Vicious Grace Part 21

"Okay, then," I said. "Come with us."

I couldn't fight the rider if every swing I took hurt someone innocent. I couldn't stand against the Beast Rahab without becoming a little bit like it. The good guys were the ones who protected the innocent, who stood on principle, who thought that failing in a just cause was better than championing a moral compromise. And it turned out that wasn't me.

I was the lesser evil.

TWENTY-TWO.

One of the first cantrips I'd learned was how to bring my qi up to my eyes, brushing aside all illusion and sharpening my sight. My head ached from it now. The hospital around us seethed with malice. We had navigated the second subbas.e.m.e.nt without another encounter with the rider's victims, but at the cost of moving slowly through longer, harder routes. Ex had brought us to dead ends twice now, forcing us back along our path. The frustration of being lost in the maze made me want to scream. The fear that another ambush might be around the next corner. I'd given my paper talisman to David on the theory that the wards and protections Eric had put on me would give me some cover, and I didn't want the guy with the shotgun getting all glowy around the eyelids.

I wasn't the only nervous one.

"But how did you find us?" Ex said.

"I don't know," David said. "I mean, I knew you were going back to the place. With the coffin. I just started going there too, and then . . ."

"There are choke points," Aubrey said. "Any complex route is going to have places where the number of possible paths narrows down and places where it opens up again. The rider knew that too."

"The rider headed us off at the pa.s.s?" Ex said.

"It could be at all the pa.s.ses," Kim said. "All of them at once. And the chances are always pretty good of running into someone when you're going to the same place."

Only Chogyi Jake didn't talk. Since the fight, his face had grayed, and he kept a hand pressed to his belly. I knew he was hurt and hurting. That I couldn't do anything about it only added to my frustration.

"But if there's a connection," Ex said. "If David and the rider are still in communication somehow-"

"Then every hallway between us and that coffin would be standing-room only with people trying to kill us," I said. "They aren't, so they aren't. Let it go."

It took almost an hour, scuttling like rats, darting from shadow to shadow, to reach the thick steel doors with the faded trefoil on them. Fallout Shelter. The remnant of the good old days when the Russians were going to drop nukes on us at any moment and the worst thing you could be was a commie. It wasn't even my parents' generation. These were my grandparents' nightmares in fossil form, concrete and steel to keep what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima from happening here, built less than a decade after Truman had given the go-ahead to drop the bombs. The lock had been forced, and the air within smelled like burned cheese.

Inside, the shelter was like a dorm room writ large. Narrow bunk platforms on steel frames rose from the floor to the low ceiling. If there had ever been mattresses on them, they were gone now, leaving only a slightly rusted webwork behind. Eight sleepers to a bunk, eight sets of bunks in a row, fifteen rows to the end of the room. Dim lightbulbs glowed in cages hanging from the ceiling. It was submarine-tight, but almost a thousand people could have been packed in here, breathing one another's air as the nuclear slag that had been Chicago cooled four stories above them. Men and women and children, half of them sick or dying, buried alive.

Storage rooms lurked off to the sides. I wondered whether they still had palettes of food there, waiting since before my father was born. We walked through the tomb of the Pharaoh Doris Day, avatar of the 1950s. Dread curdled at the back of my tongue. A stairway at the end of the bunks led down. It was wide enough to carry a gurney down it. A faded sign had a blue circle inscribed with a white triangle and the letters CD-Civil Defense-and a bent arrow pointing down.

"That's where it is," David said, pointing down the stairs. "That's where I found it."

"Okay," I said, and gestured back at the open steel door. "What can we do about getting that door closed and locked? I don't know how long this is going to take, but I don't want fifty p.i.s.sed-off orderlies breaking in on us when the thing figures out what we're doing."

"I'll see what I can do," Aubrey said.

"Are there lights down there?" Ex said, squinting down into the gloom.

"There were," David said. "They didn't do too well when I broke the concrete, though. I had a lamp and a couple cans of fuel from one of these rooms, though."

Ex motioned roughly that David should follow him and stalked away toward the storage rooms. Chogyi Jake sat at the top of the stairway, looking down. He was pale and wan. I had the urge to kiss his head, but instead I took out my cell phone and let it complain that it couldn't connect to the satellite. I went down the stairs by the electric candlelight of its display. Kim followed close behind, her footsteps soft and careful.

The ward was in ruins. Smoke clung to the walls like it was afraid to let go. Old boxes-wood, not cardboard-lay shattered on the ground, ancient rolls of yellowed gauze spilling out of the remains. A tangle of metal and wire bore a Profexray placard. Chunks of concrete were piled up among the boxes. A shovel leaned against the wall. The air smelled like overheated metal and fresh clay. I'd expected something richer. More like soil.

"Lot of work," Kim said.

"He was motivated," I said.

"And how are you doing?"

I turned and stared at her. In the dim light of my cell phone, she looked like her own ghost. There was no color to her face or hair or clothes. The cut on her lip where the rider's minions had beaten her looked black, the bruise around it gray. Her eyes glowed, but only with reflected light. I didn't know if the flood rising up in me was anger or laughter or raw disbelief.

"Sorry," she said. "Stupid question."

"Yeah, well," I said, turning away.

"I meant to say I'm sorry. All of this is my fault. I was drunk and shooting my mouth off. I should have known better."

"Don't sweat it," I said stepping forward. The shadows twisted and danced every time I moved. A yawning mouth of earth, a thick pile of pale dirt. Crushed limestone at a guess. And only a couple of feet below the floor of the shattered concrete and twisted rebar, the box. The coffin. Its black lid was off, a collection of scattered bones catching the light; rib and skull, vertebrae and femur. The mortal remains of the architect. Part of me had hoped to see it in splinters, unusable. No such luck. Or maybe it wasn't luck. Maybe the Invisible College had built the coffin to withstand the worst they could imagine. A coffin to last until Judgment Day.

I squatted at the edge of the hole. It was too much work. Even if David had known exactly where to go, exactly how to generate an explosion that would shatter the floor, getting through the steel and concrete rubble would have been the work of days, not hours. The reinforcing steel bars alone would have . . .

I put my hand on one, and it snapped like a twig. The metal was brittle. Fragile. Rotten from being too close to the rider for too many years. I took a chunk of concrete and rubbed it between my fingers, feeling it come apart in my grip. The ward was more than destroyed, it was inflamed. The ground itself had been festering for half a century, rejecting the rider, pushing it out like flesh rejecting a splinter. The thought left me a little nauseated.

"We need to clear the air," Kim said, and for a few seconds I thought she meant that the smell of smoke was overpowering. Then I understood.

"We really don't," I said.

"We're about to get into a very dangerous piece of magic," Kim said. "Group work. All of us together. If we're going in fractured and conflicted, it will break the circle. You wanted me to forgive you, and I . . . well, I didn't exactly get around to it. So here. You didn't do anything wrong. I don't hold anything that happened against you, and I really, sincerely want you to succeed and be happy. I don't think you need it, but if you still want my forgiveness, you've got it."

She nodded once, more to herself than to me. She'd gotten through the words. I wondered when she'd started rehearsing them. I held up my hand to her. She hesitated for a moment, then took it. Her fingers were cold and thinner than I expected. I drew her down to sit next to me. Just beneath us, the coffin seemed to suck away the light. Nomen mihi Legio est, quia multi sumus shone on its side.

"I broke up with him," I said.

"This isn't about Aubrey," she said.

"No, really," I said. "I broke up with him. Upstairs. Before the rider even got out."

"Jayne," Kim said. Her voice was taking on a tone of real annoyance. "This isn't. About. Aubrey. Okay?"

"Then what?"

She shook her head, a tiny movement that meant exhaustion and morbid amus.e.m.e.nt and sadness all at the same time.

"It's about me letting go of all the things that I could have done with my life and didn't," she said. "Aubrey's only one entry on that list."

I nodded. Ex's voice came from above, a bark of pleasure and triumph. At a guess, he'd gotten a lantern working.

"It's very strange, thinking about what happened as rape," Kim said. I was amazed that she could sound so calm. So clinical. "I mean, I understand that it was. No consent means no consent, and it explains . . . how it felt. Not knowing that until years after the fact makes it strange. I wonder if it would have been easier if I'd been aware of it at the time."

"You think?"

"I don't know," she said. "But it helps everything that came after it make sense. I had nightmares for years. I'd wake up convinced there was someone in the apartment. A man who was going to . . . Anyway, I didn't put that together with Eric until now. And now, it seems obvious."

"I'm sorry for what he did to you," I said. "Not repentant. Just . . . sorry."

"That's more than enough," Kim said. "That's fine."

The rage in my heart was starting to flutter, the fire going out. I looked down at the coffin. The pale light glittered off the black surface. The bones seemed alien and unreal. They had more in common with rock than with human flesh and frailty. For a second, I felt the swelling, oceanic sorrow behind my own anger. A presentiment of what was going to come.

"I don't know if I can do this," I said.

"Chogyi Jake, you mean?"

I've got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark. Down in the dark he'll stay.

"How long do you think he was alive?" I asked, motioning toward the bones with my chin.

"Not long," Kim said. "Hours. Not more than a day, even with the rider. You can see where they carved sigils all along the inside. There?"

I did see them, now that she pointed them out. Hairline swirls and strokes that covered the inside of the coffin so thickly they became a texture. I imagined Declan Souder's hands clawing at those sigils in the darkness, screaming as the air grew thicker and closer and the rider raged, tearing through his mind. I wondered if he'd known, even as he designed the prison, that he'd end here, deep beneath it. I suspected that he had.

"I'm not going to be okay after this," I said.

"I know."

"Do we have to do it?"

"Yes, dear," Kim said. "We do."

THE LOCK on the main door to the shelter was bent past repair, but Aubrey had managed a decent barricade, two of the bunks turned on their sides and stacked one on top of the other, then the s.p.a.ces where bodies would have slept filled with boxes and crates, the overall ma.s.s growing past the point where the door could be forced. Hopefully. Ex and David had encountered less luck.

"We have lights," Ex said. "The interment box is solid. It barely needed anything. And I salvaged enough straight nails from those boxes, I'm fairly sure we can seal the coffin at all the critical points."

"That sounds good," I said.

"But we don't have a hammer."

"What about a chunk of the concrete from down there?" David said. "There were some pretty decent-sized bits."

"Check," I said, "but be careful. A lot of it's crumbling. It might crack the cement instead of driving the nail."

Ex shook his head, but he said, "I'll look."

"There's an old X-ray machine down there too," I said. "It might have something heavy enough to use. A bar or something."

Below us, Aubrey and Kim were clearing debris away from the bared earth so that we could stand at the cardinal points: Kim to the east, Aubrey to the north, Ex to the west, and I'd take south. Chogyi Jake would be in the middle, with David standing guard to see that nothing interrupted. I could hear their voices coming up the stairway. Chogyi Jake was still sitting at the head of the stairs, his eyes closed, his head resting against the handrail's pole. He looked pale and sick and still, but his rib cage worked in hard, sudden bursts. Some meditation I'd never been taught. Something for warriors, maybe. For someone preparing to die.

I couldn't imagine what was going on in his head, so I tried not to think about it. It would only wind up with me going over, intruding, talking to him. If I thought I had anything that might comfort him, I'd have done it, but I only would have been trying to make him comfort me. David looked from him to me and then down.

"What else can I do?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. "We'll start soon. It'll be over."

"Yeah," he said. "It's almost six o'clock."

"Long night."

"They're coming in. Up there, the first bunch of people are probably coming in," he said. "Nurses and doctors. The guys who work the coffee bars."

"Probably are."

"This is going to . . . I mean, this is going to blow things open," he said. "Spirits. Possession. Magic. The whole thing."

"No, it won't," I said. "They're going to show up. It'll be weird. Then we'll lock that b.a.s.t.a.r.d thing back down, and it'll go away. At most, it'll make the Fortean Times. The world isn't going to know what happened here, and it isn't going to care."

David was quiet for a minute.

"What if it gets out?" he said.

I thought of Kim and Eric, the magic he'd used to wreck her life.

"They won't know it then either," I said. "It's just one of those secrets that keeps itself. Right up until you're in the middle of it."

"He knew, though. Grandpa Del knew."

"He did."

"I screwed up his life's work."

"Well, it's not like he told you to be careful. And really, even if he had, what would you have done?"

David squinted down toward the stairway. His wide face tensed and relaxed, and tensed again.

"Seriously," I said. "If he'd taken you aside when you were a kid or left you a letter or something. Told you that there were spirits from outside the world, and that he'd used his talents and abilities to lock one of the biggest and nastiest up by getting buried alive under a hospital, do you think you'd have been better prepared? Or would it just have been more evidence for a genetic component for your breakdown?"

"Yeah, probably that last one," he said. "A secret that keeps itself, eh?"

"I had to have proof too. When I found out? I got my clock cleaned by a haugtrold that had taken over this cop's body. Put the original guy into his girlfriend's dog."

"Really?"

Despite everything, his voice had a sense of amazement. Wonder. Had I been like that? Awed by the truth behind the world. Overwhelmed by the sudden unveiling of a bright, dangerous version of everything that had been walking beside me the whole time. I probably had, but I couldn't quite imagine it now. I wondered what he'd make of it if I told him all my stories: the Invisible College in Denver. Mait Carrefour in New Orleans. Midian Clark, vampire chef. The thing with that guy in London. I'd almost forgotten that one myself. I could imagine mistaking it for glamorous.

And, I realized, that was how I'd seen Eric. He'd known more. He'd done more. And so I'd made him into the hero of my own private comic book. Eric h.e.l.ler, gentleman adventurer. Force for good. Decent human being. It hadn't had anything to do with the real man.