Chris's Place

The following is Bee’s routine:

Each morning she sits on the train for an hour and thirty-five minutes, enclosed in her ivory suit and gold watch, dark hair spilling and coiling over the wedges of her shoulder-pads. She has a briefcase jammed between her thigh and the laminate wall, crammed with printouts in grey columns. If another passenger sits opposite her, they will look at her, and especially if they are male. That means her surface is immaculate.

She turns her gaze towards the train window. It is winter, now; her colourless reflection moves across the pale landscape. She searches for flaws while it is still crisp with the blue night outside, for crannies she has missed with the powder that lies thick as velvet. She finds nothing worse than tresses that have come loose after the comb and trickle down her white forehead. Her hands lie in her draped lap, soft hands with artificial nails.

The winter wind slips along ravines between still façades. Its edges drag across her. She enters the Regis Building, straight-lined in beige sandstone that strives towards the sky. Keys, folders, occasional calls. It feels as though she is packed yards-deep between compact paper. At least it is warm. There is money in this building, but it is less tangible than a breath. It is money that is one click of the finger from not existing at all.

At one occasion, she walks along a corridor, very narrow, from some earlier architectural era: carpeting and air saturated with dust. She is headed for the coffee-maker, because everything in her is screaming for the hot water – the scent of something burnt –, but behind her in the corridor, a couple of humans are talking. She does not know whether they are men or women. The human language is not her native one, and she has to concentrate to make out the words: until then, it is only a buzz. She does not know whether they are talking about her, whether it is positive or negative.

*

A few minutes past five in the afternoon, she clicked her way through the gloomy vestibule and into the street. The air was raw with slush and exhaust. The station house, the train. Strings of dirt from melted snow on soles ran along the carpeting in the aisle.

She hadn’t eaten at midday – she rarely did, on working days –, and now she was so hungry, it took the innards out of her, it took her thoughts. A seller emerged in the far end of the coach with a jangling food trolley. He stopped for almost each passenger, receiving money. If she had thought about bringing something to eat, packed slices of meat that was almost pink underneath the hard cooking surface, rosy flakes of marrow, she would not have had to lose money now. An itch took her, and she clawed at the back of her hip, where the shirt met the waistband of her skirt, to pass some time. The eyes of the passengers across the bolted-down table were like a touch. She scratched until it felt as if her nails had pierced her skin.

The trolley stopped at her row. She squeezed the debit card through her pocket. Her gaze bounced between the shelves, through the glittering wire grid.

“Two pies… two of those, and two ham sandwiches.”

The wrappers rustled when the seller handed them over. A youth in the seat opposite nudged his lady friend with his elbow, covering his face with his arm as he grinned. She was aware of their eyes, so she ate at a comfortable pace, with the wrapper open in a bowl around the contents so that she would not drop one particle of food. The train slid deeper among the hills below the night sky.

*

When she came out of the station, the air stabbed in her throat like ozone, and it felt as though the frost was etching across her skin. She went up the hill through the city: the tram station’s swirls of glass roofs beneath her, a mural of school pupils and football players beneath a happy sun, hotels and office buildings with a cold light in the windows. On the asphalt – black and glittering with wet in the warmer mini-climate of the city – she found a small coin, then another. They were only copper, but new, shining as if they had come out of the mint a day ago. She stuck them in her pocket, patting on the outside to feel that they were there. She heard the little chinking.

She stopped by the cash machine next to a lit corner shop, slid in her card and drew money. The machine gave only three hundred pounds a day, a limitation that the humans had set to ensure that no criminal would be able to flee with all their money. The alien blue light from the screen fell on her face, reflecting in the smooth falls of hair. She stuffed twenty notes in her pocket, striding onward, and onward, beneath the hotel façade, up the snake-bent hill road, past the golf club’s neon sign and the pawnshop that bought electronics, and onward, until the lights grew softer and scattered towards the suburban homes on both sides, and onward, until all that existed was the hillside like a solid blackness on one side and the human city of Sheffield like a nebula beneath the road barrier on the other.

She looked across the distances, the one ahead and the one she had put behind her, and as usual, she got an irrational impulse to brace one foot on the edge and stretch out into the void, neck raised and arms flung out behind her. The immature human voice in her, from many decades ago: What kind of dragon are you that can’t fly? She chuckled, alone in pitch blackness. The cold was like a drill bit against her cheeks.

She smelled the mine entrance before it became visible, a streak of something older and ranker. She took the last ten steps. The opening was covered with wood litter and turf and scrubby brambles, but it fell to the side almost in one piece and exposed it, a long lizard maw in the colourless heath of the hillside.

She slunk in through the crevice, where the air was stuffy and filled with a dense inorganic scent. The hillside vanished around her. She could have made her way without a light source, but there was a little pile of wooden splinters inside the opening, on stones to keep the damp away. She raised one, taking the long lighter out of her briefcase. It crackled, then the flame caught, a narrow curly streak of orange fire. She stuck the splinter between two rounded stones while she pulled the litter back.

Torch held in front, she followed the sloping passage, then climbed downward, like a reversed reflection of her nocturnal walk. Warm red light flickered on the stone, giving it a faceted glitter where there was moisture. The skirt pulled tight around her legs when she had to stretch between two rocks. She could have tossed her clothes here, where no one would have seen, but they retained a little more heat.

The sound quality changed ahead.

The wide, low tunnel she had made her home was not one of the romanticised caverns from dreams, so large, the furthest wall vanished in mist. The portable generator stood by the nearest wall: white-lacquered metal, the fruit of the first two months’ salary. She switched it on, then the heater that stood next to it and a bit askew, again in white metal, like a rambunctious calf next to its mother. The moisture shone on the scratched rock behind them. The metal pinged, and smoky gases sifted into the air, making it flicker above her torch. The fuel tanks, in frosted plastic that gave a hint of the movement of the liquid inside, stood in the opposite corner. Many were still unopened. They enclosed a few weeks’ heat. As the heater warmed up, she heard the distant drip of water, the rhythm that humans had imitated with clocks.

The third piece of machinery in the chamber, again connected to the generator, was heavy like a photocopier, an apparatus for casting polyethylene, transported by van to the top of the road. It was an expense she had not needed to make, but she had never been able to bring herself to regret it.

She shoved the stack of notes into the intake, keyed in the settings – as if she were in the corridor in the Regis Building –, watched the notes getting sucked in, and waited. The hull of the machine buzzed, and the toy-shiny, unviable scent of chemicals mixed with the woodsmoke and exhaust while the polyethylene cured. The warmth added to that which wafted in thick satin waves from the heater.

Her body twitched to put its hands out to the grille and soak up the heat, like a devil in exile who had found a steam vent from the depths of the Earth, but she still had the disguise over her: it would absorb the heat and maybe take damage, lose its shape or craze. She pulled off the suit, folded it on top of the generator, and started peeling off the slack flaps of skin prosthetics. She had lost nails before, and panicked as she searched for them among the rock litter and in the cracks of her bed – only ten, idiotically, if she lost one her disguise was undone –, so she kept her eyes on them. The white-pink patches came away from her scaly hide. She held them pinched in her claws as though they were an abortive slough brought about by illness. It felt like illness, having to live in this, to breathe it, all this soft immature skin.

The blinking flames reflected in her claws as she laid the prosthetics, shapeless like shed snakeskins, on her work clothes, so that the wet would not get to them. The wig, all black hairs the same length, joined them. The light sparkled on her forelimbs. Each scale was a little star point.

The dank air in the heater’s corner was starting to warm up. She opened the laminator, taking out the block, hot and still a bit tacky. The notes lay buried in its clear insides, almost fully smooth and aligned, no folds or rolled corners that she would always be aware of. No human would use them for anything. She kept her claws from its surface as she carried it to her bed. A light on the apparatus shone red. She was going to have to buy more polyethylene rods. More minutes in a shop burning with light, among humans who twisted and stared as though they could feel her foreign surface.

Her bed was irregular, much wider than tall, but no longer insignificant. The dark rock shimmered through the cubes with their flat fossils of notes. She set the latest down, so as not to scratch the fresh surface, then flung the copper coins over the bed, like a human sowing.

She needed to eat, but the cool-box in scarred styrofoam was within reach from the bed. Berus sat up on it, and the mere closeness of the cool blocks started to restore some balance in her, as if they were lowering a fever. The modified plates of scale on her spine and up to her skull ridge, soft and flexible like those on a hatchling wriggling from the shards of eggshell, started to straighten as she reached for the box. Her tender tail stub – itself like an egg for something curled-up – twitched once as her nostrils snatched at the scents. The parts of a jointed cadaver with a matte chestnut coat lay stacked in the box, nearly filling it still. No more hunts for another few nights. She gripped the topmost one, a shoulder, closed the box and pushed it away: the chunk of meat was rounded and sizeable, she was not going to need more tonight, after the cooked food on the train. She gnawed the shoulder to the bone between her forelimbs. The hunger slept again. She was aware of the newest cube behind her and to the right, of the warmth spreading to the furthest wall.

It was evening, not night yet, and sleep would carry her to the next morning, to sit on the train with the loose prosthetics on her body and the scales itching underneath them as though the material had started to poison them. She would have had time to go out hunting – not because she longed for the hunt, her arms and legs were exhausted, but to have an excuse to roam across the hills, beneath the stars. She would have had to pull on her clothes again, it was cold, and each hunt increased the risk of being spotted. The stars were they same colour as her scales, they reflected in them.

Better to stay in the chamber and let herself be drugged by the heat. (The heat that she would have to buy more.) She relaxed, straightening into a better position, and something in her arm stopped pounding. The dreams were another way out into the nocturnal moors.

*

It was another day, perhaps the next. She’d moved through the dusky corridors, and through the train that was another corridor, mobile through the twilit landscape. The humans had dug tunnels and roads the way they had dug the mine system. The dark fell until it was barely possible to tell whether they were rushing through a tunnel or between the distant hills, but the coach was too harshly lit, lit through, a light that would disturb her sleep.

She lost fifteen minutes on going to the office shop, transparent like one of her cubes and lit as though with a single explosion, picking up some cardboard cases rattling with soft polyethylene rods, and standing in the serpentine queue. Nothing happened. Once she was out in the cold, she scratched her upper arm through the blazer, and felt one of the prosthetics hang loose. No one in there could have seen it.

It was later than usual when she made her way up the side of the hill, but the walk eased something in her. The suburban houses further down the hill were only visible as little golden squares, without the dark framework of brick and wood. They lay below her like tossed coins. The wind lay on her and smelled as though it came from somewhere far away, from other moors.

She dragged the litter aside, made her way down the tunnel and into the chamber. She fixed the torch upright and hit the button on the heater.

Something was wrong. She felt it the way she would have felt a malformed scale.

It could not be anything but the bed. Her gaze flitted to it. One of the cubes was gone, was it not? Not a large enough number to alter its shape. She blew out the torch: this you would see better without a light. She felt as it were a sliding and extending of soft parts deep in her long skull as other components, at the back of her eyes, took control.

The nocturnal sight let her see with greater precision. Only one of the cubes was missing: from the outer edge of the bed, on the right long end if you came in from the tunnel, not the freshest one. And here, the scent trail of a human, something that had never entered the mine since she had made her dwelling here: plastic-coated flaps of shoe material, fabric, skin oil, the chemicals on clothes and in hair, fats smeared on skin and lips, perfume. She could almost see the mingled trail, she could sense how it twisted through the chamber.

She ended up standing at the irregular corner of the bed, by the gap where the cube should have lain.

In three days, she would have earned those three hundred pounds again. It made no difference. They would be other notes, and she could have scrounged together three billions and still not have them back.

It had happened after she set off this morning. The scents had not faded greatly – five to two hours, perhaps. They were not quite new, they had stirred a little, she got no clear image of where the hair bordered on the clothes. Maybe closer to five hours than two.

She turned around and ascended to the surface. As she went, she pulled off her mask in one hand, so that nothing would disturb the air currents to her nostrils. She hurried her steps, without running. The few dark openings she passed were pinpricks on the outskirts of her awareness. She cleared the opening and followed the trail out, but it soon unravelled in the frozen night air. She turned her head both ways, the air burning in the tender flesh inside her nostrils, but the unobstructed winds had long since dissolved it. The side of the hill was a black massif behind her.

She was grateful for it, wasn’t she?

She pushed the litter back. She made her way back down, where the heat had started expanding and branching up into the passages and crevices. As soon as she had got the clothes and pieces of prosthetic off, she laid down on the bed, stiff as though she were still standing. The intruder’s smells were still in the room. If she closed her eyes, it would be as though it were still there.

She had an itching sharpness in her brain, and sleep was far away. She let her eyelids quiver down. Her long nostrils, hooked in the ends like calligraphy, drew in the trail, tasting it, as though she might be able to create a reproduction of the intruder, despite those components that had sunk or risen from the right places.

Less than two yards tall, by the humans’ measurements. (About the same height as her own body.) Its height was easy to gauge, its width harder. Young or in the prime of life, agile enough to make its way down the tunnels, alone for sure. Not a child; its head had moved too high. She guessed that it was female: more artificial variables among the scents, shampoo saturated with scent, chemical fats fastening on its lips, deeper secretions different from a male’s.

She had gone deeper than she needed. The human had been sweating, sweat that burnt out the little traces of perfumed antiperspirant. Older sweat had dried to minerals on the fabric – but it had not worn the clothes for more than a day, and they had no traces of soil or wet greenery. It was the salty sweat of long motion or work, and like a cut through it, the bright sweat of tension.

She had been afraid.

Berus raised her head, peering around the tunnel, with her sight and scent. The stolen cube – she could still see the brilliant hollow – had lain a few paces in along the bed: not one of the closest, but not on the far side. She had taken a few steps in from the opening – if Berus concentrated enough, she might be able to count them –, but stayed on the side of the generator and the machinery. She had had a source of light, not one that had given off smoke, but she had not wanted to go around the other side, where the bed lay closer to the bedrock and left less space.

Soft, now. She had stopped one step in, and remained still while she let her gaze trail across everything in the chamber, as did Berus now. She had walked up, scrutinising the heater, the generator, and the laminator – maybe tarried a minute longer by it, until she understood what it was. Not astonished: as far as she knew now, it could not be anything other than a human having its dwelling down here. Her attention had swivelled back to the bed. Berus saw it in glimpses, now with her sense of smell, now with her mind. She had lifted a cube – the grease from her hand had left traces on the surfaces –, but no more. She had put it back, then taken another.

(A human, even a child, would have been able to carry many more.)

She had not gone around the bed, where she would have been cut off if anything had shown in the opening. She had put the mine behind her, with swift steps, heart pecking in her chest and churning her blood, too hurried to turn her head. Her ears had picked up little sounds from the tunnel around her that were just enlargements of the sounds of stone flakes falling from her feet, from the pattern of her soles.

She needed to let her thoughts take it slower, draw fewer conclusions. All she could say for certain was that the human had been afraid – it was written in her pheromones –, which trajectory she had followed across the floor, but not what she had thought.

The human had not been acting out of greed, if it were even possible to use the cubes as currency in human society. (Was it possible that she would return, with like-minded, or with a vehicle?) Why had she even taken one? Curiosity? A challenge?

She settled herself into a more comfortable position, still a bit curled up, on the humped bed. The fatigue was on her, her body was waiting to sink in it, but she realised that she was lying facing the tunnel.

Am I afraid?

She laid her head down on her arms, closing her eyes, but even those motions were like defiance before some larger being in the chamber. To defy the fear was to admit its existence.

She threw herself into sleep as though through an effort of will. Nothing entered her chamber other than the wild dreams.

*

The next day was another work day. She needed to put on the ivory suit and go through the street-light twinkling dark to the railway station, and she could not bring herself to it. She remained standing in her chamber, in the orange light of a torch, in her prosthetics and wig, skirt hanging floppy in her hand.

To try to hide the opening was pointless: she knew where it was now. Even if she were to find a boulder to roll in front of it – and where were there boulders, in these soft lands of pastures for horses and sheep? –, she was weak. The human had not been much smaller than she; would she have to find a rock that was heavy enough to the ounce that only she could move it? She slid her lips back from her teeth a fraction.

For a while, she had had wild thoughts of moving the bed instead: the mine tunnels went deeper, dark, serpentine, half filled with groundwater. The hills were as though eaten by something, maggot-ridden. It would not protect the bed from the human: the mine lay open to it, and she would be in another city, thirty-five miles away. The human would splash through the gloom, a slender little creature, a bug, spun out to a great length like its own shadow. (They were the ones who had gnawed through all mountains in the land; the tunnels were made for them.)

Even if the cubes would have been safe down there, if she had been able to find a den that would hide them, she would have needed several hours, hours she did not have. She even tried lifting an armful of cubes. She was not too weak to carry them, but there was a limit to how many her arms could hold. They would slide out of her grip and perhaps vanish in crevices of blackness. If she then had to climb down shafts where she would need her forelimbs – no.

If it had been possible, would she have carried them all up again tonight, or would she have had to make that hiding-place her own?

She vacillated between the possibilities, and the next time she looked at the watch, it was too late to make it to the train, and the decision had been made for her.

She sat on the bed, curled up, one arm around her knees, head low and turned towards the opening. If anything moved up there, it would wake her, but her body did not need to sleep. She had switched on the heater again, intoxicating smoky heat flooded the chamber, but she had little more than one meal’s worth of meat left. She would manage one or two days, for sure, without food.

Did she think the human would give up when those days were over?

She waited, in silence. At one point came a sound, and her head jolted up as if from a real injury. It did not return. It was only a stone that had fallen higher up in the tunnel, after years of slow draught.

When she got hungry, she went to the cool-box. There was less food there than in her memory: she had interpreted the swivelled shape of a thigh as more food than it was. She was close enough to feel the scents. She could eat some of it now and save the rest for the next meal, or eat it all and make her next plan while she was sleek and agile. If she had eaten it all last night, she would not have had to make that decision now.

*

She waited. Day moved above the mine. When she imagined the world outside, it was small and enamelled, like a clockwork she had seen many years ago: a rayed sun twitching across the dome of the sky, bringing day with it, then a crescent moon that bore a field of night.

If the human had dared to come within sight, she would have told it: come then, take my treasure, touch it, do it before my eyes. Her body was soft, of equal thickness, a pale lizard of the woods, but she would win that fight. She couldn’t leave her network of tunnels. The bed was like one of her vital organs, one that she needed to watch, because it was outside her.

*

She slumbered, so close beneath the surface, she would have felt an intruder in the chamber as if within her own body. Her body economised its strength, it realised there was nothing it could do, but when she woke for good, she had started feeling a venomous weakness in her entrails. She was not dying, she was not even hurt from the hunger, but the weakness was not going to let up. She would wake up a little slower, with a little more slicing pains in her belly, until there came the point where she needed to hunt and was no longer able.

That decided her. She was going to get out, take a cow or a horse from a paddock, and return within the hour. A human would not have time to bring much of the pile outside, any more than she would.

She switched off the heater. She rubbed on the prosthetics, dressed, and put on the wig: it was necessary if a human were to spot her, and the false hair and pieces of skin held the cold a bit further at bay. When she was finished, she made her way up through the passages. The distance grew between her and the bed, the bed that she would leave unguarded, and yet she felt a strength in having made one first decision. The strength mingled with the ache of hunger, hurrying her steps.

When she reached the uppermost tunnel, she got a notion that the human had been here, again. She stood still, letting her nostrils tremble open. There was nothing; the original scent trail was barely perceptible. Nothing could hide a smell. Not even visual impressions were as reliable.

She pushed the litter to the side. Outside was the black sky; the lampposts were far enough that one could see the little diamond sprinkle of the stars. The air had a smoky scent, one that might be the scent of winter itself and had not risen out of a fire, and was like a splintered edge scraping across her scales. If she had not been starving, she would have righted the branches again and withdrawn to her chamber and the heat of the petrol burner.

Something glimmered ahead.

A sapling grew on the roadside behind the barrier fence, where the rough year-old grass hung waving over the steep incline to the valley. It was a birch sapling, no more than some year old, but she could not make head or tail of what was lodged in the cleft of the branches. It split the street light like a raindrop large enough to rest in one’s paw. She took a step to the side, and what she had thought was part of the trunk was dark outlines, straight or curled, in the object’s transparent insides. It was the polyethylene cube.

She took a step towards it, two, three, down in the folded grass.

She fell face-first, palms in the grass, her head some foot away from the barrier. Blood exploded out of her calf, pattering on the earth. After a moment, her arms gave under her and the ground slammed into her belly, with a new crunching impact in her leg. Her face was open, not in a scream, in the struggle to breathe in again. All air had shot out of her. Her mouth was a wide black crevasse.

What had happened:

Her shoe in black patent leather had landed on a pressure plate, releasing a spring sturdier than her thumb. The two heavy steel jaws of the trap slammed shut, high above the shoe’s collar, meeting in her calf. The bone was smashed in the juncture. She lost control of her bladder. The jaws squeezed her calf muscles together and ballooned them outward, then her blood hissed out of the severed arteries, through her skin that hung in flaps. Droplets landed sizzling on blades of grass dry with frost, thawing them with their moisture. Her trouser leg was saturated and thickened with blood, above and below the encompassing wound.

She got no air. Her field of sight had softened and blackened around the edges, but she was conscious. She should have lost consciousness – it would have been better to lose consciousness –, but a sound, an odd yipping howl, like something large trying to imitate a fox in the night, made her turn her head. Her neck crunched, as if it was it that was damaged.

A human figure stood a dozen paces away, motionless. It was hard to see it. The world blinked, though her eyes were open and felt the sandpaper dry cold: it darkened and returned in a pulse that might be the same as that in her body. It was a female human, splinter thin, with a white face and black hair. She held something long and thin in her hand, angled outwards from her body. A long needle or a knife. Whatever it was, it was only reflections on the nocturnal darkness above the valley.

The world faltered and returned. The pain was growing fainter, sinking the many miles towards the bearable. It was her body that was weakening and could no longer contain it. It was good. She was going to lose consciousness, she needed to lose consciousness. She had expected the human female to be gone the next time her sight sharpened, but she kept her outlines, not like a vision. Had she taken one step closer or back? The wet tarmacked road where she was standing lay a bit lower, Berus could not see her feet. She was clad in white, of course she was clad in white.

Berus’ head trembled and fell down on the frost, then jolted back up again. Her head tottered, as if she were no stronger than a hatchling. Her pulse was weaker now, and she had begun to experience a sickening vertigo that howled in her ears; the heat had started seeping from her body. The woman in the road was not some allegorical reflection of her human disguise: she wore a cream white winter coat, her black hair was flatter and shorter, her face had other geometries. She was something real, something where claws could find purchase and draw out the wetness, something with lengths of bone that could snap through the flesh.

“Help me!” Berus called.

Her voice cracked and became shrill. The human staggered closer.

She still did not know. She could not see whether Berus was a human – and what would she do if she had broken the leg of a human? She would go, and call for help, and vanish, but she had not done it yet.

“Help me,” Berus said again. “Why… did you…”

She needed to force enough energy into her voice for it to reach her. She did not know whether she managed. The hearing had drained from her. She tilted her head, gaze on the woman. A human would have been able to smile, maybe even now when all her face muscles and jaw trembled, but all the prosthetics sat across her face and became a visor.

She looked back down her body to the trap. It was black iron. The blood was black under the lamppost. If she crawled one foot forward, she would drag it with her and it would snag on every irregularity.

She raised her head. The woman was closer. She closed her eyes, as if she could make it go faster by hurrying up the rhythm of dark and light.

Her brain snatched for something.

“You don’t have to call the hospital,” she said. “Just open the trap. Then… I’ll be good.”

The pain had hammered and racked her voice until it no longer sounded like she. Perhaps it never would. She managed a poisoned smile. It failed, pulling towards the earth.

The woman stepped closer. She was so close now, her steps were audible over her lungs. Every time a sole pressed down the frosty grass, there was a little papery sound.

She had thought – she had no strength left for thoughts. She let her head thump down. The ground smelled of iron and soil. The grass was not as cold as she had expected. Her temperature had started to even out with the ground’s.

It was a little sound that yanked her eyelids up, a little inhale or exhale. She twisted her head upwards. The woman felled the knife towards her, towards the ripe flesh of her throat, flashing bright as though it reflected the sun.

Her wig or a prosthetic had slipped aside.

The blade fell, almost parallel to her upturned neck, striking a pain that was a little shining spark compared to the leg. But she sucked in a breath, she got air, the artery was not open. The edge had bounced and dented on her scales.

The human was not prepared for hard skin. She drew a scraping gasp that sounded like a word, and punched the knife down again with both hands. Berus rolled to the left and the edge only slid across the side of her neck. Before the human had had time to straighten up, Berus grabbed her wrists.

Even now, when so much had pumped out of her, she was stronger. One yank, then the human was half on her knees, half slumped over her. The monochrome light made her face a white mask with black openings to the other side. The cap of black hair was just a void. She yelled out, not for help, just from surprise or pain. (They were miles from anything that might hear.) The knife had fallen somewhere in the shadows and was unreachable as the moon. The human fought, spitting, to pull her hands free, then swivelled her body and tried to stamp a boot down on Berus.

It went quickly after that. She put her forelimbs around the woman’s face. Her muscles convulsed and swelled up as she jerked to the side. She heard the sliding of white cartilage in the rupture, then a branch-dry crack of neck vertebrae.

The woman did not move after that. She coughed, her white eyes bulging out, then lay still. The pain came over Berus like something greater and more savage, a predator for which she was a human or a calf. She struggled for breath, and the pain took her when she breathed, and when she held her breath. She must not scream – but perhaps she had screamed, perhaps she had no more control. The world was gone, far below her.

The pain was weaker now, slower. There was not so much left of her that was able to feel.

She needed. She needed to look at her leg. More crunched and splintered as she manoeuvred herself to a position where it was in front of her. She looked at the leg and only felt two jolts of a slow chilling nausea along the insides of her cheeks and down her gullet. (It was all her body could manage, now.) It was only a shapeless ruin, red flesh and fabric that were equally separate from her. Only the crushed bone held her tied to the trap. It was thicker than she had expected. She had not known how anything looked, inside the walls of the flesh.

She ripped off the prosthetics on her forelimbs to have them out of the way, then gripped the flesh with both hands. It was wet under the pads of her palms. She wanted to destroy it, as much as she could of it, as if it too were an enemy.

She had thought it could not hurt more to force her way out through the pain, but the first ripping jerk made her vision black out. More than black out: the thin dark veil got a pattern of stars with every yank, as if it were true night.

She gasped and gasped and found no new resources of strength. She prised again. The black starry sky was encircled by her kin, those who could fly. They sailed like sparks from beacons.

The bone stump was loosened now, but it was not over there. She had to drag the woman’s body with her into the mine, though it weighed almost as much as her own. (Perhaps it weighed more now.) She tore off much of her soft shirt and bandaged the leg’s end. She left the body slouched in the entry tunnel and came back for the meat, the meat that had been part of her. The trap was not locked to anything, it was just pressed into the soil with frosty iron spikes. An instinct made her drag it through the opening as well, leave nothing where a human might see it. Last, she took the cube. At some point, it had fallen out of the branches. It was so small, she put it in her blazer pocket.

She crawled down into the chamber, the human’s body tossing randomly and knocking against corners behind her. The heat had not had time to dissipate much; the room was like a volcanic chimney. She experienced something other than pain. She let the cube thump into its old spot. Everything was taller around her like this. From this vantage point, down on the stone, one could not see the red light on the heater.

She ate, she filled her stomach until it bulged, and when she fell in a slumber, she welcomed it, in case she might see the long-bodied flyers around the horizon again.

*

She did not know how many nights went by after that. She ate, and fell asleep like losing consciousness, an intoxicating plunge into the void. She had just enough strength to crawl further down the tunnel to relieve herself. At one point, she woke with a crashing cough – the long time on the deep-frozen ground – that made her lungs come up with fluid. Yet, her body was too strong to die. The swaddling-cloths around the stump were pitted with blood, but the next time she loosened them, her leg was covered in rough scab inside them. The blood flow was staunched, next it would heal. Her mouth was full of smeary breast fat and stringy meat, but her body dragged her across the border of life, whether she would or not.

She sat up on her bed. The phlegm rattled deep in her lungs, but they, too, had started to recuperate. Her leg had healed so far that the new bandage was still clean. It had healed with a section of bone jutting out of the cut surface: the only thing showing that it had been an appendage. The woman’s body, that she had left out on the floor, was not much more than rags of clothes and skeleton except in the ends of the extremities, and when it ran out, she would not be able to hunt again. A human would have been able to go down to the hospital: a crutch, a prosthetic leg. She had recovered only to sit here awaiting the hunger that would become starvation.

Something sparkled on the woman’s rubbery left hand: a ring with a square blue stone. It sang in her brain. She pulled it off. It squeezed her finger, but got past the joint.

Her body could not imagine the hunger as long as its stomach was full. She twitched on one side of her body as she straightened up, and headed upwards. She had lost so little of her leg. As long as she had walls to grab on to, she could limp ahead almost as quickly as she had walked. Perhaps she might still find prey, slower individuals, enough to keep herself alive. She forced the thought back.

A raw draught seeped through the opening, and she saw a streak of pearl grey sky. She had left the opening unprotected. (Her only pursuer was dead.) She came up and stood in it, one hand gripping the chill-dank concrete frame.

It was late morning and had rained. The asphalt and grass before her were washed clean, there was not so much as a petal-sized spot of blood, but she could feel the smell in the soil. On an impulse, she hopped up to the bend to look for the imprints of the trap’s spikes, but could not find them. The soil had unfrozen and the straws bent in the rain.

She raised her head. Something dark moved on the road below, so small and dark, it first made her think of a beetle. It was a car. She looked at it until she was able to tell that it was moving upwards.

Her heart beat the way she could not remember it had during the nocturnal struggle. It crashed in her chest. She glanced the other way, where the litter lay: slick rotting branches, crumbling wood, all scattered. She still had time to gather it to something that adhered. Fatigue pulled at her chest, but she could do it. Gather it, drag it before the opening, and retreat down to her bed in the dark. The human was not heading for her, it did not know that she was here.

And why? What did she have left to fear?

She turned to the opening, heading back through the tunnel, as fast as she could. She did not cough, but her lungs were as though shrunk after the infection; several times, she had to stop to breathe.

She emerged in the chamber. Now, she needed to disguise herself again. She rubbed on the prosthetics – only one was too torn to use –, screwed the wig right on her head, checked in the reflecting glass on the laminator that all locks lay right. She wasted a little of the water in the tank on washing her sleek new face.

She had a change of clean clothes, cream white. She put them on, and still she heard nothing in the tunnel. The trouser leg unfolded and rippled almost to the floor – clean –, as if her ankle and foot had got a ghost.

She made her way to the opening again. Her ribcage had stopped twitching with the phlegm, as though her body needed to collect itself for a new battle.

She got out on the asphalt. The air was damp and springlike. The car stood by the bend in the road. It was not getting closer. A thin, dark bipedal figure had come out of it and was heading for her. The cold made her leg hurt – not her leg, but the cut surface that was nothing but scab. The ache disturbed her equilibrium; it was stronger than the fear.

The human had seen her; it hunched up a little running the last stretch. She stood waiting for it to get closer, so that this damp-cold stage would be over. Her new asymmetrical body leaned, putting more weight on the left arm that propped her up.

It was close now, maybe twenty paces away. It wore bulky trousers and a dark jacket. Its hair hung shaggy behind the ears, and its colouring and age resembled the woman, but it was sturdier in all limbs, as if it were her brother.

His expression changed when he got closer. He was not much taller than she, but heftier. Now she needed to be able to read their emotions, now that she did not have the energy. He opened his mouth, and she understood their language.

“Oh…” he said, “have you, have you seen a girl up here… a bit younger than you?”

Breathlessness made his voice stutter. After a few moments, he went on:

“Her name was… is Lilah, she has black hair, a bit short, almond-shaped brown eyes… white coat. Early twenties, twenty-three, not that it’s easy to tell…” He was speaking quickly, as if he too felt a pain that wanted to force him back into the warmth. “Her parents said her workplace’d called this Monday, Monday morning, and said she hadn’t been in…. I went to her flat to look…”

She wanted to know what he was seeing in her face, whether he could make out any sign of weakness, or whether it was armoured and tower-like and as unreadable as his was for her. Now she drifted. Past his shoulder in the scratched jacket, she saw the spot where she had lain in the trap, where her leg had been a leash that she had had to struggle with, then the drop. Her thoughts floated in and out between each other, and she would never be able to bring them to any logical sequence again.

“You haven’t seen anyone at all?” he went on.

He slumped a little, he became smaller.

“I can take you to her,” Berus said.

She raised her hand so that he could see the violet blue stone on her finger. No sun was visible through the overcast, yet a thread of sunlight sparked in it, like in the stones that seafarers had used to track the sun’s position on a grey day.

The man twitched, as if he had been hit by a gust of wind that did not reach her. For a moment, he looked close to tearing the ring off her – and she would not have been in a state to defend it if he had –, then he staggered backwards, as if he had.

“Please, where is she?”

Berus stood still. She could feel her lips a bit parted.

“I can take you to her,” she said, “if you do something in return.”

The man sounded as if he were trying to gasp for breath.

“It is my fault,” he said. “I… we were never a couple. I told her I would become her partner if she did something for me… a challenge. If I thought you would believe me, I would tell you that I… I never thought she would do it.”

He was silent for a moment, while his mouth struggled. He held out his hands, bare palms upwards.

“She found… a white scale,” he began. His voice caught so much, at first she thought he was speaking a different language. “She said she was going to find… it. She took it with her, I don’t have it.”

He fell silent and breathed in, many times. His eyelids were almost closed. If she acted now, perhaps she would be able to knock him over, and force him backwards over the edge. The opportunity was past. He might have survived the fall anyway.

“I’ll do whatever you ask,” he said. “Just bring me to her.”

They went to his car. She lay on her back under him, the way humans mated. Her trousers lay tangled around the space where her lower leg should have been. If he noticed the wound, he said nothing. Several times during the mating, his gaze darted to the ring, as if it were it and not she who did this. Or else she only imagined that it did.

In the meantime, her body digested Lilah’s flesh, which was about to become her flesh.

*

It was dark again, in the mine and outside, as if the vault of the sky was only a larger cave. Lilah’s man was gone. She lay on her bed again, down below. The heater was switched on, and she imagined she could feel a new spark of warmth deep in her womb, though it was far too early. Something had taken root there, and would live.

She looked down at her upper body as if the flesh were transparent, just a reliquary. What did a reliquary care about having all appendages intact?

When night fell at sea, it was more total. Denny’s motorboat bobbed in the middle of a sphere of velvety darkness. It had clouded over, there were no stars to show where the sea ended. Only off to the south-west was a little galaxy of lights. Ylva guessed it was Västervik.

She stood, lower arms resting on the chilly railing, in night air that made the little hairs on your arms stand on end. Some might have wanted a cigarette in this pose, even if they’d never smoked. Here in the dark, the sea – even if it was just the Baltic, hedged about with landmasses – was a science-fiction world, a dream of journeying further. It was separate from the reality of sharing a two-room boat with two others, the arguments about who would do the cooking, the awareness of the septic tank whenever you had to use the toilet in the closet where your knees wedged the door open.

A sole pressed against the deck, and a moment later Justin was next to her, a potato chip in his hand. Another one crunched between his teeth. The smells travelled far in the almost scentless air over the water: sour cream and onion.

“A bit chilly to be standing here without a coat,” he said.

Every time he cared for her, or not even that, was polite, she wanted to think that it meant something more. So fucking idiotic, Ylva. She fought for the hope as much as against it, she burned energy on not saying anything.

It was a couple of years since she’d told him she was into him, while they were in university. After that she’d forced it down, for friendship’s sake. It meant that she had to continue pressing it down, every day they spent together.

“Not just yet,” she said. “I might have to put my coat on soon.”

Her clumsy voice left a gap in the conversation. He stood in the light of the deck-house. If she turned her head, she would see his golden profile, and she wouldn’t be able not to stare.

If she’d turned her head, she might have spotted something.

“Denny is getting married,” he said. “To Irja.”

He said it as if he was only now realising it. Something in his voice was scraped raw.

“Starting to feel the mid-life crisis, Justin?”

It sounded stupid and crude. Above the mainland something blinked, a star or a plane.

She looked at his hand as it went into his pocket. A moment later she heard his jaws grind something else, thicker, maybe a Dime bar.

“I wish I’d talked to him,” he managed.

That was the point where little pieces fell into place: the way he’d fallen silent when Denny talked, the way he wouldn’t look at Denny, the same way she wouldn’t look at him.

What she felt was closest to freedom. Justin was gay, she didn’t have any possibility to win him. Love had no more power over her.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

She’d been about to say “talk to him now,” but what would that achieve? Irja was on the mainland. She hadn’t been able to take time from her doctoral thesis to go with them. She hadn’t deserved this, and Denny wasn’t going to leave her, not when they’d come this far.

She shook her head. A long strand of hair tickled on her neck.

“Talk to him. You’ve been friends since first grade. Be honest, it’s better than hiding things.”

She could have put her arm around his shoulders, now that it was allowed. It was still only a couple of minutes away. (If she had, what would have happened?)

Justin made a noise. It made her look up. He was glossy-eyed and so flushed, it made his profile almost spongy, impure. If she touched his skin, it would sizzle. Drunk, that explained his behaviour. He must have topped up his glass after she went on deck.

He didn’t say anything more, but vanished down the hatch.

Ylva stayed. There were no sounds here, no night birds at sea, and they were too far from any other boats. The blackness might have been a nocturnal forest around them. When she got home, she might look up how long she’d have to save to buy a boat. It wasn’t so bad, being able to raise anchor and set out, even on an inland sea, even with piss and shit building up in the tank. She was going to miss these days. A selfish thought, when it had ended like this.

She heard a sound, a fleshy slap. It made her lean over the railing, looking down to where the hull met the water. She switched on the light of her phone, sweeping it downward. The sound returned. The wind had fallen with night, the black waves were one hand tall. She couldn’t see anything other than the reflections of the beam. There was nothing in the depths below, nothing slapping against the hull. It didn’t sound wet. The only thing that would sound like that would be if there were a lump of dense thumping flesh down there.

She headed for the light in the hatch. If Justin and Denny had been talking, she would have heard them. Instead, she heard the thump again. It was no longer possible to ignore.

She climbed down into the short wood-panelled hallway, warmly lit. The galley and control room were ahead, and the bunks to the right, where it was dark.

“Denny?” she said.

She barely recognized her voice.

The sound came from the doorway on the right. She glanced inside. Justin and Denny were on the floor, Justin’s head above Denny’s, the shadows over them blending them into a single body. She ought to have backed away, and yet she stayed.

Justin raised his head a couple of degrees, fixing his gaze on her. His face was just the whites of his eyes and a light-lined cheekbone. He was trying to say something – it sounded like he was trying to say something, but it came out thick, just a retch, a sob. He thrust his hips into Denny again, and Denny’s head whipped and bashed face-first into the footlocker beneath the bunk.

“For fuck’s sake!” she yelled, thought she yelled, grabbing Justin’s shoulders and trying to wrest him off.

Justin shook himself free, bending his face towards Denny’s back. She drew her fist back and punched him. The angle was too bad to do any damage. Justin’s head snapped to the side, but he kept going as if he hadn’t noticed. His face was above a tear in Denny’s shirt where the pallor of skin showed. He had a strip of something pale between his teeth.

She just wanted to put an end to this. She wasn’t wearing anything on her feet. She would have kicked otherwise. There was a floor lamp out in the dining room, a fluted tube with a heavy floor plate. If she turned her back to them, and went out into the yellow light of the deserted dining room, and still he hadn’t reacted, her sock-clad feet padding on the lino, making light little noises when the sweat made them stick.

The plug thudded on the floor when she pulled it out. She moved back towards the bunk room.

Justin raised his eyes from the thing under him and in the next moment he’d leapt towards her, on all fours, not like a human. She only had time to see it. The lamplight blackened above her, and that body slammed into her, driving her back. The back of her head smacked into the bathroom door with a dry-wood noise. She didn’t feel any pain, she didn’t feel anything, but she was on her back, only her head and shoulders wedged upright against the door. Her hand couldn’t feel the lamp-stand now.

Justin stood over her, his fly open, nothing visible, with a look that didn’t belong in his face. It was illuminated, beatific. He hadn’t done anything yet. He seemed to totter, or was it the surface of her eyeballs that couldn’t keep its integrity?

“Justin, do you hear me?”

That alone made her winded. She was trying to reason with it, as if it were Justin.

It glanced between her and Denny, silent on the floor.

Ylva twisted around, planting her palm in the lino. The lamp was to the left, the hatch to the right. She chose the hatch. Justin, the form, flung itself after her. She felt its fingers through her T-shirt. For a moment she could feel the body on her back while its momentum carried them in the same direction. Then she slammed into the ladder in front of it, feeling her ribs buckle.

The air had gone out of her between the varnished rungs and its weight. She didn’t know whether she would be able to inhale. She tasted blood, without knowing what she’d bashed. That being was pressed against her back, she couldn’t breathe anything except its smell, she tasted it in her saliva. It hadn’t started yet. Its fingers felt her shoulder-blades. They were clumsy, like something that had frozen and not thawed to the right shape.

She started hauling herself up the ladder, as if she could pull herself free in that direction.

Something jabbed into her, into the long fleshy muscle that stretched down across her back. It stained the fabric of her shirt, and she didn’t know how deep it had gone or whether it could still be fixed.

Now she screamed, still more a yell of anger. It didn’t help, it didn’t drive it back an inch. She pushed back from the ladder with one foot. The pressure of flesh against flesh gave a little, without letting up. It was hard to get space, she didn’t have more than a few inches between him and the wall. She felt the hard surface of a kneecap under her heel. Another kick, and it gave a hissing gasp and fell away.

She climbed like you do in dreams, with just a little slot of clarity between fields of shining haze above and below, with hands that seemed to slip as often as they caught. It was just below her, enough inches away that she couldn’t kick at it without having to stop, but it was okay. She wasn’t trying to outrun it.

She stumbled out on deck beneath the black sky. They lay immobile, the sea in all directions around them. It went for her ankle as she got out of the hatch, and she felt its nails slipping, but it didn’t catch hold.

Her feet pounded on the deck boards, louder than any other sound here. The railing lay before her, then blackness. She didn’t have a weapon. The deep outside the railing would have to be her weapon.

She danced around – and if it wasn’t coming, would she have to lure it to her? – but it was emerging from the hatch. She didn’t have to look straight at it, it was enough to glimpse its – Justin’s – yellow hair and red-striped shirt, two irritating infections on her retinas. She was one step away from the railing, or two. If she kept backing away, would it catch on? (How much did it understand?)

It took two leaps across the deck, three, she could see its toes splay against the dim boards with every bound, and then it was on her. The force of its leap shoved her against the railing, but her lower back was pressed against it and she kept her footing.

This was where she’d wanted it, but it was heavier and taller than she. It wasn’t trying to pull her away from the railing: it was happy having her here. It sniffed her with its wet muzzle, like some drugged shadow-memory of being nuzzled by a friendly animal at a farm. She stared past its chest, towards the hatch and the yellow lantern and the blackness on the other side. She wasn’t getting enough air, her ribcage wasn’t expanding properly. It bent its head over her, drooling. Its saliva had a smell. It dripped on her shirt and cooled in her hair. The longer she waited, if she waited to the very last moment of safe return, the less prepared it would be. (But she was making the assumption that it thought like a human.)

She felt rows of teeth close around her ear, around the upper cartilage-slick part. It tore downward with two kinds of pain, the bloody one and the shrieking one in the middle ear.

To the left. She twisted and tore free and got it between herself and the railing. She locked arms around its waist, as low as possible, get its centre of gravity off the ground. If it had kicked now, it might have hit her chest or her stomach and knocked her onto the deck, but its legs barely moved. She took a step forward, almost placing it on the railing, and pushed upward with her arms, manoeuvring it over the edge.

Both hands hooked in her shirt. It ought to have torn. She ought to have thought to throw her arms up, and maybe the shirt would have slipped off her. Now the deck was dropping away under her soles, her breasts and waist were pulled over the railing’s thick profiled edge. She put her hand out, unseeing, and felt the edge, but she was moving too fast, the edge only hurt her fingers without slowing her. Now she fell in the dark, head first.

The surface shattered around her. It was blackness, as if this were something other than water. She sank and didn’t know which way the air was, if there was still air.

But it was still only August, the sea water was chilly rather than cold. She surfaced with only a bit of a sting in her throat. All her clothes sopped up water, the tee became large and entangling around her. The water was warmer over her right shoulder where the blood from her ear pumped out. The hull of the boat was one body-length away. She paddled towards it, and now she heard it speak, halfway under water, halfway just bubbles:

“Ylla Yvla wet down in wet soft tummy I and and Ylla...”

She couldn’t outswim it; it would follow her as long as it needed to. Out here there were no weapons, everything was soft except fingernails and teeth. She cast around and pressed her hands down over its head, fingers under its wet tangled locks, and crawled over it to press its head down with her own bodyweight. Its nails slid into soft areas of her abdomen, she felt the sea water in the wounds. It wouldn’t get better if she let go now, so she panted with every jab and lay still. The only things that were left were the warm pounding in the side of her head and Justin’s locks that had been twisted into wire around her fingers.

The body jolted. For a moment it fought with doubled strength, then it heaved in a cough, the movements slowing and stopping. Ylva remained lying across it in the blackness. She could count: two minutes below surface, then it would have to be dead. That would have killed her. It was filling up with water, it was starting to slip underneath. She twisted and kicked and got off it, and her splashing was the only sound over the sea. On her way to the boat, her hand glided through a cloud of something finger-warm and stinking, something other than the blood. She felt as if she was about to throw up herself. She couldn’t remember how long it was since she’d eaten; her body felt bitter and scraped clean on the inside.

The long sweeping hull was in front of her. It was darkness in the darkness, she was only aware of it from how the little waves sounded different up ahead. She groped with a wet hand across the slick surface, and she wouldn’t have been able to climb it even if she and the wood had been dry – enough sweat in her palms to give a good grip, rubber-soled shoes that caught on the wood –, even if the water had been a surface to stand on.

She swam around the boat for a ladder or a rope, and there hadn’t been any, and still she had to. It was too dark to see. She swam another lap, and this time she trod water after each stroke and reached up in the air. It was enough to drug her brain for a while longer. (She didn’t know whether she’d gone clockwise or counter-clockwise. She’d become the protagonist in an Edgar Allan Poe story whose brain no longer had a grip on directions.) Her nerves convinced her that she could feel the swaying draft of a rope-end, just an inch in front or behind.

Denny’s boat, warm firm boards under your feet, yellow light and blankets in the bunks, the control room, all was on the other side of the moon or the galaxy.

She located the pearl-string of lights to the west and started swimming. After having swum – a few body-lengths – she stopped and yelled, wordlessly. There were no lanterns in sight, but the whole hemisphere of air lay open around her, so she yelled until she was lightheaded.

She set out again. The water grew colder around her, the waves drove her off course. She couldn’t feel her fingertips any more, and the side of her head was cold and numb. Her arms were going to grow tired, then lose sensation, then she would go under the surface and vomit and inhale water. But there were swimmers who had swum more than ten kilometres, who had swum across the English Channel. A salty wave washed up above her nose. You could bleed out from having your ear cut off. Maybe she would pass out from it and not have to feel when the surface went over her.

The wounds in her back muscles and the remnants of her ear had started throbbing. In her mind, she saw them as fluorescent stripes of red and yellow, as if new tissues had become visible beneath the skin. They would glimmer through the water. Maybe it was starting to give her a bit of strength.