NEW NEW YORK
ONE YEAR FROM NOW ;;
Blue.
The world was blue, and when she closed her eyes Skreem could still see it, flashing blue blue blue behind her eyelids.
She was still standing, but there was no ground under her feet. There was nothing except the robot's metal fingers crushing hers, and the last breath she remembered taking burning in her lungs. That was how she knew they were moving. There was no air when they traveled like this, because they weren't moving through anything that could be called a real place. Or maybe they were, but they were moving too fast to snatch even the most desperate gasp of oxygen.
She knew they'd stopped when she could breathe again, but Skreem kept her eyes tight shut all the same.
She remembered what had happened the last time she opened them.
She remembered the bubble of stale air they'd been standing in, and the way the robot had been holding her up, because inside the bubble there wasn't any gravity. Outside the bubble there wasn't any gravity.
Outside the bubble, there wasn't anything.
There wasn't any sewer. There wasn't any ground. There wasn't any air, or sky, or people. Outside the bubble, there wasn't any universe. There was just a great sucking emptiness, and if she stepped outside the bubble, it would swallow her up – eat her up like it had eaten everything else.
She hadn't screamed. She'd been too scared.
And then the robot had explained what this place was, and why he was showing it to her.
When he'd brought her back, the light had been green – green for going back – and Skreem had been crying.
She was crying now, but for a different reason.
"Be brave," she whispered to herself.
"We're here. Open your eyes," the robot commanded. He shook her arm. "Yo. Helloooooo. Comprende? Nous sommes arrivé, scaley."
Skreem swallowed.
"What language is that?"
"Eh, who knows. I learned it in the nuthouse. C'mon. Wakey wakey, little weirdy."
Skreem dug her heels in, keeping her eyes resolutely closed. At least there was ground to dig her heels into.
And there was air. She was breathing it.
"What's a nuthouse?" she asked carefully.
The robot shrugged.
"A place I once made a daring escape from," he said off-handedly. "If you're lucky one day I might tell you the story. It's not in the top ten Most Daring Escapes By Bender, but it's still pretty good. It'll make you puke, or whatever you humans do when you get excited. Don't say I didn't warn you." He rattled her arm again. "What, are your eyes stuck like that?"
"No."
Her own voice was so small Skreem could hardly hear it.
She took a deep breath and balled her fists in the sleeve of her sweater, squeezing wads of the yellow wool for comfort. The sweater was a real thing. It belonged to Leela, to home. As long as she had hold of it, she was safe.
Skreem screwed up her courage, opened her eyes – and opened them again. This time, she did scream.
The world was black and empty. Empty like the void, empty like the end of everything . . .
A tiny orange flame snapped into being, six inches under her nose, and Bender sighed.
"Relax, would ya? It's just dark."
The flame, Skreem realized, was coming out of the top of his finger. Or thumb, maybe. Did robots have thumbs?
He was muttering to himself.
" . . . show a human the end of the universe one time and they get all traumatized . . ."
"I'm sorry," Skreem mumbled. Now that her nerves had had time to settle, she could see that he was right. It was just dark. There was a faint, pale-green glow off in the distance, but other than that, they were in a blackout.
The pale green glow, she realized, was Lake Mutagenic. Which meant . . .
"We're still in the sewer." She blinked. "But . . . but . . . it's dark. Where is everybody?"
"Gone," Bender said shortly.
He strode off, waving the little flame in front of him. Skreem hurried to catch up.
"What do you mean, gone?"
"What do you think I mean?" the robot snapped. He wheeled around and raised his hand again, so that the flickering glow fell on Skreem's face.
She blinked, her eyes watering in the heat of the flame.
"They're dead," she whispered.
She felt her gills flap open, trying to suck in extra air past the lump in her throat. If she didn't breathe deep, she knew she'd start crying again, and the robot didn't understand it when she cried. He just waited for her to stop, and looked at her, like he was now. Like she was malfunctioning in some way he didn't understand.
He was doing it now. At last he drew the flame back, plunging her into gloom again.
"They're not all dead."
"They're not?"
Skreem felt hope flare in her chest. Maybe the future wouldn't be such a terrifying new frontier after all. Maybe things weren't as hopeless as they seemed. Maybe -
The robot shrugged.
"I mean, most of them are dead. But not all of them. So you can stop crying now, or whatever."
He coughed, which had to be just punctuation for the conversation, because he didn't even have any lungs.
Then he raised the flame upwards and -
"Aw, crap nuggets. The ladder's busted." He extended his arms, up into the darkness, then wound them back again with a grunt of annoyance. "I can't reach." He turned back to Skreem. "You live here. How do we get out of this dump?"
Skreem swallowed. She'd never seen the sewer so dark – but this was her home. She could walk every inch of it in her sleep.
"There's a ladder by the West Dock," she said, with more confidence than she felt. "It won't be broken. They put it in before I was born, when they were building the West-Side Pipeway. It's the newest one in the whole sewer." She hesitated, listening to the drip drip drip of water off the pipes. The only sound for miles, apart from her own breathing. "It was new," she mumbled.
She led the way, skirting the edge of the lake out of habit.
She didn't need to. There was nothing alive in it, not anymore. When the robot pulled an empty beer bottle out of his compartment and lobbed it out over the water, no tentacles rose up to grasp at it. Nothing rippled up from the depths, or snapped spiny teeth in anger.
The lake was dead.
The ladder was still intact though, the rungs thick with rust and slime. The robot shook it. There was a dull twung sound and it wobbled – but it held.
"You first, scaly."
Skreem nodded. Then, for the first time in her life, she wrapped her fingers around the rungs and began to climb.
The robot followed her up. It was a long ascent. Bender had had to put out his flame – he needed both hands to climb, and he had filters in his eyes anyway, according to him. X-Ray vision, like a superhero. He could see in the dark.
Skreem couldn't. She felt her way up in pitch darkness, fumbling for the rungs above her, feeling the distance yawn out beneath her as her arms ached and the air grew colder. Up, up, up.
She slipped, once. Her foot missed the rung and her stomach swooped – but just as the panic clutched at her, the robot reached up and pushed her back into place, like a toy that had fallen out of its slot.
And then her head thunked on metal, and they were at the top.
The surface.
Skreem rubbed her head, clinging tight to the rungs with her free hand.
"Ow," she mumbled.
The little flame flared up again in the dark.
"There's a bolt," the robot prompted. "You have to pull it, weirdy."
Skreem nodded.
She scraped back the bolt.
"Now you push." From the robot's tone, it was clear he thought Skreem was a moron. "Up."
Skreem nodded again, and made no move.
Bender tapped impatiently on the rungs of the ladder. Clank clank clank went his metal fingers.
"You're not pushing," he pointed out.
"I can't," Skreem admitted.
The robot snorted.
"Aw, c'mon. You're not that puny."
"It's not that."
"Then what?"
He sounded testy.
Skreem swallowed.
He wouldn't understand. She was a mile up, the furthest from home she'd ever been, and he was telling her to unscrew the sky.
"It's the surface."
"D'oy," the robot said scornfully. He prodded her in the back. "Move it," he ordered.
Skreem flattened her palm against the metal, and ordered her muscles to move.
They ignored her. "Stay in the sewer" was a survival strategy that had been ingrained in her since birth. It wasn't safe up there, she wasn't allowed . . .
She shut her eyes, comforted by the dark, and tried to conjure up Mr Filmore's face.
In her mind, he smiled at her – that tired smile he had, that seemed so warm and easy, always.
"There's nothing to be scared of," he said softly.
She heaved, and the manhole rasped. Cold air played across her face.
"See?" Mr Filmore said in her ear. "It's easy. I promised I'd take you to the surface, didn't I?"
Skreem nodded. The robot was holding her up from behind now, while she pushed with all her might against the metal.
And then it suddenly gave way, and light and dust rushed in.
"I never break a promise," Mr Filmore said, but his voice echoed. The light was searing through her closed eyelids, whiting him out.
Don't go, Skreem thought. Please don't go.
"I'm sorry," he said, whisper-faint.
And then the robot was pulling her up and Mr Filmore was gone, just another ghost hiding in her head.
You're dead, she thought sadly. You're dead and you can only help me help myself.
She had to be brave. That was what Mr Filmore had taught her. Be brave, for the things that were important. Be brave, for the people you cared about.
Be brave.
Her first conscious impression of the surface was that it was . . . big. There was too much of it, stretching out in every direction. Up, down, and all around.
The sky was terrifying. It went on and on, up and up, and Skreem's head whirled just looking at it. Under it, she was nothing. A tiny, insignificant dot. A speck.
Her limbs locked and she froze in place, fighting her own dizziness. The robot had wandered off, poking around in the rubble like he was looking for something. Something to steal, probably.
Gray-white dust was settling on her shoulders. At first Skreem thought it was snow – but Mr Filmore had always told her snow was wet, and this was dry. And gritty.
She brushed it off, uneasy.
The dust was everywhere – heaped up in drifts on the sidewalk and spiraling down out of the sky in soft, lazy flurries. It found its way into her clothes, into the cracks in her scales, into her mouth . . .
She sputtered, feeling sick.
And then she realized what it was.
It was ash. Somewhere close, there'd been a big fire, and the ash had blown in on the wind.
The hovercars were snowed in in it. The transport tubes were blocked up. No wonder it had been so hard to open the manhole out of the sewer – the ash was at least a foot deep, everywhere you looked. Three feet deep, in places. The windows that weren't broken were rimed over with it, like frost. The door to the nearest building was swinging open, abandoned.
There was no sign, anywhere, of any people.
The robot had found a piece of metal and was scrunching it up into a cone shape. A makeshift amplifier. The top of his antenna had turned red and it was beeping; a slow, insistent tone. S.O.S, Skreem thought. A cry for help.
The dust was making her eyes prickle. Her skin itched, and when she scratched, the scales sloughed away under her fingernails.
It stung.
Skreem shook off more of the dust, fighting panic again. She was allergic, that was all. Lots of people had allergies. People were allergic to dust, and cats, and shellfish . . .
Heat was building on her exposed flesh. She was burning, she realized, alarmed. But there wasn't a fire, not here.
Was this sunburn? She frowned up at the overcast sky.
"Um. Mr – Mr Robot?"
"Bender," the robot said indifferently.
"Mr Bender?"
"Yeah? What?"
"I don't feel so good."
It wasn't just the dust. It was the air. It was wrong, all metal-tasting and strange. It made her feel funny, down into her bones.
"Can we – can we go inside?" she asked nervously. "I think I'd feel better inside."
"We have to be outside," the robot said. "So they can find us. Now do you mind? I'm trying to signal over here!"
"Sorry," Skreem mumbled.
She sat down carefully on the hood of a hovercar, and stared out over the horizon.
So this was the surface.
It probably looked better with people, she decided. And without all the ash.
There was a building in the distance, by the river, that didn't look like the others. It was squat and the walls were shiny, sweeping to a dome over the roof. It reminded her of a picture she'd once seen of an igloo, in a story book – but this igloo was made of metal and had a satellite dish screwed to the roof. As she watched the dish twitched suddenly, rotating in their direction.
Skreem jumped to her feet.
"There's someone in there!"
Bender cast her a glance. He didn't seem surprised.
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
"Is that who you're signalling?" Skreem asked. She squinted at the building, and then gasped. "That's it!" she said excitedly. "That's Planet Express! It is, isn't it?"
Bender sighed.
"Yeah," he said. "That's Planet Express. And no, we're not going there. It's not time yet." He stopped, as if he'd only just processed something, and his gaze swiveled back to her. "Hey, what's up with your face? You're gone all scabby, weirdy. Like a bad alloy."
Skreem touched her cheeks. The scales cracked and fell away in her hands.
It hurt.
"I don't know," she said – and then she doubled over, and vomited spectacularly onto the sidewalk.
There was the sound of a hover-engine, but Skreem hardly noticed it. Dizziness had swept over her, making it hard to think.
The robot tried to lift her up. He was talking to someone, and not beeping anymore, but Skreem couldn't focus on what was being said.
She felt wrong, wrong wrong wrong . . .
The last thing she saw, before the world slid out of focus, was a monster coming towards her – a man with no face, all in white, whose face reflected hers like a sheet of glass. He was wired up to a tank on his back, and his every breath hissed in and out.
. . . hiss . . .
. . . hiss . . .
. . . hiiiissssss . . .
"Mother, there's something alive down here," he said. "I'm bringing it back with the bending unit. Have the decon chamber ready for ETA in ten . . . ."
No, Skreem tried to tell him, no, no, don't take me, you monster. I'm not an it. I'm not scared!
But there were blisters in her mouth, and her voice wouldn't work.
The last thing she felt, as the monster man loomed over her, was the robot, swooping in ahead of him to scoop her up.
"I got her," he said. "I got you, weirdy."
But his voice sounded funny. Like he wasn't sure. Like he hadn't seen this coming, and suddenly Skreem wondered if he really did know everything – and what it might mean, for her . . . if he didn't.