“How exactly is it good?”
“We haven’t seen any corpses yet. So at least the team made it farther than the drones.”
“Or something ate them,” Grace said.
Which, Menchú had to admit, with the sort of grim humor he tended to avoid sharing with his Team Three colleagues while on mission, was exactly the appropriate moment for their flashlights to go out.
Darkness crushed them, and the silent weight of stone overhead. Wang Jianguo cursed—at least, it sounded like a curse to Menchú—in Chinese that sounded different from the Chinese Grace used when she swore. Menchú stood in the dark, an old man no longer surprised by his lack of fear. There was light, after all: The torches had not seemed to illuminate the hall so long as their flashlights lasted, but now they remained, regular dim red shapes like eyes. And the blue flash, too, from the depths, had pierced the blackness and died, too brief to lighten. In the dark, he reached for Grace.
He did not find her.
A crack, and the darkness rolled back, replaced by a sick green glow. Wang Jianguo held a shining plastic tube, and the chemical light sculpted her from blacks and greens, leaving poison sparks in each eye. He must look as ghoulish to her.
Grace stood a little to the left of his reaching hand. Stone shook beneath his feet, and he stumbled into her; she caught him, bore him up. She was still so strong, and surefooted—the tremor barely made her slip. In that moment, leaning, there was no gap between them, of years or betrayal. The tremor passed as quickly as it came; she steadied him on his feet, and he let her. “Thank you.” He waited for an aftershock, felt none. The tremor had been intense, but brief—no rocks fell, no one died. He saw no cracks in the stone walls, no raining mortar. The entire hallway might have been a throat, or a gullet, that shudder peristalsis driving them down.
“We should go back,” Grace said.
“This building has survived centuries of earthquakes without a scratch. It’s safer than anywhere in Chengdu.”
“The building was scratched,” Grace said. “If it hadn’t been, you wouldn’t have found it. We should leave.”
“Also,” Wang Jianguo continued as if Grace had not spoken, “that was not an earthquake.”
“I know an earthquake when I feel one.”
“Our first team recorded a tremor like this, before they disappeared.”
“That,” Grace said, “is not encouraging.”
“You’re missing the main point. We observed no seismic activity in the area—not so much as a blip. This is just a property of the building.”
“Great.”
“We could leave,” Wang Jianguo said, tense, terse. “Wait a day. Maybe two. Come back. Find ourselves in the same situation, or worse. Whatever is going on here, it is not normal. Grace, you alone know what this vault holds. What’s down here? What might Tom find? What could he do with it? What might he have done already? How urgent is this situation? We can guess, but we do not know, because you won’t tell us.”
Grace glared first at Wang Jianguo, then past her, into the black and blue.
Menchú thought about cave-ins, and imagined being crushed, or pinned like a silver miner, down here forever, to suffocate. Best go back, best wait. But when he thought of waiting, he thought of a dancing candle flame, of running wax, of time Grace had surrendered hope of keeping.
“Let’s go on,” he said. “We’ve seen the damage the Network can do. If this library is anything like our own Archives, we can’t let one of Christina’s helpers take whatever he likes. If the building seems unsafe, we leave—but not till then.”
Even he could not read Grace’s expression. A groan echoed from down the corridor: metal under stress, a person in pain, or else just falling rocks warped by cave acoustics. “Okay,” she said, and started down.
He traded glances with Wang Jianguo, uncertain what he intended to convey or sought from her, or she to him. Neither had time to elaborate. Grace set a strong pace down and down, no time for torches, for odd carvings on the walls, for drones, for all the questions he wanted to ask—and the answers Wang Jianguo no doubt would have liked to hear.
He jogged after Grace, feeling the existence of his knees, and the weight of his pack, not to mention the rest of his body. “Grace.”
“Shouldn’t be much farther now,” she said, “before we reach the main library. The path zigzags, to keep out evil spirits. There.” Left, straight twenty steps, right, straight twenty steps, left again. Then the hallway opened into a large chamber, and Grace stopped short. “Well,” she said, silhouetted by sharp-edged silver-blue. “What do you think, Arturo? Does that look unsafe to you?”
He stared into the broken room.
Nothing was wrong with its structure. The architecture, though improbable, fit with the rest of the building: a wide room, roof supported by thick stone pillars, a door in the far wall, with a broad pit running crosswise, passage over which was afforded by a stone half-moon bridge of the sort Menchú had only ever seen in movies and ink brush paintings. None of that was the problem.
Narrow ropes of lightning spread through the air, like cracks in an eggshell struck not quite hard enough to break. They passed through walls and pillars without apparent effect, thorns of light, lines where space and shadow were not. They spanned stone and air and bridge and chasm, they smelled of burnt copper, and people hung upon them.
Most were soldiers in full gear, all wedged in the cracks, which spread between them, haphazard. The cracks held them still, but their stillness flickered from pose to pose, random filmstrip frames shuffled together, now screaming, now silent, now twisted in pain. Across the room, across the bridge, stood Tom. The Network man looked as he had in Wang Jianguo’s photo—down to the length of beard and the stains on his shirt—though the photo had been taken days before. The crack that held him issued from the farther door, but did not branch like the cracks that held the soldiers. Whatever he had planned when he decided to break into Grace’s old library, the plan did not seem to be working out.
“Unsafe will do,” he said, “for a start.”
Wang Jianguo drew up short beside them, slack jawed. “What is this?” She reached for the nearest soldier. The crack that held him widened in midair, and spat blue sparks.
“Don’t,” Grace said, and she stopped.
“Are they—” Dead was left unspoken.
“I don’t think so.”
Wang Jianguo retreated to the door. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Shanghai,” Grace pointed out, but Wang Jianguo shook her head.
“Those were monsters. I’ve seen monsters, fought them, killed them. But this—what is this?”
Menchú felt a stab of sympathy then, for Ms. Wang and for the world. Asanti had mentioned this before, when she used to describe the advantages of going public with the truth about magic, about demons, about the Society’s business. They could not be everywhere at once, and without them, people didn’t even know what dangers they faced. “Magic,” he said, “is more than monsters.” Grace shot him a warning glance; he appreciated the concern, but ignored her. “More than demons. There are worlds beyond ours: a sea of beasts and dangers we cannot fathom. We are lucky. We live on an island where time always goes one way, where distance has meaning, where people cannot melt together, where your mind is your own. But sometimes the waves roll in.” And the tide, he did not say, is rising. “Tom must have disturbed something in the library, and caused a wave.” He wished Asanti were here. But he could manage without her, in the field. He had for years. “As to what—”
“Oracle bones,” Grace said.
Wang Jianguo blinked. “Explain.”
“Turtle shells, cracked in a fire. They used them in the Shang dynasty for divination.”
“I know what oracle bones are,” Wang Jianguo said. “But they don’t do this. I’ve seen them in museums.”
“They don’t all do this. We took the ones that did, and brought them here, and put them in a sealed peachwood box at t
he center of the library, in its most secure room, watched by clay warriors, so no one would do something this dumb ever again.”
Lightning played across Wang Jianguo’s face. “Oh.” She set her hands on her hips. The defiant posture did not make her look less scared. “They’re not dead.”
“Trapped,” Grace said. “The cracks the bones make spread through time. Your soldiers’ bodies can’t travel, but their minds can—back, mostly. We tried to go forward, but nobody ever managed. The cracks spread from memory to memory. That’s what happened to your troops—they remembered their friends, and pulled them in. If you get too close, it will happen to you too.”
“How do we stop them?”
“With this.” Menchú had removed his pack; he drew the shroud from within and offered it to her. “We can handle the bones safely with that cloth, if we can reach them. But to do that, we need to know what we’re dealing with.” So he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and walked into the room.
“Arturo,” Grace said. “What are you doing?”
“We need to get Tom out of there.” The cracks hummed and hissed when he approached; there were more than he’d thought at first. They spread, hairline thin, almost two-dimensional. Some he barely noticed in time to step over them, or crouch beneath. Snakes in underbrush made a sound like that. “Grace, you saw him in Shanghai. He could know you. Remember you.”
“No.”
“We can’t risk it. And Ms. Wang, your troops are here. I have the least connection to anyone in this room. I’ll pull Tom out. Then we can find out what he knows, and stop these cracks.”
“This is a bad idea, Arturo,” Grace said, though her voice was kind enough.
“Maybe,” he admitted.
The bridge held. The way this mission was going, he half expected it to collapse underfoot. He climbed, and descended the other side. There were fewer cracks here, larger. He ducked low, stepped high, and wished he were ten years younger. Twenty.
At last he stood in front of Tom. The big man hung skewered by time, both feet off the floor, one hand reaching out. Like the others, he flickered between pain, panic, even laughter. Menchú waited, and waited, and when Tom seemed to be laughing, he grabbed his hand, and pulled.
Tom slid from the crack like a splinter, rigid, frozen while he touched the blue light, his face stuck in mid-guffaw. But as he slid free, and his life returned in a snap, Menchú realized his mistake: Tom was not laughing at a joke. He was hysterical with fear.
The big man thrashed, and screamed, and thrust Menchú away from him, and he tumbled into blue.
3.
Falling, falling, to land, young again, in darkness, on rain-slick pavement beneath a pink night sky studded with black stars. Germany. Not a typical night, with that sky and the strange shadows it left: magic all around him, sunk into the soil beneath cracked concrete. Long thin fingers grew from wet earth to branch and wave like sea grass, their nails newborn-white and clean, and sharp. They caught his ankle, bit through cloth into skin, and he heard high-pitched laughter underground. He kicked. Tiny bones broke, and he tore free.
Menchú scrambled to his feet—he could still scramble in this memory of a spring in 1989: a world reeling, power on retreat as thousands of firm hands seized crowbars and tore down walls. Uncertain people prayed, and listened. Sometimes they heard whispers back. Not all those whispers came from God.
Twenty-five years from now he hung doubled in a blue oracle bone crack. Here, blood ran down his ankle, and more finger-fronds sprouted from alley walls, from broken pavement, and that pink sky was the inside of a mouth, and he was alone, Father Hunter gone, Ananth gone, and there at the alley’s end hung a woman pasted to the wall by flesh, book open in her hands.
No time for thought, for horror, for this doubled memory, for young self and old in one mind. He had to get the book. Wrap it in the shroud, and hope these monsters went away. (How long they’d hidden here, he did not know—the Orb had glimmered around East Berlin for years, but only recently erupted.) He ran. More fingers—he jumped past them, rolled on pavement, found his feet. (In the back of his mind, an old man marveled: that speed, that ease. He never thought of himself as nimble, then.) Everything stank of skin. A nine-fingered hand crashed through a window behind him and caught his jacket. He pulled against it, let the jacket tear. One thin tendril curled around his arm, tugged, and he stumbled, off-balance, against a brick wall, which sprouted thinner, smaller fingers. Their nails drew papercut streaks of blood as he lunged away.
Close. Ten feet.
Asphalt erupted ahead, and the alley filled with a stench of rotting milk. The beast from below fought upward: first an enormous, tongueless mouth, flat teeth and a void between, all set in fresh pale skin, then two beady blue eyes where the chin should have been, then slender arms and shoulders and ham-hock hands, shoving itself into light.
He could get past this somehow. Strength. Speed. Faith.
He was humble enough, even then, to know his limits in all three. But he had no choice, and was alone.
Then a woman fell from heaven and hit the monster in the face.
Teeth broke. The beast flailed; its big hand hit the woman, and she rolled back, skidded, broke away from the tiny fingers that caught her, no more than an annoyance (to her, at least), but was, in that moment’s change of direction, visible as more than a blur. As, in point of fact, Grace Chen.
She was beautiful when she fought. Painters always seemed to feature their subjects in repose—easier to model lying on a couch mostly naked for sixteen hours at a stretch, he guessed, though cold—but if they had seen Grace fight, they might have felt differently. Power ennobled her. The more strength in each movement, the clearer the line.
She saved him, with a smile.
And as he ran past the monster, toward the woman with the book, he slipped from himself and into her, watching him go, this vivid, angry, beautiful young man, watching him not kill the woman with the book, but bring her back.
And she remembered him, remembered his shock in the shadows of a shipping container when she burst from the box, remembered him holding the stopwatch the first time they tested how fast she could run, remembered him sitting by the fire, lit golden, silent, crying, unable to tell himself he was crying, remembered tumbling into darkness as he held out his hand—
This was wrong, Menchú—was he still Menchú, after all? Was he still only Menchú?—thought, wrong to see these things, to hear them, even as he felt another mind struggling in the web of his own memories. He needed her, clutched her close, pulled her down. They drowned in time.
A voice called his name with an accent he did not know, and he wondered if it was a whisper from God, or the other kind.
• • •
Menchú landed gasping, bruised, on stone; his ribs creaked and his knees too and he tried to stand and found he was not young anymore. The face above him did not belong to Grace. Stone cracked. The world trembled.
“Get up,” Wang Jianguo said. “We have to leave!”
Time: so strange a concept. Moments orderly, one then the next, memory a faint echo, a story told rather than fullness lived. Where were all the other selves? Where was—
Grace shouldered Wang Jianguo out of the way. “Come on, Arturo. We don’t have much time.”
He said her name. She did not react, or reply, just hoisted him to his feet. He steadied. Tom, the man from the Network, sprawled on stone nearby; Wang Jianguo grabbed his wrist and dragged him through the door into the next room, into the library. “We should—we have to go back.”
“No,” Grace said, and when he looked, he saw why.
The cracks had opened.
Wang Jianguo’s men hung in blue fields now; the hairline cracks Menchú stepped over and between had widened to pierce pillars. One had blocked the bridge entirely. The roof groaned. He staggered through the door after Wang Jianguo. Shelves crowded the space beyond. He sat there, caught his breath in the light of time and chemicals. “Grace. I saw you. You
were—”
“I was stuck,” she said, curtly. “Like you.”
“What?”
“Tom knocked you into a crack, and it spread between us. We were in there together.”
“Oh,” he said. “I saw …” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Me too. Wang Jianguo used the shroud to get me out, then you. Looks like Tom here was the linchpin, holding everything together.” She bent over Tom, and pulled him upright. The big man blinked, eyes unfocused. Grace tapped him on the cheek. “Wake up.”
Wang Jianguo stared back through the door into the bridge chamber. “The cracks just keep widening. We have to leave.”
“We can’t,” Grace replied. “Get that through your head.” Tom blinked, vacant. Grace snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Focus. Can you hear me?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
She did not hit him, but from Tom’s flinch Menchú could tell he had somehow determined this was a possibility, and would not end well for him. More discernment than he expected from a Network goon. “I’m the woman asking the questions. You came for the oracle bones.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Don’t swear,” Grace said. “Bad manners.”
He tried to hit her. She moved faster than any of them could see, and slammed his hand back against the wall. “Christ!”
“I said, don’t swear.”
“What do you want?”
“We want to know why you have intruded on the sovereignty and national heritage of the People’s Republic of China,” Wang Jianguo said.
Grace turned to the other woman, shook her head, then shifted focus back to Tom. “Tell me what happened in the core.”
“I know you,” he said, suddenly. “Christina told us. The Bookburner with the curse.”
“All that matters for you,” she said, “is that I’m here to save you from your fuckup.”
She released his wrist, and he held his hand as if she’d broken something in it. Maybe she had. He didn’t speak for a while.
Bookburners Page 21
