A Broken Darkness by Premee Mohamed

Author:Premee Mohamed [Mohamed, Premee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I WOKE IN full daylight, a beam burning my face through an inch-wide gap in the heavy velvet curtains. After a while I went to my coat, hanging on the door hook, and unzipped one of the inner pockets, removing the tiny book that Huxley had pressed into my hand as we had left the Society agents’ car. Not a sentimental woman; I remembered her calling Johnny a weasel right to her face.

Sentiment or not, she’d clearly given me something precious: a tiny book, sixty or eighty pages, bound in pinkish leather the colour of my palm. The paper was thick, crackled with age, smelling of age too—the sweet smell of paper breaking down, and a hint of mould. It was filled with numbers handwritten in fading black ink. No illustrations, no title, no author, no nothing, just numbers. But not useless, I knew. Given with intent.

I put the book back and zipped up the pocket. I noticed we had gotten another delivery, this one a small heavily-padded courier package the size of a paperback book, sitting on the small table next to the door. Reception had signed for it, an illegible scrawl. Probably a bomb or something, with our luck. I held it to my ear, hearing a faint ticking scritch that startled me nearly into the wall.

“Okay,” I said, and poked Johnny with a pen. “Up you get. Up-up.”

“Mmphh?”

“Someone may have given us a bomb? I mean, it’s not very big, but.”

“Oh. No. No no, give that here. I wanted something from one of my labs. I think I came up with a magic-proof, tamper-resistant communication system, and now is as good a time to try it out as any.”

“What? You are not implanting anything in me. No. Bad.”

“No, no. Also, paranoid much?”

“Yes. Stay away from me. Stay away from my squishy parts. I’ll sue.”

She tore open the bag and drew out a blue plastic pill case fitted with a tiny square of black glass on top, to which she pressed her thumb. Opened, five of the day compartments were empty; the last two contained something glossy, nearly mirrored: beetles, or things that looked like beetles, filling the compartment from head to toe on a bed of cotton wool.

“Wow, holy shit!” I was impressed despite myself. “Where do you put the battery? Can they fly or just walk? Are they radio control or can you—gah!”

“It’s all right! He’s just storing the imprint!”

“It’s what!?”

“Don’t hit him!”

I forced myself to stand still as one of the things, which had exited its compartment with an enthusiastic lunge and lifted off like a tiny helicopter, wandered along my collarbones, then circled my neck a dozen times, its legs digging in like needles. “...Johnny. These are real bugs, aren’t they.”

“Okay, look. They can fly, they can crawl on any surface, they’re resistant to virtually every toxic compound I’ve tested, and their chitin is reinforced with nanoceramic, so they’re even resistant to things like acid and crush injury.”

“Cr… like someone stepping on them.”

“And I’ve modified their metabolisms to be ultra-efficient on limited material intake.

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