Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  “Amazing,” she said out loud, to no one in particular. She wondered how strong her protection spell was, how close it might be to wearing off. Whether she might be able to walk right up to the rip and peer in. What would she see?

  “I don’t like this,” a small voice said behind her.

  It was a kid, a little boy, no more than seven, or it used to be. He must have been wearing a light hat and coat to stay warm in the chill of the early morning, but it was hard to tell where he ended and his clothes began now. He was having trouble walking and, to look at what was left of his face, he was probably almost blind.

  “I was running home from school,” he said. “But I can’t run now.”

  Christina gave the boy a good look. She’d devoted her life to magic and had seen things worse than this. A few of them were things she envied Liam for having forgotten. But this boy almost made something in her crack. Maybe everything doesn’t want to be connected to everything else. Maybe turning magic loose in the world isn’t such a great idea. She put it out of her mind. She had a mission, and this phase of it was almost over, as long as she could get out of town in one piece. It seemed that, right now, she still could, provided she hurried. Up the street from the boy, she could see the edge of the car she’d rented, as yet unaffected. From how quiet the town was, it looked like some people had already left. She knew that would soon be impossible.

  She fixed her eyes on the boy.

  “You’ll be all right,” she said, and pulled her keys out of her pocket.

  She learned, on her way out of town, that the magic was even spottier than she had thought. She passed a block where the houses were swaying together, as if they were made of something much more flexible than wood and stone. In front of one of them, a man appeared to have merged with his dog, and they were going for a walk, a big smile on their collective face. Three kids were learning to play a new kind of tag in the iridescent street, as they figured out they could now move in three dimensions. No touching the ground, one was saying to the other as Christina passed. No going over the tops of buildings, either. Then she reached several blocks where nothing was wrong. The houses lay in rows next to the road. The gardens in the front were starting to bloom. Someone had forgotten to get the mail out of the mailbox. At the end of the street was a sheet of light rising into the sky and exploding overhead. She turned left onto another street, and it was a straight shot out of town, the road rising to the edge of the ridge. She took it, drove the car to the top of the hill, then eased it onto the shoulder, got out, and looked down into the valley.

  She understood, then, what she had seen in the town. It was as though she and Opie had set off a small bomb in Middle Coom, and that bomb had thrown out sparks of magic that landed here, landed there, turned to seeds, and began to grow. From the hillside it appeared that Middle Coom was soil. Light and color rose in winding columns above the rooftops and spread branches that were connecting above to form a canopy. Everything in that town was connecting to everything else.

  This was only the beginning, Christina knew. In time those columns would grow together to form a single thing that would transform all inside it, for good. Then it was unclear exactly what would happen—the details in the research the Network had done were a little fuzzy—but it seemed that there would be some sort of explosion, a second, gigantic release of energy and magic into the world, and the process she and Opie had set off on the second floor of a bed-and-breakfast in a small town in Ireland would start all over again, on a much larger scale. That next phase, when it was done, might transform the town.

  And this was just a test. If it worked—and right now, it certainly looked like it was working—the Network would cast another spell that could swallow a city. Maybe set off another explosion that might take in the whole country. Then, perhaps, the British Isles. Then Europe. Until all the world was changed.

  For the better, Christina thought. When it’s done, we will all be together, all the time.

  She got out her phone and made a call.

  “It’s working,” she said. “I’ll report again soon.”

  She noticed then that the spreading magic was starting to draw a ragged loop around the town, from the edge of the fields to the water beyond the docks. The colors of the fields were oozing toward it, like molasses. She had gotten out just in time. She wondered if anyone left in the town who wanted to leave would be able to in a little while, and decided not to find out. She told herself it was because of the mission. Not because a part of her was a little frightened by what they had done.

  5.

  “Do you think you can keep it down a little?” Liam said. He was sitting behind Frances.

  “You’re right, I’m sorry,” Frances said. “I got a little excited.”

  “It’s understandable,” Asanti said.

  Team Three was on a plane over France, heading toward Ireland. Liam and Frances were in the window seats. Asanti was sitting next to Frances, Sal next to Liam. Across the aisle from them sat Menchú and Grace. Brow furrowed, Grace was concentrating on Good Morning, Midnight. Sal noticed that Menchú hadn’t said a word since he’d boarded the plane.

  “What were you talking about?” Sal said.

  Frances turned around in her seat a little so she could talk to Sal. “Some of the functions that the Orb may yet have. It appears that in addition to detecting magic, it may have some ability to contain it, or to protect people who are close by from it.”

  “Really?” Sal said.

  “If I’m understanding the manuscript right.”

  “What makes it hard to understand?”

  “It’s complicated,” Asanti said. “First, this particular section is written in several languages, and second, it’s written in a very elliptical style. It’s full of references to things we don’t know about, and the instructions read like metaphors or euphemisms.”

  “So it’s a code?” Sal said.

  “That’s what we think,” Frances said.

  Asanti nodded. “At the very least, it was written for a very small audience. I think whoever the author is wrote it specifically so that strangers couldn’t learn from it. It was written for people the author already knew, to refresh their memories about this.”

  “Or perhaps it’s gibberish,” Liam said.

  Frances looked annoyed, but Asanti shrugged. “Could be. But we’ve learned enough from working with it so far that I don’t think so.”

  “So about this protection bit,” Sal said. “How close are you to being able to make that work?”

  “Not close,” Frances said. “But it’s very exciting.”

  “It’ll be even more exciting when it actually protects us,” Liam said.

  Frances looked even more annoyed, and Sal could see that Asanti picked up on it, too.

  “Those kinds of comments aren’t as helpful as you think they are, Liam,” Asanti said. Her voice suddenly wasn’t gentle, and Sal looked around at her team. Now Liam seemed hurt. Menchú’s face hardened. Grace’s left eye twitched; Sal could tell she’d heard and was pretending not to notice. Even Frances seemed a little embarrassed.

  We really are in trouble, Sal thought.

  “Comments like that aren’t very helpful either, Asanti,” Sal said. She tried to moderate her voice, inject a little sympathy.

  “You’re right,” Asanti said, and sounded contrite. But the team’s mood didn’t improve.

  “It’s just hard to listen to you talk like that,” Liam said, “when we have no idea what we’re in for.”

  Sal heard a tone in his voice that she’d heard before from him, back when they were doing … well, whatever it was they were doing with their relationship. He was about to say something that had been on his mind for a long time. He couldn’t hold it in any longer. And it didn’t matter much to him whether they were on a plane with other passengers right now.

  “We’re not subjects for your experiments,” he said.

  “We’ve never said you were,” Asanti said.

 
“And yet I feel you’ve treated us exactly that way lately.”

  “I’m sorry,” Asanti said.

  “You don’t sound like you mean it,” Liam said. “You sound like you’re just trying to get me to shut up.”

  Asanti arched an eyebrow. “If you want the conversation to move in this direction, it can. It would help if you kept your voice down.”

  “To keep what we do a secret? It’s interesting that you of all people should be worried about that, given your ambivalence about our stated mission. You know, to lock it all away. Which I presume you used to believe in.”

  Sal glanced at Menchú, who was watching both Liam and Asanti. His lips were pressed closed.

  “I believe in what we’re doing. I don’t know why I keep having to say that,” Asanti said, with a little exasperation. She lowered her voice. “And no, I’m not trying to keep it a secret. I’m trying to keep people from panicking.”

  “But here’s the thing,” Liam said. “Maybe they should start.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the reports I’ve been picking up are not good.”

  Menchú leaned forward, into the aisle.

  “What have you learned?” he said.

  “There’s a fishing village called Middle Coom,” Liam said, “where something very, very strange seems to have happened.”

  “What is it?” Frances said.

  “It’s hard to say, because it’s all on social media right now. Several reports of lights in the sky. Strange sounds, like UFO stuff. But then here’s a post from someone who claims they saw the town … dancing. As in, the buildings were dancing. Then there’s a post from a fisherman who says he wouldn’t go back into harbor because there were what he calls monsters in the water. He also says Middle Coom was lit up like fireworks. Of course, nobody believes these things. They think the witnesses are drunk, or sick, or hallucinating, or something. The fisherman isn’t sure he believes it himself.”

  “What about the official media?” Asanti said.

  “Nothing yet,” Liam said.

  “So no real information,” Menchú said.

  “Except that all the posts are talking about it happening to the entire town,” Liam said, “which is why you’ll pardon me when I say that I resent being a lab rat in an experiment, when we’re going up against something so big.”

  “Please let’s not rehash this,” Asanti said.

  “Why?” Liam said. “Because it’d be inconvenient for you if we did?”

  “Liam,” Menchú said.

  Liam looked at Menchú in disbelief. “You’re siding with her?”

  “No,” Menchú said. “I just don’t want us to discuss this here. Not at this moment.”

  “Then when?” Liam said.

  “When you’re not making an ass of yourself in public, okay?” Grace said. She didn’t even look up from her book.

  Nobody else spoke, so Sal found her opening. “We’ll get through this and then talk,” she said. “Okay?”

  “How can you be so sure?” Liam said.

  “I’m not,” Sal answered. “But I’m planning on it. Aren’t you?”

  Liam opened his mouth to speak and then stopped. He nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. For now.”

  Sal didn’t know if what he said worked on everyone else. But she knew Liam well enough to know he was lying.

  6.

  Rory didn’t know quite how long she’d hovered above the town. It felt so good up there she hadn’t wanted to come down. The sensation of flying was like swimming—which she loved—but so much better, and she could breathe the whole time. Then there was the view. She’d been in an airplane twice and thought she’d seen the world from above, but being up here now revealed how small that plane’s window had been. How much had been hidden from her. To the west, the county unfurled below her in an undulating carpet of farms and roads and towns, until the land disappeared in a haze. To the east, the iron sea swelled to the horizon. And below, the town was a marvel. There were patches of it that were still unaffected, and people who hadn’t changed; she couldn’t say why. They seemed to be worried. She could see them running from house to house, trying to find each other, getting inside, or heading toward churches. Places they thought they would be safe. It was a shame, she thought, that they saw what was happening as such a threat. There was nothing to be worried about. She knew because the threads that grew up from the ground to wrap around her had only become more numerous, and they conveyed, with each minute, what another person was thinking.

  The town’s secrets all bloomed in her brain, everyone’s hopes and fears, their desires and doubts, all the things they wished they had done. Ryan Smith wished he’d gone to Dublin when he was younger, instead of waiting. He still thought he might do it if he saved up enough. Roisin, her friend from school, was going to go to America. John McCabe had gone to the doctor six months ago and had been given a tough diagnosis—cancer—that handed him a death sentence. But he hadn’t told anyone, afraid too many people would treat him differently; he just wanted to live his life to the end. It turned out that a good half of Middle Coom—women and men alike—were attracted to each other, a network of desire made of passing glances, stolen stares, idle dreams. The town was awash with a gentle, what-if lust. Rory would have thought, before this all happened, that these kinds of revelations would tear the town apart. But instead she, along with everyone else in Middle Coom who had come under the spell, was flooded with an overwhelming sense of acceptance. They were all together now. The tensions were sprung. The contradictions no longer needed to be resolved. They could just be. Everyone was welcome—the town was an open embrace. Even to the people who were losing their minds, losing themselves, to what was happening. And then, suddenly, Rory wanted to go home.

  If she had been relying on sight alone, it would have been impossible for her to find her house. Enormous, sinuous limbs, like the stamens of flowers, had sprouted from the line of roofs near where she lived, and they were stretching up into the sky, reaching for each other, quivering. The roads there had turned to rivers of color and light. But none of that was disorienting to her. She knew where her family was because she could feel them. She was tied to them by a golden thread, and she followed it back to them, descending through the forest of tendrils, through the roof below, and finally, to the floor of the living room. It had all changed. The walls moved, pulsed, expanding and contracting, as though she were inside an organ. A lung, maybe. And there was her family, growing, melting, fusing together.

  “We’re so happy to see you,” they said.

  “I’m so happy I came here.”

  “We know you want to go,” the family said.

  “I know,” she said. “Is it okay?” Though she already knew the answer.

  “The truth is that we all want to go,” the family said. “We all want to go and we all want to stay, all the time. We get in the car and it always occurs to us that we could just keep driving; we get home and wonder how we could ever have thought about going anywhere else. We love you and we never want to leave. We love you and we all want to go. Does that make sense?”

  “It does,” Rory said. “It does.”

  “We understand you now,” the family said.

  “And I understand you,” Rory said.

  “Then join us,” the family said. The room swelled with light, and all the family’s hands reached out to her. Rory stepped into their embrace, and they took her in. The house flexed and grew. Soon they would be part of it, and it of them; and in just a little while, when the next burst of magic happened, they could go wherever they pleased.

  • • •

  There was a wobble in the air above the town, as if smoke were rising, though there was no fire. Christina could see now that there was a curtain, a shimmer, across the road that led into town. A low moan came from somewhere in the direction of the ocean. Middle Coom was elsewhere now. The elsewhere was coming here. Christina smiled, satisfied. She got in her red car and he
aded north, toward Dublin, toward the border with Northern Ireland and, beyond that, Belfast. The Network’s tests were complete. It was time for the real thing.

  • • •

  For Opie, the moan that Christina heard was a low rumble that made the floor ripple under his feet. He’d been hearing things all day. Voices from downstairs. A high keening from somewhere else. But he hadn’t seen enough to be more than a little nervous. The small window in the room faced the backyard, and apart from the sky, it was still as it was when the sun had come up, an overgrown tangle of vines near the house, a small garden near the edge of the lot.

  The book on the desk quivered as the rumble passed through the bed-and-breakfast. That was when Opie noticed that the floor under the desk was softening, buckling. The desk began to tilt; the book slid toward the floor. Opie, sitting on one of the beds, rushed forward and stopped it with his right hand, keeping it open with his left. His feet sank a little into the floor, and he let out a small scream when he thought he was going to go melting through it. He staggered backward onto the bed, the book on his chest, still open. The desk curved and lurched like a wounded sea creature. The wall behind it peeled back, and a wave of light and color flooded the room. Now Opie really screamed. He jumped to the opposite wall, held on to the book with one hand, and, by instinct, put the other one over his face. But now he could see through his own hand. It was blurring, shifting. It had a thousand fingers. It didn’t have any fingers; it was just a flipper of flesh, a piece of clay, changing in front of him, as if molded by busy, invisible hands.

  He screamed again and dropped the book, ran down the stairs. The book lay open on the floor.

  • • •

  A red car, heading north at great speed, passed Team Three’s van as it headed south.

  “Whoa,” Liam said. “Someone’s in a hurry.”

  “Are we almost there?” Sal said.

  “Just about,” Liam said.

  They could see light in one of the valleys not far away, the kind of glow a town would throw off at night, though it wasn’t night.