“Do you get what this means?” Ripple continues, gentler. “You have a family. Parents, maybe siblings too. I bet they’re a higher peerage than the Dahlbergs. And they’re going to be so glad I brought you back.”
The more he thinks about this, the better it bodes. Where would a damsel like Abby be from, anyway? A penthouse in the Fraud District? Maybe her dad worked for Laidly Bros., or one of the other finance firms that still kept a satellite office in the city. No, better: maybe her dad owned one of the firms. The scene plays out in high definition in Ripple’s mind. It’s sixteen years ago. Abby’s parents bring her to the city on a business trip, stay in one of the last big hotels, bellhops tap-dancing and all that shit, when boom, the place goes up in flames. The parents escape, but they’re sooty and beat up—in a tuxedo and an evening gown, for maximum effect—and Abby’s mom is all crying, “My baaaaby, my baaaaby!” sifting through the ashes with her opera gloves. So they go home to wherever they’re from—their own island, but instead of a garbage dump it’s a tropical paradise, with coral reefs and waterslides and definitely a volcano—and they grieve. But they still have a hot tub full of Abby’s sisters to take care of (older, younger, a whole sorority of sun-kissed fun-seekers), so life goes on. Until one day, they get a text from Ripple saying, “Hey, I don’t know if you still want your lost daughter back…?” and they lose their minds. Ripple and Abby fly out via private HowJet and boom, they’re walking down a white-sand beach hand in hand, and Abby’s hot sisters are streaming out en masse, bouncing bikini’d down the dunes to hug them…it’s been so long since she’s seen these fems, they’re practically strangers…
“This will rule.” He leans in to kiss her, but Abby pulls away, scrunching her brow.
“How will we find them?”
“First, we’ve got to find a BeanReader. They usually have them at orphanariums and morgues.” He snaps his fingers. “They’ll scan this bad boy and it’ll spit out your name, your personal-record locator, everything.”
“My name?”
“Sure, why not?”
Abby twists a strand of hair around one finger. She doesn’t meet his eyes. As if she’s attempting to remember something important—or attempting to forget.
“I love you,” she says instead.
“Uh…” Ripple didn’t plan on this contingency. I do. Love. The second big commitment in an overcommitted day. Is this what he wants? He looks at Abby, her pixie-ish face, gentle yet feral, the wild blond hair, her ears sticking out through the strands. A girl like Mom? A poochi-poo? He can never know for sure unless he takes the plunge. “…I love you too?”
* * *
In the bag his mother packed: all the currency he has, cargo shorts, his Shredder multitool, a six-pack of Voltage, six bags of BacoCrisps, a pair of flip-flops, his sleeping bag, a deck of Skin Pic playing cards, a flashlight, the old stuffed mastodon from his bed, crayons, his LookyGlass, a solar-powered camping toothbrush, T-shirts, underpants, his inhaler, a lighter shaped like a headless woman’s torso where the fire comes out of her neck stump. Lucky socks. He hoists the duffel onto his shoulders, snaps Hooligan’s leash onto his collar, and glances around his bedroom one last time.
“Anything else you want? Dad’ll probably toss the rest of it once he finds out I quit the family.”
Abby considers the toys, electronics, controllers strewn around the room. She gets up and goes over to the ball pit, squats down at the edge, and carefully selects one yellow sphere.
“OK!” she says.
Ripple takes Abby’s hand and the two of them walk down the hall with the dog, where the elevator is still waiting. They step into that jewel box of a container, reflected in the gilt-edged mirrors behind. Abby inhales sharply. Then the door slides shut.
“You OK?” he asks. She squeezes his hand and smiles.
Just then, he hears a high-pitched siren sounding in the distant regions of the house. The elevator shudders to a halt. “Fuck! My dad must be onto us!”
“What?”
“Total butt nugget set off the security alarm!” Ripple fumbles through his pockets, pulls out a set of keys. He opens a locked panel under the buttons on the elevator, exposing a numerical pad and a recog screen. “Like I don’t know how to manual override? Guess again, pro.” The doors open, exposing a gap of a couple feet between the elevator floor and the lobby floor below. “OK, that’s the best I can do. Follow me.”
Ripple and Abby jump down into the hallway. “We better hurry,” he says, already breathless. “The whole place is in lockdown, c’mon.”
They’re on the first floor, near the greenhouse. Ripple takes off at a jog, counting on Abby to follow close behind, but a dozen paces later, he stops dead in his tracks, staring up at the convex security mirror positioned up near the ceiling just before the right-angle bend in the hall.
Torchies. One is shirtless with a Mohawk. One has a bad burn across half his face, as red and veiny as a monster mask. One wears a morningstar-spiked scrum cap and a kutte vest, bare arms bearing sleeves of slice-’n’-smudge tattoos. And the last one is a child, or very nearly: he’s small and fierce and disorientingly hairless, with his hair and eyebrows singed away. Dressed all in black. Like the others, he’s holding a chain saw.
Four torchies, inside Ripple’s house.
Time stops. It’s at this moment, for the first time, that Ripple truly realizes the nature of the story that he’s in. Up until this moment, he believed himself to be the hero, if not in terms of actual bravery, at least in terms of situational positioning. The story was about him, always. Now, though, Ripple realizes what an illusion all that was, a function of clever editing in service of mindless entertainment. He grabs Abby by the forearm, hard, silences her with a look.
The torchies disappear down the hall in the opposite direction.
“OK,” he whispers—and the choice is so weak, it doesn’t feel like he’s even making one, though later he’ll go over it again and again, trying to replay his logic step by step, to understand how he could do what he did when his mother, father, uncle, were still alive and vulnerable in the far reaches of the house. How he could have felt, even, relief, at that pivotal moment, when he cast away his birthright and gave up any hope of a truly happy ending: “Let’s get out of here.”
14
NEGATIVE SPACE