With an icy smile, the hag retreated slightly. Jane journeyed deeper into the store.
Wherever she went, though, she felt the hag's suspicious eyes at her back, like a physical force pushing her farther and farther to the rear of the shop, until she wound up at the very back, fingering a red-and-black scarf with a border of white skulls and four Celtic spirals on the fly. She looked up and saw for a wonder that the hag was distracted by a new customer and no longer looking her way. Hastily, she shoved the scarf inside her blouse.
It was only then that she remembered Ratsnickle's warning to avoid the scarves.
For an instant she expected lightning to strike her, guards to descend, a clawed hand to close upon her wrist. Then, glancing up into the corner of the ceiling, she recognized the bundle of bones and feathers there affixed. It was, with minor variations, exactly the same as the fetish bundle outside Blugg's doorway, which she had crossed to steal his nail parings on the day she had discovered the dragon's grimoire.
Her blood was human. The fetish was helpless against her.
Heart pounding, she made her way from the shop.
When she and Ratsnickle rendezvoused at a bench by the holy well at the far end of the mall, she had already gone to the ladies' room to draw out the scarf in privacy and reposition it. Standing on the well's mossy rim she twirled on her toes, momentarily as wild a creature as any of the girls in her homeroom. She made a fist and then, reaching through it, pulled the scarf from her sleeve and waved it in the air. "Do you like what I got?" she asked, and laughed at Ratsnickle's amazement.
"How did you do that?" he asked suspiciously.
"Oh," she said airily, "I have my ways." She licked her lips. "Let's do it again."
When Jane finally left, she had a handful of gimcracks stuffed into one trousers pocket and the scarf blowing from her neck. They had spent hours within the mall, and yet outside the afternoon was no later than when they had entered. Almost, she turned around and went right back in. But Ratsnickle wouldn't let her lift any more. Her enthusiasm for the sport unnerved him. She suspected he hadn't had as much experience at shoplifting as he'd led her to think.
But she knew she was going to come back on her own.
"I'm home!"
7332 did not answer. He never did. In all the time they had lived above the landfill, he had not spoken to her once. After their one wild and glorious flight the night of their escape from the factory grounds, he had gone completely to ground. "They will be looking for us," he had said. "Keep your promises, and there won't be any trouble." Since, he had lapsed into silence. 7332 had the uncanny patience of all iron-based saurians. Yet for all the months since she had last heard him speak, his presence still lay heavy at the back of her skull, like a lump of dirty ice that had outlived winter.
She laid out her books and began to study.
Outside, there was a soft thud and then the softer sound of wings laboring heavily to lift into the twilight. An owl, possibly, or a lesser harpy had found food for its young. Jane yanked a grab rod to open a cabin window. The sky was beautiful outside. Three low stars glinted in the dusk. A bead of red gleamed atop the water tank.
It was around this time of night she could sometimes glimpse the wolf-boys running single file over the landfill on their way to the park, and hear their howls, lonely and ecstatic. She longed to be one of their pack then, to wear a heavy leather jacket that creaked when she moved and shitkicker boots with short chromed chains across the back of their heels, to hang out at the arcade, bored and spoiling for a fight, listen to some hot music, maybe score a little taste of something illegal.
Often, she would stay up at the window into the small hours of the morning, waiting for them to come trotting by on their way home, bloody-muzzled and sleepy. Once, one of them, last in line, had turned to look at her. Their gazes had locked for an instant, and she had felt a wild urge to fling open her door and go running barefooted after him.
Jane knew better, though. Wolf-boys weren't safe.
So tonight as always she kept the door locked. After a while, she undid her scarf and smoothed it over her knee. It was pure silk, hand-dyed by dwarven artisans with the spirals arrayed as if radiant from a common center, so that they seemed to whirl one into the other. She reknotted it loosely about her neck, and turned it around so the triangular part hung down in front. "Did you see what I got? Pretty, isn't it?"
7332 did not respond.
"It's stolen."
Nothing.
"I went out to the mall with a boy, and he taught me how to steal things. I was good at it."
Still the dragon did not answer.
Every night, just before she slept, Jane spoke to 7332, meditating silently and with all her will, trying to communicate her needs to him. My shoes are wearing thin, she thought, I'll need new soon. And galoshes too. Money for schoolbooks, new jeans, a poster of Bryan Faust dressed in black leather with his Stratocaster slung low at the hip. Sometimes he listened; more often he did not. Now the cumulative effect of his indifference welled up within her and came boiling out in tears.
"Damn you! Why won't you answer me, you stupid fucker? Why?" She slammed an iron plate wall with her fist. "You know what? I don't believe you're even alive anymore. You only had the stuff for one flight left in you, and you used it up. You're nothing now but a hunk of iron. Maybe there's still some current in your electrical systems, some kind of dim awareness, but that's it. You've been lobotomized, you can't even speak. You're nothing! Nada. I ought to sell you for scrap."
No response.
Angrily, she swept her books from the pilot's couch. They slid down and scattered themselves across the Pnuk counterpane that covered her bedless mattress. Her possessions were meager, but even so the cabin was tiny enough that there was scarcely room enough for them.
She plonked down in the couch.
At a touch the navigational systems came alive. The wraparound closed about her head, and she was once more looking through Melanchthon's eyes. He was staring fixedly at the ground. She raised up his gaze. Her vision now covered a full 360 degrees, over the landfill to one side of the scrub, and down a short, sharp slope on the other, where a sooty-bricked line of row houses showed their narrow backyards, all cinders and the rusting bones of bicycles and other dead machines. The graffiti on the garden walls shone in the dragon-sight like neon: ELVES GO WRACK! and DWARVES RULE O.K. with a pair of crossed hammers beneath it. In the human range of the spectrum, three windows flickered an uncanny television blue.
For a long instant she hung on the edge of the precipice, ready to invoke Melanchthon by name. The syllables hovered a fraction of a second away from her tongue. But at even this faintest thought of them, nausea rose up within Jane, a perceptual queasiness so strong she almost threw up. Something half-uncoiled inside her brain.
Her gaze unfocused and turned inward on the machine diagnostics, green lines unscrolling and multiplying upon themselves as if they had a life of their own. Schematicized, Melanchthon was a map of misery and disrepair, every break and gap where reconstruction was needed—lubricants, rewiring, replacement parts—glaringly obvious. There must have been a thousand such failures riddling the black iron body, and each one an obligation she had pledged her soul to heal.
The presence of the dragon welled up beneath her, all iron and cold, cold blood. She felt like an ant on a moving mountaintop. An aura of sickness emanated from him, blackening the air, and the realization struck her for the first time that in his present state Melanchthon was a cripple, and like any crippled creature, dangerous in proportion to his strength and former vigor.
Sanity returned to her, and with it, fear.