Eyes of the Owl (Part Two of Two)

The stairwell is easy. It's a sanctuary. Breathing space. And so the temptation is to linger here, move slowly. Get my balance back.

But we're on the clock.

And Charlie's music-synthetic voice is there in my head: “It looks clear. Keep going.”

I break out easily onto the fourth floor. It's dark, and I trust my friend: the sensors, the cameras, they've all been disabled. The museum is eerie by night – and how could it not be? - with all these long-dead, long-disused things sealed up in glass. The displays around me tells stories from a past so old even Charlie's grandma didn't live it. To the side of me the mannequin ladies wear dresses that scrape the floor, that are held together with cushions and wires, their hair all netted and bonneted, lace clusters around their necklines. Across the hall from them the early hominids are gathered around a waterhole, scooping real water with fibre-glass, silicon-fibre hands. Their eyes are glass and wire, a faint glitter. You think they might move, that any second they'll come out of their frozen coma, and suddenly their world is the world.

Their bones are on display in cases. In this light, in this pink-streaked, indoor twilight, slate grey bordering on void-black: this is when I remember that these bones belonged to people. People, sort of. Maybe not much more than animals. But they had some person in them, they had feelings and simple thoughts. A dead man or woman left us that bone. Lived. Died. Lay there, buried or unburied, until the sharp edge of shovel disturbed that. And now...

An old gun. Ridiculously decorated. A puff of smoke type thing. Strange and old and clunky. Hard to imagine people killed with those.

“Em.”

Had I been staring? Absorbed.

“Focus.”

“I think she's nearby.”

“You're okay. You're not looking at her.”

But I will be. And when she was moved, set up, human eyes would have seen her. She'd have inhaled just a little bit of that museum worker, that security guard. Just a slender wedge of human life, but it's still lodged inside her. She's still awake.

“I'm so sorry,” Charlie's grandma had wept at her, “so sorry that this has to be you two. I would never put you in danger. Least of all this danger.”

“We were hired to do a job.” Make light of it. Don't get sucked deep into the old lady's terror.

And we were, hired. Charlie's grandma knows what we are. How we survive. She understands.

“Straight ahead,” Charlie's saying. “Just around the corner. All clear.”

And the giant doors loom up ahead. Ornate. Forbidding. The huge archways are crowded with complex designs. There's crystal-work along the edges, it looks like gemstones set into the door frame. And the doors are painted with murals of some ancient culture, something to pre-date nations maybe.

Locked. Of course.

“You got this, Charlie?”

“Yup.”

“How much longer?”

“Depends on how sharp they are. Hey, it's just City Hall.”

“They're morons. They're not dead.”

Not yet. Not everybody. Focus. You can do this.

This should be the army. The military should be raiding this place. Smashing that stupid owl lady. They could rig a few explosives. Take care of it all. But just like she said: Nobody Remembers. How many generals are 150 years old?

“Okay, Em. Got it. Ready?”

Not by a long shot. “Sure thing.”

And the doors open slowly, open towards me, flow as if on a current. Already I can feel her, the air prickling, a tide of curiosity, of malice. A darkness bound with light – sucking me gently, tenderly towards it.

#

I remember her voice, the voice she used to have. Twelve years old. A live wire.

“I want to die!” she wailed at me. “I don't want to end up like this!”

“But you are. You will.” Thirteen. Confused. Wanting to say the right thing to a devastated friend. But this was so enormous. The scans were so hideous. The poison spread deep into the marrow, spread all over her body, rotting away in her jaw. Secreting into organs, skin, eyes. If they'd caught it when they should have she'd have been okay. If they'd caught it later she could have had that childish, insincere wish. It'd been close.

It must have cost her family everything. Her dad, still living then. Her aunt – the same. Whatever little they had and then some. But it paid for the surgery. It saved her life. It sucked her dry of substance, crippling.

The live wire who'd used to duck and tumble, who seemed to outrun gunshots: that was gone now. This child was huddled, bent. No money to restore her bones and nervous system, just enough for the plastic jaw, the implant that allowed her to still use speech.

No money for rent.

They'd moved into a tiny box of a room.

Been evicted.

Her father: arrested. This is how he paid then? What he'd had to do. The price was inevitable. A twenty year sentence. Dead five years into it.

Her aunt. Work-scarred, worn: her heart gave out the next year. No money for wires. And she was dead too.

While her grandma went on. With no-one knowing how, with no parts for Charlie, no cures. Just the soft spoken words: it isn't so simple. Child, the price. I could never want you to pay the price. I would help you if I could.

And Charlie. And me. Believing her absolutely.

Charlie's grandma, she knows things. Things even other age-defying renegades like her don't know.

#

And the doors. Opening.

It seemed like forever, walking inside.

She's there, cocooned in her display case. And at first she looks almost ordinary. Just this ancient figurine, apparently pre-dating time. She's woman first – made patiently and elegantly of clay – but the sense of owl becomes quickly invasive. There'd something in the face, at once softly rounded and still sharp; and in the soft, silky nut-brown shades of her hair. Gold mixed in there – shiny, filigreed wire. Her dress like feathers, white and brown and seemingly soft, with colours of red-purple-blue spliced in there. A subtle anger present in her eyes, a dire blue. A sense of wisdom, tempered with patience, woven in with that quiet malice, that dark aura that comes out of her cold, like a heartbeat...

It's just a figurine.

And yet she isn't. I'd known. Because I believe Charlie's grandma. And now I know twice over. She takes my breath away. And she's seen me. I feel her attention, it settles over me as a cold mist, a tacky glaze that rests somehow inside my skin.

“Em.”

“Okay.”

Well, you're not fireproof, bitch.

A fluctuation, somewhere deep in my heart. Like she's heard. And what the fuck next if she is fireproof? I should have brought a hammer.

“Em!”

She's getting into me. That's what it is. My heartbeat feels intense, too fast. It takes all my breathing to keep it from rising any higher. Shivering. She radiates cold – unfettered ice.

“Turn the suit off.”

Sensors disabled. Yes. Fucking sloppy. But the cold doesn't flow away. I want to believe that's just a matter of time. Body adjusting. Suit powering down. Except for the mist of feathery icicles gathering on the walls, along the floor.

I set the charges. Lips pressed together. Just concentrate.

“Em!”

She's beginning to glow. Just softly. Just in the centre of her, but it grows as my eyes are drawn to it. She's gravity. And waves of grey-green light come off her. They're soft, cloud-like. But they leave the air tasting toxic, metal at the base of my tongue. A choking sensation that grows in steady increments, wrapping itself around my throat. I can feel the numbness creeping up in my legs, through my fingers, into my wrists.

This room is awash with it, phosphemes in grey-green-gold. They blossom. And I can feel them in my heartbeat, everything intensifying. Vision slurring, streaking. My hands struggle with the wires, pressing them into the red putty, sealing them with foam.

“Last one,” I murmur.

“Make it snappy. There's incoming.”

But I'm grasping it now: that's the least of our problems. It doesn't matter if we're caught, it doesn't matter if we're wired up and warehoused in a military prison. Getting out of here alive is the game now. Getting out of here with her dead.

Her head turns, and our eyes meet.

Blue as the summer ocean, bluer, deeper. Sparkling on the inside, haloed with gold and white-gold and green; glitter black in the centre.

You cannot defy me.

I can. For a flicker of a second her words become my thoughts. They do. I believe in my heart that I can't. That she rules me. In the same moment I feel weak, I feel like water. But I remember my fingers, still holding the last set of wires. They feel slippery, clumsy; but this is something I could do in my sleep. The last wire pressed into putty, foam sprayed over it. I set the last timer.

“Go!” Charlie yells at me. Her voice sings and screams all at once.

When I try, my legs give under me like melted wax. I fall hard, and it feels as if my skin is melting, smearing along the polished fake-marble floor. I find my breaths coming hard, fought for, sucking every one of them into my lungs around a lump of solid ice. Arms don't move properly. And behind me things are about to get fiery.

She opens her eyes a little wider, letting in more colours, holding me.

“You're looking at her! Stop looking at her!”

Turning my head, wrenching it away: that's an act of pure will. It's like pulling myself free from stretchy steel. Her gaze pulls back. I feel like throwing up. But that' bad, that's DNA, that's a no-no. I crawl towards the window, not trusting my legs or my balance.

Behind me: a voice. Not words. A song.

A last charge, set against the window. I bury my face in my arm as the blast hammers the glass. It cracks, it almost holds, but then it falls away in patches. It falls a long way down. I have elongated seconds to hope that it won't hit anyone, to imagine it slicing them from above – all weight and momentum, sharp-edged. Be careful down there.

I rappel out the window. So fuddle-minded right now could easily have failed to attach to magnet. I could be free-falling all the way down to the ground, crunching into bleeding pieces. Dimly: doesn't matter, we've taken her out. She can't do what she would have done. A million and a half pieces. Let's see you come back from that. And then the cable clinches. Fall arrested. I shudder under the impact, feeling like some rank amateur. My hands take over from a brain still shell-shocked. A ripple of vibrations. Heat. Light. Up above me flames burst through the window. Up above me the other windows crack. One breaks. It breaks into fragments, confetti, raining down not that far from me, sparkling ruby-bright from the fire up above.

“You with me, Em?”

I search for my voice. “Yeah.”

“Get moving.”

“It's over.”

“I get it. But we don't want to get caught.”

Doesn't matter. But the ordinary world is beginning to reassert itself, where things are measured in single people, where it's me-centred. The world's not in danger, and I don't want to be arrested, I don't want to risk being handed over to the military. My feet are still numb, I feel the pressure of touchdown through my ankles, through coming to a halt.

Charlie has the engine running.

I stumble to the van.

“Oh, fuck. Look at you. Are you actually hurt?”

“I don't think so.”

She half reaches for me. Shocked. I don't have a mirror. She's my mirror? Did that owl-bitch almost kill me?

“I'm okay,” I pretend, or guess, or just say the words.

“Get in then.”

10k. Each. I try to focus on that. The museum recedes away as we drive. A red beacon in a black, neon-scraped night. The fire burns ragged, it burns like a fraying wound in the eye sockets of the fourth floor. An eye that follows us, winking at us, assessing us, even as we turn the corner, even as its colour fades.