Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  He grabbed my shirt, getting a handful of skin; I blinked in shock. How had he gotten inside the swing of the board without my noticing? It was like Drozanoth in Ben’s room.

  But it didn’t matter; his hands had found my throat and we fell thrashing to the slippery floor. His fingers were icy, strong and slick, but weirdly unformed, as if the bones were embedded in wax. Cold battled the burn in my throat as everything went dark.

  Fading... dying?

  She’s not going to come get me

  She’s not coming for me

  Do something

  But it was dark, and warm, and the pain was fading into the distance like an echo, and...

  Didn’t think

  Got caught

  Do s—

  I jammed a hand under his chin and shoved, feeling something grind under my palm. His grip loosened; I rolled free, weakly grabbed the board, and clocked him in the head.

  He flopped onto his back, more clotted grey stuff flowing from his mouth onto the intricate tiles. I stood panting for a second to make sure he wasn’t going to get up, then ran back to find Johnny, where she was fighting in silence with someone else, a tall woman in a long red-brown robe, hair a wild, dark cloud around their heads. I stepped forward with the board, then hesitated—what if I hit Johnny with that nail? Would she catch something? Some contagion of Theirs, making humans into these grey things?

  A second later the question was moot; Johnny threw the woman over a chair and kicked her so hard in the face that I heard a rattling crunch, as if she’d stepped on a cockroach. The woman tumbled to the ground and rolled, fetching up against a man I hadn’t even seen, already fallen. Johnny was gasping, one hand still extended protectively towards her pile of books and papers.

  “What the fuck was that?” I croaked. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m—they—are you hurt?” she said, grabbing the light and holding it over her head. “You’ve got marks on your neck.”

  “I’m okay.” I giggled hysterically even before the next sentence left my mouth, feeling it as both a gag and a gag. “Think I just murdered a guy though, the airport guy—or I dunno, if he’s not dead, he’d better be able to live with part of his head on the floor.”

  “Nick, don’t—”

  “‘Mamaaaaaa,’” I sang, “‘just killed a man—’”

  “Nick!”

  “‘Put a gun against his—’”

  “Stop butchering Queen and calm down for a second, all right? They weren’t alive any more.”

  “I killed a dead guy?” That did stop me, and I stared at her, the green eyes glittering not with tears but with prodigy mode, now that I knew what I was looking for. Yes, there—the halo of golden dust, her time ticking away. It faded as I watched. No wonder they had found us. She’d been using it since we got in here. And the longer she used it, the brighter it must have been to them, like a searchlight beaming into the sky. “You said human servants.”

  “I didn’t say alive ones.”

  “What are you supposed to do with a dead servant?”

  “The Ancient Ones used to do it all the time,” she said. “Tariq is the expert, but I gather that human thralls, they’re called y’tan rek’wh, they’re not dead, they’re not alive either, they’re not lalassu, spirits in human form. All their life force is drained out of them, fueling the magic of their master.”

  “An Ancient One.”

  “Drozanoth, more likely.” She took a breath and let it out in a long fluting whistle, like a strange bird. “It’ll need to start over now. It’s spreading itself thin, even with these increased levels of magic. Trying to keep a lot of plates spinning, keeping its thralls going, preparing for the alignment, calling out to Them, finding us.”

  “Is that what the cats saw?”

  “Probably. The Society uses them as spies because they can see magic and magical beings. It would probably only work in Fes.”

  “So. But. I mean. The upshot is, I’m not a murderer?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “Don’t think it. Drozanoth is the murderer here, not you. Not us.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I just do not know how you, as a scientist, handle this shit. I just don’t.”

  “If anything, I think it informs my science,” she said. “I’m always looking for the explanation that rules Them out, since I can’t deny that They exist. I want to know Their purview. Where Their limits lie.”

  “Because They’re where science stops and magic starts,” I said. “And you went ahead and became a scientist anyway.”

  “I had to. I had to prove that there could be one covenant that didn’t go wrong. And I can still prove it.”

  The last fumes in my tank ran out and I simply sank to the chair at her study carrel, trying not to look at the bodies behind her. What about their families? How would they find out? How were we going to get rid of the bodies? What were we going to do, what incriminating evidence had we left behind? This was far worse than anything we’d done so far, no matter what she said. They would still be alive if we hadn’t come.

  I was shaking so hard my teeth were clattering together in a steady buzz and my stomach hurt, a long dull ache like a noise in the distance, like the buzzing, furious chant I thought I’d heard for a second just as the board connected. I hadn’t even realized I had picked it up with the nail end out. I hadn’t even looked. “Oh God, what are we doing here?” I whispered as she turned back to the pile of manuscripts, putting her elbow down hard on one that was trying to crawl away. “What are we doing? Wasn’t there anyone else who could do this?”

  She didn’t answer. After a while I turned away, put my head down on my arms, and waited for her to say my name and tell me we could leave. I had to keep my eyes open, because every time I closed them I saw the thick fluid spilling from the airport man’s head, covering the tiles. Hiding their beauty in his contagion.

  She still didn’t say anything when I began to sob, but I hadn’t expected her to.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WE LEFT AROUND dawn—Johnny had transferred what she needed onto her computer, packed my bag with more notes and a carefully hand-copied map, and generated a new laptop map. When I had gone out into the hallway to find a bathroom—no way could I bring myself to just find a handy corner, not here in a mosque or a library—the airport man had disintegrated to a muddy black outline on the tiles, only scraps of his Adidas jacket remaining, bubbling slightly, moving as if it were filled with maggots. I had been preparing to have a conversation about body disposal, and was relieved that I wouldn’t have to.

  We headed through a tiny side door into a walled garden or park. I gasped the relatively damp, cool air gratefully and looked up at the palm trees swaying in the pale, pink light of dawn. A few stars glittered on the horizon, hot and blue. Everything smelled of cinnamon, flint, and leaves. I hadn’t realized how stifling and musty the library had been. “Did you find what you wanted to find?”

  “The alignment isn’t in our solar system,” she said. “It isn’t even in our universe. I knew that, but I also didn’t know where it was. Now I do. And we are screwed. Absolutely screwed.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “We have till about dawn on July fifth,” she said. “Today’s the third.”

  “But... did you find out how to shut the gate?”

  She shook her head; the light wasn’t even touching the dark circles under her eyes. I probably looked even worse. At least I didn’t have her beauty to lose; start lower, not as far to fall. “But I know who’s got the set of records I need. Duplicates, but they’ll have to do, we don’t have time to track down the originals.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Ireland. But they’ve got good copies at the University of Carthage library.” She snarled with frustration, and dug a foot into the thick grass. “We can’t waste any more time on buses; we’re chasing daylight now. We’ll have to take our chances at the airport here.”

  “But the cops...?”<
br />
  “Depends largely on Omar,” she said. “If he shut up that big cop with the moustache and told the others he transferred us, it’ll be a little while before they realize we’re not there. It’s easy enough to lose track of people in custody.”

  “Jesus, let’s hope. What about trains?”

  “No trains. You gotta zig where They think you’ll zag. Plus, trains mean tracks. Too easy to find and you can’t bail if you need to.”

  To my immense, almost tearful gratitude, we found a cafe to have breakfast in first—or whatever meal we were supposed to be eating after skipping so many. The tables were small and round and perfect as backgammon pieces, real marble or a white stone that looked a lot like it, the plastic chairs a little incongruous next to them. She ordered in French and paged through her notes while we waited, my forearms resting on the smooth edge of the cold stone.

  “What did you order?”

  “Dunno. I said ‘the usual.’ Too bad, because I really wanted real couscous here—not the box kind you get back home. But that’s not really breakfast food. I just want something hot from the big pot in the back.”

  “How do you know there’s a big pot in the back?”

  “There’s always a big pot in the back.”

  Eventually a tray of sticky-looking glasses and a tall silver teapot appeared, as well as one plate of what looked like samosas and another of flat bread with hummus, and two big bowls of bean and tomato soup sparkling with olive oil. The server poured our tea with an extravagant flourish, not spilling a single drop.

  “Eat,” she said. “For the next ten, fifteen minutes, all we worry about is our blood sugar. Do you have to pee?”

  “I peed back at the library. Not a bunch. Think I might be super dehydrated. You too, incidentally.”

  “Check. I feel like a raisin.”

  “You look like one, too.”

  I chuckled, and right on cue felt my lips crack. Johnny dug in her bag and solemnly handed me a lip balm, the fancy brand her mother sold at her spas. I debated asking her if it was one of those sneaky ones that looked colourless but then turned pink, then decided I didn’t care and smeared some on. She used it herself before putting it away. It was, I thought bleakly, the closest we’d ever come to a kiss.

  The tea wasn’t what I expected—mint, hotter than napalm and almost as thick thanks to all the sugar. I guzzled it anyway.

  “I packed Tudela pills, but you should get something in your stomach first or you might get cramps,” she said. “We’ll be able to drink the water after that.”

  “Good thinking,” I said, emptying another glass of the tea. Super dork. Naming her traveler’s bacteria pills after some medieval nerd who traveled around and then wrote a book about it back when no one else went further than a half-day’s mule ride from their house (half, she’d explained, so’s you could get back before dark). I wondered who else in the world would have got that joke. Then I wondered if Helen would have gotten it, and managed to startle myself with jealousy just thinking it.

  The tea was like hot mouthwash and I didn’t feel like it was hydrating me at all, but the shakes stopped and I dug into the food, soup first. After I finished mine, Johnny let me scrape out her bowl too. The triangle things turned out to not be samosas but some unbelievable device with tuna and a hot, runny egg in it that exploded down my arm.

  “Oops,” she said, reaching for one. “Should have warned you. Briks usually have an egg in them.”

  “You’re the worst.” I licked off as much as I could, dried my arm on my t-shirt, and devoured the emptied thing, then two more before digging into the flatbread and hummus. At least I recognized that.

  We each took two of the pills, washing them down with the tea. I felt like I was still sweating out half a glass for every one that I drank; my blue t-shirt was black with it, surrounded by high tide marks of salt. Classy. I doubted anyone would care, at least. This place was sweat central.

  Afterwards, we found a drugstore and Johnny bought water, sunscreen, toilet paper, and packaged snacks—“So this doesn’t happen again”—and loaded up my bag.

  “Do you need to pick up girl stuff? You can go back in, I’ll wait here,” I said.

  She gave me a look so long and loaded that I felt sweat start to trickle down my back again in the coolness of the alleyway. Oh God, stop talking, stop talking. I said, “I’m trying to be, you know, helpful. You don’t have to PMS at me about it.”

  “First of all,” she said, “I suggest you never again ask someone if they’ve got PMS, or whether it might be responsible for their behaviour, lest you get murdered to actual death. Second, not that it’s any of your business, but I don’t need that any more.”

  “A... any more?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I patented an annual shot five years ago to get rid of periods.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re a pain in the ass, and some people don’t want to bother,” she said, her voice getting icier by the minute. “I could ask my marketing people for up-to-date information, but last I heard, about fifty million of them are being sold every year in North America. It was all over the news. And you had no idea, of course.”

  “Why would I have any idea?”

  “Exactly,” she said, darkly. “Anyway, how about you choose life by shutting up, and we figure out how to get to the airport and act inconspicuous? I’m getting a lot of flak for being a white girl, traveling with a brown boy, with no wedding ring.”

  “You kind of look like a boy with the scarf,” I said.

  “Stop trying to be helpful, Nicholas.”

  “Sorry. I just meant you don’t have any tits, which is good.”

  “I could buy some when we get home.”

  “That’s true.”

  She was right about the flak: I’d noticed a lot of dirty looks and whispering as we’d been moving around in public, even some yelling. I had guessed at the meaning, but she had obviously understood.

  I was dark enough to fit in with most of the people we saw on the street, a mix of tans, browns, beiges, blacks. There were quite a few white people, I wanted to point out, but they were traveling mostly together—not in mixed groups. One of those subtle call-outs that other countries saw more clearly in tourists, I supposed. And of course, it did help to be a dude. Nowhere in the world you could travel that it was easier to be a girl.

  At the same time, though, what the hell? Was this really the first time she’d seen shit like this? Maybe it was, now that I thought about it. It was like both our lives had been designed to be obstacle courses by people bigger and older and meaner and smarter than us, and you had to jump through so much shit to live—for me, being young, being dumb, being poor, being brown, not knowing languages, not knowing manners, not knowing anything; and then for Johnny, what? Basically, being a girl, being famous. Her obstacles were tiny and easy and had a net below them, so that she might bounce back up laughing, and she had money and looks and genius and a staff of people rushing around to ensure that whatever obstacles did come up, she might not even see them. It was like she’d gotten to build her own course, instead of having it handed down by family, prejudice, geography, history. Here maybe, truly, was the first place that I was better off than her, in one way. I followed her, and pushed down a small, mean wave of satisfaction.

  FOR A CITY of a million people, Fes had a podunk little airport crammed with tiny planes like a parking lot, with a single, though elegant, concrete building. My stomach lurched. How were we going to go anywhere in one of these tinkertoy gliders? When she’d said ‘airport’ I had pictured big planes, like the 747 we’d flown here in from home. Hundreds of people—safety in numbers, anonymity, the bland process of booking and confirming and going through security checkpoints in long lineups with everyone else, throwing away hand creams and baby bottles, no liquids allowed now at all, filing into our assigned seats, even if we had to do it all under fake names, and with cash. But these planes suggested a sort of Wild West chaos, pilots picking a
nd choosing their own passengers, everything jumbled together.

  I waited for her outside the main building with a few dozen other people in a boiling wind tunnel, where the captured breath of the planes and the roaringly hot air of the nearby farms was caught in a kind of vortex that pulled the end of my scarf straight up. The other travelers ignored me, after a token glance. A relief, to not feel watched for once.

  I found myself scanning people’s faces all the same, watching for anyone who stared, who was too pale, who moved like a shambling marionette in a kids’ show, their strings pulled at a distance by monsters. It helped make me feel at least a tiny bit useful, while Johnny did all the work here, less like the dead weight I knew I was. Quantum, I thought. Quantum, quantum. Stay in motion.

  I didn’t even know what quantum meant.

  When she came back out, she was already rolling her eyes. “You ever get the feeling that you’re trapped in a Star Wars movie?”

  “Yes,” I said, with conviction.

  “So it’s normally about a six-and-a-half-hour flight to Carthage,” she said. “This guy? Claims he can do it in five.”

  “Gee, that sounds both safe and pleasant,” I said. “And likely. I bet his Millennium Falcon is a shitty little cargo plane that in no possible way could go faster than a 747.”

  “Right? Lying right to my face, after I paid him all that money, Jesus. Anyway, go use the bathroom, I put toilet paper in your bag, and then get ready to hold it for probably about—”

  “Eight hours.”

  “Exactly.” She pointed at a tiny, shit-brown painted turboprop parked on the tarmac with something blue written on its side in Arabic, and a clunkily painted logo of a shark. “That’s our plane, our pilot’s name is Hamid. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

  “Are we? How much did you pay him?”

  “I dunno, probably more than the plane’s worth, but we’re kind of in a hurry.” She pointed peremptorily at the concrete building, adding something I barely heard as I walked in—maybe ‘Don’t get caught.’

  As I washed my hands, I wondered how much the plane was worth. Johnny was rich, of course, the kind of rich where she didn’t actually have to patent or produce or publish things any more, the money simply multiplied like the heads of a hydra, no matter how fast she dumped her profits back into science stuff: labs, chemicals, telescopes, researchers. So this wasn’t much, probably—a crumb, not a chunk, that would go unnoticed in her annual budget, something Rutger would write off as ‘Misc.’, like giving a couple of million dollars for grad students to study ancient documents.