by Becca Mills
SOLATIUM
Emanations, Book 2
Becca Mills
The Emanations Series
Nolander
Solatium
“Theriac,” a short story
To my readers. I know some of you have waited a long while. Thank you.
Acknowledgements
A great number of people helped me with this book. My husband, who supports my writing so generously. My children, who are wonderfully patient for such wee folk. Those who provided feedback on drafts, including Bonnie, Carolynn, Daniel, Jesse, and Leanne. Their insight and suggestions made Solatium much better than it would otherwise have been. And especially Sue, who read multiple versions, providing astute feedback and enthusiastic support at every opportunity. Thank you all.
Author’s Note
I have placed a fairly extensive Glossary of Places, Terms, and Individuals at the back of this book. For ease of searching, I’ve alphabetized people according to what the main character, Beth Ryder, usually calls them. For example, Andrew Duff would be found under “A,” for “Andy,” whereas Lodovico Yellin would be found under “Y,” for Yellin.
Prologue
The great wolf Ghosteater crept up the dry streambed.
He traveled in the silence. Given his quarry, approaching unseen was the only option. But the silence made it hard to mind the things of reality: dips and pebbles and stray eddies in the wind that might wrap around his small presence in the world and carry his scent.
The streambed grew shallow, rising toward the level of the plain.
The wolf stopped, crouching.
There, the wind whispered faintly in his ear. This far into the silence, he could barely hear it.
Staying low, he edged his nose into the warm currents sweeping across the plain. The scent of dragon overwhelmed him: time, moss, enamel, cloudless skies, old blood. The odor reached back into his deepest mind, finding the remnant of the blind, helpless pup he once was, for a short time, long ago. He shivered, the filaments on his back stiffening.
Ghosteater did not fear much, but he feared dragons — their size; their power; the strangeness of their ways, which were like those of other beasts, and yet not. He would fight one like this, if need be, but he would not expect to win.
Focusing, he let his nose map the plain that stretched before him — a hundred square miles of ancient dry-land vegetation, littered with shed teeth, feces, and the remnants of carcasses. In the center, lay the dragon. She was sleeping. She had been asleep for some time.
The wind blew over her massive form and reached Ghosteater’s nose. Here, it said. Come and see. For the she-pup.
But the next gust said, Danger. Run.
The wolf hesitated. He had come a long way to reach this place, through stratum after stratum, always following the wind’s ambivalent messages. So far, his curiosity had prevailed, but to approach a dragon, and one of the oldest, at that … it was madness.
What could a dragon possibly have to do with a human girl, anyway? A connection seemed impossible, but the wind did not lie. It told different stories, yes, but that was because it touched many things, flowed through many futures.
Ghosteater wanted to understand. He always did. Curiosity gnawed on him like a bone.
He opened his mouth slightly, tasting the scents to test the progress of the night. Dawn was still some time away.
Carefully, he settled his large, silvery body back into the streambed. Then he pushed himself far into the silence, withdrawing into the no-place between, keeping the merest toehold on the world.
He needed to think this through. His curiosity had gotten him in trouble before.
Fortunately, he had time.
Dragons liked to sleep.
Chapter 1
Andy helped me jump down to the tracks, then stood there monkeying with a set of night-vision goggles. The Subway station’s anemic fluorescent lights gave his brown skin a greenish tone that didn’t look entirely healthy — especially paired with the freshly healed gash on his forehead.
“Did you get hurt on patrol this morning?”
He looked at me blankly for a moment. Then understanding flashed across his face, and he touched his brow.
“This? Naw. I cut myself making lunch.”
“Chopping veggies with your head?”
“Ha, ha. No.”
He went back to adjusting his goggles.
“So?” I said. “What happened?”
“Nothing. It’s no big deal.”
“You did something stupid, didn’t you?”
He grinned. “Who, me? Never.”
“Right. Theo egged you on, didn’t he?”
“He might’ve been there.”
Theo was Andy’s big brother. When I’d first laid eyes on the two of them, I’d pretty much written them off as heavies. But they were way more than that. Over the four months I’d been in New York, we’d become good friends. Their mischief-making was part of their appeal — when you do the kind of work we do for the kind of boss we had, you need some silliness in your life. Plus, they were really nice guys.
“There with bells on, I bet.” I looked around nervously. “Hey, can we get going?”
“Yeah. Just a sec. I think the batteries in this thing are going.”
I shifted from one foot to the other, trying not to show my anxiety.
We were at the 6 train’s downtown terminus — Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall. It was still rush hour, so people were milling around all over. I felt exposed, standing there next to the platform, but Andy’s barrier must’ve been up and working properly because no one gave us so much as a glance.
“Okay,” he said, settling the goggles over my face and tightening the straps. “That feel snug?”
I nodded, jostling them out of position. “Sorry.”
“S’okay.” He readjusted them. “How’s that?”
“I can’t see anything.”
“They’re not turned on.”
“Oh. Right.”
Andy folded the goggles up toward my forehead like a massive set of those goofy flip-up sunglasses.
He pointed down. “Remember the third rail. Don’t touch.”
“Third rail bad. Got it.”
I must’ve looked nervous.
“Don’t worry, Beth. Just stick close to me ’til the track widens out.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t shoot ’til you see the whites of their eyes.”
“Rats’ eyes don’t have whites.”
“Details, details.” He turned away, then paused and looked back. “Um … you know I was kidding about the shooting part, right?”
“Yes! Oh my god, can we just go?”
Andy grinned and chucked me on the chin. “Yup.”
I smiled back and tried to banish my butterflies.
This was my fourth time down in the city’s train tunnels. I hadn’t gotten used to it yet. Hadn’t gotten used to going places normal people weren’t supposed to go and doing things normal people didn’t do.
I took a deep breath. This sort of thing’s my job, now.
Plus, I was only a trainee. I wouldn’t be here if the job were dangerous. Mentally, I girded my loins.
Andy started walking. I followed him into the darkness.
Even with the night-vision goggles, I heard the rats before I saw them — a strange mixture of scratching, rubbing, and squeaking. Looking into a small alcove off to my right, I saw a foot-high pile of dark, writhing bodies.
“Over here!”
“You got something?” Andy came up beside me. “Huh. Talk about natural rodent packing behavior gone nuts.”
He shrugged. “I looked up rats on Wikipedia. Seriously, ask me anything.”
“What’s the meaning of life?”
“Gonna do you a favor and pretend you didn’t make that joke.”
I grinned, then sobered up. “Why don’t we try to save them, this time? Take them to Duncan or something.”
“Duncan’s not a vet. Even if he were, he’d curl up and die if you brought him that.”
“We’ve killed so many.”
Andy shook his head. “They are the way they are. It can’t be changed. Well, not by the likes of us, anyway.”
I knew what he meant. Cordus could’ve fixed them. Mind manipulation was his thing. But no one had seen our boss in months.
Not that he would have bothered fixing rats, anyway. The great powers had bigger fish to fry.
We stood there for a few more seconds.
Andy said, “Come on, Beth. You know they’re suffering.”
That’s something I liked about Andy. He sought my agreement before acting. He treated me like I was a real partner even though, in reality, I was mostly baggage.
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”
Clearly, the rats were suffering. As we got closer to the pile, I could see that a number of the animals were dead, and that some of them had died long enough ago that they were decaying. They flopped sickeningly among their live brethren, greasy and bloated.
It still bothered me.
Don’t get me wrong — sewer rats are nasty, and I know people gas, bait, and trap them to death by the thousands every day in a city like New York. But these rats were victims of Graham Ryzik’s peculiar gift: luck. Three months earlier, he’d sent me to a bad place and then been chased through Manhattan by those trying to rescue me. His luck had caused several hundred disruptive events — shoot-outs, car accidents, masonry collapses, rat swarms — all designed to hinder pursuit. The city was thrown into chaos. The media dubbed it the “Day of Disasters.”
Not good, from the point of view of someone whose main job is to keep weird things under wraps.
Fortunately, the day seemed to fade pretty quickly from people’s memories. All those accidents were one-off events: they happened and were dealt with, and that was that. People generally try to block out stuff that doesn’t fit their frame of reference. Give them an opportunity to forget, and most of them will.
What wasn’t fading from public discourse were the rat-kings. The city was having an epidemic of them: sixteen had been discovered in the last four months. The first one had been a fascinating curiosity, but they’d long since started freaking people out.
A rat king is a bunch of rats that have gotten tangled together by their tails. It’s a natural phenomenon, but really rare. Our best guess was that Graham’s luck had created a whole generation of screwed-up rats, rats that really, really liked to hang out together. Their sociability had blossomed into above-ground swarms just when Graham needed distractions to help him stay ahead of his pursuers.
But now, months after Graham had been stopped, all those damaged rats were still around, doing their thing. Swarms had continued to emerge across the city. In addition to swarming, all that togetherness led to rat kings. Those got a lot more media attention than the swarms. Not only were they weird and horrifying, but they couldn’t move very well, so they were easy to film — a custom-made viral sensation.
New Yorkers are a tough bunch. Most people rolled their eyes and joked about it, but there was a vein of anxiety under the humor.
I’d gotten a little taste of the city-wide tension a few days back when I’d paused to listen to a street preacher in Times Square. He was claiming Armageddon was at hand. His reasoning went like this: the rat kings were the warning signs of a huge army of rats massing beneath the city; when they came pouring out, they’d all be carrying fleas infected with a genetically modified version of the Marburg virus that had been stolen by Islamic terrorists from a secret government laboratory in Area 51; the plague was actually the “noisome and grievous sore” of Revelation 16; New York was the great Babylon and everyone here carried the mark of the beast, so we were all going to die in the epidemic.
His unique blend of religion, au courant conspiracy theory, and science fiction had attracted quite a crowd. People were making fun of him, yeah, but not everyone. You could see them scattered through the crowd, the ones who were listening quietly and looking worried. You could almost hear them thinking, This guy’s too nutty to have it right, but sure as shit something’s going on.
It was those quiet folks who made people like Andy and me nervous.
Furthermore, from what I’d seen on TV, scientists were paying attention, and that was a lot worse. I’d seen one rodentologist say the NYC finds had “increased the number of known rat-king specimens worldwide by almost fifty percent.” He’d looked a little weirded out. Scientists aren’t supposed to get weirded out. When they do, people in high places take notice.
Again, not good. Not if you’re someone tasked with keeping weirdness under wraps.
So we Nolanders had been hunting down rat kings for months. And thank god we had, because there were actually a lot more than the sixteen the public knew about — all in all, we’d found seventy-five of the things.
I eyed the alcove in front of me. Make that seventy-six. Poor rats.
“Okay,” I said with a sigh.
After a few moments, the living rats went still. They were dead.
Andy had explained his method before: he put a barrier of compressed air around them and then pulled the oxygen out of it, leaving pure nitrogen inside to breathe. It’s a painless way to go. With nitrogen, you don’t feel like you’re suffocating.
Andy was gifted in working gasses. He could harden them into near solidity, separate them from one another, and move them around. All in limited quantities, of course — he was a strong worker, but not super-strong.
Grimacing, he retrieved the pile of rats, using the air-barrier as a carrying bag.
I couldn’t sense the barrier at all. To me it looked like a big ball of dead rats was just floating along under his hand.
“How many do you think are in this one?”
He gave the mass an experimental bounce. “It’s pretty big. I’d say at least fifty.”
I pulled out my phone. “Shoot. We’re supposed to meet Zion in ten minutes.”
Andy gave a little groan. No one liked pissing off Zion.
“Let’s push on to the Canal Street station,” he said. “It’s closer than going back.”
We hurried north through the darkness.
Zion was waiting for us at the clock kiosk in Grand Central. She was leaning casually between two of the little windows, doing something on her phone. She was wearing black leather from collar to ankle, finished with orange suede zippered booties.
If I tried that get-up, I’d look like Halloween walking. On her, it was kickass.
She looked up as we approached, the bluish light of her phone’s screen playing across her dark skin. Silently, she arched one eyebrow. The eyebrow said, You. Are. Late.
Zion was a tracker — a very good one. She could find almost anything, so long as it was in range. She’d been canvassing the city for swarms and rat kings a couple times a week for months. It was largely thanks to her that most of the rat weirdness had been kept out of the public eye.
In addition to being sub-zero cool and very talented, she was also sort of touchy. After helping us locate another rat king down on the station’s lower track level, she copped some attitude about putting them in the trunk of her car. She was really into her car.
“Those barriers had better hold, Andy.”
“Rock-solid.” He shook the smaller one we’d just nabbed. “See? You can’t even smell it.”
She looked skeptical. “If they leak, you’re detailing my trunk.”
“No problem, sweet cakes.”
She rolled her eyes, grumbling under her breath. I knew she wasn’t really a
ngry. It was almost impossible to get mad at Andy. Even Zion couldn’t pull it off.
Once the rat kings were stowed, I settled into the Panamera’s luxurious back seat. Zion turned on some classical music, and Andy started ribbing her about it.
Cordus’s estate was twenty miles north of the city on the west side of the Hudson. Given the late hour and Zion’s driving habits, the trip would take less than forty minutes.
I tuned out the conversation in the front seat and started running through noun declensions under my breath. I’d had the day off from studying Baasha, the lingua franca of the Second Emanation, but I’d be tested on it tomorrow. Baasha had six cases in the singular, five in the plural, and four genders. It made French look like a day at the beach. I’d always prided myself on being a good student, but this was a lot of work.
Wergovisom, wergovisoh, wergovizey, wergevisad, wergovizyo, wergevizy — a working performed by a beast, rather than a person. Wergevisoh, wergovizys, wergovizymos, wergovisoshom, wergovizysu — the plural. Wergovizyha — the dual.
The dual number annoyed me. Why go through all this fuss to differentiate two from one and three-or-more? It was silly.
I tried to pack my irritation away. Learning Baasha was among the many things I had to do these days. I resented it more than my other tasks because I was the only person around who had to do it. I heard on a daily basis what a “special opportunity” I was being given. “Baasha is for Seconds, not Nolanders,” my tutor liked to say. “Your mistakes defile it.”
I locked my jaw in place to keep my teeth from grinding together. Getting mad all over again wasn’t going to help.
“I’m sorry,” Andy said from the front, “it’s just trying so hard to be sophisticated. It gives me a headache.”
I could tell from the way her head moved that Zion was rolling her eyes. “It’s not trying to be sophisticated. It is sophisticated.”
“This is satellite, right? There’s gotta be an ’80s station.”
“Andrew Duff. Touch my radio, and you will be in a world of hurt.”