by Josh Pearce

Along the edges of the collapsed cities, safely enough away from their ground zero downtowns, Lenore Briar prospected through layers of Fordite and plastiglomerate. She used pick and spade and hand-twisted powder cartridges to break apart the baked layers of human industry while Techs, her pack zebroid, flicked his ears at each shovel strike and glumly nosed through the slag for mouthfuls of thistle-weed.

When she hit concrete, Lenore paused for water. She poured some out in a pan for Techs. The animal sniffed it, tapped twice on the ground with his front hoof, and walked a little ways off. “It’s clean,” she promised him. No response. “Suit yourself.”

The concrete was the wall of an underground vault – formerly underground, before bomb-blasts and windstorms etched away whatever building had sat atop it. Probably another bank basement with worthless money, but she had memories of old stories. Weird religions had long ago buried their holy texts in anticipation of a New Earth, sheets of precious metal engraved with the wet dreams of polygamists, prepper prophets, and pulp authors.

Or maybe it was a billionaire’s abandoned bunker, or even the grave of Jenny Sunflowerseed itself! Her drill punched through the lock tumbler, oxygen torch peeled back sections of steel door like a tin opener.

The vault was empty.

“Damn.” Coulda been worse, though. Every once in a while, a tomb was nuclear waste storage. “Come along, Techs, we struck out on this one.”

The zebroid had found a dark thatch on the ground and was gnawing at it. Lenore pulled at his halter, but he dug his feet in. She pulled harder. There was a body in a shallow grave, under a thin layer of the local trinitite. Wind had exposed the top of its head, and Techs had pulled it up by the hair. Lenore scraped aside the glassy green pebbles with her shovel.

The cadaver looked recent fresh – skin and clothes were full of holes, but not yet eaten down to skeleton. Boots were rotten, but its hand held an uncorroded pistol. Lenore took the gun and shook off the dust. It looked like a Colt Navy revolver, but was ornamented with gears and cogs, vibrating with a heartbeat that put a mechanical buzz in her head. It didn’t have a trigger, and the action was all locked up. It wouldn’t break open to show her how many rounds were loaded, either.

Well, she could clean the grit out of its workings and sell it at the next town. Lenore tucked it into Techs’ pack and he shied away before folding up all four legs and settling onto the ground. She pushed one way, pulled the other, then finally gave up. “Stupid ass,” Lenore said, but laid down also, using his flank as a pillow and covering her face with her hat.

She could hear it ticking in her ear like a pocketwatch. Just as she dropped off, Lenore felt her sister wake up. A muffled voice from inside her shirt said, “Momma said a pistol is the Devil’s right hand.”

Without opening her eyes, Lenore said, “Shush, Polyp.” The hypnotic noise followed her into sleep, and she dreamed that her body was an anthill. The formication started in her sternum, a million pleasurable pricklings marching up her neck over her scalp, and down her spine and belly to nest in her vestibule.

Lenore gasped awake, fearful of what her body had been doing without her, and found the front of her pants damp and both hands pressing the clockwork pistol firmly between her thighs. Its ticking now sounded like a timebomb. She moved the gun carefully away from the sensitive area of her body, because either could go off without warning.

• • •

Witness distant city lights of Teslândia where the Babbage Engines nested in their underground pyramids like immortal pharaohs, talking to each other on dedicated lines, and only shallowly extended thin tendrils of attention toward humanity. A Wardenclyffe Tower in the center of town transmitted so much energy that it ionized the air into plasma, creating a permanent glow cloud, and horseshoes struck sparks off the ground for miles around.

Steelbeard was in a rented cubby in the Black Light District where the girls had glowing bodies and mouthfuls of photonegative teeth, had one of those girls unclothed on his lap. Her hair was a writhing orange mess of sea nettles that brushed his knees, and her jellyfish skin was only opaque in the ultraviolet of the overhead lamp or the glow cloud. Whenever the electric trolleys went by outside, the building’s power flickered and she turned transparent enough to see the parts inside her, enough to see the parts of him inside her.

He had an ache in his pants from her anemone genitalia, its poison designed to enhance his sensitivity and expedite the experience. Her stick-figure skeleton was made of scrimshawed oosiks. Many of the carved patterns were self-inflicted notches tallying her conquests, while others were more pornographic, a point-and-pay menu so the girls could do brisk business across any language barrier.

Frequency bleed over from the telegraph grid vibrated the metal bristles of the man’s facial hair. He tasted strange things. Electricity crackled at the tungsten filaments of his eyebrows and eyelashes. He saw faraway places that he had never visited. The fine hairs inside his nostrils and ears hummed at VHF pitches, bringing with them foreign sensory impressions. The copper wiring holding the girl’s bones together glowed orange from the energy until her body resembled an Edison lightbulb. He could see her brain squirming within her softshell skull.

Just when he thought he’d pop a fuse, Steelbeard heard the voice of Dispatch in the tiny cochlear hairs, her voice which was not a voice but a series of dot and dash impulses leaking from the uninsulated overhead cables. He was quite fond of her signature fist. “Got yourself a new girl, ‘Beard?”

“No, ma’am, these here girls belong to the Devil.” This one already off his lap, invisible again, and drifting out the door with all his silver dollars, her business concluded as soon as he’d answered the call. Steelbeard picked a penny off the ground and put it in his mouth to let the metal leach into his system. Increased signal strength. “What’s the news, ‘Patch?”

“Chatter on the wires is that a lost gun is back on the network. You’re to take a look.”

“Whatever the Engines want,” he agreed, but surely she felt his hair stand on end at the thought of another frontier patrol. Babbages always stringing more telegraph lines to extend their reach into the Scablands, and it was the job of walkers like him to ride out whenever they uncovered the unexpected.

He enjoyed the pleasures of flesh within city limits, sure, but that didn’t mean he wanted to meet the Devil face-to-face in an empty hellscape, and there were savage salvage cults out there that would flense Steelbeard alive for the cash redemption value of the metal content in his body.

The wiry strands growing from his follicles were rooted very close to the electrochemical signals of his brain. ‘Patch put a needle in a groove and piped soothing music into his auditory channel, put a different needle in a different kind of groove and dripped opioid analog signals into his neural pathways until he forgot what he’d been worried about.

There were stationmasters up and down the miles and miles of trunk lines, bearded men and women like him. He located the nearest junction box, stuck his finger in the outlet, and went wirewalking.

• • •

She wasn’t hard to find in a town that wasn’t much more than a few false-fronts arrayed around a plaza. Lenore caught her breath in the combined saloon truck stop bathhouse while Steelbeard made contact with the local stationmaster in the combined post office jailhouse train platform. St. Elmo’s flickered down metallic hair, beard, chest wires, arm hair, steel wooly crotch – pulling arms and legs like puppet strings.

They came face to face in the middle of the street. “Who are you? What you want?” she demanded. Back in Teslândia, Steelbeard kept his grip on the live wire and looked out at her through the stationmaster’s eyes. Lenore dragged the clockwork pistol out of her belt and pointed it at his face.

“That won’t do nothing,” he said. “Only six hours this gun can be fired and only in six places on this Earth, so you gotta be at the right place and the right time.”

She let it drop to her side. “Why’s it so heavy? I feel like I’ve been walking uphill ever since I found it.”

“Gyroscopes. Do you find it harder to point in some directions than others? Those are the aim stabilizers steering you toward its next target, using accelerometers and dead reckoning to remember where it is. All-mechanical, self-winding cocking and firing clockwork. That’s why it doesn’t even have a trigger – all it needs you for is to carry it.”

“I can’t get rid of the damn thing. I already tried pawning it, but it skittered across the countertop on little rotating machine parts and leaped right back into my hand with some kind of spring action. Enchanted? Or cursed.”

“No,” he said, “simply imprinted on you as its new bearer soon as you came under the wire. It powers itself from your motion, heartbeat, and body temperature. Only way to get rid of this duty now is to kill each target or die.”

“Like the last guy? Raw deal.” She weighed that information. Techs stamped his hoof twice. “How does the gun decide who dies? What makes it tick?”

“Imagine the Babbage Engines, deep below, milling enough bullets to kill everyone who lives within 100 miles of a telegraph wire. They put a man’s name on a bullet, tune it to the positron emissions leaking out of his head.” He tapped two fingers to his temple. “Everyone metabolizes ambient fallout differently and the signal filters through blood-brain barriers in unique patterns.”

“That’s the how, so what’s the who?”

Night had fallen, and the glow cloud was a muted green gleam beyond the buttes and mesas, so Steelbeard lit two fingers of his knife hand to see better by and held his gun hand out for the clockwork pistol. Lenore passed it over. It stuck magnetically to his palm.

The wirewalker clicked the cylinder a single chamber at a time to read the ones and zeros: “After the bombs, an infestation of transnatural beings emerged from the Earth. The most malefic are revealed here as: Asibikaashi, also named Ma Cobb” —click— “Colel Cab” —click— “Ba’al Zebub” —click— “Kabi:kaj” —click— “Mothman; and —” Once more. Click. “Deimos Copperwater. Five gods and a devil.” He returned the gun to her.

“I’ve never killed anyone my entire life! Now I’m supposed to go shoot gods?”

“Whatever the Engines want,” he agreed. “You’ve got a burro —”

“Techs is a zedonk.”

“— So, you’re familiar with the concept of stick and carrot. They use similar motivation on humans. Any pleasure you can imagine, the Babbages can put directly in your head. Reversely, earning their displeasure gets your own name on a bullet. Besides,” he said, “you aren’t pulling a trigger, so you aren’t the one committing the violence.”

Graying the issue. Lenore put her left hand to her chest like she was trying to suppress something. In his head, he felt ‘Patch nodding her fist in approval as he read from the script. How many times had he said these words to convince a shootist down that path? Worked every time, and once they took the first steps, they never came back.

• • •

Lenore was guided by the beauty of her weapon into the Scablands, leaving behind civilization and its agents. Polyp said, “They send a charmer and you’ll just be their drone? What good of it? You can’t eat dopamine.”

“Don’t have much choice,” Lenore said. “You heard his terms. And he called them ‘malefic,’ which doesn’t sound good.”

“I don’t know the meaning of that any more than you do, but what even are these gods’ crimes?”

This far from the city lights there were myriad stars. Lenore unbuttoned her shirt down to her navel so that Polyp could look out and see as well. “Momma told us all the old stories.” Thick cobwebs crisscrossed the trail. Techs gamely plowed a path through them. “Spider grandmother weaves Faraday dreamcatchers for those with something to hide.”

When they stopped for the night, a cloud of saturniids orbited the campfire light. “During the war, the moth harbinger would appear in the skies over a city just before a bomb landed on it.”

They shook cockroaches out of their boots at dawn. Lenore said, “The roach king is invoked to protect books, and you know what Momma always said about a little learning.”

Mid-morning, they found a water hole in which an enormous translucent medusa continuously filtered the liquid through its body, but they passed by without drinking because there were bloated bipedal bodies at its edge. Corpse flies pelted their eyes and mouths like a sandstorm. “Fly lord’s apples are full of maggots. If you eat one, the worms get in your brain.”

By noon, the roadside was covered in ditchweed flowers with bees poking between their petals. “The hive queen builds her nests in the corpse wax of bog bodies. Her honeycomb is madness, and its mead is a concentrated hallucinogen.”

Polyp countered: “You’re only telling half of each story! The dreamcatchers are good luck! They snare harmful things that fly through the air, like alpha particles. And Ma Cobb’s bite injects a slow poison to liquefy tumors so she can drink them from the sick. Colel Cab’s mead will let you enter your dreams, her honey will let dreams enter you. Both at the same time will let your dreams enter the world. The Lord’s larvae can cause visions as they burrow through neurons or swim in the water of your eyeballs.

“Kabi:kaj has been around for at least 320 million years, and many ancient books dedicated the flyleaf to him in hopes he would save their pages from bookworms. He possesses all of the written knowledge of all the world, in all languages, throughout all ages. The Mothman’s predictions are unpredictable, and the Babbage Engines don’t like undefined variables.

“Notice what each one has in common – they alter brains, change thoughts, disrupt Babbage control. And that’s why they’ve been sentenced to die.”

In the cooling afternoon, Techs suddenly stopped in his tracks, stamped twice, and would not move again until a rattler had finished crossing the road in front of them.

“What did the Devil ever do?” Lenore asked.

“You know what Momma always told Pa – the Devil makes the jellyfish girls. As if that would keep him away from the Black Light District. ‘You and me and the Devil makes three.’ It was the thing forever between them, which eventually drove them apart.”

The Geiger counter gun chatter filled the empty spaces in their conversation and sounded loudest when they traveled in its desired direction. Plucking the head off one of the ditchweed flowers, Lenore said, “You’re basing a lot of this on our childhood fairy tales. Momma also used to say Jenny Sunflowerseed would return some day.”

Jenny, who walked barefoot across the country, planting sunflowers to absorb radionuclides from the soil so that settlers could sow crops again. But without ambient radiation, the Babbage Engines wouldn’t be able to surveil anyone, so Jenny was put in the electric chair, supposedly.

• • •

Long weeks later, Steelbeard caught up with Lenore at the edges of signal coverage, out of sight of the wires, where only the radio waves coming off the Wardenclyffe Tower kept him connected to Dispatch. His temporary traveling body was surrounded by a pale blue nimbus while ionosphere conditions permitted. These liminal wilds invited danger. He asked ‘Patch to fill his gun hand with thunder, his knife hand with lightning.

Then he saw Lenore in the moonlight, silhouetted on a crater rim, wearing a sheer shirt. Backlit like that, she looked like a UV girl. He felt a heat in his cock, even though the body he was currently puppeteering didn’t have one.

Her eyes were closed like she was sleepwalking, but she turned to face him. Through the fabric, he could see her right breast all shriveled and puckered. Her lips didn’t move but he heard a voice: “Dying out here.”

The canteens and feedbags on her pack animal hung slack, their contents having evaporated beneath the harsh nuclear weather in a countryside with no safe water and where nothing edible grew on its own. When the wind came off the shrunken inland seas and marsh pools, curled-up desiccated jellyfish blew in over the mountains. Sometimes they rehydrated in the clouds and bent sunlight like soap bubbles, and sometimes they landed in still water. A traveler who got the fine white spores in their eyes would soon feel tiny tendrils reaching for their aqueous humor.

“Let’s get you something to drink,” Steelbeard said, putting in a call.

After a moment’s delay, ‘Patch said, “Incoming.” A signal rocket fired off from the town’s battery and exploded in a red firework, fading into a magnesium cloud that condensed scant layers of atmospheric vapor into a thunderstorm. The rain drifted over them and away. Lenore and Techs drank. The groundwater flooded thick white worms from their tunnels. Lenore and Techs ate.

“How’d you find us?”

Steelbeard indicated the overhead aurora. “Radio bounces farther off the upper layers as the sun’s going down. For a few hours on either side of the terminator, the Tower has enough range to pick up gun talk, even out here. Hmm – four rounds fired. So, you’re two-thirds done.”

She told him what she’d seen out there, what she had done.

Found Cobb decomposing in a silk shroud: the gun shot a hole through the copper-wire dreamcatchers twisting in the wind above her deathbed – holed three in a row, dead center, like a trick shot. She prodded the shrouded body. It sloshed and undulated like a water mattress.

Cab was a melted wax statue filled with bees, standing knee-deep in a swamp: the gun shot her swollen belly, where the hive mind was densest. Lenore didn’t know if it hit the queen bee, or if it just scattered the swarm.

Bub was found hanged from a tree, sun-ripened and weather-withered: the gun put a bullet through his head and into a rotten apple on the branch above him. Lenore couldn’t tell which was the target, and which was just in the way.

Kabi’s library burned down, and his remains couldn’t be sifted from the paper ashes, but on the way back, Lenore found a man reading on the side of the road. She could not see his face behind the book. The gun fired a round through its pages.

“Well, that just leaves the Devil and the Moth.”

She kept saying “the gun did it” – but whose hand was it in? Lenore kept her eyes shut. “I feel drawn back to the city, but without a clear direction. Like the gun is confused.”

“The Devil inflates those slick jellyfish bodies with brain waves from intercepted Babbage transmissions. When the Engines send out a new target’s information, he uses dreamcatchers to capture the pattern and sends them shambling back into the city with a little piece of his mind as decoys. Adaptive camouflage.”

“You know all about those women, don’t you?” She came upon him swiftly, blindly, and unerringly. “You sated some, but not all, of my physical needs.” Stroked her fingers through his sideburns and tripped them down the fasteners of his clothes. “Isn’t that why they sent you? Or did you look for me on your own?”

He grabbed her by the arms as if to push her away, but didn’t. She said, “You can’t resist – I feel the electricity between us.”

He started to tell her that was literal, but she took his hands and put them inside her shirt, pushing the thin fabric away. Steelbeard felt the firmness of her left breast, but in place of her right one his fingers traced instead over the face of Lenore’s partially absorbed twin.

Lenore’s head rested on Steelbeard’s chest while Polyp’s mouth went down to work between his legs. “Your sleeping sister,” he gasped.

Polyp retracted her tongue just long enough to say, “She’s never done this, but I have with some frequency. And what of your puppet?” He was barely even connected to the stationmaster by this point; his blue aura flickered with the intermittent signal and the stationmaster rode the sine waves in and out of her ecstatic trance. Polyp’s tongue returned, but before he could come, the sun went too far beyond the horizon and the atmosphere’s ion layer dissipated. The signal vanished. Steelbeard returned to himself, sweating alkaline and holding a limp cable.

• • •

Lenore found the Devil in a graveyard where there was a suspicious blank spot in the network’s signal strength. The tombstones were laid out in galaxy arm spirals, at the center of which spread the limbs of a dule tree, and from every branch there dangled the ornate geometries of a thousand dreamcatchers, each one woven from the hair of a wirewalker, and each one netting a condemned soul as it flew from the glow cloud. The Wardenclyffe Tower was a sickly beacon behind her.

The cemetery was fenced with barbed wire, against which loose jelly skins fetched up like plastic grocery bags. “Deimos Copperwater,” she said to the person under the skeleton tree.

He was slim and pale, in a white linen suit and a Faraday fedora, and wore sidewinder boots. Scattered in the dust around him were all the spare parts he used to make the ladies, which was how Lenore had found him – retracing their footsteps from the brothels to their birthplace.

Deimos stood over an empty grave, using its skewed stone slab as a tabletop, set with a dreamcatcher rewired into fractal pentacles, a bottle of madding mead, an encephalopathic apple, and a book. “I used to be someone else,” he said. “Before the electroshock treatment.”

He ate, drank, and read – a familiar sacrament done in remembrance of the dead, the resurrection ritual of holding them as a hologram in the mind. Lenore heard rumbling from the skies above Teslândia, but it was not a storm. A flying creature emerged from the glow cloud and circled the Tower’s bright light.

The Mothman circled lower toward them. It was covered in ocelli eyespots, the flexion wave in its four wings more like the rippling fringe of fish fins than any flying animal Lenore had ever seen. The burr of its flight was a sound she could feel in the roof of her mouth. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, a thousand moths would fly out, or she would speak in insect tongues.

The Moth descended to a point directly over Deimos’s head. It stirred up a helicopter wind that tore the dreamcatchers off the tree branches and blew the hat off his head. Their Faraday shielding was abruptly gone.

Lenore reached for a sharp pain in her ribs – the clockwork gun buzzed and shook like an alarm clock until she pulled it free of the shoulder holster. The hammer cocked back by itself, a notch at a time. She felt it twisting her wrist where it wanted, so she sighted down the direction of least resistance.

The Devil opened his mouth and the words of the Mothman prophet were spoken to all who could hear. Lenore screamed, “What does that mean?”

Deimos said, “This city is condemned.”

The gun went off by itself. The bullet entered the Mothman’s abdomen, transforming its entire being into powder. The wind stopped like a shut door, and the dust of Mothman’s wing scales fell upon the humans in a dry rain. Lenore gripped the gun with both hands, trying to wrench it aside as it realigned to its next target. “Watch out!”

The self-winding mechanism ratcheted the hammer back again, cycled the next round into the barrel. Lenore saw the iron sights eclipse Deimos Copperwater’s unconcerned face. She felt the sear move out of its notch, she watched him blink once, very slowly.

The hammer jammed halfway through its descent, and all the action stopped.

Lenore hit the pistol’s cylinder a few times with the heel of her hand as if she could dislodge the locked gears. “What’s wrong with this thing?”

“Oh,” said the person who had been a man called the Devil and was no longer either, “I changed my mind.” Her voice was higher and softer, and her entire carriage had shifted. “Your gun no longer recognizes me.”

The revolver made only a patient tapping noise like a deathwatch beetle, and did not resist being lowered. Lenore asked what anyone automatically does as soon as they see a magic trick: “How’d you do that?”

“Not the first time it’s happened to me. After the electric shock, I was not dead, only braindead. Then the flies and maggots came to me in my grave and filled my thoughts until I became someone else. From each local god, I gained a gift, though they gave them up to the Devil unwillingly and only through force.”

She touched the pentacle on the table. “I put spider webs inside my hat to shield myself from the calculating engines and to catch useful ideas.” Tapped the bottle. “Drunk on this, I dreamed I was a better person in a better world.” She shut the biography with a yellow flower on the cover. “Vermin know everyone’s dirty secrets. The cockroach king had the story of everyone’s life in his athenaeum. I’ve been reading up on my own history.”

She swept her hand across the polished bacula stacked like cordwood beneath the unforgiving tree. “I built companions with the part that God took from Man to make Woman and to leave man as the only ape without a penis bone.” Lifted the rotten apple. “Used the taboo fruit to make my applehead dolls, who seed confusion among the thinkers in the deep.”

Lenore, skeptical: “Are you really her? Or are you wearing this identity as penance for murdering actual mythological creatures?”

The other woman said, “Many gods die at least once, but so long as its ideas persist in the world the being itself remains extant. An infestation is notoriously difficult to completely exterminate. I have simply joined the relay at this lap of their rebirth cycle.”

She shoved her hands in pockets and snatched them back out again in surprise, holding fistfuls of sunflower seeds. With an expression of nostalgia and regret, she said, “Whatever my past sins, at least there’s this; that even when I was not myself, I was myself.” She dropped the seeds into the empty grave and kicked dirt in and, only just then noticing them, said, “These shoes simply will not do.” She kicked them free and curled her toes in the lush corpse grass, dusted off her hat and put it back on. “Can’t let them know what I think like, now.” Then she walked away to pick up her work where she had left off.

Lenore closed her eyes and tossed the clockwork pistol far into the weeds. It didn’t come back. “Is that it, then?” Techs stamped his hoof once and led the way out.

• • •

The Earth made short work of erasing their traces. Wild dogs tugged loose the jellyfish skins and consumed their shreds. Crawling things undid the knots of each spiderweb charm. Sprouting green tendrils gummed up the works. Deep underground, a series of mechanical switches flipped over, and the Babbages chose a new devil.

A flash of lightning exploded among the mausolea, and Steelbeard rode up, in person this time.

• • •

In the terminus crossroads hotel, Lenore slept in a hot bath while Polyp smoked an espresso cheroot. They’d gotten a few dollars selling the Devil’s scrap metal, enough for a couple of civilized days before going back to digging out the isotope hills. Soap foam filled the basin to the brim; perfumed salts and cigar smoke; a potbelly stove nearby for heating extra water; quilts, cotton towels, and their crisp, laundered clothes. Her dreams were as migratory birds south for the winter.

A noise woke Lenore – the zebroid’s alarmed braying, and someone coming down the hallway, shouting her name. She stood up unsteadily in the bath.

A gunshot tore through the door and hit her square in the forehead. Lenore toppled back into the soap bubbles, splashing them all across the floorboards. The cheroot dropped from between the teeth in her chest and hissed out in the red water.

The door opened and Steelbeard staggered in with the clockwork gun. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, I couldn’t stop it!” He’d been dispatched to dig through the tombstones and the weeds, and it imprinted on him when he got close enough. “’Patch rewrote the remaining bullet when I picked up the gun.” He dropped to his knees beside her nude, bloodstained flesh and put both hands on her sternum, thinking a vague notion that he could summon enough voltage to jumpstart her heart, but then no, he thought, there’s no coming back from a hole in your head.

She sat up, abruptly, scared a scream out of him as he tumbled over backwards. Polyp sputtered bathwater out her lungs, sloshed out of the tub, and stood dripping in front of the mirror. Lenore’s eyes were rolled back, her mouth slack. Her brain was dead, but within her breast Polyp’s was still alive and controlled their body.

She mourned her twin in the mirror. Mixed with the grief, though, was a certain sense of freedom, of finally having a body all to herself. Polyp put a cotton wad into the bullethole and then bandaged her head. “A hat should cover this.”

As she dressed and packed, Steelbeard plucked all his metal hair with needle nose pliers, one strand at a time. Little beads of blood welled up from his pores. “Won’t listen to those immortal Engines from here out.” It was unnerving to watch her somnambulate about the room.

“Hey,” Polyp said. “My eyes are down here.”

“What’ll you do when the necrotic brain rot starts to smell?”

“Suppose I’ll have to be like the headless Blemmyes, walking around with my face in my chest. I know where there’s an empty grave I can bury her parts in, if I need.” Polyp pointed at his pistol. “What to do about that?”

Even without the voice of ‘Patch in his head, Steelbeard would be pulled by the gun’s weight back to an authorized machinist, where it would be reloaded. “Cycle will never end so long as they’re still sending out signals.”

“I have an idea.”

Steelbeard said, “You’ll never reach the pyramids.”

“I have practice breaking into sealed tombs. Jenny Sunflowerseed is out there, healing the world. We just need to buy her some time.” She looked out the window at the smudge of city lights. “How much dynamite do you think it would take to bring that radio tower down?”

“I don’t know about dynamite, but I do know where the signal rocket arsenals are buried, and I know all the numbers to get us in.”

A clockwork gun made many choices for its carrier. Sometimes it whirred like it had a thought that made it sigh. Anyone who carried it long enough grew afraid that the noises were voices, or grew afraid of himself for thinking that could even be possible. Afraid of what a pistol could possibly have to say if it could speak. All his life, people had been telling him what to do. With ‘Patch gone, who was he going to listen to now?

“Well, my new friend,” Polyp said, “me and you and the Devil makes two. Let’s get ‘em.” She marched out the door.