i just held you in the door-frame through all of the earthquakes. WHO: Solomon Tyler. WHAT: Nightmares centering on his mother's accident, his sister, and the chip. WHEN: The morning of November 1st. WARNINGS: Julie can't write.
When he opened his eyes, he was back at the estate.
It was nondescript and uniform, each door exactly the same as another, the sagging windows leaning helter-skelter in their frames. Greenery grew unchecked and rotted with weeds (so different from the Parakeet garden). The elevated cement walkways and stairwells were splintered, forming spiderwebbing cracks in the ground. He followed the path, lifting each foot high to avoid the crevices.
(Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. He could see his mother’s spine snapped in half, her body bent back at an inhuman angle, limbs mangled by the bus. Trish crying at his elbow. And Solomon forcing himself into that tiny, rickety hospital chair and trying to keep his hands on his knees, his feet on the floor, he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t.)
The buildings seemed to lean towards each other. The Leaning Towers of Walworth. Like the steepled fingers of some enormous giant, trying to meet at the tips. He stood alone between the long rows of flats, staring up at the concrete mountains until they seemed to block out the sun, until all was grey around him, until –
The door slammed.
He was inside. It set the entire apartment to trembling, vibrations thrumming through the floors and walls, rattling knick-knacks on their one bookshelf. The stupid kitschy little glass deer seemed to hit a crystalline note, which rang and hung suspended in the air.
ding
He reached out to touch it, but someone clearing their throat in his doorway made him turn. It was Trish, her knuckles on her hips, looking far older than fourteen. (It had something to do with the disappointment traced in the furrows of her brow and the downturn of her mouth, and how it reminded him of mum.) “Leave off,” his little sister said. “You’re gonna bruck it up.”
“Isn’t so,” he said, and his voice sounded younger than it should’ve been. Solomon took a moment to glance at the pictures on the walls (cheap prints, cheap frames, wood splintering): they were still below eye-level, yeah? He hadn’t shrunk or de-aged or anything in the night, had he? He wasn’t Kody, after all.
(Who’s Kody?)
“Either way, let it be.” She huffed and threw herself into the sofa. He sat down again.
In profile, Trish’s face seemed to meld, features turning familiar yet unfamiliar. When she turned to look at him again, it was Eden. Her voice still British, but with that touch of softened vowels, of America having set its stamp on her accent –
Until she was spasming, her head snapping backwards as if the entire room had slammed on the brakes, shrinking like a collapsing car like a tin can and his little sister had whiplash. A dark trickle of red liquid seeped from her nose. Into the corner of her mouth. Trish, he tried to say, but his voice caught in his throat. He was mouthing blankly, forming an O like a fish.
She finally twisted her head, turning her neck impossibly far, to where it shouldn’t be able to go and then –
And then they were in a laboratory. Sol was seated neatly in the corner, his hands on his knees, feet planted square on the floor, body still too tall for the chair he’d been placed in. Trish looked asleep on the table – restful, almost. But when he looked up, he finally noticed that a vise was prising open the back of her head (like a hatch, he thought, like a doorway leading into her skull). Metallic claws grasped somewhere at the nape of her neck, forcing a metallic sphere inside.
“Oi. That’s not right. They said it was about as big as a grain of rice.”
Trish didn’t move.
Tentative, Sol reached back to feel the back of his own head. There was a lump there. He could feel it now. As if he’d knocked his head into something recently, or as if a cancerous, calcified tumor had sprung up overnight. It didn’t hurt.
There was a girl sitting in the opposite corner, watching them. She looked familiar.
“You got something to do with this?” Sol asked. He reached out for his powers instinctively: they were his first thought and weapon, as they always were. But her eyes widened and in that moment he recognised her (Marine, it was Marine, why was he dreaming of Marine? this was his horrific laboratory, for fuck’s sake).
But then his hands were still grasping in mid-air, and there was no one left in the room but Trish. And he’d missed, the vibrations went thrumming through the room (the surgical instruments rattled in their tray) and her body shook again, full-body spasms as if she were having an epileptic seizure, and he could see the bones softening –
Step on a crack and break your mother’s back. When he closed his eyes, he thought he could feel her bones beneath his hands. It was like cracking crab claws to get at the wet meat on the inside. (Though he’d only had crab once in his life, and that was when aunt Candace came to visit and taken them to a fancy restaurant. He and Trish had never forgotten it; they’d dressed up in their actual Sunday bloody best and smuggled away pastries in the starchy handkerchiefs that came draped on each plate.)
He tapped the bones and the vibrations ran through them and snap