Albedo Chapter Eight
Endure the timid sun, Chlorine 3
There was a fraught excitement back at the farm. On return, one of their tablets had been connected
to a cellular hub and linked to the live coverage emerging. It was only just beginning to kindle as
they arrived. Rapt viewers and shared looks and stares off into the distance. A glut of emotions.
Marnie could feel the tides of the them between the rest of the group. There was something like
pride coming from the Danes, a fulfillment on their faces. Almost an indifference on the face of
Anthony with the glasses, a job done, over to lean out the kitchen window and smoke. Flynn and the
other women, who'd given two different fake names to Marnie over the past two days, were
shamefaced."Feels a little like we went overboard. Maybe should have stuck with the scare tactics"
Said Sylvie or Susie or whoever. Flynn was staring into the middle distance. Although it had been
through technology, it was his control that had done the final deed, his hands the ones sticky with
blood.
A breaking news ticker rolled along under the bottom third title "CEO Killed at Convention" with
details of the event in the text. The anchor hadn't been given a lot of time before the bystander
footage came up. Stills with flashes of the white drone barrelling towards the stage, stills of
flashing white flame. Press on the scene were still interviewing ashen faced victims in the
vicinity. Marnie could still see the smoke clearing from broken out windows in the skylight. When
the footage from the group finally appeared on the news it was in radically curtailed form. All of
the message Marnie had wanted to see had been edited away. The Danes said it was posted online in
full and that she could view it if she wanted. Flynn didn't even want to watch the news cut, he was
just sitting in his room. The networks had all put together a very human picture of the man's last
moments. Speaking into a mic, grinning at a joke he had told, a flash of confusion and then a web of
fear blossoming across his features. An ear splitting sound and an instant cut to chaos, smoke and
fire and thick dark panic rippling through the hall, everybody rushing for the exits, a few staff
approaching the epicentre. The smouldering chairs on the stage.
Anthony had made his excuses and said his goodbyes, something about another job to prepare. He had
asked for a way Meredith could contact her before he left. At some point Susie/Sylvie had
disappeared, Flynn had looked worried but the Danes were calm in her level of complicity. They went
from trying to reassure Flynn to ignoring him within the space of an hour. They ambushed Marnie in
the kitchen and sat her down to debrief, and likely to stem the flow of doubt coming from their
drone pilot.
Sat at the table while she made tea, one or the other of them started up "They're exactly the sort
of people responsible for the damage to the environment. Exactly the traitors who still damage where
we live even while we live amongst the wreckage." Marnie could take on the sentiment just fine.
There were people profiteering upon natural collapse, but there was also the harsh truth. There had
been a man alive who was now dead at their hands. The other one started in as the kettle hissed and
rolled. "Our habitat is no longer liveable. People like you and I didn't do that, it was on them.
The people we got today. I say good riddance." The kettle pitched into a high shriek."Corporations
will use the media to vilify us now. There will be weeks and weeks of condemnation. They're never so
keen to attack people earning billions while all of our natural resources are plundered and the rest
made useless by waste and pollution. Marnie?" The kettle screeched a final wail and clicked into
quick silence. Pitch thick soundlessness. She could feel a pressure beneath her ribs, a fear that
gave way to excitement. She hadn't felt anything like this before, not ever. It had all been such a
drone. A one note tone the whole time. This flutter, the variation. It made her feel like even
amongst all of the chaos, she felt calm and quiet. "I don't disagree" she said, and set out two
cups. One for her, and one to take into Flynn. A single word text bubble appeared on her new phone,
from an unknown number. "Bravo". Which she could only assume was Meredith.
Flynn's door was a small jot open when she arrived at the frame, dithering with a mug in each hand
and listening to the small quick movements he was making inside. She shouldered her way in quietly
and set down both cups with a clunk to announce her presence. "No, do come in. Don't mind me." He
said, with grinning in her direction, placing rolled up garments into his duffel carefully. "You're
going?" She said, wanting to say more. Like 'What am I supposed to do here now?' She couldn't work
up the courage to ask. She'd gotten closer to him than any of the others. His fault, he'd taken it
upon himself to shepherd her over the past two days. Had spent a lot of time talking to her, and
touching her hands when showing her what to do, and telling her jokes, and sitting close to her in
the van. A soft little cluster of feelings had begun forming in her. The light peeling in through
the back window was shattered with the shadows of tree branches. And then blocked by a large shadow
for a small moment that went unnoticed by the two of them. After being led around by him the whole
time, Marnie wanted to change his mind now and feel something like control. A familiar growing heat
in her core. She pushed the door shut with a click, and he glanced up with a smirk. "You gonna stop
me from leaving? I'm bigger than you remember?" She walked over to him at the bed and put a hand on
his chest, looking up at him. His smirk faded as he stared down at her. The shadows in the room
seemed to swell in size, the growing heat in her felt like boiling water, the thudding presence of
the figure in the tea room came to mind. A throbbing streak forged between them.
And then in a moment it all dissipated, a howl of wind and a burst of sunlight, Flynn looking up to
the ceiling with a deep sigh. Some great ancient spell broken in the turn of his head.
A food delivery drone had dropped off a few lukewarm burgers, looking lost and tired and low on
charge. It made her wonder how Flynn did it, carrying a heavy payload over such long distances on
those little fast copters. There was a dizzy haze coming from the water, thin film interference
giving the edges of the water a colourful cast. To avoid having to schlep around on
stranded-passenger apps, she'd texted one of the local Taxi men she knew would be working and asked
for a private hire. She was loaded up with a few extra possessions from the Danes, standing on the
edge of the water when she got picked up. The boat driver calling out to her about her new number
and why didn't she say she was from the centre. The Danes sheepishly waving from the land's edge,
cowed after a chat they'd had earlier about paying her less after she turned up three days late.
She'd been shocked she was getting paid at all and had kept quiet when she saw how much money she'd
be getting. More than she made in a month at the centre.
The ride took her through motorway drainage culverts, farmland ditches, and eventually contraflow in
the over-wide river bordering the town of Greater Hmmm. "Had to update the maps to get way out here"
the driver said "Strange to see you out in the sticks. New job?" Marnie was smiling out into the
weather fettered evening. The news cycle had been pleasantly bereft of police progress, everyone
still scratching their heads about where the attack had come from. Trying to trace the messages
posted online claiming the crime. The seed of action humming away in her had a taste of it now,
aching to do something more. A message with some coordinates came through on her phone as if to
manifest her will. Meredith's number. A flitter of anxiety at being caught held her, but was washed
away by the dread of returning home and doing nothing again.
"This ok?" the Driver said. She bumped phones and said her thanks. She imagined heading up to her
flat to discover investigators waiting, momentary burst of action, slammed down onto the floor with
a knee in her middle back, questioned in starkly lit rooms, her face on the news. On returning to
her flat she saw it the same as it ever was. A bulb blown in the roof gave it grave look
inside.
She turned on her other phone to see it bursting with messages from her girls. Her eyes welled with
tears for a moment while her emotions surged around her. All she had to do was respond and she could
enter again into the standard existence she'd been drifting through forever. She held down the power
button like a suffocation, stemming the flood of easy, boring life that came with that old part of
her. Giving room for all of the jagged, glistening new.
When she went to flip on a lamp she saw a small kayak out in the water, its owner staring up at her,
then looking down into the bright illumination of their phone. After a second, a message came through
on her new phone, left on in her new pocket after paying her boat fare. From yet another unknown
number, it read:
When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.
The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;
I have nothing but the embittered sun;
Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
And now that I have come to fifty years
I must endure the timid sun.
She smiled at her phone and flicked on a light so that the person down on the water could see her,
she wanted him to light his face up too, to prove her suspicion it was Flynn. They stayed looking up
now without moving. She tried waving him up but she could see him turn and row away. Silky paddle
strokes taking him off out into the distance.
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