A Broken Darkness Read online

  Oh you fucking little liar. Nice words. But you don’t really think anyone is like you.

  She jumped down from the podium and ducked under her assistant’s umbrella; a tall, broad-shouldered woman sporting a crystal brooch the size of a tennis ball stepped up and began her own speech. The mayor, I gathered. Or another politician. Good voice, nicely enunciated.

  I glared at Johnny, huddled in her sodden coat. Innocent, and confident in her innocence. God, you could see it in the way she was standing, without a word being said. As if she herself had not been made by the monstrosities she called the Ancient Ones, as if her experimental clean-energy reactor had not first attracted Their attention, then handed Them the keys to enter our world.

  What she had caused—what was eventually dubbed the Dimensional Anomaly—had, in less than two minutes, killed hundreds of millions of people; and aside from the deaths, the aftereffects still poisoned the planet like deep peat burning far below the charred trees of a forest fire, the very land itself smouldering out of sight, ignored by those who saw only a landscape that seemed safe from further flames. Nothing had been unaffected, and the rebuilding, in dozens of countries, still went on. Wearily, painfully, the long drudgery made bearable only by her handouts and her tech. She had been hailed as a savior, and accepted the invisible crown of everyone’s gratitude, and said sweet modest things. If only they knew.

  She had nearly ended the world. And half against my will, I had worked with her to save it—at the last minute, by the skin of our teeth. But nothing else had been saved. My job, my family’s safety and privacy, their trust in me, my only friendship, sleep, sanity, everything we thought we knew about each other, ourselves, the universe in general.

  For months after our return, all I could think was: No one else knows what I know. No one was there to see. No one knows. No one will ever know. A monotone filling every waking hour, drumming out thought. As if I’d visited some planet that scientists denied even existed, and I had brought no evidence back, nothing but stories.

  We never made a pact, not like when we were little kids playing blood brothers with the knife and the signed papers; nothing had even been spoken aloud. In our heads we simply said: Don’t tell. Don’t tell anyone.

  We couldn’t talk about what had happened.

  We couldn’t talk about what it had cost.

  And for all the time we could have said something—alone, unwitnessed, recuperating in the warm dimly-lit hospital in Baghdad—we still had not. All burnt and blasted and busted up inside from the kickback of the spell, with my chipped and fractured bones (ribs, pelvis, left arm) reassembling themselves, waking in the dark to realize she was still sleeping in the chair in the corner of my room.

  When we were both awake, bandaged and shiny as robots with silver burn ointment, we spoke little, and watched old movies on the TV bolted to the ceiling. Ignored the hum (whose exact frequency and pitch I knew I would never forget) of the bone machine, sitting closer to me than her, and even more her than she was, somehow, a white box with the bright C and L intertwined on the side, Chambers Labs. Stitching my bones back together with nanoceramic, stronger than the shielding on a space shuttle.

  Any time I could have woken her up, whispered to her in the dark. But I was rattled by drugs and pain and shock and fear of the future, and I did not yet know that it was hate I felt. Nor that I had sworn off the old love forever. Both seemed too impossible.

  For months I woke screaming with nightmares, staying up as long as I could to avoid a moment’s sleep. Even Mom, of the school of ‘Try thinking positive thoughts’ and ‘Maybe you just need a vacation’ had suggested therapy or drugs.

  I insisted on moving to a new house. Johnny’s people arranged it in days, as part of her reparations (I refused to believe she felt guilt about what she’d done to us, but she felt something, and she paid up). A fresh start: but it hadn’t helped. With the hate, or with the noise in my head.

  Then last year, just as I had begun to think frankly alarming thoughts like What would fix this? What would be a way to solve this problem for good? the Ssarati Society came to me with their job offer.

  Times are tough, they’d said, not with condescension; just a straight-up statement of fact. Times are tough. How are you making ends meet? You leave the house, you drive around for hours, you tell your mother and your sister and your brothers that you got another job. You don’t tell them about the money that appears in your account every month, do you? Wouldn’t you rather earn your own, doing honest work again?

  What honest work?

  Let’s say… information management.

  Low rank, but a rank nonetheless, without which you could not operate in the strict hierarchy of the Society at all; and a title, a paycheque, a cover story. What had I known about them till that moment? Nothing except what Johnny had told me (a vague story of their mission to preserve and study knowledge); and what I had seen for myself the moment they had refused to help us on our frantic, half-deranged sprint to assemble the weapon we needed to save the world. Hell, if anything, they had tried to stop us, under the guise of ‘protecting’ us, and who knew how that might have gone if we hadn’t squirmed free?

  But the most important thing I knew about them was the one thing they did not say in that long conversation: that they did not like Johnny, and they did not trust her. And that was enough for me, without hearing anything else at all.

  Give me that. I’ll sign it. Snatched the heavy beautiful fountain pen I did not know how to use, and scrawled my name in blood-thick ink. As if they might snatch away the offer, whip the paper out from under my hand. Spat out the Oath, not listening.

  And the drumbeat in my head stopped dead, instantly, and I could sleep again.

  On the screen, Johnny raked her hands through her wet hair and returned to the podium, digging in her coat pocket. Out of old habit, not expecting it any more, I glanced at her left hand: but there it was anyway. Our secret sign, unhurried, and making sure (how did she always know?) that the camera caught it—the signal she had been giving me since kindergarden to tell me she knew I was watching.

  My eyes filled with furious tears, and I turned reflexively, as if avoiding a kick. The death of love felt an awful lot like a cracked rib.

  But if I lived to be a thousand I would never love her again. Never trust her again. Still and always wish her revealed, humiliated, imprisoned, even dea—

  “Nick! It’s happening!”

  “Are you watching?”

  “You gotta watch! This is the best part!”

  The device in Johnny’s pocket had been a remote; as the noise from the crowd mounted into a steady roar, she raised it into the air, paused theatrically (of course), and pressed the button.

  Far out to sea, something leapt silently into life; for a second I thought lightning had struck, but it was something else, a made thing, a lit skyscraper surging up through the waves like a breaching whale. It had been there all along, of course. Switched off and so giving the illusion of invisibility. Now it was a tidy array of golden lights, blurred by the rising storm, arranged inside a square gray building perched on a square gray island.

  “See how cool?” Brent whispered. “They said it was a power plant. How’s it work?”

  “Why’s it on an island?”

  “Yeah, that’s weird. Where do the wires go?”

  “I dunno. They put her wind turbines out in the middle of the ocean, too,” I said.

  The camera panned over her shoulder, closed in on the sparkling building, then whirled back out and swivelled nauseatingly over the city skyline, all soaked buildings drooling soot and smoke, everyone still clapping, waving, tilting back their umbrellas... and then a smaller shock, another face I knew in the crowd.

  Was it? No. Couldn’t be her.

  Someone who looked like her, that’s all. You goof! Paranoid much? The rest of the world getting to you?

  The girl in the crowd yanked her scarf over her face, even raised an arm, as if the camera’s ga
ze were not only perceptible but the disagreeable breath of a comic-book heat ray. In moments she had shoved through the mass of people and vanished off-screen, leaving her dropped umbrella, still open, spinning forlornly on the cobblestones.

  And then it was all over, a quick shot of Johnny climbing down from the podium again, the politician and her bodyguards trailing them, everybody piling into gunmetal gray government cars, a sudden gust of rain. The entire segment: speech, ceremony, light-up, crowd shot—had barely been as long as a commercial break.

  The last shot was of security drones, deceptively dainty-looking with nothing around them for scale but probably eight or ten feet across, blinking red as they flew tight laps around the lit-up building, and the two long-range observation towers, instantly familiar—the same everywhere you went. Looking for enemies that they would never, could never detect.

  I took the remote from Carla and rewound it, ignoring the whining about her show, to pause on the face in the crowd.

  No, it was her.

  Huh.

  “My turn!” Carla grabbed the remote back, and the DELETE THIS SEGMENT? menu popped up. A second later it was gone, and the Planet Express zoomed confidently across the screen. “Are you okay?”

  “All good.”

  Jesus. If I’m right. If. What does it mean? The pain in my hand, the mistake still burning there, as if it were eating away the bones. The boys so excited to see Aunty Johnny again, never knowing that two people who should have been a world apart were in the same place at the same time. Not a coincidence. Nothing was a coincidence any more. Think, focus. The phone buzzing again in my pocket, like a hornet.

  Don’t say anything. Got enough problems. But if I—

  No. The coward’s way out. Trying to distract my boss with this? Like waving a laser pointer in front of a cat? He’s not a cat, they’re not cats; they know there’s nothing there to catch, that it’s an illusion. They’ll know what you’re doing and it’s utterly transparent, it’s so transparent it’s actually fucking pathetic, like the old days, bringing Johnny home with you when you know you’re in trouble, knowing Dad won’t yell at you if there’s a guest… is that what you want them to see? You being like this? Trying to weasel out of what you did?

  No! No.

  Her fault anyway. Her fucking fault all this happened. Some genius.

  I realized I was panting; the kids were staring at me. What would happen to them if something happened to me? No, don’t say anything. Keep your head down.

  Outside our cosy box of blankets and light lay the solid wall of night that had settled in hours ago, streetlights gleaming on fresh snow, my car huddled in the driveway with the black umbilicus of its extension cord snaking back to the house, bright and ordinary stars gleaming through the trees in the yard. Everything back to normal. The scattered black plastic bits of the boys’ new Xbox, not cleaned up from Christmas; Carla’s books neatly stacked in the corner; Mom’s shoes gleaming and new on the shoe rack by the door. We’d never had so many shoes that we had needed a rack before. We’d never even had a Gameboy.

  “Are you gonna get that?” Carla said tentatively.

  I touched my phone, a bolt of pain shooting up my arm. A new normal. The world a little rattled, sure. First contact bound to be a shock. No business of mine. And now we were closed up, everything shut, locked, bricked over. A clean start, free of the enemy.

  Yet a world in which the Ancient Ones posed no threat was still a world in which plain old humans could get up to all sorts of evil.

  Okay, but. Listen. But that’s been the case since forever. Since we crawled out of the oceans and began to lose track of one another’s business.

  This is nothing, this doesn’t mean anything. Not seeing her there and not seeing her there either. Can’t you just hate without doing anything about it? Look at this, at all you’ve been given. The house and the job, the trips, everything the kids want, everything Mom’s always coveted to be like her friends, the shoes and DVDs and makeup and perfume, the safety, the quiet. Given to you. And all you have to do is keep up your cover and do your job. Your little, insignificant job. That they only gave to you because you knew her. That you should not, cannot, risk for her.

  Cannot.

  And yet.

  Nothing is a coincidence. Not any more. Not even if you hate someone does it make anything they do a coincidence. If I… you would not have to stick out your neck very far. Because you’re far from the only person who hates her.

  “Nick?”

  Three faces turned to me, lit in the flickering blue of the screen. “Good for her,” I said, slowly rubbing my aching hand. Something cold and hungry still writhed in it, not stopping. The proof of my mistake. Maybe the last mistake I’d ever make.

  They were still staring. I said, “Come on, guys. Clean electricity. Super good for the planet. Thanks for letting me see that, seriously.”

  Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything.

  Twelve hours later, I was on a plane over the exact centre of the Atlantic Ocean.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IF ANYONE KNEW what I knew, they’d say, and rightly so, You knew everything. She told you everything, at the last. And you took this knowledge purchased literally with your life and you did nothing. It’s not too late though. Call the cops. Call the FBI. Call a priest. Arrest her! Do something! But you didn’t talk. And she didn’t talk.

  We didn’t talk. But we’d have to talk tonight, for as I laboured up the slope towards the entrance of the castle, everything made certain to remind me, in case I managed to forget for one second, that this was her party, it belonged to her, she’d paid for it, was the guest of honour, the hero of the hour, and the world’s first official Chambers Reactor powered the lights and music.

  A lightshow rotated on the damp stone of the castle walls: flags of Scotland and the European Union and the City of Edinburgh, and a tangle of crests, tartans, logos, brands, mascots. Spinning unicorns corkscrewed into a half-dozen Chambers Industries graphics: Chambers Labs. Chambers Energy. Chambers Biomedical. I imagined a half-dozen interns jealously duelling it out at the projector deck like rival DJs fighting at a rave, elbowing each other aside to get their particular division on the program.

  Which was hilarious, because tonight I was pretending to be an intern too: for BGI, the big tech conglomerate. I’d been assigned the internship as a cover (as well as a branded t-shirt, mug, baseball cap, cell phone, and five hundred business cards that I never handed out). Only Society members were supposed to know if you were in the Society or not.

  BGI was a good choice. Their employee base worldwide numbered in the faceless and anonymous thousands, and they were recognizable enough to be ‘prestigious’ to Mom and, grudgingly, in our infrequent phone calls, Dad too. They had a vague idea what my job description meant (“Quality assurance and quality control”) and were merely proud that I had gotten such a well-paying job in the gap between high school and, they assumed, university.

  I hoped I could lie fluently about being in Edinburgh on a work conference, sent as a last-minute replacement for my boss (which was more or less true). Meanwhile, I’d told Mom and the kids I was in Orlando for a different conference (user interface design? something like that). The Society had even figured out how to get my name on the web page; I knew Carla would peek right away. She tried to resist, I knew, but was always cross-checking my movements to see if I was lying to them again. I felt terrible about her compulsion, but I could never tell her the truth; who knew what they’d do if I did.

  Really though, in my (rented) tux, I was pretending to be James Bond. Like Jude Law in The World is Not Enough or Die Another Day, sleek and arrogant and able to brazen his way through anything. Hadn’t mentioned that on the phone to my boss, of course. There hadn’t even been a space to apologize for what I’d done to the watcher, nowhere to fit words in through the Niagara-like, billion-ton waterfall of his anger. Only when he had paused to catch his breath did I mention that his daughter, whom I’d thought was st
udying in Spain, was now in... Edinburgh? Coincidentally, at the Chambers Reactor ribbon-cutting ceremony, to which tickets had been assigned months in advance? What a lucky young lady she was…

  Lucky, Louis had said, drawing the word out, and hung up on me.

  As I had stood in the kitchen, staring blankly at my phone and trying to think of how to communicate my last wishes to my sleeping family without actually telling them why I might be doing such a thing, he had called back.

  Louis’s assistant had been quietly calling around; both Sofia’s residence manager and her dorm-mate said she had dropped out. Sofia hadn’t been seen in weeks, despite the fact that at every call with her father, she had chatted chirpily about her classes and exams.

  And one thing had led to another, and here I was, the instigator of this tangle of boss, daughter, nemesis and myself, struggling in the middle of their web like a very confused, though dapper, fly.

  From Louis, I had understood, clearly and a little insultingly, that my commitment to the Society was not distrusted exactly, but (and I would admit this) undeniably strained: both from the conditions of their discovering me in the first place, and the incident with the watcher. Do you know what used to happen to people who did what you did? In the old days? Mm?

  Fuck you, I should have said. You’re not paying me enough to threaten me.

  But I hadn’t, and had sat there instead, frightened and fuming, absorbing the familiar refrain: Just pay your dues. Serve your time. I could be so much more than a mere Monitor. I could rise in the ranks. Other people had. I could be prestigious, respected, like the others.

  Remembering the kids beaming through their envy, demanding souvenirs from the Kennedy Space Center and Disneyworld. Mom ruffling my hair, running her thumb over my ear. I’m so proud of you, baby. That’s a good sign, when they start giving you more responsibilities.