It was her. That speed, that lightning, that freakish strength… it all fit. No one but a Conduit could do that. Istvan had only ever met one.
Grace Wu.
She was sharp and raw and roiling, and her guilt held none of Edmund’s mellowed nobility.
“You!” Istvan finally managed. He was still backed up against the bookshelf. He didn’t want to get any closer and couldn’t retreat. No. No, no. This wasn’t… He couldn’t…
She heaved Edmund’s limp form over her shoulder. “Hello to you, too, Mengele.”
Mad doctor – cruel doctor – is that a ghost, Eddie – why did you release something like that, Eddie – how can you be you friends with that thing, that horror, that monster –
He was airborne. “Don’t you ever call me that!” he roared, razored and skeletal. He slashed a bloody hand through the air. “I am nothing like that!”
Again, Beldam fled.
“Yeah,” replied Grace, “keep telling yourself that.”
No widening of her eyes. No tremble in her voice. She was good at hiding it – she was very good, she always had been – but Istvan knew she feared him. She knew he knew, knew he couldn’t be fooled, and yet she never let up on that bloody bravado of hers!
She adjusted her grip on Edmund, balancing him so his feet no longer dragged on the floor.
Istvan blocked her path, muddy feathers rustled over and across one another, barbed wire tangling and tearing their vanes. The pain of the Twelfth Hour’s bindings dug into his chest, burned at his wrists: a warning which, for the first time in years, he wasn’t certain he didn’t need. “Where do you think you’re taking him?” he hissed.
She sighed. “You have a problem with the couch?”
He glanced back at the living room. Bits of scorched food spattered the doors of the liquor cabinet. The front window was broken.
“I’ll clear off any glass,” said Grace. “Now, remember, don’t touch our femme fatale, all right?” She jerked her head at Lucy. “Remember what happened when you touched her, Doc?”
He cringed. He glanced down at the strange woman, sprawled on the floor in her dress, abandoned where she had fallen. Even now, it was like she wasn’t there. Empty. And to force a possession – to… to draw his very substance, like wire, like…
He brushed at his left cheek and jaw, where his dueling scars had been before their near-obliteration by burning, and almost expected his fingers to come away bloody.
“It gets worse,” Grace said. “That was just a fragment. A shard. Trust me, it gets worse.”
Istvan shuddered. “How is it that you can touch her, then?”
Grace tapped the copper band around her head. Then she brushed past him, still holding Edmund, and laid the man out on his own couch.
“You haven’t said why,” Istvan said.
No response. She propped Edmund’s legs up on a pillow.
Something twisted in Istvan’s chest. “Miss Wu, you’re back from the bloody dead, and you haven’t said why!”
Grace looked up. “Hey, can you make sure no one’s come to investigate? I’m good, but I really don’t want to deal with an army of smilers right now.”
“Army of what?”
She waved at the window. “Torches. Pitchforks. Just go have a look, OK?”
Istvan stared at her. Stared at Grace bloody Wu, standing over Edmund in his own house with a broken window that she’d probably thrown him through.
Then he went to the front door and opened it.
A pair of children ran away, screaming, as children do. The curtains at the next house over whisked shut.
Istvan stepped out. He closed the door.
Pista, the creature had called him. A nickname. A reminder of happier days, cut short long ago. Oh, Pietro had been so proud to see that monster of a fish reassembled and put on display. A magnificent beast, in life. He’d drawn so many pictures of it.
Which do you think, Pista, the blue or the green?
The front steps were clear, and Istvan sat on them, propping his head in his hands and trying to catch the breath he no longer drew. No one had called him that in over a hundred and twenty years.
Edmund came to. Then he wished he hadn’t. The wind was too cold, his back ached, and he was half-certain someone had sawed his head open and filled it with confetti. He touched nervous fingers to what felt like the seam. Metal. A thin band of it, all the way around his skull.
He stared up at the ceiling, wondering why there was wind if there was a ceiling there. Was that rain? It had been starting to rain when he’d left. Or arrived. Or... something. He couldn’t remember. He and Lucy had been having fun, right? Time flew. Was she ever pretty. What had they…
A railroad spike hammered through one temple.
“Edmund?” someone was saying, over and over. “Edmund?”
Cold bit into his shoulder, a bone-deep numbness that he recognized. The pain receded. He groaned, sitting partway up. Couch. He was on the couch.
Lucy, nothing: this was one of those days, wasn’t it? The bad days. Figments and dreams. He didn’t feel hungover, exactly, but it was awfully close.
He massaged his face, regretting everything he’d never done. “How much?”
“None at all,” said Istvan. There had always been a faint, indefinably distant quality to the specter’s voice, but the effect was even more pronounced now. A pat on his shoulder. “None at all.”
Edmund finally got his eyes to focus. They were in the living room, which correlated with vague memories of showing Lucy through the front door, and there was a pillow knocked onto the floor near his feet. His kitchen table lay flipped on its side. Burned things spattered across the ceiling and walls. A cold wind gusted in through the shattered panes of his front window. “The hell,” he said.
Istvan crouched to his left, as he usually did – from that side, the ghost’s scarring wasn’t as visible. Before him, the limp form of Lucy in her yellow dress slumped against the upright radio, and before her...
He stared.
Grace.
He wasn’t dead. Edmund knew that. There wasn’t enough unimaginable torment for that, and anyway Istvan was right next to him and translucent as ever.
That left his list of possible explanations a solid blank.
Grace Wu. Sitting, arms propped on crossed legs, and watching him blink. She wore a new costume now: a real costume, armored, reinforced to keep her from accidentally shattering her own bones. Bright red. Bright yellow. She’d always liked bright colors. Her cowl was off. Her hair, black as her undersuit, was cut to just above her shoulders. Its strands crackled where the wind struck. Age and worry lines were just beginning to show around her eyes. She was still painfully beautiful.
“Grace?” he said.
“In the flesh, Eddie.”
Edmund tried to concentrate. Deep breaths. His right hand crept down and held tight to his pocket watch. He was more calm than he ought to have been, he thought. Istvan’s presence likely had something to do with that. Good old Istvan.
Grace. Hello, Grace. Long time. Looking good. How are you? Where have you been?
Why didn’t you call?
His jaw ached, he realized. “Grace?”
“Yes?”
“Did you punch me?”
“A little.”
He rubbed at it. That would bruise, then. That would bruise badly. “Oh.”
Grace shrugged. “Had to hit hard reset to make sure you’d clean up right. Sorry.”
Edmund touched the metal circlet around his head again. This didn’t feel real. It was like he was one step distant, watching himself talk. “Don’t worry about it.”
She stood. She held out a hand to him.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I can get up myself.”
“No, Eddie, I need the tiara back.”
“Oh.” He took the circlet off and handed it to her.
She set it back on her own head. “Thanks.”
He got to his feet, waving off Istvan’s attempted assistance. It was automatic, he knew, and appreciated, but leaning on a ghost was ill-advised at the best of times. Luckily, his own legs held him. “Can I... get you anything? Water? Tea?”
She shook her head. “Don’t bother making a trip to the well for me. I can’t believe you people seriously don’t have running water yet.”
“It’s on the shortlist,” he replied.
“I bet.”
“There were some issues with flooding. Contamination. We’re working on it. Even wizards know practical things, you know,” he added, hoping he didn’t sound too defensive. “Some of the oldest spells are actually instructions on how to preserve food and the like.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Don’t tell me you have a copy of Ye Olde Magickal Art of Digging Privies.”
He smiled, despite himself. “Actually, the division between magic and mundane was much less strict in those days, and a few of the records do cite more humble sources. Not much on privies, but–”
“Awesome. Anything on hot showers?”
“The Romans had plumbing,” he said, and then the situation caught up to him again. He looked at Lucy. She was breathing, shallowly. He wondered if he was actually going to throw up or if it just felt that way. “What did you do to her?”
“There’s a creature,” said Istvan, quietly. “Something possessing her.”
“She’s a smiler,” said Grace.
Edmund frowned. “A what?”
“Smiler. She was controlled, Eddie. A puppet. Given a whole new personality. Lucy probably isn’t even her name. She was speaking for something else, seeing for something else, this whole time, and never knew it.” Grace brushed at her hair, her expression strange and distant. “Had you falling for it, too.”
Edmund held up a hand, feeling dizzy. Too much at once. His window was broken and there was rain getting in. “Wait. Wait, say that again?”
“No,” said Grace. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Neither one of you knows. You’ve been kept in the dark, Eddie, and if you want real answers, you’ll have to come with me.” She bent down, hefting the unconscious Lucy over one shoulder, and jutted her chin at Istvan. “The spook’s optional.”
Edmund rubbed at where the band had been, one corner of his brain marveling at how effortlessly she moved under the weight. Almost like she wasn’t carrying anyone at all. Superpowers, she’d said, are kind of great. Not that I need them to be awesome.
He could agree with that. Though certain aspects of her Conduit abilities had made certain things... interesting.
They hadn’t killed her, then. Not yet.
“Where?” he asked.
She turned. “Barrio Libertad.”
He took a step backwards. “Barrio Libertad?”
“Yeah.”
“The fortress-state? The one sitting in the ruins of Providence? That Barrio Libertad?”
“That’s the one. Look, I know our reputation isn’t great, but trust me on this one.”Edmund wavered, suddenly unsure if his legs were working after all. Grace never had adjusted to magic. Not his, not anyone’s… but especially not his. Why not take up with a place utterly isolated from the rest of Big East? A place from which no one never returned? A place that the Magister had blacklisted the instant she’d been elected?
Providence. Ground zero. The place where Shokat Anoushak died in a storm of fire.
Was it something he’d done? Something he’d said? She jabbed a thumb at her chest. Lights flickered behind her goggles. “I’m Resistor Alpha, Eddie. State hero of that Barrio Libertad. I’m here for a reason, I promise. Come with me and I’ll waive your wizard-ness for the authorities. Nothing to worry about.”
Istvan drew closer to him, voice low. “There was a creature,” he said. “I saw it. I fought it. It… it knows things it shouldn’t. Your address, Edmund. The Bernault devices. If you’re going with Miss Wu, I’m coming with you.”
Edmund swallowed. “Istvan, you can’t cross the border.”
“I’m coming, irregardless.”
“‘Regardless,’” Edmund corrected him automatically. “And what do you mean? How?”Istvan looked away. Barbed wire looped around his boots in tangled circles, wound tight. “Providence isn’t that large,” he muttered. “I don’t believe Barrio Libertad is far enough out of bounds to hurt too badly.”
Edmund raised an eyebrow, wishing he felt more relieved at the other man’s determination. If Istvan was willing to endure that kind of punishment to find out what was going on, well... that left Edmund little choice but to match it. Barrio Libertad. Providence. Last battlefield of the Wizard War. No place he’d ever wanted to see again, awash in rumors of horror and paradise.
Grace Wu, alive.
She was tugging the front door open already. “You coming or not?”
Edmund glanced to Istvan. “Is she…?”
The specter sighed, crossing his arms as he regarded her. If Edmund hadn’t known him better – known how badly the scarring twisted his expressions – he would have sworn that was a scornful grimace. “It’s her.”
Edmund took a breath.
Seven years. Not a word. Not a sign.
He stood. “Hold up, Grace. Let me at least get something to put in the window.”
No teleporting. No magic at all. Grace made that very clear: Barrio Libertad, and indeed all of Providence, was under interdiction. Given Shokat Anoushak’s example during the Wizard War, it was a sensible precaution… but that didn’t answer how it was done, or how means Grace insisted were non-magical could counter the impossible.
She didn’t know, either.
“I’m not that kind of genius,” she said. “You’ll want to ring up the architect for that.”
“Are you sure this will work?”
“I told you, only teleportation is permanently blocked and for the rest we’ve already made an exception just for you. You won’t turn into a pile of dust, I promise.”
Edmund sighed. Nothing for it. “I’m not a vampire, Grace.”
He took them to the rim instead. Two jumps, one to Ganges Station and another to where Providence began, its heat-hazed wastes visible from the station roof, a broken sidewalk baked by the afternoon sun. The razed foundations of the city that once was still bore scars from the blast, parking lots replaced by rough patches of farmland. In the crater, its rim shadowed by the stripped and rusting hulk of a toppled monstrosity, there was only glass.
There was supposed to be only glass.
“Grace, this can’t be right.”
“Never said it was.”
“No, Grace, this…”
Edmund closed his eyes, recalling armies. Tides of monsters that poured through a storm-torn twilight, skittering below hulks that crushed cities in their iron jaws: lions that breathed fire, winged serpents, toothed mockeries of tanks and helicopters, green lightning flashing through pools of oil. Shokat Anoushak herself wheeled on her razor-winged mount, sword and quiver at her belt, dozens of black braids streaming behind her in golden fastenings, arrows sowing reinforcements where they fell.
Run, she’d said.
Her eyes had been a bright, bright, sunken green, like buried emeralds. She wore the archaic regalia of a Scythian queen: a tapered headdress of cloth and feathers, a knee-length dress over pants and boots, heavy cloth worked in bold stripes of patterned color. Golden figures of fantastical beasts glittered about her neck and arms, molten and shifting. She rode like she’d never touched the ground. She spoke a language almost two thousand years dead.
Run, she’d said, and keep running, as the jaws of fate and madness close on your throat. That’s all that awaits you, immortal. That’s all you can do.
Run.
He opened his eyes again, blinking back gentle sunlight. “...how?”
It was a day more suited to spring than summer, warm and fragrant, just enough clouds floating across the sky to be picturesque. A flight of sparrows wheeled past as he watched. Before him stretched a sleepy, sprawling suburb, shaded by oaks, its winding streets marked by the mossy remnants of Colonial stone walls. Each flower-lined driveway held one automobile, similar makes and models as those that cruised outside Charlie’s. Each freshly-painted home possessed its own decorative mailbox: some in the shapes of animals, others sporting American flags or sparkling pinwheels.
It was afternoon, but the birds were singing a dawn chorus, just like the one on his aunt’s farm. He hadn’t heard anything like that since.... well, they’d moved out there after the stock market crash. The Great Depression.
He’d been ten. Eleven, maybe.
Long time.
“How?” he repeated.
“We call it the Susurration,” said Grace.
Edmund glanced at her. Lucy still dangled from her shoulders. Beside her rose a ramshackle steel pylon twice the height of a telephone pole and some three times as broad. Strange, twisted antennae jutted from its sides, humming a tone that set his teeth on edge. “What?” he asked. “The neighborhood?”
“The creature that makes you think you’re seeing whatever you’re seeing. The neighborhood, sure. Whatever you think is most pleasant and peaceful and inviting. The Susurration pulls it right out of your head, whether you want it to or not.”
Edmund frowned. He looked back at the neighborhood with a more critical eye, noting the double row of pylons leading into it, the mirage of walls looming far off in the distance. A safe path, she’d said.
What about the glass? The rumored concentration camps? The warnings?
“Grace,” he said, “what’s really out there?”
A shrug. “Providence.” She dropped her voice to a dry mutter. “And don’t look now, Eddie, but I think your spook’s a little spooked.”
Edmund glanced over his shoulder. Istvan hung back, clutching his knife to his chest as he stared, whispering something over and over to himself in Hungarian.
<My God. My God.>
Grace cast the ghost a scornful look. “Wonder what it found for him.”
Edmund held up a hand – just a moment, a stand-in for words he could no longer safely say without consideration – and turned back, a little spooked himself. He didn’t like seeing Istvan nervous. That meant he was in the same general vicinity of something that made Istvan nervous. “Istvan? Are you all right? Is there a problem?”
<It’s torn,> came the reply. German, a drawling Austrian dialect that had taken Edmund some time to get used to. Istvan knew he was better with German than Hungarian. <It’s the Ringstrasse in Vienna, but there’s rents in it, holes, like the entire city is nothing but a film or a sheet draped over a model, and Edmund…> The ghost shuddered. <…it’s empty. This entire crater is empty.>
Grace propped a fist on her hip. “Care to translate from Nazi-ese?”
Istvan jerked, ripped from fear to fury in an instant. “I was never–!”
“He wasn’t, and Grace, please don’t,” Edmund interrupted. He looked over the neighborhood again. The perfect skies, the perfect streets. An old woman was watering her roses down there, peering up at him with no evident opinion – only a mild, incurious acknowledgment of his existence. He was very glad, now, that Istvan had come along. The worst horrors were the ones you couldn’t see.
Susurration. A whisper, so quiet you barely knew it was there.
Grace was real, though, right? None of this was real but Grace. And Istvan.
And him, he supposed.
“Grace?” he asked, for confirmation, or maybe just to hear her say something in response. She turned, Lucy’s blonde locks sweeping over her shoulder like a bullfighter’s cape, and strode away. “No loitering, Eddie. If you’re coming, you’re coming.”
He took a steadying breath. “How’s the border treating you, Istvan? You’ll manage?”
The ghost still clutched his knife. Tightly. “Yes. Go on. I’ll follow you.”
Edmund nodded, and caught up with Grace’s departing figure. She had a point. Wherever they were now didn’t seem like the best place to linger exactly because it did seem like the best place: it was peaceful, it was inviting, it was beautiful, and it felt like he could happily spend lifetimes there.
Those kinds of places didn’t exist after the Wizard War.
He found himself wondering what Shokat Anoushak would have seen. If she’d seen anything before she died with Providence.
They walked. The path zig-zagged down the crater wall, the neighborhood proper beginning where it flattened out, just as perfect on closer inspection. Heat rose from the pavement, but it wasn’t an unpleasant heat. The flags flapped in a breeze just strong enough to display the Stars and Stripes at their best. Someone, somewhere, was playing a saxophone. Solo jazz. Good enough to be professional.
“The Susurration is what we in the business call a sapient, parasitic, extradimensional thought-concept,” said Grace. She waved at the distant crater rim. “We’ve got it trapped here, so it can’t directly affect anyone outside – that’s what it uses the smilers for – but it’s basically got total control of the rest of the crater. Give it half a chance and it gets in your head, rifles through your hopes and fears and most secret memories, and uses them against you until you break. I mentioned a safe path? That’s the pylons.”
She nodded at the next one in line, its antennae humming. “What these things do is shield us from the whole conviction-eroding, mind-controlling, preachy I-am-the-world’s-salvation schtick. Leave the path and you’re in the same boat as ‘Lucy,’ here.”
“Istvan told me he fought it.”
Grace snorted. “Yeah, well, that’s what he does, isn’t it?”
Extradimensional thought-concept, nothing: this thing had to be Conceptual, if Istvan could fight it. A representative of Memory, maybe. Control. Peace. How had it gotten here?
Edmund fingered his pocket watch. “Salvation, Grace?”
“We’ll get to that. What does Doctor Pain see, anyway?”
“Vienna. With gashes ripped in it.”
She laughed. “Yeah, it would have trouble with him, wouldn’t it? Tries to offer something pleasant and peaceful and normal, but what can you do with a guy who drools over death and blood, am I right?”
Edmund glanced over his shoulder. Istvan was still there, trailing some distance back, his features wavering between flesh and bone. If he had heard Grace’s comment, he gave no sign. “He’s on our side, Grace.”
“That’s what you said when you let him loose.”
Edmund grimaced.
“I thought so,” Grace said. She brushed a hand across the next pylon in line. “Anyway, these people you’re seeing? They’re the only thing about this that’s real. The pylons throw a bit of a wrench into the idyll, make the disjunction a little more obvious.” They passed the old woman from before, still watching with that same incurious expression on her face. Water poured from her hose; she stood like a statue, head barely turning. Grace nodded at her. “There’s thousands of them trapped here, Eddie. Hundreds of thousands.”
He blanched. “Oh.”
“In fact, our best guess right now is somewhere right around half a million.”
“Oh.”
“We try to warn people off, but the Susurration hamstrings our efforts every chance it gets. Those counter-rumors of paradise you probably dismissed as crazy ramblings? Yeah. It’s been growing. More people, more influence.”
Edmund tried to pretend that they weren’t surrounded by half a million puppeted observers staring in slow motion. He couldn’t imagine how Istvan was coping. “I see.”
Grace pressed on, relentlessly. “It uses the smilers to find new targets and get close to them, convince them to make a little trip into the crater... and then they never leave, or if they do, it’s as a double agent. It’s a big deal, Eddie. Haven’t you ever wondered why Big East is so stable?”
He blinked. “Stable” wasn’t the word he would have used. “Excuse me?”
She flashed a grin. “All I’m saying is, for being trapped in a post-apocalyptic hellscape overrun with monsters after a war that shattered everything we ever knew about the world, a lot of people are taking it pretty well, don’t you think?”
Edmund smiled back, blandly. “How often do you get out of that fortress, Grace?”
She gave him a look.
He shrugged. He wasn’t the one who was completely ignoring the efforts of the Twelfth Hour and the other enclaves. They had worked hard to get where they were.
“The Susurration is after you,” she said. “It heard about you coming back.”
“I didn’t know I was so popular.”
She spun, prodding at his chest. “It wants you, Eddie. It wants the Hour Thief. The guy who can go anywhere and survive anything and is handsome and charming and so experienced that people just assume he knows what he’s talking about even when he doesn’t. The guy who’s so famous he’s got his face on a sign. You were Magister, Eddie! Can’t you see how that makes you a perfect target?”
Edmund turned his watch over in his hand, still buried in his jacket pocket. No teleporting, but the smoothness of the metal made him feel better.
It was worse than that. The Hour Thief run amok could mean an untouchable, uncatchable, immortal serial killer running around with the favored weapon of marriage proposal. Given time – and privacy – it would be laughably easy to ask for the rest of someone’s life.
He’d thought about this. Too often.
“Can the Susurration learn magic?” he asked.Grace’s lips thinned. “It’s interdicted, Eddie. Magic doesn’t work here. You need to stop obsessing over your little time-stealing trick.”
“You made an exception for–”
“I didn’t.” She swept a hand at a pylon, at the walls looming closer. They were immense, Edmund realized, stained and dilapidated, like the newspaper photos he’d seen of Hoover Dam while it was under construction. “Barrio Libertad did.”
“Grace…” he began, and then everything he didn’t want to say rushed in to interrupt.
Grace, how did you survive? Why didn’t you call? Grace, I loved you. I still love you. I took that chance, and I spent seven years still loving you after you were gone. Now you’re going to make me mourn you twice?
Grace... where were you?
“How did you find me?” he finally asked. He looked away. He was a coward; he knew that already. “How did you know this Susurration creature was coming after me?”
“We have our ways.”
“Grace, that’s Barrio Libertad! What have you been doing all this time in Barrio Libertad?”
She looked at him. A long look, measuring behind her goggles. Her mask. “Fighting the good fight,” she said. “Same as you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What? Someone has to do it.”
“Grace, I thought…” He pressed his lips together, staring at the walls. Self-defense. She did it out of self-defense. They’d been able to talk, once, without any of that, but now... now, it had been a long time. Why bother? She had to have made up her mind by now. Found someone else. If she’d wanted to see him again, she would have come back, wouldn’t she?
Unless... unless something had stopped her, unless somehow...
He shoved both hands in his pockets. “Grace, please understand. I don’t know where we stand. I don’t know where you’ve been. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, or with who, or why you…”
The memorial. The candle, floating on the river. Fourteen months an invalid. Had she thought about him at all? How had she survived?
“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I’ve missed you a lot.”
She didn’t reply. She walked, Lucy over her shoulder like a loose puppet. The hero, like she’d always been, returning with her spoils. The walls towered before them. Her walls.
“Grace…” he began again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Eddie, I’m really sorry. I wouldn’t have come if this wasn’t so important. You would have never seen me again.” She still wouldn’t look at him. “You’re the one who said it would never work out. Not me.”
The words escaped before he could drown them. “That was before I fell in love with you, Grace.”
She stepped around an oncoming bicyclist, a boy careening forward without touching the pedals, frozen, floating.
“We all make mistakes,” she said.