Coldbrook

2

We’re the different sides of the same coin, Jonah thought, but even that idea felt wrong. As he watched Drake sitting upright at Coldbrook’s library table, nervous and proud, gaze constantly flickering to the wall of books that gave the room depth and warmth, the truth was much more miraculous. They were more than like-minded.

‘It’s not the best,’ Jonah said. ‘I smashed my last bottle of Irish. This is a nasty blended make. Cheap. Harsh. But we’ll just have to make do.’ He poured two fingers into each of the four glasses, and felt everyone’s stare upon him.

‘Jameson’s was my father’s favourite,’ Drake said. ‘But I’ve never tried it. Someone from our Coldbrook once found a bottle of Knob Creek.’ He took the glass that Jonah offered him, smiling his thanks. ‘For days after I couldn’t see straight.’

‘That’s some rough stuff,’ Jonah agreed, lifting his own glass. Holly took her drink, still shaken. She was sitting very close to Jonah, and he could feel the fear coming off her in waves. Beside Drake was a woman who’d introduced herself as Moira. A lovely Welsh name, Jonah had said, but the woman had not reacted.

‘We should drink a toast,’ Jonah said. Drake and Moira startled him by standing, and he and Holly followed suit.

Drake stared unflinchingly at Jonah. There was an ease between them that was almost friendship. It felt good, but Jonah could not yet bring himself to trust it, not after what Holly had told him. Everything was so strange.

‘Five days ago I drank to success,’ Jonah said.

‘Huh. Well, then, how about to survival?’ Holly raised her glass to Drake. ‘You’ve managed it for forty years. We’ve only just begun.’ Before anyone else could echo her toast she drank the whisky, grimacing slightly as she sat down and placed the glass on the table.

‘Survival,’ Jonah said, and Drake and Moira agreed. They drank, Jonah refilled everyone’s glass, and they made themselves comfortable again.

Fourteen other people had shot their way through the breach with Drake. They had not lost one person to the furies. Two of them had collapsed in Control, and one was still unconscious. The effect of the breach, Drake had said, and Jonah had noted Holly nodding in understanding. I’ll feel that soon, he’d thought. Because there was one thing he was determined to do, furies or no furies, Inquisitor or no Inquisitor. And that was to see Earth as it was in another universe. He’d spent so much of his life seeking it, and despite everything he could not deny himself that experience.

Holly had yet to make a full inventory of the damage done to their control room, but Jonah didn’t want any buttons pushed in case processes started or ended accidentally. The breach itself was stable, linked directly through the core, but there were a hundred other accidents waiting to happen.

Three other Gaians were in the library with them, delightedly perusing the walls of books. Jonah had already realised that their ragged appearance belied their intelligence.

‘I’m sorry about the man I hit,’ Holly said. ‘And the breach guards. .’

Jonah noted Moira’s expression hardening, but Drake nodded. ‘And we apologise for Mannan,’ he said.

Holly waved a hand, dismissing something she had yet to tell Jonah about. She poured more whisky and sipped, sighing and sinking into her chair.

‘So, welcome to our Earth,’ Jonah said.

‘Take me to your leader,’ Drake said.

‘If only I could.’ Jonah’s smile became heavy. ‘After Coldbrook’s power went down, I lost track of what was happening up above. But Holly’s filled me in. She said you’re able to see through the eyes of the furies?’

‘Our casting technology, yes.’

‘You built a window, we made a door,’ Holly said.

‘You’re still one step ahead of me,’ said Jonah. ‘I’m the only person in the room who’s still a one-world horse.’

‘We must change that,’ Drake said.

‘This casting. . how do you do it? Is there temporal dislocation? How does the targeting work?’

‘I can tell you,’ Drake said. ‘But I’m sure you’d rather see for yourself, wouldn’t you?’

‘Probably not,’ Holly said. ‘It was. . horrible.’

‘We’ve come from a dead world to see your world dying,’ Drake said.

Jonah felt a spark of anger. ‘We’re not finished yet. There’s hope.’

‘Hope?’ Moira mocked.

‘Holly tells me that you have someone immune to the disease. I assume you’ve been studying him?’

‘For a long time,’ Drake said.

‘And they test him,’ Holly said. ‘They let him get bitten again and again. Chunks have been taken out of him.’

Drake and Moira shifted uncomfortably, but Drake recovered quickly. ‘You can’t judge us. I won’t allow it.’

‘Allow?’ Holly scoffed. ‘He tried to-’

‘And I apologised for that,’ Drake said.

‘That was a mistake, Holly,’ Moira said. ‘You’re precious to us. We’d have suggested that more subtly.’

‘Suggested what?’ Jonah asked.

‘They try to reproduce Mannan’s immunity,’ Holly said. ‘And when I found him, he thought I was there to. .’ She pressed her lips tightly together. ‘To be impregnated.’

‘He was still curled in a ball last time I saw him,’ Moira said, her eyes sparkling. ‘You certainly know how to look after yourself.’

Drake leaned forward suddenly and grasped Holly’s hand.

‘I was born into a place you can’t understand. Everything I know of my Earth before the End is from books, or recordings, or knowledge and stories handed down from my father. It’s not even a memory for me. And though some of us are resigned, I’ve never been able to let go of hope. Mannan is an oddity that none of us has ever been able to figure out, and that’s a frustration and a complication.’

‘Where did he come from?’ Jonah asked.

‘Forty years ago, in the midst of our epidemic, my father heard about him,’ Drake said. ‘Mannan was barely a teenager at the time. He was bitten in Illinois, survived, and my father did everything he could to get him to Coldbrook. There’s quite a legend built around it. Many died in their efforts to save Mannan, and for a time — well, my father remembered it as a time of hope. .’ Drake trailed off, not needing to say what had happened afterwards. No cure, no inoculation.

‘And he’s the only one?’ Jonah asked.

‘Who knows?’ Moira asked. ‘Could be others on other continents. But we don’t travel. People came from France six years ago,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Three years before that, a group travelled up from South America. They brought news, but none of it good. So there are travellers, but not many. And their life expectancy is short. Knowledge is dying.’

‘But you have your casters,’ Jonah said.

‘Between veils,’ Drake said. ‘But not across oceans. That would be like you using your breach to travel to the next town — impractical and, so we found, impossible.’

‘How do they work?’ Jonah asked.

‘Our casting engines create mini-black holes, we stabilise them, and the casters move across the resulting Einstein-Rosen bridge.’

‘How do you deal with the Hawking radiation?’

‘Hawking?’

Jonah frowned. ‘No Hawking? Well. . the overflow radiation.’

‘Oh. We feed it back via a second black hole within the first.’

‘Neat,’ Jonah said. ‘But only their consciousness goes through?’

‘Of course,’ Drake said. ‘They want to come back.’

‘Jonah, the processes don’t matter!’ Holly said. ‘It’s sharing our knowledge of the furies that’s important.’

‘Mannan,’ Jonah said.

‘Yes,’ Drake said, pouring them all another drink. ‘We’ve tested his blood, transplanted his DNA, examined every part of him again and again. Brain scans, cell cultures. We regularly try to impregnate volunteers, but we fear he’s infertile. That could be bad luck, or something to do with his immunity.’

‘I want to meet him,’ Jonah said.

‘You’re a doctor?’ Drake asked.

‘No, but I know one. Marc Dubois, the best.’

They drank. The air between Jonah and Drake was loaded, with positive potential rather than with tension.

‘I know something about your world,’ Jonah said softly. ‘More than Holly told me. I’ve been shown more.’

Moira’s eyes went wide, but Drake only nodded.

‘We thought so,’ he said. ‘We believed it was Holly to begin with, hoped it was, because she’s so strong.’ Jonah sensed Holly absorbing the compliment, and he hoped she was buoyed by it. ‘But then she mentioned you, and I knew.’

‘The Inquisitor,’ Jonah said. ‘I thought perhaps I was going mad.’

‘Are you keeping a diary?’ Drake asked.

‘No. Never been much of a diarist.’

‘Why do you ask?’ Holly said.

‘Because the woman whom the Inquisitor took from our world kept a diary before she went. We’ve gleaned much from that.’

Jonah looked past Drake at the other visitors poring over books, holding them like newborns as they turned the pages carefully. Perhaps they really were the most precious of things — their power could not be cut off, and their batteries would never run out.

‘He showed me things,’ Jonah said. ‘Holly, the morning we breached he showed me the death of the world we had just found our way to. I didn’t know it then, but now. .’ He glanced from Drake to Moira. ‘It’s tragic.’

‘What did you see?’ Moira asked.

‘People dying. Being herded into trucks. An American flag with too few stars. Burning fields, black glass deserts. Stranger things, but all to do with the disease those furies are spreading, I guess. And the Inquisitor told me-’

‘“It is required that you accept”,’ Drake said.

‘From your woman’s diary?’ Jonah asked.

Drake nodded, glanced at the bottle, and Holly poured some more.

‘But it’s not all our world,’ he said softly.

‘What?’ Holly gasped.

‘What it showed Jonah. Those sights. They weren’t all views of Gaia.’

‘But. . how can you know?’ Holly asked.

‘Your casters,’ Jonah said, a dreadful realisation striking home. He felt weak, numb. ‘Not just our world, Drake. How many others do you watch?’

Drake drained his whisky again, and his expression changed. Jonah had recognised his excitement at being there, and seen his own intelligence echoed in the man’s eyes. But now there was something else — something like fear.

‘Many. We don’t cast so much now. The energy levels required are massive, and our matter fields have been failing for years.’

‘But we’ve been watching your world, and it gave us hope,’ Moira said.

‘Not hope enough to stop something coming through,’ Jonah said.

‘And that guilt is on me,’ Drake said. ‘I should have posted more guards. Been more careful.’

‘But what of all the other Earths you’ve seen?’ Holly asked.

‘Over the past decade, I’d say that one in a hundred we’ve cast to is uninfected,’ Moira said.

There was a stunned silence.

‘I assumed it started in Gaia forty years ago,’ Holly said softly. ‘So how was your world infected?’

‘A breach, similar to your own but more violent. It caused a quake. It was thought that our casting attracted that Earth’s attention, but I don’t know. Now we believe there are endless people like you and us across the multiverse, striving to explore, looking to travel. And chance dictates that such undertakings will cross paths, here and there.’

‘As we did with you,’ Jonah said.

Drake nodded.

‘This breach into your world,’ Jonah said. ‘Something came through.’

‘We knew what it was. We’d been casting for ten years by then. The breach was half a mile from Coldbrook, and the army guarded it. It all went military very quickly.’

‘We should have guarded our Coldbrook better,’ Holly said, but Drake shook his head.

‘It would have made no difference. The breach remained static for almost a year. My father and his team experimented, sending in drones, animals. But it was solid, like a mirror. Everything I’ve read and the memory casts I’ve viewed. . everyone thought it was benign. They built a structure to encase it, and closed it off from view. And then the fury came through. Chaos found a way’

‘It’s still there?’ Holly asked. ‘Their breach?’

‘Sealed up.’ Drake nodded.

‘And you never tried to go through?’ Jonah asked.

‘No,’ Drake said. ‘My father saw no point.’

‘So the Inquisitor,’ Jonah said, trying to take it all in, trying to absorb the end of everything when Coldbrook was always meant to be the beginning of something wonderful. ‘He spreads the plague?’

‘No, no,’ Drake replied. ‘There’s not one Inquisitor, but many. They oversee the spread, record it, and recruit a new Inquisitor for every world killed.’

‘And that means we now have a chance to fight back,’ Moira said.

‘But how do you know all this is true?’ Holly asked.

Drake sighed. ‘It’s largely conjecture. But maybe now we’ll have the chance to test.’ For the first time he looked away from Jonah as he spoke. To Jonah, that didn’t bode well.

‘The woman,’ Jonah said. ‘The diaries.’

‘Her name was Kathryn Coldbrook,’ Drake said. ‘My father worked with her fifty years ago, just after she and her organisation had performed the first casting through the veils. The casters became very famous.’ He snorted. ‘I have her biography. Our world was open to wonder back then, so my father told me. Receptive to it.’

‘Not cynical,’ Holly said.

‘Well, I think we’d barely be human without healthy cynicism,’ Drake said. ‘I don’t think Kathryn was a very nice woman. Father told me she was an unpleasant genius — single-minded, arrogant, and didn’t suffer fools gladly.’

Holly glanced at Jonah, one corner of her mouth turned up. He raised an eyebrow.

‘But she was brilliant,’ Drake continued. ‘My father worshipped her memory, and he must have read her diary a hundred times. The experiments, the celebration when they made their first cast. The Inquisitor visiting her. That came over as a madness, of course, but now we know better.’

‘She’s viewed as a monster now,’ Moira said. Jonah was taken aback by such a comment, and surprised at some of their almost mystical phraseology — veils, monsters.

‘That’s not her fault,’ Drake said. ‘Understand, this is all gleaned from her diaries, with plenty of guesswork thrown in. But my father always said Kathryn had a unique mind. He said she was able to embrace the imagination in her scientific studies. She was even. .’ He frowned.

‘She had faith,’ Moira sneered, as if the word tasted foul. Jonah thought that he would have to ask about that.

‘Maybe that made it easier for the bastard thing to take her,’ Drake said. ‘I’ve always wondered. Though she was a woman of science, she was also a slave to mysticism.’

‘So what the hell is that thing haunting me?’ Jonah said.

‘Someone who perhaps has a sense of humour. Your world had the Spanish Inquisition?’

Jonah nodded.

‘We believe that they are Inquisitors of the multiverse, from a version of Earth so thoroughly obsessed by and convinced of their own exclusive holiness that they cannot allow any other.’

‘Cannot allow?’ Jonah said.

‘Maybe they found the fury disease in one reality, grasped its potential, and encouraged its spread,’ Drake continued. ‘Or maybe they conceived and released it themselves. Nurtured it from world to world to destroy everyone not of their Earth.’

‘That’s. .’ Holly shook her head.

‘Genocide,’ Jonah said.

‘Billions killed across the multiverse,’ Drake said. ‘Trillions. Beyond counting. Infected, and waiting to rise again to attack those not infected. Every Earth explores, and when they break through to what they think will be somewhere similar they find furies.’

‘And there aren’t many worlds still holding out,’ Moira said.

‘Yours is!’ Jonah said. ‘Forty years you’ve been surviving, and-’

‘You can hardly call it surviving,’ Drake said, his composure slipping. ‘It’s barely existing.’

‘You said we might be able to fight back,’ Holly said. ‘What did you mean? How can you defeat something that’s already won?’

‘Kathyrn Coldbrook’s diaries,’ Drake said. ‘She sensed something observing her even before she and my father succeeded with their first casting. In later entries she reveals her belief that her Inquisitor guided her towards success, though not quite the success he intended. And following our eventual infection he courted her, preying on her guilt with nightmare images that she noted in her diary. Some of which you might recognise, Jonah, were you to read it.’

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘The last few pages are very confused. Painful to read. So much self-doubt as she denied what she was seeing, what the Inquisitor was doing to her. As he was luring her. It’s as if she was trying to keep hold of herself, but also being torn in other ways. And one day. . she vanished.’

Silence descended, and Jonah glanced at the other three people around the table. Drake and Moira displayed a sadness that seemed to fit their hard faces well: a familiar emotion. Holly was staring down at her hands.

‘Bill Coldbrook died,’ Jonah said. ‘I took over his work.’

‘And have you ever felt watched?’ Drake said, leaning forward again.

‘Yes,’ Jonah said. ‘And so did Bill. I think that made him paranoid and drove him to suicide.’

‘And now an Inquisitor is after Jonah,’ Holly said.

‘They take you,’ Drake said. ‘That’s what Kathryn seemed to imply. Across secret bridges and through unknown wormholes those bastards have created with technology that must be so similar to yours, or ours. They take you back and convert you. And then you go out as one of them and oversee the destruction of another Earth.’

‘This was meant to be so special,’ Jonah said.

‘Countless Earths think that.’

‘So those things helped us to make the breach?’ Holly asked. She sounded hurt, and Jonah felt the same. He thought back to Bill before his suicide, what he had accomplished, the breakthroughs he had made, and Jonah tried to see where the tipping point had been. It had still taken them ten years after Bill died to complete the project, and there had been several failed attempts. But they could never have succeeded without Bill’s radical, groundbreaking work as their foundation. And somewhere in that foundation had been a rock cast by something alien.

‘It’s pure evil,’ Jonah said.

‘So you have to fight it!’ Holly said. ‘It might not be over.’

Holly felt a rush of hope. Drake had shown her views of her own blighted world in the casting room, and Vic had confirmed those images in their short conversation. But now they had a chance — a challenge — and they had to grasp it and make it work.

And Vic was coming back.

‘We need access to Mannan,’ Jonah said.

Moira and Drake leaned in close to each other, whispered something that no one else could hear: urgent, serious. Then Drake stood and shook his head.

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘We can’t bring him here.’

‘We don’t need to.’ Jonah stood as well, walked around the table and stood in front of the man from another world.

He held out his hand.

After a moment’s hesitation Drake took it, and smiled. ‘That’s something I thought I’d never do,’ he said. ‘Shaking hands is so. . mannered. It’s something we only ever see in memory casts.’

Holly found Drake compelling, almost hypnotic. He carried himself well, and had a natural grace and intelligence. But she realised now that there was something else — he was completely out of place here, no matter how relaxed he seemed.

‘You must go through,’ Holly said. ‘You have to, Jonah. I’ll stay here and wait for Vic and the others. I can check the systems, make sure the repair holds, run some diagnostics on the core. And I’ll try and figure out how to get them down here when they arrive.’

‘Perhaps Moira can stay with you?’ Drake suggested. ‘She services our casting-field generators. I’m sure she’d be fascinated with your technology.’

‘Yes!’ Moira said.

‘Of course,’ Holly said. ‘She saved my life. I owe her a tour, at least.’

‘I’ll leave this with you,’ Jonah said, placing his satphone on the table. ‘Marc thinks they’re three or four hours out.’ He waved her over and they embraced. ‘Get them in safe and sound. The girl’s precious. She might be priceless.’