Bookburners Season Two: Copyright © 2016 text by Serial Box Publishing, LLC.
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ISBN: 978-1-68210-125-4
This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Written by: Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery, Andrea Phillips, and Amal El-Mohtar
Cover Illustration by: Jeffrey Veregge
Art Director: Charles Orr
Lead Writer: Max Gladstone
Editor: Marco Palmieri
Producer: Julian Yap
Bookburners original concept by Max Gladstone and Julian Yap
Bookburners
Season 2, Episode 1
Creepy Town
by Max Gladstone
Sal Brooks couldn’t stop running.
Shaggy beasts chased her across the campus lawn. Paws hammered into the mud beneath sodden leaves. Claws ripped up the soil, and hot wet breath seared her neck. She could not look, could not bear to see how close they were. She drew her weapon, shot blindly behind her, but the beasts did not slow. Something, someone, laughed in her ear. A thorn or a finger slid along the line of her jaw and vanished.
People, Perry once said, hunted with endurance at the dawn of time. Our ancestors chased prey, the prey sprinted off—and humans jogged after. They caught up, sooner or later. And when they did, the prey sprinted off again, and the humans kept jogging. Most animals can outrun a human being over a short stretch, but none can outpace us for a hundred miles.
Sal didn’t have a hundred miles. She didn’t have one. Already her legs were flagging, her limbs felt heavy, already she strained to breathe. And Perry’s model only helped if you were the predator.
Stop, then. Fight—before they run the fight out of you.
She knew how that would end: teeth in her arm, claws in her stomach, the wet tear of viscera. Her guts seized and her sweat ran cold; she ran faster. Thick mist seeped from holes in the earth, and spiraled up with the wind of her passing.
A grim monument loomed through the mist, vacant black glass windows staring. Double doors gaped wide. No shelter there, only danger of a different kind—a carpet lolled down the stone front steps, wet as a tongue.
Where was Grace? Where was Father Menchú? Where was Asanti? Where, for fuck’s sake, was Liam?
Why was she alone? Why was she so fucking scared?
Don’t stop. Don’t think.
Just take it one step at a time.
1.
Earlier
There was a door—and a man with a rifle outside the door—in the Vatican, and Sal needed to get through both.
“I work here,” she said, hands on her hips.
“There’s no here here, miss,” he replied.
“Through that door. Right behind you. That’s where I work. Down there.”
The Swiss Guard glanced over his shoulder, and registered slight surprise. “That door does not go anywhere.” Mid-European accent, ambiguously German. Hell, maybe he was even Swiss—did they still have to be, these days? The guard was just doing his job, but she didn’t have to like the job, or him, for that matter. She had too many bad memories of men like this pointing rifles like that in her direction.
“If that door doesn’t go anywhere, why are you guarding it?”
He shrugged. “The commandant tells me where to stand. I don’t ask questions.”
“He told you to keep people from going through that door.”
“Yes.”
“And he didn’t tell you why.”
The guard’s eyebrows approached his hairline. “I don’t think that is any of your business, miss. If you take a left and go straight past the mural, you will return to the public areas.”
The problem with working for a secret organization inside the Vatican, Sal reflected—and then laughed bitterly to herself at the notion there might be only one problem with working for a secret organization inside the Vatican—was that you couldn’t exactly go around pulling rank. Back when she’d been the shield-and-sidearm kind of police, rather than the bell-book-and-candle kind, a simple flash of the badge would have gotten her through most doors. Now, she wasn’t entirely certain whom she could tell about her job. The default assumption was: no one. Including this armed yutz standing between her and the Black Archives.
“Look,” she said, and sidled left; the guard mirrored to block her. “Obviously you’ve been put here to protect what’s behind that door. I’m telling you I want to go through, because I know what’s behind it, because I work there. I’m jet-lagged. I just got off the world’s worst transatlantic flight. Literally all I want to do is check in and make sure the boards are clear before I go back to my apartment and sleep. Your orders can’t possibly be to keep the people who work behind that door from getting through it.”
Though of course they could. Six months ago, Sal’s teammates had been kicked out of the Vatican and hunted across Rome, while she herself was imprisoned and tortured by Society officials. Water under the bridge, she’d thought. Hoped.
Be reasonable, she told herself. If this was a Society coup sort of thing, he’d be trying to shoot you already. These are new security protocols, that’s all. We need them. Hell, you suggested them.
But Sal didn’t find herself very reassuring these days. “You’re doing a great job of protecting this door,” she said.
“Thank you.” He looked uncomfortable.
“But you can’t be set here to keep everyone from getting in. If that were true, they’d just have locked the door. So how do you decide who to let through? Do you need identification? Credentials?” Sal drifted left again, and again the guard shifted to match. A tour group passed behind her. Arched ceilings reflected the guide’s sepulchral voice. “Saint Peter’s Basilica is the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, and an architectural marvel in its own right, with murals and frescos by artists as diverse as … ”
“You will understand,” the guard said very slowly when the tour group passed, “that my telling you what you’d need to show me in order to get through would violate basic principles of operational security.”
“Oh, come on.”
“If you knew what I needed to let you through, and were a sophisticated attacker, you could acquire the credentials by a range of illegitimate means. You might steal or forge an identification card, blackmail or impersonate an official with clearance, spoof an RFID tag; even two-factor authentication could be subverted, given time.”
“So you’re just not going to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“That’s security through obscurity.”
The guard frowned. “Not really, miss. Security through obscurity would be if we trusted this door to be t
oo out-of-the-way to find, given the sheer number of doors in the Vatican. Security through mystery is a completely different, though I’ll admit related, protocol, relying—”
Sal jerked her body left; the guard lunged in that direction, hit the wall, and Sal darted right around him, grabbed the door, pulled it open, and ran straight into Liam Doyle.
“Hey, Sal,” he said, before the guard tackled her.
• • •
“You jerk,” she said as they wound down the long wrought-iron stair toward the Archives. “You were waiting there the whole time, listening to me argue with that unrepentant—”
“Don’t be too hard on poor Siggy,” Liam said, several stairs ahead of her “He’s only been saddled with what we all hope is the most boring job in all creation.”
“Guarding our front door?”
“The very same. And it’s a good thing I was there. If I hadn’t been, you’d be sitting in a very dark room right now, with quite a lot of rifles pointed your way. Not a good way to start a Monday.”
“I’ll say.” She rapped on the iron railing. Rebuilt to spec, at least. “Where did Siggy come from?”
“Since our trouble with the demons a few months back, the Vatican’s decided we’re a bit more of a security, ah, asset.” Which was another way of saying risk. “Siegfried the Security Expert’s our day-shift point man, reinforced by two squads of Swiss Guard watching on closed circuit camera. It could have been worse. Father Menchú and Asanti took weeks arguing the Vatican higher-ups out of a full security checkpoint, with barbed wire and everything.”
“Might not have been such a bad idea.”
“Be a pain to pass through in the mornings, though—not to mention, what would the barbed wire really do if a demon came calling?”
“There’s always Team One.”
“You don’t use a katana to cut vegetables, and you don’t set holy warriors to guard doors. Hell, posting Siggy at the door is a criminal waste of brainpower on its own. Show your card next time, and you’ll be fine.”
“I don’t have a card.”
He fished in his pocket and handed her one. “Janitorial Supervisor,” she read, beside her mug shot, which looked about as flattering as mug shots tended to. “Banner line for the resume.”
“Accurate description of the job, though, isn’t it?” he said. “Wait. Yours says supervisor?”
“Don’t hate the player, hate the Kafkaesque bureaucracy.”
Liam shook his head and continued down. Sal generally found that familiarity compressed distance: The first time she’d walked downtown from Brooklyn seemed to take years, but by the twentieth the blocks and bridge flew by. But each time descending the Archives staircase seemed to take longer than the last.
“How was I supposed to get this card, anyway?”
“Oh, I would have given it to you.”
“But if I had to get downstairs to get the card …”
“We, ah, saw you coming on closed circuit. And it’s possible Asanti sent me up to defuse any tension between you and Siggy. I took the opportunity to observe your problem-solving skills. Impressive.”
“Jerk!”
“You said that already.”
“I know.”
“A little good-natured fun in exchange for being used as an errand boy—is that too much to ask? The fake-left, jag-right routine’s a classic, though you might be a touch too dependent on it, if you ask me.”
They’d added another door at the bottom of the stairs. A red light burned beside the iron gate, above a keypad. More new security—and seeing it, she understood Liam’s resistance to the barbed wire. After facing real demons, this setup looked flimsy, another layer of organizational ass-covering. Nobody got fired for adding layers of security, whether or not those layers worked. “Anyway, it’s not like Asanti couldn’t have sent one of her underlings to get you.” He touched the keypad, and the light went green.
“Maybe she thought I’d like to see a familiar face,” Sal said. “Wait. Did you say underlings?”
“You’ll see.” And he opened the door.
Since Sal had joined the Society, she had seen the Black Archives in many states. When she first saw the place, she had thought the main chamber an impossible maze of piled scrolls and tomes and cuneiform tablets punctuated by desks, statuary, and display cases squeezed in as space allowed. Upon her return from the Market Arcanum, she’d discovered the already chaotic system further mussed by wind summoned by malicious techno-cultists; finally, after the Hand and his demon rivals fought out their cannibalistic three-way monster mash among Asanti’s tomes, the place had been a sea of chewed, burnt, and toppled text. Asanti rebuilt, always. But this was more than rebuilding. This was architecture.
Concentric bookcase circles transformed the Archives into a librarian’s labyrinth. The stacks remained, reinforced with vertical shelving. At the labyrinth’s center stood Liam’s and Asanti’s desks, Liam’s piled with magazines and disassembled electronics, Asanti’s covered with lenses and jewelers’ optics and the delicate silver tools the archivist used to manipulate books that were ancient, dangerous, or both. Between those desks rose the Orb, a glowing crystal ball atop an ornate cabinet of wire, glyphwork, metal pipes, and astrological machinery. The Orb’s old glass case had broken; no one seemed to have replaced it.
Shockingly clean, yes. Professional, yes. And—crowded.
Sal hadn’t realized until just now how rarely she’d seen anyone save the archivist and members of Team Three inside the Archives. Asanti, Menchú, Grace, Liam, and herself, that was who belonged here. Maybe Monsignor Angiuli, on the rare occasions he came by to review the troops.
Sal didn’t recognize any of the young men and women who drifted among the books, shelving, consulting texts, dusting scrolls. She didn’t recognize the woman staring through bottle-thick glasses into the Orb, making notes on a clipboard. She did recognize Asanti, who looked up when the door opened, smiled, and waved. “Sal! What took you so long?”
Disorientation or no, Sal ran down the last few stairs, zigzagged through the Archives, and gave the archivist a hug. Asanti smelled like good dust, and looked fantastic: graying braids piled high on her head, sharp in a sweeping red dress, as if she’d rebuilt herself along with the library in Sal’s absence. “This place looks amazing! How did you—how did you do any of this?”
“Far more easily than I expected, let me tell you.” Asanti swept one hand through a broad circle that included the whole transformed library at once. “Monsignor Angiuli’s been acting head of the Society since they defrocked the cardinal at the inquest. Their, what did they call it, after-action debriefing tiger team damage control subcommittee something-or-other brought me in and asked what materials I’d need to rebuild the library so nothing like this ever happened again, which I took as an opportunity to discuss our limited cataloging and research resources, and the difficulty of post-accident recovery without a full inventory of our materials—and, next thing I know, I have a quintupled budget and a staff.” She chuckled at the prospect. “If I’d known threat of universal annihilation was all it took to open the Holy See money faucet, I’d have almost destroyed the world sooner.”
Behind them both, Liam stopped rummaging through his desk and made a brief strangled sound. Sal laughed. “That’s what you get for leaving me to deal with Siggy on my own.”
Liam glared over the top of his monitor. “Excuse me if I don’t find global destruction a laughing matter.”
“If we can’t laugh,” Sal said, “the demons have already won. Trust me, I’d know.”
She heard a gasp and shuffling feet. Clinical fingers explored her scalp. “Is this Detective Brooks?” As if she were a rare butterfly spotted outside its habitat. Sal spun round, looking for the person who held the pin, and found herself staring through thick glasses into the eyes of the woman who’d held the clipboard. “I expected someone taller. From all the damage.”
The first reply that sprang to Sal’s mind was Only when I’m poss
essed, but that didn’t seem like a good thing to say to someone she’d just not-exactly-met, so she settled for, “Um—”
“Frances,” Asanti said, sliding between them, “meet Sal; Sal, this is Dr. Frances Haddad, my new assistant.”
“Nice to meet you.” Sal held out her hand. Frances blinked at it, then shoved her own hand into Sal’s, gripped hard, and shook twice.
“Dr. Asanti has said so many interesting things about you, I’d love to pick your brain, metaphorically speaking, of course, about your experiences in the hell realms, and to be honest it would be pretty cool to pick your actual brain too. We were talking the other day about possible neurobiological effects of possession, not to mention exposure to and immersion within magical environments. My second cousin’s a neuro-researcher at the Sorbonne; she can get us fMRI time whenever you’re in Paris, though of course it’s hard to make any conclusive statements without a prior—is there any chance you had a skull fracture while working with the New York Police Department? They might have taken the necessary observations. Natural experiments are so hard to come by in this field.”
“You could scan me now, and then I could get possessed again,” Sal said, and grinned at Liam’s groan.
“It’s kind of you to offer, only I don’t think that would be a useful control, since you’ve already been exposed.” Sal thought Frances was joking, but didn’t want to press it. “Anyway, it’s an honor to be working here, with you.”
“How did you—”
“Dr. Asanti consulted on my PhD,” Frances said. “Though it was damn difficult to include the information she provided in the actual text of the dissertation, since most of the sources don’t exist outside the papal archive.” She set one hand on a slowly revolving gear on the Orb’s casement—so far as Sal could see, the gear connected to nothing at all. “Worth it, though.”
“I’ve been telling them for a decade that the archivist position’s the chink in the Society’s armor,” Asanti cut in. “Bus number of one, and all that—if I get hit by a bus, there’s no one to take over for me. Oh, don’t look at me like that. The same applies if I get sick. And it’s even worse now that I find myself going into the field more frequently. There were all sorts of security reasons why it was impossible earlier, but with the bureaucrats focusing on selecting a new cardinal, I’ve been able to do real work without politics and paperwork getting in the way. We’ve made great strides.”
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 1
