“Huh.” Humphrey squinted at her. “I suppose you want me to believe you’re above all that. Well, if you want to take the high road, what do you say to this?”
At that point, he removed a square of black glass from his pocket, tapped its surface, and aimed it at the pole-stage. A whirring orifice on the edge of this mysterious device shot out a beam of light. In it swayed a shimmering emissary from the spirit realm, its substanceless form constantly disrupted with flurries and jolts of electricity. Dimly, Abby realized it had once been a girl, one not so unlike her, though plusher and with a strange, false affectation of manner. Yet Abby could also see through her, as through a smog, to the pole and the wall beyond it. The ghost-girl bent over some sort of strange instrument, also translucent, a complicated system of valves and lung-like protrusions, which emitted odd, cloying tones at the prodding of her chubby fingers.
“All the tales of old, all the stories told of a gem both rare and fine,” the flickering specter sang. “No diamond’s sweet as when two hearts meet, and call each other mine. A treasure to have and hold: love’s a dearer thing than gooooold.”
Humphrey tapped the surface of the black glass again, triumphantly this time, and the stage was dark and silent once more. “Now I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes. You’re a wizard who steals girls’ souls.”
This exhausted the remaining store of Humphrey’s patience. He shouted that he would not be insulted in his own house, and that Abby should consider herself lucky to get anything at all, since she didn’t have so much as his son’s signature on a cocktail napkin, let alone Right of First Refusal, which the girl from the Hollow Gram was entitled to under the law. Abby tried to protest or apologize, but the words jumbled together with the sobs that reshaped her language into a dialect of sorrow, until at last Katya stepped from the shadows to insist, “You are frightening her, Hummer!” at which point Abby bolted from the Man Cave back into the hall, where Duncan leaned against the wall under a torchiere, cleaner than she’d ever seen him, waiting for her.
“So how’d it go?”
She was so relieved to find him, she almost fainted.
“I guess you need some breakfast.”
Abby clung to him, eyes half shut, as he led her through various corridors, into an echoing chamber made of cold metal and tile. Two men in white smocks stood at a slab of wood, hacking the wings off the plucked carcasses of birds and tossing them into a steel bowl. It was as though she had stepped into a dream. A ceiling of electric white. Rats with eyes like blood drops.
“Where have you taken me?” she whispered, digging her fingers into Ripple’s arm.
“Uh, it’s just a kitchen. Don’t let the village idiots bother you. Pros, do you mind?”
The wing cutters glanced at each other; one of them rolled his eyes as they exited through a door marked THE HELP.
“Zero privacy, seriously. What do you want to eat?”
“Um…”
“I know how to make toast.”
“OK.”
Ripple produced a spongy loaf sheathed in a rainbow-colored plastic sleeve. Abby had seen such bags on the Island, but every one of them was filled with a chunky, moldy, vile-smelling gruel that even she considered inedible. She watched with interest as he removed two unblemished slices and placed them in the matching slots of a chrome box in front of him on the counter. “So what exactly did my dad say?”
“He showed me the girl from Hollow Gram.”
“Yeah, I probably should’ve told you about her. Are you mad?”
Abby gazed down into the chrome box. Inside each slot, around each slice of bread, tiny metal coils were glowing orange though untouched by flame. The heat was coming from somewhere, it had to be; in some far-off place, the heat had separated from its source and traveled here, lost, on the wires of forgetting. Electricity: it stole life from nature and brought it inside. “Who is she?”
“Some random GEP from Wonland. My dad picked her, not me. I’m trying to get out of it.”
“Gep?”
“Genetically engineered princess. You know how an Old Mom gets pregnant, right? A turkey baster and a trait menu. And she definitely ordered Swanny well done.”
The slices of bread, so near to the chrome box’s nexus of unholy power, had begun to smolder, releasing thin tendrils of smoke as their surfaces browned and cauterized. Yet still the coils warmed. “Swanny? Is that her name?”
“You should see this fem’s test scores, it’s unnatural. If I was selecting for shit, ‘looks good naked’ would be way higher on the list. Maybe it just wasn’t in the genes. You can’t express something that’s not there.”
“She sang to me.”
“Yeah, that’s one of her ‘accomplishments.’ My sex life is a talent show, apparently.”
The bread was burning, trapped in the torture box of tongueless flame. Abby could see it, could feel it, on her skin and in her core. Where did these machines come from? Who made them? What were they for? The Lady had warned her, but she had not listened; she had left the Island where she was safe, and now she was damned. The wires were all around Abby, pulsing with energy. She was the bread in the toaster. She was the bread in the toaster. It was too much to bear, and she felt something inside her on the brink of snapping until, instead, the bread leapt up, entirely of its own volition, scorched beyond all recognition, and she screamed, “It’s ALIVE!”
* * *
Ripple thought some toast and fucking would calm her down, but nope: Abby’s still pretty tense. He can’t tell if the fucking made things better or worse. One thing’s for sure, she is not a fan of toast.
“Ever watch Toob before?” it now occurs to him to ask. “When you were a little kid or anything?”
Abby shakes her head. “I don’t remember anything before the Island.”
“Do you like my show?”
“It’s OK. Can they see us?”
“Who?”
“The people on the screen.”
When Ripple was a kid, he once saw a Toob exposé about these special new hybrid “poochi-poo” dogs that turned out to be sewer rats on steroids. It was creepy, though, because in the video coverage they looked so plainly undoglike—their twitchy eyes, their overbites, their warty faces and muscly backs, even their wiggling, hairless tails. Ripple slowly removes his hand from where it rests on Abby’s ass and looks her over carefully, trying to reassure himself that she is not a human poochi-poo. Lots of hot girls pretend to be dumb, he knows that.
But what if she’s so dumb, so ignorant, it’s impossible for her to understand him? What if she’s a different kind of creature than he thought?
“Fem, that’s me up there,” he instructs her, carefully. “Me and my parents and everyone I know.”
“How…” She trails off.
Is it even legal to date a poochi-poo?
“It’s a recording of my life. Like, drawing a picture to remember something. Only with cameras.”
“So we’re looking into the past?”
Ripple breathes a sigh of relief. “Yeah, you got it.”
“When did you come back?”
“From where, underschool?”