“Mass”
(continued from part one)

•

II. First Introit (Rondo)

“Of course,” a physics professor—Nicholas something—was saying, “there is a God.”

“Oh,” said Morowitz, drily. “Really?” She raised her eyebrows—coolly, she thought, as she sipped from her vodka tonic, and tried not to wince at the sudden twinge in her wrist. Fucking FBI.

“Incontrovertibly,” said Nicholas something-or-other.

Jordan Wright, from the English Department—who is always, Morowitz thought, shorter than one remembers—mumbled something about faith without proof that she didn’t otherwise catch. Luisa Semple snorted and rolled her eyes. Nicholas smiled paternally. Patronizingly. “It’s actually quite amazing,” he said, “what a little proof does for one’s faith.”

Morowitz’s head ached, badly, and she wished she’d be spared enough presence of mind that she could press her cool drink against her temple; it wouldn’t help much, perhaps, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. She settled for a sigh, which was deep enough to shift the pain, like a seismic tremor, like tectonic plates shifting from over her temples, settling into the points of her jaw, flaring sympathetic twinges along her shoulders, her elbows, a bright white point at the back of her head, and of course her fucking wrist, where Johnson had grabbed her. Christ.

She was not enjoying herself. Which was a shame. She never precisely looked forward to Simon Godscalc’s annual Thank God Almighty shindigs (bookended, naturally enough, by his Free At Last soirees the last Friday before Spring Break)—certainly, such grandstanding performances as the one being warmed up to by Nicholas here were par for Simon’s course—but they were fun, in their way. Sparring, like a couple of kickboxers in a gym. Like a dozen pick-up debates on a blacktop basketball court after school, complete with genteel trash talk and convoluted insults of yo intellectual mama. Of course, this sort of gamesmanship is much more fun if one gets to play—much less fun to be greeted at the door with a dismissive, “Oh, it’s—you can put your coat,” and Simon had stretched out one long, thin arm to point down the dim hallway of his lovely if dilapidated little Craftsman bungalow, “hang on a moment,” he’d said, and then stalked off into the parlor, where Howie Madigan had suddenly begun declaiming about the civil rights violations involved in isolating an entire college town from the world at large, ticking them off one by one by long-winded one on his stubby, sausage-y fingers, and she’d lost sight of Godscalc, and she’d stood there a moment, and another moment, and then, as Howie was shouted down for asserting such an action constituted arrest without probable cause or one’s rights having been read. Someone shouted “Fuck Miranda!” and someone else shouted “Fuck you!” and she ended up deciding what the hell, she’d been here four times before; she knew where the hell the coats went. So she showed herself to the back bedroom.

And then there’d been the lovely farce of not being able to get anyone to mention where the vodka and whiskey drinks were being mixed.

And the way Hilda Ngame had pointedly ignored her joke about the Philip Glass piece—something from Akhnaten—Godscalc insisted on playing. Yes, a lame joke, but still.

And the way Gilbert Hemsley had studiously turned to greet Maury Peress when she’d tried to congratulate him on the meretricious piece of crap he’d just gotten published in the Northern Prairie Review.

And the way no one, not anyone, would meet her eyes.

They knew, of course. All of them. That she was sleeping with Jack’s assistant. That one of her grad students had run off with Jack. That the FBI had come to see her that very morning. That somehow this all—Jack, his research, his disappearance, the plane crash, his goddamn drug, Shelby, fucking Shelby, Norbert Ajax, Albania—all this was tied up somehow with what was going on with everything else: the water, the National Guard, the protests, the murders...

She stayed mostly from sheer stubbornness, and the fact that at least there was lots of Gennesee Cream Ale in the cooler. More alcohol than she had back at her place, by a long shot. And the bitter cold out there, and the wind, would turn her headache into a vise-grip slowly being clamped around her temples until the teeth met with a distinct click—

She stayed, hanging on the fringes of knots like this one, chugging Gennies and wincing and listening to dullards like Nicholas Whatsisbunny say things like, “Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of how much time self-organization on the scale of even a simple microbe might conceivably take when undertaken solely through contingency—the probabilities are, in the end, impossible to calculate, and there are some interesting findings regarding replication and self-organization courtesy of the game of Life—”

“Milton Bradley?” asked Luisa.

“The computer simulation,” sniffed Nicholas. “If we peer, instead, at the very beginning, and at the very smallest things—”

Jordan mumbled something that Morowitz couldn’t catch. Luisa sniggered. Nicholas rolled his eyes patiently. “There are four basic particles that make up everything in the universe: protons, neutrons, electrons and neutrinos.”

“What about quarks?”

“Forget them for the moment. These four particles interact in four basic ways—”

“Didn’t you guys just discover a W and a Z?”

“Forget them. Four basic ways—” Burdened by his highball glass and his plate of hors d’oeuvres, Nicholas Whosit ticked them off by scratching an index finger in some imaginary dust in the air. “Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Now.” He smiled. His eyes widened in anticipatory excitement. “Each of the four basic particles has a specific number which measures its interactions with each of the four basic forces. This number is called a coupling constant—”

You. Bitsumi’s assistant. Your grad student. PMD-80. Albania. Do we have to spell it out for you?

And then darker of the two Johnsons had sneered and asked her if the little dyke was tasty enough to be worth high treason.

And she had—Christ, she wasn’t about to hit him or anything, she’d just been raising her hand to, hell, make an emphatic gesture or something, and the lighter of the two Johnsons had made that “Anh-anh-ahhh” noise you make when you’re telling a baby no in the nicest possible way and he’d grabbed her wrist and twisted in some aikido or jiu-jitsu move and now it still fucking hurt.

He’d known. That she hadn’t been about to do anything. He’d done it on purpose.

Good Johnson insults you in the basest terms possible; Bad Johnson sprains your wrist just because he can. Nice.

“—from those initial four numbers, four constants, we must craft an equation that results in a number as absurdly small as ten to the negative thirty-eighth—a number so close to zero that, on our scale, it might as well be zero. And yet—”

She had arguably made a mistake in laughing at the idea of Albania as a hotbed of biochemical terrorism.

You think it’s funny?

Fuck, yeah.

It was then that Morowitz suddenly had the image of Johnson and Johnson sitting in a generic panel van, freezing their asses off in government-issue trenchcoats too thin for a Minnesota November, their ears pressed to the cans of a couple of old Bakelite headsets, listening through a bug planted in the vase on top of her stereo, trying to decipher clues to the Albanian situation from the noises Shelby made when they fucked—

She nearly sprayed Genny all down the front of her good white blouse.

“—any stronger, then stars would be much smaller, and burn out much more quickly. And that’s just one such number. There are any of a number of other arbitrary relationships—the difference in mass between a proton and a neutron, for instance, is a tiny, tiny number—which is equivalent to the mass of three electrons. Were it not for this ratio, atoms as we know them could not exist—”

“So?” said Lucia. Thank God.

“I’m sorry?” said Nicholas, his hand still poised in mid-disquisition.

“So what? You’ve got all these random, arbitrary relationships, without which, yadda yadda. Where’s God?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No,” said Lucia. Jordan shook his head. Morowitz shrugged.

“The probability that these numbers, these relationships, just happened to fall into place in the instant after the Big Bang is so astronomically, unimaginably miniscule—”

“Watchmaker,” said Jordan. At least Morowitz was pretty sure that’s what he said.

“Well, yes, I suppose that’s one way to look at it, but trust me—I’d find it easier to believe a watch had been spontaneously created than the elegance, the sheer ineluctable purpose behind these numbers and equations—”

“Purpose?” said Lucia.

“Purpose?” said Morowitz.

“Did you say purpose?” said Jordan.

“I—” said Nicholas Whatchadoolally.

“What purpose is that, pray tell?” said Lucia, with a smile that smelled blood.

“You’re betraying your bias,” said Morowitz, trying to be helpful, when Nicholas opened his mouth, and shut it, and opened it again.

“Bias?” he said. “Well. I suppose. But you may be underestimating the sheer beauty I’m attempting to describe, and obviously utterly failing to do—”

“Beauty,” said Lucia, “is truth, and truth beauty, but neither of them is purposeful. You’re trying to prove God, but the only evidence of a theological hand is in this purpose, which is something you’re imposing in your reading. And you still haven’t alluded to what this purpose is, beyond pretty numbers. Which is rather like reading something premonitory in the fact that two and two have added up to four yet again—”

“Us,” said Nicholas.

“Us?” said Lucia.

“You’re kidding,” said Morowitz.

Jordan mumbled something which definitely involved the words “Copernicus” and “center of the universe” and an incredulous tone of voice.

“Yes,” said Nicholas Whodenanny, as if this were the most absurd question he’d ever been almost able to make out. “Of course. What else? If these numbers weren’t exactly the way they are, we would not exist. And we have no other way to explain how those numbers came to be. It is not unreasonable to assume we are in some manner the intended result. Or, if you like, a step along the way—”

“Natural selection,” said Lucia.

“What?” said Nicholas.

“Why not?” said Morowitz, who had no idea what Lucia was talking about. “Worked in the nineteenth century.”

“This isn’t the only universe, is it?”

“Well,” said Nicholas.

“You can’t prove there aren’t any others, let’s say.”

“No,” he said, after a moment.

“So. Let’s say there’s a progression. Like maybe black holes are new universes budding off old ones. Didn’t Hawking say something like that?”

“I’m sure he—”

“Maybe it was Sagan. Anyway. You could have any of a number of universes with any of a number of combos of these beautiful numbers. And we, of course, are in the one whose numbers add up so beautifully to make us because, well. Where else would we be?”

She spread her hands in the party-wide sign that meant quod erat fucking demonstrandum.

“Hear, hear,” said Morowitz, raising the dregs of her fifth—sixth?—Genny in a toast.

“Now,” Nicholas Whatsit was saying, but Morowitz blinked as Lucia turned to look at her—looked past her—and spun, without a word, and walked away.

Jordan harrumphed and was off towards the kitchen.

“I,” said Nicholas, looking after him.

Well.

Fuck.

“Professor Morowitz?” said the voice behind her and to the right, and she turned, and she understood.

He was wearing a black suit, a black wool overcoat, a narrow black tie. His gaze was blank and anonymous enough that he might as well have been wearing sunglasses.

Well.

Fuck.

“I’ve already talked to you people,” she hissed.

Nicholas was gone, too.

“I don’t think you have. I’m Hawthorne.”

“Listen,” she said. “You people have to get your act together. I spoke with Agents Johnson and Johnson—”

“Different bureau,” he said, and he smiled, and she didn’t want him to smile again. “Could you come along with me, Professor?”

“Some ID might be in order,” she snapped.

“It wouldn’t mean anything to you. We’re just going to take a walk, and talk some. Outside.” And somehow he’d taken her by the arm and was steering her through the living room, where debating knots parted magically before them and recombined afterwards, a flurry of quiet whispers in their wake.

Well.

Fuck.

“Look,” she said, “I need my coat—”

And there was a second one, just like this one but taller and paler and with an even more kempt crew-cut, standing by the front door, holding her coat.

“This is Isherwood,” said Hawthorne.

“Good evening, Professor,” said Isherwood.

Fuck. They were both playing Good Johnson. Or was it Bad Johnson?

And the cold did, indeed, twist the vise on her headache.

“What do you people want?”

“To serve and protect,” said Hawthorne. “Same as you, I imagine.”

“We know you don’t have anything to do with Albania,” said Isherwood.

“Stupid fucking Bureau,” said Hawthorne. Pleasantly.

“But,” said Morowitz, who was starting to realize she’d drunk more than she’d thought. Well. Six beers. Okay. But the cold was squeezing her bladder around a really painful lump of piss, and her footing wasn’t as secure as it ought to be. Thank God, oddly enough, these two were so close to either side. “See, I’m pretty good at decoding coded texts. Reading. And there was a definite ‘but’ in all—that.”

“But,” said Isherwood. His smile was nicer than Hawthorne’s. Which wasn’t saying much, at all.

“There is something we’d like you to do for us,” said Hawthorne.

“For your country.”

“We need you to keep an eye on someone that we need an eye kept on. On whom, I should say, we need an eye kept.”

“I don’t,” she started to say.

“You’ve been doing a good job so far,” said Isherwood.

“Enjoying yourself, even.”

“I—” she said.

“Don’t worry, Professor,” said Hawthorne. “We don’t discriminate against gays or homosexuals at all, in the performance of our duties.”

“Outside our purview,” said Isherwood.

Oh.

Well.

Fuck.

•

III. Second Introit

Jens walked up to the counter and laid the tube of toothpaste on it and looked up, warily, into the scary old man’s watery hazel eyes, which held his for a moment, then flicked down, and widened, and darted back up, and somehow Jens wasn’t surprised at all by the scary old man’s question drilled hard and sudden out of the leftest of fields:

“You walk with God, boy?”

Nor was he at all surprised when Brielle surged up beside him, nodding violently enough to nearly throw back the hood of the borrowed windbreaker. “Been on Dante!” she cried. “Been on Dante!” It occurred to Jens that it was, perhaps, ironically, only the tip of her monstrous ear itself which kept the hood from falling.

The scary old man frowned even more than he had been, which involved accordioning his forehead to an impressive degree, and nearly swallowing the corners of his mouth with his cheeks. “Are you supposed to be some kind of olive branch from Hoover?”

“Sir?” said Jens, who, oddly, was puzzled by that. “I don’t—”

“Because I’ll tell you right now this situation with the Guard changes nothing between us. You brought this all on yourselves, far as I’m concerned.”

“I’ve got to be straight with you, sir,” said Jens. “I haven’t—I mean, I don’t really know—”

“Well, hell!” snorted the scary old man. “Obvious enough. Obvious enough you’ve never gone walking, or else you’d know what the hell a fennel stalk looked like, and you’d know Zabar’s always has ’em in stock. You wouldn’t have to go messing around with this damn-fool nostrum.” His gnarled fingers flicked the toothpaste back across the counter towards him, and Jens just managed to catch it before it tumbled to the dusty floor.

Jens took a deep breath and counted odzeen, dva, trie, chetirye, reminding himself that this was for some reason important to Brielle, and hell, he could handle this. He could deal. He tucked the absurd tube of toothpaste into his coat pocket and spread his hands in what he hoped was a placatory gesture, and tried not to wrinkle his nose at the dust and the vaguely fermented smell, like old, spilled beer, like bread baking, that filled the store. “Sir,” he said again. I#8220;I’m not from, uh, President Hoover. I don’t even really know what I’m doing here. Or why I was supposed to show you the toothpaste. She, uh—” He looked over at her, seeing the set of her hard, thin lips, her fierce eye, past the edge of the bright blue Gore-Tex hood. “This is really important to her, but I couldn’t really say why. She can’t speak English—”

“Aldi nonca Lonshin,” she said, quite clearly, and Jens watched the scary old man’s face go utterly blank. “Lonshi torzux. Lonsh. Nocod hubar gohe nonca,” and she laid her hands palm down on the rough wood counter and leaned over looking up at him from beneath that absurd, electric-blue hood, “Aldi nonca Lonshin.”

“You,” said the scary old man, who really wasn’t all that scary anymore, “you—who the hell are you? Goddamn kids, some kind of, of goddamn prank, messing around with shit you don’t under—”

Brielle lifted her hands with a sudden jerk from the counter, and Jens froze, almost literally, the shock of recognition seizing his nerves like ice, like vodka straight from the freezer, like—like shock; she was going to—she didn’t have a knife, he knew that, but it didn’t matter, she could—it was almost a physical memory, he’d rehearsed the fights so often in his head as he’d worked them out over dice and paper with Scott, with Elgin, with Kat and Pile and Sam, frustrated, enraged, she’d cock her left hand back and drive it up straight from the counter, slamming the heel into his nose, not bothering to draw back for more power, give him time to react, get out of the way—she knew the most effective angle, fuck, knew how to kill him, would, could, without thinking twice, she—

She flicked back the fingers of her left hand, and he couldn’t even breathe—

And she raised her hand, slowly—

And drew back the hood.

The old man, no longer scary at all, and looking much, much older, gasped. “Who—” he started to say, and he swallowed, and tried again. “Who are you?”

A figment of my imagination, Jens managed not to say. “Her name,” he said, and then he corrected himself: “Brielle, she’s calling herself, at the moment. I—I met her this morning. And she asked me, sort of, to bring her here. Well, she wanted me to drive her around town randomly until she saw this place—” This long, low building in the shadow of grain silos, the tallest things around for miles, that he’d still never seen before, had not even known were here, less than five miles away from where he’d spent the last two and a half years of his life. “She thought the toothpaste was important. The, uh, fennel. She had to find the, the Been—”

“Benandanti,” said the old man. “The Good Walkers. That’s us. You found us. We who walk with God.” He looked at Jens, then, his eyes sad. “You never answered my question.”

“Your—uh. Do I, well. Walk with God. I—” It never really entered his thoughts to lie; he was just trying to think of some easy, polite way to disagree, without insulting this man, or his beliefs, and really, there was nothing to do but play it straight. “No. Nossir. I don’t think I do.”

The old man nodded, absently. “Do you believe?”

Jens blinked. “I think I want to,” he said, and the old man nodded once again. “Who,” said Jens, and he looked at Brielle, who stood there, quietly, her face calm, blank, her arms folded. Her nostrils flared a little as she took in a breath, and she shifted her weight idly from one foot to the other, her intense green eyes watching the old man. “Who is she? Do you know?”

“She’s an angel, son,” said the old man, his voice filled with a rough but quite wonder. He leaned on the counter, putting his gaze on the same level as Brielle’s. “The—the L-Lonshi. The—Seven. They’ve risen? For sure?”

She nodded.

“Oh, God,” said the old man. His hands trembled against the countertop. “She—she speaks the language of angels, which we can only hear in a crude and debased form. Bereft of music. But she calls herself one of the hubard—the eternal, living flames. Which, which means she’s one of Uriel’s—”

She raised her hand again, her fingertips almost brushing his lips, and he stopped.

“Voel,” she said, quietly, distinctly.

“Voel?” he said, echoing her. He straightened. “Voel? The Virgin? But—”

The door swung open, the bell over it jingling stupidly. Jens turned, as they all did, to see who it was. He’d been wondering how long this store would remain devoid of paying customers. But it was a cop, standing there in the doorway, and he looked worried, and he was preoccupied enough that he didn’t seem to notice Brielle’s ear at all, or register the tears sliding down the old man’s cheeks. “Well?” said the old man, raggedly.

“We have a situation, Mister Gunner,” said the cop. “It’s, it’s, I, uh—”

“It’s okay, O’Halloran,” said the old man. “We’re among friends.”

The cop nodded. “It’s Carlos.”

“What does that son of a bitch want?”

“He’s, uh, formally requesting help. I—”

“So what? Tell him to get lost. Tell him to get out. Tell him to go to the goddamn Army, he wants help.”

“Sir,” said the cop, “I really think—there’s a girl involved, I—” And, apologetically, he turned and opened the door. The bell jingled stupidly again, and Jens, who suddenly realized he hadn’t formed a coherent thought in at least a minute, found himself remembering It’s a Wonderful Life. He wondered who’d just gotten their wings. A tall man in a dark overcoat stepped in, leading a short girl Jens vaguely recognized. He’d seen her around the labs. Her eyes were wide, and her arms were wrapped around her stomach, oddly.

“You,” said the old man—Gunner, Dan Gunner, if the sign over the shop meant anything—Mister Gunner took a deep, wobbly breath, and let it out, explosively. “You idiots actually did it.”

The girl was staring at Brielle, at her hair, her ear. Brielle took a step towards her, and another.

“We need asylum, sir,” said the man in the dark overcoat, who certainly didn’t look much like a Carlos. “She—her protection has fled, and she—knows. And Powers are abroad—she must be hidden again. From herself—”

“And the powers you traffic in have refused, I take it?” Gunner showed no trace anymore of his tears, his wonder, his awe. He pulled himself up to his full height and spread his hands. “Sorry to hear it.”

“Sir,” said Carlos.

“What do you want me to do? What? You know we aren’t supposed to—to meddle.”

“We’re just doing our jobs, sir. Same as you.”

“Jobs!” scoffed Gunner. “You’re meddling! Trying to fix things. Rig prophecies that must come to fruition of their own accord. You can’t force God’s hand, Carlos—”

Unnoticed, Brielle had taken another step closer to the girl, and another.

“They’re going to kill her.”

Gunner shrugged. “You’ve got a whole damn army in town. They can protect her.”

“Mister Gunner. Look. We, we each know enough about what the other’s been up to, the last week or so—”

“You threatening me, Carlos?”

“I—”

“What,” said the girl then, and everyone shut up and looked at her, “what is she going to do? To me?”

Brielle had reached out to touch one of the girl’s hands, there on her belly, and the thing of it was, Jens knew. It wasn’t violence. It was—it was something that, well, he’d rehearsed this, too, in his mind, hadn’t he? And the knowledge of it burned shamefully, like a brand pressed to the skin of his forehead, where she would—where—

Brielle touched the girl’s other hand, and gently, gently, tugged them away from her stomach, as the girl said, “I really, really would like to know,” pulling them down and to the side so that she could press herself close and, and standing on her toes— “What are you—” Brielle pressed her lips, there, to the girl’s forehead—

“Oh,” said the girl, quietly.

Oh, he thought, oh God. Oh, fuck. This—this— He felt as if he ought to have some control over this (he ought!), as if his thoughts had somehow run away with him (they had!), as if he’d just said something he didn’t mean (did you? Did you really?), something embarrassing, as if it were up to him to do something to prevent what would happen next, as Brielle settled down on her heels and pressed her lips to the girl’s lips, now, and it was somehow his fault that the girl obviously opened her mouth to meet Brielle’s open mouth, and her cheeks hollowed; the kiss had somehow crossed a line, become something hungry, and no one else was saying anything, either, and—

—And the girl’s eyes snapped open, suddenly, alarmed—

—And her hands tried to tug themselves free of Brielle’s implacable, white-knuckled grip—

—And blood began to trickle down the girl’s cheek and form a single fat drop at the tip of her tilted chin, and still no one said or did anything—

It was pretty much then that it all started to go fuzzy.

•

The floor—the metal floor was roaring.

The air, too. Everything. A loud, constant roar, a rumble. He was in the vast metal throat of some great steel beast. A bird—a—

A plane?

He was on a plane?

Yes. Yes, he was.

It was a large plane, almost empty, very utilitarian. He was buckled into a reasonably normal airplane seat, except it was a dusty olive green with greasy steel fittings and was larger than anything seen in American coach class for twenty years or more. It appeared to be the front row, of five such; there was maybe five yards of open space between his feet and a bulkhead with a dogged hatch squarely in the center. The cockpit? The air was cold, and smelled of diesel fuel, harsh and oily—or actually kerosene, since that’s what they use in jets these days. Light, and volatile. Or maybe it was the grease. The only light came from a couple of windows punched into the hull between his seats and the forward bulkhead; at once sharp and weak, it imprisoned a tumbling herd of dust motes, rising and falling hypnotically through the slice of light. He heard chains flapping, jangling, and craned around to look—there were three more rows of seats behind him, all empty, and behind those he could just make out great webs of cargo netting, thick chains, all empty, hanging loosely—

Am I the only thing on this plane? he wondered.

And then a hand was laid on his arm.

“Jens,” said a voice.

He couldn’t see her ear from this side; it was hidden by her hair, short as it was, sticking up at all angles. She had a small smile, and her green, green eyes were full of—something. Concern. Her lips were pale, and there was no trace of blood, at all.

“It is,” she said, hesitantly, “so nice to be speaking to you. With you.”

And this didn’t really surprise him, either.

“Where are we?” he said. “What’s—I think I kind of faded out, back there...”

“I am—sorry. We are linked, you and I. You are my—lusdi, my—feet. I’m—sorry. It sounds so—pedestrian, in this air. So—you’re laughing, Jens. I—”

“Pedestrian,” he said, and stopped.

“Yes! You—anchor me. Hold me fast. You are my feet, yes—oh. I see. Feet.” She frowned. “I don’t see how you can—you have so many words, for the same thing—” She shook her head. “You are lusdi, and I am your oma.”

“My head?” he said, guessing.

“In a—way,” she said. “You—ground me, hold me fast. Allow me to be.” She shook her head. “These words are so inefficient. I, though, when I—”

“Lift me up? Allow me to do?”

“You are—all of you—so enamored of this, or that. One or the other. No. Not exactly.” She looked away from him; looked up. Her bottom teeth peeped out and worried briefly at her upper lip. Which Jens realized he was doing, as well. He stopped. “When I—partake, of my prg, my essence, I lift—from here, to there. I take you with me, because of our link. When I do things, then, you—fade.”

“What,” he said, “did you do back there? Were you doing, to that girl?” Her gaze flickered down and met his again. “That’s my first question, by the way.”

“I was doing what—they wanted done. So inefficient. I—ate—her knowledge.”

“You—”

“The memories that she is with child. How that came to be. I—ate them. They are gone. She can now go out into the world and be safe from those who would—harm her. Or her child.” She brushed her fingertips along her lips, briefly. “I also—borrowed, I took—no, I learned—from her how to—speak. This. I could envelop your words, you see, your—speech, but I couldn’t be enveloped by it.” She shook her head, frustrated, and he watched half in awe as the look he’d always imagined would pass across her face passed across her face. “I do not—think—I’m doing such a good job of it, now.”

He was nodding, and he shook his head suddenly to stop. “My, uh, second question. Where are we going?”

Her mouth crooked in something that wasn’t exactly a grin. “Somewhere we can do some good. The blade is already in play. The cup is not. We go to find the cup, and bring it.”

“The—” He had to stop, and start again. The image of standing beside her in an Avalonian murk, banging coconut shells together as she accosted a filth-monger, was irresistible. “The cup? The Grail? We’re on a—Grail Quest?”

“It is,” she said, “a—sheath, as much as it is a cup. It is an idea as much as it is anything.”

“An idea?”

“That there is more to life,” she said, “than stabbing. Or being stabbed. That. No! Not that, or this. Something else.” She frowned, and he watched her hands, her dangerous, dangerous hands, flex and tremble with the effort of making herself understood. “The—balance is more—complicated. Than that. Or this.”

“So,” he said, “where are we going, again?”

“To where it is!”

“The idea.”

“The cup! The cup! We go to fetch the cup!”

“Which is—where, exactly?”

“It is where it is! Where else would it be?”

“But—where is that? What’s the place called?”

“I don’t know!” She sighed, exasperated. “It’s hot. It’s dry. We may have to walk for some time. Or ride one of those animals.”

“A—horse?” She shook her head. “Camel?”

“Jeep,” she said. “A jeep.”

“Brielle,” he said, and then he stopped. “What do I—what are you—I mean, should I call you Brielle? Or, or—”

“Voel. Angel of the zodiac, ruler of the sign of Virgo, which is your sign. Servitor of Uriel, ruler of the month of September, fire of God.” She looked away. “Call me what you like.”

“Because—I mean, how much of you is—”

“You,” she said, “imagined someone so fiercely. So clearly. That—focus, is what enables me to—be. Here.” She looked back at him, her eyes dark and hard to read in the dim light. “She—I—she is who I am. I am. Who she is.” She shook her head. “So inefficient. I, I didn’t break the pilot, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He blinked. “I, uh—I was probably still fuzzy for that bit.”

“You will get better, as you get used to me.”

“Okay, but—getting back to the pilot—”

“I merely broke his arm. And when he spoke with his people, they seemed to feel it would not hamper his ability to convey us where we needed to go.”

“His—people?”

“We serve them, you see, but they also serve us.”

“His people. The military? The Army?”

“We have always worked with the rulers of man. It’s written. Do you have any more questions?”

Jens thought a moment, and then, wisely, he thought, said, “No.”

“Good.” She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.

Later. Later, he’d try to find out how long this would take. Figure out what he had to do to cover his classes. His lab assistant job. He’d have to call his father, at some point—

Oh.

Right.

He had no one to blame but himself, of course. It was the image, really. The image of her, the hotheaded master thief, lying (let’s be brutally honest) naked on smooth silk deep-dyed a green like that of the emeralds freshly stolen from an evil adenoidal necromantic priest straight out of Lin Carter and now scattered about her (and tucked into the small fists of dancing girls, and the capacious bosoms of barmaids), that set off her flaming hair, her pale skin— See, he’d thought it would in all of that make an amusing, ironic touch if Brielle snored—

•

IV. Confession

Some time ago—

Fields had shown him where to go, ducking his head the way they all did when they looked at him. “Down that hall.” He hadn’t offered to walk him down. And nobody had watched him walk away, the way they usually did when his back was turned and they thought he couldn’t see them. They were all studiously staring at their microscopes, or whatever the hell it was they stared at. Fields had called out “Second door on the right,” as he’d headed down the fluorescent-lit hallway, with its maroon carpet—not terribly necessary, that: the first doorway, which had no door, was clearly the break room and kitchen; the third and fourth doors the men’s and women’s restrooms, respectively; and there was nothing but blank wall to the left. Behind which, of course, was the singular and vastly expensive containment facility.

The second door on the right, then: metal, inset with a thick pane of glass reinforced with a criss-cross network of chicken wire. Pokey hadn’t bothered to peer through it, he’d just leaned on the levered door­knob and yanked it open.

Like anything he did, as with any decision he’d ever made, there’d been more than one reason behind the extreme haste of his difficult journey, more than one goal in mind. Thus, when he’d stepped into the perfectly nondescript conference room—the long blond wood veneer table, the seven or eight chairs all a somewhat lighter and dustier shade of maroon than the carpet, the whiteboard with the half-erased palimpsests of old equations and a single smear of blood, still red, about the length of someone’s fore­arm—and Alastair had looked up, his eyes blank, one pale hand motionless by the black speakerphone shaped like a flattened caltrop, the kind that made Pokey think of an absurdly large weapon thrown by ninjas— When Pokey then determined it was most likely, regrettably, too late to achieve one of the goals he’d hoped for, his brief—but pointed, poignant—flare of disappointment showed nowhere in his face, his posture, his tone of voice.

He had not—then—thought much of the brief flash of something savage, unnamable: “joy” was too large a word, “triumph” too small, “exultation” was wrong in other ways—his sudden sense of supremacy, then, perhaps, at Alastair’s blenched face, his clenched hand, his spat curse, as he heard the news.

•

Now?

Six hours, Alastair had said. Being about the safe margin of error on holding back the rubberband effect of mirrorwalking.

It had been seventeen hours, now.

Alastair looked—thinner. Little rainbows glimmered about his edges when you looked straight at him, and sometimes he would fragment—a him here, a him there, edges and fragments splintering across your field of vision at impossible angles, a fly’s eye view, a cubist photograph. The normal cues Pokey would go by—smell, that peculiar feeling of weight—gone, as if he wasn’t there at all. Which he wasn’t, really. And once, as Alastair had pointed to a map, sweeping his hand through the air, Pokey saw glimmers of something silvery, liquid, terribly cold, trailing through the air after his gesture—just a flash, mind. A wink.

Could have been exhaustion.

He knew better than trying to say anything about any of it to Alastair.

The conference room was lined with maps and choked with snowdrifts of paper. In the middle of it all, burning in the air over a greater pentagram smeared in blood whose signifiers were hastily scribbled in dry-erase marker, hung a reddish blaze of light with two dark, black eyes. Pokey, who’d never bothered to learn whatever the hell language it was they were speaking, sat and looked like he knew what was going on. It wasn’t hard.

Until he caught the name “Ashura.”

Alastair made the sign of formal thanksgiving and received the formal sign of obeisance, and then the room was suddenly much less ruddily lit, and the grinding hum which had sounded like a massive, idling turbine was gone, leaving a rather nasty headache he hadn’t realized was coming on to settle in just in front of his ears.

“Well?” he said. Croaked, more like.

“Let’s take a walk,” said Alastair, after a moment.

•

“The Blade is in play,” said Alastair.

Not being congenitally stupid, Pokey had pretty much figured this out.

“You did know it exists. Right?”

“Not,” said Pokey, judiciously, “ever having had independent confirmation, I am nonetheless familiar enough with the nature of such things to know that, more often than not, there turns out to be some truth to the matter.”

Picturesque name aside, End of the Line was not in a part of Utah where one went to admire the scenery. So Alastair probably wasn’t staring out at the flat and yellow and vaguely rolling and crushingly dull horizon with quite the avidity he seemed to have mustered up for its benefit.

“Who holds it?” Pokey asked, after a moment.

“A Lesser Nuisance,” said Alastair. “It was used. To kill a Manitou. And—there’s been further movement of troops and planes along the Iraqi border.”

“Anahita’s Cup,” said Pokey, thinking much more furiously than his face or tone of voice allowed.

“That’s one name for it,” said Alastair, who apparently found a small dust cloud twenty or so miles away to be of the utmost importance. “It could have been any two,” said Alastair. “But it’s these two. Now we know.”

Pokey, who thought, sometimes, that Alastair forgot how much his right hand wasn’t supposed to know about what was going on, asked, “This was what GM was up to, last night?”

“No,” said Alastair. “That’s the funny thing. This is coming completely out of left field. Unless he’s sharper than I thought.” He cocked his head, then shook it. “Too impatient for games this deep. One thing you have to say about GM, he’s admirably direct.”

—for someone who runs Manitou, Pokey didn’t say. “You seem,” he said, “to be feeling better than before.”

“Whatever he was up to last night is immaterial, now,” said Alastair.

“The night before last,” said Pokey.

But Alastair seemed not to have heard. “I’ve always wondered,” he said, as he fragmented and fractionated for a instant, “what would happen when an irresistible force met an immovable object.”

Pokey reached a conclusion, and then reached into his breast pocket, pulling out a plain, unmarked creamy envelope of heavy stock. He held it out to Alastair.

Who said, “What’s this?” as he tore his eyes away with a visible effort that left drops of silvery stuff winking in the early morning light. He took it, and as Pokey nodded, unfolded the seal and tugged out enough of the letter within to read the first few lines. He looked up, an eyebrow raised.

“I’ve trafficked with enough agents of the Light to make it seem plausible,” said Pokey.

“I don’t need this,” said Alastair. “The Community doesn’t need this.”

Pokey didn’t say anything about what the Community needed, or didn’t need. He did not ponder the specious wisdom in hiding funds for a black budget lab as non-existent crates of top-secret silver bullets; did not wonder who might end up with the blame for the death of the last of the Grigori, and what that might have to do with what had happened; was resolutely uncurious about what undoubtedly had become of the hapless biochemist, because of a fax. Did not consider the possibility that anything—anything—might happen. He wiped his mind as blank as possible. One hand, he thought. Clapping.

One hand.

“I can’t accept it,” Alastair said. “It’s unthinkable. I know what you’re trying to do, Pokey, but the idea that we could lose—”

There was an obscenely loud snapping noise, and the letter and its envelope fell, fluttering, to the dust.

After a moment, Pokey knelt, and picked it up.

Then he sighed, the breath bubbling out and steaming in the frosty air.

Getting back was going to be sheer, unadulterated hell.

•

Alastair raised his head, his terrible, horrible, no-good head, and peered through some thick ooze at the map on the floor, marked with old blood, the mirror, the candle stub fallen to the floor.

He laughed, weakly, and raised his hand—his right hand—to sluice the gunk from his face.

Pokey. What was he thinking? Something—I overlooked, perhaps?

No.

No. It’s perfect. It’s so searingly, soaringly perfect—!

One cannot exist without the other. The victory of one is the destruction of both. There can be nothing irresistible, if something is immovable; immobility cannot stand before something irresistible.

And he had just heard the opening shot of Armageddon fired. We’re in the first minutes of the first quarter of the Ragnarok Bowl, folks...

Fuck, but his head hurt. And he was weak as a fucking kitten. He rolled over on his back and stared up at the map of the Moon that was glued to the ceiling of this little, dark room.

Fuck.

Still. Not even the pain could ruin his mood. It had begun. Through no avenue he had expected, sooner than he had anticipated, it had all begun. —Even better! Something like this, catching them by surprise—they’d play their role to the hilt. And so would the other side. And then—

He wondered, briefly, if Pokey was going to have to walk back.

And he laughed, again. Not unkindly.

Oh, God, it was all going to work—

•

V. Meditation No. 1

(Orchestra alone)

The ravens winged in on the second day, while she was still trying to figure out how she’d drunk the water from the wineskin at her feet.

Her wrists, after all, were chained to the concrete beam above her head. The concrete beam which was, like the room about her, painted that awful, industrial mint. Slick and almost wet to the touch. Well, actually wet, but let’s not dwell too closely on that portion of the column there, shall we? She had been quite certain, somehow, that putting on underwear had been a bad idea, and yet... Ah, well. One should know by now when to trust one’s gut over the dictates of fashion, shouldn’t one? (But what if she’d been hit by a truck on the way to being kidnapped? What would the doctor have thought?)

Damn you, Mother.

Chained. Chained with what she was pretty certain was a pair of reasonably standard-issue police hand­cuffs. Oh, come, darling: how on earth could you possibly know whether they were standard issue? Especially in this permissive day and age, when it is considered a giggle to chain one’s sex object to the bed so that she might not reach out at an inopportune moment and so effortlessly slice—

Ah, no. Let’s not.

Chained. Well. This is the sort of gentlemen which would use standard-issue police handcuffs, dear; that’s how I know. One can see it in their eyes. So let’s just overlook the tautology and move on to today’s ontological syllogism, to wit:

People who are handcuffed do not have the use of their hands.

I have the use of my hands.

Therefore—

“Caw,” said the raven.

Brittany swallowed, and tasted something nasty, burning, sour, bitter, gritty, something that really ought to be down in her stomach, her gut, and not, not at the back of her throat. Let’s. I. No; no. Let’s not.

Let’s not think about how long it’s been since our last dose of Zoloft, shall we?

Water. The wineskin had been—at her feet? Had it? She had reached down—had she? Her hands had trembled. Of course. One trembles when one is terrified and in extreme pain. Yes, terrified: filled with terror, frightened, alarmed, shocked; made terrible, though that, of course, is obsolete, is it not? You are no longer capable of being terrible, now, are you? Besides. It’s far from cute in someone your age. And yet—

Cute?

Where had the wineskin gone? Where was it now? Why wasn’t she looking about? Chained, facing the column as she was, she—

Facing the column?

Stop. Let’s stop and take stock, here. Our universe has constricted rather alarmingly, really; we ought to be able to place ourselves in it without grave difficulty. We have:

One (1) column, painted in so many layers of thick industrial mint-green paint that its edges have softened and blurred.

One (1) pair of wrists, chained to the aforesaid column.

One (1) set of handcuffs, chaining the wrists in question.

One (1) pair of Jockey For Her underwear, unpleasantly clammy; one (1) frightfully expensive Sag Harbor skirt, unpleasantly ditto; two (2) thighs unpleasantly ditto ditto, and cold and chafed, to boot; one (1) stomach, ditto.

One (1) awful stench, itemization of the individual components of which hereby deemed unimportant to the larger purpose at hand.

An unspecified and unspecifiable number of frightful welts along the backs and fronts of the aforementioned thighs; upper arms ditto; calves ditto; chest ditto; left cheek ditto. No, not ditto; one (1) definite stinging welt on the aforementioned cheek, and now she will forever after perhaps be mistaken for someone who has been schooled in Heidelberg. Aforementioned Sag Harbor skirt doubtless slashed to unwearable ribbons, to say nothing of the stains; one (1) Laine Kelly linen blouse undoubtedly ditto, one (1) Bali cotton bra, the clasp of which had not been designed for extensive beatings and was now twisted and digging unpleasantly into her back, and where had her cardigan got to?

Fronts and backs?

“Caw,” said the raven.

One (1) raven.

One (1) sprained ankle.

Sprained?

It hurts like hell, a deep, dull pain, like a pulled muscle. Or a whole bunch of pulled muscles. We—I—

One (1) stomach cramp.

“Oh, no,” said Brittany, quietly, to herself. “You can’t be serious. I’m not—”

One (1) nasty headache. Blood, rushing to her head—having been rushing to her head—

“No,” she said. “I’m not. It’s too much, really. I’ve been initiated all I want, really. I’ve seen the light! All done, done in...”

She had reached down—had she?—above her head—no, not possible—with wrists chained but not chained to the column, the skin had been heavy in her hands which trembled, the water had spilled down her face from her clumsy lips and past her temples and her eyes and had fallen into her hair because she was—

No.

Patently absurd.

People died if you left them hanging like that. Upside-down. Besides. All she had to do was look down—look down—

What do you think? Three (3) skipped doses of Zoloft, at this point? Four (4)? Four (4) skipped doses of neurontin? Six (6) skipped doses of topamax, then? And the clonazepam? What does that do to the clonazepam?

We weren’t going to think about that, remember?

“Caw,” said the raven.

“Caw,” said the second raven.

“You know,” said Janis, “you should not stop taking this medicine without first checking with your doctor.”

“Janis?” said Brittany. Her mouth, she noted, was dry. Where was Janis? Here? No. Not possible, my dear; neither of them is quite so... witty as to have staged that. Where was whatever was speaking with Janis’s voice? All she could see was industrial minty green, and that through a thick red haze. Over that way? Behind her?

Might as well be in your head, darling.

“If you miss a dose of this medicine, take it as soon as possible. If it is almost time for your next dose, skip the missed dose and go back to your regular dosing schedule. Do not—”

—Brittany winced; the blow did not fall—

“—take two doses at once. Do not exceed the recommended dose or take this medicine for longer than prescribed without checking with—”

—the voice had been circling behind her, Janis? or Jill? but now it suddenly swooped in, whispered, intimately, into her ear, it was, after all, in her head—

“—your doctor. Exceeding the recommended dose or taking this medicine for longer than prescribed may be habit-forming.”

It had something of Janis’s horrible confidence, the throaty chuckle she almost always had hiding in her words, her timbre, then—but the pitch, the pitch was pitched more towards Jill, now, wasn’t it? Jill’s pitch. Timbre: little bells; pitch: from the Latin, picis. Oh, what did it matter? It was all in her head. For some reason, those two roommates had decided to gang up in her head and explain to her how she was supposed to take her medicine, as if she didn’t know, as if these words weren’t engraved on her—

Oh, thought Brittany. Oh, I am sub-par. Here I am, chained to a column, beaten to within an inch of my miserable life, and all I can think of is myself.

“If they continue or are bothersome, check with your doctor. Check with your doctor as soon as possible if you experience swelling of the hands, face, lips, eyes, throat, or tongue; difficulty swallowing or breathing; wheezing; hoarseness; severe stomach pain; blood in vomit, or vomiting material that looks like coffee grounds; vision changes; or painful or prolonged erections.”

Brittany pressed her swollen forehead against the soft, cool, minty column. Fresh. “Darling,” she said, and tried not to notice how quiet and hoarse her voice was, “be a dear. I know I’m a filthy mess, but I can’t seem to manage to check my stool. Is it perchance tarry and black? It’s smeared all along my legs and the floor, there; do be a sweetheart and let me—” She stopped, for no good reason that struck her at the time. Aside, perhaps, from the fact that if one were going to pass the time talking to oneself, surely one could pick a somewhat less distasteful subject?

Legs? Or—

And besides, Jill wasn’t saying anything. Nor was Janis. Nor were the ravens—

“Caw,” said a raven.

Her forehead. Swollen; hot; heavy; gravid. Filled with black and tarry poison. Filled with words, all having rushed to her head with the blood, swimming too quickly, panicking, drowning in the flood—

She—

I—

The column was cool and slick and vaguely wet to the touch. Sweat? Or just all that paint? No matter; it was comfortable. Like pressing an inflamed mosquito bite against cold metal—or hot, it didn’t matter, no matter, either one overwhelmed the itch—

Cool—glue—what shall I do? Rue—

“Brittany,” said—Elgin? Was that—could that be—Elgin? Why on earth would she imagine Elgin here, now, at this moment, when she—his voice was a tenor, reedy, yes, and Jill-and-Janis could modulate into Elgin with a little—but so rich! So resonant, in that, that nose! So—almost—plummy! No. Too, too much; too much. Rich, and thick. Slow. Like glue. Like rue, but not—so—

“Elgin,” she said. She squeezed her head like—but how? Her hands—she squeezed her head until the words came, quietly, hoarsely: “Elgin, what do I do—if I can’t tell whether I’m—upside-down, or right-side—”

“Well,” said Elgin, or someone quite as jolly as Elgin said. “I think we’re rather beyond doctors, then. Don’t you?”

“I,” she said, but then a door opened, and someone came in, and began hitting her. Mutt, or Jeff? Her thighs, her buttocks, her stomach, her arms, her chest? Front, or back? Janis, or Jill? Wrists, or ankle? Up, or down?

She couldn’t tell.

She couldn’t tell.

•

(continued)

•

---