The Journeyman

  He didn’t recall what happened next. The doctor’s report said he’d suffered a concussion.

  The paperwork for the wrestler and his friends was longer, more detailed. It included months of follow-up visits for each of them. The police said that Paul stopped swinging the chain-lock only when it grew so slick that it flew from his hands. He didn’t remember telling them that.

  When he was sent out-of-state and arrived at New Beginnings, Pop Mike told him he’d only avoided the juvenile court system because the wrestler’s parents didn’t want their son’s name in the news anymore. They feared that when the rounds of surgery and physical therapy were done, the notoriety might force even his dad’s alma mater to turn him away come application time.

  Paul never saw Martha again.

  He didn’t know why such memories flowed when things in The Commons were at their worst. But as the sand poured down over his hair and into his eyes—it was chest-high now, and breathing required effort—the way up was one of complete clarity.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Mr. Brill shouted at Rain, far above. That would make sense later.

  Paul knew what to do. The sand heard him, listened, obeyed.

  It was time to show Mr. Brill what was in the box.

  No more clues. A lifetime of training couldn’t have stopped Annie from focusing on that. Two, three, five lifetimes.

  No.

  No begging or praying would freeze the second hand. It really was moving faster. She was certain of it.

  One, two, three, five. That and three clues had kept her little boy alive. She took no pride in his survival, congratulated herself not at all. She did not know what to do next. And for her failing, he would be the one who paid.

  She had never been good at puzzle games. Didn’t have the patience for them. On the base, choosing between the puzzlers and the first-person shooters on the ancient PC they’d salvaged, she went for boy games such as Quake or Starcraft, not the head-beating 7th Guest or Myst.

  Big mistake, but how was she to know? No one told her she needed to practice so she could keep her kid from being eaten alive after she’d already gotten him killed because she could only afford a bus and not a plane.

  The hand marched on. She was out of goddamn clues. One, two, three, five. A sum? Eleven felt wrong.

  First letters? O-t-t-f. Ottf.

  In a memory class she took once, digits corresponded to consonants. If only she could remember what those were. Such a silly thing to know, she’d thought. Letters for numbers. When would she ever use that?

  “One, two, three, five,” she said aloud to herself, like that might shake something loose. The hand whizzed past the halfway mark. It never tired.

  She repeated it. Maybe Wrangler John had something to offer. “John?” Her voice cracked.

  Nothing.

  Zach stood on the rock, looking to the farmer for guidance. The little man remained pointed at five, his previous answer.

  Such a small boy. Such an adult way about him. He’d always had that, which made his disability all the more cruel—as if he understood exactly what he was missing, what was passing him by, and remained stoic in the face of that loss.

  The hand raced ever forward. Of course it did. That was its job. It worked with the dragon fish against her son, who stood alone on a wet rock and stared at a stupid toy, waiting for it to save him.

  Not it.

  Her.

  Waiting for his mother to save him. And Mom was out of ideas.

  She would lose him, and she would watch it happen. Watch it. Know it. If she tried hard enough, if she begged, would they let her go with him?

  As if on cue, the huge mosasaur that had stayed deep and away from the others turned to face up, toward Zach. It had ignored him until this point.

  It was orange now, a safety-bright leviathan. Yet Annie still had difficulty sensing it. Even with the Humboldt connection and the mass of knowledge they delivered, it was shadowy territory to her.

  The monster shifted its orientation again. Like a bubble released from beneath it, a nugget of information rose up, as if the mosasaur had let its guard down and allowed the wee fact to escape.

  With that, she knew.

  The orange mosasaur remained apart from the rest because it was trapped down there. No reason for the confinement was attached to the data. It simply wasn’t able to approach the surface.

  Well, that was some comfort, anyway—one less water dragon to worry about. Could it drown, given time? She hoped so.

  The hand. “One, two, three, five,” she said again. “John.”

  “Liberace?” he offered, distant as ever—farther, maybe. “You need another one.”

  Another what? Annie was going to forfeit Zach. Her boy—her world. And she depended on a man who communed with weasels for an answer. And all he had to contribute was a rhinestone grand and a candelabra.

  Useless. No help. I wish my brother George was here.

  Rhinestones. Sequins. Spangles. Ornamentation. Color. Peacock. Pinecone.

  How did they fit together? Had anyone said they did?

  Pinecone. Sequins.

  What was the sequence?

  Pinecone. Sequence.

  No. Not Liberace. That just rhymed with what Wrangler John had really said.

  Pinecone. Sequence. Another one.

  She ran the numbers. One, one, two, three, five. Yes, and yes again.

  She’d always aced Bio. How had she missed that until now?

  If ever she failed her son, it would not be here.

  Eight, you soggy, stinking lizards. Choke on crazy eight.

  The sand filled the pit beneath Paul’s feet, raising him up. He didn’t ask now—he and the grains were of each other. The faster he wanted them to come, the more swiftly they did. He flew on the deserts of legend, a storm in his own right.

  At the surface, Mr. Brill stood over Rain, who was still on her hands and knees. He knew Paul was there. Paul could sense it.

  The sand carried Paul up above the floor until he stood atop a mound so large that it erased all traces of the pit and the broken glass. Rivulets of sand spilled down its sides.

  Mr. Brill faced him, beaming with something akin to pride—the abusive father whose son just showed he could take a punch. “You won’t disappoint me.” He dismissed Rain with a wave. “Not like this one.”

  He flicked something from his lapel. It became a bullet of fire that headed for Paul, fist-sized and growing.

  The sand beneath Paul spread out flat, lowering him to the floor. The fireball passed over his head.

  Mr. Brill liked that. Thus far, it was only a game for him. He enjoyed a huge advantage in experience.

  The fiery missile boomeranged. Heat from behind announced its return.

  Paul let it strike him dead-center in the back. He welcomed the flames, didn’t turn them aside. They bathed him, burning away his doubts, his hesitation.

  He burned, but was not harmed. The fire faded to trickles of yellow and orange—the final streams of a volcano coming to rest—then died altogether.

  “Good,” said Mr. Brill. “You learn faster than I did. I kept trying to talk to it, but it doesn’t want that. It wants you to rule it.”

  The floor around Paul and Rain disappeared, leaving each of them on top of a rough sandstone tower, harsh winds beating about them. Paul’s toes were perfectly aligned with the edge of the abyss—a drop of a hundred stories.

  The walls of the space around their towers were those of skyscrapers at night, studded and winking with windows lit from within. Silhouettes of faces looked out from the glow of their rooms—sightless, featureless in their bright coronas.

  Rain struggled to rise. Something was burning somewhere. Sirens keened far below.

  The pillars began to crumble. Fragments trickled past windows filled with those who didn’t know or care, those who peered out into the night at something worse than falling stone.

  They were the passengers from the bus, the dead from the snowy hillside. T
hey were those who came into The Commons alone or arrived in tragedies large and small. Crimes. Wars. Or maybe those who kissed loved ones goodnight and never greeted them in the light of morning. Robbed of their Journeys. Denied their challenges, their destinations, their fates.

  “They’re mine.” Mr. Brill let the weight of that settle in. “We are chosen. We are more than them. They feed a greater good—us. I know you know. I feel that knowledge like I feel them. We all had the same chances, the same opportunities. Yet they do not command, and we do. The Thirty-Six. The Nistarim.”

  Paul could hear Rain’s breathing. It was steady. She was playing possum, waiting for an opening. “You take your power from the people it belongs to,” he said. “You weren’t chosen by anyone.”

  Mr. Brill’s smile never faded. “There’s some truth to that. But do you know how I came to be here? I’m but one of thirty-six. I couldn’t just grab everything. It was handed to me freely. Souls who weren’t willing to risk failing in their Journeys, to meet a fate that wasn’t to their liking. They came to me for an easier way—frightened, wanting from me what they wouldn’t do themselves.”

  “Why the Ravagers, then? Why force people if they wanted your help?”

  “They didn’t all know enough to want it. Just like the Envoys. I gave them the option of working with me. They refused. I can’t be bothered with convincing everyone. Now the Envoys are gone, and there would be chaos if I didn’t take my duties seriously. Do you know the volume of Essence entering The Commons every day? Every night? Do you know what it would mean if I abdicated?”

  Paul gazed down at the dark faces in the windows. Would they have given up willingly? Were their Journeys too hard?

  “Consider this, Paul. Can I allow you to move on from here when your strength added to mine would mean levels of control I only dream of? You know I can’t. You know I won’t. So the answer is yours to give. Accept who you are—or forfeit it.”

  Paul already knew his answer. Mr. Brill would, too.

  A pit opened up behind the big man. Then it grew deeper.

  41

  Omnes Pro Uno

  With the answer came the shame of how long it had taken her to figure it out.

  Fibonacci. The numbers of nature. How had she not gotten it earlier, given all she’d seen since leaving Mr. Brill’s offices?

  Brill’s power was industry and artifice. True might—a city leveled by the shifting of the earth, the heat of a star, lightning—was of the natural world. The Humboldt knew, as did she. And with that, she and Zach might yet make it through this thing.

  Through to what, though? That was a whole other question, but Annie only had to consider the next jump for now. Trying to solve big-picture riddles would put her up against the weirdness of the entire package. Then the faults in her mental armor would widen and spread.

  In the Fibonacci sequence, each number was the sum of the two preceding it. One plus one was two; one plus two was three; two and three made five, and three and five got you to eight—the most recent correct choice.

  “Thirteen.” Wrangler John was an echo trying its best to help, as if Annie were incapable of simple addition. But she couldn’t stay annoyed at the man. He and Liberace were the heroes here.

  Still, there were only twelve numbers on the clock face. There was no thirteen.

  Her familiar foes climbed through the ropes and into the ring. Ladies and gentlemen, wrestling fans, in this corner, the terrible twosome of Doubt and Fear. We can only hope the refs have checked their tights for foreign objects.

  Doubt and Fear. The very opponents she’d been trained to overcome.

  And who had trained her? Uncle Sam and the U.S. Army, who kept everything and everyone punctual. If you’re late, don’t bother showing up.

  What did they train her with? Scrupulous scheduling. Tenacious time-tracking. Not in twelve-hour increments, but on the tried-and-true twenty-four–hour clock.

  Thirteen-hundred hours.

  She didn’t even have to say it out loud.

  Paul answered Mr. Brill’s offer as hard as he could.

  He willed a pit into being, silently driving it a hundred stories down into the floor behind the big man, who didn’t seem to notice. The potential energy of all that compacted stone left Paul shaking with the effort it required to contain it.

  But he had no intention of keeping it there. He released the compressed Essence under the floor in front of Mr. Brill.

  The floor ruptured. A column of earth and rock shot up into the air, rumbling as the released Essence fueled its momentum.

  At forty feet up, Paul brought the pillar back down in a curve, a striking snake headed straight at Mr. Brill. It smashed into him, pile-driving him down into the pit behind him.

  The Essence buried Mr. Brill mineshaft-deep, its reverberations sending cracks out across the floor in a star pattern as it filled the pit to the surface. It wanted to regain its form, coalesce into something static, so Paul worked with that.

  Within moments, the last of the rocky thunder faded. There was no evidence of the hole or Mr. Brill—only smooth floor.

  “Nice.” Rain was on her feet on her tower, shotgun in hand. She was unsteady, but her ability to stand at all was a testament to her strength. The source of that and the other assorted ways in which she wasn’t quite like most other girls was a topic for conversations Paul intended to have. “How far down?”

  “Far enough. I hope.” The tower under Paul and its surrounding windowed walls became floor again. Rain’s, too. They started toward each other.

  A whip-like sound from beneath his feet was a declaration that the fight wasn’t over.

  Barbed cable sprung from the floor to wrap around his ankles, tripping him. Another rose up behind to bind his wrists.

  It hurt, which wasn’t necessary. That attention to detail told him he’d succeeded, at least, in making Mr. Brill angry.

  The cables reached upward and, finding a purchase in heights unseen, hauled him up off the floor. Joining behind his back, they held him suspended, hog-tied, and then constricted, barbs piercing his clothes and skin.

  A javelin, brown with rust, sprouted from the floor. Its sharp tip stopped just below Paul’s stomach, nudging the hanging edge of his shirt aside.

  Rain took a step forward.

  Paul dropped a sickening inch, stopping with a jerk. Now he could feel the javelin point kissing the inside of his navel. Another step would impale him.

  She retreated.

  The cable holding him aloft began to unravel itself. He rotated slowly over the spear, its point his axis, as if in a breeze.

  “Now,” said Mr. Brill.

  The spin brought Paul around to see the big man standing below. His demeanor and clothing were unchanged, as if Paul’s attack had never occurred. “You have strength. Maybe even more than me, given the time to develop it, and I hope you appreciate my candor. But I will not grant you that time.”

  Below the javelin’s tip, angled steel thorns sprouted and blossomed down the shaft to the floor. Flecks of oxidation fell like snow.

  “Do I hear a yes?” Mr. Brill said.

  Paul laughed the way any group-home kid did in the face of a threat, be it expulsion or a beat-down. Defiance and spite. Pride was pride.

  The cable sang out in a sharp series of pings, and Paul shivered with the vibrations. Strands ruptured in turn, one after another.

  Mr. Brill had started a timer of sorts. All three of them knew what would happen when the countdown ended.

  “Now there’s the strength of will you showed my Shade.”

  “The Shade was you,” Paul said as Mr. Brill rotated into view again. “And Ken sent you home with his fists in your heart.”

  “Ken.” The big man spat the name out. “A scrap. A freak missed by no one.”

  Paul’s anger was an audible crackle. The cable and javelin evaporated, and he dropped, landing on his feet. Lightning burned the air around Mr. Brill, bathing him in white and hurling him to the floor in a b
urst of sparks.

  The fury hurt when it expressed itself. Fabric tore in Paul’s mind. He reached into a fallen gift box for its chain and lock.

  “You still think—“ Mr. Brill began, his voice a struggle. The electricity became solid. A coffin encased the big man in steel. Only his head and neck were visible. “Mere theater.”

  It was anything but. The end of the box irised into a sharp ring that sealed itself against Mr. Brill’s throat, cutting into the soft skin there.

  In his mind, Paul whirled the lock around in an arc, like bolas. He walked over to Mr. Brill and looked down at him on the floor, toes stopping just shy of his head. “You need to know something. This isn’t just my Journey.”

  Mr. Brill tried to laugh. The edge against his neck bit deeper. Dots of red bloomed on the steel.

  “I’m freeing them—all of them. The people on the bus. Everyone.”

  The big man exhibited the same confidence he’d shown all along. A touch more blood appeared at the razor iris’s edge.

  “Rain gets to move on,” Paul said. “It’s her Journey, too. She’s earned it.”

  The red circle did nothing to check Mr. Brill’s mirth. “Oh, she’s earned something. Only not what you think. Her deal’s been made already.”

  “Paul.” Rain’s voice lacked its strength.

  “With me,” said Mr. Brill.

  There it was. The suspicion that Paul hadn’t wanted to recognize. Why she’d tried to leave. Why she’d seemed to be familiar with Gerald Truitt. By the fire of the Nightlights, she’d warned him that something bad had made its way in with them.

  “Look what I did,” she’d told him in the Dew Drop Inn parking lot.

  Rain’s face wore the truth of it. For a moment, she looked as if she might have something—anything—to say. But there was nothing.

  A shadow crossed her arm, under her jacket sleeve. It emerged, dark and fast, dropped to the floor, and scuttled over to Mr. Brill.

  It was too fast for Paul to see clearly, but he didn’t have to. The spider tattoo.