The Migration, page 16
Her eyes go soft. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it? When we saw it? It wasn’t terrifying. It felt…”
“Almost human.”
“They’re the ones who died, aren’t they?” Her voice is full of wonder. “The ones who weren’t cremated. They’ve changed. They’re waking up.”
She lapses into silence as a nurse heads toward us, an older woman with her grey hair tied into a loose bun. She has a familiar look about the face. “Mrs. Taite,” Liv says, “how is he?” Of course, Bryan’s mother.
“He’s out of danger,” she says to Liv. “You can see him if you want to.”
“This is Sophie,” Liv says, and the nurse’s eyebrows rise. “You go on. He’s why you’re here.”
* * *
—
“How’s he doing?” I ask as Bryan’s mother leads me through the hallway.
“Surviving,” she says in a low voice. “I don’t understand it. How my boy could attack a police officer.”
Inside the room it’s a shock to see him surrounded by machines, that ugly pattern of bruises on his face. She looks down at Bryan, and it’s as if she is seeing the damage for the first time. She squeezes her eyes shut. “So you’re Sophie then? I wondered when we’d meet.”
“He told you about me?”
She nods. “I’ll let you stay with him, love. But don’t trouble him. My boy needs his rest.”
Alone in the room, I watch the rise and fall of his chest. I want to touch his forehead, press my fingers against his skin and feel the heat rising underneath, but this seems intrusive, a breach of trust while he’s so vulnerable. So I sit motionless, let the tension between these two impulses nag at one another: wanting to touch him, afraid to touch him.
He stirs, then his eyelids flutter open. His pupils contract against the light, then expand. They are ringed in a golden copper, darkening to a coffee-coloured band at the edges.
“Hey, freakazoid.”
“Sophie.” The word is a sigh. He struggles to sit up, but then his face goes white.
“Take it easy.”
He collapses, panting.
“How did this happen?” I ask in a low voice.
He wears the same dazed expression that Liv did. “I don’t know. I didn’t feel scared. Just felt…good—even when I was on the ground and he was kicking me, I couldn’t feel any pain.” When he realizes I’m staring at him, his face flushes red with shame.
“Should I call your mom?”
“Not yet.”
I catch his hand in mine. “Did you see it? The nymph?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you feel it too?”
“What?”
“The connection. When it flew overhead, I could see, or feel, its memories. It was like I was hallucinating.”
He shakes his head slowly. “It wasn’t like that for me,” he says. “It was…muted. Just a feeling. A sense of warmth, maybe.”
“There are others,” I tell him excitedly. “I saw it on the news. Liv said they’re waking up. I think she’s right.” His fingers squeeze mine.
“Kira?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I need to get to the cement works. But I had to see you first. I had to know you were okay.”
Bryan looks as if he wants to say something but then there’s a noise outside. Liv, I can recognize her voice. She’s shouting for me.
“Go,” he says. “Find out what’s happening.”
* * *
—
Liv is pacing in the waiting room, tears running down her cheeks. Her lipstick has smeared across her face. “What’s wrong? Liv?”
“It’s Martin. He—the doctors say…he was hit in the head. Bleeding in the brain. He’s dead.”
I collapse next to her in a chair. “Oh god.”
“He has…had a sister here in Oxford. She’s a few years older than him. I know her a little.” Liv’s staring straight ahead. “Neither of their parents are still alive.”
“I saw him out there. He was right next to me.” His fingernails digging into mine. He was lost in the same wave of emotion that Bryan was. A terrible thought hits me. “Liv, what are they doing with his body?”
“Someone from the Centre is talking to his sister right now.”
“You need to speak to her. You need to explain it to his sister, so they don’t…” Burn him up. Cut him up. Experiment on him.
Liv turns to me with an expression somewhere between worry and wariness. “What are you talking about?”
“You were out there. You saw it, you felt it. We all did.”
I realize I’m almost shouting at her. A security guard by the nurses’ station is watching me and so is another one by the entrance way. Liv seems to realize it at the same time I do. Softly she says: “What am I supposed to do? Haven’t you seen the news?”
The television is still playing. The host is interviewing one of the officers, early twenties. He’s saying: “I brought it down. Three shots, didn’t hesitate. It isn’t for me to say what it is…but the training, you know, it kicks in right away.”
Downing Street authorizes army to take immediate action.
“People are at risk, ma’am. I just did what I had to in the moment, and it made them wild, it did.”
And then the image shifts to an aerial shot taken by helicopter. Tower blocks lit up in Canary Wharf in London. Dark silhouettes passing. When the camera pulls back I realize the air is full of sleek bodies and alien faces. There are hundreds of them riding the currents over the Thames, spiralling like leaves caught up in a cyclone. So many of them!
“Liv, we have to do something.”
“She won’t listen to me. She’s scared, Sophie. Everyone is panicking.”
There’s no time to help Martin. Kira is in danger. The image in my head is so clear. Her limp form, huddled in the darkness beneath the shelter, the open circle of sky above. For months her body has been shifting, preparing itself for escape. For this—flight!
“If there are more of them we’ll be ready,” says the officer on the screen and I know he’s right. I can’t let Kira be discovered, not now. If they find her they’ll kill her.
I search for the exit. A security guard makes a move toward me, startled. His eyes fix on my medical ID bracelet and I can see his thoughts forming, slowly. The threat he sees when he looks at me—as if I might go wild at any moment.
But it isn’t me I’m worried about anymore.
24
I toggle through the gears on my bike, trying to coax more speed from them, more power. Sweat streams down my face, stings my eyes. By the time I reach Kidlington, my palms are sliding on the handlebars.
There must be other nymphs, bodies that weren’t cremated. If not here then in other places, across the Channel, across the ocean for all I know, in India where they dumped the victims of JI2 into the water. And now what? If they catch her, it will be worse than if they had cremated her in the first place.
Shit, shit, shit.
I turn onto the gravel road into the cement works, leaning forward to force extra weight into my exhausted thighs. Then—snap! Something whips lightning-fast against my shin. The bike stutters and I’m somersaulting over the handlebars. I hit gravel, flaying my jeans and shredding the skin of my knees, then my shoulder. I touch the back of my neck and my hand comes away varnished in red. Numbness, no pain yet. Nothing but a hot ache in my muscles as I stagger to my feet. The bike is completely mangled.
You have about ten seconds before the pain catches up with you.
Right. I begin to run.
* * *
—
The chimney is ahead of me, no one else in sight. Good, good. The first flare of pain sets my nerve endings on fire. My leg buckles but I force myself up. A red handprint on a concrete block, my contribution. Now I’m rounding what’s left of the raw mixture plant and I can feel blood running down my back as well.
I crash into the metal door of the chimney but it doesn’t budge.
The padlock.
I kneel to dig around for the hiding place we made for the key. A whimper escapes my lips, as my muscles spasm painfully. It should be just there…god, I can’t find it. The key. Where is it?
Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk! At first I think it’s my heart pounding. But the sound is dully metallic. Coming from inside the chimney.
Blood pulses in my temples. My vision swims, replaced by an image of tiny hands pounding on a door. “Open the door, Soff! I wanna come in!” And my voice, high with irritation: “Go away, Kiki!” I blink and it vanishes. The key is tucked into my palm.
The padlock comes off in a single, abrupt motion. Then I’m pushing the door, hearing the squeal of the rusted hinges. I pull it shut behind me and slump inside, blinded by darkness.
She hits me in the chest so hard my filleted legs give out.
Instinctively, I wrap my arms around her. Hold on, hold on!
In that brief moment of contact: the slanted shape of bones, the hard keel of her welded ribs, her skin bristling with thousands of tiny pins, a soft layer of flocculent down, new growth. She is trembling, and it’s as if she is growing larger, expanding toward me. It’s her wings, bursting through the thin membrane of her skin. Those masses on her shoulders, those hulking deformities moving beneath the surface—now stretching out, unfolding.
Her eyes are lustrous, golden. They dart from left to right rapidly, observing everything in an instant, processing it all with avian intelligence. “Kira,” I whisper. She stares at me, head cocked, her jaw a solid, expressionless shelf of bone. The gesture is recognizable, yet so alien it makes my chest hurt. She’s gathering energy, bursting with it.
Then she explodes into action, somersaulting crazily away from me, battering herself against the side of the tower like a moth trapped against a screen.
Ka-thunk!
The problem is her wings. No space to extend them properly. She can’t get enough lift, but she’s trying.
Kira crashes into the tarpaulin structure Bryan built to protect her, scattering fairy lights and old two-by-fours. Then she slams against the side of the tower again. Her wings beat at the air, pinions spread like fingers. She doesn’t know how to use them yet, not properly. She makes it halfway up the height of the chimney before they tangle. Newly grown feathers slice the air. It isn’t enough to keep her up and she falls into the dirt.
I take a step toward her, but she’s off again. This time she’s learned something because when she collides with the wall, her legs are ready for it. They’ve become flexible, pneumatized shafts of bone. How did I ever think of them as brittle? She ricochets away and pirouettes in mid-air, her spine unexpectedly tensile, so that as she passes the centre-point she is already facing the other side, legs braced like mainsprings. She’s adapting. A staccato, double beat of her wings keeps her hurtling higher. It’s not flying, not exactly. More like a crazy game of leapfrog.
My head is jangling with thoughts, not all of them my own. Her confusion radiates out of her, but so does something else. Jubilation. How much she wants to be free.
“No! You can’t!” My voice echoes in the tower. I don’t know if she can understand me, but she continues to rise. She’s going to make it all the way to the top—and when she does, she’ll be gone.
She isn’t going to stop for anything. Not unless I can stop her.
* * *
—
On the outside of the chimney is a decrepit utility ladder zippering up the full height.
The first few metres or so look like a mangled train track. The rungs hang askew in their locks, and the side rails twist this way and that. My shoulder glows with pain as I haul myself up.
Grunting, I pull and pull, feet planted on the chimney wall. Every couple of hand spans I reach another rung lock: a big knuckle of metal that carves up the inside of my hands. Pretty soon my palms are a lacerated mess of skin flaps and deep, gory runnels. Close to the top, the ladder has torn away from the wall so I can’t quite get my feet against the side rail. I have to shimmy up like I’m on a rope, relying on the meagre strength in my arms alone while the ladder creaks ominously. The extra weight tears at my grip. I won’t make it, I won’t—and then I do.
One of my running shoes, the laces flapping wildly, slides off, and plummets to the ground. My gaze follows.
You could jump.
I recognize that wormy voice at the centre of me. Jump, it says again.
Nausea roils my stomach, but the fear is gone now. It has been replaced by an ecstatic whisper. Let go, Sophie. There’s a throbbing sensation in my palms, my groin, the arches of my feet. My body is bathed in a warm glow and my nipples have squeezed into hard pinpricks of sensation.
Come with me. A keening voice in my head.
I hear a thud from within the tower. Kira ramming her fledgling body from side to side, picking up momentum and speed. She’s coming toward me. I close my eyes. When I force them open again, I start climbing again. One foot, and then the other. One foot, and then the other. All other thoughts slip away from me. There is only one: Climb.
And somehow I do. The height is dizzying, and from here I can make out a whistling noise. I become aware of shapes moving around me, the heavy beating of wings, flashes of white in the darkness. That noise thrumming through me, deep and wordless, a straining symphony that seems to come from every direction at once. I’m not alone—and neither is she. They have been waiting for her, just above the cloud cover, waiting and calling.
I haul myself over the edge of the chimney, and stare downward. I can see her gaining height, rocketing toward me.
“Kira!” I call to her. “You can’t leave!”
Trace fragments of her memories muddle up with mine. Her fifth Christmas, tearing into presents before anyone was awake. Knowing she shouldn’t but doing it anyway, both terrified and delighted to be discovered. Standing on top of the toilet in the girl’s room on her first day of third grade, missing Mrs. Laplant’s roll call and then racing into the recess yard while no one was there. The space would be hers, all hers! She wouldn’t have to share it. She wiggles her butt at Mrs. Laplant through the window, daring her to look, but she doesn’t. No one in the classroom does. She is invisible. Totally free.
Then another. I’m staring down at her on the day she died. We are just within sight of the bridge to home. And I want her to go to it, away from the flooded Thames, but she knows, is utterly certain this is the wrong direction. But I won’t listen to her. She’s just a kid, she needs protecting.
Except she doesn’t. Her body is alive with meaning, with wanting. I can’t seem to understand it, but then sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes she feels something so strongly she expects everyone around her to feel it too: joy, sadness, disappointment. But they don’t—they’re wrapped in their own bubble of protection, and nothing of hers bleeds into them. She knows I’m wrong, but there’s no way to tell me, nothing I would believe. She loves me—I feel that—but she’s impatient with me too. She knows what she wants and what needs to happen. I will only slow her down. She pulls away from me.
Suddenly Kira is coming at me fast. A final upward vault, and her wings stretch to full length with the speed of a switchblade. They lock into a rigid length of feathers and muscles.
“Please, Kira!” I call out, reaching for her. “No!”
She isn’t mine to hold onto. They’re waiting for her and she wants this. I know she does.
I let her go.
THREE
Look at my image and see how I was once fresh and gay….When you least expect it death comes to conquer you. While your grave is still undug it is good to think on death.
—A disputation betwixt the body and worms, written in an anonymous hand “in the season of huge mortality, of sundry diseases, with the pestilence heavily reigning”
25
Martin’s sister doesn’t listen, of course she doesn’t.
Liv calls to tell me the next morning, the chime of my phone dragging me out of a fitful sleep. Dreams of Kira, of dark shapes moving overhead. “I tried to explain but Cath just stared at me,” she says, her voice seeming to come from miles away. I can imagine it perfectly—her bewildered look turning to distrust as she takes in Liv’s hair, her mangled dress, her smeared lipstick. “She told me her brother was gone. Nothing could change that.”
Martin wasn’t the only casualty.
Seven people died in the Bartlemas churchyard riot. Six students, one officer. Someone tore off his helmet and heaved a rock into his head. The news alerts pop up continuously on my tablet while we talk, tiny flares of disaster in the corner of my screen. Blurry shots of our teeth, our rictus grins that night. Headlines screaming about The Age of RAGE!
I can still feel that raw jangling of emotion. A kind of push.
* * *
—
Mom comes down just before noon and from the look on her face I can tell she’s been following the news in her bedroom.
“Were you there last night?” she demands. Whatever understanding we shared is gone now. I’m her child and I lied to her. I can’t meet her gaze and she knows instantly what that means. “Jesus, Sophie. Why didn’t you tell me?”
I expect her to yell but she doesn’t. She turns on the television. Soon the two of us are huddled together in front of it. I watch her take in the appearance of the nymph, the dull gleam of its feathers—its wings, like sails. But what she sees is the wreckage of the human form, the monstrous transformation. “Oh god, oh Jesus,” she whispers, over and over. “Did you see one of them last night?”
When I still don’t answer, she makes a grab for my hand, not registering the lacerated palms, which I mended roughly with fibrin glue last night. The drugged haze of my stare, dirt crusted into the grooves of my skin. I’ve slept for maybe two hours.
“What are they?” she demands but it’s the television presenter who answers her question. Officials have confirmed the results. The recovered body was human—or it had been human, once.
