Shoggoths in Bloom (46 page)

“See those purple birds? They were supposed to be able to dissolve themselves in their own tears. These ones seem to be able to convert themselves into an amoeba-like state and back. One of your techs said it was going to set stem cell research forward fifteen years, if they can figure out how to extrapolate the tech.”

“They’re not my techs,” Mauritza says. “This was just a license job.”

“Sure it was.” He smiles.

She looks away.

“There are a whole bunch of babies inside,” Brown says. “That same tech told me they’re genetically manipulated. Stronger, faster—”

“You have a way of getting sensitive information out of people.” “I used to have a nickname.”

“I heard.” She pauses, pressed against her eyes. “If you can build a tree octopus, how much trouble is a superkid?”

“Bet the going rate is higher.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And so is the cost of failure.”

Brown turns to look at her. “You know, my license is up as of five minutes ago. I’m not a cop right this second. I’m just a guy with a conscience.”

“Doe’s going to walk out of this a hero,” she says.

“Unless you tell somebody the truth.”

She nods. She can’t look at him. She keeps talking. Not because he’s interviewing her, but because she has to tell somebody, and maybe if it’s him, she can tell herself he got it out of her somehow.

Superpowers.

“The last case we worked before I left him,” she says. She opens her mouth. She can’t go on.

Brown waits, studying his fingernails.

She studies them too. “Doe planted evidence.”

“You have proof?”

She nods. “I have a vid. The same vid that shows me nearly getting shot. I kept it to myself. But that wasn’t—” She sighs. “That wasn’t murder.”

Brown says, “If you come forward with this, that will cost you your career.”

“And him his.” She twists her hands together. “I was a good cop. It’s not the end of the world.”

Brown looks away. “You are a good cop. You know, I was thinking of getting out of this game—”

“Too much ugly?” she asks, noticing the past tense.

He nods. “They’re going to destroy all of these animals.”

“I know,” she says. “It’s not your fault.”

“Whose fault it is doesn’t change what’s going to happen.”

She has to force her shoulders out of their hunch. “What about the babies?”

“God only knows. Adoption? Want to raise a superbaby? Somebody will. And Matt and Martha?”

“Group home. After they testify.”

“Group home,” he agrees. “Until they die of old age.”

Her whole body aches with the aftermath of adrenaline. “What about the animals that escaped?”

“Escaped?” Brown glances across at her and smiles. “You think these things could survive in the wild?”

Sanchez looks him in the eye. She looks away.

“Of course. How on earth would anything escape a place like this? It’s crazy talk.”

She shakes her head, remembering the elegant coil of sticky tentacles through wet boughs.

“Crazy talk,” she says. “How on earth would that happen?”

Dagmar was doomed to run. Feet in stiff new trail shoes flexing, hitting. The sharp ache of each stride in knees no longer accustomed to the pressure. Her body, too heavy on the downhills, femur jarring into hip socket, each hop down like a blow against her soles. Against her soul. Dagmar was doomed to run until her curse was lifted.

Oh, she thought of it as a curse, but it was just a wedding ring. She could have solved the problem with a pair of tin snips. Applied to the ring, not the finger, though there were days—

Days, maybe even weeks, when she could have fielded enough selfloathing to resort to the latter. But no, she would not ruin that ring. It had a history: the half-carat transition-cut diamond was a transplant from her grandmother’s engagement ring, reset in a filigree band carved by a jeweler friend who was as dead as Dagmar’s marriage.

She wouldn’t wear it again herself, if— when, she told herself patiently— when she could ever get it off. But she thought of saving it for a daughter she still might one day have—thirty wasn’t so old. Anyway, it was a piece of history. A piece of art.

It was futile—and fascist—to destroy history out of hand, just because it had unpleasant associations. But the ring wouldn’t come off her finger intact until the forty pounds she’d put on over the course of her divorce came off, too.

So, in the mornings before the Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday section of her undergrad animal behavior class, she climbed out of her Toyota, rocking her feet in her stiff new minimalist running shoes—how the technology had changed, in the last ten years or so—and was made all the more aware of her current array of bulges and bumps by the tightness of the sports bra and the way the shorts rode up when she stretched beside the car.

The university where Dagmar worked lay on a headland above the ocean, where cool breezes crossed it in every season. They dried the sweat on her face, the salt water soaking her T-shirt as she ran.

Painfully at first, in intervals more walking than jogging, shuffling to minimize the impact on her ankles and knees. She trotted slow circles around the library. But within a week, that wasn’t enough. She extended her range through campus. Her shoes broke in, the stiff soles developing flex. She learned—relearned—to push off from her toes.

She invested in better running socks—cushiony wool, twenty bucks a pair.

She’s a runner and a student; he’s a poet and a singer. Each of them sees in the other something they’re missing in themselves.

She sees his confidence, his creativity. He sees her studiousness, her devotion.

The story ends as it always does. They fall in love.

Of course there are signs that all is not right. Portents.

But isn’t that always how it goes?

Her birds found her before the end of the first week. Black wings, dagged edges trailing, whirled overhead as she thudded along sloped paths.

The crows were encouragement. She liked being the weird woman who ran early in the morning, beneath a vortex of black wings.

She had been to Stockholm, to Malmö where her grandfather had been born. She’d met her Swedish cousins and eaten lingonberries outside of an Ikea. She knew enough of the myths of her ancestors to find the idea of Thought and Memory accompanying her ritual expurgation of the selfinflicted sin of marrying the wrong man . . .

. . . entertaining.

Or maybe she’d married the right man. She still often thought so.

But he had married the wrong woman.

And anyway, the birds were hers. Or she was theirs.

And always had been.

“Your damned crows,” he calls them.

As in: “You care about your damned crows more than me.” As in: “Why don’t you go talk to your damned crows, if you don’t want to talk to me.”

Her crows, the ones she’d taught to identify her, the ones that ate from her hand as part of her research, clearly had no difficulties recognizing her outside the normal arc of feeding station hours.

They had taught other birds to recognize her, too, because the murder was more than ten birds strong, and only three or four at a time ever had the ankle bands that told Dagmar which of her crows was which. Crows could tell humans apart by facial features and hair color, and could communicate that information to other crows. Humans had no such innate ability when it came to crows.

Dagmar had noticed that she could fool herself into thinking she could tell them apart, but inevitably she’d think she was dealing with one bird and find it was actually another one entirely once she got a look at the legbands.

The other humans had no problem identifying her, either. She was the heavyset blond woman who ran every morning, now, thudding along— jiggling, stone-footed—under a cloak of crows.

Things she has not said in return: “My damned crows actually pretend to listen.”

Dagmar grew stronger. Her wind improved. Her calves bulged with muscle—but her finger still bulged slightly on either side of the ring. The weight stayed on her.

Sometimes, from running, her hands swelled, and the finger with the wedding ring on it would grow taut and red as a sausage. Bee-stung. She’d ice and elevate it until the swelling passed.

She tried soap, olive oil. Heating it under running water to make the metal expand.

It availed her not.

There are the nights like gifts, when everything’s the way it was. When they play rummy with the TV on, and he shows her his new poetry. When he kisses her neck behind the ear, and smooths her hair down.

She felt as if she were failing her feminist politics, worrying about her body size. She told herself she wasn’t losing weight: she was gaining health. She dieted, desultorily. Surely the running should be enough.

It wasn’t. The ring—stayed on.

“Cut the ring off,” her sister says.

But there have been too many defeats. Cutting it off is one more, one more failure in the litany of failures caught up in the most important thing she was ever supposed to do with her life.

That damned ring. Its weight on her hand. The way it digs in when she makes a fist.

She will beat it.

It is only metal, and she is flesh and will.

Perhaps it is her destiny to run.

One day—it was a Tuesday, so she had more time before her section—she followed the crows instead of letting the crows follow her.

She wasn’t sure what led to the decision, but they were flocking—the crows with bands and the ones without—and as she jogged up on them they lifted into the air like a scatter of burned pages, like a swirl of ashes caught in a vortex of rising heat. They flew heavily, the way she felt she ran, beating into the ocean breeze that rose from the sea cliffs with rowing strokes rather than tumbling over one another weightlessly as the songbirds did.

They were strong, though, and they hauled themselves into the air like prizefighters hauling themselves up the ropes.

They led her down the green slopes of the campus lawn, toward the sweep of professionally gardened pastel stucco housing development draped across the top of the cliffs above. They turned along an access road, and led her out toward the sea.

She ran in the cool breeze, June gloom graying the sky above her, the smell of jasmine rising on all sides. Iceplant carpeted both sides of the road, the stockade fences separating her from a housing development draped with bougainvillea in every hot color.

A bead of sweat trickled down Dagmar’s nose. But some days, she’d learned, your body gives you little gifts: functioning at a higher level of competence than normal, a glimpse of what you can look forward to if you keep training. Maybe it was the cool air, or the smell of the sea, or the fact that the path was largely downhill—but she was still running strong when she reached the dead end of the road.

Still heavily, too, to be sure, not with the light, quick strides she’d managed when she was younger. Before the marriage, before the divorce. But she hesitated before a tangle of orange temporary fence, and paced slowly back and forth.

She stood at the lip of a broad gully, steep enough to make clambering down daunting. A sandy path did lead into its depths, in the direction of the water. The arroyo’s two cliffs plunged in a deep vee she could not see to the bottom of, because it was obscured by eroded folds.

The crows swirled over her like a river full of black leaves tumbling toward the sea. Dagmar watched them skim the terrain down the bluff, into the canyon. Their voices echoed as if they called her after—or mocked her heavy, flightless limbs.

She felt in her pocket for her phone. Present and accounted for.

All right then. If she broke a leg . . . she could call a rescue team.

If she cracked her head open . . .

Well, she wouldn’t have to worry about the damned wedding ring any more.

She reads his poetry, his thesis. She brings him books.

She bakes him cookies.

He catches her hand when she leaves tea beside his computer, and kisses the back of it, beside the wedding ring.

She meets his eyes and smiles.

They’re trying.

Dagmar pounded through the gully—trotting at first, but not for long. The path was too steep, treacherous with loose sand, and no wider than one foot in front of the other. The sparse and thorny branches on the slope would not save her if she fell, and on the right there was a drop of twice her height down to a handspan-width, rattling stream.

Dagmar wanted to applaud its oversized noise.

Even walking, every step felt like she was hopping down from a bench. She steadied herself with her hands when she could, and at the steepest patches hunkered down and scooted. The trail shoes pinched her toes when her feet slid inside them. She cursed the local teens when she came to a steep patch scattered with thick shards of brown glass, relict of broken beer bottles, and picked her way.

She still had to stop afterward and find a broken stick with which to pry glass splinters from her soles.

The gloom was burning off, bathing her in the warm chill of summer sun and cool, dry sea air. The crows were somewhere up ahead. She couldn’t say why she was so certain they would have waited for her.

Sometimes her breath came tight and quick against the arch of her throat: raspy, rough. But it was fear, not shortness of breath. She acknowledged it and kept going, trying not to glance too often at the sharp drop to a rocky streambed that lay only one slip or misstep away.

She actually managed to feel a little smug, for a while: at least she’d regained a little athleticism. And she didn’t think this would ever have been easy.

“Look at you,” he says. “When was the last time you got off your ass?”

Maybe not easy for her, but she thought she was most of the way down when she heard the patter of soft footsteps behind her, a quiet voice warning, “Coming up!”

She stepped as far to the inside of the trail—as if there were an inside of the trail—as possible, and turned sideways. A slim, muscled young man in a knee-length wetsuit jogged barefoot down the path she’d been painstakingly inching along, a surfboard balanced on his shoulder. Dagmar blinked, but he didn’t vanish. Sunlight prickled through his close-cropped hair while she still felt the chill of mist across her neck.