I will end. Helena will end.
I grimaced. “Why do I have the feeling you don’t understand time?”
Instantly, the pressure bore down on me so hard I cried out. I will end. Helena will end. It happens.
“Am I right? You mean you don’t know when it will happen?”
I and not-I happens. Burning happens. Ending happens.
“I’m…going to take that as a yes.” I and not-I—that had to mean the second oracle the Mercy had created, the one Abernathy’s had destroyed. And the Mercy had tried to burn down the store before that. If the oracle didn’t understand time, if all those things happened, for it, simultaneously or something, then maybe it couldn’t tell me when it would end because it didn’t know. What use this information was, I had no idea, but anything that would help me interpret the oracle’s cryptic pronouncements, I’d take.
“All right, so you don’t know when your ending will come,” I said.
Immediately, the pressure lessened. Seal the cracks, the oracle said, and it was gone.
I rubbed the back of my neck, which was as sore as if something physical had borne down on it. The black gem still didn’t look any different. I hadn’t really learned anything new, but I had to hope this would all work out.
I returned to the store front to discover Judy was gone. I retrieved my bottle of glass cleaner and polished up the countertop. I’d never needed the calmness that came from cleaning more. Just a little over two hours, and we’d see the end of the Long War forever.
18
Lucia showed up at just after five with her assistant Dave Henry in tow. “Wallach wanted to do this by himself,” she said. “Like flipping a switch. I told him if reality was going to move, I was going to be there for it.”
“That’s how I feel,” I said. “Something this momentous ought to be bigger than just…I don’t even know what the magic looks like.”
“Me neither.” Lucia leaned against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. It might be a momentous occasion, but she was still wearing her usual plain T-shirt and yoga pants. Dave took up a parade rest position next to her, his eyes scanning the store like he was looking for hidden threats.
“Have you heard anything from Indonesia?” I asked.
Lucia snorted. “Have I heard anything from Indonesia. I’ve heard practically nothing else. All of it reports from my Wardens that the end of times is here because our Nicolliens and Ambrosites worked together to fight the latest invasion. I wouldn’t believe it if the reports hadn’t come from some of the least imaginative men and women I’ve ever known.”
“Ryan Parish apologized to Mr. Rasmussen publicly. In the store.”
Lucia’s eyes widened. “It is the end of times. You sure it wasn’t his evil twin?”
“Pretty sure. Besides, it was a good thing, so doesn’t that technically make Mr. Parish the evil one?”
Lucia laughed. “I’ll take it. If it lasts.”
“It had better last,” Judy said. “I’m sick of my father and my boyfriend being unable to share a meal without it turning into Waterloo. With both of them starring as Napoleon.”
“I can imagine.” Lucia glanced past me at the window. “Looks like Wallach’s team is arriving.”
I followed her gaze to where a van, not one of the Gunther Node’s white ones, was pulling up in front of the store. At this time of day, when the stores were closing down, there were usually curbside parking spaces, but this van was oversized and I wasn’t sure it would fit. And then it did. I blinked, thinking maybe I was wrong about the length of the blue van, but it hadn’t gotten any shorter and it still fit into the narrow space. It wasn’t an illusion, because I’d be able to see through that, but pure alteration magic. I had no idea what kind of magus could pull that off.
The van’s doors opened, and three people got out. One of them drew my attention immediately, because she was the tallest woman I’d ever seen, taller even than most men. Her ginger curls spiraled around her face, and her pants, ordinary teal scrubs, were just a little too short for her, which was sort of miraculous that it was only a little. She towered over the two men, one of them middle-aged and balding with fat-rimmed glasses that gave him a Clark Kent look despite his age and lack of hair, the other an Asian man who might have been younger than me. Despite a serious case of bed head, he looked alert and cheerful.
The middle-aged man pushed open the door and held it for the other two. “—last thing I want to do,” the woman was saying in a heavy English accent. “Hi. Darius told us to meet him here. I’ve never been in Abernathy’s.” She looked around, turning slowly like she wanted to take it all in. “It’s a little rustic, isn’t it?”
“Camouflage,” I said, feeling nettled even though I knew it didn’t matter what people thought of my store’s appearance. “I’m Helena Campbell, custodian of Abernathy’s.”
“Sarah Osenbaugh,” the woman said, extending her hand. “Darius strong-armed you into this, didn’t he? He can be a tad obsessive.”
“Which is why he gets results,” the middle-aged man said. “Jon Pirolli. Nice to meet you.”
“How do you ever find anything in here?” the Asian man asked. He, too, was surveying the stacks, but where Osenbaugh had looked dismissive and maybe a little amused, he seemed genuinely amazed.
“We don’t,” I said. “That’s how the oracle works. We don’t know what’s in here—”
“So anything could be in here,” he said, concluding my sentence. “Amazing. I bet I could get this place to cough up the lost works of Shakespeare if I had three weeks and a couple of interferometers.”
“Um…”
He turned to look at me and grinned. “Scary thought, huh? Don’t worry, I don’t experiment on living creatures—that’s what Abernathy’s is, right?”
“Um…yes. As far as I can tell.”
He stuck out his hand. “Rick Jeong,” he said. “It’s actually Jeong Hak-Kun, but I got sick of people pronouncing my name to rhyme with ‘raccoon.’ And I’m a huge fan of Feynman.”
That made almost no sense, but I smiled and nodded anyway. “Mr. Wallach said you all would be coming to see this. Were you part of the experiment?”
“Darius based the experiment off my work in sympathetic magic,” Osenbaugh said. “I told him it was insane, but that only made it more appealing to him.”
“Rick and I did some of the hands-on work,” Pirolli said. “We built most of the anchors.”
“Not without a lot of arguing,” Jeong said. “What’s wrong with basic 3D modeling, I’d like to know?”
“3D modeling of a 5D system is—”
Jeong waved Pirolli off. “Yeah, yeah, insufficient parameters, I know, but—”
“Would you all like some water?” I said, sensing an imminent descent into irrelevancy.
They all accepted bottles of water, and silence fell. I had no idea what to say to three people who seemed every bit as eccentrically brilliant as Wallach. Judy drummed her fingers on the counter. I messed with the receipt book, flipping through the pages before putting it back beneath the counter.
Jeong idly capped his water bottle. “So, Ms. Campbell—”
“Please, call me Helena,” I said.
“Okay. Helena, what’s it like, working so closely with the kind of entity Abernathy’s is?”
“I—well, it’s…unusual. I guess that’s the obvious answer, right? But sometimes it feels like coming up against something unspeakably alien, and sometimes it’s like chatting with a friend. It doesn’t communicate easily, and half the time I don’t understand it, but there’s a closeness I can’t describe.”
“Nathaniel Briggs never saw it that way,” Pirolli said. “It was always just another job to him.”
“Did you know him?”
“As a casual acquaintance. We weren’t close friends.”
I remembered reading Mr. Briggs’ diary, how he’d written of the oracle as something he could control, and nodded. “I don’t think Mr. Briggs ever
realized the oracle’s true nature.”
“So why you?” Osenbaugh asked, her eyes narrowed in thought.
“I don’t know. Maybe because I’m a genetic sport, or maybe because I was willing to do things no other custodian had.” I wasn’t going to tell them that the oracle had predicted my existence and chosen me for its next custodian. They seemed nice, but that was a private thing I shared with very few people.
“Interesting,” Osenbaugh said.
The bells jangled, and Wallach and Viv entered. Wallach held an oversized tablet in a translucent violet case, and Viv carried an ordinary red steel toolbox, hefting it with both hands like it was heavy. “Ah, you’re here,” Wallach said. “Ready to watch history be made?”
The other three laughed like he’d made a joke. I waited for Wallach to get upset at being mocked, but he didn’t react. Maybe it really was a joke, one I wasn’t privy to.
“One minute,” Wallach said. He set the tablet on the counter and headed off into the stacks without even a nod to me. After a startled moment, I followed him. I caught up to him when he’d reached the room’s center. Wallach stared up at the black gem. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”
I looked up. The black gem seemed no different than before, except—no. If I looked closely at its edges, I could see the faintest wavering in the air, like heat haze. It blurred the thing’s outline so it looked less like an insect’s glittering eye and more like a lump of glass. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like,” I said.
“It’s supposed to look like that. The fulcrum is now connected to the node and drawing energy nicely. All according to plan.” Wallach climbed up and awkwardly shifted the gem until it tilted precariously on the edge of the shelf. I hurried to stand beneath it, though if it fell and I tried to catch it, it might break my arm. Wallach, though, gave it a shove that made it rock, its swaying gradually increasing until it slipped and plummeted to the ground. I cried out as it struck the linoleum floor with a sharp crack.
“Sorry about the noise,” Wallach said. He crouched and wormed his arms beneath the stone, which appeared undamaged. “It’s lab-created black diamond,” he said when he saw my astonishment. “It would take more than a seven foot fall to damage it, particularly now it’s connected to the node.”
“Oh. It looks fragile. Like glass.”
Wallach hefted the stone and walked away. I hurried after him. I was starting to feel like a puppy chasing after a constantly moving red ball.
The others hadn’t moved in our absence, though Lucia was talking quietly on her phone. Wallach set the gem on the counter and stepped away. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “in a few minutes, we will make history.”
Lucia ended her call and turned to face him. “Let’s hope that’s true.”
Wallach picked up the tablet and turned it on so the screen glowed blue. “The principle is simple,” he said. I recognized the tone of voice: I’d gone to college for a few semesters, and this was exactly how most of my professors had sounded when they were about to deliver a lecture. “Thanks to Sarah’s work with sympathetic resonance, we were able to establish a connection between these physical models and the magic shaped by them.” He pointed at the sheeted Tinker Toy cat hanging on the wall like a cut-rate Halloween decoration. “The oracle identified the places within the city where reality hinges—places that are susceptible to being moved. The 5D models now located at each of these places, fueled by the magic of this node, will shift our reality around the fulcrum, cutting us off from the invaders’ reality.”
I raised my hand. It had been years since college, but that ingrained reaction hadn’t vanished. “Can it really shift our whole reality?”
Wallach smiled. “Think of a tablecloth spread over your dining room table,” he said. “Suppose you need to adjust it so it hangs down evenly on both sides. You tug on one side, shifting it, but wrinkles form, so you tug elsewhere until it lies smooth again. What I’ll do is similar to that, except those secondary ‘wrinkles’ smooth themselves out. Over the minutes after I initiate the process, the effect will spread throughout our reality. So it’s not instantaneous, but it is extremely fast.”
“Four minutes and forty-three seconds, to be precise,” Pirolli said. He tapped his wristwatch. “I’ll time it.”
Wallach flicked the gem with his fingernail. A high, clear tone rang out through the room, like a note sung by a child soprano. He nodded. “We’re ready. Feel free to talk—it won’t disturb the magic.”
Nobody spoke. Maybe it wouldn’t disturb the magic, but it would make me, at least, feel weird. Wallach turned his attention to his tablet and tapped the screen. The light went from blue to clear white. Wallach continued to tap and swipe. I sidled up to Lucia and whispered, “How will we know it worked?”
“No idea,” Lucia murmured. “I hope it’s not explosive.”
So did I. I stole a glance at the gem. It still didn’t look any different, aside from the slight heat haze.
Movement caught my eye, and I looked up from the gem at the hanging cat. Its sheet rippled in a breeze I couldn’t feel, making it look even more like a ghost in a frat party haunted house. Instead of the traditional oooOOOooo sound, I heard rainfall pattering on the roof, as loud as if the second-story apartment wasn’t there. I looked out the window, but afternoon light filled the street, bright and strong without even the dimness of a slight overcast.
The sheet covering the other anchor started rippling too, but its movement looked more like a puddle of spilled milk flowing endlessly off the edge of a table. It was the weirdest mix of mundane and eerie I’d ever seen.
Wallach took a few steps in that direction and held out his hand, the fingers splayed wide, to the anchor. The flapping sheet went wild, twisting in an intangible wind. I looked closely. Though the sheet still defined a shape, there was nothing visible beneath it. The colored rods and wheels no longer showed through the cloth of either anchor.
Wallach turned and pointed his hand at the second anchor, whose sheet also went into flapping convulsions. He tapped and swiped some more. The white light dimmed and took on a greenish tint. “Ms. Haley,” he said.
Viv opened the toolbox and pulled out a tuning fork that looked like it was made of bronze. She tapped it against the black diamond. Another clear tone rang out, higher pitched than the first. The air rippled around the gem, the heat haze made stronger and more visible. A strong, unidentifiable scent filled the air. After a few breaths, my brain insisted it was peanut butter, but those moments of uncertainty told me whatever it was was truly alien, and I’d translated it into something I understood.
Viv struck the diamond again, sending out a lower sound that set my teeth on edge. I clenched them together. “Once more,” Wallach said, and the next tap produced a note midway between the others. The pleasant sound echoed through the store, and I saw Osenbaugh and Pirolli exchange smiling glances. Jeong had his phone out and was tapping furiously, occasionally looking at Wallach.
Wallach took a few leisurely steps toward the bookcases and came up short, his shoulders tensing. “That’s one gone,” he murmured, I thought to himself. He turned around and walked back to the anchor on the wall.
As he passed me, I got a look at his tablet. It showed a map of Portland’s roads as far south as Beaverton and as far north as the Columbia River. Tiny green lights, and one red one, glowed in a random pattern strewn across the screen. The red one was far to the west. Just before he was too far away for me to see the screen, one of the green dots turned red. “What does that mean?” I said, curiosity overriding my fear of disrupting the magic.
“Two anchors have been destroyed,” Wallach said.
Lucia swore under her breath.
“It’s all right, there are redundancies built into the system,” Wallach said. He used his fingers to shrink the display and then turn it. “Everything is fine.”
Jeong was still tapping rapidly. I wondered if he was texting someone or taking notes. Osenbaugh said, “It should have reac
hed activation by now.”
“It’s fine,” Wallach snapped. “Ms. Haley. Again.”
Viv, looking nervous, tapped the diamond again. The sound that emerged was the same pitch as the last one, but instead of harmonizing with the lingering echoes of the other note, it sounded discordant.
Wallach thrust the tablet at Osenbaugh and strode to Viv’s side, snatching the tuning fork out of her hand. “Sarah, count them off,” he said. He stood poised to strike the diamond again.
Osenbaugh fixed her gaze on the tablet. “Three,” she said. “Four.”
“There’s not enough energy going into the system,” Pirolli said.
“There will be,” Wallach said. He struck the diamond, not the gentle taps Viv had used, but a hard blow like a hammer. The note rang out again, producing yet another discordant ripple of sound that made my skin vibrate. I backed away from the diamond and ran into Judy, who’d done the same thing.
“Five,” Osenbaugh said. Pirolli hovered at her side, looking like he wanted to snatch the tablet from her.
Light blossomed where the two anchors were, a pinkish-yellow light that made me think of a spring morning. Pirolli and Osenbaugh relaxed. “That’s it,” Pirolli said. “They’re drawing it in.”
“Six—no seven,” Osenbaugh said.
“It’s fine,” Wallach repeated. He lowered his hand holding the tuning fork and tension visibly flowed out of him. “It just has to outpace—”
The anchors’ light brightened. Osenbaugh’s hands tightened on the tablet. “Eight. Nine. Ten. It’s accelerating!”
Wallach swore and dropped the tuning fork. He ran to Osenbaugh’s side and snatched the tablet. “No, no, no,” he muttered, swiping at the tablet. “No. It’s not fast enough!”
“Shut it down,” Jeong said, lowering his phone. “Shut it down before it collapses.”
The Book of Destiny Page 20