by Harn, Darby
The anchor rests his elbow on the desk. “Can’t you just revise the terms of the contract, Professor? Some would argue you and your kind owe Break Pointe.”
The image cuts to the grainy 8mm film they show every anniversary of the attack. The alien floats down the burning streets of downtown, a lightning storm bottled in a humanoid jar. Currents of energy arc off the object burning in its gossamer chest, a gleaming star tessellating through infinite shapes, right into men, women and children. Ghosts of terrified people swirl in the alien’s soap bubble skin for minutes after being burnt out of existence, their silent screams stretched out until they shatter into fractals of nonsense light and color.
Does your head in.
No one knows why the alien came. No one knows where they came from, or what the purpose of that thing in its chest scientists called the Myriad was. Finding the Myriad would be grand, but it was lost with the alien back in 1968.
Blackwood’s raspy voice crackles out of the television. “No one asked for this. I didn’t. My daughter didn’t. Our gifts didn’t come with a return policy.”
“They seem to come with a price tag.”
“I can revise a contract, sure. I can’t revise the law.”
Ma leaves the television, adrift between her compulsions without the ballast of her medications. Her eyes fix on me, the way they did the bulbs, the boxes, the sun burning in the sky dizzy with birds, all of them puzzles my mother can’t solve.
Her fingers claw at my heart. “Are you the light, Kitsie?”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to fix it. All day and night I’m out in the ruins searching, but there’s nothing. There has to be something, or someone is going to find Ma and I out there in the dust. I’ll find something. I know it. I’m not afraid. I’m not heartbroken this is my mother, lost to something she can’t see or fight.
I don’t fear.
I follow the routine. Boxes stay shut. Windows closed. Lips sealed. Ma bleeds the carpet red, searching for release. I go through the apartment, unscrewing all the remaining light in our home, and hiding it in places even I will forget.
Strands of birds constrict over Gibbons, thickening, shrinking, never holding. Let me find something.
Anything.
The torrent swirling overhead intensifies as I roll into the intersection of Keith and Adams, just shy of the wall. Keith and Adams is one of the highlights of the disaster tours prevalent in the city. Busloads of tourists gather around the hole blasted into the street to try and get a picture of the train stalled on the tracks below. Above, the sky rinses out its dark. Birds rocket past me, corkscrewing into the crater, and down the subway entrance, their frantic chirps escalating into a mad chorus that sounds like the city is screaming.
I chain my bike to the corroded railing bordering the entrance and take the lamp off the handlebars. Going down into the subway, day or night, is sheer stupidity. If I go home empty-handed again, I’ll be walking out with everything I own. I squeeze through the gap in the gate, down into the dark.
The floor of the mezzanine rustles with decades of bird bones. A sign in the window of the ticket station advises ALL TRAINS CANCELLED. A more recent sign pasted to the cracked glass amends the original to say FOREVER. My breath echoes off the white marble facing on the columns in the mezzanine. Beer cans top the low tiled wall bordering the escalator. Sleeping bags. Coming back in the daylight is an idea; so is never coming back at all. Birds funnel down into the subway, twisting along the magnetic line between the ship and lost debris. I zip my jacket up, for the good it will do, and I climb over the turnstile.
I ease down the stilled escalator. The glazed ceramic block of the walls enclosing the escalator had cracked in the impact of the alien ship, along with the ceiling. Dead bats dangle in thick, dusty cobwebs. Dust like chalk in my mouth. My heart thuds in my chest, ba-dumm. This isn’t fear. This is just the iron in my blood, contracting, stretching with the magnetic tug of the alien ship. There’s nothing to fear down here but stories. Poor and hungry. Unregistered Empowered. Straw Men.
I don’t think this lamp is going to cut it.
A hanging sign heralds the station name. I follow the excitement of the birds to the end of the platform and the realization what I’m looking for is somewhere far down the tracks. Naturally. Rats skip across the half-ties as I head down the track west of the station. Every few minutes I look back, the platform farther and farther away. If I fall, get lost or end up as Victim #1 in someone’s really bad slasher flick, no one will ever know. Ma may not even notice I’m gone.
Birds corkscrew through the tunnel. Twisted shapes worm out of the ash-covered burl ahead. My foot catches on something. The lamp crashes out of my hand, the bulb breaking on the ground but I can still see. Electric magenta flickers at the far end of an unlikely tunnel melted through the subway wall. Birds thread the needle, caroming through a deformed geography altered by some unimaginable force. Scabs of melted rebar vein in and out of charred concrete. Shards of igneous quartz scrape against my skin as I crawl inside, drawn like the birds toward the same conclusion. The light beyond is the ship.
Sometimes I get a jolt from something with enough power to kick me back on for a minute. I ride it out. No sense screaming and hollering. I’ll bring the tunnel down on me.
Knobby protrusions of crystal grind against my knees. I’m not sure I can even get through this thing and then the tunnel opens to the hollowed center of the wreck. Claret fissures crag the strange cave of the alien ship. Bird bones salt the tapering ridge I stumble across. The interior resembles a hollowed out pumpkin, gutted flesh petrified into a translucent shell that exists somewhere between crystal and metal. Purple-red wisps eddy beneath the crystal, evidence of the flash of cosmic violence that hardened pure energy into solid light.
I can’t stay here, not long; the radiation levels are bound to be higher near the core. In and out. One thing. A couple things. We need rent. Ma needs her medication.
I open my bag. Scoop up as many loose shards as I can carry. Conduit. Power cells. I’ve got to find some of that. High above, a dim light wavers like a dying candle. The core. A miniature star. Vortices of prismatic energy ripple across the interior of the ship. Reality deforms in their wake; the air burns like a napkin, but the holes close as soon as they open. Nothing connects. Nothing fires. I crumple down into a squat, ducking beneath the fracturing sky above. It’s like the core of the ship is trying to open a portal back through space and time.
Pain stabs through my temple. I waver, dizzy. My blood feels heavy. My body. I can’t stay here. Go back. Get out. Glimmering lines wrap into a pupa-like casing above the tunnel. At some point, the casing fractured. I shine my light into it. Hollow. I climb these ledges of crystal in the wall. Sparkling ash rubs off on my gloves as I touch the tiny, spiked core of the cocoon. Cracks vein the heart-sized clump, a deep magenta so red it verges on purple, throbbing with an imperceptible hum ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm and this is no random fragment of alien debris.
Bleeding Jesus.
I break the crystal from the casing, stubborn as an icicle. It’s not cold. It’s warm. A lightning bolt in amber. I don’t know if this is the Myriad; all I know is I’ve got something extraordinary. Priceless. Forget catching up on the rent. I can get us a new apartment, a real apartment, across the river. Ma can afford better medication; she can get well and maybe I can leave. I can see something in the world that isn’t walls and ruins and mounds of ash. I run out of the abysmal valley of the crashed ship, carrying the fire of the stars.
Birds chase me all the way out of the ship, back up to the street on Woolf, their anxious screeching drowned out by a strange whispering kind of leak, as if all the sound in the city is funneling towards this one void. I look up, like I always do.
Valene Blackwood hovers above me. “I hear you.”
Two
Here in the ruins, your navigation gets confused. Communications. Momentum. A moment ago, I found the answer to all my problems. Now I’ve g
ot a brand new set. The worst of it is, I’ve imagined this moment for years. It just never unfolded with me smuggling a dangerous piece of alien contraband.
“Hi,” I say.
My voice echoes back to me. This is her power. Valene hears everything, everywhere, all the time; in interviews, she often says she can hear fingernails growing on the other side of the planet. She can also manipulate sonic waves to amplify or mute, and to propel her into flight, like she’s doing right now.
Valene descends to the street before me, with a playful smile. In the images of her in the GP app, in the posters and billboards plastered all over the city, Valene possesses a quiet, regal dignity. But when she smiles, her statuesque perfection exchanges, chemically, spiritually, cosmically, for a girlish spirit. An effortless warmth. Just play it straight. Act natural. Whatever you do, don’t confess.
“You’re beautiful,” I say. Damn it.
She tucks back strands of black hair behind her ears. Her hands linger over them. “Don’t be shy or anything.”
“You must hear that all the time.”
“I hear a lot of things. Not all of it is good.” She smiles. “Like that – right there. Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That hum. This pulse. Tac a tac.”
I shrug. “I don’t hear anything.”
“It’s coming from your bag,” she says, stepping toward me. “It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I tuck my bag behind my back, as if that will do any good. There isn’t supposed to be anyone down at the wall. Definitely not anyone with a bagful of alien contraband from inside the ship. I could get ten to twenty for this. Life.
“There’s a lot of strange things down here,” I say.
“There are. You, for instance.”
“I’m strange?”
“In the best way. Your voice…” Her fingers caress her ears. “You have the most unique voice.”
I’ve never liked my voice, clunky, uncertain, half of one thing or another, not enough of both. When I was younger, all my H’s disappeared, like Ma’s. Instead of ‘three,’ I was saying ‘tree.’ Imagine it. What’s seven minus four? Kit raises her hand. The answer is tree. Elementary school drummed most of Dublin out of me. Now everything I say comes out flat. Considered. How Valene finds any value in it, I don’t know.
“I’ve heard it before,” Valene says.
“Oh. What?”
She gushes a smile. “I never get tired of that reaction.”
I suppose for her it’s like turning the dial on the radio. People are stations. Except sometimes the stations may be playing less, let’s say, safe for work, material.
“What else have you heard? Because… I can explain…”
Her brows arch. “I wouldn’t mind if you explained. Or demonstrated. You wouldn’t think so, given my gifts, but the truth is I’m much more a visual person.”
“I can work with that.”
“I bet you can.” These brows she’s got. They’re deadly.
“I haven’t heard anything unbecoming, Kit. At least not to my ears. But I did hear you down at the bank the other day.”
I bite my lip, to keep my shock from caroming back at me. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You saved that woman. A lot of people, most likely.”
“I did what anybody would do.”
Her smile fades. “Not anyone.”
Valene looks toward the Blackwood Building, across the river, this sadness in her eyes. What do I say? What do I do?
“Valene…”
She cups her ears. This chopping sound hits against the street. Against us. Dust lashes my skin. I cover my eyes as harsh light falls on us. A news helicopter hovers over the street. These things always chase Empowered around the city, hoping to catch a story. Not much happens here.
Valene stumbles into me. “It’s too much…”
“What’s happening?”
She sinks to her knees, her fingers clawing at her ears. “The sound… I can’t take the sound…”
I don’t understand. I thought she could control this. The cacophony of rotor blades, crumbling earth and falling debris amplifies with every second. So does Valene’s anguish.
I kneel beside her. “Focus.”
“I can’t.”
I take her hand. “You can. Don’t react. Don’t hear it.”
“Don’t?”
“Don’t fear.”
Valene’s confidence returns. Her power. I vibrate with it. Never once have I felt this. This possibility. Dust and trash cascade across the sonic bubble that forms around us, like water over a windshield in a car wash. The only sound within is my pulse, pounding through my hand into hers ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. Her smile returns, along with an expression I’m not entirely sure of. Hope, maybe. I lift clear of the ruins and the darkness, as much in Valene’s arms as she’s in mine, and she flies me home to the apartment at the speed of sound.
It’s not exactly a soft landing.
A couple miles away, the helicopter buzzes over the wall, searching for us. I pat my bag. Good. I still have my bag.
Valene leans into me, surprised, frightened, exhausted. “You won’t tell anyone… Kit, you won’t tell, will you?”
I don’t want to hurt her ears. I shake my head.
Her fingers touch my lips. “I won’t tell, either.”
She flies away, high into the clouds above the roaming helicopter. My heart goes with her, though I still hear it fast and anxious, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm.
“Sign here,” the burly guy from GP in the black suit and mirror-shades says, pointing to a line at the bottom of the NDA.
“I said I won’t be talking to anyone,” I say, initialing the thick document he came to the apartment with.
Ma pries at the TV behind me. Questions Remain captions the video the helicopter took. Debris kicked up by the chopper strikes the sonic bubble and behind the shimmer, you can’t really see me. Suits me just fine. I don’t need anyone knowing who I am, or what I was doing out by the wall that night. I just thought she might call. Send flowers. Ask me to dinner. Propose.
Reasonable things.
He points to another line. “And here.”
“I don’t want anything,” I say.
He takes the document back. “Direct any media inquiries to this number.” The big guy hands me a business card. He’s all business. There’s no name on this card. Only a number. “Don’t expect too much trouble, though. We’ll steer them clear of you.”
“Oh. Ok. How is she?”
“Did you take any pictures of Valene?”
“What? No.”
“Show me your photo log.”
“You serious?”
“Swipe your PEAL, please.”
“Wow,” I say, and unlock my PEAL. He takes my hand and swipes through the pictures. Wait. The fuck all do I have on here? Don’t be going back too far now. “You good?”
He lets go. “What is that noise?”
Birds bat against the windows, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, drawn by the magnetic lure of the crystalline object hidden under my bed. I expected it would be reporters banging down my door keeping me awake at night, or maybe at least Valene’s footsteps on the roof. Even without all the attention, I don’t need to be drawing any, so I haven’t gone to the swap yet.
“She spilled birdseed,” I say.
The big guy nods as he looks at Ma, clawing the screen of the TV, trying to liberate me from the glass. “Birdseed.”
“Just loads. Complete mess.”
He folds up the NDA and tucks it in his suit jacket. “Valene was conducting tests of her sonic abilities when she encountered unexpected turbulence. Repeat that back.”
“Um… Valene was conducting tests of her sonic powers when she encountered unexpected turbulence,” I say.
“Abilities. Not powers.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Everyone’s got abilities. Not everyone has power.”
I shake my head. “Fine. How is she? Is she ok?”
“Any concerns about your situation regarding this matter, use that number. Understand any violation of the agreement you signed will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
“Cheers,” I say, and close the door.
His shoes fall heavy down the stairs. The birds rap against the windows. Ma bangs on the glass in answer, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm and I can’t hear anything but the clatter of metal against concrete. My heart pulsing in Valene’s hand. The two of us connected for a moment, cocooned in the same sound. The same life. I close my eyes, and she holds me close. Vapor envelopes us. Fire catches my skin. Light burns inside me, for once.
Ma winds a nonsense path through the apartment, pounding on the windows, the walls, my bedroom door. Two in the morning. I haven’t slept since the crash. Days now. The apartment swells with pressure, ready to explode at any moment. Something is going to happen, you think; but then nothing does. I keep checking my PEAL, hoping for a text from Valene. Some mention of me in an interview she gives, but she’s not giving any.
Ma claws at the TV screen. “Are you the light, Kitsie?”
“Go to sleep.”
“It’s in here. You’re in here.”
I slump into the chair beside the couch. Just let it stop. This fucking whirlpool. Every day. Around and around, faster and faster as you spiral to the bottom and there’s no bottom.
Think.
Something else. Valene. Her skin. Soft. Her lips, pasted to mine. I hear you, she says, her voice harmonic in my ears, her sound enveloping my entire body in this cocoon, vibrating, pulsing, quickening against my skin and glass rattles in its frame as Ma struggles to open the living room window. Birds drum against the cloudy pane, desperate to get in. I brush Ma away, and tack up a frayed old bath towel over the mangled blinds.
“Stay away from the window,” I say.
Her hands clench in frustration. “Let them out.”
“They’re out now. You can’t let them in, Ma.”