“Liam, snap out of it!”
The others had reached them while Liam was distracted. Menchú confused but resolved, Grace’s face lined with annoyance.
Menchú was shouting now. “What’s going to happen? What do we have to stop? A fire? A stampede?”
Liam shook his head.
“Then what?”
“Don’t you understand?!” Liam was on the verge of pleading, it was too much waiting for the other shoe to fall, for them to finally get it. “The Index, the Network, Middle Coom, Frances, everything started here. Everything they did is on my head. Because of this.”
Finally, Sal’s expression turned from urgency to disgust. At last. But then she spoke: “That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.”
“You don’t understand—”
“I understand you’ve got issues that a girl could subscribe to, but this is neither the time nor the place. You can beat yourself up, literally or figuratively, as much as you want, but only after we stop Tom and get out of here. Now where is the oracle bone?”
Menchú was shaking his head. “Tom stole three of them. We’ve already found them all.”
“Then how do we get out?” asked Sal.
“Why don’t we ask him?” Grace’s laconic tones somehow sliced through the background noise, as though sheer disdain allowed her voice to ignore the din around them.
Liam was about to ask, “Who?” when the answer became obvious.
There, in defiance of every scrap of logic that said a man his size simply should not be able to crowd-surf, was Tom, carried toward them on a tide of anonymous hands lifted over ecstatic faces.
• • •
Grace was glad to have something to punch. Emotional resolution was great for the soul and all, but sometimes a body needed good, honest violence. Plus, she was discovering a truly burning dislike for house music. As his bearers either crumpled or fled from her fists, Tom fell to the ground with a thump, promptly lost in the throb of the bass that penetrated every molecule in the room. Grace wondered if Liam would mind if she knocked out the DJ next, just on principle.
As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary. As Tom coughed and gasped, he managed to wheeze out, Kill the music, and the room fell silent around them. The crowd danced on, oblivious.
The others clustered in a rough circle, creating a tiny clearing in the middle of the floor.
Sal, looking to shed some aggression of her own, gripped Tom by the shirt and hauled him to a sitting position. Menchú positioned himself beside her, squarely in the middle of Tom’s field of vision. “You took something that didn’t belong to you,” said the priest. “And now it’s time for you to answer for your crimes.”
“You think any of you are innocent?” Tom snarled. “This is the consilience! I’ve seen your minds. You’ve got blood on your hands, all of you.”
“And you don’t?” said Grace.
“How many people are going to lose their memories thanks to your little start-up?” asked Sal.
“At least I’m moving the world forward, not trying to turn back the tide with a sieve.”
Grace punched him in the head. Tom reeled and spat blood. “Doesn’t matter what happens to me,” he said. “You’ll never recover from this. Your darkest secrets have been laid bare before the others? The knowledge that in your worst moments, none of you could protect the ones who were counting on you? How will you ever trust each other now?” A split lip made his grin bloody.
Menchú calmly withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket, wiping a spray of Tom’s bloody spittle from his own face. “You are wrong,” he said. “Yes, we have all failed. But this is not new knowledge, even if we did not know the particulars before. What you have shown us is how hard each of us will fight never to disappoint our teammates again.”
Tom jerked his chin towards Liam. “Even him?”
“Liam has nothing to prove,” said Menchú. “We see him live his penance every day.” His face clean and his handkerchief tucked away, Menchú extended a hand to Tom. Tom shied away and Grace saw a flash of yellowed cloth peeking out from under his shirt. Quicker than thought, she darted forward, and an instant later she was back standing beside Sal with the shroud, stolen from them in China, in her hand.
She offered it to Menchú. “Yours, I believe.”
Menchú rose to his feet and nodded to Tom. “Thank you.”
Tom sputtered, but no one was listening. Menchú collected the three oracle bones: one from his pocket, one from Grace, the last from Liam.
The blackened, cracked bones vanished into the shroud.
Nothing happened.
From his place on the floor, bloody and surrounded by silent dancers, Tom threw back his head and laughed.
• • •
Breaking the lock and avoiding a magical trap on a hotel room door when you have an angel on your side was a trivial challenge. What Asanti found next was the problem. While Tom’s body lay on the floor of the hotel suite, Menchú, Sal, Liam, and Grace were nowhere to be found.
Perry laid the unconscious woman from the hall on the bed. Asanti knelt, shaking the insensate Tom in an attempt to rouse him. He was still breathing, but even knuckles to the sternum failed to elicit any kind of response.
Perry reached down and stilled her hand. “It won’t work.”
“Is he dead?”
“No?” Perry’s hands fluttered in distracted frustration with his inability to express himself. “He’s not dead, but he’s not … here, either.”
“Could we bring him back?” Asanti asked.
A shrug. “Maybe? Do we want to?”
“Do you have another way to find out what he’s done with the rest of the team?” she asked.
“Fair,” Perry allowed.
Asanti sat back on her heels with a sigh and reached for her satchel of supplies. “Well,” she said, “we all knew I wasn’t just going to observe and report.”
• • •
The first sign that something was wrong was when Tom began to glow. Then the world cracked open beneath him, and they were all falling after.
Falling.
Falling.
Until they landed in a very posh hotel suite where Tom was blinking back to consciousness on the floor and Asanti was pointedly packing something that looked a whole lot like magical supplies. A cold breeze from the open window carried away a wisp of sage smoke and Sal shivered.
Menchú gathered his tongue first. “Asanti, what are you doing here? Does Fox know—”
She cut him off. “Of course he knows. I am here to observe and report.” Her raised eyebrow said just as clearly: And as far as he’s concerned, that’s all I was here doing.
“We need to talk—” Menchú began, but whatever he might have been about to say was lost in the bang of the door from the hall, which flew open to reveal Shah and a very confused man wearing distressed jeans and a thousand-dollar watch. “Shah.” Menchú transitioned smoothly, “Has it been thirty-six hours already?”
Shah’s raised eyebrow was nearly as expressive as Asanti’s. “Give or take. Everything under control?” she asked. Her eyes took in the details of the room, coming to rest at last on Tom, whom Grace was tying up. Ever since her sojourn with Team One, Sal reflected, Grace seemed uncannily well supplied.
“As you see it,” said Menchú.
“Shall I take custody of him for you?” Shah indicated Tom.
“Please.”
At this, the man in the ripped jeans finally put two thoughts together and connected them to his mouth. “Now, wait just a minute!” he said. “This is our private suite. I don’t know who you are, but you can’t just arrest my engineer—”
Shah reached into her back pocket and pulled out a badge. “Homeland security. This man is a known hacker—”
“Of course he is!”
“—who is suspected of transporting classified technology to mainland China. I believe he’s traveled there recently?”
“Well, yes …”
“In
that case, I suggest you will want to cooperate with our investigation …” Shah steered the man from the room as she discreetly touched a hidden earpiece. Soo and Ellsdale entered the room, hauled Tom to his feet, and escorted him out.
Team Three watched them go.
6.
Grace sat next to Father Menchú on the flight home. Not that it was an unusual seating arrangement. Both liked to use the downtime of travel productively, and—unlike Liam and Sal—Grace and Menchú had years ago come to an understanding that productivity went hand in hand with quiet. Which was why Grace was surprised when, somewhere over the Great Plains, Menchú reached out to touch her arm. “Can we talk?” he asked.
Grace marked her place in The Remains of the Day. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I should have told you about Hannah.”
Grace shrugged. “Like you said, I wasn’t technically part of the team then.”
“This isn’t about telling the team or not,” said Menchú. “Yes, clearly I should have told the people I worked with that a danger from my past had returned, but regardless of that, or whether you were on Team Three or not, I should have told you. You’d encountered her. And there’s too much between us to add secrets to the mix.”
Grace let her hand close over Menchú’s. “I was the one who started the secrets. I should have told you I was requesting a transfer.”
“You were angry. I can’t say you were wrong.”
“Yes, but I was angry with you. So I should have talked to you about it. Not run off to Fox so he could write you a memo.”
“He sent Shah, actually. Or she came on her own. So that I’d know she hadn’t poached you, I think. In any event, it wasn’t a memo.”
Grace took a deep breath. She wasn’t one for long speeches, but maybe over the years they had become too dependent on assumptions about each other’s silences. “When Fox ordered me to start working with Team Three again, I wasn’t happy. I had asked for the transfer. I didn’t want to come back. That’s changed, for me at least, but if you’d rather not have me, I can tell Fox I won’t do it anymore. He won’t like it, but he’ll find something for me to do.”
Menchú cut her off. “Do you want to return to Team One?”
“No.”
“Grace. I value you as a colleague, a partner, and a friend. The only reason I would ever not want to be at your side was if you didn’t want me to be there.”
Grace looked into his eyes, and saw the truth of his words. She considered burning, just a little bit, to make the moment feel longer. She settled for a smile instead. They both went back to their work in companionable silence.
• • •
Sal nudged Liam from their seats a few rows back from Grace and Menchú. “So freaking adorable,” she said.
Liam huffed a laugh. “It’s good to see them back on the same page again.”
“Good to have the whole team together again. When was the last time we were all in the same place at the same time?” Between Grace working for Team One and Asanti being taken out of the field, it had been a while.
“Nothing like spending a day marching through each other’s nightmares to bring people together. This whole fighting demons thing doesn’t work out, we could do team-building seminars.”
Sal ignored the sarcasm, her gaze sliding over to Asanti, asleep in the seat across the aisle. “Is it going to be weird now, because Asanti missed that? I mean, the rest of us saw each other pretty psychically naked.”
“I wasn’t serious about the team-building seminars, Sal.”
“I know. But this was big, and she missed it. It doesn’t have to be weird though, right?”
Liam ran a hand over his scalp. “I don’t know. Maybe it is weird. But honestly, I’m kind of glad one of us was outside that horror show. Four nightmares were bad enough. I’ll take it as a win that we didn’t have to get through a fifth.”
Sal sighed. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”
• • •
Back in Rome, Asanti watched Menchú pretend not to circle her desk. He paced, approached, and retreated on various private pretexts, but gradually, his feet led him to her.
She let him speak first.
“Does it bother you?” he asked.
“Does what bother me?”
“The countdown clock.” He indicated the frozen numbers above her head, 36:00:00. “It’s always there. Looming.”
“Why do you think I let them put it behind my desk? This way I don’t have to look at it.” She smiled, and as she had so many times in the last months, hoped that it would prove convincing.
Menchú remained sober. “There’s something, someone, I need to tell you about,” he said. “An encounter that I left out of my report. Twice, in fact. I had my reasons, and I still believe that this information is best kept within the team, but I don’t want there to be secrets between us anymore. Something is coming, Asanti, and we all need to be on the same side.”
“I’m always on your side,” she told him.
“I know you are,” he said. “But I feel we’ve grown distant recently, and I regret that. You’re a good friend.”
Asanti felt her heart sink at his words, but did not let it show in her expression. Instead, she listened as he unburdened himself of the truth about Hannah. She heard him, and offered him what reassurances she could. He left feeling lighter. She remained silent, her own secrets still weighing upon her soul.
• • •
Liam and Frances sat across from each other in one of the Vatican canteens. It was the first time Liam had seen her since her accident. He had sent flowers, and Asanti had relayed Frances’s thanks, but mentally, he was still hesitating outside her hospital door, too much of a coward to knock and face the fruits of his sins.
“Thanks for seeing me,” said Liam. “I know you don’t like going out in public.”
“I don’t like going out in public because Rome has terrible wheelchair accessibility.”
Liam felt himself flush. Already he was fucking this up.
“Also,” Frances continued, “people do stare. But at least here people stare because they’re trying to figure out why I’m not a nun, instead of …” She gestured vaguely at her wheelchair and the lower half of her body, concealed beneath a blanket.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“No, I mean. I wanted to see you because I wanted to apologize for what happened in Middle Coom. If I hadn’t been working with the Network for all those years, maybe they wouldn’t have developed the shit that did this to you. Or if I hadn’t …” he trailed off, gathering his thoughts. Frances seemed content to let him. He appreciated that. “I’ve spent years not taking responsibility for my past actions. If I had, maybe we could have stopped Christina and the Network sooner.”
Frances chewed her lip. “So I take it it’s true that you ran into some old friends on your last adventure?”
Liam snorted. “Yeah.”
Frances shifted her weight in her chair, and Liam forced himself not to flinch in guilt. He didn’t want her to read it as disgust.
She picked up her tea, and put it down again. “I appreciate and accept your apology, but can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“If you really want to make amends for your past, why are you apologizing to me? Surely there are people you hurt more directly, more personally.”
Liam sighed. “Fewer than you’d think. Few enough that could appreciate an apology, anyway. Tom’s locked up in some Society vault. Christina’s dead. So is everyone who was with her in Belfast. So are Stu and Clive. Imogen’s …” Liam trailed off. “I’m not sure what happened to Imogen.”
Frances considered this, her expression difficult to read. “If you’re serious about confronting your past, maybe you should find out.”
Bookburners
Season 3, Episode 8
Making Amends
Mur Lafferty
1.
“So
tell me about this step nine thing,” Liam said, his hands worrying at a sugar packet.
Menchú sighed and put down the file he was reading. Liam stared at him earnestly over the coffee he’d insisted they get together.
“Step nine is the making amends step in the twelve-step program. As part of the healing process, you have to approach the people you harmed and apologize, acknowledge the harm you did to them, and ask for forgiveness. They are under no obligation to give it to you, but for your own healing, you must ask for it.”
“And you have to go through the other eight steps to get there?” Liam asked, frowning. He pulled out a battered pocket notebook and flipped through it.
“Not necessarily,” Menchú said. “While step one, admitting you have a problem, is crucial to the beginning of the process, the other steps you can do in pretty much any order.”
“Well, I’m powerless, that’s for fucking sure,” Liam said. “We’ve established that.” He held up two fingers. “I’ve accepted God into my life and handed my problems to him. Long time ago.” He looked at his hand. “That’s two and three, I think. Not sure I understand the difference between them.”
“That’s because you’re already a practicing Catholic,” Menchú said. “You know who you are in God’s eyes and asked him for help before this process.”
“So I’m ahead of the game!” Liam said, smiling.
Menchú picked the folder back up. “Recovery isn’t a race, Liam. Or a checklist. And I don’t think your problems are connected to addiction, per se.”
Liam leaned forward, his hands grasping the table. “But you see, that’s where you’re wrong, Father. I am powerless when confronted with the dangers of the Network. I need God’s support to keep me safe. I’m ready to call myself a worthless worm in His eyes, and that’s like three steps right there.”
“That’s not—” Menchú started, but Liam continued.
“The big thing I’m missing is making things up to people. I need to apologize. I know I’ve hurt people. It’s, uh.” He blushed and paused, then continued. “It’s mostly women I dated while I was with the Network. So that’s step eight, making the list.”
Menchú frowned. “Your cavalier attitude makes me worry that you’re not taking this seriously enough to actually heal. I’ve not guided many people through this program, but I know that it’s not like crossing off a to-do list. There’s a lot of revealing of self and inner demons—metaphorical, in this case, as you’ve already faced your literal inner demon.”
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