Sharkey wraps his arm around her shoulder and pulls her close again. He tells her, “Don’t be scared. I got ya. Shhh. You can shut your eyes.”
When she opens them again, they’re back at the Chaw Shop, embracing against the inside of the door. Her coat drops to the floor; she thinks of her mother’s fox fur carelessly strewn in the Ripple lobby. That’s how to know you’re home, when you can toss your things anywhere.
“Am I hurting you?” Sharkey presses his finger against her gum, where the tip of a pointed canine is just about to break through.
“It feels rather…good, actually.” Her tongue moves against his knuckle when she speaks.
“It’s euphoria. Everything’s euphoric right now. That’s what chaw does. Releases the pain. Lets it all out.” His hand moves away from her mouth. There’s blood on his fingertip. He touches it to his lips. “Come upstairs.”
“I suppose I should warn you now. My husband says I’m frigid.”
Sharkey places his palm against her forehead. It’s a sensation Swanny has felt a thousand times before, sick in bed as a child, when Corona or the dentist would come to take her temperature. But it’s never felt like this. What a sensation it is to be reached for. To be the place where flesh meets flesh. To be alive, still, after everything. She shuts her eyes. Tonight, he will possess her, leave her naked and bitten and filled with him, no inch of her untasted or unconsumed. But this is how it starts: his palm against her brow.
“You’re burning up,” he says.
PART THREE
SIREN BENEATH THE WAVES
* * *
If you forget my name, you will go astray.
—BJ?RK
28
MAGIC
This is a story of inheritance—of what parents leave to their children, the curses and the gifts. Of how our families call us home, even when return would mean forsaking everything we have.
* * *
Abby is talking to the city.
When the fire chief zapped her, Abby felt nothing. All sensation left her mortal form, and for a moment, she wondered if this was what happened to Dunk on his wedding day, when he went into the Toob, became of it. Had the invisible bolts translated her from flesh and blood and bone and hair into a creature of pure idea, a pixelated essence immune to touch? She experienced neither pain nor pleasure as she watched her wilted husk flop over Trank’s shoulder, journey lifeless in his arms to the truck-bed mattress, submit limply to the ropes he wrapped around her and knotted at her wrists and ankles. It was only after he shrouded her with the blanket, committing her to darkness, that she returned to her body. There she became aware of the strange new power coursing through her veins.
She is the city at night. The lights flicker on one by one.
The electricity activates each cell, illuminates it. The switches flip in a cascade of awareness, an awakening like none she’s ever known. Abby lies still, but not paralyzed; she wants to receive what is happening to her without feint or deflection. And when the whole of her lifts toward the sky in frozen fireworks, a grand imaginary architecture asserting itself, when she glows and hums, no longer human, it is then that she hears Empire Island speak.
The city’s voice is not like Dunk’s or the Lady’s, made of sounds in the air, or like Hooligan’s or Scavenger’s, made of transmissions to her mind. The city speaks wordlessly, in vibrations she feels all throughout her body. She is tied to it with a million quivering strings. And those strings are electricity: the city’s grid, mapped onto the very core of her. Abby feels the voices of all the machines plugged in. The fridges, bovine and complacent; the Toob screens, raving and hallucinating; the electric blankets and power strips and shameless, dazzling lamps. These machines are not individuals, in the same way as human beings or magic animals; they are a hive, a colony, many making one. And for that reason, even stronger than the voices, Abby feels the city’s wounds. The disconnections. She feels each exploded fuse, as raw and pained as a severed nerve ending. And she knows, beyond a doubt, that the dragons know the hurt they are inflicting on this living thing, broken, beaten, cowering beneath their wings.
But why, why?
The dragons are torturing the city for information.
But why, why?
What does the city know that they don’t?
Abby is at the cusp of that knowledge. Then the lights begin to dim. The electricity pours out the tips of her fingers and toes. For an instant, she is a starburst and then it’s gone. Blackout.
She lies under the blanket, motionless except for muscles twitching again from the ebbing voltage. The mattress is unnaturally soft beneath her. Everything is unnatural.
“The machines are alive, just like you and me,” she whispers, aloud, in the voice she uses for communicating with humans. She’s speaking a foreign language. All her life she has feared the People Machines, feared electricity above all other forces. But electricity is not a tool for evil. It’s not a tool at all. It’s nothing made by man. It’s energy, the soul juice of matter. It’s life itself.
—ID: ? - TYPE ABBY?
—Scavenger! I thought you ran away!
—protocol requires observing all violent interactions at a safe, concealed distance.
—You couldn’t have fought him off anyway. Here, nibble at my ropes.
When Ripple pulls the blanket off an hour later, the rat is still nibbling.
“Thank fuck you’re OK.” He fumbles with her bonds, flopping her back and forth as he yanks at them. His red long johns are splattered almost purple in places, chunky-sauced, the fabric starting to stiffen. He smells like salt and fear and rusty iron. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Dunk?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you all bloody?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He frees her wrists. She rubs them, sitting up, as he tackles the ropes around her legs and ankles.
“Is he dead?”
“Wench, what did I just say?”
She picks a glob of brain off of his chest—over his heart—and inspects it. “Dunk?”
“What?”
“Are you really going to kill the dragons next?”
He turns away, tugging at the knots around her ankles. “I have to do something.”
“But do you have to do that?”
Ripple doesn’t answer, doesn’t seem to have heard. She reaches for the top of his head, to trace furrows in his tousled hair, the way that once soothed Hooligan, but he jerks away as if she’s shocked him.
Her longing to connect is sharper than a pain. The lost voltage has left behind an empty space in every cell. The second he gets her loose, Abby scrambles down off the mattress. She makes for the nearest electrical outlet and jabs at it with her fingernails.
“Fem, stop it!” Ripple pulls her away. “Why are you trying to kill yourself?”
“I want to talk to the city!”