Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  ‘Yes, but look at…’

  At that moment another small raft burst onto the surface barely a few yards away and levelled out with a concussion which deafened and drenched him. Allie pulled him back urgently towards Stray, by which time the second newcomer had curled himself into a foetal ball and was rocking back and forth, repeating ‘No-no-no-no-no,’ in tones of great distress while the first screamed at him to keep away.

  ‘In case I wasn’t clear earlier,’ growled Runce, planting himself squarely in front of Sophie, ‘what is happening to your subornation?’

  She stared at the thrashing, screaming strangers helplessly. ‘I have no idea!’

  ‘Then may I respectfully suggest that you get one? Fast?’

  Over the next hour, there were three more arrivals. One was as incoherent as the first two, one leapt straight back into the water and wasn’t seen again, and last actually tried to attack them; they had to drive him off with poles and oars. By early evening, over a dozen had appeared, and Sophie was seriously worried.

  ‘I don’t know where they’re coming from or why they’re here,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got a horrible idea I know what effect they’re having: whether they mean to or not, they’re going to make the Flats expand.’

  ‘I thought it already was,’ said Runce. He was sitting on the edge of Stray, polishing the tez gun. Sunset glowed like liquid fire on its brass components, though the charge indicator showed that it was all but depleted. ‘It was why we were sent to find you.’

  ‘Yes, well, your mission just got a lot bigger. When it was just me, it wasn’t a problem, but then the Lachlans arrived, and then Joe and Allie and the rest, and each time the Flats got a bit bigger. But with so many newcomers arriving so fast,’ she shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Danae will be threatened in the next few days. The whole archipelago – who knows?’

  ‘But why would they all appear here?’ asked Allie. ‘Why would anybody? Why not just pop up anywhere at random?’

  ‘Proximity,’ explained Runce. ‘Harcourt had a theory. Like a gravity well. Big objects tend to attract smaller objects like a billiard table with a rubber surface – put one ball on and it makes a depression which causes other balls to roll down and join it.’ He snorted. ‘I told him I thought it was all a load of balls.’

  ‘So, like a kind of psychic gravity, then?’ Allie suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s more deliberate than that. This many people so close together can’t possibly be a coincidence. Somebody in the Realt is sending them here on purpose, and the link between me and Vessa makes it easier. I think they want the Flats to expand.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous,’ protested Runce. ‘Assuming that there is anybody in the Realt who knows about this place, why would they do that? What could they possibly hope to gain?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter why,’ said Bobby. ‘It only matters that we stop it. If Sophie’s right and all these newcomers make the Flats expand enough to reach inhabited land, then they’ll drag God knows how many innocent islanders back with them when they wake up. We can’t let that happen. Sophie, sorry my dear, but if these people are being sent because you’re here, then you’ve got to go back. I didn’t want to say anything before, when it was just us, but this changes our priorities.’

  Allie looked alarmed. ‘What happens if you go back?’ she asked.

  ‘The honest truth is that I just don’t know,’ Sophie answered. ‘Maybe nothing. Maybe Vessa and I swap places, and it all goes on the same way as before. Maybe the Flats disappear, and we all wake up.’

  ‘Screw that,’ Allie responded instantly.

  ‘But it’s all a moot point, anyway,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Why?’ asked Runce.

  ‘Because I’ve already tried,’ she answered simply. ‘I tried to go back when the first newcomers turned up, but for some reason it isn’t working.’ She smiled apologetically around at all of them. ‘Sorry, I can’t leave.’

  Allie was on her feet, bristling with indignation. ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve been doing what? Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘Because it’s nobody’s business but my own,’ retorted Sophie.

  ‘Bullshit it is! You can’t drag us here to a new life in the middle of fucking nowhere and then just decide to send us all back again when the mood suits you!’

  ‘Allie, I never asked you to come here.’

  ‘Well we’re here, and that makes you responsible! I can’t go back to that other place! You don’t know what it’s like!’

  ‘I have a better idea than you know.’

  Bobby tried to put himself between them, searching for something to say that would calm the situation, while Runce simply turned away in disgust. Then everybody’s attention was claimed by a sudden worldpool which dragged itself into existence directly underneath one of the newcomer’s rafts, sucking it and its screaming inhabitant into the green depths. Consternation erupted amongst those nearby, and the water around Stray erupted again into a nightmare of shouting and splashing.

  ‘It would seem that somebody has woken up,’ said Runce.

  2

  Lilivet had grown impatient. She turned to one of the blue-coated medical orderlies who were supervising the induced comas. ‘Wake one of them,’ she ordered.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early?’ queried Maddox. ‘It’s barely dusk. There’s no guarantee…’

  ‘By now the subornation zone should be covering at least half the archipelago – somebody somewhere over there will be asleep, or drunk, or feverish, or in some way susceptible. Do it. Wake that one.’ She pointed at random to one of the bed-ridden figures. The orderly hurried to obey.

  Reversing the process of a chemically-induced coma in conventional circumstances should have been simple but not necessarily quick – simply withdrawing the anaesthesia would allow the patient to awaken naturally after a few hours, though even hastening the process with other drugs wouldn’t have had an instant effect – but conventional medical science didn’t reckon with the patient awakening with an entirely new personality which was disorientated, frightened, and capable of lashing out at the fabric of reality around them.

  The EEG spiked, an alarm sounded, and the man in the bed spasmed. His IV exploded, and the orderly was flung across the room while tubes and leads rose into the air and thrashed like a nest of snakes. The plaster on the wall above his head cracked, the fractures spiderwebbing outwards.

  Lilivet was quick to intervene. She towered over the patient, manifesting her full form in all its glory. Her flesh became armoured in spiked, iridescent plates which tapered in sections to protect even the tips of her many limbs, and rose in a glorious crown over her rows of eyes. She pinned the patient in his bed and bore down on him.

  ‘Name yourself!’ she commanded.

  He gaped and stammered, terrified almost beyond the capacity for speech. ‘Who… what… are you?’

  ‘Never mind that! I gave you an order. Name yourself!’

  ‘I don’t… where am… ?’

  She lifted him from the bed as easily as if he were a child and slammed him up against the wall. ‘Make no mistake, slave,’ she snarled, ‘I shall soon have thousands more like you – if you are too slow-witted to give me so simple a thing as your name, then what use are you to me?’ One of her limbs wrapped itself around his throat and began to squeeze. Her araka senses inhaled the intoxicating melange of his pain, confusion and fear like a narcotic; it rushed into her head, making the lights seem brighter and everything in the room more sharply outlined.

  ‘W… Welan,’ he managed. ‘Of Toliar. I am a… am a dyer.’

  She relented a little. ‘Well, Welan of Toliar, the first thing you need to understand is that you are no longer a dyer. You are a soldier. You are the first suborned conscript in a glorious army which will cleanse this diseased world of the dreamers who affl
ict our own. Fight for me, and when our world is safe I promise I will return you to Toliar. Defy me, and your family won’t even have your bones to mourn.’ She dropped him to the floor in a trembling and sobbing heap. ‘I am Lilivet – your general, your queen, your goddess. Submit to my rule or die.’

  Somewhere in all the wet, choking noises she caught the words ‘my queen,’ and smiled. ‘At midnight, begin waking the rest,’ she ordered.

  3

  The late but not very much lamented Ops Deputy Morris would have been quite dismayed at exactly how much attention the Regional Supervisor for the United Kingdom, Ireland and Iceland was paying to current events. He’d foregone the beaches of Eastern Europe for the tedious necessity of Parliamentary Committee Oversight, and even though none of the politicians or civil servants involved noticed either his existence or absence from proceedings, alerts were being pinged to his phone at such a rate that he had to absent himself and see what the fuss was all about.

  He scrolled through the abstracts, and when he saw exactly what colour the shit was that had been hitting the fan on Maddox’s watch, he turned pale.

  ‘Christ.’

  He sought urgent clarification. Over the next half-hour, he interrogated the data-trawling network to see if somehow, miraculously, it could be a series of impossible coincidences – or better yet, human error. He checked and re-checked. Triple-checked. There was no error. The Hegemony made no error. Data from their psychic buoys and wake-sensitive operatives was represented graphically as a scattering of tiny firefly glimmers across his region, flaring up and dying away just as rapidly; breaches of the meniscus were generally few, sparse, and brief.

  Except for that one spot over the Dorset coast which looked like the afterglow of fucking Hiroshima.

  There was no question of investigating in person. All that left was damage limitation – and not just to Maddox’s facility. There was his own reputation to consider. Questions would be asked about how he’d allowed things to get this far. A report would have to be filed at Interstitial level. This was going to get messy.

  Still, not as messy as for the poor bastards down there in Dorset, he thought, and with a certain vindictive pleasure, he called in the scuttling code.

  4

  ‘It’s got to be you, Bobby,’ said Sophie.

  ‘What do you mean it’s got to be him?’ demanded Allie.

  ‘Vessa won’t let me go back. She’s too strong. Every time I try to open a worldpool or even see what she’s thinking, all I get is an image of that painting. It’s very close to her, and it’s the single most powerful thing strengthening her sense of self, which makes it impossible for me to even contact her. Someone is going to have to go back first and deal with it before I can do anything. And it’s got to be Bobby.’

  ‘Why not one of the others?’ She pointed at Runce. ‘Why not him? He’s got the gun.’

  ‘Because he comes from here; all that will happen is he’ll end up trapped in someone in our world.’

  ‘True enough,’ confirmed Runce. ‘Quite apart from him not actually being too happy about being volunteered to exile himself, thankyou very much,’ he added to Allie, pointedly.

  Sophie continued. ‘If you or any other Stray went – if there were any left, that is – you’d just wake up wherever your body was, nowhere near the painting. Plus, we know how that goes. No, it’s got to be Bobby. He’s entirely and physically here because Vessa pushed him here – he isn’t in a coma and has no body in the Realt to be drawn back to. If he goes back, he’ll end up wherever Vessa is, and where she is, that’s where the painting will be.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Bobby, but he already knew the answer.

  ‘You destroy it, of course,’ said Runce. ‘Cut the girl’s anchor. Let Sophie go back so that she can clear up this whole sorry mess.’

  ‘But he won’t be able to come back, will he?’ said Allie tightly.

  ‘No,’ confirmed Sophie. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Shit. Shit.’ Allie kicked savagely at a scrap of wood and stalked to the other side of Stray as far away as she could from the others. Bobby followed.

  ‘I suppose it’s pointless me asking you to do something selfish and tell the rest of the world to go screw itself, isn’t it?’ she said, without looking at him.

  He shrugged helplessly. ‘I made a deal with Sophie, in her chamber – she’d let the araka go on condition that I promise to go back and destroy the painting. I’ll find a way to return. There must be other ways between our worlds. I’ll find one, and I’ll come back to you.’

  She laughed shortly, unconvinced.

  ‘You know the thing that scares me the most?’ he continued. ‘It’s the idea of going back and not being able to remember any of this, or you. Whoever I was before I got here – what if he comes back and doesn’t give a damn? It’s not you I’m afraid of losing, it’s me.’

  She turned, took his face in her hands and looked searchingly into his eyes. ‘That’s not going to happen,’ she insisted. ‘You are a good, brave man, whoever you are, and you will remember.’

  ‘I…’

  ‘No.’ She laid a finger on his lips. ‘Don’t you dare say that. Don’t give that to me and then take it away again by being a big damn hero and getting yourself all killed. Come back to me. Then you can say it.’

  He nodded and kissed her finger instead. Then he went back to where the others were waiting.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said to Runce, ‘I’m going to need to borrow one of those swords, if I may. Whoever’s on the other side of this thing isn’t likely to be pleased to see me.’

  Runce tossed him his own. ‘I’ll have it back when you’re done.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Sophie closed her eyes, and a hole opened in the ocean before them with a roar like a high wind in tall trees.

  ‘I must be out of my mind,’ he muttered and jumped.

  5

  The vortex caught him easily and slung him around its open maw. Looking down into it, he could see only a funnel swallowing itself down into absolute blackness – that and three quick flashes of colour. Even though he was struggling to keep his head out of the water, he looked again to be sure; incredible as it seemed, his three loyal Fishketeers – Carmen, Blenny and Igor – were still riding shotgun, escorting him downwards despite the danger to themselves. Then he had no attention to spare on anything other than remembering Allie. Hold on to these, he told himself: her eyes, her smell, her crooked smile. The feel of her breasts in your hands. The warmth of her around you. Whoever you are on the other side, whatever you forget, don’t forget those.

  The worldpool spun him faster and lower, faster and lower as he struggled for air, and as he approached its lightless nadir, he found himself being crushed by the weight of so much spinning water. He’d hoped that he might pass out and be spared this, but it seemed that nature was not of a mind to be that merciful. He could no longer breathe; his lungs burned for air in the screaming darkness which was pulverising every bone in his body. His skull was crushed, shattered and reformed as the funnel narrowed even further, becoming a drainpipe, a drinking straw, a sweat pore, and the essence of him was squeezed out in a thread no thicker than an atom stretching from one end of eternity to the other.

  In that elongated moment, he became aware that there was something else here, in the dreaming space between worlds. Several somethings, huge and ponderous, like granite boulders miles across, churning against each other blindly, and yet aware. Aware of him in turn, a miniscule bubble floating between them. Aware and reaching…

  The pinprick end towards which he was rushing grew just as rapidly, becoming the face of a woman – not the face of… the face of… what was her name? Shit! Think! eyessmilesmellbreastswarmth – not her but She Shall Be Called Woman, except that now instead of her face being a blur it was very clearly that of Sophie/Vessa. She looked down at him as he appr
oached and smiled in welcome as he fell into her swelling brightness…

  Chapter 29

  Rip Tide

  1

  …and onto the institutional carpet of the Park’s Ops Room, drenched and gasping for breath.

  Strong arms seized him from either side before he could even draw breath, and someone kicked Runce’s sword away.

  ‘Caffrey!?’ Steve barely recognised him – he was bearded, gaunt, dressed in rags and covered in cuts and bruises from head to toe, but still unmistakeably Neil.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Bobby coughed. ‘He’s…’ and then a fist planted itself in his stomach.

  ‘He’s exactly where I expected him to be,’ smiled Lilivet, as she watched the guards she had stationed by the painting drag him upright. ‘Silly little witch-girl. So predictable.’ She lifted his head up by the hair so that he could get a good look at her. ‘Hello, Mr Jenkins, remember me?’ His expression was priceless. ‘Remember both of us?’ And she showed him her araka face too.

  ‘No…’ His voice was a horrified whisper. ‘I saw you die… the explosion…’

  His dismay was exquisitely delicious, like the sweetly-sour musk of overripe fruit. ‘Oh but my dear,’ she tutted, ‘you should have seen me come back again. It’s enough to give a sane man religion, wouldn’t you say, Maddox?’ she shot back over her shoulder. Maddox grimaced. She turned her full attention back to Bobby. ‘He’s what you might call a true believer. You won’t turn him like you did the others. You’re good at that, aren’t you, Bobby Jenkins? Playing people off against each other? Well, there are no stupid local constables to bribe here, and no monsters to turn loose.’ She laughed contemptuously. ‘You’re not even properly yourself. So what does that leave, Bobby? What tricks have you got to face me with now?’

  ‘No tricks,’ said a strange voice, nervous and trembling. ‘Just us.’

  She whipped around. Bobby looked, and when he saw who it was didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  It was Blenny. Blenny as a man, flanked by the unmistakeably human incarnations of Carmen and Igor.