Skinner Luce

  “He complained about the contractors,” Lucy suddenly recalls. “Maybe there are old receipts or something.”

  “We’re done searching the Ayer house. There was nothing. They sent in footage. You can see if anything jogs your memory there, too.”

  He toggles through screens, and stops on a video, clicks play. Lucy starts with recognition: the wide hallway, sunlight pouring across the pine floors and kilim runner. The camera moves through the living room with its scattered couches and imposing mantelpiece, panning over the draperies, paintings, bookshelves. The scene calls up sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking joints and laughing. The flicker of candles, the silver tray of amaretto being passed around, the haze of smoke.

  “I can’t believe a serv has enough money for a house,” Eric says, and Lucy’s surprised at the envy in his voice. Although, judging by the shabbiness of the quarters here, his apartment’s probably a hole in the wall. She wonders what he’d make of the fact that she’s got a house of her own, too.

  Or did, before she walked into the Gate.

  “Can you answer something straight up?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Are they going to kill me?”

  He has the grace to go a little red. “It’s a big crime, what’s happening.”

  “But I wasn’t involved.”

  “It won’t matter to the Qadir. You helped with all those grabs. A few here and there, they don’t care, but something so systemic, with the purpose of defying the Gate,” he shakes his head. “They’ll probably put you on the sets.”

  He can’t meet her eyes, and she’s going cold and blank with the knowing sinking in that it’s really true. A few bleeps draws his attention, and he swings his chair, giving her his shoulder as he taps rapidly at his keyboard. She hears him muttering.

  “So why should I try and help, then?” she demands, irritated by his disregard. “What’s the point?”

  He stiffens. Then he turns, rolling back a little to give her a view of his laptop. “I guess because of this,” he says.

  There are multiple windows open. Reuters, AP, various online newspapers, all showing live feeds of an office building engulfed in flame. It’s one of those tall mirrored ones near the harbor; it could be the one she was working in the other day. Jagged footage loops over and over of a bloodied figure stumbling down a sidewalk against a backdrop of billowing smoke.

  She leans forward, shocked. “Is that going on now? What happened?”

  “They’re calling it a terrorist attack, but it was two Nafikh that blew. We’ve got a dead sentry and others that were badly injured. And countless people injured or dead.”

  She can hear the accusation in his tone. “That’s hardly on me.”

  “They can do a whole lot worse than that before it’s over.”

  “You think I haven’t seen what They can do?” she retorts, pissed that she’s being judged once again by this serv with his nice combed hair and button-down shirt and no clue.

  He motions at the third screen, changing the subject. “This is satellite courtesy of Montreal,” he says. “The Nafikh emit a particular heat signature. Every visiting Nafikh in every part of the world at any given moment can be located by satellite, unless we’ve got weather or cloud cover. Elander knows this, because he took Dara-Lin when the storm was still going strong.” Eric taps his keyboard, causing an inset box to pop up. He points at the grainy black and white image: it’s a highway, a clot of trees. “We discovered the Nafikh was gone from Nahant Beach at 4:27 a.m. At 5:38, the weather cleared enough to start scanning. We located the limo at 5:56. By this time, the Nafikh had been gone two hours. We calculated a radius of 150 miles possible travel distance by car from the limo, which is generous given road conditions. But there were no Nafikh within that radius, excluding the ones that have arrived since, of course. And now, we’ve expanded the search farther north, west, and up the coast, and still nothing. We’re also keeping an eye on all watercraft. Nothing. Which leads me to conclude,” he directs her back to the map, “that he’s got Her somewhere beneath solid rock, or in a man-made structure with walls of iron, the only substances that can block Nafikh communication. Like I said, based on the travel time, and taking out the most unlikely areas”—he points back to the map of Maine, indicating darkened zones around major cities and towns—“he could be anywhere in all those circles.”

  Lucy’s mouth has gone dry as sawdust. Eric, oblivious to her state, turns back to his other screens, starts tapping rapidly on one of the keyboards. She swallows hard, staring obediently at the map, her eyes blindly taking in the names of towns and rivers. There are so many.

  I’ve got nothing.

  Eric’s laptop flickers with the destruction at the harbor. Black smoke billows over the Boston skyline. A string of cop cars races down an empty road towards the inferno. The Nafikh-fire generated by a blow doesn’t last that long, but it can’t be put out, and before it dissipates it sets anything it touches ablaze. Lucy wonders if Eva’s watching. She digs in her pocket, but she doesn’t have her phone. It’s probably in Bedrosian’s car. She imagines it ringing. Eva’s probably called twenty times by now.

  A series of bleeps, and Eric swivels at once, peers at a message in a chat window that’s popped up in the corner of the satellite imagery.

  “Oh no,” he mutters. “All right, keep your heads down,” he announces, half rising from his chair. Worried murmurs fill the room. Lucy cranes to see the message: Nafikh loose. “He’s not likely to come in here. If He does, just go about your business, am I clear?”

  Murmurs, whispers.

  Eric’s exuding a sick anxiety that’s got her on edge; it’s the Gate, you’d think they’d be used to Nafikh here. There are more bleeps, a conversation unfolding. Where is First. Is he on same level? Can’t see.

  Eric points out the window. Lucy follows the line of his finger.

  A bare-chested Nafikh is standing in the window, up where they were before, His hands splayed on the glass. It is Hansel. His breath spreads circles of mist that grow, shrink, grow, shrink. Even from here, she can feel the sickening chasm behind His eyes. His mouth hangs slightly open, and Lucy’s stomach clenches. Right. They’re coming out too fast. He looks the way They do towards the end of a visit, not the start.

  How they are on the sets, Lucy realizes. Where she’s headed when this is done.

  She swallows, closing her eyes, faint with a swell of nausea.

  “He’s leaving,” Eric says in relief. “The First’s probably talked Him down.”

  She looks up. The window is now empty, smudged with oversized handprints.

  Eric chews hard on his pencil tip, hunched close to the satellite screen. “They’re more than three hours out now. We’d need a chopper to make up that kind of time.” He shakes his head, speaking in quick, abrupt sentences, like an echo of the tapping keyboard. “They’re all going to want out now. This is the worst-case scenario. They could do some real damage. I mean, some real serious damage. At least the Stayer is out of town,” he adds with a nervous laugh. “That’s something.”

  “Stayer?” Lucy echoes dumbly. I didn’t think They were real, she almost says, then buttons her lip, feeling stupid. “So where is He?”

  “Took a cruise up to Halifax.”

  “But Nafikh can’t be in a closed environment like that for so long. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Stayers are different. They can go wherever. He took just one sentry.”

  “One sentry?” Lucy shakes her head in amazement. “What are they doing, having martinis and playing the slots?”

  Eric opens his mouth to answer, but instead goes silent, jaw dropped, horror filling his eyes.

  She twists in her chair, following his gaze. The Nafikh Hansel is back in the window, holding something in His arms. The First Qadir, Lucy realizes. He’s twisting, resisting, but even though he’s large, he’s much more frail than the massive, glowing Nafikh.

  There is a moment swollen with quiet, a bubble of time
in which no one breathes, nothing moves, the air is completely still.

  Then the Nafikh hurls the Qadir through the glass, shattering it. The Qadir’s arms and legs flail for an instant before his body drops two stories like a stone, landing on the wooden floor with a loud thump.

  The Nafikh’s harsh, wet breaths fill the air as He surveys the wreckage, leaning on the windowsill jagged with glass. His eyes rove the warehouse as He becomes aware of the gasps and calls erupting from all sides.

  The Qadir is unmoving, a huddled lump on the floor. He must be dead. There are no sentries anywhere. None up there, with the Nafikh, whose mouth hangs open, His distress obvious at the steadily increasing cacophony of noises coming from everywhere within the scaffolded edifice—frantic voices, footsteps. The sentries who were stationed at Gate level are gone.

  Suddenly He starts, turns His head slightly. Lucy eases out her breath, watching. She knows that behavior, it’s when a sentry’s talking the Nafikh down. She glances back at Eric, who is ashen. She says, “I think it might be O.K., now.”

  “O.K.?” he hisses. “Yeah, sure, everything’s just fine!”

  “I mean that,” Lucy retorts, nodding up.

  Hansel backs away from the windows. With the Nafikh out of sight, servs pour in from all sides, dash over to the Qadir’s prone form.

  “He looks dead,” Lucy says, craning her neck.

  “You can’t kill a Qadir that easy, even if he’s on the fritz.” Eric is ashen, cracking his knuckles. “If he died now—I can’t even think about it.”

  “What would happen?”

  “A new one comes right away. There are always two, no matter what. But it won’t know us, it won’t know anything about what it has to do here. It’ll walk into this chaos and make everything worse. I have to let Montreal know. And Q.C.”

  His fingers fly, spreading the word of their situation. He crouches at the keyboard, neck craned forward like a chicken, both legs jiggling. Someone’s turned over the Qadir’s body. He sure looks dead from here, Lucy thinks. Gabriel’s arrived, along with one other sentry. There are a couple of servs there, too, not doing much, just milling around looking panicked. The rest of the sentries must be on Hansel, and Gretel’s probably running around somewhere, too. And there were two others, she recalls Eric saying. Chaos. She can’t say she isn’t glad to be tucked away in here, with the cushy office servs. She rolls her chair out of the window’s view. She tries to get control of her breathing, but it’s tough with Eric in such a freak-out, tapping his foot, twirling his pen with dizzying speed between his fingers.

  None of it matters, she reminds herself. Her fate is the same, regardless of what happens today. She wonders what the sets are like, how long she’ll last. Maybe the Nafikh will blow the whole Gate up, and the question will be moot. She realizes she’s feeling for her phone again. Eva must be out of her mind with worry.

  She can’t think about that. She peeks out the window. The Qadir hasn’t moved. He’s dead. He’s got to be.

  The Ayer footage is still playing. The kitchen comes into view: the imported Italian tiles Theo was so proud of, the farmhouse table with the long wood benches. The camera pans to the French doors with their pretty latticework, pauses on the idyllic view of field and dark smudge of tree line, calling up mornings stepping out with a steaming cup of coffee, the deer hesitating, noses aquiver, mist rising all around. Slowly, the camera moves on, swinging to a framed antique map of the USSR Theo picked up at an auction. Lucy used to gaze at those roads, a million worlds away, yearning to know more about Theo’s mysterious, violent past. He had a lot of maps, all the places he’d been. He kept them stacked on a shelf.

  It’s so different now, no one uses paper. The memory slips up out of nowhere, herself tucked into the Camaro with Joe Brynn, the noise of unfolding paper, her hand hitting his ear as she spread the map open. He got so pissed. She was always the map reader when they had to run errands. Where are we? Are you sure we’re on the right highway? Check the map! Joe pestered her endlessly. He couldn’t bear being lost, just the idea of it set him on edge. Always pulling over, demanding she check again, Show me, where are we, are you sure. It drove her nuts. When GPS units were first invented, he bought three.

  Lucy narrows her eyes, tugged by a notion she can’t quite get a hold of.

  Maps. Joe Brynn’s obsession with having the latest TomTom.

  “Oh my God,” she breathes. She grabs Eric’s arm so hard he winces, eyes wide in surprise. “Joe Brynn’s GPS, from his car. The address might be on there.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s Theo’s right-hand man. He’d be going to Eden. I’m sure of it. I need your phone.”

  “Why?”

  “Just give it to me!” Lucy leans forward and snatches it off the desk, rolls her chair out of reach as she punches in Sean’s number. “I can get the Maine address, O.K.? Just wait.”

  “Who are you calling?”

  “My cousin.”

  Eric looks at her with suspicion. “Those people, you mean? The ones you lived with? You can’t call them!”

  She twists away from his grasping hand. “Shut up, O.K.?”

  He’s surprised enough to quit snatching for the phone, but he remains fixed on her every move. Come on. Come on. Come on, answer! she cries frantically in her head. The phone rings and rings. Goes to voice mail. Sean always screens unknowns, worried it’ll turn out to be some needy ex. “Sean, call me at this number, now! It’s urgent!”

  “Give me the phone,” Eric snaps.

  She moves farther out of reach, one finger held up in warning. One, two, three—

  The phone rings, and she hits Reply.

  “Where are you, Luce? Jesus, have you seen the news?”

  “Yes, I know,” she interrupts. “Listen, this is major, major important, are you listening?”

  “Are you O.K., then?”

  “I’m fine. There’s something you have to—”

  “Aren’t you going to ask how Aunt Eva is?”

  He sounds angry and frayed, ready to pop. She grits her teeth. “Sean, I am sorry, O.K.? I know how awful it all is. But you have to listen. Please just listen. The guy who attacked us last night, he had a car. I need you to get in that car and pull addresses off the GPS.”

  There is a pause. “Luce, what the hell?” he says helplessly.

  “It’s an Explorer, that’s all I know. He’d have parked it off the main road, out of sight. No more than a ten-minute walk, I’d guess. Break in if you have to. Just get the GPS.”

  “Is that detective with you? Let me speak to him.”

  “He’s not here. He’s in major trouble, Sean,” Lucy says, with a flash of inspiration. “This is for him. We have to help him. Everything’s gone to shit, Sean. You have to get that GPS!”

  There is a pause. Lucy imagines his desperate, sweet face as he tries to make sense of things. She hears him breathing. Then he asks, “Is it safe to leave Aunt Eva?”

  “Yes, yes, for sure. I swear. You have to go, now.”

  A movement in the corner of her eye: Eric jabs his finger, pointing, his face stricken. She turns slowly in her chair.

  Hansel is coming down the stairs.

  “Sean, get everything off the GPS,” she whispers into the phone. “Text to this number, O.K.? It’ll be in Maine. Look for something in Maine.”

  “O.K., Luce.”

  “Hurry,” she whispers.

  She switches the phone off. Edges to the window, staying to the side. The servs around the fallen Qadir are still as stone, watching the Nafikh’s slow approach down the stairs. Whoever tried to talk Him down failed. He’s worse off now, Lucy can tell by His faltering manners, the widening eyes and flared nostrils, the chin jutted forward. He’s dressed only in a pair of jeans. Sweat dribbles down His forehead into His eyes, causing Him to blink. His glowing skin is damp, dripping. The muscles beneath bunch and ripple as He moves.

  He reaches the bottom of the steps and pauses there. Rivulets of sweat shine down His
broad chest. His mouth hangs open, huge hands cupped as He turns, staring hungrily. His chest rises and falls faster. He sounds like a winded horse. The air is filled with murmurs, sniffles, sobs coming from all sides of the vast warehouse. A chair in the room she’s in suddenly scrapes the floor, noise like nails on a blackboard. The Nafikh twitches, mouth drawing back to bare His teeth.

  Not good.

  “Tell them to shut up,” Lucy hisses. “Do it! Now!”

  Eric starts, as if she smacked him. Gets to it, loping around the room, making silencing gestures. The room goes dead quiet.

  Hansel paces the floor, loose-kneed and panting. Sweat pours into His eyes. He’s still an inferno in a skin sheath, and for a few moments He becomes preoccupied with wiping His eyes, then staring at His splayed fingers in dismay like they’re infected. The sentries flick their hands subtly, sending the cowering servs away. They slink off one by one, duck into doorways. They don’t have enough experience, is the only reason why Lucy can think they received that gift.

  Hansel prods the Qadir’s humped form with His toe. The action provokes a low, deep moan that swells into the empty air. The Qadir can’t be aware, or he’d never be stupid enough to make that noise. He’s broken, unconscious, just a reaction.

  Hansel bends at the waist, His face twisted into a mask of revulsion.

  Lucy becomes aware of a new presence in the room: the Second Qadir, moving forward with her towering, strict grace. Hansel turns His head. Gabriel joins the Qadir, and the low timbre of his Nafikh speech carries across the room. Hansel stretches upward, listening, rippling muscle and sweat.

  He lifts His arm and backhands Gabriel across the ribs, sending him smack into the iron wall of the Gate. Gabriel struggles to stay upright, clutching his side.

  The Qadir looks over at him, then back at the Nafikh. To Lucy’s shock, she bends her head, retreats one pace, then another.

  “What the fuck?” Lucy hisses.

  “The Nafikh blame the Qadir for this mess,” Eric replies. “This is bad. This is really bad. She’s trying to protect us. If new Qadir come in, they’ll just wipe us all out, start over.”