Read The Minority Council Online
Authors: Kate Griffin
Tags: #Fantasy, #General, #FIC009000, #Contemporary, #Fiction
that eat through the tubing like acid and the lights are going out, not out,
in
, the lights are going in: we draw it inside of us, feast on the buzz of light and the stench of life and the smell of death and the heat of fear and the taste of dust and the humming of wires beneath us and the whisper of the gas overhead and the slipping of water and
the beating of our heart and did they really think that their chains could bind
us
? Did they really think any mortal engine could bind us? The locks snap apart as if they are afraid to be on our skin. And though the lights are dying in the room, in all the rooms of this sinful palace, still we blaze with a sapphire glow that makes the veins stand out on the chalk-white necks of Hugo’s men, burning from every inch of our mortal anatomy as if it might crack apart from the inside out to reveal our splendour.
“We be wall cracking, we be glass tearing, we be skyline tumbling down!” we bellow, rising to our feet, and the floor burns beneath us, the air shimmers from the heat rolling off our skin. They’re running, the mortals are running, and as one of the men in white overalls reaches out for the handle, scrambling to escape us, we reach out with our fist [itchy itchy itchy!] and grab him by the insides, by the heart, wrapping raw fingers of electricity around the soft places inside his chest [like when the sole of your foot is itchy and you can’t scratch it?] and squeezing, squeezing until we smell him cooking from the inside out and wisps of carbon-black smoke roll from inside his mouth [itchy like that]. His body arches in death, head rolling backwards and spine twisting like a bridge, pulling his whole body back until he balances, ballerina, on the end of his tip-toes. We hold him there for a second, letting the others see the blood bursting behind the corpse’s eyes, then let the body go.
| “Come be we,” we snarl and now they are all running, animals kicking each other out of the way, to try and get out of ours, “and be free!” | “Look, it’s okay,” I try to say but there’s something wrong with the sound coming from my lips. |
They try to pull the door shut from the outside, lock us in, one left inside scrambling at it, screaming at them to let him out and we can see Hugo striding down the hall, back to us, calm in motion but not in mind. We grab the straggler by the hair; he screams as the electricity in our fingers bounces down the spine, lighting him up from the inside out like a glow stick and whatever Templeman has done this is wonderful! This is glorious, this is freedom, this is a drug of lava, a pit without end, liquid heaven, this is…
| Majestic! | So yes, I think I might be a little stoned. I mean, not in a bad way, just you know . . a little bit… |
| We are majestic! | |
The world cannot conceive of what we are. Our right hand drips blue burning blood from the twin scars etched into our skin. And what repulsed us before is, now that we see it burning, oddly beautiful. We look up towards the door, and they were too slow to lock it, men are fleeing now down the open hall. We trace our fingers through the air, watching the electric afterglow dance on the back of our eyelids, then kneel, press our bloody palms into the floor and reach down for the things below. Our mind passes through dirt upon dirt that was itself once wood compressed beneath stone crushed by brick smashed by concrete, dirt of dirt made from mortar dust and time, smashed up then turned into unseen now. Twisted iron, foundations laid over dead men’s work, the stench of old chemical works, the place where bombs once scarred the
earth, a century of piss spilt onto a millennium of slime, the dead detritus of a human city beneath our feet, fermented into samey unseen sludge, so easy to reach out and grasp it now, to catch the whitened bones of what once was and heave it to the surface and it is here! The floor cracks with it, the building shakes, let the earth crack, let glass shatter, let steel split, let stone melt; we rise and the earth rises with us, it bursts upwards, the foundations of the building twist and rise upwards, jagged spikes of brown iron that smash through the walls, the floor, the door, piercing it like spears and we can hear them screaming all around, and we raise our hands higher and let the walls break! Let the ceiling split in two, let electricity dance like burning snakes between the gaps, let it writhe and wrap its tendrils around men’s flesh, let them for a moment be seared with blazing light and the earth has opened beneath them and those who did not flee are trapped. Some are impaled on the foundation rods that lanced up from the ground itself—him upon a spike that has passed straight through his belly, pushing him off the ground like a doll [that’s just disgusting]. She with a leg caught where the earth has cracked apart, trying to pull it free as if she could disconnect her body from the bone. We pick our way between the bodies, some dead, some dying, none meriting our attention. The cables have fallen from the ceiling, spitting fat electric sparks and here a man—the man who dared to push a needle into our veins—whose flesh has been burnt to the bone, thin clear fluids and yellow slime dribbling down across his skin, as if blood when boiled lost all its constituent parts [look at it! It’s all squishy!]. At the end of the corridor, a woman dressed in white is clawing with a broken hand at the lift,
which we dismiss from coming. Her hair is smoking [don’t judge], and she sobs as we draw near, begging for her life, as if her life or her death was of any consideration to us then we see
| | a room to the left |
| | I taste it. |
| The door was destroyed when the walls began to bend, an alarm wails behind shattered steel. There are two doors, forming an airlock between this bloody corridor and what lies beyond. We think we can hear… | |
| | Singing? |
[Listen to them singing! Push it back, push it back and see… ]
A technician all in white scrambles away from us as we approach, mumbling empty incoherent words. We toss him aside with a flick of our wrist, his body is picked up and slammed through the air, impacting head first against the opposite wall. Dead or alive, doesn’t matter, only the door. It opens before us. There was once a lock but it doesn’t fight.
The lights are all out, but we see from the burning blue shining off our flesh. It is the place where the dust is kept [oh God], stored in air-tight boxes that have begun to leak where the cables came down and the floor came up, factory-like, yellow dust, as far as the eye can see [why am I crying?], dust that was once human skin.
What is this?
We walk between aisles labelled with numbers and letters, batches of dust, and more dust and dust again, a thousand euphoric corpses, a thousand thousand blissful snorts on life-giving, soul-feasting death.
This species disgusts us.
[Not crying. Eyes that must cry and have no tears. The air here is too dry to cry—and
listen
.]
We listen.
[Can you hear it?]
There is something…
[Life is magic, can you hear? I hear… ]
| Dust to dust We raise our hand and let the fingers tangle in the air, feel the dryness and the dust that is spilling out, taste it on our lips, breathe… | … walls singing ‘lalalala’ No, wait, not good enough, not the way to describe it all the words are foggy and faint they come foggy and faint and far off and I raise my hand (and even that seems far off) |
| Repulsion! Spit the taste of dust onto the floor! Yellow spit on yellow floor! | |
| We force ourself to be still and listen. | Listen! The way the dust moves across the floor, stirred by a breeze but there is no breeze there. I saw sand move like this once, on a beach when I was a child. The beach stayed solid but the surface moved, sand in my socks and in my pockets and I did not then understand how the wind could dance on the earth. |
| We hear… … so far off… | |
| The dust moves, though there is nothing to move it. [I raise my hands to my face but they don’t come.] | |
| We understand. | Oh God. This is it. This is your monster moment, universe, this is your cry in the dark, this is the mad cackle as the lightning strikes, are you sitting comfortably, world, have you got the popcorn ready? |
| It’s alive. Perhaps not yet with a form and a shape, perhaps not yet conscious, but within the dust, there is movement, motion against the current, direction and purpose. This sick dead thing is a sick living thing. Alive. | It’s alive. God, but it sings of life and magic, of death and damnation, of how the dust came, of how they died, of all the thousand voices that were silenced, a thousand last breaths trapped in a rolling yellow exhalation. |
| It’s alive. | |
[I want to go now.]
And no living thing should be tamed.
We hear a sound behind us, off to the left, and turn instantly, raising our hands in defence. We had thought Hugo had fled with the rest, or died with the rest, but the mortal’s pride held him back, denying him realisation of the futility of his actions and he is there in the dark, a gun in one hand, finger already tightening around the trigger. [Whatever happened to the good trip?] The gunshot is deafening but we are already moving with electric speed, diving down behind one of the great yellow vats. The bullet passes too close to our head, we can hear its passage, feel the air torn up by our face, a high-pitched whining in our ears, inconvenient sense data!
[See the way the dust danced when the bullet struck? It ripples and ripples back on itself, pebble in a pond.]
Hugo fires again, has some kind of automatic weapon, and though he is too proud he is also scared. As if bullets will stop us now. [Is this awareness?]
We extinguish all light, clenching it down and down to a bubble in our hand, a pea between our fingers, and pinch it out. He keeps firing for a few seconds longer, the star-pattern flash from his muzzle dazzling in the blackness.
[Stop.]
Stops.
Can you see in the dark, mortal?
[My eyes hurt.]
A shuffle-thump in the dark as perhaps now, only now, Hugo begins to comprehend that he is not the only hunter in the room. We move silently, so silently, feeling our way between the great vats of dusted-down death, fingers tracing our path, head low and back bent.
[My breath hurts.]
The body is but a tool—sense data such a human failing.
[‘Cracked ribs’ sounds dull when you say it—hey guys, I’ve got some cracked ribs, and a six-pack of beer!—but what did the doctor say? Somewhere between cracked and fractured there’s a moment of over-excitement just waiting to become a punctured lung.]
He thinks perhaps he has found us, fires eight shots in a sweep to our right, but they are wide, burning gnats chewing air, and all he has done is reveal his position. He tries to move in silence, but we hear his steps, his breath, his terror, feel the sweat prickling on the back of his neck.
| Now he begins to understand. He thinks he has found us again, fires, and this time he is closer but we press ourself into the ground and the shots travel high. It would be easy just to bring the ceiling down, the building down, the street down, the city down, the sky down… … but we want to look into Hugo’s eyes as he dies. | I want out now. This is a sick game the world is playing, normal guys don’t dance when the music is this out of tune, normal guys don’t walk towards the sound of gunfire, normal guys don’t look down to see blood on their hands blood on my hands? I pull my hands away but they don’t come. |
We move closer, circling in towards him, smelling the oil-silk silver of his magics. He is attempting to throw up wards around himself, his voice a gentle low whisper on the air as he invokes defensive symbols, scratched into the ground and spun out of the air. They give a little silver-golden flicker as they embed themselves on the ground, creating just enough light to illuminate the shape of his back, the dance of his fingers. [Dust ripples at my feet, spinning around me in little eddies and I did not say to move.] So close now—we are not five yards away from him, a silver shimmer on the air the only thing between him and our fingers popping out his eyes.
He looks up as if he can sense our approach, but does not turn his head to see, and we already have fingers in his mind, digging down through the soft part of his brain, blocking out sense. He calls out, “Swift! We don’t have to be enemies! I have information about the fairy godmother that may be of service to you! I know things about Templeman!”
| We feel a tug of pain in the pit of us, but shake our senses free of its tangle. | I try to speak and the words stick in my throat. |
“It is clear to me that we have underestimated you, that you are dangerous beyond our understanding. Pragmatism alone compels me to offer you my services and, I assure you, I have no higher loyalty than pragmatism.”
We slide a step closer, splitting one of his silver wards in two, a shimmer of silent falling sparks parting beneath the palm of our hand. We can see the back of his neck, thick and ugly, see the pulse in a small blue vein from collar-bone to jaw. What piece of human anatomy would die if we pushed our thumb into that bloody cable?