“What’s that?”
“When a skin-and-bone woman gives in to her lust for a machine, the Devil lets form a terrible thing. A People Machine. All wires inside, no breath of life, no heart and soul. They don’t want nothing more than to be the only people on the face of this Earth. You can see them coming a mile away. Their eyes burn up the night. They ride in Contraptions powered on hellfire.” The Lady cast her crafty gaze through a chink in the boards. “They won’t find us out here in nature. They fear it. They need electricity to survive.”
The Girl licked a candy wrapper. “What’s a lectricity?”
“It’s the juice they feed on. It’s what they used to build the dragons.” Another bolt of lightning cracked the sky. The Lady nodded. “That’s it. Right there. They’re looking for us.” Thunder boomed back. “And that’s God saying we can’t be found.”
Even now, the Girl sometimes dreams of the city. She runs down cavernous streets, eternally dim in the shadows of the buildings, and the People Machines roll after her, beams shining from their searchlight eyes. Trails of lightning glisten in their wake, like the slime snails leave behind. The People Machines let loose an awful wail, louder than the tooting of the barge horns, louder than anything the Girl has ever heard. She can’t even hear herself screaming until she wakes up. But at least these dreams leave her feeling relieved, grateful, even, to awaken in her nest of pink insulation and rags. Sometimes the Girl dreams of impossible things, and then she almost can’t bear to open her eyes. She dreams of another pair of arms looped around her, lifting her up; of another hand holding hers, as the Lady’s did long ago; of the heavy warmth of another person sleeping nearby; of the smell of another neck, the sound of a laugh answering hers across the rolling dunes of garbage. Once she even dreamt of a face.
The Girl watches the dragons while she scavenges. She stands atop a heap of broken dishes and stares at them dipping through the far-off sky. They remind her of the vultures, of the flopping fish whose heads she smashes on the shore. They are too distant to see clearly, but they mesmerize her. It is hard for her to believe that the People Machines could create something so beautiful.
Not too long before the Lady lay down on that jangly, tattered mattress for the last time, sweating and clutching her forearm and grumbling about shooting stars only she could see—not long before that, the Lady gave the Girl a name. The morning of this naming, the Girl woke up alone in the HowFly to see the Lady tromping her way alone amongst the garbage hills. The Lady was bent forward, yammering, shaking her head, sometimes pausing to gesture at the sky or wipe her nose down the length of her sleeve. She only moved this way when she had been Called on a Mission. The Girl wrapped a checkered tablecloth around her shoulders, pulled on her too-big galoshes, and followed.
The Lady made her way down to the shore, twisting her head left and right, as if to shake water from her ear. The waves were strong for spring; some of the junk had gotten pulled out by the tide, and the Lady began marking the naked sand at the water’s edge with a stick. It took the Girl a minute to realize she was writing something there. The Lady had taught the Girl to read a little, really just to recognize words like POISON and DANGER and TOXIC. But the Girl had never seen a word like this. It unfurled upon the Island’s lip, a single breath. The Girl stood on an oil drum, frozen, as the word moved through the Lady’s arm into the stick into the dark wet sand. The Lady talked to herself, to God, in a low grumble all this while, with patches of humming here and there. Finally she threw her stick into the bay. She glanced up and saw the Girl watching her.
“God told me your name this morning,” the Lady hollered. “He said sorry for the holdup. Time ain’t the same up there.”
“What does it say?” the Girl asked.
“What do you think it says?”
The Girl’s mouth moved soundlessly. She tried to take in the whole word at a glance. It was impossible.
“Abracadabra?” she finally guessed. It was the longest word she knew.
The Lady jerked her head. “Close enough.”
Nowadays, the Girl tries to put the Lady back together in her mind. She remembers the Lady’s feet, the cracked black toes, the bristle on her chin, the tomatoey way she smelled. She remembers the tattoos: the skull and snakes, the wilted rose, the pillars of cloud and fire. The Girl still wears the puffy green coat with the flag sewn on one pocket, the coat the Lady never took off, even in summer. Little feathers poke out of the holes. The coat hides her knees, the sleeves her arms, even though she is a lady herself now, as much as she will ever be. She’s passed countless winters alone so far, countless sunburnt summers, and the Lady’s old, terrible prophecies of moon blood and brain aches have all come true scores of miserable times, and still the coat is too big. It will always be too big. Sometimes it makes her cry. The Girl is the last human in the world, and she has stopped growing.
* * *
The Girl floats on her back to watch the sky, that map of weather and time. Her ears are underwater. Her knees and breasts are four little islands just above the waves. She likes to look up on evenings like this, when the dusk is furred with gray. She feels like she’s inside of something, that space isn’t infinite but woolly and snug, intended just for her. She moves her arms through the water; it isn’t warm or cold, just there, a liquid as familiar as her own blood.
And then, in the sky, she sees it: a ballooning dome of white that she first takes for a plastic bag. But as it billows down, it’s much too big. It’s a sheet, but like no sheet she’s ever seen, unstained and filled with air—a cloud touched by gravity. A cloud with something attached.
The Girl flips over in the water and begins to swim to shore.
* * *
A strange girl is straddling Ripple. Her eyes are so blue it hurts to look at them; strands of blond hair halo her face in the pale gold of dawn. Not bad, but Ripple’s had dreams like this before. He smiles vaguely, lets his eyelids drift shut—and she presses the dull edge of a rusty pair of scissors against his throat. When she speaks, her voice is uncertain, with an uncanny accent like nothing he’s ever heard: “Human? Human? Say your name.”
“Don’t,” he groans. His skull feels swollen on the inside and he can’t move his left arm. Or rather, he probably could, but it doesn’t feel like it would be a good idea.
“Speak human-speak.” She presses the scissors harder against his voice box. “Talk like they do.”