“Okay.” I wondered if I were still in shock. “I don’t have a passport,” I said. “If we’re going anywhere that needs one, I mean.”
“I know.”
She dug in her bag and handed me a brown envelope, smelling powerfully of fresh ink. The passport inside looked real and official, with a textured blue cover stamped with gold and pages that, tilted, showed security holograms of maple leaves and the Parliament Buildings. My picture looked like what you’d think a passport photo would look like—wan, resentful. Nicholas Prasad, Noted Grump. Where had she gotten that picture?
“Digital mockup,” she said. “I had Rutger do it. He’s very good.”
“At faking official documents,” I said. “Does he do this a lot?”
She shrugged.
“If he gets caught...”
“It’s not him that has to worry. It’ll be me.” She thought for a moment. “They’ll probably prosecute me as a juvenile, though.”
“Hope so.” I weighed it in my hand, then put it my back pocket. “You brought this with you. You knew I didn’t have a passport.”
“Lots of people don’t have passports. You still don’t need them for domestic flights if you have other photo ID.” But in the tactful silence she left I thought: Yeah, but you also knew that there are types of people who just don’t have passports. People who don’t expect to fly out of the country. People who, not to put too fine a point on it, can’t afford to fly out of the country.
“Can I call Rutger, talk to Mom and the kids?”
“No. It’s better this way.”
I closed my eyes. Did she know how close I was to the end of my rope, or could she, as an intelligent creature, guess?
Count to ten. Count to ten before you slam her into the wall. Or burst into tears. Or both.
The way she wasn’t able to distinguish between her decisions for her work, her research, her science, and her decisions for people. The way she saw it all as the same thing. An equation where the variables were unspeaking and fixed, rather than living, breathing humans making choices out of fear, love, courage. The way she saw no ties between people—no, between anyone other than her. The way everyone ranked below her, in some great misshapen pyramid of humanity where she was the tiny point at the top and everyone was simply spread out below her. The way she saw our ties as trivial, easily broken for the sake of logic, or convenience, or boredom. As if... as if her inability to love her family meant I didn’t love mine. As if “I’ll be back in a minute” were acceptable last words.
“There are rules,” she said softly. “They have rules. For me.”
Count to ten. Count to ten. Rules for the rich. Rules for fucking money. Rules for pretty people. Rules for scientists, the elite. Rules for the famous. Rules for people who said ‘Talk to my people.’
She said, “There are no rules for you.”
She had done the math, as always. Because math is pure. The rules of math are pure. And the rules of love are dirty and messy and bend and flex and break constantly. Count to ten. Don’t lose it.
“Do you need me to pack for you?” she said tentatively.
“I’ll do it.”
My schoolbag was wearing away at the bottom; I took my old messenger bag, packed a handful of clothing in a daze. “I’ll be back soon,” I said to the empty closet. Maybe it would hold the vibrations of my voice, bouncing between the soft fabrics, maybe it would hold a few molecules of my breath till I returned, maybe it would just hold the idea, not even the words, just the intent, just that I said it.
Back outside as we walked to the car, my neighbour came out of her house, quivering, phone in hand. I nearly ran over to steady her. “Mrs. Li,” I said. “It’s all right, it’s all over.”
“Nick! What happened?” she gasped. “The noise...”
“Um,” I said. “Break-in. We... already called the cops.” She was pretty old, there was no way the word ‘monster’ would be uttered anywhere near her. Second death of the day, two too many. She clung to her doorjamb, staring at the smashed window, the scratches on the tree, the siding, the doors...
“Who broke in? They could break in here!” she said. “Where are the babies? Nick! Come back here!”
I slung my bag into the car. Johnny got in next to me, the bag between us like a chaperone. I glanced up front to the driver: not someone I knew, a heavy, silver-haired older guy, the back of his neck crisscrossed with wrinkles, smelling powerfully of cologne. A bodyguard? No, not after all this time; she hated bodyguards. Rutger was enough, she always told me. Even just the sight of his big body, the shoulders that seemed like they couldn’t fit through a doorway.
Where had the bastard gone? He had vanished like a ghost, taking the people I loved with him. Vanished all. Like ghosts.
“Do you think I’m gonna need this extremely illegal passport?”
“Mm. Not sure.”
She wasn’t even listening. She was looking out the window at the long sunset, grey and pink, sparks of gold. You could barely tell the sun was going down except for the slow diminishing of the light. Where it would normally sit on the horizon was merely a brighter westerly glow than the rest of the sky. Her familiar profile was outlined in the last of it, amber and violet, like a salute to her beauty, a hat tipped to it. But if we failed, everything beautiful in the world would die, not just her.
“Look,” she said softly. “Whatever’s happening, it’s already affecting the light. See that? The books say it starts at the shoulders of the day. Dusk and dawn. And They’re gathering around us too. Getting ready.”
“Where—”
“I mean, gathering around the world. The planet. Those northern lights we saw the other day, we shouldn’t have seen those. I knew right away something was wrong. There hasn’t been enough solar wind activity to cause that. But magic in transition seems to cause a kind of similar ionizing effect.”
She slumped, forehead against the glass. “They know. They know something’s coming.”
“Well, we know too.”
“Knowing isn’t enough. We’ll never know as much as They do.”
I thought: but someone has to fight Them, all the same, even if no one knows how. In the books, in the movies, someone always has to fight back. Not to end up in the stories later, not to be rewarded with fame and praise and book deals. They just knew someone had to fight.
Had to.
CHAPTER NINE
BACK AT HER house, it was clear that she’d already begun to pull out the big guns, cranked Prodigy Mode to 11. Burning time, I thought. Every flat surface in the Baskerville room, her biggest library, was covered in printouts and photocopies, maps taped to the walls where she’d run out of space at the plastic tables. All five computers and both fax machines were on, singing a quiet chorale of uninterrupted chiming beeps. The heat from their monitors and processors turned it into a dry sauna.
I put my bag on the couch and slumped down, sinking into the dark leather till I was almost folded in half, hearing springs crunch.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Buy a new couch.”
“If we survive, I’ll take you couch shopping.”
“Are They gonna get in here, too?” I said. “Mostly, I’m too tired to care right now, but I just need a yes or a no.”
“They will if they want. But I hope we won’t be here much longer. I’m close to figuring out what we’ve got to do. Here, I got you a cell phone. I already put my number in it.”
I accepted the silver scarab reverently, flipping it open—a huge full colour screen, almost two inches across. No signal down here though, under the concrete and the metal and the earth. In my pocket it felt heavy, reassuring. It was obviously one of her cast-offs, but I felt better having it.
“What are you doing there?” I said, pointing at the humming monitors and piles of papers.
“Half of it is a half-assed research plan,” she said, handing me a stapled handful of papers covered in her dense, small writing. I flipped through it, understanding maybe one word
in three. “Working backwards. To shut any gate during an alignment, you have to find it. I don’t know exactly where this one is—I only know it’s not the Gate of Ganzir, of course, because that got destroyed in Ur.”
“Oh, yes, of course not that one.”
“Then you have to fulfil the conditions that were put on it. I don’t know what those are either. I’ll have to access some source material and there isn’t much that can be relied on, and the good stuff is mostly in languages I don’t know.”
“So first step is...” I said, lost.
She counted on her fingers. “Teach myself ancient Akkadian, Sumerian, and Babylonian. Start hitting up museums, archives, libraries, universities, and collectors to see who’s got things I might need. Contact some people who might be able to provide information on short notice.”
“Just information?”
“Mostly people in the Ssarati Society. They used to worship the Ancient Ones. They’ve had a hundred different names over the years.”
“What can they do? Magic?”
“If there’s enough magic in our world, yeah, but the ones who know that They’re real, who aren’t playing, won’t. Because they truly understand what the threat is. The harder you fight, the worse your punishment is when They come through. You’re disincentivized to do anything but lie flat and hope for the best. Ironic, huh?”
“Son of a bitch,” I said, and meant it. A gold-and-blue dung beetle wobbled hopefully towards me on the back of the couch; I found a receipt in my jeans, wadded it into a roundish ball, and handed it over. “They take all this seriously. Will they take us seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“...They know you too. Or you know them.”
“It’s a long story. The great weakness of humanity is the one everybody knows,” she said. “It’s that we’ve always hungered for the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But the reason we hunger is that knowledge is our only power; it’s the only thing we’ve got to fight Them. It always has been, and it always will be.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Keep the printer refilled with paper and do coffee runs?”
“Oh my God.”
“For real, though,” she said. “You know how to work the Gaggia in the main kitchen, right?”
“No, I meant... well, first of all, up yours, and secondly, I thought you were further along than this. I thought maybe...”
“That I had everything worked out? No. I’m working on the ghost of a hope here, and whatever records survived through the years. That’s a ghost too.” She waved a hand above her head, a few staticy hairs rising to her fingertips like obedient soldiers. “This, what they gave me...”
“Your... covenant.”
“It doesn’t make me magic. It doesn’t make me smarter than your average smart bastard. Just faster. It’s as if... I can just put together the same puzzle a hundred times quicker than the smart bastard.”
“Wish someone had told my parents that,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “remember that time I, a ten year old, and you, a genius, decided to wash my dad’s car, and it was parked in the sun, and you threw a bucket of cold water on the windshield and it exploded?”
“Shut up.”
“Man, and they used to think you were a good influence on me,” I said, shaking my head.
“Really? They never wanted us to hang out.”
“It wasn’t you they didn’t like,” I said. “They didn’t want me to be distracted. They wanted me to study. I mean, Dad, mostly. Mom was much less of a hardass. He thought girls would keep me from getting good marks.”
“Joke’s on him,” Johnny said. “I’m not even into that kind of thing.”
“What...kind of thing?” I said nervously.
“Oh, you know. Dating or whatever. ‘Romance.’ Boys.”
“Excuse me.”
“I mean, have you met boys?”
“Excuuuuse me.”
“I dunno,” she said vaguely, shuffling a thick deck of printout. “Just not interested in the whole idea.”
“Well, maybe you’ll find it interesting later.”
“Could be. Don’t really care either way.”
That kind of thing, I thought; was she trying to tell me flat-out that she’d never feel about me the way I felt about her? Or wasn’t sure I felt about her? Or had, at some point, recently felt about her? Maybe it would be another fourteen years till she told me that. I said, “I got good marks anyway. Well, good by my standards.”
“Look, maybe he didn’t get a genius in the family, but neither did the Chambers. Technically.”
“Technically. But you were talking about... about puzzles?”
“Yeah. I’m still gathering pieces. I’m going as fast as I can. But I can’t do anything until I have enough to at least start the frame.”
“And when you do?”
“Then we go wherever we have to go.”
“This is going to be like The Road to El Dorado, isn’t it?” I said. “We let you watch that movie too many times.”
“It is not!” she said. “The only similarity is our hair. And I’ve only seen it six times. Besides, we’re trying to save the world, not get a million tons of gold.”
“Man, are we on the wrong mission.”
I looked at her for as long as I could stand, like staring at the sun, trying to take it all in—her eager, frightened, golden face under the ruff of feathery hair, the piles of paper and books, the monitors all showing photos of pottery with stick writing on it. The great hope for everything. I wondered if the slow, rolling boil in my gut was anticipation or hatred. For this, I had been torn from the people I loved. She had promised they would be safe. I clung to that, wished I could write it on the wall. For both of us to remember. “I’ll go get you some coffee,” I said.
AS SHE WORKED, I ended up not being useful for much more than to lie on the couch and, just as she’d said, fill her with espresso and the printer with paper, occasionally unjamming both. She was so focused on what she called the ‘wet problems’ of the world that her particular genius had never really turned to mere gadgets, so she used the same office stuff as anyone else—high-end, of course, but nothing special. “That’s not what needs fixing,” she’d say, when I complained about the limitations of cars or TVs. “People. People need fixing.” All our lives I’d never argued the point. After all, who was better qualified to fix people than her, the—inarguably, publicly, photogenically, financially—best person there was?
Her voice was a soft drone in the background in a dozen languages, phone cradled on her shoulder as she typed on one of the computers. I watched pottery shards flick past almost too fast to see, photographed on white backgrounds, maybe from museum catalogues. Bricks of clay, then bricks of text, black on grey or black on purple, old mimeographs. Colourful vases of glass or pottery, swirled with drawings and words, then tablets like the ones in The Ten Commandments, things chipped or stamped into them. It was dizzying to watch.
With a little start I realized I could see something rising off her like pollen, exactly like pollen, a thin, golden mist blowing from her hair, just visible in the lights of her desk.
“John? You look like you’re... like...” I cast around for a word. “Steaming.”
“Mm.” She laughed, a tired wheeze. “Prodigy mode. That’s time coming off.”
“I’ve never seen that before.”
“You’d never have been able to. Magic is coming through from somewhere, like I said. Whenever it does that, anything of Theirs becomes more powerful. You’ve been... exposed at close range for a couple of days, so I’m not surprised you can see it now. More proximity effects.”
“Jesus.”
“What does it look like?”
“Like pollen. Spruce pollen. Like, blowing off the tree and sticking to my car.”
“Gross. Tree sperm.”
“Super gross. Ent jizz.”
“Oh
no, ew,” she said, turning away from the keyboard, “I just realized there are going to be so many ents in the second Rings movie and now that’s all I’ll be able to think about.”
“Ew.” I dug my way out of the couch and walked to her desk. “How close are we to everything being fixed?”
She rocked her hand in the air. “I thought Germany might be the next step, because they might have some documentation about what happened in the war. But I don’t know if I’d trust it, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get access to it.”
“...What... happened in the... war?”
“Same thing that always happens with Them,” she said. She picked a printout from a pile—a mosaic, black and white, showing a seething mass rising over a small town on a hill. The houses looked so defenseless under the shadow of the monster that I shivered for a second, thinking of my own house, the exposed bones of the frame.
She said, “Like I said. The big man says he’ll pay Them back. Time, human sacrifices, animals burned on the altars. The Ancient Ones love life force, the way it feels in Their teeth. For years, the cults feed Them, the big man thrives. But it falls through, or he cheats, or there’s a terrible insult, or maybe the big man in the next valley simply makes a better deal. They come up, and destroy everything. Many, many times. Noah’s flood. Atlantis. Heraclaeion. Mu. Tunguska. Uruk.”
“You’re just saying random syllables now.” I stared at the picture, then her, then the picture again. Someone had depicted this disaster in tiny rocks, long after it happened. Maybe just from stories. Second-hand, third-hand, a hundred years later. But in Germany, just sixty years ago, almost close enough to touch... “Are you saying that Hitler...?”
“Yeah. The thing is, his magic didn’t work and he never did open the gate underneath Berchtesgaden. He screwed up, the Nazi researchers screwed up. So do I want to get into the Nazi archives? Even if I could, I don’t think so.”
“Jesus. Not if they did it wrong. But where else can you look?”
“Do you know where the oldest library in the world is?” she said.
CHAPTER TEN
Beneath the Rising Page 11
