Page 84 of Breaking the Dark

This is followed by three heart-eye emoji in a row, followed by three praying hands emoji.

Polly clicks on Jodie’s profile. Her page is public and shows a life of endless beach holidays and nights in London rooftop restaurants. She has a husband and a baby and a small dog and long blond hair and wide eyes and white teeth and tons of friends and a shiny car and lives in a house with windows on both sides. She looks like the happiest woman in the world, a woman with everything. But still, it’s not enough. She wants more. She wants to be perfect.

She shows the message to Arthur and he grunts, dismissively.

“Isn’t there something we could do for her? She’s willing to pay?”

Arthur continues poking at his laptop. “Well, we could give her a recipe for vampire face cream that could get us and my whole family thrown in prison. Beyond that, I have no suggestions.”

“But, babe, there must be a way,” she says. “Surely? It doesn’t have to be cream. It could be something better than cream. Something like what you’re doing with the filters. I mean, surely”—she feels her heart begin to race with excitement—“with all this new technology, with AI and everything, there must be a way to bring filters into the real world? Like some kind of special lenses, or a special light or something?”

At the introduction of a technical challenge, Arthur looks up, nods, and strokes his jaw. “I don’t know about lenses…but the laws of quantum physics allow for the transfer of one reality onto another.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if someone could find a way to transfer, let’s say, physical defects from one person to some other kind of entity that doesn’t care what it looks like, some kind of receptive vessel…”

“Yes, go on!” Polly feels it, that burning physical desire she feels whenever Arthur displays his brilliance.

“Well, in theory, you could create the impression of physical perfection. The defects would still be there, but they would just exist in another dimension.”

Polly moves closer to Arthur, feeds her fingers through his hair. “And that’s, like, a thing that’s possible?”

“Well, I have no idea. It’s all highly theoretical slash technically impossible. I’d have to know a hell of a lot more about quantum physics than I do currently.”

“But you think if you studied it, you could find a way?”

“In theory. Yes.”

He says this with a small firm nod, and with confidence. His voice sounds deeper, his jaw sits squarer when he talks like this. He looks more handsome, more manly. She runs her fingers down the back of his T-shirt and then under and along the smooth flesh on his back. She feels him shudder pleasurably.

“I think,” she says, her mouth just millimeters away from his, her other hand pressed against the waistband of his trousers, “it’s time for you to finally get your big brain to college, Arthur.”

THIRTY-TWO

AFTER HER VISIT to Amber’s apartment, Jessica heads home, stopping en route at a high-end market, where she fills a cart with the things she feels a pregnant woman should be eating: nuts and fruit and fresh pasta and avocados. She buys protein balls and ginger shots, and even plucks a packet of decaffeinated coffee from the shelf.

Her head buzzes as she passes through the store. She thinks about the twins, the innocuousness of them just now. Two normal kids who had a normal summer hanging out with a cute, quirky girl in the English countryside. Are they hiding something, she wonders, or have they been entirely brainwashed, rinsed clean of every memory of every bad thing that happened to them in Essex? Are they lying, or are they merely devoid of the truth?

She pays for her groceries, wincing at the final total, observing how much more expensive healthy food is than shitty food. It’s nearly eight a.m. and it occurs to her that she hasn’t heard from Malcolm since she got back last night. She sends him a quick text:

Hey. How you doing? I’m back in town. Maybe come by after school?

She watches the message for a moment, but no reply comes, and she assumes he must already be in class.

The clerk watches as Jessica piles her groceries haphazardly into two large bags.

“You got a long way to walk with all that?” she asks. “We have a free delivery service, save you carrying it.”

Jessica smiles dryly as she lifts the two bags with obvious ease. “I can manage,” she says, “but thanks.”

The sun comes out as she walks up her street with the two bags of groceries. She can feel the burn of it against her tender eyeballs and pulls sunglasses from her jacket pocket and puts them on. Julius, her neighbor, is just leaving his apartment when she gets back to hers.

“Whoa, early bird,” he says. “Already out for groceries!”

“Yeah, well, jet lag, I guess,” she says. “It’s lunchtime in the UK so I’m kinda halfway through my day already.”

“Yeah,” says Julius. “Of course. How was your trip?”

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