The Man Who Asked Twice

"Funny thing about help—the first time someone asks, it changes your life. The second time, it reminds you how much of it you've already given away."

The winter sun sat low over the gulf, the way it does at Glenelg of an afternoon this time of year, and it laid a road of broken light across the water that ran out to where the sky went the colour of a cooling ember. I leant on the jetty rail and let the cold come up through my forearms out of the timber. Salt-grey wood, worn soft at the corners by a hundred years of people leaning on it exactly like this to watch the day go down and think their own quiet thoughts—most of them, I'd have wagered, kinder than mine.

A southerly was getting up off the water, the kind that finds the gap between collar and neck and settles in to stay. My father used to stand at the top gate of an evening and read a wind like that the way other men read the paper, telling you what the morning would bring before it had the manners to arrive. I'd loved him for it and never once let on. All these years and a whole other world away, and I still caught myself reading the sky for a change that was coming, as if the habit had outlived the ground it was ever any use on.

Below me the sea went about its old, patient business against the pillars, a sound I'd known since I was a boy small enough to have my hand held on this same jetty. The sound of home, if home was still a word I had any claim on. I'd have given a good deal just to stand in it a while. But my mind went where it always went now, out past the easy water in front of me to another sea entirely—a black, heaving thing on the far side of everything—and to the sixty-two who had gone down into it last week and not come up.

I'd let their attempt go ahead. Or I hadn't forbidden it, which by then came to the same thing, because I'd forbidden the last three and watched what forbidding did to people who could see nothing in front of them but a slow death by starving on a rock. They weren't fools, the ones who drowned. They'd weighed dying quick against dying slow and made the only choice the island had left them, and I was the one who'd left it to them. It went on the list with the rest. The list was long, and it never got any lighter for the carrying. Grace had asked me for one thing before she went. Keep them alive. There'd hardly been a day since that I hadn't found some fresh way to fail her at it.

And here I stood, meanwhile, on the soft side of the ledger—able to cross between worlds at the push of a button while they'd drowned rowing a few miles of open water. The sun going down over the gulf like a blessing laid on nobody in particular. I couldn't have told you which part of that sat worst in me.

"You're looking old."

The voice came from behind me and caught me somewhere below the ribs—not because I didn't know it, but because I did. Deep, roughened, blunt as a fence post and warm underneath the bluntness the way only an old friend can manage. I didn't turn straight away. I wanted one more breath of being nobody in particular before whatever he'd carried here made me somebody again.

"Jeremiah." I turned, and let the gladness win out over everything else clawing for room in my chest, because it was gladness, whatever else came with it. He came at me the way he came at everything, straight on and no motion wasted, and folded me into an embrace as solid as a boat moored fast in weather. "It's good to see you again," he said into my shoulder, and thumped my back the once, and there was more in the thump than hello. There was a stretch of road I hadn't walked beside him, and I wasn't going to enjoy hearing where it had taken him.

When we stepped apart I gave him the looking-over he'd earned. Time had been at him with both hands. The long dark hair had gone to iron and salt, and a beard had come in thick and untended over it, weeks of the stuff, the sort that grows in when there's been neither soap nor a still hour to spare. That stopped me worse than the grey did. The Jeremiah I'd known kept himself squared away—not from vanity, he'd never owned a vain bone, but because letting the small disciplines slide is usually a sign the bigger ones have already gone. Whatever had been at him had got in past the small disciplines.

"You look like you've seen better days," I said, and dragged up a grin to take the edge off it. It was an old routine of ours, saying the hard thing sideways so it didn't have to be said straight.

"Ain't that the truth." Four words, and every bit of tiredness in the world folded down inside them. We laughed, the two of us, the way we always had—Guardian Atum and Guardian Atum Ra, the old double act—but it came out hollow and we both heard it land that way. A performance, and the audience it had been written for wasn't there any more.

Because we didn't do this. We hadn't stood in the same place at the same time in three years, and that wasn't two friends letting things slide. It was deliberate, and it was survival. The less we were seen together, the less either of us could be turned into a weapon against the people we were meant to keep breathing. Word went between us the long way round, through others, never a straight line a man could follow home. For Jeremiah to walk up on me in the open like this, in the last of the light, his face hung out for anyone to read—something had come loose. Something big enough to be worth the risk of standing here in it.

I'd half wondered, lately, whether he'd gone the way a few of the others had. Not dead. Just gone—pulled so far back into Clivilius, or so deep into hiding on Earth, that it came to the same thing. I'd heard Brian spoken of like that, a man who'd once held up a whole corner of what little we had and now held up nothing anyone could find. The thought that Jeremiah might have joined them had sat worse with me than I liked to admit. He was the one who'd handed me the entire shape of this life. Some fool part of me still needed him upright.

The last of the lightness went out of his face like heat off a stone once the sun's off it. When he spoke again the ground had shifted under his voice.

"Port Stower has fallen."

It hit me flat in the chest and my heart lost its footing. Port Stower. The last honest count anyone had managed put it near enough three million souls—three million, in a world that seemed built from the dirt up to make sure no such number could ever stand. And it had stood. It had been the proof that people could still make a thing worth making on that side. Now it was gone.

"Shit." It came out on its own, small and useless against the size of it. I heard how thin it sounded and had nothing better to set in its place.

"How can that be?" More plea than question. Some part of me was still hoping I'd heard him wrong, that there was a way the sentence ended that wasn't the way it had.

His eyes were red and raw, the crying already done and none of it left in him. "It's all but gone," he said, barely over the wash of the water. "Seven thousand, maybe, clinging to what's left of it. The rest—" He didn't finish. Finishing would have put it in the open air between us as a fact, and neither of us wanted to be the one who set it there.

He gave me the rest in pieces, and each piece was worse than the one before. Two million and more scattered out across the dead country of Clivilius with nowhere to put their feet. The ones who'd run for the neighbouring cities landing on places already bent double under their own people, so that the saving of them would break whoever took them in. And the Guardians. He didn't say much about the Guardians, but the little he said he said the way you read names off slates. Driven into the open to trade with Earth for supplies and hunted down for it. Taken. Worked over for what they carried in their heads—other Guardians, where the settlements lay, how the Portal Keys and the network behind them all hung together. Killed, a good many of them, and left where they'd be found, and their Portal Keys carried off into hands that should never have got within a mile of one.

A tear got loose before I could stop it and ran down into my stubble. I knew war. Belkeep had its own scars—we'd bled, we'd come near to breaking more than the once. But that was a blue in a shed next to this. This was a whole city snuffed out like a lamp between two fingers.

"Cody." His voice came back softer, and heavier for the softness. "Clivilius is in chaos."

I looked down at the water moving under the boards, because it was easier than looking at him. "And Earth's no different," I said. It felt like handing something over, saying it out loud. The two worlds weren't coming together the way the Prophecy had always promised they would. They were just going down together, in step, like two beasts roped at the neck that have agreed to lie down and not get up.

Then he did the thing that stopped my heart properly. He put his hands out towards me, palms up, the way you hold them when you're offering a thing—or asking for one. And I saw his wrists.

Iron had been on them, and not long back. These weren't the smooth silver seams old wounds settle into. The flesh was still raised and angry, still knitting, the plain record of a captivity I'd known nothing about while I stood on my rock counting my own dead.

"I need help," he said, and his voice broke clean across the middle of it.

And the years came off me like a coat dropped on the floor.

I need help. The same words. The same broken way of getting them out. I was nineteen again and stinking of a day in the paddocks, standing in the front bar of the Kingsford Smith with the light coming amber through the windows, a stranger with dark eyes buying me a beer to square away the one I'd knocked out of his hand. I was walking him up the track to my mother's kitchen on a whim I've never got to the bottom of, because something in me had been straining at the fence for months and here, all of a sudden, was a gate. I was standing outside his door late that night with my sister's odd look still sitting on me, watching colour bleed out from under it that had no business existing in my parents' house.

I was pushing that door open onto a wall gone to swirling light, a doorway stood up where no doorway was, and not one sound coming off it—that was the part I never got over, how quiet it was, a hole torn clean between worlds and it made less noise than the kitchen fridge. He'd put a Portal Key in my hand, cold and strange as a river stone, and told me the whole of it in four words: point, and press. The button had bitten me, a small sharp sting and a bead of my own blood I hadn't been warned about, and the wall had opened. I'd stepped through into a dark so complete it had weight to it, into cold, into snow going to slush under boots that had walked nothing but Australian dirt, into a silence that pressed on me like a flat hand—and a voice that was no kind of sound had risen up in the middle of me and said, Welcome to Clivilius, Cody Jennings.

I'd bolted back through white and shaking. And I'd said yes anyway. Of course I had. That was the whole trouble with me at nineteen, and I can't honestly say it's improved much since.

"Cody? You still with me?"

His voice hauled me back to the boards and the cold and the smell of the gulf. Coming up out of it was like coming up out of deep water too quick, everything roaring in the ears.

"Yeah." Too fast. I dragged a hand down my face. "What do you need me to do?"

He watched me a moment before he answered, weighing something out. "How's your settlement holding?"

Simple enough on its face, except I could feel the real question sitting underneath it—whether there was anything left of Belkeep worth leaning on, anything I had spare to give.

"We're struggling," I said, and hated what the honesty cost me. Straight out, no dressing on it. "Three hundred and twenty-six of us left." The number was a charge sheet. Every soul gone off it was a face I could still put to a name. "We've not found another settlement out there. Not one. And the people can't stand the island any longer—they'd sooner chance the water than sit and wait for the cold and the hunger to do it slower." I made myself say the rest of it. "Last week the sea took sixty-two of them."

"The water round Belkeep's like nothing I ever saw on Earth," I went on, needing him to understand it wasn't recklessness that had drowned them. "It doesn't fight you fair and lose. It just takes you. We're shut in on that island, down in a valley the winter never once leaves, and we've run clean out of anything you could call a good choice."

He gave a slow nod that didn't try to make any of it better, and I was grateful to him for that. But I could feel him steering, feel the purpose in him under all the sympathy, and my patience—worn to threads by months of exactly this—finally went through.

"What is it you actually want, Jeremiah?"

The directness caught him off his stride. Then he came at it his own sideways way. "You've been seeing someone. A good while now. Don't you think it's time you did something about it?"

The turn was so sharp it near gave me whiplash. "She's not ready," I said, and heard my own walls go up behind the words. Gladys was complicated, and what sat between us more so again, and the thought of hauling her into this—handing her a weight she'd never once asked to carry—sat in me like a stone I'd swallowed.

"Since when is any one of us ready for it?" There was an edge on him now. "Think of your children."

A laugh got out of me with no humour anywhere in it. "The twins are grown," I said, trying to walk us both back off ground I had no footing on out here in the open.

"Yeah. I know." But his eyes wouldn't let go of me. "You've been holding that settlement up on your own two shoulders for years now. How long since the last of them died and left you carrying it alone?"

I didn't have to count it. Some things you carry as a weight and never as a number. "Sylvie Sprake," I said, and her name was the whole of the answer. I could see her slate still, one more grey rectangle set flush into the frozen ground with all the others, and me the only Guardian left on my feet to stand over it when we laid her down. Every winter since had been mine to hold on my own. He knew that. He'd only asked to make me say it out loud.

"Why keep doing it on your own?" he pressed. "You know I've still got two more devices by me. Let them do the thing they're for. Let somebody help you carry it."

The push of it felt wrong coming off him. Jeremiah had always been the steady one, the one who measured a board three times before he ever put a saw to it. This wasn't measured. Under it I could hear something running—some far edge he'd already looked over and was working hard to keep his feet back from.

I turned it around on him. "Why now? After all this time, all this silence—why come and find me now?"

"So many questions." He shook his head, half fond, half worn right through.

It lit the fuse in me. "Don't you give me that obedience bullshit, Jeremiah. Not you. You're the one who taught me to pull the loose thread on every last thing I was ever handed."

His hand shot out and clamped on my arm, hard enough to hurt, fingers digging down into the muscle. "What the hell—have you lost your mind?" I got out, and tried to pull free of him.

"Luke Smith has been found." He said it low and quick, close in to my ear, as though the words themselves might carry to the wrong place. "He's been given a Portal Key. And he's activated it."

Everything in me went still.

"What—the Luke Smith?" I got out. "The one Clivilius has had us watching for?"

It couldn't be. All those years teaching Freya and Fryar the shape of a Prophecy that had worn thinner and more like a bedtime story every time I'd told it—and now, out of a clear sky, it stands up and puts its boots on?

"Yes." A grin broke across his ruined face, wildly out of place against everything else in it.

It came through me in waves. If Luke Smith was real, if the old promise was actually turning over in its grave, then every last thing—the waiting, the drowned, the slates—might come to mean something after all. And in nearly the same breath, the timing of it stood the hair up on the back of my neck. Port Stower gone to ash. The Guardians run down to shadows. Clivilius coming apart at every seam it had. And now, precisely now, the one we'd all been promised comes walking.

"Then it's time," I said, and it came out of me like a vow taken.

"Yes," he said.

I took the card out of my jacket. Small, white, plastic, nothing much to look at in the last of the light. I'd been carrying it about for weeks with no notion what to do with it—whether the using of it would save us or finish us off. But if the far end of everything was really walking towards us now, then sitting on the thing did nobody a scrap of good.

I put it in his hand. He turned it over, reading it with his fingers as much as his eyes. "What's this?"

"An access card. Killerton Enterprises."

His head came up fast. "What? How in God's name did you get your hands on this?"

The shock on him was worth something—proof I'd been working a seam he'd never known was there. "The how of it doesn't matter."

We held each other's eyes, caution and hunger both at once in it. "Have you been near the place?" he asked at last, and there was fear laced right through the wanting.

"I've been inside."

"What—" It came out of him hard. "Cody, you want to be bloody careful. They'll kill you where you stand if they ever work out what you are."

"No." Too loud; a couple further down the jetty turned their heads, and I brought it back down. "It's not what you think."

"What do you mean, not what I think?"

"Killerton's not the thing we were told it was. It can help us."

The disbelief came off him like a cold draught. "Help us? Clivilius said—"

"I know what Clivilius said." I let it sit a beat. "What if Clivilius was wrong?"

You'd have thought I'd spat on the floor of a church. Questioning Clivilius wasn't a thing Guardians did. Clivilius was the voice in the dark that had named us, the hand that pointed the way we walked. But I'd stood inside Killerton on my own two feet and come back out the far side with everything I'd held to be true knocked clean off its pins.

"Wrong?" Jeremiah turned the word over like it might go off in his hand. "Clivilius is never wrong."

"You sure about that?"

The quiet that came down then had weight to it, full up with everything neither of us was saying. I went into it while it was still open. "You need to get that to Luke."

"I don't like it." He held the card back out at me as if it had gone hot in his palm. "This is treason you're talking, plain as day. If Killerton doesn't kill you for it, Clivilius will see to it personally."

I wouldn't take it back off him. "Please. Help me get it to Luke."

He shook his head—not a refusal so much as a giving way to something. "I'm in no position to reach him."

Suspicion went off in me like a struck match. "Then how did you even—"

"But you are." He pressed the card flat to my chest, no give in his hand at all.

"I don't follow you."

"Gladys Cramer."

The name landed like a flat hand across the face. "Gladys?"

"Yeah. Gladys knows Luke Smith. Knows him well."

The plain way he set it down didn't match the size of what it meant. How in hell had Jeremiah come by that? My mind took off down a dozen tracks at once and not one of them led anywhere I wanted to go.

His hand came to rest on my shoulder, heavy, steadying, an anchor put down. "Let me bring her across to Clivilius, old friend. You need her. You've needed her a long while now, whatever it is you keep telling yourself."

I looked down at the card in my hand, then back up at him. Everything past this point ran off into country I couldn't see the end of—treachery somewhere in it, most likely, and danger for a certainty. But the other road was Belkeep dying slow on its rock, and every promise I'd ever made those two children turning out to be nothing but a story I'd told them to keep the dark off their faces.

"Alright," I said. The word came up out of a lifetime of picking the least terrible of whatever choices were set in front of me. "Let's do it."

"Yes," he said.

The sun was well down by now, the gulf gone to pewter, the cold come up in earnest, and the two of us stood there in the dark on a South Australian jetty quietly setting ourselves against the one power that had ever given either of our lives a shape worth the name. Somewhere on the far side of everything, Grace would have laughed herself sick at the sheer gall of it, or wept at the recklessness. Knowing her, both at once—and told me off for my language while she was about it.

I put the card away and turned back to the water, out towards whatever was coming for us. Under the boards the sea kept up its old conversation with the pillars, patient, endless, not caring in the least that two men standing above it had just made up their minds to try and tip the world—both worlds—clean over on their side.