House Immortal (9 page)

The town was abandoned, erased from the maps. They tore the tower down and hushed and hid the records. Only twelve people had survived the experiment when the great bell rang out. They hushed and hid them too.—1911

—from the journal of L.U.C.

I
took the corner along the fence. Lizard would be quickest to check on since we'd just fed it this morning. Then we'd go to Pony, the leapers, then the chickens by the barn.

“How do you walk around if you can't feel?” I killed the engine and hopped out into the grass. Yes, I should be asking him a dozen more important things, but I just couldn't seem to let this go.

“A man can get used to all manners of things given enough time.” He got out of the truck, shut the door, and walked around. “I have an awareness of my body. Distant, muffled. In extreme circumstances I can feel pain.”

“Getting your guts cut open isn't extreme enough for you?”

“No. Is that mountain breathing?”

Lizard was napping in the middle of the field, its belly swollen with crocboar.

“Sleeping. I understand that galvanized are a
collection of folk who went comatose and survived some kind of disaster a while ago.”

“Nineteen ten.”

“All right, a long while ago.” I opened the box where the fence controller was housed. “What I don't understand is how that made you immortal.”

“No one understands it. It can't be duplicated, and the records of the disaster are sketchy at best. There was an experiment, the Wings of Mercury, that seems to be the crux of the event.”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“The name of the project is all that survived. Well, and us.”

“So, you're saying if you had a heart attack, or if someone cut off your head . . .”

“My awareness, my memories, remain trapped in my brain.”

“And if someone shot you in the brain? Blew all your gray matter to bits?”

“Sufficiently damaged, my brain would fail. If my body survived, a new brain could be transplanted into my body, though there are complications with galvanized metabolism that would burn out a nongalvanized brain within a few years. It isn't theory. They have been . . . thorough in their tests over the years.”

“Who?”

“Scientists, doctors, torturers.” He shrugged.

“Torturers?”

“It's been a long life, Ms. Case.”

“Matilda,” I corrected.

He smiled.

Dammit. He'd done that on purpose.

I checked the wires, battery, and ground to the fence. All gold.

“What does it eat?” he asked.

He was staring off at Lizard, his right arm snug against his gut, even though I supposed he couldn't feel the pain
from that wound. Must have been habit and instinct to keep pressure on it.

“Feral critters. We get mutant beasts out here. Something in the soil, I think.”

“Ever had that tested?”

“The soil?” I closed up the controller box and started back to the truck. “Why would I? As long as I can grow food and drink the water, I don't care what's in it.”

“Also, testing would draw attention to your farm.”

“A girl likes her privacy.”

“I checked the records.”

“So?” I got back in the truck. He followed.

“This place isn't registered House Green. You're House Brown, aren't you?”

I didn't want to answer that. I'd rather he assume I was House Green, and therefore had legal voice and House influence behind me.

I started the engine and gave it some gas. The big engine roared. “Hold on. Road gets a little bumpy here,” I said over the noise.

He held on as I took the road hot, rattling over holes and ditches.

When I pulled up alongside the field where Pony was pastured, I had made up my mind. If he had really checked the records, he already knew only Grandma was registered House Green.

“Look.” I turned off the engine. “There are things I'd rather not discuss with you, and I suppose there are things you'd rather not discuss with me. But I need information to help some people I know.”

“House Brown people?”

“Friends.”

“All right,” he said. “Friends. What do you need to know?”

“Which House is moving heavy equipment into the middle of the Nevada desert.”

“That's . . . specific.”

I got out of the truck and walked around to the back. “Not far from Red Butte.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Looks like digging. Drilling.”

“Looks like?”

I pulled two pitchforks out of the back of the truck. “No marks on the trucks. No colors.” I tossed him a pitchfork, and he caught it like he'd been working a farm for years.

“What's out there? Minerals? Water?” he asked.

“I think geothermal.”

“That falls under House Red, Power.”

I ducked the fence, started off toward the hay chute down the field a bit. “Keep an eye out for Pony. It's a little skittish, so mind the horn.”

He scanned the field as we walked.

“Do you know if House Red is tapping geothermal?” I asked.

“It's possible. There was a shift in House Red a year ago. Aranda Red stepped up and her father stepped down. She's been acquiring unclaimed land faster than any other House.”

A geothermal claim would secure that land as House Red without much of a peep from other Houses. Which meant there was no conflicting House to call upon to stop this. The Fesslers' homestead would be demolished.

There had to be a way to stop them.

“Pony, I presume?” Abraham nodded toward the beast that stepped out from beneath the old apple tree.

Pony was made from parts, just like all Dad's beasts. The hind of it was zebra, the middle, neck, and head of it horse, and the four chunky legs were bison.

I didn't know where the horn came from, but it sat the center of its flat forehead just like a unicorn in a storybook. Altogether it wasn't that bad-looking.

It whickered, but didn't come any closer to us.

“Who made it?” he asked.

“My dad.”

I stopped by the chute. Neds and I had gotten tired of dragging feed out here in the winter, so we'd built a two-story shed, the top of which held a couple dozen bales of hay—or enough to keep the pony happy for half a month, if needed. It burned through a lot more feed than a horse would.

“He stitched it?”

“Piece by piece.”

“The lizard too?”

“He had a restless head and hands full of ideas. Stand that side of the chute. We'll need eight bales down and broken.” I pulled the chain. Pulleys got the track moving, and bales of hay lined up nice and smoothly in a row, coming down the ramp to
thunk
at our feet.

“And the horn?”

“No idea.”

I picked up the first bale, carried it a few yards away from the chute, dropped it, then pulled my knife and cut through the twine.

The pony trotted out away from the tree, then back, unsettled by the commotion.

Abraham had stayed at the chute and was stacking the bales as they fell to keep them from clogging up the system. “What does it do?”

“Mostly? Eat hay. But it can pull or plow if I need it to.”

I rested my hands on my hips and studied him. He moved with a steady grace of a man used to hard work and content in it. The wind caught at the collar of his coat and stirred his hair, pushing it into his eyes as he bent, pulled, twisted, stacked. He looked like he could do this sunup to moon down.

“You've done this before, haven't you?”

He glanced over his shoulder and gave me a smile that made me hold my breath from the joy in it.

“Once or twice.”

“Well, well. City boy's lived out in the scratch. Were you a farmer or stitcher?”

“Back when I lived in the scratch, there wasn't such a thing as a stitcher. I owned a cherry orchard, raised some livestock and such.”

The bales had stopped falling and the track stilled. He picked up one of the 150-pound bales like it was made of air. “Your turn to answer my question.”

“About?” I strolled over, hefted another bale, and carried it to the feed spot.

Pony was walking our way slowly, head down, sniffing the ground.

“Who made you? How long have you been out here hiding?”

“I was born to my mother and father.”

“In that body?” he nodded at me as he walked back for another bale.

Weird question for most folk. But, I suppose, not for him and me.

“I really am twenty-six,” I said sidestepping the body question. “Do you know where my brother is?”

He dropped another bale, glanced over at Pony, who was nibbling at grass just a few feet away from us. “He claimed House Gray several years ago and requested positions among the histories and libraries in other Houses.”

“What does that mean?”

“He's House Gray, and works in one-year contracts for other Houses. The last House he worked for was House Silver.”

“Vice?” Silver was the House that dealt with entertainment, drugs, sex, and any other pleasure humanity could think up.

I cut the string on the last bale. “Has he been in contact with you?”

“That's difficult to answer.”

“
Yes
or
no
should work.” I stabbed a few flakes of hay off the bale and tossed them to one side, inhaling the sweet, dusty green scent as it drifted up from around my boots.

Pony made another soft sound, easing a little closer.

“Yes.”

“But?”

He was silent as he broke open another bale.

“But?” I repeated waving the pitchfork his way.

“Your brother has a certain . . . intensity,” he said eyeing the tines of my pitchfork. “It seems to run in the family. The last few messages from him have lacked that.”

“Can messages be forged?”

“This is the modern age, Matilda. Everything can be forged.” He scooped up a handful of hay, then walked slowly toward Pony, his hands low.

I set the tines in the ground and leaned one elbow on the handle. “And my mother's message?”

“We didn't wait to disprove it. I left the moment it came over the transom. Before any other House could intercept it.”

“So it might not be real?”

He stopped an arm's length from Pony and held out the hay. Pony nibbled at dirt, trying not to look interested even though its eye was locked on his offering.

“Might not. And yet here you are,” he said. “Just as she said. And here is your farm—your father's farm. Just as she said. As real as can be.”

Pony raised its head, and Abraham leaned away from the horn and lifted his hand so Pony could wrap its lips around the hay. He ran his other hand down Pony's neck.

The man looked as comfortable out here as a frog in a puddle.

“Could I see it?” I asked. “My mother's message?” It came out a little softer than I'd meant.

The look that crossed his face—kindness and regret—was more than I knew how to deal with.

“Or not,” I said. “It's fine. This is enough for Pony. Let's go.”

I strode to the truck, tossed the pitchfork in the back, and got behind the wheel.

Abraham gave Pony one more pat, then propped the
pitchfork over his shoulder and sauntered back to the truck. He put the pitchfork in the back and got in.

“I'll show you her message,” he said. “When we get to House Gray. I promise.”

“Thank you.” I started the engine and drove through the falling dusk.

•   •   •

By the time we made it to the pond where the leapers liked to nest, I'd accepted that my mother's message was something I'd have to face.

Her death wasn't a new truth, but hope had sharpened the edges of it again.

What worried me more was my brother. If the latest messages from him had been forged, who had forged them and why? And, more importantly, where was he?

Abraham had been silent on the drive, a courtesy I appreciated.

“You can stay in the truck,” I said. “I'll handle the leapers.”

He opened the door and got out of the truck anyway.

“So far I've seen a dragon and unicorn,” he said. “Leapers brings all kinds of thoughts to mind.”

“They're just pond crawlers.”

I retrieved a bag of apples out of the back of the truck. Leapers didn't need apples to survive, but they were intelligent, determined little things that would stray far and wide for fruit.

I opened the bag and tossed an apple into the brackish pond.

Abraham leaned against the truck, searching the shadows.

“Up,” I suggested.

He looked up at the trees that overhung the water.

A rattle of leaves was all that announced the leapers.

I tossed another apple into the pond.

“Spiders?” he asked.

“Not quite.”

The leapers lived up to their name and came hopping
out of the trees and into the pond with fist-sized splashes. They wrapped their little tentacles around the apples, which were bigger than them.

“Octopuses? Tree octopuses?”

“They aren't supposed to climb trees, but one of them figured out where the fruit was, and, well.” I shrugged.

“Your father stitched little land octopuses?” he asked.

“Oh, these aren't his. Or at least I don't think so. These have been here as long as any of us can remember. Mutated. Teeth. Poison.”

“With a taste for apples?”

“Yes. And they will go miles to find them. Which, in turn, gets them killed and us blamed. Our neighbors don't much appreciate it when they swarm a tree and scuttle off with all the best fruit.”

“Why don't you get rid of them?”

I shrugged. “They're not doing any harm. Well, not much. They are poisonous, so it's not like you want them crawling up your legs. But they're kind of cute.” I grinned as one of the leapers landed on an apple and fell off. It draped a greenish tentacle over the fruit, hugging it like it had just found a lost friend.