California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “A barista—”

  “A person who makes and serves coffee.”

  Max sniffed. “I know what a barista is. I’m a smart dog.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You trust this barista?”

  “I used to go out with her. I think she likes me.”

  “Oh, love. Well. I suppose you’ve never been betrayed by someone who loves you.”

  Gabriel swallowed the sour taste in his mouth. He didn’t look at Max. “I never said ‘love.’”

  They crossed Hyperion, just a block away from Intelligentsia Coffee Bar—a red stucco storefront with wrought-iron chairs and tables clustered around a small patio. Across the canal, a dozen black-and-white water cycles swarmed from the El Pollo Loco parking dock. The cops pulled up in front of Intelligentsia, dismounted, and with cleaver-clubs raised, descended on the customers.

  It started with people being ordered to step away from the tables where they’d been sipping their espressos and tea and reading books and writing screenplays. A college-age kid in a beret was up against the wall, being frisked. A man with a push broom was being questioned as though carrying a broom was a crime. Then came the screams and shattering glass.

  The cops put a girl’s head through the plate-glass window. She sat on the ground, blood cascading down her face, rocking and bawling amid glittering shards. Nobody even bothered to arrest her. The cops turned over tables, smashing ceramic cups. They grabbed customers as they tried to flee. Some were cuffed. Others, simply beaten. The sharp crack of bone rang out like a gunshot when a cop struck a pleading man across the face with his cleaver-club. Three cops tackled a man who tried to run. A girl, restrained in a choke hold, reached out to an unattended stroller. One cop had an old woman on the ground, his knee in her back. He zip-tied her wrists and yanked her to her feet. Not once did her face register emotion. Not once did she cry out. She was old, maybe she’d been through scenes like this before.

  Gabriel had seen brutality. He’d participated in it. Presided over it. Sometimes a baron would displease the Hierarch, and the police would fall upon his holdings, burn his houses, raze entire blocks of shops and restaurants to deprive him of his income. Or the Hierarch would order a purge, and an entire generation of osteomancers would be lost.

  What Gabriel was witnessing seemed at once both more random and more personal. For the people being hurt, there was no cause. For Gabriel, it was a message: Surrender yourself or we’ll terrorize everyone you’ve ever known.

  “What are you doing?” Max snarled. He sensed Gabriel’s intentions before Gabriel could even act on them.

  “I’m going to turn myself in.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “Not right away.” He took a step down the sidewalk, toward Intelligentsia. Max gripped his shoulder and spun him around.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Gabriel said, calm, despite the painful pressure of Max’s fingers. “While they’re busy arresting me, you can hide.”

  Max tightened his grip. “I have no friends. No money. No place to go. Without you, I’ll be tracked down and killed. With you, I have a chance. A very small, sad chance. I need you.”

  A muffled blast. They were firing gas canisters into the coffee bar’s open door.

  “Those people are already lost,” Max said. “It’s too late for them.”

  Gabriel clenched his jaw tight.

  The barista. Maddie Wilson. She was studying aquaculture at USC. They dated for seven weeks. Still did, from time to time. All she wanted from Gabriel were the usual things. A little companionship, a little fun, a little passion. She didn’t ask for much. All Gabriel wanted from her was someone he could trust enough to hold a bag for him and never open it.

  Was she on shift? It was Wednesday, and she normally only worked Friday through Sunday. But maybe she’d changed her schedule.

  To die in a storm of bullets and fire was a horrible thing. The sound of gunshots was lost in fire. The crack of burning wood and collapsing masonry could drown out everything, even screams. Gabriel had seen his mother shot dead in the formal dining room of their house. She was the Hierarch’s niece, but it didn’t save her during the Third Correction. They’d shot her in the back of the head, which was a mercy, because they’d set fire to the house and her nightgown had caught and she was burning.

  Gabriel wasn’t an osteomancer himself. He’d never been fed magic. His mother hadn’t wanted that for him. So the Hierarch’s men let him go. His father, too, though he was stripped of all the position and privilege being married to Gabriel’s mother had afforded. He died in a retirement home at the age of fifty-six.

  Gabriel studied. He made himself useful, but not conspicuous. He worked very hard and fought back urges for vengeance with a desire to survive and be useful. He hadn’t heard his mother scream, so he kept quiet, too.

  He turned and hurried away with Max, the distinct crackling of wood chasing them as the coffee bar burned.

  * * *

  Water and Power headquarters on Hope Canal was a mid-sixties-era high-rise of glass and steel strata. It looked like a machine, something that converted raw materials into energy. Gabriel paused before the doors, knowing this was one of those moments in life where the next move you made might save you or destroy you. Luck favors the bold, they said. They were idiots. Going to Fenmont Szu was bold, and now Gabriel was more than half destroyed. His neighbors were dead or jailed, his neighborhood razed.

  There was no luck. There was no fairness. There was no justice. There was the Hierarch and Szu and the Ministry of Osteomancy, and there was the Department of Water and Power.

  Gabriel and Max entered the building. Even barefoot and battered, Gabriel managed to talk his way past the public reception desk, past a midlevel manager, and up to some department head before hitting a roadblock.

  Revealing his real name, and the fact that he was grand-nephew of the Hierarch, got him another rung up the ladder, to a junior water mage. And then, to get past her, he used the name Daniel Blackland.

  A man in a very fine blue suit escorted him and Max to an unmarked elevator. Gabriel’s stomach sank as the car descended. There were no lit numbers to tell him how far down they were going. When the doors finally opened again, he smelled algae and rust.

  “This way,” the escort said. He took them to a dark chamber, webbed with pipes the width of tree trunks and valves beaded with condensation, like some mechanical rain forest. The soft roar of a hidden river pervaded the space. The only source of light in the room was a pool the size of a basketball court, glowing like a blue jewel. Water lapped in steady rhythm against the sides.

  From the shadows, a voice rumbled: “You must be brave to come to me. You must be a very brave boy.”

  The voice was deep and old and faintly monstrous. It belonged to William Mulholland, the ancient water mage of Los Angeles. The escort in the good blue suit left Gabriel alone with it.

  SIXTEEN

  Jo and Emma pushed Moth’s corpse on the gurney, and Daniel followed. Once in Emma’s laboratory, he pulled over a chair and helped ease Cassandra into it. She blinked slowly, like someone coming out of anesthesia, as they both emerged into visibility.

  He rubbed her hand. Physical sensation would help reanchor her in the world.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  He watched recognition creep into her face.

  “Emma’s lab?” she said sleepily, and she pulled her hand away. Reluctantly, Daniel let her fingers slip from his.

  “Yeah, we made it.”

  If he’d had any lingering doubts that Emma was a high-level osteomancer, her lab dissolved them. Black marble columns towered to a domed ceiling, decorated with carved wyverns and griffins. One wall contained the largest library of osteomancy texts Daniel had ever seen. Not just books, but also scrolls and loose pages framed behind glass and clay tablets etched in Akkadian and older pictograms.

  Daniel was even more impressed by the oak specimen cabinets. The shelves were packed w
ith fine powders of ground bone and horn, and oils and pastes of refined magic, and even more magic in raw bone.

  Emma’s instruments were no less striking: gleaming precision scales and a vast pegboard of handcrafted tongs and calipers and an exotic zoology of glasswork. Gas jets connected to a maze of pencil-thin brass tubes rose to the ceiling. With an assortment of valves and dials, Emma could summon any kind of flame, like the master of a clockwork dragon.

  There was magic all through this room, blending to a thick, fragrant wall of power. It poured into Daniel’s lungs. It soaked through his skin. His fingers tingled, as though he’d summoned kraken electricity, and his breath was hot.

  “Are you all right?” Emma asked.

  “I’m great.”

  He went to the gurney and pulled the blanket back from Moth’s blood-drained face. He put his ear to Moth’s mouth and felt no breath. He could find no pulse in Moth’s throat.

  Jo combed her fingers through Moth’s hair. “Where is he now?”

  “What do you mean?” Daniel said.

  “I mean, where has he gone?”

  “He’s right there. You’re touching him.”

  “His body’s here. But you told us it wasn’t like he’d be sleeping. It’s not like he’s in a coma. He’s dead. So…”

  “He’s safe, Jo. He’s done this before. Come on, we need to get our gear ready for the next phase.” Daniel had asked Moth this same question once. Moth didn’t want to talk about it. And when he pressed and pressed and wouldn’t let Moth escape, Moth stormed out. Daniel didn’t see him again for a month. So Daniel stopped asking.

  Emma was less eager to brush off Jo’s question. “I think when we’re killing people, it’s appropriate to question the well-being of the soul. The Hierarch actually ordered us to look into it once. We developed a chamber electrified with a battery built from an oni demon. The hope was to euthanize test subjects and store their spirit energy in the chamber. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to conclusively prove the existence of transphysical manifestations. Though we did manage to kill a lot of test subjects. And that is how progress is made.”

  “You know what?” Jo said. “You’re a monster.”

  “Yes, I am. And you all killed your dear friend without understanding what you were doing. But since his corpse provided the cover story we needed to be here this time of night, it’s all fine.”

  Cassandra rose from the chair. “I don’t mind when you act superior to us,” she said, “because I suspect it’s nerves talking. It’s scarier for you to sneak around in the dark than it is to kill people inside magic bottles, isn’t it?”

  Emma’s smug smirk slid into sour. “In any event,” she said, “Moth’s chest is moving.”

  Indeed, Moth’s great, continental plate of a chest rose and fell, at first shallowly, then deeply as he drew breath. It seemed a gentle awakening, but then his eyes popped open and sat up with a start. He leaped off the gurney, sending it rolling into Emma’s desk. Like a cornered bear, he took in the crew, eyes darting wildly.

  “Moth?” Cassandra said.

  Moth bared his teeth.

  “Moth, honey? You’re scaring me.”

  Some of the tension eased from his muscles. The savagery left his face. He coughed.

  “I’m naked,” he said.

  Jo fanned herself with her hand. “Oh, my, yes, you are.”

  “Who’s got my clothes?”

  Daniel tossed him the bundled clothes from his pack. They exchanged a look, and what Daniel saw made him understand that on this job, he wasn’t just stealing from the Hierarch, but from his friends as well.

  “Any problems while I was dead?”

  “None worth mentioning. And you’re just in time for backbreaking labor.” Daniel placed a shovel in Moth’s hands.

  Fifty feet of stone wall stood between them and an access point into the Ossuary proper, and the stone was impregnated with a preparation of dragon scale hard enough to blunt diamond.

  “Onward,” Daniel said. But he couldn’t hear his own voice, because he had burst into flames.

  A halo of blue fames rose from his hands and from the center of his chest, searing hot. He screamed and dropped to the floor and rolled. The flames didn’t go out. But, he realized after a few seconds, neither did the flames burn.

  He sat up and held his hands up before him. The flames completely surrounded him now, obscuring his view of the room, and of his friends. He was somewhere else.

  A full yellow moon took half the sky. He rode a jet stream of cold, thin air, slicing through clouds like a knife and leaving them roiling in his wake. His eyes were situated on either side of the long fuselage of his skull, and he saw a hundred and eighty degrees around him, everything in sharp focus. He meant to whoop in exultation, but it came out as a roar that sent dwarf pronghorns and mastodons and griffins running for shelter among the junipers. He turned and sighted a giant ground sloth browsing the shrubs. Daniel beat his wings, and the sloth issued a panicked grunt and lumbered helplessly toward a water hole. Or so the sloth thought. Beneath a thin layer of dark water lurked viscous, sticky tar. The sloth was heading for a trap.

  Flames flared before Daniel’s face, and when they died, he was sitting on the tile floor. His crew surrounded them, Cassandra kneeling before him.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “What did you see?”

  “You kind of flamed on for a second,” Cassandra said.

  Jo waved her hand under her nose. “And stunk up the room, too.”

  “Methane,” Daniel said.

  He stood and examined his hands and the front of his shirt. No burns.

  “Anything you want to tell us?” Emma said.

  He didn’t want to tell them anything. Something strange had happened, and he didn’t understand it, which meant he wasn’t in control. On a job, his role was to be in control. But there was too much at stake to deny it.

  “I’ve been feeling odd since we entered the catacombs,” he admitted. “Energized. Powerful. For a minute there, I was another creature.”

  Emma nodded, as if he were just confirming what she already knew.

  “You were absorbing osteomancy in the morgue. And you’re metabolizing the firedrake processed in this room. You’re drawing magic from stray vapors and dust particulates. I’ve only heard of one other osteomancer who can absorb raw magic that easily, and that’s the Hierarch.” She stared at him as though he were a marvelous specimen. “You’re a piece of work, Mr. Blackland.”

  Daniel struggled to tamp down a swell of delight. He couldn’t deny how great he felt. If he jumped high enough, he’d take flight.

  “I’ve never gained osteomantic abilities from breathing rough magic before. Why now?”

  Emma frowned as though solving a math problem.

  “Maybe you’ve never been surrounded by so much. You’re like a device that’s been getting by on low-voltage batteries. Here, you’re plugging into your full power. And we’re still in the catacombs. Once we break into the Ossuary proper … I might have to learn to be afraid of you, Mr. Blackland.”

  “So you’re all nifty with power,” Cassandra said. “But are you okay?”

  “I feel fine. Let’s keep moving. Dig.” He unpacked his folding shovel. Cassandra gave him a lingering look before getting out her own.

  The shovels were treated with seps and grootslang and could dig through nearly everything and turn the spoil to microscopic particles, but it would still take at least two hours to mine their way to the HVAC control room standing between them and the prize.

  Two clicking footsteps, and a woman stepped from behind one of the marble columns. She exuded powerful aromas of flame and earth and deep magic.

  She was Emma, only older. Her face was more lined, the neck looser, the chestnut hair gone gray, but otherwise, Emma.

  Cassandra snapped into marksman posture, her finger curled around the trigger of her needle gun.

  Queasy dread chilled Danie
l’s stomach. They’d crossed a barrier. On one side, the job was under control. On the other side, things spun out into chaos and were never going to snap back into order. He had felt this way once before, on a job: when Punch had gone back for the monocerus. It was the only time he’d lost a member of his crew.

  “Three seconds to tell me what’s going on before you both die,” Daniel said to the Emmas.

  “I thought you were on vacation,” said the younger Emma.

  “Cancún was rainy,” said the older.

  The older Emma leaped across the distance to the crew. Cassandra squeezed off a shot, but her needle went wide, striking a column with a sharp ring. Older Emma dropped down on her before she could fire again. Cassandra folded as if a bear had fallen on her. She managed to swing her leg in a sweeping kick that Daniel had seen her use to shatter jaws of men twice her size. Older Emma absorbed the blow across her face and spat blood. With one hand, she lifted Cassandra off the ground by the throat. Cassandra’s cheeks puffed out, her flesh turning the color of a plum.

  Moth got to her first. He drove his foot into Older Emma’s knee. It should have crippled her, but he might as well have kicked a steel pole. With her free hand, she drilled a punch into Moth’s solar plexus. He crumpled, unable to even gasp. She took his wrist in her slender white fingers.

  Daniel saw the way she was holding it, what she was prepared to do. “Don’t,” he said. But with the barest motion, she turned Moth’s wrist, and Moth shrieked.

  She lifted Cassandra another inch in the air. The veins in Cassandra’s temples bulged. She was struggling less.

  “Why did you leave me?” Older Emma said to Younger Emma.

  “Put her down,” Younger Emma said. “Put her down right now.”

  “Why did you leave me?” Older Emma repeated.

  What was this? Some kind of family drama? Daniel couldn’t see a way to work it in his favor. With Older Emma in physical contact with Cassandra, he couldn’t kraken-shock her without electrocuting both of them. And Cassandra didn’t have much time left. Daniel was already calculating how much eocorn restorative and hydra regenerative it’d take to heal her. Assuming that any of them survived.