as the water—the water, inviolable, constant, ever-changing, meeting the air in a skin of ripples. Abby came from the water up into the air, and one day she would return to the water. She knew that then. She knows it better now.
“Why are we going to the house if it�
��s burned?”
“Because we’ve got to see for ourselves, OK? Because it’s my home.”
For miles, they encounter no one amid the hollow buildings, but as they move northward, Abby glimpses wet laundry on a clothesline, eyes peeking out through chinks in a boarded-up window, human urine staining a wall—she can tell it by the smell. They’re getting farther from the dragons’ dominion, farther from the city’s pain. When they edge off the grid, first onto an exit ramp, then onto the Lionel Roswell Expressway, and then down, down, down, into the tunnel that runs under the river separating Empire from the Heights above, Abby feels an unexpected calm. The city’s distress thrums in her on a molecular level. She doesn’t know it’s there until it’s gone.
“I wish I had a match or something,” Ripple says, his first words in hours. “I can’t see shit.”
“Why would you want to see that?”
—put me down. i will utilize night-vision sensors.
—We might step on you!
—you will not.
Uncertainly, Abby reaches into her pocket and takes out Scavenger, where he’s been riding quietly. His white fur shimmers, the only visible object in the tunnel’s gloom.
Ripple blinks. “Your rat glows in the dark?”
She shrugs. “He’s magic.”
The muscles in Ripple’s jaw clench and unclench. Abby doesn’t have to read his mind to know he’s holding in a scream. But why? Scavenger is unnatural, but everything is unnatural. “You’re full of surprises today.”
They follow Scavenger through the dark, a rodentine will-o’-the-wisp, a beacon guiding them onward. The tunnel is long, longer than Abby could have possibly imagined. She thinks back to the night they ran away, the underground zone that funneled them toward Leather Lungs. Who will be waiting for them after their next rebirth? As they near the dusk coagulating at the passage’s far end, Abby hears an unmistakable rumble. Thunder.
The Sky Is Yours Page 38