LAWL HAS been wandering for days, staggering around with the other unknowns of the Immortal City. Without Duncan, his is an untethered life. He is lost and fumbling, stumbling and falling into mud puddles and disregarding the rules of safety on the busy avenues and boulevards.
He is not careful. He would invite the ferrymen to take him to the ninth ring. Then he would at least be with Duncan and Gran. But the ferrymen have all disappeared. He has not seen one black-coated bastard in all his wanderings since Gran and Duncan were ripped from him. Where’s a ferryman when you need one?
The Kingdom Guards only laugh at him. It is not their job to take a man to the ninth. They remind him of this, and then they hit and kick him and then laugh at him some more. They have so little entertainment, these guards. Perhaps they will keep him around. Everyone needs a good laugh.
Lawl does everything wrong. He sleeps in gutters. He sits in the middle of streets. He steals food from vendors and does not even run. He only eats a bite or two of his pillage before he tosses the rest to a passing child or horse. In the past few days, he has been hit and thrashed more times than he can count.
Duncan remains with him. He is smiling in Lawl’s dreams. He is crying in Lawl’s nightmares. He asks for forgiveness. But why?
Lawl realizes he has not been meandering aimlessly through the Immortal City at all, but only taking the long way ’round to a specific destination. And he is here. His legs quake as he stands directly in front of Duncan’s apartment in a nicer district of the second ring. He bites his lip to keep from crying. His dirty face is already painted with tear tracks. He pushes his unwashed dark hair back from his forehead and approaches the place. Residents of the district eye him with disgust.
“Someone call a ferryman,” he hears a woman say.
“Aye,” he replies in a low mumble. “Please do.”
The steps up to Duncan’s apartment are cleaner than those back in the third ring and not as awkwardly spaced as the places in the older areas of the city. Lawl sees a family has already moved into Duncan’s apartment. He rests his head against the wall and collects himself, pouring tears to soothe his rage.
An older man stands at the door where once Duncan had carried him in with a romantic flourish. “What do you want?” the old man says gruffly, smoking on a pipe. “We want nothing to do with you. Get gone.”
“The man who once lived here,” Lawl says, trying to speak clearly. “Where are his things? His furniture? Art? What’ve ya done with his things?”
The man looks Lawl over. “They was taken first day. He had the plague, they say. Most everything was burnt, I suspect.”
Lawl cannot help but let a small cry loose, a hand slipping from a ledge.
“No, Daddy,” a young boy says. “Some of his clothes is still down in the courtyard.”
Lawl gasps, feeling a reprieve. “Thank you!” he says to the boy, and then he races down the steps to the courtyard. The residents are kind enough to give him wide berth.
Lawl recognizes every thread of the small pile of clothes lying in the courtyard. People huff, puff, and swear as he kneels at the pile, clutching the first shirt he sees—part of Duncan’s Glass Halls uniform. He holds it to his face and breathes in Duncan’s scent as if it is the first drink of water he has had in days. It is life for him. The scent moves through his being, every vein, every artery. The smell is every memory, good or bad, since they became one. And now he knows what he must do.
He strips off his own clothes. He takes his time, as if the people standing near him were nothing at all. Slowly he dresses in Duncan’s uniform. He feels better surrounded by Duncan’s scent, as if the smell were Duncan’s unfaltering optimism. Lawl has decided he is going to stop moping and find some answers, and the only way to find answers in the Immortal City was to get into the first ring. Duncan and Gran may yet be alive. He will wash his face, clean up, and then he will walk through the first-ring gate when the laborers are let in at night as a worker for the Glass Halls. From there he will find his answers. Yes, he tells himself. For Duncan and Gran, he will find answers.
THE DOCTRESS warden Deirdre Maire is walking the Preparation Ward of the Great Medical Hall of the ninth ring. It is a daily routine, checking in on the patients who are soon to die, making certain they are prepared for their trip to the Factory. The Preparation Ward is a long hall on the third floor of the East Wing. Much light comes from the tall windows, and the ward does not smell of death but of more pleasant things such as flowers brought in daily from some unnamed farm in the five rings. Deirdre demanded the flowers. They seem to comfort and calm the patients, and that, in turn, makes her job much less stressful.
Twenty-four of sixty beds in the hall are filled. Last week every bed was filled. Those still alive now are hooked up to pain medicines and are fed through tubes. Deirdre inspects each of these feeding tubes. A few of the patients watch her, but they turn away when she glances in their direction. They do not wish to see her face. But then, she does not wish to see theirs, either.
She comes to the third-sex plague victim, the one named Gran. Deirdre hasn’t come upon another third-sexer in a while. Doctress Sara is looking at Gran’s charts at the end of the bed. Deirdre tolerates Sara because Sara is different from the others. She seems to care. Naturally, this will only lead to mental instability in a place like this, but under all her resentment and condescension, Deirdre appreciates it all the same. She wonders if Sara realizes she will be filling one of these beds someday.
“How is she?” Deirdre says, looking at Gran.
“She’s well,” Sara says in her gentle voice. “But she had a rough evening last night. I do not see how she is still here. She’s a tough ol’ thing.”
“She’s a third-sex. We have to be tough.”
“She keeps asking for a Duncan. A son maybe?”
“I believe that’s the name of young man she came in with. He may be her son. The guards had to pry the two apart at the entrance before taking him to be branded.”
“Perhaps we could find a way for them to be together?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He is in quarantine, and she is to be prepared. When she finally dies, how do you think he would react to us taking her off to the Factory?”
Sara’s voice went to a whisper. “He doesn’t need to know about that.”
Gran opens her eyes and stares at Deirdre. Deirdre cannot help but fidget, and she moves her face so Gran can see the good side and is spared the ugliness. Gran motions for her to come nearer. This surprises the doctress, but she complies stiffly.
“Do you need something?” Deirdre says, standing fully erect over Gran’s bed and looking down at her. “Do you have enough pain medication? We can increase the dosage.”
“No, no, sweetie,” Gran says, barely audible. “Come closer, ma dear.”
Deirdre leans down hesitantly, and Gran touches the scarred side of her face. This gives Deirdre a start. The feeling of the old woman’s delicate hand against her face causes her to stand straight up again and step back. Her heart blossoms in beats, and she puts a hand to her chest.
“Doctress?” Sara looks concerned. She always looks concerned.
“I’m fine,” Deirdre nearly yells. Gran has fallen back to sleep. Her pain medication offers her but a few minutes of sporadic lucidity.
Deirdre walks to the west wing of the hospital. She wants to feel where the old woman had touched her, but she dare not. There are so many people around her, and a few of the doctors study her ardently, always looking for her failings so that they might have reason to replace her.
The Quarantine Ward looks much the same as the Preparation Ward. The main difference is that the patients are allowed to roam about and even to go out on the veranda if they first ask permission. The doctors and their lobotomized nursing staff wear masks against any strain of virus. Deirdre is handed a mask by one of the vacant nurses, a young man who might at one time have had a mischievous grin.
Duncan is sitting on his bed. His face shows signs of exhaustion. He has bags under his eyes, and his skin looks pale and oily. Still, he is an attractive man. He reminds Deirdre of the young men who once courted her and chased her through the streets of the Immortal City back when she was a beauty. He slowly looks up to her as she approaches his bed. He is rubbing his forearm where he has been branded with the mark of GOD, a circle with five rings.
“You’re Duncan?” she says.
He stands. “Aye. Is there something wrong with Gran?”
The look on his face speaks of concern… and something else. Guilt. She sees that look every morning in her own reflection.
“She’s fine,” she says, not bothering to shield her ugliness from him. “I just wanted to tell you, she’s fine.”
Why? Why did she want to tell him this?
“Can I see her?” he says, hope straining in his voice.
She says nothing as she turns around and leaves quarantine, her black skirt like a trail of death in her wake. It is all she can take of this place today. The quarantined are never made better. Not here.
ROSSA THINKS the sky is clearer than it has ever been, even seeing a hint of blue through the orange. She quite likes that about her stay with the gardener in his thatch-roofed home on the outskirts of the third ring. Here, the tall city buildings are only a mark on the horizon. The greatest height belongs to the trees, the largest area to the fields and the gardens. Far off in the distance, one can barely make out the third-ring wall. She loves looking look up and not seeing heaps of cumbersome architecture twisting to and fro with lacing iron walkways and rope bridges as high as the eye can see. Nothing impedes her vision of the sky here. She drinks in the air as she stands over the outside kiln making dinner—fresh vegetables, manna, and fresh meat, most likely squirrel the gardener has caught and skinned.
The gardener made her an offer the first night she arrived at his home. Cook for him, clean for him, and she could stay and recuperate for a bit. She agreed, perhaps too eagerly. The old man got a greedy stare in his eyes. But no matter. Rossa needed this. She was even given a new wardrobe. The old man’s former maid had left in a hurry, it seemed, and hadn’t cared to take any of her clothes. Rossa did not ask any questions, but she kept her eyes open.
“She was ungrateful,” the gardener told her. “So, so ungrateful, and after all I had done for her. She owed me. Yes. Yes. The little slut owed me. Mmmm.”
He gave her a single rule to follow: “I don’t want to ever see you in the garden,” said he. “My friends, my masterpieces, require absolute quiet and care, and they won’t get it with the likes of you whorin’ about. Mine are the only hands that will tend them. Do you understand, missy?”
Of course she did.
He inspects her now, with one eye wide open and the other nearly closed due to some abnormality as she stirs the stew at the kiln. Every day he seems to inspect her more. He holds a pipe, and his lip has a twitch. His garments are dirty, patched rags the years have faded apathetic colors. Rossa keeps a good distance between them. Men have looked at her with just such an expression before, and it has never turned out well. If the gardener were to ever try anything, though, she knows she can easily overpower him.
“What is your name?” she asked him the first day there.
“I be a gardener,” he said, rather reproachfully. “That’s all you need to know. Mmmm. There be not much to know after that.”
She knew then she would not be staying with him for too long. The looks he gives her are not healthy. They are not safe or sane.
She stirs the stew, and the scents waft into the air around her. The gardener has a varied collection of spices. More than Rossa has ever seen. Cumin, cinnamon, hosterscent, garlic, and guren powder to name but a few. She could open a shop with the dishes she could make if she were back in her district.
A wagon is pulling up the road. Rossa saw it coming through the trees, but she assumed it would pass them by. Now that it is closer, she sees it is a death wagon. Have they come for her? Has the gardener given her up? She cannot go with them until she sees that Key is safe. She drops the spoon in the soup and prepares to hide.
“Calm yourself, girl,” the gardener says. “They’re just bringin’ me some tools for me work, for me art. My garden gets the best food from the ferrymen. Mmmm.”
The death wagon comes to a stop just yards from them. A ferryman jumps down and opens the back. The gardener hobbles to the wagon, saying something to the ferryman, though inaudible to Rossa. The gardener looks at her as he is speaking to the ferryman. This makes Rossa uneasy, but the ferryman seems to be uninterested in anything the gardener is saying. Instead, he pulls out a long burlap bag as the old man is prattling on. It is a cumbersome thing and falls to the ground at the gardener’s feet. The gardener, having said whatever it was he had to say, drags the bag off toward the garden as the ferryman mounts the death wagon and heads back down the road taking no notice of Rossa. The gardener looks back at her, though, as he works the brown bag through the garden gates, his eye ever-inspecting.
Rossa does not know what type of plant food is in the bag. She does not know what type of plants the gardener is feeding. But she knows what type of business the ferrymen deal in, and this knowledge makes her shiver. Something is not right.
“THE SOUP is tasteless,” says Esther Kerr as she sits at her large dining room table. She is pleased Gemma is home for lunch. Her daughter’s new position in the archives gives her more freedom, though, Esther is certain, no less attention. GOD’s eyes are everywhere. “I am missing Duana more with each passing meal. She wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but she was at least a decent cook.” Esther looks over her shoulder at the new cook, a young man who seems terrified already. Sweat drips from his brow. “I hope you have plans to better yourself, or you won’t last long here.”
“It’s not so bad, Momma,” Gemma says. “Not so bad at all. Don’t scare him so.”
“But the soup, my dear. The soup is tasteless.”
“You barely eat anyway, Momma.” Gemma was not touching her own meal very much, either. She sat with her hands on her lap, her back straight against the chair. “Besides, it fits right in. Many things are tasteless, Momma. I am finding the whole world altogether bland.”
Esther takes a sip of her wine and eyes the girl suspiciously. She dangles and dances her dainty wineglass in the air between thumb and forefinger. “Is there something you wish to say, child?”
Gemma pauses. “I’m just puzzled. Why would Duana kill herself?”
“Who can say?” Esther takes her silver spoon and plays with her soup, circles and circles and circles. “Perhaps she was pining over a lost love. And too, she was a thief. She had some of my porcelain in her room. Perhaps she felt guilty.”
“Or harassed.”
Esther does not like the path her daughter’s conversation is taking, nor does she like the tone of that path. “It’s about passion, darling girl. Passion is always our undoing. We want, then we strive, and when we cannot obtain, we fall apart. And we always fall apart.”
“Surely, Momma, you had passion once. You were a revolutionary. You can’t change the world without passion.”
The servants are fidgeting. The word makes them uncomfortable.
“Once I did. Maybe. But it caused me nothing but pain.” She is back to the wine, swirling it in her glass, watching the red liquid dance near the lip. “Our revolution was a noble idea. But in the end, a government led by theocracy is no different than one led any other way. We set ourselves up, thinking our beliefs would better this world. That people would see it in time and embrace it. But our democratic theocracy… well, it’s fallen apart, hasn’t it, darling girl, because it is something that can never exist. Now GOD sits on His throne, a mad monarch.”
The new cook gasps.
Esther looks over her shoulder and eyes the man. “He’ll have to go,” she says.
“Excuse me, Momma,” says Gemma. “But I don’t know if I see the nobility in the Revolution anymore. Not from the files I’ve been reading in the archives. They are heavy with blood.”
“Some would call those sacrifices.” Esther studies her daughter with slight apprehension. “Your eyes look tired, my dear. Do the archives not have sufficient lighting? Perhaps you should seek other employment.”
“Momma,” Gemma says. “Sacrifices? The revolutionaries killed anyone who they perceived as different. They killed children. I saw the orders. Your name was on them, as was Father’s, and some person called T—”
Esther is a striking snake. She stands at once. “What did you see? What files did you see?”
The servants have all gone quite pale.
“The archives, Momma,” Gemma says, cowering under her mother’s glare. She is quieter now. “They say so much. All these horrible things…”
“What do you know of this person T?” Esther begins to shout. Her eyes are wide with rage.
Gemma stands. “I think I’ll head back to the archives. I’m not very hungry today. Excuse me.”
“Gemma!” Esther cries after her as her daughter rounds the table and leaves the dining room. “Gemma! You have no idea what I’ve had to do for you. To protect you. I know sacrifice too, darling girl.”
Her daughter does not answer as she leaves out the front door.
“Don’t believe what you read about me in those files,” she says, though she knows it is useless. “Don’t believe any of it.”
The room is silent for a moment before Esther screams and swipes the table with her arms and the wineglasses, bowls, and candles clatter and crash to the floor.
“You!” she screams at the cook, her breaths shaking and quick. “Clean this up. Then get out of my house, you worthless toad.”
DEIRDRE STARES out her office window. She dares to look at her reflection. Mirrors are a thing of the past for her. She has not seen one in years, nor does she allow them in the hospital, but she can do nothing about windows. She is feeling the scarred side of her face where the old woman touched her. She feels that touch still, the gentleness, the compassion, surging from the old woman’s fingertips into her being. For the briefest of moments, she glimpsed her other life, the more contented one before the Revolution. She had danced then. Many men and women had touched her face gently, had kissed her tenderly. She remembers smiling and laughing until her face hurt. Surely all that is not a dream. Surely it happened.
Her smile once charmed rabid dogs.
Senator General Hegart has sent a note with a ferryman. He will not be able to come and see her as he has promised. This is no surprise. He has not seen her for longer than she can remember. Something always comes up. This time, it is a new outbreak of the plague. Last time, it was the orphans running wild in the city. But she is relieved, for what would she do if he came? Hate has made her ugly. She can see that much in her reflection in the window. And she does hate him. It festers in her, eating away at her insides and causing her painful cramps. She shakes so awfully at times that she finds it impossible to do any work. More than one lobotomy has been botched because of her pain, her hate.
Deirdre remembers the last time she was with the Senator General. There was no conversation. Words are for pages are for books are for history. There was only fucking. She did not move at all as he grunted and hit at her, inside and out. As he cursed her for being “so damn ugly” and then fucked her harder for it, soaking her with drool. After they were through, the bed was wet and sticky from his saliva alone.
She would have cried if she cared or noticed the pain anymore. She had no sensation in her private areas. Not since the Senator General’s slipshod operation on her. Her only pleasure from the sexual experience with him was the touch—even his touch—on her face. “I’m still here,” she would say to herself. “Aye, that’s my face, that’s my flesh. I can still be touched.”
Deirdre breathes deeply. “Time to stop your daydreaming, you fool,” she says. “There’s work to do. Fill your day so you don’t think of such things.”
She is good at filling her days. Her mind rarely wanders except when she is alone. The old woman has distracted her, but it is over now. Yes. She is quite fine. She has a new nurse to lobotomize. Hospitals do not run themselves.
IT IS dusk and light is fading. The sky is so golden as to make GOD envious. Something has been troubling Rossa ever since she saw the ferryman with the gardener. Something is dark, very dark, here. She tries to shake the foreboding. Never mind her suspicions of the old man, she has to leave this place and resume her search for Key. Her rest has been sufficient. Her bruises have healed. She made promises to Claire and Aidan, and she intends to keep them as far as she is able. If the child still lives, Rossa will find him. She is certain she is the only one looking specifically for him. GOD does not care for lost children.
After searching the house and the barns, Rossa realizes the gardener must be with his masterpieces. She knows the gardener has warned her about disturbing the peace of the garden, but she intends to leave this night and has no desire to wait for him to return to the house in the wee hours of the morning as is his habit. She will chance an angry spat.
The black cast-iron gate feels cold and heavy as she pushes it open. Everything grows around her in silhouette. The fading light gives form, but no definition. She feels watched by the larger plants and trees. Their closed blooms and bulbs follow her like eyes on stems. She walks proudly, but watchful. This is no ordinary garden. It is expansive and overgrown, and has a unique stench Rossa can almost place. This odor is so strong, she is forced to put her hand to her nose.
She dares not call out for the gardener. Who knows what might answer? She hears a steady undertone, a growl in the dusk that seems to come from the plants themselves. She tries not to listen, lest she hears words that parallel memories from her childhood nightmares of snovelfarks and boogeymen.
The garden is guarded by scarecrows. There is one for every crop in this field. They stand, arms outstretched against the now-darkened sky. They glisten from the rain, only it has not rained for days. Rossa is drawn to a scarecrow that guards a field of leafy cornbean stalks as tall as she. She pushes past the stalks, her hand still to her nose and mouth. She is continuously tripped up underfoot by the strange, lumpy roots of the vegetables. She stands beneath the scarecrow and looks into his eyes. His eyes. These are not buttons sewn into a cloth sack. These are actual eyes, filmed over with white and surrounded by pale, rotting flesh. From the clothing, Rossa sees that this was once a Kingdom Guard, an expression of horror still set on his face.
Rossa stifles a scream and turns to run. She sees field after field, each one with a rotting corpse to keep the crows’ attention elsewhere. Why bother with vegetation when there is fresh meat?
Suddenly, Rossa hears movement toward her in the stalks. She tries to run but is tripped by the roots and falls. But then she observes with a gasp, these are not roots at all. Severed hands and feet litter the ground. Rossa vomits at the sight of half a child’s face sticking up from the earth, glaring at her.
She cannot see the gardener coming up behind her, but she can hear him. She hears his dragging movement through the stalks. She hears his hoarse whispers to his plants. He says, “Shhh. Everything will be all right. Aye, it’s all going to be just fine.”
But not for Rossa. She is frozen in fear. Her mind flashes back to an alley many years ago and a man of GOD. The gardener’s feet shuffle along the ground behind her. She hears the dull thud of hands and feet being kicked out of the way, of bones being stepped on and broken. She hears him rear back, ready to strike her with something. But then she thinks of Claire and forces herself to act.
She ducks and rolls away from the strike, crawling under the stalks. He comes after her. She is confused and heads to the scarecrow, crawling over the muck and the rot, disallowing the faces and arms and legs to register in her mind. She gives the scarecrow a mighty push from behind. The gardener is caught unaware as the corpse falls on top of him. Rossa knocks the rake from his hand, and the moment he stands free again, Rossa swings the rake with all her strength. The gardener’s cry is a sad thing, not befitting a death. She drives the rake through his temple and face, its sharp prongs sunk in deep. He falls to the ground, his large eye still staring up at her.
Rossa runs from the field and the garden, tripping over death and decay. Once past the iron gate, she collapses to the ground, retching and stripping the soiled garments from her body.
She lies on the grass for a while, naked and staring into the night sky. She is shivering from what she has seen. But she will forge new armor from this trauma. She urges herself to rise and go inside the house.
“You are stronger now,” she says. “You’ve brand new skin.”
She bathes, washing away the filth and stench of the garden, washing away the complacency of a woman she can no longer be. This does not take her long. She wants to be rid of this place soon.
When she is done bathing, she finds a new wardrobe. Rossa is through with skirts and long dresses and the designs she is supposed to wear. She finds them cumbersome. Their very idea is confining. She searches for items of clothing that will be easier to move about in because she suddenly realizes she will need to fight. She knows now what happened to the last maid, and the one before that and so on. She wonders what field each of them watches over. She refuses to think on that too deeply now, though. Instead, she focuses on all the clothes that have been left behind. She chooses a pair of dark riding pants and a lace blouse, which shows her ample chest. Over this, she wears a long black coat, buttoned at her waist, and she finds a pair of thin black boots that extend to her knees. In the mirror, she sees that she is Death. She bundles her long red hair and pins a large black hat slightly askew on her head.
Before she leaves the house, she finds a satchel and fills it with food. She grabs a large knife from the kitchen and sticks it in her belt, with another in her boot. They will do until she can find a proper sword. She wanders into the gardener’s bedchamber—it smells of manure—and finds his coin purse.
Finally, Rossa heads to the barn. She finds two horses: one of pure white and one of gray. She sets the white horse free in the garden but saddles up the gray. “How would you like to come with me?” she says.
The horse seems content to oblige.
“Good. Because I didn’t trust your sister. White has never been my color, lass. I’m gray through and through. I don’t know if that crazy man gave you a name, but I think I’ll call you Claire. You don’t mind that, do ya?”
Rossa, once of the House Bouadica, with the satchel on her back, leads the horse outside and mounts it with ease. “How about we find our boy, Claire?” she whispers in its ear before they take off on a night road toward a part of the city more urban but no less dangerous.
KEY IS sniffling by the fire on the rooftop. He is alone, but that is fine. If he joined up with one of the orphan bands, he would be more easily caught by the ferrymen. His will be a lonely life. He accepts this, but not without nightly tears.
He ran after he saw his father dead, just as Rossa told him to do. He ran without thinking, his mind a blank slate, acting as a buffer from the pain, not letting it all sink in so very soon. He just ran, dodging through people and stalls, into homes and down long alleyways with secret doors and secret stairs. He was carried by his feet, the rest of him too numb to do much else. He ran up to the highest of the buildings and heaps in the most abandoned areas of the city. The air became thinner as he climbed, but he did not stop until at last he collapsed on the ramshackle ruins of what was once a luxury apartment above the clouds. Then, with his arms wrapped around his broken drum, he slept and he cried.
He has been safe here. No one has come looking for him. Most have forgotten the city still reaches this high into the clouds. No structure is allowed to be higher than GOD’s Tower, yet one or two in the ghost towns of the second and third rings manage to escape notice. In vestiges of play, Key pretends he is high in a fortress sometimes. The broken blocks and splintered wood beams of crumbled walls allow him this fantasy. At night, he lets his legs dangle over the edge, and he tries to peer past the thick dark blue clouds to the city down below.
He is an angel without a soul to look after.
Sometimes the wind is a comfort. He almost discerns a language in it.
When he is hungry, he is careful to take the most secret of stairs. From there, he sneaks into a local home that has not yet been abandoned. If he’s lucky, he gets past a lost vendor and tries to steal something. He is usually successful.
But not tonight. Tonight, he goes to bed hungry and sad. The wind is no comfort. Only his small fire offers him any warmth of heart.
He sniffles, the wind whistles, and then, quite surprisingly, he hears another sound just before he nods off. A faint shuffling. Someone is here. Someone else has found Key’s fortress. With his little heart racing, he suffocates the fire and waits, remaining perfectly still against a stone wall beneath the scant moonlight. The shuffling gets closer. The remains of the arched doorway is like a stage, on which Key is certain he will soon see the most horrible things.
But no monster comes forward. It is a man in a uniform. He carries a bag over his shoulders. He looks around the ruins but does not see Key. The man walks cautiously to the edge of Key’s tower. The wind rushes through his dark hair as he stands above the field of night clouds. All is still and quiet. Then the man turns.
“Hello?” he says. “Is someone there?”
Key jumps up with his drum and tries to flee, but the man is quick and closer to the door. He catches the child. Key pelts him with fists and kicks. He releases Key and stumbles backward. Key wipes at his tears, sure he is soon to be killed.
The man massages his shin. “You got me good,” he says. He is holding the other hand out, palm open, a sign of friendship. “It’s okay, boy. I’m not one of them. Whoever you’re scurred of, I ain’t them.”
Key is unsoothed. He is on his feet and ready to run, breathing heavy and shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“I’m just lookin’ for a place to hide, see? Like you. My name is Lawl. I had planned to get into the first ring, but there was a chase. Ol’ Queen Mags was after me, the frigid bitch. I just need a place to hide out. Just for a wee bit. I’ve been climbing all day, and this looks like the safest place I’ve seen. Do ya think ya could stand sharing the space with me? Just for the night? I promise ya, I’ll be gone come mornin’. I’ve no reason to stay around here. None at all.”
Key does not know if he should trust this man. He eyes him warily.
“Look,” Lawl says, digging into his bag. “I’ve got food.” He pulls out an apple and a slice of bread. “You’re welcome to share it with me. It’ll be my rent.”
Key inches forward. His eyes never leave the man’s face, but his hand reaches for the bread. Like a timid, wild puppy, he snatches the slice and hurriedly devours it. Lawl waits for him to finish, then offers the apple.
“There’s more,” he says.
Key takes the apple and walks back to the smoldering ruins of his fire. Lawl approaches slowly and sits opposite the boy. Key starts the fire again quickly, and Lawl brings from his bag a whole loaf of bread. The boy looks at the bag in wonder.
“I was born a gypsy meself,” Lawl says with a lopsided grin.
If Key could giggle, he surely would as he tears into the bread. Lawl is smiling.
“You build a good fire,” Lawl says. He warms his hands over the flame. “Do you play, then?” he asks, nodding to the drum.
Key holds the drum closely. He fingers the tear where it had been ripped as he ran from the ferrymen.
Lawl is once again digging around in his bag. He comes up with a large ball of adhesive. It is thicker than any Key has seen.
“May I see your drum?” Lawl asks.
Key warily hands the drum over to the man.
“Everything can be fixed, boy,” says Lawl, as he rips a strip off the ball. “Aye. Everything that is broken can come back better, stronger. There’s no point in having a song you can’t sing or a drum you can’t beat.”
Lawl hands the drum back to Key. The boy drops his bread on the floor and examines the instrument. It looks almost new, but for a small line where the tear once was. He drops a single beat. Then another. Then a whole series of ecstatic drumbeats as he smiles a toothy grin. Lawl is smiling as well. Key nearly tackles him in an embrace.
“Play something, boy,” Lawl says. “Me and the clouds be your audience.”
Key needs no more encouragement than this. He fills the abandoned tower with his drumsong, the sound of a heart quickened. It spills out into the night and bounces among the clouds. No thunderstorm has ever given such a show as this.