“Oops,” says Abby. “I’m sorry!”
“Why are you sorry?” Ripple is no longer inside of anything. He cranks off the shower, feels around for his towel. Thankfully he’s wearing flip-flops. The sole of one crunches on some lightbulb glass. “We must have blown a fuse.” Unless Kelvin’s prediction is finally coming true. Water and power are probably next.
“No, it was me.”
“What?”
“I told you. The electricity woke me up. I can talk to the city. I was trying to send you a message, but only the lightbulbs heard.”
“I know you got tased, but it’s not demonic possession, OK? You can’t explode lightbulbs with your mind.”
“It wasn’t my mind. It was my heart. I wanted you to know you’re in my heart.”
Is insanity sexually transmitted? Ripple can’t continue this conversation. He gropes his way through the dark showers, toward the room with sinks, where the lights are still intact.
“Dunk? Dunk, where are you going?” Abby follows behind him, deft and unhesitating: what, does she have night vision now?
“Fem, I’m in a bad place. I need you to stop making things up.”
“But I’m not.” She looks at his electric razor, plugged into the wall below the mirrors. It buzzes to life. “See?”
No way. No way. No. Ripple grabs the razor, yanks it out of the wall, hurls it to the tile floor. Its plastic carapace cracks, but it doesn’t turn off. It still buzzes, vibrating and shimmying, blades oscillating. “Turn it off. Turn it off!” Ripple yells. “Make it die!”
She looks very sad. The razor stills.
“I love you,” she says.
* * *
The first time Abby visited the Ripple mansion, she flew. Returning by land, she feels the gravity with every step she takes. She never knew her own slight body could weigh so heavy on her. She wishes she could leave it behind somewhere, to “wander lonely as a cloud,” like somebody on the Toob said during a feminine hygiene advertisement. On the Island, she spent whole days scrabbling over the dunes. But she always lay down in the shade of a tire tower, or curled into a cradling nest of junked upholstery foam, before exhaustion truly claimed her. On this march, though, they take no breaks. Her feet, as callused as they are, chafe on the endless asphalt. Her knees quake in the shadows of the dragons who pass overhead from time to time, the size of bad weather, blocking out the warmthless sun. Ripple doesn’t pause. Abby knows that if she stopped, he wouldn’t stop with her. He’d sling her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, or worse, leave her behind.
“It doesn’t matter that you killed him,” she tells Dunk, whose hand feels dead and untender in hers. The sky is fluorescent white and sunless. Soot and garbage swirl in the howling wind, in the canyon formed by skyscrapers. The chill bites at their skin. “He would have died anyway. Everything dies. The Lady used to say that the People Machines want to be the only people on the face of this Earth. But they just want to survive. Everything wants to survive, but nothing does. It’s sad but it’s OK. As long as something survives, it’s OK.”
“Uh, yeah.” Ripple points to the next intersection. Her words don’t seem to comfort him at all. “Time for us to hang a right.”
Ripple uses a tourist map from the old admissions counter to guide them. He wears his ladderman’s uniform. His civilian garb was ruined forever in that first fire. This is all he has now. Abby wears her Dalmatian suit from the gift shop. She remembers swimming naked in Nereid Bay, which she knew then only as the water—the water, inviolable, constant, ever-changing, meeting the air in a skin of ripples. Abby came from the water up into the air, and one day she would return to the water. She knew that then. She knows it better now.
“Why are we going to the house if it’s burned?”
“Because we’ve got to see for ourselves, OK? Because it’s my home.”
For miles, they encounter no one amid the hollow buildings, but as they move northward, Abby glimpses wet laundry on a clothesline, eyes peeking out through chinks in a boarded-up window, human urine staining a wall—she can tell it by the smell. They’re getting farther from the dragons’ dominion, farther from the city’s pain. When they edge off the grid, first onto an exit ramp, then onto the Lionel Roswell Expressway, and then down, down, down, into the tunnel that runs under the river separating Empire from the Heights above, Abby feels an unexpected calm. The city’s distress thrums in her on a molecular level. She doesn’t know it’s there until it’s gone.
“I wish I had a match or something,” Ripple says, his first words in hours. “I can’t see shit.”
“Why would you want to see that?”
—put me down. i will utilize night-vision sensors.
—We might step on you!
—you will not.
Uncertainly, Abby reaches into her pocket and takes out Scavenger, where he’s been riding quietly. His white fur shimmers, the only visible object in the tunnel’s gloom.
Ripple blinks. “Your rat glows in the dark?”
She shrugs. “He’s magic.”
The muscles in Ripple’s jaw clench and unclench. Abby doesn’t have to read his mind to know he’s holding in a scream. But why? Scavenger is unnatural, but everything is unnatural. “You’re full of surprises today.”
They follow Scavenger through the dark, a rodentine will-o’-the-wisp, a beacon guiding them onward. The tunnel is long, longer than Abby could have possibly imagined. She thinks back to the night they ran away, the underground zone that funneled them toward Leather Lungs. Who will be waiting for them after their next rebirth? As they near the dusk coagulating at the passage’s far end, Abby hears an unmistakable rumble. Thunder.
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.