Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  Enoch closed his eyes and ground his teeth together.

  He knew the answer, and he hated it.

  It had only been a test for Abraham because Abraham hadn’t expected intervention. Enoch had no such luxury. Enoch knew the story. He shuddered. Wouldn’t be a test otherwise. Can these bones live?

  He met the boy’s eyes.

  Off to the side he saw men burst out of the trees, shadows in tow.

  “Benjamin,” Enoch said. “Son of my right hand.”

  He slit the boy’s throat.

  Enoch held him as his life’s blood pumped out, held him and hugged him close and wept. When the little body grew limp, Enoch lifted his eyes to the swamp of wet bones, his heart clenched with hope.

  Nothing moved.

  Enoch’s pulse thundered in his ears, and his arms trembled as they tightened around the boy’s body. He could feel the toy truck pressing against his arm. He could hear Roger and his men coming behind him. Their obscene promises. Ugly’s snarl.

  Enoch looked to heaven and cried out, invoking the sacred letters of the Name, calling for help, for mercy, for power.

  The words wilted on his tongue.

  He turned to Rua.

  She stood with her head cocked to the side.

  “Please,” he said. “My love…”

  She grinned and stretched out a hand to him.

  He stood and reached for her, but something tore in his belly. He gasped and recoiled, hugging his stomach with both arms. Warm blood coursed from where the bullet had been.

  Rua laughed and turned away.

  Enoch’s feet gave out and he fell against the altar, against the body of the boy. Enoch looked for Tall Man, reached out with his power, summoning, twisting.

  Only the spirit’s mouth moved, tugging upward at the edges, and for the first time ever, Enoch saw Tall Man smile.

  The truth hit Enoch then, clear and burning like a fever.

  The truth about his spirits.

  Of what he’d done.

  As the hands of Roger’s men reached him from behind, Enoch threw his head back and screamed. His scream echoed up and over the swamp, far across the bedrock canyon, and all the way down to the black waters of the abyss.

  NEW SYNCHRODAN

  by

  ELIZABETH MACDONALD

  “All right, look, kid: you’re dumb as rocks and I ain’t no one’s role model, but like as not I’ll be prosecuted for manslaughter if I brain you with anything heavier than a light spring fuckin’ breeze, so pay attention. I’m not doin’ this twice.”

  ***

  It had been a while since there was anyone who remembered when New Synchrodan was new, back when the skyscrapers had been sheer and glimmering instead of pockmarked by acid rain and uncharted asteroids, back when you could get a clear look at the rock belt through the atmosphere without wires tangling up the view like so many thick spider webs. Old photos, the shiny ones from before everything was digitized, showed a blue sky past the belt instead of smoky orange, and wafting white clouds, and clear, fresh light. On some days, a telescope would show asteroids drifting in the rock belt. That was back when the showers had happened more than once a decade, before the asteroid market had crashed, back when there had been enough money for the satellite system that told everyone within the predicted radius of impact to plan their next vacation.

  But there were a lot of back thens. These days, the streets were littered with refuse, the poverty rate was creeping above thirty percent, and the land had to be treated with three different chemicals before anything would grow. Drinking water needed a full day of filtering. Electricity flickered off without warning. The only time light made it to ground level was around noon, and even then it was used light, gray and dim. The smell, by common agreement, was too depressing to talk about.

  Most people lived in New Synchrodan because they didn’t have a choice. Their family was there, there wasn’t any money to move, they didn’t have a chance of finding a steady job anywhere else, a thousand different reasons to resign themselves to a lifetime of gas masks and pollution. Some people lived there to sell the masks, the drinking water, the chemicals, all at prices almost no one could afford. A very few people could have left, but stayed to help those who couldn’t help themselves.

  And then there were people like Chess Pillai.

  Moving to New Synchrodan had, at the time, been the best decision Chess ever made. You could find trash anywhere, just lying on the side of the road, and no one cared if you took it. He’d even been paid when he first arrived, actually paid, to drag away an entire couch. Seventeen years old and with a couch all to himself. That had been something. It had been stained and he hadn’t had anywhere safe to take it, of course, so it got stolen by a woman in a shower cap who hissed and spat at him like a cat a week later, but it was what the couch had represented that counted.

  He hadn’t yet moved into the bell tower at that point, and that was another thing that used to amaze him. The tower was a holdover from the days of Old Synchrodan, and while most of that ancient city was buried beneath layers of asphalt and granite, the bell tower still bashfully poked its way up from the ground, its church bulldozed long ago and its big brass bell melted down. Through some loophole, the tower itself was protected as a historical site. When Chess discovered the building — which took a while in New Synchrodan, because there were more tall structures than short ones — he’d been shocked to discover that no one wanted to live there. He’d reasoned that it was barely crumbling at all, and most of the roof was still there. City people, he’d thought, didn’t know an opportunity when they saw one.

  At the time, papering over the draftiness of the tower had felt like a minor detail, and the air filters he’d installed had been a small price to pay for absolute freedom and all the mess he could ever want. But filters cost money, and so did gas masks, and food, and water, and soon enough there was never time for anything else. Like everything else in New Synchrodan, that first enchanted year when Chess had moved in had become another back then to put in a forgotten photo album, a thing to take out and examine when the mood was right.

  Still, there he’d gone and there he’d stayed, because he had no real reason to leave. He slept on a mattress salvaged from an old hospital, under a fluttering bit of tarp he had pinned over the hole in the ceiling, and in the mornings he was awoken by a wet nose pressed helpfully into his foot.

  On this morning, the nose came early. His foot snatched away.

  “Go ‘way, Muriel.”

  Muriel whined and snuffled her way into the bed. Stifling fur and hot breath on his face rolled Chess onto the brick floor in short order. She bounced after him.

  “Someday,” Chess said to the wall, cheek against cool stone, “someone’s going to find you and eat you and wear your skin for a hood and I’m not even going to care.”

  Muriel’s tail swept back and forth across the floor, eyes shining. The effect was unfortunately adorable. He heaved himself up and started the day.

  Coffee was one thing no one was short on, thanks to the factories downtown. The food trucks handed it out cheaper than dirt and tasting like it, too, but Chess still knocked it back every morning like ambrosia. He left a pot of water on the portable gas stove in one corner, covered with a cracked plate to prevent steam from escaping. The oil lantern came off its nail on the wall, and a couple sleepy strikes of a match lit the wick. Chess shuffled down the tower stairs to examine yesterday’s finds.

  The good days were when he found a broken appliance or TV he could strip for parts. The great days were when no one else had gotten at the copper wiring already, and the best days were when someone had thrown out a radio that worked nearly perfectly or a flashlight that only needed a little coaxing. The last few months, though, had been on the thin side, all paper and aluminum he could sell for recycling but not much else. He’d found some glass that would fetch a reasonable price at the right pawn shop, and his number one discovery had been a handful of batteries he was pretty sure
he could recharge if he stole some electricity from a laundromat. There was still enough of the seventeen-year-old in him to declare all this a marvelous treasure, but the twenty-three-year-old wondered if it was going to be enough to settle the bill come next supply day. He tucked the batteries into a pouch on his hip and went upstairs to take the water off.

  Muriel was sitting expectantly by the dog food bag before he was halfway through his first mug of coffee.

  “Staring at me isn’t gonna make me feed you any sooner,” he told her. He was then proved a liar, except for the fact that unrolling the top of the bag showed exactly five kernels at its bottom.

  Chess stared at them accusingly. They failed to multiply.

  Muriel munched the kernels out of his hand as Chess squatted down and flicked through a mental checklist of finances. The dog food from the trucks was far more affordable than the little plastic-wrapped packages of meat, and he wasn’t sure what else dogs could even eat. Could you kill a dog if you fed it the wrong way? Chess could go without more soap for a month, he figured, and he probably had enough cooking grease left in the canister to see him through. His shoes could stand another few weeks of being worn even if the soles flapped when he walked, but the new gas mask was nonnegotiable no matter how expensive it was, another trip to the lower quarter and his lungs would calcify within hours…

  Muriel licked the palm of his hand clean, then put her head on it. She gazed up at him.

  Oh well. He had two lungs; surely no one needed both.

  Chess rubbed the top of her head, eyes drifting about absently for the calendar he’d taped to the wall. He knew a man living in the middle levels who could be persuaded to trade some meat for the batteries once charged, and that would be enough to last until supply day, which was, according to the calendar his eye settled on, not next week, no, that was odd, and not the week after, but today, it was today, it was today and he had forgotten oh hell.

  Cheerful barking followed him as he rocketed around the living space: mask, shoes, backpack, a bit of string tying his overgrown hair back, a hand stuck in the money tin to yank out all the bills — upon inspection of the bills, a hand to shake out the change as well — emergency flashlight, stamp card, gloves, a long leather belt hastily wrapped around his arm, and his skates, which were in a heavy pile next to the ladder in the corner and took time to put on properly. He finished lacing them up and pulled the knots tight at each knee, pushed Muriel off (bark, bark, “shut up,” bark), then scaled the ladder in great thudding leaps.

  The top of the ex-bell tower didn’t have much in the way of a view, not with skyscrapers on three sides and a blinking billboard on the fourth, but it did have a single disused wire that ran right past it, a black cable three inches thick, slung low enough that practiced aim and a running start was all Chess needed.

  His skates hit the metal with a sound like schung and off he flew.

  ***

  “The trick isn’t in the balance. Anyone tells you the trick is in the balance, you flip ‘em the bird and walk right out of there, on account a they know as much about riding the wires as they know brain surgery.

  “What? I don’t give a shit if they actually know brain surgery or not! Quit interrupting, you’re missin’ the point. The trick is speed. You start fast, you stay fast, and you don’t stay too long going uphill or you’ll be best friends with a length of cement for about half a second. Your skates’ll handle the rest, so long as you’re not a complete bonehead.

  “Actually, in your case, maybe you oughta write up a will beforehand.”

  ***

  Riding the old gondola wires outside of an actual gondola car was technically a crime worth five years’ community service, but technicalities were worth nobody’s time. No one cared what the wires were used for anymore, especially not the bored police officers who stared out of their crow’s nests and hoped their transfer request would go through this month. Only a handful of the cars were in service these days, and even those were rusted things that groaned like a den of grizzly bears when they moved. The skates, while illegal, were cheaper and faster. They were also about a hundred times more dangerous.

  Chess leaned into his turn a little early and nearly lost his footing. The flat metal soles squealed and sparked in annoyance, but pulled him upright all the same. He was practiced enough to know not to slow down too soon after that, so he leaned again, swept on to the abandoned mall on Third Street. It was a husk of boarded-up windows and stained walls, but also the proud owner of several more wires that ran from its roof. Chess leaped onto crumbly cement, stumbled and jogged a short way under his own momentum, and caught another wire in the same way.

  There, he thought, well oiled machine, and hoped he wouldn’t break his neck. The mall marked the edge of Grinder territory, and if they weren’t a problem, there was always, always the Slicers. Dumb to take a shortcut, but just as dumb not to. He crouched down further, prayed a small prayer, and stuck to the wires less than forty feet off the ground in case a police officer decided to take destiny into his own hands.

  It was some time before he saw someone else on a wire, and then he saw another, and three more in quick succession after that. He hadn’t realized how fast he was going until he spotted the familiar shadowy precipice rising out of the fog that sprawled beneath him. He braked a bit, scraping his heel along the wire.

  It would’ve been as simple as breathing to cruise down to the distribution center if he hadn’t almost been clotheslined by someone carrying away their spoils. As it was, he hit the pavement in a sprawl.

  “Watch it!” he heard, already faint on the wind.

  “Sorry,” Chess mumbled. He had to scramble on all fours out of the way of a blaring food truck as it trundled towards the exit ramp, away from the rest of its herd. He picked himself up, dusted off his hands, readjusted the belt on his shoulder, hurried onward.

  Chess bumped shoulders with a few people as he threaded his way through the crowd — a frazzled mother towing her two children behind her, a woman wearing an enormous knapsack and talking under her breath, a man whose mask was so big it scooped under his chin and up to his ears like some metal beard. Chess avoided eye contact with each of them. At least it wasn’t long to the queues in the center.

  Enormous steel trucks were lined up in humming rows behind a series of folding tables, their backs laid bare to show cardboard boxes. Workers in their jumpsuits dashed to unload and stack the boxes in big piles. Other workers ferried individual supplies from piles to tables in an anthill of activity. Staffing the tables were a couple dozen secretaries. They shouted to be heard over the milling of almost a thousand people, a round of “next in line”s and “card and name”s to each harried person who approached, to move them on as soon as possible. The only ones who didn’t contribute to the noise were the guards stationed every so often along the tables, hats pulled low over their eyes.

  It was a practiced chaos. Chess had to shift from foot to foot for just a couple minutes in his own line before he was at the front of it. The woman on the other side of the table had a few wisps of gray in her hair and a grim expression to match. Her voice was breathy through her mask, stretching to nasal.

  “Card and name,” she said. He had them ready. She checked him off the list in front of her and plunked a red stamp with the date onto his card, which was nearly full. She told him he could get a new one at city hall. He said he knew, but thanks. She flipped it over.

  “You’re signed up for three portions’ canned rations, three portions’ bottled water, and the hygiene kit. Will that be all?” Even as she spoke, the man beside her lifted boxes onto the table.

  “A pack of dry dog food,” Chess said, putting all of his bills down. “And another portion of water, please. And, uh, how much is copper wire going for this month?”

  She glanced at another list. “Twelve a pound.”

  “A half a pound, then.”

  The distributor counted through the money and nodded to her assistant, who trotted off. �
�Will you be needing a weight-reducer today?” she asked.

  His skates were in full view, but he gave his politest affirmation anyway. She opened a metal lockbox under the table and pulled out a toothy bit of plastic, like a hair clip. A sliver of processed meteorite was set into it. The assistant came back with Chess’s purchases and dumped the dog food onto the counter.

  “Last bag,” the assistant informed the woman, who tsked and scribbled something down while he tied everything together with string. Pet food was a bit of a specialty item and there was never much of it to go around, Chess knew. Most people would sooner eat a stray dog or cat than put up with another mouth to feed. In light of how little change he got back, he thought they might have had a point.

  The distributor clipped the reducer onto the string, droning something about remembering to return it to a depository within the week or risk facing a fine. Chess scooped it all up at a fifth of its weight and skittered away before she finished.

  Once he was far enough to be safe from trampling, he swung his backpack off and loaded everything he could into it, peeling the packs of food and water out of their cardboard shells to fit them in. He forced the zipper shut, which left the dog food. He thought for a moment. His back was probably strong enough to handle the backpack at full weight. The bag of dog food got the honor of having the reducer fastened to it, though it was still as big and ungainly as ever.

  “It’s like that one riddle.” He slipped the big belt off his shoulder. “The fox, the goose, and the corn. Except I have to get them all across the river in one go and I don’t get a boat to do it with.”

  He was grinning now. Sure, it had been a thin line between him and a month spent scraping the bottom of his ration supply and he now had an empty savings tin, but that was a worry for the future. A last pull fastened the belt into place around the bag and Chess straightened up. He’d gotten about ten steps toward the closest jump-point for a wire when a flash of red about fifty feet away caught his eye.