CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
OUR SPHERE BEGAN to sink, grayish water lapping at the side of the invisible barrier that still held it together. Someone screamed—me, possibly—but the island I had seen only on TV, and then under an unbreakable dome at a party, loomed ahead of us, bigger than I had thought, and the building smaller, Earth, home, my fucking God, she did it—
“Bail!” Johnny gestured frantically at the invisible ceiling over us, now letting in high-pressure spits and sprays of icy water; it took a minute for me to figure out what she was pointing to, just before we hit it and began to sink in earnest. A metal staircase, high and walled, like a fire escape, bolted to the side of the stone, crusted with salt but sturdy-looking. Johnny ran for it first, and began to patter up it on hands and feet, then quickly grabbed for the hand rails.
Rutger swung Sofia up, then reached for me and did the same: a moment’s utter terror, weightless again, then the clang as I hit the bottom-most steps, knocking all the air out of me, so that I slid and lost my grip. The water loomed again: not blue but gray, flecked with curdled foam.
Hands pulled me up again, and this time I managed to grab onto the railing, and mount the stairs, almost automatically. We piled up at the top of the stairs, catching our breath as Johnny punched a keycode into the door and let us into the building.
With the door shut, I felt safe for the first time since... I couldn’t even remember. Everything was a blur. The room was dim but not dark, lit by an ordinary sun behind ordinary clouds, in an ordinary February. Or was it still February? Something we could figure out later. Rutger, holding the Valusian under his arm like a football, gently placed it on the concrete floor, its lights dim, nearly invisible. Johnny walked up to a kind of mezzanine, a raised platform on two sides of the building, and began to uncover panels from their watertight covers; a moment later the lights went on, and a fan began to hum.
“There you go,” Johnny said faintly. “Backup power. Never have a thing that doesn’t have a backup thing.”
“I think we should back you up with something to eat,” Sofia said; she had spotted the vending machines on the lower level, as had I. They were both free, and though my entire body seemed to contract in a giant pang of desire for the bags of chips and candy, we pushed them on Johnny first, then sat down at the two small tables.
“Prawn cocktail,” I said, turning my bag over when I was done. “Amazing.”
“Didn’t you look to see what flavour it was before you opened it?”
“Nope.” I drained a terrible Gatorade, bright blue, and looked around the room again, marveling. To be still, to be home, to be safe, a roof overhead, electrical lights. No monsters. A bottled drink. “I could live here. This could be a good first apartment.”
“You can’t live here,” Johnny said over her shoulder. “People aren’t supposed to live here. This is for emergencies.”
“I’ve got a teenager in the house. That’s an emergency.”
“You’re a teenager.”
“Only till May.” I got up reluctantly and mounted the three steps to the console level, where Johnny was calmly pressing buttons and activating touchscreens. A quiet hum began under our feet. “What are you doing?”
“They shut down the reactor, but they didn’t disconnect it,” she said. “Just need to get in all the authorization codes, wake it up, and get it up to full power again. The spell I engineered back in Dzannin, see, when we can activate it, it amplifies the decay of a muon with magic—an electron plus a neutrino and an antineutrino. Anyway, the sudden loss of energy, the step-down, is what’ll power the quantum field to first move into our new dimension, then set up the trajectory to keep it a closed ellipse. But you’ve got to kick-start it with outside energy, or it’ll never begin the chain reaction encoded in the sigil. It needs a push. The biggest possible push, practically an impossible level of push: which is why Drozanoth told you it couldn’t be done. It doesn’t know the kind of output this thing is capable of.”
I stared at her for a minute. On the screen next to my hip, a blue circle was slowly becoming red, one line of pixels at a time. It said 10 in the center, which changed to 11 as I watched. “You made an electrically-powered spell?”
“Initially. Initially it’ll be electric. Then it’ll be self-sustaining. It’s not like, stealing electricity from the hands of children or whatever.”
“Candy from a baby.”
“Babies are living petri dishes, you shouldn’t steal anything from them.”
“What do we do now?” I said, nervous; step three, the Neverending Journey that had ended, was over, and now we were on step four, but I couldn’t remember either the code name we had come up with or what I was supposed to be doing.
“Oh, this is the worst part,” Johnny said, watching the blue circle, which now read 15. “It has to get up to full power, and then I have to start the spell. And then we don’t even cure the disease, we just”—she raised her hand and darted it sideways—“step away from it. Like someone with tapeworms just walking away from them and leaving them hanging in midair.”
“You are disgusting.”
“Thank you.”
She yelped as something crashed against the building hard enough to knock my empty Gatorade bottle off the table, sending me stumbling into the smooth round railing between the two levels. Sofia screamed as something slammed against the door: a sticky, wet thud, as heavy and ponderous as lava. Not a wave. Something else crashed against the window and stuck for a second: a yellow-green tentacle, covered in long oval suckers, each containing a gnashing mouth.
Well, that could just be an undiscovered species, I almost said, and then leapt back down to the door to grab the Valusian.
“Nick! Get back up here! We might need to tag off!”
The light brightened in my arms as I returned, clutching the delicate-feeling, surprisingly-heavy contraption in both hands. Something slapped the window again, darkening it. An eye, wet and flat, pressed to the reinforced glass. I stared into it, mesmerized for a second. Six pupils, dark and clear as ink, arranged in a rosette, on a veined amber iris. Hello? Do I know you?
A flash of light from the lower level; I shook my head, hard, and looked down at where Sofia had just blasted something unpleasant back through the door, now torn off its hinges and tossed halfway across the room, stained with a dark splatter of something. Rutger, methodically and without rushing, moved across the room to a box marked EMERGENCY SUPPLIES, and returned to the door with an axe and what looked like a fat-mouthed bronze pistol. Flaregun, I guessed.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Johnny said over the noise. “It’s gonna be okay. The reactor will be online in a minute, and then we just need to run the spell.” She glanced down at the Valusian, back up at me. “Calm down, it’s okay. No one will know this happened, isn’t that so weird? We’ll always be judged for what we did. Not what we meant to do. And you’re not going to tell, right? I just want this and... all my work to exist apart from me.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” I said, looking down at the blue circle. What else was happening out there? I didn’t want to look. This was the tip of the wedge, the main force would be coming in seconds. How could she sound so relaxed, when we were cutting it so close? The circle read 85. “What will you do next? I mean, after this. When you’re...”
“I don’t know. Retire, I guess.”
“Johnny, you’re eighteen.”
“Almost nineteen. Early retirement.”
“No.”
“Cruises. Shuffleboard.”
“No.” A terrible roaring had begun outside, mixed with shrill, chirping screams that grated on the ears. “You never did call David Bowie back, did you?”
“I’ll call him tomorrow.” 98. 99. 100. She took a deep breath. “Stand back.”
She whispered to the Valusian as I backed away, setting it on the flat part of the console, and a sudden burst of light flared on the white-painted wall, flowering from a hot bright dot, forming the familiar
angles and lines of a huge sigil, as bright as a star, so that I had to look away, and then ran down to see if I could help Sofia or Rutger. Time felt as if it were slowing down. Things were hauling themselves up the steps, up the bare stone, and through the open door, though they were easily enough pushed back by hitting them with one of the chairs, or the dull firefighter’s axe.
Any minute now. Aaany minute now. It’s gonna be okay. They’re here, They’re mad, maybe They even figured out what’s going on, but—
With a bang like a gunshot, spraying us with bits of concrete, the roof vanished, vanishing into an invisible angle in the sky, the edge of a mirror, or a line of particles, that slowly began to rotate, turn from a line to a point. But it wasn’t till I looked at Johnny that I began to move back towards her.
I wanted to run. Running probably would have been justified. The wind roared around us, spattering us with dust, seawater, shreds of roof, bits of cable. As I walked up the three steps, one of the chairs bolted to the floor flew past my head; I ducked, letting it hit the wall. I felt like I was moving through molasses. And Johnny’s face. Her face. Let me be wrong: mistrustful, paranoid, let me be those things, let me be wrong. Gut churning with knowledge, what she said was our only power, our only hope. Knowledge. And I knew her. And I knew her face.
“John,” I said loudly, over the wind. “What are you doing?”
“The quantum field is almost—”
“What are you really doing.”
“I just told—”
“Johnny. Stop it. Please tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m wrong.” We were here once before, in a sandstorm, and I trusted you. And you looked me in the eye and you said...
“I was worried,” she said, still looking up. “That’s all! I... I was worried about Them listening in. Somehow. The creatures, the trees, the grass. So I...”
“You lied to us.”
“Okay, I didn’t… yes, all right. I lied, if you want to call it that, a little. I changed a few details compared to what I told you. Because They might have had spies, okay? The real plan, what I’m doing here, was practically identical, it’s to bend a pocket dimension till it folds back in on itself, it’s almost the same amount of energy, the reactor can easily put it out, and when you fold something that small into itself it creates a microsupermassive black hole that would pull Them in and—”
But she’d said enough for all the things she hadn’t said to fall into place. “So that this one, ours, wouldn’t move,” I said, leaning close so she could hear me. “So you could keep your covenant. Because you didn’t trust us with the truth. And you wanted to be this. You didn’t want to become ordinary. Like us. And now it’s going wrong. Isn’t it. Tell me it isn’t.”
“It was supposed to only pull Them in,” she said. “It—”
“Supposed to? What is it doing? What’s…?”
She didn’t reply. Only lowered her head slowly from staring up at the sky, now a burning dark hole ringed with light too bright to see, like a solar eclipse; all of our shadows now were duplicated, multiplied, wrong, moving sinuously on their own across the floor, hands reaching, hair flying, like a flock of birds. The chittering chant was louder now, a flutter as things began to race across the sky, increasing in size. Magic trick. Everything going in the wrong direction, everything pulling apart, the floor shaking so hard now I could barely stand.
“Stop this,” I said, grabbing her shoulder, finally allowing myself to stop fighting it, raise my voice. “Stop it!”
“It can’t be stopped!”
I shoved her aside, ran to the console, slapping at the touchscreens; alarms sounded, but the light faded all the same, the shadows continued to multiply, until it seemed that every atom in the entire room cast one. Rutger bellowed something behind me, lost in the wind. I screamed, turned back to her.
She took out her wallet from her back pocket, removed something wrapped in plastic. I recognized it even before I took it: flat, the ancient paper yellowing, blue lines. Inside a scrawled initial in blood. N. She had kept it all these years. And I was looking into the face of the girl who had killed the world.
I put the paper in my pocket with numb hands.
“You said you wished I was dead,” she said.
“I still do.”
“Why did you come back?”
“What?”
“In Nineveh. When you left. And I started the chant on my own. And then you came back.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and meant it. I knew only that there were people who would abandon the ones they loved when things were at their worst, and people who wouldn’t. All hollow now. Meaningless.
“Don’t forgive me,” she said. “And don’t forget.”
Another tremendous explosion as she began to say something else, and Sofia screamed my name, and I turned to see her desperately warding herself and Rutger to the floor, blood streaming from her nose and ears in the blue light, and I ran for her, I know how to do this, I’ve done this before, let me feed power into your spell, you’ll need it, we have been betrayed, we—
“Nick! Don’t let go!”
I grasped Sofia’s wrist; her fingers closed around mine. And then a force stronger than muscle, stronger than wind, a power that moved stars and planets, tore me away.
I spun, screaming, the sky filled with creatures flapping whirling descending, facelessly smirking on dragon mounts, strafing the surface of the boiling sea, and Johnny too floated, drawn into the dark vortex she had created, headed for a churning mass of eager eyes and snapping teeth. She glanced back at me, once, then vanished into a cloud of blood that sprayed across my face before everything went dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE SKY WAS filled with moons. I counted twelve before forcing myself to stop. Far in the distance dark mountains cut shapes in the stars.
My mouth was filled with blood. I swallowed, wiped my face. Behind me: a tall, stone tower. Dark. The air cold, thin, burning. I got up, moved inside it. Stairs.
Up and up and up. Breathing was a knife in my chest, and my heart was pounding. But it was so high, and there would be an opening at the top, or I would make one.
Yes: a room, a window. Things inside it I didn’t care about, indistinct in the darkness, lit by the moons, a bed, blankets, a chest. Peering outside: beautiful, featureless dark. And the ground hundreds of feet below. My hands pale in the silvery glow, spattered with blood too, undried. The shape of teardrops: moving fast when they hit. Earth gone and my family gone and all lost forever and the disease cured but nothing left of any of it except me in a strange and terrible land and it was all right. It would be beautiful and good. A clean finish for all of us, forever.
I leaned out the window, the cold air pushing back my sticky, heavy hair. Stars, moons. In the far, far distance, a white ship, as white as lace, three masts, bobbing on an invisible sea.
Do it. A matter of seconds. It’s so far down.
It’s so far and there is no one to see. Don’t waste this height.
Something moving in my pocket. Still alive. Something still alive. A thing without a name, only a number.
I breathed in, and screamed as long as I could manage, screamed until my voice was hoarse, methodical as a song.
And then I climbed back down and sat in the doorway, out of the wind. A dozen torches approached, wobbling, through the darkness; and voices human, though nothing I recognized. I stayed still, and waited for the light to reach me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my impressively patient and diligent agent Michael Curry, as well as my eagle-eyed editor David T. Moore, our publicist Hanna Waigh, and cover designer James Paul Jones (another brilliant job!). I would also like to thank my friends JRD and JLH, who were virtually the only people I confided in while writing this novel, and without whose encouragement I would never have finished.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, A
lberta. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Analog, Escape Pod, Augur, and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel, Beneath the Rising, was published by Solaris Books in 2020.
www.premeemohamed.com
@premeesaurus
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