More Than This

  And still the Driver watches him. However it is that it manages to watch, Seth feels watched.

  “What have you done?” he gasps, turning again at the pain in the wound –

  The pain as it seems to be healing –

  “What have you done?” he says again, and his voice is full of emotion. “I don’t understand.”

  He curls forward at another shock in his body, arms around his middle, but he finds he can bear it. He looks back up at the Driver, and his own eyes are clouding with tears.

  “Why?” he whispers, and then he says again, “I don’t understand.”

  The Driver makes no sound, no sign that it’s even heard him. It’s as mysterious and unreadable as ever, its face as blank and empty as a void.

  The shocks in Seth’s body seem to be dissipating. He looks down at the wound again. The scar is ugly, purple, painful to the touch. But it is a scar. His mortal wound has healed.

  He looks at the Driver again and repeats his question from earlier. “Who are you?”

  The Driver makes no response. Balancing on its one leg, it pulls itself up on the parked car, rises over Seth again, and regards him. Seth licks his lips, tasting the drying blood there. He’s too weak to run, too weak to fight anymore. All he can do is wait and see what the Driver does next.

  Seth has absolutely no idea what that might be.

  And then the Driver twitches, its whole fractured body twisting oddly in one violent jerk –

  It raises its arm as if reaching out for something –

  But there’s nothing in front of it, nothing to reach for, Seth is still on the ground at its feet –

  A point of light appears in the middle of the Driver’s chest, just a small white spot at first but then exploding out in a shower of sparks so wild that Seth scoots back on the sidewalk, grunting at the ache still running through his torso.

  The Driver shakes, its back against the parked car, as if it’s being held there somehow. The lightning surrounds it, diving into and out of its body, causing it to spasm all over, its seams and joints starting to buckle. There’s a buzz in the air now, a whine that increases as the bolts surge through the Driver, increasing in density and speed, a web of pure electricity being woven around it –

  Seth moves to get himself to safety. He drags himself behind the stone wall where he can see Regine still lying –

  He looks back –

  A huge CRACK tears the air –

  The Driver disintegrates.

  It blasts outwards in burning, melting little pieces –

  Seth curls down to avoid the shrapnel, pulling himself onto Regine to protect her –

  But not before he sees the Driver’s helmet shattering into fragments and circuitry and unknowable materials that might have even once been flesh –

  And then there is only quiet. Just the pitter-patter of little bits of Driver falling to the ground, like noxious rain. Seth uncurls himself and looks over the wall.

  The Driver is gone.

  Burning, melting parts of it cover everything –

  But it’s gone. It’s really gone.

  And rising from the seat of the car the Driver had been leaning against is Tomasz, a ludicrous strip of hair completely burnt away from the top of his head.

  He’s holding the baton.

  “Well,” he says, “that is not what I expected.”

  Seth gets slowly to his feet, his middle aching, glancing down at Regine to make sure she’s still breathing, before he goes to Tomasz.

  “I crawled in the other side,” Tomasz says, getting out of the car. “And stabbed it in the back.”

  “Yeah,” Seth says, breathing heavy. “Yeah, I can see that.”

  Tomasz half stumbles over to him, still wobbly from being thrown through the air so far. He leans into an embrace with Seth, and Seth hugs him back, getting a close-up view of the almost even stripe of hair missing from the top of Tomasz’s head.

  “I saw it kill you,” Tomasz says, his voice cracking. He puts a hand on the tear in Seth’s shirt. “I saw it do this.”

  “Yeah,” Seth says. “I don’t know either.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Me, too. I think maybe I was –”

  Tomasz looks across the stone wall and cries out. “Regine!” He runs to her, Seth following.

  “I think it just knocked her out,” Seth says as they kneel down next to her. There’s an ugly swelling coming up around her right eye where the Driver punched her. There don’t seem to be any other wounds, though, no blood on the back of her head.

  “Regine!” Tomasz shouts, almost directly into her ear –

  A wince crosses her face. She parts her lips, and a low moan escapes. “Seriously, Tommy,” she says. She says something else, but it’s lost in Tomasz’s cries of relief. He throws himself across her in a hug, which she accepts for a minute, then says, “Get the hell off me.”

  Seth pulls Tomasz back, and they wait next to her as she slowly sits up. “What happened?” she asks.

  “I wish I knew,” Seth says. He looks around at all the little bits of burning Driver scattered around them.

  “I killed it,” Tomasz says, but he doesn’t say it in his usual way that’s asking for more credit. “I stuck the baton in its back.” He takes the baton out of his pocket. It’s completely fried, the end cracked and broken. “I think it overloaded.”

  “The Driver is dead?” Regine asks.

  “If it was even alive to begin with,” Seth says.

  She shoots him an angry look that causes her to wince again. “I swear to God, if you say one more philosophical thing to me –”

  “It saved my life.”

  This stops her. “It what?”

  “It killed him first,” Tomasz says, his voice still edged with worry.

  “It did this to me with its leg,” Seth says, pulling up his shirt to show her the bruised, purple scar. “But then it took it out of me and did . . . something. Something that sealed up the wound.”

  “I did not see that,” Tomasz says. “I was crawling into the car. I only saw it throw the thing through Seth and thought . . .” His face crinkles up. “I thought it had killed you. And I did not see Regine. And I thought . . .”

  “I know,” Seth says, putting an arm around Tomasz and letting him cry.

  Regine shakes her head, before stopping at the pain it obviously causes. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No,” Seth says. “No, it doesn’t.”

  Regine puts a hand up to her cheek. “Jesus, my face hurts.”

  “And my whole body,” Seth says.

  “And my hair,” Tomasz says, putting unhappy fingers on his new bald spot.

  Seth’s arm is still around Tomasz, who’s resting part of his weight against Regine, who in turn nudges Seth with her outstretched leg. They just sit for a moment, together, injured, confused.

  But alive.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, they gather themselves up, helping one another to their feet with a tenderness they don’t need to discuss. Seth shows them the other scars the Driver left on him, still wondering at their very existence.

  “How does it look?” Seth asks when Regine checks out his back.

  “Like the one on your front,” Regine says. “Except.” She picks something off his skin and shows it to him. It’s a piece of cloth, soaked with blood, the exact same shape as the tear on the front of his shirt.

  “Looks like it cleaned out the wound, too,” Regine says. “I don’t get it. Why did it save you?”

  “If it’s a caretaker,” Seth says, “maybe it’s supposed to keep us alive.”

  “And throwing a metal javelin through you accomplishes this how?” Tomasz asks. “You could have died immediately.”

  “And it seemed pretty happy to try and kill me and Tommy,” Regine says.

  “I don’t know,” Seth says, but he says it quietly, still thinking about what happened, about why the Driver did what it did, about whether he did in fact die ju
st now, right here on the pavement –

  But what would that mean?

  “Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.”

  Seth can tell he’s thinking of his mother. Life definitely hadn’t gone how they’d expected it to. Regine either, he thinks, as they start trudging toward Seth’s house, each of them avoiding bits of the Driver, still burning in little puddles.

  No, life didn’t always go how you thought it might.

  Sometimes it didn’t make any sense at all.

  You’ve just got to find a way to live there anyway, Seth thinks.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got any painkillers in there,” Regine asks as they walk up his front path.

  “We can try the supermarket if there isn’t,” Seth says. “Rustle up some expired aspirin.”

  “Or expired morphine,” Regine moans, holding her eye again.

  “I could try to fix this,” Tomasz says, holding up the baton. “Zap you with it. Might work.”

  Regine bops him on the back of the head.

  “You are not feeling that bad then,” Tomasz says.

  They go inside. Nothing has changed. The front window is still broken, the kitchen and sitting room still piled with the furniture they hurled in the Driver’s way.

  “I can’t believe it’s gone,” Regine says as Seth climbs over the fallen-down fridge to get them some water. “How did it come back anyway? We saw it burn. Not even a machine should have survived that.”

  “And what will happen now?” Tomasz asks, flopping down on the settee. “Who will take care of all the sleepers?”

  Seth doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know. He climbs back over the fridge with a bottle of water and three cups, and they all sit around the coffee table, drinking and resting.

  They sit there for a good long time.

  “You knew, though,” Regine says, after a while, as if mid-conversation and snapping Seth out of an almost-doze he didn’t even know he was having.

  “Knew what?” he asks.

  “You said the Driver was going to be there for one last attack, and it was.”

  Seth frowns. “I didn’t think I was going to be right,” he says, and it’s mostly true.

  Regine looks down into her cup. “Your idea of this all being a story in your head. Or that we’re your –”

  “Guardian angels,” Tomasz says. “She is correct. Does this mean we are angels? Because I would be very cross that I was such a short one.”

  “It was there, wasn’t it?” Seth says, feeling the scar on his ribs again. “Just like I said.”

  “Just like you said,” Regine repeats.

  They look at him as if he can provide some explanation they haven’t thought of. He doesn’t have one, though. The Driver, who had previously shown no mercy, showed mercy. The Driver, who had killed him, also healed him. No single explanation – if everything was real, if everything was just in his head – covered everything.

  Then again, maybe the point was that there was no point. Well, not no point, because looking at Regine and Tomasz, he can easily see two points without even trying.

  So if this is all a story in my head, he thinks, then maybe –

  “Oh, forget it,” he says with feeling. “Nobody knows anything.”

  He looks up at the painting above the hearth, the terrified, screaming horse that has spent its life freaking him out, showing the pain he thought lay underneath the whole world.

  But it’s just a painting, isn’t it?

  He looks back at Regine and Tomasz.

  “Shall we do what we came here for?” he says.

  “Are you sure?” Regine asks him for the hundredth time since they came up to the attic.

  “No,” Seth says again, “but I’m going to try anyway.”

  “I think that is the last of it,” Tomasz says, winding the metallic tape around Seth’s bare stomach, taking care to avoid putting too much pressure on his scar.

  It’s taken them some time to get to this point. They cleaned themselves up with the block of dishwashing liquid and cold water, then they’d gone to the supermarket to get some expired painkillers, which they all took in rather too-large quantities. Next, they went by the outdoor store to pick up some boxes of the metallic tape Seth had seen there, and also some scissors, which Regine used to cut off the remaining bits of Tomasz’s hair.

  Seth had then started up his coffin. It didn’t seem to be broken like Regine’s. He powered it up and it came to life, asking questions on its screen, some of which even made sense. Seth programmed it in the very basic way he could guess, achieving – after some frustration and with help from Tomasz – a box that read RE-ENTRY PROCESS READY.

  He’d changed into shorts, and they’d put bandages around his legs and upper body, agreeing they would only try a test run, “for a count of no more than sixty,” Tomasz had insisted, to see where Seth went in the other world. Brief enough so he wouldn’t need tubes shoved into him and brief enough, too, for him to survive if the worst happened.

  Seth doesn’t feel like the worst will happen, though. For once.

  “This may not even work, you know,” Regine says, also for the hundredth time. “In fact, it probably won’t.”

  “This is an encouraging sign,” Seth says, tapping the light on his neck, which has been blinking a regular green ever since they started up the coffin. “But you’re right, we don’t know.”

  “There is only your head left, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says, holding up the bandages.

  “I’ll do it,” Regine says, taking them. She starts to unroll them, then stops. “Seth –”

  “Nothing might happen,” he says. “I might never leave here.”

  “Or you could wake up at the bottom of the sea and die before we can save you.”

  “Or not.”

  “Or Tommy and I might not be able to get you back even if it goes all right.”

  “But you might.”

  “Or you could just want to stay there and forget all about us –”

  “Regine,” he says gently, touched beyond words by her concern, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I want to find out. And that’s the first time that’s been true in a really long time.”

  She looks as if she’s going to keep challenging him.

  But she doesn’t.

  “Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says, solemnly taking his hand, “I am wishing you very, very good luck. But I am also wishing very, very much that you come back to us.”

  “So am I, Tommy,” Seth says, then corrects it to, “Tomasz.”

  “Ah,” Tomasz smiles, “this is where I am supposed to say that you can call me Tommy. Except I like the way you say Tomasz and want you to keep on saying it. For many, many years.”

  Seth nods at him, then he nods at Regine.

  “You’re sure?” she asks, for what he can tell is the final time.

  “I am,” he says.

  She waits another moment, then she begins to wrap his head in the bandages, placing the first edge on his temple.

  “See you soon,” she says, and covers his eyes.

  Here is the boy, the man, here is Seth, being laid back gently into his coffin, the hands of his friends guiding him into place.

  He’s uncertain what’s going to happen next.

  But he is certain that that’s actually the point.

  If this is all a story, then that’s what the story means.

  If it isn’t a story, then the exact same is true.

  But as his friends begin the final steps, pressing buttons, answering questions on a screen, he thinks that what is forever certain is that there’s always more. Always.

  Maybe Owen died, maybe he didn’t, either way, it had affected his parents more than he ever considered, and maybe it was nothing to do with him.

  And there’s Gudmund, too, and H, and even Monica. They’re weak and strong and they make mistakes, like anyone, like he has. And love and care have all
kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more.

  More and more and more.

  Sometimes in the shape of other people, surprising people, with unexpected, unimaginable stories of their own. People who looked at the world in a completely different way and by doing so, made it different.

  People who could turn out to be friends.

  And he doesn’t know what will happen when those friends press the final sequence. He doesn’t know where he’ll wake up. Here. Or there. Or some third place, even more unexpected than this one. Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other?

  But whatever happens, whatever comes, he knows he can live with it.

  And now it’s time. There’s a silence he can tell is expectation.

  “Are you ready?” his friends ask him.

  He thinks, Yes.

  He thinks, Go in swinging.

  And he says, “I’m ready.”

  www.candlewick.com

  www.candlewick.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2013 by Patrick Ness

  “Borrowing Time” written by Aimee Mann, published by Aimee Mann, sub-published by Fintage Publishing B.V. All Rights Reserved

  “More Than This” words and music by Peter Gabriel © 2002, reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd/Real World Music Ltd, London W1F 9LD. All Rights Reserved

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First U.S. electronic edition 2013

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2013943065

  ISBN 978-0-7636-6258-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7636-6767-2 (electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street