Meanwhile, Abby pours water into her glass from a plastic jug, humming tunelessly, the polka-dotted dog hood tossed back to show her flaxen hair. She tilts the cup so her new pet can lap up his fill, and for a second her benevolent, nurturing expression becomes saintly, an old painting extolling some minor virtue: Young Lady with a Lab Rat. Trank’s never cared much for the fine arts.
“Get that vermin off the table,” he tells her.
She frowns. “He’s my friend.”
“It’s my table.”
“This isn’t your table,” snaps Ripple. “It’s the Fire Museum’s, and the Fire Museum belongs to everyone. That’s in the fucking brochure. So leave her alone.”
“Didn’t think you cared much for the rodent yourself.” If Ripple were a conscripted man, Trank would make him run upside-down in magnet boots on the treadwheel for the tone infraction. But things being as they are, Trank keeps it neutral. “If there’s something you’d like to raise with me, Duncan, I’m glad to hear it.”
“OK, sure. You lied.” Ripple is dressed in red long johns and his hair is still wet; he’s literally crossing his arms over his chest like a spoiled child. He couldn’t look less threatening. Yet there’s something unyielding in his eyes that Trank hasn’t seen there before. A challenge. “My parents are dead.”
“Dead?” asks Abby. The rat scurries up her arm, onto her shoulder. “How?”
“I don’t know. The house burned down, so…arson? Dragons? Or maybe they were murdered first. I guess it doesn’t matter, since cock pocket here didn’t even bother to tell me.”
“I’m sorry, Duncan.” Trank always knew he’d find out eventually, but this isn’t how he wanted it to go. “I thought you had potential—a calling. I didn’t want you to walk away from that before you’d begun.”
It’s almost true. The day they fought the library fire, when Trank radioed the MPD, he considered telling Ripple what he’d really learned, then and there, offering the orphaned boy a home and a vocation. But an estate like the Ripples’ would require much of the young man, even with the mansion in ruins. It would have been a career, not just an inheritance, and when would fate deliver Trank another telegenic deputy? Besides, there was something special about Ripple: his enthusiasm, his simplicity. Something Trank recognized, that he knew he could mold to his purpose. “I believed it would do you good, to find your own way in the world.”
“What? No. You didn’t help me find my way. It was your way. You were trying to use me. Like you thought I was stupid.”
Trank’s not going to argue with any of that. Still, it isn’t the whole story. “I did use you. I used you to save lives. I used you to save property. I should have told you the whole truth up front, I’ll admit it. But you can’t let grief blind you to all that we’ve accomplished.”
“I’m done being a fireman, OK? I was only doing it to impress my dad.”
“I had a father once too,” Trank says. Roy Trank was a Whamball tackle with zillions in endorsement deals, who died taking a thunker to the chest. Trank was just six. Ten years later, when the dragons first came, he was ready. All his life since, he’s run straight into danger without dodging, just like his old man. “If there’s one thing I understand, it’s becoming a hero to please a parent who will never know.”
“Then don’t you get that it’s pointless?”
The boy is hurting, but Trank doesn’t care much for the question.
“We’re on a mission,” he says, as gently as he’s able. “Is that pointless?”
But Ripple doesn’t come around the way Trank expects.
“You’re on a mission,” says Ripple. “You want to control the dragons the same way you want to control me. You don’t care about saving anything. All you care about is being in charge.”
Trank stiffens. “I’m a leader, Duncan. I lead. And you’ve got an opportunity to be part of my team. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll step in line.”
Ripple stares at his pizza. He thinks for a long time—longer than Trank’s ever seen him—longer than Trank would have thought possible. When he looks up his jaw is set, defiant. “You know that command console you talked to me about? Well, good luck finding it first. May the best man win.”
Trank knew the boy would challenge him someday, but he never expected this caliber of insolence. What kind of an orphan would push away a father figure? The kind who believes he’s heir to the throne. Trank should have known that Late Capitalism’s Royalty would have its own plan for succession.
“So you want all the power for yourself?” Trank asks. “You really want that responsibility?”
“No way, Hamburger Head. But that doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No. Because I’m not like you. I’m not going to use the command console for myself. I’m going to be a hero for real. I’m going to use it to slay the dragons.”
Trank’s lost so many boys over the years, it’s hard to keep track. Toward the end of his service as fire chief, conscriptees would splash themselves with gasoline in protest and run into the fires, and Trank would have to send in more boys, boys to chase the boys who, if they lived at all, would be skinned alive and subject to a court-martial. It hurt and pained and shocked him every time. After the mutiny, Trank finally thought he was past all caring. But now, Ripple’s words have a strange effect on him. It’s as if Ripple has peeled back his rubber face skin, and slowly, deliberately turned every one of his screws.
“You can’t slay the dragons,” Abby murmurs, hushed and fearful. “They won’t let you.”
“Watch me, wench.” Ripple stands up. “Come on. We’re leaving.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Trank asks Ripple.
“Anywhere we want. The city is mine.”
“Not this city.” The MPD hasn’t given Trank much besides a badge, a walkie-talkie, and some nonlethal weapons. But they get the job done. Trank pulls out a TaseMePro™ and levels it at the boy.
Ripple snorts. “Uh, I am not afraid of an electric razor.”
Before Trank can depress the Stun button, Abby flies across the table to shield Ripple from the blast. A blue-white beam crackles through the air, into her lithe blond form. She flops to the floor, every muscle twitching and spasming. Her hair statics out—she glows visibly for a second—her eyes dance under their lids, bewitched by rapid nightmares. Then all at once she relaxes into a poisoned princess’s swoon. Her rat leaps down from the table to the floor and beelines for a hole in the wall’s baseboard. Some friend.
Ripple sinks to his knees beside her. “What the snuff did you do? Put that thing down!”
“Not every man can be god of his own history.” Paxton Trank has never had a son, and he never will. But he believes that he will be remembered. One way or the other. The taser’s recharge diode lights up, ready to aim and fire. “I give the orders around here.”
* * *
The first time Humphrey showed Ripple the Dignity Kit was way back before Ripple started flunking everything, when it still seemed like he’d turn into a grown-up son who could be trusted with secrets.
“Your mother and I will only use it if we’re ruined,” Humphrey told him, taking the black box out of the safe, unlocking it. “Then you’ll inherit whatever’s left.”
The blue pills in their tiny vial. The golf pencils. They scared Ripple in a way the CGI beheadings and explosions on his XL projection screen never did. Who knew death came in travel size? Little Dunk: “But I don’t want whatever’s left. I want you and Mom.”
“Sorry, son. We’ll be dead.”
“Then I’ll take poison too.”
“There won’t be any for you.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’ll have taken it all.”
* * *
When Ripple comes to, he’s flat on his back, staring up into the sky. The city is so dark these days. Even a year ago, before the mutinies, he never would have been able to see this many stars. He doesn’t recognize any con
stellations, although he probably should. Back in underschool, he had to take Astrology for Scientists instead of Cosmonautics because, as usual, he bombed the placement test, which meant, unbelievably, that he missed out on a class trip in a special ion-propelled HowTram up above the atmosphere, where smarter students floated around laughing like maniacs and Kelvin kissed the YA impersonator Cheryl for the first time and some prodigy underclassman barfed gravy in arcs and spheres. Ripple only watched the episode later, after it was all over, when it was already old news. Just like his burnt-up house.
And his parents. His mom’s disconcertingly lithe stripper body, with the elective cesarean scar (“Your father wanted to keep me tight,” she informed him during her explanation of where babies come from), her waist-length platinum-blond hair and six-inch heels; his dad, with his velour sweatsuits and bad toupee, his ear whiskers, rosacea, and annoyed expressions—Ripple can see them both so clearly, like they’re projected on the night sky above him, their bodies mapped out in points of light.
“I’m sorry,” he says out loud. “I’m sorry I fucking suck.”
He wants to believe that they’re up there, star-parents living out eternity in a cloud city like something from a HowFly commercial, but they’re not. They’re dead. Whatever they thought of him, they’re not thinking anymore. There’s no one left to tell Ripple what to do. There’s no one left to care.
Did Swanny feel this way too, when she saw the torchies shoot her mom?
As hours pass, the sky lightens and Ripple orients to his surroundings. He’s locked in a wire cage on a roof—he’s betting the Fire Museum’s. The cage is big enough to lie down, but barely tall enough to stand up. No biggie: Ripple isn’t exactly springing to his feet anyway. He has an electricity hangover that he hopes isn’t brain damage, though it’s hard to tell. He does feel even dumber than usual. Dumber and more doomed. A dragon (the green one, his old buddy) passes directly overhead, at seven thousand feet but still too close for comfort. Walking the streets is bad enough, but at least there’s always the possibility of cover within easy ducking distance. Being here is like the park, but worse. Because this is where they strike. Depending on how long he’s out here, it’s only a matter of time till he gets fricasseed.
This must be what it was like back when the whole world was nature and men were only prey. No wonder his caveman great-granddads stayed the fuck in their caves.
Ripple doesn’t know where Abby is, and he’s not counting on her to come find him with a pair of wire cutters. When Trank finally appears at the roof hatch sometime midmorning, Ripple doesn’t know if he should panic or feel relieved that at least something’s finally happening. Trank’s wearing bunker gear—slicker, boots, turnout pants—but the Tarnhelm is flipped back, and his expression is totally blank, as if that rubber skin was just peeled off the conveyor belt at the assembly line, freshly manufactured and never before used.
Great. That’s not creepy at all.
“Listen, I am legitimately sorry about earlier. I shouldn’t have gotten mad. It’s not like you killed them. Learned my lesson big-time, for serious.” Ripple decides to go into full apology mode, because who knows what this pro is capable of? As he speaks, though, he surprises himself by kind of meaning it. What the chief did was janked, but he’s a janked-up guy, inside and out. Ripple can’t help but sympathize with that, at least a little. They were buds just yesterday. Maybe there’s still something worth saving in the ruins of Trank, some Survivor of kindness or sanity, half-smothered and screaming HELP. “Now, you want to let me out of here?”
“Duncan, you have to understand that after what you said, I can’t possibly trust you with any intelligence I have concerning the movements of the dragons.”
“I one hundred percent swear that I will not do anything related to the dragons ever.” Ripple 100 percent doesn’t mean this. If the dragons are scary now, imagine them controlled by a bona fide zapmaster. Ripple glances skyward nervously. “I’ll be happy if I never see a dragon again.”
“And if I can’t trust you with that intelligence, we can’t work together.”
“I’m fired? OK, awesome, I’m fired. Thank you for firing me, sir.” Ripple rattles the cage’s wire door; the lock doesn’t budge. “So I should pack my things and go, right?”
“And if we can’t work together, that means we’re working separately. Which creates competition down the line. It makes a conflict inevitable. Do you understand that?”
“No need to pack, even.” Ripple is making a serious effort not to read the subtext here. “Me and Abby, we can just, like, jet. Where is Abby?”
“Downstairs. She’s still recovering, but she’ll be all right. I restrained her, for her own safety.”
“Restrained?” Ripple nods, determined to be chill with this. At least she’s not dead: major points for that. “Restrained is cool. Restrained is good.”
“I don’t consider her a threat.” Trank peers at him through the wires, those fake eyes zooming in for a close-up. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Duncan? You can tell me whatever pretty stories you like to get out of that detainment kennel, but we both know what’s in your heart.”
Ripple stares down at the ground. He’s still in the red long johns he had on earlier, the ones he sleeps in. They have feet, like a little boy’s pajamas. Is it possible that he’ll die without ever seeing his own toes again?
“I say there’s no time like the present,” says Trank. “Let’s settle this here and now.”
Trank takes not one but two hatchets off of his utility belt and holds one in each hand, the twin blades glinting. With a shing of metal on metal, he cuts through the lock on the cage door, and the hinge creaks ajar.
Trank stands in the open doorframe. His expression is losing its smoothness, acquiring worry lines and crinkles as, below, the animatronics shift. It’s human, but unreadable—the look of a man looking into the void.
“You wanted to be the greatest fireman in the world. Now here’s your chance.”
Trank holds out one of the hatchets to Ripple, keeping the other lowered at his side. It’s a loaded moment, a passing of the torch, totally nonviolent. Say what? Maybe this is a different part of the story than Ripple thought. Disbelieving, he grasps the handle. He looks from the sharpened blade to Trank, then back again.
“So this ax has…superpowers?”
“No.”
“Then how does it make me the world’s greatest fireman?”
Whatever intensity awakened Trank’s features collapses back into exasperation. “It doesn’t. But you can’t be the greatest while I’m still alive.”
“Whoa!” Ripple almost drops his weapon; he bumps into the wall of his cage and the whole thing jingles. “You want to kill each other?”
“One way or another, we’ll have to face off. There’s no way around it. You won’t let me fulfill my destiny, and so I can’t allow you to fulfill yours.”
“Pro, let’s just dial it way back here. I was going to be your princeling. What happened?”
“It would have been a fine thing to rule the city together. But it would never have worked out. I can see that now.” Trank wields his hatchet with both hands; beneath that heavy slicker, the muscles in his chest and shoulders visibly flex. “Do you want to die fighting, or in that cell?”
“I’m not going to fight you!”
“Then you’re going to die.”
Maybe Ripple can reason with him: “Listen, what if there is no command console? Or what if there is—and neither of us ever finds it? We might not have to fight ever. Can’t we just wait and see?”
Trank grimaces. “There’s no terror in dying when the alternative is to live without hope. You can’t let cowardice rule you, Duncan. You were right to think of greatness from the start.” Trank flips down his Tarnhelm, as if it’s a combat visor. “You have to rise above.”
Trank is blocking Ripple’s way out of the cage; the only way out is through him. Ripple raises the hatchet—there’s athletic t
ape wrapped around the handle. To help him get a grip.
Trank steps backward, and Ripple cautiously advances…
Now both men are on the roof of the Fire Museum, circling each other, while the dragons circle them from above, black-winged squiggles against the blinding white clouds. Ripple thinks of the first time he walked into the Fire Museum, the words BRING IT ON inscribed over his head like the logo at the start of an opening-credits sequence. Dragon Prince. What’s worse—a reality that’s over? Or one that never was?
Trank swings his ax first. Ripple ducks.
EXT. SCORCHED LOT—DAY
RIPPLE and TRANK scrounge through the smoldering rubble of a collapsed building. RIPPLE sees something in the wreckage and points.
RIPPLE
Sweet, check it out!
CLOSE on the command console, a wood-paneled unit bearing dials, joysticks, and sliders, with a faint but otherworldly lemon-lime glow.
Trank swings again. Ripple blocks him with his ax handle and pushes Trank backward with a strength both men find surprising.
EXT. BLUE SKY—DAY
RIPPLE, riding the yellow dragon, bursts out of a cloud bank, hooting and pumping his fist.
Trank stumbles. Ripple hesitates.
INT. FIRE CHIEF’S CHAMBERS—NIGHT
In an opulent darkened chamber, a sickly, aged TRANK lies atop pillows, wearing an old-timey nightcap with a big pom-pom on the end. RIPPLE sits at his bedside next to a nightstand loaded up with pill bottles and medical devices, looking sad and worried.
TRANK
You have been like a son to me. But now I will be one with history.
RIPPLE
This blows chunks.
TRANK
As my last act, I bequeath you…(coughs) all the power of my kingdom.
Across the room, the command console waits for its new owner, glimmering faintly in the shadows.
When Trank regains his balance, he goes on the offensive, slashing as Ripple dodges back, and back, and back.
The Sky Is Yours Page 35
