“Any advice?”
“Don’t let her play with gators.”
“Thanks, that’s…um…specific.”
The pro drops the anchor, a cinder block on a chain. The entire tunnel vibrates when it hits the metal floor. “End of the line.”
“Wait, what? You’re supposed to take me to Torchtown.”
“Those routes are forbidden. The city could take my medallion.”
“You’re a sewer gondolier! There’s no way you’re allowed to be down here in the first place.”
“Tell that to the Public Hire Transport Authority.”
“That’s not even a real thing.”
The gondolier holds out a card, besmirched beyond legibility with unmentionable thumbprints. “Then how did this get laminated?”
Ripple glances around. Nothing but sewage in every direction. “Help me out here. What am I supposed to do? I’d bribe you, but I’m broke.”
From under his seat, the gondolier pulls out a pair of hip-high waders. “Walk.”
* * *
Ripple sloshes through sewage higher than his knees, squinting in the dark. He wishes he’d been able to convince the gondolier to lend him the lantern too. Or at least a candle. He’s gone barely a hundred yards when he hears footsteps not his own ringing against the metal pipe and sees a flashlight beam flickering from around a curve in the tunnel ahead.
Torchies.
Ripple freezes. He’s unarmed. Should he run? But where to? The gondolier already departed, and anyway, Ripple can’t move fast in this muck.
“…just saying that they could leave a few for when we get back from patrol. Just manners, is all.”
“Nobody wants stale doughnuts, Gerald.”
“I grew up on day-olds. I’m made of day-olds.”
“You make every issue too personal. That’s your problem.”
“You are what you eat, Todd.”
“You’re saying we should expect the guys on sentinel duty to sit with a box of Loretta’s sour cream old-fashioneds for six hours while we’re down here? Because you identify as a pastry?”
“We’re the ones in the danger zone.”
“The poor fuckers maintaining the top of the wall are the ones in the danger zone. Torchies take potshots every time they can scrape two bullets together.”
“Potshots sure, but who’s more likely to get chainsawed? Them up there on the wall, or us down here in the dark?”
“Aw, stop trying to spook me. Torchies know to stay away from our patrol route. We always make plenty of noise so they can hear us coming.”
“I’m just saying, maybe the firemen weren’t so wrong to have a mutiny. Maybe we should try something like that ourselves.”
“Over doughnuts? Gerald, we’re not conscripted. If you don’t want your pension, you can quit anytime.”
Cops. Policing the tunnels. Catching criminals outside of Torchtown and throwing them back in. Ripple has an idea—maybe the first good idea of his life. Maybe not. He steps into the middle of the tunnel, holding his hands in the air. The flashlight beam catches him, shines right in his eyes. One of the cops shrieks, so high-pitched it sounds like echolocation banking off the walls.
“I’m turning myself in for the murder of Paxton Trank,” Ripple says.
30
CHILD OF SCIENCE
By the time the Lady met Abby, the Lady no longer had a name. She had given it up, along with all her earthly possessions, the day she joined the Flesh Soldiers of God’s Organic World. At that time, she’d been living on the streets as long as she could remember, which wasn’t too far back, after the shock treatments she’d endured during her most recent stay in the Quiet Place. The Lady talked to God, always had, but when she fell in with the Flesh Soldiers, it was the first time she met others who could hear his voice too. The other Flesh Soldiers heard it clearer, even, since they were actually able to understand what he was calling them to do. The Lady usually just heard God grumbling about nothing in particular while she panhandled up and down the Black Line or washed her undies in the Bay. She talked back to him, and between her “delusional parasitosis” (as the doctors put it; she called ’em “stringy skin critters”) and the sins of his world, they had plenty to keep them commiserating.
But the other Flesh Soldiers, they knew what he was after, what the endgame was. What was required of them in this life, and on into transcendence beyond: to stop the coming of the People Machines, whose time was growing nigh—the People Machines, who would be man-made but not men, the fruit of a lewd act with science itself. When the Flesh Soldiers laid out their plan for the bold crusade against the research headquarters, it struck the Lady as miraculous that God had made his orders so specific, even providing blueprints of the building and flak jackets for participants, bless his holy heart. She didn’t trouble much over the prospect that not all of them would come back alive. The Lady didn’t think much of this life; the best part of it was God anyhow, the nearness of him inside her skull, like the radio station she picked up through the fillings of her teeth. She figured that would go on just as well or better once death wiped out all the distractions: the chills and the sweats, the electrode headaches, the critter sores, the hunger and the thirst.
Not that the Lady suffered too bad from those last two, not since the congregation had taken her in with open arms. They holed up in an old bottling plant in North Crookbridge, below rusty smokestacks asprout with city weeds, just beyond the reach of those fireballs that roared down on Empire Island, that had been roaring down for three years. Between the chanting sessions and conspiracy theorizing and pamphlet distribution, they drank boiled rainwater from tree-wood cups and ate bland garmonbozia made from chickpeas and lentils unmodified by man—most other food was teeming with “nanomachines and mutagens,” robot crawlies smaller than a fleck of dust that might stay up your poop chute even after you’d cleansed with the leeches and the tubes. The life was monastic, sure, but it was the first winter in an age that the Lady had got through without frostbite, and come spring, she was pleased to give the Lord his due.
The laboratory complex was at the southmost tip of Empire Island, a glittering series of angular boxes like a crystal city from outer space. The scientists had a beachfront view, their workaday lives a vacation from God’s will. The Flesh Soldiers rowed ashore in stolen boats. Technology had crept inside the human form and become inseparable from it, ghost hearts beating in human chests, baby skin growing on old bones. Technology had replaced pets and meat beasts with simulacra indistinguishable from true. Technology infected mankind like a sickness in plague time. The Flesh Soldiers were the cure. They wore bird masks. They carried obsidian shivs.
They killed their way inside. The Lady didn’t enjoy watching the security guard bleed out the throat, but the good Lord always did like a sacrifice. It was once they were in that she got a funny feeling down in her guts. The rooms were tiled white and shiny, heaven and a bathroom combined, but the animals in them were just that: animals. Like no machine she ever knew, shitting and shedding, growling and howling, molting their feathers on the floor. The lab rats squeaked when you stomped them. The monkeys were worse. The Lady lost her toleration for it quick. God whispered in her ear, “I got a special mission for you. Check down the hall.”
She snuck away from the others. There wasn’t but a single room down the hall he chose, all sealed up in one-way glass. The Lady took a gander in. It was a child’s room, mostly stark and plain except for a few clowns painted on the walls and a picture of a ship. A plasma ball nightlight crackled in the corner, some scientist’s idea of a joke. Electricity woke you up, electricity will help you sleep again. But the child—the child. The child was alive.
No more than three years old, but vanishing small, there in the hospital bed she lay. Soft blond hair fanned out on the pillows. A mouse of a girl. Hands like milk glass. She’d never been outside a day in her life. A more delicate creation God had never made. But God had made her, the Lady felt sure of that.
&n
bsp; It was then, as she heard the footsteps of the other Flesh Soldiers coming down the hall, that God told the Lady exactly what to do.
* * *
The laboratory still looks like a crystal city from outer space. At least, it does to Abby. She does not want to go in, not right away. Although she’s been on Empire Island for weeks, this is the first time since her own Island that she’s seen the waves, felt the sand beneath her feet. Scavenger has guided her and Hooligan here, routing and rerouting them through the maze of skyscraper canyons and alleyways, past the Ladies of Rags and Cans, past the shaded windows of incurious Survivors just waiting for the flame, past the looming walls of Torchtown, ever southward. Now the lab rat points his little pink nose like a quivering compass needle at the entrance’s code-locked double doors.
—FINAL DESTINATION in 15 METERS.
Abby looks back out toward the water, where the wet lip of beach lies smooth and blameless, unnamed.
—Maybe I should go home. I miss my Island.
—that is your prerogative. but we could mutually benefit from a reciprocal information exchange.
The apehound wags his tail, tilting his head in confusion.
—no go inside?
—Maybe in a minute, Hooli. Want to walk down by the water first?
But Hooligan is too cold and damp already. While the dog and lab rat watch, Abby strips off the Dalmatian costume to wade the surf alone and naked, chilly froth lacing the tips of her toes, her ankles. Her unshaven legs. The waves never linger long. Stay, she thinks, stay. She’s freezing and miserable, but some part of her wants this moment to last.
I don’t know who I am. Or where I came from.
What will Abby’s life be like without those questions? She can’t imagine it. Some other Abby lies in wait behind those laboratory doors: an Abby with eyes like searchlights, with hair like wires. An Abby who knows too much. An Abby no longer innocent.
“The People Machines take out your heart and put in a gear,” the Lady used to say. What if all the explanations fill up the space inside Abby for hope, for wonder, for love? But the gears turn in her already. She picks up a scrap of driftwood, gnarled by the tides, and scratches a message in the sand. She does not know how to spell much, but she’s learned a little by now:
The letters will wash away; they aren’t hers any longer. That time is done. She does not belong to Duncan. She owns herself.
It is a kind of freedom to exist outside the gaze of man. Before she met Duncan, Abby was invisible, the soul of someone who might never be. She did not know where she ended and where the world began, so she was one with it. It was Duncan who defined her, fused her to this body. This skin, molded into the shape of woman by his groping hands. He gave her that much, at least. Now, alone again, she is not invisible but Unseen. A thing apart. Like God. Though she no longer feels God’s presence—she hasn’t felt it in a long time. Maybe what she once believed to be his force, his holy will, was simply the stirring of her own secret power.
She licks sea salt from her lips. It tastes like her blood.
“Let’s go inside,” she calls to the animals. Her human voice rings out, clear and musical, and though they do not speak this language, they understand. She climbs back up the dunes and meets them at the lab entrance. The architecture, a shattered mirror, reflects the looming clouds.
* * *
No human has stepped inside the laboratory for decades, not since they euthanized the final monkey, shredded the last of the files, and locked the doors forever. How much the place has changed. When Abby enters, naked and wet from the sea, she sees the logo over the information desk.
Abecedary. Abby mouths the word. But it isn’t her name. The spelling isn’t right, and it is far too short.
Abby turns down a hall overgrown with cords and cables and wires, white and black and blue and gray, spliced together, plugged into jacks and outlets, the root system of a dozen ThinkTanks. At every keyboard, there’s a lab rat, tapping at the letters with paws and nose, squinting at streams of indecipherable data with beady red eyes. It is like nowhere she has ever been. Yet, at the same time…it reminds her of a hallway long ago, cold and sterile. Tile everywhere gleaming. A ceiling of electric white.
It is like walking into a dream. Only now, Abby walks this hall alone.
Lab rats turn to stare as she passes, her hair dripping, soles leaving footprints in seawater on the tile. Who else walked these halls the last time she was here, so long ago? Abby can no longer remember the faces of the scientists. Her years on the Island wore away their particularities, left behind only nightmare ghosts in bleached robes who drew her blood for examination. Who shaved patches of her scalp to attach the brain-imaging sensors. Who bathed her and measured the volume of liquid displaced.
But those ghosts did once live—perhaps they live still, somewhere far from here. Does a small Abby still dwell in their memories, trapped there forever, like a girl in a Toob? Or is it to them as if she never existed? She takes a scientist’s bleached robe—a lab coat, the name returns to her like breath—from a hook on the wall and slips it on to cover her nakedness. The pocket is full of pens. The sleeves are much too long. They will always be too long. She is all grown up.
Abby remembers that the scientists never looked her in the eye, though she laughed and babbled and reached for their glasses and bonked them on the nose. She never understood why.
Now Abby reads the words written on a frosted glass door: LIVE SPECIMEN TESTING—LAB 4. She turns the handle and steps inside.
The laboratory faces the sea. A single massive picture window forms the room’s far wall, framing the storm that’s just begun: water above meeting water below.
The world is just a rift for water to pass through. That rift is closing now.
In the center of the lab, the cords and cables and wires from the hall converge upon a giant Drive. Abby does not remember this. It was never here before. During the years she spent in the lab, it was hidden from her, like so much else: stored in a windowless locked room in the basement, accessible only to those with full security clearance. The scientists wiped the data before their departure, powered it down for good. But now, here it stands, a cityscape of diodes and copper and black glass, taller than Abby and radiating heat, recalibrated and humming with information restored. The rats have been feeding it with every fact they can glean, every tidbit of history relating to their own origins, to the company that made them.
Abby approaches the device, reaches out to stroke a circuit board. Electricity crackles between the surface and her fingers—a wordless hello. She pulls her hand away.
In each generation of Abecedary’s experimental rats, one is born a “Seer.” Instead of red eyes, hers are milky pale and greenish. The scientists never knew why. They used to joke about it in the lab: that the afflicted rodents could see in the dark, through walls. That they could read minds. Today, this generation’s Seer steps toward Abby, twitching her long droopy whiskers with the dignified caution of the blind. She wears a tiny headdress shaped from colorful Toob connector wires, gnawed off and frazzled at the ends, and walks upright with the help of a staff made from a bedazzled tongue depressor.
Seer touches her paw to Abby’s foot and those lemon-lime eyes illume. Abby’s foot glows red and transparent, her bones like the branch-shadows of a black forest, her Bean a drop of spilled ink.
Seer reads the Bean. She reads Abby’s name.
—you have returned.
—But why? What do I do now?
The shamanic lab rat points her staff, and Abby approaches the Drive, places her hand flat upon its black glass. Shuts her eyes. This knowledge will rewrite her; it will sever her from every human she has met, and leave her with one last hope of connection. But it is time to learn. Electrons orbit in her like clouds of fireflies. Chemical reactions flash and bubble in her brain.
No one stays a child forever.
* * *
What does the Drive say to Abby? They do not speak in a language that
we can understand. The language they speak is not a thing learned. It is the very substance of which they are made.
But we can say this much: before Abby, the scientists created sparrows and rats, fish and dogs, snakes and vultures and apes and geckos. Hybrids too, because they could. Some were released into the wild, tagged and tracked; some were kept in cages in the lab; some were bred and sold as pets. Magic animals, sprung from imagination’s womb. Written into being. After each creation, barrels of pink protein solution poured into the waters of Nereid Bay.
Though Abby is mortal, her cells are slow clocks, a mystery to germs and decay, enhanced with efficiencies humans hoped one day to retrofit to themselves. She was born fifty years ago: an old child, the first and last of her kind. The scientists drained her incubation tube, patted her dry—and that very hour, the dragons rose up from the waves.
Abby was to be the link between the humans and the magic animals. She would be durable, indispensable. She would speak to the magic animals as man could not, name them and give them purpose. But she was lost before the scientists could teach her how.
She is no longer lost.
* * *
That night, Abby and Hooligan rest together on a futon in the laboratory’s open-plan TeamWorkSpace. “Brainstorm,” reads a single word, written on a whiteboard in a shade of fluorescent pink that appears to glow and vibrate even in the unelectrified night. All around, the room is an abandoned playpen for adults, scattered with dry-erase markers and candy-colored SitPro fitness orbs that remind Abby of balls from Duncan’s ball pit, grown large beyond their nature by time. Once, long ago, humans gathered here—sharing their findings, tapping out reports, making predictions—all about her. Now they are gone, and only she remains. Her fingers furrow through Hooligan’s fur, tracing paths she knows well. Lingering, as if for the last time.
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