Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

  And then when I trusted him—or trusted that he was trying to do good at least—I found him and I told him the truth about the crash; about who we were, that there were people on board, where we came from. He guessed a lot of it—or he’d worked it out—but he sat and listened for the hours and hours my story seemed to take. Every word, he just listened to it all. I told him about Australia. I told him what it was like to live there, how dangerous it was. About the gangs: the Lows, the Bells, the Pale Women. About my mother and Agatha and about how they died. I told him about Jonah, who I cared for and who actually—insanely, in that place—seemed to care for me. About Mae, who I wanted to save, who I wanted to give a life that I never managed to have, who wasn’t yet broken when I found her.

  I told him about Rex. The worst of the worst. How she fought me, tried to kill me, over and over. How she died falling down in the ship, her body a wreck of her own making. And I told him the end of the story: how we survivors landed here, lost and confused and praying for a home to accept us in a way that we had never had before. How we were betrayed.

  After I finished talking he didn’t say a word. He hadn’t made notes or anything. He’d just listened. And then he sat there, silent and still, fingers to his mouth folded up like a point. I thought about running. I thought he might be thinking about calling the authorities, the police, the Services. Worst case, I’d be fighting my way out of his apartment, out of the tower, and back to my new home in the docks. And that would have been another lesson learned about who to trust.

  “That’s all real?” he asked. “True, I mean?”

  “Why would I make it up?” I replied. “You can put it in the newspaper if you want.” He smiled and shook his head.

  “This is a book, Chan. It’s longer. It’s a book, and everybody’s going to want to read it.” He went to his desk and pulled out a folder and wrote a word on it: Australia. And then he told me to start over. This time he took notes.

  He brings up a screen and stretches it as far as he can with his fingers until the image is so large that it looks almost blurry. His desktop is full of video clips and documents and he rearranges them to find the ones that he’s looking for. They’re bad quality, but you can just about make out what’s going on.

  “Don’t ask me where this came from,” he says, but I wasn’t even going to. He’s got sources and he protects them. Partly that’s why I feel safe with him, telling him my story. Everything “comes from one of his sources,” and that’s all he’ll ever say about them. It suggests that he’s keeping me as anonymous as he’s keeping them. “This was the day that you escaped. This is you, right here.” He jabs a finger at the screen and it highlights one of the figures, a little ring of yellow around it like a full-body halo. It’s me. I remember this. I’m lying on a table. There are straps holding me down, guards all around. “This is what happened. It’s what you told me, you know.” I wonder why he got this, if maybe he was checking out my story. Makes sense: Trust doesn’t come easily. Not like I haven’t asked around about him as well. “This was taken from the other side of the city. There’s an old space center; my guess is that’s where the autopilot in your ship found a homing signal.”

  He presses play and I—the me on the screen—start twitching, stirring. The guards come around and I fool them—play dead, then break out of my bonds and take them down. I’m fast, I realize. I’ve never been able to watch myself fight before, but I’m so much quicker than them. I look like I’m in control. That’s not how it is inside my head while it’s going on. Maybe I don’t realize how dangerous I can be either. The only thing I don’t recognize is the look on my face. I’ve never seen it from this angle before. I’m kicking the guards, hitting them, using their weapons against them. My teeth are bared the whole time and it reminds me of Rex—the way that she fought and challenged the Lows to fight. A nightmare lashing out.

  No wonder the guards in the video look scared of me. Not that I experienced them being scared at the time. At the time, they were threats.

  I did what I had to do.

  “Now,” Ziegler says, and he exhales loudly, like he’s been holding his breath the whole time we were watching me fight. He points somewhere else, but I’m still watching as I take down the backup, the guards who have arrived to halt my escape. I take them down and I’m gone, over the exit ramp just in time and out of the compound. The cameras don’t follow me. They watch me stagger-run into the distance, not knowing where I’m going, confused about where I am. Ziegler pauses the video. “Chan—eyes here,” he says, and he points to another section of the picture showing the inside of the place that they were loading us survivors into. “You couldn’t remember where you were, right?” He presses play and the video continues.

  “No,” I say. And I still can’t. I left that part of the city and I ran and I didn’t stop until my feet were bleeding and some old woman found me crying in a dark corner. She didn’t ask me anything, just gave me something to eat, and she rubbed my shoulders until I’d pulled myself together, and she told me that everything would be all right.

  “I still don’t. But I heard them saying that it was a transport.” From here, on the video, that’s now clear. It’s enormous. A truck of some sort. I can see the conveyor, the loading in of the people that maybe I once knew, that I used to say hello to, or stay away from—people who at one time I tried to give something better to.

  “Right, and it was,” says Ziegler, “but we didn’t know where it was going.” He swipes through the video, fast forwarding it—hours of it, because in fragments of frames I see the guards that I took out get picked up, dusted off, their wounds seen to, and then a new shift start work. It’s like I was never even there—until we see the conveyors get taken away. I can see flashes of the people packed inside the vehicle. The doors shut. A guard walks forward, brings up something in a holo from his wrist, some sort of document. Ziegler freezes the picture and pulls his hands around it, zooming in. “And then I noticed this.”

  MANIFEST, the top of the document says. PC1.

  “What is that?” I ask, and he grins.

  “PC1. I looked it up and it’s listed as a revision facility. That’s just a way of saying it’s a prison. It’s the sort of place that does some psych testing, but that’s all that makes it different. In the old days they just sent prisoners up into space in ships like Australia. Now there are lots of types of prisons, different ways of rehabilitating prisoners to get them ready to be put back into society. There are different names for them all, but the meaning’s the same . . . Getting this feed took some serious favors.” He says this in a way that lets me know how much work he’s gone through. He’s going to want something in return and I’ll have to play ball. It’s a barter system. At least I’m used to that. “But so . . . PC1 is Pine City.”

  “Where is that?”

  He smiles. He sometimes forgets that I don’t know these things and when he’s reminded, it’s like there’s something quaint about me, something amusing. “It’s in the North, a little town in New York State. Or, used to be a town. They evacuated the whole place when they rebuilt the infrastructure, but kept the prison.” He shrugs. “I don’t know exactly what goes on there. There’ll be more information in the Archives, but I don’t have access to those and I’ve used up all of my favors,” he says, his words fading into the background. “We’ll have to think of something else.”

  “But Mae won’t be there?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “No. But again, the Archives could be how we find her.” He sounds skeptical, even as he says the words. “Everything that the Services keep about where they take prisoners will be there.” He smiles. “But those files are locked down tight. No press access, no requests for information. I don’t even have any contacts who can get to them. Not anymore.”

  “So we get access ourselves,” I say, and he almost laughs.

  “You can’t just waltz in there. That stuff is very carefully protected.” I wonder how obvious my disappointment must be. “W
e’ll find something. We just need a little time.”

  “I know,” I say, but that doesn’t make it easier. Everything is out of my hands. That’s the worst thing about my situation here in this city. I’m powerless. He keeps saying that I should focus on what will happen when the book is written, that I should be thinking about my life here when the book is done and my story is told. Back together with Mae—starting a life properly, trying to make everything better than it is, than it has been. “I have to find her.”

  “And you will, I’m sure.” He looks down at my drink, which is empty now. The taste of the fake berries is so harsh on the back of my throat. We had real ones on Australia. The soil there was good. Here, it’s ruined. Everything’s lab grown and nothing tastes quite right. It’s all worse, or maybe it’s better and I just can’t tell. “You want another?” he asks. I shake my head. “Food, then?”

  “Have you got any bacon?” I ask.

  He smiles. “Absolutely.”

  While he fries the bacon, I walk around his apartment. He’s got more picture mementos than just the holos. I’ve looked at these photographs so many times. They’re real prints, not miniature screens, fastened behind glass inside wooden or golden or silver frames, propped up on the shelves and on the sideboards. They’re of the same little girl. It must be his daughter. Whatever happened to her—I think that’s why he is who he is now, why he does what he does.

  Now he’s alone, just like me.

  Bacon sandwiches. The first thing he ever cooked for me and the thing I will keep coming back for. He says that the bacon doesn’t taste as good as it did when he was a child, when they still had pigs in the city farms. I don’t know anything different from this, though.

  “So who has access?” I ask. Apparently it’s rude to speak with your mouth full. I couldn’t care less about that. It takes Ziegler a second to realize what I’m talking about, and then it clicks. I want to know about the Archives.

  “Outside the Services and the police? Only the people who work there, I reckon. The executives. Probably some of the techs. There’s no way of seeing who’s on file for getting into that place.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The Smithsonian Archives, near the museums.” That’s where we met. “But you can’t get in there.” He knows me too well. “I told you. You’ll get caught, and you’ll end up . . . Well, who knows. They won’t be kind. They’re already looking for you.”

  “Maybe they’d take me to Pine City, with everyone else from Australia,” I say. “It could be like a reunion.”

  “You’re joking?” he asks, and I smile. He laughs then, like I’ve given him permission. “That’s nearly two hands I need to count the number of times you’ve made a joke.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t need more,” I say.

  “Maybe ask your contacts,” he says, sighing, as if he already knows how pointless this is. “Ask Alala. She might know some way in. But if she doesn’t, I think it’s a dead end.” The bacon is gone, the smell still hanging around. But he’s itching to get to work, to ask me more about the docks, about anything that I’ve heard, about Australia.

  “So what do you want to know?” I ask. He waves his finger in the air, draws a line, and scrawls his shorthand signals.

  “Tell me about the Pale Women,” he says. “You mentioned an emissary, a boy.” He scrolls through notes on his paper. “Jonah,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. Jonah.

  “What was he like?” Ziegler asks.

  “He was nice,” I tell him. “He was really nice.”

  THREE

  Ziegler’s car drops me off after every session and takes me right back to where he met me, but not today. Today I ask the car to take me to the Smithsonian.

  “I am contracted for one single ride,” Gaia informs me. “Further trips will have to be approved by Mr. Ziegler.”

  “Just drop me off there,” I say, “then you can go back to him.” Ziegler mentioned Alala, and she’s definitely an option, but there was a time I used to do these things for myself, by myself. Maybe I should start doing that again.

  “Thank you,” Gaia says. It took some adjusting, talking to the voices of people that aren’t actually real—in cars and stores and pretty much everywhere else. It’s easier in so many ways because Gaia—disembodied and run by software, not even close to human—isn’t going to judge me the way that people sometimes do.

  I lean back and shut my eyes for a second, rub my eyelids. I don’t know what I’m hoping to get out of going to the Smithsonian. I can’t get into the Archives and I won’t try. Ziegler’s right about that part. There will be guards, because everything is guarded. There’s every chance they’ll identify me as it is, as soon as I set foot in there, into the eyes of their security cameras. I would risk everything on an impulse and I’d lose.

  It’s so tiring being here.

  It’s not how I dreamed it would be.

  Every other car on the road is just like this one. I can see into their seats if their windows aren’t dimmed: the smiling families, the people in business suits on their way to conferences or lunches, the kids being ferried around and taken where they need to go. There’s nobody like me. Nobody is looking around with the same awe at this place, feeling uncomfortable surrounded by so much comfort. They’re used to it. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get used to being here.

  As we drive, the buildings get taller and taller. I crane my neck to look at them, to try and see where they peak, where they touch the sky. Soon the streets are too dense, and I shade my eyes against the glare of the glass. And then we’re in the part where the towers give way to the very center of the city.

  When they rebuilt Washington, they concentrated on the infrastructure. That’s how they describe everything—the layout, the areas, the people who live here. The city is structured like a wheel, with the oldest part—the bit that’s meant to be protected, with all the buildings full of important people, important information—in the middle. And there’s grass and parks as well, green and luscious and nurtured. You’ll be driving along the road, hemmed in by buildings, then suddenly everything drops away and you’re surrounded by white stone and polished marble and iron statues. The streets are three times as wide as anywhere else in the city and there are gardens and fountains and a general sense of luxury.

  Now the car pulls up outside one of the buildings. “This is as close as I can get,” it tells me. I’ve never been able to tell if it’s meant to be male or female. Probably that’s the point.

  The buildings here are hundreds of years old. My favorites are the oldest-looking ones: big, whitewashed walls, spired roofs, windows that stretch almost from the awning to the ground, stone chipped away at the edges. They’re even older than Australia was. There are weapon scanners when you go inside the buildings—the city officials are worried about terror attacks just like everybody is—but they’re still welcoming. Everybody is allowed to learn the history of where we came from and what we went through.

  No. Not we. They. I went through something very different.

  When I was first finding my feet in the city, I came here a lot. Some of the museums here have art, some have furniture, some deal exclusively with war. But I like the one that’s a tribute to what the world was like before anyone who’s now alive saw it: a history of everything that went before.

  I go through the enormous, polished-wood doors and let the realization hit me like it always does: I’m looking at something that doesn’t exist anymore. This is a dinosaur. Tyrannosaurus Rex, the holo in front of it says; it’s all jaws and teeth sticking from exposed bone, a snarl on its skull. The world’s most fearsome predator. Its name is from the ancient Greek words for Tyrant and Lizard; and then Rex, which means King. Nearby, other smaller skeletons rear up and prowl, animals throughout history posed as if they’re encircling the biggest dinosaur, as if they worship it—or maybe as if they’re getting ready to attack. It’s hard to tell. The smallest, a Velociraptor according to the holo, is the s
cariest. Its teeth are sharpened to terrifying points, its claws like thick, curved knives. And velociraptors are fast, the holo says. Fast is sometimes much scarier than big.

  I stop now and look at it. I picture my head in its mouth, the vision coming from nowhere. The big one might share Rex’s name, but this little one is what reminds me of her most—smaller, vicious, more dangerous.

  Corridors lead off from the central lobby and people mill through them. Words hang in the air directing you to the various sections of the museum: A WORLD BEFORE US, THE GROUND BENEATH OUR FEET, LIFE UNDER A MICROSCOPE, THE BEASTS AND THE BURDEN, WHEN WE FELL. It’s this last one that I walk toward. This passageway is the quietest by far. Most people don’t want to be reminded of their mistakes, or the mistakes of their parents, or their grandparents. They want to go further back—to a time when stories weren’t even written down, when they were passed along, verbally, generation to generation. And that’s how it was for me, and how the lies of what happened to us—why we were on that ship, where we came from—were set. But now? The closest history I can learn is more interesting than the furthest.

  The corridor opens into a hall, a diorama at the far end showing the city as it once was, before they set the infrastructure. It was smaller, more squat. There was more green. Most importantly, there was no wall to cordon it off from the rest of the world, keeping the temperatures down and those in the wilderness out. It used to be so much messier than it is now, more organic. You can see the freeway as it roared into the city and the aquarium—a towering building that swelled to bursting in the heat—one of the first major casualties (the brief plaque in front of it says) the metal that held it together splitting and spilling its innards across the road it sat upon. There’s the palatial house where the president used to live, one of the oldest buildings in the city, with tunnels and secret places below it. When the heat kicked in—when the riots started as the evacuations left people here to die—the building was torn apart. When they rebuilt the city and let the people back in, they put up a statue in tribute.