A Brotherhood of Crows.

The note had been lying on our doormat when we’d staggered in, exhausted, bruised, but thankfully alive, as dawn began to break over Edinburgh. Its existence alone was intriguing. No one ever sent us post; everything arrived via holo mail. An actual handwritten letter was an archaism that sparked my interest. A letter addressed to me, when I could count the number of people who knew my address on one hand, was even more so. It was written on cream paper, thick and heavy, in swirling calligraphy:

For the attention of Elijah Avaron and associates:

I have a matter with which I require your assistance. Please attend me tomorrow at St Jude’s College, Cambridge.

Sincerely

Dr Horatio Cruicus

Which was why I found myself, blinking blearily, still aching from blows and kickback, on an airship from Edinburgh to Cambridge. Waverly was still mostly closed off; the media was arguing amongst itself as to whether or not the destruction last night was caused by an escaped animal, a steroid addicted lunatic, or some sort of Severance insurgency. Talking heads disagreed viciously over what exactly had happened, spiralling further and further away from the truth, that by the time I reached Cambridge, the prevailing theory was that it had been some sort of alien, the unexpectedly aggressive second coming of Christ, or both.

Luckily, the media made no mention of a man and a teenage boy chasing after the beast. Tobias, who had chosen to stay in Edinburgh, periodically texted me as he delved into the police and media channels hidden away from plain sight. We were in the clear, he told me; the authorities were more concerned about the massive metal monster that had ripped up half the city, than they were about two blokes chasing after it. A relief in some ways.

What about the girl? I texted back as I disembarked in Cambridge.

Nothing about any girl. Came the reply. Why?

Why indeed. That was the question I asked myself as I walked, hands deep in my pockets, coat buttoned up to the collar against the searing November wind. I may have been walking the streets of Cambridge, drifting north from the station towards the centre of town, as the buildings grew older and the streets grew narrower and cobbled, but my head was somewhere else entirely. It was back on that walkway in Waverly, in the grey parody of it in Elsewhere, and it was with that woman, with blood red hair cascading over her shoulders, and her voice: So it’s not just me.

No, it isn’t just you. It’s me too. Me and the portioned off consciousness of cats. We somehow have ended up in that pale place, living another life just beyond the fingertips of reality, a world that existed in the corners of people’s eyes and fluttered and floated behind our eyelids. For eight years, I had walked those grey streets alone. Everyone else an unseeing shadow. Certainly, there were things that lived in Elsewhere; ghostly shapes and forms that had no corresponding existence when I opened my eyes, that occasionally turned their wispy heads and watched me as I passed. I had no desire to meet them. There were things in that world that were worse than any of the horrors I came across in reality.

But another person? That was something new. That was something I had never seen before. Someone else lived part of their lives in Elsewhere. And I had to know why.

Elsewhere. Reality. These were the terms I used because no other words existed, no other utterance could explain the dual existence of my split life. Yet they came with presumptions. I presumed, for example, that the world of Tobias and of airships and of the Commonwealth against the Severance and of Dr Cruicus and his letters was real, and that Elsewhere somehow wasn’t. That it was a place like a dream. But how could I know? How could I know that the real world wasn’t a dream. Maybe I too was just one of those Pale Citizens I had seen wandering the ghosts of city street. Maybe reality was the dream. Maybe none of it was real. The thought of it all filled me with the kind of horror that crept into the corners of your consciousness and slept there, stirring, occasionally, to remind you it was there, and would one day wake and consume you.

In short, I was afraid that one day I would find that none of it, absolutely none of it, was real.

Cambridge twists your sense of direction and leaves you wrung out. Streets weave and wind around ancient College buildings. Any sense of orientation that an outsider may briefly gain would be lost as you turned a corner and found yourself once more staring at King’s College in total bafflement. Several sets of bemused students gave me directions; they seemed surprised that I wanted to go to St Jude’s. Perhaps they thought I was a tourist, up from London to see the University that had spewed out the genius of Milton, Darwin, and Wordsworth. St Jude’s, it seemed, was off the beaten track, and something of an embarrassment.

When I finally got to St Jude’s, I found myself facing a rather austere Victorian building, sandwiched between a department and an old bookshop. Upon entering and asking for directions at the Porter’s Lodge, I was told that Dr Crucius was lecturing, and that I was attend him at the Mill Lane Lecture Theatre. Who asks someone to attend them? I thought bitterly, as stomped down King’s’ Parade, sticking out like a sore - and more importantly - uneducated thumb.

The lecture theatre was vertigo-sufferers nightmare. The main entrance was on the eighth floor, and the tiered rows of seats plunged perilously down to the stage, which occupied the building’s basement. The atmosphere inside was heavy; there were no windows, and the only thing that illuminated the sinking rows of benches and desks were dim lightbulbs dangling nakedly from a barely perceptible ceiling. As I entered, the room was nearly full. There must have been almost two hundred students crammed onto those rigid benches, jostling for space on those stern wooden desks. They tapped away at holopads and some scribbled scratchy notes with pen and ink. I perched myself on the edge of an empty desk at the back, and peered down into the depths of the earth, trying to make out the man on stage.

“...Now, a foundational principle of the so called ‘natural sciences’ lies in methodology.” The speaker, without the need for amplification, I realised, intoned “The scientific method, we are told is foolproof. We are told of the virtues of repeatability, of testable explanations, realistic predictions about the state of the Universe...anything this methodology cannot explain is consigned to myth and fancy…”

Dr Crucius was not a tall man. From here, I could see him almost dwarfed by the lectern. Yet in spite of his size, his voice rang clearly, climbed the foothills of the lecture theatre to where I sat at its summit.

“Let us for a moment remind ourselves of Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory supposes that certain systems are complex. A system can be many things - a financial market, say, or a field of military combat, or meteorological analysis. Such systems are very sensitive to initial conditions. Small changes in these initial conditions can completely render any attempt to predict the outcomes of a system. This is conventionally known as the butterfly effect - in a weather system, say, even something as small as the beating of the wings of a butterfly might cause a storm that even God himself cannot stop.

“What Chaos Theory tries to do, then, is consider the world according to a non-linear, deterministic model. The impact of initial conditions of one state of a system - the calm before the storm, if you will, disturbed by our butterfly - can cause significant differences in the later stages of a system - a hurricane that wipes a city of the face of the earth.

“For Unnatural Scientists, this method of considering the world, of considering its determinism, and yet unpredictability, is something we choose to apply to all things as a methodology. For example, where natural scientists may consider the outcomes of an experiment that consistently do not fit with predictions ‘anomalies’. They often become jokes among the scientific community, a trope if you like, safely filed under ‘things we can’t explain’. Unnatural Scientists, on the other hands, attempt to systematise these anomalies into knowledge. We do not believe that there are ‘things we cannot explain’ but, more accurately, that there are things we do not want to explain for fear that in doing so, we may find ourselves lumped together with the priest, the conspiracy theorist, or the occultist.

“Our key difference, perhaps, with the natural scientific community is that we see that scientific progress is not a straight line: we are not objectivists, nor are we happy to keep our inquiry within the frameworks dictated by reputable journals and University ethics boards. The Unnatural Scientist knows that the only principle which does not impede progress is ‘anything goes.’ Methodologically, you may say, we are anarchists. And in our anarchy, we are capable of asking the questions that the natural scientist would consider unaskable. We are sensitive to the changes in initial conditions that can mark the difference between life and death itself - yesʔ”

A hand must have gone up somewhere in the depths of the lecture hall, but where ɪ could not see.

“ɪ’m not sure ɪ understand, Doctor,” one of the students asked. ʜe was clearly bellowing to be heard clearly, yet his voice sounded pathetic in that cavernous space. “Are you saying that Unnatural Scientists can raise the deadʔ”

For the briefest of moments, ɪ saw a tiny twitch in Crucius’s faceː the hint of a smile. “ɴothing quite so fantastical, or Frankensteinian. But it is an interesting case study. One of the great lacunas in human knowledge is of the nature of life - we scientists, for all our progress, are still perplexed by consciousness, being, the soul, if you will, and thus we defer such questions to the priest, or the psychiatrist. ʜowever, the body we do understand. We know that muscles can be made to move via electrical pulses. We know it is possible to manipulate vocal chords into producing sounds not unlike human speech. The body ultimately is mechanical. We Unnatural Scientists know that it is both theoretically, and technologically possible, to control devices mentally. Many of you will use neural implants that link to your holopads. Can we raise someone from the deadʔ ɴo. A consciousness, once gone, is gone. Can we, however, reanimate a body through biomechanical means and then manipulate it psychologicallyʔ ʏes. The projection of part of a living consciousness into a mechanical thing - even a dead human body - has been written off as Astral Projection by the ɴatural Scientists, but,” Crucius paused, and peered over his tiny spectacles, his gaze piercing its way towards his interlocutor, “ɪt is possible.”

Crucius pressed a button on a small holopad next to his lectern. With a hum, the projector dangling from the ceiling of the lecture theatre came to life, and displayed on the great blackboard behind him an image of a glowing, purple particle.

“As Unnatural Scientists, we have evidence here of the impossible.” Crucius continued, “The thauma particle defied, at the time, all scientific explanation - a simple collection of atoms which could, against all conventional wisdom, release matter from the effects of gravity. When Oppenheimer and his team founded the Manhattan project, they had hoped to create a weapon so terrifying that it would force the end of the greatest conflict of the 20th century. Instead, Oppenheimer and his team discovered the thuam, the very thing which allows our airships and military fleets to stay aloft almost indefinitely. The impossible, then, has become the mundane, and leads us to question what other realms of possibility have been closed off by the narrowed mindedness of natural sciences.”

As if by an unseen signal, the students began to pack up. It must have been close to the hour. As noise began to fill every corner of the room, Crucius bellowed out that he wanted three pages on the discovery of thauma particles in his pigeon hole at St Jude’s, no later than close of business on Friday, and the students began to leave. I stepped to one side and let them pass. As the last left, leaving behind only the echo of their excited voices, I descended the steep steps down to the bottom of the lecture hall.

“Dr Crucius?” I said as I approached the lectern.

He had become engrossed in his holopad, and merely waved at me. “Mr Avaron, I presume? So good of you to join me. I shall be with you in a moment.”

Crucius swept his screen off with a lazy gesture and arose, allowing me to see him properly for the first time. He was neither tall nor short, neither thin nor fat. He wore a rather unremarkable grey suit, that could have been the product of a fancy tailor or a supermarket. His hair was shoulder length, like mine, and dark brown with flecks of grey. His nose was long, and perched on the end of it was the smallest pair of spectacles I had ever seen, like tiny glass full stops. As for his age, it was hard to say. He could have been an ageing forty, a moderate fifty, or a youthful sixty. Rather like his university, he seemed unnatural, and to exist for show.

As he walked over, I blinked and checked out the situation in Elsewhere. Nothing out of the ordinary. It didn’t placate my sense of unease.

“You received my letter, I take it?” said Crucius. The voice was measured, the enunciation precise, and yet it was oddly unremarkable.

“I did.” My nerves were beginning to get to me, so I reached into my coat for my tobacco pouch.

“I expect you have questions?” Crucius settled himself onto edge of the great desk that dominated the lecture stage.

“Many,” I said. “Like how do you know where I live, for one thing?”

The smallest twitch of a smile creased Crucius’s thin lips. “You’re more intrigued by that?”

“That and the fact that you know who I am in the first place,” I said. “I’m not exactly high profile.”

Crucius reached into his jacket, and withdrew something. He handed it to me across the table. His fingers, I noted, were very long and thin, a violinist’s fingers. “An associate of mine passed me this.”

I took it. It was a thin red business card, which I recognised as one of my own. It simply said Sleepwalker.

“...And you associate is?”

“Dr Hugenot, of Queen’s College,”

Something clicked in the back of my head: “I remember. Old guy, got in some trouble with his own research. Was exploring some things that might not have been too tasteful.”

“Indeed. Your services were immeasurably helpful.”

“Glad to hear it. Whatever happened to him?”

“He’s dead. Killed by one of his own experiments.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

A short silence passed between us. Crucius eyed the business card.

“Why Sleepwalker?”

I smirked. Why indeed. The idea has been Tobias’s. Most of the ideas I came to regret were Tobias’s. One night, while watching an all night Ghostbusters marathon,Tobias had been struck by an epiphany. Mate, what if we had business cards? Instead of picking up odd jobs, we could advertise, discretely, of course, our services. I mean, this whole paranormal investigating/vigilante thing isn’t really a service everyone’s going to be after, so we need to be careful how we market it...and he’d kept talking about it, kept trying to get me to read business plans, kept trying to script holo-verts, until in the end I had said yes to the business cards. And that’s when Tobias had insisted on a professional alias and a very good idea of what it should be.

“Sleepwalker?” I said, and tried to put on a rueful smile, “It’s because I don’t sleep until I get the job done.”

I also, I thought, don’t sleep.

“This,” said, Crucius, “Is precisely the attitude I require. May I brief you on the details?”

I finally found the cigarette I was looking for and lit it. “I’m listening -”

Crucius’s hand shot out in a movement so fast I barely registered it. The cigarette was plucked from my lips, and with a flick of his fingers, Crucius extinguished it and cast it into a nearby bin.

“I really must ask you not the smoke in here. It’s a foul habit,” said Crucius.

“And that’s your way of asking, is it?” I spluttered. That movement had been fast - way too fast. Suspicion arose again. “Could you not have actually asked?”

“Perhaps,” Crucius retorted, curtly, “But I doubt you would have listened. I believe you are a rather heavy smoker, Mr Avaron. How many is it, forty a day? Fifty? Sixty? It’s remarkable that a man in your physical condition can also have such a heavy smoking habit -”

I was starting to get fed up. “Look, how do you know all this stuff about me?”

A twinkle appeared in Cruicus’s eye. “I know a great many things, Mr Avaron. I am an academic, after all. Knowledge is my business. I take great pains to find out as much as I can about those I wish to take into my employment.”

“Yeah but how -!” I began, but Crucius cut me off with a wave of his hand. He reached out and touched his holopad.

“Yes?” he said.

It must have some neural link to Crucius, as I hadn’t heard it make a sound. A voice came through:

“Forgive me, Doctor, but I have Jacob Manning, Minister for Public Decency on the line again -”

“Tell him I am in an important meeting,” said Crucius, a touch sharply, “And that if he is so keen to speak with me, he can damn well come and see me in person.”

He tapped the holopad again and the computer went dark. “My apologies, Mr Avaron.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “The Minister for Public Decency phones you up? Regularly having chats with the top brass, are we?”

“I am an adviser to Her Majesty’s Government, on certain delicate matters, yes,” replied Crucius.

“Well, judging by their record, either they’re not listening to you or your advice is total bollocks.”

Crucius opened his mouth to retort, but then closed it, and regarded me with his piercing gaze. I held it, unblinking. “Perhaps,” said Crucius, “We might get back to the matter at hand?”

“Your little job for me?” I leaned back. “Ok, I am listening. And you owe me a cigarette.”

“You need not fear, Mr Avaron. I am willing to compensate you handsomely for your services.”

I snorted dismissively. “I’m not interested in money,”

Crucius hesitated. “Then what interests you, Mr Avaron?”

“Information,” I replied, “Money is of far less interest to me than being owed favours - having go to sources of information. I do this for you, you provide me with information as and when I need it, information that might help me with my work.”

He frowned. “You deal in an odd currency,”

“You’re an academic. You deal in knowledge every day. I’m not so different. Now, what’s the job?”

Crucius reached inside his jacket once more and produced a sheet of paper, folded, which he handed to me. I took it and unfolded it. It was written on the same heavy cream paper, in the same elaborate curling script:

Who are the Brotherhood of Crows?

“That’s it?” I turned the paper over a few times, seeing only the single line of text. “I don’t understand?”

“It is a question I wish you to answer for me.”

“Right, and do I get anything else to go on?” I asked.

“I have nothing else to give you.”

I studied his face, trying to sense if he knew more than he was saying. He remained blank, as inscrutable as a marble bust.

“Ok, well, why, then?”

“Why what?” he replied.

“Why this question. Come on, Doctor. If you’re going to give me an abstract question, then why this one? I mean, I could answer this for you right now. Who are the Brotherhood of Crows? No sodding clue.” I dropped the note to the desk. “You’re going to have to give me more to go on than that.”

Crucius furrowed his brow. He said, almost grudgingly, “I believe that this Brotherhood of Crows poses a grave threat.”

There was a short silence, in which I waited for him to expand on the point. He didn’t.

“A grave threat to….what precisely?”

“Everything,” he replied, definitively.

I sighed heavily. “Again, abstract as hell. I need practicalities. Specifics. You want me to find out who the Brotherhood of Crows are? Where do I start? Give me a name. A location. Anything. Otherwise I might as well just Google it and then give up.”

Crucius seemed to mull it over. His brow remained furrowed, in a look of deep concentration and conflict. “I think it would be safer for you, Mr Avaron, if I kept the information to a minimum.”

“Don’t worry. I can take care of myself. Tell me what you know.”

“Very well. Until a day ago, I did not believe that the Brotherhood of Crows existed. There were rumours, of course - whispers of a powerful, secretive society, a group which had been built in shadows and but with its fingers on everything under the light..I overheard something, recently, which changed my mind about it all being a fiction. So - a few titbits, all I have....I suggest you begin your enquiries in London, near the Palace of Westminster.”

“Good,” I noted it down, “I have some contacts down there. People in the know.”

Again a short silence. I was suddenly struck by how small I felt in the cavernous depths of the lecture theatre, and that niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right clawed at the back of my mind.”Why me?” I asked.

“I don’t follow you.”

“Why ask me to do this. You said you worked with the Government. Surely a man of your status has access to all of the resources of state. Why hire me when you could just speak to the Ministry of Speculation?”

Very briefly, Crucius’s lip curled. “I have very little trust in the work of Speculation.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t blame him. The Ministry of Speculation had long since replaced more conventional intelligence agencies, and its methods were as unorthodox and frightening as its organisation was secretive. The Speculators claimed that it was possible to use complex mathematical algorithms to identify terrorists, criminals, and other threats to security. They used probability instead of detective work, equations instead of intelligence gathering, they could, they said, know the geometry of the human mind. They were never wrong, so they said. So they said.

But that didn’t answer my question. “Still doesn’t answer why you’re bringing in a privateer.”

“I require a man with exceptional detection skills,” Crucius replied.

“Shame I’m not a detective.”

“I more importantly need someone I can trust.”

“And what, you don’t trust the government?”

“I have been part of it long enough to know that would be foolish.”

I gave up - trying to get answers out of Crucius seemed to be impossible. I made a mental note to ask Tobias to do some digging on him when I got back to Edinburgh. “Alright. I’ll look into this Brotherhood of Crows for you. Timeframe?”

“Consider it a matter of urgency,”

“Ooh, please, be more vague.”

“I want to begin at once,” Crucius bristled again - the closest he’d gotten to an actual emotion, “When I say I believe there is a threat, I mean it. Here.” He handed me a slim phone.

“You shouldn’t have.”

“I am about to embark upon a scientific expedition of some importance,” Crucius said, ignoring my jibe, “I shall be away for some time. The device you now hold is heavily encrypted, and can only be used to contact one person - me. I will expect regular updates on your progress.”

I half considered saying “Text you babes,” but decided against it. “I’ll get on it.”

Our business concluded, I turned to go, and began to ascend the steep steps of the lecture theatre. I had gotten about halfway up when Dr Crucius called after me:

“What was that?”

“I said,” he repeated, “Be careful, Mr Avaron.”

I turned, and opened my coat enough to let him have a good long look at the revolver on my thigh. “I can take care of myself.”

“There are some thing that cannot be stopped with a bullet, Mr Avaron.”

“Good thing I have lots of bullets then. Ciao!”

I exited the lecture theatre and found myself outside again. Having spent so long in the gloom, the averagely grey day seemed dazzlingly bright and it took a while for my eyes to adjust to the light. I leaned myself against a wall, rolled myself another smoke and lit it. As I put my lighter away, my hand strayed against the Crucius’s scrap of paper. I took it out, and read it again.

You might remember - a while ago, back when we were in Waverly and the pieces were still in motion - I said that some moments, unexpectedly change lives. Somethings are marches that lightly just the trajectory of your life and send it up like a magazine. This moment was one of this, this little scrap of paper, and that question would consume me, take me to the very ends of the earth and ultimately, kill me.

Who are the Brotherhood of Crows?