“Time for bed!”
So they go to bed. The girl starts snoring right away, and wiggling her butt around and making little whimpering noises, and Ripple lies on his back, willing his laceration to heal faster and cursing himself for the many, many mistakes he’s made since the previous afternoon. He hears rodents scuttling on the dunes outside. He hears the ultrasonic cries of bats and the buzzing of insects. He wonders if anyone is looking for him. He wonders if his parents think he’s dead. He wonders how long you can stay a virgin before it gives you ball cancer. He dozes lightly, sitting bolt upright half a dozen times when nightmares—of a giant rat gnawing on his arm, of a skeleton with bright blue eyes, of his name spelled out in orange flame—startle him awake.
Finally, he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he wakes up, the girl is straddling him again, slapping him in the face. This time he knows what to do. He doesn’t hesitate. He pulls her down on top of him and howls when she crashes into his bad arm.
3
THE DRAGONS’ NEST
Torchtown is a hell of a place.
It didn’t start out that way. It started with our best intentions. Long ago, before the dragons came, we used to export our criminals. We sent them to faraway concrete compounds, to think about what they’d done. Upon release, the ones who’d thought the hardest came back with a plan to do it all again. Why not teach them to live in a city instead, we asked ourselves. Why not build a city within our city that could teach them to be good?
We nicknamed our plan the Nest. We chose a section downtown where buildings stood empty and derelict and we walled it off, an irregular hexagon. We decorated the iron gates with birds in flight. The Metropolitan Police Department provided guards, but we also hired rehabilitators, men and women who could teach a trade—carpentry, masonry, rooftop farming, first aid—to the most jaded of pupils. We went ahead and made the Nest co-ed. That was our first mistake.
The early inmates took to their new home in the prison colony. Carefully selected among available offenders, their crimes were serious, but never damning, and for some, the Nest was their first, best chance at redemption. They set up shops in the storefronts; they set up house in the apartments. They worked alongside rehabilitators until they learned the trades, and then the inmates taught these trades to one another. Guards strode through the Nest’s twilit streets with no more fear than the police strode through any part of our city. For the first few years, the experiment was a success.
That all changed when the dragons came.
We could not have predicted that the dragons would attack, much less that they would attack the Nest with a vehemence unparalleled even in the rest of the city: it would become, in short order, the burningest locale per square mile that statistics have ever recorded, ten times more likely to flare than anywhere else in the metro area. What drew the dragons there? What draws them still? Is it the strange boundary formed by the concrete walls, a jagged shape like a character from an unknown alphabet?
Or is it our hubris, our notion that the city, in this measured dose, could be an inoculation against all future harm?
We should have evacuated the prison colony at once, but in the early days of the dragon attacks, we made a lot of big mistakes. We were distracted, just trying to survive. We were stretched to our limits. HowDouses swooped in to extinguish the prison colony’s first few fires, but soon were needed elsewhere. We promised the prisoners relief and left them to their own devices for a time, a few days, a week at most. We did not forget them. But they felt forgotten.
First they rioted. Then they killed their guards.
We could have reacted differently. But it was a moment when retaliation, swift and brutal, drew cheers and votes, in the sky or on land, it made no difference.
We sentenced the prisoners to life, unilaterally, without the benefit of trial. We no longer sent guards into their zone. Instead, we topped their walls with electrified barbed wire, automatic sniper rifles, observation platforms with hourly patrols. And Torchtown, as it was now called, became the destination for cold-blooded murderers, rapists, the perpetrator of a zillion-dollar Match King scheme—the worst of the worst, irredeemable. We threw them all in together and dropped crates of supplies over the wall: canned goods, bottled water, live chickens, mass-market paperbacks. We released no one. We figured it was just a matter of time before they killed one another off.
But the inmates didn’t kill one another off, at least not entirely. They made some kind of society in there, amid the abandoned buildings we deprived of city gas for fear of explosions—amid the daily jets of dragon flame that burned the roofs above their heads. Under the shadow of those wings. They certainly made some babies. Even now, with our own streets nearly empty, we hear their new babies crying in the night. These are the Torchtown natives, born into the original sin of their ancestors’ convictions. In the last fifty years, who knows how many have lived and died behind the walls? Nowadays, none of the originally incarcerated remain; “inmates” have taken on the aura of legend. The only inhabitants are their children, their children’s children, their children’s children’s children, generation upon generation, fast to breed, fast to die, born into a nest of violence with no knowledge of the world outside.
We should knock down the walls. We should let them all out. But we cannot, for fear they might deal us the justice we deserve.
The prison colony is a special kind of damage to the city: a collaboration between the dragons and ourselves. A hell we built together.
But in all the years of destruction, all the blasts and combustion, one corner of Torchtown has remained untorched. It’s a small building, three stories with a basement, unassuming dark red brick. SHARKEY’S CHAW SHOP reads the sign. The letters are made of solid gold. No broken windows. No lock on the door. There’s an alligator chained to the fire hydrant outside—the only working fire hydrant in Torchtown.
Sharkey is IN.