Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  They talk about Tanner City. About their fears when they were separated. About how relieved they were to see each other again. Asanti asks if they all got the pastries she made them. They did.

  “I’m so glad you’re all right,” Menchú says to the rest of them.

  “Thanks,” Sal says, “but I’m not sure I’m all right.”

  “Well, tell us about it,” Asanti says.

  “I don’t know if I should.”

  “Our lives depend on being able to talk to each other,” Asanti says.

  Sal hasn’t talked about Balloon and Stretch to anyone. She decides she can’t keep it in any longer. She tells her teammates everything. They are the only people she feels she can trust. She’s expecting them to be outraged. She’s expecting a gasp here, an Oh, God there. Something to let her know that they’re as repulsed as she is.

  But it doesn’t happen. Sal finishes, and there’s nothing but a long, uncomfortable pause.

  “Huh,” Sal says. “I guess I was expecting you to be more surprised.”

  “Sal . . .” Menchú says.

  “So when you just said that we need to be able to tell each other anything, you meant I should always tell you everything,” Sal says. “And in return, you just keep letting me figure out things you already know on my own.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Asanti says.

  “Well, it sure feels like it,” Sal says. She looks at each of them in turn—Grace, Menchú, Asanti, Liam.

  “I understood that Team Two was kind of like the Society’s State Department,” Sal says. “When were you going to tell me that it was the CIA, too?”

  Menchú and Asanti look at each other, as if Sal’s stumbled into a conversation they’ve been having with each other for years. But neither of them says anything.

  “Frankly,” Grace says, “I’m a little surprised that you thought we didn’t have one. You’ve seen what we do. You’ve seen how dangerous it gets.”

  “And Team Two isn’t a hit squad,” Liam says. “Most of what they do is, well, pretty boring, to be honest. It’s phone calls and meetings and paperwork. You think anyone at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needed to be coerced into anything? They just need emails. Phone calls. Lots of them. But that’s it. And no one is hurt. They’re kept in the dark, sure. But you’re police. You of all people should know that most people don’t want to know what we deal with. They don’t want to know that anything we see on our jobs even happens. So we just need to make sure we do the due diligence and then get on with our work.”

  “How many people has Team Two killed?” Sal says. “Just because they know something they shouldn’t and are unwilling to be quiet about it.”

  The silence after Sal’s question is way too long for her.

  “None,” Liam says. “That I’m aware of.”

  “You know what?” Sal says. “Right now that is not nearly good enough.”

  She stands up.

  “Where are you going?” Menchú says.

  “Home. Away from this place.”

  Liam moves to intercept her. Menchú stops him with a glance. They all watch as Sal takes the stairs back to the surface, two at a time.

  • • •

  That night, Sal gets a text from Liam.

  Can I come in? it reads. I’m outside.

  She lets him in.

  The visit starts off all right. He gives her a long hug. He commiserates about how crappy the job can be sometimes. He tells her he’s there for her. He thinks Sal’s let it go. She hasn’t.

  “You know those guys on Team Two offed someone,” Sal says.

  Sal sees Liam wince a little.

  “I don’t know that for sure,” he says. “There’s nothing in the official records that says so. I checked before I came over here.”

  He was expecting it to be comforting, she thinks, and suddenly knows it’s the opposite.

  “Of course there isn’t an official record of it,” Sal says. “It is in no one’s interest that it ever gets recorded. Which means people could just be dropping off the face of the Earth, thanks to them. Whenever they think it’s good for the Society.”

  “Killing innocent people would never be good for the Society,” Liam says.

  “Then why does the Society keep two people like that around?” Sal says. Her voice is rising.

  “Because they’re good at their jobs!” Liam’s voice is rising, too.

  “Yeah, they’re fucking great at them,” Sal says. “Just as long as they don’t leave a trail of blood and no one ever asks how they do what they do.”

  Sal feels at once like she’s standing on the edge of a cliff. She was standing on it before in Oklahoma. She was standing on it again all through the inquest. And she was standing on it in the Black Archives. She decided not to jump off it then. But now, in her apartment, she decides to jump.

  “You know what repulses me so much about this?” Sal says. “It’s not that the Society condones what it does. And God knows it’s not that the Church does. The Church can condone whatever the hell it wants. It’s that you do. You and Grace and Asanti and Menchú. God, Menchú of all people, after what he grew up with. But you, too. You’ve all let this job turn you into monsters.”

  Sal knows she’s said too much now. She sees anger flash across Liam’s face. He lets it stay there, lighting him up. She braces herself. He’s going to hit her where it hurts.

  “And you’re not?” Liam says. “Who are you now, Serpico?”

  “Nice reference,” Sal says. “Thanks for speaking my language.”

  “Get on out of that,” he says. “You’re just as complicit as the rest of us. I don’t know whether you’ve been willfully ignorant or just stupid—you know, like every cop who thinks he’s one of the good cops, so everything’s fine—but you didn’t have to play along. You didn’t have to sign up. You didn’t have to tell us everything in the field. You didn’t have to say everything you said at the inquest. If you wanted to protect that little family in Tanner City, you could have, but you didn’t, and you got your commendation for it. Team Two does what it does. But you pointed them in the right direction. Live with that.”

  “I swear,” Sal says, “the day my brother either dies or wakes up, I’m out of here.”

  She knows there’s more keeping her here than that. But it feels good to lay it on the table. Just to hear what he says.

  “Good,” Liam says. “Truth be told, I don’t think you’re cut out for it anyway.”

  What the hell, she thinks. Let’s go for broke. If we’re going to get to the bottom of something, let’s really hit bottom.

  “And when I’m out, I’m telling the world what’s going on here.”

  “Great,” Liam says. “I hope you do.”

  He’s as angry as she’s ever seen him, but she knows him well enough to see the look of surprise on his face. He’s said what he’s said because he’s trying to be nasty, she knows that. They both are.

  But the last thing he’s just said is different. She can tell. A part of him actually does hope for that, does want it. To pry the lid off the whole thing and let all the worms out. To let everything out into the light.

  They both want it, the same thing.

  For a second, they stare at each other, glaring. Then his face softens, and he reaches for her.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she says.

  He lets his arm drop, conciliatory. Trying to patch things up a little. “You all right?”

  “I will be,” Sal says. “Just not now.”

  “Call if you need me,” he says.

  “I don’t,” she says.

  “I suppose I deserved that,” he says. “Good night, Sal.”

  He turns and walks out. She locks the door behind him and looks out the window at the sky over Rome. It looks smaller than ever.

  Episode 7: Now and Then

  by Max Gladstone

  1.

  Shanghai. Then.

  Chen Juan decided she did no
t like the Russian.

  He smelled of rendered fat, and wore a black suit he must have stolen from a funeral. He leaned against the stone rail, facing out over the Huangpu River, away from Shanghai. He wanted her to think he was watching the marshes and warehouses of Pudong across the boat-studded black, but every few seconds, when he thought she wasn’t looking, he glanced at Chen out of the corner of his eye. She noticed, and ignored him.

  The Bund curved north, bounded to the east by the river and to the west by the alien, yellowed marble facades of traders’ clubs and banks and, far away, the embassies, British and American and French. 1928 had not been a good year, but good or bad the Bund endured, and served itself, as always. Few Nationalist flags flew here.

  Chen had dressed for a party: heels, a long high-collared black dress slit past the knee, a fox-fur stole, silver earrings, gray silk opera gloves with silver trim, and—underneath all that—a tasteful cross. She had not dressed to be ogled on the Bund by some threadbare knife-faced foreign ghost.

  She drew a long breath through her cigarette, and pondered the exigencies of her profession.

  Tallow-stink and uneven footsteps heralded the Russian’s approach. When she looked right, he leaned against the rail beside her. His coat was too tight, or there was too much muscle underneath: his head perched between mounds of shoulder.

  She tipped ash and straightened to leave.

  “Stay,” he said in bad Chinese, tones broken, vowels slurred. “I tell you a story.”

  “You don’t know any story I want to hear.”

  He caught her by the upper arm as she turned away—his fingers and palm were rough, his grip hard enough to bruise. “I think I do,” he said. She stopped. “In the stone den,” he continued, pronunciation almost perfect now but singsong, learned but not understood, “there lived a poet.” His eyes glittered like ice covered with alcohol and set on fire.

  She frowned. “Your boss knows this is the world’s worst pass phrase, right? Any child would know the next part. If this was England would you use ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’?”

  “We’re not in England. Say it.”

  She sharpened her voice and wished her consonants could cut him. “He was a lion addict, resolved to eat ten lions.”

  “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Grace,” she said. For some reason foreigners liked people to have foreign names. Any foreign name would do, didn’t have to be Russian or German or whatever. All their languages sounded the same anyway. Maybe even they couldn’t tell the difference.

  He let her go, and smiled a crooked smile with crooked teeth. “I’m sorry, my dear. I don’t make the rules. But it is a pleasure to meet you. Do you have the envelope?”

  She snapped open her pearled pocketbook and lifted from within a red envelope sealed with white wax and stamped with a winged lion. “Here.”

  “You open it.”

  “Don’t you have hands?”

  “I do. I have yours.”

  They were alone, despite the lights and crowds. Farther up the Bund, couples strolled. A black car idled near the sidewalk.

  She slid her thumb beneath the envelope’s flap and tugged once. The seal popped. She withdrew and unfolded the note inside. “There’s nothing written here. Just red paper.”

  “It’s not a letter,” he said. “It’s a packing label.”

  And his arm was around her neck, his other hand pressing a wadded wet cloth to her mouth and nose.

  She let out a muffled cry, stopped breathing, and sagged into him.

  Behind them, the car’s engine roared to life.

  He grunted under her weight, shifted his grip from her neck to her shoulder so he’d seem to be supporting a drunken girlfriend home, and turned them both away from the river. The cloth left Chen Juan’s mouth.

  She snaked her arm around his, twisted her hip, dropped her weight, and broke his shoulder. He screamed higher than she expected.

  Dark spots swam through her vision. The chloroform, or ether, or whatever, slowed her a little. The Russian tripped and fell, and tried to rise even through the pain. She straddled his back, took his neck in the crook of her elbow, and squeezed. His gasps reminded her of a carp she’d landed when she was six. He twitched under her. “Here’s a story,” she hissed into his ear. “On the mountain was a monk, and the monk said, ‘Master, tell me a story,’ and this was the story he told—”

  She let the Russian go when he passed out.

  Car doors slammed up the road and heavy voices, foreign voices, cried: “Stop!” She dove to the ground and rolled. Shots split the night—but the shooter wasn’t aiming at Chen. The Russian’s friends dove for cover. A second black car pulled to the curb, its door flew open, and Wujing dove out. He ran toward Chen Juan, a black blur, while Ahsan covered them both with his pistol from the passenger seat. Wujing got his arm under the Russian’s, lifted from his side while Chen Juan lifted from hers, and together they pulled him into the car’s spacious backseat. Wujing climbed back behind the wheel and gunned the engine. Chen Juan cuffed the Russian’s hands behind him, shackled his legs together, and tied the handcuffs to the leg irons before he woke up.

  He thrashed and roared, as she expected. Up front, Ahsan traded fire with the pursuing Russians. Wujing turned a hard left and a harder right.

  “What’s your name?” Chen’s Russian wasn’t much better than his Chinese, but it would pass.

  “Fuck you!”

  She hit him in the broken shoulder, and he screamed.

  “Name.”

  “Vasily,” he said, and repeated it, like a charm.

  “Let’s trade stories, Vasily. You told me one, I told you one. Now it’s your turn again.”

  “I can’t.”

  Wujing yanked the car through a 270-degree hairpin. Chen Juan removed her right glove and placed her bare hand on Vasily’s shoulder. “Where are the girls, Vasily? Where’s the Professor? Tell me now, and you’ll wake up somewhere better than this and never see me again. Hold out, and I’ll introduce you to my other friends. I don’t think you would like them very much, Vasily. I don’t like them very much, to be honest. But they ask good questions, the kind people just can’t help answering.”

  “No,” he said.

  “The girls. The Professor.”

  Ahsan leaned out the window and fired again. The pursuing car swerved and crashed through a cabbage stand.

  Vasily slumped.

  “They’re in Pudong,” he said, and gave an address.

  “Thank you, Vasily. Turns out you did know a story I wanted to hear.” Chen took the chloroform rag from the seat beside her, pressed it over his mouth and nose, and waited for him to still. “We’ve got it,” she shouted up to Wujing and Ahsan. “Now we just swoop in and save the girls before the Professor can move.”

  Wujing laughed. “Like it’s that easy.”

  “It’s worked so far.”

  “You think luck is the same as a good plan.”

  “You have my back,” she said, and grinned when she caught his eye in the rearview mirror, “and I have yours. That’s better than luck.”

  Vasily groaned. Chen Juan decided she liked him better this way.

  Vatican City. Now.

  “I have never seen such irresponsible, corner-cutting operational behavior in my entire life as I have since you joined up.”

  A quiet, please sign hung on the wall in the Black Archives beneath the Vatican, receiving even less respect than usual. Though, for a change, Grace was the one shouting.

  Sal was shouting back. “Excuse me for saving lives,” she said. “You wanted us to let those tourists die. I saw a chance and took it.” She was covered in ash and cuts and bruises, just like Grace—though, Sal noted bitterly, the other woman’s cuts and bruises seemed shallower. The rest of the team, Liam and Menchú and Asanti, studiously ignored the argument. “And it worked out. So I don’t see the problem.”

  “I, for one,” Liam said, consulting his cell phone, “could murder a pizza.”
>
  “You don’t see the problem?” Grace seemed to have a less figurative sort of murder on her mind. She brandished her copy of Middlemarch the way Sal had seen drunks brandish barstools. “That’s exactly the problem. You don’t see. You’re good at patterns, you’re good at streets, and you ask all the right questions except the ones that matter, the ones about risk, about death. You and Asanti went off to Glasgow without backup. You plug yourself into a magical computer because oh, why not; you endanger us all trying to save civilians from Team One; and now you run into hive-infested tunnels to rescue some dumb tourists who should have listened to the goddamn cave-in warning we put out expressly to keep them from being eaten by giant bugs.”

  Father Menchú coughed and opened his mouth as if to speak, but Grace wheeled on him and he decided against it. Asanti opened her suitcase and began extracting leather-bound tomes.

  “I’m thinking pepperoni and anchovies?” Liam said, hopefully.

  Sal spread her arms. Ash rained from her clothes. “We protect people. That’s the point. That’s my point, anyway. That’s why I’m here.”

  “We don’t just protect people.” Grace stormed toward Sal. Middlemarch’s spine stopped just short of Sal’s sternum. Grace’s fingers left smudge prints on the gold-stamped Modern Library binding. “We protect everyone. We protect them from monsters, we protect them from people like Norse who think they can use the monsters, and we protect them from Team One, who has to clean up if we fail. And there are, in case you hadn’t noticed, five of us. So we protect each other. Which means we don’t take crazy risks. We close ranks. We work together. We listen to one another. We take care of one another.”

  “You want our ranks so close nothing can get through. Hell, you want our ranks so close even I don’t know what’s going on half the time. If you’d open up a little, maybe I would have known about the pheromones in the first place!”

  “Our world’s dangerous. This isn’t a game; this isn’t a, what, a campfire circle. I keep telling you, and you don’t listen. People. Get. Hurt.”

  “I don’t need to be told that.”

  “It looks to me like you do.”

  “My brother,” Sal said, slowly, “is in a fucking coma, okay? What do you know about getting hurt?”