Ripple sinks to the floor, buries his face in his hands. “You’re—so—weird!”
She regards him, gore-beslimed and curled in a fetal position at her feet like something born too soon. The first time she saw him, he was damaged too, his arm slashed and dripping, his parachute tangled around him. But he seemed so perfect then, a gift from the universe to her. She lay beside him for hours, staring into his face—ostensibly to make sure he kept breathing and protect herself in case he woke up, but really because the pleasure flowed into her ceaseless and intense as she memorized him, every freckle and clogged pore, every flake of dandruff and rivulet of drool, every eyelash a wish come true. She would never be alone again, now that he had come. And for a while she wasn’t. But in the days and weeks that have passed since she followed him home to the mansion, she has felt more alien than she ever did when she believed herself to be the last of her kind.
The last of her kind. Maybe she really is. Maybe she doesn’t belong in Dunk’s world after all.
—i have not yet made my final determination. but your willingness to place another’s safety above your own supports my hypothesis that you pose no threat.
Scavenger is perched on the edge of the mattress, picking rope fibers out from between his tiny teeth. Abby steps around Ripple and scoops up the rodent.
—Thanks, Scavenger. You’re sweet.
—i am perceptive.
“I guess I should take a shower,” Ripple utters from the floor. He heaves himself up to his feet and looks at her. “I wish I understood you, you know? I wish I knew what you’re thinking.”
“I wish that too,” says Abby, half to him, half to the rat in her hand. But as Ripple makes his way to the bathroom, it’s Scavenger who answers her: —he never will. he is a control.
* * *
Ripple has never figured out why the Fire Museum contains a baroquely decorated bathhouse, or why there’s an additional admission turnstile outside of it, saying 18 & UP, ONLY next to a solid-gold men’s room sign, upon which the masculine silhouette wears a tiny fireman helmet of rubies. The entrance is right there on the first floor, just past the coat check: they must have steered the kids away from it on his class trip. Was it open the same hours as the rest of the museum, or did they reserve it for galas? And…was it some kind of sex club? It’s a labyrinth of gleaming tile, with pirate-ship wheels for knobs to the various faucets, including a bunch of hydrotherapy massage and other hose extensions. Neatly stacked white towels wait in baskets everywhere. Ripple’s been showering here for a month and a half, and he still hasn’t run out.
He stands under the pulsating showerhead—the water pressure is amazing—and tries to feel every drop of Trank’s blood, down to the molecular level, powerwash off his skin. It didn’t really happen, he tells himself. Nobody filmed it.
But try telling that to the Metropolitan Police Department. They graded his worksheets; they issued him his Junior Special Officer badge. Although he hasn’t met any of them in person, he’s going to be their number-one suspect, when and if they dispatch somebody over to the museum to check on their independent extinguishment contractor.
As bad as he feels right now, Ripple has never understood the villains in movies who feel compelled to confess. He’s never gotten the point. “Pro,” he’s wanted to say when various content purveyors have presented him with this scenario, “your pregnant wife is already dead. You know that, you hid the sledgehammer yourself. No amount of time you spend eating baloney bones in jail is going to bring her back.” Wanting to be punished only makes sense to Ripple in relation to the “Dungeon Master” folder in his porno collection. And that goes double now that he’s in this situation himself. More than anything else that’s happened in his adventures, the idea that he killed somebody—self-defense, self-defense, but the word is still “kill”—and might be brought to account for it makes him want to go running home to Mommy.
Except, his parents are dead.
Ripple tries to masturbate, since that usually makes him feel better, but um. Not the right moment apparently. So he gives in to the other vice he learned to indulge under the fluid-and sound-masking deluge of his private shower back at underschool. He lets himself cry. It’s such a relief, he wonders why he doesn’t do it all the time. I’ll cry forever, he promises himself, I never have to stop, and when it occurs to him how depressing that thought is, it just makes him cry even harder.
Trank: an exploded blender of meaty pulp. Multiple puddles, at least one with a finger floating in it. Ripple can’t bury the body. It’s everywhere. It’s all over him.
Ripple stands under the water for a long time, letting the steam rise, letting his fingerprints prune and his ears slosh. He stays there until he feels human again. He’s almost ready to turn off the spray when Abby enters to join him.
“You’re totally naked,” Ripple observes.
Abby turns around under the water till her hair hangs in wet strings over her eyes. “I’m naked for you,” she says.
This is new. Abby doesn’t usually initiate sex, not so directly, unless you count climbing on top of him, which is pretty much her go-to move in nonsexual situations too. Ripple touches her boob experimentally. He isn’t exactly in the mood, but it’s definitely better than stroking off. At least according to his cock.
“All right,” he says.
Fucking in the shower is a logistical nightmare. Every surface involved is slick and slippery, the tile as unforgiving as ice. Ripple presses Abby against the wall, barely inside her, trying to lift her up, to get a foothold, to keep his face out of the shower’s spray.
“Is this OK?”
“Uh-huh!” She’s smiling at him, kind of intensely—like there’s something she knows that he doesn’t, something right behind him, just over his shoulder. He resists the urge to turn around, instead nuzzles his face into her neck, shuts his eyes. I’m inside her, he reminds himself, yet the thought—once so potent he forbid himself to think it till he was about to come anyway—doesn’t send him rocketing toward climax. Instead, he sees the inside of the Witch Church again, not on fire but this time alive, the hammer-beam trusses replaced with rib bones, the walls pink, yielding flesh, breathing in and out…a chest cavity so big he could make a whole life inside it without ever attracting the creature’s notice or attention…except he has, it knows he’s here, and what’s worse, it wants him to stay….
You are not the one.
Ripple opens his eyes again, sees the comforting spiral of Abby’s ear, illuminated brilliantly under the ceiling of electric white.
“It’s you,” he reassures himself, “it’s just you, you’re Abby, you’re my girl.”
“Listen,” Abby says, and the lights of the bathhouse gleam still brighter, until all at once they burst and the entire space plunges into darkness.
“What the snuff?!”