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“When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.”
Jeanette Winterson - Boating For Beginners
Daisy dreams. The trees are tall and looming around her, shards of night sky visible through the canopy. The leaf litter is soft beneath her feet and the dark is full of the sounds of living things, small and afraid. She does not care about those.
In this dream, there are claws tearing through her skin and teeth behind her teeth. Blood pounding in her ears. Her eyes pierce the darkness, dilated, capture and reflect each fragment of starlight. Her muscles coil and twitch, restless. She lifts her nose to the wind and scents something wrong. Something to be chased.
She runs. The trees rush by and the undergrowth crashes around her, her feet dig into the dirt and it grits beneath her nails. Sometimes she thinks others run with her, other shapes in the dark, gleaming eyes and hunger, driven by the same imperative, chase chase chase. The hunt fills her, whips her on as her breath rasps around sharp teeth and lolling tongue and she runs and runs and runs and then -
In this dream she is on a road, and there is a white van with its back door hanging open, something moaning inside. Rain is hammering the tarmac, too loud but she can hear the voices clearly over it, musical and despairing. The van’s hazard lights flash rhythmically, danger danger danger and Daisy feels fear ripple through her.
There is a man standing beside the van, and she realizes he is the wrong thing, the thing to be chased. He is looking at her and his eyes are dark and sad, and something about him makes her tremble. She wants to rip his eyes out so he’ll stop looking at her. Wants to tear into his throat so he can’t say a word. She doesn’t.
Daisy walks towards the van, towards the flashing hazards and the moaning interior. She knows what’s inside before she sees it. The coffin, its open lid, its descending steps, down down down and she knows without knowing how that it goes on forever, so deep into the earth that there is no wind and no stars and no anything anymore. Daisy knows that she is going to climb into it, and that there is nothing she can do to prevent it. Her muscles no longer coil and twitch, they are stiff and jerky and they carry her forward inevitably. The rain is running into her eyes so she doesn’t know if she’s crying.
She turns her head desperately towards the wrong thing. She wants to beg him for help, but her throat stays silent and he stays silent, looking at her as she places one foot inside the coffin and then the other, and then she is climbing down down down and then -
In this dream, she is in the coffin.
Daisy wakes with a whimper trapped behind her teeth and tears on her cheeks. It’s dark, and it takes a few moments before she remembers where she is. Lying on their camp bed near the tunnels, and the soft sound she hears is Basira breathing. Her eyes adjust to the darkness, and she sees Basira, curled up with her back to Daisy, asleep. Sees the outlines of shelves and desks and cabinets, the geometry of the Archives that’s become all too familiar.
She scrubs the wetness from her cheeks and lies there until she can unclench her jaw without fearing something terrible will escape. She times her breathing to Basira’s, slow and regular, the gentle rise and fall of her ribs. Her fingers twitch with wanting to reach out, to touch Basira’s shoulder. She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t want to wake Basira up. Even if Basira wouldn’t mind - has said she doesn’t mind - she’d still give Daisy that weary, concerned look. The look that says Basira worries about her, and wishes she didn’t have to.
Daisy rolls over and reaches for her phone. It’s nearly four o’clock, and she doubts she’ll sleep again tonight. She sighs and climbs off the cot, shifting her weight carefully so as not to disturb Basira. Takes the stairs to the top storey and pushes open the door to the roof. It’s a fire door, but Daisy learned some time ago that it isn’t alarmed.
She comes up here a lot when the others are busy. Comforting isn’t the word she’d use for the space around her, above her, a clear view all the way to the horizon. Grounding is probably the closest, but there’s an irony to that she doesn’t think she's enough of a clever git to enjoy. Jon would, probably.
The sky in London is nothing like where she grew up. The little village, before they moved to Swansea for her dad’s job. The skies there were open and endless, and clear nights her mum used to take her stargazing. Daisy still remembers all the constellations and their names. Cassiopeia, the queen. Aquila, the eagle. Cygnus, the swan.
You can’t see them from here, the light pollution is far too bad. Daisy’s eyes are better than most, but still she can barely make out Orion’s belt (the hunter) and the sharp angles of the Plow. Still, nights she’s up here she squints at the sky, tracing where she thinks the familiar lines would fall.
Tonight there are too many clouds for even that, only the pale moon-glow visible through the heavy gray pall. Daisy stays in any case, until the sun rises, reassuring herself that the sky is something that exists.
*
Weakness is a poison. It seeps through Daisy’s limbs, making them heavy. Flows into her thoughts, bitter and resentful. She tries not to let it, tries to remember all that she’s gained from all that she’s lost. When she thinks back on who she was, the obsession of the chase, the brutality of the kill, she hates it. Hates what the Hunt made her, something slipping day by day away from her own humanity.
She tries not to miss it, except now that it’s gone she’s not sure what’s left behind. A raw, gaping wound where all her purpose and certainty once sat. With the Hunt, Daisy was at once entirely who she was, and who she wasn’t. Without it, well, she’s not too sure she’s anyone at all.
She’s lying on the floor of a disused office, face down on a folded beach towel, raising and lowering one leg while Basira presses the other firmly down. Daisy is breathing hard with the exertion of lifting her thigh a few inches off the ground, and she wants to laugh and scream at how pathetic that is.
“Come on,” Basira says, “Just five more reps on this side.”
“Three more,” Daisy huffs, because she’s been counting too, and it’s just like Basira to slip a few extras in there.
“Six more for complaining about it,” Basira tells her, tapping a hand playfully against her arse. Daisy does laugh then, and does the six reps, though she can feel the leg trembling violently by the end of it.
She rolls over onto her back, letting her legs splay out, running hands over her face and into her hair. Her scalp itches and she scratches at it with her fingertips, resisting the urge to dig her nails in. Bloody psoriasis, she hasn’t had it in years. She’s been disgustingly healthy all her adult life and she knows why, but it doesn’t make this easier. The little indignities of a normal human body, sniffles and pimples and the first hangover she’s had in a decade. Smearing medicated cream on her scalp three times a day. She scratches again.
“Don’t,” Basira tells her, tugging her hand away like an exasperated parent. “You’ll only make it worse.”
“Bloody nuisance,” says Daisy, and tangles her medicine-smelling fingers with Basira’s. Pulls her down, feeling the moment of resistance before Basira lets herself be pulled. Before, Basira would never have hesitated. (Before, Daisy could have pulled her down regardless.) Daisy ignores the way that knowledge hurts, and kisses her, puts some teeth into it to prove she still can. Basira makes a low sound against her mouth, and for a moment it feels all right.
“Come on,” Basira says, breaking away and sitting back up. “Arms next.”
“Don’t need my arms,” Daisy tells her, because she’s tired, and she wants to spend some time with her girlfriend without feeling like an invalid. “Let’s go for chips instead.”
“Daisy,” Basira sighs. “This is important. I need to know you’re going to stick with this. I can’t be around to babysit you all the time, you know.”
And there it is, the little sting of impatience in her tone, the frustration. Daisy understands. She’s never been much good at patience herself.
“Right,” she says. “Sorry.”
Basira looks at her like she’s about to say something, but instead she presses her lips tight together, and shifts back so Daisy can roll onto her side.
Weakness is an infection. First it makes you soft and helpless, and then it spreads to the people around you, fills them with pity and resentment. Twists their mouths with frustration when the patience runs out. It’s only been a few weeks, but Daisy feels it already. Melanie bristles when Daisy spends too long in the room with her, too quiet. Basira is - well, Basira deserves better. Deserves a partner, like Daisy used to be. She gives so much already, Daisy can’t ask for more.
Jon is the only one who never seems to tire of her presence, but he is quietly broken himself, grateful for anyone willing to be in the same room with him. Daisy remembers how the strangeness of him had needled her, before. The sharp, brittle edges of him, that had screamed of something to be hunted. Now, he just bleeds pain and grief, a wounded animal whimper.
It’s difficult to reconcile the sad, tired man who haunts the Archives with the wrong thing whose dark eyes pierce Daisy’s dreams. She never forgets, though. Never could, when she feels the constant weight of observation, right between her shoulder blades, drilling into her skull. It used to set her teeth on edge before, make her want to stalk and bristle. Now it makes her feel like prey, like something hunted. Does Jon even notice it anymore, she wonders? Is it just background noise? Or is it comforting, the weight of his patron’s regard?
Does Basira notice it anymore?
*
It’s far too quiet in the Archives tonight. Basira is away on some investigation she wouldn’t tell Daisy anything about. She pretended to, but Daisy used to be a detective. She knows when she’s being given the runaround. Melanie disappeared through a yellow door some hours ago, and Jon is in his office recording. Daisy could join him, but she thinks the statement might be to do with the Hunt, and the last one of those sent her blood pounding in her ears, I won’t let it get away. She doesn’t want to tempt that again.
When she finds herself pacing a hole in the carpet, she decides to go out. None of them go out at night very often, because there are things that like the dark and don’t like the Archives. Daisy doesn’t go out much at all, because much as she dislikes being alone, too large a crowd is overwhelming to her. It’s pathetic, she knows, when she clings to Basira’s side on a busy street, as if the sea of bodies was about to flow over her, crush the breath from her lungs and subsume her back into the inevitability of down down down with no up. It isn’t going to happen. She knows that. Her brain knowing it doesn’t make her heart beat any less frantically, though.
Night time isn’t so bad. The streets are quieter, except on the weekends, and though it’s more dangerous, she judges the risk worth while. Daisy might not be a hunter anymore, but she knows how to keep her eyes and ears open. Besides, Jon’s been moping more than usual the past few days, and Daisy knows that chocolate hobnobs usually cheer him up at least a little. She can’t do much to help the actual problem, unless she tracks down Martin and locks them in a room together to talk it out, but she can at least manage a packet of biscuits and a cup of tea.
Daisy knows it’s just a distraction, a little mission she’s giving herself so she stops thinking about how silent the place is, about how much she misses Basira. But that doesn’t stop her from humming the Mission Impossible theme music on her way to the corner shop a few streets from the Institute. She retrieves the objective, and is on her way back with the packet tucked securely under her arm, when she hears a shout and a shattering of glass.
She whips around, adrenaline spiking her bloodstream and sending her heart thundering. There’s a man on the ground outside a pub down the street, holding his head and groaning. Another figure disappearing into the dark between the streetlights, his feet slapping on the tarmac. Daisy smells blood even at this distance, her nostrils flaring, and every muscle in her body tenses to chase chase chase the fleeing man. A low growl starts in the back of her throat.
She takes a half step in his direction before she pulls herself up short. That isn’t what she does anymore. She’s not a detective, and she’s not a hunter. She clenches her fists, digging her nails into her palms and forcing her breathing to slow. Swallows the vicious sound in her throat, and makes her way over to the injured man, who's struggling to stand. Tries to ignore the way her mouth waters at the scent of his free flowing blood.
He’s not badly hurt, just had a pint glass smashed over his head after an argument with a so-called mate. Daisy makes him sit down, checks his pupils, and waits with him until the police and the ambulance turn up. She makes herself scarce once the flashing lights arrive, because she can't imagine many things more awkward than running into someone she knows from the force. Someone who knows that she’s supposed to be dead.
Daisy’s hands are shaking as she walks back towards the Institute, and she realizes she’s lost the hobnobs. She doesn’t go back for them, just looks up to the too-bright sky and tries to count the stars she can’t see.
Her mum taught her that sailors used the stars for navigation, out at sea. They could never get lost, because the stars would always lead them where they needed to be, steady and changeless. Daisy could use some direction these days. For all these years the Hunt, the thrill of the chase, the pulse in her ears, that was the star she followed. Her true north wherever it led her. Now she doesn’t even recognize the constellations anymore.
She’s not a detective, and she’s not a hunter. She’s not sure she’s anything.
*
Daisy dreams. The buildings are sharp and looming around her, the lights in their windows bright as stars, forming fleeting constellations. The concrete is hard beneath her feet and the dark is full of the sounds of living things, loud and foolish. She does not care about those.
In this dream, there is blood in her nostrils and hackles on her neck. Nails cutting into her palms. Her eyes pierce the darkness, dilated, capture and reflect each fragment of neon. Her muscles coil and twitch, restless. She tilts her ear to the wind and hears something shatter, a shout of something in pain. Something to be devoured.
She runs.
She dreams of the road, and the van, and the wrong thing, and the moaning, gaping entrance from which there is no turning away.
She dreams of the coffin.
Daisy wakes, and it is dark and quiet, and it takes a few moments before she realizes that the strange absence of sound she’s hearing is because Basira isn't here. Something aches deep inside her, painful and hollow, and she hears a soft whimper escape between her teeth. She picks up her phone in the dark. It’s almost four o’clock. She gets up, not shifting her weight carefully, nobody to disturb with her loneliness and fear.
The sky is clear tonight, and Daisy can see the faint points of starlight above her, can easily pick out the brighter objects: Mars, Venus, Sirius. Sees Orion with his gilded belt, just beginning to turn to the southwest. She breathes, long and slow in the cold air.
“Lonely?”
The voice behind her is amused and pretending to be friendly, but Daisy catches the teeth in the tone. A poisonous sort of voice. She turns. The man who arrived so soundlessly is middle aged, tall and broad and bearded. His face is like his voice, sharp and cold behind a veneer of joviality. Daisy feels the muscles tense under her clothes, drawing tight and hard.
“You’re him then?” she asks. “Peter Lukas?”
“The one and only,” he says, inclining his head. “And you’re Daisy. What brings you up here all alone?”
“I like looking at the sky,” she tells him, keeping her voice carefully neutral. She wonders whether she should try to take him, drag him downstairs and have Jon talk to him. Do that thing where he rips people’s thoughts right out of their head. Might wipe the smug look off this bastard’s face. She knows she shouldn’t though. She might not be able to, and even if she could manage it -
“I imagine you would, after being buried so long. Do you dream about it?”
Daisy stares at him levelly, swallowing the fear that tightens her throat, down down down. She won’t give him the satisfaction. He watches her for a moment, then smiles.
“Never mind. I suppose you’re more worried about going back to the Hunt, eh? Blood rising in your belly day in and out? It must be terrible. I could help you with that.”
“Is that so?” Daisy says, trying to show no emotion, no anger or fear, no reaction to the mention of chase chase chase. She doesn’t know what Lukas wants, but it can’t be good. Bloody monsters. He nods.
“Oh yes. You could come and work for me. It’s hard to feel much savagery or anger through the Lonely - or much of anything, really. It’s done wonders for Martin.”
Daisy feels her fingers curl into her palms at that. She doesn’t know Martin, not really. The last she remembers of him was the hawk’s eye view of a mouse, scuttling through the grass. Timid and insignificant. But she knows Jon, now. And she knows the way Jon misses him, the loneliness rolling off him in a way that Lukas must relish. It’s enough to make her protective of Martin Blackwood, or at least the idea of him.
“I think I’m all right, thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” Lukas says with a shrug. “I thought I’d offer. It has to be difficult, feeling like you’ve lost your purpose. Like trying to navigate when you can’t see the stars.”
“I have a GPS,” Daisy tells him flatly, and he laughs, a good-natured chuckle with no humor behind it. Without another word he walks away, still completely silent, and Daisy loses sight of him almost immediately. She lets out a long breath and feels her muscles slowly uncoil, her palms hurting from where her fingernails sank in.
Bloody monsters. It’s not the worst idea, though. Finding another fear to feed. What do they call it, patronage? Basira’s with the Beholding, much as she might deny that it has any hold on her. So is Jon, although Daisy never imagined that Jonathan Sims would be a factor in her decision making. She’s already under the scrutiny of the Eye every day she’s here. Might as well get something out of it. And it would stop the dreams, she knows that much. Would get the wrong thing out of her head, the thing she doesn’t like to associate with a man she’s fast coming to consider a friend.
Daisy looks up to the sky, to the stars she can see and the stars she can’t, and makes a decision.
It isn’t hard, getting into Elias’ office. Almost like it was expected.
*
Basira comes back looking tired and defeated and Daisy’s heart leaps at the sight of her. She missed Basira, more than she realized was possible. Daisy pulls her close with almost no effort, and doesn’t know if it’s because her arms are getting stronger, or because of the yearning look in Basira’s eyes, the faint tilt of her mouth that says she missed Daisy too. Daisy kisses her, soft and deep and with no teeth at all, tries to push everything she feels into it.
When they pull apart Basira smiles at her, looking a little stunned, and things are far from all right, but for now they’re good. Basira’s with her, and they’re good.
“I want to take you stargazing,” Daisy tells her. “Tonight. Up on the roof.”
“I didn't know you liked astronomy," says Basira, sounding a little breathless.
"There's a lot you don't know about me," says Daisy. "But you will."
Basira is looking at her, wide eyed, as if Daisy's managed to surprise her. Daisy can't remember the last time she managed to surprise Basira. She thinks she likes it.
"I, ah...I don't know anything about stars."
“I’ll teach you.”
Daisy might not be able to see the old familiar constellations anymore, but that's okay. She knows her stars, and from now on, she's drawing her own map.