In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  “We’re all running out of time.” Privya surveys the street now, where her people lie dead or bleeding. Some are groaning, moving; her attention lingers on each one. “If you can’t help ... well. We all die anyway.” The edge of her lips twists. “I can give them a fight. She can give them a stupid, apocalyptic dream. I’m tired and there are no happy endings in this scenario. But do nothing, and all these outside bastards—all the billions of them—they win. They steal our air and make it theirs. And they’ll never even know.” She sighs and shakes her head. “Look—the dragons have left us.”

  “You should—um. Someone will call the police, or has.” With the storm dying, Verity already sees curtains moving, a pale shocked face at a window. The spot just between her shoulder blades itches with the knowledge that a car will doubtless turn the corner soon.

  “Yes.” Privya, too, glances around at the surrounding houses and the still-bare street corner. As if on cue come the faint phantom sounds of sirens in the distance, running wailing lines up Verity’s spine. Privya mutters something that sounds both old and coarse, then she steps past Verity, toward where Shauna now stands waiting. Shauna has a hand pressed to her bleeding scalp; she is staring at Brian’s sparkling remains. “Take the shadowmancer inside. There aren’t many left with any real power. It’d be a shame to lose him to some idiot doctor with a wall of machines.”

  “Can Ouroboros recover?”

  “The snake? I don’t know. Your man saw it die; I expect it’s dead. I suppose I am a little sorry for that. You need to come and find me. This city’s practically breathing. We’re almost out of time.” Privya quickens her steps and reaches Shauna’s side, taking her arm again. At first, Shauna ignores her, but at her squeeze, the stocky woman looks downward with a wincing nod.

  The sirens squeal like lost children, growing closer. Verity casts a quick look toward the corner, another back toward the unmoving Jacob, and then finally jogs—awkwardly, but as quickly as she can manage—to the spill of Ouroboros at Brian’s booted feet.

  She bends to lift the snake, but she can already taste that something is wrong. Ouroboros is as still as Brian’s broken statue, and as empty. She smells neither flowers nor coal—only the rough-textured scales of a snake that is only a snake, its belly ribbed and its fanged mouth gaping. She is startled at the broken egg-yolk flatness of its eyes. It is not a shadow; no secrets lurk beneath its skin. It is only a dead reptile, already winter cold, its head at a brutal angle.

  She picks the snake up, gently, and wills it to curl around her wrist, or her shoulders, but it only dangles. Holding its sloppy coils as best she can, she walks across the lawn to Santiago, hurried but cautious in the slickness of the new fallen snow. Again, she sees a curtain move in the house’s front window; she sees only a flash of eyes, but she swallows back a mouthful of confusion and appalled terror. The city’s shrieking has rolled to something like a rumble or an ongoing moan.

  Against aging brick, the magician is curled tightly, arms around his legs. His tarred eyes stare forward more mindlessly than Jihan’s ever have. He is shivering.

  Verity is hesitant to touch Santiago, but she crouches in front of him and offers the dead snake. It seems like a long time—she can hear the sirens wail—before he blinks and shakes his head, but his hands are already taking the cold loops from her arms. He presses the snake to his chest. She puts a hand on his shoulder. She is not surprised when his leather jacket feels like fur to her, and his chattering teeth bring the whisper of dry scales around her throat.

  She can’t think of Ouroboros. She swallows back the sensation. She has no time.

  “Santiago,” she says.

  The magician fails to respond. His long-fingered hands clutch at the dead snake, too small to encircle its girth.

  The sirens are yowling closer, streaks of light brightening in front of her eyes, so Verity reaches for Santiago’s upper arm and pulls. “Stefan. I have to get to Jacob. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Ouro. Please come.” She expects resistance, but the magician only shakes his head again and lets her tug him to his feet. When he stands, she has to pull at him again, yanking him across the street. His stricken eyes are bare. He kneads the snake and its coiled tail dangles at his ankles.

  Verity holds Santiago’s sleeve and leads him as though he were a child. They step around bodies, and some of them are moving; she can’t look, and she has no time for apologies. She looks at Jacob’s still form sprawled at the top of the stairs, and quickens her steps.

  “Help me,” she tells Santiago. She is relieved when the magician cradles Ouroboros to his chest with one arm, then leans down and grabs Jacob’s shirt with his free hand. She lets go of Santiago and shoves at the front door. The sirens are screaming, and she tastes the sharp crackle of electricity stinging her throat in the seconds before they pull Jacob’s unresisting body inside and she slams the door shut again. It’s difficult to set the lock. Her hands are shaking.

  “There’s a first aid kit. Um, in the bathroom upstairs. Under the sink.”

  Santiago stares at her, then begins to ascend the staircase. He gets two steps past the landing, but drops to sit with his elbows on his knees and a dead snake spilling across his lap. He rakes his hands through his hair.

  Jacob lies where they’ve left him, puddled on the worn hallway runner, his shoulder leaned awkwardly against the base of the coat rack. He is already stirring; there’s blood in his hair, but he groans.

  A whirl of red and blue lights comes through the frosted glass of the FLNEURS, INC. sign. The colours play in alternating high and low tones that jar against the siren. Verity swallows the vibrant hint of lightning.

  “If you cannot find truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?” -Dogen Zenji

  19

  OTTAWA (February 7, 2014)—Police are looking for leads after suspected gang violence left nine dead in the Glebe yesterday afternoon. The victims, currently unidentified, range in age from approximately fifteen to forty.

  “A fight broke out two blocks east of Bank Street on Second Avenue,” said Constable Georgina Bartheson. “We are still investigating. Multiple stabbings took place. There do not appear to have been any guns on the scene.” According to Bartheson, four victims were found alive on scene and were rushed to Ottawa General Hospital, but did not survive. No drugs were recovered, and the exact motives for the fight are not known.

  This event is symptomatic of rising incidences of violence in the city, particularly during the recent power outage. The nine victims bring the total number of homicides to twenty-three so far this year, compared to two at this time the year before.

  City Council will meet on Monday to approve emergency surplus funding for the police force. “Coming on the heels of this winter’s power issues, Ottawa is well over budget for yearly expenditures,” warned Mayor Glenn Wickson. “We are already estimating a 4.6-million-dollar shortfall. From snow removal to emergency shelters to heightened police presence, we’ve been dealing with some significant challenges. Despite this, our priority is keeping citizens safe. If hiring more officers is what we need to do, then that’s what we’ll do. If it’s equipment, we’ll bring in equipment. We are already in discussions with the chief.”

  VERITY

  Verity Richards only ever screamed on the day she was born.

  She came into the world like most other babies: wailing, covered in mucus and blood, eyes squeezed against the glare. She held her tiny limbs close against her body, already clenched, as if assuming the position could somehow regain her the rhythmic warmth of the womb.

  The nurses wrapped her in a pink blanket and handed her to her mother, who was panting and wet on a stained table. “It’s a girl!” they said. “What’s her name?” The baby’s father looked on, beaming. He had only then let go of his wife’s hand.

  The baby’s name was supposed to be Amelia—the issue had been discussed at length—but the tired woman on the table (her name was Letitia) stroked a gentle finger across the red, torme
nted face of the child in her arms and said without thinking, “Verity.” She could never explain quite why, afterward, except that she had the distinct feeling she hadn’t been choosing a name so much as just answering a question.

  That was when the baby stopped crying—not all at once, but in tiny gasps that gave way to stuttering misery, her bloody lips working, and then nothing. Only then, it seemed, did she dare look at her new world.

  “Oh!” said Letitia. “Her eyes are grey.”

  “That isn’t possible, honey,” said her husband—who looked, but the baby had already scrunched her face. “Newborn eyes are blue. It must be the light.”

  “Is she ... is she covering her ears?”

  “Of course not. She’s only two minutes old.”

  So Letitia and her husband (Rory) took little Verity home to their house in the suburbs. They put the baby in a nursery with flowers on the walls and lace on the windows and a soft bear in the crib. They fed her and sang to her and rocked her.

  But the baby didn’t cry or smile. She was a fussy eater. She trembled when her father crooned a lullaby, or when her grandparents made ga-ga noises and waved their fingers in her face. She wept silently when her mother read her a book; her tears ran down her soft cheeks. She only slept when she was alone.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Letitia finally. She sat in the nursery rocking chair, holding the baby that cringed from her hands. “She should be walking. She doesn’t try. She looks at me when I talk to her, but then she looks away. She shakes. She’s shaking now.”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” But Rory’s heart wasn’t in it. He could see the way his daughter shuddered when he spoke.

  Verity’s parents were lawyers. They were smart, ambitious people. Their house in the suburbs was clean, filled with plush furniture and elegantly matching drapes. They kept their lawn scrupulously neat and pretended to their neighbours that everything was fine. They pretended their daughter was improving. They pretended to think about having other children. The truth was that it had become suddenly difficult to pretend anything at all.

  “What should I make for dinner?” Rory would ask, and Letitia, holding the baby, would sigh, “Just order out now and skip the step where you burn everything.”

  Letitia, on the other hand, might say, “Should we go visit my parents this weekend?” and Rory would look up from changing the baby’s diaper: “You know your mother won’t shut up the entire time.”

  Little secrets they might have kept were out in the open; little lies they might have told were shifted, at the last moment, to bluntness. They were not diplomatic. Their own abrupt honesties caught them by surprise. “I didn’t mean to say that,” Letitia confessed, one tense afternoon after a particularly harrowing argument about who hadn’t done the dishes. She was holding Verity, as tentatively as though her daughter’s rigid body were fine crystal. “I just—don’t think I can lie in front of her, you know?”

  Rory snorted. “Then she can listen to us scream instead.”

  It seemed to be true, though. Both Rory and Letitia would have scoffed at the notion it was supernatural or strange. It was just that when they were holding the baby, they would start to speak, and then maybe they would look at her downy hair or her squinched little nose, or they’d stroke her tiny fist, and change their minds about what they were going to say.

  You look nice today, Rory would be about to comment, then he’d heft his daughter from her high chair and tell Letitia, “I miss the haircut you had when we met.”

  I’m glad we could spend time together, Letitia would mean to say, but she’d rest her palm on the baby’s soft head and sigh to her husband, “I can’t wait until we can both go back to work.”

  They squabbled over chores and families and home decor and what to watch on television. They took turns feeding and rocking a child who wouldn’t look them in the eyes.

  At night, Rory would stand in her room and stare down at her, his arms folded.

  Verity seemed happier in the quiet, which was as well. Her parents, by this point, existed in a state of frosty détente. Letitia was sleeping in the spare room. Still, Rory and Letitia made appointments and went to doctors. They learned words like ‘dissociative’ and ‘sensory processing disorder,’ and when the rain of syllables didn’t seem to help, they learned more. They hired therapists and read books. They showed their daughter flash cards with pictures of animals, letters, and colours. She looked away.

  After a year, Letitia went back to work, with a pinched smile and a quiet sigh of relief. Rory did too, for a few months. They hired a string of nurses and nannies, none of whom remained for long. “She looked at me,” complained one woman, rushing out the door. “She looked at me, and I just ... oh god. I hate my life.”

  Finally, Rory sighed, “I’ll just stay home.”

  They worked out the finances. It made sense. Of course, Rory was still an ambitious man. He liked a challenge. He looked at his child, curled silent on the kitchen tile, and tapped his fingers on the table.

  When Letitia left in the mornings, nodding coolly, Rory made Verity breakfast. At first, he fed her with a spoon, but after a few weeks, he set the bowl down in front of her and waited for her to find it. “Right there,” he would say. “To your left.” For two mornings, he let her go hungry. Then she would stare into the middle distance, but her fingers would fumble for the cutlery until she could eat.

  In the hours before Letitia returned, Rory would read to Verity. He started with children’s stories. He would sit in her bedroom while she shuddered in her crib; he read her fairy tales and stories about princesses.

  She tried to bury her head under a pillow. He took the pillow away.

  “You have to learn.”

  When he finished the fairy stories, he moved on to the encyclopedia, and then law textbooks, which were swiftly replaced by novels he brought from the library. He was calm and inexorable. He read to Verity for hours each day, and she wept soundlessly and kicked at the air.

  “Did she have a good day?” Letitia would ask, running a hand over her daughter’s hair, and Rory would consider.

  “I think she’s improving.”

  Verity learned to walk when she was five, with her hand on the wall and one small foot always feeling forward to test the solidity of the floor. Her parents, who had not been speaking to each other that week, were ecstatic.

  She was at her worst when people talked to her; she would scrunch her face and press her hands to her ears, her eyes welling. Letitia learned to limit her words to simple things: “Dinner” or “bedtime” or “bath.” By the time Verity was six, she would pause, cock her head, and then generally wander in the right direction. On a calm, quiet day, she might even accept her mother’s hand.

  “This isn`t working,” sighed Letitia. “Not really. We need to find her something else. A better doctor. A different prescription. She’s never going to go to school.”

  “Any kid of mine is a smart kid. She’s getting there. It might go easier if you’d even try sometimes.”

  It came out more snidely than Rory had intended. When his wife stormed from the room, he sighed and put Verity back down on the carpet.

  Her father kept reading to her. When his voice gave out, he locked Verity in her room with a radio turned to talk programming and a light that flashed in random colours. She rolled herself into a ball on the floor. He added a second light.

  “You can do it,” he told her.

  She figured out how to unplug the radio. Her father smiled, then added a television on a shelf she couldn’t reach.

  The first word Verity ever spoke was “lies.” She was seven years old. Her parents were in the living room watching the nightly news when she walked into the room, turned the television off, and uttered that single syllable. Her father had time to make a gurgled sound; her mother got three inches off the couch, but then Verity walked out of the room again, arms tightly wrapped around herself. They found her in her closet with her back pressed to the corner of the wall. Sh
e sat in the dark and rocked.

  It was a month before she spoke again. Letitia came in late one night, shedding her coat and umbrella in the hall. When Rory said, “Everything all right?” she shrugged: “It’s pouring out there. Just traffic.”

  Verity was sitting in the middle of the carpet, stroking her fingers through the fading fibres. But she whispered, “Lies,” and hunched one shoulder.

  “What’s that, honey?” Rory was immediately alert. But Verity only lifted her head and looked straight at her waterlogged mother, who blinked. Kicking off her shoes, Letitia made a beeline for the kitchen. Her daughter didn’t speak again.

  That September, Rory enrolled Verity in school and went back to work. Letitia found out three days into the school year. Verity hid in the closet during the screaming.

  She was still a quiet child, but she could get up in the mornings and dress herself. Rory would make her toast, and then she would go wait for the yellow school bus and go to class.

  Her teachers would call. Verity isn’t interacting. Verity is experiencing social challenges. Verity wouldn’t do the poetry assignment. Verity hid in the bathroom all day. Verity isn’t getting along with the other children. Listen I hate to suggest this, but perhaps you should really consider—

  Rory wouldn’t consider. Letitia would. Verity came home each day with tears running down her face and her book bag dragging behind her. She would curl herself into the peace at the back of her closet until her mother returned, and the house became a war zone interspersed with frosty silence.

  She did learn to speak in more than single syllables, somewhere between the books and the blaring radio and the schoolyard taunting. She spoke in hurried sentences, with long pauses between, as though each was carefully considered but then blurted as soon as she could get it over with. “Don’t make me go,” she said to her father one morning, as he inspected the bows she’d tied on her shoes.

  He paused. “Why not?”