by N. D. Wilson
“How are the feet?” Antigone asked.
“Cold,” said Cyrus. “Kinda numb. Silky.”
Antigone burst out laughing. “I can’t believe how much you screamed. Even after Arachne knocked you out again, though then it was more like you were gargling.”
“Har, har,” Cyrus said. “Like you would have done better.”
“True. But the thing is, Rus-Rus”—Antigone slid onto the rock beside him, nearly knocking him off—“when I scream like a girl, at least I am, actually, a girl.”
Diana laughed. Cyrus looked down at the water. The boat was gone.
“Any idea what we’re doing here?” he asked.
“Rupe will tell us soon enough,” Antigone said. She stood up again. “He’ll beat us back in the boat. I was supposed to get you for dinner.”
Cyrus lowered his silk-socked feet to the rough ground. Diana and Antigone were both in boots.
“Who’s cooking?” Diana asked. “Not Jax or Dennis, I hope.”
“Alan Livingstone,” Antigone said. “And he’s using the biggest pan I’ve ever seen.”
Cyrus watched his feet as he walked. He could feel the rough edges of stone, but they were somehow softened.
He placed his foot on a sharp stick and tested it with his weight. Even in his canvas shoes, he would have felt a little pain. Instead, the point of the stick bent and snapped beneath him. And the weave was watertight, too. When he squelched across wet moss, the water beaded up on his feet and slid away. Inside, his feet were dry.
His spider socks might have looked like ballet shoes, but they were as tough as combat boots.
“Oh, that’s a good smell,” Diana said.
Cyrus looked up and sniffed. Eggs. Cheese. Sausage. Mushrooms. Maybe bacon. And he could hear the sizzling. Up ahead, between two broken-down bunkhouses, Dennis and Jax and Arachne were sitting on old logs, watching Big Alan Livingstone work a massive skillet over a fire. He looked back over his shoulder and grinned inside his blond beard. His left nostril had two little stitches where it met his cheek. His sons, George and Silas, were slicing onions and peppers and meat over the pan, while their father snow-plowed it all around with a long spatula.
Cyrus dropped onto a log and watched the big man work. Rupert had wanted the Sages to name Alan as the Brendan. It was hard to imagine the Brendan being this kind of guy, his nostril stitched on, cheerfully scrambling eggs for a bunch of kids. Of course, maybe that’s why Rupert had wanted him. He was big and dangerous, but he was jolly.
“Mouths wanted!” Alan boomed. “Too much wealth in that pan for just the six of us!” He began to hum. “Chicken gifts and udder gold … Silas, grab the peri peri. In my bag. Left side.”
Silas hurried away.
“You three, grab a log,” Alan said. “Coming off hot, and hotter soon enough.”
Rupert and Nolan came through the trees on the other side of the campfire. Rupert was bare-chested and toweling off as he walked. Cyrus couldn’t help staring at his scars. They were as stark as they had been in his dream.
“Will these eggs light my belly on fire?” Rupert asked, smiling.
“Only on the inside, Rupert Greeves,” Alan said. “Just like your mama used to make.”
“Cheers, mate,” Rupert said, sitting down. “It’s been too long.” He looked at Cyrus. “How are your feet?”
“Good,” said Cyrus. He smiled at Arachne. “Great, actually. Thanks. Sorry I lost it.”
Arachne didn’t smile back. “The Angel Skin will be much harder. You will have to be still.”
Cyrus nodded, not knowing what she was talking about and not much caring to find out. Silas was dusting red powder all over the eggs while his father stirred it in. George was assembling a stack of wooden platters and forks.
When the platters were passed around, heavy with eggs and cheese and bacon shards and diced sausage, Cyrus dug in without another thought in his head. It was spicy but not scorching, and warmth spread through his limbs as he ate. Platters were reloaded until Alan’s bathtub pan was empty of all but the shrapnel of the fried meal. Nolan sat on the ground beside it, picking out egg shards one at a time.
Rupert dropped his platter on the pine needles and slid down beside it, leaning his back against the log.
“Right,” he said. “Cyrus, we let this settle, and then we dive.”
Silas Livingstone was rubbing his scarred eyebrow. George was splayed out beside him. “Find what you were looking for?” Silas asked. His father shot him a look. “Mr. Greeves,” Silas added quickly.
“Not yet,” Rupert said, “I need a little time, and a few dives. We’ll move again soon.”
“I think we should lie low,” Diana said. “And this is as good a place as any. Let the transmortals and Phoenix go at it. When the dust settles, we can fight the weakened survivor.”
Rupert pulled a knife from his boot and peeled a long strip of bark off a stick.
“Miss Diana Boone, you give the same advice your father did. And it’s good advice. He was born a trapper, and that means patience. But hanging back and waiting in ambush has its own risks. The dust might not settle how we’d like.” He studied the stick in his hand. “What if the Ordo and Phoenix come to terms? Imagine Gilgamesh and Phoenix on the same side.”
“Gil wouldn’t do that,” Arachne said. “He hates wizards and flesh changers.” She hadn’t eaten anything. Her spider bag was empty on her lap. Cyrus wondered how many of them were feasting in bushes all around him right now.
Nolan laughed and lobbed a pinecone into the low fire. “You haven’t known him long, have you? A wizard and a flesh changer is exactly what old Gilgamesh of Uruk is.” He began to pick at a scratch on his forearm. Getting his nails in deep, he peeled the skin off like a wet sock. It reached his wrist, then he tugged it off his hand and his fingers, and was then holding a long, translucent glove of human skin. He let it float toward the fire. “Gil knows how to sling a curse.”
“You stole from him,” Arachne said. “He could have done worse.”
Nolan cocked his head and sent her a glare.
“Ho, now,” Alan said. “Old stories, old wounds, no need to claw them now. What Gil does, he does, but Rupe is right. If the Ordo can’t stomp out Phoenix, they’ll find a truce.”
“Can I ask a question?” Antigone asked. “Something I’ve wondered.”
Everyone looked at her.
“If there are teams, why are Nolan and Arachne on ours?” She hurried to explain. “I mean, I like you both. But I don’t understand. You’re transmortals. The O of B made a whole bunch of rules that all the other transmortals hated. Now they got rid of them, but you’re still with us. Why? Just ’cause you’re nice and they’re not, or what?”
Nolan sat up slowly, smiling. Then he began to laugh.
Arachne scrunched up her face. “The others don’t understand, either,” she said. Her eyes widened, flashing ice. “But some of them are quite nice.”
“To you,” Nolan mumbled.
“So …,” Cyrus said. “What’s the answer?”
Arachne sighed. “We—neither of us—ever wanted the change. Maybe we would have, but we weren’t given the choice. It just happened. It was done to us.” She looked at Nolan. “Gilgamesh dove for the fruit of life at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Nolan was the starving son of a fisherman who found him floating.”
Nolan stirred the pine needles on the ground beside him. “I ate because I was hungry. Because I thought he was dead. Why would I let a dead man’s fruit go to waste? When he woke, he couldn’t kill me, though he tried. He gave me my curse.”
Cyrus studied the pale boy from the Polygon. Nolan looked up at him, and his eyes were heavy and more worn than ever.
“And you,” Antigone said to Arachne shyly. “There was a story we read in school about you. The book said you were in a weaving contest with Minerva, and when she couldn’t beat you, she smashed your loom and turned you into a spider.”
Arachne’s face softened and her eyes drifted away, focusing on
something only she could see. “Ovid lied in that poem. I never wanted that contest. Minerva was one of the undying, part demon, part witch. I had only the gift of sight and a little magic in my fingers. She wagered her life against mine and bound us with terrible spells. I had no choice but to weave. But she had cursed my loom—the frame split, and the threads could not hold my weave.
“Desperate for my life, I cast prayers into the sky, to the one who wove the world. And my prayers were heard. For the first time, spiders came to me. They were my loom and my silk, and as I wove, holy power flowed through me, a touch reserved for creatures outside this world. What I wove shimmered like a pond at dawn, and in it a sun rose and set, and men and women moved as if alive. I wove them voices of holiness to curse Minerva and her kind, and to sing of the beauty that once was in the world and that would come again like morning.”
Arachne looked up. “That day, Minerva died. Now I never can. And from the moment the judges—kings and priests and wizards—looked on my tapestry, I was hunted. Men searched me out for charms, cloaks, strength, and healing, for beauty and power. For centuries I would hide, but they would always find me. When the Order bound me, I found protection. Often I have sheltered in Brendan’s Estates.”
She glanced at Nolan. “We two still feel like mortals, like death was stolen from us. We are like you, the dying. Not like Gil or the Vlads or Radu or Semiramis or even Ponce—those who fought against their own mortality.”
George Livingstone adjusted his short blond bulk on the ground. “So … you want to die?”
Arachne nodded. Her ancient blue eyes were lightless and still. And then, slowly, a sun rose within them. She smiled at George. “Just not today. See, I am like every other mortal.”
Nolan climbed to his feet, watching loose pine needles slide off his trousers. His face and body still belonged to a boy, but to Cyrus, he seemed as burdened as the oldest man. When he spoke, his voice was low. “There are things on the other side of death that we may never see. Thirsts we may never quench. Tastes these mouths cannot consume. But down here, under the sun, there is nothing new.”
For a moment, the group was silent, listening to the wind rasp through needled trees. But with it, there came a distant drone.
Every head turned. A plane.
“The Boones are here,” Rupert said.
Cyrus looked at Diana. She raised her eyebrows and exhaled. He smiled at her.
Rupert rose to his feet. “Cyrus, it’s time to dive. Arachne, if you wouldn’t mind starting on Antigone?”
Arachne nodded, stood, and whistled into the brush.
“What?” Antigone asked. “Start what?”
Cyrus laughed, following Rupert into the trees. “Whatever you do, Tigs, don’t scream like a girl.”
Walking through the trees, stride for stride with Rupert, Cyrus glanced at his Keeper. Nolan was trailing behind them.
“So,” said Cyrus. “You didn’t really answer the question back there.” He ducked under a long branch straggling with bearded moss. “If we can’t wait until the dust settles”—he hopped a rock—“and you don’t want Phoenix and the Ordo to become allies”—he switched to Rupert’s other side—“then what are we going to do?”
Rupert arched an eyebrow and scratched his jaw while he walked. They broke free of the trees and stood at the top of the gray sea-stained cliff. Rupert began descending on a narrow, winding goat path.
“Besides diving in freezing-cold water off an island somewhere near Nova Scotia!” Cyrus yelled after him. “That’s the obvious first step.”
“Sun Tzu!” Rupert yelled back over his shoulder. “The Art of War! I told you to read it a year ago.”
“Well, yeah,” Cyrus said, following. “And I even started, but the first couple pages weren’t that interesting.” He began feeling his way down the path, carefully dragging one hand on the cliff face.
Rupert laughed, and his voice echoed off the cliff walls around them. The boat was just visible below, sheltered in a little harbor of black water. “If you had read and understood the book, you might have some suggestions for me right now. As it is”—he glanced back up the path with a grin—“you’re just baggage.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Nolan said behind Cyrus. “Sun Tzu is a friend of Gil’s. Extreme dirtbag.”
Rupert slid to a stop on a tiny gravel beach beside the boat. Cyrus staggered out beside him.
“So I’m baggage,” Cyrus said. “Fine. Now can you just answer the question?”
Rupert kicked off his boots and tugged off his shirt before wading into the frigid water in his trousers. With water lapping around his thighs, he grabbed the boat’s edge and leaned in, pulling two squid buckets toward the side.
“We are smaller,” said Rupert, and he nodded for Cyrus to follow him. “We are mobile, but not to a degree that provides any advantage. We must establish communication, supply lines, and concentration of attack—which is the great difficulty, given that we face two stronger forces on two separate fronts, and in the O of B and its new Brendan we have a point of soft treachery, or at least vulnerability, in our rear.”
Cyrus’s spider socks weren’t going anywhere, but he dropped his leather jacket by Rupert’s boots and pulled off his shirt. His skin immediately tightened in the cold. Rupert was waiting. Cyrus exhaled, bit his lip, and then felt his way into the water. His muscles knotted into rocks. His feet became lifeless dough. The water’s bite was so sharp, Cyrus couldn’t even feel the wetness of it. He felt only needles and knives.
With his shirt still on, Nolan waded after Cyrus, unaffected by the cold. Cyrus staggered slowly forward, chattering, and Rupert extended a squid bucket toward him.
“Our best hope is surprise,” Rupert said. “And that is why we are here. This place and this moment are what Arachne prepared you for, and why I made you risk the water cube—though all too briefly. We are here to do what our enemies will fear but also least expect.”
“What’sssstt?” Cyrus managed. The water was up to his hips. He dipped his hand in the bucket and felt a squid latch on.
Rupert smiled. Cyrus raised the squid to his face.
“Red means dead,” said Rupert. Cyrus glanced at the beak he was already raising to his mouth. Three red speckles the size of pinpricks dotted the tip of the writhing squid’s black beak. “You can’t breathe hydrogen.”
Cyrus puffed breath onto the dark creature and dropped it back in the bucket. “Jeeps,” he said. “That was close. Why would you even bring those?”
“They switch genders. In any group, half are male and half female at any time. Always check the beak, even if you’ve taken off an animal and are putting the same one back on.” Rupert pulled out a squid for himself and offered one to Nolan. Nolan shook his head. “Now tell me this, Cyrus Smith,” Rupert said, sorting through the tentacles. “What is the one thing the transmortals would not expect the Avengel of Ashtown to do?”
Cyrus pulled out another squid and squinted at it. He wasn’t sure.
“Open the Burials,” said Nolan.
Rupert nodded. “The Burials. And what is the only Burial they themselves would fear to open? The Burial of the man who beheaded their fearful dragons.”
“John Smith?” Cyrus said. “Seriously? The actual John Smith?” For a moment, he’d forgotten the cold.
Nolan shivered.
Rupert’s face split into a wide grin. “The Captain. Do you have your Solomon Keys?”
Cyrus’s free hand shot up to his neck. Two keys—one silver, one gold—safely invisible on his tiny snake. “Yeah,” he said. “The Burial is right here?”
Rupert plucked three pairs of old goggles out of the boat, tossing one to Nolan and one to Cyrus. “I hope it’s right here. I’ve already searched all but two other coves on this island.” Rupert fit the squid onto his face, pulled on his goggles, grabbed a spotlight out of the boat, and began to wade into deeper water.
“Go on,” Nolan said to Cyrus. His transmortal skin was as pale as ice. “I don’t n
eed one of those creatures. Don’t need to breathe when it comes right down to it, and I prefer lung burn to squid face.”
Cyrus checked the squid’s beak for red dots, and then slid the thing over his face. The beak clicked inside his mouth, trying to nip his tongue, but he’d arranged it right. The tentacles latched tight around the back of his head. He tugged on his goggles, careful not to pinch any of the tentacles, and then slid out into the frigid water.
His ribs froze on contact. Inside them, his lungs tried to shrink. He was going to die of cold, he was sure.
Rupert dove all the way under the surface. The squid bubbled into Cyrus’s mouth, but he couldn’t make himself inhale. He could maybe last thirty seconds underwater at this temperature. A minute? He tucked and dove.
The squid spat more bubbles, and this time he caught them. Nolan, a pale ghost, came alongside him.
And then the bottom dropped away over a jagged stone shelf, and Cyrus dove straight down, and down, and down. Far below him, the bottom was glowing orange. Rupert’s crisp silhouette swam in front of it.
The water was growing warmer.
Dan bumped up the driveway and killed his headlights. For a moment, he stared at the windows of the old house. It had been a couple of weeks since he’d been there, and he couldn’t remember how he’d left the curtains. Or whether the screen door had been latched. It was swinging in the wind right now.
Why was he so nervous? The man on the phone had said someone would come. And he’d known about Dan’s heart. How? Rupert hadn’t known. The nurses at Ashtown hadn’t known. They’d tested it and everything else. Of course, they hadn’t known about his “eyes,” either.
Because he hadn’t told them …
The moon was high and bright. If someone was inside, they would be able to see out, but Dan wasn’t going to be able to see in. And there was stuff in there he wanted.
Daniel reached under his seat and pulled out a short baseball bat. Then he opened his door as quietly as he could and left it open behind him as he crept toward the house.
A light flicked on in the kitchen and Daniel froze, clenching and reclenching the handle of the bat. He waited a moment, and then he raced forward bent at the waist and ducked beneath the kitchen window. Even over the crash of the distant ocean, he could hear voices. Glass shattered.
