Sing back to us
So we know you remember
Then we will tell the others that you know what is needed to be known
I sang it back into the thousand towers curved at their tops into craters of light, and it bounced back, rebounding, the soundwaves precise, visible, all in formation, and the reflection hit me, knocked me out of the air, towards the brightest light of all, parting, opening, to reveal a safe warm darkness, silence, relief, the end of pain.
WHEN I WOKE up, I was stretched out in the bedroom with the tiny TV, on but muted. Someone had put a mildewy-smelling wet rag on my forehead. I pushed it off, followed voices back to the kitchen. My legs felt shaky, tense; I had carpet-burn on both palms, and my left wrist ached. Must’ve fainted onto the floor. Lucky to not land on my face.
Huxley and Johnny were eating toast and oranges at the table, not looking at each other. Between them, separating the butter dish, jam jars, and three more mugs of Ovaltine, lay a thick open book, but a strange one—printed like normal, but scribbled over, vandalized really, in blue ballpoint. There were two sigils on the page, complicated and badly smudged.
“Okay,” I said, sitting down. “Somebody talk.”
It was a long time before Huxley sighed, and tapped the book. “You said your piece.”
“I what?” I stared at the blue writing. It wasn’t in English. “I wrote that?”
Johnny nodded. “We opened the door up when the lights stopped, and you came out babbling for something to write on. So I gave you a pen, and you grabbed a book off the shelf.”
“…Did I write anything useful?”
They both nodded.
“And is someone going to fucking tell me what that was, because I could have died in there, and you said so yourselves. I risked my ass for this!”
“We have to get out of here,” Johnny said, “is the short answer. I can tell you the rest on the way.”
“The way to where?”
“Prague.”
“…What?”
BACK AT THE entryway, we put our coats and boots on again, and Johnny tied on her green-and-red scarf. There was a strange new nastiness between her and Huxley, very different from the generic, former-coworker hostility they’d had when we had arrived. What had they talked about while I had been away, I wondered? She would never have told Huxley the truth about the Anomaly, but the old woman must have guessed it anyway, perhaps thrown it into Johnny’s face. What good would denial do at that point?
“Prague is dangerous,” Huxley said, getting a piece of chalk from the desk. “Low spot. One of the lowest spots now, built over one of them—what do you call it. Not a gate, but one of them big tangles that sops it up. Collected all sorts of things over the years.”
“A nexus,” Johnny said. “You’ve never gone?”
“Never needed to. I got everything I need here.” She laughed, an oddly bitter sound, and chalked a circle on the stone wall. “And safe as houses. The wards they put on this place…”
We all paused at the same moment, sniffing the air. Wet, mouldy smell of magic. But something else. Ozone, a thick reek of musk, like the enclosed smell of a zoo.
And smoke.
Johnny froze, mouth open. Behind Huxley, in the darkness of the shelves, light flared—white, as hot and fierce as lightning, fading to scarlet—and we all began to cough. The shelves trembled, swayed, and began to fall away from the walls, rocking around us, raining books and scrolls onto our heads; I covered my head with my arms, and we ran to get our backs to the stone wall, the only place in the room bare of shelves.
As I turned, a tremendous head burst through the darkness above us, tangling on the chandeliers till they tore loose from their wires, plunging us into darkness except for the shivering glow of the approaching flames. Black-glass teeth snapping and champing, iridescent scales, the scrabble of huge claws ripping up the tiny tiles on the floor, spraying them up like raindrops.
A dragon, impossibly wedged in the tiny place, shouldering aside shelves, walls, warping the bright brass of the railings, books dropping onto it and bouncing off. And kneeling on its head, clinging with an arm like black smoke to one of its horns, was the one Johnny had called the Burning King.
“You dare!” Huxley screamed, then doubled over coughing; the heat was growing so intense that I half-instinctively shoved her and Johnny behind me, closer to the wall, as if it would help.
The dragon squeezed through the railings, snapping and biting at the brass; the tip of a tooth broke off and whirled over my head like a bullet, audible even over the crackling roar of the burning books. One enormous limb worked free, scrabbled for a second on the tiles, and stretched towards us, flexing and clenching. Cornering us: no way out, burning the only escape into the maze of books. The Burning King had no face with which to smirk, but seemed to be anyway: gloating already, his prize nearly in reach, feet from the snapping teeth of his mount.
Someone screamed behind me, the voice already too broken by smoke to figure out who, and a blast of green light enveloped the dragon, its rider, the books, the flames, everything, in a wash of brightness that turned the entire place inside-out and blew it to pieces.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHEREVER WE HAD ended up, a streetlight still glowed, though it was tilted at a hilarious angle—nearly parallel to the road. Enough light remained for us to creep back towards what was left of Huxley’s pocket dimension: a pyramid of rubble and ash, disintegrated bricks, pages smouldering as they blew lightly across the street, a few twisted pieces of brass that must have been from the chandeliers, the small faun statue that had crowned the fountain. Mosaic stones littered the ground like busted windshield bits after a car accident. I stooped, unable to stop myself, and picked up a few, their edges softened by heat.
Johnny was still coughing, bent over; I moved her arm, unzipped the front pocket of her bag, and handed her the sticker-encrusted inhaler.
Huxley was incandescent with rage, the anger visible even as she slowly, even menacingly, picked up a fragment of binding with a few pages attached, still on fire. Somewhere sirens began, spiraling towards us, still distant. It was night, deep and clear, a sky glittering with stars. I wished I could identify any of the constellations. Wished I had anything telling me where and when I was.
“Dr. Huxley,” Johnny croaked, “I could have got us out.”
“Not in a thousand years,” Huxley snapped, dropping the burning book. “I told you, the wards on that place was cooked up for it special. Prodigy? Genius? You’re a scientist, not a sorcerer. All you’d have done was dithered around and we’d ha’ got roasted alive.”
That probably wasn’t true, I thought, after everything Johnny had seen and memorized; but there was no point in arguing it. Johnny flopped onto the edge of what remained of a low brick wall, and took another hit from her inhaler, the little electronic voice counting down its numbers primly between the approaching noise of the sirens.
“It followed you here.” Huxley glared at me, sparing Johnny temporarily while she was dealing with her inhaler. “You. There’s no other way it could’ve found this place. Damn near ten years this place’s been running. Not a rumble, not a whisper. Not even during the Incursion. You fucking bastards.”
Johnny said, “I can…”
“You can what? No amount of money will replace those books.”
I stared at her, numb; it was all very familiar. Maybe everyone Johnny knew would have to say that to her at some point. And what could I say to the accusation? Of course it had come for us. Huxley had only managed to save us, as far as I could tell, by destroying the entire dimension, courtyard and all.
Where were we? I had no idea. Big, old stone buildings around us, three or four storeys. A steeple nearby, neatly blocking out a narrow triangle of stars. It wasn’t all that cold, but I began to shiver, and sat down heavily next to Johnny, making the little pile of bricks wobble alarmingly.
“You know what really pisses me off?” I said to the street at large. “This
isn’t even like... the fifth worst day of my life.”
“Not by a mile,” Johnny said, through chattering teeth.
“Fix your scarf. What are we going to do now?” I added, as Huxley returned to the heap of rubble and began methodically pawing through it, kicking aside flaming piles with her slippered foot.
“We? Fuck you, sonny. I’m going to get as far and fast away from the two of you as possible. After beating you to death with the Equalizer, if I can find it.”
That sounded pretty reasonable to me, and when Huxley eventually unearthed the ashy but intact cricket bat and approached us, all I could manage was, “Her first.”
“Rude.”
Huxley stopped, sagging, then began to sway as if drunk, and I got up so she could sit down in my spot. She covered her face, leaning one arm heavily on the handle of the bat. “Christ.”
I closed my eyes. The sirens were getting closer. Let them arrest us. Arson, or whatever. Let someone else do this. Take over. Let the grownups handle it. I just saw what we already knew: the satellites never saw anything, the proximity alarms were never tripped, because the creatures weren’t coming from space. Of course they fucking weren’t. Everything pointed straight up: but that’s not where They come from. They come from over there. Under here. Just there. Watching us so closely we probably leaned on Their eyeballs at one point, separated by a membrane so thin our molecules touched. Seeing nothing.
I thought: Something’s coming? Wrong. Something came. And They’re moving in, because soon our world will be just like Theirs. Redecorated to Their exact taste. Just like that. And They will get rid of the pests living in it, if They don’t turn us into things that are not pests…
Waves of red and blue light appeared down the hill, inching their way towards us. This address, I thought, probably hadn’t existed a minute ago; neighbours would be calling it in using their own. Shouts, car horns in the roads around us. Lights in the windows, curtains being pushed back.
The first fire engine rounded the corner a moment later, a storm of noise and light so that for a moment I couldn’t see or hear. Two police cars, bright blue and yellow, pulled up next to it, adding to the light. Doors slammed, feet scuffed on the asphalt. “Don’t move!”
I put my hands up, not looking to see what the other two were doing. Whatever (let’s face it) pleasure I had felt at the thought of forcing Johnny to slip up, bring herself down, at impressing the Society, whatever it was I thought I had been doing, felt very far away. Rutger was somewhere spilling his guts, why wouldn’t he? I’d just do the same. Tell them everything, and deal with the consequences. Maybe they’d think I was nuts and lock me up. That would be fine. The kids could come visit on weekends.
The cops ringed us, surprising me a little with their getup: radios, no guns. Two of them pointed Tasers at us though, and someone shouted “Don’t move!” again, despite the fact that I hadn’t. I resisted a powerful urge to look behind me and see if Huxley or Johnny were moving. What would I need to be arrested properly? To go limp, first of all. They would help me out with the Taser if I wasn’t submissive enough on my own. And to not speak when they started to fuck me up, if they did (and these cops not having guns was no guarantee of anything, I knew). And my wallet, probably, to show them my ID… still safe in my back pocket? Yes, it felt like it. What else? I supposed they could look at my dead phone, if they wanted to.
“Hands in front,” one of the cops said, and approached me with the cuffs out. People had started to open their windows, interestedly, watching the show. I supposed they thought a bomber or something had been caught, given the explosion. A trio of bombers.
“Am I being arrested?” I said.
“Shut up. Hands front.”
I held them out at my waist, and looked closely at him. He was about my colour, about my height, a bit bulkier; his high-vis jacket was unzipped over a thin bulletproof vest marked CHAMBERS ENGINEERING. Of course.
Without meaning to, I jerked my hands back when he touched them. “All right,” he began menacingly, but I didn’t even hear what he said next, and began to backpedal, back towards Huxley and Johnny, who had realized the same thing I had: some of the cops weren’t human. The firefighters, who knew, too far to see, doing stuff with hoses and axes so that the smouldering remains of Huxley’s archive wouldn’t catch anything nearby, but the cops, no, the one who had almost cuffed me had not been holding the cuffs in hands but something else, something with claws, and a few of the others had thin silvery tentacles snaking from their backs, eyes in their cheeks, glistening in the headlights.
“Get back here!”
I ignored him, kept backing, heart hammering. Great, extremely great. The dragon didn’t catch us, but these guys—yes, excellent, perfect way to end the night. They hadn’t surrounded us, only partly flanked us, there was room to run, the empty street behind us leading back into the maze of houses, but Johnny surely couldn’t escape, and what about Huxley? I couldn’t leave her.
“Halt! Or we will activate non-lethal weapons!”
“What?” said Huxley.
“Well, they don’t have guns,” I said. A moment later, she pushed something into my hand, something heavy: the cricket bat. We’re not fighting our way out of this, I almost said, and then without looking brought it up, slapping the prongs of the Taser high into the night sky, entirely reflex, not even hearing the bang as it went off. Someone else fired another one, which spiralled randomly somewhere to our left, and then they were closing on us, cautiously, as I swung the bat around my head. Not quite enough of a threat: one man darted at me, trying to go low. I brought the bat down across his shoulders, hard enough to make him grunt, not hard enough to stop him, and squirmed out of his grip.
Johnny’s breath wheezed rapidly, cleared, wheezed again. There was a small, out-of-place noise: a zipper. And a second later, two gouts of blue fire whooshed past my shoulders, flattening the cops and making the cars rock so violently that their tires cracked and deflated. I blinked away afterimages, shouldered the Equalizer, and turned. “Run!”
HALF AN HOUR later, we fetched up in a lightless little park under a couple of dead, intricately-rusted streetlamps, at the top of a steep hill that gave us a view of an unrecognizable city, mostly low buildings, no skyscrapers, golden-lit windows smeared by fog. Johnny’s breath sounded a bit better; Huxley had not spoken.
I turned to Johnny, a dark lump in the starlight. “Do you mind my asking...”
“What?” She tensed up, shivering.
“How come you cured practically everything except fucking asthma?”
“…Oh that. Well, the organoids I came up with, they’re great for organ-focused diseases like Alzheimer’s or diabetes. ‘Oh, but asthma is just lungs’: no it isn’t. Turns out it’s a full-body autoimmune response dysfunction. Organoids don’t have a fully-functioning immune system, so it’s tricky to research autoimmune disease. The system is hard to turn it on, even harder to turn it off, and both of those could kill somebody while you’re still frantically trying to flip the switch.”
“You could just test stuff on monkeys or humans or whatever. Like normal labs.”
“I don’t like the wait times for approval.”
I nodded, and listlessly spun the handle of the cricket bat between my palms. My skin still seemed lightly slimy or sticky where the monstrous cop had touched me. That’s how it is, I thought. They figured out how to infect us with Themselves. If it’s a war, that’s how it’ll be won: annexation, assimilation. Just like in school. I wondered if I too would turn, then decided that if it was going to happen, it would have happened after the attack at the party.
Still no idea where we were. The cops’ accents had sounded a bit like Huxley’s: not English, not Irish. Funny of the Society to put a pocket dimension exactly where her original house had been. Must be why she got cable, but you couldn’t get a cell phone call out.
“If we—” Johnny began, then looked down blearily; the bench she was sitting on had grown a couple of
small, luminescent tentacles, waving near her shoulders and piping a faint unpleasant song. She got up and moved to my bench. “If we live through this, I’m never leaving the house ever again. I swear to God.”
“You won’t have a house,” I said. “It’ll be a monster. It’ll be turned into a monster. It’ll just be a… a house, shaped like a monster.”
“Like in that movie.”
“Yeah. But fancy.”
“Wards are being removed,” Johnny said, closing her eyes. “The books said. I mean, you said the books said. Worldwide. Dug up, chiseled out, burnt down, picked apart.”
Huxley nodded. “Someone’s not doin’ their job.”
“Mm. Could be. And that volcano,” Johnny said. “In America. No seismic indicators at all. And there’s six new hurricanes forecasted. February isn’t hurricane season... and there have been earthquakes, tsunamis. Those aren’t necessarily... signs of something happening, like the way people used to take the appearance of a comet as a harbinger of plague. Sometimes they’re a result of... of dimensional shifts. In unmonitored places. Like deep in the ocean, or below the crust or the mantle. Knock-on effects. But crucially: unseen. Unseen, always. Things aren’t responding to the changes in the world, they’re responding to something else that’s responded to them. But what?”
“What kind of weirdo uses the word ‘harbinger’ when they’re just talking to ordinary people?” I said.
No one laughed.
“If I were going to start a war,” Johnny said slowly, “I’d want to win it right away. In fact, if I could fight a war without fighting at all, I’d do that. Then I’d get the win, and all the things that go with the win, without having to lift a finger.”
“Okay,” I said. “You could get your enemy to join you. And then you’d win.”
“Then I’d win.”
Huxley’s head swung back and forth between us, her face inscrutable in the faint light. “It’s not a war,” she said. “It’s done. You talk about it like it’s still going.”
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