by Andrew Post
“I still don’t buy it,” I said. “Why would he chance getting burned to save you? And why are you keeping him at arm’s length? You asked me to tell you when I see him around so you can kick him out.”
We turned onto Superior Street, began heading toward Rose Park. We could cross through there and take the boardwalk stairs to the beach. I looked out the window. The lake was so still it was like a mirror reflecting nothing but gray skies and the rig, the patient monolith.
“He’s too jumpy,” Thadius said. “I think he wants to stop the Smocks even worse than we do. But I figured if I let him in on the fight, let him know what Mosaic Face and I were up to, he might change his mind at some point and bring the Smocks down on us.”
“Why would he do that?”
Thadius chewed his cheek. “I don’t trust him. We’re different. I could see him betraying us, given the right opportunity.”
* * *
We got down to the beach. I undid the chain from the rowboat, and together, we dragged it to the water’s edge. Thadius held it still so I could get in. He put the heavy tote in my arms, and I could barely hold it for a second. I set it on the floor of the boat with a thunk.
Thadius climbed in, facing me, and dipped the oars into the water.
“So he just hangs around Duluth all day?” I said.
“He can go back.” Thadius grunted with the effort of rowing. “But I think he stands more of a chance getting caught over there.”
“How?”
“He still has the implants: the harvester and rebuilder sockets.” He indicated his palms. “The way he tells it, things are pretty calm over there. They never had the A, remember. And if someone got one look at him and saw he had the sockets and wasn’t in Smock attire, they’d report him. They take deserters seriously.”
“So he’s just sort of trapped straddling the vershes, not really welcome in either one?”
At the other end of the rowboat, Thadius frowned. “Don’t make it sound like ‘Oh, poor Clifford.’ He chose to become the Betrayer. I’d like to keep him around, but the minute someone asks if he’s my son, I might sock somebody one. Damn WTF,” he said, pinching one of his jowls.
“Why does he go by Clifford?”
Thadius looked at me. “Do you think I was born as Thadius Thumb?” He indicated his left hand awkwardly balancing the ore handle. “Wouldn’t that be a little ironic, given my . . . lowered digit count?”
“So you guys are even named the same thing?”
“Your e-book’s written by Cassetera Robuck, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but that’s a different versh from Clifford’s.”
“True, okay, good point. Short story long, yes, my real name is Clifford.” He glared at Duluth as if a crowd of people were just waiting to hear that news and laugh while spreading it all over town.
I nodded. “I still kinda like it, though.”
He chuffed. “Shut up. Here. Your turn for a while.” He shoved the ore handles at me.
I was going to ask to anyway since I had to steer us around the mines. I drew us closer to the rig slowly, carefully, threading the needle expertly and by memory. “Does he know the plan?”
“I had it in mind to ask him once we got you fixed.” He gestured at my crutches crossed on top of the tote he’d brought with him from the store.
For another spell, we crossed the water in silence.
“It’s going to hurt, I bet. When you fix my legs.”
“Well, it’s technically your brain we’re fixing, but yeah”—he winced sympathetically—“it might.”
I spotted the harvester rifle at the bottom of the boat. “And I suppose there’s no way you can jazz me without harvesting me.”
“I could try and crack your nut open with a hammer and poke around inside, but I don’t think that’d yield the results we’re after.” It was meant to be a joke, I could tell, but his smile soon faded. “I’ll do my best. I promise.”
“I know you will.”
Track 26
EXPLODER
We reached the rig. Thadius helped me out, and we unloaded the scythe rifle, my bag, and the tote of stuff from Mosaic Face we’d need and went up inside. I carried a few bags of the other things we’d need. Spare canisters—scary thought, me carrying something the size of a two-liter soda bottle I might soon be inside of. We were determined to make one trip up inside the rig, even with all we had to carry. We managed.
The rig was cold. The lights were all off. Flipping them on in the dining room, I saw the now-empty bag of banana chips I’d left out. I called Squishy a few times. Thadius wanted to get started, understandably, and I gave him quick directions to the cauldron.
He left by the hatch leading onto the helipad garden, and I went down the hall to the bunk rooms. I checked my parents’ old room, then mine, under the beds. Then the rec room. I pushed open the door.
Squishy sprang to his feet and whirled to face me. Panic.
“There you are,” I said, relieved. “Hey, relax. It’s just me.”
He was standing in front of something. He didn’t seem happy at all to see me.
I moved up closer, taking one swing forward.
He sidled over, stretching his arms to block what was behind him. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“About what? Did you break something? If so, it’s okay. Look around. Almost everything here’s already sorta broken.”
I clack-thumped closer.
He dropped his arms to his sides and stepped aside.
The TV was dismantled, and so was the radio that the original occupants had used to communicate. He’d cobbled them together, wires running every which way, exposed circuit boards and tools scattered in a dense fug of soldering smoke. A rejiggered frequency display showed a series of increasing numbers.
“What’s all this?”
He looked up at me. Big wet eyes. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I want to go home.”
“The Savannah’s not a real place, Squishy.” With my swollen knee and bound legs, I couldn’t get down to his eye level. I just tried to let sympathy ring in my voice. But the words lost their way coming out of my mouth when I realized who he was really trying to contact. Squishy wasn’t trying to phone home. He was trying to . . .
“Oh no.” I stared at the radio, dialing through the frequencies and stopping here and there when it picked one up. I heard a familiar voice talking in a rush, giving orders.
So familiar: my mother’s voice.
But it wasn’t her, and the temporary comfort evaporated.
I looked at him.
“You’re . . . ?”
“I do not belong here in this place, ma’am. And while I don’t blame you for bringing me here, I know you were tricked. I had to contact the authorities. I knew of none other than the Regolatore. I did only as they say they mean to do for this world, ma’am: to protect you from yourself.”
“You told them about me?”
It all made sense. How the Smocks knew my name, right where to find me. The sweatshirt that put the Scary Thing on my scent.
The foam handles of my crutches squeak as I squeezed them.
Squishy shrank back, putting his hands up in a defensive pose. “Ma’am, please don’t be upset. I think this is for the best. I believe you are in need of help—”
“Do you have any idea what you did?” I roared. “So many people died because of you.”
“No, ma’am. Because of what you and Mr. Thumb are doing—that is why people are dying. If you would just stop, and let the Regolatore do as they will and police this place effectively, no one would come to harm.”
“It’s because of them that we have to do this,” I screamed.
I had more, but the radio blared a torrent of static. A voice rang through the cobbled radio’s tinny speakers: “It said it didn’t know where she was currently.”
“Do you believe it?” Her. My not-mother.
“Given enough time, we won’t need her abomination to find her. We’ll make the girl talk befor
e long. I think she knows where Cassetera is.”
Beth. She was still alive.
“And we’re positive she’s not Cassetera?” Alternamom said my name like it was a disease.
“She didn’t last five minutes of questioning before admitting she’d lied to us.”
Oh, Beth. No—
“So we have nothing.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
The Smock captain who sounded like Mom said, “Abomination? Are you there? Can you hear me? Answer.”
Squishy looked at me.
I looked at him. “Do not.”
The mic, with a button on the side to speak and a coiled cord, lay between us.
He was lower to the ground and not on crutches. He reached.
I raised my crutch high overhead and, as much as it pained me, clonked him with it. I tried making sure I hit him only with the rubber end, but it was hard to gauge my swing while trying to remain standing upright.
He dropped the mic, and it sprang across the floor, pulled back by its spiral wire.
Squishy looked dazed, pressing his hands to his head. He glared as if he was going to jump at me, sink his teeth into my shin.
Instead, he bolted out of the room and up the hall. I followed, always more than two dozen of his short strides behind. He crossed the dining room, then went out the door onto the catwalks.
“Squishy. Wait.”
I lost him for a while out there, under the blinding morning sun. Cold wind.
“Squishy?” I shouted, turning one way, then the next.
I heard a scuffle of feet on metal and went that way.
I took the zip lines. Forgetting how far they went and unable to see, I hit some landings and scuffed my hands stopping myself.
I was afraid he’d double back to the radio, lock the door behind him, and summon the Smocks. I approached another exterior staircase, sweat pouring down my forehead. I blinked it away and nearly lost my footing and fell to my death. The scare made my chest go tingly, my ribs feeling cold for a few beats of my heart.
I screamed with all I had. “Squishy?”
I turned a corner.
“Ma’am. Please stop.” He was standing on the railing. Below him, I knew, was a drop straight down to the water. In his hands was a pipe wrench, a length of wire connecting it to one ankle.
“Squishy. Get off there. Now.” I stumbled toward him.
He put out a hand to halt me. “Ma’am. Please.”
“You don’t have to do that. Everything’s okay. We all make mistakes. We can . . . work something out here. We can maybe ground you or something or maybe not allow you to have banana chips for a while or something. Just please get down. Okay? Get down.”
His eyes were calm. When he spoke, it was slow, measured. “It’s not your fault. Any of it. Any of what happened. The Regolatore cannot be blamed, either, because they’re just trying to keep you from destroying yourselves.”
“Is that what they said?”
“They’re not proud of what method they’ve decided to use. But, yes, that is the long and short of it.”
“What are we doing that’s so wrong?”
“You’re repeating their mistakes.”
“Okay, that’s fine, but would you please get down?”
“I mean no disrespect, ma’am, but I won’t. I strongly believe in not repeating mistakes. Dr. Werewolf was never able to catch me because he never tried a tactic other than to chase me with weapons. Sure sign of psychosis: never adjusting to failure. And it’s what you’re doing: repeating the mistakes they’ve made.”
“But we haven’t made them. Their mistakes should be on them, not us. Besides, if they’re so smart, why don’t they try to stop us some other way? Why burn people alive?”
His furry face formed a rueful smirk. “Do you really think a swat on the wrist would keep humankind from jazzing, scratching, making things that shouldn’t be in this world?”
“Why mess with time, though?” It was the burning question, the one I couldn’t shake. We were all racing toward death a lot faster than we should have been, because of the Smocks.
“A short lifespan will mean a gnat-like human race. You won’t have time to understand so much as one plus one, let alone how to use a molecular constructor or how to jump dimensions. Then the killing will stop, because keeping this versh in line will be as easy for them as tending a terrarium full of moss.”
I looked at the six-pound wrench in Squishy’s hands. His arms were shaking from the effort of just holding it.
“But why . . . kill yourself?”
“They’re right. I don’t belong here. I know that now. They know who to go after, so my job is done here. I am redundant. I could go on, but it wouldn’t be very good for either of us since, clearly, I could live nowhere but here.”
“Squishy . . .”
“Good-bye, ma’am.” He let his fingers uncurl. The wrench clattered against the rail and fell, tolling one rusty note. The line went taut, and Squishy, eyes closed, spilled over the railing behind it. I screamed for him, threw myself forward.
All that was down there was a ring in the water, some bubbles, a descending smudge of faint maize yellow swallowed by the darkness of Lake Superior. One bubble, two. No more.
“Oh . . . God.” My arms gave, and my crutches fell away. Gravity took on a new degree of force, and I collapsed, screaming into my hands.
I screamed again when someone grabbed me. I threw a wild fit, swinging with open hands.
Thadius. Apparently, as he told me later, I was trying to climb under the third bar of the railing. I was close, too, I guess. He pulled me away and held me until I stopped trying to go after Squishy. Pinned my arms so I couldn’t hit him anymore. I didn’t want to hit him.
I recall having a similar reaction when Mom, wrapped in that bedsheet and cocooned in old chains, was dropped into the water. I’d tossed my stuffed animal Squishy in after her, letting him go by his Velcro-padded hands. It felt right to do, at the time, but I regretted it. Seems silly, but I missed that yellow nylon bag of stuffing almost as much as I missed Mom sometimes.
I never imagined I’d have another Squishy, only to lose him again.
* * *
“Just do it,” I shouted over the machine. I lay where Thadius had put me, next to the cauldron in the lowest floor of the rig, on the filthy, wet floor. I was ready for Thadius to hit me with the scythe rifle and get it over with.
I imagined being powdered into fixins would be like having a vacation from existence. My soul would slip away as the gun broke me down and shoved the base parts of me into a canister. I’d be in this void, enveloped in soundlessness and darkness, a vacuum where nothing would hurt.
“That’s no way to go about this,” Thadius said.
I scoffed. “Like you know. You’ve never done this before. You said so yourself. So don’t go trying to make some stupid speech about what kind of . . . mental state I should be in when I get harvested. Come on. Do it.”
Thadius stood on the opposite side of the room, folded his arms. “I won’t until you’ve pulled yourself together.”
“You can get off your high horse now. Do I need to remind you that you used to scratch up drugs?”
“He was your friend.”
“He was a traitor. And he wasn’t even real to begin with.”
“If you really felt that way, you wouldn’t be this upset.”
I gave him my best withering glare. “He jumped right in front of me. How am I supposed to react? I’ve never seen anybody do something like that.” I saw he was about to interject. “Don’t even. I don’t want your fatherly wisdom right now, all right? Save it.”
He stepped over to me, picked me up by the shoulders, and pressed me against the wall. “You’d better lay off with the fucking attitude. Because I can just leave and carry on with the plan without you. Not that it’d be too tough getting away from here.”
“Is that a cripple joke?” I hissed, trapped in his grasp. I could hear my legs scra
pe on the metal floor, so I knew he hadn’t raised me completely off the floor, but it hurt. “Let me go.”
“No, I meant it wouldn’t be too tough getting away from here, meanin’ it’d be a relief to get away from all the crap you’re spewin’ right now.”
“Squishy just killed himself,” I screamed, right in his face. “He was my friend, he screwed me over, and now he’s dead. Tell me: how am I supposed to react?”
Thadius sneered and set me on the floor. His mouth opened, but then he shut it and just growled. He held up an index finger and opened his mouth again.
One of the portholes flashed white. The entire rig shook. The lights flickered. From the next room, I heard a drum fall over.
Thadius whirled toward the concussion. “What was that? Is that normal around here?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve only heard it once before.”
“When?”
“The time someone ran into one of Dad’s mines.”
Track 27
HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
Thadius snatched the harvester rifle and threw it over his arm, and we raced topside. He carried me and my crutches up the three sets of stairs, taking two risers at a time. We barged into the overcast daylight, the walkways slick with drizzling rain. We crossed through the raised planters on the garden helipad, past the greenhouse.
Beyond the southward railing, a long stripe of black of smoke rose to commingle with the gray clouds. An old fishing vessel craned back, its fore end pointing heavenward. It held for a moment, then began to sink. Flotsam littered the area around the smoking wreckage. No survivors, it seemed.
Thadius set me down.
I got my crutches under my arms. “Whose boat was that?”
He shook his head, then flinched and pulled back from the railing.
I did the same when I saw what he’d seen.
A Smock crouched upon a broken piece of the boat’s hull, using the harvester hand to produce a continuous blast of water that raised the wreckage to our level. Once high enough, the Smock took one long step, alighted on the railing, then dropped onto the deck with us. A hand snatched off the soaked hood. Red hair fell around a face that was both familiar and alien to me.
