Leather Lungs. That’s what they call the phantom fireman, the keeper of false promises, the bearer of bad news. Leather Lungs. Sometimes he doesn’t save anyone. He just comes to the fires to watch.
Back in underschool, Ripple heard all the stories—no two of them are quite the same. Sometimes Leather Lungs is hideously burned beneath his snozzled hood, his cauterized flesh exposing patches of blackened skull and a pearly, lipless smile. Sometimes he has the face of a friend or sibling or grandparent who died unrescued in a blaze—someone with a grudge. And sometimes, at the tale’s end, his victim feels compelled beyond all reason to pick up his ashy costume, the heavy domed helmet, the mask of hose and hide, and put them on—to slip inside the skin of Leather Lungs and live the curse himself. It’s this last idea that always scared Ripple the most: the thought of losing his face, his name.
“Who are you?” Ripple demands now of the apparition masquerading as his childhood nightmares. It’s as if Leather Lungs isn’t himself a presence, but rather the powerful absence of something else. Like the time Kelvin gouged his hand in Power Tools class, and Ripple couldn’t stop staring at the meaty little notch in the side of his thumb. Leather Lungs is a notch taken out of the world. Ripple steps in front of his wenches and canine protectively. “Back off, pro. I’ve faced old ladies and torchies, I don’t have to take this shit.”
Leather Lungs does not respond. He plods steadily toward Ripple, toward the fire, as though the dragons have opened a portal back to his interdimensional hell world and he intends to return with a guest. Ripple stands his ground. Hooligan tugs on Ripple’s pant leg and growls a warning.
“I’m not gonna say this again. Don’t get any closer.” Ripple’s not used to his bluffs getting called. It occurs to him that it’s dangerous to grow up with power before you have the physical strength to back it up. “I mean it.”
“Metropolitan Police Department,” says Leather Lungs. Through the mask, his voice sounds like his prerecorded siren—another echo from the past. “Independent extinguishment contractor.”
Oh.
“Can I see some ID?” Ripple asks shakily.
A walkie-talkie crackles on Leather Lungs’s utility belt. “Special Officer, confirm your position?”
“Ten-four, position confirmed,” Leather Lungs radios back. To Ripple, he says, “This is an emergency conscription. By your presence here today you have waived your right of noncompliance. Any attempt to resist performance of your civic duty, or to disobey orders, can and will be used against you.”
“Wait, what? Conscription? My dad buys me exemptions for that. I’m Duncan Ripple the Fifth. You can’t just conscript me in the street. Pro, back the fuck up.” Ripple puts up his fists.
“Dunk, don’t touch him, he’s a People Machine!”
But before Ripple can deliver his punch, Leather Lungs has throttled him and single-handedly lifted him by the throat two inches off the sidewalk. For the second time in five minutes, Ripple feels the breath squeezed out of him. He kicks at the air as Leather Lungs ominously raises his free hand, which Ripple now sees is no ordinary hand but a claw, two stainless-steel crescents connected by a hinge. It’ll be murder by dissection. Leather Lungs closes it around Ripple’s neck. Ripple waits for the scissory snip, the slice of metal into flesh and the feeling of light-headedness that he always imagined would go along with being decapitated. But instead, as Ripple tumbles backward onto the sidewalk, the claw still holds him in its grip. It is detached from Leather Lungs now, an appendage with a mind of its own.
And Ripple can’t get it off. He paws at the gizmo, which glimmers with light-emitting diodes and gives off a faint buzzing noise. It stays on snug, just below his chin. Leather Lungs doesn’t stick around to guard his handiwork. He continues on his way as the girls and dog huddle around Ripple.
“Oh no, a collar!” cries Abby. Hooligan shakes his head sympathetically.
A collar! Wait. What?
“Did that claw-slinging fog-nozzler really just try to conscript me?”
“No, he’s chosen you for his pet,” Swanny counters dryly. “Or perhaps for torture. At any rate, he owns you. Pity, I was hoping he’d do away with you at once. I just renegotiated the widowhood clause with your father yesterday.”
“I can’t get this thing off. Fems, do either of you have a hex key? Turnscrew? Multitool? Nail file? Toothpick? Nothing? Nothing, for serious?”
Leather Lungs’s hot-dog cart bounces away along the pavement, into the molten heart of what’s giving off thicker and thicker clouds of pollution. When he’s ten feet away, the diodes on Ripple’s collar start to flash.
“Ow!” Ripple jerks his head and slaps at the collar. “Fuck! It bit me! Ow! Fuck! It did it again! Ow! Fuck! Why does it keep doing that? Ow! Fuck! It fucking hurts!”
“Electricity!” Abby is berserking, but she isn’t wrong. The shocks get worse the farther off Leather Lungs gets—sizzling, shivery disturbances that feel like Ripple’s body is misaligning with his soul. Ripple sprints after him.
“Pro, wait up! Wait!”
* * *
Swanny was assembled in a lab out of spare parts of her parents. Now and then, her mother disparagingly referred to the way babies were “traditionally made,” as though procreation of the ordinary sort were a quaint affectation of the old-fashioned, despite the fact that there was a better product on the market—in this case, a customized one. Pippi selected for maximum intelligence (no guarantees, of course, but the doctors knew the genetic markers), keen senses, and, when it came down to picking among specific embryos, Swanny’s amber-colored, almost golden eyes.
“People act as though it’s some kind of witchcraft, but there’s always selection in the womb,” Pippi said. “Shark fetuses gobble up their siblings till only the strongest survives. That’s nature, darling. We could wring our hands over might-have-beens, but what for? You came into this life a winner.”
It’s Swanny’s eyes Abby stares into now. And though Abby knows nothing of the beakers and centrifuges, the cryocrypt where the recipe for the baroness in question spent its existential Before, she sees something in the particular hue of those irises that is not of God’s manufacture.
“You’re working for the People Machines,” Abby whispers. “Maybe you are a People Machine.”
“What are you muttering about? They have such strange accents where you come from. You don’t sound like anyone at all.”
“You want him to go. You want him to die in a fire.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m plotting against him with some sort of mercenary…fog-nozzler. Honestly, why bother to live in a city if you’re afraid to breathe the air?”
Abby repeats Katya’s words: “You’ll have babies, but you’ll never make love. You’ll have your babies in a Toob.”
Swanny’s mouth falls open, exposing the second row of teeth that half-doubles her lower jaw. Then her eyes narrow. “How dare you say that to me.”
“People Machine!”
“Empty-headed slut!”
“People Machine!”
“Shopworn dollymop!”