Inside the house, male voices belt out the fortieth rendition of “Blessing grant, oh God of nations, on the isles of Fiji”, sung by the bunch of rugby players who ported in with Alex from Malibu. These guys are built like wardrobes, and they’ve drunk western LA county dry. Kelly has the French windows open and is working on her fifth large Chardonnay of the afternoon, watching the sun sink into the hills, casting shadows on the river.
When the phone rings, it takes her several seconds to place the sound. She finds the receiver wedged between two cushions of the chesterfield.
“Kelly? It’s Byron.”
“Byron! How are you? Haven’t seen you in…”
Well, how long is it? They kept in touch after college and there was a year when they were an item, but that must be a decade ago. Kelly’s hazy about it now, but didn’t they part on bad terms? Byron called her a sellout for working in PR; she said he was a loser for thinking there was any money in whatever neuroscience dead-end he was mad about that week.
“Kelly, we need to talk. There’s something...”
“Shores of GOLDEN SAND! And sunshine, happiness, and song! Stand UNITED! We of Fiji. Fame and glory ever!” A conga line of Fijian rugby players sashays down the staircase. Alex is at the front, a bottle of rum in one hand, wearing a pair of shorts as a hat. “Kelly!” he yells. “Come to Fiji. The sun’s coming up.” Kelly shakes her head and points at the phone.
“…important we talk,” Byron says. “People need to–”
“ONWARD march TOGETHER!” The rugby singers boom louder as they reach the Port room, but the volume shrinks as they go through. “GOD…. Bless…Fiji.”
“I need your help.” Byron’s voice cracks. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
The house falls silent as the last reveller transmits to Fiji. Kelly hates a quiet house; it swells with empty space for her thoughts to fill.
“Come over, Byron. But be quick. I’ve got a date in Fiji.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he says. “Don’t tell anyone. And don’t use the -.” Kelly clicks off the phone and drops it on the couch.
She waits a whole half hour and Byron doesn’t show. She checks the Port settings maybe a hundred times. Kelly hates hanging around, especially when the floating party is ported to the other side of the world. It’s dark outside and a Fijian sunrise sounds attractive. She picks up the phone and presses ringback. The call shunts to voicemail and she hangs up.
She changes into a swimsuit and sandals. In the Port room she half-expects Byron to flicker in behind the glass door before she can leave, but the cubicle’s dark. She steps inside. The cubicle lights come on and ripple in lilac, and a puff of air on her face makes her blink. When she reopens her eyes, she’s in a different room and she’s got that tingling buzz of her senses dialled up a notch, like a first glass of wine. People say porting stimulates endorphins; it sure works for Kelly.
She opens the door and smells the sea. This house has wooden floors, smudged with sand and damp footprints. Outside, a verandah gives onto a beach. As always after a Port, Kelly’s mildly horny and fuzzy, briefly unsure where she is or why she’s here. Down at the shore, people dance around a driftwood fire. A fat sun heaves itself into a salmon sky. Kelly runs to join the party.
After Fiji, she and Alex port to Tokyo for shopping, before a night in a cabin in the Himalayan foothills. They sit outside in canvas chairs and drink raksi with soda.
“I had a call from Byron. Remember him?”
“That wanker. He came over?” Alex is a silhouette against the star-freckled night.
“No. He called. Like, on the phone.”
“Scared you’d punch him again?”
“I never punched him.” But even as she denies it, Kelly recalls the last time she saw Byron. A London pub, he had a new job and was moving to Leeds. Come with me, he said. Get away from those airheads at the agency. They’re my friends, she shouted, and when he grabbed her arm to stop her leaving, she yanked it free and swung the other to deliver an open-handed whack on the side of his head. She didn’t look back.
“That him on the phone when the Fijians were there?”
“He sounded worried.”
“Worried about what?”
“No idea. He said people needed to know about something. Wanted my help getting the word out.”
“You’re definitely the girl for that.”
“It’s odd he didn’t port in. He said he’d come over, but never turned up.”
“Forget him,” Alex says. “If he doesn’t come, it’s not important. Where shall we go tomorrow?”
Kelly knows he’s right, but it bothers her. What was the research Byron was working on? She thinks they might have argued about it back then. Alex moves to top up her raksi, but she puts her hand over the cup. Her thoughts are too sluggish for more alcohol.
I need another port jump. Clear my head.
It’s an odd thought, one she’s never had fully formed before, but it’s been there at the back of her mind, like the desire for a sharpening gin at the end of the day, or the first cigarette in the morning.
After Nepal, they port to Istanbul for breakfast of dark coffee and freshly baked pastries. They spend the afternoon and evening in Sorrento, where Kelly buys a new dress, and they have pizza and iced white wine in a garden overlooking the Bay of Naples. Clouds caress the summit of Vesuvius, giving the illusion of smoke from the volcano’s crater.
They port home late. Kelly’s tired and while Alex unpacks, she drifts through the rooms, touching the backs of chairs, running fingers along tabletops, as if to bring them fully back into reality and clear the fog in her head. She can’t recall where she slept the night before.
The phone’s still on the sofa, red light blinking. Kelly watches it wink at her for several minutes, vaguely conscious of Alex moving around deep in the house. A message? The thought surfaces like a fragment of driftwood from a wreck on the seabed. She picks up the phone.
“It’s me again.” Byron sounds different. He’s outdoors, and behind his voice there’s the grumble of an engine. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Kelly, you can’t tell anyone about this. Some people don’t like my research. I’ll explain when I get there but stay away from the portal.” He sounds worse than before – breathless and distracted. “And Kelly?” He’s not finished, but Kelly’s already thinking about how you delete these messages; no way is Alex hearing this. “I wanted to say I’m sorry how it ended with us.”
It takes her a couple of minutes cack-handed fumbling to junk the voicemail. She walks to the back of the house and watches the cubicle door. No activation light comes on.
Four days at work pass in a blur, and Kelly gets home early on Thursday to a note from Alex, pinned to the cubicle door: ‘Gone fishing in Maine. Dinner at that place in Dublin?’ Alex does a three-day week, and it’s not unusual for him to start partying when Kelly’s still working. She has papers to deal with, but they’re dull, and she can’t focus on them. Nor does Dublin appeal, with Alex a day ahead on the weekend.
Kelly thinks again about Byron. Despite his messages, he’s not appeared. What’s so urgent that he leaves messages promising to visit, but so unimportant that he never shows? How long would it take him to come over and tell her what’s on his mind? With Alex away, she decides to settle this. She taps her palmer, pulling up contacts. The last address she has for him is in Greenwich. There’s no personal terminal, but a street port’s nearby. She goes to the cubicle and jumps to south-east London.
Refreshed and light-headed, Kelly skips onto the street. It’s years since she’s been here, and back then the streets throbbed with visitors; pubs and cafes hummed all week long. Not now - half the shops are boarded-up; scraps of paper rustle underfoot; tufts of grass sprout between paving stones. Byron’s address is a brick terraced house, front garden cluttered with discarded computer cabinets and cracked monitors. Kelly presses the doorbell, then raps on the wooden door. The door scrapes inward to reveal a woman in a dressing gown.
“Is Byron in?”
“Who wants to know?” The woman looks her up and down.
“I’m a friend. My name’s Kelly.”
“Ah, he mentioned you. The PR lady.” She sketches air quotes with her fingers. “Contacts in the media.”
“Is he here?”
“No.”
“Do you know where I can find him?” Kelly asks. “He said he needed to talk to me.”
“That’s right. He’s gone to see you.”
“That’s what he said. But he never showed up.”
“He’s on his way.”
Kelly studies her face. The woman waits, like a chess player who’s just put her opponent in check.
“I don’t understand,” Kelly says. “I just came from my place. Did he go from another port, and we crossed?”
“Doesn’t use them.”
“He…?”
“Never uses them. He said he talked to you about this,” the woman says. “Some big deal about how he was going to get your help. People needed to know.” Air quotes again.
“Know what?”
“Not to use them.” She shrugs. “I don’t. Never trusted it.”
“I’m sorry,” Kelly says. “Let me get this straight. Byron’s coming to see me?”
“So he said.”
“But he’s not porting?”
“Nope.”
“So how is he…?” Her voice trails off. What even was the word? How is he getting to my place? How is he…travelling?
“How did you get here, love?”
“The public booth down the hill.”
“No, darling. How did you get from the booth to this house?” She glances down at Kelly’s shoes, and back to her face, eyebrows raised.
“He’s…walking?”
“He won’t use the port, like I said.”
Kelly stares at her. Is this a joke? Maybe Byron will appear in a minute and they’ll all laugh, go inside and drink coffee. She and Byron will talk about old times, and this woman – who is she, anyway? His wife? – this woman will turn out to be friendly instead of weird.
“Seriously?” Kelly says at last.
“Seriously.”
“How long will that take?”
“I don’t know, love. Where’d you live?”
“The Cotswolds. Near Bath.”
“Nice,” she says. “So, got to be at least a hundred miles.”
Kelly has no idea how far that is. Does anyone? These days - when it’s as easy to be in Kyoto for tea as it is to go to the corner shop for milk - no one thinks about the spaces in between. Everywhere is just…everywhere. At least, everywhere you’d want to go. Anywhere else is nowhere.
“He left three days ago,” the woman goes on. “Must be important, don’t you think?”
“You’re saying he’s somewhere between here and my place? On some road somewhere?”
“Well, he ain’t got wings, darling.”
Kelly’s not sure what to do next. Go home and wait for Byron to turn up? How long will that take? The momentary sparkle from her port jump has faded and her head feels stuffed with cotton wool.
“Do you want to come in and rest for a bit, love? You look tired.” The woman holds the door open wider. The softness in her tone surprises Kelly.
“No. Thank you,” Kelly says. “I should get back.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Can I ask you something? What happened here?” Kelly gestures down the hill, indicating the rubbish-strewn streets, the formerly bustling town centre.
The woman frowns. “What do you mean?”
“It used to be busy, full of people.” For a moment, Kelly fears she’s angered the woman, casting disrespect on her neighbourhood, but when she speaks it’s clear the frown is a mark of pity, not anger.
“Where’ve you been, darling?” she says. “Isn’t it like this everywhere?”
The jump home revives her, and she puts on some sweats and sits with a glass of wine in the garden, overlooking the river. Alex messages to say he’s booked a table in Dublin, but she’s got a couple of hours. It’s easy to find an online map showing the road network between here and London. The map’s fifteen years old, but no one’s building any new roads, so it’s accurate enough.
Kelly stares at it for a long time, zooming in on parts of the terrain between here and Byron’s home in south east London. The woman was right: it’s 110 miles. Kelly has no clue how fast Byron walks; could he do twenty miles a day? If it’s as urgent as he says, he surely would, which means he could turn up in the next 48 hours.
She's forgotten how many roads there were. Some must still be used for transporting freight - most small goods get ported, but there’s still bulk transportation of food and raw materials. Aside from the main arteries, is the rest of this spiderweb of tarmac just sitting there, sinking under weeds?
She changes into a dress for dinner, but there’s still an hour before she’s due in Dublin. She walks around the house, switching TVs on and off, picking up magazines and throwing them back down unopened. She considers another drink and has the bottle out of the fridge before she gives in to the thought that’s been in her head since she looked at the map. It’s easy to search for public ports. She picks a section of motorway north of Newbury - if Byron’s doing twenty miles a day, that’s roughly where he’ll be. As she dials the code, a deep-down rational voice tells her this is stupid: she can’t expect to drop in on the right place at the right time in a hundred miles of road. But it’s increasingly easy to ignore rational voices in her head these days - easy to do stuff; hard to think about it.
Don’t use the portal. She remembers Byron’s warning as her finger hovers over the Jump button.
One of Kelly’s earliest childhood memories is her family’s first Jump, back when it was such a novelty that crowds gathered to watch travelers disappear. Her father went first, and she cried when he vanished. Her mother had to force her into the booth and Kelly screamed to come out. Everything changed with the Jump: a burst of pleasure, as if someone had promised her ice cream, and she tumbled out of the booth and into her father’s arms. Maybe that memory is why she still gets a kick out of every Jump.
It’ll clear my head.
She pushes the button.
Zap! Fizz! That’s better. The door swings wide and Kelly takes in her surroundings: concrete forecourt, patches of weed pushing through cracks; a low building, windows blind with boards. A stub of road leads away toward a much wider road.
The motorway.
There’s no sign of activity. A distant low growl of an engine, but no other sound. She walks toward the motorway. She must have traveled on one of these, when she was young. She has another childhood memory: falling asleep in the back seat of a car with her head on her mother’s lap, as her father drove through the dark. In the early days, the ports were expensive and old-style transport coexisted for a decade, until the fusion breakthrough erased the power problem.
Kelly’s seen archive footage of this kind of road, stuffed with vehicles; a slow-running river of metal and glass. A river now frozen into a ribbon of asphalt wide as a football pitch. The motorway is empty. Wait, not quite. Beyond the shrubs of the central divide there’s movement. A crabbed figure shuffles east along the far carriageway, pulling a wheeled cart.
“Hey! Hello.” She’s halfway across. The rough surface gives way to a smoother middle lane. The engine grumble she heard earlier is louder now, but her attention is on the figure across the way. It’s not Byron, but maybe he knows something.
“Excuse me?” She waves. “Can you help me, sir?”
He sees her at last and reacts strangely: waves his arms at her in a shooing gesture. His mouth moves, but a sudden surge of noise drowns his words. She’s never heard anything like it – a rising roar, a grinding clatter like a building sliding down a hillside. The stranger runs forward, arms windmilling.
“I can’t hear you,” Kelly shouts.
His face twisted in alarm, he stops on the grass reservation and points to her right. Kelly looks where he points and immediately throws herself backward. A high-pitched blare like a siren. Kelly’s eyes close in a reflex against the fist of warm air that slaps her face and chest, but not before she catches a glimpse of something passing in front of her, like the side of a building rushing past, over the spot on the road where she stood a second earlier.
Kelly skins her hands and bruises her backside on the asphalt. She opens her eyes to find the stranger standing over her. Beyond his shoulder, the rear end of a house shrinks into the distance, taking the engine noise with it.
“You okay, miss?”
“What the fuck was that?”
“What’d’you think? You’re standing on the main London to Bristol road. Freight carrier.”
“Don’t they give any warning?” The motorway is empty again, quiet enough to hear scraps of paper drifting in the wind.
“Prob’ly didn’t even see you.”
She stands up, brushing dirt from her clothes. “Is the back of my dress okay?” She turns to show him her back.
“Looks fine to me.” He gazes a little too long.
“Well, thanks for your help. I’d better be going. Got a dinner date.”
“Why are you here?”
“I was looking for someone.” He squints at her, his eyes bright, albeit buried in a nest of whiskers and frizzed grey hair. “I must have got the wrong port,” Kelly says. “The one back there doesn’t look like it gets much use.”
“Who you looking for?”
She’s eager to get away. When she followed her impulse to search out Byron, she didn’t envisage making conversation with some Robinson Crusoe character on a ghost highway in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, he saved her life.
“Are you traveling far, sir?”
He shrugs. “Quite a way.”
“Do you meet many people on the road?”
“A few. No one like you.”
“A friend of mine,” she says. “Someone told me he’s walking from London. Maybe you’ve seen him.”
“Maybe I have. What’s this fella like? Boyfriend?”
“About my age. A bit taller.” She ignores the boyfriend remark, and the beardy leer that accompanies it. She’s keen to get back in the port; dinner in Dublin has never seemed more appealing.
“I’ll look out. Any message if I see him?”
“Just tell him Kelly was looking for him.”
She looks back as she walks to the port cubicle. The man has recovered his trolley and is already shuffling again toward London.
“Here she is!” Alex’s voice – slurred by the drink or two he’s had ahead of her – turns Kelly’s head as soon as she steps from the port in Temple Bar. “Get this party started.”
In truth, it looks like the party started long ago. Does it ever stop? Alex has his arms round the shoulders of two young men. One wears a firefighter’s uniform, the other a pink tutu. Behind them, a flash-mob of revelers fills the cobbled street, dressed as if they’ve raided a film studio wardrobe: Mickey Mouse skips behind Marie Antoinette, her arm round Count Dracula.
“Nobody told me it was fancy dress,” Kelly says. She should be used to the sudden changes after a port jump but landing in this noisy Dublin street seconds after leaving the desolate motorway makes her dizzy.
“You’re dressed fancy enough for anywhere.” Alex’s eyes narrow. “You okay?”
“Tired.” She leans against the wall of a pub. Warm air from inside brings the smell of frying food and beer. “I thought it was dinner. Not a party.”
“It’s always a party,” Alex says. “Where you been?”
“I was just…” Where had she been? When she reaches for the memory, it’s like pulling a frayed rope from a well with no bucket.
“Forget the party crowd.” Alex takes her arm. “You look like you need quiet time.”
He leads her to a small bistro, where they get a corner table and have pasta and red wine. It reminds Kelly of somewhere else, but when she searches her memory, she can’t locate a clear image of any of the hundreds of restaurants they’d eaten in. She closes her eyes and tries to conjure a memory of them somewhere else, on another day, in another place. They’d been everywhere; surely somewhere stuck in her mind. Tantalizing wisps of memory are there – she can feel them – but when she reaches for them, they slip away like she’s trying to catch an eel with her hands. Instead, the only picture that comes is an imagined view of her brain, but instead of the folds and creases familiar from medical images, a seamless silvery sphere fills her skull, like a balloon filled with mercury.
“You okay, Kel?”
“Tired.”
“Anything on your mind?”
“No.”
It’s true: her head’s a bubble of air; if Alex asks what she had for breakfast, what today’s weather’s been like, her favourite childhood toy, she’d have no answer.
They port home after dinner. Alex wants to join a crowd jumping to Tromso for the Northern Lights, but Kelly cries off, pleading lack of warm clothing. She goes to bed and falls into an antiseptic sleep. When she wakes up, it’s late morning and Alex has gone out. Her laptop’s on the breakfast bar and Kelly opens it while eating muesli. It takes a while to work out what’s on the screen, then she remembers: the map, the motorway, the man with the shopping trolley, walking toward London. And someone else, coming the other way. Byron. Where is he now? With a finger, she traces the old roads.
The house is full of no one and nothing. It makes her sad. She toys with the idea of porting somewhere, anywhere; a Jump would clear her head. Instead, she walks through the house, touching familiar objects and looking at photos of herself with people who have come adrift from their names. She pours a fat glass of wine and takes it into the garden. A rowboat is moored on the riverbank and someone’s walking up the lawn. Kelly shades her eyes against the glare of sunlight on the water.
“Kelly?”
Byron cuts the distance between them with a few rapid strides and, to his evident surprise – and her own – Kelly flings her arms around him. There are flecks of white in his beard, like ash from a bonfire.
“I found the house, even from the river,” he whispers into her ear. He smells of dust and sweat. “How about that?”
“You didn’t row that boat all the way from London? Even you aren’t that crazy.”
“Just from Chippenham.” He pulls back to look at her, hands on her shoulders. “Before that, I walked. The old roads are still there.” He takes his backpack off his shoulder and taps it. “When what’s in here gets out, we’ll all be back on the roads.”
Kelly had no idea how she would feel to see him, and emotion takes her unawares. Her eyes prickle with tears. She covers up by turning away. “You must need a drink.”
She drinks more wine, Byron has coffee. They sit in the garden. She nods at the moored boat. “May not be so easy going back upriver.”
“No problem. I’m going down to Bristol after this. People I need to see.” He pulls a plastic folder from his backpack and opens it, fanning the papers within. “This is what I needed to tell you about, Kelly.” His serious expression tells her this conversation will be dull. “You’ve got contacts,” he says. “People in the news media. I’ve tried getting this out there; I just can’t get the traction.”
“I last saw you when?” she says. “It’s got to be ten years.”
“Probably. Look, Kelly, I don’t have much time. I need your help. It’s about my research.”
“I can’t help with that,” she says. “Like you said when we split up: I’m good at the fluffy people stuff, but what I know about science wouldn’t confuse a kitten.”
“Did I say that? I’m sorry. I can see why you dumped me.”
Did she dump him? She can’t remember. She tries to picture them back then, but nothing comes. His face, his voice, the way he moves – it’s all familiar, like he’s a character from a movie she saw once.
“Anyway, this is important,” he goes on. “You know how the teleports work, right?”
“No.”
“You don’t need to know the detail. The thing is, the teleportation process isn’t safe.”
“Seems safe enough to me.”
“How can you tell?” Kelly doesn’t like the way Byron stares at her. “Maybe it is safe, for you. But it’s risky for some: in a small proportion of cases, over time and with repeated port jumps, it can damage neurological connections. That’s what my research shows, but they’ve cut off my funding.”
“If it’s only a few cases, maybe that’s not so bad.” A line of ducks drifts down the river. One of them pecks at the side of his boat, then glides after the others.
“Memory loss, impaired small motor function, psychosis. In extreme cases, early dementia, and death. Some people are getting their brains wiped.”
“If that was true, they wouldn’t let people use it.”
“Come on, Kelly! Who wouldn’t? The world depends on instant, almost cost-free transportation. A lot of powerful people don’t want to interfere with that just because some poor saps get their brains bleached by too many jumps. Too much depends on the teleport system: jobs, money, most of the biggest corporations, government tax revenues.”
There’s a breeze blowing from the west. It swings Byron’s boat in an arc out to the end of the rope and back to shore, like a slow windscreen wiper on water.
“I don’t want to drag you into this, Kelly. But there’s people after me.” Byron’s words pull her attention back from the river. “I’m scared what they’ll do to stop this getting out.”
He’s about to say more, but he’s interrupted by a burst of noise from the house. Alex appears on the lawn, followed by half a dozen women in white robes. “Kelly, you’ve got to see this.” He strides toward them. The women follow him in a ragged line, chanting wordlessly. “The Aurora’s fantastic. They’ve got this festival going on up there.”
Within minutes, the port disgorges another dozen white-clad revelers, who form a ragged circle on the lawn, singing and waving their arms above their heads. Alex drags Kelly into the circle. The chants are easy to learn, and the Druids are friendly. She has more wine. Later that evening, they all go to Tromso. As they leave, Kelly shuts the windows and casts a last look around. There’s no longer a boat moored at the end of the garden.
“When did Byron leave?” she asks Alex.
“Is that who it was? The guy on the river?” He holds up a pink plastic folder. “I think he left something.”
Inside is a thin sheaf of papers, topped with a handwritten note: “I need to keep moving. Read the papers. Please get word out. They want to stop me. Don’t say you’ve seen me.”
Kelly puts the folder somewhere safe.
In Tromso, they soon ditch the sun-worshippers. It’s too cold for Kelly, so after a dinner of fish soup and potato waffles, they port to Havana, where it’s mid-afternoon. Alex joins a small group snorkeling at Punta Perdiz while Kelly nurses a cocktail on the beach. By the time they get home, there are only six hours until she’s due at work. She takes a hangover pill and sleeps for five.
A few days later, Kelly and Alex are eating dinner in front of the HD and Alex is trying to persuade her to go to Kyoto for a nightcap, but she has an early start next day.
“Anyway, it’s breakfast time in Japan,” she says. “What kind of a nightcap is that?”
“As if anyone cares what time it is anywhere,” Alex says. He says something else, but Kelly’s distracted by a news item onscreen.
“Bristol?”
“Why go there?” Alex asks. “Might as well stay home.”
On the screen: a waterside warehouse, a police officer bending to examine the bottom of a wooden rowboat hanging from a chain. The voiceover says, “…treating it as an accident, Bristol police have said. The deceased lived in south-east London.”
“Are we going to Kyoto or what?” Alex is in the doorway with his coat on. Kelly’s thoughts flee like startled birds. It could be anyone’s boat; lots of people live in south-east London.
“Yes,” she says. “I need something to sharpen me up.” She can think about this when they get back.
The Jump shoots bubbles through her brain. It’s snowing in Kyoto, but it doesn’t settle. They eat ginger dumplings in a shack near a building that once housed the railway station but is now a temple. Alex does most of the talking. Kelly nods occasionally, but whenever she tries to form a sentence, the words are slow to come, and Alex is onto another topic. She keeps thinking about a pink plastic folder. They jump home at midnight and Kelly is asleep before she reaches the bedroom.
Months later, they’re on one of Alex’s regular one-day weekends, where they keep porting west to stay ahead of the sunset, enjoying forty-eight hours of daylight. They’re in San Francisco Chinatown, for a dim sum lunch. The restaurant has menus with pink plastic covers. They remind Kelly of something.
“Alex,” she says. “Back home, I had a plastic folder with some papers in it. What happened to it?”
“Don’t know. Important?”
“Something I needed to do.” She stares at a cube of tofu in her bowl. “I can’t remember what.”
“I’m sure it’ll turn up,” he says.
After lunch, they port to Hong Kong, then keep moving west during a long afternoon, outrunning the sun. When they get home, Kelly hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours.
“I feel like I’ll never sleep again,” she says.
“Take a pill,” says Alex. “You’ll be good as new in the morning.”
She wakes up in the dark and something draws her barefoot into the tiny room they use as an office. In the bottom of the filing cabinet, she finds a pink folder. The papers inside are covered with charts and dense text. Kelly tries to read them, but every word is a clenched fist, hiding its meaning. All at once, tears spill from her eyes and drip onto the paper. There is a block of ice in her chest. She has never felt so sad, but she doesn’t know why.
She can’t bear the thought of the folder remaining in her home. She wanders through the house and onto the lawn, thinking she will throw it in the recycling. The full moon lays a bar of silver across the river. She looks for a rowing boat, but there isn’t one. Still crying, walking as if in a dream, Kelly returns indoors, takes the folder to the port room and places it on the floor of the cubicle. Without knowing why, she looks up the code for her former boss, now the head of an online news agency, punches it in and presses the button.
The hateful folder disappears. Kelly goes back to bed and is asleep in seconds. When Alex wakes her next morning with a cup of coffee, she sits up and stretches like a cat. For a few seconds, her head is fogged with a dense sadness, as if she has woken from a terrible dream. Then, it evaporates, as dreams do, and her head is full of sunlight.
“You were right,” she says. “I’m as good as new.”
“If not better,” Alex says, and he smiles and asks her his usual question. The only question that matters.
“Where shall we go today?”
Chris has appeared in places like Galaxy's Edge, Podcastle, Interzone, and two recent Best of British SF anthologies. SF novel, Fifty-One, was published in 2018 (“better plotted than Connie Willis” – Interzone). Earlier horror novel, Among the Living, also remains available. Chris lives physically in London and virtually at www.chrisbarnhambooks.com
Art: Toe Keen