“You look like shit,” Talya said. “You want some coffee?”
“Yes.” It was going to taste awful, and I didn’t care. “And whatever you have to eat. I’ve had a hell of a week, and Jenner needs to know about it. But I can’t go to the fight tonight.”
Talya paused in the doorway to the kitchen and looked back over her shoulder at me. Zane stopped mid-exercise, fists up, knee lifted to his chest.
“Why?” Talya asked.
“The short version? I have to head off some bad, bad business.” I sighed, sitting back. Everything ached. My muscles and joints complained just watching Zane work out. Binah hopped onto my lap, and her paws seemed to find a deep bruise wherever they went. “The long version is that I was captured by the Vigiles, again, and they’re gunning for me with everything they’ve got. I’m nuclear right now, and I need to get out of town.”
“Yeah. We saw someone that looked kinda like you on T.V. They’re forecasting a Cat 4 hurricane, too. Calling it ‘the Perfect Storm’.” Zane let off a flurry of short, sharp jabs, turning sideward into the last strike. “Whatever you tell us will get to Jenner. She’s holed up with Ron and some of the other guys.”
GOD, where to start? I lay a hand on Binah’s back. The sensation of relaxation that she offered me was intense enough that my eyes stung for a moment. Not tears… just relief. “Well… firstly, what we found at the funeral home is just the beginning of something much, much larger.”
“You’re telling me,” Talya called back from the kitchen. “I cracked that hard drive you guys got.”
“And?” I focused on the doorway. It was so dark that all the lights in the house were on at eight in the morning. I watched Talya’s shadow track back and forth through the swaying bead curtains.
“You first. I’ll have to show you.”
Right. “The murdered FBI Agent was spying for someone. A group called ANSWER.” I turned back to Zane. “Any of you heard of them?”
“ANSWER. Yeah, I have,” Zane said. “Well, the name. Michael said that if we ever met an operative from ANSWER, we were supposed to treat them as if they were sen-sun. Kind of like, uhh, ‘brothers-in-arms’. Allies by default.”
“That seems to tie into what I’ve learned about them.” My gut rumbled as the smell of coffee began to fill the house. “Angkor is a member. He goes by the name ‘Zealot’. His breakaway and disappearance has something to do with ANSWER’s business here. Depending on who you ask, it’s either about saving the world or destroying it by summoning something I’ve heard described as the ‘Engine of the Morphorde’.”
Zane eased down from his fighting posture, a silhouette against the window. “I don’t know what that is, but I don’t like the sound of it. You sure he’s not a Vigiles agent?”
“The Crusader spook from the CIA who forced me to work for them didn’t recognize him on video,” I replied. “They kidnapped me again, made me watch a security tape taken from the last murder scene Ayashe took me to. And they gunned down Ayashe in cold blood right in front of me and dragged her off, full of holes.”
“What?!” Zane paled.
“I overheard some guards saying she’d been taken to the Vigiles prison. Well… one of them. They have two, I think: The Icebox, and The Sandbox,” I continued. “I don’t think she’s dead. Just as well, because I learned what they do to Weeders while I was in custody. You remember how you threw up when we broke into the funeral home?”
“Yeah,” Zane said cautiously.
“They have a way to render Weeders into their elemental Phi,” I said. “Using something called a ‘digester truck’. That truck we saw in the garage was one.”
“Render.” He repeated the word numbly, dropping to crouch on his toes. “Render, like what? Like soap? You mean to tell me they’re pulling people’s fucking souls apart?”
“And using the resulting matter to create homunculi,” I finished. “Yes.”
Talya returned with two cups, one for me and one for herself, and a small plate stacked with a shapeshifter-sized serving of reheated pizza. I normally didn’t eat pizza, but I needed the calories. She took a seat while I dug in, her face tight with anxiety.
“You know, the Elders always tell us stories about the Crusades and the Deutsche Orden,” she said after a couple of pieces had disappeared. “They’re like the boogeyman, you know? Some part of me, like… can’t believe someone could really do a thing like that.”
“People can be the worst Morphorde, Kitten.” Zane shook his head grimly.
“I know that,” Talya replied, brow creasing. “Don’t talk down to me like I’m dumb. I’m Unangan. My grandma spent, like, ten years in a concentration camp. What I meant is that I don’t believe a person could look someone’s Ka-Har in the face and think ‘hey, I wonder how I can turn this into magic playdoh’. That’s a Morphorde thing.”
Zane looked a little chastened. “Right. Sorry.”
“I got out of the Vigiles’ transit house,” I said, starting on slice number four. My stomach felt like a bottomless pit. “Escaped with another woman they’d captured. Lee Harrison.”
“She’s been on the news, too.” Zane sat down, stretching his legs out in front of him. “They’re saying you murdered her.”
“The Vigiles did.” The pizza turned to ash in my mouth. “She was… a courageous person. I wouldn’t be alive if not for her. She escaped and came back for me. Admittedly, it was only because she mistook me for someone involved in ANSWER, a man named Norgay.”
Talya cocked her head. “Norgay as in Tenzing Norgay? The Sherpa?”
“I suppose.” I shrugged, choosing my next words carefully. “I didn’t learn much from her, except that some bikers apparently turned her in to the cops when they recognized who she was. She was tight-lipped, as much so as Angkor. Following that and my escape, I met with the Deacon.”
“You weren’t lying about having a hell of a week.” There was something in Zane’s voice that was off, and my lips tightened imperceptibly. “She probably ran into one of the cop clubs. There’s a couple of crews who are on the force, or used to be, that do rides and take over bars.”
“You met the Deacon?” Even Talya was squinty-eyed about that.
I held their gazes, steady as the dawn. “The Deacon thought he could recruit me, because as it turns out, the Templum Voctus Sol is literally at war with the Deutsche Orden. He claims he’s foreseen the end of the world, caused by the arrival of this Engine, and that Angkor and ANSWER are ushering it in to throw us all to the NO.”
“I assume you refused,” Zane said. A statement, not a question.
If I was honest, it was less cut and dry than I would have preferred. I didn’t trust the Deacon as far as I could kick him, but I had no solid reason to doubt the core of truth that braced his weird opinions about Angkor. The Deacon was irrefutably right about one thing: shit was getting weird and bad, and fast. The events of the last four months were building to something. I had no doubt that the ‘something’ was nothing good.
“Of course,” I replied. “I’ve been fighting the TVS for months. I never told you what drove me from the Organizatsiya, did I?”
“No.”
“A Gift Horse showed up in New York,” I said. “Her name was Zarya. She arrived in a great big shell, a Fruit or, as Angkor called it, a Rind. She was being held captive by the Manellis, and against my better judgement, I got involved. Jana Volotsya was the first TVS member I met: a sorceress, and possibly the TVS leader in NYC prior to the Deacon. She knew that Zarya’s Rind was here and circulating in the underworld, but not precisely where, so she instigated a gang war by murdering one of the Manelli Family shotcallers to see if he or someone else would slip the location.”
I hadn’t expected either of them to really know what a Gift Horse was, but both Talya and Zane blanched a little. They looked at each other.
“We know,” Talya said, looking back to me. “About the Gift Horse, that is.”
Zane nodded.
“What? How?�
�� I glanced between them sharply.
“We felt it,” Zane said. “And about a month after that, the arrival of something else. They are… I guess you could call them ‘sacred’, in the sense that they’re important and supernatural.”
“Our Ka talk to us across the barrier of our consciousness,” Talya said, her voice crisping to an academic cant. “They can reach over when we’re asleep. We don’t really ‘dream’: we talk to our Ka instead. On the night the Gift Horse arrived, everyone I know had the same conversation with their Anima.”
“The Mare is here,” Zane said. “The Fruit of the Pure Lands has arrived.”
“Then a Tree of Life,” Talya said nervously. “Zane, is it even okay for us-?”
“I know about the MahTree already.” I couldn’t keep a note of irritation from my voice. The hoarding of knowledge was a terrible problem with Weeders. They were almost like a strange sort of occult hive-mind. “Lee told me.”
“Then she wasn’t close-lipped enough,” Zane replied. “No one should know about this other than us. It means the Creatures of the Pure Lands are under threat.”
“I don’t think they are,” I said. “I think… based on what I know of GOD and my own knowledge of how bodies work… I think that the Gift Horse’s arrival is something akin to an immune response. Because this has all been going on a lot longer than since her recent appearance. Celso was saying that plans have been in motion since the mid 80s, at least. What else do you know?”
They looked at each other again.
“Stop it,” I said. “For GOD’s sake. Literally. I’m a big boy now, and I can handle forbidden knowledge.”
Talya bit her lip and looked down. Zane regarded me levelly with green eyes too light for a face as dark as his. Cat’s eyes.
“The Deacon’s right,” Zane said. “The world’s gonna end soon. We’ve known it for ages.”
That threw me for a second. “Wait... what?”
“We all do.” He shrugged. “The Weeders, that is.”
“And you... didn’t think to…” I gestured with a piece of pizza. “Say anything?”
“Even if people believed us, it’d just cause problems.” Zane grimaced, and rubbed the back of his head. “We know because of Talya.”
Talya stiffened, her hands balled into fists on her lap.
“We need to start from the beginning to give you the right context.” Zane turned his hands up, and when he began speaking, it was in the rhythmic cadence of a storyteller who had memorized lines told to him by another. “The Pure Lands were the skin and virgin flesh of the YESbeast. They took the form of endless forests made of glass that embodied all colors, a giant prism that constantly reflected itself. Our Ka roamed these forests in ecstasy, feeding and transforming, living among the branches of the great Trees who breathed fresh life into our kills. We hunted in innocence of death. It was a great Everything, and no being went without. Then the Morphorde came.”
“There were two great wars for the YESbeast. The first was an invasion, in which a full quarter of the Beast’s flesh was spoiled. The second was when the forests, now aware of mortality, fought back.” Zane let his eyes hood. “Eden lost the Second War. The Pure Lands were destroyed and shattered, introducing Separation, Time, and Form into GOD. All the Weeders who will ever live came from that final act of destruction, tiny shards of Edenic memory and primordial form floating free inside of the YESbeast.”
Talya nodded. “They bond to HuMans during birth in place of a normal soul, appearing at random on every world in every Cell of the YESbeast’s body. When the world is healthy, the only Ka that incarnate are small animals, prey creatures like the Pathrunners. As a world sickens, more of our souls are drawn to the world, like an immune response. The Ka get bigger and meaner. You start getting tiger shapeshifters, lions, rhinos.”
“People like Jenner and Ayashe,” I said. “And you, Zane.”
Zane nodded, arms folded across his broad chest. “Yeah. When a world is dying, about to be drawn into the hot zone of the Third War, then the big guns arrive. More and more shapeshifters appear, and they’re the badasses, the ancient Ka who fought the armies of the Morphorde. We’re talking like... dinosaurs. American lions, like Talya. Megafauna. Giant snakes, giant eagles. When Talya arrived in New York and sought out the Pathfinders, we knew that shit was about to go down. There’s others that have been appearing, too, all around the world. Cassie’s one of them. So is Starfish.”
“So you knew, too?” I asked Talya.
Talya nodded. Her eyes were dark and troubled. She was picking her lip, something she only ever did when she was nervous.
I drew a deep breath, and blew it out. My plate was empty. Eight pieces of lukewarm pizza had barely even made a dent in my appetite, but the grease at least made the coffee more palatable. “Well, that settles that then, I suppose. The jury’s out on whether or not Angkor is to be involved in summoning this cataclysm, but my gut tells me the Deacon is full of shit on that front.”
Zane scowled. “Well, you know what they say about good intentions.”
“True.” Tiredly, I motioned to Talya. “In light of all that, will you show us what you found? You might have the final pieces of the puzzle.”
“Oh! Sure!” Talya brightened a little, and pushed her office chair back to her hastily-set up workstation. The desk and table she had set up groaned under a collection of beige steel and plastic equipment, which included two monitors and several pounds of cables. “This whole thing is huge. I was going to report to Jenner tonight.”
Zane didn’t even bother getting up. He just crawled across to kneel beside her, watching over her shoulder. “You were careful to cover your tracks with all this, right?”
“Hey, don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Of course I was careful.” Talya fondly patted one of the whirring beige boxes that cluttered up her desk. “Mister Tunnels here means I don’t even use my own internet connection.”
“Mister Tunnels?” I stared at the box in confusion.
“Yeah! He gives me a new phone number every time I dial into my university. Among other things!” Talya typed in lines of commands on a blank screen. She hit a key, and a great big ‘NeXtGen’ logo written in lines of dots and dashes spooled out, then disappeared before a virtual interface unfolded. It was bland and officey: blue background, gray boxes, buttons with symbols on them.
I blinked and glanced at Zane. He shrugged, so I slumped back and stroked Binah’s flank. She stretched out under my hand with a yawn before she curled back up, her front paws hugging her face. “How did you get into this kind of work, anyway?”
“My dad worked on the missile programs in Alaska. He was right there for it all, like, in the 50s and 60s,” Talya said. “Mom lived on the islands, so I spent some of the year with her, and some of the year with Dad on base. I always had a head for numbers and code, so I ended up getting a scholarship to Berkeley, and it all sort of went from there. I was just really lucky to be in the right place at the right time, to be honest.”
I watched her navigate deftly through the desktop to a series of logged files, curious and mystified at the same time.
“Okayyy… Where do I start?” Talya bit her lip, eyes scanning the screen as she selected a group of files and opened them. “Well, the first thing is that I’ve confirmed that The Future of America is a PAC basically owned by Spartan Corp, or more accurately, that ‘Max Sterling’ is the PAC’s Chief Operations Officer. But the whole thing is so weird. Like, the Donor List. Look at these names.”
I leaned forward and narrowed my eyes to read the spreadsheet she’d brought up. “Matim Harad’bak. Letiaat Suul’ah’fa. Prida Ul’khish.”
Zane scowled. “They look like fake Middle-Eastern names.”
“I know, right?” She scrolled down, past the weird nonsensical names to a list of more typically Western-American names. “I looked them up, but they aren’t names in Arabic or any other language I can find. But I was able to look up a few of these guys.”
“Charles Bishop,” I murmured. “Well, well.”
“Do you know who he is?” Talya said.
I recalled the Deacon’s blithe explanation of his role in government, and made a face. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“Nope.” Zane shook his head.
“Charles Bishop is the Director of the P-SAD,” Talya said. “The Paranormal Special Activities Division of the CIA.”
Zane rubbed his hand over his stubble, scruffing it. “Damn, Kitten.”
“So, uhh, I did some careful digging around on him,” Talya continued. “And I couldn’t really find much of anything that wasn’t just a government ‘meet your director’ type profile. Someone I know on USENET told me he was involved with the Stargate Project during the Cold War, but no one knows how. He’s a major donor to the PAC.”
I rubbed my palm over my mouth, thinking.
Talya nodded and continued.. “It turns out that only some of the money The Future of America gets goes to Sebastian Hart. Some goes to Catholic charities and other organizations... umm... there were two that really interested me.”
“Go for it,” Zane said.
“The first one is the Catholics Against Cults foundation,” Talya said. “They’re seriously anti-supernatural, and they’re also leading this big campaign around the Church of the Voice of the Lord.”
The final stroke. My heart sunk, and I felt vaguely ill as I thought back to what I had done with Christopher, the memory of his unnaturally blue, piercing eyes looking at me beseechingly from the floor. “That cinches it. Pastor Christopher Kincaid is the Deacon.”
“Woah, wait a second.” Zane leaned back, arm resting over the other knee. “Where’d that come from?”
“A few things.” I sat up and leaned forward, swallowing the pizza-flavored gorge rising in my throat. “Firstly, I interrupted a government hit on him. Men in Black were breaking into the church late at night. They murdered the security, and I just happened to be there. After I saved him, he told me that he’d been losing time... that he’d been having fugues where he passed out and woke up without any memory of what he’d been doing or where he’d been.”
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