It isn’t like I thought it would be, like I used to imagine it would be. Bryan is very, very gentle so much so that eventually it’s me who pulls him close, helps him ease into me. It’s strange and it’s sweet and it hurts more than I thought it would. When I’m ready, he begins to rock into me. At first I don’t feel anything but the pain of it—then something in my body shifts. It’s as if my body is a bell that’s been struck, singing out one long note.
We have to remove the sheets after because of the blood. It scares Bryan, seeing it there, and for a moment it scares me too. I wonder about anti-coagulants, how what we just did must be dangerous. It was for Liv. But I don’t regret it.
I stay over. Some time after, the power goes off and Bryan rests fitfully as I listen to the rain slamming against the roof. My body aches with a pleasant dullness. I watch his chest rise and fall as he sleeps. There’s a kind of magic in the intimacy he’s granted me.
In the morning we’re both awkward with each other. He makes something he calls builders’ tea on a camp stove. I cradle my mug against my belly, imagining what Liv might have been going through, why she was willing to take the risk. The longer I stay with Bryan the more I have to lose.
But I don’t want to leave yet.
When Bryan takes my empty mug I pull him close and kiss him. I laugh as he strips my shirt away and neither of us flinches at each other’s scars. We make love again, and it’s better than the first time. We’re both more certain of ourselves, less self-conscious.
Mom and Aunt Irene will be wondering where I am but my time with Bryan is running out. I want to seize hold of it while I can.
It’s late morning when I finally head home. The rain has nearly stopped and the sunlight is just a smear of light on the wet pavement. The footbridge over the Thames is slippery, pounded by the rain and the thin spray thrown off by the churning river.
I walk my bike along the towpath past the derelict mill buildings. Raindrops splonk into the river beside me, stippling the surface. In the distance I spot two emergency service officers in bright, Day-Glo vests. One of them, a woman in her forties with a ruddy complexion and fawn-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, waves me toward her. “What’re you doing out here?” she demands. “Where do you live?”
“South Street.” A tight feeling in my chest. “On Osney Island.”
“We’ve just come from there. Have you checked in?” I shake my head and she scowls. “You need to get home as soon as you can. They’ll be evacuating Osney soon. We’re going door to door to let people know, in case they haven’t heard the announcements.”
“What announcements?”
“There’s a major storm coming.” Her partner’s lips are compressed into a hard line. “We’re worried the flood defences might fail. With what happened in London…if the rain keeps coming down like this, it’s going to get a lot worse very quickly.” I want to ask her more but already she and her partner are shouldering past me.
God, I think, oh god. It’s happening.
When I make it back to the house, Mom is pulling open a suitcase on the kitchen floor.
“What’s going on?” A tipped-over dresser worth of clothes lies in piles. My eyes land on a cream blouse with bright pink trim—Mom used to wear it at home in Toronto all the time. I didn’t know she’d brought it with her.
Aunt Irene rushes into the kitchen carrying a giant stack of papers. A binder skitters out from where it was wedged under her arm and smacks onto the tiles. “For chrissakes, where have you been? Turn on your damn phone, will you? I’ve been trying to call you for hours.” I look and she’s right: there are over thirty missed calls.
“But what’re you doing?”
“We’ve been ordered to evacuate, Sophie. So get moving, please,” Aunt Irene says.
I pick up the binder and flip it open: lists of names and dates, a copy of the map of England that hangs in her office with the old county lines and towns, some of them crossed out, others circled.
“The rail link north has already been flooded out,” she’s saying. “Didn’t you see it? Tewkesbury is practically underwater, and the power is out as far as Cheltenham and Gloucester. They think the Thames will burst its banks here.” Aunt Irene clamps down on my wrist, surprising me with the strength of her grip. It hurts.
I gawk at the wreckage of the house. “But—you said we’d be coming back.”
Aunt Irene takes the binder and slips it into a duffel bag where she’s stacked dozens of them. She and Mom exchange taut glances.
“Please, Sophie,” says Mom. “We don’t have time to discuss this. The roads will be dangerous soon. Take what you need, okay? Only what’s important.” She pushes me up the stairs, calling after me as an afterthought, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
A lie—we both know everything’s falling apart.
The wind whistles, squeezed through the hollow spaces of the house and into my bedroom. Outside the rain is slowing, now a grey curtain over the river, but I know it’s a brief lull. The quality of darkness shifts, expands. Sandbags and slats of wood have been laid across doorways to catch the mud and detritus. Soon these homes will be as empty as the villages on Aunt Irene’s map. I pull my dusty suitcase from the closet. How did those people choose what to take with them? What was necessary?
I pick up my favourite sweater, a pilled, sheepy grey thing with extra-long sleeves. Do I need this? The shelves are crowded with keepsakes. A charm bracelet with a jewelled heart that Jaina gave me for my fourteenth birthday, a straw hat I wore camping in Algonquin, a frayed toque with a ratty looking pompom. I swore I would throw it out, but I never did. Not those, what then? I yank out a cream-coloured sweatshirt with an appliquéd owl on it that says “Owlsome.” It’s so dorky, when would I have ever worn this? Then I remember—Dad gave it to me. Why didn’t I keep anything else from him? The sweatshirt goes into the suitcase as well. I could leave all of this behind. None of it really matters. But at the same time I want to take all of it, to hoard these memories.
I dig through my chest of drawers, searching for my notebook with its inscriptions, scrawled poetry and fragments of translated Latin, Jaina’s unanswered letter folded between the pages. Also newspaper cuttings about JI2, the names of the dead. Sketches of maps, abandoned villages. A strand of Kira’s hair I found curled in her pillow and pressed between the pages for safekeeping. Martin’s report is there as well, folded in half and held in place with a paperclip.
Fear glides down my spine like meltwater. But not just fear—a presentiment. Dreams of something chasing me, darkness descending and Kira calling out my name.
“We can’t stay much longer.” Mom’s voice drifts up from downstairs, ghostly and panicked.
In a plaintive tone, Aunt Irene answering hers: “This is my home. I have to salvage what I can.”
That’s when I know I will never see this place again. We’re leaving for good.
And I don’t want to let go of it, of any of it. The river, this room, the sketch above my bed, a well-thumbed collection of old fairy tales, gilt-edged. And also slanting sunlight on cold mornings, our laughter, the two of us perched on our suitcases on our first day, both eager to go home. Except home is here now.
Cool air from the crack in the window chills my bare arms, riffles through the pages of my notebook. The words dance in front of my eyes, vivid in the greying light.
Things return to us.
There’s a feeling inside of me, a tension, as if I’m being wound up like a spring. If I leave with them now, I’ll never know the truth.
I trudge downstairs with my suitcase, place it carefully beside the stack of luggage in the hall beside the evacuation kit.
“Sophie, can you start loading the bags into the car?” calls Mom. She and Aunt Irene are unplugging all the electrical appliances in the kitchen, one by one. The chairs are being stood on the table, everything upside-down, to avoid water damage.
“Mom.” I say it quietly, watching them from the doorway.
It’s Aunt Irene who comes to me first, hands on her hips, impatient as all teachers are with those who don’t seem to be listening. “Sophie, get moving! We have to go.”
“Mom,” I repeat slowly. “I can’t come.”
I expect hysterics. There aren’t any, only the slow turning of Mom’s face toward me. “Of course you can.”
“We won’t be back, will we?”
“In a couple of weeks, maybe. We hope.”
“But you don’t think so.” She doesn’t answer. “I can’t go yet.”
Aunt Irene stares at the two of us as if we’re mad. “What are you talking about?”
“There’s something I need to do.”
“It’ll have to wait, Feef.” But a look of fear has come into her eyes, the same look I saw when we talked after PC Trefethen brought me home. But I can’t hold back now. There’s no more putting it off, no more room for lies.
“I can’t. Kira is out there. She isn’t dead.”
For a moment she doesn’t say anything, just stares at me, eyes wide. Then she bends forward, caught between hope and fear. “What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t her body. They cremated another girl. I fixed it.” Aunt Irene gives me an incredulous look. “I’m telling the truth. Kira is up there. In the storm. And this is my only chance if I want to…” Find her. Save her. Say goodbye. “Keep her safe.”
“Kira’s alive?” Mom demands.
“I think so.”
“I’ve been dreaming about her,” she says, her voice almost lost in the howl of the wind outside.
“She didn’t die. She just…changed. The same way I will.”
“Sophie, don’t,” says Aunt Irene but I shake my head.
“Listen to me. I need you to understand what’s happening to me, what I am.”
I pull the cuff of my cotton blouse away from my wrist, revealing first the JI2 bracelet, then higher up, the seam of the scar from the night of the crash. Mom lets me take her hand, lets me touch the pad of two of her fingers against it.
“I’m still alive, despite the infection I’m still me.” She tries to pull her hand away but I keep hold, not forcing her, just letting her know I’m not finished yet. “When Kira got sick I didn’t understand, not really. Deep down. I thought her body was weakening. That’s what the doctors told us. In Canada. Here, too—like Dr. Varghese said. But that’s not right, is it? Dr. Varghese told me our bodies want this to happen. There’s a reason all this is happening.”
I flex my fingers and the muscles ripple, the scar dances.
“I can’t leave without finding out what she is.”
“If you’re going then I’m going with you,” Mom insists stubbornly.
“You can’t.”
“Like hell I’m going to let you go on your own.”
“I need to do this alone. You have to trust me. I know I don’t deserve it but Kira’s out there and I can find her. I know I can.”
“Will you come back?”
My hands are trembling. “I’ll meet you at the evacuation point.”
She makes a small noise and moves away from me to the window where she can see the storm clouds thick and heavy, swirling as if someone has stirred them with a spoon.
I turn to Aunt Irene. “You said that something will come after. You took me to see the survivors in Ashwell. You told me you didn’t know where the nymphs had gone.”
“We still don’t, Sophie.”
“Listen, this isn’t magical thinking, no matter what you believe. It’s just a new way of thinking. We’re caught in a cycle. This has happened before—during the Black Death, during those earlier cycles of sickness and calamity—because whatever’s causing it is a part of us. We can’t keep doing the same thing we’ve done before. You said you wanted to help me. This is how.”
“You’re only seventeen, how do you…” She still thinks this is her choice to make.
“I’ll be eighteen soon.”
“I wanted to solve this for you. I wanted to help.”
Gently, I say to her: “It doesn’t work like that, not this time. It’s just—the only alternative is nothing. Waiting for the collapse. Shoving coins soaked in vinegar into the boundary stones and hoping someone will see them. Surviving isn’t enough, not anymore.”
“This is crazy, Sophie. Let us come with you.”
“Keep this safe. For me.” I push my notebook into Aunt Irene’s hand. It’s not enough, I know, but it’s something—and she’s used to sorting through the debris. She opens it, hands trembling ever so slightly. Then she sees the report with Martin’s name.
“What is this?”
“It’s everything I have. Just in case. I need you to read it. Maybe then you’ll understand.”
Mom is staring out the window, losing herself, then returning like a tidal flow. She turns to me and tucks a few strands of hair behind my ears, the gesture so casual, so familiar. “I love you,” she says. “You know that, right? And Kira too—so much. You have to promise me you won’t get hurt out there.”
“You mustn’t let her go, Char. It’s too dangerous.”
“You were right before,” Mom answers. “I can’t keep her locked up, can I? Not now. Not when…” Her eyes search for mine. She says: “But promise me anyway.”
“I can’t,” I answer her as honestly as I can.
“Please.”
“I love you too.”
“Come back, Sophie.” A fierce smile, a blue smile—and then she lets me go.