Darwinia

She had doubted it at first — dismissed Guilford’s notes and letters as the hallucinatory raving of a half-starved survivor. Jeffersonville had changed her mind. Tom Compton had changed her mind. She had been taken into the confidence of the Old Men, and that had not merely changed her mind but convinced her of the futility of writing about any of this. She wouldn’t be allowed to, and even if she succeeded she wouldn’t be believed. Because, of course, there was no ruined city in the Alpine hills. It had never been mapped, photographed, overflown, or glimpsed from a distance, except by the vanished Finch expedition. The demons, Tom said, had sewn it up like a torn sleeve. They could do that.

But it was, at least in some intangible way, still there.

She kept herself awake by imagining that city deep in the Darwinian back country: the ancient soulless navel of the world. Axis of time. The place where the dead meet the living. She wished she could see it, though she knew the wish was absurd; even if she could find it (and she couldn’t; she was only mortal) the city was a dangerous place to be, possibly the most dangerous place on the surface of the Earth. But she was drawn by the idea of its strangeness the way, as a child, she had once loved certain names on the map: Mount Kosciusko, the Great Artesian Basin, the Tasman Sea. The lure of the exotic, and bless that little Wollongong girl for wanting it. But here I am, Lily thought, with this rifle on my knee.

She would never see the city. Guilford would see it again, though. Tom had told her that. Guilford would be there, at the Battle… unless his dogged love of the world held him back.

“Guilford loves the world too much,” Tom had told her. “He loves it like it’s real.”

Isn’t it? she had asked. Even if the world is made of numbers and machines… isn’t it real enough to love?

“For you,” Tom had allowed. “Some of us can’t let ourselves think that way.”

The Hindus spoke of detachment, or was it the Buddhists? To abandon the world. Abandon desire. How awful, Lily thought. An awful thing to ask of anyone, much less of Guilford Law, who not only loved the world but knew how fragile it was.

The old rifle sat across her legs with a terrible weight. Nothing moved beyond the window but the stars above the water, distant suns sliding through the night.

Abby, weaponless, crouched in a corner of the dimly candlelit room. Sometime after midnight Guilford came and hunkered down on the floor beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder. Her skin was cool under the heat of his palm.

She said, “We’ll never be safe here again.”

“If we have to, Abby, we’ll leave. Move up-country, take another name…”

“Will we? Even if we do go somewhere else, somewhere no one knows us — what then? Do you watch me grow old? Watch me die? Watch Nicholas grow old? Wait for whatever miracle it was that put you here to come and take you away again?”

He sat back, startled.

“You couldn’t have hidden it much longer. You still look like you’re on the shy side of thirty.”

He closed his eyes. You won’t die, his ghost had told him, and he had watched his cuts heal miraculously, watched the flu pass him by even when it took his baby daughter. Hated himself for it, often enough.

But most of the time he just pretended. And as for Abby, Abby aging, Abby dying…

He healed quickly, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be killed. Some wounds were irrevocable, as even Tom was plainly aware. He couldn’t imagine a future past Abby, even if that meant throwing himself off a cliff or taking the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Everybody was entitled to death. Nobody deserved a century of grief.

Abby seemed to read his thoughts. She took his hand and held it in hers. “You do what you have to, Guilford.”

“I won’t let them hurt you, Abby.”

“You do what you have to,” she said.

Chapter Thirty-One

The first shot fractured a living-room window.

Nicholas, who had been dozing, sat upright on the sofa and began to cry. Abby ran to him, pressed his head down. “Curl up,” she said. “Curl up, Nicky, and cover your head!”

“Stay with him,” Guilford shouted. More bullets flashed through the window, whipping the curtains like a hurricane wind, punching holes the size of fists in the opposite wall.

“Guard this room,” Tom said. “Lily, upstairs with me.”

He wanted an east-facing window and some elevation. Dawn was only twenty minutes away. There would be light in the sky by now.

Guilford crouched behind the front door. He fired a couple of blind shots through the mail slot, hoping to discourage whoever was out there.

An answering volley of bullets tore through the mosquewood door above him. He ducked under a shower of splinters.

Bullets fractured wood, plaster, upholstery, curtains. One of Abby’s kitchen candles winked out. The smell of charred wood was pungent and intense.

“Abby?” he called out. “Are you all right?”