Revolving Door: Volume 2
Frostbite - II
Content warnings (may contain spoilers):
This chapter depicts heavy alcohol use and decaying corpses.
Orobelle carries the weight of the world in her eyes as she beckons the team back together. “Vesper, Hong Yi, Honourless, you triangulate ahead,” she mutters. “Dorian, Marcia, with me.” After a long pause, she finally pulls the corefinder from the pocket of her bag, and holds in Vesper’s direction. “Guard it with your life.”
“Well, if you insist,” Vesper answers, dusting her hands on her shirt.
Stepping in among the circle of travellers, Hong Yi's voice fills the silence. “We probably don't have a lot of landing options in the Fallout World next door,” he says. “Could Honourless take us to, let's say…Perth? I don't know much about Perth, to be honest. It’s a city on the west coast of Australia, far off from everything, and I doubt it’s getting nuked anytime soon. All the better if Honourless can find us a nuclear bunker—a sealed chamber under the ground.”
It is knowing only that much about the destination—that it is a west coast city with a monosyllabic name—that Honourless takes her two allies by the hands. Without a word, she draws in a deep breath, and strains, and plucks them off the face of the world, into that interstitial universe of lines. Light races past unwaveringly, lengthening into strings, and as they do, Vesper closes her eyes.
*
When at last the colours snap away, they leave…nothing. A pitch-black starless dark.
Briefly Vesper wonders if she’s forgotten to open her eyes. But two blinks later, the perfect darkness persists.
Then the stench hits—it presses on them, so thick they start to gag. She stumbles about, and hears the shouts of her allies, until she kicks something soft, and freezes. She has felt it before.
“Corpses,” she mutters. “Room's full of them.”
Hong Yi gags again—then a soft thump as Honourless catches him, spitting a slew of admonishments. Meanwhile Vesper opens her palm, and lets an electric arc dance across the tips of her fingers, illuminating—
—faces. Hands. Piles and piles of people, some crumpled in poses so seemingly alive that she would believe them asleep, if not for the missing limbs and eyes, and visibly decaying blackness around their wounds, staunched by the cold. She swallows, beating away the memory of the river under Gerjen Bridge…
A pile of corpses is strewn all the way to a closed door on the far wall. Above it, a tiny green sign draws her eye, but what little she can make out is incomprehensible. “I don’t think this is Perth,” murmurs Vesper. “There’s writing on a sign, but I can’t make it out, it’s…maybe an Asian language, but I can't say which.”
She plucks the corefinder from her pocket and holds it as close to the arc as she can without the current jumping. She watches for the needles that settle. It is not like reading a compass, so many points crossing, each tip marked in a different colour. But soon enough she can discern that one has settled pointing at her, and another at Hong Yi.
A third settles not long after, pointing past the wall to their left…
Just as Hong Yi stumbles to her side and grabs her arm with eyes welded shut, her gaze falls upon a row of screens, gleaming dimly in her arc light.
“Y…you tell me where to go,” he groans. “I’m not opening my eyes until we…”
“Do you know how to use a computer?” she asks.
“Yeah? Why?”
Vesper starts to drag him along, and he stumbles, finding his footing, and yelps when it collides with a cold elbow. As they shuffle past arms and legs, she kicks his shoes to guide his steps out of the way. “Almost there,” she says, eyes flicking to the desks and their screens. “Alright. There’s a chair to your left.” He kicks to his left, and one foot collides with its wheels, making it roll a foot away. “It’s…a little farther to your left now.” She clutches his shoulders and steers him towards the wayward seat.
The chair looks like something out of a sci-fi novel, molded from a single piece of plastic. She shoves him down onto the cushioning. He lands with a shout of her name and whirls back, eyes flying open, then snapping shut at once with another yell. Vesper sighs. Honourless, leaning against the far wall, gives a little chuckle.
She rolls the swivel chair back into place, Hong Yi tucking his feet in above the wheels. She rotates him to face the screen. “All right, open your eyes.”
He does so. There is a terminal in front of him, and he immediately starts taking stock, reaches for a button on the tower, and gives it a push.
It clicks. Nothing. He pushes it again. It takes him two attempts before he says, “Uh, could you check under the table to see if the thing’s plugged in?”
She kneels to the ground and nudges a cold hand out of the way. There’s the plug, and there’s the switch. It appears to be turned on, but she flips it anyway. Another click of the power button garners no answer from the machine.
“Okay…uh…could you get the plug and tell me how many pins it has?”
She reaches under the desk and yanks the plug out of the wall, finding that it has two round prongs. “Two.”
“Okay. What shape are they?”
“Round.”
“Hm. We're probably in China, if what you said about the sign is to go by. That's not enough to tell us the city, though. Can you generate and hold a twelve volt potential, and make it alternate in polarity? Just pass the current between those two pins and alternate them like…”
“Like a power grid current?”
“50 hertz.”
“I think I know how to do that.”
Laying the plug on the ground, Vesper rubs her hands together and generates the potential. Then, pinching each pin with one hand, she begins to feed power into the plug. Alternating current is not her strong suit, but she has felt it before, sticking forks in sockets as forbidden in many a safety manual.
Hong Yi pushes the power button again, and this time, she hears the computer answer with the whir of a fan, then minute clicks and the flash of a screen.
“No way—”
The scent of melting is all the warning they have before a fuse pops and the screen winks out.
“…No way,” Hong Yi sighs.
Vesper shakes her head. “Sorry. Luckily we have…eleven more goes.”
“True. Okay. Next up—”
On the second computer, Vesper ramps up the voltage slowly, and they make it far enough for Hong Yi to gasp. Then that tower, too, shorts in a spitting of sparks.
She punches her leg with a growl and turns to Hong Yi again, lighting the air over her hand. But he has yet to move.
He stares at the blank screen, no trace of light leftz.
“We’re in my hometown,” he says simply.
She relights the arc in her hand. “How do you know?”
“The domain name. Dixiacheng Wangge. That’s the underground city in Beijing.”
“Oh.”
“I need to get outta here. Can we check the corefinder against your compass?”
Wordlessly, Vesper slides the devices out of her pockets, laying them on the table while she produces an arc light. He glances over at the reading, then slips his phone out of his pocket, the plotter filling the screen in a jarring cascade of green and blue. He begins to tap away at the interface.
“Okay, good news,” he huffs. “There are only two cities along the great circle route. Bad news: they're both very small, so I have no clue if our target is even in them.” He sucks in a deep breath, and blows it out, squeezing his eyes shut as if his life depends on it. “Okay. Let’s go. We can decide where to jump to next after we’re out. Please.”
Vesper turns to Honourless with a wave and a nod, and she winds her way around the poor dead of this underground bunker.
The great boon of travelling with these two companions is that neither one needs much telling what to do. They clasp hands, and Honourless leaps—and in a whirl of colours too bright for their dark-acclimatised eyes, they leave those future catacombs behind.
“Reykjavik, Iceland. Asunçion, Paraguay. And miles of ocean between.” Hong Yi presents the information under the dim moon in a town whose cold they are underdressed for. A hollow terror has settled in his eyes since the Underground City. “I mean, they could also be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, for all we know.”
“What’s our best triangulation point?” asks Vesper.
“Has to be somewhere that hasn't been bombed to pieces,” he says, and she can hear the way his voice has shrunk.
Rather than answer his suggestions, Vesper claps his shoulders. “Keep marching, soldier. Just one step after another. We’ll make it through.”
He nods meekly back. “Let's go, then,” he says, gesturing at Honourless as he types. “For triangulation…Arkalyk again, that could work.”
*
In this world, Arkalyk is all but a husk of itself—killed not by the nuclear apocalypse but by something perhaps older: a slow death that has left no sign. Now in the place of shops are tents, their huddled residents tending family plots of crops in the rundown streets.
The route Hong Yi draws from there points them northeast, crossing over the line from Beijing at almost the northern coast of Russia. “Looks like we're in for a cold one,” he says, fingers searching for a settlement. “Not a whole lot going on in that area…but there's a town there that I've never heard of—Dikson.”
Vesper paces about beside him. “Whatever shall we do if our mark were not in a settlement?”
He shrugs. “We could keep walking, or driving, and consulting the corefinder, but other than that…sorry folks, I’m not sure. There's only one thing we can do now.”
*
By the time they return to the starlight-bathed city of Aden, Orobelle is dozing on Dorian’s bedroll in the shadow of the wall, while he stands guard. Marcia leans on the wall beside him, the pair in quiet conversation.
When they land, the duches stirs with a groan, then leaps out of bed, hands swinging towards Vesper before she has even fully opened her eyes. “Corefinder,” she mutters, and Vesper lays the device in her hand. Only once she has inspected it in full does she carry on. “Where are we headed next?”
“Somewhere cold, probably,” Hong Yi says. “Close to the north pole. Let’s get some winter clothes sorted. Who needs something?”
*
Honourless’ skill in theft has been improving in leaps and bounds. With two jumps, she secures for herself, Vesper and Marcia a motley assortment of winter coats, gloves and hats, taken from his world, out of place in the Aden night.
Hong Yi finds himself chuckling as they suit up—it’s the puffiest he has ever seen the crew. Will it be harder to transport us like this? he asks Honourless in a corner once his hat and muffler are in place.
If they made us weigh more, that would make a difference. Those clothes do not weigh much.
What memory will you spend this time?
The same as always. The name of someone I no longer care about. This time, I am thinking of Ivy, the kid on the street who used to fill my shoes with rocks.
Ivy. Why don’t you tell me each memory before you spend it? I can write it down for you.
I am forgetting them for a reason.
But surely there will come a time when you run out of those kinds of names.
If that time comes, then we talk.
She takes Hong Yi and Vesper by the hand first. They nod to each other, Honourless’ face steeling up as her eyes focus past them, upon a place too far to see.
“These jumps are starting to feel as routine as doing the groceries,” Hong Yi says, feeling Honourless’ grip tighten.
“Speak for yourself—” Vesper is cut short as the universe redshifts away.
Artur kicks the last flecks of snow onto the mound in the ground by the lighthouse door. He does it so that the grave shows some sign of existing, even though he knows that the next snowstorm will scatter it again.
Even then, the white around the mound is mingled with flecks of earth, earth that the lighthouse keeper’s shovel hit a metre down. In the process of digging, he has excavated two more of the lighthouse’s front steps, and only now begins to wonder how deep they go.
Beside the new mound, Artur has planted a rusty pole and mounted his slippers atop it. That will have to do. The keeper has another pair somewhere; he’ll make do.
He hasn’t shed more tears since the day of Binka’s slaughter, but his attention has had elsewhere to go. The better part of February has passed him by without a sound, and the number of days in which Sabina may return are diminishing. He has woken twice to find paint and wastewater smeared on his door. He cleans it as he finds it.
Now that he is alone again with the memory of what was here before, the lighthouse seems quiet as death. He falls back into a cycle, hope replaced with habit. In the day he sits by the glass and watches the sea, reading old paper manuals from the storeroom. At night he lights the beacon, and waits to see if it brings anyone to shore.
A week of this elapses: scaling the stairs with vodka, pulling his chair, brushing aside the remains of his old companion, returning below to make another attempt at jerky stew that predictably fails, and falling asleep with alcohol on his breath—sometimes in the armchair, surrounded by the foggy sky, when he doesn’t make it to the bed.
*
It is with blurry eyes and an ache in his skull that Artur hears a knock on the front door. Through the morning freeze, it is crisp and strident.
He jolts up as it repeats itself, echoing up two stories. His heart booms. The villagers wouldn't knock like that.
The picture of Sabina’s face as he last saw it, turning as she vanished through the doorway, clouds out his alcohol-muddied vision as he stumbles down to the entryway.
But as he dashes down the last three steps and shuffles towards the door, he hears a voice he doesn’t know. A child? Surely she did not bring a child with her. He would not know what to do with one in his living room…
He makes out the demand in the visitor’s words as he loosens the chain and opens the door a crack.
“Did you not hear me the first time?”
Through the silvery gap in the door, huddled in furs and crystals, is a child no higher than his shoulder, with hair and skin almost as pale as the snow. At her side is not Sabina, but a man taller than himself, with a deep maroon coat and long brown hair under an old-fashioned cap. Artur's heart sinks.
“Sir, you must leave with us at once.” The sorrow begins to change—to roil up inside him. “We understand you have work to do with this lighthouse, but I assure you that this is more important than—”
That is all he has to hear before he slams the door with a growl and loops the chain back on. The yammering stops, replaced with yells and the banging of a fist. He returns to the light room, and this time he wedges the door shut behind him.
The comforts of this cold, grey city—one called Dixon, or a name of that style—are few and far between. They first land among the shadows of colossal metal frames in the grey and the boom of freezing waves, rolling against the stones below. Their breath puffs out in white clouds as the group of six appraise the strange vista.
Marcia feels the cold sink its teeth in. She paces about, even the three layers that almost cooked her to death in Aden not enough to protect her from the freeze. She shoves her hands into the pockets at her waist, seemingly made for that purpose, as they scurry away.
They soon find—after an hour hiking in the snow, with Orobelle and Dorian as cards in Vesper’s pocket—only one hostel taking lodgers. Its door stands shut, and it does not have a name; they only find it when a stranger quietly opens the door to leave.
The rest are more than eager to pile in through the door, but Marcia halts at the doorstep. She is sure she hears a crunch of feet behind her.
Turning to look, she sees only the pale white snow gleaming back. She is still frowning when she follows the rest into the warmth, closing the door behind her.
The air in that woody atrium is suffused by a hearth that greets them when they step inside. Orobelle and Dorian request lodging for six, then learns that their options include a few double rooms and two twelve-bed hostels. The counter server converses in a language yet again different from any she has heard, and she can only understand the duchess’ replies.
“We shall have a double room,” Orobelle declares before anyone can speak. “And the rest will share a hostel room.”
As far as interaction goes, it is easier for Hong Yi and Vesper to get by than in Arkalyk—many here speak English, albeit with different inflections. Marcia uses them as her conduits. Now and then, as they shuffle along to the hostel, her mind blacks out—as when she has not slept in a day—then returns to attention when she has taken a deep breath.
She feels a nudge of her shoulder, awakening her to the fact that she has stopped walking. To her right, Vesper offers her opened water flask.
Marcia blinks. “Many thanks,” she says, taking it from her hand and swigging. Water spills down her chin. She returns it, thrill surging over her when their hands brush. Fingers lingering, she holds Vesper’s gaze, then ventures, in English, “Thank you…gorgeous.”
Vesper’s eyes widen. “Me?” she laughs, and whatever she says in answer is incomprehensible except her tone: deflective, and less certain than how she normally speaks.
Marcia grins back, startled to feel as if her fever has returned. “Who else?” she murmurs. With a shake of her head, Vesper waves them into the room, though the grin never fully deserts her face.
*
While Vesper and Hong Yi tour Dikson in search of for food, the duchess and her protector disappear into their lodgings. Marcia, meanwhile, lays herself down on the closest bed in the hostel room and curls around a pillow, closing her eyes against the nauseating heat and chill.
She is dimly aware of the former pair returning from their foray with a bag of raw fish because she can smell it through the door. She crawls out to meet them. They knock on the duchess' room for culinary help, and Dorian hastily obliges, cooking the fish to oblivion, the heat radiating for metres on every side.
The cause of his hurry becomes clear as they pick away at the burnt fish at the ramshackle table in the lobby. He and Orobelle pass them, dressed for the outside.
“Do not leave till we return,” snaps the duchess without meeting any eyes. While the pair march out the front door, the remaining four pick bones from between their teeth.
It is barely an hour before Orobelle blusters back into the hostel room in her furs, solely to deliver a rant about the “ingrate” who slammed his door in her face.
“The man did not even address me! Not even a commoner's greeting! He had the nerve to slam the door in my face!”
Vesper closes her eyes and rubs the bridge of her nose. “Have you learned nothing?”
“What, should I have humoured him with flattery while standing outside his door? In the snow?”
She sighs. “Want me to go do it? Or one of the others? I'm not choosy.”
“If you reckon you could convince that bull-headed oaf,” the young duchess growls. “He is twenty minutes down the coast. Follow the road away from town until you see a village. He is in a lighthouse.”
“May I borrow Dorian?”
Orobelle flails her arms as she spits, “And leave me without a protector? Absolutely not!”
Shrugging, Vesper turns to Hong Yi. “Can your phone do Russian?” she says, yanking her jacket and sweater from where they hang from her bunk bed.
He blinks back, already slipping the phone from his pocket. “I think I downloaded it a couple of years ago, yeah.”
Walking past, she claps a hand on his shoulder. “Ahoy, recruit, get those boots on the road.”
“Yes, Captain,” he chuckles, pulling his winter jacket on.
*
Finding the lighthouse proves almost too easy, for even in the grey gloom, they see its light blinking from the cliffs, revealing the frames of cranes each time it flashes past.
They follow the light down the contour of the coast. The streets and sea are eerily silent, alien white expanses of snow sprawled where beaches and breakwaters would be.
“What do you think he'll be like?” Hong Yi mumbles, jaw stiff in the cold.
“No nonsense. Russian. Irritated by little duchesses barging in on his quiet.”
“Yeah, I thought as much, but like, powers?”
She turns to him. “Whatever serves one in a lighthouse? Maybe he's the flashing light we see.”
“Yeah, that's a solid guess. I think he's gotta be some sort of chemistry guy. We've got physics and biology represented, but no one who does chemical reactions or anything…”
It's half-light when they trudge at last up the slope to the lighthouse, fingers and ears numb, breath coming in white puffs. It is impossible to tell the hour of day in the dimness. Vesper remembers Scottish midwinters where the sky turned black at three, but this far north, and with no view of the sun, there is no telling which month they have landed in.
“Well, here goes,” she says as the foreboding tower glides into view, bone white and grimeless, lit heaven-white from above with each pulse. Flash—a two seconds beat—flash—
As they surmount the last snow-capped step, Hong Yi shrinks back from the door. “Uh…you knock,” he chokes.
Vesper gives him a look, but the fear is hard to miss. Nodding, she knocks thrice, slow and sharp.
No answer.
She knocks thrice again. “Hello? Anyone home?”
The wind roars by, and through its static noise, she thinks she heard a creak.
Then, a voice from above, bouncing off the slopes, bellows: “What is wrong with you people?”
They look up at the faceted window of the gallery, reflecting the sky in every direction. One panel juts from the glass, and behind that, there lurks the murky shape of a person. The sight is only there for a second, before vanishing.
Then all around them, a biting gale begins howl to life. It rouses from the ground around the lighthouse like some invisible serpent, or perhaps a flock of doves, spiralling with shards of snow and some old forgotten earth.
It surges and sharpens, sharpens, tearing at their skin like sandpaper, battering them back. Yelling out, Vesper shields her stinging eyes, but even now the gale fills their jackets like parachutes, thrashing and tossing them backward. The friction ignites auras of static on everything—their sleeves, their faces, the dry air.
“Let us inside!” she calls. “We must shelter!” Crying out as he trips, Hong Yi snatches Vesper around the waist and lands with feet apart, leaning back to counterbalance her. Her shoes sink into the snow as her weight doubles, knees bending while her companion pulls her centre of gravity down.
Then a gust bursts from the front to barrel them back, and they both cry out as their feet scrape through the snow, away from the wall—
“He's doing this,” Hong Yi gasps, spitting snow out. “He’s controlling the wind!”
“Christ! Are you creating this wind?” Vesper shouts at the sky, and at the man behind the glass, veiled by curtains of stirring snow. Hong Yi tugs on her arm, and they doggedly push towards the wall, step by heavy step.
She is certain the stranger should not be able to hear her, and yet he answers with a roar louder in her ears than it should be:
“Are you here to condemn me, too?”
“No—we are here because we need you!”
“Why?”
“Because of this!” She gesticulates at the gales around them. “You are like us!”
She can hear the way his teeth grit as he growls his answer, anguished as a mourner. “How can you be like me? A godless fool?” The beacon flashes past, and they see his silhouette in its whiteness.
Vesper and Hong Yi look at each other. Voices cannot carry across this gap, between them and the stranger above.
She glares up through the swirl of the building blizzard, and lifts her left hand into the air, creating a grounding channel.
With a crack and a boom, a bolt leaps from the centre of the swirling cloud, branching and blossoming through the snow. The thunder resonates long after the lightning has winked out, and she begins the opposite manoeuvre, building potential in her right palm so steep her hair starts to stand—then points her hand up at the window.
A second bolt booms, setting the tower aglow. It strikes true, rattling the glass and steel frames overhead. The window slams shut, and they can see the stranger no more.
Almost as fast as it came, the wind falls around them, like a blanket tumbling from a line, laying the snow back down at their feet. In the dimness, Hong Yi rises from his crouch. Vesper feels her weight return to normal.
He frowns. “Did you…kill him?”
She squints up at the empty gallery. “I can’t have.”
He starts to laugh. “Oh my God, you sure are good at the theatrics.”
“Am I? I only assumed he was the kind to listen to force.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right—”
There is the muffled sounds of chains falling, metal rattling against the door. Then, after an endless pause, there is a creak of the hinges, as the door cracks open and reveals a face cast in shadow.
He is pale with jet-black hair, some of it falling into his ringed eyes under his sorrowful brow. His stocky frame is dressed in furs, one gloved hand resting against the doorframe. His beard seems about two weeks unshaved.
“Who…are you?” he murmurs, in that same rough voice as before, weakened by confusion. “Where do you all come from?”
They look at each other. “You must have seen our…friend from before,” Hong Yi says, smiling sheepishly.
“She is about this tall,” Vesper motions out a height just higher than her shoulder, “and probably wasn’t very polite.”
The man nods slowly. “You are working together.” His eyes rise to Vesper. “So you…have these…” he swirls his hands illustratively, “strange powers, too?”
“We both do,” she answers with a nod. The man’s eyes shift to Hong Yi.
He shrugs. “Sorry, mine aren’t as…flashy, not so fun for demonstration. Uh, watch this.” He plucks a wool glove off, which hangs from his grip one moment, and in the next, billows like a leaf. He flicks it into the air. The lighthouse keeper stares as it flutters slowly down in the wind, then is picked up by a breeze, drifting away from them.
Hong Yi yells and starts to chase—but the stranger lifts a hand, flapping a palm towards himself, and another breeze whips the glove back towards its owner. Hong Yi cups his hands as it approaches, and suddenly leaden, it plummets into his palms.
“Please, come inside,” he says then, and he pulls the door open.
*
It takes a few stubbed toes before the trio reaches the second floor of the lighthouse, where embers smoulder in the fireplace and a pair of oil lamps illuminate the round room in place of the thin window. Two chairs sit by a coffee table, and from a coat rack hangs a collection of fur jackets.
The man seats himself, and Hong Yi follows suit in the other chair. He divulges his name—Artur—and they, theirs.
“So…we are all connected, by these powers. They come from the same source. And you…come from beyond this world. Like aliens.”
“Uh…we're not aliens…but something like that. We are from different versions of Earth. My Earth has a Russia, too, but in…the past.”
“And mine from even farther in the past,” Vesper adds.
“Not aliens…world hoppers. Just like in that movie. Door to Tomorrow.”
Hong Yi smiles awkwardly. “Never heard of that, but yeah, probably like that.”
“Your powers, they tie you to the same fate as ours do,” Vesper puts in. “The girl you saw…she is the orchestrator of that fate. Found us in our worlds, and gathered us one by one. And now we have found you, too.”
Artur nods solemnly at these words, relief and pain both fleeting in his eyes. “You want me to leave with you.”
Vesper lays both hands on the back of Hong Yi's chair. “Are you able to leave?”
Artur glances to his right, at the furnace in the wall, one arm folded upon his lap. “Not yet,” he says, eyes unfocused. “I wait for someone here. I must see her first.” He closes his eyes. “Five days. End of February. Don't come back until then.”
So Artur waits, watching the grey sea for every little vessel that crosses the horizon into sight. That bizarre interruption from days ago has trickled out of his thoughts, muted by his hope and sorrow, spiralling in turns in his mind. He waits for a telltale knock, a trail of footprints in the snow, watching every shape that roams up the fading road.
Does this world have a future? Perhaps, but he can see no sign of it anywhere. Trees no longer put out leaves. Frost no longer melts.
But the lighthouse blinks anyway. What use is despair? Humans are still clawing towards tomorrow, as they always have and always will. While they do, why shouldn't the lighthouse glow for a ship that may never come?
On the last day of February, the wind roars, and here is a day of blanket clouds, the same as the days before it, and the months before them.
Artur listens to the crackle of frost, the rumble of waves on cliffs of stone, somewhere out of sight beyond the fog. The hours pass, and February burns out, dwindling into a final ember. Then that afternoon, as the bay clouds start to gather in the dark, he hears a knock on the door.
He quietly descends the stairs and unlocks the chain, uncoiling the two loops of links, lets them fall dead to the ground.
From outside steps Vesper, a grey jacket in the old style over a brown wool coat, hands clasped behind her back.
“You,” Artur mutters, heart sinking despite himself. “You’re a day early.”
“Half a day. But I’m not here to drag you away. God knows we’ve done that enough times. I’m here to wait with you.”
He stares. “Why?”
“What isn’t improved by company?” she answers, pulling her outer jacket off her shoulders while he pushes the door shut.
“Silence,” he says, following her with heavy footsteps.
“Well, I like silence, too.”
He doesn’t pay her much attention as he climbs back up to the light room, picking up his green tea where he left it.
She follows, hanging her jacket on the coat rack. She sits down on the ledge beside the glass, while he settles into his armchair. He can see in her face, silhouetted against the roiling grey, that there’s some quiet knowing there. She does not speak. He sips his tea.
Over the sea, the fog that normally lies like a field of corpses is stirred by a brief wind, heads and florets of clouds coalescing.
“What do you really want me for?” he finally breaks the silence.
“I don’t know,” she answers, eyes shifting away from the glass. “Orobelle doesn’t know. Something none of us understand, something that’s bigger than my world…or yours. It's something more important than the war I left behind. For you…it really should be your choice, whether you leave this world for another. The child will try to force you. But no one can force you.”
Artur flinches away, eyes stinging. “How can I leave this world…the people, places…to die without me?”
Sadness enters her eyes. “Is it going to die?”
“Maybe not. We found oil under the Arctic. Oil trap. I don’t know what it means, but the scientists…”
“It’s something.” She is looking away again, at where the distant clouds have gathered black on the edge of the night. “Something is a whole lot more than nothing.”
He nods, picks up a vodka bottle, then lifts it to his lips to swig. They watch the night cool around them.
“Do you know this song?” Vesper asks then. “It goes something like this…”
She starts to hum a melody that at once sounds intimately familiar and strange, lighting a patch of his memory like a sliver of sun through clouds. “Uletela ptashechka…” He begins to sing it, one line, before his memory gives out. “I learned it long ago…before everything.”
Vesper nods. “A boy in the army taught it to me. He drank a lot. Like you.” She looks into the choppy grey water. “I don’t know what became of him. He may have died. I may have killed him. I have no clue.”
He realises none of this surprises him. “Soldier?”
Her eyes are still trained on the waves. “More like…weapon. That’s what they would call me.”
“Ah, you almost killed me,” he says. “Last week. This window.” He points past her.
Smirking, she shakes her head. “Won’t happen. Long as I can help it.”
“The one who taught me the song died, too. My mother.”
Vesper meets his eye with uncanny sorrow. He waits for a prying question. “D’you have any to spare?” she says instead, pointing at his assortment of bottles tucked away behind his chair.
He takes a glance around the chair frame, plucks a smaller bottle from the floor, and rolls it to her across the concrete. She looks at its peeling label, the name wreathed in intricate Celtic knots, and the year 2185 beneath the name.
“You English like whiskey, yes?”
She breaks the seal as she uncaps it, giving it a whiff. “I don’t mind it. But I’ve never had whiskey from the future.”
“‘Future?’ It is forty years old. Ancient.”
“Good thing whiskey lasts forever then. Till it’s opened, that is.”
He snorts, then rolls a shotglass to her that she catches under her palm. “Winter keeps it good.”
She pours out a shot of the golden potion. “To survival,” she declares, lifting it, and he raises his half-finished bottle in answer.
*
The sun glides beyond the curve of the world, stealing the last daylight of February from the sea. There are no lights in the distance besides the faded purple band of the horizon. Artur does not ignite the lamp in the quartz. The lighthouse door never sounds with the knock he has been awaiting.
As it finally grows too dark to tell land from sea, he rises to his feet, pale face reflecting what little light still creeps through the eternally overcast sky.
“There is nothing left in this world for me,” he says. Vesper lifts her head from against the window’s steel frame as he lays a hand on the doorknob. “Take me with you.”