“Hold on to the rail!” Pippi calls after her daughter, because she’s always been a clumsy girl, a disaster at dance, such poor posture, always dropping things, tripping over her own two feet, when they named her Swan they named her all wrong, because there’s not a graceful thing about her, the child is, to put it frankly, a weight, a terrible heaviness on Pippi’s heart, because Pippi cannot bear to see her fall, she simply cannot bear it, in certain cases the laws of gravity simply should not apply.
But Swanny doesn’t fall. She pounds down the stairs, two at a time, around and around the helix, her chinchilla coat flying out behind, the first athletic feat of her life, while up above the gunfire makes a symphony of percussion. Swanny’s nearly to the first floor when she hears her mother scream. And then she sees Pippi, plummeting through the center of the staircase, that column of nothingness around which the whole thing revolves, and crashing to the concrete floor. And even though Pippi is dissolving into a pool of herself, a red so dark and lustrous and conclusive that Swanny’s old decorator kit would name it Rapture, Swanny cannot stop to stare, she’s through the door and back out into the house’s lobby, because she’s reached the ground floor, there’s no farther down to go.
* * *
Beneath our city lies another city, carved into the earth, a city of hollowness, a city of emptiness, a city of negative space. Its skyline will never be revealed, not until that time in the future when our society’s final resting place is excavated and disturbed by a more advanced species. But until that day, we can only know our shadow city piece by piece, by the frail beam of a flashlight, by the touch of a hand outstretched in darkness. Long ago, parts of our underground were illuminated day and night—train platforms and exit signs, emergency stairs. Since then, all the electricity has escaped, seeping out the ends of frayed wires or bolting free from fuse boxes in dazzling sudden starbursts. Though this is the one realm unthreatened by the dragons, we have allowed it to decay like everything else we bury.
Once, the Black Line ran through these tunnels. But subterranean public transportation ceased decades ago, the first of the city’s systems to fail and still, blood in the veins of a corpse. Now the Chute has become the lair of Torchtown escapees, conscription dodgers, and others who don’t wish to be found. In that final category, one must include teenage runaways, even if, with their clumsy footfalls and their worried talk and their mutant dog straining at his leash, they make their presence in this place an open secret.
“I probably would’ve just gotten in the way,” Ripple is saying. “Don’t stick your hands in where they don’t belong, that’s what I learned in Power Tools class. Unless you’re suicidal, and fuck that. There’s a reason CHALLENGER got canceled; nobody likes to see a pro like Osmond stuck in a chair forever.”
Abby has been ignoring Ripple’s guilty monologue up till now, but this, of all things, finally captures her attention. “I thought the wheels were part of him.”
“Osmond? No way. The chair moves all on its own, it’s high tech.”
“It’s alive?”
“It’s like—motorized.”
“OK.” Abby bends to pick up a candy wrapper from the gunky trench between two ties. He doesn’t get why this is so hard for her to understand.
“It moves, but there’s an engine in there. Not a heart. Not a soul.”
“It’s evil?”
“No, it’s just…” Ripple jolts. “Did you hear that?”
The three of them stop walking. Hooligan cups a hand around one floppy ear.
“It sounded like footsteps,” whispers Ripple. “Like someone’s following us.”
“The bad ones? From the house?”
“I don’t think so.” Ripple swings the beam of his electric torch in an uneven circle, shedding light on iron columns, rat nests, a crumpled tarp. “Nobody’s here.” His words, echoing against the cement, don’t sound reassuring.
“I’m scared,” announces Abby. Hooligan whines in agreement. “There’s no sky.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“God can’t see me.”
“If he’s God, can’t he just look in through the ceiling?”
Abby tilts her head. “How?”
“I dunno, holy magic?”
“You’re silly.” Abby wraps her arms around his neck and presses her lips to his. The sensation is an island of comfort in the river of darkness, a place just big enough for the two of them. It’s funny how many worries go away when your mouth can’t form words. “Mmm. I don’t need God. Now I have you.”
Then they hear the voice, low and disembodied, a few yards away: “Freeze.”
Ripple leaps a foot in the air, swipes at the darkness with his flashlight beam. “Who’s there?”
“Don’t you recognize my voice, Duncan? Am I really so changed?”
Ripple feels something run over his foot—maybe a mouse?—and a shiver goes up his spine.
“Swanny,” he says, “what happened to you?”
There’s nothing obvious, not on the surface. She’s wearing that fluffy gray coat again over her pajamas, and her hair is frizzy and snarled, but she didn’t look way better right after they consummated. What’s different now is her face. Maybe she had a device installed behind her eyes that gives her terrible powers in place of a mortal soul. Her skin is so pale, she looks like a hologram floating in the beam of illumination.
“Give me half of everything you’ve got,” she says. He notices that one hand is concealed in the pocket of her coat, thrust forward in a gesture it takes him a second to recognize: it’s supposed to be point-blank concealment, a mugger’s heads-up.
“Sorry, we’re still married. I’m keeping my stuff.”
“When it comes to ink on paper, it’s either there or it’s not.” Swanny seems to have acquired a tremor, or, more accurately in her case, a jiggle—every thirty seconds, a major seismic event happens that she doesn’t seem to notice.
“Right.” He wonders if she really has a gun. That could be bad. “Well, I bet everybody back at the house is worried about you, so…”
“Everybody?”
“Sure, your mom…”
“Mother is dead.”
“Whoa, what?” He reflexively touches his cheek, which still stings from Pippi’s blow, then plays innocent. “How did she die?”
“How do you think?”
“How’m I supposed to know, she was super old.”
“You were a teen pregnancy, you ugly hulking scoundrel!” Swanny’s face scrunches disturbingly. Then her eyes go wide, like she’s watching an instant replay only she can see. “They shot her. Those fucking torchies—shot her down.”
“They had guns?”
“They had your father’s guns. How nice that he keeps the house well stocked.”
“Oh shit. Oh shit.” But Ripple isn’t thinking of his mother-in-law now. “What about my parents? Osmond? Are they OK?”
“I don’t know, Duncan, they didn’t check in with us before fleeing to the panic room.” Her voice drips with bitter sarcasm. “I suppose cowardice runs in the family.”
“Uh—” Ripple would throw down a comeback, but all of a sudden Swanny is looking less pallid and more…greenish. “Hey, are you OK? Maybe you should sit down.”
“I don’t need to ‘sit down,’ I simply need to, to, to…” As if checking an invisible timepiece, Swanny raises her wrist to her eyes, then faints.