They’re in Fremont, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area; all of them know that, and all of them know it doesn’t matter. Where they really are is the Up-and-Under, and in the Up-and-Under, sometimes the hardest thing to find is the road that takes you home.
The woman was impossibly beautiful. She looked like sunshine on a Saturday, like chocolate cake and afternoons with no homework. She had a smile like a mother’s praise, all sugar and softness, and Zib stared at her, wanting nothing more than to throw herself into those welcoming, unfamiliar arms.
If you trust her, you’ll never get home, whispered a voice in the back of her mind, a voice that sounded so much like the Crow Girl that Zib nearly looked over her shoulder to see if she’d been followed. That was silly. The Crow Girl was with Avery, looking for a lock to fit their skeleton key. Avery couldn’t be left alone. He was delicate.
Zib had never been allowed to be delicate. From the day she was born, she had been told to be tough, to be bold, to pick herself up and dust herself off and keep running. Sometimes she wondered what it was like, to be allowed to fall down and stay fallen.
“Hello, little girl,” said the incredible woman. “What’s your name?”
“Zib,” said Zib.
“They call me the Queen of Swords. I would very much like to be your friend . . .
—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker
Book VI
Up-and-Under
Forgive me, my children, but I will never know you.
—A. Deborah Baker
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
—Edgar Allen Poe
COAL DUST
Timeline: 00:01 PDT, June 17, 2016 (at last, a new day).
Midnight greets Leigh Barrow as she steps off the plane and onto Californian earth for the first time. (But not for the first time, never for the first time; there are so few first times for someone like her, a mosaic, a palimpsest of a woman; there are too many souls woven into the depths of her. Somewhere deep, a woman she once was rolls over and cries in restless slumber, remembering the scent of eucalyptus on the wind, the taste of sea air, the cries of the gulls that flew, white-winged and bright, above the California coast.)
She shivers away the feeling of the ghosts at her foundation stirring and strides toward the car sent to do her bidding. The man behind the wheel is an alchemist, a student of Reed’s art who realized long ago that his survival would be more certain if he was well outside his master’s ever-questing grasp. The other man, the one who opens the door for her without a word, is a construct, mud and frogs and clever science. Leigh spares a smile for him, poisonous and sweet.
“How long ago did you make him?” she asks, once she’s settled in the back seat, belt buckled across her waist, pistol resting in her lap. On the tarmac, the private jet which brought her here is taxiing away, heading toward the hangar where it will wait for her return.
“Six years, ma’am.”
“Clay, native amphibians, and . . . ?”
“Railway iron, ma’am. Stolen from the tracks. I had to trade any chance of speech for the additional resilience, but you could hit him with a bus and he wouldn’t notice.”
“Hmmm,” says Leigh speculatively. The massive construct gets into the front passenger seat, not bothering with his own seatbelt; it wouldn’t stretch across the barreled expanse of his chest. “We’ll have to see about that.”
The alchemist behind the wheel goes as silent as his construct. No one who works with or for James Reed doesn’t know about Leigh Barrow: where he found her, what she is. For a manikin to outlive their creator . . . it requires an immense amount of power.
“Have you found them?” The question is asked lightly, almost sweetly. In that moment, Leigh could have been anyone, harmless and looking for her friends.
“No, ma’am,” he says.
“Why not?” The moment has passed. Her voice is a promise of pain unavoidable, and his hands clench on the wheel.
He knew when Reed called that he probably wouldn’t survive the night. He had no way to refuse. Until this moment, he was still holding on to hope. Hope is gone now; hope has fled.
“They left their car. I can take you there.”
“Do that,” she says, leaning back in the seat. “And drive quickly. I’m not feeling patient tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. Clyde?”
The construct opens the glove compartment and withdraws a Hand