by Molly Flatt
Both men turned to stare at her. She put the bottle on the floor. ‘The thing inside my Story – it’s not a mutation,’ she croaked. ‘It’s not a power. Or a weapon. It’s a hole.’
‘A what?’ Finn said.
‘It’s a hole.’
Finn looked at Taran, who opened his mouth, but no words came out. Finn flung himself onto the sofa beside Alex. ‘Alex? What do you mean?’
She’d been trying to work out what to say during the long journey back up through the tomb, through the Library and to the house. But now that she was sitting inches from his face, all her carefully constructed sentences shattered into monosyllables. ‘It was the void.’
‘The void?’
‘It’s been there from the start, from the night of the seventeenth, waiting for me in my episodes. I thought it was just fear, the edge of panic, the start of unconsciousness. But it wasn’t unconsciousness. It was anti-consciousness.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I kept trying, like we agreed. I Read that Storyline again and again. And every time I Read it, I could feel the thing – what we thought was this mutated root Memory – at its core. And every time I got close, it would tumble me down into the void. I tried my best to fight it, so that I could stay conscious, so I could grab the root Memory and get it under my control. But in the end, after I had Read the Storyline maybe eleven, twelve times, I was so knackered I couldn’t fight any more. I gave in, Finn. I finally let go, just like everyone’s been telling me to. For the first time since the night of the seventeenth, I didn’t resist the void. I opened my eyes and jumped right in. And that’s when I saw it, in the split second before the Storyline fell apart. That’s when I saw the hole.’
Taran was frowning down at her, shaking his head. ‘Breaking a Reading before the Storyline is finished does bad things to the system. Very bad. No wonder you’re in such a state.’ He looked at Finn. ‘She needs drugs. Do you think you could get away unnoticed, reach Cait?’
‘No.’ Alex grabbed Finn’s arm. ‘Listen. You have to believe me. I’m telling you, I know what I saw.’
‘Alex,’ Finn said, glancing at Taran, ‘what you’re telling us doesn’t make sense. Stories are made of pure consciousness. They don’t have holes.’
‘Well, mine does. I saw it. It was the size of a Memory, but it wasn’t silver, or shimmery-black like the calm. It wasn’t any colour at all, not light, not dark. It was nothing, total nothingness, and it was sort of . . . tattered round the edge.’ She gave Finn’s arm a shake. ‘You said that no-one could mistake their own Story and, believe me, I knew exactly what this was. It isn’t some magic mutant power. It’s the opposite. It’s a wound.’
Taran grunted, as if he had been punched. Finn appeared to have stopped breathing.
‘Finn.’ Alex squeezed his elbow as if she could tourniquet the pain of her words. ‘I’m so sorry that I have to tell you this. After everything I’ve done to you so far. But there’s no doubt in my mind what happened. Your father ripped out my root Memory.’
Finn’s face turned white, then red.
‘Alex,’ Taran said. ‘This is madness. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.’
Alex looked up at him. ‘I wish I could think of some other explanation. But you all keep telling me how talented Egan was. The best Reader for generations. This fearless prodigy. A man who didn’t care what others thought. A man who thought anything was possible.’
She looked back at Finn, who still hadn’t moved. ‘It all adds up now. It all makes sense. Your father refusing to stop Reading, concealing it from the Council. The changes in his mood. He was trying something new, wasn’t he? Experimenting. You told me how passionate he was about the impact that being well-Read could have on people’s lives. So what if he found a way to actually remove a root Memory? That would shatter even the most stubborn Storyline, wouldn’t it? Force its owner to change? And wouldn’t it give Readers so much more control than they have right now, when people can simply feint, or re-form their Storylines a few days later? Wouldn’t it mean that you guys – all of you, around the world – would finally be able to keep the Library working the way it should?’
She was getting through to Taran. She knew she was. He was agitated, rubbing furiously at the back of his neck, refusing to meet her eye. She turned back to Finn, desperate now for him to react, even if it was to punch her in the face.
‘Don’t you see?’ she pleaded. ‘Your dad managed it, Finn. He did what no other Reader had ever managed to do – what no other Reader had ever even thought to do. And it worked, in a way. It forced me to change, so quickly and thoroughly that it felt like a miracle. Because it was a miracle. It had nothing to do with me. He ripped out the eye of my storm.’
Finn was still as stiff as a corpse. Taran was pacing, looking anguished. Alex slumped back against the sofa and stared at the cracks cross-hatched across the ceiling. She was so very tired.
‘It backfired, though, didn’t it?’ she ploughed on, determined to get it all out while she still could. ‘My Storyline didn’t just fall apart, once the root Memory had gone. I understand it now, you see. Poor thing. It’s like it remembers that something should be there, like it’s still trying to hold onto the pattern. But without that first, crucial Memory, it doesn’t make sense. Nor do any of my other Storylines. That Memory must have been a part of all of them. Without it, I don’t make sense.’
One of the cracks looked like a long, thin finger, reaching out from the corner, preparing to rip the ceiling apart.
‘Sure, once it was gone, I could finally get free of whatever crap was holding me back,’ she murmured. ‘But that crap made me who I was. Now I’m too free. Free-floating. Free-falling. Constantly trying to stitch myself together from other people’s ideas and words. Improvising myself, moment to moment, which sounds kind of Zen, but isn’t really Zen at all. It’s absolutely bloody exhausting.’
The sofa creaked. Alex looked over to see that Finn had stood up. One of his hands was buried in his hair. The other was clenching and unclenching by his side. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘I know!’ Alex let out a hysterical laugh. Finn’s face darkened from Eudo scarlet to Iskeull indigo. ‘I’m so sorry, Finn. I’m so, so sorry. But you’re the one who wanted me to go back down there. You’re the one who told me I need to start trusting my instincts. And my instincts are in absolutely no doubt about what I saw. An ex-Memory. A grave. And, God, I wish I hadn’t seen it, because now I finally understand how utterly fucked I really am. And I wish – I really do wish – that it wasn’t your father who had done it. But who the hell else could it have been?’
CRACK. A shard of glass ripped across Alex’s cheek. A spray of whisky hit her face. Finn made a sound as if he was going to be sick. His complexion switched back from purple to bone-white. A single rivulet of amber liquid rolled from his hairline into his eye. Then he crumpled to the floor to reveal Taran, holding a broken bottle, watching him fall.
23
They remained like that for several seconds – Alex on the sofa, Taran in front of her with the bottle, Finn on the floor between them. It was as though, if no-one moved, they might be able to pretend that it wasn’t happening. Then Alex tried to launch herself out of the sofa in a desperate leap for the door. But her ankles wouldn’t take her weight. The back of her knees buckled, and she flumped back onto the broken springs. She turned and grabbed the back of the sofa. Hooked one foot over the top. Tried to climb over. Felt her elbows buckle. Crashed back down.
‘Stop,’ Taran said, still looking at Finn. ‘You don’t have the strength. And there’s nowhere to go.’
He was right. Already, from her one pathetic fumble, her ears were ringing and her vision was perforated with flashing lights. Alex hauled herself back to sitting, her heart making strange arrhythmic leaps. Her cheek was stinging and she could feel liquid rolling down her skin, although she wasn’t sure whether it was alcohol or blood. Beneath her, his hai
r shining purple in the firelight and his prone body giving off an overpowering stench of acrid malt, Finn still hadn’t moved.
ABC, her mother’s voice said. That’s the first thing you need to remember in an emergency, darling. Airway, breathing, circulation. ABC.
They looked up at the same time. ‘Taran,’ Alex said. She had been going for calm and rational, but her voice came out too high and she had to fight down a wave of panic that threatened to black her out. ‘What are you doing?’
Taran sighed. ‘I am trying to do what’s best for us all.’
‘Did MacBrian put you up to this?’
He snorted. ‘Sorcha? Sorcha’s nothing but an overblown secretary. I told you, Alex, you and I, we’re pioneers.’
‘I don’t want to be a pioneer,’ Alex croaked. ‘I want to be alive.’
‘But you have been, haven’t you?’ Taran swept his hand through the air, taking the half-bottle with it, in a glinting arc. ‘Truly alive, for the first time in twenty years? Oh, it didn’t quite work, as you said. There are issues to iron out. But while it did – ppppfffff.’ He gave his hiccupy-gasp laugh. ‘It’s been a testament to what we might achieve.’
He looked back down at Finn, who was leaking blood from a clotted nest of hair just above his ear. Grasping the opportunity, Alex tried to propel herself forward again. But her legs ignored her, her arms crumpled like paper and she collapsed back onto the cushions with a cry. Taran didn’t even bother to look up. She closed her eyes and tried to summon some calm, but her chest was a birdcage: brittle, fluttering, leaking breath.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Finn needs help. Let me get him out of here.’
‘What a waste.’ Taran shook his head. ‘Not a patch on his father, of course, but still. What a waste.’ He levered the heel of his boot beneath Finn’s shoulders and rolled the boy to one side – thump-thump-thump – his head bouncing on the flagstones as he turned.
‘Taran—’ Alex pleaded.
Taran looked up at her. ‘I’m sorry, Alex. I really am. This has all been as difficult for me as it has for you. I didn’t think for a moment that you’d come within a thousand miles of this place again, once they let you go. But what’s done is done. And your sacrifice will allow me to keep working. It will buy me time. This may not have turned out quite the way I hoped, but then this isn’t about us. It’s about the Library. It’s about what’s right.’ He stepped forward, readjusting his grip on the half-bottle’s base.
Alex’s bowels tried to empty their non-existent contents while her stomach heaved the whisky back out of her mouth. She swiped at the sticky mess with her sleeve. ‘Please.’
‘Be brave, my pioneer,’ he said, bending over her. ‘We’ll get it over quickly now, you and me.’
With a final, mammoth effort, Alex jerked her knee up and into Taran’s balls. He grunted and reeled back, but now she found that she didn’t even have the strength left to slither past him onto the floor. Turning back, pink-faced, Taran grabbed her wrists. He transferred them both into one big hand and dragged her back up.
‘Such an old Storyline,’ he said, leaning close to her face, his voice tight with pain. ‘Girls and their fathers. Perhaps the oldest Storyline of all. But then the oldest ones are always the most powerful, aren’t they?’ He touched the jagged glass to her throat. ‘Now close your eyes.’
A shout. A jerk. A rumble. A rush of air. An almighty crash. Alex’s face smashed into the sofa, her mouth full of flaking hide and dust. A hell-beast was crouching over her, its musky bulk pinning her down, its hot pant in her ear. No. No. She had been here before. She wriggled, screamed, choked. Beyond her head, more shouts, bangs, a grunt, another crash. Beyond her feet, a terrible, low, animal wail.
Then the weight lifted just enough to allow her to flip onto her back and she found herself staring up into the face of Iain MacHoras. He grazed her neck with a rough-padded thumb, then looked up beyond her head. Alex craned her head back to follow his gaze and saw, upside-down, Taran crouched on the ground. He was swarming with black-clad guards, with his bound hands wrenched high above his back and thick strings of blood spinning from his mouth.
Iain barked something in Iskeullian and the men dragged Taran to his feet. Another familiar voice shouted an instruction from the other end of the room. Iain twisted off the sofa in one sideways leap and Alex saw, from over her toes, MacBrian, standing in the doorway. She was restraining the source of the horrible wail: a tall, barefoot woman in a stained white nightdress with a wild storm-cloud of hair.
Iain directed one of the guards to help MacBrian, then knelt beside Finn.
ABC.
Alex tried to speak. She couldn’t speak.
ABC.
Shit!
ABC ABC shit shit shit. She couldn’t sit up and suddenly, shit, oh God, oh shit, she couldn’t see.
ABC ABC ABC ABC ABXYZXHGYUTOPSHJEIYX
A grenade of panic exploded in Alex’s chest.
Bang.
Lamplight, dim. Weight on her legs: a blanket. A silhouette in the doorway, facing out. Still in her clothes, stiff with mud and sweat. The sheets beneath her smelling of unwashed skin and alcohol. Splintered shutters, bolted shut, peeling with paint. And, glinting in the shadows all around her, hundreds of pale, sculptural, shining things, bristling with blades and spikes and tubes and curves.
Tech components? Lab equipment? Medical – oh God – medical instruments?
But then her eyes adjusted and she realized what she was looking at: a flock of model aircraft. They were all shapes and sizes, perched on every available shelf, table, crate and chair. Chunky 747s, elegant gliders, giant Space Shuttles, spindly wooden biplanes. A plastic Action Man helicopter. A metal replica of Concorde. A Lego Starship Enterprise. In the corners, shadowy stacks of magazines. On top of a chest of drawers, between a khaki fighter plane and a white-and-orange EasyJet, a brown glass bottle and a silver-backed hairbrush.
‘Dorothy Moore?’
She tried to scream. She rolled her eyes to the side of the bed and saw Freya MacGill sitting on a wicker chair, arms crossed over her chest.
‘They’re fetching the doctor,’ said Freya. Her voice was slurred, her eyes yellow-tinged. She had covered the white nightdress with a knitted jumper, but Alex could feel her shivering where her bare knees pushed against the bed.
Am I going to die? Alex tried to say.
‘I’m sorry,’ Freya said thickly. ‘I knew something was wrong, but—’ She shook her head. ‘Please, don’t blame him. It’s me.’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I’m not right. I think, when Taran let me have a drink, he – when Finn arrived – I think he put something in the—’
Is Finn dead? Alex pleaded with her eyes. Finn. Is Finn okay? But Freya had turned to look at her collection of planes.
‘Egan used to bring them for me,’ she said, vaguely. ‘He’d order them to be sent to Kirkwall and every time he went on leave, he’d bring one back. It made my brother angry, but Egan understood. He liked those sort of things, too. Outside things. Things that would help you remember that there’s a world out there where people can just – go, wherever, whenever they want.’ She shook her head again. ‘I know Taran gets carried away with things, but I never thought he’d actually hurt someone. And not Egan, surely, never Egan . . .
Mum? I need you, Mum. I need you. Dad?
Freya turned back to Alex. ‘I promise, Taran never confided in me, about what they were trying to do with the Stories. About what they did to you. You have to believe me, I would never have let him—’ She paused, squeezed her elbows. ‘He used to tell me everything, before. He was always shut away in his room with his books, but I didn’t mind. I was just happy to be with him. He was always so excited about one idea or another, tripping over himself, spilling over with thoughts. Our father didn’t understand. Our father used to call him a chneònachat. A – a – what’s the English? A misfit. A geek.’
Girls and their fathers.
‘Egan
didn’t understand him, either.’ She sniffed, tossing back the heavy mass of her hair. ‘Not really. He was fascinated by Taran, loved to listen to him talk, but he never took him seriously. He once told me he thought that Taran was mad, brilliant but mad. But then I suppose, if what they’re saying is true, Taran must have finally convinced Egan to test out one of his theories. To take him seriously.’
Girls and their fathers?
‘I wish he had told me. Maybe I could have helped in some way, reminded him that Stories aren’t . . . He sometimes seems to forget that they’re people, not things. But then when I – after I . . . Tom,’ Freya leaned forward, her eyes suddenly lit by the same bright fervour as her twin. ‘Tom. Tom Rendall. That was his name. No-one wants me to say it, but I won’t forget him, I won’t be ashamed. His name was TOM.’ Then she shrank back into herself, shivering again. ‘After Tom, Taran didn’t talk to me like he used to. He didn’t understand why I’d done what I’d done. I think being around me made him sad. And angry. He was so angry, all the time.’
What the hell had Taran meant by that? What was the Memory he had stolen from her? What was the meaning of her wounded Storyline?
‘Do you understand what it means to love someone, Dorothy Moore? To love them in a way that has nothing to do with books and ideas? To love them in a way that would make you do something stupid, something quite mad . . .’
But when Alex tried to think, tried to understand, her head became as heavy as stone and her chest sparkled like stars; and the void, oh, the void, the bottomless void—
Light. Bright morning light, spangled across whitewashed stone. A linen shift, her body naked, dry, clean. Cool sheets. A red-and-yellow patterned woollen blanket. A circle of warped, bubbled glass, and against it the interminable drum and hiss of the rain.
She turned her head and felt the tiny spines of feathers prick through the pillow. Bedside table. Wardrobe. Stand with blue bowl and ewer. Shelves crowded with books and homespun knick-knacks, battered desk, green-cushioned stool, sheepskin rug. She felt sore and drowsy, as if she had been sleeping for a very long time.