People Park

I

ERE WAS THE MORNING barely. Sometime in the waning hours of Friday night, those uncertain moments before dawn, the cloudcover sealed fontanelle-like over the island and snow began to fall. The temperature dropped and when the sun rose it did so with effort, struggling through fog thick as a pelt. Clouds drooped over the island, the sky nuzzled the ground, everything the same dirty white: the air, the thin crust of snow. Where did earth meet atmosphere, there was no telling.

It was this faint, hazy morning that greeted Kellogg. Waking felt akin to surfacing from the murky depths of a cave into an even murkier swamp. Outside hung that miasmic mist, and for a moment Kellogg had no idea where he was — and who were these people? and who was he? It took a moment before he recognized the children in the backseat as his own. The woman asleep in the passenger seat was Pearl, his wife, and he was her husband, Kellogg. They were a family, the Pooles, together, on vacation.

From the huge and vexing and open, Kellogg nestled into the sanctuary of the familiar. He looked from one dreaming Poole to the next, peaceful and perfect. But something nagged at him, watching them sleep. Elsie-Anne, Gip, Pearl, their faces were masks. Who might he be in their dreams, what sort of figure, a hero or villain, triumphant or shamed?

Though Pearl claimed she didn’t dream, never had. But everyone dreams, Kellogg told her once, they’d had friends over for dinner, he looked wildly around the table for support. Not me, she’d said, and poured herself more wine. She could be lying: maybe her dreams were too weird to share. Or maybe she was oblivious to her own dreams, which was sad. Sadder: what sort of person had no dreams?

Watching Pearl sleep Kellogg wished for a device with which he could witness his wife’s dreams — and then he could tell her about them. But such a device did not exist. Kellogg looked past her, out the window, where snowflakes like little flames tumbled through the campsite’s lamplight, and replayed the final hours of the previous evening.

When the khaki-shirted men had escorted Gip back to his parents there’d been something almost apologetic in the way they handed him over — Sir, Ma’am. From that point things petered out: the last firework popped and splattered, the videoscreens shut down, an NFLM rep came onstage and offered a tepid, un-mic’d, Thanks for coming, have a great night, and ducked behind the curtains. The crowd lingered with collective, discomfited confusion — there was a sense of unfinished business. Kellogg, though, remained ecstatic. With deep booming pride he hugged his son. You were amazing, champ, he gushed. Wasn’t he, Pearly? Everyone was watching you. Everyone saw! But the boy seemed distant. He felt oddly limp in Kellogg’s arms. He’s tired, said Pearl, prying Gip away, petting his face. We’ve had a long day, let’s get everyone to bed.

The crowd scattered, the air grew cold. Kellogg shivered as he hustled the family up the path out of the common. Along the way Gip kept silent as he was recognized and accosted: You were the boy onstage, how’d he do it? Pearl got snippy with one family who suggested Gip had been in on the trick and was now responsible for explanations. Leave my son alone, Pearl snapped, sweeping him under her arm while Kellogg shrugged and chuckled in a diplomatic way, he hoped.

At their campsite Pearl said, It’s too cold for camping, my kids are not freezing to death in a tent tonight, and herded them onto Harry’s backseats. Car sleepover, yelled Kellogg, fun! and grinned into the minivan. Gip gazed back blankly, his face emptied of life. What an amazing night! Kellogg roared, and Pearl said, Hush now, get the sleeping bags, you’re letting the cold in.

He headed to the tent feeling unsettled. The night had been amazing — hadn’t it? To think Gip had been centrestage alongside his idol for the whole miraculous thing, a dream fulfilled, before thousands of witnesses. Though why did the boy now seem so numb? The night struck Kellogg as a jewel — sparkling, perfect, yet flawed when tilted to the light. Worse: with some ghastly embryo fossilized inside.

Outside the tent Kellogg shivered, bedding heaped in his arms. Across the site, inside Harry, was his family, they couldn’t see anything beyond the lit-up interior of the minivan. He watched Pearl blow her nose, excavate her nostrils, inspect what she found, and ball the tissue in her fist. The campground was quiet, everyone was going to sleep. The air felt wintry and thin.

And now, the next morning, winter had arrived. Kellogg turned the keys in the ignition, the engine growled and the fans came on with a blast of cold air. And yet still no one woke: cocooned within sleeping bags Elsie-Anne and Gip slept soundly, Pearl leaned against the frosted window, a little ellipsis of clear glass where her breath melted the ice.

Kellogg had to pee. He slid out of the minivan quietly, eased the door shut. A half-inch of snow covered the ground. In the fog floated dark forms that might have been trees, he aimed in their general direction, shivering, and as he zipped back up from the neighbouring site an engine came coughing to life. The red squares of taillights appeared. Holy, said a voice, can’t see anything out here.

Another voice responded — quieter, murmuring, followed by the pneumatic wheeze of an opening car trunk. Kellogg moved toward the lights and voices, the squeak and crunch of snow and gravel under his feet. The trunk closed with a whump.

At the neighbouring campsite forms materialized from the mist: a young man, a green hatchback, a camping stove, blue flames wobbled around a tin pot. The car idled and chugged exhaust, the door hung open, and in the passenger seat a young woman flipped through a mess of static on the radio.

Morning, said Kellogg. Some fog.

The man — more of a boy, a fist-shaped medallion dangled from his neck — nodded down at the burner. I’m trying to make coffee.

Not going so hot? Heh.

Kellogg’s joke went unheralded. The girl joined them. The radio’s like, dead, she said.

The boy pulled the lid of the pot, revealing water as flat as glass.

My family’s sleeping a few spots over, said Kellogg. We were camping, but —

Weird, said the girl. Look at the snow! Yesterday was so nice, then, bang, winter, just like that. You ever seen snow and fog at the same time? And this shet with the bridge —

What’s the um, shet with the bridge? said Kellogg.

They’re still blocking off the PPT and Topside, said the boy. I went for a walk up there this morning and a Helper-guy told me — the bridge is just gone.

What, still?

Yeah. I mean, it can’t be gone, said the girl. How are we supposed to get out? We had camping plans this weekend, we aren’t even supposed to be here.

Our stupid dorm’s being fumigated, so.

And now there’s no way off the island.

Could be worse places to be though? said Kellogg.

You’re not from here?

My wife is. Originally. We’re here on vacation. That was my son onstage last night!

We didn’t watch the show, said the boy with pride.

And the magician? Maybe when he turns back up he’ll fix —

The girl said, Do you know how much money they spent to bring that guy here?

No, said Kellogg. How much?

She looked blankly at her boyfriend, who offered nothing. Lots, she said. Money they could have used for more important things.

Such as?

Housing programs.

For?

People.

Gotcha, said Kellogg.

This water, said the boy, it’s just not boiling.

What I’m saying is, said Kellogg, maybe the trick’s not over.

I mean, they’ve got to do something, said the girl. She looked forcefully and with disappointment at Kellogg, implicating him in this they.

They will, he said.

From the fog a voice called, Kell?

He excused himself, discovered Pearl on her knees in Harry’s backseat rooting through a mess of wrappers and juiceboxes and snot-wadded facial tissues. The kids were awake, blanketed to their chins and shivering.

Pearl stepped out, took Kellogg by the elbow. I can’t find them, she whispered.

Can’t find what?

His meds, she said. I can’t find Gip’s meds.

THE FOG FIT snug as a lid over the island, dying at its edges in raggedy wisps. As the view from Podesta Tower rotated east the Mayor, torso still estranged from the lower half of her body, was faced with People Park: the common was a bowl of milk overflowing into the city. Fog scudded along the streets and up the sides of buildings, thick all the way to the water in every direction.

The deck rotated: Fort Stone, Li’l Browntown, Bebrog, Greenwood Gardens, the Institute’s campus knuckled into the island’s southeastern corner — all of it hidden under a melancholy lather. To the south, Perint’s Cove was also lost in fog, the Islet didn’t exist.

To the west the fog spilled through downtown, connected in ropy sinews to the low-slung clouds concealing the office towers’ tops, lapped up Mount Mustela right to the Necropolis, in LOT ignored and bounded over and through the gates of the Mews, engulfed Knock Street, threaded into UOT and Blackacres, the tenements swathed, the power still out, in the northwest corner of the island Whitehall was invisible too. And on the westside, as with the east, the fog stopped at the water. As if, thought the Mayor, a wall had gone up around the island.

Now she looked north: where Guardian Bridge had been was only absence. Across the Narrows, the mainland, was fogless and clear, not a wisp reached its shores. NFLM patrols clustered at either end of Topside Drive and at the opening of the People Park Throughline, into which snaked a trail of cars. That morning a queue had begun forming of commuters waiting for the bridge to reopen — or reappear.

Though this she couldn’t see, and only knew from the memo Griggs had faxed over at dawn. The gist: At four a.m. some hysteric had broken through the barricade screaming, Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors! and tried to sprint out over the Narrows. There’d been no cartoonish moment of the guy suspended in space, he’d just plummeted straight into the river. The current had been particularly swift and Luckily, reported the NFLM, there were no witnesses, and the story had been swept away with him.

Phone, said the Mayor, and Diamond-Wood passed her the handset, retreated, the cord connected them umbilically. The Mayor coiled it around her finger, let it sproing back and dangle slackly, listened to the steady bleat of the dialtone. She liked when expecting a call to ambush the person phoning, to pick up before it rang and disorient them, to always have the upperhand.

People who weren’t quick and sharp infuriated her, inefficiency was the bane of any city. This was the reason she’d whittled her council in half her first term, why she’d cut the city districts to four, and now met only quarterly with representatives from each quadrant. The Mayor was methodical, which wasn’t the same as slow: methodical meant developing a methodology and then operating, swiftly. If life were a minefield, the Mayor reasoned, you informed yourself and blazed into it, never tiptoeing along in meek, weak terror. If your leg got blown off you hopped. And now with a shudder the Mayor thought of her own legs: if you lost both, apparently, you found someone else to push.

Connect me to the Temple, she said.

Diamond-Wood dialled, the handset purred, the Mayor imagined the NFLM line jangling unheeded on some desk, the men asleep in bunkbeds — kids playing firemen but with hairier feet.

The view swung around to People Park. On its north side, the Thunder Wheel looked like a rusty sawblade lodged halfway into a robustly frosted cake. Beneath it, damp with fog, the rides would be shrouded in tarpaulin. Island Amusements was scheduled to open that evening, yet how could it possibly in this?

She let the line ring a couple more times, hung up, ordered, Hit PAUSE.

The deck stopped turning. Everything was still.

Look, she said, pointing to the Thunder Wheel. What a beautiful thing. Do you love this city? I love this city. I was born at Old Mustela Hospital fifty-seven years ago and I’ve lived here all my life. You know how many times I’ve left in those fifty-seven years? None. Why would I leave? I’ve never been on an airplane. On a boat exactly once — the fireworks barge during the centenary celebrations. You don’t need to leave this place. So why get bent out of shape about being trapped here — where else would you rather be?

Silence from Diamond-Wood. The Mayor checked the phone again — nothing — handed the receiver to him, he deposited it into its console. Take off that tape, will you? she said. It’s like talking to a coma patient.

He did.

Better?

Yes, he said. Thanks.

Anyway where was I? Oh yes — trapped, bah. The idea of being trapped here, it’s like a child being trapped in a. . in a. . wherever children like to be. A store for children’s things. Games or what have you!

The Mayor could hear the anxiety rising in her voice. Like a child in an adultless land, she decided, and continued with rekindled vigour: And while these aren’t ideal circumstances, doesn’t it offer the potential to bring the city together? Maybe it’s exactly what we need to make us realize how lucky we are! So the bridge is gone, so what! Right?

Well, said Diamond-Wood, the power’s still out in the Zone —

Those people are used to struggling! If anyone can deal with a little hardship it’s them. Few people are aware of this, but I come from poverty.

Oh?

The Mayor peered over her shoulder at her aide: hunched upon his crutches, patchy stubble darkened his cheeks and chin, his uniform had the appearance of a rumpled paper bag. She looked away, continued: Touch green! Grew up in a trailerpark in what was then called South Bay. This was before the Lakeview projects. I was born in a house on wheels. Not literally, I was born at Old Mustela, but a trailer was where I spent the first few months of my life. So I think I know a little something about struggle. I understand people — rich, poor, young, old, fat, stupid — and that’s what makes for an effective leader in times of crisis: empathy.

The phone burbled to life.

Give it to me! she screamed, nearly falling off the dessert cart.

The High Gregories sat around the speakerphone in their underground conference chamber — Griggs, Wagstaffe, Magurk, Noodles. Bean stood at the portal that led up into the Temple, hands behind his back in the pose of niteclub bouncers. In an adjacent chamber, Favours was having his morning treatments administered by two Recruits in latex gloves and surgical masks. From another came whimpering — tears?

Bad news first? said Griggs, his voice as inert as the basement air.

Fine, said the Mayor.

No sign of him, said Wagstaffe.

None? said the Mayor. What is wrong with you people? What did you —

It’s nothing we can’t sort out, said Griggs.

And Island Amusements? said the Mayor. It’s expected to open —

Don’t get your gitch in a gotch, said Magurk. That’s the fuggin good news.

Everything’s all set, said Wagstaffe.

Everything? said the Mayor. I wouldn’t say —

Let’s meet here for a face-to-face, said Griggs. There’s a car waiting for you outside.

Now?

Now.

See you soon! said Wagstaffe cheerily, and the line went dead.

Griggs looked around the table. Anyone hungry?

Noodles nodded.

Bean, said Griggs, fetch us some flats. And wake B-Squad up. I’m sure the Mayor will want some answers from the dynamic duo meant to be keeping tabs on Raven.

SAM SLID BACK the cover from the peephole. The armoire was empty.

If you’re there say something okay, he said, and moved his ear to the door.

Silence. Sam touched his face. The scab was dry.

I know you’re in there okay, said Sam. I know you can make it look like you’re not. But you can’t go anywhere Raven. Sam tried the handles: the boards and chains and locks held fast. There’s no way out.

Sam placed an apple on the tray he’d affixed through a slot halfway up the door. You can have an apple for breakfast. If you want more I can get more.

He pushed it through, heard the dull thud of the apple falling, put his eye to the peephole. From the bare overhead bulb fanned a cone of yellow light that dwindled in the dark corners. Upon the armoire’s newspapered floor sat the apple, gleaming. There was no hint of movement from the shadows, darkness there and nothing more.

If the apple’s bruised I can bring you another one okay, said Sam. Or if you don’t like apples tell me what you like. I have juice. Or water. Or I could nuke you a meal.

Sam waited, eye at the peephole. Nothing.

The phone rang, the sudden burst of it a small explosion in the still room. Sam stood over the console. It alternated ringing and not — a tinny jangle, then silence, and the silence felt expectant, and Sam synchronized his breathing to it: inhale as the phone rang, and exhale between rings, not picking up because it would be the same voice, a deadened echo as though the call were coming from the bottom of the lake. Like speaking to his own drowned ghost.

The phone stopped ringing. The room waited. Then, from the armoire: scraping. Sam held his breath. A thump. And then something scrabbly and wet-sounding — the watery snap and crunch of a mouth biting hard with its teeth into an apple.

AT THE SOUND of fluttering Calum raises his head. Swooping down from above is a grey bird. A pigeon it seems at first but as it stills itself in the air with a slow backward beating of wings it might be a dove, though dirty or dusted with newsprint or ash, he thinks.

The bird, whatever it is, lights upon the railing of the pedestrian walkway, its claws curl around the metal bar, and tilting its head regards Calum with something evaluative or curious. He stares back. He feels cold. He laces his arms around his shins and pulls them close and wedges his chin between his knees. In the bird’s pinkish eyes glitters something suspicious, he thinks. It doesn’t trust him. It can’t be trusted.

Calum says, Go away. And the words again are eaten.

The bird lifts one foot, then the other, puffs, shudders, but doesn’t go anywhere.

So Calum lunges at it — though halfheartedly, if he caught it what would he do. The bird maybe knows this, it makes no effort to fly away. It only regards Calum steadily with those eyes like two droplets of something’s pale and mucosal blood. Calum feints again to smack it but the bird holds its ground undaunted, so he lowers his hand and for a moment the bird looks familiar, he thinks, though his memory feels emptied and what he can’t think is from where or when, or where where might even be or when, when.

He takes another swipe. Deftly the bird swerves out of reach, resettles on the railing, nods, caws, squawks, chirps, what does a bird think or mean to say, is it taunting him or only making noise for itself. Watching the bird gloat Calum feels repelled and repulsed.

Go on, he says, get out of here.

But his voice sounds like a tape played in reverse, each syllable sucks back into itself.

He looks up and down the bridge which narrows identically in both directions to little pinprick endpoints, tunnelling into a sky that has forgotten how to be a sky. Which way to go, does it matter. All that matters maybe is movement, away from this bird.

Calum picks a direction, he doesn’t know which one, and begins to walk.

II

EBBIE AWOKE ALONE. The covers on Adine’s side of the bed were undisturbed.

Adine? she called, sitting up. Adine?

No reply. She got up.

In the den Pop’s bedding remained heaped in the middle of the floor. The bathroom door was open, no one was inside, nor was anyone in the kitchen. Other than Jeremiah, blinking at her from the couch, the apartment was empty — Debbie did not count herself.

Normally the fridge hummed, the mixing bowls atop it jingled. But with no power everything was silent, the air brittle. From the couch Jeremiah, tail alert and coiled at its tip into a fiddlehead, watched her. Debbie shivered, scooped the blanket off the floor and took it to the window nook, swaddled herself, and curled up looking out over the street: but there was nothing to see, UOT was smothered in fog.

Across the room the blank screen of the TV glowed a greenish eggshell hue, it had a light of its own even when it wasn’t on. Where was Adine? Out there stumbling through the city in her sweatsuit and goggles — Adine out in the city, how absurd.

Though there’d been a time when she’d loved the city and in a way the city had brought them together. When they’d met, Debbie had been still new enough to it, having spent her undergrad years mostly on the Institute’s campus and in the adjacent student neighbourhood spoken of myopically as the ghetto. Everything west of the park seemed impossibly vast and intimidating and arcane.

Adine had spent her whole life on the island, she navigated it effortlessly, she knew things and places and secrets. Debbie’s exuberance and naivety invigorated her and so the city came alive for them both. Though it wasn’t just living in the city, it was talking about it: so much happened every day, hilarious and thrilling and sad. So they opened themselves to its people, its streets, its clichés and mysteries, and everywhere they found stories to recount to each other.

Once, during an early-morning Blueline commute, an elderly woman’s newspaper-wrapped fish came alive between her feet, and the woman — so old she was made of dust, Debbie would later poeticize her — calmly took the flopping creature by the tail, beat it to death against the train’s dirty floor, and reclined with a nonchalance meant to suggest the blood and scales at her feet had always been there. Witnessing all this from across the aisle Debbie was already skipping forward to that evening, when she’d tell it to Adine, and they’d cackle together in horror and delight.

Back then despite living on the opposite side of the city she spent most nights at Adine’s, and every minute apart provided stories for their next meeting. But they never had enough time: there was always too much to tell, their voices bubbled overtop of each other’s, everything frantic and urgent — and then! and then! and then! At night they had to start setting two alarms: one to wake them in the morning, the other to indicate a time they absolutely had to shut up and sleep, and after which they weren’t allowed another word.

After a year of this Debbie moved in. Technically she and Adine began to share everything, though quickly there seemed less to share. Something happened: the city lost its drama, fewer were the moments of the sublime, the absurd, the ridiculous. In stitching their lives together Debbie began to fear they’d sealed the space, that chasm of mystery and possibility between them, where what was most alive about their relationship had crackled and zipped.

But if the real city no longer held any magic for them, Debbie had wondered, perhaps Adine’s tiny replica version might. The first time Debbie suggested visiting her Sand City — just to see! — Adine had scowled and scoffed. But after some persuading, up there alone in the Museum’s upper gallery they’d gone quiet before it, almost reverential. Adine ran her hand over the glass. There it is, she’d said simply, and Debbie had scooted up behind her and laid her head on Adine’s shoulder so she could see what Adine saw and told her, It’s beautiful. And then: I’m sorry.

Jeremiah hopped up onto the window ledge, mewling, back arched, tail rippling at its tip. Good dog, said Debbie, running her hand over the cat’s spine. There was something in his fur, some dander or fluffy lint, Debbie plucked it free — a feather. For a moment she assumed he’d clawed open a pillow, something he used to do as a kitten, and then she remembered the bird. Oh no, bad dog, she scolded him, and went into the kitchen.

On the sill sat the newspaper-lined casserole dish into which she’d laid the dove. The window was open, mist hung thick and colourless over the street. In the dish were some feathers, a yolky smear of poop — but no bird. Oh, Jeremiah, sighed Debbie, taking his face in her hands. Did you eat that poor bird? The cat offered a slow, bemused blink, and flicked his tongue over his nose. Then he squirmed away.

Debbie looked under the table, behind the stove, anywhere the feeble creature might have been either dumped or gotten lost. From the kitchen window she struggled to make out the street below, let alone a carcass upon the sidewalk. The fog was solid as cement.

She removed the newsprint from the dish and unfolded it on the countertop as if it might reveal some clue. Maybe the dove had flown? The idea swelled from fantasy to probability. It had been simply stunned, Debbie told herself, and over the course of the night revived and, at some early morning hour, found the strength to push off out the window, caught an updraft that lifted it over the city, up through the clouds into the sky, where it wheeled and danced, maybe, once again free.

AT SOME POINT midmorning, time meant nothing in Cinecity, the images onscreen went live again: first-person footage of the downtown streets, fog whisking this way and that, a faint snowfall sprinkling down. The shot plodded along between office towers, everything silent save the rustle and squeak of popcorn breakfasts taken in the theatre.

These were the first live images Adine and the rest of the full house had seen since midnight, when she and her westend cavalcade had arrived just in time to watch a dishevelled Lucal Wagstaffe and a possibly drunk Isa Lanyess announce they were ending their broadcast. After the analgesic tone of an EBS test the colour bars were replaced with a title card in black and white: The Silver Jubilee, A Second Look.

This comprised hastily spliced-together We-TV footage of the previous night’s festivities, and began with monologues performed in garages and bedrooms around the island, from the Mews to Fort Stone, the popular acumen of the masses, all those predictions and insights edited into one rambling overture that echoed and contradicted and befuddled itself before things cut to a happy Li’l Browntown family painting wings on one another’s faces and chanting Ra-ven on their driveway.

Cut to a disembodied voice narrating tremulous handheld footage of the crowds descending into the park, hundreds of napes of necks and backs of knees with the view sometimes flashing skyward where sunspots seared the lens. A new voice took over, someone else shooting the opposite end of the park. All of this was set to a jaunty carnivalesque score, the time flashing at oddly progressing intervals: 13:40, 14:10, etc.

The daylight began to deepen. An extended segment featured a surprisingly well-researched and thorough tour of the Museum of Prosperity, right up to the top floor, and here was Adine’s Sand City, and seeing it she felt a slight pang of — what? Something proprietary, violation, shame, yet beneath it an ember of pride. With the camera zooming in on her model it seemed unreal, or too real, the miniature buildings expanded to the size of actual buildings. Feeling overwhelmed, Adine’s thoughts retreated into memories — of Debbie. Debbie who had once cranked a song on the radio, claiming it was theirs, and Adine had run to the bathroom and pretended to barf. But if anything was theirs it was the Sand City. Visiting the Museum’s top floor had become the thing to do when there was nothing to do, they’d Yellowline over and Redline up and wave at the girls working ticketsales and climb the tower and there it was, under glass.

They’d tell each other stories then. When they ran out of stories they’d make some up: What if Isa Lanyess was actually sent here from some other planet to jellify our minds so she could plant her eggs into them and then all our heads would hatch millions of little space-alien babies? Adine suggested once. What if Lucal Wagstaffe’s a secret vegetarian? countered Debbie. Adine had a key that locked the door, if she needed to. And sometimes Debbie would fix her with a sidelong lingering look, and she did.

Though these thoughts sparked irritation. The model wasn’t Debbie’s, it wasn’t theirs — it was hers, Adine’s, only Adine’s. Debbie was an interloper. She had so much else, all her friends and causes, her stupid cumin-drenched dinners and community. She shouldn’t get to possess or even share the thing Adine had created before they’d met.

Debbie was the one responsible for its display now on the bigscreen — this violation, this corruption. Of course the public could visit the Sand City whenever they wanted, and that was bad enough, but simultaneously seen by so many people like this, with its creator reduced to another set of ogling eyes, felt cheap and humiliating.

But then the image dissolved: from the roof of the boathouse someone made wide sweeping pans of the mobbed park, which became a montage, one image flashed to the next, until the moment the Zone’s power had cut out. All the westenders who’d missed the illustration edged forward in their seats. The tubby little superfan, Gip Poole, was brought onstage. The crowd went wild, the trunk opened, Raven got inside, the boy locked him in. Cut to one of those massive screens that flanked the gazebo, footage of the footage of Guardian Bridge, and the lights went out and came back on and the bridge was gone, and everyone in Cinecity gasped, even those not seeing it for the first time.

Cue fireworks.

Fade to black.

Credits.

The End.

And now this preamble to the main event, All in Together Now, the movie for the people by the people: a camera trolling the streets of downtown. South on Paper Street, out of downtown to Lakeside Drive, down to the shoreline, nosing out of the mist with the curiosity of a stage manager scoping the crowd between parted curtains. If this made the water an auditorium, there was no audience. The view was clear: no fog, no people, just the crimped steel of the lake all the way to the horizon.

Little flashes pocked the water where waves flared into whitecaps. Otherwise it and sky were the same brooding grey, clouds too sullen to storm. No one was out boating or swimming. There was something soothing about the quiet chaos of the lake, undisturbed by human beings, wave after wave slicing up and frothing and dying. Adine watched. Everything was quiet. A pall had fallen over the theatre, silent and serene.

IN THE TEMPLE’S basement, upon their respective wheeled devices at either end of a conference table piled with breakfast flats, trembled Favours, drool snaking down his chin, and the Mayor, whom a re-ducktaped Diamond-Wood had pushed right up to the table to conceal her lower half. To Favours’ left were the High Gregories (Griggs, Wagstaffe, Magurk, Noodles), and to his right, the L2’s (Bean, Walters, Reed). In the corner, with the guilty, squirming silence of two soot-smeared arsonists awaiting trial, on stools perched Starx and, like a child in his father’s clothes, Olpert Bailie.

The air was thick with that stale cornchip odour that men exude in basements. Into the musty silence came a thumping sound from the other side of the wall, followed by faint chirps — someone crying?

Big fella, said Magurk, beckoning to Starx. Come with me for a sec.

Starx stood, bowed, and followed the Special Professor out of the room.

The Mayor spoke: Where is the magician.

Illustrationist, corrected Wagstaffe.

We have no idea, said Griggs.

No idea? said the Mayor. Not the answer I was looking for. He’s just gone, poof, like the — like the fuggin bridge?

To be fair, Mrs. Mayor, said Griggs, Raven never told us how things were going to work, just his basic schedule. Our job was largely site logistics.

The Mayor opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by growling from the other side of the wall — then a dull whumping sound and Magurk’s pennywhistle voice shrieking, You like that, fatty? There was a pause, an exchange of words — Olpert thought he heard Starx say, He’s all right — a slap, another whump, and Magurk was back with Starx trailing after him, looking dismayed.

Magurk reassumed his place among the HG’s: Sorry about that, me and the big fella here got things under control. Isn’t that right, big fella?

Starx sucked his teeth.

So, continued the Mayor, despite shutting down the north shore to traffic, you didn’t know the bridge was going to disappear. Nor did you have any idea that he’d disappear. And now — you’re as lost as me.

Yes, said Griggs.

You pretty much nailed it right there, said Wagstaffe, beaming.

But your men were watching him! They didn’t notice anything? Did they help him escape? Did the stage have trapdoors?

He doesn’t use trapdoors, muttered Starx.

Helpers don’t speak until told, said Magurk. Do we have to get the ducktape?

The Mayor eyed Magurk as if he were a slug she’d found in her salad, then spoke to Griggs: Who were the men in charge of Raven?

Him, Starx, said Griggs, pointing. And the redhead — Bailie.

Hi, said Olpert.

Raven works alone, said Starx, and we weren’t ever privy —

Both of you! screamed Magurk. Silentium!

I don’t care who talks, said the Mayor. I just want to know what’s going on.

Everyone looked around the room at everyone else, but no one said anything.

Wagstaffe chuckled. Maybe it really was magic?

You hear that? the Mayor asked Griggs. Was it magic, Babbage?

Whoa, Mrs. Mayor, said Wagstaffe, that’s the Head Scientist you’re talking to. Patronyms, please!

Well, said Magurk, something made the bridge disappear. And your legs —

Griggs held up a hand to silence them both.

The Mayor scrubbed her eyesockets with the heels of her hands. Then, blinking, she looked from one High Gregory to the next: Wagstaffe (grinning), Griggs (ineffable), Magurk (nostrils whistling), Favours (sleeping), and Noodles, who had yet to speak, lips pursed within a bristly white goatee shorn into a perfect square. He stared woodenly at the Mayor, perhaps waiting to glimpse whatever hid behind her.

What about you, sir? Mr. — the Mayor checked her notes — Sobolin?

Noodles nodded once, slowly.

This one doesn’t say anything? the Mayor said.

Noodles is judicious, said Reed, bowed his head, apologized for speaking.

The Mayor turned to Starx. Stars, is it? Billy? What. Happened.

Starx eyed Magurk.

Speak, said Griggs.

Mrs. Mayor, said Starx, we weren’t assigned to do much more than make sure Raven was comfortable and that he got around to his events. In this city there’s not much you have to worry about security-wise, which is such a testament to the NFLM’s fine work —

The Mayor made an on-with-it gesture.

Starx continued: Maybe we haven’t considered that this might all be part of the trick. Him disappearing, I mean. As in, there might be more to come.

Smoke and mirrors, said Wagstaffe, laughing. No one else laughed.

Tell me, Mr. Starx, said the Mayor, if we don’t find this magician, am I going to have to see a doctor about my legs?

Starx caught Olpert sneaking a peek beneath the table and elbowed him in the ribs. His partner buckled, breath escaping in a woof.

Fug if it’s fair we’re being blamed for this, said Magurk, smacking the table with a hairy paw. Best event the city’s ever seen. You ask people — he gestured vaguely at the surface — and they’ll tell you they had the time of their lives last night.

Favours brayed. Olpert looked at him, expecting more: but the old man’s head slumped to his chest, back into catatonia.

Griggs took a flat from the tray, nibbled a corner. I think, Mrs. Mayor, what we’re trying to tell you is that last night was about giving something back to the people, and we did that. We, Mrs. Mayor, did that. We made it happen — we funded the whole thing, we organized it, we staffed it, and we made sure it went off without a hitch.

Without a what? The Mayor’s voice was shrill. How about the teeny-weeny hitch that I can’t walk? And, oh right, the other small hitch that the person responsible is missing? And the other as-of-yet-unrelated-but-it-doesn’t-take-a-genius-to-do-the-math hitch that our artist laureate’s memorial statue is also missing. And, oh! I almost forgot! That other barely-worth-mentioning hitch — anyone? Anyone? Allow me: Guardian Bridge is gone. It — the Mayor tapped the tabletop with each word — Is. Not. There.

She was on a roll: And I’m sorry, event? You make it sound like this was just a way to fill a weekend. Have you appleheads completely forgotten that the whole thing was supposed to be commemorative? Or was that never on your radar? It’s not called a Silver Jubilee for the pretty name. There’s, oh, a certain little park we’re meant to be celebrating. A little park that transformed the city? Twenty-five years ago? A little park that is going to be here long after your stupid magician goes flying away in his helicopter.

The helicopter, said Noodles.

A miracle! said the Mayor. He speaks! He was listening!

Oh, the Imperial Master always listens, said Griggs.

I listen to all kinds of things, Noodles purred.

His sudden animation made Olpert uneasy. The room was already cryptlike enough, and now a corpse had leapt up off the slab to speak.

What are you thinking, Noodles? said Wagstaffe.

I think, said Noodles, that if Raven’s helicopter is still here, then he’s on the island.

Touch green, said the Mayor.

Quiet there, said Magurk. Noodles is speaking.

What else, Noodles?

The boy.

Which boy, Noodles?

The boy that was onstage. We must find that boy. He saw something.

And the Imperial Master bowed his head.

Mr. Noodles has spoken, said the Mayor. Amen and hallelujah.

The boy though, yes, said Griggs. Gip, was it? Goode?

Sorry, Griggs, just one second here, said Magurk. Can we backtrack for a moment? I resent the insinuation, Mrs. Mayor, that our organization doesn’t value civic pride.

Don’t talk to me about civic pride! I was born here. This is my city.

And I wasn’t? yelled Magurk. And, I’m sorry, whose city is it?

Special Professor, please, cautioned Griggs.

But the Mayor was riled. You care about this city? she screamed, almost levitating off her dessert cart, neck strained into sinuous cords. Then where is he? Where is he!

And then she fell.

The room went still. The Mayor, or her upper half, lay by Olpert’s feet, eyes closed. He gazed down at the greying half-woman discarded on the floor, struck by how drastically she resembled a seamstress’s dummy.

I got this, said Starx, swept her into his arms and replaced her atop the dessert cart. From the table he took a roll of ducktape and adhered her torso and legs to their respective tiers. Everyone pretended not to watch, the air stiffened with feigned nonchalance, it was like a breastfeeding. Starx bowed, retreated, the Mayor coughed, smoothed the lapels of her jacket.

Into the silence from the next room came whimpering.

That fat sack of shet, roared Magurk, and stormed out.

Mrs. Mayor, tell me what you need, said Griggs. We’re here. We can help.

This is my city. My city. I will not see it spiral into chaos. There was a plan for this weekend, an agenda. You’ve got your Spectacular, sure, but what about families —

Island Amusements is scheduled to open as planned, said Griggs. Why wouldn’t it?

And the movie, said Wagstaffe. Don’t forget! Our movie for the people —

By the people, chorused Bean and Walters and Reed. This time they were not scolded, instead Wagstaffe continued, beaming: All in Together Now! It’s going to be great.

Griggs smiled thinly. Mrs. Mayor, while our men look for Raven — and we will find him — we’ll send these two men, Starx and Bailie, to find the boy. A chance to redeem yourselves, said Griggs, and Noodles nodded, nodded, nodded some more.

Okay, said Starx, standing, hauling Olpert to his feet.

Magurk appeared in the doorway — shirtless, his chest so shaggily haired it appeared a rodent clung to his nipples.

Good luck, he said, sneering at Starx, finding anything in that fuggin fog.

III

HIS IS GOOD, finding my knapsack, Gip said, towed along by his mother as the Pooles marched in a tight grim formation through the foggy campground, the gently falling snow. So I can get the Grammar? And then I’ll be able to figure out where Raven’s gone? And maybe even how he vanished the bridge? And how he had me onstage? It was like he picked me because he knew. Like he knew, Mummy, are you even listening? Like he knew that I was his biggest fan so maybe do you think he wants me to put everything right? Like it was a sign? Like it’s up to me now?

That’s a lot of responsibility, honey, for a boy your age, said Pearl, blew her nose, tucked the tissue into her sleeve. Stay close, we can barely see anything.

We’ll get your knapsack, Gibbles, don’t worry, said Kellogg, with Elsie-Anne wobbling atop his shoulders.

Gip kept talking, his voice trembling and delicate. Every sentence swung up into a wavering interrogative, questions that weren’t questions, questions that only demanded being heard. The boy had come to life a bit since breakfast, Kellogg thought, eyeing him warily, but still seemed less than himself.

The Pooles came out of Lakeview Campground at the Ferryport, no boats were running. A sinew of fog linked Perint’s Cove to the Islet, where it collected in a cataractal haze. Otherwise the view south was promise-clear to the horizon.

Beyond the roundabout where Lakeside Drive met Park Throughline lights stabbed through the mist in crimson spears.

Did someone crash? Kellogg said, and slid Elsie-Anne down to a piggyback.

The fog parted: one car sheared in half in the ditch, another upturned onto its roof. Around the accident gathered emergency vehicles, sirens flashed, pink flares sparkled, yet the scene was silent.

Good thing we walked, said Kellogg.

Except now my knee’s bugging me, said Pearl, reaching down to massage it.

Is it, Kellogg said vacantly, watching two paramedics haul a stretcher out of the ditch and slide the body-shaped figure upon it into a waiting ambulance.

Limping slightly, Pearl led the family up the Throughline. Traffic was stalled bumper to bumper in the northbound lanes. To every car and van and truck corresponded a family, some huddled for warmth inside, others had unloaded lawnchairs and gathered around little bonfires on the shoulder. Farther along there looked to have been an accident, a white coupe angled into the ditch. Engines idled, but no one was going anywhere. There was no way off the island.

What’s everyone waiting for, said Gip.

To go home, said Kellogg.

To escape, said Pearl.

But there’s no bridge, said Gip, and don’t you think I could save all these people, Mummy? We have to get my book, what if someone found it and they don’t know that I’m the one who’s supposed to finish the illustration?

Gip, said Pearl. We’ll get your book. But this has to stop.

Kellogg set Elsie-Anne down. Dad’s a bit tired, you mind walking?

It’s okay, she said, hugging her purse. Familiar can help.

At the edge of the poplars the Throughline ducked underground and ran beneath the common all the way to Topside Drive, where it surfaced again at the gates of Island Amusements. The Pooles skirted the line of cars disappearing into the tunnel, climbed up top, and looked down into the park. Nothing below, just a milky wash of fog, the closest poplars appeared as shipmasts in a misty harbour.

Wow, said Kellogg. Think we can find anything in that?

I’ll do it, said Pearl.

How’s that, Pearly?

I’ll go get his bag. If it’s not there I’ll find someone. Event staff or whoever. You take the kids to the Museum. We can meet back up later. Go to Island Amusements maybe.

Not a bad idea, said Kellogg, and pulled the CityGuide out of his backpocket. How about it, guys, want to see some exhibits? They’ve got a model of the city there, Gibbles — and hey look at this! Kellogg tore out a coupon. Two-for-one entry for kids! One of you guys gets in free!

Why does Mummy keep leaving us? said Elsie-Anne.

Leaving us? Ha, Annie, she’s not leaving us. Just knows the city, she’ll be back.

Will she? said Elsie-Anne. Familiar’s not sure.

Kellogg frowned. I’m beginning to have it up to here with Familiar.

Yeah, Dorkus, said Gip, Mummy’s our only hope of finding the Grammar.

That’s the spirit, said Kellogg, wrapping his kids under his arms. This is Mummy’s town! If anyone’s going to find your knapsack, it’s Mummy. Right, Mummy?

Let’s hope, said Pearl.

A REAL WRITER, Isa Lanyess repeatedly told her staff, was meant to have a voice. Yet Debbie’s writer’s voice always felt distant, a vague echo toward which she’d only ever leant, squinting, like a deaf person with an ear trumpet. The voice was faint, or a hallucination, or there was too much clutter, too many other voices from outside and within, a cacophony of selves all clamouring for attention. All she could ever make out was its timbre: meek, timid and doubtful and meek.

The night before, down in the belly of the city, she’d gotten the closest she’d ever been to this voice, or something like it, before the power had gone out. Now Debbie sat in the window nook in a square of limpid daylight, the streets clogged with fog, trying to summon it back. But worry muddied her thoughts: where was Adine, had Debbie driven her away, would she come back? Over and over she replayed their fight, felt stupid for fleeing it, she should have stayed, said something. .

Maybe things could still be fixed with words, thought Debbie, and she decided to write Adine a letter. She fetched her notebook and settled back into the window nook. But where to begin? What she wrote had to be genuine, from that essential part of herself she’d almost found in Whitehall, not as the cartoonish maudlin goof she’d come to play against Adine’s cold cynic. But with the pen hovering over the page as always she was a little lost. What to say? How to say it?

All she could come up with were memories of happier times. Look, she wanted to tell Adine, see when we were happy, see how happy we can be? Though what was wrong with happiness, she thought. Maybe what they needed was exactly that — a celebration and reminder. She settled on a story: their first kiss.

They’d gone to Budai Beach so Adine could show Debbie how erosion would have swallowed her Sand City. The night was moonless. They slipped out of their shoes and sat where the waves swished up onto the shore and withdrew fizzing into the lake. Adine’s leg brushed Debbie’s, retreated, then she reached over with her toes and playfully pinched Debbie’s calf, and Debbie yelped and Adine leaned down to press her lips to Debbie’s leg. When she came up her face was close. Neither of them said anything. Everything felt a little lost in the dark. Trembling, Debbie leaned in and — miracle! — Adine was doing the same. They kissed and Debbie thought, This is the most perfect kiss in the history of kisses. And after an instant or forever Adine pulled away and said, Fuggin finally, holy shet.

Debbie recalled a funny interpretation that had always batted mothlike around the fringes of this memory: When we first kissed, wrote Debbie, it was like two halves of the same strawberry pressed back together. Reading this over, her cheeks flushed. She could hear Adine’s laugh, a skewer that pricked and went sliding into her heart, pictured her puckering her lips and teasing, Don’t be shy, put my strawberry together. Don’t make fun of me! Debbie’d wail. You’re mean!

She dropped her pen. Here she was once again, performing herself in caricature. Always Debbie gushed and swooned, safely mawkish and too much, and Adine played the cruel realist, cutting her down with jokes. Though it felt good to make her laugh, and eventually Debbie would be laughing too. This dynamic preserved the illusion that they were still having fun — and it was, actually, fun. But also exhausting: fearing them corny Debbie buried her most heartfelt thoughts somewhere inaccessible even to herself. And Adine? She wondered if their theatrics had numbed Adine to her own heart entirely.

From the front door came a creaking sound.

Debbie sprung from the ledge. Adine?

It was only the apartment, its rickety walls spoke their own dialect of ticking and groans. Adine? echoed through the empty rooms. Debbie did this often, called her name, sometimes for no reason — it just came out, midsentence while reading or doing the dishes: Adine? And when Adine came harrumphing into the room, hands on hips, and Debbie would have to invent some excuse as to why she needed her. What was this instinct, akin to some nightmare-stricken child pawing for a parent in the dark: Adine, Adine, Adine?

But now she didn’t come. The letter lay unfinished and abandoned somewhere between thoughts. Fog choked E Street. Adine was out there somewhere in it, thinking spitefully of Debbie. But where? To whom might she flee? At Sam’s maybe — but the phone was dead, there was no way to call. The island suddenly seemed too huge, its streets sprawling in vast and terrifying catacombs within the mist.

Debbie tore out a page from her notebook, wrote a quick purposeful note: Not sure where you are. Worried. Heading out to find you. Sorry about last night. See you back here if you come home first. Love, Deb. This she taped to the TV, collected her jacket and keys, and with a glance over the apartment, taking everything in, realized that Adine might not be able to read it. But she’d left. She’d gone somewhere. She couldn’t have done it blind. So the note was a gesture of faith, thought Debbie, as she headed out into the city, making sure to leave the door unlocked.

CALUM HAS NO idea how long he’s been walking. The scene keeps repeating: the bridge is identical with the same beams and girders and lampposts and the smooth roadway split with the yellow dividing line, the horizon never gets any closer, there is no way to gauge how much distance he’s travelled and no change in light to suggest the progression of hours. Also each step feels part of a steady fluid motion that his body performs outside of itself, churning along the bridge so along the bridge his body walks, toward — toward what, toward nothing.

He remembers hearing a voice, the voice hasn’t returned. From which direction did it come and should he be seeking or escaping it, Calum doesn’t know, he doesn’t know which he is doing anyway. The silence out here is cottony, a river would make some watery whispering noise but whatever’s below doesn’t, it just hovers blackly beneath the mist and everything’s dampened and the only noise sometimes is the bird: and here is the bird, the fup-fup of its wings as it flies by and disappears, where does it go, Calum wonders. All he sees is the sky, and the bridge, so he walks.

The air smells of water. Nothing is getting closer: there is no nearing shore, just the endless bridge which slopes gently to an apex beyond which it seems to slope down, though Calum is perennially on the upslope, the apex always just beyond reach, he feels himself chasing a wave as it rolls steadily away.

It feels, Calum thinks, like being on some enormous treadmill. The girders and beams and lampposts he passes indicate momentum, yet they are the same, the same, the same. He seems to be a character, he thinks, in a piece of cheap amateur cinema with the scenery cranked around and around on an endlessly repeating scroll.

And if this is a film then Calum’s body is just an illusion, he thinks, a mirage fidgeting in and out of existence, and if the projector breaks or stops Calum will shudder for a moment and then fade and cease to even be. Like something dreamed and destroyed upon waking. And so to exist he must keep moving, toward the bridge’s peak, toward nothing, just on along the bridge and forever and ever on.

THE TRAY PUNCHED through the slot, a jeering tongue. Sam approached cautiously. Upon it was an applecore nibbled into an hourglass and already browning. He peered through the peephole. The armoire was empty.

You ate the apple Raven, said Sam, so I know you’re in there Raven.

He shifted his ear to the peephole, listened.

Outside a sprinkler spat arcs of water over the roominghouse lawn.

I can’t even let you out if I wanted to okay. I don’t even have the combination of this lock. There’s a way I guess of getting it open, a boy showed me how from your book. But I don’t know how. I don’t remember. I never knew.

Sam removed the applecore, pushed the tray in square with the door. From underground there was no sign of time’s machine starting up again. The floor didn’t judder or vibrate, the silence down there felt booming and hollow. And his third watch was still stopped. Now the end would be like a train barrelling headlong to a precipice, the tracks running out, and the whole thing hurtling over the edge.

You have to help us, said Sam. You have to okay. I’ve done all the work and —

From inside the armoire came the sound of a book opened in a windstorm, pages flapping madly. Sam peeked in. Something ragged and panicked fretted through the dim light: a bird. It bumped against the ceiling, flung itself against the door, settled. A few feathers puffed through the crack, drifted to the carpet.

I can’t let you out okay, said Sam, even if I wanted to.

The armoire shuddered with another collision, the bird squawked, hit the door again, beak and claws ticking.

Please stop.

It seemed to listen. Stillness prevailed. From beyond the basement the sprinkler sputtered and hissed.

Sam stepped hesitantly toward the armoire.

The tray slid out of the door. Upon it was the bird — a dove — lying on its side, motionless and serene, eyes glazed, freshly dead, and served up as a dish.

ON CINECITY’s bigscreen appeared another title card. It explained that before that afternoon’s premiere of All in Together Now the theatre would screen a Best of We-TV countdown. This began with Lakeside Drives, an utterly unwatched show that consisted of a single tracking shot of the eponymous thoroughfare’s centreline, inch by inch of yellow paint striping black bitumen, from one end of the island to the other, and back — meant, Adine guessed, to be experimental, but without explanation only boring and bad. Everyone booed.

Next: the island’s community theatre troupe. Strange and solemn music played while shadowy figures in black undulated around a royal banquet, and just as the King opened his mouth to speak he was replaced with grainy film of a Y’s Classic, all that maroon and white thronging in the stands as time wound down toward a championship, and that became two matronly looking women poaching themselves in a hot tub and reciting highlights from their daughters’ diaries, and that in turn transformed into something else, and then something else, and so on.

It was weird to be watching TV again, thought Adine. And while this was exactly how she’d always navigated channels at home — relentless flipping — experiencing it at Cinecity, on this scale, in a roomful of strangers, was much more disorienting. With the images so enormous and the sound stereophonic and everywhere, her senses were overcome. She felt trapped on some endless babbling stream, forced to leap from stone to stone before each one flooded: establishing a foothold then plunging ahead to the next, just hopping along without a purpose or destination.

But more than that, the swift flicking through all those lives seemed deeply sinister. Each fleeting glimpse of existence suggested not only mortality but the expendability of people too. This was made even more tragic when shouts of recognition rang out in the theatre (Hey it’s me! — Hey it’s you! — I know that person, hey!). People delighted in seeing themselves or someone they knew up there, gigantic and famous, each a bit more popular than the last. But celebrations were brief before each station was supplanted with something better.

Listening to voices exclaim and rejoice and awkwardly fade, Adine forced her mind to cloud over, to abstract the people and places onscreen into shapes, shadows, patterns of colour. Wasn’t that more honest? Those weren’t people up there but pictures, illusions of life. So she let them be that — just light — and let the sound also blur into formless noise. Every so often this reset, nonsense hiccupped into more nonsense, the rhythm soporific, lulling Adine into a dreamy stupor.

She sank into her chair. The theatre faded. She felt removed from everything. If time in Cinecity had become an abstraction now so was space. She had only a peripheral awareness of having a body. Her mind was a whitewalled room. And then into the emptiness stabbed a voice. And though it was hushed the words were clear: I don’t think I can take much more of this.

Adine blinked. Up there onscreen was Faye Rowan-Morganson.

It’s just too much, she said, twisting a lock of black hair around a finger. I know no one’s watching, she said, and paused.

Adine sat up, moved to the edge of her seat.

No one at all.

Faye Rowan-Morganson was younger than she’d had imagined, the cheekbones a little more drastic, and darker, and she wore makeup. But that was not the biggest surprise — most startlingly, she was naked. Or at least appeared to be, visible only from the shoulders up, the camera in tight, the background blurred. Even so, Adine felt she was meeting a long-lost childhood friend, now an adult — not an exact equivalent of the version in her mind, but the essence matched: mournful, fatigued, unmistakably her.

No one in the theatre spoke up, no one seemed to know Cinecity’s latest star. Or if they did, like Adine they didn’t say.

Well, Faye Rowan-Morganson told the camera, tomorrow’s Thursday. Her tone was one of resignation. As I’ve been saying, that’ll be it for me, and by the time you see this —

The channel flipped: a woman in a yellow bandana and a heavily bearded man, cross-legged, bongos in their laps, were providing heartfelt tips on how best to transmit the Essential Soul through percussion. Their eyes were intense. You have to be one with the drum, advised the woman. I snuggle mine, said her husband. Yes, she said, nodding sagely, it’s a very good idea to snuggle your drum.

IV

Y MIDDAY ALL that was left of the flats was a puddle of grease, and Magurk — still shirtless, distended belly resembling a lightly furred, bulbous gourd — had popped the top button of his khakis. Since her fall the Mayor had retreated into an almost barometric silence that loomed at the edge of the conversation in a grey solemn wall. She sat pushed away from the table with her arms crossed while Griggs outlined the NFLM’s plans and Noodles presided behind tented fingers — nodding, always nodding.

We’ll open Island Amusements at six, Griggs explained, and channel all the traffic up the Throughline into the parking lot. He dispatched Bean to oversee the operation of rides and concessions. Silentium, Logica, Securitatem, Prudentia, advised Griggs.

Good lookin out, said Bean, puffed his inhaler, and hurtled eagerly up the ramp.

The next order of business was the ICTS. Power was out only in UOT, Blackacres, and Whitehall, but because no trains could turn around in the Barns the whole Yellowline was frozen. Walters and Reed and their moustaches were sent to figure this out.

You see? said Griggs, sealing the portal from his control panel. We’re on it. This is how we do, Mrs. Mayor — we run the city so you don’t have to.

Primly she brushed flat crumbs from her jacket.

The final issue: communications. While the NFLM’s internal radios were working fine, both the phonelines and We-TV’s closed circuit were out. Which actually isn’t such a bad thing, explained Wagstaffe, since it likely means we’ll get better crowds at Cinecity. To, you know, distract people a bit. From what’s going on, I mean. And with that Wagstaffe excused himself to oversee the film’s final cut.

Around the table only halfnaked Magurk, enigmatic Noodles, incontinent (probably) Favours, Griggs, the Mayor, and her mute and crippled aide, Diamond-Wood, remained. The adjoining room had gone silent since Magurk’s last visit.

And the final order of business, said Griggs: Raven.

The Mayor sighed. And?

A trapped animal, murmured Magurk, is a dangerous animal.

What? said the Mayor. What does that even mean?

Special Professor, please.

So? said the Mayor. What’s the plan?

Noodles held up both index fingers.

The Imperial Master has some thoughts, said Griggs.

Oh, good old Noodles, said the Mayor. Cuddle me up to a whole forest of green.

And yet Noodles’ thoughts are his own, explained Griggs.

Oh, said the Mayor. Of course.

Noodles nodded, twice. And sat back, having said nothing. The room felt like the inside of a steadily deflating balloon.

Anything else? said Griggs.

The Mayor shifted into a stern, authoritarian pose, leaning forward — but before she could speak an alarm went squawking throughout the Temple.

Code 42! said Magurk, jumping to his feet.

Favours whipped to attention, eyes full of fire. Code 42! he cried in a phlegmy warble.

Code 42? said the Mayor.

A breach, muttered Griggs. From the main floor came thumps and shouts, a crash. Footsteps pounded back and forth. The alarm howled, the stomping thickened into rumbling, a mob of dozens, crashes and whoops.

In the corner of the room, Favours had never seemed so alert, eyes darting around the room, a smirk playing at the corners of his lips. They’ve come, he chortled. Code 42, Code 42! They’ve come!

The Mayor looked from Favours to Diamond-Wood to Griggs to Magurk to Noodles, who returned her bewilderment with a curt, officious nod.

Magurk rose, knuckling up. Those fuggin animals, he sneered.

They’ve come, sung Favours. Oh my yes Code 42 they’ve come!

Who’s come, old man? demanded the Mayor.

Kicking his feet in their stirrups and cackling, Favours threw back his head to reveal a rubbery yellow neck laced with purple veins.

For fug’s sake, growled the Mayor, what kind of loony clubhouse is this?

Application forms are upstairs, said Griggs coolly. He pressed a button on the console. The alarm died, the lights in the basement extinguished. After a moment of total darkness, a generator stirred to life somewhere within the Chambers, and the lights returned, though duller, tinting everyone beige.

The noises above weakened into a faint scuffling.

Griggs lifted the phone to his ear. His face sagged. He tapped the console, once, twice — then hung up, sat back, and rapped his fingers on the table.

Did they cut the line? screamed Magurk, and then he stamped off to the adjoining room yelling, Is someone here for you, you fat sack of squatter trash? Who the fug is it?

If there was a reply to this, it was drowned out by a gentle explosion from the Great Hall. The conference chamber shuddered. From upstairs came another rush of footsteps.

There must be a hundred of them, said Griggs.

Favours howled.

Who’s them? hollered the Mayor. Who are they?

A smoky odour began seeping into the basement, acrid and sharp.

Magurk reappeared drawing a sword, long and parabolic, with a slippery shink of metal. Slicing through the air, he shrieked a feral battle cry.

Oh come now, please, said Griggs. With the portal closed there’s no way anyone can get down here. Sheathe your weapon, you’re embarrassing everyone.

Griggs, said the Mayor, tell me right now: who’s attacking you?

Oh, it could be anyone, said Griggs, almost sadly. There are just so many people, he sighed, so many people it could be.

WHAT DO THEY EXPECT? said Starx. That we’ll get out and check every site?

Maybe we should have told them we don’t even know what — Olpert checked their notes from Residents’ Control — Gip Bode looks like.

And what? Also tell the HG’s we didn’t even watch the show? Terrific idea, Bailie. Crazy Magurk’d cut our fuggin eyelids off.

Ha, said Olpert — though this time Starx didn’t seem to be joking.

They drove at a crawl through fog-soaked Lakeview Campground. Around every bend the Citywagon’s highbeams appeared as twin dabs of yellow paint on a blank canvas, illuminating nothing, while the wipers scrubbed lethargically back and forth, smearing the scant snowfall into wet streaks across the windscreen.

Starx steered them into a Scenic Vista at the edge of the poplars. Though the vista was of fog. Above the treetops this bled into a grey cloudcover in parts tinged bluish. Around the Citywagon the fog churned, coiling and uncoiling, a thicket of pale snakes or the fingers, thought Olpert, of many many searching hands.

Know what I think?

Okay? said Olpert.

I think this guy, Raven — know what he’s doing? He’s hanging out somewhere right now, maybe in his hotel room, having a laugh at all of us.

You think?

Starx tapped the walkie-talkie: just a dull drone, not even static. Weird, he said.

So do we go to the Grand Saloon?

No, it’s not our job to look for him. They’ll have dozens of guys doing that. We’re supposed to find the kid, right, but how can we? I’m not a fuggin detective. Are you?

Starx put a hand over Olpert’s mouth. That was rhetorical, you scrotal pleat.

He let go. A taste of soup lingered.

Tell you what. Let’s get a cider.

Starx! We haven’t had lunch yet!

Fine, you get lunch, I’ll get a cider. Though if you don’t drink then you have to drive.

Oh, said Olpert uneasily.

The Golden Barrel it is, said Starx, firing up the ignition. On the dash dials spun into place, the Citywagon’s headlights splashed onto the fog. Starx pointed at the dashboard clock. See? It’s nine o’clock, Bailie. Perfect time for a drink.

Starx, wait, said Olpert, pointing through the windshield. Look.

Something was happening in the headlights, mist swirled into phantasmal forms.

Pictures? said Starx.

They’re moving, said Olpert.

What is it? said Starx. Can you tell?

A series of indistinguishable images played holographically out of the highbeams, skipping one to the next — a slideshow of strange shadows marbled with light, just figurative enough to suggest people maybe, or animals. The pace quickened, then the figures began to sputter into motion, invoking those halted jerky images from the advent of cinema. But quickly they sharpened, the animation smoothed, and a scene took shape. .

Is that? said Starx.

I think so, whispered Olpert.

And —

It can’t be!

But —

Oh god, said Starx. Oh no, oh god.

Olpert’s face had gone the colour of the fog.

No, said Starx. Bailie, no.

The two men watched, rapt. The film’s refracted light danced over the Citywagon’s hood. Neither spoke, neither blinked, neither budged a muscle. The film blazed into a final searing swath of white, and in an instant everything was gone. The highbeams left a yellow stain on the wall of fog.

What was that? said Olpert. What did we just watch? Starx?

Starx shook his head as if to dislodge something from it, slung an arm around the passengerside headrest, put the gearshift into reverse, and floored the gas. Olpert lurched forward, the seatbelt sliced into his neck, gravel shrapnelled up the sides of the Citywagon, and they went screeching out onto Lakeside Drive.

At the roundabout a Helper lowered his traffic batons and leaned in the window.

Nothing on my radio, he said. Your guys’s dead too?

Starx nodded so slightly that Olpert felt the need to pipe up: Yes, ours too.

Where you headed?

Special mission, said Olpert.

Special mission, repeated Starx, and fixed the Helper with a blazing, wild look. Going to let us through, brother? B-Squad’s got places to be!

The Helper removed himself from the car, called, Good lookin out, and waved them through the barricade, around the traffic jam up the Throughline, and out of People Park.

IN THIS MOVIE or is it a dream the bridge has been empty, that sort of huge and booming emptiness that could never have been anything but empty, who else could be out here and where would they come from. But there it is bobbing at the horizon, a fleck, what might be just a spot in Calum’s vision or a reflection or a trick of light. From this distance it could be anything small, a mote or mite or flea, maybe not a person at all, this little blip of matter exactly at the point where the bridge narrows and vanishes. Amid all that emptiness here is this thing, whatever it might be, a blot or a mistake, a puncture or a speck, now visible and now not, flickering. It seems less present than projected or imagined. It is a dot, a period, the end.

Calum keeps walking and holds up his hand to gauge perspective: the shape has curled into a comma half the length of his thumbnail. Some indefinite amount of time later it has fractured into a top and bottom, a semicolon, twice as big. Calum seems to be closing the distance at a rate incommensurate with the speed he’s walking. He squints but doesn’t pause. The shape bobs on the horizon. It is moving. It is growing. It is, he realizes, approaching.

He squints again. This thing seems to be human, or at least human-shaped, and coming at him very, very quickly, now the length of a knuckle. And though the shape of this thing is human there is something inhuman about it, about the way it moves and its spectral presence and the shimmer of air between it and Calum, a dream’s air that thickens into tendrils that slip and tighten around his neck.

Also as this person approaches, the bridge behind it, in fact everything behind it, even the sky, seems to be disappearing. It isn’t going dark. What was there a second before vanishes. And for a sky that was already an absence to cease to be even that — it becomes nothing, there’s just nothing there. As this person moves the horizon recedes, closing in, a hand curling around a camera’s lens, shrinking the image, choking what can be seen until, eventually, it will be just Calum and this person, alone, and everything else a void.

Calum backs away from the yellow line. His first step is deliberate, but then he staggers, legs twisting, and everything goes slow and soupy, this can’t be a movie, it has to be a dream. The encroaching figure nears, the emptiness swells behind it — and Calum stops walking. He steps off the yellow line. He backs up against the bridge’s railing. There is nowhere to go. He looks down into the mist and what is maybe a river’s shadow beneath and above at what remains of the colourless sky, swiftly vanishing.

And the figure comes closer still, swallowing everything in its wake.

AT BLACKACRES STATION train 2306 sat on the southbound tracks, doors open. The platform was empty, the movators motionless. Debbie boarded the lead car. Two passengers sat down at the far end: a kid, maybe eight years old, and his fatigued-looking mother with a handbag in her lap.

Standing over her, the kid kicked his mom’s feet, she told him to sit down. He crawled up on the seat opposite and from his knees looked out the window and said, We aren’t going anywhere, we’ve been here forever, what are we doing. Sit down, Rupe, his mother said again, and he said, I am sitting down, and pulled himself up as tall as he could on his knees and stared at her stonefaced. She had nothing to say about that.

Normally the neighbourhood’s tinny din would drift up from the streets into the station. Instead the car filled with a silence that came thudding into the ears, at once thick and hollow, everywhere and empty. Outside the mist swirled past the windows of the train and over the roofs of Blackacres, between watertanks resembling the hulls of fogged-in ships, grabbing and releasing the phonelines and electric cables that lolled between rooftops. They were dead: the power was out, of course the train wasn’t moving.

Yet Debbie didn’t leave. Stray bits of mist nudged through the open doors. At the far end of the car the kid got down and went back to kicking his mother’s feet. I said stop it, she said, and he kicked her once more, and she said, I’m warning you, and he kicked her again, giggling — and at this she sprung forward and smacked his face. The kid held his cheek. He looked stunned. She shrunk away, seemed to reconsider, grabbed him roughly by the arm, and shook him. Are we supposed to walk to find your brother? she screamed. All the way all across the city, are we supposed to walk? The boy started crying. Rupe, no, said the woman and hauled him into her arms. I’m sorry, she whispered, kissing his face, his mouth.

Stiffly, Debbie watched. Sometimes at the Room she was privy to corporal parenting, almost always interrupted by a realization of witnesses. Then came excuses and embarrassment, the family slunk out the door in shame. But to this mother, now coddling her boy, Debbie seemed invisible, their world didn’t include her or her judgments. What was wrong with these people, didn’t they know they were in public? Had they no shame?

But what bothered Debbie most was feeling excluded and ignored. With nothing to say and no way to help, she slipped back onto the platform and down to the street. A Citywagon idled in the depot opposite. Debbie approached, waved. The driver, bundled in furs, face taut as a canvas and primed with powder and rouge, rolled down her window. Yes?

Hi, said Debbie. Sorry, could you help me?

Help you what? I can’t drive you anywhere. I have to get home.

In a rush Debbie explained her predicament, that her phone was out, that someone was missing and —

And so?

And she’s blind, said Debbie — which, really, might not have been untrue.

Oh, said the woman. Blind?

Yeah. All I need’s a ride to Canal Station, maybe the Redline’s running. . Listen, I can pay you, she said, producing her wallet as proof — the woman snickered — and shamefully pocketed it again.

Can’t you get your own car? said the woman.

I don’t have a Citycard. I don’t know anyone in the um, men’s league.

Yeah, see, my husband. . The woman trailed off.

The engine idled, chugging exhaust.

Debbie felt cornered. She sighed, could hear the self-disgust in her voice as she said, Listen, I write for Isa Lanyess —

Oh? said the woman. Sudden interest glinted in her eyes.

Debbie felt filthy, but blundered on: Yeah, and if you give me your information I bet this is just the kind of feel-good story she’d love. You know, power out in the Zone, kind benevolent citizen makes generous act. .

Benevolent, murmured the woman. I like it!

She was already out of the car, handing Debbie a business card, eyes glazed with fantasy, projecting herself onto her friends’ TV screens, basking in their awe and envy. She spoke in a rush, every moment here delayed her taste of fame: Keep the engine running, you won’t need to log in. There’s a lot by Canal Station, park it there. Or I’m going to have to pay for it, understand?

Of course, said Debbie, sliding behind the wheel. I appreciate this so much.

And I’ll hear from you soon? About the show?

Debbie nodded. You bet.

Gosh, little old me on In the Know, cooed the woman, who would have guessed?

V

EARL STOOD at the top of a staircase that vanished into People Park as a swimming ladder into a frozen pond. The fog collecting on the common didn’t shift or swirl or embody any of the vaporous properties it did elsewhere in the city, but seemed instead a solid stagnant mass. Down there somewhere was the gazebo — and, with luck, Gip’s knapsack and his meds. The air was icy, the light a sort of non-light. It had stopped snowing, what had fallen layered the ground, pebbly and granular, half an inch thick.

Pearl imagined herself heading down into the misty park, swallowed up, never coming out. But that was ridiculous. She dangled a toe until a snowy stair responded with a squeak and crunch. And down she went, tentatively, by feel and sound, imagining Gip and Kellogg and Elsie-Anne browsing the Museum’s exhibits, her husband flapping his guidebook and raving about the place as if it hosted miracles.

A dozen careful steps later the stairs flattened into a Scenic Vista, the fog so thick she crossed the platform at a crouch, feeling ahead with her hands. In the snow her fingers quickly went cold and stiff, she brought them to her mouth to blow on them, reached out again — but what if she encountered something cold and wet and fleshy lying on the deck. . Pearl recoiled. A chill passed through her, deeper than the cold, it iced her heart.

Kneeling, she checked her watch: dead, the hands stuck at nine and twelve. She thought of Gip. Her bad knee twitched. In inclement weather and with stress, acting as a vane or gauge, the restitched ligaments often tightened. Though this felt different, not stiffness or pain, but a strange, electrical tingling.

She stood, shook her leg out. Her knee was swollen to twice its normal size. Water retention usually came on over hours, if not days, and only after a workout. She hadn’t done much lately but sleep and sit and stand. Fluid seemed to be collecting at an abnormally drastic rate, and the joint pulsed, and despite the frigid air wasn’t cold at all, but oddly warm and soft, almost spongy — and it was inflating.

Her jeans stretched, split, the denim tore with a zippery sound and out the knee crowned. Pearl stumbled, the entire leg was numb, she had to hop. Finding the deck’s railing she leaned against it: the knee had gone hydrotic, big as a toddler’s head. Weakly Pearl called for help, her words slipped into the fog and were lost.

She waited. There was no pain. Instead the numbing fizzled into lightness. And the knee, a globelike bloom, began lifting, and behind it went her leg, unencumbered by will or gravity. The rest of her body followed: her right foot peeled from the deck, there was a weightlessness and ease to the whole thing. Pearl went limp, her worry drained into the fog. This must be a dream, she thought. She never dreamed, now she felt herself a tourist in her own subconscious. What to do but give herself over to its magic? And so she floated, her kneecap the puffed-up bladder of a hot air balloon, the rest of her body dangling beneath, out into the pillowy air over the common.

THE FIGURE IS CLOSE enough that on its face Calum can make out shadowy splotches of eyes, a nose, a mouth. Its clothes are white. And as it advances it draws a curtain upon the world — no, a curtain would be something. This is just oblivion: everything behind it is swept from existence. The bird, the pigeon or dove, swoops down from somewhere, the airy splash of its wings, looping up and circling above. Calum tries not to think of vultures. And still the figure approaches, sweeping with it that great wave of nothingness. It is a man, a brownskinned baldheaded man in white moving with brisk strides, and as he closes in Calum sees upon this man’s face, grim and dark as a ditch: a grin.

ONCE THE NOISES upstairs had calmed, Magurk raised his sword. Who’s got my back? He pointed the tip of the blade at Diamond-Wood. Recruit, you ready to earn your schnapps?

The aide glanced at the Mayor, who waved him away. My sword’s got a jones, screamed Magurk, blade in disembowelling position. Griggs, sighing, opened the portal from his console: no one waited there ready to pounce.

Magurk crept up the slope at a crouch, Diamond-Wood followed awkwardly on his crutches. A tense sort of hush poured down from above. The Mayor waited, listening. They’ve trashed the place, cried Magurk. My people, are you with me?

Griggs and Noodles exchanged a look.

We should probably get the radios back up, said Griggs, and Noodles nodded, and together they headed upstairs to join their brethren.

The Mayor eyed Favours in his wheelchair. Should we have a race or something?

Code 42, chuckled Favours, they’re here, at last!

From upstairs came moans of dismay, disgust, barks of rage from Magurk, the sound of the men moving room to room, surveying the damage.

So what next for your little boys’ club? said the Mayor.

His eyes widened — in anticipation, it seemed.

And the portal banged closed.

Favours squealed.

From the hallway that led to the other chambers came a whooshing, fluttering sound. Out of the darkness flew a bird. It circled the room — the Mayor ducked — and returned down the hall. From the shadows came a patter of footsteps and in the next chamber the man hollered, Lark! My liberationeers have arrived!

In a rush of black six hooded figures spilled into the conference room. Before the Mayor could cry for help, hands were upon her, a strip of ducktape was slapped across her mouth. Favours was spun around in his wheelchair, the old man clapped and hooted in delight, and then he was shuttled off into the Chambers.

The Mayor found herself wheeled past barred cells and bunkrooms, down a ramp into an unlit corridor. Favours’ whoops faded as he was swerved along another passageway. The abductors piloted her in silence, eerily purposeful, careering around a corner — a flash of light from some hatch above, they were entering a stormdrain. Things went dark again. The air warmed, infused with a mustardy, sulphurous smell. .

The floor degenerated from concrete to gravel, juddering through the cart and rattling the Mayor’s teeth, she held on for dear life. My legs, she screamed, make sure you don’t lose my legs — but beneath the gag her words sounded submerged. On they went, hairpinning into a passageway that angled up toward streetlevel.

Some light splashed weakly from the end of this tunnel: in it the Mayor tried to get a sense of who her kidnappers were. But their faces were mysteries inside their hoods. They drove her headlong up toward the watery brightness — a glimpse of the surface in some distant corner, who knew where, of her city.

THE FIGURE STRETCHES from the tips of his fingers to the heel of his palm and suddenly Calum is outside it all. He has a bird’s-eye view. From high above Calum sees himself upon the bridge and sends frantic thoughts to this person who is some version of himself to run, but the body is frozen, leaning against the railing, staring at this person, whoever it might be, barrelling over the bridge and inhaling the visible world with him.

That purple-lipped grin shadows the lower half of its brown face, the grin of some sinister and weird anticipation. Here are the eyes, dark and glittering. The baldhead sings with a dull sheen. The legs move in great strides but the upper body is motionless, almost rigid, the man less runs toward the Calum on the bridge than glides.

And this Calum is up against the railing, on this bridge from nowhere to nowhere, with even that nowhere becoming some farther and deeper sort of nowhere, and the man closing in of course must be a dream, the whole thing must be a dream. The skybound Calum watches himself look over the railing: hundreds of feet below, a swath of gauze.

The figure is big and close, hovering, and overhead Calum as a bird traces looping circles against the shrinking sky, and where will he go when there is no sky left. A vast negative halo surrounds this approaching figure. It brings nothingness into Calum’s dream — but then Calum thinks no, this is not his dream, it couldn’t be his dream. Calum has invaded someone else’s dream and now that person is coming to banish him from it.

From above Calum watches himself watching — the figure is almost upon him, moving swift and slick, no sounds of footsteps, no sounds at all, just those blazing black eyes and monstrous joyous grin, legs stabbing in front and sweeping away behind him, and this man is big, he is so big, and he is reaching for Calum with long thin brown fingers, and the fingers seem to be growing, stretching into tentacles twisted through with veins.

Things start to swirl and twist and eddy and Calum, soaring, can imagine this man’s hot breath on his own face, those fingers lace snakelike around his wrists, almost gently, and he feels his knees go weak — but then with a last desperate surge of strength Calum watches himself tear free, climb up onto the railing, and launch himself off the bridge.

But then Calum is climbing up, closing his eyes, and jumping off the bridge.

Closing his eyes, Calum climbs onto the railing and jumps.

Before the man is fully upon him, the man’s fingers are curling around his wrists and he feels the feathery touch of something else wrapping his ankles, the mouth opening from a grin to something far more sinister, he is trying to devour Calum, Calum shakes his arms free and leaps up onto the railing and propels himself off the bridge.

In silence Calum jumps off the bridge.

Eyes closed, Calum jumps, and for a moment finds himself floating.

And he is back inside his body and falling. The wind whistles into his ears and his head fills with a sort of screaming, all he can hear is screaming, his guts tumble, and down he plummets, not quite a swan-dive but flattened out, all swimming limbs, the tug of gravity, Calum’s body, the water and meat of it, falling, and it feels endless, this fall, down and down he tumbles toward the possible river below. He braces himself for the smack and icy rush, time will slow as the water catches him, then he will sink, and his crushed and ruined corpse will be buoyed back to the surface and swept away. And if this is a dream Calum will instead of dying hit the water and wake.

THAT’S HIM, said Starx. That’s the kid.

What kid — oh. Him?

That kid on the corner there. The one who spat on you.

Across the intersection of F and 10 the fog opened to reveal the Golden Barrel Taverne. From the Citywagon idling at the corner Olpert watched: onto the sidewalk stumbled a someone in a black sweatshirt, hood up. His movements were a sleepwalker’s — that sludgy, heavyfooted trudge through one’s own inner world.

Same shirt, said Starx, same slouch. Though, fug. All these people look the same to me.

Olpert squinted. The fog swirled, the figure disappeared. Are you sure that’s him? What’s he doing?

Take the wheel, said Starx, unbuckling his seatbelt. I’m going.

A lump bobbed in Olpert’s throat.

These animals, they need to pay.

Starx flew into the street like a great khaki bat, the fog closed around him. A scrabble of footsteps, muffled shouts, Olpert thought he heard his name, opened his door, reconsidered, and slid into the driver’s seat. As he edged the Citywagon forward, the passengerside door flapped and creaked. A misty whorl shivered up over the hood. Olpert eased on the accelerator, couldn’t see anything.

And then a person came reeling out of the fog, right in the path of the car. Olpert yelped, stomped the gas. The figure, black as a shadow, thumped into the grille, flipped over the hood, and amid a screech of brakes rolled up and wedged between the open door and the windshield.

The car idled. A jagged hypotenuse cracked the glass. Beyond it the fog tumbled and seethed. Half lolling into the car, half dangling outside, hung a boy.

Starx appeared, stared at the body, at Olpert, and back.

Olpert felt he’d swallowed a handful of tacks and his stomach was a clothesdryer, tumbling them around.

Starx spoke — Holy fug, Bailie — and some part of Olpert released and drifted off into the mist. He felt light, watching Starx peel the kid from the doorframe and lay his body, limp as a sack of flour, on the hood of the car. Starx listened to the chest, felt for a pulse inside the hood. He’s dead, said Starx, eyes wide and astonished. We killed him.

We? said Olpert.

We.

Up and down F Street, nothing but fog.

Open the trunk, said Starx. His voice was solemn.

Olpert did.

Now help me.

Together they hoisted the body into the trunk. Gently Starx folded the kid’s legs, crossed his arms on his chest. Around his left wrist, a fork. The hood came loose: one side of his face was a mess, the left eye swollen shut, the cheek stippled with dried blood.

At least it’s him, said Starx, the kid who spat on you. See?

Olpert’s vision swam. The tailpipe spewed exhaust against his legs, pleasant and warm, he didn’t want to move. Starx closed the trunk and guided Olpert into the passenger seat. But the door wouldn’t close properly, it kept popping open.

Just hang on to it, said Starx.

Olpert did.

Listen, Bailie, this is the reason we’re in this organization. You have a problem, they take care of it. We’ll take him to the HG’s. They’ll know what to do. Right?

Okay.

He handed Olpert the walkie-talkie. You talk though. Your gramps an OG and all.

Okay.

Bailie, it’s going to be fine. It’s an accident. I pushed him, sure, but I didn’t realize you were — not that it was your fault. . Starx massaged his temples with his thumbs. Just an accident, he said. They’ll take care of it.

Starx turned onto Tangent 10. Waiting for a response over the radio, Olpert stared at his reflection in the sideview mirror. A smudge marked his jawline from ear to chin: he wiped at it, but the mark remained. Vaguely aware of Griggs’ voice — What is it, B-Squad — calling from his lap, Olpert peered at the mirror: the mark wasn’t on his face at all. It was the glass, he realized, smeared with something red and sticky-looking and wet.

VI

VENING WAS coming and the armoire was empty. Or it appeared empty, it was possible that if Sam looked one place then Raven went somewhere else, that he could somehow read Sam’s thoughts and knew where his eyes would go and bounce from that spot to another. The door was secure, the lock held fast, there was no chance the illustrationist could have tunnelled his way out, what would he have used?

Sam had trunked him, the illustrationist had told him how: The image I take with me into the trunk dictates where I will reappear. The image had been of the armoire. Sam had drawn it. But what if his drawing hadn’t been perfect enough? Maybe the perspective was off, or he’d gotten the shading wrong. . Where might Raven have trunked to instead?

Sam rapped on the door. It’s dinnertime okay.

No answer. Yet the basement felt different, emptier somehow. Sam pressed his ear to the door, heard only wood.

Outside the light was shifting, the sprinkler hissed and sputtered across the lawn. And time’s machine was still silent.

Sam said, Okay I’m nuking dinner.

He carried the dead bird upstairs, struck by the weightlessness of it, a pocket of air wrapped in feathers, and put it in the kitchen trash. From the freezer he took two trays of nuclear dinners, punctured the cellophane lids with a knife, and while they were nuking he took the knife in his fist as a murderer might and stabbed twice at the air. He pressed the blade into his fingertip, felt the sharp prick, pushed until it punctured the skin and a droplet of blood swelled and ran down his finger in a twisting ribbon.

With the nuked dinners stacked in one hand and the knife in the bloody other he went back downstairs and stood before the armoire and said, I have your dinner but I cut myself okay.

No reply.

Sam closed his fingers around the handle of the knife and made a stabbing pose. He said, I cut myself, I need your help, come on out. Help me.

The sprinkler on the lawn stopped. The silence was absolute.

Raven I’m just trying to do the work okay. You stopped time’s machine before the third hand came all the way around. Monday the work’s over though right Raven? I’ll let you out then. But I need your help okay. Please Raven. Please okay?

Nothing.

Sam went at the armoire with the steak knife: he stabbed, the handle snapped, Sam kept stabbing the door clutching just the blade. Blood ran down his arm and smeared his fingers and he kept stabbing and scraping, shearing wood from the door, saying, Help me, help me, help me.

He stopped. The pain in his hand was a sharp wet twang and he uncurled his fingers with difficulty. He’d buried the blade into his palm, he had to wiggle it out, the sound it made was gristly. The blood was sticky and hot and everywhere. Sam took off his three watches, lay them side by each on his bed, the third hand stuck at nine. Then he wrapped his wounded hand in ducktape, thinking as he did of Adine’s face in the hospital, swathed in bandages, the eyes hidden somewhere deep inside, seeing nothing.

CAN I GET you a drink, said Wagstaffe. Or something to eat — sausages maybe?

Griggs eyed the NFLM’s Silver Personality, whose face glowed an ungodly russet in We-TV Studios’ halogen-lit hallways, chin jutting from it in a dimpled, tanned promontory. He had the eager look of a camper on parents’ visiting day, standing there with his hands clasped, rocking on his heels. The unsolicited and disarmingly thorough tour was finally over, here at the control room.

Noodles checked his watch. Tapped it. Held it to his ear. Didn’t nod.

We’re fine, said Griggs. Let’s proceed to the task at hand?

Of course! Head on in, I’ll get you guys set up.

Wagstaffe wheeled two chairs up to the console, patted them for Griggs and Noodles to sit, flicked a switch, and a bank of monitors came to life.

Grab headsets, said Wagstaffe. They’re tuned to the NFLM frequency. What else?

As long as we can monitor all the Squads, said Griggs, we should be fine.

Wagstaffe puffed his chest. Well with ten thousand cameras — Eyes on the City, as we say! — feeding live right here, you’ll be able to see anything you want. Actually, he said, tweaking a knob on the console, for a little intimate entertainment, if we switch over to the live We-TV feeds, there’s a lonely Fort Stone housewife who —

That won’t be necessary, said Griggs, smacking his hand away. Now, shouldn’t you get back to your movie?

Our movie, Griggs — All in Together Now, right? We’re almost done the final cut! It’s going to be —

Noodles nodded curtly toward the door.

Mr. Imperial Master, said Wagstaffe, retreating. Mr. Head Scientist — good lookin out!

Though the monitors displayed the whole city — the Institute’s Quad, the parking lot of IFC Stadium, a rooftop camera surveying People Park from the Museum of Prosperity — every view was obscured by fog. Even the Knock Street Station security camera across from the Temple revealed only a faint glimpse of Pea and Dack standing sentry on the front porch.

Griggs pulled a list and a pen from his pocket. Let’s see. . Magurk’s got the roundup underway — anyone not from here, anyone suspicious, they’ll be taken in — check. D-Squad is looking for Favours, Diamond-Wood’s going to find the Mayor, bridge access is still blocked, check, check, check. Radios are back up. Wagstaffe’s — sorry, our — movie is almost ready to go, Island Amusements is set to open for families, check and check. Starx and Bailie — no word yet, but they’re on the hunt for that kid. And then there’s Raven. . Anything else?

Noodles motioned for the list and Griggs’ pen. He made an addendum, and with a long-nailed index finger tapped the freshly bulleted point:

Revenge.

UP OVER THE common Pearl floated, pumpkin-sized knee dragging her beneath it. Along she scudded, sweeping the occasional languid backstroke or, with her good leg, whipkicks that stirred the fog into spirals.

Her mind was so blank she was unaware of its blankness. Everything was airy, empty, nothing mattered. She had a vague impression of the ground hundreds of feet below, and yet with this realization came no fear, only lightness, the heedless ease of a sleeping child.

She drifted out of the park’s northern side, a sign emerged out of the mist: STREET’S MILK & THINGS. As she swept past, Pearl reached out and grabbed its corner, hung on for a moment, her knee tugged her away. There was no breeze to speak of: the knee seemed to enjoy a velocity and volition of its own.

Pearl was lofted out over Street’s empty parking lot. East along Topside Drive the rollercoasters of Island Amusements appeared in silhouette, skeletal dinosaurs prowling the fog. Across the road she was carried, distantly aware of people below, the faraway sounds of idling engines and horns and voices.

From above came a fluttering sound. A bird swooped down, disappeared, circled back, and, as Pearl reached the far side of Topside Drive, made another pass. At the shoreline the fog parted: mist swirled around the bushes on the chalky hillside but ceded abruptly at the water. She floated out over the Narrows. The opposite bank was low and flat.

The bird returned, soaring up from below and gliding for a moment alongside, a flock partner or mate. It seemed to regard Pearl with curiosity, this bird — a pigeon. Then it did a little loop and landed on her inflated kneecap, adjusted its footing, ruffled its feathers, and settled. In tandem she and this new passenger traversed the slate-coloured channel over which Guardian Bridge had once risen. On the far shore an airplane was taking off from the airport. The skies above the mainland were blue and clear.

The pigeon seemed both wary and dismissive of the human being connected to its roost. It clucked. The Narrows rippled along. A slight breeze ruffled Pearl’s hair. She waited, watching the bird, should she shoo it away or let it rest? But before she could decide, it straightened, fluffed its wings, extended its neck, and, with a swift, downward stroke, drove its beak into her knee. Chirruping gaily, the pigeon lifted and flapped madly back to the island.

Air whistled out of the hole, the balloon began deflating, Pearl sank toward the water — fifty feet up, now forty, she could smell it: clamshells and rust. The current rushed swift and purposeful to the east, a branch went whisking by, thirty feet below. The skin around her kneecap had gone baggy and loose.

She had to get to shore, either the mainland or the island, she was halfway to both. One was home, the other — something else. Wheeling, Pearl paddled the air, arms thrashing, lowered ever closer to the murmuring Narrows.

THE THUD AGAINST the side of the Citywagon at first struck Debbie as a hiccup in the exhaust. But then figures swarmed out of the fog, surrounded the car. How many people, a dozen, it was impossible to tell, one stood at the car’s fender, holding a plank with spikes at both ends, there was nowhere to go, they were everywhere.

The driverside door was pounded, voices were hollering. Debbie fumbled with the locks — and something smashed into the window, crinkling it in a greenish web, and she screamed, and the pipe or crowbar was swung again, and the window caved inward, greenish glass sprinkled her lap.

A high, childish voice cried, Out of the car, out of the car!

Debbie went foetal, the door was opened, hands undid her seatbelt and dragged her out and shoved her ass-first onto the tarmac, and for a moment everything went still.

Over her stood a figure, hood pulled tight around its face, holding a mophandle with bike chains attached to one end.

The trunk was opened, slammed shut.

No one in here, called a second voice — flatter, kazoo-toned, but also very young.

The figure pulled her hood aside to reveal hair shaved into a handprint. But the Hand made no intimations of recognition, just flicked her weapon between Debbie’s outstretched legs: the chains jingled, brushed her thighs.

Please —

Again the Hand whacked the chains against the pavement.

The first voice, shrill as a whistle, demanded, Where is he?

Debbie raised her hands in a pacifying gesture. Who? I don’t know. Please.

Your car took Calum, said the second voice. Your car hit him and took him, it said, moving out from behind the Citywagon. We saw it happen.

We see everything, said the first voice.

The speakers appeared on either side of the Hand, tiny creatures each carrying makeshift weapons: two-by-fours with metal prongs ducktaped to both ends. Ten years old, Debbie guessed — and only three attackers, she’d assumed a mob of dozens.

Calum, said Debbie. I know Calum. Who took him, what are you talking about.

The Hand stared back, unspeaking.

The kid on her left said, What do you know? Can you help us?

Tell me what happened, maybe I can —

He was hit by a car like this one. This car.

No, this is a Citywagon, they all look the same — wait, he was hit? Is he okay?

They took him, said Right. They put him in the back part.

Oh god. Was he alive? Is he all right? Where did they go?

We don’t know.

The Hand shifted. The bike chains clinked.

We’ll find him, said Debbie. I can tell you care about him, and I care about him too —

Shut up, said Left. We need to find him.

We need to, said Right.

I know. I didn’t know — but yes. We need to find him. There’s a Citywagon depot —

We’re taking your car, said Right. Drive us.

I can’t, it’s not my car —

The Hand lashed the ground again, Debbie sprung away. The girl’s eyes were hateful.

Okay, said Debbie, hands up, placating. Let’s go, we’ll find him.

INTO THE DUSK they sprung, up through the bowels of Whitehall and south on F Street beneath the Yellowline tracks, three phantoms in hoods pushing and the Mayor white-knuckling the dessert cart, rumbling over the uneven sidewalk, jarred by potholes and cracks in the road. The fog had lifted to form a cloudbank into which the day was fading, inky shadows spilled from the feet of the Blackacres lowrises, the twilight pixelated and staticky and through it the hooded triumvirate rolled the Mayor, past darkened derelict housing all sad old ghostfaces on the eastside of F.

At Tangent 18 a sour, chemical smell swelled up — Lowell Canal. The Mayor’s eyes watered and nostrils burned, her tear-streaked cheeks whipped dry by the wind. On she was driven, down F past a blur of descending east-west Tangents — 17, 16, 15 — and three-storey walkups, some with plastic sheeting for windows, others freshly painted with windowboxes sprouting green shoots. A Citywagon whipped past at F and 12 and was gone.

Two blocks south, passing the Golden Barrel Taverne, the pace slowed. The Mayor checked the lower tier of the cart: her legs were still there, ducktaped down. And then the slap of feet on pavement silenced and she was released. She rattled along for another half block before the cart slowed and banked left and bumped up to the curb. She faced the depthless shadows of an alleyway.

A block north her hooded abductors collected in the middle of F Street, conferring in low voices — a fourth figure had joined them, big and shirtless and wearing a strange helmet. They seemed to have forgotten about her entirely. She listened, could make out nothing distinct, just low muttering. She got a fingernail under a corner of the gag, and was just beginning to peel it away when lights flooded F Street.

There was a roar and a screech of brakes, the blare of highbeams. Doors opened, two Helpers tumbled out shouting, Hey you — Θtop there — Get them! But her kidnappers had slipped off into the shadows, or become shadows. The Mayor struggled with her gag, thrashed atop the cart to draw attention, but the streetlights were out, she was lost and mute in the pitch. The partners piled back into their pickup truck, which went squealing up F Street.

But before the Mayor could feel too dejected, she was bumping up over the curb. She looked around: no one was there. The cart seemed to be moving on its own — rolling forward, very slowly, over the sidewalk and into the alley. The air felt thick. The shadows enfolded her, it was like entering a mine or a cave. No, a lair: something huge and horrible made its home here.

As she thought this a humid and foul-smelling breeze washed over her face. Then another in a rotten swell — breaths, she realized. The cart pushed deeper. She seemed to be teetering at the edge of a slope, the front wheels angled over. A pause. The Mayor gripped the sides of the cart. The moment stretched out, expanded. Another breath gusted up from below. And then the cart tipped over and she was plummeting headlong and reckless toward whatever lurked in the depths of that terrible dark.

VII

FTER SOME indeterminate amount of time, the We-TV countdown in Cinecity reached the Top 10. Each clip was met with cheers and groans, fans and detractors trying to drown out the other. Top 10 status was the province of the truly sensational. At #5, on the Devourers’ channel three men had set fire to a car and were eating it, piece by flaming piece. People howled.

At #4: Stupid Fat People Humiliated in Public Bathrooms by Drunk Babies.

At #3: The Lady Y’s Lingerie Pillowfight Extravaganza (Semi-Finals).

At #2: Isa Lanyess, In the Know.

At #1, of course, was Salami Talk.

Lucal Wagstaffe grinned. I’m very happy to retain my position at the top of your charts. Nice to know you all still like to watch. (A slow lick of his upper teeth, the tip chomped off a pepperette.) But this isn’t about me. I’m only here to introduce one of many highlights of the Silver Jubilee weekend, and also an amazing example of our citizens coming together in harmony. What you’re about to see has come from you, dedicated viewers — a movie for the people, by the people. The result reflects not just who we are, but what we all want to be. So sit back, relax, break out a sausage, slide the sausage slowly into your mouth, bite down, slowly, allow the juices to burst over your tongue, and enjoy.

Cinecity buzzed as the film began.

THE NEW FRATERNAL LEAGUE OF MEN AND WE-TV PRESENT:

ALL IN TOGETHER NOW

A SILVER JUBILEE SPECTACULAR

Through a pair of binoculars Gregory Eternity gazes squintingly, like a moustachioed and gunslung nearsighted person, though he isn’t (nearsighted), he can see really great, out over the roiling black waters, which are also white where the waves lick like black yet white-tipped tongues into whitecaps, of the Lake.

He lowers the binoculars as a look of consternation sweeps over his face at the same time as a cloud sweeps over the sun, metaphorically. What could be out there? his scrutinizing gaze seems to suggest. Something, suggests his gaze, as he squints and looks through the binoculars again. Maybe something evil. .

Something’s out there, he intones brassily, and his second-in-command, a buxom and curvaceously sensual yet with a look in her eye that says, Just fuggin try me, woman named Isabella who wears bulletbelts crisscrossed over her torso, combat boots, and cool reflective shades behind which it’s impossible to tell what she’s thinking, says sultrily, I think you’re right.

He turns to Isabella and kisses her, hard, his moustaches smearing against her soft, creamy skin like a broom pressed against a wall and smeared around as though to scrub something gross off of it.

Take me, she says. So he does. Gregory Eternity takes her, right there, soft and then hard, poetically on his mother’s grave in the middle of the Necropolis.

But while they are taking each other something moves on the horizon — something black, something not quiet human, something with the reek of the inhuman about it like a stinky halo of otherworldly danger and evildoing. Something evil.

What are we doing? says Gregory Eternity, withdrawing briefly from Isabella, already well on her way to her sixth climax. She is a woman ripe in her prime.

Isabella climaxes anyway, then collapses on the bed of flowers they laid there earlier — the reason they’ve come to the Necropolis being to lay flowers for Gregory Eternity’s dead mother, who passed quietly at her own home surrounded by friends and family, except Gregory Eternity, who was out drinking cider with his buddies, and now carries guilt like a bag of rotten squab because he could have saved her with one of his kidneys, but didn’t, for reasons unexplained. Probably medical.

Danger-slash-evil is moving closer.

Who is it? says Gregory Eternity, who quit drinking through a supportive twelve-step program at the Museum of Prosperity (Sundays 2–4 p.m.). But it must be a rhetorical question, because then he answers himself sort of: It’s not human.

Isabella shudders visibly. What do we do? she asks questioningly.

Gregory Eternity squints again, putting his pants back on. We defend this place, he growls. This is our home and no outsiders will ever come here and take it from us. This is where we live and so do our friends and families, except my mother, who is dead, RIP. It’s the best city in the world. Do they think they can come here and take it from us?

I don’t fuggin think so, says Isabella, producing a huge gun from somewhere, cocking it, and glaring with a come-and-get-it look at the encroaching boats (they’re actually boats). She focuses her aim on the lead boat, which sails a flag featuring a foreign symbol that is inhuman and alien (not necessarily of the outerspace variety) but most of all, undoubtedly evil.

This. Ends. Now! ejaculates Gregory Eternity.

Isabella echoes, Now!

But the boats aren’t in range yet, and first they’ll have to call a town meeting to assemble an army to defend the island. But it will end soon. Very, extremely soon.

PEARL’S GAIT SEEMED even more laboured than usual. From the steps of the Museum of Prosperity Kellogg watched her approach from Topside Drive: dragging herself along, heaving one step to the next. Her jeans were torn at the knee, the hole gaped raggedly. But, most important, she didn’t have Gip’s knapsack.

Pearly? Hey, Pearly, we’re up here. Kellogg stood and waved. Look, kids, it’s Mummy!

We are wasting valuable time, said Gip. How many times do I have to tell you?

I know, champ. I know. But know what? When you’re old like me you’re going to look back on this and think, gee, it was so great to have that time with my family, so great to spend time with my parents now they’re dead.

Dad? said Elsie-Anne.

Ha, no, I’m not dead yet, Annie, don’t you worry.

Not. . yet, she whispered.

Kellogg ran at Pearl, a plastic bag from the Museum’s giftshop swinging in his hand, and hugged her clumsily.Pearly, he said, I got you a present! He produced a sweatshirt. Islandwear! You’re a local, figured you should dress the part.

No backpack, she said. No meds.

Aren’t you going to put it on?

Maybe later.

Okay. Kellogg took it from her, held it up to his wife’s chest, his own. But hey, mind if I wear it? Getting a little chilly out here with the sun going down and all, is all.

Sure.

Kellogg disappeared inside the shirt, struggled to find the arms, popped his head out the top, and announced, Well hello again, Family Poole!

Gip came down the steps. Mummy, did you find my book?

I —

Well obviously not, since you don’t have it. How am I supposed to take over for Raven if I don’t even know what Situation this is? You promised, Mummy, that you were going to come back with my book, I went through that whole stupid Museum with him — he jabbed a thumb at his father — and the Sand City model isn’t even working, it’s just covered in fog like outside, and here you are without my book even though I thought you knew what you were doing, but look, you haven’t even done your job and —

Pearl’s open palm connected with a sharp smack. The air seemed to fall apart: it was as though a blade had sliced down and guillotined the space between her and the rest of her family. Pearl’s hand shrank to her side, its imprint reddened on Gip’s cheek, the Pooles tableau’d: mother and father and son, Elsie-Anne talked to her purse on the steps.

Gip didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.

Pearl buried her face in her hands, then gathered Gip in her arms. Kellogg checked up and down Parkside West: a family watched from the opposite side of the street. He stepped into their sightline, turned his back, widened his stance. This was private.

I’m sorry, Pearl said, stroking Gip’s cheek. I’m feeling a little. . off. I shouldn’t have —

Well no kidding, Pearly, said Kellogg. I mean, sheesh.

Gip whimpered. Pearl held him close.

From the steps: Did Mummy hit Stuppa?

Kellogg wheeled. Hey! No way, Annie. The Pooles don’t hit our kids. Right?

But, Dad, I —

Nope! Gip had a bee on his cheek is all. Can’t ever be too careful! Right, Pearly?

Kellogg smiled broadly, eyes blazing. And watching his wife and son, their arms around each other, he felt certain that it was not Gip who needed holding. If released, Pearl seemed ready to collapse. And so Kellogg joined the huddle, wrapped and squeezed them tight. Everything’s going to be okay, he whispered. I just love you guys so much.

THE HAND TAPPED the passengerside window with a fingernail.

Right, said one of the kids from the backseat.

Debbie killed the lights and turned onto Knock Street, jostling over the cobblestones. The streetlights were on here, it was disorienting after piloting through the murk of UOT.

Stop here, said the other kid.

She parked at the entrance to Knock Street Station. Across the road, the Island Flat Company flagship restaurant, a two-storey complex that occupied half the block, glowed in twin golden stripes from each of its floors. High above the IFC logo flashed, one letter to the next, over a flatlike obelisk. At the edge of forever buzzed beneath in orange squiggles.

Beside it the NFLM Temple looked abandoned, the flickering bulbs on either side of the S I A I O N sign seemed the faint lifesigns of a comatose patient. Debbie laughed: the windows had been blackedup.

And another lot north was the Citywagon Depot, a grid of three dozen vehicles, identical and silver and sleek. Each car was plugged into consoles upon which greenly blinked the time: 9:00. Though it wasn’t nine.

Okay, said Debbie, here we are. I don’t know how you expect to get into the trunks —

One of the twins, halfway out of the car, said, Let us worry about that, and the other said, Leave the engine running, and they followed the Hand into the Depot, leaving their weapons in the backseat.

In the IFC’s upper-floor window, two men in NFLM gear were sitting down with trays of flats. There was something familiar about them: one presided over his food with a simian sort of hunch, his partner, lanky and blond-bearded, demurely tucked a napkin into his collar. The stockier man angled his head, jaws unhinged, to stuff a flat halfway into his mouth, while the other deposited unwanted toppings into a napkin and inspected the offal as a virologist might some rare and curious disease. Then he spoke, and though his lips blubbed silently, each s whistled between his whiskers as: Θ.

Tragedy! Havoc! Snitches!

In shame and dismay Debbie laid her forehead on the steering wheel, playing the previous two weeks over in her mind: the two men’s sudden materialization, no one had ever heard of them before, their all-round shiftiness, such a performance of rage and militancy — and so it was. But what of Pop, his restribution planifications of the night before alongside these two infiltrators? Debbie had abandoned him. She felt sick.

A Citywagon’s window exploded in the Depot. An alarm wailed and blared, the car’s trunk flapped open, the shadows shivered with movement.

Up in the second-floor window of the IFC, Havoc — or whoever he was — cocked an ear like a tracker. Another window smashed, another trunk opened, another alarm joined the first. The other man stood, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, moved to the window, cupped his hands to the glass — and Debbie slid down in her seat, out of view.

From the Depot: the puff and tinkle of another window knocked in, a trunk opening. The night air throbbed with honks and sirens. Debbie peeked out: the shadows seemed to fracture and shift. Meanwhile, the snitches had disappeared from the IFC’s upper window. What purpose did they serve the NFLM — undercover operatives, provocateurs? They’d comprised a third of the entire Movement, nearly doubled its size! Spies? Even the idea seemed absurd.

At the restaurant’s front doors the Helpers were accosted by the hostess and held up while the one who called himself Tragedy went digging through his windbreaker. Havoc moved to the window, gazed out, Debbie ducked.

A voice cried, Calum’s not in this one either! In the sideview mirror Debbie watched the Helpers leave the restaurant and creep across the Temple’s front yard, the shorter man, scuttling buglike alongside his gangly companion, produced a walkie-talkie: Pea and Dack here, he shouted. It’s them!

At this the Hand rose out of the shadows, illuminated by a streetlight, with the vexed alert posture of a startled animal.

What happened next Debbie could only process in fragments: a surge of adrenaline — the engine roared — Havoc and Tragedy frozen in her headlights — the car swerved — two men diving out of its path — the Hand and the twins piling into the backseat — Havoc and Tragedy getting to their feet in the rearview — a screech of tires — kids’ voices: Where are we going? Where are you taking us? — and maybe Debbie said something, maybe she didn’t. Then she was swerving north onto F, over Lowell Canal, leaving behind the lighted streets of LOT, swallowed into the sheer slick darkness of the Zone.

VIII

Y THAT EVENING the fog had thinned to dewy gossamer. Through it cars and vans and trucks stalled all day down through the belly of People Park were directed along the PPT and east on Topside Drive into the IFC Stadium parking lot. Marching alongside the slow-moving traffic the NFLM provided encouragement: Family-friendly entertainment! — Free rides for all! — Better than sitting doing nothing! — Come on you appleheads, let’s have some fun.

With Harry bunkered away at their campsite, the Pooles walked west along Topside Drive, and as they passed the Stadium Kellogg said, There it is, and Pearl said, Yup. Helpers directed them toward the entrance to Island Amusements, over which coloured bulbs twinkled in kinetic patterns, back and forth. High above brooded the Thunder Wheel, a huge blank clockface stripped of the time.

Why are we here? said Gip.

This is where all the kids are going, said Kellogg. Free rides! See, there’s Mummy’s puking one.

Why though, Dad? I can’t help from here. Raven’s gone and I’m the one —

I bet they have flats at the concessions too, guys! What do you say, Annie?

Familiar has to pee.

Familiar or you, Annie?

Same thing. He’s living inside me now.

Kellogg knelt in front of his daughter. Enough of that, eh? It’s getting a little weird.

While Cinecity hosted entertainment for the island’s eighteen-and-overs, Island Amusements’ free entry was attracting families by the hundreds: with the arrival of each Redline train more parents and their children poured down from Amusements Station, the lot reached capacity, to avoid double-parking along Topside Drive the NFLM allowed traffic onto the pasture reserved normally for vendors.

Helpers wielding plastic orange batons directed drivers into a grid. One Helper, face as luminescent as his sticks, screamed, Free today, kids, rides’re free! and in a panicked semaphore ushered the Pooles through the turnstiles onto the midway. Here the night seemed to open up and come alive. Everything glowed and sang and burbled and flashed, the air redolent with caramel and deepfry, beneath which festered the porcine stink of the portable toilets upwind by the treeline.

In a tight, tense voice Kellogg said, Everyone stay close, and took Gip’s hand and, prying it from her purse, Elsie-Anne’s. Pearl drifted alongside, gazing around with astonishment. Everywhere was something: games of chance, the yelps of vendors and hawkers, the booming evil laughter of Broken Hill Haunted House, the Atomic Canyon and Holy Road and Kicking Horse (Love the Horse or leave the Horse, threatened a Helper) rollercoasters whipped and roared and looped to the delighted terrified screams of their riders, over Rocket Falls’ Get shot thru tubes! sign had been posted an apology: SORRY, NOT TIL SUMMER — MGMT.

Daunting queues threaded from every ride, but the two most impressive led to the washrooms and concession stands. These dipped and twisted so circuitously that newcomers assumed positions beside those at the front. You waiting for food or the toilet, a woman asked Kellogg, and he grinned and told her, Neither yet! The woman frowned and was bumped by a man reeling past balancing a tray of ciders and greasy island flats.

Annie wants the bathroom, said Kellogg. Pearl?

She was staring at the Thunder Wheel, its apex lost in the low-hanging clouds.

Pearl? You want to take Annie, or —

No, she said, Gip and I will ride the wheel.

Gip cowered behind his father. The boy’s face was still faintly crimson where she’d smacked him. Pearl reached for him, stroked his cheek with the back of her fingers.

Great idea, said Kellogg. A chance for you two to, you know. . Gip? Go on, take Mummy’s hand.

The hand that hit me?

Shhh, now, said Kellogg, and nudged him at his mother.

He joined her grudgingly, watching as Kellogg and Elsie-Anne were folded into the crowds, their spot assumed by a teenage couple lugging unwieldy inflatables won at games of chance.

Come on, said Pearl, eyes on the Thunder Wheel, and dragged her son across the midway.

A bored Helper told them, Ride now, you’ll get it solo.

Pearl looked up: every Thundercloud was empty.

No view, explained the operator, clouds’re too low. Still fun to go up though. . I guess.

Pearl said, Remind me how long the ride is?

Six minutes, fifteen seconds.

Exactly?

Usually each Thundercloud gets less than thirty seconds at the top. But since you guys’ll be alone, I’ll give you five minutes. Quite a while to be up there, eh, kid?

Gip, what do you think, want to ride it with Mummy?

But —

It’ll only take a few minutes. Maybe from way up there you’ll be able to find Raven?

Gip gave her a skeptical look.

Okay, said Pearl, we’ll go.

Congratulations, said the Helper, helped Pearl and Gip board a Thundercloud, buckled them in, and closed the gate behind them.

AT THE BOTTOM of the Slipway Starx and Olpert Bailie sat in the Citywagon facing Crocker Pond. Or the misty enclosure over it. Despite thinning at streetlevel down here in the park the fog had the opaque gloss of a gessoed canvas. This is good, whispered Starx, just how Griggs said. He led Olpert to the car’s rear and opened the trunk: there was the boy, his hood pushed back, gaping at them with one glassy eye.

Hold on, Starx said and went off somewhere. Olpert didn’t know where to look — not at the boy, that waxy cycloptic stare, not at the fog, who knew what horrors might appear within it. So he looked up through the hazy ceiling at the darkening sky, the moon nudging into view.

Starx returned pushing a wheelbarrow lined with a tarp and bags of salt. He set the wheelbarrow down, tore the bags open, dumped the salt into the barrow. Then he brought Olpert around to the trunk, reached in, and took a sneakered foot in each hand.

Get his top half, he instructed. We’ll wrap him up, the salt will weigh the body down.

The boy was heavier than he looked, his head lolled against Olpert’s chest, the jaw clacked open, Olpert staggered and dropped his end. The kid’s skull knocked off the pavement with a dull, nutty sound.

What the fug, Bailie, hissed Starx, and all the way across town sitting on the motionless train at Blackacres Station, with Rupe sleeping in her lap, Cora looked up sharply. Something hitched in her throat. What was happening out there in the dusk?

Starx scooped up the body, folded him into the wheelbarrow, arms and legs sagging over the sides, and bound him in the tarp. As he was manoeuvred toward the pond one of the boy’s shoes jostled loose, which Olpert fetched and, cradling like a magic lamp, brought to Starx at the end of the launch.

The boy’s unshod foot dangled, a hole in his sock revealed a rosy coin of heel, and all the way across town the stabbing in Cora’s throat went twisting down into her chest. She gazed out over the roofs of Blackacres to the wall of skyscrapers downtown. Into the twilight appeared the night’s first few stars, and in the moon’s pale light down in the empty pit of People Park Starx said, Help me here, and Olpert tucked the shoe under his arm and took Calum’s feet, the spot of exposed skin clammy to the touch.

Got him? said Starx.

It’s because he doesn’t wear shoelaces, said Olpert.

What?

That’s why his shoe fell off. Olpert nodded toward it, wedged in his armpit. See?

Out in the Zone the moon painted everything silver. Rupe moaned in his sleep, and in his face Cora saw his brother’s face, and her heart felt ravaged by little scrabbling fishhooks. The downtown office towers struck her as dominoes, she imagined them toppling, one felling the next until they were rubble.

Starx said, On three. Olpert nodded. One, said Starx, and as two butchers with a side of meat they rocked the boy, salt sprinkling from the tarp. Cora shivered. Two, said Starx, the body swung pendulously out over Crocker Pond, and back. Rupe woke and said, Ma, are you crying? And Starx yelled, Three.

The body flew. The tarp unfurled. Salt scattered, arms and legs flailed, and everything disappeared into the mist.

There was no splash.

What the fug? said Starx. He toed the water: frozen solid.

Olpert still held the boy’s shoe. He looked from it to Starx.

He’s on top of the ice out there somewhere, said Starx, squinting.

The fog was without depth, a wall of white.

Starx took the shoe from Olpert, knelt, and slid it along the surface. For a second or two it swished over the ice — then vanished, went quiet.

Cora said, No, I’m okay. She petted Rupe’s hair, eased his head down to her lap. Go back to sleep, we’ll find your brother tomorrow.

The mist domed Crocker Pond. Everything was silent.

Fug it, Starx said. Ice has got to melt sometime. There’s salt out there too, right.

Olpert peered into the fog. Shouldn’t we go out there?

But Starx was on the horn with Griggs: Good lookin out, it’s done. What now?

And now? said Griggs. And now, Starx, B-Squad must disappear.

WITH THE WAXY white stick Sam marked two bright flecks on the door of the microwave. (Its clock too was locked at 9:00.) He pressed his forehead against the plastic, lined up his eyes: a match. Next were the holes. With his ducktaped hand Sam guided the drillbit into the door — a grinding sound, a smell of burning plastic, crumbly twists twirled onto the floor. Sam blew out the dust: two eyes stared back.

Next, putty. Sam pinched a grey gob out of the container and sculpted a half-inch volcano shape over the left hole, leaving the top open, and then the right, smoothing the ridges. He put his face up to them, the putty nestled perfectly into his eyesockets, he stared into the oven’s shadowy inside and moulded the two little mounds tighter, it was vital that no light or heat escape, or any air get in, and he smeared the putty onto his cheeks and up to his eyebrows, along the bridge of his nose on both sides.

He felt for the power dial. Found it. Paused. Okay, he said.

Sam breathed in with a great chest-filling gulp, and out, and thought of Adine’s face after the explosion: that raw pulpy mess, that death mask, that mask of blood.

The work was about returning to nothing. And as Sam stood there ready to rewind everything, staring into darkness, he wondered when it was over what he would see. Even darkness was itself something — nothing would be like space, in space it was always night. But no, night was something. Nothing was what you couldn’t see. Nothing was the space behind your head — if there was no space, if you had no head.

OLPERT FOLLOWED his partner into the boathouse, the wood splintered where the big man had shouldered the deadbolt through the doorframe. Starx groped in the dark for a lightswitch, flicked it on: the room was a jumble of nautical equipment, life preservers and flutterboards and oars and paddles and various small watercraft — rowboats, canoes, kayaks, pedalboats in stacks. It smelled of sawdust and mould.

Starx came at him with a pair of denim jumpsuits. Griggs said to get disguises, he said, handing one to Olpert. Starx’s uniform fell to the floor in a heap of khaki. He had nothing on underneath. Olpert was transfixed: so much man stood before him, everything so broad and fleshy and thick. Wrestling that massive body into the jumpsuit seemed equivalent to squeezing a ham inside a sandwich bag. In the end the pants clingwrapped his calves and the top flopped at his waist.

You too, candynuts, Starx grunted, we can’t be in uniform for when they ship us out tomorrow. Don’t look so forlorn, pal! Just a little break, a little holiday, till this all blows over. I need a different shirt though, maybe there’s a lost and found here or something. .

Starx wandered off and reappeared in a maroon Lady Y’s Back-2-Back Champs T-shirt, which fit him as a tubetop. Not ideal, he said, but better than —

Olpert was gone.

Bailie?

Starx stuck his head out the door, looked left, right, up the hill: mist, mist, more mist.

Bailie? Starx’s voice rang out over the common.

And then, to the north, he saw movement — a figure flitting down the path from Street’s Milk & Things. Starx nearly called out, but it wasn’t Olpert.

This person was small, a child, a tubby little guy in a red cap who descended with purpose at a light gallop. He reached the bottom of the hill, paused, transfixed by the cloudy bubble over Crocker Pond — waiting, maybe, for a sign.

GRIGGS.

Walters? said Griggs, chair-wheeling beside Noodles before the Orchard Parkway monitor.

And Reed, he’s down in the truck. Cathedral Circus is cleared. Only business with anyone in it was Loopy’s — she was in there, crying, but we sent her to the pub. Reed gave her a fivespot, told her to get a cider on us. Everything’s ready.

We see that. We’ve got cameras on the street and — he flicked channels — garden.

I’m up on the roof. Of the Grand Saloon. With the chopper. It’s clearing down on the street but still foggy as shet up here.

And you’re sure he hasn’t returned to his suite?

Raven? No, no way. We’ve had men in there all day. I mean, he didn’t have any luggage or anything like that but —

Fine. Is everything set?

Yeah, pretty much. The chopper’s rigged and ready to go. Hitch looks good, should be a breeze.

Good lookin out.

So do we go ahead? With the um, demobilization?

It’s going to land in that little parkette, correct? To the north of the Hotel?

If Reed guns it, it should, yes. Provided the chains hold.

They’d better hold!

They’ll hold, they’ll hold.

Griggs lowered the walkie-talkie. Noodles had wheeled away from the monitors to a corner of the control room. Feet up, he massaged his temples, a soothsayer conjuring a vision, eyes closed. Griggs hit TALK: You’re sure no one’s going to come through there?

No chance.

Okay, I guess we’re good to go then.

We’re good to go?

We’re watching, Walters, keep in mind.

So should we go ahead?

For fug’s sake, said Griggs, yes, go ahead.

Good lookin out, said Walters. Talk in a bit.

From the pickup’s trailerhitch a towline lifted and disappeared two storeys up the Grand Saloon Hotel into what was either sinking clouds or rising fog. A thumbs-up flashed out of the driverside window, the engine rattled to life, and for a moment nothing happened. Then Griggs’ walkie-talkie crackled. Okay, all set, said Walters, here we go.

The pickup’s engine roared, the tailpipe belched exhaust in a sooty plume, the towline snapped taut, twanging.

It’s moving, yelled Walters, the chopper’s moving, it’s dragging it to the edge!

The pickup inched forward, the chain trembled.

It’s about to go over, said Walters. Griggs, are you there?

I’m here, said Griggs. Noodles and I are watching.

The pickup strained, the towline flexed, Walters screamed, It’s going over!

The chain went slack. The pickup, released, went tearing up the road. Griggs waited for the crash as the illustrationist’s helicopter fell groaning over the side, plummeted six storeys, humbled to earth as an elephant to its knees.

Instead the towline came whipping out of the fog and thrashed in the Grand Saloon’s parkette. No chopper followed. Noodles opened his eyes. Blinked. Did not nod.

Walters?

Griggs, it’s done!

No. Nothing came over.

What?

The towline came loose. Ask Reed, when he returns from his joyride.

Wait — Griggs? No way, I saw it go over. What?

IX

HAT DO you mean he’s gone?

He’s — Pearl began, but she felt emptied, incapable of words.

In his free hand Kellogg held a tray of flats, the cardboard sagged and dripped grease. He handed this to Elsie-Anne. Around them the midway blared and jingled. What happened, Pearly? Where’s Gip?

I got on the Thunder Wheel and he was beside me and —

And?

I look away for a moment, and then I look back, and we were moving, and Gip. . I started yelling for them to stop the ride but it just kept going up and up.

You checked lost and found?

No. We should.

And the bathrooms. Or some other ride? Or — whoops, Annie!

The flats slid from the cardboard tray and landed in a soggy heap on the sawdusted path. I bought dinner, said Kellogg, pointing. I thought maybe Gip could use something to eat.

A fly landed on the flats. Then another. And another.

No problem, Annie, said Kellogg. We can get more. But first —

Where’s Gip? said Elsie-Anne. Mustard streaked her dress.

Kellogg wiped his hands on his pants, left greasy streaks, lifted his daughter into his arms. Mummy just lost track of him, Annie. We’ll go make an announcement. He can’t have left! Where would he go?

Pearl followed her husband, the midway clattered and brayed. They passed beneath the Kicking Horse’s loop-de-loop, a trainful of riders hurtled around it screaming and yanked away, a hawker brandishing two ungodly stuffed bears, eyes thyroidal and bulging, two kids about Gip’s age lapping candyapples with sugared frenzy.

Kellogg stopped a youngish couple walking arm in arm, opened his wallet, dug out Gip’s school photo, wagged it at them, they shook their heads. He moved to an elderly gentleman hobbling along with a fistful of balloons. About yay tall, Kellogg explained, red hat, healthy, um, girth? Raven’s co-star last night? The balloon man apologized, wished the Pooles luck.

Pearl watched this hazily. As the Wheel had first begun to turn she’d gazed out over the island with melancholy. She tried to locate the view of the carnival below as the echo of some memory, but couldn’t. There was the story of her poor date throwing up, but though she remembered the details enough to tell it, the actual memory didn’t exist. She couldn’t recall the boy’s face, let alone his name, what the weather had been, how she’d felt before or after. All that remained was the disgusting, dramatic climax. She’d been happy to entertain her family with this, but now she wanted everything else: who was the boy, what had that night meant to her as a teen?

It was then that Pearl realized the seat beside her was empty. The wheel kept climbing. Her stomach flipped. With panic rising into her throat, choking her, she scanned the fairgrounds. Maybe she’d find Gip flashing a cheeky grin and waving as the ride lifted her skyward: what an illustration, vanishing like that. But the crowd shuffled along, no one looked up, no one was anyone she knew — besides the ride’s ambivalent operator, face cupped in hands lighting a cigarette.

Her cries of, Stop the ride, stop the ride, were lost amid the roar of the midway and the honks and shrieks of looped calliope. A metal bar pinned Pearl into the Thundercloud, though even if she could escape it was too high to jump, especially on her bad knee — she imagined it popping off like a bottlecap.

The world shrunk away beneath her. At seventy feet it became impossible to pick out faces from the crowd. Another twenty feet up what filled the midway ceased to be people, more a hive teeming with bees. Past one hundred feet their movements resembled a sheet rumpling in a slight breeze. And another fifty feet higher Pearl passed into the clouds, and through the other side, and everything below disappeared.

The wheel stopped with a shudder. She was alone up here — again. (Though that flying episode must have been a dream, surely. .) This was real: the Thundercloud swayed and creaked. The night was speckled with stars. The moon was colourless and ghostly. She breathed the crisp, clean air. Dread drained from her body. Her shoulders loosened. Her whole body loosened, a tight icy coil within her loosened. Despite the sounds of the fair filtering muffled through the fog, Pearl felt beyond everything, giddy and light, yet serene. She wished, or longed, or pined, to never come down.

What would she return to? A scenario began to play out in her thoughts: if Gip had run away or been kidnapped — hoping of course he would turn up, eventually, safe and sound — she imagined a scene, some months later, returning home from work to Kellogg and the kids standing grimly at the end of the driveway with boxes and luggage. She would be deemed negligent and unfit. A judge would award him custody of the children. She pictured herself in the living room, emptied of everything but her reading chair, sitting there in the dark, deserted and mercifully alone. Just like this.

At this came relief — followed immediately by shame, but the initial response was undeniable. It was a terrible thing to wish for, to abandon your family, or have them abandon you. But she was tired, always tired, and tired of being tired. Conversely there was freedom: no medications, no slogging alongside Kellogg’s manically blazing happiness while inside her glinted something black and mean. Pearl imagined her family as a brick and her life a balloon, the brick squashing and squishing and contorting the balloon, the balloon curling up in little rubbery swells around the sides of the brick, always on the verge of popping.

Pearly! cried Kellogg. Come on!

He was lunging past the balloon man, Elsie-Anne in tow. Pearl caught up at Lost Property. The calliope died, the PA crackled to life, and the guy working the booth struck up a little handheld radio. While Kellogg whispered dictation, out rattled a monotone announcement: Gip Poole, your father is looking for you. . Please come to Lost Property. . Not that you’re property. . Gibbles, Dad’s here. . He loves you. . Champ. . Everything is going to be okay.

OLPERT STOOD across the roundabout from Bay Junction, hiding in the shadows from the couple waiting at the Ferryport. They were that headscarfed woman and her husband, a burly creature of beard and fleece, who lived on the Islet’s southernmost point in a home built from trash scavenged from the beach. They existed without electricity or running water, grew all their food in a solar-powered greenhouse, hosted gatherings at which visitors orbited a bonfire tapping homemade drums. One night Olpert had watched in secret from among the reeds, found the rhythm soporific, fallen asleep, woken up cold and hungry, the bongos still tocking.

This couple, toiling at land’s end with their compost bins and trellised veggies, were worrying: they seemed apocalyptic and crazed, harbingers of some social collapse to which no one else was yet privy. Even so Olpert usually braved a sidemouthed Hi when he bumped into them. But now he hung back, skulking within the shadows while the ferry came chugging into dock and the apron lowered. Only upon the foghorn warning, low and mournful and ghostly, did he race aboard, all the way to the bow.

The engines roared and off they slid toward the Islet. At night the crossing seemed slower and lonelier than it did during the day, a sluggish grumble through the dark. Though tonight Olpert hardly noticed time passing or the lakebreeze batting his face. Starx’s huge domed head kept rearing into his thoughts. And with him came the boy, or not the boy, just that single glazed and horrible eye: You did this to me, Olpert Bailie, you.

He felt gutted. All he wanted was sleep. Even the prospect of being pulled from bed, handcuffed, and escorted back to shore seemed worth it to collapse into his sheets, slip away, and, if only for a few hours, be nothing but not awake. But handcuffed by whom? His uniform precluded him from justice. Or the forces of justice had deemed him just — they’d even abetted his escape.

The water slurped the sides of the boat. Olpert pictured himself in a limp, tired way tipping over the railing — the icy throttle of the water, sucked under, the peace of sinking to the Cove’s dank, cold bottom. He’d never been much of a swimmer, it wouldn’t take much to drown. The engines chugged, the water churned. And just as Olpert was gathering himself to mount the railing the Islet’s lights shone down, the woodsy couple sidled up, and the ferry bumped into port.

OTHER THAN THE milky hump concentrated over Crocker Pond, the fog on the common had almost completely dissipated. The thinning clouds exposed a dull and flat and sparsely starred sky, not the big wet-seeming messy sort of night Gip was used to back home, which suggested other worlds and dreams. This was muddy, the low moon a halved apple afloat in a bucket of muck. It was in the light of this moon that Gip found his knapsack stashed sidestage.

He opened it, riffled through all the junk his dad had packed — and, with a grin, pulled out the Grammar. Yes, he cried. Yes!

Then he climbed into the gazebo. The illustrationist’s trunk sat front and centre where he’d left it, or it’d left him, the lid gaped, locks busted into useless tin crabclaws. Standing upon the ducktape X, Gip examined the trunk: its velvet lining was scuffed and threadbare in parts, but there was no sign of any trapdoor or hatch through which Raven might have slipped away. Such trickery wasn’t how illustrations worked anyway, Gip knew.

Gip tilted the Grammar toward the moonlight and flipped through to the 10th Situation: Abduction. A succession of line drawings presented a figure beside the trunk, brandishing an image, and the second —

The light extinguished. Someone had turned off the moon! No: a hulking figure had appeared stageleft, his torpedo-shaped head concealed a section of sky.

Gip Goode? said a big, round voice. We’ve been looking for you.

Gip Poole, said Gip.

Whatever, said the man. He was dressed strangely — coveralls that sagged at his waist, a tiny shirt that struggled to contain his massive torso — and approached cautiously, saying something about people who had questions for Gip. The moon peeked over the top of the man’s head, illuminating a scrap of paper tucked into a corner of the trunk.

My people just want to know what you know, said the man, plodding across the stage.

Gip hopped into the trunk, took the paper in his hands. Faintly he could make out an image: a drawing of. . furniture?

No, hey, pal — the man’s voice was rushed and panicked — what are you doing?

Gip grabbed the leather thong hanging from the lid and pulled it down. Darkness enclosed him. He could hear the big man charge across the stage, fists banged on the trunk, a voice hollered, Open up, you little knobdiddler! And then it all faded: the trunk’s bottom dropped out, the sides fall away, the lid lifted, and Gip hovered in space, and then through it he was falling.

WITH HIS FACE pressed to the microwave, eyes inside each of the structures he’d puttied around the holes, ducktaped hand on the POWER dial, Sam waited. The kitchen was still. There were no machines, there was nothing. If Sam had ever trunked him, Raven was gone. Only nothing remained. All that was left was to join this nothing. Sam wasn’t frightened: this is just what it was. This was the work. The house was quiet. Upstairs the others were in their beds. But now there was a noise outside — footsteps. Someone was coming up the walk. He’d have to hurry. Okay Adine, said Sam, and sucking in his breath widened his eyes until they ached and cranked the dial as far as it would go and the microwave hummed, and all Sam could see was light.