August 2
Woke this morning to find the man still alive, glued to the rug with dried blood. I unstuck him and shook him awake.
My name is… Konstantin, he said, and I thought: Good, then you can go into my diary, because your name does not start with the same letter as anyone else’s. We did not wait for the other names. No one gives them any more.
He thanked me. I accepted his thanks. I didn’t know what else to say.
I did not say, Stay here in this neighbourhood, with everyone else. Out loud, I said, I expect you’ll have people to get back to.
He said, No. Not any more.
Ah, I said.
Rude to pry. Especially when the answers were all around us for a while, rotten and mummified, grasping each other in their last desperate moments, like the ash casts from Pompeii; so many that we stopped seeing them till they began to vanish, so many that we never could bury nor burn them, though of course, in those early months, we did try. He must remember that.
I told him, There are a few of us, and we are getting by. If you help us, we’ll feed you.
All right, he said. Thank you.
But we have to rest today.
Yes, he said. What can I do? Your leg doesn’t look good. Can I get water? Wood?
So I sent him out an hour ago to scavenge for cans and water and whatever else, and when he was gone I heated up the needle I keep in my collar and stitched the worst parts of the claw wound shut. Unsanitary, I suppose, using that curtain thread. But I’ve got a good immune system, and there was lots of it, the thread I mean, unravelling easily from the clumsy hemming job someone did at the bottom. When M. and I first moved out, we had curtains like that, and he never knew how bad a job I had done at shortening them for the window. Things to remember, things to forget. Leg is propped stiffly in front of me now, which makes a good desk to balance this book on.
VICTOR AND I pick things up with tweezers and put them in jars, plastiseal them in clear packets, like pills, to analyze later. There seems to be something different about this than Winnie with her bones, and me with my words. We seem like vampires or ghouls or something, while Victor seems like a real scientist, dreamy, focused, pure. I sometimes find myself resenting that he never has to deal with our moral dilemmas of consent, theft, desecration of the dead. He leans down and snips seedlings, and hands them to me to embed in the bags of clear nutrient gel. (It tastes like coconut. We’ve all sneaked a bit; it was that or die of curiosity.) “Soon, we’ll have siege trees growing back home,” I said, and he nodded, excited.
There’s such a thing as the love of truth, I think, watching him handle the seedlings so gently, watching Winnie’s hands on her bone fragments, far more delicate than any manipulator on even the most carefully-engineered drone. But if that’s true then truth can come in many forms; as many as love.
Victor hands me a seedling and says, “People always misunderstand ‘survival of the fittest.’ Even now. It doesn’t mean we rush over each other to the exits to survive. It means we help each other become more fit. There’s the micro-level of you, your genes, which you want to live above all others. But then there’s also the macro level. Not of you or even your family, but your species, your ecosystem.”
I nod absently. The seeds and even nuts we pick up are sometimes disquietingly serrated, all razor-sharp edges and clear patches. Victor tells me they’re quite normal and will lend no credence to them ever ‘grabbing’ people. But his genetic analyses show that where you’d normally find ordinary elm or linden seeds or the occasional chestnut, something has ‘obviously’ modified them. “Maybe a gall,” he says, and we don’t meet each other’s eyes. “Or some other parasite. Maybe a fungus.”
I think Darian is sabotaging my investigation. I can’t say anything. Baseless suspicions, nothing you could hang your hat on, and the others would roll their eyes at me. He got the vast majority of the funding for this trip, he usually calls the shots. He’s the reason we got a real research pod instead of a crappy trailer, he’s the one who made sure that we could charter a hover to drop us out here instead of schlepping everything in by truck and foot.
At any rate, no matter what he’s doing, it continues. The investigation, I mean. In my off-hours I still tack around the city, mazed with wonder and terror, trying to confirm the things I find in Eva’s journal.
The student, Polina, says you can’t hit the statues during the day with a shotgun? I’ve never seen that before. “Applied science,” I said last night during dinner, and Darian said “What?” and I flung a rock at the one near our pod. It hit, solidly, and ricocheted off the faceted bronze surface to land somewhere in the darkness. The sound was unbelievable, a deafening gong like I’d hit a churchbell. We stared at it in absolute childish horror for a moment, as if that were its cue to ‘come alive’ and attack us, but of course nothing happened.
I found a place to hide and read the journal, the real version, while I lie and tell the others that I’m with someone else, when I can’t bear it any more. Another research team, I read on my notepad, is headed to a town about a hundred klicks away at the end of the month. I wonder if it’s the one where people fought back. But how do you tell?
My secret place has ancient candles everywhere, imprisoned in clear glass and brass lanterns or bare on marble shelves, lighting the huge decorated room like a Renaissance painting of the annunciation. I wonder what it used to be, once. Not a church. To get in you pass through a place so small that I had to put my bag in front of me to fit through the doorway, arched black brick. Here and there marked with scarlet, as if the brick itself were not black but plain red and had once been burned. Down several uneven steps into a low room, brushing past silk scarves and gloves, lipstick displays, antique compacts, feather fans, silver filigree card holders. And three shelves of perfumes, thick glass slabs on brass fittings, then the door into the bigger room. Maybe it was a store. But what a store! I light the candles, poke out bricks for ventilation. I don’t want the others to find me in here, dead from bad air.
There are history books, Eva. Children are still being taught. And we are the descendants of the people you rescued.
I need to ask Winnie about the nutritional states of the bones she’s finding, I know she can do that analysis. Were they well-fed or starving? If we find some wonderfully well-fed bones, the bones of a glutton, would those be Konstantin’s bones? I wonder. I must break myself of the habit of thinking that any of these people can be identified. Only their traces are left.
August 27
K. works in the garden, uncomplaining. His hands look all right, don’t they? We noticed in that skirmish that Their agents, the thralls I’m convinced have been deputized to administer Their reign on Earth, had been issued official badges, horrible, insectile things with razor edges. I am quite sure they move when you’re not looking. But at any rate: you know an agent because of their bloodied handkerchiefs and raw fingertips. I suppose he could still be working with them, unofficially. What spy would blow his cover with such an obvious thing as his hands?
He talks while he works. About revolution, about counter-revolution, about trains filled with doomed royalty. These things, he had told people again and again in those first dark weeks, never changed; you could read about it in the textbooks, write papers about it, even teach it, but until you lived it, you could not expect to truly understand. And that was why they survived.
This man is not old enough to have their attitude—courtly but adamantine. He is some kind of scholar. But he will not talk about his past. Not unusual in and of itself; many don’t. It is a monumental kind of pain, like birth, and despite what my mother told me, unforgettable; you do not do it more than is necessary. To keep with the comparison, such a large thing as one’s comfortable, safe past in the city, fed and warm, with one’s family still alive, cannot pass through such a small orifice as the mouth.