Menchú sagged in his chair, letting his head fall back, and stared up at the ceiling. His words, when they came, were so quiet she could barely hear them. “Is this our fault, Asanti?”
“What?!”
“For years, we’ve worked well with Angiuli precisely because he didn’t make difficult decisions. We did. And then he would back our play. Sometimes he complained about it but … It’s not as though his lack of leadership qualities should come as a surprise.”
Asanti huffed a laugh. “Did you put a gun to his head and force him to become acting cardinal?”
“No. Did you?”
“Please, I’d never touch a gun.”
“We didn’t discourage him. Maybe wanting a cardinal who was as malleable as our monsignor was greedy.”
“And now we’re being punished for our sins?” Asanti asked.
Menchú shrugged.
Asanti shook her head. “So goddamned Catholic. It’s not always about you, you know.”
Menchú’s turn to scoff.
Asanti asked, “How are the other teams taking the news?”
“Fox smells blood in the water. I haven’t even seen Sansone. Team Two has been in full cover-up mode after the bombing. They can’t admit it was the Society—because they can’t admit that the Society exists—but if they blame someone else, it’s likely to set off an international incident. A consequence that His Holiness has made very clear is in all ways unacceptable.”
Asanti’s eyebrow rose. “He said that?”
“I am told it is a direct quote.”
It was so easy to fall into the rhythms of familiar banter. Conversational tracks well worn over the years. For a moment, she could imagine that things were simple again, that their biggest problems were demonic books and incompetent sorcerers. But then silence fell, and Frances’s monitors beeped away, counting out Asanti’s failures. She sighed. “You think I’m reckless, but I’m not. I’m scared. You would give your life to this cause, to protect the world. Sal, Liam, Grace, all of them would.”
“So would you,” said Menchú.
“Yes,” said Asanti. “But for the rest of you, if you give your life to the cause, your task is over. Succeed or fail, you have given everything that you could, and no one can ask for more.” Asanti leaned forward. “I have children, Menchú. Grandchildren. When I am gone, I might not be able to leave them the world I knew, but I have to leave them a world that they can live in.”
Menchú had nothing to say to that, and they sat together in silence.
Beep. Beep. Beep …
• • •
Liam’s eyes burned, his back ached, and the less said about the tendons in his forearms after ten hours bent over his keyboard, the better. But at last, a picture had begun to emerge. He just wished that it wasn’t the picture he was looking at.
He sat up, joints popping as he stretched and attempted to return circulation to muscles gone slack. He hadn’t been able to go to the gym in days, and the break in his routine bothered him. Since his last encounter with the Network, he knew intellectually that he was free of his demon, and that his hours of uninterrupted work were spurred by the urgency of their situation, not a malevolent supernatural force. He didn’t need his routines anymore. He could have a piece of cake if he wanted. Even if it wasn’t someone’s birthday. His mind knew that. It was just that the part of him that had spent the last nine years looking over his shoulder didn’t believe it.
At his shift in position, Sal looked over. “Did you find Christina?” she asked.
Liam nodded.
“You sure?”
Another nod.
Sal glanced up, as though she could see through the ceiling to the offices where the leaders of the Society were sequestered, determining their next move in the wake of Angiuli’s resignation.
“Are we going to be able to do anything about it?” she asked.
Leadership’s last word to the three teams had been: “Do nothing until you receive further instructions.”
“Not fucking likely.”
Another moment of silence.
Sal nodded. “I’ll go tell Grace.”
“Give Asanti and Menchú deniability if this all goes tits up?”
Sal grimaced. “I thought I’d let her decide if we should tell them or not.”
“Coward.”
Sal shrugged. “You want to ask Asanti to leave Frances’s bedside?”
Liam shuddered. “Pass.”
Sal was halfway up the staircase in the middle of the Archives before she called back, “Where are we going, anyway?”
Liam took a deep breath and didn’t let his voice shake as he answered, “Belfast.”
Sal nodded. A few moments later she was gone. Liam watched her go.
Belfast. Where it had all begun.
• • •
Grace sat in her room, watching her candle and her life burn away before her. When she heard footsteps approach her door, she quickly pinched out the flame. Hopefully, whoever had come wouldn’t notice the wisp of smoke lingering in the air.
• • •
Asanti, lost in thought at Frances’s bedside, jerked in surprise as a small, cool hand touched her wrist. Frances had opened her eyes and was struggling to sit up. Together, Menchú and Asanti helped raise the bed and position her pillows behind her.
“How are you feeling?” Menchú asked.
Frances scowled at him. “I feel like my legs have been turned into tentacles.” She almost sounded angry, but her breath hitched, just a bit, on that last word. She swallowed. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you out stopping the Network?”
Asanti took her assistant’s hand, squeezing it in her own. Frances pulled it back.
“Stop it. I don’t need to be coddled. I need—”
“—for what happened to you to mean something.”
Three heads turned to the doorway where Grace stood. Having finished Frances’s sentence, she now waited in silence.
“Yes,” said Frances. “That. Now help me get out of here and we can—”
Grace interrupted her again. “No. You need to rest.”
“You don’t know what I need!” Frances shouted, but her protest quickly withered and died under Grace’s level stare.
“I think you know that I do.”
Frances shrunk back against her pillows. “It’s not the same,” she muttered, but she couldn’t meet Grace’s eyes.
Grace nodded to Menchú and Asanti. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?” asked Menchú.
“Not here.”
• • •
Sal and Liam were waiting on the terrace of a cheap café near Termini Station. Menchú noticed the packed bags stashed causally beneath their aluminum chairs, as though they were a tourist couple about to begin the next leg of their journey.
Menchú spoke before Sal could. “I assume this is where you inform us of your intention to flaunt the hierarchy of the Society and the authority of the Vatican and go after the Network on your own?”
“That was Sal’s plan,” said Grace, “but I convinced her that you both would agree to come.”
“And why are we going to do that?” Menchú asked.
“Because we’ve seen what waiting for orders gets us?” Asanti suggested.
“Because defying orders is what we’ve been doing since Sal got possessed by the Hand?” Liam muttered.
Sal kicked Liam under the table and met Menchú’s stare with one of her own. “Because we’re a team. And saving the world is our job, even if we don’t have permission.”
Menchú knew he’d been right to recruit her for the team when she’d found them in New York, throwing herself into their investigation at every turn and refusing to let anything stop her from saving her brother from the demon that had seized him.
He cleared his throat. “We need a plan and resources. After what happened to Frances, not to mention the rest of Middle Coom, we can’t just hope for the best, especially if we’re off
the books and can’t count on backup from the Society.”
Sal pulled an envelope out of her jacket. “We have a shroud. That should neutralize whatever books the Network’s got.”
Liam tapped his temple with his ring finger. “And we have me. The Network has retreated to Belfast—either to lick their wounds or plan their next move—but that’s my home turf. Wherever they are in the city, I can find them.”
“And we’ve moved my candle to Sal’s apartment. Just in case we get disavowed again while we’re gone,” said Grace.
Menchú shared a look with Asanti. “That sounds a lot like a plan,” he said.
She gave him a tight nod. “I’ll go pack.”
2.
Liam’s breath steamed in the early morning chill. This was one of Belfast’s residential neighborhoods, and quiet at this hour. Liam walked as slowly as he dared without appearing to loiter. Every footstep brought back a hundred memories of making this walk a thousand times before. True, he no longer felt the gaping hole of his demon-induced amnesia, but the process of unlocking the closed-up parts of his memory was ongoing, and although he hadn’t admitted it to the others, it occasionally caught him by surprise. Being back on his old home ground threatened to trigger an overwhelming flood with every breath of familiar air.
Liam paused at a bus stop, stomping his feet against the cold and forcing his brain back in order.
“You okay?” Grace’s voice asked in his ear.
She was watching from somewhere among the rooftops across the street. Sal and the others were in a rental van around the corner, waiting for the all clear.
Liam didn’t look up from the posted bus schedule, but nodded, counting on Grace to notice.
“Do you want backup?”
Headshake.
“Then you’d better move on. The bus is less than a block away.”
Liam nodded again, as though the sign had confirmed his question, and crossed the street in the middle of the block. There was little enough risk of the bus driver noticing him or remarking on his presence, but buses were full of cameras. Until proven otherwise, Liam had to assume that the Network had access to any video feed in the city. Flying into Shannon and driving across the border probably meant they hadn’t been tagged when they arrived in the country. Probably.
The neighborhood had changed in the last nine years. Which only made the muddle of Liam’s memories more confusing. The corner shop was now a bank branch. The pub looked like it had gotten a new coat of paint. Signs of the Great Recession still lingered, but the city had brushed itself off in the last few years. Maybe it was the new UK economic incentives. Maybe it was the lack of violence that had been the punctuation of Liam’s childhood.
Fortunately, the small empty lot in the middle of the block hadn’t been bulldozed in the name of progress. The old chain-link fence had been replaced with something more substantial, but was still eminently climbable. What had once been filled with trash, dice, and drug deals was now an informal community garden. Liam narrowly avoided stepping in some grandmother’s cabbages on his way over the fence, but a glance confirmed that the UK surveillance state hadn’t decided to look quite this closely at home front agriculture yet.
Now, the only question is … Good. The dilapidated storage shed had been refurbished, but not torn down and replaced. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about any belligerent junkies taking offense at being roused, like he had in the old days. Not that Liam had cared about belligerent junkies when he had set up this bolt-hole. His demon partner hadn’t, anyway, and that had been good enough for him.
There were days Liam wondered if forgetting his years of possession had been so easy because his brain had been too distracted at the time to really absorb what was going on around him. Or maybe the wiser parts of his nature had decided that it was better not to pay too much attention to what he was doing.
Liam broke the padlock on the shed, and barred the door once he was inside. Not the most effective security system, but he didn’t need it to last for long. In the back corner, under a pile of tarps, garden implements, and a wheelbarrow, he found the remains of a rectangle chiseled into the concrete foundations. Liam brushed it clear, making sure nothing lay across the crudely-carved line, and then knelt down, letting his right hand rest against the cold, gritty surface of the cement. He wasn’t actually sure that this would work without his demon along for the ride. He wasn’t sure if he hoped it did, or that it didn’t.
Liam took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and leaned his full weight against his hand, pressing into the ground. Nothing happened.
Well, that was it. He could get up, brush himself off, and go tell the others that this wasn’t going to work. They’d have to stop the Network another way. Menchú wouldn’t object. It was probably even the smart thing to do. Liam had been the one who had always argued that they should depend on their own resources, that fighting magic with magic was about as effective as holding out a torch to extinguish a fire. The others would be disappointed, but they would pull together like they always did and find another solution. They would come through. But would they come through in time?
Or you could stop being an idiot and honestly try to open the damn door that you brought everyone here to find.
Liam’s internal monologue was comfortingly blunt.
Liam laid his hand on the concrete again. This time, as he did so, he reached back in his mind and found the memory of the hundred times he had come here before. The door wasn’t magic. The magic was what was hiding the door. He aligned his mind with the memory, and remembered what he had to do. Liam leaned forward, and this time felt the soft click of a pressure switch swinging free. A moment later, a rush of musty air washed over his face. Liam kept his eyes closed. He had never gotten the hang of passing through an illusion while he was looking at it. The concrete in front of him would appear unchanged. Liam pictured what he knew to be there instead: a solid wooden door hinged to fall inward, revealing a short drop into the forgotten foundation of a house that had been bombed out and demolished so long ago that no one remembered it had ever been there.
Liam opened his eyes once his boots hit the earthen floor. The flashlight on his phone showed that some of the walls had further crumbled while he had been away, but his work shoring up the structural supports had kept the roof from full collapse. It was exactly as he had left it.
Everything was going according to plan.
Fuck.
• • •
Once he disabled his mundane security measures, it was a simple matter for Liam to open the sewer access. Asanti, Menchú, and Sal went from the back of the van directly down into the manhole behind it, Grace keeping an eye from above to tell them when the coast was clear and they could descend without anyone remarking on a priest making sewer repairs. A few minutes later, Grace herself arrived, and Liam carefully maneuvered the manhole cover back into place above them.
Sal wrinkled her nose as she ducked through the last doorway into the abandoned basement. “When you said you had a bolt-hole, I didn’t think you meant ‘hole’ quite so literally.” The usable area was about fifteen feet square, although square was a generous term for the irregular space left clear amid the tumbled bricks and broken rebar.
“How did you find this place?” Asanti asked.
“I was down in the sewers making a tap into the fiber optics as they were being laid. Had to duck out of the way of one of the crews running the lines. I thought I was ducking into a disused pipe and ended up here.”
“Lucky break,” said Grace.
“I had a lot of those for a few years there. In retrospect, I suspect it had more to do with the demon than luck.”
A silence fell over the small group, standing together in a space uncomfortably like a tomb, lit only by Liam’s phone and a couple of flashlights.
“All right, then,” said Menchú. “This is where you think we can tap into whatever the Network is running?”
Liam nodded.
“Then let�
�s get to work.”
• • •
Sal, with nothing to add to the wiretapping operation, either magically or technically, found a corner where she was out of the way and let Liam and Asanti do whatever it was they were doing under Menchú’s more than adequate supervision. She noticed Grace had done the same, watching from a spot a few feet down the wall.
After a few moments, Grace noticed that Sal was watching her, and glared a question in her direction. “What?”
“You aren’t reading a book.”
“I can see how you made detective.”
Sal ignored the sarcasm. “Why not?” she asked.
Grace shrugged.
“Everything okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m allowed to waste my time if I want to.”
“Sure.”
“If the Network destroys the world in an ill-considered attempt to create a magically interfacing hive mind, the number of minutes left on my candle is hardly going to matter, is it?”
“Probably not.”
“I don’t feel like reading. I’m thinking.”
Silence fell between the two women. Finally, Sal said. “You finished your last book on the plane and you forgot to bring another one, didn’t you?”
Grace did not deign to reply.
“Okay,” said Liam. “We’re in.”
“Can you find the book?” Menchú asked.
Liam was clicking away at his laptop as Asanti continually drew and redrew a circle in the air around them with a silver letter opener.
“Working on it …”
“Get out before they notice the tap,” Asanti said. “I’m already getting interference.”
“Just a second,” said Liam. “I’m almost there.” Liam’s fingers doubled their speed and Sal half expected to see smoke rising from his keyboard.
Tiny sparks flew from the tip of Asanti’s letter opener, and it made a scraping sound against the air. “They definitely know something is going on,” she said.
“Have they found us?” asked Grace.
“I don’t think so …”
Menchú nodded to Sal and Grace. “Prepare to move out as soon as Liam’s done. I don’t want—”
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 45
