A Broken Darkness Read online

  PRAISE FOR BENEATH THE RISING

  “A wonderful genre-defying adventure, rife with strange heart and weird horror. But most notable is its particular, careful attention to its characters. Premee Mohamed is a bold new voice.”

  Chuck Wendig

  “A perfect balance of thriller, horror and humour; reminded me of The Gone-Away World.”

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “A galloping global adventure where privilege and the lies we tell others are as great a villainous force as the budding cthulonic forces the heroes must rush to stop.”

  Brooke Bolander

  “One of the most exciting new voices in speculative fiction.”

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “Premee Mohamed writes with a joyous velocity that careens through genre-lines, whipping the reader helplessly after her. One of the most exciting voices I’ve heard in a long time.”

  John Hornor Jacobs

  ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S BEST SCI-FI AND FANTASY BOOKS OF THE YEAR

  “One of those wonderful books that keeps peeling back layers, not of some cosmic mystery, but of its two main characters. Nicky and Johnny end up being much more complex and ambiguous than they appear at the start of this book, and every reveal is gasp-out-loud astonishing.”

  Charlie Jane Anders

  “Gripping from the first, arresting sentence to the last, this is unsettling, mind-devouring cosmic horror at its best, wrapped around one of those captivating noooo-this-is-a-terrible-idea-but-why-what-noooo relationships.”

  Jeannette Ng

  “I wish I could provide a short and pithy blurb for this novel, but I can’t. It’s too involving a book, too good a book for that. It quietly drills holes in your expectations, sliding demolitions charges into them, running the wires back to a detonator, and then—when you reach the climax—it quietly says ‘You can’t say you weren’t warned’ (and you were), before quietly leaning on the plunger, at which point, things stop being quiet at all.”

  Jonathan L. Howard

  “This book is the offspring of A Wrinkle in Time and the Cthulhu mythos, raised on epic poetry, the love songs and rock ballads of the 00s, and the inescapable rhythm of Gitanjali if it were a gory tentacle-sprouting punk anthem.”

  Likhain

  “There’s such a searing clarity to its understanding of the world. It’s loving, too; it’s affectionate of the people and the neuroses and the gentle way we are all damaged. It relishes the few things still beautiful here. It reminds me that it is hard not be angry at this world when you love it.”

  Cassandra Khaw

  “The most interesting thing about Beneath the Rising is the friendship between Nicky and Johnny. During the course of the novel, Mohamed peels off the layers of this relationship with nuance and depth, and takes it to places where few novels I’ve read have gone.”

  Sara Norja

  “This is a great story! I loved the globe trotting, ancient history and mysteries at every turn.”

  Stewart Hotston

  “Mohamed explores the many layers of Nick and Johnny’s relationship with empathy and heartbreaking precision. It will haunt me like no Old God ever could.”

  Kari the Talewright

  “Beneath the Rising is a fast-paced adventure story. It’s also a story of powerful, complex, often difficult emotions, and the tangle of friendship and devotion and other scary things, and honestly I wasn’t prepared to have so many feelings.”

  Karolina Fedyk

  A BROKEN DARKNESS

  Premee Mohamed

  First published 2021 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-331-6

  Copyright © Premee Mohamed 2021

  Cover art by James Paul Jones

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  For the friends who left

  And returned as strangers

  CHAPTER ONE

  I SPOKE THE words of power, and brought into being a perfect void.

  The small impossibility hovered weightless and self-sufficient, fueled by strange particles, carrying impossible light, bound by rules not of our world but of worlds alongside ours, unseen and untouchable, worlds of endless abyss.

  It was also about the size of a grape. Was it supposed to be that small?

  I flipped through the deck of index cards containing my scribbled notes, but it was too dark inside the closet to read them. The only light—strange, headachy, and faint—came from the void. It was practically at my eye level, and I didn’t like the look it was giving me.

  Don’t look, I knew that much. Don’t make eye contact: it didn’t like to be stared at. And don’t breathe on it. Human breath worried it.

  “So it’s like a tarantula?”

  “That is quite enough back-talk from you, Nicholas.”

  I kept my eyes meekly down while I set the cards aside. It was dangerous in the first phase of creation, and vulnerable (maybe even nervous: who knew) while it grew its coating of reality, the hardened skin of molecules and time on this side of the boundary. Unstable, basically, in every sense of the word. Easily offended, capable of great harm.

  But when it was all done, toughened up, wised up, it would be the first watcher I’d been allowed to create. An incredible honour (as my instructors kept telling me) for someone in such a junior position. Maybe even a first. Don’t let it go to your head, they said.

  Not yet, I thought. Not while it was still raw and angry. Maybe I’d let it go to my head after, when the watcher was working, part of the global monitoring network, a blob with a job, like me, floating invisibly around and speaking in its inaudible and incomprehensible way to the other watchers. When it was more than just a gyrating grape shedding flecks of weird spectra. Lopsided, too. If it were a real thing, it would have been making a little woob-woob-woob sound as it lost its spin.

  My back teeth hurt. Well, I’d been warned about that: you pay the price for the spell, as it took whatever it needed from you as well as whatever nearby magic was around. First thing the training had covered.

  “And you’ll teach me to do… magic?”

  “That will be the first part of the training. Not everyone has the capability, you know. And of those, the few that can be trusted to use it properly…”

  Don’t think about it, don’t think about it. I rubbed my jaw and watched the void rotate faster, squeeze into a proper sphere, sprout tiny crackling spires of glassy, bluish light, the first stages of its armour. The spikes flickered, steadied, and sharpened themselves against one another just at the edge of hearing, the sound not like music but the massed voices of a choir heard from far away, sweet and high.

  I didn’t know what would happen to me if I failed this spell. If the watcher didn’t work or, God forbid, decided to leave, or got itself caught somehow. The Society wasn’t real big on telling you about consequences in any kind of detail. Only that they existed: only that to violate the Oath would not result in anything so mild as being written up or demoted or disciplined in the way I understood from ordinary jobs. Because the Oath was “To protect the sources of magic and of magical know
ledge; to acquire and guard whatsoever artifacts and devices which comprise the same; to uphold the system of watching and knowing which preserves the security of mortal life on Earth.” And at the end of the ten- or fifteen-minute recital, you had to say: With my entire being.

  With my entire being.

  My new employers were powerful. Always had been, to a greater or lesser extent, and in inverse proportion to their visibility. And now that I worked (I refused to say lived) in the bright upper-atmospheric cloud of that power, looking at the world I thought I knew from fifty thousand feet, I no longer felt awed by it.

  Awe had lasted about a week. Now it was fear, pure and simple. Fear of the true and unfathomable strength of their grip, held in check till the Oath was recited and signed, and only then revealed: a hold that would not break even if you fought it with all your strength, or all your wiles, or all your money, or all your allies. Not even (someone had hinted) death could release those coils. And what the hell did that mean?

  Still. To be so high up. To be raised so high, in such secrecy, lifted alone into this bright place, to look down on where I had been before they had arrived, even for the terrible reasons they had asked, the worse reasons I had accepted….

  The void swayed and sang, sang and swayed. I monitored it out of the corner of my eye, seeing only glimpses of a thing like a solar eclipse: a feathery ring of light surrounding a perfect orb of darkness. It’s fine, it’ll be fine. Trained for weeks. Wrote the sigil a thousand times on the whiteboard.

  And after this, who knows? Sky’s the limit, baby.

  My heart pounded as the watcher rose slowly over my head, and settled into a kind of questing, steady flight, no longer rotating, the spikes quiet. I exhaled slowly, and reached for the whiteboard again. The second part of the spell would b—

  “Nick? Can you come up? The boys won’t let me record my show!”

  The watcher flinched in midair, jerked towards the door. Towards the voice of my sister.

  Before I could think anything more coherent than Get the fuck away from her! my hand snapped forward and closed around it.

  Roar of pain. Invisible explosion, trapped and rebounding from unbreakable walls, darkness whirling, a crack as something broke.

  Under the surging noise I barely heard Carla’s socked feet pattering down the steps, and I wrenched my fingers open, shaking my hand. But it was too late. This was no crushed bee, dead after its single-use weapon. The watcher had… popped, or something, and an agonizing wave of cold crawled up my arm, burning and freezing and breaking and pulsing like lightning.

  No time to suffer, only enough to conceal. My legs weren’t working; I staggered up from the floor, crashing first into the door then through, shoving it shut just as Carla entered my bedroom.

  Her nervous, angular little face seemed startled in the reflected light of the stairway. “What were you doing?”

  “Work.”

  “With all the lights off?”

  “What were you saying about the PVR?” I shepherded her back to the stairs and we climbed to the living room, following the familiar sound of the boys shouting.

  “I wasn’t going to bother you,” she mumbled. “It’s just, I wanted to set it up to get the new Futurama, and their turn is over, and the rules say—”

  “Okay, okay. TV cop.”

  “...I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Were you super busy? I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, it’s okay.” I sat on the couch, poking one of the boys—I couldn’t tell who—with my toe. They both remained glued to the rug, staring up at the TV. “Hey, you butts. Why’re you being butts this time? Why’re you doin’ buttly things to your saintly sister?”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’ll only take a second!”

  “We just wanted you to see one thing! We found it on the news!”

  “And Cookie is a tattle.”

  “You’re supposed to say nark.”

  “You don’t even know what that means.”

  “Neither of you knows what it means!”

  Chris turned, agitated; their usual bickering seemed strangely on-edge too. And what the hell could a couple of ten-year-olds worry about, I thought with a sudden flare of irritation? What was so important in their goddamn lives? It wasn’t like they’d just fucked up the most major task they’d ever been trusted with, it wasn’t them who’d have to explain... my God, and the phone was already beginning to buzz in my pocket, and I didn’t even dare take it out to look at the number. I knew who it would be, and the questions he would ask, and how weak my answers would sound.

  How could you be so careless (the kids were busy and Mom was asleep, I thought I had time to), why were you doing it inside the house (I didn’t want to die of hypothermia), what other places would have been dark enough to perceive the necessary spectra (none, I checked, honestly I did), did you even bother to erase the sigil (no, whoops). Jesus Christ.

  My brain felt like it was in two places at once, and I only half-heard Brent saying, “Hang on, I gotta fast-forward through the boring stuff.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. My boss had recruited me, trusted me, placed me carefully into the global network of knowledge and safety, found me a spot in the system. And I’d just squished part of that system.

  It wouldn’t matter to him that I was paying a price of my own; the Society would need to extract their own later. How long would I have? My phone fell silent at last, and through tears of pain I tried to focus on the TV, which both twins were pointing and yelling at in unison. Carla turned on the closed-captioning, which simply said [AUDIENCE APPLAUSE].

  The cold, mercury-heavy weight in my arm faded; my fear receded; my ears rang. In a cartoon, I thought deliriously, in a comic, there would be golden stars and chirping birds and little pink hearts (no, not hearts, goddammit) orbiting my head like planets.

  Because there, on the TV she had bought us (using the electricity she paid for every month, in the living room of the house she had given us) was Johnny Chambers, former child genius, prolific inventor, world-class researcher, scientific celebrity, noted asshole, and once the kids’ favourite aunty and my best and only friend in the world. No longer. And never again.

  It wasn’t that I had been avoiding her for the past year and a half, only that I had, as much as possible, gone out of my way to not talk to her or think about her. Or see pictures of her. Or video. Or respond to her phonecalls or ICQ messages. Not avoiding.

  And anyway, even if I had, what else did she deserve after what she had done to me? To us? To the world?

  All the same, I couldn’t blink, couldn’t even look away from the small familiar face, coin-sized on the huge screen. My heart was still beating somehow, but my blood had turned to ice. I imagined it as the river glimpsed from a passing train: sludgy with cold, thick and still. That was how you knew it wasn’t love. It was its opposite, as far as you could get.

  “What’s she doing?” said Carla.

  Chris said, “You’ll see in a second!” at the same time Brent said, “It’s a secret!”

  I rubbed my temples. All right. Stay: because they want you to, and because they’re excited, and enough feelings have been hurt and trust has been lost; let them have this. It’s a shitty gift, but you still have to show appreciation for its giving.

  Push the memory down. That’s over, it’s all over. That was another world, and she was another person, and so were you. And if you had a moment, a split second, when the spell was cast and her job was done and you could have let her die, and maybe you should have, not for revenge—no, of course fucking not, no, not that—but for justice, to pay the price for what she had caused… Stop it, push it down.

  Don’t let the kids see. Look past the TV, don’t look at it. Yeah. That should work.

  The camera pulled back, clearly trying to impress us with the size of the crowd: people in black coats with black umbrellas packed onto a flat concrete platform, so that against the indisti
nguishable silvery mass of sea and sky it seemed like footage from an old movie. The girl, too, in black at the podium, the big man in black beside her, and above them a hundred wheeling gulls whiter than chalk. Was it raining? She stood unprotected in it, face shiny and hair dull.

  “...gratitude to the government of Scotland for their dedication and hard work,” Johnny said, half drowned-out by the waves. It was easier to read than to listen, but that meant losing sight of her face. The face I had loved, the face we had all loved, beautiful, serious, sensitive, interested, intent on her speech. The face of a traitor and a monster. When was the last time I had seen it even on a screen? Months, I thought. Longer. Maybe a year.

  Thanks droned on. The high-precision laser-level startup. Tolerances to within a thousandth of a—Construction process of the—Trust the science to—Permitting process of—Public consultation extremely gratifying and—The reaction of Edinburgh in general to the—A tribute to the many—A fitting—

  “I’d also like to thank everyone who came today, what with the rain,” Johnny said, to a faint squelchy chuckle from the crowd. “You’re part of history now, you’re part of science—you’re part of a better future. Part of the world getting back on its feet. And that makes you no different from me. Thank you.”