She ran her empire in roughly the same fashion as ancient kings insisting on going to war personally rather than staying in the castle and moving pieces on the map with a wooden stick. But that was something. The audit... why would the Society be here for that?
“There’s a completely private one for my personal guests,” Johnny was saying when I tuned back in. My watcher-wounded hand had started to hurt for some reason, quietly building, as if ice were forming from some tiny core within it. “Down that hallway, and you’ll see a guy in a dark green suit? Tell him I sent you, and say ‘Independent review.’”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” she laughed.
Sofia disentangled herself, gave me a peck, and slipped through the crowd, her dress a trickle of mercury through all the dark fabrics. Where her lips had touched my cheek felt like a cigarette burn.
“Let’s go get some more food.” Johnny wriggled out of her sweater and handed it to Wayne, who folded it neatly to the size of a paperback book and placed it inside his own jacket pocket.
The crowd parted almost frantically around us. Her touch phobia, which to this day I wasn’t sure was real or staged, was well-known, in fact had literally been the subject of a documentary once, and although many palms hovered in congratulations over her bared shoulders, people probably knew they would have set off, at best, a crying jag and a swift retreat, or, at worst (and it had so often been worst) a couple of swift blows ending in broken collarbones, fingers, or jaws. Even a dislocated shoulder once, I remembered. An older man had touched her from behind and… bad angle. Bad land. She struck out like a wasp, not strategizing, just looking to jam in her sting and flee. The phobia had disappeared after the Anomaly, or her stubborn maintenance of the act had slackened off, but no one else here could know that.
Near the fireplace, the room was stifling; sweat gathered in my hairline and crawled down my face. I heaped up plates of random food in the low scarlet light, handed one to Johnny, and, although I was beginning to suspect she was already a little drunk, let her get two more glasses of champagne. Or no, what was the word…?
“Flutes, Nicky,” she said airily, as if I had projected it from my head like the lightshow outside. “Chug, chug. It won’t go flat right away but it’s kinda gross when it gets warm.”
Her tone was affectionate, familiar. If I hadn’t spent so long remembering and recreating everything she had done to me, it would have been so easy to just... tell her everything. Fall back into the deep permanent me-shaped rut that she wanted me to see was still there, and still perfectly intact, even though we were both so different now. Look, she was saying. I won’t treat you any differently. Everything you miss is waiting for you. Everything you’ve been missing during this long cold self-enforced solitary sentence. See, I don’t even mind your girlfriend, or you not telling me. Because we’re best friends. Blood brothers. Aren’t we?
I took the glass and we wandered away from the fire into relatively cooler air. I’d play along, no more. Couldn’t she see, she who had known me all my life, that I wasn’t hers any more? That she had thrown me away by telling me the truth? At the very least, could she not fucking tell that I had a higher mission now than being her pet?
Anyway, I’d put something on her plate that I hadn’t put on mine, and I wanted it. “What’s that?”
“Stuffed mushroom, I think.”
“Stuffed with what?”
“Haggis.”
I frowned, and stabbed it with my tiny fork. “I thought a haggis was a whole... thing. Like I’m picturing an animal the size of a volleyball.”
“I think that’s a weirdly common misconception.”
I drained my flute, the bubbles crackling between my teeth. The second glass of champagne, I decided, was better than the first. More like fine-grit than coarse-grit sandpaper. But it still left me desperately thirsty. “What’s in this stuff?”
“I know, it does the same thing to me. I think it’s a rich people conspiracy to sell more champagne.”
“You’re a rich people.”
“No, I just have money. They’re rich.” Her apparently casual gesture at the crowd somehow managed to hand off her empty glass and swap it with a full one; she gave it to me. I wiped my face with my sleeve again. My left hand hurt so badly it was taking an increasing amount of concentration not to clench it into a fist, and break the delicate glass.
“So,” she said. “You and Sofia.”
“Uh.”
“Is that what you were going to tell me earlier?”
“No.”
She smiled, a careful selection from her arsenal, one I knew well: sly, self-satisfied, slow, only wavering for a second when it seemed I wouldn’t react to it.
“I thought it was so romantic,” she breathed, “the way she came in half an hour before you did.”
“What? No she didn’t.”
From her belt she unclipped a phone case I hadn’t noticed, black leather with a glittery unicorn sticker on it. “So, the station up front where you got your wristband? That laptop is synced up with my records. Neat, huh? And so nice to see that you… managed to reunite after meeting once? It’s like something from a movie. Like Cinderella. You Prince Charming you.”
You know what? You’re one to fucking talk. You were sneaking around behind the scenes for my entire life, making sure anyone who might have loved me or even liked me suddenly had to move away or switch schools, got fired from their jobs or transferred to another country. You think I’ve forgotten? Or you’re forgiven? Looking up at me like that, so innocent?
But we couldn’t talk about it. Still. Never.
The room swam with heat and pain as I tried to focus on a real response. Of course Johnny thought we’d only met once. In Fes, when Sofia had appeared out of nowhere, saving both our asses. What was the obvious...? “Okay, not that it’s any of your business, but yeah, she did find me afterwards. It wasn’t like you made me hard to find. We talk a lot on ICQ and stuff, this is the first time we’ve seen each other in… listen, the main thing is, we have to keep it on the down-low from her dad. He doesn’t want her to date while she’s in school. He’d be pissed. Pissed, she says.”
“Totally hear you,” Johnny said. “He used to say it all the time. Even when she was little. You know. No boys. Keep your eyes on your books. Boys are evil. Only after one thing.”
“Yeah, you get it.”
“Mm. So that must be why she took you to this party,” she went on, jerking her chin at the room. “A big, public event, with scientists and celebrities and politicians and royalty. Where you’d be filmed together. And photographed together. And that the Society’s had two tickets to since last September. Makes perfect sense.”
“None of my business,” I said again. “I got nothing to do with those weirdos. I’m here for the free food. And what’s that over there?” I gestured at the pedestal in the middle of the room.
“Nice subject change. Come look at my pride and joy,” she said. “You may as well, since you came all this way just for... the party. I’ll show Sofia when she comes back from the bathroom, too. Not everybody is getting the personal tour, you know.”
“Poor them.”
It wasn’t an ice sculpture as I had thought, but a glass dome over a tiny model of a building, perched atop an island the size of a paperback book. It might have been made out of paper-thin folded metal. “What is this, a reactor for ants?” I said.
“I know, right? The thing is, the working part of the real reactor is about the size of a hockey puck, but you can’t just put something that small out there. It needs to look legit. People get nervous if it doesn’t.”
She tapped the dome with her glass, making everyone around us cringe at the noise. “This is my favourite thing. We’re not doing a lot of transparent nanoceramic because of the interactive bond-degradation problem, but I begged them to make enough for the model. It took months. I utterly degraded myself. We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!”
“Yeah. I
bet.”
“And then I came over and me and Wing ran it over with one of the lab trucks to see if it would break. It was awesome.”
“…Ran this over?”
“We buffed out the tiremarks afterwards. You could blast this with a railgun and it probably wouldn’t break.” She paused, thinking, and sipped her champagne. “It might chip. Anyway, generation is fully automated, but there’s remote control just in case. See, there’s the signal array. We used the experimental molpoxy on it, the entire roof will rip off before that dish does. On the building, I mean, not here. This is all held together with superglue. The torus and shielding goes there, under the red X. Except I forgot to put one on the mockup so I had to borrow some nail polish from one of tonight’s makeup guys.”
“A professional did your makeup? I hope you didn’t pay them.”
“Shut up. I kept touching my face during the photoshoot. Anyway, I made sure the reactor is about the size of a golf cart, and the rest of the building is mostly safety stuff in case of storms or seismicity, and smart grid control systems to regulate the undersea cable distribution load and deal with surges. And make sure that it’s tuned to... to avoid... the problem we had when it was initially developed.”
“The,” I said slowly, “problem.”
She tilted her chin defiantly, as if one of us had said, Are you referring to the ‘problem’ that accidentally but very nearly ended the world? “I’ve had trial versions running with no issues, no harmonics. Oh, and down there, that’s the pod system for personnel in case the drones can’t reach the island.”
“And what’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That,” I said, touching the top of the dome, where a half-dozen small, shiny orbs had been meticulously painted on the underside. “Is it for measurements or whatever? Wind? Waves? Are those weather balloons?”
She blinked. “Those are a reflection.”
As one, our chins dragged themselves to the vertical, pinning our horrified stares on the high, crossed beams of the ceiling where the light refused to go.
“Remember that one time we rode our bikes north of town,” she whispered, “and—”
“—went to that old grain elevator because—”
“—I wanted to test my cyclonic densities detector, and it was full of...” She carefully put her glass on the pedestal, without looking down.
“Oh man,” I said, still staring. “It would be awesome if those things were bats.”
And, as if it had only been waiting for us to meet its gaze, darkness descended.
THE THINGS BILLOWED down in silence, formless and lazy as parachutes, so that for the first moments people smiled up at them, maybe thinking it was some kind of art installation. But Johnny dove to the ground, rolling away from the roped pedestal, and I did too, just as the screaming began: one high, terrified note, quickly joined by dozens of others.
“Everybody outside!” someone cried, but it trailed off into an awful, wet gurgle. Ballgowns and shining shoes flowed past us like water, confused with other bright things: eyes that were not eyes, just membranous lights; hair that wasn’t hair but strings of slime; feathers as far from feathers as anything you’d see in a nightmare; and worst of all, recognizably human, or imitating a human: familiar skulls, femurs, eyes mindless with pain. Feet hammered against my shoulders as I rolled into a ball, watching for Johnny, the bright winks of her metal belt.
Many of the creatures were pulsating far outside the normal spectrum, hues you’d only see in sigils. The palms of their hands stuttered and flashed like strobe lights, sending people unseeing into the walls, to be quickly picked up by scavenging beasts while they lay stunned. Others extruded what I took to be streams of bubbling liquid but quickly proved to be tentacles, stabbing through clothing and into spines, wearing people like dangle-legged puppets high in the air, screaming and scrabbling for their pierced backs.
People fell, were swarmed at once, flung into the air, released to fall howling into thrashing nests of teeth and limbs, splattered ichor, humans and human-monsters trading identical blows. The hall echoed with voices, the clang of dislodged weapons, crash of broken wood and bone. Someone pulled the fire alarm and that did it: time slowed to a crawl, and everything glanced off the surface of my eyes instead of sinking in.
Up, one hand crunching over broken crystal: the bloodied rainbows of a highball glass etched with thistles. Where had Johnny gone? Her security people surely—no. Smothered in flapping wings and claws, two gunshots virtually unheard over the noise of the alarm, three shots, four, a spray of them, why would you stop shooting once you’d started, why did they have guns? Something whined past my nose: not a bullet but a human head, bodiless, mouth filled with tentacles, the tiny wings behind either ear pitted and oozing.
A semaphore of flashing discs: there. Johnny hadn’t gone far, only crouched behind the pedestal with a silver hors-d’oeuvre tray. Good idea actually. I picked one up myself and ducked instinctively as something swooped over my head, catching in my hair for a moment with a skittering skritch that told me it had hit scalp. I flailed at it, snarling, but it was long gone, lost in the commotion.
What spells did I know to fuck something up in here? I couldn’t remember. Maybe they hadn’t taught me any. Probably for the best. My brain was flying in a million directions, couldn’t even focus to see properly, my vision seemed washed out with fireworks of panic. At least the room was still emptying, the walking-wounded dragging the just-plain-wounded, occasionally picking up a monster that seemed more human than the others, releasing them with a cry of disgust. The escape was jittery, stop-and-start, chaos as people stopped to fight the creatures at the doors, creating bottlenecks. The human puppets swooped down, away, back, mobbing, screaming, scrabbling at people’s faces and tossing them aside.
Johnny squealed as someone descended on her, clawing at her bare shoulders. As she kicked it away, I walloped it with the tray, casting around for a weapon—the walls, for Chrissake!
I made it about two steps before she grabbed my wrist, and I turned in surprise only to realize that it actually was a tentacle this time. Hitting it did nothing; I turned my head away, shouting helplessly as the mass of purplish bulges and glittering teeth began to drag me away from the sword-covered walls. Its face was half-familiar, bearded, all too human except where the eyes had been replaced with something else.
Flailing at the thing with my free arm, I unexpectedly fell on my face as it crashed into something and lost its grip, leaving my wrist with a burnt-looking ring and a dozen spots of bloodied flesh. Broken? Hope not. I spun again while it was distracted and wrenched a sword loose from its display—massive, ancient, blunt, with a chipped metal handle that stuck at once to the oozing cuts on my palm.
Then it came into crystal focus, like a lens had swung down; Johnny met my eye and I heard her think it too, clear as words. Oh shit. Oh Christ. It can’t be.
The monsters weren’t trying to kill her.
They were trying to capture her.
(And maybe me, judging from that last grab.)
And if we didn’t escape them we’d better figure out a more drastic solution, because any reason they wanted her alive meant death was the better option.
Things flew, banked, crashed to the floor in cocoons of slime—half-here, half-somewhere else, unreal, flickering in sync with their battle cries. Wide slicks of food, liquor, blood, other things (don’t think about it don’t look don’t touch it) impeded the last few people racing through the doors, hampered in dress hems and coattails, dropped jackets. The cold, rotten reek of magic mixed with the smell of whiskey, and some small, still functioning part of me thought: Well, that’s that; I’ll never have a sip of the stuff in my life.
“Go!” Johnny gasped, pointing at the door. “Quick!”
“You go first!”
“I’m right behind y—”
She cried out as something huge and scaly dropped, really fell this time, as if it could not fly at all, clumsily
flattening both her and the pedestal; the domed model rocked, wobbled, recovered, and then, impaled abruptly by the thing’s claw, exploded into a billion glittering shards as if it had only been waiting to be relieved of some impossible level of internal stress.
The creature towered over us both, studded everywhere with the starry bits of broken dome, a collection of human faces stretched over its wings—or not wings, but flat membranes extending from its back. Its dozen thick limbs were all occupied in pulling the struggling Johnny from the floor. And failing: horrifyingly, there was so much blood on her bare skin that it couldn’t get a grip.
My vision narrowed to a pinprick. I ran roaring at the thing, swinging the sword, feeling my thumb wrench back with a pop as blade met scale.
Something dug into my throat, something else seized my jacket; something that felt horribly like a beak crunched into my ear. They all felt very far away. All that mattered was the noises Johnny was making, noises that even I, who had heard her scream at least once a week for most of my life, could not tolerate with any degree of rationality.
I was being dragged backwards, but my sword was stuck in the monster, a real hit, and greenish liquid was pouring onto the floor, and Johnny was alive, rising, running. Towards me, and then past, grabbing my sleeve. I twisted free from the things behind me, shuddering at their highpitched wail that was so nearly human speech, and then we too were through the doors and outside, plunging through the icy fog at a dead run.
“Keep moving!” Johnny panted, glancing back as we threw ourselves down the hill towards the main road, sliding on the wet stone. “Can’t let any escape. Move outta range!”
A Broken Darkness Page 4
