The Bridge Read online

  “Do you think they’ll ever crack our code?” Trudy whispered. “And when they do, what’ll happen to us? To me and Lara and . . . you?”

  Outside, the mist swirled thicker than usual so that it looked like the bridge was boiling in acid. The indigo sky hung low over the quaint roofs of Wellsburg on the other side, a few lights winking sleepily. But I knew better. I peered closer and noticed a hazy glow cast by a building along the river, the glamorous, infamous Sweeney’s Landing—invitation only—no Made had ever been on the List. The clock tower in its scaffolding cage rose above the mist, and a shape on the bridge jumped into the edge of my eye. I stepped back and peered out from the edge. I probably needn’t have worried. It wasn’t as if my window could be differentiated from the hundreds of identical ones in the Tower, each with a lonely Made standing in the frame—but better to be safe than sorry. From my hidden vantage point I watched a crouching figure materialize on the railing. As its outlines sharpened, I saw what looked like wings drawn around its body. Its head was shrouded in shadow but surely angled toward my window, and at this distance and beneath the folds of its starlit hood, I looked into a face that was a void into endless night. I shivered and couldn’t stop, my insides filled with the coldness of that hole.

  Trudy had turned onto her side, still watching me. I realized with a shock that I liked her. And that brought warmth back into my body. I stopped shivering. “Nothing will happen to us,” I said. It was less a lie than a prayer—was there a difference?

  “But they, the governments or whoever, they see something in us. They pretend we’re just sad useless cult victims that need their help, but I don’t know. It’s like . . . they’re afraid us or something.”

  “Maybe they are.” I turned away from the window, tried to unsee that black hole of a face.

  “Do you really think they’re going to hack us?” she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Lara says that’s just an urban myth.”

  “Lara is just trying to make you feel better,” I said.

  “I can hear you,” Lara mumbled from her bed, groping for her earphones. “We just have to stick together is all. I heard of places in Upper Slant cities, and in New Dip and the Wastes too, where Mades congregate, watch out for each other. And there is this counter-hacker out there called Made2Break who’s trying to get to our code before anyone else does. Which may also be a myth, but whatever helps us survive is good enough for me.”

  I thought of Kai’s stories and the way they gave the Mades something to live for, to live and to die for.

  Lara said all of this with her eyes closed and her earphones in, and the blue light played across her face, and Trudy said, “And then what? What will we be then?”

  “Free, maybe,” Lara mumbled. “Fingers crossed.”

  Trudy smiled at me and held up two sets of crossed fingers. Then she turned to the wall and in minutes was asleep.

  It took me a while. The excitement about Pagan’s text was overshadowed by the shame of having dismissed the two Mades whose lives were intertwined with mine whether I liked it or not. The figure on the railing of the bridge seemed to be gone but I knew better than to believe that, so I texted Pagan back.

  I’ll be there.

  When I finally slept, Kai was in my dreams again. She walked up to a giant crocodile and began to recite to it from a notebook bound in Malemade skin. Her blue ribbon had slipped so it lay across her eyes like a blindfold, and her hair bristled with black feathers. The crocodile was the size of a small mountain, like one of the Starveling Hills, and its tail formed a glittering escarpment that dropped into the abyss. I couldn’t see the drop but I knew it was there. Kai began to cry, black tears seeping beneath the ribbon. The huge jaws of the croc opened and I could see down its abyssal throat. The jaws opened wider and Kai began to move toward it and there was nothing I could do to stop her.

  When I woke the pillowcase was soaked and the sheets reeked of sweat, but my illness had finally broken. I got in the shower, trying to wash off the sadness of the dream. The girls had gone to class, leaving their cheap scents behind them. Trudy’s bed was all hospital corners and fluffed pillows and Lara’s a tangle of sheets and shorty pajamas, with a charging cord wrapped around the leg of a teddy bear. I spent half an hour in the shower, scrubbed my skin raw. Washed my hair and braided it wet into a high coiled basket on top of my head. I helped myself to my roommates’ makeup and watched a video from a Wellsburg blogger to learn to apply it.

  Maybe I was already hacked. Already corrupt. I couldn’t have resisted Pagan if I tried.

  At eleven thirty I set out across the bridge. I ignored the guards, kept my arguing eyes on the prize. Gargoyles leered in the weak sun. The leaves were turning gold, and the narrow, terraced buildings shimmered on the wet cobblestones. Rot from the river wafted in the air. The coffee crowds spilled onto the pavements, standing on the curbs smoking cigarettes and sipping from keep-cups. I spotted some bonny lads who reminded me of the drovers at the Nag. But by the time I got to the Quad, where students clustered around the fountain, I had begun to lose my nerve. Maybe the Regulars were right. Maybe the whole thing—the Blood Temple, Starveling Hills, everything—had all been a dream, but the kind from which there was no waking, because maybe it had dreamed me instead, and Kai too.

  “Her eyes pop like grapes between my beak?”

  I turned to see Pagan dressed in white jeans and flat shoes. A suede fringed poncho hung over her shoulders. She wore sunglasses and no makeup, the angles of her face gleamed like marble.

  “I think I upset the TA,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Trigger warnings are the first step to censorship. This is a free country last time I looked. I like your makeup.” Pagan’s lips pulled back in a gargoyle’s grin. “Jacinta won’t last. They never do. What’s with the flesh-eating bird? Is that a thing?”

  “Yes and no. Corvus chimaeralis, they’re a hybrid introduced by . . . one of the cult scientists. They’re good at finding things. The birds, I mean.”

  But she was reading a text, smoking a cigarette I didn’t see her light.

  “Listen,” she said. “There is a reading series you should check out. I think it could appeal to your, quote, aesthetic.”

  My heart flipped. I forced myself to hold my ground, to refrain from sniffing.

  “What happens at a reading series?” I asked.

  She needled smoke from delicate nostrils. “Right. I always forget that you wouldn’t have had much exposure to culture in the, quote, conventional sense. Our little series is called Fearsome Gatherum. Look it up online to get an idea of our vibe. It’s kind of a protest group, actually.”

  I nodded enthusiastically. “Against?”

  “Against the fear of fear, of course. The taboo against terror.” She raised both hands in mock-horror. “Because of, well, you . . . survivors. Out of respect for what you went through. The Blood-thingie cult and all that.”

  All what?

  “Everyone has to be so sensitive all the time now,” she continued. “But if you’re always tiptoeing around other people’s, quote, feelings, then where do you find your own truth?” She composed herself. I imagined that for the likes of Pagan, life was a series of poses and the challenge was simply in holding them. “Everyone has the right to take truth where they find it. That’s what, quote, fearsomeness is about. ”

  “Fearsomeness?”

  “Yours feels very lived in, Meera,” she dimpled. “Please tell me that you have more where that one came from?”

  I began to shake my head. Cannot lie. Mustn’t lie. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  She held her cigarette in still fingers. “You’re killing me,” she said.

  “Maybe I should go.”

  “Look. There’s that psycho on the loose now.” Her forehead crinkled in irritation. Maybe boredom. “People make their own happy endings, Meera. The Fearsome cro
wd are good people—we protect each other. Like sisters. You need friends in a place like this.”

  I swallowed. “Why me?”

  She dropped the butt in the fountain, checked a text and then she looked up. “I told Sasha Younger about your crow story. I said it was the real deal. So that was enough for her.”

  “Ravens,” I said. “They aren’t crows, despite being in the Corvus genus.”

  “Hundred percent detail-driven. I like that.”

  I remembered the name from Marvin—Sasha Younger, daughter of a founding father. Well, at least we’d have something in common.

  Pagan stepped away to talk to some unsmiling guy with a camera slung around his neck. I sat back down on the fountain edge listening to it lapping at itself, and the voices all around. Pitched high and low, melodic and percussive—none of them with our peculiar crack, splintered and brittle as bone. A cluster of Regulars spoke about another attack on a Made over the weekend The victim survived, they said, but only just.

  “God. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” someone said.

  “She crawled to safety. Said something scared her free. A noise that startled her attacker.”

  “The Hunter?”

  “That’s what they’re calling him over there—you know how they love their fakelore.”

  “There is meant to be an actual ghost of that jumper in the 1800s, the one who killed a bunch of, quote-unquote, witches.”

  “Or who was pushed.”

  The click of cigarette lighters, the ting of text messages.

  “Who knows? The attacks are breathing new life into the myth, whatever. Rumors of a black hunter’s cloak—a long leather duster—will have something to do with it. But could just be talk—you know how superstitious the survivors are.”

  Their voices were filled with rapturous schadenfreude.

  “Imagine being a . . . I can barely even say it.”

  “I know, right? The word, ‘survivor’ is totally ironic and not in a good way.”

  “The Blood Temple. Sheesh. Created with AI protocol and human flesh and real wombs and embryos—my God. What could be worse than being sentient enough to know what one isn’t?”

  “What could be worse than being almost human?”

  “Like, with enough exposure to the real world, you’d blend right in. But you’d always know.”

  “Hundred per cent.”

  The air filled with the sultry aroma of high-class weed—different from Marvin’s dirty leaf. Infused with hints of berry and chocolate.

  “I wonder if our pets would love us like they do if they knew they weren’t the same as us.”

  “Gypsy would love me no matter what. You love God, even though you know you’re not like Him.”

  “I wouldn’t call it love,” someone else said, as they moved off toward the coffee stand. “Fear maybe.”

  “Fear totally.”

  By the time Pagan came back, my mind was made up. I don’t know if it was the talk of the victimized Mades or the Hunter. Or if it was just her promise of protection—you need friends in a place like this—or something I could not yet define. But I told her I’d give the reading series a try.

  “A trial, actually,” she said. “I mean we’re giving you a try, not the other way around. You get that, right? Like an audition, kind of.” That dimple.

  “Trial by ordeal, I get it.”

  She nodded absently as if she’d expected nothing else. “A tip? Just make sure that your story delivers beginning to middle to end. No cliff-hangers. It’s a reading series, not a sitcom—Sasha’s rule. The audience wants to dream the dream and then wake up. A different dream next time. Got it?”

  But then her eyes traveled from my stained brown shoes to my hair. “There is a dress code, by the way, even for the trial. I’d hate you to get it wrong. I’ll have some clothes sent over.”

  I assured her there was no need, but she insisted. “Don’t want you to waste your money buying an outfit just in case . . . well, fearsomeness isn’t for everybody.”

  Once, after a game of backgammon with the Father, Kai had bragged about how she’d started bearing off before he was even out of his inner board. He had been so busy racing to the end that he’d forgotten to keep his eye on the beginning.

  “I’m not everybody,” I said.

  “No kidding.” Pagan narrowed her eyes against a shaft of late afternoon sun, and blew me a stone-cold kiss, and I was gone.

  * * *

  High in his aerie on the roof of the Blood Temple, the Father says that we Mades would lose our heads if they weren’t screwed on. I turn away from the caged birds and start down the stairs, holding my breath. But I must have missed the door that led into the lobby. Instead I just keep descending, flight after flight. The fire stairs seem endless—at each landing a locked door. I panic and start climbing back up, trying to keep count, but when I get to the lobby level, or what I think is the lobby, the door is locked. I turn the knob in a growing panic then start back down, sweating and spitting sobs, four, five, six, ever downward. Finally there are no more stairs. I am at the bottom. I push on the door, not wanting to think about what if it too doesn’t open, and I imagine scenarios of having to sleep there and leave my sister without her healing tea, without me to sponge down her forehead, to whisper in her ear how I’ll never leave her.

  The door finally opens at my shove, and I burst through it stumbling. I am in the school basement—there is a metallic underground smell from the earth but also something chemical—contaminated ground water from the weapons facility. There is a wide dark hallway with rooms leading off to the side and crinkled heating pipes with the silver coating peeling off, and pipes running along the ceiling. It is unlit of course, but there is a glimmer at the end and when I get to it, I turn into another hallway, narrower and lit from above by sputtering fluorescent tubing whose illumination stops about halfway down. My heart is pounding. I try not to panic. There are doors along it, signs saying HAZCHEM and CLEANING and I realize that the smell is that of a hospital, and that this is below the infirmary and the birthing rooms and some of the pathology labs. A sign to my right says “Morgue” and through the glass panel I see metal gurneys and a big lumpy oblong shape on one and a smaller lumpy shape on the other.

  Glass crunches underfoot. I hear distant voices—the cheerful authority of the Assistants and a Matron, and I cannot breathe. I can’t feel my feet—I grope the walls, freezing. If I am caught, I am dead, and if I die, then Kai is dead meat, and I can’t let that happen. I need to get to her. Surely this hallway will lead to an exit. My thoughts are like chewing gum. Kai looked so ill before I left. I think of her waiting to be chemically unmade in the infirmary and how much she knows about everything and how little I know about anything. I don’t want to live without her, because without her I am lost. I need to save her to find myself and I need to save myself to find her.

  I wish my head would clear, like in Narn’s hut—what I would give for some of that tea. I think of the ravens, how they are connected somehow to Narn’s magic, which is different from that of a normal witch. Zigzagging blindly along with my arms waving in front of me, I wonder if maybe I can be unmade in her place. My hands grope the darkness. Maybe I can start taking the Father’s unmaking drugs instead of Kai. I will make some fake pills from the soft insides of our dinner rolls like Kai did for our dolls when we were little, and I will give them to her, and I will swallow her real pills, the ones for unmaking. But the thought of losing my horny lady-bit, now that I have found it, just makes me feel like crying.

  My flailing arms steer me toward a room that ripples with self-generated light from a half-open door, like an opal. I move toward it urgently, my mind elsewhere—but then the door opens further at my touch, and I am in the shimmering room. Refracted light from the liquid in dozens of jars on dozens of shelves. Each jar contains a single pink lady-bit
suspended in liquid dark as ink.

  I am all eyes. Only eyes.

  The lady-bits have curly horns or ears like on a sheep or a goat, just like the Father said, so they must have belonged to Unmades—twins or liars—bad Mades who didn’t turn out as the Father intended. Mistakes. My butt clenches. Each jar has a faded number and a name. They’re dusty, an irregular harvest. I back away, the frigid air cuts my skin. I won’t look at the names, refusing to let my brain record any of them. My hips collide with a steel table on wheels, and something smashes on the floor. I pivot into a crouch and glimpse beneath my feet the broken jar, and on one fragment of glass, a number and a name handwritten in Sharpie. The name is not faded like the rest but dark and glossy and still wet.

  I run.

  CHAPTER 10

  SISTER-ACT

  The abrupt seasonal change literally took my breath away, and although my infection was mostly cured, October found me with a persistent bronchial tick that made it hard to talk. Or at least that was my excuse for not seeing as much of Marvin as I should have. The real reason of course was that I had a story to come up with—this time for Pagan’s reading series—held most Sundays except for session breaks. Sasha had been keen, she said in a follow-up text, to “trial” me at least once before Halloween. Fearsome Gatherum? I could barely say the name—I wished Kai were here—she’d die laughing. I texted Marvin a sick face, and frittered away the hours until I could call Narn. I couldn’t do it without her. When I had tried, after meeting with Pagan, to come up with a story on my own, my imagination deserted me. If memory was Kai’s strong suit and imagination mine—our symbiosis complicated by the Father’s Forever Code—then why was the triangle that defined us failing me now?

  A drift of leaves dropped at my feet on cue. The wind blew wads of sulfuric frost up from the river. Above me bare branches spasmed then grew still. The shop windows were strung with pumpkins and rubber spiders. Halloween wasn’t a big celebration in South Rim out of respect for witches, but here it was as if the Apology never happened. A wart-chinned manikin cackled at me outside the front door of the yoga studio.