• • •
From the instant Menchú and Sal stepped into the courtyard at sunset, it was obvious that everyone at the Market knew what was going on. Not that Mr. Norse had been at all subtle with his threats the night before, but Menchú couldn’t help but notice how every whispered conversation paused as they passed and then resumed as soon as they were out of earshot. He wished that Asanti were there with them. Actually, he wished that Asanti were there instead of him. Menchú had learned over the years to take people as they came. His easy manner with all sorts was one of the reasons he had been recruited into Team Three. But the Market, with its casual magic use and even more casual classism, made his teeth crawl.
He did his best to shake off his annoyance. It wouldn’t help, and railing against the good fortune of people who did evil over those who did good was bush-league theology of the first order.
As if she could read his mind, Sal let out a sigh. “It’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“We probably have the largest collection of magical books and artifacts in the world in the Archives.” She gestured to the crowd around them. “We could be sitting on something that could not only stop Mr. Norse, but also make his balls fall off the next time he even thinks about going after our people, but it doesn’t do us any good because we never use any of the artifacts we find.”
Quickly, Menchú drew Sal off to the side where they could speak without being disturbed. That kind of thinking had to be nipped in the bud. “We are fighting this, Sal,” he assured her, “and we are going to win. Liam, Grace, and Asanti are going to be fine.”
“You don’t know that. We can’t give Mr. Norse the book because he would use it to destroy the world, I get that. But look around us; this place is full of people who use magic every day. It doesn’t seem to be driving them insane.”
“You don’t know them very well yet.”
Sal shook her head. “I just don’t understand why you won’t even consider—”
“Because I know what happens when people try to use forces they don’t understand.”
Sal was clearly still in the mood to argue, and Menchú realized they would be at it all night if he didn’t give her something productive to do. “Why don’t you call and check in with the others? Let them know what’s going on and make sure that they’re still all right.”
“And what are you going to do?”
Menchú couldn’t stop the grimace. “Look for allies.”
• • •
Sal’s conversation with Liam had not gone well. A burst of static exploded from the phone the instant he picked up. She tried to tell him what had happened with Mr. Norse, but wasn’t sure that he could hear anything over the bad connection. From what she’d been able to tell over the interference, the situation in the Archives had only gotten worse, and there was still jack-all that she could do about it from goddamned Liechtenstein.
When Sal hung up, the techno-cultist who had been staring at her the night before was standing at her elbow. She jerked in surprise, and her phone went flying from her fingers.
The techno-cultist’s hand darted out, picked her falling phone out of the air, and handed it to her. All without ever once breaking eye contact. He worked his mouth for a moment, as though he had to remember how to talk. Finally, he said, “You’re Perry’s sister, aren’t you?”
Sal felt her heart lurch in her chest. She checked the courtyard. Menchú was nowhere to be seen. “Yes. Who are you?”
“You can call me Opus93.”
“How about I call you by your real name?”
He shrugged. “What makes Opus93 less real than the name I was born with?”
Because Opus93 is a stupid-ass name, Sal didn’t say. “What do your friends call you?”
“Opus93.”
Sigh. “What do you know about my brother, Opie?”
“Word is he got his hands on something real, but he brought it to his sister the cop. He goes nova, puts out a huge spew of phantom data, then goes dark. And now Cop Sister is a Bookburner, and no one’s heard from Perry since.”
“What are you implying?”
“Implications are imprecise. Facts are what’s needed.”
Sal didn’t know whether to roll her eyes or fight back tears. It was too much like talking to Perry when he got into one of his esoteric fugues.
“Fine. Are you offering facts? Or just fishing for them?”
“Information wants to be free, doesn’t come without a price. You want help with your little billionaire problem, you need to ask the Index.”
The Index. Even Sal could hear the capital letter. She looked around again for Menchú. Still no sign of him. She swallowed. “Tell me more.”
• • •
Either the small room the techno-cultists had reserved for their use during the Market was not normally part of the castle’s museum, or it had been lovingly restored to its original purpose of storing dirt. Though dirt wouldn’t have required the window the cultists were using to vent the portable generator they had brought. That was the only familiar piece of equipment in the room.
Through a shared childhood with Perry, Sal had become passably familiar with circuit boards, resistors, and the various shells that computers and their innards came in. Not that she could do anything with them, but at least she knew what they were supposed to look like.
These computers—and Sal used the term loosely—had probably started their lives as standard PCs. What had happened to them next . . . One laptop looked like it had been repurposed as a planter, the keyboard replaced with a bed of moss ringed by yellow flowers. Above, a screen glowed with life. As Sal watched, Opie brushed a hand over the moss, and the blinking cursor and command line vanished, replaced by scrolling code that flew by faster than her eyes could follow. Another half-open desktop was filled with boards where glowing crystals grew among the circuits, absorbing the machine into their structure. A screen on the opposite wall connected to a large aquarium, complete with a herd of tiny sea horses milling in the purple-hued water.
Opie caught her staring. “Biocomputer. Only working example in the world.” He walked over to the aquarium and pulled a keyboard off a nearby shelf. A few keystrokes later, the blank screen above the tank changed to display a video of a baby panda. “Panda cam in the Beijing Zoo. It’s closed circuit. Not publicly accessible.”
Sal was more disturbed by the sea horses. As soon as Opie picked up the keyboard, they fell into formation, then scattered. They were currently swimming in a very intricate pattern through the tank. Except that every few seconds, all of the sea horses would suddenly freeze in place, like a buffering video. The baby panda, meanwhile, rolled on its back happily, and a hand reached in from off-screen to rub its belly.
“I thought biocomputers were still theoretical.”
“In the rest of the world, yes. But if you have a little bit of magic to help you . . .” He gestured to the rest of the room. “All things are possible.”
“Is that the Index?”
“The Index makes this look like a Commodore 64.”
“So why are you wasting my time? I have friends in trouble. Can you help me or not?”
Opie gave her a smug look. “I can help you. But the Index contains the sum of all human knowledge. Like I said, you don’t get to access that for free.”
Sal scoffed and held up her cell phone. “I already have access to the sum of all human knowledge. Costs me sixty-five dollars a month.”
Opie snorted. “We both know that if that was enough, you wouldn’t have followed me, Cop Sister. The Internet is merely the totality of human knowledge that’s been written down and put on online. The Index is a repository of everything known by any human who has ever interfaced with it.”
“And that includes Mr. Norse?”
Opie nodded. “Ask your question, and know what he knows about what’s happening to your friends.”
“What’s the catch?” asked Sal, torn between being fascinated by the possibi
lities and really disturbed by the implications of what Opie was saying.
“For every question you ask, the Index takes one piece of knowledge from your mind, and you can never know it again.”
4.
Sal had found Menchú when they both returned to their B&B after sunrise. Predictably, he had not been enthusiastic when Sal told him about her encounter with Opie and his offer.
“I don’t like the idea of losing a chunk of my memory any more than you do, but I don’t think we have a choice,” she said, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. Sal couldn’t imagine that getting snippy with Menchú would help matters, and it wasn’t like any of this was his fault.
“We always have a choice,” said Menchú. “And we only have the word of one techno-cultist that this so-called Index won’t wipe your entire memory. We don’t know that it even works at all.”
“I’m pretty sure that mind-wiping someone would be considered both breaking a deal and offering violence against another member of the Market. Do you really think they’d risk getting evicted?”
“I’m sure their expulsion will be a great comfort to you after your mind has been destroyed by their infernal machine.”
“That’s the other thing. If this is all a ploy, what’s in my mind that they’re so interested in? Out of everyone here, why target me?”
“Your brother.”
“You know more about what’’ going on with Perry than I do. Plus more secrets of the Society besides. Why haven’t they been eye-fucking you this whole time?”
Menchú didn’t even crack a smile. “Because if they’d approached me, I would have said no, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
“You think they targeted me because I’m the weak link.”
“I think they know what you want, and now they’re offering it to you. It’s what demons do—find your weakness and turn it against you.”
“You think Opie is a demon? Seriously?”
“I think something is powering the Index, and it isn’t love and light.” If possible, Menchú’s expression turned even more serious. “You haven’t been with us for long, but even so, these people would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to suck you dry of every drop of information you know about the Archives and the Society. You remember how Liam was possessed?”
Sal nodded.
“This wouldn’t be the first time techno-cultists tried to use the residue of a demon to access our secrets. And once they’ve touched you . . . Demons leave scars just like physical wounds. Break a bone once, you’re more likely to break it again in the same place.”
“So where are you broken?” Sal asked.
Menchú froze. “What do you mean?”
“You recruited me after I fought off a demon possessing my brother. Liam was taken over by something out of his computer, lost two years of his life, and now lives to fight the kinds of things that stole that time from him. I’m willing to bet that Asanti had some brush with the arcane that got her so curious about magic, and for some reason, Grace isn’t afraid of getting shot. So what happened to you?”
The silence sat heavily between them.
“Does it have to do with an angel?”
Menchú’s head shot up. “What did Asanti tell you?”
“Nothing. But you just did.”
Menchú seemed to deflate before her very eyes. Shrinking somehow, as though the clerical collar was just a costume, and he wasn’t a crusader saving the world from magic, demons, and things that lurk in the night, but merely a middle-aged man who was suddenly very, very tired.
Sal expected him to tell her that the discussion was over. Or that his past was none of her business. Or even to send her back to Rome. Instead, he said, “It was a long time ago. When I was still a parish priest in Guatemala.”
• • •
The parish consisted of a single village, tucked into a valley surrounded by as much farmland as the residents could cultivate before the terrain became too steep to support anything but virgin forest. The United States had been telling the world that Guatemala was a democracy for at least ten years, although what evidence it had to support that claim beyond a nominally elected government was dubious. Were mass executions and disappearances the hallmarks of a democracy? Menchú was pretty sure they weren’t. And he was dead certain that they shouldn’t be.
Still, there were a few signs that things were changing for the better, and maybe that was why he had not seen the disaster coming. Unknowing, perhaps he had let his guard down. Whatever the reason, the first Menchú knew of the impending disaster was a small fist banging on the door of his residence in the middle of the night.
Menchú had not been asleep and was at the door almost immediately. It was one of the boys from the village, an altar server no more than seven years old, fist already raised to knock again. “Father,” he said, “come quickly.”
Menchú read his expression in an instant. “What’s happened?” he asked, even though he was certain he knew the answer. Still, What’s happened? was a kinder question than Who died?
“The Army. They’ve surrounded us.”
Menchú did not ask further questions.
• • •
He followed the boy outside into the square. Soldiers were roaring into town now, making no attempt at stealth. Menchú couldn’t fathom how he hadn’t heard them coming. There was too much noise to pick out what individual men were saying, but their intent was clear. Every resident—about sixty men, women, and children—had been rousted from their beds and corralled into the main square. The man with captain’s braid on his shoulders paced back and forth. Behind him, a dozen men stood, their rifles still slung over their shoulders. For the moment.
Menchú didn’t fool himself that they were going to stay that way.
“Father,” a low voice called. Menchú turned, and his heart sank even further. Apparently the rebels hadn’t all made it back to their hidden camps in the mountains in time. And now here they were, guns at the ready, hiding in the shadows by the church.
• • •
Menchú paused, and Sal watched him with open concern. “The army just showed up to kill everyone, just like that?”
He shook his head. “There was an excuse. There always was. Harboring rebels who had refused to disarm. But effectively . . . yes. They showed up to kill everyone.”
“Why?”
“To prove that they still could.”
“And then the rebels found out, and surrounded the army?”
Menchú shrugged. “There weren’t enough of them for that. But it was enough for an effective ambush. With the element of surprise, they probably could have killed most of the soldiers. And then the government would have sent more to retaliate. Concentric circles of death all the way down.”
Sal wasn’t sure what to say. “I’m sorry” seemed inadequate, but it was all she had.
“For years, I wondered if it was because of me. I had distinguished myself within the Church during the civil war. Conflict is fertile ground for demons, and I had made it clear that I would protect both sides from their influence, banishing them back where they came from as soon as they dared show themselves in my presence. I wondered if maybe . . . If someone high enough in the chain of command decided to take exception to that policy of neutrality, they might have made an example of my village in order to send a message.”
“The rebels couldn’t have been too happy that you were helping the army.”
“Not really. But they were more at risk from the demons than the government forces were. Doesn’t matter anyway. Eventually, I realized that trying to blame myself was just a form of self-aggrandizement. There was no way I made enough of a difference for either side to take me down so spectacularly.”
“You must have saved lives.”
“From demons, yes. But I couldn’t stop people from killing each other. And that’s what it looked like was going to happen again.”
They sat together in silence, until Sal asked, “Wh
at happened instead?”
Menchú sighed. “I stopped the massacre.”
• • •
Father Menchú steeled himself for the strong possibility of death. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that his collar would somehow protect him when the bullets started flying. For every man holding a gun who might hesitate to shoot a priest, there was another who would want to be sure that no official representative of the Church survived to tell the world what had happened in a small mountain village.
His only hope was to somehow convince the two armed groups bent on killing each other not to kill a cluster of innocent civilians in the process.
And then a hand caught his sleeve.
The boy was still standing beside him. Only now his eyes were featureless white, his skin glowed with an unearthly radiance, and his hair fluttered by his face, fanned by a breeze even though the air was perfectly still. He was the most beautiful thing Menchú had ever seen.
“What are you?” Menchú asked.
“If you try to talk to them, they’ll kill you.”
“Maybe not,” he said, then repeated, “What are you?”
“You know what I am.”
He did. At least, he hoped that he did. Menchú fell back a step, still cautious, but—for the first time that night—hopeful. “Can you stop this?”
The child nodded.
“Then why don’t you?”
“You have to ask.”
A part of Menchú’s mind, some deep instinct, told him to say no. It warned that there was a trap before him, and the only way to avoid it was to walk away. But hope was too strong. The hope that no one, including him, would have to die that night.
Menchú asked.
God help him. He asked.
• • •
“And?”
Menchú looked up from his clasped hands and realized he had been staring silently at them for some minutes.
“I asked the . . . thing . . . to protect the villagers from the army and from the rebels.”
“And?”
“It did.”
• • •
It was as though a madness swept through both armed groups simultaneously. Suddenly the army seemed able to see the rebels wherever they were hiding, and fired unerringly into the alleyways. The rebels fired back. The sound of gunfire and screams filled the air.
Bookburners: Season One Volume One Page 19