wealthy, protected
Yes, we would protect you
Forever
It would be the work of
Of
Of moments
The simplest of works
“What don’t you understand about ‘no’? Fuck off! Leave me alone! This world doesn’t belong to you, and neither do I, and neither do my dreams!”
The new world would be a beautiful dream, filled with
“You’re going to destroy it! Just like you tried to destroy everything before!”
According to whom
According to the child?
Is that what she said?
Make your own choices, human, choose your own way, make your own
Yes, your own
Yes, do not listen to her, she is run by older magics than even we, the Great Old Ones, the Watchers, she has ever been their thrall
“No she isn’t! She told me the truth about you!”
She has not
Told you
Everything
I opened my mouth to reply and everything went white.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FOR A SECOND I thought I was paralyzed—nothing moved, nothing felt—but then I realized I could feel, and what I felt was something repeatedly tapping or poking me on the shoulder. Were my eyes working? I tried opening them, experimentally, and saw blue sky peeking through thick, green needles. All right. Woke up; calling that a win. After a moment I managed to sit up and paw at my shoulder, only then realizing that someone was squatting beside me and prodding me with a pen. We stared at each other.
“Er,” he said, a zitty young guy maybe five years older than me, in a white t-shirt and khaki shorts, with a wilting moustache. “English?”
“Yes?”
“Uh. The lady inside, uh, uh—”
I nearly groaned with relief. “Johnny sent you to come find me.”
“Yes! Miss Chambers. Doctor Chambers? Miss Chambers.” His relief seemed as great as mine as he helped me up from the needles and we walked back to the library. My head and back hurt, and my eyes were burning; I wondered if I’d slept with them open. How long had it been? I didn’t feel refreshed by the nap, and now I was embarrassed that he’d been sent to find me. Some lookout I was. Jesus. Slacker.
My face burned as I came up behind Johnny, who was staring at something I couldn’t see on the computer monitor, obscured by the brown-sugar hair sticking up where she had run her hands through it. She looked a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio about to freeze to death. “We’ve got trouble,” she announced as I came in, about to tell her about my dream.
“Wow. Didn’t even turn around. Do I smell that bad?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m pretty sure we both smell.”
“You don’t.”
“Anyway. Would you, perhaps, if you’re quite done, like to hear about the trouble?”
I sat as she gestured the student out of the room, then pointed at the computer, where she had a dozen Explorer windows open. “Look at this. Giant oarfish washing up. Indonesia, the Philippines, the coast of Chile. Do you know how deep those live?”
“Oh sure, I just wrote a whole book about them.”
“Sinkholes in Siberia and Patagonia, and the middle of Australia. One of them, they’re saying, was filled with CO2—a herd of over five hundred cattle died instantly, and the three ranchers that were out there. And an unconfirmed one in Maine.”
“All right, but—”
“Look.” She started clicking feverishly through the windows, so fast that I couldn’t read the headlines, just a barrage of pictures, none of which made any sense. “That was all in the last couple of days—starting within minutes of pouring water into the reactor. This too: a meteorite landing in the ocean near the Rock of Gibraltar. Hasn’t been recovered. The resulting tidal wave swamped the tourist launch, four hundred and eighty people were washed away, drowned. Another thousand or so in hospital. A windstorm of two hundred miles an hour is revealing new Nazca lines, reported by a local pilot. Archaeologists who rushed out to see them—that was this morning—haven’t been heard from. Look. Look. The Shinano river is turning red. No bacteria, no dyes, no industrial effluents that they can think of, they keep sampling it and they can’t find anything. Bright red. Look, it’s almost orange. It happened in the space of an hour. They’re having seismic events there. In fact, seismic activity is increasing all over the world.”
“Johnny—”
“They’re rising,” she said, turning back to me, her pale face glistening with sweat. “This could all be random, right? But all at once? How random is that? And this is just stuff that’s being reported, no one knows what they’re reporting or what’s not being reported, they can’t see the pattern—this giant eye found