And yet: what a selfish thing to think about the end of the world.
I just want to live. I’ll kill to live. V. is just like that, a small carnivorous creature just like me. Falcon, stoat, fox. Not lion or bear. Nothing so big and unwieldy, but a little awful dangerous thing that kills in silence, and alone. We move through the world killing and trying to kill and that’s all we do now.
I had dreams once, I think, of doing or being something else. All hazy now. I liked our tiny garden, liked coaxing vegetables and flowers from the earth, identifying and tearing out weeds, brushing bees off my cheeks; I liked picking mushrooms when we went camping, the swing of the axe, the gentle and domestic danger of picking apples. Life was small and safe and I saw it through a pinhole. I thought I would be a short fat baba one day with an apron full of treats. I had never been out in the world, never known the breadth and length of it. I suppose I never will now.
SHE SPEAKS OF solar storm and abnormal auroral activity, but there’s no way to measure it now. I made the mistake of mentioning it to Darian, in case he knew of some obscure method I’d never heard of, and he said I’d just have to rely on my hand-me-down stories, because there was no way of measuring it. “But we can predict it,” I said weakly, “can’t we sort of figure out a pattern for the—” and he said, “Emerson, we have telescopes trained on the sun, not the past.”
The big telescopes couldn’t be used back then. As soon as anyone figured out how to get the lights on again, or even tried to turn on a phone, they found the full attention of Them directed on them, irritated, irrational, irregular, and whatever device had managed to power itself up would have five minutes to an hour before it died again, normally with its unlucky operators. Long enough to field some bombers, if you didn’t mind the 100 percent fatality rate for the pilots rather than their targets, of whom the fatality rate seemed to be zero, inasmuch as you couldn’t tell whether you’d killed any of Them. All Eva would have thought was: bombers are still in the air. Can’t they rescue us? No.
I’m so sorry. No.
July 19
The sentinels seem to have lost interest in old town, or maybe our smells are just less fresh and irritating to them after the days of rain; today I insisted that V. and Polina come back with me and look properly.
We should split up so we can cover more ground, V. said, and I agreed at first; we took paint sticks and scribbled marks on all the buildings we checked. Very Biblical of us, P. said. But after a few hours, hearing invisible things move around in the rubble, we rejoined, silently, a little contrite. There’s safety in numbers, and the three of us might be able to join our tired, half-starved forces to beat something up that we couldn’t alone.
V. is useless with directions. I made sure we didn’t double back. The trees craned to watch us, as they do, and even some of the shrubs; P. gave them an unusually wide berth.
One of them tried to grab me, she muttered. A while back. A topiary actually. In the rich part of town.
Some of them, more worryingly, are developing what appear to be… I don’t want to say teeth, or beaks, or both, but their branches are becoming something like chainsaws, with clear sharp items growing from the twisted bark like broken glass from a beer bottle. And they are changing colour; the bark is no longer gray or brown or dotted with lichen, but dusky violet and bronze. Luckily that makes them easy to spot, and we keep our weapons up, by our faces, as we’re forced to pass by.
I’ve tried to kill the statues during the day, P. said as we passed a particularly large specimen, as high as the hotel it stood next to, riddled with cracks and already turning green in the damp air.
Us too, said V. I think everyone has.
She said, Yeah? I used a gun. A shotgun. Like for ducks? And there wasn’t even a sound until it hit the building behind of it. The bullets just passed right through. It’s like they’re not even real during the day.
We paused for a moment and looked at it. I tried to picture what it looks like at night, when they come alive. It was too big, I couldn’t do it.
The ground is littered with the prints of the sentinels and the local statues, though. They’re around this area a lot. Something is happening here, something is up. The few people we saw shrugged when we asked them though.
Have you seen children around here? I pressed. Maybe with statues or sentinels? Maybe with agents?
No, they all said, staring at me, hard. No children. There are no children in this city.
As far as I can tell, they’re right, and they’re wrong. There are none now, but there was one.
July 22
Whispers, murmurs today. A surreptitious and near-spontaneous market, like the others in courtyards, on rooftops, in side-streets where everyone can run if they need to. These are the only places where I can see faces different from the faces I see all the time—V., P., A., the handful of others in my neighbourhood. We meet briefly and our eyes rove hungrily over strange faces, we seek novelty now.
Someone whispered, There’s a town I heard of. Where people are fighting back against Them.
I lunged, I dropped my basket; behind me, V. cursed.
Where did you hear that, I said. An old man, a dishonest face, shifty. Look at you, you liar, I wanted to say. You were lying long before the invasion—what were you? You lied for a living, whatever it was. An insurance adjustor or something.
I said, Tell me the name of the town.
He said, That, I don’t know. But not far. Not even a hundred kilometers west. Soon, we’ll see the fires in the night sky, all the colours of Their bodies burning.
They don’t have bodies, P. said.
Their servants, the old man said stubbornly, looking between me and her. And Their agents. And the statues…
You can’t burn the statues, I said, and turned, but he had already seen the hunger in my eyes; I saw it too, reflected back in his, and I stayed, defiant, I did not want him to think he had driven me off. Funny colour, kind of a greeny-yellow. Who else did they say had eyes like a lynx?
I said, How? You tell me that.
He said, Never mind how. Someone figured out how to turn Their bad magic against ’em. You’ll see the fires, and then you’ll know.
Who told you? P. said, her little tabby claws out. He took a step back. The market was breaking up, the sky too; we had to get home before dark.
People who know, the old man said.
You mean agents, P. said. That’s who you’ve been talking to. They lie, they’ve got a job to do. Why do They need agents? That’s for humans. What are the agents doing, what are they administering?
The old man looked at me then, and said, Watch this one, eh? She asks too many questions.
He melted into the shadows like a movie vampire, and P. and I looked at each other; I know you’re not an agent, I wanted to tell her. You were asking all the same questions I wanted to ask.
Come on, she said. We’d better go.
Grateful to her for that, but I keep thinking about it. We spoke for perhaps two minutes and really, truly, we learned nothing useful. But my whole body is on fire tonight, thinking about it. I feel as if, were I to go outside in the rain, it would blast off me in steam before it even hit my skin.
I am furious, pinioned, I want to know more—my hands clench as I write, see how I dig into the paper. Tell me! Tell me! Goddamn you! Why can they fight and we cannot? Why are we trapped and dying here? What secret do they know? Where are the children of that town? Where are their children? And where are ours? It isn’t fair!