Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  They didn’t know where they really were, or what was really happening to them.

  • • •

  It took the girls’ parents a few hours to realize something was wrong. The sisters’ visits with Gabriel were never short. But the kids were always home before dinner.

  “How long have they been down there?” their mother said.

  The father looked up from his phone. He hadn’t realized how late it had gotten.

  “I’ll go get them,” he said. He headed downstairs to the landing in front of Gabriel’s door. He could hear what he thought were voices. He could hear something, anyway.

  “Elena? Victoria?” he called. They didn’t answer.

  He put his hand to the door. It was warm, warmer than it should have been.

  There’s a fire in there, he thought.

  He called out his daughters’ names again. There was still no answer. He ran down the stairs to the superintendent, and they both came back up to Gabriel’s landing.

  “Gabriel?” the superintendent called. “Are you in there? Are those girls with you?”

  The superintendent tried his key. It turned, but it didn’t unlock the door. Then it stuck, as if held there. As if something had reached into the lock from the other side, something with very powerful fingers, and had latched hold of it.

  The superintendent jiggled the key.

  “I can’t even get it out,” he said.

  “My girls are in there,” the father said.

  “Gabriel!” the superintendent yelled. “If you don’t open this door in thirty seconds, I’m calling the police.”

  They waited. It was quiet on the landing.

  Then they felt the air move, all around them, from up and down the stairs, as if it were being drawn under the door to Gabriel’s apartment. They watched as the door flexed outward in its frame. It was inhaling. It was as obvious as it was impossible. They felt the wind rush around their ankles, first toward the door as it ballooned, then away, back into the stairwell, as the door smoothed and flattened again.

  They looked at each other. Each one confirmed to himself that the other had seen it.

  “Call the police,” the father said.

  5.

  They were on an Alitalia flight. At first Sal was a little disappointed that an outfit like this didn’t have its own airplane. Then, when—at a wave of some papers from Menchú—they got the next four seats to Madrid and were escorted through security at once, she got a little more respect for the whole operation. Maybe they didn’t have a plane. But they did have about a thousand years of favors to call in, and they didn’t mind doing it whenever they needed to. Or even when it just made their lives a little easier.

  The pilot told the cabin and crew to prepare for landing in Madrid. Menchú was still sleeping, his mouth slightly open. Grace, sitting next to him, had finished Persuasion and was just starting Northanger Abbey. Sal watched her for a minute. Grace turned a page every twelve seconds or so. Sal timed it.

  How could anyone read that fast? Sal thought. Why would anyone want to?

  Then Grace caught her watching, and Sal looked away.

  “Are you all right?” Liam asked from the seat next to her.

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?” Sal said.

  “Well, right now you look a little green.”

  “I don’t like flying very much,” she said.

  “Really?” Liam said. “You might have picked the wrong job.”

  “I think the problem is that I’ve chosen the wrong state of consciousness.” She nodded toward Menchú.

  “You could be right. But then you’d miss this delicious snack.”

  He’d been doing this since they left the Vatican, trying to chat with her. She would say chatting her up, but if that’s what was going on, he wasn’t very good at it, or at least not very good at getting to the point. But he kept doing it, whatever it was. In the car on the highway out to the airport. While boarding the plane. And now here, on the plane, for two hours. Forcing conversations that they didn’t need to have, forcing jokes that she didn’t think were all that funny. Exercising his wit just a little too often, but not hard enough. And he talked about nothing, nothing that mattered, nothing worth a damn. It was setting off all her personal alarms. It was like he was trying to hide something behind this thick verbal smokescreen he was kicking up. But what was he hiding? It was getting on her nerves.

  “Liam?” Sal said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Whatever you’re trying to do here, I think you might be trying a little too hard.”

  Liam sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m talking too much.”

  “Yes. But it’s okay.”

  “It’s just that . . . Grace and Menchú, they’re not talkers. And we spend too much time in planes and cars not to talk.”

  “Was the person before me a talker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d he leave?”

  “She was a she. And I don’t think I’m entirely at liberty to say.”

  “You’re not giving me a lot of faith in this organization.”

  “Good one,” Liam said.

  “I’m serious, Liam.”

  “Sorry.”

  He took a pretzel out of the bag on the tray in front of him and chewed it more slowly than most people chew pretzels.

  He was still being annoying, Sal decided. Then chided herself for being harsh.

  He just apologized and backed off when you told him how you felt, she thought to herself. He’s not trying to screw you or screw you over. He’s just trying to make a friend. Don’t fault him just because he’s terrible at the preliminaries.

  But then, she argued back to herself, you give him an opening and you’ll never hear the end of it. She took a breath. Oh, what the hell, she thought.

  “So,” she said, “about Eye . . . Eh-ya . . . the volcano in Iceland.”

  “Eyjafjallajökull?” Liam said.

  “Yeah, that,” Sal said. “What was it like?”

  “I don’t know,” Liam said. “It was just before my time here. That was when I was . . .” He put his hands together as if he was about to pray, then tilted them, lay his head on them, and closed his eyes.

  “I see,” Sal said.

  “Though I doubt I did much sleeping.”

  “Has anyone ever figured out what happened to you?”

  “Asanti’s been over the case a few times,” Liam said. “She has some guesses, but nothing concrete. We don’t know what possessed me. Aside from Grace hitting it in the face over and over again—well, probably that means hitting me in the face—we don’t know exactly why it let me go, either. Or, for that matter, if it really did. For all I know, it’s still in here.” He tapped his temple with a finger. “For all I know I’m going to wake up tomorrow and try to kill all of you, then take over the world.”

  Sal thought of her brother. Again. She forced him out of her mind and took a sip of her drink.

  “That was a little awkward,” Liam said.

  “It’s okay,” Sal said.

  “No, it’s not okay. Not with your brother the way he is.”

  Sal narrowed her eyes and looked at him again. He was more observant than she’d given him credit for, after all.

  Liam lowered his voice. “Look. You may have noticed I’m in suspiciously good shape for a man who sits in front of a computer all day. It’s not just so I look good in a suit. It’s part of a strict regimen I’ve kept for myself. Of exercise. Of diet. Of sleep. I’ve got everything down to the rep, the heart rate, the calories, the minute. I do it because I want to make sure I don’t slip. I want trip wires all over my life so if the demon’s still in there, I can tell if it starts taking over, and so you can tell, too. You catch me eating a piece of cake and it’s not someone’s birthday, you lock me away. Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Sal said.

  “That goes for all of us on this plane. I know we seem flippant. I know it l
ooks like we don’t get along. Maybe we don’t even like each other very much. Sometimes I don’t know if we do. But the mission unites us, you understand? Each of us has lost too much to magic to take it as anything but dead serious. I can’t promise that in two years you’ll have your brother back. I can’t. I can promise you, though, that we won’t stop trying. We’ll go the world over, wave every magic wand we can. And with every step, we’ll make sure we save as many people as possible from the same fate.”

  His face, for the first time since Sal had met him, was completely earnest. He wasn’t just being nice, or trying to get something out of her, or keeping secrets. He was just telling the truth.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” he said. “I am doing everything I can.”

  “Thanks,” Sal said. Maybe he’s not so bad, she thought. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

  He patted her hand twice. She didn’t move it.

  6.

  The policeman who showed up at the apartment building was a burly man with a friendly, mustachioed face. On him, the police uniform—the brightly colored shoulders, the checkered band on the hat—looked almost clownish. The superintendent looked at him and felt afraid for him.

  “Which apartment is it?” the policeman said.

  “I’ll show you,” the superintendent said. Halfway up the stairs, he said, “There’s something about the door.”

  “What?” the policeman said.

  “You’ll see.”

  A nervous man was waiting on the landing.

  “You’re the girls’ father?” the policeman said.

  “Yes,” the father said.

  “So tell me what’s happening here,” the policeman said.

  “You should just look. At the door,”

  “That’s the key jammed in the lock?”

  “Yes. But that’s not what you need to see,” the superintendent said. “It’s that the door is breathing.”

  “Breathing?” the policeman said.

  “Watch.”

  The policeman watched. The superintendent was right. The door was breathing, without question. There was no other way to think of it. The policeman stared at it for a minute.

  “How long has it been doing this?” the policeman said.

  “A couple hours.”

  “My girls are in there,” the father said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “What’s the tenant’s name again?” the policeman said.

  “Gabriel Medem,” the superintendent said.

  The policeman knocked on the door. “Mr. Medem?”

  There was no answer.

  “This is the police, Mr. Medem. I understand you have two little girls with you. I’m concerned for your safety and theirs. Please open the door.”

  The door seemed to sigh.

  “Mister Medem, open the door if you can.”

  The door inhaled.

  “Mister Medem?”

  The door held its breath. The policeman saw it. He looked at the father and superintendent and put out his hand. Step back, okay?

  The policeman cleared his throat. “Mister Medem, if you don’t open this door—”

  It happened so fast that the father and the superintendent didn’t really see it. But the policeman saw it all. The door flew open and slammed against the inside wall, and a giant, spidery hand of wood and bone snatched him up and pulled him inside. It wasn’t soft or gentle this time.

  The door slammed shut behind him, and a layer of twigs and hair grew over it.

  The hand dragged the policeman down the hallway. The floorboards were half-gone, the holes covered with grass, with bark, with skin, with what seemed to be a sheet of fingernail. He passed the door to the living room. There were the two girls. They were floating off the floor, their arms and legs out, their hair splayed around their heads, as if the room were filled with water. No. They were suspended from the ceiling, pushed up off the floor, by a swarm of threads that kept breaking and rebuilding, breaking and rebuilding, every second. The rug teemed with them. It was a dark meadow. The lamp had twisted forward and grown eyes and bony limbs, stretching toward the floor. The couch had a thick pelt of fur, six squat, hairy legs that ended in clawed feet, and a mouth full of irregular teeth. It was climbing up the wall.

  Everything was growing. Growing something.

  The policeman kept getting dragged, first to the far end of the hallway, then into the room with Gabriel and his book.

  The man was still at the desk. The book was still in front of him. But it was hard to tell how much of him was left. Gabriel’s arms had fused with the book up to the elbows. His head was down, on the book, on the desk. The policeman couldn’t see anything of his face. Just his ears at the level of the pages. Gabriel’s feet had melted into the floor. And from his back, it was as though he had tried to grow wings, seven wings of skin and cloth, but they were too big for the room and had melded with the ceiling instead. The walls of the room were hair and plaster. No. Splinters and sinew. No. The policeman didn’t know what the walls were. And, within a breath, it didn’t matter anymore. Things that felt like fingers, or snakes, rose out of the floor and coiled around him, curled into his mouth. Then the policeman was somewhere else. He was a winged serpent in a crystal cave. He was a gargantuan snail with a thousand colonies of sentient insects anchored to his shell. He was a huge, many-legged thing nestled inside a silver egg. When he hatched and spread his wings across the sky, the world would shudder with wonder.

  • • •

  Outside the apartment, the father and the superintendent looked at each other, then back at the door.

  “Officer?” the superintendent yelled. “Officer?”

  “What do we do now?” the father said. “Do we call the police?”

  “That was the police,” the superintendent said.

  “I mean call them again,” the father said. “My girls are still in there. They’re still there, do you hear me? We have to do something!”

  “What do I tell them?”

  “I have no idea,” the father said.

  7.

  Team Three’s van was caught behind an idling taxi. Grace, behind the wheel, cursed under her breath.

  “Take the next left,” Liam said.

  “How much time do you think we have?” Grace said.

  “The police were called just before we landed,” Liam said. “Something strange in the neighborhood. An officer arrived at the scene. Nothing else yet.”

  “All right, then,” Menchú said. “The usual plan. Grace, you take point. Liam, you’re right behind her. Sal, I want you to get the artifact, whatever it is. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Sal said.

  Menchú looked at Sal—her eyes sharp, her jaw set.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Sal said. “Why?”

  “You look worried.”

  “This?” Sal said, pointing at her face. “This is my game face.”

  Liam laughed.

  “Game face?” Menchú said.

  “You all must have game faces,” Sal said. “Everyone has a game face.”

  “I . . .” Menchú said.

  “Oh, you have a game face, all right,” Liam said to Menchú. “It looks like this.” He narrowed his face and scrunched up his nose.

  “I do not look like that,” Menchú said.

  “If we could get a camera to work around here,” Liam said, “you would know just how wrong you are.”

  “I don’t have a game face,” Grace said.

  “You don’t ever not have a game face,” Liam said. “Take the next right.”

  They turned the corner onto a wider street. There was a police car parked in front of an apartment building.

  “At last,” Grace said. She stopped the van behind the car. They all started getting out.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” Menchú said to Sal.

  “Yeah,” Sal said, a trace of irritation in her voice. Everyone stop asking. “Let’s do this.”
/>   The door to the apartment building was open.

  “The call was to the second-floor apartment,” Liam said. “The super said two girls from another apartment are trapped in there.”

  They bounded up the stairs. At the landing they met the superintendent and the father.

  “Who are you?” the superintendent said.

  “You called the police,” Menchú said.

  The superintendent and father looked at each other.

  “The police already arrived,” the father said.

  “We’re backup,” Menchú said. “Where’s the officer?”

  The superintendent pointed at the door. “You might want to wait just a moment,” he said. “Until it does it again.”

  “Does what again?” Menchú said.

  The door sighed. Bulged outward and flattened again.

  “I see,” Menchú said.

  “What’s going on?” the superintendent said.

  “Don’t worry,” Menchú said. “We’ve seen this before.”

  “I’ve been a super for twenty-three years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Which is a testament to the fine job you’re doing keeping up the building,” Menchú said. “I see this all the time.”

  He nodded to Grace, Liam, and Sal. Grace positioned herself on point, right in front of the door. Liam and Sal were right behind her.

  Menchú turned to the father and superintendent. “Better get back,” he said. “Up. At least three steps.” He reconsidered. “You know, better if you just go all the way up to the next landing.”

  “My two daughters are in there,” the father said. “Are they in danger?”

  “Not for much longer,” Menchú said. “Now, please give us some space to work.”

  The father and superintendent hesitated.

  “Go,” Menchú said. This time they moved. They retreated to the landing above.

  Menchú looked at Grace and nodded.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

  • • •

  The apartment door flew open before they could move, and this time, four tentacles of muscle and hair rushed out, snapping, flailing. But Grace was too fast. She was inside the door before the tentacles could catch her. They turned back inward and snaked in the air toward her. She dodged them, caught them herself, and ripped them in half.