by Neil Clarke
Jason Playne said, “He fell.”
“Yes sir.”
“Are you sure? Because I reckon that cut in my son’s arm was done by a knife. I reckon he got himself in some kind of fight.”
Julia said, “That sounds more like an accusation than a question.”
Lucas said, “We didn’t get into a fight with anyone.”
Jason Playne said, “Are you certain that Damian didn’t steal something?”
“Yes sir.”
Which was the truth, as far as it went.
“Because if he did steal something, if he still has it, he’s in a lot of trouble. You too.”
“I like to think my son knows a little more about alien stuff than most,” Julia said.
“I’m don’t mean fairy stories,” Jason Playne said. “I’m talking about the army ordering people to give back anything to do with that dragon thing. You stole something and you don’t give it back and they find out? They’ll arrest you. And if you try to sell it? Well, I can tell you for a fact that the people in that trade are mad and bad. I should know. I’ve met one or two of them in my time.”
“I’m sure Lucas will take that to heart,” Julia said.
And that was that, except after Jason Playne had gone she told Lucas that he’d been right about one thing: the people who tried to reverse-engineer alien technology were dangerous and should at all costs be avoided. “If I happened to come into possession of anything like that,” she said, “I would get rid of it at once. Before anyone found out.”
But Lucas couldn’t get rid of the shard because he’d promised Damian that he’d keep it safe until they could figure out what to do with it. He spent the next two days in a haze of guilt and indecision, struggling with the temptation to check that the thing was safe in its hiding place, wondering what Damian’s father knew, wondering what his mother knew, wondering if he should sail out to a deep part of the Flood and throw it into the water, until at last Damian came over to the island.
It was early in the evening, just after sunset. Lucas was watering the vegetable garden when Damian called to him from the shadows inside a clump of buddleia bushes. He smiled at Lucas, saying, “If you think I look bad, you should see him.”
“I can’t think he could look much worse.”
“I got in a few licks,” Damian said. His upper lip was split and both his eyes were blackened and there was a discoloured knot on the hinge of his jaw.
“He came here,” Lucas said. “Gave me and Julia a hard time.”
“How much does she know?”
“I told her what happened.”
“Everything?”
There was an edge in Damian’s voice.
“Except about how you were hit with the shard,” Lucas said.
“Oh. Your mother’s cool, you know? I wish . . .”
When it was clear that his friend wasn’t going to finish his thought, Lucas said, “Is it okay? You coming here so soon.”
“Oh, Dad’s over at Halvergate on what he calls business. Don’t worry about him. Did you keep it safe?”
“I said I would.”
“Why I’m here, L, I think I might have a line on someone who wants to buy our little treasure.”
“Your father said we should keep away from people like that.”
“He would.”
“Julia thinks so too.”
“If you don’t want anything to do with it, just say so. Tell me where it is, and I’ll take care of everything.”
“Right.”
“So is it here, or do we have to go somewhere?”
“I’ll show you,” Lucas said, and led his friend through the buddleias and along the low ridge to the northern end of the tiny island where an apple tree stood, hunched and gnarled and mostly dead, crippled by years of salt spray and saltwater seep. Lucas knelt and pulled up a hinge of turf and took out a small bundle of oilcloth. As he unwrapped it, Damian dropped to his knees beside him and reached out and touched an edge of the shard.
“Is it dead?”
“It wasn’t ever alive,” Lucas said.
“You know what I mean. What did you do to it?”
“Nothing. It just turned itself off.”
When Lucas had pulled the shard from Damian’s arm, its translucence had been veined with a network of shimmering threads. Now it was a dull reddish black, like an old scab.
“Maybe it uses sunlight, like phones,” Damian said.
“I thought of that, but I also thought it would be best to keep it hidden.” “It still has to be worth something,” Damian said, and began to fold the oilcloth around the shard.
Lucas was gripped by a sudden apprehension, as if he was falling while kneeling there in the dark. He said, “We don’t have to do this right now.”
“Yes we do. I do.”
“Your father—he isn’t in Halvergate, is he?”
Damian looked straight at Lucas. “I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re worried about. He tried to knock me down when I went to leave, but I knocked him down instead. Pounded on him good. Put him down and put him out. Tied him up too, to give me some time to get away.”
“He’ll come after you.”
“Remember when we were kids? We used to lie up here, in summer. We’d look up at the stars and talk about what it would be like to go to one of the worlds the Jackaroo gave us. Well, I plan to find out. The UN lets you buy tickets off lottery winners who don’t want to go. It’s legal and everything. All you need is money. I reckon this will give us a good start.”
“You know I can’t come with you.”
“If you want your share, you’ll have to come to Norwich. Because there’s no way I’m coming back here,” Damian said, and stood with a smooth, swift motion.
Lucas stood too. They were standing toe to toe under the apple tree, the island and the Flood around it quiet and dark. As if they were the last people on Earth.
“Don’t try to stop me,” Damian said. “My father tried, and I fucked him up good and proper.”
“Let’s talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Damian said. “It is what it is.”
He tried to step past Lucas, and Lucas grabbed at his arm and Damian swung him around and lifted him off his feet and ran him against the trunk of the tree. Lucas tried to wrench free but Damian bore down with unexpected strength, pressing him against rough bark, leaning into him. Pinpricks of light in the dark wells of his eyes. His voice soft and hoarse in Lucas’s ear, his breath hot against Lucas’s cheek.
“You always used to be able to beat me, L. At running, swimming, you name it. Not any more. I’ve changed. Want to know why?”
“We don’t have to fight about this.”
“No, we don’t,” Damian said, and let Lucas go and stepped back.
Lucas pushed away from the tree, a little unsteady on his feet. “What’s got into you?”
Damian laughed. “That’s good, that is. Can’t you guess?”
“You need the money because you’re running away. All right, you can have my share, if that’s what you want. But it won’t get you very far.”
“Not by itself. But like I said, I’ve changed. Look,” Damian said, and yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, showing the place on his upper arm where the shard had punched into him.
There was only a trace of a scar, pink and smooth. Damian pulled the skin taut, and Lucas saw the outline of a kind of ridged or fibrous sheath underneath.
“It grew,” Damian said.
“Jesus.”
“I’m stronger. And faster too. I feel, I don’t know. Better than I ever have. Like I could run all the way around the world without stopping, if I had to.”
“What if it doesn’t stop growing? You should see a doctor, D. Seriously.”
“I’m going to. The kind that can make money for me, from what happened. You still think that little bit of dragon isn’t worth anything? It changed me. It could change anyone. I really don’t want to fight,” Damian said,
“but I will if you get in my way. Because there’s there’s no way I’m stopping here. If I do, my dad will come after me. And if he does, I’ll have to kill him. And I know I can.”
The two friends stared at each other in the failing light. Lucas was the first to look away.
“You can come with me,” Damian said. “To Norwich. Then wherever we want to go. To infinity and beyond. Think about it. You still got my phone?”
“Do you want it back? It’s in the caravan.”
“Keep it. I’ll call you. Tell you were to meet up. Come or don’t come, it’s up to you.”
And then he ran, crashing through the buddleia bushes that grew along the slope of the ridge. Lucas went after him, but by the time he reached the edge of the water, Damian had started the motor of the boat he’d stolen from his father’s shrimp farm, and was dwindling away into the thickening twilight.
The next day, Lucas was out on the Flood, checking baited cages he’d set for eels, when an inflatable pulled away from the shrimp farm and drew a curving line of white across the water, hooking towards him. Jason Playne sat in the inflatable’s stern, cutting the motor and drifting neatly alongside Lucas’s boat and catching hold of the thwart. His left wrist was bandaged and he wore a baseball cap pulled low over sunglasses that darkly reflected Lucas and Lucas’s boat and the waterscape all around. He asked without greeting or preamble where Damian was, and Lucas said that he didn’t know.
“You saw him last night. Don’t lie. What did he tell you?”
“That he was going away. That he wanted me to go with him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Well, no. I’m still here.”
“Don’t try to be clever, boy.” Jason Playne stared at Lucas for a long moment, then sighed and took off his baseball cap and ran the palm of his hand over his shaven head. “I talked to your mother. I know he isn’t with you. But he could be somewhere close by. In the woods, maybe. Camping out like you two used to do when you were smaller.”
“All I know is that he’s gone, Mr. Payne. Far away from here.”
Jason Playne’s smile didn’t quite work. “You’re his friend, Lucas. I know you want to do the right thing by him. As friends should. So maybe you can tell him, if you see him, that I’m not angry. That he should come home and it won’t be a problem. You could also tell him to be careful. And you should be careful, too. I think you know what I mean. It could get you both into a lot of trouble if you talk to the wrong people. Or even if you talk to the right people. You think about that,” Jason Playne said, and pushed away from Lucas’s boat and opened the throttle of his inflatable’s motor and zoomed away, bouncing over the slight swell, dwindling into the glare of the sun off the water.
Lucas went back to hauling up the cages, telling himself that he was glad that Damian was gone, that he’d escaped. When he finished, he took up the oars and began to row towards the island, back to his mother, and the little circle of his life.
Damian didn’t call that day, or the next, or the day after that. Lucas was angry at first, then heartsick, convinced that Damian was in trouble. That he’d squandered or lost the money he’d made from selling the shard, or that he’d been cheated, or worse. After a week, Lucas sailed to Norwich and spent half a day tramping around the city in a futile attempt to find his friend. Jason Playne didn’t trouble him again, but several times Lucas spotted him standing at the end of the shrimp farm’s chain of tanks, studying the island.
September’s Indian summer broke in a squall of storms. It rained every day. Hard, cold rain blowing in swaying curtains across the face of the waters. Endless racks of low clouds driving eastward. Atlantic weather. The Flood was muddier and less salty than usual. The eel traps stayed empty and storm surges drove the mackerel shoals and other fish into deep water. Lucas harvested everything he could from the vegetable garden, and from the ancient pear tree and wild, forgotten hedgerows in the ribbon of woods behind the levee, counted and recounted the store of cans and MREs. He set rabbit snares in the woods, and spent hours tracking squirrels from tree to tree, waiting for a moment when he could take a shot with his catapult. He caught sticklebacks in the weedy tide pools that fringed the broken brickwork shore of the island and used them to bait trotlines for crabs, and if he failed to catch any squirrels or crabs he collected mussels from the car reef at the foot of the levee.
It rained through the rest of September and on into October. Julia developed a racking and persistent cough. She enabled the long-disused keyboard function of her tablet and typed her essays, opinion pieces, and journal entries instead of giving them straight to camera. She was helping settlers on the Antarctic Peninsula to petition the International Court in Johannesburg to grant them statehood, so that they could prevent exploitation of oil and mineral reserves by multinationals. She was arguing with the Midway Island utopians about whether or not the sea dragons they were using to harvest plastic particulates were also sucking up precious phytoplankton, and destabilising the oceanic ecosystem. And so on, and so forth.
The witchwoman visited and treated her with infusions and poultices, but the cough grew worse and because they had no money for medicine, Lucas tried to find work at the algae farm at Halvergate. Every morning, he set out before dawn and stood at the gates in a crowd of men and women as one of the supervisors pointed to this or that person and told them to step forward, told the rest to come back and try their luck tomorrow. After his fifth unsuccessful cattle call, Lucas was walking along the shoulder of the road towards town and the jetty where his boat was tied up when a battered van pulled up beside him and the driver called to him. It was Ritchy, the stoop-shouldered, one-eyed foreman of the shrimp farm. Saying, “Need a lift, lad?”
“You can tell him there’s no point in following me because I don’t have any idea where Damian is,” Lucas said, and kept walking.
“He doesn’t know I’m here.” Ritchy leaned at the window, edging the van along, matching Lucas’s pace. Its tyres left wakes in the flooded road. Rain danced on its roof. “I got some news about Damian. Hop in. I know a place does a good breakfast, and you look like you could use some food.”
They drove past patchworks of shallow lagoons behind mesh fences, past the steel tanks and piping of the cracking plant that turned algal lipids into biofuel. Ritchy talked about the goddamned weather, asked Lucas how his boat was handling, asked after his mother, said he was sorry to hear that she was ill and maybe he should pay a visit, he always liked talking to her because she made you look at things in a different way, a stream of inconsequential chatter he kept up all the way to the café.
It was in one corner of a layby where two lines of trucks were parked nose to tail. A pair of shipping containers welded together and painted bright pink. Red and white chequered curtains behind windows cut in the ribbed walls. Formica tables and plastic chairs crowded inside, all occupied and a line of people waiting, but Ritchy knew the Portuguese family who ran the place and he and Lucas were given a small table in the back, between a fridge and the service counter, and without asking were served mugs of strong tea, and shrimp and green pepper omelets with baked beans and chips.
“You know what I miss most?” Ritchy said. “Pigs. Bacon and sausage. Ham. They say the Germans are trying to clone flu-resistant pigs. If they are, I hope they get a move on. Eat up, lad. You’ll feel better with something inside you.”
“You said you had some news about Damian. Where is he? Is he all right?”
Ritchy squinted at Lucas. His left eye, the one that had been lost when he’d been a soldier, glimmered blankly. It had been grown from a sliver of tooth and didn’t have much in the way of resolution, but allowed him to see both infrared and ultraviolet light.
He said, “Know what collateral damage is?”
Fear hollowed Lucas’s stomach. “Damian is in trouble, isn’t he? What happened?”
“Used to be, long ago, wars were fought on a battlefield chosen by both sides. Two armies meeting by appointment. Squaring up to eac
h other. Slogging it out. Then wars became so big the countries fighting them became one huge battlefield. Civilians found themselves on the front line. Or rather, there was no front line. Total war, they called it. And then you got wars that weren’t wars. Asymmetrical wars. Netwars. Where war gets mixed up with crime and terrorism. Your mother was on the edge of a netwar at one time. Against the Jackaroo and those others. Still thinks she’s fighting it, although it long ago evolved into something else. There aren’t any armies or battlefields in a netwar. Just a series of nodes in distributed organisation. Collateral damage,” Ritchy said, forking omelet into his mouth, “is the inevitable consequence of taking out one of those nodes, because all of them are embedded inside ordinary society. It could be a flat in an apartment block in a city. Or a little island where someone thinks something useful is hidden.”
“I don’t—”
“You don’t know anything,” Ritchy said. “I believe you. Damian ran off with whatever it was you two found or stole, and left you in the lurch. But the people Damian got himself involved with don’t know you don’t know. That’s why we’ve been looking out for you. Making sure you and your mother don’t become collateral damage.”
“Wait. What people? What did Damian do?”
“I’m trying to tell you, only it’s harder than I thought it would be.”
Ritchy set his knife and fork together on his plate and said, “Maybe telling it straight is the best way. The day after Damian left, he tried to do some business with some people in Norwich. Bad people. The lad wanted to sell them a fragment of that dragon that stranded itself, but they decided to take it from him without paying. There was a scuffle and the lad got away and left a man with a bad knife wound. He died from it, a few weeks later. Those are the kind of people who look after their own, if you know what I mean. Anyone involved in that trade is bad news in one way or another. Jason had to pay them off, or else they would have come after him. An eye for an eye,” Ritchy said, and tapped his blank eye with his little finger.
“What happened to Damian?”
“This is the hard part. After his trouble in Norwich, the lad called his father. He was drunk, ranting. Boasting how he was going to make all kinds of money. I managed to put a demon on his message, ran it back to a cell in Gravesend. Jason went up there, and that’s when . . . Well, there’s no other way of saying it. That’s when he found out that Damian had been killed.”
