“She made it up,” I said, authoritatively.
“Do not listen to him,” Johnny said. “Heed not his babbling. He speaks, like the Devil, with a forked tongue, and often offers people apples.”
“It’s so you don’t get scurvy,” I said, as Rutger returned, bearing a sheaf of papers; he had shed his suit jacket to reveal a dark-blue shirt nearly the colour of the desert sky above us. He looked about as lightheaded as I felt; the girls seemed fine. When he stood next to Johnny, she seemed more complete somehow: as if her shadow had snapped into focus on a sunny day.
What you carry with you, I thought. Magic could carry time and light from where it originated; but Johnny carried me, and Rutger, and all her secrets. Which way were we spinning, I wondered. Were we all working in the same direction?
EVEN WITH JOHNNY’S warnings that it would be a long drive, I found myself startled when, a few hours after we left, the sun went down. Columba, a powerfully built man who had dressed head to toe for the trip in pale khaki that showed every sweat stain and speck of dust, turned on the Hummer’s headlights, illuminating the highway ahead of us in a wash of white nearly as bright as day. He whistled. “Get what you pay for, eh?”
Hayes sniffed. “Not always true.” She leaned forward, brushing back her long dark hair, and grasped the edge of the shotgun seat, where Johnny had plugged her laptop into the cigarette lighter to keep the screen at full brightness. “How much further?”
“Hang on. Let me do one more iteration.” She typed, adjusted the little device wired to the side, and pressed the On button on the remains of the calculator. After a moment, it displayed two strings of digits, which then appeared on the Hummer’s dashboard GPS.
“Recalculating,” the voice said primly.
“We’re gonna run out of road pretty quick here,” Davis muttered.
“That’s why we got a personnel carrier.” Columba patted the dashboard reverently. “I like this. Eh? We run into any of them things, we just... run them right over.”
We all nodded queasily. Several more hours: but Rutger, always ready, had packed the cargo compartment with enough gear to overnight out here, mostly purchased in Prague. I had never been camping, although thanks to Johnny, I had certainly slept rough a lot, and performed the usual functions of hygiene in unexpected places. Sofia had confessed that she’d never gone camping either, and Johnny had agreed that it was, generally, not a good idea, depending on your feelings about getting eaten by bears, but that probably wouldn’t happen here, sleeping in the vehicle.
What else would eat you out here, I wondered? In Edinburgh: nothing, surely. And in Prague, I had been assured by one of the people Johnny had talked to on the phone that despite strenuous rewilding projects outside the city (bears and wolves, but also several things that bears and wolves could eat, including Chambers Enterprises-funded aurochs, though I didn’t know what those were), it was still nothing. But we were driving through mountains, and things lived in mountains that you didn’t know about because it was impossible to get up there and look.
I almost nudged Sofia to ask, but she had fallen asleep, and Rutger was staring stonily out his window, so I did too. Mountains, lit for a moment by our headlights, and the increasingly ridgy road. Familiar, though not our well-known Rockies, which I felt I had seen a thousand times on family road trips to Banff or Jasper: always terrifying and beautiful, always known. Their individual shapes sharp against the sky, striations of snow, distant flecks of trees. These were the same, the road cutting between walls of stone, often slick with water in sheets or tiny waterfalls, thick green plants branching from whatever crevice they could get a hold.
We had passed at least a half-dozen mines of various sizes too, their signs flashing for a moment as we left them behind: safety warnings, insistence on wearing your employee ID, carefully hand-painted logos on mailboxes or guard towers, maybe by bored security people. We had been driving east and a little north, as far as I could tell from peeking at the GPS, for hours.
I thought: You are very far from home—very, very far—and they would have let you go home if you wanted. You know that. And you are not needed here: even as a spy.
Yes, I know. I know. Not needed.
When Johnny finally started dozing off and could not be roused to give directions, Columba pulled carefully off the side of the road. Branches and leaves scraped the roof of the big SUV, something stickily squealing along my door. “Well, that is the rule,” Columba said, grinning and turning as he killed the engine. “If you rent it, drive it like you stole it.”
As the engine ticked down, there was a moment, agreed-upon without speaking, of silence, feeling the weight of the mountains around us, the weight of the trees and the vines, even the weight of the sky, new stars still blinking in fretful code. You are all alone out here, said the wind, and the world is riddled with sickness and it is coming for you from all directions. Moving slowly, but on its way.
The silence was broken as Sofia scrabbled for our door handle, seeking fresher air.
“Guns of Navarone,” I said, as we piled out, rubbing our sore backs and legs, testing the footing of the gravelly turnout next to the highway. “Secret mission.”
“Hell yeah!” Johnny said with sleepy excitement. Rutger came around to the front and took the laptop from her, stepping back into the undergrowth to let her get out. “Dibs on being Gregory Peck.”
“I already called dibs. While you were sleeping.”
“Aw.”
The air smelled of green things, soil, road dust, and something indefinably of altitude: something about the way the inside of the human nose responded to it. Briskly, without chatting much, Rutger and Columba set up a tiny camp stove on the sheltered side of the Hummer, and made tea while Hayes and Davis got out tarps to sit on. No tents or sleeping bags: it would be a close night inside the SUV, everybody breathing each other’s breath.
“Will we know it when we see it?” Columba asked Johnny, as we passed BamFoam cups of tea around the circle enclosing the flickering stove. “This place you speak of, I mean. This place of, uh… transfer.”
“Maybe,” Johnny said. “With our eyes, I don’t know. There might be knowing but not seeing. But I think... it wouldn’t be able to disguise itself the way a lot of places seemed to be doing over the last couple days.”
“What do you mean?” Davis looked up from working the can opener on one of several large tins.
“Even if we haven’t evolved to use magic the way They have—and I’m not saying we have or we haven’t... because there’s really no way to test it on a scientifically useful scale...” She had lost track of the beginning of the sentence; I waited patiently. “Uh, I think there’s the possibility of something that responds inside us. Like a vestigial organ, but the opposite, really: a prescient organ, something that evolves for a function that doesn’t exist. Or doesn’t exist yet. The way Prague and Fes and Lagos and Paris were built over low spots, the way you can barely move in London and Kyoto without getting tangled in something.”
They nodded. I began to say “On purpose?” then fell silent. I’d seen enough of magic, if not of city-making, to know how it would have gone. Maybe your little group of hunters and gatherers included one person who was sensitive to magic, or was marked by Them, maybe even contacted or covenanted by Them, rare as it was. You roam the Pleistocene landscape long enough, eventually your shaman or your priest or your old-souled child or your twin or your wise woman says: I got a good feeling about this place. Let’s make camp here. And because everyone’s seen that they have a knack for it, maybe you wintered there, and the gods spoke to you, or gave you something you wanted. The next spring, maybe they say: Let’s just stay one more year. And everybody nods. And before you know it, you’re surrounded by skyscrapers and car dealerships and nobody ever even knew for sure what was underneath.
“It might be that part of us will know,” Johnny said. “It might be that we don’t realize it, no. And we have to circle in. But I really doubt it, I
really do. I think there would be no way it could prevent itself from giving itself away, especially now.”
“Is it dangerous?” Hayes said.
“Everything’s dangerous.”
Big white moths fluttered close as we ate, intrigued by the small flame of the stove. Afterwards, we took turns negotiating the darkness of the woods with a clip-on light and a packet of wet-wipes, brushing ants off one another’s clothing. Rutger had bought insect repellant devices at the airport: the size of a nickel, prominently marked with the Chambers Biomedical branding.
Johnny rolled her eyes as she accepted hers. “They work best when they’re somewhere real warm,” she said. “Try sticking it between your boobs.”
“Joanna Meredith Chambers, you cannot just go around saying ‘boobs.’”
“Sorry. Breasticles.”
“Anyway,” I went on, as Sofia slowly turned fluorescent pink, “where do I stick mine?”
“Where the sun does not shine, young padawan. Where the sun does not shine.”
Rutger placed his on his neck beneath his collar and sat again, frowning into the flames. “What I understand of the physics does not explain the rest of this,” he said quietly. “We should have returned to the house. You should have returned.”
“What,” Johnny said, “and just… bunker down?”
“Yes.”
Her lower lip trembled. The end of the world. Sparrow’s bunker, his bike hanging on the wall. Some people wanted to get involved in the apocalypse, and some people just wanted to watch. What good was all her money, Rutger’s gaze seemed to say, and all the bedrock and concrete, rebar and surveillance, if she would not use it? If she was out here on the side of the road in the Andes, eating beef stew out of a can? Why bother making it at all if you refused to shelter yourself behind it? Not cowardice to opt out. Simply common sense. The wise preparation of someone who had, like in a fable, socked away seed all summer, and now had somewhere to hide when winter came.
I imagined her saying, I did this. Not on purpose. But no excuse. And that’s why I have to do something about it.
Instead, she said, “No one made you come.”
“No one made you come, either. These people could have handled it.”
“No,” she said, “they couldn’t.”
The awkward pause was broken by the strange small sounds of wildlife nearby: insectile clickings, the uncertain calls of frogs. Eventually Johnny made a reconciliation attempt by passing out ‘energy bars’ for dessert, which she had been hoarding in her bag and had developed, she added proudly, in her own labs, but not yet sent for market testing.
“What’s this?” I said, as the Society people tore into theirs. Rutger put his into his pocket without comment.
“Just eat it.”
I peeled back the foil and pressed into it with my thumb, the oval dent bouncing back as I watched. Sofia was staring at hers with polite suspicion, which was probably wise.
“Is it oatmeal?” I said. “Soy?”
“No.”
I sniffed it, getting nothing. I said, “Is it... almonds?”
“No.”
“Um, let me think. Seaweed? Whey protein? Lentils? Tofu?”
“Tofu is made from soy. Anyway, no.”
I gave it a tentative lick, surprised to find that the thin brown coating tasted like peanut butter. “Peanuts.”
“No.”
“But you made those allergy-free GMO ones,” I said. “You should be using those in everything.”
“Allergen-free,” she corrected me. “How’s it taste?”
“Oh my God,” I said. “Is it... people?”
“Like you wouldn’t eat it if it were people,” she said amicably, ripping hers open and chewing with relish. Good timing on that one, as hers was some kind of fruit, cherry or strawberry, dark red under the chocolate shell. “Remember when we went to see Resident Evil and you wanted to get lunch right after and I was throwing up? You’d be eating people ten minutes after the zombie apocalypse started. You’d be eating people before you got bit. Now eat your damn dessert before you eat me.”
“As if,” I said, greatly offended. “Eat you, after all your lab incidents? You’re probably contaminated with all sorts of stuff. Tainted meat. I’d rather lick a sidewalk.”
“Oh, all of a sudden you’ll only eat free-range— “
“—cruelty-free—”
“—grain-fed—”
“—uncaged—”
“—antibiotic-free human? You elitist. You bougie.”
“Why bother?” I said. “You’re too little to waste my time eating. You’re a snack. A little contaminated snack. Like a chicken nugget.”
“How dare you.”
I gave up and started eating the bar, which despite its complete lack of smell tasted serviceably like a peanut-butter granola bar, studded with chocolate chips and cranberries. The matrix holding it together was so relentlessly chewy that I glared at her while I ate, positive now that it was human. Maybe the grad students that had dropped out of one of her programs, or corporate spies or something. Sofia, across the fire, stared at us as if we both had two heads.
Later, as I tried to get comfortable, spread out across our bags in the cargo compartment of the hummer, I spotted a strange glow: Johnny sitting on the hood, draped in mosquito netting, her face lit from beneath. I pushed the sleeping bag aside and opened the door. “Nick,” someone mumbled, though I wasn’t sure who. “Don’t.”
I climbed up beside her; she glanced over and lifted the netting to let me slide underneath. “What about your repellant?” I asked.
“They only work on ectoparasites. I got tired of the moths bonking into my face.”
Could the others hear us? I couldn’t even tell who else was awake, when I glanced over my shoulder to look into the vehicle. Twigs cracked around us; I scratched the back of my neck. “What are you really up to?”
“I think it might be better if you don’t know,” she said.
“But I could help you with it. These people…”
“No, I know. But the thing about them, the thing about the Society, what it does to them… Power corrupts, right? Of course power corrupts. Everyone who says it means it. People with power, people without it, they both say it and with the same emphasis. Some people mean: it ruins you, it makes you broken and bad, it rots you in a way that makes you… unfit. And some people mean: It makes you evil but it doesn’t make you useless. To be corrupt is to not be broken; just functional, and twisted. You don’t fit into the old lock you used to fit into. But you’re not not a key. You just have to fit a different lock. With nothing good on the other side…
“The Ancient Ones have never been corrupted, by Their definition; They’ve always had power. Always. They see the world the way They expect it to be forever: mortal things at the bottom, and stupid things like light and gravity and chemistry; and Them at the top, snacking on the things They like from us. Time. Fear. Life. Hopelessness. So when things from the bottom rise up, it’s a shock. Food fighting back. Toys coming to life. We’re not really real to Them. And that’s how the Society is learning to see people too. An underclass. Below them, and below their new bosses.”
I stared out into the darkness. Eyes were moving out there, but tiny ones; and the watcher in my hand made no alarm. “The plan,” I said again.
A long silence. The tiny eyes moved closer, blinked, receded. So small they were like stars fallen from the clear sky, still visible through the gathered knot of the netting. An animal, a creature not from here? Something changed, turned? At last she said, “I put a self-destruct trigger on the reactor, did you know that? Common sense really. Should have done it with the first one, the experiment, so we didn’t have to mess it up at the house. If this reactor is tampered with, it’ll reduce itself, more or less, to its component molecules. Pretty violently, too.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I hope you told the people who were going to be working with it about that. You know. Hazard assessments and w
hatnot under the Occupational Health and Safety Act.”
She nodded. “That’s why I automated it. Again,” she added, stressing the word, “pretty violently. Because it’s really important that no one tamper with it.”
I swallowed, hard. If they were listening inside the Hummer, had she just gotten us in trouble somehow? Because this was something they had not heard about, I knew. Only Johnny and I had been there for it: the reactor unmade swiftly, minutes before one of Them showed up demanding that it be weaponized.
If I was interpreting this apparently random anecdote correctly, and I wasn’t sure I was, she meant to do something of the sort with her nanomite anti-prions. The cure not defense but offense. A weapon against Them. Perhaps even biological warfare: wiping Them out. I wouldn’t have put it past her.
“What do you need me to do?” I said.
“Whatever the others ask you to do,” she said. “Can you do that for me?”
I finally turned, and looked down at her. Her eyes were clean pools in the smudged dust, visible even in the starlight: something burning in the pupils, not just exhaustion, not just fear. There it was, I thought, brace for it: gird your loins against it. I’d read that before, in some book or other. Maybe more than one book. What did it mean, girding? But anyway, there it came, that thing in her, the brightness, the warmth I had loved, the spark that gave of itself to warm you. The softness of her gaze that said: I see you, all of you, through you, and I stand on the same side; I would move mountains to stand next to all that you are.
Even knowing that it was fake, that she had engineered the love and its love in return, barely diminished its force. Come back to me, I thought again, then shook my head. No. Not her pet. Not her… her service animal. And I had saved her life in the castle, and I had saved her life in the place of dragons. And still she doubted me, because she was the only thing in any dimension she wanted to save. “What you’re talking about could go out of control,” I said. “Self-propagating. You said.”
“It’s war. Not a siege. A siege implies that we’re safe, and we’re not. But I can stop it. I just need to know if you’ll do what I ask you to do. There’s no one else I can ask.”
A Broken Darkness Page 28