by Peter Newman
Nothing happens.
Licey tries again and the gun begins to hum off key. She grunts in surprise and veins pop to attention across her face. The hum continues, sound wavering as the gun quivers in her grip. Muscles in her hand spasm first, then her arm and shoulder. Soon all are straining to breaking point, violent, relentless, shaking her until teeth chip at each other and her heart pops. Fourteen long seconds later, Licey is dead.
Too late, Vesper covers her face. She cannot pluck out what she has seen, cannot wash it away with tears.
As the dust settles, Churner starts to crawl away, keeping low, unobtrusive.
Duet’s boots soon fill his vision. She has her sword back now. ‘Your turn.’
‘Don’t be doing in old Churner. I is helping you. I is showing you secret ways and I is giving you a safe path.’
‘This wasn’t safe.’
‘Safer than the way you is trying to go.’ He sees her sword start to rise and changes tack. ‘Will help you more, show you best ways. And I is stashing many treasures. You would like to be seeing them. You would.’
‘We’ve had enough … of your help. We don’t need … anything from you.’
Vesper chimes in. ‘It’s not his fault. They were going to kill him too.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘But they hurt him and stole from him. He wouldn’t want that. Please don’t do anything to him.’
Duet’s sword hovers above Churner’s head. ‘If we let … him go. He’ll sell … us out.’
‘So will the men that ran away. Killing him isn’t going to make a difference.’
She sheathes her sword. ‘We’ll regret this.’
‘Oh no, you is wise and generous. I is remembering this. Oh yes. I –’ He pauses as Duet scoops the tablets out of his hands. ‘What is you doing?’
‘We traded for … a safe path. You didn’t deliver.’
Vesper opens her mouth to speak but Duet silences her with a look and points to the gun in Licey’s cold grip. Trying not to sob, she crawls over to the body, breath coming in gasps as she struggles to unpeel fingers, stiff and stubborn.
They leave Churner still kneeling in the dirt, a few pills speckling his palms. Vesper looking back at the last moment to mouth a silent apology.
Alone, Churner starts to mutter. ‘I is remembering this. Oh yes. I is remembering this.’
The night passes. One sleeps while the other watches, taking turns, dividing the dark. The kid leaves them to it, soft snores unbroken.
In the morning they continue. The valley ends in a rough set of natural stairs, uneven, tilting things, hewn from the rock by powerful forces. Upon seeing them, the kid begins to bounce.
Duet scowls. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
Vesper shrugs.
Hooves click on stony ground, drumming, excited, then speeding forward.
The girl and the Harmonised watch bemused as the kid bounds from one step to the next. Each landing brings a new platform into view, even more tempting than the last. Sometimes the kid makes the jump first time, sometimes legs flail in the air before plopping down again. To the kid, it doesn’t matter. Progress is erratic but fast. By the time the humans start the climb, the kid is two thirds of the way up, squeaking and joyful.
Exertion soon takes its toll on old wounds. Duet pauses, leaning heavy on the wall. She raises a hand to her visor, letting her head drift down, taking its weight. Grief grumbles from deep within, threatening to wake. She takes a deep breath, swallows, and looks up.
Vesper is there, one step above her, hand held out as open as her face.
‘What?’ growls Duet.
‘Let me help you.’
‘I don’t need …’
Fractionally, Vesper’s hand lowers. ‘I, I didn’t thank you for saving me, and before that, in Sonorous. There were so many of them and you stood up to them all.’ Their eyes meet. ‘I owe you everything.’
Duet’s frown trembles. Another deep breath, another swallow. She grabs at Vesper’s hand, a quick, rough gesture. ‘Come on. Let’s climb.’
Together, they make their way up. The kid skips down to meet them, bleats, skips up again.
At the top, the ground is mercifully flat and good progress is made. The rocky ground gives way to fields of wild crops. A sudden explosion of life, the giant stalks sprout manically for miles, pale yellow, aspiring to be trees.
They plunge inside, and fall down onto ground a step lower than expected. Soon the world becomes a series of bending bars, fibrous, bowing to make room for more. An unending vista of gold. Often they stop to check their position with the Navpack and breathe deep of the blue square above their heads.
Beneath their feet the soil is thick and dark, rich and squishy. Vesper hears crunching and looks down. Tainted things squirm in the mud, a writhing cluster of cockroach shells. Where the girl’s passing has flipped them over, a pink underbelly is revealed, sickeningly soft, featureless.
Ahead, the stalks part to reveal the resting place of an old Auto-farmer. One of the last, for years its bladed arms have hung still while legions of creatures investigate, making homes among its wires, tucked safe behind plates of steel. Earth and machine blend together, one seeming to grow out of the other.
Flowers sprout from its cracked eyes, roots twist about metal toes.
Vesper stares at it for a long time.
Duet notices, stops. ‘What is it?’
She smiles. ‘It’s beautiful, don’t you think?’
‘No.’
‘How do you know? You haven’t even bothered to look.’
‘Yes I have.’
‘No you haven’t!’
She grits her teeth. ‘This is stupid.’
‘Just look. It won’t take long.’
‘Fine.’
She glances at it and mutters agreement, keen to move them on. In places they push the stalks aside, in others they step around them. The kid stays close, sneezing often.
Vesper nudges Duet. ‘What did you think?’
‘Of what?’
‘You know.’
‘Oh, it was …’
‘What?’
‘Different.’
‘Different?’
What little patience there is evaporates away. ‘What do you want me to say? What do you want from me? It was a broken machine. So what? It won’t help us survive, it doesn’t even work.’
Against all sense of self-preservation, the girl smiles.
‘Why do you keep staring at me? Oath or no oath, if you don’t get that smile off your face, I’ll kick it out!’
The smile gets broader still. Vesper holds up her hands as Duet advances towards her. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you, I’m happy for you.’
‘What are you talking about? Make some sense, damn you!’
‘Your speech. Since Sonorous, it’s been broken but now that you’re angry with me you sound natural again.’
Duet stops and slumps against the foliage. Thick stalks sway but don’t fall. Hands cover a face covered by a visor. She tries to breathe, tries to swallow it down but this time the grief is too strong. Tears come, thick and fast, misting her visor, misting the world.
One Thousand, One Hundred and Sixteen Years Ago
For years, Massassi roams. She samples food, samples bodies, takes what she wants, breaks what she wants. She is young, angry and, for the first time, free.
Without forcing it, she gets stronger. She sees the light in everyone now, sees their true faces without trying, hears their voices stripped of pretence. People quickly bore her. Each new acquaintance robbed of mystery, just another animal with nothing special to say.
Pleasure is pleasure, however, and she enjoys travelling, exploring the contours of the world. Unrendered food is a particular high.
Mostly, she forgets about the chink in the sky but as time passes she finds it bothering her more and more. Like a stone in her shoe it is trivial yet omnipresent. The feelings recede as she travels north but after a month or two it re
turns again, and her stomach clenches.
At first, she tells herself that she notices because she has become sensitised. Then she tells herself it is because her new senses are more powerful now. At last, she admits the truth: Whatever is wrong is spreading, getting worse.
Perhaps it is boredom that makes her go south, perhaps it is a late blooming sense of duty or an itch that demands scratching, but south she goes. Jump boots propel her along, their design an affront to all her old safety regulations. Between them and her glider, she makes quick work of the journey.
Massassi arrives at a quarry. A handful of people watch over automated loaders and mining mechs. Scores of tools rise and fall together, regular, tireless, while vehicles rush about clearing the growing piles of rock.
Neither machines nor overseers attend to her arrival. The disinterest is mutual. Massassi focuses on the sky. She sees it, ordinary, cloud painted, part blocked by smog from nearby factories. But she also sees more, the film of blue reality stretched thin like a boil, filling with an alien pus. Directly above the quarry, the sky is folded, as if being pressed towards the ground, a giant inverted pyramid, roots hidden well above the horizon, its apex somewhere within the earth.
She glides closer, careful not to touch it, and spirals slowly down. The tip is not within the quarry itself, not yet, though the diggers aim that way. Massassi lands, boots hissing as they absorb the impact. She detaches her glider, planting the two halves into the ground before the wings have fully retracted and begins to dig.
Before long she finds it: the narrowest point, sharp and focused. But then she finds it is not the end. Beneath her, the sense of wrongness widens again, as if the point she has discovered is not the tip at all, rather the meeting place of two pyramids, one on top of the other, mirrored forces, trying to push into the world. The point she has found is the place of greatest pressure. It is not under the dirt, not literally. Normal geography does not apply. The thing Massassi sees is out of phase. There is no space for it to be here, yet the pressure continues to build.
Sooner or later, something will give.
She reaches out with her metal arm. Silver light spills out as the iris in her palm opens. She hesitates. There is nothing in the world that scares Massassi now but this is something else, something not in or of the world. It is bigger than her.
In spite of this, perhaps because of it, she makes contact.
CHAPTER TEN
A line cuts through fields of crops, three metres wide, stretching from the eastern coast to the western one. In places, it is broken by remains of man-made structures. Once a wall of light stood here, holding back the spread of taint, now it is gone. So have the trains that used to link it to the north, so have the magrails that powered them. Scavenged, buried, stolen or eaten, integrated into a hundred new ecosystems.
Vesper steps into the space, stretches her arms.
On the other side, giant crops continue but are made to compete for dominance. Thick runners drape across the yellow stalks, excreting spore clouds from little holes in their knobbly flesh. Branches like hands sprout from the ground, choking the life from other plants. Among them insects hang heavy in the air, rat-sized, their bellies swollen with blood.
The girl shudders, turning up the collar on her coat, wrapping arms and clothing around herself, tight. Duet hangs back, only exposing enough of her face to peer along the open channel, first left then right. The kid bounces past her, past Vesper, crossing the space with enthusiasm.
Hooves connect with something hidden.
An old cable tightens, snaring legs, bringing the kid to the ground with a thump. A trap set by the First’s hunters. Vibrations travel along its length, rapid, determined and half a mile away, a bell sounds, prompting unseen forces into action.
The kid makes his own sound, less subtle. It is clear he finds his predicament unacceptable.
‘I told you we should have traded it.’
‘Quick,’ says Vesper, racing towards the kid.
Duet’s reply is whispered from cover. ‘Leave it!’
‘You can’t say that!’
‘I can. Whoever set this will be less likely to follow us if they get a meal.’ She meets Vesper’s eyes as the kid squirms against his bonds, bleating, desperate. After a moment Duet breaks away, abandoning stealth, cutting the kid free.
He springs up and turns a quick circle, happy again.
Duet scowls, remaining uncharmed. ‘We’d better get moving.’
They run on, quickly swallowed by the fields.
Vesper is distracted by the abundance of life. Unknown creatures hang like fruit, waiting for night to come. Strange things moan under the earth, sliding worm-like through soil where swollen flowers grow, their stalks so bloated they almost fold in on themselves, their colours too pale, washed out.
Duet grabs Vesper’s hand and pulls her along, always forward, cutting a path where necessary.
Often, Vesper glances behind her. She sees movement, buzzings and crawlings, but no hunters. ‘Shouldn’t we try and hide our trail?’
‘No chance. The ground is too soft here. Our best option is to outrun them.’
‘Okay. Do you think we can do that?’
‘Not if we keep talking.’
They run on until breath becomes ragged. Eventually, though, they have to stop, weighing wasted time against the need to rest. Sweat glistens on Vesper’s head and neck, attracting attention. Some of the insects are too big to fly. Instead they jump from tree to tree, armoured monkeys, gangling, with bladed faces and gemstone eyes.
On the girl’s back, the sword hums, restless.
At the sound she looks up to see tainted insects all around her, hanging, four to a stalk.
The kid tucks himself behind Vesper’s leg.
Wings thrum all around them.
None move to attack.
Seconds pass, tense, Duet with her sword ready, Vesper with her gun.
The swarm watches them. Within a score of labium, proboscises quiver.
Duet steps forward, sword raised and the swarm fall back, maintaining distance. She steps forward again, testing. Once more, the swarm retreats. With growing confidence, she advances, pulling Vesper with her. Bulbous, faceted eyes fix on the girl and the goat.
She keeps her sword arm extended and herself between predators and food, increasing pace.
The swarm allows her passage, falling back in a rough line.
They walk on, nerves tight. Weapons are lowered but not put away. The action elicits a hum of excitement from the swarm.
Vesper glances about, eyes wide. ‘What are they doing?’
‘I don’t know,’ replies the Harmonised, blinking angrily at sweat collecting behind her visor. ‘But I wish they’d get on with it.’
One of the swarm swings closer. Duet raises her sword again. It springs back.
Still further they go, stalked by the swarm. Whenever heads droop or steps falter, the swarm inches closer. When Duet or Vesper realises, they snap back to attention and the swarm gives ground, though never quite as much as before.
Back and forth, back and forth, like a sinister dance, playing out to its inevitable conclusion.
When Duet finally speaks, her voice is dulled but firm. ‘They won’t leave us alone until they’ve had their fill.’
Pale faced, Vesper nods.
‘I’m going to give them your goat.’
‘You can’t!’
‘It’s that or I sell myself to them. Unless you have a better idea.’
The girl frowns, thinks. She looks around for inspiration. After a moment, she shakes her head, bitter. ‘Okay.’
‘Maybe we were right to save it after all.’ Duet raises her sword.
The kid looks up at the girl, cute, oblivious.
‘Wait! Don’t do it yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘I … Just give me some time to think.’
‘We have to do this now. Get away while they feed.’
Vesper’s eyes flit towards
the kid and away, unsure if it is best to watch his end or not. She decides it is nobler to look. Changes her mind. Changes it back. Tears threaten to come. The swarm creeps a little closer. ‘Okay. Do it.’
Duet nods, raises her sword swiftly …
And all at once, the swarm disperses, buzzing away into the darkness.
Silence pours in after them, shocking and sudden. But not pure. From behind them hushed feet approach. One of them missteps and a shell cracks underfoot, thunderous.
Girl and Harmonised exchange a look, speaking as one. ‘Run!’
Fatigue forgotten, they flee. Vesper stumbles, nearly falls but momentum keeps her on her feet. Duet keeps pace, one hand pressed against her side while the kid follows, mouth open, delighted.
Behind them, unknown hunters give chase while all around, the inhabitants of the yellow forest choose whether to run or hide, to watch or pursue.
One Thousand, One Hundred and Sixteen Years Ago
The point where the pyramids touch is small, small enough for Massassi to curl her fingers around it, enclosing the distortion in her fist. From her open metal palm, her essence shifts, exploring, sensing.
The divide between dimensions is thin here, stretched to breaking point. But even the tiniest film remains an infinity, too vast for her to comprehend. There are no cracks or splits, not yet, but what remains is so weak that she is able to feel things on the other side, like touching faces wrapped in plastic.
It is tantalising. There are hints of wonders beyond imagination, of terrors, of oddities that threaten madness, of more.
She strains her senses, tries to understand what is there.
Unformed shapes lurk on the other side, alien things, fluid, vast. She can almost define them now, almost taste them on her tongue. Fear tickles her thoughts, thrills through her body. A part of her wants to stop, does not want to know any more.
Silvered fingers clench and she dares to go deeper.
Her essence finds the weakest place or perhaps it is pulled there. She will never be sure. There is a growing desire to retreat, racing to match the need to go further.
Like a hand on a window, her essence rests against the divide. From somewhere on the other side, things notice. They rise from dark places and storms of swirling madness, forming from unthinkable ideas. Chunks of void break away, becoming hungry holes that swim towards her.