The Birth of the Deathbed #2
“You’ll dull your blade,” Dawn says. He reminds Guy, often and rightly, that Tyro is too old for this kind of indulgence.
She’s already too tall for her trousers and will need new shoes by month’s end.
She is, Guy can’t help but notice, beginning to smell different.
Deep in the folds of his gut, he knows time is short.
“There.” He guides the razor over the foamy knob of her chin, protracting the last, gentle stroke. “The more you shave, the more it grows. By twenty you’ll have a little mustache, like Three.”
Dawn tosses them a towel. “And you’ll love it just as much as she loves hers.
” He stands, too tall for the apartment, his lamplit shadow filling the space like liquid.
He’s volunteered to cover for his team this morning, claiming a one-man job from the company bulletin.
His quarry is the kelpie lotus, a common blight on septic pools in the midcity.
Not a lotus at all but a carnivorous water bug, it attracts pets and unwary children with flutters of flightless, iridescent wings.
One touch will result in a gush of gelatinous exudate, with which it adheres to its victim and sinks into the depths to feed.
It’s a passive predator and easy to remove, necessitating only a well-placed tarp and a fishing net, but out of all flavors of vermin, sticky is Dawn’s least favorite.
Guy rubs the suds away and smacks Tyro’s smooth cheek. “You wanna come to Three’s today?” he asks. “Help me fix my helmet?”
“Only if I can have a cigarette,” she says.
“Ty—”
“Just one. And you don’t have to light it.”
He rolls his eyes. He barely has a reluctant yes in his mouth before she pushes past him and out the door, witch’s herbs nibbling at the end of her hair.
She trots down the gangway, stopping only to greet the usual pack of neighborhood boys, half-dressed monkeys dangling in the jungle of catwalks beyond the guardrail.
Guy’s stomach always turns at their antics, though he and Dawn had been in their fearless place little more than a decade ago.
“That kid walks all over you,” says his bunkmate flatly.
Despite himself, Guy smiles. “She’s light on her feet, at least.”
“She’ll get heavier as she gets older.”
“I’ve heard that’s how growing works.”
“She needs structure.” Dawn slows where the branch to Three’s workshop diverts from the main path. “Stability. You shouldn’t let her run free all day.”
“Then what should I do with her?”
“Find her work.” Guy laughs, then bites his tongue when Dawn gives him a stern frown. “I’m serious. It’s that time, Guy. It’s just the right time.”
Three is half as pleased to see Guy alive and well as she is to see that Tyro has come with him. She ushers them into her workshop with a wry smile, mussing the girl’s hair as she passes.
“Hope you don’t mind the extra company,” Guy says.
“Ah, no skin off my teeth,” Three replies. “How you feel?”
“Not bad.”
“Get to work, then.” She directs Guy to the furnace, where he pulls off his shirt and dons his iron mitts. Tyro feigns helpfulness by rearranging Three’s collection of gears and wires. She sucks on the unlit cigarette, sleeves rolled up over smooth, unmarked forearms.
“Atrocious,” Three sighs, plucking out the congealed crust of BSPAF from the crannies of Guy’s broken facepiece. “Criminal abuse of equipment.”
Her own markings dance across her native arm as she works, attestations to her projects as an engineer for Wherewithal, Inc.
, foremost of which is the bank’s miserly coin-counting apparatus, an invention so successful it would’ve secured her a life of pleasure and a penthouse in Hart Park, she claims, had a corporate coup not exiled her to the undercity.
“You’re fortunate I’m not an honest woman, or I’d report this,” she says. “Fucking tubes jangling everywhere. Gaps loose enough to let any bug crawl straight to your brain. No wonder you were seeing dragons—put your back into it, Moulène. I need heat.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a dragon,” he says. “But I saw something. Tyro believes me.”
“Grub, you believe anything this man tells you?”
She shrugs. “No.”
“Yeah, you do, Ty.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Wise girl.” Three waves her over. “C’mere for a minute. Stop scrambling my shelves and I’ll show you how to weld a grenade casing.”
“Whatever it was,” Guy grunts, leaning over the bellows, “it wasn’t in the Manual.”
“You better hope it was. What are we at now? Three ninety?”
“Three ninety-seven,” Guy and Tyro say together.
“Well, pray you don’t get credit for three ninety-eight.
You know what happens to boys who add new species to the books.
Here, grub. Go play with these.” She plucks Tyro’s cigarette from her mouth and replaces it with a stick of solder.
“Remember Bacher’s dragonfly—if they name something after you, it’s because you’ve been eaten by it.
You should know this, Guy. Somehow you’ve got the whole damn Manual memorized and you still don’t know this. Keep at that furnace.”
“I don’t want credit for three ninety-eight,” he grunts.
“Don’t lie to me. I see that glint in your eye.” She lights the cigarette on the dome of the furnace. “Right, hot enough. Enough. Don’t overdo it.”
Guy steps down from the bellows, massaging his shoulder. Heat pounds along his wounded ear. “You think I’m crazy,” he says.
“No, I hope you’re crazy.” She closes her wooden fist around a pellet of dried sap and thrusts it into the furnace.
“Because if you’re not, then we’ve got something the size of a streetcar crawling through the rhizosphere.
And things like that—well, they don’t get that big by not eating.
Or worse, not being fed, if you catch what I’m putting down. ”
He shivers in the heat. “You reckon it’s a Cult of the Mammoth Stag situation?”
“I don’t reckon anything. I’m not paid to reckon. Here, put these over the vent.” She rips his defunct tubing from his helmet. “Problem is, these big ones, once they get a taste of you”—she jangles her wooden arm at Tyro—“they come back for more.”
“Don’t start,” Guy sighs. It doesn’t take much to prompt Three to wax nostalgic about the beast that swallowed her from the elbow down.
A couple of beers, or the presence of some doe-eyed boy.
Sometimes the culprit is an albino alligator crawled from the river’s depths, sometimes an ancient automaton awoken by a nefarious secret society, sometimes a vengeful middle manager from Wherewithal.
“Your real issue, Guy, is that you’re not crazy.” Three removes the resin-glass from the furnace and pulls it apart like toffee. “Not nearly crazy enough.”
“Yeah, you say that on quarterly feedback.”
“I mean it. Only way for an exterminator to retire sane is to enlist mad.” She twirls the sap and folds it into a homemade, illicit mold in the shape of Borisch eyepiece lenses. “Done stripping those tubules?”
“Almost.”
“Good. Big list this week. Bugbear moths on the next root over. And the lunar priest on Broken Teeth has those demon woodworms again, sowing doubt in his flock. We’ve even got an overcity job.”
“Sreckt wouldn’t take it?”
“Nah. The wedding planner on Fifth has lice again.”
“Those lice?”
“Those.”
Guy groans. The carousal louse is a common crasher of weddings, leaping unseen from bouquet to veil to marriage bed. Unions infested by the creature are short-lived and violently resentful, and one or both spouses aggressively try to seduce an exterminator the moment they arrive to decontaminate.
“I think it’s the same goddamn nest.” Three gives the mold one last shake and snaps it open.
A piece of amber glass appears in her hand.
“The subspecies that always gets the bride’s father involved.
Every time I think they’re gone they pop up somewhere else.
Like that line from that thing you like. The king of something.”
“‘Strike me from the front,’” Guy quotes, “‘and like the bullet-star, I’ll only rise at your back.’”
“Exactly that.” Three places the glass into the frame of his helmet, then refits the tubes. “Boy’s got a brain like a sponge.”
“What does that mean?” Tyro asks.
“Means it’s soft and full of holes and you can squeeze shit out of it.
Here, Guy. Take your helmet. Don’t you dare damage anything else.
I don’t wanna file any reports. We’re professionals, not those plebeians you find at Sreckt Brothers.
” She opens a browned catalogue and jots a column of numbers.
“One eighty for the tubules. Ninety-five for the glass, two twenty for the labor.”
Guy laughs. The sum is obscene, and arbitrary. “I can get you a hundred by new moon,” he says.
She looks him over. Unfailingly, she knows when he’s lying; she’s only uncertain when he tells the truth. It is his consistent dishonesty that forges a peculiar trust between them.
“Four ten,” she says. “Regular Borisch channels, they’d charge you over seven hundred for a replacement.”
“Two hundred.”
“Three fifty and a favor. A really despicable one.”
An equation tumbles in Guy’s head: beer, smokes, housing maintenance fees, Tyro’s ankles poking from trousers he’s stitched and unhemmed and stitched again.
What’s another few handfuls of dirt, he thinks, when he’s already a fathom deep?
Not that he’s ever lived on ground solid enough for burial. “All right,” he sighs.
“Well, don’t look so upset about it. You’ll scrounge something up. Your day off is next week. You can ask for a donation from—” She glances to Tyro, still playing with the soldering torch, and lowers her voice. “Well—isn’t there some god up there you’re close with?”