Dust City (23 page)

Soon, we’re nearing the center. We turn a corner onto a street that looks like all the rest—rows of palaces, well removed from the sidewalk and buried in blue shadow. But then I notice a difference. They’re all connected. And there’s a raised concrete monorail running between all the buildings. A signpost reads:
Nimbus Thaumaturgical ~ Better Living Through Enchantment
. It’s topped with the familiar halo.

Farther along the street we see it’s more than just a monorail that links these buildings. The palaces are ancient, but they’re connected by a thoroughly modern network of pipes, towers, platforms, exhaust vents, storage tanks—all of them glistening under the moonlight. High-voltage wires sag from everything. It’s as if the laboratory modifications are a creeping disease, a gleaming virus spreading from the foundation upward.

Fiona shakes her head. “Look at it all. They’re ruining this place.”

“We have to find a way in,” I whisper.

All around the compound, there’s a tall fence, crowned with loops of razor wire. If worse comes to worst, we could scale it, but not without leaving a good few snags of ourselves behind. There ought to be another way.

“We’ll keep following the fences,” I say. “Maybe we can find a lock you can pick.”

We stay behind a hem of bushes and keep going, circling
the palace-cum-laboratory. Eventually our search pays off. We find a door in the fence fastened with a huge padlock. It’s massive.

“You think you can beat that one?” I ask Fiona.

She sucks in a breath. “Might be beyond my capabilities.”

“See if you can—” I stop. I grab hold of her shoulder and pull her back to the bushes.

Someone is coming.

Fiona pricks up her ears. She hears it, too. Muffled footsteps through a door. The jingle of keys. We watch through the bushes and through the fence as a man comes out from an unmarked door in the building. He’s dressed in a set of gray coveralls and he’s stumbling badly, zigzagging toward the fence. He falls onto the links, grabbing hold to steady himself.

“He’s drunk,” Fiona whispers.

With one hand, the man is covering his face, wearing his palm like an eye-patch. He struggles to open the lock and then comes through, heading straight for us.

Fiona flinches beside me. I’m about to leap out, when the man stops and turns and plops down on the grass, right in front of us. He’s muttering to himself. “No way, no way, this cannot be happening . . .”

Fiona stares at me. I put a finger to my lips and point in the opposite direction. Maybe we can sneak off. Gingerly, we raise ourselves to all fours and tiptoe away.

“
Who’s there?
” The man leaps to his feet, shining a
flashlight into the bushes. All the while, he keeps one side of his face covered with his hand.

“Who—” The man peers into the bushes. “You better come out now.” He takes a step closer. “You’re—” He stops.
“A wolf!
There’s a w—”

I lunge out of the bushes, bowl him over, and pin him to the grass. I clamp his mouth shut and he’s too shocked to put up a fight. Besides, he seems more worried about covering his face. His one hand is still glued there, cupping his eye.

I bare my teeth. “You’re not going to scream, okay?”

He nods. There’s a blue badge pinned to his coveralls. It says:
Richard Froschler, Shipping and Receiving.

Fiona comes out of the bushes, crouching behind me. “We’re not going to hurt you, understand?”

He nods again, so I take my paw from his mouth.

He gapes at me, wide-eyed. “And I thought
I
had it bad.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Finally, he takes his hand away from his face. It’s his eye. It’s
huge
—the massive, glossy, bulging eye of a frog. It’s popping grotesquely out of its socket, rimmed with lumpy green skin. “See?” he says. “I’m changing back.”

“Huh?”

He sighs heavily. “They never tell you about the fine print, do they?
Sure,
it sounds good at the time. Get the girl, fall in love, and we’ll make you a hominid. You can live up in Eden, get seats at the theater, get into the country
clubs. ‘Sounds great,’ you tell them. Damn fairies! So you say, ‘Sure, wave your wand, sprinkle your dust, do what you gotta do.’ But what they
neglect
to mention, is what happens when things go south. When you fall
out
of love, I mean. Suddenly, they up and disappear, and by the time you figure out you’re screwed, there’s nobody around to fix it.” He lolls his head back and forth. “But what am I telling
you
for? Obviously, you know
exactly
what I’m talking about. Looks like the magic ran out for you and your lady friend a
looooong
time ago.”

Fiona’s first to figure out what he means. “Sorry to burst your bubble,” she says, standing over the pair of us, “but Henry and I have never masqueraded as hominids. It’s not like we’ve lost our sheep’s clothing. We’re just wolves, plain and simple. We’re looking for something.”

The man blinks at us, with one normal eyelid and one huge, translucent mess. “Wolves! There are wolves in—”

I slap his mouth shut again. “Okay, already. We established that.” I lean in close. “Now, listen—
Richard
. Judging by that eye of yours, do you really think it’s a good idea to start drawing attention to yourself?”

He stares for a moment, thinking. He shakes his head. So I do him a favor and let him speak.

“Sorry,” he says. “Force of habit. They sort of train us up here to cry wolf. But you certainly have a point there. Can’t have anyone finding me looking like this. Right now, all I wanna do is to bail on this whole crazy place.” He sighs,
gazing wistfully into the sky. “I thought it’d work out, y’know? Thought I’d be able to fake it, even after things went sour for Lily and me—that’s my wife, by the way. Ex-wife. Obviously, it
did not
work out.” He points to his amphibious eye. “It’s getting worse now, too—and fast. Believe it or not, I didn’t look like this when I started my shift. All I had was this little green patch on my temple. But the divorce was finalized today, so I think that’s why. Figure I’ve got another twelve hours, maybe a day, before I’m back to my old hippity-hoppity self.” He squirms to look back at the Nimbus buildings. “Sure as hell can’t be up here when
that
happens.” He looks back at Fiona and me. “Just like
you
shouldn’t be here, either.”

“Sorry,” I tell him, “but we came here for a reason.”

“Better be a damn good one.”

“It is,” says Fiona.

“Wonderful. Congratulations. And now that we’ve settled that, would you mind letting me up? I’m gonna have to get past security going down the Empyrean, and the sooner I do, the better.”

I give him another glance at my teeth. “You’re not going to tell anyone about us, right?”

“I promise,” he says. “Look at me. Who am I gonna tell?”

“Okay.” I help Richard to his feet and take special care to brush him off, picking crumbs of grass and dirt off the back of his coveralls. “There you go,” I tell him. I give him a friendly slap on his back. “Get going, and good luck.”

He looks at me oddly for a moment, like he’s astonished I didn’t chew his face off. “Thanks,” he says. “Uh, you too.” Then he scampers off down the street.

Fiona watches him. “You sure it’s wise to just let him go?” she asks. “You seemed awfully nice cleaning him up like that. Maybe sometimes you’re a little
too
nice to folks.”

“Or not.” And I show her what I mean, holding up the ring of keys I picked from Richard’s pocket. “A little trick I learned from Jack.”

38

LEFTOVER MIRACLES

INSIDE THE GROUNDS, WE’RE SUCKED INTO A SWAMP OF LABORATORY
works. We head toward the center, toward the largest, most forbidding tower of them all. The nearer we get, the denser the shafts and wires become. Around the base, you can’t even see the walls of the palace.

We jam the stolen keys into door after door until we find one that works. It’s a service entrance, leading to a corridor with walls of painted breeze blocks and a ceiling lined with pipes. There are noises down the corridor—whirs of machinery and clanks of metal. We follow them. It brings us to the entrance to a warehouse full of enormous shipping containers. Keeping to the shadows outside the entranceway, we watch.

There are several workers in uniforms like the one the frog-eyed man was wearing. Two of them control a pair of cranes, lifting the containers from here to there. Parked in the corner are several trucks—just like the one that killed my mother. The cranes swing the containers from the trucks and into an enormous freight elevator. When the elevator’s loaded, the
doors shut and the containers (unaccompanied by any of the workers) get spirited away to some other part of the compound.

I cock my head in the direction of the elevator. “Bet that goes somewhere important,” I whisper.

“Yeah,” says Fiona, “but where?”

“One way to find out.”

Slipping to all fours, I lead Fiona from container to container until we’re beside the elevator doors. When the crane swings past we lope in its shadow—and right inside. The floor of the elevator is oddly soft and rubbery. We’re squeezed into the rear when the doors shut, casting us into pitch darkness.

Fiona moves close to me. “You think this is a good idea?”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

I take Fiona’s paw in mine and for a moment, nothing happens. Then the elevator buzzes and clicks and starts moving upward. Distant winches and cables strain to lift us, creaking with the weight. At last, we stop, only the doors don’t open.

Fiona’s grip tightens. “Now what?”

I prick up my ears, hoping I’ll hear something. But I don’t. This may’ve been a mistake. We might be trapped. Who knows if—

There’s the crackle of electricity behind us. The elevator wall we’re leaning against slides away, taking us by surprise. There’s another set of doors on the opposite side of the freight car; and as if that weren’t enough to throw us off balance, the floor starts moving. I realize that’s why the floor was rubbery. It’s all automated, a huge conveyor belt.

Fiona and I are spit into a hall and onto another conveyor belt. It pulls us sideways along with the containers, all of which trundle in single file, geometrically perfect. We travel down a barely lit shaft toward a rectangle of light. As we get closer I see the claws of another crane reach for a container and pluck it off the end, swinging it into space. There’s a hydraulic hiss and a loud click, and the bottom of the container pops open, spilling its cargo in a smoky blur. It looks like—
like what?
Giant skeletal hands?

Fiona grabs me. “What
was
that stuff?”

Before I can offer an answer (which I don’t have) I realize we’ve got a much more pressing problem. When the conveyor ends, it’s a dead drop-off. That crane is the only thing that stops the containers from smashing on the floor—which is exactly what we’re going to do in about ten seconds.

“Quick,” I tell Fiona. “Grab on!”

We latch onto the container beside us, dangling off the side, just as the crane lifts it from the conveyor. There’s the hiss and the buzz and then the bottom of the container opens up, releasing its cargo. Up close, I see it’s not a pile of giant bones. It’s something else.

Deadwood trees.

Whole trees plummet from the container and land on top of an enormous heap. It’s piled so high, the branches are grazing the soles of our feet as they hang down.

“Jump!” I say, and I let go, reaching for a thick bough. I catch it, but of course the tree isn’t rooted to anything, so it
lurches under my weight and I nearly lose my grip. Which is fine until Fiona leaps off herself and goes for the very same branch. With both of us hanging on, the tree tips to the side, suspending us over a drop that must be sixty feet to the floor.

“Hang on!” I shout.

“What do you think I’m doing?!”

At the last moment before I think the whole tree’s going to lose its grip and come tumbling down on top of us, the roots find purchase, hooking into the pile, holding us steady.

As gingerly as we can, we scale down the trunk and continue climbing, down the expanding pile, careful to avoid the rain of more trees from the containers. Finally, we reach the floor of this cavernous place, a warehouse bigger than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s a vast, windowless corridor, as tall and broad as an airplane hangar. The remains of uprooted trees are everywhere, all of them deadwoods. The concrete floor rises and falls with dunes of bone-pale branches and roots and—

Roots.

I see something I’ve never noticed before.

“Oh, God. Look at that.”

“What is it?” asks Fiona.

“I think we found them.”

“What?”

“Look at the roots.”

Seeing them here, far removed from the desert, laid bare under bright artificial light, it’s clear what the roots are really made of.
Bodies
. Bones. Thousands upon thousands
of delicate frames, each one blessed with the arcs of mothlike wings. It’s the army of ghosts I saw at the bottom of the Capra well. Only that wasn’t a hallucination. Those weren’t spirits I saw. They were skeletons.

Fiona grips my arm. “But how?”

“This must be what happens to them. After they die. Look at the branches—they’re made of hands. Every one of them rising up, grasping for the sky.” I look at her. “It’s because they want to go home.”

“Why bring them here?”

“Leftover miracles,” I say.

“What?”

“This must be how they make it,” I say. “It’s why Nimbusbrand dust is more popular than the rest, and why nixiedust is so potent. They aren’t using the fairies for labor. They’re using them as . . .
raw material.
It’s processed from the bodies of their dead.”

“But if they vanished all at once, it would mean . . .”

I nod. “They killed them.”

Suddenly, Fiona swings into action, bringing up her camera. “Pictures,” she says. “We need pictures of this.” She starts snapping away, close-ups to show the vertebrae, the wing structures, the delicate skulls. Other shots reveal the scope of the place, the horrendous volume of bodies. When the clicking stops, she flips open the camera.