She glanced over at Ignatio, then back to Fergus. “When yer friend arrived last night,” she said, her eyes narrowing, “ey said ye weren’t huma—”
“Hang on,” Fergus said. “The door’s open.” He pointed to the side entrance to the upstairs. “Would Gavin—”
“No,” Isla said.
Fergus shoved through the door and bounded up the stairs, where he found the apartment door itself wide open. Gavin was on the floor, holding a thin man in a headlock, who was kicking and struggling frantically.
Gavin looked up, and the intruder used the brief distraction to pull himself free. The intruder scrambled to his feet and grabbed Fergus’s pack, then bolted toward the door, pulling a knife from his pocket as he came.
Behind him, Fergus could hear Ignatio and Isla coming up the stairs. “Knife!” he shouted, and moved to block the intruder’s escape. The thrust with the knife, when it came, was clumsy and broadcast so far in advance that Fergus almost could have dodged it while sleeping. Instead, he concentrated on some of the mujūryokudo movements that Dr. Minobe had drilled him in during their spare time under the ice of Enceladus, and let himself half-fall, half-slide sideways out the attacker’s path. As the intruder stumbled forward into the space where he’d been standing, he slapped his hand on the man’s hunched-over back and let a big spark fly.
The intruder crumpled to the floor, the knife falling from his open hand to land point-down, quivering in the carpet, as Gavin scrambled to his feet.
“Uh,” Isla said from the doorway, as Gavin stared from across the room.
Belatedly, Fergus realized the spark had been bright enough that it would have been very hard for either of them to miss.
“Well,” Ignatio said brightly, stepping in around his sister. “That horse is now out of its bag, yes?”
Chapter 3
Gavin and Isla both started to speak, but Fergus held up his hand. “Wait,” he commanded. The bees in his gut were already telling him that the intruder was still alive, still electrically operating, but Fergus bent down to take the man’s pulse anyway to be certain. A dead intruder was more complication than either he or Gavin needed. Satisfied the man was merely unconscious, Fergus rolled him over and patted him down, checking his pockets to look for ID.
“Is that the white-van man?” Ignatio asked.
“No,” Fergus said. “That guy was all muscle. This guy . . . he’s so thin, if we’d waited another five minutes, he might’ve just fainted from hunger on Gavin’s floor.”
Fergus had thought the thief middle-aged or older at first glance, but it was an illusion of the thinness; the man could hardly be out of his mid-twenties. His clothes were clean, though, and made of an expensive if plain linen. He had no ID, nothing except a single old-fashioned credit chit that gave nothing away. When he checked the man’s shirt for anything hidden in the lining, he discovered there was a strange, hard lump in the center of the man’s chest, and Fergus gently lifted his shirt. “Huh,” he said, and sat back on his heels. “Anyone seen anything like that before?”
The others leaned in to look.
There was a metallic disk, about the size of an old-fashioned pound coin, embedded in the skin, with a stylized fire symbol on it. He picked up the man’s knife from the floor, turned it around, and poked it with the end of the handle. “I think it’s attached to his damned breastbone,” he said. He glanced up at Gavin, who flinched when meeting his eyes. Bloody great, Fergus thought crossly. “So, what happened?”
“Woke up to him rustling around my flat, making a lot of noise and muttering to himself,” Gavin said. “Came out here, he tried to hit me, so I took him down and had him until ye burst in and distracted me.”
“He must’ve seen us leave and thought the apartment was empty,” Fergus said. “What was he saying?”
Gavin shook his head. “Couldn’t make it out, but it was repetitive, like maybe a chant? A spark came out of yer bloody bare hand, Fergus. Did ye . . . did ye kill him?”
“No, he’s just sleeping,” Fergus said. He scanned the embedded disk with his handpad, then let the man’s shirt back down and stood up. “So,” he said.
“So,” Isla repeated. “You’ve got something ye need to be telling us, I think.”
“Yeah,” Fergus said. He took a deep breath. “So, short and ugly version is: I was abducted by aliens a little less than a year ago while out on a job. They saved my life, but they also left me with a parting gift.” He raised one hand, palm up, and let a spark jump along his fingertips.
Gavin jumped back. “Bloody hell, Ferg,” he said.
“It’s not like they asked my permission first,” Fergus said, feeling defensive.
“Ah!” Isla said. “Now I get how you and the fragment can talk to each other.”
“What?” Gavin said.
Fergus shook his head, feeling he’d already said more than he’d ever wanted to. And again, there was that odd sensation of being able to read the thief’s field, his own internal chorus of electrical bees whispering that the man was nearing consciousness but not quite there yet. Another handy feature, or another step into his own damnation? And once again he wondered if he’d have the chance to find out before it was too late.
Not right now, he didn’t. “Later. We don’t want our friend here accidentally overhearing anything,” he said, then nudged the man with his boot.
“Hey, you!” he shouted. “Wake up and answer some questions, and maybe we’ll give you some brekkie before the police get here.”
Slowly the intruder’s eyes fluttered open, and he focused on Ignatio, shrieked, and tried to scramble backward across the room. Gavin put a foot down on him to keep him still. “Quiet, ye wallaper!” he shouted.
The man swung his head around wildly, looking for an escape and finding none. “Let me go, ekbruligaĵo!” he shouted, terrified.
“What’s your name?” Fergus asked.
“Let me go; I didn’t hurt anybody! I wasn’t going to. I just wanted you to get out of my way!”
“It’s not that easy,” Fergus said. “Tell me your name, or I’ll have my giant green spider friend ask instead.”
“Yes. Boo,” Ignatio said.
That seemed to push the intruder over the edge, and he shook uncontrollably. “Peter. My name is Peter! Please, I just followed Kyle here. I saw his van out front, and I just wanted to know what he was interested in. I didn’t mean any harm.”
“Aww, bullshit,” Gavin said. “Ye pulled a knife on us. And ye were trying to rob us, ye bastard.”
“And who is Kyle?” Fergus asked.
The man pressed his lips tightly together. Ignatio edged forward and did their springy-leg trick that had gone over so well with the waiter earlier, and Peter broke into a cold sweat. “I dunno! I’m assigned to follow him, that’s all!”
“Assigned by who?”
“The Estro de la Hejmo,” the man said. “I can’t tell you more than that. I took an oath!”
“Then if you were just following him, why did you break in here?”
“I saw you scare him off,” Peter said. “I just wanted any little bits of scrap, if you found any on the mountain. Nothing valuable to you.”
“I didn’t find anything except sheep. And even if I did somehow, with all that snow, what makes you think I’d give it to you?” Fergus asked. “What kind of scrap?”
“Nobody understands except us,” Peter said. “It’s our salvation, not yours. Kyle’s boss doesn’t get that! You don’t get that! Only we get it. We are the righteous—”
“Ah, shut up,” Gavin said. “Ferg, this guy’s not making any sense. Do I call the police now?”
“No!” Peter shouted. “No police. Just let me go!”
Fergus crouched next to the intruder. “Listen to me,” he said. “I didn’t find anything on that mountain except the sheep I went looking for, and I’m sta
rting to resent people asking me about it or, worse yet, going through my things or parking vans outside my place. I have no reason to lie to you, because I’m in control right now, right? So, if I let you go, I don’t want to see you—or anyone affiliated with you, or anyone who even slightly looks like you—ever again. You get me?”
“Yes,” Peter said.
“And if you do come back here, my spider friend is going to sit on your head, inject you with acid to turn everything inside your body into nutritious goo, and leave your deflated little skinbag of a corpse outside with the compost. You still get me?”
His last words were lost in the man shrieking again.
“Bloody brilliant,” Gavin said. He put his hands under Peter’s armpits and hauled him upright, then manhandled him over to the door. “Walk or I kick ye down,” he said, and Peter managed to find his feet and raced down the stairs out into the street, still screaming.
“I am non-comfortable with that inaccurate description of my eating methods,” Ignatio said once Peter was gone and Gavin had slammed and locked both doors behind him.
“Me too,” Isla said.
Fergus shrugged. “I don’t think he’s going to come back.”
“If he does, will you expect me to—” Ignatio started to ask.
“No!” everyone else shouted at once.
Gavin grabbed one of the kitchen stools and sat on it, running his hands over the morning stubble on his chin while staring at Fergus.
“Uh . . .” Fergus said, when the silence went on too long.
“Were ye gonna tell us?” Gavin said.
“I hadn’t decided,” Fergus said. “I’m still coming to terms with it myself.”
“Ye could’ve killed him.”
“I have more control over it than that,” Fergus said.
“But ye could’ve, if ye wanted to?”
“. . . Yeah,” Fergus said. “He had a knife, and Isla was coming up the stairs. What else was I going to do? But if anyone finds out about me, they’ll haul me off and dissect me so fast, you’d hear the sonic boom.”
“That bloke Peter might have seen,” Isla said.
“He was facing the other way. Getting shocked messes with your immediate short-term memory,” Fergus said. “And he’s not exactly a reliable witness, even if he was willing to go to the authorities, which I’m guessing he isn’t.”
Gavin shook his head. “It’s way too early to start drinking, but I think I might. It’s . . . Look, I owe ye, Fergus; we all do for what we let yer parents put ye through without stopping it. And I feel like you and Isla here aren’t just cousins but the brother and sister I never had, and I thought even if ye were gone for nineteen years, ye were still . . . you, you know? But I’m also me, and I run my bloody bar, and I like my life without big spider aliens and crazy people breaking into my house and conspiracies and all that.”
“I’m sorry,” Fergus said. “I only came back to give you back your motorcycle and then get out of your way for good.”
“I don’t want to lose ye again, Fergus. But I can’t take the insanity ye brought with ye, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if we’re safe around ye.”
“Vergus is a person of honor and big courage,” Ignatio said.
“I’m not saying otherwise! I’m not saying anything bad about ye, okay?” Gavin said. “The occasional postcard from Pluto or Ganymede or Wuckifuckitt or wherever was one thing, but this is Old Kilbride. The most excitement we had here all year, until ye arrived, was when Craig dropped a bunch of pickled herring inside Ennis’s bagpipes right before the Scottish Independence Day parade. Space is something out there, not here.”
Isla opened her mouth to speak, and Gavin glared at her. “Don’t physics me on that, Isla.”
“I’m sorry,” Fergus said again. “I shouldn’t have imposed myself on you.”
“I insisted ye stay here, and . . . I’m glad ye were here. I just need a little time to take in all this,” Gavin said. “Isla goes back to my parents tomorrow for her break, and I need a day or two to catch up to my own head, and then we can talk about it, okay?”
“Okay,” Fergus said.
“Gav . . .” Isla said.
“It’s for the best,” Gavin said. He looked around the apartment at all the things scattered by the intruder during his search and subsequent fight and flight. “You mind helping me straighten up?”
“Sure,” she said.
“I’ll call an auto-taxi for me and Ignatio,” Fergus said. “Unless you want me to help—”
“No, no, go on,” Gavin said. “Best to get it over with.”
“Yeah,” Fergus said, and he wondered as he said it if it was going to be the last words he spoke to his cousin. He’d come too long a way just to leave it at that. “Gav?”
“Yeah, Ferg?”
“Thanks for not forgetting me, all those years.”
“Don’t get all mushy on me,” Gavin said. “We’ll talk in a day or two, okay?”
“Okay,” Fergus said, and picked up his pack, tucked his confuddler and few other things inside. Everything else he had there was borrowed and easily replaced.
Ignatio followed him down the stairs and out, gently shaking eir head.
* * *
—
They took an auto-taxi into New Glasgow; it seemed best to get out of Old Kilbride entirely. The edges of the city still wore its scars from the flooding that had devastated so much of Scotland, and yet so much less brutally than many other places in the world. Torrential rain and raging rivers, it turned out, were still gentler conquerors than the ocean.
He had grown up with his mother’s tales of the horrors of the centuries of climate catastrophe, and sometimes she would dig out old photos and vids of what the land and country had looked like before so much had been swept away, but this was always his normal, and for all that his mother had believed herself personally robbed of the past, the truth was this had always been her normal, too. Maybe that was what she’d resented the most.
Understanding his mother had never been something Fergus had managed. Maybe it had never even been possible—he didn’t think his father understood her, either—and he’d mostly come to accept that over the years, but now it felt again like a failure. Because how could he explain any of it to Isla?
If you ever even see her again, Fergus thought. Although running around to try to save the Earth from an interdimensional menace seemed a pretty damned good excuse.
And a patently ridiculous one. I’m not some bloody holonovel hero, Fergus thought. Far from it. He glanced over at Ignatio, who was staring, unblinking, out the auto-taxi window as the city deepened around them. “Which of us is the sidekick?” he asked.
Ignatio turned eir head to regard him thoughtfully. “Side-kick-er, or the side-kick-ed?” ey asked. “I believe I have natural advantages over you to be the kicker, if you feel that it is necessary for me to kick you in your sides.”
“Never mind,” Fergus said.
Outside the window of the auto-taxi he watched as they rolled into the city. Beside them, the Clyde roared along between its reinforced banks, the water was blue and bright and comforting in its contained fury; centuries ago parts of the city had to be pulled back one sodden brick at a time from its grasp, and other parts were given up in tribute to it, like a blood bond with the river to secure their mutual future.
As the auto-taxi slowed to go over one of the road scanners, checking its eco license and safety reports, Fergus spotted the edges of a park ahead. The sun was out, the morning’s chill was grudgingly yielding to a more temperate April day, and he felt the urge to be outside, in gravity and open air and trees, possibly for the last time. “Let us off at the park,” he instructed the auto-taxi, and it dutifully pulled into the drop off circle and dinged his Duncan MacInnis account a small fee for the ride.
Fergus grabbed
his pack from the back and Ignatio followed him onto the grass, past the flood markers and pandemic memorials, to a bench under a tree surrounded by daffodils. “I meant to ask—” he started to say as he slung his pack down on the bench and turned toward Ignatio, but his friend was still some distance away, doing an odd tiptoe dance across the grass, all four of eir eyes wide. When ey got close enough, they called out, “I am not hurting them? They are tickling me! It is a defense?”
“The grass?” Fergus asked, and laughed. It was a good thing this part of the park was empty, or that would have earned them a crowd. “No, you’re not hurting it. Honest!”
Ignatio reached the bench and curled up all five of eir legs atop it, one outer eye still on the grass as ey focused the remaining ones on Fergus. “And now we do?” ey asked.
“I guess we get some information on this morning’s visitor,” Fergus said. He toggled on his handpad and uploaded an image of the intruder’s odd chest emblem and ran a fast visual identification search. Fajro Promeso, it returned after a few seconds. Cult; currently active.
Ignatio leaned closer. “Cult?” ey asked.
Fergus was already pulling down more details. “That’s hard to explain,” he said, taking a moment to formulate an answer that would make sense. “It’s a group of people who follow a single leader, usually unquestioningly, because of a shared set of unscientific or supernatural beliefs. Sometimes, the members have their thinking manipulated into belonging ‘voluntarily,’ maybe from a young age, or they’re kept from leaving through fear or force. Often for the leader it’s about power and self-aggrandizement. That must seem strange.”
“Alas, not much so. On Xhr Home we have a pulp-filled seed unit named hkto that is very difficult to grow. If you eat one, it is pleasingly sweet and gives you great warmth and well-being, but if you eat many, it is a toxin that deteriorates one’s clear thinking,” Ignatio said. “In the lifespace I came from, there are many who cannot resist hkto, and this gives a dis-scrupulous few an advantage of power and control over them. Some of these were family, but I would not be a part of it, despite much insisting and small force. It is one reason I left.”
The Scavenger Door Page 5