The Electric Kingdom

by David Arnold

  Her face now felt like fire, not only at the seemingly endless pile of things her father hadn’t told her, but because whatever part of her wanted to believe her dad was the very part she would lose if his story wasn’t true: the knowledge that she, above all others, knew him best.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Downriver, Harry ran ahead, attempting to play the Game again, but neither of them was in the mood. Minutes passed in the relative silence of footsteps and the gently running river, and then Lennon stopped, eyes faraway. On his face, that same constricted look she’d seen days ago, by the fire as he spoke of Boston, his mouth having been commandeered by his brain.

  It had stopped him short then. But not this time.

  “Every minute of every day,” he said. “Do you know what I think about?”

  And then the look broke apart, and his eyes welled, and something about seeing him on the verge of tears brought her there too.

  “It’s awful”—the well overflowed, a few tears fell down his cheek—

  “Lennon.” She reached out but he pulled away.

  “I wonder what would have happened if my birth parents had survived instead of—” He looked away, wiped his eyes. “Jean and Zadie gave me everything, and I loved them, and I wouldn’t trade that. But there were two people before them who sang songs to me at night, took pictures I’ll never see, made plans I’ll never know, because the only things I know are what they told a couple of strangers over dinner at a campsite hours before the Flies hit. So it’s hard for me when I hear you . . .”

  It took everything in her not to reach out again. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Harry returned, ears perked, head tilted, and whereas before his eyes had asked, Why no Game?, they now said, If you are sad, I can make things better.

  “You don’t need to apologize.” Lennon bent down to pet Harry; Nico knelt too, scratched behind the dog’s ears. “I just wish I’d had a chance to know them,” he said. “And I worry—all the time, I worry that Boston is a mirage. Another sad consolation.”

  Nico had heard a thousand stories in her life, understood their call and response: Once upon a time, her father would say; I am listening, she would say. But listening was about more than hearing; it was about when and where you put yourself in the story.

  “I’ve lost everyone,” said Lennon. “I have memories, that’s what I have. Memories and a wristwatch with a skyline.”

  For the first time Nico saw herself, not as Voyager, but as a trusty blowfish. And the old story was made new, its truths richer and more complex.

  “Dad trusted me with his stories because he knew I’d take care of them,” she said. “I’m guessing Jean gave you that watch for the same reason.” One hand on Harry, she took Lennon’s hand in the other, and this time he did not pull away. “That skyline’s not nothing, Len. And you haven’t lost everyone.”

  Between them, Harry soaked up the attention: tongue out, King of Dogs, There now, that’s better, isn’t it? The three of them stayed like that for a few minutes, content in this new and fascinating consolidation.

  Lines

  Farther south, somewhere in the distance: the low, familiar drone of a waterfall, steadily louder with each step. The closer they got to Manchester, the more houses and apartments lined both sides of the river. There were empty hotels and restaurants, overturned cars in streets, and it wasn’t that they hadn’t witnessed these things before now, but there was a feeling of magnitude, as if all towns prior to Manchester were little more than dry runs.

  It began to sleet. The air chilled, emptiness filled their moods, the grayness of the sky so visceral, Nico felt it in her teeth.

  “Well,” said Lennon. “Welcome to Manchester, I guess.”

  They took cover under a small gazebo between apartment complexes, ate a quick bite before formulating a plan. Harry kept his nose in the air, sniffing the sleet as if gathering intel.

  “So what are we looking for?” Lennon pulled out his map.

  “In the story, Bellringer says Kairos is surrounded by a cluster of mills.”

  Nico pulled out her own map, pointed to the red circles on the bank of the river. “Dad circled these. It’s been years, and with so many mills, and with his—memory—who knows how accurate this is. Could take hours to find.”

  Lennon looked up—then back at the map. “We should have crossed.”

  “What?”

  He pointed to the red circles on her map. “They’re all on the east bank. We should have crossed the river north of here. One of those bridges . . .”

  He was right. The train tracks, the pedestrian bridge, any number of bridges they’d passed.

  “Looks like there’s a bridge here.” He pointed to the map, just south of where they were. “And another here. We’ll find a way across.”

  When the sleet let up, they tucked their maps away, slung on their bags, and within an hour they came to the first bridge, a paved four-lane road. As Lennon led the way across, it wasn’t hard to imagine the bridge as a once-impressive thoroughfare, four lanes of city traffic, the hustle and bustle of it all. Now it was little more than a crumbling monument to a dead city. The road felt wobbly beneath her feet, the sky grayer, and with each step forward, she wanted more and more to turn back.

  Just when she was about to say so, Lennon stopped abruptly, arms out.

  “What?”

  He pointed ahead, where the road succumbed entirely, went from crumbling to obliterated. It picked up again closer to the east bank, but there was a solid twenty- or thirty-yard gap where the middle section of the bridge had collapsed, resting somewhere at the bottom of the Merrimack.

  And just as frustration was about to boil over—at herself, for not thinking to cross when they’d had the chance, and at her dad, for the piecemeal directions—she turned south and saw all of Manchester spread out before her, like the city had been hiding, and only here, from the middle of a half-collapsed bridge, high over the Merrimack River, would it reveal itself.

  The entire city was built on, or around, the Merrimack River. Massive brick structures lined the water’s edge, bigger than anything Nico had ever imagined, impressive even in their various states of deterioration. The wide rocky river led down into a proper panorama, power lines and industry, a landscape Nico had only dreamed of. It was a different kind of awe up here than the view offered by the attic deck. Both provided wonder, but where the endless horizon of treetops and mountains was pure potential, the gray Manchester skyline was a product of potential wasted. Little craters everywhere, massive holes where natural-gas lines had sprouted leaks and, ultimately, exploded. Rusty pipes and leaky tanks and no one there to repair them, her father used to say. Whole cities going up in flames, craters where buildings once stood, ash-snow, mountainous piles of soot—

  “A darkness has chased away the sky,” Lennon said, his hand weaving into hers, and she took a breath to say something, but nothing came out. Here, this relic of a city spread before her, Nico understood the world that she had missed, knew that she’d been cheated by time itself. But even as this injustice threatened to wreck her, she felt some small seedling of hope wriggling to the surface: that whatever part of her still doubted her father, a larger part must trust him to have come so far.

  Ruins

  After retracing their steps back to the west side of the river, they continued south in hopes that the next bridge was intact. The sound of water intensified, and they came to another hydroelectric station, with its huge cage-like construction of rusted metal or steel, and tall cone chimneys reaching up to the sky. As before, various sections of the cage were connected to power lines, maybe even the same ones that had followed them here.

  Beyond that, they came to the spot where the river reached its widest, and a waterfall plunged some fifty feet before crashing and continuing its path south. In that old shoebox in the attic, there was a photograph o
f her parents when they were young, on a boat at the foot of a waterfall that seemed to come straight out of the clouds. In the pictures, they’d had to wear special ponchos so they wouldn’t get soaked. The waterfall in front of Nico and Lennon was nothing like that, though the sheer breadth of it—from one side of the bank to the other—was its own kind of impressive.

  Even with the city in their sights, the walk got harder before it got easier. The brush thickened, as if the rural could sense the urban just around the corner. Now or never, it seemed to say, growing and blooming until they had to turn back in places. It was a frustrating go-the-long-way-around situation, especially this near to the end, and by the time the next bridge was in sight, it felt like hours had passed.

  “What time is it?” she asked, the overcast sky making it difficult to get a read on the sun.

  Lennon looked at his watch. “Almost four. What time is he ringing the Bell?”

  “He said a couple hours after sunset.”

  She tried to calculate what time of day the sun normally went down, but as time had always been relative to meals or sleeping—dinnertime, lunchtime, naptime, bedtime—it was difficult to say. Nearing the second bridge, Nico tried to think. “Knowing what time he rings the Bell won’t help us get there any faster.”

  “True,” he said. “Still. Maybe we . . . ?”

  “Yeah.”

  Without another word, they broke into a light jog.

  The second bridge was more elevated than the first one, closer to the heart of the city. They would be visible for miles up there, exposed to any and all lurking Brunos or Metal Masked mobs.

  “We’ll go fast,” said Lennon, reading her mind.

  Hands in pockets, breathing into the front collars of their shirts, they started across this new bridge, chasing after Harry. What had been cold on the streets of Manchester was now, out over the Merrimack, downright frigid. Below them, the river had outgrown its shores, spilling into the ground floors of the mills lining the water’s edge. Farther downstream the land dipped, and the flood line looked significantly higher, two or three stories completely submerged. Nico had read books where the world had been wiped out, whether by pandemic, nuclear fallout, alien invasion, or, according to Lennon’s stories, robot uprisings. Now, looking out over the foggy skyline, she tried to reconcile those fictions with the realities of this city: its decaying infrastructure and smoking craters, its cables leading nowhere; empty streets, empty cars, empty houses; a river that had risen, reached out, and devoured the nearest buildings; and all under a sky of ashen chaos only made possible by nobody being alive to give a fuck.

  They made it across without incident.

  If you can call that without incident, she thought.

  Floods

  Most of the mills had names on the outside, signs etched into stone or brick. It was a considerable amount of running around, trying to find each sign, but at least they weren’t forced to inspect every mill inside and out. A good thing, given Nico had never seen so many buildings in her life, not just mills but stores and stations and restaurants. After searching for any sign of Kairos, consulting the little red circles on her dad’s map, holding it at different angles, they wound up in a parking lot by a sign that read AMERICA RUNS ON DUNKIN’.

  So far they’d seen three just like it.

  “Maybe Dunkin is the guy who makes the doughnuts,” said Nico.

  “What’s a doughnut again?”

  “Like a cake, I think?” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Look.” Lennon pointed farther west. “There’s another one over there.”

  The sky was the color just before evening snow, when the whole world looked like one big cloud. Some twenty feet away, a rusted-out car was parked in the lot. Inside, the skeletal remains of a person in the driver’s seat.

  Lennon pointed to one of the mills they’d already checked, which had been converted into a museum. “Why don’t we try in there? Maybe find a more detailed map of the town or something.”

  Walking into the museum was like walking into another dimension. Everything was surprisingly intact, organized, aesthetically pleasing, and small enough to not feel overwhelming. Photos on walls depicted canals from years ago, captions explaining how many of the paved streets they’d just walked on had once been canals. A huge display of the Merrimack River showed how it all worked: from the Upper Canal to the Lower Canal, water ran through each mill, spinning a turbine under the floor that powered textile machines throughout the building. There was a whole section about the “Manchester renaissance,” a period that began in the early 2000s, when tech companies and restaurants and coffee shops and high-end lofts turned the run-down mills into valuable property.

  Another display outlined the many floods through the years, the most destructive of which occurred in 1896, submerging buildings and taking out bridges. The 2020s saw a slew of floods, one after the next until the final one—which Nico could only assume was the one outside now—stuck around. As if the Merrimack River were a giant battering ram, each flood an attempt to break down the castle door. Now that it had, it wasn’t going anywhere.

  They walked through a hallway with closet-size dioramas of Manchester through the years: the Manchester News, city hall, a soda shoppe, a stylish little bookstore called Bookery, and at the end, a reconstructed movie theater with a marquee that read COMING SOON: “MANCHESTER AND THE GREAT WAR.” The whole thing was an immersive and curious experience, a time capsule of the old world. On any other day, Nico would have loved it.

  But today was today.

  They exited the museum with nothing to show for it; outside, the snow had started, big thick flakes in a steady stream, and the sky had deepened to a darker shade of evening.

  “Hey,” said Lennon.

  “What.”

  He pointed to the mill across the street. It was enormous, probably four stories high, a hundred yards long. Earlier, when they’d checked the entrance of this mill, the ground floor was completely underwater. What they hadn’t noticed until now was that the mill was built on an incline, so what was the ground floor of the south entrance was apparently the basement of the north entrance.

  In front of them now, a walkway led to a set of double doors, with a small sign beside it reading KAIROS, INC.

  Characters

  It was dry under the awning, but she felt shivery, the cold and wet having seeped into her bones.

  A heavy chain had been wrapped through the handles and then padlocked together. Stenciled across the top of the door, in bold white lettering: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Lennon pointed to a broken camera up under the awning. “Video surveillance. Though this . . .” He ran his hand over a small black box attached to the wall. It was hard plastic, with a blank screen and a few small round nodes. “I have no idea what this is.”

  “Some sort of digital lock?”

  He bent down for a closer look at the screen. “Zadie used to travel for work. She told stories about airports that scanned your retinas for identification.” From one end to the other, the width of the box was almost exactly the width of Lennon’s face. “I bet that’s what this was.”

  Nico thought of the blue-lipped family in the back of the station, and the crowbar that locked them inside. “I guess the geological anomaly needed protection from the outside world.”

  “Or the outside world needed protection from it.”

  Nico blew into her hands to warm them. “A retina scan. So futuristic and yet—”

  “A thing of the past.”

  “Maybe.”

  Braving the elements, Lennon ran to the nearest window to see if it was locked. “You think retina scans will make a comeback?”

  “Like you said. Reboot. Rainbow. Start over.”

  Nico bent to pet Harry. He, too, was wet with sleet, and she had a sudden memory of bath days in the Farmhouse, how sheepish he looked while being
bathed, but then, once done, how he’d run around in circles, barking at nothing, just happy to be clean and alive. She could almost hear her father now: The most compelling evidence of intelligent design is the joyous stupidity of dogs.

  “Why put up a sign?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lennon, back under the awning again.

  She pointed to the sign by the door. KAIROS, INC. “If it’s a secret government thing. Why even have a sign?”

  Lennon thought for a second. “Can you think of a better way to draw attention to your company than a giant unnamed, unmarked building?”

  He had a point. Still, Nico couldn’t help wondering if maybe her father had worked for a company called Kairos, only instead of studying some vague geological anomaly, he’d been nothing more than a cog in an office, pushing papers around, sipping coffee, wondering what was for dinner.

  “So. All the windows are barred. Guess we should circle the building, see if there’s another way in?” Lennon grabbed the giant padlock, shook the chain around. “Unless you have a key.”

  Slowly, she stood and stared at the padlock.

  “What?” said Lennon. “That was a joke, I don’t expect you to actually have—”

  From her pocket, Nico pulled out a silver key attached to a chain necklace.

  “What is that?”

  “A key,” she said.

  “Well, I know it’s a key. I’m saying—”

  “It was Kit’s.”

  “Is that the one he said—like, an angel supposedly gave it to his mom, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nico. There are a billion keys in the world. I think I’ve found half of them on scavenges.”

  Ignoring him, she stepped forward, and it felt as though the crushing weight of Kit’s absence had been reallocated to this lightweight object in her hand. Nico took a breath, inserted the key into the lock, felt a smooth click as she turned it, and a small part of a much larger wound began to heal in ways she could not explain.