by Matt Wallace
“It’s funny,” Luciana continues, “I can’t quite place your origins. I’m very good at that, usually. You’re not human. You’re not demon.”
“Am many things. Have seen many things.”
“Yes, that’s what you do here, isn’t it? You impart the knowledge of your considerable years to Chef Luck and his staff.”
“They are much like children to you and I,” Boosha says, and there’s an obvious and unbidden affection in her tone. “They have so little time in their skins, to see and to know. Most of them will never understand their own world as it truly is. Yet the ones here have seen, do know, even if they cannot understand. I try to help them. They are kind. Mean well.”
“That’s very sweet. It’s very . . . motherly.”
“What your purpose is here? Truly?”
“I think you know. I had to treat you like a doddering old biddy, naturally, so Chef Luck and his staff would never suspect you posed a threat to me, but it’s obvious you’re the sharpest knife in this particular kitchen.”
“I will not let you hurt these people.”
“That’s your last word on the matter?”
“No.”
With that, Boosha spits on the floor at her feet.
“Last word,” she pronounces.
Luciana’s smile never falters.
“Very well, then,” she says.
Luciana hefts her attaché case and plants it flat atop stacks of old tomes near the door. She demurely removes her wide-rimmed eyeglasses and folds the stems, slipping them into the breast pocket of her dark, sleek suit. She reaches out and presses her thumbs against the clasps securing the two halves of the bloody business accessory.
Boosha’s eyes narrow into serpentine slits, watching her. The muscles of her hand tense against the body of the lectern, and suddenly the grip of a black steel stiletto is filling her palm.
Luciana pops the attaché case open, just a crack, and immediately the shadows inside begin spilling out in thick waves of black that seem to flow on the air like ink in the absence of gravity.
She turns her gaze away from the case to regard Boosha, and that unwavering, professional smile suddenly turns sinister.
“All right,” Luciana says, brightly. “Let’s begin.”
PART II
X’s AND O’s
WHO ONCE MADE THE EARTH MOVE
The strip of Bed-Stuy waterfront is an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of gentrification; multimillion-dollar developments guarded by Whole Foods standing abreast of each shiny new complex like sentinels, broken up by barren lots, faded tenements, and crumbling industrial ruins.
In the glass banquet hall of one such ever-rising steel condominium, Sin du Jour is awaiting the arrival of the campaign event’s elemental guests. Allensworth and his entourage of shadowy, nameless government agency cronies are already there, milling about the edge of the large moon pool that runs right under two giant bay doors set into the far wall of the space, and out into the East River.
The only other people to have arrived are a contingent of half a dozen obviously homeless people seated around one of the many velvet-draped tables in front of a small speaker’s stage. Lena can only guess it’s some kind of outreach program, or a prop in the political speech being made this evening, although she wouldn’t have guessed such issues mattered in the subcutaneous world of the supernatural.
She is currently watching them quizzically, not because of their tattered layers of clothing or unkempt faces, but because they’re apparently not being allowed to eat. Filling the table in front of them is a fast food feast from Henley’s. There must be hundreds of Chicken Nuggies in their cardboard boxes with tiny plastic caps of Big Top sauce formed into four-foot pyramids. Double Udder sandwiches wrapped in foil are piled just as high and surrounded by plastic containers of Clown Noses, the roasted red potatoes Henley’s offers in lieu of French fries.
Lena can see the poor people shifting in their seats, eyeing the food both nervously and wantonly, and occasionally casting their desperate gaze at Allensworth’s people. It just seems flat-out cruel to her, and unnecessarily so.
She is staffing a buffet table of the miniaturized dishes they’ve designed for the gnomish contingent. Bronko’s coin-sized bento boxes with chopsticks half the length of threading needles are meticulously arranged in kanji symbol patterns. Beside those are ratatouille teaspoons, and micro-terrines of mushroom and dandelion root.
A new group of men enters the space, all of them wearing expensive three-piece suits. From a distance each one of their heads seems to Lena to sparkle in the light. As they approach Allensworth and his people, Lena realizes the new arrivals all have the slickest hair, the whitest teeth, and the shiniest skin she’s ever seen. They’re like Brooks Brothers mannequins made flesh. All of them seem to have permanent, brilliant smiles plastered on their faces.
Allensworth greets each one of them warmly, shaking hands with a mechanical detachment.
A few seconds later, one of the polished men breaks away from Allensworth’s glad-handing session. He crosses over to Lena’s station. She has to consciously remind herself to smile professionally and not stare at the freakishly manicured individual with bewilderment.
The man stares down at the doll-sized cuisine silently. Lena opens her mouth to inform him (cordially, of course) the dishes are that size because they’ve been prepared for gnomes. However, she never gets the words out because the man’s left cheek suddenly drops from his face.
There’s no blood or gore or shriek of pain. A portion of the man’s face simply falls away from the rest of him, leaving a dark, dry depression. He doesn’t react to the event at all, but Lena does, taking an involuntary step back, her eyes wide and filled with horror as she watches the man begin to literally fall apart. More pieces of his face and skull fall away, then his neck and shoulders, clothing included, all of it crumbling in symmetrical chunks.
Darren is suddenly there, hands on her biceps, stabilizing her as subtly as he can.
“Chill out,” he whispers. “They’re the gnomes.”
And so they are. Lena manages to shift her gaze from the man on the other side of the table who is now just a waist and a pair of legs to the table itself. Dozens of tiny, bearded, bipedal figures flit gracefully down onto the tabletop, each one wearing a patch of the man’s skin or clothing, or a fully functioning organ like an eye, as an oversized hat. Mechanical parts are affixed to their limbs, curved prongs and interlocking joints fashioned to connect with one another.
The gnomes stand on the table in front of Lena and Darren, chatting in voices too low for their words to register in human ears. They pick up the bento boxes and chopsticks and begin to snack as they converse among themselves.
“Boosha failed to mention this part,” Lena says tightly, as gently as possible shaking free of Darren’s hands.
He quickly steps away from her, arms going stiffly and self-consciously to his sides. “I think this is, like, a recent innovation.”
“Ritter told me about those gnomes his team ran into in Wales, but he didn’t say they could make goddamn human androids.”
Dorsky’s head suddenly appears between them as he leans in and whispers, “CEO gnomes.”
“Fucking hell,” she hisses at him, startled. “What?”
“They’re just like people,” he says. “Only smaller. Not all gnomes are created equal. Some forage in the dirt, some sell off endless streams of Silicon Valley start-ups. Whose vote d’ya think a dude running for Sceadu president would want to court?”
The gnomes savage half the contents of the buffet table in minutes. Lena bolts to the kitchen attached to the banquet space for reloads. She finds Bronko back there, leaning over a gas range where a towering pot of emulsified vegetables is steaming.
“Where’re we at?” he asks her, sounding wearied and tired.
“Guests are arriving. I need more mini-apps.”
Bronko silently waves an arm at a stainless-steel shelf where platters of the gnom
ish dishes are waiting for her.
“You okay, Chef?” Lena asks him.
“Haven’t been sleeping great,” is all he tells her.
When Lena returns with the platters, she finds everyone gathered around the moon pool. Its waters are currently bubbling furiously, as if a great submarine is preparing to emerge from the depths.
Instead, seven gray-green bodies break above the surface of the pool. Covered in gleaming scales and with hammer-shaped heads, they appear as large as full-grown human beings, and even have a vague human shape. Sets of six-inch gills pulsate on both sides of each thick neck, and the undines even have stubby, atrophied arms dangling from their chests.
Heavily modified Segway personal transporters are submerged at the foot of a concrete ramp leading out of the pool. Each one of the conveyances has a vertical, cylindrical tank bolted to where the rider is meant to stand. The undines swim up to the personal transporters and carefully wriggle the fishtail halves of their bodies into those customized tanks. Mechanical braces lock into place, holding them upright, and one by one they wheel up the ramp.
As they exit the pool, Mr. Mirabel, Sin du Jour’s elderly, air tank–encumbered busboy, offers each one a large plastic bib, or “fibs” as they’ve come to be known around the Sin du Jour kitchen (for “fish bibs,” although Jett reminded the staff the politically correct term is “pharynx receptacle”). They’re actually two plastic bags that fit over the undines’ gills, connected by a collar ring.
When the last of the undines has rolled away from the edge of the pool, the bay doors retract and the bow of a nondescript fishing boat is guided into its waters. Its hull is scrawled with Mandarin characters. On its deck, a large shipping container is wheeled toward the bow under the power of two figures completely obscured by the reflective fire proximity suits they wear. The attendants wedge the container as close to the tip of the bow as possible and pull the latches securing its front entry doors.
The doors fly open as two gargantuan, four-legged reptiles with flaming scales burst forth from within the shipping container. The curved claws of their front feet grasp the bow of the vessel like grappling hooks, pulling their bodies overboard and dropping into the moon pool like two Cadillac cars driven off a cliff.
The surface of the water sizzles, and steam rises in thick sheets from it. When the salamanders’ long snouts first break above the water, they’re black and extinguished, smoke still trailing from their scales. In the next instant, however, as the air hits them anew, those scales burst aflame, burning bright and hot and red.
The next thing Lena sees is Nikki, fearlessly wheeling a large stainless-steel cart burdened with her frozen treats toward the pool. When they see the food approaching, the salamanders paddle to the moon pool’s edge and hang their long snouts over it, waiting.
When Nikki has angled the cart close enough, the first salamander lifts its head, opens its maw, and a burning tongue whips out. The lash of flame encircles one of the frozen blocks of foie gras and reels it into the creature’s mouth. Steam immediately shoots from the elemental’s every orifice, and the fire blazing around its snout dims noticeably for several moments.
When it swallows, the steam jets die down and the flames rise high from its snout once more. The salamander rumbles in what Lena can only hope is satisfaction. It seems sated, however.
She spots Dorsky standing by the entrance to the kitchen, watching the scene with mild amusement. Lena briefly abandons her station and walks over to him. They haven’t traded a meaningful word since her return, and his indifference has rapidly gone from being a relief to annoying the absolute piss out of her.
“So, are dragons a real thing too?” she asks him.
He shrugs, not looking away from the feasting salamanders and Nikki. “Probably. I don’t know. We’ve never had to cook for them.”
“Look, when are we going to have the awkward conversation?” she asks suddenly.
“About what?”
There’s no sarcasm in his voice, and no hesitation.
Lena wants to kick him in his liver and feel the poisonous sack burst inside his body cavity.
“Fine,” she says. “Just be . . . you.”
Lena walks back to her buffet station, not quite boiling, but at least simmering.
The glass ceiling of the banquet hall is one large, open skylight. The night above is calm and cool for this time of year. The stars are unobscured, at least for the first part of the evening. As she stands at her station, muttering unkindly under her breath and staring up, Lena sees a distortion through the skylight. It’s almost like the jet engine of a plane blurring the background.
She feels the wind rise and then turn violent a few moments later. Great gusts suddenly billow down from the skylight, causing tablecloths to waft and even knocking over centerpieces and empty chairs. The wind pouring down through the skylight eventually takes on a faint color, almost like milky smoke. Lena begins to make out several distinct and separate patches of the misty stuff.
If they’re not the sylphs, the air elementals, then Lena is a line cook at TGI Friday’s.
It’s like watching ghosts in some old cartoon, wisps of shapeless, formless white swirling around in circles above all of their heads. Eventually they fall into formation, like birds, and streak across the room.
The sylphs enter the homeless delegation seated at their front table loaded down with Henley’s fast food. The wispy forms disappear through nostrils, ears, and mouths. Each weary body is thrown back against its chair, convulsing for several moments before snapping back into a perfect, calm stillness. A new awareness dawns on each smudged face.
The thing that shocks Lena the most is how quickly she’s able to realize, understand, process, and accept what’s happening. Her Sin du Jour training has far exceeded simple culinary craft. She expects Allensworth to walk over and gland-hand the sylphs, now firmly in control of their homeless hosts.
Instead the air elementals tear into the Henley’s fare like a pack of feral, starved dogs.
As she watches them wordlessly, ravenously, and without a single semblance of etiquette devouring the cheap fast food, Lena thinks back to something Chef Luck said to her. It was during her first day at the company. Chef compared the world they serviced as watching something foreign and exotic on National Geographic. That’s what this feels like to Lena. These are beings that obviously exist without form, without any notion of the physical, suddenly inhabiting physical bodies and experiencing their sensations and pleasures.
Lena imagines she would probably act the same way.
She just hopes they don’t all start fucking each other too.
It’s all she can do to ignore the nauseating sight of the possessed bodies gorging themselves with both hands. It’s hardly the evening’s most off-putting image, however. As she watches, the undines dip their heads into long, gilded troughs of emulsified frog meat or algae, as a vegetarian option (“We have to prep a vegan option for fish?” Dorsky had asked several times throughout the week).
The liquid fare is cycled through their gills and ejected into the plastic bags of their fibs. That part’s not so bad, but when Mo attempts to help one undine remove its nearly full fib bag and it rips open, marinating him in recycled fish food, Lena almost retches.
Pacific, on the other hand, bursts out laughing.
The elementals feast and commiserate for the next hour. They all seem to be able to communicate with one another, except for the sylphs, who everyone, elemental and human, seems to patently avoid.
Eventually, Allensworth mounts the stage and removes a microphone from its stand.
“If I could draw your attentions from all the lovely food and drink this evening, I’d just like to thank the esteemed representatives of our four elemental enclaves that made the arduous journey tonight. As you all know, the Sceadu is ready to sit a new four-year president. We’re gathered to hear from one of the front-runners this evening, the first independent candidate in the election’s history to win
the nomination from the Order of Shadows, not to mention the first human to ever seek the Sceadu presidency. It’s my duty to welcome him to the stage now . . . Enzo Consoné!”
Lena isn’t positive, but she thinks she detects hesitance in Allensworth’s usually smooth, unperturbed delivery. If she didn’t know better, and she realizes in that moment she doesn’t, Lena would almost think she detected a note of disdain, too.
When Enzo Consoné takes to the stage, Lena is surprised by how young he appears. She’d pictured a more venerated man, but Consoné looks to be barely out of his twenties, if that. He’s clean-shaven, aging his face down further, and his short black hair has been left unsullied by any product. He wears a dark suit with no tie, but doesn’t do that atrocious I-forgot-to-button-my-top-shirt-button thing Lena hates.
Another man, a full head taller and a great deal bulkier, takes up position in front of the stage, folding his hands in front of him and moving his eyes over the whole of the room. He’s obviously the candidate’s personal security. He looks like a hard individual to Lena, with his stony eyes, military-cropped hair, and old-school mustache. Oddly, his hips appear even broader than his shoulders.
No one except Lena seems to notice him.
Their eyes are all on Enzo Consoné.
Nikki presses a hand to her chest as if she’s pledging allegiance to a very sexy flag. “Every pair of panties I own is now ruined.”
“Me too,” Darren agrees.
Lena looks at both of them with open disdain.
Sure, she thinks, he’s kind of hot. But no more so than any actor wearing scrubs on a network TV show about doctors.
Consoné kneels then, like a supplicant, or an impassioned football coach about to give the big speech. He cups the microphone in his hand, holding it against his lips as his eyes slowly scan every person and creature in the vast space surrounding the stage.
“You . . . who once moved the Earth,” he breathes heavily and solemnly into the microphone. “I bow to you all.”
“I want to fuck his voice,” Nikki whispers.
