Shut up.
Be a scientist instead. Come work for me.
You don’t tell the truth.
I hire people who tell the truth.
“Well, all right,” Mom said slowly. “But I hope they’re paying you overtime for this. You can’t let people take advantage of your time like that, baby. You’ll learn that as you get older, get into the corporate world. You know your boss doesn’t own you, he doesn’t own your time. You’ve got to push back on it.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I’ve got a book about it in the house. It’s about negotiation.”
“I’ll read it when I get back.”
“Anyway, I’d better go to bed, I’m about to drop. I missed your voice. Is calling or texting better? I’m not very good at the texting, I have to get Cookie to do it.”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. I’ll try to keep in better touch. Everything is going to be okay.”
“Wear sunscreen, by the way! I don’t care if it’s winter, the UV goes right through clouds, and people say we can’t get cancer, but I saw a whole episode of Dr. Malone about it, a two-part episode, and she had all these people on there, from all different countries, who got skin cancer because they—”
“I’ll buy some,” I said, trying to keep the tremor from my voice. “There’s a drugstore across from the hotel. Work will pay for it.”
“I know you say it breaks you out, but honey, you’ll outgrow the acne, you won’t outgrow a carcinoma.”
“I know, I know. I’ll buy some.”
“A hat isn’t enough! Anyway, you get some rest too, and by the way, I moved the Cav off the driveway and onto the street, because it was in the way, but it’s still plugged in. Love you! Bye!”
“Love you.”
She hung up, and I stared at the humming receiver for a long time before hanging it up. A sob sat in my chest like a brick, its edges slicing into the soft flesh. I could not push it down, swallow it down, let it out.
Johnny had declared early on that she was done ‘being parented,’ and I had wholeheartedly agreed; and it was fun to pretend that we were some kind of... tiny, feral gang, that we were the Lost Boys, or Robinson Crusoe, or some other little civilization of two (Blue Lagoon was never mentioned, though we had both seen it). No one could tell us what to do, impose their ridiculous expectations, we would be perfectly free, the idea and the implementation of that perfect freedom unmarred by a single responsibility or restriction—in fact, not Lost Boys at all, subject to a feather-hatted leader, but even better. Even freer. Sharks. Birds.
And then I would go home, to house rules, chores, making sure the kids didn’t plunge off the balcony or eat a handful of nails, to studying, getting good grades, making sure I was never a disappointment or a spectacle (the two things my parents hated most); and she went back to being a bird, being a shark. I had felt smothered and desperate at home, but loved; and I passed that love on to Carla and the twins. Had she?
Being loved meant you had the duty to do something with it. But if you didn’t think you were, what would you do with your life? She was proof of it, whatever it was. Proof of concept. She was what happened when you thought love was useless, for the weak, that it even in some way damaged you, stole from you: that the cost of love was something nobler inside of you. Well I just don’t think it’s important, she said once, I don’t know, maybe for some people, I guess. But I think there’s a lot more important things. She had set up her entire life so that she never, had never, since she was a child, had anyone to kiss goodbye; she had always scoffed at attachments, at what billions of us felt for lovers, friends, family. All she ever wanted was the love of an animal, and she had gotten me, and said it was good enough. And there wasn’t anyone she’d die for except herself.
I lifted the hem of my t-shirt, still smelling of bunker dust, and wiped my face. Mom had taken all these lies, would pass them on to the kids in the morning, no doubt laughing, telling them they’d get even better souvenirs now, because I was there for much longer. I had lied to her a lot as a kid, of course; I’d always felt I had to. For protection. After the Anomaly, they had mistrusted me, my disappearance, Johnny’s involvement, Rutger, the world. No way to make it up to them, stitch together a narrative; no way to look like anything except a liar who didn’t trust them either. I had been a stranger to them. My people. Who believed that I would never abandon them again.
Get it together. Get back to them. Go back to your people. Like Huxley said.
My people. The people that belonged to me, and that I belonged to.
When my face was dry, I called Louis too—getting his assistant Sherwood, as usual—and gave a twenty-minute rundown, as best I could, of what was happening, or what I thought was happening, and where we were for now.
“I don’t know where Sofia is,” I said at the end, into the ticking silence; was that on his end or mine? I hadn’t heard it when I’d been speaking to Mom. Someone listening in? “I can’t get ahold of her. So I expect that Louis will probably kill me, and like… that’s fair. But she was definitely alive the last time I saw her.”
“I will let Mr. d’Souza know,” Sherwood said smoothly. “However, speaking personally...”
“Yeah?”
“This is all simply tremendous. Actionable, accurate insider information, gathered with impressive initiative and resourcefulness. I might predict, unofficially, that you would not remain at the Monitor rank for long. I feel your skills would be better employed with other duties. Personally. Though of course, as I am unranked, I’m not permitted to make recommendations to the Steering Committee.”
I stared at the wall, my face heating up. “Well, uh. Thanks, man. That’s… Thanks.”
“As discussed, we’ll ensure that your family is monitored and protected. However, we’re concerned about communications from now on. Although you may be on a secure line, that can’t be verified at the moment; do not use a phone again to contact us, including the one we’ve supplied. We’ll contact you with further instructions on where to communicate information.”
“Oh, uh. Okay. How will you—”
“Thank you.”
I hung up, and patted my face again to make sure it was dry of tears. It still felt hot, an embarrassed flush. Johnny would look at me and say Chatting with Sofia, huh? And for a moment I looked again at the phone.
Nah. Got enough problems already.
Back at the room, Johnny was sleeping more heavily, curled into a ball, fist next to her face.
I watched her, trying to remember what I was supposed to feel, or had once felt, witnessing the vulnerability of the beloved asleep. Or trying to remember what it was like to think of her as loved, rather than a swindler and a liar, and a thief and a murderer and a monster. I supposed you could love all those things. People had, in the past. What did that make them, though? If you loved a monster? History would treat you the same. Eva, Adolf. Terrible to think.
We will leave history behind, history will leave us behind. No one will be left to write it. No, that’s not true. They will write it, They will torture the historians to write Their version. If that’s something They do. If that’s something They care about.
Could at least pull the blanket over her. She’s so close to the edge. Reach over, grasp the overhang, lift, and drop. At the very least.
Mm. No. Might wake up and bite me.
I crawled under the blankets on the other bed, and despite my shuddering heart and unsteady stomach, fell asleep in minutes.
I WOKE IN full daylight, a beam burning my face through an inch-wide gap in the heavy velvet curtains. After a while I went to my coat, hanging on the door hook, and unzipped one of the inner pockets, removing the tiny book that Huxley had pressed into my hand as we had left the Society agents’ car. Not a sentimental woman; I remembered her calling Johnny a weasel right to her face.
Sentiment or not, she’d clearly given me something precious: a tiny book, sixty or eighty pages, bound in pinkish leather the colour of my palm. The paper was thick
, crackled with age, smelling of age too—the sweet smell of paper breaking down, and a hint of mould. It was filled with numbers handwritten in fading black ink. No illustrations, no title, no author, no nothing, just numbers. But not useless, I knew. Given with intent.
I put the book back and zipped up the pocket. I noticed we had gotten another delivery, this one a small heavily-padded courier package the size of a paperback book, sitting on the small table next to the door. Reception had signed for it, an illegible scrawl. Probably a bomb or something, with our luck. I held it to my ear, hearing a faint ticking scritch that startled me nearly into the wall.
“Okay,” I said, and poked Johnny with a pen. “Up you get. Up-up.”
“Mmphh?”
“Someone may have given us a bomb? I mean, it’s not very big, but.”
“Oh. No. No no, give that here. I wanted something from one of my labs. I think I came up with a magic-proof, tamper-resistant communication system, and now is as good a time to try it out as any.”
“What? You are not implanting anything in me. No. Bad.”
“No, no. Also, paranoid much?”
“Yes. Stay away from me. Stay away from my squishy parts. I’ll sue.”
She tore open the bag and drew out a blue plastic pill case fitted with a tiny square of black glass on top, to which she pressed her thumb. Opened, five of the day compartments were empty; the last two contained something glossy, nearly mirrored: beetles, or things that looked like beetles, filling the compartment from head to toe on a bed of cotton wool.
“Wow, holy shit!” I was impressed despite myself. “Where do you put the battery? Can they fly or just walk? Are they radio control or can you—gah!”
“It’s all right! He’s just storing the imprint!”
“It’s what!?”
“Don’t hit him!”
I forced myself to stand still as one of the things, which had exited its compartment with an enthusiastic lunge and lifted off like a tiny helicopter, wandered along my collarbones, then circled my neck a dozen times, its legs digging in like needles. “...Johnny. These are real bugs, aren’t they.”
“Okay, look. They can fly, they can crawl on any surface, they’re resistant to virtually every toxic compound I’ve tested, and their chitin is reinforced with nanoceramic, so they’re even resistant to things like acid and crush injury.”
“Cr… like someone stepping on them.”
“And I’ve modified their metabolisms to be ultra-efficient on limited material intake. Their olfactory and memory centers are jacked up too. Augmented on a dozen levels, same with their musculature.”
“Help.”
“Once this one imprints on you, he’ll go between us, only, and so will mine. It’s like a text service only we can use. Messages go under here, there’s a pocket. They’ll instinctively avoid everyone except for the person they’re looking for. And they’ll eat the message if they’re captured.” She proudly lifted the other one from the pillcase, and gently levered up one of its wing cases; I couldn’t see anything under it, but I supposed I would if I eventually needed to use it. “They’re warded using Suhrim’s Attunement. Genetically-encoded micro-sigils in a repeating, cryptic pattern.”
“Get off.” I finally scooped the beetle off my neck, and held it up, its legs windmilling. It was pretty, I supposed—a dark, glossy fuchsia, with gleams of violet and blue where the light hit it. “How come I got the pink one?”
“Because I wanted the gold one. What are you going to call him?”
“Call it? I don’t know. My cellphone doesn’t have a name. What’s yours called?”
“Well, he used to be 6248. But now he’s named Democritus.”
“You can’t just name a beetle Democritus. What did mine used to be?”
“1779.”
“Congrats, you got a name.” I put it gently on the dresser, where hers immediately leapt out to meet it. “Thanks, I think.”
FOR A LONG time she watched the two beetles, squared up in a sunbeam, the pink and the gold apparently locked in a staring contest, nothing moving except, occasionally, their antennae. “They took Sparrow’s name,” she said, eyes unfocused, her voice dreamy, speaking to the room in general. Something seemed to gather around us, cold and heavy. “Meant to be a punishment... it’s a curse, a hex. The antithesis of a ward. Like a lead bullet left in his body forever. I stopped dreaming, after the Anomaly. Every night while we were in the... the hospital...”
“Don’t.”
“...just darkness, every night, and I thought: Well, that’s okay. Trauma, drugs. All those patches they stuck on us. But then I came back and weeks went by and... I thought: Can dreams be taken? Is it a sickness, is that too something inside me, working its way to my heart? They left me my name, they said You can still be considered at least that human, at the very least. Without speaking to me that is what I heard.”
“Stop it,” I said. “Knock it off. You’re giving yourself the creeps. Let alone me.”
“But I dreamed just now, and I…” She shook her head. “You’re right. Retraumatization in an unsupervised setting.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?” I said, interestedly. “I thought that was just our lives.”
She looked back at the beetles. “Are you still mad at me?”
“For what? Anyway, yes.”
She didn’t reply. I looked at the bugs too, still eyeing each other up like two boxers before a bout. A message system only we could use: of course. The old days, leaving tightly wrapped notes for one another, mine never as neat as hers. We weren’t in school together; why did we need to do it all the time? And why in Braeside Ravine, where anyone could have found them? I supposed if someone found one now from those days, they could auction it off somewhere. Maybe on the internet. Like Einstein’s letters, Galileo’s hat...
“Did you dream how to fix this whole thing?” I said without much hope.
She nodded, surprising me. “I did, actually. It was one of those things that was terrible, but I didn’t realize it right away. And in the dream I wanted to understand it, and I tried to... to turn on... well, you know. The thing. The gift. But the switch wouldn’t flip. I felt relieved for a second, I thought: Then my time is mine again. It’s not Theirs. Then I saw darkness, something burning... white and blue. And something moving, so I had to watch it. Everywhere it touched began to burn, in lines, in patterns, and then I realized: my God, it’s a pantograph. I screamed, and it stopped moving, and then it started again. And then... I heard the newspaper, I woke up.”
“What’s a pantograph?”
“It’s a... it’s just a device. A really simple one. People have been using a version of it for thousands of years. Basically it’s a frame, with tools on either end, that lets you copy something that already exists onto something new.”
“Okay,” I said. “That doesn’t sound terrible.”
“No, it doesn’t. But I knew... that that was what they wanted me to see, they wanted me to see it both move and stop moving. And to realize what the light was. It was a universe, Nick. It was a new universe. Do you understand? The universe is a certain shape because it has to be a certain shape. But how did the shape come about, how many shapes are there? And if it’s copied, who’s doing the copying? Who does it every time there’s a spell? I thought it was happening naturally, I thought: it’s the way magic works, like gravity. You set up the conditions for there to be gravity, you can see its effects, reliably, every time. On a given world you throw a sphere up, and it comes back down. But it’s not.
“There’s an intelligence behind it. There always has been. That’s what separates magic and science. And they wanted me to see that. It wasn’t really a dream. It was a vision: they give those to you. And you can’t give it back.”
I shivered. She sounded terrified, and it was catching; I hadn’t even understood everything she’d said, but she was so frightened that I was worried that we’d both stop being able to move. Whatever truth she had grasped was—at l
east for now, thank God—too big for me to see more than the barest edge of whatever filled her vision. I realized she was nearly paralyzed with it, that she had broken it with enormous effort to speak.
After a minute, she got up and dragged her laptop onto the bed. I debated getting up to see what was on the screen, but she didn’t seem like she cared if I saw it or not. “Magic isn’t a particle, it isn’t a wave, it doesn’t have spin or mass or direction or velocity, and yet it’s real enough to smell and even feel with human senses, it flips between dimensions, it travels in and out of time, it can take other types of particles with it, it can be created and moved and destroyed and aimed, the force it exerts can do work when guided into the correct structures and activated by the correct words, so why can’t it be measured?”
“Is this one of those whatdoyoucallit questions?”
“Rhetorical. What if magic particles take something with them when they move? Or have something associated with them? What if… what if because it carries those things, we can see the signs of where it’s been, and calculate backwards? Like in space, with gravitational lensing. Except not in space, and not gravitational lensing.”
“Uh.”
She wasn’t listening to me, scrolling endlessly, her finger tapping against the touchpad. In a minute, I knew, she’d say something like This isn’t rocket science.
“Does any of this,” I said, “fix our specific issue here? By which I mean, the end of the world?”
“Maybe. I need some sample materials.”
“Ew.”
“I know, but listen. The bigger anything is, the less its properties follow quantum mechanics, the more Newtonian they are. But the smaller anything is, the fewer rules we know, and the fewer we can know. What if these… these magical prions are doing quantum tunneling, what if they’re doing it on purpose? What if we can engineer something to interfere with that? Get in the way, force them into a different orbital, and therefore a different configuration of bonds. Break the prion, break the spell.”
“This is terrible. This is worse than death. Stop talking.”
A Broken Darkness Page 20