I hear nothing from Bryan all night, though I check my phone until late, just in case. But the next day, just as Mom is opening a can of beans for lunch, he shows up at our front door.
“Hello?” Mom asks, a tad suspiciously, when she opens it. I can see her taking him in, the collared shirt I haven’t seen before. An air of respectability. After he introduces himself, a thoughtful expression replaces her irritated broodiness and she lets him inside. That dressed-up College look is working. She’s warming to him.
“The place is a bit of a pig-sty,” she apologizes. There are drifts of laundry draped over the radiators, ready to be hung outside. No one’s had the energy to do it.
“I was hoping I could borrow Sophie for a few hours.” Mom glances outside, a small frown creasing her lips when she sees his truck.
“You have a licence?”
He smiles. “Passed it on my first go.”
“Well…” she says. I watch her eyes travel to his wrist, searching for a medical ID bracelet. But he’s either shucked it off or hidden it beneath his cuff. I slip into my shoes before she has a chance to interrogate him further.
“Bye, Mom,” I tell her, planting a kiss on her cheek as I walk past.
Even with the windows down it’s hot in the truck. Bryan doesn’t say anything about what prompted him to show up at the house. But for me it feels strange. For so long I kept him separate from the rest of my life, a secret. But now my worlds are colliding.
We turn onto Banbury Road toward the cement works. There’s a kind of easy trust between us that’s been strengthened since the riot. But I can sense a familiar anxious energy in him as well. He blinks too often, licks his lips—it’s almost a nervous tick. He takes the roads slowly, carefully checking and double-checking before he turns or changes lanes.
It seems like it has been months since I was last at the cement works though it’s only been a few weeks. Still, it feels good to be going back, just the two of us. This is our place, a sanctuary.
The air is scorching away from the river, the grass brittle beneath our feet. I head straight for the tower, which still has the faint sour smell of acetone. My bloody handprint on the door, flaking at the edges. Inside, Kira’s blanket, the dusty-looking fairy lights lying on the dirt near the wreckage of the tarpaulin shelter. Her absence feels strange, like the ache after a tooth’s been pulled.
Bryan walks toward the raw mixture plant, about thirty paces from the tower. When I join him, through the gaps between the oversized, chalk-white support pillars, I see a large shape drawn on the concrete floor. It reminds me of an ancient petroglyph, stark, like the ones I saw back home in Ontario—turtles, snakes, birds and humans, all carved by hand into the gneiss-flecked rock. This has the same mysterious quality, a giant disk with either a rocket or a throne sketched inside.
He says, “This is what I wanted you to see.”
“What is it?”
He stares at the drawing for a moment as if lost in thought and then picks up two slender silver tubes about two inches thick stamped with the letters EMT on them. When it’s clear I still have no idea what he’s talking about, he shows me how they might fit together. “I found Da’s old brazing torch in the shed this morning. I managed to work these bits together without much trouble. It’s not much, but it gives us a frame, yeah? And there’s loads more EMT conduits from back when he rewired the house. See? That rectangle in the centre will be where we mount the harness.” I have the odd sense that it isn’t Bryan I’m talking too, or not the Bryan that I know. This one is expansive in his gestures, loosened, unknotted. There’s a…too-muchness about him, too much pressure, too much force.
“Bryan.” I want to summon him back to me. “What about Martin? What should we do about the report? There’s things I need to tell you.”
His face goes cloudy with something close to rage. I feel it too, reacting to him. That crawling sensation under my skin, a feedback loop, reflecting his excitement and his anger both.
“Martin,” he says, “that’s why…” But he’s shaking his head as if he’s trying to block out a terrible sound. “That’s where I got the idea for this. Listen. That feeling Martin talked about…You’ve had it too, haven’t you?”
I nod slowly. “Like they’re out there. In the sky, somewhere, maybe over the ocean, calling us.”
“We need to do something about this ourselves,” he says. “We can’t trust the media. The Centre isn’t trying to understand this. They’re trying to stop it.”
“I know. But how exactly does this help? What is it?”
“A paramotor.” He says at last, as if he can’t understand why I haven’t been able to keep up with him. “A powered paraglider. I saw a bunch of students using them over Port Meadow once, in the old days. They’re surprisingly simple when you break them down, simple enough that you could build one yourself if you had the tools.” A long pause, as if he’s waiting for me to respond. Which I don’t, until he says, “We could go up there.”
I take in the new angularity of his face, the compact muscles of his shoulders and arms. He looks as if he has been pressurized like coal beneath the heavy crust of the earth. He positively glitters, hard, sharp. I pry my gaze away to look at the thing he has begun to create.
“We can reach Kira up there,” I say. My heart staccatos at the possibility. A gleam of hope. “We could communicate with them. We could find out what they are.” I could get proof, something Mom and Aunt Irene would have to believe. Magical thinking, she told me. But I know it isn’t.
Bryan presses on as if he’s tuned into my thoughts. “Martin knew they were waiting for him. That means there’s intelligence behind what they’re doing. They must have a way of communicating with each other. And with us as well—outside of a lab, I mean.”
“I’ve felt it.” When I’m close to them—at the riot, with Kira, with the nymph that Bryan and I saw. “But there’s a fuzziness to it, hints and images, memories, dreams, out of focus.” He nods and I can’t help grinning. “Getting closer to them—this could be a way to strengthen the signal.”
“All we need is a motor, a propeller, and some sort of fabric sail. Like an aerofoil or a parachute.”
Bryan fills the space between us with his plans. I’m shaking with anticipation. This is insane, I know it’s insane, but it also feels right. What if we could find her? What if I could see her again?
I’m coming untethered. I could drift away, except for this: my hand in Bryan’s, heat in my wrist, my neck, my cheeks. The two of us here, as it has been from the start. I pull him closer. My lips graze his.
His eyes widen and then his mouth presses against mine, he sucks the oxygen out of my lungs. He traces the outline of my hip, buries his hand in my hair. Our teeth knock together. Our second kiss is exploratory, the pressure of his tongue, sweet. Still surprising, but not just surprise.
And then he pulls me into him, harder. His skin is feverish. “Oh, you,” he murmurs and his voice melts my inside. I want to run my fingers over every inch of him. But beneath the elation, some part of me is frightened by the suddenness of this, the strength of his arousal. He jams my back against the cement wall and sparks crowd my vision. “Wait!” But his mouth is against mine. “Bryan, wait—” He doesn’t. Neither do I. My eyes are closed, and a furious white light burns behind them. I rise up onto my tiptoes to meet him, thinking: I could breathe underwater if it only felt like this, I could grow gills and deep-sea dive.
But then he’s gone, slipped out of my arms. “Sophie,” he says, “I’m so sorry. This isn’t me. This isn’t how I wanted it to be. I want to, but I just—”
“I know—it’s the bug.” My stomach collapses in on itself, hollowed out by disappointment.
Fist clenching and unclenching, Bryan walks a slow circuit away from me. “I don’t want to hurt you.” When he turns to face me again, his smile is small, bitter. “It gets into everything, doesn’t it? Fuck.”
As I shift away from the wall, an ache deep in my bones, the beginnings of a bruise, I still want him. His smell is so thick around me, the feel of him imprinted on my skin.
“That’s why we need to do this,” he says, half to himself. “It’s why we need to know what’s happening. What’s us and what’s—”
“Something else.” He’s as far away as I have ever known him to be.
“It’s coming. Can’t you feel it? In the air, in the earth, as if the world is shifting. But my symptoms are getting worse.” His eyes are dark and coppery, the colour of molasses. “My mum said she’s noticed changes. She said I passed out yesterday. While I was talking to you. She wanted to take me to the hospital but when I woke up I wouldn’t let her. You know they’re talking about long-term facilities?”
I nod slowly. “Dr. Varghese told me that.”
“Someone from the Centre called. After reviewing the blood tests from my HemaPen they said they were making arrangements. Said they were opening a facility up north, somewhere near York.”
“Jesus, Bryan!” I reach for him but he wards me off.
“I know, I know. My mum’s scared too, but she doesn’t know what else to suggest. In the meantime she’s started stockpiling supplies from the JR, just in case. But someone’s bound to notice.”
“What can I do? What do you need right now?”
“I need this,” he says, staring at the paramotor. “I need this to work. I need some reason to think there might be a way forward. Until then, I don’t—I can’t—” His voice is strangled. “I can’t risk you getting hurt if something bad happens to me.”
The desire has drained out of me entirely. I know he’s right. There’s a growing heat between us but what chance does it have right now? I want it to be real, to be pure—not just the product of our condition. We need to choose it for ourselves. Because that’s all we really have, isn’t it? It’s what we’ve been fighting for: the power to choose.