Authors: Jonathan Wood
Then one of them breaks from the pack. A short little man in a top hat. Not quite a run but a brisk walk, arms swinging stiffly at his side. Others take his lead, start to walk away at speed. Not following the first one, but all heading off in their own directions, dispersing out into the night. It’s like a slow-motion rout. Panic under a veneer of respectability.
I exchange a look with Clyde. He shrugs, helpless.
“Hey!” I call, not really sure of what I’m doing. “Hey wait! We need you! We need your help!”
They ignore me. None of them are heading toward us. I step toward them, but they pick up the pace, arms pumping. They’re leaving the edge of the clearing now, disappearing off into trees and scrub. Kayla stands there, watching them, letting them go.
The princess, the woman I know... Do I know her? In her white dress, with her beautiful icy face. She’s still there, walking perhaps just a little slower. And maybe she will talk to me. Maybe she’ll let this be the point where things start making sense.
I dart toward her. “Wait!” I say. “We need your help. Please—” I close the distance even as she accelerates. I reach out, grab her by the shoulder.
Suddenly I don’t have an arm. One moment it’s there, and next my shoulder ends abruptly, smoothly, a few inches down my bicep. I stare. Then something flickers and my arm is back, but it is bending like rubber, curling back on itself, the fingers arching back toward my elbow. I can feel the bones shattering and I scream. And then I have no arm but a slimy flopping tentacle—purple and white, slithering down my side leaving a cold wet trail. I collapse to my knees still yelling. Reality blinks again and I have a ragged bleeding stump. I have an arm of squirming worms. I have a metal arm, heavier than I can lift. I have an arm that ends in a baby’s screaming head. We scream together, my mind overflowing with images. A plastic mannequin’s arm. A wing. An extra leg.
I hit the earth, and I’m actually glad when my mind simply flees the scene, when I finally retreat into madness for a short but pleasurable while.
“They’re gone.”
I’m propped up against a tree near the still-sleeping Tabitha. My arm is just an arm. It’s soaking wet, but it’s an ordinary arm. Actually, all of me is soaking wet.
Clyde is kneeling down next to me. Probably the one who threw the water on me to wake me up. Kayla stands behind him, looking at me with mild disgust.
It strikes me that mild might be an improvement.
Then Clyde’s words finally sink in.
“Gone,” I repeat. “The Progeny?” Ever the optimist.
Clyde shakes his head and hope stops springing. “The Dreamers,” he says, “they’ve gone, left.”
“Is that good or bad?” I know which way it feels but...
Clyde shrugs. He looks gaunt. Defeated. “I honestly don’t know.”
Kayla looks away.
And we don’t know. We can’t know. That’s the truth. And even if we knew the implications, there’s no way to stop the Dreamers from walking off. They can turn your arm into a... a... I don’t know. Anything. Everything.
Part of my brain is still screaming. Part of it is trying to rationalize the experience, pulling on half-remembered conversations with Clyde about more and less probable realities. And the thought that in less probable realities my arm is a leg, is a stump, is a... No. This doesn’t feel like rationalizing something.
But it’s easier to think of that rather than of what to do next.
What would Kurt... No. I’m not stooping to that level of idiocy. I have no idea what to do next.
“Nothing to be done,” I say, finding a brave face to put on. “Just wait. Wait for the plane. Wait for morning.”
Clyde sits and stares off into the dark remnants of the night and soon enough I drift off to sleep.
Sunlight brings a new van, a new driver, and a paramedic. He produces a jar of ointment and smears the contents over the gash in Tabitha’s side, getting ready to stitch her up. The ointment looks vile, and I swear I can see chunks of straw or something similar in it, but I remember the pill Shaw gave me, and the punctured lung, and that did a decent enough job of patching me together. Good to know somebody knows what they’re doing.
Then we get back in the van and we drive back through the beautiful countryside, back to where our plane waits—a great military hulk squatting sullenly in a field of grass. We board it, rattle about in it, and we head for home.
We don’t talk much. There’s not much to say. Clyde sits with Tabitha’s head in his lap. I sit opposite him, while the paramedic stands in the doorway between the main body of the plane and the cockpit chatting quietly with the pilot. Kayla sits as far from us as possible.
Somewhere over Mexico I get sick of the maudlin stew that is my thoughts. I’m chasing my own tail. So I give Clyde the best smile I can manage. Pretend everything’s normal.
“You started out as a researcher, right?” I say to Clyde, recalling something Shaw said.
“Yes.” Clyde nods. “I got into odd formulations back when I was working on my doctorate at Cambridge. Odd texts. Really interesting, actually. To do with the intersecting oscillations of...” He looks at me, sees my expression. “Shaw approached me,” he says. “Seemed like a no-brainer to come on board. Good use of book skills.”
He shakes his head. Grimaces. “Of course then I had to get interested in some of the books I was reading. Had to mess around with these old spells I was finding. Had to find out I could get them to work. And then Shaw found out.” A rueful smile. “Everyone found out. Blew up a good portion of a lab on my lunch break. ‘Chernobyl junior’ Tabitha called it.” His smile breaks.
“It’s not like book learning out here.” He’s not looking at me anymore. He’s looking at Tabitha. “It’s always easy if it’s in a book. You just read it, learn it, say it again. Ta-dah. Insta-knowledge. Just add student. It’s the stuff they don’t write down. Or the stuff they write down but they get it wrong, or just not... I don’t know. Sometimes life’s not the way people write about it. Sometimes it’s different.”
I’m not sure what to say. I’m not sure if he’s even talking to me.
In his lap, Tabitha stares. Her eyes flicker.
“Thought you were brainy,” she croaks. “Figure stuff like that out.”
A smile spreads so broadly across Clyde’s face for a moment I’m worried that the top half of his head is going to fall off. He pushes the hair back from her forehead.
In the doorway at the front of the plane, the paramedic stirs, takes a few steps toward his patient. Tabitha twists, grimaces as she does so, and gives the paramedic the finger. He backs away. She goes back to staring up at Clyde. He stares right back.
I knew that white knight stuff was impressive.
Kayla stands up, moves away to the back of the plane. I get the hint and head up toward the cockpit.
But part of me can’t help but think I really should have just kept my bloody mouth shut in that car.
“Someone’s infected,” I say. “I know it.”
It’s the first time I’ve actually made it into Shaw’s office. The room is as functional as the rest of the MI37 complex, and being underground there are no windows, but she’s got a row of daylight bulbs against one wall hanging over a miniature forest of potted plants. She even has an orchid in there. It gives the place an unexpectedly soft appearance.
The rest of the office is more as expected—an angular desk, a few perfunctory-looking office chairs, stainless steel bookshelves with a mixture of modern reference books, bulging ring binders, and ancient-looking documents.
Shaw drums her fingers on the desk and looks over my shoulder.
“The Olsted-Progeny basically admitted it to me. And the way the Peru trip was leaked. And it just makes—”
“I’m not disagreeing with you, Arthur,” she says, holding up a hand, and stopping my exhausted babble. “I’m thinking.”
I nod and then rest my head in my hands. It’s been a long flight, and a long journey to Oxford. And I could, of course, be making a big mistake. Shaw could be the infected one. But the chances of that are only one in four. And if she is the Progeny then I’m not really revealing anything she doesn’t already know I know.
“It’s not the only way,” Shaw says at last. “We are largely off the grid, but there are ways to hack our system. Tabitha’s computer, for example. You saw in Peru how Clyde was able to manipulate the wireless broadcast in magical ways. There may be methods of hacking into it remotely that we just don’t know about.” She shakes her head. “Metaphysical firewalls, that’s the last thing I need to worry about.
“Then,” she continues, “there’s the fact that someone uninfected could be working for the Progeny. The way Olsted was before... well, before our involvement.”
I thump my head against the table. Sometimes it feels like the biggest achievements so far have been blowing up Cowley Road and letting the Progeny infect a powerful magician.
“It happens.” Shaw shrugs. I’m not sure she’s telling the truth, but it’s nice of her to say it. I lift my head up, smile.
“The Progeny could have a hold on the mole,” she goes on. “The mole may not even know they’re working for the Progeny. Money can be a significant blinder. And it’s not just the five of us down here that have access to the files. We’re not the most popular agency these days—” Her expression sours slightly.
“I know,” I say. “Clyde told me.”
Shaw nods. “We have to work with what we have, but that’s not my point, Arthur. My point is that there are others outside our little network who may be the ones talking. We’re not airtight.”
“True.” I nod. But I’m not convinced. It doesn’t fit. Not with the picture painted.
“Look, I’m not trying to discount the theory,” Shaw says. “I just don’t want us to ignore other potential avenues of investigation.” Which is the right call, of course. “But you could well be right, Arthur.” She twists a stray hair that hangs behind her ear. “So let’s assume you are. What do you suggest we do?”
“Well,” I start, but I’m still having trouble getting past that point.
“I mean,” Shaw says, “I could take everyone off the team. Including you. Because I can’t trust you. Including me. I trust me, but it would be suspicious if I stayed. No one else would trust me. But then who do we bring in? Who do we know for sure that we can trust?”
I’m guessing that’s rhetorical.
“This is a job, Arthur, and I hoped you’d have realized this on your own by now, to be honest, where you can’t trust anyone, and so you have to trust everyone.”
My eyebrows go up.
She rolls her eyes. I remember the woman who greeted me at my first meeting with the news I was late. There’s an incongruity. And is that... could that mean she... And then I realize she’s right. That way lies madness. There’s a leap of faith that has to be made.
“So,” she says, “we carry on. We trust the whole team until we
know
we can’t trust someone. Not just feelings, not suspicions, but genuine evidence. And I don’t want you to waste time trying to find something to pin on Kayla.” There is a trace of the schoolmarm to her tone. I used to use something similar when dealing with wayward members of my own team back on the force. “If we can trust anyone, we can trust her.”
I pause on that. Chew it over.
“Now, on to what we can work with,” Shaw says. “The Dreamers. Their presence here. That’s an angle. We should be working it.”
“About them,” I say, still chewing on the Kayla issue, “about evidence.”
“What do you mean?” Shaw asks.
So, hesitantly, because I’m still worried I’m a little mad, I tell Shaw about the Dreamer in my dreams, about her warning. About her words.
“She’s not what you think she is.”
Shaw looks down. “You think she’s talking about Kayla.”
“I...” I start, and I know how Shaw feels, about how she thinks this looks. “It’s not that she stabbed me,” I say. “I mean, that obviously didn’t start us off on the best foot, but this isn’t that. This is how she moves. This is how she acts. She’s not human. What she does isn’t human.”
Shaw taps her pen on the desk. “You don’t think she’s human, and then when a Dreamer, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, tells you that some mysterious ‘she’ is not what you think, you think that’s confirmation? Surely the Dreamer is disagreeing with you. If you think Kayla is Progeny and the Dreamer really is talking about her, then doesn’t that mean Kayla’s not Progeny? That you should be trusting her?”
I shrug, helpless. What she says is true. It’s logical. But there’s my gut too. And I was never a policeman who put much in his gut, well, aside from burgers and fries, but this time I have a feeling, and it’s hard to let it go.
But it’s not like Shaw is going to shift either, and she is my boss, and she knows Kayla better than I do, so I don’t push it any more.
“Still,” Shaw says into the silence, “the Dreamers’ involvement doesn’t sit right. Their manifestation here— it doesn’t seem like something that helps us.”
“Can you tell me more about them?” I ask. Again, the more I know. But then a fear hits me. “Can you tell me about them without using the book?” I think I need at least one good night’s sleep before I do the book again.
Another smile from Shaw. She’s actually quite pretty when she smiles. The thought takes me rather by surprise.
“There’s not much to tell,” she says. “Because we don’t know much. They control our reality, basically Whether they created the composite or came afterwards and just handle maintenance, I don’t know. But they’re a fact of life. And because of their powers they’re basically invulnerable to attack. If they don’t like what you’re doing they’ll just screw with the particular reality you inhabit to stop you from screwing with them. What happened with your arm sounds like a fair example of what they can do. Fairly minor example, actually.”
A baby’s head for a hand—minor. Jesus.
“How did they even...” I shake my head. “There was no electricity. I thought everything required electricity.”
Shaw shakes her head. She looks sympathetic. “They’re not human, Arthur. Our rules don’t apply to them. But it could have been worse. You still exist in this world. They could have blinked you out. They could have made the change permanent.”