“Stuffed mushroom, I think.”
“Stuffed with what?”
“Haggis.”
I frowned, and stabbed it with my tiny fork. “I thought a haggis was a whole… thing. Like I’m picturing an animal the size of a volleyball.”
“I think that’s a weirdly common misconception.”
I drained my flute, the bubbles crackling between my teeth. The second glass of champagne, I decided, was better than the first. More like fine-grit than coarse-grit sandpaper. But it still left me desperately thirsty. “What’s in this stuff?”
“I know, it does the same thing to me. I think it’s a rich people conspiracy to sell more champagne.”
“You’re a rich people.”
“No, I just have money. They’re rich.” Her apparently casual gesture at the crowd somehow managed to hand off her empty glass and swap it with a full one; she gave it to me. I wiped my face with my sleeve again. My left hand hurt so badly it was taking an increasing amount of concentration not to clench it into a fist, and break the delicate glass.
“So,” she said. “You and Sofia.”
“Uh.”
“Is that what you were going to tell me earlier?”
“No.”
She smiled, a careful selection from her arsenal, one I knew welclass="underline" sly, self-satisfied, slow, only wavering for a second when it seemed I wouldn’t react to it.
“I thought it was so romantic,” she breathed, “the way she came in half an hour before you did.”
“What? No, she didn’t.”
From her belt she unclipped a phone case I hadn’t noticed, black leather with a glittery unicorn sticker on it. “So, the station up front where you got your wristband? That laptop is synced up with my records. Neat, huh? And so nice to see that you… managed to reunite after meeting once? It’s like something from a movie. Like Cinderella. You Prince Charming, you.”
You know what? You’re one to fucking talk. You were sneaking around behind the scenes for my entire life, making sure anyone who might have loved me or even liked me suddenly had to move away or switch schools, got fired from their jobs or transferred to another country. You think I’ve forgotten? Or you’re forgiven? Looking up at me like that, so innocent?
But we couldn’t talk about it. Still. Never.
The room swam with heat and pain as I tried to focus on a real response. Of course Johnny thought we’d only met once. In Fes, when Sofia had appeared out of nowhere, saving both our asses. What was the obvious…? “Okay, not that it’s any of your business, but yeah, she did find me afterwards. It wasn’t like you made me hard to find. We talk a lot on ICQ and stuff, this is the first time we’ve seen each other in… listen, the main thing is, we have to keep it on the down-low from her dad. He doesn’t want her to date while she’s in school. He’d be pissed. Pissed, she says.”
“Totally hear you,” Johnny said. “He used to say it all the time. Even when she was little. You know. No boys. Keep your eyes on your books. Boys are evil. Only after one thing.”
“Yeah, you get it.”
“Mm. So that must be why she took you to this party,” she went on, jerking her chin at the room. “A big, public event, with scientists and celebrities and politicians and royalty. Where you’d be filmed together. And photographed together. And that the Society’s had two tickets to since last September. Makes perfect sense.”
“None of my business,” I said again. “I got nothing to do with those weirdos. I’m here for the free food. And what’s that over there?” I said, gesturing at the pedestal in the middle of the room.
“Nice subject change. Come look at my pride and joy,” she said. “You may as well, since you came all this way just for… the party. I’ll show Sofia when she comes back from the bathroom, too. Not everybody is getting the personal tour, you know.”
“Poor them.”
It wasn’t an ice sculpture as I had thought, but a glass dome over a tiny model of a building, perched atop an island the size of a paperback book. It might have been made out of paper-thin folded metal. “What is this, a reactor for ants?” I said.
“I know, right? The thing is, the working part of the real reactor is about the size of a hockey puck, but you can’t just put something that small out there. It needs to look legit. People get nervous if it doesn’t.”
She tapped the dome with her glass, making everyone around us cringe at the noise. “This is my favourite thing. We’re not doing a lot of transparent nanoceramic because of the interactive bond-degradation problem, but I begged them to make enough for the model. It took months. I utterly degraded myself. We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!”
“Yeah. I bet.”
“And then I came over and me and Wing ran it over with one of the lab trucks to see if it would break. It was awesome.”
“…Ran this over?”
“We buffed out the tiremarks afterwards. You could blast this with a railgun and it probably wouldn’t break.” She paused, thinking, and sipped her champagne. “It might chip. Anyway, generation is fully automated, but there’s remote control just in case. See, there’s the signal array. We used the experimental molpoxy on it, the entire roof will rip off before that dish does. On the building, I mean, not here. This is all held together with superglue. The torus and shielding goes there, under the red X. Except I forgot to put one on the mockup so I had to borrow some nail polish from one of tonight’s makeup guys.”
“A professional did your makeup? I hope you didn’t pay them.”
“Shut up. I kept touching my face during the photoshoot. Anyway, I made sure the reactor is about the size of a golf cart, and the rest of the building is mostly safety stuff in case of storms or seismicity, and smart grid control systems to regulate the subaqueous cable distribution load and deal with surges. And make sure that it’s tuned to… to avoid… the problem we had when it was initially developed.”
“The,” I said slowly, “problem.”
She tilted her chin defiantly, as if one of us had said, Are you referring to the ‘problem’ that accidentally but very nearly ended the world? “I’ve had trial versions running with no issues, no harmonics. Oh, and down there, that’s the pod system for personnel in case the drones can’t reach the island.”
“And what’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That,” I said, touching the top of the dome, where a half-dozen small, shiny orbs had been meticulously painted on the underside. “Is it for measurements or whatever? Wind? Waves? Are those weather balloons?”
“Um.” She blinked.
As one, our chins dragged themselves to the vertical, pinning our horrified stares on the high, crossed beams of the ceiling where the light refused to go.
“Remember that one time we rode our bikes north of town,” she whispered, “and—”
“—went to that old grain elevator because—”
“—I wanted to test my cyclonic densities detector, and it was full of…” She carefully put her glass on the pedestal, without looking down.
“Oh, man,” I said, still staring. “It would be awesome if those things were bats.”
And, as if it had only been waiting for us to meet its gaze, darkness descended.
THE THINGS BILLOWED down in silence, formless and lazy as parachutes, so that for the first moments people smiled up at them, maybe thinking it was some kind of art installation. But Johnny dove to the ground, rolling away from the roped pedestal, and I did too, just as the screaming began: one high, terrified note, quickly joined by dozens of others.
“Everybody outside!” someone cried, but it trailed off into an awful, wet gurgle. Ballgowns and shining shoes flowed past us like water, confused with other bright things: eyes that were not eyes, just membranous lights; hair that wasn’t hair but strings of slime; feathers as far from feathers as anything you’d see in a nightmare; and worst of all, recognizably human, or imitating a human: familiar skulls, femurs, eyes mindless with pain. Feet hammered against my shoulders as I rolled into a ball, watching for Johnny, the bright winks of her metal belt.