The Insides (24 page)

“What?” Ollie says.

“A problem,” Victor says. “We have a problem at the apartment.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the portal. To the Inside. I think it’s coming open again.”

“What? How can you tell?”

“I’m in the kitchen—? The air looks weird in here.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know,” Victor says. “It defies most of the words I’d use to describe it.”

“Try,” Ollie says.

“If I had to try,” Victor says, “I’d say the air in the kitchen is
darkling
.”

Ollie shakes her head. It doesn’t matter. “Victor, you know what to do. You have to banish it.”

“I’m not sure I can do it,” Victor says. “You—” He gaps out again.

“Listen, Victor, I’m losing signal,” she says, loudly, hoping he can hear her. “But you can do it. You know how. We’ve done it twice already. You just have to do it on your own this time; I can’t come help. Not right now.” No response. She’s not sure if they’re still connected but she forges on. “Find a tool. Whatever’s your best thing. Is Rufus still there? He’s good at this shit; get him to help you. Just get the thing gone.”

Her phone bleats; the call’s been dropped. She sighs heavily.

“Everything all right?” Ulysses says.

“I do not know,” she says.

“You need me to turn around?” he asks.

She considers the question for what feels like a very long time.

“No,” she says, finally.

Maja blinks at Pig’s seat, empty except for the half-eaten bag of mints. She waits a moment to see if he will return. The moment elongates, becomes a minute.

That’s a good trick
, hazards the Archive.

Quiet
, Maja thinks.

She looks for Pig, widening her surveillance beyond the car, encompassing the gas station, its market. No sign of him. She goes wider, looking out over the territory they’ve covered today, out over the whole state. She sighs, knowing she’s going to need to go wider still. She can look across the whole planet when she needs to, but it brings her back to feeling like she did when she was a kid, hiding in her closet, projecting her awareness halfway across the globe, looking for places warmed by the sun. Stretching her consciousness that way makes it feel thin, fragile, like so much flung gossamer: she didn’t mind that sensation so much when she was a spacey kid but as an adult it leaves her feeling vulnerable, psychically flensed. But Pig’s vanishing act has unnerved her,
so she does it. She scans the world for Pig’s unique prickle. Nothing. Her sense of apprehension doubles.

She reels back in, looks for signs of him in the local past, signs she knows should be there—the traces of his presence at the pumps, for instance. Even these seem to jitter in her mind, degrading as she tries to review them. It is not merely as though he is not here. It is as though he has never existed. It is as though he has gone somewhere outside of space and time entirely.

And then suddenly he’s back, sitting right there, grinning at her, as though he’s never left. Except, she realizes, as her attention ranges over him, it’s not as though he’s never left. It’s as though he has just come into the world for the first time. It’s as though he is brand-new. There is no history on him, not a single thing she can read.

Except—wait—there is something. If she looks deeply she can find the usual shadowed layer of fragments that she gets from him, the Cubist photographs that comprise his past. But there’s something else, too. More recent information. Facts about where he went, what he did when he was there. She can feel them slipping away, though, like dreams upon waking. She concentrates, closes her eyes, even as Pig opens his mouth and begins talking to her, hoping to apprehend the important details before they can deliquesce. Hoping to turn them into things that she will be able to remember.

She gets two pieces of information.

One: the pistol in his hand has been fired. She tries to get more history from it but she fails. Wherever it’s been is someplace that she can’t follow.

Two: he’s been near the blade. She doesn’t understand how this could be possible—he doesn’t know where it is, or how to get to it; that’s the whole reason they’ve hired her—but she’s sure of it, she can feel its signatures all over him, surrounding him like an ambience or a tint.

He’s saying words. He’s saying, “That’s the thing, see. Everybody loves sugar. I’m talking the whole
world
. And it’s because of energy. If sugar does
anything
it does that. It gives you cheap, fast energy. And magic—all magic
is
is just working with energy. Get enough energy and you can arrange it into patterns and then you can do stuff with it. Eat enough sugar and you can keep yourself alive—that’s the easy part. You can do other stuff, too. You can punch a hole in the world.”

She opens her eyes, fixes him with a glance. He stops talking. “You were with the blade,” she says.

Pig breaks off, raises his eyebrows in a bland expression of interest. “What’s that?” he says.

“The blade,” Maja says. “You were with it. Just now. You—observed it.”

“Not exactly,” Pig says.

“Don’t lie to me,” she says. “I can’t do my job if you lie to me.”

“I’m not lying to you,” Pig says.

“You went away and now you’re back and I can feel the blade all over you. Its flavor. So how are you not lying to me?”

“I didn’t say
no
,” Pig says. “I said
not exactly
.”

“Explain,” Maja says, out of patience.

“Man,” Pig says, rolling his eyes, “I liked you better before you became a person who asks so many questions.” He says this, although Maja’s not actually sure that he did.

“Explain,” she says again.

“Fine,” Pig says, shrugging. “The blade we’re looking for—? It’s not, it’s not—how would you say it?—it’s not a
stand-alone
thing. It’s a
piece
of a thing.”

“A piece of—?” She frowns. “A piece of what kind of thing?”

“It’s a piece of a larger blade,” Pig says. “It’s the tip. Of a sword. That was broken.” He shifts here, moving into a singsongy mode that sounds like he’s reciting something, a sequence of facts that he’s recited to people for a long time, or perhaps had recited to him. “Broken in 1803, by slaves, at the Battle of Vertières, in the colony of Saint-Domingue. Broken into six major pieces.”

“OK,” Maja says. “So the blade that I’m after—it’s one of six.”

“It’s six of six,” Pig says.

Maja blinks.

“The piece that you’re after is the last one,” Pig says. “We have the others.”

“We,” Maja says.

“The Foundation,” Pig says.

“Righteous Hand,” Maja confirms.

“Yeah,” Pig says. “My father and me. That’s why we hired you. To find the last piece. We’re rebuilding the sword.”

He gives off the impression of being slightly bored now, seems to be winding the conversation up. But Maja’s not ready to quit just yet; she’s still puzzling through what he’s saying.

“OK,” she says. “So the signature I’m picking up off of you right now—”

“It’s the other pieces,” Pig says. “The rest of the sword. I just went to the place where we keep it.”

“But it’s not a place,” Maja says, after a moment.

Pig looks at her. “I’m not sure I follow you,” he says, something faintly teasing in his tone, like he’s playing dumb and wants her to know it.

“If it’s a place,” Maja says, “I should have been able to find you when you were there. If it had been anywhere on earth I should have been able to find you.”

“I don’t know if I’d say it’s
on earth
, exactly,” Pig says. “Where is it?” Maja asks.

“Well,” Pig says. “If it’s not a
place
, is
where
really the question you want to be asking?”

“When?” Maja asks, thinking of Pig’s sundered history. “
When
is it? Are you traveling to a different
time
?”

“It’s not a place,” Pig says. “It’s not a time.”

“Then what is it?”

“What,” he says. “That’s the question.
What
is it. It’s sort of all around space and time. It’s like—if you think of everything that happens in space and time as happening on a stage, everything that we know about happening as part of like, a put-on, a show—theater—then this thing, this thing that I’m talking about, is sort of like backstage, like the miles of service corridor back there, like the trapdoors and pits and shit down
under
the stage, the catwalks up
above
the stage. It’s all the fucking
apparatus
that we don’t normally see as we stumble around, existing blindly, groping from one minute to the next. All the fucking mechanics that keep the show running. People who do magic call it the Inside.”

She nods. She feels satisfied by this explanation; it’s like
snapping one more piece into a puzzle that’s she’s been trying to complete for years. Because she knows the space he’s describing. She’s never entered it, like Pig just did, but she knows that it’s what she’s accessing when she traces the histories of things, their passage. It’s where all the records are kept. It’s how she can do what she does.

“You gotta watch out, of course, ’cause, you know, there’s weird shit that lives in there: like monsters? They die good enough when you shoot ’em”—he holds up his pistol by way of illustration before shoving it down into his waistband—“but then twice as many come back at you; it’s pretty fucked up. But that kinda works in our favor. They seem to want to guard the space so you can exploit the shit out of that, use ’em like a built-in security system. As long as our prop closet, or whatever you want to call it, is surrounded by like a teeming mass of a million angry worms, I can sleep pretty easy trusting that no one is gonna fuck with my sword.”

“The prop closet,” Maja says.

“To stick with the theatrical thing,” Pig says. “The metaphor or whatever the shit.”

“I get it,” Maja says.

“It’s, how would you say,
apt
,” Pig says. “Because the sword is exactly like any other prop. You want to keep it out of view until it’s time.”

“Time for what?” Maja says.

“Time for it to come on stage,” Pig says, starting the car again, “and do its thing.”

“And what is that?” Maja asks. She has to tread cautiously here: this is the kind of question that normally she
would never put forth. Part of what clients like about her, usually, is that she doesn’t ask them why they want what they want. But this case is different. The blade is powerful: she remembers the fireworks that went off in her head when she looked directly at it. And she feels the beginnings of a reservation at the idea of putting something that powerful in the hands of Pig—who, like the Archive said, might take first prize among all the fucked-up people she’s ever worked with. So she asks, even though it feels to her like stepping out onto an expanse of thin ice. “What is its thing? What is it meant to do?”

Pig seems to take no offense to the question; he just answers. “It’s
meant
to build an empire,” Pig says. “An empire for the white race. It’s meant, as my dad puts it, to be a weapon fit for the hand of a king, a king before which the inferior races of the world will bow, as they did in ages past, blah blah blah.”

Maja tries to envision it: Unger as the head of an empire, Pig as his heir. Improbable: but if she’s learned anything from studying the history of Europe it’s that the people in power almost never match your model of what the people in power should, ideally, be like.

“Do you think it’ll work?” she asks. “Do you think it will serve that purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Pig says, merging back into the flow of traffic on the highway. “I do think it’ll fuck shit up pretty bad, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes it worth giving it at least a try. ’Cause shit right now is boring as hell.”

As they wind deeper into the cleft of the Valley, Ulysses proposes a plan. He agrees to take Ollie to the farm, and he proposes to drop her at the end of the driveway and he’ll sit there and wait for some reasonable span of time. Just in case it doesn’t go well.

“Five minutes,” Ollie suggests. That’ll be enough to make sure that they’ll let her in. That’s the thing she’s been afraid of, all this time: that if she ever went back to the farm, back home, they wouldn’t let her come in. She remembers the last night she was there, stumbling down the porch steps with her bags clumsily slung over her shoulders, leaving; she could hear Donald close the door behind her and in that moment she knew, or thought she knew, that he was closing it permanently.
Don’t ever come back here
, he’d screamed, through the broken window. Exile, banishment: she felt these things as truths, deep in her body, indelible. It’s only today that she’s been able to consider the question of whether she was wrong. Just considering the question
is terrifying, but she’s trying it. Maybe she wasn’t in exile. Maybe Donald never had the power to banish her after all, the power to cut her off from her son. Maybe she was foolish to have extended that to him. On that night, that final night, he had loomed large in her mind, taking on a terrible status, that of a god or a tyrant; but maybe he was just a guy, a guy who was angry and sad. Maybe they were just two people who needed to work their shit out. Maybe they still could. She feels like she’ll know the second she knocks on the door.

“Five minutes is all I need,” she says. Ulysses gives her a look.

“I’ll wait an hour,” he says. “In an hour you can actually know something.”

It takes less time to get there than she thinks it will. In her memory the distance between the farm and the city seems vast. One hundred fifty miles! When you live in the city, and home and work and everyone you ever spend time with all fall within a circle no larger than ten miles in diameter, anything outside of that begins to seem impossibly far away, some sort of fabled distant land. But then you get in somebody’s car and then it seems like you’re there, right away, you’re seeing the sign made out of a disused barn door, you’re reading the words that you yourself helped to paint:
ILLUMINATED FARMS
. It seems like it took almost no time at all, to close the gap.