“Damn it, Black,” I muttered. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
I clicked on a few more subfolders. A lot of those subfolders contained subfolders, too. Seeing one called images-M, I clicked on it, only to find it full of pictures of me, pretty much at every age. He even had baby pictures of me.
Another folder, named images-S had pictures of my sister, Zoe.
Some of those, I didn’t even have. A few I’d never even seen.
He had another folder, images-P, that turned out to contain pictures of my parents. Only then did the “S” make sense for Zoe.
Parents. Sister.
Two other folders lived among the image files as well, one labeled, Faustus? (with the question mark), and the other labeled Phaelen.
Opening both, I was surprised when I recognized the people in those pictures, too.
Images in the “Faustus” folder turned out to be of my Uncle Charles, the only blood relative of Dad’s I’d ever met. “Phaelen” was one of mom’s old friends, “Uncle Phil,” a man who hadn’t been an actual blood relative, but someone we’d treated as one.
I hadn’t seen either of them since before my parents died, when I was ten years old.
We’d spent a lot of time with them as kids, going on camping and kayaking trips a few times of year, as well as the more usual barbecues and dinners and birthday parties. We’d visited Uncle Charlie at his house in Big Basin at least a few times a year in addition to all that, often spending the whole weekend and hiking to the coast.
The last time I’d asked about either of them, my mom’s sister told me Uncle Phil was sick, cancer maybe, and living overseas. I never heard anything concrete about Uncle Charlie, but the rumor was he’d come out as gay and was living with his boyfriend somewhere in Asia.
I’d considered asking Nick to help me track them down. I came close to approaching him with it a few times, but in the end, I decided to leave them alone.
If either of them had wanted to stay in touch, they would have.
I didn’t even know if they knew about Zoe’s murder.
Looking at their faces now in the images on the screen, how happy and carefree they looked in most of those pictures, I couldn’t help but see that happiness as indifference. I felt my throat tighten as I realized just how much of my past I’d shoved into the untidy attic spaces belonging to the time before my parents turned up dead.
Mostly, I wanted to forget any of it ever happened.
Uncle Charles and I had been close. Closer than me and my dad in some ways.
He hadn’t so much as dropped a condolences note when his brother and his brother’s wife died. He hadn’t even bothered with a postcard for Zoe.
Feeling my throat tighten more, I closed the file, fighting to blank my mind. The emotional rollercoaster I’d been on for the past few months didn’t make that easier. I found myself back there again, in that period after Mom and Dad were first gone, when I’d tried a lot harder to keep those sparks alive for Zoe. But then Zoe turned up dead, and all of it had been for nothing. I knew some part of me would never forgive any of them for not being there. My uncles who disappeared. My mom’s family, who just didn’t understand.
Some part of me hated all of them a little. Even Mom and Dad.
Rubbing my eyes angrily, I shoved it out of my mind yet again, forcing myself to focus on the task in front of me.
Other folders contained pictures of more distant relatives.
Pretty much all of those were Mom’s family.
Pictures of my grandparents on my mother’s side, including the grandfather who’d made the orca and stars pendant I now wore around my neck. He’d died while I was over in Afghanistan, during the war. I’d been working for intelligence by then and didn’t even find out until the funeral was already over and he was in the ground.
Fighting that worsening tightness in my chest as I clicked through pictures, I struggled again with just how much of my childhood and past I’d shoved under that carpet. It all came rushing back now as I looked at pictures of family gatherings up north, potlucks and pow-wows by the fires on the northwest coast. Pictures of me and Uncle Charles, holding paddles next to kayaks. Pictures of my dad and me fishing. Pictures of my mom and my grandmother, laughing over some story while they sat by the fire.
Pictures of relatives whose names I’d forgotten but whose faces and smiles I remembered. Pictures of aunts and cousins I’d stopped calling and stopped writing, even on social media.
Eventually it was too much. I got out of the picture folders altogether.
Still, I wondered... even as I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand for the third or fourth time since I’d started this... how the hell Black managed to find all of this stuff.
Clearing my throat, I went back up to the main M folder.
I would deal with the emotional side of trying to forget my family later. For now, I needed to find whatever the hell Black had been pointing me towards.
I found at least two more blood tests in another subfolder, and what looked like a scanned image of a family tree, that time written in a language I recognized but couldn’t read. It was the written form of a Native American language from one of the tribes my mother came from.
Frowning, I closed that file, too.
Did Black just want me to know he had all this? Or was it proof of something about me? A record of how I came to be? Was this his way of confessing he’d been investigating me in his spare time?
Of course, I’d more or less known that.
He hadn’t hid any part of his fascination around where I came from and what I was––not from the first day we met. He’d told me outright that he intended to look into my background once he realized I hadn’t come through any “door” the way he had, but I’d actually been born in this version of Earth, to at least one human parent.
Hell, I’d wanted him to look into it.
I wanted answers too, probably a lot more than he did.
But why would Black want me to look at this now? Was there something here I could use against Lucky? Or did he want me to destroy it so Lucky wouldn’t know what I was?
I came across another document with a list of words I couldn’t read, only this time those words came with numbers. Like some of the others, it had been scanned from a hard-copy.
At the bottom, I recognized Black’s handwriting in English.
Overall rank estimates:
Potential: 8, maybe even 9 (???!!)
Actual: 2-2.3 tops.
Mostly blocking and misdirection. Pretty much a zero in combat skills, tracking, anything offensive, most defensive arts. Pretty much a zero in pushes and illusory skills. I doubt she’s done much memory work or jumps, if any at all. I’m not even sure she’s aware of 90% of skill sets. Father must have taught her to hide her race.
I felt my heart beating harder by the end.
He was talking about me.
Black said something to me in Thailand about how he couldn’t use me much yet, mostly because I had “zero combat experience” in what he called sight-skill.
He’d never come out and said it, but we’d both assumed that if I had a seer parent, it had to be my dad. He’d been an orphan, with almost no family. My mother had family documented back for hundreds of years according to one tribe in her bloodline.
If I had to hazard a guess, this was Black ranking me in some way.
Trying to, anyway.
I didn’t understand the “potential” part, although I could guess. He probably meant that could be my score if I was properly trained, since training seemed to be a big deal to him. I had no idea what the numbers meant though, since I had no idea what scale he was using. And what was with all the question marks? Did that mean he was just guessing? Or did it mean the number seemed wrong to him in some way?
Sighing, I closed that document too.
Closing the folder marked M in frustration, I went up a level to Blackfish.
Another folder in there, a few dozen lines
above M, was called Histories.
That ended up being the folder that finally had something in it I could read.
The very first document I opened consisted of a basic word processing document––in English. After I’d scanned through the first few paragraphs, I found myself thinking Black himself had likely written this.
…unfortunately I never learned much beyond the basics on Myth tenets in the camps or even with Johan. He was significantly more interested in watching his friends fuck me for favors and money than he was in teaching me anything remotely useful...
I winced, grimacing at the end.
It crossed my mind that maybe Black wouldn’t be all that thrilled I was reading this.
On the other hand, my options were limited in terms of learning anything that might actually be useful, and he was the one who directed me to look here.
After going back and forth in my mind a few more times, I went back to reading, doing my best to skim over the parts that came across as more personal.
... later I got a little more from the rebels while I was being recruited, but I’d only been with them a few years before I came through the door. Most of that time they were still testing me and trying to figure out if I could stand up to pressure or torture if I got caught during an op. My handler, Wreg, was a good guy… definitely an ideologue, though. They never abused me at least, or anyone else in their team that I saw. I’m pretty sure what he taught me was the real deal too, straight out of the original commentaries. Rumor had it he fought with Syrimne in the original rebellion, so knew some of those histories firsthand. I wish I’d had a few more years with him before I’d fallen through the door…
The door. I’d heard Black make reference to the door before, if only in passing.
He’d never mentioned anyone named Wreg to me before, but clearly he’d known him in that other version of Earth. It was strange to think of him having a whole other life in another world. He’d been a soldier there, too, he’d said.
He told me he came here––to this version of Earth––in the early 1950s.
I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around that either, and not only because he looked closer to thirty than the ninety-odd years he claimed to have been alive.
I was pretty sure “the door” was his shorthand for however he’d traveled from that dimension to this one.
I scanned further down the page.
... only fragments of the religion from my world show up here at all, and most of that is from indigenous peoples on different continents. Most of those original cultures are practically gone, wiped out. Their descendants have been culturally assimilated by the dominant human cultures, which are surprisingly similar to the ones on the other side of the door...
As far as those like me, who also come from Old Earth, I’ve definitely seen crossover with what I learned in the camps and the version of the Myths being taught by L. here. Unfortunately, I wasn’t trained well enough in either to be able to pick apart the differences. I suspect L. has at least one of the original texts. For all I know they’ve already been modified by him to reflect his own biases, though...
L. That had to mean Lucky.
I kept reading, again skimming past segments that seemed more personal.
... the use of the triskelion originated with the Evolutionists, I think. I only ever saw it used by that group, the same one behind the big terrorist attacks in Egypt, Syria and Italy back on Old Earth in the 1920s. I don’t know what it means to L. or to his followers. The fact that Ian was carving that on all of his victims has to mean something, though...
Triskelion.
That was the three interlocking spirals. I’d looked the symbol up following the whole mess with the Wedding Murders, and it turned out to be very old, dating at least back to Neolithic times in Western and Eastern Europe. Like a handful of other archetypal symbols, the triskelion had arisen in different forms across many different cultures, including Celtic, Ancient Greek, Tibetan, Japanese, Italian, English, Maltese.
Most of its meanings were positive.
If Black’s journal was accurate, it meant something different on “Old Earth,” though. Kind of like the swastika did after the Nazis used it.
I went back to reading his words.
... most of the original Evolutionists or “Mythers” were human, but it was always rumored a seer led them. Maybe the same one Johan mentioned as “Patron.” Wreg didn’t know much about that. I asked him once, but he just said the Evolutionists were “wackos” with a poor understanding of the original texts. Wreg was a pretty good guy, for a terrorist...
I paused on the word. Terrorist.
Black never told me who he’d been soldiering for, while he lived on that other Earth. Now he’d mentioned recruitment and called the person who’d been his handler a terrorist. Given that seers had been enslaved in that other world, I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me, but I couldn’t help wondering exactly what it meant.
Frowning, I scanned further down the text.
... from what I recall, the Evolutionists mostly disappeared after World War II. They were only really notable in that they had a lot of human converts... probably because they were big on keeping the races separate and “in their place.” From what Johan told me, the Evolutionists thought each race had a specific role to play and that deviation from that role was blasphemy. It seems L’s people brought a lot of that bullshit here...
I frowned, skimming more text.
Most of it read like a diary of sorts, or maybe like a mental dump––Black’s attempt to document everything he could remember from Old Earth. Maybe he wanted a record of that other place, some way to connect the dots between his home world and this one.
Maybe he just didn’t want to forget, and this was a way to keep alive his memories. It struck me as more than that though, even from the small amount I’d read.
He was trying to figure something out, something that didn’t sit right with him. Maybe it had something to do with why he ended up here in the first place, why any of them ended up here.
Maybe Black thought there was some reason behind it.
As I skimmed, I saw him writing a lot about history.
It wasn’t any history I knew, though.
A lot of it discussed a version of World War II where Hitler employed seers on the battlefront alongside humans, using them as spies, assassins, even war generals. In Black’s version of that war, the Nazis also gassed people they didn’t like, but they gassed seers as well––rounding them up in concentration camps along with Jews and Poles and gypsies and homosexuals and whoever else.
Seers had medical experiments done on them too, which maybe wasn’t that surprising. The Nazis tried to isolate their seer traits. They also tried to create hybrids, mainly in an attempt to infuse humans with seer abilities. Apparently the Hitler in Black’s world dreamed of creating a master race with psychic and even telekinetic abilities.
Black’s version of the Nazis also made a practice of slashing seers’ faces with knives so they could be easily ID’d for what they were.
Here and there Black transcribed what appeared to be citations, even quotes, but I didn’t recognize any of those, either. Most talked about historical events and people that didn’t sound like they came from this version of Earth. Even the ones that sounded vaguely familiar struck me as excerpts he’d memorized from “Old” Earth.
Frankly, most of it was more confusing than really helpful.
I did find scanned pages from two books that appeared to be from here, both of them fiction. He’d highlighted specific passages, circling them with ink and writing, “Seers??” in the margins of the pages. He told me once that he spent a lot of his spare time looking for others of his kind living here, on this version of Earth.
He’d even talked a little bit on the plane ride back from Bangkok about that.
Frowning, I went back to the folder with the orca and the three stars.
I would read the histories too––but only aft
er I’d looked through every single file in the folder where Black actually directed me to look.
That time, I decided to be methodical.
I started at the beginning.
Seven
CHURCH
HE STOOD IN the back, where he could see the whole room.
On the altar up front, candles burned––so many of them, the altar itself appeared to be ablaze. Black scanned faces, taking note of how many appeared human and how many seer. He didn’t use his psychic ability to verify his tally; he knew he likely missed a few seers as a result, those who could pass more easily for human.
He knew he was being watched. There had to be at least three hundred people inside the underground church, all of them chanting the same words.
He felt eyes on him though.
Something was wrong.
Iltere ak selen’te dur Hulen-ta...
Isre arendelir d’goro anse vik-renme
Isre l’ange si nedri az’lenm
Isre ti’a ali di’ sule-tuum...
The light of the ritual made him sick. It made his stomach hurt.
He could feel the silver lines criss-crossing over the church.
Hard light. Metal light.
He remembered that from the Old World, too.
He’d been drowning in that silver crap since he got here. It reminded him of working for the rebels in his home world, as a kid. They’d been the good guys, the bad guys––all of that had been so mixed up in those years, and not only because he was too young to really understand the difference.
Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) Page 9