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“What’s this?” he asked coolly. “A birthday present?”
“It’s what you came here for, and the only thing you want. You don’t want to learn anything, and you don’t want to work if you can help it. I’ve watched you run and burn for what now … a couple of years?”
“Something like that,” Rector muttered, taking the packet and stuffing it into his pocket while pretending not to care.
“I was dealing with a child before, and today you’re a man. So from here on out, you pay your own debts. I won’t protect you if you don’t. ”
“Never asked you to,” Rector snapped before he could stop himself. That small, embarrassed corner of his soul grew a size or two. He felt himself blushing, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. “But thanks for the birthday present. I’ll use it wisely. ”
“Nobody uses sap wisely. ”
Rector turned on his heels and grabbed the door, pushing it open and launching himself out into the night, where the trees were too thick and the sky too dark to show him anything but a bright stain in his vision from the brilliant lights of the chemist’s shack.
When he could see again, he looked toward the wall.
“Wait for me,” he told it. “I’ll deal with you soon enough. ” And he headed off toward the water instead.
Three
The beach was deserted.
It was also shiny with a glaze of moonlight and the intermittent sweep and flash of a powerful lamp scanning the water a few miles away. The lighthouse wasn’t for boats, not mostly. Not anymore. These days it guided the airships and their crews coming and going from Bainbridge Island, serving as a beacon for the kind of madmen who didn’t mind flying at night—or the kind of ships that had no choice in the matter. The distant beam came and went, blinking in and out, grazing the tops of the subtle waves and glinting off the edge of the Outskirts.
Rector picked a large, flat rock that looked more dry than not and sat on it. For a moment he thought about staying and watching the sun rise, and then he realized what a dumb idea that was, considering he was facing west. But it might be pretty anyway, seeing the sky go from black to smoky foam gray.
The last time he’d sat on this strip of coastline, the sky had gone the other way—from an overcast panorama of sickly white clouds to a deep, rolling, ominous shade of dark. A storm had crashed in from the north, coming over the ocean like it did only once in a great blue moon. One week before, he’d watched the sky change above him without caring. When the rain came down, pelting him so hard the droplets stung, he didn’t care about that, either. But when the thunder had begun, he’d gathered his things and headed inside.
He almost hadn’t. He’d waited a few minutes in the downpour to see the lightning that always came with thunder—he thought those brilliant gold lines cracking across the waves might look like God on a bender. But there wasn’t any lightning, and he didn’t know why. He’d asked around, but no one could tell him. What did Northwesterners know about weather? Practically nothing, unless they were the sort who sailed. And the old mariners told him there hadn’t been any thunder at all—they said he’d only imagined it.
But Harry’d heard it, too, and so did a bunch of other people. Rector might make things up and hear or see things once in a while, but he wasn’t wrong about the thunder.
He untied a corner of his blanket pouch and shoved his hand down inside it, withdrawing a box of matches and the burlap pouch. Then he reached for the packet Harry had handed him on the way out the door, his birthday present. He deserved this one, and deserved it richly.
But when he unfolded the little package, he found only another folded piece of paper stuffed inside it. The paper was blank and empty.
“Goddammit, Harry! Some lousy goddamn birthday present from you. Goddammit! I thought we were friends, you old horse’s ass!” He shouted louder than someone who wished to remain inconspicuous ought to, but it was dark and he was mad. He crushed the waxed paper and the blank paper up into a ball and chucked it toward the ocean.
If it hit the waves or just made it to the beach, he didn’t know. He didn’t hear it land.
“All that talk about doing me a favor,” he growled. “Maybe I could do him the favor of burning down that stupid shack. Save him the trouble of deciding where to go, yeah. How would he like that favor?”
Shaking now with rage as well as the symptoms of withdrawal, he retrieved the last dregs of his personal stash from his jacket pocket. With quivering hands he tapped the bottom edge against his palm to settle the contents, and he assembled his tools.
The pouch held scraps of tinfoil, a tiny teaspoon, a wooden napkin ring, and a broken glass pipe. He wouldn’t need the spoon; there wasn’t enough sap left to measure. He left the glass pipe’s bowl wrapped in the old handkerchief he’d found someplace, since he couldn’t use it and he didn’t want to cut himself.
He extracted a square of foil and held it firmly between his fingers, suddenly second-guessing his decision to do this out on the beach. But the wind wasn’t strong; if anything, it was almost curiously absent. The birds were still sleeping, the world was still dark, and no one was watching.
No one saw as he bent the foil around the napkin ring so that it made a shiny little surface like the top of a drum.
No one saw him dump the last few precious grains of yellow dust onto the foil, or strike the first match to cook the stuff into fumes. Not even the birds yawned and peeked, and not even the most curious tide-pool residents winked up at him as he bent his head down low over the foil, held it firmly but gently in his fingers, closed his eyes, and lowered the glass stem.
In a rush of concentrated, sulfurous fog, the cobwebs in his head were blasted clean.
Urine-colored fire washed over his brain; brimstone and brine simmered and smoked, and in the wake of that first astonishing explosion (which never became less astonishing with time, or less painful, or less needful and joyful), a placid, pale nothingness dawned.
Rector privately suspected that this was what it felt like to die. First there’d be shock, an outburst of fear and sensation. Then would come this calm, this warmth and smoothness, and the pleasant apathy drawn from an ironclad knowledge that the world no longer mattered.
Given time for the powder to cool and the residue to blow away … given scorched fingertips and a nose that ran with pink and yellow mucus, blood, and Blight in a biological slime … this harmonious eggshell of bliss would … crack.
