by A. R. Knight
Bryce sat back in his seat after the description, rubbed his chin with his hand. I waited, but Bryce didn’t say anything and eventually nodded for me to continue. Not exactly the reaction I was expecting.
“Graham led me to this big abandoned building. There were hundreds of spirits inside. All angry. If Alec and a bunch of other guides hadn’t arrived, I’d have been dead,” I said.
“Hundreds?” Bryce said. “It’s been a while, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the war created a breach.”
“That’s I was thinking. Now, I mean. Then, I was mostly just panicking,” I replied. A breach appeared when large numbers of people died near each other, particularly in traumatic fashion. All of the spirits dumped into Riven at a single point and, due to both the number of spirits and the way in which they got there, the whole group became angry very quickly. When a breach was found, groups of guides would work together to close it.
“It probably won’t be the first,” Bryce said. “Large-scale wars, you’re going to get things like this.”
“What I didn’t understand, what I don’t understand, is why they listened to Graham.”
“Because Graham isn’t a normal spirit,” Alec said, coming into the bar and sitting down next to us. “He was a guide, long ago. A good one. Better than you.”
“Thanks,” I said. That was Alec for you, delivering the unvarnished truth.
Bryce was nodding. “I suspected when Carver mentioned the hammer.”
“So wait, he was a guide?” I asked. “Why hasn’t he been wrangled then? I thought that was standard policy.”
“A spirit must be caught to be wrangled. Graham, you see, he’s very good at getting away. At being found only when he wants to be,” Alec said.
“So you’re saying the spirit of a dead guide is hunting me?”
“Hunting you? I don’t know why he would,” Alec said. “But with the three of us, I bet we can catch him and ask him, politely, what he’s up to.”
“First things first,” Bryce said. “If you really found a breach in there, we’ve got to close it before it gets any worse.”
“Two hours?” I said. “So long as I’m down here, I want to take care of something.”
Bryce and Alec nodded. I finished my drink, and left. With Alec there, I didn’t want to bring up what Graham had told me. About letting the spirits back through. About asking for my name. Nothing against Alec, but he didn’t need to know everything.
Back outside, my mask on, I jumped a short train heading towards the lab district. If Anna had found out more about my mother, I wanted to know.
Chapter 18
The lab district was the opposite of everywhere else in the Chicago. The opposite of Riven too. Brightly lit with more technology than the rest of the city combined, stepping off the train into the lab district’s sparking avenues buried my questions beneath frenzy of light and noise.
On either side of the broad avenue in front of me, buildings glowed with gas tubes of every color. The center of the street was closed off to normal traffic because a new zeppelin was getting ready to launch. A warbling man with a looping horn boosting his voice declared that this zeppelin was powered through batteries. A thousand fans working on top of the ship to provided the charge. A horde of workers, scientists, and students clustered around the zeppelin as it started to rise in the air.
Two blocks to the left, the colors were more muted, a concession, one of the few, made to sleep around here. Cheap hotels specializing in hourly rates and single bedrooms targeted the frantic pace. The lab was the home, and when you needed to sleep, the hotels gave you a place to pass out, shower, and then get back to it. Between the larger facilities, bars and diners showed off cheap beers and fast food. Others offered exhibition galleries to go with their beverages, a chance to taste the excitement with your cocktail.
Past the zeppelin, which slowly crawled up the sky, I found the Broken Beaker. Standing outside, white mask on and watching the experiment, was Anna.
“You weren’t kidding,” I said.
“It’s my favorite place in the city,” Anna replied, not bothering to look away from the zeppelin. “The energy here is addicting.”
“You don’t get enough excitement in Riven?”
Anna laughed. Then shook her head. “When I’m there, I’m not looking for dangerous spirits. Most of the time, I’m finding a loved one and reading them a note from their daughter. Not so thrilling.”
“Speaking of, I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you,” I took out the list of names Anna had sent me. “We don’t exactly write down the details of every spirit we see.”
Anna nodded back towards the Broken Beaker. “Talk about it inside?”
She led the way. Which was good, because I would have fallen over. Or turned around and left, without her. The Broken Beaker wasn’t my kind of place. Not like Ezra’s, with its classic dignity. No, Anna’s favorite bar was a blend of humanity’s brightest lights and loudest sounds mashed together in an overwhelming blast to the senses. Beyond the array of tables dominated by scientists and students shouting inches from each other’s faces sat a large stage on which, at the moment, a contraption resembling a train car ground out a ferocious noise.
“It’s demo night!” Anna shouted into my ear. “Tonight’s theme is noisemakers!”
“Great!” I replied, wondering how many minutes we’d be in here. Having functional ears was, you know, a perk.
Anna grabbed my hand and led me through the crowded floor towards a side wall. More specifically, to a spot that sported a picture of a sunflower. She pressed it, and a door swung inward. The room on the other side was cramped and featureless, except for a second door with another flower, this one a fragile-looking lily.
“Sound damping,” Anna explained, somehow sensing my confusion even though my mask was still up. Her words proved themselves a second later as we went into the Broken Beaker’s back half, a quiet array of couches and low tables overseen by walls of chalk bearing scribbled equations. The only sound was the bartender rattling cocktails.
“Marginally better,” I admitted as we snagged a spot.
“A lot of people don’t realize this is even here,” Anna said. “Great place to meet clients.”
“Which is what we were talking about?”
“All business, aren’t you?” Anna replied, slipping off her mask.
“I nearly died twice today,” I copied the move. The air felt good on my face, even with the scent of booze underlining every breath. “Makes you rethink small talk.”
“I’d ask how, but I can imagine.”
“Bet you couldn’t. Not this,” I said, enjoying her questioning look. There was something fun about holding information from a sneak. “I’ll tell you later.”
Anna shrugged. Waved for the bartender’s attention and then held up two fingers. “I hope you like gin.”
“There are worse things to drink,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about—”
“Your mother.”
“Lucky guess.”
“The paper says she died,” Anna said. “Only I don’t think that’s true. At least, not the way they said it happened.”
Her comment knocked me back for a moment. Not what I’d been expecting.
“What do you mean?”
“Died in her sleep? Your mother wasn’t very old. She wasn’t in the hospital for injuries,” Anna said. “I get a lot of requests to talk to the dead, Carver. Guess how many just turn up that way without a scratch, and without any investigation?”
“You’re really running with this.”
“It’s not all hunches,” Anna said. “But I can’t tell you anymore. Not without a favor.”
“I already said I couldn’t help with the list,” as I spoke, the bartender dropped a pair of wide-bottom beakers on our table, each one bubbling with a set of gin and soda. Limes wedged into the neck.
“That was just to get Laurence off my back,” Anna said. “I was hoping he wouldn’t be there when you came by.
What I’m looking for, Carver, is to be one of you.”
I took a long drink. Felt the pine needle gin run down my throat. Glanced around the bar to make sure nobody I knew was around.
“There’s not a chance,” I said. “They’d never give you approval.”
“Why not? I can get to Riven. I’m savvy.”
“Because you’re a sneak.”
Anna’s eyes narrowed and she leaned forward across the table. “That’s something you’re going to have to come to terms with. That’s the deal. You want to find your mother, you get me in.”
Anna picked up her beaker and slammed it, finishing the cocktail in a single pull and then stood up. Walked away.
“He’s buying,” Anna said to the bartender as she pressed the flower and left.
Getting a sneak to be a guide was impossible. We were chosen young, evaluated when, as kids, we had our first crossing. You came tumbling down to your parents, your teacher, and talk about how you spent the night wandering around another world. Then the law kicked in and you were sent to the nearest guide headquarters and evaluated.
I drank my way through those memories in the Broken Beaker after Anna left. The constant shifts between Riven and the real world, teaching you to control the crossing. To link your own bed to a place on the other side. If Anna hadn’t been accepted as a guide, there’d been something wrong. There were no second chances.
And if Anna wouldn’t help me find my mother, I knew someone who could.
Chapter 19
I’d never been in an army. Never stood rank and file with comrades and looked across some vast plain at an opposing force. But standing on the street in Riven with a score of guides around me, staring at the factory that I’d run out of only hours before, I felt a surge of energy, pride, confidence. There were a hundred angry spirits or more, and we were going to go in and wreck them.
“Positions!” Bryce called. He was the senior guide there, the leader for the mission. At his call, ten guides on the edges split out and moved around the factory. The rest of us went forward. Into the teeth.
The first spirits rushed towards us a minute later as we neared the doors. They burst out, scrambling, yelling and grasping at the air with their hands. These weren’t the smart, tactical ones we’d encountered in the Warrens. Just your usual rage-filled ghosts looking for some sort of vengeance. We cut them down.
My lash sliced forward with crack after crack, lancing through and wrangling one spirit after another. Still, I was only one, and other guides chose arms more suited to mass attacks.
One, her arms pumping, launched what seemed like an infinite supply of small knives into the waves of spirits. Wrapping her body was a copper construct that, with her motion, cycled knives from a pack on her back down along her arms and right into her hands.
Another swept aside two or three spirits at a time, swinging the largest ax I’d ever seen. Its double-sided head fell into a haft with blades along each side, catching spirits running inside its reach with blue fire. They didn’t stand a chance.
When we broke through the doors, Bryce, myself, and three other guides pulled their tubes from our belts and launched sparks down the corridor. The blue, green, and red fires hit spirits while showing the way forward. The sparks provided the signal.
The guides back at the doors saw the flashes and sent their own sparks up to the guides on the roof, the ones who’d moved around at the start of the fight. Those guides punched holes in that roof. They used hammers and spikes to create holes and rake back metal slats. Riven’s gray light streamed in as we pushed forward, giving us our first real look at the breach. The first one I’d ever seen.
It looked like a puddle, a huge one in the middle of the factory floor. A watery mass that, instead of reflecting the world above it, showed a different landscape beneath. The battlefield in the real world where all the soldiers were dying. They crawled up through the breach, as though swimming out of a pool. Splashing their way up and into Riven.
I ducked the wild swing of another spirit and paid back his aggression with a stab of my knife. Looked up and saw that we were close. Only a few feet away from the edge of the breach.
“Carver, you want the honors?” Bryce shouted above the chaos.
“My pleasure!” I replied.
Bryce, his voulge in one hand, reached under his belt and pulled off an ancient device. I recognized it from training. A stone slate with a sapphire in the middle. A sapphire that glowed with the same pale fire burning along our weapons and in the eyes of the spirits we sought to quell.
“It’s ready,” Bryce called, and then he threw the object to me.
As more spirits crawled up from the breach, their hands grasping the edges of the factory floor and pulling themselves out of the muck, I ran towards them. Above me, guides provided cover, launching arrows, firing single shot rifles with burning bullets, or dropping down to crush spirits up close.
I stepped on the breach and my shoes felt like they were being sucked into the mud. Bits of the real world splattered on the my ankles as I ran forward. A breach had to be closed from the center. If even a little bit escaped the reach of the device, the breach could reopen. I felt the hands of spirits brush my feet as they crawled up, but the newest spirits would take a moment to comprehend their surroundings. That moment was all I needed.
Once I got to the center, I pressed down on the sapphire in the device. Every part of it, the gem, the stone, turned teal as energy flooded out. The light gushed like a river and poured off into the breach. Flooding its surface and sealing it off. The hands of new spirits retracted, fell back through the muck as the light ran over the breach. They would still be coming to Riven, but now they would be separated, would wander, and perhaps would be cycled without the need of a guide to get them there.
Then I stood in the center of a factory floor, surrounded by a score of exhausted guides, and many more glazed-over spirits starting their long walks to the Cycle.
“Well done,” Bryce said, slapping my back and reaching for the device. “This was a small one. If the war gets worse, we’ll see breaches double or triple the size.
“That goes for the rest of you too,” Bryce announced to the other guides. “We found this one by accident, but there might be others already. Keep your eyes open. Don’t hunt alone. If we catch the breaches early, they’ll stay small, and we’ll stay alive. Good work.”
“He’s right, you know,” Alec said to me as we moved out of the factory. “You shouldn’t go alone. I won’t be watching every time.”
“I’d find it a little creepy if you were,” I replied, and Alec laughed.
Chapter 20
When Bryce and Alec went back to the clock tower, I went in a different direction. Dating someone in Riven wasn’t much different than doing it in the real world. Still had to stop by from time to time. Find places to go. Experiences to share. The dinner options were a little lacking, but we figured it out.
Selena was in the middle of another one of her drawings when I showed up. This one showed the Tar Pit, and she was halfway through one of the tall smokestacks, a stark line reaching towards the top of the paper. Paper that Nicholas undoubtedly gave her.
“You’re still alive,” Selena said as I went through the door. “When you didn’t say anything, when you didn’t come back after going to the Tar Pit, I figured that was the end.”
“That’s grim,” I said, pulling out one of the wicker chairs and plopping into it.
“You’ll have to forgive me. My mind doesn’t run to happy places all that often,” Selena set her pencil down and leaned back in her chair. “How was it? Did you meet your quota?”
I gave her the details. Graham, the scrambling, the near-death experience and then coming back with the others to close the breach. Through it all Selena just stared at me, nodding every once in a while.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about that,” Selena said when I finished. “On the one hand, I don’t want you to die. On the other hand, th
at would bring you here, forever.”
“Until we both went crazy. Or to the Cycle.”
“It’s going to happen eventually, right?” Selena said.
“Not so long as your bound,” I said. “What’s with all the fatalism lately?”
“I’m a person,” Selena said. “Or, at least, I was. I need more than just sitting here.”
“I’m not enough?”
Selena laughed. “You’re not here all the time. Even if you were, I don’t think it would matter. I need more. More than wandering around with Nicholas looking for random things so he can build his inventions. More than these drawings.”
“I might have something,” I said. I had thought about taking the task to Nicholas, seeing if he had any ideas, but Selena might be even better. “There’s a spirit. His name is Graham. I need help finding him.”
“You want me to do it?” Selena look skeptical.
“He said something to me. Said that he thought that we should be working to bring spirits back. Back to the real world.”
“Wouldn’t that be disaster?”
“If we did it for all of them, sure.”
Selena’s face changed as she understood what I meant. Her hand went to her hair, twisting a pair of strands between her fingers. What she did whenever she was really, actually, interested in something.
“You think I could get back?” Selena said.
“I don’t know. But we could try,” I said.
“They’d never let you stay a guide if they found out,” Selena said.
“I’m already risking that with you.”
“You know,” Selena said. “Sometimes you really come through for me. Other times, I can’t tell if you care. But this, if you’re willing to try, would mean everything.”
I lived for that look that came over her eyes then. That hopeful, wanting glance that said I was the only thing she was thinking about at that moment. That my future and hers were one and the same and that we could get anything we wanted. Be anything we wanted. Together.
