The Journeyman

  Her chair was woven plastic bands on metal tubes. Green on white, with dark spots from the basement storage, just like the one Zach’s mother used when they went to see Fourth of July fireworks.

  Zach knew her. She was the woman from the picture. Paul’s mother.

  A voice in Zach’s head—Tape Recorder Zach—told him that the woman wore the face she needed for the situation at hand. If another one had made her job easier, she’d wear that.

  “You have something I need,” she said. “Something you’ve come a long way to give me. We’re very proud of you, Zach. You’ve done just what we required you to do.”

  She reached out and gently tapped the hand that gripped the little farmer. His pain was gone, his scrapes healed.

  The lady who wasn’t Paul’s mother glanced down at the fist that held the marble, but didn’t want him to catch her at it. She put both her hands out, palms up.

  “Now,” she said. “It’s important—very important—that you choose one of my hands and put what you’ve brought me into it. You can think about it if you want. We have time. But you must choose on your own.”

  Zach ignored her hands. Instead, he looked into her eyes. Despite what she’d said about having time, she was in a hurry.

  He made his decision and held the marble out. He would drop it into her right hand.

  At least, he thought it was her right. That always confused him, what to call people’s hands when their right was his left. Probably Not Paul’s Mother stopped smiling, then brought the grin back again—hard, as if recovering from a mistake.

  It happened quickly.

  Zach dropped the marble—and realized two things. She’d said he was doing just what they required him to do, not what was needed. And she’d said it was important that he choose a hand to put the marble into, which wasn’t the same thing as saying there were right and wrong choices.

  It was only important that he choose to give it to her.

  It was a trick.

  What he did next wasn’t possible. But he did it anyway. Because possible wouldn’t stay still.

  He caught the marble as it fell, reclaiming it with the same fingers that had just let go of it. He was faster than Not Paul’s Mother, grabbing it again before she could.

  Her smile began to fade. He didn’t wait for it to finish.

  He wheeled around, winding up with the turn. Then he threw the marble as far out into the lake as he could.

  Not Paul’s Mother screamed. She no longer sounded like a woman. Or even human.

  The marble arced out over the calm flat of the lake. It flew faster and farther than Zach had ever thrown anything in his life—farther than he was able to.

  When it was about to splash down, a delicate arm of water—a slender woman’s arm, like that of a young mother—reached up from a circle of ripples and caught it. Droplets sprayed from the hand as the marble was captured, and the arm pulled it beneath the surface.

  As the arm sank out of view, it seemed for a moment that it had become a mass of tentacles, like those of an octopus.

  Or a squid.

  The lake returned to stillness. The scream behind him died.

  A little breeze, like a breath, rose off the water. It brushed past Zach’s face—a caress—and was gone with a sigh.

  That sigh was one of old, deep worry—released and done away with at last.

  43

  The Better Angels of Our Nature

  Mr. Brill held back. It was more enjoyable for him to watch Paul suffer as Rain slowly drowned. The growing bond between Paul and Mr. Brill transmitted the big man’s odious pleasure in staticky bursts, like a radio station just coming into range.

  Paul concentrated on removing the solid layer that sealed Rain underneath it, but his opponent relented only enough for it to shift back from opaqueness to transparency.

  His shock at what was revealed fed Mr. Brill’s joy even further.

  The water under the steel-hard surface was thick with fat squid. They were so numerous that Paul first thought it was a sea of brains and eyes pressed against the underside.

  Rain was lost in them, nowhere to be seen.

  Paul knelt and placed his hands on the hard surface, trying to will it away.

  Mr. Brill’s amusement grew.

  The squid responded, and Paul saw them for what they were. They were Humboldt. Dosidicus gigas. Diablo rojo.

  They were everything. Paul knew. So did Mr. Brill, who willed the surface to darken again, commanding the squid to retreat.

  The surface remained clear. The Humboldt shifted beneath it, rippling in a wave toward Paul’s hands.

  Mr. Brill swept his arm through the air, the force of the move smashing into Paul. But Paul didn’t break contact.

  Again.

  And again still.

  Paul felt like his insides had broken loose.

  What’s in the box?

  The blows rained down with the force of an aluminum bat on a long-ago field.

  With the cruelty of boots in an alley.

  A girl cried.

  The heat around Paul’s eye tunneled into a deep ache, accompanied by a fissure from his shoulder on down. His ankle shrieked.

  It all rolled across and through. Doing nothing to protect himself cost him dearly.

  He withstood. Endured. Held. And that was a change in his favor.

  The Humboldt were the difference.

  Paul felt Mr. Brill’s fear sprout. Only a little. But still—afraid.

  The big man couldn’t push the squid back with fury alone. He lashed out further, accomplished nothing.

  The Humboldt delivered their strength to Paul from the depths of the water.

  Mr. Brill slammed him again. He crumpled, then raised himself back up to his knees. His joints were hinges. Their pins were being hammered out.

  But he held on. And Mr. Brill’s desperation grew.

  The foundations of The Commons trembled with the violence. Mr. Brill poured everything he had into the attack, putting worlds at risk.

  Mr. Brill was still too strong to overcome straight-on unless the Humboldt were able to finish what they’d started. If they couldn’t, Paul would fall.

  “Okay,” Paul said, half-turning to his opponent, who was poised to deliver a shot that might have broken him. “I give.”

  The words did no more than fall out of him.

  “What?” Mr. Brill’s question had no trust or belief in it.

  “Let her up. I’ll do what you want.”

  Mr. Brill weighed the truth of that. “Step back. Cut yourself off from them.”

  Paul kept his hands where they were.

  Mr. Brill watched him. The reprieve wouldn’t last much longer.

  It was enough.

  Down below, a gap appeared in the Humboldt, racing toward Paul. A white hand—Rain’s—with something dark and small clutched in it, the Humboldt her vessel.

  It all happened at once.

  Paul once again focused on breaking the barrier.

  Mr. Brill saw he was stalling and struck him again, but fear cost the big man control. His blow missed Paul and slammed into the hard surface over the water, flexing it. It bounced back into flatness.

  Rain came through.

  The thing she held smacked the underside of the barrier with a crack loud enough to split worlds.

  The water’s surface shattered, blowing upward in a spray of shards.

  Paul and Mr. Brill were both knocked flat. The gale that followed kept them that way for long moments.

  The wind died.

  All was quiet but for the sound of faint dripping.

  Rain coughed, learning to breathe again.

  Mr. Brill sprung to his feet.

  Paul stood more slowly.

  She was mere yards away, facedown at the water’s edge, raggedly sucking in air.

  Paul started toward her.

  “No,” she managed.

  Mr. Brill’s attack would resume. They both knew it. But she was as fast as she’d eve
r been, mustering enough strength to flip the dark stone to Paul.

  It all slowed down.

  He reached out and caught the little sphere. It clacked against his mother’s ring with the force and weight of something much larger. The mass of lives. Of destiny.

  He nearly dropped it, but held on and opened his fist to see what her hard-won gift was.

  There in his palm, against his ring, was a blood-red marble with words etched into it.

  He didn’t even need to read them. He knew what they said. What they meant.

  As did Mr. Brill.

  They waited for it to happen.

  It didn’t.

  Rain coughed again.

  The water was still and flat once more, the Humboldt gone. Their part was done, the marble heavy in Paul’s palm.

  Nothing happened.

  Mr. Brill laughed.

  He’d done it. Zach was gone from her awareness but was out of danger for the time being. Even if she didn’t know where he was, it was enough. Her son had done it.

  The rest was up to a skinny kid who, though powerful beyond his age and size, was not equal to the task on his own. No one was. That was the whole point of the Thirty-Six. It was the numbers.

  There were only two of the Thirty-Six in The Commons. The others were out of play for reasons ranging from not knowing who they were or being too far away to matter to not yet being in existence, though the very idea of them was enough to keep the number whole. That was as much as she was able to understand, and even that could fry her if she let too much of it in.

  If her limited knowledge of the power was enough to nearly wipe her mind, then the power itself would burn Paul out of existence. That was why the numbers here were wrong.

  The unbound Essence, which had waited and planned for so long, was desperate to unite itself with the shackled part held by Mr. Brill. And like too much juice focused on a portion of the grid in a surge, it would destroy the slight boy if he accepted it all, no matter his good intentions.

  Annie was the final piece of the circuit. Zach had delivered the power to Paul, but it required direction in order to be of any use. It needed her guidance.

  Yet from everything she could see, she was being asked to kill a teenage boy in order to put things back the way they should be. Or, to be more precise, to allow him to kill himself.

  Paul wouldn’t survive.

  She couldn’t do it.

  “It’s not your choice,” Wrangler John said. His voice was well inside her head now, and it was delivered in an ancient tongue. Hebrew, Aramaic, or something even older than those—the word of wave on rock, breeze through leaves, moon in grass.

  His hand grasped her shoulder. She let it stay there. “It will do it anyway,” he said. “With you, it happens the way we need it to, though there still aren’t any guarantees. Without you, the kid stands alone.”

  “I can’t have this on me.”

  “It’s not. It’s much bigger. You know that.”

  The question of what might happen to Zach if she backed out now flashed through her mind, but this decision felt separate from him. His part in this was done. “No,” she said.

  The hand left her shoulder.

  Silence.

  She waited for him to try to convince her again. He didn’t. Maybe he knew it’d be pointless.

  Click.

  Her vision went dark.

  The vast knowledge of The Commons. The Nistarim. The universes beyond.

  It all winked out. Everything. And she didn’t need any extra brain power to understand why. She got it on her own.

  Wrangler John had killed the Virtual Boy’s power. Cut her off. Just like that. Plan B.

  Annie and her consciousness reached a fork in the road and chose different directions.

  She fainted dead away.

  “It didn’t work.” Mr. Brill’s laughter brimmed with triumph. “None of it.” He now knew everything done to get the marble into Paul’s hand.

  “Paul,” Rain said. She was not who he’d known up until now—or who he’d thought he’d known. The marble had done nothing; she was scared. “Paul.”

  He knew her fear—its evolution—just as he knew what Mr. Brill knew. There was truth in what Mr. Brill had said; he and Paul were of a kind.

  Rain had done what she had because she’d been afraid—because that was what she had to do at the time. She then tried to help where she could, and she tried to leave. In the end, she’d just hoped that it would work out.

  Only it hadn’t. Mr. Brill was right. It was all for nothing.

  The big man winked. Rain’s shotgun leapt into the air and flew at her. She’d recovered enough to catch it.

  Their cards had been played. It was futile. Mr. Brill would win this fight, and he was going to have fun doing it. That meant giving Rain her gun back. And he just kept laughing.

  Paul read the marble’s words. What had failed?

  Rain chambered a round, but it took the last of her strength. It was all she could do to keep it pointed in Mr. Brill’s direction.

  He, in turn, merely watched, beaming. He was having a fine time.

  The etched writing: Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno. The graffiti on the bus seat, which Zach had scrawled on the page from Paul’s notebook years before, seemingly.

  It all came together. No scream required. No tree, no storm. All together.

  Paul understood. The Latin needed no translation. Nor did the rest: IMUURS.

  The marble heated up in his hand. It hurt. The fire spread to his mother’s ring, just as it had at the Dinuhos Tree. He closed his hand tightly, flesh against searing metal. It hurt. He squeezed. His distress brought an even broader smile to Mr. Brill’s face.

  Then the pain receded. Paul opened his hand. The marble was once again the cat’s-eye Zach had given him in the Port Authority basement.

  He knew without looking. The graffiti Latin from the marble had joined the letters from the glass on the inside of his ring. There was no mystery here.

  It began. Energy rivered into him. There would be an end. All for one, one for all.

  Mr. Brill’s eyes narrowed. Rain brightened as she sensed the fundamental shift.

  “You don’t understand,” Paul told Mr. Brill. “You never have.”

  The power came faster—through his heart, along his spine. Up, down, into all of him, setting his mind alight. The nature of his eyesight changed. Edges glowed. Rain, Mr. Brill, everything lit from within. And still it came.

  Rain appeared to take strength from the overflow. She kept her shotgun trained on Mr. Brill, but spared a glance for Paul, concerned.

  “It isn’t yours,” Paul said. “It’s not mine. We’re just borrowing it.”

  “What are you—?”

  Paul cut him off. “It isn’t knowing you’re one of the Thirty-Six that stops you from being one. It’s using it for yourself—thinking you deserve it more than those we serve.” It was too much. And only a sliver of what was to come had entered him. “Didn’t you wonder why controlling it was so hard? Don’t you think that’s been tried? Truth will out.”

  Mr. Brill was about to attack again.

  “It belongs to all, and we belong to it. I-M-U-U-R-S.” Paul took even more of it in. “I am you. You are us.”

  It was going to rip him apart.

  Rain lowered her gun.

  “You can’t own what you’re a part of,” he told Mr. Brill. “I’ll show you.”

  Fast as ever, instincts sharp as concertina wire, Rain hit the deck.

  It didn’t come from Paul. It came through him. The humility of knowing he was only a vessel was why it worked—a willingness to let it go that made him stronger than the likes of Mr. Brill.

  The power reached that of the storm that had taken the Ravagers at the Dew Drop Inn. Then it surpassed it.

  An impossible gale, wind made solid, hit him. He remained on his feet—didn’t budge. It focused on his center, joining what he held within. He raised his hands, palms out, before him. The
movement was not his; it was the will of The Commons and all beyond it.

  He felt himself torn at first, but then it shifted. It was a joining—him with all.

  Paul and Mr. Brill stood with Rain in the office, a place of thievery and malice. Yet the two Nistarim also stood on a plane all their own, a nothingness of light and not-light, sensed and unseen.

  Mr. Brill lashed out across the distance. The blow would have destroyed Paul only moments before, but it never reached him.

  Paul had joined with The Commons and its brother and sister worlds. He was one of the Thirty-Six. Nistarim. Lamed Vav. He completed the group.

  And Mr. Brill was no longer of them.

  Paul unleashed their ferocity. It flowed through his mother’s ring and then from his whole being—arms, eyes, mouth. It hit Mr. Brill as fist, wave, torrent—it washed him away.

  Mr. Brill fought his way back using all of the Essence he’d stolen and controlled. For a time, he succeeded. But he was pitted against too much. Paul could not have let up if he’d wanted to—and he did not want to.

  The fury came. The entirety of it raged at Mr. Brill, who was nothing against the whole of existence itself. Paul understood what Annie and Zach had done for him. He knew now. Annie needn’t have worried, needn’t have tried to hold it back for his sake.

  The storm knew where it wanted to go—where it needed to—and it joined with what Mr. Brill stole. It cast off its chains after so, so long.

  Mr. Brill glowed white. It was the same light that had come at Paul through the windshield of the bus, the unchecked might of rightful order reclaimed. The big man was hurled from the ground he stood on. Pieces of him tore away and were lost. He began to scream.

  Thief. Raider. Taker. His pain became terror and grief; he could not contain it. Not him—not even him. That which he’d forced to bend worked twofold toward his ruination. It joined the invading Essence with a hatred hot against Paul’s skin. And still it came.

  It was forever, worlds here and gone, everything and everyone. Its time had come.

  The storm ended with the cry of a raw throat. The last of it, Mr. Brill’s screams falling away, came as a fading breath from Paul himself. It was spent. As was he.

  With the snap of a second passed, Paul and Mr. Brill joined Rain back in the vast office.