by Peter Newman
Hands full, she uses her feet to push the two halves of the cylinder further apart. It is unclear whether it opens for her by luck or by design. Vesper doesn’t care either way. She kicks free, out of the cylinder and into open water. After such tight confinement, the sudden enormity of her surroundings is paralysing.
Vesper’s breath mask automatically filters air and Duet’s visor seals itself to conserve oxygen. Meanwhile, unaware, the kid sleeps on.
Vesper begins to drift but in the darkness she can only guess the difference between up and down.
Legs kick, frantically trying for the surface. Youthful strength and energy are no match for the combined weight of an armoured Harmonised and a sleeping kid.
They begin to sink. Down. Definitely down.
Vesper continues to kick, stirring bubbles, working hard, harder. Their descent slows, pauses. But she cannot maintain the effort, cannot hope to swim free with her burdens.
Without meaning to, her eyes and thoughts turn to the kid, then to Duet. Surely they would understand? Is it not better that some of them survive?
Suddenly, she remembers her father’s hands, always there to pick her up. Never letting go.
She cannot let go. Not now.
Legs already tiring, she continues to kick.
On her back the sword begins to hum. Where its eye looks, tainted clouds of ocean clear, opening a pathway to cleaner waters. Silvered wings beat gently, finding purchase in currents, invisible.
Slowly at first, they ascend, getting faster as wings find their rhythm.
Numb fingers grip poorly, Vesper seeing rather than feeling Duet slip away. She tries to hold on, her hand sliding down Duet’s bracer, catching on the heel of the other’s hand. Their growing speed makes it harder. It is only a matter of time before she is lost.
Vesper closes her eyes momentarily. She stops kicking, trusting to the sword entirely and wraps her legs under Duet’s arms.
Tirelessly, the sword drags them up, until light brushes red and gold around them and biting cold becomes only cool.
Vesper’s head breaks the surface. She looks round and sees grey sand close by.
An eye also sees it. Humming subsides, wings stop their work, folding once more about the sword. An eye closes.
Vesper’s head dips below the water.
With frantic kicks, she makes towards the land, not bothering to go up. Shortly, her feet touch rising rock and she manages to stand. With wobbling steps she makes her way towards the island. Rock mixes with sand, dragging at feet but Vesper keeps going.
She lies to herself: ‘Just one more step.’ Believing just enough to struggle on.
She drags Duet as far as she can before dropping an arm and falling to her knees. It is only when she places the kid upon the sand that she appreciates how still he has become.
Vesper puts her hands flat on the sand, closes her eyes. The sword is heavy on her back. Her arms quiver with fatigue. A tear squeezes out, dropping onto the inside of her mask. She takes a deep breath. Then another.
She shrugs out of her coat and unbuckles the sword, placing the latter on top of the former. She crawls to the kid, breaking the rubbery dome around his head and wipes the last of the blue residue from cold lips.
Shaking hands push on the kid’s stomach. Air is blown into the kid’s mouth.
He responds quickly.
The first cough is delicate, the second less so. Suddenly the kid is standing upright, belching out coloured water onto the beach. By the time he is finished, Vesper is asleep. The kid bleats at her, then tries nudging her with his head. The girl groans a little but otherwise doesn’t move.
The kid looks at her for a while, then at the unfamiliar territory. A conclusion is reached. The kid turns on the spot and settles next to the girl, his chin resting on her stomach. The little head rises and falls like the waves, regular and slow.
*
Samael climbs up the old metal hill. He is careful not to look towards the Breach. An instinct keeps his gaze on the dented, rusty floor. A part of him is afraid to look, knows that he will not be able to unsee whatever waits for him. Somehow, it will be easier to bear when he has resumed his customary watching post.
He plants his feet where he always plants them, enjoying the feeling of belonging. In this place he is rooted. He does not understand why this is, does not care to.
Grounded now, ready, he raises his head.
Four infernal factions race towards the Breach. As expected the Felrunners cannot be matched in pace, their weeping legs flashing underneath them like an army of sticks, a never tangling mess of movement. Hangnail is close behind, running with inhuman speed, casual. Next to the rolling, ugly gait of Gutterface, the others appear almost elegant. The Backwards Child brings up the rear. Unable to run, it is carried on the back of a huge Usurperkin, a twisted pimple on a lumbering mountain.
At last, Samael lifts his gaze further, taking in the horizon and the Breach itself.
Without meaning to, he takes a step backwards.
If anything, the Yearning has grown in his absence. A sizable section of the Breach is blocked by its ephemeral form, a roiling cloud of yellow and green, a slice of otherness, a seed trying to plant itself in hostile soil. Where reality is weak, the Yearning spreads out, expanding into spaces defined by currents of essence, mapping out the lines between this world and the impossible.
Where realities blur, the Yearning pushes, its essence smoking under the glare of the broken suns. Along the border, the Yearning burns, fossilising into crystal, forming trees, strange and starlike. This forest sprouts in the ground and the sky with equal felicity, drawing in the good air and breathing out something else.
The Felrunners are the first to reach the unearthly forest.
Samael watches as their lord plunges between the glassy trunks, leaping and sailing over bubbling earth. By the fourth of these leaps, something begins to change. A distortion of distance. A stretching.
Samael leans forward to better understand. Lord Felrunner’s head seems to be streaking ahead of its many legs, body and neck stretching to accommodate.
The other Felrunners hesitate, only to find that it is not just their legs carrying them forward. As they scrabble back, their lord rushes on, like a piece of elastic stretched suddenly over many miles, then gone.
Samael’s half-breed eyes just catch the last glimmer of Lord Felrunner’s essence, a thin ribbon of ash, falling upward, fading.
Unmade.
Unwilling to follow their lord any longer, unable to stop, the Felrunners slide towards their end, undignified. The glassy trunks catch their reflections, changing them. Samael cannot make out the images and for that he is glad.
Those that can turn away and make for home, save the Backwards Child. For even in retreat it is ever cursed to be looking where it should not.
Only the Backwards Child and Samael see the Felrunners stretching, essence pushing out through their shells, shredding them. Where the monsters once ran stand a gaggle of new essence trees, thin reedy things like stalks of long grass, fragile straws standing high on an abundance of frozen limbs. From each hangs a bag of flesh, suspended in the air, a flag of defeat.
*
Waves lap at Duet’s boots. She remains as she was left, one arm raised by her head, pointing randomly. Above, the suns orbit each other, circling slowly towards the horizon.
Vesper sits nearby, feeding the kid. Next to her, the sword sleeps. When the feeding is done, the kid totters along the beach. He doesn’t go far and looks back often, bleating until acknowledgement is given.
Vesper lies down by the sword, her nose in line with the crosspiece. She watches it for a long time. Not quite daring to touch the hilt, she rests a hand on the sheath.
The sword does not react.
She stays like that a while, then mouths a silent thank-you.
A booted foot twitches, splashing weakly. Vesper sits up to see Duet doing the same.
‘Where are … we?’
Vesper waves to the kid, who begins to race back. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What happened?’
She begins to tell her of horrors half glimpsed under the water and the fight for survival. Before she can finish, the kid stumbles sideways, comic, then falls over. Four legs scurry in the air and the kid makes an unhappy noise. He struggles to his feet, standing at a dangerous angle and barely makes two strides before tottering, falling again.
Duet sounds tired. ‘What now?’
Vesper gets up stiffly, like a woman many years her senior and rushes over. ‘He ate some of those tabs, I don’t know how many. And he swallowed a lot of water.’
‘We should have … left it behind.’
‘Don’t say that!’
‘I’m just …’ She pauses, jerking upright, her sentence ending in a strangled gurgle.
The quality of the sound stops Vesper in her tracks. She looks back in time to see Duet pull off her visor and bend forward.
Her mouth turns down as Duet vomits repeatedly onto the beach. Hisses of pain accompany the ejections, and her hand moves to her side, involuntary, drawing attention to impressions left by the First’s fist.
Afterwards, she sips a little water while Vesper gathers the kid in her arms.
When she is done, she finds the girl staring. Immediately, her face hardens. ‘What is it?’
Vesper blinks. ‘Sorry, it’s just I’ve never seen your face before.’
‘And?’
She looks again at the Harmonised’s features. Only the Knights and the Lenses are permitted to grow their hair, Duet is neither. Stubble dusts her scalp, dark and severe. Something about her nose seems wrong, her ears too, though Vesper cannot see why, the microsurgeries too subtle to leave scarring.
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t think you’d be so young.’
‘All Harmonised are. They sync us … from birth.’
‘What happens when you get old?’
‘We die?’ She shrugs. ‘They never said. I never asked.’
For a while, neither speaks. Vesper draws idly in the sand. ‘It’s getting dark. We need to find shelter.’
Duet doesn’t look at her. ‘Do we?’
‘Of course we do. We need to rest somewhere safe so we can get going in the morning.’
‘Why?’
‘For the mission of course.’
‘The mission is … over. We have no … transport. No troops, no … support. We’re dead.’
She pauses her doodling, leaving a knight half-sketched. ‘We still have the sword, and each other.’
‘A baby goat! A child! And …’ Duet searches for the words to describe herself, falls to mutterings. ‘We’re dead.’
‘I’m not much younger than you! Five years at the most.’
‘Ten is closer.’
‘Ten then. It doesn’t matter! You still believe in the sword, don’t you?’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Liar! I watched … you. In Sonorous.’ Vesper looks away. ‘The sword didn’t … speak to you … there. It didn’t … ask for me … did it?’ Duet nods grimly at Vesper’s silence. ‘She was right … about you.’
Vesper’s head remains bowed. ‘Who was?’
‘Me. Her.’
In silence, Vesper collects her things and walks towards the pockmarked cliffs.
Red light glints on Duet’s abandoned visor, then makes way for dazzling gold. One of the suns has already dipped below the horizon, the other not far behind.
Duet sighs, a long and bitter thing and levers herself upright.
Waves creep stealthily up the beach, each time a little higher, harrying the Harmonised as she limps after the girl.
Vesper begins to climb. The rocks are moist, too soft, like clay. Where she scrabbles, long spined things as big as a fingernail flee the disturbance, seeking new holes to inhabit.
The kid bounds ahead, treating sheer walls like gentle pathways.
Vesper, finding a hollow halfway up, climbs in with the kid, huddling together for warmth. When Duet arrives, the front of her armour smeared in mud, Vesper smiles but she doesn’t join them, sitting as far apart as space allows, shivering, alone.
Clouds roll across the sky, bullied along by a growing wind. Foam-capped waves strike the cliffs, coating them in crust, glistening.
The kid hops onto the top of the cliff. His dark eyes expressionless as he takes in the view. Behind him comes Vesper, determined expression glimpsed through mud-streaked hair crusted with salt. Last comes Duet, grunting and cursing with each movement, her usual grace abandoned.
Vesper lets her catch her breath before speaking. ‘Have you taken any tabs today?’
‘I took two.’
‘Two? I thought you were only supposed to take one.’
‘I took two.’
‘Then this is the best time to have a look at your injury.’
‘You’re no surgeon.’
‘Don’t be scared. I just want to look.’
‘I am scared. Of infection.’
‘The sword will protect us from taint.’ She holds up the bag. ‘And I’ve got gel for everything else.’
Begrudgingly, Duet agrees and they find a sheltered spot, a dip in the ground, where two-tone flowers grow and bushes with leaves like antlers.
She takes off the chest-plate. Its original contours have been distorted by many dents. Underneath is a thin layer of padding, smart-adjusting to temperature changes, shock absorbing. Beneath the spot the First hit hardest, blood dries in a ragged oval.
At Vesper’s insistence, she peels the padding back too, wincing as fabric tears itself from fresh scabbing. Pale skin makes bruises stark. Together they tell of multiple strikes, fist sized. Vesper smears them with anti-inflammatory gel, getting the easy part out of the way.
‘What is it?’
Vesper bites her lip. ‘It’s so swollen here, I’m not sure if the bone is broken.’
‘Do you know … what to do?’ Duet’s voice carries an edge of nerves.
‘Not really. I mean, I’ve set legs before but never ribs.’ She doesn’t mention if the legs are human or animal.
Duet scowls but doesn’t protest when the girl starts work. She plugs the newly torn scabs with fresh Skyn, dabbing the thick paste on with her fingers, like an artist. The Flexicast comes next, which appears like a long, thin sack of liquid until activated. She wraps it around Duet’s ribs, adjusting it for size. When it is snug, she lets go and the liquid solidifies, moulding itself to Duet’s body, supporting but limiting flexibility.
‘How’s that?’
‘Better.’
Vesper beams at her.
For Duet, indeed for many citizens of the Empire of the Winged Eye, smiles do not come naturally. With pain gone, tension soon departs, making room for fatigue. Before she realises it, the Harmonised has fallen asleep in the soft earth.
While she dreams, Vesper’s smile vanishes. ‘We have to be strong for Duet,’ she says to the kid, scratching behind his ear. ‘Even if we don’t feel very strong. I wish,’ she pauses, sighs. ‘I wish I knew what to say to her. And I wish Father was here, or Uncle Harm. They’d know what to do.’ She meets the kid’s gaze. ‘Duet’s wound looked bad, didn’t it?’
The kid’s eyes appear bleak.
Vesper sighs again. It would be easy to give up, to throw herself from the cliff or just curl up in a ball and cry. But she allows herself neither, haunted by the sound of swords shattering and the look in Genner’s eyes. He died for her along with countless others. It would be the worst insult to fail them now.
She starts with something small, manageable, and tries to knock out the dents in Duet’s chest-plate. She moves a discreet distance away, picks up a rock and begins to hammer. Sometimes she holds it up in front of the kid, encouraging him to kick. Girl and goat play happily. Old dents are popped back, new ones made. Throughout, Duet and the sword sleep.
When Duet wakes, they share some rations and Vesper consults the Nav
pack. It tells them they are on the mainland. It is wrong, ignorant of the floods or the quakes that have changed the landscape in the years since the Lenses kept accurate records of the south. No sky-ships dare fly this airspace and the eyes that watched the world from above have long been closed, dead spheres circling the heavens, endless, hopeless.
Several settlements are nearby, all marked with unknown or hostile status. This far south, there are no flags of the Empire of the Winged Eye, no safe havens, no friends. ‘I’m not sure which way to go.’
‘We need supplies.’
Vesper scans settlement names, searching for the familiar. ‘What about Wonderland? That doesn’t sound too bad. Uncle talked about it …’
‘You surprise me.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. What did he say?’
‘Um … he said it was dangerous. But so were all the places in his stories.’
‘Do you remember anything?’
‘Anything! That’s it. He said that in Wonderland, you could get anything. Anything at all. So I’m sure we’ll be able to get supplies there.
‘This way!’ she says, jumping up with an enthusiasm she doesn’t feel. The kid echoes the motion and the two set off. Duet follows with a different demeanour, a balance to their brightness.
They make their way down a gentle slope, the kid naturally finding the safest way. The terrain is soft rock in places, wet dirt in others. Grass grows in patches, irregular, like the scalp of a balding man.
Wind tugs at the girl’s coat, ruffles hair. As the view of the south presents itself, Vesper slows. She shines the Navpack on the floor, compares the map it draws with what stands before her. ‘Uh oh.’
Where land is expected, there are more waves, and beyond them, distant but visible, a second coastline. She puts the Navpack away, pulls up the old scope and puts it to her eye. In places, the water is shallow and she sees shapes beneath it, shadows of rooftops, tubes trying to float, suspended below the surface by stubborn cables.
She sets off, keen to explore. Duet struggles to match her pace, going just fast enough to keep her in sight but no more.
At land’s end, kid and girl skid to a stop. There is no beach here, just rock and grass dipping into water. Vesper extends out a leg, lowers her foot carefully. It goes in up to the ankle, then the knee before finding purchase on a roof. Goosebumps appear all over the girl and she bites a knuckle to stop from squealing. Then she leans forward, testing the roof with more and more of her weight.