"It's a bright-burning night, and I'm not ready for sleep," he said. "Do you want to walk around the park and talk some more?"
It was the dead hour on a chilly night, and Jenny felt drained, but she couldn't not go. Something important hovered here. They walked through a gap in the hedge, but as soon as they were away from the sparse street lights, she couldn't see what was in front of her feet.
She stopped. "I'm likely to break a leg."
Dan put an arm around her. "Then you're with the right person. Come on."
"It'll still hurt." It came out light as she'd hoped, but her entire skin was jumping as she let him lead her forward. "Night vision, too?"
"Right."
And what else?
There was talk about fixers and sex. Yas spoke about Dan in a way that suggested things. But this was Dan. They'd played in the sandbox here together. Say something, Jenny. Something light and normal.
"The anthem really is terrible, isn't it?"
"Awful. But you know, that used to mean full of awe. And terrible might not be a word to toss around these days."
No talking about terror or awe. "Perhaps we should write a new one."
"I don't think you can do that with an anthem. It has special powers."
No talking about special powers. "Do you think Yas'll resign over not getting that promotion?"
"No, she'll sabotage her rival and get her way in the end."
"Poor rival."
"Some people are forces of nature."
Jenny knew then that he wanted to talk about forces of nature, about powers, about blighters. Was it because she'd admitted to sensing things, revealed that she might have a bit of whatever made up the fixers? She'd rather bury that in the Surrey Green sandbox.
Distant streetlights glinted on bits of the playground, and she grabbed on to the past. "Remember the hours we used to spend on the swings here?"
"And the high slide."
"You certainly kept the fixer busy."
"I sometimes wonder if that caused it. If it's infectious."
She stiffened, on the edge of pulling away. "Really?"
He laughed and snagged her tight. "No. I could always do weird stuff. Mum and Dad tried to get me to hide it, but testing sniffs it out anyway. Remember that time you caught the cricket ball funny and thought you'd broken your finger?"
"Yes."
"You had."
Jenny remembered the horrible pain that had suddenly eased, so that when some adults came running they thought she'd been making a fuss about nothing. They'd been — what? — eight? Dan hadn't even touched her. He'd just stood there saying stupid things like "Are you all right, Jen?"
She knew he didn't glow or anything, but she'd thought he had to touch. She tried to remember whether there'd been a tingle. She'd probably been in too much pain.
"We're lucky, aren't we?" she said.
"You and me?"
She bumped him with her hip. "Gaia! The perfect planet. Healthy, fruitful. Rare earths to pay our way, and fixers to mend almost everything."
"And blighters," he pointed out.
"Perhaps every grail has to have a python."
"I'd rather have the fluffy bunny. But blighters aren't too high a price to pay."
Jenny thought of the refugees. "Still? Could the price become too high?"
"When there's no choice, the price can never be too high, can it? Earth's recovering, but it's still trying to ship people out rather than take them back. Even spread around other colonies we'd be an unbalancing factor."
"So it's Gaia or nothing. That's all right. I can't imagine leaving."
They wove through the playground where the swings, the slides, and the roundabout sat still, as if waiting for ghostly children. A vision swept upon her — of the whole of Gaia like this. The blighters didn't destroy things, only animals and people.
"There's no real danger, is there? From the blighters? I mean to Gaia."
He didn't immediately answer, and chill seeped into her bones. He was going to be honest, and she wished she hadn't asked.
"There's danger," he said at last, grabbing a bar of the roundabout and spinning it as if doing so might whirl something away. "People are being ashed. A lot of people, and even more animals. But the local fixers and teams from Hellbane U should be able to control things, especially now that people are leaving. They've been told to kill all the large animals before they leave so the blighters won't have anything to feed on."
"Feed on?" She moved out of his arm, spinning the slowing roundabout as an excuse.
"Where else do the victims go? They're consumed, so it has to be a kind of feeding. Of energy, we assume. The blighters are a form of energy."
Jenny shivered, even though it wasn't really so shocking. It was more that she'd not thought much about blighters before. Why should she? They were nasty, but they hardly ever popped up even near the equator, and if one did, a fixer got rid of it before it could do more damage.
Like pimples — of a lethal sort.
The roundabout had slowed again. She gave it a running spin and jumped on. "So you're going to starve them, and that'll be an end of it?"
"That's the plan." He caught it, spun it again, and joined her, but on the other side for balance. The world whirled, but they were steady inside this circle.
"What are the blighters doing, Dan? What are they? What do they want?"
"We don't know. Despite generations of study, we know grot all. They're not easy to study. Until recently they were hard to even find. There've always been people who thought they were an hallucination, or a neurosis brought on by bad air. Or by planetary contamination of our food."
"Food? We brought in Earth plants."
"But they feed on Gaian soil. As we do."
The roundabout slowed and slowed, and neither of them spun it again.
"Blighters can't be imaginary," Jenny said. "What about the ashes?"
"That's the rub, isn't it? But apparently there's something called spontaneous combustion. It's been recorded on Earth. People suddenly burst into flames and burn up, leaving acrid ash. It doesn't fit because blighters cause no flames or smoke, but we humans hate something we can't measure and explain."
"Like magic," she said, stepping off the still roundabout.
"Like magic," he agreed, joining her on the grass.
The late night and the chill were getting to her, aching in her bones, shivering over her skin, especially now they were apart. "How do you zap a blighter?"
"We sense them coming and instinctively fix them. It seems to kill them. It's hard to explain. We don't really understand what we do. We just know it works."
"So the fixers down south are fixing things, but they need help from Hellbane U?"
"There are rather a lot of blighters."
"Why so many now?"
"No one knows."
"No one knows much, do they?"
He laughed, but wryly. "No."
She was suddenly exhausted, as much by a sense of helplessness as by the late hour — and that helplessness came from Dan.
"I have to get to bed," she said. "I have to go to work tomorrow. Music usually invigorates me, but tonight it wiped me out."
Without protest, he turned to cross the soccer pitch toward the houses beyond the hedge, but he put an arm around her, and she found it too comforting to resist.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't need much sleep. I sometimes forget that normal people do."
Normal. On the street, beneath the lights, she gently moved away from him, trying to ignore a drag, as if two sticky surfaces were pulling apart. Stuck like two toffees…
"You don't sleep much because of your fixer abilities?"
"The energy of it, yes." He took her hand, rubbing the knuckles with his thumb. "There are things that help."