—EXUCYPMQFVJDGRSOBZTKWIHNLA.
The dragons’ words mean nothing, but Abby feels their truth to her core. Even together, they are alone. The sky is the only place for Them, and it is emptiness. The city will not wake up.
—I don’t belong here either. But there must be somewhere in the world we can go. Some place for us. Brother. Sister. Won’t you escape with me?
Abby already knows the answer. The dragons bring death to this place because they cannot live without it. They have imprinted on the city, on the voices of its machines; they feed on its electricity and breathe its emissions. They see in the city a creature like themselves, and they tether themselves to it with fire even as it dies. Her kind does not know how to stop loving, even when their love is terrible. Even when it destroys. The only way they will ever leave is if Empire Island rips itself from the Earth and lifts off from the sea, a reverse asteroid dripping with saltwater and heavy with the detritus of four hundred years of human lives, to show them the way. Until then, they will never leave, will never travel a greater distance from the place of their birth.
Their cords don’t stretch that far.
—POWQRITYDSKJLZUHFGEVXABCNM.
—YEAMSDRKHPTIVLFCZOBJXGNQWU.
Abby can go anywhere, do anything. It is within her power. But the dragons are her kin. What would it mean, to wrench herself from this fusion? To be alone again, forever and always? She has always dreamt of impossible things. But even though the city still sleeps, she has finally woken up.
The lullaby overflows from Abby, floods into the dragons: a key, a spell, a pledge.
—A b c d e f g, h i j k l m n o p, q r s, t u v, w x, y and z…
Her name. Not garbled or jumbled. Not shuffled, truncated, or misremembered. Her name, a simple wisp of a melody, already dissipating up here among the clouds. The dragons still once more.
They are watching. They are waiting. She has answered their call at last.
Abby reaches for the controls.
She steers the HowFly down, from blue sky to blue waves. The sea above, the sea below. No amount of bailing can keep it at bay.
The HowFly noses down into the skin of the sea. Foam rushes against the windscreen, foam and then water, blue and gray and deep gray-green, and still Abby accelerates. Down, down. Beneath the first rush of effervescence, Nereid Bay is opaque and brackish, a Human Nature Preserve wholly submerged. Currents of pink protein solution once flowed here, but now the strange new DNA mixes with all the fluids of man and earth: sewage and seepage and runoff and rain, blood and tears and bathtub drain. Down below, resting on the ocean’s floor, Abby can see dim outlines of sunken junk: barrels rusted to lace, rebar, skeletons with concrete boots, an ancient yacht on its side, dreaming.
—A b c d e f g, h i j k l m n o p, q r s, t u v, w x, y and z…
The windscreen cracks, a single fissure like a bolt across the sky, a stomp on a frozen lake. Abby straps herself into her seat. The HowFly wants to resist, her own body wants to resist, but she wills the throttle down.
The dragons dive into the bay just behind her, almost throw her off course with their tremendous splash. The HowFly bucks in the swell they make. She sees them in the rearview mirror, no longer discernibly yellow and green in the water’s murk, just ancient forms in sepia, frilled and taloned, horned and winged, reaching for her. Demons, angels of the deep. Bubbles pour from their snouts. Can they live underwater? Can they breathe here? She already knows that she cannot.
The windscreen cracks again. That’s God saying we can’t be found.
The HowFly slams into the seabed—foomph!—sending up a cloud of sand. For an instant, the windscreen is a web of cracks, and then there is no windscreen, only the water gushing in, as salty as her blood. Abby cannot see, but she can feel the dragons all around her, swimming, gliding, circling, circling. She thinks back to Hooligan’s bird, the one neither of them could fix, its lament for all time: Fly away, away. Again, she sings the lullaby to soothe the dragons, make them stay.
—A b c d e f g, h i j k l m n o p, q r s, t u v, w x, y and z…
She sings it again and again as the air car fills with water, as the water fills her lungs. She sings it to the dragons, to Dunk, to the Lady, to God. A hymn for rats and vultures, for all the scavengers of this world. She sings it so it will be the last transmission she ever sends. She will not last for long, but the dragons will circle her forever if they can.
Her bones will speak.
Her bones will speak.
Her bones will sing her name.
33
THE ASCENT
In the hours after the dragons plunged back into the seas, the surface of the water bubbled like a cauldron, releasing into the air a thick, lingering miasma of yellow smog. The streets became impassably dim, sulfurous caverns forever branching but never leading to plain daylight and fresh air. Crabbed elderly Survivors crept onto their fire escapes to breathe lungfuls of toxicity, examine their withered hands, invisible a mere arm’s length from the face. Lost dogs whimpered, truly lost now with the rancid scent muffling their olfactories. Pigeons, spooked, flapped up from the pavement, flurried in hurried circles and collided in midair, their skulls cracking together like Zero-G Snooker balls. A pizza delivery guy, marooned far from home and unable to read the street signs, paused in the intersection to eat a fortifying slice.
In the days after the dragons plunged back into the seas, the smog ebbed and dissipated, its presence a hangover from events hazily remembered. It was difficult, already, to believe that the dragons had tormented us for so long, that we had imagined eternity in the shadow of those wings. It was even more difficult to believe that they were gone for good. Scientists visited the city—new scientists, from new labs, impossibly young scientists who appeared to us as children dressed in lab coats, clear-eyed and pure-hearted and precociously serene, digging the beach with their toylike instruments, sounding echoes to the deep like unanswered prayers.
Here is what the scientists determined:
1. Citydwellers must never swim.
2. Citydwellers must never drink groundwater.
3. Citydwellers must report all prophetic dreams to a data collection center.
4. It is safe to live in the city.