by Molly Flatt
Her toes moved when she asked them to: flexed, pointed, flexed. She drew her arms out from under the covers and twisted her wrists, watching the pale hairs catch the light. She saw her palms glow red in the sun; turned them over and examined the minute crosshatching and fanned bones. Her nails were pink, and she imagined someone scrubbing away whatever must have been under them. She touched her cheek. There was a dressing on it, cottony padding and tape.
She felt the ghost of Taran’s breath on her skin, saw the glint of brown glass.
She kicked the blanket aside and sat up. On the bedside table there was a glass of water and a small cardboard packet: Health Essentials Paracetamol Caplets 500mg. She lifted the glass and took some of the cold, sweet water into her mouth. Swilled it around, held it until it had soaked into her gums. Swallowed. Drank the rest. Cleared her throat.
‘Alex,’ she said. It worked. ‘Alex,’ she said, louder. ‘I’m okay. I’m here.’
Wait. Was that . . . ? She was sure, suddenly, that she had heard the sound of children whispering, a giggle. But when she listened now, all she could hear was the rush of her own blood, mingling with the sound of the rain.
The rug was soft under her toes. When she tipped her weight forward over her ankles, they held. Stiffly, joints popping, she straightened her knees. Yup. She could stand. She bent her left knee, shuffled her foot forward, let her weight sink down, did the same thing with the right. Yup. She could walk, too. She made a circuit of the room, working out the kinks.
Then she sat back on the bed and covered her face in her hands.
She cried and cried and cried and cried until she couldn’t cry any more. Then she sat in a daze, trying to piece it all together, until she heard a knock. She didn’t speak, but the door opened anyway.
‘Miss Moore? I was told—’
‘Are my family safe?’
MacBrian stopped with her hand on the latch. ‘Your family?’
Alex stood up. ‘If Iain MacHoras has hurt so much as a hair on their heads—’
‘Iain?’
‘I saw him at the airport. Sent to blow my brains out. By you.’
MacBrian came in and pushed the door closed. Under the greying crop, her brow was gathered into a whorl. ‘I sent Iain to bring you back here, for your own safety.’
‘And was the gun for my own safety, too?’
‘Gun? Iain doesn’t carry a gun. There are no guns on Iskeull. The only person who has a gun – had a gun – was Dughlas MacFionn. And he bought that in Kirkwall using Taran’s credit card.’ She took a step forward. ‘Listen, before we get into—’
‘No.’ Alex reached her in three wild strides. ‘You listen to me. Has. Anyone. Touched. My. Parents? Harry? Lenni? Mae?’ Her voice broke. ‘Bo?’
‘Your family are fine, Miss Moore. Absolutely fine. By the time Iain landed in Edinburgh, you and Finn had already—’
‘Finn!’ CRACK. Thump-thump-thump. ‘Finn. Finn – is he—?’
‘Finn’s fine. He’s got a nasty cut, but the doctors say there’s no lasting damage done. Physically, that is. His state of mind is – well, you can imagine.’
Thank the Library. God? Whatever. Alex felt the beginnings of relief sink through her like a shot of gin. ‘So if Iain didn’t have a gun, what was in the violin case?’
MacBrian frowned. ‘The—?’
‘At the airport. Iain was carrying a violin case.’
‘Well . . .’ MacBrian paused. ‘I imagine it would have been a violin.’
‘A violin.’
‘A fiddle. For the homesickness. One of the only ways to delay its progress is to play native music while you’re Outside.’
It sounded ridiculous. She had no reason to trust her. She had no reason to trust any of them. But as Alex glared at MacBrian, and MacBrian looked steadily back, the hormonal shot of gin became a double. Alex took a wobbly step back. ‘And you’re honestly giving me your word that you didn’t order me to be killed?’
‘Of course not! Why on earth—?’ MacBrian stopped and pinched her temples. By the time she’d dropped her hand, the cold-blooded tyrant that Alex had been constructing in her mind over the past few days had become a tired middle-aged manager, squinting in the morning light. ‘I’m not a monster, Miss Moore,’ MacBrian said wearily. ‘I’m just a woman. An ordinary woman, I admit; an unglamorous and un-legendary woman. Neither the best Reader of her generation nor even of her class. But a reasonably skilled, intelligent, hard-working woman, nonetheless. One who is trying her best to do the right thing under very difficult circumstances. Why on earth would you think that I would kill anyone?’
Alex felt the heat rise through her cheeks. ‘Finn,’ she said. ‘He told me that you’d panicked. He said you’d asked the Board to suspend the Covenant, so that I – so that the problem of my Story could be solved.’
A shade of hurt crossed MacBrian’s face, then was briskly dismissed. ‘Well, he’s certainly right that things are in a mess. It would have helped if his beloved father had done a little more of his actual job, practised a little more actual leadership in between the secret Reading sessions and the unethical experiments. But, still, to believe I could commit murder—’
‘Finn told me,’ Alex said slowly, ‘that he heard it from Taran.’
‘Ah. I see.’ MacBrian pinched her temples again. ‘Another piece of the puzzle we shall have to fit in. I am beginning to suspect that Taran has secretly been trying to undermine my authority for months.’
‘But why? I still don’t understand what’s happening. What happened. With me, and Taran, and Finn’s dad.’
‘Nor do we. Not everything. We’re still unclear on how the responsibility for this falls out between the two of them. We’ve been trying to piece it together from what Dughlas has told us, and Taran . . .’ She sighed. ‘Well, Taran is refusing to cooperate until we provide a guarantee that he will be allowed to keep working on what he calls his project, which is of course out of the question. Finn is on his way to the guardhouse now to try and get him to talk.’
‘Hang on.’ Alex’s head was spinning. ‘Dughlas?’
‘Yes. Dughlas is back. It appears that he was the one who attacked you in London last week, at Taran’s behest. And he was the one who followed you to the restaurant, too. He was arrested there and detained for several days, and he very nearly ended up irrevocably damaging his Story. He only just made it back to Kirkwall last Wednesday, at which point he threw himself on our mercy and confessed. That’s why I was trying to get hold of you with such urgency. We were concerned that Taran might have sent someone else to finish the job. When you didn’t reply, I sent Iain to escort you back here. But by that time, Finn had taken the matter into his own hands. You’d been spotted together in Kirkwall by the time Iain landed in Edinburgh. So I called Iain on the mobile telephone and he flew straight back.’
‘Wait – what? You’ve known all this for days? You knew I was here?’
‘We’ve been watching you ever since you left The Reel. We couldn’t follow you on the boat, of course, and we knew that part of the journey might be dangerous. But Lucas Mac-Tomas is an excellent sailor, so we took a calculated risk to let you proceed. We assumed that Finn would take you back to his mother’s, so we picked up the trail again there. We’ve been following you ever since.’
Alex thought back to the surprising success of Finn’s riot at the causeway, her suspiciously smooth journey to the tomb, the oblivious index, the deserted avenue. Not so lucky, then. Not so fated. Not such a brilliant pair of spies after all. ‘You let me go down there again?’
‘Frankly, we were delighted. We couldn’t understand how Finn had persuaded you to give it another try.’ MacBrian spread her hands. ‘I knew you didn’t trust me, Miss Moore. By that point we had Dughlas’s testimony, but we still didn’t know exactly what Taran and Egan had done. We couldn’t simply accept the word of a deeply troubled young man against a professor and the most admired Director in recent history, without further proof. We had no idea what
you and Finn were up to, but by then we were hoping that whatever you had planned might, well, help flush out the truth.’
Alex pondered this for a moment. ‘So you knew we were in Taran’s house?’
MacBrian nodded. ‘I followed Finn there with a team of Iain’s men and made a cursory search, for appearances’ sake. Then we waited nearby until you arrived – closely trailed by Iain, who made sure that nobody interfered with your progress. We broke in through the back while you were at the front door.’
‘You were there when Taran attacked Finn, then?’
‘We were just outside the room.’
‘And you didn’t think,’ Alex said, slowly, ‘that was a good time to intervene?’
MacBrian hesitated. ‘We thought Taran might . . . divulge all. Once you and he were alone. Once he had nothing to lose.’
‘What, like some bloody James Bond villain? And what if I hadn’t made it out of the tomb, what with the addiction and the radiation and all?’ Alex paused. ‘Oooh. Oh, but that would’ve still been a win, wouldn’t it? You might not have got the full truth about Taran, but at least my Story would have been out of the way.’
‘It was not an ideal situation by any means. Personally, I was not comfortable about it at all. But being the Director – serving the majority – involves making complex decisions. Sometimes at the expense of my own feelings. I should imagine you have discovered the same in your own career.’
Alex stared at her for a moment, then walked back to the bed and slumped down on the edge. ‘So did I kill him or not? Egan?’
MacBrian followed her over. To Alex’s surprise, she sat beside her on the bed. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘As I said, we’re still trying to assemble all the facts.’ MacBrian paused. ‘The one thing we can now say is that you are, without doubt, not the slightest bit to blame.’
Alex picked up the fringe of the blanket and rolled it between her fingers. ‘Whatever it was they did to me,’ she said, twisting the wool until it was as thin and sharp as wire, ‘am I more fucked than you thought I was before, or less?’
‘We don’t know,’ MacBrian said. ‘Not yet. We have scholars working on some theories. However, until Taran decides to tell us exactly what happened, they’re no more than that.’
Alex dropped the blanket. She let out a long, shuddering breath. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that I would really quite like a bath.’
‘Of course.’ MacBrian stood up, straightening her tunic. ‘I’ve washed your clothes. And you should eat. Also the doctor will want to see you. I’ll have everything prepared.’
‘Where are we, anyway?’
‘In town. In my house. I hope my children didn’t disturb you. I did ask them to keep their voices down, but trying to keep them under control makes dealing with the Council seem easy.’
‘You’ve got kids?’ Alex realized that she had imagined MacBrian as a confirmed spinster, working all hours from her soulless office amongst boxes she hadn’t had time to unpack.
‘Three girls,’ MacBrian said, with the first smile Alex had seen from her. It transformed her face. ‘And a husband who can cook. There are hot scones downstairs.’ She reached for the doorknob, then paused and turned. ‘Miss Moore. Before I go—’
The rest of her sentence was obliterated by the single deep boom of the bell. As they waited for the shockwaves to spread and dissolve, something stirred in the back of Alex’s mind. Bells. Bells?
‘As I was saying,’ MacBrian said.
What was the significance of bells?
‘I wanted to assure you, when I first came in: whatever it turns out that those men have done, however they’ve done it, I – we – the Council, the Board, the entire worldwide Readership – will do everything in our power to heal your Story and get you home.’
What had she forgotten? What was she supposed to do?
‘Of course I can’t promise that we can undo all the harm that has been done. I wish we could. But I do promise that we will try.’
‘What day is it?’ Alex asked.
‘Wednesday,’ MacBrian said, opening the door. ‘Ten in the morning on Wednesday. You’ve been asleep for almost twenty-four hours.’ She stepped out. ‘Dr MacDiarmid will be along soon.’
Wednesday 5 August, 10.00 hours. No torture. No terror. No sobbing hostages or gory scenes. Instead her father, cranky with worry, perched on the sofa in her abandoned living-room-diner, silently polishing his uncomfortable shoes. Her mother, unboxing a hat in the bedroom, keeping up a bright stream of conversation and plying them all with tea. Mae, leaning against the tiny kitchen counter, trying to keep Bo quiet with pirated YouTube cartoons while she fired off text after email after call. And, across London in his own neat flat, Harry. Dear, good Harry. Standing in his new dove-grey suit from Charles Tyrwhitt with his handsome jaw clenched, trying to ignore the whispers of his stiffly immaculate parents while he ironed his lilac pocket square.
24
It might have been a bit of belly-button fluff, except for the fact that it was floating in the centre of a clear plastic cylinder. A cylinder that had once, according to the label, held twenty Ryman’s Assorted Ballpens.
‘One of Iain’s men found it in his living room,’ MacBrian said. She was hovering in front of the table, as if Alex’s root Memory might suddenly do something she needed to triage. ‘It was in a silver box on the mantelpiece. Unlocked.’
Alex watched the scrap of fossilized consciousness spin in the pale, watery light streaming down from the dome. Had Taran and Egan spent their evenings sitting side-by-side on the broken-down sofa, clinking tumblers of whisky, watching her Memory glitter through the latticework? Had it given them a thrill, having their smoking gun on such blatant display?
More importantly, what crucial piece of her past was spun into that silver crumb?
‘We didn’t even know it was possible.’ MacBrian, looking queasy, pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘A real live Memory, outside its Story. Outside the Library. I never could quite bring myself to believe in Story-surging, but Editing? Dear Library. Editing. And Taran’s always been a little . . . unpredictable, but the irreproachable Egan? Two elected Council members, in cahoots to commandeer the Library? How exactly I’m going to break this to the Board, I have no . . .’
There was a knock and the secretary popped her head round the door. Alex thought: Finn? He was still with Taran at the guardhouse, had been for more than two hours. But then Iain entered MacBrian’s office, with an unfamiliar figure in tow.
‘Miss Moore,’ MacBrian said, ‘this is Dughlas MacFionn.’
The boy who had attacked Alex on De Beauvoir Road and got himself arrested outside L’Antiga Capella was just that, a boy. He was sixteen at most, tall but still gangling, his features yet to settle into definite form behind a pointillist varnish of acne. Two hairy slices of flesh showed between the bottom of his brown trousers and the top of his boots, and his coarse mulch-coloured jumper stretched tight across his shoulders. No Reader’s uniform now, no shotgun. Yet Alex could still feel his weight on top of her, smell his unwashed teenage flesh, hear the huff of his breath. She was disproportionately glad, suddenly, that she had had a long bath and was wearing her own clothes. She drew back her shoulders, shook out her freshly washed fringe and glared.
See? Boy? Outsider. Outsider who refuses to die.
Indestructible bitch of an Outsider, who left her devoted fiancé stranded at the registry table, a little over two hours ago.
Where, Alex wondered, would Harry be now? Already in the car back to St Albans, listening to Elaine enumerate the ways in which ‘that girl’ had never been good enough for him anyway? Or waiting in a side room at Shoreditch Town Hall, still hoping for her to call from Heathrow with gushing apologies?
Iain grunted something and prodded Dughlas between his shoulder blades. The boy lurched forward and crashed into the seat opposite Alex and MacBrian.
‘English,’ Iain said, sitti
ng beside him.
The top of Dughlas’s head, dandruff-flecked black, dipped.
‘Dughlas,’ MacBrian said. ‘You already know Dorothy Moore.’
A flash of grey eyes. A mutter, cracked in the middle. Iain growled a few words and Dughlas raised his head, shades of pink washing across his pimples like an LED light display. Looking somewhere beyond Alex’s left ear, he seemed about to speak when his gaze caught on the Ryman’s pot. He froze, his mouth half-open. His expression flipped from surly defensiveness to the fascinated horror of a child encountering a particularly graphic piece of roadkill. He turned to Iain, rumbling something in subterranean Iskeullian.
‘This, Dughlas,’ MacBrian said, ‘is what your so-called friends did to Dorothy Moore.’
Dughlas rumbled again.
‘English,’ Iain said.
Dughlas’s Adam’s apple ballcocked up and down his neck. ‘I never knew about that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t. I never knew that was even possible.’
‘Yes, well, there it is.’ MacBrian poured water into a tumbler and pushed it across the table. Dughlas drained it in one. ‘Now try and concentrate, Dughlas. I want you to tell Miss Moore your version of events.’ She opened her notebook. ‘Start right at the beginning, with when you met Freya.’
Dughlas wrenched his gaze from the Memory to Alex’s face, veered onto her breasts, then settled for a point somewhere on her chin. He mumbled something.
‘Louder,’ Iain said.
‘I found her,’ Dughlas mumbled a little louder. ‘In the market, one day. It was cold.’ He paused. The pink dialled up to crimson. ‘She wasn’t wearing enough clothes. People were staring. Whispering. People were always whispering about her.’ He looked up, suddenly fierce. ‘She’s too good for them all.’
‘Go on, Dughlas,’ MacBrian said.
Dughlas returned his gaze to Alex’s chin. ‘I was the only one Freya would let help her. Other people tried, but she shouted and pushed them away. She liked me, though. She took my arm. I gave her my cloak and walked her back to her house. The house where she lived with her brother, Professor MacGill.’ He swallowed. ‘The Professor wasn’t there, but he found out. Later that day he pulled me out of the archives and told me not to interfere. He was angry. But when I’d left her, Freya had asked if I would come and see her again. So I wrote a letter to her explaining why I couldn’t and put it under the door when the Professor was at work. And then Freya sent me a letter back. And then I wrote back some more.’