Julia

  “One wonders if we’ve arrived,” I say, a moment after our armoured personnel carrier grinds to a halt.

  “Not yet, Jeeves,” Kuong replies. “There’s a bridge to cross.”

  I scowl. I can’t say I’m delighted that Eggplant’s new nickname for me has caught on amongst the rest of the squad, but I can’t complain: Kuong’s handle is “Donkey” and Eggplant’s is “Eggplant”, so it could be a lot worse.

  We sit in silence for about five minutes, cramped like sardines. The APC is designed for maybe twelve passengers, so with Beaton and Thayer up front and Ritter taking a snowmobile to Ottawa, there should be plenty of room. Unfortunately, there are also supplies gathered from the countryside: unperishable food items, tools, bottles of bleach, tampons, diapers, toilet paper, and a big bag containing every scrap of cast iron they could find. More still is crammed into a trailer we’re dragging behind us; it seems like a lot, but if the soldiers number in the thousands, it’s barely a drop in the bucket.

  “What’s the hold-up?” Ranbir asks.

  “We’ll know soon enough, Corporal,” says Eggplant.

  Soon enough, as it turns out, is another ten minutes or so. Finally, the hatch opens and Beaton peers inside.

  “We need Dr. Chen and the Tink up front.”

  Elsevier raises his eyebrows but clambers up nonetheless.

  It’s been strange looking at him ever since I saw through his glamour. Despite Eggplant’s assurance that the ability wears off immediately when you’re not wearing an iron band around your head, there are times—particularly when I see him out of the corner of my eye—when I swear that I can see his actual shabby appearance; other times it seems like I’m seeing two images at once: what’s actually there and the illusion that he casts. It’s like I’m looking at a badly done anaglyph 3D comic, where the pictures in the red and green ink don’t match up. I think back to that bag of junk food in the house where I first met Géraldine. Is it possible that glamour just doesn’t work on me when I know that it’s there? But why me and not everyone—

  “You coming, Jeeves?” demands Beaton.

  I nod and rise to my feet, stooping to avoid the ceiling, and then follow Elsevier outside.

  *

  “Isn’t that just the way with cottage country?” says Beaton as I emerge into the daylight. “The day the weather improves is the day you have to leave.”

  I can see his point. The air outside is surprisingly warm, given what the Winter Queen had been inflicting on us, and the snow on the road is accordingly slushy against my boots. It’s a sensation that, honestly, I never really expected to feel again. Nevertheless, I follow Beaton round the corner and—

  I gasp.

  It’s not that the vista before me is beautiful (though it is); it’s that it’s impossible.

  Imagine a bridge spanning a lake to a forested island. Imagine that a photographer came to the threshold of that bridge twice—once in summer, once in winter—and took a photo from the same perspective each time. Imagine that they seamlessly spliced these photos together, such that the island was in summer, the surrounding landscape in winter. Somewhere midway along the span of the bridge, the gauzy white clouds above and the icy sheet below just end; the sun shines directly onto bright blue waters and green trees beneath a cerulean sky.

  Now imagine seeing that landscape in real life. Exactly that lies before me.

  I’ve heard of similar phenomena at the US border; I’d only half-believed it. But we couldn’t be at the border, could we?

  Beaton notices my astonishment. He points to a snow-caked road sign just before the bridge. The message Now Entering the Algonquins of False Island First Nation appears in English, French, and (I assume) Algonquin.

  “It’s reserve land!” I realize at once.

  “It’s outside the Winter Queen’s jurisdiction,” Beaton nods. “Now let’s keep it moving, come on!”

  Elsevier, Beaton, and I proceed up the bridge. Despite the apparently steep temperature differential, there is no wind. On the summer side stand a bald, middle-aged Canadian Forces soldier bearing the name “Montpetit” on his fatigues, an Algonquin man of about the same age wearing a Stetson, and a couple of young men with hunting rifles.

  Captain Beaton snaps to attention.

  “So, this is the Nuclear Fairy,” Montpetit notes, eying Elsevier.

  “Yes, Colonel. He’s called Elsevier—”

  “Not my name.”

  “—and this is Dr. Julia Chen, his…business partner.” He gestures to the figures opposite us: “This is Colonel Montpetit, my CO, and, uh, Chief Michael Jocko.”

  I give them a nervous wave of my hand. “Actually, Elsevier should have another business partner here,” I say. “Géraldine Marciel—”

  The man in the Stetson—Jocko—nods. “Géraldine’s with us. One of the other gathering parties brought her in yesterday.”

  I feel tremendous relief to hear that confirmed. “One wonders if she’s alright.”

  Jocko looks amused by my phrasing, but answers, “She had frostbite and hypothermia when we took her in, but we’ve got a doctor on site. She should make a full recovery.”

  “Thank goodness,” I smile.

  “Well, you’re welcome to come see her,” he says. “Your…business partner, though, he’s a different story.”

  “Elsevier has promised not to hurt anyone in our presence,” says Beaton.

  “He’s been as good as his word so far,” I admit.

  Jocko nods. “That’s probably true. But I understand he’s a criminal—”

  “Unjustly persecuted under the Winter Queen’s tyrannical laws,” Elsevier interjects. “As you can well understand.”

  I side-eye him. On the face of it, it seems like he should want to stay away from Géraldine—at least if he doesn’t want to go to True Sorrow. But I scarcely know his regular motives well enough to look for ulterior ones.

  “Be that as it may,” says Jocko, “what if the authorities come looking for you?”

  “He’s a military asset,” cuts in Montpetit. “We can’t just—”

  “Respectfully, Colonel, this isn’t a military base,” Jocko replies calmly. “We believe in helping the needy, and we’re happy to have your troops as our guests. But when it comes to our people’s safety—”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  All eyes fall on Elsevier.

  “Go on,” says Jocko.

  “It seems to me,” says the Fairy, “that your problem is not that you don’t trust me, so much as that you’re uncertain whether the benefits of having me about outweigh the risks.”

  “That…basically sums it up.”

  “Well then, let me add a significant weight to the benefits column. You are suffering from food shortages?”

  Jocko crosses his arms. “Not yet. It could become a problem in a few days.”

  “Well then!” Elsevier claps his hands. “A tidy resolution to both our problems presents itself. I shall use my magic to ensure your people have adequate stores of food for the duration of my stay—so long as I’m allowed the run of your territory. Does this appeal?”

  Jocko’s brow furrows. “This food,” he says. “It won’t have…enchantments on it?”

  Elsevier laughs. “None beyond those necessary to make it.”

  “So it won’t…turn us into anything, say?”

  “The only thing that it will turn you into is a well-nourished human being,” Elsevier replies cloyingly. “You have my word.”

  Jocko frowns. “I’ll need to consult the band council.”

  Elsevier smiles. “Take your time.”

  It’s another half hour before we’re finally let onto the island.

  *

  “I know what you’re doing,” I tell Elsevier as we make our way down the bridge.

  He laughs. “I rather doubt that.”

  “You figure if you make yourself useful enough to these people, they won’t let you go to True Sorrow.”

  “Do you suppose they could stop me?” he shakes his head. “No. I’m here by contractual obligation. You see…this is precisely where we need to be if I am to discharge my responsibilities to Géraldine.”

  I freeze. “You were leading us here.”

  Elsevier says nothing, so I draw my own conclusions.

  “There’s…some kind of portal—”

  “There will be, yes,” he replies. “Right on this island. Within three days, unless I’ve missed my guess.”

  “That’s…incredibly convenient.”

  “In some ways,” he intones. “Though I hope you’ve not forgotten the gravity the situation.”

  My face tenses. “I remember.”

  He lays a hand on my shoulder. “Three days, Dr. Chen. Make them count.”

  *

  “Géraldine!”

  She blinks up at me from her bed at the clinic; her expression journeys rapidly from surprise to disbelief. “Julia?” she utters.

  Before I have a chance to answer, she’s thrown her arms around me, burying her face in my shoulder. I return the hug, patting her on the back like my mother used to do.

  “I though you were dead!” she exclaims, looking up at me. Her cheeks are wet with tears. “I tried to catch up, but—you were goin’ so fast! And then, when that blizzard hit—”

  I hush her, keeping hold of one of her hands as I sit next to her bed. “It’s alright,” I assure her. “It’s alright, I’m fine.”

  “I was so worried.” She shakes her head. “I just assumed—”

  “It’s alright.”

  She looks away, her face taut. “I’m sorry. Goin’ off unprepared.” She shakes her head. “Idiot move.”

  I should be apologizing to you, I think. Seeing her like this—no gun, no parka or backpack to make her look big, long silver hair cascading over her shoulders—she seems, for the first time, almost frail. For days now, I’ve held her in my head as a paragon of strength and endurance: brave, cheerful, never seeming to tire. It’s easy to forget that, for all that, she’s also pushing seventy with a broken heart.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Her lips twist bitterly as she looks me in the eye. “Alex is dead.”

  “Alex?”

  “Paul’s dad. Alex Boisclair. Killed at Cayamant.”

  “Your son-in-law. Géraldine, I’m sorry.”

  She says nothing for a moment, staring darkly off into space. Then: “He was an asshole.”

  I have to stop myself from laughing in surprise. “Excuse me?”

  “He was a fuckin’ asshole,” she says. “I fuckin’ hated him. Never understood what my daughter saw in that bastard.”

  I’m not sure what I can possibly say to that.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Shouldn’t say bad things about the dead.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Géraldine dries her eyes. “God, what am I cryin’ for?”

  Her eyes wander off, a pair of hard little marbles staring at nothing. When she speaks again, her voice is heavy. “I lived with him for twelve years,” she says. “Ever since Brigitte died.”

  “Your…daughter?” It occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve heard for a fact that she’s dead. I’ve generally avoided discussing family with Géraldine, recognizing the topic as an open wound.

  She nods. “Helping him raise Paul. Raisin’ Paul for him when he was off on duty.”

  “That sounds…uncomfortable,” I say, noticing how trite it is only once it’s out of my mouth.

  “Hm,” she chuckles once. I smile sympathetically.

  She eases back into her pillows and closes her eyes. “Well, he’s dead now,” she murmurs. “Everyone always dies.”

  We sit in silence for a long moment.

  Finally, I raise my voice: “Géraldine...”

  She opens her eyes.

  “Elsevier is here. With me, on False Island.”

  She sits up, a strange crease forming on her brow. “He’s here?” she breathes. “You didn’t lose him?”

  “Oh, I lost him,” I admit. “But I found him. Géraldine…” I lower my voice. “He says the portal is opening here, right on this reserve, within three days.”

  A new vitality seems to creep into her features, and she lets out an astonished laugh. “For serious?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “But that—miracle! It’s almost too good to be true!”

  “It’s…a remarkable coincidence.”

  She eases back onto her bed, smiling through her tears. “I thought it was over,” she breathes. “I thought I’d missed my chance. Right here, you say! Ha!”

  “Géraldine…”

  She looks at me, and the hope on her face is a beautiful thing to behold. “What?”

  I pause, a series of virtual words being spontaneously created and destroyed on the tip of my tongue.

  “We’ll find your grandson.” I say at last.

  She nods, giving my hand a squeeze.

  Coward!

  *

  I’m told that False Island, in normal times, has a population of about 350; right now, it’s over 3,000. The reserve is crowded, messy, and suffering from shortages of just about everything, with soldiers encamped on the powwow grounds and refugees sleeping in the community centre. And yet the general mood—contrary to my own—is almost closer to a music festival than a refugee camp.

  And why not? For the first time in weeks, these people have a guaranteed source of food. Right now, Mr. Elsevier stands next to a glistening red mass of raw meat that had formerly been a tree. It is objectively disgusting, but Ranbir and another soldier are grilling slabs of it, with several dozen people already lined up for their portion.

  I feel a rumble of hunger. But I cannot bear to look into Elsevier’s smug face—not right now. So I wander off.

  *

  The lake looks inviting in the sunset, at least on this side. Less than two hundred metres away, the surface is frozen solid. And yet, dipping in a toe, I find the water exactly as warm as I’d expect for August.

  For once, I don’t protest the suspension of thermodynamics. I pay a quick glance up and down the beach, then strip naked, letting my clothes fall in a heap. The collapse of civilization has given me a newfound appreciation for the simpler things in life—bathing, for example.

  I ease into the weedy waters, imagining the dirt and grime drifting away as a cloud. Beneath the surface, my skin seems to glow golden in the faint sunlight; I laugh in delight and glide toward deeper waters, relishing my freedom. Taking a deep breath, I dip my head under and swim amongst the seaweed for as long as I can before surfacing, giddy as I’ve ever been.

  “Is that you, Jeeves?” calls Eggplant Higgins from the beach.

  Shit.

  “Don’t look at me!”

  Eggplant grins, and to my surprise, begins removing her own uniform.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demand, turning around in embarrassment.

  “Same thing you are! It’s the end of the world! Free pass for skinny dipping!”

  I hear splashing as she wades into the water. “You can turn around now; you’re not going to burst into flame or whatever.”

  I do as I’m bid, just in time for her to splash me in the face.

  “Jerk!” I exclaim, splashing her back.

  “Oh god, I missed summer,” she says, launching herself backwards into the water.

  “Yeah, I could tell,” I reply, noting her blazingly white skin. “Have you ever actually been in direct sunlight, or—”

  “I’ll have you know that I was just about to start working on my tan when the world was invaded.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She laughs. “Whatever, miss ‘ivory tower’.”

  “Hey, you two!” a man shouts from up on the beach. “You shouldn’t be swimming here, this lake has serious E. coli problems!”

  “Ugh, spoilsport,” says Eggplant.

  “So much for pristine nature,” I mutter. Then, directing my attention to the man on the beach: “A bit of privacy please! We’re not decent!”

  The man grunts and turns around.

  “You look pretty decent to me,” says Eggplant.

  *

  “We’re actually about to have a bonfire,” the man tells us, once we’re fully dressed. “You can come if you want.”

  A bonfire! Good lord, as if this were all just some vacation that we were on! But we’re not about turn down a meal, so we follow him to a group of people in the process of piling logs into a pit—by the looks of things, a fairly eclectic mix of natives of the reserve, soldiers, and refugees from Cottage Country.

  “Mind if we join you?” asks Eggplant.

  Her question prompts a chorus of good-natured denials and invitations to have a seat as people scootch to make room. We squeeze into place and have beers in our hands before we even settle down. There’s a round of introductions and, just for a moment, the weirdness of the past month melts away; I can imagine I’m at a backyard barbecue on a perfectly normal summer’s night. The feeling is fleeting, but it’s welcome while it persists.

  “So, you girls are soldiers?” asks a friendly-looking woman named Sharon.

  “I am,” Eggplant replies. “Julia here’s a physicist.”

  This provokes some impressed-sounding noises, with Elijah, an eager-faced Algonquin teenager, piping-up to ask: “What sort of physics do you study?”

  “High-energy theory,” I reply. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about my work to a layperson, and I struggle to put it into terms he’ll appreciate. “You see, we have a basic theory of how subatomic particles behave, but we’ve only actually tested it up to a certain energy level; what I try to do is predict behaviours that we might expect at higher energy levels. Basically, I look for new physics.”

  “I’d say you found some!” someone quips to general laughter.

  “But what do you think about the Shift?” Elijah probes. “Like, do you think physics still means anything or—”

  “Well…” I pause. “I think it’s clear we’ve gone from one set of laws to another. And we don’t know what the new ones are, or how they relate to the old ones. We need to find that out—in fact, that’s what I’m out here for.”

  “You’re a seeker after truth,” says a stout white man with a waxed moustache that makes him look like a Victorian pugilist. “I respect that.”

  I raise my bottle. “Thanks.”

  “And yet I can’t help but think you’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

  “Oh yeah? What tree should I be barking up, Mister, um—”

  “Doctor Abelard Royce,” he replies. “And here’s how it is: you’re looking to figure out how the world’s changed. And you know, that’s the obvious way to go about it. But you’re missing one important fact…” He leans in conspiratorially. “It didn’t.”

  I let out a small laugh. “Is that so?”

  “It is. People talk like magic has returned, but the truth…the real truth…is that magic was here all along.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, what’s magic,” he asks, “but a unique quantum energy fluid that can be moved with your mind? I used to do that every day at my practice, years before the Shift.”

  “I’m…a bit unclear as to what you mean by ‘quantum energy fluid’,” I say, tactfully refraining from noting that it means nothing at all.

  “Just the modern name for an ancient concept,” Royce replies. “The spiritualists called it ‘aether’; Mesmer called it ‘vital fluid’; it was ‘prana’ to the Indians; and your people, Miss Chen, called it ‘qi’. But it’s all the same—the all-filling, all-flowing essence of life. It’s not new. It’s old as the Universe and we’ve known about it—every human soul has instinctively known about it—since ancient times. Only modern science denies this fundamental truth.”

  “Well, to be fair,” I intone diplomatically, “the overwhelming preponderance of evidence—at least before the Shift—seemed to indicate that this…‘energy fluid’…didn’t technically exist.”

  Royce shakes his head. “You can quote supposed evidence all day, but you know…I was down in the trenches, healing people at my clinic, and I can tell you that long before this supposed ‘Shift’, I was already bending and harmonizing these energies you say aren’t real. And, for hundreds of satisfied patients, it worked. Personally, I put more stock in that than I do in a bunch of wise guys talking about experiments, eh?” He smiles, his eye twinkling.

  “With respect,” I say cautiously, “the placebo effect—”

  He chuckles. “That’s exactly what I mean, my dear. I activate my patients’ natural healing energies, give them tools to unlock their own paths to wellness. It doesn’t magically become less magical by slapping a fancy name like ‘placebo effect’ on it.”

  “And you’re telling me it works exactly as well post-Shift—supposedly post-Shift—as it did before?”

  “It works even better now.”

  “Then you agree the Shift happened.”

  He shakes his head. “No, ma’am.”

  “But you just said it works better—”

  “It does! And do you know why?”

  “Because magic actually exists now,” I say flatly.

  “No, you’re not listening. Magic has always existed—all the way back into the unfathomable abysm of time.”

  “…Is an ‘abysm’ different from an ‘abyss’?”

  Royce ignores my smartassery. “The real difference now,” he asserts, “is that everyone knows it’s real. Their full human potential has been set free from doubt—from that stifling scientific orthodoxy you seem to love so well.”

  I emit a laugh. “So, you’re saying that one day, everyone just spontaneously started believing in magic—”

  “Nothing spontaneous about it,” he replies. “A few people started to notice that most of what we were calling science was actually a fraud, and that caused magic to strengthen. A few more noticed magic strengthening and that undermined their belief in science. It’s what you’d call a ‘positive feedback loop’. Personally, I think that ‘snowball effect’ fits a bit better.”

  “Well, it’s a nice theory,” I spit. “Just one obvious problem: science wasn’t a fraud!”

  He raises his palms inoffensively. “I’m not saying that you were perpetrating it, my dear. In fact, I think the overwhelming majority of scientists were being played. Einstein really telegraphed the game a hundred years ago when he said that only twelve people in the whole world could understand his so-called ‘theory’. Of course, what he really meant was that there were only twelve people who were fully in on the conspiracy.”

  “And what ‘conspiracy’ is this, pray tell?” I demand.

  “The Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, the Frankfurt School…whatever you want to call them. A long con, played over hundreds if not thousands of years, all with one goal: to rob Man of his soul and establish a New World Order with them on top and the rest of us poor yokels getting a ‘boot stomping on a human face forever’, as Orson Welles put it in 1984. You start off small: Copernicus saying, ‘Hey, guys, looks like Earth isn’t the centre of the Universe after all’. You let that sink in for a few hundred years, spread it around the world, and then everyone’s primed for Newton saying the Universe runs like clockwork; Darwin saying that Man is actually just a glorified monkey; Marx saying the ideal government is a dictatorship; Freud saying all sorts of perversions are perfectly natural. And then you spread it all around to the far corners of the Earth with colonialism. All just priming people to change how they think, to turn a race of heroes into a race of sheep.”

  “Uh…huh.”

  My eyes search the faces of the other people gathered around the fire, hoping to reground myself in the world of sanity. Much to my chagrin, I’m not finding many sympathetic glances— Elijah, to his credit, is looking at Royce skeptically, and a couple others seem to be looking anywhere except at either of us; but others listen with interest to Royce, even seeming enraptured by his rant. It’s only Eggplant who pulls a face and shrugs at me.

  “So how is it that magic came back?” a woman called Rita asks credulously. “Or—I mean—how did the Illuminati’s hold start to weaken?”

  “Simple,” Royce replies, turning to face her. “The New World Order failed. You could see its grip weakening even before the so-called Shift—people were already breaking free of their grasp. And why? Because they overplayed their hand; they underestimated the power of Man’s spirit. When the Soviet Union fell apart, they panicked and put the project into overdrive, started rolling out too many new swindles too quickly. Radical feminism, homosexual marriage, transgender ideology, global warming—”

  “You’re insane!”

  All eyes abruptly fall on me, and not sympathetically. I gesture impotently at Royce. “Can you not see that this man is bonkers?”

  “Well, I think that’s uncalled for,” sniffs Rita. “Dr. Royce was being perfectly civil—”

  “Civil?” I snap. “He just claimed that five hundred years’ worth of scientists were lying through their teeth and that queer people caused the collapse of civilization!”

  “Well, perhaps you’d like to present an alternative explanation, Miss Chen?” says Royce, all sweetness and light.

  “Well,” I stammer. “Perhaps—”

  Royce looks at me patiently.

  “You know what, I don’t know what caused the Shift,” I declare, leaping to my feet. “You don’t either! But at least I admit when I don’t know something, rather than coming up with some irresponsible, unfalsifiable, clown-shoes conspiracy theory! That’s the difference between an actual scientist—me—and some diploma-mill crank calling himself ‘Doctor’!”

  “Well, you call me a ‘crank’,” he replies with enervating calm, drawing himself up to face me. “But I was a healer before the Shift and I’m still one now. In fact, I was helping some of the wounded this very afternoon.”

  “That’s true!” comments a soldier.

  “How about you, Miss Chen? How’s ‘actual science’ working out for you?”

  “Oh, fuck off!”

  Eggplant steps forward, holding her arm out to keep me back. “Jeeves, I really think we should—”

  “How does he ‘know’ the things he claims to?” I demand of his audience, who look at one another awkwardly. “What evidence does he have? What evidence would he accept to refute his theory? How do you run a worldwide conspiracy for five hundred bloody years without anyone letting on? Think for yourselves, people!”

  “Julia, we should go,” Eggplant intones, grinning too widely.

  “Oh, and FYI,” I shout as she moves me, gently but firmly away from the fire. “It was George Orwell who wrote 1984, you absolute chucklefuck!”

  *

  “We’ve really got to work on your people skills.”

  “He’s a grifter!” I exclaim as we make our way through the now-darkened forest. “Preening, pompous, puffed-up prick!”

  “You’re not wrong,” says Eggplant. “But calling random people a bunch of morons isn’t a good way to win an argument!”

  “I didn’t call them morons,” I mutter. “I just…implied they weren’t very good at thinking.”

  Eggplant laughs softly to herself.

  “It’s not funny!” I insist. “Guys like Royce are dangerous!”

  “Oh, I know. It’s not that, it’s just…” She looks at me with her bright green eyes. “‘Chucklefuck’?”

  In spite of myself, I find that I’m smiling now too. “He is a chucklefuck though!”

  Eggplant erupts into hysterical giggles.

  “It’s not that funny,” I insist, even as I start to crack up; before long, the two of us are both laughing so hard we need to fight for breath.

  Gradually, the moment passes. I find myself having collapsed onto the ground, looking directly into Eggplant’s face in the moonlight. The end of laughter brings a deflated feeling—and an unpleasant realization. “I’m the crank now, aren’t I?”

  She looks at me fondly. “No, you’re the only sane one left. Plus, you have one thing he never will.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re absolutely adorable.”

  I pause, feeling a strange tingling with each breath. “I’m…not really sure how to respond to that—”

  Eggplant kisses me.

  I am sure how to respond to that. I reach up, run my fingers through her short blonde hair, and kiss her back, savouring the feel of her lips against mine.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this in public,” I whisper, pulling my mouth reluctantly away.

  “Your tent or mine?”

  *

  We make our way through the darkness to her tent, snickering like misbehaving teenagers, and don’t come-out until morning.