Limbus, Inc. - Book III
Author: Jonathan Maberry
Date: 2016-07-29 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Anthologies; Short Stories; Science Fiction; Urban Fantasy; Fantasy
Description: The Limbus saga continues with five more stories of horror, science fiction, and fantasy from some of the industry’s brightest stars – Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Laird Barron and David Liss. Thomas Malone thought he’d seen it all during his twenty years in the Birmingham homicide division, until they found the body suspended above the opening of the Carver Mine, stripped of its skin, blood dripping into the chasm below. At the bottom of that shaft, two clues—a typed manuscript and a business card, blank but for a name and two words. Malone couldn’t know that those
Publisher: JournalStone

LIMBUS, INC.

BOOK II

A SHARED WORLD EXPERIENCE

Seanan McGuire

David Liss

Keith R.A. DeCandido

Jonathan Maberry

Laird Barron

Edited by Brett J. Talley

JournalStone

San Francisco

Copyright © 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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www.journalstone.com

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN:   978-1-942712-78-7  (sc)

ISBN:  978-1-942712-80-0  (e-book)

ISBN:  978-1-942712-79-4  (hc)

JournalStone rev. date: July 29, 2016

Library of Congress Control Number:  2016941828

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Design:  Rob Grom

Cover Photograph © Dm_Cherry/Shutterstock

Edited by:   Brett J. Talley

For Anne C. Petty

What is Limbus?

Limbus is Latin for “edge” or “boundary,”

but that’s not the whole story.

Welcome to the world of Limbus, Inc., a shadow organization at the edge of reality whose recruitment methods are low-rent, sketchy, even haphazard to the ordinary eye: a tattered flyer taped to a bus-stop shed or tacked to the bulletin board of a neighborhood Laundromat, a dropped business card, a popup ad on the Internet. Limbus's employees are as suspicious and ephemeral as the company, if indeed it could be called a company in the normal sense of the word.

Recruiters offer contracts for employment tailored exactly to the job seeker in question. But a word to the wise… it’s always a good idea to read the fine print.

Limbus, Inc.

Book III

A Shared World Experience

Prologue: Drip, Drip, Drip

It was five past midnight when Malone got the call. He hadn’t been asleep, even though it had already been a long day. Two homicides, including a little girl just past her eleventh birthday. After something like that, Malone needed a drink to even think of sleep. Probably several. He was already four in when the phone rang, sitting in an armchair in front of the television, scotch neat in his hand. Hadn’t even bothered to take off his shoes. He knew it was the department. He didn’t get many calls, especially that late at night. Sherrill had taken a lot in the divorce, including all of their friends. No one much cared to talk to Malone anymore. Didn’t bother him. He preferred to keep his own company. He liked to drink alone.

But deep down he knew that was just a convenient lie. Malone’s burgeoning alcoholism was his way out, his slow suicide. He wouldn’t just put his revolver in his mouth and pull the trigger. That was cowardice, the way he figured it. Somehow this was better. Drink and hope his liver gave out one step ahead of Internal Affairs.

Ten thousand bucks. It was both a lot of money and not much at all, when you thought about it. But it had been enough to pull his ass out of debt so deep he risked coughing up numbers. It was drug money, evidence in a case that had gone sideways when the main suspect was knifed in a jailhouse fight. A hit, most likely, not that they could ever prove it. So the money went in a storage locker, left to rot until the case was officially closed. Could be years. Could be decades. Could be never.

Nobody would miss it, and he was foolish enough to believe that ten thousand dollars might buy back Sherrill’s love, or at least a part of it. Hadn’t happened, not by a long shot. Now the money was gone and so was she, while the Department had noticed it had a ten-thousand-dollar hole in its evidence locker. IA was on the case, and it was only a matter of time before they put the dots together and found they led directly to him. Then his 25-year career, all the arrests, the convictions, hell, the executions, would all be forgotten. He’d just be a dirty cop waiting to die, in general population with a bunch of guys who wanted to help him on his way.

The phone rang again. Malone downed his drink, and answered.

“Malone.”

“Uh…sir, this is Williams.” The new guy, Malone noted, even if he had been with the department for almost a year. “We’ve got a situation up here on Ruffner Mountain, off of 83rd Street.”

“Yeah, I know where it is. What’s the situation?”

“We found something up here, I think you’re gonna want to see this yourself.”

“I’ll be there in ten.”

Malone didn’t bother to ask any more questions. Williams was a good kid, and anyway, he’d been a detective long enough to know that they wouldn’t call him at this hour unless it was something special. And the way Williams’s voice had shook—well, he didn’t seem like he was in any shape to give details.

The streets of Birmingham were deserted that Wednesday night. It has been cold lately, enough to keep the few who otherwise might have ventured out on a midweek excursion behind closed doors. And tonight the rain came down in sheets, soaking to the bone anyone foolish enough to chance the cold.

The highway ran up and through Red Mountain, named for the color of the iron ore that had first brought people to this place. Malone took a right onto Runner Road, into the forest that had grown up around and over where the old Trillium mine delved deep into Ruffner’s side. The road was dark and empty. His headlights flashed across metal signs, painted in reflective orange, newly placed by nervous owners who feared litigation. On the top of the signs was the symbol of the Trillium mines, a Celtic rune called a triquetra—three curving, interlaced triangles made of one continuous line. The warnings beneath them were stark: “Danger! Abandoned Mine. Stay out! Stay Alive! Beware Subsidence. Ground May Give Away!” The number of exclamation points said it all.

Malone had been up on Ruffner five years previous when they pulled a little boy out of those mines. It had been a miracle, they said, that he had survived, even if he did lose a leg. The signs went up after that, part of a settlement of the inevitable lawsuit. The company’d also promised to fill the old shafts where practical. Trillium had been pretty good at keeping their word, all things considered. Give them another twenty years or so, and they just might get it done.

The road split ahead. The way left led to Big Easy, or First Shaft, a once giant, gaping, concrete maw that had been filled up right after the end of operations so that now you couldn’t go more than five feet inside. To the right, the Vertical. They called it that because that’s what it was. A vertical shaft that went some thirty feet straight down. The bottom was a staging area for two shafts that led off to either side, plunging even farther into the earth to the north and south. Men and material went down. Iron ore came up. He’d been told it was one of the last vertical shafts of its type left in the world. He didn’t doubt it.

Nor did he have to guess about which way to turn. There was a ponchoed officer standing at the fork. He gestured right with an orange flashlight. Malone gave him a wave—partially out of pity as water poured down the plastic cloak—and headed to the Vertical.

Flashing lights greeted him. Four squad cars were on the scene. Forensic van, too, along with an unmarked. That was Williams, standing next to an officer named Carver who Malone recognized from the beat. Malone swung around to park beside them, and as he did the headlights of his car swept the scene. And in that one brief moment, Malone saw why he was there. Merciful darkness returned, but only for an instant before a generator fired up somewhere in the distance, and flood lights burst into life.

Unlike Big Easy, they’d never capped the Vertical. They’d just thrown up a flimsy chain-link fence around it, assuming that the signs and the seemingly bottomless pit would be sufficient to keep the curious or the careless away. But someone had taken interest now, and they’d left something behind.

She was hanging there, above the pit, her bound hands pulled up above her, stretched unnaturally long, caught by the hook that dangled from the aged, rusty crane that still kept watch over the abyss. The tattered metal roof above had kept the rain off her for the most part. A blessing.

Malone approached. She was naked. His mind clicked down a checklist, clinically. He saw no identifying tattoos or major scars. Assuming there was no clothing or ID anywhere nearby, they’d have to hope for a fingerprint hit. Her breasts, chest, and stomach were painted red with blood that had once streamed, but now trickled, down into the pit below. The rain slacked, but the winds—less than gale force now but still strong—rocked her body back and forth, while the old machine croaked and groaned beneath her weight, threatening at any moment to snap and plunge her below. Malone stepped into a circle of four uniforms and Williams and Carver, all of whom gawked at the girl. Williams held a notebook, pen posed and ready to write, but the page remained blank.

“Oh my God,” said Malone, as he joined the others. He’d seen a lot, but nothing like this. “How’d you find her?”

“Luck,” said Williams, still not looking away. “Call came in a little after eleven. Kids, probably up here drinking.”

“In weather like this?”

Williams shrugged “They didn’t leave a name or nothing. Thought it was probably a prank. Uniform came up to check anyway. Called in when he found…this.”

“How the hell he get her up there?”

“Dunno. Don’t know how we’re going to get her down either. Thought you might have some ideas.”

“I’m not a fucking engineer,” said Malone. “And I’ve seen some shit, but this takes it.”

His eyes followed the course of the blood as it trickled down her body until it reached her toes—drip, drip, drip.

“Couldn’t have been dead long though. Not if she’s still bleeding like that.”

“Has to have been at least five or six hours,” said Williams.

“Unless she wasn’t dead when he hung her up.”

Malone took a step over to where the fence had been cut and peeled away. “So he brought her through here. Had to have had help to carry her and the tools he’d need to cut and roll back this fencing. Get her body in here, tie her to the crane. You guys find any footprints?”

“None.”

“Tracks of any kind?”

“No.”

“Tire marks?”

“Nothing. And fact is, might not have even been whoever did this that cut the fence. Kids come up here all the time, but nobody much else does. Could have cut it months ago and we would never have known.”

“So we got no physical evidence?”

“None we’ve been able to find, and the rain doesn’t help.”

“This is a nightmare.”

“Sorry, boss.”

Girl was in her late teens, early twenties. College student, most likely. Possibly a prostitute, but Malone didn’t think so. If she was, she was way too high class for this town. He’d made a habit of keeping up with the local street walkers, knowing their territory, their regulars. He figured since half of them would end up on the slab, he might as well get a jump on suspects. Little extra footwork on the front end would save time and effort on the back. Besides, she didn’t have the look. Too clean, no track marks. Too pretty, too. No, this was somebody’s daughter, and so far it looked like whoever had done this to her had left no clues.

Her body twisted in the wind, and for the first time, the floodlights shone on her back. Malone gasped, and that wasn’t a reaction he was used to.

“What the fuck is that?” whispered Williams, to the rain as much as to anybody else. Malone flipped out his notebook, holding it close to shield it from the downpour. He drew what he saw. It was carved into her back, a symbol he didn’t recognize. A crescent moon maybe, upside down, its horns locked around three circles, merged together, like a model of an atom he made in sixth grade science class. A single circle was carved below it, completing the effect.

“What element has three protons?” Malone asked, still sketching in his pad. His question was met with silence. He turned and stared at the dumbstruck officers. “What, you didn’t go to fucking grade school?”

“Helium, maybe?” Carver offered.

“Lithium,” said Williams. “But that’s not it. Lithium has three electrons around its core.”

“I don’t know if they were going for that kind of accuracy,” said Carver.

“You asked, and that’s what I’m telling you. If it’s an atom, it’s Tritium.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Cause it’s not natural. Doesn’t appear on any of the tables. Takes a nuclear bomb going off to make it.”

Malone made a note of that little bit of trivia. The symbol for Tritium, at the Trillium mine. How could they not be related?

He stepped to the edge of the pit and pointed his flashlight down into the depths. The beam did not reach the bottom. “Williams.”

“Yeah?”

He threw the younger man his keys. “Open my trunk. There’s some climbing gear inside. Rope, harness, that kinda thing.”

“What do you need that for?”

“Somebody’s gotta go down there. Might as well be me. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something before the rain gets worse.”

It took them twenty minutes to get it set up. Malone in the harness, rope anchored. All the time the girl waited, literally twisting in the wind.

“Alright. Hell of a bad idea, but let’s do it. You guys are going to lower me down. Slow. If anything happens, pull me up. And make that fast.” He pulled out his gun, checked the clip. Jacked a bullet into the chamber. “Probably nothing down there. But if there is…”

“You sure you don’t want to wait?”

Of course he wanted to wait. But the rain had already taken away so much. If there was a chance to claw something back, he’d seize it. He stepped to the edge of the pit, put his back to it, tugged the rope tight, tested it with a couple jerks, and jumped.

The descent took only a few minutes, but every inch down seemed to last an age. The drip, drip, drip of blood thundered in the narrow passage of the Vertical. Malone tried not to think about the fact that she was above him, hanging. Yet he found himself glancing occasionally upward at her body, silhouetted in shadow. The relief he felt when his feet touched solid ground was immediate, palpable. He didn’t dwell on it long. He crouched, unholstering his weapon, scanning the area with his flashlight. There was no one—and nothing—down there with him.

He shone his light on the floor. It was covered in the debris and detritus of twenty years without use. Cigarette butts, smashed beer bottles, used condoms. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Nothing, save for the one item that now held his gaze.

It was lying directly beneath her. He knew that, because every drip, drip, drip of blood added to the pool already on top of it. It appeared to be a large Ziploc bag, with something white inside of it.

Malone reached into his pocket, pulled out two latex gloves, snapped them on. He crouched down, slid the bag towards him, picking it up carefully. Even covered in blood, he could see now what was inside. Paper—pages and pages of it. And not blank. Typewritten. Only the words on the top were legible—Inch by Inch and Row by Row.

A fluttering sound. A flash of white in the corner of his eye. His flashlight caught it, as it hit the ground. A small rectangle of cardboard. The front bore but two words: Limbus, Inc. He flipped it over, and written on the back was a single sentence: “How lucky do you feel?”

He heard the sound of rending metal. There was a scream from above. On instinct, Malone threw himself against the wall of the Vertical. An instant later, a heavy crash directly in front of him, the sickening sound of shattering bones. Malone didn’t have to look to know what it was, but he pointed his light down upon it anyway.

The girl’s cold dead eyes shone back at him.

Inch by Inch and Row by Row

By

Seanan McGuire

The sound of someone hammering on the front door woke me from my first sound sleep in weeks. I rolled over, sticking my head under the pillow in an effort to hold on to unconsciousness for just a few more seconds. It was no use: the hammering continued. The last lingering fragments of my dreams dissolved, leaving me staring at the pink and yellow stains on my sheet. I used to take a marker when I was younger and draw blobby, abstract flowers around those stains, trying to turn them from random smears of color into something beautiful. I used to—

The hammering got louder. Whoever was out there was going to break the door down if they didn’t stop soon. The thought made me sit bolt upright in the bed. Only two people knock like that: tax collectors and the police. Neither one was likely to be stopping by for a social call.

“I’m coming! I’m coming!” I shouted, grabbing my bathrobe from the floor next to the bed. The fabric was scratchy against my skin, which was always more sensitive than normal when I first woke up, like my body had spent the night over-producing histamine in an effort to make up for a non-existent shortfall. My gardening gloves were in the pocket where I’d shoved them the night before. I tugged them on as I ran barefoot down the hallway to the stairs, praying I wouldn’t trip. The thought of someone attempting CPR on me was enough to make me move faster, which increased the chances of a fall. Through it all the hammering continued, getting steadily louder, until it felt like a heartbeat slamming through the walls of my home.

I reached the door without breaking anything, and fumbled with the deadbolt for a moment before it clicked loose and I was able to wrench the door open. The men standing on my porch looked at me dispassionately. I stared back, wild-eyed and disheveled.

There were three of them, two in police blue, the third in a black suit. The policemen were strangers. The man in the suit…I narrowed my eyes.

“I thought I told you not to come here anymore,” I said.

“I never agreed to that,” he replied. There was a plain manila envelope in his hands. He held it out toward me. “You haven’t been picking up your mail.”

“I’ve been ill.”

“You haven’t been making your donations.”

I wanted to rage at him about that. I wasn’t going to. Not with his two hired goons standing by—and there was no way they were here on official police business; money talks, no matter what your profession, and my father’s lawyers have always been good at knowing how loudly to speak to get what they wanted—and not with him glancing nervously at my gloved hands. Causing a scene would just reinforce whatever he’d told these men about me. I didn’t want that.

My life would have been so much better if my father hadn’t raised me to be polite and perennially considerate. He cultured me like a flower, and when he got what he’d been trying for, he didn’t know what to do with me. Carefully, I reached out and took the envelope from the lawyer’s trembling hand.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Your father’s conditions for your care were very specific,” he said. “You were either to continue your work with the company or you were to pay for the upkeep and maintenance on this property yourself. We’ve received no official visits this quarter. We’ve also received no payments.”

“I’ve been unwell. I’m allowed to stay home when I’m unwell.”

“You’re allowed to stay home when a company doctor certifies that you’re unwell. You haven’t been willing to see a company doctor.”

“They all have the bedside manner of scientists.”

“Be that as it may, we had a deal.” His eyes flicked to the envelope. “You have made no contribution to your keep this quarter. You are liable for the costs associated with this property during that time. Payment is expected in full by the end of the week. If it is not received, you’ll be asked to vacate.”

I stared at him in wide-eyed horror. “And go where?” I demanded. “I have no money, no credit history, and with my condition—”

“Should you not be able to make the payment and wish to maintain your current residence, we are willing to forgive your debt in exchange for tripling your visits over the next quarter.” His smile was thin and as venomous as a striking snake. “Interest, you understand.”

I slammed the door in his face. Then I froze, paralyzed by fear, and waited for the hammering to resume. It didn’t. Instead, footsteps on the other side of the door told me that my unwanted guests were leaving, choosing discretion as the better part of valor. I started breathing again.

Putting the envelope down on the shallow table where my father used to throw the mail, I pulled off my gloves. My hands were shaking so hard that it was difficult to get my fingers free, but the motion was familiar, and by the time I was done, I felt stable enough to open the envelope and remove its contents. A sheaf of legal paperwork, all of it leading up to the same inevitable conclusion: I needed to find the money by the end of the week, or I was going to be out on the street.

The other option wasn’t something I could think about. Not here, not now, not with my skin still raw from the night before. I flipped to the last page to see how much it was they were asking for. Bitterness flooded my mouth.

Sixty thousand dollars.

They were asking for sixty thousand dollars to justify the fact that I’d spent three months in my own home, tending my gardens and watching too much television, instead of going to their labs and submitting to their designs for me. Sixty thousand dollars to live in the house where my mother died, where pink and yellow splotches grew on the walls, the floor, anything organic that happened to be within arm’s reach. When my father left me the house, he did it with so many strings attached that I’d felt like a fly being wrapped up by a spider, but I’d never dreamt that he would go this far.

The tingling in my skin was becoming an itch, brutally deep and unrelenting. There was only one way to deal with it when it got that bad. I forced myself to put the papers down, pink stains already blossoming on their edges. If I held them much longer, they’d dissolve.

I was turning to head for the back door when I heard footsteps on the porch. I looked over my shoulder, hoping senselessly that it was the lawyer, back to tell me this had all been a misunderstanding: that I didn’t owe them sixty thousand dollars that I didn’t have, and didn’t need to make triple visits to the lab to make up for my shortfalls in the first quarter. There was no knock. Instead, a business card was shoved through the space between the door and floor, with enough force that it slid several feet before spinning to a stop. I leaned cautiously down, peering at the text.

LIMBUS, Inc.

Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

Call us. We employ. 1-800-555-0606

How lucky do you feel?

“What?” The word escaped without my thinking about it. I bent further, picking up the card and turning it over. There was writing on the back.

I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop this. Call these people. They can help.

The note wasn’t signed. I blinked back sudden, angry tears. Of course it wasn’t signed. There had always been people at my father’s company who felt bad about the way I was treated. Not bad enough to change anything, even if they could have, but bad enough to shoot me sympathetic looks in the halls, or to slip me extra juice when I was in recovery. Real princes among men, in other words.

Call these people? They could help? They “employed”? “Yeah, right,” I muttered, dropping the card on top of the contract. People who “employed” were either scammers or pornographers, looking for cam girls who didn’t have any other options left. I didn’t look down on people who chose that life, but it wasn’t for me, and my skin was burning.

Dropping my robe on the floor, I walked away from the contract and the card, heading for the soothing safety of my garden.

*   *   *

It took over an hour for the itching to stop. That was an improvement: after one of my “sessions” in the lab, it could take up to eight hours for my body to calm down and stop over-producing the chemicals they took from me—and that wasn’t just for one day. It took weeks before things began trending downward again. Which the people at the lab knew. They just didn’t care. My visits were only as infrequent as they were because I’d started pitching fits when I was thirteen, and in the end it had been easier to agree to my demands than it had been to calm me down. The triple visits they were angling for would take me a lot closer to their “ideal” harvest schedule.

I would never stop itching again if I agreed to that.

I climbed out of the planting bed, brushing vines away, and padded, naked and dripping potting soil, back into the house. The industrial Roomba that whirred constantly around the downstairs would deal with the mess. If it choked on the roots that inevitably wound up mixed with the dirt, I would take it apart, clean out its insides, and put it back together again. Robots are easier than people in that regard. When you kill them by mistake, you can make it right.

The paperwork from my father’s lawyer had been fully consumed by pink and yellow streaks while I was resting. The pages curled up and inward like the petals of a flower, the business card I’d found on the floor cradled in the center. It was still pristinely white. I paused. There were no splotches on the paper, even though everything around it had twisted.

I bent. I reached into the contract-flower, which crumbled at my touch, and withdrew the business card, turning it over in my hand. There were no traces of pink or yellow on the back, either.

Carefully, still holding the card, I walked back up the stairs to my room. The bed was covered in canker-sores of pink and yellow; I must have sweated more in the night than I’d thought. I’d strip the sheets and mattress protector off later, throw them in the industrial washer and bleach them until they were white again. For the moment, however, I had other concerns.

My desk chair was entirely synthetic, plastic cloth over plastic filling on a plastic frame. I sat, reaching for my laptop. Phones are hard for me; even the best case can’t keep a little sweat from getting into the machinery, and I tend to erode fine circuitry. Keyboards are easy to replace. So are optical mice. I opened Skype, checked the card, and carefully input the number on the front.

Then, feeling foolish, I waited.

The connection buzzed once, twice, three times, and I was about to go back down to my garden when there was a click and a pleasantly neutral female voice said, “Thank you for calling Limbus, Inc. We employ. How may I direct your call?”

“Uh,” I said. I hadn’t really been expecting anyone to pick up: it all felt too unreal, like a prank on the verge of going a step too far. “This is Beatrice Walden? I received a business card recommending your services?”

“Miss Walden, hello.” The woman’s voice turned suddenly, unnervingly warm. “I was told to expect your call. If you can hold for a moment, I’ll connect you.”

“Wait!” I said, without thinking. She went politely silent. I swallowed hard before asking meekly, “Connect me to who?”

“To your recruiter, of course. She’ll be able to explain everything about this wonderful opportunity—and may I say, Miss Walden, I am absolutely delighted that you’ve chosen to call us. I think you’ll benefit greatly from becoming a member of the Limbus family.”

Her voice cut off before I could ask any more questions, replaced by pleasant, twinkly hold music. I stared at my screen. I considered disconnecting the call. I looked at the business card on my desk—still white, still clean, still devoid of pink and yellow stains—and stayed exactly where I was.

The music stopped. Another voice, also female, came on the line. This woman lacked the receptionist’s warmth and sweet demeanor: she went straight for the conversation’s throat. “Walden,” she said. “So good of you to call. I have to say, I expected you to dial a little faster. Should we have waited until you were actually drowning, not merely underwater, before we made our offer?”

“I don’t even know what your offer is,” I said, bristling instantly. I dug my nails into my palms, feeling the skin begin to burn. “If this is some sort of sick prank—”

“I assure you, it’s not. I know of your existence because one of our freelancers used to work for your father. He told me all about you, and I knew from the moment I heard about your special skills that we would have some very exciting employment opportunities for you.”

“I don’t—”

“Naturally, we’d compensate you fairly. There’s no direct market comparison, given the uniqueness of your position, but we’d be able to start you at a hundred and fifty base rate, just as your retainer, with an additional seventy-five thousand to be paid following each successful…outing. Even with the estimated tax rate on this income, you would only need to take three assignments per year to pay off the onerous rates your father’s company is attempting to charge for your housing. Take a few additional assignments, and you could even begin fixing that tawdry old place up. Get some curtains, replace some floors, all those silly little things. We have a branch that handles crime scene cleanup, hazardous material removal, and construction. Once you’re an employee, we can refer you.”

“I never said—”

“We’ll email you the address for my office. Please be here tomorrow at eleven to discuss your future with the company. Wear something nice. I won’t insist on business casual yet, given your circumstances, but you will be expected to make an effort.”

“But—”

There was a click as she hung up on me. I stopped, mouth slightly open, feeling like I’d just been hit by an unusually professional freight train.

“What the fuck just happened?” I asked.

Only silence answered.

*   *   *

All the fashion blogs—yes, I’m addicted; who wouldn’t be, when those people look so happy, so effortless and normal and draped in sheer chiffons—said that natural fibers were in this season. Again. They’d been announcing how “in” natural fibers were for the past five seasons, and those of us who couldn’t afford them, or couldn’t wear them for other reasons, well, we were just fucked. They also said that the colors of the season were peach and charcoal. That was slightly more manageable. I had a rayon turtleneck in peach, with long sleeves and a hem that fell to mid-hip, covering an acceptable percentage of my skin. I paired it with black yoga pants, “environmentally conscious” because they’d been made from recycled plastic, about as natural as Twinkies.

Surgical gloves are never going to be the hot fashion item of the season, but when it comes to putting a barrier between skin and the world, there’s not much that works better. I stuffed a box into my purse, just in case, and turned to look at myself in the mirror, trying to pretend that this wasn’t a terrible idea. I looked…not bad, exactly, but years out of style and scruffy, in that “I have dressed myself from the back of the closet” way. My hair hadn’t been cut with anything more professional than sewing scissors in the bathroom since my mother died. Sheepdogs have been known to look better groomed.

“This is a terrible idea,” I informed my reflection, which didn’t disagree.

But downstairs, a pile of dissolving pink and yellow paper chips that had been a contract still said that I owed sixty thousand dollars if I didn’t want to be either a lab animal or homeless—and if I became homeless, I’d wind up in a cage at my father’s company before the year was up, when someone inevitably died and the authorities realized I couldn’t be stopped through any other means. My freedom was riding on this day. Plastic pants and all.

I took a deep breath, trying to shove my doubts aside, picked up my purse, and went down the stairs. The front door seemed to loom in front of me like the passageway to some dark, terrible realm filled with horrors. I forced myself to keep walking. I had my keys. I had my transit card. I had done this before. Not in months, true, but still, the world couldn’t have changed that much while I stayed home with my garden. It just couldn’t.

I opened the door. Sunlight flooded into the hall, making the exposed skin of my face and scalp tingle. I stepped outside. Locking the door behind me felt like passing the point of no return, and maybe I was; maybe this had been my last chance to back down. I was really going to do this. I was going to risk everything, and do it.

Then again, it wasn’t like everything was all that much, at least for me. I walked down the sidewalk to the bus stop, drinking in the landscaped yards around me with my eyes, greedy for every detail. The house on the corner had hydrangeas. Crabgrass had almost reclaimed the lawn of that one house that never seemed to keep a tenant. I couldn’t have identified any of my closest neighbors by their faces, but oh, how I knew them by their lawns.

The bus pulled up to the stop as I arrived, like a sign that I was doing the right thing after all. The gloves made my fingers feel slow and clumsy. I wasn’t used to wearing them anymore. The man behind the wheel watched with thinly veiled contempt as I fumbled through my purse and produced my card, holding it up to the reader, which beeped to show that I had paid my fare. I offered him a wan, apologetic smile and scurried to the back of the bus, compacting myself as tightly as I could into one of the empty seats.

Riding the bus is a special sort of hell. People aren’t respectful of one another’s space, sometimes because there’s no way to be—I won’t take a bus during rush hour, I just won’t—and sometimes because they just don’t care. I’ve had men sit down next to me and spread their legs so wide that there’s no way to escape, only for them to glare and sneer when I asked them to stop touching me. I’ve had people fall into my lap. And always, always there is the distant fear that something will slip, that someone will put a hand down my blouse or one of my gloves will tear, and I’ll touch somebody. Even if they were the ones who forced the contact, what happened next would still be my fault.

It was always my fault. But I couldn’t afford a taxi, not unless this Limbus place actually decided to hire me, and so I gritted my teeth and held on, praying no one was going to die.

The address my recruiter had provided for the Limbus, Inc. offices was downtown, coincidentally right on the bus route that ran past my house. It was more than forty minutes from home; even if I managed to survive the trip there, I was going to have to make the same journey in reverse. The thought made me bite my lip and hunch in my seat, feeling my skin tingle and burn beneath my clothes. Some people worry about sweating too much. I worry about…well. Something else.

The ride went smoothly, maybe because I was worried enough to look sick and no one, no matter how pushy, wants to sit next to the sick girl. I staggered off the bus when we reached my stop, pausing twice to check the address. Assuming it was correct, I was supposed to be going into one of these tall, almost featureless glass skyscrapers. All of them twinkled in the light, reassuringly sterile. Nothing could grow here. Where nothing grows, there’s nothing that can die. There was nothing here for me to hurt.

This was it: this was the point of no return. Either I turned and walked away now, and resigned myself to a quarter spent almost entirely in labs run by men who view me as a treasure trove instead of a person, or I kept going forward and took my chances on the future. I closed my eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. The face of my father flashed, unbidden, through the darkness behind my eyelids. He was looking at me with the mix of pity and irritation that he always seemed to reserve for the rare moments when we were alone.

I opened my eyes. I kept walking.

Screw you, Dad.

*   *   *

The lobby of Limbus, Inc. was enormous, all glass and chrome and polished steel. I felt grubby and out of place as I walked across the shining marble floor to the desk where a bored security guard furtively read a magazine while trying to look like he was paying attention to everything around him. I stopped and waited to be called. He kept reading his magazine. I cleared my throat.

His head snapped up, eyes narrowing in the reflexive annoyance of someone who has been interrupted while doing something terribly important. “Can I help you?”

“Um,” I said. Suddenly confronted with a living person who didn’t work for my father’s company, who I was expected to actually converse with, my throat went dry and my mind went blank. I stood there for several agonizing seconds, trying to make my mouth move.

“Miss, if you don’t have business here, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to—”

“Recruiter!” Getting the word out was like uncorking my voice: the rest of the words came tumbling after it, eager to be heard. “I have an appointment with one of the Limbus recruiters. I, uh, I don’t know her name.” How could I be so stupid? I should have asked for her name, even if I didn’t ask for anything else. The world runs on names.

The guard’s expression softened. In a much gentler voice, he asked, “Do you know your name? That will let me verify your appointment.”

“Beatrice Walden.”

“All right, Miss Walden. You just hold tight.” He pushed his magazine aside, pulling a keyboard tray out from beneath the desk, and tapped a brief phrase on the keys. “Here you are. Eleven o’clock. You’re right on time.”

“Thank you.”

“I can buzz you up, if you can answer one question.”

I went still. Keeping my voice as light as I could, I asked, “What’s that?”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” He met my eyes. His were warm and brown and surprisingly kind, given how brusque he’d been at first. “You don’t have to go up there. You can always find another way.”

I bit my lip. He was only saying what I’d already said to myself. The fact that he already worked for these people and was telling me this was a little terrifying, but compared to what I was facing if I didn’t do this, a little terror was no big deal.

“There isn’t another way,” I said. “Not for me.”

“If you say so.” He dropped a plastic key fob on the counter between us. “Floor eleven. There’s only one door, and this will get you through. Best of luck, Miss Walden.”

“Thank you,” I said, polite and bewildered. The key fob was heavier than it looked, like it was plastic stretched over some other, denser core. I wrapped my fingers tightly around it and walked toward the elevator, my skin itching and prickling under the synthetic fibers of my turtleneck. I forced myself to keep breathing. It was harder than it should have been. Not as hard as it was to push the “call” button, or to step through the elevator doors when they slid silently open. Not nearly as hard as it was to press “11” on the control panel.

The doors closed. The elevator began to move. I closed my eyes and tried not to hyperventilate.

There was a soft ding as the elevator slid to a stop on the eleventh floor. I opened my eyes and looked out on a white, featureless room. There was a door on the far wall; the lock panel next to it was the only bit of color in the whole place, bright red, almost like a warning. I walked toward it. The whole scene was so surreal that for a moment I wondered whether I’d fallen asleep on the bus and was dreaming this.

There was a beep when I ran my key fob across the red panel. The door swung open. I stepped through.

The office on the other side was much more conventional. Huge, and palatial, but conventional. The floor was covered in a thick shag carpet, and massive picture windows made up two of the walls, providing a jaw-dropping view of the city. There were a few low bookshelves around the edges of the room, each topped by a spectacular orchid. The only other furniture was the desk, which was so large that it felt like it should have come with a different, grander name. Probably something French. Everything sounded classier when it was in French.

There was a woman sitting behind the desk. She looked like her name should be in French, too. She had smooth, light brown skin and sleek black hair, and when she turned away from her computer to look at me, her eyes were a shade almost exactly between the two, deep brown and piercing.

She stood.

“Miss Walden, I presume?” she asked, not making any move to step toward me. Instead, she gestured to the wall beside me. “There’s a folding chair in the closet, if you please. You’ll want to sit down for our conversation, and you’ll forgive me for not providing you with something fancier.”

If she’d been one of my father’s researchers, who made millions off my unique properties, I would have been offended. Under the circumstances, what she was asking seemed perfectly reasonable. I was a visitor at worst; a future employee at best. Future employees couldn’t be allowed to go around destroying expensive furniture just because they felt like it. It simply wasn’t done.

The closet wasn’t locked. The only thing inside it was a folding metal chair of the sort I’d been sitting on for most of my life. I pulled it out and carried it with me as I walked across the sound-muffling carpet to that behemoth of a desk. The woman watched without comment until I unfolded the chair and sank down onto it. Then she sat back down in her own chair, folding her hands in front of herself on the desk, and smiled at me. It was a deep sea smile, a shark’s smile, filled with teeth and secure in its victory.

I didn’t recoil. If I had any victories that day, that was the big one.

“I understand that you’re uncomfortable being here, and I can sympathize,” said the woman. “You’ve been isolated for quite some time, and it will take you a while to become comfortable again. Your initial assignments will reflect this. We want you to feel at ease in the field, and are willing to invest in your comfort. My name is Emily Ng. You may call me ‘Ms. Ng,’ or ‘ma’am.’ Anything else will be taken as an insult, and will be handled appropriately. Please indicate that you understand.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She smiled her shark’s smile again. “Excellent. Now, Miss Walden, what makes you think Limbus would be a good fit for your skills?”

I gaped at her. “You…you recruited me,” I finally managed. “I don’t even know what Limbus does. I’m here because you asked me to be. I need the money. I still don’t understand what you’re going to want me to do.”

“An excellent answer. A surprising number of recruits will try to bluff at this stage, which simply wastes everyone’s time. You are here, Miss Walden, because you possess a unique set of skills—unhoned, yes, but potentially very valuable. We’re not in the business of allowing valuable things to go unclaimed long enough for someone else to pick them up. Limbus is willing to help you hone those skills, and reward you handsomely for using them to our benefit, providing you’re willing to make a serious effort to be a true corporate asset.”

“Skills?” I shook my head. “I don’t have any skills.”

“No?”

“Killing everything you touch isn’t a skill, Ms. Ng. It’s a punishment for my father’s hubris.”

She smiled again. It wasn’t getting any less unnerving. “Did you ever wonder why he named you ‘Beatrice’? A lovely name, but a bit old-fashioned, all things considered.”

“He named me after Rappaccini’s daughter, from the Nathaniel Hawthorne story,” I said. “I can’t tell you whether it’s because he liked the story or because he was a pretentious asshole. I’m voting for a combination of the two.”

Her eyebrows climbed toward her hairline. “Swearing, Miss Walden? During a job interview?”

“This isn’t a job interview,” I said. “Either it’s a recruitment, or it’s a waste of my time. I still don’t know what you want from me.”

“Oh, is that your only concern? It’s very simple, Miss Walden.” Her eyebrows returned to their original position on her face, while her smile didn’t waver. “We want you to kill people for us.”

I sat, silently, and stared at her.

*   *   *

I will probably never know what convinced my mother to go along with my father’s grandiose plans for me. That’s a good thing: if I knew why she’d agreed to it, I might be forced to love her a little more, and then I’d actually regret what I did, accidental as it was. Regardless, her signature is on all the paperwork pertaining to the genetic modifications he began making while I was still in her womb. It’s actually a pretty fascinating read, assuming you have a strong stomach and no sense of ethics. There’s a project description dated three days before my estimated conception. There’s a consent form, signed by both of them, dated two days later. And then comes the string of lab reports and technical jargon, describing, one gene at a time, what the great Dr. Walden had decided to do to his first and only child.

Not all the paperwork originated in his lab. Starting with the second trimester, there are news reports, injunctions, and legal paperwork mixed in with the reports and consent forms. My gestation ran right ahead of the law, which raced to make babies like me illegal. But the law is slow and science is swift, and bodily autonomy is still the order of the day: no matter how little they liked the idea of my existence, they lacked the power to compel my mother to have an abortion. Maybe they wondered, too, what was going to happen when I popped out, Dr. Walden’s monster baby, a horrifying hybrid of science and nature. If they couldn’t stop me, they could at least document me.

Except that my parents had money, and money meant lawyers, and so far as I had been aware, the world outside the lab had never even learned my name. I had grown up in sterile rooms and overgrown gardens, moving between beds of specially treated soil and the clinical chill of the lab.

My father, may he burn in Hell forever, claimed to be a conservationist, horrified by the loss of genetic diversity in the rainforests as we cut down more and more trees to make space for factories and cattle. I had been his grand solution. A child, modified to secrete toxins normally found only in flowers, sensitive enough to mimic any species, if exposed to it long enough. Before one of my sessions, I would be fed piles of vegetation, oleander blossoms and henbane berries and woody bark stripped from unnamed orchids. Or they’d let me have lettuce and water and sunlight, and I would sweat novel toxins, poisons that the world had never seen before.

While they were both alive, I had been expected to visit the lab once a month. They would prepare me, making my food and telling me about the plants I was going to mimic this time, the wonderful medicines they’d be able to make from what I produced. There had been a time, when I was very young, when I had been so eager to please them—to earn their affection, which I should have known I was never going to get—that I had actually looked forward to my visits to the lab. I had watched my natural pink and yellow secretions turn green, or purple, or once even a bright, electric blue, and I had been proud of what I could do that no one else could. I had thought I mattered.

Until my mother got sick. Looking back, it was probably something manageable, a bad case of food poisoning or the flu. She’d gone to bed Thursday night, and come Friday morning, she hadn’t felt up to leaving her room. I had been seven years old by that point, judged old enough to pour my own juice and make my own salad. Too young to understand consequences.

Around noon, I had made her a sandwich. Cheese and ham on wheat bread, just like I’d seen her make a hundred times. I had carried it up to her room. She had been asleep when I left it next to her bed and went downstairs to my cartoons, feeling so accomplished and grown up, like I’d finally shown that I was a big girl who could be trusted to do whatever my parents needed me to do.

I hadn’t been old enough to understand why my parents spent so much time wiping down every surface I touched, or why I had my own dishes. I hadn’t been old enough to understand a lot of things.

My mother had woken; seen the sandwich; assumed that my father had left it for her, when she was feeling better. Maybe she’d even been pleased. That kind of small, caring gesture wasn’t like him.

She had died of anaphylactic shock before he got home. Her throat had closed before she had a chance to scream.

My father had been more careful with me after that. Not more distant—that wouldn’t really have been possible—but more careful. When he finally died, some twenty years later, it had been in the lab, of a heart attack that had nothing to do with me. I was the most poisonous thing in the world, and yet I had only managed to kill one of my parents. It was a little embarrassing, really.

No matter what I did, I was never living up to my potential.

*   *   *

There had only really been two questions after Ms. Ng’s admission that Limbus wanted me to kill people: how many people, and why me? There had to be more traditional assassins in the world, people who actually knew how to commit murder, rather than doing it accidentally.

Ms. Ng smiled, leaning forward at her desk, and said, “There is a tradition in India of the Visha Kanya, the poisonous girls. They were raised much as Hawthorne’s fictional daughter, fed on poison until their bodies became vessels of destruction. Supposedly, one Vish Kanya became so deadly that even looking at her could kill. Their lives were short, since the poison they fed upon was of outside origin. Even the longest-lived among them only saw three days of her twenty-fifth year before her heart gave out. You, on the other hand, are in perfect health. Your doctors believe your lifespan will be as long or longer than a non-modified human’s. Many of the compounds you’ve been encouraged to mimic have medicinal properties. You’re one big anti-carcinogen. Your blood runs green with chlorophyll. You’re a scientific miracle, my dear, and that makes you both valuable and untraceable. You can mimic poisons so subtle, so rare, that your targets will have no defense. You can sleep in a bed of peanut flowers for a week before you meet a man with allergies, and let your touch send him into anaphylactic shock. So you see, it’s not that we can’t find other people capable of killing. It’s that we can’t find anyone capable of killing exactly like you.”

I went still, clenching and unclenching my hands against my knees. My gloves were getting squishy. My palms had been sweating almost since the start of this interview, and I knew that if I looked down, the previously cloudy plastic would be patterned in abstract swirls of pink and yellow.

“I’ve never killed anyone on purpose,” I said finally.

“We’re aware,” said Ms. Ng. “Training will be provided—and your first paycheck can be drawn for the full value of your current debts. Peace is an interesting thing, Miss Walden. There are those who will try to tell you that it comes only from within, but in my experience, money can certainly buy a great deal of the time you’ll need to find it.”

“What if I can’t perform? What if when I try to kill someone, I can’t do it?”

“Then your contract with us will be terminated. Any moneys which have been paid into your account will, of course, remain yours; the hundred and fifty thousand is your base pay, a retainer, if you will, and is not contingent on any successful outings.” She leaned back, reaching behind herself to grab a sheaf of paper, which she dropped in front of me with a smile. “It’s all there. All you need to do is sign, place the contract in the attached envelope, and drop it in the mail. Your first check will be deposited in your bank account by midnight that same day. Your training will begin the day following.”

Asking her how they could do things that quickly seemed unwise, and so I didn’t. I reached for the contract with one shaking pink and yellow hand, thinking about the house where I’d grown up, thinking about the labs where I’d bled away my childhood, one needle at a time.

“I can sign now,” I said.

She smiled.

*   *   *

There was a Limbus, Inc. company car waiting for me downstairs, a sleek, steel construct with a driver behind the wheel and clear plastic sheeting covering my seat. There wasn’t much chance of me sweating through my clothes, but that plastic sheeting still made it easier for me to relax, allowing myself to trust that these people had…

Well, they didn’t have my best interests at heart. They wanted to use me as a weapon. Given that my father’s company had always been trying to use me as a panacea, it should have been an easy choice. But being a panacea didn’t necessarily make me a good thing. I was more of a way to sidestep all those restrictions on harvesting endangered plants, a way to stick it to the companies that couldn’t synthesize the same chemicals through the cheap and easy mechanism of “sweat them out the pores of a young girl who, legally, you own.” I had made them millions in the years since I was born, and how did they repay me? By trying to expel me from my childhood home.

Maybe being a killer wouldn’t be all that bad. There was certainly no way that it could be worse.

The driver pulled up to my house in a third of the time it would have taken if I’d been on the bus. I moved to get out. He cleared his throat. I froze.

“Miss Walden, if you would wait for a moment,” he said. Opening his door, he got out of the car and walked around to open mine. I blinked at him. He smiled, the expression only slightly obscured by the mirrored glasses that he wore. Somewhere between his seat and my door, he had acquired a hard-shelled plastic suitcase. He offered it to me. I noticed that he was wearing gloves, and relaxed a little more. Wearing protection around me isn’t offensive: it’s just plain common sense, the sort of thing a person does when they enjoy breathing and would like to keep doing it.

“Ms. Ng believes that you will find these to your liking,” he said, as I took the suitcase. He didn’t help me out of the car. That was good. Touching me, even with gloves on, was not something to be done lightly. “I’ll be here to pick you up tomorrow morning at eight. Please be prepared. Limbus places high value on punctuality.”

“Okay,” I said, swallowing the urge to laugh. Limbus is going to pay me to kill people, but they place a high value on punctuality. Don’t be late to your killing-people training, Miss Walden! Don’t forget that you’re supposed to be an employee now!

The driver smiled at my amusement, and walked back around to his side of the car. By the time I reached the porch, he was gone, leaving me to hug my new suitcase to my chest and look thoughtfully at the empty street.

The light on the answering machine was on. There were two messages. The first was from my father’s lawyers, asking when they could schedule my next visit to the office. They sounded so smugly sure that they had me between a rock and a hard place, that there was no possible way I could get out of this one, that it made me want to scream.

The second message was from Ms. Ng.

“Hello, Miss Walden. I am calling to follow up on today’s discussion.”

My heart sank. She had changed her mind. Limbus didn’t want me after all.

“I wanted to personally let you know that the wire transfer to your account was successful, and you are now the proud, if temporary, owner of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars American. You’ll be meeting with an accountant tomorrow, who will go over your projected tax debt and help you with an investment plan, but all that will be applied to your next paycheck. This one is all yours.” Something that sounded like a smile crept into her voice. “Pay the bastards, and let us teach you how to make them pay.”

The message ended. I stayed where I was for a little while, looking at the answering machine, trying to put words to the way I felt. There weren’t any. There was just a tangle of conflicting emotions, each of them warring for dominion. My hands itched under the plastic gloves. Soil. Soil would soothe me.

I left a trail of discarded clothing, starting with my gloves and shoes and ending with my underwear, as I made my way from the front hall all the way back to the garden, where my greenhouse waited, silent and eternally welcoming, to let me step through its doorway and finally come home. The air smelled rich and green, ripe with a thousand poisons, playful with a thousand pollens.

The greenhouse had been my mother’s pride and joy when she was alive, heir to more of her affection than I, needy little science project that I was, could ever have earned. She was the one who placed the orders for rare and endangered orchids and bromeliad flowers. Some of her specimens were extinct everywhere else in the world now, growing only here, under their sheltering glass sky, protected from the outside world by the high fence that surrounded the property. There were plant thieves in the world, people who made their fortunes seeking and stealing rare specimens from labs and botanical gardens. Mother had always been good at covering her tracks. No one knew what she’d planted, and so no one knew what I had.

The central flowerbed was empty except for a few strips of moss. I crawled into the soil, spreading it over myself, nestled my cheek down against the moss, and closed my eyes, feeling the toxins seeping from my skin and leaking into the ground. The earth would neutralize the poison, or at least take it away from me, leaving me cleansed. Purified. Peaceful.

At some point, I drifted off. When I woke, the sky was dark and my skin wasn’t itching anymore. I rose from the bed of soil, brushing the dirt away as best I could, and walked back to the house. There were no new messages. I gathered my clothes, threw the gloves into the trash, and walked calmly upstairs to my room.

It only took a few minutes at the computer to trigger the payment to my father’s company. It should have hurt to have that much money and then lose so much of it, but it didn’t. It felt like freedom. This was me, paying my way in the world; this was me telling them that they didn’t get to own me anymore, that they never really had. I’d been caged and now I was free.

Or maybe I was just moving into a bigger, brighter cage, one where they’d feed me better and treat me like a human being instead of a lab animal. It didn’t matter much. I was going to do it, either way. I was going to be free if it killed me.

Or if it killed every single stinking one of them.

*   *   *

The suitcase Ms. Ng had sent for me contained clothes that were nicer than anything I owned, made entirely out of synthetic fabrics that my bodily secretions couldn’t dissolve. There was even a pair of pseudo-suede gloves, buttery soft on my fingers, with a tag identifying them as one hundred percent recycled plastic products. Luxury for the wealthy vegan set, now being used to hide the hands of a living weapon. They felt so nice compared to my usual plastic that I found myself flexing my hands over and over again, enjoying the way the fabric moved against my skin.

I was still flexing my hands over and over when my driver pulled up in front of the house. He got out of the car, and smiled at the sight of me standing on the porch. “Eager to get started, huh?” he asked, as I approached.

“More like not really sure you were going to show up,” I said.

He walked around the car and opened my door for me. I felt like Cinderella on her way to the ball. “This is my job, Miss Walden. I have a very strong work ethic.”

“It’s still a little strange for me,” I said, and slid into the car.

He smiled again. “It’s a little strange for everyone in the beginning. You’ll adjust.” He closed the door, walking back around to the driver’s side.

My mind was racing as he restarted the car and pulled away from the curb. He was a Limbus employee. Of course he was: he was driving the car that took me to and from the company. But was that all he did for them? Did they recruit ordinary people too, and not just freaks like me? What had he done to get their attention—or had he come to them, hat in hands, offering to do whatever they needed him to do? Did they make him kill people, too?

There were so many questions, and I couldn’t figure out how to ask any of them before the trip was over and we were pulling up in front of the gleaming steel and glass shape of Limbus, Inc. It hadn’t changed since the day before, but it still managed to seem somehow more welcoming, like it was glad to see me back again. The driver raised a hand before I could get out of the car, and this time he was holding, not a suitcase, but a little white card with my name and face printed on the front of it, like a label, like a promise.

“You don’t need to check in,” he said. “Just head straight for the elevator. Ms. Ng said to tell you that she’ll be meeting you on the thirteenth floor.”

“Thank you,” I said, and took the pass gingerly from his hand, careful to avoid touching his skin, even with my gloves.

“It’s all part of the job,” he said, and smiled at me. He didn’t get out of the car this time, not even to open the door for me. He just stayed where he was, watching as I walked up the sidewalk to the building. I looked back, and he offered me an encouraging nod. Then he hit the gas, and drove away.

The guard behind the reception desk didn’t even look at me as I walked across the lobby to the elevator. The ride to the thirteenth floor was swift and silent, and ended with me stepping out into another lobby, this one featureless and gray, except for the white door and the black box on the far wall. I walked to it, waved my card across the box, and was rewarded by the door clicking and swinging open, revealing a wide, unfurnished room large enough to be a dance studio. One wall was made entirely of windows, looking out over the city. Ms. Ng was standing in front of it with her hands folded behind her back, watching the world go by.

Ten pillars had been set up in a line across the middle of the room. Each one held a flower. Some were familiar to me—the orchids, the lilies, the bromeliads. Others were not. They bloomed in a multitude of colors, and every one I knew by name was deadly.

The door swung shut behind me. Ms. Ng turned.

“Today, we’re going to test how quickly you can adjust your body’s poison production. The figures we were able to get from your father’s people are mostly focused on volume—how long they have to prepare you to get a marketable quantity of any given toxin, what they have to do to change your receptiveness. What’s interesting is that they seem, in their eagerness to profit, to have overlooked one major factor.”

“What’s that?” I asked warily.

“From the ages of three through seven, your productivity was triple that of your later years. You needed half the time to replicate any given compound, you produced three times as much, and even the purity was higher. Do you have any idea why that might have been the case?” Ms. Ng’s smile told me she didn’t expect me to know—but she knew, and was going to take great pleasure in enlightening me.

I’ve had a long time to get used to being ignorant. I shrugged. “No.”

“Those are also the years where their observations on your behavior documented the greatest desire to please your parents. You wanted to make them happy, and so you did what they told you happily and enthusiastically, instead of out of obligation. Willingness makes a difference, something your father would have realized if he’d ever stopped to view you as a valued employee, rather than an asset that couldn’t possibly escape.” She waved a hand, indicating the waiting flowers. “Please me. Show me that you’re the asset I believe you can be. Show yourself that this doesn’t have to control your life.”

“I can’t—”

“No. You haven’t wanted to. There’s a vast difference, I promise you. Limbus is not in the business of forcing our valued specialists to do things they don’t want to do, and I won’t make you follow my instructions if you’d rather not. I’ll just remind you that all bonuses are contingent upon successful completion of field work, and that this is the first step toward the field.”

“What if I’m not sure I want to go into the field?”

There: the question was asked. There was no taking it back now. Ms. Ng pursed her lips and said, “We would continue to employ you, of course. Even if all you wanted to do was sit in that house of yours and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist, we would keep you, if only so no one else could have you. Don’t look so surprised, Miss Walden. You were created to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry. You’ve done an excellent job. What could have been a boon to scientists everywhere has become a money machine for one company. Really, it’s a marvel no one had you assassinated before we came along to recruit you.”

“They’ve done a pretty good job of keeping me out of the public eye,” I said.

“They had to,” said Ms. Ng. “If you won’t kill for us, you’ll live for us. Being a hermit doesn’t strike me as a particularly rewarding lifestyle, but it’s your choice, and I’m not going to stand in your way.”

I looked at her. I looked at the flowers. I removed my gloves. The insides smelled like talcum powder and hemlock. I tucked them into my pockets; I was going to need them later. Then, after taking a deep breath to brace myself, I approached the first plant.

It was a rare, highly toxic orchid that I had mimicked once before, in my father’s lab, while he was still alive. He had stood there watching impassively while his employees strapped me down and pointed heat lamps at my exposed skin, encouraging my body to sweat as much as possible, so that they could wipe the secretions from every inch of my skin and out of every supposedly secret cranny. He had used me. Ms. Ng wanted to use me too, but she was being honest about that; she was asking me to transform myself from a servant to a co-conspirator. That, at least, was something I could see the value in.

I brushed my fingers over the flower. They tingled where the pollen touched them. I closed my eyes, focusing on the sensation, trying to pull the toxins into my skin, where they could multiply and spread. The tingling migrated from my fingertips to my hand, and further upward to the rest of my arm. I sighed, feeling the itch in my muscles subside. It was always soothing to pull a poison into myself, allowing my specialized, alien cells to do what they were made for. The itching came from too much extraction, and this was the only way to settle it.

“Miss Walden.” Ms. Ng’s voice was patient, and surprisingly close. I opened my eyes.

She was standing just out of arm’s reach, expression concerned. “Miss Walden, you haven’t moved in twenty minutes. Is that normal?”

“Only when I’m trying really hard.” I held up my hand. The pink and yellow smears that normally lingered under my nails had turned a creamy shade of uniform orange. The poison was changing. “Is there a way to test how well I’ve copied it?”

Her smile was a greater reward than anything my father had ever given me. She produced a strip of paper from her pocket, putting it carefully down on the edge of the nearest pillar, where I could retrieve it without touching her.

I did just that, and we both smiled as the paper changed color under my skin, blackening like a bruise.

“The toxins you produce without a profile to mimic would have turned that assay strip red,” she said. “We had it made especially for you. It was prohibitively expensive, but I believe the investment was worth the price. You’re doing it, Miss Walden. You’re mimicking the compounds on your time, at your own pace. If you don’t mind my saying so, I am very impressed by what you’ve managed to achieve. Shall we try the next one?”

For the first time in my adult life, I was eager to agree.

*   *   *

My days fell into a comfortable rhythm. I would be picked up at eight, delivered to the office by eight-thirty, and spend the hours after that working. I learned to mimic novel toxins in a quarter of the time it had taken me in the lab, replicating the compounds I was asked to study with the brush of a fingertip. I no longer needed to spend hours with the plants, learning every aspect of their biology; whatever strange receptors my father had engineered into me, they were hungry, aching for the chance to show what they could do. For the first time, I was hungry for it too. I had spent too many years not really knowing what I was capable of. Now, finally, someone wanted me to really show them, and I wanted nothing more than to agree.

My father’s lawyers had raged at first, trying to find a way to prove that I was still in violation of my agreement with the company—they had only wanted money when it was something I couldn’t possibly provide. As soon as I had done what they wanted, my money was no longer good enough. It never had been. Their demands had always been intended to bring me back into their sterile halls, to get me strapped back into their chair while they scraped another million dollars off of my skin. If they’d been compensating me fairly all along, I would have been so wealthy that even Limbus, Inc. couldn’t have tempted me. Instead, they’d been treating me like a useful, dangerous animal, keeping me in a cage, providing me with exactly as much care as was necessary to keep me from breaking out.

My training at Limbus included learning how to read the kind of contracts that my father’s people were so fond of shoving in front of me, learning how to coax the meaning from their tangled cul-de-sacs of legalese and misdirection. I had never realized how much money they made from me, or how little claim I had to those same profits. Legally, when they wiped the poisons from my skin, they were performing a “voluntary harvest”: I was a donor, and so while they made millions, I got nothing.

Every day, I left Limbus exhausted but fulfilled. Every day, I got faster, stronger, more assured of my own abilities. I was blossoming like the orchids Ms. Ng still set before me, each one more exotic than the last, some of them packed with poisons even I had never encountered before. I thought I was ready for anything.

I was wrong.

The morning started like any other. I rose, showered, dressed, and headed for the door, eager to see what I’d be doing today. But when I opened it, my driver was standing there, an orchid in his hands. It was beautiful, all creamy purple and delicate pink. I couldn’t take my eyes off his gloves, which were the sort of thick latex most people only wore when they were handling contact poisons.

“Ms. Ng sends her regards, and this gift,” he said. “Your dress will be delivered in an hour or so, along with instructions on where you’re to go tonight. If you do not want this assignment, I will carry your refusal back to her. The orchid is yours regardless.”

My hands shook as I reached out and took the orchid from him, cradling the pot against my chest like it was some kind of teddy bear. Eyes wide, I looked at him, and asked, “Do you know what they want me to do?”

“You know what they want you to do.” His smile was gentle, almost apologetic. “This is what you’ve been training for, right, Bea? You wanted to do something with your life. Well, this is that something. This is the thing that only you can do.”

“Yes, but…” I let myself trail off. This was what I’d been training for. Ms. Ng had always been very upfront about the fact that she wanted me to be a killer: that everything I’d learned, from the poisons to the paperwork, was aimed at making me better at that eventual role. Even if I were the clumsiest murderess the world had ever known, there would be nothing to tie the poison back to me.

“I suppose it’s time to pay the piper,” I said finally. “Did she tell you anything about this orchid?”

“Only that it’s very rare, and that the poison won’t show up on any standard tox screen. It mimics the appearance of a heart attack. This should be a clean kill. I’ll be back to deliver your dress.” He turned to go.

“Wait!” I said, before I could think better. He stopped and looked back at me. I swallowed hard. “Do you…I mean, am I…”

“I work for Limbus too,” he said, and that answered everything, and that answered nothing at all. He walked back down the path to his car. I watched him go, and when he pulled away, I closed the door, and was alone with my new orchid.

In the office, I usually mimicked a new toxin by touching the plant that made it with one or both hands, letting the chemicals seep in through my skin. It was a perfectly reasonable method to do what I did, but it wasn’t the most efficient way. I set the orchid down on the table, looking at it solemnly, before I began slowly unbuttoning my blouse.

Full-body contact was always going to be the best way for me to copy a toxin I hadn’t encountered before. Some of the classics—hemlock, oleander, amanita—were so familiar at this point that I could copy them with the brush of a finger and with something that was closely akin to muscle memory, only buried more deeply, in the receptors my father engineered for me. New things, though, they took longer for my body to recognize and replicate. I could cut down the time required by getting more of my skin involved.

Naked and bare-handed, I picked up the orchid and carried it with me out to the greenhouse, where my bed of soil was waiting for me and the orchid alike. I stretched out, closing my eyes, and gathered the plant to my chest, letting the petals caress as much of my skin as possible, letting myself drink in the pollen. I breathed deeply, the sticky-sweet smell of the flowers caressing the back of my throat, and drifted, slowly, silently, off to sleep.

I stayed asleep until I heard a pot smash against the floor. I opened my eyes and sat up, turning to stare at my daily driver, who was standing frozen in the greenhouse doorway.

The orchid was still pressed against my chest. I could feel the poison thrumming in my skin, bright and novel and pure. When I glanced at my hand, my nailbeds were a pale shade of purple, like lilacs, like the heart of the orchid I cradled so carefully. And, apart from the dirt and the flowers, I was completely naked.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking a step backward. “I needed to deliver this, and I didn’t intend to—I mean, I had no idea that you—I have a key because Ms. Ng insisted, I thought you were aware that I—I’m going to go.”

“It’s all right,” I said soothingly. His discomfort was oddly charming: even if someone had thought to break in and lay a finger on the poisonous girl, they wouldn’t have stammered like that at the sight of me. In an odd way, it was even flattering. No one had ever looked at me like that before. Like I was a woman, like I was a mystery even rarer than my orchids. It was…nice.

It was nice.

I climbed out of the dirt, putting the orchid gingerly down on the nearest open shelf before retrieving my housecoat from the greenhouse floor and shrugging it on. It smelled of mold and peat. How long had it been lying there, discarded after the last visit from my father’s lawyers? Too long, from the smell of things. I would need to be more careful about cleaning up after myself, especially if I was about to start killing people and making more money. The sort of money that hired contractors and bought privacy, if only for a little while.

When I looked up from tying the knot on my housecoat, my driver had composed himself, at least a little. I smiled. “Can I know your name now?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve seen me naked. It seems only fair.”

“Jacob,” he said, and managed a lopsided smile. He held up the bundle in his arms. “I was bringing your dress. I got concerned when you didn’t answer the door.”

Because of course he knew that I was home: I never left if I could help it, and when I did, it was usually with him. “Thank you,” I said, holding out my hands for him to drop the bundle into. He did so with the utmost care, avoiding any touch of his skin to mine. That was good. I was so toxic I could have felled a rhino with a single finger, and still had it in me to kill a battalion.

Maybe I should have felt powerful, or important, but all I felt was tingly—and still oddly flattered, like a man smiling at me mattered more than anything.

“I’ll be picking you up at seven and delivering you to the hotel where you’ll meet your target,” he said, almost by rote. “Please be dressed and ready to go: Mr. Winslow arrives promptly at seven-fifteen on weeknights, and if he doesn’t find a suitable conversation partner within the first twenty minutes, he retreats to his room and calls for an escort.”

I blanched. “I’m not going to be expected to—I mean, Ms. Ng knows I’ve never—”

Jacob shook his head quickly. “No. You’ll be killing him at the bar.”

In full view of the public, and whatever cameras might be watching. But maybe that was for the best. Even if someone suspected foul play and rolled back the security footage documenting the night, all they would find would be a pretty girl in a fancy dress who laughed and touched his hand. Nothing in his food, nothing in his drink, nothing hidden between my fingers. A public execution was so much easier to hide under the veil of natural causes than a private one.

“All right,” I said softly. “I, um. Guess I should go get changed.”

“I should go,” said Jacob, and turned, and fled.

He didn’t even say goodbye.

*   *   *

The dress Ms. Ng had selected for me was tight as a glove and soft as a petal, clinging to my every curve, accentuating the slope of my breasts and the gentle inward turn of my waist. It was pearly white at the top, shading through a hundred shades of purple before reaching a deep, almost ultraviolet color at the hem, which rode just above my knee. I felt like an orchid given human form, set loose for a night of dancing.

There were shoes to match the dress, with white toes and purple heels; the jewelry was amethyst and diamond, and glittered like stars across my collarbone, around my wrist. My ears were unpierced, and so there were no earrings, but there were jeweled pins for my hair. I made up my eyes to match my gown, painted my lips in a shade of red that hinted toward purple, and barely knew the girl in my mirror.

There were no gloves. Tonight, I was the pretty lure, and my target was intended to touch my skin bare-handed and unaware that he was signing his own death warrant. I stared down at my hands. I had never touched anyone with my bare hands, and now I was going to touch a man I didn’t know, a man unpleasant enough that Ms. Ng believed he should be marked for death. I might never kiss anyone. I might never hold anyone. But I was going to touch a man tonight, and once I’d done that, I could never be the same girl again.

The doorbell rang. Jacob was here. I shook myself out of my brief fugue and left my room, walking down the stairs to the front door. This was it: this was my last chance to call Ms. Ng and tell her that I was sorry but I couldn’t do it. I could do a lot of things, I could weep poison for their research division or mimic medicines for their science division, but I couldn’t touch a man. Let the things they took from me harm or heal a million people. I just couldn’t touch anyone.

I opened the door.

“Whoa,” said Jacob, eyes widening slightly at the sight of me. “You look…”

“I know,” I said.

“No, you don’t.” He looked at my hands. “I hope you won’t be offended, but I’ve put plastic sheeting over the interior of the car. I need to be able to clean it out without risking my life.”

“I’m never offended by common sense,” I said, smiling warmly, so that he would know I meant it. I was petrified of what was to come, second-guessing my own choices until my head spun, but I would never be worried about getting into his car. I knew that Jacob, out of everyone in the world, would always have my wellbeing at the center of his actions. He was the one who took me away. He was the one who brought me home. If he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t do his job.

“Good,” he said, and tore his eyes from the plunging neckline of my dress, cheeks going red as he turned resolutely away. “We should go. You don’t want to be late.”

“No,” I agreed. “I don’t.”

We drove in silence, the plastic around me crinkling like I was a giant birthday present for some lucky child to unwrap. When we pulled up in front of the hotel, the sky was alive with light from its hundreds of windows, and the driveway was lit up like a movie star’s runway. Jacob stopped the car and turned to face me.

“I will be driving by the corner every fifteen minutes until midnight,” he said. “If you’re not there by then, I will have to come into the hotel, and the mission will be considered officially compromised. Please don’t make me come inside.”

“In and out, nice and easy,” I said firmly.

He nodded. “Good girl. Go knock ‘em dead.” He paused. “That was maybe a bad choice of words.”

Hysterical giggles rose in my throat. “You think?” I managed, before reaching for the cling film-wrapped handle and letting myself out of the car. “It will all work out fine. You’ll see. I can do this.”

“I believe in you,” he said.

I stopped for a moment, just looking at him. Then I smiled. “You know, I believe you,” I said. “Wish me luck.”

“You don’t need it.”

There wasn’t anything I could say to that. I slipped out of the car and walked up the shallow incline to the hotel’s sliding glass doors, feeling the eyes of the valets on my body, feeling the synthetic silk of my skirt rub against my legs. I felt like something out of a movie, like Audrey Hepburn or Jennifer Lawrence walking down the red carpet. They were watching me because I was beautiful, not because I was dangerous. They didn’t know that I was dangerous at all.

The doors opened without my needing to touch them. That was one problem down. The next was how to sit in the hotel bar without being kicked out for not purchasing anything, and without killing any of the staff by mistake when I handed them a credit card covered in novel toxins.

The problem was solved for me when I stepped into the bar and a waitress appeared, offering me a tall tumbler full of something that shaded from pale gold at the top to a lovely sunset orange at the bottom, like an orchid in a glass. “Courtesy of a gentleman who called and told us you’d be arriving at this time,” she said, smiling a sweet, professional smile. “Welcome to the Tower Lounge.”

“Thank you,” I said, careful to avoid touching her fingers as I accepted the drink. The glass was cool against my hand. The liquid tasted like oranges and alcohol, and I quickly decided to treat it as the protective coloration that it was, rather than something I should be drinking. The last thing I wanted to do was get drunk and lose control.

There were open spaces at the bar. I settled on one of the stools, careful to avoid touching anything with my bare skin, trying to balance like the women I’d seen in the movies, effortlessly elegant, not terrified out of their minds. People moved around me, some casting appreciative glances at my dress, all caught up in the dramas of their own lives. No one pointed at me and shouted “imposter” or “monster” or any of the other things I’d been quietly afraid of. They just…let me be. I was a woman in a bar with a drink in my hand and every right to be there.

It was an amazing feeling. I couldn’t stop myself from taking another sip of my orange concoction, reveling in the simple acceptance of being ignored.

“Well, hello.”

I turned toward the voice. I nearly dropped my drink.

There had been a picture of Mr. Winslow in my briefing packet. Of course there had: what good was a weapon if it didn’t know what it was supposed to be aiming at? He was a perfectly reasonable-looking man, handsome enough to get his own way in certain circles, ordinary enough that people wouldn’t necessarily remember him after the fact. The perfect predator, as well-engineered in his own way as I was in mine. Only his hunting grounds were corporate, and mine were…well, mine were still mostly hypothetical. I didn’t want to be a hunter. I wanted to be left alone.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before,” he said. “I think I’d remember.”

“It’s my first time here,” I said.

He held out his hand. “Michael Winslow.”

And there it was: one more moment of truth in what was starting to seem like a string of them. I could refuse his hand, say that I wasn’t feeling well, and flee back out into the night, still innocent, still untouched. Or I could do my job.

“Iris,” I said, with a smile, and slipped my hand into his. It was done.

His skin was dry and smooth, like wood but warm, supple, as flexible as my own. I could have held his hand all night, enchanted by the feeling of skin touching skin. It was intoxicating in a way my virulently orange drink was not.

Michael was starting to look amused. “Do you want me to join you? Because I can stick around for a little while, for a pretty lady, if you’re willing to give me back my hand first.”

“Oh!” I said, and dropped his hand. “I’m sorry. I just thought maybe I’d seen you somewhere before.”

“I promise you, you haven’t,” he said. “If you’d seen me, I would have seen you, and if I’d seen you, I would remember. We’re strangers to each other. How do you feel about fixing that?”

Flirting was an alien skill to me. I smiled at him instead, indicating the open seat next to me. Unaware that he was already a dead man, Michael Winslow sat.

Talking to him was surprisingly effortless: all I had to do was let him talk about himself, and the rest came easy. When he slowed down, I would ask a question, and he would start right back up again. Michael Winslow was a businessman; he was very good at his job; he had a lot of money; he had been considering a run for office, now that he had reached the limits of what he could accomplish in the business world. He was unmarried, still looking for “the right woman.” He smiled at me as he said that, like he wanted me to think about myself in that role.

Then he stopped smiling, a look of slow confusion spreading over his face. I put a hand to my mouth, feigning shock.

“Michael? Are you okay? Do you need some water?”

He clutched his chest, that look of confusion still on his face, and fell slowly off his stool, hitting the floor hard. His drink slipped from his hand, and shattered when it landed next to him. A commotion instantly broke out, people rushing to offer aid, shoving to get closer. It was easy for me to slip off the stool and work my way backward through the crowd, letting people move past me, never touching them.

No one stopped me as I carried my glass through the lobby and out of the hotel. Maybe later someone would remember me, but as I’d never been there before and had never given anyone a credit card or my real name, they’d have a hard time finding me—and why would they even look? He’d died of a heart attack, after all.

Jacob pulled up to the corner less than a minute after I got there. I got into the car still clutching my orange drink, which had turned a paler shade of orange as the ice cubes melted. I was suddenly, unbearably thirsty. I downed the concoction in three long gulps, almost enjoying the way it burned the back of my throat, like the pain was a small but well-earned penance. The remaining ice cubes rattled against the glass, and I realized that I was shaking all over, trembling like my body was going to break apart, to burst into pollen and flower petals and the memory of poisoned things.

“Hey. Hey. Beatrice, you need to stay with me here. Take a deep breath, and stay with me.” Jacob cast worried glances at me, but he didn’t reach for me. How could he? My arms were bare. If he so much as twitched in my direction, I’d kill him. All I needed to do was exist and he’d be dead, spasming and gasping for breath, just like Mr. Winslow. And I wouldn’t be able to take it back. I could never, never take it back.

Jacob hit the gas a little harder, flirting with the speed limit as he raced me home. He was good at his job: either there were no speed traps along the route he took, or he knew how to adjust for them, slowing down just enough to keep from being ticketed before he accelerated again. In half the time it should have taken, we were pulling up in front of my house and Jacob was jumping out of his side of the car, barely even waiting for the engine to cut out.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even reach for the seatbelt, which had to be coated in poison now, silly me, ruining everything I touched, no matter how much I wanted to be a good girl, no matter how much I wanted to justify Ms. Ng’s faith in me. I couldn’t help myself. I’d been made to kill, and no matter how hard I tried, I was never going to move past that. I was never going to be anything better.

Someone knocked on the window. I turned to stare dully out at whoever it was, and found myself looking at Jacob through not only the glass, but a thin layer of plastic. I blinked, sitting up a little straighter.

“I’m going to open the door, Bea,” he said, voice distorted by all the layers between it and the open air.

I pulled away. He opened the door.

He was wearing a disposable plastic hazmat suit, with tape around the joints and at the base of his gloves. He smiled at me before offering his hand.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you inside.”

Feeling suddenly, obscurely shy, I slipped my hand into his and let him pull me from the car in my blooming orchid dress, leading me up the walkway to the porch. He let me go while I fumbled for my keys, and followed me inside, closing the door behind himself.

“Go get yourself changed into something more comfortable,” he said, in a soothing tone. “I’ll handle things down here.”

That was all the invitation I needed. I fled for the stairs and for my room, which waited at the top of them, safe and comfortable and mine. This whole house belonged to me, and had since my father died, but my room had been mine for as long as I remembered. That was where the mattress wept poison and the walls were permanently stained. That was where the air could kill, on a particularly humid day. I would be safe there, because no one else was.

My beautiful orchid dress wound up in a puddle on the floor, discarded and kicked aside, so that I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. I pulled on a pair of leggings and a vast, shapeless sweatshirt, drawing it around myself like I wanted to vanish into its softness. My bed was a tempting comfort…but Jacob was still downstairs, and he was going to expect me to come back, even if it was only for me to tell him to get out. I owed him that much for getting me safely home. I cast one last, longing look at the bed and turned to the door, returning to the land of the living.

The smell of frying eggs met me halfway down the stairs. I followed it to the kitchen and there was Jacob, still in his hazmat suit, standing by the stove with a spatula in one hand. He looked up at the sound of my footsteps, and smiled behind his face shield.

“The toast will be ready in a few seconds,” he said. “If you want to butter it yourself, I won’t object. My hands are sort of clumsy in these gloves. Scrambled eggs okay?”

“Scrambled eggs are great,” I said, bemused. “What are you…?”

“I know you don’t drink much, and if my guess is right, you downed more than half of a tequila sunrise in the car. Your stomach will thank you in the morning.” He turned back to the eggs. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you.”

I giggled. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but there it was. “No, I guess you probably shouldn’t.”

“Exactly.”

The toast popped up. I pulled it out of the toaster and buttered it before retreating to the table to sit and nibble while I watched Jacob cook. He clearly knew his way around a kitchen; while mine couldn’t possibly be familiar to him, he had at least managed to find the things he needed for scrambled eggs. The fact that he’d done it while wearing a full hazmat suit just made it more impressive.

He dished the eggs onto a plate and walked over to set them in front of me. “Every bite,” he said, in a firm voice. “I don’t want to try figuring out whether you can take ibuprofen without metabolizing it and starting to sweat painkillers.”

“I’ve never tried to take painkillers,” I said, accepting the fork he handed me and stabbing it into the eggs. “I’m not sure they’d do much.”

“So let’s not find out. Eat.” He turned his back on me as he returned to the stove and began cleaning up the mess he’d made.

There was something oddly soothing about enjoying breakfast in the evening, with someone else washing dishes in my kitchen. It was a sort of domesticity that I’d never experienced, not even when my parents had been alive. They hadn’t wanted me in the kitchen while they were cooking, for fear that I might touch something without one of them noticing. I wasn’t even allowed to be there when they were cooking something for me, something I couldn’t possibly taint.

It was odd, but it had never seemed strange to me back then, that they would create and raise a poisonous child without putting on gloves and letting me watch them scramble my eggs. It had taken me weeks to learn how to do anything more complex than make a sandwich after I was finally allowed into the room. Without the Food Network, I would probably have burned the whole house down around my ears.

When Jacob was done cleaning up he turned back to me and asked, “Are you feeling a little better?”

I nodded.

“Good. You should get some sleep. Ms. Ng doesn’t need you to come into the office tomorrow; you’ve earned a day’s rest. Do whatever you need to do to be healthy.”

“I will,” I said. “And, um, Jacob? Thank you. For everything.”

He smiled. “It’s no trouble at all.”

I walked him to the door, and watched as he drove away. Then I went upstairs, to my bed. I fell asleep with my clothes on.

When I woke up, I was still a killer, and my bank account was seventy-five thousand dollars larger. There was an email from Ms. Ng with the names of some contractors she recommended for the necessary repairs to my home. All of them were guaranteed to be fast, efficient, and as unobtrusive as possible, backed up by the Limbus name.

I called the first one on the list, arranged a consultation, and went back to bed.

*   *   *

The next three months passed in a comfortable routine. I would get up and go to the office, allowing the contractors—backed by the Limbus guarantee—to come in and work while I was gone. They charged me an additional ten percent for the protective gear they had to wear while they were in the house, and I paid it gladly. It was worth it for the floors that didn’t creak and the outlets that didn’t spark when I had to plug in something new. They even replaced the corroded beams in my greenhouse, polishing the glass until it sparkled, until going to lie down in my beds of earth felt more like a vacation than a penance.

The receptionists and guards at the Limbus building had become used to my presence, and no longer spared me a second glance as I walked across the lobby to the elevator that would take me to my daily tasks. Ms. Ng was always there to show me to the plants I would be learning to copy, providing me with the sample papers that would determine how successful I had been. Sometimes, after a particularly good morning, she would invite me to sit with her in the company cafeteria and eat lunch. Those were the best days. On those days, I could hold my fork with fingers made clumsy by even the finest gloves and pretend I was an ordinary worker with an ordinary job—something clerical, maybe, something involving telephones and typing and asking people how I could help them—just sitting with a coworker and enjoying a few minutes off the clock. Those were the days when I felt real.

At the end of the third month, I came in to find Ms. Ng holding a red folder in her hands. Her expression was grave. My heart sank.

“Another assignment?” I asked.

“Optional, as always, but you fulfilled the first so admirably that I felt it was time for something more challenging.” She offered me the folder.

I took it. There wasn’t really another choice, not for me, not now: I had passed the point of other choices when I killed Mr. Winslow. Inside was a picture of a handsome, smiling man with deep brown skin and kind eyes.

“Jonathan Disher. Entrepreneur, builder of faulty medical devices. He has been indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds, including the daughter of a Limbus executive. He’s very fond of dating services. He believes that involving computers minimizes the chance of things going poorly. We’ve already set up a profile for you, and you should be matched with him ‘automatically’ by the end of the month.”

“Oh,” I said, in a small voice.

“Which brings us to today’s task. It will seem strange if he dies immediately after meeting you: he’s received a sufficient number of threats for his security to be cautious. He needs to survive your first date, and die following the third. We’ll be spending the rest of this week working on harmless chemical compounds.”

My expression must have been something to see. Ms. Ng actually laughed, visibly amused.

“What, my dear, did it never occur to you to mimic the cabbage, or the rose? Something non-toxic, that could be absorbed by human skin without leading to death or distress?” Her face softened. “It didn’t. Your father never told you. Beatrice, you’re designed to sweat these chemicals, but chemicals themselves are not inherently bad things. All humans excrete the things they take into their bodies. You just do it in a purer form than most.”

My legs felt suddenly weak. I wanted to sit down right where I was. Instead, I stared at her, my fingers clenching on the folder, and asked, “I could touch somebody without killing them?”

“You certainly have that potential, yes. This week will determine whether you have the skill. If you do, the date goes forward; if you do not, you’ll have to respectfully decline.” She smiled. “It should be a challenge.”

A challenge that could change everything. “I’m game.”

Her smile widened. “Good.”

*   *   *

Toxins were easy.

I had been producing toxins for my entire life. In the absence of something to mimic, my body produced a novel neurotoxin, a chemical slime that was something between an orchid and a tree frog in terms of toxicity. Just a brush of my fingers could kill a man. Toxins were simple.

Harmless chemicals…those were hard. They had structures and forms that were like nothing my body had ever tried to do, and no matter how involuntary my body’s chemical production truly was, practice was still key. I touched cabbage flowers, roses, edible blooms of a dozen types, and still the assay strips turned bloody red, signaling the presence of my native toxins in my skin. It didn’t help that so many plants were toxic in one stage and harmless in another. My body chemistry kept bending them back toward dangerous, forsaking safety for the sake of the kill. It was what I had been designed to do. My conscious mind might say that it was wrong, but my autonomous systems wanted nothing more than to fulfill my purpose.

I tried harder. I focused, I meditated, I concentrated on how wonderful it would be to touch someone else’s skin without the knowledge that I was signing their death warrant hanging over me. I thought about the joys of connection, affection, all the small, simple, primate things that had been denied to me for so very long.

I thought about Jacob, and the taste of oranges rose up in the back of my throat like a reminder of the kisses I had never given—to anyone—and how sweet it would be to share them with him.

“Oranges,” I blurted.

Ms. Ng looked up from her clipboard. “Come again?”

“I meant, um…oranges. Could we try with those? Citrus oil isn’t fatal, is it?”

“Hm. No, I don’t believe it is, even in the quantities you could produce if excited or agitated. It has a distinctive but not unpleasant odor; people will assume you’re wearing some sort of strong, inoffensive perfume. There could be issues with people who have citrus allergies, but I can double-check that your target isn’t one of them. Yes. Orange blossoms will be our next test flower. Good thinking, Miss Walden.”

I went home that night glowing from her praise, and slept fitfully, haunted by dreams where I touched people and was touched in return, with no one dying, no one screaming, no one pulling away from me. Every man had Jacob’s face, and every woman looked like Ms. Ng, but smiling at me, laughing, with eyes that were full of light. I woke drenched in sweat and aching with a need I had no prayer of fulfilling. Not by myself. My body had heard the whispered promise of someone else’s hands, and nothing I could do was going to be good enough until that promise was fulfilled.

When I reached the office, with dark circles under my eyes and hot anxiety in my hands, I was greeted by Ms. Ng with her arms full of thorny orange branches. Flowers clung to them, white and delicately perfumed. She smiled to see me. It wasn’t the warm, welcoming smile of my dreams—it was too professional, and too proprietary, for that—but it was still a smile, and it was still for me. That alone was enough to make it a highlight of my morning.

“Let’s begin,” she said, and dropped the branches into my arms.

I sat wrapped in orange boughs for over an hour, letting them press against my skin, breathing their scent into my nostrils, and wishing, harder than I had ever wished for anything before, for this to work. For this to be the answer, the key, the—not cure, because there was no cure for what I was, not short of rebuilding me from the DNA up—the solution, rather. The solution to how alone I was, how alone I’d been for my entire life.

Ms. Ng came into the room on silent feet, almost reaching my side before she said, “Your hand, Miss Walden, if you please. Let’s find out whether this has been a…fruitful path for our tests.” Her mouth twitched a little at her own pun, not quite committing to a full smile. She was saving that for the moment when the assay strip failed to change color.

I pulled my hand away from the bough and took the slip of paper from her hand. She was wearing gloves, but I was still careful to avoid touching her fingers with my bare skin. Fabric could be permeable. Accidents could happen.

We both watched the paper raptly for what felt like an age. It didn’t change colors. Finally, terrifyingly, Ms. Ng did something I had never expected her to do.

She began taking off her gloves.

“What—”

“Science is a beautiful thing. It never lies to us. It tells incomplete truths, at times, but it never lies, and it isn’t lying to us now.” Ms. Ng tucked her gloves neatly into the pocket of her dress, reached down, and took my hand in both of hers.

Time seemed to stop. I couldn’t focus on anything beyond the feeling of skin against skin, of someone else’s pulse beating in contrast with my own. How did humans walk in the world every day, knowing that this painful intimacy, this connection, was all around them, waiting to be grasped? In that moment, I loved her more purely than I had ever loved anything, and I hated my parents with equal fervor. They were the reason this was the first time anyone had touched me with such intent. They were the ones who had taken everything that should have been mine away. I, and everything I destroyed, was their fault.

Reality crashed back down over me. I yanked my hand away. “What are you doing?” I demanded, voice suddenly shrill. “I could kill you!”

“No, you couldn’t,” she said calmly. “Look at the paper.”

I looked at the paper in my other hand. The color hadn’t changed at all.

“You’ve deactivated yourself. Oh, I’m sure you could give me a killer dose of vitamin C, but as far as killing me goes, I’m afraid that’s currently beyond your capabilities.” Ms. Ng leaned over to take the paper from me. “I’ll get this to the lab, and we’ll monitor your toxin levels for the rest of the day, to see how long it will take for your normal biochemistry to reassert itself, but for the moment, you’re as harmless as anyone else. How does it feel to finally join the human race, Miss Walden?”

I stared up at her, searching for the words that would make her understand how much this meant to me. I couldn’t find them. I wasn’t certain they existed. Finally, insufficiently, I said:

“Perfect. It feels…perfect.”

And Ms. Ng smiled.

*   *   *

It seemed like such a simple solution, when I stepped back and looked at it with fresh eyes: just spend an hour every day wreathed in citrus blossoms, and I could fool my system into manufacturing something harmless, even beneficial, for up to eight hours. I had to be careful to avoid other vegetation during that time period—even brushing against a rosebush was enough to alter my body chemistry and cause me to start sweating poisons again—but as long as I monitored my surroundings and didn’t eat or drink anything fresh enough to remember its original chemical composition, I was as safe as anybody else. Even cooked vegetables wouldn’t trigger the changeover. It was flowers I had to avoid.

Lots of people go for entire weeks, months even, without touching a single flower. Thanks to Ms. Ng and Limbus, I was finally free.

To my own jaded, resigned eyes, it was nothing short of a miracle. I had convinced myself that no matter what, I was never going to have a normal life, or anything that remotely resembled one. I was always going to be the girl in the corner with gloves pulled up to her elbows, cringing away from the slightest chance of contact. Now…

I would always have to be careful. I was my father’s creation, after all, and no amount of time spent wreathed in orange branches was going to change that. But as long as I watched myself, as long as I took care and remained aware, I could have anything.

I wanted Jacob.

I was patient. I was so patient that it made my bones ache and my skin itch under my gloves, which I still wore every morning and re-donned every afternoon. Eight hours was the most my orange boughs could buy me. Assuming we started at eight-thirty, which we did most mornings, I would be toxic again by the time I went home. We began testing my limits, figuring out how much—and how little—it took to trigger the change from “harmful” to “harmless.” If we exposed me to orange blossoms again at the seven-hour mark, we could extend the amount of time that it was safe for me to be in the company of another human.

“It may eventually be necessary for you to spend the night with a target,” said Ms. Ng, reasonably. “We’ll never ask you to do anything that you’re not comfortable with, or anything you’re not prepared to do, but knowing your limits will allow us to better plan your assignments.”

They’d ask me to kill, but they’d never ask me to sleep with someone I didn’t want to sleep with. There was an irony in that that I didn’t feel like looking at too deeply, like it might tell me things I didn’t want to know. So I kept submitting to the tests, and I kept making private notes about their results, charting the distance between desire and feasibility.

In the end, it seemed that a single handful of crushed orange blossoms was enough to trigger the change in my biochemistry. I waited for a Friday afternoon, when I knew that I wouldn’t need to come to the office. Ms. Ng left me alone in the room where I sat to absorb the various chemicals I was learning to replicate, and I stole two fistfuls of flowers. It was such a small act of rebellion, barely worth noting. Just a quick motion of my hands and the flowers were tucked safely away in my purse, protected by the plastic bag that I had brought from home. There were so many flowers remaining on the orange boughs that Ms. Ng didn’t even notice when she came back into the room. She looked at my chart, smiled, and then transferred the smile seamlessly to me.

“You’re making really excellent progress,” she said. “Next week, we’ll start working on transitive toxins. It’s best if you don’t use your own when it can be avoided. We don’t want people to get suspicious.”

“No,” I agreed, and stood, letting the old orange boughs drop away. They’d be gone before morning, and come Monday, they’d be replaced with fresh ones, ready to lend me their fragrance and their harmless nature.

“The website has done its job,” she continued, still smiling. There was something shadowed in it now. “Your first date will be next Wednesday night. You’ll be provided with a dress, and with a dossier to read, telling you everything you’ll need to know about your new paramour. He’s very handsome. That part shouldn’t be difficult for you.”

For the first time, her eyes were hard, daring me to disagree with her, to say that any part of this, however small, would be difficult in any way. Her smile looked less like a benediction and more like an attack preparing to happen. I shrank back, trying to push my own feelings aside. There was no reason for me to be leery of her. She had only ever been good to me. She had only ever helped me. Yes, she had asked me to kill a man, but she hadn’t forced my hand; Limbus would have continued to employ me either way.

Ms. Ng was my friend. There was no question about that. I smiled hesitantly. “Whatever you need,” I said.

“Good girl,” she said. “I’ll see you Monday.” Then she turned and walked away, and her heels didn’t make a sound on the carpeted floor.

*   *   *

“You okay today, Bea?” Jacob cast a concerned look in my direction, eyes focusing first on my gloved hands, and then at my face. “You’re awfully quiet.”

“I’m just…thinking, that’s all. Can I ask you a really awkward question, and not worry about you thinking less of me?”

To my relief, he laughed. “When Limbus found me, I was a newly-minted Army vet with PTSD, a prosthetic foot, and no job prospects. Technically the first two are still true, but thanks to the company, I’m never going to need to go job hunting again. I get to use the skills I learned in the armed forces, and I get to go home to a roof that doesn’t leak and a fridge full of food. I promise you, there’s no question so awkward that I haven’t heard it before.”

“Do you…uh. Do you like girls?”

Jacob was silent.

My mouth went dry. I had no idea how to have this conversation. It looked so easy on television. But then, the women on television weren’t bioengineered to be toxic to the touch. “I mean, do you like girls in a sexual way, not ‘do you like girls as friends.’ You’ve always been nice to me, so I know you like girls as—”

“Okay, Bea, stop,” he said firmly. “Yes. I like girls in a sexual way. If you’re asking whether I’d ever do anything inappropriate to you, the answer is no. If I’ve done something to make you feel uncomfortable, or if you need to ask for a new driver, I’m so sorry. That was never my intention.”

My cheeks burned red. I forced myself to steal a glance at him. His jaw was set in a hard line, his hands clenching the wheel. He didn’t look angry, not exactly, but he looked cold. That, more than anything else, convinced me that I couldn’t back down and try this again later. If I left the conversation where it was, someone else would pick me up on Monday morning, and I’d never see Jacob again.

“You didn’t do anything,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I asked because I think that I…I like you. In a sexual sense. And I was wondering if you might…like me too.”

Jacob hit the brakes.

Only for a moment, and only long enough to make the car jerk around us, my seatbelt digging suddenly tight into my shoulder. Then he hit the gas again, and we resumed rolling forward.

“Bea, I don’t want you to take this as me saying that you’re not an attractive woman—you’re beautiful, please, believe that, even if you don’t believe anything else I say—but I’d die if I laid a hand on you, and you know it.”

“Not necessarily.” It was hard to pitch my voice above a whisper. I reached into my purse and pulled out the bag of orange blossoms. “We’ve been working on finding ways to turn off my skin for a little while. To make it safe for me to…touch people. To even be with people, if I wanted to do that.”

His expression went grim. “You’re getting ready for an assignment, aren’t you?”

I couldn’t speak. I could only nod.

Jacob punched the steering wheel. It was a fast motion, so abrupt that I squeaked and jumped a little in my seat. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Goddamn her,” he snarled. “I knew it was going to come to this. One little step at a time, and she’ll have you doing damn near anything to take down a mark, just to make her approve of you. Are you asking me because she told you to? Because you need to know if it’s safe before she puts you in the field?”

“No!” I squeaked, appalled. “I mean…no. Yes, she wants me to be able to take more time with this one, but she’s not making me do anything. She hasn’t ordered me to…to sleep with him. I don’t even know if he’s going to want to see me more than once. But I do know that I have a way to touch people now, and I want to touch people. I want to touch you. I don’t want the first time someone puts their arms around me to be an assignment. I want it to be because they know me, and they like me enough to do that.”

Jacob was quiet for a while, eyes on the road. Finally, he asked, “How safe are those flowers of yours?”

“I’ll need to sit with them in my hands for about an hour, and then take a quick bath to make sure I got all the oils off myself. But after that…I’ll be as safe to touch as any other girl.”

“You’ll never be like any other girl,” he said softly.

“Does that mean you will? Or does that mean you won’t?”

Jacob laughed unsteadily. “This isn’t exactly normal, Bea. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. Maybe you wouldn’t like me if you did.”

“I’m not asking you to marry me, or to be my boyfriend, or to love me. I’m just asking you if you can stay with me for a little while. If you can like me enough to do that.”

Again, Jacob was quiet. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough. “Is your house safe for me? I know you’ve touched everything there.”

That was something I hadn’t considered. “Maybe not,” I admitted.

“All right, then. I’m going to drop you off, just like I do every day. I’m going to give you an hour and a half, for those flowers of yours to work. And then I’m going to come back. If you’re waiting outside when I get there, we’ll go to a motel. Just you and me and a place that’s never been too dangerous to touch. We’ll…do whatever we’ll do, and I’ll take you home when we’re finished. If you’re not outside when I get there, if you’ve changed your mind and decided this is all too much for you, well, that’s just fine. We’ll still be friends. I’ll pick you up on Monday, and I’ll never say a word about what almost happened to anyone. Not even to you. Does that sound fair?”

“More than fair,” I said, suddenly shy, looking at the curve of his jaw and wondering what it would be like to run my fingers along it with no gloves in the way. Would the little hairs that grew above his beard be stiff or soft? Would I be able to feel him breathing? There were so many wonderful things to learn, and I was eager for each and every one of them.

Jacob gave me an inscrutable look as he dropped me off. I watched him drive away. Then I rushed inside, barely waiting for the door to close behind me before I started to strip. My clothes were tainted with the poisons from my sweat: I needed clean ones. I needed a shower. And most of all, I needed to fill my hands with flowers, and make myself an ordinary girl.

Naked, I sat in my bed of potting soil and held the orange blossoms close, wishing I could feel the chemical producing cells in my skin as they turned from one thing to another. The scent of oranges began to rise from my body, light and fragrant. I stayed where I was. This was for Jacob. This was for an ordinary night. I wasn’t cutting any corners or taking any chances. Not with Jacob’s life.

He was right: I didn’t know him as anything other than my driver. I didn’t know about his life, his hobbies, what he liked to do with his time when he wasn’t babysitting for the toxic girl. But I didn’t need to know any of those things to know that I wanted to feel his arms around me, his lips on mine. Maybe it was selfish of me not to care. I just knew that if I was going to touch someone, I wanted to choose them for myself, and not because some company dossier said that they were my next target.

The alarm on the greenhouse shelf rang. I dropped the flowers into my lap and reached for an assay strip. My hands were shaking. I braced them against my knee and watched the paper fail to change colors, holding it until there could be no question that I was safe. For once in my life, I was safe.

Jacob wouldn’t be, though, unless I took some additional precautions. I dropped the orange blossoms and made my way back into the house. The shower had been the first thing I’d improved, with my very first bonus check from Limbus. The water pressure was good enough to rinse anything away. After I had scrubbed myself five times, I was sure that my skin contained no lingering traces of anything deadly, I left the bathroom for my bedroom, and my closet.

New clothes always arrived wrapped in plastic. I kept them that way until the first time I wore them, enjoying the idea that for a little while, something in my house was truly clean. I picked out a dress I’d ordered the last time I’d felt the need to indulge in a little retail therapy, careful not to let it brush against anything else as I pulled it over my head. I would have gone out to meet him naked if I could have. It seemed like the only way to be genuinely safe. Since that wasn’t an option, I just had to be as meticulous as I possibly could. I was doing this for him. I was doing this for me.

I was doing this for the chance that once—just once in my life—I could be the ordinary one. For that, I would have done virtually anything.

Jacob pulled up in front of the house exactly ninety minutes after he had dropped me off. I was standing on the sidewalk, barefoot in my new dress, waiting for him. He didn’t get out of the car. The window on my side rolled down, and he asked, “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said, and got in.

We didn’t talk during the drive. I pleated my skirt in my hands and stared at my bare knees, not allowing myself to look at him. He kept his eyes on the road. All too soon and not soon enough, we were pulling up in front of a hotel. It wasn’t as nice as the one where I’d gone to meet with Mr. Winslow, and that made me happier than I could say. I didn’t want any ghosts here. Just Jacob, and me, and a night where everything was normal.

A man in a red and white uniform opened my car door for me, and he didn’t say anything about my bare feet. Jacob was there when I finished standing. He didn’t say anything either. He just offered me his hand.

Blood singing in my veins, I took it, and we walked together into the hotel lobby. We didn’t stop at the desk, just proceeded directly to the elevators. I’d never stayed in a hotel before, but I watched enough television to know that this wasn’t the norm. I shot Jacob a confused look. He grinned, proud and abashed and a little shy all at the same time.

“I was hoping you’d be outside,” he said. “I already checked us in.”

The whole reason we were here was so I could fulfill my dream of kissing this man. I nearly did it right then and there.

The elevator carried us up several floors to a bland, inoffensively decorated hallway ringed with identical doors. Jacob led me to the one that belonged, however temporarily, to us, and unlocked the door with a swipe of the card key, revealing a paradox of a room, perfectly ordinary, smaller than my bedroom at home, but decadent beyond words at the same time. No one had ever poisoned these sheets. No toxic blooms lurked in this carpet. I was standing in a place that had never been tainted by anything. Only life walked here. Death had no place within these walls.

The door swung shut behind us. I jumped a little before I turned to Jacob, suddenly shy, suddenly terrified, absolutely hopeful. They weren’t contradictory states. This was something I had never thought I could have, and now that it was within my reach, I had no idea what to do.

“You’ll have to show me,” I said. “I trust you.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said, and his voice was thick and rough with longing and with something that resembled my desperation.

“Too late,” I said. I reached behind myself, undoing the zipper of my dress. It fell to puddle at my feet. Jacob made a small groaning noise. I hadn’t wanted to risk tainted underthings, and so I hadn’t worn anything at all.

He was still fully clothed when I went to him.

He wasn’t clothed for very long.

What we did was…complicated, and messy, and sometimes painful, and the most amazing thing in the world. At times, I thought I was more than halfway in love with him, so consumed by need and lust and longing and connection that I would have walked off the edge of the world if he’d asked me to. Then he would pull away, ever so slightly, following the instinctive steps of a dance that had been going on since the dawn of time, and hatred would surge to wipe away the love. Hatred for my parents, who had done this to me; hatred for Ms. Ng, who had never considered that this might be something I would want. Hatred for my own body. It was already betraying me anew, already forgetting about the safe sweetness of oranges, which were unfamiliar, in favor of the toxins I made all on my own.

We only had a few hours. Both of us knew that. But oh, we made those few hours count. We held each other tight and we left our marks across every inch of one another’s skin. Every time he touched me Jacob would get a wondering expression on his face, like he was privileged beyond measure. He didn’t say anything about the small scars on my arms and the inside of my thighs, where deeper samples had been taken over the years, testing the toxicity of deep muscle and bone marrow. I didn’t say anything about his prosthetic foot, not even when he removed it, letting it fall to the floor, and curled his legs around mine, the nub of his ankle digging into my calf like a secret embrace. We were together. We defined the world. We were everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was in us.

When we were done, when I was bruised and aching and Jacob was spent, we rolled away from each other. For a moment we just lay there, side by side, covered in one another’s sweat, existing in the warm afterglow of something that had always seemed impossible to me.

Finally, Jacob said, “Normally, I’d ask if you wanted to stay the night. Of course, normally, we’d be at my apartment, not in a hotel.”

“Nothing about this is normal.” I rolled over and kissed his cheek. Even that small connection was enough to send thrills racing down my spine. “It’s all right. I knew this was only a short-term thing. You can take me home.”

“Okay.” He looked at me, raising a hand to cup my cheek. “Thank you for trusting me this much.”

“Thank you for being there to trust,” I said.

He kissed me one more time that night, on the sidewalk in front of my house, with the wind tying knots in my already tangled hair. Then he drove away, and I went inside, and shut the door behind me.

*   *   *

Jonathan Disher was handsome, in the way of men who could afford to stay handsome long past the point when age should have caught up with them; money really could buy anything, if you knew where to shop. He was charming, in the way of someone who didn’t really know what the word “no” was supposed to sound like; it could sound for other people, of course, but not for him. Never for him. And according to the carefully doctored profile Ms. Ng had designed for me, he was my perfect man.

He certainly seemed to think of me as the perfect woman. His eyes crawled along every inch of my body before he even took my hand, and when his fingers touched mine, it was as perfunctory as a business agreement, like he was merely reclaiming something that had been his all along.

We went on six dates. I carried baggies of orange blossoms in my purse and took assay strips with me to the bathroom, monitoring my body’s toxicity with religious care. We never went past second base, never reached the level of connection I had known with Jacob, but his skin touched mine constantly, until it felt like he had touched me more, through sheer aggregation, than anyone else ever had, or ever could. Jonathan ran his fingers through my hair or wrapped them around the back of my neck, casually possessive, never letting go. And it felt almost…normal. I didn’t care for him the way I did Jacob, but I didn’t want him dead, either. He was a nice, ordinary man. I could have gone on like that forever.

On the afternoon of the seventh date, only half my usual allotment of flowers was delivered to the house. I looked at them numbly, recognizing my instruction for what it was. He was taking me dancing that night, at a nightclub built into the body of a decommissioned cruise ship. He’d been talking about it all week, building it up to this great romance. As I buried my hands in the blossoms, I wondered whether he’d ever stopped to consider that sometimes a great romance came at the end of the story, and not at the beginning.

We were dancing when he died, his heart giving out in his chest. He had time to look at me, surprised and wounded, like a little boy. Then he fell, and gravity took his hands away from me, pulling them with him down to the deck. He was still staring when he hit the wood. Other bodies quickly blocked his from view, as people shoved between us, anxious to help. I kept my hands pressed against my mouth, breathing my own poison, not hurting anyone else. When the tide of humanity slowed I turned and ran for the exit, leaving the body of a man who might have been a lover—leaving the fairytale of love—behind.

Jacob was waiting for me at the end of the dock, darling, dependable Jacob, with a plastic rain poncho I could wrap around myself to keep my skin concealed. He drove me home. He asked if I needed anything, eggs or coffee or company. I refused all three, and he left me there, driving off into the night. I thought he was as lost as I was. I didn’t know the words to bridge the gap.

My first killing in the name of Limbus, Inc. had been an initiation, a step which, once taken, could not be taken back. My second had been a leap, and I was still falling. The assignments came faster after that. Some of them were quick, simple things: mimic a poison and touch their hand in a crowd, or brush a thumb across the back of an arm while I walked past. Others were more elaborate, taking longer, stretching over multiple meetings. None of them lasted as long as my time with Jonathan. That had been, it seemed, an aberration.

I killed seven men in the name of Limbus, Inc., not counting Winslow and Disher: they were my bellwethers, but the seven who followed them were the meat of my killer’s career. Seven coffins filled, seven funerals held, and I fell asleep with my hands filled with orange blossoms, dreaming of Jacob’s hands holding my wrist, dreaming of the day I could be free.

If Limbus did anything cruel to me, it was that. Once they tempted me with a real life, a life lived on my own terms, I could no more let go of the idea than I could learn to fly. So I killed for them, whenever they asked me, and I curled in my potting soil and wondered whether there was some magical tipping point past which my blood would turn as pure and harmless as anybody else’s.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to convince myself to eat breakfast before I left for work, when someone knocked on my front door. I stood. Once, that sound would have been enough to send me into a panic, certain that my father’s lawyers were here to threaten me with another round of fines or another round of tests. Now, emboldened by my experience with the world and by the Limbus money that swelled my bank accounts, I walked calmly to the door, and opened it, revealing the man in the plain black suit who had come to me so many months ago. The policemen weren’t with him this time. His hands were empty.

I frowned.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. It was a relief when my voice didn’t shake. I sounded confident, secure, and adult, like I had every right in the world to ask this man what he was doing on my property. “I paid all my debts. You have no claim on me or on this house.”

“You’ve been working for Limbus,” he said. “I know who the next name on their list for you is. I’m here to ask you to stop.”

I stared at him.

The lawyer’s name was Stuart; he had been working for my father since almost the day I was born, handling the company’s interaction with other large concerns. I didn’t know exactly what that meant; it seemed to be a way of saying that he provided plausible deniability for everyone else. Let Stuart be the one to shake hands with the monsters. Everyone else would be clean, if it came to that; everyone else would be able to legitimately say that they had no idea, even if they were the ones who sent him into the monsters’ den in the first place.

“You were the one who left me the business card,” I said finally. “I always thought it was one of the policemen. They didn’t work for my father.”

“No, which means they didn’t know you the way I do,” he said. “I always thought that what was done to you was wrong, Beatrice. Please, even if you don’t want to believe anything else about me, believe that much. Turning a child into a weapon…it wasn’t fair. Limbus offered a way out. At least with them, you’ll be compensated for the things that you destroy.”

I nodded a little, keeping my face schooled as neutrally as possible. I didn’t want him to know that I had no idea what I was destroying. I killed the targets Ms. Ng set for me, and I didn’t ask questions. I was smart enough to know that there was always a chance I wouldn’t like the answers, and the comfort and security of having a place to belong was more important to me than having all the information.

“You were already a weapon when I put you in their hands,” he said, sounding more like he was trying to convince himself than like he was trying to convince me. “I didn’t turn you into anything you weren’t already designed to be. I am so, so sorry for what was done to you, but Beatrice, none of this was ever my fault. If anything, I’ve helped you. You see that, don’t you? That I’ve helped you?”

I frowned. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with you being here.”

“I’m your next target, Beatrice.”

Everything stopped. Even the air seemed to crystalize, becoming thick and difficult to see through. My frown deepened, digging into the sides of my face. Finally, harshly, I managed to ask, “What?”

“I said, I’m your next target.” He straightened, forcing me to meet his eyes. “They’re going to ask you to kill me. Maybe I deserve it. Probably I deserve it, after the things I’ve done, the things I’ve signed off on and stood back to allow. But I have children. Three of them. The eldest is only twelve. No matter what I do or do not deserve, they don’t deserve to pay for my actions. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t let them make you kill me.”

“Why do we always say that children don’t deserve to suffer for the actions of their parents, and never that they don’t deserve to benefit from the actions of their parents?” My lips felt numb, like my own toxins had finally figured out the trick of working on my flesh. “When rich parents buy ponies for their kids, we act like it’s totally normal and the way things should work, but when those same parents go to jail for tax evasion, all we want to say is ‘think of the children,’ over and over, like it changes something.”

“Beatrice—”

“I don’t know your children. They’re not even faces to me. Why should I care if killing you hurts them? Letting you live hurts me.”

He looked at me. “Because I’m asking you as nicely as I can. And because none of your other targets have known that you were coming. When you put your hand against my skin, I’ll know it’s you, and I’ll go to my death knowing who killed me. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to take the step from natural disaster into murderer?”

I shivered. The air was warm, but that didn’t matter, because his words were cold. “You don’t know for sure that I’m going to be coming for you. None of my other targets have known.”

“Trust me, I know,” he said. “Please, just…think about it.”

Then he turned, and let himself out. I don’t know how he avoided touching the poisoned doorknob, whether he used a handkerchief or just took his chances. I didn’t want to know. I stood there, alone in my kitchen, and stared at the space where he wasn’t anymore.

*   *   *

The next morning at Limbus, a red folder in Ms. Ng’s hands: a familiar face looking up at me from the inside cover when I flipped it open. He was younger than I’d always assumed, aged by responsibility and the burdens of leadership.

The names of his three children were listed as well, almost as an afterthought. People I might encounter in the vicinity of the target. Margaret; Peter; Elaine. Three innocents who knew nothing of their father’s work, whose only contact with my world would be in the scars it could leave behind by touching them. This was supposed to be an “accidental encounter” killing: I would wind up next to him at the grocery store, touch his wrist, and walk away. No fuss, no muss, no need for extended contact.

I handed the folder back to her. “No.”

“I’m sorry?” Her pretty face contorted into a frown. “What do you mean, Miss Walden? This is your job.”

“You told me I could refuse a target at any time, and I’m refusing this one. I won’t do it. Find another way.”

“That was quite a few assignments ago; if you were going to start refusing, I would have expected you to have done so well before now.”

I said nothing.

Her face twisted further, becoming nothing but frown. “Don’t you think you owe me some sort of an explanation? This man needs to be removed. You’re the easiest method of removing him. Your refusal complicates business.”

“I know him. I don’t want to kill someone that I know.”

“He’s not your friend. He’s never done a single thing to help you.”

“He’s the one who gave me your card. Does that mean that Limbus isn’t helping me?”

Ms. Ng blinked before allowing her frown to fade, face smoothing into its customary neutral expression. “Limbus, Inc. is your employer. We’re happy to help you, inasmuch as helping you helps the company. The bottom line commands us all, Miss Walden. Even me. Even you.”

“You said that it was always going to be up to me whether or not I took an assignment. You told me, when I first came to work for you, that I would always have the option to say ‘no.’ I’m saying ‘no’ now. I don’t want to kill him. He works for my father’s company, he pointed me at Limbus, and I want him left alone.”

Ms. Ng looked at me levelly. “You don’t get to say that, Miss Walden. You can refuse the assignment, if you truly wish to do so. I can’t stop you. I won’t pretend that your choice doesn’t disappoint me, or that I don’t wish you would reconsider. I also won’t pretend that your choice saves this man. Don’t look so shocked. Did you truly think that, in a company this size, you would be our only killer?”

I stared at her. I had never really considered how big Limbus was, or was not. On a daily basis, I saw Jacob, the man at the reception desk, and Ms. Ng. Everyone else was a walk-on part, occasionally appearing, but no more vital to the work we did together than the pigeons that occasionally appeared on the windowsill. Limbus must have been large, to afford the sort of fees they paid to me, but how large wasn’t my concern. Or hadn’t been, until this moment.

“I thought…”

“You thought wrong,” she said, and thrust the folder at me again. “Take the assignment, Miss Walden. Kill him, and know that it was done peacefully and without suffering, or leave it here, go home, and know that I will personally guarantee that his life ends in excruciating agony. Anything I can do to make it worse, I will do. I’ll send the bloodiest butcher on our payroll to take him apart, and I’ll make certain that his children walk in on the mess he leaves behind.”

“You told me I could choose.”

“You are a tool.” She leaned closer, so close that I could have touched her, if I’d wanted to. If I’d been that prepared to be disobedient. “You are a useful, pretty, unique, valuable tool, and I took you because I didn’t want anyone else to have you, not because you had some right to control your own life. You never have and you never will. Do you understand me? Now take the folder and do your damn job, or I’ll make sure that you regret it to the end of your days.”

Tears rose in my eyes, hot and bitter and so toxic that they burned. I took the folder from her hand.

Ms. Ng smiled.

*   *   *

Killing him was such a small thing. There was no pretense this time, no flirtation. Jacob drove me to his house and stayed in the car while I walked up the walkway and rang the bell. I removed my gloves with the chimes still sounding through the house.

When the man from my father’s company opened the door, he didn’t look surprised to see me, and he didn’t try to run. I reached out, pressing my hands to the sides of his face, and pulled him forward, placing a kiss on his forehead. Then I let him go, and turned away.

His body sounded like a sack of potting soil when it hit the floor. I never looked back.

Jacob frowned at me as I got back into the car. “You okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said. The poison was singing in my hands. It prickled and stung, but it soothed me at the same time. He couldn’t touch me. No one could touch me. I was immune to all human acts.

Well. Maybe not to bullets. But these weren’t people who used bullets. Guns were messy, imprecise, laborer’s weapons, intended to be used by those who had no better options. My hands were so much more elegant than a bullet could ever hope to be. I looked at them, and wondered how much I could destroy.

“I’ll take you home.”

“No,” I said again. I turned to look at him, perfectly calm. “Take me back to the office.”

Jacob met my eyes, and for one terrible moment, I was afraid that he was going to refuse me. Then he nodded, small and tight, and the engine turned over, and we were moving, into the night, into the future, away from the dead thing I had made.

The lobby was empty when we got to Limbus. Jacob stayed there, standing in the elevator bay and watching me go. I think he knew what I was doing. I think he knew I had to go alone. I rode to the eleventh floor in silence, and my reflection in the elevator doors was pale and drawn, with pink and yellow patches beginning to blossom on the front of my suit jacket.

The elevator stopped. The door opened. I stepped out into the antechamber that had gone, one inch at a time, one brutally harvested row after another, from sanctuary to prison. I walked, silently, to the waiting door.

Ms. Ng was at her desk. Ms. Ng was always at her desk. She looked up at the sound of my footsteps, and frowned.

“Is it done?” she asked.

“It is,” I said, and closed the distance between us, and put my hands to either side of her face. My palms were damp with sweat and sticky with sap; she only had time for a single syllable, a soft and sighing “oh” before her eyes rolled up in her head and her body went limp against mine. I did not let her fall. I eased her gently to the floor, but I did not let her fall.

Her chair was a bit too high for me. I adjusted it as I sat, and pressed the button for her intercom. “Hello?” I said.

“Hello, Miss Walden,” said the pleasant female voice I’d spoken to on the day when I first chose to call, a lifetime and almost a dozen lives ago. “May I assume there has been a change of leadership?”

I looked around the silent office. I looked at Ms. Ng’s body. I nodded, if only to myself. “You may,” I said. “Please send someone to remove the body. And…bring me some orange blossoms.”

“Yes, Miss Walden,” said the voice, and the intercom clicked off, and I was alone, the poisonous girl, in the garden of my own design.

First Interlude:  Whispers in the City of the Dead

After they pulled him out of the hole, the shift captain on duty told Malone to go straight home and get some rest. Instead he went straight to work, delivering the sheaf of papers to the lab boys to see if they could find any prints or DNA. While he waited for them to bring it back, he did a quick search on the Internet. What he found would have been amusing, in a different circumstance. Limbus, Inc. was a book, a collection of stories apparently. Pulp horror, it seemed. Whatever sick fucks had killed that girl, they were playing with him. Or maybe they were copycats, inspired by what they’d read. Either way, it seemed like a dead end.

Next he took a picture of his sketch and did a reverse image search. To his surprise, a Wikipedia entry popped right up. “Thank God for Google,” he whispered to himself. The entry was sparse. Seemed nobody could figure out exactly what it was, or what it meant. Some thought it was an Egyptian symbol. Others thought it more ancient. A professor of folklore at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts had dubbed it the Eye of Thotep, though Malone wasn’t sure what that meant, either. So he Googled it, and found nothing but dusty academic tomes that he didn’t have time to read. If something on the Internet could even be dusty. That’s when the boys had returned the papers to him. To no one’s surprise, they contained no useful physical evidence. But that made them no less intriguing.

It was a story, that much was clear. He read it, and an hour had passed by the time he flipped the last page, but he’d barely noticed. He picked up the phone and dialed the medical examiner.

“Pierson,” the man said as he answered, and Malone could hear what he imagined was a bone saw whirring down to a stop in the background.

“Pierson, this is Malone. You looked at that girl yet?”

“Just about to cut her open. Why?”

“Do me a favor. With a presentation like this, you wouldn’t normally look for poisons, right?”

Pierson snorted. “Somehow I don’t this is a case out of Arsenic and Old Lace.”

“Yeah, well, do me a favor. Run the full tox screen anyway. Like, everything you can think of, and some stuff you can’t.”

Pierson was silent. “You’re serious?”

“Just do it Pierson.”

“Whatever. You’re the boss.”

The whirring fired up again, this time drowning out the line. Malone hung up, turning back to his computer. It was probably stupid of him to even ask Pierson to do something like that. If he had a career left to worry about, he might care. But the story had been found with the girl, and if there was any truth to it, maybe it was a clue of some sort.

And Limbus.

Limbus had been mentioned in the story, too. Had played a major role, in fact. And Limbus killed people. And if they killed people, maybe they killed the girl. God, it was crazy to even think such a stupid thing. But so was the case, everything about it.

Malone pulled himself up from his desk and walked down the hall to special prosecutions. Their offices were empty, but he didn’t need any of the investigators. Just their computer, the only one in the station equipped with a TOR browser, and thus the only one in the station that could access the Dark Net.

The Dark Net was the deep sea of the Internet, and there you could find anything—legal, illegal, and somewhere in between. The boys in special pros spent their days buying illegal weapons, accessing stolen credit card numbers, and pretending to be thirteen-year-old girls with an unusual attraction to nerdy men who lived with their parents. Malone had other ideas. The Dark Net was about more than contraband and black markets. There was information to be found there, as well. Among a thousand juvenile message boards, there was one that stood out—Iram of the Pillars. A dead city of the Net, filled with mysteries to be unraveled, and maybe clues to do the unraveling. Malone brought his own mysteries to the table.

He started with the image he’d found carved into the girl’s back, the Eye of Thotep. Only one thread came up after the search, and it consisted entirely of a conversation between two people. The first was a girl who—and this gave Malone chills—wanted to find someone who could tattoo the Eye onto her back.

RnnrGrl97: Looking for an artist in the L.A. area who’ll ink this on my lower back. Been to about a hundred shops with the art, and they all turned me down. Weird, right? And they don’t even have a good excuse. I’ve got money, and I turned 18 two months ago. Anyway, I found it in a book in the library, and it’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen. They call it the Eye of Thotep. It’s Egyptian, or something. And straight awesome.

4of3: Damn, you a dumb bitch.

RnnrGrl89: Excuse me?!?!?!?!

4of3: Nobody’s going to mess with that shit. The Three-Lobed Burning Eye of Nyarlathotep? Are you nuts or something?

RnnrGrl89: The Eye of THOTEP, dick.

4of3: Man, what an idiot. Just because you read it in a book don’t make it right. This is fucking Iram of the Pillars. We know more than some dick prof. Look, bitch, I’ll give you a free piece of advice. Stay away from that shit if you want to keep your mind straight. But you want to be a whore of the black god? You go right ahead.

The conversation was locked at that point, which was strange for Iram. Usually the threads flowed free and fast and vulgar and nobody bothered to moderate anything.

Then he typed in Limbus to the search box and hit enter. A microsecond later, dozens of threads filled his screen. He clicked one, and through the profanity and the unintelligible memes, he got the impression that these people thought Limbus was real. That it was more than just a book of pulp stories. That in fact, the book was just a cover. A way to make people miss the truth.

“Conspiracies,” Malone muttered to himself. He should have known. He was about to click off when a DING sounded from the speakers so loud that it made him jump; someone had sent him a private message. He clicked it, expecting to find an invitation to view some online porn, probably underage, or maybe an ad for drugs, guaranteed delivery. But that’s not what he found. Not at all.

Hello Thomas.

Malone actually spun around in his chair, and he fully expected to find someone standing behind him, TOR-enabled smart phone in one hand and maybe a gun in the other. The point of TOR and the entire Dark Net was that it’s anonymous. No one can track you. No one knows who you are. You can be anyone or anything in the deep. But there was no one. Just an empty room. He turned back to the monitor.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Nothing is secret from us.

Malone stared at the flashing cursor as it urged him to reply, while the little voice deep in the reptilian part of his brain screamed at him to run far, far away. Instead, his fingers went to the keyboard.

Why’d you kill the girl?

Tsk, tsk, tsk. So much more predictable than we hoped.

Fuck you.

Ah, now that’s better. We didn’t kill the girl, Detective Malone. But if you find us, you might find out who did.

The room was stifling, and sweat dripped down Malone’s neck, staining his collar. This was no joke, no prank. This was something more.

You’re Limbus.

Strike two, Detective. No one is Limbus. Limbus is not a person. Limbus employs persons. It employs them to do the job only they can do, at a time when they have nothing else left. Is that you Detective? What do you have left to live for? Just how lucky do you feel? And just how far down the rabbit hole are you willing to go?

All the way. All the way down to the bottom of this.

We shall see, detective. We shall see.

Before Malone could say another word, the message box went gray; the other person, whomever he or she was, had left. Malone said a silent curse

His phone buzzed. He slipped it out of his pocket, saw that he had a message. Absentmindedly opened it. The sender was blocked, and there was an attachment with a one-word name—Infamous. He would have deleted it out of hand were it not for the message.

You’ve just started down the rabbit hole, Detective. Time to take the plunge.

-Jack Rabbit

Infamous

By

David Liss

More than anything else, Chip wanted beer, and though the gas station was—now famously—within walking distance to his mother's house, he wasn't sure he wanted to risk the trip out there, even after eleven o'clock at night. Three years on, and still the world wouldn't let him be. Other people made mistakes and were forgiven, but not Chip. Punks held up liquor stores or raped children or broke into houses and slit the throats of old married couples sleeping quietly in their beds, and some soft-hearted judge would talk about first offenses and rehabilitation. Hordes of marauding drug dealers walked across the border, firing their pistols into the air like banditos, and they got a big Welcome to America! and virtual permission to set up shop selling heroin to toddlers. Then, if they got sick or hurt, they got free medical care. They got unemployment even though they'd never had an American job. Their kids got to go to Harvard for free.

Everyone got a free pass or a second chance—everyone but Chip, who hadn't broken a single law.

The newspapers and TV shows and the internet blogs that liked to shit on the Second Amendment had turned him into a villain. He'd been through the horrors of the legal system, and he'd walked away exonerated, though it cost him every penny his mother could scrape together. The overwhelming majority of Americans understood that he'd done nothing wrong, but he still had to live like a prisoner in his mom's house, like an outcast, like—and this is what burned him up—like a criminal. He, Chip Dunston, who had been convicted of nothing, had to spend the rest of his life skulking in the shadows while rapists and drug-pushers and illegal immigrants were getting bottle service in the VIP rooms at clubs all over America.

That was the world he was living in. That was reality.

It was also reality that he wanted another six pack. Possibly more, and maybe some Doritos. Doritos would be good. So, he reasoned, fuck it. He was going to walk to the gas station. If anyone wanted to give him lip, he could take it. If anyone wanted to give him more than lip, well that's why he carried his Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm pistol, which was easy to fit in his jacket pocket. He liked this time of year, when it was cool enough to wear a jacket. The Kel-Tec was small, designed for maximum concealability—it said so right on the manufacturer's web page—but you still needed to put it somewhere. For much of the year in Florida, that meant a holster over shorts and under a baggy shirt. A jacket was better.

The jacket was new—larger than anything he'd owned before the attack in which he'd been forced to defend himself. He'd never been thin, but he'd put on a lot of weight since then. Now he was topping out over 300 pounds, but he supposed it didn't much matter. It wasn't like he was going to get a date any time soon. It wasn't like he was going to get a job. Maybe in five years or ten or more, the world would have forgotten, would have forgiven him for daring to protect his own life, but not now. Chip was unemployed and unemployable. He was a social reject, buried under mountains of debt.

He still got the occasional donation though his online legal defense fund, but that amounted to only a few drops into an almost bottomless bucket. Only one source, a company called Versteckt Labs, still sent sizable checks, and it was a good thing too. Without them, his mother would have lost the house by now. He still managed a speaking event now and again, but they paid a lot less than they used to. He'd done every local group and event imaginable, and the fact was his speaking skills left much to be desired. He got nervous in front of crowds and tended to mumble and perspire in a way that made the audience uncomfortable. Anyhow, given how he'd changed, he didn't like to get on airplanes anymore. The seats were so small, and he hated the feeling of walking down the airplane aisle, every passenger eying him, silently chanting Please, not next to me. Even when he was anonymous, people still hated him.

*   *   *

Sometimes he felt gratitude to his mom for letting him with live with her, but not often. Sometimes he imagined her dying in her sleep. That happened more frequently. He liked to picture waking up and finding her dead—he wasn't sure how this would happen, since if she were late emerging from her room, he wasn't about to go looking for her—and then spend the morning drinking coffee in his bathrobe, watching TV while EMTs carted out her body and asked him sympathetic questions.

Even his mother had turned against him. She'd never praised Chip for defending himself, and her neighborhood, from a clearly-menacing teenager. He'd been visiting her for Thanksgiving when the incident happened, and he'd been restless and bored, and he'd just had a feeling—a twinge in his gut—that somewhere out there was a punk up to no good. He'd gone for a walk and found that punk, and the punk had done what punks do. He got lippy. He didn't like being told what to do. He didn't like it when Chip, whose own mother lived less than a mile away, had put a hand on his shoulder—admittedly a rough hand. He'd called Chip names. He'd taken a step forward and given Chip that gangster glare. That's why things had turned ugly. Not because of anything Chip had done.

Now his mom sighed when she looked at Chip. She shook her head. He couldn't remember the last time she'd hugged him or told him she was proud of him or called him her “miracle baby.” He still remembered being her little boy, when she treated him like he was something special. He remembered sitting at the kitchen table while she served him grilled cheeses and tomato soup. He remembered her kissing his cheek and saying he was proof of what happened when people had faith and love in their hearts. Those days—when she would tell anyone about how the doctors said she couldn't conceive, but God doesn't listen to doctors—were gone forever.

And his father? Chip had never even met the guy. Chip didn't know his name. The media had searched for him, of course. They'd have loved to drag his presumably drunk ass before the cameras so he could say that he knew Chip was bad news from conception. The media had come up empty handed, though, and it was for the best. Chip didn't need another parent to be disappointed in him.

Now, as he collected his keys and his firearm, his mother stood by her bedroom door in her bathrobe and slippers, her gray hair pulled back into a ponytail, that pinched look on her face. The words miracle baby were not about to cross those lips. Chip felt pretty sure about that.

“Where you off to?” she asked, already judging him.

“Walking to the gas station to get something,” he said.

“You're not taking my car,” she said.

“Don't need to take your car to walk somewhere,” he retorted, thrilling in the cleverness of his comeback.

“Last thing you need is more beer,” she told him. “This place stinks of your beer farts.”

“Didn't say anything about beer,” he replied—rather deftly, he thought—as he opened the door.

“If I stay up, what are the chances I won't see you carrying beer when you get back?”

“If you don't stay up, the chances are pretty good,” he told her, closing the door behind him. He was pleased with himself for shutting her down. Who was she to judge him, after all he'd been through? All those stories she used to tell about how much she wanted a child—well, she didn't seem to want one anymore. It was like she'd lost the ability to care about anyone but herself.

The fact was, after the incident, she had not been on his side. Even she—his own mother—thought he'd been wrong to defend himself, and she'd always resented being made to deal with the reporters and haters, and even the fans, who still occasionally came by the house. Plus she was mad because while she'd helped him with his legal fees, the trial and the lawsuit had all but cleaned her out. She'd worked her whole life as an elementary school cafeteria lunch lady, and she'd socked most of that income away for decades. She'd been a Lady Scrooge, that was for sure, skimping on birthday and Christmas presents for years just so she could pad her stupid bank account. Now that money was gone. Chip wasn't sure what she'd been saving it for. She was almost seventy, so any worthwhile part of her life was over. She still managed to find money for cigarettes, which stank up the place way worse than any supposed beer farts that supposedly blasted from his supposed anus. That cigarette smoke was real, though. You'd think the cancer sticks would have taken her down by now, but she was too mean to go anywhere. The hard-hearted lived forever, he supposed.

Chip had his head down and his hands in his pockets, feeling the comforting weight of his gun, just like he'd done that night three years ago. You never knew when someone was going to come at you. It was true for everyone all the time, and his life had proved that. People wanted to believe it wasn't true, that they were safe, but they were kidding themselves. And it wasn't just the minorities, either. People thought he was some kind of a racist, and that bothered Chip about as much as anything else. He didn't care if someone was a minority or not. If they came at him, acting all tough and swaggering, then they should be prepared for Chip to defend himself. That was as far as it went with him. He'd have shot a white guy just as quickly. He knew that in his heart. That thug had gotten in his face. He'd made Chip to feel like he didn't have any options, and Chip hated to feel that way. The gun he'd had on him had given him some options, though.

The gas station was only a mile up the road, and the cool December air felt good. He'd still rather be sitting on his mother's threadbare couch, watching that reality show about a lady who liked to get plastic surgery, but it was less fun without the beer, and these days he needed a few drinks if he was going to get any sleep. It was the anxiety.

People talked all the time about being anxious. He saw that on television. People were anxious about their jobs or about their money or their futures, but what did they really have to be anxious about? If some asshole with a job didn't get a promotion, he was still employed, or he could find another place to work. Chip had put in five years in the electronics department at the Best Buy—five years!—and that counted for nothing now. Every place he went turned him away. They made up excuses, but he knew the truth. He was bad for business. If he worked in a store, they said, the minorities wouldn't shop there—as if their money was better than anyone else's!

He'd tried some other ideas. He'd been willing to think outside the box. He'd applied for jobs at gun and liquor stores and pawn shops, places where a guy who could handle himself would be a real asset. Still, no luck. People hated him. They hated him more now that he was fat.

Things were going to get better though. Sometimes he felt himself sinking into a gloom so dark and deep it threatened to devour him, but after a few beers, he started to see that he was just being negative. The world wouldn't hate him forever. They would forget, or something would happen—more ordinary people would get attacked while going about their business—and they would suddenly realize that Chip had been right all along. He'd lose some weight and get new clothes, and then finding a job would be no problem. Places would come begging him to work for them.

Or maybe that reality show would happen. For a while it had seemed like it was going to be a real thing, but his mother had stubbornly refused to participate, and they said Chip didn't have enough secondary characters to make the show interesting. Still, they could change their minds, and then people would get to know who he truly was, and they would see he was a decent guy who had been put in a difficult situation—and stepped up.

Chip wandered into the glow of the gas station, passed a guy filling up his truck. He thought maybe he'd get a nod of recognition—that happened a lot from concerned citizens—but this truck belonged to a minority, one of the Hispanic variety, and it was better if people like that didn't recognize him. Chip kept his head down and his shoulders hunched.

He went into the store and saw Kelly Watkins working behind the counter. They'd gone to high school together, and she used to be friendly with him. It had only been eight years since graduation and she used to greet him by name and start up some small talk, but now she pretended she didn't know him. She acted like she was too good for him, but she was no big deal herself. Kelly had always been fat, and he'd been nice to her even when he'd been pretty close to normal weight, but now she couldn't even bother to be polite. That was how the world worked. She probably thought he was bad for business, just like everyone else, though he didn't know why she'd care. It wasn't like she owned the Mobil station or anything. She just worked there.

On the other hand, he'd heard that she liked to date minority guys, so maybe that was it. Maybe she was one of those people who believed whatever the fake ladies on the cable news said. She'd never been smart, that's for sure.

Chip wandered into the back and decided that after all this exertion, maybe it was a good idea to invest in the future. He grabbed one of those cases of beer with the handle for easy carrying. It was a long walk with something that heavy, but he believed in planning ahead, and this way he wouldn't have to go out for beer tomorrow or maybe even the day after. He could hide some of the extras under his bed, then pretend he was out, and ask his mother to pick up some beer. Then he'd be okay for a little while. It would be nice not to have to worry about stuff.

With this sort of forward thinking in mind, he grabbed two bags of Doritos and another of spicy cheese puffs, and then headed over to the counter. Kelly let her mud-colored eyes go unfocused so she wouldn't have to look at him while she silently rang up his purchases. When she was done, she gestured with a nod toward the register, like actually telling him the total would be beneath her dignity. Chip handed over his money, got his change, and then dropped a few pennies into the charity jar for crippled kids. He didn't have much, but he was still always thinking about helping others. That's just the kind of man he was.

Chip turned, and there was a black guy standing right in front of him. It wasn't like the only thing he noticed was the guy's skin color. That would have been racist, which Chip knew he was not. It happened that this particular person, whose skin happened to be dark, was all dressed out in ghetto clothes and wearing that big, flashy jewelry, and had that don't-fuck-with-me look on his face that basically told the entire world he was a thug. Plenty of white people sported the same look, and Chip didn't like those guys either. Maybe the world wanted him to believe that it was racist not to like a look, but he knew better. If you made yourself up to look like a tough guy itching for trouble, you couldn't blame decent people for thinking you were up to no good.

Chip was polite, because he liked to avoid confrontations. “Excuse me, sir,” he said.

The black guy raised his chin and glowered at him. “I think enough people have already done that.”

Chip tried to move away from the guy, but he shifted, blocking Chip's path to the exit.

“What's the hurry?” the guy said. “You don't want to talk?”

“I don't want no trouble in here,” Kelly said, looking toward the phone like she was prepared to use it if necessary. “Take it outside.”

Take it outside. That was very helpful, Kelly. She wanted Chip to just step outside so this thug could beat him or kill or do whatever he wanted.

“Maybe you could call the cops,” Chip said wearily. He hated getting the cops involved in these conflicts, and they clearly hated it just as much, but he didn't see that he had much of a choice.

“It ain't my business,” Kelly said, clearly having indulged him as far as she was able. “I just don't want it going on in here.”

The thug pushed Chip toward the door, and he found his feet moving, like he had no choice. He guessed that this must be what it's like to walk to your own execution. You'd know you shouldn't do it, but you'd also have no choice.

Who was this thug? Maybe a nephew or cousin of his attacker? Maybe some guy whose mind had been poisoned by the unfair portrayal of events in the media? It didn't matter. Chip had been confronted in public before—by relatives, friends, and the fired-up ignorant—and these confrontations never ended well. In the middle of the night, outside a deserted gas station, it was likely that things would be even worse.

When they got outside, the thug turned to face Chip, glowering at him. He kept his hands away from his jacket, knowing that Chip could outdraw him. If he even looked like he was reaching for a piece, Chip would drop his bag of snacks and have his Kel-Tec PF-9 maximumly unconcealed in a heartbeat. Then this guy would get that thug expression off his face. He'd have that expression that says, Hey, there's a hole in my chest. Chip had seen that look, up close and personal. Yes, he had.

With everything this guy had said and done already, Chip would have been justified in shooting him up right here and now, but Chip was all about restraint. If he shot this guy who was attacking him, people would see that he'd been right all along. If he were killed—well, then he'd be a martyr for the cause of self-defense. It wasn't ideal, but at least in death, if not in life, he would be celebrated for standing up for the rights of all Americans.

“So, what do you want?” Chip asked him.

The thug shrugged. “Nothing. Just letting you know we're keeping an eye on you. Making sure you don't kill anyone else.”

“I'm just getting some beer.”

“And some snacks, which, if you don't mind my saying, you don't need.”

“What I don't need is to be harassed,” Chip said. “Don't you have anything better to do, like maybe look for a job?”

The thug smiled, the kind of smile you give before you cut someone’s throat. Chip tensed, thought about going for his gun, sitting warm and useless in his right pocket.

“Getting a job? That’s a good idea, man. Maybe you could introduce me to your boss. Where do you work again? Must pay pretty well to live in that sweet house. Or did your mother pay for it?”

Chip’s stomach clinched at the thought of this guy knowing where he lived.

“But it turns out I already have a job,” the thug said. “I’m an attorney, dumbass. I'm also part of a watch group that wants to make sure there are no more crimes like the ones you got away with. I'm out here making sure a black man can buy a soda and some candy without losing his life.”

A lawyer. For real? Chip glanced at the guy again, and began to see that maybe he wasn't as much of a thug as he first thought. He wore baggy jeans, sure, but not the kind that sagged. He had a button down shirt tucked into them, and leather jacket on top of that. His flashy jewelry, on closer inspection, was just a cross on a chain.

“Is this how it's going to be now?” Chip asked. “I can't go to the store without one of you bothering me?'

“One of who, exactly?”

“One of your watch group.”

“If I'd been out that night,” he said, “maybe a young brother would still be alive.”

Chip opened his mouth to say something, but he decided against it. There was no arguing with a guy like this, a guy who wanted to be ignorant. “I'm walking away now. Don't follow me.”

“Why would I want to follow your fat behind?” the lawyer inquired. It was not, in Chip’s estimation, a sincere question.

Chip turned away and headed down the road. That's how it was now. A new indignity to pile on top of the old ones. Now he wouldn't even be able to walk to the convenience store without someone thinking it was his duty to make Chip's life miserable. People believed they had a right to harass him, to insult him, to say or do whatever they wanted. And they could get away with it, too. Chip might have taken out his gun with that lawyer. He would have been justified in waving the pistol in his face, but no one would see it that way. He was helpless and out of options.

He had only managed to reach the shoulder of the main road when a pickup slowed down and someone tossed something out the window, striking him in the back of the head. “Asshole!” He heard wild laughter as the car sped off.

Chip looked down to see a fast food bag, bloated with grease and half-eaten hamburgers lying at his feet. Maybe they'd recognized him. He was an internationally-known figure, after all. Or maybe they'd seen some pathetic fat guy, humping his way by the road, by himself, half dragging a suitcase of beer. It could even be that there was a time, a happier time, in his life when he might have tossed a similar bag at a similar stranger, but that didn't excuse what those people had done. He might once have done something like that for laughs, but those people had been cruel, and there was never an excuse for cruelty.

Chip wanted to think that this was the bottom, that things couldn't get worse for him, but he knew it wasn't true. As time went on, the few remaining people who still supported him would forget what he had done for America. Someone else would have to defend himself, or a cop would justifiably shoot a minority while doing his duty, and there would be a newer, fresher face for patriots to rally behind. The little money he still earned from his notoriety would dry up, but there would be no corresponding upside. The public would still revile him. He'd never be able to earn a living or have a social life or even walk by the road like a regular person without strangers throwing things at him. As bad as this was, it was only going to get worse. All those fantasies about his life turning around, he knew, were absurd. What did he really have to look forward to?

He wanted to cry. Like a little kid, he wanted to drop his stuff and stand there and cry, but he knew no one was going to come and comfort him. No one was going to tell him that it was all right and that things would get better, because it wasn't and they weren't. This was his life, and he was stuck with it. He had acted to defend himself, and he would pay the price forever for refusing to be a victim.

Chip had only begun trudging on toward his mother's house again when another car approached from behind, slowing down noticeably as it grew closer. Chip veered away from the road, making himself a less appealing target, and watched warily as the car slowed and pulled onto the shoulder a little ahead of him.

There was nothing to do but walk past it, but Chip shifted his burdens so he could, if necessary, drop his purchases and grab his gun. He decided not to look into the car. He didn't want to escalate things. Events would unfold without his intervention, just as they had that night when he'd demanded that a shifty-looking kid, obviously up to no good, explain what he was doing in his mother's neighborhood.

“Hey there,” a woman called from inside the car. “You need a lift?”

The voice was mature—obviously not some teenager messing with him—though certainly not old. Chip risked a glance and saw a woman in her thirties, and possibly attractive. It was hard to tell in the dim light. For sure he could see that she wore a pants or skirt suit and her hair was up in a bun, business-lady style. She didn't look like the sort who would toss fast food bags at passing strangers. Neither did she look like the type to give strange men a ride, and that made Chip suspicious. He kept walking.

“Come on, Mr. Dunston,” the woman called as the car inched after him. “You can't be enjoying your late night stroll, not burdened with your purchases as you are.”

She knew who he was, but did that make matters better or worse? There was still no way of knowing if she was there because she was one of his many—though not terribly useful—admirers or part of the larger and more rabid base of haters. Her fancy way of talking suggested she was in the latter category.

“I'm not here to harass you,” the woman said, inching the car along to keep up with him. “And I'm not an admirer, if you're wondering. I'm not paid to have an opinion about you either way. Mr. Dunston, I'm here to offer you an employment opportunity.”

More than anything else she might have said, this got Chip's attention.

“This seems kind of strange,” Chip noted.

“If you feel uncomfortable or if I intimidate you,” and here the woman flashed him a winsome smile, “we could arrange to meet tomorrow at a place of your choosing. I simply thought you might wish to learn more now.”

He did wish to learn more now, but there was something strange about all of this. Why would some woman want to talk to him about a job in the middle of the night? How would she even know where to find him? Things, he felt sure, did not usually work this way.

“Whatever you like, Mr. Dunston,” she said. “It's up to you.”

Only minutes ago, Chip had been thinking that things were as bad as they had ever been, and only getting worse. Now, like in a fairy tale, a woman appeared and at least claimed to be offering him a leg up. Maybe she was lying and meant to harm him, but if she succeeded, what did it matter? Chip had nothing to lose. He figured he might as well get in the car with her. If she tried something threatening, he could always shoot her.

*   *   *

It only took a couple of minutes to reach his mother's house. Chip sat with his bag of snacks and his suitcase of beer between his legs, one hand inconspicuously near his weapon, though the woman did not seem in any way dangerous. Still, in this world you didn't live long if you weren't careful.

Her name, as she explained on the short drive, was Ms. Spravedlnost, and she worked as a recruiter for a company called Limbus, Inc. As she drove, she handed Chip a card. Still keeping his right hand close to his pistol, he held up the card with his left. In the passing flash of headlights and street lamps, he saw the name of the company, a picture of a globe, fragmented into quarters, and a few lines of text.

Are you laid off, downsized, undersized? Call us. We employ.

1-800-555-0606

How lucky do you feel?

Chip had not been feeling lucky lately, but maybe things were about to change. Assuming this woman was not here to mock, expose, interrogate, abduct, or murder him, perhaps things had hit a turning point.

Once she pulled into Chip's mother's driveway, she turned to him and smiled. She was, he realized, perhaps a little older than he'd first realized, but still attractive for a woman who was maybe pushing forty. If she came on to him, he decided, he might go for it. Older women weren't his thing, but he could make an exception since he didn't have anything else going on.

“As I mentioned,” she said in a businesslike, but not unfriendly, tone, “I am a recruiter for Limbus.”

“You seem really proud of that,” Chip said. “What does this Limbus company do?”

“It recruits,” she said sweetly. “We are an employment agency, though that is a little like saying NASA is an engineering firm. At Limbus, we specialize in finding the right sort of unusual people for the right sort of unusual jobs.”

“And you have a job for me?”

“We do.”

“Well, what is it?” Chip demanded, not really liking the smug way she seemed to want to withhold information.

“Mr. Dunston, I'm not prepared to discuss that. It's not our job, and we aren't offering it. We are simply putting you in touch with an employer who might have use for a man with your skills.”

“And what skills are those?”

Ms. Spravedlnost smiled indulgently. “Yours are the skills our employer seeks. I am only prepared to say that we think you are well matched. As to other details, you will need to speak to the employer.”

“Okay,” Chip said, drawing the word out so that Ms. Spravedlnost would know he doubted the legitimacy of all this. “And what does this unknown job pay.”

“It's not our habit to discuss salary with prospective clients,” Ms. Spravedlnost explained.

Chip took a moment to process all of this. “So, you want me to take a job I don't know anything about for a salary that you won't tell me.”

“I don't wish for you to do anything,” Ms. Spravedlnost said, though not unkindly. “What I wish is to put interesting employers together with interesting employees. And I can promise you that the work will, indeed, be interesting. While I cannot give you any specifics about the compensation, I can guarantee you that you will be more than happy with what the client chooses to offer you. Finally, I would add that there is no harm in interviewing with the client and seeing what comes of it.”

That, Chip agreed, was fair enough. “So, where and when do I go.”

“The information is on the card I gave you.”

Chip looked at the card, which he had flipped over before and noticed nothing in particular. Now he saw that an address had been written in a neat hand. Below it was tomorrow's date and a time—5:30 AM.

“That's a little early, isn't it?” Chip asked.

“It's a matter of perspective,” Ms. Spravedlnost said. “The client wakes up early, but he did not want to meet with you until he had breakfasted and accomplished some of his early morning tasks. If you want the job, that's when you must be there.”

“I don't like it when I don't have options,” Chip said. “It makes me angry.”

“You have the option of not applying for the job,” the woman said. “If you wish to apply, you must meet the client at the time of his convenience.”

Chip wondered if maybe he'd overreacted. He decided he had not, but thought he should change the subject, so Ms. Spravedlnost didn't feel bad about being so pushy. In general, Chip tried to be sensitive to other people's feelings. “So, the client is a person, not a company.”

“The client is a person who works for an organization. Good night, Mr. Dunston,” she added, which Chip took as her request that he get out of her car. He realized that maybe he had been misreading her signals, since he'd been pretty sure she'd wanted him to kiss her.

Once inside his mother's house, Chip cracked open one of his newly acquired beers, put another half case in the fridge, then hid the rest of the case under his bed. Then, when he felt he could finally relax, he sat down and examined the card again. Disappointingly, this provided him with no more clues. He could use a job, even a vague one, though this whole business was weird and maybe a little suspicious. What if he showed up and some thug with a piece of rebar hit him in the back of the head? The only reason to suspect that might not happen was that thugs didn't like to get up early. Also, he didn't know exactly where the interview was located, but he knew that part of town, and it was pretty nice. Definitely not thug territory.

He would go armed, of course, but he would go. He'd check it out, listen to what they had to say. It was awfully early in the morning, though. He looked mournfully at his beer and thought that he was going to have to do the rest of the night's drinking quickly.

*   *   *

The morning was about as brutal as he feared it would be. After battling with the snooze button on his alarm clock, Chip finally managed to get out of bed and shower. He didn't have anything that anyone would call interview clothes—none that fit him, anyhow—but he figured anyone who wanted to hire him wouldn't want him dressed up as a banker. Chip Dunston brought certain things to the table, but a corporate vibe was not among them. He would be himself, and he'd see what happened. Accordingly, he slipped on a mostly clean pair of jeans and a completely clean polo shirt that was only a little tight.

With his mom's car acting up, and the fact that he didn't have permission to drive it, he didn't want to take any chances, so he called a cab. Hopefully the outlay of money wouldn't turn out to be a waste. He got to the address on the card at about six, which Chip considered close enough. It was in one of the older parts of town, where houses often looked like they did up north—two or three stories, and kind of historical, like they were from the eighteen hundreds or something. This one was particularly big—three stories, and surrounded by mossy oaks and cypress trees. It wasn't more than fifty feet from the street to the front door, but Chip felt like he was walking through a fairy tale forest.

Chip rang the doorbell while, with some trepidation, he listened to the cab pull away. If no one answered, he was going to be completely screwed. The minute he pressed the bell, however, he heard the scrabble of clawed feet on wooden floors and then, more distantly, the shuffle of what sounded disturbingly like his mother's slippers.

He listened to the claws as they scratched at the door, and he thought that the dogs were well trained not to bark. He'd had a Rottweiler for a year or so—for protection more than companionship—and it had been impossible to train it to do anything, let alone keep it from barking. Finally Chip had to get rid of it when it tried to bite him one too many times. He couldn't find anyone to take him, so he'd driven him to a field maybe fifteen miles out of town and left him there. The dog was tough and would be able to figure things out on its own.

After a moment Chip heard the muffled sounds of a person issuing orders, and the scrabbling of claws quieted. Then came the slow and laborious click of locks. Finally, the door swung outward, and Chip faced a thin man wearing frameless oval glasses. He was pale, with hair the color of wet sand and eyes almost the exact same hue. He wore khaki pants and a blue oxford shirt, partially un-tucked, and he looked like he'd just gotten out of bed. He also looked like he was younger than Chip, maybe 25 at the most.

“You are new assistant?” the man asked in a European accent Chip could not identify.

“I was told to come here to apply for the job,” Chip said tentatively.

“Yes, yes,” the foreign man said, waving Chip forward. “I understand that. It is very clear, of course!”

Chip stepped forward, and the foreign man slammed the door behind him. The interior of the house was spacious and neat, but it gave off the sense of being under-furnished, like a development model. The only signs of human habitation were a few stacks of folders on tables near the staircase. Also unusual were the two lizards, the size of Chip's discarded Rottweiler, racing toward the front door.

The foreign man turned to the lizards and shouted a command at them in his foreign tongue. The lizards pushed themselves to a stop, though they skittered a couple of feet along the floor, propelled by their considerable mass.

“What the hell are those things?” Chip demanded as he backed up toward the door.

“Komodo dragons, yes?” inquired the foreigner. “But only on the outside. In the brain,” and here he tapped his own skull, so as to avoid any confusion that might arise over the word brain, “they are dog. Mostly. Also, some cat for self-grooming and purposes of waste disposal. It creates problems, yes, to walk big lizard on a leash, so I make them to use the litter box.”

Chip glanced at the foreigner's placid expression, but mostly he kept his eyes on the dinosaurs who were maybe ten feet away from him, watching him with their big, reptilian eyes. Except, they weren't staring like they wanted to eat him. It was that look dogs got when they wanted attention. The lizards, Chip felt sure, were cheerful—or at least optimistic.

“So, what is this?” Chip asked. “You're some kind of mad scientist?”

“Ha ha! That is so funny, I think. Scientist yes, but mad only time to time. I am geneticist, and I do combine things to make difference, like these pets. Very good for security, and because ectotherms, like to cuddle for warmth. You like animals I hope.”

“I'm not cuddling with a gigantic lizard,” Chip said.

“It is not required,” said the scientist, though he seemed a little disappointed.

“We need to take a step back,“ Chip said. “Who are you, and what am I doing here?”

“I am Doctor Hacket Kohl, and I run Kohl Laboratories, an independent research facility. Our work is specialized, and we require the assistance of certain kinds of people. Limbus, for us, is good for finding them.”

“Okay,” Chip said cautiously. “What sort of people do you mean?”

“People who are free to live here, in facility. Work is not excessive—eight hour days plus one hour for lunch. Privacy, however, to us is of important upmostly, and so discretion is what we pay for. Come, let us sit.”

Kohl ushered Chip into a clear living room, where Chip allowed himself to fall into a soft couch. Very comfortable, he noted. The massive television screen on one wall was also of great interest to him.

A carafe of coffee and two cups were on a side table, and Kohl poured, adding three sugars and a great deal of cream to Chip's. “Limbus informed me of your preference,” he said by way of answering Chip's unasked question. That Limbus knew how Chip took his coffee was no longer surprising. It was one of those things he was going to have to take in stride.

Kohl poured his own coffee and then sat. He held the cup under his nose and breathed in deeply, like he was some rich asshole on TV sampling wine. Then he sipped and let out a long sigh. “Work is taking care of animals,” said Kohl.

“Those things?” Chip asked, gesturing toward the two Komodo dragons who were now lounging sleepily near the window, catching the early morning light.

“You and those with whom you are sharing house must care for pets, but your job would be caring for lab animals. These are no difficulty, however. Lizards are bred to be very gentle with caregivers.” He tapped his leg and the creatures scuttled forward, nuzzling the scientist. One was trying to crawl into his lap and Kohl knocked him down.

Kohl laughed as he patted one of the creatures. He then issued another command, and they hurried back over to the window. “You see. Only friendly. No killing. No bloody business. We make sure of it. Earlier breeds had problems.” He laughed, seeing Chip's concern. “No, not problems of hurting. Shoe-chewing. Very bad. Habit could not be broken, so we spent many years studying problem. We did not give up until shoe-chewing behavior could be identified and removed from genetic code. It is good for you, yes?”

“I don't want my shoes all chewed up,” Chip offered hopefully.

“No one does!” Kohl agreed, slapping his knee for emphasis. “So pets are easy. As for lab animals, you need not pet or be nice. Just feed, change water, clean cages. All very simple—but private. And pay is always good.”

Chip was glad that things had moved beyond the issue of liking creatures, for which his response would be ambivalent at best. The issue of good pay, however, had his full attention. “How much are we talking about, exactly?”

“As much as you need,” Kohl said with a great deal of indifference. “How much do you need?”

What the hell sort of question was that? Chip had over two hundred thousand dollars in legal bills, and it wasn't like he was going to get that for petting lizards. “I need $250,000.” Chip said, deadpan.

“Okay,” the scientist said. “That's good with me. I can do so.”

“You're going to pay me $250,000?” Chip asked.

“I just said it.”

“Over how long?”

Kohl shrugged. “What is working for you? A year, I think. Yes? Then negotiate for next year. But, as I say, you must live here.”

So, this nut was going to pay him a ton of money and Chip was going to be able to get away from his mother? This seemed too good to be true. “What's the catch, exactly?”

“No catch,” said Kohl, “but you will need to sign the non-disclosure agreement.”

*   *   *

After Chip flipped through, and then signed, the 27 page document, Kohl offered to show him around. First he took Chip upstairs to the second floor, where there was a small bedroom with a desk and twin bed on a wooden frame. It looked like it had come out of an old movie or something, as did the adjoining bathroom, with an elevated claw-foot bathtub, a sink with rusted fixtures, and a toilet that flushed by means of a curious suspended chain. The lizards had scrambled up the stairs after them and while Kohl pointed out the obvious features of the room—this is window, this is desk—they crawled up onto the bed, curled up into interlocked semicircles, and fell instantly asleep.

“They like you,” Kohl said. “You will feed them every day. Rabbits are kept in hutch in the back. I will show you later.”

“You want me to feed them rabbits?”

“There is no Komodo dragon chow. They need fresh food for the health. There is place for it, don't worry, where cleanup is easy. Not in here. You won't have blood on your things usually. But even if you do, there will be no embarrassment, for you cannot have guests here. You understand. That also means no whores.”

“Yeah, I think I've got it.”

After showing Chip the various rooms of the house where he'd be living with two other men—Chip would meet them later—Kohl suggested that Chip return home and collect whatever he needed before he saw where he would work.

“I'll get my stuff later,” Chip said.

Kohl smiled with a great deal of indulgence. “There will be no later. You cannot leave grounds once employment begins. It is what you agreed.”

“I never agreed to that.”

“It is in document.”

“I thought that was a disclosure whatever.”

“And contract,” Kohl said with a shrug. “Cab is waiting for you outside. Helpers have arranged. You go, pack your things, and return, and I show you the rest.”

Chip suddenly didn't like how this was sounding. “I'm not sure I'm ready to be locked up for a year.”

Kohl’s smiled without any humor. It was the smile of a dentist getting ready to drill. “I'm sure you find another employment. Thank you for stopping by. And please remember the document you signed prevents you from speaking of anything you saw here. I am sure you are not wanting to be sued.”

Chip had certainly had enough of the court system. The last thing he wanted was another suit. He also didn't want to go back to his mother's house or walk away from a paycheck that could end his financial problems.

He looked around the house, thinking it wasn't such a bad place to spend a year. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, maybe he would even lose some weight. He could hide from the media and the haters, and emerge with his name all but forgotten, his debts paid, his body trim, and his life ready to begin again.

“All right,” he said. “I'll do it.”

“Not too much things,” Kohl said. “The room is small. And please remember that there are not to be guns on the premises.”

*   *   *

The cab driver, a different one, knew where to take him and waved his hand dismissively when Chip tried to provide an address. He parked outside Chip's mother's house and said he would wait, but requested that Chip not take forever.

Inside, his mother was cooking eggs and bacon in a single pan, infusing them with the scent of the cigarette that dangled from her mouth. She looked up at Chip quizzically and then set down her spatula to cinch her bathrobe. She was sophisticated in that way.

“Where have you been so early in the morning?”

“Job interview,” Chip explained as he hurried to his room. While he looked for an old duffle bag in his closet, he heard his mother say that it was a fool's errand and that no one was ever going to hire him. Admittedly, Chip still had some misgivings about accepting the job, but his mother pretty much pushed him over the edge. He was going to prove to her, prove to the world, that he could take care of himself and clean up his own messes. He still had no idea what Dr. Kohl expected of him, other than feeding live rabbits to gigantic lizards, but he was sure it was important, something only Chip could do. Why else would they be willing to pay him so much?

Chip opened the metal box where he kept his Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm when he wasn't maximumly concealing it. He was going to put it away, keep it in a safe place, like under his bed, since Kohl had said not to bring weapons. Chip wanted to get along with his new employer, but he didn't like the idea of going into this situation unable to defend himself. That was always a bad idea, and even worse when there were giant lizards involved. Anyhow, Kohl didn't get to overturn the Second Amendment just because he felt like it. They were trying to back Chip into a corner, to tell him he could have either a gun or a job. Chip didn't like that, and he felt the gun could help him win the argument. It seemed to him that a good compromise was to bring the gun but not tell anyone. He slipped it into his jacket.

Once he had filled his suitcase with clean clothes that fit him, he went back out to the kitchen where he mother was sitting at the table, smoking a fresh cigarette and letting her breakfast cool while she leafed through the paper.

“You running away from home?” she asked, not bothering to look up.

“Got a job,” he said. “Have to go live there.”

Now she was interested. “Who'd want to hire you?”

“People who respect me,” Chip told her.

She snorted.

Outside, the taxi driver honked his horn.

She slid her breakfast onto her plate and stared at him while she blew smoke. No hug or kiss. Not talk of her miracle baby. It was like she was waiting for him to leave.

“I got to go, mom,” he said, and he kissed her on the cheek, less because he felt sentimental about her than because it seemed like something a person does in that sort of situation.

*   *   *

Back at Kohl's house, Chip threw his suitcase on his bed and followed the scientist to the kitchen to what looked like a basement door. At least, that's what basement doors looked like on television. He'd lived in Florida his whole life, so Chip had never seen a real basement, though he imagined they did not generally have keycard readers.

Kohl handed Chip a keycard and directed him to swipe it. It took him a few tries—he had a hard time figuring out where the magnetic strip went, but he got it eventually. Then the door hissed open, revealing not a staircase, but a gently sloping walkway.

“Why do you have all of this in your house?” Chip asked.

“It is not my house. I do not own this. It is where labs are located. Our work has many detractors, and we cannot do this sort of research where the haters—it is what they are called, yes? —where the haters can complain. So there are facilities of this nature, scattered here and there, where we can blend in.”

“I'm not sure I'm the right guy for blending in,” Chip said.

Kohl smiled at him. “House is for blending. You are for not complaining.”

*   *   *

The houses, Kohl explained, were built on a slight elevation, not very noticeable, but it allowed for a warren of interconnected laboratories to exist under the block without anyone being the wiser. “These exist everywhere,” Kohl explained, “and not only for our industry. Oh, no. For bio-weapons research, experimental nuclear or quantum physics, advanced vivisection, cloning, personality digitization, penis elongation. So many of the areas for science where people like to say 'No, no. Do not do this!' Scientists find ways to do this.”

At the end of the corridor, Kohl had Chip swipe his key card once more, and the door hissed open into a bustling laboratory. Men and women in white coats clustered in groups near work stations or computers, while haggard-looking orderlies wove around them looking beleaguered.

“Here is very important lab,” Kohl said. “This is the hybrid facility. Only most, let us say, specialized, people are okay for working here. It is why we wanted for having you.”

“I don't have any experience with science and stuff.”

“Specialize in being quiet.” Kohl pressed his index finger to his lips to help Chip understand. He then waved over one of the assistants who nodded at him and quickly handed one of the scientists some folders before hurrying over to the two of them. She was in her mid-thirties, perhaps, not un-pretty, but there was something very sharp and unappealing about her high cheekbones and blade of a nose. There was also something strangely familiar about her. Chip couldn't place it, but he knew he'd seen her before, and she had that way of carrying herself that said she didn’t want to be noticed. It was something he knew all too well—the way she'd glanced at him and then turned away, as if to conceal her face. He'd been in the habit of doing that for too long now not to recognize it in someone else.

“This is Janice,” Kohl said. “She will show you to your duties.”

Kohl walked away before completing his introductions, so Chip held out his hand and told Janice his name.

She shook his hand limply, but did not meet his eye. “I know who you are,” she said. “You killed that black kid.”

“I shot someone who attacked me,” Chip corrected her, using his most gentle and unintimidating voice, “who happened to be a minority.”

“Whatever,” said Janice. “It doesn't matter anyhow. Though there are black people who work in the labs, so you can't go around shooting them.”

“I won't shoot anyone, unless they threaten me. Then I'll shoot the shit out of them, and being a minority won't save them.” Chip explained this in a very matter of fact way, so that he wouldn't come across as some kind of militant. With him, it was about self-defense. Nothing more. “I'm not going to be bullied into giving up my constitutional rights,” he elaborated.

“You're an American hero,” Janice said flatly. “Let me show you the room where they torture the animals.”

*   *   *

Janice was clearly a sarcastic person, which Chip did not admire. Sarcastic people tended to think they were smarter than everyone else, and Chip hated a superior attitude. Plus, he knew this woman from somewhere, but he didn't want to ask her, because every question he threw at her—Are there regular breaks? Where's the cafeteria? Is there cable TV anywhere?—made her glance at him with utter contempt.

“The room where they torture the animals” turned out to be just a big lab with lots of cages. Most of these were filled with fairly small monkeys, no larger than cats, that hopped about happily enough, even though there wasn't much for them to do in their space. Several of the larger cages held big monkeys or even chimps, which Chip was careful to call apes so that Janice would understand he was an educated person and had seen TV shows that explained the difference between these animals. She made it clear she wasn't impressed.

Janice continued to walk Chip through selected rooms in the facility. It was going to be Chip's job to feed, water, and clean out the cages of the various animals in the facility. It was, Janice said, where everyone started. In each room there was a clipboard that included specific instructions on what to do, including how to avoid getting hurt by whatever creatures he was looking after.

They were in the room with the rabbits when Janice pointed this out to him. “It's very important,” she said. “Don't take things for granted. If you get hurt doing something stupid, they're going to be mad at you.”

“I'm not really worried about getting mauled by a rabbit.” Chip said.

Janice picked up a carrot from a bucket near the sink and tossed it into one of the cages. Six rabbits suddenly turned and opened their mouths, revealing needle sharp teeth. They pounced on the carrot like a school of piranha on a lamed ox.

“You don't know anything about these animals,” Janice said. “Normal ideas about behavior or disposition are off the table, so you're safer assuming everything will kill you if it gets the chance. I'm telling you this because if you get hurt too early on, they'll think I didn't train you properly.”

They headed out of the rabbit lab, and Chip stopped, forcing Janice to stop as well.

“What is the deal with this place?” he asked.

“It's a lab,” she said. “They do experiments.”

“But they're weird experiments,” Chip said. “These guys are like evil or something.”

“What do you care?” Janice asked, hands on her hips.

“I don't know. I mean, I guess I kind of want to know what sort of work I'm doing.”

“The only kind you can get,” she said, “or else you wouldn't be here. Just like the rest of us.”

*   *   *

After Janice showed him the ropes, he spent the next several hours going from lab to lab, feeding and cleaning the cages of various animals, some fairly normal in appearance, some utterly strange—birds with prehensile wings and rats with distended snaking necks. Each species had a check sheet of safety protocols, explaining how to interact with the creatures without being bitten, scratched, stung, mauled, or infused with flesh-eating larvae. The work was boring and not a little demeaning, but for the first time in years he felt like he was accomplishing something. He might have been hosing down cages and sweeping feces laden filth down drains, but it was work.

When his shift ended, Chip went to the break room that Janice had shown him and punched out with an old fashioned card and time-stamp machine. He'd hoped she would be there. He wanted to ask her more questions, but he also wanted to look at her again. He wanted to figure out why it was she looked so familiar, sure, but there was more to it. With her lean face and sharp features, Janice was no one's idea of pretty, but she had a thing about her. She was, he decided, sexy, and so he was willing to overlook the fact that her appeal seemed somehow separated from more ordinary notions of attractiveness. She was the sort of woman he might have hesitated to get involved with in the past, fearing his friends would make fun of him for dating someone so hatchet-faced, but he had moved past such immature positions. Besides, he didn't have any friends now, and no one would see him while he remained in Kohl's facility. He decided he would definitely get something going with Janice.

He lingered in the break room for a quarter of an hour, hoping she would wander in. Finally, he gave up and made his way back to the house where he'd first met Kohl and found there were two other men inside getting ready to sit at the dinner table. They were both seriously old, in their fifties or maybe sixties, and they had a grizzled look about them, like they'd worked in coal mines or lived out in the desert all their lives.

One was an enormously obese man with no hair and a long beard like a biker—but no mustache—who introduced himself as Lester. The other old timer, Gregory, was a black guy.

“So, you're the new guy,” Lester said.

“You're the one who shot that kid,” Gregory said.

“Don't any of that matter,” Lester told Gregory in a kind of lecturing voice. “Past is past.”

“I wasn't making any trouble,” Gregory said, holding up his hands. “Just observing that this is a white guy who likes to shoot black kids.”

“Don't observe so much,” Lester said. “Let's eat.”

There were pots on the stove set to warm—stew and potatoes—and a large bowl with dressed salad in the middle of the table, next to a basket of warm rolls covered by a cloth napkin.

“Who makes all this?” Chip asked as he sat down to eat.

“Don't nobody know,” Lester said. “It just gets done while we’re working.”

“And what do you guys do?” Chip asked them, though he was looking at Lester. He still didn't trust Gregory not to bring up the shooting.

“We don't talk about the work,” Gregory said. “It's best that way. They don't want anyone here knowing too much about what's going on. We start talking about it, we start to put too much of it together.”

“So, you don't want to know?” Chip asked.

“Nothing to be gained by knowing,” Lester said. “They're paying us a ton of money, and we've got it good in here.”

Chip understood that, but he still didn't like that he wasn't supposed to leave. “You guys don't ever get stir crazy, just want to get out and do something?”

Gregory grinned. “You want to go out? You just got here.”

“I mean, I don't like that we don't have the choice,” Chip explained. “I'm a big believer in liberty.”

“You were free not to take the job,” Lester said. “But you're like the rest. They hired us because they know we don't have anywhere to go.”

Chip didn't like being lumped into any category that included a couple of old guys. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Gregory shrugged. “You know, man. Me and Lester here have spent our time away from the world. I was inside, and he was just tucked away where no one could find him. When I went inside, you had to push your fingers around a little dial thing a bunch of times if you want to call someone. Now, people are walking around with supercomputers in their pockets that the government can use to track their movements. It's crazy out there now. I don't like it. In here, I get up, go to a job that doesn't take any time to get to, put in my eight hours, then come home to a hot meal. After that, I can watch TV and drink beer until I fall asleep.”

Chip looked up. “There's beer?”

“Guess you haven't checked out the fridge yet, huh?” Lester said with a grin.

Chip didn't know how he felt about sharing the place with a couple of criminals, but he liked the idea of a well-stocked refrigerator.

His first night inside turned out to be pretty great. Chip thought Gregory was going to be a problem, but he didn't seem preoccupied by Chip's past, and pretty soon they were all joking around. “Hell,” Gregory said, “I've killed more people than you have.” Then Lester shot him a look, and he stopped talking.

There were at least three or four cases of beer in the refrigerator, and Lester told him that it was restocked every night, as were the snacks. They had an unlimited account for ordering movies online, so the only real discussion each night was about what to watch. Chip didn't much care, as long as it wasn't the news, so Gregory put on a reality TV show about a former child star, and they watched as she made a complete fool of herself and wore clothes that showed off how fat she'd become.

“What a dumb bitch,” Lester said.

“Yeah,” Gregory agreed. “But I'll tell you what. As soon as this show is cancelled, she'll probably end up in one of the girls' houses they've got here. We'll be passing her in the halls.”

*   *   *

Chip woke the next morning hung over, but ready to go. He fixed himself a breakfast of cold cereal, milk, and juice, which he ate sullenly with Gregory and Lester, who were just as uncommunicative as he was. There was a kind of camaraderie in the silence that Chip liked. They'd had too much to drink together, and now they were suffering together. There was also the knowledge that tonight they were going to do the whole thing all over again. There was a bottomless supply of beer and snacks. Things were pretty good in the house.

There was a duty roster by the fridge, and Chip saw that today it was his turn to feed the lizards, but Lester said he'd show him the ropes. As soon as they walked toward the back doors, the Komodo dragons scrambled to their feet and rushed to meet them. They knew it was feeding time.

Outside was a fenced in area—a sort of lizard run—and along the side were hutches filled with rabbits.

“These ain't the dangerous kind,” Lester said, “so just grab 'em and throw 'em in the pen. All of them. They replace the rabbits every day.”

“Why don't they just feed the lizards when they replace the rabbits?” Chip asked.

“Because that's our job, numb nuts,” Lester explained.

Once the lizards were locked in the pen, Lester opened up one of the rabbit hutches, grabbed a little gray bundle, and tossed it inside. There was a flash of movement and a puff of fur and blood in the air, but then it was entirely gone.

“Cool,” Chip said. “Let me try.”

After they were done with the lizards, there was time to drink a couple of cups of coffee, cooled with plenty of milk. Then Chip joined the two men in heading for the basement door and keying themselves in. They went to the break room, punched their cards, and then nodded at each other and headed off in their own directions. Chip picked up his roster and began to make his way to the animal cages. It was mindless work, but he didn't much feel like thinking. The only thing he wanted to reflect on was how glad he was that the Limbus people had found him. Beer and food and privacy. Now he had pretty much everything he'd wanted. Maybe the only thing left on the list was a girlfriend, but it was good to have something to aspire to.

By lunchtime, the girlfriend problem had begun to occupy more of Chip's attention. It had been just a throwaway complaint at first, but now he realized that it was actually fairly serious. You can't ask a man to be solitary his whole life, after all. It wasn't as though he was in prison. Back when he'd been living with his mother, finding companionship had been too challenging, and he'd given up, but now he was seeing things differently.

Right after the shooting, there were some women who would throw themselves at Chip, but they tended to be a little weird for some reason. Then, as the case dragged on, and there were all those unflattering portrayals of him in the media, even those women tended to treat him like he was radioactive. The weight gain hadn't helped. He understood that, but he needed women to understand that he was a work in progress.

By any reasonable standards, he was progressing very nicely. Last week he'd been broke and living with his mother. Now he had a job and a place to live with a perpetually stocked beer fridge. He was, quite clearly, moving up in the world.

When he went back to the house for lunch, after a disappointing morning of not seeing Janice, Lester and Gregory were already sitting at the table, eating grilled cheese sandwiches, which had been piled up on a big plate in the center. There was a large pitcher of lemonade, as well as a basket of potato chips and a green salad.

“You really don't know who makes this stuff?” Chip asked, as he bit into his sandwich. It was good. It wasn't even American cheese, but something fancy, like cheddar or Munster.

Gregory shrugged. “No idea. I gave up wondering a long time ago. It gets done, and that's good enough for me.”

“What happens on the weekend, though?”

“Weekends we're on our own,” Lester explained, settling into his role as grand old man of the dinner table. “There's always plenty of cold cuts and frozen stuff and some vegetables if you're feeling adventurous. They're big on vegetables. I never ate salad in my life, but they have it out at every meal, and it finally got to me. They've got this dressing business down, I'll tell you that much. Now I'm like a salad junkie.”

“He's got a problem,” Gregory said.

“I need an intervention,” Lester agreed.

The both laughed like this was hilarious, and maybe it was, but Chip was still thinking about his girlfriend situation. Maybe he was just too single-minded for these guys. “How do we know there isn't some really pretty girl making all of this stuff?” Chip wanted to know. “Like one of those hot Russians or something, with an accent?”

“And one of those sexy uniforms?” Lester prodded.

“Those are French maids,” Gregory said. “Russians can wear whatever they want.”

“You're going to complain if a hot Russian wears a French uniform? Is that against the code of whatever?”

“The point,” said Chip, “is that we don't know who is coming into our house.”

“It's not really our house,” Gregory said. “Besides, who cares? They clean, they cook, they do laundry. They don't want anything in return. It's like marriage, only a hundred times better.”

“I think our friend is lonely,” said Lester.

“Let him whack off like the rest of us,” Gregory said, finishing a quarter of his sandwich in a big bite.

“I know you guys are old and everything, but don't some of the younger men want to have girlfriends?” Chip asked.

“We're old, but you're fat,” Lester said. “You tell me which is worse.”

“Old,” Gregory said philosophically. “You can always lose weight, but you can't lose years.”

“But you gain wisdom,” Lester said. “Anyhow, I'm both, which means I have fat wisdom.”

Chip was coming to understand that these guys were not going to be a whole lot of help to him when it came to the big issues.

After lunch, Chip was making his way to his next lab when he saw Janice walking through the hall. He couldn't help but think she'd grown more attractive in his mind since seeing her last. The reality, with her hard lines and brittle cast, struck him as unappealing. Still, there was something about her, and he hadn't seen anything better in the facility. He'd passed a few lady scientists who were kind of pretty, but he knew overly-educated women would never go for him. They all thought that a man who fired a gun in self-defense had to be some sort of a savage. If any of those sexy scientists, with their lab coats and horned rimmed glasses, had been there when Chip had been pretty much almost attacked, they would have seen things differently. Now, in their ignorance, they judged. It was just how things went, he supposed. His time in the lab had already made him more introspective.

“Hey, Janice,” Chip said, catching up to her, determined to soldier on, even if she was less attractive than he liked. “Thanks for showing me around the other day. It was really nice of you.”

“They told me to,” she said, not bothering to slow her pace.

“Still, you did a good job. I really feel like I know what I'm doing.”

“Great,” she said, raising her wrist to look at the time, though she was not wearing a watch.

“So, listen,” he began.

She stopped and stared at him. “No,” she said. “I don't want to hang out with you or watch movies or eat a meal with you. I don't want to socialize with you outside of work, and I don't want to be any friendlier than I have to be at work. This is what it is, and whatever you think you know about me, you might as well forget, because I'm not what everyone says.”

Janice stormed off leaving Chip standing in the hall. It was only then that he realized why she looked so familiar. He'd seen her on the news. She was famous. More than that, she was infamous. She was even more well known, more despised, than Chip because her crime was sex.

Janice has been in Congress, a Florida representative who had campaigned against abortion and sexual immorality. Then it came out that she'd had three abortions in the past five years and went to sex clubs all the time, and had a torrid relationship with a neighbor's son— only 17 years old at the time—which somehow meant she was guilty of rape. That still confused Chip, as had many aspects of the case. He hadn't even known that sex clubs were a real thing, and he wished he'd had back when he was the sort of person who could go places without anyone noticing. Now it was too late.

Clearly Janice had treated him badly because she figured he thought she was easy, and now that he knew who she was, he did kind of think that. Of course she would be on her guard now, so he had to act like he didn't care about her past and that he wasn't just trying to have sex with her. Once he convinced her of that, she would have sex with him for sure since, obviously, she wasn't shy about that sort of thing.

Chip was surprised to discover how excited he was to have something to look forward to. It was a project, something to occupy his time beyond cleaning animal cages, something more exciting to anticipate than hanging out with Gregory and Lester, drinking beer. The beer, of course, was going to become a problem in terms of his weight, but Chip remembered seeing the stories on the news about Janice's sexual antics, and she'd been with guys way fatter than he was. Besides, he was masculine. He knew how to take care of himself, and women loved that. It was, he believed, just a matter of time until she became interested in him.

His campaign was pretty simple. When he saw her in the hall, he said hello, asked how she was doing, and left it at that. He knew his friendliness would sink in, and she'd begin to see him in a new light. But after a few days of this he hadn't made any progress, and Chip began to grow impatient. He'd been nice to her constantly, and she still treated him like he was the mean kid at school. The truth was, she was being mean to him by refusing to talk with him. Obviously, she was way into sex, and if she wasn't showing any inclination of spending time with him, that meant she'd chosen someone else—maybe lots of someone elses.

That was the insulting thing, really. She would have sex with other people, but not him? How was he not supposed to take that personally? He remembered from the stories he'd seen about Janice on TV, the newspaper headlines he'd read in the supermarket checkout stands, that she didn't exactly stick with one guy at a time, but clearly there was someone, someone who was not Chip. That meant he had rivals, and Chip knew how to deal with rivals.

The first step, then, was going to have to be figuring out who the enemy was. Chip had come to that conclusion while sitting in the living room of his house, drinking beer. Gregory and Lester had already gone to bed, but he'd stuck around for a few more cans so he could think. Maybe he didn't have fancy degrees like some of the scientists, but Chip was a guy who liked to use his brain. He liked to plan ahead, and a few extra beers always helped him settle into his groove. He'd come up with a plan, and when he woke up in the morning, if it still seemed solid, there was no good reason not to stick with it.

When he saw Janice that morning, he said hello to her as usual, and she mumbled her greeting in return while looking away. Chip kept walking, but for some reason her reaction made him angrier than it usually did. Maybe it was his headache and dry mouth, but he didn't think so. He was used to people judging him, after all. People thought he was a gun nut, a killer and—this was what really made him angry—a racist. They thought he hated minorities.

People, he understood, were ignorant, and they judged what they did not understand. The media told the world that they should hate him, so that's what most people did. But Janice had tasted the business end of that kind of hurt. She hated even though she knew how cruel the liberal press could be. That's what made Chip so angry.

After she'd spoken to him like he was something disgusting (even though a lot of Americans considered him a hero, whereas no one thought she was anything but a slut), Chip walked on, but then he stopped after he rounded a corner. He let her advance down her hall and then turned around, walking quietly on his sneakered feet as she proceeded, head down, along the corridor. She passed several scientists, men and women, and they ignored her entirely, like she wasn't even there. They also ignored him, and he was fine with that, but the larger point was that he was nice to her when the scientists were not. He ought to get something for his efforts.

Janice reached her door and keyed it unlocked. As she passed through it, Chip hurried after her, his own key card out so that if any of the scientists saw him advancing, they'd think he was merely being lazy, trying to catch the door before it closed rather than sneaking in where he didn't belong. Why, after all, would anyone sneak around? It wasn't like he was looking for more work. All he wanted was to get a better sense of how she spent her day, so he could have more to say to her.

Chip—as a certain thuggish teenager had discovered to his dismay—was faster than he looked, and was able to get his foot into the door just before it swung shut. He then turned around, like he'd done something to his back, but he was really checking to make sure that no one was watching him. There were a few scientists moving around the halls, but no one gave him a second glance. The assistants were all invisible or, at least, interchangeable.

Once inside this new area, Chip let the door whisper shut. The halls were more dimly lit, and the bulbs glowed a kind of eerie blue. It was like emergency lighting, though not quite. Something else. Ahead of him Janice moved through the dark corridors, skulking and sure of her footing, like a panther on the prowl. Only she was the prey now, wasn't she? Chip tapped his pocket. That gun he wasn't supposed to have was right there. They thought their rules could force him to do what they wanted, but Chip was beyond their rules. He was his own man.

Janice rounded a corner, and Chip was about to hurry after her when something occurred to him. The labs he worked in required a key card to enter, but also to exit. Was he going to be able to get out?

He turned around and tried the door. It didn't budge. He tried his key card, and it made a slightly grating electronic noise—not the normal satisfied beep or even the staccato error message when it had failed to read the card properly. This was something new, like an electronic baby spitting out unwanted electronic food.

Chip could be in real trouble here. If he had to ask for help from a scientist, there could be some uncomfortable questions. He could claim he'd gotten turned around and wandered in here by accident, but he was pretty far from his usual part of the compound. It would be a tough story to sell.

His best bet, he realized, was to make Janice his ally. He had to get her to be friendly to him, and she'd let him out. Maybe if he begged her, showed her he was a little vulnerable, she'd like him better. It could well be that she disliked him because he radiated too much masculine energy, a residual effect of his violent past. Given her history of being a slut, she might find him too intimidating. He was just going to have to show her he had a softer side.

She had already moved far down an adjoining hall and to another door and put her handprint on a panel. There was, evidently, another layer of security here that would keep him from moving forward just as much as from retreating.

Well, Chip was nothing if not daring. The record proved that. He was all in now, and if it blew up in his face, he'd deal with it. Maybe he would burn his bridges with Janice. Maybe he'd be fired and have to go back to his mom. There were always risks, but he had never been one to play it safe, to let the soft old guys in their suits tell him what to do.

Chip rushed forward just as Janice was moving through the door. He pressed his palm out flat and prevented it from closing only inches before it sealed. He could feel some kind of pull, maybe magnetic, trying to push him away, but Chip knew he was equal to any force of nature. He pushed back, and the door yielded.

Janice turned around and shrieked. Maybe he'd startled her, but there was no need to react like he was a serial killer or something. He was just a coworker.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded. In the dim light, her face looked sharper, harder than he remembered.

“I just wanted to talk to you a little,” he said. He knew this sounded lame. He came across like a little kid asking her to the junior prom. He knew she needed him to show his softer side, but that wasn't the same as coming across as weak. He couldn't allow that.

“You can't be here,” she said, panic in her voice. “You're not authorized. If they think I let you in, I'm so screwed.”

“Come on,” Chip said. “It's not that big a deal. Anyhow, I was thinking that maybe we could have lunch together. Not at my place, since my roommates are kind of crude, but maybe at yours.”

“Get out,” Janice said.

Behind her, something growled. No doubt she had her own animal cages to clean, and it sounded like maybe they were kind of dangerous. It could be that all her attitude was about not wanting him to get hurt.

Chip looked up and into the room. It was also lit with the dull blue light, but he could see that the cages in there were huge, like something at a zoo. Something moved in one of the closest cages, lumbering like an ape, and he heard the sound of metal rattling against the cage. Then he heard something else. A distant voice from within. A voice saying, “Please,” its tone rasping and broken.

Chip leaned forward to peer inside, but Janice pushed him hard in the chest. He stumbled backwards, almost losing his balance.

“You need to get out of this section. Let's go.”

“There's no rush,” Chip said. “I just wanted to talk to you. You should be flattered.”

“I'm swooning,” Janice sneered. “Come on.”

She led him down the hallway to where she had first keyed herself in. Now she swiped her card and pulled open the door.

“What about lunch?” he asked.

“You've got to be kidding me.”

She gave him another shove, which Chip tried unsuccessfully to interpret as playful. He careened into the hallway where Dr. Kohl stood waiting for him, his arms folded. This, Chip knew, had taken a bad turn.

*   *   *

“Now we have problem,” Kohl said, sitting behind his desk, steepling his fingers, looking thoughtful. “Now we think that maybe you are not suited for working here. Perhaps, in this instance, Limbus makes a mistake.”

“I just wanted to talk to a girl,” Chip said. He'd come up with this strategy as he'd walked over to Kohl's office, and he thought it was pretty clever. It was close enough to the truth that it would pan out. “I wasn't really paying attention to where I was going. If I'd been thinking, of course, I'd never have gone where I was unwelcome. I don't want to be an uninvited guest or anything.”

“The contract you signed it was very exacting, yes?” Kohl asked. “There was no unclarity about going where you can go and not going where you cannot go.”

“Like I said, it was an accident.”

“And we take good care of you, yes? The food and also the beverage, which you enjoy both of?”

“Sure,” Chip agreed. “The salad dressings are really good.” Chip had come to understand that scientists liked it when you talked about vegetables.

“You agreed to terms of contract,” Kohl said wearily.

“I just wanted to strike up a conversation with Janice.”

“Her story intrigues you?”

Chip shrugged. “I guess.” He didn't want to admit to this, but he could see that Kohl was softening.

“In that room you went into, when you were looking for girls, what did you see?”

“I didn't see anything.” Chip said. “It was dark. What's with the blue lights?”

“Some animals are more dangerous than others. We make the very dangerous ones to be pacified by certain colors. It is way to control them. You saw such animals?”

“Like I said, it was dark.”

“And what did you hear? Animal noises, perhaps?”

“Just a growl,” Chip said. He shrugged, knowing that this would make him seem honest.

“If you had to guess the nature of this animal, what would you say?” Kohl studied him very closely.

“Puma,” Chip said. “Or maybe a Cheetah. It sounded fast.”

“Fast has vocal inflection?”

“I don't know. You're the science guy.”

“I am,” Kohl agreed. “I tell you this so you understand, Mr. Dunston. You are not very smart. It is because of this, in part, that you work here. You must do your work, drink your beer, and eat your food to make yourself grow fat and happy. This is what we wish from you. No curiosity, no looking for lady friends, and no seeking out of fast animals. Are we understanding?”

Chip had just been insulted in at least three different ways, and he was seething inside. He'd never been so good at controlling his temper, and he knew that about himself. When he was a little boy, when he was his mother's miracle baby, he could have taken comfort in belonging. That sometimes had helped him when he became angry. He didn't have even that anymore, so it was hard for him not to take out his gun and shoot Kohl.

But he didn't, because Chip was a guy who believed in improving himself. Maybe if he'd started on this track sooner, his life would be more together right now. It was hard to say. All he knew was that he wanted to stick around, and he had to control himself because Chip no longer cared about Janice, who had been unforgivably mean. Now Kohl had insulted him. More than that, he'd tried to make Chip feel powerless, and the guy was going to have to pay for that. This wasn't about having a bad temper. This was about justice.

“I understand,” Chip said. He looked down at the floor, forcing himself to play the good boy. “It won't happen again.”

He was about to say something else similarly humiliating, more words for which there would have to be compensation at some point down the road, when Chip's eyes were drawn to a few envelopes on the desk. They bore a familiar name and logo: that of Versteckt Labs, the company that had been single-handedly keeping Chip's legal defense fund afloat.

“What is that?” Chip asked suspiciously. “I know that company. Do you work for them?”

“Versteckt Labs is major sponsor of my work,” Kohl said. “I work with, not for.”

“Because they are a big contributor to my patriotic cause,” Chip explained.

Kohl smiled. “It is good then.”

“It's kind of weird, though. I mean, that they should help me out, and then you give me a job.”

“Versteckt Labs gives to many causes. They also give to saving endangered elephants. You are not elephant, yes?”

Was this a comment about his weight? Chip wasn't sure. “It just seems kind of weird,” Chip reiterated, because it was, in his view, a very good point.

“Forget labs,” Kohl said. “You have big problem now. You are on probation. Another mistake, and we end your contract.”

This sounded vaguely menacing, like they meant to kill him if he disobeyed. Maybe they did. Maybe they thought they could bully him and strong-arm him and humiliate him into being their good little lab tech, but Chip had something else in mind. He was going to find out what was going on in this lab, and he was going to expose it to the world. People would forget that he'd killed a violent minority and instead they would see him as an adventurer. A crusader. He would be like one of those journalists who uncovered some story that everyone seemed to care about even if normal people didn't see the big deal. He would be on morning television.

He had always been like this, he realized. He'd always been at his best when life backed him into a corner. At school, he'd told teachers when he'd had enough of their crap. At work, he hadn't let customers push him around. That night, with that minority, when he'd felt threatened, it had been the same way. It was like a light went on inside his head, showing him the way, and he'd learned to follow that path, even if the way was difficult.

“Thank you,” Chip said to Kohl, and this time he meant it because this little worm of a scientist had given him something he hadn't had in a long time. He'd given Chip a purpose.

*   *   *

At dinner that night, Chip decided it was time to turn his roommates into allies. “Don't you guys ever wonder about the work we're doing here?” he asked while spooning mashed potatoes onto his plate. A tray of cheese steak sandwiches was still steaming in the middle of the table. Chip had already taken two.

“What is it with you?” Lester asked. “Where does the food come from? Who does our laundry? What kind of work are the eggheads up to? It's like you're never satisfied.”

“I'm just curious,” Chip said.

“It's got something to do with the beasties,” Gregory said, tossing a bit of cheesy meat in the direction of the pair of watchful Komodo dragons. They scrabbled forward, edging one another out of the way with their snouts, until one grabbed the morsel. Then they both rested their chins on their forepaws—or feet or whatever they were—and watched Gregory hopefully.

Did the lizards know Gregory was a minority, Chip wondered. Were there minorities among Komodo dragons, or were they all normal? The universe held tight to its secrets.

“So, you think they're breeding lizards for pets?” Chip asked.

“Why not?” Lester said. “That sounds as good as anything else.”

“What do you guys do for your work? I spend my days—”

“I don't really want to know,” Gregory said, holding out a chunk of sandwich as a shield. “Contract says we can't talk about it, so I'm not going to talk about it.”

“Come on. It's just a job,” Chip said. “Sure, it pays good, but there are other jobs. It's not like you have to be a slave to these guys.”

“You really think any of us are ever going to be able to get work somewhere else?” Lester asked.

“Sure,” Chip lied. “Why not?”

“Like you hadn't hit bottom before the Limbus people showed up?” Lester pressed. “You just wanted to come work here because you like being confined to a house?”

“Can't get this sort of money anywhere else,” Chip said.

Gregory snorted. “So, you put a price tag on freedom?”

This stung Chip, because it was the sort of thing he should have said. Freedom, Chip reflected, was his jam. Now he was letting Gregory take his words, his positions, in order to try to get them on his side. It felt uncomfortable.

“So, you guys didn't have any options?” he pressed, trying to stay focused. “Is that what you're telling me?”

Gregory laughed. “You don't know who we are, do you?” He was shaking his head now.

Chip did not like to be laughed at, particularly not by someone like Gregory. That teenager had laughed at him too, for all the good it had done him. “Who are you then, hot shot?”

“I'm Gregory Haskins,” the minority said. “Come on, man? The Astral Projector?”

This was starting to sound familiar. Chip strained his mind, and then recalled the story from when he was a kid. Gregory Haskins had been an astronaut, part of the space shuttle program when it had still existed. Being an astronaut was a good deal, but he had thrown it all away. Haskins had developed an addiction to pain killers after getting hurt while in the Air Force. He'd kept the addiction a secret for years, up until that accident that he'd caused because he'd been blitzed out of his mind during a safety check. He’d made it out just fine; seven other astronauts died in the fire.

“I'm Lester McMullan,” his other roommate said, waving cheerfully. “The Portland Pedophile? Convinced on 17 counts of molestation.”

“You should hear him go on about this,” Gregory said. “The 17 were the only ones they knew about. Sick bastard.”

“At least I didn't kill America's best and bravest and pretty much single-handedly ruin the space program. At least I didn't hand the stars to China. Anyhow, I've been chemically castrated, which at my age, who gives a shit, right? They haven't taken away my love of beer, so I'm good.”

“Wait a minute,” Chip said. “You guys are both famous. Like me. Isn't it strange that we'd end up here in the same house?”

“This guy really isn't wired right,” Gregory said to Lester. “Don't you get it? We're not famous, we're infamous. Every last one of us who works here. Even a lot of the scientists. Kohl got run out of his own country for trying to clone some porn star without her permission. Some of the eggheads are just fucked up and like doing the work, but every last one of us grunts is tarnished. We've got nowhere else to go, and that's why we all agree to live by their rules.”

“No sacrifice for me,” Lester said. “I wouldn't know what to do with myself out in the world. Now I get everything I need and want, and I'm living with my best buddy.”

“Just keep it platonic,” Gregory said, holding up his hands in protest.

“You wish, you winkled old man.”

The two of them burst out laughing. Chip remained still, stunned by this revelation—both that what they said was true, and that he hadn’t figured this out on his own. Everyone who worked here was damaged. They had recruited him because he was unwanted, expendable, someone the world would never miss.

“But what happens when people leave?” Chip asked. “How does the company protect its secrets. If we're all desperate, then we all have nothing to lose by telling someone what we know.”

Gregory shook his head. “This is the Hotel California of jobs, my friend. We're all lifers. I mean, it's a good thing, right? The world hates us, so where else would we go? But that was in the contract, my man. They have the option to renew indefinitely. And it is an option they intend to exercise.”

“Then what good is the money they pay us?”

Gregory shrugged. “It makes me feel rich?” he offered.

“I like to imagine buying candy,” Lester said, “that I can hand out to children.”

Gregory smacked his shoulder. “You sick motherfucker.”

The two of them cackled hysterically once more while Chip slumped into his chair.

*   *   *

It was now clear to Chip that he'd been tricked. They hadn't told him what he was getting into, and they clearly hadn't informed him that his coworkers were going to be a bunch of outcasts. He didn't want to work for the lab for the rest of his life. He didn't even want to be working for the lab now. He wanted a normal life—not the normal life of hiding in his mother's house, where beer and television were all he had to look forward to. He wanted his old life back, and these scientists were trying to take away any chance he had of returning to that. Whatever he did now, they would have coming to them. They would have no one to blame but themselves.

Chip went upstairs after dinner and took out his phone. He'd still picked it up once in a while to play games, but only now did he realize how out of touch he'd been with the world even before coming to work at the lab. He received no texts, no emails, no calls, but he'd been isolated so long, that he hadn't even noticed. He'd half expected his mother to check in on him, but every time he looked at the phone, he'd felt relief rather than surprise to see a blank screen staring back at him. He wasn't even sure his phone was still getting a signal.

The first thing he needed was more information, so he decided to run an internet search on Limbus and the lab. There was, he discovered, no internet. His phone gave him the not-connected symbol, and he checked for Wi-Fi signals. There were several, but they were all password protected.

He wasn't sure why. It was really just a hunch, but he decided he would try one number anyhow. Limbus. “How can I help you, Mr. Dunston?” the voice answered. It was Ms. Spravedlnost. How had she known he would be calling? Surely this 800 number couldn't be her direct line.

It was night, and he hadn't expected anyone to answer, let alone someone who would know his name. He wasn't sure what to say, and he had to fight the urge to hang up.

It came out without his meaning to. It was like a rush of fear that he couldn't control. “I want out of this job,” he said. “It's creepy. Everyone is a freak. I don't belong here.”

“I see,” said Ms. Spravedlnost. “You do understand that you signed a contract, don't you Mr. Dunston? You agreed to provide services in exchange for a very generous compensation.”

“Yeah, well these guys here are telling me that no one ever leaves.”

“I am certain many employees choose to stay, given the benefits of the job and the particular nature of the recruiting pool.”

“Well, what if I want to leave now?”

“That isn't an option,” Ms. Spravedlnost said.

“Maybe it's not an option you like, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What happens if I leave now?”

There was a slight pause on the other end of the line. “You may have noticed, Mr. Dunston, that the lab is engaged in activities not entirely sanctioned by the government of the United States or, indeed, most other established states. North Korea conducts some similar work, but otherwise facilities such as the one that employs you are, practically speaking, black sites.”

“So if I break my contract, they'll kill me? Is that what you're saying?”

“You will be removed from the threat pool,” Ms. Spravedlnost explained, “one way or another. Certainly killing you would be the most efficient and merciful option, but by no means the only one.”

“But they won't ever let me walk away.”

“After you have been there a while, you might not want to walk away, or you might feel a degree of loyalty that renders you non-threatening. In either case, I cannot recommend breaking your contract, particularly so soon after starting your employment. In all likelihood, you are merely experiencing a natural period of adjustment. I must recommend giving yourself more time to settle in, particularly since the alternative could be most disagreeable for all involved.”

“The thing is,” Chip explained, “you're not giving me a lot of options. I don't respond well when I'm threatened. I'm known for that.”

“Yes, you are, Mr. Dunston,” Ms. Spravedlnost said.

“Meaning what?” Chip demanded, not liking how shrill his voice had become.

“Meaning,” she said, “that you are precisely where you need to be. Good night, Mr. Dunston.”

The connection broke off. Chip tried to redial, but the call did not go through. He tried to call the only other number he had in his history—a local pizza place—just to see what would happen, and the call did not connect either. He was shut off from the outside world. He sat there, holding his phone, which was now utterly useless.

Except it wasn't. He could take pictures and videos, which meant evidence of whatever it was they were doing here. He could expose the lab, and then they'd have to let him go. He didn't want to be a snitch, since he was a man of action, not someone who ran to the media or, even worse, the government. Still, what other choice did he have?

*   *   *

The next morning, after breakfast, Chip pretended to have forgotten something in his room, and let Lester and Gregory enter the facility without him. He usually worked at a fairly casual pace throughout the day, but today he figured he would show up after lunch and double time it through his rounds. If he worked at top speed, cut a few corners, and stayed a little late— and let a few of the lab animals go hungry—he should be able to squeak by, especially if he made up for any lapses the next day.

It was possible someone might notice he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and certainly the security cameras throughout the facility would prove he had skipped the morning shift, but that evidence would only matter if someone was actively looking. If that happened, Chip was going to have bigger problems.

Chip remained in his room with the door opened all morning. He kept his phone plugged in so he could play games without running down the battery. There was nothing else for him to do with his time. The Komodo dragons came by and sniffed at him, but he shooed them away from the bed. Eventually, they took up a spot near the window where the sun heated the hardwood floor.

At exactly 10:30, he heard the door to the lab hiss open. There was the sound of feet shuffling. Then he heard the scrape of furniture from the living room, and from the kitchen the clatter of dishes and the sound of running water.

Chip quietly slipped down the stairs, his camera phone turned to video. He moved as quietly as he could, though stealth was not really his strong suit. Even so, he managed to make it down the stairs with hardly a creak. The kitchen was around the corner from the living room, so he decided to press his back against the wall and gently move the phone so he could use it to get a look without exposing himself.

He saw three of them in the kitchen, and at first his eyes couldn't register what he was looking at, like someone had slipped the wrong image into a slide show. His mind told him that something was wrong, but beyond that nothing made sense.

Then he realized that this wasn't an error. He hadn't picked up on some random video feed. This was real. They were real.

None of the things in the kitchen were more than four feet tall, with bodies like monkeys, but hairless and with strangely human faces. They were naked, with grub-white skin, and seemed entirely sexless. They were agile, moving about the kitchen quickly and with strange focus, almost as though they’d been hypnotized.

The creatures grabbed and moved and manipulated their way around the kitchen with long-fingered hands. There was no getting around the fact that they were touching the food that Chip would soon be eating. It was disgusting and wrong, and that was probably why Chip dropped his phone.

The creatures stopped working when they heard the sound. They turned to look, their eyes wide and alien. They stood frozen as Chip crouched down to pick up his phone, hoping that he could somehow retrieve it before the creatures noticed him, but now they were studying him with their dark, expressionless eyes. He watched their naked bodies for signs of tensing, wondering if they were going to spring at him.

Instead, after a brief pause in which their large, almost colorless eyes, washed over him, trying to read him as though he were as strange to them as they were to him, they simply returned to their work. First, one picked up a dish and began to scrub it under a still-running faucet. Another returned to carefully chopping vegetables. A third, which had been cleaning in the living room, picked up its feather duster.

Chip, having regained control of his phone, began to record the creatures, this time without stealth. He moved from room to room, tracking their motions as they went about their work with relentless focus and determination. They were the perfect servants, he realized. This was the big secret, what they were developing behind all the security at the lab. These things were going to change the world with a new breed of uncomplaining slaves. First the lab was going to have to convince the government to allow their production, but once that happened, everything was going to change.

Big government was always getting in the way of progress, and the fact that these creatures were being kept a secret only proved that. The lab should have been able to proclaim their existence, to let the orders and the cash come pouring in, but instead they had to keep it under wraps. It wasn’t fair, but it was a reality that Chip could exploit. The lab wanted them kept secret, and Chip was in a position to expose them.

Once he’d recorded the creatures going about their business, Chip decided to prod them, so to speak, a little. He turned the camera on one of the creatures, which had just put a tray of baked ziti into the oven.

“Hello,” he said. “Can you understand me?”

The creature studied him for a moment, and then nodded.

“Can you speak?”

It continued to stare at him, but it did not respond.

These things, he reasoned, if they could not speak or communicate were probably designed to follow orders. The only question was if they would obey his orders. Obviously they had to be able to take commands, but would they listen to anyone, or just a trainer?

“Go stand in the corner,” he told the creature.

It obeyed him at once, moving quickly, if unhurriedly to stand in the corner, where it adopted a posture of perfect patience.

There was some kind of angle to be played in this. He just didn’t know what it was yet.

When the creatures were finished cleaning, they moved to the door. Chip wanted to know if they would return to wherever they were housed or if they had more work to do. He was hoping it was the first. It would be useful to know where they were kept.

Chip caught a break here. The creatures moved swiftly through the hall to a room to which he did not have access. One of the creatures, he saw, wore a key card on a string around its neck. Once it had swiped the card, Chip—thinking quickly, as was his way—told it to hold open the door and hand him the key.

It paused for a moment, but then it obeyed. Chip stood there, holding the card in his hand. It was hot from its proximity to the creature’s pale body, and that was kind of gross, but he felt sure that he had just gained a distinct advantage, even if he did not know what it was.

The creatures vanished inside their room. He wondered if they had extra key cards in there. If not, they might end up starving to death. Also, there might not be anyone to make his dinner and clean his room, which would be a disappointment.

On a whim, Chip walked over to the room Janice had entered the previous day. The card unlocked it. He didn’t go inside. He didn’t need to. He realized that creatures who obeyed orders by their very nature did not need restrictions. They were no security threat, and it was very likely that Chip now possessed a key to every door in the facility.

Suddenly, just like that night three years ago when a teenager had thought to intimidate him, the tables had turned. Those who imagined him powerless were in for a big surprise. Chip still did not know exactly how he was going use all of these developments to his advantage, but he would find a way, and he needed it to be soon.

*   *   *

He only had half an hour until lunch, but he decided to get started on his work anyhow. The sooner he started, the less he’d have to make up.

Lunch was weird. He didn’t know how he felt about eating food prepared by those little monsters. On the other hand, he’d had the ziti before, and it was always really delicious. The key, Lester had explained, was that they used a béchamel sauce instead of ricotta. During the meal, Chip considered showing Lester and Gregory the videos he'd taken, but he knew those guys wouldn't side with him. They wouldn't care what kind of creatures were handling their food. That's just how they were. They were lazy. They wanted a handout, like so many other people in this country. They weren't willing to fight for what they believed in. Chip wasn't sure what he believed in, but freedom had to be on the list.

Back inside the lab after lunch, his belly full of pasta, he was feeling good. He had the upper hand. He had a key card that would take him anywhere. He had explosive evidence on his phone. All he needed was Janice to come with him, and they would flee to the nearest TV station and show them the footage. The two of them would soon be famous. He didn't mind sharing the fame with her, even though she hadn't really done anything. He figured he was being gentlemanly.

He walked to the section where she'd been working the day before and keyed open the door. He paused inside, letting his eyes adjust to the dim blue light. Then he made his way down the corridor. There would be no way of knowing which room Janice was in, so he would simply check each one of them.

He opened the first door, and heard, once more, the growling from within.

“Janice,” he called, but received only animal noises as an answer.

He thought about going in. He still had his phone on him, and he could record more footage, but he didn't think he needed more. Once he showed the cops what he had, they would raid the place, just like they'd raided his house, and figure things out on their own. There was no need for him to go out on a limb.

He was just about to leave when he thought he heard someone whispering, maybe calling for help. It was a soft rasp of leaves pushed by the wind. Chip turned around and turned on the flashlight app on his phone. Most of the cages were empty, but there was a lone figure crouched in one cage in the corner. It had its back turned to him, but he could see that it was a person wearing some kind of rags. Chip took a step forward.

The creature turned. Her hair was ragged, her eyes sunken, but it was Janice. Janice was in the cage. She stood up slowly, gripping the bars.

“Please,” she rasped. “You have to help me.”

He stared at her. “Who did this to you? Was it those creatures?”

She shook her head. “They found out that my key card let you in. They want to punish me. They thought I broke the rules.”

Chip walked over to the cage. Her unwashed body smelled, and in the corner of a cage was a bucket that seemed to be full of piss. Maybe even worse.

“Please help me,” she said.

Chip came forward, his stolen key card at the ready. He had it up and ready to swipe before he saw her shaking her head. There was a keyhole, like this was a prison cell from a hundred years ago.

“Who has the key?” Chip asked.

“Kohl,” she said. “You have to get it from him.”

Chip stared at her. In his pocket he had a phone that would expose this place, and no one knew. No one had any idea what he was up to. If he started running around, trying to get keys from Kohl, he'd just end up in a cage too.

“I'm going to go for help,” he told Janice. “You have to be patient.”

“They're going to do something to me,” she said, not troubling to control her tears. “This afternoon. Chad, they're going to turn me into one of those creatures.”

He stared at her, unable to believe what he'd heard. He'd been nice to her, he'd cared about her. He'd even considered risking his life to rescue her, and she didn't even know his name.

“I'm Chip,” he said.

“Who gives a fuck what your name is?” she demanded. “You need to get me out of here!”

Not with that attitude, he thought. “I'll have them come back for you,” he told her. “As soon as I get out, I'll tell them you're here.”

“I'll be dead by then,” she said. “Or worse. Please. I'm begging you.”

Chip felt very uncomfortable with the situation she was putting him in. Frankly, it was unfair. Once again, someone was trying to force his hand, to make him do what he didn't want to do, and he didn't like that. The whole begging business was really just another form of manipulation. She thought he couldn't see that, but he was smarter than most people realized.

“You haven't been very nice to me,” Chip said.

Janice stared at him. “What does it matter? I didn't want to fuck you, so now you're going to leave me to die?”

Chip would not have put it so bluntly himself, but he was enough of a realist to see that it did come down to that. It was all about evolution, protecting his genetic material. There was no percentage, scientifically speaking, in risking his life for someone who was never going to put out. Besides, the way he saw it, he didn't have a choice. Trying to get the key from Kohl was just too much of a risk.

Janice was now shaking the bars of the cage, letting out a low, animalistic moan, like she was mourning for herself. It was making Chip very uncomfortable.

“I'll get the key,” he told her. “I'll get you out, and I'll be back as soon as I can.”

She slumped down to the bottom of the cage, sobbing quietly now. She tried to thank him, but the words came out as gasps.

Chip ran for the door. He had no intention of doing anything but escaping, but he figured it was kind to let her think otherwise. Either the people he sent here would get her out in time, and she'd have nothing to complain about, or they wouldn't, and no one would ever know that he'd left her behind.

Chip hurried through the halls of the lab, passing scientists who didn't spare him a glance. They thought they were so smart, but he had fooled them all. He was about to get out of here, hit the street, and turn his life around, and they were just going about their business, making monkey people, completely unaware that the smartest guy in the building was someone they couldn't be bothered to greet when they passed.

Chip made his way to the exit and swiped his card. There was a moment of panic when he wondered if maybe they didn't care because they were one step ahead of him. His card would fail to work, and he'd be trapped. They were unhurried because they had no reason to hurry.

But, no. The card slid through and beeped. The light turned green and the door hissed open. Chip couldn't contain his grin as he entered the kitchen, only feet away from the front door and freedom.

The only problem was the Komodo dragons, which stood before him, baring their sharp teeth, hissing like snakes. They were there to hold him in place, but they didn't know who they were dealing with. Chip reached into his pocket and drew out his pistol.

He knew he was going to be called the bad guy again. They'd say he was cruel to animals or something like that, but he didn't care. It was life or death.

Chip squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. He quickly checked the magazine and saw the gun was unloaded. Somehow they knew. They'd known he had the gun all along, so why hadn't they called him out on it. Why had they left it with him?

They wanted him to feel safe. That was the only explanation. He didn't know why. He couldn't bring himself to think about it. He had two massive lizards who were about to attack him, and he had no way to defend himself.

Chip took a tentative step forward, and one of the creatures lunged. He stepped back, and felt someone grip his shoulders. It was Kohl, and he had a needle in his hand. He plunged the needle into Chip's neck. Chip opened his mouth to protest, but everything spun wildly and went black.

*   *   *

When he woke up he was in a cage. Not one of the dark, smelly cages that Janet had been in, but a clean one, well lit, with a cot and toilet. He didn't like that the toilet wasn't private, but it was better than a bucket. The cage was in the center of a lab, and all around him scientists in white coats were typing on laptops or conferring with one another. Several of the naked monkey men were scurrying about on errands. One of the creatures was delivering a plate with a sandwich on it to Kohl, whom Chip noticed was in close conversation with Ms. Spravedlnost. There were a series of cages in the back of the lab. They held small rodents—rats, most likely. Chip watched as Janice went from cage to cage, refilling their feed canisters.

She wasn't locked up. It had all been a test, he realized. The whole thing had been a test. Everything he had done, every move he had made, had been watched. This was just one more sick experiment.

Chip tried to catch her eye, but she was deliberately not looking at him. She finished her work and pushed her cart out of the lab.

Kohl, however, looked up and smiled. “The subject appears to have awakened.” He and Ms. Spravedlnost approached the cage.

“What is going on?” Chip demanded. “I went in the wrong door, and now you are going to experiment on me?”

“Excuses are no longer important,” Kohl said. “Experiment is now over. We had to understand not only why you were not a good person, but what would trigger your badness too.”

“What experiment?” Chip demanded.

“I'm afraid it's you,” Ms. Spravedlnost explained. “You were an early model, the earliest to live, and obviously things went quite badly.”

“We had to know how you would react under the stresses,” Kohl said. “So we gave them to you. Make for you the stress and see how you react. It is very much educational.”

Chip thought about his mother, her calling him her little miracle. He remembered the money from Versteckt Labs. “Are you telling me that I'm an experiment, like those monkey things?”

“Different,” Kohl said. “Our servants are much more advanced, the product of several decades of advanced research. You were a more primitive model, a simple genetic copy of a normal human. We sold several thousand of your model, but you were the first to display these kinds of behaviors, so we hoped to know what has gone wrong. I told you before. We do not leave any stone unturned until we understand our mistakes.”

Chip put his hands to the bars. “How long am I going to be in here?”

“Until we figure out where your genetic code went wrong,” Kohl said.

“And then?”

Kohl shrugged. “And then we shall see.”

Chip was going to ask more questions, but they turned away and went over to the other end of the lab. They were looking at data on a computer screen, and Kohl was explaining something even as he took large bites of the sandwich. Ms. Spravedlnost nodded with great interest as he spoke.

Chip stepped backwards until he reached the cot. He sat down, staring ahead. The sandwich looked good, but he wasn't very hungry.

Maybe he was a genetic creation. So what? That didn't mean he didn't have any rights. They were going to regret putting him in here, treating him this way. It was a mistake, the world had often learned, to try and push Chip around. This was going to be one more instance to prove that. He just had to wait for his moment. One of these days, it would arrive.

Second Interlude:  It is Written

Malone had heard of Chip Dunston. Probably wasn’t a person in America who hadn’t. But Malone had a special hatred for him. Figured if the liberals ever got around to banning guns, it would be guys like Chip that would give them the excuse. Still, he didn’t like to think that the story he’d just read was true, even if he knew it couldn’t be. Right?

Malone’s plane had just landed in Boston when his phone rang.

“You got any idea what it costs to run a full tox screen?”

Malone frowned and wished Pierson could see it.

“Did you find anything or not?”

“Sure I did.”

Malone leaned forward, gripping the headrest of the passenger in front of him with such force that the man turned and glared at him.

“What? What did you find? Exotic poisons? Anything plant based?”

“Just hold on, Sherlock. No, we didn’t find any poison. But we did find a considerable level of flunitrazepam in her blood stream, a nitro-benzodiazepine better known as Rohypnol.”

“She was drugged?”

“Oh yeah. Enough to knock out a couple horses. At least she didn’t feel any pain.”

“What else? What else did you find?”

“What? I give you the means by which the killers got the girl to the mine and that’s not enough for you?”

“Pierson, shut the fuck up and tell me what you found.”

“That would be a contradiction in terms, detective. But I’ll humor you. There was nothing else in her blood. No opiates of any kind, no alcohol, not even any sign of pot. Seems like she lived a pretty clean life, or she had for the past few months or so. Also no sign of sexual assault. From what I can tell, they drugged the girl and then killed her, just as simple as that. Oh, and we also found hops in her hair.”

“You found what?”

“Hops. You know. It’s like a flower they put in beer? Can’t say I’m too familiar. I was always a wine guy.”

“But you found them in her hair?”

“Yeah, which is weird, right? Only thing we can figure is that she might have been a beer enthusiast, maybe she brewed her own? Anyway, we sent the hops over to a lab that has the capability of figuring out what kind of hops they are and what kind of beer you’d make with them. Thought that might be helpful for you. You can thank me later. Williams swung by. Seems they’ve ID’d the girl. Student down at Birmingham Southern. She told her friends she was staying in, studying for a Calculus exam or something along those lines. That was the last they saw of her. He’s running up a profile of all her friends. There’s a boyfriend, but no exes. Apparently they’d been dating for a while and he’s all broken up about it, but Williams still figures he did her in.”

“Did he ask about the hops?”

“What?”

The passengers in the forward rows had all exited, and the woman with the window seat beside him was shooting daggers at Malone. He rose, cursing her and Pierson under his breath.

“The hops you found in her hair. Did Williams ask anybody about it?”

“Oh. No. I didn’t think to mention it. I’ll let him know. Anyway, when are you coming by the lab?”

“Later. I just landed in Boston.”

“Boston? What in the hell are you doing there?”

“I’ve got to see a man about a book.” With that, Malone hit end on the phone, and smiled a little at the thought of Pierson’s confusion. But it was true. He’d come to Boston for answers, and there was only one man he figured could give them to him.

It was an early spring morning, which in Massachusetts meant the snow was piled high and the wind cut to the bone. Malone was woefully underdressed, but he tried to ignore the cold as he followed throngs of weather-daring tourists into the North End. He cut through the old burying ground at Copp’s Hill, past the ancient, crumbling tomb of Cotton Mather, into the labyrinth of narrow corridors and side streets north of Prince. He stopped at the mouth of one and stared with sudden recognition at a ramshackle storefront. He had reached his destination.

Ramshackle, yes, but purposefully so, the way all the hip places were these days. Exposed brick and factory-style ceilings. The millennials loved the style, and Unbound was happy to capitalize. Malone jogged across the street, ignoring the shrill honking of angry drivers, and stepped through the front door of the book seller. A bell above tinkled as the door swung open, and, as if in answer, an ancient grandfather clock chimed the early morning hour. The store was crowded, but even through the crowd Malone caught the bespectacled eye of the man he’d been looking for.

Malone didn’t bother acting like he was there for a book. Instead he strode directly across the store, never taking his eyes off its owner—Matthew Sellers.

“Well, sir,” said Sellers, “you look like a man who knows exactly what you want.”

“That’s right, Mr. Sellers. I do.” Malone flashed his badge, quickly and discreetly. “Detective Malone, homicide.”

Sellers arched an eyebrow. “Well, is that so? Bryan,” he said, calling to a young man in an apron who was stacking books on a shelf. “Leave that for now and come mind the register. I’ll only be a moment.” And then, turning back to Malone, “How about we discuss this in the back.”

Sellers stepped to the side and raised the bar that separated the general customers from the back area. With a sweep of his hand he said, “After you.” Malone walked through, and then followed Sellers into a back room that served as his office. The walls were adorned with pictures of Sellers—at various ages it seemed—at locations around the world. Sellers at Machu Picchu, Sellers rafting the Colorado, Sellers climbing a mountain Malone just went ahead and assumed was Everest. “Mount McKinley, actually,” Sellers said, as if reading his mind. “They call it Denali now, but it will always be McKinley to me. Most people assume its Everest. And I let most people continue in that assumption. Please, take a seat.”

“I have a few questions, Mr. Sellers,” Malone said as he sank into the leather chair across from the owner of Unbound. “Shouldn’t take too much of your time.”

“I can’t imagine what I can help you with. I don’t know anyone who has been murdered, and I certainly haven’t killed anyone.” Sellers grinned, and Malone wondered just how much of a lie he was trying to sell him.

“Be that as it may, I think you can help me. Tell me what you know about Limbus.”

Sellers’ grin hung for a minute, then faded. “You’re kidding.”

“Afraid not.”

Sellers barked out a laugh. “I’ve gotta say detective, over the years I’ve had a lot of people come through here and ask about Limbus, but never the police.”

“So it’s a popular subject, then?”

“Yeah, among the kooks and the crazies. People who think that Limbus is real. That the book was all an elaborate ruse to make people believe otherwise.”

“Well, in fairness, that is what the book says.”

Sellers leaned over his desk and fixed Malone with his eyes. “Don’t you think if we were trying to fool people into thinking Limbus was a fraud, we wouldn’t tell them about it first?”

Malone shrugged, removed a pack of cigarettes, held it up to Sellers. “You mind?”

“This is Boston, detective. You can’t smoke anywhere.” He sighed, pulling out a drawer and dropping an ashtray onto the desk. “That being said I’ve been known to indulge myself.” Malone offered a cigarette, and Sellers took it.

“I don’t know, Mr. Sellers,” Malone said, picking up where they’d left off, “maybe it was a double blind. You tell them it’s a ruse, and that makes it all the harder to believe it’s not.”

“Have you read the book, detective?”

“I’m working my way through it and…some related materials.”

“So you think it’s plausible that we live in a world of ancient rituals, galaxy-spanning aliens, and talking dogs?”

“Actually,” Malone said, “I don’t think the dog talked.”

“Be that as it may,” said Sellers, “I can promise you it’s fiction. The work of a very deranged mind.”

“So the Templeton story is true?”

Sellers nodded, took a drag of his cigarette. “It is. I owe that man a lot. He made the store. When I started, I was just a dumb kid with a dream.”

“I know. I read the prologue.”

“Right. Of course. I’d have been out of business in three months if it hadn’t been for that book. We sold the film rights last week to Plan B Entertainment. Heard of it? It’s Brad Pitt’s.”

“Congratulations. Maybe he can play you in the movie. So you just made up the last bit? The part where Recruiter Hawthorne shows up?”

Were it not for so many years reading people, Malone might have missed the slight shiver from Sellers at the mention of the name.

“The book needed an ending,” he said. “So I provided one.”

“So it’s all made up? All fake?”

“Every last bit.”

“Then what do you make of this?” He flopped the business card down in front of Sellers, the one that bore the Limbus name. The other man gave it only a passing glance.

“Where’d you get that? A prop store?”

“It was underneath the body of a murdered girl,” Malone said, embellishing. Sellers blanched.

“My God,” he said. “They’ve finally taken it too far. I always knew they would, the fanatics. The ones who were obsessed with Limbus. If you love Harry Potter you dress up like a wizard at Halloween. If you love Limbus, you kill people, apparently.”

“Come on Sellers,” Malone said. “Cut the crap. I know you know more than you’re letting on. Now tell me or we can talk about this somewhere more official.”

Sellers smirked and snorted. “A little bit out of your jurisdiction for such a threat, aren’t you detective? Oh, don’t look so surprised. You only showed it to me for a second but ‘Alabama’ sorta stands out.”

“A girl’s dead, Sellers. If you know anything, you should help, out of the goodness of your damn heart.”

Sellers leaned across the desk.

“You want to know the truth, detective? You are way fucking down the rabbit hole right now. Way further down than you ever imagined you’d go.”

Now it was Malone that blanched. “What did you say?”

“I said you are dealing with things you don’t understand. Things that could get you in trouble.”

“No…about the rabbit hole…you said…”

The corner of Sellers’ mouth crept into a grin. He opened a drawer, retrieved a package. Dropped it in front of Malone. There was no return address, just the outline of a rabbit in the upper left corner where one should be.

“I received this today. This morning in fact, just before you arrived. But somehow, I don’t think it was meant for me.”

Malone picked it up, studied it. “Do you know where he is?”

“Jack Rabbit? No, detective. Whatever else I may have gotten myself into, I’m still just a book publisher. But I bet I know someone who might be able to give you some direction. A man with very powerful friends.”

“Who?”

Sellers grinned. “Bernard Samuelson.”

“Bernard Samuelson? You mean the guy with the niece? The one that was kidnapped?”

“Made quite the story in our little anthology, don’t you think?”

“So he’s real?”

“He’s real. His niece, too. Though I think you’d have a hard time finding Ryan Dixson in the Marine Corps registry.”

“So that part was made up?”

Sellers shrugged. He picked up a pen and tore a sheet of paper from a pad. He then ripped it in half. On one half he wrote an address and a name.

“Here,” he said. “It’s a Thursday, and if I know Samuelson at all, he’ll be at a club called The Eye at 7 p.m. It’s a weekly ritual of his. The Eye is very exclusive, and no one gets in unless they are a member or at the request of one. But you are in luck. I am a member.” He folded the other paper in half and handed it to Malone. “Give that to the doorman. He’ll let you in. Now get out of here. I have nothing else to add, and nothing else to give. Besides,” he said, nodding at the package Malone held, “I think you have some reading to do.”

Right On, Sister!

By

Keith R.A. DeCandido

1

Wanda Jackson tried to ignore the pain in her calves as she walked gingerly through the slush-covered sidewalk of 116th Street. She'd just finished her morning shift waiting tables at Smith's Diner on 110th.

Unfortunately, it was her last shift ever. The place had been robbed a dozen times in the past two years, and the insurance premiums kept going up, and Mr. Smith decided to stop paying those premiums. Which was only a problem when they got robbed the thirteenth time. The police said to report the crime to the insurance company, but Mr. Smith didn't have insurance anymore. And that meant he had to pay for the window the robbers broke himself, and he couldn't afford it.

So he just declared bankruptcy and that was it. Wanda, along with six other ladies who waited tables and the two guys who cooked in the back and a couple of cashiers, were all out of work. Sure someone could buy the diner. But probably nobody would. It would hardly be the only abandoned building in Manhattan, and who'd want to open a diner in Harlem these days? Even if someone did, there was no guarantee they'd be hiring Wanda to wait tables every morning.

In fact, there was no guarantee that anybody would hire her. Morning shifts were hard to come by, since all the ladies with kids were snatching them up. They'd work in the morning, then pick up their kids at school in the afternoon. Wanda only got the gig at Smith's because Mr. Smith was friends with Grams.

At least she still had the afternoon job at the law office. She filed for Charlie Charles. His flyers were up all over Harlem, usually taped or stapled to walls that said POST NO BILLS, and he had ads on the tee vee. Honkies called Charlie an “ambulance chaser,” but Wanda just saw a brother who was trying to make a living. He had a law degree, so why shouldn't he help the brothers and sisters go up against the man?

She got to Lenox Avenue and walked through the big glass door next to the picture window that had CHARLIE CHARLES, HARLEM'S FAVORITE LAWYER stenciled on it. The storefront was in the ground floor of a crummy apartment building. Wanda always thought he should've just put “Attorney-at-Law” on the window, but Charlie always said that made him look too much like some jive honky lawyer. “A brother should be honest,” he always said. “And Harlem done loves Charlie Charles.”

Opening the door rang the stupid bell that was attached to it. Frieda looked up at the sound of the bell, and immediately got up from behind her wooden desk. “Lord have mercy, am I glad to see you. I need to go to the mailbox and get me some lunch 'fore I starve.”

Wanda smiled. Her afternoon shift at Charlie's always started with filling in at the reception desk while Frieda got lunch.

Frieda got up and looked at herself in her compact, making sure her afro looked good and touching up her lipstick.

As she sat at the desk, Wanda grinned. “I'm guessin' that Jimmy's workin' over at Sylvia's today?”

“How should I know if that turkey's workin' today?” Frieda was trying to play it cool, but Wanda saw right through her. Frieda had been trying to get with the waiter over at Sylvia's since he started working at the famous Harlem eatery last fall.

“Bring me back a couple legs?”

“Right on,” Frieda said, and she headed out with a stack of mail that had to be sent out. As she opened the door, which rang the bell again, she turned back to the desk. “Oh, yeah, Charlie's in a meetin' with a client. He says it's big, so if anybody calls for 'im, take a message, and if anyone comes in, tell 'em they gotta wait until at least three.”

That, at least, explained why there were so few people in the waiting room. Charlie talked to walk-in clients between one and four on days he wasn't in court, and that usually meant the benches between the reception desk and Charlie's office in the back were packed. But today, there were only about five people.

Usually a day with this much slush on the sidewalk, you had lots of folks coming in with slip-and-falls.

The phone rang six times in the first twenty minutes after Frieda left.

Two were people just asking about maybe becoming clients. Wanda gave them the usual jazz about making an appointment, or just walking in between one and four. One made an appointment for next Tuesday at eleven, the other said she'd walk in.

Two were calls for Stoney's Pizza down on 90th Street. They always got calls for there, because their number was almost the same, except for there being a 0 instead of a 9, and people always misdialed it.

One was from someone in the District Attorney's office. Wanda said Charlie was with a client, and she wrote down the man's name and number on a pink message slip.

The sixth was some turkey screaming at the top of his lungs about some craziness. Wanda hung up on him.

Things slowed up a little after that last call, so she started sorting the folders in the wire basket that had a white scrap of paper with the word FILE written in magic marker taped to it. Once Frieda got back, Wanda was going to have to file all those folders, so she figured it'd be better to put them in order first.

Just as she started to sort them, the bell rang and a big man walked in the door. He hadn't shaved in a few days, and even though he had on a big overcoat, he was all sweaty.

“Who the fuck are you, chickie?”

“Watch your language,” she said automatically. “I'm the receptionist. Can I help you?”

“Bullshit! You ain't no Frieda.”

“Frieda's at lunch. I'm fillin' in. Can I help you?”

“I gots to see Charlie!”

“He's in a meetin'. Now just be cool, take a seat, and—”

He put his hands palms-down on the desk. “I don't give a fuck, I gots to see him now!”

Wanda stared up at his face. He had crazy brown eyes and his breath smelled like cheap malt liquor. It smelled like the same brand Pops used to drink before the car crash.

“I said watch your language. He's in a meetin', and he'll be out by three. Now you just take a seat, and—”

“Kiss my ass, bitch, I gots to see him now!” And then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a revolver.

For a second, Wanda froze. He was waving the gun around, and all she could see was Rondell last July, right before he got himself shot.

The man screamed and started toward the back. “Charlie! Get yo' ass out here, motherfucker!”

As he stormed past the benches, people started screaming.

Shaking her head to clear it, Wanda grabbed the phone and dialed 9, waited seemingly forever for the dial to cycle back, then 1 twice.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“There some fool with a gun at Charlie Charles's law office on Lenox and a hun' sixteenth!” Wanda dropped the phone on the desk, still off the hook, and ran to the back.

Just as she got halfway through the benches, she stopped dead in her tracks at the sound of a gunshot.

Several people screamed, and three of the five people on the benches ran out the front door.

Wanda took a deep breath and kept going into Charlie's office.

The crazy man was standing with his gun pointed right at Charlie. Charlie was on the other side of his big wooden desk, cowering against the back wall of his office, which had a gated window that looked out over the filthy alley behind the building where they put all the garbage. Charlie's maroon shirt was stained with sweat, his pink tie loose, his checked pants losing the crease. His horn-rims were sliding down his nose. The glasses weren't prescription, Charlie just wore them because they were the same type Malcolm X wore.

There were two white guys on the floor, wearing fancy threads. One was on his back with a big red stain on his chest, which was spreading all over the white shirt and vest of his suit, so Wanda figured he was the one the crazy man shot. The other was kneeling down next to him, looking almost as scared as Charlie.

Briefly, Wanda wondered what the hell two white guys were doing here. Charlie prided himself on being a friend to the brothers and sisters of Harlem, and these two didn't belong.

Though that didn't mean either of them deserved to get shot, either.

Charlie was saying, “Now Leroy, just be cool, brother, you don't—”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up! I ain't your brother, motherfucker!”

Cowering further, like he was trying to absorb himself into the back wall, Charlie said, “Easy now, baby, easy, just be cool!”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

Wanda said, “And I said watch your language.”

Leroy whirled around. “What the fuck, bitch?”

“Look, Leroy, I don't know what you're all riled up about, but—”

He pointed the gun at Charlie. “This lyin' motherfucker done lied to me! I saw that ad on the tee vee! He said he'd get me a got-damn settlement! Well, I hired his lyin' ass, and I ain't got no got-damn settlement! I gots to pay and I ain't got no got-damn money to pay!”

“Bad enough you're cursin', Leroy, but now takin' the Lord's name in vain? What's wrong with you?”

“I done told you, this motherfucker lied to me!”

“'Course he lied! Ain't you been payin' attention, Leroy? He a lawyer. That's what lawyers do.”

“Bullshit! There's, like, truth in advertising and all that jive. He done said he'd get me a settlement and I didn't get no settlement!”

Wanda shook her head. “Brother man, please. You think there's truth in advertising? That's just another white man's lie. Look, you ever been to Burger King? You ever seen a Whopper that look like what they show on the tee vee?”

Leroy frowned and actually had to think about it. “No, they all look like shit.”

“Exactly. None'a that stuff on the tee vee is real. You ever seen a pad in the projects that look as good as where they live on Good Times?”

That just made Leroy's frown get bigger and his voice quieter. “No.”

“Right on. Now, you need to start usin' your head. You just done shot a honky, and you know it's bad news when a brother kills a honky. Now, this is Harlem, so the fuzz won't be by for a while yet—”

Leroy's voice got loud again. “You called the cops?”

Wanda put her hands on her hips. “Course I called the cops, fool! There's people in here, and you was scarin' 'em with that gun! What was I supposed to do? And then you went and shot that honky!”

“I—” Leroy put his hands to his head. “I didn't mean to! I didn't expect nobody but Charlie, he surprised me, and the gun—the gun just went off!”

“That's good,” Charlie said. “Look, Leroy, when the cops get here, I'll tell them—”

Leroy pointed the gun back at Charlie. “You ain't tellin' nothin' to nobody, motherfucker!”

“Easy, Leroy, be cool!” Wanda cried. “Now listen, you don't want no fuzz gettin' hold'a you. You killed a honky, and they ain't gonna stand for that. So you got to be goin' now 'fore they get here.”

“But what about this lyin' motherfucker?”

“He'll still be here. He been in this office for fifteen years, he ain't gonna be leavin' any time soon. Now beat it, 'fore you get your fool behind arrested!”

Letting out a long breath, Leroy shook his head and looked at Wanda. “Yeah, okay. You pretty smart for a dumb bitch.” He looked back at Charlie. “This shit ain't done, motherfucker. I'll be back real soon, you dig?”

And then Leroy turned and ran through the office and out the door.

Wanda immediately ran after him, stopping at the desk to pick up the phone. All the potential customers in the waiting area were long gone.

The 911 operator was screaming into the receiver. “Hello?! Are you still—”

“Still here, sorry, had to deal with somethin'. The cat with the gun beat it, but there's a man here who been shot.”

“We heard the shot and sent an ambulance as well as a patrol car. Ma'am, please do not leave the premises. You're saying the man with the gun has left?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Wanda said. “His name's Leroy—”

“The officers will take your report at the scene, ma'am. Would you like me to hold the line until they get here?”

“No, we're cool. Thank you. Bye.” She hung up.

Charlie was stumbling out of his office through the door, nearly collapsing against the doorframe. “Wanda, baby, that was—”

She turned to face him. “The fuzz and an ambulance are on the way. The medics'll take care'a that honky Leroy shot. Who are they, anyhow?”

“They're two men from Gage Whitney. I had me a damn fine class-action suit that they was gonna settle for some serious bread, and that jive mother ruined it!”

A whiny voice came from the office. “Mr. Charles, Harold is bleeding quite profusely!”

Wanda shouted back, “There's an ambulance on the way, honky, be cool!”

The man came out. Somehow, his suit hadn't lost a single crease. “I will not 'be cool,' young woman, my colleague has been shot! And you let the perpetrator go!”

“Take it easy, Melvin,” Charlie said, “Wanda did the right thing. If the cops showed up while he was still wavin' that piece around, it woulda got real ugly. Cops pullin' their guns, maybe Leroy goes nuts and shoots more people—like you.”

Wanda wouldn't have thought it possible, but Melvin actually got whiter when Charlie said that.

Jerking a thumb to the rolodex on Frieda's desk, Wanda said, “'Sides, he a client, which means we got his home address. We just tell the fuzz, and they pick him up at home, and don't nobody get hurt. Or at least we don't.”

Melvin shook his head. “I suppose that makes sense.”

Finally, Wanda started to hear sirens. “'Bout damn time.”

The ambulance actually arrived first, and took Harold to Harlem Hospital. Melvin tried to argue with the paramedics to take him to St. Luke's, but they would only go to Harlem. Wanda figured he'd be the only white patient in the place.

Once the police arrived, they talked to Charlie and to Wanda and to Melvin—and to Frieda, who came back from lunch to see red and blue flashing lights and yellow tape all over the office. Wanda gave Leroy's address to one of the cops, who copied the info on the rolodex card to his notebook.

By the time the cops were done, it was almost five, and Charlie just went ahead and closed the office.

Wanda headed to the subway stop at the corner of 116th and Lenox. Normally she'd walk home to her apartment on 127th, but she was too beat to hike the eleven blocks. She dug around her purse until she felt a coin that had a “Y” cut out of the middle of it and pulled it out as she went slowly down the slush-covered metal stairs. She dropped the token into the slot and pushed the big orange wooden turnstile that rumbled as it let her in.

A 2 train showed up pretty soon, and she squeezed onto the graffiti-covered car once all the people coming up from downtown got off. She only had to go one stop, and she didn't get a seat—it was rush hour, after all—but that was okay. It got her there faster.

She got out along with tons of other people one stop later at 125th and she went upstairs and two blocks up Lenox to 127th. The sun had set, and it was about twenty degrees colder, and Wanda could feel it in her bones.

New York in winter sucked. It was fine when it first started snowing, because nobody went out in it, and the snow was like this big white blanket over everything. It was the only time the city was ever pretty. But as soon as people went out in it, which was usually about an hour after the snow stopped, that was it. The snow got covered in gunk, and the city looked even nastier than usual.

Since Mama got back from the hospital after the car crash, they'd been living in the super's place in the building. Mr. Olivares was nice enough to give up his ground-floor apartment for a smaller place on the first floor so Mama could bring the wheelchair in and out. It was still a pain in the ass, but they couldn't get the thing up the stoop or up any stairs. At least the sidewalk entrance only had one small lip that even Mama's lazy behind could get past.

Wanda shook her head. It wasn't fair to call Mama lazy. She couldn't walk, was stuck in that stupid wheelchair for the rest of her life. And that wasn't her fault.

No, that blame was all Pops. He was up in Attica for murder, since he drove the car right into the crosswalk where that lady and her stroller were before hitting the truck. Three people died, including a two-year-old girl, Mama was crippled, and Pops was in jail for life.

Entering the apartment, she said, “I'm home!”

Mama wheeled in from the kitchen. “Not so loud, baby girl, Mom's asleep.”

Wanda wasn't surprised. Half the time when she got home from work, Grams was asleep, but she was early today, so she figured she might be up.

Which was too bad, because she really didn't want to face Mama alone on this.

So she just stared at Mama for several seconds, until she finally looked up at Wanda from her wheelchair and said, “What you want, baby girl? Get yo' behind in the kitchen and make us some dinner. I'm starvin'!”

“Mama, the diner closed.”

“What do you mean, closed?”

She tried to keep it simple, talking about how Mr. Smith didn't pay his premiums, and then Mama interrupted. “You mean that turkey didn't pay his insurance?”

“That's right, Mama. And he closed. So I gotta try to find another job.”

“No, baby girl, you gotta succeed in finding another job. You ain't tryin' nothin'. Otherwise we ain't eatin' much.”

Grams's social security barely paid the rent and utilities. Mama was supposed to be getting disability, but she'd been getting nonsense from the government about it, and she refused to follow up. Wanda had been real close to asking Charlie to help out, but he'd probably just dock his fee from her pay.

So she had to work both jobs.

Maybe she could talk Charlie into hiring her full-time.

The next morning, she went out to every restaurant and diner and bar in Harlem looking for HELP WANTED signs. She filled out a few applications, but mostly just got told to come back later when the manager was in or to come back tomorrow or some other nonsense.

She used to get lunch at Smith's—that was a perk of being a waitress there—but she couldn't do that today and she didn't want to spend the money to get food anywhere else. So she just skipped the meal and went straight to Charlie's office.

Except when she got to Lenox and 116th, the office was closed, the gate down, the lights darkened.

For a few seconds, she just stood and stared at the closed office. According to Frieda, Charlie only ever closed the office during the daytime when he went on vacation back in '71. Otherwise, though, the office was always open. Even if Charlie was out somewhere—in court or talking to people for a case or something—Frieda was in the office, and when Frieda went on vacation or called in sick, he got a temp.

So why was the office closed now? It didn't make sense.

She found a pay phone and put a dime in, then dialed Charlie's home number. She had it for when he was working from home—or was sick—and had a question.

The line was busy.

The phone gave the dime back, and then she dialed Frieda's home number.

“Hello?”

“Frieda, it's Wanda. Why's the office closed?”

“Oh, hey girl. Yeah, I don't know what's up. I been tryin'a call Charlie all day, but his line is busy. He ain't answerin' his phone, and I left messages with his service, but nothin'. Soon's I hear, I'll let you know, dig?”

“Thanks, Frieda.”

The next morning, after a bunch more attempts to find a waitressing job, she went home to eat some lunch.

When she got inside, Grams was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich. “Hello, dear. That nice girl from the law firm called earlier. She said to call her back.”

“Frieda?”

Grams nodded. “Yes, that's the one. Sweet girl. Very polite on the phone. Not like most of you young people today.”

“Well, she the receptionist, so she talks on the phone to clients all'a time. I'll call her back, thanks Grams.”

“Of course, dear.”

She answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Frieda, it's Wanda. My Grams said you called?”

“Yeah, and it's bad news. You ain't gonna believe this, but Charlie's had to close the office, permanent-like.”

“Say what?”

“Turns out he ain't no real lawyer!”

Wanda's jaw fell open, but no words came out. She was stunned.

Frieda went on. “The cops, they looked into Charlie and found out that he never passed the bar. He ain't got no law degree, he ain't licensed to practice law, an' now all his cases are messed up.”

“How can that— I don't—” Wanda shook her head. “Damn.”

“Yeah. Cops may be callin' you, too.”

“Okay. Thanks for callin', Frieda. Take care'a yourself.”

“You too, Wanda.”

For a few seconds, Wanda just stared at the phone before hanging it back up on the wall.

In the space of less than two days, she was out of both of her jobs.

She had thought 1977 was the worst year of her life. But two months in, 1978 was trying very hard to overtake it.

2

The next morning, Wanda went out, and a business card fell from the doorjamb.

She bent over to pick it up. It read:

LIMBUS, Inc.

Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

Call us. We employ.

800-555-0606

How lucky do you feel?

“What the hell is this?” She shoved the card in her coat pocket and went out to look for more work. Today she was wearing the only nice blouse she owned, her platform shoes, and a pair of Mama's old slacks that she hadn't worn since the car crash. If Wanda was going to look for work, she was going to look her best.

She tried the library branch on 124th, but the nice lady there told her she had to apply down at the personnel office at the big library on 42nd with the lions in front of it. However, that same nice lady said they could always use pages with filing experience, which she had plenty of organizing Charlie's files, so there was that.

But most of the people who took those jobs were students. Wanda was pretty sure they'd take one look at her and say she was too old.

When she went home for lunch, she looked at the newspaper. There were plenty of want ads for temp agencies, like the one Charlie used to hire people to replace Frieda when she was sick. Maybe she could go to one of them. There weren't any up here in Harlem, but she saw a bunch in midtown. She could stop by the library, and maybe hit some of those temp agencies.

After eating lunch, she kissed Grams goodbye before heading downtown. Mama wasn't home. Wanda had long ago stopped asking where she went during these times. She figured one of these days the phone would ring and it would be the police saying Mama was dead or hurt from doing something stupid like try to cross the street against the light and getting her fool behind hit. She'd gotten pretty good at moving around with the wheelchair, but that skill wasn't so great when she was drinking, and Wanda just knew that when she wasn't home, she was out at one of the local bars.

She also wondered how Mama paid for those drinks. Wasn't like she had money of her own. Grams's social security money and Wanda's own earnings went into the Chemical Bank account, and Mama didn't have access to that. Wanda learned that lesson the hard way after Mama cleaned out the account they had at Manufacturers Hanover a couple years ago.

Grabbing her coat, she felt the crumpled up card from the Limbus company in the pocket.

Unfolding it, she read it over again.

How lucky do you feel?

Wanda had never felt lucky a day in her life. The only good luck she'd had was that Grams was still alive. Everything else, though, was just one bad scene after another. Pops beating her when she was a kid. Having to get the abortion when Rondell knocked her up because they couldn't even afford to feed themselves much less a kid. The car crash and Pops getting locked up. Mama crippled for life and unable to get disability. Rondell getting shot during the blackout.

And now this.

So no, she didn't feel lucky, thank you very much, but she decided to walk over to the phone anyhow. The number was toll free at least, so it wouldn't make the phone bill any worse.

Picking the phone up off the wall, she dialed the number on the card.

A pleasant lady's voice answered. “Hello Miss Jackson, thank you for calling.”

Wanda actually pulled the phone away from her head and stared at it for a second, then put it back to her ear. “How the hell did you know it was me?”

“We have considerable resources not available to most companies, Miss Jackson. I see you got our card. Would you like to come in for an appointment?”

“What exactly you offerin'?”

“Limbus has numerous job opportunities, but there's one in particular that I think might be perfectly suited to you. If you wish, you can come in for an interview this evening at six? We have an office at 666 Fifth Avenue on the 42nd floor.”

For a moment, Wanda didn't say anything. She just wanted to ask a question or two, and now she had an interview? And they had a job for her already?

Then again, the lady did say something about “considerable resources.” That was pretty heavy.

“Yeah, okay, six o'clock.”

“When you get to the building, go to the elevator on the far end of the bank. That's the only one that goes to the 42nd floor.”

“Right on.”

“Thank you very much, Miss Jackson. Trust me, you won't regret this.”

She was regretting it already when she hung up, but it was cool. That address was on Fifth between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Between that building and the library were all the temp agencies she'd been looking at, so it would work out perfect for her afternoon.

Once she got outside, she buttoned her coat against the nasty wind and went over to the subway entrance on 125th. She took a 3 train down to Times Square, then went downstairs to take the 7 over to Fifth.

The library wasn't so bad. She filled out an application and handed it in, and they said they'd call her if something opened up. They were nice about it, and there were other sisters in the office, too, which made her feel better.

The temp agencies, though, were full of honky ladies who all looked at her like she had a disease or something. They were all dressed a lot nicer than Wanda, too.

She was done with all that before six, so she wandered around the area. There was St. Patrick's Cathedral, which was pretty, but too much for a church as far as she cared. Catholics were always over-decorating everything. She didn't want to go into Saks Fifth Avenue, because it was full of things she couldn't afford.

But there were a few bookstores nearby. She went into Scribner & Sons between 48th and 49th and looked around. It had been years since she read anything that wasn't a newspaper, a diner menu, or a law file, but she used to love reading when she was a kid. She especially loved Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Shaking her head at the memory, she recalled that she wore out the copy of the book at the Harlem Library.

Sure enough, she found a paperback of it at the store—along with another book by the same author! L'Engle had written another one!

For about half a second, she thought about buying A Wind in the Door. But she couldn't afford to get all indulgent. Wanda had no idea where her next paycheck was coming from.

If the interview went well, and the bookstore was still open, she'd consider it.

A lady who worked in the store saw her putting the book back and said, “You know, the third book is coming out this summer. I just saw it in the catalogue yesterday. It's called A Swiftly Tilting Planet.”

“A third one? Groovy!” Wanda actually smiled at that.

“If you want, you can have a copy reserved for you.”

Shaking her head quickly, she said, “No, I don't think so. Thanks, though.”

“You're welcome!”

It was getting onto six, so Wanda went across the street and walked up the three blocks to the Tishman Building, with the big 666 right there in the middle of the street. She hadn't told Grams where she was going, because she'd probably start calling it the “devil building” or some other jive. Wanda loved Grams, but she had some notions.

Walking in, she went all the way to the far end of the elevator bank, like the lady on the phone had said. At this point, her feet were killing from the platforms, and she wished she'd worn her sneakers like usual. She was used to being on her feet all day, but that was in her comfortable shoes. The platforms were not meant for walking all over midtown.

The last elevator in the bank had a different door from the others. It wasn't as wide.

She pushed the call button, and the door slid open right away.

Stepping inside, she saw that there were only four buttons on the wall, one on top of the other. They were simple black push-buttons. The top one said “42,” then the one under it said “LOBBY.” The next two said “DOOR OPEN” and “DOOR CLOSE.”

Wanda had to admit that it was pretty heavy that these cats had their own elevator in a fancy building like this.

Pushing the “42” button got the door to close without her having to use the bottom button. The elevator jostled for a second, then moved slowly up.

Eventually it stopped with a “ding.”

The door slid open to a long hallway. It didn't look like anyplace in New York she'd ever seen. What she was used to was either the dank, dark hallways of the apartment buildings in Harlem or the fancy Art Deco corridors of the Empire State Building and some of the other skyscrapers from the old days.

This, though, was some funky stuff. Everything looked like it was made of some kind of weird shiny metal. There weren't any lights that she could see, but everything was bright. The floors and walls and ceiling looked like something out of Star Wars.

What especially got her was how clean it was. Even the lobby had gunk all over the floor from people tracking slush in from the sidewalk, and the walls had some stains here and there. For that matter, the city always was covered in smog.

But this place? This was cleaner than the hospital where Mama was taken after the car crash.

At the end of the hall was a metal desk that had absolutely nothing on it, just a lady sitting behind it wearing some kind of headset. Wanda had never seen a headset like this, though. It was so—so small. The earphones were tiny and actually got put in the ear-hole.

The lady looked weird, too. Not in a bad way, Wanda just couldn't figure out what nationality she was. If you'd told her she was Hispanic or white or Oriental or even maybe a light-skinned sister, Wanda would've believed it. It was like she had every possible feature of every possible person. Wanda kind of liked it, actually.

“Yes, Mr. Spierings, I'm sure that will work. Goodbye.” The lady then looked up at Wanda. “May I help you?”

“I got a six o'clock interview with—” She blinked. Only just now did she realize that she never got the name of the lady she talked to on the phone before. “Uh, with someone. I'm Wanda Jackson.”

The receptionist nodded. “Ah, yes, you're Ms. Cornwell's six o'clock.” She pointed at a set of comfortable-looking chairs that Wanda hadn't noticed before against the wall underneath a really ugly painting. “Have a seat, Ms. Cornwell will be right out.”

Wanda nodded, and went to sit down. The seats were even more comfortable than they looked, and she noticed there was a small table between them that had a couple of books on it.

She didn't recognize most of the titles, but there was a beat-up hardcover on the bottom that had Madeleine L'Engle's name on it.

Her eyes went wide when she moved the book on top of it and she saw the title: A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

Wanda grabbed the book and walked it over to the receptionist desk. “Excuse me, how the hell did you get this book? Lady at the bookstore said it ain't out until summer!”

“Um—”

Before the receptionist could answer, a voice came from behind Wanda. “As I told you on the phone, Miss Jackson, we have considerable resources at our disposal.”

Wanda turned around and saw a tall white lady in a nice maroon pantsuit.

She held out her hand. “I'm Isabelle Cornwell. Pleasure to meet you in person.”

“Wanda Jackson,” she said automatically as she returned the handshake. “But I guess you know that.”

“Indeed. Come with me, Miss Jackson.”

“Sure thing, 'Ms.' Cornwell.”

“Please, call me Isabelle.”

They walked past the reception desk to a metal door that didn't have any windows or writing on it. Isabelle opened it and they went inside.

The office was huge and fancy. Bookshelves lined the wall behind Isabelle's huge wooden desk, which was covered in pieces of paper and a keyboard that was attached to a tee vee for some reason. There were also two typewriters on the desk—one manual, one electric—and one of those old-fashioned phones you saw in old movies with the earpiece resting on an arm on the side of the phone. There was also some kind of rectangular glass-and-plastic thing—Wanda had no idea what it was.

One wall was entirely a big window with a view of downtown Manhattan. It would've been pretty if it wasn't for the smog.

“Have a seat,” Isabelle said, indicating one of the two chairs that faced her desk. They were just as plush as the seats outside.

“Thanks.” Wanda sat down, setting the L'Engle book down in her lap, as she still hadn't gotten a good answer to her question about it.

“I couldn't help but notice the way you almost sneered the prefix 'Ms.' Do you have an issue with it?”

“Not really, I just—” Wanda shook her head. “Look, I got no problem with women's lib. It's cool, but most'a the women's libbers I seen are rich honky ladies who don't know nothin' 'bout what's happenin'. They can pass the ERA all they want, but life in Harlem's still gonna be a bad scene if you're a cat or a lady. Even if men and women do become equal, white still gonna be better than black, you dig?”

“I can certainly understand why you'd have that point of view.” Isabelle sorted through a pile of folders on her desk and then took out one and flipped through it. “Now then, I believe you came here to discuss the possibility of a job.”

“Actually, you came to me. I assume y'all put that card in my door.”

Isabelle smiled, but it was one of those robotic smiles that didn't actually look happy. “Those cards have a habit of finding their way to the right people.”

“So what kinda job we talkin' 'bout?”

After looking through the folder a bit, Isabelle closed it and looked right at Wanda. “We've been observing you for a while now, Miss Jackson—may I call you Wanda?”

She shrugged.

“The incident at the offices of Mr. Aloysius Charles was not the first time you—”

“Say what? The offices of who?”

“Didn't you know? Your recent employer the false attorney was born with the name Aloysius Bartholomew Charles—which goes some way toward explaining why he went by 'Charlie.'“

Wanda shook her head. “Figures. He lied 'bout bein' a shyster, ain't suprisin' he lied 'bout his name too.”

“Actually, he didn't completely lie—he didn't put 'attorney-at-law' on the window of his office. His refusal to do so could be construed as an attempt not to lie.”

At that, Wanda just stared at Isabelle.

“Perhaps not.” Isabelle smirked. “It matters little, as he did lie every time he took on a client. In any case, your talking down of Mr. Leroy Washington is merely the latest in a series. There was also Mr. Julio Garcia, who came into Smith's Diner while high on phencyclidine—”

“Say what?”

“Ah, PCP, I believe it's called in the vernacular.”

“Then just say that. Damn.” Wanda shook her head.

“You kept him from doing bodily harm to the patrons of the diner until the police arrived. There were the multiple young men who tried to loot Hooper's Grocery Candy and Smoke Shop during the blackout, whom you talked out of ruining a neighborhood institution.”

Wanda tensed. “I really do not wanna be talkin' 'bout the blackout.”

Isabelle nodded. “I can understand that, given what happened to Mr. Rondell Smith. My condolences on your loss.”

Snorting, Wanda said, “Thanks. Look, what's this—”

“There was also the time Mr. Smith got a parking ticket for parking too close to a fire hydrant and you convinced the judge that he didn't park close enough to warrant the ticket and got it reversed.”

“Yeah, I talked Miss Modzelewski into givin' me an A 'stead of a B+ on a homework assignment once back in sixth grade. Where you goin' with this?”

Folding her hands on the big wooden desk, Isabelle said, “Quite simply, Wanda, we need someone with your oratorical skills for the department of Limbus Inc. that I represent.”

“What department's that?”

Isabelle winced. “I'm afraid I cannot divulge that until you have taken the job. The department for which I hire is very—well, security conscious. Out of necessity, truly. In fact, most of Limbus's employees aren't even aware of the department's existence, for reasons that will become clear if you should decide to accept the job.”

“You still ain't told me what the job is! Matter of fact, you ain't told me how you got a book here that ain't comin' out for months yet. And you ain't told me how you know so much 'bout me.”

“Our vetting process is quite thorough.”

“No, it's more'n 'at. I didn't tell nobody 'bout what happened with those cats at Hooper's, and didn't no fuzz turn up, neither. They had better things to do that night than give a damn 'bout no store up in Harlem. And ain't none'a them cats was talkin' 'bout how some lady made 'em look foolish. So how'd you know about it?”

“Answering that would require divulging the nature of the department—which I cannot do until you accept employment.”

Wanda rolled her eyes. She was this close to getting up and leaving, but two things stopped her. One was that this was a fine office. These people had a lot of money to throw around, and probably would pay a lot better than any temp job or library job or clerk job or waitress job.

The other was that she really wanted to know how they knew so much about her.

“All right, how much you payin' me?”

Isabelle smiled. “Enough.”

Wanda was getting seriously sick of this nonsense. “How many dollars in an 'enough'?”

“Put it this way—you will have comfortable lodging and unlimited access to whatever food you might want, as well as a company credit card that can be used for whatever you might need, within reason, for the entire term of your employment.”

“Which is for how long, exactly?”

“Ten years.”

Wanda's eyes went wide. “Say what?”

“And after that ten-year term has expired, you will receive a lavish pension that I assure you will allow you to live your life in luxury for the rest of your days. In addition to that, we will pay a stipend to your mother and grandmother that will keep them living well in your absence.”

“Absence? I can't be doin' this job at home?”

“No, the job will require a great deal of travel. You will spend considerable time away from home.”

“Hold up. No. This ain't gonna work.”

Isabelle frowned. “What do you mean? We're aware that you're the primary source of income for your household, aside from your grandmother's social security remittance.”

“That ain't the problem. You can't be givin' no money to Mama. She'll just go out and drink it all down and get her fool self killed, and that'd just break Grams's heart.”

“But not yours?”

“Mind y'damn business! Point is, I don't let Mama touch the money never.”

Isabelle nodded. “Then the payments can all be given to your grandmother. It will arrive on a monthly basis, concurrently with the social security money.”

Wanda shook her head. “Grams can't go to the bank on her own. She needs me to deposit the checks! Mama can't be doin' it...”

“Not an issue. We can arrange to have the money deposited directly into her account at—” She flipped through the folder. “—at Chemical Bank. For that matter, we can arrange to have her social security deposited in the same manner. And don't worry, that bank will remain intact for several more decades, though they'll change the name to Chase when they buy Chase Manhattan in 1996.”

Wanda stood up, the L'Engle book clattering to the floor. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Please sit down, Wanda.”

“I wanna know what the hell is goin' on!”

“What is going on is that we wish to hire you to use your skills in certain sensitive matters. In essence, we want to hire you to talk people down from difficult situations. Just like you did in Mr. Charles's office. Just like you did during the blackout. Just like you did at the diner. And just like you did with the parking ticket hearing.”

Finally, Wanda sat back down. “Ain't there, like, diplomats for this kinda jive?”

Shaking her head, Isabelle said, “No, you don't understand. We're not going to be putting you in situations that trained professionals would normally deal with. These will involve normal people in normal circumstances. These are occurrences that are beneath the notice of police or politicians—or simply away from their notice, as was the case with the incident at Hooper's.”

Wanda just stared at Isabelle for a few seconds. “And you'll pay me enough.”

“Yes. You and your family will be comfortable for the rest of your lives. We know how difficult things have been since the accident.”

“Wasn't no accident,” Wanda muttered.

“Excuse me?”

She spoke louder. “I said it wasn't no accident. An accident is somethin' that just happens and it ain't nobody's fault. That was a damn car crash.”

Isabelle nodded. “Either way, since then, things have been difficult. We can ameliorate that difficulty.”

“If you got all these resources and stuff, why not cut through the red tape for Mama's disability?”

“I'm sorry?” Isabelle sounded confused.

“Mama's been tryin' to get disability for months. Well, she started tryin' months ago, anyhow. She gave up, but we should be gettin' it.”

“Wanda, your mother has been receiving monthly disability checks from the Social Security Administration for the past three months.”

For several seconds, Wanda just stared at Isabelle. Then she just said, “You're jiving me.”

“I'm not.” Isabelle handed Wanda a Xerox of three checks, one for each of the past three months, like Isabelle said. They were from the SSA, just like Grams's checks, made out to Martha Jackson.

Wanda leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Least now I know how she's payin' for them drinks. Worst part is, I ain't even surprised.” Then she stood up. “I can't just say yes yet. If I'm gonna be away from home for ten years—”

“You will, of course, be able to visit your mother and grandmother—and your father in prison, if you wish.”

“I do not wish, thank you very much. That cat can stay locked up forever and never see this pretty face again. For that matter, I ain't all that cool with seein' Mama right now, neither, after what you just showed me.” Wanda let out a long breath. “Still, I can't be makin' this decision without talkin' to Grams first. I gotta make sure she's gonna be right with it, you dig?”

“Of course.” Isabelle stood up and held out her hand again. “But be advised that this offer is only good for twenty-four hours. If you're going to accept the offer, you must be back in this office tomorrow no later than six p.m. If you don't accept, of course, simply do not bother to return, but if you arrive after six, the offer will be null and void, and you will not be permitted on the premises.”

“Right on.” Wanda returned the handshake and then left her office, went down the shiny corridor, rang for the elevator, and went back out onto Fifth Avenue.

The noise of Manhattan hit her like a slap, and it took her a few minutes to realize that she was back on the street surrounded by smog and slush and noise after being in that office. She checked her watch—it was only a quarter after, but it felt like she'd been up in Limbus for hours.

She headed toward Broadway to catch the 1 train at 50th, then switch to the express at 72nd and go home.

It was gonna be a long talk with Grams tonight. And with Mama, if she was sober.

3

It took a lot of thinking for Wanda.

By the time she got home, Grams was already in bed asleep. Mama still wasn't back from wherever it was she'd decided to go. Probably out drinking with the money she'd been hiding from Wanda.

The super's apartment in the building was a one-bedroom, but they'd converted the living room to Mama's bedroom and the dining room to Wanda's. It meant, of course, that Wanda was stuck with a cot in a room that was open, but she didn't care that much as long as Grams had her own room and Mama got at least a little privacy, since she could at least hang a curtain over the living room entryway.

Wanda lay on her cot in the used-to-be-a-dining-room and tossed and turned on it all night. She couldn't sleep for more than a minute or two. In fact, only time she lay still was when Mama finally came home, singing at the top of her lungs. Wanda couldn't talk to Mama right now sober, much less while she was drunk.

Eventually, Mama fell asleep, which Wanda knew because she was snoring loud enough that the neighbors probably thought there was a buzzsaw on high in the apartment.

The next morning, Mama was still snoring in the used-to-be-a-living-room. Grams got up and made breakfast like she always did. Wanda had given up trying to get her to quit. Grams always said, “Breakfast is the most important meal, and I always fed my children breakfast. Not about to stop now.”

“Good morning, dear,” Grams said as she stirred the grits.

“Mornin', Grams.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“Not really.”

And then she told Grams what happened, ending with, “What do you think I should do, Grams?”

“What kind of a fool question is that, dear?”

Wanda flinched. Grams hadn't talked that sharply since Wanda was a little girl.

“Of course you should take the job. Why would you even doubt it?”

For a second, Wanda didn't say anything, because she didn't want to say it out loud. It was why she didn't just jump at the job as soon as Isabelle offered it.

Then she finally said it: “'Cause I don't wanna leave you alone with Mama.”

“Dear, I've been putting up with that child's nonsense since I popped her out. It hasn't gotten any better, and it won't get any better until Jesus finally takes me. Or takes her, which will probably happen a lot sooner if she keeps carrying on like she did yesterday.” Grams looked over at the closed door to the living room, which wasn't enough to keep them from hearing Mama's snoring. “I'll be fine. If these people will take care of us, then you should take the job.”

Wanda smiled, and relaxed for the first time since she'd seen the shuttered entrance to Charlie's law firm. “Right on, Grams. I will take it. Now let's have some of them grits.”

4

The office was the same as it was yesterday, but the view was different.

Isabelle sat at her desk, and this time she was wearing a green pantsuit that looked just like the maroon one. All the folders were gone, but the other stuff—the weird keyboard-and-tee-vee thing and the little rectangular piece of plastic, and the old-fashioned phone, and the two typewriters—were all there.

The view out the window seemed the same as it had been yesterday: downtown. But it didn't look right to Wanda. There were a bunch of buildings she didn't recognize, and some of them looked wrong.

But there was something more basic that was bugging the crap out of her.

Isabelle put a big pile of papers in front of her.

“This,” Isabelle said, “is a confidentiality agreement. Once you sign it, I can tell you the full nature of the department.”

“Right on.” She started to read the contract.

Isabelle smiled. “I'm impressed. People usually just sign without reading.”

“Yeah, Rondell did that once. Cost him a thousand bucks he didn't have. Ain't lettin' that happen again no way no how.”

Wanda would never admit this to Isabelle, but most of the contract made absolutely no sense to her. But she read the thing anyhow. Took her and Rondell a year to pay that thousand off.

Finally, she got to the eleventh and final page of the contract. “Groovy. You got a pen?”

To Wanda's surprise, Isabelle opened a drawer in her desk and took out one of those feather quills and a bottle of ink. She unscrewed the bottle, dipped the bottom of the quill pen into the ink, and then handed it to Wanda.

She took it with her left hand. “This place is outta sight.”

“I'll take that as a compliment.”

“If you want.” The line at the end had the words WANDA WILHELMINA JACKSON under it. She used the pen to just sign her first and last name. “Wilhelmina” was Grams's name, so she kept it to honor her, but it was a really stupid name, and she didn't want to admit to it anymore than she had to.

She handed the pen back to Isabelle. “Now what?”

Isabelle placed the pen down on her desk and closed the ink bottle. Then she got up. “Come with me, Wanda.”

As she got up, she finally figured out what was wrong with the view. “Where's all the smog at?”

“Excuse me?”

“On the radio this morning, they said there was a smog alert. Days like that, you can't even see across the damn street. But look at that—it's all clear.” Then she peered at the window more closely. “Where the hell's the Twin Towers?”

“If you'll come with me, I'll be able to answer that question for you.” Isabelle was now standing near a small door that Wanda hadn't noticed before. It was on the far side of the big set of bookshelves, right next to the window.

“Ain't no way the World Trade disappeared overnight.”

“You'd be surprised,” Isabelle said grimly.

She opened the door, and they went down a long, empty hallway. No windows, no paintings, no lights—but it was all brightly lit anyhow.

At the far side was another door, and she opened it up and led Wanda through. As she went in, Isabelle said, “I will explain everything now, Wanda, but I must ask that you not interrupt me until I'm finished. I'll be saying a lot of things that will surprise you or not make sense to you.”

“So just like every other conversation we've been havin' the past two days.”

Isabelle smiled. “Even more so.”

The room they went into was huge. Wasn't very long, but it was wide. The far wall was only a few feet away, but it was about fifty feet high and it had a whole bunch of little tee-vee screens on it. There were so many, she couldn't even figure out what was on all of them. It was just too much.

“As I told you over the phone, Wanda, Limbus Inc. has considerable resources. We have branches all over the globe and beyond—”

“Say what?”

“What did I say about interrupting? This will take forever unless you simply wait until I'm finished, all right?”

Wanda nodded, but her head was spinning. Beyond the globe?

“One of those resources is a collection of devices that, when combined, allow one to travel through time. Those devices are put to use by the department that now employs you. The use of these devices is severely proscribed, and very few people even know of the department's existence. It's why the NDA—the confidentiality agreement—that you signed was so extensive. No one beyond the dozen or so people who know of the department can ever learn of its existence. As it is, we risk quite a bit every time we use it.”

“So why do you use it? Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt,” she added quickly.

“No, it's actually a reasonable query. Limbus has interests. Sometimes those interests are furthered by manipulating events, which is a simple enough matter to do in the present, much harder to do in other times. But we can, though we do limit it. You asked how we obtained a copy of A Swiftly Tilting Planet when it won't be released until July of this year. In fact, the edition that you picked up was a 2028 edition, released on the 50th anniversary of the book's original publication. The view of the New York skyline you saw in my office a few minutes ago was from 2004, just three years after the World Trade Center was destroyed in a terrorist attack.”

Wanda's jaw fell open, and she only didn't interrupt because she couldn't really believe what she was hearing.

Isabelle pointed at the big wall with all the tee vee screens. Wanda saw that they were from all different times. It looked like a bunch of movies—but they were all in full color and good quality. No movie she'd ever seen looked as sharp as what she was seeing right now.

“What is shown on these walls,” Isabelle said, “is one of our devices, which provides images transmitted by nanocameras that we've sent into various time zones. That's how we knew about your efforts at Hooper's in July of 1977.”

“Wait, hold up, stop. I know you said don't interrupt, but this is messed up.”

“What is?” Isabelle sounded all confused.

“You can do all this!” Wanda waved her arms at the screens. “This is some seriously heavy stuff.”

Isabelle smiled. “I'm aware, believe me.”

“Then what the hell you need me for?”

“The technology is very useful, but it's the use of the technology that's important. As I told you from the beginning, your negotiating skills are what is required.”

“Get Henry Kissinger, then!”

“He's a bit too high-profile for us.” Isabelle chuckled. “Come with me.”

They went out another door and into a nice lounge. There were several sofas and chairs. Wanda didn't even wait for Isabelle to ask her to sit, she just flopped down on one of the sofas.

Isabelle sat down next to her. “We aren't attempting to change the course of history. The negotiations we require are with people who aren't world-changers or heads of state. We just need you to talk people into making a different decision in their lives that they may not have made otherwise. Are you familiar with Ray Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder'?”

Wanda shook her head. “Read Farenheit 451 in high school.”

“Well, in that story, people travel back in time, step on a butterfly, and that completely changes the future. We're trying very hard to avoid stepping on any butterflies. We just want to push small things in different directions.”

“Okay.” Wanda was feeling more than a little overwhelmed. “So what do I gotta do?”

“For now, let's get you something to eat and drink. You look like you could use it.” Isabelle got up from the sofa.

“Damn right.” Wanda got up, too, and Isabelle led her out the door.

“You'll find we have a fantastic restaurant. It got the most positive Yelp! reviews in 2017.”

“What's a yelp?”

5

Two months later, Wanda had her first assignment.

The eight weeks leading up to that was all about the orientation and getting her used to how Limbus did things, and how the department worked.

She spent all of it in 1978—and, man, that was a funky way of thinking about things—so she got to visit Grams a few times. Mama wasn't home any of the times she went. After the third visit home, Grams had said, “It's all right, dear, your mother's just upset that she doesn't get to see you.”

“So when I am home, she ain't? That don't even make sense.”

“It does to Martha.”

“Yeah.”

But Grams was doing okay, at least, which was what mattered.

The assignment was to 2011. Wanda's first question had been, “So, what, I'm goin' to the moon or somethin'?”

Chuckling, Isabelle had said, “No, not the moon. All your missions will be in New York City. It's one of the ways we deliberately limit the time travel.”

“So someone else gets to go to the moon?”

“Not in 2011. I'm afraid that the moon won't be colonized for another century after that.”

“Really? With all them rockets they're shootin' up there, and you're tellin' me ain't no moon colonies by 2000?”

“Afraid not. And there are no flying cars, either.”

“Good. Traffic's bad enough on the ground.”

She was sent through, along with the file on her target and identification that said that Wanda Jackson lived on West 225th Street in the Bronx, in the same projects that Rondell grew up in. She wandered the neighborhood and wasn't sure what freaked her out more—how much changed, or how much was the same. The streets were a lot cleaner, though still not completely clean, entirely, and the projects looked just the same. The trees in the courtyards looked better than they did back a few years ago—or, really, forty years ago—and biggest of all, there was a large shopping center across 225th that wasn't there in the old days. In fact, there wasn't anything there, then, but now there were several stores and a parking lot.

The target was a kid who lived in the projects named Javier Mota. He was going to Cardinal Hayes High School, and according to the file, he was trying to decide which college to go to. He'd been accepted by both Columbia and Fordham, and he was having trouble choosing. Wanda's job was to help him choose.

Seemed easy enough.

Every afternoon after school, Javier went to the coffee shop in the shopping center. It was called “Starbucks” and it had an ugly mermaid logo. The shops were all over town, and Wanda couldn't figure out why, because their coffee was nasty. She poured better coffee using yesterday's dishwater at Smith's.

After the first few times Wanda and Javier saw each other in the coffee shop, they nodded and smiled to each other—and a few other times when they bumped into each other in the courtyard.

She did that for a few weeks, and when she wasn't doing that, she was having fun with the computer. To her, computers were big glunky machines with flashing lights and tapes, like what you saw on the tee vee. But in 2011, computers were like an even fancier version of what Isabelle had on her desk: a combo of typewriters and tee vees. People also had their own phones so they didn't need to use dirty pay phones if they needed to call somebody when they weren't home. The subways were actually clean and not covered in graffiti, there were twice as many signs and they were clearer, and the trains hardly ever broke down.

Not that it was all great. Things cost a lot more. People in 1978 complained about inflation, but that was nothing compared to 2011. And despite what she'd said to Isabelle, she wished there were flying cars, because there were considerably more cars on the road, and they were all either much smaller or much bigger than the cars she was used to.

The fashions were insane, too. Everything was too small. The collars, the cuffs, the hair. And the colors weren't nearly bright enough. Plus everyone had to have a tattoo, apparently. Made everyone look like sailors or prisoners. People definitely dressed stupid in the 21st century.

Finally, one day, it was crowded in the coffee shop, and so after she got a hot chocolate—the only thing in the place that was drinkable, as far as Wanda was concerned—she walked over to Javier's table.

“'Scuse me, mind if I sit here?”

Javier looked up from his book. He was always reading. “Hm? Oh hey, it's you.”

“Wanda.”

“I'm Javier. And, uh, yeah, sure, have a seat.”

“Right on, thanks.”

Javier laughed. “'Right on'? What is this, That 70s Show all of a sudden?”

Wanda forced herself to laugh with him and managed not to punch him for that comment. She'd watched half an episode of that show, and they pretty much got everything wrong. Made her wonder about all those World War II movies she and Rondell used to watch. Were they all lies, too?

“Whatcha readin'?”

“Rereading, actually,” he said. “I love to reread books. Anyhow, this is the second Harry Potter. Have you read them?”

“Not yet.”

“The last movie's coming out this summer, so I figured I'd reread the series. They're my second favorite books.”

Wanda smiled. “What's your favorite?”

“L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.”

“No foolin'? Those are my favorite too! Read those when I was a kid. I just finished the third book—rereadin' it, I mean, like you.”

“Nice.” Javier put a bookmark into the book and set it down next to his mocha caramel whatever-it-was. Wanda figured they created all these stupid extra things for the coffee to hide the fact that it tasted like sewage.

“Oh, hey, I don't mean to get in the way. I just wanted to sit. Keep readin'.”

“Nah, it's all good. I wasn't really readin' that close.”

“Why not?”

Javier leaned back in his chair. “I'm havin' trouble with somethin', is all. No big.”

“What's the trouble?”

“It's nothin', really.”

Wanda shrugged. “Okay, groovy.”

That got Javier to laugh again. “You are really rockin' the 70s lingo.”

It really worried Wanda that her way of talking was so exotic that people were laughing at her. Why couldn't these 21st century cats talk normal?

“A'ight, look, the problem is, I got accepted to two colleges.”

“Okay. So pick one.”

“I can't.” He shook his head. “It ain't about the money. Columbia's more expensive than Fordham, but Columbia gave me a bigger scholarship.”

“Scholarship, huh? N-nice.” She was about to say “right on,” but she didn't want to start that up again.

“So it'd cost the same either way. My parents are all, 'whatever you want, Javy,' since it cost the same either way. They're just all happy I'm goin' to college, y'know?”

“Well, maybe make a list.”

“A what?”

“A list. Write down what's good about each one and what's bad about each one, and whichever one has the longer good list and the shorter bad list, go there.”

“Yeah, okay.” Javier reached down to his backpack, which was down under his chair. He pulled out a laptop computer and started typing things on it. “Okay, let's see. Transportation don't matter. Got the 1 train to take me to Columbia, got the 9 bus to take me to Fordham. They both got good English lit departments.”

“That's what you gonna be studyin'?”

Javier nodded. “I think I want to be a lawyer, but I maybe wanna be a writer, too. I mean, I'd love to be like J.K. Rowling or Madeleine L'Engle, or even Stephen King. Hell, I'd even be Stephenie Meyer.”

Wanda had no idea who that last one was—Rowling was the name on the book Javier was reading. “Okay, so what about law departments?”

“Well, it doesn't matter what you study as an undergrad if you want to go to law school, long as you have good grades.”

“Okay, what about the place itself?”

Javier shrugged. “They're both nice campuses. Columbia's on the Upper West Side, though. Real nice neighborhood.”

Wanda already knew that the UWS was, if anything, even nicer than it was in her day, and it was pretty damn groovy then. “And Fordham?”

“Not so great. But you do have Arthur Avenue, and the food there's amazing.”

“What about the professors?”

“I don't really know 'em.”

“Ain't Fordham a Catholic school?”

Javier winced. “Not really? They're kinda Catholic. The slogan says, 'a school in the Jesuit tradition,' but a lot of the faculty and administration are Jesuit priests.”

Wanda didn't know enough about Catholicism to know what a Jesuit was, and how they were different from regular Catholics. “That good or bad?”

“Well, the Jesuits are really good teachers. But—” He sighed. “Okay, here's the thing. Mamí wants me to go to Fordham. I know she says she don't care, long's I go to college, but she wants Fordham because of the Jesuits. But I'm sick'a priests! Hayes is all Catholic up in there, but Columbia's a real school, private and stuff. I mean, Fordham is too, kinda, but—”

“But you don't want a religious education?”

“They make you take theology, man!”

Wanda chuckled. “So go to Columbia, fool!”

Javier straightened up his back. “I ain't no fool!”

“Look, you obviously don't wanna be goin' to Fordham. Only reason you ain't accepted Columbia yet is 'cause you're afraid of your mother. Well, that's just some nonsense, right there. You're the cat that's goin' to college, not your mother. It ain't gonna cost her no more money than Fordham, and you get to go where you want. If she asks, tell 'em the neighborhood's safer, especially if you're taking the subway late at night.”

“I guess.” Javier was squirming in his seat.

“Look, I ain't gonna tell you that your mother ain't important. But you can't be lettin' her control your life, neither. You wanna go to Columbia, so get your behind up outta this coffee shop and go to Columbia.”

Javier just stared at her for a few seconds. “Damn. Anyone ever tell you you're pushy, Wanda?”

“Not twice.”

They both laughed at that.

“Look, I'm sorry,” she said, “but you was havin' trouble, and I told you how to get out of it. You don't gotta listen—I'm just some lady in a coffee shop havin' a hot chocolate. You wanna take my advice, groovy. You don't, just as groovy. Ain't no thing to me.”

Then she got up and walked out.

6

When Wanda returned to 666 Fifth Avenue, Isabelle was waiting for her when she came out of the Device Room. (Wanda had thought they needed a name for it that wasn't stupid. Isabelle was right there with her, but they needed a boring name because it was secret.)

“I was expecting something a trifle more encouraging.”

Wanda just stared at her. “Say what?”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. Look, that's where it's at with me. You don't like it, you shouldn'ta hired me.”

“Well, for what it's worth, Javier decided to go to Columbia. Which means he'll meet Aaron Shivovitz and Jamal Jones in college instead of in his twenties, and their boutique tech business will be formed in 2017 rather than 2025, and become far more successful. Since they're a Limbus contractor, this improves our own bottom line quite a bit.”

“Hooray for you. Long as Grams gets paid?”

“Of course. Oh, and as an added bonus, your mother's disability payments are now part of the same direct-deposit package that includes your grandmother's social security and the stipend from us.”

Wanda's eyes went all wide. “You mean, Mama can't touch it?”

“Not without your grandmother's consent, no.”

“Right on.” Wanda smiled. “I need a shower, then I wanna go visit.”

“I'd say you've earned it.” Isabelle returned the smile. “In fact, you can have the rest of the week off. Report back on Monday.”

“Whatcha talkin' 'bout? It's Friday.”

“No, it was Friday when you left 2011. It's still the same Tuesday afternoon when you left here.”

Wanda blinked. “Damn. This gonna take some gettin' used to.”

“It took us all some time to adjust. You will eventually. Enjoy your week off.”

7

Wanda actually came back to 666 Fifth Avenue on Friday, as she could only stand Mama for so long.

“Where you been?” Mama kept asking.

“Earning bread, Mama. What you been doin'?”

“That ain't none'a your business, baby girl. And why ain't you home to be makin' dinner?”

“'Cause my job means I'm travelin' a lot.”

“Oh yeah? Where you been goin'?”

Wanda just smiled. “That ain't none'a your business, Mama.”

“Don't you sass me, baby girl, you ain't too old for me to—”

“To what, Mama? Take me over your knee?”

“Easier'n ever to do it in this chair.”

It went on like that for days, before Wanda finally had to leave.

When she got off on the 42nd floor, she saw a familiar face walk past her and enter the elevator to go back down.

Whirling around, she peered right at him as the door closed on him. It was a brother, and one she knew. He was wearing a suit and was clean-shaven, but she'd seen him before wearing a big overcoat and all unshaved and stuff.

And then she placed him and she ran to Isabelle's office.

“What the hell is that cat doin' here?”

Isabelle looked up from her computer. “Which, ah, cat are you talki—”

“Why is Leroy up here wearin' a damn suit?”

“I don't—”

Wanda put her hands down on Isabelle's fancy desk. “Do not jive me. Why you got some crazy brother workin' for you? I thought the fuzz arrested his behind.”

Isabelle just stared at Wanda for a second. Then she leaned back in her chair and sighed. “The, ah, the fuzz went to the address you provided on 139th Street, but it was an abandoned building. Leroy Washington never lived there—or anywhere else in 1978. He's an employee of the department, and he was originally born in New York City in 2019. He's also one of our more talented agents.”

“Agents?”

“Yes. You see, Wanda, we needed you. We still need you. Recruiting you would have been possible if you'd only lost the job at Smith's Diner, but we decided the chances would be much higher if you lost both your jobs.”

“So you just sent him there to get me to lose my job?”

“Well, not just that. The man Mr. Washington shot was Harold Gage, and while the doctors at Harlem Hospital were able to save his life, he was a changed man. His near-death experience made him a much more conscientious businessman.”

“Lemme guess, you're contracted with him, too?”

“No, his competitors. Being conscientious led to poor judgment, unfortunately.”

“You wanted me that bad?”

“Yes.”

Wanda shook her head and started walking toward the window. “Crazy. I'm just some lady from Harlem.”

“Who has a marketable skill that was being wasted in your previous circumstance. One of the reasons why Limbus is so successful, Wanda, is because we are able to identify resources that other people can't. You are, bluntly, an African American woman in a poor neighborhood. The mainstream of your society does not recognize your talents.”

“Got that right.” She stared at the New York skyline, which looked even more wrong. There were more, and taller, buildings. “What year is that?”

“Hm?” Isabelle looked over at the window. “Oh, that's around 2050, I think. Yes, I can see the Bloomberg Tower, and that opened in '50.”

“City just keeps gettin' bigger. Even that new World Trade they were puttin' up in 2011, that was gonna be bigger, too.”

Isabelle nodded. “But it's the smaller elements that we're concerned with. And I have your next mission, if you're ready.”

8

Dressing in regular clothes for the time she was in wasn't too bad in 2011. It wasn't great, but at least the early 21st-century fashions weren't actively offensive.

But her second assignment took her to 1943, to talk to a young man who was planning to bring a gun to an Army recruiting center. He wasn't taken in the draft, and he wanted to serve, and they wouldn't let him. Wanda talked him out of it while sitting next to him at the Automat on Sixth Avenue, getting him to take a job working a factory, instead. And that was all well and good, but she had to wear tight, uncomfortable stockings and an ugly dress—and the shoes! Just before she went through the device, she asked Isabelle, “How did ladies wear these damn heels that feel like your feet're bein' crushed by a damn vise? Give me platforms any day of the week, least they let my feet breathe.”

The guy in the Automat went on to have a moderately successful career as a musician and a record producer, and he produced several hits for a record company that Limbus was invested in.

Her third assignment was during the blackout in 1965. Wanda had lived through the '77 blackout—that was when Rondell was killed—and it would've been one of the worst nights of her life even without what happened to Rondell. Just a damn nightmare with fires and looting and so on.

She'd just been a kid during the '65 one, and she didn't really remember it all that well. What amazed her now walking around in it was that it was so quiet. There weren't as many cars on the road, and nothing was on fire, so it was a lot darker, too.

A couple was looking for their six-year-old girl, but they were too scared to go out in the blackout. Wanda saw them sitting on their stoop and talked them into going ahead and looking because it was safer than they thought it would be. (“Man, that conversation woulda been different in '77,” she'd told Isabelle, who replied: “But the same in 2003.”)

They found her over by the FDR Drive, which meant she didn't die by falling into the East River and drowning, which meant she grew up to be a lobbyist who helped pass legislation that helped Limbus.

And on and on she went, to different times, but always in New York City. One time, she convinced a farmer in the Bronx not to sell his land (which was in the middle of what Wanda knew as the Parkchester neighborhood) in 1880, and then her very next assignment was talking a small business owner in Parkchester not to close her store in 2075, since she would get a big bump in sales for the Tricentennial the next year.

Between missions, she was always given the chance to visit home, but she did it less and less often unless she knew for sure Mama wouldn't be there.

After a trip to 1999, where she talked a woman into avoiding going to Times Square on New Year's Eve—her leg would've been broken, which would've kept her from running in the New York Marathon, which was where she'd meet her future wife—she came back to see Isabelle.

“I'm sorry, Wanda, I'm afraid I have some bad news. Wilhelmina Jackson passed away in her sleep last night.”

Wanda immediately ran to the elevator and went down to catch the subway home.

Mama wasn't home when she got there, but the cops who were there said that someone called 911 from the phone in their apartment, so it was probably Mama who found Grams's body.

Over the next few days, Wanda made all the arrangements. The funeral was held at their church on 129th Street, and all of Grams's friends from the neighborhood were there. The funeral home had her cremated after, which was what she wanted.

Mama didn't come to the funeral. Or back home.

After two weeks of waiting for Mama to come home—or to call or something—Wanda gave up. She gave up the apartment, since Limbus let her stay at 666 Fifth, and since Mama had disappeared. Wanda suddenly wished that they lived in the 21st century, when people had their own personal phones. Then maybe she could have found Mama.

But maybe this was best.

When she went back to work, Isabelle said, “I want to caution you, Wanda, that this next assignment is a difficult one. You can refuse if you want.”

Wanda fell more than sat in Isabelle's guest chair. The view was of the skyline in 1932, with the just-finished Empire State Building standing out from all the other tall buildings. “Just tell me. I need somethin'.”

Isabelle stared at her for a few seconds first. “All right. Your assignment will take you to July 1977.”

Now Wanda winced. “Say what?”

“As I said, you can refuse. There's a young man named Luther White who needs to be convinced to take action.”

After Isabelle hesitated, Wanda rolled her eyes. “Just say it already!”

“It's not pleasant. Up until now, your assignments have all been what one could call a positive outcome. Not getting hurt, not hurting people, not dying—none of these have been what you would call life or death situations, truly.”

“But this is?”

“Yes.”

“What, you need me to tell this Luther White cat to kill someone?”

“Yes.”

Wanda's eyes went wide. “Say what? I was kiddin'!”

“I'm not. Luther White needs to shoot a gangster who goes by the name of 'Shorty.' Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of Shorty—he avoids cameras quite skillfully, which is much easier in the 1970s. But if Shorty lives, we do know that he will get several other people killed, including both his girlfriends—a waitress and a bookkeeper—and also start a gang war with the Italian Mafia that will result in the deaths of many innocent bystanders. He himself will still die in 1981, but if he's killed in 1977, many more people will live—one of whom is a major asset to Limbus.”

“One'a them innocent bystanders?”

Isabelle just said, “If you don't want to take the job—”

“Nah, it's cool. I figured you'd be layin' something like this on me sooner or later. Y'all are too nasty to always be sendin' me on nice assignments.”

The good thing was that she could wear normal clothes.

But that was the only good thing. The last place in the world she wanted to go was New York on July 13th of last year.

Or, actually, July 12th, since that was when she was supposed to meet up with Luther. It was at a bar, which was one of Mama's favorites, but she lucked out, and Mama wasn't there.

Luther's file said he had a thing for ladies with short afros, flat noses, and really dark skin, and Wanda already had those, which was probably why Isabelle tagged her for it.

“Hey baby,” Luther said to her when she sat down at the bar near him. “Let me buy you a drink?”

“Damn, brother, I just sat my behind down. Give a lady a chance to settle?”

“And let some other dude horn in on you? No chance, baby, no chance.”

Luther was about as smooth as sandpaper, but Wanda let him play his game anyhow. They shared a bunch of drinks, eventually moving from the bar to a table.

“I gots to say, baby, you are a fine distraction.”

Wanda got all fake-outraged. “Distraction? That all I am to you?”

“Oh, I'm hopin' for more, you can believe that, but right now—well, life's fulla some complicated shit. 'Scuse me,” he added quickly. Wanda had already made clear how much she hated profanity.

“Complicated how?”

“There's this bad dude named Shorty. He needs to go, you dig?”

“Go where?”

“You don't need to worry about that, baby, point is—”

“Don't talk to me like I'm no child! Look, if the brother needs to go, he needs to go.”

“I just don't think I can do it.”

“Do what?”

Luther looked away. He'd been staring right at her the whole time—it was actually kinda freaky, and if she'd really met him in a bar, she'd have already left the bar to get away from this cat by now—but he couldn't look at her anymore. “I been livin' the life since I was a kid. I rumbled with some dudes, but I ain't never...”

He couldn't even finish the sentence. Wanda got up.

“Where you goin' baby?” Luther reached out to grab her arm.

She shook his hand off. “Sorry, but I got feathers in my drink.”

“Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, baby?”

“I was thinkin' you was a man, not a chicken.”

He stood up to face her. “Don't nobody call me no chicken, bitch!”

She got in close to him. “Then don't be no chicken, fool! You said this Shorty got to go. Then he got to go. Only question is if you man enough to be the one who escorts his behind out.”

He kept staring at her, all angry, and then he looked away. “All right, yeah. You right, baby, you right.”

“Damn right I'm right.”

“Let's sit back down, okay, baby? I don't want to ruin a fine evening like this.”

“Nah, I'd best be gettin' on.”

His face fell. “But—”

She put a finger to his lips. “I'm busy tomorrow, but the day after? I'll be right back here. You come back, you tell me you done what you said you was gonna do, and then we'll pick up where we left off, you dig?”

Luther grinned. “Outta sight.”

Wanda left the bar as quick as she could.

She had to get back to 666 Fifth. She did what she was supposed to do, and she had to get the hell out of there. She did not want to be present during the blackout.

On her way to the place Limbus had rented for her over on 140th, she stopped. Maybe she could stay. Head over to the St. Nicholas Houses tomorrow night, and she could actually see how Rondell got shot. She'd only been there after the police had cleared out the place after the shooting, not seeing Rondell's body until three days later at the morgue.

Wanda shook her head. There was no reason to see that. And she couldn't change it. She'd read the contract, and it was pretty clear that if she did anything on an assignment that wasn't specific to the mission, she'd be terminated. With everything Limbus Inc. could do, “terminate” could mean anything. She wasn't risking it.

Besides, Isabelle had talked about all those nanocams around—that was how they knew about her own craziness on July 13th. So she could always—

Again, she stopped walking. Another pedestrian almost crashed into her and cursed her out for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk.

For a few seconds, she just stood there, angrier than she'd ever been in her life.

Then she ran back to the place on 140th, and used the device to get back home.

Isabelle was waiting for her like usual. “Good job, Wanda. I know that was a tough—”

“Stuff it, bitch, why you lyin' to me?”

“I'm sorry?” Isabelle's head snapped back like Wanda had slapped her. “I didn't—”

“You said there wasn't no pictures of this Shorty cat, but y'all got them damn nanocam things. So y'all know what Shorty look like, so why didn't I get to see him?”

Isabelle sighed and shook her head. “I did tell the committee that you might figure it out.”

“Committee?”

“The committee that runs the department. My bosses. They insisted on the manner in which I presented you the assignment precisely because it was felt that you should not know the true identity of 'Shorty.'“

“Why the hell not?”

“Come with me.”

Isabelle led Wanda back to the big screen room. She pulled a remote control out of the pocket of her pantsuit—it was turquoise today. One of the screens on the wall got bigger, superimposed over all the others.

Wanda followed, fuming, wondering who this committee thought they were.

Then she stared at the screen.

It showed the courtyard of the St. Nicholas Houses. It was night, and none of the apartments had lights on. There was a barrel that was burning, and that was the only light. It had to be the night of the blackout.

Rondell was standing there facing two men. One of them was Luther.

She whispered, “No...”

The one who wasn't Luther said, “End of the line, Shorty.”

“Man, this is some messed-up bullshit! Y'all know who you fuckin' with? Do you, motherfucker?”

“Yeah, we do,” Luther said. “We fuckin' with a dude who gots to go. Bumpy put the word out that you was trouble. Now we doin' what gots to be done.”

“Don't nobody fuck with Shorty, you dig? Nobody! I will kill you and your family and your—”

Luther held up a .38 revolver and shot Rondell four times.

Isabelle stopped the playback and restored the screen to its usual small size with the rest.

“I don't b'lieve this,” Wanda whispered. “How is this—” She shook her head. “This can not be happenin'.”

“In fact, it already did.”

“Wait, you said that Shorty—that Rondell—that he had two girlfriends?”

“The waitress was you. The bookkeeper was a woman named Patricia Sheridan.”

“Say what? I know Trish! That bitch goes to my church!”

“And Rondell cheated on you with her. To be fair, he cheated on her with you, as well. Oh, and that thousand dollars you had to pay back because Rondell didn't read a contract? That was a lie. He lost that thousand in a heroin deal that went wrong and he was forced to pay it back. That was what started him on the road that led to him being declared persona non grata by Wendell 'Bumpy' Ross, one of the major crime bosses in Harlem, which is in turn why Luther White shot him.”

“Why did you make me do that?” Wanda asked angrily, her confusion and sadness being completely took over by being pissed.

“Because you were the only agent who would've been able to talk Luther into it. You're his type. And, as I said, if Rondell hadn't been shot that day, you would've gotten killed—thus costing us a major asset.”

“Say what?”

Isabelle smiled softly. “Wanda, the main life that we needed to save—the major Limbus asset that needed to be preserved by making sure that Rondell Smith died on the 13th of July 1977—was you.”

9

Wanda walked out of 666 Fifth right after that.

She just started walking up Fifth. Eventually she came to the corner of 59th Street. FAO Schwarz was on her right, the Plaza Hotel on her left. She could never afford the toys at Schwarz, although Grams did once get her a rocking horse from there for Christmas. That lasted for about two years before Pops broke it. He said it was by mistake, but Wanda never believed him.

She walked up into Central Park. Maybe she'd get mugged and put out of her misery.

Isabelle had let her go, but she knew that wouldn't last. She'd signed up for ten years, and she hadn't even finished the first year yet. Breaking the contract was also grounds for termination, and she was even more sure now than ever that they meant “terminate” in the nastiest way possible.

She had nowhere to go. Grams was dead, Mama was missing, the super was living back in their old pad. She didn't have any real friends, just a few people at church, and maybe Frieda. Hell, she'd been so busy working two jobs, she didn't have time for friends. Particularly after Rondell got shot.

Eventually, she wound up at the carousel. She decided to pay the fare and ride one of the brown horses. Grams used to take her to the carousel when she was a little girl, but she hadn't ridden on it since she was twelve. She always rode on the brown horse.

The stupid music started playing on the calliope and the brown horse moved up and down in a slow steady rhythm. The breeze blew through Wanda's short afro—that same short afro that Luther thought was so groovy—as she leaned back, holding onto the golden pole.

Rondell lied to her.

Hell, that was the real reason she didn't have any friends. After Rondell died, she just stopped giving a damn about her own life. She'd work her jobs and make enough so that she and Grams and Mama could live, but there was nothing else, except church on Sunday, and she didn't talk to anybody at church, either.

It was all a lie anyhow. Rondell was a gangster. And a cheater and a liar.

And Wanda was the one who got his fool behind killed.

Did he deserve to die? He was going to die in '81, or at least that was what Isabelle said, and Wanda herself and Trish and other people would be dead also.

Then again, she'd been to 2075. Everyone she knew was dead by then. And everyone she met in 1880 was dead by her time.

The carousel slowed down and Wanda hopped off the brown horse.

“A major asset,” Isabelle had called her. That was definitely new.

By the time she made it back to 666 Fifth, it was starting to get dark. She took the elevator up to the 42nd floor. When she'd been in 2011, she'd actually used the internet to look up the building, and officially it only had 41 floors. She wanted to talk to Isabelle about it, but that could wait for another time. There was only one thing to say to her right now.

Isabelle was actually packing up her stuff to go home when Wanda walked in.

“Wanda! Are you all right?”

“No. I ain't never gonna be all right, but that was true before you left that damn card in my door. Fact is, I ain't got nothin'. I ain't got my jobs no more, I ain't got Grams no more, I ain't got Pops no more, I ain't got Mama no more, and it looks like I ain't never had Rondell in the first place. All I got left is you. 'Sides, I signed the damn contract.”

Isabelle nodded. “Good. I'm glad we understand each other. Get some rest. I'll have a new assignment for you tomorrow.”

“Right on.”

Third Interlude:  The Unblinking Eye

Sellers had played it straight. Malone arrived at the address where the club should be and found it unmarked, save for a single bulb that burned red above a doorway. A man, immaculately dressed, leaned against it. When Malone handed him the slip of paper, he took one look at it—and two looks at Malone—and ushered him inside.

The place was what he’d expected. Darker than it needed to be, wood paneling and plush couches with a bar that didn’t include too many rail brands. He sat down on a stool and a man dressed like the bartender in The Shining asked him what he’d like. He ordered a scotch and soda, and began to read.

Several scotches later, and he flipped the last page closed. Time travel. Impossible. Or was it? He didn’t know what to think anymore, and if Limbus was real—and at this point, why not?—then who was to say what limitations they might have? It was a scary thought. And eerily comforting, too. Between the thought of total chaos and someone running the show, he’d always sided with the latter. Maybe Limbus wasn’t God, but they seemed pretty damn near all powerful.

“Can’t say that I’ve seen you here before, friend,” said a man as he slid onto the stool beside Malone. “Always happy to meet a new member.” He held out his hand, and Malone took it.

“Not a member, actually. I’m here as a guest of a…mutual friend. Matthew Sellers.”

The man’s eyes twinkled, but his expression remained unchanged. “Is that right? Bernard Samuelson,” he said, finally letting go of Malone’s hand. “And how is Matthew doing?”

“Seems like business is pretty good. Always helps to have powerful investors.”

“I always found that be true.” He removed a cigar from his pocket and offered it to Malone.

“No thanks.”

Samuelson shrugged, snipping off one end with a gold-plated cutter before lighting the other with a match. Samuelson took a deep draw, and his eyes went to the stack of paper sitting on the bar.

“I always liked literary men. Business or pleasure?”

“Business. About a company I think you are rather familiar with. One called Limbus.”

Samuelson started to laugh. “And here I thought you were a serious sort of fellow.”

“Serious as a dead girl at the bottom of a mine shaft,” he said, flipping out his badge so Samuelson could see.

“Well I know nothing about that. As for Limbus, have you any idea how much that little story cost me? The headaches? The questions? Not only a murderer, but a head of some sort of cult? And my poor niece. I mean, you read the story, right?”

“And Katya. Must have been hell on her.”

Samuelson grinned. “Yes, detective. She’s real, too.”

“If it was such a hassle, why didn’t you sue? You, your niece, Katya. You should own Sellers.”

Samuelson puffed on his cigar and regarded Malone. He let the question hang a while before answering it. “I suppose I could tell you that I looked into it. Or I could say that Matthew is such a nice young man and I didn’t want to see him fail.”

“You could lie, in other words.”

“I would think a man in your profession knows that there are many versions of the truth. Shades of it, at least. But in this case, you’re right. I never considered suing Sellers. In fact, the thought never entered my mind.”

“The truth being a defense and all...”

Samuelson said nothing. Instead he turned to the bartender, ordered a bourbon on the rocks and another for Malone.

“I’m going to do something for you detective. Something I don’t normally do for anyone. And that is to give you some advice.”

“And what advice is that?”

“Stop.”

Malone sat, waiting for the rest. The rest did not come.

“Stop? That’s it?”

Samuelson nodded, puffing on his cigar.

“Are you threatening me?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” the other man said, chuckling. “I’m no threat to you. I hired Limbus only once, for an event that will happen but once in my lifetime. My association with them is done.”

With all he had seen, Malone shouldn’t have been stunned. But he was.

“You mean they are real? The stories are true?”

Samuelson shrugged. “I’m sure many of them are not. Mine is, to a degree. I don’t care to share with you what is fiction and what is fact, so please do not ask. But I can promise you this. Nothing is chance in this world. Nothing is coincidence. And that includes you being here, asking me these questions. You have been chosen, detective. For what, no one can say. Well, someone can, but you haven’t met them yet. They are preparing you, as they prepare all of their candidates. There is something they want you to do. Something that you are uniquely qualified for. It’s an honor, in a way. Out of all the billions of souls on the face of this planet, you are special. You have what it takes. You are the only one who can see it through to success. It’s a lot to take in, I know. To know that someone really does pull the strings. That someone makes the nations dance. But it is as it is.”

Malone stared at him, unwilling or unable to believe what he heard. “Look, Samuelson, I’ve already got a job. And it’s to find out who killed a girl in Birmingham, Alabama. Who strung her up over a hole and left her to die. And whether it’s a thrill killer or a bunch of psychos roleplaying, I don’t care. Now tell me where I can find Limbus.”

Samuelson gestured to the stack of papers. “That’s one of theirs, isn’t it?”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who cares?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Sellers,” he said.

“And where did he get it?”

Malone shook his head. “I don’t know. Some fucker calls himself ‘Jack Rabbit’ sent it to him.”

Samuelson laughed. “Ah, Jack Rabbit. Of course. He has been in their employ for a few years now. I will give you a gift, detective. The most valuable gift a man can give, one of information. But I beg you not to use it. I beg you to go back to Alabama and bury your murder away, deep in a cold case file.”

Malone hesitated, and Samuelson saw the truth in his eyes. He nodded, and there was pity there.

“I see. You can’t go back, can you? Or if you do, it will only be a matter of time before your entire life falls in around you. Of course. Of course that’s how it would be. So be it. Jack Rabbit is in the Czech Republic, in a little town called Český Krumlov. I believe you can use your skills to find him from there. And I guess you should take this.” Samuelson opened his briefcase, removing a stack of papers that Malone didn’t need to examine to recognize. “Now I know why this ended up at my office today. And it wasn’t for my edification. Good luck, detective.”

He handed the papers over to Malone, and he saw that it was another story. He nodded once to Samuelson, and then left him and the club behind.

He stood on the curb, staring at this latest piece of the puzzle. A cab slowed and stopped in front of him. Without thinking, he opened the door and slid inside.

“Where you headed?” the cabbie asked. He waited, expectantly, but Malone stared stupidly at the pages in his hands. “Hey, buddy, where you headed?”

Malone jerked his head up so quickly the cabbie flinched. “Airport,” he said. “International terminal.”

The Unlearnable Truths

From the Case Files of Sam Hunter

By

Jonathan Maberry

-1-

Sam Hunter

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I picked up the phone on the fourth ring. Goddamn thing would not stop ringing. I’d let it go to voicemail five times and hadn’t listened to the messages and now whoever it was kept calling.

The caller ID said “unavailable.”

Since it seemed pretty apparent someone didn’t want me to sleep in on a Sunday morning, I finally reached out from under the covers, grabbed the phone, dragged it back in where it was warm, and punched the green button.

“Go fuck yourself,” I mumbled, and hung up.

I was on that edge of sleep where you know you can not only dive back in, but step right into the dream you’d been pulled from. This was a good dream. It involved a lot of Scarlett Johansson and not a lot of clothes.

The phone started ringing again.

If I was more awake or, possibly, smarter, I’d have simply turned off the ringer. I was neither, at least not in the moment.

I pressed the button.

“Seriously,” I said, “go fu—.”

“Mr. Hunter?” interrupted a voice. Very female, very smoky.

So, I said, “Yeah…?” But I left it a question in case I needed to pretend I wasn’t Sam Hunter.

“We need you,” she said.

“It’s Sunday. Need me tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be too late,” said the woman. I figured her for early thirties. There was a quality to her voice that made it clear that she was young but not a kid.

“If it’s that pressing,” I told her, my own voice thick with sleep, “call 9-1-1.”

“We don’t work with the police, Mr. Hunter. We prefer to work with you.”

I rolled over onto my back. It had been a very good dream and I had a very inconvenient morning erection. And a very full bladder. But the bathroom was on the other side of the arctic tundra that is my apartment.

“Who is ‘we’?” I asked.

And she said, “Limbus.”

I hung up the phone again.

She called back seven more times.

I had braved the tundra and was on the toilet when I answered. I told her that I was on the toilet, hoping that would disgust her into hanging up. Not so.

“We need your help,” she said, ignoring my comments and any pictures it might paint for us both to look at. “You’ve worked with us in the past and—”

“And regret having done so,” I told her, then held the phone near the tank while I gave it a courtesy flush.

“You did superior work for us.”

“Flattery doesn’t do much for me on a Sunday morning.”

There was a very brief pause. “What does ten thousand dollars do for you?”

I closed my eyes. I really hate working for Limbus. I’ve been messed up—inside and out—twice now. I made enemies in very bad places both times. I have nightmares. Yes, even people like me have nightmares, and not all of them are about taxes or middle-age prostate issues.

And, let’s face it, I have to work a lot of hours doing intensely boring shit to come up with ten grand. On a good week I pull a thousand dollars doing investigations, chasing bail skips, snapping pictures of philandering spouses, or hunting for runaway kids. That’s a good week. Want to know how many good weeks I have in any given year? It’s a sad, sad number.

But…Limbus?

Fuck me.

“No,” I said.

She said, “And the other half on completion of the assignment.”

“Wait…what?”

“Ten up front and ten at the close,” she said. “And five on top of that if you can resolve this in less than twenty-four hours.”

I said nothing. Twenty-five thousand dollars? Holy rat shit.

She was quiet for a few moments, letting my greed, my need to pay bills, my assessment of multiple alimony payments, rent, car repairs, and maybe even a Sony PlayStation 4 for my office, nudge me toward the wrong decision.

I took a deep breath and girded my loins as well as someone can while he’s on the crapper.

“Thirty,” I said. “Half up front. All cash.”

She paused again, but I don’t think it was because she needed to count her pennies. More likely it was to take time to smile over the fact that she knew the hook was now firmly set in my underlip.

“We can do that.”

“If I like the job.”

“Oh,” she said softly, “I can guarantee you, Mr. Hunter, that you won’t like the job.”

“Shit.”

“So I’ll have twenty in small nonsequential bills delivered to your office within the hour,” she said, “and another twenty ready at completion.”

“Plus the bonus. Another five.”

“Another ten,” she said, selling it.

Fuck.

“Okay, damn it,” I said. “What’s the job?”

She actually had the courtesy to laugh out loud before she told me. I laughed, too, even though we were both laughing at me.

-2-

Mr. Priest

Town of Poliske

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation

Kiev Oblast, Ukraine

Six Years Ago

They moved like phantoms through a city of ghosts.

Mr. Priest and his four companions were dressed in form-fitting gray radiation suits. The latest design, and far more flexible even than the MAR 95-3. Very expensive, with an integrated charcoal weave infused into flexible PVC, lightweight air scrubbers, goggles with protective polycarbonate lenses, and chem-tape over all the seals. Wired with real-time telemetry that flashed data onto the big plastic over-hood, including rad count, mission clock, and maps.

Priest stopped at an intersection and looked up and down the streets. The blacktop was cracked and pernicious weeds had grown up and grown strange in the cold wasteland of this town.

“Lovely,” he muttered. His real name was Esteban Santoro, but he preferred to be called Mr. Priest, or just Priest. His business associates and even his enemies called him that. Unlike his real name, Priest was not on any warrant or watch list.

He did not consider himself to be evil, though he knew others did, and they could make a compelling argument. Priest considered himself to be a realist in a world that did not reward those who cling to illusions. National and international laws were subjective, created by specific groups to suit their own ends; they were not cosmic laws and therefore choosing not to obey them did not equal sin. The god Priest believed in—and he was deeply invested in the Old Testament—was a right bastard. Bloodthirsty, vindictive, duplicitous, occasionally malicious, and very violent. Priest admired those qualities in his god and cultivated them in himself. His long association with certain militant groups buried deep inside the skin of the Roman Church shared many of those views, and even expanded upon them. Ask the Crusaders, the Templars, the pope who slaughtered the Templars, and the Inquisition. Priest’s grandfather had been a cardinal during the Second World War and had worked hand-in-glove with the Nazis.

Priest admired power as much as he admired knowledge. The development of power and the search for knowledge were sacred to him.

Which is why he was in Ukraine with his team. A very powerful and very rich American industrialist had paid Priest a lot of money to locate and recover some very ancient knowledge. It was so immense an undertaking that it felt very much like a sacred quest. No grail at the end of the journey, of course, but something much more real and much more powerful.

A book.

One of many that he had been hired to obtain.

It pleased Mr. Priest to have his specific skill set acknowledged and admired. And paid for. Oh yes, his employer, Mr. Oscar Bell of Long Island, had dug deep into his personal fortune to underwrite this expedition. And, should this one be successful, there would be others. Bell had given him a deliciously long shopping list.

His current lover, Katrinka Favreau—known as Rink—had accompanied Priest on a few smaller missions in the past, but nothing like this. She was convinced that he was some kind of archeologist in the vein of Indiana Jones. Rink was brilliant but immensely naïve when it came to people. She was, however, a superb cultural anthropologist and research scholar, and that was useful to him. Priest was moderately sure that he loved her, but love was a fragile thing to him. If she became less useful or in any other way inconvenient, he would abandon her in whatever town was handy. And if that didn’t work, well…

Rink came to stand next to him. She was much shorter than he was, and her goggles were equal with his chest. As she so often did, Rink slipped her hand in his, their gloved fingers entwining.

“This place gives me the creeps,” she said.

“This place would give Satan Himself the creeps,” he agreed.

Frigid winds blew debris and pieces of dead plant matter past them. Boris, Keppler, and Hiro clustered behind them, silent, in awe of the spectacle.

“Looks worse in person,” said Rink, and Priest nodded. They’d studied maps, photos, and videos of Poliske, but none of that really captured the desolation.

When reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, this entire part of Ukraine was flooded with radioactivity. Even so, the residents of this town were not evacuated until forty hours later. By then many of the people who had lived and worked here had been exposed. Cancer had chased them out of Poliske and dragged many thousands into early graves. Now that specter of death seemed to whisper to them in the howling wind. It loomed above them in the lichen-covered brickwork of gray buildings. It reached for them with fingers of diseased plants and stunted trees.

Poliske was dead but it wasn’t resting in any kind of peace.

That was fine with Priest. He didn’t bring his team here for the nightlife, and he didn’t care much about ghosts. Some, but not much.

Other things, maybe, but that fear was closer to excitement, and it was something he kept private, even from Rink. As far as she knew—as far as any of them knew—they were here to loot an old Soviet lab. That was scary enough for them.

One of the other team members came to stand with Priest and Rink.

“Call it, dude,” said Hiro Tsukino. He was an urban explorer who’d gained international fame as the point man for the Tengu, the UE team from Japan. They’d conducted scavenging hunts into several of the most dangerous haikyo—abandoned buildings. Their level of skill, inarguable courage, and apparent fearlessness had made them an Internet sensation. As a teen Hiro had gone into the ruins of several department stores within hours of the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011. While aftershocks sent jagged cracks running up the walls, the Tengu had gone deep inside and returned with money and jewelry from the stores. His subsequent arrest for looting had sparked a media frenzy, and parties interested in Hiro’s bravery and skill set had financed a particularly brutal team of lawyers. Since then the Tengu had disintegrated as many small anarchist groups will, but Hiro rose to solo stardom. Despite the dangerous and illegal nature of his adventures, he received huge endorsements from international companies, including GoPro and Under Armor.

When Priest reached out to him to join the Poliske trip, Hiro had jumped at it. Poliske was legendary. A city in the shadow of Chernobyl. Not just ghosts, but nuclear goddamn ghosts. Hiro was in before Priest told him what his fee was. When they did get to the fee, Hiro was seriously jazzed, but the allure of Poliske was even greater than all those zeroes. The urban explorer was a true daredevil. He was also, as far as Priest could tell, truly fearless. Cautious, yes, but that was more about being smart than blind and reckless. Priest and Rink had interviewed the scavenger and concluded that Hiro was apolitical and a borderline anarchist. That was good. That was fine. Anarchists, even those who still clung to some of their social connections, were useful.

Psychopaths like Boris, Priest’s bodyguard, were different. Boris’ skills were limited to things he could hurt and things he could kill. Useful, but neither Priest nor Rink—or Hiro for that matter—would burn up calories shedding tears if Boris didn’t make it home. As long as Boris kept them safe until they were out of this dead fucking town and this dreary fucking country.

The last member of the team, and the only woman besides Rink, was Inga Keppler, a Swiss nuclear science grad student. Priest would have preferred having a Ph.D. on the team, but Keppler was available, she was intensely brilliant, and she could be bought. That was a winning combination. She also looked like a bridge troll, so Rink never got jealous about having her around.

“The shoe factory is over there,” said Priest, pointing to a building down the street to their left. It was a squat three-story pile with a damaged façade and crumbling brickwork, grimed windows and piles of trash heaped against the rusted metal door.

The five of them began moving toward the building. Boris translated the sign outside, “‘Three Brothers Shoes and Leather Goods’.” He turned to Priest. “Are you sure about this? How good is your intelligence, tovarisch?” His accent was thick, but Priest was used to it by now.

“No doubts,” he told the group. “It’s there.”

They reached the building and looked around. There was dirt and mud from recent snowmelt on the ground. Boris squatted down to examine it and then nodded.

“It’s good. No one’s been here in a long time.”

“How long?” asked Rink. She was nervous and kept looking up and down the street as if expecting Russian or Ukrainian troops to appear out of thin air.

“Meh,” said Boris shrugging, “this mud is two, three weeks old. Can’t tell more than that, but nobody’s gone in or out today.” Even so he unslung his rifle as he stood. He carried an AK-103 with the stock folded down and two magazines taped jungle style, one fitted into place and the other reversed for an easy swap-out in a firefight. Privately, Priest thought the double taping of the mags was probably something Boris did to impress the rubes. It was amateurish and clumsy, but it looked cool. Boris was playing his role of professional soldier to the hilt.

“You’re up, Hiro,” he said, and the former leader of the Tengu nodded and approached the door.

There are a lot of ways to approach a new site when doing urban exploration. Hiro was bold but he was also smart. Going over the schematics and floor plans of the old shoe factory was the smart way to go. Taking risks was part of the game; being stupid was not.

“We need to be careful in there,” said Hiro. “There’s been years of rain and snow with no one to repair weather damage. The floors could be rotted out; the ceiling could be ready to collapse, if it hasn’t already. Don’t trust anything until I’ve checked it out first, okay?”

The others nodded, except for Priest. He’d brought Hiro along mostly to field-test the man’s attitude, not because he thought this particular hunt was going to require his skills. After today, though, Priest would know whether Hiro could be trusted. Even so, he let the urban explorer have his moment of authority.

The door was slightly ajar and yielded to a light touch.

“Lock’s been forced,” observed Hiro.

Boris bent to look and nodded, then sneered. “Probably one of those samosely pieces of shit. They’re worse than rats.”

Despite the radiation, dozens of illegal ‘self-settlers’ had moved into Poliske and the other abandoned towns in the Exclusion Zone. They were mostly old, poor people who could not afford to live anywhere and had been drawn like flame-dazed moths to all those empty buildings. Sometimes their corpses were recovered and buried by workers of the State Agency of Ukraine on the Exclusion Zone Management; and sometimes they were left to rot.

“How could they even live here?” asked Rink.

Keppler shrugged. “The radiation isn’t as bad as all that. I mean, it will kill you, but not right away. Not for years. If you’re old…” She shrugged again, as if to say “who cares?”

Priest and Rink exchanged a brief look. He knew that Keppler tended to underestimate the danger because she didn’t want to scare anyone off. Her bonus was contingent on completing this mission. On the other hand, she had insisted on the very best protective equipment including the decontamination units in the van that was parked at the outer edge of the thousand-square-mile zone. Keppler had also insisted on a timetable that would get them out of here well before the radiation eroded the integrity of their suits.

“Let’s get a move on, yes?” suggested Priest. “Tick-tock. There are satellite fly-bys of this area and we have a three hour and fourteen minute window.”

“We should think about getting out of here sooner than that,” advised Keppler.

“That is the plan. But we leave when we’ve found what we came for.”

Hiro nodded, unclipped his flashlight, and stepped cautiously into the warehouse. The others followed and they moved through a vast space of old machines, rows of industrial sewing machines, bins where rolls of material like the stuff outside was rotting away. Animal bones littered the floor and Priest thought that some of them looked very strange. Too many legs, deformed skulls, spines mottled with odd lumps of calcium. Evidence of the radiation’s mutagenic horrors even on creatures as stalwart as rats.

“I hate this place,” whispered Rink.

“We’re not shopping for a summer home, darling,” he told her. “Come on, Hiro, this is taking too long.”

“No, it’s not,” he said as he entered one of the offices. “Come on, I think I found it.”

They hurried in after him.

“I don’t see nothing,” said Boris, looking around at a desk and chair that were badly warped by dripping water. There was a row of file cabinets along one wall and lots of framed pictures of men and women in old Soviet uniforms. They stood in front of the row of file cabinets. Diagrams and measurements flashed on the inside of his hood.

Hiro used his flashlight to tap on the cabinets and on the wall behind them. “Yeah, this is definitely it.”

Priest clapped him on the shoulder. “Perfect.”

“What?” demanded Boris. “It’s old office furniture? So what?”

Priest shook his head. “The floor plan I got from my contact in Moscow said that this whole block of buildings was erected over an old coalmine that had played out in the 1920s, right? But who would build a factory town over a coalmine? Just from the perspective of structural engineering it makes no sense. You’d have to either fill in the mine or otherwise reinforce it.”

The others stared at him like studious school kids.

“The specs on this place are nonsensical if you are trying to understand it from any direction except one in which the coalmine is still in use. Or, was in use before the reactor blew at Chernobyl. The orientation of the buildings, the power grid, the population numbers, even the location of railroad tracks and a landing strip.” Priest bent close to examine the cabinets. “I hired a forensic accountant to tear apart the billing records and manifests of building materials sent out here. For it to make sense there would have to be five times as many buildings, and they’d all be in better condition than what we’ve seen. There are records of premium-grade steel alloys, timber, and other stuff. Incredible amounts of expensive materials. Why would a shoe factory like this need six super computers? Why would almost two percent of the electrical power generated by Chernobyl come here? Two percent. Do you know how much power that is?”

“Let me guess,” said Boris. “Two percent?”

“Amusing, but no. It’s enough to light up twenty cities of this size.”

Keppler nodded. “Maybe more.”

Boris frowned. “Then what—?”

Instead of answering, Priest nodded to Hiro, who began pulling out the cabinet drawers. Most of them were crammed with old papers, and for a moment Priest’s heart began hammering in his chest as doubt flared. Then the top left drawer rolled out differently than the others. It came too far out, as if the cabinet was far deeper than the wall against which it was set. He reached inside and fiddled with something the others couldn’t see. There was an audible click and one half of the row of cabinets seemed to lean out toward them.

“Help me with this,” said Hiro. Priest and Boris took hold of the handles and pulled. It was immediately clear that the cabinet was a dummy set on hidden casters, but rust made it improbably heavy. “Might have opened electrically. God, it weighs a ton.”

Boris gritted his teeth, made a sound like an angry bear and pulled. The rusted wheels made pig-squealing noises as the cabinet moved. The whole row moved outward with dogged reluctance and then stopped, revealing a darkened cleft two feet wide.

“Light, light,” called Priest, snapping his fingers impatiently, but Hiro was right there. He aimed the beam inside and they could see that there was a short hallway beyond the cabinets, beyond which a flight of stairs dropped into utter darkness.

“What the fuck?” asked Boris. “How’d you know about this?”

“A little birdie told me,” said Priest. “What does it matter? The only thing I care about is what’s down there.”

“What is down there?” asked Keppler. “Is it something to do with what happened at Chernobyl?”

Priest laughed. “Oh, no,” he said as he squeezed inside, “this is a lot more dangerous than that. And a lot more beautiful.”

-3-

Sam Hunter

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The woman told me her name was Acantha. Greek in origin, I think, though her accent was generic American. No last name given, even when I asked really nicely.

When she got around to telling me about the job it was pretty clear why she was willing to dig deep to hire me. Understand something, she wasn’t just looking for a P.I. who isn’t afraid to bend the rules a tad, but specifically Samuel Theiss Hunter. Limbus, whoever the Christ they were, knew who and what I was. The jobs they brought me before were not something one of the bigger and better run investigations agencies would have taken or could have handled. I’m not saying I’m better, because…hey, let’s be real, but I am different. Limbus hires me for oddball jobs because of certain qualities I bring to the mix. Not talking about my snarky wit or roguish charm.

No, I’m talking about the whole fangs and claws and fur thing.

As for Limbus…I haven’t been able to discover much about them except for a few things. First, they have the most enigmatic and annoying fucking business cards I’ve ever seen. Nice paper, embossed printing, quality work, but this is what their cards say:

LIMBUS, Inc.

Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

Call us. We employ. 1-800-555-0606

How lucky do you feel?

Sounds like a recruiting ad for a hooker, or maybe a thug to guard a brothel, and not in the good part of town.

The first job I took for them involved the hunt for some rich assholes who were skinning innocent young women alive. Why? Aside from the fact that they thought their money and family connections gave them license to piss on anyone lower on the social ladder, these particular privileged dickheads were trying to appease a demon.

Yeah. Be with that for a minute. Their game plan boiled down to conjuring a demon, appeasing the demon, enslaving the demon in order to get it to grant them a lot of wishes including even more money and maybe bigger dicks.

Whatever.

Bottom line is that we had words. Me and them, and me and the demon. Actual demon. Scared the piss out of me when I realized that these ass-clowns had conjured a real demon. No, check that…it scared me to know that demons were real and not something from bad horror movies. My life’s been pretty weird but I thought there were limits, you know? There were already enough things going bump in the night. But, I don’t get to make that kind of an existential call. So, yeah…demon. Fuck me.

But, fuck him too. Turns out, he could bleed. That was a bit of a game changer because up to then I figured I was totally screwed. I mean, demon, am I right? That’s usually the point at which you figure it’s game over.

But if something can bleed, then it can die. That, as it turned out, is something of a cosmic verity. When the universe turns out to be both bigger and badder than you think, it’s nice to know that there are rules.

My second Limbus job was last year, and it involved a team of North Korean wacko scientists trying to create lycanthropic super soldiers. No, I am not making this up and I am not drunk. Okay, well, maybe I’ve had a couple-three beers today, but everything else is straight. Werewolf super soldiers.

So, my life is complicated. To which you might say, no shit, Sherlock. Fair enough. But I’m telling you all of this because it’ll help you frame your mind for what Acantha told me about the job.

I took the phone with me through the door that connected my crappy apartment to my crappy office. It was small, cramped, untidy, unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and probably unhealthy. I’d prepped the coffeemaker before I went to bed so that all I had to do was hit a button. If I could have gotten a coffeemaker with an IV drip to start the caffeination process that much quicker I’d own one. I knew that Acantha was still waiting on the line through all this even though she hadn’t said anything. She called me, so fuck it. Coffee first.

When the magical process of coffee making was in full swing, I plopped down on the creaky leather chair behind my desk. I flipped open my laptop and logged in.

“Okay,” I said, “hit me with some details.”

She started off by asking me a question. “Mr. Hunter, have you ever heard of the Unlearnable Truths?” When I was a little slow in responding she said, “Stop Googling them.”

“I’m not.”

“I can hear you typing,” she said. “Don’t bother, they’re not on the Internet.”

I stopped one-hand typing the words into Google. “Okay,” I said, “then what are they besides an obvious contradiction in terms?”

“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘Librorum Prohibitorum’?” she asked, then quickly added, “Please don’t look it up. Just answer me.”

“Um,” I said, “I don’t speak much Latin, but I can take a swing at it. Prohibited book? Something like that?”

“Very good, Mr. Hunter.”

“Do I get a cookie?”

“We’ll see. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was authorized by Pope Paul IV in 1559. It contained a list of books deemed by the Catholic Church to be heretical, lascivious, or anti-clerical.”

“Naughty books.”

“Naughty books indeed,” agreed Acantha. “And, yes, you can find mention of it on the Net. Look under ‘Pauline Index’. However what you’ll find is the wrong list of books. You see, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum contained two separate lists. The Pauline Index was a list of books the general public were allowed to know about but not allowed to have. Books that were decried by the church and sought by the Inquisition.”

“Okay. And the second—?”

“Ah, that is a very special list,” she said. “We call them the Unlearnable Truths. And they are the most dangerous books ever written.”

“Oh come on…”

She ignored me. “Even the titles of those books were kept secret from everyone except for a special and very covert office of the church and their field agents, who were known collectively as the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum.”

“Order of something-something,” I said. “Who are they?”

“The Brotherhood of the Lock. They are an ancient order of warrior priests,” she said, and there was a quality to her voice that I found both intriguing and alarming. She sounded genuinely scared. “They are the most intense and dangerous arm of the Inquisition.”

“You keep talking in the present tense but we’re discussing something that happened a long time ago, right?”

“Not entirely.”

“Hate to break it to you, sister, but I’m pretty darn sure the Inquisition is yesterday’s news.”

She sighed. “There is so much that regular people don’t know about the world, Mr. Hunter. Even people like you. And, let’s face it, the general public don’t believe you could possibly be what you are. Or that you’re from an ancient family of lycanthropes who can trace their unique bloodlines back to Etruscan times.”

“Okay, okay, fair enough,” I said. “Tell me the rest.”

“The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum—the Brotherhood—were created by a papal bull, but you won’t find that on the Net, either, or in any official church records. They were always kept secret. Only a few cardinals know of them, and most popes, including the current one, know nothing about them. Their mission is to search the world for the Unlearnable Truths.”

“And do what with them? Burn ‘em?”

“If possible.”

“How could that not be possible?”

“We’ll get to that,” said Acantha. “It was the mission of this brotherhood to seek out the Unlearnable Truths and to protect humanity from the secrets they contain. This they did by any means necessary. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that rivers of blood have been spilled. Many heretics were burned or butchered by the Brotherhood because, after all, sacrifices must sometimes be made to protect the flock.”

“You sound like you’re in favor of the Brotherhood’s game plan.”

“One can agree with the end result without agreeing with the motives or methods.”

I didn’t comment on that but encouraged her to tell me more.

“The creation of the Index,” she continued, “and the formation of the Brotherhood happened centuries ago. The Pauline Index has, for the most part, become a footnote in history. However the search for the Unlearnable Truths continues, as does the mission of the Brotherhood. They are real, they are dangerous, and they are relentless.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I’m getting to that. Until the early twentieth century the names of the Unlearnable Truths were unknown to all except the most devoted occult scholars, and then something happened, something that brought the titles into the public consciousness.”

“What do you mean?”

“We…don’t actually know how or why it happened,” said Acantha, “but during the twenties and thirties several writers of pulp fiction—predominantly horror and science fiction writers—began mentioning the titles of those books in their stories. Luckily the contents of the books formed no part of the text of these stories, but it was devastating to discover that even the titles should be so casually mentioned.”

“Mentioned how?” I asked. “I don’t follow.”

“Have you ever heard of a writer named Howard Philips Lovecraft?”

I sighed and it turned into a shiver. “H.P. Lovecraft. Sure. The name’s come up.”

“Have you read his stories?”

“Yeah.”

“And—?”

“And what?”

“Do you think they are entirely fictional?” asked Acantha.

I sat back in my chair and put my heels up on my desk, crossing them, trying to convince my body that everything was casual and cool. However I was sweating under my clothes. Last year—on a gig that didn’t involve Limbus—I’d had a run-in with a group who seemed to have stepped right out of a Lovecraft story. They were not products of some asshole writer’s lunatic imagination. I wish to Christ I could say they were, but I’m still having those nightmares.

“I try to keep an open mind,” I said carefully.

There was a sound that might have been a small, quiet laugh. “Have you read any of the writings of Lovecraft’s colleagues and those influenced by him, particularly the stories collectively known as the Cthulhu Mythos?”

“Some of them.”

“August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard…” She rattled off a dozen or so names. I knew most of them, though I hadn’t read all of them and told her as much. “In those stories the writers make mention of forbidden books. Do you recall any of the titles?”

“Um…only the main one, The Necronomicon.”

“Ah, yes. That is one of them.”

“One of…which? Are you saying that The Necronomicon is one of these Unlearnable Truths?”

“That is precisely what I’m saying, Mr. Hunter.”

“Oh,” I said. “Shit.”

“There are many other titles on the list. The Book of Azathoth, The Cloister Manifesto, The Book of Eibon, The Book of Iod, The Celaeno Fragments, The Cultes des Goules, The Eltdown Shards, The Revelations of Gla'aki, Incendium Maleficarum, On the Sending Out of the Soul, De Vermis Mysteriis…and a dozen others.”

“Shit,” I said again.

“Over the last five centuries the Brotherhood obtained many of these books, Mr. Hunter. Some were destroyed, others were locked away in the vaults of churches and other sacred places.”

“Why weren’t they all destroyed?”

“Because some can’t be destroyed.”

“Why not?”

“There are protections.”

“I don’t like that word much,” I admitted. “Are we talking magic spells or something?”

“Or something. It varies with each book.”

“Shit.”

“Which brings us to the purpose of my call,” said Acantha. “For the last century or so the Unlearnable Truths have been inert. Contained, you might say. Or lost. There were some tremors of course when the pulp fiction writers began naming them, and how and why they did that remains a mystery, but the books themselves did not appear. That, however, has changed. Limbus has learned that there are several parties actively seeking these books. Great money has been invested in finding them, and there are several competing teams.”

“Teams?”

“The Brotherhood, of course, and some groups of what appear to be special operators working for highly secret and deeply illegal groups within various world governments. That includes your own.”

“My own? You’re not American?”

“I’m not anything,” she said. “I work for Limbus, Inc.”

“Which means what?”

She did not answer that question. Instead she said, “It has come to our attention that one of the most dangerous of these books is being brought to America. It will arrive via cargo ship in a Baltimore port in a few hours. We want you to intercept the people who are in possession of the book and recover it for us.”

“Uh huh. Explain to me exactly why I should risk my ass to get a magical book and then turn it over to people I don’t know and, quite frankly, don’t really trust? You sound like a smart lady, Acantha…sell that to me.”

-4-

Mr. Priest

Town of Poliske

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation

Kiev Oblast, Ukraine

Six Years Ago

“It’s probably unstable,” said Hiro as they gathered together at the top of the darkened stairs. “Let me go first. Nobody moves until I give the word, and then only where and when I say, okay?”

“Whatever, tovarisch,” said Boris with a snort. “Do you want to shake my dick when I take a piss, too?”

“Didn’t bring tweezers,” said Hiro.

Rink and Keppler burst out laughing. Boris shot them evil looks.

“You think that’s funny? How about you suck my dick and see if it’s too small to choke you.”

“I—,” began Rink, but Priest clapped his hands once, loud as a gunshot and everyone jumped. “Okay, that’s enough. Why don’t you all shut the fuck up, yes?”

Silence fell hard and fast.

Priest gave the group a single, curt nod. “Everybody’s here to do a job, and keeping us alive down here is Hiro’s. If he says be careful, you be careful. End of discussion.”

Boris said nothing but he wore a dismissive smirk. Rink and Keppler nodded. So did Hiro. Without another word he began descending the steps, following the beam of his flashlight.

“Careful, Hiro,” said Rink. “Those stairs could be totally rotted out.”

The urban explorer stopped three steps down, then crouched and touched the surface of the stair. Priest heard him grunt in surprise. “This is weird.”

“What?” asked Rink, shrinking back.

“No, it’s okay,” said Hiro. “It’s just that this is wrong. The floor plans said that the basement was framed in wood, which means the stairs would be wood, too. That’s normal, even for factories like this. The basement is supposed to be small, for utility only. All of the storage is on the first floor. But look at these steps.” He widened the beam of his light to show a broad set of dusty white stairs. “These are concrete. Heavy-grade, too. And look over there. See that ramp? That’s for forklifts.”

“So what?” demanded Boris. “So they did renovations. Big deal. My uncle Uri installed a fuck pad in his basement, with a vibrating bed, mirrors on the ceiling, and a fully-stocked wetbar.”

Hiro shook his head. “No, dude, what I mean is that this design is military.”

Boris grunted.

“Military?” asked Keppler. “How can you be sure?”

“See those big conduits on the wall heading down there?” asked Hiro. “Those are ultra high capacity electrical lines, phone lines, and bundled Internet cables. I’ve seen this all over the world. We do events at a lot of decommissioned bases, and this is how they build it when they’re setting up an underground installation.”

Boris scowled. “There was no military here except a standard checkpoint.”

“Oh yes there was,” said Priest. They all looked at him.

“Why?” asked Keppler, confused. “What is this place? The building upstairs is falling down but this…this looks recent.”

“Not recent,” corrected Priest, “but very well-made. It was built in 1934 but completely rebuilt in ‘85.”

“What was rebuilt?” asked Keppler. “I still don’t understand what this is or what we’re looking for.”

Priest walked down six steps into darkness before he turned and smiled up at them through the plastic faceplate of his mask. “The shoe factory was legitimate, at least at first. Ordinary structure, normal electrical needs. That changed, though, when this underground facility was rebuilt and repurposed near the end of the Cold War. This was the last great investment of money, resources, and technology in the hopes of salvaging the Soviet Union. Everyone knew that things were heading toward an inevitable collapse because of economic forces here and the rise of the Reagan military-industrial complex. The Soviets couldn’t keep pace and they knew it. They were becoming resource poor, too, which is why they turned their attention to what can best be described as ‘alternative sources’ for raw materials.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Keppler.

Priest grinned at her. “That’s what we’re here to discover.”

Boris made a face and laid his hand atop the rifle that was slung across his beefy shoulder. “‘Discover’, tovarisch? We’re in a radiation zone. I can feel my sperm curling up and dying inside my balls. I don’t want to hear about ‘discovering’ anything. You said we were here to recover something. English may not be my mother tongue but I know the difference between discovery and recovery.”

“Relax, my friend,” said Priest, “call it a poor word choice. I know what we’re looking for and I have a pretty good guess as to where it is.”

Hiro mouthed the word ”guess.”

Keppler said, “If you know where it is, then let’s get a move on.”

But Priest did not immediately move. “Before we go down there,” he said, gesturing behind him to whatever lay in the shadows below, “I want you to prepare yourselves.”

Hiro automatically touched the seals of his suit. “Prepare for what?”

“For the impossible,” said Priest.

And with that he turned and ran down the rest of the steps.

They stared after him. Hiro cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “You do understand that preparing for the impossible is a contradiction in terms?”

Priest’s laugh floated up the stairs at them.

“That’s just great,” sighed the urban explorer. He looked at Rink and Keppler, and they all shrugged.

“At least it can’t get any weirder than that,” said Rink.

It was a joke, but it fell flat.

Boris said, “Shit.”

They followed Priest down the stairs.

They caught up with him on a wide landing that had three doors. One was marked as a service closet and when they looked inside they saw brooms, mops, buckets, and shelves of cleaning supplies. The second was a security room that had a long bank of old fashioned monitors, clunky keyboards on a metal table, and primitive computers. Both of these rooms were abandoned and filled with the dust of decades. The third door, the farthest away from the stairs, was bigger and more strongly made. Hiro was able to pick the lock and open it in less than five minutes, but they soon discovered a second and much heavier door inside. It was two feet thick and made from titanium, with concealed hinges. A key code reader was mounted on the wall, but they ignored it. The thing wasn’t necessary because the door stood ajar, blocked from closing by the thing that lay across the threshold.

“Jesus Christ,” gasped Rink.

Keppler recoiled. “What the hell is that?”

It was gray and strange and looked entirely wrong. At first glance it looked like a huge and unusually thick canvas water hose, but that wasn’t what it was. This was something organic, something that had been alive, and it was massive, bizarre and terrifying. The skin—if skin it was—was mottled with the faded marks of a dark pattern that was like rattlesnake skin. It was not smooth but instead showed the wrinkled sacs of what looked like pustules, and from the center of each of these was a leathery spike of hair or horn. The smallest of these spikes was an inch long and the largest were six inches. The hide was crisscrossed with lines and marks that looked uncomfortably like the scars of teeth and claws, but they were so big that whatever had left those marks must have been even more enormous than whatever this thing was.

Hiro, Priest, and Keppler shined flashlight beams over the carcass, and slowly inched forward to examine it more closely. Rink hung far back, unwilling or unable to draw closer. Boris stood beside her, his rifle now held tightly in his hands.

“Akógo chërta,” he breathed. “What the fuck is this bullshit?”

But Priest was only marginally less surprised than the rest of them, and shook his head slowly. He had been told the door would be blocked open, but his source hadn’t said by what. The ancient texts he’d pored over, and the reams of commentary, had hinted at fantastic things but he had never once stood in the presence of it. Knowing that a thing exists and seeing it in the flesh were vastly different.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, choosing the right lies and the right words of comfort to suit the moment, “but whatever it is—it’s dead. It’s not going to hurt us.”

“But what is it?” insisted Boris.

“It’s dead,” said Priest, “and that’s all that matters.”

Hiro studied it without approaching. “Looks like it got crushed by the door.”

Boris advanced cautiously toward it, keeping his barrel aimed at the center of its slack mass. The tentacle was caught a yard off the ground and drooped down on either side of the door. When Boris was a few feet away he lashed out with a kick, but all they heard was a dry rattle, like pieces of ivory in a leather bag. Dust puffed into the air and settled slowly.

Priest pushed Boris’s gun barrel away and knelt. The thing was long and it lay sprawled thirty feet into the landing, with more of it vanishing inside. When he touched it some of it flaked away into dust.

Hiro edged over and aimed his flashlight inside. “It’s torn off just a few feet on the other side.”

Keppler looked nervously over her shoulder. “Yes, but torn off from what?”

-5-

Sam Hunter

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Acantha sold it to me.

She sold it pretty hard.

“The Unlearnable Truths were never stored together,” she said. “Even those religious scholars who doubted—or claimed to doubt—their origins and nature did not risk creating a ‘library’ of such books. In church records there are accounts of catastrophic attempts to do just that. Three of them were stored in Pompeii, another four were in London in 1666. Do you know what happened in each place?”

“Yeah,” I said as I fetched a fresh cup of coffee and slumped back into my chair. “A volcano and a big fire. I watch the History Channel.”

“It became a duty of the Brotherhood of the Lock to keep the books separate and to keep them hidden. And, before you ask, this is why these particular books were never stored in the Vatican library. The cardinals overseeing the Brotherhood feared a disaster.”

“Why not weight ‘em down with rocks and drop ‘em into the fucking ocean?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she gasped. “That would never, ever do.”

“Why not?”

“They would be found too easily in the depths.”

“How? James Cameron going to grab them with that submarine thing he has?”

“There are things living in the deepest parts of the ocean that are sleeping, Mr. Hunter. If those books were dropped down they would cry out for those sleeping creatures and awaken them.”

“Now you’re just messing with me,” I said.

“I wish,” said Acantha.

“Balls.”

“I know.”

“Briny fish balls.”

“It is a larger and stranger world than you think.”

“Swell.”

“Once it became clear that the Unlearnable Truths needed to be separated,” continued Acantha, “Brotherhood teams took them to the ends of the earth and hid them away. Some, of course, had never been in the Brotherhood’s hands, but these had also been hidden away.”

“Hidden where?”

“It varies, of course. Some were buried along with saints or great warriors of the faith in the hopes that these champions would protect the world from the books. Others were hidden in inaccessible places and fiercely guarded by warrior monks, local tribes, or other sentries. This worked for many years…centuries in most cases, but that has changed. The development of archeological technologies and expeditionary equipment has left few places on our world inaccessible. The tombs of saints, kings, and other historical figures have been looted or excavated, the protective seals broken in the process. Tribes and ethnic groups shift and change as national lines have been redrawn. During the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the maps of the Middle East have been radically changed. Wars, ethnic genocide, and political instability have left some sacred sites completely abandoned or left them open to misuse. In Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, and Turkey the rise of Daesh—what you in America call ISIS or ISIL—have been actively seeking out any sacred site connected to any religion except their warped and perverted form of Islam. They think that by destroying temples or burning libraries they are eradicating other religions, but they are very wrong. They are destroying the protections that keep much older faiths from returning in force to our world.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Mr. Hunter,” she said sharply, apparently having heard something in my tone, “skepticism of a thing does not mean that it is not real.”

“Yeah, sorry. It’s just that this is a lot to swallow.”

“I’m not asking you to believe everything I’m saying,” continued Acantha, “but since you have agreed to take this case you need to at least accept the possibility that this is real. Otherwise you may not apply yourself with the degree of commitment that has earned you the respect of the Limbus board of directors. We do not want you to do this strictly for the payday.”

I sipped my coffee. “Okay, I hear you,” I said. “I’ve got enough professionalism to guarantee that you’ll get one hundred percent of my skills, energy, and enthusiasm. But actual belief isn’t something that can be bought or sold.”

The line was silent for a few moments. I swiveled my chair around to face the window. My view was of a bail bondsman, a leather bar, a tattoo parlor, and a diner. Yes, my office is in a cliché. A sad, low-rent stereotype of the kind of world-weary hard luck private investigator that looks great in movies. The truth is less charming. Most of my clients are half-crooked themselves, or they’re desperately afraid people who are trying to break their own hearts by having me tail their spouses to prove that life absolutely sucks. Most of the people I meet in my job are lowlifes, scumbags, thieves, junkies, or people who are so lost that they wash up like flotsam on the streets of this part of Philadelphia. There’s nothing noble about me or what I do. I don’t believe in a whole lot even though I know for sure that there’s more to the world than what can be measured or metered. The supernatural—or at least some of it—is real. I’m part of that world. My family has been part of it for a long, long time. But actual religion…? Jury’s been out so long on that, at least for me, that I don’t think they’re ever coming in with a verdict. If God is up there, then He’s either drunk, indifferent, or bugfuck nuts, because no one in any religion has ever been able to make a case—at least to me—that makes real sense of the universe.

Not that I’m an atheist or even agnostic. I don’t know what I am. I believe in something because I keep getting proofs that there’s something out there; but don’t ask me to tell you what it is. Maybe the great god of the universe is a maniac in four-point restraints in a celestial loony bin.

The stuff Acantha was selling was pushing me to the edges of credulity. It sounded like Dan Brown and Salvador Dali went out and got blue-blind paralytic drunk one night and cooked this up in the wee hours over Jager shots.

“Very well,” she said, “I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect you to believe everything about this. At least in the absence of firsthand experience. But I would at least ask that you keep an open mind.”

“I can promise that much,” I said, wondering if it was too early to put a healthy slug of bourbon in my next cup of coffee. Decided it wasn’t. “Tell me the rest.”

-6-

Mr. Priest

Town of Poliske

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation

Kiev Oblast, Ukraine

Six Years Ago

The tentacle was desiccated and had clearly been there for years. Time, the severe dryness of the air down here, and the hungry teeth of radiation had stripped it of nearly everything except its vague shape.

“Can’t be a tentacle,” said Boris firmly, nudging it again with his foot.

“Why not?” asked Rink, still unwilling to draw closer.

“It has bones. Listen.” He kicked it again and the dry rattle was clear even through the material of their suits. “What the fuck kind of tentacle has bones? Octopus don’t have bones. Squids neither.”

“And what the hell would an octopus be doing down here?” asked Hiro.

“No,” insisted Boris, “I said not an octopus. Too many bones and too…big.”

The whole section of severed tentacle was at least thirty feet long.

“Male giant squids can get to be over forty feet long,” said Keppler.

“It’s not a fucking squid,” yelled Boris. “Enough with squids and octopuses. This thing is something else.”

“Some kind of snake?” ventured Hiro.

Boris gave him a pitying look. “You been all over the world,” he said acidly. “You ever see a fucking snake looks like that?”

Rink touched her throat with her hands. “Where’s the rest of it?”

“Dead,” said Keppler. “A long time ago.”

“Then it can’t hurt us, can it?” declared Priest, his patience with all of them wearing thin.

“No…I mean this was cut off of something else. Something much larger. Where is the rest of the animal?”

“Dead somewhere, I expect,” said Priest. “Look, all of you—I admit that this is strange, but whatever it is…it’s past-tense, yes? It can’t hurt us anymore than velociraptor bones can stand up and bite a paleontologist. Have some dignity, for God’s sake.”

No one said a word. After a moment Priest nodded.

“Come on,” he said, “help me open the door. We need to get inside. We’re almost there.” No one moved. Not even Hiro. They stood staring at the tentacle until Priest gave another gunshot clap of his hands. “Now!”

They flinched and then inched forward, even Rink, and with great reluctance they steeled themselves, took up positions on one side of the carcass, gripped the lip of the massive door, and pulled. And pulled.

“It’s stuck,” gasped Keppler. “The hinges are rusted shut.”

“Then pull harder, yes?”

They pulled harder. Boris slung his rifle and stepped around to put his shoulder against the inside edge. He screwed up his face and gave a roar like a bear.

The door moved.

So did the tentacle. As the gap widened it dropped and rattled. Boris jumped back and brought his gun up.

“No!” yelled Priest. “Don’t you idiot—it’s the door, it’s just the door.”

The Russian eyed the length of dead gray flesh. “Der’mó,” he grumbled, but he lowered the gun.

They tried again. It moved. One stubborn, backbreaking inch at a time. Then it seemed to reach a point of acceptance and swung freely the rest of the way. They stepped back, panting and sweating.

Priest gave Hiro a light push on the shoulder. “You first.”

The urban explorer removed a couple of chemical glow-sticks, snapped and shook them, and threw them inside. Then, with Boris close behind, he stepped over the threshold. The others crowded behind him, with Rink bringing up the rear. However as soon as they were all inside, Hiro looked around, saw a heavy tool box and lugged it to the doorway, positioning it so that it would create an even sturdier block against them being trapped.

“Just in case,” he said, but no one argued against the caution. Certainly not Priest. He wanted to be here, but did not care to linger forever.

Inside they found more of the old fashioned computers, though most of these were more elaborate and expensive models used for high-level research. There were hundreds of them, big and small, on desks or freestanding. And there were machines of other kinds, design types that Priest had only ever seen in old books. He felt like he was in a museum of computer paleontology. Keppler’s thoughts clearly mirrored his own because she walked along with her fingers trailing over the dusty keyboards and murmured, “Dinosaurs.”

After a few minutes, Hiro stopped and turned to Priest. “Not that I want to downplay how good I am, but man…you don’t even need me for this. I’m used to ruins, but it looks like they built this place to withstand a frigging nuke. If it wasn’t for the, y’know, radiation and all, this place would be safe as Fort Knox. Nothing sketchy at all. Not even a hole in the floor. So far all I’ve done is pick a damn lock. I’m kind of useless on this job.”

“You know what they say, Hiro,” said Priest with a shrug. “It’s like a condom. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

“Great. I’m a rubber. That’ll look terrific on my business card.”

“Besides,” added Priest, “once we’re done here there are a few other places I want to visit, and some of them will offer challenges more appropriate to your skills, yes?”

“Sure, dude. Whatever. Long as the check clears.”

“What are we looking for?” asked Keppler nervously. “This place is enormous.”

“I know,” said Priest, beginning to walk faster now, moving along one of the walkways between the computers, breaking into a run, “but we’re almost there. It’s got to be here. It has to be.”

“Stop,” snapped Boris, stepping forward to put himself between the team and something up ahead.

“What is it?” asked Rink, shrinking back.

Ahead, only half visible in the dusty gloom, were several humped shapes.

“Let me look first,” said the soldier, but Priest stopped him.

“No, it’s okay. I think I know what that is.”

Without a word of explanation Priest hurried forward, with Boris racing along to stay ahead of him, weapon ready. The others followed and then slowed to a stop as the humped shapes resolved themselves into large medical gurneys upon which machines of various unknown function were attached, wires trailing.

Rink came up last and then uttered a sharp cry as soon as she saw what was on each bed. The others stood staring in horror. Even Boris gave a strangled cry in gutter Russian.

There were seven beds.

Each one was occupied by a person. Or what had once been a person. The bodies were withered, the moisture leeched from leathery skin, their eyes turned to milky kernels of dried rot, their hair nothing more than wisps as thin as spider webs. Electrodes had been drilled into their heads and others were attached at the wrists and heart and a dozen other places. Old-fashioned glass IV bottles hung from poles, the saline long since evaporated. Each body was strapped to the bed, and each had heavy manacles locked around their ankles.

The presence of seven restrained corpses was not what frightened the team.

No. It was the condition of each of them that made them stand around in abject horror.

“My god,” breathed Keppler. “What happened to them?”

Priest did not answer. Inside his suit his body ran with sweat and a palsy of nervous excitement made his fingers twitch spasmodically.

The bodies were each twisted into impossible posture, limbs either rigid or twisted into nightmare shapes, backs arched, mouths open in silent, eternal screams.

“Who are these people?” asked Keppler. She stood staring down at the ankle chains.

“Dreamers,” said Priest.

“That’s not funny,” said Rink.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” he said. “They were part of a special scientific project.”

“Dreamers?” asked Keppler. “What is that supposed to mean? And…what kind of program?”

“Have you ever heard of remote viewing?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s some kind of ESP nonsense, isn’t it?”

“It’s a bit more than that,” said Priest. “It’s a complex field of psychic expansion.”

“Oh for god’s sake,” began Keppler, but Priest stalled her with a sharp look.

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

Keppler looked momentarily flustered, then cleared her throat. “I do, actually. Sorry.”

Priest nodded, then glanced around at the others. “Look, I know there’s a lot of pseudoscience in pop culture, but not all of it is actually fake. There are groups within various governments that had deliberately muddied the waters by encouraging some of the more outrageous speakers in a campaign of obfuscation, essentially letting the crazy ones endanger the credibility of anyone seeking the truth. Because of that, the real truth and any true attempt at public disclosure is lost.”

Keppler nodded but said nothing. The others merely waited.

“The hype and nonsense make people think that all of this is just...silly. But it’s not. I know it’s not.”

“How do you know?” asked Hiro.

“I have been briefed by people in the know,” said Priest, but did not explain further.

The truth was that Oscar Bell was working with a science group hidden within the murky black budget waters of the Department of Defense. Bell’s genius son, Prospero, had been trying to build a dimensional gateway which he called a God Machine, but which had proved to be deeply flawed. Some of the side-effects of those design errors, however, turned out to have a variety of uses, particularly for the espionage community. One of them was to greatly enhance psychic abilities in select people. Bell leased the technology to the military so they could research and weaponize it. This research fell under the umbrella of the Gateway Project that even the president and congress did not know about.

For years, however, the research limped along, hitting roadblocks at every turn. The problem, it was discovered, rested with the main device Prospero had designed. He called it a “God Machine.” Other equally brilliant and equally mad scientists had attempted similar devices over the years. Nicola Tesla called his version an Orpheus Gate. Only recently Prospero Bell informed his father that in order to regulate the power of the God Machine he needed a code that had been carefully hidden in the pages of several ancient texts.

How these ancient books could connect with a sophisticated scientific device was something even Oscar Bell had not been able to coax out of his son. Not in any reliable way. Bell’s son tried to convince his father that those texts were filled with knowledge and secrets brought to Earth billions of years ago by alien races.

“My son is maybe the smartest person alive on this planet right now,” Bell had once told Priest, “but he’s a grade-A fucking whackjob. He thinks he’s an alien from another dimension and he’s building that goddamn machine to try and go home.”

Mad or not, Bell was willing to spend many millions to have Priest locate those books. The Unlearnable Truths. And the shadowy administrators of Gateway were hunting for them, too. They wanted to close Bell out of the project loop and take the God Machine and all of its useful side-effects away from the industrialist. True to their nature, they were doing it on the sly. They thought Bell didn’t know that Gateway agents were already in the field. Bell was very smart and very connected.

And he had Mr. Priest.

Priest considered sharing some of this with his team, but he did not want to let them in on everything. There were parts of this that Priest did not even share with Bell. This was bigger than Bell thought, and bigger than anyone at Gateway knew. Priest had not yet decided how he wanted to use all of what he had so far discovered, and all of what he intended to find.

“What does it matter to you?” he asked calmly. “Either you accept my word or you don’t.” When Hiro said nothing else, Priest continued. “First, you have to understand that the military has been experimenting with this for years. Decades. Since before World War II. The American military, the Chinese, the Brits, and a few others. Maybe everyone’s government, to one degree or another. Hitler’s Thule Society was definitely looking into psychic phenomena. So were the Russians. Remember I told you that this place was built in the twenties? That’s what I mean. This isn’t anything new, but a lot of time, money, and effort has gone in to keeping it off the public radar, or making what leaks out appear to be crazy bullshit.”

They all nodded.

“The research really intensified during the Cold War. Advances in computer and satellite technology boosted that along. Actually some of those advances came about because problems needed to be solved relative to projects like this. The space race was tied to this, too, but that’s another story. We’ll get to that later, I promise.” Priest touched the desiccated cheek of one of the dead dreamers. “This facility was originally built to investigate, develop, and weaponize tactical psychic potential.”

“Right,” said Hiro, “but what the hell is remote viewing?”

“Remote viewing,” said Priest, “is the attempt to project the consciousness to another place in order to observe things. The goal is to create a new level of espionage that does not require the actual physical presence of a person. Just the consciousness.”

Hiro laughed. “You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not, actually,” said Priest. “Not even a little. Imagine the potential. Being able to send your best spies across miles, past guards and walls and locked doors. No secret would ever be safe.”

“God,” said Rink.

“This line of research has had a lot of names over the years. The phrase ‘remote viewing’ was actually coined in the ‘70s by two physicists at Stanford—Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff—but everyone was working on it long before that. The Russians called it ‘remote control’, because it was always their intention to do more than look.”

“Wait,” said Hiro, “if this is supposed to be a spy program, then why are these guys chained to their beds?”

“Ah,” said Priest, “that’s because the attempts to explore remote viewing had a few, um, unexpected side effects, and some of those were quite dangerous. Some of the test subjects experienced psychological damage. Some shut down and went into comas. A few died. Well, quite a few, really. My guess is that these people were ‘volunteers’ from a gulag.”

“’Volunteers’?”

“Figure of speech, yes? If you were in a Soviet gulag and someone said volunteer for this or we shoot you, what would you do? Oh, don’t look so shocked. Using prisoners for medical experiments happens everywhere, including in your own country. Don’t you ever watch the History Channel?”

Hiro played his flashlight over the faces of the dead. “What the Christ happened to them? Did the Chernobyl radiation do this?”

“No,” said Keppler. “I don’t think so. There’s no sign of lesions. I think they may have been dead before the accident.”

Rink crossed herself. “They look so scared,” she said in a tiny voice.

Priest said, “Have you ever noticed that people make the same faces when they’re in ecstasy as they do when they’re in pain?”

Everyone stared at him.

“What?” Priest asked, genuinely surprised that they missed his point.

“Enough of this bullshit,” growled Boris. “Is this what we came all this way to find? A bunch of dead people?”

“No,” said Priest. He looked past them and saw the edge of something peeking out from around a corner. He began walking toward it and then broke into a run.

The others hurried to catch up. “Priest! What is it? What are we looking for?” called Keppler.

They rounded the corner and everyone stopped on a dime. Stopped and stared.

“That,” breathed Priest.

They stood before a massive arch that rose thirty feet above them, and was made from metal inset with hundreds of dials and meters. Heavy cables hung from sockets and snaked along the floor. Nearby, monstrous condensers and generators rested on steel skids. Inside the arch was a flat panel of featureless gray, but as Hiro played his flashlight beam over the rim of the arch the beams flashed with intense reflected light.

“What the hell is that?” asked Boris, pointing to a row of huge faceted crystals socketed into the metal skin of the arch framework.

They all approached with great caution and greater wonder.

“Jesus,” breathed Keppler, touching one of the crystals, “that looks like a ruby.”

“Can’t be,” said Boris, shaking his head. “It’s too big. Has to be fifty karats.”

“Fifty-six point one-one-eight,” said Priest.

Every head snapped around in his direction.

“What did you say?” asked Keppler.

“Every stone is exactly the same size. Ruby, garnet, emerald, sapphire, diamond. Each one is fifty-six point one-one-eight karats.”

Boris cursed in Russian and English. Hiro was panting. Rink looked totally dazed.

“That can’t be true,” insisted Keppler. “Do you know how much that would have cost?”

“To the ruble,” said Priest, nodding. “This project went a long way toward helping to bankrupt the Soviet Union.”

“But why?” breathed Keppler. “Why throw so much money away on decoration? It’s madness.”

“It’s science,” corrected Priest. “These stones are used to regulate very specific frequencies of power. They’re part of the device’s failsafe system. Without them this whole facility would have been in real trouble when they shut down the power at Chernobyl.”

“Looks pretty troubled to me,” muttered Keppler. “From what I can see they had to abandon this place in a hurry. And there’s that tentacle.”

“It’s not a fucking tentacle,” growled Boris, but everyone ignored him.

Priest smiled. “Believe me when I tell you, that if any of those crystals had been missing or damaged while this gate was active, then there would have been a disaster here a great deal worse than Chernobyl.”

Despite his comment, the team clustered around the stones. Priest could almost taste their hunger for the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gems. Radiation notwithstanding, they could each get massively wealthy and, big as they were, those stones could be carried out in three backpacks. Like the ones on the backs of Boris, Keppler, and Hiro.

“This…is…incredible,” said Keppler. She sounded like she was about to hyperventilate.

“You think that’s something?” Priest said, teasing them. “Then take a look at this.” He unclipped a multi-tool from his belt and stepped up to the arch, flicked open a flat-bladed screwdriver and gouged a long line across a metal panel. The gray paint curled away to reveal a different color, one that burned a fierce yellow.

“Oh my god…” breathed Rink. “You were telling me the truth. I…I thought you were just exaggerating so I’d sleep with you. But this is all true.”

The others bent close and stared at the exposed yellow metal, then they stepped back and let their gaze travel over the entire massive structure.

“No way,” said Hiro.

Boris said, “No fucking way.”

“Yes,” said Priest. “Every last ounce of it. Seventy-three tons of gold. Six tons of platinum, eight point nine tons of silver. All of it absolutely pure except for the nonconductive gray paint.”

“And all of it radioactive,” said Keppler. “How can we—?”

“Whoa, whoa, guys,” said Hiro, cutting her off. “Jesus Christ, look at this!”

He raised his flashlight and aimed at the center of the metal panel inside the arch.

“What are we supposed to be looking at?” growled Boris, nervous and angry.

“I don’t—” began Keppler, then she gasped. “Wait—what?”

Rink was equally shocked. She reached up and took hold of Hiro’s wrist and moved it so that the beam traveled across the surface of the panel.

It took Boris a moment longer, and then he saw it, too. “Oy blyad!” he gasped.

The flashlight beam was visible in the dusty air. It was a stark white line between the lens and the wall, but there was something wrong with how it struck that flat gray metal. Because it did not. It simply did not illuminate the surface, nor did it bounce and scatter the light. The flashlight’s beam simply vanished into it, like a straw stuck into mud. The light passed through the flat gray and was simply…gone.

“That’s impossible,” whispered Keppler.

Impossible or not, it was happening and they all stared blankly at it.

“My god, indeed,” murmured Priest, his heart beginning to hammer in his chest. “It’s still operational…”

Keppler turned sharply to him. “What do you mean ‘operational’? What is this thing? How could it absorb light like that? It’s impossible. What the hell have we found?”

Priest began to answer but then he saw something else and it froze his body but tore a cry from his throat.

“God in heaven!”

They all whirled and once more Boris brought up his gun.

Forty feet away, half shrouded in darkness, stood a pedestal. Priest raised his flashlight and played the beam over it, revealing that the pedestal was carved from some dark wood and fashioned into the shape of a hideous monster with a squat and lumpish body, stubby batlike wings, arms and legs that were vaguely humanoid, and a hideous head whose mouth was formed by dozens of writhing tentacles. It crouched there, arms outstretched to form a cradle upon which a book had been placed.

Rink cringed back from the horrific carving, raising a hand to shield her eyes from even looking at it. “No…” she whispered, and then began reciting an old Catholic prayer from her childhood.

Keppler and Hiro exchanged a look and then turned to Priest. Boris still pointed his gun at the thing as if the wooden monstrosity would somehow spring to life and attack with claws and tentacles.

“It’s really here,” murmured Priest and he felt a little faint. Even though he had spent many years as a younger man working with a group dedicated to locating, destroying, or hiding away books such as this one, he had never before been in the actual presence of one. He’d seen pages, photographs, and held vials of ashes from some that had been destroyed. But this one was intact, and it looked pristine. The edges of the pages glinting with gold paint, the ink dark and legible despite its incredible age. “Livre d’Eibon,” he said. “The Book of Eibon. God above.” He looked over his shoulder at the others for a moment. “You can’t imagine what this book contains. The fools who worked here tried to steal the code to make the God Machine function properly, but they probably disregarded the rest as the ramblings of a madman.” He turned once more to face the book and took a few tentative steps closer to it. “This is the only surviving translation of the original text written by the great sorcerer Eibon, chief priest of the god Zhothaqquah. In those pages is the whole story of his life. Every secret he uncovered, every celestial being he encountered on his journeys to Cykranosh, through the Vale of Pnath, the planet Shaggai, and elsewhere. All of the veneration rites of Zhothaqquah are here, all of the formulae for potions and spells. So much…so much…” An erotic shiver rippled through him. “Scholars—those who believe in this book’s existence at all—think that only a fragment of it remains, but here is the entire book.”

“You want us to believe that this is—what?—a book of magic spells and shit? Dude, you’re out of your mind.”

Priest ignored him.

“What’s that?” asked Keppler, pointing to the pedestal. “Is that supposed to be the god he worshipped?”

Priest shook his head. “No. Zhothaqquah is the offspring of the god Yeb, and in sacred artwork is represented as a short, squat, furry toad. Don’t laugh,” he warned sharply. “You mock the elder gods at your peril, yes?”

Keppler turned away, probably to hide a smile.

“No,” said Priest, as he nodded toward the pedestal, “that is something else entirely. This is the son of Yeb’s twin, Nug.” He moved to stand within a few feet of the pedestal and spread his arms wide. “And isn’t he magnificent?”

“It’s ugly,” whispered Rink. “It’s evil.”

Priest walked a few steps closer, then stopped. “Evil?” he mused, tasting the word. “No, my dear, it’s older than that.”

“How can it be older than evil?” demanded Boris.

“Because evil is a concept developed by man,” said Priest, touching the wooden tentacles, “and this one here…well, he is much older than us.”

“‘He’?” asked Hiro. “Who? That monster? Who are you talking about?”

Priest turned and looked at his companions. He smiled at them and he could feel that the smile on his face was strange. Wrong, somehow, though he could not see it. The others recoiled from him. Rink crossed herself. Then Priest turned back to the book and the magnificent pedestal on which it rested. He dropped very slowly to his knees and spread his arms wide.

And he said, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Iä! Iä!“

-7-

Sam Hunter

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

She gave me a lot of it. Probably not as much as she knew, but enough to make my head spin, and that had nothing to do with the Jack Daniels in my coffee.

“Okay, so this is some Indiana Jones bullshit,” I told her. “Not sure I see any doorway for me to walk through. I mean, I’m flattered that you called and all—”

“No you’re not,” said Acantha.

“No I’m not,” I agreed. “But I don’t operate out of the country. Hell, I don’t like going much outside of the tri-state area.”

“Ah,” she said, “my mistake. The problem is definitely coming your way.”

“How so?”

“Some events are aligning in an unfortunate way. Or, an opportune way if we can act swiftly and correctly.”

“You have a weird definition of ‘swiftly’,” I said. “We’ve been on the phone for an hour.”

She laughed. “The clock hasn’t started ticking quite yet. But when it does, then you’ll have to move fast.”

“Uh huh.”

“The team put together by Mr. Priest has acquired an alarming number of those books. And a competing team has also taken possession of some of them.”

“Wait…what competing team? Are you talking about the Brotherhood of the Lock?”

“No,” she said, “I’m talking about Closers.”

“Closers? Never heard of them. Who are they?”

“Oh, they are a very dangerous group, Mr. Hunter,” she said. “They are very highly trained special operators working for secret groups so deeply hidden inside the U.S. government that even the president is unaware of them. They are well-trained and well-funded by black budget dollars.”

“Oh, that’s just swell.”

“They also have access to technology in the form of weapons, equipment, and body armor that is far beyond anything you’ve seen. The source of that technology is something that has caused serious problems for a friend of yours.”

“I don’t have a lot of friends.”

“An ally, then. Someone whose work has many times overlapped with projects being undertaken by Limbus.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“Captain Joe Ledger of the Department of Military Sciences.”

“Oh,” I said. “Him.”

Ledger was a kind of super Boy Scout with a strong dash of absolute fucking psychopath. Like me, he was a former cop, but unlike me he now ran with one of those “we’re-so-secret-if-we-told-you-we’d-have-to-kill-you” groups. Very James Bond. Very Mission Impossible. When I did the Limbus gig in Pine Deep, Pennsylvania with the North Korean werewolf super-soldiers, he was working the same case from another angle.

And, let’s pause for a moment to discuss how absolutely fucking surreal my life is. I just said that I worked with a super spy to take down North Korean mad scientists who were creating werewolf super soldiers…and I’m not exaggerating. And you wonder why I drink?

“Are you still there?” asked Acantha.

“Yeah,” I said, “but wishing I wasn’t. Am I going to have to work with Ledger again?”

“Would you have a problem with that?”

“Yeah. He’s a dick who’s basically a standup comic with a gun. I’m not captain of his fan club.”

“He’s a good man,” she said.

“So is Will Ferrell, but I don’t want to go hunting bad guys with him, either.”

“Point taken. And it’s not an issue, I assure you. Captain Ledger is currently in the hospital in San Diego.”

“Oh. Why? What happened? He crack a joke at the wrong time and somebody knocked his pearly white teeth out?”

“He’s dying,” she said, and left it at that.

That hit me pretty hard. A lot harder than I expected. Ledger was a bit of a dick, but he was on the side of the angels.

“Sorry,” I said.

“The matter before us,” she said after a moment, “is coming to a head in your own backyard. A group of Closers is arriving in Philadelphia tonight to obtain a book in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania’s folklore department. The book is The Cloister Manifesto, and it is arguably the rarest and most dangerous of the Unlearnable Truths. Dr. Holland, the professor who is studying it, does not know what it is because the text is written in a unique form of coded Aramaic. That’s also why the book went missing for so long; it’s been in various private collections under a number of names that don’t hint at what it is. A rare book collector in Budapest had it among a collection of indecipherable curios for the last forty-six years, and he referred to it merely as the ‘Latin book’. After that it was in an estate auction catalog as ‘lot 561-F’. It was purchased in bulk with other items deemed curious but of little apparent value.” She laughed again. “It’s a bit like people passing around and bidding on a nuclear bomb and thinking it’s a doorstop or paperweight.”

“And Dr. Holland got it?”

“From a friend of a friend of a colleague. Given to him as a Christmas present because it appeared to be Latin and Holland is a noted scholar of ancient Latin folkloric texts.”

“Jesus.”

“In point of fact,” she said.

“What?”

“The Cloister Manifesto is very much connected with Jesus of Nazareth. It is why the Brotherhood of the Lock have sought it more aggressively than any of the other Unlearnable books. It is why the Closers will stop at nothing to get it. And it is why we need you to obtain that book at all costs.”

“What do you mean? Why’s that book so goddamned important?”

“For two reasons,” said Acantha. “The first is that it contains a series of complex rituals for invoking a being of incalculable dark magic who would delight in consuming our entire world. A being hinted at in many religions but given a name in the Book of Revelation.”

“Shit…please don’t tell me you’re talking about the antichrist.”

“Yes,” she said quietly, and once more I could hear the fear in her voice. “The Cloister Manifesto contains the rituals for bringing the antichrist into our world.”

My throat went dry and my heart was hammering. I shouldn’t be listening to this shit let alone believing it, but each time I’d done something for Limbus the world got bigger, stranger, and more terrifying. I did not think Acantha was lying to me now.

“You said there were two reasons…what’s the other?”

There was a sound on the line. Did she catch her breath, or sob?

“The Cloister Manifesto is written in the blood of the man crucified on Golgotha,” she said. “It is written in the blood of Jesus Christ.”

-8-

Hiro Tsukino

Sicán Cave System

Nazca Desert

Southern Peru

Four Years Ago

Hiro hadn’t understood why Priest had required them all to wear such clumsy outfits. They were modified versions of the heavy rubber and canvas rigs worn by firefighters and included thick gloves, boots, and helmets with clear plastic visors. Emergency oxygen bottles were clipped to their backs, though Priest said they probably wouldn’t need them.

The Peruvian sun was blistering hot despite the deep cold of the previous night. Deserts were like that, willing to torture and kill with extremes of temperature. The walk from where they’d parked their vehicle to this forgotten weed-choked gulley was filled with dangers, too, as if the landscape and the atmosphere were accomplices in premeditated murder. Without equipment, Hiro did not believe he could last more than a day out here. If the weather and terrain didn’t kill him, the scorpions, spiders, biting lizards, and poisonous plants would. How in hell the Sicán people ever thrived here for over six hundred years was a mystery. Bunch of masochists was the best Hiro could determine.

Luckily Mr. Priest had left nothing to chance, though, and outfitted them—as always—in the most advanced gear. Over-preparing so that there was no risk of ever being caught off guard with a need and no solution. Hiro appreciated that even if he didn’t like having to test the boundaries of those preparations this often. Since joining Priest’s little team of oddballs the urban explorer had found himself in several extreme locations. And not extreme in a fun way. Not like snowboarding down a sheer mountain or base jumping off a skyscraper in Dubai. But no, Priest dragged the team to the ass-end of the world. Different ass-ends, mused Hiro, if the metaphor would stretch that far. This place was a classic. They couldn’t bring the truck closer than three miles. There was a road, but an earthquake thirty years ago had ripped it apart. And since it went from nowhere to nowhere, no one had seen fit to fix it. The team had to climb over boulders that had been thrust up by the seismic forces, and twice Hiro had to rig lines so that they could shimmy across deep chasms. It took hours to go those few miles.

During one their many necessary breaks, Hiro took Keppler aside.

“This is nuts,” he said quietly.

The nuclear scientist took a moment before replying. “It’s no crazier than any of the last three jobs.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t mean that part...though I wish Priest had told us more than ‘we have to fetch a book’.”

“That’s mostly what we’ve been doing,” she said. “Except for Poliske.”

They shared a smile about that. Each of them had been allowed to pry some of the massive jewels out of the God Machine. Those jewels were being treated now to remove as much radiation as possible, using a technique developed by one of Keppler’s many uncles. The uncle was in for a hefty cut, of course, but there was plenty to go around. Sadly, the jewels could not be sold in their current form even though they would be worth much more that way. But the Soviets had laser-cut ID tags into them and once the cutters in Antwerp got the booty they’d have to cut those sections out. Currently Priest’s organization was overseeing that process and the stones—in whole or part—would not be formally released to the team members until the whole mission was done. It was a three-year commitment but the payday at the end had a mind-numbing number of zeroes at the end of it.

“You know what’s bugging the crap out of me,” Hiro told Keppler, “is the geology of this place. Rink showed me the geophysical history of this region and I was surprised to see how many earthquakes they’ve had around here.”

“So what? Earthquakes happen. What’s the problem? Are they predicting another one or something?”

“No, that’s just it,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any earthquakes here at all. There are no fault lines running anywhere near here. Not in this part of Peru. I checked with a geologist chick I used to date, had her look into it. She said this whole area is kind of freaky.”

“Freaky?”

“Geologically speaking. She said that according to the structure and location of the tectonic plates this is supposed to be a stable region, and yet there’ve been over thirty quakes here in the last hundred years. Different universities have sent people to study it and they came up empty. They’ve used ground penetrating radar and all. No one understands it.”

As he spoke it became clear to Hiro that Keppler either wasn’t really listening or didn’t really care about what he was saying. Lately she’d become more distant and cold; not that she’d been warm from the jump. But since the last couple of trips with Priest, Keppler had stopped acting like a scientist and tended to drift along in the boss man’s wake. Even Rink—who had become jumpier and more fearful each time they went out—had more evident life force, and was more present than Keppler. Hiro wondered if Keppler had reached a limit or crossed some kind of line, on one side of which was the rational—if greedy—scientist and on the other was a mind unable to accept the things they’d all seen.

Boris was already over on the dark side, as far as Hiro saw it. After Poliske and a short but weird trip to a four thousand year old Arawak bat cult shrine in Aruba, the gruff Russian soldier had started treating Priest like some kind of holy man. Or a god. Or something. Hiro didn’t have it all worked out yet, but it was starting to scare the crap out of him. Keppler had been stable at first, but now she was slipping into the weird, too.

“Hey,” Hiro said, trying to reach the scientist, “we don’t know what we’re walking into.”

That somehow struck a spark in Keppler and her eyes suddenly came to sharper focus. “There are a lot of people out there who can climb ropes and pick locks, Hiro. We both know that and I’m pretty sure that Priest knows it. I’m sure he’d find a replacement if you don’t have the stomach for it.” She paused and the glare in her eyes crystallized into something else, an expression he could not identify. “Courage requires vision, Hiro. Courage requires faith.”

Hiro said, “What’s that supposed to—”

But Keppler turned away and walked over to stand near Priest. For a moment Hiro was afraid that she was going to tell their team-leader about the conversation, but she didn’t. Instead she just stood there, behind and to one side of him. It was then that Hiro became consciously aware of something he’d half noticed before. Like Boris, Keppler often stood in Priest’s shadow. Not metaphorically and completely, but partly, even if it was only their foot or hand. It was something Boris had started doing after the trip to Poliske, and Hiro had assumed it was simply a bodyguard standing close to the person he was protecting. But it was more than that and Hiro now knew it. Boris would shift slowly around so as to be actually touched by Priest’s shadow. Not always, but often enough so that it was clearly not an accident. And now Keppler was doing it, too. It was starting to freak Hiro out. He tried to remember whether Rink ever did that.

No, he determined. Just the opposite. The more of these kinds of things they did, the more Rink kept herself at a distance. Not even within arm’s reach most of the time.

Keppler stood close to Priest now, and she stared at him with an unusual and somewhat adoring intensity.

Priest turned to look at Hiro. “Everything is good, yes?”

“Yeah,” he said diffidently, “it’s all good. I guess I’m just a little bit on edge. Maybe it’s the heat.”

Priest gave him a smile that would have looked at home on the Joker from the Batman comics. Very happy in bad ways.

Fucking freak, thought Hiro.

“Okay,” called Priest, climbing down from the small boulder on which he’d been sitting, “let’s go.”

They went.

Hiro did not like it one little bit, though.

Within twenty minutes of their last rest stop they reached the mouth of a narrow cleft. Hiro peered at the rock and decided that this was an old split, not the result of recent seismic activity. He wondered if that was good or bad.

The mouth of the cleft was nearly hidden by a tangle of water-starved shrubs and the twisted stumps of trees that had suffered from lack of nutrients and had grown into improbably goblin shapes. Lizards scuttled through the brush as they approached. Priest reached out with a heavily gloved hand and pushed some of the shrubs aside, revealing a slope that swept down and around out of sight. It was steep but walkable, but the entire way was protected by a strange type of thorn tree whose needles were a dark and threatening red that glistened with some kind of sap.

“Everyone keep your suit on,” ordered Priest, pointing to a sticky wetness on the ends of the thorns. “See that? Do not under any circumstances touch it. It’s a natural neurotoxin that will drop you in your tracks within two steps, yes? It won’t actually kill you, but it takes six days to leave the bloodstream. Get stuck and you will lie out here and die of exposure.”

“Unless something comes along to eat you,” said Boris.

“Yes,” said Priest with a smile, “unless that happens.”

He used his booted toe to push a smaller bush out of the way. Beyond it lay a tangle of bones. A goat or something similar. And there were more bones along the path. Not all of them were animal bones. When Rink saw a pair of human skulls she cried out and shrank back. She almost fled to Priest’s side, but caught herself and merely stepped backward. Priest didn’t appear to notice, but Hiro did.

She’s afraid of him, he thought. Even wearing a protective suit, she’s afraid to touch him. Fuck me.

“Let’s go,” ordered Priest. “Everyone be careful. I can’t afford to lose anyone at this point. Though…to be clear, if you fall, none of us will carry you back to the vehicles.”

It was long past the time when Hiro thought comments like that were a joke. He caught Rink’s eyes and from the terror in them it was clear she believed Priest, too. It was all about the mission. Nothing else was a priority or even a concern.

It took another twenty minutes to navigate the hundred yards of the cleft, and by the time they reached the bottom their suits were covered in scratches and dripping with the deadly sap. Along the way they saw bones of every description. From the delicate bones of hummingbirds to the heavy bones of wild cattle.

“God!” cried Rink as she recoiled from a skull. Hiro hurried over and saw that it was a human skull. Small. A young woman or a child.

Priest joined them. “Yes. Expect more of that.”

It was all he would say. A single, cold statement of fact. Ugly in its honesty. Prophetic in its accuracy, because the closer they got to the end of the cleft the more human bones they were forced to step over. Dozens of dead people, and some of the bones looked like they’d been there for ages. Many years at least, if not centuries.

“Who are these people?” asked Rink.

Priest shrugged. “Pilgrims, some of them. Explorers. Opportunists.” He paused. “Sacrifices. What does it matter?”

“It matters in how they died,” said Rink. “And why.”

“No, my dear, it does not. It only matters that they died trying to get to where we’re going. It matters that they were unsuccessful.”

“Hasn’t anyone gotten to where we’re going?” asked Keppler.

“And gotten out? No,” said Priest, “we will be the first.”

“Then how do you know it’s going to still be there?” asked Rink.

Priest did not answer until they reached the very bottom. He stopped in front of a thick tangle of the thorn bushes and stood considering it for nearly two full minutes. Deep in the cleft it was stiflingly hot and Hiro considered attaching his oxygen supply. But then Priest turned toward them and the look in his eyes stopped Hiro from doing anything. His breath caught in his throat and once more he backed up a step, afraid of the mad, weird lights that glittered in this man’s eyes.

“I know it’s here because I can feel it.”

“Feel it?” echoed Rink. Even through the thickness of her suit Hiro could see her shiver. It was one of those deep shudders that begins in the marrow and ripples outward. It almost provoked a sympathetic shiver in Hiro, but he managed—just barely managed—to keep control.

“Feel what, exactly?” Hiro asked.

Instead of answering directly, Priest turned and touched the tips of the thorns. “Can’t you hear it singing?”

No one answered.

Priest stepped back and signaled to Boris.

“Burn it,” he snapped.

Immediately the soldier unlimbered his pack and removed from it a small tank with a flexible leather hose and metal nozzle with a pistol grip. He flipped a switch to ignite a spark, then turned a dial to start the flow of flammable liquid. Then he raised the sprayer and pulled the trigger. Bright yellow flame whooshed out and a fireball engulfed the thorn bushes that stood in a cluster against the wall. Boris kept feeding fuel, kept spraying the fire until the bushes were blazing wildly. He only stopped when Priest nodded. Then Boris simply tossed the flamethrower into the weeds.

They stood watching the thorn-bushes burn. They were rugged but dry and they burned with great heat and immediacy. The weeds turned black and began to curl, and then pieces began falling away trailing sparks. A few smaller fires ignited from the embers.

Keppler made to stamp them out but Priest stopped her.

“No,” he said.

“This whole gulley will catch fire.”

Priest considered, then shrugged. “Let it. It’ll be easier for us to get out of here.”

As the big clump of bushes burned away, Hiro could see that there was a second cleft behind it, this one tall and vertical. It had been completely hidden by the deadly plants.

“Clear it,” said Priest, and Boris began kicking savagely at the thorn-bushes, and they crumpled into burning debris. He kept kicking until the opening was completely free. Then he peered inside, stepped back and nodded to Priest.

The opening was too narrow for anyone to walk in normally, so Priest turned sideways and shimmied into it. He vanished into the heart of the mountain. Boris followed close behind, and then Keppler. Rink lingered a moment though and cast a worried look back at Hiro.

“What’s in there?” Hiro asked.

Rink merely shook her head and followed the others.

Hiro peered inside and saw only a window narrow passage. A few distant scuffling sounds echoed back to him, muffled by the helmet he wore. Then he looked at the gully behind him. All of the bushes were smoking now and a few fires had taken hold. Soon all of this brush would be fully involved. If he waited here, protected by the mouth of the cleft, it would burn up and burn out soon. And then he could leave. Without the thorns in the way, and with his own skills at moving over rough terrain, he knew he could make it all the way back to the truck before anyone knew he’d fled.

He almost did that.

Almost.

Almost.

Was that what Priest had asked. Can’t you hear it singing?

“Goddamn it,” Hiro said to himself.

Then he went inside.

The passage was very curved and twisted like a snake, and in spots Hiro had to suck it in to squeeze through. He was amazed that the larger and bulkier Boris had managed it at all. He clicked on the helmet light and saw fresh scrapes on the stone, proof that the Russian soldier had not had an easy time of it.

Within a dozen yards, though, the passage widened and soon he was able to walk normally. At this point the walls changed from the simple roughness of rock that had been split open in the distant geologic past to something different. He paused, training his light on irregularities in the wall and saw that they were carvings. At first he had the irrational thought that they were Egyptian pictograms, but as he bent closer to inspect them he realized that they were not. These were strange markings, unlike anything he’d seen. Animals of many different kinds, strange buildings, exotic trees, and creatures clearly born in myth or madness. Tiny human figures knelt in humility or lay upon sacrificial altars. Some dressed in odd garments stood like priests, arms raised, daggers in their hands, heads thrown back in exultation. But what disturbed Hiro most was the representation of the gods these people seemed to be worshipping. He’d seen pictures of the local gods but these did not look like any of those. No, the gods of the people who had painstakingly chiseled these carvings untold years ago seemed better fitted to people who lived by remote seas or on isolated islands. The gods were massive and bulbous, with many trailing, twisting tentacles. Huge black eyes seemed to burn with intensity, even from the cold representation in old rock.

They gathered around the pedestal and stared at the book.

Even closed and covered with a glass dome it looked wrong.

That’s the word that came into Hiro’s head. Wrong.

The book was as thick as one of the old illuminated Bibles. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages; the edges painted with gold. The cover was some kind of leather that was pale and wrinkled, and it looked uncomfortably like old skin. Human skin. Hiro’s grandmother had skin like that in the months before she died of cancer. A jaundiced tinge and dark lines that almost looked like collapsed veins.

It was ugly and Hiro wanted no part of it. He stood a deliberate step back from it, glancing around at the others, seeing how the book impacted each of them. Keppler was confused, her precise scientific mind no doubt wrestling with the odd and intense emotions she must be feeling. Rink looked small and frightened, and maybe a little sick. Disgusted or nauseous with fear. Boris, on the other hand, tried to keep his soldier’s stoicism in place, but his lips were wet and he was sweating badly. Priest was like a god to him and this was something the twisted scientist craved.

The words that sprang to Hiro’s mind when he looked at Priest were all variations of the same thing. Hunger. Deep desire. An almost carnal lust to possess this book. There were weird lights in Priest’s eyes and even his skin glowed with a vitality that seemed to restore some of the youth the man had lost since this series of adventures had begun. In that moment, as Priest stood there with his hands resting on the glass dome, he was young again. Youthful in a way that Hiro found deeply disturbing. It was how he imagined the jikininki, the insatiable Hungry Ghost of Japanese folklore, to look at the moment it feasted. And just as the jikininki invariably became ravenous within seconds of finishing its grisly feast, Hiro knew that even now, even at the moment of possessing something that fed one of Priest’s deepest needs, the scientist would become hungry again for the next item on his list. And the next, and the next.

“Priest,” said Rink in a hushed and frightened voice, “let’s get it and get out of here. This place is—”

Priest wheeled on her and hissed her to silence. Actually hissed like a snake, and Hiro thought for a moment the man was going to strike her. Hiro pulled Rink backward out of reach.

“She’s right,” said Keppler. “We need to go.”

The pedestal was in the middle of a vast chamber nearly half a mile beneath the ground. All around them were massive chunks of rock that had fallen from the ceiling. Once, many years ago, there had been more than fifty titanic granite pillars holding up the shadowy ceiling. Now more than thirty of them lay in heaps beneath piles of limestone that had dropped from the ceiling when the columns fell. Hiro had studied the geological reports of this region and was alarmed at the number of earthquakes despite the paucity of fault lines. This whole area was supposed to be stable and yet it had trembled over and over again.

It’s the book, whispered a voice from the shadows of his mind. The earth itself can’t abide its presence.

The thought was absurd. Dramatic and foolish. And yet Hiro knew that it was the truth. Impossible, but true.

He looked around at the destruction and saw that nothing had fallen inside the glow from the pedestal. Not a stone, not a flake of dust. The glass dome was as clean as if it had been newly polished.

Get out of here, whispered the voice. Run now. Get away while you can. Go…go now.

Hiro felt himself edge backward. One step, two. A third.

But then he stopped, caught between his fears and the promises he’d made to Priest. And his need for the money. Until his contract was completed the bulk of the money would not be released.

It is a horrible thing to know about oneself that in the end it is greed that matters more than conscience, faith, self-respect, self-preservation, or even hope.

Fewer realizations stab as deep.

“Help me,” said Priest as he approached the book.

Every single one of them followed.

-9-

Sam Hunter

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

How do you even respond to what Acantha just told me?

I mean, seriously?

An hour ago I was wondering which credit card company I was going to have stiff in order to write a check to keep my office lights on. I was worrying about whether I needed to start buying pants a size larger because I like meatball subs more that I like doing crunches and sit-ups. I was worrying about calling back the woman I met at the diner the other night because I couldn’t afford to take her on a real date.

Now I had to worry about stopping the end of the world. Seriously. End of the fucking world. The end times. The apocalypse. Whatever else they call it. Dropping the curtain. A strange woman from a sketchy organization needed me to go up against an order of religious maniacs and shadow government special operators to fetch a book written in the blood of Jesus.

Hey, it’s not like I’m any kind of holy-roller. I grew up in the Twin Cities as part of a family that sometimes went to church on Christmas, almost never on Easter, and rarely thought about it much the rest of the year. Not atheists, not even sure we’re agnostics. Just indifferent.

And now this.

I lowered the phone and started to cry.

Couldn’t help it. Call me a girly man, call me a sissy. Whatever. But tell me how you’d react to that.

Go on. Tell me.

-10-

Hiro Tsukino

Tristan da Cunha

1750 Miles from South Africa

South Atlantic Ocean

Three Years Ago

It looked like a scene from hell.

Or, to Hiro’s eyes, something from one of the big budget summer blockbusters. In either case it didn’t look entirely real.

The island was burning.

A massive column of smoke corkscrewed up into the sky and everything on the windward side of the island was coated with hot gray ash. The team was upwind, safe for the moment unless the winds veered. The lack of any ash at all on this section of beach was only a small comfort. Red veins of lava cut crooked channels down the hill. The last aftershocks were hours past now, but none of the members of Mr. Priest’s party believed that they were truly safe. Not even their leader, who Hiro had come to believe was as mad as the moon.

What amazed the urban explorer was the timing. They’d come here by boat and Priest had ordered the captain to drop anchor twenty miles offshore and wait. Eleven hours later the dormant volcano erupted and blew Queen Mary’s Peak a thousand meters into the sky. It was only the second eruption in recorded history, and the first since 1961.

“How did you know?” demanded Keppler as their ship rocked in the churning sea.

Priest’s only answer was a manic grin.

The explosion was abrupt and intense, but it was of strangely short duration. Even though smoke continued to rise, the flow of lava was not nearly as intense as Hiro thought it should be.

“They will be coming,” Boris said. “The British will send ships and planes.”

“Of course they will,” agreed Priest, “but not in time.”

The mission timetable was the only part of this that Hiro understood. Even in a mechanized age such as this, it would take time to get boots on the ground here. Tristan da Cunha and the four smaller islands of this archipelago were fifteen hundred miles from the continents of Africa and South America. It was one of the most remote inhabited places on earth. Help would come, aid and rescue and surveillance would all happen, but not in time. Not according to the schedule Priest had given them.

“Nine hours,” he said. “We have a window of nine hours before anyone of real authority arrives here. We need to be done and gone before that.”

“What about flyovers and satellite imaging?” asked Rink.

“I don’t care about any of that. If they take our pictures be sure to give them a pretty smile.”

Their ship, The Nautilus, was an ultra-modern dual-purpose craft whose hull was coated with the same radar deflecting materials as a stealth fighter. It was fast, with both diesel-electric and hydroplane engines, and it could close up and submerge to a depth of one hundred feet. The vessel was one of a new class of smuggler boats financed by billionaire drug lords. Hiro had no idea how Priest acquired it, but the damn thing could outrun anything except aircraft and in a pinch it could simply vanish into the ocean while the eyes of the world were still goggling at the inexplicable volcano.

Now they were on the island. The ship’s crew—a collection of South African mercenaries who were probably a very short step away from being actual pirates—offloaded their gear. Five heavy-duty all-terrain vehicles stood on their fat, low-pressure tires. Gassed and ready.

While Priest was busy checking his instruments, Hiro Tsukino took Rink by the arm and pulled her gently into the shadows of a boulder. Hiro nodded to the tall man who kept taking them from one impossible place to another.

“What’s going on with him?” Hiro asked, keeping his voice down. “He’s getting freakier by the day.”

She licked her lips. “He’s always been a little, um…”

“A little what? Crazy? Bugfuck nuts?”

“I was going to say ‘intense’.”

“Really? Intense? That’s the best word for it?”

Rink looked away. He knew she was as worried as he was.

“Has he ever told you what his end game is? I mean…why are we doing this shit?”

“All I know,” she said, “is that someone is paying him a lot of money to collect these books. Or to prove for certain that those that are believed to have been destroyed are actually gone for good. He has to know one way or another. That’s the job.”

“Right, but why?”

She shook her head.

“C’mon, Rink,” insisted Hiro, “it’s our asses on the line here, too. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, which means we have to trust one another. Right now Boris and Keppler aren’t high on my list of people I give much of a shit about. Aside from me you’re the only one left who hasn’t become a zombie. We have to stick together.”

But Rink shook her head. “Priest knows what he’s doing.”

Hiro couldn’t let it go, however. He shifted around to stand in front of her. “Maybe he does. Maybe he’s the great genius of our age, but I need to know if I can trust his judgment. And I need to know what the fuck we’re doing. What’s our plan? What’s our goal?”

“We’re here to get the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. You know that.”

“Okay, sure, fine…but do you know what the fucking Unaussprechlichen Kulten is or why Priest was hired to find it? ‘Cause I sure as hell don’t.”

“Priest knows and that’s all that matters.”

“C’mon, Rink, don’t jerk me off. Getting that device is another step in a process that he hasn’t explained. He wants us to do this, and then he hinted that there were like a dozen other places we had to go, all of them remote, each of them every bit as dangerous as Poliske and Nazca. I know the papers all say that I’m an adrenaline junkie, and maybe that’s true, but it’s not as true as it used to be. I’m greedy, sure, but what good is making boatloads of cash if I’m dead? Or in jail somewhere.”

“You can always opt out,” said Rink. “No one’s forcing you.”

“Whoa, what the hell, Rink, what’s with you? Why are you being like this? You know what I’m asking.”

“You want to know what’s going on, Hiro?” said a voice behind him. Hiro whirled to see Priest standing right there, with Keppler and Boris flanking him. “Why not ask me?”

Hiro licked his lips. Boris had his rifle slung in front of his chest, one hand resting on it. The Russian soldier had become devoted to Priest since Poliske, and Hiro wondered if the man thought that their patron was God almighty. Or something approximating that.

“Okay, fine,” Hiro said, taking a shot at it, “what are we doing on this island? What is the Unaussprechlichen Kulten? What does it do or what’s it good for? We’re exactly in the middle of nowhere and you haven’t told me what to expect.”

Priest widened his eyes and lowered his voice. “Expect the unexpected.”

Hiro gave that a beat, then said, “You do realize that not only is that a bullshit answer, it’s literally impossible?”

Priest laughed then shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

“I’m serious, man…”

“I know, I know.” Priest nodded. “Okay, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten is one of the rarest books in the world. It was written by the philosopher and alchemist Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, and the first printed edition of it appeared in Düsseldorf in 1839. An English translation surfaced in 1845, but it was a deeply flawed translation. Some scholars argue that even Junzt’s version is actually a translation of a much older work whose authorship is unknown. In either case, the original version is bound in heavy leather and fastened with iron clasps. There are also holy words and phrases carved into the covers by priests who sought to…shall we say ‘contain’ its secrets?” He grinned like a cat. “The Brotherhood of the Lock have managed to hunt down nearly all copies of it. Those copies were burned. However my sources tell me that the original is here on this island.”

“Why?” asked Rink. “This is a weather research station. Why would they want an old book like that?”

Priest laughed. “No one on this island is studying the weather, my dear. This station is not unlike the base we found in Poliske. The British have been working on their own Orpheus Gate, but unlike the Soviets, they were smart enough not to conduct that research on their own soil. If something happened to this base, then the government could write it off and no one in the world would care. Or notice. After all, did any of you even know of this island before I told you about it? No? Of course not. That is the nature of discretion.”

“You knew, though,” said Hiro.

“It is my business to know these things,” said Priest, still smiling.

“What’s so important about the book?” asked Rink.

“Importance is such a relative thing, wouldn’t you say?” He shrugged, though, and added, “The book contains highly detailed information about the rituals and beliefs of the cult of Ghatanothoa.”

“Never heard of him,” said Hiro.

“You wouldn’t have,” said Priest dryly. “The book also includes many important spells and useful invocations, and it is believed to hold clues necessary to locate items such as the Black Stone, the Smoke of Bisiall, the Mathematics of the Worm, and the location of the Temple of the Toad.”

Hiro stared at him. “Are you just making shit up now?”

Priest laughed. “Hardly.”

“This is nuts.”

“I’m not asking you believe in it, Hiro. All that I require is that you do what you are being paid to do. We’re here to retrieve an artifact before British agents can arrive to take possession of it.” He nodded toward the volcano. “And before that thing makes this whole trip an exercise in futility.”

“How did you know about that before we even got here?” asked Hiro. “And don’t tell me that you had insider information. If geologists knew it was about to blow then the Brits would have evacuated this base.”

“True enough,” said Priest, “but I’m afraid I prefer to keep the source of my information confidential per my agreement with my employer. What I can tell you is that it is directly related to a bungled attempt to open an Orpheus Gate. Our job is to get in, find the book, and get out.”

“Wait,” insisted Hiro, “what kind of accident? Another meltdown? I need to know what we’re walking into.”

Keppler spoke up for the first time. “There’s been no spike in radiation and the radiation here on the island is well within, even below, normal background levels.”

Priest nodded, “Don’t worry, Hiro, this is not a nuclear situation. The Soviets were the only group crazy enough to put their base near a reactor. The competing teams have learned from that error, yes?”

“Yeah, okay,” conceded Hiro, “but we’re still walking into an accident site with no idea what to expect?”

“We are,” said Priest. “Should be exciting.”

Before Hiro could reply to that Boris held up a hand. “Wait…” He touched the earbud he wore and listened, then looked at Priest. “There’s a ship inbound. British navy. They must have had one close. It’ll be here in six hours.”

Priest cursed and stared off toward the rocky shore as if he could see the craft.

“What kind of ship?” asked Rink. “Can they launch a helicopter?”

Boris spoke in rapid Russian to the captain of the Nautilus. Then he looked up. “No aircraft. They’ll probably send a Zodiac. Figure six hours to get here, then fifteen minutes to put boots on the ground.”

“Is that enough time?” asked Rink, touching Priest’s arm with her fingertips.

“If we hurry,” said Priest, and true to that he wheeled and set off toward the line of four-wheel ATVs that had been floated in by their ship’s crew. Like most of the equipment for this run, Hiro knew that the ATVs would be abandoned. And like the other machines, weapons, and supplies, there were no identification numbers of any kind. Nothing could be traced, and certainly not back to the United States. Every single item had been purchased from foreign markets or specially manufactured for this trip. That was how Priest did everything, spending top dollar to be essentially invisible. That always impressed Hiro, but at the same time it added to the density of the secret walls Priest built around himself. And Hiro hated being on the outside of those walls. Absolutely hated it.

Now, though, even the time to complete their conversation about this mission had suddenly evaporated. Priest’s original projection was a window of nine or ten hours.

Hiro traded a quick look with Keppler, who shrugged, snatched up her pack and ran to catch up. Hiro was the last one off the beach, but in his gut the worm of doubt was turning. Was this going to be another Poliske? Was the structure that upheld the world as he understood it going to lose another strut? If so, how soon would it fall and how hard would it land on him?

Thinking bleak and frightened thoughts, he ran to his ATV. Soon the whole team was roaring away from the frigid waters that lapped onto the brown and troubled sands.

-11-

Sam Hunter

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“Mr. Hunter…?”

I heard her voice rising from the cell phone that lay on my desk. I dug a tissue out of my pocket and wiped my eyes and blew my nose. My heart actually hurt. It felt like a big bruise inside my chest.

“Mr. Hunter,” called Acantha, “are you still there?”

I picked up the phone. “No,” I said. “I’m not sure I am.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and I think she meant it.

“Tell me something, lady,” I growled, “why call me in on this? Even if Joe Ledger is circling the drain can’t you call the people he works for? I got the impression they were the A-Team for this kind of shit. You can’t put all this on someone like me.”

“The Department of Military Sciences has been compromised,” she said. “As have many of the groups who would normally handle something like this. And the few special projects groups we might otherwise call, such as Arklight, are dealing with matters of nearly equal importance.”

“Equal to this? How the fuck can something be as bad as the frigging antichrist?”

“Oh, Mr. Hunter,” she said softly, “you have no idea how truly large and frightening the world is.”

“I beg to differ. I think I do know—”

“No,” she said firmly, “you do not. And I hope you never find out.”

“Well, let’s be straight here, toots, every time you assholes call me it ups both my booze and therapy bills by an order of magnitude.”

“Would you rather we crossed you off the list of people we trust?”

I wanted to throw the phone across the room. “Bite me.”

There were a few long moments of silence on the line. “This is how it’s going down,” she said. “Maybe it’s one of those completely random examples of arbitrary synchronicity or maybe it’s fate—or whatever you personally choose to call it—but three separate teams are converging on Philadelphia right now. All three want to take possession of the Manifesto for different reasons.”

“Three? Shit on toast, lady. The Brotherhood, the Closers, and who else?”

“The third team is not composed of hostiles,” she said quickly. “They are, in fact, on the run from the other two parties.”

“Why?”

“They’ve managed to obtain one of the Unlearnable Books and are trying to get it to Mr. Church, the man Joe Ledger works for. That process is complicated because, as I said, his organization has been compromised. Although Mr. Church is very much one of the good guys, he is dealing with deeply serious matters and therefore is unable to help.”

“Who are these other players?” I asked.

“There are two of them,” said Acantha. “A young man named Harry Bolt and a woman who is currently using the code name of Violin.”

“Never heard of them.”

“You wouldn’t have. Mr. Bolt works for the CIA, though I’m afraid he is not the strongest player on their team.”

“Meaning?”

She sighed. “Meaning, he’s probably the most inept spy I’ve ever even heard of. He is also, however, lucky, which is why he’s still alive. Part of that luck was encountering Violin during a botched mission in Europe. The Brotherhood wiped out Bolt’s team, but Violin saved his life by eliminating the opposition.”

“So, she’s a fighter?”

“She is that and more. Violin is one of the most dangerous women you will ever meet unless you have the great misfortune to meet her mother,” said Acantha, though again she did not elaborate. “Shortly after they escaped with the book, they were ambushed by a team of Closers. They managed to slip past them, though it was a messy affair, and now they are on the run. They have been on the run, in fact, for weeks. We believe Violin is trying to get Mr. Bolt and the book to Mr. Church.”

“Who is running a compromised agency,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“And this is a different book than the one at the U of P?”

“Yes. The book Violin and Mr. Bolt have in their possession is De Vermis Mysteriis.”

I tried to translate it. “Mysteries of Vermicelli…?”

“Mysteries of the Worm,” she corrected.

“Oh. Right.” I frowned.

“And that,” she said, “is the second thing I need you to do.”

“What is?”

“First you need to secure the Manifesto,” said Acantha, “and then you need to steal the De Vermis Mysteriis from Violin and Harry Bolt.”

“I—”

“Without them knowing you’ve taken it. That is of the utmost importance.”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“Answer your door,” she said.

“There’s nobody at my—”

Somebody knocked on the door. I shot out of my chair and hurried across my office. My office is about the size of a phone booth, so it didn’t take a lot of hurrying. I whipped the door open and nearly gave a FedEx guy a coronary. No, I hadn’t shape-shifted but I had a kind of look, I guess. He yeeped. Seriously. That’s the sound that came out of his mouth.

He had a big box on a hand-truck and a thick envelope tucked under his arm. I glared at him, snatched the electronic pad from his fingers, scrawled some approximation of my name, and jerked the envelope from him.

“Beat it,” I said.

He beat it.

I took the box and the envelope inside and put them on my desk, extended one fingernail and exerted some lupine mojo to make it grow into a nice sharp point, and then cut open the box. Inside was a book. A massive old book. It was big, two feet long and eighteen inches wide and at least seven inches thick. It was securely sealed by six metal bands running laterally and two more going up and over. Each one was fastened with a small but sturdy padlock. The bands were covered with etchings and engravings of monsters with talons and teeth, prancing goats with too many heads, writhing squids, demon faces with hundreds of eyes, shapeless mounds with too many mouths and worms for hair.

I didn’t dare touch it.

I heard Acantha calling my name and put the phone to my ear. “What the fuck?” I said.

“That,” she told me, “is an exact replica of the De Vermis Mysteriis. It’s safe to handle. We need you to substitute this for the one that Mr. Bolt and Violin are carrying with them. They will be going to the University of Pennsylvania because Violin will want to obtain the Manifesto, as well. She has only recently received intelligence that it is there. This is very important, Mr. Hunter, because Violin is taking an appalling risk to secure the Manifesto while trying to evade her pursuers. The fact that she is doing so is significant. She is risking much, because it’s likely she will be a key player in events unfolding on the West Coast.”

“And you know this how? Ouija board?”

She gave me a small, hard laugh. “Glib as it will sound, Mr. Hunter, it’s fair to say that we at Limbus ‘have our sources’.”

“Cute.”

“Not really,” she said with a sigh. “Knowledge of this kind does not make for a quiet or happy life.”

I didn’t know what to say to that so instead asked, “What makes you think Violin will bring the Worm book with her? Wouldn’t she squirrel it away somewhere to keep it safe while she makes a run at the University?”

“Violin will never let that book out of her sight.”

“And you want me to steal it from her and this Harry Bolt kid?”

“Yes,” said Acantha, “and it is imperative that they do not know you’ve swapped them out.”

“And this Violin chick is one of the most dangerous women on Earth?”

“One of the most dangerous people, male or female, yes.”

“And there are two other teams converging at the same place and probably the same time?”

“Yes.”

“One is an ancient order of killer monks?

“Yes.”

“And the other is a group of government killers with high-tech weapons?”

“Yes.”

“And if I fuck this all up the world ends?”

“Yes.”

I wanted so badly to bang my head on the hard top of my desk. Seemed like the best possible response to all this.

Acantha said, “Open the envelope.”

I did. Inside were three items.

A ring of keys with an attached keycard for the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

The second was a set of those little white cardboard things they give you at perfume stores so you can take scent samples home. I sniffed them. Nothing was Ralph Lauren or Chanel. Each of these carried a human scent. Acantha and her bosses at Limbus knew me a little too well.

The third thing in the envelope was actually four things. Each identical. Crisp, clean bills wrapped in mustard colored paper bands. One hundred bills in each bundle. It wasn’t the agreed twenty thousand dollars.

These were four bundles of one hundred dollars bills. New, but nonsequential.

Forty thousand dollars.

I wasn’t sure I was breathing.

“Although we believe you would take this case entirely on its own merits,” Acantha said quietly, “we feel that tangible incentives are always useful.”

-12-

Hiro Tsukino

Tristan da Cunha

1750 Miles from South Africa

South Atlantic Ocean

Three Years Ago

Hiro dangled on a rope seventy meters down into a dark hole.

He still had plenty of line, but his light did not reach all the way to the bottom. The climbing harness he wore was one he’d brought with him from Tokyo. Secure, time-tested and familiar. Priest had recommended bringing one thousand meters of rope, which was a lot for what Hiro had understood was a climb into a building that was thirty-eight feet high and which had only one level of basement.

Like most of his assumptions whenever it came to an excursion with Priest, Hiro had been wrong in almost every way. Or, perhaps it was that there was no way to adequately predict the kinds of things they encountered.

The laboratory here on Tristan da Cunha was a small two-story affair built onto a rocky shelf that geologists had assured the builders was the most stable point on the island. Still close enough to the slumbering volcano to use geothermal energy to power the labs and equipment. Priest told them that the geologists had deemed the volcano sufficiently dormant to risk building a lab.

Hiro hoped those geologists had been here when the mountain blew. It would be nice to know they all got roasted.

The entire landscape was shattered. Roads were twisted out of shape, the government building and the fishing factory had been smashed to sticks, a cell-phone tower was bent in half and all of its equipment crushed, vehicles had been hurled onto improbable perches on the ruined slopes. On the flat plain between mountain and water was a garbage heap that had been the small cluster of red-roofed buildings that comprised the town. Now that tiny town with the grand name of the Tristan Settlement of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas was a smoking ruin half erased by lava. Calshot Harbor, which had been spared during the ’61 eruption, had been covered by lava twelve feet thick, and the molten rock had oozed out into the water to create steaming islands. Charred stumps of boats littered the shore among thousands of dead rockhopper penguins and Atlantic petrels. A few bloated dolphin corpses bobbed in the foam.

Priest had skirted the destroyed town, not wanting to be caught up in any refugee confusions with the clock ticking like this, but he needn’t have worried. If anyone had survived the disaster, they were not in sight.

According to the data Priest had provided there were supposed to be three hundred people on this island, not counting the twenty-six at the laboratory.

So, where were they?

Why had no one come to meet them when they’d landed on the beach? Survivors of a disaster usually fell upon potential rescuers and wept. Hiro had seen it firsthand. At very least someone would be left, someone would be signaling for help.

But there was no one.

It was the same at the lab, which was on the windward side on that supposedly unshakable shelf. Huge fissures cleaved the ground and one had cracked the laboratory open like a melon, collapsing the structure into two mounds of jagged debris. This crack ran deep and split the earth itself to a surprising depth.

It was hot as hell in that chasm, but even so it wasn’t as hot as Hiro had expected.

This island had damn near torn itself to pieces, and yet the thermometer clipped to his rig said that it was only one hundred and eleven Fahrenheit.

Why?

How?

Where had the heat and lava gone?

He released some pressure on the figure-eight descender to drop a little faster. The chasm was deeply fractured and it revealed geological marvels that continued to astound and confuse him. The rock here should have been predominantly basalt from ancient lava flows separated by thin pyroclastic layers, and though he saw ample evidence of that, he also saw huge chunks of shattered crystal, like the massive selenite spears he’d climbed among in the Giant Crystal Cave in Naica, Mexico. Hiro was no scientist but he’d learned enough about geology to recognize when things were wrong. Crystals of this kind didn’t form in active volcanoes. As far as he knew this kind of gypsum was more often found in meteor impact craters, like the ones on Devon Island in Canada. This island simply wasn’t built to create crystal spears that had to have been three hundred feet long before the earthquake cracked them apart like rock candy.

Even this was not the greatest mystery Hiro contemplated as he went down, down, down.

Built into these walls, cut into the rock, was a man-made tube of concrete and steel. The laboratory had been a front for something bigger and stranger. This had to have taken months of work and millions of English pounds. There were power cables as thick as telephone poles running down into the darkness and at first Hiro thought that they were there to handle the load of geothermic heat converted to electricity, but again he noted the lack of intense heat. There was even a downdraft that pulled cooler air from above into the bottomless black, and that made no sense at all. Heat rises. So what, then, was happening here?

Machinery of exotic design had been built into slots in the walls, but now most of it was blackened, the guts torn open to spill broken wires.

“What are you seeing?”

The voice in his earbud was so sharp and clear that Hiro jerked as if Priest was somehow right behind him. He stopped his rate of descent.

“It’s dark below,” he said.

“Can you see the bottom?” asked Priest.

“No. Wait, let me drop some glow-sticks.” Hiro removed two from a pouch on his thigh, snapped and shook them and watched as the green bars fell down into the chasm.

They fell for a long time.

Far too long.

He never saw them land. The green lights fell and fell, and then they were gone. Just like that.

“What the fuck?” he gasped and it came out almost as a whimper.

“What is it?”

“They’re…gone. I mean, they’re just gone.”

There was a pause at the other end, then Priest said, “Shit.”

“Shit? What do you mean ‘shit’? What the fuck’s happening?”

Priest said, “I think it’s still open.”

“What’s still open? Christ, don’t leave me hanging,” he yelled, aware that it was a joke but not a funny one.

Another pause, longer this time. “Can you see the stairway?”

Hiro had to bite back an obscenity. Priest was never straight with him. Even in moments like this. But Hiro took a breath to calm himself—an action that had far less success than he would have liked—and turned slowly on his rope, aiming his powerful flashlight downward. Although the building above him had split apart and this shaft had cracked wider, the destruction was less severe the deeper he went. It was like a plant—the flowering destruction spread wide at the top but left the stem more or less intact. Another forty feet below him was a section that was hardly damaged at all, and yes, there was a steel platform bolted to the curved wall, and a set of metal stars that zigzagged down into blackness.

“I see it,” he said.

“Can you get to it?” asked Priest.

Hiro wanted to tell him no. As much as he loved exploring ruins, there were too many things about this trip that did not make sense. There were too many variables and he was in no way sure that he could deal with new problems. Not with an active volcano and a completely unknown destination.

But he found himself answering that he could. “It’s right below me.”

“Does it look solid?”

Hiro lowered himself to a point just above the platform so he could study the wall. There were a few cracks down here, but none of them radiated out from the plates bolted to the walls. He swung carefully over and reached out with one hand to grasp the rail. With his other hand firm on the descender, he shook the rail. It did not budge. No dust fell from the boltholes.

“I think it’s secure.”

“That’s great,” said Priest, sounding hugely relieved. “Get on to the platform. If the stairs are still safe, then go down one level. There’s a door there with a keypad. I’ll dictate the sequence.”

“How do you—?” began Hiro, then stopped himself. He didn’t need to know how Priest had obtained this information. He was clearly being bankrolled by someone with very deep pockets and the right connections. Money and power were the only things needed to get virtually anything. And clearly Priest had deep knowledge about what was going on here on this island. On it, and beneath it.

He hooked onto the rail and climbed over to stand on the platform. It was as solid as it looked. That was something. He kept his rope firmly attached to his rappelling rig, however. Trust was hard to come by in his line, and doubly so since Poliske.

Hiro crept down the steps, trying not to make a sound and failing. The tunnel seemed to magnify every noise. He reached the first landing without incident, though he didn’t like the feel of the air. There was a steady stream of cool outside air blowing downward into the darkness, and no heat at all rising. To his fertile imagination it was like the slow inhalation of a dragon before he exhales his burning fire.

The landing had a recessed walkway of solid bedrock at the end of which was a steel security door. Hiro unclipped his line and attached it to the rail. If things went badly he could run and grab that rope and even reattach it to his rig in mid-jump. That was something he’d done before. He was fast and agile and experienced.

He was also sweating heavily despite the cool downrush of air.

Fear keeps you sharp, he told himself. So stay fucking sharp.

“I’m down,” he said into the mic. He bent and examined the keypad. It was surprisingly high-tech for a lab way the hell out here. “I’m at the door and there are lights on it. The keypad still has power.”

“Good,” said Priest. Excitement made his voice sound clipped and high-pitched. “Enter this code in sequence with a one second pause between each number. Got it? Good. Here it is…23, 119, 7, 16, 11.”

Hiro carefully tapped out on the keypad. When he pressed the last number there was a click and a hydraulic hiss, and then the door slid sideways into the wall. A ball of heat instantly rolled out at him and Hiro staggered back, coughing at the awful stink that was carried with it.

“Jesus Christ!”

“What is it?” demanded Priest.

Hiro coughed and gagged, his stomach churning from the smell. It was truly vile, like rotting fish and wet mold and feces all swirling together and then amplified by the furnace heat. It was even worse than the corpse-choked mud flats that had once been fishing villages near Fukushima in the days after the tsunami. Worse than that. Worse than anything Hiro had ever experienced and he spun around and vomited onto the floor.

“Hiro,” growled Priest, “what’s happening? Are you in? Are you in?”

After the first blast of fetid air the stench was less. Not gone by any stretch, but less. Hiro pulled off the World War II rising sun-patterned dew-rag he wore and wound it around his nose and mouth. He tottered forward, his eyes watering and his head aching from the assault on his senses

“I—I’m in,” he gasped. “It’s okay. I’m in.”

But it wasn’t okay.

Within a few steps Hiro knew that nothing in his world was likely to be ‘okay’ ever again.

Inside the doorway was a cavern that had been structurally reinforced with titanic struts of steel—massive pillars that were as big around as oak trees. Forty of them at least, upholding the roof and angled slantwise to reinforce the walls. Hiro goggled. He’d never seen structural engineering on this scale anywhere and the cost of building it must have been astronomical.

There were dozens of computer workstations enclosed in cubes of foot-thick clear plastic with steel reinforcing. Each workstation had a self-contained air supply and dedicated power lines. These cubes were empty and arranged in a wide semicircle and angled to face something that squatted on a trestle made from more of the heavy steel. It was round, segmented, and it angled downward into the heart of the mountain. Hiro’s mouth went dry because he recognized—or thought he recognized—what this was. This technology had been all over the news the last few years.

It was an Orpheus Gate. A massive one, much bigger than the one in Poliske. Different in design, too. It reminded Hiro of pictures he’d seen of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, beneath the France-Switzerland border. This machine had to weigh a million tons. Maybe twice that much, and it filled a cavern that was incredibly vast.

What are they doing here? He thought. What’s this thing for?

As if reading his thoughts, Priest’s voice whispered in his ear. “You see it, don’t you?”

“Y-yes.” Hiro said nothing. His throat felt like it was choked with dust. He stood there, his heart hammering as sweat poured down the sides of his face.

“What you are seeing is the world’s most advanced accelerator technology married to an Orpheus Gate,” continued Priest.

“Why…why…?”

It was all of the question Hiro could manage.

“Because, my friend,” murmured Priest, “we will never save the human race by repairing our biosphere or colonizing the Moon or Mars.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There are other worlds, Hiro. Countless worlds. And they are so close you can touch them.” Priest’s voice was filled with wonder, with awe. “The Orpheus Gate is a doorway to an infinite number of other worlds. Other Earths, yes? Worlds that are rich with all of the natural resources we could ever use in ten billion lifetimes. And they are all like ripe fruit for the plucking.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No,” said Priest, “it’s merely difficult. There is a mathematical code hidden in the pages of the Unlearnable Truths. Find it, solve it, and you can align the Orpheus Gate so that it opens a doorway. Do it right, and the doorway is stable. Do it wrong, or try to align it without the full code, and you…well, you tend to blow things up.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“And, if you are very, very unlucky you also crack the wrong door open and things come out. You saw one of those things—or part of one—in Poliske. That was nothing. The smallest fragment. It is like seeing a thing and thinking that it is the worst imaginable horror and then learning that it is no more significant than a flea. There are so many things greater and more terrible than that,” said Priest, his voice now a soft and eerie whisper.

Hiro closed his eyes. “Why did you bring us here, you maniac?”

“Shhh,” soothed Priest, “this door is ajar but nothing has come through yet.”

“How do you know?” demanded Hiro. “How can you possibly know if anything came through?”

“Because,” said Priest, “you’re still alive.”

Hiro said nothing. He couldn’t.

“Now,” said Priest, “go and get me my book.”

It took a lot for Hiro to continue. He stared into the mouth of the Orpheus Gate. Unlike the other one, this had a huge central diaphragm made of interlocking steel panels, like the shutter of a vast camera. Those panels had all been rolled back to reveal a massive glowing yellow light. It was like looking down the barrel of a long telescope to the surface of an alien sun.

But it was not a sun.

He looked around. The lab complex was spread out around and below him. All of the doors to all of the offices were open. Lights flickered on computer screens and along the surface of exotic machines. Every device in the lab was still functioning. Hiro was surrounded by the sound of computers and machinery laboring despite having no human guidance.

The humans were no longer manning those machines.

They were still in the lab, though.

All of them.

All that was left of them.

Rags of red flesh lying in pools of blood.

Pieces that had been discarded.

Hiro looked back at the red sun.

Which was not a sun.

He knew that even though his mind did not want to accept it. He knew what it was. He knew.

He did not start screaming until that massive, glowing orb at the other end of the collider blinked.

-13-

Sam Hunter

The University of Pennsylvania Museum

3260 South Street

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I drove downtown as the sun toppled out of sight behind the skyline. There was a little food cart near the museum that sold pretty good hotdogs. I’m a stress eater, so I bought three of them, loaded with peppers, onions, and relish. Lots of spicy mustard, and three cans of Coke. My digestive system hates me, and I haven’t been on good speaking terms with my colon for years, but damn that stuff tasted pretty great. There’s a lot of bullshit talk about baseball stadium hotdogs and Coney Island hotdogs, but that’s just hype. Maybe it was true back in the sixties, but I wasn’t born yet, so as far as I’m concerned it’s ancient history. The best hotdogs come from those little stainless steel food carts owned by guys who don’t speak a word of English but know how to boil meat. Their peppers are hot to the point of being toxic and the sodas are so cold they hurt your tongue.

I sat in my car and watched the street go dark. The food cart guy hitched up and drove off and the foot traffic dwindled. Tomorrow was Monday and it was a holiday. There wasn’t a lot of Sunday traffic and this wasn’t a residential part of town, so there weren’t many pedestrians. I could feel the street go quiet. The sights and smells and warmth of humans ceased to be the dominant energy and the older, colder energy of concrete, asphalt, glass, metal, and stone reclaimed the area. There were a few sentinel birds huddled close together on the edges of the big museum, but they were bored, weary pigeons and a few threadbare starlings.

The side door of the museum opened and three docents and a girl who probably ran the souvenir shop came out, said some goodbyes, and went separate ways. Two toward the parking lot, one toward the subway, while the girl unchained a bike. I caught a glimpse of the security guard as he pulled the door shut from within.

After another five minutes I started my car and circled the building, then parked back where I’d been. Then I got out, pulled on the backpack with the fake version of the Mysteries of the Worm in it, and walked around the building. The first circuit had been to watch for watchers, but when I went walking I used my nose more than my eyes. The little pack of cardboard scent cards were in my pocket and I’d sniffed each one before getting out of the car. The average Joe can remember smells well enough to tell the difference between a rose and a marigold or a steak and a roast chicken. The canine and lupine sense of smell is a couple of million times more acute. My Aunt Sophie liked to train me on it when I was a kid. She’d put a tiny drop of a scent in a little water and then freeze it. Sometimes she’d give me a whole bucket of ice cubes and I’d have to go through it to find the ones that had a scent, and then identify the scent. Or she’d give me a bucket where every cube had a different scent. It was a bitch but it was also fun. One cube might have a little dander from our dog, or some from the dog down the street. Another might have had a blade of grass dipped in it, or a micro drop of bacon grease. At first I was lousy at it, but it’s one of those things you grow into. Now it was old hat, and it’s one of those skills that always helped me when I was a cop in the Twin Cities, and it’s been really useful as a P.I. here in Philly. They make jokes about detectives sniffing for clues, but for me it’s truth in advertising.

While I walked I took the air, so to speak. Scents are particulate, so just walking down the street my nose vacuumed up thousands of things. Sounds disgusting, and maybe it is, but it’s what it is. Next time you see a dog sniffing as it walks, bear in mind that Fido is learning everything about what happened on that street going all the way back to the last hard rain. People, animals, car exhausts, vermin, stuff on people’s shoes, trash blown by the wind. That’s the Internet for the nasally-inclined.

I was three quarters of the way around the big museum before I caught a whiff of anything. Faint…and a little strange. I stopped and allowed the scent to fill me. It was a female scent. Very female. Vital in the way that women are, which is entirely different from male vitality. There’s a different chemistry and different physical potential in the blend of body oils, hormones, respiration, and pungencies. Which is not as creepy as it sounds. Not to me, anyway.

The scent matched one of the cards in my pocket. I liked the smell, but at the same time it gave me the willies. Not just because this was almost certainly Violin, the woman Acantha said was incredibly dangerous. No. What made the skin along my spine tingle was that the scent wasn’t really human.

And I had no idea what it was.

Buried beneath her scent was a second and far less powerful scent. Male. Very human. Young. Harry Bolt? I could smell adrenaline and fear in large but equal quantities.

The smells were recent. Ten minutes, maybe, which meant they probably entered the building while I was doing my circuit.

I quickened my pace and was almost at a run by the time I reached the employee entrance. Acantha’s keys were clearly marked and within a few seconds I was inside, standing in a short hallway with a time clock and card rack on one side and a bunch of city ordinance and inspection certificates in cheap frames on the other. The scent was stronger in here because there was no fresh breeze to dissipate it.

According to the timetable Acantha shared with me, Violin and Harry Bolt were always likely to get here first. In an ideal world they’d get the Manifesto and then haul ass out of here, maybe steal a car or go in disguise on a train or plane and head west. They’d gotten to the States aboard a series of commercial ships, the first of which took them to South America, then others that brought them incrementally to Baltimore. Not sure how they’d gotten here to Philly, but apparently stealing cars was in the skill sets of both Bolt and Violin. Fair enough. If they wanted to stay off the grid, though, then they might actually have to drive across country. Even with excellent fake IDs airports and train stations were risky. Between surveillance cameras, TSA, and fellow passengers who could be part of the bad guy network, you were also trapped. Trains and planes were boxes that weren’t under your control. A car can make it in less than a week using the right roads and with two people tag-teaming on the driving. The fact that I hadn’t seen a car outside didn’t mean there wasn’t one parked on a side street.

So far the only scents from the pack of cards were the two I’d followed inside. Good. I’m not a pussy and I don’t mind a fight if the chips fall a certain way, but the two groups chasing this book, the Brotherhood of the Lock and the Closers, scared me a bit. I’ll admit it. My family are the benandanti. That’s not our surname; it’s what we are. The benandanti are clans of lycanthropes who can trace their lines back to Etruscan days. Most of us are firmly on the side of the angels, so to speak. There are a few rogues and lone wolves, but not many. Not that we all try to live up to some of our more celebrated ancestors. My grandmother and a couple of my aunts are more exceptions to the rule. They always liked poking their snouts into things. My dad wasn’t much of a troublemaker and he never did a thing for anyone unless it was helping them fill out their tax forms or coaching Little League. But in the past we had some real warriors. The problem is that we got serious pushback from people who should have been our allies. Our biggest enemy, strange as it seems, was the church. In their eyes we’re monsters and as they see it there’s only one kind of monster: the bad kind. A lot of my ancestors were hunted down, beheaded, hanged, burned, or tortured to death by groups like the Inquisition. That doesn’t inspire the warm fuzzies for hit squads like the Brotherhood, because they were tied to the Inquisition, in both history and approach.

So, sure, I’m not a fan.

Not a huge fan of any kind of religious fruitcake, actually. Doesn’t matter which version of God they pray to, or claim to work for. Militancy and religion make for dangerous fanatics. And assholes like that have hung a lot of benandanti pelts on their walls over the last two thousand years.

As for the Closers…they were highly trained government agents with dangerous science fiction toys. I have teeth and claws. You know that old axiom about not taking a knife to a gunfight? Yeah, well that’s how I felt.

Much as I hate to say it, I wished Joe Ledger was with me. Then I thought about what Acantha said. He was in a hospital in San Diego. He was dying.

Shit.

He was one of those guys who seemed to be painted with magic. The kind who might take some hits but would always be on his feet when the smoke cleared. Kind of scary to think that someone like him was off the field.

It wasn’t very goddamn reassuring.

With those gloomy thoughts filling my head, I moved through the building.

Most of the place was dark except for small, dim security lights. I followed the scents and tried to not trip over my own feet. Wolves have decent night vision, but we’re not cats. We have great peripheral vision, though, so we notice a lot, but there’s this odd thing where we can’t always pick out details of the stuff we see, especially at a distance. We’re more movement sensitive. I sometimes wonder if our brains are so busy processing smells and, to a slightly lesser degree sounds, that the eyesight doesn’t get access to the same amount of mental computing. Not sure why, and no one in my family has ever outed themselves to a doctor for a study.

So, I can’t be entirely blamed for tripping over the body in the hall and falling flat on my face.

-14-

Hiro Tsukino

The Ritz-Cartlton, Dubai

The Walk, Dubai

United Arab Emirates

Eighteen Months Ago

The dreams were waiting for him every night. Dreams or maybe memories. He could never tell the difference and tried to escape from any certain knowledge. Booze helped. Pills, too. Sleeping pills and whatever else he could get. Rink had a few good connections and she kept him provided with whatever it took to help him through the night and to keep him functioning.

Priest still needed him. More and more often now that their shared project was accelerating. Priest’s employer was putting a lot of pressure on him to obtain the last of the Unlearnable Truths.

Hiro tried not to calculate the cost of obtaining those books. Not the money spent, but the human cost. The cost to him as a person.

He knew without doubt that this was going to drive him insane. Maybe kill him, too, but that might be a relief.

The dreams.

Goddamn those dreams.

If he didn’t take the right pills or drink enough to drop him down into the black, then when he closed his eyes he found himself back in that lab, staring down the barrel of the Orpheus Gate. Seeing the eye.

Seeing the eye blink. Seeing it turn to look at him. Knowing that it was now aware of him.

Sometimes all he could do was scream, and sometimes if the balance of pills was wrong, he screamed and screamed but could not scream himself awake.

As for the book…sure, he’d found it.

That part was easy because it was on a pedestal like the others had been. Waiting to be taken. Maybe wanting to be taken. After all, it, like all the others, contained that code and only when the code was deciphered and entered into an Orpheus Gate would the door swing all the way open.

The thing that had looked at him had known that. Wanted that.

It let him take the book.

Even so, it had played with him. Things had come out of the tunnel. They tried to take him, touch him, own him. He’d grabbed the book and run and those things had followed.

That escape was the reason Priest had hired him. Hiro had whirled and fled, running as fast as he could out of the lab and onto the walkway, dodging obstacles, vaulting corpses, clambering along trailing wires, swinging from cables to handrails, grabbing for his climbing rope, attaching it to the rings on his harness, all the time screeching for Boris and Priest to pull him up. Screaming, crying, begging. Even before the slack line went taut Hiro flung himself off of the platform and into the shaft.

The tentacles very nearly caught him.

Nearly.

But the line jerked him upward as the winches drew him toward the ruined surface of the island.

Hiro never stopped screaming. Not even after he was out of the shaft and unbuckled from his harness. He did not stop screaming until Boris raised his rifle and slammed the stock full-force into Hiro’s face.

It was worse in the darkness of unconsciousness, though.

Down there, trapped by concussion, he floated in a dark sea of nightmare. That sea was not empty and he was not alone. Slithery things rose from the depths and encircled him, igniting searing agony in his flesh and bones, filling his nostrils with the stink of rotting fish, and filling his mind with a chittering, endless cry from inhuman throats.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

That was what he’d heard down there. The cry had not come from the monster at the other end of the Gate.

No.

It had been a chorus raised by the dead. Every single corpse in the place had opened its mouth and shouted that cry.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Sometimes, in the still of a long, bad night, Hiro realized that the voice crying out those words was his own.

-15-

Sam Hunter

The University of Pennsylvania Museum

3260 South Street

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I’m not an idiot, so let’s clear that up right now.

And, sure, I know I talk a lot about sense of smell and all that, but there was a bucket filled with water and bleach, and that’ll cancel out any animal’s sense of smell. Even my kind of animal.

No, I didn’t smell the blood.

Not until I did a face plant in it.

So, it’s not entirely my fault.

That said, I felt like the biggest freaking idiot in history. Sam Hunter, experienced investigator, benandanti, the guy Limbus had called to save the world.

Fuck me.

I tried to turn to catch the floor on my palms, but between surprise and the weight of the heavy book in my backpack, I was a micro-second too late and the cold marble banged my cheek. At least it wasn’t my jaw; otherwise I’d be spitting teeth. My species regenerates after most injuries, but—weirdly—missing teeth don’t always come back. Especially the older we get, and I was looking at middle age close enough to read the fine print.

Sharp agony detonated in my head and I rolled sideways as if I could roll away from the pain. That’s when I realized two things. First, that I’d fallen into a fresh puddle of warm blood; and second, that the blood had all come from the security guard I’d seen letting the staff out.

That snapped me into a different gear and I changed as I rose. Not to full wolf, but to a useful half-and-half state that didn’t rip my clothes to shit. The shift turned the dial on my senses all the way to eleven, sharpening my night vision a bit and doubling my sense of smell. The bleach punched me pretty hard, but halfway to wolf I could smell the blood, too. Hard not to, I guess, when I was now covered in it. Shit.

I quickly moved away from the corpse and crouched down, my back to a wall as I took in what the room and the moment had to tell me.

The guard’s throat had been cut from ear to ear. A knife. The wound was too perfect for a claw. That was something. Was it Violin? As far as I could tell she and her companion were the only ones from Acantha’s set of scent cards who’d entered the building.

If that was the case, though, it cast her in a different light. The guard was almost certainly an innocent. An unlucky bastard working a night shift whose very existence was inconvenient to someone else. That pissed me off. I may not be entirely human but I consider myself a humanist. When I found Violin and Harry Bolt I had some serious questions to ask them, and I had better like the answers or the guard wouldn’t be the only corpse on the premises.

I removed my jacket and shirt, made sure there was nothing in the pockets, and dropped them. It had absorbed most of the blood. There was less on my pants and shoes. My undershirt was damp but not soaked. If there was time I’d come back to collect my stuff. I had a small-frame Glock on my belt if this turned into the O.K. Corral, but I seldom resort to gunplay. I have other weapons, and they’re built in.

The hall was quiet but I strained to hear sounds from deeper inside the museum. Human ears wouldn’t have heard what I heard. A scuff of a shoe, the soft grunt of effort as someone did something in another room. The wheeze of someone who was getting out of breath.

As I moved away from the corpse and the bucketful of dirty water and bleach, I could still smell the blood from the security guy. There were other smells, too. Human smells—sweat, skin, hair, breath, cologne, deodorant, socks. Everything has a unique scent.

There were other odors, too. Some of them were museum smells. Too many visitors who brought the aromatic olio of their lives with them. Lots of kids with indifferent hygiene. Snacks. Dust and varnish. Cleaning products and air freshener. The earthy smells of wood, metal, and stone.

And two other things. One I couldn’t identify and one I definitely could.

The strange smell was strong but not close and it was out of place. It was the kind of smell I’d expect to encounter on the docks, in a bad seafood restaurant or an aquarium where they don’t change the filters often enough. Fish. A rotting, decaying stink. And yet…it wasn’t a dead scent. That sounds like a contradiction, but that’s what I smelled. Decay and vitality wrapped together in the same scent.

I’d only ever smelled something like this once before. It was on a case where I’d been asked to help save a kid from the monster in his closet. Yeah. Real kid, real closet, real monster. When I’d gone into the darkness of that closet I stepped into another place, and the fish stink was incredibly strong, and very much alive.

This was like that.

“Shit,” I said to myself.

The other thing I smelled was blood on the air. There was a lot of it and it wasn’t from the dead security guard. Someone else was bleeding, and I caught the faintest thump of a heart. Fading, though. Fading, going shallow, and then going silent.

Shit.

I ran.

I was pretty sure I knew what I’d find, and I hate when I’m right.

A woman in a functional staff uniform sat on the top step of a stairway that led to the basement. Cleaning rags were tucked into her pockets. She wore sensible shoes and her salt-and-pepper hair was up in a bun. Black, maybe fifty. A low-pay worker. Somebody’s mother, maybe. Or a wife. A person in any case. Someone had used a knife on her, too. It was cold in the museum and steam rose from the red mouths of five stab wounds clustered around her heart. Her eyes were open, though, and I swear I caught the last, fleeting glimpse of a departing awareness. It was as if she looked at me and pleaded for help that I simply could not give. I could smell her death. There was nothing I could do but watch her die.

That, and maybe catch up with whoever killed her.

I knelt beside her. A wisp of hair had come loose from her bun and I smoothed it back. Then, for reasons I will never be able to understand or explain, I bent and kissed her on the forehead.

Saying goodnight? Or making a promise? You tell me, I’m no philosopher.

There was a sound downstairs. A lock clicking and a door opening. Then a woman’s voice said, “Hurry up.”

A young woman’s voice. Violin?

I rose from where I’d knelt and began moving down the stairs. I didn’t really understand what was happening. This wasn’t playing out the way Acantha said it would. If Violin was supposed to be one of the good guys, that wasn’t going to save her. Not if there was blood on her hands and on her knife.

No.

It wasn’t going to save her at all.

With each step down to the basement I became less of a man and more of what I truly am.

-16-

Hiro Tsukino

Monastery of St. George of Koziba

Wadi Qelt, West Bank

Palestinian Territories

One Year Ago

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” asked Rink.

Hiro Tsukino took a while before he answered. The simple truth was that he wasn’t sure if he was up for it or not. In the two years since Tristan da Cunha he had become a shell of the man he’d been. Booze no longer even took the edge off of things. The pills helped, but that was a dead end run because every day he seemed to need more of them. It was only when Boris dragged him out of a crack house did Hiro even start to get clean. The beating Boris gave him was probably unnecessary, but the memory of it kept Hiro from escaping the expensive rehab center Priest put him in.

The new drugs, the nonaddictive ones Priest acquired for him, helped the most. They let him sleep and if he dreamed, he didn’t remember anything. No great burning eyes. No tentacles. None of that. The only lingering memory was the strange cry whose echoes had chased him up out of that shaft.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

Now, nearly two years later, it was the only part of that experience that refused to submerge into unreality. Everything else had become part of a fabric of delusion and hallucination that Hiro no longer accepted as part of his actual memories. Even though they felt like something he’d experienced, his therapists—Priest’s therapists—comforted him into the belief that they were really ghosts from his days smoking meth. It was the damage from the crack that made him misremember them as older memories, or as memories at all.

Fantasies. Nothing more.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

That meaningless cry, though…it persisted.

To keep the shrinks from locking him away again, Hiro lied and told them he heard no inhuman voices shrieking in his head. As addicts and the insane often do, Hiro had become a very convincing liar.

Now he stood on a bridge that spanned a gorge that everyone around here, including the monks at the monastery, believed was the Valley of the Shadow. The actual one mentioned in Psalm 23.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.

But Hiro did fear this place. As he feared the evil things he had seen.

If ‘evil’ could even begin to describe that eye. He knew for sure it was not God’s eye looking at him, and until two years ago Hiro did not believe in the Devil. Or God. Or anything. Although he had been raised nominally Shinto he never held a splinter of faith.

Until that eye.

Until that fucking eye.

It’s just the drugs, he told himself.

Except that another voice answered that claim. Answered and mocked it.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

Tristan da Cunha was many thousands of miles away from where he now stood. A world and two years away, half buried behind drug-warped memories.

“Hiro—?” asked Rink, her voice filled with concern. He turned and looked at her. She looked so different from the elfin girl he’d met more than five years ago. Her face was lined with care and stress and there were shadows in her eyes. She, too, had seen things she shouldn’t have. Not the eye, but other things.

You’re a fucking bastard, Priest, thought Hiro. You’re going to kill us all.

Tekeli-li!

He placed his hands against the stones that lined the precarious edge of the pilgrim road and leaned out to look down into the valley. The monastery was built in the sixth century, erected near a cave where some believed the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens. The Greek Orthodox monks who lived here kept the place open to tourists, which paid the bills. He wondered how big a check Priest had written to allow the team exclusive access to this place. The monks had agreed to wait in their cells for a full day, and the roads were blocked, ostensibly for repairs.

“Hiro,” said Rink, taking a few steps toward him, “if you can’t do this—”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Boris and Keppler can—”

“I said I’m fine,” he snapped. But when he saw the hurt in her eyes, he sighed and softened it. “Really, Rink, I’m good. Just getting my bearings, you know?”

He wore his full rappelling rig, and the bulky Russian soldier stood a dozen yards away, arms folded, face filled with dislike and disdain. He certainly didn’t think Hiro was ready for this. Neither did Keppler, who was at the far end of the bridge, fretting and fidgeting.

“Are you ready?” asked a voice, and Hiro turned to see Priest walking briskly toward him. The scientist continued to age rapidly and now looked sixty, though despite his rail-thin body and white hair he had unnatural vigor. Hiro never even saw him yawn let alone take a moment to rest. Strange fires burned in Priest’s eyes and Hiro had begun to fear that look. Those fires reminded him far too much of another fiery eye.

Far too much.

“I guess so,” said Hiro.

The wide wet smile on Priest’s face twitched and a vertical line etched itself between his brows. “Either you’re ready or you’re not. Which is it?”

Hiro cleared his throat and pretended to check his gear. “Yeah, I’m good to go.”

Priest nodded. He bent and looked down just as Hiro had done. “This place is incredible. The monastery is named for Gorgias of Koziba, the first monk who lived here. They canonized him, though I forget why. Doesn’t matter. Who the fuck cares about someone who believed in the wrong god in the ass-end of the world, yes? All that matters are the scrolls.”

“Why are they hidden in the cliff wall?” asked Hiro.

“This place was destroyed by the Persians in 614 A.D. They slaughtered the fourteen monks who lived here. I just saw their skulls. The monks showed me, they have them in niches in the walls. Fascinating, you can almost hear their screams. Anyway, Crusaders rebuilt the monastery in 1179, and then in 1878 a Greek monk named Kalinikos settled here and began a restoration that he finished in 1901. During World War II this place was targeted by Hitler’s Thule Society—which, for the record, was not dissolved after 1930 as the history books insist. Nope, they just went into hiding, trying to find all sorts of occult objects and secrets to help win the war.”

“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” said Hiro absently.

Priest shrugged. “Pretty much. There’s a lot of pop culture stuff about Hitler’s obsession with the supernatural, but like most things there’s a great deal of truth to it. The Thule-Gesellschaft was real enough, and they came here looking for a book that had been given to the monks to protect.”

“What kind of book is it this time?” asked Hiro, though he was fairly certain he didn’t want to know.

“Oh…something fun. Lot of pop culture about that, too. Pretty much everyone thinks it’s totally fake. Something made up for horror stories, but that’s a long way from the truth.”

“How do you know it’s real?” asked Hiro.

The grin on Priest’s face was truly manic. “I’ve seen photographs of it. I’ve seen jpegs of old pictures taken of a few of its pages.” He licked his lips as if tasting the last drop of a savory meal. “The book was in the Vatican library for over a century, but like a lot of dangerous knowledge it was removed during the war. Not because the pope was afraid Hitler would get it—though I guess he didn’t want to risk that— but because the Allies had heard about it and they sent an investigator to find it.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know his real name. There are a few references to him in some records I saw on my dad’s computer. His code name was ‘St. Germain’. He was a notorious pain in the ass, though. He wasn’t trying to obtain the book to use it—as it was meant to be used. No, that lunatic wanted to destroy it. Fucking book burning psychopath.”

Hiro, who always been opposed to any kind of censorship, thought that maybe he’d like to take a match to any book that had Priest this deeply obsessed.

“Luckily,” continued Priest, “the Catholics are big ones for not destroying anything that might have value, even books from other religions. Or maybe especially books from other religions. Know thy enemy, I guess. Whatever. They took the most dangerous books in their vaults and scattered them around the world. Most were eventually brought back to the Vatican and are locked away where even we can’t get them.” He sighed wistfully. “But this book—Al Azif—was believed lost. Only a handful of monks know that it’s here, and the Orthodox monks are no friends of the Vatican crew. They didn’t trust the Romans to keep it safe, or maybe they were afraid of anyone ever using it.”

“Why didn’t they burn it?”

Priest laughed. “That’s just it, dude, you can’t burn it. Not without knowing how. You can pour gasoline on it and drop a match and all you’ll do is burn the gas. The book won’t even get warm.”

Hiro almost said, “Bullshit,” but it died on his tongue. Most of his doubt had died down in the underground lab on Tristan da Cunha.

The scientist was caught up in his tale. “The monks were smart, though. They cut some niches in the wall below this bridge and stored the book inside. Then they sealed it up.”

“And they told you all this?” asked Hiro.

Priest shrugged.

“If they are so dedicated to preserving the book, why are they letting us take it?”

Boris, who was close enough to overhear this, laughed. It was not a nice laugh. Hiro frowned and touched Priest’s arm.

“Hey, they are letting us do this, right?”

“Mmmmm,” said Priest, “not so much ‘letting’ us as ‘not being able to give a shit’. Dumbasses thought we were here to shoot a documentary for the Discovery Channel.”

Boris laughed again. A donkey bray. “More martyr skulls for the wall.”

Hiro stared at the monastery. His touch turned into a grip and pulled Priest close. “What the fuck did you do?”

The Russian soldier stepped forward and swatted Hiro’s hand away. He was not gentle about it. “Keep your fucking hands to yourself, you fucking junkie.”

Priest jabbed Hiro in the chest with a stiff forefinger. “Remember your place, boy. Remember who pays your bills and gives you all those yummy pills.”

“You killed them?”

“Martyred is a nicer word.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“That’s what they said,” laughed Priest. “And yet the Messiah failed to show up to save them. Talk about misplaced faith.”

His hand suddenly shot out and caught Hiro by the throat. The grip was insanely strong. Way too strong. Hiro felt himself rising to his toes and nearly into the air. It was impossible for someone as skinny and withered as Priest to be this strong.

Impossible.

The fires in the scientist’s eyes burned hot enough to sear Hiro’s mind.

“Listen to me,” said Priest. Now there was no laughter. Now there was only power in the madman’s voice. A strange power that was in no way human. No way. It sounded old and alien. It was the voice of something else. Something Hiro would not dare name for fear of revealing it to be true. “Game time is over. You will crawl down this wall like the insect you are. You’ll cut open the vault and remove the sacred book, and then you will bring Al Azif to me before the sun sets over this valley. You will do it quickly and you will do it correctly.”

A stink filled the air and for a moment Hiro thought that it was his own bowels that had failed. But that wasn’t it. There was the stench of rotting fish and it roiled in the air around Priest. The grip was crushing the life from Hiro, choking off his air. Darkness began crowding in and with it came hallucinations. Worms of darkness writhed at the edge of his vision and a voice that sounded like his own voice whispered strange words that Hiro was sure he had heard before.

Ugly, dangerous words in a language no man was meant to speak.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

Hiro heard Rink crying out in fear, pleading with Priest to stop.

Then the crushing force was gone and Hiro sagged down. Ironically it was the killer, Boris, who kept him from plunging over the edge. Priest turned away as if to hide his face. Rink seemed torn as to whether to run to see if Hiro was okay or to go to her lover. Indecision rooted her to the spot.

The moment stretched and then leveled out as Hiro gasped in lungsful of air. He shoved himself away from Boris and stood panting in the middle of the bridge.

“You’re a fucking maniac,” he gasped and spat on the ground.

Priest turned, knelt, and rubbed his fingers through the spittle. His long, red tongue snuck out from between his teeth and licked the spit from his thin, white fingers.

“No,” he said softly, “that’s not what I am.”

Hiro stumbled backward as Priest straightened, and he backed into Boris. Priest pointed to the edge.

“Do as you’re told.”

Rink was crying now. Keppler was as white as a ghost and had not advanced a single step forward during the whole encounter.

Hiro swallowed hard, fighting terror and disgust and confusion.

He took a step away from Boris, dragged in a steadying breath, and then walked to the edge. With trembling hands he checked his ropes and rappelling gear. Boris took up his position as anchor. And then Hiro stepped over the rail and went down.

Into the Valley of the Shadow.

-17-

Sam Hunter

The University of Pennsylvania Museum

3260 South Street

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The lights were off at the bottom of the stairs, the bulb smashed, the ground littered with glass. I had to step carefully and pick my way using whatever light followed me down from upstairs. I hadn’t gone full wolf because I wanted my clothes intact. I had a spare set in the car but like an idiot I hadn’t brought them inside with me. You’d think that after all this time I’d have thought that through.

Even so, I was more wolf than man. If you think that looks funny—a werewolf in shoes and K-Mart clothes wearing a backpack, maybe it does. You wouldn’t think so if you saw me coming down those stairs, though. Pretty sure I wasn’t wearing a “let’s all have a chuckle” expression. What was the phrase Shakespeare used? He had a lean and hungry look. Sure. Like that.

The stairs ended in a landing with halls going off in different directions. Most of them were lined with office doors. One hooked around and ended at a security door. My quarry went that way. The smell of blood was mingled with the rotting fish stink and it was a lot stronger down here.

The security door stood ajar and beyond it there was only darkness. I could smell the woman Violin and the less interesting smell of the man Acantha called Harry Bolt. One was clearly an alpha scent, and the other was…

What’s a good word? Prey? Yeah, close enough. Or, maybe late night snack if this thing kept going south.

The hinges on the security door creaked with all of the clichéd noise of a bad horror flick. Another thing I should have brought—WD-40.

I went through quickly and faded to one side, crouching low in the shadows in case someone decided to take a pot shot at whoever opened the door.

Nothing.

There was light at the far end of the hall. It spilled out of an open door. The rest of the hall seemed to be empty and the bloody footprints had mostly faded out. I couldn’t see them anymore, but I could still smell the blood. You’d have to walk fifty miles to lose that scent from a nose like mine. Imagine how much fun it is when someone farts. Unlike actual dogs I am not a connoisseur of ass smells.

Blood was different. It spoke to something buried very deep inside my soul. It whispered to the wolf beneath my skin. My mom says that we were people who became wolves, but my grandmother disagrees. She says we were wolves who learned how to pretend to be human. None of us know for sure, but most of the time I think Granny was right.

I crept along the hallway. Yes, crept. I’m a monster. We tend to creep. It’s a thing.

There were sounds coming from inside the open doorway. I paused to listen. Voices. There was a fresh odor of blood, too, and I could tell that it wasn’t the blood of either the security guard or the cleaning lady. This was a different person. Everyone’s blood has a uniqueness that’s made up of the things they eat and their body chemistry.

The fish smell, though, was stronger than ever. It made my eyes water. And it also made the hairs on my back stand up. On some deep level below my human consciousness the wolf was reacting to something that scared it.

Which scared me.

I listened to the voices inside.

A man’s voice, young and frightened, yelled, “What the actual fuck?”

Another man’s voice, older and clearly unafraid, laughed.

Then a woman’s voice, accented and harsh, said, “Step away from that book.”

To which the older man replied, “Kill her.”

And, like an idiot, I rushed into the room.

-18-

Hiro Tsukino

The Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia

Central Anatolia, Turkey

One Month Ago

“They’re coming!” cried Rink. She drew her pistol and began backing quickly away from the tunnel mouth.

Hiro was just going over the edge of the hole and froze, one foot on the mouth of the vertical shaft and the other dangling over the sheer drop. He had a gun, too, but it was holstered and his hands were busy with his rappelling rope. He turned to where the others stood. Priest, as always, was flanked by Boris and Keppler. His worshippers. Both of them had rifles slung and when Priest nodded they brought the guns up.

“Wait,” said Hiro, “they’re just guards.”

“What does that matter?” asked Priest.

“We don’t have to kill them, for Christ’s sake. We can disarm them or something.”

Rink looked over her shoulder. She had her pistol out in a shaky two-handed grip and the sounds of men running echoed from beyond the chamber’s rocky opening. They were in the fifth of six sub-chambers that had been cut into the living rock beneath one of the fairy chimneys. The lowest chamber was a shrine sanctified by the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great, who was Bishop of Caesarea, and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa. Along with their friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, they had come here in the middle of the fourth century to bury one of the Unlearnable Truths. It had been a sacred and dangerous mission for the three men, and they had undertaken it with the help of a few trusted priests. The bones of those priests were rumored to be down in the last chamber. They had sacrificed themselves to serve as protectors of the evil book for all eternity. That had earned them the rare privilege of a kind of secret sainthood known only to a cabal hidden within the vast bureaucracy of the church.

Now that book was forty feet below them. The team had followed a series of maddening clues, false leads, dead ends, and obscure references to this remote part of Turkey, and had discovered the network of tunnels that were still protected by Vatican soldiers despite the religious and political unrest here. The Swiss Guardsmen who were coming this way were doing what they believed was a truly sacred duty. They had been told, Hiro knew, that this hidden shrine held the bones of Saint Joseph the Carpenter, the humble Nazarene who had been husband to Mary and stepfather to Jesus.

And, as far as Priest had determined, the bones of Joseph did, indeed, lie here, brought from Nazareth in secret and with the belief that a man capable of protecting the newborn Christ was up to the task of protecting the world from the Eligoth Ministries. That book was one of several long believed to have been destroyed but whose existence had been confirmed by Priest’s many agents and contacts. The team had already collected two others like it, and when this was done they would begin the hunt for the last two of the Unlearnable Books—De Vermis Mysteriis and the most dreadful of all, The Cloister Manifesto.

And then it would all be done. The three-year contract that had been expanded to six brutal years. All of the missions to places the rest of the world wanted to forget ever existed. The gradual loss of self—first to horror, then to fear and paranoia, and to the drugs that helped him get through each night and face each day. For Hiro it was no longer the big payday that kept him going. No, it was the knowledge that this was almost over. This job and two others…and done.

After these two, there were no more books to find.

Hiro was positive that Priest neither knew nor cared how many bodies they’d left behind, how many lives destroyed. Dozens of the Brotherhood, some of the Closers, and countless guards, museum staff, priests and monks, nuns, imams. And the innocent, too. Bystanders, passersby. People whose karma had put them in the path of Mr. Priest, and who had been swept away. First by Boris and over the last year by Keppler, who had somehow become less of the scientist she had been and was now a thug, a killer who carried a gun and slaughtered anyone who became an inconvenience or impediment to her master. To Priest.

And now the Swiss Guards here. Men who protected a shrine that even Hiro respected. Joseph the Carpenter. If the Christian stories were true—and Hiro, a lapsed Shinto, was on the fence about it—then Joseph had been a good and simple man who been given a raw deal from God. To marry a girl he wasn’t allowed to touch and raise the child she said belonged to God. Joseph was either the most gullible man in history, or he loved that girl, or he believed the story. No matter which was true, he had protected Mary and Jesus. Or so the stories told. And then, when his usefulness was done he was pretty much written out of the rest of the Bible. Only tales from the Apocrypha—the lost and suspect books of the Bible—ever spoke of him.

When Priest told the team that this was Joseph’s tomb, none of them doubted him. Priest had never been wrong before. Not once.

Somehow, coming here had done something to them all. Boris and Keppler had become even more like organic robots. Cold, efficient, and scary. Rink had become less of a total mouse and had become harder. Not like the others, but in a different way. She carried weapons now and she no longer even tried to touch the man who had once been her lover. Hiro wondered if she was planning on killing Priest. If so, why hadn’t she done it?

As for him, Hiro felt like he was living some kind of dream. More than once he wondered if he was in a coma somewhere and was merely dreaming all this. Or that he was dead and this was his Hell.

When this was over, he wondered how he would ever be able to return to the world. To any world.

All of this flashed through his brain in a moment as he leaned out from the edge of the hole. The guards were yelling as they approached, panic and outrage filling their shouts.

“Priest,” he called, “don’t. Please.”

Rink turned at the sound of his voice and looked at him and then at Mr. Priest. As she turned, her gun turned with her. Not exactly pointing at the team leader, but there was a sense of dark promise in the way she held it.

Priest smiled his white, oily, merciless smile. The guards burst into the chamber.

Boris and Keppler opened up with their rifles and emptied their magazines into them. The bullets burned through the air on either side of Rink. Close. So close. She screamed and whatever courage she’d been summoning was smashed away, smashed down. Her gun fell from her hand, hit the edge of the hole and bounced past Hiro to vanish into darkness. The guards—four of them—juddered and danced as the bullets tore into them. Blood and flesh sprayed outward, splashing the rock walls. Gunfire filled the chamber and the acoustics turned everything into a madhouse of thunder. The iron and copper stink of blood permeated the air.

And then there was a sudden, terrible silence broken only by a kind of broken sigh as Rink sank slowly down to her knees and buried her face in her hands. Gunsmoke hung thick in the still air. Hiro’s head throbbed from the memory of that thunder.

Then Priest spoke.

“Reload,” he said, and his two slaves swapped out their magazines with emotionless precision.

No, not emotionless. As they performed that familiar action Hiro saw Keppler’s face. Instead of the blank nothing that was usually there he saw a curl of lip and a glitter in the eye that told of a deep, hidden, erotic pleasure.

It was a horrible thing to see. It was worse to know, because it was the truest measure of how far Keppler had fallen.

Priest walked over to the fallen guards. One of them, despite a dozen awful wounds, was still alive. He was pathetically trying to crawl. Not to the safety of the corridor, but toward the hole. Toward the shrine he had given his life to protect.

Priest squatted down in front of him and used a hooked finger to raise the man’s chin so he could look into the dying man’s eyes. Priest spoke to him in a language Hiro did not recognize, and the man replied, his words slurred by the blood that bubbled from between his lips.

Then Priest did something that astonished and confused Hiro. He bent forward and kissed the man full on those bloody lips. The guard shuddered once and then collapsed down with the finality of death.

“God…” gasped Rink in disgust. She’d watched this from between the fingers of the hands covering her face. “What…what…?”

She was unable to finish the sentence.

Priest straightened. “Hiro,” he said, “you’re not going down there.”

Boris instantly stepped forward, hooked a hand under Hiro’s armpit, and hauled him back onto solid ground.

“I don’t understand,” said Hiro. “What did he say to you?”

Instead of answering, Priest walked over to where Rink sat on her knees. He bent and gently pulled her hands away from her face. There was a smile on his face that was almost kind, though it was made hideous by the blood on his lips. He brushed her hair from her face and caressed her cheek.

“You’re going to go down there, my pet,” he said.

“No!” she cried.

But Keppler and Boris closed in on her and pulled Rink to her feet.

“I can’t,” she pleaded, but Priest only smiled as his slaves clipped the rappelling gear to the small woman. Rink caught Priest’s sleeve. “Don’t make me go down there.”

“I’ll do it,” said Hiro, stepping forward, but Boris spun and pointed his rifle at Hiro’s face.

“No,” said Priest calmly, “Rink will go.”

Rink began weeping and Keppler pulled her toward the edge of the shaft.

“Please…”

“You can rappel down,” said Priest, “or you can fall. Take your pick.”

The lack of mercy in Priest’s face was evident and absolute.

Rink threw a desperate glance at Hiro, but there was nothing the urban explorer could do. Boris’s dark eyes were as black and uncompromising as the open barrel of the rifle.

Hiro licked his lips. “It’s okay, Rink,” he said, forcing the words out, “you’ll be okay.”

“But—”

“You’ve done this a hundred times. It’s not far. Just remember what I taught you and you’ll be fine.”

It hurt him to say those words, to become an accomplice in Priest’s plan, but Hiro had no doubt at all that Priest would throw his former lover into the pit.

Rink turned to Priest. Tears still ran freely down her cheeks but she suddenly gave him a look of such venomous hatred that Hiro recoiled from it. “You’re a monster,” she said, spitting the words.

Priest only smiled.

Rink shook free of Keppler, took hold of the rope and pushed backward off the edge. Hiro slapped Boris’ gun aside and went to the rim to watch her fall. The darkness seemed to swallow her at once.

“Be careful,” he called after her.

Rink was gone.

Priest came over and stood next to Hiro, looking down, smiling.

“She’s right,” said Hiro quietly. “You are a monster.”

The team leader put his hand on Hiro’s shoulder and for a horrible moment Hiro thought Priest was going to push him in. But the hand remained steady. Heavy and oddly cold.

“The world is full of monsters.”

Down below there was a sudden, terrible scream. It spiraled up out of the darkness, high-pitched and raw and wet.

“Rink!” cried Hiro, and he lunged for her rope, but Boris pulled him back. Hiro fought him, trying to reach the rope, needing to pull the poor woman out of the hole. But then the scream stopped.

Just like that.

They all froze and looked down into the silent blackness at the bottom of the shaft. The moment stretched to horrible tautness.

“Rink…?” whispered Hiro. “Oh god…”

Then there was a new sound from below.

Laughter.

Rink’s voice. Laughing.

The laughter rose from the shaft and filled the still air, louder than the sound of gunfire. Louder than her screams.

There was nothing sane about that laugh. There was nothing human about it. Not anymore.

And it went on and on and on…

-19-

Sam Hunter

The University of Pennsylvania Museum

3260 South Street

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Tableau.

There were a bunch of people in the room. One of them was dead.

They stood in two groups on either side of a man who lay sprawled in a pool of fresh blood. The dead man wore khakis and a cardigan over a white dress shirt. A pair of cracked reading glasses lay next to him. From the picture I’d seen on the Internet, this was Dr. Holland.

Standing on the left of the corpse and closest to the door were two people who were as unalike as possible. The guy looked like a short, slightly dumpy version of Matt Damon. He wore a heavy backpack a lot like the one I wore, and he looked scared as hell. He held a pistol in a trembling hand. The woman was tall, slender, built like a dancer, with a brunette ponytail and eyes that were dark and dangerous.

Going out on a limb and guessing this was Harry Bolt and Violin.

Standing across from them was a group of five people. A tall, sinister-looking guy of about forty with black hair and a cruel mouth. He was flanked by a guy with a flat Russian face and dead eyes and a stocky blond woman with a hard mouth. They held AK-47s in their hands. To one side of them was a thin brunette woman and a Japanese guy. They had handguns.

None of them looked like what I expected either the Brotherhood of the Lock or the Closers to look like.

Sitting on a wheeled metal cart next to the corpse was a book. It was about the size of phone book and bound in heavy wood inlaid with lapis and carnelian to form patterns of coiling tentacles. Stiff bands of cracked leather were wrapped around it and buckled securely.

Before I went into the room I turned back to human form. Much easier to handle the Glock that I pulled.

The people with guns were pointing them at each other. The doorway was at a right angle to them, so no one had a gun pointed at me.

“Fucking freeze!” I growled in my best cop voice.

And then everyone was pointing guns at me.

Fun times.

“Who the heck are you?” asked Harry Bolt.

Violin looked me up and down and I saw her nostrils flare and a look of surprise flash in her eyes. Somehow—don’t ask me to explain it—she knew what I was. That is creepy as all fuck.

The tall guy with the dark hair also gave me an appraising stare. “My, my,” he said. “We are an interesting little ménage, yes?”

That’s when I saw that he wasn’t holding a gun. He had a knife down at his side and the blade was slick with blood. A few things clicked into place for me. Maybe it wasn’t Violin and Harry Bolt who’d killed those people. Maybe they, like me, were a few seconds late to a party that had already started. I mean, let’s face it, the dark-haired guy looked like a villain from central casting, and his crew might as well have been wearing t-shirts that said ”henchman.”

“I know who you are,” I said to Violin. “We have some friends in common. But who are these ass-clowns?”

“I have no freaking idea,” said Harry.

“Esteban Santoro,” said Violin.

“Oh, I haven’t gone by that name in ages,” said the super villain. He had a slight Spanish accent. Spain Spanish, not Mexican or Puerto Rican. “I am Mr. Priest to everyone who’s anyone these days.”

“Priest?” echoed Violin with a hollow laugh. “Is that supposed to be clever?”

Priest shrugged. “I considered ‘acolyte’, but it doesn’t scan as well. And, Mr. Church was already taken.”

“Church?” Harry Bolt and I said it at the same time. According to Acantha, Church was the name of Joe Ledger’s boss. If there was an in-joke—and I’m pretty sure there was—it went sailing over my head.

I aimed my pistol at his face. His henchmen closed ranks around him, but I still had a shot if I wanted to take it. “You killed Dr. Holland?”

He shrugged.

“Why?”

Another shrug.

“You’re here for the book, aren’t you?”

Priest smiled. “I believe we are all here for the same thing. Perhaps we should draw lots. Or maybe we could play rock, paper, scissors, yes?”

“Who are you?” Harry asked me.

Without shifting either gaze or gun barrel away from Priest, I said, “I’m a friend of Joe Ledger.”

Not exactly true, but close enough.

At the mention of Ledger’s name I saw several interesting reactions. Violin cocked an intrigued eyebrow at me. Bolt looked confused. But Priest’s face darkened with surprise and anger.

“Ledger,” he said, spitting the name. “He’s a dead man.”

“Not yet,” I said. Again, not exactly true. Not if Acantha was right. Didn’t seem the time to share that info, though.

Violin’s eyes flared for a moment and then she nodded. “Ah. I know who you are,” she said with a faint smile. “Joseph told me about you. I believe you met in Pine Deep.”

I grunted. “He told you about that?”

“He told me everything about it,” she said, and she leaned on the word ”everything.” Balls. Not sure how I felt about that. I’d asked Ledger to keep all information about me on the DL. Either he was a Chatty Cathy or Violin shared a level of confidence that transcended Ledger’s promises to me.

Priest looked past me to the door. “Is Ledger here? Are you part of his team? Does he now run with dogs?”

Calling a guy like me a dog is supposed to be an insult. Some of my relatives would throw down for something like that. I kind of like dogs, and I don’t give much of a cartwheeling fuck what you call me, so I managed not to fly into a homicidal rage.

“First,” I said, “go fuck yourself. Just putting that out there.”

He inclined his head as if accepting that as an appropriate response.

“Second, who the fuck are you and why’s it worth killing people to get some dumb book?”

“You know what the book is?” asked Priest.

“Maybe,” I said.

“You know,” he said, nodding. “Then you know that Violin and her pet monkey are hoping to destroy it. They are on the side of the angels.”

Harry bristled, but Violin merely shrugged.

Priest’s smile turned into a leer. “Yes, they are on the side of the angels. I, however, am not.”

“Cool,” I said. “Good line. Do you practice stuff like that in front of a mirror or does it just come to you?”

Violin warned, “Don’t antagonize him…”

“I’m not,” I said. “Though I just have to mention that you and your butt-buddies all smell like fish rectums.”

Without turning toward his henchmen Priest started to say, “Kill—”

And then there was a shout from the hallway. Male voices and the sound of running. We all turned to see a bunch of men dressed in black pants, shirts, and ski masks come crowding into the doorway. At least a half dozen of them, and they had guns, too. Swell.

They froze when they saw what was going on inside. Everyone looked at everyone, and then the first of the ski-mask crew pointed at Priest.

“Traitor,” he snarled.

“Oh, shit,” whined Harry. “The Brotherhood.”

“Kill them,” bellowed Priest, finally completing his sentence, but directing it at the newcomers.

Guns swiveled but before a single finger could pull a trigger there was a strange sound. A hollow TOK! And one of the Brotherhood thugs exploded. Or, at least his head did. It was very immediate and messy, and we were all showered with gore.

I wheeled and saw that there was another group of men pouring in from the far end of Dr. Holland’s office. They wore black suits, white shirts, and dark ties.

Closers.

I shared a microsecond glance with Violin. She looked scared and amused in equal portions. Her hands flashed and a pair of wicked fighting knives seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Every-damn-body else started firing guns.

Which is when everything went over the edge and down into crazy town.

-20-

Hiro Tsukino

The Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia

Central Anatolia, Turkey

One Month Ago

It cost Hiro to go over the edge and drop down into the darkness. He knew that he should not go. He was certain it was the wrong call.

But Rink was down there and something had happened to her. Hiro did not have much humanity left in him, not after all that he had done as part of Priest’s team. Although he’d never pulled a trigger, he was complicit in the deaths of so many. His soul was already scorched and stained with the shit of his own choices. His greed had damned him.

Rink, though, was an innocent. In Hiro’s view, at least. Bullied and cowed by Priest, dominated by Boris and Keppler, swept along in a raging tide of dreadful choices. A victim of Priest rather than an accomplice.

Her mad laughter dwindled to a low, broken chuckle. There was no sanity left in it. No hope.

Hiro could not leave her down in the shadows like that.

So he went over the edge. Keppler lunged forward to stop him, but Hiro swatted her hands away.

“Let him go,” said Priest coldly. “Let the brave knight rescue the beautiful princess.”

Those mocking words seem to chase Hiro down into the blackness.

-21-

Crazy Town

There are words that fit.

Clusterfuck is the first one that comes to mind. Oh, and FUBAR. That’s an endlessly useful military acronym for ”fucked up beyond all redemption.”

I dove for the wall and swept my hand down across the light switch and plunged everything into darkness. A computer screen was on and the ghostly blue light traced the outlines of bodies in motion. It wasn’t a strobe but with everyone in motion the effect was almost the same.

I saw Violin shove Harry Bolt out of the way as the Russian guy opened up with his automatic rifle. The hail of bullets tore into the leader of the Brotherhood, splashing his men with blood that looked black in the bad light.

Mr. Priest and his crew of zombie henchmen spread out, ducking low and firing at anything that moved. Half a dozen rounds from the Russian’s gun struck one of the Closers center mass, and although the dark-suited man staggered back he did not fall. Instead he caught his balance and brought up a very weird looking handgun. Instead of a barrel it had a ring of metal prongs and when the Closer fired the gun there was that same tok sound. The Russian’s body seemed to explode from within like a potato in a microwave if you don’t poke holes in it. His arms and head were propelled away from his torso by streaks of fire.

“Holy shit!” I heard someone say and turned to see Harry Bolt dive for cover. There was another tok and the wall behind where he had been standing erupted into bright flame.

Violin did not retreat from the attackers but instead whirled toward the Brotherhood killers and waded into them, her knives gleaming like hot silver as she attacked. I have never in my life seen anyone fight like her. She was like a great dancer, with all of the posture and dignity of a prima ballerina and all of the lethality of a threshing machine. Her lithe body evading bullets and blades as she moved among the larger, stronger male killers and cut them to pieces. Drops of blood seeded the air like thousands of black jewels. Men screamed and reeled away, clutching the stumps of arms or clawing at the holes where eyes or noses should have been. I don’t know if it’s even possible for carnage to have a kind of beauty, but if so, then Violin was an artist of destruction.

Mr. Priest was no slouch, either. He had a long knife in one hand and a snub-nosed pistol in another and was using the cover of desks, file cabinets, and work tables to make his way across the room toward the Closers. He shot one in the heart but it didn’t put the man down. The guy hardly winced, in fact, which made me wonder what kind of body armor he had beneath his suit. Priest didn’t burn up a lot of calories either being surprised or frustrated by that and put his next bullet through the bridge of the guy’s nose. Nope, wasn’t wearing body armor there. The heavy lead bullet made a small dot on the way in but exploded the back of the Closer’s skull. The man behind him got an eyeful and mouthful of hair, skull fragments, and brains. He reeled back, gagging and pawing the stuff away, and in that moment Priest stepped up and corkscrewed the point of his knife in the man’s eye-socket.

Harry Bolt began crawling across the floor toward an object and I realized that in his panic he’d dropped his gun. Idiot. But as he reached it, the Japanese guy kicked it away and aimed his own gun at Harry’s head.

So, fuck it.

I changed all the way. It’s a violent process and it hurts like a motherfucker. It also tears the shit out of my clothes. They flew apart and my backpack thudded to the floor. When I was younger the process took minutes. Now I can do it in the space of a leap. One minute I’m a short, dorky-looking guy with thinning hair, and the next I’m a wolf.

A big, bad wolf.

-22-

Mr. Priest

The Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia

Central Anatolia, Turkey

One Month Ago

Priest stood on the edge of the shaft, bent as far forward as safety would allow. If he lost balance, though, he knew Boris and Keppler would catch him. They were fully attuned to him, a connection that he treasured but did not yet fully understand. He knew that Hiro and Rink thought that it was his own mind, his own will, or perhaps some dark magic he possessed that bound the Russian soldier and the nuclear scientist to him.

How wrong they were.

They were not his slaves.

At best, they were on loan to him. At worst they were there to insure that he did not fail or stray from his mission. There were forces more powerful than Oscar Bell, the Gateway Project, or the United States Government, and they wanted those books found.

No…they wanted them liberated.

They wanted the knowledge in those books to be rediscovered. They wanted the voices of those tomes to speak after centuries—and in some cases millennia—of enforced silence.

Already some of those voices were speaking in Priest’s head. They never left him, were never silent. Hiro was too dense to realize that his smiles were a screen. A façade. He never let them see the face he saw when he looked into his shaving mirror. When the smile was gone the terror was there.

The terror and…

It shamed Priest to know that there was joy there, too. A carnal delight whose shape and depth he shuddered to consider. Rink had glimpsed it only once, and that was why she now carried a gun. Not to defend herself against guards or monsters. She carried the gun because she was afraid of him. Of the touch of his hand and the appetites that were connected to his hands and tongue and cock. To the rapacious other who had taken up residence in his flesh on that first day in Poliske. Even Priest did not know its name. It was not one of the Elder Gods or the Great Old Ones. It was a slave to them, a worshipper or priest-spirit. Priest did not know what to call it.

All he knew was that it owned him.

Body and soul.

He could feel the tentacles of its energy wrapped around him. Probing tendrils of the thing entered him at every orifice and coiled around his heart. It knew everything about him. It shared knowledge with him, but only hints. Never the deepest truths. Enough, though. Enough to help him find the Unlearnable Truths. Enough to have limited precognition so that he could stay one step ahead of the Closers and the Brotherhood of the Lock.

Enough to keep him chained to the vehicle of this quest.

The ropes that trailed over the edge had been slack for long minutes and now they jerked, became taut.

“Pull them up,” he said.

Boris took hold of Hiro’s rope and Keppler grabbed Rink’s. They braced their feet, squatted, and then began reeling the others up, straining with the weight, pulling hand over hand as sweat burst from their pores. Boris was sturdy and muscular and he managed easily; but Keppler was half his size, and yet she worked without groan or complaint. Priest marveled at it. He knew that he could assign her any task and she would perform it with a kind of mechanical efficiency and inhuman dedication, even if it killed her.

So strange. Useful, but so very strange.

He watched without helping as the slaves pulled and pulled.

Hiro emerged first, pulling himself up even as Boris reeled in the line. When he reached the edge of the shaft Hiro snaked out a hand, caught the lip of rock, and hauled himself up. He rested on his knees and turned to watch Rink being pulled up. Priest could not see the urban explorer’s face, but he saw Rink as she came into the light. Her hair was wild and soaked with sweat, and her eyes were filled with madness.

She was smiling in all the wrong ways.

Rink grabbed Keppler’s proffered hand and swarmed over the edge to stand panting like a dog. The utility pack she wore strapped to her chest bulged and strained against its buckles. A dark joy leapt up in Priest’s chest, though he knew it was not his own emotion. The thing that lived inside him exulted at the sight as Rink unbuckled her pack and removed a thick book bound in plates of ebony wood.

“You got it,” cried Priest. “Give it to me.”

Rink held the book, looking at the cover, on which complex designs had been painted in gold leaf. They were star charts overlaid with the precise shapes of a perverse twist on sacred geometry. Rink bent her head toward the book and laid her cheek against it, eyelids drifting shut. Her lips moved as she silently murmured a prayer to the book.

“Rink,” said Priest sternly, “give me the book.”

Without opening her eyes, Rink turned her face toward the book. Her mouth curled into a lascivious smile, and then her pink tongue slipped like a wriggling worm from between her lips. She licked the cover of the book, then stiffened her tongue so that just the tip of it traced a pentagonal shape. The sight of this sent waves of revulsion and erotic joy through Priest, both emotions coming in equal measure. He felt himself grow hard.

“Rink…” began Priest again, but before he could finish, Hiro took the book from her, turned and offered it to Priest.

Priest paused for a moment and then reached out to accept the black-bound Eligoth Ministries. As soon as his bare flesh touched it his heart spasmed with deep pain and his knees nearly buckled. He looked up from it to Hiro. The urban explorer’s eyes were dark, his face expressionless.

“What happened down there?” asked Priest. “What did you see?”

Hiro smiled then. A broad, happy smile that pulled the corners of his mouth and exposed his wet teeth. His smile grew and grew and grew until Priest thought that it must soon rip the corners of Hiro’s mouth.

“Stop that,” he ordered.

Rink came up to stand beside Hiro. And after a moment Keppler and Boris joined them. The four of them in a line, and they all smiled at him.

They smiled and smiled and smiled.

Then Hiro reached out a hand and placed his palm flat against the book that Priest held.

He said, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

-23-

Crazy Town

I roared as I slammed into the Japanese guy and sent him sprawling.

He was fast, though, and managed to twist away from my claws, but his aim was for shit. He fired two shots and both missed me by inches. I landed and swiped at him, knocking his gun from his hand, but he scrabbled backward out of reach. I turned to Harry and shifted enough of my face to allow me to speak.

“Hide!” I snarled.

Harry Bolt screamed like a girl and kicked me full in the face.

It rocked me sideways and I caught a glimpse of him crawling as fast as he could past me. Asshole.

I pivoted and slashed at him. Not to cut him, though. My nails sliced through the straps of his backpack and it slid around and fell off. Harry looked back and I saw him give it a moment of thought. Grab the pack or run away from the scary monster. I guess I expected him to run.

He didn’t, though.

A sob of fear broke from his chest and he flopped forward to try and snatch the torn straps of his backpack.

Kid had some balls. No brains, but he did have stones. From the look of terrified surprise I think he was startled by what he was doing. It was a weirdly endearing thing. Here was a kid who was totally out of his mind with fear and clearly out of his depth with the violent madness going on around us, and yet he tried to do the right thing rather than the safe thing. Maybe there was something in him that he didn’t yet recognize. A buried courage, or the makings of it, anyway.

Shame that I couldn’t let him have his moment.

I bared my teeth at him—all wolf again—and snatched the bag away, flinging it behind me. I heard it thump against the one I’d dropped.

Harry dove after it at the same moment that the Japanese guy lunged at me. The collision sent all three of us toppling backward in a sprawl. They both used a lot of elbows, knees, fists, feet, and knuckles.

I used teeth and claws.

The Japanese guy tried to make a real fight of it. He chopped me in the throat with an edge-hand blow. One of those good old-fashioned karate chops. A good one, too. And it hurt. I yelped—yes, werewolves yelp. Fuck you.—and fell sideways as the Japanese guy grabbed for Harry, caught his hair, yanked him away from the backpack and punched him in the face three times. Very hard. Blood erupted from Harry’s nose, but even as he fell back bleeding he stuck his thumb in his attacker’s eye. It burst the eye in a spectacularly ugly way. The Japanese man should have rolled away screaming. He didn’t. Instead he opened his mouth and vomited on Harry.

Not puke. Nope. That would have almost been okay.

Instead a black mass of some oily muck came pouring out. At first I thought it was blood but then it burst apart and became something else.

It became a mass of oily black tentacles.

Yeah.

Deal with that.

The tentacles wrapped around Harry Bolt’s face and probed at him, trying to enter his mouth and nostrils and ears. Harry screamed and I can’t blame him one bit.

I got to all fours and darted my head forward to clamp my teeth around the tentacles at the point where they erupted from the Japanese guy’s mouth. I bit down hard and felt rubbery tissue and something that crunched like bones. The taste was appalling. It was like biting fish that had been sitting in the sun for a couple of days. A smell both dead and alive with wrongness. I bit all the way through though, and then jerked my head to one side, ripping as much of them away as I could.

Harry flopped back and immediately began slapping at his face to remove the dying ends of the tentacles. He screamed and screamed.

I was busy with the Japanese man—if he was even still a man. He went wild with either pain or fury, or both, and came at me like Bruce Lee on a bad day. Kicks and punches, and a dozen kinds of chop-socky moves that I’ve never seen. And they all damn well hurt.

But, let’s face it, I’m a werewolf, so I get to play that card. And I played it hard.

As he went after me I went for him. No need for the details, but the bottom line is that when they bury him it’ll be a closed casket.

He tasted fucking awful. Even the human parts.

Jeez.

A body crashed down beside me and I saw that it was one of the Brotherhood goons. Or what Violin had left after going all Ginsu knife on him. The wolf in me was impressed. Maybe the human guy, too. She was one hell of a woman.

Harry Bolt was still being hysterical, so I took the moment to shift to a mostly human form and do half of the job I was sent here to do. I quickly opened my backpack, removed the fake book, swapped it out for the one in Harry’s pack, and tossed my pack out of sight behind an overturned desk. Then as I rose I kind of kicked the other pack toward Harry. It hit him and he stopped swatting at his face—which was long-since clear of any of the tentacle bits—and looked at what had hit his shoulder. His eyes went wide and he grabbed it, hugging the thing to his chest as he knee-walked away from the melee.

Feeling a little smug, I wolfed out and rushed at the Closers. No way I wanted to get involved in the fight between Violin and the Brotherhood. Not only didn’t she need my help, she looked like she was enjoying herself. Who am I to be a killjoy?

The battle between Priest and his two remaining goons and the Closers was hot and bloody. The blond woman was down, her head and right arm gone. The other woman, the petite brunette, had a Closer down and was doing the same nasty mouth tentacle soul kiss with him that the Japanese guy had tried on Harry. The Closer’s body thrashed and twitched and blood sprayed out his eyes, nostrils, and ears. The woman’s body trembled as if she was having the mother of all orgasms. I could smell it, too. She was definitely having a sexual encounter with the guy she was killing. And, hey, I dig porn as much as the next fellow, but that’s a kind of kinky that is six miles beyond weirdsville.

One of the Closers swung his metal-pronged gun thingee in my direction and I flung myself sideways as it went tok! The air around me went instantly white hot and I could smell my fur burning. I rolled over and over to put it out, then wheeled on the guy, teeth bared, really fucking pissed. He tried to take a second shot but I took his hand off at the wrist instead. The guy screamed and staggered, blood shooting from the ragged stump. He collided with another Closer hard enough to spoil the man’s aim and the shot hit the ceiling. Burning plaster rained down on us and the heat triggered the fire alarm. Suddenly all the sprinklers kicked in and now we were having the world’s most violent wet t-shirt contest.

Good times.

I rose up under the shooter and gutted him. Then pivoted and went for Mr. Priest.

He saw me coming and snapped a kick at me that caught me in exactly the way you don’t want to be caught. A shockingly hard shot with the point of a steel-reinforced toe on the hinge of my jaw.

It hurt.

It hurt a whole damn lot.

I staggered sideways and the bastard kicked me again, this time hitting my ribs at an angle that sent a shockwave through my lungs and diaphragm. It was almost like he understood how to fight a werewolf. We don’t have a lot of vulnerabilities but we’re not indestructible. My grandmother and aunts taught me how to fight my own kind, because not all werewolves are benandanti. Most, in fact, aren’t. If you know how to attack in just the right way, even a human can cripple us. Sure, we’ll heal, but not always fast enough.

Priest kicked again and again, breaking things, sending shocks through my heart, hitting nerve clusters on my spine.

Yeah, he knew what he was doing. He laughed while he did it, too, and said a lot of very vile things in Spanish. I know just enough of that language to understand the gist of what he was saying.

I fled from the attack. Running, falling, crawling.

Priest followed me, kicking at my balls hard enough to lift me off the ground.

Balls are balls are balls. Find me any creature—human, animal, or monster—who can shake off a full-power steel-toed kick to the nutsack and I will worship him as a god.

In the moment, though, I prayed to whatever gods may be to take me from a world of hurt and bring me sweetly into any dimension, including death, where I could not feel my balls.

Priest laughed out loud, the sound of it magnified by a moment of silence as no one fired a gun or screamed. It froze the whole room for a second, and all eyes turned toward him.

He flung away his empty pistol and snatched the Manifesto from the cart, then he turned quickly and rushed at Harry Bolt, who had taken that unfortunate moment to peer out from behind his cover.

Violin was on the wrong side of the room, and as soon as Priest moved the whole dance began again. Guns roared and men died. So did the little brunette, who was down on all fours over her victim. A line of heavy caliber bullets stitched her from hip to temple. She died quickly and badly. Four of the Brotherhood closed in around Violin and I lost sight of her, while the last three of the Closers went stomping across the floor after Priest. One of them fired his gun, but Priest ducked, warned by some sense or awareness. The air above him shimmered and the doorway burst into flame, sending a hail of burning splinters into the backs of the men attacking Violin.

I shifted back to human form and rose naked and sick to trembling feet. Then I vomited onto the floor as pain and nausea punched their way from my groin to my gut. I staggered, caught myself on the corner of a filing cabinet. The cool metal was the only steadying thing in my world. I gripped it hard and then forced myself back into wolfshape.

The transition was agonizing.

It was also healing.

Not entirely, but enough so that the pain no longer crippled me. Instead it fueled my rage.

Snarling, I pelted across the room to where Priest was kicking the shit out of Harry Bolt. The young agent was putting up a fight, though, holding onto the backpack with one hand and trying to Jackie Chan his way out of the moment. Maybe in a bar fight or an attempted mugging the kid might have won. But he was fighting a guy who’d just kicked a werewolf’s ass. My ass, and that is kind of saying a lot.

Priest hit him from thirty different directions. His arms and legs were blurs and the sound of those blows was like a butcher chopping up a cow carcass.

Before I could even close the five steps to reach him, Harry went down, his eyes rolling up, blood pouring from his nose, his limbs completely slack. He went down and he went out.

I leapt into the air to try and hit Priest from the blind side and maybe break his back. It’s a good move that I’ve done before.

Priest crouched, spun, and smashed me aside with the backpack.

I fell hard but came up quick, but by then Priest was heading for the burning doorway. One of the Brotherhood guys tried to stop him, but Priest slashed him diagonally across the face then foot-swept him so that he fell into my path. I dodged, but then the floor under me exploded and like an after echo I heard a double tok-tok!

I fell to one side, again having to smother flames.

A hand closed around my ruff and pulled me up, and I very nearly took the arm attached to it, but then realized it was Violin.

“Get the books,” she snapped.

We had another microscopic moment of connection and I got a flash of something behind her eyes. Something very, very old and dangerous. When she smiled I saw that her teeth were sharper than they were before.

Holy shit.

Then she was fighting. The Brotherhood and the Closers tried to kill her and kill each other. Violin just wanted to kill all of them.

She looked happy about it. So I left her to it.

I ran through flames into the hallway and followed Priest’s scent. He had blood on his shoes and the stink of rotting fish filled the air. I could have followed him blind.

He made it all the way to the employee exit before I caught up with him. I couldn’t see the Manifesto, but since the backpack was thicker now, it wasn’t hard to put two-and-two together.

I put on a burst of speed and then hurled myself at him. Priest turned and tried another kick at my snout, but it was too late. My weight was already committed to the jump and midway through it I turned into a man. The new configuration made the kick land on my shoulder rather than my jaw. It hurt, but it wasn’t the pinpoint precision that he needed to stop me.

I barreled into him and we hit the service door with crushing impact. His hip struck the crashbar and we went spilling out onto the pavement. The backpack went flying into the street, where it burst apart. The fake Der Vermis Mysteriis went skidding under a parked car, while The Cloister Manifesto flew straight up in the air. Priest dove for the fake worm book and I scrambled up, shapeshifted back to human, and went long to catch a touchdown pass with the Manifesto.

Priest rose, clutching the other book. He tried to kick my hands to make me drop the Manifesto, but I turned, took the shockingly painful blow on my hip and simultaneously flung the book in through the open doorway. Then I dodged a second kick as I jumped and slapped both hands against the door, slamming it shut. I turned and leaned back against it, hearing the lock click shut.

As a human I am not protected against the cold, and the sidewalk was frigid. Cold air blew knives across my skin. I changed halfway back to wolf, still standing on two feet, but now they had leathery pads and long claws. I flexed my claws and snarled at him. My body was trembling from pain and damage and I wasn’t sure how long I could stay on my feet. Priest looked ready to rumble, though, but uncertainty flickered in his eyes. He’d have to get through me and get inside the door. I don’t know how he’d managed it earlier, but if he had to pick the lock it was going to take time and we both knew I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

Impasse. We stared at each other, both ready to continue the fight but uncertain how to proceed. Mr. Priest had the fake book and me and a locked door were between him and the real Manifesto.

Priest held the book in his hands and stared hot nuclear death at me. Not sure I’ve ever had anyone focus that much pure hatred in my direction, and I have three ex-wives.

“You’ll scream for this,” he said. “You will burn in a pit of fire and beg to die.”

“Stick it up your ass,” I said, gasping from the cold.

“Open that door and I may let you live.”

“Suck my dick,” I suggested. My legs were a half-second away from giving out and there was a bell ringing in my head from his earlier kicks. Even with the healing abilities I’d inherited I was all the way out on the ragged edge of collapse.

Then Priest suddenly straightened and looked down at the book he held. His eyes went big and round and his mouth slowly opened.

“No…” he breathed. “God…no…”

Overhead in a cloudless winter sky there was a heavy rumble of thunder. Lightning forked above us, but it was as red as blood.

Then two tears, every bit as red as that lightning, broke from the corners of Priest’s eyes and fell down his cheeks.

“No…” he said again. I saw the horrible realization come into his eyes. He knew that what he held was a fake. Both books were inside the museum. He would have to get through me and through Violin to retrieve them, and if he’d seen that woman fight he would have to know that even with his skills, she’d turn him into cold cuts.

“You’re done,” I said, and it came out as a wheeze.

Priest let the backpack fall from his hands. It thumped onto the ground and lay there, inert and useless.

Another bolt of red lightning ripped across the skies chased by heavy thunder. Priest pointed a finger at me.

“You are cursed,” he said and my heart nearly froze when he spoke because it wasn’t his voice. Whoever or whatever spoke through him did so in a voice as heavy and deep as the rolling thunder. “You are damned.”

I tried to speak, but couldn’t. My mouth would not work at all.

“We know you, wolf,” spoke that voice. “We know you and we have marked you. Look for us in your dreams and despair, for we are coming for you.”

The words were melodramatic, corny, bad scripting from a cheap pulp horror story. That’s what I told myself later.

But in the moment?

Shit.

My heart was hammering so bad I was afraid it would explode in my chest. Despite the cold there was sweat pouring down my face and chest and thighs.

Mr. Priest backed away from me, still pointing his finger. Then he turned and walked away.

I could have gone after him. I could have caught up to him.

Sure.

Yeah, I could have.

Like hell.

-24-

Sam Hunter

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I kept a spare set of car keys in a magnetic box in the wheel well of my car, and extra clothes in the back. I changed into sweats and sneakers, then grabbed some tools and picked the lock on the museum door. The Manifesto was on the floor where I’d thrown it. I propped the door open and ran the damned thing over to my car and stowed it in a heavy corrugated steel lockbox. Then I took the backpack inside and made my way downstairs.

Violin was kneeling beside Harry Bolt, doing some kind of massage thing to wake him up. She paused and looked across the sea of corpses that lay between us.

“Benandanti?” she asked.

“Benandanti,” I agreed.

She nodded. I held out the backpack and she came and took it. She weighed it in her hands and nodded. Harry Bolt got to his feet and looked like a schoolyard kid who’d been roughed up by bullies. He had tear streaks on his face.

Violin glanced at the metal cart and back to me. “The other book?”

“That’s mine,” I said.

“For who?” she asked.

I almost lied, but didn’t. “Limbus.”

Violin studied me for a long, long time. “Fill a trash barrel with holly and hawthorn wood. Douse it with kerosene from a church. Any church. Strike a match at first light.”

“You want me to destroy it?”

“Yes.”

“Not give it to Limbus?”

She wiped blood from her cheek. “Not to anyone.”

“What about the other book?”

She almost smiled and shrugged. “Maybe one day I’ll build a similar pyre.”

“Same way?”

“There’s only one truly good way,” she said. There was a look of barely controlled horror and disgust in her eyes, and it was clear it came from a deep and total awareness of what those books are. And what they could do. Maybe of what Priest would have done if he’d stolen one or both.

Harry Bolt stumbled over and stood beside her, then flinched when his senses cleared enough to realize who I was.

“Holy shit!” he cried and flinched backward.

“Shhh,” soothed Violin. “There are no enemies here.”

With that, she turned and steered a trembling, shambling Harry Bolt out of the room. I stood and watched them go, my head full of a thousand questions, but heart knowing that those answers would never be mine.

I could hear them all the way up the stairs and I waited for the bang of the security door.

The museum settled into a tomblike stillness.

Everywhere I looked there was death. Grotesque and appalling. I had no idea in the world how the police and forensics teams were going to make sense of this. And, frankly, I didn’t care.

The backpack I’d brought with me was where I’d left it, hidden behind a desk, soaked in blood. Intact.

I bent and picked it up, and felt a wave of sickness wash through me. I was glad I couldn’t see the cover and didn’t need to touch it again with my own flesh. It was such an ugly thing.

Acantha would want it and the Manifesto.

That’s what she was paying me for.

I stepped over the bodies and parts of bodies and went upstairs and out the door and to my car. All the time wondering where the hell I was going to find holly and hawthorn wood and church kerosene this late at night.

There was one last rumble of thunder.

We know you, wolf. We know you and we have marked you. Look for us in your dreams and despair, for we are coming for you.

I started the engine and turned on the radio. Found some hillbilly rock and turned it all the way up. Loud enough to block out the thunder. Loud enough to block out the whispers in my head.

I tried not to be afraid.

I tried real hard.

But you can’t win every fight.

Fourth Interlude:  Down the Rabbit Hole

“Werewolves,” Malone muttered to himself as the American Airlines 757 cut through the clouds, somewhere over central Europe. The other stories had been weird enough. Disturbing, too. But the one that Samuelson had given him made him wonder how much he should believe about this Limbus group. Biologically engineered people he could fathom. Hell, that was right around the corner anyway. Time travel? Sure, why not. If Hawking believed in it, so could he.

But werewolves? Maybe this was all some sort of sick joke. Maybe Samuelson had been lying to him about his personal experience with Limbus. Still, he was dealing with something far more profound than a few pranksters, even homicidal ones. The things he’d experienced were all the evidence he needed of that. So now he was on a flight bound for Prague, with a rental car waiting to take him to some town in the interior where they burned tourists at the stake.

He was just glad he’d bothered to get a passport back when Sherrill decided a trip to Jamaica was just what they needed to get things back on track. Six months later, she was gone. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. But for the first time, he was glad she’d left him. Whatever he’d gotten himself into, it was bigger than the police force. And dangerous, too. Limbus, it seemed, had its tentacles in everything. Certainly Eastern Europe, where he was headed. And with the heat coming down from the office, maybe he’d just stay there, Limbus or not. Hell, it was likely there was no such thing as Limbus. At least, that’s what he kept telling himself.

He landed in Prague in the early evening and had just found his rental car when his phone rang. The call, he figured, would cost a fortune to answer, but he did anyway.

“Malone,” he said.

“Malone. Where the hell are you man?”

He was surprised to hear the voice. Derek Vincent was a detective down in the robbery division, and he had been friends with both Malone and Sherrill. But he’d taken her side in the divorce and that had been that.

“Surprised to hear from you.”

“Look man, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but a guy from IA was asking some pretty serious questions about you. Word is, they are looking to talk to you about something. What did you get yourself into?”

Malone broke into a smile. It had finally happened. Now he could stop worrying about it. Dreading the end was somehow worse than the end itself.

“Know what, Derek? Fuck you.”

He dropped the phone into the console and headed out into the countryside as night began to descend on the city.

By the time he arrived at the outskirts of Český Krumlov, it was full dark. His destination was a medieval village, with the town proper on an island surrounded by a river. Cars were only barely allowed, so Malone left his in an autopark and walked across the ancient bridge that provided the only real access point for the town. The night was cold, the streets deserted, and he’d rarely felt so alone. The ancient windows stared down upon him from sturdy brick buildings, and Malone imagined that beneath any one of them could lay a dungeon equipped with torture devices that would make Torquemada envious. The pale light of gas lanterns did little to cut the gloom, and he wished for someone, anyone to break the stillness. And yet it was only him, as if he were the last man on earth. When he saw a boarding house with a light on inside, he didn’t hesitate to pull open the great wooden door and enter.

The change was dramatic, and instant. The interior was brightly lit, both by the lamps that hung from the ceiling and the fire that held back the cold which, despite the date on the calendar, refused to release its grip on the countryside. There were people, too, eating hearty meals and drinking from great steins of beer. A man appeared from the back carrying three of them, and as he sat them in front of their thirsty owners, he gave Malone a nod. When he spoke to him in words Malone couldn’t begin to place, the detective simply stood, unsure of how to respond. The man smiled.

“American?” he asked, and his accent revealed that he was, as well.

“Yeah,” Malone said. “Was beginning to wonder if I was the only one around.”

“You’d be surprised. This is the kind of place you come and never want to leave. My wife Veronica and her family own this restaurant,” he said, seating him at a small table in a far corner. “I came here, met her, and the rest is history.”

“So you’ve lived here a while?”

“Several years now. And I don’t plan on ever going back.”

A dark headed beauty, one that must have been ten years younger than the man, and who Malone assumed must be his wife, brought a tray of food to the men who’d just received the beers. She glanced in their direction, but did not approach.

“She’s shy around strangers. So what can I get for you?”

“I’m starved. A beer and a steak would be good. And I probably need a room for the night if you’ve got one.”

“I think we can take care of that.”

A few minutes later he returned with a flagon of beer and a thick piece of meat.

“So,” the man said, sitting down across from him, “I hope you don’t mind if I join you. We don’t get too many Americans on vacation. So where are you from?”

“Birmingham, Alabama,” Malone said as he sliced into the steak. “Wish I could say I was here on pleasure. Truth is, I’m looking for someone.”

“Here? In Český Krumlov?” The man laughed. “That’s a first.”

“Yeah,” Malone said, chuckling. “Truth is I can’t believe it either. Seems crazy, even to me.”

“Well, maybe I can help you find this guy. He got a name?”

Malone hesitated. “Well…sorta. I mean, I’m sure he does. But I only know his nickname. I’m looking for a guy who goes by Jack Rabbit.”

The reaction wasn’t exactly like you might see in the movies. There was no crash of dishes, no dead silence that fell upon the patrons, as all of them turned to stare. The other man’s smile simply faded. The only other person to react was his wife, who turned and looked at Malone with fear and venom combined.

“It’s you,” Malone said. The other man opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. “I know it is, there’s no reason to deny it. I should have known I’d just stumble right into you. Limbus is all about coincidences, right? But why have you been sending me these messages?”

The man—Jack Rabbit—looked down at his hands and sighed. Then he turned to his wife, said something Malone didn’t understand, and then faced him again. He reached out a hand. “My name is Conrad McKay,” he said. “It’s good to meet you.”

Malone took his hand. “Thomas Malone, but you still didn’t answer my question.”

“Because I’m not sure how to answer it. I haven’t been Jack Rabbit in a very long time. I did my bit with Limbus. Then I retired here, where they first found me. Your Jack Rabbit is probably another person entirely, in another part of the world.”

“Or another time,” Malone replied. “Hell, maybe it was you after all.” He drained his flagon and leaned back in his chair, defeated. Conrad grinned at him.

“You catch on quick,” he said. “But I wouldn’t lose hope too soon. They don’t make mistakes.”

“Limbus, you mean?”

Conrad nodded. “You ever read Plato? No, I imagine not. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss out on much. But he’s got this one bit about a cave. Got a guy, chained up in the bottom, so he can’t see outside. Instead all he sees is shadows on the wall. So that’s what he thinks the world is, you know? Shadows. Then one day he escapes. And he crawls up the cave and stumbles out into the sunlight and he realizes that this is the real world.

“Lots of people know that story. And they always assume that they’re standing in the light. But they’re not. They’re still in the cave. But the real kick in the ass? It’s better there. They’re happier there. The sunlight is cruel, and the truth is far worse. Limbus is that truth.”

His wife returned from the back. In her hands were two bottles of beer and a manila envelope.

“You’d almost think I knew you were coming,” said Conrad. “Not only do I have some beer brewed in your home town, but I received this package earlier today. The instructions were simple. I was to give it to the right person. I think I found him.”

He slid the envelope over to Malone. He didn’t have to open it to know what was inside.

“What’s the point,” he asked, “of the stories?”

“Hard to say. Immortality for their exploits, maybe? Pride perhaps? Or maybe they just want you to know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“Oh, I’ve got no interest in working for Limbus.”

Conrad’s eyes twinkled. “Sure you don’t. Cheers.”

He took a long pull from the beer. Malone watched him, and then his gaze fell on the symbol printed on the bottom of the bottle. He picked up the beer in front of him, held it up to the light. And there it was—three curving, interlaced triangles made of one continuous line. The triquetra.

“Hops,” he whispered to himself. He leapt to his feet, grabbing up the package in front of him.

“Thank you, Conrad. Thank you for everything.”

“Good luck, detective.”

Malone rushed into the darkness, and it didn’t cross his mind that he never mentioned to Conrad that he was a cop.

An Atlatl

By

Laird Barron

Prelude: Doomsday Variations

KRAKATOA (ALPHA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 5:

Watching the Doomsday recordings used to be forbidden. The thumbdrives were locked in the governor’s strongbox and nobody talked about them. Talking about them earned you ten lashes. Sneaking a peek was a bullet behind the ear.

Way, way back in my youth, when I showed my fangs and claws more often. Back when folks still played the Star Spangled Banner, observed defunct federal holidays and figured humanity could get up from the canvas once more a la War of the Worlds. Yeah, the first twenty years after the dust settled was pretty much as dreary and uptight as the post-apocalyptic movies my generation adored until it was eaten alive.

Now, nobody gives a shit.

Sure, it’s against the rules, but I play a scene every night; lie back in my cot with a bottle of XO and marvel at how many goddamned eyes in the sky were floating around during the Information Age. Krakatoa’s archive is comprehensive; five or six hundred hours of viewing entertainment. I can choose from countless perspectives in two dozen countries. Often, I fast-forward and watch the mess unfold like a mushroom cloud in time-lapse photography.

I don’t listen to the commentary anymore. Don’t need to; tiny yellow subtitles, you see. I prefer the womb noises around me as the Krakatoa drifts. The Krakatoa is everything, our cocoon of warmth and light in darkness. I pay close attention to her creaks and rumblings. Her moods.

Sleep comes astride double flickers of blue static…

END RECORDING

Chapter 1 (Jane 1.0)

The universe tilted across the plane of midnight.

Dick squired his date to a romantic hilltop at the edge of town for their illicit rendezvous. He parked his sleek blue Mustang under the low-hanging limb of a cottonwood tree. A lonely kind of night. The woods were extra dark and full of coyotes, hoot owls, and one or two escaped lunatics from the decrepit asylum down the highway near the maximum security prison and the abandoned slaughter yard. A lunar eclipse would occur in two hours, forty-seven minutes and eleven seconds.

Dick turned on the radio (golden oldies, natch), killed the bottle of Jim Beam, and lighted cigarettes from the dashboard, and afterward, tossed them out the window still smoldering. While Chubby Checker did his thing, Dick loosened his tie and got busy doing his.

“My boyfriend’s gonna kill you,” Jane said without evident concern when his hand wandered to her thigh, then crept northward past the hem of her leather skirt. She leaned farther back and her knees swiveled outward, one knocking the door, the other coming to rest against the leather-bound gearshift knob. She closed her eyes and let her head tilt so the moon shone against the hollow of her throat. Her lips and eyelids were glossy and dusted with bits of diamond like the wings of a night moth.

“Who’s your man?” Dick said, not caring a whit, just exercising a bit of habitual professional courtesy. He slid her panties to the side. “You with that Samoan at the club? That monster.” He glanced up, a fox at the threshold of the coop. “Hey, the Samoan—you with him, or what?”

She sighed and shivered as his fingers went in to the second knuckle. “Nope. Little Mo’s got a regular thing with Candy. He walks me to my car.”

Something huge and dark landed atop the hood and whiplashed the couple in their seats. Metal crumpled. Cracks spread across the windshield. The Mustang’s sailcloth top opened in several ragged slashes and the naked moon shone upon poor Dick and Jane as they cowered. Then the top tore free and hurtled end over end, receding to a speck against the moon.

The shadow doubled at its middle and dug tusks into Dick’s face like a scoop excavating hard ice cream. Dick struggled and got his right hand snipped, then the left. Meanwhile, Jane leaped to safety and sprinted away from the crunching and gurgling and the arrhythmic groans of the car’s springs.

Forest closed around her and the moon stopped shining.

Chapter 2 (Manson)

The nondescript woman loitering in khaki slacks and a short sleeve shirt, maybe a real blonde, maybe not, it depended on the hair dye and the light; the woman with no discernable tattoos or distinguishing characteristics besides an athletic build, ponytail, and sunglasses—that was T.J. Manson.

Technically she had a bunch of names, kept them in a cigar box in a safe in the wall behind a faded copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at her adopted mother’s house, in lovely Van Nuys, U.S.A. She knew about the safe, Mama did. Her girl wasn’t Zorro, was she? She was not, for Mary’s sake, the Batwoman, was she? Mama tended her own knitting, as they say. Yesterday her name was something else; tomorrow, who could say? Today it was Manson.

It’s 11:00 AM and Manson should’ve been dead five minutes ago. The reason Manson was not dead had a little to do with Lady Luck and even more with the fact she pulled a double cross on Mr. Skald and Mr. Crane. Mr. Skald and Mr. Crane were currently at the end of a gravel road with a pleasant lake view, roasting in a new Tahoe with phony plates. Fire trucks had been dispatched. For now, however, the blaze was too fierce for any firemen to approach. The charred bodies would be identifiable by dental records only. The CSI team would discover a submachine gun and exploded shells that had Manson’s name written on them.

Manson wasn’t worried. She was cool. She still possessed the cylinder, and what’s more, thanks to an affinity for impromptu field interrogation, she comprehended its purpose. There were plenty more where those two came from.

*   *   *

Manson once worked for a company that insisted on code names. Hers was Tarantula. She’d always considered it to be a bit melodramatic, a bit over the top, but it was easy to remember. The Jackal, The Condor, The Tarantula. Manson resembled a tarantula in that she embodied an elegant delivery system of death.

Manson wasn’t a master of disguise. Manson took full advantage of genetics. She didn’t appear young or old. She wasn’t any particular size or height. She existed in a semi-static state, blending into whatever space she occupied at the moment. Anonymity, equanimity, and asocial tendencies were her natural gifts.

Manson didn’t train. Didn’t lift weights or read books about the deadly arts. Didn’t study either; she absorbed complex concepts by osmosis. Her old professors speculated she might be a savant. Generally, she didn’t do much except lie around her apartment on the lower end of town and smoke dope or drink cheap tequila and get serviced by every call girl and rent boy in the phone book. No need to screw with the epitome of predatory evolution. She watched cartoons on the tube, or Mexican soaps. When she slept she slept nineteen to twenty hours a day. She slept with a commando knife strapped to her thigh and an assault rifle within easy reach.

A few days before Mr. Skald and Mr. Crane get barbecued in their vehicle by a Molotov Cocktail Manson mixed up in her kitchen with dish soap and diesel while she listened to classic rock, there was a meeting. The meeting was supposed to occur in the marbled plaza of a fancy hotel with umbrellas over the tables and palm trees and waiters in bow ties who spoke pidgin English. Manson didn’t like hotels or open plazas, palm trees notwithstanding.

So they convened the face-to-face at a seedy titty bar instead.

Mr. Skald was the taller one. Mr. Crane was the asshole. Well, they were both essentially assholes, however, in Mr. Crane’s case he’d mastered the art, he’d made black belt. Mr. Skald did the talking. Not because he was supposed to do the talking, but because Mr. Crane’s eyes were glued to the ass of the cocktail waitress.

Blah, blah, blah, was the sum and substance of Mr. Skald’s verbal foreplay, which Manson pretended to absorb while she too admired the serving girl’s ass and contemplated how much it would set her back to have the chick over to the pad for a quickie. Maybe a bag of grass would turn the key, it usually did.

Also she wondered which acronym these cowboys rode under. They wore chintzy suits with clip-on ties and smelled of airport gift shop after-shave. Revolvers in shoulder holsters, the air-light aluminum frame model that everybody was carrying. Aluminum frame sidearms were chic like Uzis and Mac-10s had been in the 1980s. A couple of slicks. They seemed roughly as clever as highly socialized chimpanzees with a really well-written script. By the numbers and by the sleazy book for these two.

Mr. Skald apparently considered himself a virtuoso. He endeavored to simultaneously intimidate and flatter Manson. “We are aware of your travels, Ms. Manson—if that is your name, which I am fairly certain it is not. Don’t worry, I don’t care. I mean, Carlos didn’t need no stinkin’ last name. Ha ha. Anyhow. Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Turkey, Angola—quite an itinerary. You have enjoyed the accommodations of our nation’s finest penal institutions—Rikers, CIW, Goree, Sing-Sing. Clap on a turban and it could be Guantanamo. Kidding, kidding.” Like bad poetry it kept coming. “Of course, for you this sufficed as graduate work, eh? Took some powerful influence to, ah, extricate you from some lengthy schedules, I bet. Impressive connections.”

Manson wore sunglasses and a sleeveless shirt to accentuate her physique. She appeared extremely chic despite the fact she didn’t pack a fancy automatic pistol, or any weapon, unless one considered a switchblade a weapon, which most states did, although in Manson’s mind it hardly qualified. She borrowed Mr. Skald’s fountain pen, a veritable icepick, hefty enough to give a fellow an impromptu lobotomy, scrawled her number on a napkin, and pressed it into the waitress’ hand as she collected for the round. The waitress drooped gold-dust lashes in a wink, sexily and with lascivious promise, and wiggled when she set sail.

“Who do I waste?” Manson bounced the pen on her palm. Playing the dumb tough amused her, and so she projected the image of a thug while taking everything in and working out the angles.

“Whom,” Mr. Skald said.

“We don’t want you to waste anybody,” said Mr. Crane who’d recovered sufficiently to speak.

“I’ll do the talking, Bart,” Mr. Skald said. He didn’t sound happy. “As I was explaining, this is a courier job—”

“A courier job?”

“Yeah. Like, you carry shit from one place to another,” Mr. Crane said bitterly. He sucked a lemon wedge.

“You want me to mule?” Manson said. “I don’t mule.”

“But we don’t want you to mule.” Mr. Skald loosened his tie. His cheeks flushed.

“Okay, what do you want?”

“We want you to be a courier.”

Manson bounced the pen.

“There is a man in New York…”

Manson smirked. There was always a man. Occasionally a woman, but usually a man and usually it was Manson’s job to kill him. Manson preferred it that way because she preferred simplicity. Simple business was safe business.

“You must go to this man and acquire something from him. It’s important.”

Manson said nothing. Obviously it was important. Or at least important to them. Otherwise, why were they wasting time in a titty bar talking to a denizen of the lower kingdoms?

“So…can we do business?” Mr. Crane said.

“Yeah. We can do business.”

They talked business in an abstract manner, on the remote chance someone had worn a wire or sneaked a bug under the table. The fee was named and arrangements made. Everybody had a few more drinks and went home happy.

*   *   *

Unfortunately for the lads, in the course of performing due diligence (which included digging up a lot of dirt on the parties involved), she encountered several individuals who clued her in to the true nature of her assignment. In light of this information, she decided to put paid to her association with Skald and Crane and switch teams.

Eighteen days later, Mr. Skald and Mr. Crane were ash and Manson maintained possession of a locked and sealed space-age cylinder that contained the secrets of the cosmos. She went looking for Isaac Creely, Man of the Pearly White Teeth and a Thousand Excellent Suits.

Interlude: Doomsday Variations

NARRATOR TJ (UNIVERSE GAMMA) RECORDING 1:

Dad and his cronies call it the Rorschach Engine. That’s the code name, anyhow.

The final product is half a decade from market, minimum. They’ve recently graduated from baboons to terminal cancer patients. That’s how I make the list. Also, Dad’s a big wheel and he’s desperate. He shouts at Mom. Repeats “inoperable.” One day they argue in the kitchen and he smacks her in the eye. Mom picks up her marbles and says adios, muchachos.

The gang of whitecoats goes to town.

They stick me with needles. Load me into a coffin and hammer on the lid. I watch videos. Cartoons and warped stuff that starts out like cartoons, then changes. Giant cockroaches. Bloody piles of maggots. Soldiers blown to smithereens. Babies starving. Sharks churning the water red. Driver ant swarms over men staked to the ground. Tsunamis. Volcanoes.

Nightmares afflict me. The ocean is a source of terror.

The doctors hit me with inkblot flashcards. Reams of cards. They ask questions about what I see. They ask me to draw pictures. I draw black holes; find out later that the entire test population drew black holes. Proves Dad’s suspicions about unified consciousness, I suppose.

I get more nightmares. Cumulus clouds join my expanding list of phobias.

Dad tries to explain what a nanoprobe is, how it can be designed to self-replicate inside the body and ordered to repair damaged cells. Nanogenics, melanoma, quantum mechanics. Whatever. Somebody please explain what’s up with my cartoons.

My brain tumor shrivels and disappears.

I still have migraines and nightmares. Something bad happens with another patient. Then another. Hush-hush, of course. I never meet any of them. I never find out exactly what the problem is. Dad mentions a 20 percent survival rate, but I’m too young to understand the implications. Nobody on the research team volunteers an explanation. We plow forward, business as usual.

Even after I’m cured there’s work to be done. Could be a relapse. Could be unforeseen side effects. Could be subsidiary applications to the procedure. Could be a pile of money to be made. And we know what eventually came of those grandiose schemes…

RECORDING 1 CONT:

…the only surprising thing about the Rorschach Project getting shut down is the fact nobody is indicted. The program never stood a chance. Beyond the abysmal success rate with human test subjects there is the appalling rash of suicides and cases of insanity among the staff. A couple unrelated disasters overseas involving nanotech drive a spike through its heart.

This unpleasantness coincides with outside pressures no one could’ve foreseen. After decades of argument, Congress repeals a ban on stem-cell cloning. The competition beats Dad’s team to the punch with a cheap, low-risk procedure to correct defective genes that cause certain types of cancer and Alzheimer’s.

The nation is enduring its worst economic recession since the 1980s. This problem is exacerbated by the costs required to maintain the new Martian colony. Defense against global terrorism siphons away the remaining funds.

Dad’s ruined. Because of the project’s shady reputation, nobody will touch him with a ten-foot pole. Last time I see him alive, I’m slogging through my junior year in Stanford. He texts me out of the blue, demands a face-to-face; somehow discovered through the grapevine I’ve been asking questions about the project. We have our squalid showdown in a filthy coffee shop on the waterfront.

Dad’s a drunken wreck, interchangeable with the bums fishing for cigarette butts in the veranda ashtrays. He wants sympathy, he wants forgiveness. Mostly he wants me to forget I ever heard of the project much less was its star attraction.

To tell the truth, I’m more than slightly fucked up at this point in my life and I don’t have a drop of sympathy to spare. I suspect he’s done something horrible to me and he doesn’t deny it. Can’t deny it, not knowing the origin of his miracle cure as he does and how the research team got their grubby hands on it in the first place. Be a while before I learn the sordid details, yet I’m intuitive. Oh, my, am I ever. I don’t need the whole story to recognize a hose job when I get one.

I’m at college on a full scholarship and I got the scholarship because I’m a freak of nature. So we spit the inevitable epithets—he’s a monster, I’m ungrateful, blah, blah, blah. He starts bawling and I realize the lump in his coat pocket is a handgun, and also the impression its bullets are intended for me except he doesn’t have the guts to finish what he came to do. The combination scares me out of my pissed-off adolescent shell enough to listen quietly when he blubbers he doesn’t care if I hate him just don’t go poking around the project. It’s dead, I’m alive, count my blessings and amble on. Dad says he gives the world a decade and a half, tops. Nukes, plagues, climate change, asteroids, a rogue supercollider, invading aliens—one or more of these impending scenarios is going to fuck us over. He honks his nose on his sleeve and lurches out of the coffee shop. Soon after, he’s in the belly of a rosewood box.

Poor Dad. Just a victim of his good intentions. Will Rogers’ heart and Oppenheimer’s instinct for destruction. Oh, you motherless sonofabitch!

His prediction is off, too. We only have seven years left.

It’s okay. I’m on the job. Shortly after his funeral, I realize something has changed—a pinhole opens into my subconscious. A pinhole, then a doorway. I can see for miles and miles, doo-dah. Years and years. Centuries. Light years and light years.

An organization called Limbus is to thank for these revelations. If you’ve never heard of this group, don’t be surprised. It’s older than dirt and human superstition. I’ve a hunch Limbus played an important role in making sure that the first amphibian crawled from the primordial slime. Don’t quote me; it’s only a hunch.

Limbus entered my life at a crucial moment and showed me how to control the Rorschach Engine, how to step through the doorway and survive. You might say they introduced me to my true self…selves.

There are so many worlds, so many imperfect versions of myself trying to do good by doing evil. So many imperfect versions of T.J. playing the fool, playing the victim.

Each woman is prey to the beast.

Each world has a problem unique in its particulars. Death by fire, death by ice, death by any number of methods.

The one true iteration of T.J. lies in a stupor at the heart of the shattering kaleidoscope. Could she save us if we woke her? No, not even Limbus’ unimaginable power and resources can stop what’s coming.

Besides, Limbus doesn’t care whether a particular Earth, or universe, lives or dies. The heat death of the universe is inevitable, as is its eventual resurrection. Time is a ring.

For them, the journey trumps the destination—they move a pawn here, a knight there, and every victory or loss is a footnote in their master thesis. Acquisition of knowledge for the sake of knowledge is their sole aim.

I’m playing a different game.

END RECORDING

Chapter 3 (Thom)

Because she’d dwelled alone since the infamous split with the famous R&B singer, no one had a chance to ask Thom J. Easley why she decided to commit suicide. She would’ve shrugged and said, I am sad. Unbearably sad and unbearably tired.

Before she burned the photo albums (along with the house), she rolled a White Widow blunt and had a good long look at her wallflower self from high school. Under the influence of million-dollar modeling contracts, magazine covers, perfume and jewelry endorsements, and a cavalcade of super-hot pool boys, she’d forgotten Plain Jane.

Who could blame Thom for letting Plain Jane slip her mind? Plain Jane’s face, at its most defined, was the face of any number of girls you’ve seen in a yearbook or a newspaper spread of serial killer victims. The crime essay pictorials where hookers and coeds and young housewives blur together.

She loved her cat; she planned to get a cat; she loved her boyfriend; she fully intended to land a boyfriend. Her parents missed her, although Dad didn’t cry during the news conference after the cops recovered the body from the river or the landfill, and Mom dabbed her eyes even though there didn’t appear to be much need. She was a good girl, she loved her cat and her boyfriend.

Clad in bra and panties and sandals, she swayed out the front door of a three-million-dollar mansion. Flames burst the windows and bits of glass shattered on the steps during their slow motion saunter to the car. A scene eerily similar to a perfume commercial she shot in ’08 before her star waned in the pop culture firmament.

Sleeping pills washed down with a flute of Cristal would’ve been easier.

The sharp highway bend near the house isn’t named Deadman’s Curve; it’s a nameless part of the Angel Hills access road. There’s a cliff on the other side of the guardrail and a forty-foot plunge to rocks and surf. Jane punched their Birkenstock into the accelerator and sent the Jaguar over the edge and into the great beyond.

“You’re so vain,” said the woman in the passenger seat. A younger, stolid version of Thom. Plain Jane made manifest. “You probably think this is your idea, don’t you?”

Time crystalized. The sun coagulated until it became a stone lodged in amber and shone no more.

*   *   *

Thom didn’t snuff it on a whim. She put in plenty of work beforehand and came to the decision honestly. Her arc formed a neat circle.

She’d arrived at a few esoteric conclusions at the end of this particular rope. The tabloids were right more often than one might suppose. The conspiracy-theorists had a better batting average than they’re credited as well. Thom’s brother signed on to the Young Earth Christian movement in high school. He swore the Moon landings were fake; a guy in his church said the Van Allen Belt would cook astronauts unless their rocket had three feet of lead plating. Didn’t make a lick of difference that Van Allen tried to explain how rockets overshot the belt in an arc. Brother Ted’s tinfoil hat bullshit made Thom laugh. Anymore, she wasn’t so smug. Charles Fort, Edgar Cayce, Ramtha, Alex Jones, the Warrens…It may be I owe you guys a big fat apology.

The world was a twisted, screwed up hothouse. Take her circumstances: The child beauty pageant star who allegedly got murdered. Raped and strangled, found stuffed behind a boiler in the basement of her parents’ home. She grew up to become a supermodel under an alias. According to celebrity death truthers, her murder was one of many hoaxes routinely perpetrated by the federal government to achieve murky goals.

Conventional wisdom says her row to hoe should’ve been easy. She was the youngest of three kids. The baby. Mom and Dad were over the notion of babies, though, so she didn’t get the usual perks. Brother Ted was the eldest. Tina a year and a half behind him. Then Thom after a gap of six. Nobody ever accused little Thom of being an accident, but she had to be. When she showed up in the oven, Mom had signed with her old corporation and begun making inroads toward a second act of life comeback. Thom’s arrival derailed that narrative.

She suffered a personality deficit prior to her third (and final) year in college—as in she didn’t possess one of her own. This wasn’t an indictment of her family or fallout from a gas lighting boyfriend or an expression of low self-esteem or self-loathing; it’s a straight fact. She existed in a state of permanent disassociation. Nothing stirred her blood. Politics, fashion, entertainment, sex. None of it. The prevailing winds carried her where they willed. She bent like the reeds to the dominant opinions of more outgoing classmates and peers. She blended in. Active camouflage became second nature, and eventually, primary nature. Thom didn’t know why it took so long to come out of her shell. Deepest part of her had been waiting, or sleeping, and one day it awoke to the flicker of a photographer’s fearful eye.

Thom had drunk half a bottle of wine when she found a strange business card in her purse one afternoon. Few were aware of her burgeoning habit (which included several pills daily and way too much grass) and she scarcely acknowledged it to herself. Although this day was different; this day she’d sunk closer to the muck at the bottom of her life and she stared at the card as if it were a revelation from a god or a devil. A company called Limbus offered jobs to the downtrodden. Toll free, act now.

She might’ve set aside the bottle and dialed the number. No way to be certain—several hours went missing from her memory banks. She recalled waking in the stairwell of the apartment complex, her eardrum ruptured. As a consequence, she was haunted by weird aural hallucinations (whispers and static) that persisted for a week. A veteran of blackout drunks, Thom promptly discarded the incident and the card.

*   *   *

The official legend of Thom Easley’s miraculous discovery as “the next hot thing” went like this:

Grant Jensen shot freelance photos for indie magazines and modeling companies. He met Thom at a Halloween party. Thom had put on a top hat and a ridiculously elaborate silk vest and he snapped her as she made a wry (and according to her classmates, uncharacteristic) kiss at his lens. Jensen later sold that semi-candid pic for a quarter million dollars and a ticket to the big leagues.

Thanks to his fortuitous snapshot, the world soon learned a secret. Thom Easley proved to be a perfect chameleon, or a pristine slate. Drabness was her social camouflage, her intrinsic genius. She inhabited whatever role her handlers and clients proposed. A smudge of eyeshadow, some gold jewelry, and green screen Pyramids as a backdrop, and she became an Egyptian Queen; apply furs, prop broadsword, and a chainmail bikini and she was a barbarian princess. Regency lady, Lady Godiva, nude Celtic goddess, the smoking hot girl next door, whatever the character, she came alive in a way that caused the fashion industry’s collective pulse to race. Thom sold it in photographs and she sold it on tape. The costume of the moment constituted her identity to the atoms of her bones.

As for the matter of day to day existence, those moments when the cameras zeroed in on her essential, mundane self, she solved the problem by simply erasing vanilla Thom (aka Plain Jane) and assuming the role of an international star. Voila.

*   *   *

Thom blacked out when the Jag hit the water, its nose vertical, like an elevator with its cables cut. She torpedoed through the windshield. Riptides are common along that stretch of ocean; one swept the wreckage into the depths. Nobody witnessed the accident, although the police hunted for her after they discovered the mansion burning to the ground. The Coast Guard joined the operation, to no avail. She was listed as missing and presumed deceased.

“You died, lady,” said the beach bum who eventually fished Thom’s waterlogged corpse from a tidal pool about ninety miles south of the accident. He carried her to his shack where he administered a cure-all of bread crusts dipped in wine broth. She remained semi-comatose for three days.

“I used to be somebody in the world,” said the bum whose name was Jules. Tanned and lanky and gray, although only middle-aged. The whites of his eyes swam with busted veins. He wore a Panama hat, a Woody Woodpecker shirt with most of the buttons lost, cargo shorts, and mismatched flip-flops. “You were somebody in real life. I’ve seen you on a poster at the bus station.” He smoked a generic cigarette.

A town sat in from the beach behind the cliffs. Jules swept the boardwalk and emptied trashcans at the tavern. The proprietors repaid his labor with pocket change, six packs of Natty Light, and cheap cigarettes. “You died. You were dead. A dead mermaid.”

“Some mermaid,” she said.

“Magical. You were unearthly. You glittered like a rainbow trout in the sun. I thought some deep-sea fish had floated in with the tide. Your skin was actually gray. Like a dead seal. I saw how gray when I came closer and the light changed. An oil slick on the surface…Must have been oil.”

Thom, still bedridden, checked herself in a chipped hand mirror—the crusted slashes would heal with possible scarring. She was gaunt (even at the high-pressure zenith of her modeling career she’d maintained a voluptuous figure) and pallid as kelp. She didn’t recognize the cold glint in her own eyes and that was disturbing. The swimsuit calendar tacked to the door claimed she’d been in the water for two and a half months. Two and half months? Her post-crash memories were of bone-numbing pressure and a green gulf that blackened into infinity as it pushed into her eyes and flooded the sockets. Then, being reborn on a cot as the ghosts of bathing beauties regarded her with frozen smiles.

“I think you’re right, Jules. I died.”

*   *   *

Life at the shack settled into an eternal routine. Beachcombing and birdwatching. Long, intermittent naps. She studied the sea, which she yearned for and dreaded—nothing entirely new, except the intensity. Campfires at night. Cheap booze and decent grass. Thom dreamed of treading water in the dark while a massive shape glided past. She also dreamed of being hunted in a forest, of running endlessly, too terrified to glance over her shoulder and glimpse her pursuer.

She compared revisionist histories with her rescuer.

Jules killed a man in Ohio in 1986. He’d clerked for a mom and pop hardware store. A biker staggered in, high on meth, and waved a gun, demanding the cash in the till. Jules picked up a ball peen hammer and clocked the biker between his running lights. Dead on the way to the floor and five to twenty on a manslaughter rap for Jules. “Wasn’t any meanness to it. All I saw was that gun. I smelled beer and craziness on the guy. Figured he’d shoot me once I handed over the cash. When I hit him, my arm belonged to somebody else.”

He shipped to a medium security prison. Flew the coop one July afternoon while doing a stint with the highway crew. Simply eased into the bushes on the side of the road while another convict yelled about leg cramps. Kept right on walking until he reached the Pacific Ocean. Three decades on and his face hadn’t graced the wanted flyers at the post office. He figured maybe the world had rolled on and forgotten him.

He asked Thom if she’d done a murder too. She smoked one of Jules’ wretched cigarettes and considered the question. They sat on a boulder and watched the sun set over the water.

She said, “Worse. I turned thirty-something. The ultimate betrayal of the social contract. Can’t age. Can’t get fat. Can’t get stretchmarks. God help you if your tits sag. You’re supposed to burn your swimsuits and disappear. That’s the rule. You move to New Zealand and herd llamas, or crawl into a hole.”

“I guess you’ve done it. None of your fans would recognize you.” He’d gone to the flea market and scrounged her a floppy, wide-brimmed gardening hat, sunglasses, a selection of pastel summer blouses, baggy linen pants, and sandals.

She agreed—nobody would recognize this emaciated, battered, and wild-eyed beach bum woman with the fresh scars and too-angular cheekbones; not even the cops unless they ran her fingerprints.

“Thanks for everything. I’m strong, I’m good.”

“Moving on?”

“Gotta keep rambling.”

“Well it isn’t much…” He gestured vaguely toward his shack. She’d tried to fuck him twice, once in deferment of expressed gratitude, and later as a matter of pride. He’d apologized and said he’d gone celibate in prison.

“Where will you go? What will you do?” He spoke with patently feigned disinterest. More likely, he wanted to ask if she still planned to off herself after his efforts. She wasn’t quite certain and made no promises. Old Thom was history and dropping off the face of the earth suited Plain Jane, so perhaps extraordinary measures were no longer necessary.

What to do with herself was indeed an open question. Most of Thom’s considerable wealth had swirled down the drain well before current events. Her siblings would soon divide the remainder as inheritance, depending upon the machinery of the California legal system. It was the pirate’s life for her.

“I’m going to do what you do.”

“Aw, kid, you’re no bum,” he said.

“Jules?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“That man you killed. Is he still alive? People who are supposed to be dead sometimes aren’t.”

“Look at you.”

“Exactly.”

“His brains stuck to the hammer. I don’t—he’s dead-dead.”

“Dead-dead.”

It was getting dark and Jules’ face smudged with shadow. “The cops should have come sniffing around by now. Yeah, what a thought! That rotten bastard revived and went home to his rotten family. The cops were so embarrassed they let sleeping dogs lie and didn’t bother to contact me with the good news. Afraid I’d sue them to hell and back for false imprisonment. That’s not the best explanation.”

“What’s the best explanation?”

“Parallel universe. Turn the radio dial and you’re still riding in your car, the sun is still shining, there’s the same old Pacific on your right. Instead of Motown, suddenly you’re tuned into NPR. Dial another micrometer and you’ve got chamber music. It might be the same deal on a larger scale. Quantum entanglement. Swing the hammer, you’re a fugitive. Don’t swing the hammer and you’re a corpse at the boneyard. Turn the dial, it’s one or the other, or both.”

“Nice tinfoil hat you got there, buddy.”

She didn’t have much experience with murderers or man slaughterers. Jules seemed docile in thought and deed, yet his crime must’ve left a stain on whatever passes for the mortal soul. No takebacks once a man tastes blood. Former goddess Thom would’ve despised him for a dozen reasons, beginning with his slovenly appearance and ending with his impotence. Plain Jane would’ve stayed forever, slowly sinking into the tar pit of a Jimmy Buffet-themed purgatory. Newly risen Thom appreciated his feral kindness and forgave him his sins. He hadn’t asked why she tried to end herself. That forbearance represented uncommon courtesy. Nonetheless, she swiped thirty-six dollars from his wallet and was in the wind by sunrise.

*   *   *

Thom hitched a ride with a pair of coeds in a Volkswagen Thing and dozed several hours inland and north. The girls dropped her on the main street of a sprawling industrial town. She bought combat boots and a Leatherman knife at an Army-Navy Surplus store. That left eight dollars and change in her pocket. She initiated heavy eye-contact with two men browsing the camping section and the lady at the register. Nobody gave her a second glance.

Why had she traveled away from the ocean? She’d purchased the mansion for the view, the damp salt breeze, and the storms that lighted the entire house with sizzles of blue and white. The water appealed to some hindbrain desire; it beckoned with the seductiveness of an addiction. Thom was fed up to the gills with addiction. She vowed to keep putting miles behind her.

The eight bucks went on a burger, fries, and large coke. All that remained of her ill-gotten gains were two dimes, three pennies, and a business card she’d accidentally grabbed from Jules’ wallet in the dark. Soiled, tattered, and reeking of hemp and whiskey, its logo was of a distorted hemisphere split as if by a cleaver.

The card read:

LIMBUS, Inc.

Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

Call us. We employ. 1‐800‐555‐0606.

How lucky do you feel?

Her body ached. She was destitute and essentially unemployable. World class modeling didn’t prepare one for the blue-collar job market, although she’d probably pick up the art of doling five-dollar hand jobs at truck stops. No, she definitely didn’t feel lucky.

Why not? whispered Plain Jane. Instead of fish food in the Pacific, here you sit, digesting a burger in Downtown America in complete anonymity. We’re living a charmed life. You should make the call. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Thom’s skin prickled as she threw the card away. She didn’t see it again for three weeks.

Interlude: Doomsday Variations

KRAKATOA (ALPHA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 6:

“Mr. (static), rise and shine.”

Lieutenant Burton pronounces my name with respectful venom, brings me home from dreamland. His voice is nasal. He’s come with my summons to an officer’s pow-wow. He’s checking me out, wondering if I’m too drunk for action.

Of course I’m drunk. I’ve been drunk going on three years. Best three years I’ve had since the world went tits-up, no contest.

I rise naked, loom over the lieutenant in his pressed olive uniform and shiny boots. I do it for the flinch. I’m not a giant—submarine cabins flatter me. That and everybody born after Doomsday tends to be short and sickly. Everybody born after Doomsday is a tin soldier or a Napoleon wannabe.

Unlike the merry crew, water rationing doesn’t apply to him. Burton bathes every morning; shaves too. Usually has a pithy remark at the ready. He’s steady in the face of imminent defeat. The British Empire could’ve used a chap of his caliber a couple centuries ago. His aplomb is entirely wasted on the mongrel elements that comprise the Republic of North America Expeditionary Forces.

Burton’s bland mask is slipping. His cheeks are rosy. He’s impatient to unlimber the murder machines. Finally, a chance to wreak havoc and I’m holding up the production.

I love to fuck with his mind. “Don’t fret. We’ve got, what, four warheads left? You’ll get to uncork one.” I clap him on the shoulder as I squeeze by to rummage in my locker.

Burton says, “We’ll be there soon.”

There signifies a set of coordinates on the Black Sea. Except, since the continents are busted pieces of crockery, it’s not the Black Sea anymore, is it? There is a bone-yellow coast pocked with craters and smashed cities that once belonged to Russians, Bulgarians, and who cares—the nations and its peoples are extinct. Might as well be Mars. Nothing belongs to anybody anymore. Which means we aren’t really anywhere.

Burton has a nervous tic of braiding his mustache. Our former lieutenant, a redoubtable lad named Jacoby, clicked a set of keys as if he were Captain Queeg made flesh. Jacoby disappeared on a survey mission six months ago. Fell into a crevasse. We threw him a hell of a wake, even better than the one we threw for his predecessor. Right now Burton’s braiding like crazy.

I dress slowly, pulling on a loose, grey jumpsuit. As the only civilian aboard the Krakatoa, I don’t rate a cool uniform. We go see Captain Pizarro.

Pizarro—the name sums him up. He’s a real motherfucker. He’s also a political liability. When the brass back home decided to track down the architect of an unpleasant radio signal originating halfway across the globe, they thought of him. And Pizarro thought of me. Makes sense. To hell with my amnesty for services rendered to the Republic. I’ve got skills to pay the bills.

Captain Pizarro is in a dandy mood. He’s sitting there in his cramped office, stroking his goatee and smiling. He resembles the devil, in fact. “That’ll do, Burt.” After he’s dismissed our favorite lieutenant, he points at a chair and I sit. I notice a spool of surveillance photographs. Pizarro ignores them and studies me, clacking his Nova Skulls signet against the desk. The wood is burnished with antiquity, and matches the color of the Captain’s skin. “A drink, Mr. (static)?” Those are the magic words.

I’m looking at his ring and thinking how civilization has circled back to the dark ages, the other dark ages, that is. Mason, Mormon, Ancient Order of Hibernia—a man’s got to belong to something. Cults are the order of the day. For instance, I know of two centered on my person, but I try to keep from getting a swollen head. It’s mostly rumor, anyhow. Nobody’s given me a scepter or a tiara or some nifty title like Grand Imperceptor of Lupines.

Captain Pizarro opens a cabinet and pulls down a bottle, does the honors. We clink tumblers of Tiger’s Milk. He may be the head honcho, but my booze is superior. He swallows fast, bares his teeth. Those teeth are too white, too healthy. He’s always smelled off kilter. This would bother me more under different circumstances. “To the good guys.”

That’s hilarious. I croak, “There ain’t no good guys. There ain’t no bad guys. There’s just us chicken hawks.”

Now he’s nodding, as if anything I say bears the slightest relevance to his squirmy, homicidal brain. He plucks at the surveillance spool. “This is interesting recon. Anomalous structures, anomalous activity.”

I examine the spool, because he pushes it under my nose. A muddy composite of whorls and lines. Some rocks that are probably hills, some jagged squiggles I take for buildings. Buildings with thermal blobs of grey inside. People. Shouldn’t be any people here.

He pours another round. “The scientists are quitting on the Reconstruction.”

“I don’t talk to the scientists.”

“No?” Easy to see he doesn’t buy that. He thinks I know something. Most people suspect me of being on the inside of some conspiracy or other. “Well, they say humanity is done for and that Earth is dying. This Ice Age won’t end for a thousand years. Unpleasant activity is occurring near the planet core. It might burst like popcorn on a griddle. Everything we’re doing is pointless as boxing the Jesuit. You believe them?”

I push away the picture. “Don’t know for certain, Captain. I don’t think it’s dying, though. More like it’s going to sleep. Once we die off, she’ll stir, refreshed and green. Just minus us parasites.”

“Same difference.”

“You got me.”

“Going to sleep.” Pizarro muses happily. “Best part is, it doesn’t matter. Am I right? We get to keep on keeping on for the limit of our natural spans. Maybe bury a few time capsules for alien explorers. I wonder what I should put in mine.”

“Parakeet bones. A monkey skull. Confuse the hell out of them.”

Pizarro laughs. He even sounds sane. The cracks barely show. “I’m launching a PM operation tomorrow. Your attendance is requested.”

“You summoned me to the sanctum sanctorum to tell me that?”

“No. The men fear your reputation. Every time I emerge from one of our tête-à-têtes uneaten, my own legend grows.”

“As you say, Captain.”

We finish our drinks and I’m headed through the door when he stops me. “Forgive a personal inquiry, Mr. (static). It is good to be a national hero, yes? Your atrocities are forgiven by a grateful populace.”

“Folks appreciate the talents of a murderer when his weapons are pointed at their enemies.”

“The sins of one generation become the fairytales of another. Do you regret shedding the aspect of the beast and dwelling in harmony among lesser men? Surely, you are tempted.”

“Tempted how?”

“To roam free. To shirk the oppressive obligations of an adoring public. To stalk and slay at your whim. To disappear into the wilderness forever.”

I gaze over his shoulder to the mouth of a cavern. A man lies curled around bloody bones. The wet pelt of a bear is his bedding. He chews a femur. A younger, leaner me. Rude of brow and jaw, but me where it counts.

“Honestly, Captain, I never think about those days.”

END RECORDING

Chapter 4 (Creely)

Isaac Creely visited the zoo for two reasons: he loved to tease the animals, which he did by mocking their captivity and enslavement. Especially the tigers and the monkeys. Some of his worst nemeses went on four legs or slithered in the grass. Rudyard Kipling possessed startling insights on that front, didn’t he? Reason the second: beasts were keen to his unusual scent and paid him a lot of attention, his taunts notwithstanding. They understood the hunt and exhibited a sympathetic response to his imminent peril that he could easily read. Professional man-catchers smelled and behaved a certain way, whether a freelancer or a government drone. Four-legged predators unerringly recognized their two-legged kin among the gawping crowds.

Recently he’d tasted danger on the wind. His instincts warned that someone was keeping tabs—the occasional prickle of the hair on his neck seldom lied.

The National Security Agency profile made numerous assumptions about him. Several were correct—a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while. Basically, analysts were shooting in the dark. Most intelligence agencies are relatively sanguine regarding the inexplicable. If it’s not related to extraterrestrial (or extradimensional) life, and it’s not contagious, or doesn’t possess a dramatic upside for weaponization or profit, the powers-that-be prefer to conduct long range studies, file reports, and bury their findings in subcommittee minutes. In Creely’s experience, action always circled back to the bottom line. The bottom line is a fragile outcome—an outcome negatively affected by the whims of nervous Nelly politicians and the ever present threat of public exposure.

Private operators were where a man had to watch his ass. Detective agencies, bounty hunters, mercenary outfits, and security firms. These organizations are usually funded by rich, overly-inquisitive (or acquisitive) types, and swarming with ex-law enforcement professionals from every three letter acronym in the book.

Creely had done a good job staying off the radar. Still, as one of his many fathers often opined, shit happens. A billionaire in France caught wind of his special qualities in 1964. The billionaire’s number-one heavy was a retired Mossad agent: Arvad Gurion, the eldest son of a Nazi hunter. Creely wished Arvad had followed in the old man’s footsteps. Arvad stalked Creely, evaluated his capabilities and vulnerabilities, and put him to sleep with a drugged cocktail, easy-peasy.

“I hope you are under no illusions,” a silver-haired gentleman in a nice suit said to Creely. “You are a rat. You will endure torment and die. However, your contribution to science may prove to be important. Fingers crossed!”

Creely (Daniel Abernathy in those days) had awakened inside a padded cell. The man in the suit introduced himself (from the opposite side of a bulletproof pane of glass) as Dr. Beringer. Ironically, the good doctor proudly served the SS during the war. He and Arvad Gurion were quite collegial. While his plasma made its way through an IV drip Creely had observed the men gambling at poker and sharing cigarettes.

The padded cell lay inside a bunker far beneath a jungle in Southeast Asia. Researchers conducted a battery of tests—physiological and psychological. Blood and semen were drawn. Bone marrow and spinal fluid. Arvad applied moderate physical force; the Israeli Military euphemism for torture. After forty months of abuse, Dr. Beringer injected Creely with an overdose of anesthesia and harvested his organs. The remains were incinerated along with most of the records. Non-essential staff took a bullet in the back of the head. The skeleton crew of scientists accepted obscene bank drafts and unvoiced threats in exchange for their eternal silence.

Creely’s mind pulsed with a colossal tryptic of memories of his myriad deaths. Shot in war and love; disembowelment, strangulation, disease, senility, derangement, torn apart by hyenas, exsanguination, defenestration, drowning, starvation, bricked up in a cell, and countless other methods. This particular incident commemorated a first in his existence: he’d suffered torture and degradation directly related to his true nature.

A fresh-faced homicidal lunatic with a letter sweater, he sought vengeance during the next go around of the great wheel of karma. Sadly, he failed to exact recompense from either of the principal villains. The billionaire and Dr. Beringer died of natural causes in the summer of 1994 and 1996 respectively, thereby escaping a world of horrifying punishment. Creely tracked Arvad to a hospice in South Africa. The former intelligence agent had succumbed to dementia; cancer devoured his pancreas. Creely was forced to satisfy the debt by systematically hunting down and murdering the dozen or so technicians and assistant researchers who’d conducted the bunker experiments. One desperate technician said, we were following orders! as Creely bit off the man’s fingers. This proved supremely hollow. Nightmares of his captivity persisted.

These bad memories drifted near the surface and caused him increasing anxiety. The snare might be tightening once more. Today at the Hurley Mountain Wildlife Refuge, he’d observed owls and raptors gone mad in their enclosures, and a pack of timber wolves pacing near the fence line, hackles bunched, somber gazes fixed upon him where he observed from the midst of a crowd.

A rabbit emerged from a hedge on the outer perimeter of the fence. Neither the crowd nor the wolves noticed Mr. Bunny. Creely did—the rabbit smiled at him and cleaned its paws.

*   *   *

Intrepid researchers at Sima de los Huesos dug up the smashed skull of a near-human primate that got himself clobbered about four-hundred and thirty-thousand years ago. Let’s call the prehistoric dead guy Bill.

One of Creely’s corporations funded a significant portion of the research. Curious individuals wouldn’t read news reports of his generous contribution to science because nearly two dozen false fronts and dummy companies filtered the cash. The right people knew the score and his largesse bought a private viewing of the remains. Under museum-quality glass in a room closed off by velvet curtains. Soft lights, very romantic.

“Hello, Bill,” Creely said after a few reverential moments. “I’m not sorry.” He lit a cigarette to flaunt the secret of fire before any ancient ghost who might linger. “Goodbye and fuck you, amigo.”

*   *   *

Mid-autumn of 1985, near sunset, Jim Conklin of Kingston, New York, shot a black bear. The bear shrugged off the 30.06 round and bolted into the woods. Conklin and his two hunting buddies gave chase. Although neither of the other men had seen a bear—Frank Smolko thought it was smaller, perhaps a wild boar; and Nick Reese thought maybe a dog. A big damned dog.

As darkness approached, Smolko and Reese voted to set camp and resume at dawn. The party had hiked into the Adirondacks the day prior and were far from any road or habitation. A man could get hurt or lost wandering the mountains during the dead of night. Add a wounded bear to the scenario and the odds of disaster became exponential. Conklin was hot to follow the blood trail by flashlight, but relented to common sense and the promise of a knapsack of beer.

The men pitched camp and made a bonfire. Reese cooked beans and bacon for supper. The beer disappeared by the time the waning moon peeped through a cottony film of clouds. The hunters discussed football, the sorry state of the world, and their even sorrier jobs and marriages, and lamented that Smolko should’ve lugged more beer or a fifth of the hard stuff.

Smolko opened his mouth to crack wise. Instead, he pointed. “Oh, lordie, fellas.”

A young man stood at the rim of the campfire glow. Naked and covered in blood. Not completely naked—he wore a leather necklace strung through a chipped fang.

“You got me, Tex. It’ll be okay, though. Tom Waits told you, you need the right bullets.” The kid uttered a coarse laugh and toppled, face-down. A nasty exit wound in his upper back had clotted. Leaves and dirt stuck to his body.

The men rushed to him and did what could be done under the circumstances. Reese cleaned the wound and applied a pressure bandage from Smolko’s first aid kit. They wrapped the kid in a blanket and made him comfortable near the fire. He lay inert as a corpse. Sweat beaded upon his forehead. Occasionally his eyelids fluttered. Otherwise he might’ve been stone dead.

Conklin fell to his knees. He rocked, clutching his head, crossing himself, the whole bit. “God as my witness, I thought he was a bear. God as my witness.” Somebody handed him the last can of beer and he drank it in a long gulp.

Smolko pulled Reese aside. “We can’t move the kid until daybreak. Keep an eye on ‘em. I’m gonna scout around a bit, see if he’s got a camp nearby.”

Reese didn’t like the idea—they’d set camp to avoid this very activity. He understood the wisdom of Smolko’s plan, however. The kid might have friends in the neighborhood and they’d need to know the situation. Smolko shouldered his rifle and set forth, guided by the fragile beam of his all-weather flashlight. He could’ve sworn the kid opened his eyes to watch him go; wrote it off as a trick of the light and jangling nerves.

Two hours later with nothing to show for tramping around the woods, Smolko decided to circle back to camp. He nearly tripped over the rotted porch of a tiny hunting shack. Moss camouflaged the cabin where its decayed bones nestled amid roots and rocks. Screened by brush, its ancient foundation was sinking into the earth. No windows, no door—sockets and a toothless mouth.

Blood dried in patches on the soft ground and spackled ferns and beds of pale fungi. Smolko gagged at the reek of powerful musk. An animal had recently pissed virulent streams against the buckled planks.

Inside, roots erupted from floorboards. The floor made small hillocks where the earth had heaved. Condensation oozed from petrified rafters. The fireplace had collapsed. Doors had detached from empty cabinets. Pelts hung from the beams and were piled on the ground. Bear, coyote, deer, and other kinds. Some matted and moldering, some pristine. And among these trophies, a variety of bleached skulls lay scattered.

Smolko felt as if he’d ducked into the heart of a beast’s cave lair. Although that didn’t quite fit—stick figure men and animals were carved into the walls, and half-moons and crudely depicted constellations. He recalled cave drawings from history class and magazine photographs.

On closer inspection, he realized several of the skulls were human. One of the hides was too wrinkly and strange for any critter he’d seen; the skin dangled like a pair of hooded long johns. Ultimately, a rusted can chock full of driver licenses sent him scrambling from the death cabin. He charged in the general direction of camp, bellowing and firing the rifle into the sky.

Somewhere in the dark, Smolko tripped. He broke his leg and split his head open. He lay unconscious for forty-eight hours, maybe longer, then crawled for three days, utterly lost and raving in fevered delirium. A pair of off duty state troopers heard something rustling in the bushes and discovered him. He screamed and fought until they bound him with duct tape at wrist and ankle and lugged him back to civilization.

Search teams never found hide nor hair of Conklin, Reese, nor the mysterious kid. Cops located the shack, burnt to ashes. Years later, after he’d descended into a drunken shambles of the family man who’d gone hunting that weekend, Smolko told anybody who’d listen that busting his leg and going into a two-day coma had saved his hide, so to speak.

While dying of cirrhosis in a hospice in 2006, he grabbed a nurse by the sleeve and told her he’d seen Satan the day the troopers loaded him into a trailer behind their ATV.

“Lucifer stood beside a tree as we pulled away on that old trail. The young guy Jim shot. Naked as a jaybird and fondling that fang at his neck. Covered in gore, head to toe. Blew me a kiss.”

*   *   *

Authorities should have known there was something rotten in Stone Ridge. The stink, thinly masked by the perfume of affluence, wafted from the venerable Creely estate. Savaged cattle; dead hookers; the occasional mutilated deer hunter; and a handful of overheated eyewitness accounts of a big cat or a bigger wolf roaming the mid-Hudson Valley with evil intent. Cops are overworked and under motivated, not stupid. Sheriff Oakland, for example, had a feeling in his gut that spoiled his appetite on several occasions. The sheriff rolled by in his cruiser some late nights and wondered what debauchery or murder might be transpiring by the light of the moon. He slowed, slowed, and kept on rolling homeward to take it out on poor Mrs. Oakland (who nightly came a tick closer to unloading on him with the .32 she stashed under her pillow).

Here’s the thing—nobody gives a damn about cows, hookers, or the occasional hunter who gets tagged back by Mother Nature. Even if some eager beaver on the outside took a shine to the weird goings-on, an investigation would’ve been stonewalled in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Isaac Creely, at the onset of heroic middle age, belonged to old, old money, and had lived, as three generations before him, his entire life in Ulster County, New York with various excursions around the world as jet setting playboys are wont, nay, required, to assay. He donated wads of that old, old money heavily to strategic causes. His private investigators were the best that old, old money could buy, and these worthies periodically dug up a bit of dirt on the local power players. Cops and politicians loved him and hated him. Most importantly, they feared what he might tell if provoked.

Creely also threw fabulous, opulent parties.

The ballroom emptied as the gala wound down. High-tone guests, liquored nicely, and in some cases, a smidgeon past the line, kissed their host or shook his hand, and swayed red-faced into the night. Soon, a procession of taillights flickered on the long private drive leading from the estate and toward Highway 209.

A team of servants began cleaning with military precision.

Creely filled a tuxedo nicely; mandatory for men of his social status. He kept his hair (black and shot through with the first streaks of white) trimmed in an expensive cut the Golden Age of comic books artists favored during the height of the cold war. Steely eyes, square jaw, thick neck, and a swimmer’s body. When he loosened that Brooks Brothers tie it wouldn’t have surprised his more observant admirers to catch a glimpse of spandex with an S or a stylized bat blazoned across his chest.

“Self-made man is a misnomer,” he said as the blonde ran her hands over him. Expensive fabric; a muscled body, sleek and smooth as only money can supply. What wasn’t to like?

“Misnomer?” she said.

“Misnomer.”

“How did you get this?” She touched a bullet scar on his left shoulder.

“Hunting accident.”

“Brutal. The sport of kings isn’t a game for the hunted, is it?”

He tried to determine what sort of animal she’d be in an animated film or after a different, less fortunate draw in the genetic lottery. “I inherited everything. The money, of course. A network of powerful allies and subordinates. Enemies, too. Mother and Father were beautiful. Grandfather could’ve been a supermodel if they’d had those in the forties.” The woman (Minnie? Mandy?) nipped his chin as she worked his shirt buttons. A fox? Why not? “You’re foxy.” He slurred ever so slightly despite the fact he’d nursed exactly one martini the entire evening. Force of habit; it was usually best to keep colleagues and lovers off balance. Always best to have the edge, the half step advantage, because one could never be entirely sure what might happen next in the wild, wild kingdom.

They rolled around on a billiards table. Creely had chosen her from a throng of women vying for his attention like doves cooing on a sill. He enjoyed her scent; she didn’t use much perfume or hair spray. She radiated a feral heat that intrigued and intoxicated him. He licked her belly and tasted traces of coconut lotion and pheromones. Orgasm (a few seconds or an eternity) contracted his consciousness, then expanded rapidly and shattered like a piece of crystal fracturing into a blizzard of tiny revolving universes. He relived every climax in his lengthy existence. The outward expression of this transcendent moment was a dilation of his pupils, a mild shudder, and the tightening of his fist in her hair.

“There are three kinds,” he said. “Men who turn into animals at the sight of the moon or blood. Animals who go on two legs. And men who are wholly themselves.”

“What kinds of women are there?”

“There’s only one kind.”

She dug her nails into his biceps and stared, glazed-eyed, at the lamp shining upon them like a crimson sun. The crimson sun burned the top of his skull…

…When he opened his eyes again, gelid red light shone through the mouth of a cave and dripped from icicles. Wisps of smoke lingered in a fire pit. He lay upon frozen ground and knew it was real, yet not real, and felt the killing cold nonetheless. A mantle of mammoth hide wrapped his shoulders; his flint-toothed spear leaned against a rock. Petroglyphs scored the walls of the cave. The figures of men and animals told a story, a saga. He’d forgotten the saga across the eons as his brow flattened and his jawline receded, except in snatches during his Technicolor dreams, but the sweet, rude memory of it filled his mind instantly as the smoke from the fire pit curled into his nostrils. Tears froze his lashes.

Withered from the toll of a relentless winter and malnutrition, he’d also broken his legs. The accident occurred as he pursued an elk herd across ice sheets. Fellow hunters plunged into a sudden abyss, dying before they could scream. He’d fallen onto a ledge and eventually climbed free despite massive injuries. His hands and arms were powerful, even here at the end.

A useless gesture. Crawling wouldn’t keep him alive for long, nor had he much reason to struggle besides stubbornness. As the snows spread from the mountains, his own mate and children had gone to sleep one by one, never to awaken. Broken and alone, mind full of darkness, belly full of ache, the long sleep was welcome. The bifurcation of his consciousness, the ancient headwaters and the new tributary, altered his perspective into strange and terrifying permutations. His animalistic cries toward inchoate, primordial forces of judgment were translated into contemporary terms after a tiny lag. He beheld himself as proto-man and modern man, freezing and dying, warm and well-fucked. He could almost reconcile the gulf, except myriad other fractured selves from a myriad fractured shards of reality impinged upon his awareness. Whiteness greater than any blizzard overtook him and he was lost in the thing that resides behind the curtain of death.

It had been this way for epochs.

He surfaced into the present. He gasped for breath.

“Oh my god.” The blonde’s thighs locked around his waist and it hurt. Her expression suggested she too had traveled far. The billiard table transformed into a flat rock draped in furs.

She bit his neck like she was a lioness chomping into a gazelle.

Interlude: Doomsday Variations

NARRATORS UNK (BETA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 4:

“Item A: Transhumanism occurs concomitant with a sequence of intellectual and scientific breakthroughs. A newly discovered deep cavern in France contains heretofore unimagined and unparalleled petroglyphs and color paintings. ‘Junk’ DNA code within members of the research team are activated. The resultant contagion is transmitted via physical contact. Later, visual contact suffices. The transference range is unlimited. A recorded image is no less virulent than a live image…”

“Item B: Rapid mutations within the human genome initiate profound psychological and biochemical changes. In a nutshell, we grow exponentially smarter. The sum of humanity’s knowledge doubles every nine days. Cycles of catastrophic violence and catatonic hibernation alternate. Previously inconceivable advances in technology materialize from active dream states…”

“Item C: The Singularity is a horror that exceeds direst predictions.

Alien megastructure is made of bones. The quantum drone shot forth to take a look. The pilot began to scream when she grasped the structure’s composition…”

“I trained for marathons and would get so exhausted, I’d hallucinate spiders carving messages into leaves. My wife understood—she thought the owls at the campground were reporting our location to the bears. We visited this park in Portland. A homeless guy told us to beware the murderer stalking the bike paths. My headlamp died and when it came back on, the dude had a hatchet in his hand…”

“Gazing into the abyss of the 8 ball…all possibilities resolve to three likely outcomes—happy and uneventful until old age; war of the roses and bitterness; a horror that I have seen but must not say.”

“A Gray—12 feet tall, potbellied, blandly malevolent. Dropped down onto the road in front of my truck. Out in the pasture were the dead cattle. Couldn’t see ‘em in the gloom, but their blood hung thick on the air…”

“The signal is dark matter pouring from the heart of the sun. That scream is dark matter pouring from the wound in his face…”

“People’s eyes milked over. A complete black or white shell, and their bodies hardened into a semi-flexible plastic. We called them Retches on account of how they changed. For example: My third grade teacher, Mr. Sheffield, was the first I seen. In the middle of reading us a chapter from Pinocchio, he stopped dead and his eyes got big behind his glasses. He gagged like a cat with a hairball and turned red and did a face-plant on the floor. Thin carpet over concrete equals a busted nose and smashed glasses…”

“Eight years old, dude. I never saw anybody cough up a spleen before...”

“The whole class freaked, right? Becky Heath screamed and didn’t stop to take a breath. She started the dominoes tumbling. A lot of kids screamed. Nobody ran, though, because we’d had an active shooter drill (they referred to it as something more kid-friendly) the day before and the rule was you stayed in your room when it went down. We froze…”

“Mr. Sheffield did the funky chicken for fifteen or twenty seconds and barfed his insides. Suddenly, he climbed to his feet and looked at us, real calm and collected. The lenses of his glasses were cracked and that made the blackness of his eyes weirder. He leaned against his desk and opened Pinocchio and started reading from the beginning. His voice sounded strange, too. Nothing as strange as the loop of intestine hanging down his shirt next to his Bugs Bunny tie…”

“The week before her eyes went opaque, Thommy girl told me a secret. She said, There are so many worlds, so many variations…”

END RECORDING

Chapter 5 (Jane 2.0)

For their first date, Jane suggested drinks at a spot on the east side of Kingston. The Reading Lodge was a pile of brick and timber sandwiched between two historic neighborhoods on a ridge above the river, but set back far enough there wasn't much of a view of the water. During certain seasons locals flocked to the Reading: spring, when love and lust were on the wind and the world was new; and fall, when the trees were red and gold and brown and the hot days and crisp nights were the bitter and the sweet and a couple could hold hands and gaze out at a full, yellow moon. Otherwise the Reading brooded on its slope, melancholy and quiet, haunted by a diminished staff and a handful of regulars and the occasional tourist.

“I kind of stopped screwing around after I watched Nights of Cabiria,” Jane said.

“Did that film frighten you?” Renzo said. He sipped a cold vodka. The tips of his fingers caused condensation to pearl on the glass. In the soft light of the lounge, against the backdrop of the walnut sided booth, his flaws were blunted. Pockmarks and a swarthy complexion made his skin vellum, lent it a peculiar reverse-luminescence.

“I dated a guy from Florence, said he'd come into some money, although I bet he was lying through his teeth. I think he was actually a ne'er-do-well. Forgot his wallet on a regular basis. Too much of a coincidence for me. I lost his number and stayed in on Friday and Saturday nights for a couple months.”

“Nights of Cabiria and not Looking for Mr. Goodbar? You are a connoisseur of foreign films, perhaps?”

“Diane Keaton never moved me. My mother adored her. And Meryl Streep.” She drew a cigarette and waited for him to lift the candle in its marbled glass bowl and light it. The Reading had a no-smoking policy that wasn’t enforced during the offseason.

“Ah. I am a generation removed from my homeland. I despise Fellini. Nothing is real with him. Fantasy and hysterical people shouting.”

“Where are your parents from?”

“The Old World.”

“How old?”

“Papa put an atlatl in my hand and said, go kill that thing with pointy bits and sharp hooves.”

Jane laughed. Her lipstick was deep red. She'd dyed her hair blonde. She knew many of the women in her circle were mildly jealous of her lips and her hair, the fact she'd kept her figure and her clean skin. The power of that knowledge was good, like sex in the glow of a mellow drunk. She was on her second margarita and the bartender made them strong as sin. She'd taken the bartender home once. He'd gotten heavier lately. His gin blossoms, the pouches beneath his eyes, proof he availed himself too much from the company store, that his ship hadn't come in. These days they pretended to be strangers.

She said, “Okay, wiseacre. What do you do?”

“I’m a warlock.”

“Come again?”

“Sorry, I meant…how do you say, a magician.”

“You’re a magician?”

“I was a magician. Once.”

“Oooh—how interesting! Rabbits and cards? Beautiful assistants in sequined cabaret outfits?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You are the first magician I’ve known. Show me a trick.”

“I regret to say those days are behind me. I am officially retired.”

“Once a magician, always a magician.”

“Alas, I have hung up my magic hat for good.”

“Aww, c'mon. Something small, then.”

“What makes you sure I am not already doing something?”

“Be that way, then,” she said in a mock pout.

“Okay, forget magic. I also do what you call, uh, impressions. Disguises.” He screened his face with a placemat and hunched his shoulders. A few seconds later, he lowered the mat and revealed the snarling, red-eyed visage of a Cro Magnon. “Ta-da!”

“Holy shit.” The effect caused Jane to scoot her chair backward a few inches.

Renzo laughed. He relaxed about a hundred muscles and pulled wads of napkin from his mouth and gradually settled into himself once more. “I admire Lon Chaney Jr. He inspired me to study special effects for film.”

“Excuse me.” She exhaled and shook her head. “That’s…Well, it’s amazing. Sorry to jump. It’s just—I’ve never seen anyone transform themselves without makeup, or whatever. Whoo boy, I need a drink.” She gulped her margarita and signaled the server for a fresh one. “Since you've retired from the magic biz, what now?”

“I travel abroad. I have reinvented myself as a naturalist.”

“A fan of Thoreau?”

“I am more socially inclined than Mr. Thoreau. Nor do I write essays. I simply observe.” He raised his drink and sipped without breaking eye contact.

“Since you haven't asked, I'll just tell you: I'm the administrative assistant to the director of human resources in the Olympia School District.”

“That is a fine job. Very noble to serve as an educator.”

“I'm the director's personal secretary. We don't really work in education.”

Renzo reached across the table and took her hand. “You have money,” he said, turning her wrist slightly as if to read her palm. “You drive a new Mercedes.”

“Money? My second husband certainly did. He's dead. Bad ticker.” Jane had calmed down enough that she didn't mind Renzo touching her. His fingers were damp and cool from the glass. “There isn't a lot left. Husband the Last was a swindler. Lucky for me, I got out before it was too late.”

“Perhaps this is a trend, your attraction to swindlers and confidence men.”

“My shrink asked me the same question.”

“How did you escape the tentacles of your swindler husband? Did you shoot him?” He smiled.

“No! God, no. Silly man. I admit, it was tempting…”

“You are to be congratulated for your restraint.” He stroked her fingers. His dark eyes were off-kilter, almost crossed, but compassionate. How could a girl not go for a man with compassionate eyes?

“The Mercedes is six years old, by the way.”

“I don't care about cars.”

Jane smoked her cigarette and looked at his hand covering hers. “Well, Renzo, are you after my money?”

“It doesn't sound as if you have any.”

“Don't tell my girlfriends. They love to hate me for my wealth and privilege. I fly to the Bahamas or the Mediterranean often enough to keep up appearances. Drives them mad. They don't know it's a timeshare, ha-ha.”

“I don't care about money, either,” Renzo said. His eyes steadied as he focused on hers with a languorous intensity she associated with Latin lovers of Oxygen Network cable specials and overwrought Mexican soap operas.

“Wow,” Jane said, knocked a bit loopy from the wallop of her last margarita and the hot and sexy eye contact. She fanned herself with the plastic drink menu. The longer she studied his face, the more it sank in that Renzo wasn't what she might charitably term plain, or even homely. As her brother the Marine was fond of saying, this guy had been beaten with the ugly stick. And he was shorter than her. Yet, yet… “Goodness, it's warm in here.”

Renzo relaxed and allowed his hands to rest on his half of the table. He smiled kindly which did wonders to redeem his damaged skin, the unfortunate asymmetry of his features. “Isn't that what the undercover policewoman says in the movie to signal for reinforcements? There's always some kind of code word.” He made a show of scanning the lounge and its shadowy corners. “Are you wearing a wire?”

“Wanna see for yourself?”

He tilted his head. His hair was black and thick, except near the top where it thinned and light glimmered on his scalp. “The hour is late. You should go home and sleep. It is a work night, yes?”

“Um. I've heard that one in a movie too. The Brush-Off.” Jane realized she was tapping her foot. She always tapped her foot when nervous or pissed. Too close to call in this case.

“Never.”

“You think I'm drunk.” She heard the petulance creeping in and winced.

“Oh, I know you are drunk. If I took you home in this condition, it would hardly be fair.”

She raised her eyebrows, but he wasn't looking—he summoned a waiter and asked for the check, and would the fellow be so good as to ring a taxi for Ms. Holt? Jane wanted to protest on principle, yet Renzo was classically gallant and getting cuter by the second. She reached into her bag for her keys, saw he was already handing them to the waiter for safe-keeping. Omigod! He is a magician! Pleasantly nonplussed, she cupped her chin in both palms and gazed at him with something akin to adoration.

“Thank you for not asking,” he said after they paid for their drinks and waited in the lobby. His limp would've been impossible to miss. He dragged his left foot like a convict towing a ball and chain. His left shoe was much larger than his right. “Always they ask. I do not mind, of course.”

She looked down at her purse, uncertain of what to say, if anything.

“Congenital birth defect,” he said. “I am fortunate. You should see my brothers. Their necks…” He tapped her nose and smiled mischievously. “That is a bit of comedy. Laugh if you wish.”

And she did, mostly out of relief.

As he helped her into the taxi, she clumsily assayed to slip her card into his pocket. He kissed her cheek and promised to be in touch. He smelled of lime aftershave, faint musk, and her cigarette smoke. The night was starless and the sparsely lighted exterior of the Reading Lodge floated as if upon the surface of a midnight lake. As the taxi rolled from the curb, she craned her neck to watch him become a black shape against a yellow-blaze in the entrance.

*   *   *

Every second Thursday, Jane, or her best girlfriend Naomi Baker, hosted an informal ladies-only get-together for coworkers and close friends. This Thursday it was Naomi's turn to hold court at her chalet at the edge of a lovely subdivision in the hills near Rosendale. Mr. Harold Baker was away on a business trip and the kids had been packed off for a long weekend. Naomi pulled out the stops with a crate of California wine, hors d’ oeuvres and a stack of board games and DVD films. Friday was an in-service for teachers in the district, but most of the guests had already decided to call in sick so they could stay up drinking and gossiping until dawn.

The party was coming along nicely. Geraldine Peirce volunteered to get everyone started with drinks. Someone put on one of Naomi's conspicuous stack of mix CDs. The Stones and Jimi Hendrix and Cat Stevens were pulling the soul train, although the younger girls like Mattie Dalzell and Sarah Lynch and Grace Ring would've doubtless preferred more contemporary music—John Legend, Christina Aguilera, or the Pussycat Dolls.

While they were preparing snack platters, Jane bit the bullet and confessed her attraction to the loveably homely Mr. Renzo, he of the puppy dog eyes and male pattern balding and the quaint enunciations.

“Jeezus—guy's got a clubfoot?” Naomi said.

Jane shushed her with a venomous glance. She slid a knife from the block and began chopping celery to cover their exchange from the rest of the women who'd congregated between the kitchen and the living room. Not that that crowd was likely to notice. The girls were laughing at one of Carrie Peabody's sarcasm-laced anecdotes. Carrie's voice cut through the din like an off-key violin stroke. “Keep it down, would you? It's not a big deal.”

“Oh, yeah?” Naomi popped an olive into her mouth. “You sure?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just asking. You brought it up.”

“I'm sorry, trust me. You got any carrots; I didn't see any. Stop eating the olives.”

Naomi smirked, her hip thrust against the counter, another olive poised to her lips. “Renzo who? What's his game? What kinda car does he drive?”

“Valente, Rutigliano, damn it, I can't recall off the top of my head. He does have a last name. He said he's retired. I didn't ask about his car.”

“Yeah, yeah. Where'd you meet Mr. Mystery?”

“Church.” Jane’s face burned. Her armpits itched with sweat. She loved Naomi, but the girl knew how to get under her skin.

“Don't be bitchy, El. He sounds nice. He pay?”

“We went Dutch. My idea. He is nice, though. I met him at Kurt and Winnie's wedding last spring. Seen him around a few times since. We were standing in line at the video store and started talking…”

“It's like a Julia Roberts fairytale,” Naomi said. “Minus you being a whore, of course. Oh, wait a minute. At Kurt and Winnie’s wedding? That little swarthy guy in the suit from the '40s—”

“He's Italian. His suits are tailored.”

“Holy shit. Really? That guy? The wallflower?”

“What? You expect him to dance with his foot, uh, you know.”

“Sarah talked to him at the reception. She thought he was super awkward. Afraid of girls, maybe. Flaky.” Naomi made vague hand gestures to express the magnitude of flakiness their friend Sarah had observed.

“You blame him for being afraid of Sarah?” Jane said, and laughed. “Get a couple shots in her and look out. She'd eat the poor man alive.”

“But that guy. Jeezus, Jeezus. Personality is ninety percent of everything, right? Does that mean you've kicked Pete what's-his-name to the curb?”

“I haven't burned any bridges.” In fact, Pete Wharton had texted Jane at work that very morning. Pete was a loan officer. Tall, lean, and moderately intelligent, an animal in bed, and he seemed genuine enough. She hadn't allowed herself to get attached—she figured he'd be headed for financial and emotional skid row once his quasi-divorce finalized. His homemaker wife was a barracuda and there were three children involved. Nope, any relationship with him would be a disaster movie in the making. She'd been sure to keep her hand on the ripcord of the parachute.

“Naughty-naughty,” Naomi said.

“No, I'm smart. Girl's gotta have an escape plan.”

“Can't argue with you there, sweetie. I’m jealous as hell. Your Latin lover’s got sexy eyes. Gotta hand him that.”

They lugged the platters into the living room where the other girls had begun to adjourn in two's and three's and flop on Naomi's decidedly '70s mod couches and overstuffed chairs. Gracie Ring and Lucy Allen had endeavored to build a fire in the massive rock fireplace. Sparks jumped against the screen as heavy gusts shook the windows. The weather service predicted a decent-sized storm to blow through the mid-Hudson Valley later that night.

When the chandelier flickered, Lucy Allen and Debra Mulholland uttered primal yips and Carrie Peabody muttered an obscenity Jane didn't quite catch, but Mattie Dalzell must've because she laughed a bit shrilly.

“Think any of your damned trees are gonna crash through the roof?” Carrie Peabody said to Naomi. “One a those old growth sycamores would split this house right down the middle.”

“Yeah, Baker, you should clear-cut your property,” Lauren Bloomfield said. No secret she despised Carrie Peabody. The pair worked in separate houses at the school and were frequently at professional loggerheads. They'd antagonized one another since grade school. When it came to those two, the Doom Clock was perpetually one minute before midnight and their assured mutual destruction.

This ceased to matter three minutes later.

Naomi sent Jane upstairs to snag candles and a spare flashlight in case the power died. Jane didn’t even bother to hit the light switch—she and Naomi smoked out in the master bedroom plenty over the years. She glanced through the window near her friend’s bedside dresser. Branches whipped and sycamore leaves and pine needles whirled through the beam of security lighting. The swimming pool hadn’t been covered and its water seethed greenish-white. Odd that Naomi hadn’t covered it, considering the weather.

A black shape, larger and thicker than a man, lay at the bottom near the center. She blinked and had the horribly preposterous image of a drowned bear. Some kind of animal, surely, and not drowned, because even as she tried to make sense of the situation, the creature drifted or crawled along the bottom until it reached the edge. The shape gathered itself and heaved to the surface—

“Do you think anyone is really named Renzo?” Thom said from the opposite corner of the bedroom. Voluptuous, assured, pale as cold cream, she lurked in the gloom. “Do you think anyone could see past the façade to the vulnerable heart of you? Oh, babe, even a guy with a clubfoot could do better.”

Jane hadn’t seen reckless, feckless Thom since when, yet the sight of her, the faint smell of her perfume, the wry bite of her words, brought it back instantly.

Glass shattered downstairs. The sliding patio door not breaking, but exploding. The women shrieked and an animal growled.

“Harry keeps a shotgun in the closet,” Thom said. “You’ve seen it.” Shadows and light moved across her cheek and through it. Her voice came from a deep well.

Yes, Jane knew about the shotgun. Guns were the devil; she’d always hated them, the death penalty, and US foreign adventures. Nonetheless, two of three ex-husbands hunted. Husband the third considered himself a bit of a collector. Inevitably, she learned a thing or two about firearms.

She retrieved the shotgun and fumbled with the safety.

Thom said from even farther away, “Orange means that bad boy is ready to fire, so okay. Push in the tab on the side and pull the slide back. You’re good, you’re hot.”

Jane sat on the bed with the barrel aimed at the door. Her hands shook and it proved difficult to hold the gun steady. She said, “I’ve been here before.”

“Or somewhere like it, babe. I just remembered. This won’t work. You were supposed to do something else.”

“What?” Jane said through gritted teeth.

“Hark, the screams are over. He’s on his way. Sayonara.” Thom stepped backward into darkness.

The stairs groaned beneath a ponderous weight. The intruder’s passage was attended by crashes of upended vases and the clink and clatter of framed photographs swept from the wall.

A long shadow of awfulness flowed across the threshold, followed by the stink of blood and shit mingled with chlorine. The man of Jane’s dreams rushed through the doorway. Pieces of the women were papered to his massive torso like a collage. His clubfoot no longer appeared to afflict him.

Jane squeezed the trigger. The shotgun lit the room with an orange flash and its report deafened her. She was still frantically working the slide when he clambered upright and sprang toward the bed.

“What was the other thing I should’ve done?” A rhetorical question as her severed head smashed the window and splashed into the pool. She didn’t hear the resultant howl of victory and sorrow.

Interlude: Doomsday Variations

KRAKATOA (ALPHA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 7:

…Reynolds pilots the skiff in heavy swells. Five men cling to the gunwales. Lt. Burton kneels in the bow, impeccable as an Emperor penguin.

Krakatoa recedes in our silvery wake. Not many nuclear submarines left. Not many submarines, period. Fewer kids are born each year, which means fewer people are coming along to rebuild the technological gadgets lost defending the Republic’s meager territory. From what the intelligence community gathers, life isn’t a whole lot rosier anywhere. I think the scientists are on the money—things are going downhill in a hurry for us primates. Could be time for me to associate more intimately with another species. Trilobites may be on the comeback trail. There’s also the extraterrestrials to consider…

Stars blink on. The great sulfuric fogbanks have diminished in the last decade to the point where we can chart some constellations with the naked eye. Belts of cold fairy dust sweep in all directions.

Gerard crosses himself. Young guy, doesn’t talk much. Clutches his rifle like it’s a buoy. Him and Abram are the muscle. Flannigan, Enoch, and Rialto are corpsman, communications, and demolitions respectively. None of them are happy to be this close to a hole in space and none of them are happy to be touring what I figure is a modern village of the damned. Everybody’s pale and stinks of adrenaline.

We land without incident, unload the equipment. Reynolds waves bye-bye and jets. We’ve sixteen hours to conduct the recon mission and rendezvous for extraction. If we aren’t on schedule, Pizarro will order a crater made of the environs. SOP, baby, SOP.

I hang around to observe Enoch and Rialto assemble the robots. Robots and androids were the latest Big Thing right before the end. Lots of them ran on micro-batteries or solar power. The latter didn’t do so well during the nuclear winter. Now that the dust has settled, they’re back in style. Anything still running is back in style. The archeologists unearth lethal junk every day, yet it’s impossible to meet the demand.

Lud and Caine are top of the line military hardware. The kind of hardware the folks at the Pentagon used to keep under their hats. The robots are comprised of millions of individual subatomic machines that when inert assume the mass of a golf ball. One flick of the switch causes them to telescope into a conglomeration of pods and stalks approximately three meters high. Their exoskeletons are of a plasti-rubber alloy, similar to our own battle suits, which are impervious to small arms fire and light explosives and change color to match terrain.

Lud and Caine possess brains, I am told. Rialto and Enoch control them by voice from headsets. Magic, I say. Whatever the case, the robots are handy. They slice. They dice. They collect data and warn us if we’re wandering too close to a hot zone. Most of the hot spots have cooled and our suits are equipped with sensors and filters out the ying-yang. Never can be too careful, however.

Rialto unleashes Caine, sends it skittering off the beach and over the ridgeline to the southwest. Lud trails. The men disappear after them.

Burton gives the robots and their handlers a head start and then signals us to follow. Our squad emerges from a steep draw onto rocks above a natural amphitheater. At the bottom I pick out prefabricated houses, the lines of a larger building sunken into the limestone hillside. Swear to god it almost looks like a box store from the 2010s. Sodium lamps flicker under a pall of gray and green mist—beyond the mist are flashes of pure blue sky.

Rialto and Gerard will return soon with the news. We’re operating under radio silence. My hackles are up. There is wrong and there is super-duper two-ply wrong. This is the latter…

Chapter 6 (Thom)

A deserted outlet mall squatted on the opposite side of the highway. Lights in the parking lot came on as the late afternoon gloom thickened. The sky cracked and released a torrent. God’s creatures great and small sought refuge wherever they could. Graffiti covered the inner arch of the overpass. Gang tags, guerilla art, Banksy-style pop culture critiques, and a sequence of numbers sprayed in red:

1‐800‐555‐0606

CALL HOME, TJ

Thom lay propped against the ragged sidewall of a blown tire. She’d diminished to a skeleton in rags. Fever eagerly licked her bones, desirous of her sinews and marrow. Crows roosted upon a forgotten shopping cart and pecked in the moist earth near her unstrung bootlaces.

Three weeks wandering the USA byways hadn’t ended well. She’d gotten shifts as a dishwasher and landed a gig as night clerk at a motel. Five nights ago an unreasoning fear sent her from behind the motel counter and flying into the night. South and south toward the coast, although she couldn’t have explained the compulsion any more than she understood what had caused her to flee it in the first place. Nightmares destroyed her sleep and inflicted waking sickness; fever and shakes. Her meager cash evaporated and she went hungry. She crawled beneath the overpass to sleep and possibly die.

She hallucinated the suicide dive into the ocean led to a tour of the deeps. She piloted the Jaguar as a submarine, its headlights cutting through silty fog. She navigated red and green mountain reefs and jungles of kelp, descending into a trench. The car melted and she progressed into a cold darkness. The crushing pressure meant nothing. The cold and the dark meant nothing. Her pain and fear subsided, replaced by a smooth and vaguely contemptuous diffidence for such petty concerns.

A ringing phone penetrated the depths and buoyed her to consciousness and the wracking chills and the odors of fermented garbage. Thom had spied the phone case mounted to a concrete slab and dismissed it as an emergency unit for 911. Usually such phones were installed on long bridges and remote terminals. The placement beneath the overpass seemed odd, but in her delirium she didn’t give it a second glance until it rang for five minutes straight.

“Aren’t you going to answer? Might be important.” Plain Jane looked older since they’d last crossed paths. Left eye blacked, she wore a form-fitting dark blue jumpsuit that gave her the aura of an Olympic skier or a superhero.

“Jane, you’re hurt.” Thom had to make an effort to form the words.

“I’m T.J. Manson. Call me Manson.” Manson winked and extended her hand. “The shiner happened next week and it’s no concern of yours. Anyway, if Thom can’t come to the mountain…” She lifted Thom easily and supported her. “First order of business, answer the phone.” She half-carried Thom to the phone, opened the security box and put the receiver in her hand.

“Hello, Thom,” a woman said. “I appreciate your taking a moment to speak with me.”

Thom allowed Plain Jane to support her weight. The voice on the phone sounded familiar. “We’ve…we’ve spoken before.”

“At length during your junior year in college. Wonderful conversations regarding your hopes and dreams.”

“I wish I remembered. You helped me. Saved me.”

The woman laughed pleasantly. “We assisted you in choosing the correct path. The credit for success belongs to you alone.” After a long silence, she said, “Excellent that our talks bore fruit. You certainly left your mark on popular culture. Of greater importance, you awakened to your true potential. Partially, to be sure. There’s a final step, Thom. It’s okay to be afraid. Fear, indeed terror, is your birthright.”

Thom held on tight to consciousness. The smell of the ocean grew powerful. Twilight pulsed brighter then darker. “I don’t know what to do.”

“There’s only one thing to do,” the woman on the phone said. “Be yourself. Goodbye, Thom. Everyone here at Limbus extends their best.”

Manson lifted Thom in her arms and walked swiftly uphill and onto the overpass. There were no headlights, only a bruising rain and empty lanes that vanished into shadow. Roaring began in the distance. Water crossed the plain and covered everything except for their strip of road. Points of manmade light extinguished. Soon nothing of civilization remained beyond the ditches. Water and steam, rising. The sky tore like a piece of construction paper and the stars peeled aside.

Thom laid her head against Manson’s shoulder. The voice she’d heard on the other end of the line had been her own.

Ahead, a metal tower shot up from the horizon like some god’s pointillism—the width and height of a skyscraper, smooth and featureless. It siphoned the faded sunset. Light glowed upon the metal and turned it gold and red and black.

Manson jogged. Her boots splashed.

*   *   *

Later, in the dim, sulfurous light of a metal cavern, Manson introduced Thom to her prisoner. The prisoner crouched next to a frigid lagoon. He was chained at the ankle. Manson kicked his feet until he toppled. She put her boot on his neck. He struggled and his considerable muscles bulged to no avail.

Manson said, “This man has a thousand names. He is your son and a corruption.”

Thom cried silently. The tears burned. “I don’t know him.”

“Yes, yes, you do. Look harder. Look into his mean little eyes. You know this fucker.”

“No.” The tears burned. Smoke hissed from her blouse. “Wait. Do I?”

Manson nodded. “It’s not even a memory. It’s part of your DNA.”

Despite her sickness and confusion, that felt right. She regarded the stranger and a sour antipathy oozed from a recess of her soul. She knew him, hated him. His burgeoning fear-stink pleased her.

Manson bent and unlocked the prisoner’s ankle shackle.

The man reacted with alacrity. He slipped sideways into the lagoon. His form shifted to that of something large and aquatic and vanished. Thom screamed in rage and lunged toward the water. Redness overwhelmed her senses.

“I apologize,” Manson said as she jabbed Thom’s neck with a needle and pumped in a frightening dose of elephant tranquilizer. She lowered the woman to the ground and stroked her cheek. “We’ll see him again. I promise.”

“That does it,” Thom said as her eyes rolled back. “You’ll be sorry. Every one of you.” She snored.

“Promise,” Manson said.

Interlude: Doomsday Variations

NARRATORS UNK (ECHO CONTINUUM) RECORDING 9:

“My earliest memory is of the Scripps-henge—sunset at the end of the pier and Dad carrying me through the pylons into the bloody eye of Jupiter. We lived in San Diego for a year. I remember the devil sun. San Diego is the land of fabulous tanned tits. A shame my travels haven’t taken me back now that I’m old enough to do something about them…”

“Who needs the revelation of cosmic horror? I just saw a video of people on a Canadian highway reaching out the windows of their cars to feed grizzly bears…”

“A nightmare taught me to smudge out my features. Mom, Dad, big sis, and baby bro surrounded me as I lay helpless in the hospital bed. One by one, starting with Dad, they rubbed their faces into voids. When I woke, choking back a scream, it was because I’d erased my own mouth. It’s weird, it’s frightful and like my old pulp hero, The Shadow, it’s a trick of hypnotic suggestion, the power to cloud the minds of men. The alternative is worse. The blurry geography of our limited perceptions creates a comforting illusion of finite space…”

“I have hunted and slaughtered seventy-four people (twenty-two men, fifty women, and two unknown). Many of these are attributed to animal attacks. This is technically correct. The yellow-eyed wolf, the eighteen-foot tiger shark, the razorback…their victims heard them whisper, heard them laugh, at the savage end. I am about to be taken down by a bumbling private detective with powdered sugar on his tie. Oaf or not, he’s got a set of pistols (pearl-handled six shooters for the love of Christ) and the drop. Silver lining? This is the breakout moment. I’ll go international. It is so exciting…”

END RECORDING

Chapter 7 (Creely & Manson Together)

Creely punched the blonde in the jaw. The kind of shot he’d perfected ages before the Romans or Greeks made it an art; the kind of blow that would reliably put a three-hundred-pound defensive tackle to sleep. When she smirked he panicked, crossed with a right and kicked backward and put furniture between them. Blood oozed from the hole she’d torn in his neck. He tried not to think of the dozens of deaths he’d met at the hands of enemy tribesmen.

They stood, both nude, he dripping red, she rubbing her chin, and regarded one another.

She yawned and took a step forward and stretched her arms in a distracting manner. “I’m waiting for your loyal manservant to burst in with a sawed-off. Spoil my fun.”

“Any second now. Jeeves is a crack shot.”

“Do tell.”

“I’d advise jumping out the window.”

“Get while the getting is good, is what you mean?”

“That’s my sincere advice.”

“Not a chance. You’re less boring than most of the rich scumbags I’ve balled. Think I’ll stick around and see where the evening goes.”

“Thanks. I took classes, practiced in front of a mirror, et cetera.” He’d clamped his hand against the wound to staunch the bleeding. He risked taking it away. The blood had begun to coagulate. His body regenerated swiftly, always had, especially when his adrenaline started cooking. “This might be a trifle indelicate. Your name escapes me.”

“Seriously, dude? After ruining your pool table with our…You can’t even remember my name?”

“Sorry. It was really special.”

“Manson. T.J. Manson. Bet you don’t forget again.”

“No wager.” Creely slid his left foot back and to the left. Unfortunately, despite his bravado to the contrary, the servants had gone home after cleanup duties. That meant he might be fucked in more ways than the obvious. Weapons hung as museum ornaments—spears, sabers, knives, and rifles behind glass, revolvers tucked inside cabinets. The problem lay in getting his hands on one. If he could only make a run for his closet, the tables would turn with a vengeance. She looked fast. Fast and deadly and opportunistic. The second he turned to flee, she’d pounce; a move he’d executed on hapless prey on innumerable occasions.

Manson said, “Gotta say—that massacre at the house party last year? Uncool. I figured you were smarter. You stay on a program. Usually it’s the isolated bitch running through the woods, or a juicy hitchhiker, or a vagrant nobody will miss. A houseful of dumb middleclass broads? You must lead a charmed life.”

“I have deep pockets, which enhances my appeal,” he said.

“Getting cocky in your dotage.”

“Bored.”

“Didn’t you recognize your great love? Or is that why you made hash of Jane and her friends?”

Creely longed to rend, to maim. Images shuttered through his mind—he saw himself in tall grass, pursuing deer and antelopes and men. He composed himself, took a breath, and affected a reasonable demeanor. “For the record, Jane isn’t my great love.”

“Then why slaughter the poor lady?”

“I slaughter lots of people.”

“This feels personal. History?”

“Yes.”

“Or should I ask Renzo the Magnificent?”

“Sure, ask Renzo. Or Don Juan, or Faust. Ask Mephistopheles.”

“I’d love it if one of you would level.”

“Whatever her psychological condition, Jane, as you refer to her, shares my predilections. You’d know. I’ve got your scent. Different. Strange. You’re her. Her twin, her clone without…”

“Without her predilections?”

“I intended to say potential. How can this be?”

“We contain multitudes.”

“Jane is worse. She’s the real threat. She’s the one you should be trying to kill.”

“I’m not here to kill you.”

“Glad to hear it, sweetheart. I will kill you.”

He grabbed a wingback chair and drove its legs at her midsection. She caught the chair and they contended for several moments, then she ripped it from his grasp and flung it across the room and moved in, fingers crooked and digging for his eyes. He kicked her in the thigh and a welt bloomed. She pressed and he feinted a jab to her nose and kicked her in the leg again. She smiled and slapped the next jab aside and blocked the follow-up kick with the point of her elbow against his shin. The shock and pain of fractured bone fogged his brain. He couldn’t put much weight on his left leg, so he lifted another chair and swung it and when she raised her hands to pluck it from the air, he let go and bolted through the door.

“Goddamn it, come back here,” Manson said.

Creely made it halfway along the corridor to the grand staircase. His leg buckled and he sprawled beneath the impassive gaze of the stuffed and mounted head of a bison he’d bagged on a domestic safari. Manson drove a knee into his spine and chopped the edge of her hand across his neck.

*   *   *

He awakened inside a holographic dream of Wyoming, 1997.

The sky lay flat and close. Sun and moon and faint stars hung in balance.

Wind shivered the pale grass of the plains and drumlin slopes. He crouched so that blades tickled his mouth and concealed him from the bison herd as it grazed. The end of the Twentieth Century or the end of the Paleolithic, there was no visible distinction in this place.

Creely gripped a spear with an obsidian head. His companions reposed at the lodge, drinking, gambling, fat with a rich meal and pride at their accomplishments, their sniper accuracy. Creely had come to these hills with the hunters because they were wealthy and influential. Two managed satellite companies that belonged to the Creely franchise; two others were elite investors; another held congressional office in New York State.

Manson rose from the grass, close enough to kiss. Gleaming and bruised from their battle. She carried a metal cylinder in her left hand. The cylinder drifted from gray to blue to pink as sunrays played over its surface.

“Your eyes change color too. Right now they are yellow. I see the elk and the wolf in you. The saber-toothed cat. The Neanderthal and Australopithecus. If I stared deep enough, maybe I’d see the serpent flick its tongue.” The wind did not ruffle her hair. Her body flickered like a badly edited film image on a screen; an actress superimposed on an army of stunt doubles. The fluctuations were rapid—a centimeter too tall, then too short; hair parted differently; a softening of the jaw; a darkening of the eye; scars expanding and retreating like a time-lapse of rivers and tributaries in motion.

He inhaled, seeking some fingernail hold on the situation.

She said, “You have flawless genetic memory. You live, you die, you reincarnate and the pattern of your soul corrupts the newborn host and overwrites its developing personality with memories of a creature that has existed for eons. Qualifies you as an immortal, huh? Sweet deal. By the time you reach sexual maturity in the fresh body, you possess the wisdom and experience of the ages. Somewhere along the line two bad things happened—you learned to shapeshift into animals. Then you went rabid.”

“Don’t make it sound so negative.” He stepped back. The bison herd took heed and lumbered toward the hills. “There were many of us, once. An old hominid taught me to make tools and wear the skins of animals, and how to think like one. Not a hell of a stretch that early in our evolution. And not much of a step from empathizing with beasts to transfiguring into beasts. The code resides in everyone.”

“Yet you require a talisman.”

“Yes, or a fetish. A tooth, a pelt, a scale. My own will, my own immunity to superstition, is insufficient to overcome the need for a psychological crutch. Damned frustrating.”

“You’re lucky. The moon doesn’t control your biology. You aren’t under a curse.”

“More of a curse than you might believe,” he said. “As to curses…You’re with the government.”

“No. I represent Limbus at the moment.”

“I’m unfamiliar with them. Cloak and dagger, tentacles in every pie, does that fit?”

“Good enough. Jane was an asset, once upon a time. They wiped her memory, implanted a post-hypnotic suggestion or two, and set her in your path. They’ve run variations of the operation on an infinite loop.”

“Why would this Limbus organization set her in my path?”

Manson raised an eyebrow. “Come on, Creely. This isn’t quantum physics.”

“Matter, antimatter. Limbus theorizes we might react in proximity. She’s asleep and they want me to awaken her.”

“You’re her baby, so to speak. You and your proto-human genes. It’ll work with the right version, the true version.”

Why the hell would your masters do this?”

“They wish nature to take its course.”

“It did. Red of tooth and claw.”

“Mother Nature is keen on redundancies. We’ve a spare.”

“I don’t want to be the way I am.” He stabbed his spear into the earth and watched the retreating bison. “I had a love. Several loves. Children. Brothers and sisters. Comrades. Foes. Their ghosts dwell here, always.” He tapped his temple. “Eternity is…You haven’t the capacity to grasp eternity. It warps your mind.”

“Ask me if I care. You’re a predator. Me too. Professional courtesy, yeah. Sympathy? Fuck off.”

Creely wiped the tear from his cheek. “Then what do you care about?”

“The extinction of sapient beings.” Manson raised the cylinder. “This was found in a cave three hundred years from today. Analysis says someone left it there during the late Hellenic. We’re guessing an extraterrestrial intelligence. One or two of them have humanity’s best interests at heart.”

“What’s inside?”

“Chamber music, laugh tracks, football scores, your vital statistics and Jane’s. A death ray, a ruby ray. The record of everything.”

“Lying around in a cave three centuries from today. Which means, it’s in that cave as we speak. Waiting for you to dig up. Time travel paradoxes are fun. Where’s the cave?”

“Doesn’t matter where because everywhere is kinda the same. Reality isn’t a line, it’s a blizzard of glass shards whirling at tachyon velocity through a void. Problem is, the void narrows to a bottleneck. Those fragments merge, Creely. I’ve seen the end point. Annihilation.”

“Must be a relief to have an endgame. To see an end. I can’t even suicide out—reincarnation is a bitch.”

“Yeah, about that…The cycles are longer, yeah? Barring violent death, middle-age drags on and on for you.”

Creely freed the spear. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Limbus noticed. Your aging process has arrested. What would happen if you actually became an immortal, full stop? Say you inhabited a single body for millennia? No soft reset, no interruption in the power curve?”

“I’d go comatose from boredom.”

“Your humanity, whatever shred you possess, would erode until only the monstrous or the alien held sway. The statistics demonstrate your appetite for blood has increased, that at some point it will be exponential.”

“Sounds…ominous.” Possibilities infiltrated his bland resolve.

“Here’s the kicker. What if you learned to wear the shape of alien predators? You’re already near the terrestrial apex. We can’t have any of it, Creely. Not here, not in any continuum. Killing you isn’t the best solution since you’ll simply reconstitute and begin the cycle again, warier and smarter. There’s one option. We’ll feed you to something that will hold your squirming flesh in its stomach acid for a thousand years. Then your future self will receive the same treatment.”

“Are you mad enough to gamble on controlling her? She’s the beginning and the end. She’ll eat the world alive.”

“And shit it back out. In twenty millennia, or twenty thousand, whoever comes along next will have a chance to do a better job than we did. And at least they’ll look like us. The choice between an occasionally destructive deity who wants to be left alone in slumber versus a god who might assume the form of an alien monster and divide humanity into hunting preserves is pretty clear.”

He tucked the haft of the spear under his armpit and oriented the tip toward her navel. He scrunched his features and subtly rounded his spine. His ankle turned and bent. He said in a soft accent, “Come now, miss. You wouldn’t hit a guy with a clubfoot?” The spearhead was already traveling.

Manson didn’t flinch as Stone Age obsidian pierced her stomach and kept going. “While we were having this fascinating conversation, an extraction team has entered your home and made preparations to whisk you away on an all-expenses-paid trip to hell. Thanks for a lovely evening.”

She snapped her fingers. The cylinder incandesced and its flash buried the sun under a tidal wave of blackness.

Epilogue: Doomsday Variations

KRAKATOA (ALPHA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 8:

I almost don’t recognize Jane. The true Jane, whom I had escaped once not long before the end of the world as we knew it. I’d thought myself clever, as a wolf who slips a snare or outruns a hunter often does.

She materializes from the blurry background and strides toward me dressed in rags of a long bygone era. She isn’t covered in blood, her belly isn’t round to bursting, but the scouts aren’t returning; not in this life. Her expression is beautiful and dreadful as the goddess our ancestors carved into stone by torchlight. She’s awake again. She begins to change and not in the trivial manner that I warp flesh and bones to mimic the wild beasts. Her transformation is primordial.

Burton and the rest waste their last seconds on this miserable chunk of rock by opening fire with antipersonnel guns and rockets. I run. This old man can pick them up and put them down faster than any other man alive.

I tear free of my suit as I sprint toward the beach. It’s the wrong way to go. Alas, under these circumstances, there’s only bad and worse. I’m mildly surprised she doesn’t catch me until I hear a gabble of confused voices over the hand radio, then cries of terror, and silence. Clad in skivvies and a necklace of hawk talons, I leap from a cliff and sail high above the ocean. From this vantage I discern the dark bulk of the Krakatoa sinking into the depths. The submarine is perpendicular and trailing white froth as oxygen boils from a sundered hull. The hull groans as it is crushed within the threshing coils of a leviathan.

The atmosphere is impossible to breathe for long. I’m already laboring when a bullet from the direction of shore knocks me from the sky. Manson, of course, sealing the deal. She’s not the kind to leave this to chance.

Jane waits, gauging the trajectory of my body as it reverts to that of a man mid-air. She stretches five miles long. Her sinuous girth reflects a rainbow pattern where the sun illuminates its scales. Her scales cannot be burnt or pierced by any weapon. The poison in her fangs is deadly enough to annihilate the entire population of Earth at its peak. She’s older than everything except the muck at the bottom of the sea; her guts roil with a special acid that preserves living prey in indefinite agony. She is my opposite, or I am hers. She feeds and sleeps. She possesses not an inkling of mortal cruelty, although her capacity for vengeance is significant.

I fall to a hellish fate. I’m not even a bite-sized morsel in the scheme of her appetite. Hardly worth the effort to part those titanic jaws. She takes it, though…

END RECORDING

Epilogue:  Call Us

Malone sat in his unmarked cruiser, parked across the street from the Trillium Brewery. It was one of a dozen that had opened during the microbrewer boom that had followed a recent change in state law. And like so many, it had taken as its name a local landmark. God, it had been so simple, and the people behind this were either arrogant enough to think they could do something so hideous and never get caught or they were too stupid to think that hard about it. Given that the crew entering the back of the building looked like they’d come from a frat party, he figured the latter.

He had no backup. In case things went sideways, he’d mailed his theory to Williams. Fact was, he didn’t have all that much to go on, just a hunch that he knew was true and the obvious coincidences that couldn’t be denied. Like just happening to find that beer in the Czech Republic. The brewery was successful, but there were cities in Alabama you still couldn’t get its stuff. No, that had all been planned, of course. Just one more hoop to jump through, one more turn in the maze that Limbus had forced him down like a rat.

But no one would believe that, especially since IA was ready to collar him for stealing the drug money. He had nothing to lose and, after the last story he’d read, nothing to live for either. Might as well do one good thing before the world fell apart, for what it was worth. He slid another shell into the shotgun that sat on his lap.

He waited till night had fallen. Somehow he knew that everyone involved in the girl’s death was inside. He also knew that they were planning their next kill. Couldn’t say how he knew it, but he did. He’d never been more sure of anything before in his life. After all, this was the climax of the story, his story, and it would be a hell of a dud if he crashed a belated office Christmas party.

Under the cover of darkness he slipped out of his car, concealing the shotgun in the long coat he wore. Nothing conspicuous, given the chill that still hung in the air. But there was no one to see him, no one to notice as he crouched behind a dumpster, and checked to see that the safety was off and the clip in his Beretta was full. He didn’t have a search warrant. He wasn’t arresting anyone tonight.

He followed the wall, staying in the shadows, clambering onto an overturned box so he could see inside the windows. They were there, gathered in a circle of a dozen lit candles, black robes fluttering dangerously close to the open flames. He didn’t see another girl. He figured that would come later.

Malone took a single moment to pause, to reflect on what he was about to do. He searched his heart, stared deep into his own soul. There was no doubt there, no question. He was no longer a cop. If they worshipped the devil, he was an avenging angel.

The door was unlocked, but he kicked it down anyway. He didn’t let the shock register on their faces before he started firing. Booms echoed through the warehouse, covering the screams of men as they fell. They were armed only with daggers, and Malone grinned as he thought of the old gangland proverb. His next shotgun blast shattered a blade and a 20-something’s face. He fired until the barrel steamed and the chamber was empty. He threw the gun aside and slid his 9 mm from its holster.

He shot them in the chest if they faced him. The ones who ran, he shot them in the back. And when one held up his hands to surrender, he put a bullet through his right eye. By the time the gun clicked empty, he thought he’d killed them all.

But he was wrong.

The last of them slipped out from behind a large metal tub. Unlike the rest, his robe was red. Malone turned to face him. He looked down at his gun, and then threw it aside. So this was it.

“You’re the leader I guess.” Malone made a show of gazing around the carnage he had created. “Pretty shitty leader if you ask me.”

The man said nothing. He reached down and drew a long, curved blade from a leather sheath that hung at his side.

“That what you used to kill her? That what you used to carve her up? Well I ain’t a little girl. You’ll find me harder to cut.”

He raised the blade, took a step forward. Malone tensed, ready for the final fight of his life. Two hands appeared around the robed figure’s head, fingers long and slender, nails painted bright red. They rested on the man’s cheeks, held there for a single instant, and then withdrew. His eyes bulged and he collapsed to the floor. And she was standing behind him, pulling on her gloves.

She wore a tailored skirt-suit with a red blouse that matched her nails and made her eyes shine. When she looked up from the body to him, he involuntarily took a step backwards.

“Don’t worry, detective. I have no intentions of touching you.”

“It’s you,” he said.

“I am myself, that is true.”

She stepped over the body and walked towards him, stopping only slightly more than an arm’s length away, for his benefit.

“I admire your work,” she said. “Though a little bit messier than I’m used to I must say. I prefer my killing up close and personal. But perhaps this is more fitting for them, given what they did and how they did it.”

“You had them kill the girl. I know that now.”

The woman arched an eyebrow, and it made Malone a little sick to see that it was in approval.

“You know, I had my doubts about you. I figured you would imagine that we let it happen, but not that we were responsible. I’ll never learn, I guess. Never doubt the recruiters, that’s what they always say. Particularly Hawthorne. He’s quite adept at this. Though to be clear, it’s not entirely true that we had them kill her. It’s more that we knew they needed a victim and we directed them to her. They were children, playing with something so old and so ancient that their minds could never truly conceive of it. So don’t feel bad. They were dead already.”

“But why?”

She cocked her head to the side. “After all you’ve learned, you can’t imagine?”

Malone felt as though he was balancing on a knife’s edge, and that even the slightest breeze would make him fall. “She was part of something. Or she would have been.”

The woman nodded. “What if I told you, that girl’s child would have a child who would write a book that a man would read, inspiring him to bring down a holocaust on mankind unlike any we have ever seen?”

“I’d believe it,” Malone said.

“Yes you would, and that is why you are here.”

“So the last story,” Malone said, “it doesn’t have to be that way? It can change?”

“It probably has to be that way somewhere, in some reality. But we can make our own reality here. And that is what we do, detective. We keep the balance. We intervene, when we must and when we can. We are not God. And like God, we do not promise to prevent all evil. In fact, on occasion we are the ones doing the evil. Sometimes for the greater good. Sometimes for greater profit. We do have bottom lines to meet, after all. But we cannot do it alone. We need people. People like you who have played their hand against chips that never fell their way. People who are at the end of their rope, with only enough left to hang themselves. People who’ve never been lucky before, but feel lucky now. How lucky do you feel, detective? Because here’s the thing, if you weren’t out of a job before,” she said, spreading her arms wide as if taking in all the death he had brought, “you certainly are now. But we have a solution for that. After all, we are Limbus…

“And we employ.”

About the Authors

Brett J. Talley is the Bram Stoker Award nominated author of That Which Should Not Be, The Void, and He Who Walks In Shadow. His work has been featured in the shared‐world anthology, Limbus, Inc., and he is the editor of Limbus, Inc. Vols. II & III. He is also a lawyer, speechwriter, and an avid fan of the Alabama Crimson Tide. He makes his internet home on his website,  www.brettjtalley.com.

Keith R.A. DeCandido is appalled to realize that he's been writing fiction professionally for 22 years, which means he's a veteran. That's just weird. He's written for more than two dozen different licensed universes, several other shared-worlds, and several universes of his own devising. His most recent licensed work includes the Marvel's Tales of Asgard trilogy (including novels starring Thor, Sif, and the Warriors Three), the Stargate SG-1 novel Kali's Wrath, the Heroes Reborn novella Save the Cheerleader, Destroy the World, and short stories in the anthologies The X-Files: Trust No One and Nights of the Living Dead. Previous shared-world forays include Jonathan Maberry's V-Wars, Steven Savile's Viral, and Aaron Rosenberg and David Niall Wilson's Tales from the Scattered Earth. His own universes include the fantasy/police procedural Dragon Precinct and its various sequels in novel and short story form; a cycle of urban fantasy short stories set in Key West, Florida involving scuba diving, Norse gods, rock music, and beer drinking (most recently appearing in the online zines Story of the Month Club and Buzzy Mag, and the JournalStone anthology Out of Tune); Super City Police Department, stories about cops in a city filled with superheroes (most recently the serialized novella Avenging Amethyst); and "The Adventures of Bram Gold," urban fantasy tales about a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx who fights monsters, starting with the 2016 release A Furnace Sealed. In 2009, Keith received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, which means he never needs to achieve anything ever again. He has been doing rewatches of shows in the Star Trek and Stargate franchises, as well as the 1966 Batman, for Tor.com since 2011. Keith is also a freelance editor, a second-degree black belt in karate, a veteran podcaster, a member of the Liars Club, an avid baseball fan, and probably some other stuff that he can't remember due to the lack of sleep. Find out less at his cheerfully retro web site at DeCandido.net.

Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska, where he raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990s and worked in the fishing and construction industries. He is the author of several books, including The Croning, The Imago Sequence, Occultation, The Light Is the Darkness, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.

Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling novelist, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes the Joe Ledger thrillers, the Rot & Ruin series, the Nightsiders series, the Dead of Night series, as well as standalone novels in multiple genres. His comic book works include, among others, CAPTAIN AMERICA, BAD BLOOD, ROT & RUIN, V-WARS, and others. He is the editor of many anthologies including THE X-FILES, SCARY OUT THERE, OUT OF TUNE, and V-WARS. His books EXTINCTION MACHINE and V-WARS are in development for TV, and ROT & RUIN is in development as a series of feature films. A board game version of V-WARS was released in early 2016. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse, and the co-founder of The Liars Club. Prior to becoming a full-time novelist, Jonathan spent twenty-five years as a magazine feature writer, martial arts instructor and playwright. He was a featured expert on the History Channel documentary, Zombies: A Living History and a regular expert on the TV series, True Monsters. Jonathan lives in Del Mar, California with his wife, Sara Jo. www.jonathanmaberry.com

David Liss is the author of nine novels, most recently The Day of Atonement and Randoms, his first book for younger readers. His previous bestselling books include The Coffee Trader and The Ethical Assassin, both of which are being developed as films, and A Conspiracy of Paper, which is now being developed for television. Liss is the author of numerous comics, including Mystery Men, Sherlock Holmes: Moriarty Lives, and Angelica Tomorrow

Seanan McGuire is a West Coast author who does not sleep enough, in part because she writes a ridiculous number of books per year, and in part because her cats (two purebred Maine Coons, each weighing over twenty pounds) don't let her. She is the author of more than twenty books, both under her own name and the name "Mira Grant," and has lost count of her short fiction. When not writing, she enjoys horror movies, comic books, and going to Disney Parks.  Keep up with her on Twitter as @seananmcguire, or at www.seananmcguire.com. Seanan likes cornfields more than is strictly normal, and each Halloween hopes for the Great Pumpkin to choose her as the sincerest patch.

Table of Contents

- What is Limbus?

- Prologue: Drip, Drip, Drip

- Inch by Inch and Row by Row

- Seanan McGuire

- First Interlude: Whispers in the City of the Dead

- Infamous

- David Liss

- Second Interlude: It is Written

- Right On, Sister!

- Keith R.A. DeCandido

- Third Interlude: The Unblinking Eye

- The Unlearnable Truths

- Jonathan Maberry

- Fourth Interlude: Down the Rabbit Hole

- An Atlatl

- Laird Barron

- Epilogue: Call Us

- About the Authors