CHAPTER 18
She stumbled in the wake of a blur dressed in green, over sun-streaked cobbles and around tourist groups.
Shops and colleges flashed by, a jostle of bicycles and shopping bags bruising her thighs as they pushed across Scholar’s Road.
She could see nothing of her rescuer but the outline of a curly beard and a whorl of dark hair.
Then the ground sloped, and Emma had to watch her footing.
The Sister’s boots seemed determined to trip her at every step. Finally, the stranger’s pace slowed.
When she next looked up, it was to a familiar view.
The river, its banks stirring with winter-browned bracken.
The water shone in the dying light, flinging back reflections of bridges and colleges.
Emma dropped the stranger’s hand and stepped forward into a wash of warmth.
At the river’s edge, there were no more buildings to stand between them and the last of the westerly sun.
She tipped up her face and breathed slowly, until the sear in her chest and tremble in her legs faded.
“And the lady is saved. The beast cannot follow us into the sunlight. We have enough of that here.”
Emma turned to find the owner of the velvet voice standing behind her, along with a forest-green tunic and a face made for mischief.
He scraped a bow that managed to be elegant and impertinent at once.
“My lady. The Court is all agog to see you, and here am I”—he caught Emma’s hand and lifted it to his lips—“stealing that first honor.” He twitched expressive black brows.
Emma suspected he was making fun of her, but it was hard to be cross with anyone so merry-looking. Under walnut skin, his cheeks glowed robin red. A little black beard sprouted from his chin, curling upward. When he smiled, his eyes turned up at the edges too.
“Who are you?”
“Just a well-wisher and a stranger. A mysterious, handsome stranger,” he corrected himself, all hopeful innocence.
Emma eyed his clothing. No human had worn anything of the kind for several centuries.
But Emma’s mind had begun to admit—under mounting pressure from the evidence of the last few hours—that the man-shaped being before her might well not be human.
She peered closer at his green velvet tunic, noting the tree embroidered across the chest.
“You’re… a messenger of the Night City,” she guessed. “Like the other. You wear the same tunic.”
The stranger feigned shock. What? Me? Then he tipped her a wink.
“Quite right. You’ve rumbled me. I am but a humble messenger, not a dashing young courtier fit to win the heart of a lady like yourself. Although I might be a lord in disguise?” he tried.
Emma pressed a shaking hand to her temple. Nothing made sense anymore. Least of all this conversation.
“Why did you run from your Court summons, by the way?” the stranger went on. “It was a most original reaction.”
“How do you know what I was running from?”
He laughed. “Come. When you fled a City messenger, the alarm spread to all of us at the City’s disposal. It is why that beast was sent after you. Not many would resist an invitation to Court.”
“I wanted to go home.”
“Home? You weren’t likely to find that among a pack of mortals—” He looked at her face. “Ah. You come from mortal stock, do you? I was born in the Night City. I sometimes forget that there are other ways into our realm. What a jewel of resourcefulness you are.”
He put his head on one side to study her. “How did you manage it? Are you a spellworker? A scholar?”
The sense of unreality washed over Emma again.
This stranger spoke as though she belonged to some other world, just as the Sister had.
As though the familiar town around her, the colleges and libraries, the bicycles clattering over the cobbles, was some mortal realm she no longer had any part in.
It had not escaped her, the name they had both used, with such a similar mixture of pride and fear. The Night City.
“I’m not either of those things. I am—”
What was she? A name, whirling through space. A collection of memories: a mother’s hands scented with rosemary, a friend declaiming poetry over coffee, a tower room littered with tables of figures…
“I’m—a scientist,” she finished with wonder. In a sea of wavering memories, it was reassuring to find something about herself that felt certain.
“How unusual,” the stranger said, sounding delighted.
The sun was lower in the sky than she liked, the shadows like deep bruises. It was too easy to imagine a dark shape looming, and the outline of cruel tusks.
“Could we move? A little? The sunlight’s going.”
“Even my charm cannot halt nightfall, my lady. Much as I weep at my shortcomings.”
“But that monster—”
“Will walk easier as the shadows grow stronger, yes. But I think we may be cunning enough to evade him.” Eyes crinkling with mischief, he offered Emma his arm. “Come, O beauteous fugitive. It would be my honor to escort you to safety.”
They waded through undergrowth until the riverside wall of Beaufort College loomed above them.
It was overgrown with swathes of wisteria, pulsing and pale in the gathering dusk.
The stranger heaved aside a swag of vines to uncover a door.
The fleshy scent of the wisteria rolled thick into Emma’s throat, and her head swam with it.
As she passed through the door, she seemed to see strange lights play across the flowers.
For a crazed moment, she thought of nothing but drawing closer to those lights, of stretching her tongue to the sweet heady secrets at the base of those flowers.
“Come now, lady.”
The stranger’s hand on her arm was firm. He towed her away through the Beaufort College gardens. Emma shook her head, clearing the scent. What was her tongue doing outside her mouth? She tucked it away.
“Should they be—doing that? The flowers?”
The lights were still pulsing over the wisteria. She could hear the hum of desire in her mind. Her tongue crept toward her lips.
The stranger spared a glance over his shoulder. “Far be it from me to deny any pleasure of yours, O star among ladies. But there are other enchantments more worth your time.”
“Enchantments?”
“That one being more suited to insects and bats.”
“But—enchantments?”
“Oh yes.” He opened a panel carved into the college wall and bowed her through. “At the fading of the sun, it is not just the monsters that have free rein of the streets. With the dark, the beauties of the Night City also come into their own.”
The messenger led her through an earthen passageway and opened an answering panel at the end. Emma stepped out. They had cut through to the corner between Granville College and the Senate House.
Dusk had fallen on the cobbled streets. But above, a strange light shifted across the walls of the colleges and faculty buildings, climbing and swaying like something alive. It was as though the northern lights had fallen from the sky and come to rest in the stones.
Emma watched the play of pinks and greens in awe. “I’ve never seen anything so—beautiful. It’s strange, I always felt something was here. In the streets, the buildings. Calling me, almost. The University’s famous for it, that feeling. But I couldn’t have imagined this. This light…”
“The Night City sits upon the mortal city like a veil of shadow. They share the same streets but not the same qualities. This light is but one of our beauties. You did not see it when you were mortal?”
Emma shook her head. Then unease flashed through her mind. He had spoken of her mortal self in the past tense. As something gone. And for the first time, she had not argued with the idea. Not even in her head. When had she crossed that invisible threshold?
As they passed Granville College, the statue that guarded its gate—a griffin rampant, with furled wings—moved one stony claw to its nose and gave it a good scratch. Beside it, a group of students strolled on with no sign of having seen.
“That never happened before,” Emma said emphatically.
“The statues are all such fidgets. I had no idea mortal senses were so dulled.”
“How does it work, that glow? I wish I could study it.” She swiped her fingers across the college wall. The glow did not rub off. Instead, it fled her touch. “Fascinating. Is it bioluminescent? Like an algae of some kind, or—”
“I hate to disturb, lady. But the beast on your trail is still loose.”
“Oh.” Emma wiped her fingers on her skirt and hurried after him. “So the Night City is like… a layer? On top of the normal city?”
“Beneath it, more like. The mortals who built these streets did so under instruction from the Night City, little though they knew it. And we have pockets all our own, where no mortals can walk.”
Somebody collided with Emma. “Sorry, clumsy of me. Cool outfit—you going to the vampire party at Wessex?”
A freckled girl grinned up at her. She was wearing a hockey hoodie, with a laptop bag slung over one shoulder.
She was also, unmistakably, from the mortal world.
Unlike the students in the Gabriel dining hall, this one clearly realized Emma existed.
The messenger smiled at the girl and nudged Emma on.
Emma tugged him back. “But—she saw me.”
“What did you expect?”
“Nobody else did, earlier.”
“Ah, but observe. That was in daylight. Now it is dark. Humans can see the folk of our world in the night hours, if we take the trouble to make them. We mostly choose to slip past unnoticed. We do not appear in their gaze as strongly as those of their own world, even in the shadow hours.”
Emma filed that away. Another group passed, this time with cloaks and gowns that trailed the pavement.
Stubby horns peered from the curls of one figure.
Another wore an amethyst gown and a carnival mask.
Emma’s first thought was that they must be students in fancy dress, going to the party the freckled girl mentioned.
Then the gowned figure laughed, and Emma realized that she wore no carnival mask.
A gull’s beak truly sat across the lower half of her face, where a human mouth and nose would be.
“Now, those folk are of our own realm,” the messenger whispered.
“You don’t say,” Emma replied with deadly irony.
They passed an arch where a statue screamed with outstretched arms. Emma watched the statue yawn, shake out her wrists, and return to her pose. She turned to the messenger to remark on it, but he was no longer there. Strangely, he was lounging in a doorway far across the street.
“Well, lady mine, I leave you here,” he called.
“You leave me… but this is the middle of nowhere.”
“Ah. So it is.”
The darkness pressed around her. “But—what about the monster?”
“Ah, the monster.” The messenger’s teeth gleamed in the dark. “I’d suggest you run. That way.”
He pointed to a column of light beneath the screaming statue.
“But what—”
Emma turned back. The shadows were empty. He was gone.
Alone in the dark, Emma tried to steel her shaking legs.
A sound from the far end of the street made her decision.
Not waiting to see if it was the grunt of a boar-man or simply a passing car, she sprinted for the strip of light.
Just as she was close enough to see that the light came from an open doorway, her borrowed boots tripped her.
She clutched for the doorframe and missed, sprawling into the space beyond.
And the door swung shut behind her.