Once There Was: Chapters 19–28

“What would you do, if you found the ones you’ve lost?”
“Recirculate them,” she said. “Reintegrate them into our models. Remove any threat to their safety.”

The shard was maybe an inch long and half as wide, and sharp at all its edges. It had a funny way of catching the light, a kind of oily iridescence that seemed to happen somewhere just under the surface of its rough, broken facets.

“A piece of rock. A chunk of resin.”

Hooves cleave dirt. The night sings arrows. Dusky flanks stream lather.

The pilot opened the door, and I stepped out into a bright, cold, blustering afternoon.

He was quiet and solemn, like he was gathering his thoughts.

“That was easy,” he said, guiding us through a warren of residential streets until we were back on the main road.

The door had a crude wooden latch, which I quietly rotated out of its resting spot in the doorframe.

A sour, fetid smell hung in the air, the smell of forest loam and blood and captive fear.

A pair of long, muscular forelegs unfolded. Broad, cloven hooves planted in the dirt.

What did it recognize in me? The phantom pain of an old scar? The panic of being trapped once, long ago? The dim remnants of its own strange essence, threaded somewhere in my blood?

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said. “And it’s going to be my fault for flying you out here. Please don’t put that on my conscience.”

I daubed at the stripped flesh with whiskey-soaked towels.

When you got on that charter jet, I made a few calls and found the flight manifest.

She walked right up to him and gave him a big, earnest hug.

The woman smiled a wan, shallow smile that vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“He’ll be confused for a while,” she said, “but he’ll find his bearings. He did the right thing, and now he’s part of something bigger than himself. Some people need that in their lives. Just a guess, but I think he’s one of those people.”

At the airport, we arranged flights for both of us to our respective destinations, and when Sebastian’s plane was ready to leave, he gave me a big, clumsy hug goodbye.

Twenty minutes later, we’d canceled some inventory orders and decided to let the next installment on the X-ray machine go unpaid until business equalized.

Half an hour later, David and I emerged from his building with three bankers boxes stuffed full of receipts, and a stack of ledger books.

The bill, printed on the hospital’s sterile letterhead, unlocked a flood of images. The awful linoleum tiles in the waiting rooms, puke green and striated like slices of liverwurst.

“I’m sure the Fells told you they keep the balance. Is that right?”
“Uh, yeah…”
“It gives a noble cast to their true purpose.”
“Which is?”
“Control,” said Horatio.

Maybe the last time, there was tea brewing in the samovar.

Beside him was a woman with thick, curly hair dyed a garish maroon color, and too much blush on her pallid cheeks.

Beside him was a woman with thick, curly hair dyed a garish maroon color, and too much blush on her pallid cheeks.

His voice was deep and severe, every syllable sculpted with ponderous care.

A moment later, a puff of dark smoke billowed up from the spout of the teapot.

This young man made a meager living for himself selling rabbit pelts at the town market.

At best he was able to put bread in his belly and a meager pillow under his head.

And then one market day, an old woman rode into town on a wooden cart drawn by two browbeaten old donkeys.

The old woman parked her cart in the town square and set up a little stall of crystals and baubles and other shimmering trinkets.

And if I strained my ears, I was almost certain I could hear something else, something graceful and sleek shifting and scuttling inside that iron pot.

“Marjan,” said a hushed, furtive voice.

The giant with the huge stony hands pounded away at a boulder, pulverizing it with idle persistence.

“They’ve been studying this for nine hundred years. The secret has always been there. A constant hum. The same anomaly, over and over, until everyone forgets that it’s there.”
“What anomaly?” I said.
“The Index never goes as low as it should,” said Horatio.

“Theoretically, if we and the creatures feed one another, as I believe is the case, this population drop”—he pointed to a steep trough on the creatures line—“should have been extreme enough to create a negative feedback effect. We should have been decimated. But we weren’t. We’ve never been. We struggle, of course. We suffer. But the Index always seems to correct itself. We always bounce back.”

He tilted his head to one side, a gesture of apology that would have seemed smug coming from anyone else. Somehow Horatio carried it off with something approximating deference.

Horatio smiled at me—the kind of gentle, condescending smile you only give when someone is obviously wrong.

“They will be the seeds of the next great epoch of humanity,” he said.

“What if your math is wrong, and nothing changes?”
Horatio nodded. “Pragmatic,” he said. “That’s good. So am I. The wheels of destiny might need a little grease. Fortunately, we have a back door into the targeting systems of several hundred missiles.”