‘Maybe,’ she says, through a mouthful of pizza. ‘He’s barely talked to me all day.’
The newsreader moves on to a story about an LA actor who’s been jailed after being caught drink-driving for the third time, and we slip back into silence. I keep imagining Tariq Al-Farsi browsing online, catching sight of his wife among the news stories. The way his heart must have skipped as he watched her fall from the stars, the fear and confusion, the tiny hint of hope that she might land safely. Then the inevitable crash, bringing with it a second wave of despair.
This is why hope is dangerous: if it’s taken away, you’re left with even less than you had before.
My appetite’s gone. I throw my half-eaten slice of pizza back into the box. Rani chews on her piece of Hawaiian.
‘Remember how mad Mum used to get when I ordered this?’ she asks.
I grin. ‘“Pizza is supposed to be Italian! What’s Italian about Hawaii?”’
‘“Fruit and meat and cheese together? It’s an abomination!”’
We laugh. For a few seconds it feels good, and then there comes the tipping point: that moment where I can feel my mouth start to quiver, and I have to fight to stop the tears from coming. I close my eyes and take a long sip of Coke, until my eyes have stopped prickling. When I look up, Rani is watching me.
‘You never talk about her.’ She picks a fallen chunk of pineapple from the box and nibbles at it. ‘Neither does Dad. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who thinks about her.’
‘Of course I think about her.’ Until we came here, she was pretty much all I thought about. Even sleep couldn’t give me a break: she appeared in most of my dreams, all of my nightmares. ‘It’s just . . . hard.’
Rani picks up another slice of pizza and chews it slowly. When she speaks, her voice is even smaller. ‘What happened that day, Jaya?’
My veins turn to ice. It starts in my hands and creeps up my arms, around my neck and down my spine. For a few seconds, I can’t move. I can’t think. The dizziness swirls through my head, and all I can see is rushing water, and rocks, and panicked birds fluttering through the trees.
‘You know what happened, Rani. We were walking in the glen. It was an accident,’ I say, though that has never seemed like the right word for it. Spilling tea on your laptop is an accident. Breaking your leg skiing is an accident. Your parent dying shouldn’t be in the same category.
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Yes! Yes, yes, yes!’
Dad’s voice booms through the walls, saving me from answering. Rani runs through to the living room, her pizza slice drooping in her hand. Dad is standing over a semi-circle of maps and notes, his fists raised in the air – a mad god surveying his creation.
‘I’ve got it! I think I’ve got it!’ He strides over to the door, picks Rani up and twirls her into the air. ‘I think I know where it’s going to fall!’
‘No way!’ Rani slides on to her knees, dropping her slice of Hawaiian on to the carpet. ‘Where? How did you work it out?’
Dad kneels beside her. He spreads his notes out like a hand of cards. ‘Right, let me show you . . .’
My stomach feels queasy, and not just from the cheese curdling in my gut. Dad, on the other hand, looks . . . alive. His eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep and that soup stain is still on his T-shirt, but he looks more alert than I’ve seen in months. He leans back on to his heels and slaps his knees.
‘First of all, I tried looking at the longitude and latitude of each of the Fall spots, both globally and on a country-by-country basis. There didn’t seem to be any correlation whatsoever, at least not mathematically.’
He’s talking so fast I can barely keep up. He pulls a map of Edinburgh from the pile. There are seven Xs drawn in yellow highlighter: four in the city itself, and three a few miles outside it.
‘I tried dozens of other theories – the elevation of the places, how close they were to water – but nothing quite fitted. Then somebody had the great idea of looking into the history of the spots, rather than just their location.’
He gives Rani a little bump on the shoulder. She looks so pleased she might burst.
‘So?’ I ask, taking a step into the room. ‘What did you find?’
‘Well, I did a lot – I mean a lot – of reading about the city, and I discovered that all the spots are connected to religion. The cathedral is an obvious one, but the others weren’t nearly so clear.’ He points to the crosses one by one. ‘I found some records suggesting baptisms took place in the Water of Leith. The golf course where No. 58 landed is built on the grounds of an old priory. So, from that, I managed to narrow down the possible locations for the next Fall.’
‘That could be tons of places, though,’ I say. ‘I mean, religion is everywhere. It could be a church, a synagogue, a mosque . . .’
Instead of getting pissed off at my picking holes in his theory, he actually seems pleased. ‘Exactly! But once I knew a bit about the history of the spots, I was able to narrow potential locations of future Falls to just three places. I managed to rule out two of them based on other factors, which left me with . . .’
He draws a mark on the map. I step forward to take a closer look, and my heart leaps. He’s drawn an X on Arthur’s Seat – right on the ruin, where I hid Teacake after I found her.
‘It’s called St Anthony’s Chapel,’ he says. ‘I went there yesterday. It’s just a few walls now, but it used to be a proper little church. No one’s sure how old it is. Some say it could date back to the 1300s.’
I can’t speak. He may not have found the exact spot where Teacake fell, but he’s come really damn close – less than a kilometre away. For a few seconds, I actually believe he’s somehow managed to crack the code. He’s really managed to predict the next Fall.
And then it crumbles. This isn’t a theory; it’s wishful thinking. For one thing, linking spirituality and coordinates together makes no sense whatsoever. He hasn’t considered what’s making the Beings fall. And anyway, even if his algorithm did work, it doesn’t take into account when or where Teacake landed, so he wouldn’t get the right result. It’s really damn weird that he came so close to hitting the spot where she fell, but then the city isn’t that big – most coincidences aren’t actually that unusual when you look at their probability. Dad’s just seeing what he wants to see. Believing what he wants to believe.
I can’t tell him that though. Not, I realize with a sharp pinch of guilt, when I’m partly to blame for the flaws in his equations.
‘That’s amazing, Dad.’ The way he grins, so happy to get my approval, you’d think I was the parent and he the child. ‘So, how are you going to catch her?’
Rani glances up at me. ‘Her?’
I feel the blood drain from my cheeks. ‘Uh, or him. I just have a feeling she’ll be a woman.’
Dad smiles at me. Not his usual distracted twitch of the lips, but a real smile. It feels like the first time he’s properly looked at me in months. I’m starting to understand why Rani puts so much effort into this Being stuff.
‘That’s funny . . . I do too.’ He pulls a notebook towards him. ‘It’s difficult. You were right in a way, Jaya, when you said no one could survive a fall that fast.’ He writes an equation that’s more letters and symbols than numbers – nothing I can understand. ‘This calculates the velocity that an item would fall from a certain height, so we can estimate the speed using a Being’s average weight,’ he says. ‘Of course, that doesn’t take into account air resistance. Though most of the Beings have had both wings broken, they seem still to be able to move them, so in reality their descent isn’t quite as fast as we’d imagine.’