“What?” Grace asked.
“You said not to swear.”
“In this situation,” she replied, “fuckup is a technical term.”
Tom tried—and Menchú was not certain if this was to his credit, under the circumstances—to stare Grace down. It worked about as well as that sort of thing usually did. At last he breathed out, and slumped against the wall. “Not much to say. Christina learned about the place when she researched the area—and found a dingus she thought would open the door.”
“Show me.”
He motioned toward his pocket, asked permission with his eyes. She granted it. He drew out a small jade seal, cracked down the middle. “For what good it’ll do you. Wasn’t a proper key anyway—one-use sort of deal. Opened the way, then broke.”
She pocketed the shards. Wang Jianguo started to object, but Grace stopped her with a glare. “So, when the Network broke, you came back to China. Why.”
“It’s not like I had many leads. I wanted to see what I could get.”
“What happened?”
“I reached the center, opened the box. What the—what do you think happened?”
“Just that? You didn’t move anything? Set off any traps?”
“None that I noticed.”
Grace stood. “Then we might be able to stop this before the bones bring the whole place down.” She offered Menchú a hand up; she barely needed his help to bring him to his feet. She was working too hard—burning through time, to no good purpose.
“Grace.” He wanted to tell her, but when she looked at him, the gap between them grew. In the crack, who had been trapped in whose memory? Who inside whose mind? Or was there any difference, when two people had lived so close for so long? He could not say these things, not here, not now. When he was younger, perhaps he could have. But he had not.
“I’m thinking,” she said.
“What happens when the cracks close?”
“To the people?” She shook her head. “I think they’re freed. I’m not sure about the bridge. That might be a problem.” She closed her eyes, and turned from him. He almost spoke, but she held out one hand, and he stopped. She liked silence when she thought, and she knew him well enough to tell when he was about to speak. “There’s an artifact in the core, where they kept the oracle bones. A sort of cloud people can use to fly.”
“How do you know?” Wang Jianguo asked.
“I’m the one who seized it.” Grace started pacing. “We get that, close the box, and escape.”
The cracks made a tearing sound. They widened, pulsing. Menchú thought he could hear them—or worse, hear voices through them. “Can we make it out in time, after the cracks close?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged. “We have to try.”
“What about me?” Tom said, sounding afraid for a giant, even one with a broken hand.
“You’re coming with us.”
• • •
Grace wished she hadn’t brought the Network man along. She wished she hadn’t brought any of them along. Wang Jianguo should have stayed away. In here, a slip could kill, and Grace didn’t want to be the root of a diplomatic incident between the Vatican and the Communist Party. Then again, though she hadn’t lived in China in, oh, call it eighty years, she could hardly imagine two labyrinthine bureaucracies she would more enjoy watching eat each other. As for Tom, well, she didn’t have much choice in the matter, but if not for the thief, none of them would be in this mess in the first place.
And then there was Menchú.
She couldn’t look at him. She was afraid of what she would see. She was afraid she might catch him looking back.
Five years was a long time. Thirty years was longer. And for that moment inside the oracle bone crack, falling together, falling into one another—both struggling to break free, to return to the present, and in that struggle tumbling deeper into pits of memory—she remembered the way they were, bright as yesterday. Young, that was part of it. Young, and scared. After that alleyway in Germany when she saved his life and broke her leg, and he helped her, limping, back through broken streets away from the police, to the rendezvous with Father Hunter, bore her without complaint, strength in his arm, and joked about how glad he was to trade places for once, for him to help her, wounded, from a mission, when he thanked her—
It felt so long ago, and so fresh. The feelings did not fit together. She did not belong here.
Focus on the library.
Texts lined the shelves in the outer rings: scrolls, folding books, rolls of bamboo slats, stone slabs, titles in Chinese, Uighur, Tibetan, Arabic. “These,” Wang Jianguo said, with a tone of mild reproof, “are nonstandard characters.”
Arturo replied, “Wizards, in my experience, do not concern themselves with standards.”
His voice had cracked and deepened over decades, but she could hear him saying those same words as a young man. She would have laughed at that, years ago, before she stopped knowing how to be near him. She glanced back, and saw he was watching her, waiting for the laugh. She smiled at him, a little. The smile hurt.
“This way,” she said when they reached a turn.
“I went the other way last time,” Tom said, “and got in.”
“Then you were lucky.” Grace walked in the direction she had chosen. “The earthquake must have damaged the traps. The oracle bones may have woken them up. I can’t take that chance.”
“What were they supposed to do to me?”
Instead of answering, she led them on, and in, and down.
• • •
Menchú had to talk to Grace. Since leading them into this maze, she had walked ahead, guiding, silent—more silent than usual. And, in evaluating that usual, he realized just how silent she had grown altogether. Hard to notice little changes like that, day by day over years. You worked together, and watched her stay the same, and assumed everything was fine—until she left. And now she was back, more or less, quieter than before.
Cracks spread through the library, thinner, finer than in the hall with the chasm and bridge, and harder to evade. They spread without concern for walls or space. Some of the labyrinth was clear, and let them make quick time, but once they turned a corner and found a hall like a shattered glass cube, cracks scattering the light of other cracks into rainbow colors. Grace stopped them short, considered. “I can find a way around.”
Wang Jianguo moved through the maze like a hungry tiger in a petting zoo. Books were only the beginning. Strange bronze tripods and vases hovered an inch above their shelves, and tinted the air around them colors for which Menchú lacked names. Weapons hung in racks. Six black roses grew in a shimmering turquoise pool atop a black pedestal. Every time Wang reached for some new beauty, Grace glared, and she drew back her hand. When she asked questions (“What do these symbols mean?” or “What do the contents of this shelf have in common?” or “Is there a filing system?”), Grace ignored her. Others might have taken the hint. Wang Jianguo simply nodded, as if each new non-answer confirmed her suspicions, whatever they might be, and then, minutes later, asked something else.
She watched Grace with the same hunger she watched the artifacts.
Tom cradled his hand and looked faintly miserable, a teenage thief caught stealing penny candy. Once, when Menchú glanced his way, he said, “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal,” unprompted. Menchú had not asked him what he thought would not be such a big deal. In his experience with the Network, as with all the other techno-cultist fringe groups—the Hive, the “alt-real” movement, the Gods of the Machine, all those pretentious angry children—they thought nothing would be a big deal, then acted surprised when the things that would not be big deals turned out to be very big deals indeed, at which point they tended to start screaming, because whatever they thought wasn’t a big deal had begun to chew their faces off.
He caught up with Grace at the top of a spiral stair.
She started down, but paused on the first stair. “Is there a problem?”
“No.” Not exactly. Not as such. There was a problem only in that he had fallen into her mind, and through her mind, and before Ms. Wang pulled him free he had seen thirty years at once, superimposed, suspended, between them, and when you saw it all laid out like that, questions formed, questions he had grown skilled at not asking, and so perhaps had she. “I wanted to be sure you knew that, if you want to talk, if there’s anything I can do…”
She waited, and weighed him. Against what, he did not know. “It was magic, Arturo.”
“Magic,” he said. “But the memories were real. I’m sorry, Grace. We could have fought harder for you. There was always more—”
“I know it doesn’t work like that,” she replied, too quickly.
The others had almost caught up. “All I mean is, if you want to talk, I’m here.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But now, I’d rather not.”
• • •
The cracks grew wider, worse, as they marched on. Lacking good paths, Grace led them down the least bad ones, high-stepping over cracks. Once she had to climb shelves and anchor a rope to swing them over; at the last she had to drape the shroud to make a tunnel Tom, Menchú, and Wang Jianguo could crawl through before she wriggled past herself. Menchú held the shroud for her. “Thank you.” For that, she meant, and for backing off after that moment on the stair. He understood. There were some things you could not say, if you were Grace.
The library core looked just as she left it.
Grace ignored Menchú’s wonder, his familiar sigh and mustache stroke when overcome by some new sight, and ignored also Wang Jianguo’s rigidity, her raptor focus. Grace had her own demons to deal with.
The rest of the library seemed changed as spaces did when dark, and she had convinced herself this was not the place she left behind, just another place that looked like that one.
She could not play that game in the core.
The light was part of it. There were no immortal torches to freeze in time. The library core, as always, lacked shadows. Light reflected off every surface, sourceless. Shelves circled the room, towering forty feet tall and stuffed with scrolls and books, climbed by wheeled ladders. The great black ledger sat on a lectern opposite the door, the catalog, each item in the library’s collection described, located, annotated, that great book now shut—the librarian must have left the ledger here when he abandoned his post, which meant he planned to return. If not, he would have burned it. Maybe he was still out there—or, more likely, dead. Snarling clay soldiers, clad in armor, bearing weapons of chromed steel, stood at attention beneath the shelves. Concentric circles of display cases converged on a central plinth upon which rested four peachwood boxes, three chained shut, one open, and from that box the cracks spread. Some of the oracle bones remained inside the box. Others had spilled out, and lay on the floor, radiating cracks.
Save for the cracks, the bones, and the open box, the room remained untouched, just as she’d last seen it in 1928, before—well, before everything. Two years ago she might have said, before everything went wrong, but she did not feel that way anymore. She was not certain she knew how she felt, anymore.
Arturo Menchú stood beside her. Light shimmered off the white and silver strands woven through the black of his hair.
Tom had gotten them into this mess, but he was the only person Grace could bear to talk to right now. She knew where she stood with him. “You really didn’t touch anything except the box.”
“Do I look like an idiot?”
She left that question hanging. He grinned at her silence; he got the joke, had set her up for it, didn’t bristle at the insult. Must be a fun guy to have at parties, when he wasn’t endangering the planet. The oracle bones made a sound like creaking ice, or packing peanuts rubbed together: time pressed against itself. “Here’s our plan,” she said, to everyone. “The cloud is up there.” She pointed to a glass case filled with what looked like pale cotton candy, twenty feet up and a quarter turn around the room. “I’ll get it. Tom, you’re with me: If I run into trouble I’ll toss the case down.”
“What if you don’t run into trouble?”
Without a glance, she tried to warn Tom that he wasn’t doing much to reverse her earlier sense of his mental capacity. “I’ll be able to fly.”
“You’re sure you can use the, what, the cloud-thing?”
“It listens to intent. And it’s large enough to carry us—and fast enough, if the library starts to collapse.”
He glanced nervously up at the roof. “Is there much risk of that?”
“I guess you haven’t spent a lot of time in places like this.”
“Christina sourced all the gadgets. We just used ’em.”
“Gadgets?”
“You know,” he said. “Magic stuff. They’re just black box machines: You figure out their input and output, and use them to do whatever you want.”
Arturo had turned a funny, and probably uncomfortable, shade of outraged purple, which tempted Grace to play the conversation out, to tease him for old times’ sake. That felt cruel, to Tom as much as to Arturo, so she let the matter drop. Input, output, gadgets: a good reminder. They had feared the Network, and fought them, less because they represented a confirmed ideological evil, or even a consistent malice, than because they had no idea what they were doing and could, if they screwed up, ruin the world.
Asanti talked a good game about play, and exploration: Would you keep children from a sandbox? Yes, was Grace’s answer, if the sandbox were radioactive, and if playing children liked to make bombs. People rarely asked her opinion about this sort of thing, though; her pragmatism didn’t play well with other philosophies. Sal, she thought, would have a joke about that. There was something in the American school system about not playing well with others. Or maybe that was British?
Back in Rome, a candle burned.
“Tom and I go for the cloud. Arturo, you and Wang Jianguo get the bones. Be careful about the cracks.” He didn’t need her to tell him that, but he nodded anyway. “Just put the bones back in the box, and lock it again.”
“What else are we looking at,” Arturo asked, “in terms of security?”
Of course. Easy to assume others knew what she knew, spoke the languages she spoke. That was a price of humility. “If you don’t touch anything, you should be fine. The soldiers protect the catalogue.” Which she didn’t indicate, because she didn’t want to draw attention to it. “Go in, get the bones, close the box, lock the chain.”
They clasped hands, and she hugged him. That wasn’t planned. His touch, the moment’s closeness, this room with its sourceless light, overcame her, and in that embrace she remembered how it had felt at once, twenty-six years and a few hours back, as they limped together through East Berlin in the rain.
So Grace climbed the ladder while Tom waited at its foot, and Arturo and Wang Jianguo crept toward the fallen bones. As she rose, Grace divided her glances back between Arturo and Tom. If the Network man tried anything dumb, she’d have time to seize the shelves and work her own way down—the wood was oak and anchored deep into stone. She did not fear for Arturo; Wang Jianguo might be treacherous, but not in a way that would endanger him.
This would be fine, she thought, as she approached the upper shelves. Cloud, box, escape before any looming collapse. Easy.
She was still thinking that when she heard a crunch of stone, and Wang Jianguo’s scream.
• • •
Menchú and Wang Jianguo approached the bones from behind. The plinth seemed to block the cracks—which were dense, though tiny. They didn’t know whether a small crack was less dangerous than a large one, and Menchú did not want to risk an experiment. Keep it simple. Stay safe.
That worked, at first. Together they crept around to the shelves near the lectern, after which Menchú led, shroud out, crouched low, negotiating with his knees and back for the bit of extra flexibility required to sneak up on the oracle bones. His knees and back drove hard barg
ains. He prayed, which distracted him, though God decided not to intervene with his ligaments directly at this point. Not that Menchú set much stock in faith healing. God acted in the world, of course, constantly. But His ways were subtle, and a priest of Menchú’s age should be able to read His work without need for flaming letters scribed by an angel’s fiery hand.
A priest of Menchú’s age should not linger on a remembered embrace.
He felt no lust. He was honest enough to feel surprised by that: He was no more immune to that sin than to any other. He had confessed, time and again, contemplated his calling, and confirmed his faith and path. But not until she hugged him had he considered how rarely they touched—how fraught each contact was, as if both feared what their skin would say, no matter how they stilled their lips and tongues.
What scared him? What scared her? Why could they not speak?
Crouched, he approached the bones from behind the shelter of the plinth. He raised the shroud and snuck around the corner. The cracks were not proper cracks, but rather a kind of radiation from the bones: When the shroud cut a crack off from the fallen bones, the rest of it healed quickly. The cloth dimpled and billowed from the pressure of time.
He climbed out of the maze of his own mind, and looked back to check on Wang Jianguo.
The woman was not there.
Panic—a sweep of the room—until he saw her back by the shelves, near the closed ledger on the lectern, which Menchú had taken for some sort of holy book. Before he could call out a warning, she lifted the book. He might have tried to stop her, but the cracks were too dense, he was too far, to reach her in time.
And anyway, the clay soldiers were already moving.
Menchú always expected animated statues to move ponderously, especially in their first seconds after waking, though he’d seen plenty that didn’t, and anyway that expectation didn’t stand up to consideration. Magical statues lacked gears to rust, seals to decay, muscles to stiffen: Why shouldn’t they spring to action?
Wang Jianguo must have made the same error. The first statue caught her by surprise, and almost ended her. She pulled free, rolled back, scrambled to her feet, turned to evade a second statue’s sword thrust. Three more advanced from each side.
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