“I need—”
“Because this is your fault, you can’t even tell me that you’re better than Them, different from Them,” I said. “The world can end. So long as you’re in it when it does. Or save it if you want. But you’ll have to save it without me. This isn’t love. This is Stockholm syndrome. I was so wrong. Neither of us knew what it was. Now I’ll never know.”
“Nick—”
I turned again, heart hammering, summoning every last ounce of breath in my body. “Don’t talk to me! Don’t you say another word to me, you son of a bitch! You bastard son of a bitch, you murdering motherfucker! I hate you! I wish everyone knew the truth, so they could hate you as much as I do! Now fucking die alone because it’s what you deserve!”
They both turned to watch me go. Neither followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE ROVER WAS as hot as an oven; I aired it out before I started it, then turned up the air conditioning to MAX. Half a tank would easily get me back to Erbil, to the airport, to civilization again, even with the AC that high. It was just an hour away. An hour to things that were two and five and ten years old, instead of six and seven thousand. To where I could die with humans around me—people, instead of the apprentice of monsters and its own little monster apprentice. I was shaking uncontrollably, as much as I tried to clamp down on it, trying to control the big vehicle on the empty road. The lane markings wavered in my headlights, then went steady.
I only had to pull over once to throw up, and then it was a straight shot back; the city lights were warm and welcoming. In the centre of the city, several mosques and part of the Citadel had been lit up in blue and pink and green; maybe an art installation, or maybe just something they did because it looked nice. It looked like the northern lights.
I had never felt so free as I turned into a parking lot to get my bearings. We had left this way; which way had the cab taken from the airport? I closed my eyes, retracing it. Didn’t need her for everything, leading me around the goddamn Middle East by the nose like a donkey, carrying her shit, silently following her, no reason to be here except that I could drive and lift more than her. Pack mule, human luggage, an ancient image in a racist encyclopedia of a brown boy in a sugarcane field, hefting a sack on his shoulders. Let the prodigy go her way, and I would go mine. Unprodigious. Human. All human. Forever, however long ‘forever’ was. Maybe just a few hours.
What would my life have looked like if it had truly belonged to me? I could have had friends, even girlfriends... I could have made my own decisions, gone my own way. I could have heard voices outside the soundproofed echo chamber that was her and me: a single other voice would have been enough. No chance now. The years she had taken from me—I would never get those back. Who could I have been if I hadn’t simply been a mute, shapeless stone to sharpen the blade of her mind against, wearing away under the harder material of her genius? What could the world have been? I would never know, no one would ever know.
Dad had hated her, quietly, and me through her. Never hid it. Because ‘gifted’ was what he wanted us to be, and we turned out so ordinary. Screaming at us for anything less than 90 on a test, when our white friends would have pizza parties for marks like that. He thought we were going to be special, exceptional: doctors, lawyers, scientists. And then we were washed out in the glare of his son’s best friend, the prodigy, the false god. I wished he was here so I could have told him she had been truly false, a liar, a made thing. So that he could have hated us less. Hated himself less for failing us. It hadn’t been him who had failed.
And she didn’t need me now anyway. Had there not, in fact, been a moment when I had the power of life and death over her, there in the ice? Or more than one? I should never have let her live, I should have... I should have killed her, then myself, to cancel out the guilt of whatever role I had in creating the monster, in giving her permission to be what she was.
The city was effortlessly normal around me, not sharing in my disaster; people still walking around, smoking, eating food out of twists of newspaper, hawking things from the marketplace—shoes, electronics, fruit, nuts—under the orange sodium streetlights. No one even looked my way, parked in the empty lot in a stolen car.
If I could get to the airport, I thought, I could find someone who spoke English, get in touch with the Canadian Embassy in Iraq, get home somehow. Ask them to call in some nukes. Ask them to move the warships. Well, they would hang up on me, but maybe I could trade on that little motherfucker’s name one last time. Taste the bitterness of it in my mouth, the taste of betrayal and poison. What had they taught us Socrates drank in the end?
“Shit, yeah,” I murmured. A relief to have an actual plan, with steps in it that I could work towards. One, two, three, four. Even if they took me into custody to claim the reward, I’d still be on my way home. They wouldn’t mistreat me. And I wasn’t the one who had beat up those airport security agents back there, so even if they wanted to charge me with something, I could say that it had all been her. And it wouldn’t be a lie.
I slumped in the warm seat, feeling unburned adrenaline rush through my body till I was shaking again. Shake away, be my guest, I thought. Not doing anyone any harm here in the shadows. Let it all out, body. It’s okay. The truth set you free, and yes, it is gorgeous, it is the first time in your life that you can say it. But when the shaking was over, pain overtook me again, the t-shirt ripping loose from the bite-marks on my shoulder, fresh blood oozing. Yeah. Better go to the airport, find help. Antibiotics. Yes. Good.
The Range Rover’s owner had left, as I had suspected, some emergency or toll or snack money in his glove compartment. I sneered at the magic circle on it as I slammed the door and walked into the thicket of market stalls, ignoring the stares, my scowl apparently just enough to forestall any questions.
Three of the colourful bills and a lot of pointing got me a tall bamfoam cup of coffee, a paper bag of flatbread, and a tub of hummus, which I took back to the Rover to eat. I felt safer with the doors shut, invisible behind the tinted glass. Like a dog in its crate, I thought; and I felt hate boil up from my stomach, almost sending the coffee back up. I took another sip, defiantly. Shut up! I’m allowed to hate whoever I want to hate. Literally anyone.
On the drive to the airport, after buying a blurry, inkjet-printed map off one of the street vendors, the sky was visibly changing—not black with stars as it had been before, but boiling, charcoal clouds that could have been mistaken for rainclouds if they were not moving so fast, lit from beneath in greens and blues, sickly, weak lights, blotting out the stars. Everything racing towards the alignment, everything that had not already come through the microportals of the reactor.
I felt oddly calm and light about it, almost buoyant: evil begets evil, and now evil was being called to account for it, being taken to task, as it should be. As was right. Why should she, who was responsible for all this, beg off or outsource the responsibility for fixing it? Polluter pays. Just like she always said.
The tiny planes parked at the airport trembled as if they were about to take off, their wings rocking in unseen currents, slightly too heavy to be sucked upwards. The bigger ones weren’t moving. That was good. I wondered if I would be able to fly home from here, or if I would need to go to a bigger airport, if they would take me to somewhere more central. I was nauseated and shivery with pain, though I could feel the food settling my stomach. If only they didn’t put so much olive oil on everything; they were used to it, but for me it was just a delicious mouthful of grease that gave me heartburn. But the coffee, the strongest stuff I’d ever tasted, had helped a lot. My shoulder and ankle thudded in time with my heart as I drove, my torn palms so swollen they looked like gloves.
I pulled into long-term parking and shut the Rover off, the engine winding down, ticking sharply in the cool, dry air. The low concrete building ahead of me was a bastion of friendly, twinkling lights. At this hour there were few fliers, virtually no one to witness me turning myself in, begging for help, far from ho
me. Maybe I could even toss a call in to Rutger somehow, demand to speak to my family. I could be with them soon, comforting them at the end of the world. Mom’s soft arms around my shoulders, the feel of the kids’ hair under my fingers.
Far away, a noise began: the long, low call of a horn or some brass instrument, resonant, grating, a warning. I waited for it to die down, entranced. People left the airport and examined the wooden poles outside, each crowned with a bouquet of megaphones—even putting their hands to the wood—to see if it was air-raid sirens. It would have been so easy to just tell them what it was, and wait to be disbelieved. “That’s what it sounds like on the far side of the gate,” I’d say. “Don’t you know that?” Knowledge long her only power, now mine too. To have something that no one else had.
Enough. I got out, dragging my bag, coins jingling in my pockets, change from the hummus stall. Whoops. Get flagged going through the metal detector for that. Even in this place full of young brown men, what they feared at the airport would be a young brown man. We were what the whole world feared now—for a few minutes more. Soon enough they would fear other things.
I turned my pocket inside out, finding the coins and something soft—the ziplock bag full of frankincense. I opened it without even thinking and dug my nose into the warmed contents. Sap, she’d said, the sweet smell of the deep desert and the blood of wood, a perfume I’d never known. Would never have known, if not for her. The most precious gift anyone could think of to give to the baby they thought was their prophet, their saviour, their messiah, the one that the star shone upon, telling them where He was. As precious as gold. Given to me with barely a thought, for a couple of American dollars, simply because I was curious about it.
(That time we’d gone to see La Dolce Vita at the Metro. Her uncharacteristic silence afterwards when I had asked if she’d liked it. “Yeah, I guess.” And weeks later, she’d asked me what I’d gotten from it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Mainly that nobody is really meant for each other. And that love isn’t enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Anything, I think. What about you?”
And she’d said, “I cried. When I got home, I mean. I was trying not to in the car. Because what I got from it was that if you ever choose, you get trapped in a cage, so it’s better to go on forever never choosing.”
“You can’t go through life like that,” I said.
“I know. Not choosing traps you too. But the cage is bigger.”)
And now, holding the frankincense, all I could think of was the cage she’d locked herself in by her choice, the famous prodigy, how They hadn’t waited till she was an adult and could make real choices, how They came to her as a child too young for preschool, how she’d made the choice based on such simple math: Her or the world. The world or her. The biggest cage in the world, but still a cage. Not the sweet life. Just a life.
I’d chosen too, of course; chosen to leave. But how much of that choice had been mine and how much had been Theirs? How much had been love, how much the death of love? How much had They counted on me leaving when I knew her secret? Counting on Their gifts to go wrong, waiting for the inevitable. Laughing to Themselves. Hoping for that pain. Their trump card, saved for the final hand. Rules for her. Rules for me, too.
She had changed the whole world. Everyone in the world had been touched somehow. Everything in the oceans, everything in the skies, everything under our skins. And she had chosen the world. Did I dare make the same choice? As a salute to hers, as an acknowledgement only, not as an honour. Not to say that it was her I might choose, here at the end of all things. But to say that it was the world.
I said I love you, I won’t leave you. And then I left. But you should leave your enemies, goddammit; you should leave the people you hate, the ones who have wronged you, ruined you, stolen from you. You not only should but must, or else what kind of life can you live?
And yet.
I hated more than one being here. Many more. More hate, maybe. Hard to say at this point but... yes. I did hate Them more. Maybe I could make a difference. Maybe I couldn’t.
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to die not knowing.
I mean, I was going to die anyway, right.
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even hope. It was the great uncertainty. The only thing I felt certain of was that she was still fighting. Alone.
I rolled a piece of the frankincense in my fingers for a minute, scenting my hand with it, waiting for it to soften, but it didn’t.
Then I got back into the Range Rover.
THE DRIVE BACK out to the Nineveh ruins went straight through a violent sandstorm; my headlights—expensive, powerful—penetrated a foot or two into the swirling sand and stopped, as if I were traveling with a couple of lighters attached to the grill. I slowed to twenty klicks and white-knuckled the steering wheel, glancing over again and again at the circle Johnny had drawn on the glove compartment. It was glowing blue-white in thin, piercing lines, as if it had been incised with a scalpel. Occasionally the car was buffeted by something that felt far bigger than sand—something I would have assumed was a tarp or a plastic bag until one of them briefly stuck, in the swirling vortex, and stared at me for a second before disappearing again.
It was okay. Would be okay. Just gotta... get there in one piece, not a bunch of pieces. One piece. Fine dust filtered in through the vents even though I didn’t have the air on; I eventually shut them, watching it continue to drift in and fall, softly, like baby powder, onto the upholstery.
The city looked abandoned—no lights, no cars. Maybe the sandstorm had simply knocked the power out. Occam’s Razor, Johnny would have said. I crept through the dark streets in low gear, the sand lessened here, blocked by the dark, silent buildings, towards the archaeological site.
The Rover’s powerful four-wheel drive gave out on the ramp leading into the dig, now buried in fresh sand. I reluctantly shut off the headlights—the only light for miles except for the stars and the undersides of the ugly clouds—and got out into the dark and grit, shuffling my feet. Where the hell was that huge open excavation, with its grid of planks over the top? If I fell into that, it would be all over.
The wind screamed over the sound of chanting from the other side, the Ancient Ones awakening, pushing on the door, waiting for its new thinness to bend under Their weight. No real weight but the weight of Their malevolence and magic, the weight of Their will, pushing. Everyone in the world must be able to feel it now, that terror, as if hearing something outside scratching at a door they didn’t even know existed.
My foot caught on something thick and I pitched forwards, muffling a scream; reaching down cautiously, I felt something leathery, rough, my fingers unable to make sense of it. Like a dead bat but inches thick. And then they hit something wet, cold even in the warmth of the night, and as I drew back, my shoes finding the extent and folds of the thing, I realized that it was one of Drozanoth’s wings, torn completely off. Next to it lay Johnny’s music player, the wood cracked and the interior filled with sand and molten globs of something. “That’s my girl,” I muttered reluctantly. What had it cost her? Best not to know.
I shuffled faster towards the top of the king’s mound where I could at least get a better view, hoping my eyes would adjust to the thin, greenish light. My skin stung from the sand, the grains redolent with Their stench now, or the smell of Drozanoth’s amputated wing.
All my night vision vanished in a crack of lightning that came from both up and down, meeting for a fraction of a second in mid-air. I squeezed my eyes shut too late and had to study the scene in its afterimage, burned into my retinas: a wall, a cloud, a hole, a girl.
Johnny had somehow climbed to the top of the tallest structure, the arched brick gateway we’d seen on our way in. Straight ahead, if I could keep my bearings in the sand. There was more light now, heavy and venomous to the eyes, like staring into a UV bulb—like the lightning, it seemed to be both seeping up from the sand and down
from the clouds. As headachey as it was, it did make it easier to see, but it also meant that the alignment was close—that I had perhaps even missed it, and Johnny was up there because she couldn’t get back down. Shit.
I screamed her name and waved, but she didn’t respond, unsurprisingly; I couldn’t even hear myself over the noise. The chanting was building into a roar now, the sound of a packed stadium, rushing in synchronous waves, as if millions of voices were crying out the same thing, pausing at the same moment. A choir, unholy, unblessed, singing songs of praise for evil gods.
I stumbled over the sand till my feet hit something hard—an aqueduct, thank Christ—and sped up along the solid length till I reached the base of the arched building. Think. Look. Someone five feet tall with asthma and several recent injuries climbed this in the pitch black, dragging a laptop computer and a ton of clay tablets in a bag behind her. Where did she get up? Where did she start?
I jogged around the building in three frustrating loops. Where? Where did she get a hold? Jesus, hold it together, hold it together. Nothing. Time was wasting away. Jesus. Move! I threw myself at the wall, skinned fingertips unable to hang onto the jointless brick and stones, nails shredding. The pain woke me up, and I stopped, hands to my face, protecting my eyes. My heart pounded as the air around me thinned, breath replaced with sand.
Wait. There. Two boards torn from the excavation and propped against the side of the building, making a steep ramp just high enough to reach a ledge, from which you could climb on the protruding broken bricks till you got to the top, if you were very lucky, or very light, or both.
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