“Fuuuck.” This is real, and he can’t breathe.
It takes all the energy he can muster to grab her bony wrist and wrench the scissors out of her hand. Ripple sits up woozily as the girl scrambles out of stabbing range. She’s about his age, eighteen or so—he can tell from her pointy, wild little face—but weirdly scrawny: less than five feet tall, in an enormous army jacket and not much else. She looks like a mouse magically transformed to human. Her big ears stick up through the uncombed strands of her stringy waist-length hair; her front teeth gnaw her lower lip.
“What am I doing here?”
“I saved you.” She sounds like she can’t believe it either.
Ripple is on a saggy mattress, outside. It smells awful, and he’s noticing now that in addition to the stabbing pain, something warm is trickling down his arm, warm and sort of viscous, but she’s still staring at him, not smiling, not blinking, afraid but respectful—like he’s some kind of god. Cuz I’m the Dunk, comes the thought, unbidden. Ripple’s eyes linger on hers. Who…how…why…Then he glances to his right. Lying beside him is a human skeleton.
“Corpsefucker! Gaah!” Ripple jumps up, somehow dropping the scissors in the process, but before he can pick them up again, a volt of mind-erasing Ow! shoots through his left arm. He clutches it to his chest. His sleeve is wet and kind of sticky. He doesn’t want to think about what’s underneath. “What the—”
“I brought you to the Lady. I saved you.”
“—the snuff is going on?” Ripple glances dizzily left and right. Flies zigzag through the air; his foot’s stuck in a coffee can. Flocks of gulls circle above, weeping. Dunes of garbage cover the ground in all directions and stretch, undulating, to the distant shore: a literal wasteland.
It’s barely light outside—early morning?—but Ripple can see the terrain well enough to recognize where he is: Quick Kills, on Hoover Island, the city’s now-defunct landfill. It was all in the edutainment special they had to watch for his Desperate Activism course: Something Really Should Be Done. Dumping stopped here like forty years ago, when the Enviro Czar complained the whole place was going to sink. Maybe it would have been better if it had. They said it was the biggest mess people ever made.
The mattress is the ghost of a mattress really, not much more than springs. On top of it is the picked-clean skeleton, half covered in a Ladonian flag. Meanwhile, the girl has scrabbled away, crouches behind a nearby splintered crate marked FRAGILE. She peeks out at him furtively above the slats.
“How did I get here?” Ripple kicks the coffee can off his foot; she lets out an “eep!” and ducks back into hiding. “What kind of sick game is this, anyway?”
“Did God send you? From the sky?”
“What?”
She tilts her head. Some yards away, he sees the white deflated folds of his parachute, snagged on trash, blowing in the wind.
“It deployed,” he murmurs in wonderment. The HowFly chutes don’t have a good reputation. Usually they don’t open at all, or if they do, it happens inside the vehicle, causing the crash. He feels nothing but grateful for a second—until he looks back and sees her scrutinizing him with new suspicion.
“Are you…human?” she asks. The words dislodge from her throat like foreign objects. She doesn’t get a lot of visitors, he’s guessing.
“Am I what?”
“Are you a man of flesh?”
That sounds like the sort of question a cannibal would ask. Ripple glances back at the bones. They’re old and dry, no meat left on them at all. “I’m not answering till I know what happened to this guy.”
“She’s the Lady. She’s good to sleep near when you’re sick.”
“How did she die?”
The girl frowns.
“I couldn’t save her,” she admits.
Ripple would feel sorry for asking, but hey, he’s not the one who left a skeleton lying around. He changes tack: “How long was I out for?”
“All night. Morning now.”
Ripple glances east. Sure enough, the sun is rising, slowly, above the glass towers of the city. The dragons hang almost motionless against the orange sky, twined together like two insects trapped in amber. They seem so far away.
“They don’t torch you? Out here on the landfill?”
The girl shakes her head. “Their cords don’t stretch that far.”
Ripple’s arm is still dripping and he’s pretty sure it’s not motor oil. Plus a few vultures have joined the gulls above, and one of them seems particularly interested in him. “Listen, is there anywhere we can go? Like, I dunno, a building or something? A shelter? Maybe with a first-aid kit and some flares?” No flicker of comprehension from the girl. “You know, someplace less fucked? Anywhere?”
“What is fucked?”
“This place—this whole place—is fucked.”
The girl looks around her. “Fucked,” she says with approval.
“Where do you live?” The girl hesitates. He adds: “Could we—go there?”
“Are you human?” she repeats.
“Why do you keep asking me that? What else would I be?”
“I need to know,” she pleads.
Ripple pats his pockets. His LookyGlass, his expired dormitory ID/keycard, his organ-recipient VIP med badge are all still in the flying car he crashed. And somehow he doesn’t think they would help much anyway.
“I have a heartbeat,” he offers.
“You do?”
“Want to check?”
The girl emerges from behind the crate, her forehead warily scrunched. She’s barefoot, he notices, and there’s a strip of duct tape in her hair.
“In there?” she asks, pointing at his chest. He nods, wonders what the alternative would be. She presses her ear against his shirt and they stand that way for several moments while above them the birds scream and swirl. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Ripple should be scared, but weirdly, he finds himself thinking of that one time his mom tried to teach him to slow dance (“This is a life skill,” she told him at the time). He isn’t sure what to do with his arms.
“I guess technically, all animals have hearts,” he realizes out loud, but the girl shushes him. When she finally pulls away, tears are streaking lines of clean down her dirty face.
“I prayed and I prayed and you came,” she whispers.
Huh.
Ripple follows her across the Island. She scrambles over compacted bundles of yellowed newspaper, their headlines smeared—ALL IS NOT WELL—and the charred body of a busted HowScoot. The way she moves is kind of incredible—ducking and scampering, pulling herself over debris by her hands. She’s almost four-legged. And she’s definitely not dressed underneath that coat, not even a miniskirt. Maybe not anything at all. Ripple is so focused on the shadowy place where those spindly legs disappear under the army jacket that he doesn’t see the vulture swooping down until it’s too late.