Skyglass: Chapter 6

MOSS

My favorite song ever shuddered the leafy walls of Devin’s tree house, dangling hundreds of feet up in the green sky. “Breaklash”—a tsunami crush of liquid vocals and bone-breaking rhythm. I huddled against one of the huge exear speakers, pressing my forehead hard against its shiver.

Devin was perched atop another speaker somewhere behind me, unusually quiet. When I’d dropped through the porthole to his apartment and landed all pathetic and panicked on the piss-strewn floor, he’d known exactly what I needed: Fallin blasting out my brains, and not a rotting thing more.

Was that why I was here? Because even after all these years, together and apart, Devin knew me better than anyone else? Certainly longer than anyone else. He’d known me when my parents were still alive and I was still stable, still really actually me–and when things had gotten red, then dark. He’d lingered on the periphery of the cold and loneliness I’d crystallized around myself, and he had stepped aside without a fight when I’d pushed him away.

The music cut off. The speaker rattled to a stop against my cheek. I didn’t move. I breathed as little as possible–it helped to slow my mind, keep it blank.

“Get up.”

Phoenix. Rotting piss. Why is she here?

A hand grabbed a fistful of my hood and hauled me up and around. She held me by the shoulders and eyed me balefully.

“Tell me everything,” she hissed. “Now.”

She let go. I slumped back, head hung. I studied the mess thick across Devin’s floor–dirty socks, skimpy undergarments, empty Peep boxes, and seed trays overflowing with dirt and neon plant life. I sat on a pile of stuffed animals (mostly foxes and floppy rabbits). Devin gave a faint squeak of distress, but said nothing more in defense of his friendly forest creatures.

“Marko didn’t show up at work today,” I began. My voice felt like sand in my mouth. I didn’t want to talk, but I had to get this out–with words. Before it found some other, bloodier, way of escape.

“Didn’t call in or anything–he just didn’t show. So I stopped by his place. I guess I was worried? That I’d hurt him too much. Or that maybe he’d gone away for good.”

I put my head in my hands. “He was home. He looked like piss. I went inside, we talked, and then he told me that–” I stumbled into silence. A shudder shook me hard; I swallowed air as best as I could. “He said he loves me.”

Devin snarled and kicked something. “That rotting pisshead. Doesn’t he know anything?”

“Glorious,” Phoenix said, quiet and dead. She sat beside me. “Is this one of those sick little heart-traps you humans set for each other?”

“Don’t ask me,” I muttered. “I don’t love. Not like that.” I dropped my hands onto my crossed legs, holding tight to my boots, until I remembered that one night, when Marko had hesitantly removed them for me. I let go and tried to breathe, but I was shaking too badly.

“What do I do? Tell me what to do,” I pleaded.

“About Marko the rotsucker? Dunno,” Phoenix said, voice returning to its usual violent sparkle. “About your dejection and emptiness, well–that’s easy.” She rapped me on the head. “Get up. It’s dinnertime.”

She heaved me up by the hood again and dragged me through Devin’s porthole. I trudged in her wake for another ten minutes, Devin skipping at my other side with a hand looped around my wrist, until we halted before a greasy-smelling café with walls made of blue tube lights and spindly birches.

My stomach growled long and mournful at the smell of sizzling potatoes, and rye bread slathered in butter, gooey with melted cheese–or whatever lactose aphrodisiac was wafting from the kitchen. I fidgeted uncomfortably and tried to tug my hand free from Devin’s grip. I didn’t want to be anywhere near food–I was weak and couldn’t be trusted. But I followed them in anyway.

Devin ordered for the three of us, and when our waiter placed a basket of unidentifiable, dazzling green squiggles in front of me, I pulled it close and didn’t stop ’til I was done. I could feel Devin and Phoenix’s laser-eyes steaming into me, but I ignored them. I was going to regret this later, but I didn’t rotting care. I was going to stuff my face and wreck my stomach and piss on everything else.

“So what are you going to do?” Phoenix asked, chomping down on a tiny, prickly fireball.

I licked a finger and swiped it through the crumbs in my basket. Do? I wasn’t going to do anything, except avoid Marko at any cost. But my mouth opened and I spoke anyway.

“I want to know why my parents killed themselves.” I sighed out loud. Why had I said that? It wasn’t an answer to her question, it had just…come out. And yet, what I’d said felt right. Somehow.

My housemate groaned; Devin looked a little perplexed, but was mostly distracted by his food. The candied tadpoles he’d ordered were literally catapulting themselves into his mouth.

“Them again?” Phoenix said. “Ugh. Moaning about Marko and his sticky attachment is perfectly valid. Your baby-creators, however, are dead. They don’t matter.”

Devin whipped his head around to stare at her. A tadpole bounced off his eye and landed on the table, flopping.

I rose from my seat. My nails dug into the table as I leaned across it and into her face. “They do rotting matter.” I froze there, unblinking, then sat back, taking her fireballs.

I ate a handful. She didn’t stop me.

Phoenix folded her arms and smirked. “And yet all you do is whine. If you actually cared about your pissrot parents, you wouldn’t spend all your time moping. You’d be out there,” she said, jabbing a finger at the door and the city beyond, “trying to figure out why they left you. You’d find yourself answers; you’d do something, settle the score, and move on.”

I wiped my greasy hands on a napkin and leveled my gaze at her. “When my parents died, I went through everything they owned before getting rid of it. Everything. And still–no answers. I’ve got nowhere left to look. That’s why I’m in stasis now. And I’m rotting fine with it.” I shoved her half-empty basket back across the table. She reclaimed it with a smile and shoveled the remnants into her mouth.

Devin kicked me gently beneath the table. “Liar,” he said in a stage whisper.

I furrowed my brows at him. “What? I said I’m fine, so I am.”

“Ha,” he said dryly. “But no, not that. I’m talking about their coms. Remember?”

I shut my eyes briefly. I didn’t want to think about those. “I’m not getting their coms back. You know that.”

“Just saying,” he muttered, and took what looked to be a very satisfying sip of his two-pint strawberry bubbler.

“Their coms?” Phoenix asked.

“Were confiscated by the BBP.” I pulled up my hood and slouched on the bench seat. “They’ve got them filed away somewhere in that giant prison-tree of theirs, Ickdrizzle.”

I shut my eyes, wishing I could disappear myself away to my bed. I considered sagging forward and napping right there, sprawled across the table.

“We’ve got band practice tonight,” Devin reminded me.

I groaned. Phoenix was supposed to share a preview of the Blowup she wanted us to perform to, so we’d have something to send to that rotting guy from the Ventriloquist. She, of course, was expecting a yes from everyone–I was hoping for a resounding no.

Phoenix hummed and stood from the table. “Up we go,” she cooed. There was something darkly conspiratorial behind her voice, like every time she talked.

We took the vus into the Abyss. After a couple moments of blurring gloom, I followed Devin and Phoenix’s lead and stumbled out the back door, onto a familiar, drip-slick walkway roofed with a half-pipe that ended where the airway began.

By the time I realized what floor, whose floor, we were on, it was too late. I lurched toward the departing vehicle, but Phoenix caught me before I could tumble over the edge.

“Silly silly. Where do you think you’re going?” she asked, hauling me close with her elbow crooked painfully around my neck.

“Away,” I muttered. “Why are we here?”

“Uh, visiting Marko, of course,” Devin said. “Obviously.”

I sat on the ground and wrapped my arms around my legs. “Have fun.”

They jumped me, and started to drag my deadweight toward the sagging stair that led down to Mark’s tiny apartment. I twisted desperately against their hold, lunging for the ground, the airway–anything to free myself. Devin grunted and kicked me, which only made me thrash harder against their pull.

At the stairs, I went leaden again. “Please,” I wheezed. “Please don’t make me. Please.”

“This is for your own good, Moss,” Phoenix chirped. “It’ll be easy: knock on his door, tell him he’s gross. The end. No more worries.”

“I can’t,” I said. I whipped my head around, frantic to find a handhold to cling to, to keep them from taking me down the stairs.

“Oh, sweetling,” Phoenix gnashed. She dropped her side of me and stomped down the stairs toward my doom.

I knew I could have run then–Devin was too small to keep me still on his own–but I didn’t have it in me. I was a rabbit. Fear-choked. I trembled, leaning over the stairway’s top railing and peering down at the passage below, the glint of Phoenix’s bright hair against Marko’s doorway.

She kicked at the door and rattled the knob for a full minute, but got nothing. I relaxed a little–a little.

Phoenix glanced up. “Devin.”

“Yeah?”

“Close your eyes and Moss’ll give you a surprise.”

He obeyed promptly, while I glowered at her in disgust. “I’ll what?” I hissed, but she was ignoring me, biting her palm till it bled, smearing gooey fire all over Marko’s ancient doorknob. It liquefied the thing into a melted pile of brass between her feet. She reached through the hole and opened the door.

“Helllooooo?” Phoenix called as she vanished inside.

I winced at the dull echo of her voice, but no one answered, and no light came from Mark’s place.

“Where’s my surprise?” Devin whined.

I ignored him and stared at the frame’s black gap until Phoenix stepped back out, shut the freshly warped door, and shrugged up at us.

“The place looks like a piss-bomb went off in there. He’s got bottles lined up by the bed, and the place reeks of the bitterest thousand-proof booze–but there’s no sign of your coward, Moss.”

Relief took my legs out from under me, and I had to snag my fingers against the railing to keep from falling. Good, I thought, but the stew of feelings burbling uncomfortably in my gut didn’t match the word.

I didn’t feel good–I felt sick. Marko was drunk, he’d obviously gotten drunk at home, but he wasn’t here now. I didn’t want to admit it, but I had to: I was worried.

Continued in Chapter 7.

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