Martin’s sister doesn’t listen, of course she doesn’t.
Liv calls to tell me the next morning, the chime of my phone dragging me out of a fitful sleep. Dreams of Kira, of dark shapes moving overhead. “I tried to explain but Cath just stared at me,” she says, her voice seeming to come from miles away. I can imagine it perfectly—her bewildered look turning to distrust as she takes in Liv’s hair, her mangled dress, her smeared lipstick. “She told me her brother was gone. Nothing could change that.”
Martin wasn’t the only casualty.
Seven people died in the Bartlemas churchyard riot. Six students, one officer. Someone tore off his helmet and heaved a rock into his head. The news alerts pop up continuously on my tablet while we talk, tiny flares of disaster in the corner of my screen. Blurry shots of our teeth, our rictus grins that night. Headlines screaming about The Age of RAGE!
I can still feel that raw jangling of emotion. A kind of push.
Mom comes down just before noon and from the look on her face I can tell she’s been following the news in her bedroom.
“Were you there last night?” she demands. Whatever understanding we shared is gone now. I’m her child and I lied to her. I can’t meet her gaze and she knows instantly what that means. “Jesus, Sophie. Why didn’t you tell me?”
I expect her to yell but she doesn’t. She turns on the television. Soon the two of us are huddled together in front of it. I watch her take in the appearance of the nymph, the dull gleam of its feathers—its wings, like sails. But what she sees is the wreckage of the human form, the monstrous transformation. “Oh god, oh Jesus,” she whispers, over and over. “Did you see one of them last night?”
When I still don’t answer, she makes a grab for my hand, not registering the lacerated palms, which I mended roughly with fibrin glue last night. The drugged haze of my stare, dirt crusted into the grooves of my skin. I’ve slept for maybe two hours.
“What are they?” she demands but it’s the television presenter who answers her question. Officials have confirmed the results. The recovered body was human—or it had been human, once.
“They don’t understand,” I try to tell her.
“Understand what?”
“What happened out there. It wasn’t our fault. They shouldn’t have shot it down.”
Her gaze has wandered to the urn with its ashes and the blood drains slowly from her face. I let her hold me.
Mom and I spent the day camped out in the living room watching the news. Aunt Irene appears like a ghost in the doorway late in the evening. Lane Ballard, the Centre’s director, is trying to explain to a skeptical presenter what the nymphs are.
“What we’re seeing is an advanced stage of the condition, which only one in ten, one in a hundred, will experience.” He blinks at the light owlishly, looking unhappy, like this isn’t a part of his job. “With the right post-mortem procedures we can control this. That’s what we’ve been trying to do.”
“So you were aware of what might happen? Who else knew?” the host asks. She’s young, the kind of polished blond woman I’m used to seeing on American news channels. Reassuring, blandly pretty.
“We knew something was happening,” he responds.
“But why now? Why haven’t we seen this before?”
“We’ve been looking at comparable processes. Take locusts, as an example,” he says, “they go through changes at the same time. Their eggs hatch when the conditions are right. Their life cycle is timed to the seasons, so when they swarm—”
“You think they’re swarming?” Now the look on her face is incredulous, frightened.
“I didn’t mean it like that!” Dr. Ballard pushes at his glasses, reminding me of Martin, how nervous he looked in Aunt Irene’s office.
The television flickers on and off, the power unsteady.
“That was Dr. Lane Ballard, an expert in the field.” The last said with sarcasm. Nobody trusts them, not anymore.
We’ve seen footage from the Philippines and Malaysia, hundreds of nymphs moving over the South China Sea. Taiwan has already declared a state of emergency. No news from India yet but I remember the posts from the forum a few months ago—bodies tangled in bright sheets, unclaimed. Animals won’t touch them, we’ve learned. Not carrion birds, not insects. It has something to do with the smell, that acetone—the starvation reflex. As if they knew the nymphs were still alive.
“You don’t need to watch that,” says Aunt Irene.
Mom asks, disbelieving, “Did you know about this? Did you know those children were still alive?”
Aunt Irene stares at the television and I can tell she didn’t. Her face is white and her voice is tired, leached of the excitement she used to have. “I didn’t have much contact with the medical researchers. If I’d known I would have told you.” A grim look on her face.
“But there were people at the Centre who knew, weren’t there?” I start to insist. “Friends of mine—some of your students, even—were talking about it. How the bodies were changing…”
“They’re monsters,” Mom says.
It takes me a moment to realize it’s the doctors at the Centre she’s talking about.