Julia

  The piece of chalk blazes under the midday sun; the day is so cold that there aren’t even clouds.

  “Jesus that’s bright!” Lester complains. I can feel his voice in my fingertips but barely hear it through my hood and balaclava.

  “Sorry,” I murmur.

  “What?”

  I pull my scarf down and hold the chalk by my mouth. “Can you hear me now?”

  “Yes. Where are we?”

  “On the Ottawa River,” I reply. “Northwest of the city. We’re with Not-Rumpelstiltskin—the Fairy I mentioned earlier. I don’t know his name. Apparently, we’re heading for some kind of a portal in the woods; I think it’s where the invaders came through. We’re going to his…realm, I suppose I’ll call it. We’re going to Faerie.”

  If this news makes any particular impact on Lester, I can’t hear it in his response: “Oh.” And then, after a pause, “Didn’t he try to kill you?”

  “He did,” I say, looking up at Not-Rumpelstiltskin’s receding form in the distance. Without my glasses, which I’ve taken off to prevent the lenses from fogging over when my scarf is up, he appears as little more than a forest-green blur against a world of white.

  “Just like me, I guess.”

  I smile humourlessly. I suppose I could protest that the zombie that attacked me hadn’t really been him, but that would open up a whole metaphysical can of worms—and, more importantly, poke around in an open wound. So instead, I opt to ignore the remark.

  “We’ve, um…made a deal,” I say. “Of a sort. I get to ask…nine questions, and if he’s impressed—then he lets me into his little club.”

  “His club.”

  “Ore-spinners,” I say. “Nuclear magicians.”

  A beat. “What if he’s not impressed?”

  I twitch my lips. “I didn’t say it was a good deal. But—well. Hopefully better than the alternative. That man puts a steep price on knowledge.” I chuckle. “Maybe I should call him ‘Mr. Elsevier’.”

  It is a weak attempt at a joke, so it’s hardly surprising when Lester fails to laugh.

  “And you brought me along too.”

  “Yeah. I asked if you wanted to come last night but…well—”

  “I wasn’t in a talking mood.”

  “Yeah. So I decided to err on the side of…not leaving you alone.”

  There’s a pause. “Probably the right decision. In the long run.”

  “Not the short?”

  I swear I feel the chalk sigh in my fingers. “Look…I know you mean well, but I don’t want to talk about it. Or in general. Or…well…exist.”

  “So, there’s nothing I can do?”

  “Put me away. Leave me in the dark. At least for now.”

  I look at the chalk sympathetically. “Feel better, Lester.”

  The words “too late” buzz at my threshold of consciousness as I tuck him into one my backpack’s pockets.

  *

  I’d left the university first thing that morning, after having gathered all the foodstuffs that I could find. In retrospect, I really should have tried to negotiate some kind of food provision agreement with Not-Rumpelstiltskin—“Mr. Elsevier”, as I now can’t help but think of him. I’m not clear on what he actually eats, but whatever it is, he apparently doesn’t need to carry it with him. I also wish I’d known that he could walk along the surface of the snow without difficulty—maybe I could have arranged for him to help me do the same. Instead, I had to borrow some snowshoes from the campus rec centre–cum–emergency shelter—except, of course, all of the actual snowshoes had already been taken, so I settled for what I had been assured was the best possible alternative: a pair of tennis rackets lashed to my boots with twine. It is a decidedly sub-optimal arrangement; but I accepted them nonetheless, together with a sheet of greased plywood on a string to serve as a toboggan on which to drag all of my supplies. And then, it occurred to me that I should probably warn the blue-haired undergraduate volunteer helping me that zombies now existed, and that there was a bag of dismembered body parts in the basement of the STEM Complex that could probably do with a proper cremation. There wasn’t any need to tell Lester about that part, though.

  Then, I returned to the STEM complex to rendezvous with Elsevier. As a final thought, I returned to my own office, cold and abandoned on the second floor, for a last look around. My research—that which had been my life’s work up until a few weeks ago—sat in a few untidy piles on my desk.

  My latest paper—“AdS–CFT modelling of quark–gluon plasma in the early universe: a fluid-dynamic approach”—hung from a thumbtack on a sheet of cork board over my desk. The irony was that it was actually damn good work, even if I did say so myself; quite as good as could be done with the knowledge that I’d had when I’d written it. But now it looked like the product of another age; like some poor fifteenth-century astrological sap, diligently calculating corrections to the epicycles of Mars. It was a solid, mathematically rigorous study, hopelessly hamstrung by the fact that its assumptions about the Universe were fundamentally, irrecoverably wrong.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I popped it into my backpack. I could still use it for kindling, if nothing else.

  *

  Back before the Shift, I’d tried to walk home from the university at least once a week, no matter the weather. It sounds silly now, but I was proud of my endurance. But absolutely nothing had prepared me for snowshoeing up a frozen river on a pair of tennis rackets. An hour in, and I’m already exhausted; two hours in, and I feel something like a robot, shuffling forward on stiff legs of pain. Four hours and three rest breaks in, and I would trade my kingdom, such as it is, for a snowmobile.

  Still, it gives me a chance to think. I have nine questions left, and I want to make the most of them. I’d hoped to confer with Lester, of course, but. Well.

  I guess I can start by focusing on the things that I do know. Number one: consciousness is a physical quantity now. Surely the haunted chalk proves that.

  Well…not necessarily “quantity”, I amend. Quantity implies that you can measure it, and I don’t even know how I’d start. So we’ll go with “a physical thing”, I suppose. Entity. Nice big scientific word.

  Number two: consciousness can apparently effect changes in matter. Other people’s consciousnesses, I should say. Not mine.

  Number three: consciousness didn’t used to be a physical entity until about a month ago. At least…not to the same extent. I suppose there have always been sporadic reports of psychic powers and ghosts and all that nonsense (all respect to Lester); but it’s only in the last month that they’ve become distinguishable from statistical noise.

  Incidentally, number four: ghosts are real. And then of course number five: fairies, dragons, magic, and…probably other things—entities—from European folklore are also real, and seem to originate from some previously inaccessible location. And they’ve conquered the world! (Which I guess should be point six).

  Point seven, then: it’s winter in July, but, as far as I know, only in Canada.

  Let’s try to focus on the physics, though.

  Alright. Point eight: electricity doesn’t work—or rather, the electrical grid doesn’t work. Small electronics are fine. My nervous system is fine (I assume).

  Point nine: the atmosphere seems to have become opaque to radio waves. Something we all learned when trying to get in contact with loved ones.

  Point ten: nuclear fission has apparently ceased—at least without magical mediation, as my experience in the lab demonstrated. Which is fine by me, honestly; I’d hate to think what a mess Chalk River or Pickering would be without the surrounding infrastructure to support the reactors there.

  Point eleven…fusion?

  I pay a glance up at the sky. The sun seems to be doing fine. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything—if fusion had ceased, it would take thousands of years for us to notice, what with how long it takes photons to diffuse from the centre of the sun. But we’ll make that into a more general point, I guess: as far as we know, there’s no evidence of any change beyond Earth.

  That of itself is a bit of a problem; it’s relatively easy to explain a sudden change of the laws of physics across the entire universe—but one limited to a single planet? The laws are supposed to be the same everywhere. But if we’re saying that the change has something to do with consciousness, it might as well be centred on the only planet in the universe that we know to have it. Still: five hundred years of dethroning humans from the centre of the universe are not idly to be cast aside.

  Of course, that brings us to point number…what was I on? Twelve? Point twelve: the very laws of physics have changed, and yet humans are still here. Which is surprising when you think about it. Back in the day, we’d theorized about how the laws of physics seemed fine-tuned to allow life in the universe, how even a slight change would turn all matter into a uniform gas of hydrogen or collapse it into a black hole. But now, we’ve just thrown them out the window and survived to tell the tale. Most of us.

  I’m tempted to chalk this up the Anthropic Principle—but again, ghosts are real. There’s no reason we need to have bodies. So why are we still here!?

  Maybe that ought to be my opening question: what is the meaning of life?

  Damn it.

  I sigh.

  Point thirteen, I think. All of this could be satisfactorily explained if I were insane or in a coma.

  But that one’s a “science stopper”, so we’ll leave it off the list.

  *

  In front of me, the green blob on the horizon representing Mr. Elsevier slowly becomes larger and more distinct. After about twenty minutes, he’s standing alongside me.

  “One wonders,” I call out to him amidst heavy breathing, “if we’ve almost reached the portal yet!”

  I’ve been using a lot of that “one wonders” construction lately. I cringe inwardly at how it sounds—so pretentious that I might as well be speaking in a fake Downton Abbey accent—and yet I give myself credit for not wasting another question.

  “Does one?” Elsevier asks, clasping his hands behind his back and looking innocuously upwards. His hands are, of course, ungloved, nor is he wearing any other winter garments—the benefits, in case there weren’t already enough, of being a magical entity. “Well! One can be advised that we will get there when we get there. Unless, of course, one feels inclined to spend a question on it.”

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  I ignore his sarcasm. “If it’s much longer, I think we should break for the day, try to find some kind of shelter.”

  “Oh, please!” scoffs the Fairy. “It’s twelve hours to go before nightfall, and you people are supposed to be persistence predators! You can hardly be tired already!”

  I bite back the urge to shout “Want to bet?” at him and nod at the riverbank to my left, where a small personal dock stands half-buried in a drift of snow. The magical winter had come upon us all so quickly that whoever owned the dock hadn’t even had time to move their motorboat inside before it froze immovably into the ice. I see a set of wooden steps leading up into a grove of trees (still leafy green, despite the cold) and, beyond that, glimpses of a large, stately house. No doubt the house is full of things like woodburning fireplaces and plushily upholstered recliner chairs on which I can put my feet up for a couple of hours. With any luck, its residents have already evacuated to a shelter or made for the border. With a lot of luck, they’ve left some of their food behind.

  I make up my mind. “I’m going to take a break,” I announce. “You can come with me or you can wait here.”

  “Oh, very well,” Elsevier concedes. “Though I shall remind you, of course, that the longer that our little sojourn lasts, the more that you shall owe me at the end of it.”

  “Only if I fail to ask good questions,” I shout over my shoulder, making my way toward the dock.

  “Yes, well, thus far, you’re one for one on that count!” the Fairy calls, making no move to follow me. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to practise my transmutations.” With that, he picks up a handful of snow and lets gold dust rain down from his glowing fingertips.

  I harrumph and set about removing my “snowshoes”. The bulk of my supplies and gathered foodstuffs I hide beneath a plastic tarp in the boat, in case some other hungry soul decides to do to me what I’m hoping to do to whoever owns the house. And then, keeping only my backpack and a few bags of candies, I make my way up the wooden steps.

  *

  What precisely constitutes a “good question”? I wonder, and not for the first time, as I make my way carefully up the snow-lined steps leading up from the dock. Is it a simple matter of gathering the most information, or am I supposed to demonstrate my insightfulness or the like? Or some other quality entirely?

  Of course, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that I don’t know enough about Elsevier himself—not his real name nor what he wants in a question, obviously, but also what sort of question he would even know the answer to. I know in vague terms that he can effect changes in atomic nuclei, but what does that even mean anymore? Clearly, I should start by trying to gauge the extent of his knowledge…but how should I go about phrasing that?

  I sigh. Engaging Elsevier’s services is feeling like a very poor decision in retrospect. Which is only symmetric, because it felt that way in prospect and during as well.

  *

  The house’s patio doors, when I come to them, consist of grids of small, rectangular glass panels supported by cherrywood frames. A small decal in one panel promises me that this home is protected by a Brink’s Home Security System—though I sincerely doubt that it’s doing much these days. Nevertheless, I try a courtesy knock and then wait twenty seconds. I hear no stirring from within, no barking of dogs. I knock again, and again there is nothing. As far as I can tell, the house is dead empty. Having established this, I punch out the glass panel nearest the doorhandle with the butt of my axe and sweep around the frame to clear away any jagged shards; then, I reach in a hand, unfasten the lock, and open the door.

  For a lifelong “good girl”, it feels strange to be committing break-and-entry. Even under these apocalyptic circumstances, a small part of myself still cowers in fear of getting in trouble—freezing to death is one thing, but what if someone yells at me? But I’m also astonished by how easy it is! Certainly, there had been a security system, but what if everyone had done this? Human civilization, truly, had only hung together because the vast majority of people aren’t criminal sociopaths—and I suppose it’s ironic that I’m only realising this now.

  I stride into the house, my lingering fear giving way to a perverse exhilaration. I have done it; I have been naughty, and utterly without consequence. It feels oddly liberating.

  That heady rush of freedom lasts about two seconds—not nearly long enough for my eyes to adjust to the dimness—before someone yanks the axe clear out of my hands and shoves me roughly onto the hardwood floor.

  I groan in pain. At once, I become cognizant that I am staring up both barrels of a shotgun. “Vous êtes humaine?” demands a gravelly voice.

  I draw a nervous breath. Two years in Ottawa and my conversational French is still not what it should be. “R-repetez plus lentment—”

  “Are you human!?”

  My eyes have adjusted enough that I can make out the woman, for woman she is, holding the gun: stocky, with long grey hair and deeply lined brown skin. She wears a blue-and-fuchsia parka and looks out from behind thick glasses with eyes that seem sharp enough to pierce steel.

  I nod. “My name’s Julia Chen; I’m just trying to get out of the cold—”

  “Take off your mask.”

  Very slowly, I pull up my balaclava. It would be easier if I didn’t have mitts on, but she hasn’t given me leave to remove them, and I don’t feel like pushing my luck. Finally, I manage to get it off and smile humourlessly up at her.

  The woman takes in my appearance, nodding a few times as if I meet her approval. Then—to my tremendous relief—she lifts the gun out of my face. “Géraldine Marciel,” she introduces herself.

  I take her hand and she pulls me upright. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Sorry if I hurt you any,” she says. “Can’t be too careful nowadays.”

  “Oh, it’s alright,” I answer with a good humour that I by no means feel. “Although one thing that I’ve heard—and I don’t know whether it’s true or not—is that the Gentry can’t be harmed by bullets.”

  “Yeah, well. Worth a shot, anyway. And there’s other things to worry about than just ‘the Gentry’.” I can actually hear the quotation marks in her voice as she speaks. Géraldine reposes her gun against the wall and picks my axe up from the floor, weighing it in her hand. “Mind if I use this? I’m going to get a fire going. You can warm up for a little if you want, since you look half-frozen. Don’t got a lotta food to spare though.”

  “I, uh, brought some of my own,” I say, giving my backpack a pat.

  “Good girl.”

  I recover my glasses from their case in my parka’s breast pocket and put them on. Now that my eyes have adapted to the shade, I can be suitably impressed by the home décor, which is as opulent as one might expect for a riverfront property. The patio doors open onto a vast living room area with vaulted ceilings, furniture in an eclectic mixture of modern and antique styles, and (yes) a vast fireplace, bordered in stone, all done up in shades of brown and beige.

  “This is, uh, your place—one wonders.” One can never take chances when Mr. Elsevier is about.

  “Oh, yeahhh,” Géraldine replies as she wanders deeper into the room. “Really saved up my nickels from my lifelong career working in, uh, high finance. Y’know…imports, exports, all that shit. Real, comment dit-on, ‘jet-setter’ type, me.” She rolls her eyes. “Nah, I’m robbing the place. Like you, hein?”

  Before I get a chance to respond, she plunges the axe-head into an extremely expensive-looking antique mahogany end table, and bursts out laughing. “Now get your ass over here; I don’t wanna waste no wood.”

  *

  An hour or so later, Géraldine and I are sitting side-by-side on a Victorian divan, warming ourselves by a crackling fire. I’ve taken the opportunity to peel off my boots and socks so that I can wiggle my toes and massage the soles of my poor, aching feet.

  I find myself instantly liking Géraldine—and not just because she offers to share some of her food with me (a dark, greasy meat that she informs me comes from a racoon that she shot a few days ago—though it might as well be Kobe beef for all of the real food that I’ve had recently). After all of the days of strangeness, all of the talking to ghosts, and chopping up zombies, and bargaining with nuclear-powered Fairies over fates worse than death, it’s actually really nice to meet someone…normal? Someone who reminds me of how things used to be before the Shift. Of course, the irony is that, back then, I almost certainly wouldn’t have had cause to get to know someone like her.

  I learn that she lives in Petawawa but was born in a place called Kitigan Zibi; that she’s a former hairdresser; and that she was married for thirty-two years (“God rest his soul”) to the brother of one of her clients. In return, I tell her I’m from Vancouver and try (and fail) to impress her with my education at MIT. I’m a bit cagier when it comes to my own romantic life, something of which I’m not certain that she would approve, but our conversation flows smoothly nonetheless. It helps that it’s lubricated by a bottle of stupidly good gewürztraminer that she’s liberated from a wine-cellar in the basement—something that pairs surprisingly well with flame-broiled hunks of feral racoon.

  “I guess that even rich assholes can’t take everything with them,” I say as I refill my glass. It’s not something that I would ordinarily say out loud, but the wine is like a warm blanket around my brain and, in any case, Géraldine induces colloquiality in others like a strong magnetic field.

  “You’re one to talk, Miss M-I-T,” Géraldine grunts, not unkindly.

  I raise my hand to my heart in mock offence. “Hey, for your information, we postdocs aren’t exactly rich beyond the dreams of avarice! For example, my gewürztraminer is only ten years old!”

  Géraldine emits a warm, dry laugh, and I peel back my lips in a giggle. We clink our glasses together and drink.

  “Not that it matters of course.” She sighs with a shake of her head. “Everybody’s poor as dirt now. All except that ‘Winter Queen’ bitch.”

  I shift about uncomfortably. “The Gentry…get antsy when you refer to them in less-than-flattering terms, I hear.”

  “Yeah, who doesn’t? But she ain’t around, so fuck her.”

  I decline to press the point.

  “Me,” says Géraldine, leaning back on her divan, “I’m heading for the States.”

  “One wonders if it really is summer down there.”

  “Hein?”

  “I said I wonder if it’s really summer down there.”

  Géraldine shrugs. “Maybe it is; maybe it ain’t. I just know it ain’t getting any warmer up here.” She leans in toward me. “She’s doing it deliberately, you know: bringing the winter so there ain’t nothing to eat but the food she has on offer. Then she has you.” She laughs without humour. “That’s when they start breaking out the Treaty Jackets.”

  I press my lips together in a frown. “Unfortunately, I suspect you’re right.”

  “That’s why I’m leaving,” she says. “Getting out while the getting’s good.”

  “Nothing keeping you here”—I catch myself—“I suppose.”

  The crevices on her face seem to deepen somewhat in the firelight. “Non,” she says after a moment. “Not anymore.”

  There’s a long period of silence following that pronouncement, marked only by the crackling of the wooden fragments in the fireplace, and I feel as though I’ve committed some dreadful faux pas, though I can’t imagine what it might be. Then, Géraldine downs the remainder of her wine.

  “Géraldine, if I said something—”

  She shakes her grey head. “Nah. Nah, it ain’t you. It’s this fucking Shift. But I guess we’ve all suffered, eh?”

  Not really, I think. At least, not in any way that I didn’t bring on myself. I sip my drink and wordlessly watch the fire.

  “It was my grandson,” she supplies suddenly.

  I turn my head to look at her.

  “Paul,” she says. She turns to face the fire. “His name. He’s fifteen years old.”

  “…Oh,” I say stupidly. Then, in a flight of eloquence: “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a Sunday afternoon,” she says. “April 29th. Bright outside. We had an argument about…” She pauses. “Something stupid. Paul’s dad was coming home from his tour in Latvia soon, and I told him he needed to shape the fuck up. It, uhh, turned into a screaming match. Y’know…like these things do. And, uh, he…shut himself up in his room. Just like since he was a kid. Still a kid.”

  She looks up at me. “Most of the time, he just…puts on music. Angsty teenage shit. Does some painting. Loves painting, Paul. He sulks a few hours; then he eats dinner, runs off with his dumbass friends, whatever. This time, though…” She shakes her head. “Three hours pass…and it’s time for dinner. So I, uh”—she clears her throat—“I knock on his door. No answer. No music. No sounds. Nothing. So, I…try the knob. Locked. From the inside. There’s, you know, there’s a little hook. For his privacy. They say that’s important. But it’s just little, and something’s wrong. So I slam the door with my body until it pops, and…” I can see the emotion playing across her face, rippling her stony expression even as she avoids my gaze.

  I can imagine what she saw. The vision of Lester Briggs dangling there in the dark fills my mind all over again. But I had barely known him. This was her grandson! How can anyone even begin to process that type of a loss?

  I reach a hand toward her as gently as I know how. “Géraldine—”

  “He was gone,” she says, her voice as dry and as heavy as gravel.

  I regard her with sympathetic silence. Finally, I find my voice enough to say: “I’m so sorry.”

  She nods a few times, then stares intently into the fire.

  “You know…” I hazard after a moment. “I-I know it’s not really comparable, but…I lost my mother a few years ago—”

  “He ain’t dead!” she snaps with such sudden vehemence that I withdraw my hand with a start. “Goddamn it girl, ain’t you listening? He was gone! He wasn’t there! No…” Her voice trails off.

  “No body,” she concludes softly. She runs her hands over her face. “Rien.”

  Only belatedly do I realize what she means. Paul, her grandson, was one of those. The Vanished. One of the thousands of disappearances in the Shift’s early days that I had, at the time, written off as a hoax or an artefact of journalistic malpractice. “Oh.”

  A sniffle rises from Géraldine. “The window was shut!” she exclaims to no one in particular. “I swear to God! Locked from the inside—with the screen on! No way he could’ve got out that way. And why would he? He could just use the front door! I wouldn’t’ve stopped him! We were just going through the motions, like we had a hundred times before! I didn’t mean anything by it! I…”

  She breaks off, unable to say another word.

  I never know what to do in these situations. I am, quite simply, not good at dealing with people. But if ever there was a woman in need of a hug, it’s Géraldine. So, I give her one.

  She holds me tightly, crying into my parka. I pat her back gently with my hand, like my mom used to do when I was a girl. “It wasn’t your fault,” I tell her.

  “You don’t know that,” she sobs. “You weren’t there.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I continue to hold her.

  Finally, Géraldine regains some composure, sniffles a few times to stop from crying, and stands upright. “Look at me,” she says. “Some mopey old woman, laying all this shit on you. I don’t even know you! You’re just some random fuckin’ burglar who broke in the same house as me!”

  “It’s alright,” I soothe. “I imagine it’s a great burden. And hey…I asked.”

  “And you’re the only one around,” says Géraldine with a humourless chuckle.

  “Glad I could be of service?”

  I feel a sudden knot of fear when I become aware of the interrogative syllable-raising at the end of my last sentence; but if Elsevier is listening, he apparently doesn’t consider this sufficient to constitute a question.

  Géraldine mops her bleary eyes with her scarf and straightens out.

  “Fuck,” she says philosophically. I nod my head in agreement.

  We sit in silence for a moment while I gather my thoughts. Géraldine seems lost in thought as well. And then, suddenly, she tenses.

  “What is it—one wonders.”

  She raises a finger to her lips. “We got company,” she says softly. With a finger, she directs my attention to the living room window, where a couple of icy blue–skinned Fairies in gleaming silver armour are making their way effortlessly over the snow.