Dark Metropolis

by Jaclyn Dolamore

  “What is this?” Sigi said. “Are people going insane?”

  “They’re panicked,” Nan said. “You come from a good family, so maybe you weren’t fully aware of what the war years were like, but most of us had to get ration books and stand in breadlines, and sometimes the food ran out. We would stand for hours and get nothing. That wasn’t really so long ago. At the first gasp of anarchy, people just want all the stuff they can stockpile.”

  “I knew it was bad,” Sigi said. “But I guess I don’t remember how bad.”

  “Well, maybe we should join in,” Nan said, pointing to a raided dress shop. “We do need to get out of these work clothes.”

  “I think we’re a little late,” Sigi said. The mannequins in the window were stripped naked.

  “There are still some things left,” Nan said, picking her way over the glass. “What size do you wear?”

  Sigi groaned and said, “I’m coming.”

  Freddy stood guard at the window while they quickly exchanged their work suits for dresses. Even he could tell they weren’t very flattering, but neither of them complained.

  Thea’s street was one of the quietest they had yet seen, and they reached it as the sky was beginning to pale in the east. Just seeing a familiar place gave him renewed strength, and he charged up the stairs.

  The building was silent. As if everyone was still asleep.

  Thea’s door was shut, and when he tried the knob, it was locked. He knocked, and there was no answer.

  “She hasn’t gotten here yet.” Nan stated the obvious.

  “What do we do?” Sigi asked.

  “I hope she isn’t hurt…or running into trouble,” Freddy said.

  Nan sat down against the door with a sigh. “There’s no way of knowing, really. I guess we can wait for a bit. But, Freddy…when are you going to let the workers go, if Thea doesn’t come back soon?”

  “How long before they’ll start to…turn?” Freddy asked.

  Sigi’s brow darkened. “Another day, I think.”

  “You can’t wait another day,” Nan said. “They’re suffering. The army is shooting them to pieces. You saw what happened. And it might take Thea a long time to find her way back here.”

  He sat down on the stoop and closed his eyes. Nan was right. But when he imagined Thea racing to bring her father to her mother, he couldn’t stand to think of ripping that chance out of her hands. He closed his eyes, trying to find the individual thread that belonged to her father. Maybe he could sense Thea through it. Maybe he could find out.

  Before, he had sensed Henry through Thea’s touch. Now it was not so easy. He searched through the fog of confusion and pain, and—there—

  Henry was hurt. Freddy’s stomach twisted. His own heart skipped as he sensed Henry’s ripped insides, organs too destroyed to function, a life clinging by a thread. A thread that led back to Freddy.

  He couldn’t see Thea. He didn’t know if she was there. He could only feel Henry’s trembling life, and he knew he would have to break his promise to Thea. He would have to hope she and her mother were with him.

  “The sun is rising,” Sigi said softly. “I’d like to see it. Freddy, do you think you could wait for the sunrise before you let them go? Because all of us were always talking about the sun, and how we missed it.”

  Thinking of Henry’s pain, he wanted to say no, but he might want to suffer through it and see the sunrise, too. Freddy didn’t want to decide for him. “Yes, I can wait until sunrise,” he told Sigi.

  They found a stairwell to the roof and climbed onto its flat surface. The sky was turning a faint orange now, and then the colors began to deepen and change, blooming into different shades, transcending the drab apartments.

  “Oh,” Sigi said. “It’s so beautiful. I forgot just how beautiful. It looks so new, like it couldn’t possibly happen every day.”

  “Just like I promised,” Nan said.

  “You did,” Sigi said. “But I hardly dared to believe you.”

  Nan took Sigi’s hand, and Sigi turned as pink as the sunrise. Freddy crossed to the other side of the roof, looking not to the sun now but to the edge of darkness.

  I promised you something, too, Thea. But there’s no way for me to know. You’ll forgive me for doing what’s right, I know.

  He had never before realized how quickly the sun rose. It seemed almost as if at one moment the western sky was still deep blue with a few determined stars shining in it, and in the next moment the whole world was full of all the light and hope of morning.

  He closed his eyes and turned inward. Thousands of threads, years and years of spellwork…

  In one moment it was undone.

  The sun was rising as they found their way back to the alley where Thea had left her father. He was still sitting there, still alert. When her mother saw him, she burst into tears, and then she flew to his side. She took his hand. He stroked her hair.

  “Henry, I knew,” she whispered.

  “Oh, I missed you,” he said. “I couldn’t even remember you, and yet I missed you like a piece of my own soul. I still knew you.”

  Thea crouched alongside them, and each put an arm around her. Her tears were falling now, and she didn’t stop them. She let them blind her.

  “I love you both so much,” her father said. “And I don’t want you to be sad. It hasn’t all been bad…only being away from my family, and knowing—knowing you were out there somewhere and I couldn’t remember. It’s all right now because”—he suddenly clutched his chest—“you’re here.”

  “Father!” Now the light in his eyes was fading, and his arm was falling away from her. Her mother still clutched his hand.

  He looked happy. Peaceful. Far away.

  Thea nudged him, trying not to lose herself as she lost him. “It’s too soon!”

  Her mother pulled Thea against her, folded her arms around her, and held her against her chest. “It’s all right, my love,” she said, her voice cracking with tears. “I’m back. I’m free. Your father’s at peace. It was enough.”

  “It wasn’t enough.”

  “No. It never is, really. My other half…has gone…but we have each other again.” Her mother started to cry again in earnest; they were both sobbing and holding each other, not caring that they were in some awful alley.

  But even through her tears, Thea couldn’t forget how much was still to be done.

  “I have to get home,” she said softly. “I told my friends, and—it’s very important.”

  “I don’t want to leave your father here,” her mother said.

  Thea didn’t, either. They tried to carry him, but he was heavy. Maybe if they had a stretcher. No, even then it was so far to get him home. And what would they do with his body? Father Gruneman was dead, anyway. She didn’t want anyone else to hold a funeral service. There were other bodies sprawled on the street.

  They had to leave Father there. Thea covered him with her coat. It was so dirty, she would have to get a new one anyway, and she didn’t feel the cold.

  They both said a last good-bye, and Thea wondered what the point was, really. All these good-byes. It was awful. He was dead already. Hopefully, he was talking to Father Gruneman in the next world. She tried to cling to that thought even though it felt too pat, too perfect, like a fairy tale, but then…Father Gruneman loved those.

  She remembered the empty feeling that everything seemed to have when Father went to war, and how it was worse when she and Mother heard he wasn’t coming back. Here it was again. Like she was alone, even though her mother was there. Like nothing really mattered. Colors dulled, foods tasteless, nights sleepless. And that was why, in some ways, she hated that she had to see him again, go through it all again.

  But it was also worth it.

  A military truck drove by, loaded with grim-looking troops, and she remembered that the city was still
dangerous. The peril was driven home even further as they reached their neighborhood and saw that many of the shops had been looted.

  “I hope we’ll be able to get food,” her mother said. They both remembered the years of hunger. Thea wouldn’t let herself think that far ahead.

  And then, when she climbed the stairs, they were all there waiting for her. Nan and Sigi, and Freddy. She couldn’t imagine how he must be feeling, holding all that power in his hands and letting it go—ending thousands of lives that should have ended long ago. When he saw her, he scrambled to his feet and rushed to her, searching her face.

  “Thea…did he…?”

  “He died in my mother’s arms,” she said. She didn’t need to tell him how brief it had been. Maybe one day she would tell him about that moment, one day when they were far away from this time and place.

  “Thank god.” He clutched her against him.

  Then he released her, and she took his hand, and for the first time she could hold his hand without seeing that terrible vision. She met his eyes.

  And then she kissed him.

  It certainly wasn’t like her parents’ first kiss, on a sleigh ride in the snow, with the comfort of a simple age all around them—the kiss her mother always murmured about in the throes of bound-sickness. This was a kiss that said, Life is short, and sometimes awful, but we’ve made it through what we must today, and we’ll do it again tomorrow—together.

  Just the other day, I found an email from 2008 where I described some of my current writing projects. One of them was this:

  “The plot is based very loosely on the silent film Metropolis; the setting just as loosely based on Weimar Berlin. Thea is a shapeshifting teenage actress who is hiding the fact that her mother is going mad to protect her from an institution. When she is asked to impersonate the ailing queen, she uncovers a plot to exploit the city’s dead as undead labor beneath the city streets.”

  I didn’t properly begin Dark Metropolis until 2010, and the story obviously changed a lot! But it’s amazing to think back on everything and everyone that brings a book into being. As always, I must first and foremost thank my partner, Dade. It is embarrassing to admit how much he helped to plot this story. I literally came to him like, “Tell me how to make this ending exciting and accomplish X, Y, and Z,” and he rattled off a scene-by-scene plan immediately. Without him, my characters would probably still be trying to escape.

  I started writing this book as I nursed my beloved cat, Tacy, through the final months of her life. It was the first story I had written from a place of grief rather than a place of joy, and while I was writing it I found out my friend Lisa Madigan, a fellow client of my agent, Jennifer Laughran, had terminal cancer. Sometimes funny thoughts come out of rough times, and in this case I had some vague idea that I would write this book to cheer Jenn up because I figured she would love it and could sell it. Amazingly this plan worked, although filling the hole left by Lisa’s death is something no story could do. Lisa, you will always be missed.

  I must also give hearty thanks to the Hyperion team, who have impressed me with their care and attention to detail, from cover design to copy edits, and to Tracey Keevan for making what can be an author’s nightmare—your editor leaving the house—entirely painless. But especially to my editor for this book, Catherine Onder. I learned so much from working with her that I will carry with me into other books, and she also made this book a whole lot better!

  While doing edits on this book I was also buying a house and moving from Florida to Maryland, the timing of which I don’t recommend unless you enjoy heaps of stress, so I’m grateful to everyone who helped: my parents for support of many kinds, my sister Kate for lots of bubble wrap, my grandparents for surprise financial aid, my aunt Heidi for making a long drive to help me unpack, my awesome real estate agent Diane Derr and her team, and anyone else I might have forgotten because that entire year was a huge blur. Now I have a proper writer’s dwelling, a house with stories of its own.

  And, last but never least, to everyone who reads my books.

  JACLYN DOLAMORE spent her childhood reading as many books as she could lug home from the library and playing elaborate games of pretend. She has a passion for history, thrift stores, vintage dresses, drawing, and local food. She live with her partner, Dade, and three weird cats in a Victorian house in western Maryland. This is her fourth novel. Visit her online at www.jaclyndolamore.com.