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A better person, Jane was sure, would have been able to restrain herself, to spare the time to soothe an old friend into death before returning to her own affairs. But try though she might she could not. Feeling awful, she asked, "Where's Peter?"
Ragwort chuckled. It sounded like sheet metal tearing. "Last I saw him, the boy was headed upslope." He called after her, "Give him a kiss for me, girlie. He's earned it."
Peter had hanged himself.
His slim body hung from a low branch of an elm tree near the top of the slope. It was hard to see at first, but as she climbed the hillside the ground, trees, and sky resolved themselves into three separate shades of gray, with Peter's corpse suspended at their center. A faint breeze moved it ever so slightly—any less and the motion would be undetectable. His feet were a slowly turning compass, quartering out the night.
Jane stayed midway up the slope through the darkest part of the night, unwilling to leave and unable to bear coming any closer. Caught between conflicting urges, she could give in to neither and in the end she simply didn't move.
Around midnight the moon rose and shortly thereafter there was a slight stirring at the center of Peter's forehead. Slowly, a slim black crack appeared and widened there. His face broke open like brittle paper.
Something dark crawled from the crack. It spread damp wings, pulsed, and then flew away. More dark specks emerged from Peter's skull, one and then three and five at a time, pausing briefly and then taking wing. A thin stream formed, thickened, moved away.
It was a swarm of hornets.
"Come." A small hand—a child's hand—took hers and led her away.
She was far down the road before she thought to look to her side and see who was leading her. Then, when she did, what she saw was so unexpected she found it hard to credit her own numbed senses.
It was the shadow-boy.
Too much had happened; she could not respond. They walked, saying nothing. Miles passed. At the schoolyard the shadow-boy released her and said, "I came to say good-bye." He smiled sadly. "I can't help you any more. They've given up on finding you and the child catcher has been recalled. I'll be going back to the factory now."
"The factory," Jane said. It was hard to think of the factory. She tried to come up with something appropriate to say. "How is everybody doing there?"
"Everything is the same there. Nothing ever changes." The shadow-boy's voice was wistful. "It can't." He shifted and was gone.
"Wait!" Jane cried. "It was… you in the shadows all this time?"
From behind her, the shadow-boy said, "The child catcher brought me to help find you. Like a bloodhound, you know." She whirled and caught a fraction of his shy smile. "He has less control over me than he thought. I wasn't able to do much. But I gave you what protection I could. On Midsummer's Day, the bonfire? It was me who fetched your teacher when you were attacked. Things like that."
"You did that? Why would you go to all that trouble for me?"
"I'm your friend." A gentle, papery touch of his hand. "Friends help friends."
She turned to return his touch with a hug but there was nothing there. The sense of phantom presence that had haunted her all these past months was gone. Slowly, wearily, Jane headed back up to the landfill.
The dragon was gone.
Unbelieving, Jane wandered across the space where he had been. The low moon provided just enough light to show that there was nothing there but churned-up earth.
The meryons were gone as well, their buildings light-less and abandoned. Jane stumbled across their perimeters and was not challenged. A Quonset hut crumpled underfoot and she was not attacked. She came upon a neat pile of blankets and clothing, rolled-up posters, schoolbooks, brushes and combs, the total accumulation of wealth she had managed to amass since fleeing the factory. She screamed.
"My stuff! You just left all my stuff out in the open!"
Not caring what happened, she called on Melanchthon with all her will, howling his true name across the landfill and shouting out the catalog codes she had memorized so long ago for anyone to hear.
A voice answered from within the ground.
Go away. You are no longer needed.
His voice was more powerful than it had ever been before. It made her skull vibrate and rattled her teeth. "We cut a deal," she reminded him. "You're supposed to protect me."
And who broke the compact first? Eh, little virgin?
His scorn scorched her face and left small blisters on her nose and cheeks. She cried out in pain. But she could no longer control herself. "You bastard! You pla
A pipe thrust out of the soil, right at her feet, and ratcheted upward, skewing crazily into the sky. Jane danced back from it. To her side, a steel tower erupted from the ground, rocketing toward the moon, shedding dirt. "Stop!" Jane shouted. But metal structures were sprouting everywhere about her, in sheets and chrome walls, slamming and clashing against one another, blocking the horizon and hiding the stars and clouds. An iron bulwark curved overhead, clanging into a slotted wall, and then all motion stopped.
Jane was enclosed in a city of steel, with no windows or doors.
"Where am I?" she cried in horror.
"Location is an illusion." The voice came from a corridor to her side. She spun about and saw a warrior approaching, elf-handsome in camouflage fatigues, a pistol within a buckled holster at his belt. "That is one of the first things that Melanchthon taught us." The warrior's mouth moved, but nothing else. His eyes were beads of jet. It might as well have been a mask talking.
"You know his name," Jane said flatly.
"A dragon is not like most creatures. Knowing his true name gives you no power over him unless you also stand at his controls."
It was true. Jane knew it was true by how bitter it tasted. "Who are you?" she asked.
"We are your replacements."
She looked more closely at him. She knew now that they were meeting not on a physical level but in some virtual dream-space of Melanchthon's devising. She studied the simplified planes of the warrior's face, his flat, emotionless expression. Her apprehension of scale did a sudden flip-flop, and she realized that rather than standing within a roofed passageway in an enormous city, she had been reduced in stature and set down among the pistons and workings of the dragon's interior. "You're a meryon."
"Yes. We are. Melanchthon still needs work, and with your virginity you have lost your neutrality of power. Your hands are no longer pH-neutral. His circuitry would burn at your touch. You could not so much as open an access hatch without disturbing the balance of charges within. We, however, reproduce asexually. We have dismantled our industries and moved them within the dragon's thorax, so that we might devote ourselves to his repair and maintenance." He gestured down one long corridor where minuscule service lights gleamed on surfaces of copper, steel, molybdenum. Tiny figures moved purposefully in the distance. "See what work we have done already."
"What do you get out of this arrangement?"
"Shelter," said the meryon. "And enough wheat to see us through the winter."
"You wouldn't need his shelter or his wheat if he hadn't arranged it. He's messed with your culture, tricked you into not growing enough food to feed yourselves, and made you dependent on coal and conquest for survival, when he knew all along that it would lead you to the brink of starvation."
"The strong abuse the weak," said the meryon. "Why should this bother anybody? It's a system."