When everyone was secure, Jessica-Shgshthx half collapsed onto the nearest bank of salt, resting her arms on her knees and hanging her head. Heaving great breaths rocked her entire torso.
“Why are you doing this?!” asked Adam, struggling against the crystals that held his limbs.
“She already asked that,” panted Jessica-Shgshthx, jerking a thumb towards Alison before her arm fell back down loosely.
“Sum it up for the latecomers?”
Something in Adam’s voice made her look up. The grassy rise above the beach had become decorated with several new silhouettes, some holding cameras to their faces.
“Hey, guys,” she said, pointing at the nearest cluster of fluidics, who cringed away from her hand in fear. “You know not to come any closer, right? Yeah, you do. You’re smart.” Her head dropped again, the effort of speaking exhausting her anew.
“So why?” pressed Adam.
“You didn’t think to ask these questions before boiling me alive?” she said quietly. “You’d have looked very silly if I’d had a sane reason.”
“Well . . .”
“Well.” She straightened up and almost fell backwards off her perch before a slab of salt rose up behind her, turning her seat into an armchair. She leant comfortably against the backrest and eyed the row of journalists. “Saw you listening to Aaron-Byhagthn’s set back there. Do you want to hear about the big detail he left out?”
There was a flutter of cameras being readjusted and recording devices being checked, the equivalent of the enthusiastic tail wag of a dog being promised a treat.
“It’s shit,” said Jessica-Shgshthx, after an appropriately dramatic pause. “The Ethereal Realm is an entire dimension of shit. No stars, no planets, no cities, no Interstellar Bum Pirates. Just shit. Great drifting masses of shit. Solid shit, liquid shit, shit clouds, all the colors of the rainbow and beyond, but it’s still shit. And it’s the worst kind of shit—shit that’s gotten smart enough to think that it isn’t shit.”
Her gaze dropped again. Everyone else was utterly silent. Even the noise of the surf seemed to have quietened, although the fluidics emitted another nervous fart each time the tide brushed close. A confused look was doing the rounds among the journalists.
“And when all there is is shit, shit is the only thing that matters,” continued Jessica-Shgshthx, apparently addressing the floor. “All those vast cosmic minds, and all they do is fight over shit. For no reason. Tear enough dingleberries off the others, and maybe you’ll build up enough to be King Shit of Turd Mountain for a while, but sooner or later the others pull you apart and you’re back to square one. It’s like building shit castles on quicksand. Made of shit.”
She seemed to notice for the first time the fluidics huddled at the foot of her salt throne. “Yeah, you’re all a bunch of little shits, too,” she said. “But you were my shit. And when shit’s the only thing you’ve got, you can’t afford to get a reputation as someone who can’t hold their shit.”
“Jessica, please, just let them go,” said Alison, three of her limbs still immobilized. “I know you’ve still got some control.”
Jessica-Shgshthx jumped up as if her chair had become electrified, and it immediately dissolved into granules. “Ugh. I thought the Corporeal Realm was a bit lighter on the shit, but your skull must be full of it. We went over this.”
“But I know you do.” Alison’s last remaining free hand waved a smartphone. “You left your phone for us to find. So we would know what was going on. Right?”
Jessica-Shgshthx patted her pockets, rolled her eyes, then walked over to Alison, carelessly treading on fluidics as she went. The salt in the tread of her shoes left black footprints on their quivering forms. “Must’ve dropped it. Thanks for bringing it back.”
“You dropped it to send a message. You wanted to be found. And stopped.”
Jessica put her face an inch from Alison’s, snatching the phone rudely from her hand. “Duh, I wanted to be found. What’s the point of all this if no one sees it? I just assumed stealing all your favorite turds would be enough to make you come looking, not because I forgot my . . .” She looked down. “Wait. This isn’t mine.”
“Aunch,” went the runecrafting app on Diablerie’s smartphone. “Aunch. Aunch. Aunch. Aunch.”
Baffled, Jessica-Shgshthx held the device at arm’s length until the sound of the chant grew slurred and distant. Both she and Alison felt pressure descend upon their shoulders like a thick blanket, and a ringing in their ears as millions of magical particles were drawn in like the slow inhalation of a sleeping dragon. The two of them made eye contact, then simultaneously looked down.
The Aunch rune was a simple one, consisting only of three interconnecting lines. A conflux of angles that recurred several hundred times in the crystalline salt clusters that Jessica-Shgshthx had created. Every single one of those recurrences was now intensifying, distorting their surroundings with an effect similar to a heat haze.
Something very loud and very violent happened.
78
After these events, when Alison was in a combination of recuperation and quarantine, Archibald Brooke-Stodgeley visited her and explained precisely what had happened at that moment, while helping himself to about twenty of the grapes Shgshthx had brought.
“As I’m sure you’ll remember, the Au . . . ah, I won’t actually say it, but you know, that rune you incanted, it means push. There’s a very good reason why sensible runecrafters would only use it as part of a sequence. Push is very interpretive. You need to specify ‘Push upwards this or that distance’ to create the wall, or ‘Push sound outwards’ to create silence. What you were doing, my dear, in casting it by itself, was, in layman’s terms, saying, ‘Surprise me.’ You were telling each magic particle to decide for itself what you meant, in terms of what to push, where to push it, and with what force. And that’s broadly why you’re now in a hospital bed, and why the video of your experiment has hit several million views online.”
It was only from watching the news footage of the incident later that Alison determined the precise events, as all she knew at the time was that something confusing and painful happened. Her salt restraints had shattered instantly, sending both her and Jessica-Shgshthx spinning into the air like rag dolls, before they had both landed with wince-inducing force.
Alison had deliberately kept the volume of the chant low to keep the effect as local as possible, but even so, a crater half the size of a tennis court appeared in the shingle. Salt and stones went flying, and the fluidics caught in the radius were all instantly flattened into half-inch-thick pancakes, to no long-term ill effect. Some commenters attested that the tide momentarily ran in reverse.
Pain fluttered through Alison’s back from a thousand different starting points as she writhed in the pebbles, keeping her eyes shut while she felt around and determined that all her limbs and organs were in their appropriate places. When she finally looked, she was staring straight up the slope to the top of the rise, where, among the blurry silhouettes of onlookers, she could see the blurry silhouette of a man in a top hat.
He threw out a hand, as if in greeting, and Alison felt a length of something light drop onto her chest. Still woozy, she squinted at it and saw the familiar symbols of the dispel sequence. It was the same rune circle Diablerie had used to pacify the squirrels back in Doncaster.
Her focus shifted to Jessica-Shgshthx. She was a few yards ahead, sprawled against the side of one of her salt barriers, struggling to lift herself onto her elbows.
Alison made to get up. Her joints registered several wobbling complaints immediately, but she was able to get enough of her limbs onboard to start moving. She half staggered, half crawled the short distance and threw the rune circle around Jessica-Shgshthx, almost collapsing on top of her with the effort.
Diablerie’s runecrafting phone was lying a few feet away, silent and deactivated. Evidently the push command had also been applied to the mute button. Alison picked it up and, with her fingers st
iff and shaking, arduously keyed in the dispel sequence.
Jessica-Shgshthx had gotten as far as supporting herself on one elbow. She looked back with difficulty, the gelatinous tissue around her eyes clouded with blood. “A . . . lison?”
Alison held out the phone like a police detective presenting their credentials as the eerily calm voice began to chant.
At first, Jessica-Shgshthx just stared, jaw hanging in bafflement as she tried to focus on the tiny screen. Eventually she scraped together enough thinking power to draw a connection between the phone talking and terrible things happening shortly afterwards, but by then it was too late. She was able to drag herself a princely two inches before the magic took hold.
The chant began to sit thickly on the ear canals. The symbols on the circle darkened and deepened. Jessica’s body flopped down as if an invisible elephant had stepped into the middle of the rune circle. Her body shivered in spasm, then went limp.
The semitransparent regions of her mutated flesh clouded over like milk being dropped into water. Her skin tone slowly shifted from gray white to a conventional human paleness, embellished with red grazes and purple bruises. Only then did Alison turn off the chant.
She collapsed where she stood, landing in a sitting position, and stared at the ground between her knees. The runecrafting phone hung loosely from her hand.
Adam coughed. “Erm. Before you get comfortable? I think Victor might be drowning.”
79
Soon, Alison added another new experience to a day full of them: the experience of not being able to remember something. She had freed Adam, then sat down again as he had splashed off into the tide to free Victor, and everything after that was lost. She must have blacked out, unless someone with a teleportation power had been passing by.
The next thing she knew, she was lying in a hospital bed in a warm, lemon-colored room, with sunlight streaming in between flower-patterned curtains. There were three other beds, two vacant. With her mattress tilted forward and a generous pile of pillows propping up her head and shoulders, Alison could do nothing but stare at the occupant of the opposite bed.
It was Jessica Weatherby in hospital pajamas. Not Jessica-Shgshthx—the swollen, gelatinous flesh had been replaced with the slight puffiness of bruising.
“Jessica?” said Alison.
Her eyes were open and she was breathing, so it was probably safe to assume she was alive, but there was nothing alive about her vacant stare or the way she drew air in and out of her lungs as mechanically as a machine. She had even more pillows than Alison, probably to stop her neck from lolling too far.
Alison was helpless to do anything but take in Jessica’s appearance for what felt like an hour, before the door briefly opened to admit Richard Danvers, along with the sound of bustling nurses and orderlies in the corridor outside. “Oh good, you’re awake,” he sighed. “That’s something, at least.”
His choice of words did nothing to dull her growing sense of impending woe. “Mr. Danvers . . .” she said, but something caught in her throat and she interrupted herself with a cough.
“Focus on resting for now,” he said, coming to her side. Again, his choice of the words for now undermined his advice. “You’re in a private hospital that the Minis . . . I mean, the Department has an arrangement with.”
“Is Jessica going to be all right?”
Danvers looked at the opposite bed, then to the floor, then back to Alison. “First let me say that I completely understand what you were trying to do.”
He was zero for three on reassurances so far. “What happened?”
“You thought by using that magic-canceling device, you could pacify her, right? Perhaps even reverse the possession.” He shrugged. “Archibald’s coming down soon to run some tests, so he’ll be able to explain it better. But as I understand it, it’s like a cancerous organ. You can’t take out the cancer without taking the organ with it.”
Alison couldn’t stop staring at Jessica. The vacant stare seemed to take on an accusatory note. “She’s been brainwashed?!”
“More . . . wiped than washed, really,” said Danvers. He winced at Alison’s expression. “For what it’s worth, it might have been the best option. She might have killed all those fluidics at any moment.”
“Yeah,” said Alison, pretending to be convinced. Internally, she appended the words but she didn’t. “What happens now?”
Danvers hugged his torso and blew out his lungs, as if he were trying to squeeze the air out of himself with his hands. “I really don’t know. Anderson set up a meeting with Elizabeth first thing in the morning. I know because he did so at full volume.”
“Do you think he’ll shut down the Department?”
“Personally, I think things could have gone a lot worse,” said Danvers, with a politician’s skill for simultaneously dodging and answering the question. “There may be some changes in store.” He scrutinized her. “You were originally hired for secrecy reasons, yes? Is there any reason you couldn’t go back to your family now?”
This was it. This was the moment Alison had been dreading from the moment the Ministry had become the Department and abandoned all secrecy. Every morning for the first few weeks she had woken twisted with anxiety at the thought that today might be the day that Elizabeth or Danvers or someone else asked her the killer question: why are you still here? After months of running from office to filing room to coffee machine, she thought she had become essential enough a part of the Department’s background noise for the matter to be closed.
Danvers read her expression. “Family,” he said, sympathetically. He looked away as anger brought a hint of a twitch to his upper lip. “Like I said, just rest for now. There’ll be updates soon.”
Alison made no response but continued mimicking the blank stare of her roommate. Danvers sighed, got up, and went to the door. “Visitors for you,” he announced as he slipped past them and away.
The visitors were Adam Hesketh in his usual black ensemble, pushing Dennis the fluidic in a wheeled plastic conveyance, apparently for hygiene’s sake. There was a plastic punnet of white grapes sitting on top of the pile of Dennis.
“We bwought gwapes,” he said, needlessly, as he passed them into her hands with an adept shifting of his upper mass. He had evidently made an effort to avoid digesting the gift, but there was a thin film of dampness over it regardless. She tactfully placed it on the bedside table.
“I was checking on Victor,” said Adam casually. “Ran into Shgshthx in the hall, so I thought I’d tag along and see how you were doing, you know, while I’m here.”
“Oh,” said Alison distantly.
Adam’s casual tone dropped instantly. “I mean, not that I wouldn’t have come to visit if Victor hadn’t been here too, I just wouldn’t want you to think . . .”
Alison came to the rescue as he began to stammer. “How’s Victor?”
“Good. He didn’t drown.” He chewed on his lip for a moment, thinking of what else to reveal. “They’re keeping him under observation for a bit. He’s got ‘heightened-possession risk.’ ” He made finger quotes.
Alison frowned. “I thought you and he couldn’t get possessed anymore?”
He waggled a hand. “You can get back on the Ancient’s radar if you use too much power in one go. It’s not likely at all, but it has happened. Actually, that’s a big part of why the Ministry was formalized in the nineteenth century. Some people were trying to exploit magic users to get an edge in the Industrial Revolution, and things didn’t turn out very well.” He trailed off when he noticed that she was struggling to look engaged. He hummed briefly to fill the silence, rocking on his heels. “Lots of journalists saw what happened on the beach, didn’t they. It’s not looking good for dual-consciousness rights.”
He seemed to be sincere. He and Alison both stared at Jessica’s mindless form for a moment, until her face reminded Alison of something. “Adam?”
“Hm?”
“Did you ask Victor why he didn’t kill her? I re
ally thought he was about to.”
Adam smiled nervously. “He said she wasn’t worth it. I said we’ve killed lots of much weaker things that he seemed to think were worth it. That’s when he started getting crabby, and the nurses asked me to leave. You might’ve heard the smoke alarm going off.”
“He saw Aaron-Byhagthn’s speech, didn’t he.”
“Yeah, and he spent the rest of the day going off on one about it.” He scratched his temple. “Anyway. I should let you rest. Before we find out how badly we screwed everything up for interdimensional relations. Shgshthx?”
The fluidic expanded, forming himself into an upside-down pear shape with a basic smiley face in the middle, two dots and a curved line. “Thank oo for saving us awl,” he recited.
Somehow, it was this that finally let loose the emotions that Alison had been collecting like a rain barrel in a storm. She felt a surge behind her eyes as inevitable as the spray of juice from an orange in a slow hydraulic press. She made to hug the fluidic, and almost immediately regretted it.
80
Anderson had instructed Elizabeth to report to his office on Downing Street at six o’clock in the morning. She assumed that he had intended this as another show of dominance, but it would fall flat, as Elizabeth slept less than most people anyway. It was something of a relief to get up so early, interrupting the usual dreams.
She arrived at ten minutes to six fully expecting to be kept waiting at least half an hour, so it came as a slight surprise to be told that Anderson was ready for her. A wolfish young man with a disquietingly intense stare showed her through a narrow but grand corridor, slightly twilit to emphasize the disapproving grimaces of lords and prime ministers that lined the walls, to a quiet office with its own fireplace and tall windows that looked uselessly out onto the side wall of the building next door.
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