by Molly Flatt
The falling. The blackness. The million glittering lights. The terrible sense of loss.
She came to curled on the wet sand, her skin slick with sweat and rain. She was exhausted, she told herself as she clambered shakily to her feet. She was disoriented, she was sleep-deprived. He must have reminded her of someone else, someone from her loser-Alex past. But however hard she tried, none of the excuses would stick.
Shivering, keeping her back to the statue, she returned to the street.
After she had wound her way through the town for another half-hour, the buildings began to thin out. Between them, the horizon had turned a pale, wavering gold. Alex wondered just how many hours she had been walking, and whether anyone back at the main building had noticed she wasn’t there. It was only when she emerged round a final cobbled curve and out onto a broad avenue that she saw that what she had taken to be the dawn was fire.
She had reached the top of Iskeull. A few feet from where she was standing the avenue crumbled into cliff, and the cliff crashed back into the sea. But a hundred feet or so across the waves, connected to the mainland via a broad stone causeway, was a whole other mini-island. It was fronted by an unbroken line of stone buildings, with a huge glass-domed rotunda set in the centre like a jewel. Every window cut into the facade appeared to be ablaze, and behind the buildings a second wave of light blanched the grainy early-morning sky, as if a thousand bonfires had been set alight on the land beyond.
After the intimate darkness of the town, Alex was as shocked as if nocturnal Haggerston – street lamps, headlights, smouldering joint-ends and all – had followed her from London and transplanted itself wholesale onto a lump of Atlantic rock. So here at last was the islanders’ famed reserve. She had to admit that she was impressed. Their academic processes might be archaic, but these nepotistic Celts were obviously tirelessly committed to the conservation of their land.
She wondered what such vigilant night-time duties might involve. Burning heather – was that a thing? Studying bats? Harvesting . . . wild orchids? Dew? Feeling a surge of obstinacy sweep aside her lingering wooziness from the episode, Alex strode towards the bell tower that gave access to the causeway. Yes, the Director had asked her not to trespass, but she wasn’t about to go nicking eggs from nests or dropping gum. They probably had her pegged as a hopeless city slicker anyway, so if anyone caught her, she’d simply say she was lost. And for some reason she knew she had to see what the statue was looking at with such blank-eyed desire.
Unfortunately she hadn’t accounted for the presence of four big black-clad men, clustered at the open mouth of the bell tower in some sort of strategic huddle. With a jolt of surprise, she recognized one of them as Iain. It seemed that he hadn’t been joking about his job in security, and he was evidently leader of the pack. Alex could see the other eco-bouncers attending to his muttered speech with the same stagey active-listening expressions she recognized from many a feudal boardroom. Fortunately, they were all too busy being earnest and attentive to notice one small, sodden woman slink round the far side.
As she crept through the passageway, Alex passed the open doorway of what looked like an empty guardroom. Inside were a row of galoshes and a line of hooded waxed capes hanging from pegs. Before her conscience could object, she had ducked in and grabbed one of the capes, dragged the heavy folds over her shoulders and pulled up the hood. She’d put it back, for goodness’ sake, but now that the exhilaration of the walk was fading, she was starting to get cold. In any case, she figured that remaining anonymous for the duration of her so-very-short-and-harmless peek at the reserve was a good thing. It would prevent Iain from wasting unnecessary energy and resource on trying to throw her out.
Crossing the causeway was pleasantly scary. Alex allowed herself one thrilling glance at the waves embroidering the rocks a hundred feet beneath her feet, before fixing her eyes on the peninsula ahead. Already she could make out figures scurrying along the road in front of the line of buildings, milling in and out of the rotunda’s double doors. There were horses, too, hairy yellow prehistoric-looking things, trotting up and down. It was a veritable hive of activity, and she was sure it would not be hard for one stranger to blend in.
Alex followed the path off the causeway and strode straight towards the rotunda as if she had several very urgent and important things to do. Keeping her hood up, she climbed the steps, then came to an abrupt halt just inside the double doors.
It was some sort of vast reference room. The walls were lined from floor to dome with thousands of leather-bound folios. In the middle of the room was a second, circular tower of shelves – some kind of chamber, judging by the door set into the middle of it, which was encrusted with a spiralling mosaic made from fossils and minerals in various shades of grey and blue. In the doughnut of space between the outer and inner shelves were dozens of glass cabinets, containing colourful hand-inked tables, maps and diagrams. Between the cabinets sat circular stone desks, each one bathed in the soft yellow glow of an oil lamp. The moonlight, refracted through the rain-spattered dome, spangled a pattern over the flagstoned floor. At the far side of the room, a huge arch stood open to the night, letting in wafts of cool air.
At least a couple of hundred people were moving around the space, their voices and footsteps mingling with the drumming of the droplets overhead. The atmosphere was one of quiet efficiency. Some moved in and out of shadowy doorways set into the shelves. Some browsed the cabinets. Some studied at the desks. Others crawled up and down ladders to retrieve or replace folios. Most activity was centred around the arch at the back, where people passed in and out of the night in a steady stream. Beyond them, Alex could see the orange-yellow twinkle of hundreds of lights dancing across the reserve outside.
She stepped into the human traffic and headed straight for the arch, trying to look purposeful while sneaking glimpses of the islanders from under her hood. They covered a wide range of ages, and there was a gratifyingly even gender split – but they were all, to a man or girl, pale-skinned, dark-haired and grey-eyed, with their own version of the same heavy bone structure the professors shared. Catching snatches of their conversation, she recognized the same harsh and impenetrable Gaelish dialect that she had over-heard back in the town. Iskeullian, presumably.
As she wound her way round the central chamber, the door flew open and the sounds of a ruckus echoed out. Two men in black emerged, dragging another man in grey – who was yelling incomprehensibly – backwards through the door frame. As the others in the room froze, rubbernecking the trio with a gamut of expressions from disgust to delight, Alex took advantage of the distraction and increased her pace. She could just about make out a series of tall black shapes looming outside, in the semi-darkness between the fires. She was already halfway through the arch when someone pushed past her, knocking her roughly against the stone wall. Without thinking, she shoved back, looking up at them with a glare.
The shock hit her like a punch in the stomach. The person who had knocked into her was the angry man who had caused the ruckus. And the angry man was Not John Hanley.
He glanced back over his shoulder but, still caught up in his own drama, he took a moment to recognize her. Then his face contracted in confusion and slowly warped into a mime of disbelief, anger, and a trace element of something that looked strangely like fear.
Ordinarily, faced with such a look, Alex would have turned and legged it. On receiving such a look from a man she knew to be a drug-addled psychopath with a misguided personal grudge, legging it was the only sane response. Unfortunately, now she was out in the full glow of the firelight, Alex was also granted her first proper look at Iskeull’s nature reserve. And it wasn’t, after all, a haven for bats. Nor was it a plantation of wild orchids. It was a network of towers. Vast, ancient stone towers. Hundreds of them, spread across the peninsula in a hexagonal grid, lit by spluttering flares.
Her muscles stopped working.
Not John Hanley grabbed her arm. He pulled her back through the arch and across t
he rotunda, then through one of the doorways on the right-hand side of the wall. He had dragged her quite a way along a narrow, dim corridor before her brain, still trying to process what she had seen, caught up with her stumbling feet. He must have seen her prepare to yell, because he suddenly pulled open a door behind them and bundled her through. Alex yelled anyway, but her voice was immediately swallowed by thick stone walls. The room was small and high and lined, from floor to ceiling, with ranks of carved cubbyholes. In turn, each cubbyhole was crammed with what appeared to be hundreds of multicoloured index cards.
She skidded to the back of the room while Not John Hanley stood with his back against the door, eyeballing her wildly.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Alex spat.
He continued to stare at her in silence. She would never have made the mental leap between the grungy London smackhead and the genteel Iskeull hippies – yet now it all seemed blindingly obvious. Not just the Game of Thrones clothes and the accent, but the jutting cheekbones, the flinty eyes, the black, toilet-brush hair.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Is this an Opa! outpost? Some sort of souped-up research facility? Have you lured me out here with this elaborate cover to take some sort of twisted revenge? Because I meant what I said back in London. I’m very sorry if you guys didn’t make it, but I don’t see how you can possibly blame—’
‘Are you an alien?’ Not John Hanley burst out.
It was so ridiculous that Alex’s anger fizzled to a stop. ‘What?’
He raked a hand through his hair. ‘Artificial intelligence? Some kind of experiment?’
‘What the fuck are you on?’
But as Not John Hanley paced, she could see that, however angry he was, whatever he had been taking in London was no longer in his bloodstream. His skin was clear. His colour was high. His hands, which she was monitoring closely for potential threat, had no hint of a shake. It made him look even younger – not to mention stronger. She watched the muscles flex under his shirt as he tugged at his hair and tried not to think about how much harm they could cause.
‘Taran thinks you’re harmless,’ he said, scanning her from head to toe in that excoriating way she remembered so well. ‘With your questions and your smiles and your . . . your charm. But I know you’re stringing them along. It’s a front, isn’t it? A blind. I think you know exactly how strong you are. I think you know exactly what you’re doing.’ He shook his head, let out a groan. ‘Is that why you were sneaking onto the peninsula? Did you want to see the damage you’ve done?’
‘Look,’ Alex said slowly, trying to sound as calm as she could. He was just a boy, she told herself. A messed-up boy. ‘Whoever you are, whatever you think I’ve done, I can assure you, you’re making a big mistake. Now, please, I’d like you to move away from the door. Let’s walk out of here and talk it through like rational adults. Okay?’
‘Talk this through?’ He came right up to her and leaned forward until he was inches from her face. She could feel the heat radiating off him, see the top of another tattoo peeking out from between the undone buttons at the neck of his shirt. ‘You kill my father and you want to talk this through?’
‘Your father?’ Alex blinked. ‘What in Christ’s name are you—?’
‘Ah!’ He gave a horrible laugh, his breath hot on her cheek. ‘So this is religious? Some kind of God complex? You’ve found some clever way to manipulate your Story and now you’re on a mission to—’
‘I’m not on a mission to anything!’ Alex swallowed. ‘Please. Listen. I promise, on my life, I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You’re lying!’ He backed off and started to pace again. ‘Dorothy Moore, London. That’s what he said. Three words. Three names. And you’re the only one it could be. The others were dead ends; they searched for months. You’re the only one who tried to hide your identity. It has to be you.’
Pressing herself back against the cubbyholes, Alex felt a small, sharp object dig into her right bum-cheek.
‘You told me yourself you did it.’ He scrubbed his fist back and forth across his scalp. ‘The night of the seventeenth. You boasted about how you had “released your inner floodgate”. How you had “unleashed a new power in your Story”.’
Without taking her eyes off him, Alex slowly slid her right hand into her back pocket and closed her fingers around her father’s novelty memory stick.
‘Why?’ Not John Hanley groaned. ‘Why would anyone do this?’
‘Listen,’ Alex said soothingly. She pushed herself away from the wall, drew out the USB and rotated it inside her fist. ‘I’m sure this is all an honest misunderstanding. As I said, if we could just go back into the library and talk—’
It was the wrong thing to say.
‘So you do know about the Library!’ Not John Hanley barked, striding back up to her. He thrust his arms over her shoulders and into the cubbyholes, caging her in. ‘I knew it! I told them! I – GNUH!’
The cage released as he grabbed at the soft flesh at the base of his throat, into which Alex had stabbed half an inch of metal flash drive. Leaping sideways, she bolted for the door and managed to wrench it open just as she felt the tips of Not John Hanley’s fingers brush against her back. She crashed out into the corridor, slammed the door shut with her shoulder, then sprinted towards the rotunda. Plunging through the doorway, she skidded across the flagstones, ducked under someone’s arm, banged into someone else’s hip and hurtled out of the nearest arch.
Those towers. There weren’t just hundreds of them, but hundreds upon hundreds, each one at least sixty feet tall. Each one was uplit by a flaming torch, each one accessorized with a tethered horse. Alex’s thoughts leapt and blurred as she ran. What the Jesus fuck had she been sucked into? A secret nuclear armoury? A breeding colony of killer sodding bees?
The paths that snaked between the towers were dark. Alex veered onto the nearest, sprinting as fast as she could, her trainers sliding on the waterlogged ground. She heard a shout behind her and somehow doubled her pace, careering around and between the soaring walls, her breath ragged and her chest burning with a stitch.
Another shout. The pound of footsteps: near, too near. She cast around desperately for somewhere to hide. And it was then, threading through the panic, that she felt it. It was a pull, a sort of inner tug – irresistible, cell-deep – calling to her from inside the nearest tower. It was coming, she realized, from a crescent-shaped black gap where the earth didn’t-quite-meet the base of the wall. You know me, it said. You know what I am. Come here, Dorothy. Come home.
Two yells rang out, one answering the other. Nearby. Alex swerved over to the tower and, flinging herself onto the sandy mud in front of the gap, found herself staring into a chute of polished stone. She looked back, suddenly scared, but then the pull lassoed her heart again and whispered its siren song. You know what I am, Dorothy. Come home.
Closing her eyes, Alex plunged head-first into the opening. Thrusting her feet against the earth, she slithered down into the darkness with startling speed. After only a few seconds her momentum slowed, as the smooth slope levelled out. When she pushed forward, she felt the chute begin to rise up again and sensed a faint, warm breeze on her hands. She wriggled forward and felt the breeze strengthen, the promise of an exit inches away. She stretched up, and her fingers found and then closed around a rounded stone lip. Heart pounding against the wall of the chute, she hauled herself up and over the edge. Elbows. Belly. One knee. Both.
Collapsing, exhausted, onto the earthen floor of the tower, she found herself washed in a glorious swell of calm. Everything was fine. Everything was possible. Everything and everyone was here. Breathing in wave after wave of warm, sweet ease, Alex opened her eyes. Inches from her nose, there was a soft grey boot. She stared at it for a moment, then rolled sideways onto her back. Above the grey boot was a length of grey-trousered leg. Above the leg was the half-naked torso of a woman. A heavily tattooed woman, who appeared to be pulling a rainbow out of a galaxy of stars.
9
There were by now at least a dozen people assembled around the table at the other end of the room. Despite the indecipherable dialect and the drum of the rain on the glass dome above, it was clear they were having a furious argument.
‘Hadron Colliders?’ Alex called from the high-backed wicker chair that Iain had unceremoniously deposited her in. They ignored her. ‘Big agra? A next-gen GM nursery? Oil?’ But what she had seen had looked more like circuitry, perhaps even some sort of crazy new biochemical VR. Alex paused. ‘Oh, shit,’ she said slowly. ‘I know exactly what’s going on. You’re not Opa! at all, are you? You’re Google.’
There was yet another knock. The door opened and the harassed face of the secretary appeared in the gap. The secretary said something apologetic to MacBrian, and MacBrian, who had two red patches high on her white cheeks, wearily sculled her hand. The secretary withdrew, and yet another monochrome-faced, silver-brooched islander strode into the room. By now, Alex knew the score. The newcomer cast around; saw her; subjected her to a long, wary and increasingly incredulous stare. Then he turned and made some impassioned comment to the group, causing a further eruption to break out.
‘Hey!’ Alex called. ‘Hey!’
She wasn’t entirely clear on the sequence of events that had just occurred. She’d lain on the floor of the tower, staring up for a few shocked seconds at the woman who was manipulating that spectacular airborne mass of coloured sparks. Then a second woman had run at her from behind and pinned her down. Moments later Iain had appeared through the chute and dragged Alex back under and out. A gang of black-clad men was waiting for them outside, watching her emerge as if she were the victim of a particularly horrific car crash. The strange peace she had felt inside the tower had evaporated instantly. Steely fingers digging into flesh that Not John Hanley had bruised only minutes earlier, Iain had then all but carried her back the way she had come. Back between the towers, back under the arches, back into the rotunda – their glowering posse following their every step. As they crossed the flagstones to the chamber at the centre of the room, all the employees, or students, or whatever they were, had stopped whatever it was they were doing and gawped at Alex as if a wild animal had just been led into their midst.