“And Pippi Dahlberg can?”
Humphrey heaves himself up from his wingback swivel chair and opens the secret compartment behind the built-in shelving and watchful heads. The door to the family vault is an enormous steel porthole. He twists the hand wheel several times, and as the walk-in safe unseals, the office smells suddenly of gunpowder and currency, the nasty watermarked sweaty greenbacks you use to pay off a ransom or hush someone up, the kind you give to people you never want to see again, whose names you don’t want to know, the kind that doesn’t leave anything behind when it burns.
“We could have lost him, Hummer,” Katya goes on, lowering her voice. “This girl brought him back to us. This is a second chance for him—for our family. This is a sign. How can you not see?”
Humphrey fills the garbage bag with stacks of rubber-banded currency. “I’ll see if she’ll go willingly. If she won’t, there’s a Quiet Place in North Statesville that always has an extra bed or two.”
Katya’s heard of Quiet Places: state-run institutions for citizens afflicted with Too Much. So overcrowded lately, they cram two patients to a sensory deprivation tank and electroshock whole rooms at once. “No. No, no, no. This Abby is just learning to live with people. She grew up all alone. If you send her to a Quiet Place, she will go crazy.”
“That’s their specialty. Bottom line, I’m not going to let this young woman ruin our son’s life.”
“Hummer, Dunk and Abby are just like us. Their bodies have told them what to do. And that thing is love. What does all the rest of this matter—contracts, fortunes, names—in the face of love? We are animals, and the only happiness we can know is sweet animal happiness, the pleasure given without thinking that demands nothing in return. Tell him to follow his heart.”
“I’m not going to say that, Katya.”
“But why? Why would you deny him what you wanted so badly for yourself?”
The words are out before he can hesitate. “Because I don’t want him to make the same mistake I did.”
He says more words after that—quick, apologetic ones—but though Katya hears the syllables, sees his lips form shapes she knows she’s seen before, she can no longer understand his language. She understands even less than she did on her first day in this country. Back then, she did not believe she would always be a stranger here.
She leaves the room and knocks into Duncan on her way out; his ear was pressed against the door, eavesdropping.
Sometimes, when Katya looks back at pictures from her short-lived modeling career, she suspects an eerie thing…that somehow, she was not in her body at the moment when the image was snapped…that even before the airbrushing and the digital tweaks, the pixels lighting her from within, she had become, for a single instant, that elusive sublime being, an object of pure surface, an uninhabited woman. Now, for one moment, it happens again. All tenderizing humanity drains from her; she is impassive and empty and beautiful. Her hand could be plastic when it strikes her son’s face.
“Hey! That’s, like, child abuse!”
“Your father will see you now.”
* * *
Abby wakes to the odd sensation that she is still floating in the enormous tub. She rolls over; the surface beneath her ripples alarmingly. She sits up. She’s on a gigantic bed, strewn with pillows and a mammal-warm blanket which, she notices to her horror, appears to be attached to the wall via electrical cord. She hits the blanket with her fist. The mattress jiggles irritably. Abby jumps up and scampers across the dim room. She trips over an amorphous obstacle and hits the carpeted floor, panting. All of her calm from last night’s drugs and bath has disappeared. She is surrounded.
She raises herself up onto all fours and scuttles to the nearest wall, which is draped in what looks like a billowing sail. She grabs onto it to pull herself up. With a terrible jangling sound, the sail wrenches loose and envelops her like a net. Abby shrieks and flails and kicks, then, once freed, grabs a metal rod—which has suddenly appeared, lying useless on the floor—and whomps the pile of crumpled fabric several times for good measure.
The satin’s fall uncovers a bank of windows that span nearly the entire wall. Now nothing but glass separates Abby from the smoggy panorama of the morning city. She uneasily peers out.
Even in better times, our city was never meant to be seen in daylight. In those half-forgotten glory days, the lights of our skyscrapers and building complexes and bridges thrust upward, gorgeously, into the endless night like frozen fireworks. Dreamlike, fleeting, they were a spectacle that existed for us and us alone, that promised to vanish by the break of day. They blazed, but without substance, without origin, without threat. They were the fire without a dragon’s mouth around it.
Now, by night, our city glows with the heat of what consumes it, spells out in neon orange nothing but a last request. But by day, our true city has no choice but to reveal itself: a heavy thing, the steel anchor that tethers our dreams to the earth. The buildings, those pillars of glass and concrete, cast their monstrous shadows over the land, and the movement of those shadows marks the passage of our time.
Abby stares out the window as the reflections of clouds sweep across the blank faces of towers. What does she see? Before her are all the landmarks we know so well: the Windsor Building, its spire twisting heavenward in a child’s dream of infinity; the Gemini, the world’s tallest illusion, its two identical ’scrapers each impossibly dwarfing the other; the charred remains of the Lipgloss Building, that once-unassailable temple to global finance, its top ten floors windowless and gutted, tarps blowing from them like flags. She sees the Twolands Bridge, its damaged cables hanging unstrung as broken jewelry, and the barricade walls containing Torchtown bristling with their sniper posts and searchlights and alarms. Yet she sees all of this without words, without history or expectation. She sees a pure play of form, unafflicted by human striving or suffering or triumph. To her, it’s not something made or damaged; glorified, gentrified, vilified; corrupted, hallowed, or hollowed out. It simply is.
Abby sees the City itself: something few of us know how to see anymore, in the midst of this destruction, if we ever did.
And then she sees the dragons.