Chapter Thirty
Thirty
Time passed strangely after that. The lights never dimmed, the silence remained unbroken, and my existence narrowed to a vague blur redolent of old paper and beeswax polish.
Without buzzkill librarians getting in my way, I frolicked through the Forbidden section that lay just off the atrium, pulling tome after tome off the shelves and stacking them on a table in the center of the reading room.
The possibilities I glimpsed as I leafed through them were beyond thrilling.
Why wasn’t everyone reading these books all the time?
Finally settling on a volume with the evocative title Most Puissant Magicks with Which to Smite Thine Enemies and Secure Their Wailing Lamentations (because that sounded fun), I experimented with something called the “Grasp of the Endless Void.” It was both simple and effective, and I got a real rush from toying with the fundamental forces of the universe.
Unfortunately, my experiments destroyed most of the reading room, but some collateral damage was to be expected.
I mean, how irreplaceable were these ancient texts anyhow? I was sure the company could find more.
Deciding I’d experimented enough, I waded through mounds of debris to examine the books I hadn’t destroyed and promptly hit the mother lode: a massive volume bound in dark blue leather with the words On Abominations written in looping silver script along its spine.
Eureka! Despite it being the middle of the night, a surge of excitement at the sight of those two words helped me power through hundreds of musty pages, my gaze rapidly scanning the old-fashioned typeface.
It was pretty boring, honestly, filled with endless chapters of philosophical and epistemological musings on the nature of evil and its roots in the human condition, blah blah blah, moving on.
Finally, toward the end of the book, I reached a section titled “The Binding” and bent eagerly over its pages, hoping to uncover the answers we needed to defeat The-One-Who-Hungers.
What I found instead changed everything.
Somewhere outside, the sun was rising over a devastated Manhattan when I finally returned to the Obsolete section.
Amira and Lex had fallen asleep at their respective tables, heads pillowed on their arms, Lex drooling a little on the ancient stone tablet in front of them.
Carefully placing the book I’d found next to the tablet, I left the two of them to their uneasy dreams and curled up on the dusty carpet some distance away.
It was deeply uncomfortable, but that wasn’t why I had trouble falling asleep.
My mind kept returning to what I’d learned, and all the implications that followed.
Don’t think about it, I kept telling myself. Just don’t think about it.
Exhaustion claimed me at last, and when I opened my eyes again some indeterminate time later, everything looked depressingly identical.
The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed with the same maddening hum as I pushed myself upright, the muscles in my back protesting sharply at the minutes or hours I’d spent on the floor.
Groggily, I became aware of hushed voices and turned to Amira and Lex, sitting at a table with their heads together as they pored over the book I’d left.
Looking up as I staggered to my feet, Amira asked, “How did you sleep?”
“Not well.” I winced as I tried a few experimental stretches.
“You look like shit,” Lex observed. Then they tapped the book in front of them. “This is a gold mine, by the way. Where’d you find it?”
“The Forbidden section.”
“Huh. Makes sense, I guess. The section on binding Abominations has just about everything we need to put the last pieces together.” Lex ran their fingers along a ragged edge of paper. “There’s a page missing, though.”
Bending down to grab my toothbrush from my bag, I mumbled, “Yeah, it was like that when I found it.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t have anything super important.” Amira eyed me carefully before adding, “Are you okay?”
“Sure.” I gave her a smile. “Just a little stiff. I’m going to brush my teeth. When I get back, let’s make a coffee run, okay?”
A little while later, Amira and I descended to the lobby and found it empty. For the first time that I could remember, the receptionist was gone. Outside, the air smelled of smoke and the skies were heavy with ominous clouds. We were almost three hours away from the executive ritual.
I wondered what Ms. Crenshaw was doing at that moment.
Running the board through whatever preparations remained, probably.
The way things had gone for me lately, I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised to walk into the Starbucks and see her standing there, waiting for her usual mocha.
Thankfully, however, the only people in there were the poor baristas, all of whom looked like they’d slept in their uniforms. They stared at us with haunted eyes when we walked through the door, and a couple of them flinched as we approached the counter.
“Why are they still working?” Amira whispered to me once we’d ordered. “They look scared to death.”
“It’s either company loyalty or some kind of unbreakable compulsion.” Eyeing the shivering workers, I added, “My guess is compulsion.”
“That’s horrible.”
“No, that’s corporate capitalism. You can’t sell coffee if your employees don’t work.” I put an arm around her shoulders. “How are you doing?”
Amira shook her head slowly as she leaned into me. “I’m still wondering if this is some wild dream. But even if it is, I don’t want to wake up. Not yet, anyhow.”
“Really?”
“Really. I talked with Lex for hours last night. There are entire universes out there that no one has seen before! Worlds upon worlds of amazing things. How could any scientist not be excited by that?”
I smiled down at her. “I’m glad you’re here. Keeping all of this from you for the past two years was really hard.”
“I’m starting to understand why it has to be secret. I can’t imagine what people would do if they discovered even a tiny fraction of what’s really out there.” After a pause, she asked, “What’s going to happen with you and Eric?”
I’d been trying not to think about the future, or anything at all past the next few hours.
“I have no idea,” I said. “He lied about a lot of things. But then, so did I. He’s sworn to stop people like me, and I—” I hesitated, then finished quietly, “I won’t allow myself to be stopped. By him, or anyone else.”
Amira peered up into my face with a concerned expression. “I’m not sure I like this side of you.”
“Really?” I murmured. “It’s growing on me.”
Back at Dark Enterprises, the three of us sipped our coffees and nibbled on rubbery croissants while taking stock of our preparations.
“Thanks to that book you found,” Lex said, “I’m pretty much finished with translating the tablet.
There’s a clause at the very end I still don’t understand, though.
Something about an assurance or safeguard. ”
“Sounds important,” Amira said.
“I’m actually not sure it is.” Tapping the tablet with a finger, Lex said, “It’s separate from the ritual design. I think it was something extra Management wanted to note down, maybe some kind of defense against a contractor they used to compute the higher-level geometry.”
“Speaking of which,” Amira added, “I’m close to a means of conceptualizing multidimensional space in purely imaginative terms that anyone can follow. It’s not easy, though. I don’t have any experience teaching this stuff.”
“You’ll get it,” Lex told her confidently, and she smiled as she looked down into her cappuccino.
I finished my latte. “While you two nerd out, I’m going to visit Supplies and Procurement. There are some supplies I need. Meet you back here in an hour or so.”
In fact, my sole reason for visiting S&P was a tantalizing reference to something called “Sunfire.” I’d found it the night before while perusing the Forbidden section, and while the anonymous author had advised against “tampering with such destructive and unstable magicks,” I thought it sounded like exactly what we needed to face down a ravenous shadow monster.
Helpfully, someone had written a series of numbers in the margin that pointed to a storeroom on the third floor.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only employee to be tempted by the promise of unstable destruction.
Knowing that most of the building was empty somehow made the silent watchfulness of the third floor even creepier.
I rounded each corner cautiously as I worked my way through the warren of hallways, reaching the storeroom I wanted after nearly thirty minutes of walking.
The room itself was small, its walls lined with no more than two dozen items, and waiting there was the object I sought, a small glass sphere that pulsed with gentle light.
It didn’t look like much, but a sign mounted in front of it read HIGHLY VOLATILE—EXECUTIVE USE ONLY.
Tied around the sphere with twine was a small tag on which was written a single word.
“You’re coming with me,” I murmured as I plucked the sphere from the shelf and dropped it into my pocket. Whatever The-One-Who-Hungers threw at us, I’d be ready.
Back in the elevator, I was about to punch the button for the eleventh floor when I hesitated.
Then, on a whim, I hit the six instead. Moments later, the doors rolled open on Human Resources.
Most of the lights were out, leaving the cubicle farm cloaked in gloom, but after two years of working there I could have navigated the entire floor with my eyes closed.
The room I wanted was surrounded by extraction suites, all of them empty now, and the deep silence, unbroken by so much as a sob or a whimper, felt wrong somehow.