Two girls in sundresses, one red, one purple, were dancing to music coming from a small stereo in the grass, giggling and stepping adroitly over their textbooks. I stopped to watch, jealous of their education, their bare feet, the expensive sandals discarded on their bags—even the boombox, remembering my broken one back home. Students were the same everywhere: rich and bright, and not purposefully ignoring but not actually able to see people like me, as if they had some filter for people who were lesser than they were, that they might try to break down over the years of their schooling or they might not.
The big difference between me and Johnny, I thought as I kept walking, not wanting to be branded the campus pervert, wasn’t race, wasn’t money, wasn’t gender, wasn’t looks, wasn’t intelligence. It was that she thought the world was, in general, improvable, and I didn’t. We’d both extrapolated from the people we knew, from personal to global, and just veered away from each other like lines on a graph, never able to come close to touching again. I’d seen enough of people to know that they never changed. And she’d seen enough to think that they did.
But she was wrong, fundamentally wrong. I’d tried to change people, and failed. And I didn’t know anyone who had succeeded, not one single person. Yet she persisted in believing that she could do it—and not one or two, here and there; everybody, everywhere, for all time. That was why the press loved her, that bullheaded optimism that would have looked like actual insanity in anyone else, but who had the patents and the labs to back it up, who had designed valves for the Canadarm as well as wheelchairs, who had drugs for Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis and malaria and sleeping sickness and cancer, who had created both extra-caffeinated coffee beans and vitamin-enhanced rice, who had a giant thing that only transported photons and a tiny thing that only killed potato pests. No strata of society had escaped her vision. She saw a shining future, and I saw more of the same. But both of us couldn’t be right.
I headed back to the shade and sat under a tree across from three young guys in button-up shirts quizzing each other with flashcards. Same everywhere you went, everywhere. The ground was cool under my jeans. Should have been like Johnny in her khakis. They showed dirt quicker, but she was a hell of a lot cooler on this trip than me. I looked up through the soft leaves—no, needles. Some deep-green tree with sweet-smelling needles. My entire body relaxed in the humid, scented air as if someone had cut the strings making it go. I leaned back on the trunk and looked up, listening to air hiss through the trees.
the sky is
he has come! he calls!
shadows with no shape
voices with no voice
every light a star, every star a god
I opened my eyes to darkness, a blood-black sky pierced with crimson stars, burning with a violence that stung the eyes. Panting, I stared around myself. Had I slept, under the fragrant tree? Had the sun gone down, or had I somehow missed the disaster that was expected to happen, had Johnny’s calculations been wrong, was this the end? What had I done?
I tried to get to my feet and pitched forward as if I’d been thrown. My weight was wrong, or the air was wrong, or gravity was wrong. I floated as if I were in water, but there was nothing around me but warm air and silence. Dreaming. Dreaming?
The trees and lawns and students were gone. Nothing but the dark sky, the hot stars. Below me, far below, as I contorted myself to look, lay a plain of reddish sand dotted with white, so that for a second I thought it was calm water reflecting the sky, but they were stones. The stones were blue-white, tall and conical, like skyscrapers, blunt and—I somehow knew—ancient. They had been sharp once, as sharp as knives. Chiseled to a point long ago, chipped and shaped like a Neolithic spearhead. An indigo sea chewed away at the edge of the cliff, showing long, rippling strands of something in the water, like streamers of bull kelp, though mushroomily pale.
We greet you and salute you, human
I tried to turn, failed, hung panting in the thick air. Wake up! Wake up! Don’t stay here! They are a contagion, creeping, They have crept into my dreams—
We wish to offer you a proposition
A covenant! Just like Johnny said! They would offer a covenant and oh God, They have crept or crawled—not walked—into here, into my head, get out, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven
Wait, I know that, I know that line, get out of my head! You stole that from Johnny’s favourite poem! The one she quotes at award shows!
“No,” I said, half-gagging on it. “No, whatever it is. I said no before. I’m going to keep saying no. You’ll... you’ll have to kill me.”
We will not
“You’re going to have to. Do you hear me? Believe me? Or is it that you’re still too weak, you can only walk in our dreams, use humans as suits; well, listen up, you’re not going to get any stronger, we’re going to stop you, Johnny’s going to stop you—”
We want what she made
“You can’t have it! We destroyed it!”
Then kill her, kill the maker, kill the child
“No!”
Stop her
Stop her
Then stop her only, forget the made thing
Only you can stop her
Only you
Something was approaching behind me; I flailed, succeeding only in turning myself half on my stomach, folded over and hanging in the sky above the stones. My skin felt the pressure as it came closer, slowly, the touch of the thick air. In a moment I smelled it—different from Drozanoth’s deadly reek, this was like a stagnant swamp, bubbling and fermenting in the August sun, dead from dangerous bacteria, never to return, changing colours and killing everything in it, fish, snails, insects, everything. I held a hand over my mouth.
“Get away from me! The answer is still no!”
A green cloud enveloped me—the stench made visible, making me cough and retch, my eyes burning. How close was it? Were there tentacles reaching for me now, or limbs, or segmented legs, a carapace of some kind, were there dripping claws—?
But nothing touched me. Infinitely worse somehow.
Kill her
Kill the maker
Kill the child
It is not difficult
“No!”
In the new world we create, you could be king, ruler of many humans, powerful, wealthy, protected
Yes, we would protect you
Forever
It would be the work of
Of
Of moments
The simplest of works
“What don’t you understand about ‘no’? Fuck off! Leave me alone! This world doesn’t belong to you, and neither do I, and neither do my dreams!”
The new world would be a beautiful dream, filled with
“You’re going to destroy it! Just like you tried to destroy everything before!”
According to whom
According to the child?
Is that what she said?
Make your own choices, human, choose your own way, make your own
Yes, your own
Yes, do not listen to her, she is run by older magics than even we, the Great Old Ones, the Watchers, she has ever been their thrall
“No she isn’t! She told me the truth about you!”
She has not
Told you
Everything
I opened my mouth to reply and everything went white.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FOR A SECOND I thought I was paralyzed—nothing moved, nothing felt—but then I realized I could feel, and what I felt was something repeatedly tapping or poking me on the shoulder. Were my eyes working? I tried opening them, experimentally, and saw blue sky peeking through thick, green needles. All right. Woke up; calling that a win. After a moment I managed to sit up and paw at my shoulder, only then realizing that someone was squatting beside me and prodding me with a pen. We stared at each other.
“Er,” he said, a zit
ty young guy maybe five years older than me, in a white t-shirt and khaki shorts, with a wilting moustache. “English?”
“Yes?”
“Uh. The lady inside, uh, uh—”
I nearly groaned with relief. “Johnny sent you to come find me.”
“Yes! Miss Chambers. Doctor Chambers? Miss Chambers.” His relief seemed as great as mine as he helped me up from the needles and we walked back to the library. My head and back hurt, and my eyes were burning; I wondered if I’d slept with them open. How long had it been? I didn’t feel refreshed by the nap, and now I was embarrassed that he’d been sent to find me. Some lookout I was. Jesus. Slacker.
My face burned as I came up behind Johnny, who was staring at something I couldn’t see on the computer monitor, obscured by the brown-sugar hair sticking up where she had run her hands through it. She looked a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio about to freeze to death. “We’ve got trouble,” she announced as I came in, about to tell her about my dream.
“Wow. Didn’t even turn around. Do I smell that bad?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m pretty sure we both smell.”
“You don’t.”
“Anyway. Would you, perhaps, if you’re quite done, like to hear about the trouble?”
I sat as she gestured the student out of the room, then pointed at the computer, where she had a dozen Explorer windows open. “Look at this. Giant oarfish washing up. Indonesia, the Philippines, the coast of Chile. Do you know how deep those live?”
“Oh sure, I just wrote a whole book about them.”
“Sinkholes in Siberia and Patagonia, and the middle of Australia. One of them, they’re saying, was filled with CO2—a herd of over five hundred cattle died instantly, and the three ranchers that were out there. And an unconfirmed one in Maine.”
“All right, but—”
“Look.” She started clicking feverishly through the windows, so fast that I couldn’t read the headlines, just a barrage of pictures, none of which made any sense. “That was all in the last couple of days—starting within minutes of pouring water into the reactor. This too: a meteorite landing in the ocean near the Rock of Gibraltar. Hasn’t been recovered. The resulting tidal wave swamped the tourist launch, four hundred and eighty people were washed away, drowned. Another thousand or so in hospital. A windstorm of two hundred miles an hour is revealing new Nazca lines, reported by a local pilot. Archaeologists who rushed out to see them—that was this morning—haven’t been heard from. Look. Look. The Shinano river is turning red. No bacteria, no dyes, no industrial effluents that they can think of, they keep sampling it and they can’t find anything. Bright red. Look, it’s almost orange. It happened in the space of an hour. They’re having seismic events there. In fact, seismic activity is increasing all over the world.”
“Johnny—”
“They’re rising,” she said, turning back to me, her pale face glistening with sweat. “This could all be random, right? But all at once? How random is that? And this is just stuff that’s being reported, no one knows what they’re reporting or what’s not being reported, they can’t see the pattern—this giant eye found on the beach in California, this rain of metal spheres onto Madagascar, this boiling lake in Namibia, villages spontaneously going dark in—”
“All right, all right, all right,” I said, holding my hands out, stopping myself a second before I covered the screen. “Okay.”
“Thousands of people have already died,” she said. “Nicky, the gates are all thinning. The alignment means that a dozen old spells slot into place, not just one or two. The Ancient Ones, They’re shifting, moving, crying out, like human dominion over the Earth is just a bad dream They’re having and it’s about to end. Magic is pouring through, not seeping. Magic and danger and evil and filth. People are getting contaminated already, other things, canaries in the coal mine, chemical indicators, that fucking oarfish. All my theories were way off-base. I can’t… there shouldn’t be… we have to go. Now.” She began to cram her notes into her bag, hands shaking. “There’s only one place left that might help guide us to the great gate. It’s just damn lucky he lives in Carthage now. I left a message—”
“He? He who?”
“Friend of a friend of a friend,” she said. “Used to work for the Department of Antiquities in Baghdad. His name is Akhmetov—”
“Not from around here, I guess. Is he one of those secret society people? Does he know about your covenant?” I said, and felt a slow flood of vertigo rise from my ankles up. I was glad I was sitting down, and watched as my hand white-knuckled the table, holding me upright. The word. A cov... an agree... someone had... someone in a dream... I fell asleep outside and... “Johnny, I...”
“What?”
“Nothing. Sorry. You were saying?”
“I wasn’t saying anything,” she said. “Are you all right? You look sweaty. Are you going to throw up?”
“No, I...” I looked down into her impatient, terrified face. Something felt different. Subtle, as if I had done no more than walk through a mist of something that had evaporated at once, only the memory of it on my skin. I felt… important. Seen. Something had spoken to me directly, not through her, something had tasked me with… with something. Something essential that only I could do. Something about saving the world. Better than her. For once, better and cleaner and easier than anything she had suggested. And I couldn’t quite remember what.
“Anyway, he’s got a private library that you kind of have to see to believe,” she said. “And if it’s got the last book we’re looking for, then we’re in luck.”
“We’ve been lucky so far,” I said. “Librarians want to help, like you said.”
“Well. He’s not a… librarian, really. He’s just a bibliophile.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You’ll see.”
“And if he doesn’t have it?”
“Time to make some more phonecalls,” she said, standing, swaying, and grabbing at the back of the chair. It promptly tipped, and I grabbed it before both she and it toppled to the floor. The spell was clearly taking it out of her—but after a moment she looked steadier, and her cheeks went from white to pink again. “I’ve already talked to people who have confirmed that there are warships gathering in the Gulf: American, Russian, and French. Tensions are running high. No one seems to know who gave orders for those ships to be there—”
“What?”
“—but no one’s moving, either.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and patted her pockets for the Sharpie. “I tried to buy some time before they begin hostilities. Begged, really. Till the afternoon of the fifth, I said. But things move so fast when they start going wrong.”
I watched the back of her neck as we walked, where the skin was tanning darkly instead of burning for now, fuzzed with fine golden haze that disappeared up into her hair and down into her t-shirt, wanting badly to touch it, comfort her, but also wondering how delicate it was, the spine, the spinal cord below it, how it might crunch and pop in my hands. How if I took her around that slender throat quickly enough I could crush her windpipe, make the sides stick together. She’d suffocate at my feet without landing a single blow.
“You coming?” she said, and I realized with a start that I had fallen far behind; she looked up at me from a dozen steps down, small, expectant. So much smaller than me. That sixty or seventy or eighty pounds that she didn’t have, that inertia that she didn’t have. My hands began to shake. If I pushed her here, and she rolled another... eight steps, to the concrete below...
“Yeah. Sorry. Thinking about stuff.”
“Drink some water,” she said. “You still look sketchy.”
“Yeah.”
SHE CLAIMED IT was walkable, but I was slow, disoriented, helplessly bumping into things as if I wasn’t sure where my feet or hands were. We passed the glossy buildings and factories, the rich houses, the poor houses, a lot of suburban-looking houses, too many trees, the businesses and shacks and markets till everything
was whirling in my head in a blast of heat and spices and neon signs and bright fabrics that seemed to be everywhere, and finally Johnny paused and said, “We’re almost there. Let’s stop for a minute.”
“But it’s getting late... won’t he be...?”
“Yeah, but you’re going to die and I’m starving.”
“I’m not going to die.”
“You look like you might,” she said. “No offense.”
“I’m offended.”
The place she took us looked like someone’s house, complete with a couple of old ladies staring at us and kids playing with plastic toys in front. “Are you sure we can eat here?”
“Says ‘café.’ Trust me.”
We sat at one of the low tables and Johnny called out to the man behind the counter, a riot of blue, white, and green tile, glossy and clean despite the dust everywhere else. The old women and the kids mysteriously vanished when I looked again, a robot figure that looked half-familiar—one of the shows the kids watched?—spinning in the grass. I realized, by degrees, that I was shaking. My nails chittered on the worn wood of the tabletop. Something wrong, something very wrong. The memory of how I’d felt when I’d woken up, when I’d gone into the library, had faded, and everything else had changed too. I grabbed for the memory and felt it slip through my fingers. Only that it was both good and wrong. That I was useful not to Johnny but to everything, to history, to the future.
After we ate—fish and chickpeas with lemons piled on couscous, more egg pastries, and another huge pot of aggressively minty tea—we walked in silence through thinning crowds as dusk approached. Suddenly Johnny stopped and beckoned with a finger at her lips; we crept sidewise to one ancient-looking clay brick house and peered through the front window at their bigscreen TV. I stared at it in something approaching horror but also embarrassment, a sense of immediate vulnerability, as if the TV had reached through the glass and with a single gesture shucked off all my clothes.
The photographs of our faces—Johnny’s a professional headshot, mine my school ID—looked pale and shiny, like they were physical copies and had been re-photographed with a flash. They were followed by thirty seconds of black-and-white footage—oh shit, the airport. Johnny attacking, me puking. Through the rising lump in my throat I still had to hold down laughter, and clamped my hand over my mouth. After they showed a map of Morocco with a couple of arrows on it, Rutger came on, his face stuttering in the flashes from a dozen cameras, composed and handsome, each flick of light illuminating a patch of grey in his hair that I had never seen before. Then Johnny’s mother, then her father, in separate cities, begging for us to be returned. I hadn’t seen them for so long that it took me a moment to remember their faces. I glared at the screen till Johnny tugged at my sleeve.
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