27.4

 

The mantle of Knowledge hums in her chest, aligning her senses, sharpening her perception until the entire house feels like a blueprint of the past, present and future, and she can decipher it. She sees the moment before the tipping point happens, she sees the shape of it, she can identify it.

The woman at the sink stands with her hands submerged in water, though the dishes remain uncollected on the table and the water has gone cold, leaving a film of oil and scum on the surface and in a ring around the edge of the bowl and her wrists. Her fingers are red. Her shoulders are trembling. Her reflection in the cracked window looks like a stranger. Her cheeks are streaked with spent tears, though she is past crying now. Instead, her breath is shallow, her eyes are unfocused and her clenched jaw reveals the rage the fills her, and the one over-riding thought that carries her from her past into Roisin’s future.

Her one, quiet, terrible thought: “I can’t do this anymore.” She has no plan to set in motion, has decided no action to perform, she is just ready to surrender, to give in to the forces that have for so long tried to overwhelm her, and now they have. Her surrender will be a force that ripples outwards from this small domestic scene until Famine takes notice and is forced to act.

Roisin feels the mantle tighten, the faint lines of the blueprint darkening. Her surrender will tilt the world.

The man at the table sits with his hands clasped so tightly his knuckles are white. His tea has gone cold, the full fat milk in it speckling the surface like a sky full of stars. Gravy and sauce has dried and thickened on his plate, though of the remaining plates, one meal has been eaten entirely but for a small stack of peppered cabbage and the other plate is untouched. However long it is since Roisin ate, she doubts she would ever be hungry enough to eat this. The man’s eyes are fixed on the laminate surface as though it might contain the mysteries of the universe.

He is not angry. He has never mistreated his wife or his child. Not once, not in the seven years they’ve been married or the six years of his daughter’s life. Bags under his eyes and the droop of his shoulders show how exhausted he is. Long shifts and six-day weeks. Too many bills and not enough pay.

Roisin can hear his thought as clearly as if she were watching with subtitles. He is thinking a different thought to his wife’s: “If she leaves, I don’t know what I’ll do.” He is genuinely full of terror. It’s neither a threat, nor a promise, but a point of unpredictability; a fracture that will widen across the world and echo from the mountains; a fracture that will call to War.

Roisin feels the mantle pulse. Parts of the blueprint fade as the deeds they are built upon come crashing down. Here. His is the action that will open the Void.

The girl upstairs is small for her age. Not by a scale of derivation, but smaller than the other girls in her class. Her mother assures her she is due a growth spurt and will soon be as tall as the girls in the year above hers, but she is not so sure. The boy inside her phone has told her about genetics, and how there’s a chance she might never grow any taller at all and shown her screenshots of messages the other children in the class have posted on an app called Class Life. She can feel the tension downstairs, and it fills her with terror. She hates it when her mum and dad stop talking, and it’s almost always about her.

She sits on the floor beside the bed, knees pulled to her chest, her hands over her ears even though the house is quiet.

Roisin can hear her thought too. She can see the child as clearly as if she were in the child’s bedroom; as if the walls and ceilings were made of glass, as if the child had their own episode of the TV drama of her parent’s lives. She can see inside the child, see the plastic curls of the Princess Leia doll clutched in her hand, see their thoughts as the words on the page of a picture book. They are thinking one thought, over and over: “It’s my fault.”

And though the thought is neither true nor fair, it has become the girl’s entire obsession. If she hadn’t been born, if she was normal, if she was pretty, her parents would still be as happy as they were without her here.

Roisin’s jaw tightens. A child’s guilt is a seed, a seed that grows into action; a seed that can be opened with the knife she filched from the dinner table; a seed that calls to Death.

Roisin feels the mantle shudder. Here. Hers is the action that stops the world.