Confusion in the field. Drunken bodies stumble to their feet, or try to. Stay down, I want to tell them. Don’t you feel it?
Something very big is moving above us.
I raise my eyes. At first there’s only darkness. An open sky lit by the slackening glow of a half-moon. A walloping sound. Then one by one the stars seem to go out. Fear slaps breath back into my lungs. Somehow my fingers have found Bryan’s and his hand is clammy, cold as clay.
“Sophie,” he whispers. My eyes trace the edge of the blackness. There: a massive shape, thrashing wildly in the sky, a spiralling flurry of muscle and slick feathers. Then it shrieks, a knife-edge of noise that slices across my nerves. The sound is familiar—tormented, yes, or perhaps not that at all. Exhilarated. Rapturous. It’s so little like the soft burring noises that Kira now makes I wonder how my mind connects them. But it does.
I know you. The words hover on the edge of my lips.
The light seems to warp into rainbows around it, breaking apart the night, as its wings—wings!—unfurl like the sails of a ship, at least ten feet across. It glides above the peaked roof of the chapel, whipping up the air around it. A battering sensation drives thought from my brain.
All I can think is: It’s so beautiful.
“Bloody hell,” Bryan whispers.
My head whirs with strange images. Memories that don’t belong to me flicker in front of my eyes with the speed of a zoetrope, hovering over my vision. First darkness, then two strange faces. A woman with hair like bright copper coils. Soft hands touching my face, my fist wrapped around a fat finger. I am tiny and the world is vast and incomprehensible. I don’t understand my place. Only—I am alive, I am born. My skin as sensitive as if it had been scraped raw, every nerve new, and it’s terrifying. She is—mother. A feeling more than a word, a warm buoyancy like floating in the ocean. She cradles me in her arms. This moment is perfect.
And then it ends.
A distant pop. It could be the sound of a firework going off. I expect a flare of light zipping across the sky, but there’s nothing, only a vicious burst of pain in a body that isn’t mine. The nymph. The signals transmit along an invisible umbilicus, and my own ribs hurt.
Then the connection snaps, leaving me adrift, reeling. Some crucial piece of knowledge has been snatched away from me.
The faces around me—Bryan, Liv, Martin, Redmond—are wet with tears. It’s as if we’re all awaking from the same dream. As if we were all feeling it together.
Above us the creature loses control of its wings and it dips and tumbles. Its body slams against the peaked roof of the chapel, and there is a furious scratching. Slate tiles scatter off the edge of the roof.
I hear an anguished wail from nearby. I think it might be Liv. There is a second pop, and Bryan is the first of us to react. “Get down,” he cries out as he pushes me face first to the ground. The smell of the dry loam overwhelms me, chalky and sweet. I struggle to breathe, try to flip over onto my side, but Bryan’s weight keeps me pinned in place. Some part of me is still with the nymph. I can sense its panic, its horror, feel its chest convulse with pain. It swings its head from side to side. It sees so much more of the world than I can. The field shimmers with colours, awash in an almost electric glow I can’t process.
Now Bryan rolls off me. Drunkenness makes me slow to move. He’s so close to me that I think he might kiss me, but he doesn’t kiss me—instead he shakes me hard enough to rattle my teeth. “Sophie,” he says, “you have to go! You run, and you don’t look back.” His voice is grim and urgent. To the east of us, a squad car lights up the tree line with flashes of red and blue. “Get up!” My legs are leaden, entirely bloodless. Clumsy, clumsy. Bryan is yelling: “Go, go, run!”
The ground tilts underneath me, and after three steps violence explodes around me. “Get back you,” cries a police officer—where did he come from? There are howls of rage in response and the moonlight glints off lunatic faces, the same faces that were laughing a few minutes ago. I can feel it too—an electrifying jolt that goes beyond adrenalin. Something has wired us together, is urging us on.
A few feet away from me Martin is on the ground. He struggles to his feet but an elbow knocks him flying. His legs collapse at awkward angles. Without thinking, I take his hand in mine and yank him up. Strands of sweat-licked hair hang limply around his face—his glasses are nowhere to be seen, his pupils shrunk to pinpricks. He makes an animal noise deep in his throat and his fingernails sink into the skin of my wrist, tearing at the scar line and leaving deep gouges.
“Sorry,” he whispers hoarsely. But his fist convulses again.
I feel in him a raw anger that shocks me. It’s all I can do to make him let go, and a moment later he has vanished into the crowd.
More police in fluorescent vests are running at us, grabbing people, pinning them to the ground but there are not enough of them, not for us. I catch sight of Bryan rushing a cop, a young one with colossal shoulders.
“Why’d you have to shoot her down?” he screams. His parakeet green shirt is a map of sweat. I can almost feel the explosion of his breath as Bryan hurls himself toward the solid weight of the officer’s torso. The man spins in a tight corkscrew and now Bryan’s on the ground, and, oh god, I can see a boot coming down. Again. Again.
His hands are up over his face and I struggle to get to him, but I collide with someone with a meaty thwack. We both fall over. I have to get up. I’ll be trampled.
“Stop,” says a police officer. His voice is harsh, but his eyes are calm, sane.
He yanks me to my feet and twists me around. Bands of cool metal tighten around my wrists. Handcuffs, I realize. Then he hauls me up. My toes skim the grass and I struggle but he has me over his shoulder. There are wild noises around me, whoops and hollers, and blood pulses in my temples. I want to be out there with them, all of us—together. But at the same time I feel sick and heavy, and I stare at the ground as the cop carries me away from Bryan, from everyone.
Blood drips down the palm of my hand. Behind us, the field unspools into savagery.