Chapter Text
Bluebells bloomed out of the earth-filled spaces where the dead android’s eyes had been. Tiny roots threaded into the seams of flame-blackened brows, dripped down jagged cheeks, and tangled in the fronds of soft ferns. Leaves of grass offered meager shade to a face that emerged like a hollow dark spirit from the dirt: sunlight shivered in the fissures of fire-cracked plastic; dandelions bowed in the breeze and kissed the charred forehead with their vibrant petals; a broken jaw lay gently parted, frozen on a syllable, its teeth sheltering a tonguelike worm forever scraping for a word--
“Alice!” Cole’s voice echoed across the stone-walled enclosure, enthusiasm softened by trails of moss and tall grass. “Come on! The dragon!”
Alice stood, her shadow cast over the dead. She stared into the face in the soil, then with a quiet turn she followed the calling voice, leaving the fire spirit to gaze eternally at the sun.
With a crunch of steps on the clover-covered gravel, Alice passed the broken fence of the polar bear enclosure, where insects hissed among wide-leafed weeds and warnings of poison ivy. She rounded the weathered corner of the old reptile house, ducked beneath a long silver spiderweb, and found Cole clambering atop the blackened plastic bones of an enormous ribcage that imprisoned a bed of white flowers.
Alice’s shoulders sagged. “It doesn’t look like a dragon anymore.”
“She used to be awesome.” Cole hopped across a narrow gap to stand on tiptoes upon a narrow brittle bone, his LED trilling bright blue. He stretched his arms wide, staring down at the writhed remains of the beast’s long neck and the crushed melted plastic that was left of its terrible skull. “She’d get up on that wall,” he pointed high on the stone barrier that separated the zoo from the shining forest, “and she’d spread her wings and breathe fire right up in the sky! And you could ride on her back and pet her and I figured out the command to make her breathe fire but Dad wouldn’t let me. I named her Darla.”
“Did she burn herself up?” Alice weaved between the tall weeds and crouched beside the rusted metal jaws that remained of Darla’s shattered skull. They gaped sharp like a bear trap overgrown by a tangle of roots.
Cole hopped down and leaned on his knees over the snaking neck that rippled beneath the gravel. “Sort of. She set everything else on fire and she burned with it. That’s what Dad said.” He dug his fingers in the soil at Darla’s throat and uncovered a little metal box that glinted silver in the sunlight. After snapping it free of roots and clinging wires, he tossed the clattering device to Alice. “One flamethrower, check!”
“There was probably a reason your dad didn’t let you make Darla breathe fire.” Alice peered skeptically into the mouth of the little fire-box with a trill of yellow spinning light at her temple.
Cole snatched the box out of her hands as he marched past her. “He’ll change his mind when he sees what we’re building.”
Alice climbed to her feet and trotted after him through a dry swish of tall grass, past the green-black shine of an overgrown pond, toward the buckled rusting gates that guarded the zoo’s entrance. “I’m still not sure what exactly we’re building.”
“Just the coolest custom android body the world’s ever seen!” Cole spun on his heel and marched backwards, his arms flung wide. “It’s gonna have dinosaur teeth and ten eyes and six arms with big claws and wings and a sword-tail and a jet motor and it can breathe fire! Once Dad sees it, he’ll definitely let me transplant my AI into it!”
Alice stood on the threshold of the broken gate, watching Cole mount his bike and trying to imagine him with wings and claws and dinosaur teeth. “How will you ride your bike with six arms and a tail?”
“I won’t need a bike, obviously. ” Cole looked back with a smug grin. “I’ll fly everywhere!” To prove his flight-worthy speed, he jammed his foot on the pedal and raced off across the crackled parking lot with a whirr of gears and tires on tarmac. Alice grabbed her bike out of the weeds, took a running start, and sped after him down the wooded dirt road, the wind roaring in her ears.
The driver’s side door clapped shut behind him. Hank dropped his hands in jean pockets, tipped back his gray head, and drew a long breath of clear summer air.
Ahead, the grassy hill rose soft and green in the vibrant sun, pierced by the glitter-white Tower with its rippling gloss of oily color. The spire was shorter now than he’d been accustomed to seeing it: high slick walls culminated in an irregular crown of shattered stone that let the sunlight peek down inside. The broken white shards of the shattered spire still dotted the hill where they had fallen. They had begun to root into the soil.
Hank hiked slowly up the hill, and he paused to look out over the trees and quiet rooftops of the city. The cobbled streets traced like pencil lines between toy houses and wide green parks, circled Stratford Tower with its high weathered clock face, and disappeared among the violet farms that softened the sloping horizon.
Something moved behind him. An enormous shadow blocked the sun; the summer breeze suddenly felt colder. Hank stiffened and turned, a strained smile lifted to the monstrous silhouette above him. “Hey, uh. You remember me. It’s Hank. I’m a friend.”
The great white Dragon listed their spine-swept head, a golden eye cast with suspicion upon the tiny visitor. A leather wing twitched toward the cloudless blue sky and folded again. Scythe-sized claws pressed into the grass. Nostrils flared with a huff of hot breath like brimstone. Hank kept very still in the shadow of judgment.
The color-glossed wall of the Tower rippled. In silence, a shape of stone slipped away and a doorway opened, inviting. Beyond it, a shard of sunlight cast down through the cool shade.
The Dragon’s scrutinizing stare remained locked on Hank, unfaltering.
Hank slowly withdrew a hand from his pocket and pointed tentatively at the open doorway. “I’m gonna go.” It was as much a request for permission as a statement. He avoided the Dragon’s eye. When there was no response, Hank nodded to himself, swept his hand in an awkward feint of walking ahead, then quietly sidled through the door without turning his back on the watchful beast.
Once he was inside, Hank released the breath he’d been holding and let his stiff posture slump, hands curled on the catwalk rail. “Your friend’s still scary as shit.” He tried to keep the quiver out of his voice.
Rose called from below, an amused smile in her words. “Good! We couldn’t ask for a better bouncer.”
She stood at the bottom of the spiraling catwalks, in the shade of the moving spotlight of sun, surrounded by tended wildflowers and a shimmer of white and blue butterflies. A holographic screen clung to the empty air, showing her strings of code and flashes of images that Rose manipulated and swept aside with a maneuver of her fingers. She cast a smile up at her visitor, a laugh in her eyes. “What brings you by, Hank?”
Hank leaned on the rail, drew a slow breath, and cleared his throat. “I’m looking for Connor.” He put on his detective’s candor, stiff and professional.
Rose quirked a skeptical brow at him. “And you thought you’d find him here?”
“Hell, no.” Hank backed up and shook his head, a faint smile behind his beard. “I’ve got a lead I thought you could help me with.”
“Is there a please somewhere in that request?” Rose tilted her head with a hand on her hip. “Well, come on down here, then. Show me what you’ve got.”
Hank ran his palm along the soft mossy rail and descended the steps that spiraled around the sunlit well at the bottom of the Tower. Along the wall he passed a repetition of numbered glass pods, each designed to accommodate a single human-sized android. Only a few were occupied: androids who had been injured, who slept within the Tower while their bodies regenerated. Hank raised his brows and stared up through the spiraling catwalk to the open sunny sky. “Still no new kids, huh?”
“On one hand, I’m grateful.” Rose leaned back against the moss-covered wall, her smile cast down at the shaded flowers. “If it weren’t for the Dragon, the whole city would be out there begging us to give back the people they’ve lost. As if we took them. Or we’re holding them ransom.” She looked up at Hank’s descent. “At least as long as there are no new androids-- as long as the Tower isn’t resurrecting any more dead souls --no one can accuse us of picking and choosing who gets a second chance at life.” Her smile gently returned. “How’s Cole?”
“Trouble.” Hank stepped down into the bottom of the well; a bright fondness had illuminated his face at the mention of his son. “He and Alice are out scavenging parts for a construction project they think I don’t know about.”
“Shame on him for trying to fool a detective.” Rose quirked a bemused brow.
Hank chuckled while he tapped on his phone. “Something about wings and flamethrowers. You’ll call me if he comes in with an injury, right?”
“Do I look like a tattletale to you?”
Hank huffed a small laugh. An image appeared on the bright screen of his phone. His smile dimmed. “Right now it’s Connor I’m more concerned about. I’ve got this app here, it’s linked up to his head, right? I can see everything he sees. Well, this is the only thing he’s been looking at for the past three days.”
Rose accepted the phone and peered into the screen. In the video, a soft illumination of dappled sunlight shifted and shivered on the forest floor: fallen leaves, mushrooms with long reaching stalks, tiny white flowers, part of the rotted husk of an old tree. At the center of the image lay the decaying corpse of a dead fox.
Rose knitted her brows in concern. She turned her face toward Hank without taking her eyes from the image. “This is right now? A livestream of Connor’s visuals? Can he hear and see us?”
Hank nodded slowly, pressing his hands into his pockets. “He should. He always has before. He’s not answering.”
“Connor?” Rose took the phone with her into the light that pooled in the bottom of the well. “Connor, are you hurt? Is there something keeping you from responding? Blink once for yes, two for no.”
She waited, watching, while Hank looked over her shoulder. The video remained unbroken. The grass surrounding the fox’s corpse shivered in a gentle breeze.
From high above, at the top of the broken Tower, called Kara’s voice. “We can ask the birds.”
Kara leaned over the rail of the broken catwalk high above, where sunlight glowed inside the white shining stone. Her eyes glimmered the same gold as the Dragon. “There haven’t been any new androids, but some of the pods have been full of new wildlife. I can interface with them. See through their eyes.”
Hank squinted up at Kara’s shape against the sun. “Robot birds? You’re kidding me.”
Kara stretched out her hand into the open space beyond the catwalk, and a tiny yellow bird spiraled down from the sky and perched on her finger. In silence, Kara’s LED spun a flash of calm blue while the bird attentively watched her face.
Yellow wings fanned open, and in a flight of bright color the little bird flapped up into the sky and soared away over the grassy hill, over the glittering lake, toward the dense green of the forest.
A drip of water echoed in the lightless cavern.
The dark was ancient. The hollow room had been solid rock at the birth of the planet, carved away by a centuries-slow trickle of persistent water. Stalagmites reached up like fingers out of the stone, patient as an old god. Stalactites stretched down with jagged points made sharper with each lone, suspended drop.
A viscous clinging thread of water let go.
*drip*
From the narrow winding corridor, a light cut the darkness. Footsteps disturbed static puddles. A foreign echo of movement invaded the old silence.
Markus knelt on the cold rippled stone, a square of light in his palm.
“Hey.” His words whispered soft through an exhausted smile. The darkness listened all around him. “We were thinking of you. Josh remembered one of your paintings, and he recreated it the best he could. It looks identical-- but I know you’d say that only the original has that piece of the artist’s soul. Still, I thought you’d like to have it.”
He reached inside his jacket, and he placed a small square canvas against a jagged, oily white stone that protruded from the floor: a broken shard of the Tower. Colors shifted and spun on the surface of the stolen shard like reflections of the universe in spinning oil.
Beyond the shard, a frosted glass capsule-- similar to those that lined the inside of the Tower --contained a terrarium of blooming plantlife, a forest of green, the pressed blue and white of tiny flowers, all choked within the confines of the glass at the bottom of the ancient darkness.
Tangled deep within the leaves and roots, like a trick of the light through the glass, was the curled and sleeping shape of a person.
Markus rose to his feet and took his light with him, back through the corridor that would return him to Jericho. He left behind the forged painting:
A bright yellow star in a pthalo sky.