When both dogs lay dreaming, a gray-clad figure climbed the fence in three pulls, vaulted over, landed bent-kneed on the grass, and ran toward the convent’s back door. The shadow knelt behind a bush, and when she stood a few minutes later, she wore a black robe and a rumpled wimple.
One advantage of working in the Vatican, Sal considered, was that nuns’ habits weren’t difficult to find. She reached for the lockpicks in her pocket, then decided to try the door first. It was unlocked.
Inside, the convent didn’t look much different from any other building: narrow halls, yellowed walls, arched brick ceiling. She brushed down the hall at a dignified but swift pace until she reached the stairs.
Sal saw nobody on the first floor, nobody on the second. Maybe there was some sort of curfew? Was she supposed to be praying somewhere? Should she worry about cameras? But four nuns lingered in a sitting room on the third floor, talking quietly in Italian and drinking wine. As Sal climbed, she heard an old woman laugh.
The fourth floor was empty again; even the hallway lights were dim. Sal treaded lightly, counting apartment numbers. 416. 417. Behind her, a door opened, then closed again.
Sal forced her heart to beat. She wasn’t cut out for breaking and entering. Her career had focused more on the other side of the crime.
She tried Grace’s door.
Locked, of course.
Use for the lockpicks after all. Not that she could afford to be seen kneeling in front of Grace’s door, raking pins. But she’d come this far. She’d already violated Grace’s privacy, not to mention a number of laws—all for nothing if she left now.
Sunk cost fallacy, Perry would have called that. But if you’d sunk your costs already, you might as well dive to get them.
Sal knelt. She’d learned this from Perry, too. He used to test himself against locks in the backyard, asked her to time him. He never offered to let her try; it didn’t even occur to him to challenge her, so of course she learned. Beat him half the time, once she got good enough, at which point he stopped testing her. But she still practiced.
Click.
Sal wrapped her hand in the robe, opened the door, and stepped inside.
In a room Sal had never seen, a small red light began to blink.
Somewhere else. Then.
Thick, stifling, humid air filled Chen Juan’s nose and mouth and throat and lungs. She inhaled dust, coughed, shook. Her forehead struck wood. Darkness and straw pressed close around her. She lay alone in black. She could not move. She screamed. The sound she produced was a croak, a roar, not at all the sound a human voice might make.
Somewhere, a man cursed.
Nightmares wormed in her head, enormous gulfs of time filled with humiliating teeth and shredded skin, reflection after reflection after reflection of flame. She cried out again with her broken voice.
The man replied—or spoke, anyway—beyond the dark that was Chen Juan’s bounded world. There was an outside. She wasn’t buried. She wasn’t trapped. She was hot, so deathly hot, and the air lay heavy on her so she could hardly breathe. When she did breathe she tasted straw and funk and mold.
But there was an outside. The man waited there. Her jailer. Wujing’s minion. Wujing who had visited her in darkness—or had he? Had she only imagined him? Wujing whose voice and whose touch on her eyelids had grown roots in her sleep.
She struck the crate lid with her forehead.
Dust and splinters rained onto her face. Blood trickled down her nose.
She could not hit hard enough, bounded like this. Gravity told her stories: she lay in a long crate, tilted back. Too shallow for her to generate much power. But there was room enough to slide her arms over her body—her shirt tore even at such light contact—so both palms pressed against the lid.
Drawing breath hurt in this heat. She felt like she was swimming in herself. But she pressed. She growled. She roared, and her roar echoed tinnily. She remembered Wujing, and the casual flick with which he’d swatted out her flame.
She was awake again, so someone must have broken the spell, or lit the candle. If they knew what she was, they would have snuffed the flame already. So they did not know. Which meant—what? Japanese, maybe? Had the train fallen, and left the Bureau’s precious collection in strangers’ hands? Wujing’s collection, in which she took central billing? Goddamn girl in the goddamn crate?
Not again. Not anymore.
She pressed.
Fire flickered beneath her skin, like a ghost’s touch. She remembered that feeling from the moment of her betrayal.
Let the candle burn. Let it burn me free.
Nails cracked. Rotten timbers gave. And there was light such as she had not seen in . . . How long?
She didn’t know, didn’t care. She stepped barefoot from the crate. Dust covered her. Ragged, rotten clothes hung from her body.
She stood on a hot metal floor covered with broken wood. The room was not a room at all, but a long, corrugated metal box, about nine feet tall and nine feet wide, cluttered with crates and junk. Light entered through a ragged gash in the box’s roof, and cast columns in dust-laden air. Above, she saw all the greens of a jade carver’s workshop and more, bright and emerald and pastel, green so deep it turned blue, green sharp as knives, featherlight green, green that fell as heavy as an anvil on the eye. Behind all that, the sun shone.
“¿Que?”
The man. She had not imagined him. She lowered her gaze from the hole in the roof.
There was a narrow hall down the center of the metal box, and he stood at the far end, eyes wide, one hand out as if to ward off a blow. He wore a sweat-stained black shirt and a Catholic priest’s collar; his skin was dark and his cheekbones high and he was not Japanese. Mexican, maybe? And he was beautiful.
The candle burned between them, on its stand of bone.
She had never learned Spanish. “Hello,” she tried in Chinese. She stepped forward. Her feet held. He did not run for the candle. He did not seem to understand. She tried a different Chinese dialect, then Japanese. Russian. He looked confused. “Hello,” she tried again, in English.
That, he got. “Hello.” He licked his lips. “Who are you?”
“Grace.” She continued her slow advance, and he his retreat. She reached the candle, and placed a hand on the wax to steady herself. “What’s your name?”
“I am Arturo,” he said. His tongue darted pink between his lips. She’d seen that expression before. She knew how it felt on her own face. This was a man out of his depth, groping for some procedure to apply. “Father Arturo Menchú.”
“Father.” She laughed. He was her age, maybe younger. “Did Wujing send you?”
He shook his head. “I do not know that name. The Societas Librorum Occultorum sent me.”
Chen blinked. “The Catholic Bureau. You people aren’t allowed in China.”
“You’re not in China,” he said. “This is Guatemala. We traced the shipping container from its last port of call in Guadalajara.”
Wujing had sent her across an ocean. How bad had the war gone, anyway?
She knew she had not yet asked the only important question. She had let the moment carry her: the young priest, the hole, the layers of dancing green, the sunlight on her skin, the weight of the air worse even than August in Guangzhou, like breathing through blankets last used to dry a hairy, smelly dog after a swim in a muddy river. She did not want to ask the only important question, because once she did, the answer would never be anything but what it was.
“What year is it?”
“I don’t understand.”
He did. He just wasn’t letting himself know he understood. “The year. The date. What is it?” She tried not to speak too tensely. She did not want to scare him.
“July fourteenth,” he said, “1985.”
She doubled over.
She hadn’t thought this could happen in real life: the shortness of breath, the sickness of realization. It did in books, of course, and actors faked it on the stage. But her lungs woul
d not fill. She could not think. The world narrowed to a point.
“Grace,” the priest said. “Are you okay?”
No, she thought. If not for her grip on the candle she would have fallen. She looked at him through the strands of hair that fell across her face. I am not okay. I will never be okay again.
Fortunately, at that moment, the crates behind Arturo exploded, and a wax lion tackled him, and for a few seconds her world returned to normal.
Rome. Now.
Sal entered Grace’s small apartment and closed the door behind her. The lights were out. She didn’t turn them on. She slipped off habit and wimple, and hung them on the coatrack by the door, by the jacket Grace had worn to Spain. Right room, at least. She recognized most of the shoes in the shoe rack, too.
There was a small kitchenette to the right of the entrance, just large enough to turn around in and so neatly kept Sal doubted Grace used it much. She had only seen kitchens that clean in movies.
Past the kitchenette, a narrow, sparsely furnished sitting room overlooked the street. An Escher print hung on the wall; aside from that, the only decoration Sal noticed was a photo calendar, each month featuring a new photo of a kitten in mortal danger. Sal had heard people describe this sort of thing as motivational. Maybe it was supposed to motivate you to keep kittens away from calendar designers. This month, Grace had marked off three days. The month previous, two.
Other than that, the room held a single plush chair and a nearly-empty bookcase—far too empty for someone who read as much as Grace. Maybe she donated the books when she was done. Sal slid Grace’s Middlemarch out of her jacket pocket, pondered shelving it and leaving, but decided that would be too creepy.
Every instinct she’d ever possessed, and some she hadn’t, screamed: Go. She had come to talk with Grace, but the gulf between showing up at a troubled coworker’s doorstep unannounced with an apology, and breaking into said coworker’s apartment to root through her personal effects, was—to put it mildly—broad. It was the kind of gap into which people fell screaming.
So of course she opened the bedroom door.
And, because she was so assiduously suppressing her other instincts, Sal also squashed the urge to curse.
Grace lay on her bed.
She wore green pajamas, and slept with arms crossed over her chest like Dracula in movies when he was dead.
Sal froze. Running would make more noise than simply backing up, turning around, and leaving. So long as she hadn’t woken Grace already. So she waited.
Grace didn’t move.
That was good, Sal thought at first.
Grace didn’t move some more.
Nor did she breathe.
No one was that heavy a sleeper.
“Grace?” Sal whispered. After that yielded no response, she tried again: “Grace?”
Nothing.
Was she—no, that wasn’t possible. People died, sure, all the time, Sal had seen it, people in good health, people who hit the gym, people with eight-pack abs who could bench 430, blood vessels just burst in their brain at three in the morning and so much for the muscle man. But they didn’t go peacefully. They screamed. Their faces twisted. They curled around their stomach in pain as their appendix burst. And after they died, they stank. Bowels emptied as muscles slacked.
They didn’t arrange their arms in the goddamn Dracula position.
She walked to Grace’s bedside. Took her arm. Shook her. “Grace. Dammit, come on, Grace, wake up.” Her skin was—not cold, not exactly, but cool to the touch, and more stiff than skin should be. Sal tapped Grace’s cheek with the palm of her hand. It was smooth and round, and like the skin of the other woman’s wrist it yielded less than Sal thought it should. “Grace? Jesus Christ, Grace, are you there?”
No answer.
Magic. Someone must have gotten to Grace somehow. On the last mission, maybe? A bit of delayed vengeance, courtesy of the Hand? One more Perry for the clinic beds?
No. Grace—there, around her neck, she wore a silver cross without a trace of tarnish. It felt hot to Sal’s touch, electric like silver always felt these days, but there weren’t any demons at work. She thought. Unless they could get around the silver somehow. Which perhaps they could.
Fuck.
She glanced around the room. All the decoration that wasn’t in the sitting room was here: photos covered the wall, pictures of Team Three, large framed shots of a Chinese city Sal didn’t recognize, more of an ambiguously European waterfront. Prints of paintings of sunflowers. A Turkish tapestry tumbled down one wall, all geometry and gold thread. Sculptures lounged on shelves.
And beside Grace’s bed hung a small sign printed on thick paper in the woman’s blocky hand: in case of emergency, light candle.
Beneath the sign stood a thick white candle on a stand made of what looked like a yellowed, fine-grained wood. A matchbook rested on the bedside table.
If Grace had been attacked, this certainly qualified as an emergency. But what could lighting the candle do? Summon Menchú? Grace scorned magic. Maybe the candle had a special smell, or something, that would wake her?
Don’t think too much. Thinking too much was how you got shot. Grace was out. This wasn’t natural sleep. It wasn’t meditation or anything like that. She didn’t have a pulse, for Christ’s sake. In case of emergency—
Sal struck a match and lit the candle. The curled black wick took flame grudgingly. Sal cradled the ember so a draft wouldn’t blow it out. Brightening, the flame warmed her hand. It seemed to have a presence beyond the heat, as if she held a small bird. She shook out the match.
Nothing happened. Of course. That’s what came of spending your days dealing with freaky magic. You started to think the world was full of freaky magic, when in fact it was mostly candles.
She licked her fingers, and reached to pinch off the flame.
At which point something struck her fast and hard in the face.
Guatemala. Then.
When the fires died, Chen Juan and the priest lay on the ground outside the smoldering wreckage of the container, with the candle upright between them. Rivers of wax ran from the wrecked metal box. Trees towered overhead. Sun through layers of green laid layers of shadow on the earth, and on their bodies.
Chen Juan laughed so hard tears came to her eyes.
“I can’t believe,” Arturo said, “I can’t—I mean. They almost had me. There were so many of them.”
“Just like Wujing,” she said. “Ship all the wax things in one box to make the bookkeeping easier. He never did like . . .” she said when she stopped laughing, before she started again. “He never did like filling out forms.”
Arturo rolled over on his side to face her. His eyes were deep and liquid brown. A wax burn ran down his temple to his cheek.
“You should have a doctor look at that,” she said.
“You’re not wax.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I am not a thing, either. But the candle flame is my life. As long as it burns, I’m awake. And when it stops—” She snapped her fingers.
“When did you go to sleep? Where?”
She liked him for that: sleep. Not, when did they put you in that box? “China. In 1933.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I should go,” she said, and rolled to her feet and lifted the candle. Antopov couldn’t have come up with a more portable means of eternal life, of course. This must have been the old man’s compromise position. Left to his own devices he likely would have built something enormous with a dome on top.
“Don’t.”
“I have to get back.”
“Where?” he asked. She didn’t have an answer. “China’s changed a lot in fifty years,” he said. “The place you left isn’t there any more.” He sat up, stood up, reached for her.
“I can’t.” She recoiled, clutching the candle. “No. If they’re gone, then I’ll do—something. This candle could last years, if I don’t push it. I won’t be the first person in the world who died young.”
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“We can help you. What you did in there—I’ve never seen anyone move like that before. You could work with the Society. We have resources. We could take care of you while you look for a cure.”
“Study me, you mean, like a rat in a maze. The last time I heard that was from the man who put me in that crate.”
“No!” That word’s violence convinced her: the violence, and his sweat, and his fear. She’d seen men fake sincerity before. When faking, they did not look so afraid. “Grace, no. Look. All the Society does is search for things. One of those things might free you. And if we don’t find what we’re looking for—at least you can help. You saved my life. You could save the world.”
A bird sang high up in the shaggy-barked trees, taller and thicker than any trees she’d seen before. She was far from home.
“You’re fooling yourself,” she said. “I know how they made this candle. We can’t make another. There’s no hope.”
“There always is.”
“You’ll have to believe for both of us,” she said.
“I will.”
Rome. Now.
Sal’s skull bounced off Grace’s bedroom wall. Something struck her in the stomach at high velocity and she doubled over, breathing black. Knee, she thought, in the second before her legs swept out from under her and she struck the carpet heavy and limp as a sandbag. A hand, a human hand, thank Whoever for small favors, grabbed her throat, and even as Sal tried to raise her guard, her eyes focused through the stars on a familiar-looking fist—and beside that fist, on an even more familiar face fixed in an equally familiar expression of rage.
“Grace,” she gasped with the last of her breath. “Hi.”
The other woman’s face glowed in firelight: the candle had flared when she moved, and now it crouched again. “?”
The tension around Sal’s neck relaxed to let her inhale. “I’m sorry.” Sal pointed to the carpet, to the fallen, soot-stained Middlemarch. “I don’t speak . . . I mean. I brought your book.”
Bookburners: Season One Volume One Page 28