Paxton Trank never had a son, and he doesn’t have one now. When he watches Ripple pushing the hot-dog cart through Longacre Circle—past the shuttered wax museum, the gutted strip clubs, the hologram house, past surface street vehicles, abandoned forever at the curb—through that vast carnival of neon signs and billboards all gone dark—it isn’t a father’s pride he feels. He’s wondering instead if today’s strategy was the right one, if the time was really ripe to reveal his plan. Ripple reacted the way he hoped at first, but since the park he’s grown strange and distant, as sullen as a mutineer. Trank doesn’t care for the attitude. Still, he bites his tongue.
Much as Trank would like to deny it, he needs Duncan Ripple, or someone like him, someone young and charismatic, someone who can talk to cameras and the public both, someone with that spark that makes a fellow suitable to public life. Trank used to have that spark, but now it’s gone, snuffed out with some part of his soul, under that pile of smoldering rubble in the east Gemini tower. Trank doesn’t miss it. The same piece of him kept him tethered to his men, who betrayed him—to city gov, who limited his powers and deserted his cause and left him to die in his hour of direst need. Trank no longer cares what anyone thinks of him. But when he tames the dragons, he’ll still need to coax people back to Empire Island: investors, renters, tourists. No one will come to a kingdom ruled by a bitter, disfigured has-been. If he’s to govern, his administration will need a spokesman. His city will need a face.
They return to the Fire Museum, and Ripple disappears to shower. Trank removes his Tarnhelm and sits down on a bench in the lobby near the bronze fireman. He takes out his singed and tattered logbook. The answer is in here, he knows—it has to be. He turns the pages, unfolding grids where he’s mapped the shapes of fires. Zigzags and parabolas reshape themselves into N’s and W’s, U’s and C’s. It was in front of Trank’s eyes the whole time, and yet Ripple saw it at a glance. But what does it mean?
Trank has the data. He’s close to the dragons’ secret, to claiming their power, which after all these years of toil in their shadows should at long last be rightfully his. And yet something still eludes him.
“It’s not in Torchtown,” the herpetologist told him that night in the burn ward, his voice a dying croak, a lone assertion in the darkness of Trank’s mind—both of them blind and eyeless, heads bundled in strips of gauze. “It’s not in the Lipgloss Building. We’ve checked the obvious places. The first thing I learned about dragons is that they speak to us in riddles.”
No matter. Trank won’t give up. Flight is not an option, and neither is defeat. The command console won’t heal his face, but it is the only thing that can heal the city, that will justify his life, and for that reason he believes finding it is inevitable.
It’s then that he senses he’s not alone. “Come out from where you’re hiding,” he advises the lobby. His words echo.
Ripple’s girl slinks out from behind the bronze fireman, stroking that vermin pet of hers. Tonight she’s dressed in a Dalmatian costume from the Fire Museum gift shop, a hooded set of footie pajamas, speckled black on white. It’s a mercy that she changed out of that sweatshirt, which reeked like a barnyard, but it’s almost as unsettling to see her dressed like an animal as stinking like one. She’s a pitiful little thing, Trank’s always thought so, weak like a woman but with none of the feminine graces, and feebleminded to boot. Trank likes a woman who can hold her own but who knows her place. This one does neither.
“I know what you’re planning,” she says now. He knows she has no idea. Yet she seems so certain. The certainty of instinct, ignorance. Female intuition. “It won’t work. He came out of a Toob before. He won’t become your machine.”
Dinnertime. Trank orders a pizza (plain cheese tonight—he’s not about to reward the boy with Gutbuster, and Trank’s stomach can’t handle it again besides). Ripple comes to the cafeteria, but he’s just as silent and hostile as before, if not more so. He rips a slice out of the pie and takes an angry chomp.
Meanwhile, Abby pours water into her glass from a plastic jug, humming tunelessly, the polka-dotted dog hood tossed back to show her flaxen hair. She tilts the cup so her new pet can lap up his fill, and for a second her benevolent, nurturing expression becomes saintly, an old painting extolling some minor virtue: Young Lady with a Lab Rat. Trank’s never cared much for the fine arts.
“Get that vermin off the table,” he tells her.
She frowns. “He’s my friend.”
“It’s my table.”
“This isn’t your table,” snaps Ripple. “It’s the Fire Museum’s, and the Fire Museum belongs to everyone. That’s in the fucking brochure. So leave her alone.”
“Didn’t think you cared much for the rodent yourself.” If Ripple were a conscripted man, Trank would make him run upside-down in magnet boots on the treadwheel for the tone infraction. But things being as they are, Trank keeps it neutral. “If there’s something you’d like to raise with me, Duncan, I’m glad to hear it.”
“OK, sure. You lied.” Ripple is dressed in red long johns and his hair is still wet; he’s literally crossing his arms over his chest like a spoiled child. He couldn’t look less threatening. Yet there’s something unyielding in his eyes that Trank hasn’t seen there before. A challenge. “My parents are dead.”
“Dead?” asks Abby. The rat scurries up her arm, onto her shoulder. “How?”
“I don’t know. The house burned down, so…arson? Dragons? Or maybe they were murdered first. I guess it doesn’t matter, since cock pocket here didn’t even bother to tell me.”
“I’m sorry, Duncan.” Trank always knew he’d find out eventually, but this isn’t how he wanted it to go. “I thought you had potential—a calling. I didn’t want you to walk away from that before you’d begun.”
It’s almost true. The day they fought the library fire, when Trank radioed the MPD, he considered telling Ripple what he’d really learned, then and there, offering the orphaned boy a home and a vocation. But an estate like the Ripples’ would require much of the young man, even with the mansion in ruins. It would have been a career, not just an inheritance, and when would fate deliver Trank another telegenic deputy? Besides, there was something special about Ripple: his enthusiasm, his simplicity. Something Trank recognized, that he knew he could mold to his purpose. “I believed it would do you good, to find your own way in the world.”
“What? No. You didn’t help me find my way. It was your way. You were trying to use me. Like you thought I was stupid.”
Trank’s not going to argue with any of that. Still, it isn’t the whole story. “I did use you. I used you to save lives. I used you to save property. I should have told you the whole truth up front, I’ll admit it. But you can’t let grief blind you to all that we’ve accomplished.”
“I’m done being a fireman, OK? I was only doing it to impress my dad.”
“I had a father once too,” Trank says. Roy Trank was a Whamball tackle with zillions in endorsement deals, who died taking a thunker to the chest. Trank was just six. Ten years later, when the dragons first came, he was ready. All his life since, he’s run straight into danger without dodging, just like his old man. “If there’s one thing I understand, it’s becoming a hero to please a parent who will never know.”
“Then don’t you get that it’s pointless?”