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Basira doesn’t lie.
She’ll omit information, sure. She’ll choose her words carefully, she’ll maneuver until she’s in an advantageous position. But lies sit awkwardly in her mouth. They burn like a coal on the back of her tongue. Tell enough lies and Basira feels them against her skin, the heavy, deliberate weight of them.
So she doesn’t lie if she can help it. She certainly doesn’t lie to Daisy. Her partner’s told her all manner of falsehoods—Basira knows, because Daisy isn’t very good at it. But Basira always trusted Daisy, figured she had her reasons, figured she knew which things Basira didn’t want to know. She was right, of course. And in return, Basira was honest with her.
The promise she made to Daisy rests like a sword in her hands.
After that last confrontation at the Institute, Basira is alone again. Worse than before, without even the cold comfort of busywork and false leads. So she clutches at this last scrap of purpose and she goes hunting. There isn’t anything else left.
She picks her way through the aftermath of the brutality. Furniture broken, claw marks scored deep into the corridor walls, the floor a mess of blood and hair and bits of flesh all churned by too many feet. But no bodies. Not of the hunters, not of the terrible elongated face-stealer, and, of course, no sign of Daisy.
Basira doesn’t know if she’s disappointed or relieved. Daisy survived this—an unfair fight, three against one, against monsters who hadn’t been starving themselves for months, armed with weapons and a plan. She’d survived because that’s what Daisy was good at, if her scars and her long Sectioned career are anything to go by. Basira always admired her pitbull tenacity, but she can’t deny there’s a torn corner of her heart that hoped she’d stumble upon a familiar broken body and be done with it all.
But Daisy survived, and Basira’s promise grows teeth.
She follows the trail down into the tunnels, because it’s always the goddamn tunnels, isn’t it? The trapdoor is torn clean off and smashed into splinters against the far wall, leaving a ragged hole in the floor like a dark, waiting mouth. She descends into the dark with steady hands. She tells herself there’s no point to being afraid anymore.
The blood’s smeared in long, messy scrawls down the tunnel, disappearing past the edge of the light cast by her torch. Eventually the trail dries up and it’s just unmarked stone and concrete stretching out before her. It’s impossible to find anything down here. She knows that. But she also has no other leads and nowhere else to go and she takes terrible comfort in the familiarity of the cramped warren twisting around her.
Stupid to relax. Stupid to be surprised as a figure slopes into sight, neatly framed at the end of a T-junction. Basira freezes. Her first thought is She wasn’t supposed to be down here.
The figure snaps its head toward her, eyes flashing in the light.
“Daisy,” she breathes.
Because it is. And she looks—normal. Except for the hot pinpricks of her eyes, she doesn’t seem changed. The superficial details, yes; her clothes are shredded, her hands and feet dark with dirt and blood, her face stained red. But all that’s familiar, too.
How many times did Daisy turn up at Basira’s door looking like this? How many times did Basira wash the blood from Daisy’s skin? She knows the precise way Daisy drops her gaze when Basira drags a wet cloth over her shoulders. The feel of Daisy’s muscles trembling from spent adrenaline under her fingers. How Daisy would hesitate to touch her, even hours after she scrubbed the blood from under her nails, as though Basira were somehow clean in all this.
“Daisy?” she calls. She should draw her gun. Should at least have her hand on it. But instead she finds herself reaching, palm up, like trying to coax a frightened animal, and her foolish mouth says, “It’s me.”
Daisy doesn’t move at first. It’s like she’s pinned in the circle of illumination thrown by her torch, the harsh light carving shadows into the hollows of her face, limbs turned to pale marble. But it only lasts a moment, and then Basira catches little flashes of movement like ripples across a placid lake. Fingers flexing. A sharp shrugging jerk of her shoulders. Her jaw dropping, just a little, as though to taste the air.
The hair rises on Basira’s arms. She doesn’t move, lets her arm hang uselessly in the air, refuses even to allow herself to shake. If she could stop the choking thump of her heart, she would.
“It’s Basira,” she whispers.
Daisy’s response is a low, animal moan. The empty sound ricochets off the stone walls like a bullet and it strikes Basira in the soft flesh below her ribs, reverberates up around her heart and lungs. Daisy takes a long, languid step toward her.
Basira steps back.
Finally her hand drops to her gun. Daisy’s eyes follow the movement. Her lips curl back from her teeth. Basira thinks she can see the muscles bunch in Daisy’s legs, even at this distance. Her hand fumbles with her holster. She won’t be fast enough. Daisy was always so goddamned fast.
There’s a crash from deeper in the tunnels, a sound like something tumbling to the floor. Daisy’s head snaps to it, cocked and listening. The only movement is the slow heave of Daisy’s breath.
Daisy’s eyes flicker back to her, but Basira is silent and still and her gaze passes over her like she’s a carcass already stripped. A growl rumbles in her chest, and she turns and races down the corridor, leaving only strange echoes in her wake.
Only then does Basira’s body betray her, the tremor starting in her hands and spreading up her body like a flame to paper. She takes two heavy steps to lean against the wall, her torch aimed uselessly at her feet, her chest hollow, and her promise unkept.
She doesn’t go back down into the tunnels again.
-
When the world ends, Basira can’t find it in herself to be surprised. She’s spent the last few weeks with the crawling sensation of eyes on the back of her neck, the taut bowstring awareness that there’s someone behind you moments before they touch your shoulder. She’d known it was coming, somehow, without knowing. The walls of the Institute protect her from much of it, but she still feels the world shift, faintly electric, against her skin.
Instead of surprise, she feels anger. Frustration. And the fear, too, but that isn’t anything new. When was the last time she didn’t feel afraid? Didn’t feel the cold uncanny prickle of having peeked behind the curtain and found something incomprehensible staring back? Fear is familiar. Something she’s always been able to handle as long as there was a next step to take. Fight back. Change it.
That’s what wears her down, in the end. The clawing mania of impotence. Being stuck in a dark office surrounded by empty desks and fragments of lives lost or abandoned. A forgotten mug, stained at the bottom. Bits of notes scratched in familiar handwriting. Blood they could never quite get out of the carpet. An uncomfortable cot that smells more and more like Basira every day.
When the sky tears open and turns its dispassionate gaze on the horrors bubbling up below, Basira thinks it might be a way to make herself useful again. Something—anything—that she can accomplish that doesn’t press the bladed edge of her oath against her throat. There had been nothing else for so long, except the occasional care package for Jon.
(Jon, she thinks savagely, it must have been Jon.)
She catches glimpses of people through the windows, sometimes fleeing, sometimes just standing in place and screaming. She ventures out once to try and help a man mummified in a spiderweb, strung up and thrashing helplessly from the branches of a tree. When she touches a lighter flame to the strands, the man shrieks like she pressed it to his bare skin and begs her to stop, please, stop. Basira drops the lighter and flees before his cries draw something worse.
Before long, she moves out of the Institute. She’s convinced its protection comes at a cost. Every shadow and doorway and keyhole seems filled with hundreds of staring eyes and she can feel Elias’ self-satisfied grin through all the layers of concrete and glass, like he’s become the building itself. Like she’s been swallowed whole.
Plus, being there makes her feel...strange. Like a pressure against her eardrums. Like being at the bottom of the ocean.
So she takes whatever she thinks she might need, whatever she can carry, and she loads her gun, and she goes home.
Her flat’s a mess. She didn’t stop paying on it, out of some bizarre optimism that everything would eventually work out. She grimaces at the thought. Now every surface is choked with dust and there’s a worrisome fuzz growing on a plate left in the sink. She’s afraid to open the fridge and smell how much of it’s gone off.
And there are fragments here, too. Sharper ones. They cut her every time she enters another room, assesses the damage, retreats. She closes all the doors behind her.
An unused spare room forced into service as a closet. A cardboard box with a five-petaled flower drawn on the side.
An extra toothbrush in the bathroom. A bottle of perfume Basira almost reaches for, the scent half-forgotten.
An unmade bed. Wrinkled pillows. A leather jacket in the closet, the worn cuff familiar under Basira’s fingers. A fraying blanket, neatly folded, because Daisy wakes up cold in the middle of the night, and—
She makes camp on the couch.
Basira spends a few days there, not looking too hard at the things that remind her of what’s missing, not thinking too hard about the promise like a chain around her neck. She cleans her gun. She rations her food. She waits.
She knows it’s a temporary situation, at best. She knows it can’t be safe there. Probably isn’t safe anywhere, unless she wants to go crawling back to the Institute, and fuck that. She’ll go. She will. But it doesn’t have to be now.
It’s almost a relief when something tries to break down the door.
Basira is asleep, mostly upright, head tilted at an awkward angle against the back of the couch. It isn’t night; there isn’t really night anymore, or moon, or sun. She tries to keep a schedule, if only because exhaustion will make her more vulnerable in the long run, but mostly she sleeps whenever and wherever she drops, and she sleeps poorly. It isn’t unusual for her to jerk awake in response to some not-distant-enough sound from outside. Or from the nightmares, all blood and gunshots and shining eyes. So when Basira jerks awake, she’s only afraid in the dull, tired way she’s always afraid, eyes raking the shadows, unsure if she’d heard anything at all.
The second impact shakes the door on its hinges. Definitely real, then. Basira lurches to her feet. Her gun is in her hand before she even registers reaching for it.
Basira approaches the door sidelong, so that if it suddenly comes down she’s out of the line of fire. She leans her shoulder against the wall, gun clasped tightly in both hands, and tries to control her breathing. The third crash still makes her jump. It’s immediately followed by a second softer thump, like whatever it is threw itself bodily against the door and fell to the ground. And then a sound that makes the hair on her arms stand up—a low, painful whine that tapers off into a growl. Almost human. The pitch of it tugs at her memory unpleasantly.
Something in the door cracks ominously on the next impact. Basira does some quick math. It won’t hold, obviously. Whatever’s out there is too strong and too stubborn. She could go out a window. That would probably be the safest option. But—that whine comes again and Basira freezes, a static prickle drawing her skin into goosebumps.
Open the door on the next jump, then. Disorient it. Get a good look at it. Give herself an opening to run or to try to kill it. Assuming this is still a world where monsters can be killed. No guarantees there.
There have never been any guarantees, though. Basira reaches for the knob with one hand, the other secure around the pistol grip. She hears the whatever-it-is shuffling on the other side, the teeth-grinding scrape of what might be claws on concrete. Then silence.
She exhales.
Turns the knob.
A monster explodes past her with a snarl. Something sharp drags a long, hot line of pain down her forearm and she cries out, bites the sound in half by pure force of will, and spins to keep eyes on the creature. It lands heavily on the floor and skids to a stop a few feet away, long-fingered hands digging scratches into the cheap linoleum.
Definitely a monster. Basira’s brain registers the fact slowly, almost disappointed. Her gun is already leveled as it turns to face her. The thing looks like someone took a wolf’s skin and stretched it over a broken-limbed human frame. It’s down on all fours, panting, saliva dripping slowly from its open mouth. A grotesque blend of features: an almost-human nose, an almost-lupine jaw, a pair of shining slit-pupiled eyes.
And—as it shifts to take one rolling step toward her—a petal-shaped scar on one shoulder, pale against the coarse fur.
“Oh, fuck,” Basira says.
The thing in front of her turns its golden eyes up to meet hers, opens its horrible mouth, and tries to speak. It sounds like it’s choking, at first. Like it swallowed a handful of fishhooks and is trying desperately to breath, like every gasp hurts. Basira half-expects to see it bleed.
“Pro—promised?” it asks, in a wet, jagged voice.
“Oh god.” The muzzle of the gun dips as a tremor runs down Basira’s arms. “Daisy,” she says, voice breaking.
“Promised,” it—she—says more firmly. She takes another step.
Basira takes an answering step back. There’s something she’s supposed to do, there must be, but there’s a hole opening in her mind, black and howling, every thought dragged to the bottom and crushed beneath the sight of the Daisy-thing at the end of her gun. She can see her now in the monster’s shape, like a reflection in a shattered mirror. The crooked bridge of Daisy’s nose, broken one too many times. Her long fingers and scarred knuckles. Even the cadence of her voice, almost obliterated in the strange throat, is there if she listens.
She doesn’t want to listen.
Basira takes another step away. She opens her mouth to say something, lowering the gun, only to snap her jaw shut with a hiss as pain spikes up her arm. Her eyes flick away from Daisy for an instant and find a long scratch down the inside of her forearm, oozing blood. She wraps her other hand around it, pressing down on the wound. Not deep, but it burns like fire. Blood trickles from between her fingers to drip onto the floor.
A taut silence stretches between them, broken, hesitantly, by a creaking growl. Daisy’s attention shifts, eyes dropping away from Basira’s face and falling to the irregular plip plip plip of blood on the linoleum. Basira sees her pupils dilate, sees the flex of Daisy’s shoulders.
“Daisy, wait—”
Daisy leaps at her. Basira’s reflexes are pulled taut by adrenaline and Daisy’s still unsteady from her fall, and Basira only barely manages to drop to the ground. She feels the heat of a body against her back as Daisy overshoots. She loses her grip on the gun and hears it skitter across the floor, doesn’t see where it lands. No time to look for it. Daisy crashes into the wall behind her and snarls in fury. Basira’s heartbeat is loud in her ears, but she feels strangely distant, almost calm as she gets her feet under her again. She’s already up and moving before Daisy recovers and some instinct drives her deeper in the flat, instead of out the open door toward the unknown.
She scrambles down the short hall toward the bedroom. Daisy’s faster than her. Basira knows that. But she doesn’t look back and she doesn’t stop. Daisy growls so deep and loud that it seems to shake the building around her, but Basira’s hand is on the knob, the door is open, she’s through—
She stumbles as she crosses the threshold and falls hard, kicking the door shut behind her without trying to get back up. Even fumbles for the lock, though she has no idea what good that will do. She presses her back against the door like she has any hope of holding it closed if Daisy has a mind to open it. In the space of three panting breaths she’s taken inventory of the room, looking for anything she could use as a weapon. There’s nothing, of course, nothing that could fend off Daisy. But she’d have to try. She promised.
Basira waits for the inevitable impact. The splintering of wood. Braces for a clawed hand to punch through the door and curl around her throat. But it never comes.
The silence stretches. It seems like even the chorus of misery outside has gone quiet, straining to hear the outcome of their confrontation, to see which monster stalks victorious back onto the street. And in the silence, Basira hears footsteps approach. Light and measured and terribly familiar.
They stop on the other side of the door.
Before she can think better of it, Basira breathes, “Daisy?”
Another silence, expanding between them like a balloon stretched thin. Then—
“You know I could break this door down, right?” Daisy asks. A tired, human voice. Basira can hear a teasing smile in it underneath the exhaustion. “It’s cheap shit. I could’ve broken it down straight out of the coffin.”
It shocks a laugh out of her. Basira drops her head back against the cheap shit door. Daisy always gave her grief for not slowing down to make a plan, but Basira knew she was wrong. Why plan when she never has any goddamn idea what’s going to happen next? They went off-script a long, long time ago.
“Do it, then,” Basira says.
A pause. There’s a long, slow slide on the other side of the door and she imagines Daisy mirroring her, back to back.
“No.”
She sounds so close. For a moment, Basira imagines the door gone. Imagines the heat of skin, the sharp press of shoulder blades, the fuzz of hair at the nape of a neck. There and gone like a lightning flash, overbright, leaving her blinking hard. She feels exposed. Has felt exposed ever since the sky opened its many eyes. Thoughts press at the inside of her skull with sharp claws, push against the confines of her chest. Everything feels too close to the surface, ready to be skimmed up and swallowed by the ancient awful god of voyeurs and busybodies. There are some things she’d prefer to keep to herself.
“Why are you—” She bites off the question so fast that her teeth click. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, right? “How are you here?” she amends. “Like this.”
She hears Daisy sigh hard through her nose. There’s a long pause and Basira thinks she won’t get an answer, or worse, thinks maybe Daisy is gone, fled back out into the night, and Basira wasted her chance to—do something.
“The sky,” Daisy says finally, slow and uncertain. “I think. It sees me now. Sees everything. And sometimes it makes me look, too.” A harsh exhalation that, in another world, might have been a laugh. “It likes that it hurts.”
Basira puts pressure on the cut on her arm. Her fingers dig so hard into her skin that they ache. “Can you—”
“No,” Daisy cuts her off. “The blood always comes back. It won’t let me go again.”
Basira hears the plea in Daisy’s voice. She ignores it.
“Basira,” Daisy continues. God, it’s her, it sounds just like her. Her name never sounded as soft and as safe as it did from Daisy’s mouth. There’s irony in that, probably. “You promised to kill me.”
Basira lets out a shuddering breath. “I know.”
A thump reverberates against her back. Basira can picture the way Daisy dropped her skull back against the door, the way her eyes would slide shut, the exposed line of her throat.
“I think you’re the only one who could.”
When she doesn’t continue, Basira asks, “Why?”
A rueful twist to Daisy’s voice. “Because I’m afraid of you.”
A cold bar of steel slides between Basira’s ribs. For a moment it’s hard to breathe. This isn’t what she wanted. She promised, she promised and she hadn’t lied, but this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Not Daisy sitting so close she can almost feel her heart beating against her spine. Not Daisy asking in her own voice to die. Not Daisy afraid of her.
“Please,” Daisy says, her voice rough, strained, the barest hint of a growl. Basira breathes in deep and forces her heart to slow. “Basira, please.”
But Basira doesn’t open the door, and Daisy doesn’t ask again. There’s no space at all between them and Basira feels like she’s on the other side of the world. The door is a brick wall and a sheet of paper both. Outside it’s dangerous and unpredictable. There’s no telling what will tip the two of them one way or the other.
Basira, only a little ashamed, huddles against the door where Daisy can’t see her. It isn’t comfortable, but nothing is. And she’s so fucking tired. Against her better judgement, she closes her eyes. For the first time in a long time, Basira drifts off to the sound of Daisy breathing near her.
The dreams are terrible, like always, and the waking is worse.
She jolts awake to the sound of a furious, high-pitched snarl and the groan of torn wood and plaster, the fading sound of running feet. Her hands instinctively reach for her sidearm before she remembers where she dropped it, remembers where she is.
The door at her back is whole and unbroken. She doesn’t want to open it. But there’s only silence on the other side now and she needs to know, needs to see. She turns the flimsy lock and pulls it open.
Daisy’s gone.
All that’s left are the frantic scratches in the floor, the impact crater in the kitchen wall. A smear of her own blood, now dry. The front door is torn off its hinges, leaning drunkenly against a wall, and the wind whistles through the gaping hole left behind. Distantly, she can hear the sounds of screaming. Basira stands at the end of her short hallway and she looks at the ruins of her life and feels nothing.
Her fingers idly trace a deep gouge in the wall. She winces when a splinter jabs into her skin and pulls her hand away. With every appearance of easy deliberation, she crosses the room, crouches, and picks up her gun. Checks the magazine. Thumbs the safety on.
Basira takes one last look at the empty door frame and reads a message in the jagged lines carved into the wood: no more hiding.
She turns back to her bedroom to pack.
-
She should have been able to get out of London by now.
Basira doesn’t know how many days have passed. Or if time is even still passing, really. But her slog through the twisting streets seems endless. They blur together in watercolor streaks, a nightmare of repetition, of passing the same shopfronts and turning the same corners. She’s lived in London for years. She doesn’t claim to know all its myriad backstreets and dead-end alleys, but she should at least be capable of finding her way out. She halfway suspects the work of the Spiral—almost expects a yellow-painted door to creak open from where no door should be and to hear a familiar, mocking laugh. But it never comes. She’s as alone as ever.
She doesn’t need to eat or sleep to break up time anymore. Hasn’t felt either urge since she started moving, and she doesn’t know what that means or what the goddamn rules are here. Her rough canvas backpack is heavy with provisions, alongside the extra socks and spare clips of ammo, but she can’t fathom leaving any of it behind. That feels too much like an admission of defeat. Of yielding to whatever the Eye has decided is her new reality.
She tries to pick a direction and walk. Close her eyes to everything but the next step and the one after it and not think too hard about what she’s walking toward. She used to be able to do that. But now—
She isn’t even sure why she wants out of London so badly, beyond the vague caged animal instinct screaming out, get out. She feels like Theseus following his spool of thread around the next blind corner, but she keeps getting caught in tangles and snarls, crossing back over herself endlessly. There’s nothing but her aching feet and wrung out nerves and the crushing quicksand pressure against her chest that gets heavier the more she struggles, always seeking, never finding.
Eventually, something finds her.
She forgot, somehow, that there are other hunters out here. Other hunters that might have her scent in particular, that might want to take a pound of flesh for whatever they’d suffered at the Institute, and all the time since.
She’s so tired that at first she barely registers the monster slinking toward her down the street. She’s seen a lot of things since leaving the Institute, things that burrowed deep into the dark of her brain. She’d seen people that were little more than columns of flame bumbling through some mundane task, trails of hot fat dripping behind them while they filled grocery carts with boxes charred beyond recognition. She’d seen a woman with insectoid legs clawing free from the skin of her back. She’d turned her glittering compound eyes in Basira’s direction and Basira had taken a sharp turn and run deep into an alley, only stopping to retch bile out of her empty stomach. The sheer variety to the horrorshow would give the mandated Section 31 therapist a brain bleed.
The thing approaching her between the shadows of the looming buildings just looks, at first, like an animal. Frankly, an escaped zoo lion would not rank in the top one hundred weirdest things she’s seen on the streets of London.
Until she realizes how big it is. Until she notices the unnatural twist to its spine and its legs, the strange half-hobbling way it lopes toward her. Until she sees the ugly scar carved diagonally across its face, right over one of its too-human eyes.
Basira hears the rolling growl even from this distance. It’s locked on to her now, stepping lightly, slowly, like Basira’s a mouse it doesn’t want to startle. When it parts its jaws, its fangs are as long as her hand and shine wetly in the light.
“Hello, officer,” the monster calls. It’s voice is a yowl, but clear and still recognizable. It fills the numb pit in Basira’s chest with the echo of old fear and anger and she fights not to take a step back, by now knows better than to run. She doesn’t want to give it something to chase.
“Montauk,” Basira says shortly, as though they were meeting for a business lunch and the hunter had shown up ten minutes late. “Out here by yourself?”
“Could ask you the same,” Julia Montauk purrs. She shifts her angle of approach by a fraction, never taking her luminous eyes from Basira. Circling her, Basira realizes. She turns with her, trying to keep her back to something solid. “Where’s your snivelling pup?”
I can’t find her. The thought rises before she can squash it, but she’s not stupid enough to say as much. “Some pup,” she says instead. “I seem to recall her running off you and your old man. Twice.”
She’s close enough that Basira can see the way her pelt ripples over her muscles. There’s something strange about the way the fur lies across her shoulders. It isn’t until Montauk steps under a flickering streetlamp that Basira can see why; her back is studded with long spikes of white bone, whispering against each other like tree branches in the wind. Montauk snarls and the spines bristle into a nest of defensive quills.
“You should’ve seen her.” Montauk’s voice is measured, soft and coaxing, but Basira can see the furious lash of her tail. “Completely mad. Nothing behind the eyes. A real monster.”
Her face twists in something that might be a grin. Basira keeps her eyes fixed on the hunter, trying not to blink. She considers her options. Run—bad. She’s seen a hunter run. The only way she lasts more than a couple of minutes, tops, is if Montauk decides to play with her. Hide—worse. There’s nowhere for her to go. No guarantee any of the doors on the street would open for her, and even if one did, what then? Wait there until Montauk claws her way inside, backed into a corner like prey?
“If she’s a monster, what does that make you?”
Fight. Basira rests her hand on her holster. She doesn’t know if she can kill her. Montauk’s fast and even if Basira manages to hit her, she’s massive. She doesn’t look like she’d go down easy. Basira grits her teeth against the scrape of hooked claws against concrete. Montauk’s worked all the way around to the opposite side of the street now. Basira’s shoulders tense as she turns, exposes her back to the empty air.
A hazy shock of dread in her gut. Montauk, she remembers, works with a partner.
“Me?” Montauk says with a lazy, too-wide smile. “I’m just hungry.”
Basira thumbs open the strap on her holster. Draws her gun. Montauk bares her teeth, savage joy lighting her eyes, and a curious shudder runs the length of her body. There’s a lightning flick of her tail, a whistle of air, and then a hot, bright pain in Basira’s hand, her hip, her thigh. She smothers a cry behind her teeth, drops her gun (drops it again, maybe Daisy should have killed her) and almost ducks for it before she freezes.
Montauk’s eyes are huge and dark. She’s panting with anticipation, every exhalation edged in a growl. Basira’s eyes flicker down to her hand, just long enough to see the damage. Three long quills sunk deep into her flesh. At least one punctured all the way through, a half-inch of spiked bone protruding from her palm. A couple others lodged in the meat of her thigh, another distressingly jabbed into her gut. Blood drips into constellations on the pavement. Black spots float in front of her eyes until she blinks and looks away.
Think, god damn it. There has to be something. There has to be an opening. There always is. She’s never died before.
But her right side is a throbbing lacework of pain and Montauk is so close Basira thinks she can smell the blood on her teeth and her back is still exposed, there’s a panicked buzz in her ears and something’s coming—
Montauk’s eyes jump to something over Basira’s shoulder and her every muscle tenses like a flinch, all highlight and deep shadow in the unsure light of an empty sky. There’s a sound behind Basira, something running, gasping. Fuck it. No time.
Basira drops for her gun. Montauk screams, a high, inhuman sound, and leaps for her. And something hits Montauk like a bullet train.
A blur of red and pink and brown. It strikes Montauk’s ribcage in midair with an unsettlingly human cry of rage. The two of them careen away from Basira, hit the ground hard, and roll across the pavement in a shrieking tangle. Montauk is still screaming her bobcat’s scream. When they finally skid to a stop, Basira can see her savior. Her shackle and unkept oath.
Daisy pins Montauk to the ground. Daisy, shockingly small and human against the thrashing bulk of Montauk’s monstrous strength. Montauk’s on her belly, legs splayed beneath her, scrabbling for purchase to stand. Daisy drapes her body over her back almost tenderly. Basira sees the spines dig into Daisy’s flesh, but she doesn’t seem to feel them. She holds the other hunter down like it costs her nothing. She bends her head to look Montauk in one wildly rolling eye, her teeth very white in the filthy mask of her face.
“Get off me!” Montauk cries, her voice less human all the time. Daisy reaches for Montauk’s head like she’s moving through water, her outline shifting strangely. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”
Daisy’s hand gets too close to Montauk’s snapping teeth. She rips into Daisy, blood and saliva oozing between her fangs, staining her fur. Daisy doesn’t flinch. Barely seems to notice. Her other hand comes around and grabs Montauk’s lower jaw. Montauk makes a low moan around her mouthful of Daisy’s flesh.
Daisy twists. She yanks. There’s a crack! and Montauk falls limp.
It all happens very fast.
Daisy turns her yellow eyes on Basira.
She’s got a hand on her gun again. Not as good of a shot with the left, even without the trembling.
Daisy rises with a liquid ease. The new blood is bright and wet against old stains dried almost black. Basira thought she looked human—and she does, almost. But there’s something about the way she moves. Something about the way her shape blurs against the sky. Like the lines of her body were sharpened to razor thinness, the light glinting off her like a blade. She takes a few steps toward Basira and the world parts around her. The air bleeds when she moves. Daisy closes in with familiar easy confidence, a slick frictionless slide, and Basira’s wrung-out heart gives one last exhausted kick.
If she gets close enough, the offhand and the shaking and the blurring vision won’t matter.
“You promised,” Daisy says. Even her voice is sharp. Daisy’s voice, but with something layered over it, a static hiss, a clear tuning fork note. Layered over and compressed into a dense spear of sound that makes Basira’s ears ring.
It’s the teasing edge that locks Basira’s muscles in place. The one for late nights at work, Basira claiming she’s not tired as Daisy presses a coffee into her hands. The one that calls her a liar.
She swallows, trying to work some moisture back into her throat. Her finger is on the trigger. Daisy’s so close now. It would be easy.
Daisy opens her mouth to say something else. Her tongue catches her teeth and the flesh parts like under the edge of a knife, staining her mouth red.
A broken wail shatters in the air between them, an animal keening, echoing off the brick facades. It sounds like it’s coming from everywhere at once. Every other terrible noise is silent in its wake. Daisy’s nostrils flare. She cranes her neck back and around until Basira hears the joints pop, her eyes sliding shut, taking in deep lungfuls of air. The cry comes again, a howl, a scream, and Daisy’s head snaps toward the origin—somewhere east of them, and above.
“Got you,” Daisy says, in that shivering lead-weight voice.
Basira reaches out, futilely, and forgets about her injury until the movement jostles the spines, making her flinch. Daisy’s too fast anyway. Her limbs almost seem to extend as she moves, lengthening to lend her speed, pulling her into an unfamiliar shape. She doesn’t race away like Basira expects, but leaps straight into the side of a building and digs her fingers in like pitons. She launches herself up the wall in three lightning strike movements and is gone before Basira can think of a way to make her stay.
She stands on the empty street, bleeding, with nothing but the broken body of Julia Montauk to say that Daisy had been there at all. Basira doesn’t want to look at what’s left of her. Every old instinct and habit urges her to turn away, to put a door between her and the returning gibbering white noise, to pull the spines out of her body and disinfect the wounds until she screams.
Instead, she walks up to the hunter. There’s a tight, electric vibration in the pit of her stomach. She needs to look.
There’s hardly any blood. It’s almost tidy, except for the ruin of Montauk’s face. The nauseating angle of her jaw. She can still see the way Daisy’s fingers dug in between her teeth, the flex of her bicep before the final pull. Montauk seems smaller now. More human in death. A humid stink hovers in the air, blood and sweat and rot. It catches on the back of Basira’s tongue and she swallows thickly, unable to dislodge it. Finally, finally, she turns and stumbles away.
Later, after her wounds are bandaged, after her stomach is empty and her mouth rinsed, after she puts distance between herself and the body and the broken promise, the smell lingers. The scent seems to follow her, or she follows it. A golden thread clutched in her hands. If she concentrates, she thinks she can hear the dying echoes of that distant, grief-stricken wail.
“Huh,” Basira says, voice flat to her own ears. “Got you.”
-
Basira walks out of the labyrinth in pursuit of her monster. She (doesn’t hunt, she doesn’t hunt) follows the trail of the other hunter, the old man, knowing Daisy’s got his scent. The awareness lurks at the edge of her perception, pointing her onward, and she doesn’t think too hard about it. It takes her out of London, out into the world, if it can still be called that. It’s just a patchwork quilt of nightmares now and each one tries to sink its hooks into her, to keep her for its own. But Daisy moves through them and Basira follows doggedly.
They lead her deep into a shadowed forest. It feels familiar, somehow, the moment she steps over the boundary. Not good—the dread cinches tight around her spine from the first breath, flashbulb memories behind her eyes of Daisy with dirty hands, Daisy with bared teeth, Daisy with a knife to the Archivist’s throat—but familiar all the same. There are others here. The drumbeat of racing feet, the ragged panting, the screams always at the edge of her hearing. She learns quickly what draws them. Learns to breathe deep and even, learns to slow her heart, learns not to feel. She finds it surprisingly easy.
After what feels like a very long time, she follows that ephemeral trail to a clearing, her sense for it reading strong and fresh and close. There’s a voice from ahead, low, rough, spitting muffled curses. Basira draws her gun, exhales, and steps from between the trees.
Trevor Herbert’s losing his edge. He doesn’t even hear her. Just stays hunched up on the ground, his back to a tree, tugging at something near his feet. There’s a raw edge to his voice, pain or maybe panic. Basira stops when she sees what he’s fussing with. Almost laughs. It isn’t really funny, but—well, finding a hunter in a bear trap is a little ironic.
“Careless of you,” she says instead.
Herbert jumps, then flinches, a hiss escaping from between his teeth when the jaws of the trap hold fast. His wild eyes fall on her, flick briefly to the gun pointed casually at his chest, then back to her face, searching. The fear-stink of his sweat fills the clearing and Basira’s lips part, just a little. She touches her tongue to the blunt edge of her teeth.
“You.” Herbert spits. “You’re the one’s been following me? Christ, I thought it was—” He stops, head cocked like he’s listening for something far off. “Ah, she is. That’s what you’re after. Your mad dog.”
“Maybe.”
He chokes out a thick, wet laugh. Spits into the dirt, where it shines redly under the light of a full moon they can never see.
“You think you can bring her to heel?” He laughs again. “She’s long gone by now. Never seen anything like it.”
Basira doesn’t respond. She breathes slowly, in and out. Herbert watches her closely, and then his mouth twists as though disappointed. He falls back into the dirt, wincing when it jostles the trap clamped tight around his ankle, and starts inspecting the mechanism by feel. Basira’s a little gratified to notice he doesn’t take his eyes off her or her gun.
“Won’t answer to you, in any case,” he continues, conversationally. “You’re not her pack anymore. She’s—” He breaks off, frowning. In the dim light, Basira thinks she sees him shudder. “—she’s a lone wolf.”
“Shut up,” Basira snaps, hands tightening on the grip of her gun. She wants to hit him, the impulse curled up in her muscles like a snake about to strike, and she doesn’t know if it’s her or if it’s something from the dark shadows between the trees squirming up into her brain. Probably doesn’t want to know.
Herbert’s eyes narrow. “Or what? You’ll kill me? Better a bullet than what she’ll do. You seen it? She takes them apart like it’s a game. She likes it.”
“I said, shut up.” Her breath catches. Her heartbeat trips over itself and settles again, a little faster than before.
Herbert’s eyes catch the light. His pupils are thin as blades.
“Careful, copper,” he says.
“How fast do you think you can run with a bullet in your knee?” she says, slowly. “How long until she catches up to you then?”
“Dunno,” Herbert says, and the frankness of his tone catches Basira off guard. “She’s toying with me. Like I’m a bloody mouse. Could be she lets me run for some time yet.”
“You don’t sound very happy about it.”
Herbert’s mouth splits into something that might have been a smile a couple decades ago. Now it’s ground down thin, just a crack in his face revealing the soft meat inside. “The chase isn’t the fun part when you’re the prey”
Basira thinks about the endless empty days tracking Daisy through hell and could not imagine calling it the fun part. “Give up then,” she says.
Herbert wheezes a laugh. “I’m not agreeing to be your bait.”
“Didn’t say you had a choice in the matter.”
“Get fucke—”
Herbert freezes. His entire body goes still as a rough-hewn statue. Basira can’t even see him breathe. “Shit,” he exhales. Then he starts attacking the trap with renewed ferocity.
Basira fights to keep her composure. She wills her heart and her hands steady, breathes deep. In and out. There’s a familiar scent on the air. She can taste it. She draws it deep into her mouth and holds it there. Her eyes scan the treeline for any movement, any flash of reflected light or stalking shadow.
Heavy footsteps crunch through the undergrowth nearby. She can’t tell where it’s coming from; the forest plays tricks, makes echoes where there should be none, turns one solitary predator into a pack coming to tear you limb from limb. Basira turns in a slow circle, gun raised, searching, searching.
From behind her there’s a creaking metallic snap and a grunt of pain. By the time she whirls around, Herbert’s disappearing into the shadows between the trees.
“Freeze!” she calls, but of course he doesn’t. The wind and the leaves catch her words and throw them back at her, a mocking echo that swells to a confusing tumult of sound. From her left—or behind her, or above her—there’s a snarl and a dry tearing sound as feet dig in to run. Basira curses and picks a direction and moves.
She’s always too goddamned slow.
The forest is abruptly quiet again. She leans against a tree, panting with suppressed adrenaline. The bark is rough against her shoulder. She wonders, idly, if any of this is real or if it’s all so much set dressing left out by the Eye for them to play out their little comedy of errors.
Her thighs ache with the urge to run, to chase. She can still hear them. She still has the scent. The trail hangs in the air before her like a path cut just for her. If she ran as hard and as fast as she possibly could, maybe, maybe she could still catch them.
Basira bites down on her cheek, hard. The bright shock of pain centers her enough for her to blink the pink haze from her vision. She has time, she thinks, setting off at a walk. Time might be all she has.
-
The next time, Daisy is waiting for her.
Nothing changes in the forest. The sky never brightens or dims. She never has to stop to rest, not with the ever-present adrenaline hum of the Hunt layered over her like a second skin, so close sometimes she feels it in her teeth. The trees are spread out in a repeating pattern tesselated into infinity. Sometimes she thinks about cutting into a trunk to mark her way, but she’s distantly afraid of seeing the mark repeated on every single tree like a joke at her expense. The only thing that breaks up the time is running across one of the packs of half-mad hunters. Sometimes she just hears them whooping in the distance, but every now and then a group will pass close enough to smell the hot reek of blood in their wake. The hunters watch her sometimes, their bodies twisted into animal shapes, their eyes shining through the trees, and Basira looks back at them and does not run and they slink away into the dark like chastened dogs.
It takes Basira a moment, dulled by the rhythm of her feet and by constant low-grade terror, to realize the clearing she’s stumbled into is—different. There are small clearings scattered through the forest, to break up the monotony and sharpen the edges of your hope. The better to cut you with them. But this one is a large, silent circle of old destruction. The ground is churned up into long irregular furrows exposing earth so dark it’s almost black. The half-buried corpses of broken branches are trampled into the dirt and the clearing is pockmarked with jagged stumps, splinters of wood pointing toward the sky like accusations.
On the other side, there’s a single fallen tree laid out like a barricade. And sitting on top of it is Daisy.
She’s facing away from Basira, out into the trees. Her back is a soft curve, like she’s resting her elbows on her knees, quietly waiting. She looks so small in that empty, broken field, her clothes little more than rags, leaves caught in the shaggy tangle of hair left to grow too long. She looks real. She looks like her Daisy.
She can’t stop the little trip of her heart.
Daisy cocks her head. The movement is achingly familiar, made terrible by context. A curious animal pricking its ears. Basira swallows and draws her gun, her pulse beating a chorus of I promise I promise I promise in her ears, a song she’s almost learned to tune out.
Daisy’s back straightens. She turns toward her, swinging her legs over the fallen tree and sliding down to the ground. There’s no urgency in her. She meets Basira’s gaze, perfectly at ease, and her eyes are yellow and her face is a nightmare.
One side of her mouth is a long, twisted gash running nearly to her ear. The skin frays like torn fabric, ragged holes exposing the slippery pink of masseter muscle and wet tongue and far, far too many teeth. Too big and too sharp and crowding their way back into her jaw much farther than teeth should go.
Her Daisy, she berates herself. This Daisy looks at her with eyes like shining coins and Basira sees them like it’s the first time, that last day in the Institute. Daisy’s face twisted in a snarl, telling her to run, her eyes that same hot, reflective yellow. That was the last time she had seen her Daisy, that impossibly short and endless moment when Daisy carved her own name into a bullet and loaded it into Basira’s gun. Except she hadn’t thought so then, had she? She hadn’t been her Daisy since she climbed out of the coffin, her hands too soft, her eyes haunted. Or she hadn’t been hers since she placed herself like a weapon in Elias’ hands. Or she hadn’t been hers since the night Basira pleaded with her not to kill Jon and glimpsed the potential future where Daisy turned her back.
Always clinging to a desperate, childish belief that if she didn’t look at it then it wasn’t real. That she could force the world back into shape by sheer force of her contempt. God, she’d been so stupid. And now all that’s left is this.
They were all Daisy, and Daisy is hers.
“Basira.” Her voice is all relief. Slurred and distorted in that terrible mouth, but relieved all the same.
The way Daisy walks toward her is so casual that it sparks a little flame of anger in the hollow of Basira’s chest. It will be over for Daisy, after. No more monsters in the dark for her. And Basira will just have to keep moving forward, like after the Dark ritual, and after the Unknowing, and after the apocalypse. Some of them don’t get the option of bowing out early and hoping the books balance in the end.
The anger helps. It’s better than the woolly numbness that’s settled over her, anyway, and her hands don’t shake quite so much when she’s angry.
Daisy’s so close that Basira can see the broken blood vessels staining the whites of her eyes. She can see every detail of that mouth, how the teeth extend past the edges of her jaw. She imagines them like a zipper drawn up across the bones of her skull and Basira clenches her own teeth against a sympathetic ache.
She raises her gun. Daisy’s approach doesn’t falter. Suddenly there’s no more distance, no more time. Daisy takes one last step toward her and the muzzle of the gun presses into the center of her chest, delicate as a kiss.
“Do you promise?” Daisy asks, her lopsided smile a sad mockery of the one Basira remembers.
Basira doesn’t answer. She shouldn’t have to. She shouldn’t have let it go on this long in the first place. But Daisy takes her silence for hesitation. She sighs through her nose, almost fond.
She raises one hand and gently closes it around Basira’s. In the moment before her eyes slide closed, in the shadow, her irises look dark and human.
Fear spikes into Basira then, real crystalline fear. Being afraid is different now than it was before. She had gotten used to it. Despite the endless creativity of the new world’s horrors, constant fear eventually ends up diluted, muddied, like watered-down wine. But she can’t hold on to the numb calm that’s kept her safe. It shatters under a flash of pure white terror as Daisy rests her thumb over Basira’s trigger finger. A bitter part of her hopes the Eye’s getting its fill of her vintage.
Basira won’t get to make the choice after all. In the end she’s faithless, a coward, a liar. Daisy will render her down to nothing more than the instrument of her suicide. Not her partner. Not anything more than a hand on the gun. Daisy’s fingers tighten around hers and the fear is an electric current up her spine. It paralyzes her lungs in her chest. She’s choking up—she can’t move—it’s going to end right here, right now, and all Basira can do is watch.
Daisy goes rigid. Basira senses it like she might sense an approaching storm. Her eyes snap open and they’re that inhuman yellow again, the pupils blown wide and dark. She loosens her grip on the gun and Basira has half a heartbeat to feel relief before Daisy wraps both hands around her throat.
This is a wholly different flavor of fear, she observes. Almost entirely physical, just her body rebelling against its inevitable end. Her brain trickles out some spare cortisol, her heart races, her lungs drag helplessly for breath. One of her hands grabs at Daisy’s forearm without conscious thought. It almost doesn’t hurt, even when she feels claws that hadn’t been there a moment before sink into the soft skin of her throat. It’s just the natural conclusion of the game they’ve been playing all this time. One of them was always going to die, and Daisy’s the better hunter.
It’s the failure that burns her. Not able to do the one thing Daisy asked of her after everything she gave Basira.
Except—
She didn’t drop the gun.
Black spots flicker in her vision. Warm blood runs down her neck. She can still do it. She can still end it the way Daisy wanted it to end. The gun feels so heavy in her hand but she can—she can—
“Daisy,” she gasps, digging her nails uselessly into Daisy’s arm. Her vision tunnels.
Something shifts in Daisy’s face, just a little. Eyes narrow. Brows draw together. Something she might not have noticed if it wasn’t Daisy, if they weren’t who they were. But she sees it: something like a question, and something like pain.
Basira heaves the gun up like her arm is made of iron. The spark in Daisy’s eyes slips away, leaving only a snarl and the crushing fingers. With a jolt of grief, she remembers the ghost-like brush of Daisy’s hands after the coffin, like she thought any touch would bruise. She could end it now and it would be a mercy, and maybe that would be enough. Not much chance for mercy in this place.
Her hand falls into the cradle of Daisy’s shoulder. The cold metal of the gun brushes the shell of Daisy’s ear, bent close to whisper a secret. Daisy bares her teeth. Basira answers in kind, her smile grim.
“Sorry,” she says, and pulls the trigger.
The gunshot erupts, magnified by the unnatural silence. Daisy screams. She drops Basira to claw at her face, at her sensitive hunter ears, and Basira’s legs go out from under her. She lands hard in the dirt, free hand flying to her throat.
Daisy stumbles away from her. Her snarls fade into whimpers. Basira scrambles backwards, wants to get back to her feet, but she can’t get her breath and she slips on the loose earth, falls again. Draws Daisy’s attention back to her. She must look like an animal struggling in a trap. But when Daisy looks at her, she stops. Freezes in place, like somehow the world tilted and she’s the prey. She watches Basira gasping on the ground like she’s never seen her before, and then looks down at her own hands. Fingertips wet with Basira’s blood. A low whine breaks out of her throat.
Basira thinks she can see her hands shaking.
She tries to call Daisy’s name, but it comes out a wet cough instead and she has to turn her face to retch into the dirt. She wants to tell Daisy to wait. To stay. Wants to explain her weakness away. She wants to find the words that could make this right. Change the rules. Rewrite their ending. Make sense of the red hot tangle of promises and pain and want twisting behind her ribs.
She doesn’t know what she would say except what kind of monster begs to die?
Daisy’s gone before she gets her breath back. Basira spits a laugh from her bruised throat and it brings tears to her eyes. Of course she is.
-
The hunt bleeds everything else away. How long has it been? Weeks? Months? All this time crashing through forest with the smell of blood in her nose and a drumming in her ears and sometimes—sometimes she forgets what she’s looking for. Only that she has to keep moving, keep looking, because to slow down or to stop would be weakness. Would be a betrayal of—
Fuck, what was she doing again?
Trevor Herbert. Right. Find Trevor Herbert. He’s close. She can taste his pitiful fear on the air like campfire smoke, acrid and enticing. She creeps up slowly, carefully. He got away from her last time. She won’t let it happen again.
She can hear his voice through the trees and he’s—he’s talking to someone? Two someones. Voices she recognizes. One soft and unsteady, the other smooth and posh and smug and familiar. She peers around a tree trunk and the bloody haze clinging to her mind clears at all once.
It would be Jonathan fucking Sims.
It only takes her a second to assess the scene. Jon’s got his hands up, smiling like a moron, even though Herbert’s got his hands around Martin’s neck. Basira knows Herbert can’t hurt him, not now, not after so long with Basira on his tail. But she can sense Martin’s confusion and fear cresting like a wave and the moment it breaks, the moment Herbert gets a taste of blood, the balance will shift.
Basira grinds her teeth. A simple choice, really. Herbert or the others. Her only lead to Daisy or—
Bastards.
She pulls the trigger.
-
“I told you not to look into my head.”
“So you do believe it’s me, then.”
Jon’s still smiling. Like her sticking a gun in his face is the best thing to happen to him since the world ended. Like he’s happy to see her.
“Know-it-all prick,” she says, holstering her pistol.
God damn it. She thinks she’s happy to see them, too.
-
Listening to Jon and Martin bicker with each other is insufferable, and it makes her feel more human than she’s felt since she left London. Sometimes she wants to throttle them both, or she wants to slip away and leave them behind. She never quite shakes the feeling that they’re slowing her down. But she remembers the blurry vagueness of hunting alone in the dark and so she follows. Jon leads them all out of the Hunt domain and through a series of other nightmares, following the trail of violence Daisy leaves in her wake. Every broken body is a shining silver wire pulled tight around Basira’s throat, each one a condemnation: you could have stopped this.
Jon unspools their stories out for her and she bites down on the flare of indignant anger. It crawls up from the nauseous pit of her stomach with a chorus of I know I know how could I not know? But knowing was never enough. So she looks and she feels the itch of understanding at the back of her brain, sees the web of suffering and excuses sketched between them.
They pass into a new domain. Jon leads them carefully on a narrow path between pools of sucking mud, and Basira feels a chill of premonition. She knows what Jon’s going to say before he says it.
“Basira. She’s—she’s close.”
Her hands clench so tightly her knuckles pop. Martin appears at her side and reaches out to touch her shoulder. She jerks away on instinct, a flush of shame sweeping up the back of her neck.
Martin pulls back. The look on his face is closer to understanding than pity, and Basira knows that’s infinitely worse. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” Basira snaps. She strides up behind Jon. “You’re sure?”
Jon casts a look over his shoulder and says only, “I’m sorry.”
Basira nods.
It isn’t long until they find her.
Basira knows it’s Daisy. It doesn’t look anything like her, not anymore, but Basira still knows. Daisy’s bent low over one of the quicksand pools, sniffing curiously at the bubbling mud like she’s waiting for something to come up for air. She’s turned away, but she must hear them. Their steps make greedy sucking sounds every time they pull their feet out of the wet earth. One of Daisy’s ears flicks disinterestedly. Basira walks ahead of the others, holding up one arm to keep them back.
“Daisy?” she calls from the midpoint between them. Daisy turns to look at her with a long, slow sweep of her head, fixing Basira in place with her golden eyes. More than two now, smaller ones spreading across her cheek and jaw like a rash, all blinking out of time. “Oh, Daisy…”
She’s more wolf than human now, but there was never a wolf that looked like this, never one this big. God—she’s huge. Taller than Martin at the shoulder. She takes a step closer, paws sinking deep into the ground under her weight. She peels her lips back from her teeth, muzzle wrinkling in a silent warning snarl, and all along her body—her chest, her shoulders, her flanks—other mouths open like drooling wounds, each one filled with glistening teeth.
The fur around her muzzle is stained red-black with blood. The sight calls up a memory of the last body they’d found, the ragged ends of gnawed bone and the hollow cavity of his chest, and a shudder rolls through Basira.
Neither of them move for several long seconds. Basira realizes, belatedly, that she’s waiting for something.
Daisy looks at her, hungry, a little wary, and she says nothing at all.
Basira doesn’t quite sob; just a sharp gasp, an unsteady exhalation. No demand this time, no accusation or plea. That should make it easier. It should be easier to kill a monster than to kill her partner, even if there’s a senseless cry in the back of her mind that says too late, too late. She isn’t, the rest of her insists. She isn’t too late to end it, to stop the violence. That’s what Daisy wanted in the first place. That’s what Basira’s here to do.
Isn’t she?
“Jon?” she calls over her shoulder, not taking her eyes from Daisy. She hates the way her voice trembles. “Can you...do anything? Can you, I don’t know, can you look at her?”
Daisy said the Eye could see her, before. A million years ago in her flat, with nothing but a door between them, the second time Daisy asked to die. And Jon’s more the Eye now than he ever was, tied into the foundation of this new world in a way she doesn’t entirely understand. He could do it, surely. If anyone could pull her out again, it would be Jon. He saved her before. Basira gave up on her, but Jon never did, Jon never gave up on anyone—her and Daisy both.
“No,” Jon says. He sounds closer than she left him and she shuffles sideways to cover him, trying to keep that mess of hungry eyes on her. “I don’t think I can. I think—I think it would kill her.”
And Basira won’t let anyone else do that.
The seconds stretch and cool, hardening into brittle glass around them. A series of finely wrought statues cut into the shape of tragedy, put on display in a museum for people to murmur over appreciatively. A long project finally finished. A culmination. This doesn’t feel like her resignation or even her resolve. Just cold certainty oozing into her stomach and chest until there’s no room for anything else. In that moment it feels like nothing more than a stageplay, all of them acting out their parts, with the Eye above their silent, eager critic.
Well, she’s pulling the curtain. The Ceaseless Watcher can chew on her fear forever for all she cares, but she can at least stop Daisy from serving it seconds. No more neatly carved up bodies for the Eye’s table.
Daisy’s tongue darts out to lick her lips and the world shudders back into motion. Basira reaches for her gun for the last time.
Jon’s voice stops her. “You might be able to, though.”
It hits her like a vertigo kick, like the jerk back to equilibrium when you’ve leaned back almost too far to right yourself. She nearly turns to look at him and barely catches the fatal rookie mistake. Daisy must sense the crack in her composure regardless. She takes another step.
“What?” she demands. “What does that mean?”
“I—I mean, I don’t know if it would work, I don’t know how any of this works, it’s just a feeling—”
He never could explain anything under pressure, and there’s plenty of pressure now with Daisy closing in. He dissolves into babbling, hoping everyone else can make the same leaps of logic he makes, hoping they can see what he sees. She almost doesn’t want to hope anymore. It’s too exhausting.
“Jon!” Basira barks. Her mouth is dry. There’s static rising in her ears. “Just. Tell me what I have to do.”
“You have to make her see,” Jon explains, a little steadier. “All of it. With the others, turning their fear back on them destroyed their connection to their patron. But if she’s cut off, and then you pull her back—”
He hesitates, and every heartbeat is one more titanic step Daisy takes toward them.
“I don’t know if it will work,” he finishes lamely.
“Why me?” she asks. Asks even though she knows. Maybe she can see what he sees, after all.
“She’s your partner, Detective. Who else could it be?”
No one else. It was always the two of them, back to back, in the dark together. Only Basira can find her there and drag her out into the light.
Her hand slides away from her holster as she steps forward. Instantly, Daisy stops. Her ears flatten back against her head, suddenly unsure, suddenly the prey again. Except that isn’t right. There is no more prey and no more hunter. Basira only sees Daisy.
High above in what was once the sky, one of the great, ever-staring eyes rolls lazily away from its Archivist and looks down upon Basira Hussain.
A harsh electric hiss explodes in the air around her. She peels back the fur and flesh and bone and underneath there is only blood. It swallows her. Jon called it the bottom of the ocean once, but it feels like a river to her, hot and swift, the rust-iron tang thick in the back of her throat, and it nearly knocks her legs out from under her. God, how does Jon—it’s so much—
Daisy as a fresh-faced officer in her crisp new uniform, burning with pride, burning with a deep-down hunger she only ever looks at sideways—her knuckles connecting with a man’s jaw, splitting his lip, his head bouncing off the brick wall behind him—Daisy in front of a mirror, scrubbed pink, shivering at the memory of blood on her skin—
Basira gasps and staggers. She almost loses it, whatever grip she has on Daisy, can feel Daisy struggling against her awareness, trying to hide. Daisy’s whine climbs to a scream of pain. She stumbles backwards. Basira surges back into the current.
Daisy, slight and gangly with youth, pushing through a half-collapsed fence—a monster hissing poison into a boy’s ear, Calvin’s ear, her best friend Calvin—Calvin shoving her backwards into a horrible tearing pain—Calvin growing up vicious and the conviction bubbling up inside her that anyone might be a monster if you dig deep enough—
A rain-slick street and a coffin and the knowledge that if you peel back the surface of the world there’s rot underneath—watching a dead-eyed woman on the CCTV whose mouth doesn’t move when she speaks, feeling a sharp shock of excitement when the body goes up in flames—monsters are real and she knows what she’s supposed to do—Calvin kneeling in the forested spot she won’t tell Basira about and the gunshots, one two three four five—
Daisy retreats from her advance, feet slipping in the muck. She thrashes her huge, shaggy head back and forth like trying to shake off grasping hands, an anguished moan spilling from her throat. Basira blinks furiously, dizzy from the deluge of sensation and memory, but she thinks Daisy is smaller than she was before.
The blood in her veins beats like a drum when she runs and when she hurts, it sings when something turns to her with fear in its eyes—she grows vicious and anyone can be a monster, anyone at all, except—Basira sitting in the passenger seat of her cruiser passing her a bag of chips, face lit by the sunset, ignorant of the dirty shovel in the trunk—Basira smiling at her when Daisy comes back from a long trip tired and satisfied—Basira opening her door to Daisy still wild-eyed and juddery from a hunt and stepping aside and not asking questions—Daisy sees the blood under her fingernails and anyone can be a monster, but Basira never asks and if the blood sings loud enough she doesn’t have to think—
Basira chokes on the bile climbing her throat. The torrent paints every memory, every moment with Daisy in a layer of gore. Daisy always had her back and so she had Daisy’s. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Basira wanted to trust Daisy, held her faith tight between her teeth and turned away from anything she didn’t want to see—there were always signs, Daisy could never hide anything from her—because the alternative scared her too much.
It scares her now. It would be easy to turn away. She has a lot of practice. She could close her eyes and end this the way Daisy wanted it to end and bury it in the ground, call it over and done with and pretend it never happened. What could they possibly salvage from this?
Black shadows curl up from Daisy’s heaving shoulders like steam. At first Basira thinks it’s a trick of the light, but they peel away from her with every step. Daisy is shrinking under Basira’s relentless gaze. Her back paw slips and plunges into one of the quickmud pools before Daisy jerks it free with a frightened yelp. Nowhere left to go. Daisy meets Basira’s eyes and freezes and in that moment Basira thinks she looks terribly small.
Fight and change it. She doesn’t look away.
Daisy crushed on all sides by dirt and rock and there’s no blood to sing to her here, nothing to feel but horror, and she never told Basira goodbye—Jon Sims’ voice in the dark and his fingertips brushing hers and the simple joy of not being alone almost drowns out the shame of being saved by a man she almost executed—Basira limned in cold fluorescents, Basira turning away from her, and that’s only right, only fair, because Daisy can’t hide what she is anymore, it spills out wet and red around her like a blast crater—
The hunger pulses in her like a migraine and it makes her weak, sometimes Jon flinches away from her and so she chooses to be weak, she will let this kill her to keep the fear out of his eyes—the hunters come back and they want to hurt her and Jon and Basira—she doesn’t want to hurt anyone and she does want to hurt them and the hunger lives in her bones and the hunger never went away and she knows anyone can be a monster, she turns to Basira, makes her promise, because Daisy knows that monsters have to die—
Basira cries out against it, pushing forward through the mud and the blood. She gathers it all up, every terrible thing, and she turns it outward like a spotlight. Daisy shrieks. She’s just a person-shaped silhouette now, shadow-smoke boiling off her, hands clawed into her head, twisting like a fish on a line. But under all the fear and pain and death, there’s a hint of something soft and green and Basira digs. She clutches at the pieces of Daisy that climbed out of the Buried, small and broken, a woman who wouldn’t dare ask for forgiveness, who only wanted one last chance to do something good.
No more killing. Shooting Daisy won’t undo the past, and saving Daisy won’t either, and nothing they do now will wash that blood off their hands. But Basira doesn’t have to add any more.
Basira holds tight and she pulls. There’s one last roar of static that swallows every other sound and then—
Then there’s just Daisy.
Daisy standing naked and gasping, legs trembling. She sways and starts to stumble backwards into the waiting pool of mud and what irony that would be, sucked back down into the earth at the end, but Basira is there, Basira grabs her shoulders and yanks her away and Daisy goes down on her knees instead, taking Basira with her.
Daisy slumps against her and Basira’s arms come up to steady her on instinct. She’s sucking at the air in quick, abortive jerks like she can’t breathe, her chest heaving, shaking furiously like she was caught out in the snow.
Basira can hear Jon and Martin start to approach and she waves them back. After a long painful minute, the tremors ease a little. Daisy’s face is still tucked into Basira’s shoulder and the first thing she says is: “Liar.”
That’s what finally makes Basira’s eyes burn with tears. It’s so absurd she almost laughs. “Yeah,” she manages. She almost says I’m sorry, but that would just be another lie.
“It’s quiet,” Daisy says, haltingly. “It’s—it’s really gone.” And then, so softly that Basira might not have heard it if Daisy’s mouth wasn’t pressed to her ear, “I didn’t want to come back.”
Basira’s hands spasm against Daisy’s skin, a desperate, possessive reflex she fails to stifle. “I know,” she sighs.
“I don’t deserve it.”
In the wet, choked voice of a torn-out throat, Basira says, “Jon says it’s not about what we deserve.”
Daisy pants, thin and unsteady, against the skin of Basira’s throat. Her hands clutch at Basira’s arms, stronger than they were those last few months at the Institute. But there’s no warning prick of claws through the fabric. No growl in her chest. Daisy is bloodied and shaking, warm and alive and human.
“Jon’s always right, is he?” Daisy asks weakly.
Basira does laugh then. It punches out of her lungs like she’s retching up poison, leaving her throat raw. “If you thought he was a know-it-all bastard before, wait until you hear him now.”
“Rude,” Jon says, voice thick, from somewhere behind her. “I’m right here.”
Daisy starts to laugh too, a trembling, hysterical laugh that shudders through her like a fever. Basira doesn’t let her go until it passes. It’s just the two of them, knees in the dirt, clutching hands, the ragged edges of a broken bone grinding back into place.
“What now?” Daisy asks in between hitching breaths that sound more like sobs. “What do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” Basira says, because she doesn’t. She isn’t like Jon, whatever she might be, whatever she was able to do. And she’s only ever known one way to face down the unknown. Pick a direction. Keep moving. Don’t look back.
There’s a rustle behind her, the warmth of a body at her back. Basira half-turns to see Martin wordlessly strip off his road-worn hoodie and hold it out to her. His eyes are wet, there are tracks in the grime built up on his cheeks, but he smiles at her with such open, genuine hope that the rush of warmth she feels almost chokes her. She takes it gratefully. The expression she returns hardly feels like a smile by comparison.
Martin rests one broad, warm hand on Basira’s shoulder for a moment before turning away. Basira untangles herself from Daisy enough to drape the jacket over her faintly trembling shoulders, smoothes her palms down the sleeves to hide how her own hands are shaking. In the inconsistent light, Daisy’s eyes are the dark brown of wet earth. She looks back at Basira with a shattered, pleading expression, an echo of the one she’d worn a lifetime ago when Basira opened a door and found her and Jon sprawled in a pile of hissing tape recorders. It had scared her to see it on Daisy’s face, Daisy who was always steady, iron-sure, planning out the next six steps in advance. It was the look of someone lost in the dark, reaching.
Basira hadn’t reached back, then. She reaches now, pulls Daisy against her again, and Daisy comes easily. Like she trusts Basira, after everything, to know what to do.
She can’t keep going forever. She can’t keep tripping over holes in her own flawed logic or wading into the endless mire of willful ignorance and lies. She needs to pick a place on the horizon, a tower, a star. The journey will be the journey. No more shortcuts. She needs to walk that path and—always, always—she wants Daisy beside her when she does.
She thinks Daisy wants that, too. Thinks Daisy wanted it months ago, when Basira was still too afraid to see.
“Basira?” Daisy says.
She presses her lips to Daisy’s hair, sweaty and spiked with blood. Daisy still has her fingers hooked around Basira’s arms, tight enough to bruise. Basira’s hanging on just as desperately. Her hands press hard against Daisy’s back, feeling her shoulder blades move against her palms. She doesn’t deserve this either. She’d hunted knowing that the only thing waiting for her at the end would be one more unmarked grave in a long line of unmarked graves. That would have been fair, she thinks. Poetic, almost.
Maybe they don’t deserve this. But that doesn’t mean she’s letting go.
She feels the weight of the words before she speaks them. The heavy chain of a promise. One she resolves not to break. “We do better.”
“Better,” Daisy breathes, understanding. Daisy always understood. “Yeah. That sounds—good.”
And Basira can’t think of anything else to say.
No need to fill the silence, though. From behind them, Jon clears his throat. Basira closes her eyes in exasperation, thinks wryly can we not have a moment? She doesn’t quite swallow her sigh, and her chest aches fiercely when Daisy laughs at her.
“We, ah, we should keep moving,” Jon says. “London’s not too far off.”
“London?” Daisy asks, looking up. Her eyes are a little clearer, a little sharper. “Why London?”
“That’s where Jonah—er, Elias—is,” Martin clarifies.
Understanding starts to dawn on Daisy’s face. Basira rolls her eyes, but a smile tugs hesitantly at Daisy’s lips and the hope smouldering in Basira’s chest catches on it, flares brighter. They’ve already done one impossible thing today. She hears herself say, “You want to help save the world?”