A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  “Sure, if you don’t know about germ theory. Why not?”

  “Intent, intent,” she said, staring at the monitor, as if I hadn’t spoken. “It’s all about intent. The gods are angry, they curse you. You remove or prevent it with purity, faith. It is transmitted between those of insufficient belief, of course; and you can pray it away, you can offer sacrifices, repentance. Random immunity attributable to being blessed. Nobody remembers maybe you had it as a kid and survived. Prevention attributable to shunning the unclean and unbelievers. The fringes of society, pushed out of the mainstream anyway. Cure effected by… never random chance. Faith or a lack of faith. Quacks, opportunists. Magic… magic isn’t science. Magic acts as if it’s…”

  “Of course it isn’t science,” I said, for something to say.

  She fell silent for several minutes, her lips moving. Eventually I gave up and sat down again, and picked my phone up off the floor. Impressively, or perhaps worryingly, Johnny’s jury-rigged charger had got it back to 98% charge. Five missed calls, ten text messages, but I could only see the notifications without signal. We’d have to get back to street level before I could get them. For a second all I wanted to do was rush down the hallway, run back up the stairs. Hurry up! I wanted to scream at Johnny. Come on! Did you get what you fucking needed? Hurry up!

  “It’s not the sigils that are magic,” she said at last. “Not inherently. It’s their shape… That’s why you can make one out of stone or coal or chalk or string. It’s not the words that are magic. It’s their shape. It’s not that magic itself can do anything, it’s that it has to be channelled somehow. And the way it is channelled is partly structural and partly… I can’t believe I’m saying this… intentional. That’s it. That’s how it works. Holy shit. That’s why none of my detectors worked.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Quantum theory.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Quantum just means discrete, that’s all. Packet, lump. So light, for instance: one lump is a photon. Electrons, a lump. They don’t always exist, right? Only when they’re being watched or when they interact with something. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when they bonk into something else. The quantum leaps from one orbit to another are the only way they can be real. That’s the way my reactor works: the orbits are just on two sides of a dimension. Which, obviously, yeah, I can’t tell anybody that. Anyway, when they’re not running around or crashing into stuff, they’re not in any precise place, they’re not actually in a place at all, you could say they’re not really real if you wanted to.

  “Magic isn’t like that. Magic is more like… a cross between an electron and something very light and small but divisible, like a spore. It has… volition and instinct, it follows rules both because it can be carried by currents and winds and their equivalent, but also because it knows some of the rules. It doesn’t move like heat or light or gravity or electricity, which cannot choose how they move, which always go from more to less. That’s why I couldn’t put math on it. Because it’s not subject to inertia, momentum, friction, because it does have that little bit of will.”

  I nodded politely, even though my main concern was how to remember all of this to pass on to Louis when I eventually got to a place that wasn’t made of rebar concrete. Johnny looked like she’d just washed down a handful of meth with a keg of espresso: like the night I had come over to find her in the silvery dress and steel-toed boots, out of her mind on adrenaline and discovery. The bruised goggles across her face only added to the effect. Bleakly, and for just a second, I allowed myself to wonder whether the world would end before they faded.

  “We stopped studying it,” she said.

  “Stopped studying what?”

  “Shapes, the shape of things. Remember when I was trying to come up with a reliable in-vivo for Mad Cow?”

  “Not even slightly.”

  “My nanobots got all fucked-up by the prions and I was so mad. But that’s what they do. That’s all they do, that’s… fucking prions! You know, it’s like, you can’t trust the outside of things for diagnosis with prion disease, symptoms I mean, all I wanted to do was look inside, but bodies are a problem, being alive is a problem, you can do genetic testing for some prion diseases but not all of them, and—”

  “Why are we talking about Mad Cow? You have completely and totally lost me.”

  She took a deep breath, and gingerly wiped the sweat from her face with the hem of her t-shirt. “They aren’t back. Not really. They didn’t figure out a way to get through. What they figured out, I think, was this.” She pointed at another monitor, frozen on a crumbling wall. “A magical prion disease.”

  “…What.”

  “Autocatalytic, self-seeding. They didn’t need to physically come here. They figured out something else. A conformation or configuration that acts like a prion. The shape is transmissible. It moves from person to person, thing to thing, and it’s the shape that changes, and then a spell activates to change us into Them. It’s like… a sigil that can make more of itself. A spell to make more spells.”

  My stomach sank. She nodded slowly, seeing my face, the realization of it. How did you stop something like that? Huxley had been right, I realized. Without knowing this, any of this, she had taken a look at the world and said: If it’s a war, it’s already over. They won. We lost.

  “We can’t cure Mad Cow,” I said. “Is this the same thing?”

  “My God, I fucking hope not,” she said severely. “But if I’m right, I need to get back to the facility at the Creek. Do some experiments. Maybe there’s a way. The problem with real prions is that if you break up the oligomers they make in the brain, they get more infectious, not less. This isn’t something I could… blow up.”

  “Despite that being your preferred method for dealing with things,” I said automatically, although it felt like someone else was saying it; my mouth felt numb. I felt like I had to force myself to keep breathing. And it didn’t even mean anything, I thought, for the theory that I had been working on while she had been working on hers. If anything, it fed right into it, pallets and pallets of feedstock heading up the conveyor belt into the horrified factory of my mind… supposing she was right, supposing this was in some way biological warfare, she might still have swapped sides if They could promise her immunity.

  And why wouldn’t They? It would suit Them right down to the ground to have her on Their side, and for her, to have her life spared, even her humanity spared, would be payment enough, with or without time. She’d just make a new deal. They could offer you one, she had told me more than once. No covenant could be changed once made, because it altered the entire universe such that the conditions of the covenant’s spell worked in it. But a new one. That would be something. Wouldn’t it.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I mean, assuming Harvey Birdman there lets us out of this bunker.”

  “Bunkers got more than one way out of them,” she said, rubbing her eyes gingerly; a drop of the dark liquid came off on her hand. She wiped it on her coat. “Gross. I mean, for flooding, fires, things like that. They have enough room to fit most of the important people in municipal government down here, they’re never going to have a single point of ingress and egress. And anyway, I’m going to wipe the consoles and knock out all his comm lines whether or not he lets us out. Everything’s set up.”

  “Johnny, what the hell? He did like you said! You can’t just go back on your word like that.”

  “I have to,” she said. “He can’t know what I was looking at. None of it.”

  “Can’t you just… erase what you did, and leave everything else?”

  “Nope. He’s rigged the entire system to prevent exactly that. It’s all or nothing. And anyway, what do you care?”

  “Well, I… Look, it’s just a shitty thing to do. You basically coerced him into using this. You threatened him with the worst possible thing he could imagine. Did you see his face? And now you’re going to do it anyway, even though
he did what you asked.”

  “It’s war-time,” she said firmly. “He’ll understand.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  She glared at me. “I’m not leaving him anything to give to the Society, okay? That’s final. And anyway, we’ve all done shitty things.”

  BACK UP AT street level, the sky had the pale glow of dawn. I opened my phone immediately while we stood around and bitched about our thighs, and scrolled almost desperately through the notifications, then thumbed into my voicemails.

  “Nick, come on. We’re going to go to the hotel I stayed at last time, it’ll be quieter there.”

  “Do you fucking mind?” I said. “Like, excuse me for actually having people I give a shit about. And anyway, they won’t let you in. You look like hell. You look like Alice Cooper.”

  “Cool.”

  “I mean, not in a cool way. Like maybe he got run over and left out in the rain kind of way.”

  “Where is this hotel?” Huxley said querulously. “We’ll never get a taxi.”

  “About fifteen minutes’ walk. Also, if I never see a single stair again, it’ll be too soon.”

  “Amen for that. You, give me your coat.”

  I took it off obediently and handed it over.

  “If we—” Johnny began, then stopped to cough again.

  “Good, go on, get it all up, just spit in the corner, it’s not very ladylike.”

  I looked up, startled, as she continued to cough, at a small but familiar sound, carrying clearly across the quiet street: a camera shutter, from a film camera. Alarmed, I stared around us. There—in the doorway of a drugstore, not bothering overmuch to conceal himself, a man in sunglasses, a dark coat, with a scarf pulled up over his mouth and nose. Spotting me, infuriatingly, he lifted the camera to his face again, a big one, with a long zoom lens, and deliberately took another photo.

  I moved in front of Johnny, a sick pit in my gut out of all proportion to seeing the photographer; this used to happen all the time, and I suspected it had only gotten worse since the Anomaly, with paranoid governments everywhere relaxing the rules on paparazzi and drone operators in the hopes that some ‘early warning’ footage would be reported to the tip lines for another incident. “Come on. Let’s go. There’s some asshole here.”

  “Hey!” he called, as we began to walk again, away from him. “Hey!”

  I wanted to call back Fuck you! but instead tried to speed up, holding my arm out for Johnny to take; she refused it, and kept her head down, still walking. Huxley scurried ahead of us, her face down too, my coat collar zipped up to cover half her face.

  At the end of the block, alerted by the honking horns, I realized where the photographer must have come from: an enterprising scout, peeled off from the larger mass. And indeed, as I turned in despair to glance behind us, he was on his phone, one hand on the camera.

  A few dozen people were marching across the street towards us, ringed by obvious paparazzi: professional cameras, black tactical backpacks bulging with gear. I even thought I vaguely recognized one, or had seen her face before—in person, not in the news. She had targeted Johnny before, I was sure of it.

  Rage and fear surged up from my stomach, and for a second I almost felt warm. “Fucking leave us alone!” I yelled.

  Mistake. Bad idea. They looked up, and kept coming, not running, but moving quicker than they were. Most held signs, not in English, though a few were: THREAT TO HUMANITY, one read, and WE DEMAND THE HAGUE. One, sending a bolt of terror and recognition through me like ice, bore the photos I had last seen side-by-side two years ago: the ones they had put up when Johnny and I had gone ‘missing’ and the reward was offered. The closest was simply a drawing of what looked like a bacterium, or some kind of cell, complete with all the organelles, with the red-slashed circle universally understood to be forbidding it, overtop.

  “What the absolute shit?” Johnny said, looking up, her mouth ringed in black.

  “They’re... they’re protesting us. It’s an... it’s an anti-us march. What are they saying, do you know?”

  “‘We want answers, we want justice, we want answers, we want justice,’” she said, as Huxley murmured the same thing, backing away and hitting the wall again. “Ow. Okay. Let’s... let’s just head back the other way. If we head into one of the stores, they won’t...”

  “Nothing’s open,” Huxley said. “They’re under the alert, maybe even phase two. Back, yeah. Circle around, find your hotel.”

  We made it half a block, the three of us awkwardly turning to keep our backs to the march and still be able to navigate, my heart pounding, Johnny still coughing, moving slowly.

  “Fucking Sparrow,” Huxley muttered.

  “What?” I whispered. “You think he—”

  “Who else? I’ve seen him pull these things before. He’s got this whole network of little local mercenaries who can organize at the drop of a hat, as distractions, as sheepdogs, as…”

  I opened my mouth to say But Johnny cut off all his comms, and realized that she must have missed something secret. For a second I was almost pleased that she had been outwitted for once, but then I went right back to being pissed off.

  We made it to the end of the street, turned right, away from the low building that housed the entrance to Sparrow’s bunker, and stopped short: someone was calling for Dr. Huxley.

  A small black car had pulled up at the end of the street, nearly on the sidewalk. A man and woman sat in the front, the man at the wheel gesturing to us. “Dr. Huxley!”

  Her face had gone gray and expressionless, nothing moving but her hair in the breeze. For a terrible moment, no one did anything. At last, she said, “Get in.”

  “Dr. Huxley,” Johnny whispered. “We don’t have to do this. We can get you out of here. I can…”

  “Not for long,” she said grimly. “Get in. In.”

  Huxley paused before we got into the car, taking off my coat, so that as we piled into the small back seat it lay across all our laps like a blanket. We pulled off sedately as I fumbled for seatbelts, finding none. I stared up at the so-called protestors in the rear-view mirror, now lit cotton-candy pink with sunrise. My stomach was sinking, a familiar fall, feeling Huxley tremble minutely against me. What was happening? I could guess, didn’t want to guess, wanted to guess something else. Be wrong, I told myself. For once. There’s got to be another explanation…

  The man was heavyset, his head shaved close to the skin, leaving a gingery fuzz; the woman’s dark hair was pulled into a bun. In a mild, American accent, she said, “Dr. Jordan Huxley. You are in contravention of Clauses 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, and 22 of your post-employment contract. You’ve been summoned to present evidence in advance of...” She trailed off, maybe not wanting to use the official language. In the rearview, the man pressed his lips into a line, then visibly forced his face to relax into an expression of polite, administrative concern.

  She went on, “In advance of the decisions that will be made by the relevant committee.”

  I stared between him, and her, and then down at Huxley, who had gone perfectly still, and then over at Johnny, visibly stricken. Had Huxley known this would happen? Yes, she must have thought it likely, I thought, but not so soon. Not like this. Sparrow’s doing too? One last dig? No way to tell now. Maybe the moment she had done that spell at her archive, some alarm had been tripped, and they had hunted her down. Maybe…

  “Wait a minute,” I said, looking between the man’s neck, the woman’s half-turned face. “Wait. Okay. Listen, yes... she did do the... the thing that she wasn’t supposed to do. But she saved our lives, all three of us. Literally, without exaggeration, saved our lives. There was no alternative, none. Doesn’t that—”

  “Dr. Huxley. Do you acknowledge the charges?”

  It was as if they hadn’t heard me at all. My breath sped up; everything I wanted to say, scream at them, whirled inside me, trapped, like some animal that had fallen into a dry well of unimaginable depth, sprinting in circles, unable to gain height, ab
le to do nothing but panic and run.

  Some people allowed to be angry. And some people ignored.

  “I do acknowledge them. I’ll present my evidence.” Huxley glanced at me; the pearl-button eyes were bright, but with hatred rather than tears, and a certain bizarre pride, even satisfaction. “Get to the bottom of this. You don’t need me.”

  “Of course we do. This is fucking ridiculous, they can’t...” I grabbed her arm instinctively, as if it would help. “No! This isn’t fucking fair, this isn’t even... There has to be an exception, we would have died, you don’t know how close it was. You don’t even know what happened. You can’t possibly arrest her for...”

  “She’s not being arrested,” the man said, affronted. “This is strictly administrative.”

  “It’s not fucking administrative if you’re going to punish her for doing what she did!”

  “We won’t punish her,” the woman said.

  We won’t punish her. Of course not. My God.

  “This is our fault!” I said, as Huxley shook me off. “Ours, mine. I got her into this, I asked her to come. Wait. Tell them—no, listen. I’ll go instead, I’ll explain everything, I’ll...”

  “There’s no question of instead, Nicholas,” Huxley said. “Use your head, boy. Stop being hysterical. I brought this upon myself, and I take full responsibility.”

  “But—”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “Stop it. Show some dignity.”

  She quickly squeezed my hand, the cold fingers like claws, and tilted her chin up. “I now invoke my right to silence, until I present to the committee.”

  “Your invocation has been noted.”

  Both the Society agents looked at me in the rearview mirror, and smiled, at the same time. Johnny murmured, “Here,” and the car stopped in front of a little jewel-box of a building, glass-fronted and with dark purple velvet curtains, wedged between two taller buildings.

  We got out without speaking, and watched the car vanish down the empty street.