voice, “If you’re having a good time, why should the fun stop here? It’s just one slim coin for another thirty minutes of devotion! What do you say, Iris, old pal?”
He falls silent.
They cross the street and travel almost another block before he speaks again.
“You didn’t find that distasteful?”
“No. It didn’t bother me. What will bother me is if you pretend to feel regrets we both know you can’t feel.”
“I don’t regret it. Regret is an inversion of desire, and it’s true, I don’t want things. But I can tell when a musician strikes the wrong note.”
They have reached his corner. His meter has less than four minutes on it.
“I’ll let you make it up to me,” she says.
“Please.”
“You were a good birthday gift, Chip. You carried me to the top of the Spoke. You gave me the sun and the stars. You saved me from blackmail, and you floated down to earth with me. For an hour you gave me back the life I had before my father got hurt.” She leans toward him and kisses his cold mouth. It feels like kissing her reflection in the mirror.
“Did that make it up to you?” he asks.
She smiles. “Not quite. One more thing. Come with me.”
He follows her past his charging plate and up onto the overpass. They climb the slight slope of the bridge until they’re over the rails. She straddles the wide stone balustrade, one leg hanging over the tracks, one leg over the sidewalk, the aquaball in her lap.
“Chip. Will you climb up here and drop this thing in front of the next train? I’m not sure I can time it correctly. They’re so fast.”
“The mermaid was a gift from your father.”
“It is. It was. And he meant well. But when I look at it, I feel like I’m looking at him: this helpless thing, trapped in a little space, that isn’t good to anyone anymore and won’t ever be free again. Every time I look at it, this ugly fish is going to remind me my dad won’t ever be free again, and I don’t want to think of him that way.”
Chip climbs onto the balustrade and sits with both feet hanging over the rails. “All right, Iris. If it will make you feel better.”
“It will make me less sad. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
A faint, whistling, bottle-rocket sound begins to rise in the night, the next cannon-train coming toward them.
“You remind me of him, you know,” Iris says.
“Your father?”
“Yes. He’s as devoted to me as you are. In some ways you were filling in for him tonight. I was supposed to have the stars with him. I had them with you instead.”
“Iris, the train is almost here. You should give me the aquaball.”
She turns the glass globe over and over in her hands, does not offer it to him.
“You know how else you’re like my father?” she says.
“How?”
“He used to die, every day, so I could have the things I wanted,” she says. “And now it’s your turn.” And she puts her hand on Chip’s back and shoves.
He drops.
The cannon-train punches through the darkness with a concussive boom.
By the time she carries the aquaball down the embankment, the train is long gone, rattling off into the south, leaving behind a smell like hot pennies.
Chip has been all but obliterated. She finds one of his ceramic hands on the blackened pebbles, a few feet from the rails, discovers shreds of his wool coat, still smoldering, among some slick, damp weeds. She spies a black diamond of battered plasteel—Chip’s heart—and is able to pry the battery out of it. It is, miraculously, intact and should slot right into her Monowheel.
Tokens gleam between the rails, across the rocks. It almost seems there are as many silver coins on the ground as there were stars above the Spoke. She collects them until her fingers are so cold she can’t feel them anymore.
On the walk back to the embankment, she kicks something that looks like a cracked serving plate. She picks it up and finds herself staring into Chip’s blank smiling face and empty eye sockets. After a rare moment of indecision, she sticks it chin down in the soft gravel, planting it like a shovel. She leaves the aquaball next to it. She has no use for the kind of ugly, helpless thing born to live its life trapped in a bottle or a ball for the amusement of others. She has no use for victims. She intends never