Kaani was gone. Gone as if she had never been there at all. So comprehensively obliterated that no trace of even one particle of her unique Manna remained to give any hint of what she had once been.
Seb, his body healed, his clothes still smoking slightly, drifted slowly back to the ground, settling as lightly as fallen snow.
Mee shouted up into the sky.
“Yeah. And don’t come back, you pointy-hatted bitch.”
Joni laughed, and groaned almost immediately as her head sent a burst of pain to remind her that she’d hit it pretty hard. She looked up to see her dad standing over her, smiling.
Mee coughed. “I would have kicked her arse myself, but my back’s fucked.”
Seb sat between them and held their hands. Joni shook her head as she felt her body repel his Manna.
“It’s just a headache, Dad. I’ll be fine. Take care of Mum.”
She leaned forward and looked at Mee, who was smiling broadly. Getting to her feet, her mother stretched, twisting her freshly remade back in every direction.
“That’s better. Thank you.”
She bent forward, keeping her legs straight.
“Still can’t touch my toes, though.”
“Well, if you want me to sort that out, you only have to—”
“No. I’ll just stay as I am, if it’s all the same to you.”
“The way you are seems pretty good to me. More than good, actually.”
He reached up and pulled her down onto his lap, kissing her deeply.
“Oh please,” said Joni. “You wanna get a room?”
45
“Where’s the bald kid?”
“She has a name, Mee.”
“Yeah, but it sounds daft. I feel stupid saying it.”
“This from a woman who has a personal pronoun instead of a name.”
“Seriously, Varden, if this is your idea of foreplay, we need to talk.”
“Have you two finished?”
Joni was pointing to the far side of the yard, where Fypp had been standing. A three-foot circle of snow had melted around the spot, and a strange kind of heat haze blurred the view beyond.
Seb, Mee, and Joni walked over, but there was no sign of the missing T’hn’uuth.
“You don’t suppose..?” began Mee.
“I don’t know,” said Seb. His body may have been remade, but his mind carried the memory of the incredible power unleashed against him by Kaani. His defenses had been brushed aside frighteningly quickly. A few seconds and he would have had nothing left.
“Joni?”
She looked up at him, her face pale. “I know what you want to ask, Dad. Please don’t. I don’t want to have to think about it.”
“Okay. Okay. But I…?”
She nodded. Seb smiled, not knowing she would never be able to forget the sound of his body being ripped apart as he died. Despite the accepted wisdom offered by psychotherapists, Joni’s future held a lifetime of not talking about it.
Seb supposed he should be unsurprised that a T’hn’uuth much older and more experienced than himself should be so much more powerful. He was so used to the feeling of invulnerability that the revelation that he could not only feel real pain, but be injured, or killed, had come as a profound shock.
“I’d forgotten,” he said, more to himself than to Joni and Mee. “Forgotten what it was like to be hurt, or to know that anything that did hurt would keep on hurting. When Cochta was fighting me, I thought I was going to die, but it wasn’t really me. It was like a lucid dream when Joni found me and woke me. But this, this was real. I could have died, I could have lost you both.”
“But you didn’t,” said Mee. “And we’re here. Let’s go home.”
With one last look at the spot where Fypp had stood, they turned and headed back to the path through the trees.
“Kaani must have been augmented by the Gyeuk in some way. I don’t think she could have held her own against Fypp otherwise.”
“What happens to Billy Joe now - and the massive guy with the enormous dick?”
“His name is Bok, Mee. Typical - that’s the only thing you remember, right?”
“Well, you were the one who mentioned it.”
“Fine. The truth is, I don’t even know how I’d get a message to them. I guess Bok could follow Fypp here. I don’t know.”
Joni frowned.
“I don’t think that route is open anymore.”
She told them about the trap Kaani and the Gyeuk had laid for Fypp, the closed loop that no longer connected Earth and the other World Walkers.
“Then there’s nothing you can do,” said Mee. “It’s over.”
The next voice came from in front of them, and they all stopped dead when they heard it.
“It’s far from over.”
Fypp stepped out from behind a tree. She was chewing gum. She laughed at their expressions.
“Oh, come on. You seriously thought that pathetic attempt at a T’hn’uuth could hurt me? I’ve taken more difficult shits.”
Mee raised an eyebrow on hearing a turn of phrase she would have been proud to deliver.
Seb smiled broadly.
“Well, it’s good to see you, Fypp. And Kaani, she’s…?”
“Oh, yeah. Blown apart into little tiny pieces. After which each little tiny piece was sliced up into even tinier pieces before being set fire to then stamped on. She’s toast.”
Seb put his arm around Mee.
“What’s next for you? I mean, if the Gyeuk has sided with the Rozzers.”
“I guess we’re heading into an unpredictable, dangerous time. The Gyeuk will need to be confronted about its actions here. And it will need to be shown that such actions will have consequences. They’ve been very naughty.”
Seb looked into Fypp’s bottomless eyes. He wouldn’t want her as an enemy.
“And the whole mystical tradition? What did you say about it? You weren’t interested in the labels, you were interested in what’s inside the bottles. Still interested?”
“You know it,” said Fypp. “And the Gyeuk’s involvement suggests it might be interested too. Perhaps it threatens the Gyeuk in some way. I don’t know.”
She grinned at them.
“I’ll admit it. I love it when I don’t know something. It happens so rarely these days. It happened three and a half thousand years ago, but it wasn’t anything like as interesting as this is. Why would an artificially intelligent swarm mind be worried about the continued exploration of mystical exploration by short-lived carbon-based species? I mean to find out. Once we sort out the Gyeuk, we can come back and explore the whole subject some more.”
Seb smiled back at Fypp. “Please tell Billy J—, I mean, Baiyaan, that I—”
Mee interrupted, her eyes fixed on Fypp. “What do you mean, we?”
Fypp gave her a look as if to suggest that she’d rarely heard a less intelligent question, then turned back to Seb.
“You’re coming back with me. If there’s a problem with the Gyeuk, we’re going to need everyone. Particularly since we’ve lost Kaani.”
“No.” Mee. Seb and Joni spoke simultaneously.
Fypp shrugged.
“I’m sorry. I can’t give you a choice in this. It’s not as if there’s another T’hn’uuth I can try instead. Try to remember we’re the rarest creatures in the known universe.”
She looked quizzically at Joni.
“Although she’s quite a find. A shame her body wouldn’t be able to withstand the stresses of Walking. No, it’s just you, Seb.”
Seb had heard Mee’s long intake of breath as Fypp had spoken. He knew what was coming, but before Mee could launch into a rant of epic proportions, he put a finger on her mouth. Her eyes widened, and she struggled to stop herself, but with an obviously immense act of willpower, she managed to clamp her lips together, allowing only a solitary, and barely audible, “fucknugget” to escape.
“Give me sixty minutes,” he said to Fypp. “I’ll meet you all back at the Keep.”<
br />
He planted a kiss on Mee’s comically enraged and confused face, then took a step away and Walked, leaving the three of them wondering what they were going to talk about for an hour.
Forty Minutes Later
The moonlight was still lending the quiet wood an almost fairytale quality when the man appeared in front of the old oak. In this clearing, only a few weeks previously, Joni had nearly been killed by Adam, saved by the reappearance of her father after a seventeen-year absence. Over seven years before that, the oak had been the cause of Joni’s first reset after a nearly fatal fall from high in its branches.
There were no Thin Places on Innisfarne, an island which held no Manna at all. But some sites held an ancient sense of power which felt markedly different to the stores of nanotechnology seeded across the planet. Joni wasn’t the only one who had found herself drawn to this clearing in the woods, the small area dominated by the oak. Visitors to the island, walking alone, had often stopped here, unable to put into words the sense of significance, of rightness about the place that made them pause, reluctant to move on.
There was something in humans that responded to a natural site like this. Mind, spirit, soul, chi, chakras…words and labels became hollow and meaningless here. It was not somewhere to come and think. Concepts considered in the shadow of these old branches seemed shallow, schedules unraveled, plans dissolved. It was a place of letting go. Of accepting and being accepted.
It was the place this man was inexorably drawn back to. Unsure of his very identity, the sense of belonging here reached through the branches, the dirt, the roots, the leaves, the air, the light.
He stood in the clearing, facing the giant oak, its silent presence a living witness to his decision.
He raised his arms.
The snow began to swirl, rising in a widening spiral, a miniature tornado turning darker as mud, rotted leaves, mulch and soil rose from the ground; spinning, dancing in the moonlight, a sufi whirl of creation singing its song of shit and rock, twig, bone and dark, soft mud.
It took no more than a few minutes for the figure to emerge, a sculpture suggesting human proportions and form, edges soft at first, fast gaining definition and detail. The hinged right-angle of an elbow, a snaking surge of spine, the shadows where eyes began to form, glistening. A gaping hole that became a mouth, the cold hard teeth, a rough tongue smoothing over moist lips. A scar on the fine-haired stomach, a face like so many other billions yet unique and perfectly imperfect. Virgin breath clouding the sub-zero air.
A moment of possibility. A pause, not born of hesitation, but rather an acknowledgment of the sacred, the unnamed, the now and the always. A silence, a stillness and a place where words were born, but could never describe.
The man held out his hands to his creation.
“Remember,” he said.
The new hands rose and grasped those of its twin.
This scene had played out a generation ago, but one of the figures then had been a visitor who had crossed unimaginable distances, before waiting more than two-thirds of a century to save one human life.
This time was different, but no one was there to see it.
The fresh body trembled and shook, a series of shockwaves passing through it, waves of energy rippling across its form.
Increments of time passed, differently perceived by each of the two figures, the barn owl which swerved away from the clearing, the reprieved field mice, the woodlice in the leaves, the oak, the moon.
Finally, the first man spoke.
“You’re sure, then?”
“I’m sure.”
Fypp had spared Mee and Joni an hour of awkwardness by falling asleep in front of the fire in the Keep’s large, flagstoned kitchen. All three knew that World Walkers didn’t need sleep, but the pretense suited them equally, so no one pointed it out.
Joni and Mee did what British people have done in times of great stress for centuries: they drank tea and played charades.
“It’s a film,” said Joni, as Mee pantomimed the operation of a movie camera.
“One word, although you’re not supposed to hold up that finger, Mum.”
Mee raised both eyebrows in mock-innocence.
“Alien?” said Joni.
“Bollocks. How did you get that?”
“I know you too well, Mum. Plus your last two were Starship Troopers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. My go.”
Fypp opened her eyes and stood up, facing the door. Mee joined Joni and took her hand as the door opened.
It was Seb.
Mee creased her forehead as she looked at him. Definitely Seb. Only…
Joni’s expression so precisely mirrored her mother’s it would have been comical under other circumstances.
Fypp said what they were all thinking.
“Who are you, then?”
Seb didn’t answer the question directly, instead turning his back on them and walking out toward the outbuildings, leaving the door open. He called back over his shoulder.
“Someone I want you to meet.”
They followed him out, Fypp uncharacteristically meek.
Standing outside John’s workshop was another Seb.
“Oh, not this bollocks again,” said Mee.
McGee, the island’s resident goat, drawn out of his stall by the unusual activity, took one look at the two Sebs, bleated loudly in shocked disapproval, then retreated at speed.
The second Seb spoke.
“It’s me.”
“If you’re you, who’s he?”
Fypp had spent the time since she had initially detected Seb’s return gathering Manna information and trying to build a comprehensive picture of what she was perceiving.
“Some kind of construct?” she managed.
“Well,” the first Seb said, “usually, I’d be slightly insulted, but as we’re gonna be spending lots of time together, I guess I’ll let it pass. You can call me Sym.”
He stuck his hand out. Fypp walked toward him, then straight past as if he didn’t exist, heading straight for the other Seb.
“Charmed,” said Seb/Sym, sticking his hand in his pocket.
Fypp slowed as she reached Seb, then looked him over carefully.
“You know what you’ve done?”
He didn’t respond. Her Manna would have answered her own question before she’d spoken.
“There’s no going back from this. Do you understand that?”
“I do.”
She looked at him for another second, then beckoned, as if she wanted to whisper something.
Seb bent down, and Fypp whipped back her head before head butting him, breaking his nose with a loud crack which echoed around the stone buildings.
“Ow! What the fuck? Shit, that hurts.”
“Yep,” said Fypp, looking at him with a puzzled expression. “It’s called physical pain. You won’t have experienced it for a while. It’ll heal eventually, but your nose will be a slightly different shape. And it’ll ache while it heals. From now on. if you get sick, you’ll stay sick. You can’t even use Manna! What were you thinking? And when you die, you die. Which will be soon, Seb, since humans barely even begin to live before they drop dead. Why? Why did you do it?”
Sym/Seb walked over and shook his head at the state of Seb’s nose, which was bleeding profusely.
“Here,” he said, “let me just—”
“No.” Seb waved him away. His voice was muffled and strained. “Fypp’s right. I’m gonna feel pain again. Might as well get used to it. And a crooked nose will be a nice reminder.”
Mee and Joni had joined them, Mee offering Seb a wadded ball of tissues. He held them up to his face, stemming the blood slightly.
Sym looked at him, and the blood stopped flowing.
“Hey, it’s the least I can do. How you gonna explain what you did if no one can understand a word you’re saying?”
Seb took the tissues away. His upper lip was slightly swollen, and dried blood covered his chin.
“Sexy new lo
ok,” said Mee. “So, what’s going on.”
Seb pointed at his double.
“I made Sym an offer. He gets to be me. The World Walker me, I mean. He always was me, really, at the most basic level. He just developed differently - a mix of me, Walt, and a life lived as much online as in the real world. Kinda weird.”
“Standing right here, buddy,” said Sym.
Joni looked from one version of her father to another. She cautiously touched the arm of the one with the broken nose. It felt reassuringly normal.
“So…what are you? If he’s you?”
Mee answered.
“You’re a homunculus, aren’t you?” she remembered the version of Seb which had gone willingly to his death to save her from Mason, back in New York two decades previously.
“A very sophisticated one, but yeah.”
“Don’t they fall apart after a few hours?”
Seb smiled, then winced as his nose spasmed in pain.
“Not this one. Guaranteed for a lifetime. A human lifetime, that is.”
Fypp continued to stare. “I am unsure whether to admire you or pity you. Either way, I cannot understand. You were immortal, Seb Varden, a T’hn’uuth. A universe of infinite challenges, delights, and mysteries was open to you. And you gave it up for a flicker of existence filled with suffering. Why?”
Seb put one arm around Mee, the other around Joni.
“It wasn’t a hard decision. Don’t expect an explanation because there isn’t one. There’s no logic in this, just love. And I don’t even know what love is.”
Fypp stared blankly at the three of them for a long time. Seb wondered if she was genuinely speechless, or if billions of years of life had taught her to recognize the occasions when it was best not to speak. Either way, he was glad of her silence.
Sym stepped forward.
“Right, let’s go unchain Baiyaan, wake Bok up, and kick some Gyeuk ass.”
Very slowly, Fypp turned to Sym, then back to Seb.
“Well, he’s probably going to be more fun than you, anyhow.”
She stepped back.
“Shall we?” she said to Sym. “I’ll have to recalibrate. It’ll be a long trip by your standards. Not that you’ll know it.”
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 121