“I’ll be sure to grow it out the next time my old mates start dabbling in black sorcery.” Liam recrossed his arms. He’d been more at peace while he could still see the rest of his team knock on doors in their march into madness, but they’d long since turned a corner. Now he couldn’t decide if watching magic gone wild was better or worse than watching the more domesticated kind.
Asanti sprinkled water into a copper cup. “Liam does have other hair,” she said. “A few of those would do the trick.”
Liam made a strangled sound. “Like hell are you going to—”
“But blood will be even more effective.”
“Oh, an excellent point!” Frances brightened. She unzipped a little case from her bag and took out a tool that looked like a plastic pen. She fiddled with it.
Asanti set the cup down on the log beside her and reached toward Liam. “Give me your hand.”
“Wait a second, how much blood are we talking about? And does Father Menchú know about this?” A sound drifted toward them, a curious blaring like an orchestra’s trumpet section dying all at once. They all ignored it.
Frances screwed the plastic pen together again. “It’s just a pinprick, Liam. I do it three times a day. It doesn’t really hurt; it only feels like being snapped by a rubber band.” She handed the pen to Asanti.
“My objection is not over whether it’s going to hurt. This is doing outright blood magic! You can’t shuffle your feet and tell me it’s harmless.”
“Liam, do you want to try to stop the Network or not?” Asanti was cold, implacable. He missed the days, not so long ago, when he’d thought she was all grandmotherly warmth and unbridled curiosity. Just one more lost illusion.
He took a deep breath. “And you think this is the only option?”
“We could go from door to door like the rest of Team Three, asking if anyone has seen a woman matching Christina’s description.” Frances adjusted her glasses. “And it’s looking like there aren’t many people home right now. Liam, this isn’t the only option, but it could be substantially more efficient. And time is not on our side.”
Liam took a deep breath, let it out, and gave Asanti his finger. Frances was right. It did feel like being snapped by a rubber band.
2.
The teeming patrons of the Harp and Spear hardly looked up when the Team Three search and rescue trio walked in. The drinkers were all crowded onto benches, slouching on bar stools, or hunched over the bar itself. Nobody was standing away from the bar, Sal noted. Unusual. People generally clustered in little groups to chat in every free bit of floor space where they could get a little of extra elbow room.
It was quieter than it should have been, too. The hushed tenor of conversation seemed more fitting for a library than for a drinking establishment. There was no boisterous laughter. No laughter at all. And, Sal realized after a moment, not one of their glasses had beer in them. Only half of them even had a pint glass to begin with. Come to think of it, the bartender was missing too.
Menchú and Grace followed her in before she could ride that unsettling train of thought to its destination. “Good, there are still people here.” Menchú’s relief was palpable.
He addressed the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, we know there are some strange things going on in your town, and—”
The crowd didn’t even look up. They continued their quiet conversations, heads bent together. Grace tensed, light on the balls of her feet. “Something isn’t right.”
Sal coughed apologetically, then climbed onto the bar. “Attention!” she said in her very best, loudest voice-of-authority. The one that stopped civilians in their tracks every time. “I need your attention, please.”
Nothing. Sal clapped her hands. “Listen up! Your lives are on the line, people, and we can …” She trailed off. The crowd’s nonreaction was complete. She whistled, the piercing two-fingered variety she’d learned in the police academy.
An older gentleman with a fringe of white hair tipped his head to the side, as if he were trying to hear something from far away. Beyond that, nothing.
“What’s wrong with them?” Sal asked. She slid down from the bar.
Menchú was grim. “Magic at work, one way or another. They don’t see us.”
Grace snapped her fingers in front of a patron’s face—a thin-nosed woman with close-cropped hair and a hand-knit sweater. “Hello? Anybody home?” The woman frowned, waved as if trying to shoo a fly, and continued talking to the round-faced matron across from her.
“There has to be a way to get their attention.” Sal cast around for ideas.
“We could set the place on fire.”
Sal wasn’t quite sure whether Grace was serious. “We could just … haul them out?” she mused.
Menchú grimaced. “This is no time for jokes from either of you.”
“I’m not kidding,” Sal said. “What if we just grab someone and try to get them out of the magic circle?”
“I guess it can’t hurt to try.” Menchú nodded toward the person closest to the pub door. A thin man of middling years, ginger but graying, in a Metallica T-shirt, black jeans, and a woolen cap.
“Got him.” Grace put her arms around his waist and pulled.
The ginger man’s mouth opened. It was bottomless and empty, like Horatio the car had been. The man screamed like a thousand modems dialing. His chair’s legs snapped away from the floor, gushing blood. But the seat of the chair stayed attached to the man’s rear.
Every head in the bar swiveled to look at them in perfect unison. “System fault,” they said in chorus. “Rerouting.”
Grace tried again to separate the man from the chair, even while the chair’s leg stumps spurted blood. “It’s all one piece,” she said, setting the chair down again. “Like he’s become a part of the furniture.”
Blood from the broken chair pooled and ran in the cracks between the floorboards. The man closed his mouth, curled his knees up, and whimpered, “Why? Why why why why whyyyy?”
Sal didn’t put her fingers in her ears, but it was a close thing. “What happened to him? Are they all like that?” She pulled tentatively at one man’s elbow, leaning on the bar, but it was firmly stuck there, as if he were a part of it. Which he apparently was. “What’s going on here?”
An answer came, expected or not, from every mouth at once. “We are the Hive now.”
Menchú remained impressively calm. “The Hive? Are you saying you’re all a part of some kind of—”
“Network.” Sal’s hands dropped to her sides. “They’re all a part of the Network.”
“Let’s keep looking,” Menchú said. “We can’t help these people right now, but if the houses were affected piecemeal, surely the people were, too. And if Asanti can figure out how the Network did this, maybe she can reverse it. Everyone could still go back to normal.”
“Let’s hope.”
They left a trail of bloody footprints behind them, and for a dozen or more feet once they’d left the pub.
• • •
Liam’s blood was not as good a beacon as Asanti and Frances had expected. At first everything had gone swimmingly. Liam’s blood went drip-drip into the cup, there was a disconcerting burst of steam, and then Asanti had taken off toward the town like she knew precisely where she was headed.
But the strong start had fizzled before long. They’d walked past the carcass of some slain ear-wheel creature—Grace’s work, if Liam wasn’t mistaken. And then they’d dodged horrors from oozing signposts to grasping shrubbery, heading toward the water. But since then they’d circled the same four blocks for ages, while Asanti stared into her copper cup and argued with herself under her breath.
That was bad enough. But there was worse: Liam could feel the presence of magic all around him, like an acid eating away at his skin and lungs. Dissolving him cell by cell. If he stayed here too long, perhaps nothing would be left of him.
“What’s the problem?” he ventured at last. “Magic not working out for you?”
> “It appears to be working perfectly,” Frances answered. “But the results are confusing.”
Asanti walked ten steps, to where the curb was replaced with oozing honeycomb in the shape of a foot. She shook her head and turned back. “The problem is, according to the charm, we’re surrounded by the Network. This whole area is the Network, apparently.”
Liam peered into the cup, but all he saw was some muddy water. “The work they’ve done is everywhere around us?”
“The people,” Frances corrected him. “According to this, there should be a Network person here, where this honeycomb is. And there should’ve been another on the last block, with the bicycle.”
“The one covered with hair?” Liam had remarked on it. In another setting it would’ve made a memorable shampoo commercial.
“The very one.” Frances kneeled down next to the honeycomb foot and prodded it, then took out a glass tube and collected a sample with a long, thin spoon.
“There’s no place that these readings seem to be centralized,” Asanti told him. “Which is how I’d expected to find the Network’s headquarters—a concentration of all of them working together.”
“Maybe they left after all,” Liam suggested. “They’re idiots, to be sure, but not the kind that would enjoy turning into a part of the landscape. Maybe you’re only seeing pieces of what they left behind.”
Frances put her equipment back in her bag. “Then perhaps we should go from one piece to another,” she said. “Until we’ve found them all. Perhaps one of them will give us a clue if we examine them more closely.”
“So much for being efficient,” Liam said, rubbing his finger. The lancet had left the tip feeling bruised.
“Efficient,” Asanti said, “is for when you have more than one option.”
• • •
Sal’s knuckles ached from knocking on doors, and still she knocked. Just because the people in the pub had been … whatever … that didn’t mean the whole town was. And there was a lot of ground left to cover. Even a small town is big when you’re trying to knock on every door in six hours or less.
Not that it seemed likely to do anybody a lick of good. Besides that Hive collective in the pub, they hadn’t found even a single survivor yet. But that didn’t mean there weren’t any to be found, right? She reminded herself yet again: There was a lot of town to cover.
And maybe some people had escaped Middle Coom already. Maybe they weren’t finding anybody alive because all of them had had the sense to run away.
Then again … She thought about tornadoes, and Tornado Eaters. Sometimes people didn’t want to run away, even if they could. She thought about a restaurant made of meat, and two girls and a man trapped in an apartment overgrown with hair and flesh. Sometimes people couldn’t run away, even if they were alive.
She knocked harder this time. The sound echoed down the empty street and then settled into silence again. Menchú’s knock echoed back a moment later.
And then they heard the bell: the church calling its congregants in for services. The three of them broke into a run toward the noise, avoiding the places where the cobblestones had turned into eyeballs, skipping over the river of ichor spurting from a gnarled mass that might have once been a fire hydrant.
They followed the sound from one pretzel-curved road to another, looking for the source of the tolling bell. It fell silent by the time they found the entrance, but they knew without question that they had the right place.
The church tower remained unaltered by magic. But the rest of the church was a patchwork of weathered stone and black feathers, subtly twitching as if irritated by the breeze. Judging from the rough stonework and the architecture, before it had been enfeathered, the church had probably been standing there for five or six hundred years. Perhaps longer.
Such a shame.
The roof of the church stirred, as if it were a wing that might unfurl, then stilled. Menchú ducked his head to avoid looking. He banged on the heavy wooden door—just ordinary wood, miracle of miracles. A voice called from inside, salty and rough-hewn like the church itself: “Who are you?”
“I am Father Menchú. We’ve been sent from the Vatican. We’re here to help.”
The door groaned open. The priest was a fat man with a boxer’s nose and a model’s lips. “Father Kilpatrick,” he said. He shook Menchú’s hand. “From the Vatican, you say? Do you know what’s going on?” He jutted out his lower lip. “Is it the end times?”
Menchú shook his head. “Not on my watch,” he said. “This is a more local phenomenon.”
Father Kilpatrick leaned hard on the post of the door. “Oh, thank the Lord. Come in, come in,” he said. “Tell me what you know.”
The inside of the church was completely untouched by magic. Possibly because the altar was hung with an enormous silver cross, to all appearances as old as the church itself.
And the church was old, indeed, but well-loved by its congregation. The pews were a bit scratched, the floor cracked in places; banners hung from the rafters—probably fabulously historical, judging from how they were barely rags. For all that, the place was immaculately kept. Not a speck of dust on the windows, not a single scrap of paper on the floor.
A pair of angels trumpeted salvation in stained glass on either side of the sanctuary. Sal stared at them, trying to find some resemblance to Aaron, the one angel she’d met. Something about the eyes, perhaps, but it was just as likely she was imagining it.
She turned her attention to the small congregation present; the priest was far from alone. There were eight other people assembled in the little church: a pair of older ladies, a couple of younger fishermen, an extremely pregnant young woman holding a napping toddler on her hip, and some backpack-laden tourists having the hiking vacation of a lifetime. They were a very long way from Hong Kong.
Every one of them was alert, watching Menchú and glancing at one another for reassurance. Better, none of them looked to be permanently attached to the furniture.
Sal crouched to pretend to check her shoelaces so she could hide her face for a moment. She waffled from high to low. There were survivors. They’d found survivors. Only nine, out of a town of—what was the population? Several hundred? So few, so few. But they could still save somebody, and that was worth something.
It took her a moment to regain her equilibrium and put her game face back on. No place for feelings on the job. But thank God there was a job to do, after all. When she stood back up, the conversation had already passed over the introductions.
“What happened here?” Menchú asked. “Or do you even know?”
Kilpatrick spread his hands wide, a supplicant. “Wish we did. The first I learned anything was going on was this morning, round about seven, when Mrs. Graham here asked me to call on her sister.” He nodded at one of the old ladies.
Mrs. Graham chimed in, the words gushing out of her like a popped water balloon. “Erin turned up as part of her bed when I tried to wake her this morning, nothing but sheets and coverlets all the way down. I thought to bring in the Father, y’see, because it didn’t seem properly medical to me and I thought it must be devils. And it was devils, right? The work of Satan’s own dark hand?” She was triumphant at being right, to the exclusion of being concerned for her sister.
Menchú cleared his throat, but before he had to come up with a diplomatic answer, his local counterpart had swept back in.
“After that,” Father Kilpatrick said, “we started hearing similar stories from all over town. And worse! Cars being sucked into the town square; a freak wave turned Mrs. O’Shea into a statue made of coal. Furniture sprouting wings and flying away! I hear Rory Duncan like to melted her poor little face off, and she was such a pretty girl, too.” He made the sign of the cross, and then a few times more, for good measure.
The local congregation crossed themselves as well. The Hong Kong tourists hung back, whispering to each other.
“Do you have any idea where this all started?” Sal focused resolutely on sol
ving the problem. “Someplace where things happened first, or worst? I don’t suppose you have anyone in town who collects old, rare books?”
Father Kilpatrick shook his head, then looked to the rest of the survivors.
“There’s been some visitors at the bed-and-breakfast,” Mrs. Graham said. She turned a frosty gaze toward the tourists. “Not foreign folk, but strange as all get-out. Anna tells me they stay in their room like honeymooners, no hiking or nothing, but they brought a great lot of boxes inside. She said she saw all manner of wires and such, like they was deep into the real filth, tying one another up and so on. Kept blowing her fuses, too, she said.”
Sal blinked a minute, trying to incorporate this dirty speculation into the image she had formed of Mrs. Graham as a kindly busybody. “The Network was at the bed-and-breakfast,” she said, “so that’s where Liam and Asanti and Frances should be looking. We have to tell them.”
Menchú flinched. “There’s no way to reach them. We’ll have to hope they can find the right place on their own. For now we need to focus on this.” He nodded at the nine survivors.
“Can you help us?” the pregnant woman asked. She held the sleeping child’s head tight to her shoulder.
“Y’sure you don’t want me to hold her, Lizzie? You should be taking it easy.” One of the fishermen hovered beside her.
“I’m fit enough, if we just get away from here,” Lizzie snapped. “I can rest when we’re safe.”
Sal looked back toward the church doors, safely shut behind them. “We can help you, if you come with us. We can protect you from anything prowling the streets. Once we get you over the town border, you should be in the clear.”
“Sounds as good a plan as any,” Mrs. Graham said, dubious. “So we just … walk out, through all that madness?”
“That’s the idea. Follow me,” Sal said. “And please, go as fast as you can.”
3.
“Bookburners!” The voice was thready and attenuated, like a radio station coming from a thousand miles away. Liam jumped, fists up, but no imminent danger presented itself. Just the same old Middle Coom street. Here the cobblestones had grown into mighty boulders of ice, with shadows flitting inside of them. Asanti frowned into her copper cup, navigating around the hazard in search of some evidence of the Network’s presence.
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