The world is just a rift for water to pass through. That rift is closing now.
In the center of the lab, the cords and cables and wires from the hall converge upon a giant Drive. Abby does not remember this. It was never here before. During the years she spent in the lab, it was hidden from her, like so much else: stored in a windowless locked room in the basement, accessible only to those with full security clearance. The scientists wiped the data before their departure, powered it down for good. But now, here it stands, a cityscape of diodes and copper and black glass, taller than Abby and radiating heat, recalibrated and humming with information restored. The rats have been feeding it with every fact they can glean, every tidbit of history relating to their own origins, to the company that made them.
Abby approaches the device, reaches out to stroke a circuit board. Electricity crackles between the surface and her fingers—a wordless hello. She pulls her hand away.
In each generation of Abecedary’s experimental rats, one is born a “Seer.” Instead of red eyes, hers are milky pale and greenish. The scientists never knew why. They used to joke about it in the lab: that the afflicted rodents could see in the dark, through walls. That they could read minds. Today, this generation’s Seer steps toward Abby, twitching her long droopy whiskers with the dignified caution of the blind. She wears a tiny headdress shaped from colorful Toob connector wires, gnawed off and frazzled at the ends, and walks upright with the help of a staff made from a bedazzled tongue depressor.
Seer touches her paw to Abby’s foot and those lemon-lime eyes illume. Abby’s foot glows red and transparent, her bones like the branch-shadows of a black forest, her Bean a drop of spilled ink.
Seer reads the Bean. She reads Abby’s name.
—you have returned.
—But why? What do I do now?
The shamanic lab rat points her staff, and Abby approaches the Drive, places her hand flat upon its black glass. Shuts her eyes. This knowledge will rewrite her; it will sever her from every human she has met, and leave her with one last hope of connection. But it is time to learn. Electrons orbit in her like clouds of fireflies. Chemical reactions flash and bubble in her brain.
No one stays a child forever.
* * *
What does the Drive say to Abby? They do not speak in a language that we can understand. The language they speak is not a thing learned. It is the very substance of which they are made.
But we can say this much: before Abby, the scientists created sparrows and rats, fish and dogs, snakes and vultures and apes and geckos. Hybrids too, because they could. Some were released into the wild, tagged and tracked; some were kept in cages in the lab; some were bred and sold as pets. Magic animals, sprung from imagination’s womb. Written into being. After each creation, barrels of pink protein solution poured into the waters of Nereid Bay.
Though Abby is mortal, her cells are slow clocks, a mystery to germs and decay, enhanced with efficiencies humans hoped one day to retrofit to themselves. She was born fifty years ago: an old child, the first and last of her kind. The scientists drained her incubation tube, patted her dry—and that very hour, the dragons rose up from the waves.
Abby was to be the link between the humans and the magic animals. She would be durable, indispensable. She would speak to the magic animals as man could not, name them and give them purpose. But she was lost before the scientists could teach her how.
She is no longer lost.
* * *
That night, Abby and Hooligan rest together on a futon in the laboratory’s open-plan TeamWorkSpace. “Brainstorm,” reads a single word, written on a whiteboard in a shade of fluorescent pink that appears to glow and vibrate even in the unelectrified night. All around, the room is an abandoned playpen for adults, scattered with dry-erase markers and candy-colored SitPro fitness orbs that remind Abby of balls from Duncan’s ball pit, grown large beyond their nature by time. Once, long ago, humans gathered here—sharing their findings, tapping out reports, making predictions—all about her. Now they are gone, and only she remains. Her fingers furrow through Hooligan’s fur, tracing paths she knows well. Lingering, as if for the last time.
—Hooli?
—mmrruff.
—Does it bother you that God didn’t make us?
—uh-uh.
—But it means we don’t have souls.
—what is soul.
—Something that stays behind after we die. You know. A ghost. An angel that flies up to heaven.
He considers this, his tail twitching thoughtfully.
—our bones will speak.
—Like Magic Bird?
—uh-huh.
—I guess that’s almost as good.
Hooligan yawns.
—sleep now. don’t worry.
But Abby does worry, lying there deserted as the apehound snores. She worries that despite her best intentions she’ll leave the world more desolate than she found it. She worries that Duncan will forget her, that she and her kind will fall from man’s story without leaving a trace. She worries that her whole life has been a mistake, an experiment gone totally awry. Most of all, she worries that the Lady was right, all those years ago, when she told Abby that knowledge was a sin. If it is a sin, there is no undoing it now.
“Abracadabra,” she whispers in the dark.
31
QUEEN OF THE NIGHT
I have to sign off on a confession to get incancerserrated without a trial and as a full-blown MURDERER that doesn’t gibe with my lifestyle because I don’t follow rules not even the LAWS OF MAN but I don’t want to waste another minute in this stupid detayment kennel in this stupid police station so here goes get ready for a serious SHOCKING TRUE CONFESSION from yours truly
I Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, being of sound mind and body, killed the fuck out of former Fire Chief Paxton Trank, with an ax. And I’d do it again!!! I’d kill the fuck out of all you cops if you gave me a chance esp Gerald and Todd, you smell like sewers and its not because you work there, the smell is coming from your BUTTZ.
Love,
Duncan