line of blue light on the floor, the pressure of the air as its limb approached me, that I should never have been able to sense. “It said everything would be taken from me.”
Her shoulders slumped as she stared down at the counter, like her reply might be coded in the millions of tiny dots in the granite, a secret language just like Theirs. I knew what it would say, I had read the same thing in the ragged edge of the thing’s garment: unhappiness, everything good in me emptying out like a lake over the edge of a cliff, vanishing into the dark and the cold for years, nothing ever returning to me. To conquer, she said. Not occupy. Of course They would not want to live here as equals. It was not in Them; I knew that now.
I took in the softness of the blonde at her temples, how thin the veins were there; the curve of her lips, the angles of her hands, the sleek sweep of her back under the cheap cotton polo shirt, the gloss and curl of the lashes. My nose knew every molecule she gave off, because that is what love does, turns you inside out until you are nothing but a pile of nerves and senses—the sweet, hay-like smell of her hair, the cherry of her cheap lipgloss. Makes a million dollars in a month and spends precisely one dollar and nine cents on her cosmetics in about the same time.
Could I possibly tell her that I had been asked to kill her rather than let the reactor be used? No. No words for it. And, I thought, she had probably figured that out already.
“Everything will be,” she finally said. “And everything will be taken from me, too. All of us. All of the world. That’s what it meant.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s what They do,” she said, slowly. “Because Their evil takes that form: taking, destroying. Because that’s all They want. They know we want this. That’s why They want it. Because anything we love is something They want to take away.”
“But—”
“It’s got to be that the doorways are thinning. Maybe not opening, not yet. Conditions must be lining up for them to be able to open, though. There has to be something. Historically, there’s always been something. A... volcanic eruption maybe, an earthquake. Something big. Something soon.”
“And what happens then?”
She shook her head, a sharp snap like she was dislodging a fly, and reached for her cooling sandwich. “I told you. You read the mythologies, a pattern starts to emerge. You have to remember that history, which they say is written by the winners, is in fact written by the survivors; you can’t write shit if there’s nothing left after you win. Look at Sumeria, look at the whole Middle East, look at half of South America.”
“What... am I looking at?”
“Patterns. Repeated, like wallpaper. The big man rises, boosted by the gods, till something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong, because the gods are finicky fuckers, they’re like my Aunt Edna on meth, they scream when you move the doily on the coffee table. A renovated shrine, a skipped sacrifice, a missed syllable in a hymn—everything suddenly becomes a blasphemy. The city is destroyed, or the country is destroyed, in moments, but so violently and visibly that horrified witnesses can describe it from miles away. Every last man, woman, and child killed, all the animals burned, the rivers erupt and boil, the buildings toppled, the sky torn apart. Sometimes there’s a crater, sometimes there isn’t. What happens when the gods are no longer on your side? You’re not the big man any more. You’re nothing. And everything is taken from you.”
“That isn’t happening here,” I said firmly. “It could have killed me. It shut the door and turned off the lights and grabbed me, and that was all it did. That must be all it can do right now. Nothing was stopping it.”
She looked away, and a silence drew out. “Making the reactor woke Them up, I think. But now They’re getting ready for bigger things. Their powers are… we don’t have good words for it. Not in any language. And that thing is more of a scout than an ambassador, if it’s who I think it is. It likes to make deals, they say.”
“You… know it?”
“I think it must be Drozanoth. No one else watches Earth enough to know what to watch for.”
“It just watches?”
“It’s a powerful igigi,