Spray bags loaded, Ripple and Trank enter the sanctuary. The place yawns before them, cavernous, bigger than it looks from the outside. Filled with fire, like the belly of a dragon. Then Trank points to the back, farthest from the altar. Another Survivor.
“You take care of her,” says Trank. “I’m going up into the choir loft.”
The lady’s an old, old fem, old enough to be Pippi Dahlberg’s grandma, wearing this white lacy outfit that looks like a spiderweb dropped down on her from the ceiling and stuck her to the pew. As Ripple approaches, he sees she has a book open on her lap and she runs her fingers over its pages, petting it like it’s something alive, while she stares right at him. Only he can tell she can’t see anything. Her milky blind eyes make her look like her soul’s been erased.
“Ma’am, is there anyone else in the building?” Ripple asks her through his gas mask. The tapestry behind the old lady is burning, the carpet runner leading to the old lady is burning, but somehow the old lady herself isn’t burning. She’s just sitting there like she’s posing for a picture. A formal one, since she isn’t smiling.
“You will go into the fire,” she says.
“Duh, I already did.” Ripple sprays out the flames in front of him and takes another step toward her. “I’m here as a representative of Metropolitan Emergency Services.”
“You will go into the fire, but you will not find the way out.”
“Ma’am, I’m gonna help you now so you don’t get cremated alive.”
“You will never reach them.” Her voice quavers with cruel intensity: “Thus the fire speaks!”
Oookay. According to Trank, cults used to be huge in the city, but this is the last one with staying power: the Say-Somethings. Apparently these people worship the dragons, offer themselves up as sacrifices in hopes that, at the last moment, the dragons will speak through them, using earthling brains and vocal cords to communicate their otherworldly demands. A different take on reading the fires, kind of—except it’s the dragons’ minds they’re trying to read. Bonkers.
“You are not the one,” she tells him.
Wow. Like he was thinking earlier: rude. He stares at the old lady, then grabs her around the waist and throws her over his shoulder. It’s not procedure, but who cares.
“Prophecy disproved,” he announces, striding toward the doors.
She feels impossibly light in his arms. He expects her to resist, like the other Survivor he tried this on once—that bedentured harpy chomped him on the ear, and not in a sexy way either—but she doesn’t.
Instead, she laughs, and her laughter is a curse.
Outside, in the light of day, the old lady looks mummified: too dry and brittle to move without cracking into pieces. Behind them, a patch of church roof falls in on itself. Sparks dazzle up to the clouds. Ripple tries to set the old lady down, but she clings to him. Her hands clamp onto his slicker, his gloves, his utility belt.
“Hey!” A holster rips and his hatchet thunks to the pavement, narrowly missing his foot. “Wench, look what you did!”
“You will fight,” she whispers. “And you will lose—everything.”
She scuttles away down the street, cackling. In all of that ragged white lace, she’s a scrap of doomsday scripture, crumpled up and discarded but impossible to ignore.
Talk about a thankless job.
“You’re welcome!” Ripple yells after her.
“Duncan.”
Ripple turns. Trank stands framed in the doorway of the Witch Church. The fire behind him is gone, just gone, a blown-out candle. Trank points to the ax.
“Pick that up. You’re going to need it.”
* * *
They’ve never gone to the park before. Here, what were once lawns and gardens and meadows form a charcoal vista as bleak as the surface of the moon. Evaporated stream beds meander near carbonized swing sets and picnic tables. Every so often, a branchless rampike juts out of the lifeless earth, spent and blackened like the head of a match.
“Not to be a gutless wonder, but aren’t we totally exposed out here?” asks Ripple.
“Dragons don’t torch the park anymore, Duncan. There’s nothing left for it.”
“There’s…us.”
“They don’t aim for humans. We’re nothing to them. At most, they see us as ants.”
“My uncle used to death-ray ants with his quizzing glass before he stopped going outside.”
They crest a knoll. In the valley below, a dragon-seared carousel stands amid a makeshift open-air market. Two dozen sellers display their wares on worn rugs and blankets and stained bath towels; buyers move from booth to booth, bartering and haggling with the merchants.
“You can have anything shipped in,” says Trank, “but I like to support local commerce when I’m buying my gear. Let’s find you a new holster.”
As they start down the hill, Ripple takes a closer look at the vendors. The Survivors Ripple has met so far are mostly frail and elderly, wispy-skinned and wet-eyed, like pickled babies in a jar. But these pros and wenches are leathery as fuck, an armpit convention in smell-tastic 4-D. Looking around, he notices almost every single one has a disfiguring burn someplace visible.
“What’s the deal with the, uh, sales force?” he mutters to Trank.
“These folks lost everything and had nowhere to go—or just didn’t like the thought of retreating. So now they get by on trade, living here in the park. Under the bridges, mostly.”
“Like trolls? Why don’t they just grab some abandoned apartments? There isn’t exactly a shortage.”
“Once burned.” Trank doesn’t complete the thought.
One booth is selling canned goods. One is selling fire blankets. One is renting out a portable generator by the minute, allowing customers to charge their batteries. Ripple isn’t sure how lucrative any of this could be, but other shoppers are picking among the stalls, some spending currency, some bartering wares of their own.
“This is real chicken-thigh meat, it’s got to be worth something,” one woman says, haggling with a merchant who specializes in secondhand medications, pills arranged in piles by color, half-empty bottles of cough syrup priced by vol. The merchant shoots back, “Take your secondhand Torchtown poultry and go. I’d rather eat bird-lady pigeon than one of those mean, stringy fuckers.”
“Harsh,” Ripple observes. But it’s nice to see some of the citydwellers aren’t spending the remainder of their lives holed up inside. Most of the patrons here are pyropreneur types: Ripple spots the pizza-delivery pro with a satchel full of jelly beans and tuna fish—tomorrow’s toppings?—and gives him a thumbs-up. A loam-monger indiscreetly swaps drug packets for a box of extra-strength delousing powder. Apparently the park is another district the MPD isn’t obligated to police.