In the days that follow Mom struggles to take care of me, to keep our family intact. She wants to be strong but it isn’t easy. Aunt Irene helps her sort through the unsparing paperwork that follows a child’s death. There are phone calls to Dad: some terse and businesslike, others that explode into anger and tears. She still can’t sleep at night, she says, so she goes for long walks in the evening. When that doesn’t work she takes pills that leave her movements slow and narcotized. It scares me to see her like that.
It’s only when Aunt Irene finds her collapsed from exhaustion in the middle of the day that the decision is made. “I’ve already spoken to Jackie,” my aunt says. “She’s expecting you, Char. Take as long as you need out there.”
The next day I walk her to the train station. We sit together on a bench, sipping coffee and eating the last two soggy croissants for sale at the kiosk. There are families camped out here with piles of suitcases, everything they can carry.
“This will be good for me.” She sounds as if she’s still trying to convince herself. I squeeze her hand as she stares at the departures sign. The routes to the south are still cancelled, the tracks mostly underwater.
“How long will you be gone?” I ask.
She glances at me guiltily. “I’ll only be an hour away. You’ll let me know if you need me? Sophie?”
I promise her I will. That I’ll be okay without her.
After that we don’t talk much, not about Kira, not about anything that has happened. When the departure for York is announced, everyone struggles to haul their baggage through the gates at once.
The truth is, I’m glad she’s leaving. Relieved. I don’t know how to take care of both of us right now. I need her to find her own way.
Her spine is rigid when she hugs me goodbye, her “I love you” almost formal but when I hold her a second or two longer she relaxes. Her smile when she pulls away is brittle but it’s there at least.
“I love you too, Mom.”
My life settles into a new routine.
I keep a log of my symptoms, tracking changes in my body, looking for symptoms: joint pain or stiffness, weakness or fatigue, problems with my cycle. Any of these could be a signal that my condition is worsening. I touch the HemaPen to my index finger and wait for the prick of pain that tells me a sample has been taken. Aunt Irene keeps an eye on me but her work at the Centre leaves her less and less time. I assist with her project when I can, making notes on medieval tax records, church rolls, wills and contracts—tracing names and dates, births and deaths, first English translations and then increasingly in Latin as my skills develop. They’re different from the chronicles she had me reading at first, more like debris, the flotsam and jetsam of daily life. But they’re something I can focus on, something that gives me a sense of control.
January turns to February, February to March and nothing changes. Mom stays north with Aunt Jackie and her family, sending me sketches from time to time: acres of stunted peach trees, a portrait of Stephen, the youngest of the lot, barely five now. My favourite is a charcoal drawing of Warwick Castle that I decide to tape to the wall above my bed. When I run my fingers over it I discover traces of lettering, a message to herself she never intended me to read:
where did she go? Sometimes I think I hear her.
I sleep when I can, and when I sleep I dream. Odd dreams of darkness and light, moving bodies that glitter like textured pearl. Someone urgently calling my name. The words a silver cord hooked into my stomach, pulling me up and up and upward toward…
Morning.
Cherwell College takes up the rest of my time, with tutorials starting at nine in the morning and homework in the afternoons when I can be bothered. It’s difficult to concentrate or really care about the work. Today, we’re making our way through the A-level exam syllabus. Post-war writers, doom and gloom stuff. George Orwell and John Wyndham. It’s sweltering in the classroom even though it’s only March.
Outside, we can hear the frantic clicking of wings, tiny bodies confused by the glass. Flying ants, Bryan told me. Once a year they grow wings, all of them, so they can take to the air in search of a new colony. It happens after a heavy rainfall in the summer when the weather turns muggy and humid. But now the days are getting hotter earlier in the year. The seasons are out of joint and the ants are confused by the heat. The changing weather patterns. By nightfall they’ll have shed their wings. All over England this is happening.
“So, what’s the commonality between these writers?” Mr. Coomes is waving a copy of The Day of the Triffids but mostly I’ve tuned out, scanning the growing swarms outside. I can see the ants landing on the pane, skittering along the edges.
Next to me a girl named Lilee MacGilrea with a bog of rusty hair is sliding a safety pin through the first layer of skin on her thumb. Her lips are chewed, patchy with scabs. She wears her JI2 ID bracelet without a trace of self-consciousness. It’s the two of us at the back, quarantined together, staring at the backs of the other kids. Evie Chudwell with her too-pink lipstick and Nate Peverill in his neoprene bomber jacket, which he isn’t supposed to wear over his uniform. I hate them, just a bit.
“Apocalypse. From the Greek, meaning, literally, an uncovering,” Mr. Coomes says. He’s creeping toward sixty, creases under his eyes and heavy yellowish earlobes. “A vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities. When St. John was writing the book of Revelation he wasn’t just writing about the end of the world. He was peeling back the surface of reality. Does anyone know the Latin root of ‘revelation’?”
“Revelare,” I murmur under my breath, “to lay bare. From velare, to clothe or conceal.” My work with Aunt Irene is paying off.
“Sophie?” he asks, arching an eyebrow. “You have something to contribute?”
I’m used to him trying to draw me into the conversation, but it’s easier if I don’t give the up-front kids a reason to turn around and stare at me. So I pretend to search my notebook where I’ve copied out fragments of text from my research.
In the same year, a remarkable thing was noticed for the first time: that everyone born after the pestilence had two fewer teeth than people had had before.
But Evie turns to look at me anyway, her eyes filled with disdain. “Sorry, sir. I don’t know.”
“This is important.” His voice has an edge of irritation. “When writers imagine apocalyptic futures they’re trying to illuminate what’s already embedded in their own society beneath the surface. Both Wyndham and Orwell lived through war-ridden times.”
I slide lower in my chair, hating it when his eyes slide away from me even though it’s what I wanted.
Lilee flashes me a brief smile in sympathy, but we don’t speak to each other. She brushes a flake of dead skin from her thumb and turns back to the sharp point of the pin. She stabs it in and lets out a sharp intake of breath. Blood wells up, staining her nail.
“Um, Mr. Coomes,” says Evie when she spots what’s happened a minute or two later, “could you maybe fetch Lilee a plaster? I’m not squeamish or anything but…”
He scowls. “All right you,” he says, “go clean yourself up.”
Nate and Evie hide smirks under their hands. Their eyes are varnished with amused distaste. They still believe this won’t happen to them. I glance down again, underlining my notes:
these bands processed through towns and villages along their way, chanting in unison and whipping themselves and each other until the blood ran freely down their back and shoulders. It was said that many had died in a state of ecstasy from their beatings. Where they went hundreds flocked to join them, and thousands welcomed them into their communities, singing with them the flagellants’ hymn and hoping that their abasement and suffering would ensure their town or village exemption from God’s pitiless scourge.
I glance out the window at the cloud of things moving in the sunlight. Larva. From the Latin meaning a disembodied spirit, or ghost. They’re ephemeral, forced to search out a new home for themselves. No one knows if they’ll make it.
The flare of the sky after the dull classroom lights is blinding.
Spring has made Oxford beautiful. The grass is a lush carpet dotted with ox-eye daisies, dandelions and meadowsweet, their blossoms gorged on sunlight. I always loved spring in Toronto, the strange delight that seized hold of everyone once the snow began to melt. We’d wear short skirts even though our legs were still goose-pimpled with the chill, and all the boys would stare as if they’d forgotten what naked skin looked like.
It’s the same here but now I find it unsettling. The men who live in the houseboats along South Street strip off their shirts to enjoy the heat, lying on the bank beside the Thames. Women in string bikinis dip themselves up to their thighs. The floodwaters have receded and winter is barely a memory for these people. The papers report our thinning numbers but no one seems to care. There are still late-night hen parties at the pub across the road, still shops selling confetti and cheap champagne as the end of term approaches—the pop and crackle of fireworks after dusk. They just want to forget.
I pick up my bike from the racks, careful to keep clear of Evie and Nate, the nastiest bullies. That lot are all healthy looking, their arms slim and muscled, reddening in the new sun. They congregate on Paradise Street, cackling and sniping, swatting each other’s books from their hands. I’ve heard they know a pub that’ll serve them but no one’s told me where it is.
Not that I’d want to go, not with them. I’m speeding past when Nate fakes a run at me and I swerve. “Slow down, Perella,” he calls after me, “you fucking nearly took my head off.” I keep my mouth closed, squinting against the droning swarms as Evie squeals, picking ants from her hair.
It’s a long ride to the cement works where Bryan will be waiting for me, the same as he does every day he can get away from the hospital.
Forty-five minutes later, I lean my bike against the warm concrete of the tower. My muscles are tired and I’m out of breath but I’ve got stronger—despite everything. The afternoon light suffuses everything in a warm, saffron haze. The foot-high grass, the profiles of trees, Bryan himself, a hand shading his eyes. He tilts his head slightly, and we communicate wordlessly. Yes, she’s still alive. Yes, I’m fine.
When I open the door to the tower she’s exactly how I left her yesterday. I fill a bucket of water and begin the slow process of cleaning her. Her skin has toughened into a hard layer of keratin. It’s pale and lustrous, lacquered like the inside of a conch shell. Dark shapes are visible beneath the surface: her bones shifting slowly. Her ribcage, the thick ridge of her sternum. Her fingers have shortened and fused. Her lower jawbone juts out like the prow of a ship.
The tremors have passed now, but for weeks she has barely moved. Her legs have thinned down to the width of saplings. There was a time when she could beat me to the end of the block and back even though I towered over her, even though she had to work double time, two strides for every one of mine—there she would be, huffing away, red-faced and grinning madly, waiting for me to catch up. “Did I do good, Soff?” she would ask me. “You did good, Kiki-bird,” I’d tell her, “you beat me fair and square.”
The keratin shell is beginning to flake away. She’s trapped in a kind of stasis, Bryan told me. But as I run the damp cloth across the hard line of her mouth, lips receded to reveal a serrated, chitinous edge beneath, I wonder: what is she turning into?
I dump the sponge back into the bucket when I’m finished and dive into the opening of Peter Pan. “When the first baby laughed for the first time,” I read to her, “its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” We get as far as Wendy’s flight to Neverland before I dog-ear the page and head outside to join Bryan.
He hands me a beer from the cooler we keep stashed in the bushes, as he settles himself down on a blanket. We have a pact not to speak of this ritual, of Kira, to anyone. Some nights I still wake in a cold sweat, certain someone has discovered her. Bryan says she’ll be cremated if they find her, but the more I see of what’s happening to Kira, I don’t understand how they could.
I sit down next to him, close but not too close, trying to let my mind go blank, just soak up the sunlight—the few free hours before dinner time when Aunt Irene gets home. She’s worried for me all the time now, trying to keep track of the things Mom always did for Kira. My general whereabouts, my appointments at the Centre, the new curfew rules for ages eight to eighteen. The Thames Valley Authorities introduced them in February to tackle “antisocial behaviour”: the rising levels of drunkenness, vandalism, and disturbances caused by so-called disaffected youths. The unrest is a natural reaction in areas threatened by disease, Aunt Irene says. But we’ve reached an agreement. While my blood work is stable I can do what I like, but I carry my phone, which has a GPS tracker turned on at all times, and a tube of fibrin sealing glue in case of bleeding.
“I won’t be out here tomorrow,” I tell him.
He glances up.
“I’ve got an appointment at the Centre. Another.” It’s my second this month. “Then I’m heading out of town.” Aunt Irene has been planning this research trip for weeks but she’s had to put it off several times because of emergency meetings at the university or last minute phone calls with her colleagues on site at digs in Sheffield and Lincolnshire.
“I can look after her,” he says without me needing to ask. “Don’t worry. I’ll let you know if there’s any change.”
“Thanks,” I say slowly but Bryan just shrugs like it’s not a big deal. He makes a show of flipping through one of the ancient issues of New Scientist his dad used to collect and holds up a spread to show me. It advertises one Major de Seversky’s ion-propelled aircraft: a gas lantern attached to a giant overhead circle of metal. Come see the incredible magic carpet of the future! reads the headline. “In five years,” he reads aloud, “the ionic drive will prove more efficient than either propeller or jet as a method of aircraft propulsion.”
“When was that exactly?” I put down my project notes and crack open the can, swallowing a mouthful of warmish beer. The fizz burns my sinuses.
“Nineteen sixty-four. So much for progress.”
I sing a line from the Common Misfits. “Nothing’s as goo-ood as it used to be.”
He lets the issue fall open on his chest. “My da loved all this. Figuring out how things worked, building stuff himself.” I smile.
Bryan sports a burnished tan below the rolled-up sleeves of his jacket. During these afternoons, bit by bit, I’ve come to know him better. He isn’t like Markeys Ellison or any of the boys I hung out with back home. He’s quieter, more restrained. Funny at odd times in a dry, sarcastic sort of way. I still keep at a distance from him. I remember what Aunt Irene told me, about mirages and false comforts, and I wonder if I look like the girl he lost, Astrid. He hasn’t brought her up again and I haven’t asked.
“You think you could build something like that?”
He snorts. “Sure. And a rocket ship too.”
When he isn’t volunteering at the hospital—or here—he spends most weekdays as an assistant at the Orinoco scrap store even though his mom, he says, has been begging him to quit the job. Just until his nineteenth birthday, just for this year.
But he’s methodical and very good with his hands. He’s replaced the temporary tarpaulin he rigged up over Kira with a sturdier structure built from old two-by-fours. He wove a line of battery-operated fairy lights around it that glitter in the darkness. Sometimes he brings odd projects like this old ham radio that used to belong to his dad. It crackled with snippets of French, German and Portuguese when he finally got it working. The inner workings of diesel engines and electric motors fascinate him. The only time he really settles is when he has a set of blueprints, tracing the faint lines, understanding how they come together to create their own particular kind of magic.
It helps pass the time. Neither of us knows exactly what we’re waiting for, only that Kira continues to change.
Today I’m feeling a bit on edge. The BBC has been reporting on two bodies discovered in one of the subterranean tunnels that drains off at Christ Church Meadow. Brother and sister, twelve and fifteen years old. An awful state of decomposition, they reported, but there were no pictures. No one knows what the boy and girl were doing down there, only that their parents had lost their council-owned house in one of the early floods. The newspapers say they’ve been cremated.
Thinking about it makes me finish the first beer fast. It sits unpleasantly in my stomach. Still, I take another one from the cooler. Bryan watches me. Only when I return for a third does he comment: “Steady on.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” I say, rolling my eyes. I’m being brattish, I know, but I can’t help it. Now he watches as I crush the can between my hands. Twist and crunch, twist and crunch. I don’t really want another, but I don’t want to stop drinking either. Bryan coughs. “If you’re planning on getting plastered, we probably should’ve picked up more supplies.”
“I’m not planning on getting plastered.”
“Right.”
His eyes turn back to his magazine and he flips idly through the pages. For some reason this makes me angry. I make to stand but the ground tilts precariously beneath me. Stumbling, I shake my head, then stagger to my feet. His eyes follow me.
“Sophie?” he says. “What?”
“Are you—okay?” He looks away, as if asking something personal is deeply unpleasant. I rest my hand against the wall of the tower. The hot stone reminds me of the heat of Kira’s body beneath my gloved fingers. Even out here there are traces of her body’s bitter smell underneath the cherry blossoms and loam. My eyes fill with tears.
Please don’t let Bryan look at me.
But now he’s beside me, not quite touching, and I can’t hide. He waits until I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, as if crying is something that can’t be interfered with. He squints. “Will you let me try something?”
“What?”
“Just let me…” I flinch away from him at first, but then he rests his hands on my shoulders and they feel warm and soothing. He has his own particular smell—musky and sweet. Hot sand, paraffin wax, sweat. He guides me to the entrance of the chimney and unchains the door.
“I don’t want to go in there again.”
“Trust me. Please?”
The chain slides through his hand into the dirt. Then he’s holding my shoulders again, his mouth close to my ear. “Okay,” he whispers and guides me through. His breathing is uneven, uneasy, puffs of air brush the small hairs on the back of my neck. There are no other sounds.
Dust and crumbled flecks of keratin dance in the angled light streaming through the open top. It reminds me of the old-fashioned kaleidoscopes we got for Christmas one year, the world of brightly spinning colours we saw when we pressed our eyes to them.
The dust moves around the structure Bryan has built in a slow spiral. Underneath it, Kira has tucked her knees beneath her, foreshortened arms hunched around them. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution whisper to me: This is dangerous. Monster. I can’t tamp down the tug-of-war inside me whenever I see her new, alien body—I keep hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of my sister in there but the suspicion has been growing in my mind that whatever is happening, she isn’t coming back to me.
“Hold still,” Bryan tells me. Carefully, he places his palms over my eyes. Heat spreads through my cheeks. “There now. Can you see anything?”
“Nothing.” They put blinders on horses, I remember, to keep them from being spooked. Is that what he thinks, that I’m scared of her? Maybe I am, a little.
“Good. Then look properly.”
“Your hands—”
“I know,” he says. “That’s the point. Try to see her as you used to see her.”
Some part of me resists. “I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“I hate remembering.” I breathe in and out fiercely. “It just makes it worse. She looks—broken now.” I push him away, my chest boiling with an anger I don’t entirely recognize.
“Hey,” he says. A look comes over his face: frustration, apology, pain. “It was just a trick I learned from my mum. When my da was really sick. It helped. I don’t know why. I needed to remember the way he was before. That he wasn’t a stranger.”
“It’s like someone has taken her away. Locked her up. I catch glimpses but it’s as if she’s a long way off, hidden. And then I wonder if maybe I’m just imagining my sister is still in there.”
“At least she’s isn’t alone.”
His breath is warm. His body is warm. I lean into him. His hand circles my waist. I don’t know what this is exactly, only that it’s good to touch him.
“Bryan?”
But he pulls back.
“Sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean—”
“No, I know.” I try to seem casual but I’m stung by his withdrawal.
He’s heading out the door now, digging around for the key to the padlock. I throw one last look toward Kira. I wonder if she even knows we’re here at all.
But then she does move, ever so slightly. She glances up. Her pupils glow a dull red in the low light like an animal’s at dusk. They follow me carefully.
“Kira?” I whisper.
A membranous film flicks over her eyes. “Is it you?”
They don’t open again. Her body settles once more into the slow rhythms of sleep.