Sharkey turns onto Scullery Lane, under the shadow of wings. His luck’s run out; he knew it would someday. Nobody’s untorchable forever. If you have a heart, you can burn. And all animals have hearts.
He unchains his gator from the fire escape, kicks it in the tail. As it scuttles away down the sidewalk, the yellow dragon swoops low and ignites the Chaw Shop. Not just the roof: it hovers there for a full minute, blasting, till the whole building is engulfed. Dotting some final i. Flames flicker in the windows. Sharkey stands watching it for a long moment, the way the kindlings do. Then he climbs the steps up the stoop, lets himself inside.
Fireworks.
* * *
Ripple has never driven on land before, but the vehicle’s controls are kinda like a HowFly’s minus the vertical axis, so he figures it’ll be OK—close enough. The inside of Sharkey’s Magic Garage is an elevator, it turns out. Ripple exhales as it rumbles the limo down toward the underground parking lot below. Officially out of Torchtown.
“So where to?” he asks Swanny. “Your house out in Wonland, maybe?” He flips on the brights, steering the limo through the darkness, between the concrete posts that support the ceiling like ancient trees holding up the night sky.
“Black forest,” she murmurs.
“What?”
“Nothing.” The silence that follows is accompanied by a lapping, wettish sound.
“Wench, are you chewing?”
“This has been a very stressful afternoon.”
“It’s eleven a.m.” Looks like this marriage thing is off to a great start. Again. “I can’t fucking believe you risked our lives over a harpsaccordion.”
“It’s a klangflugel, you imbecile.”
* * *
Up, up, up, far above the clouds. Abby has always loved to swim, loved the feeling of weightlessness, her gravity effortlessly receptive to the water’s whims. But to soar—to scream across the sky, to thrust oneself in a single escalating assertion straight into God’s kingdom of the sky, to lose oneself in the dizzy heavenblue reaches of the sky—she’s never known a feeling like this before. Riding along in the HowLux was woozy and nightmarish, vertigo in motion, but this is a dream she can control. She remembers her fantasies back in the Fire Museum, the volcanic island of towering plants and untrod paths and caves aflutter with flying mice. It is as if she’s entered the highest reaches of that world. She tries to grow used to it, but she cannot sit still.
A vulture appears at her window. Abby gapes at the beaky face, haggard and creased, familiar yet impossible.
—Cuyahoga? How did you find me?
—you’re the one in my sky. how did you find me?
—It doesn’t matter. I’m glad I did. How is your sister’s brood?
—my sister’s wing is healed now, but i will stay on for a time. there’s nothing like the stench of the little ones’ regurge.
Abby feels the pride in her words.
—I’m happy for you.
—and you—you’ve learned to fly.
—Kind of.
—have you come to talk to Them?
—How did you know?
The vulture flaps once, as if to shrug.
—when i saw you, i thought, she’s come to talk to the big ones.
—Goodbye, Cuyahoga.
—goodbye.
The bird falls back, but the HowFly cruises on. The green dragon is no longer a speck in the distance. It drifts aimlessly, dead ahead, its back to her, its tail swaying leisurely, its wings extended, as tattered as sails left too long at sea, holding it aloft but doing little else. Abby has seen it before, but gliding along its side, she observes it perhaps more closely than anyone has previously survived to report. Beneath the barnacles and dried anemones, she sees the brittle scales, worn away in places to expose the rawhide flesh, or even grayish bone. She counts the creature’s ribs, pressed starkly against this un-upholstered skin. She sees a talon that has become painfully ingrown, a weapon curled in upon itself. And as she cruises up to the dragon’s face, she sees its snout, whiskered and frilled—the nostrils, which glow orange with each breath—and the eyes. Only the eyes surprise her. The eyes are shut.
—Hello?
And then they’re open—violet eyes, electrified with streaks of silver. Twin globes, each three handspans wide. Trained on her.
—HCKXAVUEDQYGPOIWRSBFMJTLZN.
A truly unpronounceable name is not language. It is a roar, a cacophony in which every tone denies the others, every tone asserts itself and itself alone. The dragon cannot form this name as utterance; he can only inscribe it, brand it, in breath or fire or idea. The dissonance shears the air as he sounds out each letter aloud and with his mind simultaneously.
—ZXSAQWCVDEGTRBIYNFOLMJUKHP.
The HowFly rocks in the turbulence of his exhalations. The transmissions throb through Abby’s brain. She feels zones of her gray matter lighting up: power surges to neighborhoods in the city of her mind. Neon letters glow searing bright and then explode.
—You wrote my name on the city. You called for me, and I came.
—GLOJDHSZVNXCFBUKAWMYEQRTPI.
The yellow dragon isn’t even in sight; she is miles beneath them, down under the clouds. But at the green dragon’s cry, she rises. Square-jawed and low-browed, she plows through the air the way a cowfish swims, her teeny limbs cycling like useless fins, her massive leathery wings doing all the work. Those wings: so much stronger than her brother’s, scale-less, featherless, with a claw at the top of each, like a bat’s thumb. Not lizard, not mammal. What code of transpositions and substitutions, duplications and omissions, wrote her into being? Her unknown glyphs, made flesh, are fearsome strange, the kind of asemic codex that human language dreams about.
—VNGEFKJMIBLQHXYZUCSRDPWOTA.
—UXZAPJGBKOTWFLEDIYMRNQCSVH.
Abby presses the heels of her hands hard into her ears, but the worst of the pressure is inside. The dragons’ voices sync then syncopate, vibrations and reverberations merging into a single pulsing rush. Cascading failures black out whole realms of Abby’s imagination and thought. It’s all too much. Too Much.
—What do you want?!
The green dragon huffs once more, falls silent. The yellow dragon yawns cavernously. Blue flames flicker in the darkness past her uvula, her throat’s pilot lights.
Amid the short circuits and showers of sparks that fill her, Abby senses with sudden relief, even ecstasy, that she is no longer alone. This is not the small weight of Scavenger stowing away in her gray matter. The dragons have connected to her, linked the vast machinery of their minds to hers, and as her own thoughts move, she feels theirs move in tandem. Though they are ancient creatures, primordial, byzantine and enormous, they are also incomplete: she sees that now. They do not have language. They do not reproduce. They have no predators; they have no prey. They exist outside of time at the very deepest level. The world is a womb to them, but they have stopped growing, and they have forgotten how to die.
No one else understands Them as she does. No one else understands Her.
—Will you come to my Island with me? Will you make me less alone?
—LIMOENFUCAKTHJQZRGSYWDVBPX.