“Because we’re dead.”
“And we like happily-ever-afters.”
Morsel picks his nose. “Even though we didn’t get one.”
32
A BONESONG FOR FLYING MACHINES
Abby dreams that she sheds her skin. In the dream, she wriggles to and fro, inching her way out of a ripped seam that stretches from her collarbone to her ear. She rises from the crumpled envelope of flesh, the blond hair splayed on the floor, and walks across the laboratory floor to the Drive. There, she sees herself reflected in the black glass. Her body, naked now as never before, is like the Drive, glittering with copper and diodes, networked with wires. An electric city in the shape of a Girl.
She wakes up back in her body again. She lets the morning pass. The rats prepare her a breakfast feast, little chunks of cheese on platters made from bottle caps, flat soda in thimbles and shot glasses, strips of jerky on chipped saucers, a lone cheese doodle on a beer coaster: everything they’ve saved for this special occasion. They carry the dishes out one by one into the TeamWorkSpace, placing them before her. A veritable smorgasbord. Hooligan eyes the tiny portions, glances at her in concern, but Abby isn’t hungry anyway. She lets the apehound eat her share. Only when the rats bring her a Sin Bun, still in its cellophane wrapper, does she finally take more than a single bite. The pastry’s taste brings her back to her first night in the Ripple mansion—to Katya, to Duncan. Everything was so new then, new and so strange. Now this world seems very old to her. Old, but even stranger.
—Seer?
—yes, my child?
—I have to go up to the sky. I have to talk to the dragons.
* * *
The HowFly is on the roof of the laboratory complex, a company ride emblazoned with the word ABECEDARY. Small and white and boxy, nothing like the dark, gleaming, crablike HowLux that carried Abby from her Island into the sky. Seer points at the craft with her bedazzled tongue depressor. Today the sky is as cold and blue as a sea, frothed with clouds. Abby pulls the lab coat tighter around herself, her hair tossing in the chilly wind.
—I don’t know how to drive.
The door slides open at Abby’s touch.
—the flying machine will listen if you tell it where you want to go.
—I’m scared.
—of the dragons?
—No.
Abby thinks of the years spent on her Island, among things discarded and unnamed. The worst thing isn’t up there in the sky. The worst thing would be to come back down alone.
—a path of cinders has brought you to this place. you know your name. where you are going you will not be alone.
—Goodbye, Seer.
Abby climbs inside the HowFly. Hooligan tries to clamber in after her, but she pushes him back.
—Hooli, stay.
—stay with you.
—No, stay here.
—till you come back?
—Stay here till I’m gone. Then go find Dunk.
She seals herself inside the machine. Hooligan flaps his tail, once, gazes at her with his luminous, watering eyes. Do dogs cry? He looks as though he might, but just whimpers instead.
—Be good.
* * *
When Swanny comes downstairs in the morning, Sharkey is already waiting at the kitchen table, wifebeater, no hat, a mug steaming in his hand. She lingers in the doorway. He doesn’t look up, but she knows he knows she’s there. His silence is a pressure begging for release. She recognizes the book he’s reading: SLAKELESS, the paperback she found in the Chaw Shop her first day. He only has a few pages left.
“Is it a happy ending?” she asks.
“Depends on who you’re rooting for.” Sharkey cracks the spine, sets the book facedown on the table. “We gonna talk about last night?”
Swanny’s breath catches before she realizes he means their quarrel in the limo. “I’d rather not. Except”—she forces herself to append—“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to see him again.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I don’t trust myself. I don’t know what I’d do if I found the two of you together.”
Another killing offense. Soon she’ll have committed them all. “How generous of you to warn me.”
“C’mere.”
No reason to provoke him now; she’ll be gone by tonight. Obediently, she sits on his lap. He’s so hairy; even his shoulders, the tops of his ears, bristle with unshaven, bestial life. Only on his scalp does it recede, leaving his brow heavy, sloped, bare. Atavism: a being of the ancient type, born too late into this world. She wishes he repulsed her, but nothing will ever prickle like his stubble against her skin.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” he mutters. “You did a number on me.”
“Oh, Howie.” Despite herself, she’s sighing the words into his ear. She knows how it feels to be jealous: a smashed vase, a shattered mirror. She has violence in her too. How can I want you so badly when I’m already in your arms? How can she even think of leaving, when his body is still so warm? She tries to remember her reasons—Duncan Ripple V, the specter of years to come whittled away by addiction, even the sodden blanket of her grief—but none of them have the substance of Howie’s arm on her back, his palm on her thigh. None of them, except two pint-sized kindlings with no substance at all: You didn’t wring our li’l necks. That was Sharkey! She pulls back, drums her fingers on the table to hide the tremble in her hands. “You mustn’t let me keep you from your work.”
“Yeah. I’m gonna go make some chaw.” Sharkey gets up, puts on his zoot jacket. Looks back at her over his shoulder. “You chew yet today?”
“I’ll resist till afternoon, I think.”
He smirks. “Have fun.”
The moment he’s gone, Swanny hurries into the shop. Her hours have been irregular of late; it’s been more than a week since she came in this early in the day. She goes behind the counter, peers into the dark space beneath the register. There’s the slingshot, waiting for her on the floorboards, as promised. She stashes it in her handbag, starts to leave the room—then goes behind the counter a second time and reaches for the jar labeled CORDIAL GOODBYE. Just a few mouthfuls for the road. She’s giving it up forever, but forever can start a little later in the day.
She wraps herself in her chinchilla and, with pockets full of drug, proceeds outside and down the streets to her designated meeting place with Ripple.
“Wench, I have been in this dumpster all night. Couldn’t you at least bring me a breakfast burrito or something?”
“You’re a spoiled child,” Swanny says, and bursts into tears.
“Hey, I’m just…kidding?”
“Don’t touch me. It’s bad enough for us to be seen walking the streets together.”