Humphrey nodded. “That’s what I thought.”
After that, Ripple never brought up the Metropolitan Fire Department onscreen again. It was lucky for him that public opinion was shifting away from conscription around the same time. Exposé sites kept uncovering new abuses and excesses; the firemen tried to form some kind of union, which got shut down immediately. Ripple didn’t follow any of it closely. Then, about six months ago, midway through his final semester of underschool, the dragons torched the Gemini Building and an army of mutinous conscriptees dispatched to the scene stormed out in protest without extinguishing it. The ensuing blaze reportedly killed dozens, including charismatic Fire Chief Paxton Trank, and the flames of Empire Island have been unattended ever since. Ripple thinks of what Kelvin said: a total wasteland. Water and power are probably next.
“What a pity,” Swanny says now. “It might have made a real man of you. But at least you have your—image.”
“We are way too sober for this,” Ripple observes.
* * *
Ten minutes later, they’re in the herb garden on the fifth-floor terrace, smoking out of a pipe made from an old Voltage bottle. The smoke is scented with the sickly sweet citrus of the long-gone drink. Just beneath that lies the odor of the loam itself, peaty and musty and decayed, poisonously abandoned: something between a dorm-house shower curtain and an old cedar chest. Though he likes getting swamped as much as the next guy, Ripple’s never gotten used to the taste; he could never be a twenty-four-hour marshie like his uncle Osmond. But Swanny, though a first-timer to the substance, seems to be taking to it just fine. She coughs, delicately at first, then with the phlegm-rattling intensity of a show-off emphysemic.
“Good lord,” she murmurs. She stretches out one of her ringlets and watches it spring back. “Is this what average intelligence is like?”
“No way,” says Ripple. “This scrip makes you dumb.”
Absently stroking the lapel of her chinchilla coat, Swanny rises from the hemlock glider and minces toward the terrace railing. Her feet no longer seize the ground with a conquistador’s purpose. The night is dark and misty, and the dragons all but invisible; only the white-hot, sizzling lines of their breath assert their presence in the lower city. Swanny leans toward them, four floors and the sheer cliff face of the Heights falling away before her.
“Baroness, do not widow me.” Ripple hacks out his last hit. Hooligan, lying at his feet, looks up with concern. “Siddown. Gravity is not your friend.”
“?‘The Sky Is Yours.’ Ha. It’s quite extraordinary that my mother became successful peddling such lines of patent nonsense. ‘The Sky Is Yours.’ No wonder she’ll go to her grave with her name a lie. Gibich. The sky isn’t mine. The sky belongs to the dragons. Even before they came, it was just waiting for them. It was as though they made reservations.”
“Uh, you weren’t alive back then.”
“But I read, Duncan. I do read. I’ve read enough to know well that man never possessed the sky. He only ever passed through it, on his way up or on his way back down.” She leans dangerously over the creaking rail, an arm outstretched toward the dragons. “That’s our lot in life, isn’t it? We fall through the world without leaving a trace, all the while trying to grip the air. Oh, to be an unstoppable force of nature. To belong somewhere as they do…”
Ripple hasn’t laughed like this in a long time. But all of a sudden, the plump silhouette of Swanny from the back, the quavering line of her finger, tracing shapes in the night, the petulant, know-it-all timbre of her voice, suddenly coalesce not into a person, his fiancée, but into the punch line of a ginormous prank being played at his expense, like that time in underschool when some of the guys wrote WASTED on his forehead when he was passed out and no one said anything about it till the ID Holosnaps were already taken. And once he starts laughing, he can’t stop. Dimly, it occurs to him that Swanny did the same thing to him earlier, back in his room, so whatever. They’re even now.
“I don’t see what’s so amusing,” she says uneasily.
“You want to be a dragon?! You really are swamped.”
Swanny starts to reply, then freezes, half-turned to her right. In a different, lower voice—both more feminine and more insinuatingly unpleasant—she says, “How rude of me not to include you in our conversation. By all means, please join us.” For a second, Ripple thinks she’s still talking to him. Then Abby creeps a little closer, into the dim glow of the city’s lights. She’s wearing one of his mom’s old teddies, a flimsy pink thing with feathers around the neckline, under the green camo hoodie he had on this morning.
“You weren’t in your room,” she says. The sleeves of the sweatshirt are almost down to her knees, the hood like a cape down her back: it’s just like that ugly coat she used to wear on the Island, only with less bird shit on the shoulders. She sinks to her knees at his feet, and for a second he half hopes, half fears she’s going to do something unspeakable, but instead she scratches Hooligan behind the ears. His tail thumps the all-weather carpet. “Where’s Cuyahoga?”
“I don’t believe you’ve properly introduced your ‘friend,’ Duncan,” says Swanny. She returns to her hemlock glider like a queen reclaiming her throne.
“This is Abby,” he says, staring at the girl’s blond hair. It seems to give off a glow, even in the urban near-dark, and he thinks of a story his mother told him long ago, about an abandoned subway tunnel so full of smugglers’ treasure it shone like daylight inside.
“Abby what?”
“Just Abby.”
“Just Abby,” Swanny repeats. “How insouciant.”
Abby is rubbing Hooligan’s belly intently; he wriggles to and fro, occasionally clapping with delight. Ripple gently prods her with the toe of his sneaker, but she doesn’t stop, or look up at him either. Great. Now they’re both mad.
“See this bandage?” He rolls up his sleeve. “My HowFly misfunctioned. But I got lucky. Abby saved my life,” he admits. “I guess I should’ve said that before.”
Now Abby lifts her head. Her eyes are redder even than Swanny’s, and for a confused second he wonders if she’s been smoking too. Then he realizes she’s been crying—not to get his attention, but alone, in her room. Because she missed him.
Him. That’s all she wants. Not his fortune, not his name. Him.