A girl’s voice, in the darkness ahead of me. Not Johnny’s. For a second I was so confused I stalled out, like hitting the brake and the gas at the same time, and then the courtyard lit up with green light.
I blinked away afterimages, then gagged on the greasy smoke that had begun to fill the small space, backing out the way I’d run in, then bumping hard into someone. I screamed, my fist shooting out automatically, connecting with thin air.
“Wow, holy shit,” Johnny said.
I spun. “Holy you’re a shit,” I gasped. “Where the fuck were you? What happened? What’s happening now?”
“You screaming like a little girl,” she said matter-of-factly. “Come on.”
“‘Like a little girl,’ she says. Like I’m the one who cries every time I hear a Simple Minds song.”
“Not every time.”
It was as if an invisible hand had taken my leash again; I followed her dumbly back into the street, into the orange and pink streetlights, aware I was on the verge of tears. I’d never been so glad to see her—or possibly anyone—in my life.
“I thought you got kidnapped,” I said. “I thought one of Them got you.”
“You thought right,” she said. “It was camouflaged in the wedding parade. One second I was standing there, the next I was fighting it off.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
She rubbed her arms, where black bruises were already developing like a Polaroid. “Anyway, I got loose and ran, but a couple of y’tans came after me, and then someone cast a fire spell from behind me, and here we are.”
“Here we are? Someone? What?”
“All of us,” she said, and pointed as, from the courtyard, dusting her hands, walked another girl about Johnny’s and my age, pretty, coppery-brown and dark-haired, in a loose pink and green dress topped with a white scarf. “And you are?”
“A helpful local?” the girl said hopefully.
“Nice try,” Johnny said. “You’re from the Society. Why were you following us?”
“Why do you think I was following you? A ‘thank you’ would have been nice too, you know.”
“Thanks. Come on, Nick.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, as Johnny turned away. “How did you find us?”
She shrugged, a little cagy. “There’s always information. But I mean, the two of you… it was like following a trail of explosions or something.
Johnny turned, interested again, and returned. “Who are you?”
They glared at each other. She wrung her scarf in her hands; her nails were painted a frosty pink, some of the polish scorched off at the tips. After a moment, clearly making a concession that she expected us to notice, she said, “My father said—”
“Who’s your father? Do I know him from a hole in the ground?”
“Louis D’Souza.”
Johnny groaned. “That explains everything. Yeah. Okay, Sofia. That is you, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What does he want from us?”
“Johnny!” I said, startled. “She just helped us. She saved our lives. That doesn’t mean—”
“He just wants to know what you know,” Sofia said. “The Society has a stake in this.”
“The Society gave up its stake,” Johnny said.
“No, it did not. I just helped you. Like he says. We bought a stake with it.”
“That’s not how this works. You can’t expect to be paid for helping. You don’t buy a stake in someone else’s business.”
“Why not? Everyone who helps you is paid.”
“Not me,” I said. They both ignored me.
Johnny crossed her arms over her chest, beginning to turn away again. “Ask Helen. Ask Tariq. They’ll tell you everything.”
“We did ask them. Why do you think I’m here? We need more information.”
“Yeah? Trying to buy a way out of the end of the world? We don’t need any more help. You’ll only get in the way.” Johnny turned her back on the girl, and glared at me. “Where’s your phone?”
“I lost it.”
She gave me a look—not anger, just disappointment, like the old cliché, knowing that she’d warned me about pickpockets, and probably also knowing that I’d put the phone in the front of my bag, where the bulge would show. “All right, let’s go. That was as scary as shit, and I don’t want to get separated again. Especially if I can’t get ahold of you.”
“Seconded, Mom,” I said, pleased by her eye-roll. “I mean, check.”
“Check.”
“Check.”
“Check.”
But Sofia followed us as we headed back down the street, more paranoid now, even my sweat smelling different, acrid with fear.
“Magic is coming in,” she said, walking a few steps behind, her voice pitched low. She had a slight accent, perhaps French. I wondered if she was local. “Please, listen. Listen for a second? There are monsters in the city. I’ve seen them. People say they are in the ruins, smelling with their heads down, like dogs. I wouldn’t even have been able to cast that spell if so much magic weren’t coming in.”
“Don’t doubt it,” Johnny said, not even slowing down.
“Something is coming. What is it? My father said—”
“Cosmic alignment. Morning of July fifth. Hope that helps.”
“Let us help,” the girl said, trotting to keep up in her heeled sandals. “Father said—”
“A lot of things, probably,” Johnny cut her off, glancing up at a street sign. “Helen talked to him, eh? And he talked to you. ‘Oh, if they need help, do what you can.’ And by a huge coincidence, we were tracked by the y’tan, we needed help.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, more loudly than I had meant.
Sofia glared at me, then caught up to Johnny, panting. “Listen, the Fes chapter—all right, Father said there have been questions about them for a long time now, about their loyalty, because of what the city was built upon. But we’re not like that here.”
“Cool. Especially that Louis didn’t want to tell me about these, uh, questions.”
“Joanna, they were rumours, no one knew for sure, and there would have been... splits in the group, people wouldn’t have liked it.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Johnny finally stopped, out of breath, and turned to the girl. It struck me as deeply weird that they were probably the same age, maybe to within just a few months of each other, and yet Johnny seemed like an adult and Sofia a child. Maybe that said more about me, about the company I kept. “Go home. Don’t get in our way. This warding spell isn’t enough to protect all three of us—especially now that you’ve been casting shit.”
“You called us for help!” Sofia protested, voice breaking.
“Yeah, and then I changed my mind,” Johnny snapped. “Like I told them in Fes.”
“Johnny, wait a minute,” I said. “You did say we needed the help. You said we needed as many people as we could get, and that no one would help. Well, now she’s saying that they will. And it’s kinda ungrateful to—”
“Yeah, thanks but no thanks,” she said. “That kind of help we can do without. Come on.”
You don’t get a vote, is what she was really saying, and I slunk after her as she briskly kept going, Sofia falling behind us in the dark, just the shine of her earrings and sandals fading into the blackness, and then she was gone.
“What will happen now?” I whispered.
“Did we just make an enemy, you mean? I don’t know. But we don’t have time to play nice.”
“Afterwards, though.”
“I’ll fix it if it needs fixing. With any luck I’ll never speak to them again.” She hesitated, and glanced up at me. I stopped too, in the shade of a drooping tree, like looking out of the mouth of a cave, while she dug in her bag for water.
After a minute, I said, “Remember when we first met?”
“Of course.”
“They separated us from the adults. And the adults let it happen because they thought it would be better, that
we’d get hurt. Remember that. Remember that they couldn’t do anything, that they did what they were told, that no one tried to be a hero. Not even for us. Their children. Their most precious things. No one even tried. Because that’s not what they do. They just wanted to negotiate, beg, try to ‘appeal’ to the humanity of the people who had locked us in that closet. And that’s the way it always goes. It’s up to us to do something else. I understand what you’re doing now. And what you’re saying by doing it.”
She looked at me appraisingly, and smiled. “Attaboy.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE STOPPED AT a big, nondescript house, white brick and red tile just like its neighbours, with its own rooftop garden—swaying green leaves, black against the indigo sky, with stars visible through the drifting fronds. Calling to me, the stars. A dog whistle, nothing Johnny could hear. I gritted my teeth against the noise. She warned me they would pull. It seemed stronger now, impossibly so: like a string attached to my head, dragging me up, cutting in.
Contamination, I thought again. She carried with her the pure heat that would burn the infection from the world. I carried something else. I was sure of it. The stars said: You are the infection now. Whatever that meant. I wondered that she could not see or sense it. But where had I gotten that idea?
The air smelled of roses and the old, sweet scent of books. There was no sign saying Library; in fact, there were no signs at all, just a locked metal gate leading to a courtyard in front of the house. The house was dark except for small lamps on either side of the big, arched door, gleaming off bronze studs set in wood that looked older than the house itself.
“We’re too late,” I said, grasping the gate and jiggling it in case the catch released. “He’s closed.”
“He knows what’s at stake,” Johnny said grimly.
“Yeah, must be why he locked the door and turned off all the lights.”
She got out her cell phone and pressed what seemed like two dozen numbers on the little orange-lit pad. “Ha, wow, look at that. Forty-five missed calls. None from Mom.”
“Yikes. Anything from… from my mom?”
“Rutger would never let them. I’m sorry, I know it’s scary, but… hello? Igor? It’s John... at your front door. Yes, Tunisia. Yes, on the street. You can go right back to bed after. I need to... Yes. It’s what we talked about. No, I know it’s crazy that I’m here, with my body, at your house. I know.”
A light went on in an upstairs room. Further down the street, silent, I saw a flash of blue and red—cop lights. No way a cop would let a bounty hunter get that money, I thought. She’d said so. The Society, maybe. Without speaking, we moved slowly into the shadows beneath the big tree by the gate. That, too, quite a coincidence. The society people again, Sofia the Suspiciously Good Samaritan? Secret detective work? Or was it just that millions of perfectly random people had seen us on CNN today?
Finally a dark shadow padded through the courtyard—a stocky man barely taller than Johnny, in a loose white robe and slippers, holding a lantern with violet glass in the panes. As he got closer I saw designs etched into the glass and wondered if it meant something or if it was just decorative; everything seemed like a system of signs now. He was mostly bald, dark hair cut short where it remained, scalp visible through it.
“Stand back,” he said, and I followed Johnny as she backed into the street. We turned just in time to see a blue-white flare, like the light of an arc welder, fade from the gate’s heavy lock. “Quick, quick. Who’s this?”
“He knows,” she said, as if that were an answer. As we passed under the gate I felt a bone-deep tingle, as if I’d been briefly electrocuted; the air shimmered in front of me. Johnny’s hair rose for a second, then settled back down. She said, “Protection?”
“No. Who is so strong? Not me. A glamour only, to hide the call of the books. I put it on days ago, when you first called. Shouldn’t have worked, should have needed too much power. Hmmph.” He unlocked the front door with an ordinary key, but tapped the brass studs quickly in a pattern almost too fast to see before he opened it. Inside, it smelled like fresh, unfired clay, books, and incense. Broken-up sticks of the stuff lay unburnt in flat bronze dishes hanging on chains from the ceiling. Bad place for open flames. The walls were bare, white clay, undecorated with the tiles I had seen everywhere else.
He looked at me. “You. She didn’t answer the question.”
“Nick Prasad.” I looked down into his face, creased and squashed with sleep, his eyes blue but surrounded by pink, bleary.
“Where you from? Here? Assyrian, Akkadian? Not a Hittite.”
“Um,” I said. “We’re from Guyana. I was born in Canada.”
“Guyana? You don’t look African.”
“Guy-ana,” I said. “Not Ghana.”
“Then you don’t look South American.” He turned to Johnny, face pleading. “Look at this thing you drag with you, full of lies.”
“Guyana is crammed with Indians that the British brought over to work on the sugarcane plantations,” I said, annoyed. “Read a book sometime.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Speaking of which, don’t touch the books. And as for you”—he held the lantern closer to her, so that the lavender light joined their faces, matching expressions of anger and impatience—“you say you’ll make this right.”
“I said I’d try.”
“On the phone. You said. You knew how to do it.”
“I said I knew how to find out how,” she said. “You’re splitting hairs. Are you going to let me down there or not?”
He chuckled, a thick, angry noise. “Some choice. Some choice you give me.”
The plain white hallway led to another big, studded door, this one locked top to bottom—seven locks, all different and some as big as a Frisbee—and barred with a wrist-thick iron rod. He continued, not looking at either of us as he fumbled in his robe for a keychain: “I watch the news too, I see what they say. I get emails from all over. I got yours, for example.”
“Well, there,” Johnny said. “Why lie? Why come all this way to lie?”
“Who knows? I thought: Famous scientist wants to dabble in the occult. Stupid, awful kids nowadays. It wasn’t you that convinced me, you know. You, the prodigy. It was seeing all these things. It was seeing everything... thinning out, getting soft, thin. You know the locals finally finished pulling out all the logs in Estaqueria, the circle there? They burn them for charcoal. Tsk. Spell’s broken for good.”
“Forever? Was it weakened after they changed it from a sigil to a circle?”
“Think so, yes. It was good protection. Gone at last. When we needed all we could get.”
“Suspicious timing.”
“Those weirdo people, what do you call them. The Committee?”
“The Ssarati Society.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be preserving those things? Their local chapter. Buenos Aires or such. What were they doing, huh? They knew it was getting weak.”
“I don’t know.”
“What you doing here, anyway? They send you to fix this?”
“No one sent us.” She opened her mouth to say something else, then shut it again. Smart, I thought. Maybe no one else has figured out why she’s involved, but she’d only need to say one wrong thing.
He fell silent, working at the locks. Some of them unlocked with a puff of smoke, or a burst of light, or a hum that set our teeth on edge, or a faint, faraway shriek. Finally, he tried to lift the iron bar without putting the lantern down; I let him struggle for a minute before helping get it off and slot it into the holder next to the door. The door swung open, emitting a surprisingly cold draft, reeking of mould and books.
“I’m going back to bed,” he said. “Be gone by dawn.”
“We’ll be gone long before then,” Johnny said. “We have to get to Iraq before the alignment.”
“Iraq! Good luck with that. Don’t you know it’s a tinderbox over there? Saddam, you know? You don’t know about that? You don’t read?”
We crept down the stairs, clay wall to one side, empty air on the other. The lightswitch at the bottom lit a roomful of books with a handful of low-wattage bulbs encased in heavy-duty glass, giving everything a wavery, underwater glow. Akhmetov shut the door behind us—slammed it, actually, with a reverberating thud that I felt in my back teeth.
“What an asshole,” I ventured as we looked up at the towering piles. A path about two feet wide threaded through the books, most of which were unshelved and stacked with the spine in, presenting us with walls of yellowing paper. Sprung traps with desiccated mice in them littered the floor, so that we had to nudge them aside as we walked.
“He’s worried,” she said. “If he’s watching the local news like he said, then he knows how much the reward is, and he knows he can’t turn us in, and he’s sick about it. He’s missing out on more money than he’ll make in twenty years; but what if we’re right? We have to trust his uncertainty.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“He sort of… gives the impression that he trusts yours.”
“He should. Mine’s researched uncertainty.” She skirted a stack of wobbling books smaller than the palm of my hand, and glanced back at me with her sharp-edged smile. “You’re an asshole when you’re worried, too.”
“Yeah, and you just become nicer and sweeter and more accommodating of all these assholes we’re meeting,” I said. “When you start sounding like Shari Lewis, I’m gonna find a bed to hide under.” I ducked under a low arch and followed her into another room of books, this one lit with just a single bulb. “But Saddam, he... they... nothing’s going to happen to us, right?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“I read that the UN said they were going to go look for weapons of mass destruction there,” I said.
“They’re not going to find them,” Johnny said. “Or, at least not the worst ones Iraq has. Because that’s what we’re looking for. Big Man syndrome again. Conventional weapons aren’t what the world needs to worry about anyway. I don’t care what he’s got, frankly.”
“Yeah, pretty sure the Ancient Ones aren’t on the UN list.” We stopped, and I stared around at the endless maze of books. “Jesus, how are you going to find what you need? We’ll be here for days.”
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