Faintly, I heard cries of panic in a language too garbled to identify. They grew louder, as if a fight had broken out somewhere nearby and was drawing closer. The smell of old paper mingled with the smell of smoke—no, incense, a dark, rich odor that filled my lungs and spread through my body.
Then new sounds arose, terrible, skin-crawling, hissing squeals that came from nothing earthly. As the noise, too, drew closer, I cringed, wishing I could hide from the things that made it. Footsteps echoed through the oracle, the sound of someone running across marble, not linoleum. The person was coming my way. Without opening my eyes, I reached for the runner, found a handful of cloth, and dragged the person toward me.
Whoever it was stumbled and fell into me, knocking me into one of the bookcases. Immediately my sense of the store vanished, and with it the keening, hissing squeal. I opened my eyes. Claude Gauthier sprawled at my feet, breathing heavily, his hair and clothing disordered.
I gaped. “Claude! How—”
He flees. We stand. Here, and there, and here.
“Helena,” Claude gasped. “Where are we? Is this Abernathy’s?”
I ignored him for the moment. “You did this before, with the other oracle,” I said. “But that was because the two of you shared the same oracular space. How did you reach across a continent and an ocean to bring Claude here?”
The oracle was silent, though I still felt its presence. Claude got to his feet and dusted himself off. His eyes were wild, and he was still breathing heavily. “Is it the oracle to whom you speak?” he said in a low voice, like he was afraid of interrupting me.
I nodded and held up a finger, asking him to wait. “Is that too hard a question?” I asked. “Um…can you tell me if we’re in danger?”
The guardians fall. Four are gone, two remain. He flees. Here, and there, and here.
“The Athenaeum is gone,” I said, and looked at Claude. He nodded. I didn’t think he’d heard the oracle speak through my thoughts. “How did we save Claude?”
Again the oracle was silent. Then it said, We are one. We are apart.
“I…think this may be too complicated for you to explain to me. We made a connection with the Athenaeum? Could you always do that?”
We are apart. If we touch, we end.
“And the Athenaeum was already lost, so—” A horrible thought struck me. “Can the invaders use that connection to come here? That would bypass the wards, I’m sure.”
We are apart.
“All right.” I looked at Claude, who was watching me without betraying any of the confusion he might justifiably have felt, what with me talking to the air like that. “I don’t know how it worked, but I’m glad. They would have killed you.”
“They nearly did,” Claude agreed. He looked around with interest. “I have not seen the store ever. It is extraordinary.”
I let out a deep breath. “We need to call Lucia. She’ll want to know what happened.”
My phone rang the instant we left the oracle, as if it had been impatiently waiting for me to emerge into a place that had cell reception. “Which Neutrality?” Lucia demanded.
“The Athenaeum. It’s lost. The oracle…I don’t know how it happened, but it brought Claude Gauthier to Abernathy’s before the invaders got him.”
“That’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve heard all week. We can discuss it later. How did they break through the wards?”
“Um…why don’t you talk to Claude?” I handed Claude the phone.
As he spoke to Lucia, Judy came through the stacks. She looked pissed. “Why does no one ever tell me what the hell is going on?” she exclaimed. “And where did Claude come from?”
“Switzerland,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.” I described the events of the last few minutes. Judy’s expression went from angry to thoughtful. “I think the oracle was able to overlap with the Athenaeum, or something,” I finished. “Which means it probably can’t do it again, if the Athenaeum is destroyed.”
“That sounds dangerous,” Judy said. “But what a relief that he wasn’t killed.”
“Yeah.”
Claude abruptly handed me back my phone. Lucia said, “From what Gauthier tells me, Abernathy’s isn’t in immediate danger. The protections on the store aren’t stone wards, so they’re not vulnerable to the attack the invaders just pulled on the Athenaeum. I’m sending enforcers to watch the neighborhood in case they try an attack on one of you directly.”
“Okay. How likely do you think that is?”
“I no longer know what to expect from them. There were three other simultaneous attacks when they destroyed the Athenaeum. Not cities, but pinpoint attacks on Neutralities in Istanbul, Hong Kong, and outside Scranton. The invaders have changed their tactics again, and I wish I knew why.”
“It’s like they don’t care anymore about preserving our world.”
“It—what did you say?” Lucia’s voice went sharp.
“Um…that they don’t care about preserving our world?”
“Why would you think they ever cared about that?”
Stammering, I said, “It was something that invader told me, about wanting to basically farm us. It made it sound like they wanted cooperation. But this is more like total destruction.”
“It is. Damn. I’ll call you later.” She hung up.
I lowered my phone slowly. “The attack hit more than the named Neutralities,” I told Judy and Claude, and related what Lucia had said.
“There has to be some pattern to it,” Judy said. “Something those Neutralities all have in common.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” I said. “What if they’re just trying to throw the Wardens off-balance? If the real targets are the named Neutralities, and the other attacks are to draw Warden resources away from protecting them—”
“That makes sense, I guess.” Judy let out a deep breath. “Only two left. It’s terrifying. Makes me wonder what happens if—” Her mouth snapped shut, and she looked away from us.
“That is true,” Claude said. “If they are all destroyed, what does that mean? What if the named Neutralities are guardians in a literal sense?”
I nodded. “The Wardens need to stop them before we find that out.”
It was late afternoon, and I was dusting shelves, before Lucia called again. “You were right,” she said. “That’s how their tactics have changed. The invaders have given up on the possibility of convincing humans to cooperate, and they’re going for total destruction.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought that was always the plan. That the cooperation thing was a lie they told the Mercy.”
“The lie was that they would give power to some humans to make them co-equal with the intelligent invaders.” Lucia spoke rapidly, like the words were spilling out of her. “It was always optimal for them to take our world without having to fight for it. Wasted resources and all that. That’s been their strategy for over seven hundred years. But now, maybe because of the destruction of their human allies, maybe for some totally different reason, they’ve settled on breaking humanity. Starting with its defenders.”
“So there is a pattern to their attacks. There must be. They choose their targets according to what will best defeat the Wardens.”
“Smart girl. Yes. We’ve gone back to our original efforts to analyze the attacks with this new information in mind.”
“But the named Neutralities are separate from that pattern.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It’s just what the oracle has been saying all along, that they’re the guardians. I really do think it means that literally. There’s something about the named Neutralities that makes them fundamentally important, not just as a distraction to the Wardens.”
“You might be right. We’ll keep that in mind. Until then, Henry’s on his way over again. We need Abernathy’s more than ever, now that the Athenaeum is gone. Damn Darius Wallach. I need him too, and—” Lucia’s voice was hoarse. She cleared her throat and sai
d, “Stay safe, Davies,” and hung up.
I put my phone away and went back to dusting. It still confused me, the difference between the invaders wanting our cooperation and the invaders wanting our destruction. They needed our magic, and I could understand them wanting it given, if not willingly, then at least without a huge fight. But if they destroyed us, didn’t that make our magic inaccessible to them? I wished I understood better what it meant.
Claude was reading in the break room when I finished. It was an ordinary book, not an augury, he’d taken off the shelves. “You want to stay with me and Malcolm?” I asked. “Until we figure out what to do?”
“I do not wish to intrude.”
“It’s a big house, and I like having guests.”
He shrugged. “Very well. I must make calls, and I think, me, that you and I and Samudra should talk. Samudra will need to know how the wards were thwarted, so that he may perhaps stop it happening at the Sanctuary.”
“Do you know what happened to the wards?”
Claude closed the book over one large knobby finger and pursed his lips in thought. “I told you how the Athenaeum’s heart is—was—protected by an impenetrable ward. It appeared to me that they used that impenetrability to their advantage. Their advance force bore similarly unbreakable wards that were…in harmony, perhaps? It is as if their wards confused those on the heart into thinking they were the same, and thus allowed them to pass through.” He shook his head ruefully. “We should perhaps be grateful the intelligent invaders were in no position to direct their stupider cousins, all these years.”
I thought about what Lucia had said about their intent, what I had guessed, and said, “I think there were a lot of things we took for granted all those years.”
Dave Henry came in just before closing and apologized for his lateness. “Traffic,” he said, handing over an augury slip. I opened it and read What is the pattern to the invaders’ attacks?
“I hope the oracle can help with this,” I said. I folded it into my pocket and walked into the oracle’s space—and into the reddish glow of a dying star. My heart sank.
“Are you sure?” I said. “This would make such a difference. I wish I could at least tell Lucia why you won’t answer. Is it that there really is no pattern? Or is searching for a pattern the wrong approach?”
I felt the oracle’s presence an instant before I thought, The guardians fall. Four are gone, two remain.
“Does that mean it’s the named Neutralities that matter? Or—I don’t know what you mean.”
Seal the cracks.
An idea occurred to me. I hurried back to where Dave waited, grabbed the pen beside the ledger, and scribbled out Lucia’s question. “Ask something else,” I urged, thrusting the paper and pen at him. “Ask ‘How do we seal the cracks?’”
“What about the other augury?”
“The oracle refuses to answer. Hurry, try that question. I can’t ask for an augury for myself, so you’ll have to do it.” I was about fifty percent sure the oracle would reject the question on the grounds that I’d given it to Dave, but fifty percent was good enough for me to take the chance.
Dave wrote the question and handed the slip to me. “Thanks,” I said, and hurried back into the oracle.
The light was clear and blue-tinted, and I breathed out in relief. “I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before,” I said as I paced the aisles looking for the augury. “You keep talking about cracks, and it’s past time we figured out what it meant.”
It didn’t take long for me to locate the blue light. I dragged the book off the shelf; it was a weighty hardcover with a lurid cover titled Plague of Frogs Vol. 1 and looked like a comic book compilation. I tucked it into the crook of my left arm and opened the cover. Dave Henry, $500 was written there in silver ink. I closed the book and headed for the exit.
Dave raised his eyebrows when he saw the size of the augury. “$500?” he said, opening his briefcase. “Is that good, or bad?”
“I never know.” I scrawled out a receipt. “Sometimes I think the cheap ones are because the oracle believes they’re important. But then it gives out a cheap one to someone whose request is frivolous, and then I wonder if that’s true, or if I’m wrong about what’s frivolous.”
“I choose to be grateful the oracle answered the question. And hope Lucia isn’t so irritated that it wouldn’t answer the original question that she doesn’t take this one seriously.” Dave closed the briefcase and nodded a farewell.
It was six o’clock, so I locked the door behind Dave and then stood for a moment looking through the crystal. Everything beyond was slightly blurry and warped out of true. It felt like a metaphor for my life lately. My relief that I’d withstood the invaders’ attack was overwhelmed by my fear about how they’d somehow overcome the wards on the Athenaeum. There was no reason they might not try that here.
My phone rang. I looked at the display, and my heart lurched when I saw Jeremiah’s name. “Jeremiah,” I said. “Is she awake?”
“No,” Jeremiah said. His voice sounded choked. “Helena, it’s not good news.”
I clutched my phone so hard it hurt. “She’s not…”
“She’s alive, but…” Jeremiah cleared his throat. “This morning her magic levels were low. They thought it was the normal ebb and flow—it’s natural for magic to increase and decrease even over the course of a day. So they replenished them, and by noon they were low again. Her magic keeps draining away, and the mechanism that ought to replenish it naturally isn’t working.”
“I don’t understand. Can’t they repair it?”
“That’s what I thought. But the bone magi said it’s not reacting to anything they do. Like it doesn’t respond to their magic and can’t be repaired.”
I leaned against the counter, afraid I might fall without its support. “That’s…what does that mean?”
“It means Viv is dying,” Jeremiah said.
22
The monitors hooked up to Viv made occasional hissing, humming noises that sounded overly loud in the quiet room. Viv herself was still and utterly silent, her breathing barely visible as the rise and fall of her chest. Her lips were still pale, but glimmered with the ointment they’d used to treat the dryness. Her skin, always fair even in the heart of summer, was almost white, as if the color had leached away along with her magic. I held her hand, which hung limp and unresponsive in mine. My eyes were painfully dry, and I once again felt numb. This couldn’t be happening. Viv could not— My mind sheered away from completing that thought.
“After running a few more tests, I think I know what happened,” Rick said, startling me out of my painful reverie. “Viv took the full brunt of the magical backlash, which contained not only the magic the fulcrum had absorbed, but the fulcrum’s connection to the node itself. The human body is built to absorb magic—it’s how we can be revived if something happens to drain our magic, that ability to take it in. Viv’s body tried to protect itself by absorbing some of the magic, diverting it, and it did that to a degree that the backlash only knocked her unconscious.”
“Is that why she won’t wake up?” Jeremiah asked.
“I’m getting to that.” Rick touched the second IV bag, turning it so he could examine its glittering contents. It looked like a sack full of pale blue diamonds. “The problem is the mechanism that regulates magic production was severely damaged by the overload to Viv’s system. Not only is it not working, it’s too damaged to repair itself, and because it’s magical rather than physical, it’s not something a bone magus can fix. Viv’s using her magic at a normal rate, but it’s not being replenished. She’s unconscious because…you might think of it like shutting off an overheating computer to keep it from frying itself. When she’s unconscious, she uses less of her magic.”
“I thought people couldn’t use their magic. Isn’t that what an aegis is for?” I said.
“Can’t use their magic consciously,” Rick said. “We use magic passively all the time, sort of like how our b
lood oxygenates our bodies. This is like if Viv was bleeding from a wound that won’t heal.”
Jeremiah was as pale as Viv. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“We can keep her alive indefinitely through transfusions,” Rick said, flicking the IV bag with his fingernail. “And I haven’t given up on finding an alternative. But I don’t want to give you false hope. It doesn’t look good.”
Malcolm put his arm around my shoulders. I let go of Viv’s hand and took Jeremiah’s, squeezing it tightly. He didn’t respond, and when I looked at his face, I saw his eyes were unfocused as if he were staring at something none of us could see. “Keep trying,” he said. “There has to be something. A transplant?”
“Like I said, the mechanism isn’t physical,” Rick said, “so there’s nothing to transplant. You’re right, that would be an ideal solution, but it’s not possible.”
Jeremiah nodded, his eyes still distant.
“Try to get some rest,” Rick said to Jeremiah. “She’s not in any immediate danger, and we’ll call you if there’s any change. Or if we have a breakthrough.”
Jeremiah looked at Viv. “I can’t sleep at home,” he said. “It’s way too quiet.”
“He can stay here, right?” I said. “There’s even that bed. It won’t disrupt anything.”
Rick shrugged. “I don’t see why not. I’ll let the nurses know. Helena, come with me. I want to look at your hand, as long as you’re here.”
He ushered me and Malcolm into the next room over, empty even of medical monitors, and gestured to me to sit on the bed. I thought he’d unwrap the bandages, but he just took my good hand in his and closed his eyes. “The regenerative field is starting to fade,” he said, “which means it’s almost finished healing you. The bones are all strong, though that’s no surprise because they were completely intact. Muscles are maybe a little on the underdeveloped side, but some hand exercises will soon fix that.” He released me and opened his eyes. “You’re going to be fine.”
The Book of Destiny Page 24