She frowns, touches the letters and numbers she just wrote. A faint metallic shimmer transfers to her fingertip. “He’s going to kill you first.”
But if Trank notices the broken BeanReader, he doesn’t say anything. Downstairs in the Fire Museum cafeteria, he orders pizza for them again. Abby sees him do it this time. Another machine lives on the wall down here, its workings concealed in an exoskeleton of black plastic. Trank twists its faceplate first one way and then the other. He speaks the names of dinner into a smaller device that hangs from the host machine by a rubbery umbilicus.
“What’s he doing?” Abby whispers.
Ripple slurps from a can of Carbon8. “Old-school dialer. I guess that’s how they reached people back in loser times.”
“So they come when he calls them?”
“They better. In thirty minutes or less.”
“Why don’t you call your family?”
“Because I don’t want to talk to them right now. I told you, I’m not going back home until I make a name for myself.” He contemplates the phone, then shakes his head definitively. “Besides, the number’s, like, privatized. Normally I just poke their picture.”
Two days later, in the morning when Trank and Ripple are out fighting fires, Abby stands at the dialer, holding its receiver in her hand. Thirty minutes or less. It doesn’t seem like enough time to prepare herself. You have a family. She thinks of Dunk’s family, his father’s strange nests of artificial hair, his uncle’s belches and wheels. She thinks of Katya, so kind and yet so sad. The Ripples. A family. A tribe. Strange that Abby lost hers and never longed for them, never missed them the way she missed the Lady, never dreamed of them the way she dreamed of Dunk. Maybe they have forgotten her too. Maybe they abandoned her, cast her away. It would explain why she wound up in the trash.
Each hole in the dialer’s faceplate displays several letters and numbers. Abby places her finger in the K and cranks it around. Within the machine, she feels the activating shift: the gears stirring, sparking. Waking up. L…5…0…2…
When the faceplate spins back into place the final time, Abby presses the receiver to her ear, as she saw Trank do. Somewhere deep inside, it trills, a foreign sound to Abby but one that suggests all she needs to know, which is: wait. Wait. Soon.
“Hello?” she says when the trilling stops. “Hello?”
The quality of the silence inside the receiver has changed. Before, it was mute in the way of things inanimate, dumb as a box of rocks, like the Lady used to say. The new silence is complicated by omission, a quiet full of background noise. A hush of things unsaid.
“Hello?” she repeats. “This is Abby. At least—I call myself that now. Maybe you called me something else?”
She hears something, a faint…squeaking? But no words come in reply.
“I don’t know who I am,” she confesses. “I don’t know who I’m calling.”
The squeaking intensifies, but Abby can’t make out a syllable she recognizes. Is the machine itself talking to her? Or is there truly someone on the other end?
“The Lady used to warn me about false mothers,” she says. “The People Machines pretend to be mothers sometimes, so you love them and trust them. Inside, they’re just puppets for science. You can always tell a false mother when you twist her neck. Their heads go all the way around. Are you my mother? Are you going to come and find me?”
A fainter squeak, and then nothing but that other thing: the presence of someone or something at the other end of the line. That sense of a connection.
“I’m at the Fire Museum,” Abby blurts. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. I don’t know where I belong.”
Abby can’t tell time, but hours after her call is ended, she knows that Dunk was wrong. Thirty minutes or less. Answers won’t come to her so quickly. Maybe it’s her own fault. She doesn’t even know which questions to ask.
21
UNTORCHABLE
What does it mean, to have a brother? To be a brother? To lose a brother? Osmond looks at Humphrey’s corpse, stained with blue poison foam around the mouth, the skin lifeless and stiffening by the second, every inch of it fast becoming false and unvital as the toupee that, even now, clings to its forsaken perch. Humphrey’s velour pajamas are his costume for the afterlife. But Osmond still has time to change.
The panic room hardly accommodates a full turn of Osmond’s wheelchair when uninhabited; it’s nearly impossible to negotiate with both these bodies in the way. But he manages to back himself into the far corner to reach the emergency wet bar. He cracks open a cask-aged limited-release bottle of hundred-proof Moondrool and pours a hefty draught into his pint glass. The time for beer is done.
When, at age fifteen, Osmond was a contestant on CHALLENGER, his brother, not yet graduated from underschool, was the only person in the world to advise him against probable besplatterment.
“There’s no use in killing yourself,” Humphrey told Osmond. “It’s wasteful. Sure, you’re a weirdo and a mama’s boy, you’re out of shape, you’ve got a fungus growing on your neck—that cream isn’t working, by the way, I wish you’d see my dermatologist—but all of those problems can be easily corrected with diet and behavior. And even if you don’t want to make an effort to improve your situation, think about how rich we are. You can approximate happiness through purchasing power. Women are all basically prostitutes anyway.”
“Money is no reason to live,” Osmond grumbled, in his dressing gown (the hour was late), pacing. Using his legs for the last time, actually, come to think of it. His toes nestled in fur-lined slippers, every one soaking in sensation, in animate life. “Pleasure is meaningless in absence of principle. To have something to live for is to have something to die for, mon frère—and I die to mark man’s name upon the reign of the dragons. Even if I only eviscerate one of those bristleworm pterosaurs, posterity will be sure to cast my likeness in bronze.”
“Not to belabor the point, but that’s fucking retarded,” said Humphrey in his most grating debate-team voice. “For one thing…”
Osmond plugged up his ears: “Fa-la-la-la-la, I can’t hear you!”