‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have no knowledge of any of those things.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘I want to make something great. Here on Earth. I want our species to level up. And you’re going to help me.’
There was a field of agitation around him. Shadows were moving in the bright sweat on his face. I could see his pores, the stubble where his beard was growing in, and he was rubbing his palms on his thighs as if to wipe something off them. Sweat, maybe, or maybe something else.
‘Make no mistake, Pearl. Pace Industries will come for the briefcase. They think it contains information that will lead them to IIF’s hidden assets. They’ll come after you and they won’t stop until they get it. So you have to decide: do you want to save the Resistance? Or do you want to run around carrying an unstable artefact from a lost civilisation hoping it won’t spit out a pterosaur next time you open it?’
I made a face.
‘There are always other choices,’ I said.
‘Like what?’
He was up in my face and I smelled his breath. Something familiar there. Something I could understand; it took me back to some unspecified past moment of—Couldn’t be peace. No.
‘Please,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t take over this man’s body. Make your peace with Dr Sorle. There has to be a way to make this situation better.’
‘What do you know?’ he snapped. Spittle flew from his lips and his bloodshot eyes flared intimidation. ‘What did they tell you? That you’re here to ease the suffering of the living? What about the suffering of the dead? I can hear them, you know.’
‘You can hear the dead.’ I kept my voice carefully neutral.
‘Since I was a child. I could hear them under the ground in the oil fields. In the pipes. In people’s houses. I can hear them in petrol tanks. How would you feel if you walked into a petrol station to buy a Diet Coke and the fuel in somebody’s Citroën started whispering to you? You probably think that’s funny, don’t you?’
I didn’t dare think anything. He was freaking me out. I’d folded my wings down out of sight, but I let their knowledge hold me and give me strength. I was here for a reason, and until I found out what that was I would have to hold the line. If only I could see it his way, maybe I would know what to say to him.
‘They were there long before we were human. Long before. History has taken them from the ground and sent them into the sky, and we breathe them in. They live in leaves and deadfall. Is it any wonder both of us have ghosts in our bones, Pearl? We come from the dead. And we don’t have free will.’
I noticed that I’d edged away from Kisi because I couldn’t take the intensity of being near him physically. We were a block away from Liam Forbes’ house. What had Kisi done with Bethany?
‘You can’t fight me,’ he said. ‘I have history on my side. Give me the briefcase and let me close this deal. I’m running out of time.’
‘I don’t believe you. You lied to me before.’
‘Why do you think the Resistance kicked you out? They’re afraid of you. They know you blocked me from bringing the briefcase here. They think you’re going to destroy them and they’re right. You are. Unless you give me the briefcase now.’
‘I want to see you open it. If you can open it and show me what’s inside, then maybe I’ll consider helping you. I don’t promise anything.’
He sucked his teeth with a sharp hiss. ‘We don’t have time for this.’
‘Because you’re on the run from the law.’
‘And because I’ve barely got Forbes on the hook. He’s agreed to meet me. I have to show him proof that his boss isn’t dead, that everything is going to plan. Then he will release the funds. That’s how the deal was set up.’
‘The proof is in the briefcase?’
He threw his head back and laughed, exposing the columns of his throat.
‘Pearl, Austen Stevens is in the briefcase.’
Forth
Sweat sprang on to my palms. I don’t know why. I mean, it’s not like the briefcase was big enough to hold a body. If it had been a bowling bag with a guy’s head in it, or even a garment bag . . . Ugh, but no.
‘He’s not dead,’ Kisi added. ‘I wish he was, but he’s not. As far as I know. I promised him immortality.’
‘You scanned him,’ I said. ‘You stole my scanner and used it to scan somebody right before they died. But where’s the body?’
‘Oh, the body is in there. He’s captured. He isn’t dead or alive.’
I guess that makes Alison Schrödinger’s veterinarian.
‘I’m coming with you to meet Liam Forbes. I need to see this for myself.’
‘I can’t bring you with me.’
‘Why not?’
‘You might spook him.’
‘Good. How about I open my wings? That should spook him real good.’
* * *
We took Bethany’s car because the meeting was in Queensferry. Kisi said Forbes hadn’t wanted to meet him but had been persuaded it was in his best interests.
‘How did you persuade him?’
‘You don’t need to know that.’
Bethany. It had to be. Kisi was holding her hostage somewhere. How could this cold, angry man originate in the same boy that had grown up to be Dr Sorle?
‘He is afraid to be seen near his own home. Pace has investigators looking for him. We must get the deal done before he’s picked up for questioning.’
I concentrated on my driving. The inside of the car was a well of darkness. I could see only the whites of his eyes and a faint reflection of streetlights off his skin; the lines of his expression were lost to me.
We were a third of the way over the Forth Bridge when the first two bullets punctured the rear window and lodged in the stereo and the air vent, respectively. I braked and there was a jerking thud as we were struck from behind. The car spun out. The bridge moved sideways, the sky turned, headlights moved laterally in my vision as I tried to hold the wheel.
My wings exploded into the car. Kisi ducked. Windows broke. The wheel juddered and came off in my hands. I saw the whites of Kisi’s eyes as I handed him the steering wheel like it was a birthday present, and I felt a wild, futile smile break across my face.
We were sliding along the rail that separated the main carriageway from the pedestrian walkway. There was a big, predatory 4WD behind us with its headlights set to dazzle. It hit us again and this time lifted us up on its bull bar. There was a crunch as Bethany’s car was jammed against the rail. The 4WD reversed and then rammed us again. Metal buckled and gave. We were bucked over the guard rail and the car landed on its side and spun. I ended up trapped on the downside of the car, with my door pressed against the ground. Kisi above me was climbing through the broken passenger window on to what was now the topside of the car.
The car juddered to a halt. The rail was broken and the car was now in the pedestrian area, stopped by a second guard rail. I could see the dark waves below through the hole in the windscreen that my head had made. I felt no pain. The other vehicle rammed us again. Nothing between us and falling but that piece of metal. Clinging to the surface of the car, Kisi reached in for the briefcase.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t you give it to them.’
He reached in for me.
‘Take my hand.’
‘Go, Kisi. My wings are stuck. I can’t get through that door.’
‘Take my hand. Now!’
I drew breath to argue. He grabbed my arm and pulled. My wings were jammed against the doors and ceiling, protruding halfway through broken windows, and my head was sticking out of the broken windscreen; I was wearing this car like an aluminium coat. I had the briefcase in my left hand and I thrust it ahead of me. The 4WD struck us again, and at the same time three shots punched through the briefcase and into Kisi. I felt him take the impacts.
His body trembled. He gripped my forearm tighter; then his hand slid out of mine and on to the briefcase, clutching – there was a jerk as th
e whole car moved again, and in a second he was gone from my field of view.
I thrashed like a dog shaking off water, kicking myself upward. The car fell away from me. My wings spread wide, aching; I surged up, out over the tossing waves of the firth. I saw people get out of the 4WD, and more were running towards the scene from another vehicle. I stroked past the central support tower of the bridge, and I could taste the briny undersmell of its structure on the back of my tongue.
From on high the scene looked insignificant. The car was crumpled. What little traffic there was at midnight had stopped and clogged up the bridge, and people were rubbernecking. The distress of frightened drivers was decaying to annoyance. I couldn’t see Kisi anywhere.
But he’d been shot. He wasn’t on the bridge. He had to be in the water. I vaned and let myself drop, searching. More shots popped off, but nothing hit me. No Kisi. In those few seconds while I was preoccupied by escaping the car, he had disappeared.
He must be in the water. I flew in spirals, scanning the waves for any sign of him on my visible spectrum; there was none. What if he was not swimming? What if he was under the water, unconscious or worse?
And the familiar feeling came over me, the sense of being behind the beat. The bullets had gone through the briefcase, too. I knew what happened to that briefcase any time it felt threatened. I didn’t need to look for a man. Not anymore.
Come back
I headed east, away from the searchlights, and then I saw it. Over the railway bridge the ancient animal glided black and lunar, like a cracked piece of sky. As its shadow flickered through the bridge’s ironwork a train was rolling out of Edinburgh and I saw passenger after passenger coddled in the carriages’ pillbox windows. None seemed to sense the entity that passed over their heads.
As I flew after it along the Forth, making towards open sea, an image of its desire opened in my mind. Oil rigs. Fire on the water. Mayhem.
But not tonight. Too much pain. The bullets had done harm.
The quetzlcoatlus went down on a strip of shabby beach. A lacework of trees broke up such misted light as came from street lamps. At the top of the beach a concrete hut bore a large notice-board spelling out parking restrictions and assorted prohibitions, most of which had been spray-painted over. A length of buckling pavement skirted the sand. By day people would jog here, walk their dogs, take the air. Now the sirens’ drunken singing floated from the bridge, and there were no dogs in sight. Good thing for them, because the pterosaur had landed splayed in the shallows, where it alchemised the surrounding water to black steam. An acrid, frightening odour stained the back of my throat, and I coughed as I landed on the wet sand, tripping as though my feet didn’t remember how to stand on the earth.
The creature looked like forged emptiness. It breathed smoke and the vast unlit places between stars. On the ground it seemed amplified. Its wings made a hard wind with even the most casual movement, and its breath rebuffed the waves. A pheromone fume seeped from its fur. There was a disturbing hum in my occipital bone, a sensation of drag on my consciousness. Like magnetism. The sensation was out of all proportion to my physical body. I felt I could be reeled, wings and all, into a single one of the quetzlcoatlus’ black-hole pupils and never be found again.
‘Dr Sorle,’ I said. I didn’t look at its eyes, but I could feel their pinpoints roving over me like the sights on a rifle scope. ‘Dr Sorle, I know you’re there. Come back. We have to talk.’
I didn’t expect a reply; in fact, my whole effort at dialogue had gone over the top of bravado and down the other side, a Jack-and-Jill tumble into sheer idiocy. We have to talk: like characters in a soap opera, like someone writing cartoon-bubble expressions on a depiction of the numinous – a blasphemy. As soon as the sound of my words had punched their way quivering through the air, I knew there would be no talk. Talk is cheap.
There would be this other thing.
This:
When you were a boy you picked through the sump of oil in the lowland. The smell of black smoke and a glimpse of flames, so alien against the lush green, an ugly show of power.
You used to wander away to watch the fires. In the smoke you saw bright-feathered dinosaurs. You saw pterosaurs. You didn’t know what they were at the time. You saw other things that you couldn’t name or even describe. You guessed they were demons; certainly they were terrifying. It was only years later, trained in the simulators of the birdmasters, that you learned that dinosaurs and angiosperms were the oil. Their echoes had infected you even then, rippling backward to the small boy you used to be.
Ancestors used to come out of the fire, too. They’d look at you and they’d point. Wordless accusation. You could never forget that. Not in all the years. The fish-hook weight of their gazes. The birdmasters would never explain, and by the time you learned how you’d betrayed your ancestors, it was too late.
After the black-winged bird fell out of the sky and turned one silver eye on you as you lay bleeding, after the boy you used to be was scanned up, the birdmasters didn’t hesitate to tell the boy how dead you would be. They told the boy that in the great scheme of things, you were supposed to die. The birdmasters told the boy they had saved him, because he was special.
That was the beauty of their plan. The birdmasters knew how to borrow against the past. They took for agents the ones who were doomed anyway. The ones who wouldn’t live long enough to leave descendants or make a ripple in the stream. The ones who could vanish and never be missed. They took the boy and the boy was supposed to be grateful.
The boy was grateful. At first.
Now with everything that happened you’d think sincerity would be outside the curve. But the boy used to be grateful and sincere. Learning to hate came later.
We outrun the bleeding edge of time, the birdmasters boasted. We play parkour with the higher dimensions. We transgress on the unused spaces and one day we will find our way back to the Immanence that abandoned us.
Who wouldn’t want to play parkour with the higher dimensions? The boy took the bait. And nobody expected you to live. But you did.
* * *
There was a sound like thunder. I stepped backwards into the cold water, my heart jamming in recognition. The pterosaur’s body seemed to pulse in synchrony with my blood, but I couldn’t take this in.
I didn’t recognise myself. Never again the same. In my brain a thicket of dendrites were standing on end in dark and terrible welcome: nervous impulses that cried out, I know this story! I lived this story. That black-winged bird dropping out of HD and into the jungle, it was me. I scanned, I stole, I flew away, I carried away the injured boy’s waveform, I returned to the nest, I was broken down for rebuilding, it was me. Except it wasn’t. That was some predecessor of me, some aspect but certainly not the whole. Nothing is so tidy. Yet somehow I am in all of it, I am of all of it, I am and was and will be there, and maybe I’m getting sucked into something twisted but it’s too late and it has always been too late.
Kisi’s story is also my story.
I thought about this a second. Then a twitching coda of a realisation tapped me on the shoulder like a Scooby-Doo ghost:
He stole me but I stole him first.
Breathing. Shaking. I was afraid. Kisi Sorle had been shot, and I had to help him. My teeth ached.
‘Dr Sorle.’ My voice emerged bald and crumbling. ‘I can help you. Come back. I’m here. Come back.’
But Dr Sorle was not coming back. He was leaving. The quetzlcoatlus seemed to grow, until I realised that the space between me and the world around me was growing, and the beach was stretching away, and the sky was unpeeling from itself so that everything was becoming more remote from everything else. ‘Kisi, don’t go. Don’t let it master you. You have to break away.’
Nothing so feeble and dim as human intention in the face of that sucking darkness. But I picked up my sluggish feet, hauling myself through the shallows even as it seemed all things were becoming increasingly far from all other things. The quetzlcoatlus reared ov
er me and a crushing weight came down.
I staggered backwards, wings vaning for balance as I braced up against it. Muscle heated. I willed my tendons to hold.
When I got in the car I never expected this. One minute, the most you’re dealing with is a steering wheel and traffic, maybe a couple of bullets; the next, the ineffable is bearing down on you as if to crush you beneath its casual, steel-shod heel. No real warning. It was on me now: power and more power, clearing the world off me like a vast original wind from the heavens, blowing water away from my ocean floor, exposing the cracks in the deep.
I felt like a matchstick but I held fast and I held and I held and just when it seemed certain I would be crushed to diamonds and steam, there was a snapping sensation. The world rushed back in and darkness lifted and the human form of Dr Sorle collapsed, bleeding, into my arms.
All creatures old and new
Alison picked up the phone on the seventh ring, groggy. She didn’t ask me for explanations, and she listened to my description of where I was.
‘Sounds like Cranleigh,’ she croaked. ‘On my way.’
I carried Dr Sorle up the beach and lay him on the sand. He was still holding the briefcase against his chest, his hands curled around it in a sort of spasm. There were three bullet holes in the briefcase, and they were smoking.
We were both soaking wet. I tried to keep him warm with my body, and with my wings I called up all memories of his waveform when it was whole, overwriting the injuries as best I could – but I was out of my depth. It must have been fifteen minutes before Alison’s 4WD spun into the car park, and all I could think was that Dr Sorle was a part of me and I was a part of him and I wasn’t going to let him die.
Then Alison’s headlights flashed over me; I waved to get her attention. The 4WD manoeuvred between posts and buildings and bumped out onto the beach. It stopped ten feet away with the headlights on us and Alison came staggering over, the wind whipping her hair sideways into jagged lines.
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