head down on my lap. 'Let's continue this conversation later. Say, once I've had a nap.'
I watch her fall asleep, stroking her face, pulling her hair away from her eyes. Having Lissa here this Christmas has made it just about bearable, but my parents' absence is palpable and agonising. I finish my beer. My head dips, my eyes close and I'm in a dream at once.
The Hungry Death laughs, and dances around the corpses of Lissa and my family. This new family. The one I haven't lost yet.
But you will. The shadow that is the Hungry Death dips into a bow. Merry Christmas, Mr de Selby.
In one swift movement it wrenches Lissa's head from her shoulders, and hurls it at my face. Her dead eyes open, unseeing, never to behold me again.
I wake with a jolt. Only a moment's passed since my eyes closed, scarcely more than an eye blink. Lissa's still next to me, her heartbeat is strong. She's a thousand times more alive than when I first saw her, and I will not see her dead again. Never. I refuse to.
And it's so lovely to know that that is inside me, and is part of me in such a fundamental way. So very lovely indeed.
'You know,' I whisper to it. 'All I really wanted for Christmas was a pair of socks.'
I slide away from Lissa. There's an ibis on a nearby roof, looking like a weathervane. It turns its long beaked face towards me.
'Lissa's sleeping,' I say. 'Keep an eye on her.'
It dips its head, and scrambles across the roof for a better view. A crow shoots above me, landing on our roof with a scrape of claws. I get a confusion of perspectives looking in towards Lissa and away. The suburb is quiet, but for kids riding their new bikes, or people getting ready for a late Christmas dinner. Aircons are sighing, beetles are whirring. There's a clatter and a snap from up on the roof, and for a moment I can taste the crow's gecko dinner. Ugh.
I walk back to Lissa, kiss her on the brow. She startles me by actually opening her eyes.
'Where are you going?'
'Somewhere you can't come. Don't worry, I'll be safe – well, safeish. I've got work to do.'
'It doesn't stop for you, does it?'
I smile. 'You know, there was a while there when I thought it did. That I deserved a break. But when I stop, people die, people who I care about. And when they die, I die a bit, too.'
Lissa touches my face, with a hand so perfect, so clear in my mind that I could hold it forever. 'Merry Christmas,' she says.
And I think about HD, and its last words to me. I can't let it spoil this. I'll be damned if I'm going to give it even a minor victory.
'Yeah, merry Christmas.'
Then I shift, leaving her and my Avian Pomps behind.
28
Even this early in the morning Suzanne's Boston offices are a picture of efficiency. People work behind terminals, tapping away furiously, calculating the best routes to a pomp or a stir. A stocking taped beside a noticeboard is the only concession I can see to Christmas here.
Suzanne used to base herself in New York, but found it too noisy; 'too clamorous', as she put it. I can understand that – such a big city, so many beating hearts hard up against each other. Washington, she'd never cared for, just as I could never imagine basing myself in Canberra. Capital cities are modern constructs. Our regions were built on different models.
The blinds are up, and it's snowing outside. Suzanne and Cerbo are both waiting for me.
'Merry Christmas, Mr de Selby,' Suzanne says, and pecks me on the cheek before I even realise what she's doing.
'You, too, Ms Whitman.'
Suzanne leads Cerbo and I into her office. 'I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to spending a few days in Australia,' she says, once she's shut her door and sat in her throne. 'I've actually booked a room at the Marriott, a couple of blocks away from the bridge. Beautiful view.'
I'm not here for small talk. 'Things are getting worse,' I say. 'Stirrers are growing in numbers and I can't detect them.'
'We've had problems here, too,' Suzanne says. 'The god's presence is making them almost reckless. You've seen it, you can understand why.'
'Rillman isn't helping, either.' I describe the symbol Rillman designed, and its powers. I'd emailed the details out to every RM, but it doesn't hurt to go over it again.
'No, he is proving to be something of a trial,' Suzanne says.
'That may be the biggest understatement I have heard in my life. Are you practising for a political career? A trial? Christ! And I need to know as much as I can about this god. Is there even any hope of stopping it?'
Suzanne nods at Cerbo.
'All I can tell you is this, and it goes back a ways,' Cerbo says, pouring me a coffee, which I didn't ask for but accept none the less. 'Six hundred million years ago something happened. Call it Snowball Earth, call it whatever you want, but after that, life grew more complicated, and the Stirrers' grip on this world ended.' His voice speeds up: words tumble into each other with his excitement. I've never seen Cerbo so wound up. He's a nerd of the apocalypse. 'You can see it more clearly in the Underworld. Look at the base of the One Tree; you'll see stromatolites crowding in like slimy green warts. We even have intelligence -' Cerbo looks at Suzanne, and she nods. '- we've even had intelligence that the Stirrers keep some in the heart of their city. Get out on the Tethys, go more than a few miles out, and what do you find? Nothing, no echoes of anything. Life hugs the shore. There's probably patches or places that correspond roughly to life and death on the earth but the sea of Hell is vast and I haven't found them. Believe me, I've looked.'
'So what are you telling me?'
'What you probably already know, and what you will know as time goes by, ever quicker for you – that life is precarious. I think the Stirrer god existed before the Stirrers; a long time before. Maybe it's as old as the birth of the universe and Underverse itself.'
'Old doesn't mean smart,' I say.
'But it does mean tenacious and robust. That Stirrer god may be the most ancient consciousness in existence.'
'So that's what we're up against?'
Cerbo nods.
I think about it for a moment. Try and find the most positive outcome. 'Well, life won before, obviously. We're all still here. Things are alive. Life can win again.'
Cerbo shakes his head. 'But you see, I think that was an accidental victory, a consequence of forces that just slipped in life's favour. That is, if you can even call it a victory. Life exploded after those events, but the desolation beforehand… And this time…'
'And if the world shifted that way again?'
'It may well be worse than the Stirrer god itself. You don't know how bad the earth would be if we returned to those minus-fifty-degree Celsius temperatures.'
I shrug. 'I've seen The Empire Strikes Back.'
Cerbo's smile is thinner than his moustache. 'Humour is an inadequate defence. And it would be nothing like that. The planet Hoth would be a walk in the park on a summer's day compared to that.'
'What do we do?'
'I don't know if there's anything we can do.'
Suzanne grabs my hand. 'See? See how difficult this is? This is what we are up against. I ask that you not judge any of us for the choices we may have to make in the days ahead. You, least of all.'
I open my mouth to speak. Suzanne's phone rings, and mine follows a few moments later. We look at each
