by Dave Rudden
Vivian frowned. ‘Fair enough. And who’s this?’
A girl stepped forward. She had Darcie’s skin and Abigail’s grace, wrapped round a body that somehow took Simon’s gawkiness and gave it the sort of studied elegance that made Denizen think of a flexing bow. Her eyes had the malachite sting of poor lost Ambrel Croit, but her smile was crooked and hesitant, unsure if it should be there at all.
It was disconcertingly familiar.
‘One of the Neophytes. Caught her a bit lost in the corridors so thought I’d bring her along.’
His eyes met Denizen’s.
‘It’s not safe here.’
16
Retreat
This is not a dream.
Jasper Falx had left Alaska when he was barely out of boyhood, but it had never truly left him – tucked in the stretch of his syllables, unfolded in his anger or his laugh. It faded like freckles when they were on the road, but here at the lodge where he had been born it was as thick as crusted snow.
Wrapped in two coats, a scarf, mittens and an old roosari of her mother’s, Abigail could only feel sunlight on the very tip of her nose, but that was enough for her to know exactly where she was. This far north, daylight was different from Sumatra or Borneo or Madagascar – all brightness and no heat, polishing the frozen lake below into a dazzling mirror, snow-covered hills shining like the spotless tops of clouds. She’d hiked those hills. She and her dad had climbed the huge black peaks beyond them.
This is not a dream.
This is a memory.
‘Sholea Sassani-Falx, I am trying to –’
‘I know you’re trying. I’ve been listening to you practise this speech every morning for a year. I found it trying too.’
‘It wasn’t every morning –’
Realizing it was a memory gave Abigail a languorous sort of power, sliding from detail to detail like a ride at a theme park. This was more than a year ago, she thought, looking at her ironless hands.
This was before.
She mouthed along with her parents’ bickering, watching her mother, dark as teak, hiss at every touch of the wind. Eyes the shade of bubbling copper were all that could be seen between collar and shawl, and the wind came off the lake as cold and sharp as if they had wronged it.
This was where it happened.
Her father’s voice washing over her. Her mother the model of innocent attention, then winking whenever Jasper couldn’t see. Rafi had to stay inside out of the cold, but Abigail knew he would be watching … was watching … had been watching from the window above.
Abigail fought the urge to wave. She hadn’t the first time, and now she was reliving it she didn’t know if she could. Besides, it was easy just to let things happen, to watch the movie of her own life play out.
I would have liked him to join us. That’s all. I wouldn’t have changed anything else. Not today.
Not the day she Dawned.
It would be dark very soon. Abigail had lived in cities rich with street lights, but out here there was nothing to slow the night from falling but miles of crisp cobalt sky. Abigail trembled with excitement even though she knew exactly what would happen next.
I was so worried. Worried that it would never come, wondering what her parents would do if she turned out to be …
Ordinary.
Normal.
Falxes had an incredibly high rate of Dawning. Her mother’s family did too. There had been a grand-uncle who’d chosen to be an imam instead, but he’d possessed the power; he’d just chosen to help people in another way. She didn’t know of any relative who’d simply been …
Lacking.
Abigail knew this moment. She knew how it would end. It would unfurl from every cell, from her stomach and her heart and the two people before her, the two people whom she loved more than anything, and all the thousands upon thousands of ancestors before them.
The power came, and my skin turned to gold, and slowly I undid my scarf and slipped from my shoes and the snow melted beneath my feet.
I felt newborn. I felt perfect.
It will happen now.
She waited, tilting her head upwards for that first blush of inner sun … and shivered, as the wind hardened against her cheeks. She frowned. That’s not how it happened. The cold lessened. The wind fell away.
Her mother and father smiled in unison, just as they had when this had happened for real, but the movie was skipping, the memory faltering. Abigail felt unstable, unmoored, like a wrong note in a favourite song, like a rotten bite of a favourite food.
‘We’re proud of you, Abigail. Our daughter, the Knight.’
The frozen lake still glittered. Her parents still grinned, blank and sinister. The lodge before her was as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror, but the shadows had deepened, and ice gleamed wherever she looked.
‘So proud.’
The words echoed, as if bouncing off walls she couldn’t see, and Abigail turned to stare at the horizon, an unwilling extra in her own best day.
This isn’t how it happened.
‘So proud.’
Their lips moved in unison, drowned beneath the teeth-chattering rumble of the ground underfoot. Snow slid from the roof of the lodge in sheets. She heard windows break, and panic thudded in her at the thought of Rafi and shards of glass, but when she tried to run to the door the wind congealed around her to hold her in place.
And the bright cold of the sunlight began to slip away.
This isn’t –
And the trees swayed against their roots like the swell of a tide.
How it –
The mountains were moving.
The range separated, each massive peak of stone chafing free in world-drowning waterfalls of dust. It happened with such slowness, and all Abigail could do was stare, the voices of her parents like needles in her ears.
This isn’t how it happened.
Not peaks. Fingers.
The colossal fingers of a horrific hand.
‘Proud. Proud. Proud.’
Sucked up by the wind, pebbles rattled like snakes along the ground. One clipped Abigail’s head and spun her round, but there was no blood, and no pain, just horror as trees tore themselves free to arrow towards the hand, as hills were skinned of snow, dirt lifted in miles-wide scabs –
Her mother smiled as she came apart in sighing threads of dust.
Her father in shreds, pulled apart to feed the beast.
And the dull roar of the Emissary’s paw as it gathered the whole world in its palm, and, as everything upended, Abigail felt herself being disassembled, atom by atom, tumbling towards a Tenebrous the size of a planet, and the black hole in its core.
Its laugh was Armageddon.
‘Abigail?’
From one nightmare to another, and Abigail was moving before her eyes opened – the crossbow of her body loosing with a snap. She unfolded from a sitting position – I was sitting? – and felt the meaty tremor as she drove two fingers into soft flesh and twisted, balancing her opponent on the hook of her hand.
‘Hnnngh!’
Something about the sheer pathetic humanness of the noise brought Abigail back to herself, thinned the howl of adrenalin in her blood. That noise didn’t come from a throat you designed yourself: it came when your own biology was working against you.
Slowly, the world returned.
Time and dust and Tenebraic twisting had hidden whatever this building might have been. Rafters bulged like ribs. Windows narrowed to squints. The Intueor Lucidum didn’t help – seeing every detail only mattered when the details made sense, and the Tenebrae had wrung sense out of this architecture a long time ago.
‘Let me go –’
Oh yeah. That.
Abigail withdrew her hand, and Matt Temberley staggered back with a look of relief that soured to resentment in the space of two steps. He rubbed his chin where her fingers had dug in.
‘What was that for?’
Abigail tried to blink some sense into her brain.
She could still feel the heatless burn of winter sunlight on her skin, her mother’s old clothes protecting her from the cold, the sickening lurch in her stomach as gravity shifted, as up became down, as the universe tilted into the gullet of a beast …
She started in panic. My Dawning. It didn’t … oh no, oh no –
But there it was, coaxed out of hiding by sudden terror, a faithful hound protecting its mistress. Light filled her, and she had to fight back tears of sheer gratitude.
‘Whoa –’ Matt was backing away, his face no longer silver in the Lucidum but illuminated, pale and afraid, by the light flaring from hers. ‘What are you –’
Breathe. It was just a dream.
‘Sorry,’ Abigail said, forcing the fire away. ‘I just …’ Everything was muddled, her blood still a heady cocktail of adrenalin and fragments of the past. How … how did I get here? There was a memory, as light as a spiderweb, of a scrabbling, panicked run. Her trousers were ripped, dark with blood at the knee. And then –
DO YOU FEEL YOU’RE GOOD ENOUGH, ABIGAIL FALX?
Five a.m. starts so she could run at her own pace instead of waiting for everyone else. Hours of sword practice until her hands bled and healed and bled again. That was how muscle fibre worked – you tore it and it came back stronger.
And when the moment came, when her comrades needed her fire, her bravery … I gave them cowardice.
She’d worked so hard. She thought she had understood how the world worked and how she fitted into it. There was such power in understanding your body, knowing how hard you could punch, how fast you could run.
Capable. That was the word. She had always known what she was capable of, and had added to it every day. Until today, when she realized that she wasn’t capable of anything at all.
Something hot leaked down Abigail’s cheek. She could feel it try and fail to move the grime on her skin.
Matt was staring at her as if she might grow wings, his hair lank and stringy with sweat. The studied coolness and nonchalance, that sense of strange ownership of everything around him that he seemed to display had … diminished, as if just a little air had been let out.
He looked like she felt. Uncertain, as if the world had moved in a direction it shouldn’t.
A hand, rising to blot out the sun, growing larger and larger with each piece of the world it stole …
Abigail shivered, and Matt twitched in response, but, when she didn’t hook his jawbone or light up like a fuse again, he straightened and moved towards her. She flinched away from his outstretched hand.
‘Hey! Hey, don’t … don’t freak out. I just … found you here. I was …’ He looked decidedly shifty for a second. ‘I was looking for stragglers. Other Neophytes. I thought I’d searched the whole place, but you had crammed yourself back in there –’
An alcove – just a nook of stone, but carved with the kind of delicacy that made Abigail think that at one point it had been important. Maybe some long-dead Adumbralian had knelt here before a little shrine of household gods, or just left flowers to take the bleakness from the stone.
Anger then, chewing some of the cobwebs away.
‘So you just went to grab me?’
‘You were staring at the wall and rocking back and forth,’ Matt said, evidently with no idea how close it came to getting him killed. ‘So I thought I’d …’
‘Call out my name?’ Abigail said, and though it probably wasn’t exactly him she was angry at, this wasn’t the time to be clueless. ‘Grabbing a Knight who doesn’t know you’re there is a good way to get yourself hurt.’
Matt’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not a Knight, sweetheart. Maybe you should be saying thanks that I knocked you out of whatever state you were in.’
Palm-strike. Base of the nose. He’d be dead before he felt it.
Abigail stopped her fingers before they could curl into fists. Not because he didn’t deserve cartilage shards slicing into his brain like soft cheese, but because the thought was unworthy of her. They were both tired. They were both scared.
Be the bigger person. Her mother had always said that. Lead by example.
‘I wasn’t in a state,’ Abigail said, as pleasantly as she could through gritted teeth. ‘I … I got separated from everyone. I was just … I was trying to figure out what to do next.’ Her heart skipped a beat. ‘Oh no, did they have to send a search party? Is everyone else all right?’
Her spine stiffened with shame. She hadn’t even thought about them. She’d been languishing in her own misery when the people she was supposed to be protecting could have been hurt. What was wrong with her?
She turned away, and Matt followed, though at least this time he kept his hands by his sides. ‘Hey, wait, it’s OK.’
She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to take deep breaths, and then turned so quickly that Matt backpedalled. ‘Let’s get out of here. Where are the others?’
‘Ah,’ Matt said. ‘Well, that’s the thing …’
They stepped outside, and Abigail could almost have felt nostalgic for the remnants of her nightmare because at least that had been in her imagination. Now the rising murk of the Tenebrae was all too real – a gelid clamminess that left her sweating despite the coolness of the dark. Leaves rustled down the empty street though there was no breeze to move them, and Abigail wanted to tell herself that they were the source of the whispers she heard, but she knew that would be a lie.
‘We got separated,’ Matt said. ‘Adler told us to run back to the truck and I was trying to get everyone to head back, but everyone was just panicking and running and … and screaming –’
His voice was sure, almost cocky, but there was an edge to it, as if he wasn’t entirely convinced by his own story. Abigail was barely listening. Where was everyone? She had to get back and make sure her comrades were OK. She’d abandoned them once. She wouldn’t do that again. She’d make everything right –
There had been blood on Malleus Coiled’s lips. There had been things broken inside her.
Abigail pounded her fist into her leg to make the tremors stop. Matt didn’t notice, caught in his own reverie.
‘So I went back. Didn’t want anyone to get left behind, like? And, hey, lucky for you I did, right?’
The glare she gave him should have wiped the smile from his face, but no such luck. It was almost fascinating. She’d grown up hawkishly observing people around her, and Matt was more like those cartoon characters that ran off cliffs but somehow kept going because they refused to look down.
It took a moment for what he was saying to sink in.
‘Wait – so you’re alone? The others aren’t with you?’
‘Yep. I mean – no. They’re not. They’re probably back at Daybreak, assembling a rescue cadre. Not that we need rescuing? But yeah.’
Abigail stared at him for a long moment.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Just … nothing.’ She looked around. ‘Do we … do we know where the Emissary went?’
‘No,’ Matt said. ‘And I don’t want to know. We’re better off going back to the Order, telling them we’re OK and then just … letting someone else deal with it. They can figure it out. It’s not our job.’
‘Yes,’ Abigail hissed. ‘It is. We need to …’
She trailed off. What did they need to do? Matt might be incredibly annoying, but he had a point. They were two unarmed teenagers against a creature that could crush them in a single fist. She had as much chance against the Emissary as … as the Knights I abandoned. Proper trained Knights, Knights who didn’t hesitate when they were needed. She was in even less of a position of strength compared to the last time she’d faced the Emissary.
DO YOU FEEL YOU’RE GOOD ENOUGH, ABIGAIL FALX …?
‘It’s our duty,’ she said. ‘We need to at least try.’
‘So we can what?’ Matt snapped. ‘Die? Like the Knights? I don’t know what you think you have that they didn’t, but they’re dead. I … saw it. Do you want to go up against that? Do you want to
die?’
Would they still have loved her had she turned out not to be a Knight? At her real Dawning – not the horrible nightmare version – she’d searched every angle of their faces for doubt, for a sign that they were preparing to love her any less.
It was the only time they’d ever disappointed her.
You can’t disappoint them now.
‘We don’t have to fight it,’ she said. ‘We just have to find out what it’s doing. That’s all. We can … tail it. At a safe distance. Listen to it … or something. And then –’
Matt’s eyes were wide. ‘Then we go back to Greaves. With useful information. Valuable information.’
‘Exactly,’ Abigail said. ‘That’s what a Knight would do.’
‘That’s what a hero would do,’ Matt said, and for once she matched his breathless grin, though a canker of her nightmare remained, cold and sharp against her heart.
That’s what they would do.
Her mother’s face breaking apart. Her father reduced to dust.
‘Let’s get to work.’
17
In Current Company
‘Hey.’
One canvas backpack – standard issue. One pair of hiking boots – size 6. One lightweight shirt and matching combat trousers with extra knee padding and MOLLE webbing, to which would be clipped one combat knife, one sheath and one canteen of water – all to go underneath what Denizen absolutely refused to call a tactical poncho.
The column of Neophytes trotted after Vivian along the shuddering veins of Daybreak, and Denizen went through the list again because lists were even more comforting than maps. Where did the Order get this stuff? It was one thing seeing armour and weapons that had been lovingly maintained from generation to generation, and Denizen knew there were online marketplaces for anybody’s apocalypse of choice, but surely combat kits for teenagers (bulk order) would raise some eyebrows?
‘Hey, you.’
It was probably where they’d got the black robes too. Did that not worry people? Battle ponchos were one thing, but …