CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (5 page)

After the Kid recovered, Venus, Milo, and the Kid invited the Boy and the Girl to dinner every Thursday night. The Girl didn’t show up every week, but the Boy was there every time. The Boy had never seen the Kid so relaxed, as if all that rage had finally stopped piling up.

Greytown never did reappear. So the city started construction on a shopping mall to go next to that huge, empty parking lot. The Girl and the Boy tried to use the doorway to visit the Girl’s grandparents again, to make sure the old couple was safe, but the door under the steps now opened onto a concrete wall. The Boy tried talking to it. The wall stayed resolutely mute.

For months, the Girl cried herself to sleep. Often, the Boy would be there to hold her. Once her breathing had calmed and she was finally asleep, his shirt wet with her tears, he’d cross the street and go back to his house. When spring came along, her mood finally lightened.

The next summer, the afternoon school let out, while the Boy, the Girl, and the Kid were hanging out and sipping smoothies at Max the Guru’s Hip-Hop Diner & Secondhand Nautical Gear Emporium, the Boy asked, “Do you miss making adults afraid?” The Kid—who still bore, and would always bear, scars that would forever remind the three friends of Greytown—hadn’t laughed that way since the previous summer. Whether the laugh was gone or whether the Kid had chosen not to use it anymore, the Kid wouldn’t say.

“No. Not really. I think I was making myself afraid, too. Afraid of adults, I mean.” The Kid paused, scrutinizing the Boy. “Hey! I just realized something! You don’t stutter anymore!”

“No, not since I had to go and rescue you guys.”

The Girl let out a big whoop. “Rescue us? I did all the rescuing, buster!”

Staring at the clock behind the cash counter, the Kid shushed the other two and whispered. “Wait for it.”

The Boy said, “It . . . ? What’s going to happen? What did you—?”

The Kid’s smile grew just a tad menacing, and the Girl’s eyes widened in anticipation.

Leah Bobet

Six and Joe bunk together nights in the smallest north-side billet on the twentieth floor. “Take care of your brother,” Mama said when she gave them the key to the rooms. They shut the door behind them on their brand new domain: polished parquet floors and a fresh-netted balcony, a mattress in the corner and walls white as white, ready to be decorated with scribbles or artwork or sun, moon, and stars. And Joe pulled a face.

“She meant it to me,” he said, with a flip of his curly girl’s hair, and strutted into the tiled bathroom to wash.

That’s not when Six started hating him, but it’s when he knew it to the bone.

Six’s name is really Charlie, but he’s the devil’s boy right through, and they’ve been calling him by the devil’s number since he was old enough to walk. Sixth son of a seventh son; “You’re bad news,” the brothers’ wives tell him afternoons between rows of peas trained up to the ceiling on the seventeenth floor. A couple of them ruffle his hair after they say it, fix him with a crooked, between-you-and-me smile. A couple of ’em don’t.

Nobody ever tells Joe he’s bad news.

Six locked him out twice when he pulled faces behind Six’s back, and he wailed in the halls ’til Mama gave him his own key at seven, and
no
Higgins ever got their own key at seven. Six hid Joe’s stuffy toy next and Mama strapped him for the first time ever over that, and now Six is Bad News. Six won’t punch Joe in the nose for that insult ’cause Joe’s still the baby, and it’s his job to take care of the baby no matter what Joe thinks Mama said to who.

But Joe gets away with murder, gets the steals of pastry and half-days off that Six never got even before he was Bad News. Joe’s seventh, Sunday-born seventh, and he’s had a destiny since he was yea high.

It drives Six clean nuts.

“I’ll die,” Six whispers, late at night, curled up in his bedroll on the edge of the fat mattress that the littlest Higgins boys share. “I’ll throw myself off the tall pasture and then you won’t be seventh no more.”

This used to freeze Joe mid-breath. He’s nine years old now and got himself wise to it. “You’re fulla shit,” he says proudly—nobody ever boxed his ears none for saying
shit
like a street-picker’s boy—and puts a pillow over his ear.

“I will,” Six breathes. Imagines leaping, the tug of wind, falling, falling. “I will and you’ll go to the devil.”

* * *

Of course, Joe squeals in the morning.

Six gets hauled into Father’s office after breakfast with last year’s blackberry jam still on his mouth. “What’re you telling your brother?” Father says, back to his desk and leaning heavy in his big black leather-backed chair. There are papers scattered on his desk, Market language that Six can’t yet read. Interrupting Father’s work used to be worth a spanking too, when more of the brothers and sisters were young. Father is a busy man. Except when it comes to Joe.

“Nothin’,” Six mutters, knowing there’s no good answer to give.

Father clucks his tongue, and Six bounces back and forth from foot to foot, rearing, raring to go. The air in Father’s office smells dry and sweet like paper. All the other air in the clan building smells like dirt and green.

“Saturday’s child has far to go,” Six’s father sighs under his fat moustache, and Six hates him. Father is the agribaron of the whole central district. Everyone in central knows him; he has three whole cars on the Moving Market staffed by Six and Joe’s big sisters, and on Sunday market the papermen and water-sellers and the three rich owners of Hydro tip their hats at his clan through the windows.

Six isn’t allowed to work the Market cars. Six makes trouble. The last time, he threw fresh tomatoes at the tailor’s little boy, and Mama went white with rage and sentenced him to garden work until he knew the value of good food.

So now Six works in the gardens, underfoot between his big sister Lucinda and stupid little Joe, who’s small enough and spoiled to only do half-chores in the kitchen and be a pain in the ass the rest of the day. All the Higgins children know their sums and their letters, but Joe’s gonna go to the alchemists when he’s ten. Seventh son of a seventh son’s strong magic by them, so he doesn’t do full-chores and hasn’t learned the garden. There’s no use in it if you’re going away.

Six weeds tomato beds all afternoon in whispery silent disgrace, stared at crinkle-eyed by sisters and brothers and their wives, but he doesn’t throw them at no one. He goes up to the tall pasture, spread over the soaring rooftop, and feeds the ducks that lay in the pond that used to be a tiled swimming pool. And Joe follows him everywhere, kicking and pinching and chattering so loud the mama ducks flutter their wings and stick their necks out in case Joe’s starting something with their brats.

Sunshine comes through the windows around the pond, through the thick glass door that goes out to the pasture and the wall that keeps the goats and sheep from the thirty-floor drop below. Six goes to the rail and looks down, way down: the cracked pavement streets and rubbled-out buildings stretch all the way to the lakeshore, empty of people, of ships. He turns around, fingers tight on the rail, tries to glance casual over the backs of the Uncles’ prize flock of sheep.

Joe watches him. He don’t even flinch.

It’s halfway down to dinnertime before Six finally loses Joe, trailing him into the kitchens Mama keeps on floor twenty-six and making a run for it when Joe’s eyes stray to the fat raisin cake for dessert time. He runs pounding down the stairs down to floor number six, still uncleared, full of pigeon shit where the screen doors came open once upon a time.

When Father and his brothers claimed the clan building for their own they started cleaning from the top: the work hasn’t gone down past nine these days, not with all hands busy with the milking and shearing and growing and weeding and tending to the biggest clan farm in all of central district—and with the cousins clearing their own buildings, taking up their trades and moving out. The twenty-second floor was once Uncle Elmer’s yarnshop. The twenty-first, Uncle Ignatz’s dairy. The nineteenth was Uncle Eddie’s garden, but Uncle Eddie grew devil’s weed and the rest of them kicked him out.

Uncle Eddie was a sixth son. He smoked little brown cigarettes that smelled like cinnamon toast and talked with his hands open like he was bringing fire into the universe. Six was too young to remember much more when they threw out Uncle Eddie and burned his crop on the wasteheap, but Mama called Uncle Eddie a bad seed. Bad seeds don’t grow when you put them in the dirt, but Six doesn’t know why that meant burning. Bad seeds don’t hurt anyone else.

They cleaned out Uncle Eddie’s garden when they booted him out, but Six snagged a lamp and hid it real good from Father. Over the years he’s got himself a bunch of Uncle Elmer’s spare string, old herb stakes, cracked pots, odds and ends and unwanted things too busted to recycle. It all gets smuggled down to the sixth floor, through the peeling walls and dust-stink carpets, where Six has set up his workshop.

The workshop’s behind a broken-locked door, or never locked by whoever lived there once when the world fell one night between evening and dawn. Six cleared it all by himself, broken machines and moldering paper snuck out to the waste on odd, switched-up days. The water’s dirty here, but the water runs. It keeps Six’s little garden.

Six plants the flawed seeds. He plants the bad seeds, the ones that don’t grow when you lay ’em down, or grow crooked, or bear limp and yearning fruit. He sneaks down and waters them every other day, shoos flies away from the opening leaves and nibbles the produce at night when the whole clan’s down asleep.

“I’ll take care of you,” he tells the bum seeds. They make spindly, delicate, blight-prone plants. Half of them die before they can strengthen out. Six has to tie them to popsicle sticks with Uncle Elmer’s old grey string, and they lean like addled sheep against the snap-end, dirty wood.

Six don’t think they’re beautiful. He knows the difference between strong and busted, good and no-good.

He and his plants, they stick together. They’re bad news.

* * *

The alchemists run their long black train only at full midnight. Market girls tell stories about it, rushing through the platforms like a ghost of what the city used to be, rustling the flyers and wrappers and dust into a hiss against black book-magic.

People talk ’bout the alchemists only in whispers. They bring the good weather. They bring the out-of-district news and keep books, mounds of books written in faded-out scripts that no one can read since the world fell two generations past. Nobody ever sees their faces, knows their names.

They give out magic, and they take sons.

They take sons to their Destinies.

* * *

Father throws a feast for Joe’s tenth birthday. He gets paper from the papermen and the sisters take a whole day off to pen the invitations, and come the afternoon of Joe’s nativity the whole clan gathers in, cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers, and holds a festival day in the downstairs meeting-hall.

Six helps set the buffet table. The sisters and brothers’-wives boss him around, dump basket or plate in his arms to ferry one to the other, every single one of them sharp-voiced and mad. None of the brothers’-wives ruffle his hair today. Everyone’s edgy. Everyone’s bad.

The clan puts on its best Sunday clothes and Father holds up his glass, handed down from before the world fell and full of out-district oaked white wine.

“To our son,” Father says, and the whole clan roars.

To our son!

Six slides out of his chair between the stamping and cheering and weeping. He boots it around the cousins and the table with the soup tureen down the rattletrap metal-gray stairs to the sixth floor.

His workshop’s quiet. Six floors above, he can’t hear the cheering and congratulations and condolences, the aunts touching shoulders and saying how brave one is to give up a loved little brother for the good of the district, the world. “They didn’t have a party for you,” Six tells the empty air, the bent-stemmed plants and his green and growing bastard-born potatoes.

The absence of Uncle Eddie says no, they did not.