Her phone buzzed; belatedly, I realized it had been buzzing the entire time we’d been speaking. Not ringing, at least; I was pretty sure if we got caught, we’d be escorted back down, none too gently, for being smack in the middle of a crime scene. “Are you gonna get that?”
“No point. They’ve shut down the reactor. Taken it completely off the grid. Everywhere else is starting to shut down construction on theirs. Singapore, Sydney, Berlin. They’re invoking the Act of God clauses in their project insurance. They’re saying it’s because...” She forced out a laugh, somewhere between a cough and a sob. “Because they think the reactors are causing interference with the long-range detection systems. That they’re a security risk.”
“Wow. They could not possibly be further from the truth if they tried.” I rubbed my temples, still shivering; the rain was getting heavier and colder, turning from a mist into fat sparse drops. And what the hell was I going to do now? What was she going to do? Were the two even related? I just… had to find a quiet spot, call Louis. Or his assistant. No. Wait. Couldn’t do that until I knew where Sofia was, what had happened to her. Otherwise just wasting everybody’s time. Christ, why had I agreed to this, why was I so far from home, why… “Get back here. You’ll ruin my jacket.”
“It’s already ruined. You’re not getting your deposit back.” She climbed onto a heap of wreckage, dug from it a dramatically bent sword, looked at it, put it back down. “This is impossible.”
“You don’t care if you ruin other people’s stuff, that’s your problem. Plus, that word has kind of stopped having any meaning for me?”
“No, I mean literally impossible. We are no longer living in a universe that can have this happen. And the other thing I don’t understand is—ulp!”
We both jerked backwards reflexively as the stones began to shift a dozen paces away, clattering and clinking like bells, a bluish, abyssal glow oozing across the cobbles towards us. Johnny toppled backwards from her perch, and I grabbed her reflexively, hanging onto the loose fabric of the tuxedo jacket as we froze, half on and half off the heap.
For several seconds, nothing moved: not us, not the rubble. And then it began again, a stealthy sound, the leathery noise of something soft scraping against stone. Unsteadily, swaying, someone rose from the wreckage. I opened my mouth to call out to him, a short man in a tuxedo, almost invisible in the dim light except for the white of his shirtfront, but Johnny, rigid against me, inhaled sharply: not to silence me, a different warning. Stay still. Don’t let him see us.
No sound but the faint squeal of her breath, something she couldn’t control, coming from her chest. From the city, a hum of approaching drones, still distant. The man dusted down his sleeves, patted his face—and flopped backwards with a guttural grunt, his body limned with blue light. Don’t look, I thought urgently, though at whom I wasn’t sure: Johnny, me, the world. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.
He twisted, writhed; a rising scream was cut off abruptly by something wet and toothed jutting suddenly from his mouth, a sinister plant that flowered into a dozen slender tentacles. Bones cracked and broke as he tried to stand again, his hands flailing in the darkness, as if reaching for help. Wings sprouted from his back, pointlessly small, barely bigger than his hands.
The rain divided around him, became mist again, small vortices of it gleaming in a halo around what remained of his head. And then he turned, as I had known he would somehow. Towards us: not eyes seeing us but something else, that too like a deep-sea fish, no need for sight when you had other senses, when you would snatch and eat anything close enough, if there was something there, don’t let him realize something is there, the something is us—
His legs weren’t working properly. He managed one step, another. I inhaled deeply, tightened my grip on the jacket, prepared to run. Like in the movie: you were safe if you stayed still only for so long. And definitely not if the T-rex was moving towards you. Our smell, our heartbeats, neon signs showing him the way.
“Attention! Please exit the area. This area is not safe. Attention!”
This time we both screamed, and I overbalanced and fell onto the cobbles, Johnny just staying upright, losing one of her shoes. The monster started, flung itself into the darkness, gone in seconds. Above us, the hubcap-sized drone dropped nearly to head-level, its tiny light erasing our night vision, multiplying our shadows into strange curls on the stone. Then it drifted slowly off, as if to remind us that it had a camera, we were being watched.
Johnny snarled under her breath, picked up her shoe, and followed me back down the hill, sliding on the damp stones.
“It sort of looked like a—” she whispered, but was cut off by another bleated “Attention!” this time close enough to blow back our hair with the drone’s rotors. We let it escort us all the way to the medical tents again before it soared off with the others. The policeman I had spoken to earlier frowned, but did not approach us again.
We stood for a moment under the awning of one of the tents, on the far side of all the drone lights and headlights of the police cars and ambulances that kept pulling up, our shadows from the legs down long and crisp on the wall next to us.
“It looks like a…?” I said under my breath.
She clung to the wall and put her shoe back on, then glanced warily up at me. Her face had nearly been washed clean in the rain, leaving only a few streaks of dried blood and the blue adhesive on her cuts. Under her lank bangs her eyes appeared bright yellow, holding light from somewhere else, not this enclosed place. “Look,” she said. “Whatever this is. Whatever’s happening. I’ve got this, okay?”
“You what?”
She gestured vaguely at the still-smouldering heap of wreckage up the hill, pluming a thick transparent of smoke into the dark sky. “I don’t want you to get involved. Last time, I… we…”
My stomach revolved. We don’t talk about it. We never talk about it. We never said we wouldn’t talk about it. We… Stop it, focus.
“The least I can do,” she said, “is try to minimize collateral damage. I’m going to get to the bottom of this, yeah. If there are any answers to be found, I’ll find them. But you, you stay out of this… be safe, go home. Be with your people.”
I stared at her, at a genuine loss for words. A couple of years ago, if you had told me that she and I would ever have a single awkward silence, I would have laughed at you. That there would ever be a moment that we could be together and not be joyfully babbling over each other’s words, not finishing each other’s sentences so much as never letting each other start them…
For just a second I fought down a powerful urge to just tell her everything, start to finish, everything I hadn’t been telling her while I’d been trying to pretend she didn’t exist. It shouldn’t be me, I never should have come. They could have taken you and flown you back to wherever the fuck They came from. That place in the dark where a circle’s worth of angles doesn’t add up to a real number. Where you came from, in a sense. Where you really belong. Your homeland. “I think I saved your life a little while ago. Again.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Again.”
And you don’t get to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. Not anymore. Not now that I know what you are. But I didn’t know what to do next, and realized that part of me had been waiting for her to tell me. Which she had, and the anger beginning to smoulder under my ribcage told me that all the other parts of me had wanted a different answer. It wasn’t her I was mad at, not really. It was still and always me.
She glanced over my shoulder. “There’s my ride,” she said tonelessly. “I’m at the Sheraton. Are you close? Do you want a lift back?”
“I’ll walk,” I said, even though I was thinking again of the man in the tuxedo cracking and twisting, transforming in front of us, before thinking that could be me, on the walk back, ambushed and wrenched apart into a shambling monstrosity, how many people had that happened to already before the ambush tonight, how many had it failed for, how many pieces of people migh
t be in the city, rotting under bushes, washing into the gutter… “You said They couldn’t come back. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.”
“I know what I said.”
“But what are you going to do?” I waved a hand, feeling again that brief cold stab of pain where I’d seized the watcher. Do about the police, I meant to say; and the reporters, the photographers, the drones, the ambulances, the still-smoking rubble, the fact that she had blown up part of a castle, the fact that she was alone, that we didn’t know that all the monsters were destroyed or gone, everything.
“Do you know what plausible deniability is?”
“Sort of.”
She took off my jacket and handed it back to me, ten times heavier than when I’d put it on, soaked through. “Then let’s just say it’s my consolation gift. For tonight. Because you didn’t get to enjoy the party. And just… stay away from me. I mean keep staying away from me. You were getting really good at it.”
What would James Bond have said? Something snappy. My pleasure, madame. Something like that. We’ll just see if you can stay away from me, ha ha, check and mate.
Instead I shrugged, and walked back down to where the road was level, slipping easily behind the frazzled-looking line of police and medics trying to keep reporters and photographers from getting in. The rain eased off, and I resisted the urge to look up, see if that rip in the clouds was still there.
Back at my hotel, the temptation to sniff the jacket in case it smelled like her was so strong, and so infuriating, and so fucking pathetic, that I forced myself to throw it into the shower and crank the spray to full blast. Specks of broken glass jumped up like crickets as the water struck, and the sodden fabric spun in a reddish vortex. I dumped one of the tiny shampoo bottles onto it for good measure.
There. Fixed.
CHAPTER FOUR
NEITHER MY BODY nor my brain knew what day it was or what time it was supposed to be, but I dozed restlessly for a couple of hours and woke before dawn, disoriented and cold. The paramedics had given me a pocketful of extra patches to help get me to sleep, help with the pain of the healing bruises and scrapes, but they hadn’t put me far enough under, and I remembered too much when I woke.
Bad dreams, like the old days. Messages encoded in buildings and landscapes, instructions I was supposed to infer from the placement of certain stones on a beach whose sand was the crumbled bones of sea serpents. I blamed the light: while I had been on the phone with Mom, then Louis, I had turned on all the lights in the room, even the extra ones in the bathroom that lit up the counter and the interior of the shower; I had not wanted any dark angles, no places I couldn’t see into, quantify, name.
Because something was moving. Something was moving that I couldn’t see and Louis couldn’t either, that neither of us could even sense. Something like bees nesting in the wall of a house, but silent, not even dripping honey, not buzzing. Just clinging there together, in unnatural order, disobeying their instincts to dance and fly and feed.
Do as you wish, he’d said. I am not authorizing anything you wish to do. But if you are suspected, and you say anything...
He hadn’t needed to finish the sentence. And that was how you knew it was a real good threat. At least in Mission: Impossible they told you you’d be disavowed.
Why were two Society members supposed to be at that party?
If you were allowed to know that, you would know.
No pause, nothing. Shame darkening my cheeks. Know your place, his tone had said.
The Society was, they’d said, a microcosm of the world. Hierarchies, ranks, layers. But nothing so opaque or difficult to understand: no, they wanted everything to be clear and easy, so that there wouldn’t be misunderstandings. At the very bottom, me and my fellow Monitors. Then the Mentors, Instructors, Investigators, Counselors, and Archivists. Above them, the Governors, like Louis, each with one Advisor. And at the very top, the Director. Know your place: one brick at the base of the pyramid, one book on a bookshelf, like that. Holding up the rest of the structure. But you’d know exactly what was in your book and nothing else, as best they could manage it.
Idly, I wondered if Johnny would tell me. If, I told myself sternly. But she’s not gonna, because I’m not gonna ask. There’s other ways to find things out. And maybe one day, not a Monitor but an Investigator, and… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Don’t hope too much. Never pays off. Better to want something else, something reasonable.
Everything still hurt, but I had to admit that at least it was all different things now. Nice to get some variety. I got up creakily, glancing back at the spots of blood and dried glue left on the white sheets, and unplugged my phone from its charger, thumbing it open. One incoherent text message from Carla—something about some limited edition ‘sapphire blue’ mouse ears—and one from Sofia simply stating ‘I am fine,’ and no missed calls.
I didn’t think Louis’ assistant would be able to dig up the ears. I’d just have to tell Carla I hadn’t had time to find them. A little disappointment, soon forgiven. Not like Louis’s, not like the Society’s. At what I had done to the watcher. At what I had failed to do here, my chance to redeem myself.
But if I could give him something only I could give. If I could convince him of that. And that I was not doing this out of revenge, or because he had slighted me… Some people, I had learned very young, were allowed to be angry; and some would be slapped if they showed it, or beaten down. And some would be laughed at. I had never been allowed to be angry in all my life. So I had pushed it down, and pushed it down, and pushed it down, and it had no use, could never serve as fuel. I couldn’t let it now. If anyone brought her down, it would be the Society.
Witness meant two things, her face had said last night, in the flickering light of the ruined castle. A verb: to witness. But it was also a noun. Both of us watching and watchers so that now, in the aftermath, only we knew what she had done; and only we knew how I had factored into that, voluntarily or not. I could say nothing without jeopardizing myself, and vice versa. No one else. No one in the world. We had both armed and arranged nukes pointing directly at one another’s faces: friendship as mutually-assured destruction.
It has to be us, I could say, and she’d believe it; out of shame, and out of necessity, and out of the thing she couldn’t resist: the unknown. But I’d be damned if I begged her to tag along. Such a thing as dignity. No.
I drummed my fingers on the windowsill, seeing and not seeing the first hints of dawn, not real light yet, just a pale silvery glow illuminating the black branches that pressed against the window. Who knew how monsters worked, how these monsters specifically worked… like cockroaches, maybe? The saying about how if you saw one, there were a hundred more hidden somewhere? In what world would you be able to see one cockroach and think, There he goes, the brave explorer, all by himself, the only one in my house? Surely those creatures that had ambushed us in the Great Hall weren’t alone either.
If you were allowed to know that, you would know.
If you were allowed to know anything. Why were only some people allowed to know? I stared at my face in the brightly-lit window, refocusing past the darkness outside. Dozens of tiny cuts, mouth drawn down at either corner, dark hair floppy and dull. The same look of exhausted paranoia I saw whenever I bothered to check, which wasn’t often. I was tired of my entire face and just as tired of trying to change it.
I tried, anyway, though I couldn’t shave with all the little wounds and didn’t bother trying. Wetted and combed my hair, creakily put on clean clothes from my suitcase, breathing the smell of home: the new-drywall odour of my closet, bright chemicals of detergent. What was it, Mountain Spring or Mountain Breeze…? No matter where we went, how many times we moved, Mom insisted on buying the same scent and the same brand. Even during our two brief stints in shelters she had lugged a bottle of it back and forth in a plastic bag.
One more look in the mirror before I left: better-framed—a big gilt thing artfully speckled with age—tha
n the window, but the reflection itself not any better. Do I dare?
Do I not?
Downstairs, I leaned over the cold marble counter of the concierge desk, and cleared my throat to wake him up. “Hey. Yeah. Sorry. Where’s the Sheraton?”
OUTSIDE, THE COLD air made my watcher-wounded hand feel better, and dulled the faint but persistent pain. To soothe it I walked with one hand in my pocket and one out, trailing through the low thin fog.
Practically the first thing I saw after I left the lobby was the castle, perched defiantly on its hill and swagged with high-viz crime scene tape. The wreckage still emitted a stream of dark smoke, a straight undisturbed pencil-mark in the pale sky. Drones orbited it, occasionally harassed by crows, and the metal and glass of monitoring devices winked down like secret code. Other flickers of light might have been police or investigators with cameras, clipboards, other gadgetry. They’d be looking into it for months. I wondered what the ‘official’ investigation would find—about the monsters, probably nothing; but the explosion was a different matter.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t be like Johnny to design something that might incriminate her. Too preoccupied with her image for that, and justifiably so; to keep up her hero costume, she had been working at a breakneck pace on electric cars, electric planes, and bio-plastics. Phasing out fossil fuels to burn meant phasing them out of the manufacturing cycle too, so she had devised ways to recycle all the existing plastic by breaking it down to its molecules, what she called molcon. Made for a booming economy in a lot of places now. Anyone could do it, mine out the landfills, collect scrap, divert stuff from the back-end of factories, beachcomb for it. The tide was rising, she said; and unlimited cheap electricity would bring everybody up together.
The city was somber under a misty, bright sky; after last night’s rain, it felt fresher, clearer. Big electronic billboards proclaimed PHASE 1 ALERT IS IN EFFECT. Something strange about the letters, maybe a projection lens slipped out of true. Below in a smaller font, virtually unreadable, scrolled the same information as the card the concierge had given me as I’d left: no large gatherings; some bus routes cancelled; entertainment, fitness, and recreational facilities closed; no boating; ferry service and airport still operational; some roads closed. Tour groups permitted for fewer than 15 people. Curfew not to be instituted till Phase 2. Refresh the supplies in your go-bag in case there’s a power cut.
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