Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  “I wanted to come by.”

  She gestured to the chair beside the bed. “Sit with me? I’m watching cartoons.”

  “I’ve never seen this one before,” he said. “I’ll get lost.”

  “You can follow it,” she said. “It’s just started. And you can ask me, if you have any questions.”

  “I’ll do that.” He sat. “Thanks.”

  She pressed play, and the centipede roared.

  5.

  Asanti woke early and showered, and wrapped her braids high on her head in a strong winding knot. She read Donne. She was learning to hate Donne again. In her life with Donne, she had gone through love to hate, and out, and back. She could draw a wave of Donne over time, marked with marriage, the birth of children and grandchildren. She wondered about frequencies and amplitudes and redshifts and blueshifts, and whether Donne was going away or coming toward.

  Someone knocked on the door. “Come in.” The guards preserved the facade of privacy, averted their eyes as they approached the lock with the same keys Sal had stolen. Kind jailers, and wary. No one could quite believe a being of magic had offered her a way out, and she refused. She must (they thought) be playing some long game, scheming for eventual triumph. Why would anyone face judgment if they didn’t have to?

  Asanti had often wondered what it felt like to process. Now she knew. Two guards marched in front of her through Vatican sub-basement halls, and two guards marched behind. They did not cuff her or bind her. She was a queen.

  A courtroom of eyes fixed upon her as she entered. Regard settled over her like a mantle, and she bore it with pride. Shoulders back, love. Chin high. Eyes clear.

  The cardinal’s seat was empty, and the monsignors’ seats as well. The election must have ended. That explained the delay. Her heart ran fast as she took her chair at the table before the bench. Cardinal selection meant the Society had unified behind a candidate, and the Pope concurred. She wondered if dying would hurt.

  She didn’t have to wonder—she’d seen it happen, seen the Oracle strangled. But the sophist’s escape tempted: All she knew was that other people looked like they did not like dying. She had no access to their sensoria. She saw reactions, that was all—muscle contractions, the body reduced to an animal by pain. Perhaps when she died, it would feel easy as breathing, no matter what contortions her body assumed meanwhile.

  A weak argument, but it filled the time.

  Doors opened behind her. The others turned. She did not give the new, official arrivals the satisfaction. The cardinal too processed—like her, escorted, imprisoned in his own way, his boots’ tread regular as a horror movie monster’s.

  But the cardinal who revolved into her vision was not the cardinal she expected.

  Her calm shattered, and rage and fear burned in its place.

  Monsignor—no, Cardinal Fox, rose to the seat. The red did not suit his coloring, but he wore the robes well. They settled from his broad shoulders to his thick legs. He looked like a flattering carving of himself.

  The audience sat. Asanti remained standing. Was that proper protocol? She neither knew nor cared.

  “Archivist,” Cardinal Fox said, “you have proven your case. Magic is returning. The Church must fight this battle with all the weapons at its command. You are one of those weapons, Dr. Asanti. We cannot afford to set you down, or break you. But we must stand together against the coming tide. We need discipline. Strength. Vision. You are guilty of abusing our trust, but the fault lies not with you, but with the Society’s leadership. Your sentence is, at this time, commuted. You will remain with us, in your capacity as archivist, and you will help us stop the death of the world. All research into the use of magic, and all cooperation with magical entities is, from this moment, banned. We cannot let this rot touch us from within. But neither can we afford to remain complacent. We will shift our approach. In the coming weeks, we will forge a new Society: a Society that will act quickly, without mercy, to purge evil. The budget and purview of Team One will be expanded. Team Two’s surveillance will be stepped up. And Archivist Asanti, you—and Team Three—will shift focus. Find me a way to stop magic. Find me a way to kill it.”

  He raised his hand. “We all have work to do. Let’s go.”

  • • •

  Menchú was halfway up the winding stair from the Archives to the Vatican when Asanti caught him by the shoulder and thrust him against the wall. Her fingers were strangler-tight around his arm. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  He had not run after the sentencing, but he had walked fast. He had spent all yesterday working out a speech for when she came for him. He’d thrown out six drafts and started again. This team needs you, he had planned to start, and I need you, and for all your high-minded ideals, no one can do the work you can. Yes, Fox is a jerk, and yes, he’ll lead the Society in the wrong direction, but since when have we cared about what the cardinals think? What matters is, we’ll be free.

  “I had to,” was all he got out.

  “All you had to do was let me do what had to be done, you infuriating, frustrating, self-righteous, moral man. You priest.” The spit of the p landed on his cheek.

  “We need you.” He had never seen her this mad before. Not after Peru, not after Glasgow, not ever. It would have been wonderful, like a summer storm, if he weren’t the target. “The rest of the Society can rot. The world hangs in the balance—and it needs you.”

  “We were supposed to get a moderate cardinal. A papal appointee—hell, it could have been you. I thought—” She let his shoulder go and drew back, disgusted.

  “After Belfast? The conservatives were too strong!”

  “Unless you threw me under the bus. That was to be the deal. I go under, the radicals get the election, and there’s enough political will to fix things around here, and then maybe, just fucking maybe, the world survives.” He had never heard her swear before. “And you messed it up. Don’t try to deny it. You did this. You made the deal—Fox enthroned, for my survival.”

  “We make compromises.” Menchú straightened his shirtfront and straightened his collar. “In the field, we choose who lives and who dies. What risks we take, and which we don’t. You made this the field. So I chose—and I saved you, so you can save us, so we can save the world.”

  The echoes faded.

  “Didn’t you listen to a single thing I said in court?” The echoes had bleached the anger from her voice. “We can’t stay the same and survive.”

  He reached across the gulf between them, to her shoulder. He might as well have touched a statue.

  She did not look at him. “Get out of my library.”

  He let her go. She said nothing more. He climbed the stairs.

  “You, too,” he heard her call down the stairs, toward the door he had not heard open, to Grace, to Sal, to Liam, who of course were listening. “All of you. Out. I need to be alone.”

  Epilogue

  Rome was shit at handicap accessibility. Frances Haddad wheeled down the sidewalk, glanced over her shoulder, and saw nobody following. Not that she had many options for shaking a tail if one existed. She was relying, mostly, on the fact that the Society didn’t expect much from her these days, because she couldn’t walk, and because what was she? An assistant to a woman whose wings had been clipped. A scholar, not a doer, whose brief field experience ended poorly.

  She turned down a narrow alley. At the far end stood a shuttered shop, its doorsill blissfully level with the walk. Watchmaker, read the sign over the door, but she couldn’t read the name.

  Cobblestones sucked. Gross word, she’d always thought, considering, but it fit. Cobbles weren’t made for people with wheels. The chair was sturdy, and she kept a good grip—the last few months had developed her grip and arms in a way she would have said, before, she would have killed for—but she still worried she might miss a gap between stones that was exactly the wrong shape, and the wheel would bind, and pitch her onto her face in the street.

  She had grown better tha
n she had ever wanted to be at solving this particular puzzle, and soon she reached the watchmaker’s shop. Leaning forward, she caught the door handle, engaged the brakes, pulled open the door, and entered. This would get easier, she expected, with practice. She’d already grown used to the many pieces of the motion, blending them into a single thought: Open and enter.

  The door closed, and left the room in near darkness. Late afternoon light snuck between the boards nailed over the windows, and dust cohered that light to solid striped beams, which fell to touch the broken floor with gold.

  There was a table in the center of the room, and a single candle on the table, and across the table stood Asanti.

  “I don’t think I was followed,” Frances said.

  “I don’t think I was, either.” Asanti leaned into the table. “I don’t know how we’ll do this, in the long term.”

  “We’ll manage,” Frances said.

  “We have to.” Asanti took a matchbook from her purse. “Okay. There should probably be some kind of ceremony, but I’d rather leave that for the priests, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “No argument here.”

  She lit a match off her thumbnail and lit the candle. It cast shadows of itself. “Welcome to the first meeting of the new Team Four.”

  Frances waited for a gong to ring, or a car to crash out on the street, for the voices of a heavenly choir. Asanti seemed to be waiting, too.

  “Just us?” Frances asked.

  “At first.”

  “Don’t worry.” Frances’s head whipped left, then right; her eyes darted, searching for the source of the new voice. A man emerged from the shadows in the corner: shadows not deep or dark enough to hide a man, shadows that seconds before had been empty. Frances did not recognize the voice, but she recognized the man. She’d seen his picture before, in Sal’s file. “I think our numbers will grow soon enough,” Perry said.

  Up Next

  …and that’s a wrap on Bookburners Season 2. Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed it!.

  Bookburners will return Summer 2017

  In the meantime, turn the page to check out a special preview of ReMade the newest serial from Serial Box Publishing.

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  Coming up next from Serial Box Publishing…

  Every minute, 108 people die. On October 14th, 2016, from 9:31-9:32 p.m. EDT, 23 of those deaths will be teenagers. Now they are humanity’s last hope for survival. Awakened in a post-apocalyptic world and hunted by mechanical horrors, these teens search for answers amidst the ruins of civilization. Fate, love, and loyalty face off in this adrenaline -pumping YA adventure.

  You live. You love. You die. Now RUN. ReMade.

  Written by Matthew Cody. Andrea Phillips, Carrie Harris, E.C. Myers, Gwenda Bond, and Kiersten White. Presented in 15 episodes.

  The season begins September 14, 2016. Subscriptions and Season Passes now available! Can’t wait? Get a sneak peek at the pilot now:

  ReMade

  Season 1, Episode 1

  Shadows and Dreams

  Matthew Cody

  Someone shouted Holden’s name. A girl’s voice, calling to him—or had he been dreaming? Either way, he didn’t like getting yelled at. He wanted to ask her to calm down, he wanted to ask what was wrong, but when he tried to talk his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth like cotton. He opened his eyes, but the bright light overhead burned spots into his vision. He closed them again and he saw little exploding stars.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, but his words didn’t sound right in his own ears. His thick tongue got in the way.

  Then the dream—surely he must be dreaming—changed. A beautiful girl leaned over him. Almond skin and a dusting of glitter on her cheeks like frost. She wore a crown of leaves in her hair.

  She whispered in his ear. “O, how I love thee. How I dote on thee!”

  Holden knew that face. It belonged to Titania the Fairy Queen. Wait, that wasn’t right.

  The Fairy Queen suddenly screamed his name, terrified.

  The next time he opened his eyes there were monsters. They surrounded him, poked at him with spindly metallic arms. He saw himself reflected in their glassy eyes, multifaceted like prisms. A dozen Holdens all screamed at once, but someone had turned his voice off. There was no sound. When he tried to fight back his body wouldn’t do what he asked it to. He couldn’t even close his eyes anymore; he couldn’t blink. He had to watch what they were doing as they jabbed him with needles that made his body spasm.

  “He’s awake,” said a voice near his ear. Rough, gravelly. Not like Titania’s at all. “You shouldn’t do this to him while he’s awake. It hurts him.”

  All at once the metal spiders froze, like Holden was living in a video that had stopped playing. Buffering … buffering …

  They came back to life as one of them jabbed another needle into Holden’s throat.

  “It hurts him!” said the voice again, and Holden was looking into the face of one of the ugliest women he’d ever seen. Her heavy brow and broad, whiskered chin made her look almost simian. But she smiled at him with her yellow, crooked teeth and laid a hand on his forehead.

  “Go back to sleep,” she whispered in his ear. “We’ll wake you when it’s all over.” There was a tiny pinprick as she stuck him with a needle of her own, but this one didn’t hurt so much. Within seconds all the pain went away and Holden was sinking into a warm, dark bath. The woman’s hands were rough and calloused, but she was gentle as she brushed her fingers over his eyes, closing them for him as one would for a corpse.

  Two things occurred to him before he slipped back into darkness. First, he wondered if Titania would be waiting for him. And second, he feared that he hadn’t been dreaming at all.

  • • •

  Holden Black wanted to be absolutely sure he’d be the last one out of the building, so he sat alone in his dressing room and waited. It was really a storage closet, but for the weekend run of A Midsummer Night’s Dream it did double duty. For the time being, he had to share it with a plastic mop bucket on wheels and several crates of industrial-strength cleaner—the kind that was strong enough to dissolve dried gum off desks. Using grease paint from his makeup kit, Holden had drawn a smiley face on one of the bottles and started using it as a wig stand. Unfortunately, the school janitors still used this closet during the daytime, because when Holden arrived at half-hour tonight there was a note taped to it that read, “Pls clean! NOT a toy!”

  Holden’s sparkly wig now hung on a mop pole instead.

  Being the only male, Holden couldn’t dress with the other fairies, so he was stuck with a makeshift dressing room inside a janitor’s closet. That meant he was also closest to the “cafetorium” that doubled as a stage. Laughter and congratulations filled the lobby just outside his door. The closet didn’t lock from the inside, so Holden changed into his street clothes as fast as he could, making sure to keep his back to the door. Not that anyone would get curious about a janitor’s closet, but still. Holden could just picture that door accidentally opening onto a crowded roomful of teenagers and their parents, and him standing there in his boxer briefs and eye shadow. It would be a Holden moment to remember.

  He nearly tripped over his own legs as he yanked his jeans on, but it was even harder getting off his glittery stage makeup. The only water in the closet came out of a slop sink, and Holden didn’t trust the brownish liquid that sputtered from that faucet, so he did the best he could with wet wipes and a handheld mirror. The glitter had gotten everywhere, and the eye shadow made him look like a raccoon. His fairy tights
had given him jock itch.

  I should take a picture of all this crap, he thought. Start a Tumblr called “What’s the stupidest thing you’ve done for love?”

  He finished cleaning off his makeup as best he could, but there were still voices outside. People sure were taking their time high-fiving one another.

  To pass the minutes, Holden used the grease paint to doodle on a few more bottles of cleaner. At first he kept the smiley face theme, but then he switched to really pissed-off faces. After all, how would you feel if you were a bottle of industrial strength gum dissolver? He hid these ones way in the back of the crates. Maybe one day they’d give someone a laugh.

  He ignored the lone card on his makeshift dressing table. It sat there unopened, with his name written in curling letters and the message “Break a leg!” carefully hand drawn to look like the words were exploding out of a champagne bottle. Holden hadn’t read what was on the inside. Eventually he would, just not yet.

  In time, the commotion outside his door died down and Holden grabbed his backpack. Three new texts on his phone, all from the same person, but he didn’t read them. Time for that later. He started out the door, stopped, went back for the unopened card, and shoved it into his pocket.