It’s all too rare they have nights like this. Days, sure, they’ve had plenty of days where they can just be teenagers, but unless they’re off doing something for Gerry’s mum, they usually have to be home early—school in the morning, somewhere they need to be, you name it, Aunt Lily always has an excuse. But Gerry’s mother dragged them down to the South Downs hunting a Leitner that, it turns out, was already sold. Gerry’s mother was ready to blow a gasket until Martin put on the stammering, awkward act, threw in a couple words of Polish, and managed to charm the contact information for the man who purchased it out of the old bookseller. She’s so grateful, or acting so grateful anyway, that she gave them the night off…with the strict injunction that they’re to be to Dover by the first train out so they can head across to Calais, but still, a whole night of freedom. Gerry doesn’t think they’ve had that since the Poland trip.
And this is the perfect place for a night off, or near enough to it. The nearest village is small and doesn’t put out a lot of light, and despite this spot apparently being of interest to a certain variety of tourist, nobody hangs around the downs after dark. Gerry finds an open spot, checks to make sure there are no holes or anthills, and shakes out the old tartan picnic blanket he found in a shop earlier in the day.
“Here,” he says, kneeling down and smoothing out the wrinkles. “This is as good a spot as any.”
“Because you’re suddenly an expert on stargazing.” Nonetheless, Melanie flops down on the blanket and tucks her hands under her head.
Gerry looks up at Martin, just visible in the fading light of the day. “C’mon, Martin, take a load off, yeah? You’ve done a lot today. Let’s just relax for tonight.”
Martin smiles. The last rays of sunset catch his hair and make it sparkle like it’s been been spun out of rubies. “Okay, but if we get in trouble, it’s someone else’s turn to be responsible.”
They lie on their backs, heads close to one another, as darkness spreads towards the horizon and the stars begin to come out in a—for once—cloudless sky. A gentle breeze rustles the beech hanger just over the top of the hill and carries with it the faint scents of summer flowers. Martin folds his hands over his chest, and Gerry curls one arm behind his neck and lets the other rest comfortably in the center of the circle. The moon is nearly gone, and the sweep of the Milky Way gradually becomes visible overhead.
“It’s easy to see how religions get started on a night like this,” Melanie says, a bit dreamily. “That looks like a river you’d expect to see a god sailing on, doesn’t it?”
“Or a road one could walk on,” Gerry agrees. “What do you think, Martin? If you were making a religion, what would you say the Milky Way was?”
Martin hums. “I think…it’s a brush stroke. The first broad, sweeping mark on the canvas of creation. The painting has only just begun, and someday…someday the whole of the firmament will be a complete painting, and when we look at it, we will truly understand what it’s here for.”
“And then what?” Melanie asks, tipping her head back to stare upside-down at her brother.
“And then we find out of the Great Artist brings out a new canvas or wipes this one clean and starts over, I guess.”
“The Age of Turpentine,” Gerry quips.
“Fine, Mr. Rembrandt, how does your religion go?” Martin retorts. “The gods walk the Milk Road…”
“The Starlight Road. No, the Starway, ” Gerry corrects himself. “The sun is…a balloon. Yeah, that’s it. Every morning the Lightkeeper selects a new balloon and lets it carry him across the sky while he sleeps, and then he wakes up when it deflates and sets him down. Then he walks the Starway back to the—the balloonery and selects a new one, ready for the next day.”
“Is the reason the nights are longer in winter because it’s cold and takes him longer to walk?” Martin asks.
Gerry sits up briefly, staring at the black line of the horizon. “That’s genius!”
Melanie snickers. “I think the river is…where life comes from. There are two boats that sail along it, the Fisher and the—the Logjammer. The Logjammer is the one responsible for breaking up the clouds and keeping the Heavenly River flowing clear, and when he takes a night off, that’s when it rains. The Fisher is the one who scoops babies out of the stars and takes them to the Night Market, where the storks pick them up and take them to their families.”
Gerry settles back onto the blanket and looks up at the stars again. “Do you think there’s anything out there? Really? Other than the Fears?”
“If there’s not…” Martin somehow shrugs without taking his shoulders off the blanket. “Seems like an awful waste of space.”
“Is the ocean a waste of space, then?”
“There’s life in the ocean,” Martin points out. “Just not human beings.”
“True,” Gerry allows. He sighs contentedly and stares up at the sky. “Hard to imagine people being afraid of something so beautiful, isn’t it?”
“‘I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.’” The surprise is that it’s not Martin that quotes the old poem, but Melanie. They all know it, of course, it’s one of the first ones Martin ever memorized way back when, but still, Melanie’s not usually the one to start quoting.
Still, Gerry has to agree. “If more people lived where they could see how crowded the sky was, I don’t think space would scare them as much.”
“Depends on why, I guess,” Martin says.
Gerry exchanges a frown with Melanie. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” Martin waves a hand at the firmament. “What about space scares people? If it’s the big open space, then yeah, that’s the Vast, and maybe seeing it cluttered with stars will make them feel less afraid. But if it’s how dark it is…okay, yeah, the stars and a full moon would probably ward off the Dark too, but all it takes is a big enough cloud, and if you’re actually up there, the stars are so far apart you wouldn’t be able to see. And then there’s what you said, about wondering if there was anything out there…I could see the Lonely having a hand in it, if you’re afraid that there’s nothing else in the universe. Maybe the Stranger if what you’re afraid of is what is. And, you know, you can’t breathe in space, and the pressure is so high, there’s a good argument to be made that it’s the Buried.”
Gerry blinks. “I…I never thought of that.”
“Well, we keep saying, the damn things overlap.” Martin goes quiet for a moment. “Gerry?”
“Mm?”
“Do you really think there are only fourteen Fears?”
Gerry’s not sure how to answer that. Obviously there are more than fourteen things to be afraid of, but he’s always just sort of…gone with the idea that they all more or less slot into the fourteen major categories. Especially since Martin has only ever seen fourteen different colors on Leitners and those touched by the Fears. But it’s somehow never occurred to him before this very minute that the exact same thing might fit into multiple categories at the same time and also one at a time.
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “There’s probably a better way to categorize them than Smirke’s method, but…I’ve never thought about it before.”
“Maybe we can come up with something better,” Melanie suggests. “Like the Dewey Decimal system, or the way they categorize symphonies.”
“I think those might be too specific,” Martin says, a little uncertainly. “Or too restrictive. Or too similar to Smirke’s system, just…breaking it down further. We’d have to come up with something that…allows for overlap, I guess.”
“Hmm.” Gerry taps his thumb against the ground thoughtfully. “I mean. You’re already seeing the colors. Maybe that’s the key to it.”
“How do you mean?”
“Like…like there are all different shades, you know? And they sort of…bleed into each other. Like lilac is a shade of purple, but it’s kind of close to pink, too. And how teal has blue and green, but it’s different than blue-green. Maybe we should be thinking of them by color rather than…”
“I don’t think so,” Martin says. “Like I said, there are so many different things in space to fear, and they all filter into the Fourteen differently.”
“Like stars,” Melanie says.
“I—what?” Martin shoots her a puzzled glance.
Melanie waves at the sky herself. “Well, there are all sorts of constellations, right? And sometimes the bigger constellations have smaller ones inside them, or overlap with them, like how the Big Dipper is only part of Ursa Major and we talk about Orion’s Belt separate from Orion. But there are also stars that are special. Like Betelgeuse and Vega and the North Star and all. And they’re part of constellations, too, mostly. But the same star could be in multiple constellations.”
Martin seems to be mulling that over. “I like it,” he says eventually. “Makes more sense than the colors, anyway.”
“Hey,” Gerry says, but without a lot of heat.
“You know what I mean, Ger. You can’t mix but so many colors together or you get a kind of muddy greenish-brown mess. But Melanie’s right, as long as you’re drawing the lines yourself, the same star can be part of so many pictures.”
“Yeah, I know, just giving her a hard time,” Gerry says. “Anyway, what you said—what if that’s the key to it? Like—like maybe the Fourteen are colors, but it’s how they interact that make the actual Fears. It’s all in how you layer the pigment, and what kind of medium you’re using, you know?”
“Like letters,” Martin agrees. “Or sounds. The aah sound can mean so many different things depending on where it goes in a word, or what letters you combine with it, or how long you draw it out.”
“Or like…choreography,” Melanie says slowly. “I mean, there are only so many basic dance steps, but it’s how you combine them that makes the ballet. Or the waltz, or the samba, or…you get the idea.”
Gerry snorts. “Hell, why don’t we divide it up by taxonomy? Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, subspecies…”
“I think that runs back into the same problem as Smirke’s Fourteen.” Melanie sighs. “We’d still have to limit each thing to a single overall category.”
“Yeah, true.”
“Categorizing anything is hard,” Martin says, and there’s an almost bitter tone to it. “Like saying a tomato is a fruit—it is, but it’s also a vegetable, because ‘fruit’ means one thing in botany and another thing in cooking and ‘vegetable’ is a category that only exists in cooking—and people argue all the time about if potatoes count as vegetables. There are four voice types in choral singing but eight in operatic singing, and they’ve all got subcategories. Fish don’t exist in the scientific community because there’s no way to define ‘fish’ that doesn’t either include things we’ve already decided aren’t fish or exclude things we’ve already decided are fish, but everybody knows what ‘fish’ means, except that Eric at school told me that the Catholic church in the eighteenth century declared that beavers were fish for purposes of being allowed to eat them on Fridays during Lent.”
“So what you’re saying is we’d need a classification system that allowed for nuance,” Melanie says thoughtfully. “Like we were saying before. You give each fragment of something a value or a classification, and then mash them together to give a label to the thing.”
Gerry purses his lips briefly. “You’d need a computer program to keep track of something like that properly, I think.”
They fall silent again. The night gets darker and darker, even as the sky stays lit with stars—not enough to read or see by, but a good deal brighter and clearer than in London. Gerry thinks back to their earlier conversation about religion. With the sky looking like that, he has to admit, it’s hard to concentrate on fear. Easy to believe in things like hope and joy and goodness.
He almost thinks the other two have fallen asleep, and he’s starting to get a bit drowsy himself, when he hears Martin’s voice, so soft it’s almost below their hearing. “What if we’re going in the wrong direction?”
Gerry turns his head to look at Martin. Martin’s eyes are fixed on the sky. There’s something distant in them, though, almost like they’re looking at something beyond the stars…or maybe behind them. They reflect on the lenses of his glasses, and for just a moment, it almost seems like his freckles have turned to stardust. If Gerry didn’t know better, he’d think Martin was getting absorbed by the sky…by the Vast.
But that’s silly. The Vast hasn’t touched him, other than the occasional brush with a Leitner. Martin’s been Marked by the Eye, the Lonely, and the Spiral, but that’s it. He’d know if the Vast had touched him. Surely Martin would tell him.
Wouldn’t he?
He would, a voice whispers in the back of Gerry’s mind. It hasn’t touched him. You’re right. He’s safe from that one so far.
Gerry takes a small, quick breath and tries to refocus on the conversation. “What do you mean, Martin?”
Martin slowly turns his head so that he’s looking at Gerry and Melanie. There’s a faint worry in his eyes. “What if Smirke’s Fourteen are too complicated? I mean…he just liked balance. Everything had to have its opposite, kind of. What if there aren’t fourteen Fears? What if there are fewer?” He blinks a couple times. “What if they’re all just…Fear?”
It’s…an interesting theory, Gerry has to admit, but there’s an obvious flaw in it. “That color thing of yours, remember? You wouldn’t be able to see a difference between them if they were all one thing.”
“If you shine a torch through a prism, and it breaks into different colors, it’s all still light. You’re just seeing different wavelengths.”
“And there’s no way to put them back together,” Melanie says. She rolls over onto her stomach and props herself up on her elbows. “Once light’s gone through a prism, it’s separated into the different colors and that’s the end of it. You can’t mix it back to plain white light. So even if the Fears were all one thing at one point, they sure aren’t now. And there’s no way to mash them back together again.”
“I guess you’re right.” Martin rolls his head to look back up at the sky. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to understand them. Smarter people than us have tried and failed.”
“Like the Archivist?” Melanie says, lying back down and turning over to look up as well. “Do you think she knows what they’re really about?”
“If she did, I don’t think she’d still be the Archivist,” Gerry says dryly.
Martin sighs. “I don’t think she has a choice. I-I mean, if you live long enough to get a title like the Archivist, you’re probably an Avatar. Like the Twisting Deceit. I don’t think she can get away from it now.”
“Do you think she wants to?” Melanie asks. “Or does she like being…like that?”
“Well, from all the stories we’ve heard, she certainly seems to like fucking with other Fears and blowing things up.” Gerry half sits up, almost convinced he can hear a low, keening, heartbroken moan, but when he listens again, the world is silent save the wind in the beeches. “But I guess…I dunno. I feel like if you’re aware enough to still feel things, even if you’re an Avatar, you aren’t going to enjoy being one. I bet if she had the opportunity to get rid of it, she would.”
“I know I would, if it were me,” Melanie says. “Not that I’m ever going to be that important or, or powerful, you know? But if I was, if I was trapped in something like that and I found out there was a way I could cut the Marks off me? I would.”
“Me, too,” Gerry says. “Nothing’s worth that.”
Martin, surprisingly, doesn’t say anything for a while. Finally, he says slowly, “I’d like to say I would, too, but…I don’t know.”
“You mean you wouldn’t walk away from all this if you could?” Gerry asks, his heart sinking a little. He’ll never abandon Martin and Melanie to this, but there’s a part of him that’s kind of hoped, someday anyway, they might all get out together.
“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” Martin says. “If there’s a way to turn our backs on it all and forget about it, I’ll do that in a heartbeat. I’ve kind of got an idea how to, actually. But…I mean, being able to See the Marks and stuff…I don’t know that I’d stop that, even if I could.”
“I guess it’s useful,” Melanie says, a little uncertainly.
“It’s not that. It’s just…it’s part of who I am, you know? It’s been a part of me since I was eight years old. Would I really still be me if I cut off something that was part of me for so long?”
“Yes, of course,” Melanie says stoutly. “You’ll always be you, no matter what. Even if you, if you scoop out your eyes with grapefruit spoons and set them on fire or something.”
Martin chokes on a laugh. “Grapefruit spoons?”
“They’re a real thing! They’re, they’ve got kind of jagged edges to grip really well, but they’re small and skinny, so they’d be perfect for something like that.” Melanie pauses. “Not that I’m saying you should gouge your eyes out or whatever, just—”
“Yeah, no, I get it, I get it. You’re saying my Marks aren’t what make me…me.”
“Exactly.”
Gerry wonders, for just a moment, what he would be like if he wasn’t touched by any of the Fourteen. Whether he would still be the same person or if he’d be something, some one wholly different. If Martin and Melanie would still love him if he was completely free of it all.
Of course they would, the voice in his head murmurs, sounding infinitely sad, but Gerry isn’t sure he believes it. Still, no good in speculating on it now.
Anyway, it’s immaterial. Like Melanie said, none of them are ever going to be important enough—to any of the Fears—to have to make a decision like that. And even if they do, something tells him it still won’t matter. There probably isn’t any way to actually get free of them.
Well. There is. But there is no way in hell Gerry would ever allow that to happen to his siblings. Or do it to them.
He loves them. He won’t lose them, or let them be taken from him. Not without a serious fight.