by Andy Marino
Ashamed of herself, Hannah shoved the thought aside.
“Let’s all remember not to look them in the eyes,” Belinda said.
They were past the mall now, into the final exhibit: some kind of futuristic hotel, a honeycomb of sleek, capsule-shaped pods. Ahead, just beyond the glass doors, Hannah glimpsed the concourse. Tourists slid smoothly along a moving walkway that swept them past a wall mural, a map of the castle.
A pair of Watchers hopped off the walkway and strolled toward the doors.
“Oh my,” Belinda said.
“We are so done,” Nancy said, averting her eyes. Hannah covered her face and peeked out from between her fingers. The Watchers took positions on the other side of the doors, content to wait for their prey. Their faces made streaks like northern lights on the glass. Hannah nearly broke down. All this running, and her mother was just as far — just as gone — as she’d ever been.
“Perhaps not,” Belinda said. Through her fingers, Hannah chanced a look. The concourse had erupted with roiling black smoke, blossoming along the floor. Tentacles of grime crawled up the mural and snaked toward the exhibition hall, enveloping the Watchers. Soot stained the glass.
“I know this trick,” Hannah said, taking Nancy and Belinda by their hands and wrenching them forward. She felt a fingertip brush the back of her head, could swear the furnace heat of a Watcher’s breath had come within inches of her ear. Behind her, cameras flashed, one after another. Not cameras, she thought. Eyes.
They stumbled through the door and into the choking aftermath of Stefan’s painted smoke bomb. The Watchers could be two steps away, and Hannah, Nancy, and Belinda would never know unless they bumped into them.
Nancy yelped.
“Hush!” Belinda scolded.
“Sorry, but I think somebody just touched my arm.”
“Hannah?” It was Stefan’s voice.
“We’re all here,” Hannah said.
“Where?”
“Here.”
Something moved nearby.
“There’s a blue light that marks the subway station,” Stefan said. “Take the stairs. I’ll meet you down there.”
Stairs, she thought. No problem. This was the dead city, where stairs were just stairs — it was glass eyes and faucets that caused her problems. A faint glow of Easter egg–blue appeared in the fog. It turned out to be a glass orb, perched on a lamppost: the entrance to the station. In a row, they descended stairs that felt awfully spongy, almost as if they were carpeted. A clatter sounded from the depths, followed by a subterranean breeze that chased the lingering smoke from the staircase.
Belinda recoiled in disgust. “How perfectly awful.”
“It’s better than a jail cell,” Hannah said, trying to sound brave. But as she pulled her hand away from the railing, she wasn’t so sure.
The staircase was covered in fungus.
* * *
Stefan was waiting for them in the station.
“It’s empty,” he said.
Unless you count fungus, Hannah thought. Then its population probably numbered in the billions. The mossy parasite didn’t just grow in the station; it was the station. The staircase had been impressively full of the stuff, but down here it had put down roots. Hannah felt like she was intruding upon a secret society. There was a faint buzzing in the air, as if the moldy sprouts were whispering.
There was nothing to indicate the station had ever been anything but a fungal cave. No ticket booth, no turnstile, and the platform that led to the tracks was just another soft bed of spores, with cauliflower-shaped growths popping up here and there like stunted trees.
Belinda closed her eyes and hummed softly to herself, a look of serene panic on her face. Nancy mashed the toe of her shoe into a sludgy growth.
Commotion from the concourse drifted down the stairs.
“They’re gonna find us any second,” Hannah said. Stefan was already moving across the platform, toward the tracks. A sound like the slurping kisses of an affectionate dog echoed out of the darkness.
“Train’s coming,” he said. “Help me get this out, quick!” He began tugging at one of the cauliflower growths, pulling it free except for a few stubborn roots. Without his jacket, Stefan’s chest had a caved-in look. His sweater was at least a size too small. Nancy and Hannah grabbed hold of the stalk, which felt just like a fresh vegetable but smelled like rotting garbage.
“Ugh, what is this thing?” Hannah asked, leaning back on her heels and pulling with all her strength. It popped free and she staggered back. Neighboring spores cried out in a piercing whine.
Stefan beckoned and she gladly handed it over. “Our ticket,” he said.
“Ha!” Nancy clapped with glee. “ ‘Rotten cauliflower’ means ‘subway ticket’!”
Stefan looked questioningly at Hannah, who shrugged. “Muffin Language.”
“Never, ever, ever trust a fungus,” Belinda said weakly. She was leaning over the edge of the platform, staring into the depths of the tunnel, hugging herself as if she were cold. The tunnel was vaguely tube-shaped all the way around, and the mold that lined it had been rubbed smooth and shiny.
Hannah rushed to pull the old woman back before she could tumble onto the tracks. “I refuse,” Belinda muttered. “I simply refuse.”
The slurping had gotten louder. It was accompanied by a second noise, the clacking of a machine in motion. Hannah wanted to think of it as the sound of a train, but it was so muffled and unsure of itself. Weren’t subway trains supposed to roar fiercely into stations? This was more like a shuffling. A gust of stale wind blew strands of hair from her ponytail.
“You wanna do the honors?” Stefan asked, handing the cauliflower back to Hannah.
She wrinkled her nose.
“If you’re gonna be on the run, you’ll have to get used to stuff like this,” he said. “Now hold it out over the tracks.”
Hannah took it gingerly by the stalk. There were footsteps behind them, coming down the stairs.
“Better hurry!” Stefan’s eyes shone with reckless abandon as he urged her on, almost as if this were a dare.
“No,” Belinda said. “No, no, no. There is simply no way I’m boarding this thing.”
The platform began to tremble. The bed of fungus that coated the station became an echo chamber for the slurping of the train. Every spore and patch of mold seemed to be amplifying the sound and sending it straight into Hannah’s ears.
She faltered.
“Steady as she goes,” Stefan said. The train was a vaguely snub-nosed blur, like one of those high-speed monorails she’d seen online. It passed so close that it scraped the edge of the cauliflower, sending tiny pods scattering like dandelion seeds. Belinda took Nancy into her arms, and they huddled together as it screeched to a heaving, desperate halt.
Flakes of rust settled about the platform like snow.
The train was armored with a patchwork of rusted panels welded together and fastened with blackened nails. Here and there, leather straps crisscrossed at tarnished buckles, holding together a rickety system of pipes. Torn and shredded bits of fabric were stuck to the sides. There were no windows.
Beneath the armor, pinkish flesh squelched. A lump of jellylike skin slithered out from beneath a lopsided panel and surrounded the cauliflower, drawing it in with a frantic gibbering. Hannah let go and the train ate the ticket in a flurry of ecstatic slurps.
In front of them, a curtain of dangling beads parted to reveal a white-washed door, stuck to the train at an odd angle. The door swung open and Hannah jumped aboard, followed by Stefan and Nancy.
“I’m sorry,” Belinda said from the platform. “I can’t.”
Behind the old woman, a Watcher’s face swarmed with fungal patterns as she crossed the platform. Hannah caught a glimpse of a sequined gown. Then the doorway beads came together around her arm, blocking her view.
“I can’t do this without you,” Hannah said.
She felt the papery skin of Belinda’s hand and pulled the old w
oman in, just ahead of the closing door.
* * *
The train car was empty. The walls were lined with travel posters and advertisements that overlapped to keep excess flesh from burbling into the interior. Copper poles and triangular handholds descended from the ceiling. Pages of an abandoned newspaper, the Dead City Herald, were scattered along the floor.
The train picked up speed, clattering and slurping its way out of the station. Hannah and Stefan collapsed onto a stainless steel bench. Across the aisle, Belinda and Nancy parked themselves on a wooden seat with wrought-iron legs. Hannah’s breath came in ragged gulps. It was some time before she was able to speak.
“I thought my head was about to explode back there,” she said to Nancy. “Why couldn’t you just sit still?”
“It’s not like it used to be,” Nancy said. “We don’t exactly fit anymore.” She shuddered. “It’s a nightmare, actually.”
Above Nancy’s head, a poster implored passengers to VISIT SU-ANKYO — DISCOVER EXCLUSIVE DARKDAY SPECIALS. The words floated atop a glittering skyline of steel and glass towers. Hannah wondered how many different neighborhoods the train was hurtling beneath, how many billions of souls. She looked away from the advertisement. Wherever her mother was, she was just another face in a window, another pair of legs crossing a street.
“We did the best we could, Hannah,” Belinda said. “But we couldn’t stay hidden a second longer or we’d be … how can I explain this to you? Strained.”
“Yeah, strained,” Nancy said. “You should say you’re sorry for almost straining us to death.”
“I’m not sorry — it was the only way we could escape.”
“Then you know what? From now on, Hannah is Muffin for —”
“Girls, honestly,” Belinda said wearily. She seemed to have recovered from her near collapse on the platform. Except for her lips, Hannah noticed, which were drawn and bloodless.
“I want to tell you a story,” Belinda said. “Listen closely. Once upon a time there were two sisters. One good and one wicked.” She thought for a moment. “They were stepsisters, I believe. There was also a prince, and a faraway land, and some … adventures. And at the end, a lesson. The wicked sister learns to be less wicked and more like the good sister, or perhaps the good sister wasn’t so good after all. Either way, the moral is universal, even though it’s meant for one of the sisters in the story. It doesn’t matter which one. The point is, you shouldn’t be arguing, because I can’t hear myself think. Okay.” She slapped her palms against her thighs. “Storytime’s over.” She turned to Stefan. “When is the next stop, dear?”
He sighed. “Does it even matter?” His body seemed to crumple into itself. When he spoke, his eyes focused on something far away. “I really thought that was it. I thought the Guild had done it.” He laughed bitterly and twirled a finger in the air. “Ascension, here we come. Instead, I went backward.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said quietly. “And thank you. For doing what you did. You don’t have to come with us if you don’t want to.”
He turned to look at Hannah with cold eyes. “But I can’t go home, can I? You were right — that wasn’t our ticket to Ascension back there. They really were coming for you. And eventually the Guild will figure out that I’m the one who took you into the castle. I brought the Watchers down on us in a bad way and wrecked it for everybody.”
Hannah didn’t know what to say.
He continued, “I admit I spent most of my time hunting failure moths and keeping the upper class dorms clean and saying ‘yes, sir; no, sir’ to a meathead who likes to dress in a gorilla suit. But I’m a good painter — I know I am. It was only a matter of time before some professor or dean or art critic noticed. And the Guild was getting close, everybody said so. Glass and sculpture had nothing on us. We were gonna be first out of Nusle Kruselskaya and into Ascension. Now I’ll have to start over someplace else.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head back against the wall. “Maybe art’s not the way. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said again. She tried to imagine what it must feel like to have your personal goal dangled in front of your face and then snatched away. Stefan seemed more delicate and birdlike than ever, as if the slightest touch would shatter him. She let him be and turned her attention to the newspaper on the floor. The page beneath her feet said LORMAYR WOMAN ATTEMPTS KRESH RIVER SOLO SWIM.
Underneath the headline was a black-and-white picture of a woman in a swimsuit and goggles, snorkel clasped between her teeth. A harpoon gun was slung across her back, a fearsome knife strapped to her thigh. She held a pistol in her hand. Hannah wondered what sorts of things swam beneath the surface of the Kresh River. She reached down for a closer look, began gathering up some of the stray sections — and froze.
Kyle was staring up at her from the front page.
The next thing Hannah knew, Stefan was gripping one of her arms and Nancy was holding the other. A pile of torn newsprint decorated her lap, and she was holding crumpled bits of Kyle’s photograph in her clenched fists.
“I’m okay,” she said, wriggling forcefully to free her hands.
“Take it easy,” Stefan said, letting her go. Nancy did the same, and Hannah brushed the shredded bits onto the floor. Nancy removed the halves of the photo from her hands. Across the aisle, Belinda had salvaged a few whole pieces of the newspaper.
“It’s him,” Hannah said to Stefan.
He beckoned for Belinda’s section of the paper. She handed it over. It was a full two-page spread beneath the screaming headline TERROR ALERT: FUGITIVE ON THE LOOSE. Blocks of text were broken up by a half-dozen pictures of Kyle. Even the grainy images couldn’t hide his TV-star looks.
“I hate him already,” Stefan said.
It was as if someone had created a little story out of photographs: Kyle’s Trip to the Big City. There he was, crouched in the doorway of a villa, peering out of a window in a high-rise office, getting into a three-wheeled car. In all the photographs, the surroundings were a blur of movement and hustle and bustle. They were action shots, she realized — video stills from different neighborhoods.
The beginnings of a plan nibbled at her brain.
“Stefan,” she said, “these are security camera pictures, right?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean if the Watchers are trying to keep track of somebody’s movements, they check in with their glass eyes around the city. Like security cameras at a store.”
He studied the photographs, then turned to Hannah. “Sure, I guess that’s what they’ve been doing to stay on your trail.”
Hannah pictured the Watchers kicking back in front of a giant bank of TV screens, feet up on their desks, shoving popcorn into their scrambled faces. That was the side to be on when you were looking for someone.
“We need to see what they see. We could let the Watchers chase us around the city for a million noondays and never get any closer to finding my mother. But if we could figure out a way to hack into their system, then I bet we could narrow down the places she could be.”
“Hack into their system?” Nancy laughed. “We don’t know how to do stuff like that. It’s probably a little bit harder than using the Internet at the library.”
Hannah turned to Stefan, who shook his head.
“The Painters Guild is pretty traditional. We don’t use computers. I’m not your guy for this kind of thing. Listen, Hannah, don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s a crazy idea.”
“Crazy ideas are supposed to be my specialty,” Nancy said.
Hannah scanned the travel posters above Belinda’s head. Lormayr seemed like a nice place, full of limestone haciendas nestled among cypress groves. But she wasn’t looking for tranquility. “There must be people in the city who know how to do it.”
“Well, maybe,” Stefan said. “But how are you going to find them? And even if you do, what are you going to say? ‘Hello, we’d like you to hack us into the Watcher network’?”
“Being straightforward is often best,” Belinda said.
Hannah pointed to the VISIT SU-ANKYO advertisement. “What about there?”
In the picture, monorails sped between glittering towers. The framework of the neighborhood was all right angles and beveled mirrors, adorned with bulbous pods, graceful curves, honeycombs of layered apartments. Hannah thought of New York, Tokyo, Shanghai — cities she’d only ever seen in pictures. Places of luxury, progress, technology.
“Su-Ankyo?” Stefan consulted a map of the subway line that ran all the way across the ceiling of the train car. Hannah watched his eyes travel the length of the map. “Better make yourselves comfortable.”
“It does seem quite far,” Belinda said. “Is anyone else craving a cup of decaf tea? Or coffee, if you prefer. I don’t, personally, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“You’re babbling again,” Nancy said. Hannah gave her twin a significant look. Earlier, Belinda’s attempt at a fairy tale had been an odd failure, and now she wanted a drink Hannah was sure she’d never tried in the first place. It was like she was doing an imitation of a grandmotherly old woman — as if that’s how Belinda thought she should behave, without quite knowing how.
Stefan stretched, cracked his knuckles, and itched his belly. Hannah saw the bony outline of his ribs when he lifted his sweater.
“Are you coming with me?” Hannah asked.
“Nothing else to do,” Stefan said. He closed his eyes and settled in. “Nice jacket, by the way.”
“You can have it back if you want.”
He opened one eye. “It looks better on you.”
Huddled in the folds of the paint-spattered coat, Hannah let her gaze rest on a poster of a woman strolling hand in hand with a little girl down an avenue lined with chic storefronts and shop windows. Quickly, Hannah shut her eyes, trying to banish thoughts of mothers and daughters. But memories could be willful, disobedient things.
* * *
Weaving Season was Leanna Silver’s name for early autumn, when the kids of Carbine Pass went shopping for notebooks and pens and new clothes. For Hannah and her mother, there was a trip of a different sort: a visit to Five Rivers Farm on the northern outskirts of town, where they would stock up on braided cornhusks, dried maize with pebble-hard kernels, and spools of surprisingly tough straw.
