by Ben J Henry
They let them live: as heavy as stone thrones, the words hung between Gus’s ears. Thoughts laced with disappointment. His father could have ended the pair of them. Anna Harrington, Jack Henson, Melody Wilson—how many others might still be alive?
‘It’s harder than you imagine.’ Peter stepped around the thrones, closer to Gus. ‘To take the life of a blood relative goes against nature. Ingrained through evolution, there is a need to protect the family. True strength,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, ‘lies in the ability to break the rules that we inherit through nature’s cradle. To overcome our biological flaws. When faced with difficult choices, weaker minds will fail to do what is in their best interests.’
You’re here for Winter.
‘I see the anger in you.’ Peter searched his eyes. ‘Born out of the murder of your parents, nurtured by fear and yearning to feed itself through vengeance. Aldous and Morna do not expect forgiveness. They offer you the chance to break the cycle. Must they die like the others?’
As Peter continued, faces entered Gus’s mind. The images held such clarity that he was certain they were delivered with each word reverberating between his ears.
‘Joseph. Alicia. Winter. More innocent lives, more collateral damage, victims of a struggle that need not concern them. But there is a solution, Augustus. Take a seat.’
Again, Peter gestured to the throne revolving past him. Again, Gus heard a clamour between his ears.
A rehearsed speech—
You’re here for Winter.
—written by Aldous.
Through the maelstrom of his thoughts, Gus spotted something around Peter’s neck: a silver chain just visible beneath his unbuttoned collar. On the end of the chain, glinting in the light that streamed ubiquitously through the arches, a thin disc bore the symbol of the Order of Chaos.
He’s not listening to you—
—make him listen.
Gus raised a hand as though to ask a question, then lowered three fingers until the index remained, pointed at the ceiling. Peter leaped backwards and raised his arms as the roof of the tower was blown skyward. Heavy chunks of stone fell like meteorites into the lake.
Gus swept his arm to point at the thrones. Peter tensed, his long-fingered hands before him.
‘You wouldn’t like that,’ said Gus, nodding at the throne without taking his eyes off Peter, ‘would you?’
Peter straightened up, pushed his hands into his pockets and restored a mask of nonchalance. He opened his mouth to speak, but Gus beat him to it.
‘What happens when I sit on this throne?’
A brick slid from one of the broken arches and cracked a tile on the floor. Peter cleared his throat and ran a hand through his dark hair.
‘It is commonly understood that the energy that drives us in the physical realm—’
‘In your own words,’ said Gus. ‘You’re their puppet—I get that. You’ve been practising, standing at that arch, watching the portal. Waiting for your big moment. Tell me in your own words, not his.’
Though the waxwork mask did not change, Peter’s fury radiated through the tiles, heating the soles of Gus’s feet.
‘Solar energy—photosynthesis, plants, food.’ His lips barely moved. ‘That’s what makes our bodies move. Our material bodies. But there’s another energy. The energy right here.’ He spread his hands. ‘Aldous and Morna spent decades in Vivador seeking the origin of the soul. And they found it. While our physical bodies are driven by the light of the sun, our immaterial bodies are powered by the stars. Every human on Earth is linked to a different star.’
Peter paused as if anticipating scorn at the fantastical statement; but Gus did not blink. Conversing with a stranger in the immaterial realm while his body lay under a rocky overhang in Portugal, he would have found nothing unbelievable at that moment. The anger that blazed in his projected body was no less real than the air he breathed into his lungs on Earth. He had never considered its origin.
When Gus made no comment, Peter continued. ‘The strength of a person’s soul depends on the strength of their star, and its proximity to Earth. This puts the individual linked to our closest star, the sun, at an unfair advantage—deriving from it both material and immaterial sustenance. This individual would have a conviction of will unparalleled by any other. They call this power the Sol.’
As he continued, Peter kept his hand on the arm of a throne, completing a revolution of the dais.
‘Your grandfather, Augustus; he found what his parents were looking for. He fell in love with the Sol, in the guise of Eloise. She couldn’t handle it. Eloise sat on this throne and took her life on the day that two children were born: Alicia and yourself. Aldous and Morna want to know which of you inherited her strength of will.’
The twin seats were identical, casting shifting shadows. The rock was as white as bone, every inch carved with a tessellating pattern of triangles. Which seat was he expected to take, or was this the test? A throne passed and he imagined the ghostly apparition of Eloise sitting upon it, lifting a gun to her temple so that he or Alicia might inherit a responsibility that she was unable to live with.
Gus frowned. ‘Eloise is Alicia’s grandmother, not mine. Why would I inherit anything from her?’
‘A fact I have raised with Aldous more than once.’ Peter nodded as if conceding a point. ‘He believes it to be more complicated than that. And here we are—to prove, perhaps, that you do not have what they seek.’
Gus hesitated and his soles burned with Peter’s impatience.
‘I will…’ he said, gesturing at the passing throne, ‘park myself on this stone seat if you get Winter to a hospital. Once I know she’s safe, and—’
Rainn appeared between a pair of crumbling pillars where an arch had stood. She raised her eyes to the sky and then glanced from Gus to Peter.
‘This is a waste of time,’ she said. ‘It’s Alicia we need, not him.’
A snarl issued through Peter’s lips, the cleft exposing a canine.
‘A good dog does not leave its post.’
Peter and Rainn glared at one another and Gus caught a flush in her cheeks before she willed them pale.
‘He sleeps,’ she said, lifting a hand to gesture at Gus.
But Gus was gone.
Ryan, age 16
I memorised the position of each sheet of paper on the desk, so I would know where to put them back. I held my breath, partly to concentrate and partly to listen for the sound of Peter’s motorbike. Rainn said he would be gone all day and I wondered if he would be back with another dress for her.
Underneath printouts of medical journals I saw a photograph of a boy who looked maybe ten years old. Another orphan? On top of the bookcase behind the desk was a plastic tub filled with about 29 rubber snakes, and a small cardboard box labelled anti-venom. I didn’t want him to bring another kid to Burnflower.
‘Bingo,’ said Rainn as she lifted a file from the top drawer of the metal cabinet behind the door. I saw my name on a printed label on the corner of the file. She looked at me like she was thinking about handing it over, but she leaned against the cabinet, crossed her feet and opened it. I had come to expect this from Rainn: if there was a ‘right thing to do’, she would do the opposite. The only thing she loved more than stroking Sam in front of me was ‘training’ him. She would smack him for dropping the cricket ball at my feet, but then stroke him for growling at Amira when she walked too close to his food while he was eating. I told Mum she wasn’t treating him properly. She said that jealousy was an ugly trait.
Mum is jealous of Rainn. She’s 19 now and Mum said she could have left Burnflower and found a home of her own, but she chooses to stay here. I used to think it was only Amira that interested Peter, and whatever phobia she had that week, but he spends most of his time with Rainn. I hear them arguing sometimes, in the Pagoda. She’s the only person who’s allowed to shout at him. Last night, I kept my bedroom window open and her shouts raced across the field: ‘She’s not your secret!’
/> Who is ‘she’?
It’s not like I could ask Rainn. The only reason she talks to me is to torment me. Accusing me of watching her change into her nightgown. Telling Amira I had drawn a picture of her, and Rainn had burned it because it was so cruel. So, I didn’t jump up and bow when she walked into my room after breakfast this morning. But she had a key in her hand—the key that Peter wears on a chain around his neck. How did she even get it?
There wasn’t much in the office: file boxes on the shelves filled with printouts from journals and a desk drowning in paper. A rectangle of wood where the laptop sat—he had taken it with him, like he always did. An old printer on the floor under the window. Rainn had gone straight for the filing cabinet.
I leaned against the edge of the desk, careful not to disturb the papers, and I watched her read my file.
‘He’s been studying you.’
‘Ground breaking.’
‘Egoic-association…targeted cathexis…attachment.’ She smiled that cold, beautiful smile. ‘You’re his special subject. He’s training you.’
‘For what?’
But I knew. I had known for years. That mirror was like a test tube in a lab. Isolated and unloved, he was growing a killer.
Peter—my father—had controlled every variable in my life to make sure I had no attachments. He had nurtured an anger inside me so strong that I had murdered Sam out of jealousy. My life had been an experiment and my personality a product of his design. How many of my actions, from dropping that dollhouse to the death of Sam, had been under his direction? Had I made any of these choices?
Had I made any choices at all?
I walked up to Rainn and she held the file to her chest, smiling like she did when she pushed Sam’s ball down her top. It wasn’t my file I reached for; it was hers. I knew why Peter found her interesting: he’s fascinated by her REM behaviour disorder. I wanted to know how he planned to use it.
I pulled out her file and opened it on the desk. There wasn’t much inside, not half as much as mine—I guess he keeps most of it on his laptop now. Along with some old school reports, a couple of magazine articles on RBD and an advert for a Sleep Clinic in Singapore, there was a sheet of paper filled with names. The names were in little boxes joined with lines—it was a family tree.
My finger stung as Rainn ripped the paper from my hands. She dropped my file on the floor and walked out of the office. This was obviously what she had come for, and I thought she would take it back to her room, but she turned left out the door and headed up the steps that spiralled to the top of the Pagoda. I sucked my papercut and followed her up the stairs.
Rainn sat down in the archway that faces the house with her legs over the edge of the bamboo floor. I didn’t like it—Mum was round the back of the house, picking rhubarb with Amira, and if they walked down the side they’d see us right away. There were six arches, why not sit in the one facing the forest?
But I didn’t say anything. I wanted to know what Peter wasn’t telling her, so I walked up behind Rainn and studied the paper in her hands. Two names at the top: Aldous and Morna. Beneath them, two more: Augustus and Marcus. Augustus was linked to two women, one on either side. From a horizontal line joining him with Eloise, a vertical line went down to Anna. Anna was linked to Rory, and they had two kids: Alicia and David. On the other side of Augustus was Blithe, and they had two boys: Benedict and Joseph. Joseph wasn’t linked to anyone else, but Benedict was linked to Sylvie, and they had named their boy Augustus.
It was the other side of the tree that had me holding my breath again. The woman linked to Marcus had a full name: Hazel Burnflower. Marcus and Hazel had a daughter.
‘Rainn Crow?’ I read aloud.
Rainn looked up at me and I took a step back, but she didn’t look cross. She folded the paper and held it out for me.
‘Put this in your pocket.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll need your hands.’
I did as I was told. I wanted to tidy up the office before Peter got back. But Rainn did not get up. She turned and lowered herself over the edge of the floor, hanging out the archway, gripping the bamboo. Then she screamed.
She screamed so loud that I took another step back and almost covered my ears. So loud that Mum came running down the side of the house with the basket of rhubarb in her hands.
‘Help!’ Rainn shouted, but she wasn’t asking me. She was trying to look over her shoulder. Mum dropped the basket on the patio.
‘What are you doing?’ I held out my hand, but she screamed even louder.
‘He pushed me!’
Mum was running down the gravel path between the ponds. Rainn looked in my eyes and I knew this was another game. She waited until Mum entered the Pagoda and then she asked me to help her up. I grabbed her arms and pulled and she made it up to her knees. She leaned against me, hands on my shoulders, and then she pulled me forwards and I lost my balance.
I don’t remember hitting the ground. The last thing I remember is the sound of a motorbike.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Patience
Alicia landed in the centre of the platform with such force that the surface of the obsidian split. Startled, Amira stepped back, her eyeline falling to the crack between her feet, and it occurred to Alicia that the creator of this platform had deemed it unbreakable. The younger girl looked up, eyes roving the tunnels and ledges higher up the crater until her telescopic vision found Rainn on the distant rim. A face in shadow inclined as the woman nodded.
The rock shelves filled with an onion-skin audience, ten thousand simulacrums of Amira. Unlike the girl on the platform, these translucent figures did not wear a baggy, cable-knit jumper, hanging from a scrawny frame like a shirt caught on a fencepost; they gleamed in neon Lycra. Unlike Amira, these girls looked comfortable in their own skin. With hands to their mouths, they chanted her name, and Amira tugged at the ends of her jumper, squirming at their immodesty. She faced Alicia with humiliation in her eyes.
Amira cast a hand behind her and from it flowed a long, silver whip. With a hiss, the whip flew through the air, splitting into two tendrils that snapped either side of Alicia’s face. As the girl toyed with the weapon, casting it from behind her lean figure to snap at Alicia’s left and right, its movement appeared organic. Each tendril unfurled and cracked independently, like the tentacles of an octopus. On the fourth strike, the whip cracked so close to Alicia’s ear that the air around her shifted. She raised a finger to her stinging cheek and blood smeared the tip. A cheer echoed around the crater, primal as the amphitheatres of ancient Rome.
Amira cracked the whip again and the two tendrils split into four, curling around Alicia’s wrists and ankles. The silver hardened as the whip became a metal chain. The girl’s eyes narrowed and Alicia’s scream filled the crater as the metal burned.
I have no body.
As with the shards of glass, Alicia tore her mind from the matter, closing her eyes to deny her body and resist the scent of burning flesh that threatened to wake her.
‘I didn’t bring you here to practise your defence,’ a caustic voice sounded in her head. Alicia opened her eyes and sought the silhouette against the sky.
‘Patience, Rainn,’ she fired back as the metal continued to sear her wrists and ankles.
‘Patience is for those with low expectations. If you want your brother, fight for him.’
Alicia was fighting. She was resisting the belief that the pain was real. But she could not win this battle—she could not succeed in this realm—by denying it. Fire in her wrists, white heat scorching her ankles, and beneath this: intention. Focusing on the heat, Alicia hijacked Amira’s desire to burn her. She filled her projected body with a brilliant fire, fuelled by the girl’s will, rising to a temperature as intense as the magma beneath her. And then, like an electric charge, she sent this heat back along the whip, delivering it into the girl’s hands with such ferocity that she was blown into the air.
Skinny feet skidded to the edge of t
he disc and wet eyes shone through a tangle of dark curls that had fallen from her plait. She was on the edge of tears; what words of encouragement might Rainn be offering? Amira’s lips hardened and she stretched one hand before her and the other behind, palms down, in the stance of a surfer. From her palms, what appeared to be smoke poured outward and encircled her.
A cheer rose from the simulacrum crowd as she thrust her palms forward, issuing the cloud before her, a cloud not consisting of particles of smoke, but thousands of tiny piranha. As the shoal drifted through the air, reflected in the volcanic glass, Alicia raised a single palm. The silver cloud slowed as it crossed the distance between them. When the first of the fish were inches from Alicia’s outstretched palm, the shoal froze. She slowly lowered her hand, holding the cloud of fish in her mind and resisting their approach. Thousands of tiny mouths snapped at thin air a moment longer and then all was still. Resting her hands on her thighs, Alicia cast her mind through the shoal in its entirety, feeling Amira’s struggle to regain control of her creation. But the piranhas were under Alicia’s command. The fish burst to life, continuing their journey through the air and whipping around Alicia in a spiral of silver scales and needle teeth. Amira watched on, helpless, as Alicia lifted the spiral skyward before sending it plummeting into the lava. The platform rocked and rumbled. Amira’s bare feet faltered and she steadied herself, glancing left and right to guess from which direction the fish would emerge. When, finally, the shoal burst into the air, dripping with lava from the molten bed, the thousands had coalesced in a tight formation, taking the shape of a great white shark. The shark twisted through the air, the scales of each individual piranha glimmering in the glow of the lava. Amira drew her arms before her face as the shark opened its mouth ready to engulf her. The jaws snapped shut, striking at empty space as Amira woke.
