The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  And then it’s worse still, for now there are voices in the flames, voices he does not understand, that he definitely does not want to hear. They’re loud, and crude, and the boat is crumbling; he fights to hold on to the wheel, as the water starts to surround him, and the flames begin to consume him, but he can’t, it’s long since slipped from his hands, slick as if coated with oil, but it’s not oil…it’s definitely not oil…and and he is being pushed up and forwards and towards the gate I don’t want to go back in, don’t make me…please, please no, I don’t deserve this, I can…I need to…don’t take me back…please don’t lock me up again…

  Even as he screams to the tableau, something in Aiden is awake, something understands that this emotion is strange and new and different and that he isn’t supposed to feel this way about home - it was home, but what is this, what is he so frightened of? Why does the idea of going back in there panic him so? Why is he covered in fear?

  There is a further swell, a final swell, Aiden is carried on a torrent of everything, thrown, three two one, the gate looms large in front of him, there is a slam, and all is black, the voices are silenced, everything is gone, whooshed into a vacuum. There is a moment between sleep and consciousness, at which Aiden feels as if he’s at a crossroads. He can’t see anything at the end of any of his options, none of which he can understand anyway.

  At last, he wakes up. He finds himself surrounded by close, suffocating darkness. The fur is tight around his body, and his legs are wet and numb. He’s shivering. He’s freezing. He can’t move his arms. But…but wait. Adrenaline floods his veins.

  The ground is moving, shifting, no support at all. No, wait. It isn’t. He’s moving. He’s not on the ground at all, what, he twists, and thrashes, hard. He’s yanked five kinds of sideways and there are shouts in a language he doesn’t understand.

  This is incomprehensible, unbelievable. As horrifically disorientating as those first days Outside, with his insides fighting to be Outside too.

  He twists again and he is in a cloth, something, heavy and impossible to get a hold on, waxed, perhaps, waxy against his skin, and his…throat…his necklace…my jewels, oh my jewels - everything is gone.

  His heart skips, flutters, breaks.

  It’s not supposed to be like this. Whatever it is, it is definitely not supposed to be like this.

  He wonders if it’s Jere, even though he’s sure that he knows it can’t be, there are footsteps, there are hands, he is manhandled left, right and centre, so many goods in a potato sack, he’s carried by many people and then perhaps just one person, slung over someone’s shoulders, and everything is uneven and let me go like that will help, like anyone who’s going to snatch you up in your sleep is going to let you walk away without any further questions.

  The talking grows louder, angrier - Aiden wonders if he can pull the trick of making them argue amongst themselves and have them kill each other whilst he runs free, for that works in many a tale, but, being as he isn’t sure of the language, he’s even less sure as to how to actually engineer something.

  What to do, though? My jewels, the diamonds…it’s as if those were all that made him so, as if they were the things that gave him life, and to Aiden, that might as well be the truth, for all the idea he has of the truth of his own origins.

  “I have more!” he tries, calling out, as best he can, raw and muffled. “The diamonds…I have more. I have gold and silver, sapphires and rubies - I have them all! Let me go!”

  His pleas are as much based on storytelling and imagery he’s stolen from other times and places as they are on an understanding of human psychology.

  And then there’s more feeling of nausea and disorientation and then he hits the ground with a smack, and it’s uneven and digs at where his kidneys are and he shifts and squirms and everything hurts, and then there’s a thump or a kick, and this has to stop and for a moment he fears he’ll be sick, which in this situation is an even more terrifying thought than it might previously have been. He breathes hard, tries to compensate for it, and counts his breaths again. Keep breathing, Aiden, keep breathing. Things are about to get incredibly strange, and you’ll need to have yourself in order.

  There’s a pause in the motion, just long enough for Aiden’s stomach to catch up with itself, for which he’s glad. The discussion grows louder. Perhaps, he’s managed it after all. Who doesn’t want shiny things? He is shifted up, off the ground, and everything is uneven; around him, voices rise again, conversation, heated.

  “Diamonds!” shouts Aiden, unable to think of anything else which might make so much as a shred of difference. And even this, he supposes, now, might be worse than useless if they don’t understand him.

  They stop.

  But perhaps they do understand after all?

  He feels himself being repositioned, passed, is turned and a hand feels along his body. Then once more, once more, PAIN, there is a punch to his stomach, then another, and another. He whines like a child, whimpers and begins to sob. A voice shouts the same word at him repeatedly; there is a further, solid blow, and Aiden is quiet. The nausea is dizzying.

  “Please…” he whispers, and then gives up.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Mappers

  Far away, but not as far away as Aiden presumes, Selina and Alej are settling down into their new bunkhole. They’ve been given the chance to wash properly for the first time since the fire, in some kind of shower run with rainwater, so they’re told. The water is grey, but, crucially, it’s running and, best of all, it’s warm.

  Kit has offered them his room for as long as they need it. He won’t hear a word of their not taking it, says hospitality isn’t something he gets to offer all that often. Alej doesn’t appreciate the offer enough, Selina thinks: he doesn’t mind as long as it’s comfortable, practical. She thanks Kit twice, with the most profusion she can manage.

  In this room, Alej is sat alone on a slab stone bed cushioned with material, scraps and scrags of it knotted and woven together to make a vast, sprawling blanket of sorts. He’s wound himself in this, sat awkwardly, legs straight out in front of him, hands pushing experimentally at the muscles in his thighs, still sore from the journey. His head is throbbing and his throat’s still rough from the passing out.

  Days and nights have merged in his head, and he wishes more than anything that he could be back inside his cycle with duties to accomplish. It’s the order he misses most, rather than the castle. Still, there must be a cycle here too (because that’s the only way you can operate, right?) and his place in it (because everyone has a function, right?) will surely become apparent soon enough.

  When the door to the room opens, with its thin craw of a noise, Alej expects to see Selina, but, no. It’s Eliza, Alej establishes, a jolt of discomfort accompanying that realisation. She’s peering at him, this way, that way, sizing him up like you might a nervous animal. She’s dressed entirely in black cloth so black that her white hair and white-gold skin are all the more striking. Then, neither are so striking as her eyes, colourless darkness, ferocious as flashlights, wide and fixing. Such is the strength of her appearance that Alej shrinks, shifts back into the blanket.

  “How are you?” she asks, but her eyes are searching like that’s not the question she really wants to ask.

  He nods, which sets his head sore again. He puts a hand to his forehead. “I have a few pains,” he says, because, well, that’s the truth.

  “Rest properly then,” she says, voice low, secret-sharing style, “you ought to be fit as you can be.”

  Alej tries a smile, because that seems the kindest of replies. It comes out a little unpleasant.

  “So where are you from? What have you been doing since…” and she doesn’t finish.

  Tired and not thinking clearly, he tells her he’s a gardener, that he serves and aids and gardens, and it’s the gardening part that has her curious, confused, for there haven’t been gardens in this world for a generation and more.

  “A real gardene
r? You could grow things?” Eliza’s voice remains low, but obtains a most suspicious edge.

  “Of course. With…trowels.” Alej retrieves the word trowels from a long time ago, from Aiden’s tale of the Gardener who dug the trenches for the Wars of the Nations. Such was his strength and speed and skill that, in time, there were machines made in his image that stretched the lengths of lands and attempted to keep the leagues of thousands away from, or was it inside, somewhere. Aiden’s stories could wander, and whilst Alej so often found them captivating, at other times he was lost in the middle, and would let his companion’s precise and practised monotone take him through time without care.

  Those days where he was to serve Aiden were all but always spent sitting on Aiden’s bed, or at the table in the library, listening. Aiden would use Alej as a chance to consolidate his learning, as a test audience, even if he would increasingly forget to check that his audience had listened and learned. This was fortunate, for, even now, when Alej himself is the subject, the listened-to, he still drifts into the rest of his mind, moving away from the immediate as he is doing nothing much with it. Where he is not digging, planting, chopping, fixing, cleaning, moulding, working, then he is not truly himself, not really engaged.

  “Hey,” Eliza says, and Alej refocuses and finds her face just inches from his: she’s kneeling in front of him, her hand coming up to his face as if to slap him awake, but it doesn’t, she only puts cold fingers to his jawline, tilts his face forwards so there’s absolute eye contact, and he shivers, because her gaze is ice water and cruelty, even though her demeanour is so calm.

  “I asked you a question,” she’s saying, and he closes his eyes for a moment, hoping that it will come to him. He’s lucky: she repeats it.

  “How long did it take you to get here?” she asks again, sitting back on her haunches. The chill of her touch remains long after her hand has gone.

  He catches a deep breath, swallows, and fixes his eyes at hers again. “I think, three…three risings. Perhaps four. But we travelled through darkness, and sometimes we doubled back, and sometimes we ran. And sometimes we hid.” He strokes his jaw, the fair stubble pushing its way around it being the only personal and consistent measure of time he has. It’s just long enough to be soft, which usually means four risings, but it isn’t as if they’ve lived with enough structure for that to count as anything either.

  “I don’t understand,” Eliza says, her tone becoming aggressive in spite of itself, and taking the form that innately sends Alej into a nervous state. “I don’t understand you, at all. Are you telling a joke? Or a lie?” Her voice is accusing.

  Alej narrows his eyes. Of course he isn’t. Where would the joke be in that?

  “No, I wanted to tell you…” he starts, but then thinks, no, actually, I didn’t want to be telling you anything. Was this a mistake? Has he truly done things wrong already? How can humans live in such complex groups - could he and Selina leave here and find their own place like this, alone? How should he try to guess what Eliza means, or what she wants?

  “You should get to sleep,” Eliza says, standing up. “Wrap yourself up well. It gets cold down here, in the night. I’ll tell the girl you’re resting.”

  Alej wonders if it can possibly be night already, thinks that it seems like only moments ago that they were running through vague light, first light, wasn’t it, or was it later light, but he is tired, and he can’t care any more. He pulls the blanket up about himself; it’s softer than he thought it would be. He rests his head on his overshirt. Alej is asleep before Eliza’s so much as shut the door behind her.

  “What did you do,” asks Kit, in the end, “when they came? How did you escape the Pulse?”

  Selina is stuck for an answer, and, in a moment of sheer ingenuity, she lets the torment of everything she does remember about the way things used to be, flood over her. She begins to sob.

  “It’s okay,” Ali says, “you don’t have to tell us, not yet.” She kicks at Kit. “You know you can’t just ask people that kind of thing, it’s not fair. Just because we missed those times. You don’t know what she’s seen…”

  No, you don’t, thinks Selina, and she worries about what they might say if they knew, and how she can cover a complete lack of understanding of ‘they’ and ‘Pulse’ without giving herself away further. Only late into that night does what Ali said come back to her: just because we missed it, and she realises that they aren’t the only ones with a story here. Indeed, such is the ease with which they’ve been welcomed, that their hosts might have had curious lives themselves truly hasn’t occurred yet.

  This is the point at which Eliza comes in. Selina looks around, hurriedly. “Is he okay?” she asks. She had been reluctant to let Alej out of her sight, in one sense, and, in another, once she’d space from him, had been relieved to be apart. Alej is so tiring, the way he doesn’t quite understand so many things, the way that he zones out right in the middle of your trying to tell him something important. It’s good to see other people. Better still to speak with them. She had forgotten how good it is to be able to stop talking, too, to listen to others talking amongst themselves. She doesn’t want to be their focus, just wants to listen, to find out about things as they are, where they are, who they are.

  “He’s fine,” Eliza says, voice short and to the point, “only exhausted. I left him to rest. Aren’t you tired, too?” She says this emphatically, but Selina misses her inflection completely.

  “No, no,” she says, her response quick verging on over-eager. “I’m very well, yes. I couldn’t be happier. I don’t want to sleep. It’s so good to talk.”

  “Right,” Eliza says, uneasily. She looks at Ali, who looks back at her uncomprehending, perhaps deliberately, perhaps innocently, no way of knowing. “It’s only,” Eliza continues, “I spoke to the boy there, and he said he used to be a gardener.”

  Kit frowns. “What, like, a forager? Or…I don’t understand… in a laboratory?”

  “That’s what I asked, and he said, no, digging, digging with a trowel - so do you understand how this might be the case? In this time? Not even in the old times, or the times before those, because you aren’t old enough for that, either of you…”

  Everyone looks at Selina, waiting for her to pick up the trailing slack of the effort for understanding.

  She doesn’t oblige them, lost by the implications, her mind swimming with tired details.

  “Is that true?” Ali asks. “Was Alej a gardener?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so,” Selina replies. “Does it matter?”

  Kit puts a hand on Selina’s arm. “Thing is, Selina, there hasn’t been any garden around here for an age. What’s all this about?”

  Selina swallows. Her mind races, and she begins to concoct lengthy ways to explain this. Clearly, she thinks, they’ve never gone as far as the mountain, and this means that they’ve still no idea about where they actually came from. She can try to tell them, she thinks, if I could only…maybe it’s a case of…but no, no. Best not to. Because they’ve trusted me, and Alej, up until now, haven’t they? I mustn’t spoil that. But in just one night, Alej has aroused suspicion; he’s going to keep doing it. Best get it all out there. And…if it turns them against us, better now than later, when we could as well have come to rely on them. The train of thought batters down her defences. Her only chance is to be up front, and to see how that goes.

  She tells them. She tells them her story, as best she can. All of it. She explains that she doesn’t know why it was she was chosen, that she was encouraged to practice her dancing and to be served and to serve, and that she and Alej were friends, and she and Aiden were friends, and Aiden was special, but he disappeared, and she says they must look for him, that they must tell her if they see someone, tall and slight, strange, she says, he’s strange-looking, and she misses him, she says, please check, if you see someone like that, please ask him if he’s Aiden.

  They are still staring at her, hard not to, with her increasingly frantic attempts at
description and explanation.

  No-one interrupts her. This, Selina thinks, reflecting as she talks, is something, but she also wishes they would, finds she’d had a half-hope that they’d miraculously open another door and lo, despite their words, they’d have Aiden right here, or they’d know something that would make her life until now make much more sense than it does, but there is nothing.

  She tries to capture the isolation they lived in before, the distance they’ve had. She explains that everything they’ve come to was completely different when she was young, that the city was supposed to be built up, rather than torn down, that when she was young times were hard, but they didn’t look like this. She tries to get across to them that neither of them have the first idea what’s happened, or why, and that, strangest of all, she’s no idea where all the people are. Where her family are.