by Kara Silver
“What? Damn! Come on!” Kennedy made a grab for him.
“No, I’m— I’ll meet you there.” He pulled away.
“That’s crazy. We’re going to the same place.”
“Then let’s make it a race.”
“As in, first one there’s the winner, loser pays a forfeit?” Kennedy shook her head. “Not fair. You seem to know loads of short cuts to and from this college!”
“Then you’d better start running,” he advised, leaning against the wall, arms folded.
“This is crazy!” Kennedy yelled as she sped off, charging for the back gate. She turned right, got onto the tree-lined avenue she’d walked and cycled along. The Natural History Museum was right on the same street, a little farther up. Her route would surely be quicker than going all the way through Heylel to the main entrance? Not that she knew which route Aeth was planning on taking. For all she knew, he was sliding down a tunnel like a mole man, or leaping from rooftop to rooftop like…whatever did that. Making herself laugh slowed her down a little, but cheered her up.
She was late, but after dashing across the grass forecourt and inside the huge pointy-roofed building, it was easy to hurry along one of the cloisters around the ground floor and slip through one of its archways when she saw the group of students gathered around a black-gowned professor in the main space. Kennedy took deep breaths, calming her breathing, and wiped stray hairs from her face and neck, nodding to a solemn and upright navy-blue-uniformed custodian, trying not to look as though she’d just arrived.
“Beat you.”
Kennedy whipped around with a scowl for Aeth, leaning against the base of the stone arch she’d just shot through. “I didn’t see you.” She kept her tone as hushed as his.
“You are now,” came his cocky reply. “Shhh. Don’t want to miss anything about being critical of context, understanding the spirit of scientific positivism in which these different areas of scientific study emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, do you?”
“Oh, God. Have I missed a lot?” Kennedy dived into her bag for her notes and handouts. She’d just orientated herself, that this class was on the ideologies governing the gathering and presenting of history, when the professor cleared his throat.
“We begin today with the subjectivity of knowledge. How it’s inevitably conditioned by that which is happening in the wider world, politically and cultural. No science or social science is in a vacuum. Anthropology, which has not necessarily been the most inclusive field ever”—he waited for the polite laughter—“is a product of the—”
“—spirit of scientific positivism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” Kennedy muttered along with him, able to because she was parroting Aeth’s words of a few seconds ago. She turned to sneak a peek at him where he stood, eyes fixed on the professor, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
Of course, he could have read up on the topic, be quoting the standard introductory spiel, but Kennedy suddenly wondered if Aeth was repeating the year! That might explain his vast knowledge of the college and Oxford, despite him attending first-year classes? And maybe she only saw him occasionally because he wasn’t redoing everything, but maybe just making up a couple of subjects or classes he’d missed? Oh, he could have been ill! He might still be, which might account for him going AWOL. She sneaked another look at him. He didn’t look in the pink. More in the grey. His clothes and his complexion.
He looked at her when she snorted back a giggle, and she shook her head. “Just thinking this grand central court is more like Grand Central Station,” she whispered, indicating the glass roof and the cast-iron pillars and girders or whatever, sprouting gracefully overhead to hold it up and divide it into aisles.
“The pillars are worth a look,” Aeth replied.
So she moved over, glancing at the carvings of flowers and leaves decorating the iron work, and slipping into a group composed of her tutorial group, Emma, Maja, and Liam. Felicity, Mia and Elke from her other tute group were at the next case along and gave her sympathetic looks, obviously recalling earlier. The guy with them…oh, yes, he’d been studying in the library with the group the other day. He’d been impatient, telling Khloe and Maja to shut up about their hangovers. She squinted at his name. Jake.
“And so, I invite you to discover the ulterior purposes and principles behind the presentations all around us, both the scientific and the social. Consider the rationale behind the curation of knowledge!” finished the professor with a flourish of his gown.
Kennedy had her hands ready, but no one applauded, so she dropped them.
“All this ‘sorry we were a colonial power’ apology tour!” Jake moaned. “Yes, all free public institutions are contemporaneous with the creation of the nation state as we know it, but get over it already!”
“Knowledge is power.” Kennedy grabbed the chance before the gathering dispersed to go and look at dinosaurs or dodos or whatever they were supposed to be doing. One thing she did know, whatever it was, it was bound to lead to an essay. “I mean, do you all know about this?”
Keeping an eye out for the professor or any TAs who might be lurking, she slid the newspaper from her bag and laid it out on a display case. “A girl from college has gone missing.”
“I heard about it.” Maja nodded. “Poor thing. Stressors. Stress, I mean. Pressure.” She flushed as she always did when she made a mistake with her English.
“Umm. Heard about it just now back at Heylel,” Emma agreed.
“I saw her,” Kennedy whispered, shocking the group into giving her their attention. “The night of that party, in the cellar bar. After I left—”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” argued Jake. “If you saw her then, she hasn’t been gone long enough to be reported and found missing.”
“She was already missing from college by then,” Kennedy improvised, adding, “but we didn’t know that at the time,” to ward off any questions about why hadn’t she done something about it then?
“Where did you see her?” Elke asked.
“Not far away. Just near the college. She didn’t look good.” Kennedy pursed her lips and gave a slow shake of her head.
“We’d better move.” Emma glanced up at the approaching professor. She raised her voice. “Let’s get some thoughts together about why the museum founders felt people at that time needed to learn about the natural world.”
“And exactly what fossils were and are still being included to make a nice neat linear history of evolution, so the Genesis creation narrative can never get a foothold here, in a place that prides itself on rationality,” Jake almost shouted, glancing up at the black-gowned figure walking past as he did so.
“I’m wondering, could the missing girl, Janey, have been doing drugs?” Kennedy said, ignoring Jake’s thirst for good grades and inserting herself into the middle of the gang next to Maja as they set off, determined to prod and poke.
“Why do you say that?” Elke asked.
“Oh, I mean, the way she looked, was behaving, well…”
“Oh, no!” Maja gasped, stopping dead and looking around the group.
“Yep, completely out of it. Well, you know what drugs do. And didn’t you all…” Kennedy wondered how much further she could push things without giving away that she’d heard them talking about that. In the silence that followed, she said, “What happened at the party after I left? Things got crazy, huh?”
“I don’t actually remember?” Liam said, moving aside as someone joined them. Aeth. “I shipped a ton of drink. Well, we all did.”
“College, hey!” Emma got a hand to both Kennedy’s and Felicity’s backs, urging them forward.
“I took some drugs!” wailed Maja. “At least, I guess I did. Look.” She shoved up her sleeve and thrust her arm out. Kennedy almost bumped her nose into it, she bent so far down to look.
“There’s nothing there.” Maja’s flesh was clear and unblemished.
“There was. I woke up with it!” Maja hiss
ed, rolling her sleeve down. “A mark. And Khloe too and Leanne and Jin—”
“But you had a great time! We all did!” Emma capped. “I won’t tell you when I woke up.” She winked.
Kennedy noted the names Maja had dropped, for later. “What did the mark look like?” she insisted, blocking Maja’s path.
Her move or maybe her question got some stares, and Maja shrugged. “Just a red injection hole.”
Go for broke. All or nothing. She ignored Aeth’s urgent signal and slipped off her backpack when he grabbed it, trying to pull her away. “Did anyone else wake up with a mark? Do any of you have, or have you seen anyone with marks?”
“Kennedy.”
She wriggled free of Aeth’s hold. “Strange marks, like tattoos? On the shoulder blades?”
“What’s going on here?” The booming academic voice broke up their circle, the bemused looks everyone had turned on Kennedy, the sliding of concerned glances from her to the others. “Well? I’ve never taught in a school, but I imagine this must be how it feels to herd gossiping groups from the playground back into class!”
“Sorry. We were…”
“Excuse me…”
Mumbling excises and apologies, the group melted away, Kennedy staring after them. The professor stomped off. Kennedy tried to turn but whump! she was knocked into a display case when Aeth grabbed a handful of her sweatshirt, his grip rock-hard, and dragged her from the court, along the cloister to behind a large free-standing poster, before he let her go.
“What is your problem?” Kennedy hissed, yanking herself free. “You’re always trying to stop me—”
“From putting yourself in danger, yes!” Aeth shouted back. “You’re crazy—you need to stop talking to people about your mark!”
Wow. She’d never heard him so much as raise his voice before, and now— His words, not just their tone, caught up with her and she stilled at them. Her mark. He knew? How?
“Oh, no, you don’t, kiddo.” As he tried to step past her, she shoved him, hard, and he thudded against the wall behind him.
“Don’t you fucking dare try to vanish on me again. Not before you give me some answers. And don’t even try and pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, because you do. You just gave yourself away.”
He said nothing, just eyed her, so cool and collected she felt stupid. No. I won’t let that stop me. She changed tack. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
“I’ll stop talking to people about the mark, keep my mouth shut and trust no one, if you tell me what you’re hiding.” She held herself still, pressed close to him, her eyes level with his. The light grey of his irises deepened to a storm-cloud bruise before he moved, making her pull back.
“Very well. I just hope you’re ready for this, Kennedy Smith.”
12
He stalked off, still dragging her, and Kennedy snatched her backpack from where he still carried it, stumbling to try and keep up.
“Where are we going?” she panted.
“Somewhere more private.”
“Outside?” It was a reasonable question as they were approaching the entrance, but he ignored her, and the tempting door out to the fresh air, to the real world. “Guess you’re more into showing than telling?” she muttered, as he turned down a stone staircase and descended. She hadn’t realised there were floors below the ground, the display court, but there must be, there obviously being much more to the museum than what was on exhibition. She smelled coffee before she saw a small sign for the café. But Aeth didn’t leave the staircase, instead descending all the way to the bottom.
They passed a lecture room. and just when Kennedy was seriously unnerved, beginning to reconsider, Aeth stopped at a smaller door, pushed down the handle and signalled she should go in. It was a small anteroom, perhaps connected to the lecture hall next door that they’d passed.
“Right.” Kennedy stood between Aeth and the door. He wasn’t shimmying his way out of this, whatever this was. No way was he vanishing on her again, before she got answers. She hoped the journey had cooled him down a bit. She fought to keep her levels of anger and determination up. “Questions.”
“Yes. I have a few. Starting with, oh, I don’t know, why are you asking about the mark?”
Nope. He was still pretty angry, his eyes, darker in this subdued light, so flinty they were shooting sparks.
“I…” Kennedy took a deep breath. “I have one. A mark on my shoulder blade. A birthmark, I mean. At least, I suppose it is. I’ve always had it.” She finished her lame explanation with an even lamer shrug. Should she offer to show it to him? “I saw the same mark on the girl who’s just gone missing and in—”
“No. No, you didn’t.”
“What?” It came out squealy with surprise that was quickly chased away by irritation. More people telling her she didn’t know what she doing, what she was seeing, that what she was thinking was wrong. “I suppose you’re going to tell me next that I don’t have a mark at all and… Wait.” She advanced, her finger raised. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I’m not. I suppose I might have already known you had a mark.”
Aeth’s eyes were averted and he looked, well, coy, maybe? Not the cool, know-it-all Kennedy thought him, anyway. His words sunk in and she shivered. How could he know that? Know what her body looked like? She remembered her first night in her room in Heylel, the feeling she’d had of being watched. She still didn’t feel at ease in her room and preferred the curtains drawn.
Suddenly, some of the articles she’d come across when researching into missing girls slashed across her mind, the reports of a high proportion of girls of colour missing in the States, and the theories about their disappearance. A chill ribboned through her. It’s not possible, here, is it? Classic NIMBYism. Not in my backyard. Is that how things start, and continue, people burying their head in the sand, refusing to see?
Now, she was conscious of being alone, in a confined space, with a person she hardly knew, and that no one knew she was there. She felt for the door at her back, making sure she knew exactly where the handle was.
“Kennedy.” Aeth sighed, as if weary. As if the weight of her suspicions was wearing him down. “You’re a student at one of the world’s best universities, for fuck’s sake. That must mean you have a brain. So act like it. Think logically. Ask intelligent questions.”
“Don’t patronise me,” she warned, her temper rising. “And what’s this, some sort of challenge, or riddle? I only get a set amount of questions, then it’s over? I don’t think so. You’re staying here until I know what’s going on. And stop interrupting!”
Aeth had opened his mouth, but closed it again, limiting himself to staring at her as she paced the small room.
Kennedy looked at the wall lockers and odds and ends of tables and chairs, as if for inspiration. Finding none, she confronted Aeth. “What does the mark symbolize? The mark you knew I have?”
She blinked. She hadn’t known she was going to ask that, but now she had…she couldn’t stop her fingers crossing behind her back, like a child trying to ward off something it didn’t want to be true, or to happen. She fought not to screw her eyes shut, an even more frightened child thinking if it didn’t see, the thing wouldn’t, wasn’t— “Tell me!” she shouted.
“It means you’re a demon. It’s a demon bone.” His words rolled and fell, like a stone dropped from the heights of a waterfall into the depths below, a deep, tight splash and ripples racing in all directions.
“No.” Her instant denial and head shake followed hard on the heels of his pronouncement. “I don’t believe it.”
“Good. Don’t. I’m crazy, right? People are all a little whacked out here? It’s not your sort of place, is it? Maybe you should go home.”
The shrill, mechanical trill that accompanied his last two words made her jump, and she stared from Aeth to her bag, where the noise came from.
“Aren’t you going to answer it? Your phone?”
She kept her eyes
on him as she did, the nearest she could get to training a gun on him like in a movie. Her phone screen showed a local number and because she had no idea if this was more of Aeth’s tricks, she answered it.
“H-hello?”
“Kennedy? Miss Smith? Tha’all right?”
The full, comforting accent slotted into place with a sweet-looking babyish face, like a picture and a subtitle.
“It’s Constable Collier. From t’—”
“Bobby ’ole.”
“You remembered! How do?”
“Hello. How are you?”
“I’m a’right, thanks for asking. I was just wondering about you.”
“About me? Anything in particular?” She wished she could see him as he spoke. She could do with a friendly face, and observing him would give her more information about what he wanted.
“Well, like, have you heard the latest? The news, about another missing girl? You were asking about the cases, for your research.”
“Yeah. And I heard, yeah.” Chris had said it wasn’t his case, he didn’t know much about it, but he’d obviously remembered and been interested enough to call her. “She was a second year.”
“At Heylel,” Chris said.
“Yeah.”
“On a scholarship.”
What? Janey had been on a bursary, like Nia and Jade and Kelly and the others?
“Kennedy? Kennedy? Hey, you still there?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Poor reception. Did you know if you want decent phone reception in an Oxford college, you’d best stand right in the middle of a quad? I’m amazed I got any at all where I am,” she babbled. “Erm, talking of, how did you get my number? I didn’t fill in any forms or anything the other day.”
His crumbly chuckle made her feel silly. “Copper, remember? You’d be amazed at what we can find out, when we put our minds to it.”
“I suppose. Well, thanks. For calling me, I mean. You must have a million other things to do.”
“Tha’s welcome. And, well, take care, okay? Watch yourself. And pop in anytime. If you’re passing, I mean. To say hello. Or tell me how your assignment’s going. Don’t feel you have to report a crime, or owt like that.”