The Waking Engine (8 page)
The bitchiness in her tone brought out something that had lain dormant in Cooper throughout the whole day. He withdrew from her touch and lifted his chin, remembering her words that morning, when she’d been an angel cradling his head in her hands.
“What the fuck do you think I know? How could I know anything?” He spat— actually spat—in her face. “I’m a turd, remember?”
Sesstri had the good sense to hold back her anger but gave no sign of remorse or sympathy. She left the spittle to dry on her cheek.
“This animal,” she pointed at Marvin, “will drag you back to his cohorts, who will rape you until you cannot remember your own name, force you to pollute your soul and offer it up to their masters. Know that, when your lips have been bitten off and you can’t spit in any more faces.”
She’s lying. Marvin thought at Cooper. And you know it.
“You’re wrong.” Cooper didn’t know it, but he knew he was furious and he let the rage speak for him. “You insult me and abandon me and then assault me when someone gives me a moment of basic human decency? Who do you think you are?”
Sesstri grabbed him by the arm and stalked toward the exit. “I’m the only chance you have at saving yourself, Cooper, and if you’d stop behaving like a brat who needs a spanking you might even understand when I explain why.” Light from the courtyard streamed in through the incense smoke, and Marvin followed at a clip.
“And if you weren’t such a stuck-up cunt I might even listen. Fuck off and die, if you can, and wake up somewhere far away from me.” Cooper threw off her hand and stumbled into the starlight—overhead, the sky lit the well of faiths with a blue glow. He ran a few yards and tripped over the metal crest set in the center of the courtyard floor. Milling apostates looked at the commotion with annoyance.
“If I can?” Sesstri laughed, a bellyful of sound that didn’t belong in her wasp-waisted frame. “Cooper, you bumbling disappointment, you have no idea how close to the mark you’ve hit. And unless you calm down and listen to me you will wish you could die and wake up anywhere else but here.” She reached into her satchel and brought out her note pad, as if to read from it.
Cooper smacked it out of her hands.
Sesstri let the paper flap in the incense and stared at Cooper hard. “Have you even looked at your stomach yet, Cooper?”
“Have I what?”
“Are you drunk?” Sesstri asked with an escalation of incredulity. “I mean, honestly, Cooper, button your pants and open your eyes. You need my help, not a cuddle.”
Cooper turned from her and saw Marvin’s lip tattoo clearly for the first time—just inside his lower lip a black coin had been inked, with a stylized snake of negative space slithering forward as if wriggling out of Marvin’s mouth. The light was far too dim for Cooper to have seen, and anyway the inkwork was a rough job, but somehow Cooper’s eyes picked up the detail, and he did not question why. For a moment Cooper saw the tattoo more clearly than could have been possible—he saw that Marvin held a coin in his mouth, and a tiny green snake crept over it, a forked tongue darting out like an extension of Marvin’s own. Then the overlaid image vanished.
What was that? he wondered, passingly.
“Your lip,” Cooper said, scowling at the coin and snake. The tattoo hardly looked friendly. “I don’t . . . I don’t think I like that.”
“It’s his slave brand,” Sesstri sneered. “The symbol of his masters and the sign of his enslavement to them. He’s a goon, Cooper, stationed here to cull the unwary and those enchanted by the promise of True Death.”
“That’s a lie!” Marvin challenged her.
“Oh really?” Sesstri was smug. “I suppose you’ll tell me that tattoo on your lip, whatever it is, is not the symbol of your bondage to the Undertow, and you aren’t a runner for a gang that worships lich-lords who swarm unseen above your burning towers? You aren’t in thrall to undead remnants who steal souls from the dance of lives and bind them in torment? Who rape children to taste purity?”
Marvin cursed beneath his breath and took a step back. Cooper stood bewildered.
“That’s not right,” Marvin began, but his protest sounded feeble. “It isn’t torment to be free.”
As he pleaded, other figures emerged from the shadows above. Black bodies like boomerangs jackknifed overhead, whooping, flipping from portal to portal and swarming the air. Landing like maleficent dancers, young men and women wearing dark clothes hit the pavement stones rolling, tumbling, screaming laughter and manic smiles. They all looked like Marvin. A thin girl rose like smoke out of the shadows behind Cooper; two boys leapt over his head, caterwauling, and pushed off from one another, spiraling to the ground bare of chest and foot, wearing only silk trousers. Around him, devout apostates scattered inside while casting dire glances over their shoulders. Cooper heard chirrups of their fear as the pious impious flapped away: UndertowOverheadUnderfoot NoPeaceNoPeace . . .
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Marvin groaned, reaching for the wrist of the thin girl, “Couldn’t you have held back for a few more seconds, Killilly?”
But the girl spun out of range and grimaced. “Shove off, Marvin. Can’t you see it’s not going to happen? Slake your lust with Hestor as usual, and leave the thighs of this full-figured insect alone.”
Marvin looked away.
“Do you still feel like fondling strangers, Cooper?” Sesstri sneered at Marvin, who narrowed his eyes but said nothing. “This boy works for the undead. Do you want to discover yourself trapped in the lair of skeleton wizards who drink innocence like wine? Do you want to be their slave? Their meal?”
“Don’t listen to her,” Marvin said to Cooper. “Come with me and you’ll see freedom.”
“Or don’t, and save yourself from mutilation.” Sesstri’s tone was casual. “Asher and I can help, Cooper. You don’t need to resort to trash. Don’t be stupid.”
“Come with me,” Marvin begged. Now.
Marvin’s sad eyes and full lips were a siren song, and Cooper wanted so desperately to make himself inseparable from those lips, the smooth skin of that body, muscle and hair and spit. But Sesstri’s warning was hard to ignore, and she wouldn’t warn him if she cared as little for Cooper as he’d thought. And where did sirens lead you, but the rocks? He didn’t have enough information to make the choice. Cooper didn’t make a decision so much as follow an instinct he usually ignored:
“No.” he said. It was his word, and it felt good to finally say it.
He turned on his heel and ran, the blood in his head already pounding out a rhythm of escape. He pelted out beyond the courtyard and was sprinting up the tunnel to the surface before either Sesstri or Marvin could say another word. He felt bells ringing in his head like a thousand sermons, urging him to run faster, faster, away from the—the what? For a moment the chaos of bells and tears buzzed into a kind of white noise, which in turn collapsed into a high-pitched hum, then fell quiet. Cooper ran from Sesstri and from Marvin and from their dueling falsehoods, and he could feel their focus on him like raptor eyes.
Don’t leave! and Not yet! cried their unconscious fears. And from Marvin a second, deliberate whisper into the language centers of Cooper’s brain: I’m not what she says I am. Cooper sobbed and ran faster, bells still tolling all around him.
Through a haze of tears, he ran out from under the mountain, through the music, and back across the bridge of titan bones and rebar. He fled the bells, past the wet spot where the fighter pilot’s barrel had been, and past the footpaths that led over the canals into the Guiselaine, where Asher had abandoned him—he wouldn’t go in there, it was dark now and looked ominous. So Cooper darted down unknown streets, barely drawing notice from the jaded citizens of the City Unspoken, until at last he collapsed outside a three- story tenement in a filthy square, where the only sound was children playing cruel games, and all he could think about was home.
I’ve come to understand only one thing: that there’s no country in a dozen heavens so beautiful as Missouri. Excepting Arkansas.
—Sam Clemens, in a posthumous letter to Gertrude Stein
Nixon sauntered into Maw’s boardinghouse like he’d scored a table gratis at Lutèce on Saturday night, ignoring the clamor of semi-feral street kids and the smell of boiled dandelion greens. Husks of brown vegetables bobbed like long-dead things in the pots by the kitchen, but Nixon turned up his stub nose at the ever-brewing daily pot: he’d filled himself with roast meat and clean potatoes, and for once he hadn’t had to eat on the run. He’d bought himself a proper dinner and had eaten it like a gentleman— or as close as could be, sitting behind the Guile & Gullet, balancing his bowl on his knees while taking great swallows of yellow beer from a cracked stein.
The other children shied away from Nixon as he walked through the common room into the smoking room behind it, revealing the secret divide that set Mother Maw’s Minorarium apart from the rest of the gangs, houses, and work programs for the children of the City Unspoken. Maw’s children—real children, born in the city but abandoned, orphaned, or just plain unlucky—were camouflage for the kids like Nixon—unboys and ungirls blessed with juvenile reincarnation.
Nixon heard shouting, shouting of a dialect and timbre that sounded promisingly familiar. Memories flickered through his little head. Schoolboy days in short pants and long ties, steno paper copies, the roar of helicopter blades. So much came rushing back at the sound of a simple voice, it almost touched his heart He heard a voice plump with the confidence that all its problems had a simple— and swift— solution. He heard a shrill disbelief that the shouter’s concerns might not merit sufficient attention. He heard the certainty that came only from being the golden child of the most gluttonous opportunity: in other words, Nixon heard America. His house mistress, the amphibious Mother Maw, stood in confrontation with a bewildered young man in jeans and a black t-shirt. If Maw had gotten to her feet, it spelled trouble for the round-faced American, who was pointing his finger at Mother Maw. Disastrous. Worse? The American was the chubby guy Asher picked up that morning, the one he’d been paid to tail. Not a good sign. The American insisted:
“Listen, somebody must have been through this before, you’ve got to—”
“—I don’t, and I won’t. Never mind that I can’t. I’ve never heard of—”
“—everybody’s heard of traveler’s checks, it’s the only reason they’re any use at all. There must be a bank nearby—I can’t be the first real person to get lost here. Could you at least—”
“—Out, out, and out!” Mother Maw was livid, her fat froggy neck shaking in leathery agitation. She was standing, and for the first time Nixon saw the feet that protruded from Maw’s stained orange housecoat— and he almost lost his dinner.
“You’re too old, too new, and too full of questions to be of any use to me. Get out!”
She lifted a fat but powerful leg and kicked the American in the shins, sending him to the floor. She saw Nixon watching at the threshold and pointed a webbed finger. “Clean out the trash, boy.”
Outside, the American sobbed into his hands like a child, pumping snot from his face in volumes. He looked like he’d lost his only friend or something.
“American, eh?” Nixon crossed his arms and sucked on a piece of candied eel. The idiot sat dejected on the doorstep with his face in his palms, and appeared not to have heard.
“I am so stupid!” he wailed. “I just thought, maybe . . .” and then he seemed to deflate. The American let out a sigh that went on until Nixon was sure the man’s lungs would collapse.
Nixon cleared his throat and repeated himself in a wooden tone: “American, eh?”
Still nothing. Fucking moron, Nixon thought, afraid he might miss out on the grift because his mark was too stupid to bite the bait.
YouAmericanMoron.
Cooper sat up and looked at the boy properly for the first time. Dirty brown hair covered a pug-nosed face with big dark eyes, and a filthy shirt pulled over a belly that stuck out with a bit of defiance. What now, a child to taunt him?
“What did you say?” Cooper asked, more skeptical than hopeful. He shook his head to clear it of the bird- scratch feeling of Nixon’s thoughts against the hull of his mind. “You know America?”
Nixon held his arms out wide in an exaggerated shrug. “Can anybody really know America?” he asked philosophically, playing at uninterest by turning away from the stranger to look at the starless night sky. “I’ve seen the amber waves, sure. Never did find a majestic purple mountain, but then, I was awful busy.”
“Can you help me?” The fool took the bait.
“Maybe.” Nixon looked him up and down appraisingly but didn’t seem impressed. “What’s help, and what’s it worth to you?”
“I don’t have any money,” the American said, and Nixon saw it for a lie but let it slide.
“Gimme your shirt, then.” Nixon’s goals were immediate, not grand.
“My shirt?” The stranger felt his black t-shirt like it was the only thing he owned. He looked like he’d been asked to give away a kidney.
“It’s cold,” Nixon explained. It wasn’t, but he needed a better shirt to pull over the dead giveaway of his smooth belly, or what good was being prepubescent?
“I don’t think I’m your size,” said the stranger with suspicion.
“Suit yourself.” Nixon turned to leave, his line baited. “Good luck, Americano!”
“Wait!” The American reached out to stop him. “What will I get for my shirt? And I’m not giving it to you until I’m satisfied.”
Nixon rolled his eyes. What ever happened to trust? he wondered.
“Follow me.” He led the teary-eyed stranger toward the rundown square’s only exit.
“But isn’t there a place where people go when they’re lost?”
“Of course there is. We’re living in it.” Nixon waved his arms.
“This shithole hostel?” The American looked behind them doubtfully. He could still hear Mother Maw excoriating children inside, the occasional cry from a web-fisted beating.
“No—this shithole city, stupid.”
Asher won his fourth toss in a row and collected a pile of chips from his opponent, the Marquis Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises, who for all anyone could tell was ignorant of his own wretched luck. The lantern-jawed marquis reached for the dice cup to begin another round, but Asher laid a gray hand atop the marquis’ ring-bedecked pink one and shook his head. Nobody could lose so much coin so quickly without being totally unfamiliar with the rules of the game—or perhaps too drunk to care. Neither the staff nor the patrons of the Guile & Gullet saw fit to correct the fault, whichever it may be.