On the shattered steps of the Senedd, Water calls us before him.
In an old life, before Their arrival, he wore suits and dodged questions on the BBC; talked up the Bluebirds and the need for a modern, confident Wales. Now, he drapes himself in robes like an archdruid awarding the Chair. A little dirtier, though, a little more tattered.
Funny. It ought to be risible, but I can never seem to remember his old name.
Water. Perhaps it’s for the sound of the word in Cymraeg, dŵr—perhaps he’s hoping for an echo of Glyndwr, a shadow of past defiance. Perhaps it’s because of the way we used to talk a big fight about water being our path to independence. We’ll start charging the English for it, get them back for Tryweryn. That’ll show them. It seemed to matter, at the time. Or perhaps it’s simply because water’s where They came from, rising like a hundred Atlantises out of the waves. Their element, and our only barrier against Them.
The sky is the color of slate; I’m shivering. Rhys slips a wiry arm around my shoulders and I lean up against him, absorbing body heat.
Purely platonic, no matter how much I might wish otherwise. He’s never thought of me as anything but a little sister.
We used to share a house in Roath, before. The last night we spent there surfaces in my mind with miserable regularity. Getting close to midnight, the TV on low. I eyed him across the sofa, wondering if I should make my move. We’d have to decide if we wanted to sign a new rental contract the following week, and I knew that once we’d done so I’d lose my nerve, fearing a lost friendship and a year of awkwardness. Rhys gave me a tired, lazy smile, and for a second, I wondered wildly if he was thinking the same thing.
“I’m so glad we’re living together,” he said, then.
I inched closer. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s nice having a female friend who’s not a potential girlfriend, you know? No chance of any misunderstandings.”
The excitement fizzing in my stomach curdled into disappointment. “Right,” I said. “No misunderstandings.” I hesitated. “So you don’t think—”
I never finished the sentence. Rhys was staring open-mouthed at the telly, the BBC news channel showing shaky phone-camera footage of a great amphibious bulk rising out of the sea, dwarfing the New York skyline. “It has to be a hoax, right?” he said, a pleading note in his voice. “Or a viral trailer for the new Godzilla film or something. It can’t be real.”
“Can’t be,” I echoed.
Hong Kong was next. Paris. London.
After that it was mostly hiding, sticking together as much for safety’s sake as anything else. When we heard Water’s summons, we came running. These days, if someone might be able to protect you, you don’t pass it up.
The air’s damp with mizzle, the grey waves choppy. Cormorants dive sleek and black off the half-submerged canopy of the old carousel. And in the distance, past the line of wreckage where the barrage once held the waters in, one of Them rolls over in the ocean, the distant boom of Its voice reaching us like the ghost of a church bell. It’s been there for weeks, a third vast island dwarfing the low dark humps of Flat Holm and Steep Holm. It doesn’t approach, doesn’t retreat, obeys only Its own incomprehensible instincts. I heard a rumor that they tried to send boats over from Bristol; that it smashed one with the flail of a limb and ignored the other completely, though they fired harpoons and who knows what else at it.
Water clears his throat. “I’ve called you here because of your historical knowledge,” he tells us.
I blink, startled. When They came, I felt the pointlessness of my life choices in a way none of Dad’s lectures on the subject had ever managed to achieve. All those hours in ill-lit archives, poking at fragments of lost languages, when I could’ve been learning to fight or grow vegetables or snare rabbits. Pure luck that I’ve survived this long, really.
“Any ideas?” Rhys whispers, and I shake my head. Everyone looks similarly mystified.
Water pauses impressively, and then announces, “We’ve found something.”
“Wonder what ‘we’ means?” I mutter, as we troop indoors and downstairs. “And who actually did the finding?” Water rarely leaves his headquarters; a location more symbolic than practical. Right beneath the old seat of power, such as it was.
Inside, it takes me a moment to recognize the room. The old debating chamber, though, half caved-in, it doesn’t exactly look like it used to on the news.
Water’s second-in-command steps forward. A square-bodied, matter-of-fact woman, she’s foregone the robes in favor of waterproof trousers and a sturdy cagoule. “You all need to treat this with the utmost caution,” she warns us. “The manuscript I’m about to show you has… properties.” Her lips thin, perhaps in dissatisfaction at the vagueness of the phrase. “And by that, I mean it appears They can sense it. They may even be attracted to it.”
It’s Rhys who speaks up. “But there’s one of Them right there in the Bristol Channel. If They’re attracted to it, why hasn’t it come over here and just… squished us already?”
“A reasonable question. We certainly don’t understand all there is to know about Their perceptions, but it appears certain metals are able to block them. That’s why we have this.”
She crosses in front of us and raps her knuckles against a heavy grey door, quite out of keeping with the old part of the building. Like a leftover from the Cold War.
I remember my mother talking about that. When she was small, there were videos and pamphlets telling you to brick up the windows when the bombs came, fill the bathtub and hide in the cwtch. But of course, she said, we’d have been okay over here. The mountains would’ve stopped the worst of the fallout.
We cram in after Water’s second-in-command and wait while she closes the first door and opens another, leading us further into the bowels of the building.
There are desks arrayed at neat intervals in the chamber beyond. It looks so much like the Special Collections reading room at the university that for a moment I have to clutch Rhys’ arm and breathe slowly, struck by that sudden gut-punch that comes when I’m reminded of the world before.
Another door in the back of the room, which Water’s second-in-command ignores. A fragment of text sits on each desk. Photocopies on white A4, not originals. That surprises me, though perhaps it shouldn’t. I was expecting some ancient manuscript written in blood and bound in unidentifiable skin.
“It’s pre-Brythonic, we think,” she tells us. “There may be information here about Them. I’m sure you’ll understand why our deciphering it is of the utmost importance. We know They aren’t immortal.” The great serpent that slithered up the length of the Severn, its bulk displacing bridges, and died there, unable to turn around, proved that. “The question is, what are Their weaknesses? Anything could help.”
We nod and mutter agreement.
“You’ll be provided with food and board, of course. Your families too, if you have them. And of course, our utmost gratitude for your service.”
She doesn’t tell us, I note, that we’re free to go if we’d rather not be part of this. Still, I doubt anyone’s going to argue. Food and board, these days, sounds like paradise.
“Are you going to stay?” I ask Rhys.
He’s not listening to me, eyes roaming from desk to desk, and it takes him a moment to register I’ve asked a question. “Of course,” he says at last, frowning minutely. “Aren’t you?”
“No,” I say, “I mean, yes, of course I’ll stay.” Where else would I go?
Water puts us to work immediately, a single photocopied sheet each. I pore over fragments, remembering when the opportunity to read something like this would have felt like a dozen Christmases come at once.
Here, with Water’s second-in-command breathing down our necks and two guards beside the chamber door, it’s not quite the same. I can’t decide if the guards are there to keep strangers out or to keep us in.
By the time the second-in-command—Elin; she introduced herself before we got to work—tells us we can finish for the day, my shoulders ache from sitting hunched over my desk. The bright light inside the chamber is giving me a headache. Rhys hasn’t got up yet, and I touch his shoulder as I pass by his chair.
“Come on,” I say. “They promised to feed us. We might have more luck tomorrow, after a proper meal and a kip.”
I sound more optimistic than I feel. For all that I’ve pored over my sheet until my eyes hurt, I’ve managed to decipher precisely nothing so far. We don’t exactly have comprehensive records of the pre-Brythonic alphabet, and it bears little resemblance to anything later. There’s the occasional pictogram here that I recognize, but most are unfamiliar, and I can’t even guess from context what they mean. This fragmentation’s ridiculous—surely we’d have more chance at making sense of the text if we put all the pages together? Perhaps I’ll make the suggestion tomorrow. Elin seems reasonable enough.
Rhys doesn’t answer me, still bent over his photocopy, scribbling away. Doodling, I suppose. He’s always said it helps him think.
“Mr.—sorry, Dr. Williams,” Elin calls. “You can leave it there for tonight.”
He doesn’t answer her, either. Then he straightens, a single sudden jerk upright, and holds up his photocopy. “Finished.”
The buzz lasts well into the evening. They do remember to feed us, eventually, though I’m not sure Rhys gets the chance to touch his food while Water and Elin pepper him with questions. The rest of us watch them warily as we eat, not quite daring to whisper amongst ourselves.
There are three others. Maddy, from Swansea, a postdoc a couple of years younger than Rhys and I. Cynan, Bangor: well-established in the field, and clearly fuming that Rhys figured out something he couldn’t. And Gwyneth, a retired archivist, interested and self-taught. White faces: not much Butetown in evidence chez Water. I tell myself it’s because the locals had the good sense to scarper when they heard about the giant monsters emerging from the sea.
Gwyneth looks the most approachable, and I catch her eye as I pass the salt. “Had any luck with yours?”
She shakes her head. “No chance. Even the parts that don’t look water-damaged don’t make much sense.”
Same with the others. None of us says Rhys’ name, but I feel the curiosity brimming in all of them. What was on that photocopy? Why was it so much easier to figure out than any of ours?
Water and Elin let Rhys go, at last, and he sinks into the seat beside mine. He catches my expression and asks, “You okay?”
“I’ve got dinner and a roof over my head. Who can ask for more than that these days?”
“Fair point.”
“Anyway, I’m not the one with the big news here. How’d you manage to translate all that so fast? I can’t even figure out the syntax.” I grin. “Be honest, they gave you the easy one, didn’t they?”
“Maybe.” He gives me a tired smile, but it’s a closed-off thing.
I can’t resist prodding. “Or maybe not?”
“I don’t know. It was… strange.” Rhys is frowning now, not looking at me. “I spaced out, I suppose. You know when you get really absorbed in something? But blurrier than that. And it felt—” He stops, shakes his head.
“Go on.”
“This is going to sound crazy,” he warns me.
“Go on.”
“It felt like it was speaking to me. Like I wasn’t really reading anything at all, but it was there inside my head, whispering away…” He trails off, running a hand through his wild dark hair so it sticks up every which way.
I lay a hand on his shoulder. “You’re tired, that’s all. It’s been a weird day. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
But in the morning, after a night spent on narrow, unfamiliar beds deep inside Water’s headquarters, he looks no better. There’s coffee at breakfast. Bitter, instant stuff, not even the nice sort of Nescafe that used to come in tins, but still a wonder. I cradle the mug between my hands and blow on it, sipping slowly, knowing I won’t dare ask for a refill.
“This is something, isn’t it?” I say when Rhys sits down opposite me. He blinks, and has finished his in one great gulp before he even seems to notice that I’m speaking. There’s an insomniac tinge of pink to the whites of his eyes.
“Oh,” he says, “coffee? Yeah, I suppose so.”
“Didn’t sleep well?”
“Not really.” He frowns. “Noisy in here at night, isn’t it?”
“Gwyneth?” I ask. “I could hear her snoring through the wall.”
Rhys gives me a puzzled look. “No,” he says at length. “Not that.”
I’m caught short, trying to remember if I heard anything else last night. I don’t think so, though between Gwyneth’s Darth Vader impression and the lumpy mattress, I didn’t spend much time in dreamland.
Before I can open my mouth to say so, Elin sweeps into the room with a brisk, “Everybody finished? Good!” and we’re headed back to the sealed chamber.
More of the same today. An hour in, I’ve got a scrawled list of half-formed suggestions on my notepad and a headache, and Rhys raises his head from the new page he’s been poring over and announces, “Done.”
He’s ever so slightly paler than usual, sweat standing out on his top lip although the chamber is cool. I get up from my desk to stretch my legs and wander over. Rhys is sitting with his head in his hands, eyes half-closed, and I scan his notes while he’s not looking. Not much of it makes sense, but there’s one phrase repeated over and over: Water, word and flesh. I roll it around in my mind a few times, but no meaning falls out.
Elin appears, scoops up Rhys’ notes, and spirits them away past that inner door. At her approach, he cracks an eyelid, but doesn’t speak.
He looks, I realize, exactly the same way he used to when we were postgrads, lolling around hungover in the office after a few too many in Clwb the previous night.
I reach for his hand, hesitate a moment—too familiar?—and then decide that hardly matters now. It’s faintly clammy under my own, and when I give it a squeeze Rhys blinks rapidly and looks up at me. “More voices?” I ask.
A weary nod. “Something like that. Like I said, it’s…” He trails off midsentence, brows drawing together, eyes fixed on a point on the opposite wall.
“Hard to explain?” I finish for him.
“Yeah. If I had the sheet back I’d be able to hear it again. But without it…” He waves a hand, a vague, frustrated gesture.
I nod, though I’d be lying if I said I understood. “You probably need to sleep. You should ask for something to help with that. If anyone’s got medical supplies these days, it’ll be Water.”
“I suppose.”
The door opens. Elin again, with a new sheet of paper. Rhys’ eyes widen minutely when she walks in, track her greedily across the room as she approaches. After a moment, I realize it’s not her he’s looking at, but the sheet of paper in her grasp.
She stops before the desk, eyeing me steadily. “Have you finished as well, Dr. Rose?”
It’s a clear dismissal, and I get to my feet. “No. Just needed to stretch my legs.” I roll my shoulders theatrically, dawdling to get a look at the paper she lays down in front of Rhys. There has to be something different about the ones he’s been doing, right?
He pulls it in close to him and leans over it, covering it jealously with his body, like a kid in an exam hall afraid that his neighbor’s going to copy his answers. Then he seems to remember I’m there and glances up at me, sort of sheepish, a touch of pink coloring his pale cheeks.
He doesn’t show me the sheet, though.
I shrug, doing my best to hide my disappointment, and head back to my desk.
The marks on my photocopy are no easier to decipher than they were before.
Rhys scribbles furiously, as though the words are a torrent running through him and he’ll be overwhelmed by them if he pauses for breath. Occasionally, though, he stops and stares at that same spot on the opposite wall.
It’s only later, when Elin allows us out to take a breath of fresh air, that I manage to orient myself relative to the chamber. That spot on the wall—it’s exactly where the one of Them that’s out in the sea would be, if we could see It from inside.
I’ve made no progress by the time we break for dinner, and I sigh and head back to Rhys’ desk, keeping a watchful eye out for Elin. He’s just finished his third sheet. I smooth my own out on the desk before him.
“Come on then,” I say. “You have a go at this one. I’m not getting anywhere. Needs a fresh pair of eyes, I reckon.”
He looks at it for a moment, brow furrowed, lips moving in puzzlement, and I think, phew. It’s not me being an idiot.
Then he picks up his pen.
The next day, Elin comes for him mid-morning, handing over a keycard on a postbox-red lanyard. It must be from the old days, I think, a relic left lying around the building’s interior. She leaves the rest of us to it and leads Rhys off to another room, deeper in the bowels of the old Senedd.
Rhys glances at me once over his shoulder as he follows her, and then his gaze mists over and he looks away. His hand goes to the front of his T-shirt, hovers there a moment, and falls back to his side. I don’t know what to make of the gesture. Maybe nothing at all.
I feel like I’m watching him board a plane, hop on a train to Edinburgh, whatever old-world metaphor would put him hundreds of miles away. Maybe they’re separating us deliberately.
“What’s in there?” I ask Rhys, later.
He blinks at me. He looks washed-out, eyes bleary from staring too long at the page. “What?”
“Wherever they took you off to earlier,” I say. “You know. The VIP room.”
“Oh.” His cheeks color, and he glances down at his feet. “Just, uh, the originals. The text Water’s got us working on.”
You don’t have to say ‘us’, I want to tell him, but I bite it back. “Wow. So what do they look like? Time period? How much is intact?” I don’t have to fake the curiosity, at least.
Rhys shakes his head. “I’m not sure. I mean—I don’t know that I would have noticed. There’s something about them…” He trails off. “I’m sure you’d understand it if you saw them.”
“Yeah,” I say, “maybe,” but I’m not so sure. There’s a lot I don’t understand, these days.
Rhys isn’t sleeping.
I’m not, much, either, but it’s different with him. The dark bags that have carved themselves out beneath his eyes. The fact that he’s given up shaving, saying it’s too much effort with a straight razor. The febrile shine in his eyes when he leaves the inner sanctum, the tremor in his hands that he doesn’t seem to notice.
I approach him one evening before lights-out. Water works us until late in the evening, but afterward there’s food, and a common room of sorts in another part of the headquarters, where a fuzzy radio gives updates on Their activity—sightings, areas to avoid—and a precious bottle of mid-range Scotch is shared out like nectar.
I’m not sure where Water got these luxuries, and long after I’ve set my glass down, I feel its imprint on my lips. Like the way my hands used to feel dirty for long minutes after I’d put the bins out, even though I’d washed them straight away.
It’s Elin who issues instructions during the day, but in the evenings, Water deigns to mingle with us, circling the room as though he’s spreading some nebulous blessing with his very presence. A couple of the others even seem to believe it: Maddy starstruck; Cynan arguing that, well, there’s something to be said for employing pageantry to bring people together, in a tone that suggests he’s looking for an excuse to believe. Tonight, though, Water pays attention to neither of them, instead standing over Rhys with a sharkish look in his eyes.
The thought of interrupting makes my stomach turn over, but I pour an extra shot and head in their direction. Water glances up, sees me coming, gives Rhys a proprietorial pat on the shoulder, and excuses himself. I offer the glass to Rhys, who takes a moment to focus in on my face. I sit on the arm of his chair and hold it out again.
“Oh. Thanks.” He takes it and falls silent again, gazing into it without drinking.
“Talk to me,” I say. “What’s on those sheets you’ve been racing through?” I’ve managed another half-page of spotty notes, but there’s no pattern I can detect, no clue to the wider meaning of this document, whatever it is.
“It’s—” Rhys stops, shakes his head, tries again. “A description of Them, I suppose? But description’s not quite right. It’s like a summing-up, like every line contains all of Them, because they were here before us and They’re under everything… They’re everywhere, like water, and the words are Their flesh…” He presses the cool glass to his forehead, brow wrinkling like he’s trying to ward off a headache. “It’s hard to explain. I’m not reading it so much as it’s coming through me, you know?”
“I don’t know.” I sip my whiskey. “Sorry.”
He smiles up at me. “Well, I’m glad.”
I shrug, one-shouldered and resentful.
There’s a brief moment where he looks up at me without saying anything, wetting his lips. “I don’t mean that in a patronizing way,” he says, then. “You’re so much smarter than me. I don’t know why it’s doing—whatever it’s doing—through me. Random, I guess.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I say, but the soft, open look on his face won’t let me stay pissed-off. “I shouldn’t be annoyed at you. This is all so…” I trail off, stuck for an adjective, but Rhys nods like he gets it anyway.
He reaches for my hand, then, and puts it to his lips. It’s a question; one I’ve dreamed about answering for years. Never thought it would really happen, though.
I hesitate. I should probably say, no, we’re working together. We don’t know what might happen tomorrow. I’m not sure if you really want this anyway, or if you’re trying to distract yourself from everything.
I’m weak, though. And it’s true we don’t know what might happen tomorrow. That might not be a reason to pull away.
I move my hand to cup his cheek. “You sure about this?”
He shrugs, half-smiles. “Not sure there are any good ideas, these days, are there?”
Not exactly the enthusiasm I was hoping for, but I’ll take it. He’s probably right, after all.
I set down my glass, leaving a wet ring like the shadow of an eclipse on the table, and lean in to kiss his mouth.
We slip out, back to the room he’s been sharing with Cynan. It’ll be a while before Cynan turns in—he’ll sit up, bitterly holding court to Maddy and a couple of Water’s more easily impressed minions, until Elin starts making noises about how there’s work to do in the morning and sends them off to bed.
I’ve wanted this for years; never really dared fantasize about it, though. Now that we’re here, I’m not sure what to do. Rhys makes it easy for me, though, pulling me down on top of him on the narrow bed. Under his jumper he’s so cold it makes me suck in a shocked breath, and he burrows his face into the curve of my neck like he’s trying to leech warmth through the skin.
It doesn’t feel much like desire. Once, I’d have objected to being a distraction. Now, at the crumbling fag-end of the world, I’ll settle for what I can get.
Later, lying draped half over Rhys, my fingertips snag on an irregularity in the smooth skin on the flat of his belly. We kept the lights off, but now I lean closer, eyes narrowing in the dark. My fingers find more of the same, slightly raised, like scars.
He pulls away. “Don’t,” he says, and for once he sounds present, like he’s talking to me and not half to someone I can’t see.
I prop myself up on my elbows, giving him a stern look he probably can’t see. “Rhys. If you’ve hurt yourself, you need to tell someone.” A horrid thought occurs to me. “Have you been hurting yourself?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment, and nausea twists my guts.
“It’s not about that,” he says, then. “About pain, I mean. It’s—it wants to get out, and writing it down isn’t enough. It’s like it wants to be flesh, wants to be alive. It wants to be everywhere, and because I’m reading it, I’m it, too. And it’s Their language, but it’s not just that, it’s more than a language…” He trails off. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.” Reluctantly, I lean across the bed and switch on the lamp. Its light is warm and dim, but still enough to make Rhys flinch and shield his eyes.
A memory: Bute Park in June, the last day of the semester. I’m overdressed in cardi and sunglasses, blinking owlishly after a morning before the computer in the dingy postgrad office. Rhys stretches out on the grass like sunshine embodied, tanned golden from the barest hint of summer, not even squinting against the shocking blue of the sky. Mousy, etiolated thing that I am, I want to warm myself in his glow.
Now, he turns his head from the lamplight and flops back on the bed, resigned to my scrutiny.
Raised red marks, still scabbing over. Clear and sharp. That straight razor has been seeing some use after all. Rhys breathes in hard through his teeth when I brush them with my thumb and I pull my hand back, fingers curling in, a silent apology.
The symbols aren’t quite the same as the ones on our photocopies, but I can see suggestions in there, echoes. As though these are copies, altered by years of interpretation—or perhaps the other way round. Their language in its original form. Looking at it in the dim light makes my eyes hurt, a darkness crawling around the edges of my field of vision like the beginning of a migraine.
I jerk my head away, and Rhys reaches for his T-shirt.
Getting to my feet is an effort. My legs are leaden, like I’ve run a marathon instead of having a fairly lackluster shag. Rhys doesn’t look at me while I pull my trousers back on, and I shake my head. “You’ve got to tell them you can’t do this anymore,” I say. “We don’t even know what they want with this stuff, what they’ll do once you’ve translated it all.” I could say ‘once we’ve translated it all’, but that’d be redundant, really.
“Water wants to use it,” he says. “Or maybe he wants to be it…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“Whatever it is, it can’t be so important it’s worth doing this to yourself.”
“Probably not,” he admits, “but I’m not sure I could stop if I tried.”
I corner Elin at breakfast the next morning. She’s at the far end of the table, already issuing orders to subordinates, no food in front of her, just a mug of black coffee. She mainlines the stuff like it’s not going extinct, a sleep-is-for-the-weak pose. It occurs to me that, if she were English, she’d have had a shelf full of biographies of Margaret Thatcher before the world went tits-up.
I elbow my way past the minions and plant myself in front of her. “We need to talk about Rhys,” I say.
She sits back, blows on the surface of her coffee, takes a sip, and finally motions for me to sit. I do so, with a flare of irritation at myself for having waited to be told.
“What about Rhys?” she says, after another sip.
“You know he’s not well. This text you’ve got us working on, it’s doing something to him. Everyone can see it. He needs a break.”
Elin eyes me levelly. “I understand that you’re worried. He’s your… friend, after all.” That pause is pointed, deliberate. “But you must understand there are more important things at stake here.”
I frown across the table. “You haven’t told us what is at stake. Not really.”
“It’s need-to-know.”
“Oh, come on. The rest of us might actually be getting somewhere if we knew what the point of all this was.”
“That seems unlikely.” She eyes me sharply over her coffee, reminding me of my place. The rest of us, at this point, are pretty superfluous to requirements. A word from her, and Water would probably agree to toss us out on our arses. And where would we be then? Back to scrabbling for crumbs amid the ruins, watching the sky in endless fear of Their looming silhouettes.
She’s quiet for a moment, apparently weighing up the risk of telling me against the hassle of having me thrown out, and then sets down her mug. “You know we’re under threat at the moment.”
I snort. “It’s been that way since They came. What’s new?” Two years, almost, since the great shock of Their arrival, the destruction They wrought without pattern or apparent motive. Everything fell apart afterward, factions clinging tight to their own atomized scraps of life, fighting for food and roofs over their heads. Perhaps being in Water’s inner circle insulated her from the worst of it, but there’s still no such thing as safety, no such thing as knowing you’ll wake up tomorrow.
“We may have a way to change things.”
“How?” Whatever information she and Water think is buried in those photocopies, it’s hard to imagine it making a difference to Them. They’re so much bigger than us, so much more powerful. What weaknesses could They possibly have?
Elin thins her lips and eyes me for a moment without speaking. Deciding how much to tell me, perhaps.
“There seems to be something about the language that attracts Them,” she says, at last. “The particular form used in the book. We believe it may be able to influence Them, used properly, but right now it’s too dangerous to try. That’s why we hired you all. If we know what it actually means, then we might be able to work out how to use it. Think about it. If we can control Them, we’ll never have to worry about going hungry again.” She looks me in the eyes. “That goes for you, too. You’ll all be under Water’s protection.”
“And do you?” I ask. “Know what it means?”
That one, she doesn’t answer. Maybe my face has given me; I’ve never been much cop at poker.
But it’s starting to fall into a sort of sense. All Rhys has been doing is reading the stuff and there’s already a kind of somatic link between him and the text, and the one of Them that’s out in the bay. What he said about the words being in everything, like water, and Water wanting to be the words…
I know, suddenly, why Water chose his name. It wasn’t for any old ideas about nation and independence, no. He wants to be essential to life, inescapable, for Them as well as us. If he could become the words, and the words are Their flesh, then he’d be as good as one of Them. The head of a monstrous army.
The thought of Water in control of Them is terrifying. The thought of anybody who’d want that, having it, is terrifying. And the area he controls is bounded on all sides by other little ruined kingdoms, other people clinging by their fingertips to life. With Them in his pocket, he could control everything. Or, more likely, stomp all over it. He wouldn’t care too much about the people.
I’ve spent two years thinking They were the worst thing in the world. I almost forgot that, whatever catastrophe the planet throws up, somewhere there’ll be a man who can make it worse.
I suppress a shudder and get to my feet. “I need food,” I say, and head to the toaster, hoping Elin won’t hear what I really mean.
I need to get out of here. I need to get Rhys out of here.
And the original book, whatever it is—I need to get it away from Water.
The opportunity comes sooner than I expect.
It’s one of those Aprils that turns on a dime: blazing sunshine one day, single digits and rain the next. On one of the sunny days—a Saturday, Elin informs us, though days of the week have long since lost meaning—Water announces a holiday.
He does it at the breakfast table, an unusual enough occurrence. Most of the time, he eats alone, rationing his presence so that we’ll all pay attention to him when he’s around. Today, he stands up with a beaming smile while the rest of us are still stuffing our faces, forcing us to set down our mugs and slices of bread and listen up.
“You’ve done great work,” he tells us. His voice is one of his great weapons, deep and magisterial, rumbling like a distant tide. He looks immensely pleased, if more with himself than us. “I think you all deserve a day off. Go outside, enjoy the sunshine! It’s important to enjoy the small pleasures, now more than ever.” He smiles widely, enjoying his own magnanimity. There’s nothing behind the smile, I think; a void that frightens me more urgently than Their mindlessness.
I feel eyes on me as he speaks. Elin, seated at his right hand, watches me levelly as she shuffles papers without looking at them. This, I realize, is her doing. She’s been prodding Water behind the scenes, making him think it’s his very own idea. A generous gesture, a day of rest—a sop, to convince me that they give a shit about Rhys’ welfare. To keep me quiet about what they’re doing to him.
He isn’t watching Water, poking at the greyish yolk of an overboiled egg. I wait for Elin to look away and then nudge him with my elbow. “Did you hear what he said?”
Rhys blinks slowly. “Sunshine,” he says, at last. “Something about sunshine?”
“We’re getting a day off,” I tell him.
“Oh.”
I lower my voice, though there’s no way Elin is close enough to hear. “I’m going to be ill,” I tell him. “Give it half an hour and then come back inside.”
That, at least, seems to get his attention, claw a shred of it back from whatever obscure place his mind is in these days. “What for?” he asks.
I bite my lip. Would it be better to tell him, so he doesn’t get surprised and freak out later on? Probably not worth it. I’m not sure how he’ll react to anything these days, what Elin or Water or the words have been doing to him inside that inner room.
“Do you trust me?” I say, instead.
“Of course.”
“Then just do as I ask. Please. I’ll explain later.” If there is a later.
He hesitates a moment. Then his hand goes to the front of his T-shirt again and I swallow, remembering the angry-red inscriptions on his skin. He nods.
As we troop out into the shock of sunlight, I squint and massage my temple. “Bloody typical,” I say, loudly enough to make sure Elin hears. “I’m getting a migraine.” I turn to Rhys. “I’d better go and lie down. You enjoy the sun.”
I duck back into the cool, stuffy cocoon of Water’s headquarters. I remember when the Senedd building was new, all open space and glass. An eco-marvel, or at least that was the idea. Water’s headquarters, wedged into the wreckage, looks like an intruder, a crashed airplane protruding from an impact-shattered landscape.
On my way back to the dorm, I pause to try the handle of the room we’re not allowed into. It doesn’t move, of course—Elin would never be so sloppy—and I move on. I don’t have much with me; all my clothes fit into the storage locker under my bed. I stuff them into the backpack I brought with me on the first day, along with soap and toothpaste from the bathroom, and a few squashed slices of bread I filched from the breakfast table, stuffed under my cardigan in a napkin for safekeeping.
Then I stuff the bag back under my bed and lie down, fully clothed under the covers. I close my eyes at the sounds of a footstep, fearing it’s Elin grown suspicious and come to check on me, but when a hand shakes my shoulder and I open my eyes, Rhys is crouching beside the bed.
“Are you okay?” he asks, all genuine big-eyed concern, and I’m not sure if I want to laugh or cry.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Come on. Pack your bag; we’re getting out of here.”
He frowns at me. “Really? Do you think he’ll let us go?”
“I’m not giving him the choice.” I hold out my hand. “Have you got your keycard, the one Elin gave you?”
He nods and hands it over, obeying when I motion him toward his room. I hold my breath, listen out for footsteps, and then slide the keycard down the side of the reader.
There’s a heartbeat, a beep, and a clunk as the door unlocks. I slide through, holding my breath, and let my eyes adjust to the dim light.
I identify the original immediately. It’s on a desk ahead of me, propped up on one of those cushioned stands like they used to have in the university library. But this isn’t a book, it’s a bunch of fragments, propped up awkwardly on the stand. Vellum or parchment, age-browned and disintegrating, though there’s a faint and disagreeable blue-grey tinge to it. At the back of the room, sheets upon sheets of white A4 are stacked up: the photocopies we worked on, and pages covered in Rhys’ sprawling handwriting. Way too many to carry. Water’s lot must’ve used up half the Senedd’s stationary supplies by now.
I hesitate a moment. Then I stuff the originals into my bag and scrabble around under the clothes I’ve packed. I carried a box of matches with me everywhere, before Water brought us here. I’d retrieved them from the rubble of one of the shops halfway up Bute Street after They came, and I hoarded them jealously, not knowing what I’d do when they ran out.
Now, I strike them and drop them onto the paper one by one. Almost all I have left. They smolder, catch, the acrid smoke stinging my nostrils. Perhaps I should burn the originals too, I think, get rid of the whole shebang in one go, but then the flames are leaping up face-high and it’s too late.
Rhys has stuck his head out into the corridor, frowning at the smell of burning. I grab his arm. “Come on!”
We make for the back entrance, out through the rear of the building. Out of the protective cocoon of Water’s sealed chamber. I can’t see out into the bay from here. Sunlight sparks off the water near the old carousel, deceptively bright and blue.
I hear an alarm behind me. A commotion of voices and footsteps.
And beyond that a voice like the tolling of a distant bell, and the vast displacement of water as It begins to move.
I can still hear It by the time we reach the edge of Water’s territory, up near the broken ribbon of the M4. It moves slowly but inexorably, a great shadow at our backs. I don’t stop to look back long enough to take in its shape, or to wonder how many buildings it’s trampled as it comes toward us. I don’t let Rhys linger, either. “Keep going,” I tell him, “we’re dead if we stop,” and he seems content to do as he’s told.
I’d thought when I saved the originals, that Rhys might be able to tell me what to do with them to keep Them away; that I might have time to figure out how to break the words’ hold on him. I had other, vaguer thoughts of making sure somebody better than Water possessed them. That’s all looking pretty optimistic right now.
We stop under the A48 flyover. I strike a match and hold it to the paper, swearing as my hands shake and the match flickers out. The next one catches, and I watch it burn until my eyes hurt. The aching sunshine outside, the sharp black shadow of the road, and within it the small yellow flicker of the flame, dying to nothing as the vellum blackens and curls. The shade is comforting. I’d lie down in it if I could, stretch out and enjoy the darkness and pretend the blazing sunlight didn’t exist.
Instead, I crouch close to a concrete pillar and listen as the fire dies, the blackened fragments scattering from my fingers. Stillness, for a moment. Then a great impact, Its footstep, and the sound of tree-trunks cracking in the distance. And that voice, tolling, tolling.
Rhys is frowning to himself, his eyes distant, but at the sound he looks up, twitching nervily.
I take his hand and smile, hoping I sound more confident than I feel. “It was the original,” I tell him. “They’re attracted to it, remember? But I’ve burned it now. It won’t follow us anymore.”
We head east, off the road and into the bright afternoon. Trees and hills hardly pose any obstacle to It, but there are more places to hide.
It keeps coming.
I place one foot in front of the other and keep my eyes down. If I think about what happens next—what happens because of me—I’ll start screaming and never stop. Rhys trudges forward at my side.
It keeps coming.
And later, once the sun has sunk redly behind the hills, we hear another sound. A great distant slithering that makes me imagine a nest of snakes, up ahead of us.
Rhys comes to a dead halt, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” under his breath.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, though my voice shakes. “Coincidence, probably. Who even knows what They’re really up to? We’ll hide and They’ll go away, eventually.”
He shakes his head, wild-eyed. “No,” he tells me. “It’s the language that attracts them, remember?” He falters, glancing down at himself. “And it’s part of me now.”
My heart sinks. Stupid, so stupid not to have thought of this.
“We have to run, then,” I say.
“How? All of Them will be coming. Anywhere we go, we’ll bring Them with us.” He says it softly, hopelessly, but there’s a strange peace in his eyes. As if he’s always known this was coming. He glances up, past my shoulder, and I turn with my heart in my throat.
It’s a tangle of limbs, or maybe branches, a thousand feet high, with no identifiable body or head. Miles away for now, but I can hear its hissing voice like wind in trees, precursor of a storm.
Still that tolling voice to the west. And off to the south, a high, crackling shriek. I can’t yet see what manner of monster it belongs to, but it turns my blood to ice.
Rhys looks at me helplessly. “They’re going to come for me,” he says. “Water’s place is gone. We can’t hide there.”
“We couldn’t go back there anyway,” I say. “You know what he wanted to do.”
He nods agreement. “I think maybe,” he says, “it’s better if you let them take me.”
“No.”
“You can’t stop them.”
“And I can’t leave you alone!” The idea of wandering endlessly without him, without anyone to stay alive for, fills me with despair. A grey miserable blank of an existence; a rat in the ruins.
I hesitate, grope around inside my pack again. Emergency scissors.
“Show me again,” I say. “The writing.”
He hesitates, then pulls off his shirt. The marks have spread since I last saw them, all over his chest, down his upper arms. I wince, looking at the red mess of scars.
I open the scissors, grit my teeth, place the point of a blade against my arm.
Rhys grabs me by the wrist before I can press it in. “Wait,” he says. “Look. Maybe you can change it.” He spreads his arms, offering himself to me like a canvas, small and pale and bloodied in the gathering gloom. “Write something else. Or, I don’t know—mess it up, so it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I can’t do that,” I say. “I can’t—hurt you.” But it sounds small and pathetic, and he reaches for my arm again, drawing my hand closer.
“They’re coming,” he says. “There’s no time to hesitate. C’mon, you have to.”
I set my jaw and press down with the scissors.
Afterward, we’re both breathless, blood soaking the front of Rhys’ T-shirt. I’m going to have to look for an abandoned pharmacy, something to clean the wounds out with, or he’ll get an infection.
That is, if we survive this.
I hold my breath, my hand clutched tight in his, and watch the sky.
The tolling voice, drawing ever closer, suddenly tapers off. I bite my lip and look in Its direction, and find it standing stock-still, as though It’s walked into a room and forgotten It was looking for Its glasses.
The high, shrieking sound begins to fade, too. That one never came close enough for us to see its owner. There’s only that incoherent tangle of limbs, still moving toward us—and as It approaches It veers off to the side, making instead in the direction of the shrieking noise.
I breathe out hard, Rhys sagging against my side. We wait an immeasurable span of time as the sky darkens and Their lumbering shapes, visible by the absence of stars, recede into the distance.
The sky is clear tonight, the moon coin-bright. Its light casts everything in monochrome, turning the blood on Rhys’ skin black. The moment doesn’t feel quite real. I’m afraid that if I reach for him, my hand will pass through his flesh like water.
His fingers find mine. “Come on,” he says. “We can’t hang around here.”
I nod and we haul ourselves upright, leaning on each other to stay on our feet. Step by unsteady step, we walk into the night.
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JL George (she/they) lives in Cardiff and writes weird and speculative fiction. Her first novel, The Word, won the New Welsh Writing Award and Rubery Book Award and is published by New Welsh Rarebyte. In a previous life as an academic, she wrote a PhD on evolution in the classic weird tale. You can find her on Mastodon at @jlgeorge@toot.wales. |
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