“SKIDDLE? ARE YOU STILL AWAKE?”

John turned in his bed. The door was ajar. As he watched and waited, it seemed to breathe and widen. Everything about the house on this late summer’s night—the scent and the feel of the air, the dry whispering that came from the trees that stirred outside his window, even the pressure of the old mattress against his spine—was strange and unreclaimed. They’d only got back from Ley that afternoon, and nothing yet really felt as it should. The long-dormant cleaner would be fussing over mountains of dirty washing in the kitchen. Fishing kit and Wellingtons were stacked in the hall. The smell of sand and salt and dried-on seaweed and fishscale competed with the odor of closed rooms. It was a time of year that he always wished would go quickly, impatient for this sense of strange unbelonging to dissolve in the closing of the days, the browning of the trees, the harvest, the carnival, the coming of the Borderers, the restarting of school: impatient for the turning, as he always thought of it, of the year.

“Is it late?”

Hal came into the room, a darker shadow.

“Depends…”

“I couldn’t sleep anyhow,” John said.

“It’s always like this.” Hal sat down on the bed, a soft weight. The unsettled world shifted and formed a new center of gravity. “Coming back—home never feels like home.”

“Are Mum and Dad still up?”

“Still sorting themselves out. Still looking for disasters. Dad, anyway…” The two brothers smiled at each other through the darkness, sharing the memory of their father’s holiday-long obsession. All the time they’d been at Ley, he’d fretted that he’d somehow turned the house’s systems up before they left. He tried calling through the net on the little booth along the quayside but was never quite able to make the final link and check the settings. Their mother kept saying that they’d be bound to have heard if the house exploded, froze, or burned down, that if it bothered him so much, all he had to do was call one of the neighbors. But their father being their father, he could never do anything as simple as that. He just carried on worrying. All things considered, their summer at Ley had been typical enough.

For a while John and Hal talked of the things they’d done and the things they’d do. They were reestablishing the old Hemhill ground rules. Coming home and waking the house from the hot long sleep of summer, preparing for autumn, having their separate lives and possessions again, friendships and pursuits that no longer depended on each other’s presence, they always needed to rediscover their relationship. This autumn, an even greater transition loomed; in a few weeks’ time, Hal would be leaving home, moving to London. Studying something called structural communication, an esoteric field that he’d never quite been able to explain to John or their parents. But it took good grades, and you could end up working on the satellites. No one was complaining.

“It seems funny to be coming back here…”

“I thought you’d go and see Annie tonight,” John said.

“I called her. Told her I was too tired. I suppose I am,” Hal said, almost admitting a rare lie. “Restless tonight anyway. You know.”

“Yes.”

“It’s as if…”

John looked up at Hal, waiting for the sentence to finish. But Hal was staring away, his hand resting heavily like something forgotten on the blanket by John’s chest. As if what? So unlike Hal to leave anything unresolved.

The silence hung, hissed, emptied, turned over. John could feel his bed and the whole dark house around him shifting like an animal relaxing into sleep. The quartzy sand was dissolving from his socks and shoes; his summer clothes were folding themselves back into the cupboards; the stale, slightly damp smell of unbreathed air was fading. Hal still sat unmoving at his bedside, but time—the nights, anyway—was shifting, draining, flickering by. The house was lived-in now and taken for granted, and the sheets no longer smelled soapy-fresh. Part of him understood. This could only mean he wasn’t really here in bed, at night, at home, in Hemhill. This contraction of time meant that from somewhere, somehow, he was looking back.

As if…

Hal turned his head in the changing air, the sentence still unfinished as he looked at John. It was another night, and John could tell that Hal had returned from being out with Annie. He could see the near-fluorescent whiteness of the shirt his brother was wearing, slightly crumpled now, smelling of outdoors and the couple of beers he’d had. Smelling, too, of the lovely sea-lavender scent of Annie’s hair.

Everyone agreed that they made a devastatingly good couple, but since Hal came back from Ley this year, a coldness had come between them. John suspected they were staying together now in this odd transitory time between Ley and London only because they didn’t want to let down the people who so liked to see them together. Of course, when Hal did go to London, he’d call Annie and he’d still visit Hemhill with respectable regularity to see her and his parents and catch up with his old school friends. But the going out, the touching, the kissing, the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing, that was over.

“What are you going to do Skiddle, eh?”

“When?”

“Next week. Tomorrow. Next year. The year after.” Hal got up from the bed—and once more the gravity of the room shifted, the nights turned. John realized that the question hadn’t really been meant for him anyway. It was some inward thing that Hal was chasing. Sighing, his brother went to the window and touched the control to let in more of the night. It was another night. Turning. Now Hal was in the faded denim shirt he always wore when he was dicking around with the wires and crystals and nerve fibers in his room. His passing wake no longer bore Annie’s scent; it bore the soft, coaly odor of sweat and soldering crab oil. And outside the window, John saw that the nights were slipping by. The trees became a cloudy blur; the cars and vans passing along the road were silent silver lines; the stars up in the deep darkness were streaks, smears, gray comets. Autumn was nearly here.

Leaning at the window, Hal gazed out for some time at the murmuring, spinning night. Faint shadows orbited the room.

“What do you do, Skiddle? How much is enough?” The air remained hot, close. John could see the wide sweatstains that stretched down and across Hal’s shoulders and back like predatory wings.

“I was out with Annie this afternoon,” he said. “I mean, you know how warm it’s been here, to finish off the ripening. How hot. It’d be a shame not to go out on a day like this, and it was so quiet in the village anyway that Annie got the afternoon off. We went out for a drive in the old Elysian with the top down, and we stopped by Ludgate Hill and walked across the fields to take in the very last of the summer. The sky…” He gazed up through the window of John’s bedroom. Amid the blur of the shifting stars hung a scowling, hooded moon. “…was blue, an incredible blue. And I was holding Annie’s hand, and the corn they grow there was like a tall golden wood around us, and the skylarks were singing.

“We found this place to sit down. In the dell down by the pond where Gerry Barry almost drowned last summer. Or was it the summer before? The sky was so blue up there through the trees, shimmering like something underwater. We tried to think of a word for that blue. I mean, not a real word because there isn’t one, but some new, better word for the blue of the summer sky that people would understand just from hearing the sound. And all the time, all the time, off in the grass beside the ruined millhouse we could hardly see because of all the hawthorn, there was this old agripede that someone had dumped.

The thing settled down on its rotting tires. And I couldn’t help looking at it. My eyes just kept going back. Someone had broken open the controller, and the nerve tissue had seeped out in those thick green and purple strings with the flies buzzing around them. And there we were. There I was. With Annie lying back in the grass looking up at the sky though the trees on a late summer’s afternoon, and all I could see in the dell were the flies buzzing around that broken nerve box. The one ugly thing. The rest of it—I don’t know. I just can’t break…”

Hal suddenly turned to John. The night turned. The stars beyond the window spun behind him, silvering the edge of his face.

“Skiddle, it’s as though there’s always something between it and me. As though I’m never quite there anymore. Not anywhere. I mean, I was just looking at the flies and the rot falling out of this tractor, even though I was with Annie and the sky was so blue and I should have been…ought to have been…”

Hal sighed, looked down for something he seemed to have lost on the floor, and pushed back his hair.

John knew that summer was passing. Winter was coming, bright and cold. London was waiting. Soon, it would be time for Hal to go. Every day, his mother produced more of the things she’d saved, the treasured odds and ends, and announced she’d throw them out if Hal didn’t take them. Cups and cooking implements for this tiny flat he’d already found, where, if you stood on a chair in the shower and peered over the stately rooftops, you could just about see the green Thames. There was talk of a farewell party, a surprise party, although Hal would doubtless see it coming and then pretend with all his usual grace that he hadn’t. There was talk of buying an engraved tankard, John chipping in what pocket money he could. But what really lay between Hal and London now—between Hal and the definite, incontrovertible end of summer—was the harvest carnival and the coming of the Borderers, the opening of the compound in the valley.

John wondered what the house would be like afterwards, half-emptied without Hal. He pictured it as a person he’d once seen with a limp: keeling over slightly, still trying hard to smile and adjust. He closed his eyes. And heard the rush of wheels approaching on the road outside. Yes. The sound gathering like a wind. Opening his eyes, he saw the play of headlights on the wall, catching in the mirror, redoubled, spraying golden wings across the ceiling, shifting through the black bars of the roadside trees. The sound of big wheels. Why did no other vehicle that passed through Hemhill ever sound like this? And why did they always have to come at night? But they did. They did. And now, as the headlights brightened and passed and faded and were gone like the flick of a switch, there was that other sound, a sound as autumnal as the crackle of leaves and the whoosh of fireworks and the wind-carried cry of crows. The hum of the compound in the valley.

“Come on, Skiddle,” Hal said, standing over him, holding out a hand. “I have something to show you.”

John took his brother’s warm hand. Swinging on its leverage to lift himself up and out of bed, he felt the air of the house on his flesh, though his nightshirt, cooler now, though the controller was set to an even temperature. Another sign that autumn was nearly here, that winter was coming, that Hal would soon be gone.

“It’s in my room…”

Barefoot in the darkness, John followed. The house was quiet. The lights were off. The doors were all closed. What time was it? Did time exist on a charmed and changing night such as this? And Hal, anyway, was breaking an unwritten rule by getting him out of bed. Not that their slumbering parents would really have minded if Hal occasionally let his younger brother wander the house late at night. But it had never been done; it wasn’t part of the ritual.

John followed Hal along the landing, then turned and froze as something big and silvery nudged up the stairs. It bobbed and floated, squealing with big eyes, a leering face. Then he saw the trailing red string, and the face resolved into that of a storybook pirate, and he knew that it was only the balloon he’d bought that day at the carnival. Today. And that was why his teeth were sticky with toffee apple and candy floss. That was why his head ached from the beer he’d drunk for the first time in the gray-lit tent, and later from the beat of the carnival band. That was, underneath, why he felt so sick, so tired.

“Come on, Skiddle.”

Hal turned on the light in his room. Now that he was this near to leaving, John half-expected to find it cleared and emptied, posters off the walls and rolled up, the bed piled with neat stacks of screens and clothes. But the room was the way it had always been: filled with all the stuff of Hal’s life. If anything, messier. Being untidy, John sometimes thought, was Hal’s single excuse for a vice, something he had to work hard at because he didn’t have a real one. John could see his big brother forcing himself to take out and scatter stuff that he’d already put away. He could see him secretly sneaking back up the stairs to redistribute scraps of underbed dust he’d stolen from the bag inside the cleaner.

“I’ve been going through my things,” Hal said. “Clearing out.” He chuckled, waved his hands at the mess. “I started anyway. But you know how it is. You find things you haven’t touched in years. And instead of clearing up, you spend hours remembering, messing around…”

John nodded. Squatting on the pillow of the bed beside the shining eyes of an old action doll, he saw a robot they’d once made together from scraps of other things that had fallen apart. Or, rather, Hal had allowed him to stand at his shoulder and ask questions and generally get in the way while he made it. They called it Lilith, and it was programmed to wander about the lawn collecting beetles for the insect project John was then working on at school. It soon disappeared, and after a thorough search of their and the neighboring gardens, they found it in the study, turning the pages of an antique wildlife book, busily snipping out all the insect pictures with its scissor hands.

Strewn around the floor were tennis shoes, laptop games, faceless piles of book palettes, a box filled with the twitching spidery angles of a self-construction kit, model cloudpickers, radio-controlled boats, shuttles, vans, and planes. Much of the stuff John was familiar with; Hal had never minded him playing with his old toys, although John knew his older brother well enough to make sure he gave them all back even if (especially if) they got broken. Hal never exactly minded lending things, but he could never let go of them either. He liked to know where everything was—even the presents he gave. John remembered how once Hal questioned their mother for what seemed like hours about how she’d managed to lose an umbrella he gave her.

“There’s so much of it,” Hal said, picking up a dodger ball that had fallen into a box by the bed. It rattled; the gyrostat was broken. John remembered years before: a November evening, looking out through the back window and seeing Hal still in the yard, Hal tossing the flashing ball against the garage wall. The fan of tiny spangled lights. The way he always seemed to catch it.

“And this.” Hal picked something else up. Looked at it. Put it down. “And this…” As he wandered the room, he seemed to forget about John. Which, John reflected, was so unlike him. John glanced out the window, which had been cleared now like his own, and saw the lime trees standing sentry-still over the road and the unlit tennis courts beyond, and saw that the stars had ceased their odd spiraling and were hovering motionless in distant space. But perhaps, John thought, I’m not really in this room with Hal—otherwise he wouldn’t be wandering around like this and muttering to himself. Otherwise he wouldn’t be ignoring me. Perhaps, inside whatever dream this is, I’m actually asleep and dreaming…

But then Hal turned, and his eyes were clear and focused. “And see this.” He pointed towards the tangle of wires, screens, links, and cannibalized nerve boxes that lay on the desk where he worked. “This was my big project of a year or two back. It had promise!” He let his hands drop, a little amazed. “I don’t know why I gave it up. Really. Do you want to see?”

John nodded. He always wanted to see.

They sat down, Hal on a box, John on the swivel deskchair because he was smaller. Staring at the weird entanglements on the desk, he felt a tingle of the old anticipation. This was more like it—Hal about to wave his hands over junk and turn it into something magical. He’d rigged up connections to a three-sense screen that once belonged to a game of battle chess and run a wire to the low-level terminal in the wall, then spliced the connections and inserted a nerve cube. John had heard that this was a way of tricking the net into granting access to the next level up, although that was illegal. The scene was intensely familiar: Hal dicking around with nervestuff and electronics. Hal showing him something strange and wonderful and new. John smiled as he watched the soldering crab pick its way across a big old circuitboard, squatting and dropping its little globules of silver at regular intervals. This was going to be good…

He remembered how they’d once reprogrammed the cleaner to fall over and say fuckit at regular intervals as it trundled through the house. For a whole hilarious week, their parents had been too embarrassed to call out the repairman, or even say anything. Then, of course, Hal took pity on them and fixed it secretly and better than ever. In those days, Hal had an elaborate, wild streak in him. His eyes shone with a light that John saw less often now.

Hal powered up the screen. There was the usual electronic humming, a clean dark smell like seashores and armpits and whisky. He tapped at the keyboard that had its guts spilling out of it like a squashed beetle.

“If I just…”

The bedroom filled with ruddy light.

“This is a bit…Yes.”

The light settled, began to pulse. The room was a deep shifting red, almost like a picture John had seen once of a foreign sky. But then he realized that the flowing all around them was blood, that the shuddering curtains that overlaid the walls were the insides of a body.

“And this here…”

The speaker membrane that used to be inside the big screen in the lounge began to give out a solid thu-thump underlaid by a gurgling, liquid hiss. A heartbeat.

“Right! We’re in!”

It was obvious, but still John didn’t understand. He gazed at Hal’s bed, which was now red-lit, adrift like a boat on the pulsing tide.

Thu-thump. A heartbeat. But in where?

“Great!” Hal balled his fist, would have banged the desk in triumph if there had been space for him to do so.

The beat was quicker now. And beneath it, the sigh of breath and a rumble like thunder.

“You know where this is, don’t you?”

’t you?

Hal’s voice, tumbling like rocks down a mountain. A deep, deep echo. Thu-thump. Sigh.

“Your heart?”

“Yeah, Skiddle. Incredible, isn’t it? My heart.”

John nodded, feeling a little disappointed. This was weird, but hardly in the same league as accessing a cloudpicker the way they’d done last spring. Or even simply climbing over the rocks at Ley and finding a lump of colored glass. Thu-thump, thu-thump. Hardly what you would call fun. Blood flowing red all around him as if driven by an invisible wind. The valve opening and closing like an undersea mouth. There it all was, too, represented on the monitor. Little blips like they showed you from the doctor when they gave you reformats at school. Hal’s face was glistening crimson. He looked like he’d been cut. He touched John’s hand and smiled. Now, listen…

It’s not the walls of a real heart around us anyway, Skiddle; it isn’t as though there’s a tiny camera and microphone down there, but if you fiddle with the net in just the right way—if you tickle the electrons, if you trick the airwaves—you can access the implants that thread into your spine, input all the data from the tiny molecular messengers and viruses that go voyaging on the seas of your circulatory and lymphatic systems, and create an analogue of what it’s like. Real enough, but ultimately unreal.

Hal touched the screen, and the shuddering red walls faded. The air in the room darkened again. There were darts and arrows now on the monitor—falling back, organized yet too quick to grasp, like a magnetized snowstorm. Another touch of the screen, and Hal and John were surrounded by a thousand white lines crisscrossing the room like dustmotes in winter sunlight.

This, Skiddle. This is data from my powerpack monitor. Hal moved the cursor, and the room seemed to tilt as the shimmering matrix turned. The strings ran close to John’s face now, and looking down, he saw that he was pierced through his chest, his belly, his hand. Hal touched the screen again, and the strings all froze.

“See, Skiddle.”

John looked, and saw

GGGGGCCATGTAAGTCCTATGCCTGTCATGTGCAA GAATTGCAATTTCTACCGATGTGCAAGAACCGCAA

“That’s the code for the supply monitor of my powerpack. If you break it down, it tells you that it’s about two-thirds viable at the moment, which means I’ll probably have to replace it next year, although there’s no hurry…”

The letters dissolved into snow again. Then refroze. “And this, here—let me pull it in. That’s the identifier from the cpu. That’s not all of it, of course, but effectively an analogue of my own immune system’s T-cell response.”

Snow. Freeze. And this. And this. Incredible, isn’t it? Touching the keys; Hal’s voice and hands trembling a little. Snow. Freeze. This. This

TTGCATGCCGTAATATTATGCGTGCTAGGTAGCTCG TCGTAGATCAATGTCGTAGTTCCTCTGCTCGTCGCT

Hal was going deeper now into the operating system that monitored his body, somehow accessing it on an unrestricted bandwidth, leaning over the terminal plug to fiddle with a stray wire, taking a pipette to squeeze fresh nutrients into the silver-crosshatched nervebox that he was keeping warm, from the heat generated by a small transmitter that John had last seen put to use when they were out on the high meadows chasing rabbits with the gyrfalcon. And where was the gyrfalcon now anyway? Those red eyes and silver clattering wings? He squinted around the blurred and fizzing room

ATAGTCGCTCGCTCGCTCGATAGCCGCTCGTAGAT TATCAGGTCACCCCTTTTAAATGCTATGATCAATGA

and the litter of unstrung tennis rackets and worn-out clothing. Nowhere. Hal had probably cannibalized that, too.

TAGTACGCTAGATAGCTCGCTCAGATAGGATCAAT GATCAATATATCGCAAACCTAGCTTAATTGCCGCC

“Now look, Skiddle. Bingo! Right into the main operating system!”

The letters were slower now, scrolling around them at an almost readable rate.

“Watch…”

Hal’s quick fingers on the screen. The letters froze.

“Look…”

Close by their faces, as Hal typed, the letters began to tumble over and change. A became T and T became G as he changed the codes in his own recombinant. “We’re in…”

AGCGCATCCGAATGCCTTGGGAAATAGTCGCTCGC GCTAGGGATCGCGCTCGATAGCCGCTCGTAGATAT

“Will you look at this? Would you believe….” The lattice turned and blurred. Bright points against the darkness. Where was he? The room tilted, dissolved, and John was falling up towards the whirling carousel of stars. And a voice somewhere was still saying, Will you look? Would you believe?

But John was losing his brother. He was falling through darkness towards the scent of cold sweat and old smoke and damp stone, and the gray of morning.