Page 96 of Breaking the Dark

“Probably not.”

Luke’s eyes go to his bedroom. For a moment Jessica thinks he’s making a proposition. But then he goes in and emerges a moment later with a flashlight and a tool kit.

“These are the things you keep in your bedroom?” Jessica asks.

“Sure. Yeah. Why, what do you keep in yours?”

She throws him a wry smile and says, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” But then, before they can take this clumsy sexual flirtation any further, Jessica hears her phone buzz and glances at the message:

START MAKING YOUR WAY TOWARD CENTRAL PARK!…THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN!…

It’s time to

Meet Miranda

She shows the message to Luke.

“Cool,” he says. “Let’s go knock some walls down, find Malcolm, meet this Miranda chick, and save the world. You in?”

Jessica nods and smiles. “I’m in.”

One Year Ago

Barton Wallop, Essex, UK

The research and development phase is going well. Arthur says he’s made huge progress. He says he might have a product ready to take to the world by this time next year. It’s time for Polly to start thinking about branding. And if there’s one thing she’s sure of, it’s that Perfect Peach is not the right name for a major, world-changing, game-changing, era-defining technological development. Her product needs a mighty moniker, something immediate, something that will look imposing on billboards all over the globe. It needs to be a word that has multiple meanings, that works internationally, that trips off the tongue, something unforgettable, strong yet feminine, something that evokes an emotion, a sense of awe and aspiration.

It’s all she thinks about these days. Her head, which is never a quiet place, which has been buzzing and humming with ideas and plans since the day she was born, is now deafening her in its determination to find the right name. She sees words everywhere she goes, they scroll through her mind’s eye like subtitles, they hit her from left field, they repeat and repeat under her voice, as she cleans the kitchen, as she walks the dogs, until they sound like nonsense to her.

And then, one cold October afternoon, she finds it in the unlikeliest of places.

She doesn’t know what sends her up the cobbled pathway that day, but she feels it might be kismet, fate, the same sort of kismet and fate that led her to Arthur and his family all those years ago. She still stares into the palm of her hand sometimes, creases and uncreases her fate line, the line that Ophelia told her only a few people have, the one that means she is special, that her life is predetermined, that she will be somebody. She is on a journey, a great, great journey, and now her destination is in sight. And there it is, the last piece of the puzzle, on the wall of the local church.

She gasps when she sees it.

It’s a plaque commemorating the deaths of the children who were buried under a mud slurry in the 1400s, the children whose energy still lives on in the soil, the earth, the roots of the trees that have grown in the centuries since they passed, the children whose death imbued the land with the blood light that will one day make her product work. Their screams, their pain, their slow release of life force as they sucked in and breathed out their last, excruciating breaths are forever imprinted into the earth, the same way that the DNA of an unborn baby remains in its mother’s body, in her blood and tissue, for eternity.

Finding this spot was her greatest triumph and now poetically, perfectly, the source of the energy that is about to change the world has also given her her branding.

Engraved on the commemorative plaque is a simple etching of a child with arms outstretched to the sun. And in the inscription is the Latin word admiranda, which according to Google Translate means “wonder.”

She closes her eyes, and she can see it. It’s so simple. It’s so perfect.

Her product will be called MIRANDA.

THIRTY-EIGHT

OUTSIDE LUKE’S APARTMENT, Jessica sees a group of young girls heading toward the subway. One of them has the Miranda flyer in her hand.

“Hey! Where did you get that?”

The girl eyes Jessica with suspicion. “Er, like in the girls’ bathrooms at my school?”

“Any idea what it is?”

“It’s like a pop-up meet with this influencer, I think.” She shrugs.

Jessica feigns interest. “Oh yeah? Who’s the influencer?”