Chapter 42 #3
But I remind myself that it could be worse. Andrea and Dinah aren’t here, and Ms. Lim and the dog are out of the building. I only have to save Tristan. I don’t even have to save myself.
The soft welcome of my silence seems to work, because Adam finishes his thought as the terminal pulls up the treasury’s index.
“I thought maybe there was a different version of myself I could be. Like maybe if I’d met you before I met Cardinal Cashel, if I’d seen Lyonesse before I went to seminary…
” He’s looking down and away now, and when I dare another glance, I see the blue light caught on his colorless eyelashes. Like he’s underwater.
I think of him kneeling in my apartment, the desperation in his eyes when he pressed his face into my lap.
Pity rolls through me, hardly perceptible over the anger and adrenaline but there all the same.
I can see some of Isolde in Adam, actually, in that inborn need for things that someone in a harness could have given him on a Friday night for free, followed by a kiss and a snack besides.
And instead he signed his soul away, quite literally, to the first avatar of power he found, mistaking its votive demands for the actual demands of God, mistaking cruel control for cruel love and order for care.
The Church—like the Army, like so many things—is just another toxic Dom when you get down to it.
He still hasn’t checked his iPad or looked up at the ceiling to check the cameras. Maybe because he knows where they are…or maybe because they don’t matter. Maybe because Veronica isn’t even watching the feeds right now.
And then it makes sense—God, yes, of course.
Adam already told me that I was going to die, but he’d also told me that he wasn’t planning on fighting me.
It would be Veronica who’d come to finish things after my obedience was secured with the little display in the grotto. Which means she’d be away from Tristan.
Which means I might be able to have more than Adam’s word that Tristan will live—I might be able to personally ensure it.
I’m tapping nonsense into the terminal now, trying to tally up the different variables that would affect the time it would take to get from the grotto to here.
The grotto and the treasury are on opposite sides of the club, and you’d need the elevator both ways—maybe ten minutes, going at a desultory pace—but Veronica is shorter than me, and she doesn’t know the way as well as I do. So fifteen minutes, maybe?
“We can’t change the past, only the future,” I say absently, changing the view on the index so that it looks like I’m doing something, then toggling over to the treasury room controls. “Although Cashel tried to change the past, didn’t he? Or at least the records of it.”
Adam gives me a sharp glance. “You know about that?”
I don’t want to implicate Lox, but there’s no reason to protect Father Minch. “The Vatican archivist who fled? I took the liberty of visiting him in Fez. And do you know what he said to me as he was dying?”
Adam regards me in silence.
“He said ‘it’s not real.’ At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it.
It was almost a whim that had me taking his Bible with me when I left Fez, and it was definitely a whim that had me hunting down some of the titles he had written inside.
Titles that either hint or explicitly point to the existence of Ys. Except?—”
“Except only digitally,” Adams interrupts, looking away. “Yes, I know. It’s much easier to forge something when it’s a small matter of Photoshop and hacking of barely protected archival databases.”
“And yet the actual books themselves, the first editions, remained unaltered. No mention of Ys whatsoever.”
I’ve stopped pretending to type now, instead watching Adam as he seems to wrestle with some impulse. Pride, maybe.
“Was it your idea?” I ask.
He slides a look over to me, his bottom lip caught behind his teeth.
“I only ask because it feels like you. You always think of those clever details, of the subtleties other people miss.”
It is pride. A shy smile pulls at his mouth.
“His Eminence wanted a mythology. He wanted Ys to feel like something that had always been there, under the surface. Convincing people to work with you is always going to be difficult, whether it’s moving guns into the Schengen Area or giving you a misinformation campaign for free—but if you invite people into an exclusive ancient club instead, if you make them feel like they’ve been chosen, like they have secret knowledge only given to the special among us…
it’s very easy to manipulate people then.
But such a club would have a footprint going back centuries, and without it, the allure would be gone.
Nothing can be too mysterious—actually secret—if you want it to impress people.
It needed to be the kind of rumor that would only seem sturdier the more people tried to look into it. ”
“So you suggested altering the digital records. A brilliant idea for someone so young, Adam.”
The compliment seems to please him. “I’m nearly your age, sir, but I met Cardinal Cashel when I was just out of seminary, so I got an early start. He’d already begun his work when we met, but he was ready to expand, to make Ys into something global and enduring. I helped.”
God, how long can it take to get from the grotto? Did the elevator break down? I look back to the terminal screen where the room’s controls are still pulled up, and I’m about to click away to something else when Nimue’s words from this morning slide through my thoughts.
You should burn it all to the ground. Today, if possible.
I press a few keys, hit the Return key before I can think about it too hard, and then say, “But Father Minch saw through it, didn’t he? Did you ask him to help with the forgeries?”
Adam shakes his head. “He didn’t learn about Ys from us.
And for the forgeries, we always used freelancers hired through layers of intermediaries.
It was only bad luck that Minch discovered us and then the truth.
We’ve spread our whispers quite far by now—he could have heard about Ys from any number of places.
But somehow he found the digital forgeries in our own archives.
Stumbled upon enough discrepancies to piece together the truth. ”
Maybe I was wrong about Veronica coming here, about her being the one to execute me. But I can already feel the new bloom of warmth in the air, notice the fresh hush of half the fans having been shut down.
“To that end, I’d like everything in the treasury about Ys,” Adam requests quite politely, like he’s ordering from a menu he’s only just had a chance to peruse.
“As you’d like,” I say. “But we’ll need to move to the server itself and plug in directly. It’s isolated from the other CPUs and the terminal.”
That’s a lie—it’s connected to everything, just like all the others—but Adam nods and gestures for me to go ahead and lead the way, so it must sound plausible enough.
I grab a laptop from the terminal and a cord and walk into the server cases with enough speed to make it look purposeful.
I pick a case deep, deep into the maze, deep enough not to be visible from any of the cameras, and then stop.
“This one,” I say.
Adam waits patiently as I open the case and connect the laptop to a CPU I pick at random.
A slight mist has begun to shimmer near his hairline.
It’s noticeably warmer in here now; I think about Tristan being hot as well, bound and unconscious in the steamy grotto, and have to draw in a deep, careful breath.
I can’t let the anger or fear surface right now.
If I’m getting Tristan out of this, then I have to keep Adam engaged until either Veronica gets here or the dormant cooling systems sufficiently fuck shit up.
As the laptop comes to life, I turn to Adam and say, “You should know that I think of that afternoon in my apartment quite a lot.”
He stares at me, lips parted.
“I think about your offer. How lovely you looked while on your knees.”
His throat moves up and then down again.
“I think it must be a special skill of yours, making people crave you.” I’m moving closer to him, small shifts forward that have him stepping back too late, too awkwardly. His back is against a glass server case now. “Is that what you did to Aaron Sims when you were his chaplain?”
This is a guess—one I wouldn’t ordinarily make out loud without more evidence—but it’s ultimately a correct one. Adam swallows again.
“You know about Aaron?” he asks. “How?”
“I knew someone named Father Adam was special to him. I knew he tumbled into Ys’s loving arms after that Father Adam left him.”
Adam has to look up to meet my eyes now, that’s how close I am. I brace a hand on the glass by his head and then use my other hand to hold his hip. I press closer, my thigh between his.
“I don’t think Cashel knew how good you were at winning people over,” I say softly. “You might have toppled Lyonesse long before now if he’d understood any other human need as well as he understood the need for power.”
Adam is breathing heavier, partly from the heat, partly from my proximity.
I press closer to him and remind myself—achingly—of Eliot, of how easily he seduced people.
Eliot did it by falling in love with them genuinely, if only for a moment, and while I don’t know if I can fall in love with someone who’s threatened to kill Tristan or who’s attacked my club and put my guests in danger, I can try.
I can look down into those pupil-dark eyes.
I can squeeze his slender hip. I can let him use my thigh to rock against. I can summon up what I felt that day in the apartment when I knew that if things had been different, if I weren’t in love with two other people, I would have had Adam bent over my kitchen table in a heartbeat.