A Brotherhood of Crows.

Time passed.

I came across a hollow where the earth dipped into a natural bowl, bordered by high rocks. In the middle of the hollow was a tree, and from its branches, seven people hung. Four of them were children. Their Chaos drives had not triggered for some reason. They had tried to make a camp at the base of the tree; a shelter, constructed from branches and leaves, a little circle of rocks for a cooking fire. It was almost like I’d stumbled on a family camp out.

I sat and I watched them. I had no more energy to scream, no more desire to weep. I felt nothing. There was nothing I could do for these people. No one could. So I got up and I walked on, leaving behind the bodies dangling silently from the branches.

I climbed out of the hollow and went forward, deeper into the wood. The only sound was the crunch of twigs and dry leaves beneath my boots. I wasn’t even aware of my own breathing anymore. Maybe I’d stopped. The world went from colour to grey to colour again, like an old film on a broken projector. Was I walking through Elsewhere or reality now?

Did it even matter?

Time continued to pass. My limbs moved. My mind stayed still.

Eventually, I found myself in the Senate House again. It had been eight years since I’d last been there. We’d occupied in solidarity with striking staff. We’d snuck in at six in the morning to what was called the Senior Combination Room, a great medieval hall, where the professors would sip coffee and shield themselves from the world with newspapers in high back leather chairs, chairs so deep that you couldn’t see who was sitting in them if you approached from behind. We secured the doors with bike locks, of all things, set up a holo-projector donated by a sympathetic academic at the window and projected onto the Brotherton Building the words: “This space now belongs to the people. No Gods. No Masters. Feuer Frei.”

A week passed. We held meetings. We planned. We slept in sleeping bags and borrowed duvets, cooked in the titchy little kitchen attached to the SCR. Someone wrote a big list of Universities on one wall, and which had gone into occupation next to it in emphatic red capitals:

Manchester: OCCUPIED!

Leeds: OCCUPIED!

Anglia Ruskin: OCCUPIED!

Belfast: OCCUPIED!

(“Up the Republic!” someone else had written next to that, under which someone else had written “Fuck you.”)

LSE: OCCUPIED!

Edinburgh: OCCUPIED!

Glasgow: OCCUPIED!

And so on.

Meetings. Educationals. Teach ins. I’d spoken at many of them. So did Tabs, and Jacob, and Miles, and Siobhan. We’d founded the movement in a cheap pub in Nottingham over the summer. Planned the revolution over rollies and cheap ale. I don’t remember details. Back then, when I was a person, when people knew my name. Six months after that, Jacob was dead, shot to death by the Met. Tabs had been sent to Yarls Wood. She’d died there, at the hands of guards, twelve hours before I’d broken in to rescue her. They’d done unspeakable things before they finally broke her neck. I’d cradled her bloody body and wept into my gasmask, as the halls around me billowed with non lethal neurotoxin I’d used to pacify security. A year latter, I tracked down the guards who did it, and had left them outside the the Home Office, with every bone in their arms and legs shattered beyond repair. It didn’t bring her back. Miles had been conscripted and had been torn apart by a Severance mech, in a battle of so little consequence, the army hadn’t even noted its location or outcome in the terse letter they’d sent his parents. WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON HAS BEEN KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY, FIGHTING FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY. No one knew what happened to Siobhan. I had tasked the Confederacy of Small Friends to seek any shred of information, no matter how thin, about her. And I, as far as the world was concerned, was missing, presumed dead, as of November 9th. Last known location, Parliament Square, London. Considered armed and dangerous.

For all the world knew, I’d died the day they turned the guns on the students.

I knew it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. But I stayed there, as long as I could, before finding myself back in the wood.

(I know what you did.)

“Do you?” I said, bitterly, to no one in particular. “Good for fucking you.”

Elsewhere. Reality. Elsewhere. Memories. Trees. Silence. I saw it all happening. I hadn’t felt panicked for a while now, but Panic, that toothed bastard, was still prowling the depths of my stomach, sniffing out a way to my heart.

A long time ago, a very long time ago, my father had taken me on a walk. We’d caught an airship to Derbyshire, and hiked through the Hope Valley, a place of low, undulating hills, capped with purple crowns of heather. I’d run a little bit ahead, and found a dead animal. A deer, I think. It had been shot by a hunter, at close range. Its guts spilled from its body in a tentacular mess. Its horns were gone – trophies, perhaps – and its eyes were open, glassy, and pecked at by crows. Its mouth hung open in a final look of surprise. Maggots crawled along what was left of its downy fur. It was the first dead thing I’d ever seen. I was five.

I’d screamed, and my father had caught up with me, and lifted me up into a warm embrace with powerful arms, and he had shushed me and walked away with me. It’s okay, Eli. It’s okay. Breath now. Breath. In for four. Out for four. In for four, out for four. Close your eyes and breath.

I stopped dead in my tracks as if I’d walked into a wall.

How did I remember that?

How did I remember that​?

(I know what you did.)

“NO!” I screamed, “NO YOU DON’T. YOU CAN’T. STOP IT. STOP IT. I DON’T WANT IT BACK. YOU CAN’T BRING IT BACK!”

My voice, loud to my own ears, was an insignificant meep in the silence of the forest.

That animal Panic took advantage of my outburst. It crept up my back, and sank its needle teeth into the nape of my neck.

So I ran. I ran from that hollow metallic rattle, ran from the faces of my dead and vanished friends, ran from the tightness of my father’s embrace, ran from -

I must have run off the edge of a cliff. Suddenly, I was falling, spiralling through the air like a discarded toy. Then I hit something hard, and wet, and sank. Water. I’d fallen into a lake.

I sank. Water stung my eyes, caught in my clothes, weighing me down like a grindstone. The lake was deep. I felt no need to swim. This was it, then. Drowning.

Well. Fuck it. I’d paid for my ticket. Might as well see the show. I opened my mouth, and let the water fill me.

As my vision faded, I felt more than saw, something moving near me. Then I was seized, and yanked, violently, upwards, out into the air, and flung. The world pirouetted and then a thud. I felt sand under my hands, pressing against my face. Shore.

Something heavy landed next to me. A deep, guttural snarl rumbled the very fabric of my being. Slowly, painfully, I rolled to see what it was.

It stood ten feet tall, with the approximate shape of a man. It was naked, and of absurd proportions. Huge muscles like a sack full of footballs; a barrel chest pock-marked with scars, legs that bent back like a raptors. Barbed wire coursed in and out of its skin like vines, metal plates erupting from its flesh, like cobbled together armour. Its head, once human, was elongated, wolf like, with a wide mouth full of sharp, metal teeth. In its empty eye sockets, fires burned like distance furnaces.

“Drowning, Sleepwalker?” a hollow voice rattled nearby, “Come now. You deserve better than that.”

Across the beach, Gorcrow was approaching, his gloves hands clasped behind the back of his suit. What light existed in this place glinted off his mask, accentuating the wicked curve of his beak.

I tried to speak, but only managed to cough up water. I took a deep breath (In for four. Out for four. In for four) and croaked. “Fuck you. Stop hiding behind that hologram and -”

A savage kick caught me in the chest. I curled into a ball of pain.

“Does that feel like a hologram?” Gorcrow spat. “No, I am here in person now. I wanted to be here for this moment.” His arms spread wide, gesturing around the beach, the lake, the cliff-face I had stumbled off, “This is where you die, Sleepwalker.”

My head swam from the pain of the blow. “You going to have your pet finish me? Fine. Do it.”

Gorcrow tutted. It was like rain on a tin roof. “No, no no no. You’re missing the point.” he laid a hand, gently, against the hulking beast that stood over me. “This is not the instrument of your destruction. No. Look at it. Is it not magnificent? Years of work to create the ultimate fighting beast. All the power and the precision of a machine, with the creativity, cunning and precision of a human mind. My order has attempted beasts like this before. You met them, at the Rim. Our Clockwork Hearts. Useless. Oh, they will obey, but cannot think for themselves, cannot plan, cannot adapt...” his hand ran along the line of the beast’s jaw, “My creations...my supersoldiers...are better. Faster. Cleverer. They can think for themselves, but all that power is under my control. Everything they do occurs within a closed, psychological chamber. A chamber to which I own the key.”

He glanced down at me, still in the foetal position, and by the angle of his mask, I suspected he was smiling. “You met this one. Before he changed. A fine soldier. I owe you thanks for accelerating his passage.”

I realised, in the twisted mess of the supersoldier’s face, there was clear evidence of a major head wound. A self inflicted gunshot. “You sick, evil fuck.”

“Evil?” spat Gorcrow. The beast suddenly seized me, and hoisted me up, until I was facing Gorcrow, my feet a few inches above the sand. “Is that what you think this is, Sleepwalker? You think I’m building an army because I want to rule the world? Don’t be a fool.” He leaned in close, until his beak was a few centimeters from my ear. “There’s something coming, Sleepwalker. Something foul beyond words. My order has courted its power for far too long, but they have never once considered the consequences of their actions. They think they can find a way to control the Pale Citizens. And they will be devoured by them. There are things that dwell in spaces between places that would, without care, annihilate the earth and everything that lives on it. What I am doing, all I have done, is to prepare for that day when they emerged from the void, and once again walk the world of men. No.” He leaned back. “I am not evil. When the Pale Citizens walk the earth again, no army, not the Commonwealth, not the Severance, can stand in their way. My supersoldiers...they can hold back the tide. You do not understand, do you, Sleepwalker? There is so much at play here. My order. The storm. The ones who seek eyes. We have walked this path before, humanity. We have failed again to see the signs. But I...I will make the first move. I will lead the pre-emptive strike. I’m not evil, Sleepwalker. I’m the one who’ll save us all.”

He signalled, and the beast dropped me in a heap. The hand waved again in a dismissive gesture, and the beast threw back its head, roared and bounded across the beach, running on its knuckles like an ape, and vanished in the trees.

I struggled to stand. Gorcrow’s foot planted itself on my back, and pressing me down into the sand, a firm, harsh pressure. I felt his hand slide down, reaching to my leg. “And when I lead my vanguard, I will have you at me side. You already walk their world, though you don’t know it. Somewhere in the depths of your mind the the knowledge of their weaknesses, their flaws. A new you. A better you.” He drew back his hand and dropped something in front of my on the sand. My revolver. “Go on. Do it.”

I looked blearily from him to the revolver, to the him of Elsewhere, a demon wreathed in flame, and back to the revolver. “No.”

“I know what you did, Sleepwalker,”

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t waste my time. If you had any fight left in you, you’d have turned that gun on me. You’re starting to remember, aren’t you? You remember their faces. Their names. The people who died because of you.”

“Not...my fault -”

“Wasn’t it? You tried to save them. You failed. But there’s more than that...”

He lashed out, and I expected a blow. Instead, he lifted me onto my knees. His strength was incredible. “This isn’t about the lives you failed to save, Sleepwalker. It’s about the lives you took.”

“I don’t....” Seasick vision. Drifting between worlds. Pressure in my head. “I don’t take lives...I had to protect myself...”

“Oh yes, your noble code. You don’t kill unless in self defence. But we both know that’s a lie.”

He was close again. If the fires of Elsewhere him had been real, I would have gone up like an ammo dump. “Why do you think you wiped your memory? What were you trying to hide? Something so terrible that you knew you could not live with yourself if you remembered. Who would do that to their flesh and blood?”

The gun was being pressed into my hand. I was barely aware of it. In fevered corners of my mind, scenes were playing out. Shouting. Screaming. Blows to my face and body. A man in a dog collar, smirking at me while I was lying down. Shapes and sounds and sights leapt at me from the fog walls I’d built up in the black matter of my brain, leaping predators.

Distantly, I heard a splash, something else falling into the lake. It didn’t matter now.

I’d held that gun before. The first time I’d picked it up. I remembered.

I remembered the weight of the thing. Heavy. So heavy I thought I couldn’t lift it. It seemed to weigh more than life itself. Bullets in one palm, thick metal tubes. Hollow point ends. A jerk of the wrist, popping out the cylinder to load. A movement I made every day, bridge back to my mind to that first moment, that first moment I closed the chamber and cocked back the hammer with my thumb and felt the barrel rise and rise to my own temple no not my own temple but I can feel it against my skull and the hammer is cocked and he’s going to make me blow my head off but I can see another shape emerging from the gloom making its entrance after I’d banished it and everything it meant and was and could have been and it was a blinding blur the gun’s against your own head stop and it said a word before the bomb blast that ended that voice and my voice forever it said:

“Filth.”

From across worlds, across ages, Gorcrow said: “You remember now. Don’t you? You remember what you did. Go on. Do it. Do it. You deserve it. Who could do that? Who could do that to their own-!”

There was a dull thwack.

Gorcrow looked down, in stunned surprise, at the crossbow bolt that had burst out of his chest. He didn’t scream. A muffled groan escaped his mask.

Someone was rising out of the lake. Water poured off their body in a flood. They rose, and rose, and I saw the crossbow in their hand.

He began to turn. Thwack. Another bolt buried itself in his shoulder, and now he screamed, a hollow bellow of pain. The shooter was charging towards the shore through the shallows, firing with one hand, cranking the reloading mechanism with the other. Gorcrow, blood pouring from the wounds, was trying to speak, trying perhaps to signal to his beasts to save him.

A final bolt went straight through the eyehole of his mask, and erupted out of the back, spraying blood of the those deep, black feathers.

(I know what you did)

The gun was still against my head, the hammer cocked. My finger, no longer under my control, was tightening, slowly, but surely on the trigger.

Something hit me in a rugby tackle and I went down, the gun skittering away across the sand. I was turned, and lying on my back, looked up at the figure in the gasmask, who was shouting silently at me through my blurred vision. I recognised the eyes behind the mask.

It was Zularna.

She’s going to save your life. Twice.

One down.

And then the gasmask was suddenly around my own face. Breathe. Zularna was mouthing at me, her face tense around her nose and mouth. She was trying not to breathe herself. There’s something in the air here. I inhaled, deeply. In for four. Out for four. In for four. Out for four...

Another person in a gasmask now, carrying a spare one in his hands. Tobias. I knew that untidy mop of hair anyway.

“...ice shot,” Tobias passed Zularna a mask which she wrapped around her own face. “Alright, Eli, old son? You would not believe the day we’ve had...”

I kept breathing. There was nothing else I could do. Their voices, muffled by the gasmasks passed over me.

“...to shoot himself.”

“Fuck....rab the revolver.” Hands, suddenly, reaching into my sleeve, “Ok, Eli, just gonna take these off you,” I felt my gauntlets being unclasped from my forearms, “There we go. Thank you. No one’s doing anything dumb today. Tobias, what’s our exit?” The same hand, now gently caressed my cheek around the edge of the mask, “It’s okay...it’s gonna be okay...you’re safe now...”

In for four. Out for four.

Safe. My father leading me away from the deer carcass.

“Got it. I can remotely bring down a service elevator. We go out the way we came in,”

“Good. I don’t think he can walk,”

My friends, leaning over me on a distant beach.

“We’ll carry him. I’ll take his weight. Keep that mask on him. Poor bastards on a bad trip.”

Safe.

I know what you did.

Filth.

Darkness beckoned, and I followed it.