Excerpt

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 knowledge; 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 indistinguishable 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."

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 gaze 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.