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About the Author
Copyright Page
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FOR JOHNNY,
WHO GAVE ME FAITH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to many individuals: Peter Steinberg, my agent, who loved and encouraged this work from beginning; my coeditors, Michael Homler and Craig Pyette, who with extraordinary patience and kindness provided invaluable guidance; John Eicher, my husband, whose magic inspired every word, whose faith in my abilities still leaves me astonished, and who tirelessly provided me space and opportunity to write; Matt Williamson, lover of all things weird and wonderful, who published a version of this story in Unstuck; Sarah Whicker, my sister, for whom the act of creation is a necessity and without whose inspiration and support I would be lost; and my parents, Burton and Barbara Whicker, who earnestly believed I could do anything in the world.
I am also grateful for all the books—too numerous to name—that helped me make sense of a possible future by way of understanding the past. Likewise, I wish to enumerate the many places in which this manuscript was shaped, all of which gave me unexpected gifts: Richmond, Virginia; Iowa City; Austin; and Potomac, Maryland.
Lastly, I wish to thank Colette Eicher, my daughter, who arrived on the scene in the midst of everything, who changed it all, and brought the best gift—hope.
It detonated. Nature, God, mankind
Like sulphur, nitre, charcoal, once
Blended, in one annihilation blind
Were rent into a myriad of suns.
Yea! all the mighty fabric of a Mind
Stood in the abyss,
Belching a Law for “That” more awful than for “This.”
—Aleister Crowley
CHAPTER 1
THE UNCRUSHER
When they rode, they took severed heads with them, in canvas sacks, in saddlebags, and set them out wherever they stopped, on rocks, or stuck them on pikes and tied the sticks with red streamers so the ribbon and the dead hair blew together with the wind. O, terrible Heads, gloomy-faced deaths—for the longest time, the girl remained afraid of them, even as she reached into her brother’s canvas sack each night and withdrew one by its crackling hair, even as she gingerly poked it onto a pike and jabbed the pike in the earth outside her tent. She did not have her own magical head yet. But everyone said she should, so her brother made her one, cut it away from its body and powdered and magicked it so it would not go bad, so it would scowl always and forever in defense of her. He was twenty-nine, her brother. He could not read. He made Heads.
The Head had been a man named Cosmas, a doctor. Not a Walking Doctor, but a miracle healer, who’d once uncrushed an arm and made it work again by magic. He blew air into the arm like it needed breath and it plumped and warmed and worked again like new, but when the executioners saw that Cosmas was a miracle healer, they killed him and took his head. Her brother had fought three men for it—that was what he told her. “And now he’s yours,” he’d said, and presented to her a canvas sack, the kind he gave his customers, when he had customers. She was fourteen. Old enough to ride her own horse, to make her own camp—old enough for a Head. “Go on,” he said. “Take it out.” The skin, tornado-green, false-hard like a manta’s eggsack; her fingers could punch through it if she pressed. She did not press. Eyeless, lashless Cosmas.
That night she put Cosmas in his sack and stuffed the sack into her saddlebag, but her brother banged into her tent with the Head, screaming, “Why isn’t it out?” He was all flapping arms and dark hair, terrifying with his height and drunk eyes. She sat up in her blankets and he pulled her, shivering, outside, where he piked the Head and then made her do it as well, made her slide the sharp wooden pole into the hollowed-out neck, and it crunched and she cringed. “No crying,” he said, when he saw her lip tremble.
“I’m not.”
“Right, you’re not.” He stepped back and admired the Head. “Looks good. Did you know I make the best Heads in this sorry carnival? Always have. That’s cause I have pride in what I do.”
She nodded. They were camped on a plain, a field wild with weeds and prairie grass. Maybe food had been grown in a great field like this, before the Disease. She wondered who had figured out the field was safe to walk upon, how long ago that had been. It was early May, and the sky was mesh, stippled with stars. She was cold, in her nightclothes without a coat. Her hair, so fine at the ends it nearly winnowed away to nothing, was long and light brown. She was skinny, dirty, and had not seen her own eyes in a pool of water for months. She hated it outside here, and trembled in the chill. Argento saw her shiver but didn’t give her his cloak. He was mean like that. Along the outskirts of camp, fires glowed, ten, fifteen of them, all guarded by sentries—do not cross the line, now, ever, you are not allowed. You are a little girl. The men are gates you cannot pass through.
“Can I go to sleep now?” she asked.
“Fuck no.” He yanked her toward his tent.
“No,” she said, tried digging her bare heels into the ground.
“Not that,” he said. “It’s your birthday, right?”
“I think not anymore. I think it was yesterday.
