She’s taking me towards the lights, towards the impossible towers at the centre of the world. I look as long as I dare, poking my head over the dashboard of the car, my body still hiding among the shadows, as we cross the narrow expanse of water that borders what I’ve come to think of as my part of the city. I can’t directly see those buildings, but I can see evidence of their presence. It’s overcast, and the clouds are lit up in red and gold from below, the light of the city overwhelming the darkness of the moonless night. It looks like we’re driving into an inferno, or a sunrise.
The bridge is lit by regularly placed streetlights, whose orange glow sweeps over me like the flashing green lights of the soldiers’ truck. The sensation is strange, as I flinch away from the soft orange lights only to be bathed in blissful darkness for an instant. There are a few cars in front of us, a steady stream of white lights from the scant oncoming traffic and red pinpricks from the rear of the car in front of us. A second bridge crosses the channel to my right, a raised edifice of steel and concrete that glitters with yet more traffic. That road is busier, and the vehicles are moving far faster than looks safe.
The wheels rumble as the surface of the road changes from flat concrete to the steel grating of a drawbridge, the sudden change in sound causing me to jump a little, pulling a little more of my torso back into the shadows. Besides me, Ember chuckles at my nerves. She turns to look at me, and I see a reassuring smile on her face. I smile back – as best I can without any of the needed muscles – with my mouth gaping wide to reveal the razor-sharp teeth tucked just behind my beak-like skull. By all rights, baring my teeth shouldn’t look like a smile, but both Mike and Ember seem to find it an acceptable substitute.
“We’re almost there,” she says in a soft voice. “We’re just heading into Eastlake now. Welcome to your new neighbourhood.”
I want to duck away from the lights, but my curiosity is enough to overrule my instincts. Eastlake looks newer than anywhere I’ve seen before; it’s almost impossibly clean, without a scrap of graffiti or broken window anywhere to be seen. There are still people, and they’re still drunk, but there are far fewer of the ragged and desperate types that used to fill the majority of the streets. I spot a couple of black uniformed soldiers talking pointedly to a man in a pink shirt, with an open bottle in his hand and a wine stain running down his chest. They’re not dressed for war – like the grey-uniformed ones – wearing peaked caps instead of helmets and carrying pistols instead of those strangely boxy metal rifles.
The road forks, and we pass underneath the enormous bridge I saw over the channel, the enormous structure supported directly overhead on concrete pillars, casting its shadow onto the car as we pass underneath. The buildings are all strangely blocky, and cables crisscross the streets, but I could learn to like this place. It might not be as comfortingly gloomy as my last haunt, but places like that still remind me a little too much of Mike for comfort. Maybe he was using me, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t nice to know that there’s someone at home who’ll be happy to see me.
Maybe Ember is using me as well, but that’s all right. I don’t mind if she is, because I’m using her for shelter. For human contact. She doesn’t look at me like I’m a freak, and she hasn’t treated me like a dumb animal even though I’m mute. I’m willing to overlook a lot for those simple treasures.
Ember pulls the car into a short car park next to the shoreline, with a long expanse of dark water stretching across a small lake before ending in the glittering lights of another part of the city. She gets out of the car, and I scramble over the gearstick to leave through the same door as her, rather than fiddling with my own. She steps aside to let me out, before walking around to the trunk of her car and pulling out a hooded jacket, putting it over her work clothes and pulling the hood up, casting her head into shadow.
“You can see through the shadows, right? I figured you’d want to see where we’re going.”
I purr contentedly – there’s no better word for it, but I dearly wish there was – and leap at her face, spooling through the shadows to the back of her hood. She stumbles backwards in shock, the hood angling with her head and forcing me backwards as a little bit of light creeps in, before she steadies herself.
“Please don’t do that again. The last thing I want is to set my clothes on fire in full view of the neighbourhood.”
The shudder that accompanied her words has me feeling a little guilty, so I form a hand in the back of her hood and give her head a few reassuring pats. That seems to work, as she immediately starts to walk forwards. She takes me towards the water, rather than towards the tall buildings behind us, and part of me is a little confused. Maybe she has a secret cave, like a smuggler?
The truth is even stranger than that fiction. She walks us out onto a jetty, with a few unnaturally white boats moored up in a tight cluster, before turning right. My view, limited as it is by the hood, is suddenly filled by the strangest sight I have ever seen. It’s like someone has taken a street of houses and placed it on top of the lake itself; the jetty is flanked on either side by two-story houses, floating on top of the open water. There’s an expanse of water between each building, like an alleyway, and a lot of them have boats parked in the same place most families would put a car.
“Pretty cool, right?”
I can’t help but agree, staring in awe at the strange floating buildings. Ember steps up to one near the end, with walls of painted red wood and a simple metal number on the white painted door. She fumbles with her keys for a second, before stepping through into a surprisingly homey entrance hall, waiting for me to crawl out of her jacket before hanging it on a peg next to half a dozen others. I look up at her, tilting my head in confusion.
“Okay,” – she sits down on a staircase that runs along the right wall – “so we as an organisation do have, like, secret bases and that, but I personally don’t. The closest thing I have is the security centre in the Red-Light district, but that’s not really the sort of place you’d want to be living in. What I do have is a spare room, at least until I can sort something better for you.”
I take another look around the hall, noting the subtle personal touches that have been built up over time, and nod at her. There’s something comforting about seeing a place that’s been lived in, rather than just somewhere that people have chosen to stay. There aren’t any pictures on the walls, but the shoes and coats in this room speak to a divide between the outside world, and this sanctuary. That’s the difference between here and the derelict factory, and I’m quite happy to share the space if it means I get to stay here.
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She flashes two thumbs up at me, and makes her way up the narrow staircase to the second floor. I follow at her heels as she leads me into a small mezzanine area with three doors and an angled bay window, looking out over an expansive balcony and the even more expansive lake. There’s something fundamentally welcoming about that vast stretch of dark water, but I turn my attention back to Ember as she opens up one of the two doors to the left of the window.
The room is simple, with small window on the far wall looking onto the jetty, and an even smaller one on the right that looks into the water between this building and the next. They pale in comparison, however, when compared to the enormous bed in the middle of the room, with a mattress that looks to be at least a foot thick! I leap up onto it and immediately curl up into a ball, trying to sink as deeply as I can into the soft springy material.
A low laugh draws my attention back to the doorway, where Ember is leaning with a wry grin on her face. She’s holding a duvet, and she tosses it unceremoniously on top of me. It takes me a few moments to scrabble about under it, but eventually my head pops out at the wrong end of the bed. Somehow, the duvet is even softer than the mattress.
“I’ll be in my room if you need anything.” – she jerks her thumb over her shoulder, pointing at the door on the other end of the hall – “If not, then I’m going to turn in for the night. One of the many downsides of a shift that ends at three AM is that it doesn’t leave much room for anything except sleep when I get back. Goodnight!”
She swings the door shut, leaving me along in the room. In my room. That thought is almost as comforting as the duvet I’m curled up beneath. I have somewhere that I can call my own again, somewhere that isn’t decrepit and abandoned, somewhere free from damp and secure against the elements. Or at least as free as a floating house can be. I feel like it shouldn’t work, like it should have toppled over into the lake long before I arrived, but I’ve already seen so much that should be impossible. What’s a floating house when compared to corpses puppeted by machinery, or towers that scrape the heavens?
No. I’m not afraid of the house. I feel safe here, in the comforting soft darkness of the first bed I’ve felt since I got here. I feel comfortable, at peace, but I don’t feel tired. It’s far too early for that. So I creep out from under the duvet, dropping down onto the carpeted floor of my room. I look around, finding another radio on my bedside table but I decide against turning it on; I don’t want to sleep right now, but that doesn’t mean I can wake up Ember with loud music.
Instead I gently push open the door and step silently out into the hall. The door across from me is Ember’s room, so I leave it alone, but curiosity has gripped me, and I’m determined to have a good snoop around what might well become my new home. The door next to mine opens into a study, roughly the same size as my room. It has a far more professional air than Ember’s home, with one of the strange devices I saw in the electronics shop on top of a wooden desk. Her drawers are locked, so I leave them be. I slink back out of the room, feeling a little guilty. Ember seems welcoming enough, but the study is very definitely her space, in much the same way that my room is mine.
I creep back down the stairs and open the first door I see, finding myself in a well-furnished kitchen. I can’t make heads or tails of a lot of the machines, but one thing that does draw my eye is the mess. The faux-stone countertops are grimy, and in need of a wipe down, while stray scraps of packaging are everywhere to be seen. I open up the trash can – overflowing with refuse – and take note of the strange black bag that lines it. Plastics have the be one of the most confusing things I’ve ever seen. They’re so universal here that they really ought to feel familiar to me, but instead I’m constantly surprised by just how much stuff these people use them for.
I rummage through the cupboards until finding a whole bunch of plastic bags, rolled up into a compact black cylinder. It takes me a while to reach some of the rubbish, but eventually I manage to figure it out. If I use my forepaws to pull my torso up over the top of the counters, then I can use my more dexterous arms to grab at the refuse and pile it into the bags, tying them off before piling them up next to the trash can. In truth, the rubbish isn’t really that bad. It looks like the sort of mess that would come from someone too busy to tidy up, rather than someone deliberately neglectful.
I guess I just have an eye for cleanliness, especially now that I live somewhere worth cleaning. Sometimes I wonder where these strange quirks and impulses come from; it feels like I learn something new about myself every day, but never anything really important.
There’s a door in the kitchen that leads to a sort of combination living and dining room, with a table at one and a cluster of couches at the other, in front of another bay window that looks out onto the lake. As before, my eye is drawn to empty food packets on the dining room table, and some other trash near the couches. I spend a while cleaning as best I can, eventually steeping back out into the hallway in search of cleaning materials. I find a small utilities room tucked under the stairs, with yet more strange machines and a few more familiar cleaning materials.
I spend my time going through all the rooms in the house – except for the bedroom in which Ember is still soundly sleeping – with a damp rag and a feather duster, removing what might be months of dust from the furniture and adding two more black bin bags to the small heap in the kitchen. If I had been anyone else, then the noise of this endeavour would have long since woken Ember. As it stands, I’m almost unnaturally silent as I move throughout the house. I don’t know if it’s because I’m far lighter than the average person, or if there’s something about my power that muffles me. Knowing my luck, it’s probably both…
By the time I’m done, the sky outside the wide windows of the house has started to turn to that faint purpley-red that comes just before the dawn. I’m sprawled out on one of the couches, feeling contented with my work as I look over the spotless living room. It was a welcome distraction from every trouble that’s been eating at me, and by now I’m much too tired to give them any thought. Instead, I creep back up the stairs and crawl underneath my duvet, curling up into a ball in the middle of the bed. Something still isn’t quite right, so I reach with my hand up to the head of the bed and slowly pull down a pillow until it’s resting beneath my head. Cocooned in comfort and safety, I swiftly fall into a dreamless sleep.