by Molly Flatt
Taran sighed. ‘Yes. It’s getting late. They’ll want you back for training. We should go.’
Over the sea, the light was fading to purple-grey. Exhausted and cold as she was, Alex suddenly dreaded having to leave the horizon and head back inside.
‘Alex?’
No tears. If you start, you’ll never stop.
‘Alex?’
NO TEARS. ‘Fine. Let’s go.’
She couldn’t trust herself to speak as they started back along the shore, Taran gabbling about Story-surging again, Iain trailing a few silent paces behind. Through the dozens of questions churning in her head, the one that finally popped out was: ‘What’s going to happen to Finn MacEgan?’
Taran stopped talking. ‘He’s been charged with breaking the Covenant. They’ll allocate him an advocate, put him on trial before the Iskeullian Council and then refer him for sentencing to the international Board.’
‘What happens if they find him guilty?’
‘Most likely he’ll be assigned to some sort of manual labour, moved into supervised housing. All Outside trips revoked.’ He paused. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this,’ he added slowly, ‘but I will do everything in my power to get Finn released. Being banned from the Library will be more than enough punishment. Reading is Finn’s whole life. He’s wanted to become a full-timer ever since he was a tiny boy. What he did was foolish, but he was grieving. Lashing out at you was an impulsive mistake.’
‘I am sorry, you know,’ Alex said after a while. ‘About what happened to his dad. More than you can know.’
Taran looked out to sea. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘But this thing’s part of me, isn’t it? Part of who I am? Shouldn’t I have been able to stop it, somehow? Like I did the first time with that Greum guy back in 2005 when he tried to Read my Story?’
‘I believe,’ Taran said, ‘there’s a greater force than any individual at work here. I think it would have found its way out, one way or another, even if it had been delayed for a few more months or years. You’re part of something enormous, Alex. You’re the instrument of mother nature. Of evolution. You’re the vanguard of a change that began with one terrible, terrible tragedy, but that could in the long term have un-imaginable benefits for us all.’ He sighed. ‘I like to think that Egan would have taken solace in that. I like to think that, even in the moment of his death, he might have realized that it wasn’t a waste, but a brilliant sacrifice.’
Alex followed his gaze out to the horizon. ‘Did MacBrian mean what she said? About letting me go home? As long as I go down there tomorrow? Even if I can’t . . . get it under control?’
‘You don’t believe her?’
‘Finn told me not to trust her.’
‘Finn was upset. And Sorcha . . . well, Sorcha . . .’ He grimaced, glancing over his shoulder towards Iain. ‘Let’s hope she knows what she’s doing.’
‘Oh, great.’
‘I’m sorry. We’re sailing in uncharted waters, with you.’
At the top of the cliff the wind hit her, flinging hair into her eyes. Taran went to untether his horse while Iain helped Alex clamber on. As they rode away, she looked back over her shoulder at Taran’s house, at the smeared windows with their rotten-looking shutters and lichen-bearded sills. Then the horse jolted from a trot to a canter and she had to focus on not falling off. But before she turned around, she was sure she had seen a glimpse of a white face in one of the windows, staring back at her from beneath a halo of storm-cloud hair.
12
Darkness rolled over Alex’s head, heavy as a wave. She released her grip on the last swaying rung and thumped onto the ground. There wasn’t the faintest bleed of light, despite the fact that Taran and MacBrian were standing with lamps on the edge of the hole less than ten feet above. She tried to shout up to them, but although her lungs did all the right things, the darkness swallowed the sound.
Breathing down a swell of panic, she turned back to the tunnel. Her eyes battled to focus, convinced the darkness might suddenly solidify into a biting thing. The ground beneath her trainers was steeply sloped and as springy as a forest floor. When she stretched out her arms, her fingers brushed against fibrous walls that felt like they were made from aeons of compacted fossil and root.
Just keep going. That’s what MacBrian had said. Alex’s senses were screaming at her to reach for the rope ladder dangling above her head. They were begging her to climb straight back up into the cramped normal-darkness of the tomb that lay above. This was the tomb they’d ridden to straight after breakfast, cantering along the boggy paths between the Stacks through the relentless morning rain. The tomb that was hidden beneath a low grassy mound, right in the centre of the maze. The tomb that concealed the mouth of this tunnel, which led – they said – into the depths of the Library. At the end of the tunnel – they said – she would somehow be able to enter her own Story, gain access to all her Memories, and be able to Read her screwed-up Storyline. They’d said a lot of things to her over the past twenty-four hours. She was no longer sure which of them she believed, or even understood. Except for just keep going. She understood that one. It was one of her mother’s favourite pieces of advice. And it seemed pretty much her only option, in the circumstances.
So instead of trying to scramble back up to the waiting islanders, she took one tentative step forward. Then another. Then another, with one hand still brushing the wall of the tunnel and the other stretched out. This was the bargain, she told herself, as she stumbled down, trying not to imagine suddenly touching something warm and wet and soft. If she did this, they’d promised to let her go home. Which meant that every step she took was a step closer to freedom. To sanity. To a world where accessing your consciousness was something you did in an evening class. All she had to do was walk.
At first she tried to count her strides, but she was on such primal high-alert that the slightest sound – a gurgle from her guts or the scrape of a stone underfoot – sent her straight back to nought. This blackness wasn’t simply an absence of light. It was alive. She could feel it breathing with her, probing and pressing her, as if she was being digested in the belly of a giant snake. And as she walked and walked and walked, Alex slowly felt herself becoming the one thing she’d been trying to avoid since the moment she was born: alone.
This wasn’t the pleasant solitude she felt pounding the Hackney streets, when she sometimes imagined a camera was recording her movements to a jaunty rom-com soundtrack. Nor was it the aching emptiness she had felt the morning after her first and last one-night stand in her narrow university bed. This loneliness was older and deeper, primordial and brawny. It threatened to unleash all the monsters that a lifetime of dinners and books and soft furnishings had tried to fend off.
Alex thought about her father. She thought about her mother. She thought about Harry, Mae, Lenni, Dom. She rifled through the headshots of the Eudo team, shuffled through her pack of work contacts, brain-checked old family acquaintances and called up the faces of reliable bit-players in her life. She recalled the barista in the cafe over the bridge, the homeless guy outside the off-licence near her flat. She even tried to summon the thousand miniature smiles of her digital not-quite-friends. But the figures came out flat and dead, like shadows jerking out of a zoetrope. The bulwark of people she had built up around her, back on the surface of the earth, had failed. No-one was coming to save her; no-one could. This was her tunnel. This was her dark.
Alex walked. And walked. And then walked some more. More than once, pausing to swipe the cold sweat on her forehead with her sleeve, she found herself experiencing a wave of full-body paralysis. It took all her willpower to resist the temptation to sit down and never get up. Calves and thighs cramping, outstretched arms aching, she lost all sense of distance and time. As she grew tired she began to stumble: skidding against a patch of loose rocks, catching her foot in a hoop of root. Her palms became grainy with scree, her elbows raw, the water flask in the back pocket of her jeans ominously light.
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It smelled dank and earthy and ever so slightly of that metallic musk that she remembered from Dardan Ismaili’s Story the day before. If Chloe were here now, Alex knew she would say that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But then Alex’s concept of insanity had grown rather baggy over the past thirty-six hours, and putting one foot in front of the other seemed the only sensible thing left to do.
Of course it was still possible that all this was happening in her head – super-realistic sense data and primordial instincts aside. Perhaps she had crashed, in Iain’s ridiculous plane. Perhaps she was strapped to a bed in Kirkwall hospital, tripping on heavy-duty painkillers. Her mother and father might be standing above her right now, clinging to each other and weeping while they watched her eyelids flicker, willing her to wake. Perhaps, just perhaps, if she tried hard enough . . . If she relaxed every muscle and breathed really deep, she would be able to simply open her—
‘Fuck!’ Alex felt rather than heard the shout inside her head as the blackness slammed into her face. She staggered back in a fizz of pain, grabbing at her nose with one hand while she flailed with the other to ward off attack. It took a few seconds of stumbling about, banging into the walls, before she realized.
She’d found the door.
They’d been telling the truth, then. The tunnel wasn’t just a very long grave. And the door to her Story – if it was indeed her Story – was exactly as MacBrian had described. It was firm but not rock-hard, slightly rough and faintly warm. Sweeping her hands over the surface, Alex felt the dip and curve of carved letters and used her fingertips to trace the words.
Dorothy Alexandra Moore.
They were right about that, too, then. Although neither MacBrian nor Taran had been quite able to describe how, exactly, this one tunnel could take whoever travelled down it to their very own Story, every time. Mouth dry, heart leaping, Alex pressed both palms against the door and pushed. It shifted, then jammed. She put her shoulder against it and shoved with all her might. It remained firmly stuck.
She’d asked them about this, as well.
‘If my Story is sealed from Readers,’ she had said, opening one eye from where she stood in the middle of MacBrian’s office, ‘what makes you think I can get in?’
‘Because you’re still coherent,’ MacBrian had replied, watching MacRob hoick Alex’s arms back up above her head with a frown. Alex had always been rubbish at sports, and it was looking increasingly likely that she would prove no better at Reading than at netball. Even holding the basic Reading posture for more than a few seconds seemed beyond her. ‘If you were shut out of your own Story, you’d have lost all language, all sense of self. You’d have gone insane.’
‘It seems likely,’ Alex had said, irritably shaking off MacRob, ‘that I have.’
‘For Library’s sake,’ MacBrian, who was visibly losing her headmistress cool by the minute, had snapped, ‘we don’t know what’s going to happen when you try to Read yourself, Miss Moore, but you’ll simply have to try. For your sake, as much as ours. Try.’
But trying, it seemed, wasn’t going to be enough. Even though she had proved to the Library that she was 100 per cent committed to Reading her own Story, by dutifully slogging all the way down into its subterranean guts. Reading someone else’s, up above ground in the Stacks, was starting to look easy in comparison – give or take a special gene or two, and decades of training. She braced her shoulders against the door, dug in her heels and strained with all her might until her back almost gave way. Panting, she rested her hands on her knees and gazed back up the tunnel.
Was that really it, then? Game over? Return to Go, a dozen miles uphill in the dark? Do not collect the Shield of Self-Knowledge or the Sword of Truth? Traipse back up and beg the Games mistress to give you another Life?
Alex turned and rested her damp forehead against the door.
A heartbeat later the door swung inwards and she was floundering forward into thin air, scrabbling at nothing. An updraught of warm wind scoured her face and her pupils contracted with the sudden transition from dark to light. Her right foot found solid ground, but the left continued to grope, sickeningly, for purchase, until her vision began to clear and she found herself staring down at a narrow walkway suspended above a fathomless abyss. Panicking, she tilted sideways even further. And for a moment it was as if it had already happened: the slip and the fall and the endless weightless tumble through the buffeting air. But then she managed to grab onto the doorframe, plant her left foot next to the right one and steady herself.
Alex clung to the slippery doorframe, her eyes fixed on her feet, her heart hammering. The walkway was narrow and the currents blowing up from the chasm were strong. She could still climb back through. She could still change her mind. But as the telltale taste of salty copper crept into Alex’s mouth she felt the calm wash through her, a hundred times stronger than it had been in Dardan Ismaili’s Stack. She tried to blink away the last of the dazzle, until she realized the darkness itself was shimmering. She looked up.
‘Room’ wasn’t really the word. There was no floor, no roof, no walls. The only architecture, if you could call it that, was the walkway she was standing on, which terminated in a small circular platform fifty feet from the door – although quite how she was supposed to move along it, without anything as sensible as a handrail, she wasn’t sure. The walkway was made from a cream-coloured matt substance that looked suspiciously like bone, and its surface was being lapped from above by washes of rainbow light. Alex looked higher.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
There had to be hundreds of thousands of Memories scintillating in the blackness high above the platform. In constant succession – so quickly that she could barely distinguish one from the next – silvery sparks from all over the chamber were swarming into loops, orbiting in bursts of colour, then shattering back out. It was so beautiful it made every hair on her body stand up in salute. So powerful it made her want to fall on her knees and stammer out a prayer. And, beneath the awe, she felt once more that eerie sense of déjà vu, as if she’d been in this immeasurably vast, deeply intimate place countless times before.
She raised her arms to either side, improvising a tightrope-walker’s pole. Then, taking a deep breath, she stepped out across the walkway. The calm blew against the backs of her legs, roiling up over her shoulders and buoying her towards the platform. And now, pupils dilating, she realized that Memories were forming right before her eyes: pinpricks of silver, blinking out of the air. They were, presumably, what she was seeing and feeling and thinking right now. Memories, she thought dizzily, about Memories. The new Memories were darting up to join the Storylines forming and re-forming overhead. But as soon as any of the newborn sparks touched a Storyline, the loop would give a discordant flash and burst apart. She was evidently struggling to fit this experience into what she thought about the world. About herself.
She took another step along the walkway. She was barely conscious, now, of the chasm below, and the calm carried her forward until she reached the centre of the platform. Dropping her head back, she gazed up at the Storylines far above. A twist of mint-green was rotating so fast its Memories had dissolved into one smooth blur. Moments later it exploded in a glittering spray, giving way to a silky lasso of blue and grey; then a short ochre cable; then a loose loop of pinky-red. But she could already see there was something not quite right about these Storylines – at least compared to those that had emerged from Ismaili’s Story the day before. Whereas his had shone with a clear, almost unbearable radiance, hers gave off only the faintest cloudy bloom. It was as if they were coated with a layer of glaucous mould. And then, as Memory after Memory was sucked inexorably into a new Storyline, she knew, without a doubt, that she had found what she was looking for.
It was twice as fat as the others and as big as a python, so dense that it was entirely opaque. Stuttering round sluggishly in a muddle of yellowish-brownish-greenish shades, it emi
tted an even dimmer, sicklier glow than all the rest. It hung above the platform for several minutes, much longer than any other Storyline. Then, when it finally broke apart, the Memories sheared away heavily, in uneven plasmic clumps.
‘Remember,’ MacBrian had said, ‘you don’t have much time. You won’t just be exposed to radiation in there, you’ll be immersed. The sooner you get through this, the sooner you can go home.’
Home. Remember home. Time to press play. Level one: Practice run.
Alex tried to gather her whirling senses. She shuffled her feet until they were hip-width apart. She went through the routine MacRob had shown her: unlock knees, drop weight, relax shoulders, lift arms. She pulled calm deep into her lungs fifty times, and fifty times let it out in a long exhale. By the time she had finished, she felt as still as stone, as heavy as earth, as light as air. Her mind sank and spread into a cool, glassy pool. She floated in it for a moment, breathing in stillness until every cell was washed clean. Then she looked up at the Storyline that had formed above her – a pale-orange braid. She closed her eyes. She dropped its image into the mind-pool. She raised her wrists.
The Storyline locked on almost instantly, barely an inch from her skin, blood-warm and crackling. Instinctively, Alex jerked back. Her eyes sprang open, and she found herself staring at a silver mist of Memories, already swarming back up into the darkness above.
‘Reading your own Storylines is a perfectly natural process,’ MacBrian had said. ‘You don’t need the genes and the skill that are required to Read someone else’s – just a little attention. The important thing is not to react. Don’t think too much. Don’t judge and don’t reach. Just let go.’
Don’t think too much. Just let go.
Alex got back into position and closed her eyes. It took her longer this time to establish the rhythm of her breathing, to still the last stubborn skitters of her mind. But the calm did its work, and after a while she was able to sink back into the mental pool. By this time the sheared-off Memories had re-formed into the hideous python. She wasn’t about to touch that until she’d got the hang of the others, so she had to wait until it had once again slowly sloughed apart. As soon as the next Storyline gathered – a long mauve lasso – she shut her eyes and offered up her wrists.
