Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods

by Michael R. Underwood

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Despite hours of work, the Gardener’s divinations yielded no results. I had suspected as much—Esther would know to cover her tracks, but my statements to that end did little to placate the Gardener.

  He sent us away, the door returning us to the street, where we decided to split for the night.

  “It’d be a bad idea of pretty epic proportions to go to the Bronx at night,” Antoinette said. “I’ll check in with some friends of mine in Queens, make sure they’re all still okay. We start again tomorrow morning.”

  “I regret that I must work until noon at my work-study position. My scholarship depends on it,” I said.

  “Priorities, man,” Carter said.

  “That is rather easier for one to say with a trust from one’s parents,” I countered.

  Carter narrowed his eyes, and Nate laughed, his voice clear and bright.

  And so we went. Nate to his tiny apartment in the East Village, Antoinette to Brooklyn, and Carter and I to a series of crowded commuter trains back to our dorms, where the normality of college life felt far too strange given how shortly I’d been away from it.

  Students joked and smoked on the front stoop of the building, stomping their feet to stay warm and passing hand-rolled cigarettes between them as they nearly shouted at one another despite being huddled within a hand-span of one another.

  Rather than try either of our patience, I went first to the food court and let Carter have the room to himself for a while. Later, we traded, and I paged through the borrowed tomes again, filling several pages of the back of my Abnormal Psychology notebook with annotations, formulae, and critiques. (The Williamson erroneously asserted that agate’s resonance with tourmaline was contraindicated for restorative enchantments, when I’d combined them to great effect on no less than four occasions. It was a criminal mistake, and would need to be corrected in a future edition, barring the end of the world, of course.)

  After I’d recovered from the digression of annotating Williamson’s errors, Carter returned to the room. Continuing our pattern of trying to give each other space, Carter went directly to his computer, leaving me to my books.

  Several hours later, my eyes would not bear the strain of more reading. It certainly wasn’t fatigue or sleepiness. I merely made the decision to muster my energy, setting my alarm for seven thirty AM and hoping that sleeping deeply might lessen the night’s bout of nightmares, or at least let me get a greater amount of restful sleep before Esther could invade once more.

  The nightmare returned, as it always did. But this time, I saw the story unfold from outside.

  Earlier scenes began the dream. Thomas inviting me to prom. My parents reacting to the news, telling me what this meant, the incredible gift that he was giving me and the family. I saw the pauses, the looks between the two of them, and wondered why I hadn’t been able to see it then, how they stitched the story together like players on one of the improvisational comedy shows that Carter enjoyed. I’d taken their pauses as excitement, rapturous joy at the incredible occasion.

  If Esther was right, then it had been a happy accident, the perfect opportunity to set the prophecy into motion. They’d taken Thomas’s offer of friendship, his attempt to bring me into the world to share an experience together, and they’d twisted it to their own ends.

  I watched Thomas’s murder from the outside, saw the world break apart with my father’s betrayal, his cruelty.

  He would pay for this. And Mother, and Esther. If I ever went back to my family, it would be to kill them. How could I ever do anything else? The thought made me sick. Seventeen years of what I’d taken to be nourishing, comforting affection soured by the truth behind my family’s actions.

  Was it still love if the people that loved you were monsters? Did their actions taint everything they did, or was there some humanity in the family? Had they ever really loved one another, or was it a mask, a role that each Greene has played to further the goals of the Bold and awaken the unborn? There was a film, some film, that matched this feeling. I’d heard someone talk about it in class.

  My mind’s eye flew from the bedroom, jumping from memory to memory as my free association broke from the nightly loop of pain and regret.

  I could not settle on the name, had no point of reference for the story. After that, my memory of the dreams faded, until I woke to my alarm.

  It was seven thirty. My bed was unsoiled. I’d not woken in the night to scream.

  I sat up in bed.

  “Carter! Wake up! The day is here,” I said, leaping out of bed, hitting my head on the ceiling, then landing with a massive thump on the cold tile of the floor. I managed not to fall over in an ungraceful avalanche of disheveled foolishness, and instead righted myself, moving directly to the closet.

  Carter grumbled, turning over in his bed. “The fuck, man? It’s early!”

  “It is seven thirty. I slept through the night. And now I must away to work while you head into Manhattan to join the war council.”

  “Whatever. I’ll catch up.”

  I waited for him to admit his joke. Instead, he rolled over and covered his head with his pillow.

  “So be it,” I said, and headed for the showers, more spring in my step than I’d had since I fled home.

  I had a work-study shift first thing in the morning, reshelving books in the university library. It was the very definition of grunt work, requiring only basic literacy and a knowledge of the university card cataloging system. The only saving grace is that Tessane had arranged to share our shifts, working as a team so that we could talk.

  Tessane had picked me out of the crowd and taken to calling me her “project.” To her, I was a shy homeschooled kid who had more brains than sense, and that was true enough. I had no doubt she’d discard me if she knew the truth, but in the meantime, her assistance in acclimating to the world was worth three times the tutorial assistance I rendered her for classwork.

  When I walked into the library at eight, Tessane was already standing by, ready at a cart laden with books. “Good morning! Clock in; we’ve got a backlog.” She wore a gauzy shawl over a black shirt, and the sort of jeans that were as much tights as anything else. Her hair draped in a manner that was somehow simultaneously messy and carefree.

  While I struggled to speak in complete sentences for several hours after waking, Tessane seemed to be chipper from the moment she awoke.

  “Morning,” I said, still feeling the exhaustion of the previous day. I’d need a better, or at least deeper, power source if we were to continue the hunt this afternoon. But that was a problem for later.

  I clocked in, then followed Tessane to the elevator. The books were already sorted by floor from the shift before us, so we merely had to ferry them to their homes, literary psychopomps of the cheapest order, the true librarians our overseers.

  “Sorry to be blunt, Jake, but you look a bit run-down. Rough night?” Tessane asked as we waited for the elevator to climb its way to the tenth floor.

  “It was, indeed. I don’t sleep that well, and last night was no exception.”

  “Sorry to hear.”

  Silence.

  “You should say thank you there, Jake,” Tessane said. She had taken upon herself the unsolicited task of correcting my manners and social maladaptation. If I didn’t know how important it was, I might have been upset by the presumption. Instead, I was desperate for the assistance.

  “Apologies. Thank you for your concern. I assume you slept well?”

  “I did, thank you. Can I ask what kept you up?”

  “I’d rather not speak of it, if that is permissible.”

  “Of course. How’s that group project coming along?”

  She referred, of course, to my doomed attempt at collaboration.

  “For lack of the ability to confer with my group, I took it upon myself to complete
the project and submit it for the group.”

  “Ain’t that always the case. My senior year, we had this huge project in World History, thirty percent of our grade, and my group consisted of me, the soccer captain, his stoner girlfriend, and a kid who had mono and was absent four days a week. Guess how that one ended.”

  I waited a moment. A moment later, I asked. “I’m sorry. Was that a rhetorical question, or am I supposed to answer?”

  “Either way. But thanks for asking. I did the whole thing myself, and still only got a B-plus. Mr. Land, I swear. That guy.”

  The elevator opened onto the tenth floor, and I grabbed the back end of the cart, Tessane taking the front position. Together, we pushed and pulled the cart out onto the carpeted floor, turning into the first row of shelves on the left.

  We alternated tasks, with her handing me books and moving the cart while I returned the volumes to their proper homes. It was a calming task, bringing order to chaos, recognizing and sustaining patterns, progressions, and the seamless transmission of knowledge.

  “What will you be doing today when our shift is done?” I asked, a question I learned from Tessane to be an appropriate way to make conversation, showing a respectable level of interest without prying too closely. It was also adaptable to other situations in other permutations. “What are you up to today?” is the form she suggested for general interactions on campus but did not recommend using it out and about in the city. The shared context of the university allowed the higher level of assumed intimacy, whereas the preferred opening for other New Yorkers was “How’s it going?”

  After the second informal lesson with Tessane, I had started making flowcharts to concretize the advice.

  The Greenes had a kind of etiquette, but social niceties were not a priority. Conversation was like ritual. There were very specific ways to speak, topics to address, and everything else was a distraction.

  “I’ve got class, and then I’ve got to get ahead of this final paper. Wish I had the time to do the research here before class, save myself the trip.”

  “I could finish out the last half-hour worth of work, if you desire.”

  “I shouldn’t, but that’s sweet,” she said, and we moved on to the next shelf.

  Over the four hours, we returned ten carts worth of books to their proper homes, and then Tessane and I parted ways, her headed for class, me for Manhattan.

  The crowds pressed in tighter than ever as I made my way through the Times Square station. Even walking to the far end had not granted me any reprieve on the train in. I’d been pressed bodily up against several commuting businessmen and a woman who managed to hold a purse, a work bag, and an e-reader, while keeping a decent sense of balance and getting some reading done.

  I instead focused on breathing, my bag held in both arms, one hand on a pole for balance.

  When this was all over, perhaps it would be best if I moved to a smaller city, one less overfull of people.

  As I crossed the indoor arena with a thousand other commuters, I took in the kaleidoscope of stimuli that was the city.

  A woman in a heavy coat stood by a churro stand, hot confections in paper sleeves wafting their cinnamon scent out into the crowd, steam still rolling off the pastries.

  The edges of the arena were lined with shoebox convenience stores and things that might have been boutiques if they’d not been stuffed into the tiny locations, like plants stunted by small pots.

  And sound, everywhere sound. A woman with a portable stereo singing an aria from some opera that I swear Mother must have played in the house a hundred times without my ever learning its title. She sang in German, finding beauty in the notoriously harsh language. The entire commuting mass was her orchestra, with low chatter, the roar of trains, the sounds of rain-wet boots squelching on the concrete, sloshing in puddles, and the dripping of hundreds of sources of runoff.

  A group of commuters banked left from the group ahead of me, veering for the exit to the street.

  Behind them, I saw my sister, standing as still as a living statue. Though she lacked the extensive gray or white makeup the performers used, she looked no less cast from granite, as weather-beaten as the rocks upon a shore. She spotted me, and smiled. As if she’d been waiting all morning. Maybe she had.

  I could see three police out of the corner of my eye, two standing together, the other looking down to the other end of the hall, toward other trains. I could call out to them, but that would force her hand. She’d flee without my being able to learn her next move. Or worse, she’d throw caution to the wind and slaughter hundreds.

  There were too many bystanders for me to use any workings. If she struck, I might be able to respond, but everything about this situation was tense, a pile of dynamite with fresh cord atop a pile of flint.

  So talk it was.

  “Good morning, sister,” I said, stepping close enough to be heard over the din. I kept a hand free, a few inches off my hip, in case I needed to draw power with haste. The crowds continued past us and our conversation became a rock in the river of human movement. People parted ways for us and then closed ranks on the other side. The opera singer continued belting, doubtless singing of sorrow, lost love, or betrayal. All were appropriate.

  “Good morning, brother dear.” Esther beamed, the fake smile that she wore when she needed to be a good little girl and show Mother and Father how loyal and devoted she was. It was a smile without sentiment. I could not generally read faces outside of my family, but I knew Esther well enough to understand that the only forces that drove her were ambition and cruelty.

  I kept my voice low as a police officer walked by, trying not to give away my anger lest we draw attention and force Esther’s hand. There were too many variables, too many innocents present to justify a confrontation. Not to mention the very high likelihood that Esther would bring the entire street down on us as a part of the melee.

  “You’re not going to succeed, Esther. If you can’t get the Hearts, you won’t be able to break the chains, and you certainly won’t be able to wake the unborn. If you go home now, I’ll let you live,” I said, not knowing if I meant it.

  Esther’s smile soured, her eyes darkening, mouth twitching. “How generous, brother. But how do you intend to cover it all, to keep them safe?” Esther waved a dismissive hand at the crowd.

  “This disgusting garbage pile of a city is practically without end, piled up like a gigantic trash barge.

  “You think the four of you can stop me? Or have you made an army of friends since yesterday? I know how talking to people was always your favorite thing. I brought Father’s knife; your new friends can go and join Thomas . . .” Esther showed the pommel of the knife, peridot shining, as if hungry. “His poor parents,” she taunted. “They still think he’s missing, you know. The papers say that the two of you disappeared together. There were rallies, searches, billboards and all.”

  “Monster,” I said through gritted teeth, guilt and loss flooding over me once more as they did every night. “You’ll never get the rest of the Hearts.”

  “That’s rather bold, brother, especially since the victory at the dance class was not yours, but bought at the cost of a sliver of a mortal’s soul, fed to a cosmic fence-sitter.”

  Sliver of a soul? What did she mean? Was there really a cost for the Gardener’s intervention? Is that why Nate had been so unsettled? What was he not telling us?

  I tried to recover, continue the conversation so I could keep Esther tied down and give the others time to respond. “We don’t need to be everywhere. Just everywhere you are,” I said, forcing my own smile.

  While I talked, I scanned the crowd. The Gardener might be watching my position. Of course, Carter still had the stone to signal Antoinette, and any magical effort on my part while talking would be immediately noticed.

  “So, where are you headed next?” I asked. I couldn’t tell if Esther was staying jus
t to taunt me or if making me embarrass myself was even more delightful to her.

  Esther rolled her shoulders, stretching. “Oh, I don’t know. I spent the night in the company of a very generous woman. She helped me heal my leg, told me where to find the Raksha, and how I could undermine the stodgy old Gardener. Did you know that their charges are the source of their power? And that without their little crops, they’re barely more powerful than a hedge magician with a staff? Their vast power comes from the harvests. I’d never had the stench of one on me before, never had the chance to ask.”

  Half of this could be lies. All of it. But I seared every word into memory, trying to create a mosaic of Esther’s story, where her mind was going, what she was trying to make me think about, worry about. Every little piece was a clue.

  I could try to stop her right there, challenge for status of scion of the Greene clan, invoke the traditions of our family. If I won, I could head this off until another of my siblings could challenge. But I would not even make it that far, for no skill did I possess where she was not my superior. Not yet, at least.

  Esther reached out and put a hand on my cheek, her touch the only gentle thing about her. “I will succeed, and when I do, you will have one more chance to return to the fold. The coming age will be glorious, Jacob. I saw it last night, as I dreamed. The seas will boil, cities will tremble. The gift of change will spread across the earth as tectonic plates scream in ecstasy, redrawing the map for the Last Age.

  “And we will be queens and kings, the chosen ones. Are you really so deluded to give all of that up for some perceived slight, because of some momentary weakness of character? I thought you were stronger than that, little brother.”

  This had the ring of truth. Terrifying, plausibly insane truth. She’d seen something, but it couldn’t be the only truth. The future was not set, was not already told, prophecy or no. To think otherwise would be to give up on life, give up on all of these people. The opera singer, dreaming of the spotlight. The churro-vendor mother, working for a better life for her children. The police, working to preserve the peace.