Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  Liam finished whatever he was typing on his computer with a flourish of angry keystrokes. “If by great strides, you mean the fox is loose in the henhouse, then yes.”

  Asanti shrugged. “I prefer to think of myself as a hedgehog, actually.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You really should read Berlin, Liam.”

  “The city?”

  “Um, guys,” Sal said. “With all due respect. The Orb is glowing. Shouldn’t we be—um. Something?”

  Liam kicked his legs up on his desk. “Does that look like an outbreak to you?”

  Sal touched the crystal surface; it felt cold and hot at once, which made no sense, which fit her general experience with magic to a T. When the Orb had warned them of magical outbreaks in the past, its glow had reminded her of lightning, or of animations of a thinking brain—sparks cascading and cracking through crystal. This looked more like the sun behind a thin layer of high cloud in a northern winter: a diffuse brilliance like a bruise of light, flecked with sun dogs. “I don’t know what it looks like.”

  “Neither do we.” Frances made a note on her clipboard. “Isn’t it exciting?”

  “Exciting is one word for it,” Asanti said. “The Orb started behaving this way three months ago, not long after you left on vacation. We were concerned, at first, that it foretold a broad-spectrum outbreak, but we received no indication of demonic activity, or—to be honest—of greater than usual magical activity of any sort, since it began. The world’s been quiet. We wondered if it might have something to do with Perry.” She said Sal’s brother’s name without hesitation—all the kindness of tearing off a duct tape gag. “Have you heard from him?” And no trace of pity, either, for the brother lost and found and lost again. Sal wanted to hug her again for that, for how normal she made the whole absurd situation seem.

  “Not for a while,” she replied in the same tone. Not for a while barely covered the truth. She’d gone home to visit her family, and heard from them that Perry’d just been through weeks before, bound for Utah, that he’d spent an utterly charming week with them before he left, and he’d written regularly ever since, postcards that arrived without postmarks or postage. If her brother gave them any indication that he was sort of sharing his body with something that claimed to be an angel—that they’d merged somehow—that info hadn’t made an impression.

  She’d gone to Utah and hunted down Perry’s hotel, only to find he’d flown out a week after he’d arrived. And so the chase continued.

  “Sal,” Asanti said, and Sal knew she was about to press for information that she, Sal, didn’t have, that she wished she had, and she didn’t want to confess she’d spent months chasing leads that never came through. She just wanted to get back to work.

  Fortunately, before Asanti could say anything more, Father Arturo Menchú burst into the Archives. “I just got a call from Sansone. We have a problem.”

  • • •

  It’s Halloween, of course. It’s always Halloween somewhere in America. Halloween waits in unswept corners behind bookcases, lurks in the branches of trees. Halloween knows where you don’t look. Some days you see the monster before it sees you—when the night’s crisp and cold for the first time in two seasons and Halloween hasn’t remembered quite how to blend with the clearer air. Or, stepping sweatered onto the porch after a storm, you stare up into bare branches and glimpse the crouched beast once hidden behind the fallen leaves.

  Joseph burst through the rear doors of Saint Francis Xavier School and fled across the yard, past the jungle gym. Footsteps pounded behind him, nearing. The kids chasing Joseph were bigger, older. Stevie Jenks had been held back a year, and the others were almost as big. They weren’t shouting anymore. He’d made them run too fast for shouting. This was a real chase, now.

  Sweat and tears streaked his makeup; his torn costume robe flapped behind him, trailing glitter from stars where the glue couldn’t hold. He’d tossed his plastic pumpkin full of candy behind him, but they hadn’t stopped.

  Running didn’t help, but Joseph ran anyway. That was how the game worked—it never felt like a game to him, of course, but the other boys seemed to enjoy it. “Don’t flinch,” Stevie Jenks would shout as his fist blurred toward Joseph’s face; if he flinched, Stevie would stop short and laugh and call him a coward; if he didn’t, he’d get hit. Don’t fight back and the teachers said you should have; fight back and you got hit you until you stopped, and the teachers took you to the nurse and said nothing. Don’t run and there’s no escape; run and they’ll catch you. Give them what they want and they’ll come back for more; don’t, and they’ll take it anyway.

  Joseph ran and his eyes were hot and the makeup he’d put on before the party burned and his nose was bleeding.

  The library waited across the yard.

  Mrs. Milligan might be there, minding the haunted house. He’d helped her put up the display of scary books. Even if she didn’t help him, he knew the squat stone building with the odd statues in the corners better than he knew the contents of his closet; Ron and Stevie and the others might not know the back door wasn’t locked. He could lose them among the shelves, in the fake cobwebs and between the ghosts, and slip out the back.

  He strained to budge the heavy library doors; turned round, saw Ron and Stevie and Chris and Ted tearing toward him across the rain-slick yard: two skeletons, Frankenstein’s monster, and a ghost. Their boots ripped troughs in the grass.

  Joseph stumbled through orange-and-brown construction paper chains into the dim library. Spooky wind-chime music from hidden speakers echoed off the vaulted ceiling. Ghosts wafted between the shelves. Bats flapped, and unearthly fog covered the stone floor. He’d filled the helium balloons for the ghosts, rigged the bats on fishing line, looked up how to work the smoke machine online, but panic made the place new. He was in hell.

  And Mrs. Milligan wasn’t there.

  2.

  Working with the Society, Sal thought, tended to distort one’s sense of the meaning of the word “fortunately.”

  “America,” Liam said as he paged through the folder he’d been passed. “I really hate that place.”

  “At least it’s big,” Hilary Sansone said from the head of the table. The digital projector cast a mottled autumn forest on the woman’s face, and her shadow on the image behind her. The effect should have been comical, but nothing could make Hilary Sansone look comical. Describing Sansone, Sal reached for words like “carved” and “molded,” neither of which was right, because they suggested Sansone was the product of some agency other than her own. Sal didn’t like the Team Two director much—liked her even less since Sansone had, effectively, saved her life. Sal wondered when Sansone would call in that particular favor. “Your target’s Saint Francis Xavier School, in northern Massachusetts, USA.”

  “A school?” Liam shook his head.

  “Listen to the briefing,” Grace Chen said from the shadows behind the projector. She leaned against the wall, perfectly still, with a paperback under one arm. “Stop wasting time.”

  “A school,” Sansone continued smoothly. “K through twelve, where all the students and faculty seem to have disappeared.” Next slide: a round, smiling clergyman who looked wholesome enough to Sal, allowing for his poor choice in facial hair. “Father Cullough, the chaplain at Saint Francis Xavier, happens to be one of our informants in northern Massachusetts. We’re pretty densely staffed in that part of the country, in part because of the heavy Church presence, and in part because we want to avoid another Enfield Incident. Anyway, Father Cullough missed his regularly scheduled report, and while the man’s a generous soul”—which Sansone made sound like a euphemism—“he’s never missed a report before. I dispatched one of our Boston agents with a streaming camera.” Next slide.

  Video: Mist stroked the campus ground, and naked tree limbs clawed an overcast sky. The camera toddled toward a pointy building with the words “Benefice Hall” carved in Gothic letters in the artificially aged limestone ov
er the front doors. Speakers reproduced the crumpled-paper jumble of footsteps, leaves, and fierce wind crushed through a button mic. A voice must have been hiding in that mush, because yellow letters appeared at the bottom of the screen, barely legible against the yellow fallen leaves: “Central building looks deserted. Cars parked—” The camera veered sharp left. “Oh, God.”

  Sal saw nothing in the blur, maybe a twist of colors that shouldn’t have been there, a dash of static, but magic didn’t show up on video and anyway, the agent wasn’t sticking around long enough to find out. He ran toward Benefice Hall, breath roaring in the mic. The camera darted left, right, left again. “They’re in the trees, they’re in the grass. Jesus God. Howling, howling, all—” Static warped the screen and scraped the speakers. The subtitles stamped across distortion, glowing, nonsensical: “—after me—can’t see—so big—the wriggling and the—”

  Static.

  Sansone stepped into the wash of black and white. “Nobody’s approached the school building since. We lost two mailmen and a police officer before we closed the loop with our contacts in the state capital. The site’s locked off now, but we wouldn’t know if it was spreading—Saint Xavier sits on eighty acres of undeveloped land. If the event’s stationary, we have two hundred and twenty-three people inside to rescue. If it grows linearly, based on our agent’s position relative to the classroom building, we have several weeks before it reaches the nearest town. If the growth is exponential, we have days, if we’re lucky. So. Time to do what you do.”

  “The Orb,” Liam said, “is supposed to warn us about these things.”

  Father Menchú pressed his steepled fingers to his chin. He looked more tired than Sal remembered, which was saying something, considering that Menchú at the best of times looked like a man coming off a month of all-nighters. “Obviously it did not.”

  Sansone said nothing.

  Asanti closed her folder and placed it on the table. “The Orb’s become unreliable as of late. It’s possible that higher levels of atmospheric magic are making it less useful as a predictive tool.”

  “Possible?”

  “We’re investigating. Now that we have the remit to research magic, we’re moving as fast as we can. But there’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  Liam frowned. “Solving magic with magic feels a bit homeopathic to me.”

  Sansone drummed her fingers once on the table, and all eyes revolved back to her. “With all due respect,” she said, “the Orb’s not your only source of intelligence, and by treating it as if it were, you’ve hamstrung yourselves. Team Three’s always tended to rely on itself—but there are other teams. Mine, for example—around the world, cultivating sources, building diplomatic ties. You have had your issues with my people, but those are done, now. Do you trust us?”

  “Yes,” Menchú said, not giving anyone the opportunity to disagree. “We’ll fix this Massachusetts problem. And we appreciate your support. If the Orb’s issues don’t resolve soon, we may come to depend on your sources even more.” The Father even sounded as if he meant it. Then again, Sal thought, maybe he does.

  “Thank you,” Sansone said, passed them all plane tickets, and left. Menchú followed her. “Hilary. A quick question about the elections?” Asanti and Liam tidied their paperwork, determinedly not looking at one another, and walked out side by side, stiff and silent.

  “I do not trust that woman,” Grace said when they were gone. Static snow danced on the screen, subtitled with a scream.

  “Sansone?” Sal blinked herself back to the conference room. Her mind had followed Liam and Asanti out into the hall. “Are Liam and Asanti okay?”

  “Asanti’s getting what she wants—free rein to investigate magic. Liam has his issues with that.” Grace shrugged. “They’ll deal. Sansone’s the one who worries me.”

  “She saved my life.”

  “Because there was something in it for her. She wanted a chance to clean house, consolidate her own position in Team Two. Balloon and Stretch had a close relationship with the old cardinal, a relationship which undermined Sansone’s authority—in a way, we were lucky they tried to kill you. Don’t scoff.”

  Sal wasn’t scoffing.

  “She wanted them out, and she got what she wanted. What happens when our interests and hers don’t coincide?”

  “She’ll leave us to hang.” Sal stood and took her file.

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  She shrugged. “I like clarity.”

  • • •

  “Come in, Arturo,” said the small, precise voice on the other side of the rosewood door. “I’m just cluttering.”

  Menchú opened the door despite his reservations, entered the cardinal’s office, and tripped over a box of papers. He stuck out one hand to catch himself, and in that imbalanced moment it occurred to him just how much priceless artwork hung on the walls of this room, how many pieces of seventeenth-century crystal occupied its surfaces, and just how much apologizing he would have to do if he accidentally put his fist through a Vermeer.

  A hand as small and precise as the voice caught Menchú’s shoulder, steadying him. “Sorry, Arturo, sorry. Still getting used to the place.”

  Menchú found his footing on the plush red carpet. “Thank you, Monsignor. Or should I call you ‘Acting Cardinal’?”

  “Oh, please, Arturo, let us not get ahead of ourselves.” Angiuli raised both hands and backed away, stepping neatly between piled boxes. The thin man gestured up and out, embracing the office with its roseate wood paneling and brass accents and tapestries of saints’ lives borrowed from the Vatican collection. “I’m uncomfortable enough here. They’re right, of course, my place in the east wing”—a closet, Menchú had always thought, more than an office, an out-of-the-way nook crowded with bookshelves and statuary no one else wanted, unbefitting the monsignor’s role as Team Three’s administrative liaison to the Vatican, but nonetheless cozy, a warm, dark room where Monsignor Angiuli had nestled like a pearl in a dusty oyster—“was barely large enough for me, and now that I may be expected to host team leader meetings and councils, it really wouldn’t do. Perhaps they’ll let me go back once this whole business is done.”

  “You mean the confirmation process?”

  “It’s a search process, technically,” the monsignor said. “They have to find an ideal candidate.”

  “You’re the ideal candidate, Monsignor. Sansone’s ineligible.”

  “There’s always Fox in Team One. Or some other cardinal.”

  “Fox distrusts politics. As for another cardinal—who would take the post?”

  “Management of the Society is quite prestigious.”

  “It’s honorable, Monsignor,” Menchú said, gently. “That’s a different thing. Most of those qualified for the job would be too scared to hold it.”

  “Because of the papal ban.” Angiuli sighed. “It’s a shame, really. Ambition calls away too many great leaders from this vital role.”

  “Demons sneak, Monsignor, and they plot. Even for us, even with silver, the risks of possession are high. Would you want a secretly possessed man on the papal seat?”

  “You’re making me sound like the best bad option, Arturo.”

  “Not at all, sir. I think you’ll do well.”

  “I am all too aware of my own limits,” Angiuli said. “I will do what must be done until God and the search committee settle on an ideal candidate. With luck, someone better will suggest himself.”

  “You said cluttering, earlier.” Menchú stepped over a box of photographs—Angiuli’s older sister’s family farmed outside of Parma; she had ten children and a second husband she’d married after the first died of a heart attack. Angiuli kept a handwritten ledger containing all the Christmas presents he’d sent each one, and filed the thank-you notes he’d received in reply. There was, Menchú remembered, a chair somewhere in front of the desk, though he couldn’t see it for all the boxes. “Are you sure you didn’t mean cleaning?”

  “Of course not,�
� the monsignor replied, and knelt beside an especially large document crate. “Here, can you help me bring this over to the desk?”

  Menchú lifted from his legs, and kept low to take most of the weight from Angiuli; still, the monsignor staggered, grinning broadly as he guided them around and past boxes.

  “My predecessor,” Angiuli said, with a note that Menchú interpreted as actual respect, “kept this entire office neat as an empty house. It’s too big and too grand for me. I rattle around inside it. If the extra space is needed, then it is needed, but why spend my time staring at distant walls? Don’t put your foot there, there’s a painting—”

  Menchú tottered, and as he tried to recover balance he shifted, by accident, most of the box’s weight onto the monsignor. Angiuli’s face went pale, and his thin arms shook. He bared his teeth, a rictus that almost resembled a smile. Menchú leaned back in, took the weight, and helped the old man heave the box onto the desk. The antique silver fountain pen rattled in its penholder, the cut glass ink jar rattled on the lacquered desktop, and Menchú’s teeth rattled in his skull. “What do you have in this box, Monsignor?”

  “Bric-a-brac,” Angiuli said. “Arturo, Sansone told me you’re taking the whole team out on this call.”

  Menchú shook feeling back into his hands. “Yes, now that Brooks is back.”

  “And you’re bringing Asanti along?”

  So he’d heard about that. “Her decision,” Menchú said. “She wants to deal with more magic in the field, especially now that she’s recruited a team to mind the Archives in her absence. She’ll accompany Team Three to America.”