Lament for the Afterlife

by Lisa L. Hannett

  The hoarded glass gouges him skyward. He floats, empty, open, honest. Peytr doesn’t justify the indulgence. He doesn’t make excuses. Doesn’t consider it a humungous waste, over a month’s worth of flight gone in one hit. Those are tomorrow’s thoughts, tomorrow’s regrets. Today, he thinks, it’s as simple as weakness.

  He needs the escape.

  He needs to soar.

  He needs.

  For a few minutes Peytr is a kite, a silken box of primary colours. Wind whistles through his hollows as he drifts out and up and away. He skims the clouds, tastes ozone, stiffens with pent electricity. Glass ribbons his fabric but he keeps on chewing; now he’s all-over stinging, now he’s cry-laughing, now he’s scoured light. Before and beneath him the city glistens, frosted with crystal and tears.

  What an ugly fuckin’ view, he thinks, plummeting.

  Closing his eyes, he tries to regain the heights. His legs are a flutter of satin, his cock a strong taut cord trailing all the way down, held by—Nobody. No one. He will be untied—yes, that’s it—he’ll be released. Untethered. Floating among the stars.

  Squinting, he sees the promise of constellations, the glint and shimmer of beyond. Elsewhere. A place after this one. He glides a few metres more, then jerks to a halt. Anchored, Peytr can only float so high. Now he sinks, lower, lower, low. Hovering by the eaves, he feels Amelia’s gravity weighing him down. And the city, so hideous, pulling. Distant spires and gaping holes and bunker towers. Steel scaffolding and cranes hung with dirty grey banners, company names turning this or that piece of sky into property. Air-whales with bellies full of human flotsam, tossed on the tides of war. Grey missiles darting from shadow to shadow—and far too slow behind them, impotent eruptions of light. Wheeling around flares and rockets and reinforced steeples, the skybunker girls. Sleek gliders zooming over suburbs and battlefields. Little vultures above swooping the vultures below.

  The view is exactly the same and yet totally different from the one he remembers as his city. The one he still thinks of as home.

  Here there’s an annoying pretence of wealth and brightness. Sunny terracotta tiles, sandstone buildings, coral-rendering, blue corrugated iron, titanium concrete. There’s a never-ending cycle of reconstruction and repair. As if destruction itself is the enemy. As if conflict can be smoothed away with high-grade plaster. As if upstanding brownstones and townhouses and rock gardens mean victory. As if the faces staring down from new balconies and through designer blackout curtains are somehow less gaunt when surrounded by colour. As if, within weeks, the fresh paint and worn panels aren’t streaked with jet-drippings. Sulphur-washed. Licked with wholesale grey.

  Peyt’s hometown, on the other hand, is a perfect example of efficient decay. The suburbs are clad in smoke-yellow tin siding. There are fire-blackened brick units. Share-houses held together with pebble-free stucco and lengths of weathered wood. Copper roofs on government offices, purposely greened so they’ll disappear in the flarelight. There’s no power after dark. No flambeaux. No museums.

  Back home, things are impermanent. Things are disposable. Things are easily abandoned.

  #####

  Now the glass skyline flickers and sparks. Peytr can’t help but think: it just isn’t the same here. Take the roads, for a start.

  Take the roads… . Take the roads… . Take any road …

  He bats his ’wind and feels himself sink almost to ground level. So disappointing. A full bomb shouldn’t wear off so quickly. It should have a few slices left in it yet.

  Take the roads… . Take the roads… . Take the roads, for a start …

  Sidewalks at home aren’t smoothed featureless; they’re brush-marked and so pale as to be almost white. They’re swept daily, free of dead words and rubble, not buried in last week’s battle-dung. Peyt knows those sidewalks, just like he knows the tar lines stop-gapping rifts in the streets—how they’d heat up in summer until the air smelled like oil and he and Dake and the girls would dig their toes so deep into the soft black, he sometimes still feels its warmth in his feet. How paths always seemed to lead somewhere better, more interesting. Away.

  Take the roads …

  Here, train tracks and drays and twice-a-days all come from elsewhere, but Peytr hardly ever sees them go back. Airships arrive—or they don’t—but these days only evacs and soldiers leave.

  Soldiers, he corrects, and Pigeons.

  Invisible straps pull on Peyt’s shoulders and he falls, hard. Resisting the come-down he closes his eyes, and surges forward, not up. When he opens them, the porch is thirty feet behind him; he’s grounded at the end of the driveway, gravel digging into his knees. Satchels are too heavy for him to carry, they’re too late, too full of important messages. So Peytr lies down on the unnatural sidewalk, beside a cracked but untarred street, and stares at unattainable clouds.

  Soldiers and Pigeons and glider-girls, he adds, catching glimpses of swift triangles overhead. It’s impossible to tell how many there are; they flit through the skies, now high, now low, now gone. Sprawled, he bites the insides of his cheeks. Follows them the only way he can.

  Velos whizz past, powered by muscle and steam. Peyt lifts a hand to flag one down—then immediately changes his mind. The cycles are too dangerous; lately, they’re the greys’ favourite targets. One minute they’re pedalling along, the next they’re aiming their wheels for road-ruts in the busiest streets. Their little engines combust, explode, pulping bodies, blasting wordwinds and limbs, spewing metal carnage, impaling onlookers with scraps and screams… . No, he wants something faster, safer. Something that will take him all the way back to before. He wants to see the stadium. He wants to visit Jean’s grave. He wants to get there in one piece.

  Take the road… . Take the road… . Take the road …

  He knows he can’t. With his ruck, full packs, and Amelia—well. Peytr’s not as young as he used to be. He can only lug so much around.

  That afternoon, Peytr’s drowsing in a glass mellow when the roof thunders, shouting above him. He jolts—then freezes, muscles clenched. It’s a ghost, he thinks. Only his eyes rove, peeled dry-wide, following the noise’s clunking roll from peak to eaves. It’s the greys. Too loud… . Too obvious for greys… . Bedsprings squeak beside him as dust rains from the rafters. Head cocked, he listens to the screech of Amelia’s ebbs and flows. As usual, the low lighting plays tricks, makes it seem like she is stirring. Peytr holds his breath and watches, but doesn’t hope. Don’t let it be rats, he thinks, not-seeing her arm move on the quilt. Last time she was gnawed, he’d had to trade three bombs for a small pot of salve that, when it came down to it, he was too afraid to smear into the wounds.

  Overhead, something’s raking over the wooden tiles. Talons, maybe. Claws. Screeches stutter into barks, short and scared. It’s the herdboys, he decides, squinting at the beams. Armed with crowbars, they’re going to peel open the cabin like a rotten tin can. They’re going to break their way in, and eat.

  But Amelia has nothing to offer. Her belly is empty. Her scalp is clean.

  Licking his lips, Peyt fills his mind with filthy thoughts. As his ’wind swells, he lifts his feet onto the settee, then reaches down and quietly slides his bag and boots out from underneath. After so many years in a rough canvas sack the grenade is dented, the pin bent out of shape, the cap rusted shut. White-knuckled, he wrestles with it until his palms are raw. His grunts and curses are echoed outside.

  At last the lid gives. Hands weak, trembling, he crams the cavity full of angry phrases. Vicious proverbs. A fear so old and strong it drips oil and reeks kerosene. “One whiff and they’re fucked,” Peyt says aloud, mustering courage with voice and lies. His aim doesn’t even have to be true; close will be good enough. The backlash, he knows, will almost be worse than the blast. Fear like his can’t be avoided.

  Dogs pound the front of the cabin. Springs squeak—no! It’s not springs. More like hinges. He looks at the door: it’s shut, still bolted. No one’s coming in. Amelia isn’t stirring. Wrenching the ca
p back on, Peytr cups the shell carefully and clamps the pin in place with his thumb. Quickening, the grenade rattles—above the sink, the blackened window responds in kind. Hung on the wall beside it, a row of good mugs bounces on hooks. Clay figurines dance on the sill. He looks at the door. No one’s coming in. The yelping and thumping are off to the right. Not quite at the house’s corner …

  Peyt’s gaze alights on the stove’s flue. The chimney hasn’t been fastened properly—it shoots up through a round hole in the ceiling, with a rat-sized space gaping between iron and wood. Old Rupe was much better with pots and pans, Amelia liked to joke, than he ever was with hammer and nails. Her mouth alone laughed whenever she told this part of the story: “‘Shut up and keep stirring,’ Old Rupe said, the only time I ever nagged him about it. That was it: ‘Shut up and keep stirring.’ Ha! He wasn’t a talker like you, Peyt.” Then she’d get a really good chuckle going, and have to step away from the cooker so her tears wouldn’t spoil the glass. “What a jackass,” she’d say, after a while. An explanation or an apology; Peyt was never sure.

  But Amelia isn’t stirring, or laughing, and the metal pipe is jerking violently back and forth. The chimney’s high-hat rhythm offsets the wall-bass thumping between beats.

  You’re going to fuckin’ break it, Peytr thinks, and now he’s unlocking the door, now he’s turning the knob, now he’s stomping on porch, winding up to throw. If he lobs the shell on the ground, not too close but not too far away from the foundations, he should scare the shit out of the fuckin’ dogs without doing the house too much damage …

  “Thank fuck,” comes a sweet voice from above. “Thought I was going to have to rat my way through these straps—your eaves can’t cut through leather for shit. You got a blade in there, legger? A hand wouldn’t go astray neither.”

  Peytr blinks and blinks and blinks. The girl doesn’t disappear.

  He grunts in surprise; a second later he finds himself inside, the door flung wide. In the living room, everything is quiet. The squeaking has stopped. Amelia isn’t stirring. Her rotting has lulled to a hum. He crosses to the divan. Buries the grenade in his pack, tucking it in a nest of shredded gauze and soft red fabric. Then he sits, elbows propped on knees, and tries to catch his breath.

  It isn’t her, he tells himself.

  It can’t be her.

  “Hey, pops!” she hollers, breaking his reverie. “You gonna leave me hanging here all day?”

  “No,” Peyt whispers, pulling up his hood, rubbing the shine from his eyes. “I’ve got you, Neddie. I’m coming.”

  The glider’s frame isn’t twisted too badly. The crossbar lists to port and the keel prows upward a bit at the nose, but it’s robust for something so frail. “Nothing a few good whacks with Antonine’s mallet won’t fix,” the girl says, pacing, surveying the damage. Lying on its back, the craft is a stingray flopped out of a high blue sea: pill-white on its undercarriage, rubber-grey on the dorsum, wings rippling in the wind. Half a dozen steel hooks jewel its belly. She bends and flips the ’ray over. Winces as she straightens—then cusses a streak longer than the gash in the top-skin of her sails.

  She’s talking to herself, Peyt knows, but he feels like he should say something. It’s okay now. We’re okay. His mouth guppies open and closed. I missed you. On the porch’s third step, he sits with feet planted wide, watching Ned stomp around like her leg isn’t paining her, cursing like a grunt. His daughter, a lightning-dodger. Grey-struck at 12,000 feet. That’s what she’d called it, grey-struck, no emphasis, as if getting shot out of the air was normal. She showed him the scars to prove that it was.

  Fourth fall this month, she’d said.

  “Fourth?” Peyt hopes he’d sounded more shocked than sceptical. Either way, Ned had shrugged it off.

  “There’s more of them up the vault nowadays,” she’d said. “And their ships is fuckin’ hard to see.”

  “So—what. They’re aiming at you?”

  “Nah,” she’d said. “We get in their way, we go down. Simple as. They don’t care enough to aim.”

  Peyt wants to hug the brave right out of her. He wants to tell her it’s okay to hurt. He wants to say he’s sorry. But her back is straight, her chin tilted at the level of fine. A stroke of luck, he thinks. Crashing into the roof’s slope instead of its spiked peak. Getting rope-tangled instead of turning to jam on the concrete. The chimney cap did a number on her glider—but apart from a few scrapes, a bit of rope-burn, a thick coating of soot and ash, Neddie’s intact.

  Fuckin’ grey-struck, Peyt thinks.

  Five or ten feet away, Ned hunkers with elbows resting on bony knees. Slightly duck-footed, like her father. Boots flecked with paint, matching the grooves she’d scuffed on the cabin’s siding. Goggles pushed up on her forehead. A twisted cord trapping long strands of her dust-brown hair. The knife they’d used to free her juts from the breast pocket of her jumpsuit. Valla is embroidered above it in charcoal cursive, a series of numbers and dashes printed beneath. Peyt chuckles, shaking his head. Ned’s older now, sure, but clearly hasn’t changed much. She always did hate her name, not that he blames her. So this week it’s Valla, is it? Fine. It’s better that way. It suits her. The double ells like the two long braids framing her round face, the V the same shape as her glider. And the whole thing has a nice dip and lift to it. vAllA. Like a rollercoaster, like a loop-de-loop in the sky.

  A real highflyer’s name, Peyt thinks, suddenly overwhelmed, lightheaded with relief. Glad to be sitting while his body quakes him weak. Mireille must’ve left Ned, too… . And what happened to May? Peyt wipes his face when the girl glances back at him. His mouth twists, faking a smile. They must’ve thought poor old Ned was orphaned. The skybunker corps must’ve saved her from selling her skin, from being a toy for the herd.

  “How’re you with a needle?” Ned asks, fingering the sail’s ragged edges.

  Neater now than I was when you were my Neddie, he thinks. Back when he’d sewn her name into all her little clothes. Back when he’d performed surgery after surgery on the rag-and-bone dolly Mireille had found, a gangle of colour Ned toted everywhere. Back when she called him Pops, and meant it personally.

  “A bit wobbly,” he says. “Not terrible.”

  She stands, brushing dirty hands on her jumpsuit. “Got a spare? My kit’s gone and done a loose-balloon. No telling where it’ll land.”

  What happened? Peytr wants to ask as Ned reads the compass strapped to her wrist. All this time, he wants to yell. How did you survive? How did you know what to do? Who taught you? Who raised you? Where have you been? He clears his throat and says, “We’ve got a sewing box.”

  Ned lifts an eyebrow. “We?”

  “Yeah.”

  For a minute, Peyt thinks he sees recognition in his daughter’s expression. A squint, a glint, a too-long stare. The same look she’d given when he and Mimi had swapped her doll for one less ridden with lice. While Ned slept, he’d worked all night on the new Saralita, embroidering a tiny pinafore and bloomers to match the ones they’d burnt. Come morning, Ned eyed the doll in just this way, just like this.

  “Sara’s had quite the adventure,” Peyt recalls saying. “She’s lost her thumbs, poor girl. But we can forgive her.”

  “I’m going to need something stronger than thread,” Ned says. “This ‘we’ of yours got a tackle box in there by any chance? Acrylic line? Wire? Sinew? Gutting? I’d settle for horsehair if you got it. Mind you, en’t nothing tougher than musings for getting a gal off the ground …”

  “No. She doesn’t have any.” Peyt’s tone is too harsh, too abrupt. Clamping his hood on tight, he tries again. “I mean, you can’t glean a thing from her. I mean, she keeps to herself—”

  “Tack your sails, legger. I won’t never ride no ’wind that weren’t free-blown my way. I take my job serious, you know.” Scathing, the creed Observe, Gather, Report, Examine ribbons around Ned’s head. “I en’t never borne vaultwards what weren’t mine to fly, got it? I know what’s giving and what’s taki
ng.”

  They pull the glider close to the porch, then Peyt tells Ned to turn around while he yellows a rough circle around it. “Should keep the dogs off,” he says, zipping his pants. Ned hardly seems to notice. Her ’wind is columned in lists and tallies, her posture saying, Whatever gusts ya high, legger.

  “Reckon you could point me to a barterman? A hawk?” As she speaks, she unhooks severed ropes and straps from the rigging, drapes them over her shoulder. “And a Whitey? All my coin’s become someone else’s lucky-rain—but they still trade round here, hey?” Without waiting for Peyt’s nod, she takes stock of her gear. “These boots should fetch me a roll of wire at least. And my belt oughta buy me a quick call up to Antonine.” Ned grins. “The old shark worries something fierce if her ’rays are too long undercloud.”

  “Wait a sec,” Peyt says, tripping up the stairs, trying to keep her in sight while also heading inside. “Just keep your gear on there, glider. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “And where d’you think I’ll go,” she calls after him, “with my rig belly-up on the turf?”

  A minute later he comes back out, a red shirt bunched in his fists. “This’s got to be worth a few thread-pennies.”

  “Thanks all the same,” she says, and Peyt hears Jean’s pride in the refusal. “It’s too much.”

  “I used to work the nightmarkets,” he quickly continues, kneading the soft fabric, turning sunsets and palm trees over and over in his hands. “Learned to haggle from the best liars and cheats ever to hang tarp over table and call themselves merchants. I’ll get what you need and be back before darkfall, pocketing a jangle of change.”