Chapter Eighteen

The Devil’s Exhibition

Agloff had never had thoughts of killing someone before, but he really, really wanted to kill Malvo Jask. How could Jask have compelled Eron to live for so long in his walled kingdom? The thought that Agloff had survived this long was all that hope he needed that Eron could. At the thought, he reached a hand to his wounds, the artefact of Fall’s rage. Agloff dreaded to think the lengths Jask had gone to restrain his brother to the land of the living.

Ariea didn’t understand, how could she? She had lost nothing to Winter but time. She didn’t know what it was like, to be eaten up by an itch she could never scratch. For Agloff, Winter might cost him the one thing he held truly dear: her. To that, she would say “so, don’t go,”, but it didn’t work like that. Either it ate him up until death itself, or he walked to Winter in hope of revelation. Neither route was kind on Ariea, he knew that. Maybe she didn’t believe he did. Their relationship had never quite healed since the Underground. But the second route was surely quicker, easier. The path of least resistance.

But how could he lose Ariea? Agloff knew he couldn’t win.

They took it in turns on the way north to Wilder to map-read, up the west shore of Lake Principia. For the first time since the Underground, Agloff’s arm was unslinged. Ariea kept it dressed though. Every so often he would rub the wound by his thumb. It was a numb kind of pain. A deadened ache he thought might never go away.

Agloff led them over shallow beaches, marred by long grasses, narrow streams and wide dunes that potted the shoreline. From upon a crested dune overlooking the lake, Agloff could see miles across the flat grasslands into the Colony in the other direction. Half a dozen smaller towns were scattered across his eyeline. Each was an island nation, scarce a dirt track between them.

Oxford suggested they stick to the open areas during the day, and the forested at night and none argued. On the fourth morning, the trees gave way to a road meandering up sloped countryside. There, crowning the prairie’s peak was a weathered castle, shrouded by a low wall collapsed in its centre. It looked a sickly place, long abandoned to the elements but deliberately untouched. The land rolled away and down towards a stream, and Agloff wondered why no one had taken up residence since.

This was Fort Wilder.

Agloff felt cold. The thought his mother had walked these same tracks brought him no comfort. It was like walking over her grave. Weeds punctured the stone walls and one tower had collapsed into the keep’s embrace, like a monument to time.

They deferred to Agloff’s lead. He pushed limply on the grand castle doors and they swung opened into an entrance hall. It was a cold place, he thought, in every sense of the word. The ground fell away into a staircase and Agloff had an urge to follow it to its end. That if any hint of a secret remained, it was in the down deep. It was darker than night. There could have been corridors or alleys jutting off from the sides of the passage, but Agloff would never have known. Memories stirred, and Agloff’s mind rolled back to that late summer’s eve when Drake had led him below Backwater, still suited from a day’s work. That night was a knife that cleaved his life into two, what came before scarce remembered. The months of waking time since were a flicker book, much too fast to comprehend how he had made here. He remembered only the endless walking: the spits and wheezes of the Underground, the kiss of winter in the trees punctuating the land above. It was odd feelings and images more than it was the details.

As they plateaued onto a narrow passage, Oxford clicked on his torch and the shroud of darkness lifted.

‘Couldn’t have done that earlier?’ Memphis snapped.

‘It’s got limited battery,’ said Oxford.

Lady swatted an oversized sleeve at the wall and dust choked the line of Oxford’s torch. Agloff’s eyes followed her finger along the wall to a doorway, filled with concrete. Notches were etched into the dust, scribbles from someone who had gotten bored down here: names and dates, each partnered by Winter’s crest.

Abbi 30.2.2729

Elliot 11.11.2954

Behnji 17.9.3212

Oxford scanned them with his torch, but he saw what Agloff did. None were dated past Behnji, on the Seventeenth of September 3212.

‘Winter’s been here all this time,’ Oxford said grimly.

But something else had caught Agloff’s attention. ‘No,’ he said. A golden placard was engraved on an office door at the far end. It read:

Office of the Governor

Tomas Wise

Oxford scoffed. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘They can’t have been here!’

‘But they have.’ Oxford poked the names in the doorway.

‘My mum knew Tomas Wise. They worked together during the war. If he was governor, it was before the Underground. Before Fall. There’s no way anyone’s lived here since then.’ Tomas had somehow vanished from her life and resurfaced at an obscure fort at the end of Colony Two. The same fort his mother had left for. The coincidence was too great, he thought. He was close now. He could feel it.

Oxford’s voice strained. ‘But they have!’ he repeated. ‘Till three hundred years ago.’

‘When I looked at the maps, Wilder did disappear about three hundred years ago,’ said Ariea quietly.

Merry stepped in front of the doorway. Her eyes scanned as she spoke. ‘So Winter went to the trouble of keeping this place safe for five centuries, keeping everything exactly as it was, keeping it on maps, why?’

Oxford turned the torch on his face. Deep shadows cut into his features. He stared hard at Agloff. ‘Because they knew Agloff would come.’

Reaching a hand to the wall, Agloff nodded. This whole place had been bait, for him.

‘But they left,’ noted Memphis. ‘Why would Jask wait five hundred years, then give up? If you’re gonna wait five centuries, may as well keep waiting.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Merry concurred.

‘Something made Jask change his mind,’ said Oxford darkly.

‘Erm…’ Merry’s voice tapered off from the other side of the hallway. She pointed up to a mark beneath a pipeline, in the ambiance of Oxford’s torch. ‘That’s fifty years ago.’

Dappo 5.7.3488

Oxford’s mouth set on edge. Muttering under breath, counting the marks. ‘There’s more of them,’ he said. ‘Less often. They must have just checked in. Every twenty years or so, it looks like.’

‘But why were they checking in?’ Merry said. ‘Checking in for what? There’s nothing to guard.’

Ariea cleared her throat. ‘Agloff, I don’t like this. We should go.’

Lady shifted closer to Merry. Her saucer eyes searched for some relief.

‘They were guarding something,’ Oxford said, ignoring her. ‘Something they knew Agloff would come for. And they did a damn good job ‘cos no one else has shown up to move in.’ He shot Agloff a look, who was dumb to its meaning.

‘So, what is this then?’ Memphis said. ‘They just left it here like a lure?’

Oxford’s brow tightened. ‘Lures tend to be placed near traps, don’t they?’

Ariea exclaimed. ‘Agloff!’ But her voice passed over him.

They bored Agloff. His legs carried him towards the office of Tomas Wise and prodded the door open. It was that insatiable itch.

He scanned the room. It was large and circular, occupied by tall plinths, mounted by glass cases. In he stepped, and a spot lamp whirred over the first of the plinths. Suspended from the ceiling above them, a television fizzed in white noise.

'The hell?’ Oxford followed him in, reached up one arm to wipe the screen clean of dust and the other to his holster.

‘Looks like a museum,’ Ariea said.

The lines of static running across the screen shifted and rippled like waves. Waves chiming to the cackle of white noise. An inhuman voice blustered from the speakers. ‘Observe.’

‘I don’t like this,’ Merry said, drawing Lady closer. Her fingers combed over the girl’s matted locks.

Memphis raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think anyone does.’

The column of light over the glass casing intensified. Inside rested a skull, with a metal ring soldered above the temple, no more than a few millimetres in diameter. It pulsed blue.

As it did so, the noise on the screen resolved into an image and that inhuman voice spoke again. ‘December 2708,’ it said. ‘The planet Ku.’ Nineteen years before they went to the Underground, thought Agloff.

They saw the image of a haggard man, staring into a mirror in a vest much too large for him. They watched through his eyes. Everything was exactly as the man saw it.

He combed receding hair across his scalp, then splashed water into his face. The man then jolted, shirking over the washbasin as a volley of gunfire boomed from the distance. Agloff knew Ku to be a warzone at this time.

‘Tomas!’ a woman called from the next room. Tomas Wise sighed and headed out the door. They were in a cabin of some sort, as far as Agloff could tell, and a heavy-duty door guarded them from the world beyond. Between them, a sheepish child stood, a silvery scar drawn down the centre of his forehead. The kid looked from man to the woman and back again, but neither seemed to care for his concern that much. Tomas’ stare hung on his colleague.

Through the screen Agloff could sense the subtleties in his attention and focus, like he was drawing her with his eyes. She wore a silken head of brown hair, wound into a bun.

There came a second barrage of gun shots. Tomas rushed for a bag in the corner of the room, slinging it to his partner. ‘They’re back! It’s them. It’s Jask. Just go! Go!’ he yelled.

The woman paused, considered the child. ‘But the boy.’

‘He’s just a job, Ann. Just leave the kid! We’re screwed anyway.’

The woman looked at the kid. ‘That’s treason, Tom. They’ll exile us at best, kill us at worst.’

‘Go!’

‘And what about Thawn, you know—'

‘He’ll be fine up there! He’s covering us from the tower. Just GO! Back door.’

The woman nodded, sharp and reluctant, sweeping up her things, whatever she could parcel away under her arm. Searchlights flooded the windows of the cabin, then a warning shot. Tomas chased his partner out to the back porch. He paused to glance the outline of mountains painted over darkening skies. The kid had followed them, but Tomas’ eyes paid him no mind. He just begged the woman to go. Told her that he had to stay to protect her.

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He looked up, to a heady metal spire ensnaring the cabin. The enemy’s glare surveyed the compound. They passed and Tomas made for a line of trees running along the shoreline of a lake that split the watchtower from Jask’s assault. The last thing they saw was the man withdraw his weapon from his holster, raising an arm to shield himself from the lights across. Then the screen fizzled into darkness.

‘Tomas… Ildred… Wise.’

Tomas’ eyes opened into a blackened room and the scene had changed. He glanced down, restrained by his wrists. A second man glided towards him. He looked like he was handsome once upon a time. But his features were tortured by injury. The right side of his cranium had collapsed, as if hollow, and in its place a web of fine circuitry was etched into the remnants of his skull. Agloff could only imagine this to be one man.

clasped his hands over a document, waited for Tomas to speak.

‘Where’s Ann?’ Tomas said, limp.

Jask turned the document to his eyes, read: ‘You’re a nurse. Correct?’

The prisoner said nothing.

‘The Eighty-Fourth Battalion. Deployed to the Battle of Ku. Correct?’ Jask waited. ‘Did the Confederacy ever find out who you and Andromeda Ashborne really were?’ he said curiously.

Tomas panted. ‘Why d’you care?’ he breathed.

The Enemy smiled, if it could be called that, and raised an arm around the back of Tomas’ chair. ‘So, you blag your way to Ku, as war nurses. A compelling guise. Then, leave, for your real job? As smugglers for the Sign of the Tondrus.’ Every now and then Jask would pause for Tomas to speak. When he never did, he continued his train of thought. Agloff remembered what Marty had said at the Underground. His mother was a very small fish in a very large pond. He had said she worked for this Sign.

‘What was the job?’ Jask asked.

‘It was just a simple pick-up, and drop-off. This kid. Coast-to-coast. Sign would collect him, undocumented ship to hell knows where. We’d go back to the Confederacy.’

'Did you know who the child was?’

‘I guessed,’ Tomas said quietly. ‘When you were after it, and that other guy too. I thought maybe we were smuggling a Patent. Erebus.’

Jask rolled back his eyes, amused. ‘It’s an inordinate feat of evil to imprison an AI in a child’s mind, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t get paid to think about it.’

‘It’s far from the first time. Me and that ‘other guy’ have had dealings with Erebus before. The Sign’s depravity is truly endless.’ Agloff thought he saw Jask’s mind carried elsewhere for a moment. He paused, called. ‘Pisus!’

Another man, sheathed in a silky robe, entered with a child before him. Agloff knew it instantly with its milky scar, the one from the cabin, abandoned. ‘You left it behind, so thank you for that. You mentioned someone else was after it?’ Jask’s face lit up in a delectable mania.

Tomas nodded shamefully. His eyes refused to meet the kid. ‘When we got to the drop-off, the handler was replaced last minute. There’s nothing odd about that. Happens all the time. But this guy was weird. Seemed personally interested in the kid.’ Agloff could sense his scowl through the screen.

‘He have a name, a real name?’ There was a hunger in Jask’s eyes. Agloff knew the answer already, as he was sure Jask did.

‘Yeah. Abbadiah Thawn.’

Agloff’s heart stopped, and a lump throbbed between his ears. On screen, Jask’s face lit up in a frenzy. He laughed, then couldn’t stop laughing. ‘You don’t seem fond of the man?’ the Enemy said at last.

‘We had to wait out a storm for three weeks with him, before we could go back.’ Tomas paused a long time. ‘He was a looker too. Classical-handsome type. Why you so interested?

Jask ignored him. ‘After we took you, we found the watchtower and cabin deserted. So, where did Thawn go?’

Tomas laughed. ‘Like I care. She... They… Three weeks.’ Tomas’ voice tremored. ‘I loved her for ten years. She was pregnant, by him. I mean she never said but the last few days she was sick. Stressed. I could tell.’ Agloff felt a rock hit the base of his stomach.

Jask tilted his head, a wide smile ripening between his ears. The lines of his eyes deepened. ‘Pregnant? Well, this couldn’t be more perfect.’ Jask shrieked, at some realisation. He looked down at the child and smiled, as if some terrible and perfect plan were forming in his mind.

‘I… Where are we?’ Tomas said eventually, at last coming to his senses.

Four pilgrims closed around him, masked, save for the slits of their eyes. One of them extended a metal ring, like the one on the skull in the exhibit. No, Agloff thought. The one in the exhibit. Tomas tried to move his head but was pinned back against his headrest. One pilgrim extended the ring to the side of his head. Another was holding a drill of sorts. Tomas’ eyeline jerked, but the fighting only seemed to tire him.

‘This is a contract between us,’ Jask began. ‘A device of the Sign’s own making. They call it a recall cell. It will record everything you have or will ever experience. Comply and you’ll be fine. Fail and it will hurt until you do. I need your help, Tomas. I was wronged by Abbadiah Thawn so long ago, as you were, a thousand times over. I’ve searched a long time for him. And now you say this woman carries his child? I need to make him hurt, to make him suffer, like I suffered. This is fate, you see. Do I have your agreement, son?’

Before Tomas could answer, he was held down tighter. There was a flicker of stillness. A few seconds later, Tomas’ eyes opened, though it was unclear if the screen had jumped again. ‘Return to Andromeda,’ Jask’s voice said. ‘Maintain her trust. Bring her child to me, however the hell you like, I don’t care.’ Tomas nodded a fraction, apparently too weak for anything more.

*

A second time, the screen fizzled, and the announcer declared almost a year had passed since Tomas and Jask’s encounter. It was November 2709. Agloff thought he would be two months old by now.

Tomas was suddenly outside, absorbed by a line of civilians, with Andromeda next to him. They walked into the glare of sunset, smeared behind the outline of a distant city. Spires ascended in curves and at angles. Agloff recognised this place from books. They were still on Ku.

Tomas looked down to two bundles nestled in each of his and Andromeda’s arms: the twins. He pulled back a strip of fabric, and a baby gawked back at him. They were approaching a checkpoint to a runway in a desert of spindly grasses and tortured rock, to where rows of shuttles were poised waiting for them.

Andromeda hid a tear in her eye. ‘Fort Backwater. Colony Two. I know a guy there. Marty Naples. And the Sign won’t find us. Blue Line out of Ku, then Magenta to Earth, then—’

Tomas chuckled. ‘Ann, I know. We went over every detail a million times. I know what to do.’

The woman looked up at him, her face brave but weary. ‘Jask’s never going to stop chasing us, is he? Why us?’

‘I don’t what he wants,’ Tomas lied. ‘But I don’t think so.’

‘It’s so real.’ She managed a smile. ‘This is our way out the Sign, Tomas. We talked about leaving for so long. People talk about fresh starts, but I never really understood it until now. We’re going home.’ She paused. ‘I just hate this is how we have to do it.’ She reached a hand to caress the infant in Tomas’ arms.

Agloff could sense his shame. ‘We’ll see you in two months, don’t worry about that.’ He drew the baby closer, peered at its vacant stare. ‘Splitting up is the safest way, Ann. As refugees. The Sign are expecting us to report back with twins and we already had one close call.’

She leaned across the line and kissed them, he on the cheek and the infant on the forehead, then turned to her own bundle and stared long into his eyes as a checkpoint guard beckoned them across. ‘You’re right. Of course, you’re right. Look after Eron,’ she said. The words were fatal. Almost immortal, and the shape of the truth that had been occluded in Agloff’s mind for so long had an outline.

Tomas had betrayed his mother to Jask and brought him Eron. But for what?

Revenge perhaps thought Agloff then, against Thawn. He was the handler who had shared that cabin with Andromeda and Tomas. He was the one Jask was so interested in. He was the one who Jask said had wronged him—

Agloff’s father.

—He was the key to everything. That’s why his mother had mentioned Abbadiah Thawn in her letter! The truth in plain sight. There was more to it than this, there had to be. Why was Jask so interested in Abbadiah Thawn’s children? What terrible thing had Thawn done?

*

Again, there was a crackling of static and the scene shifted. The announcer said it was now August of 2712. This was the time his mother went missing, Agloff thought. Or close to it.

Tomas peered up from a book at an oaken desk, lit by candlelight. The gloom of the window betrayed the lateness of the hour. There was a knocking at the door, and he beckoned them to enter.

‘Pisus Om,’ said Tomas and a pasty man slithered in in silvery garb to the chair opposite Tomas, who gestured he sit.

‘You are aware by now the delicacies of the situation? His Lord is most concerned,’ Om said in a high-pitched voice.

‘It is not my fault the boy fell ill, Pisus, though I was sorry to hear it.’ Tomas seemed at greater ease than he ever had. Clearly, he was in great authority. Agloff’s eyes passed from screen to office, and he noted the symmetries between them. The screen was an ancient vision of the very office in which they stood.

‘Obviously,’ Om snapped. ‘We call it winged fever. We have never seen the like.’

The Governor glanced back down to his book. ‘Fascinating. Doubtless you are here to ask something of me, Om, so ask it.’

‘In the meantime, the boy will be placed in moonwater, until such time as there is a cure. His survival is imperative.’

Tomas was taken aback. He straightened himself and pulled a pair of spectacles from his face. He stared hard at Pisus, who was unmoved. ‘I’ve heard about moonwater. It’s a death sentence much as it is salvation.’

‘Only long-term,’ Pisus said matter-of-factly. ‘Hmm. A cruel irony, which is why it won’t come to that,’ he added curtly.

Tomas leaned back once more. ‘Oh?’

‘The boy has a twin brother, does he not?’

Tomas’ stare narrowed. ‘My arrangement with Jask was that I deliver one of Andromeda’s boys. Jask said the other was to be left alone with her. Agloff and Andromeda could live their lives. Whatever your intentions for him, I won’t allow it.’

Smirking, Om rolled his thumb over a device in his hand. At once, the image faltered and hissed. Tomas stare fell into his lap, groaning loudly. ‘Don’t test His patience, boy.’ Tomas raised a hand to the wound on the side of his head. ‘Remember by whose grace you sit in that chair, in this office. Who gave you that title on the door.’

‘I delivered Eron,’ Tomas blustered. ‘And Eron only. That was our arrangement. I did what He asked and was paid for it. I’ve done my job.’

‘Circumstances change like the weather, and you’ve made your feelings for Andromeda Ashborne quite known. She trusts you,’ Pisus mulled. He cast a long stare out into the darkness down the hill and looked back at Tomas.

‘What then?’ the Governor muttered.

‘Write to her, visit her, I don’t care. Get the pair of them here.’

‘I’ve been dead to her three years. You think she’d listen? I’ve told you before where she is,’ he spat, dragging himself up. ‘Get her here yourself.’

Pisus feigned a smile. ‘You think a mother wouldn’t take even the slightest chance to save her child if it came knocking? And besides, she would trust it more from your hand. Anything else and she will suspect treachery.’ He hummed and stood with a terse bow and gestured the device in his fingers. ‘Good evening then, Governor.’ The pitter of rain punctuated their silence. A second time, Om looked out the window, added, ‘On second thought, I think I’ll stay the night.’

The scene fizzled into darkness and the television switched itself off. The six of them exchanged dumfounded stares, thinking of nothing to say. Agloff looked again at the skull in the case and saw burn marks where the ring clung to the temple.

He wondered if Tomas Wise ever did write that letter by his own hand. But now he knew, he thought. What had prompted his mother to leave Backwater all those years ago.

But why did Jask want me, Agloff pondered still, if he had originally meant to leave Agloff in Backwater. Was Agloff meant to be a cure for Eron, a hostage, or wanted for some altogether darker purpose? Answers whirled through his mind, turned into more questions. He had been tempted with fragments of the truth, and at the heart of it all, still, Thawn!

The column of light over the plinth wheezed and flashed to a second one. Inside was a small photograph, an image of a face that looked like his own but wasn’t. It was thinner, sicklier. The eyes were at rest. The stand turned on a turntable and Agloff could make out something ancient scrawled on to the back of the slip: ‘At Eden lies in wait.’ Encapsulated within those words, everything Agloff had ever convinced himself he wanted.

Sure enough, this was a lure. A breadcrumb trail from here to Eden, just for him. Agloff was starting to imagine that Malvo Jask was a showman. This whole lure was theatre. Jask was all too eager to flex his influence, and that made the trap all the more obvious. But this was clearly a man of another world and another time. Perhaps Agloff shouldn’t reason his motives, even if he knew there was a twisted logic to them. But it was also the work of desperation. Jask needed Agloff.

Agloff was sure Jask wouldn’t have left Wilder behind if Eron was dead. If Agloff could survive eight centuries with a gunshot wound, so could Eron with winged fever.

‘Agloff!’ Ariea yelled, and he felt himself pulled back to the here and now. He turned to look at each of them. The only reply he could muster was a nod; his mind was too busy for words. His lips curled in lieu of an apology.

‘Shitting hell,’ Oxford said. He glared Agloff. ‘Your family is messed up, man.’

‘Jask set this up,’ said Ariea, her eyes piercing Agloff, as if he were the only one there. ‘He went to great care, obviously. He knew you’d come. And you’re the one thing he wants more than anything in the world.’

‘Yeah, so?’ quizzed Memphis.

‘Do you think he’d just let us leave?’

Almost as she finished, the lights clicked off and sirens began to shriek. The whole room hissed. Puffs of smoke swelled at their feet and they pushed their way into the corridor, led by Oxford’s torch. Angry shadows writhed up the walls, chasing their ascent. Gas was too slow to kill them, Agloff thought. Unless it had meant to drive them out. Wordlessly, they pressed towards the gloom of day. They flooded over the crest of the staircase, into the entrance hall and through the doorway onto the hill. Agloff looked at Ariea who returned the compliment. He wondered how hard she was repressing the urge to say, ‘I told you so.’

Memphis collapsed and rolled over, pressing his face into the soft ground. ‘That was a terrible idea,’ he moaned.

‘Lady, are you alright?’ Merry gathered the girl in close before she had chance to answer, brushing dust from her cheeks. ‘I think we’ve had enough for today.’ Her usual ethereal good-nature gave way to a stern stillness.

One-by-one, they pressed their gazes on Agloff, but he didn’t care what they had to say. His mind was too overwhelmed, too tired for it. He realised he wanted nothing more in that moment than to bury himself in a duvet. He squatted to the ground and still they delivered him uncertain looks, like he were suddenly half a stranger. Unsure of the correct response, he turned on to his other side, only to jerk to his backside.

He looked up. A bow and arrow were angled squarely in his eyes.

Agloff rolled his neck up to see a young woman staring him down, eyes wide like pebbles. They each raised their hands against the ground in surrender. He could see two more women trail behind, swords at their backs. The girl scanned her prey by the tip of her arrow.

‘Thieves!’ she hissed. ‘You try and steal from this place?’ she said, in an accent Agloff did not recognise. She was tall and well-built, with a greasy main of golden hair strangled into a flat ponytail.

‘We’re not thieves!’ yelled Ariea.

‘You’re dumb ones at the least,’ the girl said. ‘You set off the alarm.’ She herded the six of them to their feet, and bound their wrists in ropes, strung together in a long line. ‘Everyone knows not to come this place.’

Again, Ariea sent Agloff a piercing look but he turned away. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. To look her in the eye was an admission of guilt he could not stomach right now. Instead, he studied his captor, noting neat cuts in the straps of her leather armour. The cuts spelled out the name, ‘Kira’.

Deep within himself, Agloff bowed his head as they were led down the slope from the castle, unsure as to what his reality was anymore. He looked up to tortured skies, struck down in hues of grey and wondered what was going to happen next. He could see a storm gathering after all.