Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  They left the restaurant after sundown and made their way to the trail Argent’s operative told them about. Fog thickened around the island like a slow flood as they hiked into the interior toward Mount Torquemada. Limbs of mahogany twisted like arthritic fingers from cracks in the schist, reminding Sam of the San Andreas creature’s grasping claws.

  The trail dipped into a hollow where thicker fog gathered. Sam couldn’t hear Em’s footsteps, yet the breaking surf at the bottom of the hills seemed mere yards away. The brush rustled with creatures. The air did weird things to sound. It was too easy to imagine every fox or shrew darting across the scrub was actually something worse.

  As they headed up the next rise, Sam heard something worse.

  A breath. A snort. Something large. Wads of mist swirled ahead.

  Another snort, and a whisper-soft bulk emerged from the gloom. At first Sam thought it was a bison—there were still bison on Catalina, descended from a herd brought over in the 1920s for a silent Western—but as the creature came closer, Sam made out curving tusks, crossing at their tips, and a trunk swinging low to the ground.

  Sam’s breath caught in his throat. The animal wasn’t huge. The top of its head didn’t even come up to Sam’s chin. But it was nonetheless magnificent.

  Em clutched his shoulder, and he felt she was the only thing holding him to the ground.

  “That’s not an elephant,” Em said in a gruff whisper.

  “No. It’s a mammoth.”

  Its breath smoked, and as it approached, scents of grass and dung and magic rolled over Sam in waves.

  Judging from the length of its tusks, it was an adult, but its modest size meant it must be a pygmy Colombian mammoth. Their remains were known on some of the other Channel Islands, but they’d gone extinct eleven thousand years ago.

  Sam’s cells contained inherited mammoth osteomancy, which the Hierarch had gained by eating mammoth bones, but his sense of this creature’s magic was so much stronger. It was potent, and beautiful, and wrong. And it was proof of concept that osteomancers could take bones and vat-grown organs and cultured flesh and combine them into a patchwork animal. Imagining a living Pacific firedrake, Sam was struck with dread and delight.

  The mammoth came to a rest on the trail before them. It raised its trunk and snorted, drawing in air.

  It’s smelling me, thought Sam.

  He pulled away from Em’s grasp and extended his hand out into the few feet of space between him and the mammoth. The mammoth reached out, curling the fingerlike extensions on the end of its trunk around Sam’s hand. Sam was touching living magic.

  Over the last few days, he’d wondered how he was different from the Hierarch. Now he knew. The Hierarch would see the mammoth as a resource. He would consume it. But Sam never would. Sam considered the mammoth his kin.

  Releasing his hand, the mammoth lowered its trunk. Sam and Em stepped aside to let it pass and watched as it retreated into the fog, becoming a ghost in the gray world.

  * * *

  At the peak of Mount Torquemada, a woman and two men huddled around a long piece of plumbing mounted on four knobby tires. Sam and Em watched them from the cover of an ironwood tree.

  “Antiaircraft gun, twenty millimeter,” Em whispered. “Looks like war surplus.”

  They would have met the gun had they arrived by air as originally planned. But Sam couldn’t feel good about avoiding that fate. Not with Sofía Bautista’s body lying under a pile of rocks in the desert.

  In addition to the big gun, the crew was equipped with thermos bottles, black rifles, and a radio set. The radio was the biggest problem.

  On Em’s go signal, they set off across the distance to the gunners.

  Darkness and fog assisted their suits’ osteomantic stealth properties, but as they approached the three from behind, Sam felt as though he were tap-dancing in broad daylight while playing bagpipes. One of the men yawned. Another arched his back to stretch. Em leaped ahead. She struck one gunner behind his ear and hit the woman at the base of her skull. Both went down.

  Before the third could raise his gun, Em dropped low, thrust a leg out and swept it in a circle, taking him down at the ankles. By the time he hit the ground, Em was back on her feet with his gun aimed at his face.

  The two gunners she’d sapped were still conscious, and they were Sam’s responsibility. He took a lump of gray caked powder from his kit—processed gorgon bone—and crunched it between his molars. His tongue grew cold and numb. He forced it down, past his dry, brittle throat. Within seconds, an icy sludge crawled through his veins. He blinked, and his eyelids felt like they might flake away. He blinked again, and they felt normal.

  He blew a cloud of particulates into the air. They crystallized in the cold and precipitated onto the two gunners. The gunners stopped writhing. Their moans fell silent. Their faces grew gray as concrete, and they froze in rictus horror.

  With the sound of cracking walnuts, Sam stretched his neck and flexed his fingers.

  “It’s time for you to check in,” Em said to the third gunner. “If you don’t, your friends downstairs will know something’s wrong, and they’ll send someone up to check. Right?”

  “That’s how it works,” he said. He had pimples and was working on a mustache.

  Em cupped the radio mic in one hand and put it in front of the gunner’s mouth. She keyed the mic and whispered, “Talk.”

  The gunner cleared his throat. “Base, Mount Torquemada Station, all clear. Over.”

  “Thanks,” Em said. “Except for the part where you used your distress code. You were supposed to call this ‘High Vent Station.’ Fortunately, I changed the frequency, so that went out to Guam.”

  “Well, that’s the best you’re going to get out of me,” the gunner said, with a gleam of defiance. “You can go ahead and shoot me now.”

  “We’re not going to shoot you.” From his kit, Sam removed a tiny vial, filled with a golden, pearly fluid.

  “Cat piss?” the gunner asked.

  “Lamassu,” Sam said, leaning over him. “Ever heard of it?”

  The gunner swallowed. Clearly he had.

  “With enough of this stuff, I could convince you to shoot your own mother dead and eat her for dinner.” Sam felt like a heel, making threats. The guy probably wasn’t ideologically invested in Otis’s operation, and he might not even know anything about the firedrake. But fear was a better weapon than fisticuffs. “I’ll try not to use that much. Just enough so you’ll make the radio call and then take a nap. But if you’re going to struggle, I might get sloppy. Hold still, okay?”

  Em put him in a headlock and turned his head so Sam could reach his ear. He let three drops of the lamassu fall in. The gunner did not fight him. He even bit his own arm to muffle his scream.

  * * *

  Sam and Em opened the hatch to a freight elevator shaft that plunged into the mountain’s interior. “Hopefully, the car won’t come up and smear us into paste,” Em said, starting the way down iron ladder rungs stapled into the bare stone.

  The ladder reached bottom in the back of a high-ceilinged vaulted chamber lined with chain-link pens. Sam and Em hunkered behind a stone pillar and surveyed the room. Housed inside the pens were a few dozen men, women, and children. The occasional cough or moan broke through the din of air handlers.

  With only some banks of fluorescent fixtures dropping weak light, Sam couldn’t get a good look at the occupants, but from his time on the leeches’ glue-factory boat, he could guess what kind of prison this was.

  A lone watchman paced up and down the cages, none too watchful. His attention was buried in a paperback book, held in one hand. The other lazily swung a cleaver-club by its strap. Sam could make out the walnut grip of the holstered gun and the dried blood on the blunt edge of his cleaver. Whoever the prisoners were, they must not be considered much of a security threat.

  Sam wanted the guard to keep coming toward him. He wanted to see a brief look of surprise register on his face. He wanted to see his
hand fumble at his snapped-shut holster, and maybe even an instant of pain as Em broke his neck. To Sam’s mind, the difference between the gunners upstairs and this guard with blood on his cleaver-club was vast.

  Without lifting his eyes from his book, the guard turned and headed back down the floor.

  “Leech victims?” Sam whispered.

  “Maybe,” Em said. “But what for?”

  “A project like this needs a lot of osteomancy. They’re probably wringing it out of any low-level osteomancer or user they can find.”

  “Suppose so. Anyway, when he comes back this way I’m going to shoot him, unless you have a better idea.”

  “Too noisy,” he said. “This’ll have to be Em-quality fisticuffs.”

  “I knew it,” she said with a sigh.

  At the end of the chamber, the guard turned and started his next circuit.

  Em untied one of her boots and removed the lace. She made eye contact with Sam and pulled the lace taut between her hands. Sam understood.

  The meretseger-impregnated soles of her boots made no noise as she rushed the guard in several long strides. With her bootlace, she reached over his head, put a knee in his back, and pulled down on the lace, garroting him.

  Sam was right behind her. Kneeling, he grabbed the guard’s face with both hands and exhaled gorgon essence. Like the sentries above, the guard stiffened and turned gray. When Em loosened the garrote, he fell, and the sound of his cheek striking the floor was stone grating against stone.

  “We can stash him in one of the pens if there’s an empty one,” Em said.

  “Why does it have to be empty?”

  “If it’s not, we have to deal with prisoners trying to get out.”

  “So?”

  “Effecting a prison break’s not part of our mission objective.”

  “Then let’s change our mission objective. I say we bust them out.”

  Em arched an eyebrow. “And do what with them?”

  “They can climb out the way we came in. The gunners we left up top aren’t in any condition to do anything about it, so maybe they’ll make it to a beach.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then maybe they’ll steal a boat. Whatever, at least they’re spared the glue factory.”

  “Not part of the mission,” Em whispered.

  “We were being held with people like this just yesterday. And a breakout could be a useful distraction.” Daniel used to tell him about the use of deliberately introducing chaos: fire alarms, actual fires, massive explosions.

  Sam could tell he was winning the argument. Missions of liberation were kind of Em’s thing, after all.

  “Fine,” she hissed.

  Sam went to one of the pens. He didn’t recognize anyone from the leech boat in the desert, but these people would have fit in with them: Some had fading scales or molting feathers. One woman had scimitar incisors curving over her bottom lip. He tried to ignore the faces staring at him through the diamond-shaped gaps in the fence and concentrated on the gate. It was held shut with a heavy chain and padlock.

  “The guard’s got the keys somewhere on him,” said a boy in the pen Sam was examining. He couldn’t have been older than ten.

  Em fished a key ring from the guard’s pocket, but didn’t toss it over when Sam held out his hand.

  “If we let you out, it’s going to cost you,” she said to the boy. “You tell us everywhere you’ve been in this complex, everything you’ve seen, everything a guard’s ever said to you. Everything.”

  “It’s a trick,” said a man from an adjacent pen. Flaking horns grew from his temples. “Don’t tell them anything.”

  “This room’s the only one we’ve seen,” the boy said, ignoring him. “We were all picked up by leeches and they sold us to some people in San Pedro and they put us on a boat, but we were under the deck so we couldn’t tell where we were going, and then we were inside and they locked us up here. They took my mom and my sister yesterday.”

  The woman with the scimitar teeth nodded. “They move a few of us out every day. At different times, not on a schedule.”

  “Where do they go?”

  The woman didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to. They were being processed for their magic. Whatever was left didn’t matter.

  The horned man turned to the others in his pen. “We don’t know what happens to the ones they take away. Maybe they’re still alive. If we try to escape they’ll just capture us again. They’ll kill us. Maybe they’ll do worse.”

  “There is no worse,” the boy said flatly.

  Em unlocked the gate and swung it open, then moved to the next. She let out the woman with the scimitar teeth.

  “There’re three gunners up top,” Sam said. “I magicked them pretty good. But the rest of the island could be crawling with sentries, and there’ll be even more once they find out you’ve escaped. But if you can make it to Avalon, maybe you can steal a boat—”

  “And in the meantime, we’re a diversion so you and your partner can do whatever you came to do?” the woman said.

  “Yes.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  “I’d rather not say. But we’re going to hit the people running this place as hard as we can.”

  The woman took up the guard’s pistol and cleaver-club. “If we run into anyone, we’ll hit them even harder.”

  Sam turned to gather up Em and go but froze when he saw the man with the horns at the room’s entrance. His hand was on the pull-switch of an alarm box.

  “Don’t—” Sam said. But it was too late. The man stared him straight in the eyes and pulled the alarm.

  “You know that thing Daniel told you about jobs going to shit?” Emma said.

  “Let’s have a nice conversation about that after we’ve hauled ass out of here.”

  They ran from the chamber, into unknown parts of the facility, while the alarm bells clanged. They did not lollygag.

  SIXTEEN

  Moth wiped sea spray from the binoculars and handed them back to Daniel. From their inflatable commando boat a hundred yards offshore, Daniel watched the opening to the sea cave. They were supposed to make their entry here, but it didn’t look promising.

  In addition to a sandbagged machine-gun nest, an operator sat behind an array of eight war tubas—giant horns with a complex of tubes that fed into the operator’s ears.

  “Can he hear us?” Moth mouthed.

  Daniel shook his head. “They’re aimed at the sky, for airplanes.”

  “We can take these guys,” Moth said, pleading. He was more of a smasher than a sneaker, and too much hunkering made him cranky. “We rush them with overwhelming force, fight our way in, make it to the dragon, you drop in your little jar of poison, we bash our way out, and then it’s nothing but the finest meats and cheeses for the conquering vandals.”

  “You’re an adorable ape. But I want to find Sam and the Emma. That means we sneak.”

  “They must have found a way in,” Moth offered, as if this were a sound argument for storming the castle.

  “Okay. So we find another way.”

  “Can you sint holo both of us?”

  “If I extend confusion miasma to you, you’ll just get confused. I could maybe walk you across a room, but over rocks and a minefield…?”

  Moth massaged his temples, as if he had a headache. “All the things I could have done with my life. I could have been a bank robber. I could have been a jewel thief.”

  “Come on, it’ll be just like old times.”

  “Terrific. I so miss the hellish disasters of old times. Okay, how about this: I storm the beach and let them shoot me. And they’re like, ‘Oh, holy shit, we just shot that guy!’ and they come down to look. Then, when my guts grow back, I’m all, ‘Ha-ha, suckers!’ and I bash their heads together, and we’re in!”

  “Will you please take this seriously?” Daniel said.

  “I’m willing to get my guts shot out and you don’t think I’m taking this seriously?”
/>   “How long does it take your guts to grow back?”

  “Okay, about a day. You’re a jerk. So, what’s your bright idea?”

  Daniel landed the boat on a narrow apron of gravel, about 250 yards north of the machine-gun nest. From there, they picked their way over sea-carved sandstone, trying not to slip on green slime coating the rocks. Where passage was impossible, they waded into the water.

  The current alternately tried to suck them out to sea and smash them against the rocks. Moth had an easier time with his strength and bulk, and his firm grip saved Daniel from becoming driftwood a few times. But when they neared the sea cave, it was up to Daniel to get them both inside, alive.

  The machine-gun nest was tucked in front of the cave opening, on a ledge six feet above a rocky shelf. It was a problem, but not insurmountable. Daniel was more concerned about the mines he smelled.

  “We could go in bold,” he suggested, “like those Norwegians who took the Nazi hydroplant in the Global War.”

  “I don’t know that one,” Moth said. “Where the fuck’s Norwegia?”

  “God, Moth, read a book some time.”

  “Crumville ain’t got a good library.” He sighed. “I guess we go beetle, then.”

  Daniel unhappily agreed. He unsheathed his knife, covering the blade with his hand to prevent its gleaming black iridescence from drawing attention. The blade was impregnated with shinjin-mushi beetle shell, an abrasive essence good for tunneling. To conceal the noise of digging, he timed his attacks to coincide with the incoming surf. His blade dug into the cliff face, chipping away at soil and scrub root and sandstone as if it were rock candy. But even with his digger’s best friend, this was going to take a long time.

  He and Moth took turns chipping away until Daniel’s shoulder started screaming from fatigue and Moth took over completely, hacking away like a miner with gold fever. He muttered “Fuck you, cliff,” between blows, and by the time he broke through he was almost frothing at the mouth.