They set the flowers growing, the deer running, the wolves hunting. They made the sun rise and fall, and unlocked the wind.
San Francisco’s billboards and video screens had been masses of symbols without meaning, their pulses catching and holding his eye, but now he saw that they just wanted him to buy things. There were abandoned shipping containers by the Bay, with long chains of stenciled white numbers that seemed to float off of their aluminum hulls, and these numbers stayed with him, for it seemed they must be a code that would tell him where the containers came from, what cargo they’d carried through the world, why they were left baking in the sulfurous mud.
Graffiti was everywhere, all the gangs’ marks of territory and memorial. In the buried levels his flashlight found blocky, diamond-eyed skeletons clawing their way out of the wall, bony fingers stained with blood, uttering spiky words that, he found, proclaimed the valor of the Downtown Aztec Kings, which had a sadness, the Kings having been wiped out years ago in their war with MS-13, which had itself crumbled before the waves of new arrivals all determined to seize a piece of the limited markets in drugs and girls.
He dreamed of letters black as embers, crawling with red light, coalescing into words or forms with words’ sweep. At night he swarmed up the new walls to the empty lunar surfaces where no one had been but the drones who had built them; he wrote what he remembered of the dream’s afterimage with scavenged spray paint under wind-driven fog. The favelas were always rising, like hard clouds of grey stone billowing up, and he knew his work would be buried soon, but he liked to think of it, down in the concrete, abiding.
The locked door with the writing read Knock three times and enter, so he did, and stepped out onto the upper branches where the eagle was waiting. There were more doors there, and the child, who seemed a little older now, opened one onto a huge room where a fire burned in a hearth big enough to hold a car. The eagle said, This is the ancestors’ hall, and he saw that there was a thickly branching tree incised on the stone floor. A mirror rose up from the flagstones and the eagle asked him to write his name in its fog, but he stood there with his arms folded. Then the eagle asked for his mother’s and father’s names, but tentatively, and seemed unsurprised to be ignored. Finally it gave him a book of names from which he chose Kern, for its harsh foreign sound and because it meant “warrior” in the dead language of a cold island somewhere far away, and choosing a name seemed like a magical operation, as though his choice would give him strength.
The next doors opened onto games. There was one where stuffed animals chopped carrots and peppers and dropped them in pots boiling on a stove while a grandmother rabbit watched them from her bed. There was a garden out back with rows of flowers and vegetables. The grandmother seemed to be sick—the blankets were pulled up to her chin, and her voice was kind when she asked him if he’d like to help them make dinner, but he was already backing out of the door.
The next game was about designing clothes and making outfits, and the one after that was about digging tunnels in a mine; his attention was wandering and the outside world seemed closer but then the next door opened onto a steaming, snake-infested jungle where he picked his way down vines thick as cars to a derelict spaceport. Moisture dripped from the roof of the hangar onto the husks of shattered aircraft, covered in moss, long left to ruin. White orchids drooped from cracked fuselage. The steel blast doors were black and twisted, the concrete seared as though in unbelievable heat. In a corner of the hangar, under a thick growth of red bromeliads, he found an armored transport, treads melted, hull intact. The ancient metal clanged hollowly as, using the flowers for handholds, he clambered up. The hatch was sealed, but by it was a black plate with the outline of a hand—on impulse, he pressed his palm to it—the hatch sighed open.
Within the transport was a cavity full of shadows, rotten seats of padded fabric, and a crate painted in black-and-white camouflage. On the crate’s side was a long chain of stenciled alphanumerics, just like the shipping containers, and he wondered if they shared some secret affinity. Inside the crate, fitted in molded foam, was a gun—oiled black steel, the grip deeply textured, an old one, its mechanism so simple he could see it with his eyes—and a tablet computer in layered black armor. Machines within machines, he thought, and, perhaps, machines within those, and so on forever, and for a moment he remembered that he was playing a game, but then the tablet woke to life. We’re dying, said an old man with cheekbones, a soldier’s haircut and a fierce intensity. We’re dying, but there’s hope. If you’ve found this, if you have the courage to take up the gun, then we can still break the Shadow Clan, save everything, bring the war to the final chamber. Even if the spaceport can’t be saved—outside the transport the wind howled through the pierced, listing hangar—even if our army is scattered—birds called brightly in the jungle’s distance—victory can be ours—yours—if only you have the discipline.
There were explosions where the old man was, the lights flickering as the walls shook, the recording momentarily fading out, but he never stopped speaking of survival, of the need to improvise, how everything would be against him, how the Shadow Clan ninja were ubiquitous, unspeakable, an enemy out of nightmares. Find the final chamber, he said, and everything will be explained, but then there was shouting, commotion, a horrible metallic hissing—the old man turned, reaching for his sidearm, his face a mask of hateful determination, and the video turned to static.
*
He hunted them unseen through steaming deltas, glittering temples full of chimes, the ebb tides of flooded cities. The Shadow Clan, complacent, thought their enemies long gone. Their installations were like seashells, vast and full of symmetry.
The tablet guided him to long-abandoned vine-entangled depots. He levered open the sealed doors and found water, medicine, and, best of all, weapons, baroque and glorious, the neodymium laser and the Higgs cannon and the phased accelerator reflex rifle—he murmured the names, shivered at their power. They were finicky, though, hard to repair and harder to customize, their manuals in a dense, technical English that he spent hours picking through with the tablet’s dictionary.