by Paige Orwin
She wasn’t saying anything.
He kicked at the bridge, wishing he hadn’t said anything either. “Look, I know you don’t like him, but Istvan does know what he’s doing. He got me through it. I went back to work. Same-old, same-old.”
“Not so invincible, then,” she said.
He lifted his bad arm, still in its sling. “Never was.”
Firecrackers popped below. She glanced over the rail. Glanced at him.
Walked back, and took his good arm.
“Come on, Eddie,” she said. She waved him forward, down another path. “You went to all this trouble to get here and I haven’t even offered you a Fourth of July hot dog.”
Chapter Nineteen
The corridor Istvan followed now hadn’t been there eight years ago. The Magnolia Group had rigged it with power and lighting but the earthquakes hadn’t been kind: many of the visible carvings were riddled with cracks.
The door to Modern Technologies and Such was ajar. Istvan stepped through.
Istvan started towards the back of the room. Scaffolding stretched eight and ten feet high. The hum of machinery permeated the air, omnipresent, much like the many hundreds of multicolored cables snaking across the stone. Holes drilled in the walls supported shelves full of odd devices and personal knickknacks. Precautionary wards flickered across an enormous crack in the ceiling. The air was cool and dry, supposedly the perfect environment for computing machines, though he doubted the dust from broken plaster was doing it any favors.
Lists of names scrolled across screens at the far end of the room, marked with numbers. Boxes appeared and disappeared. Columns of light slewed across one of the panels, detonating multicolored triangles in starry bursts. A celery stick sat in an empty coffee cup before a well-padded swivel chair, currently occupied by a different sort of wizard.
Janet Justice.
She glanced back at him with a hesitant smile before returning her attention to her electric magic.
He told her.
He probably shouldn’t have gone on the way he did, or been quite so insulting of the man’s taste and intelligence, but Edmund deserved it. A note? Don’t follow me?
Miss Justice finally held up her hands.
Istvan came to a halt, worrying at his scarring.
She raised her eyebrows.
She shrugged.
He paused.
Istvan blinked.
A shrug. She struck a key.
A map appeared on another screen, a copy of the larger one on the Twelfth Hour’s wall and its constellation of pins.
Miss Justice pointed at the upper part of Triskelion, deep in the spellscarred mountains of former Pennsylvania.
Istvan leaned over to get a closer look. Triskelion? That was the home of those mercenaries, the best in Big East. Stealing goats was surely far below their purview. Men who dealt in Bernault devices had better things to do with their time.
Of course Edmund hadn’t told Istvan, or explained to him, or even taken care to warn him, if there were anything to warn him about. At this rate Istvan would find a note about this, too. Goat trafficking, indeed.
Bloody wizards.
Miss Justice made the map disappear again.
Istvan sighed.
He departed. Back through the stone corridors, through the library, through the door of glass and steel that opened both ways to two different places. He wasn’t following Edmund, not precisely. Not all the way. He would only make certain that Edmund was in fact at Barrio Libertad, and not... elsewhere.
The Susurration knew where Edmund lived, after all. Could likely find a way inside. Even fake his handwriting, if it wanted. The creature dealt in memory and impersonation – Istvan had no way of knowing for sure if the note was genuine. If it was, Edmund would be in terrible trouble, yes, but if it wasn’t, it was easy enough to drop charges.
If it wasn’t, the man was in terrible trouble of a different sort.
Istvan wasn’t following, wasn’t chasing, wasn’t worrying overmuch, he was... he was being sensible. Rational. Proper man’s logic. He had to be certain.
He felt no additional pain at the border. The Twelfth Hour’s bounds ended some miles short of where Providence began, steering well clear of the blasted landscape, and he alighted there. The street was rough and cobbled, and terminated abruptly before the husk of a fallen monstrosity, the decayed concrete and iron bars of an immense tail attached to the greater beast heaped in the distance. Past the boundary, it rose as an angular framework and nothing more, stripped to what passed for its skeleton. The work of men and women who had no idea what they were really doing. Dreamers, walking.
Istvan searched for the pylons. That was where the Susurration began. That was where the horror started.
Just past the beast.
He took a breath.
Hesitated.
He turned away, pacing across the street. What would the Susurration have to gain by leaving a note like that? Misleading him? Why put a return time on it, if it meant to keep him away? But... the alternative was that the note was real, and Edmund had done what he’d done, and that Grace... that he and Grace... that Grace had come back and...
Istvan kicked at the tail. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t supposed to matter. It wasn’t supposed to hurt this much.
Bloody shrapnel. Bloody woman. Bloody–
“What are you looking at?”
Istvan started. Turned around. “Pardon?”
A man in a grey business suit leaned against one of the flickering street lights, a suitcase on wheels propped beside him. Blonde. His smile was hesitant, but kind. “You’ve been pacing around for a while now, staring,” he said. He gestured at the ruins, at the vast ribcage stark against the orange sky. “Some waste, isn’t it? I’d hate to meet one of those things alive.”
“Do you know what that waste is?”
A shrug. “Sure. You just looking, or looking for someone?”
Istvan blinked back a sudden upwelling of what h
e knew wasn’t the pain of the bindings, punishment for overstepping his bounds. Maybe it was the smile. Maybe the concern. That was rare, among anyone who didn’t know him. He swallowed. “I’ve a... a good friend in there,” he muttered. He fiddled with his wedding ring. “Somewhere.”
“Maybe you should go after him,” the man said. He drew up beside him, abandoning his suitcase beneath the streetlight, peering out at the restricted borders of Providence with his hands in his pockets. Not afraid. Not even nervous, so close to a ghost. “I mean, friends are pretty valuable, right? You don’t want to lose this one. Not like you lost Pietro.”
“Excuse me?”
A rueful shake of the head. “Best of luck.”
The man walked back to his suitcase, took the handle, and strolled away.
Istvan could have stopped him. Could have sped after him, caught him, and demanded to know why he could shake his head ruefully but evidence no emotion of the sort, why he wasn’t afraid or even slightly discomfited by the cold, why he was empty–
Instead, he stood, and watched him go. He could do nothing else.
They had met at the University of Vienna. Pietro was there on a scholarship, Istvan on what was left of his father’s good graces. They had shared a flat to save rent. Pietro had resolved to show Istvan every park in the city – he was a native, he knew everything – and Istvan had tried to teach him Hungarian. They became a regular fixture at the coffeehouse near the museum: the loud one with the exotic accent and dueling scars, and the quiet one with intense eyes and that sudden wit, who drew long-dead monsters on scraps of paper and would sometimes sketch caricatures of unwitting customers.
Oh, they had been inseparable.
It was all so long ago.
* * *
She offered him a hot dog. It wasn’t real, she said, but what was these days? He agreed: hot dogs had never been real anyway. She offered him lemonade, a walk around the plaza, an introduction to acquaintances (most former smilers, most conversing only briefly). Edmund accepted it. All of it. What was there to accept.
Followed her.
She talked about her work, intercepting the Susurration’s agents both closer to home and far afield, trying to decode Diego’s strange speech and stranger technology, trying to keep morale up as best she could. It sounded difficult and he said so. He ate more of the hot dog, which she informed him was a product of that technology: all of it powered by the Bernault devices they needed to keep the Susurration in check.
“You know,” she said, “you’re the only one who can help us. The only one who might listen. Your Magister is the one who declared us off-limits, isn’t she? Are you sure you can’t convince her to turn over that shipment? Or, failing that, bring them in some other way...”
“I’m not a criminal,” he said.
“You probably aren’t supposed to be here,” she said.
He stopped talking, then, because he knew: he was a thief and a criminal and that was why she had left him. Drank too much. She drank her lemonade; Istvan drank pain; he, Edmund Templeton, drank lives and then drank over them, doing nothing but try to forget how deep down a well he’d fallen. Grace was right. Why had he ever tried to get her back?
Over. It’s over. I’m sorry.
Why was she still talking to him? Was it over, really? How could she do this to him twice?
Finally, she took him back up atop the walls, another ride in one of the deceptively fragile cable cars. The sun was setting, throwing Providence and all the Susurration’s prisoners into shadow, a darkness distorted by the hulks sprawled about like fallen mountains. Hundreds of thousands trapped, and no lights to see by. Did they work at night? Did the Susurration drive them on, blind?
He asked. Grace shrugged.
Around them stretched walkways and turrets and more walkways, all crowded with people. Families. Groups of friends. Couples. All of them seemed to have brought blankets and chairs. The whole fortress, setting up for quite the spectacle.
Music drifted up from the dark. Sousa marches.
Edmund rubbed at his bad arm. “Grace, what’s going on?”
“I told you. Fireworks. It is the Fourth, Eddie. You can’t leave without watching some fireworks.”
“Shouldn’t everyone be facing the other way?”
She swung herself up onto a turret. “Nope. Now get up here, before someone else takes it.”
He dropped his hand to his pocket, already running through the parameters for a short teleport – and then dropped the hand to his side. Not here. He eyed the barrel, wondering what caliber something like that would fire, and how far. Forty miles? Fifty?
It wasn’t that high up. Maybe if he got a good start...
“Oh, right,” Grace said. She dropped back down beside him.
“Don’t pick me up,” he said automatically.
She chuckled. “Here, I’ll give you a leg up.”
It took some doing, and he bashed his bad arm against metal once or twice, but he managed. There was plenty of room on the turret proper, and he sat there. The surface warmed as he touched it. Not metal, then, and controlled by Grace’s machine friend, like everything else. “I could have done it if I’d had two good arms,” he said.
Grace sat beside him. “Sure.”
“I was mauled by a tiger.”
“I believe you.”
She was close, but not too close. Not close enough. A friendly distance that scorched the air between them. She’d said they were over. She’d sounded like she meant it. Istvan certainly seemed to think she had no feelings for him anymore, and, despite personal bias, the specter did have a certain insight into such matters. But if that were true, why was she doing this?
Edmund took his hat off. “You’re sure we’re facing the right way?”
“Absolutely. The Susurration puts on a hell of a show.”
He froze. “The Susurration?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
She leaned back, putting her arms behind her head. “No idea.”
* * *
The sun set as he hovered, high above the horror. No more hesitation. No more weakness. No way in but through. A moment within the fortress walls ought to confirm Edmund’s presence, and then Istvan could be off again. That was all. He could tell Edmund of this mysterious conjunction and its stolen goats later, once the man had finished being a fool. No need to stay, no need to reveal himself. No need to dwell on what he oughtn’t.
Istvan steeled himself. If he flew fast enough, maybe the Susurration wouldn’t have time to affect him.
He tilted into a steep dive.
Vienna yawned around him, rent and torn, human shells on noontime promenade, whispering filaments of glass twisting just beyond his perceptions. Empty – empty – the fortress the target on a range, the rings beckoning –
He covered his eyes – and slammed into a wall.
A barrier. A Conceptual barrier.
Istvan wobbled away, tumbling drunkenly across a solid nothing. A vast crowd gathered on the walls below, none of them looking at him. None of them feeling anything. Blocked. Empty. Surrounded by blankness masquerading as substance. Edmund. Where was Edmund? He had to find Edmund, had to–
Istvan regained his wings and angled straight at steel.
This time the report blew him backwards in a fuzzy haze of flickering mists and tangled wire.
Dazed, reeling, he tumbled past the walls. Striking the walls. Solid. All solid. How was it solid?
It struck Istvan’s heart like the shock that had killed him.
No. No, no, no....
He lunged for the fortress once more but it had gone, receding, replaced by a rippling like waves on the ocean. Curtains. Scrollwork. Tree branches and vines, hypnotic intricacy, winding about and about in a lattice of whispering glass that smelled of rain and coff
ee and old leather. Waltz, but wrong. There were holes in the rhythm... and it was empty.
“Edmund!” A yelp more than a warning. He didn’t care. “Edmund!”
The Susurration dragged him down, drowning.
* * *
At precisely ten o’clock, the first rockets streaked heavenward. A thump and a whistle, repeated a dozen times across the horizon – and then the sky burst into sparkling fury directly above them. Thirteen ribbons of red and white. An offset flash of crackling blue, stars tumbling through stripes even as the image of the flag itself unfurled upwards. It lasted only an instant before collapsing into a great shower of sparks, but it was enough to startle him into a whispered, “Holy...”
“We’re still not sure where it finds them,” she said.
“It’s all half-starved smilers, running this?”
“Yup.”
More rockets were already on their way. Rings within rings within rings. Ovals laid out in zig-zags whose final edges barely touched. Patterns of tiny bursts sketched out like a field of blooming flowers. Screamers tuned to distinct chords. The detonations were so close he could feel the roar through his back, rattling the metal beneath them.
“Think how it looks from the other side,” Grace mumbled.
“Hm?”
“The show. You’ve seen the difference. It looks good from here, but outside... their skies are clear, Eddie. No glare from Barrio Libertad. Stars that go on forever. Smoke that highlights those colors just so, like a painting. That screamer that just went off? A choir of angels.” A sigh, almost wistful. “Absolute perfection.”
He turned to look at her, a silhouette outlined in red and gold. She lay with her hands behind her head, one knee up, chest rising and falling in gentle rhythm. The music had changed to a medley of strident patriotic tunes, and the night had deepened to a greater cold. Was she shivering?