Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  Being neither, I kept spilling off both the boards and the ledge, each time landing on my back not as hard as I thought I should—something had gone wrong with gravity, tangibly, as if the ground were pushing up on everything that was on it. My fifth try took, though by then my fingers were cramping and my legs trembling from the effort, and I finally made it to the roof, nearly toppling at the last minute as I swung myself over the edge, coughing.

  Johnny’s face was inscrutable as she turned, no expression at all. I wondered if I looked the same way. Whose betrayal was worse, I couldn’t say. And what help I could be now that I was here, I didn’t know. Maybe I was worse than useless, to have come back. A distraction. Too bad.

  I crossed the roof to stand next to her, my feet sliding on the sand as if someone were pushing me backwards. Her nose had been bloodied again, I saw, not quite dried, crystalline with adhered sand. It was quieter up here, only the howl of the sand rather than the constant hiss, though the chanting was louder. I waited for her to thank me for coming back, even though I knew she wouldn’t. At least, I thought, an acknowledgement that she hadn’t expected it.

  “What did you do to Drozanoth?” I said after a long time, when I couldn’t stand to stare up at the curdled sky any longer, bereft of stars. The clouds were so wrong, moving in ways clouds shouldn’t ever move.

  “Only what was deserved.”

  “Good.” I paused, and added, “Fucker.”

  “I couldn’t find the hua-sinoth in time,” she said. “I knew I would have to stop looking and prepare to just... do the spell without it.”

  I stared at her, suddenly dizzy, and put a hand to the rough brick roof to steady myself. My stomach was flying up like the rocks below us. “But you said... it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t be powerful enough.”

  “I know. But I have no other choice.”

  “No, can I help? Is there anything I can do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I thought there would be help from Nuphel-Don or her apprentices, but there wasn’t. I don’t know how to open that valve. I can’t even see it. I’m sorry.”

  I swallowed. We would be beaten because we deserved to be beaten. Called Them to us. Handed Them the power to get in. Didn’t find help in time. And the world would never know. “Shit, son.”

  She smiled at last. “Well, at least we’ll die doing what we loved.”

  “Standing on a roof in a sandstorm?”

  “Swearing.”

  “Oh. Yes. That.” I looked down at her computer, protected from the sand inside a slipshod hut built of clay shards and tablets, its screen dimmed. Reference material for the spells to shut and lock the gate. Except could we shut it now, without an amplifier? Or would it fizzle out, like those fireworks that pop into the air and fall back to earth, charred instead of alight, while its fellows illuminate the entire sky?

  “Got any last words?” she said after a minute.

  “Nothing I’d want printed on my tombstone.”

  “Me neither.”

  We stared upwards, helpless, frozen, as the sky ripped open—tendrils of blackness parting like torn flesh, not light and air at all anymore, a membrane, shredding, and through it crowding nightmares. I cried out and shut my eyes, turning away, but it was too late, I had seen the legion of teeth and tentacles, eyes and brains, like nothing we had seen yet, nothing the Earth should ever have had to see.

  The noise of Their side rose to a scream; I slapped my hands over my ears and sank down behind the wall, dimly seeing Johnny still standing, her hands up. The building we were standing on began to rock and sway with real violence, sending her down on her knees beside me, whimpering in pain from the broken brick. I looked over the edge to see a huge crater forming in the ruins below us, tentacles as thick as schoolbuses reaching up from there too, as if about to grasp the ones curling down sinuously from the sky, a deadly handshake of congratulations at overtaking the world.

  Johnny was wrong; she did have last words, and they were about to be in the Old Tongue. She shouted into the wind, hands still up, palms out; a long crack of red lightning hit and enveloped her. For an agonizing moment she hung suspended in midair, and then the lightning blasted outwards into the sky with a noise like tearing metal.

  The tentacles responded with a shriek and withdrew into the darkness; a moment of blazing hope, seeing two stars—ordinary, white, twinkling stars—in an ordinary black sky. Johnny collapsed next to me, her breath leaving her in a long, forced wheeze, as if she’d been punched.

  I glanced down at her for just a second—because the building was rocking now, shifting sharply; her laptop slid to the lower edge, cracked against the brick, and flipped over, disappearing into the maw of darkness below.

  Then the chanting faded and resumed even louder, pounding against my head. I screamed, barely aware of the noise coming out of my mouth. She wasn’t moving.

  “Johnny! Get up! They’re coming back! It didn’t work!”

  She muzzily rose, blood spilling from her nose and ears, and slid as the roof tilted even further, fetching up next to me with a boneless thud.

  “Do it again!” I screamed.

  “Can’t,” she said; I had to read her lips for that one. “Nothing left.”

  “Not nothing,” I said, using her t-shirt to haul her to her feet. “Not nothing. You still have me. You always have me.”

  She turned to me slowly, tentacles reaching not everywhere now but coming for us, a few tiny orange flowers bursting far away—someone must have gotten organized with a tank or an RPG or a fighter jet or something, to no effect, the scaly bubbles of skin weren’t even singed—and I heard a voice as clearly in my head as if we were alone in a silent room.

  Whatever is in you that can fight

  Whatever remains

  Let it step forth and fight

  Let it step forth from the darkness into the light

  Take it, I answered, and snapped my arm out; Johnny’s hand locked onto my forearm and everything inside me lurched towards her, as if blood, soul, weight, mass, thought, were all on separate planes, dragged by different forces, blue light churning from her clamped fingers and up into her arm. Her mouth moved—nothing audible above the undiminished roar. Saying the spell? How would we know if—

  I howled as it turned me inside out, heart, guts, everything, eyes pressing in then out, something fleeing me in gouts, a ribbon spiraling out for miles and miles, into the darkness, red and pure, bonding with the spell and whatever remained inside of her, detonating in the centre of the abomination in the sky. Blue light surrounded her, and her hand on my arm blurred, becoming translucent as her mouth continued to move.

  A bright bolt of agony in my leg; I forced my head back down, realized that the ledge was crumbling, shards of ancient brick both dropping and soaring, swirling around us in a razor-edged hurricane of edges and sand, tentacles and eyes. One upward-flying chunk of brick missed me by an inch; another clipped Johnny square on the chin, staggering her. The blue light wavered. My stomach heaved as we dropped a foot, then two, and then a shocking lightness—freedom—only pain and sound and air and bricks.

  I felt my heart flutter and pause. Dying.

  Well. We always knew we were going to. Only the time unknown, and the time was now, and she was falling, mouth still moving.

  No. Cannot be. Falling. Finish! Finish the spell! Finish!

  I grabbed Johnny and wrapped myself around her, fingertips touching a scar I knew, a round scar, a moon, full not crescent, images flashing behind my shut eyes, the kids’ faces in winter sunlight, Mom laughing as we chased her with the hose, Carla’s braids, Johnny’s small, knowing face under the pyramid as we looked at the century plant, the faces of others, only others, all the light outside of me where it belonged, all the love, my emptied heart gulping to a stop.

  With my last breath I whispered her name, unheard beneath her loud, pure voice still crying out the spell, cut short by the stunning impact, an explosion of pain, light, and sound.

 
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  SILENCE.

  Darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  LIGHT. THE PALEST and purest of golds trembling, flecked with black, long, curved spikes coming for my eyes. Dull, unceasing thumping, like the march of an army. The light wavered, rolled out, vanished, rolled back in.

  I slowly came back to myself—not just senses but words, memory, coming back bit by bit, creeping back to me—and realized that everything hurt. Maybe that meant I wasn’t dead?

  “Blink, blink,” someone was saying, far away.

  I blinked obediently and something warm moved across my eyes and face, making me sputter. I forced myself to sit up. Johnny knelt at my side with a water bottle; I realized she had been washing sand out of my eyes. Everything looked gold and pink.

  “Can you hear?” she said.

  “What?”

  She handed me the bottle and I drank deeply, the plastic-tasting liquid as hot as tea. How long had we been knocked out, in the silence and the dark? The sun had come up, night was over. I looked around; the ruins were gone, or at best more ruined; we lay in the bottom of a vast crater of sand and gravel and broken clay bricks and scraps of toppled steles, surmounted by a circle of perfect, beautiful blue sky.

  I stared at it. The thumping was my heart, irregular but strong. I listened to it while I stared, marveling at the cleanness and evenness of the blue, unmarred by even a single cloud or bird, let alone the things we had seen.

  God! Those things. I wondered if I would see them every time I closed my eyes for the rest of my life.

  “We won,” I said, trying to make it not sound like a question.

  “For a given value of winning,” she said. “The gate was open a long time. Too long.”

  “I don’t care. I’m calling it a win because we shut the fucking thing,” I said.

  “Well, then it’s a win,” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

  “So are you.” The cut on her chin had bled in a wide delta, soaking into her t-shirt, and she was covered in fresh scrapes. A blotch on her dusty hair resolved into a bloody handprint—mine, too big to be hers. Tear tracks had sliced through the pale dust on her face and washed away the crust of the nosebleed. I imagined I looked worse, having fallen who-knew-how-far onto a pile of ancient bricks. Had I broken bones, protecting her from that fall? Concussion? Shattered spine? TV had led me to think that I wouldn’t know till I tried to move.

  I looked up, where the circle of sky had finally been crossed by a handful of sharp little planes, silver and black and green. “Are we about to be bombed?”

  “Hope not.”

  I stood, ignoring her protests, then swayed and went down again, trying to catch myself on a pile of sand instead of bricks. I landed on my ass with a puff and missed her next several sentences through ears ringing with pain, gritting my teeth.

  “Anyway, you did it,” I said when I could talk again.

  “We did. I asked for everything at the end. Everything inside of you. And you gave it. And when we fell...”

  She started to sob, one hand over her face, the other waving at me. Inanely, I handed her the water bottle. She dropped it and lurched forward. My arms came up reflexively, catching her tense body as she collapsed onto me. My God, she was so fragile, she was so light; as small as she looked, I had no idea she weighed so little, as if the desert had dried her out like a leaf.

  Her hands formed fists in my t-shirt, as if she were literally fighting tears. Against my chest, her heart was going so fast I thought it might burst out of her. How soft her hair was. The fur of some predator. Like petting a cat, aware that it’s a carnivore, that its ancestors leapt and slashed, that it only seemed tame. I thought, clearly: You did this to me. And you have been doing this to me all my life. You expect a dog to love you back. All the different definitions of love and I never realized that you engineered mine.

  But I couldn’t push her away.

  After sobbing for what seemed like forever, she simply went limp; I sat there with her silky head tucked under my chin, rocking slightly, smelling blood and sand and the faintest edges of ozone, as if she were carrying a thunderstorm within her, and a whiff of frankincense as it warmed against my hip.

  There were awful conversations ahead, I thought. About how to get out of here without dying—how would we find the Rover? how would we find our way back?—and then assuming we could leave, we still had to get home, release my family from witness protection, fix things with the reward and the missing persons report, fix things with the airport security guards, fix things with Rutger, fix my house. Grown-up things: credit ratings, jobs, reputations.

  But for now, there was silence, the slight coolness at the bottom of the blast crater, the warm bricks. And there was knowledge. I knew that she too had never trusted, that she too feared that if she dared love anything, it would be taken from her. I knew her great fear was not so different from mine: that we were always too late, too slow, too cautious, that our hearts did not even belong to us. At last we were neither particle nor wave moving in an unknown trajectory. We had come to rest.

  I felt her hands move tentatively up my arms and onto my shoulders, as if there were still a chance I might push her away. She reached up and cupped the back of my neck.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, but it was spoken into her open mouth, sending a shock all the way down to my toes—no one had told me a girl’s mouth was so soft and warm, no one had told me you could kiss someone and taste their blood, no one told me the edges of her predator’s teeth were like a razor. I told myself: Remember this. It won’t happen again. Her hand in my hair, her heart wild and loud, the satiny skin under my nose, the softness and sharpness of it.

  This couldn’t be love. Anyone else would kiss you with such yearning tenderness as proof of love, but not her. Always she had only loved the lie and, loving it, loved only herself.

  We finally peeled apart, gasping, and she wriggled free from my hands and stood up. “Think you can walk?”

  “If I can’t, can you carry me?”

  “We could have a conversation about dragging.”

  She didn’t look like she could drag a helium balloon, but I gamely got up again and teetered for an uncomfortably long time. The first few steps shot iron bolts of pain up both legs, but nothing gave way.

  The crater’s edge was more sand than brick, and more glassy, burnt stuff than either; Johnny scrambled up first and waited while I dragged myself up the few pieces that looked as if they could hold my weight, slicing through my shirt and leaving thin obsidian grooves in my stomach, like claw marks.

  The air was an oven again, but had lost that heavy, leaden feeling that had both flattened us to our knees and lifted the ancient bricks, and it had lost that awful, damp stench from the place where They slept. At the top, my legs gave out and I ate sand.

  It took an eternity to force consciousness into my deadened limbs, feeling heat and blood draining onto the ground below me. Johnny grabbed my wrists as I struggled up, my head gonging in a whirling circus of darkness, and by bracing her feet and leaning back like the prop on a tug-of-war team she somehow got me vertical. I rewarded this feat by collapsing directly on top of her; she grunted with the effort, but stayed upright, and slung my arm around her, shoving her shoulder into my armpit to take my weight. I felt bad for weighing as much as I did.

  “Is your touch phobia over now, or what?”

  “It wasn’t a phobia.”

  “We’ve had this conversation.”

  “Walk,” she said. “It’s not far.”

  Lying: it was miles and miles, a sea voyage, crossing the entire desert, the thousands of miles of it. My vision narrowed to a pinprick. I watched her feet and mine, in our similar blue runners, and tried to sync my steps to hers. It helped to have something to focus on. Focus on something, anything, doesn’t matter what. Just has to be something different from what you’re doing. Step. Step. Step. The sweet smell of her hair. How was she holding me up? Step. Step. My body
roared and grated as I walked, the pain mounting with every step, slowing me as we trudged towards the barely-visible top of the buried Range Rover.

  I stopped and lifted my head, scenting the air like a deer. We really had won. It smelled just like air. Just ordinary air.

  “I know,” Johnny said, turning her face up to the sky. “I know, I know.”

  EPILOGUE

  “DOORBELL!”

  “It’s too early!”

  “Nicky! I can’t find my wand! Did one of the boys take it?”

  “Ew, boys!”

  “I can’t find my shoes!”

  “Doorbell!”

  “We know!”

  I pretended to jam two fun-sized Tootsie Rolls into my ears as I waded through the chest-deep sea of kids, some of whom I didn’t even know—Carla had invited a ton of her friends over so they could coordinate who was going as which princess, except I couldn’t figure out who on earth was supposed to be a princess with a wand, was there a Harry Potter princess?—and clung to the doorknob like a drowning man.

  It was too early; most trick-or-treaters would have waited till it got dark, a couple hours from now. Maybe some parents with a baby or toddler, too young to go out alone.

  I wiggled the chain off, ignoring the hands pawing at my back, and said, “Trick or... oh.”

  “Treat!” Johnny said, and plunged into the crowd, balancing a box teeteringly filled with bags of chips and full-sized chocolate bars and Skittles and Jolly Ranchers and Bonkers and all the weird candies I’d ever imagined in the desert, where I only wanted food from home and thought I’d scream if I had to eat one more date. For a moment I was too stunned to speak. We hadn’t seen each other in months. But the kids were pushing past me, yelling for her.

  Johnny said, authoritatively, “Pregaming, you guys, that’s where it’s at.”

  “Auntie Johnny!” screamed Chris, and ran for a hug before I could stop him; she dropped the box and threw her arms around him, which was Brent’s cue to sidle up and snuggle for a minute.