HUNGER

They sat on the mountain and watched the night burn.

It happened almost without warning. The sun seemed to give up. There was a sudden, vertiginous sweep of light as it tumbled toward the horizon, struggling there for a moment before spilling over the edge. For a while, the dark was absolute, as if the sun hadn’t just moved to the other side of the planet but been extinguished altogether.

Then came the screams, feral and full of fury.

“Demons,” Pan whispered.

“Means it’s about to happen,” said Night. “The fire.”

It responded to her call, a distant plume of flame searing up, so bright that it left sparkler trails on Pan’s vision. It filled the sky with orange and blue, a blazing pool that rippled outward. A second volcanic eruption surged skyward, this one much closer. Pan squinted against the force of it, seeing that it was coming from one of the black pipelines that crossed the land. A third joined in, then a fourth, until the heavens burned and the night was lit up like the day. Their roar made the earth tremble.

“It’s not safe to stay put for long,” Night said, getting to her feet. “They have a way of finding you.”

Past the glare Pan could see movement down below as the demons crawled up from the baked earth. Their screams filled the night but they were far enough away for now. Night had picked up her spear and was walking down the slope. Pan had to heft herself up like her body was made of solid iron. It took her reformed brain a moment to work out how to take a step. At least she had clothes, though. Night had skipped off a while back and found her a threadbare shirt. It was gray and riddled with holes, and it made her skin feel like it wanted to crawl right off her bones, but it was better than an old sack. She’d found her some sweatpants in the dirt, too, which had to have been a thousand years old.

“None of this makes any sense,” Pan said, and she could hear the desperation in her voice. “This place, it’s just wrong.”

“What did you expect?” asked Night, leading the way down. “You make a deal with the Devil then you won’t exactly find yourself in the Intercontinental. This place is two-star at best.”

“Two-star?” said Marlow.

“An extra star for the view,” she said, and her laugh drew a smile from him.

“You kept your sense of humor in hell,” he said. “That’s pretty impressive.”

“I didn’t,” said Night, studying the insect shapes that scurried across the land, treading carefully as the ground grew steeper. “I lost hope, I lost my name, I thought I’d lost myself. But you guys, you gave it back.” She cleared her throat. “I’ll lose it all again, and so will you, but for now, right here, it’s not so bad.”

“Speak for yourself,” muttered Pan. “You didn’t get your head ripped off.”

“Actually, I did,” said Night, jutting her chin in the air to reveal a jagged scar around her throat. “Not by Patrick, but by a ghost. It hurt. Didn’t even come off all the way, took forever to bleed out.”

“All right, Nearly Headless Night,” said Pan. “You win.”

“Don’t suppose there’s a Famous Ray’s New York Pizza around here?” Marlow asked. Pan’s own hunger was an aching void inside her, her thirst unreal. Night just laughed again, but this time it was bitter.

“No food,” she said. “No water. You want to eat, then … Then there’s flesh, plenty of it. But you don’t want to go there. No faster way to lose yourself than to end up like Patrick.”

“Don’t we need food?” said Marlow. “Don’t we, like, die without it?”

Night nodded, scrubbing her face with her filthy hand.

“Those are the worst deaths,” she said. The metal in her skin caught the firelight, glowed like the filament in a lightbulb. “They take weeks, and you grow weaker and weaker and weaker until you can’t even move. Those are the very worst. But you get used to them.”

“You really saw the Devil?” Pan asked, trying to change the subject and instantly wishing she’d picked something else.

Night waited until she’d skipped off the foot of the mountain into the desert of ash, checking left and right before walking again. She was heading for another of those conduits, this one looking like a massive oil pipeline.

“I don’t know what he was. Don’t ask me to describe it, because I cannot. I saw the end of the world, the end of everything. And he was there.”

“How do you know?” Pan asked.

“Because I have seen him before,” she said. “In the black pool. I saw him there every time I made a deal. You saw him, too, he is unmistakable.”

Pan had seen it countless times, when she’d climbed into that pool of death to forge a contract with the Engine—a madness of eyes and teeth, as big as the world, who had asked her, “This is what you desire?”

“You saw him?” she asked. “Here?”

Night nodded.

“Great,” muttered Marlow.

They walked in silence for a while, trailing the giant pipeline. Pan reached out, grabbed the conduit for support, only to feel that sensation again, so much stronger this time—like the metal pieces that made up her flesh were trying to pull their way out of her. There was an explosion of dark light at the front of her skull and she let go, blinking away spots of shadow. Her whole body thrummed like a plucked guitar string.

“What?” Marlow asked.

“You don’t feel that?” Pan said, nodding at the conduit. It wasn’t really much of a pipe, more a snaking piece of machinery. This section must have been thirty feet tall, sculpted from a thousand pieces of iron. Black, fleshy veins as big as her arm ran the length of it, weaving in and out of the mechanical components, pulsing gently. She watched as Marlow put his hand to it, as what little blood was left in his face drained away.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Remind you of anything?” said Night. She stood there, spear gripped in her hand.

Millions of cogs, springs, filaments. Yeah, they reminded Pan of something.

“The Engine,” she said.

Marlow nodded.

“Yeah, the Devil’s Engine,” said Night. “I don’t know what they are, but I know this: if you follow them, you find him.”

And Pan suddenly understood what she was feeling when she touched the metal, that magnetic pull.

The Devil was calling them.

“We have to go to him,” said Marlow, reaching the same understanding.

Pan spat out a dry laugh.

“No way. No way in hell.”

“You think we have a choice?” he asked.

Pan looked at Night and the girl shrugged, digging her spear into the ash.

“You felt it call you,” Marlow added. “What else can we do?”

Whatever these pipes were, wherever they led, Pan wanted no part of them.

“Come on, Night,” said Marlow. “Where else are we going to find answers?”

“Even if it is the Devil,” said Pan. “What makes you think we’ll get answers?”

He chewed his shrapneled knuckles for a moment, frowning.

“Because this place has to mean something,” he said. “It can’t just be … this.”

Pan stopped walking, flexing her toes in the cloud-soft ash. Her thoughts were boxed away, pushed into storage. Uncovering them felt ridiculously slow. She tried not to think about the fact that she had died, that her brain had literally grown again from the earth, each and every synapse formed from the stuff of the dead. Going down that road would lead her to madness and nothing else.

But she could still feel that awful pressure, the moment her head had come off. And she’d heard it, that crunch of bone, as Patrick chewed on her skull. She’d still been conscious for that first, awful bite.

I deserve it, she told herself, thinking of what she’d done to Patrick, to his sister, to everyone she’d ever hurt. Her procession of the dead would stretch a long, long way, starting all those years ago with Christoph. I deserve all of it.

And maybe she should just lie down, wait for the demons to take her. She could lie there and die and die and die, over and over and over. After a while, surely, she wouldn’t even notice it. She rubbed the scar that ringed her neck, swallowed dust into a stomach as dry as sandpaper.

“This place doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “All it wants is for us to suffer.”

“But—”

Marlow stopped speaking, stopped walking, ducked down. Pan froze, too, her borrowed heart clamoring. Night had taken a couple more steps before she realized she was alone, crouching, all of them listening to a voice ghosting out of the night.

“Marlow? Marlow? Marlow?” It was thin and reedy, just a whisper over the roar. It grew louder, louder, muffled by the pipe that lay between them. Then it faded.

For a while, nobody moved, then Night pushed on, leaving tiptoe prints in the ash. Marlow hesitated, and Pan could read his thoughts as they flashed across his face—What if it wasn’t a ghost? What if it was somebody real?—before he gave up and kept walking.

“Your but,” said Pan.

“My what?” he asked.

“You said but.”

“Oh, yeah, this place. I can’t…” He chomped on a knuckle and she could see the blood there where he’d broken the skin. “Oh, right. But why are we here? I mean, I know about the contract and everything, but why? You ever stop to ask why you’d lose your soul if you couldn’t break your contract? Why the Devil would even want your soul?”

She had, she’d thought about it so many times, but the answer had always been the same: It doesn’t matter, because it will never happen to you.

“He eats them,” says Night. “That’s what we always got told. Went to Catholic school back in Mexico, before they kicked me out for drinking the sacramental wine. You should have seen that Eucharist, we replaced it with antifreeze.” She laughed softly, the sound like sunlight. “Anyway, we always got told if we sinned, the Devil would feast on our souls.”

“Like barbecue?” said Marlow.

“Sí, like he wanted to drain something from us, our energy or something. Ay dios mío, Sister Margarita would freak knowing that she’d actually been right about me. She always said I would burn.”

“Sounds like a nice lady,” said Marlow.

“Don’t even get me started on la chancla.”

“So you’re saying we’re here because the Devil wants to eat our souls,” said Pan. “Which means I’m right, we shouldn’t go anywhere near him.”

“But you’re still walking,” Marlow said. And he was right, she was.

Pan sniffed, staring out into the desert. A wind had blown up, forming ripples in the ash and pulling it up into the air. It was so thick it looked like mist and she was glad of it because it meant they were harder to find.

“I’m just saying,” Marlow said. “We don’t know anything about this … this whatever you want to call it. We all saw him inside the Engine, yes. He gave us the powers, granted our wishes, yes. He took our souls and dragged them into this craphole, yes.”

“Yes?” said Pan when he didn’t continue.

“What if there’s something else he wants?” Marlow said with a half-assed shrug. “What if there’s something we can give him?”

“In return for what?” Pan asked. “Special treatment? He might serve us for the main course instead of dessert.”

“I’m just trying to think of ideas,” Marlow snapped back. “I’m just trying to do some—”

“Whoa!”

Marlow thumped into the back of Night, Pan almost walking into Marlow. She craned her head over Marlow’s shoulder but all she could see up ahead was the same desert, the same cloud of ash bathed in firelight.

“What’s up?” she said.

“What’s down,” said Night, standing to the side to make room for her.

Pan took a couple of steps forward and was about to take another one when Marlow grabbed her arm. She retreated, finally seeing the slope, the ledge just beneath it, and then nothing.

“Oh,” she said, kicking at the ash and watching it slide into oblivion. Only the conduit carried on, stretching out into the haze like the Brooklyn Bridge in the fog. She looked to the side, seeing the vague line of the cliff, and beyond that what could have been the edge of the world. “You think it’s deep?”

“Could just be a couple of feet,” said Marlow. “Dibs not checking.”

“Dibs,” said Night.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure dibs doesn’t work down here,” Pan said. She ducked, rooting her hand in the ash, staring into the swirling abyss. Every now and then the clouds would thin and she was certain she could see something churning far below, an ocean. A fist of vertigo struck her in the gut and she moved back on her hands and knees until she felt steady enough to stand.

“Well, that answers that, then,” said Pan.

“Huh?” Marlow and Night said together.

“Our field trip to see the Devil. We can’t go any farther.”

Marlow was looking at the pipe, chewing his knuckles, and Pan shook her head.

“Don’t even think it,” she said.

“It’s huge. It will be like walking along a footbridge.”

Yeah, a footbridge that filled your head with shadows, that blinded you.

He put a hand up to the metal, not quite touching it. His expression belonged to a man who was about to jam a fork into an electrical outlet.

“I’m not going,” Pan said.

“Then wait here,” he replied, wincing as he put his hand to the pipe. She heard a noise—or not quite a noise, more a cross between a generator hum and the buzz of a bluebottle trapped inside the pipes of her sinuses, tickling them so much she had to pinch the bridge of her nose. Marlow had pulled his hand away and was flexing it madly. His face was like parchment, like it had been drawn onto a paper bag.

“Come on. Whatever is over there, it can’t be worse than what we’ve already seen.”

She glanced back into the swirling wall of dust. Demons, ghosts, and Patrick the Monster, too, probably. He’d have regenerated by now and she had a funny feeling he wasn’t done with her.

Could the Devil be worse than that?

Yeah, she thought. He could.

But however awful it was, nothing could be more awful than being alone here. And it was that thought—watching Night and Marlow vanish into the dust, leaving her behind—that made her nod her head.

“Fine,” she grunted. “After you.”