The next morning we hear from Mr. Coomes that Cherwell College is closing temporarily. He tries to reassure us it’ll re-open, that they’ll be able to make up the lost time before the A-level exams, but already the promises of that future seem so distant. It’s impossible to imagine life going on as normal, me going to university next year.
For days Mom keeps me in the house and takes away my tablet and phone. My only escape route is cut off. Her rationale slides between a grounding for the police visit and a kind of makeshift quarantine, the best thing she can think of to do while she tries to get in touch with Dr. Varghese. But the phone lines to the hospital are always busy and when she and Aunt Irene drive down they’re turned away by security guards. Medical personnel and emergencies only until further notice. My aunt looks furious at being cut out of the loop.
Bryan was released from the hospital but I haven’t heard from him in days. The lack of information makes me nervous. What if there have been complications? Reports have been coming in across the country of teenagers like me taking sleeping pills, bleeding out in warm baths. Their parents have sick, bovine expressions on their faces afterward, an air of betrayal when they say I never thought she’d do something like this. She was such a happy kid.
When Mom hears about that, there’s a nasty couple of hours when she considers removing my bedroom door. She stares for ages at the rusted hinges before Aunt Irene calls her off.
“You can’t keep her locked up.”
“She could’ve been hurt out there!”
My aunt answers her: “What are you going to do? Ground her for the rest of her life?”
“If I bloody well have to, I will!”
Unwilling to face them I stay in my bedroom anyway, staring outside at the sky. Searching for Kira.
In the following days, a creeping calm settles over the city. There are reports of a nation-wide register of people who have tested positive for JI2 but so far most of the doctors around the country have refused to share patient information. The prime minister addresses the nation, telling us he’s temporarily closing the borders. Police officers have been authorized to carry weapons—lethal weapons, not just guns with rubber bullets. Trefethen was right. They’ve been ordered to shoot down the nymphs. And they do.
The reports begin to filter in. They’re filled with grotesque pictures of the nymphs, their strange attenuated bodies laid out on the pavement. Side by side they display images of dead teenagers, school photos cropped carefully to show their faces, the kind you see in missing child posters. I’m shocked when I see Lilee MacGilrea from Cherwell College among them, that wild mess of flame-coloured hair. It says she died two days ago of an aneurysm in her house. When her parents found her, the transformation had already begun. The image shows her immobile body lacquered in keratin.
Whatever is happening is happening faster. It took months for Kira to change, trapped in some kind of holding pattern. But nothing is holding them back now.
A week after the riot, we’re all going stir crazy in the house. The power has been flickering on and off as the late March heat engulfs England, air conditioning little more than a dream. Aunt Irene tries to keep working but I can tell she’s frustrated by her lack of access. With the university temporarily closed she holes up in her office, going over printed reports and trawling through her notes. I think she blames herself for not having more answers.
One afternoon Mom comes back from the shops with bags of fertilizer and potting soil. But for once she doesn’t send me to my room to try to study. She lets me help her unload trays of starter plants and sort through seed packs: beans, beetroot, broccoli, carrots, celery, lettuce, peas, potatoes, spinach and spring onions. Together we start to prepare the soil beds but the garden is mostly overgrown with ivy. First we have to pull down the long strands that have crept up the side of the fence and dump them in a bin for composting, she says.
“What’s all this for?” I ask her.
“I’m tired of sitting on my hands. This garden’s been going to waste and we might as well fill it.”
Mom never had much of a green thumb in Toronto but her time with Aunt Jackie seems to have taught her a thing or two. After we’ve disposed of the worst of the ivy we dig up the remaining weeds and mark the plots with stakes and wire. Then we work in the fertilizer by turning over the top foot of soil with a hoe.
It’s as if she’s channelling her fear, her frustration, into the simple task of fixing something. She doesn’t look up, not once.
Soon Mom and I are both red-faced and out of breath from the heat. There’s an ache in my muscles but it feels good to be doing something normal. Still I’m thinking about the empty houses out by the cement works, their lawns covered in massive clots of dandelion and borage. “We’ll lose it all if the river breaks its banks here.”
“Then we’ll start over again,” she says. “We’ll salvage what we can and replant. There’s no use in sitting around and waiting for things to get better. So good thoughts, Feef, okay?”
“Good thoughts.”
When she smiles at me, it feels like the first time she’s seen me properly since the news broke. Seen me and not my condition. For a moment our old closeness is rekindled.
For my good work I’m rewarded with the return of my phone and tablet and permission to leave the house. I tell her it will only be for an hour, just so I can stretch my legs. I’m information starved, desperate to see how Bryan is—Liv and Redmond too, anyone I can find.
I text Bryan to meet me in front of the Bodleian but there’s no reply. I head out anyway before Mom can change her mind.
The first thing I notice when I get to the centre of town is the how different it feels. Like a war zone, the same shell-shocked expressions on the faces of all the people I pass. A dense, welcome drizzle has begun to soak everything grey. Grey skies, grey streets, grey faces. No one looks up. Like Mom, they keep their eyes fixed on the ground.
The College fences have been piled with makeshift memorials, old photographs and bright flowers, the expected things, along with exam books and school ties looped around the knuckly fleur-de-lis gate heads. But most of these have been wrecked. Someone has drawn X’s on the faces of the dead, draped banners with ugly messages across the debris of petals and torn paper.
There’s a group of half-pissed men outside a pub across from the Bodleian gates, a stone’s throw from New College. They have wrinkled, sunburnt faces and glazed expressions of despair. One of them lobs a half-full can of cider toward me. “It’s you lot to blame!” he hollers as the liquid spirals out, splashing against my knees.
The drunk staggers to his feet and lumbers toward me. A scattering of grey hairs fuzzes his otherwise shiny pate. The other men avert their eyes, pretend not to see what’s happening, and it’s then I start to get scared. There’s no one my age on the streets.
“You got it, then?” he says. His breath is rank, teeth yellowish. He lurches forward and grabs my wrist, twisting viciously. He stares at the medical ID bracelet. “Thought so, thought you might.”
“Don’t touch me.” My words are strangled with fear. But he pulls me close. I try to get my elbow between us but his grip tightens. The rain thickens, hammering down on us.
“Please,” I’m shouting, and then to anyone. “Please, he’s hurting me.”
“Same age, same age as her. I could show you a picture.” He’s drunk, I think, drunk and mourning. But then a police officer is between us, pushing him away from me.
“Leave off, let her alone.”
“She shouldn’t be out,” the drunk mumbles as the cop shoves him away from me. “Not all on her own. Not now.”
The officer is clean-shaven, courteous. “You shouldn’t be wandering the streets by yourself. Is there anyone I can call to collect you?”
I don’t want to head back, not yet, so I tell him I’m a student at New College. He walks me over to the front gates. “You be careful now, hear?” The solicitude he shows makes me want to cry more than the scare in the street did, both so unexpected.
Inside the College are security guards, which I didn’t see last time I was here. They eye me suspiciously. “You’re a student?” one of them asks but I shake my head. “I’m here to see my friend.” Then I’m seated in a corner, the subject of intense whispers between the guards and the porter, a few sideways glances. I’m made to wait while the porter calls up to Liv’s room.
“You know her?” the officer says as Liv makes her way across the quad in clothes that look as if they haven’t been washed.
“Yes,” she tells him. She takes me in, the dirty smears on my wrists where the man grabbed me. “Come on.”
I follow Liv up a set of narrow stairs to the junior common room. She seems tense, concerned for me in a distracted way. She’d said she had rheumatic fever as a child, and I wonder if it’s made her JI2 symptoms worse. Her skin is blanched and she doesn’t look well.
She sits me beside the fireplace and pours me tea. “Drink this. It’ll warm you up. Let’s see if we can get hold of Bryan. I think I’ve got his landline number. He’ll want to walk you home.”
“Have you heard from him then?” I’m shivering bitterly—shock, I think, only there’s a hot buzzing sensation beneath, a thrumming in my blood sparked by the near violence.
“Only that he’s out of the hospital.”
“What, no port? Shoddy service.” Redmond gets up from one of the couches. I can feel it on him too, that same veil of anger Liv wears. But he smiles when he sees me, real warmth—so it isn’t me he’s angry with.
“Shut up, you,” Liv snaps but Redmond shrugs it off. Both of them glance at me expectantly. Apart from the two of them the common room is deserted. There are shapes in the quad below, students shuffling across the long pathways through the green, but not many of them. Without Bryan I feel like someone’s little sister crashing the party. Tolerated but not really one of the gang.
“Relax,” Redmond says after a too long pause, “better in here than out there, eh? Bloody cretins.”
“You can dry yourself off, if you want.” Liv points out the washroom to me and then heads back to the common room to see if she can track down Bryan.
Inside, the mirror fogs with heat from the running water as I squeeze rain from dark twists of my hair. There are bruises I don’t remember on my face, a scattering of them on my arms too, amid patches of dried skin. I have the same sickbed colouring that Kira had, that same otherworldly paleness, as if my blood has been leeched. I shove my hands beneath the taps, letting the scalding heat wash away the memory of that man, the rancid sheen of his grief.
When I return to the common room, Liv and Redmond are hunched over a tablet and I join them. I recognize the landscape in the video: the striped lawns lit by a low sun to the west, the grey-blue dome of the Radcliffe, and to the side, the gated walls of All Souls and Hertford College.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.”
The screen goes white for a moment, but then the image clears again. Curving cloud cover, the slippery grey of zinc and mercury. “Oh,” says Liv.
Dark shapes have appeared. At first it seems like they could be blips in the footage, but then the clouds break open and we get a clear shot of the nymphs below. Massive, sporting plumage of different colours: ash and taupe, black, spots of reddish brown like terracotta.
“When was this taken?” I ask.
“Yesterday.”
The nymphs themselves seem to glide effortlessly, as if they are fixed points in the sky, moving but unmovable. Then the screen crackles with static.
“Hold on. The battery’s gone wonky. That surge a couple of days ago scrambled the circuits…but…let me…” Redmond raps the plastic casing smartly against the table and it jumps to life—but only for a second. “Shite.”
“Reddy, it’s wonderful,” says Liv—and she’s right. I haven’t seen images like this, untainted by the commentary of the news. “Their wingspan, you see? Their wings must lock into place like an albatross’s does. It’s the only way they could support the weight of their bodies—but if that’s true they must be able to fly for miles without landing. For thousands of miles.”
Redmond grins, and circles her with his arm but Liv stiffens and looks away from him. “Poor Martin,” she says, trying to stifle tears with her hand. Someone has set up a framed photo of him on a table. It’s bedecked with notes of affection, a few cut flowers that look like they’re from the garden below.
Redmond turns off the tablet, stands and heads toward the massive pool table that dominates the south side of the room. He starts racking up the balls. “Have you seen the tabloids? You’d have thought Cath had suffered enough, losing her brother and all, but there have been reporters banging on her door night and day, hoping for an interview.”
I ask them what’s happened, what they know that I may not.
“The tabloids have been publishing the names and addresses of anyone who’s sick, saying the people have a right to know,” says Liv. “They’ve been harassing Cath, wanting to know all sorts of things about him.”
“The shitehawk bastards.” This from Redmond. “But why?” I want to know.
He sends the cue ball down the centre of the table with a smooth, effortless movement. The balls explode into motion. “Those ones thrive on disaster, getting people all riled up just so they can sell a few copies. They don’t care a damn bit about who it hurts.”
“It’s all me first, and how do we protect our own? As if it won’t happen to them, that somehow their children will be safe from it all.”
“That’s crazy. No one is safe from this,” I say.
Redmond nods aggressively. “Everything’s mad right now, isn’t it? It’s bedlam out there.”
“I can’t believe they’re still shooting them down. Still cremating the dead,” says Liv. “I thought—surely once they understood they’d stop. Once they realized that they’re human.”
“They were human. That’s what they’re saying, isn’t it? Not now though. So they can do any damn thing they like.” He sends another ball down the length of the table. Snick plop—the three-ball lands in the pocket. “But I’m not having it, not anymore. There’s a group of students I’ve been talking to. Percy Herring and Tim Blackburn.”
“What do they want?” Liv looks up at him, startled.
“They’ve been talking about the crematorium. The one out by Barton. Percy and Tim think there might be a way we can shut it down.” Violence, action. That itchy feeling is back in my palms, adrenaline surging into my bloodstream at the thought of it—I don’t trust it though, not after what I saw in the churchyard.
“What good would that do?” Liv says. “Beyond convincing the people the tabloids are right. That we can’t be trusted, that we should be watched.”
“We need to do something. Jesus—what we need is leverage, eh? A way to make them listen to us. We need to understand what those things are.”
“Nymphs,” I break in and they turn toward me. “Bryan told me. His mother works for the hospital. The word doesn’t mean what you think though. It has something to do with the transformation. The Centre calls them that.” I lower my voice. “They must have suspected something like this would happen.”
“This is why we need to act,” insists Redmond. “They still aren’t telling us the truth, not about what they are. What this transformation is all about.”
“You think you’re the first to have thought of this, Reddy?” Liv asks. “There have been protesters outside for days—”
“I’m not talking about protesting.”
“And it wouldn’t stop anything. Do you know how many crematoria there are in Oxford alone? Think about how dangerous that would be. You’re not a revolutionary, Reddy, you’re an English major. What are you going to do, recite poetry at them?”
“Oh, love, how can you be so fecking cool about all this? The new reality is this.” He stabs his pool cue toward the picture of Martin. “It’s Martin with his bloody skull fractured. Them against us. Why do you think they want a list of who is sick? Haven’t you heard about what’s happening in China? Mandatory registrations, heavy fines for any family that disobeys or harbours a child without making weekly reports. If you don’t think they’re going to round up those kids then you’re delusional. Liv, I know you don’t want to talk about it but things are getting worse. If something happened to you…”
I make a sound of distress. Redmond turns. “See,” he says, “Sophie understands.”
“The nymphs matter.” I stare at the two of them, anxious to feel included in their plans. “You were out there in the churchyard. You must have felt something? There’s a reason all of this started. There’s a reason it’s happening now. There has to be.” Even as I say this, the words feel inadequate, naive, but Redmond nods eagerly until Liv rounds on him.
“Leave her out of this! If you want to risk your life acting stupid that’s one thing. But—” She stares at me, close to tears. “She’s too young.”
“I’m not,” I tell them, “I’m part of this too.”
But then the common room phone rings. Bryan is with the porter, waiting for me.
Liv urges me toward the door. Redmond looks as if he wants to protest, to say more but she won’t hear it. “You think you’re invincible, that they can’t touch you—”
“I don’t.”
“But the Centre wants to help us.”
“Redmond’s right,” I tell her as we cross the quad toward the porter’s lodge. “We can’t just do nothing and wait for the situation to get better.”
“Never mind about Reddy. Just pretend you didn’t hear it,” she says softly. “He’s always going off half-cocked like this. You need to take care of yourself.” I know that tone of voice, that protectiveness. And I wonder if back home she has a little sister, someone for whom she would give her life to keep safe.