But where does the magic come from?
The rain shower stops abruptly, but instead of light breaking through the clouds, a shadow envelops them. Abby stops in her tracks and looks up. The yellow dragon is gliding overhead, its batlike wing flap a vast umbrella. Hooligan whimpers till it passes.
“Electricity. It’s the juice they feed on,” the Lady once told her, speaking of the People Machines. “It’s what they used to build the dragons.”
Abby knows it can’t be true. No one built the dragons. The dragons are alive. But so is the city, and someone built that for sure. What if the People Machines can build living things? What if they did build the dragons?
—Scavenger, I know why you came to find me. I know why you were inside my mind.
—proceed.
—It’s because we came from the same place. Because we were made by the same…people.
—i can neither confirm nor deny your theory.
—You’ve known me long enough to tell me the truth.
—cannot confirm. i did not complete my cortical search.
—But that’s what you were looking for, isn’t it? Proof. That we’re related. That I’m part of the colony’s history somehow. Stop keeping secrets. You know I’m not a threat.
—reconfiguring privacy settings.
Scavenger hops down to the pavement and pauses for a long moment, his fuzzy brow furrowed, his pink ears twitching in concentration. Abby stops walking and stares down at him. Hooligan tilts his head in confusion. The dragon has passed. Dog fur drips in the rain.
—your supposition is CORRECT. 91% of present colony members hypothesized a connection between the colony’s history and your own when you called.
Abby remembers her finger in the dialer’s faceplate, the receiver at her ear. The squeaking on the other end.
—Your number was in my Bean?
—i was tasked with locating the source of that call and gathering conclusive data.
—Is Hooli one of us too? Is that why he speaks our language?
Hooligan tries to sniff Scavenger’s butt. Scavenger climbs back on top of his head, holding wet tufts of apehound pelt in his naked shriveled paws.
—the apehound is a recalled commercial product. we are experimental biospecimens. at least, i am.
Abby looks from the rat’s paw to her own hand. The intricate whorls of her palm. It’s all she’s ever known. She hasn’t known it at all.
—Why did the Lady bring me to the Island? Why would she want to protect me from People Machines if I am a People Machine?
—maybe she was not protecting you. maybe she was protecting others from you.
—But you said I posed no threat.
—not to us.
—Then take me to the colony, Scavenger.
29
FERRYMAN TO THE UNDERWORLD
Like our now-defunct system of trains, the sewer gondolas are aged, filthy, and underground. Unlike the train system, they tend to keep a strict schedule and the berths are never crowded. You might imagine them a lovers’ form of transport, but the creaking of an ancient hull in sludgy, waist-deep flushwater tends to rob a journey of romance.
Most passengers hire the shitboats because they fear fireballs roaring down onto the surface streets, but have an unmet need so urgent that they cannot eschew the city just yet. Mongers, thieves, the delusional bereaved—in his new vocation as a gondolier, Osmond Ripple is only too happy to oblige them all. Rowing his humble craft, a onetime maintenance skiff with a rusted motor, or pulling it along the slimy pipe walls with a handy long-necked plunger, he tells tales of the various ills of the city and how they’ve affected him personally.
Osmond transports his passengers through the northmost territory of sewer only; his route stretches from upper Empire to the middle of the Heights. So when he collects a fare headed northward, they’re almost home free, far from the torchies and drake fires, halfway to Upstate and the siren kumbaya of the endtimes lumberjacks. But sometimes, they want to go the other way. Downtown. He takes them as far as he can, then hands them off to the next oarsman in the chain and watches them recede, southbound, into the darkness—heedless souls returning to the city, for profit or revenge or occasionally disappointment, searching through those cinders for someone they loved and lost.
“Your father, eh?” Osmond asks this afternoon of his young charge, a precocious boy of nine or ten, who slouches, staring into the feculent trench fluid. The pipe is nearly twenty feet wide, a lazy river of silt.
“Yeah.” The kid draws his knees up to his chin and hugs them. It’s chilly down here in the sub-subway and he hasn’t got a coat. His rustic hand-knit sweater contrasts with his manufactured pants: a child of two worlds. The last suburbanite. “He used to HowTruck in post-evac supplies, canned goods and stuff, and sell them to the park trolls. My mom says he’s dead, but I think he left her for another woman.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Almost a year. But right before it happened, I found a condom in his wallet. That must mean he’s still alive.”
“Clearly he and your mother just didn’t require any more nosy, thieving children. Prophylactics are a sire’s heart crying, ‘Never again!’?”
“Nah, that’s not it. My parents always wanted more kids. They were saving up to get me cloned.”
“Hmm. Perhaps they dropped you on your head as an infant and longed for an unmarred version.”
“What I’m saying is, they were…”—the boy closes his eyes, either out of embarrassment or mnemonics—“fertility deprived. So why use a condom? He must have had a girlfriend. He must still be in the city somewhere. Living with her.”
“Isn’t the most likely scenario here that your father was philandering until the moment of his untimely demise?”
“No way, that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because that would be too many bad things at once.”
“Ah. So your father can either be flawed or departed, but not both?”
The boy sets his jaw in a stubborn frown. “He wasn’t so bad.”
Osmond rows in silence as the child takes out a Boy Toy handheld and mashes its buttons mindlessly. Osmond never expected to become a sewer gondolier. He was not even aware of their existence until, two nights after he set fire to the mansion, he took shelter in the ruins and heard voices rising from the emergency access sewer hatch. After forty-eight hours of nothing but rainwater and chewed sticks for sustenance, he was thinking none too clearly and set about the perilous descent down the manhole rungs without any of his usual caveats. His little legs dangled helplessly into the abyss, but he clutched on, shouting threats and bribes, and when at long last he reached the docking platform, he discovered Gondolier Josh and a skiffload of fares, sallow-faced in their lantern’s glow, looking on with mingled pity and admiration. The stench presented itself synaesthetically then, an undulating brownish-yellow haze. It was as if Osmond had squeezed through an ensorcelled portal right out the anus of existence.