The Waking Engine (29 page)

He did know there were more ways out of the city than through the lich-lords, but he didn’t want to tell Marvin about that. He didn’t want to tell Marvin anything about the accidental spirit walk he’d taken, or the denuded faerie garden whose machine queen he’d . . . visited. So far as the Death Boy knew, Cooper had hit his head on a girder and fainted, and that was that; Cooper saw the glint of suspicion in Marvin’s eyes, though, as if he knew that there was more going on in Cooper’s head, but wasn’t confident enough to say so.

Marvin made a groan that was halfway between awkward and sexy. “I knew you for a New Yorker asshole the minute I saw you in that Danzig shirt.”

Cooper nodded, just stoned enough not to be surprised, much. “You too?”

Marvin snaked his arm through Cooper’s and tilted his head onto Cooper’s shoulder. “Denver. I was a big Misfits fan, Black Flag, Samhain.”

“OK, cool.” Cooper smiled, though Marvin couldn’t see him.

“I was waiting for their first album, in ’88, but I . . . didn’t make it.”

“Oh. Sorry.” What was the protocol for talking about someone’s deaths? Sympathy? Congratulations? “That must have been a shock. It shocked me, waking here.”

“There are a lot of us in the Undertow, you know. Young men from Earth, from the ’80s, the ’90s. . . .”

“Uh huh.” Cooper looked at Marvin sideways, not understanding.

“It started . . . maybe thirty years ago? We found our way to the city, each of us—it called to me, sort of. After what happened to us, nowhere else seemed to fit. Our other lives didn’t . . . they didn’t work, not after . . . how we . . .” Marvin trailed off.

“What are you trying to say?” This side of Marvin was new. His eyes looked haunted.

“Young men die all the time, I don’t know why we’d be special. Maybe we’re not.” Marvin tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth pulled down; he was holding back tears. “It was just sex, but to us it was the first taste of freedom and life and . . . and it killed us.” Marvin lifted his hands in a helpless gesture.

Cooper didn’t understand. And then, with a rush of insight, he understood far, far too well. He’d been living under this shadow his entire life. “HIV?” he asked, weirdly insulted that such an Earthly problem could crop up here, amidst magic and evil cyborg faerie queens.

“We had just started to be allowed to live, and it was the living that killed us.” Marvin looked lost. “Imagine that the sun shone black. It . . . did something, to me at least . . . we invented a new kind of scar, and it brought us to the skylords, in search of our stolen freedom.” Marvin seemed to deflate. “And we’re worlds away, still in closets, still fucking in a circle around death, still struggling to fly away. Young and broken forever: be careful what you wish for, Cooper.”

Marvin shrugged and tossed the last of the joint into the air and watched it spin. “It will be time to dance soon, we should head up to the roof.”

“Dance?” Cooper asked, suddenly queasy. “I don’t really . . . dance.”

Marvin pulled him up the last few storeys. “Don’t be scared. Hestor is happy I brought you—he’s hoping that stealing the marchioness’ prized childborn will set him above Killilly. The Charnel Girls are already jealous.” Hestor was the Death Boy chieftain, Cooper knew: Marvin had mentioned him before with a frightened kind of awe.

Cooper stepped out onto a rooftop party that could have been in Manhattan, except for the fires that blazed from neighboring towers and the cold storm overhead. Trashcans burnt like torches, and wine and smoke were everywhere. Marvin pointed to a terror of a man who could only be Hestor— surrounded by a circle of admirers, he sported a tawny crest of hair shaved close at the sides, a vest spiked with pieces of bone, and plastic louvered sunglasses. He glared out from between the Beach-Boy-yellow slits with a menacing alchemy of attitude, and even from across the rooftop Cooper could feel Hestor’s eyes latch onto him, the prize.

“Our power is shamanic, like yours.” Marvin looked at him, waiting. “We both cross the lines between life and death—we just don’t quite come all the way back. Hestor values your shamanic potential.”

“Ah.” Cooper could not quite pretend to be pleased. “Another fan.”

Someone began pounding a drum, then another, and another, and the mood of the Undertow shifted. The small groups engaging in muted conversation broke apart, the Death Boys and Charnel Girls separating into two groups. Some began hooting—all looked excited, and their anticipation trebled the air.

“Whoelse is your fan?” Marvin asked with a bit of an edge. “The pink- haired lady?”

“Ha!” Cooper shook his head. “She knows better—Sesstri’s the one who decided I was just a turd. I’m starting to think I’d be better off if she’d been right.”

“Cooper, don’t say that.” No edge now, just an arm slinking through his, elbows locking.

“Her words, not mine,” Cooper said.

“Well, I think you’re not a turd.” The smoke on Marvin’s breath smelled good. Warm. Alive.

“Do you?” Cooper pulled Marvin close. “I think that’s premature.”

Marvin took Cooper’s chin and brought their faces together. Noses brushing. A kiss.

After a long, long moment Cooper broke away. “Yeah. You think I’m a shaman. You want to feed me to your lichly masters.” He made it sound like a joke, but knew it wasn’t.

Marvin rubbed his forehead against Cooper’s. “That isn’t how it works.”

“But you’re still going to hurt me, aren’t you?” The question came out as a whisper.

Marvin looked out over the city, and Cooper followed the arrow of his gaze—the view here was the opposite of that from Sesstri’s rooftop terrace: the Dome lorded over a quarter of the horizon, of course, but from here they could see the karst-hill volcano of the Apostery as well as the wide bowl and set-piece houses of Bonseki-sai. Cooper saw the yellow hills near Rind and Displacement, one of which had been his landing pad in this anti-Oz.

Marvin disarmed him with a cheap smile. “Hurt happens, Cooper. Sometimes the best you can do is to direct it.”

“That isn’t reassuring, Marvin.”

“Would false reassurance be a kindness? Come on.” He pulled Cooper with him, toward the gyre of whirling Charnel Girls and Death Boys, the two living thirds of the Undertow. The sky surged with their undead complement, dripping darkness in black rain that pooled underfoot. The air was cold and the fires were hot; Cooper felt more alive than usual.

Maybe Marvin’s right. Maybe by abandoning the dance of lives, they truly live. Live free.

They dove into the madness hand-in-hand, Marvin’s spine loosening itself with ecstatic energy and unchoreographed abandon. Cooper thanked the green smoke still pulsing through his veins, and began to yield to the ritual, the rave, whatever this was—a black-mass flash-mob dance.

The drum beat wildly and Cooper found himself bending to its rhythm despite himself, eyelids half-closed, raising his arms with the sweat-soaked Death Boys in a wordless paean to the heart-dark masters who circled overhead. The liches themselves Cooper could not see, but the black wraiths of energy they radiated flapped all around the Undertow now; the air grew thick with undead tailwinds and crazed, beautiful dancers.

The Death Boys formed an impromptu circle around their leader, who stood naked, save his vest and glasses. Hestor’s cock was hard and red, and he gloated while his boys hooted and cried, imploring their lich- lords to take them above, to give them flight. On another corner of rooftop the Charnel Girls had formed their own ring with Killilly a wild-eyed valkyrie at their center.

Hestor lifted his arms to the sky and the black rain fell on him like India ink. He opened his mouth and the rain did something to the tattoo inside his lip—dark lines of tattoo ink began to pour down his chin and spread unnaturally across his collarbone, coiling in a rococo flourish that expanded across his bare chest. He sang to the sky, a hymn of wrong notes and backward progressions—anywhere else in the worlds his voice would have offended the ears, but here it fit—and Hestor was transformed into an Orpheus. Wrongness swaddled them. When the ink trails curled across Hestor’s shoulders and climbed the skin of his raised arms, the Death Boy leader unleashed a triumphant cry—the tattoos coursed up his arms and around his hands until the ink spilled out of his skin and shot up into the sky—and when Hestor’s tattoo ink met the dark whips of the lich-lords’ tails, a shockwave burst across the roof.

Cooper gasped—the power of the Undertow rolled over him in a fusion of living lust and undead appetites. An intoxicating combination that compelled him to follow the urges of the clan, muting any other thoughts. He became part of the host of black-eyed sirens that circled, crying out to the sky.

“Tonight you fly with the Death Boys.” Someone grabbed his shoulder and shouted. “Tonight you learn what it means to live!”

The lich-tails were everywhere now, curling about their legs and arms, teasing their waists before whipping back up into the turbulence above. As one, the Death Boys screeched their pledges, begged their night-masters for favor, and Cooper screamed with them. To his right, a tall Death Boy with a mop of corn-yellow hair and bloodshot eyes caught hold of a lichtail as it solidified out of the bristling shadow, and for a heartbeat he locked eyes with Cooper. Then he vanished, ripped away into the sky with a shriek.

Like sharks to a frenzy, the lich-tails sought out the living with a hunger. One by one, the Death Boys around him caught their tails and rose, hooting with glee and devotion. Cooper heard similar cries from the Charnel Girls across the roof. Marvin grabbed his waist and pulled him close, breath urgent against his cheek.

“Hold on, childborn, or you’ll fall forever,” he warned, and Cooper wrapped his arms around Marvin’s rib cage.

Then he felt a cold snake whip around his thigh, his chest, his arms— and the rooftop dropped away. They flew through blasts of inky wind that shocked him with their coldness, as though his life bled out through his pores to fill the deathly vacuum.

Marvin’s cock pressed through their clothes, steel-hard despite the frigid wind, or because of it. Cooper felt the heat against him and shuddered— part lust, part terror. Then they banked to one side and rolled over again and again in a spin of yaw, and all thoughts of Marvin’s body flew from his head.

The thrill was electric, opiate, and Cooper understood how the flight- fever held the Death Boys in thrall. Marvin was right about at least one thing—this was freedom. They’d found the razor’s edge, an adrenaline- junkie’s wet dream, whirling through the dark on the coattails of undeath’s midnight minions. Cooper cackled into the gale and clutched at Marvin with all his strength. He cried into the air and again knew that no one heard him, but he did not want to care.

Then Marvin did the strangest thing. He stroked Cooper’s cheek with one free hand, which shouldn’t have been possible—what was holding them together?—and kissed Cooper softly on the lips. Tears were pouring down Marvin’s face now and Cooper kissed him back, hungry, but Marvin turned his head aside.

“This is what we live for,” he whispered into Cooper’s ear, kissing his way gently down his neck. Cooper saw the City Unspoken sprawling below him, lights flickering, rolling on and on as far as his eye could see. From on high the Dome almost looked small, cradled at the heart of the land by the concave bowl of the city’s crust. They fit one another somehow, the Dome and the concave metropolis, the pieces of a design you couldn’t see without a perspective larger than life, the vantage of gods and undead hurricanes.

Marvin continued to kiss his neck while the ground spun away. Marvin purred against Cooper, their bodies fitting together like the Dome and the city— strange and electric. Cooper felt the full attraction of the Undertow, and its pull was tidal. The exhilarations of undeath seemed limitless, less about natural laws and more about . . . conceit. It wasn’t living, not a moment of it, was it? Charcoal smudges and splattered red ink, light welling up from below, casting strange shadows on a darker sky.

“Do you feel undeath, Cooper?” Marvin’s voice gained a strange echo, a papery lisp dubbed over his natural snarl. “Do you feel it slithering up your thigh? Wrapping its arms around you? Kissing your neck, right here?”

“Oh, god, yes. It’s not life at all, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” Marvin agreed, while the echo cackled.

“It’s not life. It’s art.”

Marvin’s cock was a hot brand against Cooper’s hip. “I knew you’d see it,” he hissed.

“It’s not good art, but it’s art.”

Cooper pushed Marvin’s face away and let his response die into the shrieking wind. Fuck, this felt good. Cooper’s life bled out of his heel and into the undead thing hiding above, his head spun high above towers ruled by emaciated poseurs, and somehow it all felt so wonderfully good. Black tar champagne sex, cut into lines.

As he and Marvin gnawed upon each other, Cooper tasted the red thread of Marvin’s story. He could taste the truth: a black streak of running with the Death Boys, and before that a short life under a red sky, before that a sickness, before the sickness there was rage, before the rage came ecstasy, the ecstasy followed a period of torture and fear, and before that was nothing. Marvin’s lives, reduced to simple flavors, were so easy to digest.

Cooper tasted America. Mall food from the ’70s, cheap noodles and expensive vodka in the ’80s. Lots and lots of sex, followed quickly by death. There was more.

Then they fell, and Cooper’s stomach interrupted his trance on its way to his throat. Cooper made a strangled sound.

“Are you alright?” Marvin asked as he rolled himself to catch the brunt of the landing.

Then the hard roof knocked the breath from them both, and by the time Cooper sat upright Marvin was standing, straddling his body and pointing at Cooper in a kind of glee. Though his vision spun, Cooper saw Hestor, still panting from his dance and flight, leaning against a half- crumbled wall, sucking on his teeth with eyes that already looked bored.

Cooper pushed himself up onto his forearms, all thought crushed from him by the impact. Looking up at Marvin, he saw a pretty, damaged man who offered him momentary tenderness. He harbored no illusions about Marvin’s loyalties, and he knew he couldn’t trust him, but the Death Boy offered him physical affection and the semblance of comfort, and those were commodities Cooper could not bring himself to reject. Not even if Marvin bartered intimacy for some greater reward from his tribe.