The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  That’s God saying we can’t be found.

  Ripple flips up the hood of his slicker and steps unceremoniously into the drizzle. Abby does the same with her Dalmatian suit; the ears flop around her face. She scoops up Scavenger, already wet from a puddle, and follows Ripple up the steep incline toward the house’s gates.

  The mansion is a shipwreck dragged to higher ground. Abby can see that even before Ripple applies his digit, then his fist, to the slashed and mangled fingerprint-recognition lockpad. As partly unhinged gates shriek inward, Abby and Ripple follow the circle drive around toward the hole where the entry hall once gleamed like a spacecraft. It gapes now like a fatal hull breach.

  The lobby is all char and shards. In the fountain, the colossus stands headless and dismembered, his severed arm—still clutching the trident—in pieces at his feet. Farther in, past the grand stairway and elevator, the burnt-out structure has fallen under its own weight in places. In others, rain leaks through, pouring into roof holes, sluicing down between the scorched and jagged floors. A sooty chandelier glistens darkly on the ground like a beached jellyfish. Carpets bristle like urchins, spiny with shards of glass.

  The house is just a rift for water to pass through. No amount of bailing can keep it at bay.

  “Sorry,” Abby whispers, touching Ripple’s slicker with one tentative hand. He flinches. She can’t rescue him from this. He never learned to swim. Now he’s going to drown.

  Abby wanders alone toward the back of the mansion. The Hall of Ancestors is a crud grotto of blackened frames and canvases already mildewed from exposure. Abby picks up the portrait of Ripple, lying facedown on the spongy rug, and leans it against the wall. The oil paint is heat-blistered, sullied with ash, washed out from the damp. Wanderer Beneath the Sea of Smog.

  —came back came back you came back!

  Abby doesn’t have time to look up before the animal tackles her, pinning her to the ground and assaulting her face and hands with eager slurps.

  —Hooli! I thought you were dead!

  —waited and waited and waited and waited and you came back!

  His whole body squirms and wriggles, carpeted joy alive to her touch. They hug.

  —love! love! love!

  —I love you too!

  —ERROR. predator detected.

  —Oh! Scavenger.

  Abby sits up and pulls the lab rat out of her pocket. He smooths his fur furiously, disheveled from the encounter.

  —Let me introduce you. Scavenger, Hooli. Hooli, Scavenger.

  Hooligan waggles, sniffs the rat all over. Scavenger cowers.

  —magic rat. play now.

  Before he can pounce, Abby sternly pulls him back by the collar.

  —Play gentle. You don’t want him to end up like Magic Bird.

  —EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ENACTED.

  Scavenger darts away, squeezes through a gap in what’s left of the wainscoting, and disappears.

  —rat gone. sad now.

  —Don’t worry, he’ll come back. Come on, let’s find Dunk! He’ll be so glad to see you.

  As she and Hooligan meander through the Ripples’ disintegrating interiors, Abby thinks back to the circumstances of their parting.

  —Where’s Swanny?

  —left me. got in a street machine with a smelly man.

  —What kind of smell?

  —yucky. scary. bad dream. death.

  Dunk appears around a corner, as stiff-limbed and shambling as a walking corpse.

  “Look who I found!”

  Hooligan makes the hang loose sign and tries to high-five his old buddy, but Ripple doesn’t even smile.

  “He’s the only one?”

  Hooligan circles around Ripple, nudging his head under Ripple’s hand.

  —love! love! love?

  “He came all the way back by himself. He’s been waiting for us.”

  —love? love? why no love?

  “Uncle Osmond?” Ripple calls, turning away from them. “Anybody?”

  —sad. sad. nobody home.

  —Are you sure?

  —show you.

  Hooligan bounds across the room. Near a staircase to nowhere that cranes hopelessly up into a second-floor chasm, he digs in the rubble, dislodging a mound of crumbled, smoke-stained plaster and melted insulation. He recovers a sticklike object, which he holds in his useful mouth as he returns on all fours to drop it at Abby’s feet. It reminds her of the Lady. It is a human femur, charred meatless.

  —it’s the big one. but his bones don’t speak.

  “Huh?” Ripple’s eyes widen. “Is that…” Without warning, he kicks Hooligan in the ribs. “Bad! Bad! Bad dog!”

  —sorry sorrrrry sorrrrrrry.

  “Stop it, you’re hurting him! He’s just trying to show you.”

  “Show me what? That he can treat my dad’s leg like a pizzle stick?”

  “He wants you to know what happened.”

  “He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t know anything. He’s just a dog! And that rat—is just a rat! And you—it’s like you’re not even human. I mean—I mean—what the snuff, Abby? Who are you? When I took you back to civilization, I thought—I thought you’d catch on, start acting normal, you know? But—superpowers—and telling me it’s OK to murder people—and—and—you just get weirder all the time! I thought Swanny was scary—but this—I can’t handle this!”

  His face is still so beautiful. That human face.

  “Everything dies,” she whispers. “But it’s OK. Something survived. Love.”

  She reaches for him, but he shakes her off.

  “You just don’t get it, do you? I need somebody to talk to. I need my family.”

  When Abby was just a girl, when she still played in the shallows and drank with the Lady from the small pink cup, when she was the simplest possible version of herself, she dreamt always of a friend—another child, a small grubby person unconcerned with the alchemy of food hygiene or the workings of the Lord, a playmate, a fellow architect of trash castles built to withstand the pummeling of the tides. She tries to conjure this figment now, to coax him into concrete detail.

  The first inspiration for him, she realizes, was her own reflection.

  “We’re your family. Hooli and me.”

  “Go away and leave me alone,” he says.

  * * *

  It is still raining when Abby leaves the Ripple mansion for the second and final time. It is raining outside, and inside of Abby’s heart. She walks back down the sloping drive, listening with her mind, but although Hooligan follows at her heels with Scavenger riding on his back, the magic animals do not speak to her. They don’t know what to say. Neither does she. But before they enter the tunnel at the bottom of the hill, she addresses the dog.

  —Hooli, you can go home. Stay with Dunk.

  —stay with you.

  —But he’s all alone.

  —stay with you. keep you safe. love.

  —You loved him first.

  —love you more.

  Abby can’t answer that, can’t reject it. She doesn’t want to. At least someone loves her most of all.

  The tunnel yawns, as dark as the inside of Abby’s eyelids closed in the dead of night. But this time, she isn’t afraid. Even if something is waiting for her in that blackness, she can’t hurt more than she hurts already.

  She will always be alone.

  Abby thinks of her life on the Island before Dunk came. She thinks of the few, pleading fish that she tossed back out of her nets into the waves, and of the day she first met Cuyahoga pecking out the brains of a desiccated gull—the joy and relief she felt at finding other creatures capable of communication. But she learned then what she still knows now: an animal will never fully understand her. It isn’t their fault. They just can’t. No matter how many times Abby grinned or laughed at one of the vulture’s wry remarks, no matter how many dead mice or limp minnows she tossed into that beaky craw, Cuyahoga never gave her a smile in return. For that, Abby had to turn back to the t
eeth left in the Lady’s skull.

  Yet, when Abby finally met Dunk, a creature with a body like hers—a human—there was still a link missing. They weren’t made of the same stuff.

  —Hooli? Do I smell like other humans you’ve known?

  —every human different.

  —But is there anything special about me?

  —nice smell. good smell. familiar.

  —Familiar how?

  —magic i guess.

  Abby thinks this over as they exit the tunnel. Magic. Some animals can speak; most can’t. And she’s the only person she’s ever met who’s able to hear the magic ones’ voices. Even the Lady never could.

  But where does the magic come from?

  The rain shower stops abruptly, but instead of light breaking through the clouds, a shadow envelops them. Abby stops in her tracks and looks up. The yellow dragon is gliding overhead, its batlike wing flap a vast umbrella. Hooligan whimpers till it passes.

  “Electricity. It’s the juice they feed on,” the Lady once told her, speaking of the People Machines. “It’s what they used to build the dragons.”

  Abby knows it can’t be true. No one built the dragons. The dragons are alive. But so is the city, and someone built that for sure. What if the People Machines can build living things? What if they did build the dragons?

  —Scavenger, I know why you came to find me. I know why you were inside my mind.

  —proceed.

  —It’s because we came from the same place. Because we were made by the same…people.

  —i can neither confirm nor deny your theory.

  —You’ve known me long enough to tell me the truth.

  —cannot confirm. i did not complete my cortical search.

  —But that’s what you were looking for, isn’t it? Proof. That we’re related. That I’m part of the colony’s history somehow. Stop keeping secrets. You know I’m not a threat.

  —reconfiguring privacy settings.

  Scavenger hops down to the pavement and pauses for a long moment, his fuzzy brow furrowed, his pink ears twitching in concentration. Abby stops walking and stares down at him. Hooligan tilts his head in confusion. The dragon has passed. Dog fur drips in the rain.

  —your supposition is CORRECT. 91% of present colony members hypothesized a connection between the colony’s history and your own when you called.

  Abby remembers her finger in the dialer’s faceplate, the receiver at her ear. The squeaking on the other end.

  —Your number was in my Bean?

  —i was tasked with locating the source of that call and gathering conclusive data.

  —Is Hooli one of us too? Is that why he speaks our language?

  Hooligan tries to sniff Scavenger’s butt. Scavenger climbs back on top of his head, holding wet tufts of apehound pelt in his naked shriveled paws.

  —the apehound is a recalled commercial product. we are experimental biospecimens. at least, i am.

  Abby looks from the rat’s paw to her own hand. The intricate whorls of her palm. It’s all she’s ever known. She hasn’t known it at all.

  —Why did the Lady bring me to the Island? Why would she want to protect me from People Machines if I am a People Machine?

  —maybe she was not protecting you. maybe she was protecting others from you.

  —But you said I posed no threat.

  —not to us.

  —Then take me to the colony, Scavenger.

  29

  FERRYMAN TO THE UNDERWORLD

  Like our now-defunct system of trains, the sewer gondolas are aged, filthy, and underground. Unlike the train system, they tend to keep a strict schedule and the berths are never crowded. You might imagine them a lovers’ form of transport, but the creaking of an ancient hull in sludgy, waist-deep flushwater tends to rob a journey of romance.

  Most passengers hire the shitboats because they fear fireballs roaring down onto the surface streets, but have an unmet need so urgent that they cannot eschew the city just yet. Mongers, thieves, the delusional bereaved—in his new vocation as a gondolier, Osmond Ripple is only too happy to oblige them all. Rowing his humble craft, a onetime maintenance skiff with a rusted motor, or pulling it along the slimy pipe walls with a handy long-necked plunger, he tells tales of the various ills of the city and how they’ve affected him personally.

  Osmond transports his passengers through the northmost territory of sewer only; his route stretches from upper Empire to the middle of the Heights. So when he collects a fare headed northward, they’re almost home free, far from the torchies and drake fires, halfway to Upstate and the siren kumbaya of the endtimes lumberjacks. But sometimes, they want to go the other way. Downtown. He takes them as far as he can, then hands them off to the next oarsman in the chain and watches them recede, southbound, into the darkness—heedless souls returning to the city, for profit or revenge or occasionally disappointment, searching through those cinders for someone they loved and lost.

  “Your father, eh?” Osmond asks this afternoon of his young charge, a precocious boy of nine or ten, who slouches, staring into the feculent trench fluid. The pipe is nearly twenty feet wide, a lazy river of silt.

  “Yeah.” The kid draws his knees up to his chin and hugs them. It’s chilly down here in the sub-subway and he hasn’t got a coat. His rustic hand-knit sweater contrasts with his manufactured pants: a child of two worlds. The last suburbanite. “He used to HowTruck in post-evac supplies, canned goods and stuff, and sell them to the park trolls. My mom says he’s dead, but I think he left her for another woman.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Almost a year. But right before it happened, I found a condom in his wallet. That must mean he’s still alive.”

  “Clearly he and your mother just didn’t require any more nosy, thieving children. Prophylactics are a sire’s heart crying, ‘Never again!’ ”

  “Nah, that’s not it. My parents always wanted more kids. They were saving up to get me cloned.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps they dropped you on your head as an infant and longed for an unmarred version.”

  “What I’m saying is, they were…”—the boy closes his eyes, either out of embarrassment or mnemonics—“fertility deprived. So why use a condom? He must have had a girlfriend. He must still be in the city somewhere. Living with her.”

  “Isn’t the most likely scenario here that your father was philandering until the moment of his untimely demise?”

  “No way, that’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that would be too many bad things at once.”

  “Ah. So your father can either be flawed or departed, but not both?”

  The boy sets his jaw in a stubborn frown. “He wasn’t so bad.”

  Osmond rows in silence as the child takes out a Boy Toy handheld and mashes its buttons mindlessly. Osmond never expected to become a sewer gondolier. He was not even aware of their existence until, two nights after he set fire to the mansion, he took shelter in the ruins and heard voices rising from the emergency access sewer hatch. After forty-eight hours of nothing but rainwater and chewed sticks for sustenance, he was thinking none too clearly and set about the perilous descent down the manhole rungs without any of his usual caveats. His little legs dangled helplessly into the abyss, but he clutched on, shouting threats and bribes, and when at long last he reached the docking platform, he discovered Gondolier Josh and a skiffload of fares, sallow-faced in their lantern’s glow, looking on with mingled pity and admiration. The stench presented itself synaesthetically then, an undulating brownish-yellow haze. It was as if Osmond had squeezed through an ensorcelled portal right out the anus of existence.

  “You’ve got strong arms,” the oarsman observed, “want to help me row?”

  It was, Osmond reminds himself, the only position offered.

  In his new employment, Osmond has found his life forever changed. The gondoliers rarely leave their boats. Bathroom functions are completed by going over the side—an acro
batic feat for a paralytic, but Osmond is gaining new skills all the time—and they live on foodstuffs bartered to them by fares. Sleeping twelve fathoms deep, in hulls that rock like cradles, they are safe from the dragons, safe from the sun, safe from the wind. Safe as men long buried in their graves. That suits Osmond just fine. He doesn’t even mind the smell much anymore, though he isn’t a fan of the gators.

  “During my training, Joshua referred to them as ‘floaters,’ leading me to believe they were vast coagulations of human excrement, gnarled and lumpbacked through the sculpting of the waves,” he reminisces now. “Imagine my surprise when I nudged one with my pole, only to have it gape jaw and bare its fangs. It struck me as a nightmare begging for psychoanalysis. To be consumed by one’s own leavings is truly to vanish from history.”

  “That’s pretty gross, mister,” says the kid. “Are we there yet?”

  “Nearly,” Osmond replies, after sniffing the air. His senses, once refined to sample craft brews and the cruelest varieties of foie, are now his nervous system’s fine-tuned GPS.

  He arrives at Port 41, where Gondolier Hugh is waiting to take the late philanderer’s son on the next leg of his voyage. Hugh, a stooped albino with oozing face sores, grudgingly offers Osmond a packet of jerky and a quart of fresh water to fortify him for the return trip.

  “Be well.” Osmond bestows naught but a fervent handclasp in return.

  The brotherhood of workingmen is less unpleasant than he imagined, Osmond reflects on the way home, deftly plungering his way around an intractable clog in the middle of the pipe. There is something to be said for sharing one’s labor and one’s profits. A blessing and a curse—at least unfortunates are never alone.

  The runaway boy tonight reminds Osmond, perhaps inevitably, of his own wayward nephew and his mind drifts back to Duncan, his only relation possibly still dwelling upon this much-emptied globe. As he docks the skiff back at his home station (a block of stained concrete beneath the embers of his family estate—a headstone marking below what lies above), he finds himself humming and, in time, belting out, a familiar tune from that beloved timeworn classic Back There Again, the lone work of valuable literature he had once imagined Humphrey’s offspring capable of comprehending: