“What do you mean?” I ask, though I’m starting to understand.
“Maybe this loosens Axiom’s grip enough to shake it off.” She looks down at the mayhem on the ground. “Maybe if everyone sees what’s happening here, they’ll realize nothing’s as solid as they thought. That the powers that be aren’t invulnerable. That we have a chance.”
I feel a tingle rising in my spine. Did the scope of today’s ambitions just widen by a mile?
Tomsen snatches the briefcase out of my hand with the twitchy speed of a pickpocket.
“Whoa, whoa!” M says, reaching out to stop her, but she ignores him and crouches to the floor, pops the case open, and pulls a little electronics kit from one of her many pockets.
“Where did you find this thing?” she says. “It’s ancient! Does it even work?”
“Let’s not find out,” M says, watching her nervously as she pokes around in the wiring. He jumps half a foot when a grenade detonates in the battle below. But after a minute of tinkering, Tomsen shuts the case and stands up.
“Trigger is good. Now what?” She doesn’t give the case back to me and I don’t ask for it. BABL has been her life’s work; she deserves to be the one who finishes it.
“I know a way into my house,” Julie says and starts to head back the way we came, then stops when she sees Sprout following at her heels. “But Marcus was right, Sprout. We can’t bring you into this.”
“I want to help!” Sprout says.
“I know you do, but this is too dangerous. Your dad would kill me if I let you come.”
“But me and Addis can see things,” Sprout says, and she doesn’t sound like a six-year-old arguing. She doesn’t sound whiny or pouty. She sounds strong. “See?”
She pulls off her eyepatch and drops it on the ground. Her “bad” eye gleams yellow like Addis’s. Like mine and Julie’s, once upon a time. I can feel it drilling past my flesh, seeking the spaces inside me.
“We can read the Library,” she says. “The books tell us secrets.”
A chill runs down my back. Julie and I exchange a glance. Addis watches us with his unreadable stare.
“Decision, now!” Tomsen says, passing the briefcase from hand to hand like the handle is hot.
“Sprout,” Julie says. “I know you can see things. I know you might be able to help. But you’re too small for what we’re doing and you’ll probably get hurt, or even get us hurt.”
Sprout’s stiff spine slumps a little.
“So I think if you really want to help, you should stay here with your friends and take care of Nora. You have your own brain, but I’ve been around longer, and that’s what I think you should do. Your choice.”
With that, she turns and heads down the hall.
M eases Nora to the floor and props her against the wall. “Listen,” he says, trying to catch her swimming gaze. “You’re Nora Greene. Baddest ass I ever met. Gonna take a lot more than poison to knock you down.”
Her eyes hold his for just a moment, then slip away again.
I glance back at the kids as we leave them in the corridor, the noise of battle rumbling up through the rectangle of daylight behind them. Sprout looks frustrated and confused. The others are harder to read.
“You really think they’ll stay?” I ask Julie.
She shrugs. “I said all I could. I’m not going to tie them up. They’re people.”
Tomsen is already to the stairwell, bouncing on her heels while she waits for us. “Faster! Sooner! Time is Russian roulette and every second is a trigger pull, tick tick tick, click click click.”
“Jesus Christ,” M grumbles.
We move past the stairwell, heading toward the interior side of the wall, and after a claustrophobic squeeze through a pitch-black service tunnel, we emerge into harsh white artificial daylight, perched on a narrow ledge of grating.
Directly below us, at the end of a rusty ladder: the sheet metal roof of Julie’s house.
“I was a teenager and my dad was a paranoid alcoholic general,” Julie explains. “I had to sneak out a lot.”
“What if Balt left some guards?” I ask. The streets are mostly empty now, despite the remain where you are message blinking on the Jumbotron. People must have decided to make their own decisions.
“What do you think I brought you and Marcus for?” Julie says with a wry grin. “You used to be some kind of ninja, apparently, and Marcus…he’s good at absorbing bullets.”
M sighs and slaps his barrel of a stomach. “One advantage of being big. You skinny bitches can’t hold your lead.”
Tomsen loops her belt through the briefcase handle and scurries down the ladder with the case bouncing against her hip. Julie is close behind and then M, leaving me alone on the ledge, staring at the ladder. I think of another ladder, much longer and made of living bone. These brutal skills I have—do I climb downward every time I use them? Are they stored in those primordial pits below the basement? The Library is messy. There are Lower pages tucked into Higher books and the opposite as well, and sometimes down is up.
I descend the ladder and pad across the roof of Julie’s house, limbering my hands for whatever they need to do.
WE
“TEAM MANAGER ABBOT to anyone in Goldman Dome! Do you read me? Does anyone read me?”
Abbot pulls his walkie away and curses at it like it’s an insubordinate officer. “Of all the fucking times for a jammer surge.”
Security forces have withdrawn into the stadium walls, digging in for a siege, but the nature of this fortress necessitates strange formations. They’re not gathered together in organized ranks but scattered throughout the tunnels, each soldier finding his own solitary perch from which to shoot. Only Abram’s probation keeps him tied to Abbot on this particular ledge.
“Line sounds clean, sir,” Abram says as he pops out a spent clip and replaces it. “They’re just not answering.”
Abbot presses the button again. The squeal of the jamming signal is indeed faint. “There was no attack on Goldman…” He looks in the direction of the dome as if visualizing it through the intervening buildings. “Why wouldn’t they answer?”
Abram fires carefully, trying not to waste any bullets, but the targets are small and fast and erratic; it’s like trying to shoot a wasp out of the air. He used to enjoy the challenge. All the new hires looked forward to Boney encounters because it was a chance to show their worth, to impress their father-bosses and perhaps earn a few Approval Credits. And there was a sickly gratification in the feat itself, the way a good headshot made them collapse like a snipped marionette, a clean, bloodless deletion of the enemy.
But today he feels nothing. No one is keeping score as he guns down these absurd stacks of animate calcium. Abbot is still shouting into his walkie, trying to reach Goldman or the acquisition teams en route to Portland, but no one is listening. Grenades turn clusters of skeletons into clouds of osseous shrapnel, but they’re spreading out to make harder targets, surrounding the stadium like a swarm of termites.
“You said it’s a vault, right?” Abram calls to Abbot. “They can’t get in, right?”
Abbot lowers his walkie and watches the skeletons mount the wall, their pointy fingers digging into cracks and lifting their weightless frames. “You see this watch?” he says in a disconcertingly subdued voice, lifting his wrist to display a gold Rolex. “Water resistant down to a thousand feet, it says. But I don’t take it swimming.”
Abram leans over the edge of the opening to pick off a few Boneys that were getting too close. The sound of their claws ripping free of the concrete reminds him of ticks. The sight of his calves dotted with them like gray warts after an afternoon in the woods with Perry. That hideous sensation of being inhabited. Of being fed upon. And that horrible tug as his father pulled them out.