Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  Ryan was over by the wall now. Jake didn’t know what Ryan was doing at first, then he noticed several pipes running down the far wall. One was water, the other, definitely not. “Old building, old pipes,” his friend said, by way of explanation, and started chipping away at one of them.

  Jake didn’t question it. Three long, quick strides and he was across the room. He grabbed the nearest chair and hurled it through one of the windows, sending thousands of shards raining down on West 91st Street below.

  Jake had one thing on his mind—and that was learning how to fly, because he was going out of that window one way or another. The snow on the ground wasn’t much of a safety blanket.

  Ryan broke through the seal on the pipe and was rewarded with a dull thunk and the rasping hiss of escaping gas. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter.

  Jake looked at him and nodded. “Do it.”

  Ryan thumbed the wheel, and set the flame burning as the first gunshot rang out. He took this as his signal to jump—three steps and he hurled himself through the shattered window, Jake one step behind him, and for one excruciatingly long second he thought he’d gotten it all wrong, that there was nothing there, then he hit the wrought-iron railings of a city-mandated fire escape and rolled.

  Thank God for rules and regulations. Simple as that. Some officious little prick somewhere had just saved their lives. But only for maybe another fifteen or twenty seconds if he didn’t move.

  It was a long way down. Jake fired the M9 through the window, buying them a couple seconds more, and started down, running three, four, five iron steps at a time, chasing behind Ryan until he hit the next landing, then again.

  Shots rang out.

  Jake aimed backward, firing wildly as he dropped another level lower. It was still a long way to the ground and he could hear someone clattering down the fire escape behind him. The snow made the iron steps treacherously slippery.

  Ryan launched himself down the next set of steps, then jumped all the way to the platform below, hit the sheet of metal hard, his legs buckling beneath him, and rolled, scrambling back up to his feet even as the concussion of bullets pitted the wrought-iron platform beside his hand.

  Jake followed and then kicked open the ladder, grabbing it and shimmying down as it locked into place, then dropped the last few feet to the alleyway that ran beside the building. He took aim and put a bullet into the chest of their pursuer. The shot spun the guy around, and left him sprawled across the lower levels of the fire escape.

  The same cars that had clogged the street earlier were still there now, but with the snow it gave the scene an ethereal, otherworldly quality, like the surface of an industrial moon. There were hundreds upon thousands of dollars’ worth of abandoned machinery in this street alone, running all the way across the heart of Manhattan, millions of dollars of useless steel.

  He looked up at the brownstone. There were lights on in almost every room. In fact the only room with no lights on was the nerve center up on the top floor, where the windows that weren’t shattered were blacked out. Another guard climbed through the broken window at the exact moment that a shudder coursed through the street.

  Fire roared out through the black windows, engulfing the man. He fell, arms and legs ablaze like some burning angel crashing to earth, shrieks escaping from his lips. And then silence and flame, the air sucked out of the world around them.

  Jake felt the explosion like a physical blow, as so much anger erupted within the old brownstone, tearing at the brick and asphalt as it ripped its way out through the walls. Then he realized he couldn’t hear a thing. The rending of brick and mortar was horrific, but for Jake it was all happening in eerie silence.

  He could feel the heat on his face as he stared up at the brownstone, backing up a step and then another as a ripple ran through the sturdy old walls almost as if the bricks had turned liquid. They buckled as the conflagration roared. Then the entire structure was bathed in flame, windows on all floors shattering, though the façade held its shape even as a fresh wave of fire billowed out from a second explosion deeper in the building, chasing a shock wave so fierce it took Ryan off his feet. He staggered, trying to catch his balance, stepping back off the curb. As the sheet of flame rolled out across the street, only to suck back into the building, Ryan hit the ground hard, narrowly missing an abandoned car.

  But Jake wasn’t looking at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the fire ripping through the building.

  Everything else along the quiet residential street was unchanged save for the mound of shattered stone and wood and glass where the window frames had been, the twisted columns of the sentry boxes outside its gates where the debris had rained down. The wrought-iron gates themselves hung open, their frames mangled, beckoning toward the burning building like the gates to hell. There was no sign of the sentries themselves.

  Jake simply stood there shaking his head, trying to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened. He rubbed his fingers across his rough palms, still trying to process what he’d found in there, when Ryan began to tug at him.

  “We need to bounce.”

  Jake’s hearing was beginning to return and he knew Ryan was right. Of course he was. They’d just caused untold damage to this billionaire boys’ club. They couldn’t exactly stand around and watch it burn. But Jake’s head was ringing, and not only from the explosion. All he could think was: Sophie? Harry? Assassins? He couldn’t even begin to comprehend the implications, and just how far back into his own life they delved. I’m not who you think I am.

  “Von’s going to kill me when she finds out the shit we’re in,” Ryan said, shaking his head. “I can’t do this. It’s not me. You have no idea how hard it was to clean my identity, to start fresh, away from the Russians. Not to be always looking over my shoulder expecting a bullet. I don’t want that kind of life. Not now. Not for her.” Which was his way of saying, I wish you hadn’t dragged me into this.

  “I won’t tell if you don’t,” Jake told him, dead straight, no hit of humor in his voice. “You get the files?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Good, because right now that’s all that’s keeping us alive.”

  They started walking.

  And didn’t look back once while the building blazed behind them, turning the night sky a bloody shade of red.

  Chapter Thirty-EIGHT

  THEY HEARD SIRENS THROUGH THE CLOSED WINDOWS.

  They’d been there less than fifteen minutes. In that time he’d told her everything.

  “We couldn’t go home. I didn’t know where else to go . . . so we came here,” Jake said, taking another swig of the ice-cold Diet Coke Finn had given him. He kept thinking about what that guy at the station had said about willingly putting poison into his body, but he drank anyway. Ryan lay on the cot beside him, legs crossed at the ankles, hands behind his head. He was pretending to be asleep. Jake still felt slight tremors that marked the aftermath of their escape.

  Jake drank deep, but lowered the can quickly when he saw Finn’s wide-eyed expression. “Not straight here,” he assured her. “I made sure nobody was following us. Don’t worry, we’re safe.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she muttered, then told him about the stranger who’d broken into her office earlier.

  “Damn,” Jake sighed. “That’s my fault. I didn’t even think before . . . I must have led him here. Look, we should go.”

  To his surprise, she shrugged it off. “Maybe not. Maybe it was Harry’s doing. It doesn’t matter. We’re in this together. The three musketeers.” She looked across at Ryan. “Well, two and a half.” He smiled at that. “The only question that matters is where do we go from here? Who can we turn to? Who’ll even believe us that isn’t already in their pocket?”

  It was the million-dollar question. Billion, Jake corrected himself. Where the fuck did you go when you’d just made enemies with some of the richest men in civilization? On the plus side, though, he liked the way she used the word we.

/>   “Honestly? Every time we make a breakthrough and learn something, it just leads to more questions, not answers, like Sophie and Harry and where they fit into this.” Jake had explained about the code names and everything else they’d found inside the brownstone. “We know these mythical rich guys are behind this, in the shadows, pulling all the strings, killing people, but we don’t know who they are, we don’t know any of their names, the corporations they represent, any of it. So who can we trust? We’re just three people. They might as well own the fucking world.”

  “Then we take the fight to them,” Ryan said without opening his eyes. “That’s the only reason I’m still alive. I learned that much pretty fast out in Russia. Wait for them, we wind up all kinds of dead. These people aren’t messing around. They’re serious. And you’re wrong, you do know who they are. Or at least one of them.”

  “Harry,” Jake replied.

  “If this was the streets, I’d say we needed a sit-down, organize a truce, ’cause there’s no good way out of this. We can’t keep running and hoping. They know who we are, they’ve got resources. We can’t hide. Not like them.”

  “When did you get so wise?”

  “Long time ago, in a galaxy far far away,” the younger man said, finally sitting up. He swung his legs over the side of the cot and stood up. “Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we? It better be good because we need to trade it for something useful, like another forty years on this planet.” He held up the stick crammed with files stolen from the brownstone.

  Chapter Thirty-NINE

  FINN STARED AT THE SCREEN. “You know what they are, don’t you?”

  He studied her face.

  She navigated through the desktop to her secure files, and the link to the dive’s photos, then opened one of them. It was a pyramid, but unlike any he’d seen before. There was a peculiar quality to the light. It was too green, too blue, not nearly yellow enough. But it wasn’t just that. There was an odd filminess to the pyramid and its surroundings as if the photographer had put a soft filter on the entire image. No, not a soft filter, he realized. He was seeing the entire image through a natural filter: water. He was looking at a submerged pyramid. But only part of his mind registered this.

  Those symbols were a perfect match for the ones they’d stolen from the computers in the brownstone. And as best as he could recall, they were a decent match for the ones he’d been seeing in the subway.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “It’s what I’ve been working on. A ruin they just discovered off the coast of Cuba,” Finn explained.

  “How does it fit in?”

  “I was brought on board to analyze the symbols. It’s what I do. I’m probably one of only a couple people in the world who can decipher them. This pyramid is literally thousands of years old. And as far as I know, nobody had seen these markings until our divers took the first photos the other day. Actually, today, if you’re looking at a decent hi-res shot where you can make them out properly. It’s a lost language. We haven’t seen anything like it in three to five thousand years. And those files you stole have perfect copies on them.”

  “Okay . . .” Ryan said slowly. “Humor me here. These ruins are thousands of years old?” She nodded. “And they’ve got these symbols all over them?” Another nod. “The whole world goes dark and a group of rich guys use that to cover their tracks while they wipe out the city’s entire infrastructure and replace it with their own?” A third nod. “And it just so happens these guys are using the same symbols as your drowned society? That’s one hell of a coincidence right there.”

  Finn opened one of the images they’d taken from the brownstone. “This is definitely a message of some sort, it’s got to be,” she mused aloud. “The one symbol I’ve identified is Olmec, but this is Mayan, or as close as can be. I can translate, it’ll just take me a few minutes.”

  “Mayan?” Jake scratched at his chin.

  Finn frowned. “In a nutshell, yes. It’s more complicated than that, the ruins are covered in a mix of Olmec and Mayan writing, which makes no sense . . . It’s just . . . wrong. Civilizations don’t blur like this. At least not the way we understand it. One might supplant another in a region, of course, but this . . . these carvings, the pyramid itself, I don’t know what to make of it all.”

  “And you can read it?”

  “With luck.”

  “Maybe it’d be good to know what this shit means,” Ryan said. “Before we have the pow-wow? Forewarned is forearmed and all that.”

  Jake nodded.

  Finn pulled her chair over to the desk, enlarged one of the shots, grabbed her old, battered research guides and notebooks, and got to work. It didn’t take long before she clearly forgot Jake and Ryan were there. Jake liked that she could do that; it demanded a kind of focus he could appreciate. For a while there was no such thing as time, no constraints from the outside world, only a string of symbols. It was a dangerously sharp focus that skirted the border between concentrated and obsessive. Most people deliberately wore faces, and were conscious of how they looked to the outside world, worried about how others would see them. Lost like this, Finn was as good as naked. It was natural, life in extremis, facing down death, delivering it.

  She started changing the pictures rapidly, and scratching down numbers. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Got it!” she exclaimed, brushing her hair out of her face. “It’s a date.”

  “I haven’t even asked you out yet,” he said before he could stop himself.

  A quick grin flashed across her face. “They all are. The entire city down there is covered in them, like a gigantic calendar, but this one is duplicated on the main pyramid, right at the zenith. This one’s different. It’s a date for the end of the world.”

  “That seems a bit extreme, I was thinking dinner and a movie,” Jake said, earning a chuckle from Ryan.

  “Smooth, Jakey.”

  Jake ignored him. “Anytime soon?”

  “Yes, actually. This morning.”

  “So we know how they did it. We know how they knew,” Jake said, scratching at his cheek. “But how is that even possible? I thought the polar shift was a natural event. How could someone have predicted it thousands of years ago?”

  “It was natural,” Finn assured them. “But it’s one that scientists have been theorizing about for years. Centuries. You forget, science isn’t new. It isn’t something we invented in the twentieth century. A lot of ancient civilizations were incredibly advanced in certain sciences, including astronomy and geology. We’re still rediscovering things they practically took for granted. The Mayans were one of those, the Olmecs too. They were able to predict eclipses and other astronomical events with a precision and accuracy we can barely match for all our computers and lasers. And now it seems they understood enough about the polar shifts to be able to calculate accurately when the next would occur.”

  “And our spoiled little rich kids found that prediction,” Jake guessed, “and formed their boys club to exploit it for their own gain.”

  “They used it, certainly,” she affirmed, “but I’m not so sure about finding it. There’ve been end-of-the-world predictions for ages. The Vatican has archives filled with hundreds of them dating back centuries, and they all tend to cluster around turn-of-the-century cataclysms and end-of-millennia disasters. The Mayans’ is one of the most famous, even though it didn’t really predict an end so much as a transition, from one age to the next. But this,” she gestured at the images still displayed on her computer screen, “is way more detailed than anything I’ve seen before. I don’t know how to explain it, it’s like the real prediction, the full text, not just a calendar. It’s everything. And these symbols we’ve been seeing, they’re markers, they’re mirroring the ones on the lost city. I think it’s some sort of ritual celebration.” She frowned, pausing for a moment. “I don’t think they found this. I think they already had it. I think they’ve been observing it the whole time.”

  “A ritual cele
bration? You mean like Día de los Muertos?”

  “Exactly like that. There are two days, Día de los Muertos and Día de los Inocentes, the Day of the Dead and the Day of the Innocents, where they’re honoring deceased children. November 1 and November 2. These rituals are known to be nearly three thousand years old.”

  “Like our lost civilization?”

  “Like our lost civilization. And back then, from all we know, it used to run for an entire month. August. They used to keep skulls as trophies to be displayed during the rituals to symbolize death and rebirth.” She tapped the screen, at the center of the clearest image.

  Jake could just about trace the lines of what was obviously a skull. “So you think they’re Mayan? Isn’t that all a bit . . . 2012? End-of-the-world prophecies and all that?” He hadn’t even considered them being anything other than the super-rich, American, venal, greedy—the powerbrokers, the movers and shakers of the city. That they could be rooted in some long-extinct societal heritage had never crossed his mind, but it certainly provided the motivation he’d wondered about earlier. They were taking back what was once theirs. Jake considered this, then nodded.

  “I don’t think they’re some long-lost branch of the Mayan civilization, no,” Finn said. “At least not genetically. Spiritually, maybe. There’s an affinity, a strong one—you only have to look at the names they’ve chosen for their assassins: they’re all the names of Mayan gods and goddesses, most of them associated with death in some way. This is our missing link. This is what turns a coincidence into a pattern, Jake.”

  “I got this off one of them,” he told her, pulling the ceramic knife from the sheath on his thigh and laying it on the flat of her outstretched hand.

  She was careful not to touch the blade’s edge as she studied it. “It’s obsidian,” she said after a minute, “and chipped rather than forged, I think. The style, the materials, the decoration, it’s all classic Mayan.” She handed it back to him.

  He handed her the gold pin he’d taken from the same guy. “What about this?”