The Migration E-Book

Helen Marshall

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 418

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Creepy and atmospheric, evocative of Stephen King's classic Pet Sematary, The Migration is a story of sisterhood, transformation, and the limitations of love, from a thrilling new voice in Canadian fiction. When I was younger I didn't know a thing about death. I thought it meant stillness, a body gone limp. A marionette with its strings cut. Death was like a long vacation – a going away. Storms and flooding are worsening around the world, and a mysterious immune disorder has begun to afflict the young. Sophie Perella is about to begin her senior year of high school in Toronto when her little sister, Kira, is diagnosed. Their parents' marriage falters under the strain, and Sophie's mother takes the girls to Oxford, England, to live with their Aunt Irene. An Oxford University professor and historical epidemiologist obsessed with relics of the Black Death, Irene works with a centre that specializes in treating people with the illness. She is a friend to Sophie, and offers a window into a strange and ancient history of human plague and recovery. Sophie just wants to understand what's happening now; but as mortality rates climb, and reports emerge of bodily tremors in the deceased, it becomes clear there is nothing normal about this condition – and that the dead aren't staying dead. When Kira succumbs, Sophie faces an unimaginable choice: let go of the sister she knows, or take action to embrace something terrifying and new.   Tender and chilling, unsettling and hopeful, The Migration is a story of a young woman's dawning awareness of mortality and the power of the human heart to thrive in cataclysmic circumstances.

Leseprobe

Contents

BEFORE

ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

TWO

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

THREE

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

AFTER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE FOR THE MIGRATION

“Intelligent, dark, wildly inventive, The Migration does more than put a new twist on the apocalyptic outbreak novel. It dares to be full of heart and full of difficult, defiant hope.”

PAUL TREMBLAY, AUTHOR OF THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

“This beautifully written fictional blend of biology, history, and the human heart is a clear-eyed, clean-limbed parable of change – a blazing emblem of the transcendent power of hope.”

NICOLA GRIFFITH, AUTHOR OF THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD TRILOGY

“A dark fable that somehow feels both timeless and urgently topical.”

M.R. CAREY, AUTHOR OF THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

PRAISE FOR GIFTS FOR THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER

“Helen Marshall is one of my favorite living writers. Her elegant, grotesque stories are best encountered like this, gathered together in a book and in conversation with each other; only then can you appreciate the staggering variety of her imagination. This is life, in all its beauty and sorrow.”

NATHAN BALLINGRUD, AUTHOR OF NORTH AMERICAN LAKE MONSTERS

“In turns chilling, heart-wrenching and uplifting. Marshall has a way with words that makes even the most peculiar seem possible.”

KAARON WARREN, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THROUGH SPLINTERED WALLS

PRAISE FOR HAIR SIDE, FLESH SIDE

“Sometimes a book comes along that is so original, so vibrantly alive, so beautifully imagined and so much a law unto itself that the only comment or advice a reviewer can offer is to say: go read it.”

NINA ALLAN, AUTHOR OF THE DOLLMAKER

“Stories subtle and unsettling: Helen Marshall clothes the uncanny in new flesh and then makes it bleed.”

KELLY LINK, AUTHOR OF PRETTY MONSTERS AND STRANGER THINGS HAPPEN

The Migration

Print edition ISBN: 9781789091342

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091359

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: March 2019

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2019 Helen Marshall. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For Laura.

For a while now, Duck had had a feeling.

“Who are you? What are you up to, creeping along behind me?”

“Good,” said Death, “you finally noticed me.”

Wolf Erlbruch, Duck, Death and the Tulip

BEFORE

When I was younger, I used to play dead.

That was back before I knew what dead meant—what it really meant. But when you’re a kid you play at things you don’t understand. You play doctor. You play house. At ten I didn’t know a thing about death. I thought it meant stillness, a body gone limp. A marionette with its strings cut. Death was like a long vacation—a going away.

Mom was pregnant with Kira when my golden retriever, Knick-Knack, got hit by a Buick speeding down Dupont Street. I was six years old, in first grade, still getting used to whole days away from home. Afterward Mom said it was lucky it happened on a school day, lucky I wasn’t around.

Lucky, she said, but it wasn’t. Knick-Knack was my responsibility. There had been long talks before we got him, Dad on his knees, eye-level, saying: “I know you want him, Feef, but he’s a living thing. You’re going to have to take care of him.” And so for two months I had walked Knick-Knack around the block, Mom holding my hand, me holding the leash. I brushed his coat, wiped thick black gunk from his eyes, and slid my hand into the silky white curls that covered his belly. I let him slink onto my bed, his head low, when the crash of thunder left him shaking.

But even when Mom sat me down at the kitchen table with a glass of water to tell me what had happened, her round belly pressing against her cotton dress and me in my navy Hudson College jacket and tie, knee-high socks rolled down to my ankles because it was a warm September and my legs got so itchy in the heat, I still didn’t really understand. What it meant for something to die. Dad never cried much, and the day Knick-Knack died, he was true to form, no waterworks. He’s a tough guy, Dad is, poker-faced. But he kept rubbing his sleeve against his chin. His gaze wandered toward the half-empty dog bowl, the leash hanging from a hook next to the door. I don’t know if he hugged me—maybe he did.

By the time I was older, I understood more of the way the world worked, but it still wasn’t real dead I was playing at. It was something else. Something mysterious and deliciously terrifying. Like kissing a boy for the first time.

This is what I remember about the last time I played: late summer, the morning thick with humidity. A storm was coming and the air had that eerie electrical charge that made the hairs on the back of your arm stand up. Murky blue light streamed through the filter of my curtain.

The house on Dupont was old but gorgeous, a beautiful, nineteenth-century bay-and-gable with two-and-a-half stories of red brick. A bedroom each for Kira and me, mine in the attic where the steep roof came to a point above me. Skeleton beams all musty and sweet-smelling.

I pulled up the covers snugly around my neck, halfway in and out of sleep. The grandfather clock chimed from downstairs. Bong, bong, bong. Back then the chiming was a part of what it meant to be home. I loved listening to it in the morning. Counting out the hours until everyone else came awake, thumbing through the books Aunt Irene had sent me from England where she lived now. The Ladybird Book of British History, all those complicated family squabbles spilling into death, the rise and fall of the nation. A complete set of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, which must have come from a used bookstore because some other girl had scrawled her name on the inside covers. I loved those stories for their strangeness. They offered a vision of somewhere else, the past opening up like a fairy tale, filled with wondrous happenings, signs and portents.

But that morning I wasn’t reading. My eyes were shut, my breath shallow. “I’m dead,” I whispered to myself. Outside the window grackles and robins and chickadees hummed above the traffic sounds of the Annex waking up. They felt so close, like they were nesting in the attic with me. The air was full of light, movement, the anticipation of things to come.

And then I heard Kira, three years old, toddling on her pudgy legs. She opened my bedroom door a crack. “Sleeping, Soff?” she asked. I didn’t answer, not right away. I listened to her feet padding across the carpet, waited to feel her finger hovering right above my forehead. And then, like a butterfly landing, the nail scraping gently between my eyebrows.

“No, Kiki, I’m playing dead.”

Kira was seven years younger than me, Mom and Dad’s darling—their stopgap measure against a divorce that loomed on the horizon even back then. Kira didn’t fix things but she bought us all time together. Time for me to grow up. It wasn’t Kira’s fault that she couldn’t build a bridge between my parents. She was beloved regardless.

I felt the bedsprings give way as she climbed up and slid her feet beneath the covers. She curled into me and whispered into my ear so that the little hairs moved: “I gonna play dead too, Soff.”

I couldn’t help smiling, my lips twitching though they weren’t supposed to. Kira’s hair was a cloud of velvety down against my cheek. She smelled of milk and soap. She snuggled up, warm like a hot water bottle, and placed her ear against my ribcage. I tried to slow my breathing but I knew my heart was still beating a loud thumpa-thumpa-thumpa.

“Soff, am I dead?”

“No, Kiki-bird, the dead don’t talk.”

“Why?”

“Because they can’t breathe anymore. You need air to talk.”

“Oh.” She thought. “Like fish?”

“Not like fish.”

“Last night, Soff, um, I was an octopus. We were underwater and everything was blue. You were a fish, and Daddy was a fish, but I didn’t eat any of you.” She brought her palms up to her face to hide her giggles.

“I’m glad you didn’t eat us.”

“I wouldn’t eat you!”

Her knees tucked into my side. Her toenails touching my thigh through the thin fabric of the pyjamas. “What’s being dead like?” she asked me.

“I don’t really know, Kiki.”

“I play too,” she whispered.

And we lay together, side by side. My breath went in and her head rose gently. It was the first time I let Kira play dead with me, and somehow it made things different. I’d been imagining a kind of passage, crawling through darkness into a very bright light where everything was new and beautiful. But with Kira beside me all I could think of was Knick-Knack’s empty bowl, the hole in our lives he had left behind.

I remember how Kira looked that morning. Her long eyelashes and her clear blue eyes hovering on the edge of grey. A smattering of freckles around her nose. Her face so like my own, but smaller, rounded in baby fat. I didn’t want her to play dead with me.

“Everything born will pass away,” Mom had told me when Knick-Knack died. “Sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s scary but that’s just the way the world works.” It frightened me to think that everything I knew would one day be gone. I didn’t want to see Kira as still as that so I ran my fingers over the ticklish bit of her tummy until she squirmed. “Read me a story, Soff,” she begged when I finally let her go.

***

I miss the house in Toronto. I miss how my life was before everything changed.

Last August—just before the start of my senior year—Kira caught the chickenpox. Half her friends had it but she was the only one left dizzy. The light from the window bothered her. Her hands shook when she tried to turn the page of her book. A week later she collapsed.

The doctor at the intensive care unit said she’d had an episode—that was what he called it. He was handsome in a craggy-faced way, the hair at his temples threaded with grey. In a calm voice he told us her immune system had gone into overdrive and was attacking her brain. Kira stayed in the hospital for weeks. After they released her she was prone to bursts of temper, violent fits. She would start to cry for no reason.

There were more tests. Protein electrophoresis. Something to do with her cerebrospinal fluid. They didn’t know what the results meant. Then two of her friends developed the same symptoms. The school year resumed with a strange air of dread and quiet, everyone glassy-eyed, some wearing face masks, others wiping their hands again and again with antimicrobial gels. But Kira never went back.

Mrs. Burnett told me in one of the counselling sessions Mom recommended that sometimes a stressful event can bring a family together. The shock jolts you out of bad patterns. But it hasn’t been like that for us. When Mom said we were going to live with Aunt Irene, a professor in the Faculty of History, for a while in Oxford where there were better doctors, I knew Dad wouldn’t be coming. They both said it was temporary but I guessed that was only for Kira’s sake. Mom had always been there for us while Dad was away at the office. He had been more of a spectator to our lives. He’d make special appearances on the weekends, serve us breakfast, take us to the zoo once in a while. I’m not surprised he couldn’t take it.

Lately I’ve been telling myself stories about our life in Toronto, trying to fix my memories in place. It’s not easy though. Memory is a tricky thing. It isn’t a ruler, a hard, straight line for measuring the past, the passage of days, months, years. Memory doesn’t work the way my old grade school history books do. It isn’t neat and tidy. It’s more like murmurs, voices whispering in the darkness. Aunt Irene told me that was how the monks used to remember things. They would whisper the words to themselves over and over again, fixing images, sentences, whole histories in their minds so they wouldn’t be forgotten. Memor. Murmure. The meanings of the words are intertwined.

A long time ago I used to play dead. Back then I wanted to keep death near me, to imagine what it might be like. Not Death with the robes black as midnight carrying a mirror-bright scythe. Not the death in monster stories, a hand that grabs you in the night. But the feeling of rest after a long journey.

But ever since Kira got sick I’ve been thinking about things differently. Death is a doorway and I don’t want to know what’s on the other side.

ONE

The powers of creation come into violent collision; the sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterraneous thunders; the mist of overflowing waters, are the harbingers of destruction. Nature is not satisfied with the ordinary alterations of life and death, and the destroying angel waves over man and beast his flaming sword.

Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker, “General Observations,”The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century

1

The episodes always begin the same way, with a strange look in Kira’s eyes and that twist of her mouth. Everyone says they’re a symptom of her condition, an intermittent twinge of paralysis. “Watch for changes,” Mom said, “but don’t be afraid. Just write it down, record everything.”

It’s early January now, a month since we arrived in England. Christmas was a blur of torn paper and scraps of twirled ribbon. Gifts grabbed last-minute from Oxfam to replace things we left behind.

And now this. Aunt Irene has driven us out to Bunkers Hill, a little nothing stretch of road twenty minutes north of where we live. Kira’s wearing oversized rubber boots, the thinness of her body hidden by a waterproof jacket, her small hands in ratty purple mittens. She trudges gracelessly ahead of us on the opposite side of the road. It’s just the three of us today, Mom absent again because of another meeting with the specialists at the Centre where she’s been taking Kira for treatment. When she left this morning I could tell she wasn’t expecting good news.

So we’re still doing our best at make-believe. Aunt Irene suggested a trip to the countryside, and here we are—just outside Oxford, a place I’d only heard about in stories. I’m surrounded by a tangle of green, gappy hedgerows of hawthorn and blackberry scrub. My aunt has been pointing out features of the new landscape to us: early blooming irises, nettle husks that still sting if you brush them with bare hands, jack snipes, chaffinches, all the other birds I don’t recognize yet. The air is milder than it would be back in Toronto this time of year, the wind more like breath. Flowers in January.

On the right is a row of terrace houses, most of them showing signs of abandonment. In front of me an inflatable snowman lists to the side, sagging and dingy. A walnut tree has dropped a branch as thick as my wrist into a tangle of clothes line. Just before Christmas the River Cherwell broke its banks and flooded this area, prompting a temporary evacuation. The water has drained into ditches and culverts but most of the families still haven’t come back. Maybe they never will.

Storms have been worsening everywhere. In the airport before we left Mom couldn’t tear her eyes away from the monitors, watching the presenters go on and on about the devastation. All over England, rivers have been breaking their banks, or trying to, only held in check by levees and diversion canals. Whole villages in the south have vanished and in Wales the flooding has stripped away the peat, leaving behind ancient animal bones—bears, red deer and aurochs, things that have been extinct for hundreds of years.

“Do you really think it’ll be better for us in England?” I’d wanted to know.

“It’s for your sister, Feef,” she’d said tiredly. “Your aunt said they’ll be able to help her. And it’s only for a little while.”

Kira coughs hoarsely into her fist, another sign of trouble, and her medical ID bracelet jingles. She showed it off like it was a charm bracelet when her clinician first gave it to her, twisting it this way and that in the light. Now she usually keeps it hidden. KIRA PERELLA – JUVENILE IDIOPATHIC IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME.

“Should we go back?” Aunt Irene asks. There’s a muscle over her left eye that starts to jump when she’s worried. Mom has the same twitch.

I shake my head, watching Kira. “Let’s wait.”

Kira plods along the road, stiff-kneed, ignoring us. She sets one foot in front of the other, walking an imaginary tightrope, toe pointed. Then she points to her right, squinting into the distance. “What’s that?”

Through the tangle of hedges and brown brambles I see what caught Kira’s attention. The silhouette of a tower, at least a hundred feet tall, jutting into the sky. “Well spotted,” Aunt Irene says, smiling. “That’s the old Cherwell cement works. It’s been empty for a good while now. That was the chimney, I think? There used to be all sorts of other machinery around it, and flues for separating the hot gases from the kilns. You can just see the quarry lake from here. I imagine it’s drenched down there right now. I used to…” She shades her eyes with her hands. “There was a man I knew who worked at that site, a quarry engineer who sometimes did freelance work assessing dig sites for the School of Archaeology. We went for walks around here.”

A trace of emotion crosses her face but I don’t say anything. I always used to ask Mom about her life before I was born, old boyfriends, how things were when she was my age. Not so much now.

Before Kira got sick all I could talk about was university. I spent late nights at Jaina Heymann’s place, she and I flipping through course catalogues together, looking at media studies or English, maybe journalism. It all seemed within easy reach. Now there’s a painful squeeze in my chest when I think about how my future was supposed to be. Mom’s trawling for a sixth form college here that will take me at short notice. A whole new system with A-level exams in the late spring I’ll need to pass.

I take a breath and let it out slowly but the ache is still there.

“I thought it was, you know, like a castle. Mom said there would be castles around here.” Kira stares at the tower, tugging off her mittens.

“Not here, Kiki,” I tell her. “She just meant in England.”

Her grey eyes narrow. “She said here.”

“I’ll show you a castle,” Aunt Irene says. “In the summer we can all go to Warwickshire. There’s a proper castle near where your cousins live, much older. The cement works was built in the twenties.” She grins at me conspiratorially. I like her like this.

If Mom’s around Aunt Irene is different, more careful—with Kira especially. I don’t think she’s used to kids anymore. Before Kira was born, she took a sabbatical year in Toronto and she visited us all the time. I still remember her distracted kindness, the beat-up guitar she gave me when she thought I might be musical, her encouragement even when the lessons didn’t take. She was always reading, and she infected me with her love of stories. If she was sitting at the breakfast table she’d read the ingredients on the Rice Krispies box aloud. It used to drive Dad crazy.

I keep quiet. I love the smell of damp stones and moss, the minty musk of nettles. Ivy crawls over every surface, trees and fences and brickwork. All these houses will disappear eventually and no one will miss them. For some reason it feels good to me, being in a place so close to being forgotten.

“Promise?”

A horn from a distant riverboat sounds and all at once the sky is filled with birds.

“Starlings,” Aunt Irene cries out. “Look!”

They take to the air making a fantastic noise. Where did they come from? I hadn’t seen them on the trees, or I hadn’t understood what they were. Just leaves, dead things.

Kira fumbles for my hand. There are moments like this when everything feels the way it used to. I glance at her and she smiles, a brief resurgence of her old self. The strange look in her eyes is gone and I wonder if maybe I imagined it. Still, she’s pale and a blue vein glows at her temple.

“Hey now, kiddo.” I give her hand a squeeze. “How’re you holding up?”

Her eyes are still fixed on the birds, watching the flock twist itself into complicated patterns and ghostly shapes, almost recognizable.

“Maybe it’s time to go home,” she says.

Home. I wish it were as easy as that.

2

It’s just past five when Aunt Irene pulls her Renault into the driveway. Her house—our house—stands at the eastern edge of Osney, a wedge of barely-island just outside Oxford town, circled by the Thames and its offshoot tributaries. The river footpath runs along the side of the house to the southeast, criss-crossing the waterways down to Christ Church Meadow, a popular gathering place for the students from the Colleges.

Kira’s nodded off in the back seat. She only stirs a little when Aunt Irene opens the door and unbuckles her.

“Want me to carry you upstairs?” She’s too big but I ask anyway, backsliding into how it was between us when she was younger. All the medical tests and treatments have made her wary of being touched.

“I can walk,” she yawns.

Where the Thames flows past the house, thickset men in fluorescent vests are laying sandbags down in case of another storm. “Hullo, my duck!” one of them says to Kira, his vowels slippery and rolling. She smiles shyly and offers a little wave.

“Will we sound like that one day, Soff” she murmurs to me as Aunt Irene fiddles with the keys on the step. Kira tries on their accent: “Hulloo, me durrck!”

“Maybe. Would you want that?” Mom’s already got a lilt in her voice I don’t recognize. She’s starting to sound more and more like Aunt Irene, which I guess is how she used to sound before she moved to Toronto before I was born.

“Nuh-uh. No way.”

Inside we all struggle to find somewhere to dump our things. There are coats and backpacks hung on the knob of the banister or piled with the muddy boots next to the front door. Aunt Irene wasn’t used to having company much before us. So many things are broken in the house: the kitchen clock, half the electrical sockets. The lower right-hand corner of my bedroom window has a thick crack running through it that lets in the cold. “That’s just how it is here,” Mom says if I complain. In Toronto Dad wanted our home to be immaculate. But I like how this place seems to say, “There are more important things to be worrying about.”

Mom appears in the doorway to the kitchen. “How was it?” She looks worn down, but weirdly it makes her seem more glamorous. She has the striking features you see in certain old paintings, cheekbones made for candlelight, her hair a shade darker than mine, chocolate with hints of copper. She’s beautiful in a way that makes it difficult for people to like her, the wrong combination of fragility and hardness. But where Mom is lithe and elegant I take after Aunt Irene: square, compact shoulders and narrow hips.

“Okay,” I tell her, “but there was—”

“Nothing happened.” Kira’s glaring at me. I decide to hold off until she’s out of earshot.

“How was the Centre? Any news, Char?” Aunt Irene asks as she steps out of her mud-splattered boots.

Kira rolls her eyes. She hates people talking about her. “Going upstairs,” she announces and clumps her way up to our bedroom. We share a big room upstairs, a barely insulated extension over the garage that Aunt Irene was using as an office before we arrived. My bed is mounted on an interior balcony I have to climb a ladder to reach while Kira’s is tucked underneath, an old wire-framed twin that looks like it came from a charity shop.

Mom shrugs and makes a sign for us both to come into the kitchen where Kira won’t hear. “Nothing definitive. Not yet anyway. But Dr. Varghese wants to meet with Sophie after we visit Cherwell College tomorrow.” She glances over at me. “Would you mind terribly, Feef? She says it might help for the two of you to get to know each other.”

“Whatever’s best.” I hate visiting hospitals but I know it’ll be easier on Mom if I suck it up.

“Good girl.” Mom kisses the top of my head.

***

Aunt Irene offers to work from home the next day so she can watch Kira while Mom drives me around.

“Most of the students in Cherwell College will be ahead of you,” explains one of the teachers, Mr. Coomes, for the umpteenth time in my interview. “You’ll have to work hard if you want to catch up.” He has sharply parted hair, glossy black streaked with white like a badger’s. He reminds me of the men from Dad’s office: that clipped way of speaking, the musky smell of cologne.

I grit my teeth and smile for him. “I know. But I don’t mind the challenge.”

Mom’s quick to say how smart I am, how she doesn’t think I’ll have any difficulty with the reading load. He quirks an eyebrow at me and all I can do is nod while he shows us around. We brush past a group of uniformed girls my age who glance at me without interest. They look identical: red lipstick and too-heavy mascara. Like old-fashioned pin-up models.

Pod people, Jaina used to call kids like that.

When the tour is over Mr. Coomes hesitates before taking my outstretched hand.

“I do hope your sister feels better. Our Centre, I hear, is very good for people with her condition.” Our situation was explained before we arrived, offered as a kind of apology. I’m getting used to it. Before I can respond Mom’s taking the registration forms from him and hurrying me out into the parking lot.

“God, what an ass. I forgot how condescending people can be over here,” she says when we’re back in the car.

“He was all right.” It’s the fourth place we’ve been to but the only one willing to take me at short notice. If I don’t start now I won’t be able to take the exams in the spring and that could mean putting off university for a whole year.

“You could imagine going there?”

“The other students seemed nice,” I lie.

“There are other schools in some of the nearby towns that might have spaces open…”

“We can register tomorrow,” I tell her.

We head west along the high street, passing Brasenose College and the heavy iron gates of the exam schools. As I watch a gaggle of the older students heading toward the Bodleian Library, I feel a twinge of envy. I want that to be me next year.

***

Perched at the top of Headington Hill sits the John Radcliffe Hospital, a massive complex of grey brick and glass.

“Last stop, I promise,” says Mom as she leads me toward one of the side entrances. “We won’t be long.” From the parking lot I have a stellar view of Oxford. I can make out the spires of the Colleges in the distance to the southwest. To the north is a load of prefab pop-up wards, and beyond that, the countryside, rolling hills sketched out in yellowy green and brown.

This is the part of the day I’ve been dreading. Mom and Kira have been here once a week since we moved back in December but it’s my first visit. I wouldn’t have come if I had a choice.

The hospital has chipped blue-green walls that make you feel like you’re underwater, slightly rubberized flooring that turns your footsteps noiseless. The same depressing aura as hospitals we’d been to in Toronto. The JI2 Centre’s new wing is an annexation of the old blood donor ward. They haven’t taken down the old signs. There’s something desperate about the whole operation. All the on-duty nurses have the same burnt-out look, as if they’ve been running triple shifts. There are loads of volunteers in dark blue smocks and posters asking for more to help out at all hours.

“Something wrong?” Mom asks me.

“I guess I thought it’d be shiny and new. Space-aged.” I try not to let me disappointment show.

“They’re really good with Kira, you’ll see—and they’ve just opened a new set of wards.”

Knowing they’re expanding doesn’t calm the swimmy feeling in my stomach. It just means they haven’t found a solution yet and more kids are getting sick.

“Come on you, Dr. Varghese is waiting.”

We check in at reception and find the office we’re looking for, and a slight, dark-haired woman answers Mom’s knock. Back home I got used to meeting different kinds of doctors: the chummy ones who pretended I was their best friend, the sympathetic ones, and the ones so focused on Kira they barely saw me. I try to size up Dr. Varghese but she doesn’t match any of these. For one, she’s a good six inches shorter than I am and maybe ten years older. So, young for a doctor, and pretty too. She looks me in the eye when she introduces herself. “You must be Sophie. You know you have your mother’s eyes, you and Kira both. But then you must be used to hearing that!”

She offers us seats in her office. The room is spare except for a couple of framed photographs.

“Your mother and I thought it would be a good idea for us to meet properly. I’m your sister’s clinician—her primary carer here at the Centre. I know this must be stressful for you.”

“She’s been managing it really well, haven’t you, Feef?” Mom chimes in.

Dr. Varghese smiles. “Let’s start with what you know about your sister’s condition.”

I rap my fingers against my knee. “I know something’s wrong with her immune system. That she gets sleepy more easily and restless sometimes. That if she gets sick then JI2 can make it much worse.”

“That’s the gist of it. It took us a while to identify Juvenile Idiopathic Immunodeficiency Syndrome as a single condition because the first cases presented in different ways, as clusters of seemingly unconnected symptoms. ‘Immunodeficiency’ means the body doesn’t fight diseases and infections the way it’s supposed to, so sometimes blood doesn’t clot properly or the immune system can attack healthy cells. Health problems—even common ones—can be much more dangerous.”

“I still don’t understand what’s causing it.”

“That’s what ‘idiopathic’ means. It doesn’t seem to be a virus or a bacterium.”

“I’ve heard it’s spreading though.”

Dr. Varghese sucks in a breath. “Yes, well, that’s true. Over thirty thousand cases have been documented in Britain alone.” Mom’s eyes widen. It’s more than either of us had heard.

“What are the recovery rates?” I’m testing her. No one’s given me a straight answer so far.

“It’s too early to tell.”

I grimace.

“Patients with the condition have a statistically higher rate of mortality within the first four months of diagnosis but—listen, Sophie, the numbers never tell the whole story. They aren’t a prediction. And we’ve made some major breakthroughs in the last few weeks.”

“Like what?” I’ve read dozens of online summaries that all say the same thing: we don’t know what it is. But Dr. Varghese surprises me again. While Mom listens, nodding from time to time, she explains to me that they’ve identified a special hormone in the bloodstream of patients like Kira. “It seems to be manufactured by the thyroid, we think, in addition to thyroxin, which plays an important role in all sorts of body functions, like digestion and brain development and bone growth. The hormone interferes in some of those processes. It can disrupt body temperature, blood pressure and clotting, which is one of the reasons your sister’s immune system is compromised.” When she sees the look on my face she changes tack. “We call it a ‘juvenile’ syndrome because it only seems to affect young people. We suspect it has something to do with the changes the body goes through in puberty.”

“I’ve heard of kids older than me getting it.”

“Most of the changes in your body are over by the time you’re seventeen or eighteen but some go on after that. The prefrontal cortex, which handles all sorts of complex processes like reasoning and memory, continues to develop into your early twenties.”

“So Kira may grow out of it?” I ask hopefully.

Mom squeezes my hand again but Dr. Varghese’s smile is restrained. “We think so. But with your mother’s help—and yours as well—her condition should be manageable.”

She stands and walks toward a large cabinet and she comes back with a small plastic device that looks like a tuning fork with a screen on it. “This is a HemaPen. It’s based on insulin monitors so it’s non-invasive. We’ll use it to track Kira’s hormone levels.”

She hands it to me. It looks jury-rigged, as if it was pounded out in shop class yesterday. Heavier than I expected. She takes it back and turns it over, lightly flicking a sensor on its base. Then she slides its two prongs around either side of her index finger. “Like this. It should only take a second.” The machine makes a crackling sound and flashes green. “It’ll automatically send the results to us. I want you to keep an eye on your sister and let me know if you spot anything out of the ordinary—even if you don’t think it’s important. You may see something I can’t.”

“Sophie’s amazing with her,” Mom pipes up, nudging me with her elbow. “The best.”

***

When we get home Aunt Irene is in the kitchen starting on dinner. She doesn’t cook much and with all the flooding it’s been difficult to get fresh ingredients. All signs point to another night of pasta and red sauce.

“Go check on Kira, will you?” Mom hands me the box with the HemaPen inside. “God knows I’m not her favourite person right now.”

“I can try.”

I find her asleep in the loft. She’s an inert comma beneath the sheets, head turned away from me.

“Kira?”

She twists around, giving me the hairy eyeball when she catches sight of what I’ve got. “Will it hurt?” Not what is it. She knows what it is, or close enough. It bothers me how used to the idea of being tested she’s become.

“Just slide it between your fingers.”

She presents her palm to me so I can help her, then yanks it away when I press the button. “Ouch!”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just cold?”

“It hurt.”

She buries her head in the pillow. A minute later the HemaPen begins to crackle softly. “Anything else I should record?” I ask. There’s a logbook on her bedside table to track her symptoms.

A mumbled “nuh-uh.”

“Please? I’ll take you to the pub for pudding.”

She pulls the pillow away. “Say ‘dessert,’ Soff.”

“I like saying ‘pudding.’” I nudge her foot. “Now you, enough stalling, pudding or no pudding?”

“Fiiine.” She tugs at a lock of long white-blond hair. The strands look frayed at their ends. “Out of breath, um, weakness in the right leg. Tiredness…”

“Scale of one to ten?”

She tucks the hair between her teeth and slicks it to a point. “Eight.”

“Pain?”

“Hmm.” She’s fading. I write down what she’s said and put the logbook back next to the HemaPen.

The faint sound of snores. Her face has gone smooth, slack, vulnerable.

I let out a breath, suddenly unsettled by the distance I’ve travelled from Toronto to here. My eyes slide over Aunt Irene’s old shelves, still crammed so tightly with her books they creak whenever I try to prise one out. Reference tomes on the Middle Ages alongside old science fiction paperbacks like The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, which I remember reading in the ninth grade. It’s something at least. I had to leave most of my books at home.

She must have been in here during the afternoon. One book sticks out crookedly and I pull it free, glancing at the title. A Little Book for the Pestilence. It’s old and sweet-smelling like musty vanilla. The glue has weakened and a frail sheet flutters to the ground, the heading inked in a heavy, monastic-looking copperplate. In like wise, as Avicenna says in his fourth book, by the air above the bodies beneath may be infected.

The cryptic words remind me of an old copy of the I Ching that belonged to Jaina’s hippy-dippy mother. She loved crystals, burning sage and incense, ley lines and ouija boards. “Every part of the world touches every other part,” she used to tell us, clad in a long, loose-fitting skirt redolent of sandalwood. When Jaina and I were alone we’d laugh about it but we let her read our fortunes. “The gentle wind roams the earth. The superior person expands her sphere of influence as she expands her awareness,” she would intone.

I turn the page over but behind me Kira stirs on the bed, her voice guttural and indistinct, coming from somewhere deep in her chest. As I slide the page back into the book, the HemaPen stops its processes with a low blip. Numbers in a neutral dark grey scroll across its display panel but I have no idea what they might mean.

***

After spending most of the day in bed Kira gets up for dinner and won’t settle until I take her along the canal to see the houseboats. They’re as exotic as gypsy caravans, lacquered in deep purple, oxblood, navy, russet, pink and gold. Kira loves the potted plants and lawn chairs laid out on the roofs.

“One day,” she tells me, “I’m gonna live in a boat just like that. What’s the ocean between here and home again?”

“The Atlantic.”

Dreamily: “Yeah. I’m going to sail across the Atlantic. You can come too, I guess.”

“You think we’d both fit?”

“I’d fit but you might have a problem, porky.”

It’s not until well past ten that she finally nods off. I decide to get a start on the syllabus Mr. Coomes gave me. Aunt Irene has piled some of the books from the list on the corner of my bed. I curl up under the covers and begin working my way through The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s a strange partial autobiography of a distraught woman locked in a sick room:

For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

There’s a narcotic flow to the words as the narrator’s world contracts down to a tiny room she can’t escape. I lose myself in the story until the buzz of my tablet interrupts me with a message from Jaina.

Jayhey04: u there soff? got sumthing to show u. u’ll wanna see it. Promise.

There’s a hot itch of worry in my palms, the back of my knees. I dog-ear my page and set the book down.

We used to message daily, but I haven’t been in touch for a while now. The signal’s been on and off since the substation blew during the last storm. There are rolling brownouts to reduce the load until things are repaired. Resources are stretched thin everywhere.

FeeFeesFeed: Im here.

Jayhey04: u seen it yet? Pls tell me u saw it!

A link hovers at the bottom of the message, but I don’t click on it, not immediately. There are a load of forums devoted to JI2. Some tracking news reports, others spinning off into conjecture and conspiracy theory. Jaina’s been a regular on most of them, ever since Kira got sick. The first time she invited me to one, I lurked for a couple of days, tracking threads about the infection rates in India and China. I finally figured out the users were mostly rubberneckers, chasing disaster. I didn’t much like the idea that Jaina was one of them.

I toy with the idea of putting the tablet away, going back to my homework. I want to see how it ends, what the woman will discover in the strange sickly wallpaper of her room. But I know Jaina will badger me with messages until I give in.

FeeFeesFeed: hold on

When I click on the link, the page opens to a news video. A shaky mobile camera with a smooth voice-over talking about a kid named Liam Barrett. I can make out a small crowd of people and, beyond them, the expanse of the ocean, grey the colour of wet ash, its surface frothed with whiteheads. Clouds scud the horizon.

Liam Barrett was on a ferry off the coast of Vancouver when tragedy struck…

The footage must be from one of the other passengers because at first it focuses on a twenty-something girl waving to the camera. Behind her is a freckly kid a year or two older than Kira with a mop of blond curls peeking out from under a fur-lined trapper hat, leaning against the railing of the boat next to his dad. He’s pointing at something in the distance—a pod of dolphins? The camera zooms past him to try to focus on the sleek shapes, diving in and out of the water. Then the angle shifts and a woman is shouting, incoherent. The kid is on the railing, both arms lifted. The shot jerks and blurs, snatches a slice of clouded sky as the boat crashes into a wave and whoever is holding it loses control for a moment. When it refocuses, he’s gone.

FeeFeesFeed: i dont get it. Wht happened?

Jayhey04: did u watch it all?

A hard cut to the newsroom. The host and her partner have adopted chatty tones, like this is breakfast TV fodder, despite the serious glances they sometimes gives the camera. “Liam Barrett’s father has confirmed that his son was JI2 positive. His body was taken to St. Paul’s Hospital shortly after where the so-called jitterbug video was taken.”

FeeFeesFeed: jitterbug?

Jayhey04: its gone viral now, check it out

Another link then, with over twelve million hits. This video is clearer, a still point of reference rather than the jerky-cam style on the boat. No audio. It shows a clinical-looking room, bright lights that flare, blanking the image with white. There’s the same kid laid out on a steel table. The curly hair and still, pale face. It takes me a moment to understand. He’s dead, and this is his autopsy.

The camera trained on him wobbles. Someone must be holding it.

Jayhey04: u watching?

How could this be posted? Notifications flash at the bottom of the screen, more comments. The views are racking up.

Then I see it: his right leg has begun to hop. It’s barely noticeable at first, the way your leg might twitch if you had a bad spasm. “Shhh …” says a voice. “There it is. It’s happening again.” A blurry hand appears in front of the lens, pointing. A moment later Liam Barrett’s left leg jumps. Then his whole body starts to rock as if he’s having a fit.

Jesus Jesus Jesus. My heart is beating wildly. What am I watching?

FeeFeesFeed: what is it??

Jayhey04: CBC says its some sort of lazarus reflex but who knows?

I type “JI2” and “lazarus reflex” into my search bar, my hands shaking. The first page in my feed is a Globe and Mail article from an hour ago.

PHAC denies that JI2 is linked to post-mortem tremors

TORONTO – Vancouver’s deputy chief medical health officer said yesterday the province was investigating protocols after an anonymous video taken by a nurse was released of a boy’s body suffering what have been called post-mortem tremors.

Liam Barrett, aged twelve, was diagnosed two months ago with Juvenile Idiopathic Immunodeficiency Syndrome (JI2). His is the fourth confirmed death to be labelled as an accident in recent weeks. The case is being investigated by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg but officials deny there is a link to JI2.

Most doctors attribute the strange phenomenon to the so-called Lazarus reflex, which causes brain-dead patients to briefly raise their arms. Barrett, they believe, may have been improperly confirmed as deceased. The phenomenon is named after the biblical figure Lazarus of Bethany, whom Jesus allegedly raised from the dead in the Gospel of John.

But others have suggested a different explanation.

Dr. Eliseo Gilabert, the coroner who certified Barrett’s death, said: “Liam Barrett was clinically dead, yet his body showed signs of enough cellular energy for certain genes to become active. All we can say is that JI2 seems to be inducing biological processes we still don’t fully understand. It’s time the medical community started talking about this openly.”

I try to digest this. Has Mom seen it? Aunt Irene?

I switch off the tablet. I don’t want to see any more videos or hear Jaina’s crazy theories, not when it’s my sister who’s sick. I swing myself down from the bed. Kira is still asleep, hair mussed. I crouch down next to her and touch her shoulder. After a moment she stirs, pushes my hand away. One sleepy eye opens.

“What’s wrong?” she grouses. It’s even colder in here at night. I can see the goosebumps on her exposed arm.

“Nothing.” I want to bundle her up in my arms.

“You’re making a worried face.”

“No, I’m not.” I pinch her, an old reflex from when she was healthy and didn’t bruise so badly. But she squeals, tries to tickle me back though I can keep her arms pinned to the pillow without much effort.

“Soff, don’t!” she says in that voice that always used to mean, yes, keep going. “I’ll kick your butt!” But after a second or two she scowls. “Just stop, okay?” She slumps back and pulls the covers up around her neck.

3

It’s clear from the nervous energy in the house the next morning that Mom and Aunt Irene have both heard about Liam Barrett. When I leave Kira asleep upstairs I find Mom curled up on the couch with her sketchpad, fingers blackened with charcoal, drawing meaningless patterns on the page. Something about the shape of them reminds me of The Yellow Wallpaper.

Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.

Aunt Irene is near the refrigerator, sniffing at a carton of milk. “Power went off again,” she says, lips curled. “This is no good. Happy with toast?”

The bread is stale and neither of us trusts the butter not to have spoiled so we have the toast plain, both of us standing close to the stove. The heat is enough to keep the small space warm despite the chill rolling off the river.

“Leave her for now,” Aunt Irene says when my gaze drifts back to the sitting room. “She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She’s pretty upset.”

I shrug, try on an adult tone: “Kira’s okay, though. She’ll be fine.” I can hear my own false confidence.

Aunt Irene wipes the crumbs from the counter into her hand. “Your mum wants to take her in to the Centre today.”

I munch on the dry toast, swallow then ask, “Will you tell her? Kira, I mean? About the video?”

“Should we?”

I let the thought roll around in my mind. Liam Barrett on the table, his skin pale and bloodless. Then the twitch of his nerveless muscles. The image fills my mind like a dark cloud.