The Waking Engine Read Online Free PDF

anywhere. Don’t pay more than five dirties for a room or you’re being robbed blind.”
    “Thank you, Asher,” Cooper said, bemused by the generosity. “But I think I’ll stick close to you for the time being.” He poured the coins into his empty pocket; when he’d lain down on his bed back home he’d had a stick of lip balm in his jeans, but discovered now that he’d lost it. Which was just great—Cooper was dead with the papery lips to prove it.
    A man with liver-yellow skin and bloodshot eyes stumbled out of a storefront, screaming incoherently. Beneath his matted hair his face was wild, twisted, and he wore a strange kind of suit that looked far too new to be as filthy as it was. A woman in culottes and a faded t-shirt was shouting at the rabid-looking man. “Get out, you crazy pilgrim, your Dying insanity is bad for business!” She shooed him away. “Bells! What do you want with bridal veils, anyway?”
    The stranger lurched first one direction and then another, taking a strange tack-and-jibe approach to walking. When he saw Asher, he winced, and his eyes slid sideways to Cooper with a kind of relieved hatred. He threw himself forward, hands reaching for Cooper’s throat.
    Asher acted several beats more quickly. He pivoted on one foot and planted the other between Cooper and the madman, while reaching out with one long arm to wrap his hand around the man’s neck—tripping and choking the lunatic at the same time. It happened so fast that Cooper saw Asher as a blur of smoke, moving more swiftly than any normal man. His assailant came to a full stop with a sickening popping sound from inside his neck. With Asher supporting most of his weight from his gullet, the man made a choking sound and began to claw at the air— although the length of Asher’s arms kept him at a safe distance.
    The deranged fellow glared at Cooper and raged, trying to shout through a half-crushed windpipe. “You have one!” he rasped. “Oh, oh, you should not be here. The darkness . . . you see the darkness, you hear the fright! The darkness in the depths can never be held to light. We Die, we live! Exult, extinguish!”
    Asher threw the man—by the throat— across the street, into a row of trash cans. “Fuck off, pilgrim, or I will carve you into pieces.”
    The man lay there amidst the trash, moaning. SisterWhereAreYou? Cooper heard the man clear as day.ICan’tHearYouAndItHurtsMe,Sister! His fear was an alarm bell. AstarnaxMySister ItHurtsToLiveWithoutYou IAmSoAlone.
    “I lost my sister,” the man whimpered, aloud, to his trash-can pillows.
    Cooper remembered Asher’s admonitions and held his tongue.
    “I did not lose my sister!” he screamed, suddenly incensed again. “She was stolen from me! Or she . . . she Died. Did I? I didn’t Die, I couldn’t Die. Nothing happened but more heartbeats inside my haunted chest. Where did my sister go? Astarnax? Astarnax, where are you?” He was laughing now, looking around blindly like he was losing a game of hide- and-seek. “Why did you steal my sister? Why?” Cooper-OmphaleIBlameYouBlameYou!
    Cooper was dumbstruck. How does he know my name? “I . . . I . . . I didn’t do anything to your sister,” he stammered.
    “Liar!” the man screeched, a raptor’s cry. Window glass shuddered in its casements along the length of the street, a ripple of pain. The flow of the crowd juddered; everyone had felt that.
    A moment of wretched silence passed before Asher pulled Cooper away, instantly lost in the crowd and hurrying from the crazy, too-knowing man. Cooper tried to gather himself, but his self did not want to obey. Too much, too fast, too wrong.
    He grasped for a thought to ground him. A memory. Something green. He tried to remember his parents’ home in the summer, tried to picture the gardenias that grew so big and waxy, the heirloom irises from his mother’s childhood home, their purple flowers faded almost white. He tried to see the light through the windows as it fell