Abby walks through the Fire Museum alone in the middle of the day, barefoot, in Ripple’s old sweatshirt, still. It’s gone unwashed so long it no longer smells of anyone but her.
Here in the Fire Museum, everything is trapped, pinned and posed, displayed in locked showcases or behind velvet ropes. Nothing lives or dies or changes. The only place that Abby likes is the Hall of Natural Disasters. She pretends the dioramas are landscapes she could step into without any effort at all. She doesn’t understand why droughts and forest fires are natural if dragons aren’t…but in this space her mind calms.
She likes the volcano diorama best. It shows an island like her Island, not like Empire Island. There are no cities. There are no ruins. The only sign of man is a single straw hut, its stilts perched on the slope. A place apart. But this place is even more beautiful than her Island: the shore is made of glass ground so fine she imagines it would be soft beneath her feet. The water is the color of antifreeze. Red pigeons and blue vultures circle through the pink painted clouds. Paths twist amid green shadows, and strange creatures with dog hands and old men’s faces clamber up the plants.
In the center of it all is the volcano, bursting into the sky. Fire from below. Abby imagines Dunk saving her from it. She imagines clinging to him, her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, as he runs through the green leaves down toward the beach. In real life, she can run faster than he can, so in her imagination, she’s wounded in some small way, sliced by debris like he was when she found him floating in the bay. She wouldn’t mind him endangering himself if he did it for her; that’s the only reason she can accept. After all, she would die for him.
The fire-from-below is beautiful, not like the fires she knows. It showers through the sky like rain and pours down the sides of the volcano in rivers. What if Dunk couldn’t run fast enough? What if that flowing mass of orange gold overtook them, and they fell into it? The fire-from-below would be hot and sweet and sticky—it would coat their bodies and pull them inside. Rather than burning, it would melt her and Dunk completely, and then they would become part of it, feeling everything it touched, feeling every part of each other, their love a single substance reaching from the island’s edge to the lip of the volcano and down its throat into the ground. When they cooled, they would be the island, and someday new feet would walk upon them, and new flowers would bloom upon them, until there were no feet and no flowers and no ocean lapping at their shore, and even then, they would be together, a single mass, until they wore away to dust.
She is living in the wrong disaster.
Abby is so lost in her daydream, it takes her a long time to notice that something is different about the volcano diorama today. She gazes into it more carefully. The miniature HowDouse, lofted by wires up at the very top of the exhibit, swings slightly left and right. It is off balance.
It has a passenger.
A rat with eyes like blood drops.
But the white rat isn’t only there, in the diorama, behind the glass.
Abby has a passenger too.
It is very odd to feel an intruder creeping through your mind, sniffing and nibbling at what he finds there. Abby’s brain is a maze, and the rat sneaks through it, nimbly and with a strong sense of direction. He noses through the fantasy she just had, digs around in her memories of breakfast, then scampers toward her dreams from last night. Before he can snoop through those, Abby tries to shift the parameters, to corner him, but he’s too deft to trap. As the floor of her mind tilts beneath him and her perception shines a beam to catch him, he wriggles his way into a gap in her awareness too small for her consciousness to fit into. She senses him in there, slinking along on the undersides of her ideas and feelings, whiskering his way through the dark of her.
Is this what it’s like to be decrypted? She feels something like sympathy for the BeanReader she infiltrated.
—Who are you, and what are you doing in my head?!
The rat stops dead, a small weight detectable in his sudden stillness. He thinks she still might not notice him. He thinks it’s impossible that she’s onto him already.
—Get out!
It feels like sneezing, like coughing out a throat-lodged fish bone, like vomiting up that pizza the first night here in the Fire Museum. Abby’s body has powers she knows nothing about, and one of these is the power to expel. The rat’s psychic avatar flies from her mind and back into his own verminal skull with such force that he falls from the miniature HowDouse onto the volcano, where he rolls down the slope in an avalanche of foam-flake-and-wire trees.
—ABORT MISSION. EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ENACTED.
The rat skitters across the plastic ocean and squeezes into a little hole in the diorama’s far corner.
“Hey! Hey, stop!”
Abby can no longer see the rat, but she hears him behind the wall: scrabble scrabble, scrabble scrabble. She chases the sound, past the other disasters and out into the corridor that connects the halls. The rat runs out of the baseboard and hightails it down the tiles.
—Come back here!
The rat glances over his shoulder at this telepathic exhortation, but he patters on, down the corridor, down the grand stairs into the lobby, past the bronze fireman and the ticket booths, toward the basement cafeteria. Abby loses sight of him down amid the tables and chairs.
—Come back…!
But he’s gone; it’s like he was never there. He’s gone.
Years of solving her own problems on the Island should have prepared Abby for a setback like this; it’s been a long time since she wept in pure frustration. But that’s what she does today. She wanders into the cafeteria’s kitchen and sits down on the floor with her back against the refrigerator, her knees pulled up to her chest. The box of ice and wires thrums electric against her back. There was a time when she would have recoiled from the sensation, but right now, it’s the only warmth she knows. What is she becoming? She’s mad at the rat for entering her mind without permission. She has never been the subject of such an intrusion before. But she’s even madder at herself for letting him escape before she found out how he was able to do that. He holds some key to her that she didn’t know existed. He knows something. About her.
And for the first time in her life, it isn’t some unknown Other that she longs for most. It isn’t even Dunk. It’s knowledge of her own true self.
Snap!
—gnaw off, leave on. 50% pro-con ratio. CANNOT COMPUTE. gnaw off, leave on. gnaw off, leave on. gnaw off, leave on. SYSTEM FAILURE. RESTART. gnaw off, leave on. 50% pro-con ratio…
It’s coming from behind the stove. Abby climbs onto the counter and peers down into the gap between the back of the oven and the wall. At the bottom is the white rat. His tail is stuck in a mousetrap. He stares up at her, red eyes blinking.
—There you are.
When the rat replies, he sounds less robotic. Squeakier.
—you will eat me.