“Swanny, hey, where are you going?”
“I told you, I’ll meet you at the garage.”
“How long should I wait?”
She doesn’t turn around: “As long as you like.”
Back on Scullery Lane, Swanny lets herself into the building, avoids the squeaky floorboard in the entryway, tilts her head to listen. But Sharkey isn’t here. She’d be able to sense him if he were. She waits for a full minute, as still as a statue. If he walks in right now, what then? She could behave as if nothing has happened, reply airily and tranquilly to his queries, sit down to a late breakfast in the kitchen and ask him to read her the choicest passages from SLAKELESS over toast and tea—he reads her the loveliest poetry sometimes (“Teach not thy lips such scorn, for they were made / For kissing, lady, not for such contempt”). She could stay all afternoon. She could stay another night, another morning, stay until Duluth rallies enough to take his revenge or the dragons get them all. She could stay until Sharkey’s pull on her weakens and this terrible feeling passes and she doesn’t need him anymore. Don’t you trust me?
She doesn’t trust herself.
Swanny inhales sharply; her knees give, as if she’s awakened poised on a precipice. It’s been hours since she last chewed: her eyes burn, her jaw aches. She checks her watch, but it stopped weeks ago. The time is now. Swanny scales the stairs two at a time and patters back down carrying her klangflugel in its case. She goes out through the kitchen window, down the fire escape, and out the back alley.
Instrument in hand, she walks as briskly as she’s able, but it still takes her nearly ten minutes to reach Sikes Way, another desolate lane near the southern Outer Wall. Normally, she never would notice the garage; it’s a ramshackle structure crammed between two gutted storefronts, its red siding streaked with soot, its steel shutter door rolled down and marked with unreadable squiggles of graffiti and, of course, the omnipresent leggy snake. But today, something sets it apart.
Sharkey is waiting for her there.
He leans against the jamb, you couldn’t say surprised. Sinister sorrowsworn deathlord, guardian of the underworld. He wasn’t wearing his top hat when he left this morning, but he certainly is now.
“If you ever come back, I’ll kill you.”
Swanny can’t stop her voice from quavering: “I know.”
“Good.” He spits on the ground. Walks away.
* * *
Sharkey walks alone. Sparkers and cocottes clear the sidewalk when they see him coming. Nobody bumps into him on the street, nobody meets his eye. Nobodies. And who’s their king? Sharkey is, with only God upstairs to judge him. He used to like it this way. He considered his solitude a privilege, a sign of respect. Fear was a tool he could use. Loyalty, friendship, love—those were crutches that left you crippled when they fell away, and they always did. Or so he thought.
Turns out he was right.
I can’t live without you, she told him once—not so romantic, if you think about it. Desire without alternatives isn’t passion, it’s weakness. But Sharkey makes his living off the weakness of others. He understands how deals are made. A deposed baroness is better than none at all. Swanny was worth more to him damaged, orphaned, addicted, with the lack he opened at her core. If you want to keep a swan in your pond, you have to break its wing with a croquet mallet; he read all about it in Lifestyles of the Ostentatious. She needed him, his chaw, his protection, even his touch: he made sure of that.
He tasted her blood. He took her past death and back again. Every pleasure he gave her was richer than life itself. But that wasn’t enough. Not for her.
He had her, but he did not keep her long.
I can’t live without you. Not so flattering, if you think about it, and it wasn’t even true. Yet he’d kill to hear her say it, just one more time. It’s him who’s saying it now, over and over. I can’t, I can’t. He can see the future, but it doesn’t matter anymore. She’s already gone.
Sharkey turns onto Scullery Lane, under the shadow of wings. His luck’s run out; he knew it would someday. Nobody’s untorchable forever. If you have a heart, you can burn. And all animals have hearts.
He unchains his gator from the fire escape, kicks it in the tail. As it scuttles away down the sidewalk, the yellow dragon swoops low and ignites the Chaw Shop. Not just the roof: it hovers there for a full minute, blasting, till the whole building is engulfed. Dotting some final i. Flames flicker in the windows. Sharkey stands watching it for a long moment, the way the kindlings do. Then he climbs the steps up the stoop, lets himself inside.
Fireworks.
* * *
Ripple has never driven on land before, but the vehicle’s controls are kinda like a HowFly’s minus the vertical axis, so he figures it’ll be OK—close enough. The inside of Sharkey’s Magic Garage is an elevator, it turns out. Ripple exhales as it rumbles the limo down toward the underground parking lot below. Officially out of Torchtown.
“So where to?” he asks Swanny. “Your house out in Wonland, maybe?” He flips on the brights, steering the limo through the darkness, between the concrete posts that support the ceiling like ancient trees holding up the night sky.
“Black forest,” she murmurs.
“What?”
“Nothing.” The silence that follows is accompanied by a lapping, wettish sound.
“Wench, are you chewing?”
“This has been a very stressful afternoon.”
“It’s eleven a.m.” Looks like this marriage thing is off to a great start. Again. “I can’t fucking believe you risked our lives over a harpsaccordion.”
“It’s a klangflugel, you imbecile.”
* * *
Up, up, up, far above the clouds. Abby has always loved to swim, loved the feeling of weightlessness, her gravity effortlessly receptive to the water’s whims. But to soar—to scream across the sky, to thrust oneself in a single escalating assertion straight into God’s kingdom of the sky, to lose oneself in the dizzy heavenblue reaches of the sky—she’s never known a feeling like this before. Riding along in the HowLux was woozy and nightmarish, vertigo in motion, but this is a dream she can control. She remembers her fantasies back in the Fire Museum, the volcanic island of towering plants and untrod paths and caves aflutter with flying mice. It is as if she’s entered the highest reaches of that world. She tries to grow used to it, but she cannot sit still.
A vulture appears at her window. Abby gapes at the beaky face, haggard and creased, familiar yet impossible.
—Cuyahoga? How did you find me?
—you’re the one in my sky. how did you find me?
—It doesn’t matter. I’m glad I did. How is your sister’s brood?
—my sister’s wing is healed now, but i will stay on for a time. there’s nothing like the stench of the little ones’ regurge.
Abby feels the pride in her words.
—I’m happy for you.
—and you—you’ve learned to fly.
—Kind of.
—have you come to talk to Them?
—How did you know?
The vulture flaps once, as if to shrug.
—when i saw you, i thought, she’s come to talk to the big ones.
—Goodbye, Cuyahoga.
—goodbye.
The bird falls back, but the HowFly cruises on. The green dragon is no longer a speck in the distance. It drifts aimlessly, dead ahead, its back to her, its tail swaying leisurely, its wings extended, as tattered as sails left too long at sea, holding it aloft but doing little else. Abby has seen it before, but gliding along its side, she observes it perhaps more closely than anyone has previously survived to report. Beneath the barnacles and dried anemones, she sees the brittle scales, worn away in places to expose the rawhide flesh, or even grayish bone. She counts the creature’s ribs, pressed starkly against this un-upholstered skin. She sees a talon that has become painfully ingrown, a weapon curled in upon itself. And as she cruises up to the dragon’s face, she sees its snout, whiskered and fr
illed—the nostrils, which glow orange with each breath—and the eyes. Only the eyes surprise her. The eyes are shut.
—Hello?
And then they’re open—violet eyes, electrified with streaks of silver. Twin globes, each three handspans wide. Trained on her.
—HCKXAVUEDQYGPOIWRSBFMJTLZN.
A truly unpronounceable name is not language. It is a roar, a cacophony in which every tone denies the others, every tone asserts itself and itself alone. The dragon cannot form this name as utterance; he can only inscribe it, brand it, in breath or fire or idea. The dissonance shears the air as he sounds out each letter aloud and with his mind simultaneously.
—ZXSAQWCVDEGTRBIYNFOLMJUKHP.
The HowFly rocks in the turbulence of his exhalations. The transmissions throb through Abby’s brain. She feels zones of her gray matter lighting up: power surges to neighborhoods in the city of her mind. Neon letters glow searing bright and then explode.
—You wrote my name on the city. You called for me, and I came.
—GLOJDHSZVNXCFBUKAWMYEQRTPI.
The yellow dragon isn’t even in sight; she is miles beneath them, down under the clouds. But at the green dragon’s cry, she rises. Square-jawed and low-browed, she plows through the air the way a cowfish swims, her teeny limbs cycling like useless fins, her massive leathery wings doing all the work. Those wings: so much stronger than her brother’s, scale-less, featherless, with a claw at the top of each, like a bat’s thumb. Not lizard, not mammal. What code of transpositions and substitutions, duplications and omissions, wrote her into being? Her unknown glyphs, made flesh, are fearsome strange, the kind of asemic codex that human language dreams about.
—VNGEFKJMIBLQHXYZUCSRDPWOTA.
—UXZAPJGBKOTWFLEDIYMRNQCSVH.
Abby presses the heels of her hands hard into her ears, but the worst of the pressure is inside. The dragons’ voices sync then syncopate, vibrations and reverberations merging into a single pulsing rush. Cascading failures black out whole realms of Abby’s imagination and thought. It’s all too much. Too Much.
—What do you want?!
The green dragon huffs once more, falls silent. The yellow dragon yawns cavernously. Blue flames flicker in the darkness past her uvula, her throat’s pilot lights.
Amid the short circuits and showers of sparks that fill her, Abby senses with sudden relief, even ecstasy, that she is no longer alone. This is not the small weight of Scavenger stowing away in her gray matter. The dragons have connected to her, linked the vast machinery of their minds to hers, and as her own thoughts move, she feels theirs move in tandem. Though they are ancient creatures, primordial, byzantine and enormous, they are also incomplete: she sees that now. They do not have language. They do not reproduce. They have no predators; they have no prey. They exist outside of time at the very deepest level. The world is a womb to them, but they have stopped growing, and they have forgotten how to die.
No one else understands Them as she does. No one else understands Her.
—Will you come to my Island with me? Will you make me less alone?
—LIMOENFUCAKTHJQZRGSYWDVBPX.
—EXUCYPMQFVJDGRSOBZTKWIHNLA.
The dragons’ words mean nothing, but Abby feels their truth to her core. Even together, they are alone. The sky is the only place for Them, and it is emptiness. The city will not wake up.
—I don’t belong here either. But there must be somewhere in the world we can go. Some place for us. Brother. Sister. Won’t you escape with me?
Abby already knows the answer. The dragons bring death to this place because they cannot live without it. They have imprinted on the city, on the voices of its machines; they feed on its electricity and breathe its emissions. They see in the city a creature like themselves, and they tether themselves to it with fire even as it dies. Her kind does not know how to stop loving, even when their love is terrible. Even when it destroys. The only way they will ever leave is if Empire Island rips itself from the Earth and lifts off from the sea, a reverse asteroid dripping with saltwater and heavy with the detritus of four hundred years of human lives, to show them the way. Until then, they will never leave, will never travel a greater distance from the place of their birth.
Their cords don’t stretch that far.
—POWQRITYDSKJLZUHFGEVXABCNM.
—YEAMSDRKHPTIVLFCZOBJXGNQWU.
Abby can go anywhere, do anything. It is within her power. But the dragons are her kin. What would it mean, to wrench herself from this fusion? To be alone again, forever and always? She has always dreamt of impossible things. But even though the city still sleeps, she has finally woken up.
The lullaby overflows from Abby, floods into the dragons: a key, a spell, a pledge.
—A b c d e f g, h i j k l m n o p, q r s, t u v, w x, y and z…
Her name. Not garbled or jumbled. Not shuffled, truncated, or misremembered. Her name, a simple wisp of a melody, already dissipating up here among the clouds. The dragons still once more.
They are watching. They are waiting. She has answered their call at last.
Abby reaches for the controls.
She steers the HowFly down, from blue sky to blue waves. The sea above, the sea below. No amount of bailing can keep it at bay.
The HowFly noses down into the skin of the sea. Foam rushes against the windscreen, foam and then water, blue and gray and deep gray-green, and still Abby accelerates. Down, down. Beneath the first rush of effervescence, Nereid Bay is opaque and brackish, a Human Nature Preserve wholly submerged. Currents of pink protein solution once flowed here, but now the strange new DNA mixes with all the fluids of man and earth: sewage and seepage and runoff and rain, blood and tears and bathtub drain. Down below, resting on the ocean’s floor, Abby can see dim outlines of sunken junk: barrels rusted to lace, rebar, skeletons with concrete boots, an ancient yacht on its side, dreaming.
—A b c d e f g, h i j k l m n o p, q r s, t u v, w x, y and z…
The windscreen cracks, a single fissure like a bolt across the sky, a stomp on a frozen lake. Abby straps herself into her seat. The HowFly wants to resist, her own body wants to resist, but she wills the throttle down.
The dragons dive into the bay just behind her, almost throw her off course with their tremendous splash. The HowFly bucks in the swell they make. She sees them in the rearview mirror, no longer discernibly yellow and green in the water’s murk, just ancient forms in sepia, frilled and taloned, horned and winged, reaching for her. Demons, angels of the deep. Bubbles pour from their snouts. Can they live underwater? Can they breathe here? She already knows that she cannot.
The windscreen cracks again. That’s God saying we can’t be found.
The HowFly slams into the seabed—foomph!—sending up a cloud of sand. For an instant, the windscreen is a web of cracks, and then there is no windscreen, only the water gushing in, as salty as her blood. Abby cannot see, but she can feel the dragons all around her, swimming, gliding, circling, circling. She thinks back to Hooligan’s bird, the one neither of them could fix, its lament for all time: Fly away, away. Again, she sings the lullaby to soothe the dragons, make them stay.
—A b c d e f g, h i j k l m n o p, q r s, t u v, w x, y and z…
She sings it again and again as the air car fills with water, as the water fills her lungs. She sings it to the dragons, to Dunk, to the Lady, to God. A hymn for rats and vultures, for all the scavengers of this world. She sings it so it will be the last transmission she ever sends. She will not last for long, but the dragons will circle her forever if they can.
Her bones will speak.
Her bones will speak.
Her bones will sing her name.
33
THE ASCENT
In the hours after the dragons plunged back into the seas, the surface of the water bubbled like a cauldron, releasing into the air a thick, lingering miasma of yellow smog. The streets became impassably dim, sulfurous caverns forever branching but
never leading to plain daylight and fresh air. Crabbed elderly Survivors crept onto their fire escapes to breathe lungfuls of toxicity, examine their withered hands, invisible a mere arm’s length from the face. Lost dogs whimpered, truly lost now with the rancid scent muffling their olfactories. Pigeons, spooked, flapped up from the pavement, flurried in hurried circles and collided in midair, their skulls cracking together like Zero-G Snooker balls. A pizza delivery guy, marooned far from home and unable to read the street signs, paused in the intersection to eat a fortifying slice.
In the days after the dragons plunged back into the seas, the smog ebbed and dissipated, its presence a hangover from events hazily remembered. It was difficult, already, to believe that the dragons had tormented us for so long, that we had imagined eternity in the shadow of those wings. It was even more difficult to believe that they were gone for good. Scientists visited the city—new scientists, from new labs, impossibly young scientists who appeared to us as children dressed in lab coats, clear-eyed and pure-hearted and precociously serene, digging the beach with their toylike instruments, sounding echoes to the deep like unanswered prayers.
Here is what the scientists determined:
1. Citydwellers must never swim.
2. Citydwellers must never drink groundwater.
3. Citydwellers must report all prophetic dreams to a data collection center.
4. It is safe to live in the city.
In the weeks after the dragons plunged back into the seas, developers, those eternal optimists, bought up derelict properties, attended auctions for the air rights. It was a seller’s market again, despite the soot and unscrubbable yellow scum, the one-eyed park dwellers, the Bird Ladies and Say-Somethings, the gutted husks of buildings that loomed in the middle of every block and the wrecking balls that rolled in noisily to dispatch them.
Without dragons to distract them or a single kingpin in control, the torchies got wise. Their scouts peeked from below manhole covers—stood with telescopes on the few unscorched roofs of Torchtown, ignoring constellations. Rival factions consolidated power, revved chain saws in their streets. Fresh tattoos spelled KEEP OUT and SQUATTERS RITES in blood and ink. The underbelly is always the most vulnerable part of the creature. They knew the walls were coming down. They wanted to be ready.
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