The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  The other two are already there, waiting for him. They stand silently, each holding a sack containing all that’s worth taking.

  “Are we going?” Alej asks. “Is it time?”

  Ali only nods.

  Neither of them say goodbye to the murky chambers that have kept them alive throughout all Den Huo’s best efforts.

  There is a moment, rounding the undergrowth the Caracaras was carefully left behind, where Ali panics that it has gone, that it’s been stolen, that their plan will have been thwarted at the last moment. She is so achingly desperate to leave, now.

  But as she opens the door and climbs into the pilot seat, her fears and her strains wash away immediately. Where before the Caracaras felt to be only metal, sad, sunk, stopped, now it is alive once more, thrumming in readiness for her and Kit to take it where they will.

  Alej climbs into the recess behind the seats, places his blanket against the hard-edged seams of the machine to protect himself as best he can. Kit and Ali’s sacks are filled with similarly hard objects, and he has to fit them in as well. This will not be a comfortable journey.

  Then again, no part of this journey has yet been comfortable, not for Alej.

  Ali shouts in joy as the machine starts exactly as it used to, and she takes it immediately up into the air, diving forwards without so much as a care for a passenger without any straps to hold him safe.

  But Alej doesn’t care, not even when the back of his head cracks so hard against the wall as to lump immediately. No, he just wants to get to Selina. He has a feeling she needs him.

  Strangely, Alej is the one thing she doesn’t need right now. But he’s on the right track. Better hurry. By the time the sun’s well and truly risen, you might, Alej, be able to solve a problem that’s about to make itself abundantly clear.

  The Caracaras lurches down and about and around, and swerves to avoid…what? Alej can’t see a thing, can’t look out of the window, something about his not being in control of it drives the whole experience into something horrific. The world is spinning and revolving and diving outside; every moment Alej tries to get a glimpse of the landscape, his stomach clenches and his throat closes. There’s none of the majestic swooping of before, nothing like that, and the speed, well, Alej doesn’t even know that they’re going fast - he can’t make sense of anything about it, doesn’t understand the concept of speed any more than he does flight.

  Ali appears to be in a kind of daze as she twists and pulls the controls; her eyes are closed more than they’re open, she’s got a connection with this machine - there’s a trust in her motions, an understanding that she has, a way that she feels the landscape as the Caracaras glides close, too close above it for Kit’s comfort, even though he knows that there’s no better person to be doing this, even though he’s flown more miles than there are in the world, he’ll never get over the closeness and confidence of Ali’s driving.

  “How,” Alej asked before they left, “will you find your way?” But Ali just laughed in response. The truth of it is that she doesn’t even know how she finds her way around the world - as long as she knows where she wants to go, logic, the sky, the ground, the curves and shapes of the land will guide her. She wants to find Eliza and Selina? There are obvious paths, to Ali, through the land.

  The Caracaras whirls then, sharp, catching Alej and Kit out. Kit only jerks about, held tight by the ropes, but Alej jams right into the roof of it, the tiny compartment both too small and not small enough for his body, which is gathering bruises by the moment.

  “Ali!” Kit yells, bracing himself as best he can in his seat.

  “I can see something…” she replies, her eyes wide open, darting all about the landscape.

  “What?”

  “Ugh,” Ali growls, and keeps steering the Caracaras around, diving so low down that it skids in the undergrowth, and Alej bangs his shoulder on the curve of the pod, before flipping down and smacking his head on the back of Ali’s chair.

  “What are you doing?” Kit’s asking, but then he sees it too. There, in the not-so-near-distance, it’s vast. Kit’s seen palaces, seen all the wonders of the world - the real, full world, not just this land which everyone else seems to think is all there is, no, the whole world, right around until you come back to here, or wherever else you started from.

  They learnt there was little point in telling Eliza about the rest of the world, for she was long-since conditioned to understand that this was all the world. And once Alej and Selina arrived, well, it didn’t seem prudent to tell them everything. If they were even interested. By this point, the troubles of this piece of land, this horrific, brutalised, bastardised piece of land are no longer their concern. And, from the air, already it looks utterly insignificant.

  Looked insignificant.

  Now they’re over the complex, well, this is obviously something. And it’s so grand, it must be, must be where Eliza and Selina were headed. Ali wonders if they ever arrived.

  “Don’t go into it,” Kit says, holding tight to everything he can.

  “No?” Ali asks, taking the Caracaras low, swooping about, skimming a lake.

  “Descend outside. I think we’ll be able to get over the wall. It looks quiet.”

  “You’re right,” she says, and comes back, over the wall, dropping the Caracaras easily and silently as it lifted up. “Besides, if we need to make a run for it…”

  Kit nods.

  Alej doesn’t say anything at all.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The Fallout

  Eliza is taken down to the Testing Centre. Selina does not follow. The very fact that they call it the Testing Centre, after everything she has heard, gives her yet another kind of fear, as if she had not discovered enough in this day. The guards promise her that it has a room which will contain her, until such time as Selina wishes to see her again. And they promise that she will not be harmed. They seem so strong, yet so placid, that Selina believes this of them. She does not, at this time, wonder why it is they are answering to her.

  His Excellency’s body is, also, taken down to the Testing Centre. There are, one of the guards tells Selina, using small, quiet words, facilities for dealing with such things.

  And Selina wonders how many people have been ‘dealt with’ in this world.

  “Are you hurt?” Tabatha asks her, has asked her twice already before Selina hears it, through the haze of confusion and the stench of blood.

  Selina shakes her head. Eliza didn’t touch her. But, she thinks, she wanted to. The thought sends another shiver through her trembling body.

  “I have things to attend to,” Tabatha says. “I will come back for you shortly. If you want to wait in the atrium, rather than in here, then please do.”

  Selina nods, but she didn’t hear a word.

  As Tabatha exits the room, Aiden moves as if to walk off too, but Selina grabs his arm, tight. Don’t leave me again? Perhaps.

  “Where are you going?”

  He looks at her, sweetly as if he’d gone to leave her room to fetch a book on the day he’d serve her in the cycle, back in their castle, back before any of this could have been imagined.

  “To my room. I would like to wash.”

  Selina nods. It makes sense. He turns back, tries to leave again.

  “Aiden?”

  “Yes?” Aiden is not impatient with her.

  “Are you alright?”

  Aiden tips his head from side to side. He feels the answer ought to be ‘no’, but that would be a lie. He clutches the rings tight in his hand.

  They’re sticky.

  “I will be better once I’ve washed,” he plumps for, in the end. It is a surprisingly tactful response.

  Selina’s hand tightens about his arm, and then lets go. Things are not the same, now.

  “You should -” she says, and stops, because she hasn’t decided on the end of that sentence, but had to start it before Aiden disappeared.

  “What?” he asks, his eyes looking as if he might be able to
see what she has not said.

  “You’ll have to…I mean…you’re his son. They’re going to look to you, Aiden. They’re already looking to you.”

  “To what?”

  “To take over, I suppose.” Even as she says it, it sounds ridiculous. To take over, as if Aiden would be able to understand what to do with the people here. He hardly knows what to do with himself. She is surprised by how much pity she feels for him now, when he’s witnessed the murder of his father, and he doesn’t appear to know how to care or feel about it at all.

  Aiden smiles.

  It isn’t the response Selina expected. Does he understand? “Is that…do you think you can…?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with here, or him, or your blonde friend, or anything else. This was never for me. It is tiny, insignificant. I have a book that will tell you exactly how much so. You should read it. You should have it. You should have it all. You deserve it, for everything that happened to you, and for all the lies you told me.”

  Something in his voice tells Selina that he means this as a punishment.

  He is gone once more, before she can even imagine a response.

  She is alone in the room for but a moment, when Tabatha returns.

  “I do not understand what has happened today,” she says, just as quiet as she’s ever been.

  “Neither do I, Tabatha. Neither do I.”

  “You should rest,” Tabatha says, “please. Your quarters are as ready for you as they were before.”

  “Surely I shouldn’t…”

  “I understand Eliza is very loud, and very angry. I think maybe it is best if you’re very quiet for a time, and perhaps if you can sleep. The light will come soon, and we will see what the day brings. I think you have much left to do here, if you will. If you can.”

  “What do you mean?” Selina asks, but Tabatha shakes her head and will not be drawn any further on that.

  Aiden’s room has been remade at some point since he left it. There are flasks of liquid on the side. There are fresh clothes in the wardrobe. A bath has already been drawn.

  Without thinking, he goes through the procedure of washing, closing his eyes when the blood runs red and then pink off his body. It looks awfully unpleasant.

  Back to his usual shade, he climbs into the bath. It is blissful.

  He does not think about the dinner.

  He tries not to think about Eliza, or Alej, but his mind is not kind to him, and keeps presenting him with the constructed image of the three of them lined up together. This image alternates with his imagining of his mother, as per Eliza’s tale. And then with the image of his father.

  He stays in the water for a long, long time.

  Aiden does not hear the doors to his room open.

  He does not see Juan standing there, behind him, staring at him with red eyes.

  It is as well.

  Juan was in the Testing Centre when His Excellency’s body was brought down.

  His heart broke instead of beating.

  There is nothing in this land for him now.

  But he would not leave without one last look at the boy who came down from the castle.

  It could have been so different.

  He’ll travel South. He knows the stronghold there still exists. It was as protected as here. Eliza, the only person to have told us of the South, assumed it, and the terrible people who carried out those appalling acts on her and her mother, were as gone as everyone in between there and here, but she was wrong. Some remain. A very few. A very select few. It is but an outpost, now, but some of the technology is still housed there. Juan knows it’s still working, has receives contentless signals from it on a regular basis. It’ll never be a home, will never mean anything, but he’ll be able to live there.

  If he can get there.

  Juan hasn’t travelled anywhere since he left castle for complex, and that journey, like Den Huo’s, was forced and miserable and long. He doesn’t stand a chance, not crossing the infinite ruined land of his own creation. But it is all he can think of to do. He cannot stay here one moment longer without his companion beside him.

  He leaves in the last of the night, darkness shrouding the way he slips from the gate. With no-one to give orders, no-one else behaves any differently from the way they usually would. Even if they had seen him, no-one would have stopped him. Still, he dresses in dark clothes. He takes with him his most beautiful toolcase, the one Den Huo gave him on the day of the Coronation. That, and a tiny, tiny pair of leather shoes that have sat on the mantelpiece in his quarters since the day his son was taken from him, and placed in the castle.

  Alej may have failed them all in some way or other, but when you look at the way in which life itself has failed Juan, there is no comparison.

  It is permissible to rewrite the worst of history, sometimes.

  Selina dreams of an infinite redness, and an everlasting silence.

  She is woken by Tabatha, whose firm but insistent voice repeats her name at her ear, again and again until she replies with a blurry “Yes?”

  It feels so rude. She didn’t mean to be rude.

  The memories of last night - this morning? - flood back to her. She shivers.

  “Eliza…”

  “She’s still in the Testing Centre. She’s safe. She hasn’t stopped shouting. She is a danger to us all. But she is not the pressing thing.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Is it Aiden? Is he okay?

  But Tabatha is explaining that there has been another arrival. That still more strangers have walked in, and that one is a boy who is asking for her.

  “Is it Alej?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “Tall, wide, blond hair, dark eyes?”

  “It sounds well enough like him.”

  Selina leaps from her bed, ignoring the strikes of pain the soles of her feet give her as they touch the ground. She halts mid-run as she realises she is wearing only a slip of the thinnest silk. “I don’t remember…”

  “You were asleep on your feet. It is all part of what I do; you have no need to worry.”

  Selina nods. “Is there something I can wear?”

  “I have for you only some of your companion’s clothes. You oughtn’t to wear that dress again. Not now.”

  Selina dresses in her slip, then in Aiden’s silk shirt and trousers without even thinking about it, and when she catches sight of herself there is something shocking about her in what was always Aiden’s look. Her hair is sleek. The slip pokes out sage-coloured at the V of the unbuttoned shirt-top. The trousers sit low on her hips, and she has to turn them up at the bottom, even though she and Aiden are of a height. Her feet disappear completely, even when she puts on the wrecked shoes that brought her here - despite Tabatha’s protestations that, surely, they could at least find her something other than those, this is not the kind of time that Selina wants to be uncomfortable. No, she just wants to get to Alej.

  “Selina?” Tabatha asks, quietly.

  “Yes?”

  “There is no leader. His Excellency is gone, and Juan, who many of us looked to, is nowhere to be found. Will we turn to Aiden, now? I am not sure he is capable.”

  “He said that he would not accept. That…Tabatha, he said I ought to take charge, if any of us should. But I was not made to lead.”

  “I can say only that, from here, it looks to me as if you were made for nothing else.”

  Selina swallows. She has never imagined this for herself. She cannot think of this, not now. She offers only: “I have to see Alej.”

  Tabatha nods, and steps in front of her, leading the way down.

  Alej and Ali, as it transpires. Alej tried to go in alone, but Ali stopped him, said she needed to know how Eliza was, that it would be wrong, after all this time, to leave without saying goodbye.

  Selina covers her face with her hands on seeing Alej. Then she drops her hands, and takes a long, long look at him. She can see it now, the similarities between him and Aid
en. The hair - Alej’s yellower, yes, healthier, definitely. The skin, too, the golden tone is richer in Alej, darker, but present. The eyes are completely different, presumably his father’s, where Aiden has his mother’s, but Selina will not meet Juan, not in this story at least, for Juan is already gone. She will not see how similar he and his son are, not now.

  “Did you get what you came for?” Alej asks.

  “Where’s Eliza?” Ali asks.