A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  “This isn’t rocket science,” she murmured. “Rocket science is Newtonian. So this is what the numbers are showing. And that’s why they’re fucked up. But how do you recalibrate to account for magic being in the math? How can I make one of my own to counter Theirs? The problem with causality theory is that it implies, well I mean, it’s a theory, so yeah, let’s say implies, that the properties of any system are caused by earlier events, events that went according to the laws of physics. If you know enough detail about those earlier ones, you know the current state, how it’ll progress. Right?

  “But this only applies to undisturbed systems. You can predict if as long as you don’t look to see if it’s actually doing what you predicted it to do. So how the hell can I interfere with the magical system they’ve set up? And where’s the source?” She got up, rubbing her arms. “I’m gonna go shower. I feel gross.”

  “What are we going to when we’re both clean?”

  “Buy clothes. Go talk to a neurologist I used to know. Sample a monster.”

  “…Can I stay here?”

  “No.”

  LEAVING THE HOTEL felt like poking my head out of a foxhole in No Man’s Land. It was cold, and my coat (extensively ripped, burned, and stained) let in the wind. Very different here, I thought. Edinburgh had felt damp, nearly tropical. Like you were on vacation somewhere you might see palm trees. Here, the light breeze freezing my ribs made it feel like home.

  It was brilliantly clear and sunny, and last night’s snow sparkled like diamonds, untouched by footprints or road grit. We walked to what even I could tell was an unreasonably expensive shopping district, where security guards waited at barred doors, and even places selling what looked like simple jeans and t-shirts had prominent alarm stickers on the glass. Here, her face alone, busted-up as it was, got us into a few places, though it didn’t work everywhere; she laughed for what I thought was the first time in days as we were turned away from even approaching a watch store, and fled cackling into the empty street.

  “I bought a pocketwatch there last time,” she said. “A Vacheron. As a present for Rutger. The owner took me out for dinner the next night.”

  “And now you’re a bum.”

  “And now I’m a bum. Tragic.”

  “Have you talked to him yet? Rutger?”

  “Oh, yeah. Couple times. The police let him go after seven or eight hours, he said. Funny what a few well-placed phonecalls can do.”

  “And like, millions of dollars.”

  “Well yeah. Anyway, I don’t know that he’s on-board with what we’ll need to do, but he’s got a couple of my labs in Prague on high alert.”

  “Oh God.”

  We split up inside the next place, a tall, narrow department store, and I had to put 1779 on the shelf inside the changing room, cautioning it not to move or make any noise. It was quiet in the store, which was peak-ceilinged and perfumey, like the Holt Renfrew’s I remembered wandering into (and then immediately back out of) back home. I hadn’t even dared stop in and buy a Coke in their cafe. Dad had liked browsing through the menswear, unfolding and rummaging through every article of clothing and announcing how cheaply it was made: the seams like this, the pockets like this, the stiffness of the collar, insisting something was polyester falsely labeled as silk. A sudden clear memory of my hand on the folded ties on a display table, like a sunburst, the smoothness of the rich fabric: for rich people, not for us, it said. For people who deserve these things. All you can do is look; indeed, you shouldn’t even touch.

  Eventually, I returned with two pairs of jeans, some socks and underwear, a couple of shirts, a sweater, some gloves, and one of those overengineered winter coats with a hundred pockets, charcoal-gray with lime-green zippers, as well as a backpack to stuff everything into. 1779, offended, nestled inside the pocket of another pair of new jeans, tags still dangling, which the cashier (they probably had a fancier term for them, I figured, at a place like this: Apparel Duke? Register Prince?) glared at as I loitered on the cool surface of the till, a solid block of dark-veined marble. I had wadded up my old clothes and stuffed them into a trashcan I found in the back of the changeroom.

  Johnny found me half an hour later, hair ruffled into a cockatiel spike, with a similar minimalist armful of clothes. “You know,” she said, pushing everything towards the cashier, “like, we showered? We brushed our teeth. We combed our hair. We put on lipgloss. And we both still absolutely look like hammered shit.”

  “You didn’t offer me any lipgloss.”

  “It wouldn’t have helped.”

  “Oh, you’re just used to looking like a princess, that’s all. You gotta lower your standards. The world’s ending. All the non-monster people are gonna be like...” I paused; there were too many options. “Mad Max. Leather, fishnet stuff, piercing, feral kids. Well, you’re already sort of one of those.”

  “I could start a gang maybe?” She handed over her credit card, a thick slice of apparently pure platinum, embossed and carved like an ancient plaque, with a window for her thumbprint; the cashier looked genuinely distressed when the system didn’t reject the card. “I can’t believe you didn’t buy a fishnet shirt.”

  “I was worried about it slicing off my nipples.”

  “You’re not going to use them.”

  “You don’t know that.” I refused their elegant paper bag, and knelt behind the marble to stuff everything into my new backpack and put my coat on.

  “I’ve never understood why you want kids anyway,” she said. “What are you supposed to do with a kid?”

  “I don’t know. What are you supposed to do with a genetically-modified dung beetle?”

  “Look, we’ve had this discussion, they’re very important ecologically, and the containment breach was an accident.”

  “Containment? You mean the Cool Whip tub?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.” She tapped her foot impatiently. “Anyway, beetles are hardy, strong, they’re survivors. They’re not like stinging insects. Wasps and bees and ants.”

  “Yeah, but they only sting because they have a hive to protect,” I said. “Don’t they? And beetles are like. Solitary.”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  Back outside, Johnny crammed everything, still wrapped in its crackling tissue paper, into her bag, and swung it onto her back. “I should’ve bought a present for Bernier, too.”

  “The neurologist? Wouldn’t he help you without it?”

  She rocked her freshly-mittened hand in the air. “It’s hard to tell sometimes, it really is. Especially at a time like this, you know? He’s a bright guy, obviously. He’s asking himself the same questions we all are. About… about loyalty, about keeping your mouth shut. About which side you want to be on at the end of the war. Now you think: well, They’re making it so there’s only one side, and you’re probably right. But if we go to him, and say we’re on the other side, maybe he’ll just turn around and say: Nope. I don’t want to antagonize Them. I don’t want Them to know I helped you.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, genuinely shocked. “He’s a human. He’s on the side of humans. He wouldn’t want to be one of those… those things. Those peoplemonsters. Nobody would.”

  “Mm. Do you think so? I don’t know. What do people do in wartime? Especially if they think they’re just going to get… overrun, rolled over? Surrender, of course. But before that, if they think it’s a foregone conclusion, then what?”

  My stomach was sinking, flipping, sinking. Well, they’d do what you did, I thought. Or what you maybe didn’t do, I can’t tell. “Work with them. What’s the word.”

  “Collude. Yes. Out of fear. If you could be… say, a pet, servant, livestock even. If you could be spared even in some small way because you had done one thing right… well, fear’s powerful. It’s the strongest thing that drives us.”

  No, I thought. Not all of us. Out of ego, not out of fear. We’ve all seen you here trumpeting your line about saving the world, but now They’re here, bent not exactly on invasion and destr
uction but assimilation, and someone, something, came to you with the… with the intelligence, and self-control, and motivation, and ability to offer you a new deal. You’d feel even more special, wouldn’t you? A chosen one. A what’s the word. Apostle. Like that.

  And right on the heels of that: and the wards that guard us being pulled. The Society is supposed to stop that, upkeep those, protect them from damage. Are they… did they decide…?

  Don’t think about it. Not now.

  THE BUSES AND even the trams had stopped running, and it was strange to walk in the light traffic, past businesses open but empty, people scowling behind the desks, sipping coffee for something to do. Sun dazzled off snow, gilt, glass. It felt like war and it didn’t feel like war, because I knew from novels that soldiers spent their time mostly walking, and waiting, and watching the skies... but soldiers had comrades, and I just had her, and maybe she had turned somehow in a way I couldn’t see, and was dragging me along for who knew what reason.

  I thought about what Sparrow had said, about the fines, compliance. But something did seem to be working now. Maybe just sheer, animal fear: the ground trembled constantly but unpredictably under our feet, the menacing snarl of an earthquake never quite materializing, and outside the city were constant flickers of lightning, the boom and groan of tortured molecules trying to right themselves, find the rules of this dimension. In the distance, streaky black and green tentacles dangled from high strings of mist, twisting lazily, like funnel clouds. We passed dozens of downed statues, not only fallen but melted somehow, green oxidation mingling with the fresh gleam of molten metal.

  Bernier’s apartment building was painted an off-putting pale blue, and was chipping and peeling all over to reveal the original and equally unpleasant yellow underneath. All the windows were cloudy, as if they were not dirty glass but plastic, obscured by a million tiny random scratches of branch and pollen and grit over the years. I expected a security door, but Johnny let us in through the front door and we simply climbed up the creaking wooden stairs, my thighs screaming.

  “I thought neurologists were rich,” I complained. “Who lives in a building without an elevator?”

  “Well, neurologists aren’t rich everywhere.”

  The hallway stank of burning plastic; Johnny began to cough as we opened the final door from the stairwell, the stench blowing past us with the pressure change. Johnny held up her hand to knock on the dirty white door marked 408, and hesitated at the same time I did, seeing that it was open. A crack, silence within, gray light.

  “No,” I said. “I know how this ends in movies.”

  “Me too,” she whispered, “but...”

  But we couldn’t just stand there without knowing, either, and eventually I nudged her against the wall and pushed the door open. If anyone were hiding, I figured, they’d see the empty hallway first and have to come out and look for us.

  We gave it a couple of minutes, then cautiously entered. Chaos: everything upside down, inside out. Books and food strewn around, bookshelves knocked over, the fridge door hanging open, light still on. Even the sofa had been torn apart, cushions ripped open and oozing foam from ragged cuts. TV on the floor, a hole kicked or punched in it. Every kitchen cabinet had been opened and the linoleum was thick with broken plates and bowls. We tried to shut the door and discovered that the hinges were awry, keeping it from lining up so it could close, and glanced at each other in silent alarm. It seemed important to be quiet.

  I got a knife from the magnetic rack in the kitchen, Johnny rolling her eyes—Well that’s gonna look great when the police get here, isn’t it—but I thought, and she probably did too, that the police weren’t coming. Ever.

  The bedroom told the rest of the story. Dresser drawers spilling clothes, the tiny closet emptied out, nothing but a few wire hangers. And the bed rumpled, the pale-blue bedspread nearly black with blood. Blood hung on the wall above the headboard too, like a map. Not red and fresh, not liquid; but not dark enough, either.

  I glanced at Johnny, who had frozen, staring at the wall. “Are we in a murder scene?” I whispered.

  “I think so. I hope not.”

  “He was just a doctor. Who would…”

  She held a finger to her lips. Spy movies again, I thought. Place might be bugged. Seeing who came to look for him first.

  The burning smell came from a little electric fireplace in the corner of the bedroom, its door opaque with soot. Johnny held her breath and gingerly opened it with a pen. Cooled and solidified gloop inside, a few metal remnants; she fished out one of these, twisted and curled, and frowned at it.

  No body. Very small blessing. After she had scraped what she wanted from the fireplace’s grate, we nearly ran back down the stairs into the cold, clean air, not speaking until we were crossing the bridge nearly an hour later. My hands were warm, but felt numb; only the round bruise had any sensation, as if it were stealing it from everywhere else. An angry cramp, maybe the sensation of healing, my body rejecting the invader. I rubbed it with my other hand, unable to feel it. The entire time I had felt certain we were being followed, but had seen nothing, not even the turning trees, the eyes and twisted humming pillars that had infested the city on our way there.

  “I’d take the body,” I said after a while, leaning on the low stone wall that overlooked the river. “If I just killed a guy. The police might come after me, but I bet not having the body at all would slow them down.”

  Johnny nodded.

  “So, um. We’re not... going to call the police. Are we.”

  She shook her head.

  “Yeah, didn’t think so.”

  “It’s not that someone knew we were going to go see him,” she said, as we stared out at the sparkling water. “It’s that someone knew someone was going to see him. Maybe he isn’t even involved with any of this, he doesn’t know anything. But someone thought, ‘Close enough.’”

  “Is someone going to think ‘close enough’ for us?”

  “If they’ve got any sense.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE BOAT ROCKED minutely; it felt as if the river were not water at all, but a road, and we were in a parked car. No one else was on the river; from a drone’s-eye view, I thought we might look as if we were adrift, even trailing a broken mooring rope behind us whitely in the dark water, Johnny and I and Dr. Chan, who was, I felt, exactly the right amount of paranoid. The city slid past us at walking pace. I had long since stopped looking down into the water.

  “I don’t know if They can hear us,” Chan said, looking at the space between Johnny’s shoulder and mine, as if there were a third person there; I reflexively looked too. It had been that kind of a day. “Maybe it’s best to assume They can. Maybe it’s best to assume They know everything. Everything. The water helps.”

  “I know, Dr. Chan,” Johnny said. Since she had called him, he had been saying almost nothing except that running water might ‘help.’ It’s all right, she’d said, and we had met him at one of the abandoned—and locked—tourist boat launches. He’d seemed a little shocked by Johnny’s lock-picking skills (and lack of apparent remorse), as well as Democritus’ expert covering of the tiny security camera several minutes before we arrived. Both beetles now huddled on Johnny’s lap under the flap of her wool coat, clearly not fans of the things in the river, but unwilling to leave her.

  All around us the shoreline rippled as it changed, propagating from tree to tree, stone to stone. The occasional anguished scream rose through the bare branches. The world of the Matrix, I thought. The world of the conquerors, forcing itself on this one, forcing it to change.

  “Sorry,” he said. He seemed barely older than us, with a silver streak in his dark hair, his scarf pulled up, like Johnny’s, to hide half his face. “George’s death, I’m not surprised. Listen, over the last... year? People have been going missing, from that… from the So… from the people we worked with sometimes. Or killed themselves, or just... died. It’s okay to die! I don’t think it’s bad to die. We should all..
. but unexpectedly. Not that we should stop expecting it.”

  “People in his… position, do you mean? Or people in his, uh, circumstances?”

  “People who worked for that group. Accidents. Hushed up. I hear it from the cards, the stars, the cats, the families, so many. Even the newspaper, sometimes. No one that knows tells, only those that are not supposed to know. And now this, the new attacks, my God. You know, they say the wards are being taken down? The old ones, the big ones. Wyoming and Rapa Nui. Great Zimbabwe. Greenwich.”

  Johnny nodded.

  Dr. Chan lowered his voice, beckoning us closer; we leaned in, our heads nearly meeting under the glowing red bars of the heated roof. “What’s happening? Am I next? Are you next? You shouldn’t be asking questions about this, and I shouldn’t be answering. We should all be at home. I should have given you this and vanished. Safer for us both.”

  “I know, and I’m grateful you agreed to talk to us,” Johnny said. “There’s things that need to be said face-to-face.”

  “Yes, I know. I know. I’ve seen it enough…” He shivered. “Maybe it’ll be all right. The water. Listen, you were right about the dates. I gathered it all up. Some places, the disease disappeared about two weeks after the Incursion. And some places, they were still seeing cases. Till now, even. More and more. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people. Not being reported, not being treated even. There’s samples in there, inside the vials. There’s photographs, there’s… but it’s the graphs you want. Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Johnny said. “I think so. Do you have any MRIs?”

  “A few, yes. Bernier’s, actually. Copies.”

  She chewed on her lip again. Under the flap of her coat, the beetles moved in small random patterns. She put her hand absently over them. “Do you think there’s… there’s anything to my theory?”

  He nodded. “When you said it, I thought: This is it, it cannot be avoided now. If I had not worked for the… this group, you know, I would have thought perhaps the Anomaly had permitted some extraterrestrial material into the atmosphere, and that caused the syndrome. Either way, I think it fits the data we have. But you must look at it. See what you think.”