Dust City

by Robert Paul Weston

  Fiona and I are spit into a hall and onto another conveyor belt. It pulls us sideways along with the containers, all of which trundle in single file, geometrically perfect. We travel down a barely lit shaft toward a rectangle of light. As we get closer I see the claws of another crane reach for a container and pluck it off the end, swinging it into space. There’s a hydraulic hiss and a loud click, and the bottom of the container pops open, spilling its cargo in a smoky blur. It looks like—like what? Giant skeletal hands?

  Fiona grabs me. “What was that stuff?”

  Before I can offer an answer (which I don’t have) I realize we’ve got a much more pressing problem. When the conveyor ends, it’s a dead drop-off. That crane is the only thing that stops the containers from smashing on the floor—which is exactly what we’re going to do in about ten seconds.

  “Quick,” I tell Fiona. “Grab on!”

  We latch onto the container beside us, dangling off the side, just as the crane lifts it from the conveyor. There’s the hiss and the buzz and then the bottom of the container opens up, releasing its cargo. Up close, I see it’s not a pile of giant bones. It’s something else.

  Deadwood trees.

  Whole trees plummet from the container and land on top of an enormous heap. It’s piled so high, the branches are grazing the soles of our feet as they hang down.

  “Jump!” I say, and I let go, reaching for a thick bough. I catch it, but of course the tree isn’t rooted to anything, so it lurches under my weight and I nearly lose my grip. Which is fine until Fiona leaps off herself and goes for the very same branch. With both of us hanging on, the tree tips to the side, suspending us over a drop that must be sixty feet to the floor.

  “Hang on!” I shout.

  “What do you think I’m doing?!”

  At the last moment before I think the whole tree’s going to lose its grip and come tumbling down on top of us, the roots find purchase, hooking into the pile, holding us steady.

  As gingerly as we can, we scale down the trunk and continue climbing, down the expanding pile, careful to avoid the rain of more trees from the containers. Finally, we reach the floor of this cavernous place, a warehouse bigger than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s a vast, windowless corridor, as tall and broad as an airplane hangar. The remains of uprooted trees are everywhere, all of them deadwoods. The concrete floor rises and falls with dunes of bone-pale branches and roots and—

  Roots.

  I see something I’ve never noticed before.

  “Oh, God. Look at that.”

  “What is it?” asks Fiona.

  “I think we found them.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the roots.”

  Seeing them here, far removed from the desert, laid bare under bright artificial light, it’s clear what the roots are really made of. Bodies. Bones. Thousands upon thousands of delicate frames, each one blessed with the arcs of mothlike wings. It’s the army of ghosts I saw at the bottom of the Capra well. Only that wasn’t a hallucination. Those weren’t spirits I saw. They were skeletons.

  Fiona grips my arm. “But how?”

  “This must be what happens to them. After they die. Look at the branches—they’re made of hands. Every one of them rising up, grasping for the sky.” I look at her. “It’s because they want to go home.”

  “Why bring them here?”

  “Leftover miracles,” I say.

  “What?”

  “This must be how they make it,” I say. “It’s why Nimbusbrand dust is more popular than the rest, and why nixiedust is so potent. They aren’t using the fairies for labor. They’re using them as . . . raw material. It’s processed from the bodies of their dead.”

  “But if they vanished all at once, it would mean . . .”

  I nod. “They killed them.”

  Suddenly, Fiona swings into action, bringing up her camera. “Pictures,” she says. “We need pictures of this.” She starts snapping away, close-ups to show the vertebrae, the wing structures, the delicate skulls. Other shots reveal the scope of the place, the horrendous volume of bodies. When the clicking stops, she flips open the camera.

  “Here,” she says, handing me the film. “Hold this for me. I need to reload.” She hurries in a new roll of film and keeps going. “How could they do this?” she asks me, over and over. “How could they do this?”

  “I think we could answer that question.” Fiona and I spin around. Fiona’s heart is pumping so fiercely I can hear it. She can probably hear mine, too. Standing side by side a ways down the storehouse, dwarfed at the bottom of a mountain of bones that reaches the distant ceiling, are Karl and Ludwig Nimbus.

  “But before we do,” says Karl.

  “We’re going to have to shoot you,” finishes Ludwig. He raises his arm until he’s pointing some sort of antique pistol at us.

  He pulls the trigger and a dust dart whips into Fiona’s ribs. She yelps and spins, trying to pluck it out, but before she can, it releases a cloud of fairydust that sparkles like the sun. It’s stronger than anything I’ve seen, pluming around her in a silver sphere, and then compressing all over her body. There’s a sizzling sound. This dust doesn’t bother with your mouth, your nose, your lungs. This strain is ground so fine it seeps in through your pores.

  “Fiona!”

  She howls and falls to her knees, raking her claws over her hide, trying to get it off. “It burns!” she screams.

  I kneel and hold her, but it’s too late. Her eyes roll back and her tongue flops horrifically from her mouth. She slumps into me, lost in a bitter sleep.

  “Better living through enchantment,” Karl chuckles.

  “Now it’s your turn,” says Ludwig.

  Each brother raises a pistol at me and fires.

  39

  TOOTH AND CLAW

  THE TREES FORM A CANOPY OF DARKNESS ABOVE. THROUGH THE BRANCHES I see flashes of clouds and a ghostly moon. I drop to all fours, padding into the forest. Every tree I pass comes alive, electrified with wind. All I can hear is the endless swish of leaves . . .

  I emerge from my nightmare in a room all too similar to one of the cells in lockup. It’s got padded walls, a bare floor, a domed lamp hanging from the ceiling, too high to reach. There’s the distinctive lack of windows and the single door—heavy, thick, and presumably bolted from the outside.

  Briefly, I wonder if this whole thing is a bad dream, my worst (and certainly longest) nightmare of all. Maybe I dreamed up everything while I was conked out in a cell back at St. Remus. But that can’t be the case. There isn’t any furniture in lockup—and I’m very clearly sitting in a chair.

  It’s something you’d expect to find at the dentist. But my teeth are fine, so I try to get up. Only I can’t. I’m strapped in. Silver clamps pin down my wrists, arms, and legs. There’s another clamp around my throat and one around my forehead. From the neck up, I’m completely immobile. I’ve also been fitted with a muzzle.

  If I strain my eyes downward, I can make out a low table beside my chair. It looks like the place where a dental hygienist stacks those little paper cups you spit into. Only there aren’t any paper cups. The only thing on the table is a large pair of pliers.

  The door opens. It’s Karl Nimbus. He comes in carrying a stool and sets it beside the table. But he doesn’t sit down. Instead, he stands close to my face and puts his thumb against my eyebrow, pushing upward for a closer look.

  “Good,” he says. “I’ll get my brother.”

  He leaves again, locking the door after him. I make an attempt to get to my feet, but it’s useless. I prick up my ears, but I can’t hear anything. The padded walls sap away all the sound. It’s as if they’ve muzzled my hearing, too.

  The door opens again. This time it’s both of them, Karl and Ludwig.

  “Welcome back,” says the elder brother. “It’s Henry, isn’t it?”

  As if I can answer him.

  “Yes, sorry about the muzzle, but you know how it is with you animals.” He wags a finger in my face.
“Prone to biting.”

  Karl takes a seat on the stool he brought in earlier. He lays one hand over the pliers, but he doesn’t pick them up.

  “Did you really believe you could come here, to our little paradise in the sky, to the very headquarters of our corporation, and simply waltz in and out?”

  I glare at him between the straps of the muzzle.

  He shakes his head, apparently mystified. “Since you’re here, I can only assume that yes, that is precisely what you thought. Only a beast like you would be so foolish. I’ll take it as clear proof of your inferiority as a rational species.”

  I try to let out a growl, but the muzzle strangles it in my throat.

  Ludwig steps behind me. “Now, I’m going to ask you a question. It’s a simple one, and I want you to speak nothing save for the pertinent answer. Do you understand?” He unbuckles the muzzle from the back of my neck, and gently, he frees my jaws.

  “Where’s Fiona?! What have you—”

  Ludwig clamps the muzzle back over my face.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “Torture is so inhumane. How can two esteemed men of science such as Karl and Ludwig Nimbus resort to such grisly techniques of interrogation?” He pauses. “The answer is simple. It is our belief that it is impossible to be inhumane to a creature that is, by its very nature, inhuman.” He lightly pats my shoulder. “Karl?”

  Ludwig’s brother picks up the pliers. They’re huge and heavy. They gleam as fiercely as the pipes and chutes we navigated through on the way in. Karl holds them out in front of his face, opening the jaws and then snapping them shut. “What’s that expression?” He’s addressing the tool in his hands. “Tooth and claw.” He looks at me. “You must have fought ‘tooth and claw’ to get here, Henry. It’s an interesting expression, is it not? It refers loosely to the modus operandi of all animalia, of beasts such as yourself. It’s the way you prefer to do things. By tooth and by claw.” He lowers the pliers until they hover above my fingers. “Some might say that’s who you are, nothing more than an overgrown set of teeth and claws.”

  I squirm as best as I can against the restraints, but it’s useless. Karl clamps the pliers onto the claw of my baby finger. “I’m going to remove your fingernail now. There’s a good chance I may break one or two of your knuckles in the process. This is merely meant to impress upon you the seriousness of this interrogation.”

  He begins to pull. At first, there’s only a dull pain at the tip of my finger. Karl’s clearly the younger and fitter of the two, but he’s still more or less an old man. Maybe he’s incapable, I think. I hope.

  Then he starts twisting. The size and weight of the pliers give him ferocious leverage. Bullets of agony shoot through my finger, up the tendons on the back of my paw, and the pain swells all the way up to my shoulder. The center joint in my finger grinds and pops and finally bursts. It snaps just as Karl predicted. He’s broken my finger. The pain is more than I could have imagined. I feel faint, like my whole body’s floating away.

  Karl rises off the stool, spreads his legs, and then he really starts pulling. Every time he yanks, the whole chair judders on its bolts. The pain is hot and terrifying, but it’s mostly in the joints of my paw and in my wrist. But then, when the roots of my claw finally begin to tear, the misery concentrates in the very tip.

  Karl wrenches one last time and the claw comes free. I’ve lost it—along with a chunk of hair and flesh.

  Ludwig puts his hands on the sides of my shoulders. “I hope you understand how serious we are. This will end as soon as you answer our questions.”

  Karl drops my claw on the little side table.

  Again, Ludwig unbuckles the muzzle. “Now, I want you to tell us everything you know about our operation in Dockside.”

  I grit my teeth, grinding them together as I speak. “If you hurt Fiona, I’ll ki—”

  On goes the muzzle.

  “Henry, Henry, Henry,” says Ludwig, shaking his head. “How stubborn you are. Do you really wish this to continue?” He sighs. “Alas, I can only imagine you do.”

  Next, Karl goes to work on the middle digit of the same hand. It’s a much larger claw and he has to use all his strength to tear it free. I shut my eyes tight and gnash my teeth inside the muzzle. It feels like he’s taken off my whole finger, but when I open my eyes, I see that it’s still there, although the end looks like it just came out of a blender.

  Karl looks exhausted. His forehead glistens. My claws have printed a little map on the surface of the side table: a pair of black, volcanic islands in a lake of blood.

  “Perhaps we’re not taking the most productive approach with you,” says Ludwig. “We could certainly continue, wearying as it is, to remove your claws, then your teeth, and finally strips of flesh.”

  My head spins.

  “Or—since you clearly possess little in the way of self-interest and appear to harbor nothing but great sympathy for your companion—it might be more fruitful to threaten these same procedures against her, instead.”

  Despite the pain throbbing up and down my right arm, I rage against the metal bands locking me to the chair. The frame rattles and creaks, and for an instant, Karl looks concerned that I might actually bust loose. But it’s all for nothing.

  “Ah,” says Ludwig, enjoying my display of strength. “I think we may have discovered a chink in your armor.” He steps around to face me. “Can I assume you’re ready to tell us what you know?”

  If I could speak, I would say, “Yes, I’m ready. I’ve got nothing to lose, nothing except Fiona.”

  Ludwig moves behind me again and unfastens the buckles.

  “Okay.” My voice sounds as shredded as my fingertips. “I’ll tell you.” And I do. I explain how I found my way behind closed doors at the nixie refinery; I tell them about my father’s theories; I tell them about my vain search for the fairies and how Fiona and I uncovered the truth.

  “You killed them.”

  Karl chuckles. “Not Ludwig and I personally, no. The nixies did it. There was no road to Eden back then. The nixies used to be the only ones who could get up here. That’s why we seduced them out of the sea and put them under our employ.”

  “That makes you responsible for the deaths of—”

  Ludwig claps his hands. “Enough of this! We’re not finished. There’s something else we need to know.” He lays the muzzle in my lap and looks me in the eye. “Who have you told about this?”

  “No one.”

  Ludwig gives his brother a stern look. In response, Karl picks up the pliers and pulls his stool over to my opposite arm.

  “Wait, I’m telling the truth. I haven’t told anyone.”

  “We find that hard to believe,” says Ludwig.

  “It’s true.” Except that it isn’t. I told Mrs. L and Detective White. Of course they didn’t believe me, but that’s beside the point. No matter what these guys do to me, I’m not going to mention either one of them. Who knows what they’d do if I did.

  “You told no one else?”

  “That’s right. No one.” It’s a fight to keep my voice from cracking. “I’m telling the truth. Just don’t hurt Fiona.”

  Ludwig picks up the muzzle and returns to his place at my back. “Very well,” he says, an odd kindness in his words. “We won’t hurt her.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But we have to be certain.” He foists the muzzle over my face.

  Karl grips the claw of my left thumb with the mouth of the pliers. I mewl through the muzzle, but he doesn’t let up. He starts pulling and as my joints begin to buckle, as the flesh begins to tear, everything goes fuzzy. My vision reels and the room shrinks into a pinprick of darkness.

  Thankfully, I’ve fainted.

  40

  PAPERWEIGHT

  CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNS IN A DRIBBLE. ONE DROP ADDS TO ANOTHER UNTIL I’m trembling in a humid puddle of candlelight.

  “Henry?”

  Fiona’s face hovers off to my side. It looks strange, not like her re
al face but an image on a mosaic wall, faintly interrupted by a million cracks. But it’s not the factures between broken tiles. It’s wire. There’s some sort of metal mesh between us. I lift my head and the light caroms wildly, everywhere at once.

  “Careful,” she says. “It’s wobbly up here.”

  I roll onto my side and vomit. The meager contents of my stomach sieve through the cage, dripping onto a plush carpet.

  “Nice one,” says a voice from the opposite side. “Good distance.” I turn and see Richard, the man-slash-frog whose keys I stole. He’s locked in a third cage, and his face is worse than before, the jade-green skin spreading down his cheek, his hair balding on that same side and his once-hominid ear retreating into his skull. “Hey,” he says quietly. “We meet again.”

  “Henry,” Fiona asks, redirecting my attention, “are you all right? Your fingers . . .”

  My pulse drubs slowly in my paws. They hurt so much I can barely move them. I have them curled like crab claws, cradled in my lap. “I’m okay,” I tell her, but I can see she doesn’t believe me.

  These cages are nothing like the rusty kennels Skinner keeps in his refinery. These are gilded beauties, works of art. We’re in somebody’s study, one that reminds me of Doc Grey’s roost in the old rectory building. But where Doc’s office was cramped and cluttered, this one is expansive. Every inch is done up in plush red, sparkling gold, and deep, studious brown.

  “Where are we?”

  “This is where they live,” says Fiona.

  Richard nods. “Helluva lot nicer than my wife’s place, I’ll tell you that much. She ended up with the palace, you see.” As he speaks, I notice his lips have grown thinner and his mouth wider. The corners are drawn back nearly to his jawbones. He sighs to himself. “Who knows? She might be proud to see me here, rubbing shoulders with the likes of these guys.”