Annalise leaned forward. “Remind me.”
Hardy glanced at his watch. “We’re running out of time, I’m afraid. We’ll have to move on to the next part of our chat, which can’t happen here. We can talk about it then, if that’s all right?”
Annalise’s high voice was flat. “We can talk about it here.”
“I understand and I’m sorry.” Hardy grabbed his black bag and stood. “The clock is my tyrant, and we are behind schedule. See Lauren outside. We have a facility to tour, and she will take you there. I promise to explain everything and to keep the truce as well.”
Then he turned and walked away, leaving his three-legged cane stool in the middle of the aisle. Another guy might have turned his back on us as a power move—a show of contempt—but Hardy seemed oblivious to the idea that he might be insulting us, or that we might break the truce while his back was turned. He made a decision, expected us to follow along, then started to walk away, lost in his own little dream world.
I stood and watched him go. If I’d had a gun, I might have shot it into the ceiling, just to wake him out of his… Was it confidence? Cluelessness? Was he a fucking toddler who didn’t understand people yet?
Annalise was looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Since she was the boss, I did. “That dude sure feels comfortable admitting that he spies on people, doesn’t he?”
“He does.” She started toward the exit, and I followed. “We need to get the rest of the society off this guy’s stupid website. How secure do you think it is if I call them right now?”
In my lowest voice, I said, “Not even a little bit. Besides, you making that call right away might be the point. The guy might be lying to spook us into making a panicked call his people can trace.”
She nodded.
Lauren Woo was outside, leaning against the hood of her little golf cart, scrolling through her tablet. When she saw us, she darkened the screen and tucked it under her arm. “Mr. Hardy has asked me to escort you to the Deep Ark.”
Huh. I figured we’d have to break in to this underground bunker if we wanted to see it. I wasn’t used to guided tours.
Annalise sighed. “How far is that?”
Woo turned and pointed toward the northeast. “See the blue and red loading trucks? And the yellow backhoe? Right there. It’s on the corporate campus, and construction is nearly complete.”
“Let’s go, then.” Annalise climbed into the passenger seat and I took up my spot in the back.
The view from the hill was the same going down as it was coming up. There was brown, barely fertile California scrub soil. There were little trees and shrubs along the side of the path. There were office workers milling around—getting in our way—but they scattered at the toy-car beep of the cart.
Then we reached a chain link fence with razor wire at the top. A security guard in black tactical gear—vest and everything—stood inside the guard post, and when we approached, I could see the Ten Bar logo over his heart.
I studied his face to see if I’d tried to kill him before, or if he’d tried to kill me. I didn’t recognize him.
Woo showed her tablet to the guard and he opened the gate for us. We drove over a berm and came to a wide concrete circle with a— Well, I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was low and round, and had a number of cameras mounted on the outside. A bunker. It looked like a low bunker in the middle of a round concrete parking lot.
To the right, a backhoe was piling dirt up high, extending the berm around the lot. The blue loading truck was parked at the entrance to the bunker, with workers unloading slender rectangular boxes onto carts. Monitors, maybe. The red truck we’d seen from the hilltop must have finished and departed before we arrived.
Four Ten Bar security guards watched everyone closely.
The cart chirped to a stop at the side of the bunker, beside a yellow stencil on the concrete wall that read, cleverly, CARTS. As we walked by the unloading truck, I saw that I was right. They were flat-screen monitors, some of them small enough to fit on a security guard’s desk, and the others were large enough to be a living-room TV for a football fan. Woo led us around the workers toward the front door.
That’s when I felt the first pulse.
The door was heavy steel, and etched right in the center was a powerful sigil. Power radiated from it like the subsonic beat of a set of really big speakers. I stepped back involuntarily, intimidated by the feeling of presence. It was like a tidal force trying to carry me back to shore.
Annalise halted too. “Who put that mark on the door?”
Woo spoke over her shoulder to us as she strode toward the entrance. “Mr. Hardy did those himself. He cleared out the construction crew and spent three nights marking the outside of the Ark with these symbols. The architects complained that any damage to the door could affect its integrity, but Mr. Hardy insisted they were necessary.” She stopped about ten feet from the door, folded her arms, and stepped back with one foot, her head tilted as if she was studying a painting in a museum. “I like it.”
Annalise said, “If Milton Hardy took a shit in your salad, you’d brag about it to all your friends.”
Woo spun around quickly, but she didn’t look shocked or insulted. She just narrowed her eyes and, when I was sure she was about to give Annalise the finger, said, “You’re right. You’re exactly right.”
I didn’t like the feeling that sigil was giving me, but I strode toward it too. If this fancy secretary wasn’t nervous, I wouldn’t be either.
She glanced at me, and not in a friendly way. I took advantage of that moment’s attention to say, “What did your boss say this big mark was for?”
“For?” she asked, as thought it was a piece of art hanging in a museum.
“He had a reason for putting that there, and it’s not because it’s pretty. You may like it, but it’s not pretty. So, did he confide in you why he did this?”
“Mr. Hardy doesn’t confide. He communicates. Openly. That’s part of our mission statement. But he did say that he put these symbols in place—and I’m paraphrasing here—because the only people who could pass them to come inside were the ones who belonged inside. Something like that.”
“Outsiders,” I said, the word coming out of my mouth at the same moment the thought entered my head. “He said it would keep out outsiders.”
Woo quirked her head. “Now that you mention it, that is what he said. Huh. Mr. Hardy asked me to bring you into the facility to meet with Luis, our head of operations here. He’ll go over the purpose of the Deep Ark in some detail. Mr. Hardy will meet with you soon to finish your conversation.”
She punched a code into the keypad beside the door with the sigil on top. There was a metallic clang of a latch releasing and the rumble of a motor rolling the door back. It was like the opening of a high-tech tomb, except the air that flooded out smelled of pine forests, fertile soil, and air conditioning.
A man in a pinstriped suit came through the gap, his hand extended and a smile fixed firmly on his face. He approached Annalise first, but she did not want to shake. When he turned to me, I decided not to insult him by leaving him hanging. His handshake was firm but friendly. He didn’t try to squeeze too hard or yank at me, the way people did in the circles I used to travel in. “Luis de la Cruz,” he said. “Let me show you around.”
He and Lauren Woo waved cordially to each other, and we went into the tomb.
“Welcome to the Deep Ark,” Luis said, “the largest, safest, and most centrally located survival bunker in all of California. Mr. Hardy has asked me to give you the soft sell, since he doesn’t think you’re interested in one of the handful of remaining spaces, but who knows, eh? You might like what you see.”
He clapped his hands, then rubbed them. “So! There are certainly other survival bunkers scattered across the country—many built inside abandoned missile silos in remote locations—but our facility is right here, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and it has amenities you won’t find elsewhere.”
I confess that while I checked out for most of the tour, Annalise seemed genuinely interested. The stairs were of the same stone as the theater. The security room had stations to control an array of remote-operated gun emplacements, so guys inside the bunker could put bullets into people on the outside. And there was food storage, several layers of hydroponic gardens, exercise spaces that looked more like a tiny sports arena, water reclamation, geothermal electric, quarters for the staff and their families, and finally, way down deep, were the client suites. There were fifty of them, each about as fancy as the bedrooms and kitchen in Serrac’s house. That would be a step down from the usual digs that Hardy and his pals might expect, but I guess allowances would have to be made for the apocalypse.
Luis spent some time going into the technical details of the rooms, the security, the seismic retrofitting, the heat pumps, and whatever. I paid zero attention to that shit.
I kept thinking about what Hardy said to us in that auditorium and wondering how much of it could be true. If Annalise and I—along with the rest of the society—were really hurrying the end of the world with our magic, then…
Nothing about that was clear to me. We were trying to protect people now, fighting an enemy that was right in front of us, but were we also making things worse for the future? Predators were a danger I had already faced. I’d seen the pain and grief they’d created. This other thing, this Hatchling, was a hypothetical danger that was off somewhere in the future.
If it was even real.
Could it have been?
Eventually, we left the suites. Hardy was waiting for us at the top of the stairs. Luis greeted him warmly, a gesture Hardy did his best to return. Hardy explained he was taking over, and Luis smiled warmly as he said goodbye to us. He also said he hoped to see our names in his little client book so we would have the same peace of mind he had. So much for the soft sell.
Once the doors closed on Luis, Hardy led us back into the suite we’d just toured, and we all sat in the circle of furniture in the living room area.
“The theater is pretty secure,” Hardy said, “but we do a fair share of employee rollout meetings and stockholder updates there. It’s a prime target for corporate espionage, and you can never be sure if the latest sweep for cameras and bugs has been careful enough. But down here…” He looked up and opened his hands, as though the massive piles of concrete above us would make us safe. “It’s one thing for our enemies to hear us talk about the Hatchling, but our private matters should remain private.”
Annalise leaned forward. “Why should I remember you?”
Hardy settled in. “Sarasota, Florida, May twenty-second, 1991. I was ten, and we were celebrating my cousin’s sweet sixteen. The whole family was there. My aunt had quite a large house, with a big pool in the back and oak trees at the edges of the yard. Money. They had money, compared to the rest of us. My cousin’s name was Olivia, after the singer, but she wanted to be called Liv because she hated Grease and Xanadu and all the movies that singer had been in. And, ironically, the girl who demanded we call her Liv had just been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After five months of her mother nagging her about laziness and anorexia, Liv found that first lump. My aunt felt so guilty that she broke out the checkbook to make this party a memorable one. Liv’s last birthday party.
“We’d done the cake. We’d done the presents. There were games for the younger kids, like me, but Liv didn’t want to take part. She had her friends in the corner of the yard, all sitting around her, as though she was the hub of a wheel. At the time, I thought it was because it was her birthday and they were treating her like she was special.
“Which she was. I liked Liv, and I wanted to be part of that wheel, but every time I approached, she told me to get lost. My own mother told me she was just being a teenager and to let her go through this phase—that I would go through this phase myself when I was her age. I didn’t care. I hated being excluded, and in that moment I hated her. I told my mother I never wanted to see her again and left the older and younger kids behind to climb one of those oaks.
“Less than an hour later, you killed her.”
Hardy paused a minute. He sounded like he was describing something that happened to someone else, but maybe he was trying to put some distance between himself and the memory. He was still talking in that odd, flat tone, even about this. He took a breath and continued.
“We heard a series of muffled thumps from the front of the house, and lights flashed in the back windows. Then there was some sort of explosion that knocked us all to the ground but did not blow out the windows of the house. I fell into the pool. My mother fell against the edge, striking the side of her head on the concrete.
“Before I could even register what was happening, the back door burst off its hinges, and you came into the yard. Your hair was the same as it is now, and you were wearing a fireman’s coat, but you had a different face. Or maybe I can’t really remember it well. There was blood pouring out of your nostrils and your left ear, and for one awful, ridiculous moment, I thought you might be a zombie.
“That’s when Liv stood up. She began to glow with a pure white light. It was a sacred light, the kind you’d expect to shine out of the face of God. Once that light struck my face, my anger, fear, and confusion burned away, leaving me with nothing but contentment. Peace. Then she floated into the air, arms wide, head back, and she turned into a shimmering prism, and her white light separated into every color of the rainbow.
“She could almost have been an angel, like the kind you see in cemeteries, or maybe the Greek goddess Nike, except where she would have had wings, there was a spinning disc that threw off color and light and fragrance. Smell is supposed to be a powerful trigger for memory, but what came off my cousin Liv that afternoon made me remember things I… They felt like memories, but they weren’t my memories. I couldn’t even really understand what I was experiencing except as the feeling of movement, of vastness, of contagion.
“Her circle of friends sort of collapsed in on themselves, sagging into round shapes in a way that living bodies should not have been able to do. Then they began to glow with rainbow colors, shining like tiny stars as they floated into the air, forming a larger circle around Liv.
“And there was singing. I remember singing, I think, that made me believe it was perfectly okay to sink below the surface and drown myself. Did you have a sword?”
“What?” Annalise asked, clearly startled by the sudden question.
“Did you have a sword that you used against Liv and her friends?”
“No. I’ve never used a sword.”
Hardy seemed to grow thoughtful. “I suspected as much. I have such a clear memory of a swinging sword, but I think that image was superimposed on the actual event because I watched anime obsessively for a few years after. I saw a lot of magical people killed by swords in those cartoons, but I’m not sure I ever saw what you did to Liv.
“I do remember my mother, though. She was lying nearby, almost close enough to touch. It took me a moment to recognize that there was a tiny pool of blood beside her head. I moved closer and saw that her eyes were partially open. She looked like an embarrassing photograph that was taken at the wrong moment. But obviously, she was dead.
“And then Liv was gone, and so were her friends. My whole family was dead, except for a pair of toddlers who had been napping in the pool house at the back of the yard, and me. The whole family had been afraid this was going to be Liv’s last birthday, and it was, but not only for her.
“You crossed the yard, pulled me out of the pool, pressed something against me, then threw me back into the water. For a second, I thought I was a fish that was too small, and for years after, I thought you’d come after me when I got old enough. And now here we are again. I’m a grown man and you still look too young to buy a cocktail. Not to mention you have a whole new face.”
“More bullshit.” Annalise glanced at me like she was anxious to leave the party. “There was no Hardy family at that birthday party. Kane, Goodman, Pena. Those were the family names of the people at that party.”
“You remember?” If Hardy expected an answer to his stupid question, he didn’t show his disappointment at not receiving one. “My father’s cousin took me in afterward. She’d always wanted a kid but couldn’t have one of her own. She and her husband adopted me and gave me a new name, but I was Milton Goodman on that day.”
“And you can recognize me?” Annalise said, in a flat tone that I knew well.
“No,” he said. “But I recognize that.” He pointed at the base of her throat, where the tops of her spells were visible. “When you picked me up out of the water, I was too afraid to look you in the face, so I looked at your neck. I drew those shapes many times over the next few days—even gave them to the cops, but since I also told them about the rainbow colors and the smell of memories that weren’t my own, I think they went into a circular file somewhere, marked traumatized kid. And I know they didn’t look very hard for you, since it turned out my aunt and uncle were smuggling cocaine. They had a neat box to drop those murders into, and anything that didn’t fit the box was discarded.”
“Are you waiting for an apology?” Annalise asked. “Because fuck you. Your aunt put a predator into her precious teenage daughter because she couldn’t stand to lose her. By the time I showed up, the thing that was living in your cousin’s skin, talking with her voice, and exploiting her relationships, had already killed her parents, her kid sister, and her circle of friends. They had all become part of a single thing, and you and your mother weren’t at that birthday party to eat cake. You were there to be eaten.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Hardy made a gesture toward the door as he stood. “I’m not trying to argue that you were wrong to do what you did. I know you think outsiders are evil, just as some believe—
“Evil?” Annalise snapped. “No, I don’t believe that. They come here to eat us. Evil and good has nothing to do with it. I’m just a mouse with the tools to kill a cat.”
Hardy opened the door to the hallway. “And what happens when one of the cats slips by you?”
“They haven’t so far.”
“That’s what this place is,” I said, following Hardy down a long hall. This part of the facility had a utilitarian look to it. “A refuge from predators. Supposedly. If we fail, you and your other Richie Riches shut the door behind you and wait for the rest of humanity to get themselves eaten.”
Hardy led us to a staircase made of raw concrete, and he glanced back and shrugged. “Fifty families for a hundred and fifty years. That was the original pitch. If you include the handpicked staff, it’s enough to repopulate, and we have the seed vaults and technical manuals necessary to rebuild. But that’s not all. Come with me.”