Dust City (15 page)

She holds her new hands up to the light, wriggling her enchanted fingers. I want to ask her what happened. How did she lose them? But that’s her business, not mine. She moves across the room to the corner where two shallow countertops meet. “Must be hard work,” she says, “running all over town.”

“It’s my first day.”

Tom scoffs. “No kidding it is!”

“Would you like something to eat?”

“No!”
says Tom.

“He’s right,” I say. “We have to get back.”

But she’s already slapped down a chopping board and gathered utensils. It’s only when she uses them that you can tell the hands are enchanted. Faster than I can follow, her fingers slide over the board, gathering vegetables and meat, slicing them impossibly thin.

“I hope you like soup,” she says, smiling weakly.

“I do.”

“No,” says Tom. “We have to go.”

But I can see he’s as mesmerized as I am. The woman’s hands move so fast, you can barely see them. In an instant, the meat’s deboned and sizzling in a pot. Onions are diced, carrots julienned, potatoes perfectly cubed.

But then her grip on the knife falters. Her mouth tightens in concentration. There’s still more to chop, but she’s already slowing down. And then, almost miraculously, she cuts herself.
It’s a clean slice across the back of her thumb, and although she’s in pain, she doesn’t make a sound. She merely stiffens her grip on the knife and hardens her eyes, struggling to finish. The wound leaks an ethereal kind of blood. Not a fluid, but a gas, ribbons of smoke that scatter in the stagnant air.

“I need some more,” she says.

At this rate, the nixiedust will hardly last her through the evening. It’ll be gone by nightfall.

“Can you give me another hit?”

Tom grabs me.
“No way,”
he says. “Do it yourself this time. We gotta go.”

He pulls me away and the last thing I see is the woman tearing open the packages, frantically scooping up dust even as it trickles through the holes in her vanishing hands.

24

WARP AND WEFT

THAT’S HOW IT WENT FOR DAYS, A BLUR OF BREATHLESSNESS AND PITY AND
nervous sleep. Tom and I shuttle under the streets, galloping back and forth between Skinner’s refinery and an endless stream of random addresses. We never know where we’re going until the moment Hans the hedgehog furnishes each of us with a tightly bound brick of dust.

Every time we return to the refinery, I watch the conveyors. From behind that wall they trundle out with a seemingly endless supply of dust. The way to get back there is perpetually guarded by a pair of enormous globs. But I’m also learning the tunnels, garnering a keen, wolfish sense of how they hang together beneath the streets. When I get the chance, I study the maps—and I think I’ve found something. I think there’s another way in, from the reservoir.

Oddly, most of our drops are made during the day. This is because, in the middle of the night, the only folks awake are the night-shift dust miners and the cops. A pair of dustrunnners—even if we’re only aboveground for a couple of
blocks—nevertheless look pretty suspicious. In the daytime, however, there’s the bustle, the traffic, the construction noise—all the things you need to blend in.

Which is why I’m so surprised to be shaken awake at three in the morning.

“Henry, get up.”

I’m too bleary with sleep to see who’s in my room-slash-closet, but I don’t need to. It’s Matt. I recognize his scent. There’s a boozy cloud that follows him wherever he goes. “Outta bed,” he says. “You got a drop to make.”

He stands by the door of my closet while I’m getting dressed.

“How are you doing, Henry?” he asks me. His voice is clear and even despite the fact that his breath is so full of whiskey I’m buzzing on the fumes. “Tom giving you trouble?”

“A little, but I can handle it.”

“Good. You let me know when you want out. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Who said I wanted out?”

“You will.”

Once I’m dressed, curiosity gets the better of me. “You want to explain why I’m up so early?”

“Let’s just say Skinner likes you. C’mon.”

When we get down to Hans in the refinery, I notice something. The place is practically deserted. There’s only one guard and he’s rocking himself to sleep in a creaking metal chair. Three in the morning. One guard. Duly noted.

Tom’s waiting for us in Hans’s office. “I was wondering when you’d get here,” he says. “This place is lonesome in the middle of the night.”

Hans, apparently, doesn’t sleep. He’s bright-eyed and active behind his desk, same as ever, poring over figures in his ledger. Loaded into the archaic scales on his desk are several bricks of dust. Tom plucks one of them up, waving its chemical tang under my snout. “Special delivery,” he says in a whining, singsong voice.

Hans rises and swipes the brick from Tom, replacing it on the scales. “Which is why,” he declares, “you gotta take this seriously. No fooling around, no dawdling, and”—he glances pointedly up at the wall clock—“there and back quick as you can.” He points a curled claw at us. “You screw this up and Skinner’ll murder the both of you. Literally.”

Tom glares at me. “Or maybe he’ll just murder
one
of us.”

Matt steps in and clips Tom behind the ear. “Yeah, and he’ll do Hans and me in the bargain. So pay attention.”

“Ow!” Tom rubs the back of his skull like a peevish cub.

“They specifically asked for our biggest guy on this run,” Hans informs us, and then he points at me. “Which means you.”

Tom turns to go, but Matt blocks his way. “What?” says Tom. “If they want
him
so badly, I say we let him go on his own. That way, I can get some sleep.”

“I don’t think so,” says Hans. “Runners always run in pairs.”

Tom snorts but turns back to the desk.

Hans hands us the bricks one by one, somber as a hangman. “This is top-grade stuff. Takes years to refine it properly. Closest thing to old-time magic you’re liable to find anywhere. Few folks are rich or stupid enough to afford it. So whatever you do, don’t screw it up.”

“Okay, okay,” says Tom, zipping up his pack. “We’ll be careful.”

After Hans drew our attention to how special—not to mention expensive—this dust is, I expected to come upon something a little more grand. But not so.

We surface on a side street, one of the broad alleys where folks living in meager townhomes park their cars. Even in the dark, you can make out the leopard spots of rust. The homes are shouldered together in one endless array, and I can tell from the wooden slats and metal siding—just beginning to fade and buckle—that this is a newer subdivision going to pot. In short, it’s not a slum, but it will be soon. How could someone living in a place like this afford several bricks of the nixies’ most exclusive dust?

“Stop staring,” says Tom, striding up the alley ahead of me. “It’s not like there’s anything to see.” He points. “Should be right up here. Number forty-seven.”

When we get closer, I see something I recognize. It’s a tree—the same tree Doc was painting in his office back at St. Remus, the last time I saw him alive.

“I’ve seen that before,” I tell Tom, slowing my gait to take in the tree’s stooping, Doc-like posture and lolloping roots.

Tom doesn’t care for it. He reaches for the back gate, sneering. “Ugly,” he says. “They oughta cut it down.”

“Maybe they are.” As we enter the backyard, I point to a hole in the ground at the base of the tree. “Looks like they’re planning to dig it up.”

“Good for them.”

In one of the rear windows of number forty-seven, there’s a light on. A shadowy figure moves behind the curtains. A moment later, a blowzy, middle-aged woman steps out on the back porch, her hair tied under a head scarf that matches her faded, flowery dress.

“Come,” she whispers, waving us toward her with both hands.

“We’re just dropping something off,” says Tom, a suspicious growl creeping into his voice. “That’s all.”

The woman glances back and forth down the alley. “Come in, please!”

Tom shakes his head, unzipping his pack. “No way.” He stacks the bricks delicately on the bottom step of the porch. “Our job ends right here, lady.”

“Please,” she says, “one of you.” She’s looking at me. “I need your help.”

“No,” says Tom.

“I need you to bring him back.”

When she speaks the words, I freeze. It’s an echo of what my father told me at the East Pen.

What if they could bring her back?

“Tom, wait.”

He’s already on the far side of the fence. “Either you come back to the refinery with me right now, or I go back alone and tell them you were too slow to keep up.”

If Tom returns without me, it’ll mean one of two things: One, Skinner and his goons will turf me out and I’ll lose whatever chance I have of finding out where they’re keeping the fairies; or two, they’ll save themselves the trouble and kill me.

I jog up to Tom. “Don’t forget what Hans told us.” I point back toward the stoop, where the pudgy old woman is gathering up the packages. “He said this stuff was special. He said it was
expensive
. A customer like her is valuable, so you gotta figure Skinner, Hans, the nixies—they’ll want us to make her happy. Right?”

Tom squints at me, searching my face. Then he looks past me at the woman, the bricks of dust piled in her arms. “Fine,” he says. “Go see what she wants. But hurry up. In ten minutes, I’m gone.”

25

A CLOUD ON A WINDLESS DAY

INSIDE, THE HOUSE IS A MUSEUM OF BRIC-A-BRAC. FRAMED PHOTOGRAPHS
clutter the walls; small plinthlike tables fill the corridors; and every surface is awash with cups, saucers, figurines, dusty glass baubles, every sort of knickknack you can imagine. The same goes for the wallpaper. The pattern is a twine of roses in every color, thorny stems mangled together.

“This way,” says the woman, waving me toward a locked room at the end of the hall. “Hurry.” When we arrive at the door, she fishes through her pockets for a ring of keys.

“What did you mean,” I ask her, “when you said you wanted to bring him back.”

Without turning around, she shrugs. “I meant just what I said. I need to bring him back.”

“Who?”

“My brother.” She slides the key into the door, opens it, and releases a puff of warm, stale air—air that reeks of illness. It’s a bedroom, featuring a high, four-poster bed and a further clutter of collectables. On the floor, pushed
against the baseboard, there’s a hefty wooden chest, locked with tarnished brass fittings. Even though it’s smaller than the bed, the grim darkness of the trunk dominates the room.

At first, I can hardly see the man lying under the blankets. He’s buried so thickly in quilts and pillows that his body is a formless blob. Only his face is visible—skeletal, pale, with papery skin that collapses into deep hollows. He looks as old and fragile as the figurines that fill the house. I assume he’s dead—
I need you to bring him back
—but then the man coughs. It’s a hopeless rattle.

Now I realize what the woman meant. She
did
want to bring her brother back, but not from death. Merely from the brink of it.

“So this is your brother?” I ask.

“No,” says the woman. She goes to a table under the room’s frosted window, tearing open the bricks and pouring all of them into a large ceramic bowl. “This is Papa.”

“But I thought—”

“Yes. My brother. He died when we were only children, and now my father wants to see him again, one last time.” She lifts the bowl, heavy and brimming with all the nixiedust. “Hold this,” she says, handing me the bowl. “I’ll need your lungs if I’m going to get it off all in one blow.”

“Okay,” I say, hesitating. “But where? Where are we supposed to aim it?”

With several other keys, the woman unlocks the chest at
the foot of the bed. “In here,” she says. When she opens the lid, I feel my heart thump heavily against my ribs. Inside, the wooden chest is empty save for a pile of bones. They’re in such a jumble it takes my mind a moment to put them together.

Then I realize what I’m looking at: the skeleton of a hominid child. The torso is curled up like a baby in its mother’s womb. Beneath the bones are a few clumps of moist earth. I remember the hole in the ground, out in the yard. Worst of all is the tiny skull. It gapes up at me, severed from the spine and lying empty at the child’s feet.

“What happened to him?”

“I can explain later,” the woman says, taking the bowl back from my paws. “Right now, I need you to take a deep breath. You understand?”

I nod dumbly.

“Good. Now on the count of three. One, two, three . . .”

We both exhale, long and slow and even. There’s so much dust inside the bowl, it’s hard to believe we’ll get it all out. But we do. It spirals up to fill the room, sparkling and still, a cloud on a windless day. For an instant, I wonder if it knows what to do. Could it be confused? If it believed it was meant for me, what would happen?

All at once, the full weight of the hovering dust reels and hisses and blows down into the wooden trunk. The whirlpool of air is so fierce that it buffets the lid and slams it shut. The room falls silent, save for the weak sputterings of the old man.

The woman steps around me and goes to her father’s side. “It’s okay, Papa,” she says. “I did it. You’ll see. He’s coming now.”

There’s a wet thump from inside the wooden chest and then, very slowly, the lid is pushed open. Rising up is a small boy. He looks about four or five years old, with deep brown hair to match his eyes. His skin is as pallid as his father’s, but unlike the sickly old man, the boy’s skin glows as if lit from within.

“Mama?” he says, looking around, blinking and bewildered. “What happened?”

“She’s not here,” says the woman. “But come.” She lifts the boy out of the box and carries him to the bed. “Come and see Papa.”

But instead of regarding his father, the boy buries his face in his sister’s shoulder. “I’m frightened,” he whimpers.

“Don’t you want to see Papa?”

The boy nods, grinding his forehead against his sister’s neck.

“Okay,” she says. “Then why don’t you let me put you down?”