Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  “He’s still with us,” Perry said.

  “Wake up,” Menchú said to the boy in Spanish.

  The boy turned his head from side to side, eyes still closed.

  “Wake up and open your eyes,” Menchú said.

  The boy did. His eyes were deep brown, and full of fear. A drop of blood fell from Menchú’s face onto the kid’s, and Menchú realized how scary he must look.

  “Are you okay?” Menchú said, in the kindest voice he could muster.

  The boy nodded. Menchú let him go.

  “Go home,” Menchú said. “You’ll be all right.”

  The boy ran off. Menchú rose to his feet. The spectators in the street were still staring. One of them reached into her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, walked over, and gave it to Menchú.

  “Keep it, Father,” she said. “For your face.”

  Menchú thanked her. He sat down on the curb to blot his cuts, but really he was waiting for them all to leave. In time, they did.

  “Am I still bleeding?” Menchú said to Perry.

  “A little,” Perry said.

  “Do you think we led Hannah here?”

  “No. I think she saw us coming.”

  “So it doesn’t change anything?” Menchú said.

  “I don’t think so,” Perry said.

  They began walking back to the hotel.

  “I have to ask what you’re really doing here,” Menchú said.

  “Backup,” Perry said. “Like I told you.”

  “The time for being coy is over,” Menchú said. “I need some real answers.”

  Perry sighed. “There are certain answers I can’t give you,” he said. “There are hierarchies among angels, and I am not at the top of it. As a fellow bureaucrat, I think you understand that.”

  “Understand it and hate it,” Menchú said, without thinking.

  “I’m getting to that,” Perry said. “But here’s what I can tell you. There are flaws in the world, fatal flaws, and without maintenance, it will come apart.”

  “What do you mean, come apart?” Menchú said.

  Perry paused for a second. “What I mean is …” he started. He clasped his hands together, and then, mimicking the sound of an explosion, spread them apart. “The world becomes magic,” he said. “All magic. The world as you know it can’t survive that.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Menchú said.

  “There has been debate among … us … about what to do about it. Some say we should let things take their natural course. Others—just a few—say that we should be running around fixing things.”

  “Like the boy with his thumb in the dike,” Menchú said.

  “Except that sometimes you have to release the pressure to prevent a bigger explosion. You have to let some magic into the world.”

  “And destroy a part of it,” Menchú said.

  “Yes,” Perry said. “Which is why I’m breaking protocol by telling you all this. While this debate has been going on, Hannah has taken it upon herself to do the maintenance. She’s good at it. She’s also ruthless. I’m worried that she’s going too far.”

  “She has broken protocol herself,” Menchú said.

  “Yes … somewhat. About as much as I’ve just broken it now. She’s at a higher pay grade, you might say, and I used to be better about toeing the line. But becoming part human, part angel has changed my perspective on things. The angel in me sees the changes in the world as transformative. The human in me sees the destruction. The angel in me admires Hannah’s diligence, her willingness to work hard and make tough decisions about when and how to release pressure to keep the project going. The human in me is appalled at how many people she kills in the process.” He shrugged. “So as you can imagine, I’m torn.”

  “This … big transformation,” Menchú said. “How much time do we have?”

  “It won’t happen tomorrow, if that’s what you’re asking,” Perry said. “But magic is a chaotic system, as you’ve probably noticed. And the clock is ticking.”

  “The clock is always ticking, isn’t it?” Menchú said.

  “You can’t tell the others what I’ve told you,” Perry said.

  “This is a confession, then?” Menchú said.

  “Kind of like that.”

  “All right,” Menchú said.

  They reached the hotel and settled in. The car didn’t leave until dawn, and it was two days’ walk through the jungle. Menchú lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Somewhere along the shore, someone set off fireworks.

  3.

  Menchú saw Sifuentes waiting for them at the trailhead where the road ended. He had a small pack on his back, his clothes already damp with sweat. The archaeologist extended his hand as Menchú, Sal, and Perry got out of the car, and he nodded to their own small packs.

  “We have a camp halfway to La Lágrima,” Sifuentes said, in strong English. “It will take most of the day to get there, but we have what we need for you to stay there, as long as you don’t mind sharing tents. Then it’s another half day, much easier than the first.”

  “Good,” Menchú said. “Let’s go.”

  The road vanished behind them within minutes. On the first three hours of the trail into the rain forest, they kept running into signs of modern human activity. A blue plastic bag. A Coke can. A sock. Fragments of the world. Perry’s words lingered. It would all become magic. Menchú heard water drip from leaves, watched light colored by the canopy, the same as ever. How much longer would it stay the same?

  They met an older man heading back toward the road with an enormous bundle of sticks on his back, held in place partly by a leather strop that looped around his forehead. It got really hot. They stopped for water all the time, stopped for lunch. By the afternoon, Menchú realized he hadn’t seen evidence of any people except themselves for quite a while. The trail was narrow, even prone to disappearing a little. They would never have been able to do this without Sifuentes.

  “You grew up here?” Sifuentes said to him.

  “Yes, in the highlands,” Menchú said. The conversation distracted him from the end of the world. “It’s where I began my priesthood, too. Where are you from?”

  “Mexico City,” Sifuentes said. “Do you come back here often?”

  “I haven’t been back since the war,” Menchú said.

  It seemed almost unfair to bring up the war. Menchú knew Sifuentes had just been trying to make conversation. But he also knew that, once he’d brought it up, he wouldn’t need to elaborate on what had happened to his town.

  “My own family is all still in Mexico City,” Sifuentes said. “My grandfather was a small businessman and did well for himself. We have some means. But a few of my students from the south talk about how there is almost no one left in the towns they grew up in. There’s no work. No way of getting by there, and that means that if you leave, there’s no reason to go back.”

  “Where do they go?” Menchú said.

  “Oaxaca. Mexico City. The United States. Other cities in South America. Even Europe. You name it, I suppose. The worry is more about how to get out, I think, than where it takes you.”

  “That was my experience as well,” Menchú said.

  “The priesthood was your way out?” Sifuentes said.

  “You could say that.”

  “But you felt called, too.”

  “Yes,” Menchú said. “It was my best chance to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish.”

  “Which was?”

  “To help people,” Menchú said. “If not to save them, at least to help them when they could not be saved.”

  It had been a long time since Menchú had thought about his past in those terms, let alone explained it to someone else, and it struck him how simple his motives had been then, how narrow the path to priesthood had felt. There were few other options at the time, if he wanted to both escape and help people. Now everything was so much more complicated. It was easy to lose sight of the simple reasons he had joined the clerg
y amid the Church’s machinations, the politics he hated, even as he couldn’t help but be caught up in them. But he had succeeded, he realized, at one of the things he had set out to do. He had gotten out. He had come a very long way.

  Was he still helping people?

  “People become clergy for far worse reasons,” Sifuentes said.

  “Yes,” Menchú said. “I’ve met some of them.”

  Sifuentes laughed. Menchú was serious.

  • • •

  The rain forest seemed even louder at night than during the day. Monkeys and birds called to each other in the trees above them. Animals scurried in the leaves around them. Sifuentes reminded them to zip the tents up tight and heated a can of beans and some tortillas on a small stove, sliced up ripe avocados that tasted to Menchú like home.

  “The truth is that I wish we could keep going,” Sifuentes said. “I’m anxious to get back to La Lágrima. There have been some strange things happening around the site, and I’m told you have some experience with this.”

  “What kind of things?” Sal said.

  “Hard to explain,” Sifuentes said.

  “That’s a good start,” Menchú said.

  Sifuentes took a breath. “At first I thought I was just pushing the crew too hard,” he said. “We all know each other well and we’d gone into the field with a real sense of camaraderie. But as we continued, the crew got more and more irritated with one another. There was a fight. One of the crew went after another with a shovel. These are grad students we’re talking about. Nothing like that has ever happened on one of my expeditions before.”

  “That’s not unnatural, though,” Sal said.

  “No,” Sifuentes said. “But the … blurring was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Things would, well, blur,” Sifuentes said. “Sometimes it would seem as if time were speeding up, or slowing down. Or the ground would seem suddenly less solid. The air seemed more solid. As if everything were blurring together.”

  “Did this happen to you?” Menchú said.

  “It was happening to everyone. Just for a few seconds, here and there. But to everyone.”

  “Could be hallucinations,” Sal said.

  “I thought the same thing. I considered heatstroke and made everyone rest. I had our food checked, our water checked. I tested the air as best I could. But I don’t think it was in our heads. The last time it happened to me, I was with Alarcón, my assistant. We were talking about how to decipher some of the glyphs we had found, and at once it seemed to me that she was … well, melting. Her speech slowed. It changed pitch. Her face looked like it was beginning to collapse in on itself. It lasted a few seconds, and then stopped. And she looked at me and blinked. ‘What happened?’ I asked. And she said, ‘I don’t know. But it looked to me like you were flying apart.’”

  “It happened to both of you,” Sal said.

  “Yes,” Sifuentes said. “And then I got the message from you.”

  “Do you know what’s going on at the site now?”

  “Contact is spotty,” Sifuentes said. “But Alarcón is worried. And she’s never worried.”

  “How much longer will it take to get there?” Menchú said.

  “Five hours or so.”

  “We can start as early as you want,” Sal said.

  “As soon as it starts getting light,” Sifuentes answered.

  • • •

  The next morning, Menchú, Sal, and Perry followed Sifuentes through the rain forest in silence, stopping only for water and for Sifuentes to try to contact La Lágrima. No one answered. As the sun climbed overhead, a steep hill rose through the trees, covered with trees, itself.

  “The southern temple,” Sifuentes said. “We’re here.” Menchú saw the archaeologist’s pace quicken. He, Sal, and Perry followed suit. The trail took them to the left side of the temple and into a depression in the land between two more mounds. Now Menchú could see for himself the carved walls peeking out from the moss and dirt, the outlines of what were surely stone buildings that continued to the north.

  “Something’s wrong,” Sifuentes said. “We should hear them now.”

  There were no voices.

  “Maybe they left,” Sal said.

  “Alarcón would have told me,” Sifuentes said. “Something is definitely wrong.”

  They found the first body a minute later, facedown on the trail. It looked to Menchú like the dead man had tripped and fallen there and just needed to get up, until they got closer and he saw the deep gashes in the man’s back. Something sharp had been driven into him, twice, while he’d been trying to get away, the wounds bad enough that whoever had inflicted them must have been satisfied to let the victim stagger off. As though the perpetrator knew the wounded man wouldn’t get far.

  “That’s Felix,” Sifuentes said. He was shaking. Menchú looked farther down the trail. Someone else was lying there, on her side. Even from here, Menchú could see that her head was open. Sal had seen it too. She looked at Menchú and shook her head. Didn’t say a word. Menchú knew what she meant. Whatever they found, it was going to be bad.

  Now Sifuentes raised his head and saw the second corpse. He cried out, a sound Menchú hadn’t imagined his voice could make.

  “Shhh!” Sal said.

  A flash of anger passed across Sifuentes’s face. Menchú could see he was getting confused, starting to lose it. Menchú took a couple of steps toward him.

  “I’m sorry, but you must be quiet,” Menchú said. “Whoever did this might still be here.”

  “Oh, God,” Sifuentes said.

  “Whatever happens,” Menchú said, “we’ll face it together. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Sifuentes said, but he didn’t sound sure.

  “Okay?” Menchú said again, a little more firmly.

  Sifuentes cleared his throat and nodded. Menchú was a little more convinced.

  “All right,” Menchú said. “Let’s go.”

  They found two more bodies as they headed into the main part of the temple complex. One lay on his back, staring up into the trees, his head half-severed from his body. The other was curled on the side of the trail in a fetal position. There was a gash in his side that laid him open like a sliced ham. Now clouds of flies hovered all around. Menchú could see that Sal was keyed up, full of adrenaline. She was ready for whatever was coming. Perry was calm, his breath slow and steady. Maybe the angel was taking over. Sifuentes shook harder, dropped to his knees, and threw up. They waited while he retched and sobbed. Then he raised his head and looked at Menchú.

  “I know where to go,” he said.

  He led them into a low stone building that seemed to be broken up into apartments. More bodies, slumped against the walls, lying across doorways. At last, they were in a room that seemed untouched by time. The glyph-covered stone walls were bare. A slit in the wall admitted a beam of light that illuminated a woman lying on the ground, her eyes open. Blood had come from her mouth, run down her cheek, and dried already on the floor. There was a machete in her gut. It went all the way through her. Her own fingers were clutched around the handle. It seemed clear to Menchú that she hadn’t been trying to pull it out. She was the one who had driven it in. There were two panels in the floor and they were open. Through the panels, below them, was open sky. Open, pink sky.

  “That’s Alarcón,” Sifuentes said. “That’s my assistant.” He started to cry.

  “What did you find here?” Sal said. She was a little too impatient, Menchú thought. Sifuentes was in no shape to answer any questions.

  “I don’t know,” Sifuentes said, his voice scrambling over choking sobs. “I don’t know what this means. Any of it. Oh, Teresa.”

  Sal turned to Menchú and Perry. “Do either of you know what’s going on?”

  “I can guess,” Perry said.

  “Spare yourself,” Sifuentes said. The sobs were gone. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and dried his eyes. When he took his hand away, Menchú found himself staring into tho
se familiar pale eyes again.

  “I have to thank you for bringing me a fresh body,” Hannah said. She made Sifuentes smile at them. “I had run out. Once they figured out I was here, and what I was doing, they would kill me before I could finish. I thought when I got down to the last person, this professor’s lovely assistant, I would at last be left alone. But she was stronger than I expected, and look what she did to herself. It was all very, very annoying. They were a strong bunch, all of them. But this professor, thankfully, is much weaker. I’m almost out of time.”

  Sifuentes’s head tilted toward the ceiling. His eyes rolled back in his head. His mouth clicked open and a guttural noise rose from his throat, modulated only by his tongue.

  “Oh, crap,” Perry said, a tone of recognition in his voice. He reached down and grabbed the handle of the machete that was in Alarcón and pulled it out. Sifuentes stopped chanting and lunged. He caught Perry’s hand, the one holding the machete, by the wrist. Then took the wrist in both hands, brought it to his mouth, and bit, hard. Perry shouted in pain. The machete dropped to the floor.

  Menchú made eye contact with Sal. “You go high. I go low,” he said. Sal nodded. They both tackled Sifuentes and Perry, trying to keep them away from the open portal. For Menchú, the next few seconds were a tangle of wrenched limbs, elbows to faces, faces ground into the floor, the feeling of bones being strained, joints starting to be pulled out of alignment. This was no monster fight. There were no martial arts. No spectacular kills. This was a desperate scramble on a dirty floor, just three people trying to keep a man from killing them all and himself. The problem, Menchú understood, was that Hannah didn’t care what she did to Sifuentes. She threw him against them with more strength than Sifuentes had in him. A fist smashed into Perry’s face opened the skin on three of the professor’s knuckles. Then the professor twisted around and began choking Sal until she let go of him. Menchú had enough of a hold on Sifuentes’s leg to pin him down. Hannah made Sifuentes jerk hard enough to knock the wind out of Menchú and get away, though even Menchú heard the pop in the professor’s hip when he did it. For a single instant, Sifuentes was free of all his attackers, and Hannah used it. She made Sifuentes flop away from them, both his arms and his one good leg making up for his other unusable leg. He lurched toward the open portal. He was almost there.