The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

Demelza tipped her face towards the sky. “Who can say? You can’t build peace outside without finding it in yourself first.”

  It was painfully saccharine. Everything in him tensed against it. Peace. Maybe not outside. Not yet. But inside. Clear it all away, she’d said. It had felt so seductive, so many times, when he’d been offered his out. Had Roan been offered the same? Whatever help she needed, he couldn’t give it to her in his present state.

  But first he would have to sort those drawers. To break off the rest of the locks and carefully consider the contents. He had to be all right with outcomes he would never be able to change and things he couldn’t just cut away.

  After a while, Eli sat down in front of his mother, carefully crossing his legs. “How long will this take?”

  She stared pointedly back at him. Her eyes were the same shimmering coins of the other shaded dead. He had a feeling the time to talk was over.

  Eli’s mind was weak. Demelza could send hers out and watch Roan’s progress, but he couldn’t. Not yet. In the meantime, he just had to trust Roan would be all right for a little while longer. She’d have to be. Just hold on, he sent the thought away on a line, cast into the gloom. Don’t bloody give in.

  To Demelza, he thought, Let’s begin, and went into the first drawer.

  * * *

  Another night, another fire. I had taken off my hoodie, tearing it up into strips. I’d been warmer lately, now that the fire was coming back. I wouldn’t need the hoodie as it was, even in the night-cold. It needed to serve a new purpose. Making it smaller, into shreds, each one suited to a better use, was like making a new skin. Like moving laterally into an actual tomorrow.

  I laid each strip beside me in a pile. I would use them to bind my feet up, bloody and blistered since my shoes had finally worn through. I would build calluses. I wouldn’t need these makeshift shoes soon, either.

  I stopped, mid-tear, the fire bending towards me, magnetic. I suddenly felt like I’d forgotten something very important. Like something, other than my clothes, had left me. I saw a flash of gold in my memory, but it winked out.

  Don’t bloody —

  The fire crackled. Just embers then.

  The night air filled with snarls and yips. The garnet blade reflected the fire’s light in elegant crimson beside me. Today the blade had been smeared with black blood, but I’d burned it away. Things came out of this country with teeth snapping, like today’s beast — six legs. Jagged antlers like spears. Its guts were a halo on the ground, the drumbeats a stampede, and by the time I was through dancing, I was elbow deep in gore. I’d washed it from my hoodie’s sleeves, but it wasn’t enough. That’s when I knew my hoodie had to become something different.

  I’d gladly use the blade tonight, and every night, if I had to.

  The snarling persisted and I got up. I didn’t have to go far. Even in the dark I could pick out the shapes of shades, the way they rippled as real dark didn’t. Their pinprick eyes made them obvious.

  Target practice would be good. I threw my hand up and threw down a lob of fire, sending the shades scattering.

  “Hunt quieter and somewhere else,” I barked at them.

  Four Fox shades levelled their heads and snarled at me, but they didn’t advance. Where they had been, there was still one shade left behind, cowering. It didn’t flee either when I approached it, but it raised its shivering head, huge ears unfurling. A Rabbit.

  “So the dead hunt the dead now?” I asked, not much expecting an answer. The Rabbit leapt up and shimmered behind my ankles. The Foxes’ mouths were open, chirping from the backs of their throats.

  “They do it only for sport, mistress,” said the cowering Rabbit, as if defending its attackers. Then its shadow-fur stood on end. “But sometimes, hunted shades become corrupted Bloodbeasts.”

  “This one has been following us for days,” said a Fox, head bobbing.

  “If you do turn, then our mistress can burn you in half!” brayed another. The others laughed like their distant cousins, hyenas. I shot another handful of flame, rained cinders on them, and they scattered.

  “Idiots,” I muttered. Then I turned, noticing the Rabbit was up on its dark haunches, peering up at me. “I’m sorry about them. Everything’s messed up around here.”

  The Rabbit tilted its head, almost shrugging. “It is in their nature to chase. It is in mine to run. We like to adhere to the memory of a natural order.”

  I sniffed. Not knowing what else to do, I started walking back to the fire. By the time I sat back down to finish dismantling my clothes, the Rabbit was at the edge of the light, pressed between a rock and a tree.

  I didn’t look up. “Do you have a name?”

  I saw the shadow of a giant ear flop, then snap back. “Baskar.” A log collapsed inside the fire and crackled. Sparks filled the air. “They were right. I have been following. But I follow for the same reason they do. You have a touch of death about you.”

  I glanced over at the shade. They were looking right at me. “I’ve avoided it a few times.”

  They shook their head. “Not that. You carry it, like a mark. It is in your way of seeing.” They looked back in the direction the Foxes had fled. “It is what draws us to you. Makes us trust you as one of us.”

  A mark. I touched my left cheekbone. Spirit eye. The name lingered like déjà vu. I shrugged, slipped my shoes off, and took a good look at my ruined, blistered feet. “You know a lot, don’t you, Baskar?”

  The Rabbit crept closer, keeping their distance from the flame. I admired the care they took. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t let the fire hurt you. It’s a part of me.”

  Baskar pressed against my leg; I felt a faint coolness from their body, but it was welcome. Companionable.

  “Many of us have been here a long time. Many of us find that the things we already knew aren’t worth knowing any longer.” Baskar tipped their head up to me. “You carry death, but you’re not dead. Can you tell me . . . a story from your living world?”

  I looked from Baskar into the fire. I squinted. The words were ready, my mouth was open, but nothing came out. Inside my head, I heard someone laugh, felt that absence like a continental shift, but thought, Sometimes, it’s better to burn the grief away. Remember it, then let it go.

  “I think I can tell you something,” I said, unsure. “A story about a girl I once knew.”

  The Foxes that had chased Baskar had returned, drawn to the fire. Blank but loyal, attentive. I felt like one of them.

  “Once upon a time, a fox followed a girl home. The girl was marked by Death. Death gave the girl to the fox, on one condition: she must banish a snake. To do this, she needed a rabbit, a deer, an owl, and a seal. They all did this thing, and they won. The snake wasn’t satisfied with its prison and sent its child to get revenge. The child infected other children. All this child wanted was a family. The fox girl was separated from her friends. They all went on a journey. They needed the hearts of the ones all the animals came from. If they couldn’t do this, the snake, and its siblings, would take the world away. When they gathered the hearts, it would wake up a sleeping giant, and the giant would save them all.”

  I stopped. I hadn’t realized that there were tears on my face, until my fingers came away wet. I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel anything.

  “What happened then?” Baskar breathed, little paws cool on my knee. “Did they wake the giant? Is the world still there?”

  I looked at the tears, heard my own voice echoing the story I’d just told as I thought it through. I knew it was my story. I knew . . . I thought . . . I felt suddenly like I was weakly grasping for something, and its trailing threads were slipping through my fingers. That story. The certainty of it. Where had I heard it before? It couldn’t be mine. My story . . . what was it, again?

  “I don’t remember,” I said, the moisture on my fingertips hissing away into hot mist. Then I sh
rugged, because I didn’t feel anything but calm. “I guess it doesn’t matter if I do. It’s just a story.”

  I looked out into the bleak black woods, feeling as blank as a clean slate inside. “I think I’ll write a story of my own.”

  The Unsealed Chamber

  After she had stepped off the Cold Road and back into Winnipeg, Natti spent the night in the basement of an old North End subdivision, a place she’d been pointed to for unregistered Denizens. From what she’d gathered from the other squatters sharing the dank, ETG-defiant accommodations, things in Winnipeg were worse off than she thought.

  The chancellor was in and out of the city, but he always came back like a bat to roost. It seemed he’d set up shop in the Old Leg and wasn’t intent on going away long without finishing his work here. Whatever that was. There was word that some machine had picked something up from the Darkling Moon. Or was it from the place where the Darklings came from? It didn’t matter. Truth was thinner on the ground than the people Natti could trust. Everyone was scared, though, Mundanes and Denizens alike. The ETG presence had swollen. Natti had originally thought to go looking for Seneca, an Owl who usually had some answers. But he was nowhere; either gone to ground or arrested. The chancellor had left town for some United Nations briefings, according to local news, so now would be her chance to act.

  There was one last person she could go to, though she’d put it off all this time.

  Natti wasn’t kidding herself anymore. She couldn’t do anything alone. She was barely convinced of this as she walked closer to One Evergreen, looming desolate on the other side of the bridge. She never answered Phae’s only letter from years ago — better late than never.

  * * *

  “She’s just doing it to piss me off,” Phae said, pacing the living room. Jet watched her progress, and she felt each step dig a trench into the carpet, one they were all about to fall into. Phae’s arms were crushed into her body, jaw rigid. She was a fuse ready to go off with no flame.

  “But what if she’s not?” Jet said quietly. “What if the Moth Queen led her somewhere and she can’t come home?”

  Phae stopped at that, considering the little boy seriously. “Jet,” she said gently. He wasn’t old enough yet to know how to be direct, but he clearly wanted to help. And he knew something she didn’t. “Do you know where Saskia is?”

  He screwed his eyes shut, mouth twisted. Then his face loosened, and he sighed. “I dunno. I’d have to go out and look properly. Who’s that man that Saskia talked about? Mr. Rath? He’d know.”

  Jordan had said Jet had much more potential than anyone would have the time to wrangle. Phae always worried she was doing him a disservice with no good Owl role models around. Though those had always been few and far between . . .

  “Solomon Rathgar,” she said, keeping her voice even. When Saskia had come home from her first day, she was obviously shaken but too proud to admit that anything was under her skin. Not to the other kids. Victor and Cara and Lily ate up her quietly told accounts of her new job. Saskia wasn’t exactly pushing their praise away, either.

  “You’re just full of surprises, Scaredy Sask,” Victor had grinned. “First you get arrested, then you take this job. You must really be crazy.”

  “If I was,” she’d said curtly, “they would’ve known immediately. They screen your thoughts and intentions. With an Owl.” She’d spread her arms like a showman, the better to get a look at her uniform. “Guess I passed.”

  Lily and Cara had oohed. Phae had just come in from the fifth floor, where Mr. Cole, a Rabbit, was in shambles after his daughter, Dannika, had disappeared. How many more house calls like this was Phae going to make before she snapped? She was already tightly strung, and Saskia’s attitude had been the last straw.

  “What was the Owl’s name?” Phae asked, the little gathering whipping their heads guiltily towards her. “It wasn’t Solomon Rathgar, by any chance?”

  Saskia didn’t blink, just bit her lip and stood up. Classic escape procedure.

  “If you’ve got any brains left, you’ll at least stay out of his way,” Phae warned. “He’s powerful, and a Denizen traitor. He’ll try to get into your head and convince you of things you’d never agree to in your right mind.” Her mouth twisted. “Barton could tell you all about that. But your employers took him away. You already knew that, though.”

  The air of whimsy and espionage in the room died before Saskia had left it. Phae was still so angry at her. But who was to blame for the way things had turned out?

  Now Phae realized she had been so busy helping everyone else that in her grief she’d let Saskia suffer, calling it collateral for her own ill choices. If I have to live with my mistakes, she should, too. But blame wasn’t in a guardian’s wheelhouse. Barton wouldn’t have blamed Saskia. Neither would Roan, for all her extremes.

  Phae hoped it wasn’t too late.

  She slipped on her coat then grabbed Jet’s and held it out for him. “If Solomon’s involved, then Saskia may be in trouble. And we had better start looking.”

  Jet’s face lit up with something Phae hadn’t seen in it before. “Really? Me?”

  Her hand was on the door handle, and despite the urgency, she couldn’t help grin. “Yes, you. C’mon.”

  She opened the door and nearly walked into a brick wall. Well. Just a person who’d always seemed as solid as one, hand poised to knock, and just as surprised as Phae.

  “Ah,” Natti said. “Good, uh, timing.”

  Phae stared. The dark blue shapes of the tattoos arced over Natti’s stern brow, the double lines from chin to mouth. The tattoos weren’t what shocked her, of course, but the person who bore them. That she was really, truly here.

  Natti backed up, then rubbed her neck.

  “Look, I know this is a long time coming,” she started, “and you have every right to not —”

  Natti gasped with the force of Phae’s arms around her middle.

  “Oh,” Natti wheezed. Phae had already pulled away, and Natti had been too stunned to hug her back, anyway.

  Jet was tugging on Natti’s jacket. “We’re getting the old team back together, aren’t we?”

  Phae pursed her lips, tried not to get queasy with nostalgia.

  Natti cut in before that could happen. “Why? What’s up?”

  “Saskia’s missing,” Phae said as she glanced about the hallway. Ella’s aunt’s place was remarkably silent. The ETG might have been here recently to haul her away to some therapy facility or another. They might still be around. “She, um, went to work yesterday but didn’t come home . . .” She was going to say more, give more context, but how could she with Natti, after so many —

  “All right,” Natti nodded. “Let’s go.”

  Phae startled. “You don’t have to. It’s . . . it’s my fault, and you’re probably busy —”

  “Why do you think I came over here?” Natti asked, the hint of a grin coming up. “Did I really do that much of a number on you?”

  “There’s no time!” Jet stomped. He slapped a pair of goggles over his eyes, with all the seriousness such a costume-addition could afford. “If you guys won’t get moving, I’ll find her on my own.” He beelined for the stairs and Phae exhaled sharply.

  Then a hand was clenching her shoulder, the force behind it saying all the things Phae really needed to hear.

  “We’ve got our marching orders,” Natti said. “We can make awkward small talk on the way.”

  * * *

  As Saskia followed Ella down and down, she stared into the flame cupped in Ella’s outstretched hand and thought of Jet.

  “So the Cluster is bad?” he’d asked Saskia.

  Saskia frowned over the metal plate she’d just screwed into place. It was when she was working on the ETG disruptor as a kind of calm-down hobby, not yet engaging her skills in military espionage. Jet was digging through Saskia’s milk crates.

/>   She’d wanted to get her point across in a way he’d understand, but she didn’t want to lie to him, either. “Do you know the difference between good and bad, Brain?”

  He shrugged, yanking a motherboard and a spark plug free from a wire tangle. He was about to launch into a game of pirate ships on the sea of her bedroom carpet.

  “Bad people hurt people,” Saskia said slowly. “The Cluster hasn’t hurt anyone yet, as far as we know. They just believe that the Darkling Moon speaks to them, and that what it has to say is important.”

  The little spark plug stopped pre-collision with a keyboard iceberg. “But the Darklings are bad. They hurt people.”

  Saskia was about to agree — she had direct experience with them, after all — but she stopped herself. The Darklings had destroyed things, but it was, after all, Denizens who put their own people directly in Zabor’s path. Then again, Seela had swept the continents with forests of victims — kind of hard to push that aside . . . except that some of those motivations were guided by Killian’s own beliefs, and he was a Denizen, too . . .

  Saskia didn’t have the answers, but she didn’t say any of this to Jet, and she’d kept it firmly behind her mental wall. He’d already moved on, anyway. “And the Task Guard?” he asked.

  “Bad,” Saskia said immediately. “Super bad.” Though now she thought of Cam. Nothing was black and white after all, just ETG grey . . .

  Jet had moved on from pirate ships, building a little 2D sculpture on the floor out of coloured wire bits. “They hurt people. They hurt Barton.”

  “Yes.” The picture on the carpet took the shape of a rabbit with lopsided ears.

  “Barton tried to help people. When there were trees all over, he set lots of people free. He was a hero.”

  Saskia had turned away, body itching with a feeling that might never go away. “Yes,” she said. Barton had been born a Denizen but had to walk a hard road to reclaim his power. He’d only ever used it to help people. To Saskia, he’d seemed unbreakable.