Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  Sal squeezed back even as her other hand closed around the grip of her service pistol. She couldn’t stop her face from mirroring Grace’s smile.

  • • •

  Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as Grace made it out to be. Once Sal had detailed the tactical situation, Menchú and Liam had suggestions as well. Good ones, too. Soon they had a plan Sal had to admit she never would have come up with on her own. Certainly not in the heat of the moment ten years ago.

  Menchú found a handkerchief in LaPaglia’s jacket pocket and put it on the end of a stick to wave in the air, shouting at the same time that he was a priest and that they needed to resolve this through negotiation. That was sufficiently distracting—or confusing, Sal suspected—that Grace was able to get nearly halfway to her new cover before anyone noticed her moving and started shooting again. Grace picking a bloody bullet out of her shoulder and throwing it back to hit one of the concealed snipers in the forehead wasn’t exactly tactically effective, but it certainly didn’t do anything good for the other side’s morale.

  As Grace kept running, Sal calmly picked off the two snipers in the overlooking offices, keeping everyone else pinned down until Grace scampered back to join the rest of the group.

  “Did they work?” asked Liam.

  Grace dropped a handful of tape-wrapped paperclips into Liam’s lap. “Well, I’m not electrocuted, so that’s a plus. There was a hell of a spark when I jammed them into the outlets, but I didn’t stick around to see if anything caught,” said Grace.

  “Old wiring like this place? It caught,” said Liam. Sure enough, smoke was already curling around the wall outlets Grace had passed on her run around the room.

  As the smoke burst into flames, Sal took aim and shot each one of bad guys as they broke position and ran. One by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  This is for Knight. This is for LaPaglia. This is for Collins. And this is for me.

  The noise around her fell away, until the only sound was her own breath echoing in her ears. Sal felt a sense of calm fall over her. When she confessed to her superiors at the NYPD that she had seen the offices and hadn’t said anything, that she could have saved LaPaglia and Knight, they said: “It wasn’t your fault. This couldn’t have been prevented.” The investigators had agreed. So had her therapist. So had her family. “It’s a miracle two of you made it out of that kill box alive,” they all said. “It was an unwinnable situation.”

  And now, in the moment that she had the proof that her heart had always believed, that there had been a way out, she finally believed there was nothing she could have done. She had years more experience now than she had then, perfect information about who was in the building and where, not to mention a priest who could sell holy water to the Pope, a technical genius, and a woman who shrugged off bullets like a bad leg cramp, and it had still barely been enough to get them through. The idea that she could have convinced three senior detectives that the offices weren’t empty and then come up with a plan where they all made it out alive? Laughable.

  They had done the best they could with what they knew and the resources they had at the time. The outcome had been terrible, but it could have been worse.

  It wasn’t her fault.

  • • •

  Grace watched with relief as blood came back to Sal’s cheeks and the shock and battle haze faded from her expression. For the first time since they’d stepped out of the hotel and into—wherever the hell this was, she seemed like the Sal that Grace had come to know over the last two years, and not a hollow, haunted shell. It was nearly enough to make the fact that they were still inside a burning building a secondary concern.

  As if reading her thoughts, Menchú called out, “Grace, perhaps we should leave now?”

  This was followed by the sound of Liam punching a door and swearing. “Easier said than done. This door isn’t moving.”

  “What?!” That was Sal again.

  Grace continued her careful inspection of the bodies. She wasn’t surprised that escaping this room wasn’t as simple as exiting the door where they entered and finding themselves back in a Seattle hotel. Tom had laid a trap, probably a trap specifically for them, knowing that Team Three would be on his heels after the theft of the bones in China. Getting out of a memory by getting through it was tempting psychology, and she didn’t blame Menchú for invoking it. They had needed something to get Sal—their only native guide—thinking instead of panicking. And the catharsis had certainly been good for her, but metaphor only got you so far. The gunmen had been an immediate threat, and so had to be dealt with. The fact that they were now in a burning building … well, from Sal’s description of events, that had been inevitable.

  They were in a real place, and that meant they would need to find a real way out of it. And if her estimate of the level of heat and smoke in the room was right, they would need to find it in the next two minutes.

  Grace knew intimately what could be done in two minutes.

  She reached the last of the bodies and flipped the unfortunate gunman onto his back. The others had yielded little in the way of either useful equipment or information about the true nature of their situation. But as Grace frisked over the boy’s—the man’s, when did everyone start looking like a child?—body, her fingers found something flat and oval stuck into the waistband of his jeans. Something just slightly domed … like a turtle shell.

  “Menchú,” she called. “I found one of the oracle bones.”

  The others abandoned their doomed efforts to open the door and rushed over to her.

  “Do you think we can use it to get out of here?” asked Sal.

  Grace pulled up the shirt to reveal the artifact, wrapped in a layer of ordinary newsprint. Asanti would have a fit. Grace grasped the paper to pull it away.

  “Be careful,” Menchú said, “we don’t know—”

  But Grace couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t hear anything. In the instant her hand brushed the surface of the bone, the world cracked open.

  3.

  The night was full of mist and coal smoke. Lights twinkled on the river, giving an illusion of life to the wavering reflection of the Shanghai skyline. Grace froze. The bite in the air, the wind off the water. Every sensation felt sharper, more real than anything had felt in years. As though a layer had been scraped from her skin, leaving her raw and open and … alive. An abandoned newspaper fluttered in the wind and skipped down the abandoned street. She didn’t need to catch up to it to know the date. This was the last night of her life. The night she had been born again as something else.

  Grace felt a sudden sympathy for Sal, and ashamed of her uncharitable thoughts about her panic. It was one thing to live through someone else’s worst memory. It was another to find yourself suddenly immersed in your own.

  “Grace?” said Liam. Of course Liam would have recognized the horizon by now. Shanghai was different in the 1920s, but the shape of the harbor, the feel of the air … some things were embedded in the heart of a place.

  Grace readied herself before she turned to face the others. Her team would be relying on her, and she would not let them down. It was just as she had told Sal: She had survived this once, she could do it again.

  Except that I didn’t.

  By the time she faced Liam, his face was lined in concern, but Grace’s masks were back in place.

  “We’re in Shanghai,” she confirmed in answer to the question he had not asked. “The year is 1928. This is the night I”—her voice caught for just an instant before she completed the thought—“the night we went after Antopov.”

  There was a silence that greeted her words. Until Sal said, “You know, I’ve never met this Tom guy, but when I do, I really think I’m going to kill him.”

  Get in line, thought Grace.

  Liam’s expression was grim enough that she wondered if he wasn’t having similar thoughts himself. Then she noticed the blood leaking from beneath the bullet wound to his thigh, and revised her assessment of his expression from gri
m to pain. Sal came to a similar conclusion.

  “Shit, are you still shot?”

  “Looks like it.” Liam shifted his weight more firmly to his good leg. “But either it’ll get worse, and I’ll bleed out, or it won’t. Unless you have a lead on some non-1920s painkillers, there’s not much we can do about it.”

  “Opium?” Sal suggested.

  “Wrong century, and not funny,” said Grace.

  “Not joking,” Sal muttered back.

  Menchú cleared his throat. “Grace, are we safe here for the moment?”

  Grace nodded. “For a little while.”

  “Then I suggest we concentrate on making a plan. Liam’s wound has carried over from one memory to the next, but so has the oracle bone.”

  Grace looked down and saw the etched turtle shell lying on the pavement at her feet. She had been so distracted, she hadn’t seen it earlier. She knelt down and picked it up. Touching it the first time had sent them here. Maybe doing so again would take them somewhere else.

  It didn’t.

  Liam limped over, touched the shell. He met her eyes and shrugged. “Worth a try. I guess it’s one trip only.”

  Menchú was speaking again. “If the oracle bones are driving these memories, the second one must be here. Tom only stole three when he was in China. If we can find and neutralize all of them, we might be able to break out of this trap.”

  Sal grimaced. “The only way out is still through?”

  “I don’t see that we have an option.” Menchú held out his hand to Grace. “Here,” he said. “Give it to me. I’ll put it in a shroud.”

  Grace didn’t move. As they all had taken the place of someone in Sal’s memory, she recognized the roles that the others were supposed to play. Menchú was not wearing his priest’s collar and coat, but Wujing’s crisp navy suit that he preferred for nighttime operations. It was cut to allow its wearer to move freely and hide at least three blades in the lining. It was a very well-designed suit, but it was Wujing’s, not Menchú’s. Just as she had found a stranger’s MetroCard, a leaking pen, and half a pack of chewing gum in the pockets of Knight’s blended wool-poly blazer in New York, not the detritus of her own life.

  Menchú had noticed her hesitation and looked a question at her.

  “Do you still have the shroud?” she asked him.

  She saw him reach into his jacket pocket, and realize the same thing she had. They carried the oracle bone and Liam’s wound from their experience inside the previous memory. They hadn’t carried anything else either from it or from the hotel.

  “Well,” said Sal as Menchú’s silence answered Grace’s question. “That could make things more difficult.”

  Grace slipped the shell into the pocket of her own jacket and Menchú didn’t protest. She was glad, because she needed it, an anchor. The night was the same; her clothes were the same; she was the same. The hard edge of the bone against her side was a tangible reminder that something was different.

  If you could live normally, without your candle, would you?

  Grace dismissed Asanti’s remembered words as soon as they entered her mind. Memory was not time travel. Their actions in the warehouse hadn’t brought two detectives back from the dead. Avoiding the wax now would not undo the last ninety years.

  “So if there’s an oracle bone somewhere in the city,” Liam was saying, “where do we look first?”

  “It has to be near here,” said Grace.

  “You can’t be sure of that,” said Menchú.

  “This place is created from my memories, just as the warehouse was from Sal’s. A specific time and a specific place that was so terrible we can’t forget any of it, not even the smallest detail. It feels real, because to us, it still is. But if the oracle bone is here, it has to be someplace I was, because that’s all I can remember.”

  “That narrows things down,” said Sal.

  “I bet we can narrow it down even farther,” said Liam. “These memories are trying to hurt us. The oracle bone is going to be someplace that will force Grace to be in exactly the last place she would ever want to be.”

  Grace had been trying not to look at Menchú as the conversation progressed to its inevitable conclusion. But she could feel him watching her, wanting to reach out, and she wasn’t so hard-hearted that she could let him think that she was trying to push him away. We’ve spent too long being apart. Time to admit that we’ll hurt each other more by denying the other what little we have left. She looked back and found all the pity that she had feared. But to her surprise, there was something more as well. Confidence. He had faith in her.

  Maybe it was the memory of her more fragile body, or maybe it was just the lack of secrets between them, but Grace had never felt more vulnerable in her life. And yet, standing before him, she could feel his confidence bolstering her own. If she trusted him, and he believed in her, maybe she could trust herself.

  “All right,” she said.

  • • •

  Menchú felt the irrational desire to apologize to Grace. I didn’t want to invade your privacy. I never did. After China, I thought I would never do it again. If he was about to see the moment that ended her life … That felt more intimate than seeing her naked.

  The moment that killed her, and brought her to you, the traitorous voice in the back of his mind told him. If not for the worst moment of her life, she would be as dead as everyone else in her old department by now.

  Menchú shook his head. It was horrible, reprehensible, selfish to be glad that this had happened. This was Grace’s memory. How self-centered was he to make this somehow about his own sins? And so he wouldn’t. If this was the worst thing that had ever happened to Grace, he was going to make damned sure that this time, it would go differently.

  At Grace’s insistence, they proceeded directly to Antopov’s lab. “The girls won’t have the oracle bone.”

  “Why not?” Sal had asked.

  “Because everything in the hostage rescue went according to plan. No trauma, no artifact.”

  “But—”

  “If I’m wrong, we can still get to the girls after we deal with Antopov.”

  Sal hadn’t argued after that.

  Menchú watched Grace as they approached the lab. Where Sal’s nerves had presented as a need to speak—to confess—Grace grew quieter the closer they got. He had insisted that Grace brief them on what they should expect: the goons, the ape-like creatures, the smell of wax and burnt hair. Most of all, she had been very clear about the dangers.

  “No one else can go for Antopov. There’s no way to reach him without being drowned in the wax.”

  “But it’s not real wax,” Menchú had argued, “it’s a memory.”

  “Liam is still bleeding,” Grace pointed out. “I am already tied to the candle. I will not risk the same thing happening to any of you.”

  The moment they stepped into the warehouse, everything was as Grace had described it. The candles, the cauldron, the stench. And standing in the middle, surrounded by a trough of molten tallow, was a deranged Russian professor.

  Antopov.

  For a moment, everything was still. And then, wax creatures were everywhere: lions, apes, tigers … Menchú couldn’t tell if they were transforming before his eyes or if his brain was simply refusing to process what he was seeing. But it didn’t matter. Because Menchú realized that they were not, in fact, everywhere. They were all making a beeline right at Liam.

  “Jesus, Mary—”

  The end of Liam’s exclamation was cut off by the sound of gunfire from Sal, who was already falling back to put herself between Liam and the wax creatures. She threw a glance over her shoulder at Menchú. “If you have a gun, use it. It slows them down, and we only have to buy Grace time!”

  Menchú shook himself out of his surprise. They had always known this wasn’t a moment for negotiation. He ran over to Liam and Sal and watched as Grace ignored them all, moving straight toward Antopov.

  Menchú’s heart stopped as he saw her consum
ed in a fountain of molten wax, as the Russian reached for her, and realized too late that she hadn’t closed to attack him, but his candle. Grace had eighty years of experience to remind her where his weak point was. Her fingers, still dripping hot tallow, closed around the burning wick. The candle went out.

  Antopov and the wax figures fell to the ground, senseless. So did Grace. Menchú rushed to her, barely noticing as Sal and Liam’s unerring aim picked off the few flesh-and-blood goons Antopov kept for his protection.

  She wasn’t moving. Of course she wasn’t moving. The candle was out. But it wasn’t her candle, was it?

  Menchú fumbled in her pockets, looking for a match. He had to light the candle again, had to wake her up … No. He couldn’t. It might wake her, but it would definitely wake the others. But how could they …

  The only way out is through. He had to find the oracle bone.

  Without conscious thought, Menchú searched Antopov’s body, as still and cool as a mannequin. He suppressed the thought that he was as still and cool as the dead. Menchú had never touched Grace when she was not awake, and did not like to think of her sleeping form as a corpse.

  The oracle bone wasn’t there.

  Menchú sank to the floor, staring at Grace’s unmoving body, and beyond it, the thick, yellowed candle that she had knocked to the floor when she collapsed. The thick, yellowed candle with a line of black a few centimeters from the bottom.

  There was no ring on Grace’s candle. Menchú got up, examined it more closely. It looked as though something had been trapped inside when the candle was formed. A string? A plate? The edge of an ancient turtle shell …?

  Menchú had always treated Grace’s candle as an object of reverence, acutely aware each of the few times that he had held it that it was, literally, her life in his hands. He tore at it now, scraping away the wax with his nails, pounding at the candle with the sole of his shoe until …

  The candle cleaved at the line, across the shell, leaving its upper surface exposed. Menchú had planned to wrap it in a cloth. Even if it wasn’t a shroud, it seemed as though touch had triggered the transition from one memory to the next. With Antopov neutralized, in theory they could wait here, bide their time. Make a plan.