“Out of range of what?” I shouted, but she was sprinting back towards the Great Hall, unhooking her belt.
I swore, a nonsensical string of syllables, and began to run after her. Later on I would remember how slow it felt—lumbering and clumsy, like a plane taking off next to a songbird. Five steps, six. Seven. A blossom of lightning-hot darkness.
Familiar. Where had I. Oh yes. The couch. The—
The explosion knocked me off my feet, allowing a surprisingly long time, as I flew, to imagine how expensive these special effects would be in a movie, unless you used computers, I supposed, and moreover that the Mythbusters had proven that in such close proximity to an explosion you would just turn to jelly, not become airborne and weightless, but my boots left the ground and the cool wind of my flight cradled me and all around me in a dense cloud like guardian angels flew chips of stone and glass and wood and metal and, I supposed, transparent nanoceramic, and monsters made to look like us.
That wasn’t out of range, was it, I tried to say, but I was too sleepy and the words wouldn’t come.
CHAPTER THREE
I WOKE, OR came to, what seemed like a few minutes later. The blackout had possessed a strangely infinite quality, as if it had been not months or years but an immeasurable amount of time, too long to capture in numbers, compressed into a period of perfect darkness unrelieved by a single mote of light. I felt like I had been running for the entire time, ruining my feet, wrecking my back. Thought about school, phys-ed class the last year of high school, when they couldn’t really think of what to do with us, grown men, and just made us run.
No more school. Real world. Sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, earth doesn’t revolve around you. Get up. Up.
Everything hurt. I lay on the cobbles, my field of vision filled with the strangely broken sky. Something wrong with it. Hard to see with eyes. What other senses to use? Like pigeons maybe: magnetic fields, the pull of something other than light. Blurry stone walls crowded me on three sides, like worried bystanders.
Standing took a while and there was plenty to look at while I clawed my way up the wall. The Great Hall, for example: the glowing heap of wreckage, still encircled by a few stubborn stones, was sort of on fire—greenish, fading as I watched to gray, and then nothing, only a curious shimmer above it, like heat haze. The stench of something not quite magic, but not quite not, hung in the still air.
That strange flame. Was something still burning under there, something that would burn without light or heat? Those monsters, pretending to be people. Or people made into monsters. Or… whatever they had been. The fear shuddering inside me felt oddly familiar, and I thought if I had been a peasant in, say, fifteenth-century Europe, born after the big outbreaks and only knowing horror stories of the plague, I might feel something similar if someone had staggered out of the woods in front of me covered in black buboes and dropped dead. Something known and unknown; something that should not have happened, something I had been told could not happen.
Yeah. Told by who?
Maybe some of that flame had been Johnny, trapped and burning under the wreckage. Or what was left of her. And if she was dead, how would I… how would the world…?
I stood there unable to move for so long that eventually the paramedics found me themselves and walked me gently down the hill, their voices audible, even recognizable as English, but incomprehensible through the roar in my head.
The white pop-up party tents that had held DJs and speakers and appetizers and ice buckets brimming with beer bottles had all been commandeered, converted to impromptu medical stations crammed with medics and stretchers. Down the road, sirens sang through the fog, sending up fans of blue and red light.
No, I’d know if she were dead. I’d know. Don’t think about it. Think about what to do next.
What the hell did she do?
Don’t think about it.
As I walked, each step sent electricity through my body, hairfine crackling pain ricocheting from heels to forehead and earthing in the bloodless wound in my left hand. Serves me right. My fault. Tried to fix that mistake by cringing like a kicked dog, and going here where I was sent. And see how that turned out. I didn’t even know where Sofia was. Louis was going to kill me. If he hadn’t been ready to kill me before (himself, or in some worse, official fashion, involving the entire Society), he’d definitely do it now. I’d just be disappeared.
Calm down. Don’t say anything. Something can be salvaged, something can always be salvaged. There’s no one to yell at but yourself now.
Okay. Okay.
Inside the tent I sat as directed on a shaky pair of stacked coolers. Five other people lay around me on stretchers shoved between small folding tables still laden with cold food. It smelled powerfully like bacon, and under that a thin sickly current of blood, rubbing alcohol, vomit. The champagne in my stomach gurgled loudly, which I ignored.
“Deep breath, little pinch.”
I breathed, and held very still, and accepted the murmured praise. Someone stuck a small round patch on the back of my hand, and warmth crept up my arm, settled into my chest.
“Give me that hand, love.”
Glass removed. Expensive crystal shards. Nanoceramic too, probably. That un-shatterable dome.
“Now the other one.”
A gravel pit’s worth of tiny rocks had to be painstakingly mined out and scraped free, pattering stickily to the ground from the tweezer’s tips. How had it gotten so deep?
“Eyes closed.”
Cuts glued shut, strange smell of mint. Why not make a medicinal glue smell less medicinal? Not herb or solvent, something else, something nice—think of it later. Hum of a device along my face: I opened my eyes despite my instructions, saw the Chambers Medical logo, black ink on gray plastic, drive past my face. Instant, disconcerting tightness of the skin knitting itself shut, embracing, hands across America. Sky-blue tape around my wrist and thumb. A different device, white. Cloth on my face.
You think you can get away from her, but you can’t. But what does it mean if we all get away from her? Look at this fucking thing on my face. Look at it simply and seamlessly sticking me back together. Like special effects. Did we get away from her? Is that what we did? What happens now?
“Can you press on that? Press on that, my love, for a minute.”
She wasn’t dead because I’d know if she was dead. That was all. That was the entirety of it. She was not. And anyway, even if she was. The Society would… they’d fix this. Whatever this was. Power in numbers.
“Press hard! That’s right. Keep the pressure on.”
She was not dead because something would have told me if she were dead and I didn’t care what that was. Along all the ways that we were (not used to be) connected I felt that none were severed. In my head I walked along them, plucking them like a spider testing the strands of its web for soundness.
Not by the bonds of our covenant, nor by the bonds of trauma, by proximity; not by time, love, hate, or blood were we apart. We were not.
And anyway, some fucking genius, setting off something she couldn’t escape. Her ego wouldn’t let her even consider dying like that. Would it. Not for someone who kept saying she wanted to save the world.
I talked to myself in silence, moving my lips without breath, holding the cloth to my nose as the medic did something cold and painful to my left ear. They let me go half an hour later, after an unbelievable amount of paperwork, and I staggered outside and instinctively looked up: framed by stone arches, a hole had been punched in the clouds, edges razor-sharp, containing within it like the deep still water of a well a smattering of stars... and an enormous violet-blue aurora crossing the darkness like a malediction, a no-smoking sign. Banned, barred. You cannot come here. You shall not pass.
The castle grounds were busy, orderly, the earlier chaos giving way to shellshocked obedience. Police filed up and down the slopes holding clipboards like leafcutter ants. The hot white reflections of their safety gear kept reminding me of th
e explosion: like a nuke, an anti-nuke, releasing darkness rather than light, hurtful to the eyes. Everything wrong about it. What had Johnny done? I hoped no one would arrest me and ask the same question. Witness to the crime. Present at ground zero. Accomplice, possibly. Maybe it would be better if she had taken her secrets to the grave.
No such luck. She was outside a tent, gadgets dangling from fingers and chest, getting nebulized and crying a little bit, tears cutting through the dust and blood on one side of her face and bumping over dozens of tiny cuts on the other.
I stood well back between two canvas walls, watching her while she couldn’t watch me, trying to get my brain around the edges of what I was feeling. Whatever it was, it was sharp enough to cut, it hurt me in places where I thought the nerves had died, it clenched my just-repaired hands into fists that broke the cuts back open.
I thought about her destroyed model, stainless steel and superglue and nail polish under its supposedly indestructible dome. Years ago, in her passion for what she called the ‘iterative economy,’ she had cooked up a thousand low-carbon and biodegradable substitutes for plastic and styrofoam, but had never managed to duplicate glass, only things that looked like it.
“It’s too weird,” she had told me once. Sitting on her balcony in the middle of the night, cherry Slurpees, grass stains on our knees, mosquitoes around us disoriented and colliding in the field of her repeller. “I mean weird in the physics sense. Wyrd, maybe. It’s a matrix, it’s a slow liquid, it’s a glacier moving at its glacial pace and scale; but it’s also a crystal, it’s also a galaxy. Basically it’s a jerk. I can’t engineer the same chaos. It does it by itself.”
Yes. I am the only thing you ever made that turned out the way you thought it would. And now I too am unmaking myself. And one day everyone will know you are a monster, not just me.
When they took her mask off, I took a deep breath, smoothed the anger from my face, and headed towards the tent. She met my eyes just as a tall thin policeman stepped in front of me, holding a clipboard as big as the serving tray I’d lost in the Great Hall.
“Sir? Like to come with me for a minute?”
“I have to check on my friend,” I said. “She shouldn’t be alone.” It’s dangerous for people, I almost added.
“Wasn’t really a request,” he said, then glanced over his shoulder. Johnny gave a minute head-shake, almost too small to see, not even dislodging the pendant of bloodied tears hanging from her chin. But the officer saw it, and wandered off. Not far, I noticed: maybe not close enough to eavesdrop over the noise of sirens and engines, but close enough to watch us.
“You okay?” Johnny said hoarsely.
“Better than you.”
She wiped her face on the blanket, leaving a smear of slightly less muddy skin; her eyes glittered like broken glass. “Really? You look like hell. Where’s Sofia?”
“She texted me. She’s okay. Went back to the hotel.”
“Is she.”
“Sure is.”
The paramedic still taping up her arm made an extremely good show of not paying attention.
“Nick,” she said quietly. “What are you really doing here? And if you say that you wanted a Scottish holiday in February with your secret girlfriend who’s in the middle of exams, I will literally stick a scalpel in you.”
“Can’t have one,” the paramedic said.
“I wasn’t asking.”
Wisely, he turned her loose. We retreated towards the castle, away from the flashing lights and headlights and flashlights and the new onslaught of photographers and reporters and cameramen. Drones were approaching from the city, still dots for now, their rotors sending ahead of them a kind of jaw-numbing hum of compressed air. “Up,” she said. “It might be safer.”
“Good, ’cause I got some things to say to you,” I said.
“Totally, but keep your voice down.”
Crunching over the broken glass, we ended up next to the cannons, looking down at the dog cemetery, a semicircular patch of turf edged with flowers. Miniature tombstones ringed the wall, epitaphs illegible in the shadow of the wall.
War dogs. There was really nothing people wouldn’t do if they wanted to kill someone, was there? There really was nothing. They’d even throw dogs at them. Dogs, the purest, kindest things humanity had ever managed to produce. Throw dogs into battle, and then bury them under small versions of human monuments as if that made up for it. They’d never know. Only that they had done what their people asked. Out of love, out of hunger to please, out of something else they did not even know they suffered from, the desperate fear of being turfed from the pack.
Before she could open her mouth again, I said, “What the hell just happened, and don’t you think that’s more important to answer than what I’m doing here?”
“Of course it’s important!”
“More important, I said. Look, I know you’re probably jealous or whatever—”
“Of what?”
I paused, and recalibrated. One thing I had learned, or that we had been forced to learn, two years ago, was how little actual adrenaline people usually operated with; and how badly your brain worked when your body was flooded with the stuff. “Look,” I said. “What happened? What the fuck did we just see? I thought you said nothing could ever come back here!”
“I did say that!”
“So you were lying? Like you lie about everything?”
“No!
Jesus Christ. I waited out a hideous wave of vertigo, clinging to the stone wall till something new broke open on my palm. “Just tell me.”
“I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. That’s the truth.”
“Uh huh. So those things just randomly showed up right where you were. Right after you activated the reactor you said you fixed. And not anywhere else. In the whole world. And you don’t know what happened—you, who knows more about anything, and definitely more about Them, than anybody else in the world. Absolutely. Makes perfect sense to me.”
“Listen. There haven’t been any reported sightings,” she said. “Okay? That’s true. They clearly came in from somewhere. But it doesn’t matter where They started off, because all the options are impossible. The spell I cast locked all the gates. Broke the keys off in the locks. Made them unusable.”
A house with all the doors shut, the bolts shot home, I thought. But you never knew who had owned your house before, did you? For billions or trillions of years, or more, maybe before time began, the Ancient Ones had existed; and even if They had slept or fought or dreamed for most of that time, who knew what They did when They weren’t sleeping? Our little blue marble hanging in space, its water, its life, everything being watched from somewhere both very far and very near... if you were one of those things, and you lived next to something teeming with life, how tempted would you be to break in if you couldn’t get in any other way? “Is there a way to get to Earth without a gate?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve never read about one.”
“Well, people don’t put everything in books!” I took a deep breath and tried to lower my voice. “We both saw what we saw! Everybody saw! Hell, it’s probably being broa—” I stopped, horrified. Broadcast all over the world. What if Mom had seen that, the kids had seen that? There had been cameras in the room, I had seen them, a half-dozen, easily. If they knew I was here, instead of where I said I was, my cover would be blown, I would…
Johnny, apparently not noticing my internal screaming, said, “The thing is, Their matter doesn’t really work like ours, I don’t think. A lot of the writing, the thinking about it, has been lost. When They show up in dreams, are They real? Is anything in a dream real? Or in a coma, or delirium, or when you’re high. There have been sightings of all of those. But where are They, when you see Them in a dream?”
“Oh my fucking God.”
She shook her head, the side of her bloodied lip twitching, revealing a flash of incisor. I glanced down at her torn dress, billowing in the cold breeze; her arms were cove
red with goosebumps. And what was that on the back of one arm? It couldn’t be… no. Darkness playing tricks on me. Reluctantly, I gave her my jacket, ignoring her nose-wrinkle as she put it on. The damp air soaked instantly into my sweat-sodden shirt and I began to shiver. “So you’re just going to stand there and tell me to believe you,” I said, “about the reactor.”
“Yes.”
I looked out at the city for a minute, dazed. Warm, lit windows; cars moving slowly down the roads; cranes near-invisible further out, just their lights gleaming far above all the rooftops like fallen stars. A lit and pillared building like Greek ruins. A clock in a domed tower, telling the wrong time. Or had my watch stopped? It was a nice view, if you didn’t look straight up. I couldn’t help but feel that it was listening to us, that rip in the clouds. As if it were anything more than water vapour arranged in the most menacing possible configuration. “You knew this was going to happen.”
“What?”
“You blew up a castle! You didn’t even have to go back to the car or anything! You were already carrying a… what was that, anyway?”
She patted her belt, which had four neat parallel scratches down one of the discs, just visible in the dim, lilac light. The disc next to it was missing, revealing a short length of chain and two small strips of dangling duct tape. “Built a one-shot plasma fusion field generator into the back of that one.”
“…The issue here being that you had it on you.”
“Yeah. Just in case.”
“In case of what.”
“Just in case.”
“There’s no reason you’d need a, a, a weapon of mass destruction on you unless you thought something like this was going to happen, Johnny.”
“I know what it looks like. But it’s not for... Them. It’s for anything.”
“You could have killed people. A lot of people. Why the hell would you carry something that could do that if that wasn’t what you were going to do?”
“Well I just proved what I’d use it for, didn’t I?”
A Broken Darkness Page 5
