Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  That blank wooden face held no answers for him.

  Angiuli was a kind man, a loving man. He had always let Menchú guide him in difficult times. He had believed that while he climbed the ranks of the Society, his job would remain much the same: clear the way to allow his people to do their work unfettered. Always allow the right thing to be done.

  He had known that the cardinal must sometimes make difficult decisions. Of course he had! He was no fool. But he had thought that those around him would guide his actions and clear his conscience. Heaven help him, he had known the truth, but he had not felt it until now.

  This was a part of what the Society must do to protect the world. A lesser evil to prevent the greatest evil of all. There was no true choice to make, really; no difficult decision. There was only one path left, however harrowing.

  He would do the right thing, even if it broke him to do it. And it would break him.

  He picked up his phone and called Fox. “We’ve waited long enough. Tell Shah to eradicate the threat,” he said. “Now. No more delays.” He hung up before he could question himself.

  He stayed on his knees, and he wept.

  • • •

  Menchú stared at his phone, willing it to ring. He’d seen a lot in his career; things that defied explanation, things that would make a strong man crack. He’d seen strong men crack before, for that matter. But he had thought Angiuli was made of sterner stuff.

  Shah touched him lightly on the shoulder. “I got the order,” she said. “It’s time.”

  Menchú started. “Angiuli spoke to you?”

  “Yes,” Shah said, “he told us to get it over with. I can’t wait for your team.”

  Menchú nodded heavily. Everything about him had become heavy: his head, his heart, his spirit. “Give them all the time you can,” he said.

  “I’ll try.” Shah moved toward her troops. “But it’s up to them to save their own skins.”

  • • •

  Sifting through the Network’s changed gear looking for something that might be a book was sticky, Frances decided, and as completely unpleasant as any experience she’d had to date. The wires kept twining around their hands and trying to bind them; but at least they were easily broken. There were stacks of humming boxes filled with liquid crystal that stung when she touched them. And of course there was the food garbage to sort through, and the accompanying mundane disgust.

  She shifted a stack of takeaway boxes, and glanced up at the field of stars. She realized, suddenly, that she could read them: they were words on a page, and the blackness was the paper upon which they were writ.

  Frances reached forward and ran her fingers through the words. They scattered and regrouped like frightened goldfish. Such lovely words, too. She read a few, then remembered she had a job to do. “Liam! Asanti! I found it. Look, this is what happened to the book. It grew! We’re inside of it now.”

  She felt a softening, like all the tension had left her muscles. A humming, the song of a thousand perfect systems working together. It was delightful. Magic, she thought, was delightful.

  Dangerous, of course. Grace wasn’t wrong. But Frances was no fool. The thought of Grace reminded Frances of the way Liam had stood up for her earlier, the way he’d stepped between them, so close she could smell the starch in his collar. He always did smell nice.

  He stared at her from across the room. “Frances? Are you—”

  Why was Liam so worked up? He shouted at her, but she couldn’t be bothered to listen to the words he was saying. He called Asanti over, and the two of them conferred. They looked so upset! Why were they so upset? Couldn’t they see that everything was delightful now?

  • • •

  Team One worked with an economy earned through long, hard hours of drilling. They didn’t have nukes, after all, but they did have plenty of bombs. They were fat, squat things in olive drab, to all appearances surplus left untouched since World War II.

  “What is that?” Sal asked.

  “Napalm.” Grace was curt. “Lots and lots of napalm.”

  Next Team One uncovered one of the trucks to reveal a catapult. The Team One swarm loaded a bomb into the catapult and performed a series of impenetrable sightings. They shouted calculations to one another.

  “A catapult? Seriously?” Sal looked from Menchú to Shah and back. Menchú was ignoring the Team One proceedings, his attention fixed on the part of town where the rest of his team had gone.

  “Can’t count on aircraft or drones to work here,” Shah said. “Unless you have a better idea.”

  A soldier came to Shah and saluted. “First target locked, ma’am.”

  “Fire when ready.”

  The catapult thumped when it was loosed, and the truck bearing it shook like it had been dropped from the sky. The bomb sailed toward the very far end of the magical bubble. There was a flash, and moments later, a rumble. A wave of hot wind. Where the bomb had struck, the town was engulfed by fire. Smoke spiraled toward the sky.

  “Load her up again,” Shah shouted. “Make it fast, people! Turn it around!”

  “Do you see them yet?” Sal asked Menchú.

  “Not yet.” Menchú’s shoulders were up by his ears. “But they’ll be fine. They have to be.”

  • • •

  The Network’s headquarters rocked. A sound split the room, like a thousand bolts of thunder flung from the heavens at once.

  Frances found this delightful, too. What a charming surprise!

  Liam pulled the bag from his pack—the one to put cursed books into, right? A shroud. Frances watched, bemused and silent, as he opened it wide. “We’re going to save you,” he said, his eyes pinched. So lovely, that he was worried about her. So beautiful. Such a beautiful man.

  She started trying to tell him so, but her tongue was floppy and sound didn’t work quite the way she’d expected. Why had she expected it to work that way, anyhow?

  “We have to run, Liam.” Asanti loomed over his shoulder. The perfect mentor. The perfect mother. Oh, what would Frances have ever done without her? She tried to say something about that, too, with a similar result.

  But it was all delightful. Even the second crashing boom, like thunder, like earthquakes.

  “Sorry about this, Frances,” Liam said.

  Why would he apologize? He had nothing to be sorry for. He had never been anything but kind to her! Or remote. Kind and remote. Like a delightful mountain. With a sunrise. And matcha. She tried a third time to explain her thoughts, this time by thinking them much harder. She was sure it would work any second, if she just tried her very best.

  And then Liam shoved her inside the bag.

  • • •

  “There!” Menchú’s finger darted toward a tiny speck on the street far below. “Shah!Thavani, I see them! Hold fire!”

  A third bomb was almost ready to go. “They’re coming?” Shah asked. She squinted, then gestured for a pair of binoculars. “I only see two,” she said. “But your man Doyle is probably carrying the third in a bag.”

  Menchú grabbed the binoculars. “Is Frances—” He wiped his forehead. “Just wait until they’re out. They’re almost here.”

  The catapult hiccupped. The third bomb sailed toward the center of town, and the blast flung Asanti and Liam off their feet and to the ground. They helped each other up again. Liam reclaimed his burden, and kept coming toward them. So close. Almost there, but now Liam was limping.

  “Hold up!” Menchú cried again.

  Shah held up her hand. “Hold fire for five minutes,” she called. “Not like we’re seeing a counterattack.”

  “Come on, come on,” Sal said under her breath. “Liam, you jerk, can’t you run?”

  Liam did not run. After five minutes, Team One let fly another bomb, and this one hit offshore, safely away from Sal’s teammates. Before the fifth bomb was loaded into the catapult, Liam and Asanti were out of the bubble.

  “Frances?” Menchú asked. “Is she all right?”

  Liam let his
burden slide to the ground. It lay there, lumpy but unmoving. “She’s in here,” he said. His voice and eyes were tight. “It’s complicated. You’ll see.”

  “Menchú, get your team out of here,” Shah ordered. “Get some distance as fast as you can. We’re going to have an up-close view of the barbecue real soon, and there’s no need for you to be here for it. Go home.”

  Menchú shook her hand. “Thank you,” he said. “I—thank you.”

  Shah was unreadable. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “Of course.”

  Menchú ushered his team back into the van. It took a while for the engine to start; the magic had come too close, and a few Team One soldiers had to come and help them push their vehicle farther out before it could start.

  Finally the engine took, and they headed south, toward the airport and on to Rome. Behind them, the whole sky was blue again. Blue except for the rising smoke.

  Bookburners

  Season 2, Episode 12

  Coming Home

  Margaret Dunlap

  1.

  Frances couldn’t quite remember where she was. She had been in Middle Coom, in Ireland; they had been trying to stop the Network. Then she had … She tried to think, but her brain shied away. Better not to dwell on the past. Focus on the present. She could hear voices, sharp and urgent.

  “Heart rate up, blood pressure stable. For the moment, anyway.”

  “How long has it been since the last shift?”

  “At least an hour.”

  “That’s probably a good sign.”

  “What about … those?”

  The pause before the last word was pregnant with nothing good.

  “Worry about that later. Does anyone know what happened?”

  “Some kind of magical backlash. We lost containment. It’s lucky we got her out at all.”

  Frances knew the last voice: Asanti. She struggled to open her eyes. When she did, all she could see was ceiling and bright lights shining down on the lower half of her body.

  “She’s coming around.”

  “Asanti?” Frances’s mouth felt dry and gluey, but she must have managed to make herself understood because Asanti’s face appeared, smiling down at her. Frances felt her brush a lock of hair off her face.

  “How are you feeling? Is there any pain?” A doctor with the distinctive Vatican crest embroidered on his coat was shining a light into Frances’s eyes, checking her pupils. That answered the question of where she was, at least.

  Frances had to think about it. “I … I don’t think so.” Her eyes sought Asanti’s and found them deep and wide and sad. “Did we win? Did we stop the Network?”

  Asanti shushed her. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine.”

  That isn’t what I asked, Frances thought.

  The other doctors, nurses, and assistants were all moving around the lower half of her bed, out of her line of sight. She felt the bed shift. Someone muttered something about a reflex response.

  “Can you feel that?” the doctor asked.

  Frances struggled to sit up. She had felt something. But what her brain was telling her didn’t make any sense. She tried to go back to the last thing she could remember about Middle Coom, but all she could bring to mind was a rush of magic and fabric over her head and Asanti and Liam shouting, and she was being carried, bouncing, swinging … and …

  “What happened to me?”

  Hands were trying to push her back against the bed. “Calm down. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Frances shoved hard at the hands around her. Whatever they were hiding from her, she had to know. It couldn’t be as bad as what she was imagining. It couldn’t be—

  Frances looked down at herself.

  She thought, Why are there snakes in my bed? Until she realized they weren’t snakes, they were more like tentacles, and they were growing from her hips. Her legs had been replaced by a writhing mass of reptilian flesh.

  This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Frances looked up and saw Asanti’s wide, sad eyes, and screamed.

  “I said hold her!” There was swearing in Latin.

  Frances felt a pinch, like the snap of a rubber band, followed by a push and a burning feeling. Then the world felt very far away, and she lost consciousness.

  • • •

  Sal wanted nothing more than to go back to her apartment, forget that she had ever heard of Christina, Opie, and the Network, and sleep for a week. Instead, she grabbed a quick shower in the Society’s gym and was quietly thankful she had started to keep at least two full changes of clothes stashed away at work. They had bloodied the Network’s nose at Middle Coom, but according to Opie, Christina had gotten away clean.

  Liam was tracking her now, and as soon as they had a destination, Sal expected to be heading out. Bad enough that the Network’s quest to create a magical-technological hive mind had ruptured reality in a small Irish town. If Opie’s information was accurate, the Network had found a way to make their own demonic books. Sal really hoped that Opie had been lying to them. As far as they knew, the ability to build the books that Team Three had been created to seek out and contain had been lost to the world centuries ago. If that power was in the hands of a group of techno-cultists who believed that magic was a force that should be set free in the world … Sal forced herself to shake off a train of thought that would do her no good to pursue. But even if Opie had been exaggerating the Network’s capabilities, they couldn’t afford to let Christina regroup. Surely Angiuli—after the near-disaster of his indecision during their last mission—couldn’t fail to realize that the time to act was now.

  She found Liam alone in the Archives, bent over his computer. “Any word about Frances?” Sal asked.

  Liam shook his head. “Asanti’s still in with her.”

  “And Menchú?”

  “Angiuli called him in for a face-to-face.”

  “You think he’s going to explain what the fuck happened with the chain of command in Middle Coom?”

  Liam snorted. “Yeah, like that shit is explainable.”

  He had a point. Sal’s history in law enforcement had taught her that failure of nerve by one’s superiors was seldom explicable. Unfortunately, it nearly always had the same result: Someone farther down the chain was going to have to take the fall.

  • • •

  Menchú arrived in Angiuli’s office torn between fury and fatigue. He wanted to let fly with all his rage and frustration from the last twenty-four hours. With Frances’s injury, not to mention the destruction of a town and its entire population, he had plenty of ammunition. But the toll of those losses, coming at the end of his constant push and pull with Asanti over the last few months, had left him near the end of his energy. Just a little bit farther, he told himself. Find Christina, put a stop to her plans. Then rest. We’ve come too far to give up now.

  From behind his desk, Angiuli waited for Menchú to seat himself in one of the two guest chairs. For a change, the office was immaculate. No piles of stray papers or half-unpacked boxes remained to ruin the impression of a powerful man inside one of the most powerful organizations on Earth. Was he too busy cleaning his office to give us a clear directive?

  The thought was uncharitable, but Menchú had known Angiuli for more than a decade, and he had never seen his office so tidy. It looked almost bare.

  “Father Menchú,” said Angiuli, “you may be wondering why I wished to speak with you.”

  Before Menchú could give voice to any number of replies, ranging from sarcastic to impudent, the monsignor continued.

  “I wish to apologize.”

  Menchú’s mouth snapped shut.

  “My lack of decisiveness in a time of crisis led to unnecessary casualties among innocents and our own. Although the Society was able to contain the disaster, our success came in spite of my leadership, not because of it.”

  Menchú, feeling hope in his heart in a way he hadn’t realized had been missing, nonetheless measured his next words carefully.
“I’m sure what has happened will help to guide you in the future.”

  Angiuli shook his head. “No.”

  “What?”

  “In light of recent events, I have chosen to withdraw my name from consideration for promotion to cardinal, and I will be tendering my resignation from the Society within the hour.”

  Menchú’s expression must have been an accurate mirror of his inner turmoil, because Angiuli gave him a wry smile. “I’m sorry, Arturo. I know you weren’t expecting this, but out of respect for our friendship, I wanted to tell you first.”

  • • •

  Beep … Beep … Beep …

  Asanti had barely left Frances’s bedside since Team Three had returned to Rome. The beeping of the dozen monitors could have been nearly soothing in its regularity, except that the constant rhythm meant there had been no change in her assistant’s condition. Frances’s heartbeat was steady; her blood pressure was fine. Even the tangled mass that used to be her legs was demurely covered by layers of starched sheets and gently folded blankets. The doctors had given Frances something to help her sleep and keep her calm. She had yet to wake up.

  Make it through, Asanti thought to her, and I will never let this happen to anyone else. Whatever it takes.

  A soft knock from the open doorway. Asanti looked up. Father Menchú let himself in and sat down on the opposite side of Frances’s bed. He took her hand.

  “Any news?” Asanti asked.

  Menchú shrugged. “Plenty. Very little of it good. Angiuli is going to resign.”

  “From the Church?”

  “From the Society.”

  Asanti grimaced. “It’s a start.” She waited for Menchú to tell her that she should be more forgiving. For him to counsel her to patience, to turn Frances’s condition into a reason for her to give up the quest to understand—to use—magic. Anything so they could finally have the fight that had been simmering between them for months.