Chiu contemplates this for a moment, then his face flickers with relief. He sits and I experience another one of those moments where I’m surprised by how young he is. Farah sits too, cross-legged with her hands on her knees. She smooths back a strand of hair, wraps her arms around her stomach.
Chiu lets out a shivering breath. “This calls for a game of Uno.”
THIRTY-TWO
We’re exhausted, but we play anyway and then we sit for a long time, until the sky starts to turn sooty with the onset of night. It doesn’t change gradually like it does in the ordinary world. It changes in discrete steps, one minute it’s a particular shade of turbid grey, the next, it’s another. Somehow, you never see it change. You blink, or you look away, and the colour of the sky becomes different.
The darkening, starless dome recedes, becoming more impossibly vast with each step. I’m caught by a sudden insight, a vision of myself: a flicker, a guttering candle, an astonishingly small moment. Darkness before and darkness after.
I blink and the feeling is gone. The brain is like that, I think. It’s attuned to notice change and proportion. If you close your eyes and hold a penny in one hand and ten pence in the other, you can tell the difference; but if you hold a brick in one hand and a brick with ten pence on it in the other, you can’t. If you spend your life locked in your room, then going to the shops is, proportionately, terrifying; but if you feel, for a moment, the vertigo of falling through all of space and time and the immensity of your insignificance, then nothing in the ordinary world feels like such a big deal anymore.
All of which is to say, I think things are going to be different when we get back to the ordinary world. Small comfort.
As night falls, we drift back into another game of Uno. The cards are our version of music: they bind us together, create a space that is for us alone.
But I feel It always now. My aura. That implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It notices me now. I don’t know whether it happened when I killed Tongue, or when I got us here, but I’ve definitely caught Its attention.
“How did you do it?” Chiu says.
“Do what?” I say.
“Get us here. Escape.”
Farah nods. “It didn’t want us to get out, but you knew how to get us here.”
“Blindsight,” Chiu says. “It’s getting stronger, isn’t it? Ever since Jonah.”
“I don’t feel any different,” I say.
Chiu pulls a card from his hand and holds it up with its back to me. “What card am I holding up?”
I half laugh. “How should I know?”
“Tell me what card,” Chiu insists.
“But I can’t see.”
“Guess.”
“Red, seven,” I snap.
Chiu flips the card and we fall silent.
“Lucky guess,” I say.
“This one,” Chiu says, holding up another card.
“Reverse turn, any colour,” I say.
Farah holds up one of her cards.
“Plus-four,” I say. I wince because that card was coming for me.
“What’s going on?” Farah says.
“Blindsight,” Chiu says, with satisfaction. “Like I said, you have a superpower, Kyle.”
“Not much of a superpower,” I say.
Farah grins. “Not unless we take you to Vegas.”
The sky is black and nothing, and we can only see by the grey sheen of unlight. It doesn’t frighten us here though. This place is safe, tethered by the weight of people who hold this place in their mind.
“I think we’re going to be OK,” Chiu muses.
“OK?” Farah sounds dubious. “That sounds like a stretch.”
“Kyle is going to get us to the machine and get us home.” He nods. “With his superpower.”
“No pressure then,” I say.
“I’m going to see my parents again,” Chiu says, his eyes shining in the unlight.
Farah doesn’t respond. I’m worried about her; she picks absently at the makeshift bandage wrapped around her damaged hand. For a moment, I imagine staying here for ever. I can go outside here. I have friends. I have Farah.
But Farah’s dying in the ordinary world and if she’s stuck here, there’s nothing they can do to save her there.
