The One That Comes Before

by Livia Llewellyn

  Felix laughed. “Well, to be fair, a lot of people have died on that sofa. We really should replace it.”

  “To be fair, I think those stains say exactly what they need to about our professionalism. It keeps the messenger service on their toes. Anyway, I’m the receptionist, the couch is in my room, and they’re going to stay.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Not really.”

  “Yeah, not really,” Felix says, but his hand slips briefly onto her shoulder, surfacing then disappearing like a tiny kraken. “But, yeah, really.”

  Alex smiles and takes a deep draw from her straw. Felix is smart and witty and handsome, with bands of premature silver at his dark-haired temples that only make him look far more attractive to Alex than if he were younger. He’s that type of man who’s charming and complimentary to ugly women; and he’s always been especially charming and complimentary to her, although in a slightly condescending way. He knows she’s attracted to him, and he’s just cruel enough to enjoy it and egg her on, because it amuses him to see what he believes is the delusional pining and pain of a sexless spinster. She’s known him for almost twenty years now, ever since he moved from the watery ruins of the northeastern continent down to Becher, his graduate degree in arcane languages coiled in his lanky hands. Twenty years. Twenty years of longing to feel him inside of her, hot and hard, his tears dripping down onto her face as her hands follow her favorite knife through his chest, all that hot wet red blood coating her quaking flesh as he comes, and goes, in her arms. But she’s spent her life longing for all kinds of things she can’t have; and, unlike all those little apprentices, Felix would be missed, so.

  So.

  She takes another long drink from her mug.

  They walk down the halls in comfortable silence now, concentrating on their desire to find the conference room, turning left and right along the creaking wood planks, swerving past mounds of yellowing papers that rustle in their wake. The floor is sepulchre-quiet, as usual: there are only eleven employees at the press, and Alex often goes weeks without running into any of them in the flesh, their presence known only by the crumpled notes Felix passes back and forth to each of them. Sometimes she wanders the halls for hours, tiptoeing and barely breathing, listening to the distant crack of the wings of birds or the scuttling of clawed creatures that have made their way through hidden holes, following the strange whispers of musical chanting from the editors’ radios and gramophones, seeking elusive rays of strange light that stream in from star-shaped windows and out of half-hidden closets filled with glass jars of pale creatures that stir and shudder in amber fluids. She walks the empty hallways, telling herself she’s just walking, just wandering, not looking for anything, but she’s always looking, she knows exactly what she wants to find, exactly what she wants to do.

  “Wait.” Alex stops before a door. It’s cracked slightly open, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of clean, empty space.

  “What?” As usual, Felix steps back, letting her move forward. They all do, in situations like this. Even though they don’t say it, they all know her ugly secret.

  She pushes at the door, and it swings into a completely cleaned-out office. The wood furniture has a soft sheen to it, as though it’s never been used. Light bands of dust float over the empty shelves and a desktop barren of everything except a stained paper coffee cup and one slightly chewed pencil. Alex sniffs at the air. Cleaner, or maybe cologne.

  “Nothing untoward,” Alex says as she steps inside. “Just, I haven’t seen an empty office here since—” She lets the sentence die, faster than the former art director.

  “Did someone leave?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. I mean, I guess I have no idea. I probably haven’t seen half the rooms on this floor. You?”

  “I’ve never seen this office before,” Felix replies, as he begins sliding file drawers open and shut. “It’s not Editorial or Production. No ink stains or burn marks on the desktop. The floor is spotless. Everything is too clean. It’s like one of those furniture showrooms. All that’s missing are the price tags.”

  Alex steps over to the window. A very thin stream of air moans and whistles through an invisible crack in the triangular frame. Behind her, she hears the hushed rustle of Felix’s movements as he works his way through the room. Alex presses the tip of her nose against the burning hot glass. As her eyes adjust to the brilliant outside glare, that cold hard snowstorm of anxiety blossoms throughout her chest again.

  “Felix. Take a look at this.” She hears him walk up behind her, hears his low exhalation of breath.

  From their vantage point on the fortieth and final floor of M37, Alex can watch the entire circular width and length of the district as if it’s a silent film: the gleaming ring of fog from the river, the glint of rooftops and windows, the insect glisten of moving traffic. She can see all the way to Anchorage East, South, and West spurs, all crossing the roaring river like giant clamps locking a metallic disk of thaumaturgical movement firmly in place. From here, she notes how the avenues and streets circle, merge, and diverge like the massive cogs of some otherworldly mechanism, how the great factories and cyclopean engines lining the roads gyre and shudder in place, sending out oily columns of black and emerald smoke veined with ruby fire. A faint green shimmer, paler than the polluted gold of the air, coats every rooftop, rising up in puffs and coils from the vibrating ground. And all across the district, from one curved side of Becher to the other, hundreds of small aircraft crowd the skies. They hover at the rivers edges like insects, sometimes darting across the district and disappearing into the tangle of flywheels and pipe stacks. Others rise up from behind bulb-headed cooling towers and star-shaped office buildings, brightly colored shipping containers swaying below them in silver chain harnesses that they ferry through the mist, disappearing into Obsidia. Movement—above, everywhere. A prime swarm of bees, abandoning the old nest.

  Every Obsidian knows the exact moment they will die.

  “Wow!” Felix seems more impressed than concerned. Apparently he’s going to be just fine today. “I thought Becher was a no-fly zone.”

  “Sometimes the factories get permission to fly equipment in, but I’ve never seen anything being flown out,” Alex says. She calculates: it would take her at least two hours from here to walk to the Obsidia side of the spur. But with no money, no luggage, no family or friends, where would she have gone after that? It’s all so obvious from up here. There has never been another place. “Something’s going on.” The words feel heavy and slow against her tongue. It’s all that futility, coating them like slime. And anger—this is how she’s going to spend the last hours of her life, in a fucking editorial meeting?

  “Something’s always going on.” Felix moves over to the other window, pressing his face against the glass. “I’ve seen far weirder things here. Remember when they found that mile-wide trapdoor spider nest in the landfill?”

  “Speaking of weird,” Alex says as she watches a sleek multi-winged aircraft barely miss sheering the tops off a row of fat chimney stacks, “do you know anything about someone from the Ministry clearing out the safe in reception? I came in this morning and it was empty. There was just a note saying all deliveries had been made.”

  “No, no one told me anything about that.”

  “You haven’t seen anyone from the Ministry here? It would have been Friday after closing, or early this morning.”

  “No.” He draws the word out as though it’s an entire sentence. Alex gives Felix a sharp glance. He’s still staring out the window, his fingertips drawing circles in the light coating of dust on the sills.

  “Felix, do you know something?”

  “No, I don’t know anything,” he says. “It’s just…Quartus had me hand over all the Library deliveries on Friday. He said he’d take care of them himself.”

  “But he’s done that before, right?”

  “I don’t mean he’d mail them out, he’s done that before.” Felix turns, wiping his hands against his
pants. “He said he’d be delivering them himself to the Library in person—he was summoned there this weekend. He left with them on Friday, right after work. So maybe he took your copies, too?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. The copies go all over Obsidia, not back to the Library. There’d be no reason for him to take them, unless—”

  “—unless he was told to bring them. When the Library tells you to do something, you do it.”

  “Is he in today?”

  “No,” Felix said. “He said not to expect him today.”

  “Oh.” She turns back to the window. She leans into the glass, letting her body rest against the wall. All the little tremors and quakes travel up from the earth, from the foundations of the building, pour into her body. Outside, aircraft stream up and away from Becher like ashes flaking off a burning corpse. Sirens, unending, faint and high.

  “He took them because the press has finished its job, its—its—raison d’être. He took them because we’re closed for business.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Bartram would have told us. We would have gotten some kind of notice.”

  “We’re getting our notice right fucking now, Felix—look outside.” Alex reaches out to the desk for her mug, and a wave of dizziness hits her. What’s happening is real: this is her last day of life. She clutches at the back of the wooden chair, willing herself steady.

  “You’re drunk,” Felix says, moving away to the door. “Again.”

  She rolls her eyes, then grabs her mug. “Hardly. It’s far too early in the day.”

  “You know, I always defended you. I’ve been covering your ass for twenty years.”

  “I know. It’s kind of sad, actually, since the only thing making me nauseous for the past twenty—thirty—years has been working here.” The shock on his face would be unbearable, except she feels that heaviness in her chest dissipating, rising up out of her as if she is Becher itself, and all the fears she should be feeling are being magically airlifted away. She smiles. “You really want to stop me from drinking? Because I have a little secret to tell you: it’s the booze that keeps me from turning all of you inside out like human socks.”

  “Oh, yeah, evil Alex, receptionist and killing machine, who can barely do enough magic to change the toner in the copy machine. That’s just sad. Sad and delusional.”

  “Fine. If you don’t believe me, come to reception after work and sit on that couch for a while. See what happens.”

  “Ugh, fine, whatever,” Felix says. He really doesn’t believe her, she realizes. All he sees is a middle-aged joke. “When Quartus is back in the office, I’m filing a request for your termination. No one’s going to be out of a job here except you. No more putting up with your ridiculous behavior. I have no idea why you’re acting like this, but honestly? I’m glad, because I’m through making excuses for you.”

  “I’m going to die today,” Alex says. “That’s my excuse. How about you?”

  “Is this what menopause does to women?”

  “That’s what I thought.” Alex pushes her pad and pencil off the desk. They drop into the metal garbage can with a heavy clank. She sits down and swivels around in a slow circle until she faces the windows again. “Please tell Bartram I’m not taking any more fucking notes at his fucking useless meetings.”

  “So you quit?”

  “No, I’ll never quit.” She sucks at her straw. The Coke is warm and flat, and she can barely detect the vodka. She’ll need to remedy that, soon. “I’ll never leave this place.”

  “Well, good luck with that.” She hears Felix walk out into the hall. “Because Bartram is going to fire your ass right after I tell him, so yeah. Best of luck!” He shuts the door firmly—not quite a slam, but hard enough for her to get the point. She hears him shout crazy bitch! as he heads down the hallway, and then it’s silent. That small creeping anxiety trickles into her chest again as she stares up into the cloudless sky. Somewhere, beyond all this magic and filth, there is a clean, clear, bright blue. She swivels around and places her arms and head against the desk, closing her eyes. It’s stupid to take a nap right now, the world is coming down around her head even as it’s rising up above her, she has so few hours left and she’ll never see her little apartment again, so few hours until the late afternoon, when the night starts to bleed indigo up into all the corners of the city, and she’ll see that sky, see that perfect clear blue, she’ll be flying away from it, down and into the animate emerald abyss, screaming, screaming, screaming…

  12:53 pm

  She’s standing at the kitchen window, watching the world burn outside in a hot-white roar while she waits for the cake to finish baking. It’s not a cake she herself has baked—Alex can barely handle putting her takeaway leftovers in the sputtering icebox, even toasting bread in the morning is utterly beyond her capabilities or interest—but there’s something in the oven that’s bursting into hot angry life, and it’s her job to see it through, because it’s her kitchen. And that’s what she does, she sees things through. Buildings crumble outside like soft sponge in the pyroclastic flames as she whips buttercream frosting into high stiff peaks with a steel whisk. And something beneath the surface is vibrating, throbbing and thrumming, sending waves of teeth-chattering energy up through her bones.

  Something’s coming, she whispers to the frosting, and it’s going to do to us what I’m doing to you.

  The soft ping of the bell on her kitchen timer sounds out. It’s done. She bends down toward the misted glass oven door, fear writhing throughout her as quickly as whatever it is that’s moving on the rack inside—

  Alex jerks her head up from the desk. How long has she been here? A stale, sticky film of sugar and alcohol coats her mouth and teeth. She leans back in the chair, running her tongue around her mouth and swallowing hard as she checks the tiny face of her wristwatch, although the strange new angle of the sun pouring through the windows tells her all she needs to know. The editorial meeting is probably long over, and so is Felix’s meeting with Bartram, if he was true to his word. Then again, that’s assuming Bartram didn’t fire all of them already.

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter,” she mutters to the empty room. She wishes she fully believed what she was saying. If she doesn’t actually die today, Alex and her bank account are going to be in a shitload of trouble tomorrow.

  ping

  Confusion and cold unease wash over her, driving her headache deep inside. Was that an elevator bell? But she’s nowhere near the elevator banks, they’re in the center of the building, and this office is at the far southern side. She rubs her eyes, then stops, cursing softly as she examines the smudges of mascara and eye shadow against her knuckles. Great, now she probably looks like a fucking ghoul. Alex glances out the window. The skies are largely empty now, only a few stragglers circling up and away. A small sigh leaks from her mouth, ragged and fluttery and weak like the beat of her heart.

  ping

  This time it’s louder, and it’s definitely an elevator, one of those slow-moving, old-fashioned water-powered cars that sounds out its aches and pain with every floor it passes; and it’s definitely coming up to this room. Alex stands up and walks quietly over to the small closet door on her right. Felix had tried the handle earlier, but it was locked. She tries the handle again, then presses her ear and hands against the slightly vibrating wood. The entire building is vibrating steadily, she realizes. That wasn’t just part of her dream. Wait for it, wait—and the ping again, loud and clear. And now all the buzz of sleep and the last vestiges of the booze burn away in a snap. It’s not like she feels it stealing over her. This sensation of knowing that what she longs to do has become what she will do, because it’s always there, this is who she really is, unmuted and uncaged from the conventions and social trappings of the world. She has nothing to lose.

  ping

  Quickly, her body flowing like mercury, Alex turns the chair to face the closet door, places her mug on the seat, grabs her pen, then presses herself flat against the wall just
to the left of the door frame, right arm raised, muscles flexing in place. The pen is silver, long and sharp, and when she clicks the button at the top, the extra-long nib emerges like a stinger. Alex runs her tongue over all the smooth and sharp edges of her teeth. There’s no magic to it. She doesn’t need it. It’s an ordinary ink pen with a nice little supply of tourmaline-colored ink with a dash of tranquilizer; and she’s simply going to do a little cursive writing with it. Her left hand slides down her thigh, lifts her skirt, and unsheathes her knife. It too is vibrating, with a power and purpose all its own. Her knife is not ordinary at all.

  ping

  The sky outside has taken on a dark cast, sending queer shadows slithering through the windows and across the office walls. A deep rumbling rattles the windows and sends dust whirling through the air. A cnidarian airship, something massive and leviathan, genetically engineered to transport biologically dangerous machines in and out of the Southern Ocean relocation site. Probably a lion’s mane transport. She’d seen once long ago, when she was a teenager and still in trade school, its bloated, tentacled mass blocking out the sun as it soared along the southern edges of Becher.

  PING

  Alex stares at the wall across the room, at the empty bookshelves, at the smeared dust lines where a picture used to hang from a rusting nail still sticking out of the cream plaster. She stares at the nail. There is nothing in the room but the nail, adamantine and alone. There is nothing in the world but the nail.

  The nail.

  The nail.

  The nail.

  The nail.

  The nail.

  PING

  She hears a metal grate sliding open into the wall behind her, and then the closet door swings out. Silence. The knife hums in her hand, and the oscillation of the metal sends all the blood rushing between her legs. Whoever he is, Alex knows he’s looking at the mug. He’s moving forward—a hand emerges into view as he reaches out, followed by legs, a torso, and he stands before the mug, curious, picking it up. She darts forward, silent and swift, right behind him, and her arm swings up and back and slams hard into the side of his neck. Gurgling, little spurts and squirts of bright red blood. Later, when she’s cleaned up, she’ll use the blood from the pen to write up her weekend grocery list, Malbec and whiskey at the top, if there’s enough cash in his wallet. Alex’s hand moves up under the edge of his fine wool jacket. This requires no effort—the knife guides the full weight of her body for her, and she merely follows, leaning in and thrusting up with all her might not because she has to but because she wants to, because they are a team, they are fucking this man to the death together. Alex grasps the blade tighter, rubbing her crotch up and down against the man’s shuddering thighs. She can tell by the change in vibrations that it’s thrust itself past the spinal column and is now splitting him in half, like two legs opening up to receive a welcome lover. The knife blade was forged from the remnants of a meteor, and older metals, older than the eldest of the gods themselves, elements not of their alien worlds but of this world. Her world. The blade can split, lengthen, coil. It speaks to her as it throttles and twists through the nerves and spinal cord and cartilage, twisting, spiraling, bucking around and through bone. Sometimes she picks up snatches of radio whispers in the air. She doesn’t know what it’s saying. She doesn’t care.