The Brilliant Dark
Page 21
Then Jet had swept his hand through his picture of wire, scattering the pieces and the conversation, announcing he was hungry. Life went on, but the grief stayed put.
Maybe, if she just had a little more time, she could connect with Barton again. Maybe, at the end of all this, she could stab grief in the face.
Saskia wished she still lived in a world where things were simple, where light fought dark and always conquered it. But how could Saskia fight the dark if she was part of it? Someone down here better have some answers. Or, even better, a way through the mess she’d done a pretty great job of getting into.
“Am I about to become some ritual sacrifice, or what?” Saskia quipped, counting the stairs to keep her mind focused on something other than how close Ella was. She’d been holding on to her shoulder, since the stairs curved down and were unevenly spaced, as if they’d been carved out of the earth. She resented needing her help.
Ella snorted. “Sorry. Bloodletting is on weekends.”
Ella glanced over her shoulder and stopped them just as they reached level ground. “It’s broken between us, isn’t it?” she asked softly.
There was so much Saskia wanted to say, to do, but ahead of them, the chamber glowed with electric light, and it was full of strange, hungry faces. Now was not the time. It probably never would be.
“I’m sorry,” Saskia said, though she was pretty sure it wasn’t her fault this time.
Saskia left Ella behind and stepped into the room, feeling raw as an infected tooth. The man standing in the centre of the room was not Solomon Rathgar; he was off to the side, seated. Nearby, Saskia was surprised to see Amanda, Josh, and Dannika, who was shivering, looking worse for wear after that river hunter bite. Miraculously she still looked semi-human, though she crouched just out of the light, avoiding it. Maybe not long now.
Amongst the familiar faces were many strangers. Grown adults, some as old or older than Solomon. Because she didn’t recognize them, Saskia couldn’t tell if they were Denizen or Mundane, but then she remembered that the Cluster welcomes all. She did know, then, that they couldn’t be trusted, whoever they were.
Saskia would’ve stepped closer to the man standing in the centre of the room, but rubbed into the black granite of the floor around him were red rings Saskia wanted nothing to do with, when it came down to it.
“Thank you for coming,” the man said. His voice was soft, almost meek.
Saskia’s jaw clenched. “Like I had a choice. You kidnapped me.”
The man glanced sideways to Solomon, who sighed. “You passed out,” he said. “We weren’t about to leave you under a bridge.”
“You made me pass out!” she shouted back. The strangers in the room seemed to tense at her outburst. She turned again to the man in the centre of the room, scrutinizing him. “You must be the famous priest, then? What do you want from me?”
He shut his eyes, seeming to collect himself. Was he a Denizen? Or just a Mundane heretic? The other people crowded in the chamber seemed keen on listening and waiting. The priest’s followers. But this was Cecelia Bettincourt’s summoning chamber. The place where Roan Harken learned what was ahead of her, even if she didn’t know what she’d have to give up to get there. What right did any of them have to occupy such a sacred place?
Saskia’s eyes darted to those red rings at the priest’s feet. They weren’t glowing. They couldn’t call the Darklings down. Could they? She’d been joking about the sacrifice thing, but now she wasn’t so sure. Ella took her place at the wall with the others, to watch. Saskia started to sweat.
“You’ve been blessed,” said the priest with the soft voice. His hands spread. “The Darklings spoke to you, long before they went on the move. Solomon saw a fragment of your past with them, and the burden you now bear, and was concerned for your well-being.”
“Concerned?” Saskia snorted, pointing at Solomon. “That man’s only concern is self-preservation. He’s head of the Owl Unit, but he’s also working with the Cluster? None of you know anything about the Darklings. What they’re like. Not one of you knows anything.” She made sure to address the whole room with that. “Whatever you want me for, I’m not doing it. You can kill me first.”
“We didn’t invite you here to kill you.” The man’s eyes flickered about the room, as if expecting someone else to interject. “You’re young, but you know more than the rest of us. We want to learn from your blessings. Your gifts. The song that is inside you.”
Saskia was still. So, not execution, then. She had to try reason, even if just for herself. “I don’t know what I’ve been hearing,” she started. “How is it connected to the signal the Task Guard is making us work on?”
Solomon stood up, all eyes of the room following his painful movements. But he, too, did not seem interested in crossing over the red threshold surrounding the priest. “The transmission was picked up via the Apex, through one of its many tests. Whatever it is, the powers that be believe it’s the missing piece. If they can interpret it, lock onto its location across dimensions, they can apply it to Project Crossover —”
“And they can open their Bloodgate,” Saskia finished. “I know. I work there.”
“The old-fashioned way no longer works, you see,” the priest added, interrupting her with quick flicks of his hands, movements that Barton had shown Saskia once, when he told her what was involved for a Rabbit neutralizer to open these infernal doorways.
Saskia cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re a Rabbit, then?”
The priest’s hands stilled, falling slow as snow to his sides. “Not anymore.”
Saskia squinted, but she needed more to go on. “So what? I already knew all that. About Project Crossover. But what I can’t get past is why Grant wants to open a Bloodgate at all. What’s he expect to get out of that?”
Solomon sneered. “What do most people dig holes for? To bury something.”
The sweat at the back of Saskia’s neck froze. “He wants to send Denizens . . . to the other side?”
“The moon!” Dannika was still shaking all over, as Amanda tried to keep her from thrashing. “The moon will stop all of this!”
The priest turned away, troubled. “The Darkling Moon’s movement means something. It wills the Bloodgate to open. The Narrative demands it. The Cluster exists to observe the consequences Denizens and Mundanes have wrought.”
“Observe and do nothing?” Saskia flared, absolutely done with the empty rhetoric. “Then what do you want with me?”
The priest opened his hand. “Step into the circle and find out.”
* * *
The trek from Osborne Village to Wellington Crescent was not a long one, but long enough. Silence stretched between Phae and Natti, and once Jet’s little legs got tired from parkouring heroically, he, too, was focused on the task ahead of them.
Natti’s tattoos, her very presence, drew stares from pedestrians, and from Task Guard soldiers. She hadn’t been stopped — yet. Natti just grinned beatifically at them all.
“Don’t provoke them,” Phae muttered, eyes on the pavement. Natti ignored her as they went past the all-girls’ school on the corner, waiting at the Maryland Bridge intersection to cross directly onto the crescent.
“Phew. Still ritzy.” Natti blew out her cheeks as they came towards the mansions, immaculately kept even in times like these. Phae noticed that, somehow, the iron fences around them all had climbed higher. “Shame about the property value. I hear it’s gone down due to, you know . . . monsters.”
Phae stared straight ahead, but the corner of her lip quirked. “The river was a hazard before we knew there were monsters in it.” Then, before they could progress farther, her arm shot out, and Natti walked into it, grunting.
“Jet,” Phae said, calling him away from looking into one of the grand yards. He hurried over, his usually dour face flushed with excitement beneath a toque that was too big for him. Gods,
he looked happy for once.
She tweaked his nose. “Remember what Jordan taught you? About hiding?”
Jet’s face brightened tenfold. “Are we going to hide together?”
Phae nodded, straightening. “You said you felt that Saskia was nearby . . . I have an idea where.” She threw a long look down the winding street. “But we wouldn’t want to be spotted on the way there.”
“You’re right. I’ve seen how many Owl Units are just on the streets. Better to cover our tracks anyway.” Natti scowled, hands on her hips. “Never pictured Winnipeg to be regime-central, honestly, but best to work around it.”
Phae looked to her friend . . . former friend. She wasn’t sure which. It had been a long trek, and Jet had provided an ample buffer in the awkward silences, but they stretched on when he became preoccupied. Seven years had made Natti harder, tougher. Stronger. Phae wished she could draw some of that strength for herself.
“Saskia is always on my case for not doing enough,” Phae said suddenly, her internal conversation spilling out. “She wants me to be the hero I used to be. But she barely knew me then, and by the time she did, all the heroic stuff was Barton’s area, not mine.” She pressed her arms into her body. “I’m afraid it’s too late to do anything now that’ll matter.”
Natti turned, a surprised look on her face. “Saskia is just a kid . . .” she started, then backpedalled, as if remembering exactly how Saskia had crossed all their paths. “Well. I guess we all were kids, once. Now look where we are.”
Phae just sighed. “Remember when things were . . . not this?”
Natti shrugged. “I remember that when two polar bears showed up in my living room, you were there like a shot.”
Phae was slightly appalled at how quickly the tears gathered. “We’d been through a lot. You needed me. That’s what friends do.”
“You’re right.” The hand on the shoulder, squeezing. “We’ve also lost a lot. I’m not interested in losing anything else today, are you?”
Phae swiped her hand over her eyes. “No. Never again.”
“And as far as it being too late, c’mon. Even when all the brickwork is coming down around us, we’ll still have at least a few seconds. Then we can talk about too late.”
Natti opened her arms, hesitantly, but Phae went into them like there was nowhere else to go.
“I’m sorry for being such an asshole,” Natti said gruffly.
“I’m sorry for not being brave enough to call you on it.”
“That’s really nice,” Jet was saying, sitting on a bench and twirling a dry stick in front of his face, “but can we get to the rescuing part?”
Phae and Natti shyly disengaged, laughed, and let out a collective sigh. “So where exactly are we headed?” Natti asked.
Phae looked long up the street. Behind her was her old high school, where Saskia went now, transformed into a bizarro nightmare with its high walls and Task Guard brainwashing. So much had changed. But the regime couldn’t reach inside of them and change what had made them. Roan had reclaimed her family’s legacy up this street. She’d found the dead girl. She’d been followed home by a fox and marked by a moth. It seemed like things were replaying themselves, and Phae was more than willing to pick up those threads, to actively choose to see this through. Phae, after all, had made a choice to become a Deer, and to confront Fia in the Glen. Doing nothing in the intervening years hadn’t exactly worked out for her.
It was time to do it Roan’s way.
“We’re going back to where it all started,” Phae said. “Then you can get creative. After all, the river’s nearby. And you’ve flooded that house before.”
Recognition made Natti’s body visibly relax, and she cracked her knuckles. “I was fairly certain we’d be skirting around old times,” she said, “not recreating them. But I’m game if you are.”
Phae revelled, for the first time in a long time, as her hair undid itself from its braid, snaking up her head, forming its antlers, sparking blue. Jet made them all invisible, and they were off.
At least the old standards were always reliable.
A Risk Worth Taking
Saskia backed up, then stopped, looking to Solomon Rathgar. In that white room underneath the Old Leg, he’d had his crown, his limitations. Here, in the summoning chamber underneath Cecelia’s reclaimed house, he could do whatever he wanted with his powerful mind. The priest stood in the middle of the circle, waiting for Saskia to join him. They all waited for her to decide.
“Even if I say no, are you going to make me?”
The priest considered her, then let out a breath. “No. If it is willed, then it will happen.”
“That’s not how any of this works!” Saskia, despite logic, was moving towards the priest now. “It was never about predestiny. Don’t you get it? It’s about making a choice. It’s about doing something and accepting what happens after. No one controls me. No one tells me what to do!” She stopped, without looking down, at the edge of the red mark.
The priest had been perfectly still. “But the Moth Queen does.”
Saskia sucked in a breath, turned and looked for Ella, then to Solomon, then back to the priest. “Death just wants back what was hers. She wants to help Denizens. What do you want?” She chewed her lip, not wanting to let slip her own reasons for opening that door, to save the one person on the other side whose cry for help she couldn’t get out of her head. “I just want things to go back to the way they were before.”
Solomon stood close by and Saskia couldn’t really parse the look on his face with everything swimming there, but his expression was determined. “We want the Bloodgate open, yes. But we have our own reasons. We want to save Denizens, too. We can’t stop the Darklings from exacting their purpose. But Ancient can.”
“What?” Saskia blurted.
The priest went on. “We believe that the signal came as a response to the Darkling Moon moving, not from the moon itself. We believe it came from the Brilliant Dark.”
Saskia’s throat tingled with something like — she couldn’t tell. Relief? Hope? “So Roan and Eli succeeded. They woke Ancient?”
So many years, believing they had done all of this, changed the world and everyone in it just so they could see how ugly it really could be. But it wasn’t for nothing.
“There’s more to it than that, to making it work.” Something in Solomon’s eyes changed. “But the signal is the key to finishing this, on our terms. We just need the right receiver.”
“And you think,” Saskia came to it slowly, then all at once, “I’m that receiver?”
Solomon just dipped his head. “We know that you have a plan, an inherent part to play. I didn’t see it all, but you let some of it come through during your assessment.” His face showed amusement, and Saskia flushed.
“Sorry for my weak Mundane mind,” she grumbled.
He was quick to defend her. “Much, much stronger than some Denizen minds, I assure you. And just know that it caused me pain to see it, to know it, that red song in your head. Maybe that will make you feel better.” Solomon scrubbed his face as if he was in a great deal of pain now. “Whatever your plan is with making the Apex work using the signal and that broken Quartz, we want to help you succeed.”
Help. The word was built out of barbed wire. Saskia wanted to reach for it very badly, but she knew what would happen if she put her fingers around it.
Saskia turned to the priest, who looked down at his feet, at the red rings. He stepped out of it suddenly, moving around her.
“You’re right about risks,” he said, tipping his head up at the chamber’s ceiling, searching it. “I’ve taken my share of them, and I’ve had to live with the consequences.” He looked back down at Saskia. “But we can’t move forward if we don’t take that step. The game will move on with or without us.”
The gathering murmured, “The moon wills it.”
More muttering from the peanut gallery, disconcerted hissing from the spectators. The priest raised a hand and they were silent. “The Cluster doesn’t worship the Darkling Moon, Saskia,” he said. “But that moon is a means to an end.”
“The Cluster,” Solomon continued, “is just another name for resistance.” The other spectators lining the wall watched her, and she turned back, dumbfounded, to the empty red circle as Solomon went on. “The Cluster believes that, with the Darklings released, once and for all, Ancient will rise. When it does, Denizens will be more powerful than ever before, and the Task Guard, and any Mundanes who see fit to do us harm, will no longer be able to erase us. There are Mundanes who stand with us, too, who believe the old order was best. We are all invested in seeing that there is a world to fight for, before the end.”
A race. That’s all this was. Whoever opens the door first takes the spoils. And here was Saskia, apparently caught in the trample zone.
“What about me?” she said again, having said it so many times to everyone who had tried to use her for her brain, for having been touched by death or the dark or for just being in the wrong little Scottish town at the wrong time. They all looked at her like she was the answer, but she had none. “I’m a Mundane. What can I do, really?”
“I was made into a Mundane, and I’ve done plenty,” the priest said, after breaking away from a woman with short blunt hair who had spoken something quietly in his ear. “All that matters is preventing us all from being erased. The Task Guard simply built our way forward. You can get us onto that road.”
Solomon leaned heavily on his cane. “I don’t pretend I can make up for all the things I’ve done while feeding the resistance from the inside. But when I saw your thoughts, saw you had some kind of plan, some kind of connection to the Darklings . . .” Solomon gathered himself. “We wanted you to know that you aren’t alone.”