The slender figure in a black hoodie lets themselves into the house. Before I can question who they are—of course I suspect them to be the seer—they lower their hood. Their face is young and their eyes shimmer prettily. So prettily
So prettily
So
Blank
They blink and I snap my head away.
No eye contact. I forgot the first rule for dealing with seers.
As I rub my head to calm the growing headache, they gesture with their hands. “Well? Are you the one being so reckless about your information storage? If you weren’t at the edge of the town, I’d have reported you immediately.” They might be trying to raise their voice at me, but it’s soft. Soft and pained.
“But you didn’t?” I say, looking out the window. I can see their eyes in my peripherals and it makes it hard to think. But it’s not as paralysing as direct eye contact.
“No. And if you immediately disperse your data then I won’t have to.” They look to the floor giving me a moment’s relief. I hear their boot crush something. “This place is already infested with infomites.”
“Would you like some tea?” I ask, and head to the kitchen.
“No,” they say. “Disperse your data.”
I enter the kitchen (a narrow space too small for both Rowan and me to work in at once) and put the kettle on. “Certainly. It’s useless anyway now that you’re here,” I say. The tea-leaf bowl is in corner of the ceramic counter. I check it for mites while I wait for the seer.
“Now that I’m here?”
“I’m sure you’ve pieced together what I’m doing. You’ve seen the sort of data I’ve been gathering.”
“Bits,” the seer says, now at the doorway to the kitchen. “You’re looking into the Waker. Why?”
I keep my back to the seer. It’s uncomfortable—it goes against my instincts to let myself be so vulnerable. “I’m going to kill the Waker. And I need you to help me find out where she is. I need you to see for me.”
The seer laughs. It’s a hoarse laugh that dips in and out of soundlessness. “Don’t mistake lunacy for hope. You think you’re maybe the last person in this undying place who believes things can be better. That you’re the only one willing to try something—anything—to make things better. Maybe that would be hope in another time, but not now. It’s too late for hope. They took that from us too.”
“Then you won’t help?”
“I didn’t say I was uninterested. I just said not to misunderstand that what you’re doing is lunacy.”
The kettle finishes boiling.
#
We carry a heavy, sloshing box into the living room where the seer is sipping tea. Rowan pauses before I open the box. She’s wearing thick-rimmed glasses so I can’t see her eyes. There’s a long, slimy worm stuck into the left lens, wrapped around the rim. It twitches.
“I want to test something out,” she says as she approaches the seer on the couch. I don’t stop her; she won’t have much time for experimenting once we leave. That is, if this leads to anything.
The seer looks at her and she looks at them. I have to watch out of the corner of my eye, so I can’t be entirely sure, but it seems like they’re making eye-contact. Soon the seer realises this and leaps to their feet. “You can look me in the eye? Those glasses? No—your sight must be blocked.”
“It’s not,” Rowan says. She’s rises quickly with a wild grin. “Hold up a number of fingers.”
The seer, still shocked to make eye-contact, complies. Rowan says four, the seer changes the number, Rowan says five. It goes on like this until the seer is satisfied.
“Amazing,” they say.
“Isn’t it? The worm here is an infoeater—dead—but I hooked it up to a battery to keep it functioning. It’s sucking in information just like your eyes do—”
“It’s eating it?” The seer throws their hands over their eyes and backs away. “No, no, no, no, ….”
“Relax! Relax!” Rowan says. “It’s dead. It’s not digesting it. It passes straight through.”
The seer calms a little but refuses to look at Rowan. “Take them off.” Rowan is about to talk— attempt to explain how the device is harmless—when she sees me watching her, my brow furrowed.
“We should leave it,” I say, and nod towards the box. She accepts this.
The seer sits down again and goes back to sipping their tea. They sit hunched now, tense. Rowan places the glasses in a small case which she puts to the side. She sits on the opposite end of the couch to seer and I open up the box.
An animal corpse floats on its side in a vicious liquid. Its dog-like head is hairless, and its fat body is very human. Its arms are tiny but its legs are thick, powerful. Its bulbous, milky eyes and its engorged tongue bob with the little waves.
The seer leans forward to look at the body. “Disgusting.”
“I’d like to think we preserved it pretty well,” Rowan says. “Will you be able to work with it?”
“The eyes are inctact, so yes.” The seer shakes their head. “This thing has seen the Waker?”
“It’s been into the Land of Old Corpses. That’s where we believe the Waker is hiding. We sent it there with a message on the tag—,” Rowan points to the small, blocky device strapped onto the dogthing’s left leg, “—and when we got it back the message was scratched out. We think it made contact.”
The seer shakes their head, either in disbelief or disappointment. They tell us to stand next to stand in front of them and to either side. “Look into my eyes while I see.” We nod to each other and watch as the seer closes their eyes and lifts the dog thing out of the water so they are face-to-face with it. Then their eyes open—
“Hello, little puppy,” a bubbling shadow with a bright smile says to me. I blink and bark at the creature—it does not smell like food, it smells like nothing. It is dangerous! I scream at it. I run. I run. I try to run but I can not run. The creature laughs at me. “Oh, look at this? Someone trying to talk to me? You’re a mailperson.” The creature laughs more, so brightly. What is funny? Why do I make it laugh? I am no comedian, you asshole!
The creature lifts me up and I try to bite at it; my mouth goes numb. I try to kick at it, to rend its flesh—if it has flesh—and my leg goes limp. I cannot hurt it? I cannot save myself? No! No! My eyes grow wet then water pours from them, my screams become whimpers. Where is my pack? All dead and gone. No more. I’m the last one left. It is my duty to found a new pack but I will die at this monster’s hand.
Yet it lets me down on the ground. I am still numb. It looks me in the eyes again. It hurts. “You want to talk to me? I’m honestly delighted to hear that,” the shadow tells me. “I’m in the place where the oldest have died. The ones who lost the fights over this world when I first woke them. If you come here, you’ll find me.” The shadow stops smiling and my hearts pump ever faster. What does it mean? Is it mad? Will it kill me now? “I welcome you, but it might not be easy all the same. I regret that I cannot meet you anywhere else.”
The creature stands up. “Go back to your master, puppy. Show them what I told you.”
My legs tingle and twitch and then I’m running, thundering against the curly black grass away from the place where the old corpses lie—
The seer closes their eyes and plunges the dog-thing back into the solution. They collapse onto the couch, covered in sweat, breathing deeply. I feel my own legs, barely, and they fail me. I fall to the floor. Rowan is beside me, holding her legs close to her chest.
The Waker has invited us over.
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