“Okay, next one we dig a ramp, because we are obviously the hottest but not so smart,” I said. “Where do we... Johnny?”
She was crying again, quietly, her back to me. In the absolute silence of the desert, her squeaky sobs were barely distinguishable from the faraway cries of the bats. I hesitated. I’d never seen her cry as much as I had this week, and my God, I was so tired of waiting it out, of waiting for both of us to pull our shit together. By far we were too young for this. By far we had not seen enough of the world we needed to save. Our bones and teeth and brains weren’t even done growing yet, how could we bear this weight? This pain and fear? How could we form a structure that could bear it together? No one built great houses or churches or ships out of saplings. They waited till the trees were old and strong. What kind of fucking world was this?
My own eyes filled with tears as I came up behind her, some kind of sympathetic magic. I wondered what I could say that would move her. Or me. Or just keep us going a bit longer. “John,” I said. “We can do this. But I can’t do this alone. Tell me where to dig next.”
“...Little bit east. This way.”
“I know which way east is, thank you.” I clicked my shovel handle against hers, like patting her back. “Hey. Come on. Don’t waste water crying. Dig.”
“X marks the spot,” she said through her tears, walking about twenty yards away and plunking her shovel into the sand. “Let’s try here. We’re not far, I swear.”
After a while my shovel clinked against something again; I stooped and gently pried out a ceramic mask. I laughed when it came to light, unable to help myself.
“What is it?”
“Just a mask,” I said, putting it back in the hole.
“Pretty.”
“I honest to God thought when I turned it over, it was going to be you,” I said. “I don’t know why. Maybe because that’s what would happen in a movie.”
“I don’t think there’s any Sumerian in my family, Nicky.”
“What does this thing, this talisman, look like, anyway?”
“It’s a magic circle, a solid one. It won’t be clay or glass or cement or stone. It won’t be anything you know. It’ll look weird. Very weird. I don’t know how big it is, though. And, I guess, one more thing: this close to the alignment, it might be glowing. Or it might not. Just keep an eye out.”
“Ark of the Covenant,” I said firmly. “I’ll know it when I see it.” I paused for effect before I began to dig again. “Is it going to melt my face?”
“It might melt your sperm.”
“Son of a...”
The sun was actually down now, and I could feel the air cooling by the minute. But it had been so hot earlier in the day that I doubted it would get cold enough to make us uncomfortable. I kept digging while Johnny dragged brush from the shrubs and fallen trees near our pit, and lit it up with one of the lighters in her bag. It was good to have the light, and it burned without smoke, a pure, clear blaze. When she wasn’t looking, I fumbled the bag of frankincense out of my pocket and threw a few of the honey-coloured crystals onto the blaze, waiting for the smoke to blow to her.
“Ha,” she said a few minutes later, turning around; her face was wan but pleased in the golden glow of the fire. “Good one.”
“Mm. I guess it’s an okay gift for the son of God,” I said. “I mean I guess it’s better than, like... a sheep or something. Or a goat. Or a fancy hat.”
“I guess. You’d get him some shit from San Francisco, wouldn’t you?”
“Novelty t-shirt,” I said. “Obscene magic 8-ball.”
“Shot glass set.”
The ground trembled minutely, transmitted up the haft of the shovel into my hands. I paused uncertainly. “Johnny? Did you feel that?”
She looked up instead of down. “Oh, shit.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
AT FIRST I thought it wasn’t alone, had several more things like itself concealed in the huge raggedy cloak, had brought an army, but then I realized that it had just grown to fifty times its size. What had looked like an overcoat at the Creek was now clearly wings, spanning half the horizon, obscuring the first stars. I froze, as if we were in Jurassic Park and staying still would help.
Between the wings was a tangled mass of gleaming tubes and tentacles. The pale face was not a skull but shards of bone arranged around flaming eye pits—black flame, the light all wrong. I looked down, trying not to meet its gaze.
“You dare,” Drozanoth cried, hanging there, billowing. “This, you dare. To interfere with Our realm, you and your dog.”
“It is not yet yours,” Johnny said, her voice very small after Drozanoth’s. I saw the circles on her hands light up as it drifted closer, and saw her visibly sag. The spells, drawing out more power. Jesus. The fire flickered as if it too had suffered a loss.
“You cannot stop Us. No one can,” Drozanoth said. “We will take back what is Ours, and you animals will once again find your proper place.”
“This world isn’t yours,” Johnny said. “It’s never been yours. Find some other world.”
“‘Find some other world.’ But you invited Us to this one, child. You and your... toy.”
She was kneeling in the sand now, face a mask of shock and fear; my stomach twisted. What did that mean? The reactor, yes, but...
A screech of laughter. “Do you not know? Can you not guess? With the gift We gave you, which you have been so assiduous not to waste?”
She stared up at it, a small patch of light in its darkness, the robe flapping mere feet from her face.
“I... my calculations...”
“Were correct, of course. Little monster, is that what you feared? That you were merely wrong? Is that all you fear in this life? They were correct. But you did not go far enough.”
Something else in her face now. Something that sent ice through my veins. I knew that look. “Johnny,” I whispered. “Don’t listen to it. Let’s go. Run. Back to the...”
“Finish,” it whispered, its voice thick, gloating. “Finish it now. You stopped at—what? Where it fit your human ego? Where you thought you could save the world, where you thought They will call me now a god. Now go on. Let them run. We do not; Our minds do not work that way. We know it in the other way of knowing. But you, you will not believe me. Finish it in your head.”
It chuckled, rising to a howl as Johnny stared at it, through it, the golden glow rising above her head and quickly ripped away in the strengthening wind, as hot as the breath of a bonfire.
“You see?” Drozanoth hissed. “You do, I see it, I even smell it from you.”
“Johnny!” I grabbed her t-shirt and pulled, but she seemed fixed to the ground, not even noticing me as the seam along her shoulder ripped, exposing skin, blood, the ancient scar.
“You opened not one door or a hundred or a thousand but a number you cannot even conceive. And you opened them into one of the few places—and there are so few now! —where the chanting that lulls my masters to sleep can be heard with human ears.”
The noise, I thought. Oh God. We heard it. We both heard it. You lie, I wanted to shout, you lie...
“Yes,” Johnny said dreamily, still staring blankly up at it, her face suffused with internal light. She looked like she had the night she’d discovered the reactor. When I had seen her in her silver dress. “Yes. Microportals. Of course. Opened briefly and randomly by the flipping of the electrons. I thought it was into one dimension, the closest. But it wasn’t. It was all, all of them. And it let everything through. The reactor wasn’t a call but a—”
“—an invitation. Not a—”
“—gate, but a road.”
“Not a road. You know that, my child.”
“A ship to fly,” she said softly. “Between places you often travelled, and had become overgrown. Wings, and—”
“—the power to soar between the places. Carry us, O—”
“Lesser Angels. Carry us. Carry us down the meeting ways.”
I looked betwee
n them with revulsion, listening to them finish each other’s sentences as if they were singing a canon. Old friends. I let go of Johnny’s t-shirt and wiped my hand on my jeans, only half-aware I was doing it.
“You didn’t save the world,” it finally said, trailing closer; I backed away instinctively lest the dripping liquid touch my skin. “My unwilling apprentice, you carved it and served it to Us on a plate. What will they say when they know? And after you have spent so long keeping your secrets. What will become of you? Ripped to pieces by a baying mob? Well, you need not worry about that, little godlet. No one will ever know. You will not leave this place. Nothing of you that can be torn apart will leave this place. And We will take you for Our own, and you will re-make your toy, and We will use it to go between the darkness and the light as We wish. Forever. Effortless as the flight of a star through the void.”
“No,” she said, and shook her head sharply, the scarf sliding free and landing next to her. Freed, her hair crackled at the tips with black and violet light. “It doesn’t matter how it happened. It won’t matter. You’ll be gone. We are sending you away.”
The sand below us trembled again, more definitively this time. I fell to my knees, got up. The sharp bone face swivelled to me, casting inexplicable shadows on the sand, flickering at the edges, all wrong. I resisted a powerful urge to jump into the hole I’d just dug. It doesn’t matter how it happened, she had said. Of course it did. She said it only because it was her fault. Hers. Her doing.
“This world is as much Ours as he is yours,” it said, drifting even closer, till I could hear the wind through the shredded edges of its wings. I continued to stare at the sand. Stay calm. What did it mean? Stay calm. It knows it’s almost defeated, it’ll say anything, try anything. Slippery, slimy, the better to fit through loopholes.
“Did you not know that, human?” it went on, the gloating unmistakeable now despite the scratchiness of the voice, the lack of humanity. I turned my head away.
It said, “I thought not. Witless creature, pathetic lapdog. What drives a man to become? Tell me, you who think you are a man, not an animal. Is it guilt? Greed? Lust? Is it different from her? Yes, I think it is.”
The sand was trembling now, rocks dancing half an inch above the surface. I unlocked my knees and straightened my back, trying to ride the waves, my bad ankle shrieking in pain, about to give. I ignored it. Not going to kneel in front of you again, asshole. What in the hell was it implying? Had it come here simply to harangue us about its impending failure?
“Don’t,” Johnny said, sharply. Of course. Figured it out before me. Prodigy. But what?
“Don’t? You little lover of truth, so you say, how long have We watched you? And you have never told him. Let this then be the last thing he hears before We rise. If he is the one you wish at your side when it ends. If he is the one you wish to witness. Is he?”
Close now, so close the desert couldn’t cover its smell, so close I could see the things that made up its wings, not skin at all but thousands of blind, black, leathery creatures clinging to one another. I gagged, recovered, finally found words. “Whatever it is, I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it.”
“No,” it said, “you do not. Had you wondered why you were not killed at once? Why We allow you to live? Why you see Our truths in your dreams?”
“B—because...”
“Nick, don’t listen to it,” Johnny shouted, her voice thick with tears. “It’s lying. You know They lie.”
“I did not lie about your device. Did I?” Drozanoth flapped a wing negligently, sending a wave of sand and stones towards her, crashing against the invisible barrier of her warding spells. Enough got through that she went down, coughing and spitting, nearly into the half-extinguished fire. I turned towards her as if on a string, then stopped. Drozanoth was chuckling.
“You were part of her covenant,” it cried; the ground cracked as if in response.
“Wha...”
“O witless one, perfectly matched! She feared, when we first came to her, that she would spend all her life alone,” it said, laughter now coming from its wings, its chest, the creatures that comprised it all delighted, laughing together. “Thought that Our gift might leave her bereft of love, her great works unadmired. And so she asked for a present. We believe, in fact,” it chortled, bringing its face within feet of mine, “that she wanted a sister. What she got was you.”
“How?” I said, aware of how faint it sounded. All the blood in my body seemed to drain into my gut, all the blood in brain, heart, hands. Everything trembled around me, dark around the edges. My body was lead, sinking into the sand. The buzzing voice seemed to come from inside my head, it was so close.
“We... made arrangements. Planted seeds. Covenanted with others. Arranged a performance. And after you were struck by the human weapon that had struck her, she summoned us and said: Him. He will never leave me. Put him under my protection. You cannot kill him just as You cannot kill me.
“And We always... keep... our word.”
Memory exploded back, driving me almost into the hole; I felt my head slide over the edge of it, hair hanging. Darkness, the smells of blood and piss and cigarette smoke, the dim light of the windows, rough voices. The agony in my shoulder, screaming till I lost my voice, the explosions that had taken off the walls and doors. Two survivors. Two survivors. Bullets striking the small, bloodless corpses. The lie that only ugly things are evil, that only beautiful things are good. The lie, the lifelong lie.
“No,” I said, struggling up, balancing again on the seismic sand.
“Yes. Ask her if it’s true. We are not the ones who lie. She lies.”
My head turned of its own accord to look at Johnny, getting to her feet, scarf gone, her hair sweat-soaked and dark. “Nick,” she said. “I can explain, it’s not the way—”
“Twenty-seven children died that day,” I said, the words dragging up like vomit. “Were killed because of you.”
“I...”
“You could have stopped Them,” I said. “Before it happened. Isn’t that true? You could have stopped Them. Told Them to do something else. Some other day.”
She fell silent, and in that silence I thought: Dog. I was always meant to be her dog. I never had a choice but to love her, I never had a chance. We never had any other friends. Look at the others who tried to get close to her, and I never saw the pattern, only she would have: suicide, accident, relocation, incarceration. Look at the people who tried to get close to me and couldn’t. She took up all that space. The dog that gets kicked and kicked and kicked and still comes back for another kick. She took me away from my family, because that’s what you do with your pets. You take them with you and you erase their kin. Their own kind.
“You were a made thing,” Drozanoth hissed softly, just louder than the wind now. I stared up at stars, at the corner of its wing. “No better than a dog. Little better than a lalassu, which at least is shaped like a man. Had you never wondered why she could not love you?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Because she made it so. There,” it said, “die with that. Or leave. Whichever you choose. For now you know, and you have the choice. Do you not?”
Its flapping wings had laid clear a perfect path to the Range Rover, blowing the sand away, subsoil gleaming in the starlight. I glanced back at Johnny, pink-faced and shaking. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Nick, wait,” she said, stumbling over the dunes towards me, ducking under Drozanoth’s wing as if she had not seen it. “Wait, listen to me. It’s manipulating you, it wants you to do that, since when would you do anything that thing wants? This is the world we’re talking about, how can you—”
“It’s always been the world,” I said. My blood was heavy in my veins, weighing me down. “It’s always been the world, not me. How could you have stayed my friend for so many years, knowing that? Knowing what you did? And knowing that I couldn’t leave?”
“I... listen, it’s not as simple as that, it�
��s not as black and white as that. You know there’s so little that’s black and white.” She was hurrying over her words now, the green eyes wide and terrified, not remorseful at all. That cinched it. But I thought I would let her finish.
“What I’ve done for the world,” she said, “you, you’re part of that. You’ve made me what I am, not Them. Showed me what humanity is and could be. Made them worth saving—all the people I never would have worked for if not for you. I know it... it sounds as if... it sounds bad, the way everything began... I thought I would miss out on the chance to save the world. I changed the lives of so many people—extended my share of lives, by millions or billions of years. When it would have been so easy to become a force for evil instead of a force for good. So it’s not so bad, is it? You’re... the centre of that, the heart of what I’ve done...”
“You had no excuse,” I said. “None. None, to make me your slave.”
“That’s not what you are!”
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you remember what my family came from? That we were slaves, born of slaves, shipped over from another country filled with slaves? The British gussied it up, changed the name, made us ‘colonials,’ part of their empire. Said we were part of a great undertaking: that we would change the world. Just like you. But there was no way home. Not then. I have one now, though. And that’s where I’m going.”
“Nick, you can’t!”
“I can’t? I can’t?” I said, watching as she stumbled to her knees. Her eyes were dry. I found myself unsurprised.
“Don’t you know what it’s like?” she cried. “Having the whole world tell you the same thing, tell you that you can do anything?”
“Do you know what it’s like having the whole world tell you that you can do nothing?” I said. “All right. So that’s why this fucker went after Ben instead of me. When I was standing right there. That’s why my family almost died. Why my family almost died. I thought: Oh, yeah, They’re leveraging the leverage, trying to make me more compliant. I didn’t know They couldn’t kill me. All right.”
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