Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales Read Online Free PDF

rememberingthe feel of the woman.
    There’s a part of him, a small part, that used to know how to climb trees and walk for miles through the grassed plains, that knows the woman speaks the truth and accepts it. It explains the lights, the bathing liquid, why his favorite music sometimes pauses and gasps as it never has before. There have been delayswhen he presses the button for food, and his bed has twicenow risen from the floor with its sheets still tossed about and wrinkled as if he’d just awoken.
    When he was a child, his parents and theirs before them predicted that the cities of the Machine could not continue forever. They spoke of ancestors who’d been rendered Homeless, cast out of the Underneath after a rebellion, and who had thereafter chosen to live a natural, honest life on the surface.According to them, technology was a bane rather than a blessing; it rendered men decadent and complacent.
    And Tavil had believed them. He’d abhorred those who lived underground and awaited the day their constant quest for comfort would cause them to collapse in on themselves. It’s why he’d snuck down the tunnel that night so long ago. To see the Underneath for himself, before its inevitable end,so he would have firsthand knowledge of the Machine to pass on to future generations as a warning to never allow life to sink to such depths again.
    But his parents had been wrong. He’d been wrong. Underneath is progress, evolution. It is life at its most advanced—existence for the pure pursuit of ideas and the cleansing of the human soul!
    He reaches for the Book of the Machine and lifts it tohis lips. “Oh, Machine,” he murmurs, kissing the cover. Holding the Book is tangible proof of the truth he’d been denied as a child on the surface: that there is power greater than himself.
    The thought comforts him, causes his trembling to cease and the sweat gathered along the remaining wisps of his hair to dry. He closes his eyes to feel the hum of the Machine around him, caring for him andprotecting him. He is a part of it now, irrevocably so.
    So be it if it fails—this marvelous Machine of progress. He has known of this inevitability from the moment he released the final rung of the ladder and fell into its depths. He will not abandon it now, will not return to that old life of strain and sacrifice.
    It is too much to ask of him. He would rather live his last moments below thesurface, ensconced in the Machine, than spend eternity aboveground away from its comforting hum.
    Even until the end, Tavil’s faith in the Machine is absolute. He has his rituals, and he adheres to them faithfully: repeating the mantra of the Machine as the first and last words he speaks each day, kissing the cover of the Book three times before opening it and after setting it down, ensuring itnever touches the floor or that its spine faces the door.
    Some of these are habits he developed on his own over time, others are shared by the larger community of believers. Even as the medic system fails, the lifts cease their function, the bathing liquid turns foul, and the beds no longer rise from the floor, those Underneath continue their devotion.
    If anything, this causes Tavil’s idolizationof the Book to intensify as it remains proof of the Machine’s supremacy.
    And then the communication system collapses, the last throes of their dying world. Tavil knows that many around him have left their rooms to gather in the tunnels and along the airship platforms. Unlike him, they did not know of the inevitability of this day; they had not been expecting and waiting.
    They had not known theirfate as he has.
    The idea of joining one of these groups repulses him. He rubs his hand against his tunic, remembering the last time he came into physical contact with another human being. Thewoman from the surface, who’d warned him of this day and asked him to eschew what he believed for the chance at a life he did not want, who’d offered him a false salvation from a