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Esben, with a little difficulty, pinched the handle of a small flathead screwdriver between his hooks and handed it across the table. He then guided the blind man’s hands to the first of the four screws that were set in the corners of a shiny, square plate in the automaton’s chest. Each one came out fluidly, and Martha caught them in her hands as they rolled out of their holes.
“Oil,” said Carol. Martha, holding a small oiling can, dutifully applied a few drops of the stuff to the two hinges that sat inlaid by the machine’s rib cage.
The plate was folded open. Inside, the boy’s innards could be seen by everyone present: a landscape of myriad cogs and sprockets, the workings of the most complex grandfather clock ever imagined.
In the center of the boy’s chest, amid the stationary workings, was a small, round, and very empty cavity, the size of a tennis ball.
“Cog,” said Carol. Martha handed the Möbius Cog to Carol. The thing glowed and whirred in his hand. With a little guidance from Esben, he found the empty spot in the boy’s chest and gently set the cog in place.
It slipped into the opening with a snug click, and the glow began to expand. It cast a warm illumination onto the cold metal of the surrounding gears. The miraculous orb’s three rings started spinning faster and the purring whir grew louder and soon the mechanics of the boy’s chest began to slowly shift into movement.
“Close it up!” instructed Carol, having heard the sound of the boy’s gears working, and the door in his chest was closed and its screws replaced. The whir of the cog became muffled behind the metal plate, but still discernible. Both Carol and Esben stood back, waiting.
Nothing was happening.
And then: The boy’s eyes fluttered open.
The crowd surrounding the table gave an audible gasp to see the machine come to life. The little blue irises in the boy’s opaline eyes flickered side to side, taking in this new onslaught of vision. His mouth rasped open; the hinges moaned.
“More oil!” Carol cried. “He’s trying to speak!”
Martha flew to the machine’s head and daubed grease on its mouth hinges. The eyes watched Martha carefully as she did this. A moment passed before the boy tried the mechanics of his mouth again; he clacked his jaws together a few times before issuing the first word of his newly remade life.
“Why?” he asked.
It was an odd picture, to be sure: th
e massive wall of ivy growing up on the edge of the Impassable Wilderness, seemingly contained by some invisible force field, but most Portlanders didn’t think much of it. They’d become so accustomed to ignoring this strange and inhospitable stretch of land on the border of their city that this phenomenon mostly went unnoted. The ivy had sprung up early that morning, growing larger and larger as it lapped against this transparent wall, but nothing much else had happened, so it was assumed to be relatively benign. In fact, by the following afternoon, it had been all but forgotten, and most Portlanders went about their day as they normally would.
“What’s that, Daddy?” asked one particularly precocious toddler, sitting in the back of her parents’ station wagon on the way home from day care. They were driving along the Willamette Bluffs and were afforded a good view of this forbidden no-man’s-land and its bizarre transformation.
“What, honey?”
The child was pointing to the squirming, wiggling ivy wall, just on the other side of the river, which by now had completely curtained off the typical view of the I.W.’s many tall and imposing trees. “All that plant,” managed the toddler, with what few words she had to describe a three-hundred-foot-tall screen of positively menacing-looking ivy vines.
The child’s father, who’s name was Foom (for reasons too strange and complicated to unpack here), simply said, “Oh, that’s nothing.”
“Is it mad?” pressed the child.
The girl’s father laughed. “You say the funniest things sometimes. I’ll have to remember to put that up on SocialFace later.”
“Will it get us?”
“Comedy gold,” was all her father said, and that was that. By the time the Periphery Bind, the magic ribbon that, for millennia untold, had kept the Outside safe from the impositions of the Impassable Wilderness (and vice versa, depending on your perspective), dissipated with its quick snap, the child in question was sitting on the floor of her room and removing the head from her Intrepid Tina doll while her father was in the living room, merrily broadcasting his daughter’s childish bon mot for the world to mindlessly skim. The ivy had built up so much force, pressing against the barrier, that when it was unleashed it was like some pent-up Mesozoic lake that had, after centuries, been finally made free to swamp the world in a flood that would transform the immediate landscape for centuries more to come.
The citizens of the Outside did not know what hit them. Literally.
When the Bind broke and the wall of ivy exploded forward, the first to be consumed was the Industrial Wastes. The milling horde of stevedores, carefully picking through the debris of the collapsed Titan Tower, were caught unawares; they’d just unearthed the toupee of their beloved leader, Brad Wigman, and were preparing to sanctify it as a relic for a religion of their own future devising, when the tide of ivy crashed through the gravel roads and alleyways of the Wastes like muddy water through a sluice box and poured over them with the force of a tsunami. They were, each of them, frozen in place as the magic coursing through the ivy pitched them into a deep, untroubled sleep. Soon, the chemical silos and web of piping of this forbidden land was covered as if with a furry green tea cozy and the ivy moved on, splashing into the water of the Willamette River.
The rampaging plant bridged the water handily, rumbling into the current, and soon made landfall on the far side. It captured trucks that were idling by the wharves and fishermen as they quietly bobbed their lures from old wooden docks. It gave shape to the Ghost Bridge, that mighty structure that spanned the banks of the Willamette only when its bell was rung; the ivy, being shot through with enchantment, was unaffected by the bridge’s nonexistence, and so those Outsiders who happened to be gazing out at the river in that particular direction for a moment saw the vision of a gorgeous suspension bridge being seemingly knitted out of thin air by vines of ivy—that is, before they succumbed to the wave of the plant too, and then all memory of the vision was erased in their dreamy slumber.
And then it moved on; it went farther afield. It swept along the placid avenues of the neighborhoods that bordered the Impassable Wilderness, up in the hills, and it poured over the cars navigating the looping streets, freezing the traffic in its widespread green cocoon. The power of the Verdant Empress and her thrall over the ivy was such now that those who were unlucky enough to be swallowed were instantaneously slept; reactions were limited to the following fleeting thought, which, oddly enough, was entertained by nearly every Portlander just moments before the wave of ivy overtook them: “What should I have for dinner? That’s strange; it looks like some big green carpet is just about to . . .”
Gaining steam as it covered more territory, the ivy fell in torrents on the downtown, climbing the tallest buildings and filling the lowest basements. Unsuspecting citizens, perched over their coffees, had scarce opportunity to dash off a witty riposte about the coming vegetal deluge on their phones when they were consumed and frozen in stasis, tossed haphazardly into some strange dream. Cats and dogs, swallowed. Bicyclists, swept up. Laundromats, fire stations: blanketed. Parks and schools, civic administrative buildings and carefully restored Craftsman houses in the gridded streets of the East Side—nothing was spared.
The flood covered everything; everything was placed in a fathoms-deep sleep.
Prue looked out on the devastation from the back of an airborne heron and wept.
