California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Right, because going back would be stupid.”

  “—and you can pulp them with your earthquake-beetle trick. Pulverize the whole place, kill most of the guards. Between your nose and our digging tools, we can still find the sword.”

  “We don’t even know if it’s being kept in the Ossuary,” Daniel said. “We don’t even know if still exists.”

  “Emma believed in it, and she turned out pretty square.”

  “Maybe we’ll consider that Plan F.”

  A fresh red stain bloomed on the bandage covering the gash in Jo’s forearm. For the second time, Daniel smelled unfamiliar shape-shifting essences coming from her.

  Something was off.

  “Better have Cassandra take care of that,” he said.

  * * *

  Cassandra stole a pontoon van and drove it to the five-thousand block of West Pico Canal, a neighborhood of mechanics and used furniture stores and a day-slave market behind a hardware store. Armed men in uniforms checked slaves in and out of the fenced pens, but they were private security, not cops or Ministry security. They wouldn’t be looking for Daniel and his crew.

  Cassandra tied the van off beneath the shade of a dusty palm tree, and Daniel led the crew down cracked sidewalks. It was a short but nerve-jarring walk, especially when a pair of black-and-white water cycles zipped down the waterway, but it turned out the cops were only escorting some baron’s luxury yacht downtown.

  “Aw, can’t we have breakfast, at least?” Moth moaned as Daniel rushed them past Roscoe’s House of Chicken N Waffles.

  Cassandra made a face. “I find the combination dubious.”

  “The waffles are substandard,” Moth allowed, “but the chicken is delectable. They elevate each other.”

  Cassandra would not be convinced. “I don’t believe chicken and waffles can mate and produce viable offspring.”

  Jo glowered.

  They arrived at a two-story corner building with bars over the windows. A vacuum cleaner shop occupied the first floor. It wasn’t quite 7 A.M., and the sign on the window was flipped to CLOSED. In the unlit shop, upright vacuum cleaners stood in ranks, like soldiers.

  Out of habit, Cassandra examined the door lock. “Want me to break in?”

  “Let’s try it legal for a change,” Daniel said. He rapped his knuckles against the door glass.

  A light in the back of the shop went on, and a figure wove a path through the vacuum cleaners to stand a few feet back from the door. She wore a belted bathrobe, the pale skin of her face and neck standing in soft contrast to the darkness of the shop. Tall and slender, she appeared not much older than her mid-teens, with large, pale-gray eyes, and a delicate finger curled around the trigger of a shotgun.

  “She doesn’t seem friendly,” Cassandra said.

  “Or like someone who can help us,” added Jo.

  Daniel moved his face closer to the glass. “Emma Walker sent us.”

  The face changed, so quickly Daniel almost missed it, but for a flash the girl’s eyes grew hard as diamond, and the fine features sharpened to hawklike intensity, and Daniel no longer knew what the fierce thing on the other side of the door was, other than that it was osteomantically potent.

  Then she resumed being what she’d been before, at least in appearance. She unlocked the door.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  They followed her through the showroom and upstairs, to the second-floor apartment over the shop. There was a living room and a sparse kitchen. The furnishings were high-quality thrift-shop finds, mostly black-lacquered wood and red silk upholstery of Chinese design. The only books in view were a copy of the Yellow Pages and a stack of soap opera digests. At the girl’s invitation, Daniel and his crew took seats, looking like admonished burglars invited in for tea.

  The girl told them to wait while she put together some refreshments. Daniel protested that it wasn’t necessary, but she acted as though she hadn’t heard him. She returned bearing a tray of tea and a plate of shortbread cookies. She left the shotgun in the kitchen.

  Moth helped himself to cookies as she poured the tea. Her manner was serene and courteous, and Daniel wondered if he’d imagined her transformation behind the door. He smelled Oolong, but no magic.

  He saw it then in the shape of her nose, in her jaw, in her eyes: She was a younger version of Emma.

  “Tell me what happened to her,” she said.

  “We met in Chinatown,” Daniel began, remembering that, during their first encounter, they’d drank Oolong, the tea of black dragons and great sorcerer-kings. Without telling her the specifics of the job—the place or the score—he admitted that Emma had been helping them with an illegal enterprise, and the last time Daniel saw her, she was helping them escape a powerful osteomancer.

  He watched her face as he spoke.

  “But you already knew all that, didn’t you?”

  The girl set down her teacup and closed her eyes. She seemed prayerful.

  “Yes,” she said. “Most of it. Emma took you into the Ossuary. Where else would she have gone? The sorcerer who killed her? Was it Mother Cauldron?”

  “Fenmont Szu.”

  “The Hierarch’s scalpel and truncheon.”

  Daniel still clung to the hope that she’d somehow survived. He didn’t want any more sacrifices to him in his ledgers. “Are you sure she died?”

  “It was Fenmont Szu. Of course she died.”

  His lungs tightened, a physical manifestation of his guilt. He wasn’t sure the guilt was warranted—Emma had used him to get into the Ossuary, after all—but the guilt was there, regardless. It did Emma no good.

  The girl returned to the kitchen. Daniel watched her carefully. She took up the shotgun. “Come with me.”

  Daniel stood. “You guys stay here. Finish your tea. Enjoy your cookies.”

  “All of you have to come,” the girl said. “You’re being pursued, and your scent leads here. I’m going to have to abandon this place.”

  Moth stuffed a handful of cookies in his pocket, and they all followed her into what turned out to be a complex warren of rooms, closets that led to other rooms, sliding panels opening to more passageways, and then down a staircase. The girl lit the way with a flashlight, revealing walls of wood and plaster, giving way to brick as they descended, then to stone blocks and mortar, and finally to undressed granite. They were below canal level now, and when they reached the bottom of the steps, the girl took them through a stone tunnel with a ceiling so low, Moth had to bend to avoid scraping his head. The low hum of canal water flowing behind the walls made Daniel feel as though they were walking through the city’s circulatory system.

  “Where are we?” he asked the girl.

  She stopped and turned, her face ghostly white in the halo of her flashlight beam.

  “Have you ever seen a map of the canal system?”

  Daniel was a thief. He’d seen a lot of maps.

  “When the canals were first built, they called it Mulholland’s Mandala,” she said. “A mandala is a—”

  “A maze,” Daniel said. “A labyrinth.”

  “Right. Osteomancy isn’t the only kind of magic. Los Angeles is driven by trade and consumption, so osteomancy dominates here. But labyrinths hold power everywhere. You’ll find them in cathedrals in Europe. You’ll find them on Celtic stones passed from mother to daughter. And on the petroglyphs of the Hohokam. Theseus found a wild man in the center of his labyrinth. Look at an old map of the canal system—a true map—and you’ll see the mandala. The byways of Los Angeles vibrate with power. Enough, maybe, to challenge the Hierarch.”

  “So why doesn’t he bring them down? He can’t read a map?”

  She turned again and resumed walking. “Not all things are down on maps. Some fingers in Mulholland’s Mandala remain dry. When the water mage decides it’s time to topple the Hierarch, he’ll turn his valves and let water fill all his empty spaces and complete his power circuit. But until then, my family and I hide in the empty places.”

>   “So you’re allied with Mulholland?” Daniel wasn’t thrilled at the idea of throwing his lot in with another old sorcerer.

  “He doesn’t know we’re here. We’re allied with ourselves,” she said.

  The passage widened, and the moist air warmed, and they came to a grotto of sorts, with water trickling down the walls from a great height and collecting in black pools. The space was filled with cots and sleeping bags and some proper beds, and even a four-poster. Plastic lawn chairs and loungers and dinette chairs with orange, sparkly plastic cushioning completed the furnishings. Strings of white Christmas lights sagged overhead, and in alcoves, the flames of votive saint candles flickered. Frogs croaked.

  A woman stepped out from beneath a lintel fashioned from a railroad tie. Her nose was long and elegant, her face lined but attractive.

  Other than her short, dyed red hair, she was Emma.

  She pinned Daniel with a frank stare. Her lips parted, and blue flames licked the air.

  * * *

  Some two dozen people lived in the grotto, ranging from toddlers to people in their fifties. There were a few singletons, but most were twins or triplets. They hauled buckets of water, sorted groceries, swept the floors, and attended to the electrical wires that hung from the ceiling like mangrove roots. By the smell of it, there were stores of magic here, too, though they were kept out of sight.

  “I owe Emma thanks,” Daniel said. “She gave her life for ours.”

  “I would have chosen differently,” the older Emma said. Wisps of blue plasma flashed behind her teeth.

  “We have to respect her decision,” the younger Emma said.

  “I’m not so sure we do,” the older said, “since it resulted in exposure of her purpose. Not to mention her immolation.”

  That sounded like something the Emma Daniel knew would say.

  “What was her purpose?” Cassandra asked. Daniel noticed the way she’d subtly positioned herself between him and the older Emma, always guarding him. It was something his friends did so often, so naturally, that he’d stopped making note of it. They were always prepared to take a hit for him.

  The young Emma swept her hand in a gesture encompassing everyone in the grotto. “All of us here are mirrors. Or, golems, if you like the cruder term. My sister and I, like the Emma you knew, are spawns of Dr. Emmaline Walker, who is … was … one of the pioneers in this kind of work. All of us were born in the Ossuary. The Emma you knew was not the first to escape, nor the first to evade the Hierarch’s hounds. But she was the first who went back, time and time again, to liberate as many of us as she could. She freed dozens of us.”

  “So you see,” the older Emma said, “while you were after profit, our sister was a liberator of slaves and test subjects. And now she’s a pile of ash, and here you are, asking for our help. I think I’d rather roast you.”

  “Maybe this will change your mind,” he said. He unzipped his bag to show the Emmas the casket of jars Emma had freed from the Ossuary. He opened it.

  Proto-golems, mirror-spawn, whatever they were properly called, it was wrong to use them as currency. But Daniel was still a thief, which meant he took things and used things he had no rightful claim to, because that was how he and his friends survived.

  The younger Emma bit her lip and reached for the jars, but Daniel stepped back and closed the casket.

  He was becoming a monster. “This is a transaction.”

  * * *

  In exchange for the jars, the Emmas agreed to use their underground network of safe houses, conductors, and shepherds to get Daniel and his friends out of Los Angeles, as far as the Sierras, the eastern border of the Southern Kingdom. They’d have to survive the mountain passes, where the Hierarch was rumored to keep bands of living gigantopithecus and herds of griffins. Whether or not that was true, there’d be border guards to contend with. And if they were lucky enough to make it down the Nevada side of the ranges, they’d have to survive one of the vastest deserts in North America, only to throw themselves on the mercy of the United States government.

  It wasn’t exactly his dream of defecting to the Northern Kingdom, with bales of cash for new identities and bribes and start-up funds.

  “I’ll need to talk it over with my friends,” he told the Emmas.

  The young Emma took them through the tunnels to a large, dark room serving as a graveyard for shopping carts. The Emmas needed time to get messages to their sisters on the outside, and there was nothing to do now but rest.

  Jo barely waited for the Emma’s footsteps to recede before airing her objections.

  “Exile? We go up a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain, come down into a United States desert? Maybe we end up in a refugee camp, or maybe a prison? That’s what Emma calls help?”

  “It’s not ideal,” Daniel admitted. “But I think it’s our only option. What do you want to do, Jo?”

  “I already told you. Let’s finish the job we started.”

  “That’s what Punch said at the warehouse in Saugus. She never came out.”

  “We got our asses kicked down there, Daniel. We got lit on fire. And there’s one thing you don’t do when you’re on fire. You don’t run. We’re still the best thieves in this kingdom, and the only thing that’s going to save our lives is being thieves. The Blackland sword is still in the Ossuary. Otis is still expecting it. If we deliver, he can do for us a thousand times better than these Emmas. And if we don’t, we’re dead, whether we’re in Los Angeles or Las Vegas.”

  Cassandra gave the rebuttal. “You’re talking about the Ossuary where we almost died. The home of the Hierarch, a wizard whose reach touches even Otis. And Otis may not actually give a shit about the sword when his real game is delivering Daniel.”

  Cassandra’s arguments were overwhelmingly better, but Daniel was still willing to put it to the vote.

  Cassandra and Moth stood with him.

  Jo stood alone.

  She sat cross-legged on her blanket, grasping her own hands, and smiled her sad smile.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  She lay down and covered herself in a blanket. “Of course I’m sure. Friends till the end.”

  TWENTY

  A whisper in the dark: “Dude, get up.”

  Moth lurked over Daniel like a giant gargoyle. Cassandra was curled up in the corner, snoring, and Jo lay buried beneath a mound of blankets.

  “What’s up?” Daniel whispered, following Moth to the door.

  Moth put a frankfurter-sized finger to his lips.

  He took Daniel through the Emmas’ maze of rooms and hallways, through the network of attics and hidden panels connecting rooms to other buildings, and finally up the long, rickety stairwell that led to the surface. They came up between two garbage dumpsters in the alley behind the vacuum cleaner shop. The sun tinged the purple-gray sky with dawn. A few pigeons picked at the greasy remains of a Chinese takeout box. Out on the canal, a garbage scow rumbled.

  “What’s going on?”

  Moth rubbed the back of his neck, reluctant. “It’s Jo,” he rumbled. “She ain’t herself, is she?”

  No, she really wasn’t, and Daniel was relieved he wasn’t the only one to notice. It was more than just a case of Jo suddenly questioning Daniel’s decisions. He didn’t mind that. He’d led them right into Fenmont Szu’s jaws, and he should be questioned. But Jo was fixated on the idea of going back into the Ossuary, and that made no sense.

  “I think she might have gotten a little broken down there,” Daniel said. “I’ll try to make it up to her, somehow. I’ll try to make it up to all of you.”

  Moth stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at his boots as though they were the most fascinating objects he’d ever seen.

  “What are you not saying, Moth?”

  The big man sighed. “Here’s the thing: I’m not sure Jo’s wrong.”

  “You want to go back? To the Ossuary? The sword might not even be there. We don’t know if it ever was. And we barely escaped
the trap Otis and the H-Bomb set for us.”

  “It’s not a great plan,” Moth admitted. “But I like it better than hiking into Nevada. I like it better than leaving Los Angeles. I’ve got some people here, you know.”

  Daniel was ashamed he hadn’t considered that. If Moth and Jo and Cassandra were with him, then everyone he cared about was accounted for. But they all had other friends. Family. Loved ones.

  “What if just you and me went back?” Moth said. “It’ll be like old times, like when we used to heist slushies from the Mi-T Mart in Culver City.”

  Daniel thought about it.

  Then he smelled akhlut and colo colo.

  “That sounds swell. But there’s just one little problem with that, old buddy, old pal. Your forearm is bleeding again. Jo.”

  Jo looked at the arm she’d reshaped to look like Moth’s. A ruby stain leaked through the sleeve of Moth’s jogging suit. She sighed through Moth’s wide nostrils.

  Her hand came out of her pocket, holding a revolver.

  Daniel gaped at it. It was not the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him. Only the first time it was held by someone he loved.

  “Put it away, Jo. Please.”

  “We’re going back down. Just you and me. Your nose, your earthquake magic, my shovel. We’re going to get the sword.”

  “We’re not.”

  She raised the gun a fraction of an inch.

  He felt like weeping.

  “You can’t wave a gun around and expect me to go wherever you tell me,” he said. “It’s not a magic wand. It’s not a remote control. It’s a gun, which means I have to believe you’ll shoot me if I don’t play along. Are you going to shoot me, Jo?”

  Maybe it was an alteration of her smell, or something in the tension of Jo-Moth’s shoulders, or something in her expression. But Daniel knew she was going to pull the trigger—maybe to scare him, or to graze him—and with gouging sadness, he raised his hands like a symphony conductor and electrocuted his friend.

  When she fell, she was no longer Moth. And to Daniel’s astonishment, she was no longer Jo.