up at her. She is so repulsed by the sight she almost shoves the sphere out of her lap.
“Wow,” she says. “Wow. I love it. I really did always want one.”
He bows his head and squeezes his eyes shut. A tingle of shock prickles across her chest. He’s about to cry.
“I know it isn’t what you wanted. What we t-t-talked about,” he says.
She reaches across the table and clasps his hand, feels like she might start to cry herself. “It’s perfect.”
Only she’s wrong. He wasn’t struggling against tears. He was fighting a yawn. He surrenders to it, covers his mouth with the back of his free hand. He doesn’t seem to have heard her.
“I wish we could’ve done all the things we talked about. The S-Sp-Spuh-Spoke. R-Ride in a big buh-b-bubble together. These fuckin’ medical Clockworks, kid. They’re like hyenas pulling apart the corpse for the last goodies. The medical Clockworks ate your b-birthday c-cake this year, kiddo. We’ll see if I can’t do a little better for you next year.” He shakes his head in a good humored way. “I have to c-c-crap out for a while. A man c-can only take so much excitement when he’s g-got half a working heart.” He opens his eyes to a sleepy squint. “You know about m-mermaids. When they fall in love, they sing. Which I understand. Same thing happened to me.”
“It did?” she asks.
“After you were b-born”—he turns sideways, stretches himself out on the bench, struggles with another yawn—“I sang to you every night. Sang until I was all sung out.” He shuts his eyes, head pillowed on a pile of grubby laundry. “Happy birthday to you. Happy b-birthday to you. Happy b-b-b-buh-birthday, sweet Iris. Hap-p-puh-p-p—” He inhales, a wet, clogged, struggling sound, and begins to cough. He thumps his chest a few times, turns his face away from her, shrugs, and sighs.
He is asleep by the time Iris reaches the top of the ladder, climbing out of his pod and leaving him behind.
She shuts the hatch, one of eight thousand in the great, dim, clammy, cavernous hive. The air smells of old pipes and urine.
Iris left her Monowheel next to her father’s pod on a mag-lock, because here in the Hives anything that isn’t bolted down will vanish the moment you take your eyes off it. She climbs up onto the big red leather seat of her ’wheel and flips the ignition four or five times before realizing it isn’t going to start. Her first thought is that somehow the battery has gone dead. But it hasn’t gone dead. It’s just gone. Someone yanked it out of the vapor-drive and strolled off with it.
“Happy birthday to me,” she sings, a little off-key.
3.
A cannon-train approaches, making that cannon-train sound, a whispery whistle that builds and builds until suddenly it passes below her with a concussive blast. Iris loves the way it hits her, loves to be struck through by the shriek and boom, so all the breath is slammed from her body. Not for the first time, she wonders what would be left of her if she jumped off the stone balustrade. Iris fantasizes about being pulverized into a fine, warm spray and raining gently upon her rotten, selfish mother and sorry, hopeless father, wetting their faces in red tears.
She sits on the balustrade, swinging her feet over the drop, the smooth green ball of sludge resting in her lap. There’ll be another train in a few minutes.
When she looks into her poisoned crystal ball, it isn’t the future she sees but the past. This time last year, she was fifteen, with fifteen of her best friends, fifteen hundred feet underground in the Furnace Club. Magma bubbled beneath the BluDiamond floor. They all traipsed barefoot to feel the warmth of it, guttering streams of liquid gold not half an inch from their heels. The waiter was a floating Clockwork named Bub, a polished copper globe who hovered here and there, opening the bright lid of his head to offer each new course. In the throbbing red light, the faces of the other girls glowed with sweat and excitement, and their laughter echoed off the warm rock walls. They looked as roasted as the piglets they were served for the main course.
Her friends were all drunk on one another by the end of it, and there was a lot of hugging and smooching. They said it was the best birthday party ever. Iris got carried away by all the good feeling and