Solace & Grief (12 page)

‘After-effects of what, though?’ Electra muttered.

‘“Sweet Jerusalem Clancy”?’ mused Manx.

It was another five minutes before Jess truly began to come back to herself. As though she were sobering up from a week-long binge, she slowly regained proper control of her body and breathed more easily, silent after her initial ramblings. Throughout it all, Evan knelt at her side with Glide behind him, a mismatched pair of sentinels. No one spoke – not with words, anyway. By the time Jess finally sat up and looked around with clear, focused eyes, it felt like an aeon had passed.

‘I'm all right,’ she croaked. ‘That was –’ she managed a half-smile, ‘– deeply, deeply weird. I need a drink.’ Seeing Evan's face, she reached out and squeezed his hand. ‘Thanks for looking out for me, little brother. And thank
you
for bringing me back.’

Glide shrugged and smiled. ‘Don't mention it. You're not the only one in need of a drink. That was harder than it looked.’

‘Yes,’ said Evan coolly, finding his voice again. ‘Alcohol and an explanation sound like just what I need.’

‘The Gadfly, then?’ Jess suggested. Almost instantaneously, Evan's face changed from one of anger to comic disbelief.

‘But you almost
died
! You can't just, just
–
’

‘Evan. In the absence of a doctor, if I say I'm alive and well enough to go out – no, look, please don't make that face, I'm
fine
! Where was I? Oh, right – then nobody, especially not my little brother, can deny me.
Particularly,
and this is important,
particularly
if said brother has no desire for me to recite the Pineapple Incident
in detail
. Is that clear?’

‘Crystal,’ Evan grudged, a thoroughly routed campaigner.

‘Pineapple Incident?’ queried Solace.

Jess made a face. ‘Don't ask.’

‘Don't tell,’ said Manx, quickly. As Evan glowered, Manx reached out and flung an arm around his bare shoulders.

‘Oh, cheer up! You
like
the Gadfly, remember? Tell you what – I'll even lend you a shirt.’

Evan disentangled himself from Manx and stormed off upstairs, although it was difficult to tell if this was inspired by genuine pique or mere theatricality. On the stairs, he turned to deliver a retort, but was caught off-balance by the sight of Manx waggling the whisky flask, and promptly forgot whatever clever thing he'd been about to say.

‘Your
best
shirt, dammit!’ he shouted instead.

Manx only grinned.

I
t was, Solace later thought, surreal.

After Evan came back downstairs – clad, as promised, in Manx's best shirt –they all smoothed the wrinkles out of their own clothing and trooped outside. To Solace's consternation, it was still early afternoon: since she'd woken up, so much had happened that it felt as if hours had passed, instead of less than one. This realisation left her feeling disoriented and oddly small, as though her encounters with Sharpsoft, Glide and Jess were diminished by dint of having occurred within such a short time frame. Sensing Solace's discomfort, Electra linked arms with her and grinned, which brought a measure of reassurance and prompted Solace to ask, given the hour, whether the Gadfly might be closed.

Electra shook her head. ‘You'd think so, but no – it's always open. At least, I've never seen it closed. Which is lucky for us, really; I can't remember the last time we kept normal hours.’

Also luckily, the weather was overcast, thereby sparing Solace the ironic hindrance of appearing drunk on sunlight before they could even reach the Gadfly. As they walked, she couldn't help but wonder about Glide, who had not only rescued Jess, but was thus far one hundred percent more lucid than anyone present was used to, chatting and laughing normally. With no polite way to broach the topic, however, she – and, it seemed, everyone else – was forced to push the thought aside, one more oddity in a day already brimming with surplus.

As promised, the club was open. They weren't even the only patrons, which Solace found surprising.
Don't these people have homes to go to
? she thought, and then realised, with a mental shrug, that the same question was equally applicable to them.
That's different,
the Vampire Cynic argued, but only half-heartedly.

Somewhat expectedly, Evan and Manx started up an argument as to who should buy the opening round; somewhat unexpectedly, it was Manx who lost, even agreeing to Evan's request for a large Long Island Ice Tea, which was inadvisable at the best of times. He returned laden with drinks, prompting an outburst of laughter as Evan all but downed his cocktail in a single gulp, gasping at the effort, which was, even by Gadfly standards, excessive.

‘Has my brother declared war on sobriety again?’ Jess asked, raising her brows as Evan set out on a solo trek to the bar. ‘Behold, my prophetic powers: woe unto any who sculleth the spirits, for verily, they are stupid.’

‘Well, it doesn't take a seer,’ Electra quipped.

‘True, but it doesn't
not
take a seer, either.’

There was a pause, during which this statement was given due consideration, and found lacking.

‘Huh?’ said Solace.

Airily, Jess waved a hand. ‘It'll come to you.’

‘All right,’ said Manx, taking a first sip of his own concoction. ‘We have our alcohol, but are still lacking an explanation. Which, by the way, I'm kind of curious about. So let's hear it.’

All eyes turned to Glide. Now that she'd managed a decent look at him, Solace was startled to realise that he was handsome: tall and broad-shouldered, with a sleepy tousle of chestnut-brown hair, dark green eyes, and a wide, slow smile, which he now turned on Manx. Leaning back, as if uncertain of where to start, Glide inhaled and spoke.

‘All right. So. The universe is made up of infinite realities. Everything which could ever happen, has ever happened, might ever happen and will ever happen, has already happened or is in the process of happening somewhere within it.’ He paused. When no one rushed to repudiate this statement, he nodded. ‘The thing is, though, that there's more than one
kind
of infinity. More than one level to it. And the only reason I could find Jess – no, look, I'll get to the rest of the actual
how
in a minute – the only reason I could find her is that she was in the simpler one.’

‘A simple infinity,’ echoed Manx.

‘A
simpler
infinity?’ queried Solace.

Glide nodded at them both. ‘Yes. How can I explain it? All right. Imagine an infinite line of little wooden boxes, about so big –’ he motioned with his hands, ‘– stretching away towards the horizon. Every time you think you've reached the last box, there's another one after it, right? Because that's what infinity means: that there's
always one box more
.’

‘Like a bottle of whisky!’ said Evan, staggering over with his arm around Phoebe's shoulders. Evan, it seemed, had met her at the bar, and was well on the way towards fulfilling the more recent of his sister's predictions, with another exorbitant cocktail in one hand and a foolish grin on his face.

‘Shut up, Evan,’ said Jess, pleasantly. She handed him some money. ‘If you're not interested in an explanation, then go and get more… drunk.’

Evan saluted cheerfully, somehow managing to spill none of his drink in the process. ‘Can and will do!’

He and Phoebe wandered away again. Glide watched them go, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth, before continuing.

‘So. An infinity of little wooden boxes. And inside one of the boxes – one of the
infinite
boxes – is an apple. Now.’ He finished his drink. Jess handed him another one. ‘Imagine you're immortal. If you keep walking along the line of boxes, sooner or later, even if it takes you centuries, you will find the apple. Right?’

‘Right,’ they chorused.

‘Right,’ said Glide, nodding firmly. ‘But now imagine an infinite three-dimensional grid of boxes: height, width and depth. Even as an immortal, you could never find the apple, because there would be no way to conduct a coherent search of every single line.

‘When Jess was in her trance, she was looking down a linear march of infinite reality: one line of boxes. I could sense her doing it, which is why I came downstairs. But what you heard, that deep voice at the end? That was someone else – possibly some
thing
– which noticed, too. They spoke through Jess, and either intentionally or by accident, their presence broke her link to the here and now: the box she'd started from. Without it, she was floating through infinite threads of infinite realities – in the
grid
of boxes. If the push had been any stronger, she might've gone spiralling out forever. But she was lucky.’

‘And you found her,’ said Manx.

Glide shrugged, smiling shyly, a gesture that only emphasised his good looks – which, by the look of things, Jess was feeling particularly well-placed to appreciate. The thought of it made Solace smile; as did Glide himself, but in a different, more exhilarating way. She didn't imagine that Evan would find it easy to draw on Glide again, although as it was, there were still a couple of pheasants on his arms from the last time, inked faintly in blue ballpoint.

‘Wait,’ said Electra. ‘That thing – searching the boxes, I mean – couldn't you only fail to find the apple by doing a linear search? And assuming that the apple wasn't in the first ladder? Or that you didn't just get lucky – I mean, all right, the boxes are infinite, but that doesn't mean the apple can't be near your starting point. Searching randomly might even increase your chances.’

‘Yes and no,’ said Glide. ‘That might be the case, but either way, it's down to luck and exceptionally long odds.’ He grinned. ‘It's a complicated subject and not the best analogy. Suffice to say that luck was with us this once, and that's all that matters.’

Electra clinked glasses with him. ‘Fair enough.’

Something in Glide's speech was nagging at Solace, an incongruous phrase. How could he possibly have
sensed
what was happening downstairs? Was it his Trick? And how, exactly, had he been able to rescue Jess – not just what he'd done, but how he'd done it? She was on the brink of asking when, as if from nowhere, an answer occurred to her, albeit so strange a one that she almost didn't believe it.
But then,
she thought,
nothing else that's happened lately makes sense, either. And his dreams were all in fragments
.

‘You don't sleep,’ she said abruptly. Surprised, he glanced at her. ‘Whenever you're in your room, talking to yourself – you're not dreaming. You're in the universe. Watching it, jumping through it… surfing it. It's like…’ She fumbled for words. ‘It's like infinity is your internet, which, yes, is the lamest analogy not yet used in a budget sci-fi flick, but I'm right, aren't I? None of this makes any sense unless that's your Trick, or something very much like it.’

Leaning forward, Glide took a sip of his drink, looking mildly impressed. ‘It might be.’

‘Solace,’ murmured Jess. ‘I just remembered what I was saying before I was – well, before I was interrupted. I was talking about Solace.’

‘No, you weren't,’ said Electra, a little uncertainly. ‘You were talking about solace the word, not Solace the person. I think.’ She glanced around, puzzled. ‘Wasn't she?’

Jess rubbed at the side of her head. ‘I don't know. Maybe. I can't even tell if that
thing
who spoke through me was good or bad. It's the weirdest casting I've ever done, and that's saying something. I mean, spooky or coincidental?’

For a moment there was silence.

‘Nobody has to agree with me,’ Manx began, ‘but I think we should still meet Lukin. Whatever it was, if it'd meant to hurt Jess, it could've done worse –’ he looked to Glide, who nodded, ‘ but didn't, which makes it seem accidental. And if that's the case, they were trying to tell us something, however cryptic.’

‘And if not?’ asked Electra, frowning a little.

Manx's face hardened. ‘If not, we're already in trouble. We filled those surveys out honestly: Lukin knows who we are, what we can do, and roughly where to find us. Assuming the voice was him, or working for him, backing out could get us in trouble all by itself.’

‘But we'll still be in danger if we go,’ Electra countered. ‘In which case, it might be safest to stay put.’

‘Look,’ said Jess, carefully. ‘All of this is pure speculation, but the way I see it is this. If Lukin really
is
dangerous, then there'd probably be a confrontation regardless of what we did. If not, we can take it or leave it: our choice. But if we go, and nothing happens – or even if it does – we might find something out. Caution makes sense, but we've done that for ages. Now something interesting is finally going down, and I want in. I'm curious.’

‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ Electra cautioned, but her heart wasn't in it.

‘Then only Manx needs to worry,’ said Solace.

‘Hey!’

Solace gave Manx a playful shove. ‘Besides, satisfaction brought it back, remember? Everyone always forgets that.’ When no one added anything, she glanced around the group. ‘So. We all agree, then?’

‘Yes,’ said Manx and Electra, after a moment. Mouth twitching, Jess glanced at Evan and Phoebe, who were kissing on a nearby couch. ‘I think,’ she added, ‘that I can safely speak for Evan, too. Yes.’

‘Not to interrupt or anything, but what are you all talking about?’ asked Glide, who'd been listening with an expression of pleasant bafflement on his face. ‘Not that it isn't interesting – I just feel left out.’

‘I'll explain over there,’ said Jess, gesturing to a booth. When Glide gave her a blank look, she shook her head and pulled him up after her. ‘In private!’

In the near-dawn hours, the time of almost-light during which the inhabitants of the warehouse most often collapsed into sleep, Solace dreamed of a black-eyed man and his black-eyed wife, both with half-smiles on their faces, dead. The woman, Morgause, lay still in bed, while Aaron slumped alongside her, his knees on the wooden floor. Beside him sat a small handbell, made of bronze, with an ivory handle.

In her dream, Solace leaned over her mother and kissed her pale, white cheek. She reached for her father and touched his cold, bent brow.

And then, in her dream, she turned to the bell.

Around the metal, the air seemed to vibrate with electricity, buzzing and humming like an insect. Half-anticipating a shock, she closed her fingers around the ivory. The buzzing stopped. The humming stopped. And a low, soft
thrum, thrum, thrum
began.

In her dream, she straightened. The bell in her hand was silent, although she hadn't muffled the tongue. Raising her arm up high, her back to the bodies of Lord and Lady Eleuthera of Starveldt, Solace tolled out a single, sweet, high note.