“Yeah. See how well that turned out.” She laughed bitterly. “They knew this would happen. This exact scenario. They planned it, waited for us to play our parts… They probably put bets on it. And we underestimated Them. Lesson learned. Last one ever.”
We walked on in silence; the churches were lit up again, and the museums and statues. End of the Blitz: no more blackouts. Till the next one, the one that would end this all. Did people know that? Had they guessed? Or had they realized and decided to disbelieve, made denial a personal policy? Not exactly one last party, one last market, but Maybe I will be spared. Maybe it won’t happen to me.
Frozen breath caught the lights of many colours, knitting tangled clouds of yarn above people’s heads. Ahead of us, one of the big squares had been turned into kind of a celebratory night market—not just for the lockdown ending, it seemed, but also something related to the European Union, with the distinctive blue flags hanging from several stalls. Unseen musicians performed competing songs, the notes slipping between one another into a wall of sound, violins and cellos, voices and laughter. The air smelled of woodsmoke and perfume and frying things.
“Do you want langoš?”
“I don’t know what that is, but yes, yes I do.”
“It’s like a...” She thought, and dug in her pockets for change. “It’s like a beavertail. But with cheese and ketchup. I bet they’ll have it here. Or do you want to go to a restaurant or something?”
“No, I want the beaver pizza.”
“Do we still have to pay for stuff if money will be meaningless in a couple of weeks?”
“Yes. You should give him a million dollars, probably.”
We ate on the plastic stools outside the stall, keeping our paper plates so that I could get a sausage in a bun. Johnny got a bag of chestnuts, which I ended up holding while she got us hot wine from an old woman running a gigantic cauldron of the stuff, orange slices bobbing around like they were treading an inky sea.
We walked around and between sips of wine carefully shared out the chestnuts, which were easily as hot as the langoš out of the fryer. People were roasting big cuts of pork, frying sausages of all different sizes and shapes, displaying apparently award-winning hams (decorated with medals and ribbons), offering pastries and buns, fried cheese, things in jars: jam, honey, peppers, onions, pickled things.
“A minute ago I was thinking ‘We should tell people the truth, we should tell the whole world,’” I said, as we paused in front of a stall selling antique books. “But like, I look around, and I think... yeah, no. No. It won’t make any difference. Why say something so horrible if there’s nothing people can do about it?”
Johnny nodded listlessly, and out of habit began to examine the books on the cart in front of the stall, gently rearranging, then replacing, the thin chains that bound some to the metal cart. The stallkeeper nodded approvingly. “Yeah,” she said. “Nothing like telling people that no one’s going to fix it this time.”
“You think they’re counting on that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. There’s precedent.”
“Us,” I said. “We’re the precedent.”
“I know. But people don’t know that.”
People don’t know shit, I thought. I miss being one of those people. The human mind, something I never think about, just collapsing under the weight of things it thought were weightless. “They… do you think they… suffered? The people who died after the Anomaly, I mean. Or from the Anomaly. Do you think it was… really bad?”
She looked up at me, eyes still in shadow. “Yes. I do. I’m sorry to say so, but I do. The literature, never mind what that said. Journal articles aren’t… I just think when you tear away something that people are using to live, it’s never a quick, painless death. No. To starve to death or dehydrate or asphyxiate.”
“Well, people didn’t need the belief that we were alone to live.”
“No, but I think they needed the belief that we were, overall, as a planet, generally safe.”
I leafed through the books for a minute too, something nagging at my memory. Never going to forget that white pedestal, the backbone of a monster, never going to forget the stomach-wrenching fall, the wallop into that black water that was not water at all. Never going to forget flames or pain or a mouth bloodied from clenching against a spell. But I had forgotten something else. “And everybody felt the same thing at the same time. That must’ve been something. Feeling what they felt. And no preparation at all.”
“Yeah. Not what we felt. Totally different. Because we had a couple days to prepare for it. And we had the only weapon on the whole planet.”
“An army with one gun. Like a million guys in the army. A million soldiers. And just one gun.”
“An army with one gun.” She held up what looked like a small prayerbook, bound in dark red leather and stamped with golden roses and a tiny cross on the front, and spoke enquiringly to the stallkeeper; he nodded, unlocked the book, and she paid and slid it into her bag.
“Johnny,” I said, pained. “Why are you buying books you won’t have time to read?”
She sighed and even managed an eye-roll. “Because it’s pretty and I want it. Give me the nuts.”
“Hurr hurr hurr.”
While she fussed with the chestnut bag and the napkins, I remembered what I had been holding on to, trying to decide what had been meant by it. Probably couldn’t do any harm to hand it over now, even if I wasn’t supposed to. I wished I’d been told what to do with it. I unzipped my jacket pocket and got out the small book of numbers Huxley had given me. “Hey. Here. Early birthday present. Or not, I don’t know. Might be a curse or something.”
“Where did you get this?”
“Dr. Huxley gave it to me. At the last minute there. In the car.”
Chewing, she moved into the circle of light thrown off by one of the steel drum fires, and gently opened it, swapping me for the paper bag. “Mm. Interesting.”
“Do you know what it is?”
She shook her head, scanning the columns of numbers up and down, rather than left to right. I tried to read it over her shoulder, and so we were both looking down when a voice said our names right behind us.
“YOU KNOW, THERE isn’t very much alcohol in this,” Johnny said, as she paid for three more cups of wine and handed one to me and one to Sofia.
“Look, I said I needed a drink, and it’ll do,” I said. “I don’t like surprises.”
Sofia said, “You wouldn’t have been surprised if you had been answering your phone!”
“A lot of stuff,” I said, “has happened to that phone.”
“I don’t even have mine,” Johnny added, apologetically. “A dragon ate it.”
Sofia took that in as we walked, past the stalls of books and sausages and clothes and cheese buns, past stalls offering crystal, memorabilia, coats, wooden toys, gingerbread, bright red jewelry, amateurish paintings. She wore a long dark coat, black rather than Johnny’s navy, and her thin pink-and-silver scarf was knotted with a kind of casual artistry into a fluffy rosette that spilled down her back. In her boots, the top of her glossy, snow-sprinkled head was just an inch below mine. “But you know why I’m here, even without the voicemails.”
“Yeah,” said Johnny, at the same moment I said, “Nope.” As we passed through a larger complex of stalls joined together and lit with strings of light, Johnny dug her elbow into my side: Can you stop being a dope for two seconds?
Yes, but this isn’t the help Sherwood promised, I thought. Can’t be. She’s not in the Society. She’s who they try to protect from the Society. And she’s sure as hell not help. This is some other kind of setup. Like at the party. I’m really cursed, aren’t I? The gods have cursed me.
“Let’s find you a new watch,” Johnny said, and Sofia nodded, though she was clearly impatient to make what I knew would have been a beautifully rehearsed and prepared speech. I hoped it was something uplifting or even motivational, but judging from her face, this was a stupider
hope than usual.
It was warmer under the roofed stalls, even though the roof was just a sheet of transparent plastic; we moved along the stalls, and for a while the kind of helpless fear that had been coming and going in waves in my stomach like the tide receded into numbness, which came as a warm relief. Or maybe it was the hot wine: I wasn’t sure. Sofia and Johnny chatted and frowned and evaluated and lifted bits of shiny things into the light: a moment’s confusion till I realized that Sofia’s nails were painted silver, like the things she was handling.
If the world was ending, I thought bleakly, you may as well know exactly when.
I fell behind to throw out my empty cup, and when I caught up they were at a jewelry stall, run by a big beaming man with long, curling silvery hair. “Gandalf,” I whispered down to Johnny, and she whispered, “The white!”
“Oh,” Sofia said under her breath, turning a ring over in her fingers; narrow, dark gray—not a precious metal, I thought, but iron—bearing a small round red stone in it like a lentil, barely as wide as the band.
“That is Greek,” the stallkeeper said. “Like you? Very old. Not like you! A pretty ring for a pretty lady. Glass, not gem. Inside it say—”
“‘This is the home of love,’” Johnny said, as Sofia held it out so she could see the inscription. “It is very old. Does it fit? Oh, there you go. Beautiful.”
Sofia held up her hand under the light. Were we still supposed to be keeping up our cover? I had no idea. But I knew, from her wistful face, or possibly years of dealing with the kids, that she had fallen in love with it, and if the world was ending... “You want it?” I said. “I’ll buy it for you.”
There was a beat; Sofia flushed brightly, and the stallkeeper rubbed his hands together in sheer delight at her consternation.
“It doesn’t mean anything!” I said hastily. “It’s not, a, um. It’s not. I’m not. It’s just a present. If you want.”
“...Are you sure?”
Well, I don’t really expect Visa to chase down my statement when I can’t pay it off, I thought. “Of course. Come on, it’s nice, and it fits you.”
“Fits perfectly,” the stallkeeper added encouragingly, and turned to Johnny while I fumbled out my wallet, hoping my card wouldn’t be declined. “Ah, you got an eye for it. See, this one also writing inside. That one, that is from Roman time. It says...”
“Sure does,” Johnny said, and got out her own credit card. I peered over at her purchase as the stallkeeper took the two cards over to the machine plugged in at the back of the stall: hers too was iron rather than a precious metal, no gem, oddly pitted and faceted. She put it on before I could even glance at the letters incised inside it, catching only a glimpse at how deep they were.
I took my receipt, wincing, and we headed down the line of stalls toward the cooler air. I looked automatically for one of the drum fires; the square was even busier, if anything, so you had to look for the knots of people assembled around the fires, holding out mittened hands, warming faces.
“Thank you, my darling.” Sofia held her hand out so that the little red gem caught the light. “It is beautiful.”
Oh, so we were keeping up the story. Nice to know where you stand. “You’re welcome.” I glanced down at Johnny, who seemed to have stalled out in front of a display filled with shelves of crystal glasses, saucers, and sculptures, but also globes of various sizes on little wooden tripods so they wouldn’t roll around. “Uh. Are you okay?”
Johnny picked up one of the spheres, weighing it in her hand as the stallkeeper came over and asked her something, then nodded and replaced it on its holder. Something kindled in her eyes: I pictured the ‘pop’ of a lighter, held behind the yellow-green irises. Half-consciously, I thought, she touched her coat pocket, where I had seen her slip Huxley’s book earlier. “Rings,” she murmured without looking away from the sphere. “Toroid.”
“What?”
“I’m going back to the hotel,” she said. “I need my laptop.”
“For what?” said Sofia, but Johnny was already gone, darting and bouncing across the square full of people like a rogue pinball. We stared after her.
“So,” I said, when we had both spent about as long as I could stand without talking or looking at each other, “what did you come here for?”
“NO,” I SAID. “And I really mean that. You haven’t seen what we’ve seen over the last week or whatever.”
Sofia frowned. “And what is that?”
I closed my eyes for a moment. Leery of the cameras installed everywhere, we had ended up in a small, ancient pub which looked like it had been built in the thirteenth century and was so low-tech it only took cash. Its light fixtures looked like they hadn’t been changed since the Second World War and were stubbornly holding on, filaments dull, nearly orange, but still burning. In the weird light, the beer I’d felt obligated to order looked like red Kool-Aid.
“It doesn’t matter. We just... look. Let me just stop saying we. Because this whole time... listen. You know I’ll come with you. But Johnny just absolutely will not. She wouldn’t have before this week, and she definitely will not now.”
“But she has to.”
“I know you think joining forces or whatever is the way to go here,” I said patiently. Sofia folded her arms and glared at me. “And I know you don’t give a shit about whether I come or not, because I’m not useful, only she is. What I am trying to explain is that a) she won’t; and b) it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing we can do now.”
“That is what I am trying to explain to you, Nicholas. What if there was?”
I stared at her, the fear returning, starting in my stomach and working its way up. The end of the world: drinking beer in Prague and waiting to go home to die with my family. Wait, stop. Don’t fall for it. They do this, it’s what they do. Both the Society and the Ancient Ones. “There isn’t.”
“And who told you that?”
“Several people. And things. Not just her, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” I poked at the pretzel I’d ordered, knocking off some of the salt. It was the size of a hubcap, and my stomach was revolving slowly and queasily, like the pork we’d seen on the spits at the market.
It wasn’t so much that I thought Sofia was lying, or that Johnny and I had been lied to, or that (in fact) anyone was lying. It was more that everyone was concealing their version of the truth. Johnny and I were skittering around like cockroaches in a dark room because of that hunger to conceal, that fear of what would happen to us if the truth emerged; but the Society’s need was different. They weren’t ashamed or afraid of what they did; they just needed secrecy to function.
And it wasn’t that they were hoarding or monopolizing decisions about magic; it was more that if the public knew the Society existed, they’d become obsessed with exposing its workings and private communications, with demanding to join it, with preventing it from doing its work, basically. Because I knew people (better than Johnny did, I often thought), and I knew people interfered because they thought they all had the right not just to an opinion, but to participation; not merely to express their ideas, but to barge in and ensure they became real. Like those conspiracy nuts demanding access to government intelligence that simply could not be exposed for the government to function. You couldn’t run a business like that, let alone a group of academics.
But they weren’t that any more, were they?
And now their secrecy prevented accountability. And so rot had set in, and someone had decided: No more fighting. No more knuckling under, no more compliance. Instead, active, even enthusiastic collaboration. And then in the world to come, we may not be peers, we may not be pets, we may not even be cattle, but we might be safe. And no one else will be.
All of them? Some of them? I studied Sofia as if it would help. “What were you really doing in Edinburgh?”
She sighed. “Obviously I went to go see what Joanna was doing. All right? You knew that already. I had suspected for a long time that... that her device, her power
plant, was in some way attached to the Anomaly. I thought: How, why? Did the Ancient Ones spot it somehow, one of Their watchers with Their horrible face pressed against the Earth? Is that why They tried to come? And later I thought... well. Whose side is she on? Because if... if They came, if They... got through, threatened her... I am not saying she’s evil. I am saying she probably made a choice. And yet the reactors were allowed to go ahead. Why?”
I stared stonily at her.
“You know there are Ssarati personnel in governments all over the world. Doing two jobs: one public, one private. They say: One job for the part of the world you can see, and the other for the part you cannot see.” She leaned urgently over the table, bumping her wine. “And yet, the reactors could not be stopped. So much movement behind the scenes, even... even creating, moving, signing the documents that would be needed. But she prevailed. What does that tell you?”
“She’s very good at it,” I said carefully. “Because when she wants something...”
“That is why we need her! Yes, I was investigating her, all right? I will say it. And in Edinburgh, I thought Papa would come, so I could explain why I had left school, I knew he would not come otherwise, he’s always trying to keep me out of Ssarati business... but he sent you. Without telling me. So I immediately worried that you were... that you had betrayed us. Were working with her instead. But on what? We had no idea. Papa says, though, that your loyalty is unquestioned. That you are with us, always, and on the side of humanity, and preserving life. And she is too. Isn’t she?”
“Of course she is. Especially if she can put her name on it.”
“Well, then.”
I sipped my warm beer. It was all so simple, and so complicated, and there should have been only two sides of the siege, but there weren’t. Inside the castle walls and outside them. The army outside, and the one inside. And did she even know? That the Society that she loved and idolized, that she had been soaking in since birth, might be splitting? Or had split? Or contained, at the very least, a couple of shards of broken glass inside its bland academic softness? She must know. But then why send her to say these things, I wondered? To lure Johnny and I back into a trap, after we’d gotten out of their other ones? Or just Johnny? To turn her back over to Nya… the Manifestation?
A Broken Darkness Page 25