by Gwenda Bond
“We’re LARPing,” Justin says. When the man frowns, he clarifies, “Playing a game.”
“No, we’re not,” I say.
Despite Justin and Oz’s Society uniforms, the guy gives all indication of buying it.
“I have a niece who does that,” he says. “Nice costumes.”
“Bree,” I say, because it’s clear the bystander is no help. He’s already leaving. “Please. Don’t let them take me in. There’s no time.”
Bree finishes her journey to us, crosses her arms over her chest. “I should let him take you, after that stunt you pulled. And not telling me what you were up to.” She sighs. “Let her go,” she says.
To my amazement, Oz does.
“What is going on?” I ask.
Tam jumps in to answer. “I’m as surprised as you are, but apparently Oz and Justin may be willing to help us.”
“You,” Bree says, “willing to help you. Despite everything, and by ‘everything’ I mean a story I would like to know, because Society boy over there won’t cough up the details.” She pauses, and her eyes sweep down my body. Her irritation melts away. “Whose blood is that? It can’t be yours, or you wouldn’t be standing here. Kyra, tell me it’s not yours.”
“I had the same question,” Oz says.
His inflection provides no hint of whether he’s bothered by the idea it’s mine in the least. I seriously can’t imagine why he’d be willing to help me, after how I tricked him.
“It’s not mine. It’s Anzu’s,” I say, lifting my chin to indicate the sky. “A lot has happened in the last twenty-four hours.”
“You can tell us all about it,” Bree says.
But Oz shakes his head. “No,” he says, lowering his voice, “we have to get her out of here. There are people here who could make a fortune off a cloth with that much divine blood on it. The gods don’t take too kindly to those who try and sell it.”
“OK,” Bree says. “My place, then?”
Oz nods to her. To me, he says, “You can’t always run from people when you have unfinished business with them.”
“I don’t…”
“Don’t worry, we’ll finish it later,” he says.
Bree cuffs him. “Stop scaring her.”
But it’s too late, because he’s right. Ours is a conversation I intended to put off forever and the promise that won’t be possible frightens me more than pulling that bone fragment out of Anzu’s side did.
Bree’s mother turns out to be at home. The middle of the day is a prime sleeping time for her when she’s on the late or early shift. Given that it’s the solstice holiday and that there’s a top secret – but leaked to people with sources as good as hers – Society execution planned for later that evening, she’ll be working most of the night. Though being a workaholic ensures that she’s a sound sleeper, it’s for the best if she doesn’t know anyone except Bree is here.
The rest of us wait around the side of the house as Bree goes to check it out, with a promise to come back to us with a report on whether the coast is clear.
Tam leans out to watch her head inside. If I’m not mistaken, something weird is going on – if not with them, then with him. He has barely taken his eyes off her, and isn’t even trying to pick arguments with Oz and Justin. Honestly, Justin is the only one who seems to be acting normal, besides Bree. Oz is full-on grudging, not that I blame him.
Far more troubling is that my lack of sleep the night before and the excitement of the morning are catching up with me. My eyes droop, that gritty need-to-sleep feeling contained in every blink, and I find that I’m leaning on the wall for more support than I should need.
Tam squints at me. “You OK, Kyra?”
I nod. Grunt. “Uh-huh.”
“She’s exhausted,” Oz corrects, and before I can protest, he puts his hands on my shoulders and presses down. “Go on, sit. We’ll get you up when Bree comes back.”
I barely have the energy to protest the suggestion. I don’t have to though, because Bree returns. “What’s going on here?” she asks, clearly surprised by the fact Oz is touching me.
“I wish I could explain,” I say.
“She needs a shower and a nap,” Oz says.
“She needs to fill us in first,” Bree says.
“I agree, but I don’t think she can,” he counters.
“Fine,” Bree says.
Oz offers me his arm in support, and I take it. “You need to know,” I say, “Bronson has it. The Was. And he’s working with Legba.” I pause. “Yes, that’s everything big. Oh, except Dad is supposed to be the subject of a prophecy. If he dies, bad things will happen. That’s why I was looking for Mom.”
They gape at me.
“Theory proven,” Justin says.
Oz says, “We’ll have plenty to do while Kyra gets her strength back. Sounds like she’s going to need it.”
“Why?” I ask, low.
“Why do you need your strength?” he asks.
Tam slips past us to walk beside Bree, the two of them exchanging an odd look. Justin is rattling off something about how the next things we need to figure out are the where of the evening’s events and the elements of the ritual and…
“Why are you being nice to me, after what I did to you?” I ask Oz.
“Because what happened was my fault. First rule of being an operative: see what is really there, not what you want to,” he says, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. “I should have known better than to trust you.”
“Oz,” I start.
“Don’t,” he says.
For once, I obey someone’s orders. I keep quiet, but all I want is to apologize. I want him to trust me again. But I don’t ask.
I am well aware I don’t deserve it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I don’t know how many hours later, I stumble blearily out of Bree’s bed. She’s already done some haunting sketches of the sages that are pinned to the wall, their eyes rendered in black ink. I leave their flat gazes behind and go in search of the others.
Nalini must have left for work already, because they make no effort to keep quiet. Heading downstairs, I track the sound of overlapping voices and someone frantically flipping pages in a book. The leftover blur from my heavy sleep fades by the time I locate them in the living room.
The page turning is Justin, kneeling in front of the glass coffee table. Bree peers over his shoulder at some sort of heavy leather journal or notebook. There’s another thick bound volume that could have come from my family’s reliquary beside that one, and they are going back and forth between the two. Tam looms over them wearing a frown I recognize – he’s thinking something over, not clear how he feels about it yet.
“The question is still where,” Justin says. “Only a handful of people know, and they’re all either a) inaccessible on this timeframe or b) not likely to tell us.”
“Where what?” I ask.
Faces swivel in my direction. Bree takes me in, and says, “I’m making you some food. Justin, bring her up to speed.”
Tam says, “I’ll help you,” and trails Bree out of the room.
I move closer to the table. There’s an illustration on a page faced by tiny text. It depicts a vast plain populated by strange shapes with horns and wings and extra limbs that must be gods and their attendants, interspersed with wispier forms that must be ghosts or humans or some intersection of the two.
“What’s the problem?” I pause. “Immediate problem, I mean.”
Justin is quiet for a moment, peering up at me. He takes his hand off the book in front of him, and stands. “I just want you to know that I’m helping you because it’s the right thing. Not because I like you.”
“Well,” I pretend not to be thrown by his words, “at least you’re direct.”
“I don’t know what you did to Oz, but whatever it was… he didn’t deserve it.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice.” Justin shakes his head. “The thing is, he’d probably h
ave helped if you’d just asked him to.”
I take two steps closer. “I don’t blame you for sticking up for him. I’d do the same if we were talking about Bree. But… I did it because of that. I was afraid he would help. He’d be in way more trouble then, wouldn’t he?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “Would either of us be here if staying out of trouble was our top priority? Oz isn’t the type who can stand by. I am, maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure. But I know he’d never forgive himself. Bronson doesn’t deserve his loyalty, but neither do you.”
Ducking around him, I sink onto the couch. “I’m doing the best I can. Everything I’ve done, I thought was right at the time. But I’ve been overmatched every step of the way. Legba prodded me. Bronson too. I’m not making excuses.” He gives me a look like, Come on. “OK. I’m not only making excuses. It’s the truth. And… I don’t see we can outsmart a god who walks through all time.”
Justin turns to face me. “We can’t. But it seems to me that he’s probably playing and prodding Bronson too – at least a little. He wouldn’t have bothered with you otherwise, if you were just a means to an end. Your father would have served well enough. There’s something else going on here. We don’t even understand why Enki was willing to be involved. Oz took a message to Set for Bronson, the other afternoon when he was being an errand boy. It’s safe to assume Set and Legba are both colluding with Bronson, even if Enki isn’t.”
“Great.” I rake a hand through my hair, slightly damp from the quick shower Bree forced me to take before I collapsed. The jackal face of the Was – Set’s face – snarls in my memory. “So, immediate problem?”
Justin waves to the book that’s more like a journal. “These are notes I slipped out of Bronson’s study. They’re from the meeting that the Society had after the Awakening, to decide what protocols to put into action.”
“I’ve never really understood that,” I say. “How can there only be one door to the Heavens and one to the Afterlife?”
“There aren’t in the natural order, but there are rituals that can make one door stand in for all the ways into and out of them. If you seal those doors, it takes away the gods’ ability to resurrect. Just like us, when they die, they go into the Afterlife. There’s no door needed, because death is a state of being that takes you there automatically. But gods are powerful enough to walk out of death, if there are doors to pass through. By making a single door and sealing it, we made sure no way exists for them to do that until it’s reopened. It also prevents them from being able to make a new door anywhere they want. So long as that one remains sealed, the Afterlife confines any god that ends up there. Same for the Heavens, though they can’t even visit there now. Even though reopening the doors isn’t easy, the locations are a closely-guarded secret.”
“So, on the bright side, we’re only looking for one spot.”
“Yes. But only the five people who were in that meeting know the locations that were used. They might be recorded somewhere, but not anyplace we’re going to get into. And I am certain that the ritual tonight has to be done at the exact location of the door to the Afterlife, the underworld – whatever you want to call it. That door is the one they want to unseal, which means it’s where the sacrifice has to happen.”
“Hm.” I know as I say it that Justin will have thought of this already, but, “It has to be nearby.”
“Not really,” he says. “If he has Legba’s help and given some of the relics here, they could easily move your dad anywhere in the world. It would take hardly any time at all.”
“That is not good news. We need an invisible door that we have no way to locate and it’s” – I check the clock on the wall – “7 o’clock. Legba said solstice is midnight. That was the deadline he gave me. If he was telling the truth about it.”
“I see she gets it,” Bree says as she wafts back in, a long green dress flowing around her legs. I notice her shyly smile at Justin – so does Tam and he is definitely not smiling about it. I will find out what else I’ve missed in the last couple of days. Apparently, lots.
Justin says, “Given how rituals tend to work, he probably was. That’s right at the exact moment of solstice, when the sun is at its furthest point.”
Bree sits down beside me, hands me a plate with takeout Chinese on it. Nalini’s rarely home to cook, and so their kitchen is always packed with half-full containers from corner groceries and the few restaurants left around the city. I begin to inhale the food. Noodles, chicken, water chestnuts. Calories. All of these things are good.
She raises an eyebrow at me.
“Starving,” I say, “and it’s better than Hell & Co.”
“I do not even want to know what that means,” she says.
“It’s a bar,” Tam puts in.
“You just know everything,” Bree says.
I can’t tell if she’s exercising her right to sarcasm or not.
“Not everything,” Justin points out. “Or he could solve our problem.”
“We’re not giving up,” Tam says.
Bree nods, approving, “Of course we’re not.”
“Five hours.” I put the plate down on the floor. “Let’s think about it this way. If Legba is involved and Bronson and Set – you said Set is a definite too, right?” Justin nods. I continue, as if we’re not discussing disrupting the plots of gods. “And Dad has to be there. Are there many relics that could transport Dad and Bronson at the same time?”
“No, but a god could,” Justin says.
“Point. But think about it,” I say, “if you were the Society… Scratch that, you are. So, where would you put the doors?”
“We know they’re far apart,” Justin says.
I wind noodles around my fork. “And we know there are two of them. But we also know they wouldn’t risk putting them just anywhere. They’d want them somewhere they consider a stronghold, somewhere they can protect effectively if needed.”
“True,” Justin says. “We could probably narrow it down to cities with a big Society presence.”
“You can narrow it down further than that,” the voice belongs to Oz, who lazily strides in, as if he didn’t slip in the back door without alerting a single one of us.
Bree has a hand on my forearm, so she was even more startled than me. “Sorry,” she says, lifting her fingers. “Jumpy.”
“What do you mean?” Justin asks Oz.
“Well, Bronson has given strict instructions to every single operative on duty tonight that I believe will solve your riddle.”
“How long were you out there listening?” I ask.
Oz meets my eyes. “Long enough.”
I have no idea if that includes me and Justin talking about him or not. Probably not. I hope not.
Tam crosses his arms. “Care to share with the group?”
“Bronson has posted an elite force outside the Jefferson. No one’s to be allowed in but the Tricksters’ Council. No one is to roam inside the building tonight. He will be the only human attending the execution.” He doesn’t look at me, but he hesitates, and I realize it’s because I’m here.
“Except for Dad,” I say.
I can see no weakness in Oz, no anger. I should have known better than to trust you.
He nods. “Bronson will escort him alone. Everyone else is barred, assigned to be on duty elsewhere during the solstice festivities, except for those ordered to ensure no one unauthorized is admitted from outside. It has to be somewhere in the building.”
I set down the plate. “The door,” I say, “I know where it is.”
“How?” Justin asks.
“The five people in that meeting. My dad was one of them, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” Justin says.
Oz fixes on me. “What is it?”
If this wasn’t so important, I’d be forced to stay quiet and leave this room to escape the weight of his gaze. The fact it isn’t accusing somehow makes me feel more accused. But I speak. “Dad used to tell me to lay down on the sun in the Gr
eat Hall. He used to tell me it was the center of the universe, that everything revolved around it. That it could lead to anywhere if it needed to.”
They are all quiet. I imagine them doing the same thing I am, picturing the Great Hall. The whirl of the zodiac set in marble, the four points of the compass rose marked within the big brass sun, guarded by busts and columns, inscriptions and statues. The still and grand heart of the Jefferson. Not its center, but a center. The center of a universe, a door that leads the way to a place where all that is mortal – if not immortal – must eventually travel. A door into the dark beyond, where a god can escape death and be reborn.
Justin shrugs. “I hate to say this, but she’s probably right.”
“Then,” Oz says, “all we need now is a plan.”
We discuss nicely and we wield sarcasm, we argue and we agree, and eventually, we do have what Oz requests: a plan, with neatly defined responsibilities. It’s enough that we can pretend we have a chance of success, that any of this will end well.
But I keep hearing the echo of Mom’s “blood and doom”, and wondering where she is. I remember her saying the end of the world would be neater than what we can expect, if this all goes as foreseen. I think of Dad telling me to leave town, as if I’d do that.
Bree picks up my plate to take it back to the kitchen, and I get up too. Tam shoots us a look, but doesn’t come with… because of something he sees in my face or in hers.
Stopping at the sink, Bree rinses off the plate.
“So,” I say, “what’s going on?”
Bree doesn’t pretend not to know what I’m asking. “I did want to talk to you about something.”
“I know,” I say. “I know you, and I can tell. Let’s do this now. Just in case.”
Bree turns off the water and makes sure I see her shake her head, no. She says, “There is no just in case. This will work. We’re going to get you your dad back.”
“In case,” I say, infusing it with a quiet certainty. “We’re past the denial stage, Bree.”
The five of us don’t have much time before we split apart, each with our parts to carry out.
She starts, “OK. Well. So.”