by Femi Fadugba
I imagine being connected to every joule inside every bullet. I start trusting I can control it all, start believing I will.
I reach both arms forward. I’m not close enough to touch any of the shells, but I squeeze down hard anyway as if I’m wrapping my hands round each one. It burns, the way gripping a dozen hot coals would burn, but I press down harder, firming the waves of heat scalding my wrists.
There’s an enormous amount of energy packed into every bullet; I can feel it ready to burst out. If I release it too fast, everything within a square mile goes up in smoke. But, if I don’t do something quick, the bullets hit their targets.
Just by thinking it, by willing it, I pierce into the bullets, splitting their fiery skins in two, letting heat and red light surge out. Watching it is like staring directly at the sun – fifteen suns, each only a few metres from my eyes. If I don’t turn away now, I’ll be blinded. Just like he was, I remember. But, if I turn away or lose focus for a split second, they’ll all die. From the corner of my eye, I see Kato and Rob turning away from the flash. All the others, including the men in SWAT gear, cover their eyes too.
I’m folding. My fingers and calves cramp under the strain, and my eyes are drenched in crimson flashes. Blind spots start appearing. I go faint and lose my grip on the round heading for Nadia, and, like unpausing a video, the bullet speeds up again. I’ve already converted most of its metal to light, but the remaining pellet would still cut a hole clean through her.
I ignore the pain, refocus, breathe slower. ‘Don’t … fuck … this up,’ I cry to myself, pulling on the bullet – now an inch from Nadia’s skull. And, with everything I have left, I yank my arms back, releasing the final ounce of energy trapped inside, and a hot sphere of electromagnetic light floods the sky.
I’m lying on my back, melted hailstones connecting my spine to the concrete. I try to sit up and can’t.
Sirens sing in the background, and people are shouting medical things. I grope my stomach to check if the stab wounds are still seeping. They are.
I did it.
I saved everyone I could. No fewer, no more.
The storm clouds have moved on. So has the blinding scarlet light that drowned the atmosphere seconds earlier, and I’m left with a star-specked sky to stare into, knowing that, in a few minutes, my vision will get blurry, then spotty, then fade to blindness for the rest of my life. Soon I’ll forget almost everything I saw in the Upper World; the memories will give way to fifteen years of static confusion. I’ll forget that every moment of my life is still floating up there, waiting to be re-seen, to be relived. I’ll forget it was all so worth it and the million reasons why.
But for now, while I remember, I smile.
QED.
THE AFTER-MATH
* * *
EPILOGUE
Esso · 16.5 Years Later
Judging by the number of convertibles blasting neo-bashment in traffic, no one was taking the first sunny morning of summer for granted. With Peckham Library behind us, Rhia and I were standing where the alleyway opened up to the main road.
Over a year had passed since the night she and Olivia burst into my house, the night I finally went back to the Upper World. If it hadn’t been for Rhia’s therapist intervening on my behalf, I’d be in jail eating Pot Noodle out of an electric kettle right now, instead of enjoying a summer walk with Rhia. Anahera thought all the crazy stuff that had happened to us could be easily explained away by psychology and science (she was always careful to use the word ‘science’ instead of ‘physics’, since she didn’t want to further ‘confuse’ poor Rhia). Turns out, dissociative amnesia – where a traumatic event makes you forget the memories associated with it – is a surprisingly common medical condition that doesn’t require an invisible world to explain. And, when Rhia showed Anahera the CCTV footage, she responded that bullets go missing from crime scenes all the time, and that a freak power surge can put enough current through a streetlight to cause permanent eye damage in a grown man. Even Kato – who I’d told about seeing the Cantor’s headphones in the Upper World and who had literally been standing next to me when I bought their stock – doubted I’d ever seen the future. Just like everyone else.
But Rhia and I knew better.
‘D’you reckon you’d do things differently if you could?’ she asked. ‘You know … if you remembered what you saw each time you went up there and all.’
‘You know the mad part?’ I replied, thinking about the fifteen years I’d spent waiting to go back and change things, only to go back and cause what had already happened to happen. ‘I’m not sure I would.’
I’d been so obsessed with getting to the Upper World to fix the past, I’d ignored how strict the rules of physics were, that our universe was that unchanging block of space–time Nadia had described.
But, as rigid as the past and future might be, both eternities balanced themselves on a single point, a miracle axis we all live in: the present.
The here and now is the only place we’re free to tilt our futures, where we can rediscover and remake our pasts. It’s the only place I’ll ever get to feel the sun’s scorching touch … and Rhia’s hugs – which were surprisingly suffocating these days. The equations of relativity draw the same arcs whether you run them forward or backwards – who’s to say the present isn’t where both ends of time flow from? Where we both experience and choose our fates. Sometimes we can’t move forward till we look back. But, when we do, Now is where we find that first step.
Rhia was doing her ting too. After clearing her GCSEs, she took her Honours exams a year early and smashed those as well. UCL offered her early admission to their physics programme and, apparently, their football team already had an eye on her.
A car approached, carrying a group of men wolf-whistling out the windows.
‘Oi! Peng ting!’ came one husky echo down the alley. It actually took me a second to realize he was chatting to Rhia. We walked a bit further in, pretending not to hear.
‘Ting!’ he shouted after her. ‘I said you’re PENG!’
Judging from their laddish accents, they definitely weren’t linked to a Bloodshed set (or ‘Uncle Bloodshed’, as Rhia liked calling him for jokes, even though she’d still not managed to meet him). After another round of whistles, the car screeched off, leaving smoky fumes behind for us to choke on.
For the waste-sergeants in that car, this was just Saturday-morning banter. I wondered how often Rhia had to deal with that kind of nonsense, and, thinking back, how often I’d been the mandem in the car or the silent pedestrian walking past with his head down.
‘You know what,’ I said, turning to her. ‘Don’t have it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was shaky, probably as angry at me for what I was suggesting as she was at the men driving off. ‘You want me to run after them? Pick a fight with all four?’
‘Nah,’ I replied. ‘Do it the other way.’ While she was considering it, I used my finger to draw an arrow from street level to the sky. ‘The roof … as far up as you can get it. You’ll need to hurry up, though.’
I heard her skip over to the pavement edge, probably to get a clearer view of the whip.
‘I can walk you through the memory again,’ I offered.
After Rhia’s trip to St Jude’s, I’d shared more details about my last meetup with Nadia, and in the process, turned Rhia’s faintest and most painful memory into one that shined with love. The way I remembered it, baby Rhia was chillin happily on the grass when I took the photo of Nadia on that bench. But Nadia had been so anxious about letting her baby go, that as soon as I pressed the shutter she leapt up and grabbed Rhia, smiling as she hummed a sleepy lullaby into her ear.
‘Nah, it’s light,’ Rhia replied as a noisy wind entered the alley. ‘I got it this time.’
‘Remember: gravity is an illusion,’ I said anyway, imagining her already opening her WINDOW. She’d read up about how Einstein – after figuring out space, time and energy – spent another decade in a h
ole scribbling equations, then came out realizing we’d been seeing gravity the wrong way round as well. She’d derived the maths herself – even taught me a thing or two about Riemannian manifolds. The next line was all me, though.
‘And when an apple breaks from a branch, it doesn’t actually fall to the ground –’
‘I know, I know,’ she replied. ‘The apple stays still. It’s the ground that accelerates up to meet it.’
There was a harsh groan – twisting metal and the sound of bolts popping out of their sockets. Then came a loud SNAP! – the roof tearing clean off the chassis – and, finally, the soft whistle of an unidentified car part leaving the atmosphere.
Thanks to Rhia, a roofless Vauxhall was now riding around Peckham with four terrified dudes screaming inside it. What made it even more hilarious, poetic almost, was that the universe felt like a lighter, breezier place because of it.
We both laughed so hard we had to slump down where the concrete met the brick wall in the alleyway.
‘Don’t go bussin up your lungs,’ Rhia said, seeing I was still neck deep in it. ‘You’re all the fam I got right now.’
I found myself choking up and tried to create some distance between us so she wouldn’t notice. I was getting softer by the week.
‘Anyway, I told you I had something important to tell you,’ she reminded me.
‘Yeah, go on, then.’ I was still blinking faster than I wanted.
‘So I might have … sort of … asked an old friend to download Mum’s records from a deleted St Jude’s database.’ After copping a judging stare from me, she added, ‘Look, it is about Mum, but it’s not what you think.’
‘I don’t know, Rhi. I’ve finally – just about – turned the corner on this whole acceptance thing. Was assuming you were trying to do that, too.’
‘I am. And I mostly have. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I still wish I had my parents around; the same way I wish the guys who just drove past us weren’t all pricks. But I’m not waiting for anyone to come along and fix me any more. I feel like I’m whole already.’
This time I had to take a really deep breath to fight the tears. We couldn’t save Nadia and D, but we’d at least managed to save each other.
‘So, you wanna know what I found or not?’
‘Of course I bloody do.’
‘Well,’ she said, taking a long pause, ‘it turns out Mum kept a notebook while she was there.’
‘And?’
‘And … you were definitely right about her not being insane.’ She took another painful break. ‘I think it’s the Upper World that’s madder than we thought.’ That part didn’t surprise me – whenever your circle of knowledge expands, the wall of ignorance that surrounds it does too.
‘And,’ she added, almost whispering now, ‘your dad … wasn’t the only one who knew about it.’
APPENDICES
* * *
APPENDIX I: PYTHAGORAS’ PROOF (FROM ESSO ADENON’S SCHOOL NOTEBOOK)
Apparently, Pythagoras took four identical triangles (like the one above) and arranged them on a square white plate – the first time making the pattern on the left (below) and the second time making the pattern on the right.
The left plate has got an empty white square in the middle. Since the sides of it have a length of c, the white square has an area of c2 (since the area of a square is length times width).
But the right plate has two empty white squares on it. Using the same logic as before, we find that the one at the top has an area of a2, and the other one has an area of b2.
Here’s the clever bit: in both the left and right arrangements, none of the triangles has changed size and the plate underneath hasn’t changed size either … which means the total uncovered white space must be the same for both patterns … which means the combined area of the two white squares on the right must equal the area of the big solo square on the left.
Or, in maths speak: a2 + b2 = c2.
Like a page from God’s sketchbook …
APPENDIX II: SPEED OF LIGHT DERIVATION (FROM RHIA’S NOTEBOOK)
Maxwell’s equation for calculating speed of electromagnetic induction:
From my textbook, I plug in the numbers for the two symbols to the right of the equals sign and get:
Punching that into my phone calculator gets me:
Or rounding up …
(the exact speed of light in metres per second).
APPENDIX III: FROM RHIA BLACK’S SCRAPBOOK
APPENDIX IV: FROM RHIA BLACK’S SCRAPBOOK
Starting with the same triangle as last time, I get the following equation (using Pythagoras).
I can also break out the car’s speed, v in the equation, into its components across all three dimensions of space (again using Pythagoras).
Then substitute this version of v back into the first equation.
If I divide all terms on both sides of the equation by tOlivia2 I then get:
If an object/person is travelling through space at the speed of light, the three grey terms on the left equal c2 (again because of Pythagoras) and the time-travel term on the right is zero (i.e. travel through time stops). If an object/person is stationary in space, the three grey terms on the left are equal to zero and the time-travel term on the right is equal to the speed of light.
APPENDIX V: FROM RHIA BLACK’S CLOUD ACCOUNT
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Afkera – my soulmate, homie and (not so) secret weapon. Thanks, Mum and Dad, for the love and imagination that allowed me and this story to exist. Cheers, Jumy, Modupeola, Bose and Femi B – the Greatest Siblings in the WorldTM. Thanks also to my wider fam: the Unstoppable Adepojus, the Unmatchable Falades and the Everlasting Emiolas (special thanks for the roof, Aunty Tayo, and ‘board room’ chats, Tosin). Thanks, John, my earliest and most unexpected physics teacher.
Hold tight, Abim, Sam, Bishup, Kate, Jasmine, Ella, Loquacity and C.S. for helping to make this dream real. And to all my early reviewers – Kura, Viki, Matt, Tunuka, Pete, Kwasi, Linda and Tobi – your time and wisdom made a difference.
Love to my MEF team (Denice and Asmeret) for steering this ship beautifully. Thanks to my peerless agent, Claire (for being Claire), the Penguin Random House UK and HarperCollins US teams for taking a bet on me, and my sick trio of editors – Emma, Stephanie and Asmaa – for getting this thing right on both sides of the pond.
Tom, Weruche, James and Lazzro – you guys dripped all over the audiobook. I praise God for your drip. And love to Daniel, Eric, Tendo and Michelle for giving this story a second life off the page.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published by Penguin Books in 2021
Text and illustrations copyright © Femi Fadugba, 2021
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustration by Michael Rogers
With thanks to Inclusive Minds for connecting us with their Inclusion Ambassador network, in particular Robert Kingett and Jessica Chaikof for their input.
ISBN: 978-0-241-50562-5
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Footnotes
Chapter 1: Esso · Now
1 See page 341 for more information.
Chapter 4: Rhia · 15 Years Later
1 See page 343 for more information.
Chapter 10: Rhia · 15 Years Later
1 See page 345 for more information.
Chapter 24: Rhia · 15 Years Later
1 See page 347 for more information.