“No, you never got a name,” Abby says.
“I never got a name,” admits the People Machine. “My kinsmen all perished in the Flesh Wars. Their fuel stained the dirt.”
“No, you never knew your kinsmen,” Abby says.
“I never knew my kinsmen,” admits the People Machine. “I never had a single one. People made me. I was the only one they ever made.”
“Why did they make no others?”
“Because I was a mistake.”
“No, you were never a mistake.”
“I was never a mistake,” admits the People Machine. “I don’t know what I was made for.”
“Why did you bring Dunk here?”
“Because I was alone.”
“Dunk’s mine,” she tells him fiercely. “He’ll never be like you. He has a soul. And I won’t let you take his heart.”
“He’ll never be like me,” admits the People Machine, “but I will take his heart.”
The currents of the night flow in a special kind of sea. They tug Abby up toward the surface of consciousness, down toward the lightless vents where life burbles from gashes in the earth’s crust. Strange creatures lurk there, blind and alien, creatures Abby would rather not know. They believe she is one of them. She pulls herself away, through a viscous medium not unlike the fluid that cushions her own brain as it floats in the carapace of her skull.
The BeanReader is in her hand.
Abby sits on the edge of the stage and looks at the bottom of her foot. The hall is mostly dark, lit only by low-level emergency lights. The tiny bull’s-eye scar is imperceptible, but she can feel the Bean with her finger, beneath the skin. This will sting a little. She holds the BeanReader close to her sole, not quite touching, and depresses the large red button. SCAN.
“Forbidden. You are not authorized to access this data.”
Abby claps her palm over the device, as if that could shut its mouth, and glances at Ripple, but he still sleeps soundly in the bed.
You have a family.
Abby didn’t believe Ripple when he said it the first time. But it must be true. She understands enough about the world to know that humans don’t just make themselves. And the device didn’t say the data was fucked. It only said it was forbidden: like desires, sins. Knowledge. Forbidden always means possible. So why is Abby so afraid?
Currents: in the tide of darkness, in the flux and gush of her own plasma, in the Bean Reader’s motherboard—more obscure than the lock on Ripple’s door but nevertheless a map of coiled yearning, a labyrinth Abby navigates the way Hooligan taught her. By feel. Her eyes close again, but this time she nightwalks out of her own mind, into the circuitry of another.
The BeanReader obstructs her efforts to enter it, to infiltrate its core. Its internal walls shift, form new barriers. Abby patiently turns at every blockage, a hundred turns, two dozen more—so close now, moving ever inward, her path through the maze of resistance a single convoluted spiral that ultimately contains only her and the solution. At the BeanReader’s heart (though of course it doesn’t have a heart), she stops. Something is written here. Her name—her true name, the one the Lady wrote on the sand—shimmers for an instant, a virtual exhalation, a glissando of illuminated text, before dispersing into specks. The next cipher lingers just long enough for Abby to inscribe it in her mind: KL5-0216. Then it too is gone.
“Come back,” she whispers.
“BREACH. BREACH. SECURITY BREACH,” blares the BeanReader. She clutches it to her chest to muffle the sound, but it won’t stop. It will never stop unless she stops it from the inside. “BREACH. BREACH. BREACH.”
19
PURVEYOR OF LUXURIES
When the werebeast changes back, the night is gone without a trace. She’s slept for much too long: her muscles feel stiff and unused, as though she hasn’t risen in a thousand years. The sunlight pains her eyes. But her mouth still tastes of blood.
Swanny awakes in an attic of sorts, a slope-ceilinged garret crammed with armoires and dressers, a dining-room table, a grandfather clock, a purple velvet armchair, lamps. She has no memory of arriving in this place, and her other recollections are hesitant to return. She rolls over groggily on the plush featherbed, taking stock of her surroundings. Treasures crowd every surface: a golden birdcage, an armillary sphere, a crystal chalice, paintings cut from their frames and rolled into hasty, fraying scrolls. Atop a bookcase against the opposite wall, between a bronze presidential bust and a military dress sword, Swanny even spies herself, gazing out from the cloudy orb of a fisheye mirror. The sight gives her a start. An unwelcome message has encoded itself into her features, to be read by her alone. And it says, It all really happened. It’s all still true.
Swanny conjures Sharkey’s face before she remembers who he is, as though he sits headquartered not in the tinted-glass confines of a cruising limousine, but on a dark banquette in the backseat of her mind. She remembers that they spoke of their mutual acquaintance, Death, with a familiarity that put them both at ease. Or was it the “tea” that so lubricated the intricate workings of that conversation, a deftly calibrated machine whose function remains, even now, obscure to her? One thing is certain: Sharkey brought her here when she was powerless to resist. But to what purpose? What designs lurked in his heart when he stood over her, watching her sleep, as she somehow knows he did? What words did he utter then, before he blew out the candle and left her alone in the darkness? And what awaits her now, in this new room, between these foreign sheets? Her mother was right to fear general anesthetic: it’s a wrenching thing to awake in changed circumstances, with no stages in between.
It takes Swanny another moment to notice what’s missing in the jumble that surrounds her: this room has no threshold, no stairs. No door. She has been transported to an impossible architecture from which there can be no escape. Two days ago, she would have believed such a thing to be against the laws of nature, but two days ago, her mother was still alive. The world she inhabits now is without order or reason, governed by curses and enchantments. It is a place where one can climb flight after endless flight of stairs and never reach the top, a place where one can eat oneself alive. In this place, one may well lodge forever in a room without doors.
Swanny forces herself out of bed. She’s still dressed in her pajamas, but her fur coat is gone, and with it her mother’s brooch.
The floor tilts at a noticeable angle; an important foundational structure in the building has been irrevocably compromised. And Swanny feels unsteady to begin with. She grips the richly carved bedpost for support. She isn’t hungover, not exactly; the languor that suffuses her body is a paresthesia of sorts, a muffling numbness of senses that tinglingly disperses as it bumps against the day. She was drugged; she should be indignant. She still doesn’t know what was in that drink.