That did it.
'What the fuck is going on?' she yelled.
'Keep your voice down,' Zach admonished.
Laura marched straight towards Zach, ready to make someone-anyone-finally pay, though the effect was ruined at the last moment by her ankle, which chose to give out as she came level with the couch table. She stumbled, and Zach caught her. Ignoring the vicious yank on his hair, he settled her on the couch, her foot elevated.
'Leave me alone, I'm OK.' But she lowered her voice: murdering Zach was her prerogative, not the mob's.
'You've sprained your ankle,' Zach said as he slipped off both shoes, then her socks, 'but I don't think you've torn a ligament.' His fingers were gentle, and she winced only once. At least her toenails were clean, she thought as she glared at Max, who glanced down at his bare feet, then curled his toes and hid one foot behind the other.
Zach helped her to remove her jacket, then told Max, 'Fetch a towel with some ice cubes from the kitchen.' He grinned his infuriating grin. 'Make that two towels, your sister's ruining my furniture with her dripping hair.'
'I'll ruin more than your sofa.'
He handed her his phone from the table. 'Go on, then, ring the police.'
She maintained a dignified silence while Zach packed her ankle, but when he tried to dry her hair, she snatched the towel from him. 'I'll do it myself.' In the meantime Max had brought them mugs of tea and a plate of thick cheese-and-blackberry jam sandwiches, exactly the horrid sort he himself liked to eat. She drank some tea while Zach left the room. He returned almost immediately with his backpack, a pair of elegant ankle boots which might fit her with some toe padding, an elastic bandage and dry woollen socks, a tube of ointment, and a bottle of anti-inflammatory tablets, two of which she swallowed without protest-there was no way he was going to carry her out of here. He stowed the bottle in his backpack. Sandwich in hand, he began to pace the room, passing repeatedly before the window and peering out. Finally, with an apologetic shrug, he switched off the lights, though he left the door to the passage ajar so that they weren't entirely in the dark. Max ate as if he'd missed supper, but kept his eyes on her and attempted a grin whenever she looked his way. Neither he nor Zach offered an explanation.
'You'd better eat something,' Zach said. 'We've got a long cold ride ahead of us.'
'If you think I'm-'
'Changed your mind? Fine.' He dug out his wallet. 'Keep the lights off and don't answer the door. Here's enough money for a taxi. And a number to ring-the driver's trustworthy.' He rested a hand on Max's shoulder. 'You can always have Laura drop you off at your friend's house. Or your sister will think up a good story; stick to it. There might be some trouble, but you'll be OK. It's me they really want.'
Then Zach handed Max some notes and a slip of paper, nodded at Laura, and hefted his backpack over a shoulder, leaving socks and bandage like a reproof on the table next to her foot.
'Where are you going?' Laura demanded.
'He doesn't know.' Max spoke through a mouthful of sandwich, hurriedly choked it down. 'Don't let him leave.'
'Zach, wait.' His footsteps slowed, but he kept his back to her. 'Please, help me with the bandage.' He turned. His face wasn't as expressionless as he tried to make it. Beneath skin as thin as a tissue of lies lay living parchment, word-rich.
'I haven't changed my mind,' Laura said.
Zach said nothing.
'She isn't lying. It's the family temper,' Max said, 'Like shaking a bottle of warm coke, but with Laura the gush doesn't last for long.'
Laura rounded on Max. 'Listen, little brother, if you're suggesting I'm anything like Mum . . .'
Still without a word, Zach came over and dropped his gear to the floor. He knelt by the table, and Laura forgot to be cross at Max as she watched Zach unwind the bandage, set aside the ice pack, and lift her foot; apply some ointment and deftly wrap her ankle. After securing the material with a clip, he slipped the thick sock over her foot, then held out his hand for the other foot. Max rose from the armchair, went to the window, and eased one of the curtains aside. He continued to look beyond their dim reflections towards the canal, as if he could penetrate a private dark, while Zach slowly drew the sock up over her toes, the ball of her foot, over the arch, the heel, the ankle. Her foot rested in the palm of his left hand; his right smoothed the sock into place, smoothed it over the arch and heel and ankle, smoothed it. She had to be very firm with herself-it would have been such a little lie to tell him that something was stuck inside the sock and could he please take it off and start again.
Max laughed. 'A dirty toenail clipping, maybe?'
Laura slid her foot from Zach's hand. In the silence that followed, her mind clicked over the implications of Max's joke. And checked and clicked, like badly rusted curtain rings which needed replacing.
'You're scaring me,' she said.
Max left his post by the window to stand next to Zach, who rose and slipped an arm around her brother's shoulders.
'You tell her,' Max said.
Her blackout curtains tore. Like a voyeur waiting in the dark, Laura had a bright terrible view of two figures embracing, embracing. There was nowhere to fix her gaze. She balled a fist and jammed it against her teeth, bit down hard. How could you, you bastard? she managed not to cry. He's just a little boy. But she didn't manage to keep her eyes from smarting in the sudden blinding insight, however much she blinked.
'You're bonkers,' Max said. 'He never stops thinking about you.'
Max meant to reassure her, but it felt as though he'd been drilling a hole in her skull-to liberate her thoughts, or was it her demons? There were some people mad enough to claim trepanning expanded your consciousness.
'You really hear me?' she asked. 'It's not just sympathy?'
'Empathy,' Zach corrected.
'I suppose you lot are far too clever to make a slip of the tongue!'
'Since when have you started talking about simus like that?' Max asked.
Stung, Laura grabbed her mug, gulped her lukewarm tea. 'Ugh, it's worse cold. You've dumped half a pound of sugar in it.'
'Max knows I like it sweet,' Zach said mildly.
'Like Mum,' Max added. 'She always jokes that it sweetens her disposition.'
Laura cast a searching look at her brother but saw no guile on his face. From where she was sitting it seemed as if he'd grown recently, the crown of his head nearly level with Zach's shoulder, his wrists pale and fragile in the anaemic light.
'What are you doing here?' she whispered. 'You're supposed to be at Justin's.'
Max pulled the neckband of his pyjama top up over his chin and lower lip, an old childhood habit. Laura remembered his terrifying nightmares-all of his ribbed collars matted and chewed within weeks. He'd come to her bed, trembling, sometimes crying, and his fear had always soaked into the sheets and pillows and duvet, into the mattress like spilled milk-colourless but with a sour smell that had clung to her hair and skin till she showered, or threw open the window to bright sunlight. She took a few deep breaths to clear the smell.
With a crooked smile Zach tugged the fabric from Max's teeth, but gently, the way he'd tug a slipper from a puppy, your tomorrow from underfoot.
'Zach?' Laura asked.
'Max is a cognoscens,' Zach said.
'What?'
'A cognoscens.'
'That's impossible!'
Zach's eyes gleamed as though a match had been struck along his optic nerves, a look which made her wonder how he'd escaped a flick-knife or tyre iron or garotte till now. Well, that could be remedied. She turned to Max. 'He's sending me up for some reason.'
'Ask Dad, if you don't believe him.'
Which meant that even the impossible is sometimes true.
'But how-how-?' Stymied by the task of framing a question coherently-any of fifty, a hundred questions-Laura rose and walked to the window, not quite limping, but careful not to put too much weight on her damaged ankle. There was no pain, only some throbbing, and the feeling that her foot couldn't bear the strain. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass until Zach joined her. With a fingertip he traced a spiral in the fading condensation, then breathed on the pane and drew a small figure-a rather lopsided seal.
'Max would have been back at Justin's before anyone was awake. I'll run him over now and return for you.'
'The police might pitch up any minute.'
'You can wait with my backpack in the cellar. I'll show you a warm corner where you'll be safe.'
Safe, she repeated to herself.
'Come away from the window,' Max said. 'I think somebody's walking along the canal.'
'Can you pick up everything we think?' Laura asked.
'Most stuff, if I pay attention. It's easiest with simus, though.'
'From far away?'
'I can't always tell about distance.'
They followed Max to the bedroom, where he collected his clothes and went into the bathroom to change. Six months ago he'd have still undressed in front of her. Seated on the bed with her leg raised, Laura ate a few bites from the sandwich Zach had forced into her hand, then wrapped the rest in a tissue.
'I'll finish it while I'm waiting for you. It'll give me something to do.'
'Then don't shred it all over my bed,' Zach said with a smile.
She shook out a second tissue to rewrap the sandwich. Zach was exaggerating, she'd only been kneading it a bit between her fingers.
'He really is a cognoscens, you know,' Zach said.
'But he looks nothing like any of you!'
He shrugged. 'Better for him.'
'You know what I mean.'
'Different DNA coding, maybe.' She frowned as he added, 'New improved model.' She never knew how he managed to convey so much mockery-self-mockery-without the least change in tone or expression. Perhaps it was the way his eyes became as opaque as old glass-antique glass, beautiful and priceless.
'Are there others like him?' she asked.
'None that I've run into.'
Laura understood the unmistakable implications, but before she could question him further, Max appeared in the doorway, pyjamas and toothbrush in hand. Grinning with a certain cheeky sheepishness, he didn't quite meet their gaze, as if he knew they'd been talking about him. You moron, she thought, of course he knows. Only gradually was she beginning to grasp what this all meant, what it must have always meant.
'How long have you been able to sense our thoughts?' she asked.
Max glanced at Zach, then reached again for his collar, only to release it when Zach picked up a pillow and tossed it at her brother, who fielded it with his free hand to toss right back. Zach ducked, then laughed. There was an easiness in their exchange which Laura recognised as more than the usual male bonding. She'd always be excluded from parts of Zach's life, and now from parts of Max's as well. It doesn't matter, she told herself sternly, you don't need to read every word to enjoy a novel, you don't even have to own a dictionary. But her throat tightened, her chest, and the feeling came back to her then, that terrifying paralysis when she was called on to read aloud in her first years at school. How hard she had tried to make sense of the black squiggles on the page! On a screen it had been even worse; they would never stay put long enough to share their secrets, though sometimes one or another would stop and wink. Around that time her dreams had come to be dominated by a yew-like maze whose openings would disappear whenever she was about to step through, whose hedges shifted and writhed and grew dense with thorn, while the giggling, chattering voices from the centre grew piercing with teasing: the magic spell, stupid, you haven't learned the magic spell.
'Sometimes you woke me,' Max said. 'I can still see those monstrous hedges.'
'Even back then?' Laura asked. 'You were tiny.'
Max nodded and bundled his pyjamas into his backpack. 'It took me a long time to figure out which stuff was mine, and even longer to realise nobody else was like me, but by then Dad had warned me never ever to speak of it. Though a few times I came close to telling you. When the nightmares were really bad.'
'Why didn't you?'
'Why do you think?'
'I'd never have cozzed you up to Dad.'
'Yeah, I know. But you'd have been scared of me.' Laura began to protest but Max cut her off with a sad half-smile. 'Just like Dad, though he tries to hide it. Even from himself.'
Laura went to Max, who submitted to her hug. She could feel the bony jut of his shoulder blades, his ribcage. Over his head she and Zach exchanged glances.
'Anyway, it got better when I learned to block most of it out,' Max said. 'And Dad gives me medicine to help.'
'He medicates you?' Somehow this seemed most terrible of all, like a parent plying a small child with cheap booze to keep him quiet, with tranquillisers.
'Don't be too hard on your dad,' Zach said. 'Max also needs the serum.'
'That's rich, coming from you.'
'Maybe I'm learning.' He gestured towards Max. 'Max knows how powerless your dad feels. Fulgur has a stranglehold on its people.'
'But your own child . . .' Laura's voice trailed off.
The drift of her thoughts hung in the still, dry air of the room like a pall of acrid smog, and Zach wouldn't have needed Max's gift for it to sting. Abruptly he turned and rummaged in the drawer of his bedside cabinet, while Max found something of great interest on the carpet underfoot, then in the signed and framed photograph on the wall-the one she could never decide whether she liked or hated, even less understood. In luminous black-and-white it showed a small genderless child seated cross-legged on the shore, the glistening sea rising behind it in a huge tidal wave, a glass bowl in its naked lap. In the bowl lay what could only be a human brain, from which the child was eating with a spoon. The child's eyes were dark and lashless and followed you no matter where you went in the room, and you knew that the wave was cresting, cresting very soon. Mostly, Laura thought the child was a girl.
