Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  Then a sound grew from the stairs, human voices rising, overlaid with a high, glassy keening. The expressions on Sal’s and Liam’s faces changed. They turned their heads and looked up and down the stairs, and at once they were tumbling and fighting. Liam was lifted off the ground, his feet kicking in the air. He punched upward and dropped again, fell to the floor, got on his feet. Someone landed on Sal’s back. She crouched and rolled, pinning her assailant beneath her, then flipped over and tried to hold the attacker down, but couldn’t.

  “Close the door!” Liam said to Sal.

  But one of the tenants of the building made that impossible. He had jumped to his feet and made his way into the doorway. Sal threw herself on him and knocked him down, and they wrestled on the ground half in, half out of the apartment. The tenant began to break free and turned his face toward Menchú. It was elongated, faceted, an abstract sculpture of itself. It made Menchú doubt how much human was left. Behind them, on the landing, Liam was facing two other attackers and losing, the glassy screams getting louder and louder.

  “Sal is right,” Hannah said. “Call their boss.”

  “I don’t know how,” Menchú said.

  “I think I do,” Hannah said.

  “What’s the spell?” Menchú said. “Quick.”

  “There doesn’t always have to be a spell. Grab the book and call.”

  A long, wide crack appeared in the ceiling over their heads, dropping a flurry of dust in the air. The possessed man in the doorway was almost free.

  Menchú grabbed either side of the book and spoke into it.

  “Whoever oversees these servants’ work,” he yelled, “it is out of control. It is dangerous. The work must be stopped before someone is killed.”

  The book felt warmer in his hands. The edges of the solidified pages pulsed beneath his palms. He could hear Liam shouting from the landing, Sal swearing at the man she was trying in vain to contain. The crack spread from the ceiling to the walls.

  “Does anyone hear me?” Menchú said. “Is anyone there?”

  A low moan escaped the book. Menchú looked down into it. He could see a tiny figure in the middle of it, first little more than a dot, then growing larger. It looked almost like a turtle. It got closer and then seemed more like a Christmas ornament, a scintillating globe with tiny head, tiny limbs. It got closer, and bigger. Big enough that Menchú took a step back. Another step.

  A hand reached out of the book, thick, square, with stocky, stony fingers. It was too big for the book, impossible to say how it was fitting through, but it was emerging. An even wider shoulder followed, the curve of a sphere that, Menchú realized, would almost not fit into the room. Another arm on the other side. A thick leg. A second one. Its head began on the top of the sphere, but as the sphere grew to fill the space, the head slid down to the middle of what would be its chest. Eyes opened in the head where Menchú did not expect. The mouth appeared above them, spitting out a few shards of glass before it spoke.

  “I am the foreman of this crew,” it said. “Cease working.”

  All the noise stopped. In the doorway, Sal’s attacker stopped moving and lay on the ground. The two servants on the landing stood up. Liam stood up with them, straightening his clothes. The building swayed beneath them. They could all feel it.

  “You are dissatisfied with the work?” the foreman said.

  “You felt it for yourself, didn’t you?” Menchú said. “The work has made the building unstable.”

  “They are rebuilding it. This edifice cannot be improved without first making it more fragile. Surely everyone knows this.”

  “Yes, but there are people living here,” Menchú said.

  “Structural work is always inconvenient, regrettable but necessary,” the foreman said. “People, like buildings, can be fragile, and must be made stronger.”

  “Some of the people don’t want to be made stronger. They just want to be left alone,” Menchú said. He looked toward Sal and Liam. They had both been through so much.

  “That is their choice,” the foreman said. “We don’t impose. We don’t make them stronger unless they ask.”

  “Ah,” Menchú said. “Maybe that’s so for them. But you’ve overlooked something. Your crew has decided to work on the entire building, and not everyone in the building has been improved to withstand it.”

  The foreman cocked its head.

  “I,” Menchú said, “have not been improved to withstand it. This little girl beside me. My friends right here. If you continue to work on the building, you’ll kill us in the process.”

  “We can help you to live through it,” the foreman said.

  “Don’t you see?” Menchú said. “We don’t want your help in that way. We’re okay the way we are.” He was surprised to find how much he meant that.

  “I’m afraid that perhaps you don’t see,” the foreman said. “This building is being improved in order to be brought up to code.”

  “I’m sorry?” Menchú said.

  “Circumstances are changing around you. Whoever summoned our crew in the beginning asked only that the walls be painted. I understand that. But in doing that work, so many violations were revealed that the entire crew was necessary.”

  “This building and half the people in it will not survive until the end of the day if you continue to do your work.”

  “This world and all the people in it may not survive if we do not do our work,” the foreman said.

  Menchú’s skin tingled. He had a sense of standing on the edge of a cliff that was crumbling beneath them, the ground far below nowhere in sight.

  The building heaved again. The crack in the wall widened. They could all feel the structure beginning to pitch over.

  “I can’t worry about the world just yet,” Menchú said. “I’m worried about the people in this building making it to tonight. Can you understand that?”

  “Of course,” the foreman said.

  “Then can I ask you to call off your work?”

  “I’m afraid that’s complicated. There are protocols to follow.”

  Protocols. Rules. Regulations. Now Menchú was back on solid ground. Sal’s trick had worked once. Maybe it would work again.

  “Let me speak to whoever oversees you,” Menchú said.

  The foreman sighed, shifted its weight from foot to foot. In the slowness, the creakiness of it, Menchú had a sense that the foreman was very heavy. A sentient wrecking ball. He also had the sense that the foreman was very old, and very tired, and perhaps really wasn’t being paid enough to deal with this problem—whatever that might mean in magical terms. It just wanted the whole thing to go away.

  “Whoever summoned us has apparently left the building, correct?”

  “Yes,” Menchú said. “I think they were scared off by what you did.”

  “So in truth, there is no real way of determining whether we have done our work to satisfaction, or even whether it’s finished,” the foreman said.

  “That’s right,” Menchú said.

  He waited for the foreman to speak, and then realized the foreman was waiting for him.

  “You can stop working anytime you want,” Menchú said.

  The foreman’s head sank a little. It took in a deep breath.

  “All right, crew,” it said. “Put everything back the way it was and pack it up.”

  Menchú stole a glance at the girl nearby. Watched as her eyes darkened, and she grew confused. She started to cry. Menchú felt almost nothing but relief.

  • • •

  For Gioconda, Simona, and Nazario, it was as if a cold wind moved through the entire apartment building, beginning in the basement, swerving up the stairs, moving through every floor. The structure groaned back into alignment. The staircases unscrewed and straightened. The endless designs on the walls, the ceilings, sank back into their flat planes. Even the work that had started it all, the white coat of paint, flecked away, and the wall was dry and drab again. The old cracks in the stairs reappeared. The musty smell,
which everyone who lived there had grown accustomed to, returned anew.

  Nazario, lying on the floor of the studio apartment, felt what had happened. He rolled onto his back and held his arms out in front of himself. They were the flesh and bone he had always known. He was stricken. He leapt to his feet and ran upstairs. Simona, looking terrified, followed him from the landing. Gioconda lay on the ground in a fetal position, her hair mussed, her housedress twisted around her legs.

  “Are you okay?” Liam said.

  “I’m fine,” Gioconda said. “But someone will have to help me up.” Without warning, she started crying.

  Nazario would discover that the art he had made with the servant’s help was still there. Simona’s dissertation, almost complete, was saved on her laptop. It was work they had done themselves, after all. The servants had only helped them with it. But Simona despaired of the small amount of work left to be done. Her mind was flooded again with the stresses of her daily life, the fear of disappointing her advisors and herself. And Nazario knew he would have to treat his compositions with care. He needed a strategy for rolling them out, for selling them. He had to be sure not to take too many commissions at once. He would never be so productive again.

  Simona and Nazario, in the next few weeks, would take to having coffee with Gioconda in her apartment on the ground floor. Simona would bring the coffee from upstairs. Nazario would bring a few pastries from the bakery two blocks away. Gioconda would set out plates and cups before they arrived; she insisted that being in a wheelchair didn’t make her an invalid. They would talk about the most mundane things. There was gossip to relate about the other people in the building, behavior of local politicians to condemn. They actually talked about the weather. They didn’t talk much about their careers or their health. They didn’t have to. Even if they couldn’t read one another’s thoughts anymore, each of them knew what they all had lost.

  6.

  “So you did it without Grace,” Asanti said.

  “Yeah, we did,” Sal said.

  “Getting better at hitting?” Asanti said.

  “Well, at least talking,” Liam said.

  “And done in three hours,” Asanti said. “That’s a short conversation for you, Liam.”

  Menchú’s eyebrows rose.

  “What did I do to deserve that?” Liam said.

  “You know I mean it with love,” Asanti said.

  Team Three was back in the Archives, discussing with Asanti the final details of the book they’d brought back. As she talked and asked questions, she wrote quickly in a notepad.

  “One more question,” she said. “Did you ever discover who activated the book in the first place?”

  “No,” Menchú said. “Even the trail of figuring out who rented the apartment went cold.”

  “Someone to do with the black market,” Liam said. “I still have a few people I can ask about it, but I’m not expecting anything.”

  “I can ask, too,” Asanti said.

  “I’m sure you can,” Liam said with a laugh.

  Sal looked from Asanti to Liam and back again. Had they always talked like this, about their connections to criminals, to illicit activities that undermined the Society’s mission? Had they kept it under wraps for the first few months she was there, or was she just noticing it more now? It was hard to remember.

  “Well,” Asanti said, “I have to get home to my family. To think in the past year we’ve almost seen a city or two destroyed. It’s nice to know that sometimes it still comes down to someone misusing a book. Seems almost quaint now, doesn’t it?”

  Menchú, his arms folded, studying Asanti, said nothing.

  “And the building is back to the way it was?” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” Sal said.

  “And the people who live in the building?”

  “No risk to anybody or anything now, it seems,” Menchú said. “No need for any team but ours.”

  “I’m delighted this all wrapped up so fast,” Asanti said. “And so clean.” She got up and headed toward the stairs. “Good night, all of you.” Even in the chipper mood Asanti was in, though, Sal caught her sparing a moment to shoot glances at the new cameras in the room. The archivist still hadn’t gotten used to them.

  None of the other three moved. They waited for Asanti to make her way up the spiral staircase and close the big wooden door at the top.

  “Well,” Liam said. “Asanti seemed pleased. Maybe a little too pleased.”

  “Meaning what?” Menchú said.

  “She had such good information, right from the start,” Liam said. “And certainly a spring in her step when we closed the case. There are always loose ends to these things …”

  “Maybe this time the loose end is her,” Menchú said.

  “I have my suspicions too,” Liam said.

  “But this mission isn’t a reason to open an investigation,” Menchú said. “First, we have no real evidence that she was anything other than helpful. And if it was an experiment of hers, she did the right thing by helping us fix it. Even the magic seemed … I hate to say this, but more benign than usual.”

  “Give her enough rope, then?” Sal said.

  “I’ve never heard that expression before,” Menchú said. “But I think so, yes.”

  “So it’s all tied up?”

  Menchú nodded.

  “Good,” Liam said. “So now I can ask: Did anyone else hate this mission as much as I did?”

  “Why did they have to like being possessed?” Sal said. “Why did it have to seem like we were ruining their lives to set them free?”

  No one spoke for a moment.

  “It was a drug for me, pure and simple,” Liam said. “A bad one. I carved a path of destruction across this planet, for myself and those around me. I did damage I can’t undo. There’s no doubt about that. But now that I remember what I did, I can’t shake the feeling of those first few days, even those first few weeks. The madness we got up to. We were awake for five days straight. We partied in four different cities in three different countries. I was so young, so full of it, but I was so ready, too. I don’t remember everything—how could I?—but when I’m back there, it’s a blur of music and lights and sweaty bodies, and dashing for cabs.”

  He let out a small chuckle.

  “Oh, yes—and running from cops. We were in London by then, at a party in a warehouse that was illegal from top to bottom. We shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and the things that were going on in there … well. It must have been about five in the morning when the police raided the place. All of a sudden, there were flashing lights and bullhorns everywhere. We thought it was part of the party and cheered. Then, when it dawned on us that they were there to put us in jail, we ran. I remember diving out a window with a mate and hitting the ground outside, hard. We bounced off the pavement, were on our feet, and dashed away.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “I know what I did during all that time. I know what I’m responsible for. But the thing that’s hardest to face is that early on, I loved it. I really did. And even when I knew how bad it was getting, there was still that feeling, that rush. I couldn’t let it go. I didn’t want to. And if I’m honest with myself, I still don’t. Even with what I know now.”

  Liam’s voice dropped. “I’m not proud,” he said. “I’m ashamed. I hate it.”

  Sal felt the rage in her uncoiling, fought at first to tamp it down. Then realized there was no point.

  “I’m sorry,” Sal said. “I wish I could be more sympathetic.”

  “Excuse me?” Liam said.

  “You can’t be the martyr in your story,” Sal said. “You’re the perpetrator. I’m sorry you feel bad about what you did. But you went looking for something and you got it. I didn’t ask for what happened to me. I didn’t ask for the Hand to crawl into my head, crawl into the inside of my body. Possession was a drug for you? For me, it was nothing but violation. I was ready to die rather than face another minute of it. I tried to thro
w myself off my balcony. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “No,” Liam said.

  “The only reason I failed was because the Hand stopped me. He froze every muscle in my body just as I was heading over the rail. I got a good look down into the alley below, the parked cars, the black pavement. There were lines in the street that some construction workers must have painted. Want to know what I remember feeling? Sadness. Sadness that I couldn’t be down there, my skull broken into five pieces. I know what it looks like when people jump out of buildings. I know what happens. It’s why I knew it would be so effective. And he took away even that.”

  “But you beat him, Sal,” Menchú said.

  “I wish it were that simple,” Sal said. “But I stopped believing in that particular line of thinking long ago. I don’t think anyone beats anything. We never get over it, we never put it behind us. There’s just learning to live with it.”

  “But you’ve learned to live with it so well,” Menchú said. “You too, Liam. You’ve both taken what’s happened to you, what you’ve done, and used it to make you stronger.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way,” Liam said.

  “Well, it looks that way from where I am,” Menchú said. “I see it in what you say. I see it in your actions.”

  “You’re saying we’re better for having suffered?”

  “I would never say that,” Menchú. “I’m saying that I admire you both, every day, for the way that you continue to live your lives, after what you’ve been through. And when I am feeling weak myself, I think sometimes about what you two might do, and it helps me to be better.”

  Liam blinked. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years,” he said.

  “Well, don’t get used to it,” Sal said.

  “Believe me, I won’t,” Liam said.

  Sal could tell that Menchú wanted to say more. Something was on his mind, eating away at him. She considered pushing him on it, but thought better of it.

  “So,” she said, “who do you think opened that book?”