by Rachel Caine
Myrnin stopped, facing a blank corner for a moment without replying. Then he slowly walked back toward them and took a seat on one of the lab stools that hadn’t been destroyed, flipping back the tails of his frock coat as he sat. “So it is deliberate, this bane.”
“Apparently,” Claire said. “And now he’s got you where he wants you.”
Myrnin smiled. “Not quite.” He gestured around the lab. “We do have weapons.”
Most of the granite-topped tables had metal pans spread with drying reddish crystals. Claire nodded toward them with a frown. “I thought we were going with the liquid version of that stuff?” That stuff being the maintenance drug that she and Myrnin had developed—or at least refined to the point of being useful—that acted to keep the vampire disease’s worst effects at bay. It wasn’t a cure; it helped, but it had diminishing returns, at best.
“We were,” Dr. Mills said. “But it takes longer to distill the liquid form than it does to manufacture the crystals, and we need to medicate more and more of the vampires—so here we are. Two prongs of attack.”
“What about the cure?” He didn’t look happy, and Claire’s heart shrank down to a small, tight knot in her chest. “What’s wrong?”
“Unfortunately, the sample of Bishop’s blood we had degraded quickly,” he said. “I was able to culture a small amount of serum out of it, but I’m going to need more of the base to really develop enough to matter.”
“How much more of his blood do you need?”
“Pints,” he said apologetically. “I know. Believe me, I know what you’re thinking.”
Claire was thinking of exactly how stupidly suicidal it would be to try to get drops of Bishop’s blood, never mind pints. Myrnin had managed it once, but she doubted even he could pull it off twice without being staked and sunbathed to death. But she wasn’t willing to give up, either. “We’d have to drug him,” she said.
Myrnin looked up from fiddling with glassware on the table. “How? He’s not one of those partial to human food and drink. And I doubt any of us could get close enough to give him a shot large enough to matter.”
Claire pulled in a deep breath as it occurred to her in a cold and blinding flash. “We have to drug him through what it is he does drink.”
“From everything I’ve heard about Bishop, he doesn’t drink from blood bags,” Dr. Mills said. “He only feeds from live victims.”
Claire nodded. “I know.” She felt sick saying it, so sick she almost couldn’t speak at all. “But it’s the only way to get to him—if you really want to end this.”
The two men looked at her—one older than her, the other infinitely older—and for just a moment, they had the same expression on their faces: as if they’d never seen her before.
Myrnin said thoughtfully, “It’s an idea. I’ll have to give it some thought. The problem is that loading blood with sufficient poison to affect Bishop will certainly kill a human subject.”
Poison. She’d been thinking of some kind of knockout drug—but that wouldn’t work, she realized. Doses big enough to affect a vampire would be poison to humans in their bloodstream. “Does he always drink from humans?”
Myrnin flinched. She knew why; she knew Myrnin had drained a couple of vampire assistants he’d had, which was strictly against the rules. He’d done it accidentally, kind of, when he was crazy. “Not . . . always,” he said, very quietly. “There are times—but he’d have to be greatly angered.”
“Yeah, like that’s a trick,” Claire said. “Would it kill a vampire to put that amount of poison in his bloodstream?”
“The drugs would not necessarily kill a vampire,” Myrnin said. “Bishop draining him certainly would.”
The silence stretched. Myrnin looked down at his dirty feet in those ridiculous flip-flops. In the other room, Claire heard a child singing her ABCs, and then a woman’s quiet voice hushing her.
“Myrnin,” Claire said. “It doesn’t have to be you.”
Myrnin raised his head and fixed his gaze on hers.
“Of course it doesn’t,” he said. “But it will have to be someone you know. Someone you might perhaps like. Of all the people in Morganville, Claire, I never expected you to turn so cold to that possibility.”
She shivered deep inside from the disappointment in his voice, and fisted her hands in the folds of Shane’s oversize sweatshirt. “I’m not cold,” she said. “I’m desperate. And so are you.”
“Yes,” Myrnin said. “That’s unfortunately quite true.”
He turned away, clasped his hands behind his back, and began to pace the far end of the room, turn after turn, head down.
Dr. Mills cleared his throat. “If you have some time, I need help bottling the serum I do have. There’s enough for maybe twenty vampires—thirty if I stretch it. No more.”
“Okay,” Claire said, and followed him to the other side of the room, where a beaker and tiny bottles waited. She poured and handed him bottles to place the needle-permeable caps on with a metal crimper. The serum was milky and slightly pink. “How long does it take to work?”
“About forty-eight hours, according to my tests,” he said. “I need to give it to Myrnin; he’s the worst case we have who isn’t already confined in a cell.”
“He won’t let you,” Claire said. “He thinks he needs to be crazy so that Bishop can’t sense that he’s still working for Amelie.”
Dr. Mills frowned at her. “Is that true?”
“I think he needs to be crazy,” she said. “Just probably not for the reason he says.”
Myrnin refused the shot. Of course. But he took pocketfuls of the medicine and disposable syringes, and escorted Claire back out of the lab. She heard the lock snap shut behind them.
“Are Dr. Mills and his family safe in there?” she asked. Myrnin didn’t answer. “Are they?”
“As safe as anyone is in Morganville,” he said, which really wasn’t an answer. He stopped and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. “Claire. I’m afraid. . . .”
“What?”
He shook his head. “I’m just afraid. And that’s rare. That’s so very rare.”
He sounded lost and uncertain, the way he sometimes did when the disease began to take hold—but this was different. This was the real Myrnin, not the confused one. And it made Claire afraid, too.
She reached out and took his hand. It felt like a real person’s hand, just cold. His fingers tightened on hers, briefly, and then released.
“I believe that it’s time for you to learn some things,” he said. “Come.”
He pushed off from the wall, and led her at a brisk walk toward the portal, flip-flops snapping with urgency.
5
Myrnin’s actual lab was a deserted wreck.
Whether it was Bishop’s goons, vandals, or just Myrnin being crazy, there was even more destruction now than the last time Claire had seen the place. Virtually all the glass had been shattered; it covered the floor in a deadly glitter. Tables had been overturned and floor in a deadly glitter. Tables had been overturned and splintered. Books had been ripped to shreds, with the leather and cloth covers gutted and empty, tossed on piles of trash.
The whole place smelled foul with spilled chemicals and molding paper.
Myrnin said nothing as they descended the steps into the mess, but on the last step, he paused and sat down—more like fell down, actually. Claire wasn’t sure what to do, so she waited.
“You okay?” she finally asked. He slowly shook his head.
“I’ve lived here a long time,” Myrnin said. “Mostly by choice, as it happens; I’ve always preferred a lab to a palace, which Amelie never really understood, although she humored me. I know it’s only a place, only things. I didn’t expect to feel so much . . . loss.” He was silent again for a moment, and then sighed. “I shall have to rebuild again. But it will be a bother.”
“But . . . not right now, right?” Because the last thing Claire wanted to do was get a broom and a dump truck to pick up all that bro
ken glass when the fate of Morganville was riding on their staying focused.
“Of course not.” He leaped up and—to her shock—walked across the broken glass. In flip-flops. Not even pausing when the glass got ankle-deep. Claire looked down at her own shoes—high-top sneakers—and sighed. Then she very carefully followed him, shoving a path through the glass as she went while Myrnin heedlessly crunched his way through.
“You’re hurting yourself!” she called.
“Good,” he shot back. “Life is pain, child. Ah! Excellent.” He crouched down, brushed a clear spot on the floor, and picked up something that looked like a mouse skeleton. He examined it curiously for a few seconds, then tossed it over his shoulder. Claire ducked as it sailed past. “They didn’t find it.”
“Find what?”
“The entrance,” he said. “To the machine.”
“What machine?”
Myrnin smiled his best, looniest smile at her, and punched his fist down into the bare floor, which buckled and groaned. He punched again, and again—and an entire six-foot section of the floor just collapsed into a big black hole. “I covered it over,” he said. “Clever, yes? It used to be a trapdoor, but that seemed just a bit too easy.”
Claire realized her mouth was gaping open. “We could have fallen right through that,” she said.
“Don’t be overly dramatic. I calculated your weight. You were perfectly safe, so long as you weren’t carrying anything too heavy.” Myrnin waved at her to join him, but before she got halfway there, he jumped down into the hole and disappeared.
“Perfect.” She sighed. When she finally reached the edge, she peered down, but it was pitch-black . . . and then there was the sound of a scratch, and a flame came to life, glowing on Myrnin’s face a dozen feet down. He lit an oil lamp and set it aside. “Where are the stairs?”
“There aren’t any,” he said. “Jump.”
“I can’t!”
“I’ll catch you. Jump.”
That was a level of trust she really never wanted to have with Myrnin, but . . . there was no sign of mania in him, and he watched her with steady concentration.
“If you don’t catch me, I’m totally killing you. You know that, right?”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but didn’t dispute that. “Jump!”
She did, squealing as she fell—and then she landed in his strong, cold arms, and at close range, his eyes were wide and dark and almost—almost—human.
“See?” he murmured. “Not so bad as all that, was it?”
“Yeah, it was great. You can put me down now.”
“What? Oh. Yes.” He let her slide to the ground, and picked up the oil lamp. “This way.”
“Where are we?” Because it looked like wide, industrial tunnels, obviously pretty old. Original construction, probably.
“Catacombs,” he said. “Or drainage tunnels? I forget how we originally planned it. Doesn’t matter; it’s all been sealed off for ages. Mind the dead man, my dear.”
She looked down and saw that she was standing not on some random sticks, but on bones. Bones in a tattered, ancient shirt and trousers. And there was a white skull staring at her from nearby, too. Claire screamed and jumped aside. “What the hell, Myrnin?”
“Unwanted visitor,” he said. “It happens. Oh, don’t worry; I didn’t kill him. I didn’t have to—there are plenty of safeguards in place. Now come on, stop acting like you’ve never seen a dead man before. I told you, this is important.”
“Who was he?”
“What does it matter? He’s dust, child. And we are not, as yet, although at this rate we certainly may be before we get where we’re going. Come on!”
She didn’t want to, but she wanted to stay inside the circle of the lamplight. Dark places in Morganville really were full of things that could eat you. She joined Myrnin, breathless, as he marched down an endlessly long tunnel that seemed to appear ten feet ahead and disappear ten feet behind them.
And suddenly, the roof disappeared, and there was a cave. A big one.
“Hold this,” Myrnin said, and passed her the lamp. She juggled it, careful to avoid hot glass and metal, and Myrnin opened a rusty cabinet on the wall of the tunnel and pulled down an enormous lever.
The lamp became completely redundant as bright lights began to shine, snapping on one by one in a circle around the huge cavern. The beams glittered off a tangled mass of glass and metal, and as Claire blinked, things came into focus.
“What is that?”
“My difference engine,” Myrnin said. “The latest version, at least. I built the core of it three hundred years ago, but I’ve added to and embroidered on it over the years. Oh, I know what you’re thinking—this isn’t Bab bage’s design, that limited and stupid thing. No, this is half art, half artifice. With a good dash of genius, if I might say so.”
It looked like a huge pipe organ, with rows and rows of thin metal plates all moving and clacking together in vertical columns. The whole thing hissed with steam. In and around that were spaghetti tangles of cables, tubes, and—in some cases—colorful duct tape. There were three huge glass squares, too thick to be monitors, and in the middle was a giant keyboard with every key the size of Claire’s entire hand. Only instead of letters on it, there were symbols. Some of them—many of them—she knew from her studies with Myrnin about alchemy. Some of them were vampire symbols. A few were just . . . blank, like maybe there’d been something on them once, but it had worn completely off.
Myrnin patted the dirty metal flank of the beast affectionately. It let out a hiss from several holes in the tubing. “This is Ada. She’s what drives Morganville,” Myrnin said. “And I want you to learn how to use her.”
Claire stared at it, then at him, then at the machine once again. “You’re kidding.”
And the machine said, “No. He’s not. Unfortunately.”
Claire had seen a lot of weird stuff since moving to Morganville, but a living, steam-operated Frankenstein of a computer, built out of wood and scraps?
That was just too much.
She sat down suddenly on the hard rocks, gasping for breath, and rested her head on her trembling palms. Distantly, she heard the computer—that was what it was, right?—ask, “Did you break another one, Myrnin?” and Myrnin answered, “You are not to speak until spoken to, Ada. How many times do I have to tell you?”
Claire honestly didn’t even know how to start to deal with this. She just sat, struggling to keep herself from freaking out totally, and Myrnin finally flopped down next to her. He reclined, with his arms folded behind his head, staring straight up.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“I don’t,” she said, and wiped trickles of tears from her face. “I don’t want to know anything anymore. I think I’m going crazy.”
“Well, it’s always a possibility.” He shrugged. “Ada is a living mind inside an artificial form. A brilliant woman—a former assistant of mine, actually. This preserved the best parts of her. I have never regretted taking the steps to integrate technology and humanity.”
“Well, of course you wouldn’t. I have,” Ada said, from nowhere in particular. Claire shuddered. There was something not quite right about that voice, as if it was coming out of some old, cheap AM radio speakers that had been blown out a few times. “Tell your new friend the truth, Myrnin. It’s the least you can do.”
He closed his eyes. “Ada was dying because I had a lapse.”
“In other words,” the computer said acidly, “he killed me. And then he trapped me inside this box. Forever. The fact that he doesn’t regret it only proves how far from human he is.”
“You are not trapped in the box forever,” Myrnin said, “as you well know. But I still need you, so you will simply have to stop your endless wailing and get on with things. If you want an escape, research your way out.”
“Or you’ll what?”
Myrnin’s eyes snapped open, and he bared his fangs—not that he could bite the computer. It was just a
reaction of frustration, Claire thought. “Or I’ll disconnect your puzzle sets,” he said, “and you can read the works of Bulwer-Lytton for entertainment for the next twenty years before I take pity on you.”
Ada was notably silent in response to that, and Myrnin folded up his fangs and smiled. “Now,” he said to Claire, “let me explain Ada. She is the life force that powers the town, of course; without her, we could not operate the portals, and we could not maintain the invisible fields that ensure Morganville residents stay put, and suffer memory loss if they manage to make their way out of town. The drawback is that Ada is a living being, and living beings have . . . moods. Feelings. She has been known to grow fond of people, and to sometimes interfere. Such as with your friend Michael.”
“Michael?” Claire blinked, intrigued despite everything. She didn’t want to know more. . . . Oh, hell, yes she did. She really did. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that Ada interceded to keep Michael alive, because she could. Ada’s presence is most felt in the Founder Houses, which are closely linked to her; she can, with enough of an effort, manifest in them, or anywhere there is a portal, for short periods of time. In Michael’s case, she chose to save his life by storing him in the matrix of the Glass House rather than allowing him to die when Oliver attempted, and failed, to turn him into a vampire.”
“She didn’t just save him, she saved him,” Claire said. “Like a computer saving a crashed file.”
“I suppose, if you want to put it in mundane terms.” Myrnin yawned. “I told her to let him go. She ignored me. She does that.”
“Frequently,” Ada’s disembodied voice said. “And with great satisfaction. So. You are the girl from the Glass House. Myrnin’s new pet.”
“I . . .” Claire wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she settled for a quick shrug. “I guess.”