Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  I glanced back one more time, my huffing breath the only sound in the sterile landscape. No weapons here. Could I smash her head on the stone? Strangle her? They would be able to bring me back, and then I could find Rutger, force him to give up Mom and the kids... protect them while everything happened, and then we’d be all right afterwards, They would make sure we were, in a new world, with no bullshit jobs, no worries about school, no cable bills, no...

  A great wave of calm flowed over me, like warm water, a bath for my brain. Five minutes. That’s all it would take. Just surprise her, and five minutes later, everything would be all right. For once in my life, I would have done the right thing. For everyone.

  I walked back slowly, feeling the ripples of that beautiful calm flow around me, washing away my pain and silencing the rabble of voices inside. It was so strong I almost thought my hair was blowing back. The crunching of my shoes made her look up; I wrestled a smile onto my face and waited for her to smile back.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Are you almost done?”

  “Yeah, we should be able to go back in...” Her eyes crisscrossed my face, anxiety written in her gaze as clear as the Sharpie on her hands as her voice trailed off. I took one more step, watching the clouds of gold swirl and evaporate around her head, much clearer now than before, in Their place, engulfed in an atmosphere laden with Their magic, and found that I couldn’t move. With a great effort I managed one more step, then stopped, heart pounding from the force needed to move my legs.

  It took me a second to realize what had happened: the warding spells. They had warded me off. Me.

  Behind me, I sensed the eyes turning, lids and membranes opening, focusing on us, our little drama, the two warm, live bodies on the bare stone, seeing us as They saw us: the bright dots, so close together. Awake? Asleep? Still dreaming? Did They dream They saw us, or did They know?

  Out of nowhere, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about for years, as if it had been projected onto my mind: her grandmother’s funeral. Thirteen years old. How we had faced each other afterwards, and love had blown through me like all four winds, and I knew it for what it was, for all that we stood there now, turned away from each other like bullfighters, poised for horns and spears.

  Outside. Always outside, except for her. Never belonging, except that I belonged with her. Belonged to her.

  The sky roiled behind me; I didn’t need to turn to see it. Definitely awake. A low, rumbling roar began, like the prelude to the kind of thunder that would knock out the power and slap shingles from the roof. We stared at each other as I knelt next to her, no longer pushed away.

  And I knew she knew what I was thinking, exactly what I was thinking, and how the hold had been broken, and why she had lied to me when I had asked for warding spells of my own. She knew.

  “One day, we’ll have that conversation,” she said, as if I’d spoken. “But right now, They’re realizing we’re here and we should probably bail.”

  I opened my mouth. The discussion did need to happen now, goddammit, and I was sick of her pushing me around, more sick than I’d ever been, but at the same time I felt somewhat infected by her pragmatism. I had robbed someone for taking my time earlier; I could not waste it now. “Jesus, yes. Don’t know if we’re going back to anything better, but—”

  She looked over my shoulder and her eyes widened. “Don’t turn around,” she said, so of course I did, and saw the sky splitting, something mistily emerging from it, long and thin and dark, flapping like a tapeworm, flying towards us. Dozens of eyes opened, popping audibly even over the noise of the thunder, a buzzing roar like a billion voices saying something different all at once.

  “Johnny!”

  “Handled,” she said, and instead of reaching for the marker like I thought she would, she snapped a hand up and sketched something quickly in the air, then said something guttural, deep in her chest. Everything folded inside-out, so suddenly that my own scream seemed to hang in the air far behind us.

  WE DESCENDED INTO chaos, books tumbling everywhere, and the rapidly closing orifice that we’d tumbled through was disgorging—that was the only word for it—vomiting things, fast-moving shadowy things like the black ghosts of wolves, running towards us without faces but with fangs and tattered skin revealing glistening sacs bulging with cloudy fluid.

  “Stairs!” I yelled.

  The ceiling crumbled as I turned, fridge-sized chunks of clay and wood crashing into dust on the floor, mostly missing me. One of the black monsters lunged out of the corner of my eye. I spun and managed a clumsy kick that knocked it back, but it recovered and bit down on my ankle with a crunch. Johnny ran back at me screaming and tore the thing off, spilling glittering fangs onto the floor. My jeans had taken the brunt of the bite, but it hurt like crazy as I ran after her. I wondered if it had broken skin, injected some nightmarish venom into my bloodstream.

  She pattered up the stairs ahead of me, then said “Duck!” and I saw her hands begin to move. I dropped flat and covered my head. Even with my eyes shut I saw the blast of purple light, searing my retinas for just a blink, about as long as the screaming lasted. When I got up again Johnny was sagging against the door, exhausted and bloodless, her fingertips either steaming or smoking. I stared for a second, then pushed at the door, still half-blinded by the falling clay. It opened an inch, then stopped. I looked up, shading my eyes, and saw the bar down on the far side. The things behind us were still coming, crawling clumsily up the stairs; not enough had been blasted by the light.

  “The locks are still open but the door’s barred! Can you get it open?”

  “Maybe,” she said faintly. “Hold my bag.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Behind you!”

  Something yanked at my leg again—not the wolf-things, but something else, a whirling mass of tentacles and claws of a dark, burnt red, with a single huge baleful green eye in the centre. I lost my grip on the stairs and went bumping down towards the opening mouth, no teeth but a ring of grinding plates making a sandpaper noise as they circled each other. As I slid, I kicked out, sending chunks of clay and stray books into the mouth, choking it. It reared back in surprise and a solid kick sent it flying onto two of the wolf things, scraps of their dark skin simply tearing loose and spattering the walls.

  Something swooped towards Johnny, a hovering creature that seemed to be mostly teeth, like a flying shark, and I hurled pieces of debris at it till it came for me instead, the end of its beak stabbing me in the collarbone as I dodged. I grabbed its head, smashed it as hard as I could on the edge of the stairs, and kicked it down onto the others, who immediately turned on it.

  Panting, I scrambled back up to Johnny, who had somehow succeeded in melting rather than burning a hole in the door on our side, through which the bar was just visible around the smoldering, liquidized wood. The other monsters had already finished their fallen victims, and were coming back for us. I kicked futilely at them, and covered my eyes as Johnny let loose another blast of flame, but worryingly weaker now, smaller, less virulently bright.

  Looking at the burn marks on her arm, I saw the problem. Her reach wasn’t long enough: she could grab the bar through the hole but couldn’t push it up, lacking both the leverage and the strength.

  I balanced on the top step, just a few inches wider than the others, and reached through the still-hot wood, banging my hand at once on the bar; she’d guessed pretty close to where it was. I pressed my entire body to the door to get the heavy bar up, straining to pass the pivot point where it wouldn’t simply fall back, listening for the clunk.

  The door flew open, letting in a welcome breath of clean air that blasted my hair back. I grabbed Johnny’s shirt and hauled her after me, jerked back in a moment and losing my grip as something behind her seized her leg. She shrieked and fought at it, nothing coming from her hands now. I seized the bar and brought it down on the thing’s head, sending it shrieking backwards for just long enough to shut the door.
I threw the bar down, and we raced through the darkened house.

  She paused at the last moment, near the gate. “The books! I could—”

  “We are not going back for any books, you fucking dipshit!”

  “Let’s just get out of here,” she gasped, wheezing from the dusty air. “Wait. What’s…”

  Akhmetov was curled up in a corner by the cement wall, far from the house, shivering and clutching his purple lantern. Inside, the noises had ceased, replaced by a faint, high chant that sounded painfully familiar, though I wasn’t sure from what.

  The look on his face. The monsters hadn’t dropped that iron bar; they’d come in from somewhere else. Perhaps only haste or a last glimmering of conscience had stopped him from resetting the locks. I wondered what They had offered him to do that, and to take off the protective glamour, to let Them in. His uncertainty, Johnny had said. Trust that. And we hadn’t; and we were right not to.

  It didn’t matter. I glared at him as I towed Johnny away, a limp bundle barely able to walk, and kept walking till we found a public park, collapsing onto a concrete bench under a dozen tall, dark trees. The air was cold and clean, the cinnamon-sand smell muted by leaves. Far below us, the dark streets were outlined in pink and orange, gleaming here and there off solar panels, some larger buildings—castles?—lit up more extravagantly still, with coloured spotlights.

  I was shaking and had barely caught my breath; she looked as if she were barely breathing. Her bag was twice the size of mine; she must have stuffed the books into it. Well, a small compensation for what had happened; Akhmetov deserved to get robbed.

  “Peter was betrayed three times,” she said, and laughed wheezily, a chiming noise like the asthma attacks she used to have as a kid. “At least we’re only up to two.”

  Three if you count me, I almost said, then shook my head. “Your chest doesn’t sound good.”

  “Boys. Always obsessed with chests.”

  “Did you bring an inhaler with you?”

  “I haven’t needed one for almost five years,” she muttered, pushing herself upright on the bench. “Thought it was gone. I just need a couple minutes.”

  I took her bag strap off my shoulder and passed it over my head, so it was across my body, like my own. Could at least let her not carry a literal weight. My chest screamed as I settled the strap across my collarbone.

  I gingerly lifted my jeans leg to see where the thing had bitten me—three dark, clearly teeth-shaped marks, bruised and rippled, and—yep—blood, soaking into my sock. It seemed to have stopped, though. Something shone in the wet denim; I leaned down and picked a broken tooth out of it, faintly shocked, staring at it in the moonlight—the first real evidence of Them that I could touch. It was translucent, with blue-black veins running through it. I rubbed it in my fingers, feeling the fine serrations along the edge. Like the tooth of a T-rex. A steakknife built to cut meat away from bone. The universe is a certain shape because it must be to do its job.

  “Can I have that?” Johnny said. I handed it to her and she examined it the same way I had. Her hands were bone-white, trembling, and she almost dropped the tooth a few times. “Look, a real allu tooth. Servants of the God of Prey. Amazing. I’ve never had anything of Theirs to analyze before.”

  I looked over at her. That would be her god, wouldn’t it? If she wasn’t an atheist? And the only real relationship in her life, ours, was that of the predator and the prey, wasn’t it? The most intimate of relationships, closer than twins. The one that had life on the line. When we talked, when we ate, when we danced, it was teeth versus hooves, claws versus horns, parrying and thrusting, giving ground then taking it back. Kids watching nature documentaries think the contest can only end one way, but it’s not true. Prey fights back. Has been given the tools to fight, even if it is eventually killed. She would know that, being a predator herself. Even her vulnerability was not really vulnerability, not what you would see from other humans, but the curiosity and innocence of a dangerous wild animal that has wandered into a camp of hikers or farmers, all sides unarmed, seeking simply to see what they are and how they might react to a monster in their midst.

  A made thing. Like any made thing.

  “Give me that. It’s not good to touch it.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I didn’t like the way she stared at it. I took the tooth back and put it in a tiny pocket inside my bag, and we listened as, down the street, Akhmetov’s house collapsed, sending a cloud of white dust into the sky. I wondered if anything had been killed, or if it was crawling out now, sniffing for us. I found that I was too tired to care.

  “I found the gate,” she said after a minute. “It’s buried at Nineveh, under the old city.”

  “Wow, you could have made a bigger deal about it. Where’s that?”

  “Northern Iraq, not too far from the sea.” She reached for her bag, then dropped her hands back to the bench. “They destroyed the city, and of course the great library of King Ashurbanipal, but one of the sorceresses that worked for the king was able to drive Them away before They destroyed the entire valley. The spell she used was hidden in a secret chamber below the king’s tomb, but as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been found. We’ll need that. It’ll be close to the gate.”

  “As far as you can tell?”

  “Nineveh is an archaeological site now,” she said. “Local academics have been working on it for years, bit by bit, depending on funding and permission. But I don’t think they’ve found that chamber—there’s no mention of the spell tablet in any of the literature dating back to the earliest days of the dig, and it’s not in their current catalogue.”

  “Or it doesn’t exist.”

  “Or somebody took it that wasn’t part of the dig,” she went on. “The chances we take.”

  “Well, isn’t that what we’re doing? Grave-robbers. Cursed. Like the—what do you call it. King Tut. We learned about that in school.”

  “We’re not robbing the grave. We just need to read something written inside it.”

  “How’s that different? We’re breaking in.”

  “It’s a library,” she growled. “We’re using it.”

  “All right, all right.” I paused. “Come to think of it, you stole from Akhmetov’s library too.”

  “He deserved it.”

  “And that’s it,” I said, trying to fight down the hope that insisted on rising in my chest, like the small, guttering flame of a lighter. “That’s all we need?”

  She sighed. “There was more I had hoped to find. How to make the spell permanent, how to power the spell—the sorceress used twelve apprentices, apparently—”

  “Ew. Apprentices are people too.”

  “—but you don’t need to if you can find an amplifier device. But we don’t have time for that. We need to get out to Nineveh and find the tablet and not get killed or caught.”

  “Right. By cops, by the airport staff, who probably have our faces plastered all over the place now,” I said, counting on my fingers, “by Boba Fett, or by Drozanoth, its buddies, Their dogs, or any of the other Them.”

  “Correct.”

  “Whoooo.” I rubbed my face, feeling clay land on my jeans. For a moment I wondered if I would, physically, be able to get up off the bench. The silence around us pressed in, close, cold, lit by so many stars I wondered if I’d ever seen them properly before. Not back home, definitely. The new ones, malevolent and oddly-coloured, blazed like eyes through the leaves. What would Dad’s old astronomy group make of that?

  Johnny’s small voice rose beside me, steady and brave, tinny, as if it were coming from a radio far away. “I know you’re tired. I know you’re hungry. I know you’re burnt and bleeding and a little bit busted up. I know we’re headed into dark, small spaces, and I know those scare you, and I know we should have been diagnosed—formally—with PTSD years ago, when we should have been helped. But no one did. No one did. The people that should have been protecting us and making sure we were okay just didn’t. We can’t count on anyone else
to do it either. Just ourselves.”

  “I know that.”

  “I know you’re sick of being away from home and stuck with me. Me too. Me too. Me too, all of it. But whatever is in you that can fight needs to stand up and fight. We’re the only ones who can.”

  “I will,” I said, and forced myself to my feet. “I can.” I held out a hand to help her up; she looked at it for a second, white in the moonlight, and then stood by herself, shakily, straight as an arrow.

  “One more day,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WE AWOKE TO screaming and for what seemed like minutes I had no idea where I was or what time it was or what was happening, and when I remembered that we were on a plane I still had no idea. Johnny scrambled out of her seatbelt despite the plane’s jolting, and grasped the cargo webbing to climb to a window, immediately jerking back and falling flat onto the floor.

  The screaming was coming from up front, but in the darkness I couldn’t see who it was. I reluctantly unclicked my seatbelt and went to look.

  After the last few days, what I saw barely surprised me. I had felt real anticipation, getting onto this plane—it wasn’t a commercial liner, but it was comparatively big and sturdy, the neatly boxed cargo was fastened to the floor with webbing as well as bungee ties, and the pilot—old, lean, unflappable—struck me as eminently more trustworthy than Hamid, which already seemed like a thousand years ago. We even had a few people riding with us this time, a middle-aged married couple that seemed to be local as well as a young tourist from New Zealand, here on her gap year.

  They were all screaming now at, I assumed, the glowing, dangling white shapes pacing the plane on either side, eyeless and essentially shapeless, like snot. Something rocketed out of one and smacked wetly against the plane. I stepped back as the window began to bubble and spit.

  “Oh, I’ve seen this,” Johnny said, faintly. “Xenomorphs.”