Gatekeeper

by Alison Levy

“No, I just ran into the street.” Hoping that her face showed an appropriate amount of embarrassment, she added, “I . . . I guess I panicked.”

  The officer nodded—apparently, he accepted her explanation—and instructed her to have a seat on the nearby curb until he could take her official statement before rejoining his partner, who was now standing watch over the oracle.

  An ambulance arrived on the scene seconds later, whereupon the officers worked to keep the sidewalk clear of onlookers and to keep traffic flowing on the partially obstructed road. It took just a minute for the EMTs to stabilize the oracle for transport, less than a minute for them to load him into the ambulance, and just one more minute for the ambulance to wail its way out of sight. It took several minutes after that for the two police officers to notice that the young woman who had flagged them down had quietly slipped away, now with a flash drive in her pocket.

  7

  SHUTDOWN

  Mr. El Sayed was visibly unnerved by the sight of Rachel’s injuries. She handed him her credit card (the bill was paid by the Central Office, provided she didn’t make excessive charges), but he didn’t immediately take it. Instead, he reached past the card, took hold of her wrist, and turned her hand over to examine her bloody palm.

  “What happened to you, crazy girl?” he asked in the voice of a concerned father. “Did you fall?”

  “Not exactly,” she said.

  “It was that bad man.”

  Both adults lowered their eyes to the child behind the counter. The pencil in his hand was still poised over his notebook, but his eyes were on Rachel, his expression cool but firm, as if he were a teacher trying to impart a simple truth to his student.

  Mr. El Sayed frowned a little at his son. “Naji,” he scolded. “Do not interrupt.”

  “It was that bad man,” the boy repeated, never taking his eyes off Rachel. “The man who bought the juice. He’s done bad things.”

  “Why would you say that?” the father pressed.

  “He’s all empty inside,” Naji said, his voice trembling just a bit. “There’s no light inside him. He scares me.”

  “Me too,” Rachel agreed, looking at her palms.

  Mr. El Sayed squinted curiously at her, at his son, and then at her again. “Why did you chase that man?” he finally asked.

  “You’ll save us both a headache if you don’t ask,” she said.

  He nodded solemnly and accepted her card, but then, instead of swiping it, he set it on the counter and walked away. Rachel watched him, too tired to be too curious, as he walked down one of the aisles. He returned a moment later with gauze and bandages. He put them in the bag with the soda, buns, and cheese. She started to protest, but he silenced her with a wave.

  “No charge,” he said. “You returned as you promised.”

  As much as she disliked taking anything she hadn’t earned, Rachel didn’t have the strength to argue. She smiled gratefully at Mr. El Sayed. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “You have a good heart.”

  The compliment softened his expression and brought out a seldom-seen smile that warmed Rachel’s weary soul. “Take better care of yourself, crazy girl,” he said. “For your grandfather’s sake.”

  BACK AT THE house, Rachel changed her clothes and cleaned and dressed her wounds while her laptop scanned the files on the USB key for viruses. Finding none, it loaded the flash drive’s contents onto the screen. It was stuffed to the brim with large files—a mix of scanned items and typed documents, each of them potentially a case-breaker for her.

  She clicked on the first file, eager for a clue that would salvage her pride. But she couldn’t read it. The language in the document was one she couldn’t even identify, and her computer didn’t recognize it either. She opened the next file only to discover a different language, also unfamiliar. The third document was composed of some sort of hieroglyphics, and the fourth was written in an alphabet she had never seen before. Growing increasingly perplexed, she opened one file after another.

  Twenty minutes later, she slammed her bandaged hands on the tabletop and shrieked a curse. She couldn’t read them! Hundreds of documents, and she couldn’t read a single one.

  While in training for her job as a daemon collector, she’d been required to learn at least two languages currently in use in the Notan world. Though it wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere in the training materials, it was well-known among trainees that the more common the languages the collector knew, the better the assignments she would get. Granted, there had to be a few people on staff who spoke those obscure languages that only a few hundred people had even heard of, but the best chance of traveling to a wide variety of places was to speak a major Notan language. Currently, Rachel was fluent in five languages (English, German, Spanish, Common Arcanan, and K’Maz, her mother’s native tongue), and she knew a smattering of several others on top of that, but none of that was proving to be of any help with what she’d found on the flash drive.

  Her bruised ego suffered another blow as she finally admitted to herself that she wasn’t going to be able to fix this mess alone.

  Snarling quietly, she picked up her phone and called the local office. Generally speaking, collectors weren’t supposed to punt their cases back to the Skiptrace office, but in this case her request was appropriate. As things stood, she could not continue work on this job until she knew what was on this damn memory stick, and she wasn’t going to figure it out by staring at the computer screen until she was cross-eyed. She hoped that someone in the office would either know the languages she needed or would know how to get the documents translated. Then maybe she could get back on track.

  The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

  After fifteen rings, Rachel hung up—annoyed and agitated, but mostly confused. The office never closed. Daemon monitoring was a twenty-four-hour operation; someone was always, always at the desk.

  She continued to click through files while calling every number she had for the Daemonic Monitoring Department. After an hour of placing unanswered calls, her frustration was boiling out of control. She let her last phone call ring thirty times before finally punching the end button, slamming her laptop shut, and screaming aloud. Still confused but now also thoroughly pissed, she put on her coat, pocketed the USB key, and headed out her door. If she couldn’t get the office on the phone, she would go there in person.

  THE OFFICE WAS sealed.

  When she tried to walk through the shadowy space between the old door and the restaurant wall, she was met with a cold, solid wall. She’d been cut off from the Skiptrace office. After bumping her nose, she cursed, kicked the door, and shrieked for someone to let her in. A few restaurant employees who were loitering out back stared at her nervously. One of them whispered something to his companion in Greek. Though she didn’t speak the language, one of the words got her attention; it was almost identical to the word her mother used when her brother started commanding the sheep to dance for him after chugging a bottle of wine at the harvest celebration.

  Angry but determined not to draw undue attention, Rachel shoved her hands in her pockets and left.

  She wasn’t sure how to handle this. She wandered around the area for a while, calling the office again and again, but the result was always the same: it rang continuously for two minutes straight, and then the call was unceremoniously cut off. She couldn’t even leave a message.

  Baffled, she tried calling a few friends and colleagues. No one was able to offer her any insight.

  Every call Rachel made pissed her off more and more, until her cell phone was shaking in her clenched fingers. The office never closed! That doorway had never been shut, never! And why wasn’t anyone answering the phone? She balled her fists and pinched her lips tight to muffle the roar in her throat. Her whole body shook and her teeth ground together as her repressed rage burst from her core and exploded through every pore. With great effort, she kept her fury silent until she regained control and her irate tremors ceased. As her body stilled, she stowed her anger in a
corner of her mind and made herself a promise that she would unleash it on the first person from the Skiptrace office she actually managed to speak to.

  She decided to head back to her house. It was either that or find a place nearby to wait until the passage reopened, and she was in no mood to be in public. She felt the need to scream and curse, preferably in her native tongue, and she couldn’t do that where Notans could see her.

  As she turned on her heel to head back the way she’d come, she collided with a man who was walking up behind her.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Excuse me.”

  “No,” he said. He grabbed her by the elbow. “Um, no.”

  Startled, she glanced up at him. He was a young man, in his early twenties, but he had the sunken eyes of a much older man. He was shuffling his weight from foot to foot, unable to stay still for even a second, and his bloodshot eyes twitched wildly. A whiff of chemicals and rot floated about him.

  Rachel wrinkled her nose, yanked her arm free, and tried to move around the man, but he stepped into her path.

  “Back off,” she snapped.

  “Give me your money.”

  She stepped around him and started walking away.

  He grabbed her elbow and tugged her back. “Give me your money,” he repeated quietly.

  “Get bent,” she said.

  He tried to reach his hand into her coat pocket, but she smacked it away and shoved him in the chest. He stumbled backward a few steps, caught himself before tripping, reversed his trajectory, and lunged at her.

  Relieved to have an outlet for her frustration, Rachel pulled back and slapped the guy as hard as she could. A satisfying tingle vibrated through her bandaged hand.

  The violence of the contact clearly rattled him—his wide eyes blinked rapidly and his mouth fell open—but not enough to send him running. Instead, he pulled a knife out of his pocket and waved it in her direction. “Give me your money, bitch!”

  “I am so freakin’ tired of people who are trying to hurt me calling me a bitch,” she said. “Get outta my face and go fuck yourself!”

  Twitching like a cricket on a hot plate, he made a few half-hearted jabs in her direction, but they grew weaker when she folded her arms over her chest and stared at him without moving. They grew even more timid as she continued to stare him down. It wasn’t long before he started to inch his way backward, edging away from her. After casting one last sneer at him, Rachel confidently turned her back.

  Half a second later, Rachel heard the mugger coming at her again. She calmly stepped out of the way. He barreled right past her, teetering on his unsteady legs, then whirled around, swinging his pocket knife in a wide, pointless arc, and tried to grab her arm again.

  “Just walk away,” she said, smoothly moving out of his reach. “Don’t make me kick your useless ass.”

  “Give me your money!”

  He lunged again and this time, without hesitation, she punched him in the face. Short and small though she was, she was plenty capable of inflicting damage on a twitchy man whose only hand-to-hand combat experience probably came from video games.

  Reeling from the blow, the mugger dropped his knife and grabbed his face with both hands. Blood dripped through his fingers. “Bitch!” he shouted through his hands.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  He threw out an arm and swiped at her blindly. She sidestepped his shaking fingers and tried to walk away, but he made one last attempt to grab her. As his knuckles brushed her arm, Rachel drew back her fist to land a second punch, but before she could take her shot, a blur of blue whooshed across her vision and slammed into the mugger, flattening him against a wall.

  “It was her!” the attacker shrieked. “She—”

  “You tried to mug her and got what was coming to you,” said the blur. “Fuck off already.”

  “No! I—”

  “It’s not her fault your girlfriend ran off with your money,” said the stranger. “If you need to steal to get your next fix, then go steal from your clueless grandmother. That poor woman still thinks you’re in school. Go see her before your parents give up hope and stop shielding her from the truth.”

  Stunned, bleeding, and entirely out of willpower, the would-be mugger slunk away. Rachel barely noticed his departure. Her attention was filled by the strange man who had appeared out of nowhere. Clothed in a blue hospital gown and a baggy old coat, he was filthy, scruffy, and dragging the tube for an IV bag from his sleeve.

  She squinted at him and cocked her head, as if seeing him from a different angle might make his presence more logical. “Mr. Oracle?” she whispered.

  “Hey.” He turned to look at her, and for the first time she saw clarity in his electric-blue eyes. “Good to see you.”

  “What hap—I mean, are you okay?”

  “Oh yeah.” He laughed gently. “Yeah, I’m great. I haven’t felt this good in a long damn time. And I kinda feel like . . .” He stared at her with a strange intensity. “Like maybe I need to talk to you.”

  8

  BACH

  “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  Rachel stopped and glanced over her shoulder. They were only a few steps away from the passage that led to her house, and the oracle was eyeing the shadow like it might be full of scorpions.

  “It’s fine,” she insisted for the third time. “I walk through it every day.”

  “But I can’t see it.”

  “You aren’t supposed to. That’s how it stays hidden.”

  He didn’t look convinced, so she tried to work a little assurance into her voice.

  “Relax. It’s easy.”

  “You won’t get in trouble?”

  “No,” she lied. “It’s fine. Now come on, let’s go.”

  He took a deep breath and followed on her heels as she stepped into the inkblot shadow and crossed into the pocket dimension. Rachel lost all sense of him while in the passage, just as she lost all sense of everything, but moments after she exited, she felt his presence again.

  A SHIVER WENT through Bach as he stepped over the threshold and onto her front walk. He closed his eyes and shook his head to dispel the extraordinary disquiet he had experienced in the dark. Then, forcing his eyes to open, he looked at his new surroundings. The house at the end of the walk was run-down but ordinary enough, and the sky beyond it looked appropriately blue. When his gaze slid to the right, however, his sense of perception was jolted. The lawn that surrounded the house bled into the sky in a colorful smear just a short stretch from where he stood. He followed the blue upward until his nose was pointed straight above him. The sky up there was blue, but the color was mist-like and insubstantial. Beyond the mist, where the sky should stretch into infinity, there was nothing but a white expanse, as though the house and its lawn were encased in a canvas sphere. It was as though he had entered a painting that was bounded by a dome-shaped frame. It was both mesmerizing and hard to look at.

  “What happens if you go to the edge?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “I haven’t tried. But I wouldn’t recommend it. It could be that you’d walk into a solid wall where the dimension ends, but it’s equally likely that you’d fall off the edge and disappear.”

  Disappear. The word was like a cold breath down his back. “That’s a little creepy,” he muttered.

  “Says the guy who lives under a bridge.”

  “Hey, the bridge thing is a relatively new development in my life,” he said. “I’ve only been there for”—he calculated in his head—“about six months. Before that, I had an apartment.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I lost control of my . . . what did you call it? My sight-beyond?”

  “Yes.” She pursed her lips. “There’s an actual word for it in my language, but it doesn’t translate well. ‘Sight-beyond’ is pretty close.”

  “Whatever you call it, it got the better of me. Something in my head kinda popped, and suddenly I couldn’t keep it together anymore. The last six months ha
ve been a mess. I only remember bits and pieces.”

  They climbed the front steps and walked through the unlocked door into the foyer.

  The girl stopped inside the door to remove her coat. “So what changed?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “I remember picking up that thing on the ground and feeling a shock go through me.”

  “You had a seizure.”

  “Seizure?” he asked in surprise. “That’s different. Anyway, when I woke up, I was in the hospital, and it was like I was back inside in my head after months of being off in Nowheresville. I feel like myself again. Well”—he plucked at his grimy beard— “not exactly like myself. I hate to ask, but could I take a shower?”

  “I don’t mind.” She waved a hand toward the staircase nearby. “There’s a bathroom upstairs on the left. Oh, and there are some men’s clothes in one of the bedrooms. The last collector to use this house must have left them behind. If something fits, take it.”

  “Awesome. Thanks.”

  He eagerly climbed the stairs, stripping off his layers as he went. As he stepped into the bathroom, he removed the remnants of the IV from his arm; then he started fumbling with the controls on the shower, already shivering in the cool air.

  What he saw in the bathroom was unlike anything he was accustomed to. There were buttons and switches in strange places, some of them with peculiar lettering, and there were pipes, faucets, and porcelain in shapes he didn’t recognize. There was a bathtub of sorts, but it was barely half the size of any bathtub he’d ever seen, and the shower stall had not one but two nozzles—the first in the traditional place, the second located at roughly waist level and poised above a small basin that jutted out of the shower wall. There was no sink, only a strange slot in the vanity countertop that glowed and hummed when he stuck his hands into it. The toilet had no tank on it and no water in the bowl (suddenly, he was grateful that he had used the facilities in the hospital before leaving).

  After a few minutes of trial and error, he managed to get the shower working. The water was lukewarm, at best, but it was clean and clear. He stepped into the shower stall and stood under the nozzle.