by Al Robertson
At last they reached the dark shore. Jack stood and water fell off him. Memories drained away. Jack took a step and nearly slipped over. It was difficult to maintain balance on the lake’s muddy floor, harder still when the first of the embryos flew at them, screaming. Tiny limbs flapped excitedly. Its child body was a scribble of half-formed lines. The head tipped toward them. The pale dot in its forehead was a round, unclosing mouth, jagged with fractal swirls of teeth.
‘Don’t let it bite you,’ screamed Fist. ‘Get it into the water!’
Jack snatched it out of the air. The mouth grabbed for his hands, all hunger. He plunged the eyeless face down. A splash and it was deep in water. He imagined memories flooding the embryo’s little unanchored self. It quickly stopped struggling. Jack let it float to the surface. It was already losing form, black lines unravelling into dark water.
Fist was sobbing. ‘That’s me,’ he choked out, ‘before I was born.’
‘Are you all right?’
Another embryo appeared.
‘Fuck’s sake. RUN!’ screamed Fist.
They were hurtling towards a tiny alleyway.
‘How do we stop them?’ yelled Jack, staring wildly around. Fist howled as a shack wall dissolved into nothing and a third embryo attacked. Behind it, a shuddering figure collapsed, black liquid memories bleeding away.
‘They’re breaking fetches!’ Fist’s voice was full of grief and rage. He leapt off Jack and charged the embryo. Using a brick as a club, he smashed its body. Scribbles of darkness shimmered, then died away. The ravenous, broken head disappeared last. Fist wouldn’t stop slamming the brick down. Jack tore it out of his hands.
Then there came the sound of music, soft and distant and full of memories. ‘Can you hear that?’ said Jack. Fist didn’t answer, tormented by what he’d just done.
Jack snatched him up and set off again. ‘Where now?’ he asked. Fist didn’t reply. He half-recognised the music and ran towards it. It became louder and louder as they neared it. Fist wept on Jack’s back as he took the next two embryos, stamping one into an explosion of dark lines and smashing the other against a wall. Both were soaked in broken fetch-blood.
‘Why aren’t they hurting us, Fist?’
‘Your hands.’
Jack looked down and saw bruises, leaking black liquid. His fingers were nearly transparent. Fist too was becoming a ghost.
‘The files?’
‘Safe. They’re inert. Not like us.’
Memories bled out of Jack. Time spun and it was hard to know why he was running, what he was running towards. The music was an anchor, holding his identity in place. Andrea burned in his mind, but he often forgot her significance. He feared he was losing himself.
There was more screaming behind them. ‘No,’ Fist moaned, ‘not another.’ It darted forward but Jack ducked and it missed them. It cut through a wall, then a fetch. Memories crumbled instantly to nothing. The embryo fed and died. Jack ran. They burst out of the alleyway, into open space.
‘GO!’ screamed Fist. One final small figure was closing on them. There was a shining light ahead, a self-contained orb. The music throbbed with grief and anger and triumph. Jack felt himself beginning to lose coherence. Sound triggered memory cascades. A voice screamed ‘JUMP!’ He threw himself forwards. A circular jaw ground against his leg. He could barely breathe. Teeth cut into his skin and he felt a great, devouring appetite hammer at the gates of his mind.
Then the light took him, and for a moment nothing existed.
There was a woman in front of him, hanging in midair on wings made of song. They shone like an angel’s, but the feathers they were made of were barbed and spiked like a demon’s.
‘Hello, Jack,’ said Andrea, her voice full of care. ‘And Fist. You’re safe now. Thank you for the present.’
The wings surrounded him and there was a kiss. A new music at once exploded from and reasserted every memory he had. With a shock that stole the last of his energy he became himself again.
‘It was Kingdom,’ he said.
‘I know.’
And then there was nothing at all.
Chapter 46
When Jack awoke, he was surprised and not a little relieved to find that he remembered who he was. He was lying on the cold earth, and there was a weight on his chest. He opened his eyes and saw Fist sitting on him. The puppet had his head in his hands and was shaking. The undamaged rucksack was strapped safely to his back. They were on the edge of the city of the dead.
In the air above them hung a snowflake.
Jack sat up, cradling Fist as he did so. The puppet let himself be held, falling limply against his chest.
The snowflake was floating directly over the centre of the city of the dead. Its lowest point brushed the top of the dark pile at the heart of the lake, which was substantially smaller than it had been. Jack saw shades swimming through memories to reach it. Others were clambering up the pile or clinging to the pure white of the snowflake, climbing slowly towards the sky. The snowflake’s peak broke through the clouds and into the weave. The dead were pulling themselves back into life.
Jack was awed at the sight. He wondered how the living would receive both the unadulterated dead and the fact of such direct Totality interference in Station matters. It was, he supposed, an act of war.
Fist kicked feebly against him, reminding him of more immediate issues.
‘Are you OK?’ Jack asked him.
‘Go away!’ Fist’s voice was at once aggressive and broken. Looking round, Jack saw why. The wind played at dying fragments of code, the lines that had defined the embryos. ‘They’re all dead,’ spat Fist. He’d stopped leaking memories. Jack assumed that Andrea had stabilised him too. He wondered where she was, if they’d now actually won. It was clear that Fist didn’t perceive the battle’s climax as a triumph. ‘They hadn’t even been born,’ he said hopelessly.
Jack held him close. ‘We didn’t have any choice,’ he reassured him.
‘So much waste.’ Fist was silent for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was low and quiet and hard with fury. ‘I’m going to kill Kingdom. I’ve got everything I need to break him and I fucking will. If I have to die I’ll fucking do it.’
Dormant machinery sighed and creaked in the depths of Jack’s mind. He was very glad that, for the moment, Kingdom was out of their reach. He tried to soothe Fist, but the puppet wouldn’t let himself be consoled. Jack gave up and asked about Andrea and Penderville. Fist said nothing, consumed by his own thoughts. For a moment, Jack wondered if Penderville too was climbing up the snowflake, if Andrea had used her wings to rise up and find him. But Fist had said that the search programme would bring Penderville directly to him. The thought that he might have melted into the memory lake hit Jack like a punch.
And then a fetch shimmered into being. It was barely coherent, lying like a man-shaped mist on the grey ground.
‘Look, Fist. It must be Penderville.’
Fist turned his back. ‘Fuck off.’
Jack left him to his pain and walked over to Penderville. The fetch was shuddering silently through multiple versions of itself. Child, teenage, adult selves sketched themselves across the opaque materials that life had left behind, emerging for a moment into clarity and then vanishing. Jack even recognised the vacuum-frozen corpse face he’d seen out in Sandal’s docks. Everything flowed in constant gouts of change, except for the mouth. It was always a gaping O, howling pain and loss. After Penderville’s death, his existence had become a perpetual scream.
Jack sank to his knees by the fetch, wondering whether it could ever have anything coherent to say. Andrea could help, but he didn’t know how to reach her. He stretched out to touch a shape that might have been a shoulder. There was nothing but pity in him. The silent scream continued as his hand sank into Penderville’s body. Cold bit into Jack, and then depression enclosed him. He’d never imagined that such density of guilt could be possible. He snatched his hand away, and immediately the pain was gone.
> ‘Needs stabilising,’ said Grey in a calm voice. Jack turned. Grey’s presence was shock enough. He was even more surprised to see his patron arm in arm with East.
‘What the hell are you two doing here?’
‘Not quite hell,’ replied Grey breezily. ‘Just the Coffin Drives. And we’re here because of the Totality, just like Andrea. They opened a path down here. We all followed them in.’
‘You weren’t just looking to avenge Corazon’s death,’ said Jack to East. ‘This goes far deeper than that. You’re in partnership with Grey.’
‘Why do you think I looked after little apostate you?’ purred East. ‘You were working for my lover, setting him free.’
‘I’ve been working on my own. For my own purposes,’ declared Jack, with as much conviction as he could muster.
East’s laughter rang out in the dead air. ‘Of course you have.’
‘Don’t tease the poor man,’ Grey told her. ‘He’s been through enough.’
‘Not as much as Penderville,’ replied Jack. He turned back to the broken ghost beside him. It screamed on. ‘We need to help him.’
‘Fascinating,’ said East, peering down at the fetch. ‘He’s all crisis. I wish my news producers were this focused.’
Jack turned to East. ‘You disgust me,’ he spat.
‘If you were onweave you’d be watching me, along with all the rest of them. Now,’ she said, turning to Grey, ‘where’s Andrea?’
Jack wished that he had a way of, for a moment, forcing them both out of existence. Their presence had polluted his determination to help Penderville, reminding him that it was driven by specific motive rather than pure altruism.
‘Andrea’s with the Totality,’ Grey replied. ‘Helping stabilise all those fetches before they reenter the weave.’ He turned to Jack. ‘That feather’s a pretty powerful tool,’ he commented. ‘She’s giving each of them an individually customised copy of it.’
‘Ask them if they can spare her,’ East told him.
Grey closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘They say yes,’ he said.
When Andrea appeared it was without any fuss. One moment she wasn’t there, the next she was walking towards Jack. The air around her vibrated with the faintest suggestion of wings, folding themselves away. Her appearance had none of the dancing imprecision that Jack associated with fetches manifesting in the Coffin Drives.
‘We need you to stabilise Penderville,’ East said.
Andrea ignored her. ‘Hello Jack. It seems I’ve made a bit of a splash.’
‘What happened?’ asked Jack, reaching instinctively for her hand. Andrea took it. At last the matter of their bodies was identical. They could touch as equals. The gods were suddenly so unimportant.
‘Harry came to me, furious. He told me everything. He thought he was taunting me, that he’d be able to roll me back and I’d forget it all. I told him to fuck off, and then I came to find you. He couldn’t do anything to stop me.’
Jack smiled with relief. ‘The feather worked,’ he said.
‘It was a wonderful starting point.’ She drew in close and kissed him. For a moment, they lost themselves in each other. Then she pulled back and asked: ‘Where’s Fist?’
‘Over there.’
He was gaping at her. [God, Jack, if you could see her as I do.] All the rage had gone from his voice.
[ What do you mean?]
[Such coherence. Far more than I gave her.]
‘Your understanding of fetch data structures is remarkable,’ said Andrea, giving him a broad smile. ‘But you hardly know me at all. I had to restructure the feather to fit myself.’ Her wings pulsed in and out of existence. ‘And then I found I needed more than one.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Fist replied bashfully. It struck Jack that the puppet had never received such clear, unambiguous gratitude before. ‘I didn’t have much time.’
‘You did a beautiful job,’ Andrea reassured him. ‘Now I have complete control over every part of myself. I can travel anywhere in the Solar System. And now the Totality have opened the way, I can come and go from the Coffin Drives at will. We’re using my rewrite of your feather code to stabilise all the other fetches, so they can do the same. You’ve freed us all.’
‘What are the Totality up to?’ said Jack. ‘All that’ll restart the Soft War.’
‘They want the caged fetches on the streets of Station, telling everyone what Kingdom did to them. And they’ve always hated the Coffin Drives.’ Penderville caught her attention. ‘Poor man,’ she sighed.
‘Can you do anything for him?’ asked Grey. ‘It’d help us a lot.’
‘Oh, I can stabilise him. But not to help you, Grey. To help him.’
Penderville’s body was a manic scribble. Andrea knelt down by his head and placed her hands on his forehead. Jack was surprised to see that they didn’t sink in, as his own hand had done. She leant forward, putting her mouth close to where Penderville’s ear should be, and began to whisper. Jack had an impression of music, playing a slow, stately tune a great distance away. Fist watched, fascinated. Jack wondered what deep processes he was witnessing.
Penderville began to fall into something approaching definition. The speed of shift between selves slowed, until the changes matched the music’s slow, deliberate rhythm. His mouth still gaped open in a scream, but it shifted less and less between different versions of itself. At last, he was mostly his final self – a pale-skinned man in his late twenties, dressed in a vacuum suit that was only missing a helmet.
Andrea reached up and over her shoulder. When she brought her hand back there was a feather in it. She took it and, ever so gently, placed it in Penderville’s mouth. A convulsive shudder ran through him. He screamed like a newborn. His limbs flailed. Andrea’s hands were on his cheeks, her gaze steady on his own.
‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all right. You’re dead now. Nothing can hurt you.’
She slowly soothed him through aching moans and then sobs and then just whimpering until he was lying silent, curled around himself. At last she looked up at Jack.
‘He’s ready,’ she said. Then she turned back to Penderville. ‘Stand up,’ she told him gently, ‘it’s time.’ She helped him climb to his feet. The vacuum suit made his movements awkward. Penderville wiped tears away from his face with a heavy gloved hand, leaving grey dust smeared across his cheeks. ‘This is Jack,’ said Andrea. ‘You need to talk to him.’
Then, she turned to Jack. ‘I have to go now. I’m working with the Totality to stabilise all the other fetches.’ Her wings unfurled. For a moment they seemed to be the size of the sky. There was a jagged blast of music, and all the best times they’d shared pulsed in Jack’s mind at once. ‘I’ll see you soon, my love,’ she said. ‘You too, Fist.’
‘If we make it,’ replied Jack.
Andrea laughed. ‘Fuck’s sake, Jack, enough with the self-pity. Didn’t I tell you not to get in too deep? You’ve only got yourself to blame.’ She winked, suddenly so truly herself. ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said, ‘I’m sure of it.’ And then she was gone.
Jack took a moment to pull himself back to the present. He turned to Penderville.
‘Hello. I’m Jack Forster. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.’ He wasn’t sure what else to say. ‘I’m sorry that Yamata killed you.’
‘There’s no need to be,’ Penderville replied hopelessly. ‘I wanted her to. But it didn’t change anything.’
‘What happened to you?’ Jack asked him. ‘Why?’
Guilt and pain had written themselves across Penderville’s whole body. He’d been a young man when he died, but now his hair was grey. Wrinkles scarred his face. The vacuum suit, a little too big, hung awkwardly on him. When he spoke, his voice was soft and sad.
‘I was glad when she killed me,’ he said, his voice bleak. ‘I knew I was going to be caged. I thought at least I’d never have to think about it again. I was wrong about that. I was only sad that nobody knew.’
‘Nobody knew what?’
>
Penderville put his face in his hands, and moaned. ‘Tell us,’ said Grey, softly. East cut in too. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Confess. It’s so much better to share these things.’
Penderville choked words out. It was difficult to make them out. He was looking down at the ground. There was such passionate shame in his voice. ‘I thought it would be nothing,’ he sobbed. ‘Yamata lied to me. She told me that the rock would just hit one of the abandoned moon bases, that it would just look like Totality sabre rattling. She said that Kingdom would use the incident to justify a fresh round of legislation against them. I didn’t know they’d aimed it at the summer camp.’
Jack looked from Penderville to Grey and East. ‘No,’ he breathed, profoundly shocked.
Words tore out of Penderville. ‘It’s true. I made the rock invisible to anyone on Station. They’d only see it when it actually hit the moon, and then they’d be terrified because they’d think that the Totality could bypass our defences so easily. I killed all those children. And I let Kingdom blame the Totality and start the Soft War, but then I couldn’t live with it – and I was going to tell – but Yamata killed me first.’
Jack swung round to Grey. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘I knew nothing, Jack,’ he protested. ‘I’m appalled. Those poor children—’
‘Oh, for gods’ sake.’ Jack turned back to Penderville. ‘So Yamata dropped the rock on the moon? On Kingdom’s orders?’
‘Yes. I met her when it was all being set up. I was worried about what would happen if I was caught. She told me that it would all be fine. That Kingdom knew. That it was his plan and that it had his full approval.’
‘They would have killed you whatever you’d done, once you knew that.’
‘We’re all tools of the gods. When they call we have to obey. Once I knew that it was Kingdom I couldn’t say no. He was my patron. I owed him everything.’