Lacking a view in the front, Grace had gone around to a side alley to do some quick reconnaissance, and Menchú waited, knowing that he would be unable to relax until she was in sight again.
“She’s going to be fine,” said Asanti, breaking Menchú’s concentration.
“We can’t take that for granted. Just because it’s hard for her to get hurt doesn’t mean—”
Asanti interrupted. “I meant her candle. She’s going to be fine. We’re going to find a way to turn her back.”
“After every terrible thing we’ve seen magic do, how can you be so optimistic?”
“I’ve seen people do more evil than demons, and no one’s arguing we get rid of people,” Asanti pointed out.
“People do good as well as evil. Can you say that for magic?”
Asanti shrugged. “Grace would have been long dead from time, malice, or accident if she didn’t have her candle,” she pointed out. “And I think she’s done some good in the world.”
Menchú digested this. “Did you notice that she didn’t bring a book this trip?”
Asanti frowned. “She was reading on the plane.”
“She was staring at a book and occasionally turning pages. Then she left it behind on her seat. While you and Liam were working earlier, she wasn’t even pretending. I’m worried about her,” Menchú admitted.
He went back to watching the shop. A young mother with a stroller stopped in front of the windows to adjust her baby’s blanket. Shifting the blanket caused the baby to lose its pacifier, and it sent up a thin wail.
Menchú said, “I found an old photo that had her candle in it. Did you know it’s lost close to half its length since we found her?”
Asanti shook her head. “I knew it must have diminished … but no, I hadn’t realized.”
“And what kind of a life does she have? Going from mission to mission, one day off per year to do with as she pleases.”
“She—” Asanti began
“She’s a grown woman, and she can hear you,” said Grace, swinging down from the fire escape to land lightly on the sidewalk beside them.
Menchú could see that Grace wasn’t happy. “How much of that were you listening to?” he asked.
“How much of my future were the two of you planning on working out between yourselves before you asked my opinion?”
“Grace—” said Asanti. She was cut off by a screech of brakes at the intersection. The traffic lights at the corner had all gone red. No, all of the traffic lights in all directions had turned red. From the cacophony rising from the surrounding streets, it sounded as though the entire city had become instantly gridlocked.
“Good God,” said Menchú. “Is that the Network?”
A bus was stopped, mid-block, in front of them. The electronic destination board read: CHRISTINA, COME AND GET ME.
“I’m thinking not,” said Asanti. Off Menchú’s look she added, “You did tell Liam to use his initiative.”
The front door of the shop across the street flew open. The young mother barely snatched her (now-screaming) baby out of the way as half a dozen programmers streamed out. Christina was at the head of the line.
“How are they going to ‘come and get’ anyone with traffic at a complete standstill?” Grace asked.
One of the Networkers unlocked a metal rolling door heretofore concealed under several layers of advertisements and band posters to reveal half a dozen mopeds. Christina hopped on one and took off, weaving through the stopped traffic. Menchú and the others quickly ducked out of sight as the rest followed her.
Menchú looked back out of the alley. The mother and her baby had moved on. “Anyone else inside?” he asked.
“Should be two,” Grace said. “Give me five minutes before you come in.”
She was gone before Menchú or Asanti had time to say a word.
• • •
It was a simple matter for Grace to pick the lock on the door to the Network’s shop front. It was equally easy for her to kick the man they had left behind on guard into unconsciousness, which she wished she could take as a compliment to her skills, but the man was clearly incapable of defending anything more important than a bag of Cheetos. He barely even moved to defend himself when she walked in, underestimating her as a threat in spite of the fact that she had just come in through a locked door without a key, and should therefore have been assumed to have hostile intent.
People see a short girl and they assume I’m not going to kick their asses, she thought with a sigh. Can’t they at least make this interesting?Can’t someone not be predictable for—?
Which was when the second Network goon snuck up behind Grace and nailed her with a Taser.
Grace’s knees went out. She was falling toward the floor. You idiot, you knew there was a second one … And then there was a clanging sound, the burn of electricity stopped, and the Network minion hit the ground beside her.
As soon as Grace could convince her muscles to listen, she rolled to her feet to find Menchú and Asanti standing in the doorway. Menchú was holding a tire-iron. Grace blinked in surprise, then scowled. “That wasn’t five minutes.”
“You might be older than both of us,” said Asanti, “but we do outrank you.”
“Besides,” added Menchú, “why should you always get to have all the fun?”
Grace didn’t have anything to say to that, so she kept frowning.
“Come on,” Menchú held out a hand. “It’s time to stop the Network.”
• • •
Back at Lucky Fun Land, Sal and Liam paused in their preparations to watch the local news on the ancient TV—still mounted, and miraculously still working—behind the snack bar. The coverage was mostly focused on the pink sky and citywide gridlock, but a ticker at the bottom of the screen read, Who is Christina?
“Well,” said Sal, “I think we got her attention.”
• • •
When Frances heard the door open, she didn’t bother to turn her head and look. If Sansone had come with more “helpful” observations, she had no desire to hear them, and most of the medical staff seemed happier when she didn’t try to make eye contact.
The click of cold metal against her wrist, however, snapped Frances’s head around, and she discovered not a nurse, but a member of the Vatican’s security team. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
The man didn’t answer. He merely walked around to the other side of her bed, where he took her other wrist and secured it to the opposite bedrail. But when he moved, it allowed Frances to see the man who stood behind him: Monsignor Fox.
“Frances Haddad,” he intoned. “Under the authority of His Holiness the Pope, and by virtue of my office as Protector of the Societas Librorum Occultorum, it is my duty to place you under detention.”
All of Frances’s frustration and boredom transformed into impotent anger. “What? Why?”
Fox didn’t even bother to fake a smile. “For your own protection, and that of those around you.”
“You can’t do this!”
“Until such time as a new cardinal can be named, the Society is in a state of emergency. At such times, I am authorized to do whatever I deem necessary to safeguard the security of the Society, its Archives, and its personnel.” He tossed a letter onto her bedside table. She could see the Society seal at the bottom, but it was out of reach of her shackled hand. “Look it up,” he said, and turned away.
“Am I still considered personnel, or just a threat?” Frances called after Fox’s retreating form. He ignored her.
They didn’t bother to leave a guard outside her door. She had no legs and she was shackled to her bed. Where was she was going to go?
Hours passed. Frances memorized the ceiling above her bed. She counted all the bumps in the plaster and the fringes that hung from the shade of her bedside lamp. Periodically, someone would come in to check her sugar, or adjust something, or take note of something else, but she was past caring. A priest came in and prayed over her, then had a whispered c
onversation with her doctor about spiritual ramifications of various surgical options. They didn’t even try to include her in the conversation. Sansone’s prophecy was already coming true. First she was a freak, and now they believed she was a thing.
You’ll find that people can believe all kinds of things. That’s what Sansone had said. But why had she said it?
Did Frances care what the Society believed?At some level, she had to respect an organization that had compiled a resource like the Archives, but that didn’t mean she thought the Society or the Church was infallible. For centuries, the Vatican had believed that the sun went around the Earth. They’d eventually admitted that was a mistake, but she suspected it had been scant comfort to Galileo. The Society still believed that they could stop the rising tide of magic by locking it away and ignoring it. Maybe the turn on that topic would come faster. Maybe not.
Fox had already demonstrated what he believed about Frances.
Frances looked down at where her legs had been. She hadn’t actually seen herself since she’d first woken up in the Vatican hospital, and that had been barely a glimpse. But now she needed to know what she had become. She needed to know what she believed.
Of course, now her wrists were shackled to the bed and she couldn’t lift the blanket. Not with her hands, anyway.
When she tried to move her legs—what had been her legs—she found that she didn’t have a lot of fine control. Maybe that would come later, when every signal her nerves were sending her wasn’t new and strange.
Finally, after several minutes of hard work, a tentacle emerged from the side of the blanket. Frances lifted it toward her hand, so she could feel it. It was warm, which she hadn’t expected, but of course she was still warm-blooded, so it made sense. It was also soft. And strong, she realized, as she wrapped it around her fingers. She squeezed one of the bed rails experimentally, and noticed it was slightly bent when she pulled away.
She looked at where she was shackled to the bed. Looked at the tenta—looked at herself. She pulled at the rail again. She would need time to plan her escape if she didn’t want to be found exhausted on the stairs as soon as she left her room. But as Sansone had said, the leadership was distracted. She would have a little time to decide her destiny for herself.
• • •
Inside the copy shop, Asanti took a large and ancient-looking leather-bound volume out of her satchel and placed it carefully on top of a counter. She then removed several glass vials and laid them alongside the book.
Menchú paused in his search to watch. “What are those?” he asked.
“Since we’ve begun using magic, not just suppressing it, I’ve expanded my list of standard supplies.”
“You’re intending to use magic?”
Asanti treated him to a withering stare. “We came here to destroy the Network’s book-making capabilities,” she said. “Did you think we were just going to throw a shroud over the problem and that would be it?” She turned back to the counter and un-stoppered a vial, tapping a ring of gray powder into a circle around the book. “Besides,” she continued, “the Network is trying to establish a global hive mind. Whatever they’ve constructed to facilitate that, we can’t bring it back to Rome and lock it up. Surely you knew that when we came here.”
“I would have if you’d thought to share your plans with me before this instant.”
“I don’t report to you,” said Asanti.
“I know,” said Menchú, “but we used to be friends.”
Asanti paused and looked at him. “Are you upset that I’m planning to use magic, or upset that I didn’t tell you beforehand? Because if it’s the former, I’m going to point out all the times we’ve used magic at your suggestion in the last two years. And if it’s the latter, then maybe now isn’t the best moment for us to stop and deal with your hurt feelings. Liam and Sal have distracted Christina, but we do not have unlimited time.”
Menchú gaped. When the silence between them became unbearable, Grace—who had been doing her best to pointedly ignore their little spat—finally looked up from her search and noticed the book Asanti had laid on the counter. “Is that the Lost Folio?” she asked.
Menchú turned to Grace in surprise. “You recognize it?”
“I was stuck in the Archives without a book once and started reading accounts from the Chronicles of the Society,” she said.
Asanti blinked. “How can you be stuck in the Archives without a … No. Never mind, not important. Yes. It is the Lost Folio. It turns out that it wasn’t lost, just chained inside a locked box bolted to a shelf in the fifth vault. For all that they held the title of archivist, some of my predecessors were woefully lax about their cataloging.”
“And the chain and the locked box inside a vault did not strike you as a sign you shouldn’t put it in your carry-on?” asked Menchú.
“How did you find it?” asked Grace.
Asanti shrugged, “I’m the archivist; it’s my job. It seemed like the sort of thing we might be glad to have someday.”
“Do I even want to know what it was made for?” Menchú asked.
“It doesn’t contain a demon, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Asanti. “It’s a spell book. No more dangerous than a list of recipes.”
“I thought it was originally taken from a wizard who was trying to sink Sri Lanka,” said Grace.
Asanti frowned. “That account was almost certainly exaggerated, and definitely written years after the fact.”
“By a member of the team sent to retrieve the book,” said Grace.
“Sri Lanka is still there, isn’t it?” Asanti demanded.
Menchú sighed. Was he just upset because Asanti hadn’t kept him in the loop? He honestly wasn’t sure, but regardless, she was right that now was not the time to be dwelling on his own bruised ego. And the fact was that no amount of his displeasure was going to send the thing back to the Archives where it belonged.
“What are you planning to do with it?” asked Menchú.
“The shroud suppresses magic when wrapped completely around a book. But we know that it doesn’t just work for books. Else Liam wouldn’t have been able to use it to successfully neutralize the magical listening device Team Two planted in the Archives last year. There’s a spell in the Folio that should serve to temporarily link me to the shroud, allowing me to direct its neutralizing capabilities.” Asanti’s tone was perfectly dry as she added, “On the chance that a bookmaking operation is too large to wrap.”
That last dig had been unnecessary, in Menchú’s opinion, but just because Asanti wanted to pick a fight didn’t mean he had to give it to her. At least her plan hadn’t been “In case of emergency, sink Ireland.”
He hoped she knew what she was doing.
• • •
Grace was displeased to find that looking for a book in the middle of a shop full of paper was just as annoying as she had thought it would be. She was checking the trays of a bank of copiers behind the counter when she discovered that the drawers in one of them were stuck.
That was odd.
Grace put her hand on the machine. It hummed, warm beneath her fingers.
Grace slipped around behind the machine to unplug it. The plug was also stuck fast. Grace pulled again, harder. When the cord came loose from the wall, it snapped and writhed like a live thing between her hands. With some difficulty, Grace wrestled it into a knot. It was difficult enough that by the time she finished, she took a brief pause to get her breath back.
When she looked up, Menchú and Asanti were staring at her. No, they were staring at the copy machine. Which was still warm. And humming. And now pulsing with a distinctly demonic glow.
Menchú cleared his throat. “I think we found out how the Network is making books.”
• • •
Lucky Fun Land may have, at some point in its history, been fun. Standing next to Liam on the deck of the abandoned bowling alley as the door burst in, admitting Christina and half a dozen Network-types, Sal hoped
that it was still at least a little bit lucky.
Sal hadn’t seen Christina in person since their encounter at the server farm in Antakya, but although she had been distracted at the time, she was pretty sure that the unearthly green glow emanating from Christina’s body was new.
As she and her people crossed the threshold, Liam triggered an activator in his pocket, and their guests were greeted by an electrified net, rigged to fall from the rafters. Christina looked up as it fell and, with a flick of her wrist, sent the tangled mess flying toward Liam and Sal. Sal tucked and rolled, coming up behind a scoring desk, where Liam joined her a heartbeat later.
“What the hell was that?” hissed Sal.
Liam swore quietly. “She’s got a demon.”
In the wavering half-light of the empty bowling alley, Christina smiled. “No, Liam,” she called back, “I have your demon.”
5.
Father Menchú looked from Grace—still holding the writhing power cord—to the copy machine that pulsed with demonic light. The Network was devoted to the marriage of technology and magic; of course they would put the ability to write demonic books into a copy machine. The idea that the Network was writing books was bad enough. But that machine … Are they replicating demons?
He cleared his throat. “Asanti?”
“Yes?”
One look at her face, and he knew that his old friend’s thoughts were close companions to his own. Offering a silent prayer that he was making the right decision, Menchú gave Asanti one tight nod. “Do what you have to do. Shut it down.”
Asanti took the shroud and laid it on top of the machine. She consulted a page in the Lost Folio and sprinkled the contents of several vials onto the shroud, chanting as she did so. The pulsing glow of the machine increased. “Be ready,” Asanti said, lifting the cover, “there may be defenses that will—”
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 47