(her note: Island) in the Pacific, destroyed in some cataclysm twelve thousand years ago. How had that been a civilization, I wondered? Surely we hadn’t even graduated from hunter-gatherer yet? Clear signs of one of Their doomsday weapons, so complete had been the destruction. Sunk into an abyss so deep that nothing of Earth could swim to the bottom of it, and we moderns, with our remote subs and our satellite imaging and our radar, would never find anything but its traces, vanished as completely as if we only knew about the dinosaurs from footprints fossilized in mud.
The notes began to blur together, unhelped by the beginning of a panic attack. Cities ruled by ‘great animals’ that no one could stand to look at or touch; winged serpents; statues of weeping Gods in long, unkempt robes with bulging eyes where they didn’t belong. Maps with monoliths marked with X’s or checkmarks in every colour of gel pen: Scotland, Peru, Wales, France, Bolivia, India, Uganda, Australia, dozens in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean Sea. Thunderbird myths. Salt lakes. Inter-tribal, international, and perhaps even interchronological (what?) slavery enabled by Their spells. A gate in Wyoming, strange round towers, paintings of volcanoes spewing demons rather than lava. So many human sacrifices, so much blood. Kings bragging that they had met Them and lived. Festivals and ceremonies: They loved those, eating the life force of hundreds of people and animals at a time.
I put the manuscript back into her bag and covered my eyes with my hand for a second. I had thought she’d been... well, not bullshitting me about Their history, but certainly exaggerating. But it seemed that the opposite had happened, and she had been skimming over it—maybe not for my sake, maybe not even on purpose, maybe just out of distaste. There was so much out there. There was so much. Until now I hadn’t truly realized how much was arrayed against us: that thousands of us had spent thousands of years throwing armies, sorcerors, intrigue, bargains, entire mountain ranges against them, and now it was down to two people.
The entire history of the world had been the story of Them proving that we were weak and insignificant, and that we should feel fear rather than hope. And whenever They saw hope in us, the only thing to do was beat it out of us, double-cross us, blow our cities to rubble and remind us that we had been conquered, till They got kicked out again.
Well, we’ve got something They’ve never had: Johnny Chambers. That means we can do this, I told myself. But it sounded fake and small even in my head.
Their own had fought Them before, and been ground into dust.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE BUS STOPPED several times, but she’d said that Fes was the end of the line, so we simply waited while it half-emptied, refilled, swapped a few people, refilled again. It must have been a popular route. The women sitting in front of us passed around flatbread and a huge bag of dried dates, handing them directly to Johnny after staring at me for a minute, as if not wanting to feed someone so unrepentantly and ostentatiously a kidnapper of young girls.
I had lost my appetite in the heat but made myself eat a couple of dates, startled by their rich sweetness, before passing the bag on. I’d never eaten one before, and wanted to nudge Johnny and be like, “Look, I’m on my first date,” but she didn’t look like she was in the mood. Luckily the sun went down after the fifth stop, cooling the bus perceptibly; I was still sweating, but just my face and neck instead of every square inch of my body.
When we finally reached Fes, it was fully dark, boasting a hazy half-moon like a lemon wedge. Even so, it was crowded at the bus station, or market, or whatever—booths everywhere, all the streetlights still on, the air filled with the smell of food and warm bodies. Our fellow passengers dispersed into the arms of families who had come to pick them up, or taxis, or cars of their own, but the actual crowd itself didn’t seem to thin out at all. Johnny led us away till we were in a more residential area, quiet under a single streetlight, pinky-orange like the ones back home, no different. It was still hot, but a breeze picked up that dried my soaked shirt.
“We’re at Bab el-Mahrouk, tsk. Really shouldn’t take a cab at