Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

Again, Sam was at a loss.

  “Firedrake scales are nearly indestructible,” the pregnant Emma said. “Pacific firedrake scales will be even more so.”

  Sam wanted to become more of a participant in his own interrogation. “Do you think it’s feasible? To sabotage the firedrake?”

  Eye-patch Emma took this one up, addressing her answer to the old doctor. “Blackland has the skill set for it. He knows how to break into secure complexes. He’s the only person to ever breach the Hierarch’s Ossuary and come out alive.”

  Barely alive, thought Sam.

  “And his crew is experienced and skilled, individually and as a team. There’s a good chance Blackland might have been able to do it.”

  Might have. Past tense. Because Daniel might die. And if he lived, he’d be in no shape for adventure.

  The pregnant Emma took a thoughtful bite of chili. “I think we should move up the Palm Springs operation. We need transportation infrastructure intact, and who knows what Otis Roth and his collaborators will do if they deploy their firedrake.”

  The conversation switched to various contingencies and alterations of strategies, all predicated on the idea that the power structure of the kingdom was about to take a major shift, and that instability and possible widespread destruction might result. This all had to do with rescuing golems from various places. No one was talking about a mission to Catalina. No one was talking about sabotaging the firedrake.

  “Excuse me,” Sam said. “About the dragon?”

  The doctor gave Sam a nod of assurance. “As long as you are in our care, no matter who or what Otis sends for you, we will not let you get within three hundred miles of Catalina. You have our word.”

  “I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about the dragon. Who’s going to take over for Daniel?”

  The doctor poured some more tea for herself. Her movements were deliberate and precise, a wordless lesson in control, in contrast to the disorder Sam had brought to her house. He felt rebuked. The old Emma could really pour tea.

  “Even with Daniel’s background and skills, his chances of succeeding were never more than dismal. If he were caught, they would drill holes in him and drain his blood and lymph and bile. They would strip off his skin and carve away his fat and muscle. They’d wring out all his organs and grind his bones to fine dust. He’s a treasure chest of magic. And if you were caught, they’d do the same to you, only they wouldn’t let you die. You are exactly what they need for their project, Sam. And as much as I’d hate for that to happen to you, I’d hate it even more if they used you to bring the firedrake to life.”

  “I’m their best source of magic,” Sam said. “But if it’s not me, they’ll find another.”

  Her eyes fixed on his over the rim of her cup. “Don’t go to Catalina. You’ll fail, and you’ll die. That’s not a prediction.”

  It felt cowardly to admit it, but she was right. He wasn’t the Hierarch, or Daniel Blackland, or even a competent osteomancer. He was just a resource.

  “If it’s not going to be Daniel or me, then the ball’s in your court.”

  “Daniel’s mission is outside the scope of our interests,” the doctor Emma said flatly.

  “There are golems in Los Angeles. They’re as much at risk as anyone if Otis gets a firedrake.”

  “We’ll step up our efforts to liberate as many of them as we can. We’ll contact our other cells to do the same. And then we’ll evacuate our safe houses in high-population and high-value target areas. This one as well.”

  “We’d have to do that anyway,” Em explained. “You and Daniel being here puts us at risk.”

  Sam was having a hard time caring very much about the Emmas and their problems.

  The doctor Emma finished her tea. “We’ll be relocating to the Sierras. It’s not as comfortable as this, but it’s secure, and we’ll be able to take care of you and Daniel there.”

  Assuming Daniel survived.

  Em patted him lightly on the shoulder, like a big sister. “It’s really the best option, Sam.”

  “Sure, thanks,” Sam said. “I’m sure that’s what Daniel would want.”

  * * *

  Sam went back to his room. He took an inventory of his duffel, as well as Daniel’s, and transferred things of use from Daniel’s bag to his own. He took Daniel’s osteomancer’s kit, a leather wallet containing a bone crucible, a few envelopes and vials of magic, and Daniel’s mechanical torch, a gift from his father. He took Daniel’s knife, which was keener than his own. And he checked his sint holo box.

  It looked empty, as it was supposed to. But when he reached inside, his fingers landed on nothing. Because it actually was empty.

  “Okay,” he said. “So it’s going to be like that.”

  He spent the next several hours volunteering around the house doing laundry, sweeping, peeling potatoes. While he did, he tried to notice everything. Which doors required keys. Which rooms made people nervous when he neared them. How postures and expressions changed when he spent a long time in a particular corner, pretending to examine a painting, or looking at the ceiling, sniffing. For the most part, nobody seemed to care very much where he poked his nose. The house was secure to the outside, but it wasn’t a prison or a bank. The Emmas all trusted one another. They also seemed to have a good relationship with Daniel, which was useful.

  After sundown, the old doctor told Sam he could see Daniel.

  Part of him thought he’d find Daniel sitting up in bed, sipping chicken soup. He’d constructed a hope that the doctor was just being overly cautious, trying not to inflate Sam’s expectations. He’d thought that, when he left tonight, he’d do so knowing that Daniel would be all right.

  Instead, he found Daniel lying flat, his skin like wet limestone.

  “I guess we’re counting on good luck,” Sam said to the doctor, lingering in the doorway.

  “Good or bad, luck is shorthand for what happens when intention meets chaos. I intend to cure him, and I think Daniel intends to live. Sometimes I forget what this boy’s already been through. And how well his father prepared him for it. So, I’d say our side is better armed.”

  “I tried to heal him with my own magic at the gas station. No luck.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. You’re a strong osteomancer.”

  “I’m not an osteomancer,” Sam said. “I don’t have the magic.”

  “You have the Hierarch’s magic. You have all the magic.”

  “Well, yeah, I’m a big fizzy bottle of pop, but shake me up and I pour out flat.”

  “Better that than the bottle explodes.”

  The doctor left him alone with Daniel.

  Daniel wasn’t a big man. Sam had outgrown him by the age of fifteen. He’d seen Daniel tired from long drives, and he’d seen him worn from his burdens. But he’d never seen Daniel weak. The first time Sam ever laid eyes on him was at the Magic Castle. Daniel had been only a few years older than Sam was now, and he’d just brought down a ceiling on the Hierarch. He’d bristled with electricity and exuded waves of redolent osteomancy. He was strong then, and he was strong when he took Sam’s hand and led him away from the burning wreckage of that battle. He was strong when he said good-bye to his friends and left his life behind to protect a boy he barely even knew. He was strong when he finished a sixteen-hour drive by building a campfire and cooking Sam an amazing meal out of salt, pepper, water, and whatever vegetables he could scrounge from remote desert grocery stores.

  Sam touched Daniel’s hand. It was damp and cold.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  * * *

  Valuable things were kept in the attic. Sam determined this by noticing when people came and went with guns, ammunition, osteomantic materials for first-aid kits, and when he heard squeaking floorboards above his head.

  He went back to his room after midnight and took a pee. Use the bathroom when you can, Daniel always said. Then he slung his duffel over his shoulder and slid the window open. There were some dizzy moments as he climbed ont
o the eave, out into the chill desert air.

  Sam wasn’t much of a climber, but the house’s log construction gave him good hand- and footholds. He managed to get himself perched on the attic windowsill, but his feet didn’t quite fit, and the weight of his duffel bag threw off his balance. If there was a point at which he was going to fall to his death, it would be now. He gripped the window frame and wished he’d done more finger push-ups, or any, ever.

  He decided that Daniel had lied about all the second-story jobs and roof entries he’d bragged about. This was difficult.

  Praying to gods he didn’t believe in moments ago—and, if he was honest, wouldn’t believe in moments from now—he asked for strength and agility and skill before prying the window open with Daniel’s knife. He tumbled through the window to the attic floor and lay there, marveling that he hadn’t pancaked in the dirt and pine needles two stories below. Thank you, he thought to the gods who’d responded during his brief and now expired interval of faith.

  The beam of his pencil flashlight revealed a low, sloping ceiling, duct work, and insulation. Two wooden chairs faced each other in the middle of the floor. Nearby, a bucket. The arrangement suggested unpleasant conversation.

  Up against the wall stood three metal cabinets—gun lockers, Sam presumed. And beside them was a smallish safe.

  He examined it with his flashlight and scratched the dial with his knife. Smelling the blade, he picked up some sphinx-riddle oil, but nothing very complicated. On heists, Daniel had never been the box man. That job fell to his ex, Cassandra Morales. But Daniel had some rudimentary safe-cracking skills, and he’d taught them to Sam.

  Ten minutes later, he had the box open. Easier than falling through a window.

  He shined his flashlight in the box. It looked empty, but he wasn’t too disappointed. With a safe this easy to bust, the Emmas might have dusted the interior with sint holo. He felt around, hoping not to put his fingers into a hidden mousetrap, but felt nothing.

  “Looking for this?”

  With a sigh, he rose to his feet and swung his flashlight around.

  It was Em, with the pouch.

  “As a matter of fact, yes, I am.”

  “What for?”

  “Because it’s mine.” This argument did not appear to move her. “May I have it, please?”

  “Depends. What are you going to do with it?”

  Sam hiked his duffel bag higher up on his shoulders. “What do you think?”

  “An ill-advised and probably suicidal mission to Catalina Island to destroy Otis Roth’s Pacific firedrake.”

  “Gosh, you’re sharp,” Sam said. “Can I have my pouch back?”

  “I have some more questions.” She lowered herself to one of the chairs. He didn’t know if it was the torturer’s chair or the victim’s. He remained standing.

  “Any black-ops experience?” she began.

  “What’s black ops?”

  “Have you broken into a secure facility? Have you ever dealt with armed sentries? Have you ever been in a firefight? Have you ever blown shit up? Have you ever killed someone?” Her eyes gleamed like flint in the shadows. These were all fair questions, Sam had to admit.

  “I’m woefully inadequate to the task. But the guy who was supposed to do it is laid up right now, and the network of golems with all kinds of black-ops experience passed on the job. Two weeks. The dragon goes online in two weeks.”

  “I know,” she said. “I argued with my sisters after chili. Actually, both me and Emma—sorry, the Emma with the eye patch—but Emma won’t be persuaded. I mean our doctor, Emma. She’s the leader of the cell, and she has our loyalty, because she’s never wrong.”

  “She’s wrong about this,” Sam said.

  Em took a breath, signaling another barrage of rapid-fire questions.

  “Are you trying to prove something to someone? To Daniel? To yourself? Do you feel that you were created with the Hierarch’s power and were cheated out of your destiny? Do you just want to do something dramatic to prove that you’re worthy of your magic?”

  “Em, may I pretty please have my pouch back?”

  She stood and took a few steps over to him. In the harsh beam of his flashlight, her scar looked like a red thread. She handed over the pouch. “Here.”

  Sam looked inside. It was all there: the hand-drawn diagrams of the Catalina facility, a map of the island with surveillance posts marked, the cash.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You want to come with me?”

  “As if I’d give you a choice.”

  SIX

  Leaving the house was easy, thanks to Em. There was an Emma on watch in the garage, where Daniel’s—or, rather, Faith the café owner’s—truck was parked. But Em told the Emma that she had insomnia and figured she might as well do something useful instead of staring at her ceiling all night and would be happy to take a sentry shift.

  Em told another Emma guarding the gate that the doctor had instructed her to take Sam to Bermuda Dunes for transfer to another safe house.

  The Emmas were a family, and they trusted their own. If Em had misgivings about betraying that trust, she kept them to herself.

  Half an hour later, they were speeding down open highway with Sam behind the wheel and the headlights off and every star in the sky looking down on them.

  Em had Gabriel Argent’s intel documents on her lap and was reading them by flashlight. Her kit was packed tighter than Sam’s, but it was like a bottomless bag from which she’d pulled not just the flashlight, but a warm hoodie, a thermos of coffee, a spare aluminum cup, and two tomato, lettuce, and mushroom sandwiches. Sam also caught sight of a bowie knife, a coiled rope, and the grip of a handgun emerging from a canvas holster.

  “How’s your stealth osteomancy?” she asked.

  The same sint holo that concealed objects in his bone-lined box was in his cells. A skilled osteomancer like Daniel could summon it and make himself vanish, or least make himself hard to spot.

  “Not great,” he said.

  “How impenetrable are you?”

  “You mean like to bullets and things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I am utterly penetrable,” Sam admitted.

  “How about offensive magic? Kraken energy, fire breathing?”

  “Not so much.”

  Em shined her light on him, as if searching for some defect. “You are the Hierarch’s golem, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t live up to my potential.”

  She kept the light on him, concluded an unspoken observation with a “Hmm,” and went back to the documents.

  “I can manifest magic,” he said, trying not to sound too defensive. “But I’m not nimble at it yet. Daniel’s been training me ever since he got me out of LA, but it still takes a lot of effort.”

  “Maybe you need a better tutor.”

  “Daniel’s the best osteomancer I’ve ever met,” Sam said, a little too forcefully.

  “Those who can do can’t necessarily teach. Anyway, what about when you were attacked? Emma—the doctor Emma—said you may have saved his life.”

  At the gas station, the hydra and eocorn had flowed out of him, like sweat under a hot sun. He barely remembered what he’d been thinking and feeling, other than desperate fear that Daniel would die right there on the asphalt. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I did that.”

  “What if you draw on freshly ingested osteomancy? Like if you ate some fresh griffin bone. Can you manifest magic then?”

  That’s what Daniel called surface osteomancy, as opposed to deep osteomancy. “Sure, that’s easy.”

  The dim silhouettes of Joshua trees along the road looked like twisted sentries. Em neatly folded the documents and returned them to the pouch.

  “Changed your mind about doing this with me yet?” Sam asked.

  Em took her time answering. She was thinking about it.

  “No,” she said, after a while. “But we’ll have to score some magic.”

  “That’s where we’re headed,
” Sam said. “I know a guy.”

  “Someone we can trust?”

  “Yeah. But not someone you’ll like. In fact, I’m sure you’re going to hate his guts.”

  “I can’t wait,” she murmured.

  Em tilted her seat back and closed her eyes.

  Sleep when you can.

  * * *

  Damnation Mountain revealed itself at the end of a dirt road, a two-hundred-foot-wide, adobe-slathered cliff face painted in a dizzying palette, like a quilt assembled by a deranged grandmother. A yellow trail from the foot of the cliff to the top was surrounded by swirling stripes like the whorls of God’s fingerprints. Biblical passages painted in crude brushstrokes crawled over the mountain. Dead center on the mountain’s face was a painted red heart the size of a garage door, and written on the heart was Matthew 10:34 I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

  “What a sweet sentiment,” said Em as they pulled into the dirt field before the mountain.

  “If you want cheerful, Salvation Mountain’s down the road.”

  They got out and approached a broken-down truck parked in the field. Its old-timey rounded fenders were like something out of a cartoon. A handmade plywood camper shell perched uncertainly on the truck’s bed. Like the mountain, the truck and shell were scrawled with Biblical passages. John 1:18 No one has ever seen God was painted across the windows.

  “Are the Emmas religious?”

  “Some.”

  “You mean you have some religion, or some of you are religious?”

  “Both.”

  Her answer seemed more complicated than evasive.

  “Mason?” Sam called out. “Mason, I need to talk to you.”

  There was no answer.

  “He’s probably working. Follow me.”

  An artificial cave of concrete and adobe grew from the cliff like a fungal growth. Inside, dead trees blended into the walls and ceiling, limbs spreading like veins and arteries. Shafts of sunlight came in through gaps in the ceiling. The bright pastels lent an atmosphere of whimsy, even when the candy-colored walls were scrawled with messages like His rage blazes forth like fire and the mountains crumble to dust in his presence.

  “Careful. Paint’s wet.”