finely shaded oilchalk. How had they done this, cover a wall six stories high? Climbing on scaffolds? Hanging from ropes? On jetpacks? Both toys and masters sprayed here, leaving simple tags and extensive pieces, stretched-taffy letters and elegantly shaded portraits. Even Keif and Drive were represented by a few tall, narrow tags depicting cartoon rabbits in army fatigues. But the tags, pieces and masterpieces of all the artists-save one-looked slightly old, worn by weather and time, as if all the artists-save one-had given up on this playground and yielded it to its new overlord: the graffiti killer.
The designs of the journeyman and the apprentice were absent; this place was the exclusive canvas of the master. All of the familiar signs were here: the vines, the chains, the barbed wire; but he had not stopped there, experimenting with new motifs that I hadn’t seen elsewhere: ships crewed by hostile hip-hop frogs; herds of blood-dripped sheep with sparkling eyes; a vast writhing worm wrapped around the arc of a swinging pendulum- figures tortured and amazing. But across the cliff I recognized a familiar design: the skyline of Atlanta, a grassy dome of a hill, and a coiling rose hovering between two sets of tombstones.
The same type of tag that had killed Revenance.
The vast tag seemed to shiver, a wave of wind rippling over the grassy dome, and I seized Calaphase by the arm, pulling him to his feet. “We have to go. We have to get shelter. We have to get you shelter. That entire thing is a vampire trap!”
Calaphase’s head snapped quickly from side to side, sizing up the canyon around us. “The opening faces the rising sun,” he said. “Think, Dakota! The trap is almost fifty yards away. How do you think he planned to get me into it?”
Good point. The master tag was too far away-probably. Surely it couldn’t grab us all the way out here? I tensed, eyes seeking movement. Then I felt a prickling, goose bumps rising on my flesh-but it wasn’t goose bumps. It was a flood of mana-but not from the master tag.
“Behind us!” I said, and we dove under the uncoiling whip of a serrated wire that trailed drops of glowing blood as it snapped through the air. Sure enough, there was another tag, a sprawled octopus snapping hungrily on the wall of a decayed tenement looming behind us.
On the cliff, the master tag’s vines were now uncoiling, and we dodged back from them too, edging backwards, away from the tags, until we butted against the chainlink fence barring us from the parking deck’s dark, twisted innards. Light flared from within, flashes in darkness, illuminating moving shapes which bore no resemblance to anything human.
“I think the tagger means for us to go to the tag,” I said, “rather than it come to us.”
“What do we do?” Calaphase said. “Run the gantlet?”
I swallowed. The tagger’s playground was a box canyon of buildings. The black pavement stretched away from us, between the expanding rings of the master tag on the cliff and the waving wires of the coiled design on the tenement that had brought us here. Some of the twisted remnants of the swings and jungle gyms had tags on them, almost certainly traps. At the other end of the weed-strewn lot, forming the only opening in the box canyon, was a painted wooden fence, filled with hundreds of marks by the tagger.
Only then did I notice that the tagger was breaking the unwritten rules of the Atlanta graffiti scene: he had painted over the marks of other taggers. In my research, I’d found other taggers had immense contempt for paintovers and whitewashes; no one with any skill did them. I scanned the lot rapidly. The more I looked, the more I saw his tags almost desperately trying to plaster over his competition. The better the original, the harder the tagger tried to outdo it.
And through it all, woven through every design, was a quirky spray of wildstyle letters that I now recognized as the artist’s actual ‘tag’, his signature: the word XRYBE over a stylized road snaking into the distance. At first I didn’t get it, but then I saw older variants, the same road with all the letters above it still spelled out, still wildstyle, so I had trouble parsing it: S-T-R-E-E, then T, the X was actually a jammed-together S-C… and then I got it.
“ Streetscribe,” I breathed. The name Revenance had warned us about. It was everywhere. “ Someone is crying for recognition.”
“Dakota!”
“What? No, no, we can’t risk it,” I said, glancing around. “The playground equipment is tagged. The far wall is tagged. This whole place is one big trap.”
“Can we go back through the tag that sent us?” Calaphase asked.
I glanced up at it. It was weakening, spinning down, though it wasn’t clear that it was actually going to shut off. “No,” I said. “I think it needs to recharge-and besides, do you have any idea how to work that thing? Because I sure don’t-not yet, anyway.”
He glanced around. “We can climb the fence there, try the parking deck-”
“He’ll have tagged the cars,” I said-and then a solution hit me. “He’ll have tagged everywhere he could-so let’s go where he can’t.”
There was a narrow gap between the parking lot and the tenement. I ran to the corner of the chainlink fence and peered through, seeing a long parking lot and a ruined carousel covered by old graffiti. The fence was strong, the chainlink newer, and rings of razorwire guarded its top twenty feet above-and it held no surface for the tagger. Little tags lurked at its base, squealing sausage monsters like blind piglets, but they were too simple to pose real danger. I paid them no mind, spinning round over them as I built up mana and cried: “Striking serpent, open a door!”
My newly-inked asp tattoo reared to life and struck the fence once, twice, three times. Chainlinks popped with ringing cracks, then squealed away as Calaphase tore into the opened links with his hands, peeling the fence away in layers.
Then a horrible wail drifted from the far end of the lot.
“Keep pulling,” I said, turning around. “Use your strength on the fence, and I’ll use my magic to watch our backs.”
Calaphase cursed and pulled at the fence. I could hear it tearing-but that noise was drowned out as the tags over the far end of the fence rippled with a massive wave of mana I could feel all the way back here, seventy yards away. There was no movement and almost no light; there was no way that could have been built up from the mana in old rotten boards.
So much for the mold theory.
Zipperface slid out of the tag, rolling out in style on a skateboard. Over his shoulder he carried a baseball bat; around his waist were strapped a set of spray cans like Batman’s utility belt. His face was barely visible beneath his vast floppy hat, but even from this distance, the steel tabs of his jagged mouth glinted, a vicious grille spreading beneath glowing white eyes.
Then the eyes narrowed. The mouth frowned. And then that wide olive face peeled back open as Zipperface screamed in rage, a long, ropy tongue snapping out as Calaphase tore the second layer of the fence away. I tensed, not sure what form the attack take or how I might defend against it; but defend us I would.
Then Zipperface raised his arms, and a long low line spread across the base of the wooden fence behind him, a sparkling sliver-like light peeking underneath a door. I recoiled as the line lit up into a rainbow wall of graffiti flames.
Oh, hell. Fire. Defend us, I wouldn’t.
“Dakota,” Calaphase said, jerking at my shoulder. “Dakota, we gotta go.”
Zipperface threw down his arms, and the fire shot out along the edges of the canyon, screaming towards us on both sides. The graffiti wasn’t just reaching for us: it was spreading, cracking out over the pavement in jagged blocks, turning it into a sea of lava.
We turned and ran, slipping through the clinging wire of the fence, darting through the chasm between the tenement and the garage, putting on a burst of speed as the lines of fire met behind us and exploded through the gap in a blast of flame and mana.
We ran down the sidewalk, full tilt, Calaphase almost flying, dragging me behind him as I poured my all into it, ignoring the explosion of pain in my knee. But as fast as we ran, the fire ran faster, sliding along the foundation of the tenement, rippling up its side in waves of flame. The running tongue of fire shot past us towards the end of the lot, impacting a low brick fence, boiling up in a torrent of flame that cracked the pavement and cut us off.
Driven sideways by groping tendrils of fire, we dodged out across the asphalt, leaping over glowing red cracks in the pavement shooting out beneath us, aiming for a squat cinderblock building next to the carousel as yet untouched by the tags. Calaphase threw his shoulder at the door and knocked it off its hinges, dragged me inside,
