Smoketown

by Tenea D. Johnson

“I’m not lying.” Anna stood and walked to the door, pausing only to say, “I’ll be back.”

  Anna knew, no doubt, Seife must be weighing her words. She’d already given the woman ample reason to think her unhinged. Now it seemed she had no other choice. Usually, Anna would leave it at that, but now she wanted nothing less than to leave it at that.

  It was dusk. The kilns were cooling, but Anna could still feel warmth radiating from them as she walked past to the small workshop on the edge of the drying plain. She heard a faint crash from somewhere further into the city and quickened her pace to the kiln. Here, Seife had showed her during her tour, the bone black was made. She climbed the stairs to the entrance and knocked on the door. A deep baritone answered and she entered.

  A gray-haired man, tall and willowy, leaned over a table in the middle of the room. He laid the completed pieces of bone black in neat rows. On an adjacent table, strips of red paper waited to be rolled around the charcoal. Dark powder dusted the floor.

  “Yes?” he said, looking up. “You’re Seife’s friend, aren’t you? Can I help you with anything?”

  ”Yes, the charcoal, how much is it?” Anna asked.

  “For Seife’s friend, it’s free.” Anna gave him one of her rare smiles in exchange and returned to Seife’s.

  Anna hesitated outside Seife’s door. She pulled off her dust-covered boots and ran her feet under the small spigot near the bottom of the door. For now, she couldn’t hear the echoes of unrest from the city and savored this moment of quiet before she upended the world again. At her feet a pool of charcoal dust gathered and ran down the spaces between the deck flooring. She watched as the sullied water joined the black-stained sand under Seife’s house, under every house in Smoketown’s grove of homes. She dried her feet and stepped inside. Dusk had just settled outside the window, but inside it felt as still as the dead of night, with only Seife’s hushed breathing and the hum of the ceiling fan. Seife stood in the kitchen pouring herself a glass of water. She turned casually to Anna.

  “I’ll show you.” Anna pulled her drawing pad out of her bag and the fresh charcoal stick out of her pocket. “What’s your favorite bird?” Anna asked.

  “A hummingbird,” Seife said, a question in her voice.

  Anna smiled to herself. “Of course.”

  She took out her handheld and typed the word in, found a photo and began to sketch. Every few seconds she glanced up at Seife. As Anna finished she said, “Ready?”

  Before Seife could answer the bird burst up from the page and flew to the red tablecloth. Seife scrambled to the other side of the room, back pressed up against the wall. Her wide-eyed stare shuffled between Anna and the bird until her breathing slowed. Slowly she slid down the wall, her knees pressed into her chest.

  Anna stood and walked to the door where the hummingbird flitted. She placed her hand on the knob to open it and let the bird out.

  “Wait,” Seife said. With some effort she stood and approached the hummingbird. The bird darted over to the kitchen window, then back to the middle of the room. Seife followed its movements with her eyes. She seemed to have forgotten about Anna for the moment, and for this Anna felt grateful. Grateful that Seife hadn’t walked past her and out the door, didn’t look at her strangely or for the moment at all, Anna waited, hand on the doorknob, to see where this moment would turn.

  The beating of the bird’s wings was the only sound in the room. Dust motes glided through the slanted light coming through the window. Anna mustered her courage and turned to Seife directly, ready to say what she didn’t know, but sure she should say something. When Anna looked she saw something in Seife, or the beginnings of it. She had been lucky. In Seife’s slowly blossoming smile and her tentative steps to follow the bird around the room, Anna saw Seife’s wonder.

  Content that they were all still in the same room, Anna leaned against the door and watched. As Seife began to investigate the bird in earnest, it repeatedly darted away from her and hovered, Anna walked over to the bed and sat down, fascinated by their dance. She wondered if the bird knew of Seife’s song. A silly thought—the first she could remember having in a very long time.

  “It can’t live in this room,” Seife said finally and opened the kitchen window. She walked the few meters to the bed and sat down next to Anna. They both watched the hummingbird’s departure.

  “Unbelievable,” Seife said, turning to Anna. “You created a life. You see? I was right. You are different.”

  Anna thought, this is the accident of attraction. It wasn’t that Seife had given her a place to stay when there was no place left for her in the world, the mornings she’d spent listening to her voice echo through the city, or the truths that Seife had shared with her. It was simply the way Seife looked at her when she finished speaking that broke Anna’s hard-won reserve. She turned to Seife and kissed her with a softness that Anna didn’t know had survived in her.

  Slowly, Anna dragged her fingers back from where she held Seife’s jaw and closed her hand in a loose ball. She waited for the call of Seife’s flesh to stop echoing, to forget the exquisiteness of her skin long enough to collect her own thoughts and whisper soft words that would allow the moment to settle gently, so that they could come back to it. She did not want this something between them to burst.

  “I should go,” Anna said, more out of reactionary fear than sincerity. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been so close.

  Seife said nothing, kept watching Anna steadily as the breeze that ruffled the leaves outside the window. The faintest aroma of smoke wafted in, momentarily dividing Anna’s attention.

  Anna said with more certainty, “I should go.” She paused. “At least to the couch.”

  “Should you?” Seife asked.

  “Yes,” Anna answered.

  “Will you?”

  Anna smiled and started to get up, thought better of it and turned back to Seife. The kiss almost made her forget and with a sustained effort she pulled away.

  “Goodnight, Seife.”

  “Sleep here tonight,” Seife said.

  Anna lay in Seife’s bed in the warm crook of the other woman’s arm and though the disjointed pieces of her felt closer, her trepidation hadn’t disappeared. The ache in her legs faded; the soreness in her back was forgotten; her headache abated, but still the gnawing in her chest remained. For now Anna rested.

  21

  On the morning of the evacuation’s second day, Eugenio and Lucine sat inside the perimeter’s last circuit station, Post Eight. They’d had a minor scare when they met back up at Post Six, a sentry who they thought had actually stayed at his station, but as it turned out he’d just been retrieving the post’s wheeled extinguishers to help fight the fires. They’d watched him load up the haul and disappear toward the blazes in the center of the city.

  Now Eugenio watched as Lucine took a velveteen roll out of her pack and placed it in front of the final panel, slowly unrolling it toward the east to reveal the small collection of picks, skeleton keys, blades, and rounded adzes that she’d carefully fashioned from her best finds at The Dumps. Lucine had spent the last three years finding and fashioning the half-dozen tools. The top half of each tool stuck out of the fabric. She began with the long thin pick that had been a microphone coil in its former life.

  She worked quickly, familiar now with this work. Eugenio, too, had grown accustomed to the tasks she’d assigned to him. Carefully, he removed the face of the drive motor and looked for the yellow wire she’d be needing next.

  He could hardly believe they were so close to success. Lovely, magnetic Lucine had drawn together all the pieces to complete their task, even bringing him back to himself long enough to stay the course. In his pack Rory’s virtu rig would finish the job they started today. Eugenio felt the corners of his mouth rise into a smile.

  The last post was easy enough to dismantle. Lucine shorted out the circuit, and disassembled the power matrix. She and Eugenio went outside to cut the lines for backup power. He eyed the mou
nd of dead birds on the outside of the perimeter, piled up against the invisible barrier. Two fat vultures stood atop the mound, feeding. Eugenio looked away and over to Lucine crouched over the backup box dug into the earth. She pulled out the last relay, and the omnipresent hum stopped. For a second the silence overtook Eugenio, and he remembered how quiet the city had once been. He closed his eyes, savoring the memory and the return of that quiet. A second later, the mound of birds toppled over into the now empty space. When it finally settled the mound resembled a narrowing path pointing back into Leiodare.

  The city looked the same as it had this morning—The Spires reaching up, The Dumps in the east, a dead space above and below. It did not feel the same though, that had changed instantly.

  A black bird flew toward them. They watched as it flew up and out. With sudden clarity, Eugenio realized there was no more ‘out’. Lucine clapped. Eugenio could not move; a knot of emotion lodged itself in his throat. The souls he had seen last night could now be free. This was just the first. He watched the black bird reach the surrounding jungle, the clouds, and what lay beyond. Within seconds, more birds took to the sky, flowing in and out of the city.

  “Eu,” Lucine said, as she began to pack up her tools. “Did you see that?”

  She made it as far picking up the cutters before she, like her brother, could only sit and watch the sky.

  22

  They must have lain in bed for nearly a day because when Anna’s eyes opened and her gaze drifted to the window, she saw the soft light of dusk and another distant glow beyond it. The faint smell of smoke mixed with the scent of Seife’s skin. Not yet ready to give up this moment of hard-fought peace, she closed her eyes. Anna felt Seife’s breath warm her ear, the comfort of Seife’s arms around her and scooted back until they touched. She could not remember the feeling of being held and hadn’t realized its absence had carved into her until this moment when there was someone to fill that space.

  Sudden banging on the front door jerked Seife awake.

  “What the . . . ?” she muttered behind Anna. Seife dragged herself out of bed. Anna rolled over onto her suddenly bare back and sat up, watching Seife make her way to the door.

  “Enough!” Seife said, a few steps from the entrance. She flung the door open and Anna saw Seife’s brother Rene, out of breath, filling up the doorway. Makisig was barely visible just behind him.

  “The fires are spreading,” Rene said.

  “Where?” Seife asked.

  “Here, or on their way. A quarter of the Gardens are gone. The winds have picked up. They’re strong,” Rene answered. “We’re digging a fire line. Can you help?”

  “Of course,” Seife answered, putting on her shoes. Anna, already out of bed, met them at the door. On the landing, she put on her boots and they hurried down to Rene’s trans.

  Outside a thick haze had already begun to infiltrate the neighborhood.

  “Everyone else is already there. Those who can help anyway. Jai Ling is rounding up the kids and older folks for an evac, in case.”

  The distant glow Anna had seen outside Seife’s bedroom window grew bright orange as the trans drew closer to the rest of the city. Rene drove over the last rise in Smoketown and Anna could see the fire’s full intensity—she had never seen anything like it.

  There were only two colors here: orange and black. The city and the Gardens had become a place of shadows and flame, where the live things, even the people in the trans, already seemed to have crossed over into darkness. Air had been replaced by smoke and night had become a bright, hot landscape where conflagrations of fire popped up every hundred meters. The trans’ cooling motor grew loud as it tried to offset the heat beating into the passenger cabin. It looked to Anna like the individual fires were close to merging. As they drove slowly on, a line of shadow people digging into the dirt became visible in the murk. Makisig pulled wet handkerchiefs out of a compartment in the floorboards and handed one to each of them.

  “The last of the goggles,” he said, distributing those as well.

  “Okay,” Rene said, opening the door. The roar of the fire immediately enveloped them. He opened the trunk. Anna saw Rene’s mouth moving but couldn’t quite understand what he said. Seife handed her a pick from the back of the trans and they joined the others at the end of the line. On the third swing of the pick, a tree thirty meters from Anna ignited.

  “The winds are shifting,” Rene yelled. Another man further down the line yelled something, but Anna couldn’t hear what it was. The people nearest him abandoned their work and ran. The man hurried over to them.

  “It’s creating these winds, must be jet stream,” he coughed out. “Firestorm. Can’t be fought. Have to evac. Now.”

  Anna turned to Seife just in time to see a fire whirl, tall as a tower, two hundred meters away dancing back and forth. It turned east to west and back again, carving a path of destruction back into the city center. The man followed her gaze.

  “There will be more. We have to leave,” he said.

  Rene, Makisig, and Seife began to move back to the trans. Anna brought up the rear. When they reached the trans, she closed the door behind Seife.

  “I’ll meet you back,” Anna said.

  “What? What are you talking about? Get in the trans.”

  “I’ll meet you back. I can do something about this,” Anna answered.

  Rene opened the door and got out, Anna was sure with every intention of picking her up and throwing her inside.

  “Rene,” Anna said calmly. “Get back in and get out of here.” Something shifted in the wind. Anna stopped moving and closed her eyes. There. It felt like the slightest pull in the air. It would happen soon. She had to do something.

  “Fuck,” Anna said. She glared at Rene with an intensity that stopped him. He looked uncertainly over at Seife.

  “Get him. Inside. And go,” Anna said. The fire would soon suck everything into its center. They couldn’t run from it, and Smoketown wouldn’t survive it. Anna knew it as clearly as she knew that everyone, Seife, Rene, the refugees from the city, and perhaps even more would die in a matter of minutes if she did nothing.

  “Get in,” Seife said to her brother, though her gaze stayed locked on Anna. ”You need to be right about this.”

  Rene didn’t move.

  “Get in!” Seife yelled. With hesitation, Rene got back in his trans, staring at Anna as he did. Finally he shook his head and they sped off.

  What could she use? What? Everything around her would burn.

  “Goddammit,” Anna spat, trying to think. Think back to organic chem—nothing. Inorganic then. Flame-resistant compounds. What did she have around her? There was phosphorous and nitrogen in the fertilizer, calcium silicate from the road. It would have to do. She would have to project; she had never tried it. But there was no time and nothing else. This would hurt.

  Anna clenched her jaw and dropped down to the road. Immediately the skin on her lower legs began to hurt. She drew the structure with her hands, shaping what she wanted in the air until she could see its beginning and end, the vision as clear as she could make it. She reached out and placed one palm on the road and one on the mineral-rich earth next to it. Anna could barely see through the smoke and so closed her eyes.

  She concentrated on the essence of what she wanted to create, holding the vision of the dome that would contain the fire, and for once, hoped she had it in her to do. The pain in her hands throbbed up her arms; she smelled her hair beginning to burn, and when she opened her eyes she saw the very tips beginning to curl in on themselves. Anna had to finish quickly. The pain would become too much and she’d lose the ability to focus. Turning her gaze up, she saw that a dark glimmering sheen, like low tide, had spread from her hands, across the ground and now rose fifty meters into the air. Closing her eyes, she willed every part of her and every atom at her disposal to push, to build before the road beneath her burst into flame or the fire sucked them all into its heart. The skin on her hand blistered and burned. She felt so
on it would melt.

  Anna screamed in agony. As she did she felt a force move through her, and burst out, both pain and, bizarrely, pleasure. It sucked the air from her lungs and she fell over sideways into the dirt. For an instant her hands stuck, then broke from the road and ground as if they’d been freed from ice. She opened her eyes to see the dome reach further up than she could see. Inside it the fire roared. With each breath, its flames shrank and the smoke inside thickened until Anna could see nothing inside, only the moon above it, now shining softly as the winds began to clear away the fumes.

  She lay there until the fire had burned itself out. Just before she fainted, Anna saw Seife appear above her, her expression full of concern, dreadlocks haloing her face.

  23

  Eugenio leaned against the railing of the Texico City iCDC office, watching Lucine cross the avenue to join him. The sunglasses she wore resembled a virtu rig, but underneath she wore a relaxed expression, her limbs moving languidly as she walked.

  A recent rain had dampened the dust that usually swirled around this part of Texico City. Eugenio pulled down the cloth he’d tied around his mouth earlier and rubbed his hand over the stubble on his jaw. Perhaps they could take some time to regroup now—or at least shave. They’d delivered his transcripts, Rory’s files, and the Series 3 rig safely to the office. ICDC and their governing body now could decide how to handle the City Health Department and file proper charges against McClaren Industries. Unfortunately, Rory wouldn’t witness any of that. His body had been found in The Shallows a week ago. Still Eugenio thought he might have received some satisfaction, and because Rory had helped expose the truth perhaps the company would be judged separately from the family. Eugenio would work toward that end when he and Lucine returned.

  Emergency Management had finally reintroduced some control and suppressed the small band of diehard Starlings whose blackout rampage caused most of the chaos. Now Eugenio and Lucine could help rebuild.