eleven 
eleven PLUMM, NEBRASKA, had been nothing but a railroad town. Some folks had worked on the farms that surrounded Plumm on every side, tilling and planting and cutting. Some folks had worked in town, trimming hair, scrambling eggs, making soap, plucking chickens, butchering beef, selling things like radios and milk shakes and couches to each other out of little brick storefronts with big windows and sideways signs that hung over the dusty sidewalks and had all been painted by the same old man who also welded the handrails for everyone’s front steps. A few more people worked in government, telling everyone else where they couldn’t park their cars or graze their horses, and what music was allowed at the one school dance that happened each year, and how long after dark people could stay in the tiny Founder’s Park with the cracked statue of bald old Edward Plumm.
But most folks had worked in the rail yards and in the warehouses beside the rail yards. Big trains had rumbled through Plumm, trains heading all the way up to Chicago, trains miles and miles long, loaded with cattle and corn. When those trains left Plumm, they were loaded with even more corn, spouted down from the big gray silos at the edge of town, and with pallets and pallets of Holy Soaps, made in iron vats with real animal fat and secret ingredients guaranteed to increase holiness after ten uses, and scented with things like lavender and honey and vanilla.
When Plumm was at its biggest, 251 people called the town home, and ten tons of Holy Soaps were loaded onto the trains every year. A woman named Sissy Plumm lived alone in a big brick house on top of the only hill. She owned Holy Soaps, designed fresh Holy Soaps, and invented new sins that Holy Soaps could cure. She never married and never had children, but one day a train brought her the pieces of a radio tower, and a pipe organ, and old silver microphones, and all put together, those were better than children. She started broadcasting the Holy Soap Soothing Lunchtime Purity Hour Radio Show from her living room, and everyone in Plumm, Nebraska, had to listen, and the mayor walked around at noon making sure that they did.
But the trains stopped coming. Bigger silos were built in bigger towns, and they were filled with more corn. And people stopped listening and stopped cutting each other’s hair and selling each other milk shakes and making Sissy Plumm’s Holy Soaps. And no one cared what music was going to be played at the school dance or where their horses could graze and how late they could stay in the Founder’s Park. Because no one stayed in Plumm at all. Almost no one.
Sissy Plumm stayed in her big brick house, and she played her organ and she disobeyed her own rules, but then she washed her hands with some of the thousands of pounds of Holy Soap that would never get loaded onto trains, and every day at noon she sang her songs and taught her lessons about the dangers of sneezes and walking too quickly on Sundays. Every day she shared her wisdom on the Holy Soap Soothing Lunchtime Purity Hour Radio Show.
Until one day, she didn’t.
The morning sun crept through tattered lacy curtains and found an old bed with four wooden posts carved with birds and flowers and rabbits, and on the bed, the sun found a boy with light skin and black hair. Oliver Laughlin was on his back and his eyes were open. But Oliver was new. He no longer looked out of his old eyes. He no longer thought with his old mind. A broken bamboo cane was in his hands, and the silver knob on the end was open, revealing a large tooth so dark it looked like a triangular hole in the sunlight, like a tiny door into some other reality, distant and cold. Phoenix pressed the tooth against his young new lips, savoring the cool electricity it sent into him. His new existence was more complicated than he would have liked, but there was such excitement in youth, such freshness in every nerve ending. How his grandnephew could have been such a pasty, mopey boy, he couldn’t imagine. The lad had senses almost as sharp as some that Phoenix had designed himself, and that was even before Phoenix’s extensive renovations after moving in. Oliver’s mind had speed, too. Nothing like the speed of thought Phoenix had managed in his last body while wearing the Odyssean Cloak, but still, it had been a stronger starting point than he had expected.
Phoenix had overhauled his pale grandnephew in a shallow pool, in an abandoned factory, pouring force into wires and needles, violently reweaving every joint and bone and muscle and organ, sharpening and grinding the mind, heightening senses well beyond human levels, beyond most bestial levels. Except for smell. Smells were intrusive. He didn’t want them, and he didn’t need them. He had people to smell for him.
And then, when Oliver had lain in that pool, still and cold and broken, when his heart had stopped and his mind was void and his soul had fled, Phoenix had left behind his old ashen body, and he had entered his nephew.
There had only been one oversight: allergies. Phoenix had never before known the itching, sneezing torture of hay fever, and so he hadn’t thought to search his grandnephew for that particular flaw. And so far, fixing the allergic glitch while living inside the Oliver body had been beyond him. After two months spent surrounded by fields, he hated hay fever almost more than he hated the Smiths.
Phoenix rocked off of the bed and his young feet found the floor. He faced an antique dressing mirror with speckled flaws in the glass. A tall shirtless boy with pale skin and symmetrical veins on his arms stared back at him. It was strange, this Oliver self of his, being a boy. Having two arms again and a mind that tried to move in straight lines. He brushed back his thick black hair and stared into the dark owlish eyes he had molded for himself, eyes that could see bright color in the faintest moonlight. There was an extra membrane hidden beneath the lids, tucked away for when he needed it, a lens for use in water. He blinked it now and smiled at the ticklish sensation on his eyeballs. He had set Oliver’s gills low on the neck, just above his shoulders, in case he might ever need to hide them beneath a collar. He had decided against the photosynthetic skin for himself. The added energy gleaned from light was interesting, but not so enticing that he wanted to live his life tinted green.
Phoenix contracted his chest and torso, his abs and shoulders and arms. His lean body knotted up and vibrated like a plucked string. His veins rippled like whips beneath his skin. Grinding his teeth, he forced the tightness even further, into pain, into agony. He felt the scream jump up inside his throat and he smiled it back down, relaxing. The young muscles were only just beginning to reach the potential Phoenix had planned for them. The old Phoenix had shed his white coat and become monstrous to achieve strength, but this young Phoenix, fast and slight and fresh, already had the strength of an ape in his grip.
And of course, he’d narrowed Oliver’s nose a bit. He’d never liked that brat’s nose.
Phoenix flipped the broken cane and caught it, smiling. It was good being young. It was something he could happily be forever. And he would have done just that, infusing Oliver with the transmortality of Gilgamesh or even that red pig Enkidu before taking the boy’s body for his own. But the Smiths had just managed to muck things up before he had been able to. No matter. Transmortality could wait. He couldn’t be killed while he held the tooth anyway. He would let his Oliver body grow another inch or two before he captured an appropriately strong transmortal and stole his life from him. But the Smiths’ meddling must be stopped now. Their role in Phoenix’s story needed a dark and painful close.
First, they had taken the tooth from Skelton, along with everything else Skelton had hidden from Phoenix in those final years. They’d killed Maxi and burned the arm off the Old Phoenix when Ashtown was as good as his. They’d taken back their father’s body just two months ago. They’d helped destroy the Odyssean Cloak. They’d prevented Oliver’s transmortality. They’d taken his oracle, and they’d torched his cigar factory. He’d liked that factory. He’d expected to do a great deal of work there. Instead …
Phoenix turned away from the mirror and jerked back the lacy curtains. He was looking down over the tiny, crumbling town of Plumm, Nebraska.
Phoenix tapped the black tooth on the glass. Then he dragged it, watching glass powder rain from the sharp groove he was carving. The Smiths were meddlesome, and for that, he was grateful. They sparked a little extra desire deep inside him. It kept things personal.
Let the transmortals tear cities down. Let Bellamy Cook kick every brick of Ashtown into the lake. Let Radu Bey gut the Avengel and feast on the Sages if he liked. Phoenix had promised himself the Smiths, and promises to himself were the only kind of promise he ever kept.
The Smiths were out there. Somewhere. Following Skelton’s steps. Collecting tools and weapons and charms that the old thief had hidden from him.
Phoenix had no plans to kill them. No. The Smiths deserved to experience many, many slow transformations before death could even be discussed.
Oliver Laughlin’s lips tightened in sudden amusement. At some point, he would design a spouse for himself. He would use a girl as clay and mold her into the mother of a truly new race. Why not the Smith girl? The boy could be carved and hacked and modified into something barely breathing and barely human. But the girl, why not make her more than perfect? She could be his Eve.
The door to the bedroom opened and a tall redhead in jeans and a white tank top stepped inside. He was one of the Reborn, greenish beneath freckles. His gills were high, just beneath his ears, and the bone tattoos on his arms were striped with precise symmetrical veins. His blinking blue eyes had the odd horizontal pupils of a goat.
“I thought I should wake you, Father.”
“A statement,” Phoenix drawled, “that implies I was asleep.”
“I’m sorry. You have been sleeping more.…”
“I’ve been growing. Boys of the age of the one I now inhabit tend to have growth spurts. Boys whom I have modified as extensively as this one can expect to have even more. Am I asleep now?”
“Father—”
“I am not asleep.” Phoenix turned. He was at least eight inches shorter than the man, but the redhead retreated a step.
“Word from Ashtown,” the man said. “That’s all. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Indeed,” Phoenix said. He tucked the bamboo cane into his belt, slipped on a shirt, and began working on the buttons. “That’s very thoughtful of you. And what might that word from Ashtown be, or are you saving it for later?”
“Six Cryptkeepers were with the monks like Bellamy said they would be. But not just them. Rupert Greeves was there. And the Smith boy. They smelled him.”
Phoenix raised Oliver’s eyebrows and waited. “And?”
“And six of ours went down.”
“Six? Who cares about six? I can make six more of you between breakfast and brunch.”
“My brothers killed five of the Cryptkeepers and all the monks they saw. Greeves made it out, but they’re tracking him.”
“I’m sure they are,” said Phoenix.
“They have his plane, but he never went back to it.”
Phoenix nodded. Then he walked out the door and down a hall and into a living room with black-and-white portraits on the walls beside framed cross-stitched lists of rules, and filthy furniture, and a moldy rug, and boxes of soap stacked in towers. The redhead followed him along the dust-free path on the hardwood floor where Phoenix always walked, past silver microphones hanging from the ceiling, and a pipe organ, and the skeletal remains of a woman in a high-necked satin dress slumped onto the keys, buried in a shallow grave of dust.
At the wide oak front door, Phoenix stepped into sandals and walked out of the big brick house and onto the only hill in Plumm, Nebraska. The brightness of the morning sun forced his eyes shut, to give his oversize pupils a chance to adjust. Then Phoenix moved down the steps and onto the broken sidewalk, which ran beside a street that was more weeds than pavement. He enjoyed taking crisp, swift steps and not having a limp, but longer legs would be nice. He looked forward to it.
“Father,” the redhead said behind him. “One more thing. When they got to the chapel, Greeves was talking to the monks about Skelton’s map.”
Phoenix wheeled around, suddenly a snarling old man caged inside a boy. Decades of fury poured out of his new eyes, and his lip curled as he spoke. “One more thing? That is the thing, fool, that and the Smith boy. If your brothers return without a Smith or that map, I will gut them each myself.” He jerked the bamboo cane out of his belt and thumped the silver knob against the redhead’s chest. “How many of my sons are still there?”
“Seven.”
Phoenix clicked the knob open and pressed the tooth against the tall man’s neck, just beneath the gill. He wanted to slash. To kill. To end this fool like every other fool who dared frustrate him.
“Then go join them,” he said. He reached out with his mind, trying to grope his way inside this oaf he had created, to make him feel fear, to make him shake with terror and awe, to motivate complete obedience.
The redhead blinked in confusion and began to sweat.
“Father, I’m … dizzy.”
Phoenix lowered the tooth. He glared at his Oliver hand. He sneered at his Oliver mind. He was the Phoenix. He was the New Man. But this flesh was not yet what it needed to be. It channeled less power than his broken-down old carcass had. He needed time to train his Oliver self, to cut spirit doors inside his new skull so he could once again flood out into the skulls of others. Oliver could not be a mere flesh costume, a boy possessed. Phoenix knew he must truly be Oliver, and every cell of Oliver must be his.
He had time. Plenty of it. Radu Bey and the transmortals were only getting started. But if Greeves had Skelton’s map, was that how they had found the cigar factory? Skelton had known that place. He had known many places.
“William Skelton,” Phoenix said.
The redhead blinked.
“Was he ever here? In Plumm?”
“I don’t think so, Father.”
Phoenix made his Oliver head nod. “Good. Are the women ready? And the vats?”
“Both ready. The potion is bottled and the vats were cleaned last night.” The redhead looked nervous. His blue goat-pupiled eyes were unsteady. Tremendous peripheral vision in those sideways eyes, Phoenix knew, but truly grotesque on a man. He turned away. The Holy Soap warehouse was waiting for him.
“My name is Dr. Oliver Phoenix,” he said aloud. He closed the knob over the tooth and pressed it against his lips. “Oliver. My name is Oliver. I am Dr. Oliver Phoenix.”
He sniffed as he walked, stepping around the tall dry forests of weeds that owned the sidewalk cracks.
“Dr. Oliver,” he said. His nose itched, and he rubbed it with the heel of his hand. His eyes began to stream. “Oliver Phoenix. I am Oliver Phoe—”
A sneeze erupted out of him. He snorted and spat and widened his eyes while he walked. This could be fixed. He would find a way. Three more sneezes took him to the bottom of the low hill. Main Street was a rustling pastureland of weeds. Shattered storefronts gaped darkness. The Founder’s Park had been swallowed by scrub brush.
Oliver Laughlin, lean, gilled, and furious, whose portrait hung in the Galleria of Ashtown, sneezed his way across the street.
Two large coyotes watched the strange one from their barbershop cave. He smelled like the other mans that now wandered their town, but rot and death clouded around this young one with the snout fits. He smelled like traps, like poisons in meats, like one whose eyes would soon bleed and whose snarlings would drip foam. He smelled like mate-killer, young-eater; he smelled like madness and rage.
Lips curling, hackles rising, the animals growled loathing and backed deeper into shadow.
The plane jostled through another pocket of turbulence, and the wheel shook in Antigone’s hands. Again. Her copilot headset rattled down onto her cheeks. Again. She pushed it back up. Again. Then she looked at Diana Boone. Tan, freckled Diana in her aviators and ponytail and khaki safari shirt with the sleeves buttoned up and the neck open, showing a long scar just above her collarbone. Diana who liked Cyrus.
“I don’t like this,” Antigone said. She was sick of her chair and the fizzly air-conditioning; sick of her headset and the noise it couldn’t keep out; exhausted from too little sleep and too little food and too much worry. She didn’t want to be flying the plane. It added even more stress to the layers of things she had to fret about. And it made her tense. Her shoulders were knotted tight.
“You don’t have to like it,” Diana said again. She glanced over from the pilot’s seat and then rechecked the instruments. The tilt-rotor plane hadn’t pulled itself out of the mud by the lake easily. For a while, it had looked like it might not pull itself out at all. But Diana had gotten in the air eventually, though they were still behind Rupert’s mandated schedule. Four and a half hours in the air—three of them Antigone’s—and another hour until their fuel-up at some nowhere airstrip in Mexico.
“Do you like this?” Antigone asked.
Diana looked at her. “What if I do?”
“You don’t,” Antigone said.
Diana shrugged. “I like this more than I like ignoring orders from the Avengel of the O of B. I like this more than I like the idea of explaining my disregard of orders to that Avengel when he eventually shows up mad.”
Antigone twisted in the copilot’s seat, looking back into the cabin. Dan was reading some old book he’d found at the camp. Katie Smith was leaning on his shoulder, her eyes open but blinking slowly. She gave Antigone a smile. Pythia ignored her empty chair and sat on the floor in a nest of her own hair. Nolan and Horace were both asleep. The rest were still at Llewellyn’s camp. The division between those who had stayed behind and those on the plane had been part of Rupert’s instructions. Dennis Gilly, Gunner, and Llew were the only mortals still at the lake with the Captain, Arachne, and Gil.
Antigone turned back around.
“I don’t know why we brought the hair along. If we wanted protection, we should have at least brought the Captain. And Arachne is basically our doctor and we left her with all the people who will never need one.”
Diana smiled. “The split makes sense if you think about it. You would never want to leave Nolan and Gil together. Dan is the only one who even talks to Pythia, so why leave her behind? The Captain and Arachne both have a chance at controlling Gil if things go bad, so they should stay with him. And if Bellamy or Phoenix or both take a shot at the camp, I think it’s in pretty good hands. Would you want to drop in on that gang?” Diana laughed. “Gilgamesh, John Smith, Arachne and her ten billion forest spiders, and Gunner, too. Did you see all those rifles in the weaponry shed?”
The plane bounced hard and Antigone’s heart skipped. Her headset slipped down. She sputtered her lips and pushed it back up.
“You don’t like leaving, either,” Antigone muttered.
“Of course not,” Diana said. “Because I’m selfish. Because right now Cyrus and Rupert are in the fight, or at least circling the enemy. Because I haven’t talked to Jeb and I don’t know how he’s doing. Because I’m anxious and curious, and because my job is to sit still for hours and make sure you fly straight and don’t crash.”
Antigone looked down at the globe Skelton had left them, folded neatly and tucked into a leather pouch below the instruments. Rupert had given it back but took his with him. After refueling in Mexico, she would be pointing the plane south and very, very west, all the way to a ship on the globe marked:
“Have you ever heard of Lemon Chauncey?” Antigone asked.
“I have,” Diana said. “But nothing good.” She turned her aviators at Antigone and smiled. “What would you expect from a friend of old Billy Bones? She was tried twice at Ashtown and got off both times. When they wanted to charge her a third time, she filed a trek and skipped out of there. Basically the same thing Rupert did before Bellamy could raise a tribunal.”
“Charged for what?” Antigone asked.
“I only know the dining hall stories,” Diana said. “From other kids. Not exactly reliable. They said she murdered three Acolytes she was training. Some other kid said she was charged with sorcery—curses, charms, dark stuff. You’ll have to ask her.” She laughed. “I’m sure she remembers.”
Antigone adjusted her headset, thinking. “That map might be outdated,” she said.
Diana nodded.
“Skelton died more than a year ago.”
“Yep,” Diana said. “And he even made the map before that.” She smirked.
“And we’re trying to find a ship. Ships move. What if this Lemon lady decided she wanted to go somewhere new? What if Skelton didn’t know what he was talking about?”
“Well,” said Diana, “then we will fly for a very long time and look at a whole lotta ocean, and then we will run out of fuel and fall into it.” One side of her mouth twitched up. “Don’t worry, it’s not a bad way to go. Popular, even. Been used a lot in the O of B since people started strapping wings on.”
“Well, thanks for that,” Antigone said. “Good to know. But if we’re going to die, I’d rather keep the cause of death unique. Think you could you arrange that?”
“You mean like being eaten by a dragon? Tigs, you could have done that months ago. Opportunity missed. I think right now it’s falling out of the sky or nothing.”
Antigone looked out her window at the herd of clouds marching around the world. It was like being back in Radu Bey’s strange open room on the pillar, looking out at sky that wasn’t really there. She exhaled slowly, remembering how close she had come to death that day. She could still smell his hot dragon breath. Her ribs remembered the crushing strength of his tail. If Arachne hadn’t woven her the Angel Skin, Antigone would have died right there. For weeks after, she hadn’t wanted to take off that shimmering spider silk. Now she kept it in her pocket, folded into a tiny square as light as a pack of tissues. Two spiders lived in its center, always ready to march down her bare spine, binding her into her charmed pearly skin. They were friendly, but the thought still made Antigone shiver.
“Tigs?” Diana asked. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that about dragons. You don’t need to keep that memory fresh.”
Antigone shook her head. “No, it’s fine. I think I’ll skip the dragon option. Maybe a meteorite. Lightning. A tornado.”
Diana held out her hand, palm up. She waited, eyes hidden behind her glasses, strong jaw set. Antigone took the older girl’s hand.
Diana squeezed. “Old age,” she said. “Let’s die of old age. In times like this, with what lies ahead, old age is as unique as it gets. Maybe even impossible, but we should definitely give it a shot.”
Antigone felt her throat begin to tighten, but she smiled, and she meant it.
“Deal,” she said. “And that goes for everyone.”
Cyrus leaned against a shelf loaded with battered copper pots, and metal sheets ringed with the baked footprints of ten thousand cookies, and saucepans big enough for him to sit in. These were the rejects, the spares, the backups for special days when Ashtown was overflowing with members from continental Estates and family holdings around the world. The last time they had been used was most likely when Bellamy Cook had been named Brendan, when Ashtown had been so full the Acolytes had been forced out of their rooms and into a tent city in the courtyard. Cyrus wondered how many people were still around and how many had retreated to homes in faraway places to wait things out.
The storage room was at least fifty feet long, but narrow and dim. The walls were gray stone, the floor was cement, the ceiling was cement. Four large bulbs spread light that was more moon than sun and added to the quiet underground coolness of the place. Cyrus and all the pots were on one side. The other side was packed tight with towers of plates and bowls, wooden boxes stenciled with pictures of forks and spoons and knives, and then more boxes, bigger boxes, overflowing with foam and labeled with stenciled letters: CRYSTAL, SILVER, CHINA. There were dozens of them, and some were the size of hay bales.
Cyrus looked toward the door at the end of the room, where Sterling had disappeared. Then he looked down at his hands and feet, sleeved in black, and he looked back at the shelf, with the door hidden behind it, where they had entered. He had memorized his step counts and turns along the way, exactly how Rupert had shown him. He could duck back in and disappear before Sterling came back. He could get into the lake and swim for the harbor and steal a boat and try to find the plane. But he knew he was too late. Men had been in the tunnels, hunting for him. Of course, he could steal another plane. He could even call it borrowing. But if he did, where would he go? There was no way he could fly back to the camp. And it wasn’t like there was a telephone number he could call for help if he just flew somewhere random and then hid.
He flexed his gloved hands and listened to his knuckles pop. Why was he trusting Sterling? He wasn’t. Not really. Would he really be surprised if Sterling stepped back into this room with Bellamy Cook himself, if all the cook really wanted was to pack Cyrus up and ship him to Phoenix?
Cyrus knew that he needed his own plan, and he needed it soon.
Down the room, the shelf in front of the hidden door suddenly rocked and wobbled. Pots clattered together.
Cyrus backed away. He watched the shelf slide out into the room as the door behind it opened wider. His breath had stopped. His heart pounded on his eardrums. Run? Hide?
Dropping into a crouch, Cyrus pulled his knife and slid quickly toward the wobbling shelf. Tucking his shoulder, he rolled past it and froze, pressing himself tight against a large wooden crate.
The shelf stopped wobbling. Cyrus was stone. A single pot clicked against another as it rocked itself still.
Cyrus leaned forward, just past the crate, peering between pots at the narrow slice of darkness where the door had been pushed open.
“I smell you, boy,” a man whispered. Hidden beyond the door, he inhaled long and slow. “Your taste hangs sour in the air like your brother’s and mother’s.” He sniffed again. “But there’s something more rotten, something more like … your dead father.”
The door exploded open, flinging the shelf of pots across the room into towers of plates, knocking Cyrus back off his feet. In the rain of copper and china, a large shape stepped into the room, his head just below the lights. He was darker than Cyrus, but the bone tattoos were still easily visible. His hair was long and straight, his brow was heavy, and the bridge of his nose was wide, lined with folds, and tinted blue.
Cyrus crab-crawled back through rolling pots and shards of porcelain, and then scrambled to his feet.
The man drew two long, thin knives from his belt, then dropped into a low crouch, like an ape sitting on his heels. He grinned, baring the huge fangs of a baboon.
“Dear Cyrus Smith,” he growled. “Please come play. From, your friend Oliver.”