by Lily Markova
The previous day, in his fear and confusion, he had forgotten how much he loved her—well, not her specifically, but ordinary people. Of course what had happened to him wasn’t Joy Ramonnes’s fault. She couldn’t possibly have crippled him by just knocking him off his feet. It must take so much more to tear the nerve linking one of them to the rest of the family. It couldn’t have been Joy’s doing. And yet she stayed, she helped, she interfered. That was what ordinary people did. That was why his kind would fight for them until the end.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when Joy returned with a big steaming cup of tea in her hands. “About India.”
“Careful,” she warned. She bent over him to replace the empty bowl with the cup, and it had not escaped Whale’s notice that Joy’s skin had acquired a faint bluish tinge, and the shadows under her eyes seemed darker today. “Chamomile tea. If this doesn’t make you feel better, there’s probably no hope for you.”
“Thank you,” Whale said again, giving her a small sincere smile. “For everything.”
“Never mind India,” Joy said, quite cheerfully, pulling the folding screen aside.
She cast a quick look toward the other side of the apartment. There were so many tangled wires there that the area resembled a giant nest, in the middle of which Julius was sitting like a very annoyed bird, wrapped in a blanket, with his hair spiked chaotically and his mouth wide open in an endless yawn.
“I didn’t really want to leave, anyway,” she said under her breath, turning back to the screen.
Whale put the empty cup down on the bedside table. He had just realized that his temporarily being an ordinary person with their ordinary approach to gaining energy was going to be a much wider range of experiences than he had expected. “Um, may I—?”
“Bathroom?” Joy forestalled him. “That way.” She pointed at one of the two doors located in the “neutral” zone between her golden-and-brown, cozy corner and Julius’s austere black-and-silver lair.
Even after he had locked the bathroom door behind him, Whale’s keen ear enabled him to hear Julius grumbling about being “brutally” woken up for no reason.
“You shouldn’t have worked all night,” Joy replied.
“What are you, Bedtime Police?”
“Yes, sir! Officer Ramonnes. I’m here to get your sleep cycle back in sync,” Joy reported, and she continued in an exaggeratedly disappointed tone, “What-are-you-police jokes? Really? Hang on a second, I need to make a call to the New Friends Search Service. Tough love, kid. Eat your breakfast.”
“Are you sure you can’t afford another ticket to some very beautiful, very faraway Asian country?” Julius said, chewing and rattling his spoon vigorously against the bowl.
Whale felt a slight sting of guilt as he saw a pile of blankets and pillows on the bottom of the bathtub. Apparently, Joy had spent the night in it because he had been occupying her couch. No wonder she looked so tired. He had trespassed long enough on her hospitality, and it was high time he left.
He had no idea where he’d begin looking for his family, but astonishingly enough, that wasn’t what scared him most at the moment. His insides turned over at the thought that, as long as he remained disconnected from them, his survival depended on money, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had had it. He wouldn’t be able to just walk for miles and miles without ever getting weary anymore. He was going to need food and a safe place to sleep and shower. He would have to somehow return to his parents’ apartment in Hong Kong, he would have to find a job. He would have to pay bills and taxes. Whale’s hopefulness gradually gave place to despair as he contemplated his prospects. How did ordinary people cope with all of that? And more importantly, how did they trick themselves into keeping going?
When he returned to the living room, Julius was sitting in an office chair, leaning forward so his head rested on his crossed arms, which, in their turn, were resting on the long, narrow desk that spanned an entire wall. In front of him were six monitors stacked in two rows of three, all the screens matte black.
Whale was about to thank Joy again and say good-bye to her, but she jumped off her bedside table the moment she saw him, and saying quickly, “Right, uh, sorry about the mess. I’ll clear the tub,” she slipped past him into the bathroom.
As soon as the door behind her had clicked shut, Julius, who had been tapping his fingers on the lacquered surface of the desk and looking innocently bored, whipped around and beckoned Whale to approach. He pressed some key, and the displays came alive. Blue lines of code ran across the screens, jumping from one to another, an underscore blinking in the bottom right corner of the last monitor.
“What is this?” Whale forced himself to take his eyes off the cursor that twinkled menacingly, as if inviting Julius to continue typing.
“You,” Julius said. “I’ve copied your code. Took me all night, but I’ve figured you out.”
He spoke very quietly and kept looking back over his shoulder at the bathroom door, his hand hovering over the keyboard, ready to switch off the screens. “Impressed?”
“Are you?” said Whale.
Julius seemed not in the slightest troubled by what he had discovered. Maybe just a tiny bit pleased with himself. Whale was not sure what to do about it. In principle, there was no law forbidding him to tell ordinary people about his kind and what they did, but he doubted that his family would appreciate his sharing the information nevertheless. Then again, he couldn’t have stopped Julius from perusing him after the little genius had found something he hadn’t encountered before.
“There’s still a part that I don’t understand,” Julius admitted, frowning. He pointed at several lines where blue numbers were replaced by angry red symbols. “It looks as if you’re. . .faulty. But I could try to fix this.”
Whale stared at him, startled. “Why would you help?”
“Scientific interest.” Julius shrugged. “I must warn you, though, that I’m not very good at it yet. The editing, I mean. You may experience some freezing. The side effects of the cut-and-try approach—”
“I’d rather you didn’t cut anything,” Whale interrupted him curtly, making an effort not to sound terrified. He wasn’t certain that Julius required his permission to experiment with his code.
“What you did to me, by the way—” Julius said, without turning to look at Whale. His long skinny fingers raced across the keyboard like spider legs, and the screens flickered and went black, one by one. Whale expected the next words to be hurtful, and they were—just not in the way he’d thought. “Thank you.”
Whale had been prepared for Julius to blame him. He had been prepared to hear that he, Whale, had ruined Julius’s life. That would have been fair. For a moment there, before Julius had said those two terrible words, Whale could see a fourteen-year-old, confused, ordinary Julius in the young man before him. They had done it for a greater purpose, yes—but they still had failed, they had made this kid, and many others, a monster. And the worst part was that Julius was grateful for that.
“Jules!” Joy’s voice called from the bathroom, unusually high-pitched. “Would you mind coming over here for a second, please?”
She sounded somewhat alarmed, but Julius didn’t move a muscle.
“You’re always doing this,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. “Why won’t you simply tell me what it is?”
“It’s my eyes,” Joy said. Her matter-of-fact tone was too obviously forced. “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.”
“WHAT?” said Whale.
“NO,” said Julius at the same time. It wasn’t a concerned or frightened “no”—more like the kind of “no” that would come in handy if someone told you something so incredibly exciting that you needed time to process it.
They exchanged knowing looks and darted across the living room.
“Let me see,” Whale said firmly, squeezing past Julius into the tiny space next to Joy. A wet towel hanging from the clothesline above them brushed insistently against his cheek. He pu
shed it aside repeatedly, and every time, the towel slid back to the center of the sagging rope. Joy seemed a little taken aback by his intrusion.
“Uh, sorry, I don’t think you understand what—” she said, frowning slightly, and she looked at Julius for help.
“Oh, he understands,” Julius said quickly from behind Whale. He sounded busy, and Whale knew that Julius was already scanning her.
Julius’s confident word proved convincing enough for Joy; she nodded briefly and stepped closer to Whale. She stood still while he peered into her dilated pupils, although her gaze kept slipping down under his concentrated stare.
Whale squinted and glanced up, grimacing at the bare, weak yellowish bulb dangling from the ceiling. “I need more light,” he said, and the towel, about which he had forgotten, slapped him in the face again.
“Balcony?” suggested Joy.
Whale and Julius followed her through the room and to the wide glazed balcony belted with a steel pipe railing.
“Glass floor,” said Whale, shaking his head at the sight of the street bustling about eighty yards below his feet. His legs instantly felt weak and tingly, weightless below the knees, if at all existent. “Of course.”
“Yep. The apartment owner is a bit of a crazy bat,” Joy explained. In the cold white natural light, her skin looked even paler, and Whale could see the thin purple blood vessels in her temple. “Afraid of heights?” He knew she’d asked that mostly to distract herself from what worried her much more than the giddy view from the balcony, which she was probably accustomed to.
“No, I’m not.” Not of heights. Of falling from them. “It’s just—” The floor might crack, and somebody would—
Whale forbade himself to even think it. His intuition couldn’t be as reliable as it used to be. “Nothing.”
Joy turned around to look at Julius, who was standing right behind her, staring very intently somewhere below her waist. She flushed and compressed her lips.
“Um, Jules? Jules, never thought I’d find myself saying something along these lines, but if you’re looking for my eyes, they’re up here.”
“You don’t suppose your eyes are always in the same place, do you? They move, obviously,” Julius replied, and he resumed the scanning of whatever he had been scanning down there.
“Right. Okay,” she said, turning back to Whale.
“Let’s see what we have here.” Whale took Joy’s face in his hands, turned it up a little, and looked into her medium slate-blue eyes, which were now big and watery with apprehension.
“Are you like Jules?” she asked.
Whale shook his head, not taking his eyes off hers.
“Am I going to be like Jules?” Her voice quivered, betraying a hint of dread.
There was a long silence while Whale continued scrutinizing Joy’s eyes, which blinked more and more often.
“I don’t think so,” Whale said finally, letting go of her face. “When did it start?”
“Yesterday—I guess.” Joy lowered her evidently stinging eyes, her bare feet shifting on the cold glass. “I was so anxious. Just couldn’t sit still. I thought it was because the day was kind of. . .well, haywire. Missed my ship. Almost killed a stranger. Stress and everything. And then at night. . .” She hesitated.
“Insomnia? Inexplicable unease? Depersonalization? As if you’re not real, not quite yourself?” he enumerated the most common symptoms.
Joy nodded, biting her lower lip. Her shoulders sank.
“Listen to me, Joy,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you: You are transforming.” His voice was calm and low, and Whale himself was surprised at the tone of it. He was sounding like a seasoned doctor, and as much as he wished to instill trust and hope in her, he knew the patient’s condition was serious. He considered her for another moment and added, a crease of confusion between his eyebrows, “But we didn’t change you. The past few weeks have been quiet: no new threats, no omens. We couldn’t have changed you, not while I was still part of the family. Otherwise, I would know why you were chosen and what you’re going to become.”
“I don’t—” Joy stopped and looked around slowly, as if hoping to find a translation of his words nearby.
Of course, that last part made no sense to her. To Whale himself, on the other hand, the meaning was clear, and devastating at that: If he had had no part in Joy’s conversion, it could only suggest that his kind were still doing their thing. Without him. He was the only one who had been cut off. And they either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Hell, they must have nudged Joy on the crowded pier just the previous day, shortly after he had lost them. What was with the urgency? It was disturbing and not typical of them to skip days of research and preparations and jump straight into action, but that wasn’t what shocked Whale the most about it; they had been there, they had been at the very pier where he’d been waiting, hoping, praying that they would come for him. They had simply walked past.
A feeling Whale had never experienced before rolled through his body in hot waves. Abandoned. Betrayed. That stupid conviction that he would be safe no matter what, that his family would always be there for him, gone. For once, Whale didn’t feel that “heartbroken” was but a pretentious exaggeration. When something is broken, there are sharp splinters, and it did not feel nice to have something broken inside him.
“Tell her,” Julius said, dragging Whale back out of the spiraling vortex of self-pity. “I would have been okay a lot sooner if one of you guys had just taken a minute to explain what was going on with me.”
Whale knew that if anybody in the whole world could help Joy right now, it was him. And he wanted to help her. She made a good ordinary person, she tried to be kind and high-spirited, and he felt sorry that such a personality had to go. The diagnosis had been made, and there was nothing he could do to prevent her changing, but he could at least save her from the strain of not knowing.
“But I don’t want to transform.” She looked at Whale pleadingly, then turned to Julius and repeated, her voice breaking on the verge of crying, “Jules, I don’t want to.”
“Joy,” called Whale softly. “Joy, listen. You know that Julius is different, and you know he wasn’t always like this.”
She nodded.
“He was made like this, and. . .and I’m one of those responsible for that. And I’m sorry,” Whale went on, when Joy didn’t say anything, “but there was no other way. There still isn’t, and we’re going to continue to convert some people. I don’t know why you’ve been selected and what you’re going to turn into, because I’m kind of off work—not for long, I hope. We are—”
“Phaeton,” Joy muttered, looking absently through the glass wall of the balcony. This transparent box in which they stood so high above the ground was now darker inside, because outside it had been enveloped by an impenetrable gray cloud, and it was impossible to tell whether it was an actual cloud, or the perpetual fog of this city.
“What?”
“You’re called the Phaeton,” repeated Joy, barely audibly. Her voice seemed somewhat ghostly for a moment, filled with deep sadness and regret.
“Called. . .by whom?” Whale was starting to feel nervous. It was not usual for a new subspecies to be aware of his kind’s existence at all, let alone have a name for it. The most unsettling part was that “Phaeton” sounded as natural and familiar to him as if they had been called that all along. The name seemed to match them perfectly, though Whale couldn’t understand why he felt that way.
“Phaeton?” said Julius. “There used to be a planet called Phaeton. The fifth planet from the Sun.”
“The word just sort of popped up in my mind. . . . They’re whispering inside my head.” Joy shut her eyes, wincing, as if in pain. “So many of them. . . .”
“A collective mind?” Whale was completely amazed. “Well, there are a million of you inside that poor head of yours now.”
“One hundred million,” Julius corrected him.
“Shut up!” Joy cried. Whale an
d Julius, who both had been about to say something, clapped their mouths shut and exchanged half-surprised, half-wary looks. Joy held up a silencing hand and tilted her head to one side, as if straining to hear something, and after a few seconds, she opened her eyes and let out an incredulous huff. “They’ve stopped!” Joy slid her hand under her hair and, gingerly, she probed the back of her neck. “But I can still feel them. . . .”
“This is impossible,” Whale murmured to himself.
One hundred million. What on earth was going on? What kind of threat could possibly have forced them to make so many? Something was coming, something huge, and for the first time in his life, Whale had absolutely no control, no information.
“A hundred million,” Julius repeated. “That’s how many there are of you, right? And collective consciousness? Is Joy one of the Phaetons now? Instead of you?”
“No, that’s not how we—” Whale fell silent, pondering the awful possibility that he had been replaced. He shook the silly thought off. “No, no, you have to be born one of us, just as you have to be born an ordinary person if you want to be one—well, not that you have a choice, but—”
“But how do you guys—?” interrupted Julius. “I mean, with you being—well, you?”
Whale gave him a disapproving look.
“Scientific interest,” Julius added quickly.
“When a Phaeton—when one of us reaches the age of eighteen, she or he finds a match,” Whale explained, rather reluctantly, “and when their child is seven, the three of them part and go their own ways.”
“Seven-year-old kids go their own way?” Joy intervened. “You mean you just dump your children and leave them to roam the streets alone?”
“Our children are never alone,” Whale assured her heatedly, and he pointed at his temple. “We’re all together, always. At the age of seven, they do not have the consciousness of a child. We are one, and those children are part of something that possesses thousands-year-old knowledge.”
Whale contemplated the gray substance clinging to the glass. He had been so sure that his family would never leave any one of them behind, and here he was, roaming the streets alone, with the consciousness of a child.