Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  The Silk Road had originally run from China to Rome and from there to the rest of Europe. But online, the Silk Road was an anonymous marketplace where you could buy anything from drugs to guns, a new identity, even people. It had, of course, been found and shut down. So someone had launched Silk Road 2.0. Which had also been shut down. Liam hadn’t heard of another official re-launch after that, but evidence definitely pointed to it being alive and well.

  Somehow, the idea that he was trapped in a magical representation of a website was much less unnerving than being sucked into a demon dimension. Even though his circumstances hadn’t actually changed, computers were something Liam understood. It also meant that what had happened to him even made a certain amount of sense. After all, why was he here, but none of the others?

  They had all been following the path of the historical Silk Road, so that wasn’t it. Liam guessed that route had then intersected with a data line someone had laid in Antakya. Lines of power were lines of power, whether they were ley lines, chakra, or high-speed internet connections. But Liam was confident that he was the only member of Team Three who also had a connection to the digital Silk Road running through those fibers. And that meant that while the others had walked on through… here he was. That definitely wasn’t good. It wasn’t natural. But it also wasn’t demonic. It was just weird.

  Weird he could cope with. Weird was his job.

  Liam scanned the road again. He wondered if all of these people were manifesting here because they were dead, like the old traders in Antakya, or if the appearance of the traders hadn’t been related to their deaths at all. Were they really ghosts, or more like echoes? He wondered if that would make Sal feel better about them.

  Liam snorted to himself. Sal was still safe with Grace and Menchú. She could worry about herself.

  His eye fell on a new face in the crowd, and all sound died in Liam’s throat. She wasn’t looking at him. She didn’t appear to have seen him. But Liam was definitely looking at a very familiar face.

  Shit.

  • • •

  The ghosts continued to gather. As Grace and the others followed them, their convoy joined others in the plaza, then walked on, meeting more groups as they slowly and deliberately made their way out of the old city toward one of the newer areas built on the outskirts of the city.

  For Menchú and Sal it had long ago become impossible to move in the crowd without being stepped through by a ghost at every turn. Sal kept her eyes firmly on Menchú’s back as she followed him, gritting her teeth and resolutely not looking at the ghosts passing through her body.

  Although the ghosts never made any overt move to avoid her, Grace walked in a bubble of isolation, untouched by the spirits around her. But that’s nothing new, is it? Watching her life literally burn away before her eyes had not made Grace a fan of metaphors, but this one was hard to avoid. She was isolated from other people, from the world, from time itself. And now, even the ghosts apparently wanted nothing to do with her.

  Grace knew that she shouldn’t take it personally. If the ghosts turned restless or violent, their antipathy could be useful. There were, as Asanti had pointed out, benefits to her condition.

  Was that true? Or was it just what she told herself to make herself feel better about circumstances over which she had no control? Asanti’s question haunted her.

  If you could live normally again, would you still want to?

  Grace wrenched her attention back to the here and now. People were depending on her in a city full of ghosts. Now was no time for metaphors.

  The ghosts had become a virtual river flowing through the silent city. Periodically, a dog would bark in protest, but since the dogs couldn’t describe what they saw to their two-legged companions, the city’s human residents remained mostly oblivious.

  They left the residential districts and entered a commercial park, where the ghosts broke formation and spread out into a giant ragged ring. The circle thickened, but an area in the center remained clear, an island surrounded by a sea of ghosts, thick enough now that individual forms blurred into a shifting fog from which faces, limbs, and objects briefly emerged, only to be sucked back in and swallowed up by the changing whole.

  Sal and Menchú broke through to the eye of the storm, breath misting in the spirit-cold air. Grace joined them and watched the void of her passage through the ghosts immediately vanish behind her.

  Sal was bent forward, hands resting on her knees as she took deep breaths, forcing herself not to hyperventilate only with difficulty. “Okay, that was horrible.”

  Menchú was not so obviously shaken, but he sat down on a bit of sidewalk in front of a large building.

  “Is this any better?” asked Grace.

  “Yes. Yes. And in all ways, yes.”

  “Except one.”

  Sal’s look to Grace was almost comical, so deep was her distress. “What do you mean?”

  Menchú caught Grace’s intent. “She means that now they have us surrounded.”

  Grace patted Sal sympathetically on the shoulder as she sank to the ground with a groan.

  5.

  Liam knew the face: green eyes rimmed in gold, blonde hair that fell soft and straight past fell soft past her shoulders, the freckles that speckled her upturned nose. He knew every detail that could be crammed into a single memory, a few heartbeats long, that he’d been given by a brush with gold-tinged blood in a clockmaker’s shop, surrounded by death and time.

  Show me the vastness, Liam, she’d said.

  A fragment from his missing years that he’d ruthlessly squashed down, not wanting to poke the sleeping bear of his amnesia for fear of what he’d wake.

  And here she was, looking at him now. No one else on the road had made more than cursory eye contact. But this woman was looking at him, and did not look away.

  She didn’t move; she just stood there in the stream of people, looking at him looking at her.

  Christina.

  It came to him like a lost set of keys, suddenly appearing in the spot he’d have sworn he’d searched five times before. He saw her, felt the gap of her name, and then there it was, as though it had been there all along, waiting patiently for him to notice.

  Her name is Christina.

  With that detail, others followed: She’d said she was from the west, but she’d come to Belfast looking for challenges she couldn’t find in the tamed-tech sectors of Galway. She’d laughed when she told him Ulster was her first visit to a foreign country. That in all her life, she’d never crossed the Irish Sea.

  “What are you doing here?” Liam asked, mostly to himself.

  A heartbeat later she was standing before him, their faces barely a breath apart.

  Reflexively, Liam took a step back.

  She smiled at his reaction, revealing a small chip on her right front tooth. That was new. Liam wondered when and how it had happened. It didn’t detract from the charm of her expression, and that made him want to shiver.

  “What am I doing here?” she repeated Liam’s question back to him. “What are you doing here? You turned your back on all this years ago, Liam. It doesn’t concern you anymore.”

  All of what? Cybercrime? Something else? Something darker?

  “Seems like I’m up to my neck in it at the moment,” he said, because it certainly did.

  Her lips twisted again. “Are you, Liam?”

  “What do you think?”

  Her smile faded. “You don’t remember. Not really.”

  “Come on, Christina.” He threw out her name like a fishing line. Not sure if it was even baited, or what he’d pull back if it was.

  Something in her bit. Another long appraising moment and then she said, “You’ve got my name again, at least. Meet me in Shanghai and find out.”

  She leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek. She didn’t smell like anything, and her lips on his face were cool. Before Liam could catch her wrist or try to ask another question, she’d turned away and vanished into the crowd.

>   • • •

  Sal looked around with an expression of perfect despair, and then turned to Grace and Menchú. “Did you have to point out that we’re surrounded? Couldn’t you have let me enjoy the illusion of not being up to our armpits in shit for just a couple of minutes? Please?”

  Grace shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You’re free to sit here and pretend that you aren’t surrounded by ghosts.” Grace gestured to Menchú. “While we determine why they are here, how to get rid of them, and how to get Liam back.”

  Sal glared at Grace as she got to her feet. “It would serve you right if I took you up on that.”

  “You’ll be happier if you’re busy anyway,” said Menchú.

  “Stop agreeing with her,” Sal muttered. Grace and Menchú both chose to pretend that they didn’t hear. With a sigh, Sal turned to look at the building. Mostly because there were no ghosts in that direction.

  The structure was several stories high, brick, and had a number on it which she guessed was an address, but other than that was completely unlabeled. “Do we have any idea what this place is?”

  “Warehouse?” Grace guessed.

  “I don’t see a loading dock,” said Menchú. “Why a warehouse?”

  “It doesn’t have any windows.”

  Grace was right. The facade of the building had what looked like window frames set to match the other buildings in the area, but they were mounted on the walls, not in them, and all the glass was mirrored.

  Sal looked up toward the top of the building. It was hard to tell since it was the middle of the night, but she was pretty sure there was a bank of AC units on the roof. She pointed them out to the others.

  “Necessary if you don’t have windows,” said Menchú.

  “But why so many?” asked Sal. “It would be letting in light and heat that would be a problem in this climate. Without those, this building should need less air conditioning, not more.”

  “Unless something inside is putting off a whole lot of heat,” said Menchú.

  Sal jumped at the squawk of a megaphone behind them.

  The ghosts continued to writhe in their circle around the building. A phalanx of Turkish security guards stood in the middle of their misty mass.

  “What,” said the guard that Sal assumed was either the leader or the one with the best English, “are you doing here?”

  Menchú slowly raised his hand, and took a cautious step forward. “We received a call—”

  A single shot rang out in the night.

  6.

  Sal had to envy Grace’s reflexes. Before the sound of the shot had faded, Grace had already thrown herself into Father Menchú, toppling both of them to the pavement behind a bench near the building entrance.

  Sal dove in beside them a fraction of a second later. “You hit?” she asked.

  “No,” said Grace. “You?”

  Sal did a quick check to make sure the adrenaline surge hadn’t covered a serious injury. “No. I’m good.”

  The bench didn’t provide much in the way of cover, but when there wasn’t a second shot, Sal risked a look at the guards.

  There was a lot of shouting at each other in Turkish, but the content of the conversation wasn’t hard to guess: Someone in their midst had spotted the ghosts. Sal recognized the expressions of confusion and panic.

  “I think we need to get out of here.”

  Grace shook her head. “I can’t block both of you from that many guns.”

  “Even if you could, I’m not bringing you home full of holes,” said Menchú. He gave her hand a squeeze. Grace stiffened for a moment before returning it.

  “Can we get inside the building?” said Sal.

  “Will that help?” said Grace.

  “I don’t know, but whatever’s in there, the ghosts seem pretty excited about it.”

  Grace eyed the short distance to the door. “Doesn’t look like it’s anything fancier than a standard mechanical lock system. Wait for my signal.”

  Moving swiftly and silently as a shadow, Grace slipped over to the door. The guards—still distracted by the horde of ghosts—ignored her. A minute later, she gestured to Sal and Menchú. Sal didn’t try for stealth or finesse, opting instead to throw herself into motion with as much oomph as she could, counting on Grace to have the door unlocked by the time she reached it.

  Grace flung the door open and Sal barreled through, her shoes squealing to a stop on the polished concrete floor inside. She heard the door close behind Grace and Father Menchú seconds later.

  “Did they notice that?” Sal asked.

  The sound of the megaphone managed to penetrate the building, although the words were impossible to make out.

  “I’m guessing yes,” said Grace.

  “At least they aren’t coming in,” said Sal.

  “Yet.”

  Menchú frowned. “If they call in reinforcements, we’re going to have a really big problem.”

  “Because we’re going to have to call in Team One and Monsignor Fox is going to see it as evidence that we can’t do our jobs anymore?”

  “Worse,” said Grace. “If they call in reinforcements, the percentage of people in the city who can see the ghosts might reach a tipping point where more people can see them than can’t.”

  “And that’s bad because?” asked Sal.

  “People believe our cover stories about gas leaks and hallucinogenic spores because, deep down, most people don’t want to believe that magic actually exists. If enough people have seen evidence that it does, we’ll lose containment not just on this incident, but on what we do as a whole,” said Menchú.

  “That would definitely be bad.”

  “On the plus side,” Grace observed, “Asanti would probably be able to investigate whatever magic she wanted then.”

  Menchú grimaced. “Let’s see if we can find Liam and put a stop to this before we find out.”

  • • •

  For lack of anything better to do, Liam continued to walk the road. With each step, he forced himself to take stock of his situation rationally. He was somewhere outside the realm of the normal world. Not good, but choosing to view it as a metaphor for a computer network kept his nerves under control for the moment. He was surrounded by participants from several different incarnations of the Silk Road. Moreover, experimentation had shown that they all knew him by name. That was kind of disturbing. Sure, Liam hadn’t always used his computer skills for the white hats—hell, there was an argument that being part of a top-secret society within the highly secretive Vatican wasn’t exactly legal either, but at least now he was pretty sure he was on the side of the angels.

  One angel, anyway …

  Liam wrenched his mind away from Perry/Aaron/whatever-the-hell-he-was-now and back to the matter at hand. The fact was, it wasn’t like he’d been an international crime lord in his old life. Yeah, he’d known about the new Silk Road and had done his share of shady dealings, but even if he’d had an international reputation, the site was anonymous. That was the point of having an illegal internet marketplace: It was a place you could go where no one knew your name.

  So really, the only person here who should recognize him was Christina. He didn’t know for sure how she linked to either the historical or the internet version of the Silk Road, but she pretty much lived inside the two-year-sized hole in his memory labeled Things Liam Doesn’t Know.

  This was neither the time nor the place to pry open that particular box, but Liam tried to make the logical connections that he could. Silk Road 2.0 and its successors had never been tied to magic, as far as he knew. Yeah, there was plenty of illegal shit to be found, but if someone were trading capital-letter Artifacts or Books on it, the Maitresse would have it shut down before the Society could get their boots on. If you wanted to deal, you did it at the Market Arcanum. There was some fringe stuff that wasn’t worth her while to quash, and she didn’t technically control anything outside of Europe, but in all of his time with T
eam Three, he’d never found any sign of magical commerce taking place online. Given the way that magic and tech didn’t mix, it was only sensible.

  Except… what about the “information and magic want to be free” techno-cultists who kept insisting that oil and water really wanted to be friends? No. Even they did their business at the Market Arcanum.

  Until last year when their attempt to raid Sal’s brain had gotten at least one of their cultist cohorts banned. What if they tried to build their own trade routes to compensate?

  Liam had to get in touch with the rest of the team. He pulled out his phone. No signal. But if this was a trade route, a trade route connected to the internet, no less, there must be a way to get a message to the outside.

  As he mulled the problem, Liam realized that he was walking next to the man with the donkey again. Either this is the first coincidence to happen in this place or …

  “Do you know how to get back to Antakya?”

  The man looked at Liam, blank.

  “I mean, Antioch?”

  Nothing.

  If this man wasn’t going to be useful, why had he been drawn to him on the road? He was missing something. Liam looked at the man more closely. He certainly didn’t have a cell phone. The donkey was carrying what looked like bolts of silk. The man carried a staff and a small leather satchel with a rolled piece of paper sticking out of the top. Well, it was worth a try.

  “Could you carry a message for me?”

  The man nodded.

  • • •

  Grace had been correct, in a sense: The inside of the building did very much resemble a warehouse. But the shelves, instead of being filled with boxes or trade goods, held rack upon rack of servers. Sal looked down at the rows of machines, tiny lights blinking on and off. That explained the air conditioning units—the humming HVAC system kept the space chilled to the liking of the machines.

  Over that, Liam’s ringtone on Sal’s phone sounded like a full-on orchestra.