Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Nothing you can help me with.”

  “Okay.”

  The woman sat there, seemingly content to let the silence linger undisturbed. Liam stared at his beer. He took a sip. It didn’t taste like much.

  There was something else. Something beyond his own memories or the fallout shelter. Something with the pub…

  “Do you see any spiders in here?” he asked the woman. The question was abrupt, out of nowhere. She wasn’t bothered by it.

  She looked around. Eyes scanning carefully in the dark corners of the room before returning to him. “No. Not really.”

  “This pub was full of spiders.”

  “When?”

  “Earlier.” Liam looked around the room. “I guess they’re gone now.”

  “Are spiders in the local pub a frequent problem in this village?”

  “No. Well, kind of. Not specifically.”

  The woman raised an eyebrow. “Not specifically?”

  Liam sat back in his chair. “Not specifically spiders.”

  “Tell me about it,” she offered. “Maybe I can help.”

  The pub was quiet. And she was easy to talk to. So Liam told her about the algae, and the spiders, and the complex systems, although he left out the beta test and the Network’s projects because while his balls might be a little sore still, that didn’t mean that he wanted Christina to remove them for him.

  The woman nodded, and listened, and didn’t interrupt until Liam was finished. “Have you thought that it might be a systemic issue?”

  “Yeah. But hell if I know where the vermin are coming from.”

  “Couldn’t you isolate the systems you’re interested in? Use an aquarium, or an ant colony, something you can control?”

  “That would kind of be missing the whole point, right there.”

  A light of recognition sparked in the woman’s eyes. “Of course, that’s why you’re called the Network.”

  Liam reached out to grab her arm. The woman flinched. “What do you know about the Network?”

  “Nothing.”

  Liam could practically smell the lie coming off her. But whatever he might have said next was cut off by the door to the pub swinging open with a bang.

  Christina was livid. As angry as Liam had ever seen her. He didn’t think this was about the non-working relays, or even the fact that he was drinking when he was supposed to be working.

  Barely drinking, Liam pointed out to himself.

  Christina glared at Asanti.

  “Get the hell out.”

  Asanti was unbothered by Christina’s snarl. “I have as much right to be here as you do. Liam doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “I mind,” said Christina.

  Beside Liam, Asanti coughed. And kept coughing. And then she wasn’t coughing because she couldn’t inhale.

  Liam wondered if he should give her the Heimlich or something. What was she choking on? She never had gotten a drink. Where was the landlord? It was like he had… vanished.

  The way Grace had.

  The way Asanti did.

  Right before his eyes. One instant she was sitting in the pub, and the next she was gone.

  Liam turned back to Christina, still standing in the doorway of the pub, perfectly calm. “What the fuck just happened?” he demanded.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “A woman just vanished and you ask, ‘What do you mean?’”

  “She didn’t vanish,” said Christina.

  “She didn’t?”

  “She got up, and she left. You must have been distracted.”

  “Distracted?”

  “You’ve had a long day. Maybe you should take a rest.”

  Christina took Liam by the hand and guided him over to the chenille-covered couch in his bedroom.

  Wait. That wasn’t right.

  “How did we get here?”

  Christina pressed Liam’s shoulders until he sat down, and then slid herself onto his lap. “What do you mean? We walked.”

  “No, we were in the pub, and then we were here. How did that happen?”

  “Okay, it’s time for you to take a break.” Christina’s fingers found the hem of Liam’s T-shirt and began working it up his chest. “I’ve been pushing you too hard. I’m sorry.”

  As she said it, Liam realized it was true. He was exhausted, had been for weeks. He’d been working so hard for so long. He should take a break. Especially if they were taking the kind of break that Christina seemed to have in mind.

  He looked into her eyes, two black pools. They were so deep, as though they went on forever.

  He heard her voice in his ear. “This time, I’ll show you the vastness.”

  Show me the vastness, Liam.

  The words echoed in his memory. But a memory that did not match this place, this past. He caught Christina’s wrists. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are we doing this?”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “I thought we needed to get the relays running for the beta test.”

  “They can wait.”

  “With the Bookburners already onto us?”

  Christina’s hands on his chest stilled.

  “What the hell is going on here, Christina?” He remembered the first question the American woman had asked him by the pond. “Where is this place?”

  He felt Christina’s nails dig in at his ribs, and the fatigue he’d felt was suddenly exponentially stronger, coming on him like a wave. His vision dimmed. And with the last bit of strength he had, Liam pushed Christina off his lap, forced himself to his feet, and stumbled blindly out the door and into the night.

  5.

  As Liam got farther from the flat, his head began to clear. Eventually, he let his steps slow, legs and lungs burning, trying to make sense of what was happening. The night was dark, but not completely. Windows glowed in a few of the houses. The streetlights flickered on and off. A dull glow came from the direction of the pub.

  The glow was accompanied by the sound of people shouting. A lot of people. A mob, carrying torches, and moving toward him.

  Oh, fuck.

  Confronted with the threat of an angry mob bearing torches (with or without pitchforks—Liam wasn’t eager to let them get close enough to find out), Liam ran for shelter. Since there were no windmills handy, he went for the other traditional option for those in need of sanctuary: a church.

  Liam entered the small stone building and took a moment to lean his weight against the doors while he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior.

  It wasn’t a large space, just a single room with a few side niches and four rows of pews. The sanctuary was lit with candles that filled the space with a warm flickering glow.

  At the front, near the altar, stood a priest.

  He turned, and saw Liam looking at him. “Do you know me?” he asked.

  Liam studied his tanned features, his dark mustache. Certainly not Father Murnan from his childhood. “Should I?” Liam asked.

  The priest waved this away, as though it was an unimportant detail. “In this place? Maybe not.”

  “What is going on here?” Liam asked.

  The priest sighed. “I’m honestly not sure.”

  Liam, who had been walking toward the altar, plunked down into the front pew at this pronouncement. “Well, pardon my French, but that’s really fucking helpful, Father.”

  “Menchú.”

  “Huh?”

  “Father Menchú.”

  “Oh. Well, pardon my French, Father Menchú, but that’s really fucking helpful.”

  “That’s often the case with the truth, unfortunately,” Menchú said. “But that doesn’t mean that we can avoid it indefinitely. Eventually, it will come after you.”

  He said this with sufficient weight that Liam suspected the priest wasn’t speaking hypothetically. “Are you trying to tell me that I’ve been avoiding the truth?”

 
“For all the years that I’ve known you. You weren’t without your reasons for doing so, and it didn’t seem to do you any harm, so I thought it best to let you find your truth in your own time. However, I think those reasons may have outlived their usefulness.” A pause. “I’m sorry about that.”

  The dim sound of people chanting from outside didn’t easily penetrate the thick stone walls of the church, but it was there, and growing incrementally louder.

  “What truth have I been hiding from? That that woman was right? That I’ve been working as a Bookburner? Or is the big bombshell supposed to be that none of this”—he gestured to the room around him—“is real?”

  If Father Menchú was either disappointed or impressed by Liam’s deductions about the nature of reality, he didn’t show them. “This place might not exist in the strictest sense of the word,” he said, “but that was not the self-deception that I was speaking of.”

  “Are you going to quit beating around the bush and tell me what you are speaking of? Or are we just going to stick with the vague hints until the mob shows up?”

  “The mob might be kinder.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be dead. Spill it.”

  “Do you remember going to Prague, a little less than ten years ago?”

  Liam snorted. “With you?”

  “No. With Christina.”

  And that brought Liam up short. Because of course he remembered Prague.

  • • •

  Sweden had been amazing. The days were a rush and the nights went on forever. Liam had given up sleeping so long ago that the others didn’t even bother to remark on it anymore. “That’s just Liam. He doesn’t sleep.” It was all the fun of drugs without the side effects. Well, there was one side effect, but Liam was so busy sucking down life and work and Christina that he didn’t have time to breathe most days, let alone worry about the state of his immortal soul.

  Besides, the thing in his head never called itself a demon.

  But Sweden was just a stopover, somewhere between an alibi and a test run for the real objective: Prague.

  They found the site inside the Old City through a combination of research, magic, and Liam’s gut. Prague had always been a bit of a nexus for magic; the first known golem being made there was only the most well-known example. Even the least-sensitive skeptic had to admit there was something strange going on in a city that inspired people to throw their political enemies out of windows every two hundred years or so. And with the help of his little passenger, Liam had found the source of that strangeness: where two ley lines intersected precisely on the border between Western and Central Europe. An intersection and a border combined, which was the perfect place to bring things together.

  They’d smuggled in the supplies themselves, unobserved by elderly neighbors still habituated by years of Soviet rule to keeping themselves out of anyone’s business but their own. The small, ground-floor flat had been stripped to the studs, floor taken up and old foundations scraped away until the bare earth was exposed. The only concessions to human habitation were the remains of a kitchenette still intact along one wall and a bed tucked into the opposite corner. Piles of computer equipment covered everywhere else.

  No one knew what the equipment was for, not even Christina. Well, not officially. If she had her theories, she had kept them to herself. In fact, she’d agreed to go along with the project so quickly that he suspected she knew exactly what was going on. But she let him pretend that she had no idea what he was planning when he kissed her goodbye and boarded a train bound for the Czech Republic.

  His hands shook, and not from the cold of the Continental winter—not just from that, anyway—as he made the final connections. The computers had been laid out precisely, in positions on the dirt floor that Liam knew were vital, even if he did not consciously understand why. Knowing wasn’t important, only doing. The layout connected the computers to the earth, the cables connected the computers to each other. Liam lifted the final wire, the one that would connect him to everything.

  He hadn’t been afraid before he made the connection. There was excitement, certainty that he was about to experience the wonder of the universe and the universal consciousness in all of its power and glory, amen.

  Once he made the connection, there had been no room for fear. His entire existence was reduced to a white-hot overload of information and consilience that no human brain was designed to accommodate, and horrible, unbearable pain.

  He couldn’t tell if it lasted for seconds or years. Time stretched and compressed simultaneously. He lost all sense of his body, except that his flesh was being stretched beyond bearing, as though he was being pulled apart at the edge of a black hole. Until it stopped.

  Christina had followed him, broken the connection. Taken him back to the village to recover, and begin the work again.

  No.

  That wasn’t what had happened. He remembered.

  He remembered everything.

  • • •

  Liam looked at the priest. At Father Menchú. How had he forgotten Father Menchú? “It was you. Prague was where you found me.”

  He nodded. “Whatever you were doing lit up the Orb like we’d never seen before. We found you alone, connected to a network of machines all working with no visible power source. We pulled you out. You were in a coma for weeks.”

  Liam didn’t remember the coma, but he remembered that part of the story being explained to him before, when he had woken up. “I remember what we were doing now. I didn’t then,” he added, hastily. “Honestly, I didn’t lie to you.”

  “I know,” said Menchú. “The only person you ever lied to was yourself.”

  A pause.

  “I punched Grace in the face.”

  “She’ll forgive you. But only if you survive this.”

  “How do I get out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But Asanti just vanished. Grace too. Can’t I do that somehow?”

  “We’ve been reaching you through the Orb because you’re still linked to it. The Network either doesn’t know that, or hasn’t figured out how to disconnect you from it. But we’re not connected to whatever this world is in the same way you are. It’s easy for us to leave because at a fundamental level we don’t belong. That’s not the case for you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “If we could find your body, we might be able to help. I don’t suppose you know where the Network would have taken you?”

  Liam shook his head.

  The shouting outside was getting louder.

  “Then you’re going to have to find a way to wake yourself up.”

  Liam tried to think. Now that his own mind had come back to him—and more of it than he’d had in a long time, but he couldn’t dwell on that now—he could recognize the bits and pieces that surrounded him. “The village feels like a mash-up of a couple different places in Ireland. The pub is from around Kinsale, this church was in a town outside Dublin. It must be easier for Christina to fool my brain into thinking that this place is familiar if most of the landmarks actually are.”

  Menchú nodded. “Even if that means that you really are in Ireland, that’s still a larger area than our team can effectively search.”

  Liam nodded, not really paying attention. He realized that it wasn’t just the pub, or the church. Everything in the village was familiar. Except for one place. And when he’d gone there, it had warned him away with a feeling of foreboding and an actual fucking warning sign. And when those didn’t work, it had bounced him out. Hard.

  Liam risked a look out one of the church’s narrow windows. The mob outside had nearly reached them, but he still had a little room to work with.

  “Liam?” Menchú’s voice broke into his thoughts.

  “I need to get to the edge of town.”

  Menchú did not waste time asking him why. “What can I do?”

  “Think you can distract the angry mob?”

  Menchú, or the projection of Menchú in his mind, or what
ever it was, smiled. “I can do that.”

  • • •

  Liam ran. He hadn’t asked what Menchú had in mind for mob-distraction tactics. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The mob hadn’t spotted him as he left the church, and that was good enough for him.

  The distraction wouldn’t last for very long. He was trying to hide inside a world that might have been constructed out of pieces of his memories, but which was ultimately controlled by someone else. The minute Christina realized that he wasn’t where she thought he was she’d be right on his heels. Before that happened, he had to get to the fallout shelters.

  It could be a futile gesture. But part of what had gone wrong in Prague was that he had been so focused on finding a way to connect to the network he had built for himself, it hadn’t occurred to him until it was too late that he hadn’t thought to put in a way out. The Society would have destroyed the remains of his setup when they found him, and even Christina hadn’t known all of the details. But Liam wasn’t the only one who knew what he had been doing.

  He had, after all, had a passenger at the time.

  If Christina had found the demon, or the demon had found Christina, she would be aware of his previous error, and would have corrected it. Even if she wasn’t in league with evil magical spirits, she’d always been smarter than he was. That was part of what the demon had promised him: “You’ll never be good enough for her, not on your own. And once she knows who you really are, you’ll lose her.”

  Of course, he’d lost her anyway. That was the way demons worked. But while he’d been possessed, he hadn’t cared. Afterward, he’d been too busy hating himself to love anyone.

  Liam could hear the voices behind him now. Imagined he could feel the heat of the torches getting closer. He didn’t look back. Couldn’t afford to. He was nearly there.

  The fallout shelters loomed. The door visibly rattled against its frame. Liam didn’t even break his stride. His secrets couldn’t hurt him anymore. He knew their shape and their stature. They were terrible. But the only cure for what lurked in the darkness was the light.

  Liam hit the door running with all of his strength, holding nothing back. He felt it shatter, and he found himself face to face with the terrible thing inside.

  Liam skidded to a stop.