A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  The world had looked up and howled at what it had seen; and even if you had not looked, you still suffered. Worse for those who had already been suffering and lacked the infrastructure to take the hit and roll. They had struck at terminal velocity, and the survivors were still climbing out of the pit of madness and despair. Not quite two minutes. A hundred and eleven seconds. Her fault. Her doing.

  And that I knew what she had done, and what she was—that she had been forced to reveal it—was the greatest shame of her life. The thing she hated the most.

  And that I had been involved was the thing I hated the most.

  Johnny sipped her coffee and said, perhaps misjudging the expression on my face, “Anyway, this morning I asked Sofia if she would help me investigate—”

  We waited till I was finished coughing; Rutger, mildly appalled, refilled my cup.

  “Come on,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t ask her.”

  “Why would I? Why would you?”

  She counted off, her fingers crisscrossed with blue medical glue like she’d been scribbling on them with a ballpoint pen. “First off, no matter what she says, her dad educated her better than most. She can do really heavy spells if there’s enough magic around; we saw her do it in Fes. Front-row seats. Secondly, she’s in town already. Third, she saw everything happen; she knows exactly what we’re dealing with. It would help if I knew what she knows. Fourth, she clearly doesn’t give a shit about missing school; she’s here because her Dad asked her to spy on me and the reactor, or she isn’t, and I don’t care which, and she knows I know.”

  “…She… She came for the party, though. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Is that what she told you? Yikes. Come on, Nick. Don’t let’s have another fight about how stupid either of us thinks the other person is.” She gulped the last of her coffee, and waved the heavy white mug hopefully in the air, although as far as I could tell there was only one waitress, and she wasn’t around. Fair enough, for just three customers. “No, here’s what I figured happened. Two other Society members were supposed to be there last night, to talk to Cardinal Geary, right? Not as part of the formal negotiations, just… you know. Being social. A pre-meeting. Sofia figured that out, or was told by Louis, and got to them somehow, convinced them not to go. Then she came instead, using their tickets.”

  “Louis didn’t tell her to go,” I began, then clamped my mouth shut before I could say, That’s why he sent me. Okay, don’t talk. Don’t say anything. Just nod.

  She stared at me for a second, asking the obvious question. When I didn’t answer, she went on, “Anyway, her spying got interrupted last night. Interesting that she was in the bathroom when everything happened, wasn’t it? And then this morning, she’s not feeling well, she says. And there’s you, outside my hotel, like an idiot.”

  “…You think she put me up to spying on you?”

  “Well, you haven’t come up with a good reason to explain why you were out there.”

  I sipped my coffee and tried to think. When you laid it out like that, something I had been avoiding, it felt a bit like that Star Trek episode where Scotty had been found with a bloodied knife in his hand and a woman dead of stab wounds in his arms. You could plead innocence, sure. You could plead coincidence. But it looked pretty damning.

  “We’re all Scotty,” I said, ignoring her confused blink. “Anyway, she didn’t. She’s not a member. And I’m staying way away from all that cult crap.”

  “So you abandoned your girlfriend to come spy on me of your own free will?”

  “That is not what I was doing.”

  “What were you doing then?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. A path was becoming evident, a very distant light a million miles away, which was probably an oncoming train. All I could see of it were tangles of lies, which she would see through (I had always been terrible at lying, particularly to her), and acting, which I was also bad at. But if she had created me, I thought with a brief surge of anger, if she had designed me, then she had made this path, too. I said, staring down at the table, feeling her eyes on my face, “You’re not gonna like it.”

  “You wrote a whole speech about it, didn’t you.”

  “Yeah.”

  We fell silent as our food arrived. The answer to ‘How can you eat at a time like this?’ turned out to be ‘Ravenously.’ Rutger scrolled on his Blackberry between bites of pancake; Johnny and I ate in jaw-snapping, cheek-bulging silence, budgeting our last bites of scone and bread to mop up the egg yolk, bean syrup, and tomato juice that had escaped absorption by other items. She pushed aside her three little black pucks, which I had discovered I liked even though I had no idea what they were, and I forked them into my own plate to finish them off. Waste not, want not.

  “Look,” I said, when we were starting to wind down. “Can we talk in private?”

  “No,” said Rutger, not looking up.

  Johnny gave us both a pained look. “Just summarize it,” she said.

  I took a deep breath. Do your damn job. Had I not done it already? Simply by seeing Sofia? No, goddammit. Be a fucking grownup. Had enough of being a child and a coward both. They’re watching you; they want to see what you’ll do. Protect humanity. They can’t do that without information, can they? And Johnny does everything alone. Wants to do everything alone, always has: except for me. The real right-hand man.

  The entire history of human evolution. You don’t do things alone. Strength in the group, power in numbers, even when the number is two. Don’t go hunting mammoths alone. Bring someone with you when you pick berries, in case they’re poison. And later, sick of the sticky tumbled bodies in the cave, sneaking out to watch the stars: and secretly pleased when Og or Yug came out to sit next to you.

  Scary things. The breath in the night only bearable if you weren’t alone. Who would she want with her now but the person who’d been with her for other scary things? The first thing people do as soon as there’s a disaster is reach out for a hand to hold. Regroup, rebuild, clump together after being spread apart, share stories and art, know that you could survive if you made some numbers. Made a community.

  She hated community. But she had, all the same, asked for a pet. Long ago. And knowing that I was all she had was that light in the distance.

  I said, “Okay. Short version. I missed you, I worried about you doing this on your own. Whatever this is.”

  Her pupils dilated with visible speed, like a drop of ink had been placed in each. Shakily, she put down her cup. Oh God, it was working. You monster. No, keep going. That’s what you do with monsters. That’s what monsters are for: to expose, and then to destroy.

  “You’re never going to find answers on your own,” I said. “Are you? Maybe you are. But what if you need a backup? You already thought of that, right? Why you asked Sofia. But she won’t.”

  She nodded slowly, still staring at me through the mask of bruises.

  “I’m here. Sure, I’m not as good as her. I can’t do magic. I don’t know what she knows. But I know what we know, I know what… what we’d never tell anybody else. And that means I can get answers too. You told me to stay out of this: fine. But I’m already in it. I got skin in the game. Those things were trying to get both of us. Weren’t they.”

  “Maybe,” she finally said. “I think so. I need more co—”

  “Do not drink any more coffee.”

  The waitress came by anyway, and refilled both our cups. I pushed mine carefully away.

  “But you’re on holiday,” Johnny finally said.

  “I can change my flight.”

  She curled her hands around her cup. For a moment I could hear nothing except my heart beating—not her, not the traffic outside, not the sound from the kitchen. “Well,” she began.

  “There is not time for this,” Rutger said, replacing the phone in its case at his hip. “There has been another ethics complaint. Substantial inconsistencies are being reported at Segobriga, Fortier, and Wulworth Keep. Not in the calcu
lations. In the raw data. In the seeing.”

  “Is the degree of observed inconsistency internally consistent between the three?” Johnny said, instantly switching attention.

  Rutger stared at her, then exasperatedly got the Blackberry back out. “It is more important to fulfil the requirements of the audit than to... obsess over the incident last night. We have a great deal of work to do before we can issue even the preliminary audit report for the Astrophysics and High-Energy divisions. And those only encompass eight components. And no supplemental information requests.”

  “You don’t think a potential repeat of the Dimensional Anomaly also needs a great deal of work?”

  “No further events have occurred,” Rutger said. “It’s likely that it was... an aftershock. An isolated incident. Underberg hasn’t alerted me to anything. No diseases or deaths have been reported. The local police are looking into it, and the UN Department for Dimensional Research is sending a team of twelve subject matter experts.”

  “I’m a subject matter expert. Look, it could be an aftershock. Isn’t that a cool word? Wouldn’t that be great? Or it could be a pre-shock. I won’t know unless I dig into it.”

  “It is not your responsibility to dig into it. Your responsibility is to this audit and the subsequent continued operation of your research facilities. Enough has been impacted already. Contingency plans were not in place for such a sudden shutdown; it’s meant to take between ninety to a hundred and twenty hours of operational preparation and emergency response planning. And, as I have said, there have been no further events. Anywhere.”

  His voice was perfectly level, neutral, as always; you would not have realized how upset he was unless you knew him well. Johnny had hired him when she had been very little—six or seven, I thought. Found him as a grad student in a physics lab, then whisked him away, paid for his PhD, handed over the reins of a thousand things: hiring, negotiation, scheduling, acquiring. He ran a number of individual divisions just on his own, I knew, overseeing and vetting their research personally. Material physics and high-energy physics and astrophysics and something else; and he had singlehandedly coordinated most of their emergency response to the Anomaly while Johnny and I had been in that hospital in Baghdad.

  How possessive would you get of those, I wondered, if you had been doing it long enough? How much would you believe yourself (rightly) to be the hero of the hour when your employer had disappeared, and you had watched her go at the airport? When you had let her go, and blamed yourself for not stopping her?

  Her empire was not crumbling, but it was under close watch, being picked apart by outsiders, and I was sure he felt that he was a part of this, had a right to be a part of it; but none of this showed on his face. He was absolutely immobile in the gloom, a handsome and symmetrical mountain, the face and hair nearly the same golden-brown so that he resembled a statue or monument plucked from a city square. Bodyguard, negotiator, research assistant, guardian. Secretary. Secretary: keeper of secrets. I wondered if he hated her too.

  Johnny paid for breakfast, but followed that up with an incredibly awkward, half-whispered fight with Rutger in the doorway as we left, which trapped me on the stairs just high enough to not be able to hear what they were saying except in fits and starts, too embarrassed to either push past them or retreat back up.

  Rutger didn’t want her out of his sight, and wanted to assign another employee to guard her; Johnny didn’t want anyone near her; yes, but you’ve got him near you and look what happened last time; well that’s not going to happen this time and go back to the hotel and I’ll see you tonight. How can I do my job when you act like this. Your job is to do what I tell you to do that’s your whole entire job. Well what you tell me to do and what’s best for you are two different things. Well what’s best for you is to stop telling me you know what’s best for me. Well—

  Well, you can’t pay people to think what you want, I thought, and stuffed my hands into my pockets and waited for them to finish. When they eventually stopped talking, I wasn’t sure the fight was over. I felt heavy, sleepy. Maybe Johnny had been right about the coffee. The sun was fully up, bright through the thin clouds; the sky was a hard, chalky blue. Around us, the fog-soaked buildings and their stone and moss and ivy seemed delineated in ink, painted with dark tones against the pale sky. No one was around, every window unlit except for a convenience store far down the block sending a little stream of pink neon onto the gray sidewalk.

  Something crackled against my ribs as I shifted. When Johnny returned, having sent Rutger on his way with the car, I dug in my jacket and took out the folded newspaper. “You’re on the front page again. You want it for your scrapbook?”

  “Nah,” she said gloomily. “It probably says I’m the Antichrist.”

  “Well, maybe you are the Antichrist.”

  “I am not!”

  “No wonder the Vatican put a hit out on you,” I said, tossing the paper into a recycle bin chained to a stone post on the corner. “The Pope’s probably gonna come for you himself.”

  “Nicholas.”

  “Tase you and throw you into a van. Yep.” I hesitated. “We didn’t cover Catholic bounty hunting in school, I admit, but…”

  She laughed, then winced and touched her cheek. For too long we stared at each other: reluctantly, like reading something against our will, a technical manual or a description of something painful. Her bruising was nearly the same colour as her navy coat, there was dirt on her ears, and her hair looked dull and greasy. The only shine in it came from bits of broken glass. Had she even showered last night?

  It struck me with an abrupt wave of nausea that this was why my face had seemed strange last night in the mirror, this morning when I tried and failed to shave, why I thought something had happened to it: because all my life, I had been looking at her face, not mine. Some fucked-up little part of my brain, responsible for telling me who I was and what I needed to do next, had just rotted away. Decided she would take that spot instead of me, identified her as me, and simply atrophied and died. All those years making sure she was next to me, watching out for her but most importantly, watching her.

  After a moment, I said, “Have you… gotten shorter?”

  Patiently, she said, “I think it’s slightly more likely that you grew since the last time we saw each other.”

  “That doesn’t sound very scientific.”

  She smiled, and gave the sudden head-toss that indicated that she’d arrived at a decision that was going to get us at best grounded and at worst killed. “Come on.”

  “…What?”

  “Come on. We’re going back to the Castle. I’m Sherlock Holmes, and you’re John Watson.”

  “You’re John Watson.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS A long walk, but Johnny said she knew the way; she’d been in the city, as she explained, for more than a month, and had made a half-dozen other trips during the construction of the reactor. We moved through empty streets, waited obediently at car-less crosswalks with the other tourists while the locals walked across, heads down, hurrying to get inside. I jumped every time the sidewalk vibrated lightly under my feet, indicating that the light had changed. Drones hummed overhead, ranging from the size of a dinner plate to as big as a pool table. Johnny glared up at them occasionally.

  “Paranoia,” she said. “Unscientific. They’re looking down, they’re looking up, they can’t see or hear or sense in any way what caused the Anomaly.”

  “Yeah, but nobody knows that except us. And we’re not telling.”

  “What’s the point? The gates are shut. It can’t happen again.”

  “So again I gotta ask: then what happened last night?”

  She growled with frustration, her face reddening. For a moment I was reminded of an incident five or six years ago, when she had somehow caused two supercolliders to literally collide with one another—her own facility in Boston and another lab’s facility in Lisbon or something had tunneled straight towards each other and crashed some
thing like three kilometers below the Earth’s crust, not to mention several kilometers of ocean. It had taken more than a year for salvage teams to travel along both tunnels and try to recover some of the more valuable components. Physicists were still arguing about how it had happened, apparently, but the main image I always had was her in a sunny courtroom somewhere in Europe, face beet-red, fuming and squirming at the far end of a black-and-white marble floor like the world’s smallest, maddest chess piece.

  “Okay, so,” she said, “last year I walled off the whole Creek, put up surveillance, electric fencing—well actually to keep out bears and cougars and stuff too, you know how they get. And built a new facility in the East Field, where the old CN turnaround used to be. Not even Rutger knows about it. Do you know how hard it is to hide spending from him? I wanted a dedicated space to come up with a... a magicometer, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “Like a... a magnetometer. Or a Geiger counter, let’s say. What do you do when there’s something around you that you can’t see, but you need to know if it’s there or not, and once you know if it is, you want to measure it? Gravity’s one thing, magnetism’s one thing. Radiation: tricky. You can’t sense it, you can’t prove it exists with a simple demonstration like iron filings or something.” Her phone rang. “Gawd! Hang on. Hello?... No, I’m sorry, don’t laugh at me, okay? I’m super busy. Yes, I’m okay. Yes, we can work on it, absolutely.”

  She snapped the phone shut and ran both hands through her hair. “Sorry. David Bowie. Anyway, the point is—”

  “What?”

  “The point is,” she said, “we, and by we I mean humanity in general, have never had a way of telling whether the amount of magic was increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. Did you know that the Ssarati have supposedly amassed something like eight thousand known spells, and none of them can quantify magic? We don’t know anything about it, not really. Not where it comes from, what happens when it’s used, how to regenerate it, how to control where it goes. We just know it’s real, and it moves. Now how the hell’s that gonna help anybody in the world except make them freak out about it? Everybody’s paranoid enough already. Look at these stupid things.”