 
THE AUGUST BIRDS

By Octavia Cade

Copyright 2015 Octavia Cade

Smashwords Edition

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Note on this edition: Cover design by Derek Murphy. Corvus illustration by natsmith1 (istock).

Table of Contents

July 31, 20--: Oamaru, New Zealand

August 1, 1786: Slough, England

August 2, 1939: Long Island, USA

August 3, 1908: La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France

August 4, 2013: Istanbul, Turkey

August 5, 1948: Sydney, Australia

August 6, 1945: Hiroshima, Japan

August 7, 1946: Raroia Atoll, Polynesia

August 8, 1709: Lisbon, Portugal

August 9, 1945: Leksand, Sweden

August 10, 1916: Elephant Island, Antarctica

August 11, 1909: SS Arapahoe, Atlantic Ocean

August 12, 1883: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

August 13, 1952: Moscow, Russia

August 14, 1894: Oxford, England

August 15, 1914: Gatun Lake, Panama

August 16, 1960: Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania

August 17, 1834: Cerro La Campana, Chile

August 18, 1868: Guntur, India

August 19, 1887: Klin, Russia

August 20, 1977: Cape Canaveral, USA

August 21, 1609: Venice, Italy

August 22, 1984: Nariokotome, Kenya

August 23, 1966: Robledo de Chavela, Spain

August 24, 20--: Pompeii, Italy

August 25, 1894: Hong Kong, China

August 26, 2002: Johannesburg, South Africa

August 27, 1883: Krakatoa, Indonesia

August 28, 1965: Sealab II, Pacific Ocean

August 29, 2010: General Assembly, United Nations

August 30, 1871: Spring Grove, New Zealand

August 31, 20--: Stockholm, Sweden

About Octavia Cade

# JULY 31, 20—

OAMARU, NEW ZEALAND

August September would never grow up to be a scientist. He wanted to, very badly, although he couldn't decide if he wanted more to be an astronomer or a marine biologist or a chemist, if he wanted to study rocks or viruses or walruses. But August would never grow up to be a scientist, because August would never grow up.

He was nine years old, and he was dying, and he knew it.

He tried very hard to get used to the idea. August had been sick for as long as he could remember, sick since he was a baby, and although the doctors were kind he had hidden behind a door once and heard the phrase "lucky to have lasted this long" so there were no illusions left. There wasn't going to be any miracle cure, no last-minute reprieve, and soon, very soon, his Mum and his Dad and his sister would put him in the ground and it would all be over for him.

After he had heard how lucky he was, August had lain in his room, night after night, looking at the fossils on his shelves and the great picture books of dinosaurs, the posters of atoms and planets and robots, the telescope that April had loaned him, the tank full of fish that he had gotten for his sixth Christmas. He had looked at them and known them for his dreams and tried to give them up, tried so that he wouldn't feel bad at the thought that they were beyond him. He felt bad enough as it was, sicker all the time and his days were spent in bed, mostly, so he could look at the things that he loved and learn not to feel bad, or he could have them all taken away and look at nothing at all, at the blank walls, and that would have given him too much time to think about how much he missed them. So he stuffed them down as hard as he could, all the old dreams, and replaced them with another.

August asked for a calendar, to sit by his bed. He was only interested in one month: the month that he was named after, because on the last day of that month was his birthday.

"Double figures," said Dad. "You'll really be grown up then, eh?" And he had smiled as hard he could, and the smile was so determined and so sad at once that August knew that he would be lucky again if he could make it that far. He had known it anyway, deep down, feeling worse than ever and with the nurses coming every day, his doctor on call and the machines about his bed piling up like his bedroom was a scrap yard for plastic and metal and broken things.

"Double figures!" said April, plumped on the end of his bed with her knees drawn up under her. "I remember when Mum and Dad brought you home. You were a nasty, squalling little thing." And she had grinned at him and tickled, though only gently, and it was hard for him to look at her. April was older than him, fifteen, and she _would_ be a scientist when she grew up, and August thought that she would be the person he would miss most, if he could miss other people when he was dead.

He would not miss having to watch her live the life that he had wanted to live.

"It was her life first," someone said to him then, but August had been lying in his bed with his head turned to the door, and he had seen no-one come in.

"Who's there?" he said, and there was a heavy flutter from the end of the bed, a shifting on the blanket by his feet. When August levered himself up on his pillows–the bed moved for him, with a button he could use to raise himself up or lie flat again–he saw at the foot two birds, and their feathers glinted oddly in the winter sunlight. Large birds, and so black that there was no other colour in them, not like the tui who had purple and green in their black, but a flat, dull emptiness of colour. And when one of the ravens–for that's what they were, he realised, with their big blunt beaks and their muscular bodies–hopped onto his leg, the weight of it told him that it was no ordinary bird. Instead, it was all iron in the place of flesh. The pair of them were iron, with polished clockwork eyes and gleaming claws and feathers full of filaments that could barely bend.

"Am I dreaming?" said August. He pinched himself, not hard, but still it hurt him. The birds remained.

"Your dreams are not of ravens," said the bird upon his leg, the bird who had reached his knee and perched there, her claws digging into the covering blanket and her hoarse raven voice certain. "You have your sister's dreams, and they were hers before they were yours."

"They're mine too," said August, and at his feet the second raven gave a harsh, scoffing caw, and although August did not know what derision meant he knew then what it sounded like, and reddened.

"Dreams can be shared," the raven on his leg acknowledged, and her tone was kinder.

There was nothing August could say to that, nothing that wouldn't sound like a lie. The truth was, they _had_ been April's dreams first, and she had come to his room for years to share them, to cuddle with him under the blankets and tell him about the things that she had learned and the future that she would make for herself. It was something to entertain him, to make him feel involved, and if it had given him interest and excitement and dreams of his own it didn't change the fact that deep down, in the most secret part of himself, he knew that he was overshadowed. April was his counter-balance, born first and brighter, more beautiful, and she was brilliant too, everybody said so. Had he been as healthy as April, had he the same length of future, still he would be secondary.

(August felt he could have lived with _secondary_ , if he were only able to live.)

"And you have dreams of your own," the raven continued. "That is important."

"My birthday," said August. "It's still a month away. A month today." He was silent for a moment, and then he couldn't help himself. He had to tell someone, someone that wasn't Mum or Dad or someone who would report to them, someone who could not be hurt by him. It was too much to keep inside himself, when he was only nine years old and even so, so very tired. "I don't think I can make it."

"You can," said the bird. "I will help you. But you will have to make an effort."

If August had been older, or been sick less long, he would have asked her why she would help him, but all he had known was sickness and people who had been kind to him because of it. And the bird's last astringent comment reminded him of Mum, sometimes, when she forgot herself and scolded him for failing to feed his fish. (He almost enjoyed being scolded. It made him feel as if he were normal.) So August assumed kindness, and asked other questions instead.

"Who are you?" he said. "And how can you help me?"

"I can give you an interest," said the raven. "Something to live for. I am Muninn, sometimes called Memory, and the other is Huginn, who is also Thought."

Behind her, Huginn croaked once, and began to preen.

"He doesn't say much," said August.

"He never does," said Muninn. "But Huginn and Muninn we are, and you are August, who would be a scientist if you could. We can show you science, August. A piece of science for every day to match your calendar, to lighten your way. All you have to do is let us."

"How?" said August.

"Look there," said Muninn, and one iron wing flicked towards his bedside clock. It read 11.59–August spent so much of his day drowsy and sleeping that he often woke late.

"Almost midnight," he said, and then the clock ticked over and it was a new day.

"The first of August," said Muninn. "Would you like to see another first?"

"Yes, please," said August. It was better than lying alone in his bed, or calling for his parents to come play another board game with him and while away the dark hours thereby.

Muninn hopped up the bed towards his head. "Touch me, August," she said, and when he put his thin little hand on her hard black back the feathers expanded under his touch and Muninn with them, and he was on her back and flying without quite knowing how, flying through a dark night all lit with stars and Huginn winging silently beside them.

# AUGUST 1, 1786

SLOUGH, ENGLAND

August was able to bring his blanket with him. It was a jungle blanket, with a tiger on it. "Where are we?" he said, huddling under it. "I can't see, and it's cold."

"Let your eyes adjust," said Muninn. "You will make it out soon enough."

August was outside, that much he knew. There were stars out, and as his eyes opened to the darkness, to the little lights above, he saw that he was in a garden. There was a dark pathway that crunched under his feet, crunched as gravel crunched, and stumps as seats about him. He sat on one, felt faint ridges like rings beneath his fingers.

"Elm," said Muninn. "All elm trees, or they were. And all cut down, so that she could see the stars."

"So who could see?" said August, and Muninn tilted her big blunt beak towards a patch of lawn like a piece of empty sky. In it August could see a long, slanting shape. It was pointing upwards, diagonal on a frame, and he thought it looked nearly six metres long. "What's that?" he said, pointing.

"It's a telescope," said Muninn. "A reflecting telescope."

"It doesn't look much like _my_ telescope," said August. He paused. "Well, it's April's really. She's letting me borrow it."

"If you were older you'd remember when telescopes were older too," said Muninn. "This is what they were like when her brother was learning to make them." Small again, raven-sized, she nudged August with her cold, hard head, nudged him away from the long, lean lines of scope and towards a smaller model nearby, and the little woman perched in front of it. She was not very much taller than August.

"Watch carefully, August," said Muninn. "Her name is Caroline, and she is about to be happy."

"Doesn't she know we're here?" said August. Caroline didn't seem to be paying them any attention, even though he wasn't whispering and nor was Muninn, and she didn't seem to see Huginn either. The other bird was walking up and down the length of her telescope, walking carefully, placing his feet so his sudden, shifting weight didn't knock it out of position.

"It's hard to see thought, or memory," said Muninn. "Most people can't manage it."

"I can," said August.

"That's because you're mostly memory yourself now," said Muninn, and August was quiet, a hurt, stunned quiet, because that was most of what he heard about his bed. April, and _Remember when we went camping in the back garden, and toasted all the marshmallows?_ and Dad, with _Remember when all you wanted was hokey-pokey ice cream and I sneaked it into the ward, past the nurses and we had a midnight feast?_ And Mum. _I remember when you were born_ , she said, _and you were the most perfect, most beautiful baby, and I was so glad that you were mine._ And it was all the same, and all unending, this parade of his life, while they all tried to forget that soon memories would be all that they would have. _We've got plenty of time for some new ones, still_ , Dad had said, looking August straight in the eye and lying, like the memory source wasn't about to be cut off at the roots.

"That's elm for you," said Muninn. "It's a tree of firsts and women. Some say the first woman was fashioned from an elm. I remember the stories. The tree must have died, of course, the parts of it that didn't change, but what a change it would have been."

"I'm sorry," said August. He'd retreated inside himself for a moment, because it was easier than remembering Dad's face and growing easier still. "What are you talking about?"

"Her," said Muninn. "Caroline. Her brother had the elms cut down so that they could see the sky better, and Caroline is about to see something no-one else has seen before."

The woman was hunched, briefly, over the telescope, her face pressed to it as if they were kissing, and then she pulled her head back and stared at the night sky with her own eyes, her own lenses, and her face, pocked so that August could see the scars even in moonlight, shone for a moment brighter than the stars.

"What is it?" he said, sitting straight up on his elm stump, shivering with excited curiosity. "What did she see?"

"Your eyes aren't strong enough," said Muninn. "But I remember what she saw. I can show you, if you like." And when August nodded it was if a section of the sky opened up before him, as if a star streaked overhead.

"It's not actually a star," said Muninn. "It's a comet."

"I know what a comet is," said August. "I've read about them." He was silent a moment, staring up at the stars, almost squinting, trying to see it with his own eyes and not just the iron eyes of a raven. "People used to think they were a sign of bad luck. In the olden days, I mean. They saw a comet and thought something bad was going to happen. They thought that someone was going to die."

"Caroline didn't think so," said Muninn. "Look at her. Look how happy she is. The first to see it, and the first woman ever to discover a comet. That's what the elms bought her, it is." Beside her, August looked away, looked at his thin, tired hands holding jealously to his jungle blanket.

"I'm never going to discover a comet, am I?" he said.

"No," said Muninn.

"Did you bring me here to show me what I can't have?" said August. He didn't look at her, didn't look at Caroline or her telescope. She was gazing through it again, rapt, and Huginn had shoved his face right into the other end, head bent over the opening, and was gazing back with a black, beady eye but August turned his head away and would not watch.

"No," said Muninn, again.

"Bede," croaked Huginn, from his place on the telescope. He cocked his head and stared at August. " _Bede_."

"I don't have any beads," said August, listless. His hands were cold, and he tucked them more securely under the blanket. "There are some back in my room." He got them at the hospital. All the children did–a bead for every procedure, every blood draw and x-ray and operation. August knew kids who made necklaces out of theirs–great, bright loops like medals–but he was too old for necklaces now, and it made him sad to look at them. All those beads, all those colours, and they weren't enough.

"Huginn doesn't mean those beads," said Muninn. "He's talking about a man. He lived a very long time ago and his name was Bede. He said that being alive was like being a sparrow flying through a great hall in winter. It was all empty outside, just snow and storms and darkness, but the sparrow flew out of the winter and into the warmth, and then it left again. No-one could tell, said Bede, where it came from or where it was going, and what the winter was. They could only see it when it flew alongside the fire, and only for a short space."

"Comets melt down," said August, and his bald head gleamed pale in the dark. "They get too close to the sun, or they get caught in an atmosphere and all burn up to nothing. Bits break off, and they get weaker and weaker and then there's nothing left."

There was a long silence.

"Muninn," said August. "Do you think comets get tired?"

"I think everything gets tired," said Muninn. "I think everything winds down eventually."

"I thought you were going to try and tell me that a comet is just a piece of ice," said August.

"And I am just a piece of iron," said Muninn. "But I have travelled far, far. Like a comet, like a sparrow. Like you."

August reached for a black wing, laid his little hand gently upon it. There was no give in it, in either of them. Muninn was iron, mostly, and by now August was bone, mostly, with a little skin scraped over the top. "Are you tired too, Muninn?" he said.

"I have a lot to remember," said Muninn. "And memories make people tired."

August's hand tightened on her wing. "Muninn," he said. "What happens to the sparrow?"

The raven turned to him for a moment, her great black eyes oiled and gleaming. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe it flies into another hall. Maybe it remembers something of what it was before. I think Embla must have remembered gardens, sometimes, and how it felt to stand outside in the night, with her roots in the earth and her leaves in the stars. And maybe the sparrow is like a comet, and when it breaks down there's nothing left."

"I suppose it was good to see it while it lasted," said August, and though Muninn did not look at him his voice wobbled next to her, as if he were crying.

# AUGUST 2, 1939

LONG ISLAND, U.S.A.

"I've been reading up on you," said August. He was balanced on her body, his legs held in place by her wings and dangling down, his hands filled with feathers and imprinted with iron. Huginn flew beside them, his eyes half closed as he hovered with them in silence, high over the island and circling to keep in place, a slow and gentle movement that allowed August to inch closer to Muninn's head and whisper where he thought her ear would be.

"What have you read?" said Muninn, her wings lazy in the air and so very black against the blue.

"You don't just fly about to know things," said August, remembering the weight on his bed, the raven declaration. _I am Muninn, sometimes called Memory, and the other is Huginn, who is also Thought._ "You're like spies, you report back. Are you reporting back on me, Muninn?"

"Who do you think we are reporting back to?"

"Odin," said August, confident in his assumptions. "From Norse mythology, my book says."

"You think very highly of yourself," said Muninn. "Assuming you are right, what would Odin want with you?"

"I don't know," said August. He wasn't particularly clever, or brave. He knew there were a lot of kids in the world, and a lot of them were sick. It didn't exactly make him special. He would never grow up to be a warrior, some sort of giant berserker with a funny helmet. That was alright with him. He didn't really want to be a warrior anyway.

"Science is more exciting," Muninn acknowledged. "Though it has its place in wars as well."

"Not the sort of science I want to do," said August, who hadn't managed to decide what he wanted to be but knew what he did not. His science was green and blue and gold, the science of oceans and suns and the many colours of polar ice. He didn't like to think of it khaki-coloured and in trenches, breaking down instead of building up and with blood all down its front.

"Just because you don't like to think about it doesn't mean you shouldn't," said Muninn. "Some things are inevitable. It does no good to ignore them."

"I wish I could ignore them," said August, who thought more than he wanted to about things he could not change and things he did not like, and those thoughts were of sickness and failing and death. Of there being no-one who could help him, not really. "It's easier to be happy when I forget," he said, knowing as he said it that the forgetting was a fragile thing, a thin surface over the truths he never really lost, not deep down, but just pretended that he did.

"What would that ignorance get you, though?" said Muninn. "If you want to imagine that you're going to die in your own bed, a hundred years old and having achieved everything you set out to do then no-one can stop you. If you want to convince your family to do the same then no-one could stop them either. You could be pretend to be happy together–but you would miss the time you have, August, and you do not have the time to spare. And should the world change around you in your ignorance, it will change without you."

"It's going to change without me anyway," said August, and the knowledge of his own mortality was heavy then, as it had ever been and growing heavier still.

"You are missing the point," said Muninn.

"What did you expect?" said August, frustrated and clinging tighter to feathers in his frustration. "I'm only ten." And it was a lie and an excuse both, for August was not ten yet and still he was old enough to understand comets.

"Some things we wish we did not have to understand," said Muninn. "Some things we wish we never knew about. The men I have brought you to see are familiar with such knowing, or will be when they are done."

"I don't see any men," said August, but before he had finished speaking the ravens were dropping lower and lower still until they were skimming over roads, above and behind an old-fashioned motor car that slowed eventually, pulling up to a door that August did not know.

"Leo is in that car," said Muninn, winging to a cottage with a screened porch and Huginn beside her and settling into corners. On the porch was someone August _did_ know, knew from hair and face if not from voice and then the man Muninn called Leo stepped onto the porch and Albert was there to meet him, dressed in an old robe and slippers, dishevelled.

"Today they write a letter," said Muninn, perched beside August as he sat on the floor, with Huginn flown forward to the chairs and standing between. The men were speaking then, Albert's hair wild upon his head and him ruffling it as they talked, a mixture of English and German and dread. And then it was Albert talking, Albert alone in the language that August could not understand and his words were written as he spoke.

"It is an exercise in recording," said Muninn. "The first of the day. When he is done Leo will take it back to the city and make a recording of his own in a language meant for this new country, and not the old. He will dictate to his secretary, and she will think he is mad, wanting her to take down letters to a President from Albert instead of himself. Though it is from both of them really, looking ahead to knowledge they are afraid of, to things they would rather not be known."

"What does the letter say?"

"The short one, the one they are working on now, talks of war and uranium and bombs, bombs that are more destructive than any yet made. They have come from Europe, Leo and Albert, both of them come from a continent made unhealthy for them, and both able to see the future. To see what happens if the bomb is made by other than them."

On the porch, close enough so that August could see every tense expression, every gesture, Albert and Leo drank tea and talked. It was quick and earnest and then measured again, slowed with silences for more than tea, for more than liquid that tanned and cooled in cups. If August did not understand all the words he understood the worry. He had seen worry before, seen it on more faces than he wanted to count and on those closest to him as they braced for an apocalypse that would settle in their smallest bed and would not be turned aside.

"Why are they sending it to the President?" August asked. "Are they trying to get him to make one first?" It wouldn't surprise him. That worried look he had seen on his parents' faces came before questions, usually, and plans and response and direction.

"Sometimes reacting to something is all you can do," said Muninn. "Even if that reaction might make things worse. That is the price of knowledge, August: you can take it in your hands and recognise it and know that your recognition comes with taint, and still not help yourself. Because sometimes that taint is necessary, though it is hard to tell the difference. That is why they are writing."

"They're reporting," said August. "They're telling him things that they know. Like you, Muninn. Like Huginn. You go out and you learn things and then you pass them on to everyone."

"Do I look like I am passing information to anyone other than you?" said Muninn, and her voice sounded amused somehow, as if she were humouring a very small child.

"But the books say," August began, and Muninn interrupted him.

"Books say a lot of things. They are almost as much memory as I am. As much thought as Huginn. And not only books... all that writing, passing on." Before them, Huginn stabbed at papers with his beak, stabbed at the shaping of letters, the consideration and the response. "Huginn and I," Muninn continued, "have always existed. And if we send out what we have as letters, as Leo and Albert are doing before the dark, it is rarely and to more than story."

"Do you do it because you see a bad thing coming?" said August. "Like they do?" Like he did, with his slow dissolution, with his incipient death.

"In a way," said Muninn. "Though my horrors are not yours, they exist even so, and there are no Presidents to ask for aid."

"That doesn't sound very nice to think about."

"It isn't."

"But you think about it anyway?" _About flowers and coffins and headstones, about being gone. About agony and abandonment and grief._

"I do."

# AUGUST 3, 1908

LA CHAPELLE-AUX-SAINTS, FRANCE

"How would you like to be buried, August?"

"I wouldn't," said August, but there wasn't much chance of that. He knew that some people helped to plan their own burials, picking the music that they wanted played or the stories that they wanted told, but August did not want to plan. He had spent too long considering his own death to want to spend longer. His parents would pick for him, and he wouldn't have to think about it.

"There is always burning," said Muninn, but August was afraid of fire, a little, and he did not want to be burnt. "Not even put on a boat and sent out to sea and set alight?" said Muninn, and August shook his head.

"I don't think it would be allowed," he said, and that was excuse enough.

"A pity," said Muninn. "It does look so very fine." She cocked her head to one side, considering the scramble in front of them. "And a cave does not appeal?"

"That could be okay," August conceded. "But it might not be very private." He had heard stories from April, sometimes, when she and her friends had gone on field trips–"very educational", she had told their parents, who had smiled and not believed a word of it, knowing that there was more likely to be giggling and ghost stories and exploring than actual geological endeavour. "Imagine having all that on top of you."

April was not with them, pressed into a corner of the cave as they were, watching as a small group of excited men uncovered a body curled into a depression in the floor of cave. The bones were all tucked up and twisted, with Huginn perched on the skull and supervising, and there were little pieces of stone and not-bone scattered about the skeleton.

"What are those bits, Muninn?" August asked.

"They are grave goods," said Muninn. "Stone tools and animal bones. Buried with the dead, so that they can be taken with them into the afterlife."

"I've heard of those," said August. Mostly he had heard of them in places like the pyramids, but there had been other children in the hospital who were as sick as he was, and he had gone to the funeral, once, of a little girl who he had shared a ward with for a while. She had been buried with her rabbit. Not a real rabbit, but a stuffed toy that was her favourite, and August had seen her in her coffin with the bunny tucked under one arm and he had asked his parents if he too would have a rabbit when he died, and that had been the end of going to other people's funerals for him.

"It was a very nice rabbit," said Muninn. "She called it Casper, if I remember correctly–and I do."

"I'd forgotten," said August. "Do you think that I'll be able to have some grave goods, Muninn?" Not that he wanted a bunny rabbit. They were for babies, but he always slept better with his blanket. He wouldn't need books or posters or geodes. He wouldn't even need the telescope, and it would be unkind to bury his fish with him, with no-one to feed them and with nothing for them to do but swim in the dark until they died. But he could have his blanket, perhaps. The tiger would keep him company.

"If you like," said Muninn.

Even for his blanket, though, August could not get as excited as the men in front of him. He couldn't understand what they were saying, but the tone of their voices, the quick, darting expressions of their faces, of their hands, made him think that they were animated by something else he could not understand.

"Why are they so excited?" he said to Muninn.

"This is the first burial that has been found," said Muninn. "The first time that there is proof that Neanderthals buried their dead. That man is a Neanderthal, buried sixty thousand years ago, buried by those who cared about him. And like you, he had been sick for a long time, with people to take care of him–though he was a grown man and you are only a little boy."

She hopped a pace or two towards the group, encouraging August to take a closer look. "Do you see the skull?" she said.

August peered over her iron head. He had to be patient, because the men who were bunched close around the body blocked the view sometimes, and Huginn's feet obscured the head, but after a few minutes he managed to make it out. He saw the heavy brow ridges, the way the forehead sloped back, and reached up to cup his own forehead in comparison, felt the curve in his palm so different from the curve he saw in the grave. Yet there was another difference, and though he did not see it straight away it was obvious when he did. "He missing a lot of teeth, isn't he?"

"It would have been difficult for him to eat," said Muninn. "His food needed to be made softer, easier for him to chew." Like August, on the days when he felt his sickest and Mum brought him plain soup and custard that slid down easily and did not upset his stomach. "And there were problems with arthritis. He needed someone to look after him."

"We've got something in common, then," said August, who had been taken care of his whole life, who would be taken care of when it ended.

"A commonality that comes from more than burial," said Muninn. "Although burial was what brought this man attention. It was common, at this time of excavation, to consider his species no more than simple animals. To make them dull and brutish so that your own kind would seem superior by comparison."

Huginn squawked then, a low, hoarse noise of disgust that seemed to fix inferiority in another place entirely, in a place that pinned posture to hunches and hulking, to the substandard and second-rate and apish. It was a distinctly unsympathetic sound, and August suspected it was a sound that Huginn probably made a lot.

"Huginn is a creature of thought," said Muninn. "He finds it tiresome to be mired in preconception."

"I don't think he likes me," said August, and although he said it under his breath, as quietly as possible, the second raven shot him a supercilious look that made it quite plain that he had hit upon the truth.

"Huginn's liking is not a common thing," said Muninn. "And his temperament a product of impatience. He knows that science can come from false leads, from making pictures from bones that are not correct and then improving on them. But because he takes no pleasure in that knowing he forgets, sometimes, that the false trail can be an important thing." She refolded her wings carefully against her body, smoothed down one stray feather. "I do not forget."

"I bet you remind him," said August, and smothered a giggle when Huginn turned his back upon them both. His dismissal was conspicuous, his black iron body rigid with offended dignity. "I bet you remind him a _lot_."

"Memory is my function," said Muninn, and if there was a trace of smugness in her voice it was only a trace–not even enough to echo. "The past must be understood before the future can be so," she continued. "Why do you think Huginn and I are paired together as we are? I am Memory, the sum of past experience. And Huginn is Thought, or Knowledge. He is the raven of future days, as I am come from the past."

"You're opposites," said August.

"Opposites, and yet linked. No-one can learn without memory. If that Neanderthal before us were to suddenly come back to life, the flesh reborn on his bones, and yet with no memory of his life, the gifts in his grave would mean nothing to him. He would not know their function, and they would be useless to him."

"You belong together," said August. He could understand that, if he did not understand what his place was, carried by ravens into history, into science. _You're mostly memory yourself, now,_ Muninn had told him, but _she_ was Memory, more than him and better. She did not need him. "So where does that leave me?" he said.

"In a place of kinship," said Muninn, and the dust from the grave, from the man who had been buried by kin and kind, settled on her wings and coated them with a patina of age and of similarity.

# AUGUST 4, 2013

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

August perched on his seat at the cafe pavement, his legs swinging down and the ravens on the table top. Their iron claws left scratches in the surface. Around him, people were drinking apple tea in little glass cups, mint tea that wasn't green at all, as August had expected when he saw the leaves–but the tea made the air smell green regardless, a fresh sweet scent shot through with honey, with flaked pastry and almonds and orange water. It actually made him feel hungry.

"You should have eaten before you came," said Muninn, breaking in.

"I wasn't hungry then," August replied. And he hadn't been–his hunger was a living thing now, and freakish. It came and went seemingly without reason. Sometimes he was ravenous. More and more often he was indifferent. He spent so much time lying about, without the energy to do much of anything that he felt little need to eat and nothing his Mum made was tempting to him. He tried to eat what she made anyway, because it made her feel better, but both of them knew that what he was eating was not enough. He saw Muninn eyeing the baklava and for a moment he was tempted to ask, but there was no place on the ravens for keeping coin and he would not ask her to steal for him. Besides, if he was still hungry when he got home it would make his Mum happy if he asked for honey and apples and layer slices so August breathed deeply, breathed in the scent of cooking mixed with salt, and refrained.

The cafe looked down over the water, over a sea that was crowded with boats–big boats and little boats and some with strange sails that August did not recognise, moving up and down the Bosporus, through the strait that split the city, past giant domes and island towers, past skyscrapers and train stations.

"I am taking you to a train station," Muninn had said. "A place of departures, a point of travel. But not yet." She had taken him to gardens and cottages and graves, and although Muninn had flown with him over a great city she had not landed there. Istanbul was different, a place for landing, for disembarking, and it was nearly too much for him. If August was a sick little boy he was still a little boy for all that, and curious, and the ravens could not have dragged him through the streets without acclimation, without the chance to stop and settle into himself, to see the city before him if only from a chair. To absorb the strangeness of it, the old and new together and so much of it alive around him. He had nearly tripped while sitting, trying to spin in place as he sat and by spinning encircle himself with sights and sounds and smells that he had never thought that he would have, all bound together and on top of each other until there was no separating them.

And then the shock of it was over and August could function again without tripping, could rise from his chair into an immersion he had begun to tolerate and then it was time for the train station. "I can fly you if you wish," said Muninn, but August shook his head.

"It's only a short walk," he said, wanting the experience. Wanting to drag it out, to stretch the time he was given before he had to return to his bed, to familiar streets and scenes and sickness. "I can do it." He walked slowly, for Muninn had allowed the time, and his legs were steady beneath him. They weren't always, but August was having a good day, a _marvellous_ one, and if his chest worked harder than it was used to then that was alright, because only living things could breathe and August was alive and walking through streets of people who were also alive, like him. They were like each other.

"You know," he said, stopping to rest for a few moments at a corner and watching the people move around him, as unconscious of their movement as if they were water streaming about a river rock, "when I was little I wanted to be a train driver." There'd been a railway track and carriages and a bright engine set all along his floor, and he would lie with it and pretend it was steam coming out of the chimney, real steam instead of bubbles.

"What changed?" said Muninn, and August smiled. It had been April, he did not say, April who'd crouched down next to him and talked about James Watt and monorails and maglevs. Who'd helped him to build tracks all through his room, up as well as along, across the windowsill and so close to the door that everyone but them had had to turn sideways to get in.

"I thought I'd like building things more," he said, and as he said it he knew that Muninn already knew the answer. She was Memory, all memory and all of his as well as others, and she knew April as he knew her, knew her as she knew herself.

"Why did you even ask?" he said, smiling. "You know the answer."

"I do," said the raven. "But I do not always ask for my own benefit. It is good for you to remember your own stories."

"There'll be more of them to remember after today," said August, starting forward again with the station in sight now, the station with the long name he could not pronounce and would not remember. "Just because I stopped wanting to be a train driver doesn't mean I stopped liking trains."

"Take your time," said Muninn, navigating the pavement alongside him, a quick loping run, and effortless. She and Huginn had heavier footsteps than he did: a dull, slipperless ring of metal on stone. "You need not hurry. I will not let you miss it."

They did not miss it, and when Muninn and Huginn went before him the train doors opened for him and did not keep him out and there was a seat waiting by a window that no-one else seemed to see, blinded as they were by ravens and unable to remember his presence, to think that a small boy would stow away so baldly.

"This is the first ride, the test ride," said Muninn. "The public will not be allowed to ride for a few more months yet. You are lucky."

"I know," said August. "Where are we going?"

"Not very far at all," said the raven. "But deeper than you imagine–through the Marmaray, all the way beneath the strait." All the way beneath the waters that August had been watching, a journey underground. "The tunnel is nearly sixty metres below sea level, the deepest immersed tube tunnel in the world. It connects continents, August." And August, whose body was being stretched now between continents of a different type, pressed his nose to the glass and felt the train move, felt it glide smoothly over tracks as if flying, until it sank beneath the surface of the city and took him into darkness. Beneath the sea, he could see his own dim reflection in the glass. Beside him, Huginn was also reflected in the window but his reflection was clear and bright, and August could see every detail of every feather.

"It must have been very hard to build," he said. "It must have taken a long time."

"Yes," said Muninn. "There were earthquakes, for one. The tunnel is built close to a fault zone, very close."

"It must be very strong," said August, and even though he was dying anyway he felt a little nervous, as if the shock were coming and resilience beyond him.

"They say it will withstand very large quakes, magnitude nine even. But that was not the only difficulty, not the only delay, and not the one I brought you to see." And the darkness was lifting then, the light seeping through from the other side of the tunnel as the train came out into the city again, and the next station opened up before them.

"It was here they found it," said Muninn, and August pressed his face back to the window, the city rising up before him. "They had to dig deeply here for the station, and beneath the surface were many things–pottery and skulls and bones, a galley ship and a city wall and the remains of a great harbour. The archaeologists were very busy. That often happens when we travel, though. When we make preparations for travel. We end up excavating things we never knew were there; things we didn't know had been forgotten."

"You never forget anything, though," said August, and there were train tracks in his head and a journey before him over ground less smooth than he thought, more lumpen and full of things he did not know he was covering up and hungry for.

"No," said Muninn. "I don't."

# AUGUST 5, 1948

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

The woman fiddled with her instruments, checking connections and signals and spectra. A band around her head kept short hair from falling into her face, and her mouth was pursed in concentration as she worked around Huginn, oblivious to his presence in the middle of her tools. "Her name is Ruby," said Muninn. "She is like you–waiting, although it is not a birthday cake that she waits for."

"There's nothing wrong with cake," said August. It was going to be his last one; there would never be another to look forward to so he took extra pleasure in the waiting. "I'm going to have them make a really special one this year."

"A tiger?" said Muninn, amused, eyeing the blanket. It was just a little chilly, though not so bad as home, and August kept it tucked well around.

"Maybe," said August. "But maybe I could have a walrus, or a fish. Like my fish. Maybe I could have all three." His parents would hardly say no, even if it meant they ate cake for days.

"Perhaps you could have a sun," said Muninn.

"That sounds pretty boring," August replied, picturing a plain round cake with bright icing, and banana flavoured.

"Ruby does not think so, but then she is older than you, and sees suns differently," said Muninn. "It is hard to see a thing, sometimes." She did not look at him as she spoke, rather fixed her iron eyes on Ruby and on her observations. "I can look at the sun; it will not hurt me. I remember when others looked at it and blinded themselves thereby, the brilliance turning to blackness and all other colours left behind. But there are other ways to look, when the eyes that must do the looking are as soft as yours." She turned to him. "Have you ever seen an eclipse, August?"

"I've seen a lunar eclipse," said August. He had been bundled up and taken into the garden to watch the full moon turn a strange mixture of orange and pink and red, the colours of Earth shadow. "Never a solar one. I would have liked to see one, though."

"If you had, you would have seen it through filters," said the raven. "Or projection. Sometimes the only way to understand a thing is not to look at it directly."

"Seems funny though, doesn't it?" said August. He did not make a habit of looking away; he could not afford it. He had hidden behind doors to hear of his luck, a luck that kept him alive for short spaces and would not hold to let him study stars at close quarters and shining. "Though I suppose you can look straight on sometimes and it makes no difference." The death that was coming for him, coming with birthday cake and candles, was something he had steeled himself for staring at and still it made no sense. If he were able to wear a special set of glasses like filters over his own eyes, or project his death through a tiny pinhole onto a wall of his bedroom so that he could study it, he might have been able to understand–but it loomed before him, incomprehensible and too bright to look at and his heart was over-heated by it, burned up and turned all to ash.

"Ruby is doing something similar, but instead she sees the sun indirectly by radio waves, by electromagnetism and emissions and radiation. Her interest came from the war."

"What's war got to do with suns?" said August. "It's so far away, there's nothing it can do."

"Ruby spent her time during the war–and that's World War II, August, not any of the others–working on radar. It was an important invention of the time. A way to detect distant objects, to look at things that could not be seen directly. But if some things can be clearer with indirection, then looking away can sometimes make seeing harder. Do you understand?"

"Yes," said August, who had tried looking away, who turned his head when needles went into his arm, when he saw himself fragmenting in mirrors, and frail. Who still saw, regardless, from the corners of his eyes and the shapes and shadows there were sometimes real and sometimes made by his mind into frights and fearful things, worse than they might have been had he turned to face them.

"Using radio to look away meant that misdirection came with indirection–false readings and white noise and static that told of ghost raids and jamming devices. Background noise, the kind that was usually ignored, set aside as not important. Then one day someone looked aside and saw that there was another correlation: that the static rose with sunspots, that the reception was disrupted."

"Is that why Ruby's here? Is she waiting for sunspots?"

"Yes. The war was over but research remained, and Ruby liked the physics, the radio astronomy, so she kept her search for sunspots. But they are fluctuating things, and hard for her to find. Ruby has to wait, to find her sunspots when they come to her. This isn't the first time she has found them, but she has been waiting some weeks. Today the waiting will be over."

"Can I see them?" said August, and promptly shut his mouth when Muninn gave him a withering look. He did not understand how a raven could look withering, but there was something about the eyes, about the set of her iron head that was rather repressive. Huginn was less contained–he gave one loud, rude caw as if he were laughing. It was a nasty sound and it made August jump, although Ruby did not notice it. "Alright," he mumbled. "Don't look directly at the sun, I get it."

"You would burn blindness into you," said Muninn, severe. "And you are not so whole as to have no need of the parts of you that work, still. Indirection, August. Try to remember."

"I suppose it was a very small spot?" said August, trying to change the subject and succeeding only, he saw, because Muninn had seen though his attempts to shift focus and decided to honour them.

"A large group of them, actually. The noise the radio receiver picked up from the sun was fourteen times that of the background."

"The sun is very big," said August. "It would probably be very loud." He was used to loud, used to clamour and the way that a bright, immense focus could drown out all else, could leave him pinned to his bed and unable to think of anything else, unable to quell the little voices in his head that were only ever one step from screaming with fear and the whole terrible _unfairness_ of it.

"Yes," said Muninn, and she looked at him with an expression that he would have thought was near pity if it didn't seem so out of place. "The sun is very big."

"So what was she trying to find out?"

"Ruby was looking to see if the radiation from sunspots was the same as normal background noise. If she could see a difference between them."

"You said it was louder."

"Louder does not mean different, August." And August thought of his own approaching loudness, the one that drowned out all others. It was louder to him, and to Mum and Dad and April, he knew, but he wasn't the only one. People died every day. Most of them were people he didn't know but occasionally there was someone he did and they were buried with grave goods and rabbits and that was the same thing really, but softer, because it interfered with him less, a backdrop to his life that he'd notice sometimes when it intruded, and then forget about again because it wasn't important.

"But it looks the same, doesn't it," he said, knowing the answer before it was given him. Knowing that the distribution of the dead, the leavings of grief, were the same the world over and all the looking away in the world, all the indirection, would not show him different. He would be eclipsed, and people would look away from it, mostly, lest his death be blinding without filters, and without projection he would be as their background, no louder than the rest and static.

# AUGUST 6, 1945

HIROSHIMA, JAPAN

There were shadows on the walls, and shadows on the rock. They weren't like the shadows that August had seen not a week past on a cottage porch, and not like the shadows that he made on the walls of his bedroom, or on the walls of the hospital. He was good at shadow creatures–there wasn't a lot he could do, lying about so much, but he could make rabbits and birds and dogs and it helped him to forget, sometimes.

These shadows didn't look like rabbits or birds or dogs. They looked like people. August tried to twist his body so that he made a shadow that looked like theirs, but it was hard to see them both at the same time, and he couldn't hold his position very long without aching.

Still, it was easier to look at the shadows than it was to look at the city. It sagged around them, black and burning, and parts were pulverised into dust. The worst part of it was the creaking: there were no people and no birds, not even an insect. There was nothing alive to make a noise, but August could hear the burning and crumbling, the way that girders in the distance toppled unbalanced to the ground.

On his worst days, when he felt his sickest, when he felt all ruined inside himself, August thought he might look like this city. If April looked close enough, if she had lenses powerful enough, he thought she could put a camera so close to his eyeballs he could feel it with his lashes, and the picture that she took would be of this place.

It was too hard to look at it, like it was too hard, now, to have mirrors about him. The shadows were easier. He could still tell they had been alive. He could still tell that they had been human. His own shadow looked normal, next to them. It looked as if it fitted in.

"Of course you don't look the same, exactly," said Muninn, who saw deeper and farther than he did. "Your shadow comes from your body. Those shadows are what's left when their owners are gone. They're all that's left of the people who used to live here after their bodies were burned away."

"Burned?" said August. His mouth felt dry, his tongue too big for him. "They were _burned_?" And he thought of Albert with his funny hair and Leo with his friendly face and how they had helped to light the fire and all their shadows were burning.

"In a great and terrible fire," said Muninn. "There was a war, and this was a way to end it. Scientists, far away, lived together on a mesa and learned to build a weapon that could end the war, that could end everything."

"Do you think it hurt?" said August. He had been camping once. It wasn't a very adventurous camp, only in the back garden with April, with their parents bringing them warm cups of Milo and marshmallows on sticks for toasting. There had been a school camp he hadn't been well enough to go on, and tents and blankets in the back garden was supposed to be compensation, of a sort. He had burned his finger on melted marshmallow, and it hurt in a way that needles and operations and therapy did not, a little burn on a little finger instead of a burning all-over-everything, but April had wrapped him up tight and done his marshmallows for him and told him scary stories, and it was enough, almost, for him to forget. "I don't like fire," he said, almost under his breath. He didn't want Muninn to think he was a baby.

"I think here, where we're standing, it was so quick they probably felt nothing," said Muninn. "But other people... they hurt a lot."

August was silent. He looked at the shadow, again, ground into and black against the rock and not much taller than himself. "Do you think it was a boy like me?" he said.

"Maybe," said Muninn. "Would you feel better if it wasn't?"

"Yes," said August.

#

Above them, Huginn flew in giant, glorious circles and refused to come down.

"I think this is where he is happiest," said Muninn, and her iron feathers were flat to her back.

"How can anyone be happy here?" said August. "It's nothing but burning and ashes and it smells of meat."

" _You_ are meat," said Muninn. "Do you not like the way that you smell?"

"It's not the same," said August. "This is... burnt. It smells like death. I don't like it."

"I don't like it either," said Muninn.

"Huginn does," said August, and shivered. "Why?"

"Huginn is thought," said Muninn. "For thought, a place like this is life. Life like a pulse point, just beneath the surface and bright with blood. All the places you are visiting are pulse points. Most of them are small; brief little candle flickers of excitement and discovery, little thought-sparks of eureka. But this... for Huginn, this isn't a candle. It's a _sun_."

Above them Huginn circled, wings spread wide and whirling in dizzy spirals, the hot air currents, the sifting ashes and red clouds of smoke and burning making of the air a maelstrom. Shivering, ecstatic, he rode the air above Hiroshima, and in his wings he felt it. Each feather was erect, wire barbs and barbules and hooklets and each hummed with conversation and theories and experiments, with plays and poetry and gypsum sands.

There was Kurihara, writing her verses in the ashes, writing of birth and death and bringing forth new life, writing of a midwife so scalded by radiation that the baby she helped birth in a basement, in rubble, saw a new day that she did not. There was Lilienthal, working to harness horror for peace, and Teller working to build a bigger bomb, a better destruction. There was Meitner, looking ahead from her walks in the Swedish winter and turning aside, and there was little Sadako folding paper cranes so that others would turn aside as well. There were evacuations and tests and mushroom clouds, there were green shards of glass and school children sheltering under their desks in mad drills, there were wars and waste and people crying out for water when all their skin had been burnt away. And Huginn felt it all, felt it forwards and backwards, all the clues and quests and consequences for generations fore and aft, a white-hot burst of information, of ideas, that collected and quarrelled, spiralling out from one giant maelstrom-node of Hiroshima ash. He flew above in sparks, and saw below him bright lines on the landscape, superimposed, speeding out in all directions, space and time both, a gleaming network that spun out like cobwebs, like the quick, fish-slick ripples of disturbed water.

And in his iron head he felt it: the great coalescing weight of thought, and how it came together in him.

#

"He doesn't see things as we do," said Muninn. "Huginn is drawn to ideas. He is a creature of abstracts, of linkages."

"Doesn't he have any feelings?" said August. "Doesn't he care?"

"The feelings have been burnt out of him," said Muninn. "Burnt out with electricity and information. That is why there are two of us: thought and memory. Feelings have been burnt out of him, but they have been burnt into me."

"Do you want to see the burning?" said Muninn. "I can show you the shadows, August. I can show you what they remembered, what they felt. It's all in me. Do you want to see it?"

" _No_ ," said August, and his voice was pale as his face. "I don't want to see any more. I just want to go home now. Please. _I want to go home_."

He was only a little boy after all. When the birds brought him home, he was tucked under little boy sheets, given his little boy bear to clutch, and hooked up again to all the machines that were too much alien to be adult and sounded lonely in the night. The ravens perched on the end of his bed, claws digging into the quilt and leaving holes there. Muninn cocked her head at him and was silent, as if waiting, but Huginn's eyes were black and whirling with excitement. His feathers ruffled and would not settle; his feet flexed on the bed. It was as if his intelligence was still at Hiroshima, as if he were just waiting for August to fall asleep so that he could go back and fly over the red and black horror of it, use that shining metal beak to pick out... And that was when August forced himself to stop, forced himself to shy away from the image of the raven come out of the sky for feeding.

( _What did you expect?_ Muninn had asked him. _Do you not remember that we are also birds of war? We belong on battlefields as well, we two, and it is not for stitching up wounds with our beaks that we go to visit the dying._ )

"Go away," he said. "Go away." And he hid his bald little head under the pillow until he heard the metal flash of wings, and knew that they were gone.

# AUGUST 7, 1947

RAROIA ATOLL, POLYNESIA

"You have come from fire and into water," said Muninn. Her wings were spread as if she were sunbathing, soaking up the heat, and her iron claws dug into balsa wood. August sat next to her with his legs dangled over the side of the _Kon-Tiki_ , and though they were too short to reach the water they were sprayed sometimes, when waves splashed off the side of the raft, and the water and the sun together were so warm they made him sleepy.

"I'm glad you came back," he said. "I'm sorry I told you to leave."

"I know," said Muninn. "It's alright."

"I thought I didn't want to see you again," said August. "But then I remembered Caroline and all the rest..." and with that weighted against him he could push down the burning to a little box inside and try his hardest to forget it.

It was easier for him to look at Huginn today. The bird circled above as he had done at Hiroshima–circled in slow, lazy spirals but the sky was clear, unstained by smoke and debris, and the air smelled of salt and ozone instead of burning flesh.

August lay back, his body pressed against the warm wood, and after a few minutes he forgot to flinch when a crew-member wandered by. There were six of them, and the raft was open to them, but "Don't worry," Muninn had told him. "I did not bring you here to be noticed, and you cannot interfere." And though he had felt the vibration of footsteps beside his head, none ever touched him, and the men avoided his corner of the raft and were not aware that they did.

"They have come such a long way," said Muninn. "It would be a shame for them to trip over you now." And though the great blunt beak could not twist into humour, August felt the smile she might have made had her body been different.

"A very long way," the bird said again, her eyes closing and drowsy in the heat. "All the way from South America."

"Why?" said August.

"Because journeys are important," said Muninn. "Because they make us change inside ourselves. Because they make us change the way we think." One out-stretched wing flicked at a tall blond man packing papers into watertight bags, packing to preserve his records. "Because Thor there wanted to see if it could be done."

"And it could," said August.

"Yes," said Muninn. "He has sailed for a long time, and this is the last day. He has looked forward to success for a long time." And she pecked at August then, gentle but insistent, until he raised himself up on his skinny little arms and saw the water ahead, all broken up in long waves of bursting white and the atoll after that, the clean lines of yellow and green against blue.

"What is it?" said August, squinting. The sun on the water was so very bright it hurt his eyes. He was used to artificial light, to the flat fluorescence of hospitals and the softer shine in his bedroom, with the quiet bulbs and the nightlight and the sticky glowing stars April had set upon his ceiling.

"That is the end of their journey," said Muninn.

"It looks nice," said August. "Pretty."

"To some of them it seems like paradise," said Muninn. "Restful. A place of peace at the end of a long journey. A place where they can stop after the voyage is done."

"Only some of them?" said August, and Muninn glanced again at the tall blond man.

"A voyage can be a difficult thing," she said, and August rolled his eyes where she could not see, used now as he was to raven responses that were answers and not-answers at once. "It can take a long time, and there are losses along the way." Above, them, Huginn squawked as if he were a parrot, and then laughed his hoarse raven laugh and Muninn determinedly did not look at him.

"It changes you, a voyage," she continued. "It changes how you think, and your relationships with other people. It changes your body, even," and August, whose shrinking, failing self was turning under the sun just a little pink at the edges, nodded. He knew about change–about hospital visits and operations and the scars that they left, about loss and lack and prices. His own voyage had left him unfit for one like this, for long days under a hot sun with salt all around and a horizon without end.

"And sometimes the change is gain, and sometimes it isn't," said Muninn. "And sometimes it's so long and so hard that when it's over, and when you have reached the atoll at the end of it, there is nothing more you want than to rest, to lie in peace on a strange beach and be still. But sometimes... sometimes when you see that beach, and know that the voyage is nearly over, there are some who picture themselves lying on that sand and wish that the voyage remained to them. Some who wish the atoll further off, in another part of the ocean, and the journey not yet done."

"Endings are hard sometimes," said August, and his eyes were fixed against the glare on the atoll, on the green and yellow of end-times and exhaustion, of trees that stood above the ocean like candles. He didn't want to look away then, to look at the vast and beautiful breadth of ocean beyond him, the ocean he would never explore because his time upon it was limited, and failing. And the atoll before him was pretty, so pretty, but it was an ending for all that and he could understand, in his way, that for some of the sailors aboard the _Kon-Tiki_ the ending was bittersweet.

He understood it, and he was only a little boy under a hot sun, wanting to sail away from the atoll, to sail away forever and float in a calm sea with the water peaceful all about him.

"It is not always calm," said Muninn, and she was not talking about storms or swells or the hard wash of current, but the broken water ahead, the sharp knives of the reef and the waves that pounded on it as anvils. "And the reef is not peaceful."

"Do they _have_ to go over it?" said August, but even as he asked he knew the answer, for he could see no other way to land, no safe path between the churning. And the balsa raft was busy with preparation, with the anchor drawn up and lashed to the mast, with a home-made, make-shift anchor of empty cans and scrap, of mangrove wood and dead batteries, ready to be drawn behind. There were life-jackets then, and shoes on sunburned feet, the sail taken down and the cabin all covered in canvas and the bamboo deck taken up in parts to get at the centreboards, to bring them up and make the raft more fit for shallows.

"That is the way of it," said Muninn. "The end of a journey is often the hardest. It is where the last struggle comes in, the place of greatest danger, the place of hard roads. And then it is done," she said, "and over."

And August said nothing. There was nothing to say, for he knew the end of journeys and all the hard places. Knew the scraping over rocks, the battle for breath and the difficulty of keeping whole, the final struggle. Knew the way it would get harder and more hurtful for heart and lungs and brain, until he could slip over the final reef and let the journey go.

"Hold on to me, August," said Muninn then, and she was in his lap with his arms about her, the iron shape of her warm on his skin, warmer than water, warmer than sunlight. And he was not the only one holding on, for her claws gripped him tightly as the men around him gripped, holding tight to balsa and ready to be broken up and floated ashore, their knuckles wet and white with strain and their eyes alight with hope and with a fear that held as much of excitement as it did of endings.

And then the reef was before them and under them, the hard red rock of it grating against the bottom of balsa and the raft was screaming and creaking and then Muninn had him, her claws hard around him and they were winging upwards, above the white water and the foam and the fear of wreckage. And they were beyond it then, beyond the men who had sailed an ocean over and had washed up ashore, washed up at a place of resting, of relief and regret both, and August was carried away with his own reef ahead and still to come.

# AUGUST 8, 1709

LISBON, PORTUGAL

August tugged at Muninn's wing. "They can't see me, can they?" he asked, anxious and a little overwhelmed.

"You know that they can't," said Muninn. "No-on has seen you so far, have they? Not even yesterday, on the raft. It was only a raft, August, and there was nowhere to hide on it. If you were visible to anyone you would have been visible there."

"It's not the same," August mumbled. The raft was one thing. The men there had been half-dressed, their clothes salt-stained and fraying at the edges. The people in the Casa da Índia were frayed nowhere. They wore silks and satins and lace, with heavy cloaks and giant skirts and they were covered in jewellery. August stood and watched them, awkward in his pyjamas, in his plain little slippers and with his tiger blanket wrapped around. There were stains down his shirt from where he had spilled his dinner.

"Besides," said Muninn repressively, "the king has better things to do today than look at little boys with dirty shirts."

"It's not that dirty," said August, scrubbing at the fabric so as to make the stain less noticeable and succeeding only in wrinkling himself further. "There's a king?"

"We are in the Tower of the King," Muninn replied. "Part of his palace, as the Casa is part of the Tower. It is a place for administration and trade and travel. It is the last that we have come to see, the last which Bartolomeu is concerned with. But there are a few minutes before his presentation. If you are well enough you might want to explore. No-one will bother you."

And August, sceptical at first and then with growing curiosity, scampered as quickly as he could, which wasn't very fast at all, for all he was feeling better than the usual in a brief period of grace that came with excitement and novelty and thoughts of things other than dying. The Casa was like a great museum, with compartments and collections and artifacts: gold and silver and precious stones brought in tall ships from the ends of the earth and laid out with spices and with spoils, and all the time there were people around him talking in words he did not understand, talking and laughing and dressed in outfits too heavy for them, that looked as if they could have stood up on their own.

"Is it a ball?" he said to Muninn, breathless, when he returned from his wanderings. "Will there be dancing?" Not that he wanted to dance, which was always the least disappointing opinion when dancing was so often beyond him, but he could have watched and tried a few steps, perhaps, where no-one would see him and worry he was exhausting himself.

"Not a ball," said Muninn. "But a royal dinner, and an exhibition. See that man there, the one dressed in black with his hands full of paper?"

"Yes," said August, although he could see more than paper. There seemed to be a bowl of some sort, almost a ball, and thin little ropes between.

"His name is Bartolomeu," said Muninn. "And that is his hot air balloon. He has come to show it to court, to the king. To show that heated air will make it rise."

"How's he going to heat it?"

"There will be a flame beneath, and tiny pieces of kindling in that container."

"But Muninn," said August, "Muninn, the balloon's made of _paper_!"

"Yes," said Muninn. "A bold choice, I grant you. He tried this a few days ago and nearly set the palace alight. The fire was put out, but the curtains could not be saved."

"Wouldn't it be better to try it outdoors, then?" said August.

"What if the wind took it away? Or it just kept going up? At least with a ceiling to bump into the balloon is retrievable."

And retrievable it was. Bartolomeu crouched on the floor in front of the king, the kindling thin and dry beneath his fingers and soon set alight, and the little paper airship sprang into the air, soaring upwards until it hit the ceiling and hovered, until the kindling burnt out and the air cooled and the balloon came back to earth, came down to applause and commendation and with only a few singed bits.

"See?" said Muninn. "Success. He has shown the principle as sound."

"He's not going to try and build a _real_ balloon out of paper, is he?" said August, noting the servants circling the room with discreet buckets of water. He braced himself to be told that the small device tested was a real balloon, but he meant something that would carry people, something more than an interesting and slightly dangerous toy. While August liked to believe he was adventurous–not every dying child would consent to fly with ravens–and that he would have been more adventurous still as a grown-up, even he could not picture trusting a paper balloon to hold his weight and avoid combustion. "Because that seems like a bad idea all round."

"He wanted to build a bird, actually" said Muninn, musing. "It was to be called _Passarola_. This was a first step."

"A bird like you?" said August, and from across the room Huginn gave a derisive caw as he poked his beak into paper, shuffled amongst it with his iron feet.

"Nothing like me," said Muninn, and her wings flattened against her back. "Do I look like I'm made from balloons, an empty thing for carriage?"

"No," said August, backpedalling. "It could have been a raven, though," he said in a small voice. "In the shape of one, I mean."

Muninn snorted. "A belly like a ball with a head attached at one end, a tail at the other and a man inside to pull on wires. Mock wings and magnetism. Yes," she said, sarcastic. "Very like a raven."

"Well it's not like you're a typical example either, is it?" said August, staring at the paper balloon blackened about the bottom and thinking of goose-pimple flesh beneath warm wings, of feathers that were fragile in the air and never left patterns imprinted in his skin.

Muninn glared at him in response, frosty, as if he had been impolite and she too well-mannered to correct him, her feathers ruffling despite herself. Feathers that shared a colour with other ravens if they were not fixed to the same fabric, and it struck him then that the _Passarola_ would likely never have been a raven.

"Look at this lot," he said, of the bright coloured dresses, of the ribbons and the silk of a royal court that had set him back on seeing them. "They'd want colours all over any airship bird, they would. They'd never paint it black."

But the change of subject didn't seem to make a difference, for Muninn's eyes were still flat and black and their clockwork was stilled, having ground unimpressed to a halt. August supposed he could not blame her, having been set apart his whole life and ringed about with the subjects of his differences. It made him feel like a freak, and he wondered at the comparison and sank inside himself, cast about for something else to say. "It's not like you can blame him," he said of Bartolomeu. "Wanting to build a ship like a bird. It'd be like being one himself, almost. He'd get to float about like he was flying. He'd get to leave everything behind."

"Some things are worth keeping," said Muninn, mollified. The frost had left her eyes, the gears starting to move again. She hopped closer to August, laid her head against him, a brief black brush of iron. "And some will not be left behind."

"Still," said August, eyeing the remains of the balloon and then gazing up at the ceiling, at the small point the balloon had bumped up against and come back down to earth. "It's nice to dream about, isn't it, that you can just fly off and escape." _Fly off into past and into continents, both a strange country and a stepped one, with August at the peak and no further room to climb._ "Sometimes I wish I could fly with you forever," he said.

"You can't," said Muninn. "Not with me, not forever. Your flights are your own. But they are not over yet."

Before them, Bartolomeu was showing off his balloon, the paper and kindling and flame, the rise and fall of it. The way it could be made into _Passarola_ , and take him to the sky.

# AUGUST 9, 1945

LEKSAND, SWEDEN

"I like the north, and the snow," said Muninn. "There was a time I liked deserts better, dunes and dates and palm trees, but the north is where I belong now. Being here is like coming home."

"Where is home, Muninn?" August asked.

"Home is yew trees and ashes and cool clear pools," said Muninn. "It is workshops and tools and programming. It is a place to come back to."

"It's nice," said August looking round, but his hands were nervous and he spoke in absence, aware mostly of what home was not. "It's not burning, at least," he said, under his breath.

Beside him, Huginn laughed. At least, it sounded like a laugh, what passed for humour in a raven's mind, ground out through cogs and clockwork and clarity, and August turned away because even in his sickness he knew amusement and the sound that Huginn made held more of threat than humour. It sounded as if oil were beyond it, as if the cogs were forced together.

"Did you think we would bring you to burning?" said Muninn, her head cocked and with no curiosity in her eyes. Muninn, who held his memories of the day before, and the days before that.

"You know that I did," said August, and if there was no snow, no frozen landscape around him the fire in his chest was damping, loosening a part of him that had been locked rigid with heat. This was not Japan. The light was different, and there was no smell of burning and perhaps he had been brought to a place of healing instead of holocaust, because wasn't that something that spoke of home and not annihilation?

"There is no burning here," said Muninn. "This is a place of aftermaths. Of ashes covered up, of resolution and radio waves."

"What have radio waves got to do with it?" said August, and Huginn was laughing again, causing shivers up the fleshy remains covering his spine, the spine that was not iron, that held a pure animal fear instead of thought.

"Lise is being interviewed today," said Muninn. "On the radio, with Eleanor." And she would say no more, but winged gently over countryside, over green land that smelled of fresh earth and leaves and then into a small studio in a country town.

In that studio was a woman. August thought she might be in her sixties. Her hair was tied back in a small bun and there were dark smudges under her eyes, as if she hadn't been sleeping, as if she had wanted once to cry but the tears had been blasted from her. August knew that look, had felt it on his own face standing in the ruins of a city not his own, a city that burnt around and inside him.

She looked, he thought, as if her heart had been broken.

"It has," said Muninn, "although it could have been worse and she is glad it was not. She is good at feeling guilty, is Lise, and this is an age where physics hangs heavy upon conscience. But in this hers is clear: she helped to discover fission, working it out in the woods and the winter, with letters and with blood. And when she saw what she had helped to birth, she would not help again. Many scientists worked on the bomb, August, and they worked in good faith, many of them, wanting an end for a war that seemed to have none. But Lise thought that there was more than war to worry for, and the destruction at Hiroshima was one she would not help. And she fled Germany and came here, to a place of refuge. To a home that was not hers, but which became so."

"Who's she talking to?" said August, and the funny feeling in his tummy was back, because if this was not the bomb then it was related, and if he felt some ease in the fact that he was with a woman who did not want it then that ease was unbalanced by raven beaks and laughing.

"A woman called Eleanor, who is not a scientist but sees what science has done, what it can do, and who doesn't want it either. Who is married to a president, or was. Now sit quietly, and listen."

And August listened, listened to two women reach across boundaries, across continents, to try and make a bridge between them: between science and humanity, over war and into peace. "Women have a great responsibility and they are obliged to try, so far as they can, to prevent another war," Lise said, and August saw from her face the hope that she sounded stronger than she was, more certain, more composed. It was not an easy interview–set up in haste, with untested equipment and Lise's hands shook the more she tried to put steadiness into her voice, into the microphone that was either too close or too far and the questions coming through but dimly.

"I can't hear all of it," August whispered, and wondered if it was because Huginn was up close to the microphone, his head alternately pressed against it and against Lise, pressed for communication and for comfort, his presence as much a link as radio waves and more solid.

"It is a conversation that will go on for many years," said Muninn. "With many people, with many voices. You will have a chance to hear it again."

"Can't I hear more now?" said August, but he was hauled up into the air by the back of his pyjamas, clawed feet catching him, holding him hard about the middle though gentle enough not to prick the skin but it was Huginn who had caught him up, Huginn for the first time flying with him and Muninn following behind. "Where are we going?" he cried, the wind whipping words away from him and so loud in his ears he could barely hear the phrase dropped down onto him from above, dropped like anchors and lodestone and chains.

"Home," Huginn croaked, and his wings beat faster and he climbed higher, and August in his claws was flown into the path of radio waves, and he felt them echo through the iron legs, through the claws and into his chest, up through his throat until his head beat with them, was buzzing. There was the end of the interview in those waves, the breaking of connection between Lise and Eleanor, and then August was passing through other waves, with other conversations of other sorts, and dragged through those currents, through August himself, was the news of the second bomb, the bomb he had so dreaded and hoped not to see. And because it was Huginn, the bird of thought if not of memory, there was more transmitted through those claws than radio waves, more than memory and mourning. There was _information_ , information that was as much Huginn's home as north and ash trees, and in that glowing stream of data pulsing along the antenna of the bird's body was the rate of burning flesh, was birth defects and radiation poisoning, the ruined earth, the sears and scarring both. And August felt it all, knew it all, had it burst within him as the bomb burst in Nagasaki and the knowledge burned through him, set his veins alight with horror and fascination both, a flight of feeling and sickness that appeared unending until he was dumped in his bed, the metal cage of claws taken from his body and the spider's web of Huginn's mind removed from his.

And then August was left alone, his body wet with sweat and heaving, and the absence a scream in his head that was mostly relief, and nearly all revulsion, nearly all dread and anger and the choking, raging fear of ruined cities and abandonment that even the memory of Lise did not dampen or cure.

# AUGUST 10, 1916

ELEPHANT ISLAND, ANTARCTICA

"Is this supposed to be a joke?" August snapped, his blanket tight around him and his feet in ice, snow seeping through his slippers and numbing his toes. "First it's a burning city– _again_ –and now it's an iceberg?"

"It is an island, not an iceberg," said Muninn, tranquil. The temperature seemed to have no effect on her, though her wings were frosted. She did not shiver, and if her iron body was frigid to the touch it still moved smoothly, as if oiled, and her crow feet were easy in the snow. "And you are the one who does not like fire. I thought you would appreciate the change."

"I'm not falling for that again," said August, who had gone from fire into water and found relief in an ocean once before, who had found that relief temporary, and so mocking it cut like coral. "You're lucky I came at all. Stupid birds." He hadn't wanted to come, had thought about staying home and tucked up in bed, fuming on his own and making his family nervous, snarling and angry and with the fire beneath his eyelids always. It had given him a sort of savage pleasure to make them feel as bad as he did, knowing as he did that they would not respond, would not scream back and aim for hurting. They would not because he was sick. Because he was dying.

It was that turning away that had decided him: his Dad's bitten lips, the way his Mum looked like she was about to cry, and then Muninn had come, and Huginn, and they were as certain as always and as calm and August was on a roll–more creatures to upset, more to carp at and complain to and find fault with. More to make feel as horrible as he felt himself.

The ravens had taken him to burning, to a place of apocalypse. It wasn't right that they should be so unaffected. It wasn't right that they could still be happy, and August felt the opportunity to see that they were not, to punish them with his presence.

"You were the one who remembered it," said Muninn. "Who kept thinking about it."

"Because it was _horrible_ ," said August. "How hard is that to understand? You remember everything, don't you? The bad stuff as well as the good? Or are you just too stupid to tell the difference?"

"The differences are certainly escaping _you_ ," said Muninn. Her hoarse raven voice was as calm as ever, as if she were talking to a particle of rock, a piece of dust–something small and silent and unimportant, and the lack of reaction August sparked in her made him want to hit something. If he hadn't know how much iron would hurt his thin, aching little hands he would have hit her, but Muninn was too hard to hit and even if he was other than iron, August would not have dared to hit the other. Huginn, he thought, could very well hit back–and although his beak looked blunt August thought it might be razor-edged.

"Not all memories are the same," Muninn was saying, and August surfaced from thoughts of scars and slicing to listen, though he did not understand and would not question and the wind and ice were hard about him. "There is also pleasure in burning, in the remembrance of it: of endings and homecomings and the prospect of peace come out of the ashes."

"Home?" said August. "How can you talk about home here? Don't you see them?" The men about him, huddled and stinking and starving, whittled down by cold with their fortitude broken down around them.

"I see more clearly than you," said Muninn. "Did you think science was memories of discoveries only, exaltation and shining horror at once? No, August. So much of it is failure and waiting and boredom, the sending out of little ships into weighty seas and wondering if they will bring answers with them. Wondering if the exploration has been for nothing." She cocked her head, looking towards a man come out a small distance from the others, crouched down and wrapped about in ragged clothes and gazing towards the beach. There were pages in his hand, and he was smiling.

"Am I supposed to know him?" said August. His feet were numb and his fingers hurt and he could not conceive how anyone would be so foolish as to expose themselves further to the frigid landscape. How they could find humour in it.

"His name is Alexander," said Muninn. "And he is a doctor, come down into the wild south with Shackleton, come for learning and exploration. Come for stranding, too. His ship has been destroyed. The _Endurance_. Do you know what endurance means, August?"

"Of course I do," said August, lying. "I'm not an idiot."

"It means being able to survive, to go on. To suffer in patience, in the hope that there is more than suffering."

"Didn't do his ship any good, did it," said August.

"No," said Muninn. "The ship could not endure the ice. Oak and fir and greenheart, and it was not enough. But a ship is only a thing, August, and there was more endurance on that expedition and it was not timber-made. Oh, they talk of Shackleton, and how he led his men and kept them alive, and it is a flashy thing, his endurance, and remembered."

"Then why aren't you showing me him?" said August. He didn't particularly care; he just wanted to be difficult, to be ungrateful.

"Because flashy things are not enough," said Muninn. "Not for you, who counts his success in small victories, in single days and drudgeries. You are not the only one who does so. Look at Alexander, August. Look at him, writing in his journal and happy, for the moment, though he is cold and hungry and lost, though he is losing hope and wonders if his home is gone forever. Would you like to know what he is writing?"

"Not particularly," said August, but when Muninn just looked at him, looked quietly and waited, her black body bright against the snow, he sighed as insultingly as he could and trudged his tiny body over to the man, to the words written in brief winter sunlight.

" _I have been watching the snow petrels_ ," he read, standing behind and reading over Alexander's shoulder. " _They are wonderful little birds. Sometimes they get caught by a breaker and dashed on the shore, but they soon recover and go off again to their fishing_."

"Is that all he's writing about?" said August. "Birds? Why should I care? They're not important."

"You might want to watch them as Alexander has before you say that," said Muninn.

It was hard not to watch. There were dozens of them, hundreds, and their feathers were so white and so clean that when they were sitting in snow August missed them, until the quick, ecstatic movements as they rolled and cleaned awakened him. He could see them flying, see them running along the top of the water, almost, their clever dives and their quick flight turns and amongst them Huginn, larger and darker and as glorious, less swift and less elegant but as secure in his wings and showing off. And the petrels fell sometimes, and hit the water badly, and were washed up on a shore they hadn't expected, and they shook their feathers out in the snow and ran into the air again, circled up in tight pretty spirals and dove again.

August watched, and Alexander watched, and he laughed as August turned away in disgust, turned to look at the poor little shelters, the upturned boats and the ruined tents held down with rocks, the ice and the cold and the bleak white desert and the bergs crowded all about.

"Look at it," he said. "Just look at it! How can he laugh when he's living like this? Hungry and sick and alone, all of them, and he's laughing about the birds. He's crazy. You stupid birds have brought me to a crazy man. Doesn't he know where he is?"

"Of course he knows," said Muninn. "He knows many things. And one of these is that we make our own hells, and some are more frozen than others."

# AUGUST 11, 1909

SS ARAPAHOE, ATLANTIC OCEAN

"They are the Diamond Shoals," said Muninn, perched upon the ship's railings and with her wings closed to the wind. "A place of sinking and salvage, where two currents come together. Do you see them, August?"

"No," said August flatly, his arms wrapped around himself. The air was foggy, but even if it hadn't been he would have looked elsewhere for difficulty, looked up at the masts or the chimney or the cabins, the lifeboats lashed to the sides and useless to him. He wasn't interested in shoals or sand or sea or anything that wasn't resentment and misery.

"They are a function of temperature," said Muninn. "Of a warm body of current, a body that moves north until it meets another current coming down. The second is cold, and when they meet there is turbulence. The warm current is made colder and the water is angry about the shore. Sand is displaced, moved about, and the ocean floor is not left to settle. It shifts, instead, into sandbanks, into vast bars and barriers."

One the railings beside her, Huginn croaked, and August looked away from the hungry expression in the iron eyes.

"Many hundreds of ships have sunk here," said Muninn, dreamy in her remembrance. "Many sailors have drowned. They call it the Graveyard of the Atlantic."

"You don't think I've seen enough graveyards?" August snapped, for he had seen the apocalypse once and again, seen the slow decay of children's bodies in the hospital wards of Starship, felt his own body shiver and grow cold. Felt the warmth leach from him as the currents of his life bore him onwards and into barriers, into reefs and sandbars and annihilation. "Or is it that you find them so wonderful you think that I must find them wonderful as well?"

Huginn croaked, wordless in his response, beating iron wings and launching himself from the ship railings and into white water, into waves cloudy with sediment and unfit for seeing. Yet when he emerged, moments later, there was a fish in his beak and he landed upon the deck, close enough to August's feet that he felt the flopping of the fish through the deck, the hard, frightened thumps of it. And Huginn beat the fish against the ship and tore into it still living, ripped chunks of wet flesh with his razor beak and inhaled as if drowning, ate as if starved and feeding upon the dead.

It made August want to throw up. Not just the raw violence of the feeding, the sodden flesh and the ecstatic gulping and the memories of gouged eyes and burning, but the way that Huginn stared at him while he ate, the way he took pleasure in August's reaction, in the suffering and stilling of flesh, in the way the currents struggled and went out. He stumbled to the side, leaning as far over the railings as he could and it wasn't very far, for the _Arapahoe_ was large and sturdy and he was only a little boy, and a frail one at that.

"He's _disgusting_ ," he said to Muninn. "Can't you stop him? Can't you make him stop?"

"We all have our natures," said Muninn, composed. "Ours is to eat the dead. Yours is to die. I do not make the rules."

"You are iron," said August, and the taste of iron was in his mouth, the stringy saliva taste of metal and vomit. "You shouldn't be eating at all."

"And you are just a child. You shouldn't be disrespectful to your elders, though I note that hasn't stopped you," said Muninn, and there was a tinge of disapproval in her voice, just a trifle, and if August hadn't felt so sick he would have thrown fish bones at her, tried to knock her off her perch until she called for truce and for mercy. Instead, he heaved over the side even though there was not much to throw up. Food had never been less interesting to him, the recollection of roasting standing side by side with sickness, with loss of appetite and slow starvation, the sinking of his body into skeleton.

It was horrible to stand so hunched over, with bile in his mouth and his face wet with sweat and strain. August hated being sick, but he was used to company in his sickness, to cool cloths and sympathy and lemonade to settle his stomach. On the ship, however, there were none of these–only a raven beside him, staring out to sea and another behind him with scales about his feet and the smell of fish in his feathers. There was no-one to help him.

"I am helping you," said Muninn. "Not in the way that you want, but it is help for all that."

"I don't need your help," August snarled, sinking to the deck, curling up with his knees to his chest and his cheek on cool metal. "And if I did I wouldn't ask." He refused to give them satisfaction, the opportunity to prove their strength against his own. He preferred to be miserable.

"Help is why we have come here," said Muninn. "This ship is known for asking aid. You could learn by example."

"Don't care," said August, his tongue heavy and sour in his mouth and the queasy feeling still in his stomach.

"You should sympathise," said Muninn. "The ship is having mechanical difficulties. Like you."

"What?"

"There is something wrong with its insides. Like you."

"Oh."

"Without help they will drift into the Shoals and founder. But the _Arapahoe_ has a tool to help themselves with, a facility for transmission and for code. They are not the first to use Morse in this way, to call for help with the new signal, the SOS. But they are near to it."

"Why should I care if they're the first or not?" said August, turning his face further into metal, hoping to cool the wet heat of his forehead and the dizziness inside.

"We have been taking you to firsts," said Muninn. "I don't want you to think it is a habit. Science is application as well as discovery."

"I don't care," said August again. The smell behind him seemed to be growing stronger, and the scrape of iron nails on the deck as Huginn tore the remains into fishy, fleshy pieces hurt his ears and made his spine all shivery. He felt bile again, the rising of his gorge, and swallowed.

"Good," said Muninn. "I suppose I should not be surprised. You also are not the first; you should be used to following behind. Don't look so surprised," she said, gazing down at him from her perch high above his head. "You're not the first to die, you know."

"Maybe not," said August. "But it's the first time it's happening to me."

"Well, your memories of it are not out of the ordinary," said Muninn. "Aside from Huginn and myself, of course. That should comfort you."

"It doesn't," said August, and the bile was in him, waiting to be vomited out. "Nothing does." And nothing did–not the journey with ravens, the newness and the focused attention, not even the love from his family as solid as steel and steady beneath him, unbreached by reef or shoal or sickness. And later that day, when April roused him from sulky rest, her hand on his forehead and concern all through her face, she was the opposite of comfort.

August glared at her as she cared for him, bringing lemonade and dry toast to help his stomach and straightening his blanket. He snatched it back and into disarray, even though having the tiger tangled round his legs made him feel overheated and queasy. "I don't want your help," he muttered, hating that she had to do for him, hating her. Hating everything.

"Sorry?" said April, cheerful in the sickroom, cheerful because she had never had to ask for help like he did, because sickness was beyond her and the doctors never came for her and she was all that August would never be, healthy and full of future.

"I don't want your help!" he said, louder, then louder again until he was screaming it, over and over, until he was throwing everything he could in reach at her, even though the throws were weak and never touched her and that enraged him more. Until he was throwing books and lamps and pillows, until he was throwing the alarm clock that was never set to wake him but was set to blaring when August threw it at his sister's feet, the call for waking like sirens, like ambulances, and him too sick to get out of bed and shut it off.

It was his parents who turned it off, running into his room as April ran out, the door to her room slamming behind her and August turned his hot, streaming face to the window that was empty of ravens and did not, would not learn.

# AUGUST 12, 1883

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

"It's a funny looking thing," said August, frowning.

The animal he was staring at looked like a cross between a horse and a zebra. The front half was striped like a zebra, striped in dark and white, and the back half was a deep, solid brown.

"She is not an it," said Muninn. "She is a quagga."

"She looks sad," said August, peering through the bars. The quagga was huddled in a corner, and her head was hanging down.

"She is sad," said Muninn. "She is lonely, and she is dying, and she is the last of her kind."

"Is she going to die today?" said August, distressed. His own death was so close, now, that he could pity it all the more in others.

"Yes," said Muninn. "Very soon. And it will be unremarked, almost. No-one will know, when they find her, that she was the last quagga, the last ever. They will only find that out later."

"What happened to the rest of them?" said August.

"They were hunted until they died," said Muninn. "Until none of them were left but her."

"And now she's dying," said August. "She must be so scared. She must wonder what we're going to do to her."

"Possibly," said Muninn. "Although," she continued, seeing his distress, "it is also possible that she does not understand enough to fear your kind for what they have done to her. She only knows that she is alone. She does not know why."

"She shouldn't be alone when she dies," said August. "It's not fair!" He hated the bars between them, almost. He had been behind bars himself, sometimes, when they were put up on the side of his bed to stop him from falling out, from falling over, because his body had become too weak to save itself. And when he was lying down, with his head on his pillow, he would look out through those bars and pretend that he was in a different type of prison, and that one day he would escape to a place where he did not hear through the wall a sister that he did not want to see, the life that he wanted but would not have. He had imagined all the ways it would happen. He could dig a tunnel, or pry out the bars. He would pretend that his bedroom wall was made of stones that could be levered out, and when he did he would run away into the sun and never be trapped in his bed again.

But the quagga had hooves instead of hands, and she could not dig or pry or lever. She could only wait, and look out through bars that were too close for her.

"They are not too close for you," said Muninn, and August saw then that his little hands, clenched around the bars and white-knuckled, had grown thinner than they had been even when Muninn had first come to him not two weeks before. A healthy little boy might have been too fat to fit through the bars, but August was not healthy and he would never be fat again, never be anything but a slow increase of bone in proportion to sinking flesh. And if he turned himself sideways and took a deep breath, he could fit through the bars and join the quagga in her cage.

He could, but he didn't want to. August had had enough of his own bars. He did not think he could stand another's as well.

"Perhaps I should leave her be," he said. "Mum says when animals are sick sometimes they just want to be left alone."

"Perhaps," said Muninn.

Before them, the quagga staggered. Her legs gave out and she shuddered to her knees, tried to get up again and failed, her sides heaving. She gave up then, her long nose resting in the dirt and her panicked blowing stirring up little clouds of dust.

"She's already so unhappy," said August. "Perhaps I'd only make her more scared."

"Perhaps," said Muninn again.

"And Huginn isn't here," said August, his hands still tight about the bars and unable to look away. "If he thought it was a good idea he'd be here, wouldn't he?"

"Now you're just stalling," said Muninn.

There was the rush of wings behind him then and August turned, put his back to the bars and Huginn was in front of him with August's blanket, his favourite tiger blanket, hanging from the raven's beak. Carefully, the raven laid it at August's feet.

"Thank you," said August, half-dismayed, "but I'm not cold." He was cold so often now, but this day he was standing in the middle of a European summer, not the chilly winter of the southern hemisphere, and his flesh was warm about him.

"It was not brought for you," said Muninn. "Not entirely." The blanket was knotted on top so that the bottom hung as a pouch, and the raven pecked at August's bony little ankle. An affectionate peck, meant not to hurt but to gain his attention. "Open it," she said, and August squatted, leaning his weight behind him, and though his legs ached and wobbled beneath him he teased open the knot to find his blanket full of earth, full of a dusty red soil that crumbled beneath his fingers.

"It's dirt," he said, puzzled.

"No," said Muninn. "It's home."

"My home doesn't look like this," said August, thinking of the dark, fertile earth of Oamaru, of the garden behind his house all filled with flowers and growing things even in winter: the flaxes and ferns he was so used to, the plants he saw every day from his window, from his little barred bed. But _It was not brought for you_ , Muninn had said, and August turned with earth in his hands to see the quagga, curled in on herself in the corner of the cage, her eyes dulled with misery and dimming, and he understood.

"I don't want to go in," he said, and his voice was half-pleading.

"I know," said Muninn, and August went anyway. He dragged his feet, and his hands on the blanket were clammy so that the little grains of dirt stuck to his palms, but he went.

He didn't even have to breathe in much, though the bars were so close together. Just one quick step and he was through, inside the cage and looking out, inside with the dying animal, the _other_ one, and there was no escape for either of them but one.

Behind him, he could hear Huginn croak, a wordless, self-satisfied sound.

"Yes," said Muninn, and he could barely hear her reply over the sound of his own heart beating. "You're very thoughtful," she said, and her raven voice was dry as deserts.

August walked very slowly across the cage, as slowly as he could without stopping, and the quagga watched him come. He had been afraid that she would kick, that she would force herself up in a panic and do herself an injury–that his presence would compound her pain, would make her feel more trapped and more miserable. And one leg did kick, a small, exhausted kick and then he saw it happen, saw the resignation on the quagga's face, the acceptance of his presence, the dumb endurance in the glazing eyes.

"Don't be sad, girl," said August, sidling closer and getting down onto his knees beside the long head with not much less effort than the quagga had made when she had stumbled for the last time and fallen. "Don't be frightened. I've brought you something, quagga." And he fumbled with the blanket and drew out the African earth and spread it around her in handfuls, laid the last of it beneath her nose, and the quagga breathed it in and gentled, the old familiarity of scent recalling the plains and the grass and the pasturelands of her youth, of the time before she had been taken from her own kind and kept apart.

The quagga breathed it in and gentled, and August laid his little bony head upon her striped side, felt the shallow breaths, the slow exhalations. "There'll never be another one like you, girl," he said. "There'll never be another one like you, not ever again. You're so special, just by yourself." His own breath hitched, and he hid his face in her hairy coat, felt the movement beneath slower and slowing. "Even if there were a thousand like you, you'd still be special. It's not fair," he said. And said it again, over and over. "It's not fair, it's not fair..."

Huginn and Muninn waited beyond the cage, watching through the bars of a prison they were not a part of, and August wept against the quagga and breathed with her, breathed in the warm scent of home until his breaths were the only ones.

# AUGUST 13, 1952

MOSCOW, RUSSIA

Early on the morning of the thirteenth August was taken from one place of crying to another: from his own room–where he could hear April though the wall, the near-silent tears that told him she must be stifling her face in her pillow–to another where the tears were louder.

The place the ravens brought him to was dark and cold and echoed with sobs–a great, heaving, half-muffled choking that echoed so that August felt the size of the room he was in before he saw it, small and cramped and bound about again with bars. The sound was so alone, so wretched and miserable that August froze, seeing again the ruined city behind his eyes and burning, and if he saw that city in himself when he looked in mirrors and lenses this was the sound he heard at night, echoing in the walls of his room and muffled so that no-one could hear.

August froze, and Muninn was still beside him, her feathers flat against her body and sorrowful, with an expression on her beaked face that August had not yet learned to read. It was Huginn who moved first, who ran-hopped-scrambled across the floor towards the sound. And as August's eyes adjusted to the dark of what he had come to recognise as a cell–zoo cages and hospital beds had given him an understanding of prisons such that he would know them always–he saw that Huginn had leapt onto a thin, ugly little bed, where a heaving figure was curled in on itself, covered with a ragged blanket and sobbing. He was not only there, the raven who ignored him when he could and looked at August with disdain when forced into acknowledgement, but he was there and... and _kind_. Huginn was crouched down next to the head, carding through the grey hair, combing it with his beak and crooning, trying to comfort, and the sobbing checked a little.

"Who is that, Muninn?" said August. The ravens had taken him so often now to places that should have been beyond him that he had learned his presence would not disturb, learned that what the quagga had seen so close to its own death, its own cessation of memory, was anachronism and exceptional. He knew that he would not disturb the person crying on the bed, but for the first time he thought he might have liked to be able to, to be able to sit by them and offer comfort instead of always being the one who needed comforting and who could not now be comforted.

"Her name is Lina," said Muninn, and her harsh raven voice was subdued and sad.

The urge to offer comfort became overwhelming, and August inched closer to the bed, then closer still and sat down upon an edge of it, gingerly, noting how uncomfortable it was and reaching out to put his hand on the person underneath the blanket, reaching out and then pulling back suddenly, for Huginn had looked up from his combing and although he still crooned there was violence in his eyes. So August pulled his hand back and folded it in his lap, wanting to help but not knowing how, and his own body was so little and so thin itself that he barely made the mattress dip but the figure under the cover shifted regardless and the blanket fell away from her face.

She was an old lady, August realised, a very old, very small lady. She reminded him of his great aunt, who was never very tall herself and who sent August postcards and books on birds, hard nougat and salted caramels, who called him every week from her home in Delhi and never forgot his birthday.

"This isn't right," he said, and the shock of feeling anger on behalf of someone other than himself was almost a relief. "Muninn, what's happening? Why is she crying? Why has she been locked up all by herself?"

"There is no-one left for her to be locked up with," said Muninn. "They are all dead. Yesterday was the Night of the Murdered Poets, and this the first hours of the new day without them. There was a group of people, August, a committee, who came together against fascism, against ovens and pogroms and a boot in the face. Lina was a member. For three years they have been in prison, with torture and interrogation, with false charges and show trials. Once there were fifteen. Today there is only Lina, the only one allowed to live. She is to be sent far away and into exile. That is why she is sad. She is alone, and she has no home."

"That's terrible," said August, who had always had a home, who had always had people around him to care for him even when he didn't want them and who saw now for the first time what it would be like without them, who felt the sting of it in his eyes and his chest. "The poor lady. But I don't understand," he said. "I thought you were bringing me to see science. What's poetry got to do with it?"

"It is only a name," said Muninn. "They were not all poets. Some were involved in medicine, or biochemistry. Lina was one. She worked on something called the blood-brain barrier. Do you know what that is, August?"

August shook his head, silent.

"It separates blood from fluid in the brain, and although some things can pass through the barrier others cannot. It keeps bacteria out of the brain, and makes it difficult to infect." Muninn shifted beside the bed, her feathers ruffling in upset. "It does not stop all damage, however. You have managed to find other ways to infect yourselves, and Lina could find no antibiotic to counter the infection that killed her friends, no medicine to save herself as her work had saved so many others."

"And she was sent away," said August.

"She was too valuable to kill," said Muninn. "Too valuable to science. Though perhaps the exile in Dzhambul was as cruel, in its way, as execution."

"What happened to her there?" said August. He was sorry for her, sorrier in that moment than he was for himself. His time with the quagga, short though it was, had reminded him of what it felt like to care for others and the cool place that the quagga had made in the holocaust of his heart was spreading, spreading, and the ground around was wet with tears.

"She went into exile," Muninn said again and carefully, ignoring the exasperated I-know-that expression on August's face. "Ten months later, the leader of the country died so Lina's time away was cut short, and she was allowed to return."

"That's what happened after," said August. "Not what happened while she was alone. You know what happened to her in exile, don't you? You remember it."

"Yes," said Muninn.

"Tell me."

"No."

"Why not?" said August, frustrated. "That's why you're bringing me to all these places, isn't it? To learn? And when I want to, you shut up."

"Some stories are not mine to tell," said Muninn. "Lina never spoke of her time in Dzhambul, never. She chose to take that time to her grave, August, and I will not make mockery of that choice for you now."

"Why didn't she want to talk about it?" said August. He reached out again, reached out to the shaking lump under the thin blanket and again he pulled back under Huginn's glare. "Was it so very horrible, Muninn?"

"What do you think?" said the raven. "Everything she loved had been taken from her. Her friends, her work, her freedom. Her hope, too, for her hope was buried in shallow graves and shot all through with bullets. Would you be happy so?"

"No," said August, swallowing. "I guess I wouldn't." He let his hand rest on her leg then, braved Huginn and his hard, inhuman eyes but the raven did not attack, though his feathers stood high about him. It was all the comfort that August could give, and it made no difference. "She must be very sad," he said, and Huginn stilled before him, a dark shape bent over and unwavering.

"Guilty," the bird croaked. " _Guilty_."

"But she wasn't guilty!" cried August. "She wasn't! Muninn said so!"

"He means that she _felt_ guilty," said Muninn. "She survived when the others did not; she got to go back to her science, eventually, and her life, though that life was different than it had been, and thinner. It was not her fault that she lived, but the knowledge of their deaths made living difficult. She heard the gunshots, you see."

"That's horrible," said August, paling. " _Horrible_."

"Life is often horrible," said Muninn, and her voice was very even, almost tranquil. "But it goes on, and it is sometimes harder on those who survive than those who do not. That is why I have brought you here, to the day after rather than the day of. To see that some consequences belong to those who live. Those consequences you will not have to suffer."

She fixed August with hard eyes, and unblinking. "It's not all about you, August," she said. "And there is no mercy in that."

August could not argue. He had been brought to a place without mercy, a place that had shown Lina none, and if the incandescent place inside him where mercy had once dwelt and been burned away was cooling then the centre of it was molten yet, and fearful in the face of chill.

# AUGUST 14, 1894

OXFORD, ENGLAND

"You are being unkind," Muninn observed. "Still."

"So what?" said August. "I don't care." But when he heard the front door slam and looked down through his window at April running out of the house, her school bag bouncing on her back and her head down as if she were trying not to cry, not to be seen crying, he _did_ care. Not enough to open the window, not enough to call after her, but almost. His fingers twitched on the latch, but they didn't open it and August tried to squash down the feelings of guilt as best he could. "I don't care," he said again. He was the one who was dying, not her. It wasn't fair that she should get to go on and be happy, even if she got to go on and be sad first. It wasn't as if she were going to lose everything she loved, like Lina. It wasn't the same, it wasn't.

"There is not a lot of time remaining to you," said Muninn. "Are you sure you wish to spend that time in unkindness?"

"It's nothing to do with you," said August, sulky. "Can't you just mind your own business?"

"Your business is my business," said Muninn. "And your memories are my own, and unpleasant."

"I guess it's up to you to give me some better ones, then," said August, and he knew how he sounded but it was as if the nasty comments were coming from a mouth other than his own and he was just an observer, watching from the outside as someone who looked like him and sounded like him did their very best to make others as unhappy as he was. He kept his head turned away so that he didn't have to see Muninn's soundless, disappointed sigh, so that he didn't have to see the dislike written plainer than ever in Huginn's iron eyes. Yet when Muninn extended her wing into the corner of his vision, he did not stop himself from reaching out to take it.

#

The first public demonstration of wireless radio transmission was sent between the museum and the old Clarendon Laboratory. Had August been healthy he could have covered the distance between them in less than two minutes.

"It's not far at all," he said.

"It is far enough for Oliver," said Muninn, and nudged him closer to conversations and to mechanism.

"...might reach as far as half a mile," Oliver said. Beside them, Huginn pecked at the equipment used to transmit the message, sent in Morse code, in dots and dashes, and his beak beat out a staccato rhythm of its own. August knew Morse code, but Huginn was transmitting too fast to be caught, although he thought that Muninn understood. It made him feel jealous again, and he was tired of feeling jealous but unable somehow to stop himself. Muninn was by his side, her stiff black feathers brushing against him, but she felt farther away than she had ever been, and closer to Huginn than she was to him.

"Half a mile is still nothing much," said August. "Why couldn't we have seen him do better?"

"He did not do better," said Muninn. "This was the end of it. He had other interests, and it was left to others, to men like Marconi, to bridge the greater distances, to make a better communication and a longer one.

"So that's it?" said August. "That's it? He just packs everything up and walks away?"

"Yes," said Muninn.

"What for?" said August. "If he was going to give up why did he bother in the first place?"

"He wanted to show it could be done," said Muninn. "But Oliver lacked vision. He admitted it himself, that he could not see that there would be demand in the application."

"He was stupid," grumbled August.

"He was honest," corrected Muninn. "A scientist is not a genius by virtue of his profession. A person may try hard and learn well and still not be a Galileo. Not everyone can see so well."

"Is that why you brought me here?" said August, out of sorts and snappish. "To see someone fail? Don't you think I know enough of failing?"

"There is a difference between failure and missed opportunity," said Muninn, speaking of an experiment that did not fail and yet did not go far enough. "Some chances you don't get back. Think hard about that, August, before you call other people stupid."

August would have talked back then, been as cutting and petty as he knew how, but if Muninn was still holding onto patience then Huginn was not, and he pecked at August's leg: one hard snap with his black iron beak and that snap said _Be silent_. And so August, rubbing at the bruise, was silent and thought instead of what he could not say, of the liberties he could have taken and the apologies that he did not know how to make.

#

The door to his room was open, and August lay in his bed, lay in the dark while a small strip of light from the hall illuminated the edge of his bedroom door, and he was thinking still. He could hear voices speaking dimly in other rooms, his Mum and Dad talking in the living room, the sound of the television. He knew that they were disappointed in him, and he knew as well that they were trying very hard not to show it. Mum had smiled at him over dinner, chatted with him as if everything were normal, but she had a range of smiles that pretended they weren't sad and he knew them all.

It was lonely in his bed. The birds were gone, and his parents sounded far away. This was the time of night he would usually have talked to April, past bedtime and both of them pretending to be asleep when their parents came to check. There had been walkie-talkies once, but August had been sick over his and it had never worked well again. Instead, April had taught him Morse Code and knocked on the shared wall between their beds, knocked with knock-knock jokes to make him laugh, and if the knocks and the muffled giggles had filtered downstairs to the living room then their parents had pretended not to notice and let their children have their secrets together.

August turned in his bed, and laid his palm flat against the wall. He hadn't tapped upon the wall for a long time now–it had begun to hurt his knuckles more and more, as he got thinner and thinner and the flesh wore away from his bones, and then he had been too hurt and too angry to knock. The wall felt silent under his hand: flat and smooth, with no vibrations, and the stillness and the silence was that of broken thoughts and missed chances, and before August could think worse of it, before he could talk himself out of it he curled his little fingers into a fist and beat them against the wall.

-.- -. --- -.-. -.- / -.- -. --- -.-. -.- he rapped. _Knock, knock_.

There was no answer, though August waited with his palm pressed against the wall, waited with his breath held tight until he couldn't hold it anymore, until his bones ached with stillness and his stomach ached for another reason altogether. She always answered him. April had always answered, and she might have been asleep but she might have been angry with him, angry back and not answering, tired of his meanness and with her pillow over her ears so she couldn't hear him calling for her because the distance between them had become too great to be breached and he had lost his chance to breach it.

-.- -. --- -.-. -.- / -.- -. --- -.-. -.- he rapped again, and his knuckles stung as much as his eyes. _Knock, knock_.

And there was no answer still, and silence, and August left his palm against the wall until he had to take it away to wipe at his face, because he wasn't crying, he _wasn't_ , and there was no answer. And then, and then, there was a small noise echoing through the wall, right beside his head and repeated in familiar patterns, and he was laughing instead of crying, and felt better for it than he had in days.

_Who's there?_ said April.

# AUGUST 15, 1914

GATUN LAKE, PANAMA

For the first time in nearly a week August did not wake with anger. Instead, April was with him. They snuggled under the covers together and if it was a tight squeeze she had brought biscuits to compensate, sneaked from the kitchen the lovely ginger biscuits made for August by the lady who lived next door because she knew he liked them. They'd spoil his breakfast, but August didn't care and sugar was one of April's primary food groups.

"You're not a lump," she said, her mouth half-full and with crumbs all over her lap. "Grumpy, sure. But not a lump. Certainly not a useless one. You're not useless, for one. And you're too skinny to be a lump." She forced another biscuit into his hand. "Maybe you're a particle."

"Oh, a useless _particle_. Great. I feel so much better."

April stuck her tongue out at him. "Call yourself useless again and I'll take away your bickies. You can have Weetbix for breakfast like everyone else." And she laughed as August made a face and snatched at the tin in mock-terror. "You _are_ particles. A collection of them, anyway, and they'll always exist, one way or another. Or you can be a wave if you want. Like when you throw a pebble in a pool. The ripples come from you and spread out and out and go on forever."

"They don't go on forever," said August. "They'll bump up against the sides and stop eventually."

"Fine. It's a giant pool. Never-ending, no sides. You're such a complainer."

"Still," said August, between mouthfuls of his own, "it's a nice thought, the ripples. Little bits of me reaching out. It's like being remembered." He paused, leaning against her and her body was solid and warm against him. "You'll remember me, won't you April?" For more than tantrum, he wanted to add but couldn't. For more than sickness and selfishness and shrieking at you for things that were never your fault.

"Of course I'll remember you. I'll remember all the bits of you that I know, which are different from all the bits Mum knows and all the bits Dad knows. We'll all remember you together."

"But that won't last forever," said August. "One day you'll die too and there'll be no-one to remember me. Nowhere for the ripples to go."

April rolled her eyes. "They'll go," she said, taking another biscuit from the tin and shoving it gently into his mouth to shut him up. "Of course they will."

His mouth still tasted of ginger when the ravens came, when they flew him over oceans and deposited him on the deck of another ship, this time the _Ancon_ , caught this time in lake waters instead of shoals, and in no danger of sinking. "This is the first official trip through the Panama Canal," Muninn had told him, and August had leaned against the railings as the ship was lifted through locks, as it floated between steep banks of rainforest.

"It's hard to think of it ending soon," he said. "That the me that stood on this ship and saw the birds and smelled the trees and the water will be gone." That this would be the last of him, nearly, the ending days of August.

"There will be other Augusts," said Muninn. "Other months, other boys. You are not the last." Other journeys, other sailings. Other boats laden down with cargo and sent from safe harbour.

"But none of them will be me," said August. He hesitated. "April... April says that we go on in other ways. Particles and waves and so on. I didn't really understand."

"Yes, you did."

"Not really. I mean, I understand what she's saying in my head. But I've been trying hard to feel it Muninn, really feel it, and I can't."

"You can," said Muninn. "I have your memories, remember. You understand more than you think. Your sister knows that you do. It's why she told you."

"Oh, let's not pretend she's not cleverer than I am," said August. He had two weeks left–two weeks and two days and there was no time left for lies. It didn't even bother him anymore that April was cleverer than he was, that she would survive when he did not. It had bothered him before, bothered him badly, and he had hurt her for it. But now... after exile and extinction, after shoals and snow petrels and reaching out in his sinking he couldn't feel bad that she would live, that she would take herself out into the world and make it better thereby.

"Then let us not pretend that her abilities take away from yours," said Muninn. "You are capable of encompassing continuum, August. And if it is something that you need to see as well as think, then I can give you the looking of it. Hold to the railing, now–and don't let go, no matter what you see." Or what he _didn't_ see, as he clutched at the bars as he had clutched at those on the _Arapahoe_ , this time for expectation instead of expulsion. For the bars began to fade–August could still feel them solid in his palms, his fingers curled around them–solid as the deck was solid beneath him, and also disappearing, becoming a faint, wavering stain against the landscape, against the water that was Canal and lake at once and it was as if he were standing in an invisibility more thorough than that he had experienced thus far with ravens. But it wasn't only the ship that disappeared, for the lake itself began to run backwards, to shrivel into small channels and then into a wooded valley with a river running through, too small to carry the _Ancon_ even though he felt it silent beneath him, still smooth-sailing through another time.

"Do you see it, August?" said Muninn, perched on invisible railings beside him and her iron feathers brushing his fingers, her iron claws curled around a bar he felt but could not see. "Do you see what is happening this August, what is happening every August for years until the dam is made, until the lake is built? Both man-made, and they were the largest in the world for their time. Do you see the people bringing the earth and rock and clay to make the walls, to hold the dam in place against the water to come?"

"I see them! There's so many of them, Muninn. They must have thought they'd never finish."

"Do you see the dam done, and the land behind it filling with water?"

"Yes," said August, for beneath his feet the water was rising up in the valley, pooling and shrinking the land, transforming hills to islands, making the lake wide enough and deep enough for shipping, and the _Ancon_ came back to life underneath him and then faded again and the Canal was full of ships, ships laden down with containers and cargo, easing past them as if the _Ancon_ was a ghost in the water, and absent.

"There," said Muninn, as the landscape flickered and changed about them, faster and faster until it seemed a slide show, moving around August as if in circles until the spinning halted. "Do you see that? That island there, the Barro Colorado? The one with all the buildings on it?"

"I see it," said August again, and saw as well Huginn launching from the pale shadow of ship beside him and into the air, circling the buildings and spying this time for more than fish. "What is it, Muninn? Is it a holiday park?"

"I did not bring you to see holiday parks," the raven replied. "That is a reserve, a biological research station, come to study tropical ecology after the Canal was completed. Biologists began to come here in the twenties, and they have come ever since, to study plants and insects, birds and anteaters and monkeys, come to study all the life of the rainforest that the Canal opened up for them. They would not be here if not for the building you saw, the hauling of all that rock and spoil. That is the Canal, August. Not just the sailing, but the building of it and how that building stretched into the past. Not just the sailing, but the science of life here along its banks, and how that life continues to be explored long after the builders are gone. Long after this boat has gone. That is continuation. That is change and influence and consequence gone further into the future than you ever imagined."

Slowly then, the first boat, the boat that would be decommissioned long before August's death, long before the end of the Canal, came back into focus and August saw as well as felt it under his hands, under his feet and all around him, the railings and the chimney and the flags.

"That's the Canal," he said. The images around him stopped: the whirling kaleidoscope of engineering and biology and he was as he had been, a small boy on a steamship, part of history but not pinned to it and no longer feeling as if he should be pinning down.

"I wish you could see it," said Muninn. "How it all rolls on and on until today, a bright and endless ripple."

"I do see it," said August, smiling. There was wind in his face and the Canal smelled of water and wood and oil all together.

"You see part of it."

# AUGUST 16, 1960

GOMBE STREAM NATIONAL PARK, TANZANIA

Muninn glanced at August, her head cocked to one side. "Must you be so restless, child?" she said. "Surely it cannot be that difficult for you to sit still? You are sickly, after all. I would have thought such squirming beyond you."

"I'd be fine if it weren't for these insects," said August, slapping at himself. His pyjamas kept the worst of them off, but the material was thick and fleecy and meant for the New Zealand winter, not a warm summer in the open air, and he was sweating through it, a magnet for bugs. "It's alright for _you_. They're not interested in iron."

"Leave the poor things be," said Muninn. "They're not hurting you. Look at Jane. Does she seem so bothered?"

August peered around the bird. "She looks as sick as I feel," he said. Jane was sitting beside them, her blonde hair pulled back into a pony-tail, and her face was wet with sweat. She was indeed sitting quietly next to her companion, August noted with some disgust, and neither of them were over-concerned with insects. But there was a vagueness in her eyes that he recognised well enough–he was used to feeling dizzy and weak and a little strange himself, used to the haze of dim reality, the way the world looked slant through sickness and almost familiar.

She had been lying down when Huginn and Muninn brought him into the little clearing, a high point streaked about with ravines that August had seen from above, and wooded. Huginn had landed right down by her face, his iron wings working to make a breeze over her and she had shifted then, raising herself up to sitting and wiping the sweat from her eyes.

"She should be in bed," said August critically, and it gave him some satisfaction to say about someone else what he had so often heard about himself. "What's wrong with her?"

"She has a disease called malaria," said Muninn. "Coming down with it, anyway. She will feel a great deal worse in the days to come, I assure you, but she will be alright."

"Why did she come all the way up here if she isn't feeling well?" said August, who had seen the climb from his perch on Muninn's back, who had been grateful that it was not his to make.

"Why did you?" said Muninn. "If sickness so concerns you, I can always take you home."

"That's alright, thank you," said August, hurriedly. "I expect she didn't want to stay in bed if she didn't really have to."

"A shocking concept," said Muninn, and her voice was very, very dry. August suspected that she was making fun of him, but the thought didn't bother him as it would have in the week gone past, where he had taken all attempts at humour as mockery, and cruel. He stuck his tongue out at her, and then again at Huginn for good measure, but the other bird ignored him. He was looking at the open ground ahead of them, a clearing in the trees and the woodlands, and Jane was looking with him, in the same direction and waiting.

"What are we going to see?" said August, and Muninn sighed.

"It's a good thing no-one here can hear you," she said. "You would have given your position away long ago, and he would have gone around before we could see him."

"Who?" said August, but before he could ask anything more there was the steady sound of footprints, of a large animal approaching, and out of the trees, only a few metres away, appeared a chimpanzee. His fur was shining and very black, as black as raven wings, and he had a white beard. August and Jane and the ravens were close enough to see his expression, and it was a mirror of their own, of surprise at strange creatures and chance meetings. The chimp stilled, staring, turned his head to one side and then to the other, craning as August craned for a better view, for curiosity and connection.

"Will he come any closer, do you think?" said August, holding out his hand and forgetting, for the moment, that the chimp could not see him, that it could only see Jane and her companion.

"He is not a dog, August," said Muninn, and August dropped his hand back to his side, sheepish. "You will note that he is cautious in his curiosity."

"We wouldn't hurt him," said August.

"He doesn't know that," said Muninn. "And more salient is the possibility that he would hurt _you_. Hurt Jane, rather, or her companion. A chimpanzee is far stronger than you are, August."

And the chimp was moving then, as if in illustration of a caution other than their own, moving out of his path and into the undergrowth. August sighed, disappointed, but the sound of the chimp moving through the vegetation did not fade away and August turned about in concert with Jane and the ravens, as the other animal made his way around and below them, rejoining the path he would have taken had the clearing been empty and he'd been able to walk through without hindrance.

"I can still hear him," said August, pushing himself up on bony knees so that he could see better. "I wish I could see him." He tried to catch Muninn's eye, but the bird was very deliberately staring at the ground so that he could get no clue from her, and Huginn was standing beside Jane and crowing to himself as if he were laughing.

"Look!" cried Jane. "There he is, up there!" And August saw her expression alight with more than fever, followed her arm as she pointed and saw the chimpanzee again, and above them. He had climbed a tree to look down upon them, climbed for a better look, for curiosity and cleverness.

"He's spying on us!" said August, delighted.

"How else is he to know you?" said Muninn. "Sometimes one can only learn by taking on a different perspective, by looking from a different angle. That chimpanzee can see more and differently from the tree than the ground. It was a sensible decision, the act of a thinking creature. If only all apes would be so thoughtful."

August screwed up his face. "All apes," he said. "Do you mean me, Muninn?"

"You are an ape, are you not?" said Muninn.

"I suppose," said August. He hesitated, and in his hesitation was the remembrance of Neanderthal graves and telescopes, of reefs and radios. "Is that what you're trying to do with me?" he said. "Trying to make me see differently, to make me look differently? Is that why I'm here?"

"That is why Jane is here," said Muninn. "To learn to see the chimpanzees in a different way. She was not the only one. Dian went to the gorillas, and Birute to the orang-utans." She settled her wings on her back, watched Huginn take off to fly back and between the woman and the ape, crowing as he flew, circling each in turn. "This was one of the early days, when they began to study each other. To see the new things in their world and begin to understand them, to see the way that other creatures lived."

"It must have been so strange," said August, who had lived a double life himself, who had gone from his own kind and his own home and into the homes of others, who had seen discovery and war and failure in those others and seen them again in himself. Who watched Jane, the sweat and fever and sickness in her face and the wonder painted over all until the sickness was only secondary.

"There were points of familiarity," said Muninn. "In a different context, but they were there. Tool use, carnivorism, aggression. The ways that families came together, the ways that they came apart." She paused, and did not look at him. "Sometimes it is not so easy to see in others what we think of as belonging to ourselves," she said.

"No," said August, who had tools and hurt and sickness to spare and had shared them, who had made others share them. "I guess not."

"Still, as a way to learn I highly recommend it," said the bird. "I think sometimes I have learned as much from apes as Jane did."

"Thanks," said August, dryly. "I think."

"You're welcome."

"Muninn?" said August.

"Yes?"

"I don't think you really answered my question. You know, about why I'm here."

"Did I not?" said Muninn. "Perhaps that is a question you are meant to answer for yourself."

# AUGUST 17, 1834

CERRO LA CAMPANA, CHILE

Muninn flew him to the very top of the mountain. August could not have walked up on his own, nor could he have sat a horse, or even a donkey, for the length of time it would have taken for them to carry him upwards. Nor, when he was at the top, could August go exploring. The top of the mountain was a shattered jumble of rock, of weathered and fractured greenstone, all split and shattered and the fragments unsteady beneath him at angles.

"You will turn an ankle if you're not careful," said Muninn, and she was not wrong so August picked his way to the nearest slab. He was dizzy often now, dizzy from more than heights, so he was over-careful, inching his way between the rocks until he found a brief flat place where he could sit without too much discomfort.

"There is more to look at than your feet, August," said Muninn, reproving, and when the black spots disappeared from his eyes and he could make his skinny, sweating little fingers loosen their grip upon the rocks, August raised his head and looked. Before him was a nation of knives–a horizon of peaks and edges, of mountains before him as far as he could see, and some were tipped with snow. The air was cold and very still.

"They are the Andes," said Muninn, and August, who had only seen the Southern Alps when he had flown over them on another trip to Starship Hospital in Auckland, who had only seen the Southern Alps but who had pictures on his wall of Everest and Hillary, of the Himalayas and Mount Kilimanjaro and the Andes, actually _squeaked_ in excitement. That small noise echoed and came back to him in waves, and he would have been embarrassed had Huginn not cawed then as loudly as he could, to hear his own echoes come back to him. And then Muninn was crowing too, and in the cascading effect of all their voices together August almost missed the echoes of a fourth as it came up onto the summit of the mountain with its companions, and if the man who arrived could not hear their echoes he could hear his own, and be as delighted by them. His face was so rosy with excitement, with happiness, that he seemed younger than he was, and for a moment he looked a little as August looked, and their twin small-boy faces were radiant in the sun.

August felt the kinship between them, and it was a feeling that saddened but did not fade when the man did what August could not–scrambled over rocks and broken boulders, strong and healthy and able to move on his own and without help. And his steps that started in excitement became measured, and that was another point of difference between them, for if August was dying he was still young and often measurement was beyond him, and consideration, and comparison. He could grasp them sometimes, but dimly, as though they were a theory new-come to him and not yet assimilated, but he did not look for them as the man was looking, did not consciously gather evidence in the same mingled state of astonishment and expectation.

"Who's that, Muninn?" said August, watching the man bend over some of the rocks, tracing lichen with his fingers, the lichen that grew on some surfaces and not on others, the lichen that August had not noticed until the other had done it for him.

"His name is Charles," said Muninn. "And he has come on a grand and wonderful voyage, come from his home far on the other side of the world in a boat that is called _Beagle_. Come to learn, to see shapes and differences and islands."

"This isn't an island," said August. "I'm not stupid, you know. We could have seen tortoises, if we'd gone with him to islands. I _like_ tortoises, Muninn."

Beside them, Huginn made a rude sound.

"Oh, you think _everything_ is plodding," said Muninn. "Not everyone is as quick as you." And Huginn, impatient at the chastisement, made another rude sound and hopped away, hopped towards Charles as he bent over lichen, poking and scraping, and waited next to his knee with more patience than he had ever extended to August.

"I was born in the wrong month for tortoises, wasn't I?" said August, resigned and mournful at once.

"That is not my fault," said Muninn. "If you must blame someone, blame yourself. Had you held on to your mother for another few weeks, you would have all the tortoises you could wish for."

"I don't mind, really," said August. "I'm only teasing, Muninn." He laid one little hand upon her back, the iron warm from the sun and heated under his palm. "I've never seen anything like this before," he said. "It makes me feel so small."

"You _are_ small," said Muninn, mollified, and she reached back with her beak to give his fingers a friendly tweak. "Very small, and very young. No wonder the mountains are surprising to you. They are certainly surprising to him. But then," she considered, "he is also young. Very well: you shall be young and surprised together."

August smiled and bit his lip–he thought it might have been rude to laugh. "I wonder if we're surprised by the same thing," he said, he who had been surprised by size and smallness, he who watched Charles also focus on a smallness, and not the same. For Charles had risen from his crouch and was searching for more lichen, was ignoring the view in favour of the ground, of the broken rocks, and while August did not grudge the interest neither did he understand it. Perhaps Charles had had more experience with mountains than he had, and they were no longer exciting to him.

"You are," said Muninn. "Surprised by the same thing, though you do not know it. The perspective is there, the presence of opposites, and how those opposites can show understanding."

"If you say so," said August, who didn't understand one bit.

"Look at the rocks, August," said Muninn. "See how broken they are? And how some have lichen growing on them, and how some have been broken so recently that lichen has had no time to grow?"

"Is that what he's looking at?" said August, and then he could see it himself, because the rock on which he sat was dead rock, hard and empty, and the rock beside his feet was traced with life, with the lacy patterns of lichen.

"They are indications of earthquakes," said Muninn. "Charles has seen earthquakes before, and this is another piece of evidence for him, evidence of the changing nature of the Earth. It will make him wonder how life can adapt to such change."

"He can get all that from lichen?" said August.

"Not all of it," said Muninn, "but some. It is the presence and absence of life illuminating him, August. The contrast between the two is as a little candle for him. It makes him want to question, and to learn."

"He's going to learn a lot," said August.

"It was a very interesting voyage for him," said Muninn. "To go to such strange places, to go beyond himself. It was full of things he had not seen before, or imagined. The lichen is a little thing–alive in some places, and then absent. It is easier to see life in absence sometimes, in disruption. It gives perspective. Like you," she said, "on this mountain. You have also seen something you have not seen before, and not considered. And it has made you think differently about your life. It has made you feel smaller. And it has made him more aware of disruption, of the threat and discontinuity of life."

"Me, too," said August, almost absently, as he watched Charles, as he watched the lichen at his feet, the tiny pieces of life that could so easily be broken off and crushed.

"Yes," said Muninn. "You too."

# AUGUST 18, 1868

GUNTUR, INDIA

"I know," August said. "I know! You don't have to keep reminding me. We went over this with Ruby, if you remember." He glanced at Muninn, saw the steady clockwork of her eyes, the ticking over of time all encompassed within. "What am I saying? Of course you remember."

"Humour me."

August sighed. "Total eclipse of the sun. Don't look at it, you'll burn your eyes out. I know, Muninn. I won't look. I don't want to be blind; there's enough wrong with me already."

"I want to be sure that you are certain of it," said the raven. "There is an eclipse today, and another tomorrow. I would not have you damaged further."

"I'm fine," said August. "I'll be fine. You've got my memories, you know I remember. So stop fussing, will you? You're worse than Mum. Though you could have told me. If I'd have known we were going eclipsing, I would've made a camera. One of those pinhole ones. It wouldn't have been hard, I'd only need cardboard."

"I did not bring you here for eclipses, August. I wanted you to see something else. Look over there: it's with Huginn, and with Pierre."

August had to shift to see it, for Huginn was blocking his view, dancing about the instrument and forcing his face up close to it, staring into one end as if gazing at a mirror. "What is it?" he said.

"It is a spectroscope. Its purpose is to study the properties of light. When light passes through a prism it gives a spectrum, and the spectral lines shown by the scope are characteristic of elements. That is why Pierre has brought his spectroscope: he wishes to study the chromosphere of the sun, the solar prominences that burst from the surface and are more easily seen in eclipses. He hopes it will tell him something of the elements within the sun."

"Does it?"

"Yes. He will see a yellow line that he cannot explain. It will not match up with what he expects to find. Instead, it reflects a wholly new discovery, a whole new element. Pierre is about to discover helium, August."

"Helium? Isn't that the gas they put in balloons?" He had balloons at his birthday parties, and some of them were filled with gas that made them float high and gave his Dad a squeaky voice. He liked balloons.

"I know you do," said Muninn, and her voice was smug, as if there were secrets in it, and promises. "And yes, it is." And that was all she had time to say, for the sky began to darken then and she hovered by his shoulder, her iron wings open in case he did something foolish and she had to cover his eyes. Instead, August focused on the spectroscope and on the ground, on the little blades of grass before him. He focused on the little plants as if he were Charles, and the sky became darker and darker until he couldn't see them at all, until the birds that were not ravens stopped singing and the only thing he could hear was his own breathing, and Pierre's.

"You'll have to be quick," Muninn warned him, and when Pierre moved a little away from the spectroscope, from the telescope it was attached to (he bent down suddenly, cursing, as if something iron, something he couldn't see, had pecked hard at his ankle) August pressed his eye to the scope. "Do you see the yellow line?" she said, as Huginn flapped up from the ground and shoved at August until he could stare into the scope with his own iron eyes.

"I do," said August. "At least, I did." It had seemed such a simple thing in daylight: put together to dissect suns and make barcodes out of light. "It's amazing, Muninn," he said, and wonder was all through him. "It's so little, and it does so much."

"Like you," said the raven, and August laughed in disbelief.

"I can't do that!"

"But you are also a kind of spectroscope," said Muninn–as if his fingers were glass, as if his palms were made of prisms.

"For the sun?" said August. "I don't think so." The sun did leaves lines on his flesh–shadows, and burns that turned his skin pink and left the marks of tanning on him–but there was nothing fundamental about those lines, no indication writ upon his flesh of helium, or of hydrogen or any of the heavier elements.

"It is not the sun shining through you," Muninn replied. "It is death." And August was quiet, because that he understood. The lines left by death were familiar to him, the lines on his body where bone showed under skin; the perfect half-circles under his eyes, delimiting in dark smudges the planes of his face. The tendons on the back of his hands, the way that all those lines together made new lines on the things that touched him. The medicine so carefully measured, sometimes in little cups and sometimes in bags of fluid to be hooked up to his body and pumped through, the needles sharp and straight against his skin. The pulses on the machines about his bed, the way that they measured differently the different parts of him.

They had been talking through darkness and a strange sort of twilight. Then suddenly there was colour in the world again, only greys and blues at first and then more and more as the light came back and the eeriness passed and August could look up and Muninn's wings were folded.

"What are you reading off me, then?" he asked, as if those lines were letters carved into him as death radiated through, as if those letters were scratched onto him and able to be interpreted: a child's book of hours where all the hours were running out. "That's what he's doing, isn't he? The lines on his spectroscope show him what elements are in the sun. I already know what elements are in me: carbon, mostly, with some other bits. Calcium for bones, and there's iron in my blood." But Muninn didn't need to be told this–she already knew what was in him, what was in everyone. She remembered those parts of them without telling. "You must be looking for something else."

"It's not me doing the looking," the raven replied. "It's you. And your doctors, and your family. Everyone who knows you can see the end coming through you. It's written all over your face if it's written nowhere else."

"My face."

"As if it were glass," said Muninn. "A perfect polished surface. You refract, August, even without meaning to. The entire spectrum shines through you. Can you not see it?"

"I don't look in mirrors anymore," said August. He knew what he looked like, knew what sickness had done to him. And even if there hadn't been mirrors, like the one that had hung above the fish tank until he had asked for its removal, he would have known because other people had prisms too. He could see in their faces what he looked like. He could see that they knew what was coming.

He didn't need a mirror when he had other people.

"And they don't need one either, not when they have you," said Muninn.

"They have them anyway," said August. He was the only person he knew who did without mirrors. April had one in her room. So did his parents. And there was a doctor, one of his favourites, who had long black hair all twisted up in a complicated style that she couldn't have achieved without a looking glass. Another whose eye-liner was never smudged, another with a moustache he trimmed into strange shapes sometimes to make the kids on the children's ward laugh. He wondered if there were another reason–if they finished up their days and went to look at themselves when they were done, went to check their own prismatic faces to see something shining through that wasn't death, not yet, for all it left lines on them.

"If you can see their lines you can see what yours are not," said Muninn, "and know yourself thereby. What do their lines tell you?"

"That they're alive," said August, and his voice was sad and heavy at once, and when he looked down the lines in his forearms, in his hands, were stark: lines of bones and tendons and shrinking. "And that I won't be. Not for much longer." He looked up at the raven then, the one that stood by him when the other was with Pierre, looking for lines of another kind, the thin yellow strip that said _helium_ , that said _not-August_. The raven was dark, a prism all clouded before him and though the feathers were thin and filamented lines August could see no colours there, could wrest no meaning from them. He wondered if she ever saw her own face, the black iron lines of it. "What is it that you see, Muninn?"

"I see a spectrum," said the bird. "And I see that it is familiar."

# AUGUST 19, 1887

KLIN, RUSSIA

August was propped up in bed, playing Go Fish with his Dad when the ravens came. He froze for a moment, unable to make the bridge between them, to contain them both in the colliding hemispheres of his life, but when it became clear that their appearance was confined only to him he relaxed and let them watch.

"I just wanted to say," said Dad, picking up another card, "that I was proud of you. For making up with your sister."

August would have liked to have left it at that. It gave him a warm feeling inside and he didn't feel that often. Oh, his parents told him they were proud of him a lot, but August knew, deep down, that he had never done much to be proud of. Mostly when people told him they were proud of him it was after something nasty had happened–another needle, another operation, another painful, boring, or embarrassing test, and they were so proud of how well he'd put up with it. The thing was, they told him that even if he didn't put up with it well at all–he remembered when he was younger, crying and screaming at the needles while his Mum hugged him, and when it was over they'd still said they were proud at how well he'd done, how brave he'd been. So when Dad told him that he was proud of him for something else entirely, August would have liked to have taken the credit and warm feelings and hugged them all to himself, but the ravens were perched on the end of his bed, Muninn with her honesty and Huginn with his determination to think the worst of August always, the irritation and the badly veiled contempt, and he couldn't stay silent while they were watching.

"It wasn't exactly making up," said August. _Making up_ said to him that the two of them had been to blame, squabbling about sharing toys or space or attention, and the truth was that the fault had been entirely one-sided. "It was more me saying I was sorry." He clutched his cards a little harder, refused to look up from them. "It was all my fault, Dad. Not April."

"Yeah," said Dad. "I know."

August looked up in surprise. "You never said anything."

"You're going to be ten soon, you're not a little kid anymore. Your Mum and I thought you'd figure it out for yourself."

"And if I hadn't?"

"I would have said something, had it gone on much longer." His Dad put down his cards, rubbed one hand through messy hair. He opened his mouth and shut it again, and sighed.

"It's alright," said August, quietly. "You can say it. Whatever it is. Like you said, I'm not a little kid anymore."

Dad smiled at him then, the kind of smile Mum had when she was trying not to cry. August hated that smile, but he knew he would have hated the crying more. At the end of the bed, Huginn shifted from one foot to the other and shook out his wings.

"You're my boy," said Dad. "You always will be. My child. But you're not the only one. And as much as I'd like to let you have things all your own way right now, I've got April to think about as well. I won't let her go the rest of her life thinking her brother hated her. That her brother... that he died hating her. I'm glad you apologised, August. I'm glad you made up. Because if you hadn't, I would've made you."

"How?" said August. He was genuinely curious. It wasn't like grounding him would have made a difference, or taking away his toys. He was already losing far more than telescopes and fish bowls, and against that their loss would have been a bare thing, and trivial.

"You know kiddo, I think I would have had to guilt you into it," said Dad. "I'd never forgive myself, but I would have done it."

"Even if it made me sad?" said August, testing, though he did not know for what.

"You wouldn't have been sad for long," said Dad, and his face crumpled for the briefest moment and then smoothed again, a control over expression born out of pain and long practise. "April would have been sad for much, much longer. I don't expect you to understand, but–"

August reached out then, placed his thin little hand over his Dad's big brown one and squeezed as hard as he could. It wasn't very hard, but it was enough. "I get it," he said. "I do. It's alright. And you didn't have to do it."

"No," said Dad. "You did. Like a man, all grown up. I was so proud," he said again. "So proud."

"Anyone would have done it," said August, muttering it under his breath almost and too embarrassed, too pleased, to do more than glance up at his father, at the ravens. Muninn was watching him, and her eyes were kind.

"Pull the other one," said his Dad, throwing down his cards. "Your Mum and me have been lucky. Two good kids. It's not always that way. Having children is such a crapshoot, August." He caught himself then, gave a conspiratorial, guilty smile. "Don't tell your mother. Fucking swear jar." August giggled, and his Dad continued. "You never know how they're going to be, or what you're supposed to do with them. We make it up as we go along, and hope we don't screw it up. Hope we don't screw _you_ up. Sometimes I look at you and your sister and I think, well, we jumped off a bridge with you kids, and it turned out alright. You turned out alright."

"Jumped off a bridge," said August. "Really?"

"Like an adventure," said Dad. "Just, you know, with teething and screaming and shit."

#

After he was kissed goodnight, the ravens flew August into darkness, into a day dimmed by another eclipse and then lit up again as the Earth and the moon and the sun moved beyond each other's lines. Yet for the first time they did not land, and August experienced the eclipse from Muninn's back, high above the surface of the Earth. He was not afraid of falling, even though the air was damp and cold and the iron feathers wet under his fingers. Muninn never let him fall, and the air was crisp and thin and made him dizzy, a little, and that led to giddiness and to lack of worry.

"There is no need to land today," said Muninn. "I have brought you up for observation, and you are not the only observer." She wheeled around, August clutching at her back and his legs hanging down, and before them was a balloon without a ceiling above it. In the balloon was a man with a worried expression on his face, who did not see them in the air before him, who did not see Huginn perched on the side of the basket.

"It doesn't seem like a very nice day for ballooning," said August, and his teeth chattered with little clinks like ice.

"The eclipse was today, so he couldn't wait for a better one," said Muninn. "He _did_ get a very good view, though."

"Then why's he so upset?" The man was talking to himself in a language that August couldn't understand, but he had the same expression on his face that Mum did when she was trying to hang curtains and August was fairly sure that he was swearing.

"Dmitri is not a balloonist. He is more concerned with elements and tables, with chemicals and vodka. He has never been in a balloon before, and he does not know how to operate it."

"What's he doing up here if he doesn't know how to get _down_?" said August, horrified.

"I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time," Muninn replied. "There was meant to be another man with him, but the balloon wasn't taking off so Dmitri started getting rid of weight. Suitcase, sand, stool... out it all went, along with the pilot."

August couldn't help it: he burst into giggles. It just seemed so ridiculous, and the more he considered his position the more ridiculous it was. High and invisible on an iron bird, his hair wet with drizzle and his fingers cramping with cold and the light new come back from darkness and then haze–and before him, a bearded man in riding boots, balanced on the slippery edge of a balloon cabin and tugging ropes at random.

"I'm so glad you find it entertaining," said Muninn.

"Don't you?" said August, still giggling and dizzy at heights.

"I have only Dmitri's memories of this event," said Muninn. "They are not particularly amusing ones."

"Mine are," said August, and he felt the iron body beneath him inflate briefly, as if the raven were silently huffing at him, and then his experiences became her own as memory went from one into the other, from source to certainty and recording.

"He does look silly, I suppose," said Muninn. "You are very good at silly."

"Come on," said August. "I'd never go flying without a pilot."

"Please. That's all you do," said Muninn. "All of you, every day. Didn't you listen to your father? You launch yourselves out into the world and there is no plan for you, no place you know for landing, and you have no idea how to get yourselves down. You make it up as you go along, and sometimes the balloon crashes and sometimes it doesn't and it's mostly down to luck either way, but you scramble into it every time, just floating through your lives and pulling on ropes to see what happens, to see what you can make yourselves do."

"Don't you?" said August.

"I used to," said Muninn, and her wings beat hard beneath him. "When I was younger."

"Maybe it's time to start doing it again," said August.

"I have been trying," said Muninn.

# AUGUST 20, 1977

CAPE CANAVERAL, U.S.A.

The ravens had brought him to a space centre, and August sat, huddled in his blanket, one small boy in a crowd of excited people who didn't see him, who were all looking away and outward. Muninn sat with him.

"Why is called number two if it went first?" said August. "You'd think it would be Voyager 1."

"Voyager 1 is the faster," said Muninn. "It will pass Voyager 2, in time. But this Voyager will go out among the stars, out where no probe has been, and it will see Jupiter and Saturn. It will see Uranus and Neptune... and because of it we will see them as well."

"Even me," said August, who had seen the photos, who had been born after their transmission and who would see no more. He wanted to be excited even so, but he was nearly always cold now, even on summer days, and his seat was hard. It made his bones ache.

"You have seen many things that others have not seen," Muninn acknowledged.

"So don't be greedy, is that what you're saying?" said August, with a thin little smile, and Muninn settled her feathers primly and said nothing.

The people around them had brought popcorn, some of them, and sandwiches and apple juice. One family was eating hot dogs, and August eyed them as if with the memory of hunger. He had liked hot dogs, once. And candy apples, and popcorn. Popcorn with lots of butter and salt, and plain popcorn for making strings at Christmas. Mostly he liked to hear the sound of it bursting in the pan, and the warm scent of caramelised sugar that April would sometimes mix into hers. It had smelled wonderful then, and it smelled wonderful now, but the smell was all he could appreciate. Eating seemed too much trouble, somehow, and he was never hungry anymore, but he could sit and breathe in the wonderful smells and the excitement that was beginning to be infectious, and he could watch the rocket being made ready before him, about to go up into space and beyond what anyone knew.

"It's the sparrow again," he said suddenly, thinking of Caroline in her garden, thinking of the telescope and of Huginn croaking out the name of a man dead for a thousand years and more. Thinking of the story that Muninn had told him, of the sparrow flying through a bright hall and back out into darkness.

"Except this time the hall is all dark," he said.

"Not completely," said Muninn. "There are stars in that hall, billions of them. Voyager–both Voyagers–will travel alongside those lights."

"But space is very big," said August. "And the lights are very little. Maybe the only time Voyager will always be in the light again is if someone finds it and takes it home."

"It will be a different home than the place where it began," said Muninn. "It will be going out to strangers and strange places. There may be nothing familiar to it–no road maps, no friendly hands."

"What if it never finds anyone?" said August. "What if it flies forever? What if the dark hall goes on and on?"

"Then we may never know it," said Muninn. "But that is not the important thing. What's important is that the attempt is made–that you have tried, all of you, to reach out, to want to meet something more than yourselves, to talk with them and be friendly."

"That's why the record's with it," said August, remembering the gold plated disc sent out with the probe, sent out to find other life and to tell about Earth's own.

"Yes," said Muninn. "The Golden Record. Would you like to see it?"

"I'd rather stay and watch, if that's alright," said August, huddled into his blanket. "I always wanted to see a rocket go up. I thought, once, that one day I might be on one. I thought it might be fun to be an astronaut. To travel through space."

"You _have_ travelled through space," said Muninn. "The planet you walk upon travels, and you travel with it. And on your travels you look for others who can understand you, for others who could be friends."

August laughed, picturing himself with antennae for arms, with a satellite dish for a face, zooming back and forth and taking photographs of everyone around him. "She dressed me up like one, once," he said. "April, I mean. I don't remember it. There was a costume party when I was little, for her birthday. I've seen the photos. She was an astronaut, wrapped about with tin foil and with Mum's old motorcycle helmet on. But I was too small to wear a helmet so she dressed me up as a probe so that she could take me with her. I looked so stupid. But I wasn't Voyager."

"You could have been. You have a Record too, you know," said Muninn. "To go with the celebration and the exploration. You are also sending out your Record, uncertain."

August frowned. There had been experimental treatments, clinical trials. His DNA had been sequenced. None of it had cured him. None of it had made him better. "I don't want to think about it," he said. This was supposed to be a happy time, he didn't say, wanting more than anything to let himself forget for a moment, to be caught up in the excitement of the people around him, to share this moment in their lives.

But Muninn was iron, and she could not forget. "Those results mean something," she said. "Not to you, perhaps. But one day to someone else. They will learn from them and learn from you, and perhaps you will make a friend of them, though the space between you is long and dark."

"I'd rather know," said August. "If the doctors learn anything from me that can help someone else one day, I'm glad. But I'd rather see the helping."

"The scientists who worked on Voyager might rather see the finding," said Muninn. "They do not know if it will ever happen. They just hope that it will."

"And that's enough for them?" said August.

Muninn flicked her wings, tossed her head at the launch pad. "Does that look like not-enough to you?" she said.

"No," said August, smiling, and for a moment he imagined himself as one of the scientists, imagined himself with them, and hopeful. It made him feel warm inside.

"Look," said Muninn. "They are about to begin. Do you see it, August?"

All attention was focused upon the launch pad. The crowd around him was silent, straining with anticipation, and August held his breath. He was excited, and a little frightened. Strange, he thought, to be so. He knew this mission was successful, knew it from his place in the future, and yet...

An explosion of burning cloud engulfed the launch vehicle, until only its nose was visible, and then the great machine began to move. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster it lifted off the Earth and streaked into the sky, streaked out into the solar system and possibility.

Huginn flew with it, a dark, distant shape obscured at first by the billows on the launch pad. But as the rocket rose through the air, August could make out Huginn racing up beside it, the sun glinting off his iron wings–and then he was too high to see, and gone.

"How far up will he go?" said August, but he had to repeat himself because the crowd around him was cheering then in celebration–calling and applauding and so loud he nearly had to put his thin little hands over his ears. He wanted to jump up himself, to whoop and cheer with them, but it was hard to move quickly now, and it took too much breath to shout.

"You don't need to worry about him," said Muninn. "He'll come down when he's ready. There's no people up there, and no ideas to draw him on–he's bound to the Earth, and the people on it. I wonder, sometimes, what will happen when you humans move out to the stars. Perhaps Huginn will go with you then. Perhaps I will."

"But not now?"

"No," said Muninn. "Not now."

"You've got things to do, still," said August, and it wasn't a question.

"I am still making my own Record," said Muninn.

# AUGUST 21, 1609

VENICE, ITALY

The ravens had brought him to a tower, high above the city, and August was just tall enough to look down out of the windows, to see the dome of the Basilica beneath him, the Square of St. Mark, and the lagoon with all the little islands.

"Muninn," he said. "Look at the boats! There's so many of them..."

"I see them," said Muninn. "They are batellas and galleys and gondolas; a way to travel for those without wings."

"Are we here to ride them?" said August, and Muninn shook her feathered head.

"No," she said. She was perched on the ledge of the window he looked out from, and Huginn was on the other side, sleepy in the sun and with his head tucked under a wing. "I have brought you here to see them, and to see other things so doing."

"I could see them better close up," said August. "We are very high, here." But the bell tower was solid around him, and he was not afraid of falling.

"You will get a better look soon enough," said Muninn. "Galileo is about to be here, and he is bringing his telescope with him to show to the leaders of Venice. He will show them many things."

"Are they going to see a comet too?" said August.

"No," said Muninn. "He did not bring them here for comets, nor did I bring you to see them, or even to see the telescope. You have seen those before. I have brought you here to see what comes with him."

And August turned to see a procession of men come up the stairs, led by the Doge of Venice and by Galileo. And Galileo drew the men towards the open windows, where they could look down over the city as August had looked down, and it was there that he set up his telescope.

"It's a lot smaller than Caroline's," said August. Galileo's telescope was made of tin, and the outside of it was decorated with red satin. Huginn had come awake again and hopped towards the group, rubbing his big blunt head up against the shiny material as if he were a cat, almost. Then he flew onto Galileo's shoulder and perched there, nipping gently at his ear.

"How does he not notice?" said August, trying not to giggle. "Doesn't he feel him sitting there?"

"Thought is a weighty thing," said Muninn. "A weight that Galileo is used to. He has carried it all his life, carried it longer and heavier than most, and he has not yet felt the burden of it."

August watched as Galileo displayed the telescope to the Doge and his companions, watched as they each put their eye to one end of the scope and marvelled. They saw ships out off the Venetian coast before their eyes could see them unaided. They saw people coming in and out of a church on a nearby island, and passengers getting out of gondolas along the Grand Canal. August saw them too, when he was able to sneak between the bodies and put his own eye to the glass, to see the tiny oars and the little prows. Huginn flapped his wings at him when he lingered, and made as if to run down Galileo's arm and give August his own peck about the ear, if a peck that was less gentle and more censorious.

"They seem happy with it," said August, retreating to a safe distance and back beside Muninn, watching the telescope again ringed round with Venetians.

"The Senate rewarded Galileo for his work, and for his instrument," said Muninn. "They thought it would be useful. They did not think that he would ever use it for more than ships."

"He did though, didn't he," said August.

"Yes," said Muninn.

"Of course he did! April's telescope, the one she lets me borrow... I use that for more than stars. You can't see them during the day, and sometimes I get bored."

"I know you've looked through your neighbour's window," said Muninn, and August blushed.

"I wasn't trying to be rude," he said, "or see anything bad. But she was making biscuits, the yummy ones she brings over sometimes, and she won't tell me how they're made. She says it's a secret. I thought if I could watch her make them I'd know."

"She wouldn't like you looking at things you're not supposed to," said Muninn.

"I wouldn't have told her I looked," said August. "She could still have had her secret, if I kept mine."

"If you kept it," said Muninn. "Some people do not keep secrets well. They find things out and share them with the whole world. That is what Galileo did, when he pointed his telescope at the sky and saw things other people said he wasn't supposed to."

"I know," said August. "They put him on trial, didn't they? And made him say he was wrong even though he knew he was right."

"These are the bargains we make," said Muninn, who remembered the judges and the bowed head and the renunciation, who remembered the showing of the instruments, the threats of torture and death. "If he hadn't they might have burned him alive," she said, and August, who remembered burning, shuddered even though the day was warm and the bell tower open to little breezes. "Instead he died under house arrest–but that gave him some time longer in which to study and to learn. He was not so very unhappy, when he could forget the support he could not say, forget the bargain that he did."

"It's still not fair," said August, seeing how excited Galileo was, how he worked and hopped about, how happy he was to show and to share what he had learned, and how that would soon enough be over. "It's not fair."

"But that is _life_ ," said Muninn. "The consequences of what you see here today are inevitable. Even if Galileo had never used his telescope to look at the stars, others would have. And they would have seen in his place that the face of the moon is not perfect, that the morning star is sometimes crescent, and that Jupiter has moons. Once the instrument was created, it would never not be used."

"You're saying there was no escape for him," said August. "That he was going to be tried no matter what. That he was always going to lose."

"Is that not the human function?" said Muninn. "To address the inevitable? Once an action is taken, or an event occurs, there are always consequences. Look at you, August. You were born, and you are going to die. It is your own inevitability."

"It's not the same thing," said August.

"Is it not?" said Muninn. "I thought, once, that all the world would end in Judgement, as Galileo was judged, if more fairly. Of course, I was very young at the time."

August was surprised at that. "Were you ever young, Muninn?" he said. "Really young, like me?"

"Oh yes," said Muninn. "Oh, yes. And I grew older, and then older still, and I learned stories about more than judgement. One of those was about the world ending, again, in a great battle between gods and giants and men."

"Who won?" said August.

"Nobody won," Muninn replied. "Nobody ever does. It was a wolf age, that story, and one of darkness and drowning. But it was inevitable in its ending, a certain coming that could not be gainsayed."

"How did they know?" said August, sceptical. "How did they know it couldn't be stopped if they tried?"

"A prophet told them," said Muninn. "A wise woman, a völva. In that story she could see ahead, as Galileo will learn to see ahead in his."

"I don't understand," said August.

"Look at him," said Muninn, and August turned again to see Galileo at his telescope, at his demonstrations. "When Galileo looks through that telescope now, he can see ships and sailors and churchgoers. Soon he will see stars, and the surface of the moon. One day, not so very far from now, he will stand before another group of churchgoers who have come to judge of him, and he will see in his telescope another starry messenger: his future and his death."

"But he doesn't die," said August. "They don't kill him."

"Of course he dies," said Muninn. "He stands still for a little while, that's all. He doesn't escape his death. Still it moves, still it comes towards him. It is an inevitable as consequence or Ragnarök."

"So there was no point for him," said August. "For anyone, is that what you're saying? That you can't do anything to fight it."

"Of course you can try to fight it," said Muninn. "You are fighting now, aren't you? Through all the days of August."

"And you're saying that's not enough," said August. It was not a question.

"No," said Muninn. "I'm saying to take your victories where you can."

# AUGUST 22, 1984

NARIOKOTOME, KENYA

August blinked at the sunlight. "I'm so warm," he said. "It's nice. I hardly ever feel warm now. It makes me sleepy."

"You will not want to sleep through this," said Muninn. They were sitting on a boulder, with August's blanket under them to soften the stone and although the rock was on sloping ground the small rise behind gave no shade and the heat beat down upon them.

"We could have waited in the camp," said August. It was not far away, set up under thorn trees and palms, and if it still looked warm there then at least it would be cooler than the mass of black rocks and pebbles where they rested, or the sandy floor at the bottom of the slope that was getting too hot to walk on if one had feet that had never been toughened to it. "I should have brought my slippers."

"Stop complaining," said Muninn. "Do you see him complain?" And she indicated the man below, bent and hunched over the ground, sifting and sorting and brushing, his dark face a study in concentration and his fingers gentle in the earth. Huginn had wedged himself beside the man, right up close to his knees, and August couldn't understand how he wasn't knocked aside as the man worked, but the raven bobbed and weaved his way around obstruction.

"What's he looking for?" said August.

"His name is Kamoya," said Muninn. "And he is looking for fossils. He has found many before, but he is about to find another. It is the most important fossil he will ever find."

There was a brief moment of stillness then as Kamoya paused, his body silent, unmoving. And then he _was_ moving, and Huginn too, as Kamoya dug a dark fragment out of the earth and Huginn's beak was pressed up against his hands, pecking at the dirt between fingers, and then there was a little curved piece of bone, no bigger than August's palm, and Kamoya held it up to the light and grinned while Huginn cawed in triumph.

"What is it?" said August again, leaning so far over his boulder that Muninn was obliged to take a fold of his pyjamas in her big blunt beak and haul him back from overbalancing.

"It is a piece of bone," she said, when August was sitting still and safely again. "A very old bone, taken from the skull of a boy who has been dead a very long time."

"A boy?" said August. "Like me?"

"Like and yet unlike," said Muninn. "About your age, certainly, although the fix is not exact. Not _Homo sapiens_ , though. He is too old for that, and too early. He is another member of your genus, and so related. If you were to look him up, your books today would refer to him as _ergaster_."

"Is that his name, Ergaster?" said August.

"That is a classification, not a name," said Muninn. "Call him Turkana, if you wish. It was the name that was given him from this place, from the Lake that rests nearby."

"I like Ergaster better," said August. It reminded him of his own name. They seemed to fit together, belonging as they did to two boys who would die young and in such different places. Ergaster would not have spent his life in bed, or being taken to hospitals for beads and blood tests. He would have found August's life amazing, a strange story and a frightening one, perhaps, and he could have shown August his own strange life so that August could be amazed and frightened in turn. Two boys. He was sure that they could have found something in common.

"How long ago did he live?" said August.

"One and a half million years since," said Muninn, placid, and her wings flexed as if remembering long soaring and flights far beyond.

"That's... a very long time," said August. He looked at Kamoya, who was still brushing carefully at the skull fragment in his hand, the bone as dark as rocks. "How did he even see it against them?" he said, half to himself and wondering. "And how can he tell what it is, that it's even a boy at all?"

"He is careful and lucky both," said Muninn. "And he is good at his job, very good, and he has practiced much, taken great care. It is no easy thing to be a fossil hunter, to pick meaning out of fragments and emptiness."

"But it's only a piece of bone," said August. "Just a little piece."

"Yet he can tell that it is hominid, and from the head," said Muninn. "And it is not the only little piece that he will find, and he will soon have help."

Huginn gave a satisfied croak then, and just a moment before Kamoya rose the raven clambered onto his shoulder and was carried all unnoticed back to camp, his head held at a jaunty angle that mirrored Kamoya's happy expression. The man looked, August thought, as Caroline had looked when she lifted her face from the telescope: a look of wonder and discovery that connected through centuries and continents.

"Where's he going?" said August. "He's not leaving, is he?"

"Quite the opposite," said Muninn. "He has gone to call his employer and his friend, and in the coming weeks the crews here will continue his work, for what Kamoya has found is the first fragment of the most complete skeleton of an early human that has yet been found. It is an extraordinary discovery, the find of a lifetime."

"Ergaster," said August.

"Yes," said Muninn.

"I wish I could stay and see all of it," said August, knowing that he could not. He had both a day for himself and little more than a week, and neither would be enough.

"You have seen the beginning of it," said Muninn. "The spark. It is from such small things that science is made, that the universe is so understood. Little things, one above the other and scattered as the boy is scattered. They will find him, even so, and lay him out: vertebrae and scapulae and skull, tibia and fibula and the ribs that held his heart in place."

"It's so strange," said August. "That he's here, still. I mean, if you had told him, if you had asked him, that he would be here a million years later... what would he have said? How could he have pictured it?"

"He could not have pictured it," said Muninn. "It would all have looked different to him. Not just the land, for that has changed about his bones in the time he has been gone. But the life that he had–that too would look different, and ephemeral. Do you know what ephemeral means, August? It means something that does not last."

That August understood. His life was shorter than most, and everyone he knew would move beyond him, on and on, but they would move beyond for decades, perhaps, and then all of them–everyone who knew him–would be dead. But compared to one and a half million years those decades were short, and the confusion made him feel very small. It was as if the decades he would miss did not actually matter. It was as if they were almost nothing.

"Muninn," said August, "Do you remember him?"

"I do."

"If he had pictured it, would you know?"

"I would."

"And he didn't."

"No," said Muninn. "He had quite enough else to think about."

There was a pause. "I'm not going to be a fossil, am I?" said August, with some trepidation. He didn't know whether to be anxious or sorry. He found he did not quite like the thought of being poked at and dug up and arranged after death. His body had been displayed and prodded enough beforehand–and yet, and yet. It would make a change to have people excited about him being dead, instead of just plain sad.

"Probably not," said Muninn, and although her voice was grave there was an undertone to it, a lighter note within the croaking that made it sound as if she were trying not to laugh. "Most people aren't. Does that make you sorry?"

"I don't know," said August.

"That," said Muninn, "is not the worst answer in the world."

"I wouldn't have minded being a fossil hunter, though," said August, and beside him Muninn closed her eyes to the sun, as if she were dreaming and the dreams were pleasant.

# AUGUST 23, 1966

ROBLEDO DE CHAVELA, SPAIN

August had had a bad night. There had been alarms and hurried footsteps and oxygen, and all his family beside his bed and waiting. Not that he had known, for there had also been pain, and the amount of medicine necessary to blunt that pain had dulled his senses and sent him dreams of stillness and shallows that had been hard to wake from.

"There you are," said April, when he opened his eyes late in the morning, and if his were sticky from sleep hers had dark circles around them, and the lashes were wet. "Were you just going to sleep the day away? You always were the lazy one..."

"April," said August. Everything was fuzzy, and too bright, and he could understand that she was teasing him but he could not understand why. The knowledge hovered before him and out of reach. "Birds," he said. "I'm so sleepy, April. Tell the birds..."

"He's only half-awake," he heard, and it was another voice–it sounded like Mum, but his eyes were too heavy to open. "He must be dreaming."

August shook his head on the pillow. His tongue was too big in his mouth, and dry. He tried to speak, tried to tell them he wasn't dreaming, that the ravens were coming for him, but he couldn't force his mouth to make the words. And then April was there with him, closer than before, and he felt her lips brush his ear and her hands squeezing his. "It's alright, August," she said. "I'll tell them. Don't worry about your birds. I'll tell them."

#

"She did tell us," said Muninn, late that night when August had woken for the second time. He felt thin all through, as though he were made of nothing but clear water, and there was a distant aching in his bones like icebergs, but he was awake again, and properly.

"I didn't think she could see you," he said. "I didn't think that anyone could." He had liked it that way too, liked that he had a secret. There had been so few secrets for him. He had been prodded and measured and counselled by a procession of kind, white-coated people until his body was a book for them, a book with a cracked spine that fell open for easy reading.

The ravens had been his secret, and he tried not to feel a pang that they were now April's secret as well. If he had to share them with anyone, he would have picked her.

"She can't see us," said Muninn. "But she is a clever girl, your sister, and kind. She took bread out into the garden, and little balls of peanut butter rolled up in seeds, and lured the birds for feeding, the little winter birds who remained, and as they came for the bread she told them all that you were sleeping and they could not see you today."

"You ignored her," said August, smiling. His lips stung when he did, the tiny cracks and fissures in the flesh that chap-stick did not fully cover, but they were cracks that came from flying on the raven's back, flying with the old, cold wind of dry centuries, and he would not have missed them for the world.

"Of course I did," said Muninn primly, folding her wings about her. "I come as I please, and no little girl, no matter how clever, can keep me out if I don't want to be kept."

Huginn croaked a disapproving sound. He was perched on the end of August's bed, as Muninn was perched on August's pillow, and his feathers were all ruffled up with the force of his disdain.

"He looks annoyed," said August, and at the end of the bed Huginn turned his face away and began to preen.

"He is very fond of your sister," said Muninn. "He thinks I have been over-rude to her. He would have liked to know her better."

"He wants her instead of me," said August, and though he was not surprised he did feel hurt.

"I want you," said Muninn. "And that is all that matters."

"Can't have me," said August, feeling sorry for himself, feeling second-best and broken down. But Huginn eyed him from the end of the bed and there was no pity in his gaze–and no pleasure either.

"I wanted to come with you today," he said.

"I know," said Muninn. "But you can't. You are too weak."

"I'll feel better tomorrow," said August. He knew that he was pleading and was not sorry. He was too close to death now to worry about such a little thing as shame. "I'll come with you tomorrow. Please. Don't leave without me."

"I will not leave you," said Muninn, and at the foot of the bed Huginn nodded his whole body once, and roughly. It wasn't exactly delight, but it was acquiescence and August knew it.

"Would you like to know where you could have gone today?" said Muninn, and when August nodded, still sleepy and still curious, Huginn hopped up the bed, hopped up in his brisk raven scamper and ran up August's legs and his chest and buried his beak, the beak that smelled of iron and bread, right in the centre of August's forehead.

It was as if he had been plunged without warning into water, but this water was not warmer than August, and nor was it colder. It had the same heat as his blood, and were it not for the slipperiness and the faint feeling of compression he might not have recognised it as kin to liquid. It pulsed around him, little flickers of light and shadow that shuddered through him like language. August felt it down to his fingertips, but those fingertips weren't human anymore, at least not completely. There was human bone, a skeletal structure that on the edge of his vision was overlaid with iron feathers and instruments, with camera lenses and radio waves and on his thumbnail was stamped _Lunar Orbiter 1_.

There were shutter-clicks in those bones, and chemicals he recognised by scent with nostrils that weren't his own. There was a dim and dusty focus, a cold pale ground and an empty one–and a sudden jerk, a last-minute manipulation, and the bone-iron-camera that was August turned away from potential landing sites and shutter-clicked across void. Then the chemical scent again, and the finished photograph, and the information split up into little pieces and fragmented, and August felt each pulse, each wave of information as if they were his own body, cut up and scattered across distance but bound to each other even so. Those pieces travelled a long time, and August felt it so and did not feel it, with Huginn's beak in his brain and the transmission unaware of its length, of the space it crossed. And then the little pieces were caught and connected again, in a tracking station out of Madrid, and the men in that station saw for the first time a picture of the Earth, taken from the moon and whole, if shadowed into crescent. And then the pieces that August had seen were as nothing for the light that burst out of that tracking station went fore and aft. It covered the earth and went violet-tinged into the future, tiny connections and turnings and change coming together in conglomerate, with the photograph as instigator and consequence both and Madrid at the centre, shining beneath him like the moon on a still night lit up against the backdrop of the universe.

Then there was a quick hard jerk and August was free again, his forehead unmarked, and Huginn was stumping back across the blankets and down to the bottom of the bed, his metal eyes whirling and his wings half-spread as if he were flying. As if he _wished_ to fly, in great, predatory circles, hunting out waves and transmission and presence, hunting out the knowledge-change that came with them.

"What..." he said, shaking his head to try and clear the buzzing behind his eyes, the thin-stranded multi-vision of Huginn dipped briefly into his mind and taken back again. "What was that?"

"Not the Blue Marble," said Muninn. "And not Earthrise. Those pictures would come later. Instead the first picture of Earth as a planet, the first picture not in parts."

"It's beautiful," said August, and he wasn't sure if he was speaking more of the planet or of the picture, broken down in Huginn's iron mind to information and spread across systems, perfect and pure and absolutely, utterly inhuman.

"Of course it is," said Muninn. "Distance is always beautiful."

"I never imagined," said August, and to his surprise his eyes overflowed with tears, warm as blood and wet against his skin. At the end of the bed Huginn croaked again, and if it was not a completely friendly sound it was sympathetic, almost.

"Some of the most wonderful things we see and learn we do not see and learn first-hand," said Muninn. "Will you remember that, August, in case the opportunity comes again?"

"I will," said August.

# AUGUST 24, 20—

POMPEII, ITALY

"Do you know where we are, August?" said Muninn. "Do you know _when_?"

The streets were full of people and there were broken stones and cameras and a dozen languages at least, and all the people were dressed as tourists. It was very hot; August didn't even need to wear his blanket, and he was feeling better. Not much, but enough, and so he spread the blanket in the nearest shady spot and rested there, felt the sweat trickle down his face and sting at his eyes. He looked around, and could see nothing that he recognised–and then he did.

" _Dad_ ," he said. "Mum!" He turned to Muninn, his head swinging round so fast it hurt, and his chest was cramped within him. He tried to get up, but the bird was faster, hopping across the blanket and jumping onto his leg, just above the knee, her iron claws pricking painfully through his pyjamas. They were his best pyjamas too, his favourites, and he had been wearing them especially for the photos his parents had taken earlier in the day, photos of August in his bed with his telescope–April's telescope–and holding pictures of the Earth.

"They can't see you, August," she said. "You'll only wear yourself out trying to follow behind, and there is still a week to go."

"But-"

"Look at them, August," said Muninn. "You don't exist for them. They don't know you yet."

At first he couldn't fathom it, couldn't picture a world–their world–without him in it, but as they moved closer he saw that Dad's hair had no grey in it, that Mum was smilier than he'd ever seen her and there were no lines about her mouth. On her back was a baby, a toddler almost, who beat at the front of her carrier with urgent fists and giggled, who wore a floppy hat with a bumblebee on it.

"April," said August. "It's April!"

"Yes," said Muninn.

"They look so happy," said August, wistful, watching his parents fuss over the baby, watching them point out bits of old rock, the frescoes and the fallen masonry.

"They are happy," said Muninn. "These are good memories."

"Before me," said August.

"Yes," said Muninn, and she did not say _Before you, before the hospitals and the sick beds and the slow death of hope._

"Muninn," said August, and the one thin hand that rested on her back gripped suddenly, as hard as it could, though that wasn't very hard and she was iron besides. "Muninn, would they... would they have been happier if I'd never been born?"

"Yes," said Muninn. "But they would also have been different, and perhaps they would not have swapped that difference for all the happiness in the world."

It hurt August to hear that, hurt and comforted him both, a strange mix of feelings that he had learned to associate with the presence of ravens. But his parents were before him, his family, and if they did not know him they were his parents still, so he pushed the feelings aside and watched. Perhaps it would be alright for them, once he was gone. Perhaps they wouldn't be sad forever. They'd been happy without him once, and perhaps they would learn to be happy again.

They'd told him stories, he remembered, of when they were young, of the time before he was born. How they had backpacked around the world with April, how they had wanted her to see the world right from the very beginning. How they had seen Uluru, and the Great Wall of China, and the Red Square. How they had seen-

"Pompeii," said August. He looked around at the broken remains of a city, turned on his blanket until he could see Vesuvius rise up above him, peaceful now but looming still. "They went to see Pompeii. Dad was so pleased that they'd gone on the anniversary..."

#

("It happened nearly 2000 years ago," said Dad. "In the year 79, on the 24th of August. We had to rush to get there for our 24th. April and your Mum had come down with a tummy bug in Prague, so we were running behind."

And April, who had heard that story a dozen times if not more, who had no real memory of bug or buildings, had rolled her eyes. "You know, you might have missed it anyway," she said. "They think now, some scientists, that it didn't happen in August at all. That Vesuvius might have gone up later in the year. October or November."

"But that," said Dad, "is not nearly so good a story...")

#

"Muninn," said August. "Who was right? You remember it, don't you?"

"I remember," said Muninn.

"I bet it was the 24th," said August. "You wouldn't have brought me here otherwise."

"Wouldn't I?" said Muninn. "You have grown very certain, I think."

"Why else would we be here?" said August. "If you wanted me to see my family, we could have seen them anywhere. But you wanted me to see this."

"You have not yet seen what I want you to see," said Muninn. "Watch now." And she pointed her blunt iron beak at his parents–at the people who would be his parents, and who would not regret it.

They had come closer now, so close that if in another time he had spoken they would have heard him, and then they were swallowed up, swallowed by a group of people gathered round something on the ground, and August couldn't see them anymore. And then the raven was off his knee, her sharp little claws out of his leg, and August was free to lever himself to his feet, to slowly, carefully, stumble towards the crowd, to squeeze through legs and people until he came to a halt against the corner of a glass display case, with his parents two panes away and bodies on the ground between.

"Look," said Dad, pointing to a small figure. Its legs were curled up like a baby and the arms were over its face and Huginn was standing on one thigh as Muninn had done for August, his black iron feathers sharp against the white and preening.

"They injected plaster into the gaps in the ash where the bodies were," said his Dad, consulting a brochure. "So we can see how the people looked when they died."

#

("Smile," said Dad. "Smile for the camera!" And August had done his best, knowing that his smile was too big for his face now, or his face had shrunken down around it, but knowing also that it made his parents happy. That they would have pictures of him to the last, that they would be able to look at the photos when he was gone and remember him, the child who would be ten forever. The child who _would_ be ten.)

#

"Poor little kiddy," said his Mum, young and happy in Pompeii and reaching back to squeeze April's plump, healthy baby leg, as if to reassure herself that her child, at least, was safe when others had not been.

They walked away then, hand in hand and with the child that would survive with them, walked into the future without him and August stood and watched them go through glass that reflected his pyjamas pale as plaster and they were not his favourites anymore. Watched them go through the glass, frozen to himself and soon to be frozen to others. Frozen as, in the Garden of the Fugitives, other children were frozen, rigid in their shapes and left behind because they couldn't run fast enough to escape the death that was coming for them. And leaping over those children, leaping in the half-run, half-hop that characterised the corvids was Huginn, and he turned towards August and then away again, and not in pity.

"You wanted to see science," said Muninn, at his feet and wiry, and August sank down onto shaking knees beside her and the glass before him was blurred and running. "And I have shown you science, but you should also see what science is not. Did you think it was a frozen thing, a statue? Did you think it would accept the 24th and let it be, because the 24th of August was what was expected and entrenched, beyond question?"

"Did you bring me to the wrong day?" said August, and if his voice was hard and dead as statues he couldn't bring himself to care.

"I brought _you_ to the right day," said Muninn. "Whether it is _the_ day is another question entirely."

"Will I ever know the answer?" said August, and Muninn considered him with eyes that seemed to him to be very old then, as old as rocks, as old as plaster.

"Perhaps," she said.

# AUGUST 25, 1894

HONG KONG, CHINA

Muninn landed heavily on August's bed, her beak bound around paper and clamped tight. She dropped the paper into his lap, the imprint of iron stamped into its pages. "Here," she said, nudging the journal over to him. "Read that."

"All of it?" said August, flicking through the pages. The cover bore the date, August 25th, though it was an August that had been and gone long before his birth and the paper was old and yellowing. The words were crammed together and complicated, and he didn't think that he could read it all, let alone understand it when his head was swimming and prone to dizziness. "Isn't there an easier way?"

Huginn croaked at him from the windowsill, folding his wings and settling them neatly along his body. It sounded almost like agreement, but Huginn had never been one for taking his side so August assumed that he must have misheard.

"Stop complaining," Muninn snapped at him, unsympathetic. She gave the journal another shove with her beak, barely missing his fingers. "You do not have to read all of it." And she took the paper from him roughly, clawed through the pages with one iron leg until she found the right place, and forced the journal back towards him.

" _The Bacillus of Bubonic Plague_ ," he read, the title of the paper standing out in bold black letters. "Published today–or what was today, once. Are we going to see the Plague, Muninn?"

"No!" the bird said, and her clockwork eyes were spinning so fast and her raven voice was so loud and so harsh that August recoiled back into his pillows. Muninn saw his reaction and retreated, turning away from him for long moments and then back again. Her eyes had slowed, the cogs moving more gently against each other, without grinding, and her voice was softer, recognisable.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I am sorry, August. I just... I do not wish to see the Plague again. I have no good memories of it–just death and more death, pustules and poxes and people brought down. It is a hideous thing."

"More hideous than me?" said August, who had no mirrors but who saw himself in others, his face a spectroscope while theirs were mirrors of refracted lines. Lines that were growing stronger, and more horrified.

"You are not hideous," said Muninn, climbing onto his lap to nudge his chest with her head, rubbing up against him like a cat. "You have no idea what hideous looks like, August, and I do not particularly wish you to see it."

"Then why bring me this?"

"It is an important article. One of two, but Shibasaburo did not write the other, and his name was not that used for naming. He was the first to discover the bacterium that caused the Plague, the first by several days–but there were inconsistencies in his work, so credit for the finding was given to the other. This happens sometimes, the search for credit in science. And it happened in June, not August–but the paper was published in August, on this day, and credit is due for that."

"So we're not going to see it?" August asked. "If it's not happening today, we aren't going to see him find out what he told everyone today?"

"I don't much see the point," said Muninn, ignoring the disgusted croak from the end of the bed. "The paper's the important thing. Read it, and you may have a free day. I will take you where-ever you want to go."

"But not to see Shibasaburo?"

"No. I will not go back there. Once was enough, and that once was repeated many times, in many memories."

"Okay," said August, uncertain, and feeling somehow as if he had been cheated, as if he were missing something, even if that something were horrible. But the end of August was coming, and he was in its final week and he felt, today, as if he did not have the strength to argue. He had just settled the journal to a comfortable level when Huginn marched up the bed and tore it from his hands, took him in his own iron claws and hauled him up from his bed and out of the window.

He didn't let August up onto his back as Muninn did, just dragged him through the air underneath, his claws wrapped around and the air from his beating wings blowing August half to pieces. And August, who remembered another trip with Huginn, dragged through radio waves and radiation and the burnt transmissions of Nagasaki, screamed as loudly as he could. It still wasn't very loudly, but there was no response and when August twisted as much as he could in the iron claws of the raven who held him, twisted to look back, he saw Muninn on his bed, and looking away. She did not follow.

It didn't take August long to give up, to hang beneath like a side of meat strung up for curing. He didn't have the strength to fight, so he did the best he could to conserve himself, to preserve, until Huginn flew down into a city, down into a clean and well-lit laboratory where a man was bent over a microscope. "Is that Shibasaburo?" he said, and Huginn bobbed his head.

"Is this August then, or June?" he asked.

"June," Huginn croaked, and gave August's shoulder one hard, quick peck, just sharp enough to dent the skin and bury the very tip of his beak within. August braced himself for the warmth, for the immersion, but this was not the overwhelming flood of information that came with the Lunar Orbiter, that came with the presence of Madrid. This was a dim recollection of it only, the merest taste, and it overlaid August's vision with paper so that where-ever he looked he could see pages from the _Lancet_ , hung like ghosts before their publishing. He knew then that he was seeing the genesis of the paper that would be, the one stamped a week before his birthday, the one that lay discarded on his blanket.

There was another stool close to where Shibasaburo was working, and August hoisted himself painfully onto it, his legs swinging beneath, but he was able to rest his upper body on the workbench and so that was something. The Lancet pages seemed stamped into the bench, into the walls, and looking at them made him dizzy, although staring at the microscope sometimes made him sick so that he did not always know where to look. He could sneak occasional glances through the microscope, see the rods of the bacteria stained blue and that was not too bad, but Shibasaburo was working also with corpses, with the many thousands of dead from the Plague around them, and he was braver than August, who could not watch the organ tissues cultivated in incubators, the blood scraped from dead fingertips and all around the smell of beef tea over putrefaction, tea used to grow the bacteria in colonies that were not bodies, in populations that were not damaged and desecrated by diseases not their own.

"How does he do it?" said August, thinking of the bodies of the dead, piled up like cordwood for burial and for testing. "Isn't he afraid the same thing will happen to him?" But Huginn, awaiting his turn at the microscope, made a guttural sound of indifference and turned back to the lens, winged fascination in the midst of horror. He was not comforting, even when he flew August home, back to his bedroom that was free at least of pustules, of buboes and black blood and left him there. He was not comforting to Muninn either, who stood where they left her except this time with paper ripped to pieces about her claws and memory clouding her clockwork eyes.

It was left to August to be comforting, and he knew of nothing he could say to make it better for her, for either of them. Instead, he held her in his arms, stiff and unyielding as she was with her heart as iron as the rest of her. "At least there was a cure," he said, even if there had not been one for him, or one not come in time. "One day everything will be cured," he said.

"Do you really believe that?" Muninn asked him.

"I do."

# AUGUST 26, 2002

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

"Wait," said August. "Please, wait." He slumped back into his pillows. Huginn stood on the window ledge, his wings half open already and he folded them and made a rude noise, the noise of a raven saddled with young who wavered on the edge of the nest and would not fly. The noise was not encouraging. Yet Muninn turned back, hopped from his leg and onto his lap, then as far up his chest as she could, her iron claws digging into him and the weight of her on his chest making it difficult to breathe.

"Yes?" she said, her eyes on a level with his own and whirling.

"It's just... where are we going?"

"Does it matter?"

"Yes," said August, pathetic. He knew he looked terrible: dark circles under his eyes and a body that was failing visibly now, in the end stages of its life. All his limbs hurt. Usually he had no trouble sleeping–he spent too much time sleeping really, when so little time was left–but he had spent the night awake and then in fever dreams, drugged into uneasy dozing and waking at intervals from images of pleasant silence and deep restful pools, of Voyager 2 flying silently through darkness and its Record still within it. "I'm so tired of thinking about death," he said. "I just want to go somewhere happy. Can we go somewhere happy, Muninn?"

"What is happy?" said the bird, who had so recently been unhappy herself.

"Happy is... happy is people... and sunshine. And ice-cream. Happy is nobody on their own."

"Some people like to be on their own," said Muninn, who had also been lonely, who had spent the previous day without her mate and was still unsettled by it.

"I don't."

"That is fortunate, considering your position." Trapped in any number of beds, his own and those of hospitals, always attended or with a bell or a buzzer for attending. "If you wish for company your family is close by."

"I don't want company, I want people," said August. "They won't notice me anyway, where-ever we go. I just want to be around them–and not when they're crying in a prison bed or shivering on a frozen island or being all burnt up. I suppose I don't really care if it's people, anyway. I just want to be around, around–"

"Around life," said Muninn.

"Yes."

"And you think that will make you happy?"

"Yes."

"Then come with me," said Muninn, relenting. "Take hold of my feathers, August, climb onto my back. I can show you life."

#

They flew for a long time, and the world around was blue. And then there was land again and the birds flew on, flew on until they came to the Highveld and there they flew in circles so large that August barely felt the tilt on the raven's back as the circles became smaller and smaller still.

He saw vast expanses of grassland spread beneath him like carpets, bordered by Karoo and Kalahari and Bushveld, bordered by lowlands and highlands both. The grasses rolled with the wind as if they were one organism instead of thousands, millions, some standing almost as tall as August and topped with hairy little spikes. Huginn and Muninn skimmed the grass so closely August could have reached down to touch them with his hand, the dropseed and the thatching grass both, and though he didn't reach down he felt them whipping against his slippers, and saw what lived between the stalks. There were mice and moles and monitors, great rock pythons sprawled and baking, lazy in the sun. There were zebra that moved quickly and in herds, their striped coats blending into the grasses and reminding August of the quagga, but these coats were alive and twitching, their tails snapping at flies and their ears flickering. And then the ravens were circling higher, the grasses out of reach, past vast colonies of fruit bats hanging from their heels with their wings all folded round, and flying with them were the birds of the Highveld, cranes and larks and swallows.

And then the circles became smaller and the ravens were alone again with only August for a traveller and they were spiralling down into a great city, over scarps of sedimentary rock stranded with waterfalls of white water, over dams and gardens and airports, skyscrapers and suburbs and shanty towns, squatter settlements and universities. And all around were people: in cars and on the streets, eating and talking and even fighting sometimes, but alive for all that. Some of them were eating ice-cream, and Muninn slowed in her flight as she passed a vendor on a corner street, spun in a tight circle around him and August could see the cartons full of colour, full of pink and white and green, yellow and brown, but he shook his head against the feathers of her back and Muninn flew on. He had said ice-cream was happiness, but when he had said it he was thinking of times when it had made him happy before, and now he knew that time was past. Even if Muninn had been able to get him a cone, to steal it somehow and pass it back to him, he didn't think he could manage to eat it.

It was hard enough to pretend he was hungry at home. Not having to pretend in Johannesburg made him happier than the ice-cream could have.

At last the spiral ended, and the ravens flew down into a large building and it was filled with people, thousands of them, come for conservation and for development, for the opening of Earth Summit.

"It's not the first one," said Muninn. "But it's not the last one either. Some things are ongoing." She didn't sink down into her raven-sized self, not completely, but shrunk to dog size, her iron-feathered back just high enough for August to lean on so that he wouldn't have to hold himself up by himself on legs that were getting wobblier every day, that felt like water beneath him. And while Huginn scampered ahead, raven-running between rooms so not to miss anything August followed behind as Muninn moved sedately beside, slowing her pace to suit him.

He passed from room to room, his feet sinking into carpets and the air heavy and hot around him. There was a great hall where people were talking of biodiversity and of ecosystems, and then they left, brushing past August as he stood near the door, and he trailed after them to ballrooms and committee rooms and corridors, saw snatches of them talking of the Amazon, of water and climate and sustainable development. Most of the conversations were beyond him, but he could see the people talk well and passionately, some more with their hands than anything else, and if there were not many children his age there were young people too, and he followed them most, watched them learn and think and live and do all the things he would have done in their place. It was exhausting for him, moving from room to room with Huginn always a flicker of wings ahead, a dark shape amidst many that were bigger and more colourful. Exhausting, but he wanted to see as much as he could and he knew that if he settled into one place, into a corner of a ballroom, for instance, he would miss more than dancing.

The people all moved around him, and talked of life around him, and August was content–for a while.

"They're going to fix things, aren't they?" he said to Muninn. "They're going to give everyone clean water and stop them cutting down trees and the bats and the birds and the zebra will all be safe. Won't they?"

"No," said Muninn.

"Are you sure?" said August, knowing the answer as he did so and hoping, this once, for lies.

"This summit happened before you were born," said Muninn. "The rainforests are still shrinking and there's not enough clean water and species are dying every day. You know this, August."

"Then why did you bring me here? I wanted to be happy. To go somewhere happy. Why did you bring me here if it's all for nothing? I already know about small victories, Muninn. I know to take them because you might not get any others." Because there was still fire and the showing of instruments and tools that would be used because they existed and the use of them was certain.

"Because for you there is no _happy_ ," said Muninn. "Not here. I am sorry for it, believe me. I know what your memories are. I know how it is that you feel. And for you, death is so entwined with life that you will not be made happy by looking away from it, no matter what you think." And when August did look away, when he turned his face to the corner of the room and let his tears fall on the carpet, Muninn leaned forward and plucked at his pyjamas with her beak.

"It is a hard thing to learn. I understand," she said. "But I can promise you, August, that you will have a chance at happiness before the end."

# AUGUST 27, 1883

KRAKATOA, INDONESIA

"Can we get any closer?" said August. His little hands were clamped on the railing, and the motion of the boat had turned his face a grey-green to match the ocean. He was only able to keep from vomiting by staring at the volcano, so far away but belching smoke and still on the horizon, almost. Also he hadn't really eaten in ages now, and there was nothing left to come up. (He told his Mum that he was saving up space for the birthday cake she was going to make for him, the last birthday cake that he had requested in the shape of birds–and his Mum had pretended to believe him, had taken away his untouched trays and smiled as she did it even though August knew that the smile had melted off underneath.)

"Do you want to go any closer?" said Muninn, perched upon the rail next to his hands and in the shape of birthday cake and diversion.

"I'm... I'm not sure," said August. The clouds looked so dark and angry and he could feel the volcano grumbling in his bones, vibrating all through him. The deck shook with it, shook under his bottom and his legs where he sat clutching at the rails.

"Then perhaps we shall stay where we are," said Muninn. "There have been three explosions today already, and we are just in time for the last. It will be very large, and very loud. There are closer boats in the Sunda Strait and I could have brought you to one of those but the sailors on those boats will be deafened by it. Their ears will be made to rupture."

"Then I think I'd rather stay here," said August, shuddering. He was falling apart already and knew it, but he wasn't so enamoured of the process that he was willing to lose anything else, even at the last.

"Very well," said Muninn, serene.

"Did you want to go closer?" said August. "Or Huginn?" The other raven was perched at the top of the mast, staring at the volcano with unblinking iron eyes, a disturbing intensity of focus. At least Muninn blinked, he thought. At least she did that. It made her seem more friendly to him, and less alien. "Would it hurt you to be there, Muninn?"

"I suppose we could be hit with a flying rock," said the bird, "but I believe we would endure it. Built well, we were." She shook out her iron feathers, tucked them neatly back against the solid body of her. "Besides, I have the memories of those that were closer, the memories of those who died, and those who lived beside them."

"What was it like?" said August, tentative. He couldn't imagine the memories would be pleasant, couldn't imagine dying like the people at Pompeii had died, choking and burning both and beyond all help either way.

"I remember a wall, mostly," said Muninn. "A wall of black water that rose and rose and swallowed the horizon, swallowed the sun as a wolf would. The water was black with ground up rock and ash and pumice, and came in great dark waves, in tsunamis, came with every explosion and came far inland. _Far_."

"You could see it coming," said August, and it was not a question.

"Yes," said Muninn.

"Did the people try to get away?" said August.

"Of course," said Muninn. "Have you not spent your time trying to escape? Why do you think it would be any different for them?"

August was silent. He had seen, often, in the front of the phone book and in emergency kits that if a tsunami was coming you shouldn't go to the beach to see it, that the water would be too fast to outrun. He tried to picture it, to imagine a great dark wall rising before him and all he could hear was roaring, the roar of the volcano and the rumble of it and it drowned out the noise of the water in his head. He closed his eyes, because he was tired and trying to concentrate, to picture inside himself the giant waves that Muninn had told him about. He saw one then, within his mind–sitting in front of a silent wave that towered over him, and although the wave was water it was also mirrors, black mirrors, and that was not water. A real tsunami, he expected, would be turbulent, full of movement and rough to the surface, but August's tsunami was made of glass and hung over him in frozen stillness, almost as a photograph, and in its smooth slipperiness he saw his own face, reflected in a thousand black glass facets and drowning him in shadow.

"Sometimes running is hopeless," he said.

"Perhaps," said Muninn, as if she remembered the people on the beach and how most of them ran but some of them stayed, frozen as the water came towards them, frozen as August's wave was frozen and the real water coming forward stronger and faster than glass. "But I think you would not be surprised to see how many ran."

"Were you surprised to see how many didn't?" said August.

Muninn cocked her iron head to one side then, and gazed at him, speculative. "Would you not run?" she said. "There will be another explosion soon, and another wave. We will feel it here. The water is not shallow enough for the boat to be badly affected–the wave will pass under us and go on. But if we were not on this boat? If we were on the beach, would you stand and let yourself be the one to go under, August, or would you try to run?"

"That's not a fair question," said August, who could not run anymore, who could barely walk, who had trouble staying upright because his legs were so weak and his chest hurt. Everything hurt. "You know that I can't run, Muninn."

"You could crawl," said the bird, unsympathetic. "I think you could crawl still, if you had to."

"It wouldn't make a difference, crawling," said August.

"Then why are you doing it?" said Muninn, and when August turned away, screwing his eyes shut so that tears wouldn't escape, he was back in his own mind again, back in front of the black mirrors, mirrors in the shape of still water and which smelled of sulphur, of seared rock and burning. And he could feel the deck of the boat under him still, feel it pressed hard against his hips, against the backs of his legs–but the August reflected in front of him, the August in the wave had no boat to sit upon. He wasn't sitting at all, even, but crawling–crawling towards the August that was, crawling as the wave loomed over him and the volcano roared so that he could hear nothing else. And then August saw something else reflected in the wave: a tiny light, flickering beside his knees, and it was a candle, a birthday candle, and August knew then that his reflection wasn't crawling towards him but to the candle, dragging his hurt and aching body forward before the water came down to smother him and douse the candle out.

When he opened his eyes again the candle was on the deck next to him–and then it wasn't a candle but a piece of burning ash, come down from the sky in dust and smoke and tiny pieces of black grit that greyed his skin and settled on Muninn's iron feathers like frosting.

"Are you going to blow it out?" said the bird, and August stared at her, stared at the little light, and shook his head.

"I don't know," he said, but the truth was that he was afraid to try, afraid that he did not have the strength. The motion of the boat, the roar of the volcano, took his breath away and he didn't have much left to begin with. Breathing deeply made him cough, great wracking, rumbling coughs that left him red-faced and dizzy and sent his vision blackening at the edges. While he pretended not to know, the ash-candle burned and the August-before-the-wave didn't have to stop crawling, didn't have to choose to crawl or be pulled under to drown. "I don't know anything anymore."

"Knowledge is hard here, "said Muninn. "It is a place of in-betweens," she said, tilting her beak towards the volcano. "Of boundaries. One minute everything is all destruction, but then it hardly seems I've blinked and the islands are growing again..."

She spoke as if to herself, but beside her August shivered. He was tired of in-betweens, and as tired of certainty. It would be a relief, almost, not to have to choose anymore, not to have to hold the candle and the water in his head at the same time, not to run towards and away at once. He cupped his hand about the little flame, as if about to smother and shelter both, and waited for the final explosion, the final wave.

# AUGUST 28, 1965

SEALAB II, PACIFIC OCEAN

"It's like a submarine," said August. "But all in one place. And there's no-one here. It's empty."

"It will not be empty for long," said Muninn. "The first crew will move in today. We will stay to see them arrive. But it is easier for you to explore Sealab before they get here."

There was much to explore, though it had all been fitted into small spaces for machinery, for sleeping and eating and laboratory work with Huginn on the bench and clattering with the beakers, reordering instruments. There were hatches also, and ladders, and a cage tied beneath to keep the sharks away when diving.

"You will not be going there," said Muninn.

"Not even if you come with me?" said August, trying to make a joke of it, although truthfully he would have declined the swim if offered. There were black spots before his eyes nearly all the time now, and his body felt sluggish and cold, his limbs heavy around him. It was hard to concentrate. He just wanted to sleep, the brief excitement of exploring an underwater laboratory wearing off fast. He wished he could have come earlier, back in the days when he had had more strength, but there had been other places to visit then, and other opportunities for strength. Still, it was not so bad. There were plenty of benches for him to lean on, places to sit when he got tired. It was not a large facility, but August tired easily. His birthday was close now, so close, and where once he had looked upon that day with excitement, with hope and dread together, now he just felt a dawning relief.

"I am not fond of water," said Muninn. "For all the good memories I have of it. It interferes with my feathers." She shook out iron wings, refolded them carefully along her body. "It was difficult enough to get you down here, with the wet and the breathing. It is not that I could not keep you safe and dry inside the cage, but it would be an effort."

"That's alright," said August. "I've had enough of cages anyway." He said it to be kind, mostly. Even if they did keep the sharks out, the real danger would still be trapped inside.

"There is more to a cage than bars," said Muninn.

"I know," said August. The Sealab had windows, round portholes that allowed him to see out into dark water, and the walls were hard as ravens. Without the birds there would be no escape for him, but August had become accustomed to "no escape" and the confines of the building didn't bother him as much as they might have done. He had spent much of his life in a bigger prison than this, the prison of his failing body. Bars had frightened him once, made him sad as well as scared, but they seemed a silly thing to be afraid of now, an image of imprisonment rather than the thing itself.

"I wouldn't wait now," he said, "if I saw the quagga again. I wouldn't leave her so long by herself. I wouldn't be afraid."

"I know you would not," said Muninn.

"There's more to cages than metal," said August. "More than iron. I think there are some we're stuck with no matter what. And there are some we can visit, just for a little while, so that we can get used to them and the big ones don't seem so scary."

"Perhaps," said Muninn. "Though I think you have become more brave than you were before."

"I'm not scared of cages, Muninn. Not anymore. But I think I'd be scared to be in one alone, with no-one to talk to. To be trapped all by myself."

"The biggest cage can fit everyone inside it," said Muninn. "There is always someone to talk to. And some of the little ones are made for sharing. Like this one. The crew will share it together today. And tomorrow, one of them will share it with another person, in another cage. Aquanaut will talk to astronaut, both of them locked in their little boxes. In boxes inside boxes."

"I would have liked to hear that," said August.

"Perhaps you have heard something similar."

August laughed. It wasn't a very strong laugh, but it was sincere, a clean upwelling of humour. "Perhaps," he said. "It must be strange to be so cut off. I know they could call. But it's like living in a bubble, almost. You're cut off from everything here."

"Separate," said Muninn.

"Yes." August knew what it was to be separate, to feel apart. There was no bubble about his bed, whether it was in the hospital or in his room at home, but it felt that way sometimes–as if he were a creature from a strange country who needed a safe place made for him, one where he would not die or drown. One made for experiments and for watching, and for most of his life he had been the subject. There had been tests and operations and medicine, all to try and make him fit for a world he found it hard to survive in, and all the time his reactions were monitored.

"You are not always so passive," said Muninn. "You have made a home in strange places too." And that home had been one of watching, mostly, watching as if underwater as his family and friends, as the doctors and nurses who were all so kind to him, had their own lives on a surface he couldn't reach while his sickness made a barrier between them like iron, like steel, and sealed him off.

August leaned on the bench, exhausted, and ran his fingers over test tubes, over Petri dishes and beakers and Huginn's noisy rearrangement of instruments. "I never was able to experiment like this," he said. There had been chemistry sets, of course, baby experiments that allowed him to play at science safely in his room while April had chemicals and fume cupboards and proper burning acids at school, but they hadn't been the same.

"You are experimenting now," said Muninn. "Have you not spent your past weeks in different environments to your own? Have you not learned how to function in them; have you not learned how they changed you? And each time you have visited them you have visited in a bubble of your own, and separate."

And that was watching too, watching the lives before him that had never known him, watching as they too lived as he might have lived were he in their place. August had come to accept the changes, to accept that his experiences with the ravens were to help him adapt to the great change to come, the reef ahead. And he had partaken from a place of sealing, from outside, and never had that been so apparent to him as it was in Sealab, kept safe underwater and apart. It was easy to see the changes now, in that place of separation–easy to see how his grief had been provoked, and his anger, and his acceptance. Easy to see how grace had been lent to him, lent on iron wings, with honesty and indifference both.

August could see the changes, but he couldn't see _why_. It was hard for him to see why, like trying to make out a distant shape through deep water, where the remnant rays of light were at the surface still, and left his eyes darkening against the currents. His head was so fuzzy now, fuzzy from more than depth, more than distance, and he couldn't think as clearly as he once had done. He thought, however, that he remembered the time when Muninn and Huginn had first appeared to him. He hadn't asked why; he had assumed kindness. And Muninn was kind, he was certain of that. Huginn too, though less often and never towards him.

"It wasn't only for kindness though, was it," he said, and it was not a question.

"No," said Muninn. "Not only."

"Will you tell me why you've done this?" said August.

"I wanted you to want to live," said the raven. "I have told you so before: that I would give you an interest, something to live for."

"So that I would reach my birthday," said August. "So I would grow up." And the tired, heavy feeling was in his head again, and the water rising before him was so deep and so dark that he couldn't see his reflection. It was blurred before him, and apart. He knew that he was missing something. He did not know what.

He wondered if he even cared. He was too tired to care, and if mysteries were beautiful and interesting and spoke to him of the secret corners of the universe then they were too much for him now, who had yearned for mystery and certainty both, and who had had surfeit of them.

"Yes," said Muninn, and the rushing in August's head was so loud now that he was not sure if he heard her speak or if he were just imagining it. "That too."

# AUGUST 29, 2010

GENERAL ASSEMBLY, UNITED NATIONS

August would have liked to see the exchange between astronaut and aquanaut, but it was a liking he felt but dimly. Partly this was because he was tired, so very tired, and in the final stages of life, and he thought he could no longer feel wanting for himself. He was so tired, and his bed so comfortable, that if the ravens could have again told him where they would have taken him and left him to dream it would have been enough. But there was another reason beyond that, for August had begun to understand that the conversation he thought he had missed was one that he had been having all along. Instead of the ocean, instead of the atmosphere and a hard sliver of space, the state of death lay between him and the ravens as a refractor, and they had been talking across it for near the whole of August. The month that had begun with Caroline and reflection, the harbinger of his own death in a streaming comet, was ending with refraction, with conversations that bent around, that looked different from either side.

So when Huginn and Muninn came to his bedside for the last visit but two, August went without complaint, and trusting.

"I am sorry if you are disappointed," said Muninn in their flight, and her voice rumbled through the iron, vibrating through feathers and into bone.

"It's alright," said August, and it was.

"We have not much time remaining to us, we two," said Muninn. "We three. And I have shown you fire and water, death and discovery and exile. But Huginn reminds me that I have not shown you hope."

"There is no hope for me," said August. He did not say it with a sudden painful awakening, or a clutching at straws he couldn't yet comprehend. Instead, there was certainty and kindness both, for Muninn had become his friend and although she would remember him friends missed each other when they were gone and felt bad, didn't they? He didn't want her to grieve, or to cling to something other than the inevitable. She had taught him that.

"I did not say the hope was for you," said Muninn, and had August the strength he would have laughed, to find her still so very honest. She had always been honest with him, more honest than anyone he had ever met, although sometimes the honesty hurt him. And then they were winging down into a great city, stretched far in every direction and August couldn't see the end of it in the dark, though the sun was coming up. In this great city was a great building, and in that building was a giant room full of echoes and emptiness. It was set up as a school, almost, August thought, with rows of desks and a lectern in front, and it was entirely empty.

"It is a school, in a sense," said Muninn. "It is a place for you to learn to get on with each other."

And August, who remembered war and fire and shadows all together, shook his head. "No wonder it's empty," he said.

"It is very early morning," said Muninn. "The people who come here to learn are sleeping, still. It is important to sleep before a celebration. That way you don't miss any of it."

"What am I missing, Muninn?" said August, who did little else but sleep now and who had a celebration coming that he had tried so hard not to miss.

"Huginn can show you that better than I," said Muninn, and August shuddered in fear and anticipation both. He remembered the sharp stab of the raven's beak, cold in the centre of his forehead and too close to his eyes for comfort, the beak of a raven who swung over a burning city and came down to pick the eyes from the dead. But he remembered too the beauty of it, the information, the golden network, and if Muninn had shown him comfort over the past month, shown him reconciliation, then Huginn had shown him beauty. And he had, Muninn said, wanted to show him hope. That August could not understand. Huginn had never shown a liking for him, never wanted to share or be friendly. He had never cared if August were sad, or afraid. What hope, then, could he give?

There was only one way to learn. August took a deep breath, as deep as he could although it hurt his chest to do so, and squared thin shoulders. "I'm ready," he said, and again Huginn came towards him, that black gleaming beak born before him and buried, growing larger and larger in August's eyes until he could see it no longer and other visions were before him.

There was the same blood-wash, the same strange mix of feather and bone, a skeleton and a seeing imposed upon his own and August was in the same giant room, the same school-yard and it was limned about the edges and gold, and full of people. Between them were spider-webs, the same light lines connecting them to each other, to the past and future, and as each person at each desk cast their vote the light between them brightened, strengthened, and although it was gold it was also violet tinted and August felt himself pulled along the violet and into a past that he had seen before, a ruined city that held his ruined self, with the scent of roasting flesh in the air and shadows burnt into stone.

"No!" he cried. "I don't want to come back here!" And he was shrieking then, as loud as he could and wordless, a shrieking that sounded like bombs and turning back and the dissolution of family and April's face as he turned away from her, the small distressed noise that she had tried to hide, the sound of a door slamming behind her. Then the part of him that was Huginn took over and August felt as if he were snatched up suddenly, snatched up into spirals and he beat his fists against the snatching with strength he didn't know he had still, and those gold-violet beads were before him again, and stretching. There was another bomb, as bad as the first and a second ruined city, and there were tests and developments and islands blown to ashes, islands leaking radiation, and there was a site on a steppe that leaked as well, leaked into local populations of more than fish and mammals and seaweed and it was all covered up, this site that burned first on the 29th of August and burned for more than forty years.

The part that was August screamed and screamed, and in his desperation he felt in the golden spider-web about him a strand that spoke of home, and he followed it as best he could, grabbed hold with mind and heart and dragged the raven with him until those shining strands coalesced again in a group of islands at the bottom of the world. And there those strands split into rainbows and protest marches and sinking boats, into betrayal and bombings and songs as letters, a government brought down, into a nation who spoke one word together and that word was _No_. And the strands furled off into Chains and broken treaties and consequences, into the totalitarianism of friends and moral indefensibility, as David Lange spoke at Oxford and Marilyn Waring crossed the floor and boats were not sunk but turned away in peace and left to their disagreement. And that coalescence was a hub of its own, with its own golden spokes, and those spokes were not of people but of countries who came together to say their own no, countries and treaties and free zones, Raratonga and Pelindaba, Bangkok and Semei and Tlatelolco, Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

And Kazakhstan, who had the testing and the ending of tests on the 29th of August, came unto the General Assembly, and argued for making that day an international one, against all tests of that kind and August was pulled back into that room, the time he saw it second and full of people, interconnected.

And when Huginn pulled his beak from August's forehead, it was after he had seen them all voting for it, one after another, like dominoes, and the debate and discussion and consequence of that action, the exchange of ideas, burst out before and aft, as it had, if he had but seen it, at Hiroshima. And Huginn, meatless, without eyeballs to pluck in a school room empty that day of war, beat his wings until he soared in circles above the desks, above the lectern, and August knew then a little of what he was seeing, ideas and ideals together, and both from the same source.

"It is the privilege of thought to see the future," said Muninn, gently. She leaned against August as he recovered, let him feel the bulk of her, the iron solidity. "And hope is something that comes only to thinking creatures. One can remember it, of course, but the memory of hope breeds repetition. One tries to recreate it by recreating the circumstances in which the hope was found."

"Does that work?" said August. His mouth was dry and he felt a little dizzy.

"Sometimes," said Muninn. "Sometimes. But thought is the better way, and brighter."

"Is it going to be enough?" said August, sitting in that great, giant room stamped at the focal point with olive branches, and because Muninn had his memories she had no need to ask, for she knew he meant the days and the treaties, the cessation of burnt stone and burning meat.

"Do you believe it is enough?" she said, and August considered.

"I don't know," he said eventually. "But I believe it more than I did before." He fidgeted a little, tucked his blanket around him. "It's a very nice room," he said. "A very nice day."

"But you would like to go home now," said Muninn.

"I want to give April a hug," said August. "I want to see my sister."

# AUGUST 30, 1871

SPRING GROVE, NEW ZEALAND

August woke to a shifting in his bed and a weight on the pillow. Muninn was standing beside his head, tugging on one ear rather too firmly. "Get off," he said. "Get off!"

"Wake up," said the bird. "I know it's harder now, but wake up. And be quiet about it, or you'll wake your father."

August's Dad was sitting by the bed, his head tilted back in the chair. He was snoring, just a little, and the circles under his eyes were almost as dark as August's. Huginn had landed quietly on an arm of the chair, and had his head under a wing, preening. He looked supremely disinterested.

"What time is it?" said August. He did not need to whisper. His voice was never very loud, now.

"It's eleven o'clock," said Muninn. "And all's well."

"It isn't well," said August, pettish. He was tired and his bones hurt and the memory of disappointment was all through him. "I thought you weren't coming. I thought you'd forgotten."

"The day isn't over yet," said Muninn. "And soon it will be your birthday."

"Ten years," said August, and for a moment there was a little smile on his cracked lips and his eyes were almost as bright as Muninn's. "I did it. I made it."

"You haven't made it yet," said Muninn. "But it's not far off, and there is time, I think, for presents."

"I like presents," said August. "Thank you. But I'm so sleepy. Could you open them for me, please?"

"These are not presents that need opening," said Muninn gently, and for one last time she held out her wing.

August groaned, but slowly, very slowly, he raised his arms and took hold. His grip was very weak.

#

The flight was cool and dark. August slept through most of it; could barely remember when he had still been able to sit upright on the raven's back and close his eyes to the wind, feel it fresh on his cheeks. But he found that this flight seemed shorter than normal, a little space only, and then Muninn was winging down in spirals, with Huginn beside her, winging down to a wooden house where all the windows were dark. August was flown into a small bedroom with a quilted bed, and in it lay a woman with pale, pale cheeks.

"Is she sick too?" he said, drowsy.

"Not sick," said Muninn. "Just very tired. But you are looking at the wrong person. Look," she said. "Look down there, in the cradle. Do you see him? It is his birthday today, as it is yours tomorrow, and I have brought you for a present."

"He's very ugly," said August, critical. He had been dozing on Muninn's back, a heavy, drugged doze that he was unwilling to be woken from, and he did not feel charitable. "All red and wrinkly. Like a grumpy old man."

"All new babies are ugly," said Muninn. "To everyone but their parents, at least. You were ugly too when you were born. Your mother thought you were beautiful, though, and that's the main thing. His mother thinks the same. Her name is Martha."

"His head is such a funny shape," said August. "Is it meant to look like that?"

"It's a hard thing, being born," said Muninn. "Just as hard as dying, sometimes. I expect the head will recover."

"I'm glad," said August, but what he really thought was _Mine won't_. The baby would grow, and be less red and less wrinkled as time went on, and his head would become something people were pleased to look at, but the reverse was happening to him. The skin on his head was shrinking, it seemed, or his bones were getting bigger, because when he looked into the mirror of other people he could see the bones jut out sharply. He looked starved, almost, but there was plenty of food for him. He just didn't want to eat it–not even ice-cream, not even birthday cake. And when his birthday was over, he knew, his head would begin to change again, and not as it had when he was a baby recovering from a trip through the birth canal. His would be bone, more and more, until nothing was left but a skeleton, and one day even that would be gone.

"That is change," said Muninn. "What else did you expect?"

"Nothing," said August. "I don't really expect anything anymore." He was too tired for expectations, and medicine made his head feel all fuzzy inside. In the cradle, the baby stirred, screwing up that wrinkled face, the little lips pursing slightly in an imitation of suck. Huginn was standing on the top of the wooden sides, his shadow falling over the infant. "What's his name?" said August.

"Ernest," said Muninn. "His name is Ernest. Ernest Rutherford. He doesn't look much now, I grant you, but he's going to grow up to be a very famous man. He will win a Nobel Prize even, for his trouble."

"He split the atom," said August, wonder rising through him enough, briefly, to drive away the fogginess. "I know. April has a poster of him on her wall. Her friends tease her about it, I've heard them. But she says she likes the moustache." He paused, feeling sick and silly and so very tired. Things were all jumbly in his head again. "I could have grown a good moustache, I bet," he said.

"He did split the atom," said Muninn. "And from then on no-one thought of the atom as a little solid ball, as a little packet. It came in parts. Everything does."

"Even me," said August. He was breaking down into parts, splitting before Ernest as the atom had split, splitting down into skin and bone and absence. The whole of him, the bits that stuck together and said _August_ , well, that was nearly over.

"That's the thing about parts," said Muninn, and her voice sounded so far away now, or perhaps she was only speaking so softly that August had to strain to listen to her. "You can break them down smaller and smaller, until sometimes it looks like there's nowhere else to go, and nothing else to see."

_One day even my skeleton will be gone_ , thought August.

"And sometimes the fission is horrible, and cruel. Sometimes it comes in fire and burns shadows into the stone. Sometimes the breaking is quieter, in a little bed strung about with beads. Sometimes it comes with sadness."

"Keep an eye on the matter," Huginn croaked, suddenly, his voice almost rusted shut from disuse. Surprise nearly forced August upright, but looking closer he couldn't tell if Huginn had spoken to him, or to the baby–or perhaps to himself. Whichever it was, Muninn ignored him.

"And sometimes," she said, "it comes glorious, with webs before and after and a light like the sun, and sometimes it brings peace. But the parts, August. The parts are never gone. No matter how small you make them, the energy remains. If the electrons break away sometimes, into other atoms and other forms, then the atoms break away too. And they'll be part of the ocean, or the earth. Perhaps a plant, perhaps another living creature. But they'll stay on, August."

_Of course I'll remember you_ , April had said to him. _I'll remember all the bits of you that I know, which are different from all the bits Mum knows and all the bits Dad knows_. And those little bits of him would stay with her all her life, and change her after his splitting, as if she had taken on the new electrons of his old body and had her properties changed thereby. And she would take her changed self out into the world, and every person she met, every person born or not-yet-born who met her, would meet him, too, in his way. Would meet the parts of him that changed her.

"Maybe that's enough," he said, quietly.

"Of course it is," said Muninn. Then her head cocked and her wings twitched, the muscles smooth and strong under feathers. "Say your goodbyes, August," she said. "It's time to leave."

"Goodbye, baby," said August, reaching down to brush one plump fist with his scrawny little one. "Goodbye, and Happy Birthday."

As he said it, the room began to echo with the sound of the ending hour, a clock chiming through walls with the first of twelve faint strokes. "Happy birthday," repeated Muninn, gravely.

# AUGUST 31, 20—

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

"Are we going back home now?" said August. His grip on Muninn's scapulae was loose, his fingers creaking and weak.

"Not yet," said Muninn. "This is your birthday, the last day of August. Do you not want to see what happens on this day?"

"You could show me tonight," said August, not believing it himself but willing to pretend if he could just lie down at last.

"I could not," said Muninn, and her hoarse raven voice was very gentle.

There was a long silence. "I know," said August.

#

"It looks like a party," he said, weary. It was so hard to look around, to lift his head. "A very boring party." There were no balloons and no cake and no presents, just people sitting silently at table while a grey-haired woman talked at them. Huginn stood on her lectern, gazing up with adoration, silent, invisible. "She's not even singing," said August. "There should be singing, at a birthday."

"She doesn't like to sing very much," said Muninn. "She missed a birthday song once, just barely, and never let herself forget it." She swivelled her head around until it was almost entirely backwards, and gazed down at August from above, gazed at him as he lay flat on her back with his arms about her neck. "Do you not recognise her, little one?" she said, and August blinked dizzy eyes to clear them, tried to make out a face and a figure that were beyond him, almost.

It was the beads he recognised first: the long ropes of bright colours, the twists of cheap beads given out to children at Starship, given out for endurance and bravery both. "Those are my beads," he said, wondering, and then he knew her. "April," he said. "It's April! But she's gotten so old, Muninn."

"Not so old," said the bird, her feathers twitching beneath him. "Just older than you."

"What's she doing?" said August, and he tried to sit up, to push himself up to see better. "Who are all these people?"

"They've come to see her give the lecture," said Muninn. "All the Laureates do it. Closer to Christmas, usually, but April held out for August. Your sister achieved something wonderful, you see. She's the most recent recipient of the Nobel prize–for medicine."

"Oh," said August, and it was hard to see again, and differently so. " _Oh_." And there it was, the happiness that Muninn had promised him sinking into him as if shot from a shaft, the pain and pleasure of them intertwining: April's life, come together with his death, and meaning given to both of them.

"How did you know?" he said, and Muninn shrugged, although gently, so not to throw him off.

"It was Huginn that knew," she said, and August, so nearly memory himself now, remembered what she'd told him so soon past. _It is the privilege of thought to see the future_ , she'd said – and Huginn had seen, and loved his sister for it.

"Better than singing, isn't it?" said Muninn, and if ravens could smile, she was smiling now. August was sure of it.

"I wish I could tell her," he said. "I wish, I wish... but it's no use wishing now, is it?"

"Not for that," said Muninn. "That is beyond both of us, I'm afraid."

"I know I have to go," he said, and it was harder in that brief moment than it had been all the month long, and then he lay down upon the raven's back and the hardness passed from him and it was easy, still.

"There is another way," said Muninn. Her iron feathers twitched and smoothed, and her eyes were very, very dark. "I could go in your place," she said.

"I don't understand," said August. It was hard for him to understand anything now, and growing harder. He wanted to listen to April, wanted it badly, but his eyes kept closing and he could hardly make sense of her sentences. She was describing her methods, and it was hard, so hard, to keep up with her. It always had been. Muninn was simpler; easier to listen to, but it was such an effort. He was so tired. All he wanted to do was sleep.

"Shall I tell you a story?" said Muninn. "A story for bedtime, perhaps?"

"Yes please," said August. He let his eyes rest, half-open, on the beads about April's neck, let his head nestle into the raven's back.

"It's a story about a little girl," said Muninn. "She had a brother too, and she loved him very much. But he caught the plague and died, and all the imams and physicians in Tunis could not bring him back. They couldn't help her, either, when the buboes came up black in her neck and her armpits and her thighs. So she lay there, in her hot little bed, with her family dying around her, and then she saw the birds. Two of them, ravens, and they showed her such marvels, for she'd always wanted to see the world. And then she was given a choice: to die or to change, and take the place of one of the ravens and let it go on in her stead."

"You?" said August.

"Yes."

"And you changed?"

"Yes."

"Are you asking me to change?"

"I am."

"Does it hurt?" said August.

"Yes," said Muninn. "That is a function of memory."

"Does Huginn hurt?"

"I believe he is numb, in his way," said Muninn. "He has been still iron for as long as I have known him, and none have taken his place. But Huginn is thought, and I... I am memory. I remember, August. I remember how Caroline felt as she saw her comet, as if I were Caroline herself. I remember nights on the Pacific and nights in the Antarctic. I remember cold and heat and being burnt by a bomb as bright as the sun. I remember every wonderful thing that ever happened to anybody, and because of that I remember every terrible thing as well."

#

"He was such a good little boy," said April, breaking in. "A pain, sometimes, I admit it. All little brothers are. But mostly good. He'd be there in his bed, under this terrible tiger blanket that he'd never give up, and even though he had to spend most of his time there he hardly ever complained. It must have been hard watching life go on around him, never being able to join in. I never quite realised how hard, I think, at the time. I was hardly more than a child myself. And our parents said to focus on the happy times, so that's what I tried to do. I'd bring him bowls of popcorn and we'd watch silly films together, and we'd go to the park sometimes, or the beach. Things like that. We could never stay as long as I wanted, but it was worth leaving early to see how much pleasure it gave him to be able to go at all. He got left behind a lot, you see. And then it was the rest of us being left behind, and it seemed the happy memories weren't strong enough, and there were too few of them."

#

"She loved you very much," said Muninn.

"I know," said August. "I love her too. I always knew she'd be wonderful."

#

"Were there other kids before you?" said August.

"There were," Muninn replied. "And some chose to be memory and some didn't. And for those that did, none were memory forever. It fills you up, see. Oh, it was wonderful too at first, with the flying and the travel and the sheer breadth of life stretched out... You can't imagine anything more marvellous. But they creep up, the memories, until you're stuffed with them, and bursting. And some days it's easier and some days it's not, and some are still wonderful. But some aren't, and the ones that aren't add up, and in the end you just feel..."

"How do you feel?" said August.

"Old. I feel _old_ ," said Muninn. "When I changed I had eight years. A little younger than you, and I could never imagine how old a person could be, how old they could feel inside. Like a clock running down, and the space between ticks getting wider."

"I feel like that," said August. "Well, not old. But tired. I didn't think it was possible to be this tired."

"It's your body that's tired, " said Muninn. "Just your body. There's more of you that can live, and you wouldn't have to be tired again for a long, long time."

"It's not just my body," said August. "It's all of me. And I think... I think no thank you, Muninn. I'd really like to go to sleep, if that's okay. I used to think it would be so terrible. There was so much I wanted to do, and so much that I'd never get to do. I was sad all the time. I'm not sad any more, Muninn. I'm too tired to be sad. I just want to go to sleep."

There was a long silence. Then, "I see," said Muninn, and her voice was weightier than age and iron.

"I'm sorry," said August. "So sorry. Please, Muninn."

"Do not be sorry," said Muninn, and her voice was heavy and so kind. "There is no need for sorry. If you are more tired than I am, little chick, then you go to sleep as nicely as you can."

"Muninn?" said August. "All those things I never got to do? It's not so bad. I got to do this, and I got to see you. And Huginn. Will you tell him thank you, please?"

"Huginn is here too," said Muninn. "Open your eyes, August. Just one more time."

And when he did, August found he was back in his own little bed, with the tiger blanket and the beads about him and Dad sleeping beside. Huginn and Muninn were standing on the end of his bedstead, their sharp-clawed feet curled around the wooden frame. Huginn had his head on one side, and he was staring at August with flat black eyes, eyes that might have been looking at an insect, or a mouse, or some other small creature of no great significance. He looked, August thought drowsily, as if he were trying to figure out a clue in a crossword, as if August were a tiny cog in a puzzle beyond imagining. And Muninn was there next to him, with her iron eyes softer than he'd seen them yet.

"Muninn?" he said again, and it was harder now to talk than it had ever been. "What was your name, before? When you were little, like me."

"Hanan," said Muninn. "I was Hanan."

"I'm going to be a sparrow, Hanan," said August, and his voice was very quiet as he closed his eyes and went out into darkness.

###

# About Octavia Cade

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand author. She's spent the past few years as a doctoral candidate in science communication. Her short stories have appeared in markets such as Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Aurealis.

Apart from her short stories, she's previously published four novellas. If you liked _The August Birds_ , you might also like _The Life in Papers of Sofie K_., which is a fantasy biography of the Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya.

The other three available novellas are _Trading Rosemary_ , _The Don't Girls_ , and _Vita Urbis_.

You can follow me on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/OJCade>

My blog is at <http://ojcade.com/>

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