“Hey,” Bryan says when he sees us. “What’s wrong?”
Liv shrugs, runs a hand through the tangle of her hair. Her gaze lingers pointedly on the glowing yellow bruise on Bryan’s face. Finally, she shakes her head, kisses Bryan lightly on the cheek. “See you both around,” she says quietly, as if we might meet each other on the streets like before.
“Sure.” His tone is quizzical. “You take care of yourself, Liv. And Reddy too.” She walks away.
When we’re back out on the street Bryan turns, takes me in. “It’s good to see you,” he says, and there is a rise of sweet giddiness I can’t control.
He still hasn’t recovered, not entirely. I can tell that much at a glance. He has the short, hobbled steps of an old man and his movements are jerky. There’s a glint in his eyes, a sort of inattention, as if his mind is wandering, he’s listening to music in his head. Kira would get the same look sometimes. I wonder if I do too. If that’s what Mom sees when she looks at me.
We walk along Broad Street. With him there, no one bothers me. The rain has mostly dissipated now and the clouds are breaking up, chased by a strong-blowing wind that sends bits of refuse skirling over the pavement.
“What happened that night?” he asks at last. “After you left the hospital.”
“I went back to the cement works. To find Kira. But it was too late to stop her. She’d already begun to change. I tried, though. I even climbed the side of the tower.” His eyebrows lift in amazement. “After everything I realized I couldn’t hold onto her.”
We pass the gates of Trinity College, which are locked, forbidding. “You know you’ve never stopped surprising me,” he says. “Not from the first day. You were just so—wild. So angry and in the moment but brave too, willing to take risks when everyone else seemed to just let things happen.”
“I wasn’t wild. She’s my sister, my responsibility.”
“Even so.” To the west, toward Osney, the sun is hanging low in the sky, limning the clouds in soft orange and heliotrope. Amber light gleams off the busts of the emperors mounted on the gates outside the Bodleian Library. A shiver of homesickness skates down my body, a kind of reflexive sadness but even that doesn’t last as long as it used to. He sees it and hesitatingly puts his arm around me.
“You all right?”
I shrug, shake my head but I say nothing. He understands. “Sometimes I think I’m still grieving. But grief doesn’t feel like the right word for it anymore. Kira never really died. And grieving for her now feels—I don’t know, somehow selfish. As if what I really missed was the place that she filled in my life, how it felt to be her protector.”
There are two inches between us but Bryan doesn’t close the gap. Still, being this close to him makes me feel as if my mind is a dark room filled with broken furniture, but he is slowly setting things right, clearing out the wreckage, opening the windows.
“We couldn’t have kept her there forever. There’s a point where protection just becomes another kind of imprisonment,” he tells me.
“I don’t know what to do now. How to reach her. I just feel so lost. As if all of this has been for nothing.”
We head up St. Giles toward the Martyrs’ Memorial, an old Victorian spire that looks like the blackened steeple of a cathedral sunk deep into the ground. Aunt Irene told me about it the first time we came into town, how three English prelates were burned alive here for opposing the Pope. We take a seat on the steps though the stone is damp. What must it have been like to have known so clearly what they wanted to do, even if it cost them everything?
“Did you ever used to watch zombie movies?” I pluck a daisy that’s wedged itself between two stone slabs and stare at it for a moment, wondering how it got here, how it managed to root itself in such inhospitable soil.
Bryan makes a face but doesn’t answer.
“It’s hard not to think about them with everything that’s happened.”
“Never liked them much, to be honest. The gore, you know, and all that make-up. It seemed so artificial. I never understood how we were supposed to find them scary.”
“I used to watch them back home. There was, I don’t know, something liberating about them. How when shit got real, you had to figure out what you were capable of. Like, could you open up your boyfriend’s skull with a shotgun when he was about to turn? In the end it was the survivors who knew who they were, where they stood with the world.”
Bryan is quiet for a long time. “So, what? Could you put a bullet up here?” He raps his knuckle on his forehead, an uneasy look on his face. And it occurs to me this is one of the first times it’s just been the two of us, no one else, no pressure or obligations. Kira is gone.
I tear off the petals from the daisy one by one.
The question is still hanging there and Bryan glances at me, waiting for an answer. His eyes are intense but shy too. I reach over and touch his forehead, thinking about making a quip, telling him what I’d be willing to do to survive. But it doesn’t feel funny, not after what happened to Martin. To Kira. What could happen to any of us.
What I feel is so intense that my breath catches in my throat. He moves toward me, I can feel him doing it and I want him to kiss me. He’s warm, so warm, as if someone lit a fire inside of him. But then his eyes widen and he jerks away. A huge shadow skates along the stone between us, across our legs and over the cobblestones.
From somewhere above comes a soft pfeffing sound, the noise a tablecloth makes when you snap it in the air to get rid of crumbs. Then I see it—like a wraith above the street. Its feathers are bluish-white with inky black at the tips, and there’s something ancient about the machinery of its body. Alternating bands of light and darkness ripple across the surface.
“Sophie,” he whispers but I shush him. We are both perfectly still, alone in the street. Are we the only ones who have seen it then?
The nymph rises above the peaks of the roofs, and turns a slow arc in the sky over the Ashmolean Museum. Then it passes by again, almost noiseless.
It isn’t Kira—but for a moment I don’t care, caught up in the vision of it. So otherworldly and strange. I search for a trace of humanity, a second self pinned to it like Peter Pan’s shadow but I can’t find it. It has given itself over entirely to its new form: a body shaped like a bullet, a long neck supporting a tapering skull. Its throat undulates. It makes a low, happy sound, a song in a minor key.
I see white, a flurry of feathers, then a different sort of whiteness.
Clouds, vast banks of them, stiff-peaked like meringue.
And I can feel the wind catching me, holding me aloft the way Dad used to swing me up in the air when I was younger. Restful, secure. My body is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing.
There are other nymphs around me. Drifting through the smoke-grey sky, a slate ocean beneath them marred by choppy waves. I count twenty, thirty of them. There are more, I know there are, distant maybe but out there.
The sensation of their bodies moving alongside me, air ruffling our stiff feathers, making the soft down of our breasts and bellies tremble. My throat vibrates gently and the noise fills me up, not just noise, but something else—them, their thoughts. Ghost presences surrounding me, some close and some far, impossibly far.
But one among them is familiar. It’s like catching sight of myself unexpectedly in a mirror. “Kira!” I call.
The connection is breaking—I want to hold onto it, but it’s not enough. She’s too far away and the world is turning below us. The contours of the air are as clear to me as an elevation map. Light too, an unexpected rainbow glowing above the water, a magnetic pull in my blood. We turn together, nerves whispering with the same reedy music.
And then I’m back in my own body.
The nymph vanishes into the clouds, a vision of silver and shadow. I want so much to go with it. The pulling sensation stays with me, the certainty of it, the calmness.
Then Bryan and I are both smiling, laughing almost. He squeezes my hand and it’s as if the barrier between us is so thin I could jump from my body straight into his. But I’m crying too. The nymph has moved on: a crumpled linen ghost floating over the city. The only remnant of it is a thick acidic odor, chalky and sharp at the same time.
“She’s out there, isn’t she? I think I could feel her. Did you feel it too?”
“I don’t know. I felt something but it was weak. Too weak. Just…like hearing music in another room. There was something but I couldn’t make it out.” He shakes his head.
“We need to find them.”
“What?
My thoughts are beginning to coalesce, build into a purpose. “It’s the only way we can understand what’s happening. It feels like we’ve already passed a tipping point, doesn’t it? We’ve crossed into some strange, new, dangerous territory and no one understands what it means. Reddy thinks violence is the answer but I don’t know. When has it ever done much good? There has to be some other way.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “How do we do that? It’s just us, Sophie. Where would we even start?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.” There are still tears on my face, I can feel them. The nymph was trying to tell me something. It was as if it were trying to speak in a language of memory and dream. But the message was garbled, incomplete. Except for one thing: Kira is out there.
I know she is. This is my way forward.
The nymph has given me a gift, if only I can figure out exactly what it means.