I hardly pay attention as we run, and when he falls I know he must have been stumbling and tripping all the way. I lift him, somehow, his hair against my face smells like smoke and his body rattles loosely against me, dragging me back and down. I don’t know how long I go for, time is like a dream, I flick from one moment to the next, running on roads, fields, there are trees, light dipping over the edge of the world. Someone behind me, I run and I do not know how, somehow they are no longer there and I seem stranger and stranger still, as though someone else is driving me while I sit and watch without understanding. I wake and he is pressed against me, sleeping still, and when I try and get him to move he won’t, drained away into nothing but stillness and recovery. I don’t know where I am and it’s dark and the air is wet and heavy around us, hair and clothes damp and stuck to my face, my body, the ground beneath me is soft and cool. I feel tired, inconceivably tired, like nothing I have ever felt, when I move my eyes everything drifts slowly in and out of focus, moving behind my vision as though the world is tired as well. Too tired to get up and move, I stay with the weary, dripping, quiet world in my eyes and against my back and my sleeping, empty brother against my chest.

I don’t see him approach, his face is suddenly in mine. I see through the haze, green eyes, or grey, and dark hair around his face. There are dark rings beneath his eyes, do I look as bad as him? I feel as though I know him, the light touches him in the same way it touches my brother, it shifts around him here as though it is uneasy. He speaks, his lips move but I can’t hear what he says and I can’t reply, I have no energy to do anything but watch and sit and breathe. He touches a hand to Jass’ neck, two fingers on his jaw, against his lips, and then he waves in front of my eyes, his mouth moving as he talks. I hear the sound but it’s deep and I can’t understand it, as though it has been slowed down. He drifts out of focus and in again, I hold Jass tight against me. I am not afraid of him but I don’t know why I’m not afraid of him. My body feels stretched and squeezed all at once, my head full of bubbles. Darkness crawls into my vision from the outside in until all there is left is a pinprick of light that flickers dully and flashes out. I am aware for a moment of spinning, of my senses being lifted into the air, and then I am gone again.

Riy had been sitting in the shower for too long, the water had turned cold and her skin was left goose-pimpled, her lips blue, red hair turned dark by the water. She was trying to remember him, through the distance of days and drink-distorted imperfect memory, and found that she couldn’t. She couldn’t see his face in her mind, and the words echoing back from their brief conversation were distant and senseless. The rain of cold water made her head chatter but not clear, her thoughts remained just out of reach, twisting out of her grip whenever she got too close. He had said he had known someone, someone she didn’t remember and didn’t know now, but at the time she had felt she understood what he had meant, understood his loss. But then, the whole city was saturated with loss, the air was thick with it. That was it then, she had just been in this place too long, lingering because of a half remembered connection to this building, this neighbourhood, the city walls dampening her mind, suffocating her intelligence. Maybe it was time to get out of the city for a while, see the countryside again, or what was left of it. Wrapped in a towel, she studied herself in the bathroom mirror, did she really recognise herself? Maybe she didn’t remember what she had looked like before, how would she know what had changed? She was impossibly cold. Had she paid her heating bills? She didn’t know. She stared herself in the eyes and spoke out loud.

“What is going on with you?” she felt ridiculous, and pulled a sickened face, which was returned right back to her. “I’m going insane.”

She dressed in loose fitting trousers and shirt, wrapped her feet in warm socks and sat in the middle of the floor, legs crossed, eyes closed. Forcing her mind to empty, to drift on the inhale and exhale of breath and nothing more. It was a skill she must have learned somewhere, she found she could lose hours this way, wake up disoriented in the dark when she had closed her eyes in the morning. She felt the twittering of thought as a distant murmur, and with an effort of will flung herself back to the rain, to the neon of the bar, the smoke and dull, bass-heavy music. Faces remained blank, even his face, voices an undertone to the music, combining and twisting in the air. It felt like she was underwater, moving painfully slowly and clumsily. She saw herself, a brightness in the dim light, and swam through the thick air. He was there, it must be him, a misty swirl of a person, and she struggled to hear his words. On some deep, unconscious level she knew this was much harder than it should have been. His voice sounded distorted, like a bad recording, but the words formed in the air before her, written in cigarette smoke letters, the smell of leather and oil and alcohol. A name, twisting slowly into obscurity.

She was knocked out of her meditation hard, as though someone had taken hold of her hair and jerked her backwards. She sat, blinking and stunned in the light, and then scrabbled desperately for the pen and paper she had laid out in front of her, scratching the word in heavy strokes and capital letters, GRACE. She sat and stared at it, and realised in a dull way that the paper she was staring at already had something written on it, smudged beneath her own writing, “remember me,” she turned it over, her mouth opening in shock and confusion, there it was, his name written in plain typed letters and a number beneath it. How could she have forgotten this? It had been there, right before her, only the day before. A kind of shuddering horror gripped her, and she stayed still and frozen on hands and knees, gripping the little card. He had told her, plainly, everything she needed. His name, his number, and Grace. Grace. Who was Grace? She knew she didn’t know any one called Grace, but still there was some recognition there, a nagging annoyance that she couldn’t quite ignore, something buried beneath layers of memory. She realised it was actually painful to think about it, as though scar tissue was being ripped away, her head throbbed with it, the room darkening around the edges and blindingly returning again over and over. She covered her eyes with her hands, pressed her head into the floor, thoughts buzzing agonisingly and continuously.

Lan had just opened the door to leave his apartment when he was stopped by a hand on his arm and a little squeak of surprise. He turned to see the woman from the Marshall place, Angie, one hand stretched out to protect her and the other wrapped nervously around her stomach. She looked nervous and embarrassed, her fingers were twisting with distress and she was chewing her lip. Lan growled with frustration – it had taken him more than a few deep breaths to get him to open that door and set out, suddenly he was derailed.

“What are you doing here?”
“Um...” Angie’s expression was genuinely frightened and Lan forced his voice to soften, to squash his annoyance for a moment, just to stop her from looking at him like he was dangerous and horrifying.

“Sorry, look...I don’t have time. I have to go out.”
“But...” Angie took a little step towards him as he tried to get past her, the big black bag hung over his arm banged against her thighs and made her stagger a little. “Those men...” she managed, forced back to let him past. “Please, I don’t have anywhere to go. Some men came by, to the Marshalls. They were smashing things up, and you said...it might not be safe.”

Lan stopped, standing still with his back to her. Who else could have been looking into the apartment?

“What did they look like?”

“There were only two guys...I looked through the peep hole in my apartment door.”

“Just two guys? Were they armed?” he asked her, turning now to look at her face. She nodded quickly in reply.

“Yeah, pretty scary looking. A redhead and another guy with longer hair. I never saw them before... but they freaked me out, it sounds weird...”

“They made the air feel funny?”
She opened her eyes a little wider, stared at him.

“How did you know that?”
“It’s really hard to explain,” Lan told her, “just go in there and lock the door behind you. I have to go out, I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Right?” She looked crestfallen.
“Let me go with you,” she pleaded, still not moving out of his way. “I can’t stay here on my own.”
Lan knew that was out of the question, a ridiculous idea, what would he do with her in a dangerous situation? He didn’t know, he pushed her aside, strode past and down the stairs.

“It’s much more dangerous where I’m going,” he said quietly, “stay here, lock the door, and don’t answer unless it’s me.”

He didn’t turn to look back at her, but he heard the door close slowly and the inside lock click into place. He smiled grimly, if he hadn’t been so terrified he would have felt cool and hard like a powerful hero in an action film. Instead, he just felt alone and fearful, the very idea of rescuing Dreyan from that place was impossible. His office was a thirty minute walk away, he took a tram using a counterfeit ticket but every second that passed felt like an ebbing of life. He twisted his hands in his lap as he sat on the hard plastic seat, glancing nervously around at the other passengers. There weren’t many, it was late and no one went out much at night since the war. Probably it was just out of habit. For years no one could go out at night because of the curfew, the fear of attacks in the dark, and now three years had passed and no one could get that fear out of their heads. How long would it go on, Lan wondered, how long before we return to normal? Maybe other people would, but Lan knew on some unconscious level that now he would never be normal again, he would never go out drinking at night without fearing the explosions, the screaming burning people and the terrible, clinical clean up afterwards. The sight of government containment areas had all but disappeared, and it seemed amazing to him that they had let them keep most of the city cornered off for all that time when there was no reason for it that anyone could see. But Lan had known the truth, he had known what those containment areas were really for and that’s what had made him dangerous.

He got off the tram and ran the few feet to his office, opened the rattling old door and stopped. There was something wrong here. Lan had never been clairvoyant, although Grace had sometimes said he was, laughing at his instinctive intuition. Mostly, Lan had feelings about things, and mostly they were bad. This place felt different, the air was moving and the dust that settled on the floor was scuffed and made his nose itch. He moved cautiously then, lowering his bag onto the ground in the hallway slowly and creeping through the piles of boxes and papers to the door that opened into his own small room. He peered through the keyhole, regretting now that he had not locked the door, to see only darkness. He caught his breath, gritted his teeth and smashed the door open. There was no one there, only a flurry of paper towards him. The little room was a disaster, worse even than how he had left it. His boxes were emptied out and crushed, papers were strewn around the floor, crumpled underfoot. Lan gaped, panic rising up from his stomach to his throat, the research! He threw himself through the mess to the little computer terminal in the corner and pressed the power button desperately over and over again, but nothing happened. Someone had ripped out the insides of his computer, the accumulation of the last few years of his life that written on the hard drive was conspicuously missing, wires spilling out of the system like internal organs. Lan felt gutted himself, as though someone had reached into his chest and taken handfuls of his soft flesh and tugged it out. He sat down on the floor. He needed that system to find Dreyan, he needed it to uncover the secrets that were being held from everyone, to overturn the system. He felt as though he had lost his cause.

His phone rang in his pocket, bleating too loud in the miserable silence that Lan had fallen into.
“Drey!” Lan found himself shouting into the phone. “They’ve taken everything, it’s all gone. I can’t trace you, you have to find where you are.”
“Shit.” Dreyan’s voice was much calmer now, cold and tight and controlled. “I can’t get out of here. We’re underground I think but there’s a little window high up, I can stick my head by it and there’s coverage but I wouldn’t fit through. “
“What do you mean we? Who’s we?”
“Uhm,” a pause, a whispered conversation. “Me and the kids.”
“You found the kids?” Excitement rose now, spilling through the pain in his gut and making his head buzz. “Jesus, this is brilliant. We’ve got to get you out of there. Who’s keeping you?”
“Don’t ask me, I didn’t see anything. I was out of it. Listen, find Riy.”
“I can’t, I don’t know how to get through to her. That’s a stupid idea. Isn’t there anyone else you know? Someone must owe you a favour. What about that guy from the coffee shop?” Lan regretted mentioning him almost as soon as he said it. Dreyan’s voice sounded muffled and strange as he answered.
“No, no, look, he can’t help us now. Just trust me, find her, she’s stronger than you think. I don’t know when they’re coming back for us, Lan. Find her. There’s a bar I know, past Duke Street, there’s neon lights but I don’t know the name. She might be there.”
The phone beeped as Dreyan disconnected and Lan glared at it, then glared around his ruined office. He left, locking the door this time, too late, and took another tram.

The end of Duke Street was a miserable place, dark and still damp from the rains. A lingering smell of drains hung in the air like a kind of Victorian smog. It had been an industrial district a long time ago, before all the industry there had been destroyed and the bars and seedy clubs had taken over. There were a few places with neon lights in the windows, none of them very promising. Lan had to remind himself that Riy wasn’t the same as she had been before, that she probably had different opinions on alcohol consumption for example, or the company she kept. He felt that Riy drunk would be a terrible thing to witness, but then again who knew what this new Riy would be like drunk or sober. It was an impossible thing to get used to. It took him three tries, the first two places offering him nothing more than threatening glances. In the third bar he saw her almost straight away, she was leaning against the bar with a bottle in one hand, watching the door nervously. She caught his eye as he entered, narrowing her eyes in confusion before turning away. He strode straight towards her. Dreyan had told him once that these things took subtlety. When he had wanted to talk to Riy straight away, to tell her everything that had happened and force her to remember what had happened, he had refused to even consider it.

“She has to remember on her own,” he had said, “otherwise it won’t work, it’ll be ruined.”
Lan decided there just wasn’t enough time for that. He strode over to her, determined not to let Dreyan’s warning stop him. He was deep in concentration, going over in his head what he would say to her when a hand on his arm pulled him round. He recognised scars, an expression of intense fury, and then something hit him hard on the side of the head and lights blazed and swirled in front of his eyes.