Frances tipped her head to the side. “Did you hear that?”
“Bookburners!” came the voice again.
Frances scanned their environs, then did a spectacular double take. “There,” she said, clutching her knuckles to her mouth. She pointed at the ground a dozen feet ahead of them.
There was a face embedded in a grassy patch of garden, the fleshy edges quivering loose like a whisper at the edge of a candle flame. Liam crouched over it, staring. A pair of watery blue eyes stared back. They looked awfully familiar. “Opie?”
“Who is Opie?” Frances asked.
“One of my old ‘friends’ from the Network,” Liam growled. “One of the ones who kidnapped me, and have nipped at our heels every step we’ve taken the last few months.”
The lashes fluttered, the lips curled open. “Liam. It is you.” Opie’s voice was reedy, but definitely his own. “Liam, I’m so glad you’re here.”
A set of fingers a few yards away wriggled at them. Liam couldn’t shake the idea that those were Opie’s fingers. They were about the right shade of pallid. Maybe that honeycomb had been Opie’s foot, too. Maybe Asanti’s copper cup of Liam’s blood had been leading them all around to various parts of Opie the whole time.
“Like fuck you’re glad I’m here.” Liam stood on one foot and hovered the other boot over Opie’s face.
“Wait! Stop!” Opie wailed.
“Give me a reason.” Liam wished he had a cigarette, just to flick ashes at Opie while he was helpless.
Opie coughed. “I’ve had time to reflect on my choices,” he said. “And I have a few regrets. Liam, out of anyone, you should understand where I am right now.”
Frances took out her sampling tool and used it to prod at the edge of Opie’s face. It peeled up from the dirt like a piece of fruit leather. “Ow! Jesus, that hurts, cut it out!” Opie whined. “Listen, I want to talk to you! Maybe we can strike a bargain.”
Asanti squatted next to Opie, gathering her skirt at her ankles. “It looks like you’re in a bit of a situation, aren’t you? Not the strongest negotiating position.”
Opie turned a mottled, apoplectic red. “You’d think that, Bookburner. But I know things that you don’t. I’ve seen things you can’t imagine. Look around you at what I’ve done!”
Frances pulled a pair of tweezers out of her bag and plucked one of Opie’s eyebrow hairs.
“Ow, stop it!”
“Why in the world would you do this to yourself on purpose?” Frances stared at Opie’s face with mingled revulsion and fascination.
“I didn’t,” Opie hissed. “This wasn’t the plan at all.”
Asanti leaned in closer. “So what was the plan?”
“Magic computing. Unlocking the secrets of ultimate power.” Liam got the feeling Opie had said those words a thousand times, but never before with such bitterness. “We’ve been building the system for years now, and scaling up and up. Each time we ironed it out a little more and got closer and closer to the dream. Liam, you were there at the start of it all, but you have no idea how far we’ve come. How much we learned.” Opie beamed with pride, an expression that curled the edges of his face in unsettling ways.
“And it didn’t work? Serves you right.” Liam snorted.
“No, no, it went perfectly.” Even in his current predicament, Opie took on a fresh layer of arrogant scorn. “We do good work, Liam. You should know that.”
Liam raised his boot over Opie’s face again. “Spill it, numbnuts, before I get to feeling stompy.”
“Wait! Stop! The thing is, it worked, it’s just that there were unanticipated side effects.”
“So we see,” Frances murmured. She’d placed Opie’s eyebrow hair in a plastic specimen bag; now she pulled out a small packet of cotton swabs.
Asanti laid a hand on Liam’s knee to steer his foot away from Opie. “Let’s start over from the beginning, Opie.”
“My name’s not Opie, you know,” he said. “It’s Roger. Do a kindness to a dying man and at least call me by my proper name.”
“Roger.”
Opie took a rattling breath. “The goal of the Network is to harness the world we live in to channel magical power. Like turning the fabric of reality into a magical circuit board, right? Everything in this little town is a part of it. The shifting of the tides, which flowers the bees go to, even the brains and bodies of all the people here are caught up in it. A massive hive mind operating behind the scenes.”
“That’s amazing,” Frances breathed.
“It’s miserable,” Opie snapped. “All this oneness and acceptance for each other. You can’t control the Hive, you’re just a part of it. Every second I can feel myself slipping away. Do you know what it’s like to completely lose yourself?”
Liam frowned. “As it happens, yes.”
Frances held a cotton swab near Opie’s lips. “Do you think you could open—”
Asanti cut her off. “How, Opie?… Roger. Tell us how you did it.”
“Wait! This is a bargain, not a surrender. I’m telling you a lot, and I need you to promise me something in exchange.”
“Let me guess,” Liam said. “You want us to bring you with us when we leave. Rescue you.”
“Nah. I wish, but nah.” A manful tear leaked from the corner of Opie’s eye and trickled into the dirt beside him. “It’s too late for me. Too late for everyone here.”
• • •
Sal led the way, with Menchú in the middle of the pack with Father Kilpatrick, and the rest of his congregation clustered around him like grapes in a bunch.
Only the two tourists hung back, whispering to one another in Cantonese. One was apparently a fan of vintage equipment; the camera around her neck took actual film. Sal wondered how or if those pictures would turn out. Assuming Team Two didn’t dispose of them, of course. Grace shepherded them along so they wouldn’t get lost.
Father Kilpatrick hemmed and hawed, a question obviously behind his eyes.
Menchú sighed. “Something on your mind?”
“Are you—and no offense meant by it, but are you—are you with the Black Archives?” He lowered his voice to a bare whisper. “The Society, they call it?”
Menchú sighed again, this time with resignation. “… Yes. It’s true.”
“All of it?” The older priest practically crowed. “I knew it, I knew it! They said it was just an urban legend, but there was that number on the cards, and I thought—”
Menchú put up a quelling hand. “I trust you’ll keep this information in the strictest confidence.”
“Oh, of course.” Father Kilpatrick nodded vigorously. “Of course.”
The trip to the edge of town took much less time than Sal expected. She hadn’t stopped to knock on any doors this time. And the walk wasn’t far, really—certainly not more than half a mile—but every step felt charged with danger.
Menchú stopped the survivors periodically, hushing them to silence, while Sal scanned around the corners and curves in search of any threats. There was plenty to see: a cloud of bees flying in a complex but static figure; a place where the street looked like rock but sank under their weight like fresh taffy. No vehicles made of ears and horns, at least.
The local priest stepped over the border and to safety first. Or he tried to. He started forward over the line and bounced back, as if he had walked into an invisible wall. Grace caught him before he could fall.
Sal frowned. “Are we trapped?” She felt for the barrier stopping Father Kilpatrick, but all she found was empty air. She stepped over the border and out of the magic zone. It felt grayer outside, less electric. She stepped back in again, and the world came alive. “Nope, just you.”
“It wants to keep us,” Father Kilpatrick said, his voice hoarse. “God is punishing us!” The villagers began to murmur to one another.
“This is the work of man, not God,” Menchú responded. He stepped out of the magic and extended an arm toward Kilpatrick. “Take my hand.”
Menchú pulled
Father Kilpatrick with one hand, then with both, their fists clenched tight together. He leaned back as if he were trying to pull down a wall. Kilpatrick’s face turned crimson with the exertion.
The wavering edge of the magical zone stretched under his foot, expanding to keep him inside. Then he snapped through, and the pair of priests tumbled to the ground. Kilpatrick lay wheezing. “I’m out? I’m out!” He clambered to his feet and eased farther away from the town, slowly, as though it might eat him.
“You next.” Grace reached out to Lizzie.
“Take her through.” Lizzie handed the child to Grace, then rested an uncertain hand on her belly.
The toddler—whose name, Sal had learned, was Pia—woke up and began to flail mightily in protest. Grace bowed her head, closed her eyes, and stepped through the barrier and out as if it were nothing at all.
Sal wondered how much of the candle had disappeared in those three easy steps.
Sal clasped the hand of one of the fishermen. His palms were rough, his fingers chapped. She gripped him as tight as possible and pulled as hard as she could. Her muscles knotted. She pulled harder, but there was no give. She might as well have been trying to pull a signpost out of cement. Or a sword from a stone.
And then the fisherman eased forward, just a hair. The barrier gave way slowly at first, and they both shuffled a step. Then all resistance was gone, like a twig snapping. Sal caught herself after a few steps. “We can do it,” she said, panting. “We’ve got this.”
• • •
“You want us to promise to murder you?” Liam was incredulous.
“I’ve got nothing ahead but misery, Bookburner. You wouldn’t change places with me, would you?” There were bags under Opie’s eyes, and now that Liam was looking for it, he hadn’t shaved in a week at least.
“Cooperate with us,” Asanti soothed, “and we’ll do whatever we can do help you. But we have to know what you did first.”
Opie’s mouth was a thin, narrow line. “We made a book.”
“You made a book?” Frances’s voice cracked. “You—I didn’t even realize that was possible.”
“I’m sure for you it wouldn’t be. It was a technically complex process, requiring a decade to design and implement, and you wouldn’t understand it even if I spent all day explaining.”
Liam scuffed the turf near Opie’s cheek menacingly.
“Oi! No need for that, I’m cooperating, aren’t I?”
“So you made a book, opened it up, and this happened?” Liam shook his head. “Bunch of idiots, just like every other moron who ever thought he could control magic.”
“We are controlling magic,” Opie said, a little stiffly. “There’s just been some … unexpected leakage.”
Liam threw his hands wide, taking in the ice boulders, the pink sky, the keening song of the not-flamingos drifting in from the sea. “So that’s what you call it. ‘Leakage.’”
Opie’s lower lip jutted out. “We had a handle on it, and I would have been fine until Christina threw me under the bus,” he said. “She took off and left me stranded here. Maybe this is what she meant to do the whole time. Liam, I know you had a thing with her, but I’m starting to think she’s not a good person.”
“You don’t say. So, wait, you’re the only one here now?”
“That wasn’t the plan, but yes.”
“Back on topic,” Asanti urged. “You made a book. How does the book tie into your, ah, technological ambitions?”
Opie’s eyebrows drew together. “The book is the key to controlling this system—the keyboard, if you will.”
“So to finish this we have to close and bag the book. Like always.” Liam stood up.
“It’s not exactly a book anymore, is the thing,” Opie said. “You’ll have a mess of trouble trying to, ah, close it. You want to get inside the system, you’ll have to read it. And there’s more. Don’t let anyone leave town until you shut the whole thing down.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s a self-propagating system, mate. Your own invention!”
Asanti frowned at Liam. “Self-propagating?”
Liam had turned a pale gray. “Opie, you’re saying people who leave can infect other people?”
“That’s right,” Opie said cheerfully. “And trees, and animals, probably cars and stones, too. The system follows ’em around. Anything they touch will become magical, once it’s exposed long enough. And then anything those things touch will be tainted, too. And the whole system gets bigger and more powerful, and then …”
Liam looked ill. “So if even an ant has decided to take up traveling, there could be outbreaks of this all over the world. Magic just … gushing up and changing everything, like somebody tapped into an oil well?”
“Yeah,” Opie said. “Pretty cool, right?”
Frances adjusted her glasses. “That’s quite an achievement.”
• • •
Grace handled Lizzie and the older women while Menchú and Sal pulled the rest through the border. Then they all rushed a dozen yards away, toward the Team Three van. The tourists chattered and fist-bumped each other, but the rest were somber, no doubt thinking of all of the friends and family they’d left behind.
Sal stared back at the ring surrounding the village. “When we got here,” she said slowly, “we walked past that downed tree before we got inside. I remember it very clearly.”
“Right. What’s the matter?” Menchú looked from Sal to the tree and back again.
“Father Menchú, the ring was a dozen feet past the tree when we first went in there. And now that tree is well inside the border.”
“The bubble is growing.” Grace stood up again.
“And pretty damn fast.” Sal pinched the bridge of her nose. “If there’s anyone else in there, we have to get them out in a hurry.”
Menchú returned to Father Kilpatrick. “Can you think of anywhere else we might find more people to help?”
Kilpatrick pursed his lips. “At the school, maybe. It’s a natural place to gather.”
“Must be a hundred people at the school.” Mrs. Graham sniffed. “Didn’t seem like a godly place to stay to me, though.”
“My da was going to the Harp and Spear,” added one of the fishermen.
“Anywhere else?” Sal asked.
Lizzie nodded. “The shelter—before the phones stopped working my mother told me half the town was there, right as rain but scared.”
“Where is it?” Grace asked.
“It’s on the far side of town, next to the chip shop.”
Sal felt a sudden tingle across her skin. The light took on a rosy quality—not sunset, not yet. But the sky was turning pink all the same. She looked toward the town, at the border to strangeness, and found that it had snapped toward them.
The town wouldn’t let them leave.
The pregnant woman, Lizzie, bent over and retched a writhing mass of spiders and centipedes, then slowly collapsed inward until she had transformed into a heaving mound of insects. They scuttled away toward the center of town in straight, even ranks, like a well-trained army. Her child began to wail, shrill and icy.
“What the devil—” Father Kilpatrick’s eyes were white all around. He held up a hand, sand pouring through his fingers. No; his fingers were turning to sand, pouring away his last minutes.
One of the fishermen gagged, a snake’s head emerging from his mouth. And several more from his ears. They hissed, forked tongues flickering. He charged at Grace, who stepped neatly out of the way.
The fisherman leaped ten feet into the air and plummeted toward Menchú, razor spikes bursting through his heels. One spike caught Menchú on the forearm, slashing him. Menchú dropped to the ground at the impact.
The fisherman—more of a snake-man, now, with a dozen hissing heads sprouting from his visible orifices—shrieked an epithet. He struck Menchú across the face, then leaned in close, so one of the snakes could bite.
Grace pulled the fisher-turned-snake-man away by the neck. H
e turned on her, kicking out with one of his new spurs. She stopped his foot with one hand, then punched him in the throat. He staggered back.
Sal held out a foot and tripped him. He fell, but sprang up again, this time toward Mrs. Graham. The elderly woman jabbed toward him with her cane. “Young man! Stop this nonsense at once!”
Then he bounded away, back toward the town.
“We’re not safe here, either,” Mrs. Graham cried. “Heaven have mercy on us!” She shuffled toward the pile of sand that had been a religious leader mere moments before. “I’m going back to the church!” The stragglers clustered around her: the pair of tourists, the lone fisherman, her equally elderly companion. The fisherman picked up the bewildered toddler.
Sal put her hands up. “But you’re—”
Grace was already attending to Menchú, wrapping his injured arm in a length of bandaging. “I’ll guide them back,” she said. “You wait here.”
Sal’s mouth worked fruitlessly. “But why?”
“Grace is right. We can’t protect them here,” Menchú said. He gazed fixedly at the child. “Let them go back to the church.” He took a deep breath, then gave Sal a meaningful arch of his eyebrows. “They’ll be more comfortable there waiting for Team One.”
4.
Asanti’s lips moved silently, like she was doing an elaborate mathematical equation in her head. “If the village is a computer and the book is a keyboard controlling it … is there a way to shut everything down? To unplug the system, if you will?”
Opie looked horrified for a brief moment, but his expression slowly turned to deep regret. “That’s probably for the best, come to think of it,” he said. “I don’t know how you’d do it exactly, but if you head into the house with the red door over yon, you’ll find everything. It’s our bed-and-breakfast.”
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 42