Chapter 8 #3
“Nobody walks away,” Neera agreed. “But nobody is ever required to do it. We don’t strap people to the gurney and force the gift onto them.
Because it is a gift. However terrible, it is a gift.
We do not say, as you Colonials once did, Join or die.
You cannot walk away, because you cannot un-know what you know.
You will always share a world with this thing, that you can never, never talk about.
Because if you did, firstly: nobody would believe you.
And secondly, we would destroy you utterly, and your family, and your friends, and everything you cared about.
Because we take our secrecy very seriously. As you know.”
“And you think that’s enough, to keep me quiet? That threat?”
“I think you are very capable of understanding that there is nobody you can talk to who is not within our sphere of influence and there is nothing you can do that would place anybody or anything beyond our reach. And so you will remain quiet, and live out your short and gradually declining life in our shadow. But you will live.”
“Why?”
Neera laughed again. It was less charming the second time. “Because if you join us, I want it to be your choice. Not to escape the axe.”
I don’t believe her, Elena decided. If she said no, then she’d have an accident.
Her plane would go down, or a car would swerve, or there would be a botched robbery, or…
And now she was thinking, and it seemed that the world was so very full of ways that someone like her could cease being a problem to a family like the Enderboughs.
I don’t believe her. And yet she couldn’t know.
Which meant, of course, that in the end Neera got her wish.
The choice had, by the slenderest of threads, become a real one, and not mere duress.
“What could I do?” she asked. Somewhat apropos of nothing, but Neera’s thoughts had tracked hers, step by step.
“Found a hospital. Buy an island. Sponsor a prize for aspiring young medics. Name your own research budget. Kick a few politicians into going carbon neutral. The big things involve negotiation with the other dynasties, obviously, but you would be one of us. You’d have a voice.
You could do good, for a given value of good.
Or not. I mean, mostly they don’t, if I’m brutally honest. But if I take myself as an example, what I’ve been able to achieve behind closed doors would have blown the minds of any number of Nobel Prize judges.
I have done, and will continue to do, what is important to me.
Because of what this curse allows me to do. ”
“And yet you call it a curse.”
Neera gestured at the book, at the mounted specimen on the wall.
“There is a short story by an American author,” she said, “about a place that has every advantage but one, and the one drawback is that its prosperity is founded on a vile immorality that continues year on year. The story is about those who walk away, because that cost is too great. We are the ones who didn’t walk away, Miss Mendes. Now, what is your decision?”
Later on, they brought Ross in again. So that he could see her.
She could only imagine the fuss he’d been making in the interim.
Convinced, no doubt, that his family would have done away with her, disposed of the body, fed her to the cicadas so that they could grow big and strong, enter their final instars, copulate and produce their precious eggs.
And it was a reasonable hypothesis, on Ross’s part.
Even excepting Uncle Jeff’s overactive trigger finger, the Enderboughs hadn’t exactly shown themselves to be paragons of honour or virtue.
But here she was, still alive, and he embraced her with a kind of mad incredulity, and she held him back, coolly, feeling the distance.
And she watched the others. Gilchrist, Neera, the sourly hungover Uncle Jas.
If she hadn’t guessed already, she’d have known then.
It was written on their faces quite clearly: it was Ross they were hiding things from, not her.
With his back to them, they were an open book.
But she knew already. Because however flattering the praise from Neera might be, especially with that extra timbre to the woman’s voice that cut straight through to the subconscious and did—whatever it did, that had greased the Enderboughs’ way through history…
However nice it might be to have the woman tell her how clever she was, that was never going to be all of it.
Elena Mendes, medical student at Johns Hopkins, was never going to be that important, in and of herself, not to them.
And Ross released her, held her at arm’s length, blinked, said, “I thought they’d…
” and then, “I thought they were going to…” Blinked.
Cocked his head on one side, the way he did when he hadn’t quite heard something properly but was too polite to actually say so.
Well brought-up boy that he was. “I thought…” he said uncertainly.
His eyes strayed to the bandage obscuring the hollow of her throat, the soft depression between the collarbones, above the ridges of the trachea.
It was easier, Neera had said, with women.
The laryngeal prominence was smaller and didn’t get in the way.
And, of course, they didn’t just leave things to nature.
No Gigeresque ovipositor involved. A neat, clean procedure once the eggs had been harvested from gravid females.
Whilst, across the grounds, the husks of spent males would be lying on their backs, legs curled in, their part in the business done.
Godfrey’s beast—the one they’d smashed—had been a male, Neera said. No great loss, she’d added with a derisive snort.
“I thought…” Ross repeated, and put just a sliver of distance between them. Just a few inches, that were like plate glass and restraining orders.
She met his gaze levelly. She owed him that.
He had no bandage beneath his shirt, yet.
He’d been holding out, refusing to be a part of the monster circus, disowning his family, making such threats!
She wondered what threats, how far he’d gone, what earthly powers he’d vowed to bring down on them all.
Past Ross’s shoulder, she met the cold, stern gaze of Gilchrist Enderbough, and he nodded to her, ever so slightly.
“You didn’t,” Ross said. In those two words was all that he’d thought of her, her virtue and her moral fibre and her human worth, as opposed to the inward-turned venality of his own origins.
“For you,” she said. Nobody had coached her, so just as well she’d already read the room.
And it had been for him, as far as Gilchrist and Neera were concerned.
Because she was the sticking point for him, and now she was part of the family, inducted into the traditions, part of the secret.
Which meant his last reason for refusing them evaporated.
Except for just basic decency and morality and not wanting to have anything to do with the whole hideous business.
But she knew Ross. He didn’t deal in imponderables in that way.
His focus was always on small things, individual people.
She was the symbol of what he was fighting for, like some sacred relic.
And now the relic was in the hands of the enemy and the garrison would surrender soon enough.
“For you,” she tried again. “Because what would you do, if you walked away?” And although the egg would barely have hatched, and though what would hatch would be nothing but a grub the size of her finger-joint, she already felt a thrum of assurance through her.
Assurance that the world would move when and how she wanted it to move, that people would make way for her, that every worry she’d ever had about money or family, health, failure was just a thing that happened to other people now.
And she had promised herself that she would change things, continue Neera’s work, pare away the horror from what they were, find alternatives to stakes in the woods and staff who never served at the same table twice.
Just because they were monsters didn’t mean they had to be quite so monstrous.
And, even as she swore those things in the sanctity of her own head, she knew she was already equivocating.
That she had been given a casket filled with cursed and bloodstained treasure, and was plunging her arms in up to the elbows.
“It’s fine,” she told him. “It’s for the best.” And he nodded, as she knew he would, uncertainly at first and then more firmly. All the cognitive dissonance that had been eating him alive ebbing away, the rift in their family slowly suturing shut. With her on the inside, encysted like an insect.