I remembered, out of nowhere, the time we had been riding an Edmonton bus back to St. Albert from a book-signing and been accosted by an angry physicist, a famous one, she’d said later. “You’ve ruined my life!” he shrieked. “You’ve ruined my life! Ruined!” White hair, red bowtie, yellow teeth every which way. But he wouldn’t tell her what she had done or when, and she just hung her head and apologized. She knew, though. “I was right,” she whispered when he was gone. “About everything.”
Johnny was yelling at the ticket agent now, her high voice carrying over the crowd; I looked over nervously, as did several other people. The ticket agent was pointing at me, beckoning me to come over. I shook my head—he probably thought I was from here, spoke his language. It was weird that I felt so out of place, surrounded by people who looked at least a little like me—some shade of brown, black hair—till I realized that it was because back home, everyone was white and I wasn’t used to seeing so many people who weren’t. You grow up with them, you assume everybody everywhere is white. Holy crap. Johnny would love it when I told her. I stood on tiptoe to see her better, about to walk over.
And in that moment I saw a face that stood out at first simply for its colour—a pale grey, bluish at the extremities—and then for what I realized, sinkingly, its familiarity: the man in the Adidas jacket. I dropped into a crouch, and duck-walked the few steps separating me from Johnny, who had stopped yelling and was instead laughing with the ticket agent, which was beyond my comprehension but also not my problem right now. She accepted a few slips of printed paper and turned when I tugged on her bag.
“That guy from the airport is here!” I whispered. “I saw him! How in the hell did he find us? I didn’t see him on the plane!”
“Are you sure it’s him?”
“You could believe me for once in your life. Jesus. Look, he’s over there.”
She glanced over, then grabbed my bag to drag me behind a concrete support pillar. I leaned my face on it and tried to watch the guy, who was scanning the crowd, a still, white point in the swirling mass of people and luggage.
“What are we gonna do?!”
“Avoid, avoid, avoid,” she murmured. “Don’t draw attention to ourselves.”
“Did you get bus tickets?”
“Yeah, it’s over there. The grey one.”
“The one that’s... pulling out?”
“Yup.” She looked at me—for a moment the old Johnny, the one I remembered, all grin and wink—and we took off at a sprint through the crowd. I gasped at the roaring-hot air as we pounded the few steps towards the bus, which hadn’t picked up much speed behind the tour bus ahead of it. Black exhaust obscured Johnny for a second, and when I could see again, she was hammering on the bus door and waving something—her ticket, I thought. The bus slowed rather than stopping, and we swung aboard, wheezing and sweating. The last thing I saw as we got moving again was the face of the man in the blue jacket—staring right at me now, the expression slack, vacant, not angry.
It was packed, the air inside a solid wall of stench, body odour, cologne, diesel, garlic, feet, even a faint smell of animal shit, like a petting zoo, although I didn’t see any animals—maybe it was on someone’s shoes. The bus itself was an ancient, grease-smudged Nissan that was obviously burning some of the oil it had abundantly dripped on the concrete pad at the station. Delicate towers of blue smoke rose from the holes in the floorboards.
Johnny shoved down the aisle to the back, and we sat on the floor on top of several battered suitcases, to keep our pants out of the dirt. Half the passengers turned to stare at us, nearly all the standing men. The women, sitting, seemed too preoccupied with wrangling their bags, food, kids, and each other to care—mostly kids. I thought of Mom and felt a lump rise in my throat. I had always been the one who dealt with the kids the most, but they ran to us equally when they were hurt or scared or bored, seeking the love they knew we would give them, no matter who was doing the wrangling. Christ, where were they? How could Johnny have whisked them off like that? To not know made me feel slightly unmoored, as if I might finish this trip and discover that I had no home to return to, or that I’d never had a home at all. That I was an orphan, parentless, siblingless. Sweat was trickling down my face; I wiped it on my shoulder and glanced over at Johnny.
“Hope you don’t have to pee for the next six hours,” she said.
“The way I’m sweating, I doubt it. Man, how did they even sell tickets for a bus this full?”
“Let’s just say that not everybody here paid the same price for their ticket,” she said.
We waited while I worked that one out. “Like... bribes and stuff?”
“A bribe. A little one.”
“By your standards.”
“Yeah. Not by his, I guess.” She leaned her head back on a suitcase and closed her eyes. “Money, you know, it’s... a lifeline up to a point, it lets you live, but after that it’s a cushion. You fall, you hit the cushion, you’re fine. You get right back up again. Life is softer, easier. It gives you more options than just to fall onto the floor.”
“Hell yeah. What’s that saying? It greases the wheels.”
“Check. It won’t buy us the information we need,” she added, “because that’s got no price but ingenuity. But it will help us find it.”
“What if you get robbed or something?”
“What, like I’ve never been robbed? People try in every single country I’ve ever been in. Why do you think I travel with a steel mesh bag? There’s always ways to access the funds.”
“What a creepy, rich-person thing to say,” I said. But it wasn’t just access, I thought. It was that she was missing something different, something fundamental about being rich. Maybe the authority, the markers of authority: the clothes, the security, the planes and cars and jewelry. She had some of them, but still struck me as one of those bright birds that is bright to attract a mate, but she preferred to pretend she was dull because she liked the dullness better. Everyone might say ‘That’s because she doesn’t want a mate,’ even though it was more that she didn’t want to be noticed at all.
But any small moving thing in the stillness would be noticed.
I leaned my head on a suitcase, shoving my hair behind my ear. “Anyway, tell me about this library we’re going to.”
“It’s kind of an amazing story,” she said. “It was started by this woman named Fatima Al-Fihri—”
“A woman? That must have been some news story around here.”
“Wow, way to pigeonhole the entire population of the Middle East for all time,” she said. I felt myself blush despite the heat of the bus. It actually had been a shitty thing to say; I wished I could swallow my words and just let her tell the story. Smooth move, Prasad.
She said, “Anyway, if you’re about done knowing nothing about the history of human civilization, she inherited some money from her father—he was a businessman—this would have been back in about eight-fifty AD, by the way. Not eighteen-fifty, eight-fifty. It was a mosque, and then a small school, and then a university. So what we’re going to is technically the university library, although it’s not a university any more.”
“What is it now?”
“Uh, closed. It’s being restored.”
“What?”
“I think the mosque is still in use. But the library, it’s in rough shape—roof is crumbling, electrical system is shot, water leaks and stuff—so people aren’t technically allowed in. Just the restoration staff.”
“Then how are we supposed to use it?” I said. “More bribes?”
“Gather data, yada yada, improvise. We’ll just have to watch out for…” She chewed on her lip, uneasy. “Fes is kind of a collection spot for magic; it rolls there like rainwater finding the low spot in the landscape. There are a couple of dozen, worldwide. Places like that attract… things like that. Human and otherwise. The minimal levels of natural magic wouldn’t usually be an issue, just a curiosity. But now…”
“Now what?”
/>
“I don’t know. It’s a place where magic could be used. Where if I use my abilities, it might be like sending up a flare. And I’ve been thinking about the reactor, about what Drozanoth said...”
I hated to hear its name in her mouth. The familiarity of it, the way she didn’t hesitate or call it monster or thing. Her eyes were glassy in her red face, seeming much lighter than usual.
“I was running through the calculations again on the plane and it kind of struck me: where are the topographical atoms going?”
“…What?” I said, helpfully.
“They’re not here. They’re not in transit. They’re somewhere else, but they didn’t move to get there; they just flipped.”
“Uh.”
“Well, and my measurements were showing... it’s, um, it’s a little vague, but I think it might be another dimension.”
“Oh,” I said uncertainly. “Like from... what’s that book Carla’s reading in school. With the drawing. Tesseracts? Length, width, height, time, and...”
“No, not like that. But I mean, sort of exactly like that? It’s not a...they’re not going a distance away. They just flip across a plane, which is two dimensions. And then they flip back. And that’s what’s generating the power. I thought they were just staying in the water, but they’re not. They go next door, they immediately come back.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. But They want it so badly. I’m missing something, I know I am. And I think They know what it is. I have to figure it out.”
“Why can’t you ever be normal? You don’t even have normal enemies,” I said.
“They say you can rate someone’s quality by the quality of their enemies,” she said. “Maybe that’s it, though. They want quantum particles? Well, fuck ’em. That’ll be us too. They’ll have to use every trick up Their slee…whatevers, on us. We just have to keep moving. They might figure out where we are or what we’re doing, but I’m not gonna let Them figure out both.”
“Wave and particle.”
“Wave and particle.”
She chuckled, rested her chin on her shoulder, and closed her eyes: conversation over. As she dozed—catlike, she’d always been able to sleep anywhere, even on this noisy, fume-filled, well-over-body-temperature bus with pantslegs and skirts flapping in her face—I carefully got her notes from my bag to see if I could make heads or tails of it. It was almost impossible to read; the bus was bouncing so hard that the plastic windows were both falling open and, actually, falling out. Ochre dust stormed inside, obscuring the pages.
The destruction of Ur, four thousand years ago. I hadn’t even known people had lived in cities that long. We had done mostly North American and European history in school, so I could answer bunches of questions about the Russian Revolution, but I didn’t, I realized, know much about anything older than a few hundred years ago. The Sumerians wrote everything down on clay tablets, which would of course last longer than paper. It had been a long time since British archaeologists had found the key that let Johnny learn Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite. The little mounds you could find stuff in were called ‘tells’—ha! Like poker. I’d have to surprise her with that one when she woke up.
And all the big men, no matter where, had made exhaustive efforts to repair, decorate, and furnish the temples of their gods, but it hadn’t been enough. What the gods wanted was life force, souls, whatever was inside a person or animal that made them go. Round bowls to hold the bones and ashes as needed, to keep blood off the floor of their beautiful temples.
The old records suggested that the benevolent spirits of old, the Elder Gods, might have been able to help us fight Them—but they had tapped out many battles ago, and were all trapped, dead, or asleep. Marduk had fought Them and put Them to sleep a long time ago, but he had been put under himself, thanks to base treachery: a friend or lover turned against him. Marutukku had kept the gates shut, but he was definitively dead. Johnny had written Apprentices? next to this depressing fact, circled in pink gel pen.
When the Ancient Ones, enemies of the Elder Gods, first came to human civilizations, They had possessed so many people that exorcisms eventually became commonplace, till even the average marketplace soothsayer who sold onions for a living could do one. But precisely because it had become so common, no one had written down the spells.
Speaking of: more of her notes, in turquoise and green gel pen, hard to read. The Spanish Inquisition? No. The Salem witch trials? Yes. The Crusades? Yes. 9/11? No? But check w/ Society.
It had to be here... yes. More notes. Holocaust? No. Jonestown? No.
Carthage, destroyed by Them. Where in the hell was Carthage? It sounded familiar. A Carthaginian shipwreck had been found in Honduras in the 1970s, filled with gold bars and skeletons—they had gotten lost, her notes said, fleeing for West Africa, after They invaded the city. I felt sorry for the refugees. You think you’re escaping, your whole boat sinks. Awful. Jesus.
The Candlestick of the Andes in Peru pointed inland to the geoglyphs of Nazca, itself a great gate of immense power, which was why you could only see the designs from the air. A rope of astonishing, almost inhuman thickness was attached to the central fork of the Candlestick, marked as taboo by local residents, who knew better than to go near it. There was a drawing, in pink again, a series of pulleys and counterweights, maybe Johnny’s idea for what the rope did. Something They would pull on, to do some dark and unknown work that even thousands of humans working together could not do.
Mu, or Lemuria, the lost continent (her note: Island) in the Pacific, destroyed in some cataclysm twelve thousand years ago. How had that been a civilization, I wondered? Surely we hadn’t even graduated from hunter-gatherer yet? Clear signs of one of Their doomsday weapons, so complete had been the destruction. Sunk into an abyss so deep that nothing of Earth could swim to the bottom of it, and we moderns, with our remote subs and our satellite imaging and our radar, would never find anything but its traces, vanished as completely as if we only knew about the dinosaurs from footprints fossilized in mud.
The notes began to blur together, unhelped by the beginning of a panic attack. Cities ruled by ‘great animals’ that no one could stand to look at or touch; winged serpents; statues of weeping Gods in long, unkempt robes with bulging eyes where they didn’t belong. Maps with monoliths marked with X’s or checkmarks in every colour of gel pen: Scotland, Peru, Wales, France, Bolivia, India, Uganda, Australia, dozens in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean Sea. Thunderbird myths. Salt lakes. Inter-tribal, international, and perhaps even interchronological (what?) slavery enabled by Their spells. A gate in Wyoming, strange round towers, paintings of volcanoes spewing demons rather than lava. So many human sacrifices, so much blood. Kings bragging that they had met Them and lived. Festivals and ceremonies: They loved those, eating the life force of hundreds of people and animals at a time.
I put the manuscript back into her bag and covered my eyes with my hand for a second. I had thought she’d been... well, not bullshitting me about Their history, but certainly exaggerating. But it seemed that the opposite had happened, and she had been skimming over it—maybe not for my sake, maybe not even on purpose, maybe just out of distaste. There was so much out there. There was so much. Until now I hadn’t truly realized how much was arrayed against us: that thousands of us had spent thousands of years throwing armies, sorcerors, intrigue, bargains, entire mountain ranges against them, and now it was down to two people.
The entire history of the world had been the story of Them proving that we were weak and insignificant, and that we should feel fear rather than hope. And whenever They saw hope in us, the only thing to do was beat it out of us, double-cross us, blow our cities to rubble and remind us that we had been conquered, till They got kicked out again.
Well, we’ve got something They’ve never had: Johnny Chambers. That means we can do this, I told myself. But it sounded fake and small even in my head.
Their own had fought Them befo
re, and been ground into dust.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE BUS STOPPED several times, but she’d said that Fes was the end of the line, so we simply waited while it half-emptied, refilled, swapped a few people, refilled again. It must have been a popular route. The women sitting in front of us passed around flatbread and a huge bag of dried dates, handing them directly to Johnny after staring at me for a minute, as if not wanting to feed someone so unrepentantly and ostentatiously a kidnapper of young girls.
I had lost my appetite in the heat but made myself eat a couple of dates, startled by their rich sweetness, before passing the bag on. I’d never eaten one before, and wanted to nudge Johnny and be like, “Look, I’m on my first date,” but she didn’t look like she was in the mood. Luckily the sun went down after the fifth stop, cooling the bus perceptibly; I was still sweating, but just my face and neck instead of every square inch of my body.
When we finally reached Fes, it was fully dark, boasting a hazy half-moon like a lemon wedge. Even so, it was crowded at the bus station, or market, or whatever—booths everywhere, all the streetlights still on, the air filled with the smell of food and warm bodies. Our fellow passengers dispersed into the arms of families who had come to pick them up, or taxis, or cars of their own, but the actual crowd itself didn’t seem to thin out at all. Johnny led us away till we were in a more residential area, quiet under a single streetlight, pinky-orange like the ones back home, no different. It was still hot, but a breeze picked up that dried my soaked shirt.
“We’re at Bab el-Mahrouk, tsk. Really shouldn’t take a cab at this time of night,” Johnny mumbled, studying her computer; I looked over her shoulder to see that the two black dots were much closer now, almost touching.
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