“Just tell me why.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pauses, and leans close, speaking rapidly, the closest he will come to an admission of guilt. “What’s the point anyway? We’ll never know what They were! We’ll never know where They came from! We can’t prevent Them from coming again! All we can do now is use what happened for the future. That’s what I’m doing. Getting data to build better buildings, stronger foundations. Bunkers for war, to protect soldiers. Even better bombs. And what are you doing? Wallowing in the past with them, and bringing nothing into the future. What’s that worth? You were a waste of money on this trip, Emerson. I’m sorry to say it, but your whole project was a waste of money, and the university should know it. Nothing of any worth came out of it. Just historical curiosities.”
“They—” I begin, and almost choke on my tears of rage. His look of sympathy is infuriating; how dare he wish to comfort me, when he’s the reason I’m so angry. “They fought off the Invaders, they’re the reason we’re alive today, and not only alive but able to live in comfort, go to school, do research; they’re the reason the Setback ever ended. And anyway, you think there has to be an application for things we study? You think everything has to end up in some… lab somewhere, a product for people to buy? Well, I happen to think there are other questions in the world. Don’t you believe in truth? History? Isn’t that worth studying and saving? We are the descendants of these survivors, of people who survived in cities that everyone else thought were completely dead. Isn’t that worth something?”
He shrugs; I flop back in my seat and glare at him.
“You’re asking these questions like they’re necessary,” he says a minute later. “But they don’t need to be answered. You would have gotten enough answers just from seeing the city. Didn’t you read the last entry?”
“No.”
“You should. You should see how it ends.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. And don’t talk to me,” I tell him, “till we land.”
“All right.”
“I mean it.”
“All right.”
December 1
It is the day.
We cannot wait any longer. Snow lightly falling. Please let it not get any deeper. Our best chance today. I must leave this book. I dare take nothing with me that has no use.
Everything will be taken from us, but only us. They will go on without us, as the world goes on without us.
This was deserved. This was all deserved. Somehow, we did something to deserve this.
This morning, at long last, unneeded, uncalled-for, I remembered the last lines of the damn poem. All I can write before we leave.
Bonus: Exclusive Extract
IF ANYONE KNEW what I knew, they’d say, and rightly so, You knew everything. She told you everything, at the last. And you took this knowledge purchased literally with your life and you did nothing. It’s not too late though. Call the cops. Call the FBI. Call a priest. Arrest her! Do something! But you didn’t talk. And she didn’t talk.
We didn’t talk. But we’d have to talk tonight, for as I laboured up the slope towards the entrance of the castle, everything made certain to remind me, in case I managed to forget for one second, that this was her party, it belonged to her, she’d paid for it, was the guest of honour, the hero of the hour, and the world’s first official Chambers Reactor powered the lights and music.
A lightshow rotated on the damp stone of the castle walls: flags of Scotland and the European Union and the City of Edinburgh, and a tangle of crests, tartans, logos, brands, mascots. Spinning unicorns corkscrewed into a half-dozen Chambers Industries graphics: Chambers Labs. Chambers Energy. Chambers Biomedical. I imagined a half-dozen interns jealously duelling it out at the projector deck like rival DJs fighting at a rave, elbowing each other aside to get their particular division on the program.
Which was hilarious, because tonight I was pretending to be an intern too: for BGI, the big tech conglomerate. I’d been assigned the internship as a cover (as well as a branded t-shirt, mug, baseball cap, cell phone, and five hundred business cards that I never handed out). Only Society members were supposed to know if you were in the Society or not.
BGI was a good choice. Their employee base worldwide numbered in the faceless and anonymous millions, and they were recognizable enough to be ‘prestigious’ to Mom and, grudgingly, in our infrequent phone calls, Dad too. They had a vague idea what my job description meant (“Quality assurance and quality control”) and were merely proud that I had gotten such a well-paying job in the gap between high school and, she assumed, university.
I hoped I could lie fluently about being in Edinburgh on a work conference, sent as a last-minute replacement for my boss (which was more or less true). Meanwhile, I’d told Mom and the kids I was in Orlando for a different conference (user interface design? something like that). The Society had even figured out how to get my name on the web page; I knew Carla would peek right away. She tried to resist, I knew, but was always cross-checking my movements to see if I was lying to them again. I felt terrible about her compulsion, but I could never tell her the truth; who knew what they’d do if I did.
Really though, in my (rented) tux, I was pretending to be James Bond. Like Jude Law in the last couple movies, sleek and arrogant and able to brazen his way through anything. Hadn’t mentioned that on the phone to my boss, of course. There hadn’t even been a space to apologize for what I’d done to the watcher, nowhere to fit words in through the Niagara-like, billion-ton waterfall of his anger. Only when he had paused to catch his breath did I mention that his daughter, whom I’d thought was studying in Spain, was now in… Edinburgh? Coincidentally, at the Chambers Reactor ribbon-cutting ceremony, to which tickets had been assigned months in advance? What a lucky young lady she was…
Lucky, Louis had said, drawing the word out, and hung up on me.
As I had stood in the kitchen, staring blankly at my phone and trying to think of how to communicate my last wishes to my sleeping family without actually telling them why I might be doing such a thing, he had called back.
Louis’s assistant had been quietly calling around; both Sofia’s residence manager and her dorm-mate said she had dropped out. Sofia hadn’t been seen in weeks, despite the fact that at every call with her father, she had chatted chirpily about her classes and exams.
And one thing had led to another, and here I was, the instigator of this tangle of boss, daughter, nemesis and myself, struggling in the middle of their web like a very confused, though dapper, fly.
From Louis, I had understood, clearly and a little insultingly, that my commitment to the Society was not distrusted exactly, but (and I would admit this) undeniably strained: both from the conditions of their discovering me in the first place, and the incident with the watcher. Do you know what used to happen to people who did what you did? In the old days? Mm?