Page 114 of Breaking the Dark

“You know your girlfriend is sleeping with their father, right?” She nods in the direction of the twins and sees Arthur flinch, his Adam’s apple bobbing dryly up and down his long neck.

She shudders, trying to assemble the broken parts into one complete piece. Sebastian’s girlfriend is also Arthur’s girlfriend. She, using the name Rebecca Brown, put the water pump in Sebastian’s cellar. She told the twins to go to the Old Farmhouse to meet Belle. And now she is in NYC telling some random dweeb that she loves him and heading into Central Park, where…“Wait a minute,” she says, as an unwieldy thought explodes through her skull. “Is this Pol, Becky, whatever her name is—is she Miranda?”

The Adam’s apple bobs again. She turns to Malcolm. “Find me something on these screens. Find me anything.”

Malcolm turns his attention to the screens and then he stops as an image appears in the dark window. “Er…” He looks back at Jessica and then to the screen again. “What the hell…?”

Jessica moves closer to the screen. Her eyes try to make sense of what she’s seeing but her head tells her it can’t be true.

It’s a CCTV view of a dark space. At first it looks like an unlit, empty room. But as she stares at the image, she sees something, the same thing that Malcolm has seen.

Two pairs of wide, staring eyes.

FORTY-THREE

JESSICA SNATCHES THE mouse from Malcolm’s hand and uses it to move through the images on the screen. There are more shots from inside the weird dark space. One of them shows the outline of two people held inside what looks like some kind of canister. Another shows wires and tubes attached to the canister.

“What the hell?” Jessica turns to Arthur.

He hangs his head, and then suddenly and dramatically and quite shockingly, he begins to sob. “It wasn’t me!” he says, in a shrill, girlish tone. “None of it was me! It was…” He stops and draws in his breath noisily.

“Polly?” asks Jessica.

He nods, and sniffs noisily.

“What is Polly doing, Arthur? And who are those people?”

“I can’t tell you!”

“Arthur. Seriously. Whatever hold it is that Polly has over you, I need you to put that to one side right now and tell me what’s happening. What is she doing in Central Park?”

“She’s launching Miranda.”

“But what the hell is Miranda? I thought she was a person.”

“No, it’s not a person. It’s an app. All those people heading to the park? It’s already on their phones. They downloaded it when they scanned the QR code on the flyer.”

“But what does it do?”

“It’s…” Arthur sighs. “It’s meant to put a filter on you in the real world. It’s meant to make you perfect.”

Jessica feels a chill as she remembers her hours in the Old Farmhouse. “But how? How does it work?”

Arthur inhales deeply. “Do you know anything about quantum physics?”

“Do I look like I know anything about quantum physics?”

Arthur considers her for a moment and then shakes his head. “What about AI?”

“Again, no. Please just tell me in the most basic language you possess.”

He casts his gaze around the room for a moment, and then snaps his fingers. “Dorian Gray.”

“Dorian…?”

“He’s that dude in the book who had his portrait in the attic?” says Luke. “Right? Stopped him from aging?”

Jessica throws Luke a look, then thinks back to all those books she saw on the new shelves in his apartment and gives a small nod of respect.