A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  “I’m the bodyguard tonight,” I said.

  “Still no. Her body will not need guarding.”

  A silence drew out; Louis’s gaze burned into mine. “A solution presents itself,” he said, smiling. “Come work for us. Eh?”

  Johnny’s eyes widened in horror, but before she could say anything, he went on, “It could be a very good job. Good pay. Chances for advancement. And of course, to save all of mankind.”

  Oh, well done. My God, he was good, smooth; he twinkled and glittered with earnest benevolence, like the decorations on his mask. “Not in a million years, Mr. d’Souza. I kind of have a thing about magic. And I already have a good job.”

  “Nonsense. What could be better than this? It is human nature to want to discover, to explore the unknown, understand our history. Look at the machines we have sent to other planets. ‘Probes.’ And the spaceship to Mars this one sent up: why bother, why go? Your job, whatever it is, cannot compare. Eh?”

  “It pays the bills,” I said stubbornly. “And my ‘thing’ is really more of a phobia.”

  He sucked his teeth, and put his hand on the door’s ornate handle. “Well. Maybe when I give you a salary number, we will have a better talk. Now. Joanna. If you can spare us five minutes of your time.”

  Sofia had to drag me back to the main room, and I stood at the window with a plate of small jam-stuffed doughnuts, watching people dance and a knee-high white stone advance slowly across the flagstone floor, occasionally pursued or hissed at by one of the cats. Had someone brought a pet? No one seemed to be commenting on it. Best not to ask. After a while, I said, “What’s the official word for when you throw someone out a window?”

  “Defenestration,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Mm.” I wasn’t sure. My entire body was prickling with something that felt less like fear than the anticipation of necessary violence, and my urge to go home, back to my familiar house, my warm room in the basement, anyplace where I wasn’t wearing a suspiciously sticky fox mask with wires that were cutting into my ears, and could maybe deal with kids instead of these two, and let the world end while I was relatively comfortable, had never seemed so overwhelming; I felt feverish and restless, as if letting Sofia take her eyes off me for one second would end with me vaulting the white stone and running down the stairs.

  “She’s a... She’s going to demand not just the data, but what’s in it for her. And if she doesn’t like the answer, she just won’t do it. She won’t. She’s a monster, because she’s just... she’s just a fucking ego. With legs. She’ll never go for it, and if she does—if she’s wrangled a way to be our best hope for anything—we’re all going to die.”

  “We’re all going to die anyway. And anyway, if we can combine what we know with what she knows, maybe there’s a chance.”

  “But how much. How much of a chance?”

  “I don’t know, Nicholas,” she said, turning the new ring on her finger. “I don’t know that. Maybe she’s the only one who would know. Trust the Society. We’ve been doing this for a long time. With many kinds of outside people. She can be harnessed. We all can.”

  “She won’t work for you. She’ll, at best, work with you. And after tonight, I doubt that. What I think she’ll do is take the data and run.”

  “All right. All right, calm down. Please.”

  I ate another doughnut and tried to calm my breathing. Sofia wandered off and danced with a very old man whose head barely reached her collarbones, then with a younger one who was either a werewolf (I thought uncharitably), or in a very convincing werewolf mask, and then with a slender woman who had gone all-out: ruffles, lace, ribbons, mask, headdress, gloves, and a necklace with either a green glass stone or emerald in it the size of a golfball.

  Democritus came humming through the air, noticed but unremarked upon by a few people, who turned back to their conversations and drinks. I lifted my chin so it could land on my shoulder, but it plowed into my plate instead, hitting the dropped sugar like a snowdrift then, while shoveling sugar into its mouth with both forelimbs, turning and lifting one wing cover very slightly.

  The note would have been incomprehensible to anyone, I thought, who hadn’t known Johnny as long as I had, but my heart rose into my throat; for a second my ears rang. Hope? Something else? But only for me, and not for the Society. A secret hope, a light breaking through clouds that no one else could see. And I knew my role in guarding that light.

  IT TOOK ANOTHER three agonizing days for Johnny to crunch the data on her end, during which Rutger joined us in Prague and took a room at our hotel, where he and Johnny spoke only of the data and nothing else, glaring daggers at each other all the while, analyzing Huxley’s small book of numbers, and occasionally going out to meet with Society members at the libraries and hospitals of Prague.

  At the end, I knew roughly where we were going, but still had not yet figured out why or how it had been calculated, no matter how closely I listened in between TV-induced naps on the rumpled purple bed, waking sometimes to discover that books or notes had been arranged on my sleeping body. I could not shake the feeling that it was all going to go wrong. Not in the sense that Johnny’s plan would be ineffective, but that it would bring upon us a retaliation from the Ancient Ones like nothing Earth had ever seen before, in its millions of years of sporadic invasions.

  Bees in the walls: and earthquakes were starting again, in strange places, in the middle of tectonic plates, far from faults. Landslides from low, old mountains, worn down like the teeth of old dogs. Eruptions of natural gas and oil, flooding landscapes where no reservoir had ever been found. Chambers Emergency Response continued to rescue livestock and provide living pods for people, treat horrifying steam burns from shock geysers, rebuild shattered levees and round up dazed refugees. We were fighting a war with most of our army already crossed to the other side, I thought. And they would never come back to us, never.

  “No,” Johnny said, when I told her. “No. They will.”

  “If we think they will, maybe that’s exactly what They want us to think. Maybe there’s a… a catch, a trap, in the prions. You said that’s the kind of thing Nyarlathotep likes to do. You said he’s always liked to do it. Why wouldn’t he do it now?”

  Rumpling sound of her rolling over in the dark, a clunk as she bumped the bedside table. Someone’s beetle fell off with a despairing buzz. “They’re trying to outsmart someone that They gave the power to outsmart Them. It almost worked. But now we know something They think we don’t know. Something they only know intuitively, not formally.”

  “Which is?”

  “The rules of magic.”

  A long pause; outside, the hum of one last bus. She had made her decision in the mansion of our masquerade, and told only me: Johnny was running a scam, just like in her favourite movie; and so whatever it was the Society thought she was doing, she would not tell them what it really was. She had taken their data, they had come up with a new plan, together, and that was what they were going to execute. But she had a backup plan, because she thought theirs wouldn’t work. Or that they had designed it to not work, to pin it on her, and to let the worst happen.

  But the Society had not yet, I thought, become aware that they were working with both a tiny extradimensional monster that was far more devious than ever believed, and the Ancient Ones. They thought they did; but they had no idea. Just as I had, before she had been revealed to me. They were not poisoned by hatred; only too pleased at their own cunning to see her clearly. Whatever she did would not involve them, no matter how they arranged things to be at the center of her plan. She would only allow them to believe it for as long as she felt necessary. I knew how these things went.

  “They still think you’re human,” I said after a minute into the dark, knowing she wasn’t asleep.

  “Good.”

  WHEN JOHNNY FINALLY gave the word, Rutger arranged our flight to Peru, with the understanding (I noticed him carefully not using the word ‘condition’) that he come with u
s.

  “I have seen what happens,” he said, again and again. “I have seen what happens. Fire me if you like.”

  But Johnny refused. “I don’t want to fire you. But I don’t want you to die either.”

  “You do not want me to die because you need someone to check your data.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  Sofia also came, with ‘muscle’ from the Society. And so it was that when we finally boarded the empty 737, there were seven of us. “Lucky,” Johnny said as we filed in.

  “No such thing as luck.” Rutger scowled as he buckled himself into his seat, in the row across from hers.

  “Beneficial coincidences,” Johnny said. I caught her eye as the engines revved up: Do you know what you’re doing? Who you’re messing with? Am I seriously going to be home in a couple of days?

  She nodded once, minutely, and we started down the runway.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “MUOGRAPHY.”

  “What?”

  Johnny curled up in the empty seat next to me, and slurped from her water bottle. Outside the plane, I couldn’t help but notice, we were being paced by things that looked like a cross between a pterodactyl and an octopus. “You were asking earlier why Peru.”

  “Yes, and you didn’t want to tell me in front of everybody for some reason, even though probably none of us would have understood it.”

  “None of their business. Mainly, when you can account for the amount of volition that magic particles show, you can basically cross-reference real muography results with a kind of magical triangulation to locate hidden structures. Those lab errors, the anomalies we were finding that those bean-counters at the IARE kept logging as ethics complaints? It’s because the balance of types of matter around us is shifting. Dark matter increasing. Dark energy increasing. It’s affecting gravitational waves everywhere, around the Earth and inside the Earth and, uh. In other places. But it showed up in the numbers first.

  “So we’re getting bombarded with muons all the time, right? And we can use them to measure density changes in solid substrates. But you can also see how they hit and bounce off and absorb magic in motion. That is, magic that’s being generated, directed, and consumed. So now that we’ve found the pattern of the shift, we can see it’s got directionality. And velocity. And we found a massive new gathering of magic in one place. Here on our side. On Earth.”

  “In… Peru.”

  “Yeah. And that’s where I’m going to siphon it off to run my own spell.”

  I nodded uneasily. The Society, supposedly, had supplied Johnny with some of the things she needed to fill in the gaps in her anti-prion plan. That, I had understood. Not a cure, she said, but an ongoing spell, more like medication. To not only knock out and reverse the effects of the magical prion that was rampaging through the world, but hopefully and permanently tie up enough magic that another invasion couldn’t happen. Johnny’s anti-prions were synthetic, a nanomite with an enzyme and a protein on it, a biological sigil encoded, she said, with far more fidelity as well as power than the original. But it would never work unless it got a kick-start: as much magic as we could get.

  “You sound really sure about this,” I said, “for someone running some… kind of scam that I haven’t quite figured out yet.”

  “Mm. Anyway. The weird thing—and Rutger is still pissed off about this—is that the conversion factors we needed? To correct for the directionality of intent? Were all in the book Dr. Huxley gave you.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. So that book is what, five hundred years old? And our numbers, the real numbers, didn’t start changing until last year. Proximity effects were at my facilities only, and that’s why other labs were noting it as a discrepancy. How did the book have the numbers we needed? How did Dr. Huxley know, too, that I would need it?”

  I leaned close to her. “It’s called... magic.”

  “Oh fuck off. You know what I mean. She knew. She wasn’t just guessing. How?”

  “Well, if we ever see her again, we could ask her.” I leaned back and shut my eyes. “Go away. Go sleep.”

  I listened to the scuffling as she unfolded herself and began to head back to the aisle, then thought of something and straightened up. “Hey. Wait a sec.”

  “What?”

  “Huxley,” I said. “Did you find out what happened to her?”

  “Kind of,” she said. “I know she’s alive. I agreed to help the Society if they would let her go though. And take off all the conditions on her contract. It almost doesn’t matter any more, with the Archive gone. But still.”

  “All the conditions?”

  “Yes. All of them.” She paused, still half-balanced on the arm of the seat, her expression inscrutable. “Because she saved our lives. And it’s not fair. And you can’t always tilt the scales. But you have to, when you can.”

  “What else did you ask for?” I said, but she was already climbing off and leaving, the blanket around her shoulders trailing like a cape.

  AFTER A THOUSAND transfers, moving quietly through the back parts of airports where the people with clipboards and badges did not go, we arrived in Lima; and here the three Society members, Columba, Davis, and Hayes or Haze (I hadn’t figured out which), led us out into the sunshine, the dry thin air.

  Slowly I removed my coat, then my sweater; the heat penetrated the half-frozen layers of my air-conditioned skin. We had skipped Customs, thanks to whatever arcane maneuvers Rutger had performed on the phone in Prague, but we had been held up all the same, waiting for the alignment of people and available exits to let us out of the back ways of the airport. We had loitered uneasily, knowing we weren’t supposed to be there, but ignored by the staff that wandered by, apparently believing that since it was impossible to be back there if you weren’t supposed to be, then we were supposed to be, and all was right with the world. “Did you have us shipped as cargo?” Johnny whispered to him at one point, and he whispered back, “Emergency response supplies.”

  I had never been to Peru, a sentence that came easily from my lips as Sofia and I talked on the plane; I had never been to Peru, and I had never been to Edinburgh (except once) and I had never been to Prague (except once) and I had (several times now) been to a place that was between places, a sort of hall closet on a cosmic scale, where things were stored when other things could not think what to do with them. And I had never been to Guyana, some twenty-four hundred kilometers away, where my people were from. “India,” I said. “Then South America. Then Canada.”

  “So you’ve traveled inside Canada, then.”

  “No. Not really. No.”

  “Do you want to go to Guyana? See it, see the place your family is from?”

  I wasn’t sure. Mom didn’t talk about it much but I’d seen Dad’s black-and-white photos, the abject misery he had escaped with his very young wife, the poverty, the instability; the lack of everything when they left, and a not-dissimilar lack of everything when they emigrated, sponsored by an uncle in Toronto. Still hungry, still tired, and now (on top of everything else) freezing. He still lectured us about it, still told us that our only emotion should be abject gratitude for the sacrifices they had made, that every act we completed should be towards being grateful, being dutiful. “I guess I would go if I could take the kids,” I said. “They never get to go anywhere.”

  “It’s good to go,” she had insisted. “You need to see where your people are from. See for yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if they were telling the truth about it.”

  We had to circle back around to the side of the airport to find the car rental place, and then Johnny and Sofia and I stood around as the others negotiated with the rental agent, a small ferocious-looking woman whose dark blue uniform cap was tilted at a combative angle; she gave every impression, though I couldn’t understand what she was saying, that she had dealt with her fair share of aggro white tourists and would not be intimidated by us, no matter how big Rutger was, or how charming Colu
mba was.

  “We need a team name,” Johnny said, squinting up at the clear sky through the leaves of palm trees that looked a little dusty or thirsty in the thin constant breeze.

  “League of Nerds,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Doom Squad.”

  “No.”

  “Guns and Bros-es.”

  “We don’t have any guns,” Johnny said, then hesitated. “Do we? I didn’t ask.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “I wouldn’t trust you with a gun.”

  “And anyway, we’re not all bros,” she added.

  “You’re a bro.”

  “I’m a bro,” she conceded.

  Sofia, who had been giving us a slightly alarmed look, said, “Joanna, do you know where we are going yet?”

  “Sort of.” Johnny glanced back at the car rental window, where Columba was doing a kind of interpretive dance, and then got her laptop out.

  With Rutger’s assistance, a small rotary tool, a soldering iron, and a few bags of suspicious metal and glass from one of the flea markets, it had been modified with a device on the side, something like a cross between a compass and a satellite dish, the size of a halved grapefruit. Part of a TI-82 graphing calculator, like I had used in high school, had been attached below this, wires mostly taped down, so that the screen lay parallel to the laptop screen.

  “The closer we get, the closer we’ll be able to get. It’s a refinement algorithm, so the more data it receives and calculates, the more accurate the next set of data is. I input an, uh... an external correction factor of high reliability to sort out the muons from the magic particles. Which probably need their own name of some kind, but honestly I don’t know how they name subatomic particles any more.”

  Sofia stared at her.

  “It should work,” Johnny said. “Of course, we’re testing it now. Hard to see if these things work until you need them, you know how it is.”

  “...What’s a muon?”