by Molly Flatt
She took down a hardback copy of Maus and leafed through the pages. ‘Are these your dad’s?’
He grunted assent. ‘There’s a whole barnful out there. My mother was always pretending she was going to sell them.’ He considered the Maus, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘I suppose she might, now.’
‘Finn, I really am—’
‘It’s alright.’ He took the book from her and slotted it carefully back into place. ‘You don’t have to. I know. And we have to get on with your training. Innate autoReading skills obviously aren’t going to be enough to tackle whatever’s going on with your Story. We have one night to get you as near to professional as we can. But, first, sit down and tell me everything you know about what’s happened. From the beginning, in your own words.’
She tried to touch the recollections as lightly as possible to avoid an episode. Once she started, however, it all began to spill out in a furious, rambling rush. The events of 17 February. The attack and attempted attack, six months later. Her arrival on Iskeull. Her first interview with Taran and MacBrian.
‘That was the night I went for my wander on the peninsula,’ Alex said, pausing to drink more tea, in an attempt to soothe her lurching stomach. ‘Obviously, after our little altercation and my detour into the Library, the GCAS cover was blown. I was totally freaking out, so MacBrian took me into one of the Stacks and gave me a demo with a woman called Curstag MacRob. Then she took me into I-537 and showed me my Story.’ She swallowed, feeling the horror rush back. ‘I knew it was mine as soon as I saw it.’
Finn nodded. ‘No-one can mistake their own Story.’
‘Deep down, I’d known there was something wrong with me for months.’ She described the episodes. The slipperiness of her thoughts. The months spent on a hollow, manic high. The dizzy, exhilarating feeling of having been cut free from everything she had been before. Then she related, as accurately as she could, what she had been told about the night Egan MacCalum had died.
When she’d finished, Finn continued to sit in silence, staring at the fire.
‘Is that what you heard?’ Alex asked.
‘It’s the same as what Taran told me.’
‘But you think Dughlas was lying?’
Finn grunted. ‘Everyone thinks I’m trying to defend him, but my father would never have lied like that. And he was just as good a Reader as he’d ever been. Reading gave him energy. It was the political bullcrap that made him tired.’ He leaned forward and stabbed at the fire with a poker. ‘Anyway, Dughlas was the last person he would have asked to help him, even if he had gone mad and decided to take on secret shifts. He barely even knew Dughlas was alive.’
‘So you think MacBrian is in on it? That she was trying to set your dad up?’
‘She’s always been ambitious. Pushy. Cold. A bad Reader but a clever politician, clawing her way up.’ Finn gave the fire a final rattle, then propped the poker back on the hearth. ‘Anyway. Go on. Taran said they showed you your Reading record?’
So she told him about the abortive first Reading. About Dom’s job offer. About the miserable summer before St J’s. And about Taran’s hypothesis.
‘And I’m afraid that he’s right, you know,’ she added. ‘About Story-surging. About that mutated Memory. I didn’t want to believe it, but I found evidence, at home.’ She took the pink-and-purple diary out of her rucksack and rifled through the pages. ‘I described it taking root in me, when I was eleven years old. And even back then, I knew what it was capable of. That’s the worst thing.’ She handed it to him, open on the final entry. ‘Look. I knew.’
He read it several times, then looked up. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.
‘Well, I tried pretty damn hard not to believe it, either. I wish it wasn’t true. But there it is, in black and white. Everything my mother told me corroborates it. And everything I heard from Mae, Chloe, Dom. It seems that I really have spent my whole life trying to keep this power where it belongs – inside me, wrapped up inside a big fat Storyline, nice and safe, only screwing up my life. Until your dad got his hands on it. And now my Story’s trying to stop me from getting control of it again. It’s rotting my Memories. It’s rotting me. I saw it. I tasted it.’ And then she told him, as best she could, with the hopelessly inadequate words she had at her disposal, what had happened when she’d gone through that dark chamber at the centre of the Stacks. When she’d walked all the way down the tunnel to her Story, and tried to Read her Storyline.
The next thing she knew, Finn’s face was slowly solidifying into existence inches away from hers.
‘Dorothy?’ he was saying. ‘Dorothy? Alex?’
‘Ngg,’ she said. She licked her lips, stirred, located her hands, tried to push herself up from where she lay curled on the floor.
‘Careful.’ Finn kneeled behind her and scooped her into a sitting position, propping her against him.
‘Are you alright?’
She shook her head.
‘That was it, wasn’t it?’ he asked. ‘That was an episode?’
She nodded. She licked her lips again and rolled her eyes wildly until Finn, finally getting it, reached over to the other side of her chair and passed her the mug of cold tea.
‘Mild,’ she mumbled, after she’d slurped some down. ‘That was mild compared to the episode I had down there, when I tried to Read my Storyline. I got close to that mutated root Memory, I know I did, and my Story didn’t like it one bit.’
She sank back against him and let the heat from the fire soak through her body as it tried to stitch itself back into something resembling a whole.
‘I did try, Finn,’ she said quietly. ‘I did. But this mutation is too powerful. It’s so powerful, so dangerous, that none of the other Stories in that Stack can bear to even be near it, for goodness’ sake. It’s preventing millions of people from being Read. It’s devastating this place with storms. It’s forcing your leaders to override their deepest values and agree to murder, just so it can be stopped. You say I’m strong, but how can you expect me to overcome something like that?’
‘Because it’s your Story,’ Finn murmured. ‘You’ve asked all these people what they think of you, but none of that matters if you can’t hear what your own Story is trying to say. You need to start trusting your instincts, Alex. There has to be a missing piece. There has to be something we don’t know.’
‘Like the time?’ said a voice from the doorway.
Finn sprang to his feet, depositing Alex in an ungainly sprawl onto the floor. The cat trotted over and rubbed itself against the mud-splattered leather boots of the woman standing framed in the doorway.
Alex hauled herself up with as much dignity as she could. The woman was short and solid with a thick black plait, badger-streaked with white, pinned round her head. But the eyes were his: chips of bright, shifting flint-grey.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said. ‘I’m really sorry about what happened to your husband.’
Cait MacMorgan gave her a steady appraisal from head to toe. ‘I wondered where that jumper had gone,’ she said. it.’
‘I know it doesn’t help,’ Alex said, ‘but I didn’t mean to do it.’
‘So they say,’ she said. ‘And no. It doesn’t.’
Finn spoke again, rapidly, and Cait replied without looking away from Alex. Her tone was calm but, from the look of Finn’s clenched jaw and stiffening posture, it couched a robust bollocking. Finn started to reply, gesturing, but Cait spoke over him until he fell quiet.
‘Are you going to give me up?’ Alex said when she could bear it no longer. ‘To them? To her?’
Cait turned to look at her. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘If it is true that Sorcha MacBrian has somehow gained permission to order your death, I am appalled. Every right-minded Reader across the world will be appalled.’
‘I’m going to try again,’ Alex burst out. ‘To fix it. I’m not sure what good it will do, but I really will try.’
Cait bent to pull off her boots. ‘As my late husband would
say, do, or do not. There is no try.’
Alex blinked. ‘I think that was Yoda,’ she said.
‘I know it was Yoda,’ Cait said witheringly. ‘Egan insisted on watching that ridiculous film every time we went to Kirkwall. Now, is one of you going to get me a drink?’
21
Her parents’ skulls exploded like watermelons. A sniper bored a hole in Harry’s temple. Lenni was stunned by a rifle butt, then bundled into a revving van. As she rode through the cold morning rain, Alex cursed all the movies and games that had given her imagination such a spectacular collection of snuff scenes.
Iain could be in London by now. Or Fring. Or Twickenham, dear God. Of course he might simply leave, once he realized she’d disappeared. He might already be getting shaky, losing focus. Perhaps he was making mistakes, like the ones he – or Dughlas, or whoever her previous would-be hitman had been – had made outside L’Antiga Capella. Then again, he might already have kidnapped Bo. She’d told MacBrian and that doctor so much about her loved ones, both friends and family. If the health of the Library and the civic order of Iskeull were at stake, wouldn’t it be a no-brainer for them to use all the leverage they had, to bring her to heel?
Alex had snatched a couple of hours’ sleep in Cait MacMorgan’s spare room, after a gruelling all-night Reading training session with Finn. But the sleep simply appeared to have given her system just enough time to reboot out of shock-induced safety mode and into fully functioning what-the-fuck-am-I-doing alert. Cait’s stoic presence had somehow kept her calm as she forced down 3 a.m. eggs and tea. But now as she glanced at Finn, paler and bonier than ever in the moonlight, she could only think of how young he looked – a thought that segued into a panicked internal plea about how young she was. Too young to save the world. Too young to die.
Her plodding farm horse snorted and threw up its head. Finn turned to look at her. Alex took a breath to tell him that it was all a mistake. That she didn’t give a shit about humankind any more. That all the mind-calming techniques on the planet weren’t going to help her in that lonely chamber, and that she’d take her chances with the killer thing inside her and a succession of half-crippled assassins back home. But then Finn put his finger on his lips and pointed, and Alex saw the hulking shape of GCAS EU HQ solidifying out of the mist. They had reached the outskirts of the town.
They tied the horses in an open-fronted shelter, then continued on foot into the streets. As they wended their way along the cobbles Alex saw, from beneath the curve of her hood, a trickle of people in grey Reading uniforms emerging out of doorways, some of them still chewing on breakfast bannocks. They clumped into groups as they walked, exchanging subdued greetings, but the drum of the rain kept their heads down and their conversations to a minimum. None of them wasted a glance on the antisocial pair skirting the edges of the buildings and slipping off, wherever possible, to follow a parallel path up the town through emptier alleyways.
After half an hour or so Alex caught a glimpse of the public arena, at the end of the street they were crossing. At its centre stood the statue of Egan MacCalum, in profile. Even from this distance, she could see that the sculptor had been hard at work. Last week, MacCalum’s arms had dissolved into formless stone below the elbow. Now the one facing them was complete, its hand spread like a star in the direction of the Director’s gaze, as if the long, elegant fingers were being pulled by some invisible force towards the peninsula beyond the roofs. Feeling her stomach plummet and the dizziness rise, Alex turned away to look at Finn. But Finn’s hood was fixed ahead, and something about the set of his shoulders warned her not to comment.
Eventually they reached the north end of the town. As they emerged out onto the avenue, the rain-spiked wind attacked with ferocious force. Alex’s hood flew back, and for one terrible moment she found her face exposed, before Finn helped her wrestle the wax-cloth back over her head. Thankfully, the others walking out around them were too busy battling their own way through the gale to notice. But Alex had already snatched a glimpse of the picket lines snaking away on either side of the bell tower in front of the causeway, and she suddenly found that her legs wouldn’t work. Finn had warned her about the protests, of course. He had told her about the islanders who felt that Reading was now too risky, and that all activity in the Library should cease. Mixed in with them, he said, were a number of MacBrian’s political opponents, who were calling for a vote of no confidence in her leadership – as well as a good dose of generic troublemakers who were just happy for a chance to shout. However, knowing to expect them didn’t make the sight of the makeshift shelters, with their banners and fires and angry Iskeullians with underlit scowls, any less terrifying. Then, as Alex stood paralysed, the first great boom of the shift-change bell rang out. She let out a strangled moan.
Finn’s hand closed around her wrist. ‘Alex,’ he said, his voice loud in her ear, ‘remember. You’re strong.’ She took a deep breath, returned her gaze to Cait’s spare boots and forced them to uproot themselves, one step at a time. Still holding her wrist, Finn steered her forward, right into the stream of commuters. The bell struck again. Alex heard the snap and flap of canvas, the shuffle and thump of boots, the mercifully unintelligible rumble of a chant. Then the bell rang out a third time and Finn tightened his grip.
They were right at the front of the bell tower now, shoulder-to-shoulder with the islanders still willing to Read. Alex heard the murmur of voices as Readers exchanged words with guards, the rustle of papers as they took shift-chits from pockets and bags. Then the bell boomed a fourth time and Finn’s grip was gone, leaving her wrist weightless and cold. He had been careful to explain what she should expect to happen at every stage of their journey, up until the point at which they had no idea what was going to happen – which was around about now.
A female voice, somewhere just in front of Alex, asked a question in Iskeullian.
She’s talking to someone else. Come on, Finn. Come on.
The woman repeated the question, louder. Alex stared at her toes.
Finn. What the fuck are you doing? Hurry the fucking fuck up.
The woman spoke again, sharply, and touched Alex’s shoulder. Alex was about to throw herself, sobbing, on her mercy, when she heard him shout.
Several voices started up at once, loudly. There was a yell, then a cheer; another cheer, a tumble of cries. Alex was jostled sideways, bumped between bodies. She risked a glance in the direction of the noise. Finn was over on the far side of the bell tower. Hood thrown back, he was bellowing protestations of his father’s innocence and accusations against MacBrian, while a big male guard tried to drag him away. The other guards were instinctively flocking towards them, including some of those patrolling the picket lines. As Alex watched, the strikers furthest from Finn broke rank. At their head, she thought she recognized the bullish green shoulders of Lucas and the deep burr of his voice leading a chorus of outraged shouts.
The woman who had stopped Alex had turned to watch. Alex slipped past her into the bell tower before she could change her mind. Don’t run, she told herself as she walked through the passageway, staring at the hoop of grey waves ahead. I’m just a regular islander on my way to work. At 4 a.m. To Read a bunch of sleeping Europeans. Nice and easy. As her mother always said: More haste, darling, less speed.
Alex didn’t dare look back as she strode across the causeway, but from the sound of the racket behind her, Finn’s distraction had worked better than they could have hoped. Feeling the path shudder beneath her boots, she glanced up, then jumped sideways just in time to avoid being mown down by a massive yellow horse. On top of the horse she saw MacBrian, her chin jutting grimly as she galloped back along the causeway with a dozen guards in her wake.
The sight of MacBrian gave Alex a burst of resolve. She clenched her fists and marched on, briskly now. How dare that haughty bitch have made her feel so guilty? MacBrian had switched from protector of the species to murderer in a matter of days, without any sort of genetic excuse. The Iskeullians migh
t have to nurse human consciousness in order to keep their island afloat, but it was becoming increasingly clear that they were no more noble than anyone Outside.
Safely on the peninsula, she crossed over the road to the rotunda and climbed the steps. Every moment, she expected to hear a shout or feel a hand on her arm. But everyone else was heading the other way, running out of the index or emerging from doors along the length of the archives to watch the drama unfolding at the other end of the causeway. Alex reached the top of the steps and passed through the double doors. And now there was nothing but the glow of lamplight, the squeak of her soles on the flagstones, the susurration of the rain on the domed glass. The voices around her were barely audible, the atmosphere subdued, and Alex realized just how skeleton the Library’s spooked staff had become. It took her three minutes to cross the index, and a heart-stopping moment of dithering deadlock with a pair of grey-booted feet before she could pass through the arch. Then she was out, on the other side of the rotunda, back in the rain.
She glanced up, now, from under her hood. More than half of the flares had been extinguished, turning the Library into a broken jumble of peaks and lumps. A few riderless horses grazed beside the remaining fires, and barely a couple of hundred mounted ones were emerging from the stables behind the archives and spreading out across the sandy paths. Bad for humankind, good for her right now. Thanks to the slope of the land, it was easy to make out the black hump at the centre of the Stacks. That hump was her target – the tomb that hid the tunnel that would, in turn, take her deep beneath the Library. After tracing the route that would take her there most quickly – a winding diagonal line – Alex focused on the dark bullseye and set off.
