5.
As Liam got farther from the flat, his head began to clear. Eventually, he let his steps slow, legs and lungs burning, trying to make sense of what was happening. The night was dark, but not completely. Windows glowed in a few of the houses. The streetlights flickered on and off. A dull glow came from the direction of the pub.
The glow was accompanied by the sound of people shouting. A lot of people. A mob, carrying torches, and moving toward him.
Oh, fuck.
Confronted with the threat of an angry mob bearing torches (with or without pitchforks—Liam wasn’t eager to let them get close enough to find out), Liam ran for shelter. Since there were no windmills handy, he went for the other traditional option for those in need of sanctuary: a church.
Liam entered the small stone building and took a moment to lean his weight against the doors while he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior.
It wasn’t a large space, just a single room with a few side niches and four rows of pews. The sanctuary was lit with candles that filled the space with a warm flickering glow.
At the front, near the altar, stood a priest.
He turned, and saw Liam looking at him. “Do you know me?” he asked.
Liam studied his tanned features, his dark mustache. Certainly not Father Murnan from his childhood. “Should I?” Liam asked.
The priest waved this away, as though it was an unimportant detail. “In this place? Maybe not.”
“What is going on here?” Liam asked.
The priest sighed. “I’m honestly not sure.”
Liam, who had been walking toward the altar, plunked down into the front pew at this pronouncement. “Well, pardon my French, but that’s really fucking helpful, Father.”
“Menchú.”
“Huh?”
“Father Menchú.”
“Oh. Well, pardon my French, Father Menchú, but that’s really fucking helpful.”
“That’s often the case with the truth, unfortunately,” Menchú said. “But that doesn’t mean that we can avoid it indefinitely. Eventually, it will come after you.”
He said this with sufficient weight that Liam suspected the priest wasn’t speaking hypothetically. “Are you trying to tell me that I’ve been avoiding the truth?”
“For all the years that I’ve known you. You weren’t without your reasons for doing so, and it didn’t seem to do you any harm, so I thought it best to let you find your truth in your own time. However, I think those reasons may have outlived their usefulness.” A pause. “I’m sorry about that.”
The dim sound of people chanting from outside didn’t easily penetrate the thick stone walls of the church, but it was there, and growing incrementally louder.
“What truth have I been hiding from? That that woman was right? That I’ve been working as a Bookburner? Or is the big bombshell supposed to be that none of this”—he gestured to the room around him—“is real?”
If Father Menchú was either disappointed or impressed by Liam’s deductions about the nature of reality, he didn’t show them. “This place might not exist in the strictest sense of the word,” he said, “but that was not the self-deception that I was speaking of.”
“Are you going to quit beating around the bush and tell me what you are speaking of? Or are we just going to stick with the vague hints until the mob shows up?”
“The mob might be kinder.”
“Yeah, but I’ll be dead. Spill it.”
“Do you remember going to Prague, a little less than ten years ago?”
Liam snorted. “With you?”
“No. With Christina.”
And that brought Liam up short. Because of course he remembered Prague.
• • •
Sweden had been amazing. The days were a rush and the nights went on forever. Liam had given up sleeping so long ago that the others didn’t even bother to remark on it anymore. “That’s just Liam. He doesn’t sleep.” It was all the fun of drugs without the side effects. Well, there was one side effect, but Liam was so busy sucking down life and work and Christina that he didn’t have time to breathe most days, let alone worry about the state of his immortal soul.
Besides, the thing in his head never called itself a demon.
But Sweden was just a stopover, somewhere between an alibi and a test run for the real objective: Prague.
They found the site inside the Old City through a combination of research, magic, and Liam’s gut. Prague had always been a bit of a nexus for magic; the first known golem being made there was only the most well-known example. Even the least-sensitive skeptic had to admit there was something strange going on in a city that inspired people to throw their political enemies out of windows every two hundred years or so. And with the help of his little passenger, Liam had found the source of that strangeness: where two ley lines intersected precisely on the border between Western and Central Europe. An intersection and a border combined, which was the perfect place to bring things together.
They’d smuggled in the supplies themselves, unobserved by elderly neighbors still habituated by years of Soviet rule to keeping themselves out of anyone’s business but their own. The small, ground-floor flat had been stripped to the studs, floor taken up and old foundations scraped away until the bare earth was exposed. The only concessions to human habitation were the remains of a kitchenette still intact along one wall and a bed tucked into the opposite corner. Piles of computer equipment covered everywhere else.
No one knew what the equipment was for, not even Christina. Well, not officially. If she had her theories, she had kept them to herself. In fact, she’d agreed to go along with the project so quickly that he suspected she knew exactly what was going on. But she let him pretend that she had no idea what he was planning when he kissed her goodbye and boarded a train bound for the Czech Republic.
His hands shook, and not from the cold of the Continental winter—not just from that, anyway—as he made the final connections. The computers had been laid out precisely, in positions on the dirt floor that Liam knew were vital, even if he did not consciously understand why. Knowing wasn’t important, only doing. The layout connected the computers to the earth, the cables connected the computers to each other. Liam lifted the final wire, the one that would connect him to everything.
He hadn’t been afraid before he made the connection. There was excitement, certainty that he was about to experience the wonder of the universe and the universal consciousness in all of its power and glory, amen.
Once he made the connection, there had been no room for fear. His entire existence was reduced to a white-hot overload of information and consilience that no human brain was designed to accommodate, and horrible, unbearable pain.
He couldn’t tell if it lasted for seconds or years. Time stretched and compressed simultaneously. He lost all sense of his body, except that his flesh was being stretched beyond bearing, as though he was being pulled apart at the edge of a black hole. Until it stopped.
Christina had followed him, broken the connection. Taken him back to the village to recover, and begin the work again.
No.
That wasn’t what had happened. He remembered.
He remembered everything.
• • •
Liam looked at the priest. At Father Menchú. How had he forgotten Father Menchú? “It was you. Prague was where you found me.”
He nodded. “Whatever you were doing lit up the Orb like we’d never seen before. We found you alone, connected to a network of machines all working with no visible power source. We pulled you out. You were in a coma for weeks.”
Liam didn’t remember the coma, but he remembered that part of the story being explained to him before, when he had woken up. “I remember what we were doing now. I didn’t then,” he added, hastily. “Honestly, I didn’t lie to you.”
“I know,” said Menchú. “The only person you ever lied to was yourself.”
A pause.
“I punched Grace in the face.”
“She’ll forgive you. But only if you survive this.”
“How do I get out?”
“I don’t know.”
“But Asanti just vanished. Grace too. Can’t I do that somehow?”
“We’ve been reaching you through the Orb because you’re still linked to it. The Network either doesn’t know that, or hasn’t figured out how to disconnect you from it. But we’re not connected to whatever this world is in the same way you are. It’s easy for us to leave because at a fundamental level we don’t belong. That’s not the case for you.”
“Of course not.”
“If we could find your body, we might be able to help. I don’t suppose you know where the Network would have taken you?”
Liam shook his head.
The shouting outside was getting louder.
“Then you’re going to have to find a way to wake yourself up.”
Liam tried to think. Now that his own mind had come back to him—and more of it than he’d had in a long time, but he couldn’t dwell on that now—he could recognize the bits and pieces that surrounded him. “The village feels like a mash-up of a couple different places in Ireland. The pub is from around Kinsale, this church was in a town outside Dublin. It must be easier for Christina to fool my brain into thinking that this place is familiar if most of the landmarks actually are.”
Menchú nodded. “Even if that means that you really are in Ireland, that’s still a larger area than our team can effectively search.”
Liam nodded, not really paying attention. He realized that it wasn’t just the pub, or the church. Everything in the village was familiar. Except for one place. And when he’d gone there, it had warned him away with a feeling of foreboding and an actual fucking warning sign. And when those didn’t work, it had bounced him out. Hard.
Liam risked a look out one of the church’s narrow windows. The mob outside had nearly reached them, but he still had a little room to work with.
“Liam?” Menchú’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“I need to get to the edge of town.”
Menchú did not waste time asking him why. “What can I do?”
“Think you can distract the angry mob?”
Menchú, or the projection of Menchú in his mind, or whatever it was, smiled. “I can do that.”
• • •
Liam ran. He hadn’t asked what Menchú had in mind for mob-distraction tactics. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The mob hadn’t spotted him as he left the church, and that was good enough for him.
The distraction wouldn’t last for very long. He was trying to hide inside a world that might have been constructed out of pieces of his memories, but which was ultimately controlled by someone else. The minute Christina realized that he wasn’t where she thought he was she’d be right on his heels. Before that happened, he had to get to the fallout shelters.
It could be a futile gesture. But part of what had gone wrong in Prague was that he had been so focused on finding a way to connect to the network he had built for himself, it hadn’t occurred to him until it was too late that he hadn’t thought to put in a way out. The Society would have destroyed the remains of his setup when they found him, and even Christina hadn’t known all of the details. But Liam wasn’t the only one who knew what he had been doing.
He had, after all, had a passenger at the time.
If Christina had found the demon, or the demon had found Christina, she would be aware of his previous error, and would have corrected it. Even if she wasn’t in league with evil magical spirits, she’d always been smarter than he was. That was part of what the demon had promised him: “You’ll never be good enough for her, not on your own. And once she knows who you really are, you’ll lose her.”
Of course, he’d lost her anyway. That was the way demons worked. But while he’d been possessed, he hadn’t cared. Afterward, he’d been too busy hating himself to love anyone.
Liam could hear the voices behind him now. Imagined he could feel the heat of the torches getting closer. He didn’t look back. Couldn’t afford to. He was nearly there.
The fallout shelters loomed. The door visibly rattled against its frame. Liam didn’t even break his stride. His secrets couldn’t hurt him anymore. He knew their shape and their stature. They were terrible. But the only cure for what lurked in the darkness was the light.
Liam hit the door running with all of his strength, holding nothing back. He felt it shatter, and he found himself face to face with the terrible thing inside.
Liam skidded to a stop.
Hello, Liam. Remember me?
The last time that Liam had heard that voice, it had been inside his head. An hour ago, he wouldn’t have recognized it. Now, he knew the truth.
He was staring at a demon. He was staring at his demon.
He had never seen it, when he was possessed. Now he was glad he hadn’t. It filled the cave, sparks flickering inside it like lightning through a cloud. Liam’s mind rebelled at the manifestation of a thing it had never been meant to comprehend.
“Evil spirit, I bind you in the name of Jesus—”
Really, Liam? Don’t you think we’re past standing on ceremony, you and I? The demon rushed toward him, and Liam felt a sudden, tremendous pressure squeezing his chest. We used to be quite close.
“Yeah, and then Father Menchú and the Society kicked your ass all the way back where you came from.”
And where do you think that was? Hell? The pressure on Liam’s chest receded, and Liam could feel amusement in the demon’s tone. It was an itch somewhere behind his teeth, and Liam felt an irrational urge to rip them from his skull so that he could scratch it. As I recall, I wasn’t the one who came to you asking for a partnership.
“I never asked to be possessed.”
No, you wanted to be connected to all things. To knowledge, to the world, to Christina. At this last, the demon shifted again, taking on a distinctly feminine silhouette. Did you think that an apotheosis of universal knowledge meant only learning the good things?
Liam wanted to run. He would have. Except the mob was behind him, ready to tear him to pieces, or take him to Christina. And all she had to offer him were lies. After nearly a decade, Liam finally knew himself again. He realized he wasn’t willing to give that up.
Come back, the demon was saying. I can see you remember me, remember our time together. Will your new friends forgive you when they learn what you’ve been hiding all this time?
A new memory, or an old one, came unbidden to Liam’s mind. Twins, two boys in their twenties, barely grown to adulthood, melting together, their flesh knitting into a single body. They had been hackers from… some country somewhere. It might have been one of the -stans, but he wasn’t sure now. He didn’t think he’d ever bothered to find out. It hadn’t seemed important at the time. The twins had been trying to infiltrate Liam’s network and he and the demon had noticed. Blocking them would have been trivial, but instead, Liam had baited them into coming to Sweden, to a hidden rendezvous that only he knew. They had made themselves his enemies, so he had made them into an experiment. He remembered how certain and vital it had all felt at the time. He remembered how they had screamed.
In his mind, Liam could feel a dozen more memories of other acts pressing up behind that one, not all as grotesque, but each in their way equally horrible. He imagined telling Father Menchú what he had done. He imagined Sal trying to reassure him, telling him: “It wasn’t you. It was the demon.”
That’s a pretty lie, the demon said, reading his thoughts. Do you believe it?
He didn’t. Looking at the demon now, it seemed to have absorbed the face of all his nightmares, from childhood imaginings to the broken bodies of those who had sacrificed their lives for his mad creations with the Network.
It’s too much for a man to bear. Let me carry your burden for you.
The demon was right, Liam thought. It was a load impossible for a man to carry. And yet, he had set it down for nine years of forgetfulness, and the lack had left him half a man, a prisoner of self-inflicted routines and paranoia. The time had come to own his sins. Liam looked into the face of everything he had spent the last nine years fearing.
He stepped forward, and let himself be consumed.
There was pain, and blood, and blackness.
In the distance, he heard Christina scream.
“Liam!”
• • •
“Liam.”
The voice by his ear was calm, and did not belong to Christina. Liam’s limbs felt heavy and his head was sore, as though he had been still, without eating or drinking, for too long. It was nothing like the invulnerability that had been the hallmark of his possession, and so Liam embraced it. He opened his eyes and found—
Hillary Sansone.
“Liam.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you walk?”
Slowly, joints creaking, Liam sat up, turned himself sideways on the dental-chair-from-hell contraption he’d been lying on, and tested his weight on his legs. After a moment to think about it, they held, and he straightened.
“The others?”
“As far as we can tell, your old friends at the Network hooked you up here and ran as fast and far as they could. Either they meant for us to find you, or they didn’t think you would survive.”
Liam shook his head. “No, the others. Team Three.”
Sansone didn’t answer. Instead, she took one last pass around the room. It was either a tiny chalet or glorified storage shed. The windows were covered in brown sticky paper. The only heat source was a couple of desktops on the bare floor, their fans whirring loudly in the small space. They’d been placed near the outlet—for convenience, not symbolism. Liam could see his breath in the air. Finally, she said, “My team’s whisper-net led us here. I decided not to get anyone’s hopes up until I knew if you were going to survive.”
In one corner, Liam saw a chair with the remains of a meal and a scattering of cigarette butts on the floor beside it. “How long were you just going to sit here waiting?”
Sansone flicked back her cuff to uncover her watch. “About another twenty minutes.”
“Good thing I woke up before you got bored and decided to smother me so you could go home.”
Her expression revealed nothing. “Indeed.”
Liam… wasn’t sure what to do with that, so he sat as Sansone quickly looked him over. Apparently satisfied with what she found, she tossed him a set of keys. Liam caught them, the tips of his fingers snagging the edge of the large plastic tag from the rental company.
“Your ride is outside,” said Sansone. “Tank is full. Map on the front seat.”
Liam’s brain snagged on something in that statement. “My ride? I’m not coming back with you?”
Sansone shook her head. “I was never here.” She paused in the doorway before she vanished out into the night, looking back at Liam. “Tell Arturo we’re even.”
With that, she was gone.
• • •
Liam stopped in the first town where he could borrow a phone, and called to let the rest of the team know that he was all right. The Network had left him just on the Swiss side of the Swiss-Italian border, outside Locarno. He told them not to send anyone to meet him. “I’m fine,” he promised them. “I can get myself home. I just need a little time.”
Driving through the night, Liam let the cold, clear air rushing in through the open windows blow away the last vestiges of fatigue and whatever the Network had drugged him with. For the first time in years, he felt whole inside his skin.
The roads were clear. The car was fast. He left the darkness behind, and drove toward the light of Rome.