“I hate philosophy.”
Aaron shrugged, and Sal resisted the urge to punch him. She marched to the doors instead, and knocked three times. “This is Detective Sal Brooks of the New York City Police Department. I’m looking for my brother. Open up, or I’ll open you.”
Nothing happened, except another scream from within.
Dammit. Trust your senses, huh? She glared at the fiery cord passing through a gap between the doors, She touched the cord, felt around its burning edges. She forced her hand into the hole, braced her legs against the ground and tugged. No use. The doors remained stubborn and still.
Her fingers slipped and she fell against one of the doors. Behind her, the not-blood trail had vanished. She liked that even less.
Another scream. Perry’s voice, in pain.
Maybe if you set the book down. Pull with both hands.
She nearly did it, too—she was that angry, scared, desperate, and the thought had been perfectly pitched so it almost seemed her own. But she stopped herself.
Can’t blame a guy for trying.
She could, but didn’t want to waste the time. “Help me,” she told Aaron, and guided Perry’s hand to the gap. He pulled, and she pulled, but the doors stood firm as cliffs. Her arm quivered, her back strained, her feet tore red furrows in the ground, and at last the doors sheared open.
She almost fell. Shadowgrass reached out for her and she swatted it away with the book.
Red light rolled out, and bore them in like the tide.
• • •
Thavani Shah watched her advance team feeds go dark one by one. She winced at the electric floor. She cursed when she found her voice did not reach the team’s ears. Doyle, no doubt—and she wondered if he did not know about the video feeds, which her predecessor, may the poor man rest in peace, had added to the standard kit shortly before his death. Then again, maybe Doyle did know, and wanted her to see him take her team apart. “Clever,” she said after the map switch. The final darkness was a letdown, but she did recognize and appreciate—however grudgingly—that Doyle had not actually hurt anyone. He even shied away from tricks that might have killed them—no deadfalls that might have left a soldier bleeding out from a broken femur.
He showed mercy. Or he was afraid. He knew how far Shah would chase him if he killed her people, how little forgiveness would follow. Or maybe, remembering Menchú’s plea, he meant to send a message: We’re all on the same side here. We should not be fighting. Who are your real friends, and who your enemies?
She ordered her divers to the lake.
Stretch watched, arms crossed, over her shoulder. She glowered back at him. “Can you not do that?” But he feigned confusion as to what she’d meant. Balloon cleaned his cuticles with the tip of a nail file. Shah did not even try to remember the last person she’d seen use a nail file.
“There’s no water access to the caves,” Stretch said.
Shah nodded. “I know.”
“I understand your reluctance, Corporal. Team Three is a hard group to beat, but no one wants to use the devil’s own tools against him.”
“Still, we can’t help but notice that the reliquary has arrived.”
“And we doubt Doyle’s preparations can account for . . . extraordinary matériel.”
The video feed died, finally. Shah stared into static snow. “I’m still waiting for clearance from the Cardinal.”
“Did we forget to say?”
“I suppose we did.” Balloon drew a piece of rolled parchment from his jacket and handed it to Shah. She didn’t need to open it. She recognized the seal, and the texture. “Apologies. You seemed intent on handling matters your way.”
Or they’d hoped the Team Three defenses would push too far, that one of her advance team might die—and when her knights went down into the labyrinth, they’d be seeking vengeance.
Her orderly returned, and he, too, recognized the document she held. “Tell the heavies to suit up,” she said.
His hand shook as he snapped his salute, but she didn’t mention it, or blame him.
3.
Five knights marched toward the abandoned villa. Armored from head to foot, no two looked alike: one wore a mask of thorns, one a curved mirrored plate where her face should have been. One wore mail, one a fluttering multicolored coat bright with gems, one flowing robes that flapped and floated in the light breeze yet left deep gouges where they brushed the ground, as if the hem was a blade and the fabric weighed ten thousand pounds.
They entered the villa. The lead knight stepped on a pressure plate, and electricity arced through her, high voltage, furious. It danced along her skin and gathered into a small fluttering sphere in her palm. She let the sphere go; it discharged into the walls. The woman with the mirror mask pinched salt from a pouch on her belt, and tossed it into the living room. The room died. Silence fell. Small noises ceased, barely audible hums and whirs of refrigerator compressor, water heater, hidden motors and security systems—all failed.
Soundless, they descended into the labyrinth.
The lead knight’s glove glowed dimly as she neared certain turns, and those turns, she took. The others followed her. Ground opened beneath their feet, but none fell. The lead knight dug her fingers into the wall; the second vaulted catlike over the drop; the third did not break stride, her sandals as steady on empty air as they would have been on a battlefield. The fourth followed—his robes darting out like spider legs to span the gap and dig pits into the walls. No one saw the fifth cross.
Darkness did not trouble the knights. None of them needed light to see.
Behind her thorn-mask, the lead knight prayed. She did not like the relics she used. Guns she understood, and knives, rockets, bombs. But the relics scared her. She trained with them; it was an honor to be so trusted, and the relics themselves had been studied, scoured by generations of archivists. They did not taint the soul. They did not tempt, or taunt. No one ever claimed they did. There were not even barracks stories about relics whispering to the unwary. No matter how well-told, the joke would hit too close to home.
The relics kept her safe. She confessed each time she used them, subjected herself to the most rigorous observation afterward.
Still, she prayed.
The tunnel collapsed on top of them. The second knight swung her net and swept the falling rocks away.
Near the labyrinth’s end, they found the way blocked by stone. The fifth knight grasped the rock and pulled it like taffy to make a door.
So close, now.
The leader strained, like a hound, for the prize, and hoped it was really her straining.
The armor moved about her like a second skin.
When the fifth knight finished reshaping the stone wall, she led them through.
There, in a damp round chamber lined with sarcophagi, stood Grace Chen.
Echoed chanting filled the room. Water dripped from budding stalactites.
They moved.
• • •
Sal found Perry pinned open in the center of the bone tower.
When the tide of light dragged Sal and Aaron in, at first she’d thought to follow the screams—but she could not follow them, because they came from everywhere. Bone walls echoed cries of pain. Sal thought, feverish, following the fiery cord through the maze, that she might be screaming herself.
Turn and turn and turn through the bone tower. She wondered how she’d ever find her way out again. After a long time she risked a glance back, thinking Lot’s wife, thinking towers of salt, thinking Orpheus. Behind her, the high-ceilinged hall ran straight a hundred feet to the open doors and the skin-field beyond.
They found Perry soon after.
Someone had opened him from collarbone to fork, and shucked half the skin and muscle of his chest and stomach, pinning it like a butterfly’s wing to the table on which he lay. Silver pins held his arms to the table, and his feet. Another long, thin pin pierced his neck. His chest rose and fell. His heart, she could see it beat.
He was not dead.
She ran to him. Open eyes darted and rolled, staring at nothing or everything at once—then locked on her face. Pupils tightened. She wanted to be sick. She would not let herself be sick, would not let this place do that to her.
Aaron swore. His native language sounded like cut flowers.
“Perry,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
She forced her gorge down, and touched the pin through his neck.
—held to the blacktop, choking on his own blood, with the other boy on top of him as the fists came down and he can’t breathe and he can’t breathe and he can’t—
She pulled her hand back.
“Sal,” Aaron said. Not her brother. This was her brother on the table, if she could just get him out. “Sal.”
None of this is physical. Remember that. Perry wouldn’t have survived this long, pulled open like this, in the physical world. Your mind’s grasping for categories, shuffling stuff that doesn’t make sense into shape.
When she’d found Perry in the demon world before, he’d had so few memories—because his memories were being used to bind him here.
“Sal!”
Her eyes burned, and she couldn’t breathe. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Bubbling shapes had risen from the skin fields outside the tower, viscous and ruby-red, lurching forward on splashing pseudopods. Well. She’d wondered what happened to the trail of blood.
“I can free him,” she said. “But I need time.”
Bloodshapes bubbled into the hall, and burbled and roared.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Aaron said, and her brother’s shoulders sprouted wings.
Sal turned back to the body—no, to the soul, on the table. Speared through with silver needles in vital organs, which she was sure meant, in this dumb crazy sideways spirit logic, that he was locked by moments he could not let go. Behind her, Aaron joined battle. The sounds made no sense—searing screams, noises that were colors, impacts that washed over her like heat and made the walls ripple and flex. She ignored it all and grabbed the silver needle.
—blood in his mouth, he couldn’t breathe, raised his hand to ward off the falling fists—
Her gritted teeth widened into a smile. This one was easy. She wouldn’t even have to lie.
—and then he’s free, and the bigger kid’s beside him on the blacktop, staring up, bleeding from his mouth, and a pigtailed seraph’s standing over them both, with a rock in her hand and a look on her face like: Yeah, just you fucking dare get up—
The pin slipped from her brother’s throat. She remembered how the rock had felt, striking Bobby Gunnel’s head. She’d been grounded for a month after, and had to sit through a long lecture about proportionate response, but the moment of impact? Worth it. Seraph, huh?
Perry always had a flair for the dramatic.
She tossed the pin behind her, and did not hear it land.
The walls stopped screaming.
“Sal?”
Goddammit, she was crying. Okay. Keep it together, keep it cool.
“I’m here, Perry.”
“Sal, it hurts.”
“I know.” She kissed him on the cheek, on the forehead. When she drew back, her shirtfront was bloody. “Come on. Let me help.”
You’re not, you know, the Hand said. Helping.
She ignored it, and reached for the next pin.
• • •
Grace let herself go.
Fights have their own math, a slow balancing of strengths, weaknesses, reach, speed, risk tolerance, intent. What’s my motivation? matters almost as much in combat as on the stage. A fencer five points up plays with a different tempo than her opponent, rejoicing in the space to improvise, locking down on defense and trying the odd edge case attack because there’s room; a fighter recovering ground sifts chaff for the true golden opening. Situation awareness is more than physical path-finding, it’s deeper than vantage points and ambushes. The internal landscape harbors as many traps and pitfalls as the outside world. Step wrong and you’ll collapse.
Grace did not like the magic Asanti worked behind her. She did not like the angel, or whatever, in Sal’s brother’s skin. There had been so many bad decisions in the last few days, so many mistakes. They’d slipped, time and again, from handholds over a precipice, and still they fell.
But she could stand between her friends and the sword.
Team One’s knights trained with their tools. They used relics collected over centuries, tested and purified. They were surgeons of surpassing skill, wielding blades fine and sharp as whispers—but they were still people holding weapons.
And Grace was herself a weapon.
She rushed the first knight, ducked her gauntlet—wreathed in fire and so strong a grazing blow could shatter steel—dislocated the woman’s arm from the shoulder, kicked out her knee, and moved on to the robed figure even now clearing the hole they’d opened in Liam’s barricade. She caught her about the waist and twisted her whole body—she flew, but her robes splayed and dug into the stone, turned her round, darted tendrils toward Grace. She danced between them and hit the woman in the throat, then jumped back toward the door to deal with the third. The first knight was still falling.
She couldn’t keep this up for long. She only had so much candle—only so much life. But that was true for everyone, really. At least she could choose how to spend it.
• • •
Sal pulled the needle from her brother’s peeled-back chest, and tossed it over her shoulder with the others. It fell, soundless. One left—through the breastplate into Perry’s heart. His hands had fallen limp when she unbound them, his legs the same. With each needle removed the beast within her chest tightened, and the cord of fire strained thin and taut as a rubber band about to snap.
Sal Brooks, goddammit, think about what you’re doing here.
Behind her, the fight continued. Aaron cried out in a voice like Perry’s but deeper, mixed with drums or an eagle’s cry or a horn or all of the above. She did not look back. The bone tower changed around her as she unpinned her brother’s soul. Was this whole place her brother’s body? If so—
She forced the thought away and reached for the pin.
Do you really want to kill him?
“I’m freeing him,” she said. “From you.”
Oh, yes, the Hand replied. Freedom. Where do you think he’ll go, when you pull out that pin?
She hesitated.
What body’s left to him?
“His own,” she said, knowing she was wrong.
The body your angel friend’s riding now? The one he can’t let go?
“They’ll share.”
Your friend’s not the sharing type. Even if he was, there’s no room in that body for two. You and me, we get along just fine, because most of me’s out here, beyond your world. I just need to burn out a space in you to fit my . . . hand. So to speak. It laughed at that. But your buddy, he’s all in.
“You’re lying.”
I would, the Hand admitted. For fun, or to mess with you and yours. But you know I’m not. You pull that pin and dear darling Perry pops free, out into the world you love to call real, finds his body full, then . . . Well. What do you think happens to people when they die, Detective Brooks? Really die, I mean. He’ll find out.
Fucker. Trying to shake her, dull her edge, break her nerve. No way it was telling the truth.
But she didn’t reach for the pin.
The Hand lied. Had lied. It’d lie now to save itself, to protect its investment—in her, in her world—or just to hurt her. But its voice in her head had a self-assured and vicious edge. This wasn’t a poker player daring her to call. It was showing an ace-high straight.
“Aaron,” she said.
“A bit busy now.” His voice heavier and thicker and older than her brother’s.
She turned around.
An Escher confusion of blood and light twisted and twisted in her head, like one of those Magic Eye illusions only all screwy, s
hapes locking in, manifesting, shifting, breaking apart again. “Aaron, is the Hand right? Perry dies when I set him free?”
“You’d rather he live here? Suffering like this?”
“Answer my fucking question. Does he die?”
“Sal, we can’t let the Hand loose. It’s evil. It’s immortal. It’s incredibly powerful.”
She wanted to kill someone. She didn’t care whom. “Is it telling the truth?”
The confusion of blood and wings said, “Yes.”
4.
When the last knight fell, Grace slowed down, and heard applause. Behind her, two knights who’d been flying or falling through jellied air struck the ground in quick succession and did not rise; the first knight, whose neck Grace held in the crook of her elbow, flailed one final time and passed out.
She let the knight fall, and looked up at Thavani Shah. The woman stood just outside the cave entrance, and she bore no relics that Grace could see.
“You’re good,” Shah said. “I think you’ve kept from us exactly how good.”
“Under-promise and over-deliver, right?”
“That’s the idea.” Shah laughed. “I’m giving you a last chance to stand down.”
“I won’t give up my friends.”
“I don’t want to have to stop you.”
“You can’t.”
Shah shrugged. And—
Grace saw a twitch in the other woman’s forearm—the arm leaning against the wall, out of sight. She thought, remote control, and burned, and moved—
She was fast, but not faster than the shock wave. Rocks fell, and water behind the rocks, as the lake overhead emptied into the cave. Grace dove for Shah, but the waterfall pressed her down, tossed her up, turned her in a whirlpool slurry, and she gasped for breath that did not come.
• • •
Shah didn’t have to wait long for the water to drain. She’d done her homework—no sense drowning her objectives, or her own team, for that matter. Romans had built these tunnels; they understood drainage. The shockwave and surprise mattered more than the actual damage. Grace was fast. Maneuverable. But so were flies—which was why people invented the flyswatter.
Bookburners: Season One Volume Two Page 28