Run!

"We had never had a guest. Not once. And I stood in the middle of our sanctuary with a glass of champagne in my hand and listened to somebody hammering on a door that nobody on this earth was supposed to know existed."

I read it a third time, standing at that window, and then I let the screen go black and put my hands behind my back and looked down at London.

The Thames was doing what it always did at that hour, which was to give up being water altogether and become a long curve of hammered silver going through the middle of everything—under the bridges, round the bend, out east towards the docks and the sea. I had looked at that river from that window a great many times without ever once getting tired of it, and if anybody had asked me why I could not have told them.

Every eye in that room was on my back, and I knew it, and I did not turn round. Not immediately. I stood there with my eyes shut and gave myself a little longer, because I had been running flat out at this thing for the whole of my adult life without ever knowing that I was doing it, and I was about to arrive—and I have never in my life been able to walk through a door without first stopping in it, and I was not about to start.

What went through my head, standing there, was the stories.

Because there were stories, and nobody warns you about that, and it took me a very long time to stop resenting it. There was a body of myth around CLIVE and around the founding of the Guardians that went back a great deal further than anybody could properly date, and it had been handed down and embroidered and fought over for generations, and no version of it anywhere agreed with any other version of it in the details.

I knew them all, which had never once been my intention. I went at them the way I have gone at everything else in my life—systematically, in order, cross-referencing, building a table with columns in it—and I came out the other side of that exercise knowing them the way a child knows a book he has read four hundred times under the covers with a torch that is going flat.

Before the Clivilius Wars, the Guardians were one thing. They came and went between the worlds as they pleased, they gave their lives to the expansion of Clivilius and the protection of everything it had become, and they were united by a cause.

Then they were not, and the wars did that, and there was a very great deal of blood in that history that nobody standing in that penthouse had ever properly reckoned with.

Running underneath the whole of it, in every version, in every telling, generation after generation, there was a rumour about the One—somebody who would come and put the two worlds back together, and finish what the Founders had started, and hand us the utopia they died trying to build.

"Are you sure you want to do this, Nathan?"

Josh, from the couch, without looking up from the tablet.

"Once it's done, we expose not only ourselves, but the entire system. All of it. There's no going back."

"Killerton will try and stop us—"

"I'm pretty sure they'll have us all eliminated," said Josh.

He said it flatly, without any drama in it whatsoever, and without lifting his head off the screen, which is precisely how my brother says a thing that he believes to be true.

"But we have to do this now." I turned round to them at last. "We have risked our lives. We have thrown every resource we have at it. Our people have suffered for this. And every week we sit here polishing it is another week in which somebody at Killerton has a good idea."

"You have our full support."

That was Verity, up off the brown leather couch while she said it, without a scrap of preamble in front of it—which is how Verity Sloane has said every important thing to me since the day she walked into a meeting room in Hobart with a lanyard round her neck and a coffee she had not paid for.

Saul looked up from the laptop.

"The infrastructure is all in place. As soon as you've got confirmation the company's registered, I'll set up the accounts and start moving the funds."

"Are you sure it'll work?" Josh asked, and there was caution in it.

"Yes." Saul did not look up. "We'll be using the latest blockchain technology. The transactions will be untraceable." And then, because he could hear the room not quite believing him: "I've been studying cryptocurrency a long time. I know what I'm doing."

I let that settle, and then asked the thing that had been sitting in me all afternoon and would not sit still.

"Any word from Amber?"

Verity answered before I had finished asking it.

"Amber's back in Saint Phillis. The people need reassurance that we haven't forgotten about them."

"Okay," said Josh, typing. "I'm sending you the forms now. Sign them digitally and send them back to me."

I turned back to the window while I waited, and the adrenaline came up through me like something rising in a lift shaft.

We are really doing this.

The absurd part of it was that what we were about to do was register a company.

That was all it was. A form. A name. A registered office and a director and a company number issued by a machine in a building in Canberra without one single human being ever laying eyes on it. It was the most ordinary act of administration available to a citizen of Australia.

It was also the end of the world as every person alive understood it.

Because when Josh and I went into Killerton Enterprises, we came out again with the original CLIVE blueprints.

Killerton held things. That was what they were for, and they were extremely good at it, and I would not pretend that I understood the half of what went on in there. But those blueprints had been sitting in their vaults since before anybody currently drawing breath was born, and it took every single skill in that penthouse to get them out—it took Saul and his machines, and it took Verity's nerve, and it took my brother doing something to a door that he has never explained to me and that I have stopped asking about—and it cost us a very great deal more than any of us has ever said out loud in front of the others.

Because in those blueprints was the thing.

CLIVE has been recording. From the beginning. Every action, every experience, every emotion, every thought of every single person who has ever crossed into Clivilius or lived there—and every soul on Earth touched by the Virus. All of it. Held. Complete. Sitting there in the dark, waiting for somebody to come along and ask it a question.

In a rented office in Warsaw, under Josh's direction, a very small number of very tired people had built a door into it: a back-door, and an algorithm that could take the stored experience of one human life—everything a person did and felt and thought and was frightened of—and turn it into narrative. Into text. Into a story with a beginning and a middle and a name on the front of it.

Then a platform, to hold them and index them and map them one against another—so that where one life brushed up against another life, the platform knew, and showed you, and let you follow the thread sideways into somebody else's account of the very same afternoon.

A web of recorded lives. Laid open. For the whole of the world to read.

But they were not going to know that it was real.

They would read the Narratives as stories. They would consume them the way people consume anything—on a train, in a bath, half asleep, three chapters at a time—and they would argue about the characters, and pick favourites, and complain bitterly about the endings. They would not understand, not for years, that Clivilius was a real place and that the history they were devouring was their own.

We were about to hand an entire species its own past back, and we were going to do it by pretending that we had made it up.

And I signed the form anyway.

"Got it yet?" said Josh.

I went through the screens on my phone until I found the email, put my digital signature into the box, and sent the whole thing back to my older brother.

"Got it."

"I'm registering it now." He was already typing. "Shouldn't take more than half an hour."

Something came loose in the middle of my chest, and a smile got onto my face before I could do anything whatever about it, and I turned round to the four people who had got me there.

"Time for a drink."

"Count me in," said Verity, and she was off that couch and into the little kitchen before I had a glass down off the shelf.

The cork came out of that bottle with a bang that filled the whole apartment, and it meant in that room precisely what it has always meant in every room in every country on this earth, and I had never in my life been so glad to hear a noise.

"Are you two having a glass?" Verity called over her shoulder.

"I'm good," said Saul. He had not moved. He was standing behind Josh with his eyes on the screen over my brother's shoulder, and I doubt very much that he heard the question at all.

The glasses went together with that small bright noise, and I leaned in.

"Did you get the name?"

"Yes." Verity took a sip and looked at me over the top of the flute, with her eyes going, holding it a beat longer than she needed to, because she enjoys that and she has never once made any secret of it. "Karl Jenkins."

"Are you sure?"

Because it mattered. Because the first Narrative we published was going to determine how the world came at every single one that followed it, and if we started in the wrong life then everything downstream of it was compromised—and I had been arguing about the selection criteria for so long that Saul had taken to leaving the room.

"Yes," said Verity. "Charlie Claiborne confirmed it. Karl Jenkins was the detective in Hobart leading the investigation into Luke."

"Good." I put my glass against hers a second time. "Then Karl Jenkins will be the first—"

"I've got it!" Josh, half out of his seat, waving the tablet. "You should have yours too!"

And somebody hammered on the door.

The whole apartment stopped. Everything in it. Verity's glass, halfway up to her mouth. Josh, half out of the couch with one arm still in the air. Saul's hand on the back of the seat. That room went absolutely still and absolutely silent, and the only thing moving anywhere in it was the champagne coming back down the inside of my glass.

Because we had never had a guest.

Not once. Not one single time. Nobody had ever knocked on that door, because nobody knew that the door existed—there was a doorway in the wall of that sitting room, and we did not arrive at that apartment, we appeared in it, and the entire architecture of our survival rested on the fact that there was no corridor for anybody to find us in.

And somebody was standing in it.

My eyes went to Josh. Josh's went to Saul. Saul's went to Verity. Nobody said one word.

"Killerton." Verity's voice, and it was barely a voice at all. "Already?"

Her hand was already in her pocket and coming back out of it with her Portal Key in it.

And my phone chimed.

It made the bright, cheerful, idiotic little noise that it made for every email I had ever received, straight into the middle of all that—and I looked down at it because I could not stop myself, and there it was, glowing up at me out of a room in which nobody was breathing.

Registration of Clivilius Corporation Pty Ltd confirmed.

Saul was already moving. He went across that room slowly, with his weight forward, and put his eye up against the peephole—and he looked for a fraction of a second, no longer than that, and then he tore that door open so hard that it went back against the wall, and Verity made a sound that I had never heard come out of her before.

And Amber came in.

She came in the way a thing comes in when the door it has been leaning against is taken away—forward, and sideways, and already going down—with the hallway light hard and white and merciless behind her, going straight through the shape of her.

And every single part of that woman was wet.

Her front was black with it. Not red. Black. Soaked through and hanging heavy and running off the hem of her jacket onto our carpet in a stream, in a proper stream, the way water comes off a coat—and the smell came into that apartment ahead of her like something with a body of its own, hot copper and iron and underneath it something a very great deal worse.

Verity screamed her name. The glass went out of her hand and hit the floor and detonated, and there was glass and champagne all across that carpet, and neither of us so much as looked at it—she was already down on her knees in the middle of the wreckage of it, and she did not know that she was kneeling in glass, and she would not have cared if she had.

Amber's hand went out for the doorframe as she came through, and it did not hold her. Four fingers, dragging down, leaving four red lines behind them on the paint that got wider as they went—and then her legs stopped working underneath her, all at once, and she came down onto our carpet in a heap.

And Saul was there.

He got to her before she had finished falling, and he put the flat of his hand straight onto her neck, and he leaned on it—with the whole of his upper body, with everything he had—and the noise that came out of her while he did it was not a noise I had ever heard a human being make.

And it did not stop.

Nobody had ever told me that it would not stop. It came out round his fingers and up his wrist and down his forearm and off his elbow onto the floor, and it was pumping—it had a rhythm in it, it had a beat—and I stood there and watched my friend's heart doing exactly what it had been built to do, faithfully, and without complaint, and killing her while it did it.

"Get her flat—get her flat—" That was Josh, down there now with both hands in under her head, lifting her, and she coughed, and what came up out of her went across the front of a shirt that could not take any more of it, and into my brother's lap, and up both his arms to the elbow.

Verity was saying her name. Over and over. Not screaming any more. Just saying it, very close to her face, the way she would have said it to wake her out of a nap on a long drive.

And I did not move.

I stood four feet away from the whole of it with a glass of champagne still in my hand, and I did not put it down, and I did not go to her, and I did not do one single useful thing.

And my head kept working.

I have never been able to forgive myself for that. Because while my friend was dying on the floor of our sanctuary with three sets of hands on her, my brain went about its business—calmly, and efficiently, and entirely without my permission—and it produced findings.

Amber's back in Saint Phillis.

She was not in Saint Phillis. She was on our carpet.

She had not come through the wall. She had come up the corridor. She had come out of a lift or up a stairwell, on foot, in that condition, and she had walked to our door and put her hand on it—which meant that she could not use her Portal Key, which meant that she had lost it, or that somebody had taken it off her, or that she had made a decision not to use it and had bled the entire way here instead. Every single one of those three was worse than the one standing in front of it.

And I stood in the middle of my own sanctuary with a drink in my hand and worked all of that out, in order, cleanly, competently, while a woman I loved bled to death on a carpet that did not belong to us.

Her eyes found mine.

She looked past Verity, and past my brother's hands, and she found me standing there with the glass, and she looked straight at me. What was in her face was not pain, and it was not fear either. She looked at me the way somebody looks at a thing they have already watched happen once and are now watching happen again.

Her hand came up, slick and running and shaking, and it got hold of the collar of Josh's polo shirt, and she pulled my brother's face down towards her own with a strength that had no business still being in her.

"RUN!"

It came out of her torn and drowning, and it went across his face in a spray, and Josh did not flinch, and Josh did not wipe it away.

And she pulled him closer.

"Run."