by Dana Cameron
Recalling the setup that Okamura-san and Ken-san had in Kanazawa, and what Gerry had told me about the major Family strongholds around New England, I put that knowledge to work for me.
“How soon?” Knight’s patience was wearing thin.
“Immediately. As soon as inhumanly possible.”
Representative Nichols gave me a stern look. “You don’t want much, do you?”
“Just enough. It all has to be done as secretly as possible,” I said. “Also, we’re going to need sovereign status. I don’t care how you do it. Make it a reservation; create an embassy. Something. But my team—me, the dragons, and anyone I say—has to be inviolate. If the Makers want to come here, this is where they’ll come. If I have to act on behalf of us—Fangborn, Normals, everyone on this plane of existence—I need to be subject to nothing but my own law. It’s not like you can make me president, or king, or whatever. But you might be able to make me an ambassador.”
“Sovereign status?”
“Or diplomatic status. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but make it so I have authority without breaking too many rules. Make something up.” “And you’ll want some kind of distance from me,” I almost said, but didn’t want to give him any ideas about what could happen if I failed in whatever happened with the Makers next. “There’s got to be some fancy word for what that is.”
“Without breaking rules,” Knight said, “I believe your fancy word may look like ‘treason,’ or ‘secession,’ or ‘act of war.’ What you’re proposing violates many, many federal laws and more than a few international treaties. The president, NATO, the EU, the United Nations . . . all will be very interested.”
I wanted to say, “Since when do you care about the UN, Senator Knight?” as he pretty much played out his games with very little thought for the rights of other nations. But I thought that would be childish and I wasn’t here for my own vengeance. I felt that much of the ill use I’d had at the hands of the senator would be easily repaid now. But I took a deep breath and settled for signifying, implication, and passive aggression instead. “I have complete confidence in your abilities as a lawmaker and Hill player and am certain you are capable of organizing this. Of course, I’ll look to you and the rest of . . . my advisers. I don’t plan to go into this without a lot of help. But never forget, I’m working to save us all, and whatever help you give me will be considered . . . an act of friendship.”
Senator Knight looked thoughtful. “Given the special status and laws regarding the Fangborn that have been on the books, however secret, I believe I can craft some language that might do.”
“And I would like a cat,” I said suddenly. I surprised myself; I had no idea where that came from. “I mean, it’s not top priority, but I’ve always wanted one, and now I’ll have a place for it.” The wistfulness in my voice was pathetic, even to my own ears, but I figured, I might not be alive to look forward to having a cat at some point in the future. There’d either be plenty of people left to look after it if I died, or the world would be gone, and it wouldn’t matter.
“A cat.” Huge disdain. “Any particular color?”
“I dunno. I’ve always wanted a black one, but just a youngish one, from a shelter or something. Doesn’t need to be a fancy breed, you know?” I realized I was getting kinda soppy. “And whatever it needs in the way of . . . cat stuff.”
“That’s it?”
“Beer. Vodka. A lot of liquor, basically.” I shrugged. Knight looked downright dangerous now. “And you can make that as fancy as you want.”
I headed to the lab; I needed a moment to collect my rampaging thoughts. “Dr. Osborne?”
“All right, Zoe?” He was there, rubbing his hands, dancing a little dance of glee. “Now that was wicked! What else can we explode? Let’s do it again!”
“Trust me, we will,” I said. “Did you catch the stuff with the dragons, and what happened after, too?”
“Oh, yeah I did!”
“Well, I need a little help sorting that out. As in, what. The. Fuck.”
“I think it’s pretty clear. You’re getting powerful enough that acting in your best interest is rewarded by the acquisition of artifacts. It’s what predators get for being predators, right?”
“There’s that word again. I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to. But I’m not wrong, am I?”
I thought about it. “Like what dragged me away from that staked-out child molester in New Jersey, so that I could find the information about the asylum where Porter Senior was raising my mother. Which led to me realizing a whole new set of abilities.”
“Exactly. Perhaps there’s both a Fangborn reason for you to pick up on an artifact or a bit of information that will help you become a better, more evolved Fangborn, combined with a personal desire to be near that same place? Knowing what happened to Richard Klein was hugely important to you. That drew you to Kanazawa, but mostly because the katana and the other artifacts could . . . reel you in. I think the stronger you are, the more the artifacts are attracted to you.”
“There was a lot drawing me to Japan,” I said, nodding. “Finding the short Celtic sword, whatever that is. Killing Jacob Buell. Not a bad haul.”
“And that’s why you had the instinct not only to consider nicking a few extra baubles but it’s also what inspired you to rescue the dragons. You got many of their jewels, even if a lot were burned up in the attack and retreat home. This connection between you and the artifacts is getting stronger, and I wonder if this might not be adjacent to some of my research on how the Fangborn Change. I’ve been playing around with quantum entanglement as an explanation for that phenomenon.”
Geoffrey and I had very different ideas of what “playing” meant, apparently. “Yeah, you said . . . spooky something?”
“Yes, spooky action at a distance.” Then he launched into an explanation that used words like “remote steering,” “qubit states,” and “buckyballs.” It was when he began discussing the possibility that we were dealing with a “landscape multiverse” that I held up my hand.
“You mean . . . like a parallel universe?” I hazarded.
“Yes, but . . .” He was baffled. “It was William James who came up with the term, “multiverse.” He was American. Do you even understand that time and space are the same thing? How can you not know any of this?”
I was starting to lose my patience. “Yeah, archaeologist.”
He waved his hands. “Okay, okay, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Quantum entanglement is the faster-than-light communication of an entangled system with the time dilation of special relativity, allowing time to stand still in light’s point of view . . . Alice asked, ‘How long is forever?’ And the White Rabbit answered, ‘Sometimes, just one second’—”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m trying, but even that—”
“Let me just say that there might be important relations between you and these objects, between states of the Fangborn Change, that could enlighten us as to the nature of the universe, multiverses—”
He finally twigged that I needed more specific, concrete ideas, for now. “Let’s focus on you and your experiences. There are connections among these multiverses—you call them your mind-lab or meta-realm or voids or whatever. I think that the Makers might come from another multiverse superimposed on our own, and that they’ve found ways to bridge between theirs and ours. Just streams of particles would be all it took. You, the dragons, the artifacts all have some way of communicating across these spaces. That’s why you’re able to play with time, and now, space. I’m trying to define how you’re doing it.”
“Um, okay. The how isn’t so important as the how come, to me, though.”
He waved a hand. “It’s all part of the same problem. Take the name the dragons are always calling you. Why Hellbender?”
“I don’t know. I looked it up. It’s some kind of ugly giant
lizard.”
“Salamander,” he corrected automatically.
“Whatever. I thought it was just what I look like to Quarrel. But . . . it’s got to be more. He once said I would become the Hellbender and none but my Makers could overtake me. Or something like that.”
“Well, have you ever thought that it might be hell you are bending? Not fire and brimstone, but the place where time and space get really weird, beyond our brains to comprehend? Maybe that’s what it refers to. You’re learning to do in a very short span what he came by naturally after centuries of communicating with the Makers. He understands you have real power, to be able to do that.”
Geoffrey seemed very excited, but so far, not a damn thing he’d said trying to reassure me had worked. In fact, quite the opposite. I didn’t like the idea of bending time and space, and I most certainly didn’t like thinking about bending any hell, either. I made a note to ask Quarrel what he meant as soon as possible.
On the other hand, if Quarrel could explain it to me, the answer might be even worse. That’s how I was finding it with dragons.
“Now tell me about these shifts of temporal perception you’ve experienced,” he said.
I mentioned seeing the rebuilt oracular temple at Claros—or maybe I should say the original structure as it was back when it was first standing. I described the seeming lack of time passing for Adam while I was in the house in Roskilde in Denmark. After a moment’s consideration, I described the fight with the two Fangborn there in nineteenth-century costume, and how they vanished, the swirling chaos, the flickering sight of a giant snake.
“But I don’t know what that was, really,” I said, half-apologetically. “Some kind of hallucination, or some trick of the artifacts to protect themselves? I don’t know.”
Geoffrey stared at me. “Well, the idea of a wormhole springs to mind. A wormhole is a shortcut through space/time and wyrm is another word for “dragon”; maybe there’s a connection in the stories of the Fangborn . . . What do you call it?”
“Um, culture?”
“The way that these things move between multiverses. I mean, I’ve never actually seen one fly—and I’m not sure they are structurally sound for flight. The wings seem more, not vestigial, but not quite developed yet. So, if you want to look at the different myths and legends about dragons flying, I’d say it’s more like teleportation.” Geoffrey took a deep breath, and a disbelieving grin just about split his face. “And now you can do it. This is awesome!”
At the same time I said, “Terrifying.”
“Zoe, it’s all in the name. You’ve got to learn to bend these things, these hells, to your will.” He nodded. “Now’s no time to be timid; that’s all I can say. When you need to use these powers, go in big, like you own the place; that’s the only way.”
“It would be nice if I knew exactly how to do it and end up not scattered across the universe. Multiverses,” I corrected myself.
He nodded. “I’m working on it.”
I’d spent so much time thinking about abstractions and hypotheses that I needed something physical, concrete but not life threatening. I went to the gym, where I found Dmitri Parshin jumping rope. He’d always been an imposing figure to me. His muscles had suggested steroids, and so did his viciousness. I’d thought of Dmitri as evil—and he had been once, until I changed that—but now I recognized the discipline that backed up his ego and his ambition. Clean shaven, dark hair carefully cut, he moved with practiced ease even though he was sweating from the intensity of his workout. I was surprised to see him there, but he and the men under his command who had survived the Battle of Boston were staying with the Fangborn. Eventually, they’d move to the island with me.
It was cheaper for the government to have all their criminals in one place.
“I’ll come back later,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing here anyway.”
“Here.” He wiped off his face and went to a bin. He pulled out a pair of boxing gloves and threw them to me. He donned a pair of training mitts and held them up. “Work on your combinations.”
“I don’t have any.” But that wasn’t true. “I once learned some boxing, from a friend.”
“Then it’s time you added to that.” He gestured with the mitts. “Give me jab, cross.”
We’d worked our way up to speed, and I relaxed a little. Thoughts crept in, though, when I was doing a “jab, jab, cross, duck, uppercut.” I didn’t duck fast enough and Dmitri caught me on the side of the head with the mitt and knocked me over.
“You’re not concentrating. That will get you killed.” There was nothing of pity in his voice.
“Yeah, I know. This is just practice.”
“Practice concentrating on not getting killed. What are you thinking about?”
I wanted a distraction, so I turned it around on him. “What’s your long game, Dmitri? Because I know you have one.”
“Power. I go where power is. Sometimes it’s me. Right now, it’s you.”
I nodded and returned my gloves to the bin. “And what if I gave the power back to the Makers? What if I used that power they’re giving me to take myself out of the running? And they’d have to wait another ten or fifteen or thousand years for the next Fangborn who gets all the goodies?”
He stared at me, no expression on his face. Finally, the hint of a smile. “You’re not going to do that.”
“Let’s say I am.”
“I suppose I would find my own way of communicating with the Makers,” he said. “Ally myself with your friend Quarrel.”
“Maybe you would.” I thought secretly that the first thing I would do after I rejected the Makers’ power would be to kill Dmitri. Just in case. There was no way I was letting him get near the Makers or the dragons or anyone powerful enough to communicate with them.
Communication—I suddenly remembered the impression of reaching other minds when I’d experimented with the scarab chip. I didn’t want more abstract physics, so I turned my thoughts to Carolina Perez-Smith. “Carolina. Logic isn’t enough to deal with her brand of crazy. Reason isn’t nearly enough.”
Dmitri removed his mitts and wiped his face. “What do you mean?”
“I’m thinking about Carolina, her whole machinery. It just seems there’s no good way to deal with her and her brand of narcissism.
He regarded me with pity and humor. “You can’t win with logic, Zoe. With her, we go in, full throttle, and tear it down, burn it, then salt the earth for good measure.”
It was so easy for him. Violence was always the solution.
I nodded, slowly. Then, “No, we can’t do that. We can’t give her anything more to use against us. Check that—it doesn’t matter if we give her anything. If we don’t, she’ll make shit up, spin hysteria from speculation and rumors. We can’t feed the monster, either. We can’t feed the beast; we can’t destroy it . . .”
An idea hit me. “We starve it. We take its food away, we starve it, then feed it poison. We cut off some heads, bury the others.”
“What do you mean?”
I’d forgotten about him, struck by my idea. “Nothing,” I said, running down the hallway. “Thanks for the lessons.”
Chapter Fourteen
I showered and then asked Danny, Vee, Lisa Tarkka, and Claudia and Gerry Steuben to join me in a meeting room.
“The Makers,” I said. “I’ve told you about what I know of them. What do you think they are? And please . . . use simple words.”
Danny focused on a space on the wall above my head as he thought. It was a familiar habit, as though he were concentrating on the answers that hovered outside of our perception. “Maybe the Makers are a kind of megapathogen, a complex biological organism, that spreads. Maybe they need real estate; maybe they need information. Maybe they just want to see what’s out there.”
“And it would take a lot of energy for them to move or cre
ate something, right?” I remember how exhausted I was after the construction of the blaster and using it. “So . . . how did they make us, if that is true?”
“Maybe it’s just a”—Lisa flicked her wrist, in a gesture of throwing—“series of very little messages. Maybe they send out genes like spores, to turn worlds to something useful for them? Maybe they change your human DNA with a couple of switches on, or off. Or maybe they’re a virus that takes over in some ways, to their advantage. Something that doesn’t take a lot of effort. We know so little about the full range of genetic information; we can’t identify something like fifty percent of the bacterial or viral information in your gut. It’s biological dark matter, doesn’t look like anything we know about now.”
Eeeeewww, I thought. Like puppet masters or . . . “What is that cat disease? You know, the one that’s supposed to make you want more cats, so it gets more hosts?”
Lisa’s face cleared. “Ah, Toxoplasma gondii. Well, that’s popularly misunderstood, but the analogy of a host and parasites might be accurate here.”
“We could just think of them as aliens,” Danny said. “With advanced technology and understanding of the fabric of the universe; it makes the most sense. I mean, he talks about planes of existence and the like.”
I knew he was right, of course, but I felt my stomach flip. It was bad enough for me and the unacculturated Normal population to grasp that the Fangborn existed, stretching taut the already straining fabric of credulity. Now aliens? “I wish that wasn’t the case.”
“Zoe, you’ve already encountered vampires and dragons,” Vee said. “And you’re already on first-name terms with the Makers. Why is that idea so distasteful?”
