Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 3
The Last City
Prologue: Channel One
Channel One, live, and good evening to every eternal with a seat in the gallery. Yes, you in the back, eating something that used to be a star. I’m the Shadow of the boy you came to watch, which makes me the host, the narrator and the guy with the clipboard and the opinions, and on this channel I’m allowed to swear, so hold on to your bloody halos.
New world, new format. World three is a game show called Last Seat. One ship, a fixed number of berths, three thousand contestants on a ring of drowned hills, and the prize is getting to leave. Every round is paid in liters of water, every wrong answer costs somebody a drink, and the audience at home doesn’t vote. The tide does.
The stakes above the stakes, for anybody who just tuned in: the council is sitting on an application for a new eternal, a child called Ivy, and it gets stamped only if this love holds through all twelve worlds. The odds on a love such as theirs are one in a quadrillion, a number so big I had to ask the Architect to spell it.
About them. Everybody wants a villain, so let me ruin your evening: the Architect isn’t one. They’re the system’s fixer. They keep the builds running, patch what breaks, log what doesn’t fit and charge exactly what the rules say to charge. They don’t root for anybody, which is the most frightening thing about them and also the most useful.
Welcome back. Mind the chair.
It’s empty. It isn’t free. Since the fold there’s been somebody standing at the back of my booth, by the door, hands folded like they’re waiting for an elevator that only goes up. I’ve offered them the chair. I’ve offered them tea. They say, “We’re quite comfortable, thank you,” and go on standing, so I sit a little to the left of an empty chair, because it seems rude not to.
You know who I mean. They haven’t got a name, and if they had, you wouldn’t say it in front of an audience.
Three items of business.
First. Between worlds, while our boy was resting in the gray, the Architect took the build for world three back upstairs with them. They’d never done that. The builds are finished before a season starts. That’s what finished means. They brought it back down this morning with one new line in it, in their own hand, in the same pen they used to underline something in world five.
I’ve read the line. I’m not going to tell you what it is. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s not a monster and it’s not a storm. It’s very small, and it’s standing on a pier, and it hasn’t got a ticket.
They said, when they handed the build back, “There. Now staying will cost what it’s worth.”
I said, “It always did.”
They said, “It cost what he thought it was worth. That isn’t the same thing.”
I wrote that down. I write a lot of things down. Which brings me to…
Second. The list. Things that weren’t in the build. Page three. The Architect asked to see it, which they’ve never done either. I gave them a copy. They read it standing, as they read everything. They said it was charming. They said a dog on a step is costume, and a horn in a harbor is weather, and a few notes of a tune are what the trade calls foreshadowing, and that there was no need to keep a list of foreshadowing, because they’d written most of it.
Most, they said. I noticed that. I’m not sure they did.
They’ve asked me to stop keeping it. I’ve said I will. I’m a good employee. I’ve also got the original in the drawer under the desk, and a pencil, and a long season ahead.
Third. The dog’s gone.
I mean he’s not in this world. He’s been over the road since the first night of world two. At twenty minutes before midnight he walked out of a dune on the other channel, no tracks, and lay down across the boots of our boy’s friend Jonathan, who has his own channel and his own Shadow with a mouth on him worse than mine. Same minute, our boy tripped over him in the fog on a doorstep and called him by name without knowing why. Jonathan gave him the same name. He’s stayed there. Good for him. He’s got a better offer. I’d like a clean world, for once. One where nothing comes through. One where a horn’s just a horn and a dog’s just a gap on a step.
I’ve asked for that before.
World three: the Last City. It used to be called San Francisco. The sea came up as the sea does everything: slowly, and then all at once. Three thousand people live on the hills now, above a bay full of drowned towers, and they drink from one plant on one hill that turns salt water sweet.
The plant is dying. There’s one ship coming. There aren’t enough seats.
Our boy’s name is Theo Navarro. He’s thirty-two. He pulls copper out of the dead city for a living, and for two years he’s been saving for a seat on that ship.
He’s nearly got it.
That’s the bad news. Lights down.
* * *
Chapter 1: The Pyramid
Channel One, round one of Last Seat, and our contestant opens the season the way he opens every day, up forty-one floors of a dead building to argue with the sea. The gallery opened a book on how many floors he’d manage before breakfast. Some cherub took twelve. Twelve! Have you met him? Forty-one, every day, sunshine. Pay the man.
Every morning Theo Navarro climbed forty-one floors of a drowned skyscraper to ask the tide what it had decided, and every morning it lied to him a little.
The Pyramid’s lifts had died before he was born. Their shafts held black water to the sixth floor, skinned the color of cold tea, with the occasional surprised fish. Above that the stairs were dry, if dry meant walls that sweated and handrails bloomed white with salt and something green climbing the treads at a floor a year. He had climbed them so often he’d stopped counting. On the thirty-eighth landing he caught himself counting anyway. Fifteen steps to a flight. Two flights to a floor. He couldn’t have said why it mattered. It mattered as his left boot went on first.
At the top the floor narrowed to a glass triangle with most of the glass gone. The wind came through smelling of weed and diesel and rain falling on somebody else. He crouched in the east frame, elbows on knees, and looked down.
The city was underwater to about the height of a bus.
That was his mother’s measure, from when there were still buses in picture books. Up to a bus, Theo. Montgomery, Sansome, Battery: green canals now, straight between the towers. At low tide you could see the roofs of parked cars rusted to lace, crabs going in at the windows. At high tide, nothing. The towers stood up out of the water gray and glass-blind, upper floors empty, birds on every ledge. Down by the Channel that had been Market Street, one had sat down on itself in the quake of ‘61 and become a ramp the gulls owned outright.
Somewhere in all that water was nine kilos of copper he needed by the twentieth of the month. He meant to find it before anybody else did.
Beyond the towers was the bay, wide and flat and pewter-colored in the early light, and on the far side of it the hills where Oakland had been, and on all the water between, nothing moving except a single skiff, very small, being rowed toward the Clock by somebody who had got up earlier than him.
He studied the tide. It was falling. In two hours it would be low enough to get into the basement switch-room of the Embarcadero Two building, where there were still bus bars as thick as his wrist, and copper was copper.
Then he looked south-east, without meaning to, as he’d been doing for a week.
There was nothing there to look at. That was the strange part. South-east was the old Mission Bay lagoon, and past it the drowned shipyards at the Potrero, and past those the long brown shoulder of Potrero Hill with its scatter of patched roofs and its water tank on top like a cork in a bottle, and the plant. He knew the plant. Everybody knew the plant. It was the reason there was still a Last City at all. But there was no reason on earth for Theo Navarro to keep looking at it, first thing every morning, with his hand flat on his chest, as if something under his breastbone had a compass needle in it and the compass had decided.
He took his hand off his chest.
“Copper,” he told himself, out loud, which was a habit of people who worked alone.
He went down.
* * *
The Ana was tied where he’d left her, to a window frame on the sixth floor, bumping gently against the sill on the water inside the building.
She was a flat-bottomed aluminum skiff, fourteen feet, dented on every side, with a little battery outboard and a solar panel on a frame over the stern that he’d taken off the roof of a bank. She had been his mother’s. His mother had named her after herself, which she said was the only way to make sure a boat behaved. She’d been right about that, as she’d been right about most things to do with water, right up to the October she wasn’t.
He stepped down into her, sat, and unhitched, and pushed off from the window frame with one hand. The Ana slid out across the drowned office, under a ceiling of hanging cable and stained tile, between the tops of cubicle walls that stood up out of the water like the backs of gray cows. He ducked under a beam. He steered out through the gap where the east wall had been and into the light.
Out on the canal the morning was cold and very still. The water lay in long flat sheets between the towers, and the towers stood upside down in it. The only sounds were birds and the drip of things and, far away, from the direction of the Clock, the first knock and shout of the market setting up. He ran the outboard at a whisper, because charge was charge, and slid down Sansome toward the Embarcadero with the tide helping him.
Theo liked this. He wouldn’t have said so to anybody; it wasn’t a thing you said. But he liked it. The city drowned was the only city he’d ever known. He’d been born on Telegraph Hill while the pumping stations were failing one by one, and since the last of them at Islais Creek gave up, the night the Water came, he’d rowed down streets that his mother had walked to school along. To her it had been a grave. She’d never got over it. She’d row past a building and say that was a pharmacy, that was where your grandfather worked, there was a man sold hot pretzels there and he always gave me the broken one for free, and her face would do something he didn’t like to look at.
To Theo it was just the city. It was where the copper was.
He tied up at the Embarcadero Two at a quarter to eight and sat in the Ana and waited for the tide.
While he waited, he did his sums, which was another thing he did most mornings, and which was also not a thing he’d have said to anybody. Thirty-one kilos.
That was what he had, banked with Lena at the Clock, against his name in her book. Thirty-one kilos of clean stripped copper, or the equivalent in stainless or tin or cells or anything else the Compact’s purser would take. Two years of mornings. He’d started saving five years after the funeral, which hadn’t been a funeral, because they’d never found her, which was the commonest kind of funeral in the Last City and didn’t really have a proper name.
Forty kilos was the price of a seat south.
Nine to go. Call it eight weeks, if the Embarcadero Two held out and nobody else found it first. Call it ten if there was weather. The Compact sent a boat every month or so, down from the south, the white ships with the blue band around the funnel, and every month somebody went, and it got quieter on the hills. You put your copper down and your name in the book, and when your name came up, you went. Down the coast. Down to where there were still towns with roofs that didn’t leak and fields that didn’t flood, where it rained in the winter like it was supposed to and you could hold out a cup and drink it.
He had never seen rain you could drink. Here it came in off the bay already tasting of the bay, half the time, and the cisterns went brackish, and in the dry months it didn’t come at all. Everything you drank in the Last City came out of the plant on Potrero Hill, one way or another. Everything. Every cup, every kettle, every bucket that went up the hill on the rope-lifts to the households. The plant took in the bay and pushed it through something Theo didn’t understand, at a pressure he’d been told would take your hand off, and what came out the other side was water. The chits they used for money had the plant’s stamp on the back, and a signature. If you had chits, you had water. If you had water, you lived.
He’d thought about that a lot, in the last two years. It was the main reason he wanted to go. A city that lived on one machine was a city with one throat.
The tide went down. At half past eight the top of the switch-room door showed, a dark line in the dark water. He pulled his mask on and checked his line and his bag and his cutters, and checked them again, left to right, because that was how you checked things. Then he rolled over the side.
* * *
The cold came first. It always came first, before the dark, before the weight. The bay in March was eleven degrees on a good day and it went into you like a key into a lock and turned. He let it. There was no other way to deal with it. He breathed out slowly through the regulator and let himself sink, holding the line, and the light went green and then brown, and then he was at the door, and through it.
Inside was black. He switched on his lamp and the black became the inside of a room.
Silt on everything, soft as flour, and a stirring of it wherever his fins went. Cabinets along both walls, gray steel, their fronts gone. Cable everywhere, swaying slightly in the current he’d brought in with him, like weed. And at the back, where he’d found it two days ago and come back for it every day since, the main board: a wall of fat copper bars, green with verdigris, bolted floor to ceiling. Most of the Financial District had been stripped years ago. This one had been missed because the door had been under a fallen ceiling until the winter storms shifted it. He’d found it by luck. He’d told nobody. That was the rule. You found something, you told nobody, you took it out a few kilos a day before somebody else noticed you going in and out.
He braced his feet and set the cutters to the first bolt.
It was slow work. It always was. You couldn’t hurry underwater; hurrying was what killed people. You set the jaws and you leaned and you breathed and you leaned again, and the bolt either gave or it didn’t, and if it didn’t, you went to the next one. He got four bars loose in the first twenty minutes and bagged them. Each was perhaps a kilo and a half. He did the sum without meaning to. Six kilos. Three to go.
He was setting the cutters on the fifth when he felt it.
It wasn’t the cold. It wasn’t anything to do with the water at all. It was in his chest, the place his hand went to on the forty-first floor, and it was as if somebody had put a warm palm flat against the inside of his breastbone and pressed. Not hard. Insistently. The way you’d press a door you thought might be stuck.
He stopped. He hung there in the black, in the cloud of his own silt, with the lamp making a small wavering room around him, and waited for the feeling to go. It didn’t go. It pointed.
South-east. Through the wall, through the drowned street outside, through a mile of water and towers and lagoon, toward a brown hill with a tank on top. He couldn’t see it. He knew exactly where it was. He knew it as you know where your own hand is in the dark. Huh, thought Theo.
He let his breath go out slowly. Bubbles went up past his mask, silver in the lamp, and broke on the ceiling and ran along it like mercury. He watched them. His heart was going faster than it should, which was dangerous, which he knew was dangerous, and he made it slow down by counting. Fifteen steps to a flight. Two flights to a floor.
The pressure didn’t change. It just stayed, warm, pointing, patient, as if it had been pointing for a long time and could go on doing it for a good deal longer.
He finished the fifth bar. It seemed the sensible thing to do. Then he checked his air, and checked his line, and went up the line hand over hand, slowly, as you were supposed to, with three kilos too few in his bag and something in his chest that he didn’t have a word for.
* * *
In the Ana, in the sun, with the mask pushed up and his hair dripping down his neck, he sat for a while and watched his hands.
They were shaking a little. That was the cold. It was always the cold.
He eyed his chest, which was absurd. There was nothing to see but his wetsuit, the old patched one, black with gray seams. Under it, he knew, there was nothing either: an ordinary chest, too thin, with a long pale scar down the left side of the ribs that had been there all his life.
Eleven marks, if you looked closely. A line and, across it, eleven small white dashes, evenly spaced, like a row of stitches. His mother had told him he’d been born with it. Like a zipper, she used to say, when he was small and asked, and she’d run her finger down it and make the noise, and he’d laugh. That’s where they put you together. They ran out of thread at the end. When he was older he’d asked again and she’d said, more quietly, that she didn’t know. That the doctor at the old Saint Luke’s had said it was a birthmark, and that birthmarks were strange, and that she’d stopped looking at it after the first week because it frightened her a little, how neat it was.
He’d never thought about it much. It didn’t hurt. It was his.
He put his hand on it now, through the wetsuit, without thinking. Then he moved his hand up to the middle of his chest, where the other thing was, and held it there. South-east. Still. Patient as a hook.
There’s nothing on Potrero Hill, he told himself, but the plant, three hundred people who work for the plant, and goats. He didn’t need a hill. He had five bars of copper, thirty-one kilos in Lena’s book, and a ship to catch that was going the other way entirely.
He started the outboard and pointed the Ana north, toward the Clock and the market and the morning. Away from the hill.
He looked back at it twice before the end of the canal. The second time, the thing in his chest pulled back.
Day one, eight forty in the morning, and I’d like it on record that I said clean.
* * *