A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  Some city planner somewhere, I thought, was scared out of his wits but secretly grateful that there had actually been a use for all the new protocols and systems that most countries had scrambled to develop after the Dimensional Anomaly. Most had created them with phases (back home, it was colour-coded for some reason, rather than numbered), after the initial panic and draconian captivity of the post-DA hours.

  It wasn’t that keeping people in their houses would prevent attacks, since the appearance of creatures had been fairly limited, and only in certain areas (yes, I would have pointed out: precisely along the route of travel that Johnny and I had taken). But it might be better, everyone reasoned, if this were going to happen again, to keep the population dispersed instead of frenziedly clogging the roads, or caught by surprise in arenas or movie theaters. Same principle as blackouts during the Blitz, people said. Don’t clump, don’t concentrate. Stay apart, get your go-bag, be ready to move, but don’t interfere with defense operations, and stay out of the line of fire. It kept cities from tying up soldiers or public servants trying to manage the movement of entire populations. Hence: shelter instead of evacuation. And it was easier to practice in drills, too.

  There weren’t many people out, not much traffic either. People looked harried, rattled. I knew the look. Panic curdled quickly, as if the body were trying to hold up too heavy a weight, and became this expression: grim annoyance. One guy on the corner, shivering in a t-shirt and zebra-print parachute pants, was screaming about the reactor and the end of the world. Around him, pedestrians passed without even glancing up. Flyers stuck hastily onto the walls said much the same thing: END TIMES! and THEY ARE LYING TO US ALL! and WORLDWIDE COVER-UP OF ALIEN FIRST CONTACT! I wondered if the screamer had put them up.

  Two days till my flight home, playing spy in a strange city, killing time till I thought Johnny might emerge from her hotel. I felt ridiculous, still wished I had brought Carla’s little digital camera; my phone took lousy photos. Old stone churches and squat towers, sculptures everywhere, the trees all slick and dark against the pale sky, a few looking ready to bud, grass and weeds already going green. Some places had set up sawn-in-half wooden barrels by their doors as planters, many with strappy leaves that I thought might be tulips later. Funny, back home we were still snowed in; you wouldn’t see a flower till May.

  Gates, I kept thinking. Gates, doors, locks, keys.

  Maybe we were looking at the wrong thing. Maybe we always had been.

  Keys. Locks.

  A corner store had shingled its windows with today’s papers, clipped to thin chains: last night’s torn sky, that terrible streak of light, the purple and green even more lurid in print. The headline took up more than half the page and read simply: IT’S BACK. Unable to resist, I went in and got a chocolate bar and a copy of the paper, folding it into the inside pocket of my coat.

  The city had a hell of a lot of stairs and slopes, I realized as I ate my candy and wheezed up flight after flight, sometimes stopping in stores just to catch my breath. “When did ye arrive in the city?” a girl asked me behind the counter at a scarf place, and I managed, “Look, I used to have a lot more active job, okay?”

  Many of the stairs were barely wide enough to admit my shoulders, leading into strange little courtyards, the backs of buildings, some with fountains or gardens, more just a meeting place of stairs that went other places. The problem with North America, really, was that you didn’t have enough old buildings to look at...

  I thought about the castle, built so you’d have to run uphill to reach it in the first place. Then the thick walls, the arrow-slits barely wide enough to fit a hand, the cannon protruding from the stone. Spikes on the gates and no clear lines of sight, a hundred places to split up your foe, pen them in, slaughter them. You’ll never get in here, we are ready for you. Watchtowers, cameras. How had last night happened, how? Hundreds of people going over the place with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it would be safe for the party. We should have taken a cannonball in with us, I decided.

  Eventually a group of tourists in bright windbreakers pushed past me, their leader announcing something garbled about a war museum, and I followed them for something to do, ending up not quite back at the castle, under some huge pointy stone thing, smeared pitch black all over as if it had been burnt. Conical speakers had been wired to the top of it, labelled with the city crest, like the ones they’d put up in Edmonton on various buildings and trees. We’d taken down the tornado sirens years ago, Dad had said, because they’d use radio, TV, the internet, or your cell phone to let you know there was a warning; now, new ones were going back up. But no one was worried about tornadoes any more. Bigger concerns these days. With tentacles.

  Johnny’s hotel reminded me of her house: broad, heavily decorated with stonework like a frosted cake. I moved carefully behind the illuminated concrete sign near the lobby doors, my jeans immediately soaked by the dripping hedge next to it. Right; I had killed enough time, I thought, for someone who habitually slept in (and who had stayed up late, I knew with rock-hard certainty) to wake up and leave the hotel. And why did we say ‘killing time’ anyway? Godawful saying.

  At any rate: maybe she would spend all day indoors on her laptop, and in that case I imagined that when she did eventually leave I’d have died of a heart attack from sheer frustration. But I didn’t think she’d find the answers she needed that way, and I wanted to be ready when she did. I had two plans, basically.

  If she walked, I would tail her to see where she was going. If she drove, which she couldn’t do, she’d have to wait in the lobby while a valet or somebody brought the car around (rented, oddly Popemobile-like—giving every impression it was coated in a thick layer of bulletproof glass; I’d seen it last night). That would give me time to sneak out and leap into one of the cabs waiting at the hotel’s cab stand. It was perfect.

  Follow that car, I’d say. Growl, like a private detective in an old movie. And hope they took credit card, because not only did I not have cash in whatever currency they used in Scotland, I didn’t even know what it might be. I hadn’t looked it up before I flew out.

  The cold crept up through the soles of my boots, the thin fabric of my jacket. Back home, it wouldn’t even have felt that cold. Not a dry cold but damp, clinging. Only a few people walked in and out of the glass doors of the lobby, not glancing at me where I stooped behind the slightly-too-short sign. Because there had been no further attacks, as far as I’d heard from eavesdropping on people on the walk back, the city planned to stay in Phase 1, without too many restrictions on movement and businesses. But people clearly didn’t want to leave anyway. Maybe she’d…

  Nope. Ha. Even before I saw the face, something about the hair, posture, coat, size—everything fractured behind the decorative patterns on the glass—told me it was her. She stepped outside for a moment, trailing Rutger, then nodded to him and went back in, broken into shards again by the designs.

  Okay. So they were driving, were they? Well, there were two cabs at the stand, both empty. All I needed was for…

  “All right, let’s keep moving.”

  I jumped, and spun nearly into the chest of a black-uniformed security guard, built not quite to Rutger-scale but tall enough to loom into the fog so that I could barely see his face. His hands were clasped politely behind his back.

  “Oh, uh,” I began, backing away, trying to stay between him and the lobby doors so Johnny couldn’t see. “Sorry, I uh, I dropped my phone and I was looking for it.”

  “The phone you’re holding?”

  “Uh.” Christ! Come on, come on, thirty seconds and she’d leave. Then I could make some excuse and get away from him, into a cab. “Yeah, funny isn’t it, when you travel, the jetlag, hard to think.”

  “Pack it up. Go on, gerroff.” His voice was pleasant and level, but his mouth had drawn into a tight bloodless line in his ruddy face, fog swirling around the top of his head so that I couldn’t see his eyes.

  “Okay, okay.” I held up my hands
in a gesture of surrender, and made the mistake of looking over at the lobby doors.

  “Is… is that what it is, then? Eh? Violatin’ the privacy of our guests? One of them creepers, come here to spy on that little girl? What, to get pictures? Eh?” He snapped out a hand to grab my phone, and when I yanked it out of the way, seized my wrist instead, painfully tight.

  As I tried reflexively to twist it out of his grip, someone else took my other one, and for a second I had a sense of déjàvu that froze me to the spot just long enough to realize that he had let go.

  “Morning, Miss Chambers,” he said. “Just gettin’ rid of a pervert here.”

  “Thanks, Jim,” she said. “I’ll handle this.”

  “You’ll… er, I mean…” He gave up and headed back inside, making a little futile gesture at the valet who pulled up with their car, Rutger sitting shotgun.

  I pulled my sleeve out of Johnny’s hand. “Th—”

  “What do you want? And what part of stay away from me didn’t you understand?”

  “It’s a free country! I can walk where I want!”

  “Not only was that not an answer, but it didn’t even make sense!” She took a deep breath and, with a visible effort, lowered her voice. “What, I’m supposed to believe you just went for a walk and got… caught by a security guard outside my hotel, by coincidence?”

  “My hotel is like two fucking blocks away, thank you.”

  “Your hotel? You can’t afford to stay within two blocks of this place.”

  “How do you know what I can afford or not? Oh, let me guess. You invented some great new machine that lets you look into people’s wallets and check their account balance, that’s gotta be it. Not just assuming—”

  Somebody—I hoped the valet—honked the horn. Without looking back at them, Johnny flipped them the bird, then returned her hands to her pockets and glared up at me. Her face was a patchwork of cuts and bruises, including a real whopper across the bridge of her nose that had blacked both eyes as well. She looked like she was wearing ski goggles. Inside the sepia cups, her irises glittered like broken glass.

  “I’m too busy to have you tagging along with me anyway,” she said. “Go back to your hotel.”

  “Tagging along with you. Is that what you think I want. Is it?” I felt woozy, dizzy; I felt the sudden weight of we don’t talk about it, we agreed never to talk about it. Fuck it. “You, who fucking made me tag along with you for your whole entire life, who picked me out like a designer puppy from a store, who spent more than a decade breaking and disappearing everybody else I could have made friends with, took away everything else that might have competed for one second for my attention, because you wanted it all, all of it, you, you of all fucking people, think I want to tag along with whatever you’re doing? Is that it?”

  She flinched, nodded, looked down at the ground. Anger still seethed in me like lava, or like vomit; I wanted to keep going, let it all out. Her head snapped up as I was fighting it back down, and she said, “Okay, well give me a better reason then. You don’t have one. I saw you hiding behind the sign. You were waiting for me to come out. I saw you. You were trying to spy on me, weren’t you? And doing the worst fucking job of it I’ve ever seen in my life. Even Boris and Natasha would have been less half-assed at it. What were you thinking?”

  “Maybe I was worried about you!”

  “Oh my God, that’s such bullshit. Even if you were, there’s nothing you can do about any of this.”

  “How do you know I can’t?”

  “There isn’t! Okay? Christ! My businesses are falling apart, I have to talk to lawyers every five minutes, which by the way, you’re making me late for, the fucking Vatican is mad at me, the Ancient Ones might have figured out a way back here, or They might not have, who even knows, and every arrow is pointing at me, and why can’t you just let them? Why do you want any of them to point at you?”

  “You know why!”

  The one thing we weren’t supposed to say. The thing we thought and never said. For a second I clearly pictured us both with our hands hovering over the red buttons marked FIRE. Mutually assured destruction. Those last hours in Nineveh. That if I had come back sooner, or if I hadn’t left at all, the Anomaly might not have happened. That there had been time before the alignment to fuel the spell. But I hadn’t. Not till after the last minute. Not till it had been too late, and all those millions and millions of people had died. Her fault as much as mine. Mine as much as hers. And we both knew it.

  Her face said, If this is blackmail, I have no idea what you think you’re going to get out of it. Her mouth said, “Let’s just go get some breakfast.”

  “Don’t you have a meeting with lawyers?”

  “I hate lawyers. I like breakfast.”

  “STOP SCRATCHING.”

  “Up yours. You don’t know about stubble. It’s itchy.”

  “Just grow a beard then.”

  “Beards are for old dudes.” I squinted at the menu, a sticky laminated sheet. Our breakfast venue was a typical Johnny place: pitch-dark, near-literal hole in the wall. Outside, it gave no indication of existing. Just a door whitewashed to match the wall, set beneath a wooden sign the size of a playing card; then up two flights barely wide enough to walk facing forward. It stank of beer and cigarette smoke and bacon grease.

  Rutger in theory liked places like this, because weirdos and paparazzi had trouble finding them; but in reality he hated them, because if you did get caught, you’d be cornered. He sat across from Johnny and me, back to the wall, his broad bronze face composed and watchful. Despite the pleasant neutrality of his expression, everything about his posture suggested he’d rather be fed into a woodchipper than be here right now. I knew the feeling.

  True, there was something to be said for familiarity: for Johnny frowning over the menu, for something in this strange city that was if not comforting at least known, quantified. The physical bounds and limits of her the same as always, the mental ones even more delineated now. And the familiarity of the hatred too, of someone who had never stopped hurting me, the damage and the pain and the insult of it still inside me like shrapnel, no different from the thing in my left hand, quiet now. Would it ever heal? Would any of it?

  Mom would have said: Not if you don’t quit picking at it.

  Johnny would have said: I’m working on a device for that.

  “Wayne is not yet discharged from hospital.” Rutger frowned at his beeping Blackberry. “Elizabeth says she is ready to return to duty.”

  “Tell her not to,” Johnny said. “Back to the hotel. That’s an order.”

  Rutger grunted, a noise of frustration rather than assent, but slid out the keyboard. Typing was a laborious and delicate effort under his huge thumbs. What did he know, I wondered? About last night, about the DA, about her. What had she told him? Everything?

  I didn’t think so. Whatever else she felt about the truth, there was so much shame attached to it, so much guilt, that she’d spent her entire life hiding it. All her life had been devoted to controlling it. Wanting it buried with her, like an Egyptian pharaoh: hide it from the sight of others and the flow of time, and she would reckon up on the other side where no one could see. The more people knew the truth, the more she feared its consequences.

  And she was right to do so, I had realized. If people knew what she was, what she had caused, yes, absolutely, they would take the truth, melt it down, forge it into a guillotine blade to end her. If people knew what she had done.

  She pointed at the menu. “Let’s just get two of these.”

  “What? You can’t eat all that.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ve been here for five weeks. Optimizing the process. What you do is, right, you eat the full Scottish, with a ton of coffee, and then you don’t need to eat again till the next day. Saves all the time you’d waste with restaurants and stuff. Good for hangovers, too.”

  “You should’ve figured this out by now,” I said patiently. “Wasn’t your first hangover when you were li
ke eleven?”

  “Twelve. Yeah, but I never did Robbie Burns night here,” she said, pronouncing it Rabby. “Nights, actually, plural. I accepted about ten invitations over the course of the week. Overdid it a little bit.”

  “Little bit.”

  She blinked innocently at me, all sweetness and light. The Anomaly, I thought. You. Yours. The Anomaly, the Event, the Intrusion, the Invasion.

  Merely in the hours afterwards, they figured about three hundred million people had died: most bewilderingly without cause, simply dropping dead from a sickness that took over their entire bodies. The rest by suicide. In the weeks after, while Johnny and I had been in hospital, about two hundred million more. Impossible numbers. From plagues that had no name, racing through countries like wildfire; from accidents, panic, tramplings, botched evacuations, fires; from other disasters terrible to imagine. Crops rotting in seconds like timelapse footage, livestock galloping in terror from invisible predators. Their corrupt bodies, once captured and slaughtered, revealed to be inedible, hoofed poison.

  Even friendly fire, the worst and stupidest oxymoron, had taken uncounted lives: people shooting guns into the sky for those two minutes, at things they did not realize were not happening directly overhead them but surrounding the globe. Worst of all, a couple of countries had even managed to crack open their nuclear briefcases and special phones of various colours, sending up nukes that rebounded off nothingness and toppled onto neighbouring lands.

  All the deaths would not be correctly counted for years. Entire governments had fallen, borders had been redrawn. And people were still dying.