The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  “At least,” Juan says, “at least Aiden need only inherit. After all, all the work that must be done, we have done. It’s just the consolidation phase we have left.”

  “If only things had been different. What I would have given for us to raise great young minds together. The girl, with them. She would have made an excellent partner for their children. Wonderful genetics. Exceptional talent. We’ve no dancers here. I’d hoped she was one worth nurturing.”

  “Of course,” Juan concurs. “Such a waste. But you tried everything you could, Sir.”

  His Excellency sits forward, a frown creasing dark lines about the planes of his face. “I…tried?”

  Even Juan doesn’t get away with things like that. He clarifies, with an ease and pace born of practice, “You gave him every opportunity, Sir. Them. You gave them all you had, all you could, and more. Alas, I did not produce a child worth that honour.”

  His Excellency takes a long breath, and releases it, slowly.

  “It seems not. Never mind. It will be over, now.”

  “And…Aiden?” Juan asks the question, because he must, whether he wishes to discuss the survival of one son over another, or not.

  Den Huo shakes his head, slow, irritable. “I have yet to decide. He is the only child I have. I cannot kill him. Perhaps I can find him someone worthy enough with whom he might give me a grandchild. I can easily live long enough that that child could surpass him. It could be grown properly this time. Yes. We’ll find better elders. Wiser. We’ll run the best through the Testing Centre for aptitude and propriety. The grandchild must have the experience we had, must be-”

  “But the castle is…”

  His Excellency holds up his hands.

  “I shall have a new castle built. One that will not permit for the failings of children and old people.”

  And Juan knows better than to ask for the details of that at a time like this. They’ll be the kind of things that, once said, cannot be unsaid. And he could do without those, at least before another vessel of coffee.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The Culmination

  Eliza digs Selina out with little-to-no care. She half-expects her to be dead, just like those who died around her before. This shallow ditch was barely done when the worst of it came, and, this time, the worst was bad.

  She’s surprised when, yanking at the blunted twists of Selina’s hair, pulling her head and shoulders from the dirt, the girl responds with a filthy yell and comes up immediately, twisting, the rest of her body following her, rolling and diving out of the earth like it was red-hot. Selina lies there, twitching clumps of dirt off her body, breathing…perfectly normally.

  This is still more surprising, to Eliza. Indeed, it is is irritating just how much discomfort and unpleasantry Selina is capable of putting up with. She’d expected complaints. Physical failure, perhaps. But this cossetted little girl is curiously resilient.

  That does not make Selina like her more.

  Nor does the way that, after just a few moments, Selina sits up, brushes what will brush away from her face and shoulders, and says, brightly as you like, “Thanks. We ought to get moving.”

  Just like that.

  But Eliza is not one to argue. Not here, anyway, and not with Selina.

  It’s odd that Eliza wishes Selina were harder work than she is, that she’s aching for the girl to be difficult, to require some kind of chastising, caring for, correcting. To show, at any point, that she is less of a person than Eliza is, for all the breaks she’s had, for all the company and safety and encouragement she was given on a plate, for what, for being able to move her body in time with a music that, like everything else in this world, is now dead.

  Maybe it isn’t so odd after all.

  The ground drops and the perspective is sudden and immediate. It’s more than Alej can comprehend, though, and, after the initial lack of understanding of height and up and flying he ignores the view and concentrates on the Caracaras.

  The sensation is unlike any he’s known, excitement, for starters, that’s a first for Alej, and purpose, for another, so much purpose, if he shifts this lever, here, which prickles and tingles at his skin as he touches it, then the Caracaras shifts and lurches. It’s as well that this is a low landscape, nothing that could possibly obstruct the swooping, hunt and drop of the machine.

  The cabin is cool and quiet and Alej feels the mechanics of the machine, rather than hearing them. The vines that tethered and harnessed the Caracaras to the ground are long snapped and fluttering in its golden wake.

  “What now?” Alej asks, out loud, but for all this thing can move itself and take him upwards, it cannot speak. And yet he listens for an answer all the same.

  It’s a hot day, the hottest yet, of course it is, just to up their discomfort. After a certain point though, the discomfort is only a constant, to be taken for granted and dealt with by continuing to place one blistered and bleeding foot in front of the other.

  Eliza says, as she undoes her helmet, at last, sometime after they’ve resumed their silent travel, that that Pulse went on longer than any she’s known. That’s all she says. Nothing about what that might mean, about anything she might fear from it, nothing more. Only the silence.

  After the Pulse, after the sense of the weight on her back and the filth in her mouth, in her eyes, breath clogged and clagging with dust…it would be nice to have a distraction from that. But Eliza keeps on going, ten paces ahead, never wavering. Selina doesn’t look up towards the horizon any more, through the dips and swells of rough inhospitable ground, because it’s too frustrating, to see the distance always so far from comprehension. It’s always so far away that she’s finding it increasingly difficult to believe they’ll ever get there.

  Their target, though, is not ahead of them. It’s a half-arc of the sun before either of them cast their eyes around, so closely have they been focused on moving forwards, forwards, ever forwards.

  It is Eliza who looks to her right, and halts right where she is. She points, wordlessly.

  Selina follows her gesture.

  To the right, still so far away, they have rounded the foot of a curve in the land, where it begins to roll upwards. What’s appeared horizon for much of their walk now shows itself to be the crest of a valley, steep and yellowed on the nearside, shallow and a lush green on the other. Along the far edge of the shallow side runs a wall.

  It isn’t the highest of walls, maybe twice, or even three times Selina - it’s hard to call it from this distance - but it’s the first sign of any kind of building they’ve seen since they left the ruins of the city. Beyond the wall there are signs of buildings, the tops of them at least, stone crenulations in one place, and that, that is the strongest sign of all that this is, if not their destination, at least a stop on the journey.

  Selina’s guts churn, more than clearly telling her that the next step is to head right in there.

  “Do you remember it?” Eliza asks. “Is this where you were brought before?”

  Selina racks her brain, because, surely she should? But she doesn’t. This isn’t it. The place she visited was…shining, glowing, vast in the sunlight, that heavy, orange sunlight that she’s sure was the way the sun used to feel. Is it only because the world is dustier, and larger, when you are two amongst nothing, emphasising how much emptier things have become? The ring of guards she remembers, the gleaming grandeur that introduced her to doors so thick and carved that they could have been marble, perhaps without those, this might still look like the place she was taken to…but no. Even at this distance - still far enough that she can block the view of the entire length and height of the complex (for that is what this is) by holding up her hand in front of it - it is not. It’s not tall enough, nor is it grand enough, and it is stone, like the castle.

  In fact, it looks a lot more like the castle than any part of her memories of the place where she was ‘assessed’.

  At least they haven’t been found yet. They must be watching, right? />
  But they aren’t watching. No-one is watching. His Excellency has let surveillance slip, because why waste time and energy on an empty world?

  Self-congratulatory behaviour is the first part of his downfall.

  Yet Selina doesn’t know this, so she concludes instead that they must be watching, and if they are watching, then she and Eliza must have been seen, and if they have been seen and they have not been captured or killed, then there are three possible explanations.

  A) They don’t matter. Perhaps Den Huo has accomplished everything he intended to, and from here on whatever happens doesn’t matter one bit.

  B) They don’t know who they are. Maybe Den Huo is no longer alive, or maybe he is concerned with matters elsewhere: perhaps those watching think them someone else from their commune, which seems to stretch on and on. Is it possible everyone knows everyone else? How many are they? Eliza, in her uniform, could yet pass for a soldier, if soldiers they have still.

  C) They’re waiting for them. After all, this is their domain, and once they’ve arrived, and announced themselves, then they’ll be at the mercy of whoever is Inside. There’s no way they could be anything else. So why fight or kill on the Outside when they could wait, and let the prey come right on through the door, and deal with it with the full resources of…well, there must be resources.

  It feels as if C) is the most likely. That being the least pleasant of the options, it does little to quell Selina’s fears and gives her even less to form a plan with.

  She tells Eliza what she remembers, and that this is far from it, and Eliza looks nervous for the first time since they’ve met and explains that she thought that Selina would know, that she would at least remember something, that it would all become clear when they arrived and that, since the Pulse came and since she stopped exploring and pushing forwards, she’d always felt that there would be someone who would be able to help her, who would know not just where they should go, for, as we know, that Eliza already had an inkling of, but of what they should do when they got there.

  And now they get there, and Selina has nothing.

  “But if it wasn’t here,” Eliza says, “where were you? Don’t you even remember what direction you travelled in?”

  Selina shakes her head. “I was a child,” she says, but it doesn’t sound like a justification even to her, because her childhood was not what Aiden would describe to her as childhood - as if he was the one who could tell you what ‘real life’ was all about - and it isn’t as if her perspective can have evolved all that much, since she has been in another world for all but the entirety of that time between childhood and this moment. Back then, it was as different to her as anything could ever have been, and she was so overwhelmed by the situation, by the sight of things that weren’t brick and sand and mud and flesh, that her thoughts are flashes of recollection, clear, but, almost, too clear.

  And so they walk closer, and Eliza keeps looking at Selina like any minute she’ll have a recollection and a plan; any kind of information that will make this make sense.

  As they approach the wall that surrounds the buildings, Eliza half-expects a Pulse to come, certainly she expects something to come, and she draws her clothing tight about her, fastens her helmet tight in front of her face. She doesn’t make any plan or contingency for Selina. She’s past thinking for two, now. It isn’t as if Selina has come up with a single thing to offer her, not a thing. She’s been worse than useless and all that Eliza can hope for is that she finds herself some part to play, that she can fulfil even a hint of her expectations and ideas, for otherwise, Eliza’s decision to make this journey with her will look a foolish one. Surely, surely she will contribute something?

  Contributing nothing Eliza wouldn’t have come up with herself in a moment more, Selina points, and says, “There’s a gate,” and there is a gate, maybe not so different from the gate at the castle, like the Gate she went through would have looked like this, like a space where there is no space, like an absence of substance, wood long forgotten, a shadow, dark next to the damp and mouldering stone of the wall, covered as it is in a flourishing moss which blooms yellows and pinks across it all; the gate is a gap, a blocked gap, but a gap nonetheless.

  “I don’t like the idea of…” Eliza starts, and then realises Selina can’t hear her for her helmet, and then notices the way in which Selina is marching on ahead and going right up to this opening as if it was nothing at all, never mind the entrance to their destination, nor that they’ve no idea what lies behind it, and how it will appear to them - if they’ll have a further moment’s existence once that creaks open. Eliza’s idea was more that they would climb, or that they would at least find a vantage point where they would be able to make more of an assessment of what to do next, but Selina has already worked out, as we know, that if things are as they presume them to be, then there is no point in wasting time, no point in going around the sides. Better to march right in and take every chance.

  And she is not afraid. As she approaches the gate she remembers the feel of her leap through the opening the oh-so-similar gate left in the wall around the castle which confined her for so many years. She relives that sensation of falling, escaping. Even though she is breaking in rather than out, her actions now are coloured with all the same sensations. This feels just as right and good as anything she’s ever been asked to do. And, even though Eliza brought her all the way here, it feels like something she is doing herself, a situation entirely of her own making.

  If Aiden was here, and if his beliefs expanded outside his own existence, he’d tell her Destiny was calling. If these ifs were so, Selina would reply that that wasn’t something she understood, but that it sounded nice.

  ‘Nice’ isn’t really the word for most of the next part of Selina’s tale. But ‘destiny’? That might describe it. It just might.

  Inside the wall, fifteen pairs of eyes fix immediately on the gate. There are no patrols out. There haven’t been patrols for years. Most of the ‘soldiers’ had other, more pressing skills to tend, practices to maintain. But these watching eyes also saw His Excellency’s boy brought in from the Castle, where he had been kept for safety and for his education and edification, and things haven’t been the same since, so something else new and different could be happening. It isn’t that a further disturbance is unexpected, so much as they can’t imagine what it might be.

  These watchers are not guards; they are not armed. Nor are they even intended to be there, it’s only that their preferred patch of complex land happens to be in fine sight of the Gate. The Gate which hadn’t opened at all that they could remember, until the soldiers left, a cycle ago, now. They are children, some of them, and the others include students of history and language, a storyteller, a needlesmith and a patchmaker.

  They are dressed well, this is Selina’s first impression, as she walks right on through, and stands in front of them. Their clothes are cut neat and close, and many have pictures and embellishments around them, burned, or perhaps cut, into cloth and leather, in ways she does not know.

  Selina bows to them immediately, as she was taught to bow for Den Huo himself so many years ago. She smiles - this action comes from her idea of what Aiden would do, polite and superior as he was. Is. Could still be. But Aiden would most likely expect them to bow to him, and there is the difference. She is not Aiden, and oh, as she falls headfirst into this new situation her mind is clouded by thoughts of where he is and if he has ever known that this is here; what he would have suggested they do if he were here - she has the feeling that that might be better, that if nothing else he would not feel so lost as she does right now.

  But she is not frightened. Only lost for references. Besides, there is nothing to be frightened of, as yet. The children don’t rush to her, but they don’t run away, either. Their expressions are surprised, this much she can work out, but not sufficiently shocked that she can tell if they are…in on what’s happening, if in some way their entrance has been anticipated.

  “Hello,
” Selina says, and she tries to hold her voice as neutral as possible. “My name is Selina,” she says, talking mostly to the children, rather than looking to the adults for a leader or to make a point, hoping that if the children know she is being honest, the adults will. “And this is Eliza.” She gestures, to where Eliza is edging slowly through the gate, looking around anxiously as if at any point she might need to dive out, or duck for cover.

  At the sight of Eliza, dressed in a way that looks old and strange, the children turn to each other and begin to talk and clutch at each other, looking up at their elders for an explanation. This is not forthcoming, as the adults draw back a little, and begin to hold up their hands.

  To them, this looks like something very frightening indeed. Those uniforms were burned and the new, more ceremonial and prestigious ones replaced them so that no-one need see that reminder that the Outside was once something that had to be Dealt With.