I’m finally alone in my room and I desperately want to sleep but my head is a cauldron of worries. Mom has begun to heal but for me nothing has been solved. There are gouges and dark bruises around my wrists from where the handcuffs bit into my skin. She didn’t see them and I couldn’t tell her what had happened.
Sit tight, wait it out. Forget whatever you saw tonight.
That was Trefethen’s advice. Maybe it would be Mom’s too—but I can’t follow it. Kira is still at the cement works and Bryan could be dead. In the darkness all I can think about is the way that boot came down. The damage it might’ve done. And if he were to die, what then? There’s a terrible blankness in my mind when I try to imagine it.
Only: I can’t lose someone else.
The window is large, unsteady in its rotted frame, but I can pry it open with my fingernails.
“Sorry, Mom,” I whisper. I hate that I can’t tell her the whole truth when all I want is to find a way for us to rebuild our family. For a little while, in the churchyard, I felt joy. I understood it. Now all I can think about is survival: mine, Kira’s, Bryan’s.
The wind rushes in off the river, the amphibious smell of decay. The height makes my stomach turn as I crawl out into the night.
I ride toward the JR first. Trefethen said that’s where the injured would be taken and I need to know if Bryan’s alive. Kira can wait until after—at least that’s what I tell myself.
On the way two ambulances pass me, their sirens blaring. There are police cars trailing them, but no one else on the road. More lights are on than I’d expect in the houses I pass and once I think I hear a sound above me but when I stop and look up there’s nothing there. I squint into the night but the streetlights blind me. Eventually I get back on my bike and pedal faster.
At the hospital I find Liv by the nurse’s station. Her dress is matted with mud, the hem slashed to ribbons. Limp strands of hair, gummed with dirt, frame a face made sharp by strain. “Sophie? What’re you doing here?”
I shake my head, not bothering with the whole story. “I’m here for Bryan. Where is he? Do you have any news?”
“I’ve never seen him like that. He was covered in blood.”
“I know, I saw him.”
“That officer broke his ribs.”
“Is he—?” My heart jumps.
“He’s in intensive care. Martin too. I don’t understand it. What happened out there?”
Her eyes wander, unable to fix on anything. I grab her shoulder. “You’re okay?”
“My father woke someone up at the French embassy and had me released, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. The police took away my passport.”
I guide her toward a chair, bring her a cup of coffee. The waiting room is unusually silent, tense. Clusters of staff gather around the television monitors. The newsreel shows footage of the nymph from what looks like cameras worn by the officers. What they capture is like something snagged from a fairy tale. Androgynous. Its golden eyes are flicking left, right, left in pure panic, and its body begins to—I don’t know, undulate or bristle. The strange pearly white of its skin sucks in until I can make out the shape of its bones, the thin twig of its humerus, and a ridge that runs vertically down its chest. It leaps into flight.
“Oh my god,” someone murmurs, sparking a frightened rumble of agreement.
Liv follows my gaze. “The story just broke. There have been sightings of them all around the country.”
“Have they figured out what they are?”
Her eyes go soft. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it? When we saw it? It wasn’t terrifying. It felt…”
“Almost human.”
“They’re the ones who died, aren’t they?” Her voice is full of wonder. “The ones who weren’t cremated. They’ve changed. They’re waking up.”
She lapses into silence as a nurse heads toward us, an older woman with her grey hair tied into a loose bun. She has a familiar look about the face. “Mrs. Taite,” Liv says, “how is he?” Of course, Bryan’s mother.
“He’s out of danger,” she says to Liv. “You can see him if you want to.”
“This is Sophie,” Liv says, and the nurse’s eyebrows rise. “You go on. He’s why you’re here.”
“How’s he doing?” I ask as Bryan’s mother leads me through the hallway.
“Surviving,” she says in a low voice. “I don’t understand it. How my boy could attack a police officer.”
Inside the room it’s a shock to see him surrounded by machines, that ugly pattern of bruises on his face. She looks down at Bryan, and it’s as if she is seeing the damage for the first time. She squeezes her eyes shut. “So you’re Sophie then? I wondered when we’d meet.”
“He told you about me?”
She nods. “I’ll let you stay with him, love. But don’t trouble him. My boy needs his rest.”
Alone in the room, I watch the rise and fall of his chest. I want to touch his forehead, press my fingers against his skin and feel the heat rising underneath, but this seems intrusive, a breach of trust while he’s so vulnerable. So I sit motionless, let the tension between these two impulses nag at one another: wanting to touch him, afraid to touch him.
He stirs, then his eyelids flutter open. His pupils contract against the light, then expand. They are ringed in a golden copper, darkening to a coffee-coloured band at the edges.
“Hey, freakazoid.”
“Sophie.” The word is a sigh. He struggles to sit up, but then his face goes white.
“Take it easy.”
He collapses, panting.
“How did this happen?” I ask in a low voice.
He wears the same dazed expression that Liv did. “I don’t know. I didn’t feel scared. Just felt…good—even when I was on the ground and he was kicking me, I couldn’t feel any pain.” When he realizes I’m staring at him, his face flushes red with shame.
“Should I call your mom?”
“Not yet.”
I catch his hand in mine. “Did you see it? The nymph?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you feel it too?”
“What?”
“The connection. When it flew overhead, I could see, or feel, its memories. It was like I was hallucinating.”
He shakes his head slowly. “It wasn’t like that for me,” he says. “It was…muted. Just a feeling. A sense of warmth, maybe.”
“There are others,” I tell him excitedly. “I saw it on the news. Liv said they’re waking up. I think she’s right.” His fingers squeeze mine.
“Kira?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I need to get to the cement works. But I had to see you first. I had to know you were okay.”
Bryan looks as if he wants to say something but then there’s a noise outside. Liv, I can recognize her voice. She’s shouting for me.
“Go,” he says. “Find out what’s happening.”
Liv is pacing in the waiting room, tears running down her cheeks. Her lipstick has smeared across her face. “What’s wrong? Liv?”
“It’s Martin. He—the doctors say…he was hit in the head. Bleeding in the brain. He’s dead.”
I collapse next to her in a chair. “Oh god.”
“He has…had a sister here in Oxford. She’s a few years older than him. I know her a little.” Liv’s staring straight ahead. “Neither of their parents are still alive.”
“I saw him out there. He was right next to me.” His fingernails digging into mine. He was lost in the same wave of emotion that Bryan was. A terrible thought hits me. “Liv, what are they doing with his body?”
“Someone from the Centre is talking to his sister right now.”
“You need to speak to her. You need to explain it to his sister, so they don’t…” Burn him up. Cut him up. Experiment on him.
Liv turns to me with an expression somewhere between worry and wariness. “What are you talking about?”
“You were out there. You saw it, you felt it. We all did.”
I realize I’m almost shouting at her. A security guard by the nurses’ station is watching me and so is another one by the entrance way. Liv seems to realize it at the same time I do. Softly she says: “What am I supposed to do? Haven’t you seen the news?”
The television is still playing. The host is interviewing one of the officers, early twenties. He’s saying: “I brought it down. Three shots, didn’t hesitate. It isn’t for me to say what it is…but the training, you know, it kicks in right away.”
Downing Street authorizes army to take immediate action.
“People are at risk, ma’am. I just did what I had to in the moment, and it made them wild, it did.”
And then the image shifts to an aerial shot taken by helicopter. Tower blocks lit up in Canary Wharf in London. Dark silhouettes passing. When the camera pulls back I realize the air is full of sleek bodies and alien faces. There are hundreds of them riding the currents over the Thames, spiralling like leaves caught up in a cyclone. So many of them!
“Liv, we have to do something.”
“She won’t listen to me. She’s scared, Sophie. Everyone is panicking.”
There’s no time to help Martin. Kira is in danger. The image in my head is so clear. Her limp form, huddled in the darkness beneath the shelter, the open circle of sky above. For months her body has been shifting, preparing itself for escape. For this—flight!
“If there are more of them we’ll be ready,” says the officer on the screen and I know he’s right. I can’t let Kira be discovered, not now. If they find her they’ll kill her.
I search for the exit. A security guard makes a move toward me, startled. His eyes fix on my medical ID bracelet and I can see his thoughts forming, slowly. The threat he sees when he looks at me—as if I might go wild at any moment.
But it isn’t me I’m worried about anymore.