Like the night’s first star, his words hovered alone in her mind, blazing and far-off: I saw you before you were born.
When Nico asked what this meant, he said he should start at the beginning, and before she knew it, he’d fallen into a different kind of spiral: “It started as an experiment to fortify the honeybee against colony collapse.” His speech was fast but not frantic, quiet but not whispered. “Russian scientists used a virus to genetically modify the honeybees, but—something went wrong. Both the virus and the bees mutated.”
“Wait. So—”
“Technically, the Flies aren’t flies. Global panic drives misinformation, so people thought they were flies. Of course, they aren’t really bees either, not anymore.”
They sat on the edge of the deck, staring out over miles of treetops as he painted a picture of swarms crossing oceans and continents, scaling mountains, mining the depths of the earth, and Nico watched his words float like little souls through the attic railing, into the cold night air.
Stories of the old world were variations on a theme: how the Flies were too much, too fast, too many, how quickly they pushed humans to the brink of extinction. How governments buckled, hospitals overflowed, and how a dwindling workforce leads to a devastating domino effect: no fuel, no transportation; supermarket shelves looted or simply bought out, nothing to restock; when the electrical grids shut down, one by one, each pocket of the planet was plunged back in time, a Revolution not of Industry but Atrophy, and when this global rewind was complete, the world was back where it had started, the Darkest of Ages.
“I used to think of it as a two-act play,” her dad said. “Act One. Those first few weeks, we didn’t even know there was a flu. The Flies were more than enough. Billions of people wiped out. Those who survived thought themselves cunning to have outlasted the apocalypse.”
She’d heard most of this before, but this time felt different, as if she’d only heard the variations, and now, for the first time, the original theme.
“Act Two,” he said. “The Flu spread quicker than the Flies, quicker than science or medicine could catch up. Plenty of theories, but no . . . real certainty. Very few people survived Act Two. Those of us who did thought ourselves cunning to have outlasted the apocalypse.”
Nico had consumed enough story in her life to feel its cadence in her bones. “You think there’s a third act,” she said, searching his eyes for signs of himself. “You’re saying what Mom had—what you have—you think it’s the Flu.”
“I know it when I see it.”
Lucid or not, what he was saying made no sense. “But we haven’t been exposed.”
His voice flattened, and he turned back to the tree line. “There was a study once that theorized that most humans had herpes, but in latent form.”
“Latent form.”
“Viruses rely on the host cell for replication. Some viruses, though, instead of replicating, go into a form of hibernation. Hit and hide, they called it. Viral latency. A state in which the virus lives but does not replicate. Until something causes it to reactivate.”
Hard as it was to believe the content of what her father was saying, his communication was quite clear. She tried to let the information sink in, that even now Fly Flu might be inside her, lying dormant. “Like what?” she asked. “What would cause it to reactivate?”
“Could be any number of stress factors. Physiological changes. Could be another illness—a different, unrelated virus might act as a sort of diversion, so while the immune system is busy fending it off, Fly Flu has its moment. Could just be . . . time. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s nothing to do with reactivation. Maybe it took this long to find its way into our food and water supply. We don’t get certainty. Only theories.” He paused for a moment, and then: “There was this study once that theorized most humans have herpes, only in latent form . . .”
Nico wanted to cry. Instead she stared blindly at the dark horizon as her father explained for a second time about viral latency and reactivation, as if their conversation were a script he was rehearsing. As he talked, Harry scratched at the door behind them; Nico let her dog out, and the three of them sat together, Harry’s head in her lap while she tried to process not only what she was hearing, but how quickly her dad swung from clarity to fog and back again.
“Nic.”
“What.”
“Voyager in the Water.” He reached one hand through the railing; moonlight reflected off his wedding band, and she felt the urge to both hug and slap him. “The story is true,” he said.
“What?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but the Waters of Kairos are real. Manchester is a real place.”
For him to talk about her favorite story like this—a story she’d grown up hearing, begging to be told again and again—for him to ruin it this way, to claim it as anything other than the glorious fantasy it was, felt like the perfectly awful ending to what was easily the worst birthday of her life.
“Dad, we should go to bed. I can’t do this.”
“You have to listen.” He put a hand on her shoulder, soft but urgent, and he told a new story, how, years before she was born, he’d been recruited by the government under the guise of a company called Kairos, Inc., to study a geological phenomenon that had appeared in a flooded riverside mill, and as he spoke, she watched the cold breath of his impossible words, and she felt her soul was one of those wisps, as if it had exited its shell and was now floating in the air in front of them, free to live its brief, bright life. “When activated, the anomaly becomes the Waters of Kairos from my story. Or not—from my story. I mean I told the story . . .” His eyes fogged, and he grew visibly frustrated before breathing, calming, continuing: “The anomaly appears in the water. It’s a kind of door, we think. We were still figuring out how it worked when the Flies hit.”
Over the years there had been many mysterious conversations between her parents, times when she’d come close to learning more about what their lives had looked like before the Flies. Nico knew her dad had been a geophysicist, and while she’d love to think this was what he’d been working on, it felt like trying to spot an eagle on the horizon: she was suspicious of her own eagerness to believe.
“The anomaly is activated by sound.” He pointed to the Bell behind them, said the right frequency flipped it on like an electrical switch. He explained how Kairos had once needed someone from the team they could trust to man the switch, how in the days before the Flies, he had climbed up here once in the morning, once at night to ring the Bell. “Just like Bellringer.”
It was like dreaming your house was at the bottom of the ocean, and then waking up underwater. One minute, it was her dad talking: storyteller, scientist, true north. The next, it was a man she barely recognized. “So this—anomaly,” she said, swimming for the surface, struggling for air. “You said it’s some kind of door. Where does it lead?”
“We don’t know. A few volunteers went through—” He stopped, the implication glaring: We never saw them again.
For a moment they simply looked at each other. She felt him search for understanding in her eyes, while she searched for the haze in his.
“You have to go,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I have to go where?”
“To Manchester.”
“Dad—”
“We buried your mother in the cellar.” His eyes welled and, haze or not, she saw truth there. And she knew that the promise of love was also the promise of pain. That grief was a root: the deeper it reached, the stronger it grew. “We buried her in the cellar,” he said again, shaking his head, and she heard what he’d left unsaid: And I’ll soon be beside her, and at some point in the future, you will die alone in this house in the middle of the woods.
Nico leaned into his shoulder, felt the full weight of their combined love. And suddenly her head was full of shadowy images she couldn’t explain, pictures of the woods from deep behind the borders of the tree line, as if she were there already, as if she’d gone a hundred times before. He wiped his eyes, ran through the list of things he’d packed for her trip, said they’d review the map in the morning. “Shouldn’t take more than a week to get there. Let’s call it eight days to be safe. On the night of the eighth day, I’ll ring the Bell. We can’t coordinate times, exactly, but I’ll wait until a couple hours after sunset.”
“Dad, I can’t do this. Not alone.”
He looked down at Harry. “Who said anything about you going alone?”
Harry’s ears perked up as if he knew they were talking about him. Nico rubbed the soft fur on the side of his neck while she tried to calm her own nerves, slow her thoughts. Most fiction was laced with truth, she knew this. But if she were to believe her father now, the most impossible elements of Voyager in the Water were also the truest.
If she did go, there was no telling what she would find in Manchester, or any guarantee of even getting there. The question was, if she stayed, could she do anything to curb his sickness? If not, those unsaid words would come to fruition: she would bury him in the cellar beside her mother, and eventually she would die out here.
“I can’t just leave you.” It was the most honest thing she could think.
He put one arm around her, and when he spoke, his words mimicked the moon: gentle, bright, immovable. “The unknown can be scary. But when the known is death itself, you enter the unknown. Wherever it leads, it’s better than what’s waiting for you here.”
Her head on his shoulder, he held her in silence. He was dying just as her mother had, and no, there was nothing she could do about it. And maybe there was nothing in Manchester. Maybe his un-blossoming was complete, his mind a swampy fog. The truth was, she had no idea what to believe. But she’d spent her whole life believing in him, and she wasn’t going to stop now.
“Earlier,” she said. “What did you mean—you saw me before I was born?”
“You know why your mom called you her snowstorm girl, don’t you?”
“I was born in a snowstorm.”
“And almost in the back seat of a car. We were stuck in traffic. And then—a few hours before you came into the world, I saw you. As you are now. Or—a vision of you, I guess. Up on a billboard ledge. I can’t explain it. But it gives me hope.”
“Hope . . . ?”
He kissed her forehead. “That we’ll see each other again.”
Bathed in that gentle light, the forest seemed a painting, some dripping-new watercolor, and Nico felt the specific adrenaline that accompanies fate, when you’re about to enter a time and a place, and you know deep down that this time and this place have been waiting just for you.
“We’ll tally the days on our hands, to be safe,” he said quietly. “On the evening of the eighth day, I’ll ring the Bell. You know what to do, right?”
Of course she knew.
She’d heard the story a thousand times.
Once upon a time, said her father—on the attic deck, in the library, in the kitchen doing dishes, the Farmhouse was rampant with the echoes of those four words—there was a girl named Voyager who lived in a lighthouse on a tiny island off the coast of the Kingdom of Manchester. Here she lived with three others: Lightbringer, who was in charge of the lamp in the lighthouse; Skykeeper, who made sure the moon, stars, and sun didn’t slip and fall from the sky; and Bellringer, who, twice a day, rang an enormous Bell from the top of the lighthouse.
Voyager’s job was to communicate with the creatures of the seas. She spent her days rowing the open waters, offering advice on everything from how to end the Hundred Year Anglerfish War to the best way to handle dolphin smugness. Occasionally Voyager dreamed of life in the Kingdom—the noble King and Queen who lived in Kairos Castle, the bustling markets, the circus that performed every evening at dusk. But then, she wondered, if I lived there, who would tend to the smugness of dolphins?
In Voyager’s opinion, hers was the most important job on the island.
Bellringer’s was important too: once every morning and once every evening, he climbed to the top of the lighthouse and struck the mighty Bell. Its toll flew over the sea like a cormorant before diving into the water, where it swam like a sailfish all the way to the Kingdom of Manchester, emptying into a great fountain and activating the Waters of Kairos.
If Bellringer was to be believed, the toll of his Bell did nothing less than turn a simple water fountain into a door to another world.
“Yes,” said Voyager to her best blowfish friend. “I suppose Bellringer’s job is quite awesome.”
The blowfish said, “Bppphhhhhmmmphhhtttt,” which was blowfish for, “But nothing so lovely or awesome as you, my dear Voyager.”
(“Can you skip to the good part?” said Nico.)
(“It’s all the good part. My stories only have good parts.”)
(“Dad.”)
One night, quite suddenly, the stars went out. Poof. The sky, the seas, all of it, covered in complete darkness. Lightbringer scurried up the lighthouse to switch on the lamp. Skykeeper ran around in circles, screaming, “All is lost, all is lost!” Bellringer took Voyager by the hand, led her down to the shores of the island where her small rowboat was kept.
“Take thy boat,” said Bellringer. “Row thyself to the Kingdom, thus to Kairos Castle take heed, perchance, milady, and there inquireth as to what the heck is happening!”
(Nico laughed; her father smiled. It always happened this way.)
So Voyager looked out across the darkened seas. “I can’t see a thing. I’ll get lost.”
Bellringer pointed to the shallow part of the ocean where the blowfish awaited. “Yyyysssssssuuuuuuuburt,” said the blowfish, which meant, “I will lead you through the darkness!”
Voyager said, “But even if I get to the Kingdom, how will I know where to go?”
Bellringer explained that the castle was surrounded by a cluster of brick mills. “Findeth the mills, milady, and you’ve found Kairos. Now, Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find!”
(“Wait. That’s Whitman,” said Nico.)
(“Shh.”)
So, Voyager sailed the seas for days, followed her trusty blowfish, wondering aloud what was happening in her world. “Hrrrrrrphhhhhhizzz,” said the blowfish, which either meant, “A great darkness has descended upon our land,” or “I could really go for some cake right now.” Blowfish is an ancient language, there are varying theories among scholars vis-à-vis this particular interpretation—
(“Dad.”)
Days passed at sea, until one afternoon, with no land in sight, an orca swam by. “Where are you headed?” asked the orca.
“None of your business.” In Voyager’s experience, orcas were scheming and untrustworthy creatures.
“Wherever you are going,” said the orca, circling her boat, “it will take you a long time with nothing but oars. Why not tie your line to my dorsal fin, let me pull you to your destination?”
Voyager considered this. “How do I know you won’t bite my hand off?”
The orca dipped below the surface. When he came back up, he said, “Yes. It would be a gamble.”
Voyager looked around: nothing but dark water in every direction. “Very well. We’re headed to the Kingdom of Manchester, as fast as you can, please.” The orca swam up alongside the boat, and Voyager tied the line to his dorsal fin. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not eating my hand, I suppose.”
“The day is young,” said the orca. “And I am hungry.”
Things went much faster tied to the dorsal fin of an orca, and by evening the following day, Voyager found herself standing on the shores of Manchester—this Kingdom she’d so longed to see—now totally obliviated. She walked its empty markets, passed the shadow of what had once been a circus. Inside the walls of Kairos Castle, it was only worse. She found no King, no Queen, just more of the same dark emptiness.
There was, however, a sound. She followed this sound to a great hall, and there she found an enormous fountain. “The Waters of Kairos,” she said.
“Indeed,” said a nearby voice.
Voyager spun to find a nameless, faceless witch standing in the corner. “Oh.”
“Indeed,” said the witch again, stepping a little from the shadows.
Voyager was scared but determined. “What has happened to our world?” she asked.
The witch took another step closer. “A darkness has chased away the sky. It has erased the Kingdom of Manchester, and all great Kingdoms of the world.”
“Oh,” said Voyager.
“Indeed,” said the witch.
At that moment, the waters in the fountain began to bubble and spin, and Voyager knew that Bellringer had done his duty, that the toll had activated the Waters of Kairos.
The nameless, faceless witch pointed into the heart of the fountain whose waters now spun furiously. “In you go, my dear.”
“What? I’m not going in there.”
The witch said, “The door is open. You must enter.”
Voyager was tempted, but only for a moment. Thinking of Bellringer back home, and Lightbringer and Skykeeper, she said, “I will not abandon my friends.”
The witch took another step from the shadows. “You asked what was happening to our world. Now ask the question you came to ask.”
Voyager stood at her tallest and asked the question that suddenly burned in her heart. “How can I fight this darkness?”
The witch pointed to the spinning Waters of Kairos. “In you go, my dear.”