Leather Lungs nods slowly. “It’s an idea.”
“I just have to go back up to the Heights and check on my family first,” Ripple adds.
The elevator doors ding open on the first floor. The Librarians are waiting there, thirty at least, a whole hoary vexation of the barely undead, arranged in a half-circle, stooped and waiting. For a second Ripple thinks they’re about to go full zombie. Then they applaud.
Back outside, Ripple finds Abby sitting by herself on the steps, crying. Oh, right. For a second there, he totally forgot he was responsible for anyone besides himself.
“Hey, what’s up?” He looks around. “Where’s Swanny? Where’s Hooli? Where’s Avian Floozy?”
“They left,” she blubbers.
“Swanny left?” It’s more of a gut punch than Ripple would have expected. Swanny left. “She took my dog?”
“Everyone left.” Abby musters a smile: “But you came back.”
“Believe it, damsel. And guess what?” Ripple jerks his thumb at Leather Lungs, who stands a few yards away, speaking into that blocky, antennaed walkie-talkie. “I saved the library. Now he’s going to make me a special officer, just like him.”
Abby looks from the snozzled figure to Ripple, then back again. “But we need to find my people.”
He was afraid she’d bring that up. “Sure, we will. Except I need to find myself first.”
Abby stares at him, blindsided; her years alone on the trash island have left her unschooled in the psychology of self-actualization. “But you promised.”
Why is she giving him such a hard time? If he wanted a guilt trip, he would have stuck with his wife. “Listen, this is just a detour. The first BeanReader we see, we’ll check out your foot. Your parents have waited all this time, a little while longer’s no biggie. They’ll like me better if I have a career—if I’m not just someone’s kid.” Which reminds him: “First, though, we’ve gotta go check on my family. Maybe we can just peek in a window or something, to make sure they’re OK. When I go back, I want to return in triumph, you know?”
“Not necessary.” Leather Lungs plods over with the hot-dog cart. “I just spoke to headquarters. They dispatched a team to the Ripple mansion an hour ago, and it all looks normal. Everyone’s accounted for.”
“Wait—everyone?”
“Except your mother-in-law. Damn shame about that.”
Sucks for Swanny, anyway. She and that Old Mom were joined at the ovaries. Ripple pulls out his LookyGlass. No new texts. “But my dad still hasn’t answered.”
“Fathers can be distant sometimes.”
Even through the Tarnhelm, there’s something in Leather Lungs’s tone that suggests he understands. Ripple feels a surge of anger at Humphrey. He’s always failing his dad, and always in the most public ways. He felt like such a boss just a second ago.
“I’ll show him,” Ripple says. He hurls his LookyGlass to the ground, and the screen shatters against the pavement.
Abby cringes. “You hurt it.”
Ripple ignores her. To Leather Lungs, he adds: “Sign me up. For serious. Let’s do this.”
* * *
“Hey, I’ve been here before,” Ripple says. The building is white marble with a neoclassical portico, four alabaster columns supporting a pediment carved with figures clad in togas and merryweather helmets, ornate situlas in their hands. Chiseled into the stone just beneath the bas-relief are the words BRING IT ON.
The Fire Museum. Ripple, Abby, and Leather Lungs walk into the lobby: an expansive, open room, not unlike the one in the Ripples’ mansion. But instead of a stone fountain depicting ripped hunk vs. kraken, the monumental statue here is a giant fireman, bent on one knee, his eyes shielded beneath the brim of his helmet from the glory to come. Cast in bronze.
“I don’t like the metal man,” Abby murmurs.
Ripple came here on an underschool field trip when he was just eight; attendance was mandatory. The space is empty now, but he remembers it a decade ago, filled with the shouts and disorder of dozens of his classmates. That long-ago autumn day, the boys wandered these halls in pairs, split up by the buddy system. Kelvin was absorbed in a Boy Toy handheld championship, earmuff-headphones on, eyes trained on his screen, as they walked among the exhibits. Even Ripple’s videographers bailed after an hour. But Ripple was enraptured. In glass cases, ancient firefighting tools were laid out like holy relics, axes and wooden pails and Draegerman suits, diving bells for plunging into the sea of fire. Ox-drawn pumpers and steam-powered fire bikes stood on platforms. In one room, the boys took turns hopping from a ladder onto an old trampoline marked X in the center: JUMP FOR YOUR LIFE!
It should have been boring as fuck, yet the artifacts—adorned with brass beavers and bronze eagles, gilded and painted candy-apple red—got Ripple curious. Why had they bothered to make these things beautiful? He’d always thought of firefighting as janitorial work, late capitalism’s punishment for those too poor and lazy to qualify for exemptions, too boring to appear in reality. But the Fire Museum made them look like warriors girding for epic battle, dressed to dine in hell.
The main event took place in the museum’s auditorium. Ripple readied himself to nap through some multimedia, but instead the boys had a surprise guest: newly appointed Fire Chief Paxton Trank. Ripple didn’t exactly follow city politics, but even he’d heard of Trank. Just two weeks after his inauguration, this pro was already shaping up to be the stuff of legend. More like an action hero than a civil servant. He had a reputation for showing up to press conferences soot-streaked on the back of a HowDouse, which fired up its sirens and blasted off for the next emergency the second the Q&A concluded. That day, though, Trank was scrubbed and smartly dressed, clad in a slicker with epaulettes. Ripple doesn’t remember all the details of what he instructed them in his gravelly voice, though he did extol the virtues of enlistment and warn them to beware of “privileges that will subsidize your goddamned childhoods all the way to old age.” He cursed a lot for somebody talking to a group of kids.