Relics--The Edge

by Tim Lebbon

  He entered “Longford” into the search, hit matches from the past seven days, and then sipped at his glass of wine. He was looking forward to Jayne’s arrival. She liked red wine, she said, and rock music, and she insisted they use protection. He was a careful person, and he respected such caution in other people.

  Another place, another time, perhaps they might have become lovers.

  She can never know me for real, he thought. I hardly know myself. The same went for all of the women he met through dating sites. Most were looking for the same as him—a bit of companionship for an evening, and then no-ties sex. Some sought a little more, but they quickly understood where his boundaries lay. It was a superficial life, a cheap way of meeting partners for sex, but he justified it to himself because it went both ways. The women he met were strong and confident, seeking their own way through life just like him.

  He finished his wine and went to pour another glass. Distant though he was from the world of stable relationships, Bone still really liked sex, and he was looking forward to this evening. Even in their brief text exchanges he and Jayne had hit it off, and he was anticipating a fun, adventurous night.

  Glass filled, he walked back to the computer and scanned the search results. Usually the search brought a series of old articles about Longford, and perhaps an occasional photo or two of the wide, still reservoir, its surface calm, its secrets long-forgotten by almost anyone.

  Today, there was a hit.

  “Old Town Revealed as Earth Dam Ruptures”, the headline read. There was one photograph, grainy and from a distance as if taken with a poor camera phone. It showed a uniform grey landscape he did not recognise, surrounded by a border of wooded hillsides he knew only too well.

  “Holy fuck,” he muttered, and the wine glass slipped through his fingers. It smashed as it hit the wooden floor, splashing wine across his bare feet and jeans. He didn’t notice. His mind was in the past, his perception drawn in and afraid, and the sense of threat that had accompanied him all through his life became even more heightened.

  His phone pinged as a text came through. It was from Jayne, a promise about what she was going to do to him. He sent her a short apologetic response, then dialled another number.

  “Jordan,” the voice said, curt and cold.

  “I need the Longford job,” he said.

  She fell silent for a while, and he imagined the security procedures she was initiating—phone tracing, call recording, voice analysis. He didn’t care because he had nothing to hide. Or not much, at least, and the things he did hide were deep, deep down.

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  “Bone.”

  “How did you get my number, Bone?”

  He smiled as he scanned more reports on the computer. “Really?”

  “I’m supposed to call you if you’re needed.”

  “Jordan, you think I’ve worked for you this long without wanting to know a little more about you than your name?”

  More silence.

  “I’m at home,” Bone said. “I’ll put you on camera phone if you want, just to make sure.”

  “No need,” she said. “I can see where you are.”

  “So I’m getting this job?”

  “What makes you think there is a job?”

  “Come on,” Bone said. “I’m looking at it now. It’s all over the net.” He had to keep his voice level, not let his eagerness take hold too much. Whenever he thought about Longford some of his caution lifted and emotions took hold. He had to be careful that didn’t show through.

  No one knew where he was from. Not even Jordan.

  “Why are you so interested?” she asked.

  “Our esteemed military ancestors infected the population with some weird virus called Kovo,” he said. “It drove them mad. The authorities gassed them, buried the truth, flooded the valley. And there were rumours of ‘strange creatures in the hills’.”

  He heard Jordan’s slight intake of breath. Sometimes he felt almost sorry for her, because he knew how much she would love to get her hands on a live Kin. That’s what her department was for, and why he worked for them. It was also why he kept his biggest secret to himself. The few times he’d found a real live Kin on an assignment, he had let it go. He sometimes fed a few old relics through to Jordan, just so that she didn’t think he was totally useless, but by working for the government outfit committed to discovering the truth about the Kin, he was best placed to keep their existence a secret. He was their buffer between maintained secrecy and discovery.

  He knew what their discovery would mean. Persecution. Vivisection. Annihilation.

  He did this for himself and for his father, and now he had a chance to return home.

  “You think they might really have been there?” she asked, as open and candid as he’d ever heard her. He didn’t reply. Silence was the great prompter, even for someone like Jordan who played chess in every conversation she had. It took maybe thirty seconds.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s yours. I’ll email you the details. I doubt there’ll be much to find, but if there are any relics there, they’ll need retrieving. Usual protocol—you’re on point, and anything needs attending to, you report back to me through the usual channels.”

  “Why don’t I just text you?” he said, smiling. He thought perhaps he heard a soft chuckle on the other end of the phone. He’d met Jordan a dozen times, had seen her dedication to her work, and he wondered whether she sometimes sat alone in a darkened hotel room surfing sites similar to those he looked at. It made him sad to think that was the case. He was lonely enough for everyone.

  “Just keep your head down, Bone,” she said, “and get there fast. The gawkers and treasure hunters will be there soon.”

  “I’ll be there sooner.”

  “Okay, good. Stay in the shadows.”

  “Sure. Have a nice evening.”

  “Nice? I’ve got to get a new fucking phone and number.” She disconnected and Bone dropped his own phone onto the desk.

  He breathed in deeply and let his breath out slowly. Longford. He had spent so much of his life travelling that he’d long-since stopped believing that he would ever return home.

  * * *

  A Grey carried everything he needed with him. The tools of his trade were varied, but the heart of Bone’s talent lay within him. He used and nurtured the talent he had been born with to be the best that he could be.

  Over the past twenty years he had only met two other Greys. The nature of their work meant that meetings were rare, and secrecy was as much a part of their daily lives as eating or breathing. The old man had crossed trails with him on an assignment in Canada fourteen years before, when both of them had been sent to pursue a woman who could allegedly read minds. Nile, the old man, believed she was the result of an accident, a brain trauma that might have left her damaged and different. Bone knew better. He’d let Nile take the lead, because the older man believed he was wiser, and doing so would mean he was not so wary. It was Bone who found her. She was so obviously in distress, and he’d had only minutes to try and define exactly who or what she was before Nile arrived. In that short time, he managed to establish that she carried blood similar to his own, and did not know.

  He told her and sent her on her way. He hoped it would help her understand.

  The other Grey he met was called Jodine. At first he’d suspected that they were alike, and he had spent some time on their assignment trying to discern whether she knew as well. Once they’d tracked down their quarry—he was simply a madman, so not significant in Bone’s eyes—he’d decided that Jodine was merely someone with an exceptional IQ and physical aptitude. If he’d approached her about his own origins, he would have compromised himself, turning from Grey into a target of the Greys. So they parted ways without him saying anything.

  Bone was grey amongst the Greys, inhabiting a deeper level of secrecy than the most secret government organisation. While his peers sought the legendary Kin because they might be dangerous, damaging o
r potentially viable as weapons for the military or security services, Bone worked with his own secret intact—that he was not entirely human.

  His purpose was to find more like him, make sure they knew who or what they were, and let them go.

  Bone himself was not sure what he was. He hoped that finding others similar to him might help him to discover himself. All he knew was that Mohserran had not been human, and that non-human blood ran in his own veins. His abilities to slip through shadows, his Greyness—the talent or affliction that his dear lost mother had called his sleek—was something to do with Mohserran.

  If only he’d had a chance to ask questions of that strange creature.

  Once or twice when he’d tracked down troubled, dangerous Kin, he’d had the feeling that they knew so much more about themselves than they let on. Once, he’d caught and bound a man responsible for several deaths in rural communities across the north-east, his teeth sharp, his eyes strange. Before letting him go, Bone had taken those few quiet minutes to talk to him about what he might be.

  The man had not spoken a word, but he smiled as Bone spoke, like an adult listening to a child’s innocent, naive take on the world.

  Whoever, whatever, wherever the Kin were, if they knew of Bone and his mission, they seemed content to leave him alone. He was helping them, after all.

  At the forefront of the government’s attempts to find living Kin, he was best placed to ensure they were never found.

  He left his current home and headed towards Longford without a single regret. He would probably never return to this place, and even though he had lived here for three years, he had amassed little. Material wealth meant nothing to him. He had money in the bank, and sometimes he used it for his own pleasure. On occasion he worried that he was not really living, but drifting through and past life, letting reality pass him by while he reached for errant shadows. Sometimes he grabbed on, more often he did not.

  Out on the street, he felt as apart from things as ever. A few people smiled or nodded at him, and he returned the gesture, but most passed by without a glance, as if they didn’t see him at all.

  6

  Lilou wanted Sammi to sit up front while Angela drove, but the girl insisted she take the back seat. Lilou thought it was because she wanted her and Angela to talk, but less than an hour away from the cabin she looked back and saw Sammi stretched out asleep.

  “Is that all they do?” Lilou asked.

  “All who do?”

  “Teenagers. Sleep. Is that it?”

  “Long time since you were a teenager,” Angela said.

  Lilou sighed. She’d once feared that she would spend a lifetime chipping away at the barrier between her and Angela, but a familiarity had grown between them. They sat in silence for a while, and at least it was comfortable. They weren’t like strangers looking for something in common, but more like friends who no longer had anything to say.

  “Sorry,” Angela muttered a few minutes later.

  “Don’t worry,” Lilou said. “You have every cause to hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you. Not at all. I hate everything that happened, but you and Vince...”

  “We were close,” Lilou said. “Nothing more.”

  “I’m not even sure I care about whatever might have happened anymore,” Angela said. “If something did happen, it was your fault not his. And not even your fault really because of what you are. I can’t hate you, Lilou, because you’re the nearest thing to Vince left to me.”

  Lilou felt tears threatening. It was a while since she had cried, and it surprised her.

  “We both lost so much,” she said.

  “Like you said, you wander hundreds of miles, I sit on my cabin porch. We’re both adrift.”

  Lilou was slouched down in the seat and she tapped her foot against the dashboard. “Fuck it,” she said, sitting up and reaching for the stereo. “Let’s have some music.”

  Angela laughed out loud, startling Sammi awake behind them.

  “We there yet?” the girl asked, befuddled with sleep.

  “Yeah, a proper teenager,” Angela said, still laughing.

  A tension seemed to have been broken, and though they travelled for a while without talking, Lilou felt happier than she had in a while. Having some sort of direction gave her life a purpose she had been lacking since the Fold closed. And she believed that taking Angela out of the rut she and Sammi had fallen into had moved them both on as well. They would never get over what had happened, but they could all try to take control of their lives again.

  When she betrayed Mallian, Lilou lost the best friend she’d ever had, the creature who had been the centre around which her whole life orbited. He was brusque and cruel, and sometimes so embittered that even those close to him suffered the fallout of his fury and rage. She loved him. He terrified her.

  She had not realised how much she relied on him until he was gone.

  Even as she fought against him and his ambitions for Ascent, he was still there, still the focal point of all her thoughts, efforts and life. Now he was a universe away, and whether dead or still alive in Grace’s Fold, he was gone from her life forever. She had felt control slipping as she’d fought against him, and the moment the Fold closed, the world around her had become deeper, darker, and more inimical than ever before. She hoped that what they were doing now might give her an opportunity to establish some sort of direction once again. Mohserran had not been a close friend, but she had known him since she was a young nymph many centuries before. The chance of him having survived whatever had befallen Longford, and then decades buried and submerged behind the dam, was slight. But nothing was impossible with the Kin. It gave her purpose, and the concept of trying to track him and the other two missing Kin had seeded an idea about what her life could be from now on.

  She hoped that Angela and Sammi might take some comfort from this journey as well, and would perhaps see that hiding didn’t necessarily mean standing still.

  “Wish we could share the driving,” Angela said.

  “I’ll give it a go.”

  “I want to get there alive.”

  “Okay, I’ll be in charge of the radio.”

  “So what’s the favoured music of the Kin?” Angela asked.

  “Spooky mythological creature rap.” Lilou chuckled and sat back in her seat, watching the world flash by outside. It was the human world, but her world as well, a place where she drifted through shadows and deserted places. It was also somewhere that was starting to feel less and less like home.

  * * *

  Late that afternoon they stopped for food. The roadside diner might have been out of a movie, with a truck park to one side, cars slewed across the forecourt, and a neon sign proclaiming State’s Best Chili above the entrance. Lilou had enjoyed watching films when she lived in the safe places back in London, because she said it gave her an insight into the world that she could not experience for herself. Mallian had considered them pointless human inanities. It was something else they had disagreed upon.

  “Haven’t been somewhere with so many people for quite a while,” she said.

  “Put your mask on,” Angela said. “You know.”

  Lilou nodded. She’d been used to doing that in London, but these past couple of years spent wandering the hills and woods—back in a landscape that reminded her so much of her early days—she’d been able to let her guard slip for long periods of time, and it had felt good. But now she was worried that she was out of practice. Angela and Sammi couldn’t afford attention being drawn to them, so it was Lilou’s responsibility to be as careful as she could.

  They took a nook by the window and when the waitress came they ordered coffee and sandwiches. She glanced at Lilou several times as she scratched on her pad, even looking back over her shoulder as she returned to the counter.

  “I’m trying,” Lilou said, looking down at her hands. She clutched them before her on the table, concentrating on her white knuckles. Over the decades and centuries it had become second
nature to draw in her nymph’s allure and conceal it from the human world around her.

  She glanced around the diner, and no one was looking her way, no eyes were widening at her natural beauty. For now, it would do.

  “It’s good to be away from home,” Sammi said. “But do you really believe your friend might still be alive? After all that time buried at the bottom of a reservoir?”

  “I doubt it,” Lilou said.

  Their coffees came, and this time the waitress only gave Lilou a couple of glances before going to another table.

  “But you said...?” Angela began.

  “If there’s any slight, remote chance, then I have to see.” She stirred her coffee and breathed in the warm aroma. It smelled good. It brought memories of times near and far, and places as well. Some of them settled her, a few troubled her even more. The longer she lived, the more the structure of her life consisted of memories rather than new experiences.

  “And you wanted to get us away from the cabin,” Sammi said.

  “Of course I did. I care about both of you.”

  “Company for you,” Angela said, but there was no bitterness to her voice.

  “I don’t have much,” Lilou said. “Even the couple of Kin I’ve come across here are private, unsociable creatures.”

  “It’s good for us,” Sammi said.

  “Sure.” Angela sipped her coffee.

  “And it’ll be a harmless adventure,” Lilou said. “A road trip to an old valley full of muddy ruins. It’ll take your mind off things.”

  Neither Angela nor Sammi replied, and Lilou knew what that meant because she was thinking the same thing. No it won’t be harmless.

  It was something to do, a place to go, that was all. If all she found when they arrived there were the buried bones of Mohserran and the other two Kin, then they would return to the cabin and the woods. She was not putting them in danger. After everything that had happened, she would never do that.

  7

  It took him some time to decide what had been missing from the final glamour. It took him a little while longer to see if he could find it in the Fold. Now he knows, and he has spent a long time luring the creature to him. Putting in the groundwork. Gaining trust. The Kin knows what he is, and who he is, and that, it seems, might be a help.