Gears of the City (60 page)

T
his is how
it happened.

One week after the two of them came back down into Fosdyke, the messages began to appear.

That was one week after Ruth moved back into the old Low house, into a bare room under the attic, which she said was fine, better than fine, never mind the dust or the draft or the memories; she had a lot to think about; she wanted to be alone for a while longer.

It was six days after Marta summoned Arjun into her office, in the headquarters of the Committee for the Emergency, and demanded to know where he’d been, where her sister had been, what was going on. He said:
I can’t tell you.
She fumed. She asked if it was about Ivy. He said:
what difference does it make?
She blustered, fell just short of actually making threats. He looked around her office, at the maps, the papers, the stockpile of oil and food behind the door, the grey sheets on the narrow bed in the corner, and he said:
what is it you do here, exactly? I’ve never been sure.

It was five days after he walked north into the Ruined Zone, to the great black scar the fire had left behind, still smelling of smoke and burning, and sat all day on a blackened stone bench, listening
to the wind, trying to clear his head with music, gently sifting through simple chords and themes and tones.

It was four days after he stood under Ruth’s window, wondering if he should go up to her, or leave her alone, trying to remember just how she’d put it when she’d said she needed time, time to think. Should he? Shouldn’t he? What would he say? He felt like he barely existed anymore. The afternoon shift ended and passersby slapped his back and said:
Good man! Our savior, Mr. Clever, this is! He’ll figure it out!
He smiled, to be polite.

It was three days after he volunteered in the fields, and went to bed with his back aching and slept dreamlessly, wonderfully, too exhausted to think of how he was trapped.

It was two days after the Storm blew in, off the Mountain— they could all see it come down off the Mountain, roiling and churning, rushing like a flood. Lightning whipped it on. It carried soot, dust, black mud, wet leaves, driving industrial rain. Ruth threw the attic windows open and stared into the hurtling darkness. Her father, spitting in the city’s face. This was his answer, then! Why couldn’t he just leave them alone? But he couldn’t do it, she realized; the wound was too deep, the guilt too painful. What would he do to himself when he was all alone again? The Storm whipped away the flags, tore down the bright rags, scoured away the paint, splattered Fosdyke a monotonous grey-black. That night the Hollows came again, and did their work unimpeded.

T
he messages came in the form of posters. They were well disguised, woven subtly into the fabric of the city, and Arjun might never have noticed them if Ruth hadn’t pointed them out. How long had they been there? He couldn’t be sure.

“They’re fresh,” she said. “Look. Isn’t that odd?” They were walking together down Carnyx Street. It was a grey afternoon. The shock of the Storm and the return of the Hollows had struck at the roots of Fosdyke’s resilience, and now the workshops were abandoned, the fields untended. The Committee issued orders, and the orders were ignored, or never heard. People hid in their homes, drank and fucked in the bars, lit out across the ruins for shelter in Fleet Wark, or Anchor. Ruth and Arjun, who knew something they couldn’t share with anyone else—something that
explained everything, but made no difference, would only make things worse—walked together down empty streets, in silence. The days were numbered. It was odd, then, that there were freshly plastered posters, still wet, glistening, on the brick and concrete walls of Carnyx Street.

They looked like the old posters the Know-Nothings used to put up. A picture of the Mountain, black and vast; the green-inked slogan below urging vigilance. But instead of vigilance the slogan was murky, unformed, an analphabetic nonsense.

Ruth brushed her fingers across it; they came away sticky. “I remember this.”

Oh?”

“I don’t know.”

The next morning the posters were wrapped askew around all the lampposts on Carnyx Street: this time they resembled the old Know-Nothing posters with the young girl, and the old man, and the slogan about how we’re all in this together—but the faces were blurred, vague unfinished sketches, and the letters illegible. Arjun found Ruth standing by the lamppost, deep in thought.

“Ivy?” he said.

“Ivy. “

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. It reminds me of something, from when we were all little.”

He touched the poster. It had dried; the green ink was already fading to yellow. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“It’s not
for
you.”

The next day, all along the concrete wall at the back of Carnyx Street, by the fields: the Know-Nothings’ old recruitment posters. The slogan was more like numbers than letters, and the faces of the young men in their boots and black coats were blurred.

I
saw them again,” Ruth said. “Down by the canal.”

She’d been keeping notes. She’d been keeping a map of the posters’ appearances. She had tried to scrape samples from the walls, but they came away in damp grey strips of rag. She started trying to sketch them.

People were starting to notice her obsession.

“The face,” she said, brushing her fingers along the glossy surfaces. “On that girl. I feel like I know that face. I feel like I know the words.”

I
t’s not words,” Ruth said. “On the posters—it’s not language at all. It’s a kind of code.”

“Are you good with codes?” Arjun asked. “I know a great many languages but I have always been slow with codes.”

“No. Ivy was the one who was good at that sort of thing. But I
remember
this.”

“Ivy?”

“It’s her face, you know. If you look just right you can see that it’s her face.”

“It’s been too long,” Arjun said. “I forget her face. All I remember is that she looked like you.”

“No. She was the beautiful one.”

“Was she?”

“When we were children we had codes, and languages. She used to make them up. And …
he
, you know … he used to pretend he couldn’t understand them, though I suppose he could have if he wanted to. He wasn’t all bad back then. Or maybe he just wasn’t interested. Or maybe Ivy really
was
cleverer than him. Shit. I
don’t
understand. But I remember. Ivy’s trying to talk to
me.
She’s reaching out to
me.
She needs me, Arjun.”

I
t was as if Ivy’s patience started to run out—a letter came through the door of the Low house, addressed to Ruth, though no postal service had existed since before the War. Numbers and letters; private language, in a childish hand. The graffiti on the fence spoke to her, and the way the ivy curled on the railings. Another letter. The signals multiplied.

“We used to have a game,” Ruth said. “I think I remember it. When the Dad was away, we used to pretend there were doors, a maze, a secret city just for us, full of miracles. What did we call the city? What were the rules? Oh, the weeds in the lot behind the house were a forest. Those old iron sheds were like towers. Palaces. The rusting gears in the old junkyard were treasure maps. The cobwebs, the candles. The grown-ups didn’t know. The boys from the
factories didn’t know they were part of the game. We used to mark our territory with chalk and flowers and stones and broken glass. We took it in turns to be Queen. We had a game, when we were girls, and Ivy always took it too seriously. We had
names
for things—I wish I could remember them.”

Arjun hovered close by. He didn’t understand, and there was no point trying to understand. Whatever she was seeing it was private, personal, incommunicable. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight. He couldn’t sleep. It was very close now.

M
arta had him summoned to her office. The headquarters of the Committee were in disarray, half empty, purposeless, and off-kilter like a sinking ship.

“Stay with her,” Marta said.

“I am.”

“I don’t know—I don’t want to know. Do you understand me?”

“I think so.”

“I’ve put a lot of bloody work into not knowing.” She was drunk.

“I understand.”

“We can’t last. It’s all going to fall apart. We can’t make it work down here, not when …”

“Marta …”

“Shut up. Listen. When you go up there, I suppose you’ll do whatever you have to do. Your whatever it is—God or whatever. Do what you need to do—just think about us, will you? Try not to forget us down here. If you can do anything. Stop all this. I don’t know.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t let her get hurt.”

“I’ll try.”

“Bloody right you will. Go on, then. Get back to her.”

A
nd one day it seemed it was suddenly
obvious
to her. The shape of it came into focus and Ruth smiled beautifully. Her table was littered with scraps of paper, notes, scribbles, diagrams, maps marked with the various messages she considered significant.

“It’s a
map,”
she said. “And I
understand
‘it.”

Arjun came to stand behind her. “I don’t understand any of it.”

“I do.” She kissed him, and took his hand. She snatched up her scribbled maps and ran downstairs. He followed. They didn’t bother to lock the door. Arjun’s heart was beating madly.

Downstairs in the street she was standing by the mouth of the alley, studying her map. She bit her lip nervously. She beckoned to him, then stepped decisively into the shadows. He followed.

T
hey took a winding path to the Mountain, through back alleys, up and down fire escapes, along dusty never-used emergency corridors, across rooftops, through unlit empty cellars.

The route Arjun had taken before had led across vast open plains, station concourses, ornate blasted plazas—terrifying and immense exhibitions of ruin and emptiness. The route Ivy sketched for them now was a subtle and furtive one—tradesman’s entrances; half-open untended windows; unused sheds.

They crept along in the weeds by the sides of train tracks. “She says
don’t get on the train,”
Ruth said, and Arjun saw no reason to argue; the half-faces he saw in the windows as the trains rushed past, hollow, elongated, were not welcoming.

All morning the Mountain was at their backs, and, door by door, they seemed to be moving south across the city, and away from it. Ruth consulted her notes nervously.

“Are you sure …” Arjun kept asking, and she shrugged no.

They were being followed; they both felt it.

“Do you see that … ?”

“I thought I did. It’s gone now.”

Whatever it was, it didn’t approach them, and eventually they agreed they were imagining it; that all that was behind them was their own shadows, the slowly closing doors …

When they thought they were lost, there were more marks on the walls; more posters; the name ivy finger-written shakily in the dust on a broken window; complex spiraling children’s games sketched in ivy-green chalk over the next manhole; a sprawl of ivy all along the wall of an alley, or curling around the black iron of a fire escape.

In the afternoon, they began to approach the Mountain again. It
carne closer and closer. It grew from a distant grey-blue blur into a vast darkness.

They stepped from one alley into another, briefly crossing a high gargoyled rooftop, from which they could no longer see the Mountain, in whichever direction they looked; and they knew they were
inside
it.

Nothing attacked them. Nothing black and dreadful hurtled down from the sky or boiled up from the gutters. If they were followed, perhaps it was only shadows or curious animals. No traps. No darkness of forgetting enveloped them. Ivy had found a secret, safe path onto the Mountain.

And Arjun did not understand how it was done—in fact he tried not to think about it, because when he tried to understand his head hurt and he felt sick and scared. But as the day wore on he began to sense the shape of Ivy’s mathematics; the vast geometrical perfection she had … made? Charted? Discovered? It made his own wanderings across the city look amateurish, sentimental, haphazard, half-hearted. There was a cold and beautiful music to it. He felt that he understood her; he felt that he would never be capable of understanding her.

“We
never
understood her,” Ruth said.

At the end of the alley was another alley, which opened onto a broad, dark street. The streetlamps all down it at irregular intervals cast a ghostly haze, circled by moths. The ends of the street—if it ended anywhere—were lost in shadow. Opposite the alley’s mouth was a long concrete fence. There was a gate. It was locked.

“We can climb this,” Ruth said. “Give me a hand here.”

“No,” Arjun said. “I should go first.”

She shrugged. “Be my guest. Welcome to the family home. Wipe your feet.”

“Ruth, are you afraid of your sister? Your father?”

“I don’t know. Yes. No. I just want to
see
them.”

“We may have to kill him. I
will
kill him, if he won’t give me what I want.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe even then. He cannot be allowed to keep the Mountain.”

She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Something played on her lips that was maybe the start of tears, maybe a smile—at his expense?

“And Ivy?” she said.

“Ivy, too. Ruth.
Ruth.
She may have brought you here to help her, but
we are not here to help her.
Do we agree on that?”

She nodded. She said nothing. The white lamplight made her pale, ethereal. A good person, Arjun thought, an innocent, despite everything. She would never forgive him for being a part of all this. That was her father’s fault, too. Small comfort!

“I’ll go first,” he repeated.

They helped each other over the fence.

T
hey were in a rank unweeded garden—the grounds of a neglected mansion. There was a stand of unhealthy-looking trees to their left. The grass was wet and there was a slightly marshy odor.