“What did they want this time?” Julie says.
“They’re still trying to figure you out. Sounds like whatever they’re doing to control the Dead is a pretty crude science. Good for making mules but not much else. They want more sophisticated slaves, like our Nearlies. The ones they think you ‘made.’?” She smiles darkly. “They want your magic, Jules. Just teach them your spells and we can all go home.”
Julie shakes her head, unable to verbalize the absurdity. The magic that confounds them is humanity. The naturally occurring, slow acting, unpredictably potent product of conscious minds connecting. These madmen want to synthesize love. They want to manufacture it, weaponize it, and use it to control people. It’s such a ludicrous scheme it would be funny if they weren’t trampling the world in pursuit of it.
Abram is shaking his head too, but I sense his disbelief has a different target.
“What?” Julie says to him.
“I’m just enjoying this so much,” he says, slumped against the wall like an alleyway vagrant. His blood-stained beige jacket is gone; his gray tank top reveals an array of cuts and bruises, some fresh, some old. “I thought Axiom was insane, but they’re only trying to manage the plague, maybe turn it into something useful. You’re the ones trying to talk the Dead out of being Dead.” He looks at me with incredulous disdain. “You’re the ones unleashing a horde and then standing in front of it asking it questions, like a fucking zombie therapist.” He shakes his head again. “What kind of cartoon do you think you live in?”
I meet his gaze levelly. I won’t apologize to a statue for trying to take a step. “It has to start somewhere.”
“You were talking to them!” He laughs and throws up his hands. “You think you can cure a plague with words?”
“Words are ideas.”
I’m not sure where these ones are coming from. I hear a whisper in my head, like the rustling of pages.
“Every cure to every plague has started with an idea.”
Abram lets out a deep sigh and slumps lower. He tugs Sprout against his shoulder but she resists, remaining upright and giving me a curious look.
“R,” Julie says. “I think that was a new syllable record.”
I shrug. I haven’t been counting.
“Stopped fighting it yet?” M asks with a subtle smile, and I’m suddenly uncomfortable in this axis of attention. I stand up and gaze out the exterior windows, hoping to lose myself in a New York panorama. But the view is the brick wall of a neighboring high-rise. A few floors up, a gigantic billboard grins down at me from the roof, the model’s eyes covered by a solar panel like he wanted his identity hidden.
“So you’re the ones.”
Everyone sits up. Eyes dart for the source of the voice.
“The salmon, the zebra, the goldfinch, and the goldfish, right?”
It’s coming from the adjacent room. A woman’s voice, high and squeaky enough to penetrate the wall with surprising clarity.
“Why did you get caught? I was rooting for you, whoever you are.”
“Uh . . . who are you?” Julie asks the wall.
“Fellow grumbler. Month two of a life sentence. Welcome to Freedom Tower.”
Abram hops to a crouch and puts his face close to the wall. “Where are the guard stations? Have you found any patrol gaps? What’s your plan?”
There is silence for a few seconds. Then I hear singing. “Mon ami, mon ami, la la la la la . . .”
“Hello?” Abram says.
“Have you seen the city yet?” the woman asks, abruptly cutting off her song. “Densest pop in North America so you’d expect reality to be taut, but nowhere’s more surreal. Streets hold their shape but people don’t. No flying frogs or portal ponds but the place itself is madness. Inverted island, air underwater, everybody clawing at the bubble.”
We all look at each other.
“What’s your name?” Julie asks.
“My name’s embarrassing,” she says. “I go by H. Tomsen. Or just Tomsen. Or just H. What’s your name? Are you the goldfinch or the goldfish or the Goldman? How are things at the dome? I heard them talking about a takeover a while back. God, I miss the world.”
She speaks with a clipped, rapid cadence that sounds less like conversation and more like the random firing of synapses. Julie waits for an opening, then says, “I’m Julie.”
Abram returns to his slouch against the wall, apparently deciding we won’t be gaining any intel from our neighbor. M listens with a bemused smile, but Julie and Nora show particularly sharp interest.
“You have a . . . distinct way with words,” Nora says. “Are you a fan of the Exed World Almanac?”
“God, I miss the Almanac,” the voice sighs. “God, I miss input and output. Been working on new issues in here but not much to report when the world is a room. Everywhere’s exed and pop is always one—except for that time a spider joined me.”
Julie and Nora glance at each other with widening eyes.
“Wait . . . ,” Julie says. “Are you saying you make the Almanac? Are you a member of DBC?”
A burst of giggling pierces the wall.
“Tomsen?”