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When Eve was seven, Annie found an old record player in one of their safehouses. There was nothing better for her to do, the resistance at the time being drawn more towards hiding and regrouping than to coordinating attacks, so she spent a quiet weekend trying to slot it all back together again until familiar notes began to spill out.
Her little girl heard La Vie En Rose for the first time in her memory, and danced around the basement, clumping and scattering and stumbling, and smiling and laughing and breathing. Annie had taught her to be fast, and agile, and quiet, but there had never seemed to be an opportunity to teach her to be happy. Perhaps children could pick up on the inherent beauty of the world.
The inherent beauty of the world before, at least. There was no beauty in the world where the werewolf lieutenant stormed into the room, scratched the record across its’ diameter and scolded the child for making a sound.
Annie put the record back into its cover carefully. It had been one of the few things she had that wasn’t yet broken, and while the memories that the music brought sometimes made her feel nauseous, it was no worse than the sights that she had to shield her daughter from almost every day.
Eve hadn’t broken yet, but the world was bending her further and growing larger and darker, and Annie was increasingly smaller, and fainter, and more tired. She would hold Eve for as long as she could, but it was a long time since Annie had felt worried about the possibility of being trapped on the Earth forever.
They were only going to be ten minutes.
It hadn’t been Tom’s idea to take a hormonal sixteen-year-old upstairs, out of the hideout. He would much rather that Eve stay inside, and hidden, and preferably behind six or seven safely locked doors with a well guarded escape route in case of emergencies. And he wasn’t turning into George, thank you very much, he just wanted to keep an eye on her. But it was early, and Annie had a migraine, and they were only going to be ten minutes.
The corporal was going to let them out the back way, and they were going to make a circuit up and down the high street during the changeover between night and morning patrols, and be back indoors before the commanders even noticed they had gone. There would be a team of people watching them both for every second they could have been at risk.
None of them knew Eve had cigarettes.
Tom knew that the vampires had sniffer dogs – enslaved werewolves who agreed to cooperate with the vampires in order to keep themselves out of the dogfights, at least for a month – but he hadn’t seen any of them in action before then.
Not that he could say he had seen them in action at all; merely felt a rough hand to his back that knocked him to the ground, smacking his head against the concrete.
Next to his head on the pavement, he saw the remains of Eve’s cigarette, still smoking – it was a good thing that she had dropped it, as when the soldier asked him he could nod blearily to tell them it was his. One of them laughed and called him and idiot, and the other released the pressure to his head in order to kick him in the side.
As he rolled over, one hand pressed into his stomach, he caught sight of a length of pale blonde hair poking out from behind the shell of a burnt-out car. He could see her eyes as well, round and frozen. She wasn’t moving, though that was more likely out of fear than common sense. Tom willed himself to continue scanning his eyes across the landscape, moving his focus away from her without enough urgency to attract attention from his captors.
The werewolf pounced all over him, muzzled and on all fours despite being completely in his humanoid form. Perhaps being treated like a dog for so long caused you to regress from whatever humanity you still had left; Tom supposed it wouldn’t be long now until he found out, and, his eyes straying back to Eve, he knew that she was thinking that too.
Much as she was keeping still (and he was thinking the best of her, she must have been listening to at least some of the mandatory training sessions), what he could see of her shoulders flinched every time the hand dug into his back.
He fought and kicked as they dragged him upright; not so much that he would have any chance of escaping them, he was a realist by necessity. He hoped, though, sufficiently to draw their attention, at least enough for Eve to get herself safely out of the way.
They pushed him forwards, and he writhed and twisted in their grip as he was dragged into the back of their van and slammed the doors shut, banging his head against the rough metallic floor.
He knew where he was going, and all he had left to hope for was that she would never see him again.
Somebody had given her a uniform, and he might have fought them for that, but he knew that there were a thousand symbols of her stolen childhood that cut far deeper than any he could see. The sleeves were far too long on her, slipping over her fingers so that she would have the opportunity to worry them with her thumb.
There was no way she could have worn the hems that far down in the short time she had had them. Cutler wondered, briefly, whether the previous occupant of her clothes was proper dead or just some kind of dead.
She saluted to him, as she always had done when he was a big tall soldier come to visit her and she was just a little girl being hidden out in basements. She outranked him now – always had done, but it was much easier to forget when she had had to cling to his knees to be able to stand up straight.
When he tipped his hat to her, he called her ma’am, because that was her title, now. He had seen her stutter slightly, used to Eve or Evie or some other disgustingly bastardised version of the name given to her by a different father in a different world.
He hadn’t been able to raise her. To be honest, nobody had, but Cutler had done his bit when the others were out on their human-only operations and he had been stuck behind to childmind.
It hadn’t been enough. But at least she had survived her childhood, which was more than most people were allowed to dream for, nowadays.
He tried not to look at her when they dragged him back to the camp with a split lip and his hands bound behind his back. The resistance made a point of executing their traitors loudly and messily – almost as badly as the vampires they were fighting. It made a sort of sense; there had to be some kind of deterrent from apparent immortality. Because apparently losing your humanity wasn’t enough anymore.
Of course it wasn’t, Cutler thought as he was kicked to the ground. They can’t lose something twice over.
They would have given her the stake. It was ceremonial, which made it her job, now that they had deemed her old enough to cope with the gore of everyday life.
He remembered when they had played at soldiers, and she had stabbed him with a blunt pencil. And then cried when she drew blood, scared that the tiny slit on his finger would spread and infect his whole body.
Part of him hoped that she was thinking of it too, and as the stake flashed though his eyeline and into his heart, he turned his head up in search of her bright and playful eyes.
But the gaze upon him was the impassionate stare of a soldier.
The last thing that caught his eye was a faint glimmer, the residue of tear tracks, running down her cheeks, and then his world fell black.
Alex took her identity papers back from the vampire at the table and shuffled past him into the next queue. There were maybe ten women in front of her now, and the reek of human blood was settling comfortably around her nostrils, as it always did on bloodletting days.
She had seen the girl behind her, petite and gentle and barely an adult, surely younger than any of her brothers. Hardly likely to make a single full moon before one of the guards decided they wanted to see the pale skin ripped from her throat, organs smeared over the cage and skeleton shattered like shards of glass.
It wasn’t morbid when it was reality.
The vampire asked her if she had been in the dogfights, and the girl replied with a voice that was quiet and polite. Alex didn’t need to hear her response to know it was in the negative – there was no way a girl like that would survive two minutes in a cage.
He probably leered at that, they always did with the women. Alex had long since learned to tune it all out. Still, for someone new it wouldn’t be pleasant – it never was – so once the vampire moved on to the next name, she turned and sent a commiserating smile over her shoulder.
Alex asked the girl where she had come from, and before she answered she had glanced down at her papers, eyes flitting over them at speed. When the girl said South Wales, Alex nodded and smiled. Not that she actually believed it, but it was safer for both of them not to question anything.
After they had queued, and bled, they had been given a few minutes to patch themselves up with the clothes of last month’s victims. Alex passed strips of cloth along the rows without focusing on the tiny diameter the shirtsleeves must have had when new, and continued to contort her lips into a smile. She wasn’t feeling it, but she wasn’t feeling much, and there was half a chance that it would settle the stomach of somebody who still cared.
She got to know the girl – Lily – over the next few days. As well as anybody got to know anybody anymore, at least. Alex told her about her boring life, and her silly dad, and she didn’t cry over her brothers because the tears had long since run out. They weren’t proper dead, at least.
In return, Lily told her about the places she had been, and Alex listened eagerly to every story. It wasn’t like Lily had ever been anywhere exotic, just Cardiff and Southampton and somewhere unspecified roughly south of Manchester. But Alex had barely been south of Manchester in her life, and she wasn’t naïve enough to think she would ever have the opportunity now.
Most people told stories like they were candles, little spots of light spilling out of them. As if they could tell enough to let the light overpower the darkness, such that even after they had been taken to the cages, they could be kept alive in someone, for as long as their candles were shining.
Lily told stories like they were skins to shed; like each tale was another person to be cast aside and allow to shrivel up to ash. Every name that passed her lips would develop and grow, little sparks of personality budding and bursting out of her words. And then the vampires would come, or the disease, or the floods. They would die, bloodily and bluntly, and then Lily would fold them up and put them away, and each time she did there would be a little bit less of her left.
When the vampires came to take Alex away, she could only hope that she had been enough of a friend to Lily to merit a story.
Nobody had told him that overthrowing the humans would have involved this much bloody paperwork.
He’d been a leader before, sure, and maybe then the humans had all thought him human as well, and maybe three hundred or so years had passed since then, but the fundamental nature of people hadn’t changed that much. It stood to reason that if he threatened them hard enough the others ought to back down and let him do as he liked.
Unfortunately, most of the current vampires hadn’t been alive for long enough for the whole blast furnace massacre to be more than a second- or third-hand story, and as such were yet to have the fear of Lord Hal put into them, properly. He would have to get on to that.
For now, though, he was stuck at a desk signing off on yet another stack of deaths, pages on pages of names typed out in neat rows, the last line of a hundred lives being consigned to a random folder for however many weeks they could last before the resistance turned up with a firebomb yet again, indiscriminately out for destruction.
He stuck a record on his gramophone – the one singular advantage to being the more powerful side in a war was that he could play his music as loudly as he damn well liked.
When the piano started up, he heard an extra discordant clang, like that of colliding crockery, and his heart would have skipped a beat at the thought that his record might have been scratched.
Luckily though, it was just, in fact, crockery. Some idiot had sent in another human to clear up his office, like he couldn’t do it himself. Perhaps he couldn’t. The compulsions came in fits and starts, out of phase with the most vicious spurts of the bloodlust, so the girl was going to get it in the neck for this either way, although whether “it” referred to his fangs or a rant about his cleaning rota was yet to be determined.
They were expecting it to be his fangs. Hal wasn’t sure who “they” were, either – the girl, the vampire who sent her in, himself. She was little, and blonde, and you could see her being kind and gentle, in a world that allowed you to be anything like that. Probably her blood would be sweet and fresh, as a Lord ought to expect from his meals.
For now, he let her work. If she was going to die anyway (which she was, eventually) he may as well get a clean room out of it.
A few hours (minutes) passed with just the sound of his pen scratching over paper, and books being shifted back onto shelves, and a single low saxophone. When the door creaked open, it took all of his focus not to jump. He was a vampire, a powerful one; he wasn’t liable to surprise.
And of course it was Fergus, again, the bootlicker, swanning up with the national list of werewolf deaths in the last moon cycle. To be fair to him, that was the only actually useful list that needed to be brought to his attention; somebody had had the bright idea to register all the werewolves (that might have been him, or the other him) and since then it had been much easier to predict how many vampires they needed to guard each camp at the time of the month.
Not to be fair to him, he was a grumpy, arrogant arsehole with appreciably more muscle than sense.
Nevertheless, Hal read aloud through the list of names, mindful that it would get Fergus appeased and out more quickly than sitting on it for a few days. Some of them were vaguely familiar; the resistance was getting old, and tired, and all of a sudden clumps of commanders who had been sufficiently relevant a decade past for Hal to have heard of them were being rounded up and put to death.
Hal was getting old, too, but he had been getting old for the past five hundred years, so it wasn’t so much of an excuse for him. He kept reading.
He saw the last name on the list, and was assaulted with the memories of a life that was long dead to him; a house by the coast, the chance of a big, fat, ordinary life. Just a little less ordinary than the last one, what with the werewolf baby –
Who was almost certainly long dead. With the exception of him (if he could even count himself as one of their number), they were likely all gone, and if not, they had just made their way one step closer to it. He read out the name, and signed the bottom of the page.
The scratch of his pen on paper was punctuated sharply by the sound of smashing, and he looked up to see the human girl, face more pale and drawn than most, her bare feet surrounded by shards of what had once been quite a nice cup of his.
Fergus, ever efficient in his grovelling, snapped at the girl to clean it up, and glanced at him in the side-eyes way he did when waiting for permission to rip her throat out. Hal suspected that the girl hadn’t realised that, seeing both as she was a human, and most humans only got to see that facial expression once in their lives, and also as she seemed to be staring through the floor. Her eyes appeared unable to focus on the shards of cup, let alone the microexpressions of anybody else in the room with her.
Possibly it would have been altogether easier to just let Fergus have her, but it was getting harder and harder to find captives willing to clean his room without also trying to surreptitiously stake him in the back. Aside from the pottery scattered across the room, he had to admit that the room was fairly in order.
Admittedly, his brain found it to be a completely unacceptable order, but it was at least a reasonable place to start from. The girl looked far too hollow to do any of them any intentional damage, as well.
Instead, Hal snapped at them both to leave. Fergus complied quickly; Hal knew that he wasn’t at his most dangerous at the moment, but Fergus had been at the receiving end of his wrath plenty enough times in that past two centuries to know that even a threat ought to be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, the girl floated through the room. Enough to look emptier than most ghosts, but not absent enough to avoid splitting her feet open on every shard on the direct route between her and the door.
Eve had only one destination once they brought her back to the resistance camp.
The officers knew where they wanted her to go, maybe. There was to be a vast assembly held in her honour to celebrate the safe liberation of the War Child from the fangs of the vampires. Probably speeches, and handshakes, and feasting on rations they could ill afford to waste.
There would be funerals, too. Not funerals as they used to be, in the old world; there were too many dead to give each the dignity of a private service. But there was a number of soldiers and civilians who had died to bring her back to the resistance, who would be commemorated. There would be a talk, and people who still believed that their God would save them would pray over the corpses of their lost loved ones. Most of those who didn’t would turn to the War Child with the reverence of prayer, and she would smile and nod solemnly and hope that it looked to them like she had the answer.
Those were the responsibilities of the War Child, and she took them willingly now because she had seen how belief could hold people together and keep them safe from themselves. She was the only person who could do that, and it was a privilege as much as a curse.
But before she was the War Child, the constant symbol of hope in a war that was never going to end, she had been a little girl safe in the arms of her mother. She had just spent seven months sat in a camp waiting for her insides to be ripped from her, and before she went back to her work she needed to be reminded that she was safe again.
It wasn’t true, of course, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t believe it.
When she slipped back into her dormitory, there was another girl sat on her bed. It wasn’t surprising; the expected life expectancy in a camp was no more than three full moons. She had known what would happen when the soldier in the camp hustling prisoners down the back stairs had seen her across the room, and her eyebrows shot up before she had managed to school her features. Everyone had thought that the War Child had ascended from saviour to martyr, and Eve Sands’ possessions had been packed into a box to be redistributed to soldiers and mothers as needed.
That was okay. They weren’t the important things.
She wasn’t incredibly surprised that Annie wasn’t at her armchair as usual; Eve knew that she liked to visit the human babies, who were still able to see her. The nursery always needed hands, and it wasn’t often that they had volunteers who still had the full use of two.
When she made it to the nursery, a ghost she didn’t know was bottle feeding an infant from the milk farmed in the maternity ward. This was hardly surprising either; the turnover of humans to ghosts was high, and in her role Eve had met hundreds, if not thousands of humans, churning into their battles like floodwater and very rarely coming back as themselves.
But that ghost didn’t recognise Eve’s description of Annie, and neither did the current ward sister, or any of the corporals guarding the doors to the hospital.
None of the teachers or guards in the school were aware of her either, and – and this was an end to it – none of the children. Adults everywhere were dragged in and out of a thousand jobs in a month, never forming relationships because they didn’t know who would still be there by the end of the week. But children, here, were safe and sheltered and too bubbly and alive to have been trodden down by the rest of the world. They wouldn’t have forgotten a spark as bright as Annie, had they ever managed to meet her.
So – Annie was gone.
Not just that, but even the memory of Annie was fading into dust. Eve could find nobody who knew her directly, and within a few months, she wouldn’t be able to track down anybody who knew her second- or even third-hand.
The same went for Cutler, and Tom, and the droves of people who had sat around and brought her up, taught her fighting and writing, sat down and read with her, helped her to walk, changed her nappies. Even as the only person left who had met them all, she wouldn’t be able to recognise their photographs, much less recall their names. Even if, unlike Annie, they still had any kind of consciousness left to them, they were dust now, as much as she was, in all the ways that mattered.
Eve took herself to the stores. There was a guard checking IDs, barring all but trusted volunteers who would redistribute the impersonal, and keep records as neatly as they could, under the circumstances. Nobody denied Eve entrance. Nobody would deny the War Child anything.
She wandered up the aisles, rows of battered, leaking cardboard boxes in an approximation of an alphabet. Rails of dresses and shirts, too colourful or too loose-fitting or too happy for a war. Pages and pages of lists of the dead, or the missing. She would be on there somewhere. Perhaps they had put her down next to Tom or Annie.
She reached “S” – scrawled, appropriately, in fading black Sharpie on a wall, and scanned the boxes for a name she recognised.
The first name, she scanned over and had to go back to – Sands, George awoke nothing in her at first glance. It was a life that she had never been allowed to have, that of a father, who loved her uncomplicatedly and unconditionally, without expectation or admiration, comfortably and completely. Just because she existed, and that was enough.
Her continued existence was more of a miracle than it ever had been, but she knew that it would never be enough for anybody.
That box could remain unopened though. She had no right to rifle though the possessions of a man that she had barely met. Much more important was the box that came half an aisle later.
Sawyer, Annie. The first person in her memory to be there for her, and the last to leave.
Twenty years of warfare didn’t leave much in the way of personal possessions – much of what Eve would have expected to be there was gone – making substandard, watery tea in the hospital kitchens, no doubt.
It wasn’t like the objects in the box were devoid of joy; rather, the joyous things were those most likely to be banned in wartime. There was music, a record undoubtedly far older than Annie and far too loud to risk playing. A flower garland; decorative and cheerful, but Eve could only see a noisy, crackly, vibrant banner, useful to send a call for help, if anything at all. And, scattered along the bottom of the box, some split, some fraying, were piles of teabags, labelled in Annie’s small, neat script.
Eve wrapped the flowers around her neck as if in a hug, crossed her legs to the floor and emptied the box. She took each teabag, sucked in the scent, and absorbed the contents of each note. This was Annie’s legacy, her passion, and this box in this store would only last for as long as the resistance did.
She savoured every word, every moment of commitment and love her mother had spent creating a lasting memory of herself. The notes were brief, it wasn’t long until she had read through them all, twice, and the nagging guilt of usurping her duties crept its’ way back into her head. It no longer had Annie’s voice.
The teabags went back into the box in a heap, without ceremony. It wasn’t like there was anybody else to read them. The record slipped back over them more gently, the crooning voice from so long ago swimming its’ way slowly towards her ears, a gentle piano humming at her to stop, to slow down, to breathe. She pushed it further, and the noise stopped. The garland came back over her head so quickly that she mights have expected it to split into a hundred pieces.
The War Child folded up the last tiny bit of Eve Sands, and tucked it back in the box too, safely hidden under Annie’s Louis Armstrong record which would never be allowed back out until the war was over – which would never be allowed back out.
She went to the assembly, as she had to, and crowds of people cheered for the War Child who had been returned to them. The War Child waved, and smiled, and Eve Sands was gone but it didn’t really matter.
One by one, Eve Sands had lost her world, and now the world had lost her.