Pan walked into the courtyard of the Nest, feeling like it had been a million years since she’d last been here, not a month. Brick walls that had seen better days surrounded it on three sides. The fourth was made up of a building, one that had once been a church. It, too, was dilapidated, its windows boarded up, tiles missing from the roof, a short, squat tower bent at an angle. Only the door—big and red, perfectly lacquered—appeared new. Pan didn’t look at it, though. That door was an evil piece of work.
The courtyard was full of people. Herc was in one corner, arguing with Hanson. Truck and Night leaned against each other, both looking exhausted. Being under contract did that to you, sapped everything except whatever it was you’d traded for. Bullwinkle and Hope sat on a crate, Bully picking his nose so enthusiastically it was like he’d found treasure in there. She started to look for Forrest, then caught herself.
He’s not here, is he? Because he’s in hell.
The light in the yard came from a couple of halogen lamps and she hated it. It was yellow and sickly, and it turned everyone it touched into walking corpses. Every time she was here she had the impression that she was in a graveyard where the dead had decided to start living again.
“Who are all these people?” Marlow asked. The kid was the color of wet ash, his body stooped and weak, his eyes red-rimmed and raw. Every time he breathed he made a sound like a broken accordion. She still didn’t know what Herc saw in him, other than the asthma. It was always easier to turn someone when there was something they wanted. Or rather, something they didn’t want.
“They’re roadies,” Pan said, nodding at the guys unloading the cars. “They do the donkeywork. You can trust them.”
Marlow nodded. He was still in shock, she guessed. She couldn’t blame him, she’d not been right for weeks after she’d first seen the Engine. She watched him as he studied the courtyard, the walls, then the door, and she saw the exact moment it hit him, that feeling. He staggered a couple of paces, groaning, thumping into Truck, holding on to the big guy like he was a life raft in the middle of a cold, dark ocean.
“Somebody’s getting his first taste,” Truck said. “Just ride it out, bro, it gets better, eventually.”
“What is that?” Marlow said, putting his hands to his ears. Pan knew what he would be hearing, the voices, the sounds, those infernal scratchings. Barks that didn’t come from any dog, screams that couldn’t be human, a dozen whispered voices tickling the inside of his skull like cold, wet tongues. She could hear them too, although she’d been here enough times now to know how to tune them out. There were smells as well, rotting flesh, excrement, and sulfur, always sulfur. It didn’t matter how clean they kept the yard, how many times they scrubbed the door, those smells never went away.
“Ignore it,” she said as he reached into his pocket again, taking a blast of his inhaler. “It’s just messing with you.”
“The Engine?” he asked, wincing.
“Yeah.”
He looked like he was going to ask another question but she didn’t have the patience for it. She pushed past him and walked up to Herc.
“Waiting for anything special?” she asked. “Or do you just enjoy standing around like ducks in the rain?”
Herc’s eyeballs bulged with rage but he gritted his teeth, swallowing noisily.
“You think we’re going to let your new boyfriend in without a test?” Hanson said, leering at her behind those sunglasses. She was grateful that he was wearing them, because she knew what he looked like underneath.
“So test him, then,” Pan said. “I’m freezing my ass off here.”
“And you’re boring mine,” Hanson said, walking away.
She wrapped her hands around herself, stomping on the wet ground and cursing him under her breath. She knew there was no way around it. Given that the Circulus Inferni would try anything to find out the location of their Engine, it made sense to ensure that they weren’t letting a spy through the door. Marlow looked like a dope, but appearances could be deceptive.
She glanced at him, stooped over in his wet clothes, his brow furrowed and his bottom lip quivering. Yeah, not that deceptive.
Hanson placed a hand on either side of Marlow’s head and lifted it until he was staring right into his eyes. The boy struggled a little but only the way a beaten dog struggles when it knows it can’t escape.
“What’s your name?” Hanson asked.
“Marlow Green.” He shivered. Hanson always dealt for mind reading—among other things—so he’d know if the kid was lying.
“Are you working for Mammon? For the Circulus Inferni?”
“No,” he said. “No way, man, I—”
“Do you have any plans to infiltrate the Engine, to destroy or otherwise damage the Engine, to cause harm to anyone working for this organization?”
“I’m feeling like I might want to kick you in the balls sometime soon, does that count?” Marlow said, and a spluttered laugh actually escaped Pan’s lips before she managed to catch it. Hanson gripped Marlow’s head harder, making the boy wince.
“Do you have any plans to infiltrate the Engine, to destroy or otherwise damage the Engine, to cause harm to anyone working for this organization?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
Hanson tilted his head back, his nostrils flaring like he was sniffing for a lie. He let go, pushing Marlow away and wiping his hands on his trousers.
“He’s clean,” he said. “Holding a pretty big torch for you, though, Pan. Just about all I could see in that simple little excuse for a mind.”
“Wait, no, what?” Marlow spluttered, and Pan turned away before he could see her cheeks boil.
“Close up!” Herc yelled to two of the roadies near the gates. They obeyed, slamming them closed and pulling a bar down to lock them. It wasn’t exactly secure, but Pan knew they could leave the gates wide open and intruders still wouldn’t be able to find their way through that big, red, evil door. This place was protected by something else, something older and vastly more powerful.
“I honestly don’t know what he’s talking about,” Marlow said.
Herc put his hand to his collar mic and yelled, “Crack it.”
Pan steeled herself, taking three deep breaths, blowing each one out slowly. This part of the process always sucked. The door uttered a series of clicks, soft and wet and chittering, like there was a giant cockroach on the other side. Then it hit her, a sudden, thunderous chaos of light and noise, right in the center of her brain. She groaned, clenching her fists as hard as she could, trying not to see but unable to switch it off—corpses, toothless mouths twisted open in horror, maggots spilling out of empty eye sockets, limbs flailing inside an inferno, and something else, something worse than the demons, worse even than Mammon. A sculpture of bone and shadow that sat above it all, watching her with a cluster of fat, black spider eyes.
The door clunked again, swinging open, and the images vanished like a projector in her brain had been turned off. She swayed unsteadily, shaking her head like she could somehow dislodge what had been in there. She hawked up a wad of acid and spat, feeling the blood trickle down from her nose into her mouth. Every frickin’ time. She glared at the door, wondering if—when all this was over—she’d be allowed to take an ax to it, carve it into splinters.
Not that she’d dare.
She marched toward it, her stomach churning. Behind her came Truck, holding Marlow like a sack of groceries. The kid looked close to passing out, his breathing shallow and ragged. It was always worse the first time, feeling the Engine inside your head. She’d thrown up over Herc and Hanson. One recruit had died on the spot.
“Age before beauty,” Herc said, flashing his monstrous, gap-toothed grin.
Pan walked to the door, seeing the inside of the church, the rotting pews, the holes in the roof where the rain dripped through, the vines that had taken root and were climbing the pillars. She took a deep breath, then crossed the threshold, feeling that familiar twist and tumble deep inside, her guts protesting as she passed over. Everything fizzed, bolts of bright white agony flashing across the front of her brain. She took another step, forcing herself to, knowing that if she paused here she’d be stuck here forever, in the space between. The pain fluttered away like a startled bird and she was standing in a narrow corridor, shivering against the sudden chill.
She walked a few steps, then looked back, seeing the same open red door, and beyond it a view that never failed to take her breath away—a field of snow, as crisp and unbroken as a blank page, ridgeback mountains faintly visible through the blizzard. A face appeared from nowhere, a yellowing skull, almost invisible against the vista beyond. It pushed into the space, changing, growing a sheen of red, strands of muscle, a layer of skin and hair. Then Truck was in the corridor, Marlow materializing alongside him. The kid stood for a moment, then opened his mouth and retched, a dribble of sick hanging from his chin.
“This way,” said Pan, leading them down the corridor, trying to ignore the unpleasant tickling in her skull, the half-whispers that danced against her eardrums. Insignias decorated the walls, recognizable even though somebody had tried to scratch them away. A swastika, an outstretched eagle. They made her stomach churn just as much as the vibes that blasted up from below.
After thirty yards or so the passageway ended at an elevator. The doors stood open, the mouth of a predator waiting for her to walk right in. She did. Truck and Marlow followed, making the elevator wobble, and she tried not to think about how deep the shaft stretched beneath them, the thousands of feet of empty space between her and the pit below.
“Here we go again,” Herc said as he strolled inside.
The elevator rumbled, then started to clatter down. The first time she’d used it Pan had felt like she was on some kind of reverse rocket, one that was blasting down into the earth rather than up into space. Even now, after so many trips, her stomach did loop-the-loops as they picked up speed. She ignored the need to hold on to something, her hands balled into fists, closing her eyes for the forty-eight seconds it took the elevator to slow.
She heard the noise of the bullpen before they’d come to a halt, a clamor of voices and machinery that tripled in volume when Herc wrenched open the gates. He ushered them out into the first level of the complex, a room easily as big as a couple of basketball courts. It had been carved out of the rock, the gray walls and ceiling rough-hewn and uneven—all except for a section above the elevator, which displayed a huge swastika. It had been covered up with a dozen tarps but it still seemed to burn up there, scorching a hole right into the past. Under it, somebody—an Engineer from the eighties, apparently—had painted the words Nazis Suck, Hellraisers Rule!
Everything else in the space was brand-new. Banks of hard drives lined the far wall, humming. There were more than a hundred of them, each the size of a fridge, cased in three layers of transparent plastic so the damp and the cold wouldn’t get to them. Their lights blinked warily, making her think of caged animals at the zoo.
Next to them was a whole wall of monitors, the two outer ones as big as cinema screens, the other sixteen mounted in between. Each one showed the usual display of numbers and countdowns and infograms, like a NASA control center. One of the big ones, though, was playing a Harry Potter movie. Four women and three men sat on swivel chairs in front of it, rapt, scoffing popcorn from a couple of saucepans. Herc strolled halfway across the room, almost on his tiptoes, waiting until he was close enough before clapping his hands together. The noise was like a rifle shot, echoing off the walls, and the Lawyers just about fell out of their chairs.
“Jesus Christ!” yelled Seth in his heavy Austrian accent. Nobody really knew how old he was—sometimes he looked sixty, sometimes eighty. Right now he looked about a hundred as he clapped a liver-spotted hand to his chest. “You would really do this to me, an old man who has had four heart attacks already in his life? You are a bad guy, Herman Cole. You will be the death of me.”
“I could never be so lucky,” Herc said, walking the rest of the way and embracing the man fondly. They looked like a couple of old crusties meeting in the park, Pan thought, smiling.
“Good to see your mind’s on the job,” said Truck. “Nice to know you’re working hard on cracking our contracts.”
Seth waved a hand like he was wafting away a bad smell.
“Oh please, you know I could crack yours as easily as I could crack a fart. You insult me, Gregory, with your pathetic deals. When will you be brave and go for something really fun?”
One of the other Lawyers had paused the film and they were all milling around now like they were actually working. Pan ignored them. She knew a little about each of them, but other than Seth she did her best to avoid them. There was something about knowing the person who had to break your contract that made the whole thing scarier, made it more real. It was better to pretend that some nameless, faceless superhero was trying to save your life, not an old guy with a triple bypass, or some geeky mathematicians from MIT who were still young enough to think that ironic T-shirts were cool.
“It’s good to see you, Amelia,” Seth said, using the name that Pan hated. “We almost lost you then. That was a tough cookie to break. See, Gregory, you should be more like this young lady here, actually giving me some work to do!”
Seth wiggled his huge, bushy eyebrows at her and smiled and she couldn’t help but smile back. Until she thought of Forrest, that was.
“You should have broken his contract,” she said. “We didn’t have to lose another one.”
“Cody.” Seth sighed. “Yes. We should have. I am sorry, Amelia. Ostheim commanded us to keep your contracts active until your mission was complete. And by that time it was too late. We only just managed to break yours in time.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” she said, scratching her chest, her ruined heart. Seth walked to her, placed a warm, leathery hand on her shoulder.
“I truly am sorry, my girl. It was not my choice, but it is my responsibility. I should have said no to Ostheim.”
Yeah, right. Nobody said no to Ostheim. Pan shrugged him away.
“I will write his name in the book,” Seth said.
“Don’t,” she replied. She steeled herself, walking to the corner of the room. There was a desk there, an old, leather-bound ledger the only thing on it. It was open now, and she ran her hand down the list of names written there in black ink. Lucy White (Simmer), Beki Smith (Bluebeard), Sophie Hicks (T-Rex), Wesley Adams (Marathon Man), Tyra Jynn (Spitfire), Ryan Hodapp (Hammer), Hannah Wilkinson (Berserker), Leticia Gallardo (Bookworm), Courtney Webb (Captain Obvious). All the Engineers and their war names. All of them dead. Some of them rotting in the ground, most of them somewhere far, far worse. She did what she always did, flicking back through the book. How many names? A thousand? Those at the front were faded almost beyond recognition, centuries old. And how many more would there be, before it all ended?
Picking up the pen, she wrote Cody, then stopped, racking her brains. What the hell had his surname been? The pen hovered and she felt the shame wrap her up, smothering her. How could she forget it? He was dead, and she couldn’t even remember his name.
It’s better this way, better to forget he ever existed, better to—
Baranowski. It was suddenly vomited back into her head and she scribbled it down, adding (Forrest) afterward. Herc had given him that name because he’d always been going on about how life was a box of chocolates. She ran her finger softly over the name, then closed the book with deliberate slowness.
Job done. Time to move on. I will not think of him again.
“And who is this?” said Seth, getting out of his chair and shuffling over to Marlow. “A new recruit? Oh goody!”
“Seth, meet Marlow,” said Pan. Seth took Marlow’s head in both of his and studied him like a scientist might study a rat. He nodded approvingly.
“Oh, Marlow, how fitting,” he said, putting his head to Marlow’s chest. “Bit of asthma there, I see. Nothing we can’t take care of. A good specimen, Herman, we will have a lot of fun with this one. Have you thought about what you might like, Marlow? Have they filled you in on the possibilities, the endless, wonderful possibilities?”
“Um…” said Marlow.
“He can wait,” said Herc. “It’s been a long day. A long few days. We should rest.”
“Balderdash!” said Seth. “You need no such thing. Please, let’s work up a contract for him. You don’t know how bored I get here. They make me do terrible things, terrible things, when you are gone. These films they make me watch, about wizards and dragons and … and strange elves with socks. I cannot think with such nonsense in my head.”
“He put it on!” said one of the Lawyers, a young woman called Trix. “He’s made us watch it four times this week.”
“Lies,” said Seth, holding up his hands. “See how they slander me. Come, come.”
He took Marlow’s elbow and walked with him toward the elevator. Pan looked at Herc and the big guy shrugged.
“It’s too late and I’m too tired to argue with Seth,” he said. “I’m going to bed. You make sure he doesn’t deal for something unbreakable, all right?”
“Come on, Herc,” she said, wanting nothing more than to crash down on a soft mattress, bury herself in the warmth of her duvet. “I’m—”
“Good night, Pan,” Herc said, flashing her a smile. She looked at Truck and he shook his head.
“Bed for me. Good night, kiddo.”
“Buenas noches, Pan,” said Night before she’d even asked her.
She groaned in frustration then spun around on her heels, following the old man and the kid. Already she could feel that maddening itch, the call of the Engine. She pictured it beneath her—its sprawling insanity, an ocean of moving parts powered by unspeakable evil—and her heart began drumming. The truth was she wasn’t tired. The reason she didn’t want to babysit Marlow was because if she went downstairs, if she saw the Engine, then the desire to forge a new contract would be almost overwhelming. It always wanted her, and she no longer knew how to say no.
“Do not dally, Amelia,” said Seth from inside the elevator. “I don’t want to be another hundred years older by the time you join us.”
She shook her head in resignation, then jogged over to them. Marlow smiled nervously at her and she almost felt sorry for him. Almost. The truth was he didn’t know how lucky he was. Right now he was a wheezing, trembling sack of flesh and bone and worry.
And in a few minutes he’d be a god.