The Children(52)

At home she stripped to her underwear and mechanically consumed things from the fridge—noodles, cheese, plastic carton of browning pineapple—until her vision crisped and her hands stopped trembling. Then a long shower, a glass of wine, the twenty-minute coma of a sheet mask. None of it worked. It was two in the morning and her mind pinged restlessly among stations.

The cover of Ninth City Dreamer had been everywhere. On tables and in booksellers’ arms, young Guinevere perched so boldly in her tree, skin fat with youth and gaze imperious. One arm hooked around the trunk, the other braced against the branch that held her.

If you looked very close you would see something pressed between palm and branch. Nearly obscured by leaves, laid flat like a Bible to swear on: one of her story notebooks. Guin’s left hand fisted. Remembering the grain of its cover, the fiction that fattened the pages like waterlog.

It still hit her like a grief sometimes. The old longing, bunching itself into words she couldn’t speak, wouldn’t write. She’d hunch in the gale waiting for it to die and her mind to settle back into wordlessness.

She waited now. Standing at the window, looking out at the moving night. A car went by on the street below, trailing bass, and she watched it out of sight. Then lightly, almost carelessly, she pivoted on the balls of her feet.

All the lights in the apartment were off. Guin walked through the dark to a room she rarely used. There wasn’t much there. A pretty desk and chair that once belonged to Bitsy, and a closet Guin kept shut.

She opened it. At eye level was a tightly curated shelf of paperbacks, the only books in the house. Two shelves up was a typewriter. It was the one thing among her grandfather’s belongings that she saved.

The typewriter was heavy. Her arms strained as she eased it over to the desk. She’d had to drag the chair over to reach it. When the chair was back in place, she sat and for a long minute did nothing. Tentatively she set her hands on the typewriter’s keys.

She began, rustily, to type. Then, to write.

The words became a story. Moving through her in sensory snatches, pouring out from her hands. The night moved through its phases, light bruising the black until it broke through and became dawn. Guin wrote like a mapmaker feeling her way across a new land, recording its topography. Her fictional world unfurled like the city outside except better, because it was infinitely manipulable. A city turned lucid dream. Or the opposite: dreams that became a city. Like Edith’s Ninth City.

She lifted her hands from the keys.

The sky was pearling at its edges, and her head felt clean and quiet. At the bottom of the window frame, on the other side of the glass, Guin saw something crawling. Bees, humped up together, summer drunk, as if she’d poured Sprite along the sill. She put her stung knuckle to her mouth.

In the bathroom she closed her eyes as she peed. Sleep made a static in her head. She could’ve faded out right there on the toilet, like a rock and roll burnout.

She rose and made her way back to the typewriter. The typed pages beside it looked like the leaves of a magician’s book. Moody and rustling, keeping their own counsel.

Guin pinched them between two fingers. She carried the pages to the kitchen and set them in the sink. Lit three matches, dropped them on the stack, and watched it burn.





Twenty-Nine




There’s a scene in the Ninth City series. Book five, The Wicked Few.

Guinevere Sharpe is riding the undertrain. The tracks of this magnificent transport run beneath the city in a veinlike trace work, unattended by conductor or engineer, more creature than construction. Boldly she makes a perilous jump between stations, to get to the Moonless Market.

She’s there to find and barter for one of her brother’s lost memories. She walks among the stands, their vendors hawking shoes and candy and tiny fruit trees, hourglass flowers and phone calls with the dead, good luck measured out into white paper packets and honey made by lunar bees—thick as melted mercury, excellent for sleep. She’s on the verge of being taken in by a silver-tongued lullaby seller when she feels a tugging at her jacket. A pickpocket, snagging her map!

She chases the thief up and down the market’s snarled avenues then beyond them, piercing the deeper quarters of the unlit realm. She follows the pickpocket along the ragged edges of shantytowns and through the gleaming ring of the Beggar Queen’s Wood, then on to the place where only the most dauntless pickers go: the shifting wilds of the Dreamers’ Graveyard.

Though Guinevere has heard of it, she didn’t know what it meant for a place to die, what the corpse of a shop or garden might look like. Now she understands. Every window of every house and theater and temple lining the Graveyard’s haunted avenues is as dull as a dead man’s eye, all their colors mottled and unwholesome.

No living person, unprepared, should enter these structures. Not the glass palace there, with its fairy spires, nor the cottage to her right, which must once have been a cozy place. The air smells thickly of lilies and camphor. Dream-pickers perfume themselves with these odors of death and preservation, so they might withstand the atmosphere.

Guinevere has no perfume, nothing to protect her. She slows, then stops, and might have stood right there until the pickers came through with their rattling carts and their long-snouted masks, to ignore or save or kidnap her depending on their mood.

Something revives her: the awesome and unlikely sight of one living place among the dead ones. And the pickpocket, throwing open its door to slip through.