“You still trust her?” Sofia pushed her wet hair back from her forehead and stopped ahead of me on the slope, looking down at me. Even the trees behind her seemed to stare, or listen, droplets of the cloudy rain bulging like eyes.
“No. But I trust that she wants to get back to remaking the world the way she wants,” I said slowly. “Ours. That’s the only thing I trust. She’s a monster, but she’ll be a monster on our side. She won’t brook competition from Them.”
“Nicholas, I can’t tell if you’re going to do it or not. What if she’s been... colluding with Them the entire time? What if she set this up, and made it look like the Ssarati should take the fall?”
“We don’t have proof of anything.” I held my hand at my eyebrows, squinting through the rain. Yes, in the distance: you could hide a small girl, especially in a wet and dirty jacket the colour of the soil, but somehow, you couldn’t hide her from me, and there was that to consider too. If we lived. To choose hatred, or just let it fade into indifference; either way, and no matter how it had happened, she lived in the middle of my bones, making my blood, and I could never escape it. To be tired of hating her was like saying I am tired of this piece of shrapnel within me but never actually removing it.
Don’t think about her. Think about your people. She’s not your people. She was just pretending to be. Remember that.
“We are all at fault in this,” I said, “because we did not have faith in each other.”
“I’m not,” Rutger said.
“Fine, you’re not.” I sighed. “It should be unanimous, if we are voting. But...” A flash of white light, out on the plain, Johnny silhouetted for a second against something both enormous and invisible. Sofia jumped back, startled.
“I think Johnny should get a vote,” I said.
“No,” said Rutger, and Sofia nodded. And for a second I thought: This is it, it’s about to be taken out of my hands, they’re going to jump me, this is too much, a step too far, and when I am unconscious or dead Sofia will run to tell Them where Johnny is and Rutger will run to stop her and... and... then it will not be my fault and no one can be blamed.
Rutger said, “Then it will be two and two. She cannot be told, no matter what we decide.”
“What if it isn’t what you think she’s doing to vote. What if she surprises us. And I haven’t said no yet. And I haven’t said yes.”
“WHAT HAPPENED TO you?”
“Just now?” I spit blood into the wet soil next to her. The rain had let up, only the occasional unpleasantly slimy drop whacking into the saturated earth. “Rutger beat me up. A little bit. Sofia stopped him. But you’re asking what happened after you fucking abandoned me at the library.”
“Nick. Jesus. What was I supposed to do? Give up our only chance to get home? You’d have done the same and you know it. Abandon you, Jesus Christ.” She sat back in the mud and wiped her forehead, glaring up at me. “Fuck you.”
“And fuck you too. Get up. What the hell are you doing, anyway?”
“Plan B. Maybe Plan C. And you wouldn’t understand it anyway.”
“Use small words.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, look. This universe loves symmetry. There are many that don’t. We put our world, our dimension, into one, with one major change: a bespoke quantum field around it. It spreads and travels like a wave, has frequency and wavelength, has amplitude. The quantum field we create can’t touch their dimensions. Not will not, but cannot. There should be just enough magic to do it, if I boost it with the reactor. It wouldn’t be like Huxley’s pocket universe. It would be a real one. But new.”
“Some of those words were not small,” I said cautiously, “but I almost understood that.”
“Look, the energy an electron can have? That’s quantized. You can only have a certain, very specific energy, it goes in steps, not a ramp. You can stand on one step, or you can stand on the next step, if you’re an electron, I mean, but you can’t stand between steps. The only thing that can is a magic particle, and only if it’s told to, and only if it wants to. So for the field, you reduce all those things powered by magic to a node point, and when the energy is gone, zero energy, that’s the end of that. A self-contained place entirely without magic or the ability for magic particles to intrude. And therefore not just invisible and inaccessible to Them, but simply not there. As far as I can calculate. The last of the magic on either side would be used in the move and the creation of the field. Of course.”
“Of cou—” I rubbed my forehead. “Listen. What I’m about to say. You knew this was coming.”
“Yes,” she said, looking down at the ground. “Because you came back alive, that’s how I know. Why else would They have let you live?”
I stood there for a while in the rain, staring at the top of her head. “You should know that Sofia wants me to take the deal and turn you in. And Rutger doesn’t.”
“You put it to a vote? That’s very democratic of you. When They would have left it up to you to make the call.”
“Yes. It did. Drozanoth. And I didn’t really. Because I knew that was what it wanted me to do...” My stomach was churning; I thought I might be sick. My arm thrummed at the memory of killing her double, the terror afterwards, the sense that I had been struck by a planet-ending asteroid, had become dust and air. That I had killed her, yes, but also that I had hurt her. And that I was the only one who cared, in this friendship, who got hurt.
I said, “It said it had been watching me my whole life. With you. Watching as you closed door after door after door on what I could have done with my life, taking away everything around me so I only had you, and waiting for you to tell me the truth. Or waiting for me to figure it out. It said... it did not need to position itself as the enemy. Not when there was a much better candidate much closer. It said it wanted to... taste real hate, like tasting real time.”
She nodded listlessly. “...And the Anomaly. They came to you then, didn’t They? And asked you to do this. Something like this. They got inside you. That’s how you know that church. But you said no.”
“...It was real close sometimes, okay? I don’t want to talk about it. But I’m sick of being pushed around. By Them, by you. By the Society. By whoever. And I said: If we don’t take the deal, it’s because you’re an asset. Somehow. To us and to the future. And that’s the only reason.”
“Then you should probably take it,” she said. “What? Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know that I can do this, because it relies on us getting home by a different method and route than we came here, and the Valusian isn’t sure he can help any more; and if I can’t do step one of the plan, then I can’t do any of the other steps. So. A bad deal that still ends in war and ruin is better than no deal.”
“What?”
“I would go,” she said. “With you. To Drozanoth. If that’s what you vote. If you don’t want to chance it. But I can get this to work. If we get back.”
I looked at the contraption Johnny had made: the glass-and-metal device hovering inexplicably over a circle of broken blue-white stones, a seething glow under it, and more glass, recently dug up, still crusted with the red and black soil, carefully attached with the duct tape Rutger must have had in his backpack. It looked like a little kid’s art project.
“John,” I said, “listen.” But I couldn’t speak, and we just looked at each other while I thought: Still, even now, you’re the last voice I hear in my head before I fall asleep, telling me it’ll be all right. You’re the first person I think to call if I have a nightmare, even if I stop myself. When I look down, no matter where I am, which world, which dimension, no matter how far away you are, I still expect to see you there. Every time I thought I would... would quit, drop out, run away, you were somehow waiting for me on my doorstep, ready to listen. You played Marco Polo with me for hours every week in the ravine. You collected bugs and tadpoles with me and kept them in your lab because you knew my parents would have thrown them out. You still give me your secret signal. To this day. E
ven now, knowing I hate you. And even after I learned the truth I’ve never been more afraid of anything in my life than losing you. And I never pictured a life where we were apart.
And all of this is your fault. Because the day I had a choice about feeling any of this is long, long gone; the last day I did was the day before I met you. You imprinted me exactly the way you planned, like a stamp slamming not even into clay, which might one day be broken down and re-made, but metal, which would be buried, dug up, and still show what you did. Still show your name on me. This is your doing. Me, I, I am your doing, and so indirectly Theirs: They planned it like this, They knew there would be this moment when I would destroy what They had created. Not you, as you thought, but me. Me, your... your service animal. Not even pet. And you’ll never love me back. Not the way I loved you. Not as much as I loved you. And we never, ever talk about it. And now we’re about to die. And that’s not even what hurts. It’s something else, what you took, what you stole. Without even the excuse of love.
In the expectant pause, I swallowed, and said, “I’m... I’ve been working for the Society. For Louis.”
Silence.
“For almost a year now.”
“You said you wanted to be friends again,” Johnny said, and her face seemed to swell with heat despite the cold air. “When I saw you in Edinburgh, you said… but you were spying on me. You.”
“Why the fuck is any of this a surprise? Why? You’re the one who believed me! You fell for Louis’s stupid recruitment spiel! You’re the... you’re the fucking genius,” I spat.
“Because I trusted you!”
“Me! Your fucking dog! That you kick and kick and kick and expect me to keep coming back to you! And not only did you not think that was the shittiest thing you’ve ever done in your life, but you tried to justify it! And not tell me! You were going to take that to the grave, what you were doing to me, what you did to me! You ruined my entire life. And you’re still going! Holy shit, you can’t stop! You couldn’t stop after I found out, and you still can’t stop! And you thought I wanted to be friends again? With you?”
“I did think that!”
“You don’t deserve for me to forgive you,” I said after a minute, breathing hard. “For what you did to me. And for doing it without telling me. But you have to apologize.”
“What difference would it make?”
“If we’re all going to die? None, I guess. But if we’re not, then all the difference in the world. Even if we were never really friends. Look me in the eye and pretend for me. I just want to hear you say it.”
“Then I am sorry. And I’m sorry I kept it secret. And I’m sorry I tried to... justify it by saying you saved all those millions of lives as part of my work. It’s just that...”
“If you’re about to try to justify it again,” I said, “I will kill you. Okay?”
She looked away. “It’s not just a relief to not be bothered with love or attachments. It’s a necessity: like needing friction and gravity to walk. No one who really lets themselves divide their loyalties accomplishes anything great. If they do, it’s a weakness, a weak point. So I asked for a companion: to pour everything into, and leave the rest clean, unaffected. To never have to... beg or compete for love. To never have to earn it. Never be worthy of it. And so if you’re not wasting time and energy doing all that, you can get on with the work. The sheer pleasure of one another’s company engineered to require the minimum amount of effort, maximal compatibility, no competition with anyone else. You were an only child then, too.
“You don’t need to be in love to do the work. You do need to be not in pain though. And you never caused me pain.”
“Johnny, love isn’t like that. You think it’s… like something you’d have to share out. Something finite. So that if you give it away it’s gone forever, and you only refill the well when you earn it back. That’s not true. It’s not just not true, it’s like… what is wrong with you?”
“Love isn’t something you feel or don’t feel,” she said, reaching out to the glass-and-metal cube again, adjusting its position. The glow under it brightened perceptibly. “It’s something you let yourself feel or don’t let yourself feel. It’s not a slide. It’s a staircase. You stop on a step. Like an orbit.”
“No. That’s not love. That’s something else.”
“Okay. So it’s a trap I’d chew off my leg rather than stay in. And you wouldn’t. What does it matter?”
“It matters because I thought I…” I glanced back over my shoulder, where Rutger and Sofia were finally, and with justifiable impatience, approaching. Their figures were still tiny, just at the crest of the hill.
Johnny followed my gaze. “Don’t say you accept the apology. But you could... not to be gross or whatever. But you could have a... a good life. And a different kind of love. After we survived all this. If you just gave up on the idea that we... I mean, you and I...”
“But it was you I wanted. I would have waited for you.”
“It wasn’t a matter of waiting till I felt the same... It’s not, I mean, a matter of waiting. I just... I’m never going to... be like that. Even if one day I decided I wanted to, I can’t. You know why. But you could... you could find someone who... wanted to.”
They were still coming and my veins were filled with mercury and somewhere inside my jacket, wrapped in a piece of silk from who-knows-where, the shell, the poison to knock her out and hand her to our foes, inches from my hand, and she began to cry and said, “I just want you to be happy,” and the lie was so shocking that I blurted, “No you don’t, you fucking liar. You want us to be miserable together.”
She didn’t even have a comeback to that, and I dug my hands out of my pockets and pulled her close, the material of our coats crumpling and crackling and squeaking in the cold rain.
“I love you,” she said, muffled into the jacket.
I put a hand on the back of her head, the fine feathers of her nape. She still wasn’t putting her full weight on me, I realized; she was leaning against me, but not on me. I kissed the uneven part in her hair, and it was fine, there was less pain than I expected, because you only remember the first time the heart breaks, not every time afterwards. “Me too. If we survive this, I’ll probably never talk to you again, but I’ll still love you. Forever.”
“Forever’s a long time.”
“Yeah. Maybe I should say Till the day I die.”
“Me too then. The best and most out of anybody. As long as I can. Till the day we die.” I turned her loose, and she added, “I mean, it’s not like that’s going to be very long.”
“Oh my God. You ruin everything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“THIS PLAN,” SAID Rutger, enunciating carefully, “is terrible.”
“I think it’s scientifically sound.”
“It’s mathematically sound, at best; it is not physically sound.”
“You’re not accounting for the effects of the magic.”
“I’m not? Are you?”
“Um,” I said.
To her credit, Johnny, after a good cry, had asked Rutger to apologize for what he referred to as ‘restraining’ me; that he had refused was, I felt, not really unreasonable. Sofia, too, had not apologized for her vote, but had instead explained it, and Johnny had agreed with every point, citing only one to counter them: “The math works.”
The math might work, I thought, but not here; and I still had no damn idea what the Valusian was, except that we had definitely stolen it, and very much against the advice of the books. Sofia had tried to explain what it was, as far as she knew; but she hadn’t been able to understand the device, while Johnny had learned the language it spoke in about an hour.
“It was terrifying to watch,” Sofia said quietly when I asked again. “Now I see what Mr. Giehl was talking about. I thought I could see... it was like she was steaming. In the rain.”
“You probably could.”
“What?”
“That’s how she... uses it. What They
gave her. It’s like a switch she can flip, she says, so sometimes you can see it if there’s a lot of magic around. Sort of like how you can see the static if you scuff across a carpet in the dark but not the daytime. And she pays in time. One minute per minute. One hour per hour. No time to waste.”
Sofia stared at me, stunned.
“It doesn’t excuse any of this,” I said. “That she pays.”
“No, of course it doesn’t.” Sofia stared again at Johnny and Rutger, slightly downslope from us at our new spell headquarters, in the center of a ring of stones that were so clearly and obviously arranged like teeth that I had refused to enter with them until I absolutely had to. We had walked for most of a day, trying to find what she had been looking for, listening to the whispers from the device. “She says it’s... a mind. Or a soul or... something. From one of the places that They will have invaded, a long time from now.”
“A long time ago?”
“No. That’s what she said,” Sofia said. “Not from the thing that was killed, that you took it from, but another member of the same people... they were—I mean, will be—very powerful, she said. Able to do spells that would kill any other creatures that tried them. So, for a long time, the Valusians fought Them, and like us, managed to eject Them many times... but you can only fight so long, it says, against gods.”
“They’re not gods.”
“Well, I don’t know what other word to use,” she said impatiently. “I asked her if... if that means we failed, or I mean, are going to fail. For surely, if she manages to, as she says she can, kill Their entire army, then won’t there be no one left to invade and kill the Valusians?”
“What did she say?”
“She said there are places next to places, and since they all have their own time, not to worry about it.”
That was more worrying, not less, but I sat tight, scanning the landscape. In theory, Sofia and I were supposed to be on watch on either side of the stone circle, but in practice, the hill was high enough to give us a vantage point on most of the blasted landscape, and anything moving that was taller than the grass.
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