The magician waited while Dawn finished with her little woman’s moment. Years before she started dawdling while getting ready for breakfast. She claimed she spent those minutes in her cubbyhole applying finishing touches. A little dab of scavenged rouge perhaps, a final flourish for her thick dark hair-Mr. Jay could never tell what wonders she worked. Her forever girl’s condition had her brimming with youthful beauty at all times.
He curled cross-legged on the sill of the boarded-up window. The magician had returned some forty minutes before Dawn awoke. Mr. Jay loved and hated his time away from her. He enjoyed it because he had a very isolated life before he’d met her. Not lonely, just isolated and he had adapted to solitude. And now, he was uncomfortable with time alone, because it meant being away from Dawn. He’d known her all these years and still could not predict her actions. So he worried.
Mr. Jay blamed the fact that she’d never gone through puberty. She couldn’t recognize the dangers of the world. For her, a danger passed was passed and life took her onto the next thing. He checked that line of reasoning because it wasn’t true. She learned, and she was wiser than she let on. She played dumb from time to time. He knew that was because if she could take care of herself, she was afraid he’d leave.
Mr. Jay stretched himself out of his moody brooding and settled against the bricks. The exertions of the night had little effect upon him. He rarely needed more than a couple of hours sleep. It gave him great opportunity for study and meditation.
What he found would make it impossible to sleep anyway. He would try to rest later after he figured out whether his mission was complete. It wasn’t a success. But it was unlikely he could take it farther with Dawn in tow. The incident with the Prime’s spies worried him. They had to be using Powers to locate him so quickly.
It was a decade since his last visit to the City of Light and it had grown more oppressive and degenerate in the intervening years. He realized the City might have been among his primary reasons for his extended period in the wilderness. It was more than that; but the City repulsed him. The worst part was that its inhabitants were forgetting that something was wrong-or that there had ever been a right.
Complacency was turning them all into the walking dead. The metropolis’ soaring, bulging, hanging bulk pressed down on the spirit. Each level perched on the bones of another monstrous city below it combining to make a leviathan under a tarry shell. The citizens burrowed through its guts like roundworms.
But that they could forget why the City was the way it was. He hated and loved people for their ability to adapt to anything. History books told him what he needed to know about human tenacity, and experience had shown him their terrifying survival instincts unleashed.
He was appalled, not surprised, by the conditions he’d found while moving under cover of night through the City’s lowest and oldest level. The poor and the dead were forced to exist in the damp shadows where the first streets had been built upon and forgotten. The poor propped up hopeless lives with meaningless work. The meaning diminished by the drudgery of the tasks they were forced to accept in a society that rewarded wealth and punished poverty. And with the Change robbing them of the simple pleasures of child rearing and real death, what more then? Work. Get enough to eat, and cavort, for there was no start or end or meaning to life.
And the contrasts were extreme. High above their reach, immortal billionaires raced along the elevated Skyways from one tower to the next, gobbling up wealth and monopolizing economic power with a staggering disregard for those who eked out existence in the levels far below.
Mr. Jay shook his head at such notions. It was always the way. These ideas awaited him in every city he’d ever visited. The City of Light just took it to incredible extremes. Black winged limousines flying over the stinking bodies of the homeless. The beggar is free to work his way to the top; he’s free to die in the streets if he wants. He’s free!
There was nothing left for the poor. And they couldn’t even rest in death. Their neighbors, the dead, scurried, limped and dragged themselves through the darkness on errands of some arcane sort or other-or outright competed for the same jobs. Many of the dead retained their memories in part or whole, and these tried to mimic the semblance of lives that were gone forever.
Mr. Jay had traveled across the lowest Level Zero without incident. It was simple enough. There were few restrictions on the activities of the living. And all obstacles he found were designed to impede the actions of individuals moving up to the levels above. He found massive gates permanently blocking ancient side streets that wound upward. City Authorities patrolled all vantage points but concentrated on the large manned access areas. They were easy for the magician to evade.
Throughout his excursion he had reminded himself that there was a curfew on the denizens of the lower levels, not a state of war. Many living men and women from below worked on the City’s upper levels, and these were allowed to come and go as their employment demanded-though they were scrutinized at Authority checkpoints. They were issued work permits and travel documents. As in other cities, Mr. Jay found that the living did not fear the dead as much as the rich feared the poor.
He moved secretly around Zero and elsewhere in the City because of the Prime’s interest in him. Obviously, a watch had been set. Mr. Jay could smell Powers in the air.
Listening to Dawn hum her little morning song, Mr. Jay was revisited by the faces of the newly dead, collected and deposited in neighborhoods just past the gates on Zero. They scurried around near panic, still terrified of the dead whom they had spurned but now joined. They clung to any elevated position in the dark labyrinth of the City’s cellar because there was nowhere else to go. They were dead . But the world after the Change would not let them rest. Many, desperate, huddled about the doorways of the Relief Centers and Missions, gathering there as though some treatment might change their position in the City. They were a pitiful lot.
He had to console himself with admiration for the living workers who tried so hard to comfort the sad torment of the dead. Mr. Jay avoided them all the same. He had business under night-and no time to dally.
After traveling the dark ways for an hour or more, he came to the base of Archangel Tower. Because of its massive weight, the Tower was separate from the arching stone and steel buttresses that suspended the rest of the City’s levels. It was built on bedrock, and its mammoth shape thrust upward through the metropolis’ layers until it burst free of all encumbrance a twelve-hundred feet or more from its foundation-there to swoop another eight-hundred feet skyward. It was not free of all association, and had been built upon and conscripted as reinforcement for the ascending layers around it.
But around the Tower’s footing was a clear space of cracked and broken concrete slabs forming a shadow-strewn valley. Fifty yards at its widest, this clearing paced the distance from the smooth foundation outward to the crumbled facades of long forgotten buildings, most now incorporated into the cyclopean footing of the upper City’s support structures. Massive concrete and steel arches roared upward into the darkness like giants. So deep was Mr. Jay that the City’s busy Skyway traffic far above fell mute. He heard greasy rustling noises.
Light fell from the City’s upper reaches as a dim blue mist. Peering through this he saw that the stony valley was rippling with movement. In and through this clearing a sea of the dead undulated, many thousands drawn by some invisible force into a swirling tempest of flesh. Dead creatures-many worn to remnants-of various shapes and decrepitude lunged, crawled and wriggled their way inward on a slow somber clockwise vortex, hideously struggling against the undead tide for contact with the mammoth blocks that formed the Tower’s foundation.
Silently-with only a whispered hiss of movement-this awful circuit was repeated-many of its participants so long engaged as to have eroded dead elbows, knees or hips flat. At first he thought they were the Lost. Those were dead who started turning up after the first fifty, completely devoid of higher brain function and who had reverted to animal and aggressive behavior.
But a dead woman draped in colorful rags lagged along the outer edge of the march. She was pitiful and strange to look upon, dressed in the remnants of a uniform as though coming off her shift of serving coffee and doughnuts. There was no doubt that she was dead, her skin was the color of chalk, but when he looked at her, a dead eye caught his and reflected awareness-some weak evidence that she had only recently joined this macabre cycle. Her wrists told a sad story through slit mouths.
“Where are you going?” he had asked her, his voice echoing over the shambling, horrifying parade. Her dead eyes flickered, conjuring something like warmth or appreciation from her hard plastic features.
“It is the singing. The music! Can’t you hear it?” The dead woman staggered past before Mr. Jay could answer. He only heard the slithering hiss of the ugly march. Nothing more. He might know the music, if he knew the singer, so he gently pushed his way through the hideous tide of death-sidled up to the body of the Tower, he set his hand against it to speak…
“What do you think, Mr. Jay?” Dawn popped out of her cubbyhole and Mr. Jay’s mind snapped back to the present. A chill went through him as the transition from memory chafed.
Her dark eyes were wide and beautiful-the light in them bright and ancient. She had put on his thick woolen sweater, and knotted it about her waist with a string. Her hair was brushed back and tied to form a dark brown bloom.
“As always my dear…” The magician climbed from his place of reverie. “You are a feast for the eyes.” Her downy cheeks bulged around her smile. “But a feast best appreciated on a full stomach.” He bent low, tweaked her button nose. “I am starved!”
“Did I take too long?” Her face dropped in a child’s wide-eyed expectation of trouble.
“Of course not.” He gestured to their little table, and the meager place settings. “If you would take the time to sniff the air, you’ll notice that our little stew is only now ready.” He moved toward the small propane stove he used for cooking, stirred the contents of the pot that rested there. “Please butter the rolls.”
As Dawn clambered into her seat, he pushed down the memories of Zero. Little Dawn was in too much danger here. He had underestimated the Prime’s abilities, and the other powers that lurked. He could never tell Dawn why he had come to the City. It was not her battle. It was not her mission, and if he would never make such sacrifices again, he could not ask her to. He paused a second over the cooking pot and made his decision. He’d replenish their supplies and they’d head north. He’d take her back to Nurserywood. If the world burned in the process, so be it. They’d already taken enough from him.