But it was goddamn infuriating that she had made it legitimately and now this guy had received it via, basically, highway robbery. It wouldn’t take much to see how rushed and desperate we were, or to demand more knowing that we were kids and could get in trouble for even trying, knowing that we couldn’t really negotiate, not really. And I hated people who preyed on need like that. Hell, it’d happened to us often enough after Dad left. Little things like the phone and cable companies who wanted to charge us to cancel accounts, big things like our house getting broken into. Kicking people when they were down, that was the worst.
As I was walking back, I passed the office I’d seen Johnny go into and craned my head to look in the small, reinforced-glass window out of sheer curiosity—would it be modern, did they have computers? It was empty, covered with stacks of paper and maps of various vintages, some yellowed with age and falling apart, which I hoped Hamid wasn’t using, and... a stack of money on the desk, lazily covered with a single sheet of paper, several bills poking out, US currency. That had to be part of Johnny’s bribe—to the airport people, at least; Hamid’s was a lost cause. Had to be, or else why would it be out there? They had just gotten it a few minutes ago. I wondered if they had even bothered to lock the door. I could get it back for her, just hand it to her nonchalantly, right a single wrong in this world.
My heart hammered as I went back in, briskly, trying to look official; no one glanced twice at me as I tried the door of the office. Locked, but loose. If I just leaned on it hard enough...
Someone grabbed my belt; I whipped around with a yelp, face flaming, and looked down into Johnny’s furious glare. “Outside. Now.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“THE FUCK WERE you doing? Were you doing what I think you were doing? Because you better not have been!” she yelled over the sound of the wind tunnel, holding her scarf down with one hand.
“Trying to get your bribe back!”
“Why? That’s the whole point of a bribe, Jesus Christ.”
“Because it looked like a fuck ton of money!”
“It wasn’t!”
“Not to you, maybe!”
“I can’t believe that you were about to get us stopped, probably arrested, probably thrown into a goddamn Moroccan jail, which we just escaped from, for a lousy couple of hundred dollars! No, wait! I can believe it! Because you don’t have any self control at all! It’s like traveling with a toddler!”
“Oh, yeah? Not like you, not like Little Miss Deal With The Devil?” I shouted. “You want to talk self-control? You want to talk about controlling yourself?”
“Maybe I do! What are you saying?”
“What am I saying? This is all your fault! If you had just turned that goddamn thing’s deal down, none of this would be happening! None! And you’re the one who—who called Them here! Who sent up a goddamn billboard inviting Them in, and you already knew They were watching for exactly the kind of thing you were doing, you already knew that! You knew that your whole life! You practically knocked out a wall and rolled out a red carpet for Them to walk on! You don’t have the self-control God gave a bag of hammers!”
“Yeah, and if I had turned down the deal, millions of people would be sick or dead! And now I could save even more lives! How about you think of them for a change, instead of yourself?”
“Millions of people are going to be dead, Johnny! Maybe billions! Because of you! Because you wanted to be a hero! Because you wanted to be famous and rich and on the cover of Time magazine! Who’s thinking of themselves now, huh?”
“I didn’t ask for this to happen! I wanted to help people! Don’t you know what getting the world off fossil fuels could mean?”
“Oh, I guess not, because I’m obviously too stupid to have read up about global warming and air pollution! You’re the only one who knows anything about that!”
“I wasn’t implying that! Or that you were stupid! But if I did I think I’d be justified, based on what you just almost did!”
“What I almost did? Aren’t they tracking you every time you use your stupid powers, which you are obviously not doing now?”
“Are you suggesting I’m being stupid about this? Me? Are you sure it’s me and not you?”
I took a deep breath and started coughing on a lungful of dust, which was lucky, because I could feel veins throbbing in the side of my neck and wondered, dimly, how close I was to simply having an aneurysm or some damn thing. And Hamid was approaching, it must have been—short, fiftyish, a bright ring around his eyes where the olive skin had been protected by his mirrored shades, potbelly straining at a black Ziggy Stardust t-shirt tucked into severely drop-crotch jeans.
“You coming?” he said, cheerfully. “You can keep fighting aboard, no problem.”
“Come on,” I muttered. I stomped ahead of her to the tiny plane and climbed inside to discover that there were no seats inside, just a jumble of boxes and bags. Everything reeked of cigarette smoke; the inner walls, painted pale grey, were turning yellow in an uneven gradient from the middle up. Johnny pushed past me and settled against a big bag of something or other—I couldn’t read the writing on the sack, but it must have been comfortable. I picked a similar one and settled back. It felt like nuts, something light, round, and hard. They’d be smoked nuts by the time they were delivered, I thought. Gross.
“Ey, you kids, no touch in the back,” Hamid called from the front. “That valuable stuff. Big money!”
“We won’t,” Johnny called back.
“Nah, I know what you are. Rich babies travel on your ‘gap year,’ hey? You think I don’t know that word? No, I learned it from other kids. I know them all, English, French, Spain, everywhere. I fly them all. Always good times to fly on your gap year, see new places. Then go to school. Hey?”
“Yeah. Gap year.”
Her voice was strangled, as if she were holding back tears. I found that I didn’t care. She’d dragged me halfway across the world, taken me from the people I loved, didn’t even care that I didn’t have a house or a job to go back to. After all, she had always been surrounded by people who could just buy a new house if they needed one, and who had never even heard of jobs. She’d taken everything from me, and I’d taken nothing, and I had tried to make a gesture to show her that the world didn’t have to be as unfair as her money let her pretend it wasn’t, and she’d yelled at me. Asshole. Let her cry, if her feelings were so hurt.
The plane jolted forwards, then back, so sharply that we were thrown onto the diamond-plate floor, and then we were bumping, at a sedate walking pace, away from the asphalt pad and towards what I assumed was the runway. As I regained my feet I glanced out the window to see three men racing across the tarmac towards us, not in official uniforms, just shirt and ties, one of them waving a piece of paper with two dark squares on it. I felt my blood run cold for a second—were those our photos? had we been caught?—but the angle was wrong and they fell behind us as we taxied, picking up speed, and finally lurched heavily into the sky at an angle that threw me back amongst the boxes and bags.
“Ey! I said no touching!” shouted Hamid. “My deliveries!”
We rolled and pitched as we rose to whatever minimal altitude the little engine could manage. As the cabin filled with diesel fumes, my stomach announced that it was going to empty itself at the earliest opportunity and that I should find an available corner. I gritted my teeth and imagined being a statue, Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Don’t move anything. Not a finger, not a knee, not your tongue, nothing. Maybe the message will get passed down.
Trying to reorient my eyes and brain, I stared out the small, greasy window at my shoulder, the size of a paperback book. Yellow sand, smoke-grey mountains. Maybe just hills, back home; it was hard to tell from up here. We were still so low that you could identify specific animals—camels, donkeys, a dog running ecstatically from the road towards a farmhouse and a boy’s waiting arms.
We’d never had pets, growing up; in the Caribbean, Mom and Dad always said, animals were di
rty and belonged outside with the rest of the dirt, and they were either food or pests. You’d never have one living inside your actual house. A few rich men had pet dogs or cats, but Dad in particular dismissed that: “They bathed them constantly, cleaned house constantly. Who’s got time for that?” We begged, but nothing doing. Then after Dad left we moved again and again, and there just didn’t seem to be room for one more living creature anywhere. The kids would have done a shit job looking after a pet anyway, even a guinea pig or a fish. They just lavished love on whatever animals they met or saw, and spent a lot of time with their friends’ dogs.
The thing about Johnny, I thought, was that she had never been loved enough, never accepted enough love. She had bailed on her parents so young, only seen her dad a handful of times since the divorce; she treated her mother as an acquaintance, scheduling lunches with her weeks in advance; Rutger was more a robot than an employee; she had no other friends. Even Ben’s adoration only went one way. Always it had just been her and me, me and her—a claustrophobic togetherness that, if she hadn’t been away so much, would have driven us both insane. Or maybe it had and we hadn’t noticed, so stifled under the creeping sense of wrongness that a friendship that had begun in blood and bullets should have lasted so long and been so steady and unshakeable on such a foundation. A near-death experience was no basis for a friendship.
And yet she was the only one who ever let me in, the only one who didn’t leave me alone and outside of herself, the only one who didn’t think it was okay to leave me outside. Because that had been my whole life: on one side of the glass, staring in. She was the only one who said, again and again, Come be on my side of the glass. Come be with me. No matter what I did.
We’d even sworn a blood oath once, when we were about seven. I was sure I still had the paper somewhere at home, the red-black J on it cracked but unfaded. I remembered how she had insisted we sterilize the knife we had used, remembered the faint pop as it parted the skin; I thought it would happen in silence. Did she still have the blood ‘N’ somewhere in that wedding-cake fortress of a house? We had been so brave, so swaggering, so young. I couldn’t even use the stove or do long division, and I had cut into the palm of my hand at her suggestion.
We glanced furtively at each other at the same time, and laughed. Her nose was red, but her eyes were dry.
“Oh, you’re kidding me,” I said. “Were you crying?”
“No!”
“Pants on fire,” I said. “Listen, I’m sorry I... did some stuff back there. You’re right, I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get your money back. Because it’s really yours, not theirs.”
“I guess it makes more sense if you look at it that way,” she said. “I just kind of saw it as... this stupid, risky, dangerous thing that might slow us down. And I thought any new barrier, anything, when there’s so much already in our way…”
“I mean, it’s just the whole world.”
“Yes.”
“So I guess it’s okay that you were mad.”
“No, it’s still not okay,” she insisted. “I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry.”
“Look at us, all grown up as shit, apologizing like grownups.”
“As grown up as shit.” She sighed and leaned her head back on her bag, sending up a puff of dust. “We didn’t use to fight this much when we were kids.”
“We’re still kids. And anyway, what was there to fight about?”
“You know what I mean.”
“What are we looking for in Carthage? Your duplicates or whatever,” I said, settling back into the bag. The sunlight coming in the windows was hot, but the floor was freezing, and I couldn’t get comfortable. My stomach still felt like a kettle at full boil.
“Oh man, hope is the word,” she said, grabbing a new handful of papers from her bag and lurching closer to show me—more drawings of pottery shards, half-legible scribbling that changed from English at the top to sticks at the bottom. “Oops, I started writing in cuneiform. Don’t pay attention to that. Translated from something else. You can’t write in Their language, it... changes things.”
“Oh. Yikes. Don’t do that.”
“No no, I’m being careful.” She pointed at one of the fragments, the edges obsessively delineated. “We need to find a book that has the text that’s on this tablet, first of all, and we need to find the book that tells us how to find that book. That gives the old name of the city the gate was in—I know it’s in Iraq, what we call Iraq now, but I don’t know where exactly, and we could be looking for months if we can’t find that book. One of the big problems with the transliterations of the names, translations of translations, it’s hard to wayfind now. The locals wiped all those places from their records and memories for self-preservation, but now it means all the names are changed. And I haven’t found any navigation spells yet, let alone how to use them properly. Second, I still need to know how to shut the gate.”
“Kind of important.”
“Check. Now, I’ve found some warding spells—minor ones—that might give us a bit of protection. Mostly calling on the powers of Nariluggaldimmerankia and Asaruludu, who used to help the guardians of the gates on our side. Those spells will have to work harder as more of Their magic comes into play though. And…” She paused to catch her breath, and then blinked several times, as if dust had fallen into her eyes. “What did you say earlier?”
“Uh.”
“About… about knocking out a wall. That I hadn’t just called to them, but…”
“I was mad,” I said. “I was yelling. I don’t know. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know why I said it.”
“Hm.” She shook her head. “Anyway, when we land, we have to find a permanent marker, first thing.”
“What?”
“Warding spells are small potatoes. What I’m looking for is the big potato, the ur-spell, the Heracleion Chant complete and in the earliest possible translation without modifications, if we can find that. But it’s a powerful, powerful spell, more like a weapon, and it has to be right. Not sort–of-right, right-right. And it’ll cost me.”
“Cost... what?”
“I don’t know. I hope just time. I’d pay in years. But it could be anything. It could be life… whatever They take that makes the difference between alive and not-alive. In that case I hope I have enough.”
So, I thought, you’ll have to make a sacrifice too. Mine was my family; yours could be your life. But the world needs you. It doesn’t need me. You say it all the time, I’ve heard you say it, you said it when you cured HIV: The world goes on without you. That is all it knows how to do.
I said, “If there’s a way to, uh, to help pay... to split it up between us... when the time comes...”
“Thank you. I mean it.”
Her eyes were green in the light from the windows, as green as the forests I had seen from above, steady and unafraid. And I thought again about death, the pond, all those years ago. We had almost died. She went through with a crack and a splash, not even time for a scream; just gone. All unthinking I raced for the hole—a sickening lurch beneath my blades as the ice tipped me in with her oh my god oh god I’m falling I’m falling—then the cold hit me like a car, not temperature at first, just impact, and my numbed hands found the space-age parka, locked tight, hauled her small deadweight up into the air. With chest and pelvis I smashed through the ice to the shore, legs going like a boat prop, our faces turned to the night sky. Stars were the last thing I thought I’d see.
We had to crawl up the slope to the shed, legs already too cold to hold us up. It was minus thirty and her lips were lavender, like the frosty lipsticks the girls wore at school. When we got the electric heater started, we simply looked at each other in wonder for a long time, taking in the frozen hair, the white ears.
“No more skating,” she said drily.
“Yeah no more skating.”
Turned at forty-five degrees to each other, we stripped off our wet clothes, put our coats back on for decency’s sake, a
lready far too old to be doing that, and huddled in front of the heater, filling the shed with hot fog.
I remembered it now, still staring at her, no need to look, knowing every inch of her—the length, the weight, the width, the colour, the scent. How I had known exactly the moment that my hands would find her coat. And we had been tricked, we had guessed wrong, we made the mistake that all kids make, of thinking things could be negotiated. The ice had seemed safe—in fact, as I had crashed through it, I remembered thinking how thick it was, wondering how it could have broken under Johnny’s weight. We had been wrong before, gotten in trouble before, gotten spanked or yelled at or chased before, but we had never come so close to death. At least we were together, for a mistake like that. And here we were, together again.
“I love you,” I said. “I won’t leave you.”
“I know you won’t,” she said. There was a pause while I thought, wildly, Oh God, I said it, kill me, I hope she says literally anything next except that she loves me too, because when we die, when They destroy us, I will have to remember that lie as being one of the last things I heard from her lips, it’s the lie I’ll remember, it’s the lie.
The plane bumped with turbulence; she was up in an instant, staring out the window as if she expected to see something. “Knock it off,” I called. “I’m paranoid enough already.”
“You never know when your life is going to turn into a Twilight Zone episode,” she yelled back.
“What? No, don’t tell me. Didn’t it already?”
Beneath the Rising Page 19
