Sal scrambled in her pocket for her phone.
“‘Danny Boy’?” said Grace.
“I picked it to annoy him when he was being a butthead over our breakup,” Sal admitted, getting her fingers around her phone and answering it to banish the orchestra. A moment later, she had him on speaker. “Liam? Where are you? Have you hacked my phone from the netherworld?”
“Trying not to think of it that way, but thanks. I’ve called your phone from what seems to be the physical manifestation of an illegal internet market that some bright spark decided to call ‘the Silk Road.’”
“And then they put the servers in Antakya.” Sal felt the pieces click into place. “That was a lousy coincidence.”
“Not a coincidence. I’m pretty sure at least one group of techno-cultists is up to their necks in this.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Menchú.
A pause on the other end of the line. “That’s another thing I’m trying not to think about.”
“Well,” said Sal, “we’ve got good news and bad news.”
“Shoot.”
“Good news: pretty sure we’re in the building where they keep the servers for the website.”
“And the bad news?”
“We’re surrounded by a bunch of pissed-off ghosts and really nervous Turkish security guards. How about you?”
“Surrounded by weird shit, but nothing immediately threatening.”
A sudden quiet greeted that pronouncement, but it took Sal a moment to figure out what had changed. The air conditioning had turned off. What the hell?
Grace connected the dots. “They’ve cut—”
• • •
“—power to the building.”
Those were the last words Liam heard before his phone went dead. He reached for another scrap of paper so that he could scrawl “phone connection to Sal” on it again, but the man and his donkey who had carried it away to make the connection were nowhere to be seen. Liam concentrated—they did not reappear.
He was on his own.
Liam looked around. The road was there, the people were there. His gaze fell on the distant lights of the horizon.
As Liam watched them, the lights took on a tinge of green that shifted to amber, then to red.
One by one, the lights winked out.
Definitely not good.
• • •
The servers did not shut down immediately with the air conditioning.
“There must be a backup generator somewhere,” said Menchú. “Smart.”
Grace looked at the lights on the servers, already showing angry yellow and red instead of happy green. “Whatever they have, it won’t keep this many machines going for long.”
“I don’t suppose,” said Sal, “that if the system goes down Liam will just fall out of wherever he is and back into the real world?”
“I’d rather not count on it,” said Menchú.
“So what do we do?” asked Grace, bouncing unconsciously on her toes, ready to move as soon as someone gave her a direction.
Menchú put on his best game face. “Liam said that there were techno-cultists involved. That implies that there’s a magical center to this mess. So let’s do what we came here for: find it and shut it down.”
A woman’s voice from above answered them in Irish-accented English, “Not so fast, Bookburners.”
Sal looked up. Hidden in the shadows above the servers, she could see half a dozen faces peering down at them. It was hard to make out details in the dimness, but the pistols pointing in their direction were plain enough.
• • •
Liam fought to keep his breathing under control. The lights in the distance continued to wink out, and now people on the road were obviously vanishing. Website users being kicked off as the servers crashed? The site was going down, and he did not want to go down with it.
Great, Liam, then how about you use that brain you claim is in your head and think of something useful. How do you get off this damn merry-go-round?
The man and the donkey could make a connection to the outside world, but they were missing.
He wasn’t going to think about Christina. He didn’t want to ask her for help. He couldn’t afford to. His missing years might be a mysterious country to him, but to her? Liam suspected that Christina not only had his number, she had his whole damn map.
Liam kept walking, following the flow of travelers on the road. If they can’t get me to Antakya, they’ll have to lead me somewhere.
There he was, lying to himself again.
Following random people in the dark wasn’t going to get him anywhere but lost.
And how’s that different from what I’ve been doing for the last nine years? There was a two-year-sized hole in his memory that he had never even tried to look inside. And he’d been wandering around all this time as if ignoring it would make whatever had happened during his possession disappear. The time had come to face facts. Christina said this place didn’t concern him anymore. Which implied that at some point, it had. The historical and digital Silk Roads couldn’t have created this place by themselves; magic required sympathy, sure, but for sympathy to produce an alternate plane of reality? That required magic.
Liam closed his eyes, reached back into his memory. When have I been someplace like this before?
He opened his eyes again. A second path branched off from the main road beneath his feet.
Liam followed it.
• • •
Grace pretended she cared about the pistol pointed at the back of her head as the Irish woman led the team deeper into the building. Even before she didn’t have to worry about bullets, she could have disarmed the man behind her. But she couldn’t disarm the man behind her, the one behind Menchú, plus the one behind Sal before any of them had a chance to fire.
She could avenge her friends, but she couldn’t save them.
If it came down to a choice between saving their lives and allowing the knowledge of magic to escape into the larger world, she knew which one she would have to make. I am not a tool of the Society, I am a person. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t do my job.
That didn’t mean it was a choice that she could make without consequences. She had seen friends die before. She thought of Menchú and wasn’t sure that she could bear doing it again.
What was the alternative? Grace would not easily die by another’s hand. She couldn’t stomach the thought of suicide. Maybe Asanti would let her rest, if she asked her to. If she let a few hundred years pass without her, would the pain she left behind be just as fresh when she returned?
If I could live normally again, would I even know how?
Their little procession stopped before a giant set of wooden doors placed incongruously in a frame set up in the middle of the room. The doors were ajar, but Grace couldn’t see anything on the other side.
The Irish woman called to a skinny guy bent over a computer, “Is it still open?”
“Technically?” he said, unsure. “But it’s not very stable. I’m not sure it would be a survivable trip.”
“Good.” She jerked her head in Menchú’s direction, then indicated the doors. “You first.”
• • •
The path Liam followed led away from the lights, into a darkness so complete that he stopped trying to see and just closed his eyes. It was easier, he found, without the distraction. He didn’t have to worry about seeing where he was going. The road was as even and featureless as it was dark, and seemed to go on forever.
That sensation felt familiar. Why?
Show me the vastness, Liam, Christina said. He was looking into her eyes. Feeling like he was falling and not falling at the same time. And spread beneath them was a vast design, etched in black upon the darkness of the void itself.
In the present, Liam nearly stumbled as his eyes flew open. The newness and power of the memory was exhilarating and even more terrifying than he’d imagined. But the vastness before him was no longer featureless.
It was familiar.
And he knew his way home.
• • •
Menchú hadn’t moved. Sal braced to throw herself against him, prevent him bodily, if necessary, from entering the portal that these people had as much as admitted was a one-way trip.
“Whatever your plan is,” Menchú observed, “killing us will only make it more difficult. If we go missing, the Society will come looking for us.”
“We’ll be long gone by the time anyone comes after you,” said the Irish woman.
“What is your plan, anyway?” asked Sal.
The woman rolled her eyes. “Since you’re going to die anyway I may as well share my evil plan? I don’t think so. How about this: If none of you survive, I’ll be sure to explain everything to your corpses.” She turned to Menchú. “Now quit stalling. If you move through the portal before it gets too degraded, you and your friends might—”
What they might or might not have done was lost in a massive explosion of white light that sent the doors flying outward on their hinges. As Sal reflexively cringed back, she could barely make out a Grace-shaped shadow seizing Menchú by the back of his coat and hauling him after her, away from the blast. Everything after that was blackness.
• • •
When Sal came to, the techno-cultists were gone. The doors hung open, empty and ordinary. Grace was checking Menchú for injuries. Liam held out a hand to help Sal to her feet.
“What happened to the others?” Sal asked.
“They ran for it about the time I showed up,” he said, “right into the arms of Turkish security.”
“What was that big white light?”
Liam grimaced. “Something I’m going to have to finally figure out. Come on,” he added, “if we hurry, we should be able to sneak out the back while the security guards and the techno-cultists are keeping each other busy.”
That sounded good to Sal. She made it to her feet and was pleasantly surprised to find herself largely unhurt. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Where were you? What happened?”
Liam sighed. “I don’t think I’ve been okay for a while. But it’s time I tried to get there.” At Sal’s look of concern, he tried to reassure her. “I’ll tell you all about it on the way home.”
• • •
Back at the Archives, Grace listened as Liam told them all what had happened to him on the Silk Road. He had offered to debrief on the plane, but Menchú insisted they wait until they were home and he could tell Asanti at the same time.
As Liam spoke, Grace watched Sal’s brow knit in confusion. “Back when we were comparing evil exes, I thought you said the woman who got you into magic was named Jenna. How many magical former girlfriends do you have?”
Liam spread his hands helplessly. “I have two years that I don’t really remember, and demons aren’t big on monogamy,” he said. “Jenna and a guy she knew named Bran—they were the ones who got me hooked. Christina came later, after I was already doing whatever it was I was doing while I was possessed. Until I saw her on the Silk Road, I didn’t even remember that I had forgotten her.”
“Can you remember anything else?” Asanti asked.
“No, but the gaps feel more present than they have in a long time. And don’t think that doesn’t have me freaked right the fuck out,” he said. “But I’m going to have to deal with it. The tide is rising, and I can’t afford not to know the truth about my own past anymore. It’s not safe for me or anyone else.”
“Secrets have a way of emerging,” said Menchú.
Asanti gave a rueful smile in return. “That they do.”
Grace could see that the others were tired. One by one they filtered out, back to their various homes to sleep. In her mind, she wished them all pleasant dreams.
Only Asanti remained, working. Grace watched her as she flipped through her reference books, made notes to herself, quietly hummed. She didn’t look up until Grace stood directly in front of her desk.
If you could live normally again, would you still want to?
When Grace didn’t speak, Asanti gently broke the silence. “Can I help you?”
Grace licked suddenly dry lips. “Yes,” she said.
Bookburners
Season 2, Episode 5
Debtor’s Prison
Mur Lafferty
1.
Asanti didn’t like hiding from the team.
So she hid in plain sight. Rome was a large city, after all, and she couldn’t be accused of “hiding” while sitting in an outdoor cafe, enjoying the late afternoon sun and an espresso. It was hardly her fault that her cafe of choice was about as far from the Vatican as you could get while still remaining within the city limits.
“Hello, dear,” came a voice. Only decades of practice in dealing with magic, demons, and angry priests allowed Asanti to keep her composure and not spill thick black espresso all over her blue flowered dress.
She looked up. The woman who had caught her stood with the sun behind her, making her more of a silhouette than an ordinary human. But then, when had anyone ever accused the Maitresse of being ordinary, or even remotely human?
“Lovely to see you,” Asanti lied, her heart hammering in a way that had nothing to do with espresso. “Won’t you sit?”
The Maitresse eased her regal form down on the wrought iron chair as if it were a throne. She carried with her a pot of tea and an ancient chipped teacup.
All the usual questions rose to Asanti’s mind. Why was she here? What did she want? How did she find Asanti? But she kept her cool. The Maitresse would give out information at the rate she chose, no faster, and anyone who controlled as much magic as she did would have had no problem finding an old friend.
If that’s what they could call themselves.
“It’s dreadfully sunny. I don’t know how you stand it,” the Maitresse said, squinting at her. Bright spots of color stood out on her pale cheeks, though her face was shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat.
“Ah, I had heard you moved north. Escaping the heat?”
“Among other things,” the Maitresse said. “Is that enough? Are we done with the niceties?”
She looked younger than the last time Asanti had seen her, when she had last visited the Market Arcanum a few years earlier. This made Asanti very nervous. She put down her espresso. “That’s fine, yes. Small talk was never your strong suit.”
“That’s because small talk is not communicating. It’s dancing. And if I’m going to dance, I’d rather be properly attired.” The Maitresse poured her tea carefully. “I would like to catch up someday, though. When we have time. But this isn’t a social call. I am calling in a debt. I need you.” Her eyes glittered wickedly from beneath her hat. “And you’d better bring your team, too.”
Asanti sat very still. She’d known—she’d known—that allowing herself to be in the debt of someone like the Maitresse was not the wisest choice she could have made. But desperate times had called for making such a deal. At the time it had felt like the lesser evil. Now she was far less certain.
She smiled thinly. “You know, considering the amount of power you possess, and the friends you have, I never really thought you would need to call in a debt from someone like me.”
The Maitresse looked at her over her teacup as she sipped. She remained silent.
“But a debt is a debt,” Asanti finally said, the words feeling like rocks in her mouth. “I’ll do anything in my power to pay you back. But I would ask that you keep the team out of it.”
“You have no right to ask for such a thing,” the Maitresse said. “You can’t do this alone. You will need them.”
“They don’t owe you,” Asanti said flatly.
“You just said you would do anything in your power to pay me back. Leading a team of talented Bookburners is within your power.”
Asanti summoned the waiter with a wave and ordered another espresso. When he had swept away, she said, “Even with the team, what can we do that you and your many associates can’t?”
“Th
at’s just the thing. I need to keep all my powerful associates out of this. Someone relatively powerless and non-threatening is exactly what I need.” She smiled. “You fit the bill.”
The barb was supposed to sting, and it did, a little. As much as Asanti was not supposed to crave power, the fire that had burned inside her since her first taste of it—which her time with the Maitresse had fanned a bit higher for a short time—still smoldered under a fine coating of ash. But even if she had given herself over, she knew she would never have been what the Maitresse had become.
And that was okay. Preferable. Definitely safer.
“I’m not a complete monster,” the Maitresse said. “I figured your superiors wouldn’t see your debt as having the same importance you do, so I am willing to sweeten the pot for them, as it were. I hear you’re having problems with your little Orb toy.”
Asanti sighed. She had to pay the debt, one way or another. “What do you need?”
• • •
Working out with Grace was an excellent way to kill the boredom of a demon-empty afternoon, Sal had to admit.
She admitted it while admiring the ceiling of their small workout room. Too bad Michelangelo hadn’t deigned to paint it. This was more abstract. White dropped ceiling. A water stain. Sexy.
“Get up,” Grace said, nudging Sal with her foot. “I didn’t throw you that hard.”
“It would hurt less if you just let me sit and buy needless shit on the internet,” Sal said.
“This is a more productive way to deal with boredom.”
Sal didn’t move from her position on the mat. “Sure. I’m definitely not bored anymore. Now I hurt. I miss being bored.”
“Liam lasts a lot longer than you,” Grace said, grabbing Sal by the wrist and hauling her to her feet. “I’ve seen you fight demons harder than this. You don’t give up. What’s going on?”
“I guess I don’t see you as a real threat,” Sal said, and then barely dodged Grace’s fist. “All right, you’re a threat! Sheesh.”
She left the mat and grabbed a towel. She examined the bruises blossoming under her skin, which looked like they would match her black tank top. “I just hate being in the dark. There are too many unanswered questions. Without the Orb functioning…” She trailed off. Grace knew their situation as well as she did.
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 16
