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Someone is screaming outside.
A lot of people are screaming. It drowns out the banging of Georgie’s ancient radiator. It would drown out the Admiral’s rhythmic purring, but he’s stopped now, his small warm body gone stiff and still beneath Melanie’s hands, the kind of posture that would usually warn her to get her fingers out of the way quick, except this time he doesn’t seem to be readying himself to turn her skin into sashimi. He’s pressed hard against her belly and she can feel the wet point of his nose shoved into the curve of her elbow as he tries to burrow against her side. When she moves her arm he slides beneath it, muscles his way between her and the sofa until she has to arch her back uncomfortably to accommodate him. One of his back claws digs clumsy against her hip, not drawing blood but also not pleasant, and Melanie bites back a swear.
People are screaming and the cat is freaked.
“Georgie,” Melanie says, and she hates how uneasy she sounds, hates it but also can’t help it. “What’s going on?”
Georgie is silent for a moment. When she speaks she sounds steady, but Georgie always sounds steady when something is wrong, except when she sounds furious. Melanie prefers furious, has always liked the way that Georgie can go fierce and sharp and unrelenting when she’s angry, the way she becomes glowing and righteous with it when Melanie, for all her practice, has never managed anything but glowering and vicious.
“It’s—bad.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
(It gets worse.)
**
Melanie is twenty-three when she meets Georgie Barker. She’s hanging toward the back of her friend Jake’s Haunted Hammersmith tour, because his material is about as good as the name but she made a promise to show up and support him, which means not ducking out early and occasionally acting the part of the shill when his little group of paying customers start to look a little glazed around the eyes.
She’s sympathetic with Jake’s plight, of course: he’s no more in love with his side business as tour guide than he is with the deli job that pays for his one-sixth portion of the rent on the shitty little flat he shares with some friends. Melanie knows for a fact that the flat is shitty because she’d lived there for two months after she and Paul had finally split for good, camping out on the sofa and waking up every time one of Jake’s flatmates had come giggling and whispering through the door in the hours before dawn or got up for a glass of water in the middle of the night. Her current place isn’t much less shitty, but there are at least less people, and living with Andy isn’t any kind of trial. She doesn’t mind getting woken up to the muffled sound of him editing footage without headphones at fuck o’clock in the morning, not when it’s their baby he’s editing.
Still, she owes Jake, and more than that, she understands him: they all do what they must to fund the things they really want to do, and the book he’s been writing about local hauntings is good, just the right mix of spooky intrigue and solid background research. Not his fault that he’s less good at selling his material to curious tourists; he’s never claimed to be a performer.
“What about Thomas Millwood?”
There’s a woman toward the back of the tour, all wind-rumpled hair and enough layers to combat mid-October in London. Jake looks at her, his eyes wide and his face shining with sweat even in the cold beneath the ridiculous white grease paint he insists on wearing to sell the bit. “Ah—yes. The case of the famous so-called Hammersmith ghost.”
“He died near here, didn’t he? And there have been sightings?”
The woman is clearly throwing him a line, and for a moment Melanie is very concerned that Jake is going to fumble it, but then his shoulders relax and he’s off, his earlier stilted delivery of a script clearly memorized ahead of time falling away as he warms to his topic. He loves this, loves it the same way Melanie does on a good day, and once he gets going passion makes him charming, his hands spread as he illustrates some finer point on the history and his voice dropping into a suitably ominous rumble when he talks about recent incidents.
Melanie sidles up behind Jake’s mysterious benefactor. Now that she’s had a chance to look her fill, she thinks that she’s seen the face before, maybe some evening when Jake and his flatmates had invited people over to drink cheap wine and sit seven to the sofa that barely fit Melanie most nights. “I thought Jake said I was the only friendly face on this tour,” she says. The woman doesn’t startle, even though Melanie is certain she hadn’t been seen coming.
The corner of her mouth tilts up. It’s a good smile. She has dimples, which Melanie has always rather liked. “I was a last minute addition.” She offers a hand, one of her knuckles peeking out through a hole in her gloves. “Georgie.”
Melanie takes the hand. “Melanie.”
**
Two days after the world ends, Mrs. Dougherty down the hall goes missing. That would be bad enough. Worse is that no one realizes she’s missing for another four days afterwards, not until she’s roving the halls of their building wearing her adult son’s intestines like a scarf. Her voice as she calls out to her neighbors is warped and strange but still recognizably hers, and Melanie feels her own intestines twist in response. It doesn’t make her afraid, or—it does, of course it does, but being afraid just makes her angry.
“Wait here,” Georgie says softly, and suddenly Melanie is afraid again.
She doesn’t know what improvised weapon Georgie selects from the limited supply within their flat, but she does hear the door open. She hears a sound like metal against flesh, and then a sound like metal against plastic, again, and again, and again.
The door creaks back open.
“Georgie?” She hates the way her voice breaks, hates it.
“Here,” comes the response, and it’s Georgie’s voice. Melanie’s breath shudders out of her. Her fingertips ache, and she forces her grip on the arm of the sofa to loosen. Georgie’s voice doesn’t break, and Melanie knows that the way Georgie is panting is exertion, not fear.
“You should close the door,” Melanie says after a moment. “The Admiral will get out.”
They bury the bodies in the basement. The cement is cracked, and it only takes Mr. Ghosh next door half an hour with a crowbar to pry up enough of it to reveal the bare earth below. The rest of the neighbors take turns digging. It’s the first time in days that most of them have emerged from their flats. There’s not much Melanie can do to help, so she sits there, feeling useless and furious with it.
“What are we supposed to do?” That’s Amanda Lewis. She is—was—a paralegal for a family law attorney halfway across the city. She’d run in to Melanie in the hall a couple months earlier, when the flat upstairs had only been Georgie’s. Amanda had just been moving in, and she’d been giddy with it, the first place she’d been able to afford on her own. “If they can—it looked just like Mrs. Dougherty. It had her face.”
Melanie had been a latecomer to the Magnus Institute, but the others had talked, sometimes, and she had listened, at least in the early days, when she had still remembered that there were things she could arm herself with other than knives and poison. She still remembers Sasha James. She’s the only one who still remembers Sasha James, assuming a person can be boiled down and summed up to a face and a voice and a handful of memories that can be trusted. She wonders if anyone really remembers Maura Dougherty. Maybe her son had. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. “Polaroids,” she says. “And, uh, voice recordings. Ones on tape. Digital doesn’t always work. It changes, I think? After someone is replaced. I don’t know how.”
No one asks her how she knows, but no one expresses any disbelief. Mr. Ghosh says, “We gave Aaheli one of those cameras for her ninth birthday. I think it’s still in a box in her closet, along with a couple packs of film,” and Melanie feels a little less useless.
They take pictures of each other. Melanie smiles reflexively when Mr. Ghosh takes hers and feels like an idiot for it. Georgie still has the little tape recorder she had used for lectures at uni; it’s dusty, but it’s battery powered and it still works. Cameron, who occupies one of the ground floor flats, ushers them into his home when they come back up from the basement, all of them sweaty and disgusting and too scared to be anything like good company. He’s always seemed a little too smug and a little too obsessed with his own beard for Melanie to much like him, and he has the well-stocked larder of someone who has more than once unironically called himself a gourmand. He opens up a tin of beluga caviar with some half-hearted joke about saving it for the end of the world. Melanie still doesn’t like him, but she does like that he asks before reaching out to steady her hand when he passes her one of the martinis he’s nervously mixed up at what she gathers is an extensive-to-the-point-of-excessive home bar.
It’s a very good martini, so she supposes that Cameron has his redeeming qualities.
They go back to their separate flats that night, but this time, they don’t stay there. Amanda shows up the next day to ask careful questions of Melanie, dancing skittishly around the idea of anything supernatural even though their neighbor was replaced by a vicious stranger and according to Georgie there’s sometimes a giant eye in the sky. Mrs. Ghosh was a general contractor before this all started, and she comes around to discuss in serious tones the modifications that might be made to the building to make it more secure. Melanie and Georgie talk it over with her, mostly because neither of them have the heart to explain that better locks aren’t going to help. Melanie thinks that making sure the cobwebs are swept out of the corners and the light bulbs are changed before they can go dark might, or would have, if they weren’t without power at least eighty percent of the time. “My little guy said he heard wolves on the street below his bedroom window last night,” Mrs. Ghosh says quietly before she leaves, and Melanie says nothing, because she has nothing to offer besides try not to look like you’d be fun to chase.
The familiar tide of frustrated, futile anger rises in Melanie’s throat. She’s used to the world being unfair and awful, but she’s unaccustomed to it being something she can’t push back against, something that feels too big to fight.
(In her quieter moments, she feels angry for herself, because she had worked so hard to escape all of this, to live a life she gets to choose without all of the—the horrible, rancid shit of the Magnus Institute, and now there is no escape, not for anyone and not for her, and it turns out that nothing she had chosen or done had really mattered at all.)
Cameron opens his pantry to the rest of the building with nary a whisper of complaint. Melanie almost feels bad for disliking him. She’s pretty sure he has a girlfriend somewhere in London, but he doesn’t mention her; the phones are down, too, and the streets are too dangerous for a trip across town, even if inside doesn’t seem much safer after Mrs. Dougherty. He doesn’t mention his girlfriend the same way the Ghoshes don’t mention their daughter Aaheli, gone away to school a few months earlier. Georgie doesn’t talk about her parents, and Melanie never wonders about her cousins in Sheffield, and neither of them ever say Basira’s name, except occasionally when they do, late at night, curled close enough around each other that they can leave those whispers pressed into the pillows when they crawl out of bed the next morning.
They share what they have, they bury their dead, and they don’t talk about their living. They figure out how to go on after the world ends.
**
Melanie is surprised when Georgie calls her. Her call history is almost nothing but strings of numbers with no names attached: hotels, airlines, sources, her bank, emergency services, all of them outgoing. No one calls her anymore, not since Rotherham, and she’s long since stopped reaching out. Georgie had been one of the last to stop calling, though – she had checked in after Melanie’s brief brush with internet infamy – and so Melanie swipes a thumb across her phone screen and presses it to her ear.
“I heard you were back,” Georgie says.
Melanie shifts in her seat. Her leg throbs and her temper spikes with it. “The grapevine works fast,” she says. “Especially since I didn’t think I was on it anymore.”
“Come on, Melanie,” Georgie says. She never calls her Mel, always uses the name Melanie had introduced herself by, and her voice is warm and friendly. Tension Melanie hadn’t even known she was carrying eases out of her shoulders. “Just because people aren’t talking to you doesn’t mean they aren’t talking about you.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Jake told me. Said you were trying to find out if his sofa was open.”
Jake had been Paul’s friend first, and he’d still let her stay at his after the breakup. She’d thought—it doesn’t matter what she’d thought.
“Don’t suppose yours is?”
Georgie clears her throat. “Occupied, I’m afraid. Sorry.” She sounds sincere, so Melanie doesn’t take it personally.
“It’s fine. I’m joking, mostly. I found a place, and I should just about be able to make it through ‘til my first paycheck.”
“New job? Where?”
Georgie is talking to her. She likes that Georgie is talking to her, and the Magnus Institute has a reputation, even if Georgie had been the one to point her there in the first place. “Nowhere special. I think it’ll be okay. My coworkers are weird, though. Bit awful? Kind of a boys’ club, if I’m being honest.”
“Yikes.”
“It’s a job,” Melanie says, with a shrug Georgie can’t see. “And I’ve burned most of my bridges. So.”
She expects the awkward silence that follows, and she’s half expecting a hasty goodbye, so she’s caught off guard when Georgie asks, hesitant, “Are you—okay?” and instead of demurring politely she replies, “I got shot in India.”
“Christ.”
“By a ghost.” She can’t stop talking. Why can’t she stop talking?
She waits for the hasty goodbye.
“You’ll have to tell me all about it,” Georgie says instead. She sounds very normal, like being shot by ghosts is a thing that happens to people. “Drinks? Thursday?”
Melanie’s eyes burn. She pretends it isn’t happening, because that would be—embarrassing. “Yeah. Yeah, sounds good. Text me a time and a place?”
“Sure. Unless you like Hungarian food?” Georgie’s voice is warm and teasing. “I’ve got a date tonight, but honestly, he seems terrible. I’m just in it for the food. I can ditch him, we can go out instead.”
The burn moves from her eyes to her cheeks. It’s easier to ignore because it’s less unexpected. Georgie’s always been—but Melanie doesn’t have enough friends to take chances right now. “Eh, too salty. Keep your date. I’ll see you on Thursday.”
“Coward,” Georgie says. Melanie can hear the laughter in her voice, and she’s certain that she’s imagined the note of disappointment.
“I got shot, woman” she says. “Give me my cowardice.”
**
Even Cameron’s overstocked pantry eventually starts to go barren. The rest of them have been out of everything but bulk dry goods and tinned food for weeks, and even that’s dwindling. Amanda, who had lived almost entirely on cheap takeaway and the resultant leftovers, had been drinking brine out of the bottom of a jar of pickled onions the day before they had started pooling their resources. Maybe that’s why she volunteers to make the first supply run.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. She finishes the drink Cameron has made her and leans against Melanie’s shoulder. Melanie doesn’t think she’s trying to stave off the persistent chill in the air that could be London in winter or could just be the new status quo; not enough time has passed to know for sure, although the fact that it’s apparently been weeks since any of the others have seen the sun through their windows does not make Melanie feel optimistic about summer ever arriving. They’re warm enough inside. The building has old radiators, run on steam, and those are still working even if the lights and the phones are out. It’s not body heat Amanda is looking for, it’s comfort, and after a moment’s hesitation Melanie leans in too, presses flesh against flesh until it almost hurts. Amanda doesn’t pull away.
Amanda goes for supplies the next day. The fog almost takes her. Melanie, with her back braced against the door to their building’s lobby to keep it open, can feel it cold against her cheeks, can feel it seep into the hollow places around her heart that whisper too much and not enough over and over again, even if it’s been a while since those old doubts have crept in.
“Get her inside,” Georgie yells, like that will help anything, like doors mean safety. Melanie reaches for her anyway, reaches until she manages to catch the wool of Georgie’s jumper between her fingers and uses that grip to pull her toward the entrance. Melanie catches Georgie, and Amanda comes with her. She can hear Mr. Ghosh sobbing, and she doesn’t want to ask what caused it, what fear past or present chases around his head and convinces him that there’s nothing but alone, alone.
They end up in a pile on the floor of the lobby. Someone has their elbow firmly planted in Melanie’s ribs, but it still takes her a moment to work up the motivation to shove whoever it is off, the pain secondary to the few seconds she needs to find her balance by feeling another living creature breathing close and alive. She puts her hand down to push herself up and finds the hard metal edge of a tin beneath her palm. She stays where she is. Eventually someone finds her cane, lost in the scuffle, and gives it back to her; she can tell it’s Georgie because the fingers that brush against hers are steady even now, not the faintest hint of a tremor to them.
“See,” Amanda says, and she doesn’t sound steady at all, a giddy sort of hysteria held just barely in check in her voice, but she’s talking and she’s alive, so Melanie figures that’s good enough. “I told you I’d be fine.” She falls silent, and when she speaks again it’s softer, some of the giggly exuberance of making it home safe drained away. “Corner shop looked like it had barely been touched, which was lucky for me, but on the way back I started thinking about—what if—what if it’s only us left, and—.”
“Let’s not all start thinking it,” Melanie says, even though she’s thought it already, more than once, curled around Georgie with the Admiral pressed warm against her back at night while they whisper about the people who haven’t come to find them, who they haven’t gone to find, who can’t be reached.
She hopes that Amanda has done a good job with the shopping, that she’d taken as much as her arms would carry and then some. Mr. Ghosh is still breathing too hard for it to be physical exertion rather than emotion and Georgie has barely spoken a word. She doubts any of them will want to send someone out for more, not any time soon.
“You’ll stay with us tonight,” Mr. Ghosh says, a little breathless but very gentle and very firm. Amanda doesn’t argue.
**
It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong, and Melanie can’t help but feel that putting a knife against Elias Bouchard’s throat and sliding it through until it won’t go any deeper might make at least something right again, but that’s an argument she’s already lost. She might as well—she might as well do what she can, since she’s already agreed to go along with Martin’s plan. Even if it’s not the right plan.
Her pulse throbs in her hands. She’s clenching them too tight, little imprinted crescents of angry red on her palms where her nails have dug in. Her temper thrums in time with her pulse, simmering one moment before rising up to choke her the next, in and out like the sea, or like a drumbeat.
She’s never been this angry. She’s always been angry, always used that as a tool to get herself back on her feet and moving in the right direction when things are hardest, but never like this, never to the point where she can’t say what she is other than pissed off. It’s probably not normal. She’s thought about saying something to the others, but really, what would she say? Who would want to hear it? And hell, look at Tim, look at Martin. Maybe the only options left to them now are angry or afraid, and if that’s the case, she knows which one she prefers.
Her phone is out on the table, next to one of Jon’s stupid tape recorders. She thinks about reaching for it, maybe tossing the tape recorder into the nearest wall for good measure. Maybe the tape recorder is good enough for everyone else stuck in the Archives; maybe they don’t have anyone else to say a goodbye to but each other.
Maybe she doesn’t, either. She knows who she wants to call, but a few nights out and getting to meet a woman’s cat don’t really add up to I just wanted to hear a friendly voice before I show a great deal of restraint and don’t stab by boss in the neck, and also the world might end, so there’s that.
Her hand hovers over the phone.
She hits the red circle on the tape recorder instead.
“Melanie King, 2nd of August, 2017. 11:23 p.m. It’s late. I don’t know what time the others are leaving. Might be tomorrow morning, I guess. They don’t really tell me that sort of thing.”
**
As it turns out, there’s only so much food that one skinny thirty-something with a sedentary job and a lapsed gym membership can carry on her own. They start to run low on the essentials quickly, too quickly, and it’s more than just food—Sunil Ghosh is asthmatic, and no one is yet quite desperate enough to tell an eight-year-old he’ll have to figure out how to get by without an inhaler, apocalypse or not.
“I’ll borrow Cameron’s car,” Georgie says. “He said there should still be petrol in the tank. It’ll be faster, and I’ll be able to take more.”
“Fantastic plan,” Melanie says, “I hate it.”
“I don’t think you have a problem with continuing to eat, so I assume it’s me going that you hate.”
There are few things Melanie likes less than someone else trying to dictate her choices. She’s not about to tell Georgie what she can and can’t do, even if her stomach crawls with anxiety at the thought of Georgie being the one at risk. “On the bright side,” she says, forcing her voice even, “if you don’t come back, I get to keep your cat.”
It’s a terrible joke to make, but everything about the world is terrible right now, and she can hear the smile in Georgie’s voice when she responds. “All this time, you were just with me for my cat. I always suspected.”
“He’s a very good cat,” Melanie says. “You’re all right.” When Georgie touches her cheek she leans into the kiss, and if she presses her mouth against Georgie’s a little harder and more desperate this time, if she holds on to Georgie’s shoulders for a little longer than she might otherwise and lets go only reluctantly, neither of them say anything about it.
Georgie goes. Georgie comes back. In the hall, Melanie can hear Cameron pop a bottle of champagne, because his bar is still well-stocked even if his pantry isn’t. She can hear Mrs. Ghosh laughing, shaky and wild with relief.
“Not so bad, then?” Melanie asks, burying her hands in the Admiral’s fur so Georgie won’t see that they’re shaking with the same relief she can hear in Mrs. Ghosh’s laughter. “Nothing out there?”
“Plenty of things out there,” Georgie says. She sounds thoughtful, maybe a little uncertain, but she sounds unafraid. “It was bad. It was,” she takes a shaky breath, and Melanie has long since learned that being unafraid doesn’t mean being cold or unaffected, “so bad. But not for me. Nothing out there seemed very interested in me at all.”
Georgie’s hands curl around hers, and her fingertips are cold. The Admiral squirms in Melanie’s lap but seems disinclined to move. “I wasn’t scared. I—you know. You know I wasn’t scared.” From anyone else, it would be bravado. From Georgie it’s just unadorned truth. For once, her hands aren’t steady, but Melanie knows better to read that as fear rather than what it is.
Excitement.
“I think—.” Georgie stops. When she speaks again, her voice strained and strange, but there’s an undercurrent of that same quiet excitement. “I don’t think I’d make a very good meal.”
**
“I’m not okay,” Melanie says into the phone. “I think—I’m not okay.”
She waits for the hasty goodbye.
Instead, Georgie says, “Where are you?”
Therapy is rough. She’s sure she’s not the first person to make that observation. She’s also sure she’s not the first person to end up just on the edge of crying her eyes out in this car park. Maybe she’s the first one to be doing it not because of a hard session, but because being done with therapy means having to go back to the same horrific spooky shithole that had led to her needing therapy in the first place, but then again, maybe not.
She’d signed the devil’s employment contract for the promise of thirty-five thousand a year and commuter reimbursement. It’s almost funny. It’d make for an excellent episode of What the Ghost. “Outside of my therapist’s office.” Peeling away parts of herself until she finds something honest has become rote; that makes telling Georgie easier. “I don’t think—I’m not sure how I can go back there alone.”
“I’m coming to get you.’
“You don’t have to—.”
“I don’t. Text me the address. I’m on my way.”
Melanie spends the twenty minutes it takes for Georgie to reach her focusing on hating the Institute so she doesn’t have to hate herself. Once Georgie arrives, they sit silent in the front seat of a Subaru Melanie is pretty sure doesn’t belong to Georgie, given the way she’s fiddling with the seat position and the moment when she’d gone to signal her turn into the car park and ended up switching on the windscreen wipers instead.
The metal-on-metal slide of the seat moving forward and back stops. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Georgie watching her. “It’s good to see you.”
Melanie snorts. “Is it?”
“You stopped taking my calls.”
“I wasn’t very good company for a while,” Melanie says, because that’s easier than explaining months of paranoia, the steady drumbeat throb in her leg of a bullet that hadn’t existed until Jon and Basira had cut it out of her, the way that for days at a time all she had wanted was to hurt someone. “Thought I’d spare you that.”
“Very considerate of you,” Georgie says. She sounds like she means it. “Next time, don’t.”
Melanie finally turns to look at her. “You don’t know what you’re asking. There’s—I wasn’t the normal kind of bad company. More like not fit for human company, but in a—a very literal way. You remember when I told you I got shot by a ghost? I wasn’t kidding.”
“I really didn’t think you were.”
Melanie thinks about that. “You really didn’t.” At the time, it hadn’t seemed so strange. “No one else believed me. I was a meme, and that was before everything that happened in India. But you never thought I was crazy. Why not?”
Georgie breathes in deep. She’s silent, but Melanie doesn’t get the impression she’s ignoring the question, just thinking about her answer. ‘Did I ever tell you what happened to me during uni?”
“I’m not on the clock. Not sure I should be taking statements.”
She says it like a joke, but Georgie presses her lips together until they’re nothing but a thin, hard line of disapproval. “No. No, I made that mistake once already. But I’ll tell you. If you want me to.”
Melanie isn’t really sure she wants to hear whatever horrific shit had happened to Georgie to make her believe so easily in Melanie’s own horrific shit, because this much she’s learned after working a while in the Archives: there are no happy ghost stories. Like, no one’s just seeing their dead nan, not unless their dead nan is also trying to eat their face off. There are no dutiful gray ladies wandering hospital wards and no gentle visitations from departed lovers. There’s only the horrific shit.
“You met Jon around that time, didn’t you?” Melanie asks, mostly to buy herself time. “Doesn’t seem fair that you’d get two terrible experiences out of university.”
“Hey,” Georgie says, but there’s no real reproach to it, not like the couple of times Melanie had taken a potshot at Jon back when she and Georgie had been going out once or twice a week for drinks or dinner after Melanie had got off work. Something’s not right there, and she isn’t sure what. If she’s honest, she doesn’t really care.
She cares about Georgie, though. She doesn’t really want to imagine some Archives-brand pure, horrible shit happening to Georgie.
She doesn’t want to, but it’s nice not to feel quite so alone, or like the only other people who can understand are the ones up to the neck with her in it. “Go on, then.”
Georgie does. It takes a while. By the time she’s finished, the windows have fogged over with their breath and Melanie has stopped feeling quite so much like a wrong move will send her to pieces.
“Wait, so you can’t get scared?” Melanie considers that. “Is it really fucking insensitive if I tell you how nice that sounds?”
Georgie is smiling. It’s a real smile; Melanie can tell because her dimples are showing. “Probably, but it’s not like I don’t get where you’re coming from.” She puts the car into gear. “Come on. I’ll drive you back.”
The drive passes mostly in silence. When Georgie pulls up in front of the Magnus Institute, Melanie unclips her seatbelt and hesitates for only a moment before leaning in for a hug. It’s awkward the way that a hug across the gear lever always is, with her not quite able to slide her hand between Georgie’s shoulder and the seat and Georgie’s elbow bent at an angle so that she can give Melanie’s upper arm a squeeze. Melanie’s nose bumps against Georgie’s cheek and Georgie laughs, and when Melanie turns her head they’re close, very close. Georgie’s eyes are wide, and dark, and lovely.
“Call me,” Georgie says, like they aren’t kissing close and like Melanie isn’t kind of thinking about it, like this isn’t the first time in months that she’s had enough space inside her not taken up by fear or rage to remember that yeah, she’s always quite liked Georgie and Geogie’s dimples and the way Geogie’s hair smells. “I’ll drive you to your next appointment, yeah? You don’t have to do this alone.”
“I mean,” Melanie says, “if you say so.” She turns and presses her lips to Georgie’s cheek before she loses her nerve, and it’s weird that this should require courage when everything else in her life is so much more frightening, but it’s fine, cheek kisses are a thing that friends do. It’s important that they’re friends. Melanie still doesn’t have enough of them to take chances.
**
Georgie is asleep. Melanie isn’t. It’s not unusual. Her sensory team specialist had talked about it, something sleep-wake disorder something-something, but she hadn’t been paying much attention back when it had only been a hypothetical and she can’t exactly call him now. Georgie probably still has the relevant pamphlet shoved in a drawer somewhere. It doesn’t really worry Melanie. She’s no longer living in a world that expects her to be diurnal, and even before she’d taken something sharp and pointy to her eyes she’d always been a bit of a night owl, out on location for Ghost Hunt UK or up late watching Andy edit their videos and arguing with him about which cut to use.
“I miss Andy,” she whispers to Georgie, because they’re allowed to say those things once they’re in bed and because it had been true even before the world had ended. Her and Andy, they had been best friends and partners in crime and business partners all wrapped up in one, and it’s never quite stopped feeling like a punch to the gut that he had dropped her the moment she became too difficult to deal with.
She doesn’t touch Georgie’s hair before grabbing her cane and crawling out of bed, even though she wants to. Her aim isn’t exactly brilliant these days and she doesn’t need to wake Georgie up by way of poking her in the eye. She’s half of the way to the bedroom door when she hears something scrape against the window, a long, shrill, nails-on-a-chalkboard kind of sound.
Her heart is pounding as she turns around. Of course it is. There are a million reasonable explanations for what might be scratching at the window, but she’s no longer living in a world of reasonable explanations. It’s been a long time since the reasonable explanation was actually the most likely explanation for anything.
She waits. Then she waits some more. All that answers her is silence.
There are few things Melanie likes less than someone else trying to dictate her choices. There are few things she likes less than not being in control of her own choices, and that includes letting the too-quick thud of her own heart tell her how to proceed. She sweeps her cane forward, shoulder width as she had been taught. She had been a good student. She’d wanted – needed – to learn how to navigate the world under her own power, more than she might’ve if she’d never met Elias Bouchard and had him shove her own goddamn futility in her face. The tip of the cane whisks across the carpet before it catches against the familiar corner of Georgie’s armoire and bends, the handle pressing gently into her palm.
She reaches out with her free hand. Her fingers brush the glass. It’s cold and it’s wet. The weather sealing must be starting to go. She’ll have to talk to Mrs. Ghosh about that.
“Love?” Georgie mumbles from the bed.
“It’s fine.”
Georgie murmurs something else, sleepy and incoherent, and Melanie hears the rustle of the sheets. She hears the moment Georgie’s breathing goes from languorous and half-dozing to sharp and wakeful.
“Melanie,” Georgie says.
“It’s fine,” she repeats. “I just—I heard a noise, but it must not’ve been anything.” She presses her hand flat against the damp-chill window glass. What would she have done if there had been any danger? Why is she still like this, even with the Beholding cut off completely, always drawn forward by curiosity and driven on by the need not to flinch first? She knows where that leads. “Sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”
“Melanie,” Georgie says, more insistent this time. “There’s something out there.”
Melanie freezes. The palm of her hand is cold against the window and she can feel the thud of her heart in her fingertips. Something slides against the glass like wet paper crumpling. There’s another scratching sound, too-long nails against a chalkboard.
She stands very still. Time passes. A lot of time.
Sheets rustle again, and then Georgie’s there, pressed in a warm line against her back. Melanie wants to tell her to step back, to run, but she can’t make the words come out. There’s a thump against the window, hard enough that she can feel it not just through the window but through the wall, the armoire, the cane. She’s half surprised the glass doesn’t shatter. She waits for whatever’s outside to make a second attempt, but it doesn’t.
She takes half a step back, fingers falling away from the window, until she has to either stop or shove into Georgie. She waits for some answering sound from outside, but there’s nothing, only silence.
“Is it gone?” she whispers.
“No,” Georgie says, voice equally soft, “but I don’t—I don’t think it saw you, maybe? And we know they’re not interested in me.” She presses a careful kiss against the back of Melanie’s neck. “Come on. Let’s—go back to sleep, I guess.”
They end up stretched out on the sofa, because Melanie at least doesn’t like to test her luck by crawling back into bed with some horror of this new world only a wall and a window pane away. Georgie is half on top of Melanie to make them fit, her head pillowed on Melanie’s shoulder. It doesn’t take long before she goes soft and boneless with sleep. Melanie doesn’t manage to join her, but eventually she matches her breathing to Georgie’s deep, slow, even rhythm, and that’s all right too. That’s as good as they’re likely to get.
**
“That was bad,” Melanie says, “even by our standards.”
“B horror movie night is cancelled,” Georgie says agreeably. “We shouldn’t be allowed to do this to ourselves. It’s masochistic.” She slides against the back of the sofa until she’s leaning into Melanie. From Melanie’s lap, the Admiral gives a little merp of protest and slides the floor. When Melanie unfolds her legs her knees ache in protest, but it’s not the pain of a phantom bullet lodged in her flesh, just the glorious ordinary pang of muscles held stationary for too long.
She turns her head and Georgie is sitting smiling close, and it’s another one of those moments that’s—something, pure potential hanging like a solid thing between them. It’s in her head, it’s mostly in her head, she knows that’s true even if it turns out that she’s right, because she’d felt the same way about some friend of Andy’s at the wrap party for their first completed episode of Ghost Hunt UK, when the poor soul had secretly spent the whole night pining for so much as a glance from Toni’s disinterested eye. It’s in her head, because that’s where want lives, most of the time.
She leans forward until she can brush her nose against the edge of Georgie’s jaw, close her eyes and drag her lips against skin until she finds the corner of that smiling mouth. She feels rather than hears Georgie’s inhale, and then Georgie is surging up into her, one hand caught in the ratty old collar of the t-shirt a fan had printed up for Andy as a joke, the one that reads Ghost Hunk UK in bold letters across the front. Georgie’s mouth is open and hungry, more and better than Melanie had expected.
“Took you long enough,” Georgie says, and Melanie knows it for the adorable bullshit it is because Georgie is fearless, and if this is something she wants then she never would’ve hesitated if she’d known—.
She kind of wants to say so, but Georgie is warm and solid and sweet against her and it just doesn’t seem worth it to stop kissing her to prove a point. She bites at Georgie’s lip instead, and enjoys the way she shivers with something that definitely isn’t fear.
**
They’re six weeks past the end of the world when Basira shows up, and Melanie has an arm around her shoulders before she’s entirely thought it through. Basira’s too tall and Melanie’s too short for the hug to really work, and it’s probably going to get weird in a minute because they were never exactly the hugging kind of friends, if they were friends at all, but—no, they were, are friends. Being forced into friendship because the world had been fucked even before it had ended and because no one else had both walked away from and stuck around after the Unknowing doesn’t actually change that. Basira’s got both arms locked around Melanie’s waist hard enough that it’s sort of uncomfortable and she doesn’t immediately let go, so probably the hug is fine and not weird and anyway, fuck it, surely living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape is as good an excuse as any to be a little weird.
“Sorry,” Basira says. “Would’ve got here sooner, but it’s been, well—.” Melanie laughs a little helplessly against the lapel of Basira’s coat and Basira makes a faint sound of agreement. “Yeah. Yeah. I guess you know how it’s been.” She lets go of Melanie and steps back.
“Yeah. Guess I do. Probably should’ve tried to figure out if you were you before doing that.”
“Stranger danger?” Basira asks, a wry twist to her voice.
“Lost our next door neighbor and her son to a mannequin wearing the old lady’s skin suit the first week,” Melanie says, and she doesn’t mean to be so dismissive about it, but it’s not the same for her as it is for everyone else here, except maybe Georgie. This isn’t her first horror show. She’s seen ghosts. She’s been shot by ghosts. She’s had Elias fucking Bouchard knuckles deep in her skull, making her know—.
Better not to think about that. Bastard would probably hear – she doesn’t delude herself that he didn’t survive the world ending – and get off on it, on the fact that she still sometimes circles around the memory during her more sleepless nights, prodding at it like there’s any chance it’ll have scabbed over and stopped hurting so damn much. Little moth.
“Can’t think of much I’d do to convince you I’m safe,” Basira says. “I mean, there are recordings of me, but they’re all back at the Archives, and there’s no getting in there.”
“You tried?”
“Daisy tried. With her foot.” Melanie files that away for later consideration, because she’d never asked but she had thought—Basira had avoided the topic of Daisy so scrupulously the one time she had visited in the weeks before the world had ended but after Jon had come bursting into the flat and after the attack on the Magnus Institute, and it had just seemed kinder not to ask, not to prod and poke at Basira’s raw open wounds the way she sometimes does at her own. “Tunnels are blocked off too.”
“Maybe Elias doesn’t like this new world,” Melanie says spitefully.
“Doubt it.” Basira sighs. “I mean, either of us willing to take bets that he somehow didn’t cause this?”
“No. But only because I don’t like losing.”
Basira lets Mr. Ghosh take her picture. She meets the neighbors. That night she sleeps on their sofa, because no one has been keen to leave the dubious security of the building after dark. In the morning, over the last of the eggs from Geogie’s most recent supply run, she says, “Seems safe here. Daisy’s been staying with my mum and a couple of civilians we picked up, but—.”
“She can come stay with us,” Georgie says, before Basira has to ask and before Melanie has fully weighed the pros and cons of offering. “They all can. You too, if you want. There’s room. One of the flats on the ground floor has been empty for months, and I suppose we can clean out Maura’s, although that does seem a little—ghoulish.”
Melanie has loved Georgie for a long time. Longer than they’ve been together, she’s pretty sure. She loves her furious and glowing with it, loves her soft and sleepy and heavy in the morning with an uncanny talent for resting a thigh or an elbow directly on Melanie’s bladder, but loves her best like this: generous, and so brave, because Georgie doesn’t feel fear but that’s also made her very good at calculating the risks.
Fuck it, Melanie thinks, because the world has ended and all they really have is each other and Basira is a friend. “Yeah,” she says. “Do it. The more the merrier in the apocalypse, right?”
Basira doesn’t say anything, but she swallows hard and thick enough that Melanie can hear it, and right in that moment it doesn’t feel dangerous, doesn’t feel like more mouths to feed or more people who might be monsters wearing a familiar face. It feels good, to be brave and to be the promise of safe harbor and a still place in the middle of the storm.
**
“I’m going to miss you,’ Helen says.
She wasn’t standing there a minute ago. Melanie’s sure of that. She sounds less like Helen than she once had, and Melanie knows that should bother her more than it does but she—she’s not Jon. She’d never known the real Helen Richardson. Some part of her still looks at this increasingly less familiar version of the person—the creature—the whatever she had known and thinks friend, because the progression from one to the other has happened by inches rather than miles.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Melanie says.
“Don’t lie to me,” Helen says mournfully. Her mouth turns into what Melanie supposes is a frown, the corners curling until they touch her lower lip. It’s really uncomfortable to look at, if she’s being honest. “I rather like it. If you lie to me, I’ll just miss you more.”
“That’s kind of freaky, Helen.”
The frown disappears. No, it dissipates, evaporating from her face in a way that—really isn’t possible. She laughs, soft and echoing and looping around like a fist gently squeezing Melanie’s gut. “Would you like me to get you where you’re going?” The door hadn’t been there a minute ago. Melanie is sure of that, too. “You’ll get there safely. I promise. I know you don’t like to leave here on your own. Almost as much as you don’t like to come back. Isn’t that funny?”
Jon and Basira would probably say it’s a bad idea. Jon and Basira also aren’t here. They’ve been cloistered in Jon’s office most of the morning, and she would swear that Jon has been avoiding her ever since her told her. He means well, she thinks. He’s trying to give her the space she needs to figure it out for herself, and she can appreciate that, can appreciate it even if she’s still so angry sometimes when she sees him that she can barely breathe, even with the bullet gone. Jon and Basira aren’t here, and she’s just—she’s sick of being afraid.
“Sure,” Melanie says.
Stepping through Helen’s door is uncomfortable too, but it’s also familiar. She barely has time to feel nervous at all before she’s walking out into Georgie’s flat. The Admiral races from the kitchen, meowing at the top of his lungs. He drags his cheeks against her ankles again and again, like he’s trying to overlay the scent of something strange with his own.
“Hey,” she says, crouching so he can have his way with her hands instead. He drops suddenly onto his side and rolls over until she can see his belly, a more obvious trap than Helen’s door ever has been. “I don’t think so, buddy. I like my fingers where they are.”
Georgie steps out of the kitchen behind him.
“I need to talk to you about something,” Melanie says.
Georgie drops onto the floor beside her and the Admiral. They talk. They talk until the sky outside is turning to gloomy twilight, until Melanie’s knees are protesting about too long spent pressed against hardwood, but the move to the sofa doesn’t seem worth the effort.
“Are you afraid?” Melanie asks, not because she doesn’t know the answer but because she needs to hear it.
Georgie darts in to press a quick kiss to Melanie’s mouth. Her lips feel like they’re smiling, but her eyes are soft and serious when she leans back. “No. Are you?”
Melanie thinks about that. She’s afraid of hurting, but not as afraid as she is of staying. She wonders if it’s the same thing. “No.”
**
Basira’s mum is—not nice, but she’s sharp and focused and really fucking smart in a way that reminds Melanie of Basira, and that’s nice. Melanie pushes open the door to the empty ground floor flat that they’ve been putting into livable order for Sohir, and she doesn’t realize anything is wrong until her cane reaches and then passes the place where the wall of the foyer should be. The air feels strange. She can feel it twisting against her skin, in a way that air shouldn’t.
The door swings shut behind her.
“Helen?” Melanie says. She’s less afraid than she thinks she probably should be.
Silence.
“Fucking rude, Helen.”
“Sorry,” Helen says. She sounds a little like she means it, and a little like she’s not sure what she means. “I did intend to leave you alone. Really.”
Melanie swallows hard, and she couldn’t say if it’s very reasonable fear or something else. “Don’t lie to me. I’ll just miss you more.”
There are so many people she misses, these days.
Helen laughs, delighted, before stopping abruptly. “I did miss you.” She sounds a little wondering, like she hadn’t expected it. “You were Helen’s friend. But you were mine, too. No one else was. I don’t know why that matters.”
Melanie doesn’t know what to say to that, other than, “Does it?”
“I suppose not. Or maybe it does.” Another silence. “I’m sorry. I am trying.”
“I know you are,” Melanie says, and she does. She sweeps her cane out again. It connects with nothing, until it does, a wall where there wasn’t one before. She reaches out until she can touch the newly formed wall with her fingers, and then she leans her back against it and slides down to sit on a floor that also probably wasn’t there a minute earlier. That’s how she knows that she’s right, that Helen really is trying. “Why are you here?”
“It was fun at first,” Helen says, but she sounds dubious, like that too might be a lie and even she doesn’t know for certain. “It was a game. It’s still is. I suppose? But then I started to think I might miss you, and Melanie—it was hard to find you.”
“Was it?”
“Was it not?”
“Oh come on.” Melanie feels a little dizzy. She ignores it.
“I am trying.” Helen’s repeats. Her voice has grown closer, and Melanie imagines she’s sat down now, next to Melanie, an assortment of impossible limbs folded up against a wall that isn’t there. “Did you not know? You’re hard to see, now. Hard to find. Harder for the things that came through after me – I knew you first. I was here first, long before some great, unblinking eye invited anything else in. But still, hard. Since you did what you did.”
There’s a laugh lodged somewhere in Melanie’s throat. “What? You can’t see me, I can’t see you? That kind of thing?”
“Oh, not because of that,” Helen says. “Plenty of people are blind. You cut the Beholding out of you, though. You excised it. And all of this, everything that’s here—the Watcher is what brought them in. Finding you is difficult for me. I think it might be impossible for some of the other things out there.” The word impossible dangles in the air for a while, long after Helen has finished speaking. That’s not a metaphor; Melanie waits for it to fade before she replies.
“You saying I’m safe?”
It’s a tempting thought. Too tempting. Supposedly that’s what the thing what-was-once-Helen does. Lies. Tempts. Deceives. Melanie should be worried.
“Well,” Helen says, “safe,” she considers, “ish.”
I don’t think it saw you, Georgie had said. Melanie wonders if either of them had really known how true that was.
She lets out a long breath. “Hey. Helen?”
There’s a long stretch of quiet. Melanie wonders if Helen is gone, or if Helen has just forgotten who Helen is supposed to be. The thought makes her a little sad, although she couldn’t say why. She’d never really known Helen Richardson, only this, this strange amalgam of Helen and dangerous other.
“Yes?”
“I missed you too. Really.” She exhales again. Her heartbeat is steady, unafraid. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Oh,” Helen said, confused and confusing but also pleased. “Good.”
**
The hospital bed is unforgiving hard under Melanie’s back. It’s the least of her pains, but honestly they have her so doped up that she cares about none of her pains.
“Melanie?”
Georgie’s voice.
Georgie.
She smiles.
“Hey,” she says. “Hey.” Georgie’s hand wraps around hers, and it feels good. Everything feels good right now, even the dull pain radiating through her cheekbones. “Hey. Listen. I feel just awl-ful.”
“I’m sure you—what?”
“Do you get it? Awl-ful. Because I—because I used a—a—to—.”
“Christ,” Georgie says, but she’s laughing, sort of helplessly.
“I know,” Melanie says, grinning wide now even though that makes the pain worse. “It’s good, right?”
**
Daisy hasn’t come by, although Basira doesn’t seem worried. Daisy doesn’t come by, not until a couple weeks after Basira relocates her mum and the assortment of traumatized strangers she’s collected to the ground floor flat and claimed the one that had once belonged to Mrs. Dougherty as her own, and when Daisy finally does arrive, she’s not alone.
Melanie would swear that she and Daisy had barely known each other, but Daisy clings harder than even Basira had, thin arms ropey with a hunter’s muscle and desperate. It’s fine. The world is over, and they’re all a little desperate now.
Her grip on Melanie has barely loosened when a soft voice says, from further in the hall, “Hey.”
Melanie breathes in sharply and swallows hard.
“Hi, Martin,” she says, and she doesn’t resist when she’s passed from Daisy to someone with a form that’s taller but also softer and more forgiving. The bridge of her nose burns and she presses her face into the worn cotton where his jacket gapes. “You okay?”
“I mean,” he says, “it’s all been kind of shit. If we’re being honest. But really, I could be worse. You know?”
She does.
There’s a palpable silence from behind Martin. Jon hasn’t said anything, but she knows he must be there. Even if she thought that he would leave Martin or Martin would leave him, she can practically feel Georgie nearly vibrating with—something, standing in the door of their flat.
“Jon,” she says, and there’s a severity and a chill to Georgie’s voice that usually isn’t there.
“I,” he says, and then he stops. “You said.” He stops again. He’s awkward, but that’s nothing new. Jon had been a weird one even before the world had ended, and Melanie almost wants to laugh. “I thought it might be okay. If—we’re going to try. I—I need to fix—I’m not trying to make you. I know you don’t want, but—you said. I was welcome. As a friend.’
“Fuck you,” Melanie says, but it feels kinder on her tongue than the last time she had said it to him and he’s not wrong: she had said that. She reaches out a hand, the rest of her still caught up in Martin’s arms, and for a moment she feels nothing but empty air. Then Jon’s fingers, long and thin and scarred, wrap around hers.
“Come in,” Georgie says. She doesn’t sound happy, but she also doesn’t hesitate over the words. “I don’t want the cat to get out.” She’s silent for a moment, and then she adds, softer still, “It’s good to see you.”
The world is ending. The world has ended. And Jon—he’s a shit friend, sometimes. But he is that.
**
The apartment is very quiet, after Jon has gone. The only sound is the rumble of the Admiral’s purr.
I need an ally.
And she—can’t. She can’t. She won’t. She’s out, and she wants to stay that way.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” Melanie asks.
“I don’t know,” Georgie replies. She says the words like she means for them to sound like I don’t care. They don't.
**
“So,” Melanie says, later that night, Georgie’s arm resting warm and familiar against her stomach. “Jon ended the world. Basira owes me a fiver.”
Georgie huffs out a laugh against the back of her neck.
“He says he wants to fix this,” Melanie says, quieter. “That he wants to fix the world.”
He and Martin are asleep on the sofa right now, wrung out and exhausted, a tighter fit on those five and a half feet of worn cushions than she and Georgie have ever been and not even seeming to care. She feels Georgie’s nose press cold against her skin. “We don’t have to be involved,” Georgie says, and it’s not cowardice because Georgie isn’t capable of cowardice, only a statement of fact. “We’re safe here.”
They haven’t lost anyone since Maura Dougherty and her son. The monsters don’t want Georgie, and they can’t find Melanie. They are safe, or as safe as it’s possible to be in a ruined world.
She’d wanted that, once. Not the apocalypse bit, but the part where she’s safe and well out of the worst of it.
“Might be nice,” she says, “to get the world fixed.”
She’s so tired of being afraid.
She thinks she might not mind, choosing to be involved. If it’s her choice.
“Might be nice,” she adds, thoughtful, “to punch Elias in the throat. Just. You know. Six or seven times.”
Georgie’s shoulders shake, her earlier laugh caught now inside her chest. “Might be nice,” she says, and Melanie feels her own shoulders relax.
“Are you afraid?” she asks. Not because she doesn’t know the answer. Because she needs to hear it.
“No.” Georgie presses a kiss to her spine. “Are you?”
“No.”
And she—.
She isn’t.
She’s not afraid.