From certain angles both these things were true, as if all around me were mirrors—not real ones, more like the hypothetical ones Johnny talked about for some of her labs: her wish to have a mirror that wasn’t a real, solid thing with thickness and weight, but just a reflective pane, perfectly reflective. But here it would be six or ten or a hundred of them, placed at angles to one another that created a whole new image somehow, and behind them, or even behind me, what was real.
Worse yet, somehow, was the crawling realization that though there was no wind here, the leaves of the canopy thrashed in an irregular, but clearly perceptible rhythm. Not a single hair moved across my forehead in the cool, still air. I stared up suspiciously into the greenery. Giant spiders, right? Like from the movie. Up there chittering in their own language, waiting for fresh prey. And every time I moved my head a certain way I caught that glimpse, just fast enough to process, that the silvery-white trunks were carved stone marked with lichen, that the leaves were hanging moss, the branches the remnants of doorways and tables, chairs and beds, the items abandoned when the place I had been a minute ago (and still was, maybe?) was abandoned.
You didn’t move an inch.
You moved into another dimension.
Better dry land, at least. It was warmer in the woods, and the packed dirt of the path, interrupted only by occasional roots, continued on its way so smooth it looked swept clean. And it was something to do, aside from panicking; you may as well panic while you walk. I debated calling for Johnny, but had a flash, maybe from a movie, of birds rocketing from the trees, and somewhere, an eye opening up, swiveling, focusing, the pupil slitting… where had I gotten that idea from? Anyway, the silence was too thick and unbroken to interrupt. Nothing but the soft constant sound of leaves brushing against one another. (Or it might have been legs. Hairy legs. Lots of them.)
On either side, the uneven masses of trunks receded into the distance, thick and close, showing no other paths. Herded, I thought uneasily. No two ways about it. They know you won’t walk into the water. Maybe They don’t know much about us, but They count on that, they count on Their dim memories of human limitations.
And then this. Human preferences. The warm damp air, the smell of sap, the safe, flat pathway. How easy to steer people around when you only give them one way to go.
My left hand began to throb, a slow metronome of cold and pain, faint and irritating at first, rising in a steady wave till I could no longer ignore it. I stopped to examine it: nothing. Bruise on one side, bruise on the other. But it had started to do that back in the tunnels, hadn’t it? Then stopped, for no reason I could determine. The watcher doing something, maybe just squirming, angry at being trapped, or maybe just its ghost, if I had killed it; or an early warning system, responding to something nearby.
Or calling to it.
Panic rumbled low in my gut, as if held in the cup of my broken, knitted pelvis, and as I began to walk again I cursed myself softly under my breath, all the words I could remember, all the ones I’d picked up from Johnny’s multilingual swearfests over the years, everything I’d heard on TV. Why had I grabbed the stupid thing? Maybe it wouldn’t have done anything, maybe it would have just burst into fragments as soon as it got too far from the sigil I had drawn to summon it, first stage of the spell, right, it’s fragile, they said so, they taught me…
Something in the undergrowth gleamed like bone: a long fallen branch, sheared away on one edge to a razor point. Damp and fresh (don’t think about what that might mean) but sharp enough to do some damage. I tugged it free, snapping it loose from the last shreds of bark. It was unpleasantly warm to the touch, warmer than my hand, and I immediately wanted to put it back, but if I was being herded, I planned to gore something at the end of the chute.
No birdcalls, no bugbuzz. My boots were silent on the soil. How long had I been going? I couldn’t hear the sea any more over the hissing leaves, only the noise of my heart, the scrape of my wooden spear on the path.
Fucking Johnny. Led us under here, straight into this. Had she known it was here, and lied to me? Had she known last night was going to happen? That weapon on her belt, that… whatever the hell she had called it. That sci-fi bunker-buster not even in her purse but inches from her hand, all night. She knew, she must have known. Lied to me like she always lied to me, for years and years and years, since day one. Maybe everything part of a trap. The party itself. The fight at breakfast, staged.
But she would slip up at some point, and now I was employed by the people who could actually do something about it, not just a bewildered loner out there in the salt and the sand… She’d slip up, and the world would know what she had done. And I would get credit for it, and my job would be safe, family taken care of, whatever godawful punishments the Society had planned would evaporate.
This too was a story I needed to tell myself as I walked and muttered, and it was a story with a bad ending, an old-styley Brothers Grimm ending, like the book I used to read to the twins. Her downfall wouldn’t make up for everything that had happened to us, let alone the world. But it would feel like justice. It would feel more like justice than this. This, whatever this was, letting her, and Them, jerk me around like a horse on a lead.
Her and Them.
The party, the dome. Earlier. The reactor. That They wanted, that she denied Them. What did it…
Around me the leaves fell still, all at once, a silence like the obediently bated breath of a concert crowd when the lead singer raised a finger to the lips. I stopped, startled. Somewhere to my right a small noise began, a howl not quite human, more like an animal or bird imitating one, rising in moments too high for me to hear, followed by others, a half-dozen keening harmonies. And then, much closer and even more surprising, very clearly, the slamming of a door, cutting off a ringing cell phone.
My phone. Ignoring the noises for a moment, I hauled it from my pocket, juggling it in my eagerness. Why hadn’t I just—no, it refused to power on, and the screen was filled with something that looked like mercury, a heavy silver oblong moving reluctantly from corner to corner when I tilted it. I snapped it shut, debated putting it back in my jeans pocket again (too close to my junk? better not risk it) and slid it into an inner pocket in my jacket instead.
The cry began again, behind me, and without meaning to I sped up a little, trying not to make noise, trying not to look up at the stilled, watching trees, trying not to think about what had happened to my phone, it’s just magic, just magic, something I was supposed to be friends with now, something that’s supposed to be mine...
Remember. Don’t forget. Sometimes They want you to move forward, sometimes They want you to turn back. Always They steered you with the simplest physiological alchemy: fear here. No fear here. And you would go where They wanted you to go.
If you let Them.
A trap, of course it was a trap.
My left hand thudded angrily with every step, that small furious star of pain in my palm threatening to go supernova. Low down, something darted away from the path, rabbit-sized, a spangle of surfaces mostly reflecting the white bark, the green leaves.
And something else.
Don’t turn and look. Run.
But I turned and looked anyway.
Behind me, absolutely silent and nearly close enough to touch, something watched and smouldered—a writhing, near-invisible mass of darkness crowned with a thousand horns, dripping blood and fire from one set of eyes into the set beneath them, so that the featureless face filled in turn and spilled over. Its feet, undefined columns of darkness, like the birch twigs in which it stood, were on fire, burning with a sickly, reddish flame. I froze.
She brought me here she brought me here and she knew she must have
I brought the wooden spear up straight ahead of me, the old signal or the old threat, the same length and weight as my old stick playing street ball in the old neighbourhood: This hockey stick is between you and me. Not one more step.
It shuffled forward one step, another. Heat
wormed from it, sticky and rank, like breath rather than flame. Just before the branch would have reached its chest, I stopped moving too, and we stared at one another, my back-brain screaming Don’t look! Don’t stare! What are you doing? Don’t you know that’s how all those people died?
The eyes of fire, weeping down its face and into its throat, like the spill of lava down a volcano at night, and the furious darkness of it unlit by the flames, and the horns each as sharp as a knife, so that they sliced even the air above it. Slowly, I held up my left hand, and it did as well, and then it sketched something in the air that vanished in a second: a burning rune, a vertical streak of fire with a couple of branches. As I stared at the empty air, it stepped off the path and melted into the woods.
For a minute I stood there, staked in place with disbelief, my heart hammering so hard it seemed to echo through my whole skull. Why had I done that? Why had it done that?
Find Johnny. Get out of here. Find her and get out. Get back. Reckon up on the other side.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and called, listening for what seemed like forever between each shout. Jesus Christ, other rich people had those trackers implanted in their bones, the ones she’d developed for Chrissake, so you didn’t lose them for one second, and Rutger begged her, nagged her, yelled at her, but she never wanted one, she was special, she was—
There: a break in the trees, not quite noticeable unless you had been walking for long enough seeing nothing but the near-identical trunks, till the eye had got used to it. Johnny wouldn’t have gone that way, would she? But the leaves were indeed stamped down, branches freshly dangling, even sending a faint fragrance of sap and—unless I was imagining it—her acidic, chrysanthemum-smelling sweat. She had been running.
Don’t leave the path. Don’t leave the path.
They did this to herd you: split you up. They knew you would try to protect her because that is what she trained you to do. Don’t fall for it.
I plunged into the shrubbery, forearm over my face to protect it from the branches. Not a path but a trail, narrow as a rabbit run, almost invisible in the thick gloom.
My boots slid under me; I grabbed a branch, which snapped under my hand, and rose, gasping for air. The ground below my feet was no longer slick with fallen leaves but was damp turf, turning into mud and large stones—the built-up bank of a small stream. A real stream, a real place? Or some kind of set-dressing, the way I had thought the sea was the pool… there was no way to tell. The stream looked real. Slow, clear as glass, trickling past in sedate silence.
A moment later, Johnny crashed out of the bushes and skidded to a halt in the mud just as I had, pinwheeling her arms to stay out of the stony fringe of the little stream. “Jesus Christ, what the absolute fuck.”
“Are you okay, are you hurt? Where were you?”
“There was a thing,” she panted, putting her hands on her knees, the asthma wheeze just at the edge of her words. “A thing with a... face like a… I don’t know. About the size of a shih tzu, to be honest, but you know the rule.”
I did know; it was a very good one, known between us and the kids as the Joanna M. Chambers Unbreakable Law of Proportional Body Size and Personal Danger, and it went, If it’s bigger than you, it’s stronger than you; and if it’s smaller than you, it bites.
“And it was on the path right in front of me, till suddenly it wasn’t, and I just ran off the path and into the trees. Not thinking, I guess. On the other hand, I haven’t seen any giant spiders. Yet. I’m still gonna say ‘yet.’”
I nodded as she spoke, and stooped to pick up a rock at my feet, gently wriggling it loose from the mud like a tooth from a socket, feeling to make sure it had at least one sharp facet, running my thumb along it, and when she paused for breath, I did too.
Then I slammed the rock into the side of her head.
CHAPTER SIX
BLOOD SPRAYED IN a fine mist, coating my face and hair; I coughed, spat, frantically scrubbed it off with my sleeve.
The thing slumped in the reeds, its front half bobbing in the stream. Blood jetted into the still water, a disc of red glass rotating lazily in the dappled sun.
Holy shit. Jesus Christ. I was wrong. I was so wrong. I thought—
Stars flashed in front of my eyes, a warning clear as a billboard that I was going to pass out. My entire arm hurt with the force of the swing, the sensation of something giving under the stone. My vision began to dim.
Oh God what am I going to do what have I oh God I was wrong I was wrong I
What am I going to do when I leave this place they’ll arrest me and I’ll try to tell them that I was wrong but monster they’ll say monster you killed her you cannot explain yourself the Society won’t help me my family won’t help me they’ll what am I going to do I’ll have to disappear run away but I can’t I can’t leave them I’m all they have I have to go back to them they’re my responsibility I—
Across the stream, the woods flickered—a thousand faint eyes glowing two by two in blue and green, red and white. A blink, or a wink. Then they were gone.
Something flitted past my eye, and I jerked my head back reflexively. A wasp? A leaf? No, something else. A chip of something the size of a penny, tearing itself out of the woods and stopping, not hovering but apparently stuck, adhering to something I couldn’t see.
And then another, and another. Beelining past me, whispering like paper as they cut the air. I turned to see where they were coming from, but couldn’t tell other than, impossibly (but nothing’s impossible now, is it? nothing is, not now that the line has been crossed, the line of murder, death the one thing even she cannot cure), the woods themselves, the lush green-and-silver wall.
A portrait. Chaos to order. The black fork between two branches became a pupil, the underside of a leaf an iris; colour flew from dried grass and broken branch to form blonde and brown hair, shadows to rebuild a navy coat, the green stripes in a scarf.
Finally remade, rebuilt on thin air, thrown together from the darkness of the woods, she turned to me, dazed. “Nic—”
And she keeled over backwards, so that I had to dive to reach her before she hit her head on the stones.
IN A MOVIE, I’d have splashed her with the stream water (full of blood: no) or slapped her (asking for a punch in the face: no) to bring her around; I settled for pulling her into a sitting position and jiggling her shoulder. I would never speak of those moments of doubt. Couldn’t. Or what I had felt when I realized that I had been right, not wrong.
Her eyes, once open, took forever to focus on my face; her pupils were the same size, but as big as dimes. “What...?”
I pointed at the stream. The thing had unprettily and completely disintegrated, leaving only long sticky runnels of white and crimson that eddied around the rushes like yarn. “I hit it in the head.” I thought for a moment, then added proudly, “With a rock.”
“Killed it?”
“Well, I assume...” I trailed off uneasily. But there had been a couple of minutes, when my brain had shut down from panic and my vision had been darkness and sparkles, like someone had set off a flare in my face, and I hadn’t been able to see. Of course, there was no good way to say that.
“If you smacked it hard enough, it probably did die,” Johnny said. “Inasmuch as a czeroth can die, in the human sense. That is, I suspect what makes it ‘alive’ isn’t much different from what makes us alive, if you want to talk about the very basics of differential electrical or magical potential across membranes. Anyway, it’s dead, or it managed to get back to the place we came through...”
“Or it stayed here, circled back, and is waiting to hit us with a rock.”
“Maybe,” she said. “As you know, most people who have met us want to hit us with a rock.”
“Check.”
“Check.”
I helped her up, and she wobbled away from the gory stream, bracing herself on a tree. “How did you know it wasn’t me?”
“What?”
“...You d
on’t know what those are. Right.” She inhaled shakily. “Come here. Get your back to something. I didn’t see who cast the spell. Or what. Listen, they’re an exact copy in a way that even twins aren’t exact, in the way even a clone wouldn’t be exact. It’s a physical snapshot down to the subcellular level. No one can tell one from what it copied.”
“What are you talking about?” I leaned on the tree next to her, the bark so warm that it paradoxically made me start to shiver. “Of course it wasn’t you.”
“I don’t... understand,” she said, after a pause long enough that I almost started talking again. I’d never seen the look she was giving me, her face rippling like the uneven sunlight, anxious, unbruised places marble-pale, a small localized conflict. I wondered what the two sides were. “No one can tell. That’s not how the creature works. There isn’t even a spell to tell it apart from the copy; you just have to wait for it to fall apart. And definitely nobody could tell by looking. It’s not possible.”
“I don’t know. It just wasn’t you.”
“Even I thought it was me.”
“I didn’t think it was you. It wasn’t you.”
Yeah. Let’s just keep saying that. And let’s never talk about those moments of doubt afterwards. Not before: there was none. And not because I changed my mind at the last second, but because the stone in my hand was moving too fast. Struck without thinking, the way you might slap an insect on your arm before seeing if it would bite or sting if you touched it. Let’s not talk about those seconds when I decided I was a murderer, the blunt blade of some monstrous assassin that knew everything would happen just as it foretold, and swapped you and the double maybe at the exact instant the rock hit...
No. I had known. If she had been swathed in burlap from head to toe, and silent, and a hundred miles away, I would have known it was her.
But how?
My mind flip-flopped between certainty and doubt like a metronome: Was it magic? Had I been able to tell because of my training, because of my ability to do magic, the thing she believed only she could do? Or was it the watcher—that venomous void leaving a signature, or a mark, or an (oh God) egg in my hand?
A Broken Darkness Page 10
