I grip my knife as my stomach plunges. Oreo sits wrapped in a blanket against the back wall of the room. He's alive, and awake, but he looks ghastly. Gaunt and pale, with a look in his eyes like he's been through a war and back since we saw each other this morning. Throughout this whole conversation, he hasn't said a word. That in and of itself is the most telling part as far as I'm concerned.
"You're alive," I say, stating the obvious.
"Thanks to her."
I don't understand. Ditzy does, though, and whirls to face Ember. "So you can control it, too?"
Ember shrugs helplessly.
"Ember kept it from getting him," says Ditzy, to me.
"Not from getting," says Oreo with a grimace. "Just from taking over."
The Redding smell in the room. I try to discern where it's coming from. Most of the floor is dry, but there's a Redding-tinted stain in the corner of the carpet that glistens when the light catches it. It looks like someone puked there.
"And it didn't come back?" says Ditzy.
"It wants to." Ember looks weary. "But I think I gave him resistance to it."
There's a story here that we only have half of, and I need to know what happened. Ditzy beats me to it. "What did you tell it?" she says. "And how?"
"Something I uncovered in my 'crackpot Eldritch theories,'" says Oreo with the ghost of a smile. "That she pretended not to pay attention to at the time."
"Didn't you say it wasn't even Eldritch?" says Ember.
"Oh, so you were listening."
Ember looks prepared to throttle him. I didn't know these two were so close.
"Also, you didn't tell me you had such a good memory for language," murmurs Oreo. He rests his head against the wall. "Pretty sure I only said that one once. I'd have made more use of that brain of yours if I'd known."
"Pretty sure you just answered your own question. Now for the love of God, go to sleep before I have to carry you to the cot unconscious."
"I can't walk."
Ember sighs and returns to his side. I decide against offering to help. These two seem to be having a moment.
"Should I go back and tell the others?" whispers Ditzy, leaning close.
That will leave me alone here, outmatched in the event of a fight. My eyes drift to Ember. She helps Oreo figure out a way to keep the blanket on before pulling his arm around her shoulders and helping him to his feet. He really can't walk on his own. Whatever she did to save him from the Redding must have taken a lot out of him, because he looks ready to collapse by the time they reach a cot tucked in the back of the room. Ember lets him down just as gently.
I trust her.
"Yeah, go tell them to come," I say.
Ember looks up as Ditzy leaves the room, but says nothing. Just goes back to making sure Oreo is warm enough, comfortable enough, and not in need of anything before he settles down. He flakes out immediately. Ember returns to the desk like her steps weigh a hundred pounds apiece. She drops to the chair and rests her head in her hands.
I think I can piece together what happened now. Ember caught Oreo after the Redding got him but before it killed him, and drove it out again. Somehow. How she managed that without Morse code seems to have something to do with having a good memory for language, and that seems to have something to do with Oreo's theories. The crackpot Eldritch theories. Which might be neither crackpot nor Eldritch, but that's farther than I'm willing to speculate without more concrete information.
"I'll explain when your friends get here," says Ember without lifting her head.
I take the same seat I did when I first came to this office. The deja vu makes me twitch. The desk this time is just as cluttered as it was that night, and Ember is making no attempts to clear it. Nor is it resource planning on the papers anymore. The map of Cape Morgan peeks out from underneath, but on top of it are notebooks and loose sheets and pencils and newspaper clippings and newspapers with holes in them and at least one napkin decorated with strings of symbols that look suspiciously Kjóll. Old Kjóll. The language of the Eyjarskeggi people who took their boats and vanished from their polar islands two millennia ago for reasons we still don't understand.
A tingle runs up my spine. Islands. Old Kjóll is another ocean-adjacent language.
The back door screams. A moment later, Ditzy strides into the room with flail cocked and a look like she's ready to gut anyone who's laid a finger on me. There's no need, but it warms me inside anyway. Patrick and Calico J creep in after her. The only seat left is the couch along the back wall, so all three take it, two of them fidgeting. Ditzy lets her flail's spiked ball settle on the floor with a manifest clink.
Only then does Ember lift her head. She begins to shuffle through the desk-top mess, pulling out newspaper clippings in particular. She examines each in turn. The stack in her hand has grown to half an inch when she finally selects one larger than the rest and hands it to me. The others gather round.
Antarctic Eyjarskeggi Discovery Has Historians Baffled
"This is not a hoax," says lead archaeologist.
You know something's going to be good when it needs to qualify itself as not-a-hoax before the first paragraph has even started. And by "good," I mean, "This is probably the last thing I want to be involved with, but if it saves the world, I might not have a choice."
The article beneath the heading reads like the plot of a tomb-raider movie. Receding ice in Antarctica reveals evidence of human habitation. Human habitation should not be there. Investigators investigate, call the timeline ridiculous, but the ruins don't care, and go right on existing. Pragmatics call it a hoax. Conspiracy theorists call it aliens. And then, of course, someone reads a word they really aren't supposed to, and a curse befalls the world.
They found a whole Eyjarskeggi village on the wrong side of the globe, three centuries after those people vanished from their homeland. It had houses and middens and all the trappings of human habitation, estimated to have been there for the better part of two decades. Yet here too, the people simply disappeared. The village seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of an average day. Pots on fires, plates on tables, small coins left in a pot by the door. There were no bones anywhere.
Besides subsistence living, the only clue to the village's purpose was a ten-foot-wide, perfectly round stone plinth carved from the bedrock in the middle of it. On that plinth was a word in the same script. It's the point in the article where I'd expect a picture of the thing, but there isn't one. Just a line saying all photos were withheld from publication by authorities after the whole investigative team abruptly went silent.
I check the date of the discovery. It was fifteen years—to the day—before Red Thursday.
Fifteen years. If this has something to do with the Redding, the timeline baffles me. It's too long... or is it? We've already found Redding in canned food. It must have been in there at the time of canning, then lain dormant until it manifested when the Redding made its move. Redding came up through the basement of this very house, but the house has no connection to the municipal water system—only a well. That means the stuff reached it through the groundwater. That can also take years.
If this is connected to the Redding, its dormant form has been around as long as a decade and a half, slowly infiltrating wells, food, bodies, and every corner of society. Only when it reached saturation did it strike. No wonder the whole world went down simultaneously.
"Did it... did something attack them?" I say, looking up from the newspaper clipping. There aren't many other explanations for two dozen scientists going missing at the site of an event that may well have started the countdown on a Sleeper apocalypse.
"Depends who you ask," says Ember. She tips her head towards Oreo. "He thinks they woke something."
"Sounds reasonable," says Ditzy.
"Wait," says Calico J. "Woke something? Was the word on the plinth a name?"
A name. Woken by a name.
"That's what Oreo thinks," says Ember.
Ditzy's making the same stunned, revelatory face as I am. I stare at her until she looks up, and we lock eyes.
"That's it," says Patrick quietly. "That's what happened. Someone woke it when they said its name. And now it's..."
"Hungry," I say, because I was the one who spoke to the thing back up on the hill where it crawled up my arm without my noticing. Hungry, it said. Empty.
"So it's eating humans now, cool," says Ditzy, and though she tries to make light of it, her voice shakes. "Preserving them until it can walk them into a river like Psy."
"Can what like Psy?" says Ember.
We explain what we saw on our way here. Well, I explain it, because the other three all look a little like they're going to be sick, start screaming, or both.
"But it hasn't touched the actual Sleepers yet, has it?" says Calico J with a desperate note in his voice. He and I both have family we still care about, locked in Sleeping form. "Just the Sleepwalkers? The dead ones?"
"No idea," says Ember. "But I don't want to hang around to find out. By our best guess, yes, it was woken by its name. Which means it operates the same way as the Sleepers, just in reverse. The name is important, anyway. Oreo thinks we need it to shut the thing down again. And Meg, how do you know it's hungry?"
"I talked to it."
Ember doesn't respond to that for several seconds. Then she mutters something I don't catch and puts her head down, making finger-claws through her hair.
"It knows Morse code," says Patrick. He's remarkably calm for the situation. Which is to say not calm at all, but he's still here and talking, though he's gone almost as white as me. Given where our respective skin tones started, that's saying something. "She talked to it, and it started climbing up her arm. I drove it off again. It..." He looks to me for permission, and I nod. "Anyone who's immune and has the red patches can order it around."
"That explains a few things," says Ember.
"What did you say to save Oreo?" says Ditzy, her head tipped in what I'm pretty sure is genuine curiosity.
"Leave."
"No."
"No, that's what I said. I told it to leave." Ember groans. "Because that is the one word of Old Kjóll that I know, because I learned it from him"—Oreo again—"and he learned it from a movie or something. No, from that fucking Horror movie that Shoes and Triptych named this house after, because the murderer was possessed, so they made him speak in Old Kjóll because the scriptwriters couldn't be fucked to come up with a handful of gibberish. God, I hate that movie."
Ditzy giggles. "We'll have to organize a watch party after we save the world."
"I am really not in a joking mood at the moment."
"And I almost died two hours ago. I'm allowed to joke in an Eldritch-adjacent apocalypse when there's nothing else left to do but piss myself or break something."
That might be the most sane thing I've ever heard from Ditzy. From the dumbfounded look on Calico J's face, I'm not alone in that sentiment.
"How I deal with it is my problem," finishes Ditzy, and I kind of want to kiss her right here and now. Not that I ever haven't, but it's a lot harder to keep quiet about it when the end of humanity may well be upon us. Really puts things in perspective.
"So neither of you knows Old Kjóll?" says Calico J.
"I know one word," says Ember. "Oreo's translated anything he can get his hands on, so he's got a few more phrases lying around."
"Can he say any of them?"
"Only by estimation. Well, he knows how to say the ones from the movie, but that's mostly shit like, 'I want to kill you,' which I'm guessing isn't the most diplomatic of leads."
I groan. "So we've got two languages it knows, but we can't speak one, and we don't know its name in the other. Can we translate between them? Old Kjóll to the English alphabet?"
"Don't look at me," says Ember. "But probably?"
"Do we have its name at all?" says Calico J.
Ember starts to say something, then stops. A funny kind of look comes over her face. "No. But we might know where to find it."
"Where?"
"Oreo found the address and phone number of the head office of the research team that went to Antarctica. It's empty—they haven't replied to our calls or texts, and we've tried across multiple service providers to make sure it isn't a connection issue." The other unknown number on Vix's phone. The slip of paper in her pocket. "So it's not like anyone's going to stop us from breaking in."
There's a collective silence as everyone looks at everyone else around the room. Then, one by one, they all look at me.
"Really?" I say. "You don't need my word on this. Get the van. We're going."
Like this chapter if you also yelled at Meg to stop dithering about the kiss already (my own characters drive me crazy sometimes)
Comment if things are starting to make sense now! Or if they're not. All feedback is valuable to me 💕