The gondolier holds out a card, besmirched beyond legibility with unmentionable thumbprints. “Then how did this get laminated?”
Ripple glances around. Nothing but sewage in every direction. “Help me out here. What am I supposed to do? I’d bribe you, but I’m broke.”
From under his seat, the gondolier pulls out a pair of hip-high waders. “Walk.”
* * *
Ripple sloshes through sewage higher than his knees, squinting in the dark. He wishes he’d been able to convince the gondolier to lend him the lantern too. Or at least a candle. He’s gone barely a hundred yards when he hears footsteps not his own ringing against the metal pipe and sees a flashlight beam flickering from around a curve in the tunnel ahead.
Torchies.
Ripple freezes. He’s unarmed. Should he run? But where to? The gondolier already departed, and anyway, Ripple can’t move fast in this muck.
“…just saying that they could leave a few for when we get back from patrol. Just manners, is all.”
“Nobody wants stale doughnuts, Gerald.”
“I grew up on day-olds. I’m made of day-olds.”
“You make every issue too personal. That’s your problem.”
“You are what you eat, Todd.”
“You’re saying we should expect the guys on sentinel duty to sit with a box of Loretta’s sour cream old-fashioneds for six hours while we’re down here? Because you identify as a pastry?”
“We’re the ones in the danger zone.”
“The poor fuckers maintaining the top of the wall are the ones in the danger zone. Torchies take potshots every time they can scrape two bullets together.”
“Potshots sure, but who’s more likely to get chainsawed? Them up there on the wall, or us down here in the dark?”
“Aw, stop trying to spook me. Torchies know to stay away from our patrol route. We always make plenty of noise so they can hear us coming.”
“I’m just saying, maybe the firemen weren’t so wrong to have a mutiny. Maybe we should try something like that ourselves.”
“Over doughnuts? Gerald, we’re not conscripted. If you don’t want your pension, you can quit anytime.”
Cops. Policing the tunnels. Catching criminals outside of Torchtown and throwing them back in. Ripple has an idea—maybe the first good idea of his life. Maybe not. He steps into the middle of the tunnel, holding his hands in the air. The flashlight beam catches him, shines right in his eyes. One of the cops shrieks, so high-pitched it sounds like echolocation banking off the walls.
“I’m turning myself in for the murder of Paxton Trank,” Ripple says.
30
CHILD OF SCIENCE
By the time the Lady met Abby, the Lady no longer had a name. She had given it up, along with all her earthly possessions, the day she joined the Flesh Soldiers of God’s Organic World. At that time, she’d been living on the streets as long as she could remember, which wasn’t too far back, after the shock treatments she’d endured during her most recent stay in the Quiet Place. The Lady talked to God, always had, but when she fell in with the Flesh Soldiers, it was the first time she met others who could hear his voice too. The other Flesh Soldiers heard it clearer, even, since they were actually able to understand what he was calling them to do. The Lady usually just heard God grumbling about nothing in particular while she panhandled up and down the Black Line or washed her undies in the Bay. She talked back to him, and between her “delusional parasitosis” (as the doctors put it; she called ’em “stringy skin critters”) and the sins of his world, they had plenty to keep them commiserating.
But the other Flesh Soldiers, they knew what he was after, what the endgame was. What was required of them in this life, and on into transcendence beyond: to stop the coming of the People Machines, whose time was growing nigh—the People Machines, who would be man-made but not men, the fruit of a lewd act with science itself. When the Flesh Soldiers laid out their plan for the bold crusade against the research headquarters, it struck the Lady as miraculous that God had made his orders so specific, even providing blueprints of the building and flak jackets for participants, bless his holy heart. She didn’t trouble much over the prospect that not all of them would come back alive. The Lady didn’t think much of this life; the best part of it was God anyhow, the nearness of him inside her skull, like the radio station she picked up through the fillings of her teeth. She figured that would go on just as well or better once death wiped out all the distractions: the chills and the sweats, the electrode headaches, the critter sores, the hunger and the thirst.
Not that the Lady suffered too bad from those last two, not since the congregation had taken her in with open arms. They holed up in an old bottling plant in North Crookbridge, below rusty smokestacks asprout with city weeds, just beyond the reach of those fireballs that roared down on Empire Island, that had been roaring down for three years. Between the chanting sessions and conspiracy theorizing and pamphlet distribution, they drank boiled rainwater from tree-wood cups and ate bland garmonbozia made from chickpeas and lentils unmodified by man—most other food was teeming with “nanomachines and mutagens,” robot crawlies smaller than a fleck of dust that might stay up your poop chute even after you’d cleansed with the leeches and the tubes. The life was monastic, sure, but it was the first winter in an age that the Lady had got through without frostbite, and come spring, she was pleased to give the Lord his due.
The laboratory complex was at the southmost tip of Empire Island, a glittering series of angular boxes like a crystal city from outer space. The scientists had a beachfront view, their workaday lives a vacation from God’s will. The Flesh Soldiers rowed ashore in stolen boats. Technology had crept inside the human form and become inseparable from it, ghost hearts beating in human chests, baby skin growing on old bones. Technology had replaced pets and meat beasts with simulacra indistinguishable from true. Technology infected mankind like a sickness in plague time. The Flesh Soldiers were the cure. They wore bird masks. They carried obsidian shivs.