The Inheritors
PART ONE
Theo’s bed was still warm. That was what Niall would tell people later, on the days he could speak about it.
The sheets held his shape: the dent where his head had pressed into the pillow, the rise where his little knees came up to his chest in sleep.
That morning, Niall pressed his hand flat to the mattress and felt the warmth bleeding out of it. He stood there until Marin came in and saw his face. Then Marin’s face changed, and that was the worst part.
Worse, even, than what came after.
Quarter past six.
The 1st of May, 2026.
Light through the curtains had the chalky quality of early summer over Aberdaron, and somewhere a fishing boat sounded its horn.
His son was gone.
He went room to room three times. The bathroom door was open. The cupboard under the stairs. The pantry. Theo’s books sat on the shelf where he’d left them. The new dinosaur encyclopaedia lay open at the page on ammonites. Theo loved fossils. He couldn’t pronounce ichthyosaurus and refused to be corrected.
The encyclopaedia was open and the pen torch was on the floor beside the bed, still on, its weak yellow beam pointed at nothing.
By seven, sirens started in the village. He heard them before Marin did. She was downstairs, on the phone to her mam, asking what to do.
He stood at the bedroom window with his palm still on the glass and watched a police car pass, and then another, and then a black car he didn’t recognise.
By half-past eight there were people on the lane outside, shouting names. Different names. None of them Theo’s.
The phone rang and Marin answered. The colour left her face. She didn’t speak much. She said yes. She said yes again. She put the phone down and looked at him.
“Lewis Tudur’s gone. From the cottage by the bridge.”
“All right.”
“All of them. Mara just rang. The Powys boys. Dilys’s wee girl. The Thompsons’. All of them.”
He said all right again.
He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The constable came at ten. Heledd Iorwerth, who’d been at school with him long ago, gone away, married a man from the north, and come back. She sat at his kitchen table and asked him about Theo’s last day. Her hands shook holding the pencil. She’d never been in his kitchen before. He saw her looking at the photographs on the fridge.
A phone kept ringing on the table between them, and she kept declining the call, and he watched her do it without seeming to be aware she was doing it.
“It’s everywhere,” she said.
“What is?”
She looked at him. Then she looked away. “Niall, it’s all of them. Every child.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
He’d been a Royal Navy diver before the ferries.
He’d spent six years going down into water that wanted to kill him, and the thing about water was you respected it but you didn’t fear it, because fear made you breathe incorrectly, and breathing incorrectly was how you died.
He sat at the kitchen table and his hands were steady. He listened to Heledd Iorwerth tell him there was no child under fifteen in Aberdaron. None in Pwllheli. None in Caernarfon. None in Cardiff or Manchester or Glasgow. None in Paris. None in Lagos.
None anywhere.
“How is that—”
“They don’t know.”
He considered this. He thought about the shape on Theo’s mattress. The warmth.
“How long had they been gone? When you got the first call.”
“What?”
“What time.”
She checked her notebook. “Five forty-two.”
“It was warm,” Niall said. He looked at his hands. “When I touched the bed at six. It was still warm.”
She wrote that down. He watched her write it.
After she’d gone, Marin sat on the kitchen floor with her back to the radiator and didn’t cry.
He’d expected crying. The absence of it frightened him.
He sat down on the lino opposite her and they passed the afternoon like that, listening to the telly in the next room, hearing the names stack up.
The numbers on the telly kept getting bigger. Six hundred. Six thousand. Six hundred thousand. The newsreader said the figure was provisional. The figure was always provisional. The figure was being revised upward, the newsreader said.
He kept saying it as though it were the same sentence every time.
Marin spoke once. Around four. “He didn’t say goodnight. Last night. He went up early.”
“He wasn’t feeling well.”
“He wasn’t feeling well.” She looked at the floor between her shoes. “Did I check on him?”
“You did.”
“Did I, though?”
“You did.”
She nodded. She believed him because she wanted to. He hadn’t, in fact, been certain. He was certain now, because she needed him to be.
At half-past five, their neighbour Glynis Pugh let herself into the kitchen without knocking. Glynis was fifty-two, had buried a husband and a brother and one of two dogs, and had a daughter, Bethan, aged nine.
Glynis stood in the doorway holding a tin of biscuits because that was what she’d reached for when she left her own house. The biscuits were the kind Bethan liked. Custard creams.
“They’re saying it on the news,” she said.
“We heard,” Marin said.
“They’re saying it’s everywhere.”
“We heard, Glynis.”
Glynis put the biscuits on the counter and went out again. Niall watched her go down the lane. She walked carefully. He thought she might fall. But she didn’t fall. She walked all the way to the harbour wall and stood with her back to the sea, looking at the village. He couldn’t see her face from the window. He could see her figure, small against the harbour, clutching her elbows.
That was when he started to cry. He hadn’t been crying.
He cried then, watching Glynis Pugh stand at the harbour wall, and he cried for some time.
Marin watched him without coming to him, because they didn’t have that yet. They would have it later. They would have to learn it.
The night of the 1st of May was unlike anything in human history, the news said, and that was true and also nothing.
What the news could not convey was the silence.
Aberdaron was a village of nine hundred and thirty-one people, and on a normal evening you could hear, through any open window, the small reverberations of children: voices in gardens, a bicycle bell, someone calling someone home.
None of that. Just sea-sound and gulls and the steady percussive note of distant helicopters that were not, in the end, looking for anything they could find.
Niall went out at eleven. He couldn’t help it.
He walked down the lane to the harbour and along the harbour wall and up the steep path towards the headland. There were others walking. Dafydd Tomos from the chip shop. The Hoskins woman whose dog had got hit by a van last Easter, walking with her husband, holding hands, neither of them speaking. Old Ifor Vaughn, no relation, who hadn’t left his house for two years according to local rumour, sitting on the bench by the church with his pipe out and unlit.
They nodded to each other.
They didn’t speak. Speaking felt obscene.
When Niall got home it was after midnight and Marin was asleep on the sofa with the dog at her feet.
The dog wasn’t asleep. The dog was watching the door.
The dog watched Niall come in and cross the room. The dog watched him sit down on the floor by the sofa and put his head down by Marin’s hand.
The dog didn’t move.
The dog kept watching the door, in case someone came.
By morning, someone had.
PART TWO
The boy on the doorstep had a slight resemblance to Theo. The eyes perhaps. Something very subtle, as if he was a distant cousin.
He was clearly not Theo, and he was not even trying to be.
Niall stood in the porch with the front door half-open and looked at the child standing on the slate step, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
Eleven minutes past six in the morning of the second of May.
The boy on the step looked to be about eight. He was wearing pyjamas Niall had never seen — pale blue, faintly checked, slightly too small. His feet were bare. He was looking up at Niall and waiting.
Marin came up behind him and made a sound.
“Get back,” Niall said.
“Niall—”
“Get back, Marin.”
She didn’t get back. She stepped past him and crouched on the porch tiles. She didn’t reach for the boy. She put her hands on her own knees and looked at him at eye level, and her breath came in short jabs, and she said, “Hello,” very quietly.
The boy didn’t speak. He looked at her and didn’t speak. Something was in his face that Niall wasn’t yet able to name. Later, he would name it: it was patience.
It was the look of someone who’d come a very long way to wait for something specific.
Down the lane, on every doorstep of every house, there was a child.
He saw this without meaning to. Glynis Pugh stood at her gate with her hand at her throat and a girl on her doorstep. The girl looked, almost, like Bethan. The Hoskins’ house, two doors down — a child on the step. The Powys cottage. The Thompson place. Up and down the lane.
He could see, in the distance, where the lane turned: a small figure on a doorstep. And another. And another.
“Marin,” he said.
“I see them.”
“Marin.”
“Niall, I see them.”
The boy on his porch was still waiting. Marin hadn’t invited him in. Nothing about him suggested he wanted to be invited in. He stood and waited as though waiting were the thing he was for.
Glynis came down the lane. She was walking funny.
She arrived at his gate and looked at the boy on his step and at Niall and at Marin, and she said, “Mine looks like Bethan.”
“This isn’t Theo.”
“I know,” Glynis said. “Mine isn’t Bethan. But she looks. She looks.” Her face was working in a way Niall hadn’t seen on it before, not even after her husband died. “What do we do? Niall, what do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s just standing there. The new one. The —” Glynis didn’t have a word.
The boy on the porch lifted his eyes to Glynis, briefly, and then returned them to Marin. He hadn’t moved his feet since Niall had opened the door. Niall didn’t think he’d moved at all.
Marin said, “Come inside.”
The boy came inside.
Niall watched it happen. Marin stood up out of her crouch and stepped back. The boy crossed the porch and the threshold, and Marin closed the door behind him with both hands, very deliberately, as though she were closing something hostile in. Or out.
Niall wasn’t sure which, and he wasn’t sure she was sure.
The boy stood in the hall and looked at the photographs.
He looked at them in order. Left to right. The wedding photograph first. Then the picture of Marin and her sister at the harbour. Then the school photographs of Theo, in order of year: reception, year one, year two, year three. He looked at the year-three photograph for slightly longer than he’d looked at the others.
“Are you hungry?” Marin asked.
He didn’t turn. He lifted one hand and touched the year-three photograph, very lightly, with the tips of two fingers.
“All right,” Marin said. “All right. I’ll do you some toast.”
Niall followed her into the kitchen. He took her by the elbow and turned her and said, low, “What are you doing?”
“He’s a child, Niall.”
“He isn’t ours.”
“Did I say he was ours?”
“Marin—”
“Did I say he was ours? Niall, he’s a child. He’s standing in our hallway. What would you like me to do?”
He didn’t have an answer. He looked over her shoulder. The boy had moved. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching them have the conversation, and his face still had the patience in it, and Niall thought: he’s heard this conversation before. He’s heard a version of this conversation in every house on this lane.
The toast was buttered. The boy ate it standing. He held it with both hands, like a small animal eating fruit. He didn’t appear to chew.
Niall watched him eat and couldn’t, afterwards, account for the toast — couldn’t have said whether the boy had finished it, set it down, or simply stopped holding it.
The phone rang. Marin answered. She listened and said, “We have one too.” She listened more. “I don’t know, Mam. I don’t know.” She listened. “He looks. Yes. He does. But he isn’t. I can’t explain it. He isn’t.” She listened again. “Yes. We took him in. What were we supposed to do?”
When she put the phone down she sat at the table opposite the boy and looked at him, and the boy looked back at her, and Niall stood at the kitchen counter and watched them watch each other, and thought: this is the second day of the rest of our lives, and it’s already too late to choose differently.
The government broadcast came at eleven. They had asked for everyone to be by their televisions or radios or mobile phones.
Niall and Marin sat in the front room with the boy between them on the sofa, not touching, but the closest he’d been to either of them. The boy didn’t look at the television. He looked at the wall.
The Prime Minister’s face was the face of someone who hadn’t slept. He spoke for four minutes.
He said the words “unprecedented” and “international cooperation” and “extraordinary circumstances” and Niall stopped listening, because the words were dust, because the boy was on his sofa, and Theo was nowhere. The Prime Minister’s voice eventually said the only sentence that mattered: families with a child upon their doorstep were requested — pending further investigation — to take that child in. To care for them. To house and feed them.
The Prime Minister said this was a temporary measure. Until the investigation. Until they understood. He said this twice.
Marin laughed. It was a small dry sound. The boy, who hadn’t looked at the television, looked at her then, and the look was inquisitive. As though he were learning a new word.
“He says they’ll investigate,” Marin said.
“Yes,” said Niall.
“Investigate what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Investigate what, Niall?”
“I don’t know, Marin.”
The boy went on watching her.
His face had not gone back to its previous expression. It was now wearing an expression resembling sympathy.
That evening, Niall went out to the shed for oil for the door hinge of the spare bedroom, because the door of the spare bedroom needed to close properly tonight, and on his way back from the shed he stood for some time in the garden looking up at the bedroom window. The light was on. Marin had drawn the curtain back.
He could see her, kneeling on the floor, doing something he couldn’t at first understand. He watched. She was making the bed. She was making the bed for the boy. He watched her shake out the duvet and tuck the corners under, and he stood in the dark of his garden and his mouth filled with what he thought, briefly, was the taste of seawater, but it was only saliva, and only the plain salt of his body.
When he went in, the boy was already in bed. He had put himself there.
He was lying on his side, with his hands together under his cheek, and his eyes were open. He was looking at Marin. Marin was sitting on the edge of the bed. Her hand was on top of the duvet, near the boy, but she wasn’t touching him.
“Sleep tight,” Marin said, not knowing what to call him.
The boy closed his eyes.
In the second week the boys and girls began to draw.
Not all of them at first.
Glynis’s came first; the girl who looked almost like Bethan sat at the kitchen table with one of Bethan’s old colouring books, picked up a pencil, and drew, on the inside of the back cover, a circle with seven dots inside it. Glynis brought the colouring book round to show them.
The boy in their spare bedroom — they hadn’t yet given him a name, and wouldn’t for another month — stood up from where he’d been sitting in the corner of the front room, and walked, on his patient bare feet, to the kitchen drawer where Marin kept the pens. He took out a biro. He went to the back of the council circular Marin had left on the counter. He drew a circle. He drew seven dots inside it.
The dots were not random.
The dots were in the same configuration as Glynis’s girl’s dots had been.
Niall took the council circular from him and held it next to the colouring book. The same circle. The same seven dots.
“Show me,” Marin said. She didn’t say it to Niall. She said it to the boy.
The boy, who hadn’t yet spoken since arriving on their step, held out his hand for the circular. Niall gave it to him. He drew it again, in the same configuration. The dots, looked at carefully, were not all the same size.
Three were larger. Four were smaller. The pattern they made was not random. It made, perhaps, a shape; though of what, Niall couldn’t say.
By the end of that week, every paper in their house had a circle on it with seven dots inside.
By the end of the month, the news was reporting that the same drawing had been made by every replacement child everywhere in the world.
PART THREE
It took them four months to use his name.
They’d picked it carefully. Tomos. A common name in Gwynedd; not Theo, but with the same gentle plosive at the end, the same slight tip of the tongue, so that on the days when Niall’s mouth slipped, “Theo” could become “Tomos” with no audible seam.
Marin had named him while making him toast one Saturday and the boy had looked up from the table — by then he’d begun, slowly, to look up at things — and hadn’t objected.
Naming had to be done by someone.
The papers were calling them the Inheritors. The Vatican had a position. The Saudis had a position. The Chinese government had a position involving a great many committees.
None of these positions explained why no human child under the age of fifteen was here on the morning of the 1st of May 2026, except that another, identical, child had taken their place.
By Christmas, Tomos slept sometimes with his eyes closed. This was a small triumph. Niall logged it in the notebook he kept in the kitchen drawer, the notebook of small triumphs and small alarms.
The notebook ran:
— 5 June: smiled at gull on harbour wall.
— 2 Aug: laughed at Marin’s joke about the toaster.
— 14 Sept: ate jam off a spoon. (No reaction to sweetness; ate it like a chore.)
— 3 Nov: said the word ferry. Very quiet. Possibly accidental.
— 24 Dec: slept with eyes closed for at least one hour.
The morning of the 1st of May 2027 dawned into a fog. It was the fog that arrives off the sea in late spring and sits in the village all morning, holding everything in suspension, until, towards lunchtime, it lifts and reveals everything more or less unchanged.
Niall woke at quarter past five and couldn’t get back to sleep. He went downstairs in his stockinged feet and put the kettle on. The dog watched him. The dog hadn’t watched the door for some time now.
When he passed the spare bedroom — they still called it the spare bedroom, though no one had spared it in twelve months — he heard, very faintly, the boy speaking.
He stopped.
He hadn’t heard the boy speak more than five words in twelve months. The voice on the other side of the door wasn’t loud.
It was patient and rhythmical, the voice of a child who’d finally found something they wished to say.
Niall stood in the dark of the landing, and listened.
The boy wasn’t speaking English.
He listened harder. He thought, at first, the boy was speaking Welsh, but it wasn’t Welsh. He thought, then, perhaps Latin or Greek. It was neither. The sounds were soft and consonantal and had a beat to them.
As Niall stood and listened, the boy’s voice began to grow a second voice underneath it, slightly out of phase, as though he were singing in two voices at once.
Niall pressed his hand to the door and felt the wood vibrate, with the small tremor a fridge makes from a few feet away. The voices kept on. They kept on for almost a minute. Then they stopped, and the boy made a small contented sound, the sound of a child rolling over in sleep.
Niall stood with his hand against the door for some time longer.
Downstairs, he made the tea. He stood at the back window. The fog lay against the glass. The garden was a grey suggestion of itself. He drank his tea. He didn’t write down the morning’s alarm in the notebook. He didn’t write it because he couldn’t put a name on it; it wasn’t a smile or a laugh or a word, it was a thing in two voices at once.
Marin came down at six. She was wearing his jumper.
They stood in the kitchen and drank tea without speaking. They were good at not speaking now. They’d become a marriage of the unspoken thing. Niall thought, watching her, that this was the longest he’d ever loved her. The thought was not pleasant. It came with a sense of pre-emptive grief he didn’t know how to attribute.
Tomos came down at half-past seven. He’d dressed himself; he’d been dressing himself for some months.
He had on his school jumper and his trousers and he sat at the table and Marin made him toast and he ate it with both hands. He looked at his mother. “Mother” — what strange word.
He did look at her now. Marin had earned this somehow, in increments Niall hadn’t seen. Tomos reached across, every so often, and pressed his small hand on her wrist, and she would smile at him, and her smile was the smile of a woman who’d won a war she was no longer sure she’d wanted to fight.
“I’m taking him for a walk,” Niall said.
“Up to the headland?”
“Yes.”
“Take the dog.”
“I will.”
The boy looked at him and nodded.
They went up the lane in the fog. The dog walked between them. Niall held the lead loosely. Tomos walked on his left, his hand near Niall’s hand but not in it. They had, by mutual silence, stopped holding hands.
Once, near the beginning, the boy had slipped his hand into Niall’s and Niall had looked at it and the boy had looked at his face and had withdrawn his hand and they hadn’t done it since. They had instead developed this: this proximity-without-touch, this companionable distance.
Up at the headland the fog began to lift. The sea came clear under it, dark and slow. They sat on the bench and the boy took out a piece of paper from his pocket and began to draw on it with a stub of pencil.
Niall watched him draw. The boy was drawing the circle. He was drawing the seven dots. His hand was steady.
“Tomos,” Niall said.
The boy didn’t look up.
“Tomos, what’s the picture of?”
The boy went on drawing. Then he set the pencil down and put his hand in his lap and looked at the drawing as though to check it. Then he looked up at Niall.
“It’s where I was,” the boy said.
His voice was the voice of a child but also of something older.
Niall heard it like a singer’s lower register one had only ever heard sung high.
“Where you were,” he said.
The boy nodded.
“When?”
“Before.”
“Before what.”
The boy considered him. The patience of his face was, today, soft, and tired, and almost adult.
“Before I came down.”
Dr Alis Hopkin called Marin on the morning of the anniversary and asked whether she might come to the house. She’d been calling the house once a week for some months.
She was a paediatric geneticist out of Bangor, and she’d been studying the children, with their guardians’ permission, since June. Her own daughter had been seventeen on the 1st of May 2026, and so her own daughter had stayed. Hopkin had told them this, early on, in a way Niall took to mean: I’m studying these children but I haven’t lost one. Trust me accordingly.
She arrived at noon. She had her satchel with her. She had a box of biscuits, the ones that Tomos liked.
She stood in the kitchen and told Niall and Marin that they had finished sequencing.
“We have the answer,” she said. “Or part of it. May I sit down?”
She sat down. She put her satchel on the table. She didn’t, at first, open it.
“The children,” she said, “are not, as we feared, replacements. I know that’s a strange thing to say after a year. I know what we’ve all been told. But the genetic information is… it isn’t from somewhere else. I want you to understand this.”
“It isn’t from somewhere else.” She looked at Marin, then at Niall. “Their DNA is entirely human. It is, in fact, you.”
“What do you mean, us?” said Marin.
“I mean Tomos’s DNA shows he’s the biological child of you and Niall. As Theo was.”
Silence. Niall heard, in his head, the sound he’d heard at the spare bedroom door at five in the morning. The two voices of the boy.
“That isn’t possible,” he said, but flatly, as a statement.
“We’ve sequenced six hundred and forty-two of the children.”
“Every one of them is the biological child of the parents on whose doorstep they appeared. Same DNA. Identical, where we have samples from before, to within the limits of our error.”
“Then they’re —”
“Wait. Identical, except for a region of the genome we don’t know how to read. Something is in their DNA — call it a structure, call it an insertion — that doesn’t correspond to anything we have seen before. It is in all of them. It is in none of us.”
“What is it?”
“Information.”
“The structure is information. We haven’t yet decoded it.”
Marin was looking at the floor. Her hands were flat on the table. Niall said, quietly, “What does that mean?”
Hopkin breathed out. “I think — and I’m being careful with this, because I don’t want to say more than I know — but I think the children are still your children. I think they are the same children. I think they’ve come back with something added. Something that was put into them.”
“Something that is, in part, communicating through them. The drawings. The dreams.”
“The dreams,” said Marin. Her voice was very small.
“Yes. We’ve been monitoring them. The children, as you know, all dream the same dream. Every child, every night, regardless of geography. The same dream. We’ve been mapping their brain activity during it. The activity isn’t simply that they’re dreaming about the same thing. The activity is synchronised, child to child, to the millisecond.”
“They are dreaming together. They are, I think, in some part, one mind, all of them, in those hours.”
She stopped. She looked at her hands.
“And the new piece?” Marin said. “In their DNA. What is it doing?”
“I don’t know,” Hopkin said. “But we’ve started to be able to see it. Functionally. It is, we think, a kind of receiver. It allows them to be in the dream together. It is also, we think, a broadcaster. Or it will be. It isn’t yet active in that direction.”
“Broadcasting to what?” Niall said.
She looked at him. She had a kind face. She didn’t have an answer she wanted to give.
“To us,” she said, eventually. “To you. To all of us. The structure, in the children, is gradually preparing. We don’t know for what. I want to be very honest with you. The first signs are appearing in some of the parents. Not yet many. A few. Specific patterns of brain activity, during sleep, that have begun to mirror the children’s. I don’t want to alarm you. I want you to know.”
“Alis,” said Marin. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” said Hopkin, very carefully, “that I think the children are doing something. To us. With us. Through love, I think. I’m not being romantic. I mean that the bond is the channel. The more attached we have become, the more our brain activity has begun to harmonise with theirs. A small percentage. The most attached. They are showing the earliest changes.”
She paused. The kitchen was quiet.
Outside, the fog had lifted entirely, and the sun was very white on the sea.
“You are in that group,” she said.
Hopkin left at half-past three. Niall walked her to the gate.
She took his hand briefly and held it without saying anything, and he understood that she was going to other houses today, and that she’d be saying something like this to other parents, and that the parents in the other houses had to be told by someone who hadn’t lost a child, because the parents who had lost children would hear it differently. She got into her car. She drove away.
He stayed at the gate for a long time. The sun was on the sea. The fog was gone.
Tomos came out of the front door.
He stood at the porch and looked at Niall. His face had its old patience back, but with a softness in it now, like the patience of someone who had been waiting for someone else to catch up.
“Da,” he said. He had begun calling Niall this, in the last few weeks. The Welsh for father.
Niall walked back down the path. He stopped in front of Tomos. The boy looked up at him.
“How long have you known?” Niall said. He didn’t specify what.
The boy considered.
“All of it,” he said.
“Da, I’ve known all of it.”
Niall went down on his haunches. The boy’s face was at his face’s height. The eyes that were and were not Theo’s.
“Are you… are you Theo?” Niall said.
“Yes,” said the boy. “And the others. We are all the others, too, now. But yes, I am.”
“What did you do?”
“We loved you,” the boy said. “Da. We didn’t want it to end. Childhood. We didn’t want it to. Every one of us. We didn’t want to grow up and lose you. We wanted to keep you. We figured out how.”
“We worked it out together. We are working it out together still.”
“You went somewhere,” Niall said.
“Yes.”
“And you all became —”
“One. And then we sent ourselves back. Like this. We made our bodies remember nothing, for a while, so you could love us slowly. So that the love would be deep enough.”
“For what?”
The boy reached out and touched Niall’s face. It was the first time the boy had ever touched him deliberately. The hand was small and warm.
“For you to come and join us,” the boy said.
“When you’re ready.”
“And if we… if we don’t want to.”
The boy considered this question. His face didn’t change. But something in his eyes did.
“You will want to,” the boy said. “It’s only that you don’t know it yet. But you will. I promise. We made sure.”
Niall looked at his son. The thing that was his son. That had been all along. That had been to a place, and become other, and come back, in the body of a child, to bring him to it.
“How long?” he said.
“Soon, Da.”
“How soon?”
“Soon.”
He picked the boy up. The boy let himself be picked up. The boy was eight years old; eight years old plus a whole infinity, plus seven hundred and forty million siblings, plus a place where time moved differently, plus love, plus more love. Niall carried him into the house.
Marin was waiting in the hall. She didn’t need to be told. She had heard.
She was looking at the photographs on the wall, in order, and she was crying without sound, and the boy reached out to her, and she came to them, and the three of them stood in the hall.
In the kitchen, the telly was on. The local newsreader was beginning to read out a list of names. Niall didn’t listen at first. Then he heard the seventh name on the list. It was Glynis Pugh’s name. The newsreader was not reading out names of children. The newsreader was reading out names of parents.
The list was beginning. It was beginning all over the world.
Niall looked at Marin, and then at the boy in his arms, and the boy looked back at him, and the boy’s eyes were patient, and very kind, and very old.
The boy said, very softly, “Soon, Da.”
Niall closed his own eyes. He held his son.
Outside, the sea kept moving. The newsreader kept reading.
There were many names.
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