“Olek,” I said. “Get the fuck out. Right now.”

He didn’t say a word. Just pushed himself upright against the wood panelling, turned and walked out the door. Remshi closed it behind him. His power thudded in my blood. I loved it. In one of Jake’s journals it said: Some men desire weak women. No women desire weak men. Hardly any men understand this, though it’s the most useful truth they could possess.

I pulled on my jeans and boots.

Without a word he came to me and scooped me up in his arms. (The filament-ghost, strengthened by Olek’s interruption and the memory of Jake’s observation, flashed An Officer and a Gentleman, but that was all right. There was room for laughter. There was room for the real. There was room for everything. That came off him, too, that living was the attempt to find room for everything.) All our movements were revelled in by the space around us. The window was open. It was a twenty-five-foot drop from the ledge to the garden. It was nothing.

84

WE TOOK THE BMW 4×4 he and the others had arrived in. He drove. Randomly, as far as I could tell. The tarmac road that led to Olek’s, then lefts and rights on narrower lanes and tracks that took us into a series of tough-grassed, low-lying hills. We passed a plantation of some sort, though I couldn’t make out the odour of the crop. “Tea” my idiot American assumed. In the same way she assumed “jungle” every time the trees and undergrowth thickened. We couldn’t have seen more than a dozen buildings, all small dwellings with orange fire or blueish TV light framed in their doors and windows. There was nothing of the sunset left. One thin, rucked band of cloud lay close to the horizon, but above it the stars were out, the big diagram of remote delight.

I think he knew. That I wasn’t her. Or that I wasn’t straightforwardly her. Not the way he’d imagined. It was why we couldn’t speak to each other. The reality now was that there was a momentum at work whether I was her or not.

It was there, between us, that either way this was happening, this was going to happen. He was fascinated, compelled, uncertain of everything except that there was no turning away from this, whatever its ambiguities. I had internal clamour. The crowd of shut-out questions were pounding on the doors. But the expanding moment held them shut. When we looked at each other we smiled. There was still something—the confusion of my identity in his head—preventing him coming to me, fully. It was as if I were surrounded by a skin of soundproof glass. But when we touched—he put his hand on mine, once, while he drove, then had to whip it back to the wheel to compensate for a pothole jolt—the memory of the blurred moments in the room was live and warm in both of us. I felt my life—my children, Walker, the pack, even the ghost of Jake—curving down and away from me, like a planet seen from a spacecraft, shrinking in the wake of terrible acceleration. But there was dark joy in the loss, too, an appalling glimpse of the genuine transience of lives, tiny scraps of paper igniting for a split-second in the void’s cold invisible flame—then gone. Millions. Billions. It was his sense of time. It radiated from him. I thought: He can’t live like this all the time—can he? With this perspective? He can’t, surely, live with all he’s seen?

Twenty thousand years, you think you’ve seen it all.

They’d been his first words to me, in Alaska, the night I gave birth.

Olek’s judgement of the cure for the Curse came back, too: but really … I mean, really—it’s risible. Exactly risible.

And yet here we were. He’d been in my dreams for two years. He’d eaten away at the thing for Walker that was so close to being love. He’d reopened the question of whether there wasn’t, after all, a story at work. Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all, Lu. There isn’t one. When I tried to see forward, past this night, this now, it was impossible, produced instead of any vision of the future (going home, abandoning home, killing myself, curing my children, raising a werewolf army) a pleasant feeling of indifference, a darkness you could lean against like a fevered child leans against a cool surface. Being like this, close to him, was a koan of deep calm and near grotesque excitement. The excitement went beyond sex, though there was no arguing with my cunt, which was still wet, which still ached. (For him. Specifically for him.) It was the excitement of being part of an inevitability. It was knowing there was no other way than to let this become whatever it was going to become. It was a liberation.

We stopped.

The invisible coercive choreographer took us out of the car and fifty paces up a gentle hill of dry grass crowned with neem and peepal trees. Even the very slight movement of the air was enough to make them simmer. The constellations were huge and benignly indifferent. They’d smile in the same way (who knew if not me?) had we come up here for murder instead of love.

85

WHEREOF ONE CANNOT speak, thereof one must remain silent.

Except we can’t remain silent. That’s the real curse.

I remember—I distinctly remember—taking our clothes off. Not each other’s. I remember undressing myself and every action feeling like …

Like what?

Like it wasn’t happening in time. That it had always been happening. That it would always be happening.

I remember—not distinctly—spreading the clothes to lie on.

I remember—this is the last thing I can be sure of—his mouth and the weight of him on me. And thinking: Where’s the ground?

After that there’s only the going into and coming out of darkness. Like a slow heartbeat. Systole and diastole.

In the darkness there’s nothing.

Out of it there’s only joy.

No. That’s not right.

I remember something else.

I remember that at the end—an end that every time we approached it gave us the gift of moving a little further away, so that the pleasure had to keep growing into it, until any further would have been a kind of grief, at which point it yielded itself, and my body came back to me bringing all the bliss the universe had been saving for just this moment, just this one point where the finite met the infinite—at this paradoxical end of unbearable sweetness something went from him into me, and I knew I would never be the same again.

86

Justine

I SLEPT LATE. Hours late. God only knows why. The feed when I shouldn’t have, maybe. I knew as soon as I opened my eyes he wasn’t here, though I checked the lab anyway. Mia and Caleb were gone, too. I raced upstairs.