Wisdom's Grave 01 - Sworn to the Night

by Craig Schaefer

  “Man,” he stammered. “One man. And it was only two, swear to God, it was two bodies. I never even been to New York, you gotta believe me. I’m on probation, I ain’t supposed to leave the state. My probie catches me in New York, that’s an instant violation and I go back inside.”

  Jake loomed over his shoulder. “Who hired you? Give us a name.”

  “There aren’t any names, man. Nobody’s got a name, not where I come from.”

  “What about the payment?” Marie asked. “Don’t even pretend they paid you up front. Nobody trusts a junkie. Where and when?”

  He looked to her, forlorn. “An hour ago. Newport Station, near the lockers. He’s gone, okay? I didn’t show. That means he knows I got picked up. You ain’t gonna find him. He’s smart. Last time we met, he showed me where to stand and walk so the security cameras can’t get a look at your face.”

  Jake glanced at Marie. “I’ll pull security footage from the station, just in case.”

  Marie fished out her phone. She flicked through her web browser, rummaging through her history for the Roth Estate Holdings website. She magnified a photo of Richard Roth, smiling like a champion in the living room of a ten-million-dollar condo, and showed Sylvester the screen.

  “Was this the man?”

  Sylvester tried to rub at his eyes. The chain on his shackles shook, his wrists jerking short. He squinted.

  “I don’t…no, I don’t think so. I mean, he had a nice suit like that, around the same age, but…no, that’s not the guy.”

  Disappointed, Marie put the phone away. She couldn’t shake her instincts about Roth. All the same, she was experienced enough to know better than to latch on to a hunch. Her first mentor had beaten it into her head over and over again: follow the evidence. If the evidence disagrees with your gut, follow the evidence anyway.

  The mirror at her back slammed on its frame, the one-way glass jolting, sharp enough to send her shooting to her feet. A man screamed like a strangled cat. Another slam on the glass, and a hairline crack tore right down the middle.

  Marie and Jake ran for the door. They burst from the interrogation room into sheer pandemonium. A grizzled man with a tangled beard and ragged, dirty clothes grappled with police out in the hall. Four uniformed officers clung to him like barnacles as he spat and fought and kicked. Another jumped on his back, struggling to bring him down to the checkered tile floor. His head swung in Marie’s direction. He had the jaundiced skin and blown-out pupils of a late-stage addict, and the faint black lines etched around his chapped lips told her his drug of choice was ink. His tortured eyes widened in recognition.

  “You!” he bellowed. “You. I see you. I’ve read you!”

  The uniforms wrestled him to his knees, then onto his belly, planting him flat while they zipped two sets of flex-cuffs onto his wrists and ankles. As they carried him down the hall to the holding cells, he looked up and gave a leering grin.

  “You’re gonna die, Marie! I’ve read the ending. I’ve read the ending!”

  He disappeared around a cinder-block corner, still screaming, laughing, his words devolving into garbled nonsense. Marie stood frozen, staring at the empty hall.

  “Did you know that guy?” Jake asked, looking at her sidelong.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Huh.”

  He didn’t have anything else to say. Neither did she. They went back into the interview room.

  Their suspect wasn’t alone. The new arrival was a prim, tight-lipped gentleman in a pressed gray suit, an alligator-skin attaché resting on the table before him. He rose sharply, almost mechanically.

  “Excuse me,” Jake started to say.

  “No, sir, excuse me.” The man flicked out a business card, holding it between perfectly manicured nails. “The name is Smith. Mr. Smith, Esquire. Legal counsel from Weishaupt and Associates, here to represent Mr. Rimes. You’ve been interviewing my client without his representative present. Unacceptable.”

  “He didn’t ask for a lawyer,” Jake said.

  “Didn’t he? And yet, here I am. Suffice to say, this interrogation is over, and I’ll be lodging a formal complaint with your captain.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said, “you do that.”

  The lawyer’s head turned on a swivel, locking onto Marie. “And you are?”

  Marie was focused on Sylvester. He didn’t just seem nervous and erratic, like he had when they were questioning him. He looked absolutely terrified. And it wasn’t the detectives he was afraid of.

  “Leaving,” she told Mr. Smith. “I was just leaving.”

  Eighteen

  At the heart of a cavernous laboratory, under electric-blue lights, the Scrying Table clacked like a typewriter in the hands of a madman. It was a map of the world made from thousands of magnetic pins suspended in an oily black broth. The pins surged, rippled, and roiled, as if charting invisible earthquakes across the globe. Every jump of a pin ended in a metallic pop as it slapped back down again, splashing into the oil and striking the iron beneath.

  Bloch stared at the table, his face pale, his cheeks lined with unshaven bristle. His lab coat was half buttoned and his hands hung limp at his sides. “Now we are all sons of bitches,” he murmured.

  “You’re quoting Kenneth Bainbridge?” called a voice from above. “Now? Really? Shall I do Oppenheimer, then?”

  A crane arm whirred, and Savannah Cross descended from the ceiling.

  She wore a harness cabled to the crane, the device effortlessly swinging her across the laboratory. At her back, mounted on the harness, four robotic arms swiveled and snapped. The arms were engraved with spidery silver runes running from the harness to the pincer tips. She spun, twirling across the open air, half ballerina and half venomous spider. She floated past a bank of tables, checking on chemical equipment, adjusting a Bunsen burner with her human hands while one of the robotic arms snatched up a pencil in its yellow pincers and scribbled a quick notation on a pad of paper. As the crane winged her over to a steel slab, Savannah did a graceful backflip.

  She typed on one keyboard while her extra arms hunted and pecked across two others, answering three emails at once. She talked to Bloch over her shoulder.

  “Now I am become death, destroyer of etcetera, etcetera. You are such a drama queen. And ungrateful. We’re doing cutting-edge work here, standing at the untold frontiers of science, and all you do is whine about it.”

  Bloch waved at the Scrying Table. The pins clattered and clacked.

  “Have you seen these readings?” he demanded. “The project is going too far, too fast. We have to rein it in. We should go back to square one, start from scratch with new limited-release trials.”

  Savannah pulled on a pair of goggles. Tiny pin lights at the sides mirrored the sapphire blue of the overheads. She jumped back and the crane lifted her off her feet. Momentum spun her around, her lab coat flaring out behind her. She loomed over Bloch and raised her hands high. The four robotic arms, steered by her subconscious mind, struck a pose. An electronic Kali floating in midair.

  “Oh, sure, the early trials. Watered-down ink, barely one-percent pure. And what did the test subjects do, once they got hooked? Mostly spray-painted graffiti about owls. Not productive.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that we don’t even know why?” Bloch asked her. Savannah spun away, swinging down in front of a whiteboard scrawled with equations and occult sigils. She tapped her finger against her lips and studied her work.

  “We know why. Memetic bleed from the Shadow In-Between. A glitch in the system.”

  “A ‘glitch’ we should have thoroughly studied before pushing forward. Fifty addicts with no connection to one another, from San Francisco to New York, all decided to write ‘The Owl Lives’ at nearly the same moment. Maybe we should find out what ‘the Owl’ actually is?”

  “We will. That’s what good science is, Dr. Bloch. We study, we experiment, we learn.”

  “We’re risking a mass-casualty event.
If this experiment slips out of our control, and I think it already has, the death toll could be catastrophic.”

  The crane arm hummed. She turned his way, arching a pert eyebrow.

  “Of course it could. Your point being?” She shrugged. Her mechanical arms mirrored the gesture. “Discovery requires risks. No knowledge without sacrifice. You should try to be more like our sponsors.”

  “Our sponsors,” he spat. “We made a deal with the devil. You know that, don’t you?”

  “For unlimited funds and access to the most advanced laboratory on the planet? That’s a deal any real scientist would jump at. But for the record, Dr. Bloch, your assessment is incorrect.”

  She swooped in, hovering over him again.

  “We made a deal with the Network,” she told him. “They’re the people the devil is afraid of.”

  Bloch clapped his hands to his ears as every speaker in the room, every device and machine, let out a piercing static squeal. The blue lights flickered and dimmed.

  “Boss is coming,” Savannah chirped, her lips curling in a tight bow. “Better look busy.”

  With a ripping sound, like scissors slicing through construction paper, the copper blade of a knife tore a crack in the world. The blade protruded from nowhere, leaving a glowing black line in its wake. Then the crack wrenched open.

  Beyond it lay a lightless void, darker and colder than outer space. Papers ruffled and the map pins clattered in a panic as the howling void sucked at everything around it, stealing the oxygen, flooding the laboratory with the sound of clanging steel chimes.

  A towering man stepped from the darkness, clutching the copper-bladed knife in one brutish fist. His bare feet touched down on the tile floor, his legs like fat steel pistons under a pair of black silk trousers. He had a bodybuilder’s frame, but the muscles of his bare chest bulged in all the wrong ways, too many, misshapen, like serpents under his skin. His head was squat and bald, his ears boxy, his eyes dirt-brown and glinting with malice. He looked like a talented but untrained artist’s first attempt to model the human form in clay: an ambitious disaster.

  The crack in the world whipped shut at his back, leaving nothing behind but the faint scent of roses.

  “Adam.” Savannah offered a floating bow, then kicked into a somersault as her crane arm whirred. She spread her arms wide in greeting. “Welcome to the frontier of science.”

  “Dr. Cross,” he rumbled in a gravelly voice. “Dr. Bloch. I’ve come to check on our investment.”

  “The ink trials are proceeding with maximum efficiency. Oh, except for the virus Dr. Bloch attempted to introduce into our database this morning.”

  Adam offered a faintly amused smile. “Did he really?”

  “Hold on, now—” Bloch raised his hands, taking a defensive step backward.

  “He’d rather wallow in the mud as a primate than rise up and dance with the Kings of Man.” Savannah shook her head as she swung closer to Bloch. Her robotic pincers snapped at the air in irritation. “The only real sin in the universe is incuriosity, Dr. Bloch. I’m afraid it’s a mortal sin, too.”

  Bloch’s head swiveled between Savannah and Adam, his face lined with panic.

  “We have to stop this!” He flung out an arm, pointing at the map table. The pins bounced and rippled. “If we continue at this rate, we’re risking more than the lives of every single ink addict. We’re endangering this entire planet.”

  Adam ignored him. He looked to Savannah. “Are you going to take care of this situation, Dr. Cross?”

  Savannah flitted away. A ping from the workstations caught her attention, and she turned her back on the men as she rattled off a fresh email.

  “Already did, twenty minutes ago. Poisoned his coffee. Should be kicking in any minute now.”

  Bloch stared at her, then looked at his empty mug in horror. “What?”

  “Any. Minute. Now,” she repeated, glowering at the clock.

  Bloch began to cough. He fell to his knees, one hand pressed to his heart, the other clutching the rim of the map table. His eyes bulged as he collapsed to the floor, seizing, thrashing like a fish on a hook. He made wet, ragged sounds and retched dark blood onto the pristine tiles. Then he gave one last shuddering gasp and fell still.

  “There we go,” Savannah said. “He died like he lived: missing his cue.”

  “I’ll have him removed,” Adam said.

  One of Savannah’s robot arms shook its pincers from side to side at him, like a wagging head. The silvery runes engraved upon the steel glimmered under the blue lights.

  “Leave it.” She kicked away from the workstation, glided through the air, and landed beside the map table. “I can use it. Always need fresh bodies for something or other. I’m running ten experiments at once here. Twelve’s my current record. Going for thirteen.”

  “Do as you please on your own time, Doctor, but there’s only one project my masters are interested in. Give me an update.”

  Savannah’s human arm swept across the map, taking it all in.

  “We’re maintaining real-time surveillance of geomantic frequencies. Essentially, monitoring the membrane between our world and the Shadow In-Between. As you can see, the stronger pulses are emanating from urban centers where ink distribution is on the upswing. Every addict becomes a living antenna.”

  Adam’s brutish hands clamped down on the rim of the table. His beetle brows furrowed as he watched the metal pins dance. “So they transmit back to us.”

  “For now,” Savannah said. “But that’s the beauty of an antenna. They’re primed to receive.”

  A fistful of pins shot up off the table, soaring from the bed of black oil. They hovered for just a moment before slamming down with an ear-popping squeal. The waters rippled and spat. Savannah put both hands to her mouth. Behind her, her robotic arms bent inward and wrapped her in a mechanical hug.

  “Oh my,” she said behind her hands. “This is interesting.”

  “I’ve learned to be very concerned when you use the word ‘interesting,’” Adam told her, his voice bone-dry.

  “We’ve had a spike of psychic power. A…mind-quake, you could say. In New Jersey, by the looks of it.”

  “We aren’t running any operations in New Jersey,” Adam said. “That wasn’t us.”

  Savannah lowered her hands and beamed. Behind her, the robotic pincers applauded with tiny golf claps.

  “Then we have a conundrum to explore! Delightful.”

  “I am not convinced,” Adam said, “that you are approaching this project with the gravity it deserves. Magic is a primal force, Dr. Cross. It has little regard for your ‘scientific method.’”

  The crane whirred, lifting her high in the air. She floated around the laboratory and spun in a pirouette.

  “Gravity is overrated. And so is magic. It’s just another universal force, Adam, no different from electromagnetism, the strong nuclear, the weak nuclear, or…well…gravity.”

  She landed before him.

  “And as humanity has proved time and time again,” she said, “anything that exists can be quantified, studied, and understood. Magic is no different. By the time my work is done, people will master the powers of magic as simply and easily as they master the power of electricity now: with the flick of a switch, the push of a button.”

  Adam held up a warning finger. “Have a care, Doctor. You’d do well to remember the story of Prometheus.”

  “Stole fire from the gods,” she said. “Gave it to the people. A fine role model for any scientist.”

  “And for his noble efforts, condemned to an eternal torment of being devoured alive.” He loomed over her. His lips curled into a cold, predatory leer. “Just remember who you serve now. We can arrange that for you.”

  Savannah’s eyes narrowed. She gave Bloch’s corpse a petulant kick.

  “Unlike my late and unlamented lab partner, my loyalty should be unquestionable.”

  “I question everyone,” he said. “It’s part of my job. And we are both charged wit
h pleasing some very uncompromising taskmasters. Failure isn’t an option, Doctor. We’ve invested too much money and too much time into this project. Random, unexplainable power surges do not reassure me.”

  “Nothing is unexplainable,” she said. “There’s only the explained and the not-explained-yet.”

  “I want you in the field. Take a team, go to New Jersey, find the source. I want an explanation. And a guarantee that this won’t be a problem for us.”

  “Outside?” Her steel arms hugged her tight. The runes along the metal cast a faint glow across her worried face. “But…me? Outside? I can’t take my arms outside—”

  He cut her off with a glare.

  “That wasn’t a suggestion, Dr. Cross.”

  Nineteen

  “I found something,” Nessa said on the phone.

  Marie’s bus, battling its way through gridlocked traffic, rolled another few inches then jerked hard on its brakes. She jolted in her seat. Leaving the city was a lot faster than coming home again. Still, the sight of New York’s canyons wrapped her in a strong and reassuring embrace. Everything about her visit to Jersey felt wrong, starting with the junkie screaming her name, and ending with a lawyer appearing from nowhere. She felt as though she’d been swimming in murky, black waters, and something had grabbed her by the ankle and hauled her under. Daylight, air, and safety were gone, and she was drowning in the strangling dark.

  Then again, she supposed she’d been feeling that way for a while now. Today just drove the point home.

  “That was fast,” she told Nessa.

  “Well, I am a professional. It’s not much, I’ll tell you that right up front. All the same…dinner?”

  Marie blinked. “Dinner?”

  “Yes, it’s the third meal of the day, generally eaten in the evening. I just finished my last class. So come have dinner with me. Do you like Mediterranean?”

  “I don’t think I’ve tasted enough to say,” Marie replied.

  “Now is the perfect time, then. Meet me at Kashkaval Garden, on Ninth Avenue.”