Highlights from Finch by Jeff Vandermeer Last read on May 21, 2023
Highlights from this book
-
The dead gray cap looked like every other gray cap. Except for the one glaring lack.
The exposed cross section, cut almost precisely at the waist, fascinated Finch. He almost forgot himself, poked at the tissue with his pen.
The cut had been so clean, so precise, that there was no tearing. No hemorrhaging. Finch could see layers. Gray. Yellow. Green. A core of dark red. (A question he was too cautious to ask: Was it always that dark, or only in death?) Within the core, Finch saw a hint of organs.
Gray caps bled. Finch knew that. Not like a stream or a gout, even when you cut them deep, but a steady drip from a leaky faucet. Puncture wounds healed almost immediately. It took a long time and a lot of patience to kill a gray cap.
-
Heretic seemed to take it for a smile. As he walked past on his way to the door, he patted Finch’s elbow. Finch shivered. A touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.
-
Harsh blue sprawl of the bay, bled from the River Moth. Carved from nothing. The first thing the gray caps did when they Rose, flooding Ambergris and killing thousands. Now the city, riddled through with canals, is like a body that was once drowned. Parts bleached, parts bloated. Metal and stone for flesh. Places that stick out and places that barely touch the surface.
-
Midafternoon. A soft, wet, sucking sound came from the memory hole beside his desk. Finch shuddered, put aside his notes. A message had arrived.
Some detectives positioned their desks so they could see their memory holes. Finch positioned his desk so he couldn’t see it without leaning over. Tried never to look at it when he walked into the station in the morning. Still, the memory hole was better than the dead cat reanimated on Skinner’s doorstep, message delivered in screeched rhyming couplets. Or the mushroom that walked onto Dapple’s desk, turning itself inside out. To reveal the message.
Exhaled sharply. Peered around the left edge of the desk. Glanced down at the glistening hole. It was about twice the size of a man’s fist. Lamprey-like teeth.
Gasping, pink-tinged maw. Foul. The green tendrils lining the gullet had pushed up the dirty black spherical pod until it lay atop the mouth. Finch sat up. Couldn’t see it. Just heard its breathing. Which was worse.
-
Sometimes the overlay of reality seemed a sham. One day, he would turn a corner on a rubble-strewn street. Pass through an archway into a courtyard. Be back in that other, simpler world. When he worked in the same building but as a Hoegbotton courier. Not as a detective. When he worked for Wyte, not with him. Am I dead? he thought sometimes, walking down that green carpet he remembered from a different city, a different time. Am I a ghost?
-
On the back of the photograph, his father had scrawled a few lines: “Sometimes a man will see in his own image a desert, and it is the need to make that desert bloom which drives him again and again to action, as hopelessness compels us to our end. Sometimes, too, a man will flee in the enemy’s direction, eager to weather any punishment—physical or mental—that proves he is still alive. Or, he does so from a pride that lies to him, tells him he can change what seems unchangeable.”
-
Each time he ate a memory bulb, he became someone else. Different when he returned. These would be his fourth and fifth. The first had belonged to a girl of ten and had given him nightmares for a year. Montages of a ragged doll. Soup made with dog bones. A bleak apartment without even wallpaper. Turned out there’d been no foul play. Her parents dead, she’d starved to death. The second had been a young man, the third a young woman. A double suicide unspooled in his head. Left him with longings he didn’t know he had. Regrets that weren’t his. Memories of people he didn’t know.
Or want to know.
Finch had never eaten two in one night. How many would change him by just a little too much?
Fuck it. Opened his mouth wide. Placed the bulb on his tongue. The taste of the gray cap bulb was dry. Like dirt and sand. The worst part was you had to eat them whole.
Crunch down on the ridiculous size of it until your jaw ached. No good cutting them up, grinding them down to paste, adding them to food or water. Ruined the effect. His skin prickled as his mouth took in the strange texture, the taste. An odd, sickening blend of cinnamon-pepper-lime. Sour breath. Dread, and yet also a thin layer of anticipation. To be taken out of his own life. If only for a little while. He stumbled into the chair. Feral butted his head up against his slack arm.
Memories didn’t come out the way one might expect. Nothing logical or ordered about them. Almost as if you were standing on a street corner as a motored vehicle raced by. As it passed you, a thousand pieces of confetti flew up. You had to try to catch as many of them as you could before they hit the ground.
Finch closed his eyes.
Leaned back.
Let it hit him all at once.
Come to: At the bottom of a well. Layers of rough stone spiraled up to a distant pale light. A wriggling mass of worms or insects or something thick and strange pushing down through the light, extinguishing it. Sudden image of a monstrous City, balanced atop a single building greater than anything ever built in Ambergris, and it all housed in a cavern so huge that the ceiling is lost in blue-tinged darkness.
Come to (faster now): A stumbling, jerky run through a tunnel. A surrounding mob of gray caps click and whistle with insane speed. A glimpse of blue sky, winking out. A burning motored vehicle, ancient model. A parade with a huge black cat caged and orange-yellow-green lights spread out along the route. Superimposed: an enormous grub drowning in a sack of its own liquid skin. A dark-green frond of fungus five stories high. Blood, lots of blood, pooling out across the ground. A man’s face, in extreme agony, suddenly gone black in silhouette, turning into a huge door made half of volcanic rock and half charred book cover. And on top of the door a smaller door, and a small door set into that one. Hand on the doorknob. Opening …
Come to (slower now): A stone fortress in a desert. Spinning out into open space—falling, falling, falling. And then a face Finch recognizes, the dead man’s, smiling. Beatifically. More mud and dirt and the smell-sound of a river nearby. Side view of water flowing, ear to the grass. Something licks the moisture from his eyes before huffing and going on its way. Falling again, through black fabric studded with stars. The dead man falling, too, staring right at Finch, expression oddly calm. Words from the man’s mouth in the clicks and whistles of the gray caps’ language. And then, a sudden and monstrous clarity that can never be put into words.
Come to: Moving slowly among a thousand swaying fungal trees in a thousand vision-shattering shades of green. Nearby, a rotting tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under the fruiting bodies. The sound of footsteps. A hint of movement other than spores, strained through the heavy sky. Hunting for something. But what? A man. Moving in front of them. Night. Strange numbers and words spilling out emerald against a field of darkness. Shadowing the man. The orange sky dominated by the shambling hulks of floating fungal fortresses. Things crawl and fly and swim between the fortresses. Running now, just yards behind the man. But the man was turning to face them. The man was looking right at him when he disappeared. Winked out. Leaving only the smile. And that only for an instant. An intense feeling of confusion and surprise. Then: falling through cold air and couldn’t feel his legs.
Returned whining. Keening. A low, animal sound from deep in his throat. Lay curled up on the chair. Sweating. Things crawled around inside his skull. Didn’t know how much time had passed.
-
Finch forced the second bulb into his mouth. Chewed it into a dull paste as he moved from the chair to the couch. Lay down. Swallowed. The room spun a little. Righted itself. The ceiling had a few odd discolorations but nothing to suggest infiltration. Invisible spies. Who lived upstairs, anyway? Sometimes lately he had heard a person pacing across the floorboards in the middle of the night.
After a minute or two, Finch sat up. Nothing seemed to be happening. Nothing at all.
The dead man sat in the chair next to him, smiling.
“Uhhh!” Finch leapt to his feet.
The man was flanked by a Feral grown large as a pony. A Sidle grown as large as a Feral. They both looked at him the way Sidle had been looking at the moths. “Sit down,” the man said. An order, not a suggestion. In a strange accent. The man looked much younger than he had on the floor of the apartment. Had lost the fungal beard.
Finch sat down slowly. Didn’t take his eyes off the man. Left hand groping across the cushions. Where was his gun?
“I’ve been waiting for someone like you,” the man said. “You won’t understand it, but I’m going to give you what I know. Just in case.”
The window behind the man no longer showed the city. What it did show was so impossible and disturbing Finch had to look away. And yet the image entered into him.
The man said Finch’s name. Except he didn’t say “John Finch.” He used Finch’s real name. The one buried for eight long years.
Finch tried to slow his breathing. Failed. Chest felt like something was going to explode.
He must be inside the man’s memories.
Then why is the man sitting across from you?
“Who are you?” An obvious question. But it kept pounding against the inside of his skull. So he had to let it out.
The man laughed.
“I didn’t say anything funny.”
“More to the point,” the man said, “who are you? And who are you with?”
“Shut up. This is just one of your memories. Manifesting in me. It isn’t real.”
Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it. Through the tear: a turquoise sea roiling with ever-changing patterns.
“You don’t have to understand it. Not now,” the man said.
Didn’t know if he was inside a mushroom or outside the universe. Glimpses of the city from on high: each street, each canal, an artery filled with blood. Hadn’t known there could be so many shades of red. Spiking into his eyes. “Be careful,” the man said, echoing Rathven, and took Finch’s hand. The man’s hand was warm. Callused. Real. “Don’t lose yourself, no matter what happens.”
The man and Feral and Sidle disappeared. The window became a huge mouth, and they were all nothing more or less than memory bulbs within it. Finch fell through the same skein of stars he had seen in the gray cap’s memory.
Woke up: Teetering on the battlements of an ancient fortress, looking out over a desert, the sand flaring out for miles under the seethe of dusk. Moments from someone else’s childhood. A parent’s death. Sitting in a blind. Crawling through tunnels.
Woke up: A cavern glittering with veins of some blue metal, huge mushrooms slowly breathing in and out. Seen in a flash of light that faded and kept fading but never went out: more caverns, an old woman’s face, framed by white hair; another woman, in her twenties, her thirties, her forties. A shadowy figure hobbling down a street.
Woke up: The insane jungle of the HFZ, almost floating above it, through it, coming out into a clearing ringed by twelve green men planted in the ground, arms at their sides, their mouths opening and closing soundlessly. And the jungle was made of fungus, not trees, poured over trucks and tanks and other heavy machinery junked and rusted out and infested with mushrooms, some of it still slowly, slowly moving. And back to the fortress, at the edge of a man-made cliff, many hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and out in the desert a thousand green lights held by a thousand shadows motionless, watching. A sound of metal locking into place. A kind of mirror. An eye. Pulling back to see a figure that seemed oddly familiar, and then a name: Ethan Bliss. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered with gray cap symbols. And, finally, jumping out into the desert air, toward a door hovering in the middle of the sky, pursued by the gray cap, before the world went dark.
Wake up... Came out of it seconds, centuries, later. To find Feral and Sidle watching him. Feral on the floor near the couch. Sidle on the windowsill, a large black moth trapped between his clockwork jaws.
-
“They’re here and then they’re there, and sometimes they don’t know the difference, and if you let them, they’ll keep making that the whole point of everything they’re doing to the city. They’ll break you down by not telling you what you already know, should already know, because that’s the way they operate. Knowledge is the lack they seek in us, and when they find it, they turn the key, open a window, and it’s all back to where we started.”
-
They passed addicts with the familiar purple stains across their skin. Men in the ill-fitting uniforms of janitors for the camps. Somebody pissing in an alley. Faded posters on a long crumbling wall, showing pictures of members of the short-lived puppet government. Another blood-red mushroom looming over them big as a tree. Every week there seemed to be more of them. Next to it, a blossoming flower of a building atop the squashed remains of the local grocery store. Soft humming sounds came from an interior obscured by fleshy window flaps.
-
He’d gone to investigate a death about a year ago. By himself. No one else in the station. The call sounded simple. A man found dead beneath a tree, beginning to smell. Could someone take a look? Most days, not worth bothering with. But it was a slow morning, and Wyte took the job seriously. The woman seemed upset, like it was personal.
The body was down near the bay. Beside a cracked stone sign that used to welcome visitors to Ambergris. Holy city, majestic, banish your fears. No one was around. Not the woman who had called it in. No one.
The man lay on his back. Connected to the “tree,” which was a huge mushroom. Connected by tendrils. The smell, vile. The man’s eyes open and flickering.
Wyte should have left. Wyte should have known better. But maybe Wyte was bored. Or wanted a change. Or just didn’t care. He hadn’t seen his kids since they’d been sent out of the city. He’d been fighting with his wife a lot.
He leaned over the body. Maybe he thought he saw something floating in those eyes. Something moving. Maybe movement meant life to him.
“Who knows? Just know that it’s a dumb move.”
A dumb move. That’s how the detectives would say it during the retell. At their little refuge, not far from the station. When they told the story. A dumb move. Like they were experts.
“Point is,” Albin would say, because Albin usually told the story, “he leaned over, and the man’s head exploded into spores. And those spores got into Wyte’s head.”
White spores for Wyte. Through the nose. Through any exposed cuts. Through the ears. Through the eyes.
Although he fought it. Twisted furiously. Jumped up and down. Cursed like the end of the world. So at least he didn’t just stand there and let it happen.
“But by that time, it was too late. A few minutes later and he’s just somebody’s puppet.”
Wyte became someone else. The “dead” man. Someone who didn’t understand what had happened to him. Wyte ran down the street. Taken over. Screaming. “Screaming a name over and over. ‘Otto! I’m Otto!’ because that was the dead man’s name. Wyte thought he was Otto.”
Or most of him did. Wyte, deep inside, still knew who he was, and that was worse.
Sometimes, out of a casual cruelty, a kind of boredom, one of the other detectives, usually Blakely, will call Wyte “Otto.” Until Finch makes him stop.
“Well, they found him a day later. Once they figured out who the dead body was.
Cowering in a closet. Saying ‘Otto’ over and over again.”
In the dead man’s apartment.
“A caution to us all.”
Wyte got Otto out of his head. Eventually. Most of Otto. But not the fungus. That became worse. The gray caps couldn’t or wouldn’t help. Maybe they saw it as some kind of perverse improvement.
-
Five times he’d stayed after hours. Survived each encounter. But talking to a single gray cap during the day was different from being among many of them after dusk. It brought back memories of the war. It reminded him of night duty in the trenches, the crude defenses House Hoegbotton had created for its soldiers. Sighting through the scope at some pile of rubble opposite. Hoping not to see anything. Feeling the sweat and fear of the others to each side. The flinch and intake of breath at the slightest movement.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Moving past him. Soft rustle of robes. Hushed sigh of their breathing, as if they slept even while awake. Oddly heavy footfalls. A smell that ranged from sweet like syrup to rank and disgusting. Did they control it? Were there signals they gave off humans could never read? Those eyes. That mouth. The ragged claws on the doughy hands.
Sitting at the desks like distorted reflections of their daytime counterparts. He had never learned their names. Thought of them only by the names of the humans who’d been assigned the same desks. Or once had. So there sat Dorn, and there sat Wyte, and there were Skinner and Albin.
The fifth was Heretic. He’d brought something with him. On a leash. Finch didn’t know what it was. Couldn’t tell where it started or ended. It had no face, just a sense of wet, uncoiling darkness. Like an endless fall off a bridge at night, under a starless sky, into deep water. That one glimpse and Finch never looked at it directly again. The light in the room had faded to the dark green preferred by the gray caps.
“Do you like my skery, Finch? Do you find my skery pleasing to the eye?” Heretic asked in a voice rough yet reedy, standing in front of Finch. Emphasis on pleasing to the eye. As usual when Heretic tried out a turn of phrase. “No? That’s a shame. The skery is a new thing, and useful to us. Very soon, it will save us a lot of effort, allow the Partials to do other work.”
“You have withheld information from me. You haven’t even finished with the list. From now on, you will report every day. You are to tell me everything. Do not leave it to your judgment.”
Finch opened his mouth to speak. Heretic said words that sounded like kith vrisdresn zorn. Snapped his fingers. The skery wound itself around Finch’s legs and tightened. Sudden tingling paralysis. He could not move away. Could not fall. Choking on his own breath. The paralysis brought with it an image of an endless field of dim stars, one by one extinguished. A gulf and a void. Finch was as afraid as he had ever been in his life. Because he didn’t know what he was looking at, or why.
Try to breathe. Slowly. Breathe slowly.
The skery curled its way up to his chest. Around his neck. It pulled tight so he was gasping in his motionlessness. He felt something like sharp leaves or thorns up against his neck. An impression of lips. A sharp, smoky scent. Half the field of stars had gone out. There was more darkness than light.
From behind Finch’s desk, from a thousand miles away, from behind a thick wall: Heretic. Saying, “A skery is not as bad for you as what I could bring with me.” The skery curled back down Finch’s body. Released him. He stumbled forward, hands on the desk to stop from falling. The field of stars so bright he almost passed out. Then the desk came into focus. Prickles of sensation came back into his legs. Neck already sore and throbbing.
-
Finch stood at the prow of the gray cap boat, the only kind allowed out on the bay. Wyte beside him, skin on his arms green. Not from being seasick. The boat was big enough for eight or ten. Empty with just the two of them. Slight upward lurching push as it expelled water below the surface to propel them forward. Looked like any other boat from afar. Except it acts like it’s alive. Route preplanned by the gruff Partial who had met them on the shore. Who had shoved a mushroom into an orifice on the hull that looked uncannily like a memory hole. Somehow the boat knew where to go. How to return. Finch’s shoes were sinking into the loamy sponge of the “planks.” Tried to remember to bend his knees to keep his balance.
The wrongness of the railing at the prow suddenly got through to Finch. Should be grainy, splinters needling his hands. Instead: soft, fleshy. He took his hand away like the railing was boiling hot.
-
They turned to watch the city at dusk. The unexpected phosphorescence in places. As if the sun’s death throes. The now-dull green glow rippling from the bay. The towers were still being worked on nonstop. Finch could almost imagine them complete now.
“What do you think the towers are for?” Finch asked the Photographer.
A gleam of interest entered the Photographer’s dead black eyes. “Sometimes I dream. I dream it’s a giant camera. And it’s taking pictures of places we can’t see.”
-
The weather had gotten surly. Grayish. A strange hot wind dashed itself against the street rubble. Blew up into his face. Off to the northeast: the Religious Quarter. A still- distant series of broken towers, steeples, and domes. Wrapped in a haze of contrasting, layered shades of green. Looking light as mist. Like something out of a dream from afar. Up close, Finch knew, it reflected only hints of the Ambergris from before, the place once ruled by an opera composer, shaped by the colors red and green.
-
As ever, Wyte hid himself in a bulky, tightly buttoned overcoat. An angry red splotch had drifted down his forehead. Had colonized half of one eye. Cheek. Chin. The splotch had elongated and widened his face. Made his head more like a porous marble bust. He wore black gloves over his hands. Red and white threads had emerged from his sleeves. Wandered of their own accord.
As Wyte trod heavily closer, he extended his hand. Gave Finch a thankful look as they shook. Wyte’s grip was strong but gave. Like the glove was full of moist bread. Finch suppressed a shudder from the sense of things moving inside each finger.
-
Tripping over the things crawling off Wyte’s legs. Wyte exploding out from their shelter, overcoat thrown aside to reveal a body become other. A garden of fungus. Arms ballooning out into sudden wings of brilliant purple-red-orange. Legs lost in shelves and plateaus and spikes of green and blue. Back broader and insanely strong and gray. Head suddenly elongated and widened. As he ran a high-pitched scream came from his mouth that frightened Finch and bloodied the ears of the Partials.
-
“Look,” the Lady in Blue said, pointing out past the ruined hulks of tanks. Toward the dull orange dome.
“What am I looking for?”
“Just wait.”
As she spoke, the dome exploded. A thousand streamers rising in intense shades of red and orange. Like some kind of land-bound sun. The tendrils arched into the sky. Hung there. Then disintegrated into a vast cloud. A roiling mass of particles. Discharging light until a steady humming glow suffused the city in a kind of dawn.
There came in reply from the city a hundredfold bestial roar. Strange fractal creatures began to grow at a frenetic pace across every surface. Straining up toward the light. While the orange dome, much reduced, seemed to breathe in and out. Beyond the particle cloud the darkness continued unabated.
“Dawn, Finch,” the Lady in Blue said. “That’s the kind of dawn they have here.” “Yes, but what is this place?” Finch asked, almost pleading. “Where am I?”
“It’s a place where the echo of the HFZ—just the echo of it—destroyed a city. Subjected it to this perpetual artificial dawn. There’s no one living down there now. No one. Just flesh that serves as fertile soil … for something else. The HFZ is like a wound where the knife cut through more than one layer. And that’s really all you needed to see. No, it hasn’t been fun out here for six years, Finch. Not really.”
-
What it took to kill a man transformed that way was almost what it took to kill a gray cap. Finch had killed a gray cap once. Before the Rising. When he was James Crossley. Crossley was in charge of the patrol that night.
They had only the light of a half-moon and the reluctant streetlamps burning a hundred feet away. But Crossley caught sight of something moving herky-jerky through the junkyard.
Seven in the patrol. Exposed. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing at first, because gray caps rarely came out into the open. It was like seeing a dolphin in a public pond.
So he’d given the signal to spread out without knowing what they faced. Circle round. Converge.
He crept up, over broken girders and garbage, to find: a gray cap. Wandering in a circle. Talking to itself. No obvious injury. But something wrong. Like it was drunk.
When the gray cap saw them, it broke off its wandering dance. Tried to escape. But they had it hemmed in by then. Its teeth, needle sharp. Claws on its fingers. It expelled a fungal mist, but they were already wearing gas masks.
Crossley was the first to shoot it. It lurched. Righted itself. Ran toward another point of the compass. Two bullets. Another lurch. But absorbed. A cry. A leap like a dancer, then. As if finally realizing the danger. Crossley-Finch would never forget. It whirled past one man and then another. But instead of escaping, it turned to close the distance. As if enraged. Or sick. The light in its eyes green and everlasting. Tore into one man with its claws, slapping away his rifle. Took another bullet for its efforts, but scooped out the Irregular’s throat. The man crumpled to the ground. Crossley, scrambling to aim and fire, thought he saw a glint of a smile from the creature.
Darted. Flitted. Was gone. Then back again. Far then close. Each of them struggling to keep up with that speed. Grunting and cursing and sweating, as if it were something normal. Like digging a ditch or a grave. Too invested now. Knowing they couldn’t retreat, and that the gray cap had decided to fight.
Wherever the thing stepped, a golden dust rose up from its tread. Clouds of red-and-green spores radiated out from it like steam. Their gas masks protected them. Low on ammo. They kept shooting it, and it kept taking the bullets. Knives out. Finch shouted the order to fix bayonets. Down to four. Against one.
Reminded them not to let the bayonets get stuck in gray cap flesh. It would reel them in, finish each of them off. But, still—one man’s rifle got stuck. Forgot to let it go. The gray cap jerked him forward, disemboweled him, then turned, stung by fresh cuts from all sides. Down to three men. Flesh sloughed off its body, but no blood. It did not wince. Kept shouting in its language. Sometimes mixing in human words. In a hissing, sibilant voice.
They kept at their task. Too busy to be afraid. Too busy to scream. Inside, its flesh was black, accordioned. Crossley saw as he came in close at its back. As it bit and kept biting another man. Finch brought his hunter’s knife down across the back of the gray cap’s leg. Felt the blade cut through something hard and thick. He pulled it out, taking a wedge of black flesh with it. The gray cap limped away. No longer as agile. A snarl.
Finch and the others shot it in the face, the chest, the arms, the legs. Still, it kept coming. Dancing in and out, its face a discolored mess. Eyes peeking out from the ruined flesh. Crossley lunging, driving his blade deeper into the leg as it turned to face one of his men. Dashed out as the creature tried to turn.
There was a give, and a wash of purple blood.
He stood back. Saw the gray cap standing on one leg.
“Murderers,” the gray cap crooned. “Murderers. In our city.”
Crossley wanted it dead in that moment. To shut it up. Caught in a bloodlust so primal that the enemy looked fey and beautiful in the moonlight. Distant and removed from what they were doing to it.
Now they converged, the three of them. It couldn’t evade them. Did it weep as they tore it to pieces? Did it make any human sound to make them stop? No. All it did was stare up at the hard stars as if they were but an extension of its eyes. Arms hacked and pulled off. Cut at. Peeled away. Tossed to the side. The red of its leg. While still it stared. While a cloud of spores erupted from the top of its head, puffing away, disappearing. Hacked, too, at the torso until there was just a head attached to awreckage of neck. Still the thing smiled. Still it seemed to live. The reflexive life of a gecko’s tail.
Now they cursed and sobbed. Unable, as the bloodlust left them, to understand how they had been brought to this. How they could have done this. Even as they still wanted to kill it. Screaming. Shouting. Not caring if an enemy could hear them. Just wanting to keep on killing it until it was dead.
Finally, they burnt it, until it was just dead eyes laughing, asking if it had been worth it. Soon even that burst into spores.
-
“You have to choose a side, Finch. Eventually you have to choose a side, even if you pretend to be neutral. Even if you think giving out information is like selling smokes or food packets.”
-
Rocking. Rocking. Back and forth.
Finch sat on the upper deck of a houseboat in the Spit. From the towers across the bay, green fire gathered. It leapt out at them. Became huge and sparkling over their heads. Burned into boats all around them. Splintered timbers. Sent up waves of flame.
A fire that never seemed to reach them. And yet was inside him. Wyte and Finch’s father sat on a whitewashed bench opposite him. His father was the hunched-over specter he’d been at the clinic, in the last days. Coughing up blood. Wyte was, mercifully, as he’d been before the vainglorious charge from the chapel.
“Getting close,” his father said.
“Getting close,” said Wyte.
“Hang on,” his father said.
“Soon it will be your turn,” Wyte said. “Will you be ready?”
“Ready for what?” Finch said.
“Never lost.” Now it wasn’t Wyte sitting beside his father, but Finch as James Crossley. Youthful. Neatly trimmed beard. Eyes bright with confidence. The James Crossley who’d worked as a courier for Wyte.
Finch smiled. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. Could’ve used you earlier, James.”
His father had disappeared. Duncan Shriek was sitting next to James now.
Flickering in and out like a faulty bulb.
Finch stared at them both. While the Spit burned down around them.
Shriek said, “You can’t survive much more of this. You’ve got to find a way out.
Finch grinned painfully. With each new bolt of green light another part of him was disintegrating. Falling away.
“Easy for a dead man to say. I’m still in the world,” he said.
Something was calling. Some noise was exploding in his head.
“You’ll be back,” Shriek promised, fading into darkness.
-
Back on the Spit. On the roof of the houseboat. Dusk now, the sun almost gone, but lingering.
The Spit smoldered. Thick with flame and smoke. The towers were silent. From that angle, he couldn’t see what lay between them. But strange birds flew out between them. Like parrots, but different. Flashes of green-blue-orange. Beyond that, the city, in an agony of bronzing light.
Opposite him on the bench sat Duncan Shriek. This time he had a long gray beard, white hair down to his shoulders. His beard writhed, alive. His overcoat wasn’t made of cloth at all. Concealed a mountain of a body, reminding Finch of Wyte. No shoes. Shriek’s feet seemed to blend into the wood of the floorboards as if rooted there. His image flickered in and out. Could not seem to settle into flesh and blood.
“Hello again, Finch,” Shriek said.
Finch, bitter: “They burned your body. Spread your ashes over the towers. You’re dead,” Finch said. “You failed us. Thousands and thousands of people are going to die because of you.” Angry at himself.
Shriek said, “Your body is shutting down, Finch. You cannot take more torture. You have to do something. All I can do for now is numb the pain.”
Finch’s legs were on fire. He couldn’t put out the flames.
“There’s nothing I can do.”
Shriek pulled him close. Until his face was inches from Finch’s. Drawn into the power of those eyes that were both more and less than eyes. Into the magisterial force of the experience and pain there. “Find a way. And when you’ve done it, drink the vial you brought with you. Even if you do kill the Partial you’ll die there on the floor, otherwise.”
“The Photographer said the vial is poison.”
“It is. But it’s life as well. You’ll die, and then I’ll bring you back.”
“You can’t do anything,” Finch said. “You’re just in my head.”
“So are you,” Shriek said.
-
Felt an immense pressure in his skull. A kind of pulse. “That’s me,” Shriek said. “Me, trying to get out.” His eyes burned with a deep and abiding fire. “I was still regenerating. Healing. But I altered the memory bulb. I encoded it with a copy of me. When you ate it, I entered your brain. If my body had lived, if the real me had lived, I would have eventually become less than an echo. A stray thought. An impulse for tea instead of coffee. Unexpected sadness or joy. You would have carried me, decaying, for the rest of your life. But that didn’t happen. They’ve killed me and I’m all that’s left. Now it’s my mission.”
“There is no mission now.”
“You’re wrong, Finch. Very wrong.”
Finch, disgusted: “Like Wyte and Otto. I’ll die and you’ll come out of me. Like a fucking parasite.”
Shriek frowned. “No. Not like Wyte and Otto. Not like that at all. Otto ate Wyte from the inside out. I’m just a passenger, gone soon enough. If you help me.”
“Help you do what?”
“Manifest in the real world. Become flesh and blood. Complete the mission while there’s still time.”
“But you’re just a … an imitation.”
“It’s not the best way. It’s just the only way now.”
Shriek hesitated. Then said, “I won’t lie to you. It’s a sacrifice. I will be doing things to your body to make my own. Stealing from your tissue. Robbing you while you’re already weak. You won’t be the same afterward. Even after you recover from the torture. You’ll have dizzy spells. Headaches. You may not sleep for a while. When you do sleep, there will be nightmares as your mind flushes out my memories. But you’ll be setting me free. And I won’t take it from you unless you let me.”
-
“What are you waiting for? Start shoveling this stuff into the fire,” his father said. Still, he hesitated. Watched the smoky flames rising into the darkness, the sparks mimicking the flares in the distance.
“If we burn all of the photographs, I’ll forget what you look like.”
His father didn’t miss a beat. “But not who I am. And if you don’t do it, there’s no clean break, son.”
His father reached down, picked up a handful of documents and IDs. Shoved them into the fire. Which flared up for a moment.
“This is the best way.” John Crossley had said it a dozen times that day. Anything else of value that couldn’t tie the son to the father had been put in a storeroom on the edge of the merchant district. A neutral area. James could retrieve it at any time. The whiskey. The cigars. The books. The map. The ceremonial scimitar his father had gotten while fighting against the Kalif. “Keep it hidden, son, but use it when you have to.”
They’ll never forget, never forgive, no matter who the enemy is, son. Better just to start a new life. Be someone else.”
“Is there anyone you want me to contact,” he’d asked his father. “No, no one,” the old man had insisted.
-
The towers were complete. They shone with green fire in the light. Between them, impossible scenes flashed so fast he caught only glimpses. A vast blue dome like an observatory. Replaced by a mountain topped by a tower. A city of gleaming buildings taller than any he’d ever seen. A forest of vine-like trees. A roiling sea over which egg-shaped balloons floated, trailing lines of shimmering light. And on it went. Almost beyond comprehension.
-
what do the Dogghe want? What do they want out of Ambergris?”
Anger in her voice. Desire and need, too. Just not for him. “This was our place, John. Before your people came. Before the gray caps. And maybe it will be again.”
-
From the towers, an ungodly roar and cacophony. Lines of light reach out from the tops of the towers into the city. Toward the blood-red mushroom stations. As if helping to hold them up. In front of the towers, the tiny shadows of rows of gray caps lined up on the bridge. As if in worship.
In that space between the towers, the gate—the door—has finally found what it was searching for. A weak white disk in a porous pale sky, poor mimic of the sun beyond the towers. Framed in gray, gigantic living citadels rise in a swirl of glittering dust motes so tightly packed they can only be spores. Two, three hundred feet the citadels rise. Circular. Studded with tiny eyes for windows. A hundred curving causeways run between them. Rising from below, a thick forest of tendrils in constant, rippling motion. Waves of color washing across them, strobing from greens to reds to blues, and back again. Through this landscape, great beasts stride in perpetual gloom. Hunched over. Half seen, half heard. Cities of fungus rising from their backs. But at the bottom of this scene, a tear or rip. Like a photograph with a flame burning through it in a rough triangle. Turning it to ash.
A green-gold door rising.